Reflection on Teacher Education Programs

Reflection about Education

Think about the difference between volunteer work and having a job within a corporate system. If you're the cashier at Walmart, the more machine-like you are, the better. The important thing is to check items out quickly and accurately, to "complete your duties efficiently." Your attitude toward customers is not the primary priority. But if you're volunteering at say feeding the homeless, interaction with people is the important thing. (Unless, they are starving are something, which is very rare in America.) A machine-like volunteer would bring no joy to the lives of those you are serving, and thus misses the entire point of volunteer work, of public service. Corporate work benefits from a machine-like approach; public service benefits from a human-like approach.

In his book How to Survive in Your Native Land, recounting his experiences teaching in a public middle school, James Herndon provides a powerful illustration of the difference between truly internally motivated student activities, and what teachers assume to be internally motivated participation. He describes how kids in his regular class enjoyed the creative tasks he came up for them to do: the "uproar when twenty kids rushed to the board to put up their symbols" when the class was creating a Hieroglyphics-like language, getting information about how the Peace Corps operates and then writing "imaginary journals of stays in Africa and South America." Then, once, he and a colleague started a new class, without grades, and in which students were issued "permanent hall passes," making attendance completely optional. They soon found that students didn't want to participate in these creative tasks. "We had to face the fact that all the stuff we thought the kids were dying to do (if they only had time away from the stupefying lessons of other teachers) was in fact stuff that we wanted them to do, that we invented. ... And not only things to be doing--it was things for them, the kids, to be doing. ... We wanted to see what symbols the kids would invent for English words; we didn't have much curiosity about the symbols we ourselves would invent. We didn't write fake Peace Corps journals ourselves; we only told the kids to do it."

Herndon then describes the successful activity of that class. He and his colleague decided to make a film, but one that they wanted to make. "We didn't want to find out what the kids' notions of films were. We didn't want to see what they would do with the film. We didn't want to inspect their creativity."

"If ... the role of teacher as giver of orders didn't work out, it was also true that the other role (the one Frank and I had imagined)--the teacher as Provider Of Things To Do, the teacher as Entertainer--didn't work our either. For wasn't that just what the kids had been telling us all year in their oblique, exasperating way? What did all that Nothing To Do In Here mean, if not that the kids didn't want entertainers, wouldn't accept them if they didn't have to, wanted the teachers to be something else entirely?

"Wanted them to be what? What was the difference between all the grand things we'd thought up for the kids to do and The Hawk? Why, merely that we didn't want to do any of the former ourselves and we did want to do the latter."...

"Wanted them to be human."

Later, Herndon spells out his central message to teachers:

"Resist every day all the apparatus of the school which was created in order to enable you to manage and evaluate a group, since it is just that management which destroyed the kids you have in your class.

"You must examine your authority for what it is, and abandon that part of it which is official, board-appointed, credentialed and dead. Then you must accept the natural authority you have as an adult, belonging to a community of adults which includes the kid's parents and relatives."

So Herndon tells