This is how we ALL will be teaching in less than a decade

This is a good presentation, although it's slightly too simple. I would also add the use of video games, as I discussed in an earlier post. And for those of us who teach writing, videos may not be terribly useful. Most likely, there will be some other online resource for the student to access in non-classroom time.

Still, there's no question this is a better use of the extremely rare and precious resource of teaching time than what most of us do today.

Lecturing and teaching

I first saw Professor Michael Sendel of Harvard talking about his book Justice: What's The Right Thing to Do? on The Colbert Report and immediately sought it out. It's a very readable, straightforward, unfootnoted primer on Political Philosophy built on an inquiry into ideas of justice, morality and ethics.

Then I discovered that the course from which this book arose had been recorded for broadcast on PBS and was available on disc and online. In fact, here's the first episode (warning - it's 54 minutes long and there is a good chance you will be fascinated and unable to stop watching):



Now you can paint me blue and call me a Buick, but I don't think any of that is beyond a reasonably accomplished high school senior. (I believe Professor Sendel's course is for freshmen -- they sure talk like freshmen.) And if I had the chance, I would love to build a course on the use of these lectures (they are divvied up into discrete 24 or 25 minute segments), using my own classroom as the seminar-discussion portion of the class between lectures, just like in college. It would be a nice foretaste of college procedure, and these are issues and ideas that automatically engage any young person. In fact, these are the issues that any thoughtful young person MUST reflect on as they are becoming who they will be.

But that's beside my point in making this post. What's really interesting, beside Dr. Sendel's clear and simple explication of the ideas and analysis of the writers and questions considered, is a good illustration of the difference between writing a book and teaching a course. As I said, the book Justice is ultra-clear and ultra-simple to read. I think I even almost understand Kant's categorical imperative, at least if I stand very, very still and don't look at any flashing lights or kitties or anything.

But oddly, it is almost too clear, too smooth. It goes very fast and ideas rush at the reader very quickly. It's probably not a good idea to sit down and read the book straight through, but to stop and reflect for a while between each chapter. But when you watch Professor Sendel teach virtually the same material it doesn't rush at you the same way. We can see him "feel the room," engage in dialogue with the students, incorporate what he needs, deflect what he doesn't, and yet make every student there feel included in the conversation. Because oddly enough, while he is teaching in the most regressive and (research tells us) ineffectual mode available, yet he is effective and his ideas land and stick and leave a residue in your mind after the video is over.

Of course, when you're actually at Harvard you have a week or so between lectures to absorb what Sendel has said, to read the material for the next class, to find the holes in his arguments and to prepare questions about how it all fits together. But even without that, the videos are more effective than the very fine book. I would summarize the difference as teaching.

It all put me in mind of another series of lectures recorded at Harvard back in 1973, when Leonard Bernstein occupied the Norton Chair for Poetry and conducted six very lengthy lectures -- the longest was just shy of three hours -- on the direction of concert music. In fact, the whole thing was a defense of diatonic harmony which had been on the wane for the previous 60 years or so, but which turned around and defeated non-tonal music within a decade of his lectures, especially in the work of Philip Glass, John Adams and Steve Reich. And oddly enough, Bernstein built his argument on linguistic theory, justifying the whole series as a matter of poetics, which was what the endowment was supposed to be for. (But really, who would have hassled Bernstein if he had wanted to show home movies of his dog for 102 minutes?)

Again, the lectures were published as a book, but the book is really missing something. What they're missing is both Bernstein's pedagogical skills and the force of his personality. Which are inseparable, as they are with the charming, though less histrionic Professor Sendel.

Here's a short excerpt explicating Bernstein's central conceit:



Fun, huh? And you don't even have to know anything about music to engage with his ideas. You don't have to agree, but you almost HAVE to respond.

What makes this work, what makes old-fashioned lecturing appropriate for both Bernstein and Sendel is that they are not simply delivering information you could get from a book or a website. They are conducting an inquiry and constructing an argument; engaging in the fine art of persuasion. And to do that effectively, you must bring the power of human personality to bear, provided you have one.

Aw, the heck with it. Here's the entire first lecture by Bernstein, if you've got an hour and three-quarters to burn. It's really worth it.



All of the Sendel course is available on YouTube, and here, where there are supplemental materials. And all of Bernstein's Unanswered Question lectures are on YouTube, absolutely free. (The DVDs cost hundreds.) Isn't this a great age we live in?

And if your school IT guy still is blocking YouTube, show your principal this and start knocking some heads together. Don't take any guff.

Is Google+ the solution to school social media problems?

Most thinking administrators and teachers agree that there is tremendous power and reach to be harnessed and put into the service of education in the new social media. My former boss, Eric Sheninger of New Milford High School, with over 13,000 followers, has emerged as a national leader in the use of Twitter in connection with education. But the same group has to acknowledge there are problems and pitfalls aplenty.

The biggest problem is that of one's online identity. Or should I say, identities. As you can learn from watching Sesame Street, we have different identities for different people. We are sons or daughters AND parents AND aunts and uncles AND neighbors AND friends AND teachers AND classmates AND advocates AND hobbyists, ad infinitum. Google requires all those identities and circles of friends to rub up against each other rather indiscriminately. Thus, I get unsolicited comments from friends of friends about topics on which I may have no common ground with the commenter. Unless you want to spend all your free time micromanaging your privacy arrangements on Google, everything you do there will be tossed into one common pool.

Personally, I have elected to refrain from, for example, political comment, other than to defend my profession (which has become a political hot potato). But I like to able to share pictures of my family events, vacations and all those cute pet pictures that cause the InterWeb to break down from time to time from the sheer volume. And I don't care for my students to see that. Nor do I want to know what "crazy party" they are at and what they are doing there. When I first joined Facebook I told students I would friend them because I never went there or looked at anything there. But once I started using Facebook actively in early 2010, I unfriended all my students, rather apologetically. (That is a hideous verb, based on the misconception that the people you "friend" are your friends."

Google Plus steps neatly around this by organizing your friends into separate, discrete circles and giving each member complete control as to what circle or circles see what content. I can see the savvy teacher forming a specific circle for each course she teaches, each extra-curricular activity, with some circles sharing content, such as for all-school communications, and others being directed just to individual groups. And none of these people have to see each other with mayonnaise smeared on their face at a family picnic or playing with the family ferret. Obviously, I need to discuss this with my principal and pilot the idea, but I am really hoping that this can be a useful mode of communication before, after and outside the class.

Free serialized literature via Blog

From Neatorama comes a sub-blog called Bit Lit, in which they'll "be serializing entire novels and short stories—even some poetry, many published by major publishers like Random House. Every day, a new chapter until the entire story is complete.

"Plus, [they]’ll be interviewing authors and having contests to give away free, autographed copies of their books."

For teachers looking for alternative sources of free reading material, this could be very valuable.

Speaking of free reading material, I do not vouch for the legality or the permanence of this site, but it contains virtually all of the work of F. Scott Fitgerald, including that certain novel about that very rich person which many of us teach. It is Russian based, so it has all the texts in English and Russian, just in case you have an ESL student from Russia!

A quick commercial

My son works for Wolfram Alpha, an online computation engine which attempts to understand and answer any question asked in plain language, the answer to which is susceptible to computation. One of the side effects of this powerful tool is that astute math students who discover it could use it to simply do their homework for them. This is because WA doesn't just answer questions, but shows you how it computed the answer. The smart math teacher (of smart math students) will take account of that and figure out how to incorporate it in their instruction. Here is Conrad Wolfram, one of the key figures in this project, explaining how computers can be integrated into math instruction to promote higher-order learning. (Sorry, this is a YouTube video, so it cannot be viewed within New Milford High School, for reasons which defy rational explanation.)



I am not a math teacher, and my math instruction ended just short of calculus, but I can appreciate the concept of moving math away from mere calculation toward the analysis and the solution of real-world problems and questions. This is akin to where I would like to see Language Arts education to go--away from the study of literature and mechanistic writing skills such as forming paragraphs and punctuating them, and toward locating and de-coding real-world texts for real world purposes, and synthesizing the material found there with other material, such as what the writer generates into a text with a real audience. You know, like writing a comment on a blog and stuff.

And in any case, I'm way proud of my son and the people he is associated with.

The jury is still out

Web 2.0 is definitely exciting for a teacher, if for no other reason that it is exciting to our students; one can't help suspect that somewhere in this welter of interactivity, there are powerful tools for learning lurking.

But first, back to my former life. Back in 1999, I was working at CNBC. I was at the center of the investor universe, hearing about all the latest business trends before anyone knew they were trends. In those days we were at the height of the Internet Bubble. Every day new companies were making buckets of money by launching new IPOs based on business plans glittering with buzzwords about this new business frontier. Everyone was convinced that because this was new and exciting, it had to be the opportunity to make money.

And, of course, a year later we saw the beginning of the end. IPOs began to sputter out. Start-ups ran through their initial capitalization without ever producing a product. Investor money dried up and by early 2001 it was virtually all over.

But the internet is still here, everyone recognizes its value and some people have made money in it. But it took time. And it took relentless experimentation and a tolerance for error, and the opportunity to go down blind alleys, double back and try again. No one's giving up, but we all realize that exciting doesn't mean obvious or easy.

To me, at the moment, Twitter feels like Internet 1999. Wikis, blogs, Skype, Ning, all of these have clear applications in the classroom, and it will just take some time to develop curriculum-specific adaptations. But honestly, whereas I see that Twitter may be useful for administrators and educational leaders to communicate with each other across distances, I do not see it as a powerful communicative or collaborative medium in the language arts. I may just be a geezer lacking insight. But the economic-technological barriers (for example, we cannot guarantee all of our students have ready access) and the 140-character limit diminishes the immediate possibilities, IMHO (to employ a tired Web 1.0 idiom).

For all the postings I have seen about Twitter in education, I have yet to be directed to a complete, classroom ready lesson plan in high school language arts employing Twitter. I'm not saying it can't be done; it's just that I haven't seen it yet myself. Sorry :(