Perspective

There is a bill at hand that could give a huge boost to local agriculture and local economies.

Our economy continues to struggle, while the national debt is at a crisis point.

Corporate spending on elections has been utterly set loose.

Government agencies are preparing to set fire to the Gulf of Mexico.

It's finals week.

Among all these worthwhile topics, which one do you suppose has my nearly undivided attention?  What's really important? It always depends on how you look at it.

Reform and improvement?

At the beginning of February, the Obama administration released the new proposed budget for next year. We can take it for granted that almost anything involving politics and money will inevitably be controversial, and so I imagine every little detail of the proposal is probably getting heat from somewhere. What caught my attention, thanks to a recent NCTE newsletter, was a cut in funding for the National Writing Project, a highly successful nationwide professional development program that has been praised as "one of the big success stories in professional development" in Education Week. NWP funding, if any, will now have to come through states, who must engage in a competitive funding race for federal money that has already begun to create a cut-throat, antagonistic atmosphere amongst educational institutions. Now any given local NWP site can only hope that its state will win the funding race, and then hope that state officials will see fit to allocate some of those funds to NWP. For all intents and purposes, this will be the end of the "national" in the National Writing Project.

Of course we have limited funds to draw from, so of course we can't give unlimited funding to every educational program. But it seems to me that our efforts at redesigning educational budgets should be directed toward eliminating or reforming failing programs, those that use money poorly. If we eliminate the funding of successful programs, overall educational quality cannot help but suffer.

How to save the world, by Matt Fiocchi

For one of my classes I was supposed to write a quick blurb about my educational philosophy as it applies to students with special needs. I got a little carried away, and now I feel like sharing. Enjoy or ignore, as you please. Feedback always welcome.

Educational philosophy

My educational philosophy basically equates to my whole worldview. The main idea is to help. The best way to help is to teach. And the best thing to teach is life—knowing yourself, knowing the world, ultimately the same thing. Ours is a troubled world, yes, but most of our troubles we inflict on ourselves and on each other. We behave in ways that are harmful to ourselves and others and the world—that is, harmful to the whole. And we do this because of ignorance, because we don’t know any better; we wouldn’t have to hold rallies to protect the rain-forest if the people destroying it simply knew better (an extreme simplification, but it gets the point across). Thus, the problem is individual ignorance on a massive scale, and in my view the only realistic solution is individual awakening on an equally massive scale.

One very large and obvious complication with this is that you can’t manufacture genuine human awakening on an industrial scale; hence the term individual. And of course, you can’t force it on anyone. To force one’s own worldview on another is not awakening, it’s brainwashing, which is antithetical to awakening and leads to conformity and thence to violence in a self-perpetuating cycle. Awakening can’t be made to happen by force; all you can do is work to remain alert and compassionate and create appropriate circumstances—with prolonged contact and profound trust one can eventually hope to make a connection. Well, keeping company in the classroom day after day seems to fit the bill.

So the best way (in my humble opinion) to make the world a better place, long term, big picture, is to teach. To make contact with individual minds and help them learn how to learn about themselves and the world. I don’t want to put my ideas in students’ heads; I want to help them discover their own.

I’ve had this notion in my head for years, and it hasn’t changed much, so I figure either it’s an accurate reflection of my deepest motivations, or else I’m just very very stubborn.

As a learner, I feel like I’ve often fallen through the cracks or slipped by unnoticed. Because I did okay in school and didn’t make a fuss, it was easy for teachers to ignore me and focus on other things. I honestly think I could have gotten a lot more out of school if someone had looked into my eyes and noticed I was in there--curious, interested, watching--and taken the trouble to engage with me. I think I was a pretty special kid, and I could have been involved and inspired in school, and I wasn’t.

But here’s the more important thing: All kids are special. All kids can be involved and inspired. The whole point of teaching is to try to give all students the opportunity to engage and develop to their greatest potential.

So what about students with special needs? Every student has unique needs—some just have needs that are relatively unusual. The variety of individual personalities, requirements, and perspectives makes the classroom a richer and potentially more rewarding environment for all. As for how I will incorporate students with unusual needs into my classroom, I hope I’ll do it in the same way I’ll incorporate all of my students—with an understanding and appreciation of the unique needs and gifts of every single individual human being.

I must confess that one of my greatest fears is that I will apply my own quiet prejudices to my students without realizing it. All I can do to address this danger is try to keep paying attention to my students, to the classroom environment, to the community, and above all to myself.