Saturday 28 June 2014

John Locke dishes out the schoolin'

Mental Hercules, John Locke, starts his Essay on Human Understanding by acknowledging that publishing it got some people pretty cross.

"I have been told that a short Epitome of this volume was condemned by some without reading"

he says, which is something Philosophers have to get used to I suppose. Then he gets into the good stuff, viz. the actual meat of his disagreement with some other Enlightenment dudes. And the meat is BEEF.

Here's how you throw down 18th century style:

"My meaning, I find, is often mistaken, and I have not the good luck to be every where rightly understood."

Absolute mayhem.

Locke is from the oratorical school of acting like a perfect gentleman without giving an inch. It works out pretty well for him because

A) He's John Locke
and
B) The other guy isn't.

Let's see how it plays out ESPN style: slow motion, crunching tackles, big scores.

"Of this the ingenious author of the Discourse Concerning the Nature of Man has given me a late instance, to mention no other. "

Oh no you better not have did!

"For the civility of his expressions, and the candour that belongs to his order, forbid me to think that he would have closed his Preface with an insinuation, "

Did John Locke just praise you in print? You're toast. It's like watching a cat play with a mouse. I can't watch.

"as if in what I had said, Book II. ch. xxvii, concerning the third rule which men refer their actions to, I went about to make virtue vice and vice virtue, unless he had mistaken my meaning;"

Translation: I am going to give you one chance to take that back and then it's CLOBBERIN' TIME!

" which he could not have done if he had given himself the trouble to consider what the argument was I was then upon, and what was the chief design of that chapter, plainly enough set down in the fourth section and those following."

LOCKE SMASH! DID YOU EVEN READ IT!? DID. YOU. EVEN. READ. IT???

So there's that. What I would like to say is look how polite he is. Did he even call him a liar or a retard?  He did not. He was just like "Surely I must have misunderstood, you can't actually mean what you said?"

Textbook Principle of Charity. Try and put the best spin on it you can, do anything possible to save the grace and civil standing of your opponent.

What a chieftain!

Friday 20 June 2014

My Early Years Years

A few days ago I went back the the nursery where I worked for two years after I left university.

I was a dad at twenty, making me officially a teenage dad by Sure Start's standards. This was something I only discovered once I left the nursery and started working for Sure Start in 2010.

Up to that point I made ends meet at a small nursery in my small hometown, looking after small people. It worked out well because I got a discount rate on looking after my young daughter, who I got to be near to. They were difficult years.

When I went back to the nursery I was amazed at how quickly memories came back. It has changed hands but that's just cosmetics. The building, the path to the front door, the stairwell: walking towards these filled my chest with the burning memory of everything that happened there.

It was a Saturday, so the place was shut. I stopped at the front door and cried a bit.

Then I left, as you do. But the tears were for the struggles, the tantrums, the giggles. Calming down distraught children,  showing them how Lego blocks worked. I remember spending a lot of time showing kids how to play with farm animals and, for some reason, designing pyjamas. There were days when I would work with one extremely disabled boy who liked to run his hands under the water. Parents who spoke no English would be sent to us because people knew we turned nobody away. We would mind their children and navigate the difficulties when their child didn't know the word for "Toilet". I remember the after school club where we got well into Hama Beads and so every parent got about a zillion drinks coasters and those that didn't got smiley faces. Once we made a rocket ship. Another time we made a person size bird's nest and filled it with papier mache eggs.

So much more. A little girl who made a stage out of a drain cover and put on a show in  a language she invented. I remember a puppet theatre performing Noah's Ark and the Ramayana. There was a child who used tesselating blocks to create beautiful mosaics which she coloured in painstakingly.

Mostly there was hours and hours of care, small people wanting to be picked up and put down. My ankles swelled and my knees clicked. My boss had been doing it so long she needed half an hour's warning if I wanted her to get up from the play house. The girls invited me to karaoke and I did "My Old Man's a Dustman". They thought my taste in music was crap, and they really liked "The Script" in the under-ones room. We used to teach the kids to dance to ABBA.

People who make fun of Early Years workers people have never met them, they have never spent time with them. They have no idea what it means to throw yourself into the most critical stage of education, the one that takes your energy and breath away all at once. To belittle an Early Years practitioner is to belittle someone who, in the words of Adrienne Rich,

"Held out the crust of bread (and)
Warmed the liquid vein of life...
Who did what they could."

It was an honour to spend the first part of my life with Early Years workers. Whatever in my professional self is strong, and good, and loving, I learned it first from them.

So as I walked away from my second home, the one where I learned to be a human being in the world, I thought about all of those memories and how time has not tarnished or muddied it. There is a precious value, still, in the care of the young which politics belies. To get to it, you must speak to someone with snot on their trouser leg at toddler-nose height; someone who has changed twenty nappies today, on a rota, and who knows all the words to "Where the Wild Things Are" and "The Cat in the Hat".

When you find that person, tell them they are amazing. They need to hear it.

Saturday 7 June 2014

A Resource is not a Teaching Method


A few years ago I made a big laminated sheet of the sort that teachers sometimes make. It's meant to help with setting expectations around speech. Sometimes these things are useful. Sometimes they aren't. Mostly they aren't, in my case, and I scrap them after a couple of weeks.

This one was of the other kind. It came with me in a taxi from my old school to my new school. If it falls off the wall then looking for a new piece of blue tack becomes an emergency. If I lost it I would be sad. My phone got nicked recently. I would rather they got my phone.

Sometimes people see me teach and they point at this bit of paper and go "that's good". I am not boasting, this happens. The keenest go "Can I have a copy?"

And I say yes. Always.

However, I then usually launch into a big rant about Vygotsky and Michael Sandel, and how Constructivism is a bosh and how I think the Polis functioned in Ancient Greece. See, I want them to see not just the resource but how it came to be, all the teachers and thinkers I have admired, all the students who have challenged me and saved me from dogma. They should, I always think, understand the journey to this point.

Nobody ever does.

See, they want the resource. Why not? It's a good resource. But it will only be mine in my classroom. They may use it better, they may use it worse, but what it means to me in my space surrounded by my expectations and hopes and failings and dreams is Me. It isn't a method I can ever communicate, not unless I can carry them back in time with me whilst putting them behind my eyes.

That's why whenever people talk about Direct Instruction or Group Working or Cognitive Acceleration I sit, I listen , I think, and I wait for them to get their USB out.

You see, I just want your resources. But I love what you do. Big fan of your work.