Episode 182: How To Teach More (Wed, Dec 25, 2024)

Episode 182: How To Teach More  (Wed, Dec 25, 2024

For our Education Establishment an exciting new wrinkle would be 20 ways to practice collaboration. Their gift must be called what it is, sleep-inducing.

With just a bit of creativity and exploiting the information available to anyone, you can make memorable classroom instruction.

Magicians these days are coming up with new ways to entertain an audience. Copy that.

(For inspiration, reflect on Shin Lim
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTJbWylt4-A )

(Acknowledging typo: “...students have all the answers hidden away…"
should be “....teachers have all the answers hidden away.”)

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Word-Wise Education
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Bruce Deitrick Price

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Bio: Bruce Deitrick Price is a novelist, artist, poet,
and education reformer.

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Transcript

LET'S FIX EDUCATION     by     Bruce Deitrick Price

Episode 182        Wed, Dec 25, 2024
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 How To Teach More 

In the gym one day, I found a magazine called M-U-M, which refers to the code that magicians must not tell secrets to outsiders.

The surprising thing was that columnists in the magazine discussed tricks they couldn't explain. Amazing! People are still confecting new mysteries?! After all these centuries you might think there are no possibilities left. But many AGT winners do this again and again. Magic is in a magical age.

But in our schools, we have lassitude. Kids are bored and the schools don't have any new ideas. Why is that? They should put magicians in charge of the schools. Things could not possibly be worse.

I believe our Education Establishment is devoted to left-wing social engineering. Whether students know the name of that big river in the middle of our country is not important. As most of the people in K-12 claim to be "teachers" and “educators,” they end up being charlatans.

So what would more ingenious educators be doing if  chains of ideology were not dragging them down.

A good rule of thumb would be that every classroom has a map of the US and the world, and every day the teacher finds a reason for touching those maps. Wars, fires, riots, new legislation, new treaties, new inventions, new records set. Doesn't matter! Kids see an adult fussing over geographical detail. Students get the message that matters.

Another rule of thumb should be finding ways to draw children into discussion and debate. The cliché where teachers have all the answers and students feel stupid, that's not working.

Mention something in the news, a TV program, a new movie, a sporting event, and let people discuss it in terms of what they know and feel about it. Everything they say is "correct."

Ask this question, would you rather live in an ocean community, a river community, or mountain community? Can anyone explain why they want to live in one place or another? Let them try.

Another fruitful approach is to show the class a photograph of something complicated, an accident, a factory floor, a new product, and ask this question:  what is the most interesting thing you see here?

On any big calendar, there's a lot of stuff to use as bait for other things. If you mention a city, you can mention any one who came from there, any event that took place there. If you mention a state, you can mention events in that state’s history. You’ll find dozens of events worth mentioning. Example: Arbor Day, which was first celebrated more than 150 years ago. The idea was that children would plant trees. Environmental awareness would be encouraged; additionally, children would learn basic botany. So why have the states stopped mentioning this holiday? Apparently people running the schools don't take global warming any more seriously than they take reading.

Every newspaper has a weather map. Once or twice a week, show children how to read them: snow, rain, wind, storm fronts, high pressure, low pressure. You have a good reason to mention the cities most affected by this or that atmospheric changes.

By the way, the impact of AI is going to be difficult to say for a long time. But one aspect is surely very positive. Teachers not very well educated themselves can pick a topic and quickly obtain all the necessary copy for a day’s work.

Basically, try to use any trick in the book to make children take a second and third look at geography. One thing is particularly is vital: teach a sense of scale. For example in Virginia, where I am, most students have driven through much of it and have a sense of distance. But probably no sense of how Virginia compares to Illinois or California. Go to the map with tracing paper, trace the state of Virginia, and then cut it out. You can take that crazy shape and place on any other state (or country). Students can immediately see for example that New Mexico is about 2 1/2 times bigger than Virginia.

You can make a lot of deductions about the country when you find a straight border, for example, the one across the top of Washington and Montana. That's put there by surveyors. They went all the way across because they said well, the United States goes up to the 49th parallel and you can read that, but when you see a jagged line with a lot of curves that's probably a river and if it's more jagged, it's probably a mountain top.

Don't teach anything once. Months later, come back around from a different approach.

My recommendation is, have fun, teach more. Make some magic.(Acknowledging typo: “students have all the answers hidden away…"
should be “teachers have all the answers hidden away.”)

(For inspiration, reflect on Shin Lim
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTJbWylt4-A )

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