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In Orson Welles’s movie Touch of Evil Marlene Dietrich plays Tana, a calculating but sympathetic crystal-gazing whorehouse madam with high cheekbones and hot chili. During a shambling trip down Memory Lane the Welles character visits Tana in her “office.” In the background a piano roll is playing. Welles reminisces:

QUINLAN: That pianola sure brings back memories.

TANA: The customers love it. So old it’s new.

* * *

After I first saw the enchanting photograph of Professor James Murray in the OED Scriptorium, I showed it to some of my students. They all wondered why I wanted them to see a weird bearded old man reading books.  Then Harry Potter intervened: now, when I show his picture, the reaction is usually delight to see that someone actually looks like Professor Dumbledore: so old he’s new. (The Royal Mail post box outside Murray’s house still stands, identified with a Blue Plaque.)

* * *

In his article in The New Yorker on Murray, George Steiner, Extraordinary Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, worries that our own schooling is “planned amnesia, our work a hiatus between phone calls.” If he is somehow right, the danger of an amnesiac out for an amble may be that he doesn’t know whether he’s in Memory Lane among things so old they’re new, or in a graveyard where things that are “dead stay that way”[1]. What will he bring back?

* * *

The New York Times provided an educationist’s answer this week in an article on something called “competency-based education.” We are told by its proponents that after a century of equating time with learning as Charles Eliot Norton taught us to do, we must cross the new frontier of another revolutionary change in learning for the twenty-first century and place time itself in the dustbin of history. That is, of course, after we have become a part of another wave of the future and are “deconstructing curriculum into abstract, interrelated competencies” in order that students can give “tangible evidence of learning,” which is assumed to be the equivalent of competence, I mean competencies.[2]

There are difficulties with this approach, even apart from the difficulty of understanding what is meant. The first is that “competency,” i.e., skill, is only one part of learning, which also includes knowledge and understanding. Any system that “deconstructs” learning into “competencies” is already erasing much of what learning is all about.

Another difficulty is that in the system reviewed, students who don’t “attain” a “competency” by passing a test can keep taking the tests till they do. (Are they the same tests?) A moment’s thought about the purposes and methods of assessment will show that passing a test of competency such as a driving test means a different thing from passing a multiple-choice test, for the one is passed by demonstration, and the other by pointing. These difficulties should be so obvious that one wonders what kind of educational demolitionist would make such an elementary mistake as to confuse them.

The answer, I fear, leads to a third difficulty. It is that the demolitionists of time are not actually in favour of a new thing called “competency-based education.” What they really want is to impart impetus to (I almost said re-animate) our old friends “outcome-based education” and “mastery learning.” These “friends” are not so old they are new: they are dead and should stay that way. Anyone whose pedagogical education has continued for more than five years without planned amnesia should recognise the pallor, stiffness and chill. I certainly did! I arrived at an OBE school the year after it was implemented there and saw it abandoned a year later. I attended a workshop on OBE offered by William Spady, where I learned of new “educational paradigms” that “shift happens.” (So it does.) And I was present in South Africa as it slouched towards “Curriculum 2005,” in which an entire country adopted and then abandoned OBE[3]. I worked at two schools that adopted and then abandoned “mastery learning.” The mis-educative[4] “revolutions” reviewed in the Times article bear enough marks of the Beast for me to fear to tread there.

(Some of the proponents of this system are quoted talking about teachers’ fears in the usual fashion of false sympathy combined with the dismissiveness of fools who rush in where angels fear to tread. Actually, a certain caution is salutary in the field of education, strewn as it is with wreckage.)

In any case, the villain time is wrongly so called. In his article on Murray, Steiner notes that Murray “had the capacity for squeezing experience to the pips, for making every sensation yield organized knowledge…. There was no waste motion in heart or brain. We find this omnivorous apprehension, at once sensory and abstract, in Browning’s verse, in Carlyle’s prose, in the prodigal architecture of Gilbert Scott. A tremendous confidence underwrites it, and a gymnastic of concentration and memory.” The problem is not that schooling is chained to seat time. The problem is that education is often misconceived, and the seat time devoted to it badly used. During that wasted time bad habits of work and thought are fixed. If students who have spent twelve years at Jungle Gym Math and other kinds of fooling are suddenly told in “university” that their time is their own and that they must work their way to “competencies” in the hiatuses between their phone calls, how well can we reasonably expect their poorly trained concentration to do? The answer should be obvious.

The Times article makes much of a young man who underwent a change of attitude towards his education because “something clicked inside my brain.” Experienced teachers will recognize that click as the sound of the nickel dropping. Teachers hear it with some frequency, though not often enough for educationists to make it the basis of a self-paced program of learning “competencies” in which the students receive little or no coaching. If our young man got in “30 to 35 hours of schoolwork a week on top of 48 to 56 hours of work,” it sounds as if he finally mastered “a gymnastic of concentration and memory” as Steiner called it. That is rather different from being “liberated” from time.

What is needed for young people like this one is programs in which all three kinds of learning are given their due. “Seat” time can be time in Socratic seminars, time being coached by the teacher to improve their skillfulness, time being lectured and in other ways presented with the material they must get by heart, and time in conferences finding out how well they applied that material to new problems in their formative and culminating assessments.

In an old posting about a high-school teacher who “taught” the American Revolution by letting her class have a water balloon fight, I discussed some of the ways futile or badly informed instruction undercuts education by taking time away from what works and giving it to fooling and clowning.   Another teacher, whom I was trying to persuade to adopt the methods of “shared inquiry” and Socratic instruction by using the Junior Great Books. Her first and only question before rejecting the plan was, “Do they have an answer key?”–an answer key for Socratic questioning! That sort of futile instruction takes a toll somewhere. At my school it was paid in 9^th grade, when the fooling stopped, though not Ms. Waterballoon’s class. In many schools it is paid by “educated” young people who have trouble counting, reading, and reasoning.

One could argue that teachers of large classes need “short cuts,” but there are three problems with the argument. One is that class size in our school was capped at fifteen students—exceptionally, eighteen. Something besides class size resulted in Ms. Waterballoon and her anti-Socratic colleague’s “teaching” as they pleased. Another, dealt with in many of my prior postings, is that direct exchanges with students in the form of coaching and Socratic instruction are essential to the development of skill and understanding, and that these kinds of instruction take place in an intellectual terrain where there are no short cuts. The third, which comes up in current criticism of education schools, is that teachers like Ms. Waterballoon have not been prepared by their education to know what they have to teach, or to teach it.

That said, competent teachers, among whom I number myself, can use small classes to great advantage. I am fortunate enough to teach a relatively low number of students in relatively small classes, and so I can do things with students that I would not have been able to do at my first school, where my “student load” was exactly twice as high as it is now. In connection with a paper that most of my students are now working on, I have been able to assign a “planning document” and subjected it to line-by-line criticism (not proofreading), followed by individual meetings with each student. One of my conferees, a bright and articulate boy who hopes to find himself in Cambridge next year, had a close and intense discussion with me about his plan.

Lest I sound like someone who “only” teaches “bright” kids, I should mention that at the same school where Ms. Waterballoon taught, I had a number of students on the other side of the scale from my aspirant to Cambridge. One of them, a diligent young person of unremarkable talent, needed her meetings with me in order to learn how to produce a unified paragraph. It took months, but she ended secure in her paragraphs, if not in her longer compositions. Only coaching can meet individual needs, and coaching can take place only in congenial circumstances.

It is a pity that some teachers will react to those circumstances the way Ms. Waterballoon did. Once she came to school and told her students that thieves had broken into her car and stolen all the work she was planning to grade! I pictured the thieves casing her car for its rich store of used writing paper, smashing the windows in a busy car park at great risk to themselves, stealing the trove, and rushing it to the recycling center to realize their profit.

Surely there should be in-service and administrative remedies for this kind of dereliction, or for other abdications like using class time to catch up on email, and surely these remedies can work in an educational atmosphere that does not resemble the atmosphere surrounding Stalin’s Central Committee.

My 12^th-graders have just finished their Theory of Knowledge Presentations: ten-minute talks in which they explore knowledge issues implicit in a real-life situation they have chosen to examine.  The good news was that this year’s students took the assignment more seriously than last year’s students did, and on the whole they therefore did very well.

Only a foolish teacher would place the bad news rhetorically as if it somehow balanced the good in such a success, and so I won’t say, “The bad news is….” I am happy with the results but feel a touch of (seemingly) cave-mannish regret.

That retrograde regret is for the loss of live human beings at the front and center of public speaking by students. I have written elsewhere about the potentially deleterious cognitive effects of PowerPoint as she is spoke, detailed with devastating thoroughness by Edward Tufte[1]. The sidelining of the human is no less to be regretted.

And it is a literal sidelining, as anyone can see who looks on the darkened scene at the front of the Lecture Theatre during presentation time. In the center glows a projected pie chart (“The one thing worse than a pie chart is lots of them”—Tufte) or a baffling “graphic.” At the side, in the dark, with one half of his face aglow in the chart’s reflected glory, a student chatters away. Did I say “one half of his face”? His whole face is aglow if he falls into one of PowerPoint’s common traps and faces the screen to read his lines, rather than the audience to deliver them—but we can still see only the half of his face that faces the audience!

Many of my students have an appealing or even charismatic platform presence, but much or most of that is undercut when they choose to throw away their advantages and play second-fiddle to a projection. And what a projection! The satirical type of the awful throwaway starts with Lincoln’s magnificent anaphora in the Gettysburg Address that “We cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground.” The music of it is irresistible, as is its buildup to the climax that the “honored dead” have consecrated it. All this depends for its effect on being a part of a delivered speech by a capable speaker. Consider by contrast how  the “same(!)” material might be handled in a typical PowerPoint slide. The list of bullet points is the sorriest possible parallel construction, and it sacrifices the possibilities of live rhetoric and human interaction for a dearly bought concision. It would do so even if turned into “the dreaded build sequence” with spins and pans and close-ups.

One of my students explored this unfortunate graphic terrain in his presentation. He is good humored, personable, and well liked by his classmates; and he has a solid platform presence. In the rush to PowerPoint he threw away all these advantages, standing to the side in semidarkness to read off slides of maroon lettering on a black background.  The thought briefly occurred to me that I had made my way into a man cave. It lacked Naugahyde furniture with nail-head trim, but the feeling of claustrophobia among badly lit masses was just right. I will offer him a private word with some advice. It would be a shame if after twenty years of unchanged speaking habits he were to end up recording presentations for an on-line “school[2].”

 

Learning takes three forms, each of which is best developed with a different kind of teaching. Knowledge of factual detail, taxononomy, tables, formulae, and other fixed objects of study, classification, and arrangement is conveyed by didactic instruction such as lecture and recitation or in textbooks. In the younger grades the recitation can be en masse with singing and verses. The usual way of learning it is to get it by heart. For those who learn through the eye, that means study of the printed page. Those who learn by the ear might prefer to say their lessons aloud, or hear them read. The action types and wiggle-worms will want to move around as they study, or may work with manipulatives such as flash cards that they can fiddle and twiddle.

Skill at writing, speaking, physical arrangement, handling the apparatus of a laboratory, or what my P. E. coach used to call “the fundamentals” and their combination, is built up through practice and demonstration guided by coaching. The coach intervenes with words, red ink, or demonstration of the right technique. What he or she does will be determined by the student’s needs after the initial demonstration (a didactic activity) is scheduled and presented. Skill is directly tied to achievement in an activity that demands it: mere dribbling is useless without a sense of basketball, and “information literacy” is useless without a subject that it can be applied to.

Understanding, the bane of behaviorists and pons asinorum of pedagogues because it is an inner light, cannot be taught. Rather, we teachers must establish the conditions in which it can make its illuminations. The usual way of doing so is Socratic questioning or other demands for explanation and application that will show the inner light at work in unfamiliar terrain that has not been memorized. Since understanding can be mimicked in lousy assessments, a teacher looking for understanding must avoid those lousy assessments and set probing essay topics, seminars with question time, and conversations. Essays should receive clear, specific comments lauding insight and reproving glib superficiality. Consecutive thought should be evident. Teachers should demand sentence or paragraph answers showing needed detail in a matrix of good language.

A moment’s thought will yield the insight that didactic instruction is most suitable to electronic or textual mediation, while coaching and Socratic instruction demand human contact in order for skill to improve and understanding to dawn. A teacher with textbooks and e-stuff at his or her disposal should therefore arrange things so that precious class time is given over to interaction rather than simple exposition.

Looking into the backward and dark abysm of time at one of my early insights along these lines, I realized that I was foolish to take class time for the simple exposition of grammatical rules and the nuts and bolts of composition if I could shift that out of the classroom. I therefore bought texts of programmed instruction in grammar, and I devised written lessons to expand on Strunk and White’s lapidary pronouncements, which the students could work through in their own time (no apologies, Homework Lady: learning is great and the opportunity for helping students live is limited). Let them learn in the privacy of their own desktop to “enclose parenthetic expressions between commas[1]”, but let the teacher their writing coach use red ink and meet with them to discuss why they used commas on only one side of the non-restrictive appositive in their last essay. At that same meeting the teacher can offer suggestions on arrangement, diction, and concept-work; and he can ask for a rewrite.

Or maybe the teacher, having assigned a Yeats poem and an apposite bit of interpretive text, will set up work groups in class, in which students have questions to answer about the poem as they work through it with their classmates. Since the teacher is best heard when he is answering my question, the teacher can circulate, answering my questions from students in turn as they come up, derailing trains of thought to nowhere, and maybe doing a bit of blackboard work for the class as a whole if one question seems “popular.” If there’s no way around it, the teacher simply must explain, as with Plato, Aristotle, and Pythagoras or the appositives of “Presences” in “Among School Children,” offering a lecture on the topics, with question time during and afterwards. The point is to be available for the students’ deficits in skill and understanding.

The kind of didactic instruction best placed on e-stuff is the kind that any student will be able to get by simple listening, whether once or a number of times. Work on e-stuff is not the place to improve skill (for it can’t) or to enable understanding (for that should be in response to the student’s needs and deficits as revealed in what she says or writes).

The problem with “schools” that rely chiefly on e-stuff is that they have no reliable means to improve skill or to enable understanding, which in such places can occur only by accident. This must be done live, in real time, in order to use the window of opportunity that an evanescent interest provides or that a particular error demands in order to supply immediate and effective correction. It also allows the teacher to hold students instantly responsible for their misunderstandings and to probe understanding that is incomplete. Ingenious exceptions will only prove the rule that people improving their skill need coaches and that people with incomplete understanding need Socrates.

“Flipping” may work if it consists in the deployment by teachers of their precious time in improving skill and understanding. It will be useless if it is simply a switching back-and-forth of homework and lectures that when combined don’t really improve skill or understanding at all.[2] But any effective work along these lines will not “turn education upside down”; it will turn it right side up.

No time for a full posting this week because I am listening to and assessing the 12^th-graders’ ToK Presentations during class, after school, and on weekends. It’s also time to write letters of reference for their applications to universities in the UK, the US, and Hong Kong. (Each place requires a different focus in the letters sent.) But there is enough time to note that experience is one of the best ways to gain confidence in one’s assessment of Presentations, and that experience is one of the best teachers of how to write a good letter of reference that does not sound (and is not) made with the cookie cutter. Schools that favor teachers with little experience do their seniors a disservice.

In China teachers typically have their work spaces in shared offices rather than in their classrooms. I have written elsewhere about the professional advantage this arrangement confers by making casual meetings among teachers easier. When closeness becomes a bit burden­some, there are ways to find peace and quiet at need; but most teachers do most of their work in the teachers’ offices.

At our school the Upper Division (grades 7 – 12) has three teachers’ offices, of which one is for the I.B. teachers. The first I.B. coordinator, who advised the architect on our educational needs as the building was under design and construction, and who occasionally got the architect to listen to his advice, insisted that there should be an intercom and P.A. system allowing students at the door of the office to ask to see their teachers.

Consequently, teachers work with an ear cocked to hear if students are asking for them. At four times of day—before the Morning Assembly, at recess and lunch, and after school—our office sounds a bit like an airport lobby, the main difference being that someone is actually listening. Outside the door we sometimes find a scrum of students and teachers, though for long talks or privacy, teachers take students to nearby rooms for sit-down meetings. The hubbub usually centers on assignments, upcoming tests and deadlines. Teachers sometimes set up boxes on the umbrella stand at the door so that students may turn in work even if they don’t see the assigning teacher on deadline day, or are working till the last minute (sigh).

My name has been popular on the intercom this week because the 12^th-graders are doing their Theory of Knowledge presentations during class and in groups after school and on weekends. The presentations require a degree of abstraction and application that is comparatively new to them, at least in a culminating assessment, hence the questions. The need to adopt a position while balancing it with the judicious consideration of other perspectives on the same “knowledge issue” takes some getting used to. A gratifyingly large number of students are not just going to the internet to download potted talks, but that means that they have questions.

Yesterday I had a rather long talk with one of my 12^th-graders. At a couple of points I thought I saw a head peer around the pylon to look in to the room where we were talking, but by the time I turned around, the head was gone. After our talk ended, the mystery head appeared again—this time attached to another one of my students. He has an aversion to speaking before large groups and is nervous presenting to a group of any size, so we had agreed that he would present alone after school. He was absent from class, so I thought he would be at home the whole day; but he showed up for his presentation date after all. The presentation was nervous, but not painful to watch—a minor triumph, if you will.

The obvious lesson of this week’s interactions with my students is that schools and teachers should be arranged or organized so that the possibility for such interaction is great rather than small. But there are a couple of other lessons, too. Every time a student meets a teacher for one of those scrum talks or a meeting in a nearby classroom, he is learning how to conduct himself with another, to shape a discussion, to handle himself socially—and, of course, to learn his lessons. None of this will be available to students at on-line or “virtual” “schools.”

The other lesson must come from an inference drawn from all this contact: that the students are engaged in their work enough to take extra measures to talk to teachers or to nail down their thoughts. I naturally hope that when I meet with students, I make the meetings worth their while. Good for me if I succeed. But much of the success is also due to the students: to their native gifts, their upbringing as engaged young people, the attentiveness they have acquired at home and from their prior academic experiences, their readiness to think through talking, their receptivity to spontaneity of thought. Some success is due to an accession of courage that comes from some imponderable source and gets them over an obstruction that had seemed insurmountable. “Value”- “added” “metrics” take account of none of these things. VAMs say only that if a student answers more multiple choice questions at the end of the year than at the beginning, his teacher is good; if not, not. Some not!

 

One of my Theory of Knowledge students is a highly talented musician, and, as I found out, highly opinionated! Earlier this week I mentioned to him having found some CD “transcriptions” of old 78 and magnetic records of chamber music by Mozart. From his initial facial reaction you’d have thought I’d confessed to a secret vice, but he quickly composed himself and answered that Mozart was too tame and that he preferred Bartok and Shostakovich. Not content to leave things at that, I pressed on, wondering whether there might be room in chamber music for all three.

Here I must digress to say that my high school’s musical ensembles are unusually good—and unusually successful in musical competitions. It helps to explain my student’s next remarks, which I paraphrase: Bartok and Shostakovich let an ensemble show what it can do. If an orchestra chooses a Mozart piece for a competition, it has already lost. My own non-competitive opinion would be that it has already won, but never mind me. Artur Schnabel said that children learn Mozart because of the small quantity of his notes, but grown-ups avoid him because of the great quality of his notes. My student, midway between childhood and adulthood, might be at a stage of avoiding Mozart without yet having learned the quality of his notes.

It is likely that as a competitive young person he values the extrinsic reward that competition brings to music, and appreciates composers who help “give him an edge.” In his discussion of emulation[1], William James says, “[T]o veto and taboo all possible rivalry of one youth with another, because such rivalry may degenerate into greedy and selfish excess, does seem to savor somewhat of sentimentality, or even of fanaticism. The feeling of rivalry lies at the very basis of our being, all social improvement being largely due to it. There is a noble and generous kind of rivalry, as well as a spiteful and greedy kind; and the noble and generous form is particularly common in childhood. All games owe the zest which they bring with them to the fact that they are rooted in the emulous passion, yet they are the chief means of training in fairness and magnanimity. Can the teacher afford to throw such an ally away? Ought we seriously to hope that marks, distinctions, prizes, and other goals of effort, based on the pursuit of recognized superiority, should be forever banished from our schools? As a psychologist, obliged to notice the deep and pervasive character of the emulous passion, I have my doubts.”

Something tells me that what my student learns through the “emulous passion” will ripen in time, and that he may even come back to Mozart for the quality of his notes. In the meantime, I see no harm in encouraging that passion.

Postscript on the Doctors

Usage at first mention in English letters and history recognizes two doctors: Dr. Johnson and Dr. Arnold. I wonder if it isn’t time to add a third: Dr. King. The thought came to me as we observed the 50^th anniversary of “I Have a Dream.” If the report is correct that Dr. King extemporized most of the speech in response to a plea by Mahalia Jackson, it is an all-the-more-remarkable addition to his life’s other accomplishments. Do we really need to introduce what we say about him by referring to him as “The Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Junior”? One time I referred in class to “King’s Birthday,” and in a gentle reproach one student asked, “Which King?” My answer, “Not King Mswati,” was flip, but I saw the point, though not the need for the mile-long moniker.

“That’s not fair” is the injured cry of schoolchildren everywhere, but children—and adults—are more likely to think they recognize (un)fairness than to be able to discuss it intelligibly and productively. In his essay “Equality[1],” Sir Isaiah Berlin wrote that fairness “is a form of desire for equality for its own sake.” That sounds rather abstract, but a moment of relocation in the classroom or playground will show what is meant. Late last spring a couple of boys in my room began an argument about who should get what, and my eavesdropping instantly told me that there would be no evidentiary or testimonial way of resolving the conflict. The boys reached that conclusion at about the moment I started to eavesdrop, and decided to let Rock Paper Scissors work things out. Soon they had cooled down.

Now, Rock Paper Scissors is not a jurisprudential enterprise with due process; what it does is to set up a randomized contest in which the two participants have an equal chance at victory. The participants set aside any claims to justice, which have no chance of being correctly evaluated, in favor of equality of opportunity to win arbitrarily. Like the arbitrary convention of dueling that blood washes away dishonor, Rock Paper Scissors says that strength, in trumping weakness (of materials, not of participants, e.g., scissors cut paper but are broken by rock), washes away grievance. Unlike a duel, it gives both participants an equal chance at strength, thus privileging equality for its own sake. It has the further instrumental virtue of pre-empting interference by eavesdropping teachers who might act unfairly or attach punishment to resolution. It may even save a bruise or two.

Rock Paper Scissors is actually a surprisingly sophisticated and even shocking social construct. Participants must give up the possibility of genuine redress in favor of an artificial mechanism that offers no intrinsic satisfaction, only the extrinsic ones of equality of opportunity and possibility of victory. That this is not a mechanism of redress will be immediately apparent to anyone considering the First Amendment: who would take seriously the possibility that people “petition[ing] the Government for a Redress of Grievances” would be satisfied by playing Rock Paper Scissors with the President? And yet in some schoolrooms it works.

I am not arguing against Rock Paper Scissors. Rather, I am arguing that using its equality of arbitrary opportunity for conflict resolutions requires some careful thought or prior acculturation and the adoption of a view that Sir Isaiah would say is “one among many: the degree to which it is compatible with other ends depends on the concrete situation, and cannot be deduced from general laws of any kind; it is neither more nor less rational than any other ultimate principle.”  Things that “depend on the concrete situation, and cannot be deduced from general laws of any kind” require “man the political animal,” as Aristotle called us: people who live in groups and are constantly accommodating ourselves to each other or asserting ourselves against each other. The human faculties needed by excellent political animals (or their leaders) are what Pascal calls finesse, what Kahnemann calls system one, what Gardner calls interpersonal intelligence, and what Jung calls a superior feeling function. These powers are combined in Barzun’s “perpetual discretion” of the good teacher and are either a natural endowment or the work of a lifetime in acquiring–if they are acquired at all.

Compared to their complexity, the putative faculty of “emotional intelligence” seems rather thin and unsatisfactory, and the idea of “teaching” it must include notions of acculturation, lifelong learning, and regeneration that will go well beyond the schemes of workshopping and scripted learning typically peddled in their stead. Indeed, there does not even seem to be a clear notion of what “emotional intelligence” is, and what “social-emotional learning” entails. If it is not to be another bit of washed-up Edbiz wreckage like “transactional analysis” and “self-esteem”, we will need a huge clarification. If I like Rock Paper Scissors, it’s not because it is a tool of the “emotionally intelligent” but because it is one welcome process that careful upbringing,  acculturation, clear thinking and perpetual discretion make useful in its place.

Year 27 of my teaching career feels good so far, though I say so myself. But how can I be sure, given that Hong Kong, like all other locations rated tops by the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA)[1], does without “value”-“added” “metrics”? A modicum of assurance is provided by the “exercise book inspections” mandated by the local education department, as well as by the inspections that department conducts of local schools.

But Finland has no school inspection system. Indeed, one of its mottos about its teachers can be expressed in five words: “train them; then trust them.” And the training is both rigorous and highly sought after: the University of Helsinki has twenty applicants for every place in its teacher-training program, about the same selectivity as Harvard. This even though thirty years ago Finland’s schools had many of the problems reported for American schools. The trust is shown in teachers’ working conditions, which include two hours of professional development a week as well as extensive meetings with colleagues. This plan for professional development continues throughout a teacher’s career. Whether by inspection or by collegiality, it seems that two top systems assume life-long learning in its teachers as well as in its students.

The International Baccalaureate program has a self-study requirement that encourages schools to reflect on what they do well. I meet with colleagues regularly to discuss the courses I teach. My school’s I.B. division has started a formal program of visitations of classrooms by colleagues. This goes for highly experienced teachers as well as the less experienced ones, and it takes place in addition to informal visits we make to see our colleagues in action.

And of course, maybe most important, I can think of what I know now that I didn’t know during the beginning years of my teaching career. It took me a number of years to feel that I had an eye for students who might have special needs or had organic problems not apparent to most people. It was not till my tenth year of teaching that I met colleagues who got me started at turning my classroom into a “class of a thousand spaces.” And I was bound to be more experienced with the varieties of humanity by having years of contact with students of all kinds.

I studied Yeats with Professor Koch in university, but now, when I in turn teach his poetry to my Grade 12s, I have more than Michael Rosenthal’s anthology to go with, having carefully examined Roy Foster’s biography and Richard Ellmann’s study of him in my “spare time.” I am a better reader of Shakespeare now than I was twenty-five years ago: when Harold Bloom says that Antony and Cleopatra is the one play that shows everything Shakespeare can do, I feel more confident now than at the start of my career that I understand what he means and can convey some of the Bard’s opulent creativity when I share the play with my Higher Level students.

When I started teaching Theory of Knowledge (ToK), I felt as overwhelmed as most teachers taking on that challenge for the first time. The course remains a challenge, but as an examiner of fourteen years’ experience I feel now that I can meet it adequately. In ToK as in the other courses I have taught for a long time, I have a deep bag of tricks. It is in the nature of maturation in a long career that this kind of capacity develops in those who want it to develop; and it can’t be rushed, or at least I never felt anyone could have poured expertise into me from a bottle or lined it into me from a program of software.

It is in light of this development over time, shared by experienced teachers everywhere, that I read with deep disapproval that charter schools tend to reject experience of this kind in the teachers they hire. Like hamburger stands, they are “led” by principals and “CEOs” [sic] who are still young enough to be scratching their pimples, and staffed by teachers in “foreshortened teaching careers” who run through on the way to their next destination like crap through a goose. If such places were actual junk food emporia instead of purveyors of pink slime education, we could say at least the business model suits the business. But as I have argued in many prior postings, a school is not a business, and education is not a product, so teachers should not be transients, and their careers should not go out, out like brief candles. Bring on Year 28!

 

Much has already been written about Seamus Heaney since his death yesterday, but my words will perhaps seem tangential to many of the eulogies, for my subject today will be not Heaney’s poems but his marvelous anthology The Rattle Bag, compiled with his co-editor Ted Hughes. I first came to it while in Cambridge, England.  A friend of mine, then an editor at Granta, told me that this was his favorite poetry anthology, so on my next visit to Heffers I found it and was instantly captivated. (The copy I bought then in 1982 lies open in front of me as I write this.)

Captivation has also been the almost universal reaction of the 9^th-graders in my English classes, who used it as their poetry anthology. The first lesson was an easy one-word pleasure: “Read!” In half an hour the whole class would usually be talking about their finds. Students would be required to give a practiced reading of one poem, and a recitation by heart of another. Students chose freely except with a requirement for a minimum number of lines. Examples of chosen poems include “All the world’s a stage,” “Be Merry,” “Cocaine Lil and Morphine Sue,” “Frankie and Johnny,” “Invictus,” “Jerusalem,” “Kerr’s Ass,” “The North Ship,” “A Poison Tree,” “Poppies in July,” “The Smile,” “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” and “Thrice the brinded cat hath mewed.” You must have noticed that the list of students’ choices begins and ends with Shakespeare and has everything in between.

You may also have noticed that the list is in alphabetical order. That is the only order in the book. There are no chapters, themes, subjects, headings, techniques, explanations, exercises, questions, interpretations, skills, or footnotes. (A small glossary of strange and foreign words at the end, and a list of poems sorted by poet are the only apparatus.) The only criterion Heaney and Hughes applied when choosing the poems was that “each poem, full of its singular appeal, [transmit] its own signals [and take] its chances in a big, voluble world.”

I love that criterion that a poem should be “full of its singular appeal.” To say why requires a story.  It is set in a place near Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe. I was seated for dinner at a restaurant that was open on one side to an adjacent forest, or wood, or jungle of what I had been told was first growth. We were elevated at least a big cat’s leap above the woods; nothing other than a kind of balustrade separated us and the forest’s inhabitants. Midway through the meal we all heard a pronounced and extensive rustling and cracking of brush and branches, but no animals came out of the bush to be seen. We continued our dinner with a certain uneasiness.

The following morning I was out for a walk where a road skirted this same wood.  In front of me were a number of pedestrians standing patiently, at some distance from a herd of fifty or so Cape buffalo that were crossing the road. Following the pedestrians’ lead, I kept my distance. I remember from reading “The Most Dangerous Game” that Zaroff thought the buffalo the most dangerous game, though of course he turned out to be wrong. I had heard similar warnings from others.

But the best warning I have read was in one of the Yoruba hunter poems in The Rattle Bag. It is called, simply, “Buffalo.”

The buffalo is the death

that makes a child climb a thorn tree.

When the buffalo dies in the forest

the head of the household is hiding in the roof.

When the hunter meets the buffalo

he promises never to hunt again.

He will cry out: ‘I only borrowed the gun!

I only look after it for my friend!”

Little he cares about your hunting medicines:

he carries two knives on his head,

little he cares about your danegun,

he wears the thickest skin.

He is the butterfly of the savannah:

he flies along without touching the grass.

When you hear thunder without rain—

it is the buffalo approaching.

To take only the first couplet: the thorn acacia’s thorns are an inch or two long, and they are hard not pulpy. The wag’n bietjie bush’s sharp curved thorns catch and hold you to “wait a bit”—just what you don’t want when the buffalo is coming. Children may learn the pain and danger of thorns, but they also know the greater danger of the buffalo with his “two knives.”

The anthology has page after page of such vivid surprises mixed with some of our old favorites. The poet most quoted is Blake, but Ogden Nash “weighs” in with eight choices including one bit of unexpected heaviness to keep us guessing. Even the longer selections are interesting enough leave us expectant about what the next page will bring. Heaney’s great accomplishments as a poet are being eulogized elsewhere, but I want to thank him (and Hughes) for so many welcome chances to “wait a bit” with the sometimes thorny but always attractive poems in their anthology.