Alien Pedagogy

I’ve read 1/5 of Twilight. I don’t see it as a rival to Harry Potter yet, but perhaps it will pick up. Currently making the rounds:

• The Road, by McCarthy
• The Alchemist, Coelho
• Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul

I really enjoy giving Chicken Soup books to reluctant male readers.

One student just began The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan. She seems to be enjoying it, which means that her life is going to stop for the next few months.

Often after reading an easy book, I’ll pass it on to my classroom library. Not so with Goldfinger.

In the novels, James Bond tends to view every race, gender, and sexual preference besides his own as wrong-headed and inferior — he conquers all. Oddjob, a Korean bodyguard with a cleft palate, is presented and referred to as an “ape” from the start of the novel to the end. I decided not to pass the book on to my students.

In a recent PD session, I found a copy of Naked Lunch on the shelf, which surprised me. Burroughs should have the right to publish his material, but I wouldn’t bring it into my classroom.

Many of the books that have been banned in the past are ridiculous (Ulysses, Huckleberry Finn, Harry Potter), but I am now beginning to censor too, which is disconcerting.

Assuming your students could comprehend it, would you put Naked Lunch in your classroom library?

Got this David Foster Wallace quote from Dy/Dan’s latest post.

“Maybe being able to communicate with people outside one’s area of expertise should be taught, and talked about, and considered as a requirement for genuine expertise.”

My experience is opposite. As an English teacher, I’m consistently surprised by how inarticulate I am when discussing teaching with colleagues. It’s just difficult to express myself without resorting to ambiguous slang.

Tips?

Given the research and development in assessment for learning, understanding by design, web 2.0, etc, you’d think that we’d hear the old guard complaining that things have changed. Things besides photocopiers.

But things haven’t changed at all — unless they’ve gotten worse. Every seminar on education opens with two minutes hate for sinful pedagogy — it still reigns today! The narrative arch of every session goes on to invite confession and absolution. If you paid the fee, you’re given an photocopied indulgence that will solve all your problems.

Hopefully your name is spelled correctly.

Surely I’m not the only person who can see the developments (sometimes small, sometimes significant) that are happening in education.

A teacher told me about an activity that he’d “invented” the other day. It was a story board wrapped around a toilet paper roll, but he’d given it a name that contained both alliteration and rhyme.