Teaching Wisely: There we find the comment on loading information into the student and the mechanical, impersonal process involved. This lead me to think about, again, how I learned when I was younger.
I attended Catholic schools from K-12 (and then undergrad.!). This was during an earlier era when passive teaching was the norm. Those lessons were drilled into me. Still, just like the poems I mentioned last week, their impact lasted a lifetime and served me beyond measure throughout all the changes in career and life since. A example was my first year history teacher in high school, Sister Marietta, a Dominican. She taught us how to outline and required that all notes be taken in outlining format. Tests required some answering in outline. What incredible practice and discipline were involved!
Learning outlining was one of the greatest intellectual gifts I have ever received. It taught me both critical and analytic thinking, deductive reasoning in pure form. So, for me, the mechanical, passive learning process was a winner in this class, and just about all the rest of them. Just my penny's worth on the benefits of the "old" style teaching. Still, I am glad to be in the modern era of teaching; there is so much more we can do now.
This dovetails to Durka's comments on authority and making demands on students. (Ch. 5) These follow the preceding paragraphs in which the wonderful words "caring," "accuracy," "fidelity," and "good faith" are found. I am reminded here of an early scene in Robert Redford's film, "A River Runs Through It." In it, a Protestant minister teaches his son to write, and insists that the boy rewrite his English lessons, over and over, until the page on which the boy is writing has about 5 words left. In a voice-over, the boy, an eventual Pulitizer Prize winner, simply says: "And that is how I learned to write the English language."
Concerning teaching values and morals, I reflect on the challenge that that presents in a secular school environment, where I have done my teaching. Unlike Catholic schools predicated on the fostering of faith in every endeavor, secular schools somehow must get across the concepts of values, without emphasis on faith in the specific context. Still, I found ways to incorporate the role of Catholicism and the values it embodies.
In one case, for a political science class I taught (comparative systems), I included readings on the Church's role in European history, from the fall of the Roman Empire to the founding of the great European universities during the Middle Ages. We delved into the philosophy of the great Saint Thomas Aquinas. Actually, this review of Church history in Europe wasn't that hard to incorporate because the text I chose, one by a very well-known author, spent several chapters on this, even though it was not a book written for a Catholic audience.
In the same class, I also showed the film "The Mission," starring Jeremy Irons and Robert Di Nero. The students seemed to love analyzing this film, and identifying the values and moral choices depicted it. I believe that through this class coverage values were taught, fidelity maintained.
Thank you for your defense of outlining. It is always a great dialogue topic for teachers. Where is the correct balance between content and process?
ReplyDeleteAlso, thanks for recommending The Mission. I will check it out.
Carla and Justin,
ReplyDeleteYour love of outlining brings up an interesting observation I came across when doing my Masters research on Inquiry-based (generative) science learning vs. traditional lecture-based (transmissive) pedagogical practices in the classroom.
I'm quite sure both of you were excellent students and I found a correlation between the students that were accustomed to receiving excellent grades (often at a very early age) by drilling, memorizing, and repeating back on tests/exams/etc. and a preference for lecturing and traditional outlining.
The special needs students seemed to prefer the more engaging methods. In some ways the transformative and generative methods had leveled the playing field for the special needs learners. While this was good news overall, I did notice that the students that were used to the traditional methods seemed ruffled and wanted to stick with the those methods that they had perfected to the tune of many A's throughout their grammar school careers.
It highlighted just how difficult implementing new pedagogical practices can and will be in the future.
'Old school' usually lacks a neutral connotation these days: young people use it both with respect and as a pejorative. I can't tell you how many students in and out of college have stopped by over the years to say, "You know that sentence diagramming we did? Keep doing it!" (Often from engineering and science majors.) Likewise, the daily assignments to study geography have made an impression on students which I hear about years later. I'm forever grateful for the basic, thorough education I received in the local public schools and treasure the experience, just as you obviously do with your Catholic school upbringing. Perhaps it was the times as well as the methods that made things stick and produced some degree of personal discipline.
ReplyDeleteWe are always teaching values, whether we are aware of it or not! Carla, I love how you worked in material that would prompt the students in a secular educational setting to wrestle with Christian values.
ReplyDeleteCarla, those Ravenna mosaics in their beauty, what they show us about ourselves, sure point to God! Thank you.
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