The Importance of Not Doing Something: Part I: The Resolution

Writing is hard sometimes. I mean, not right now. Right now, my keyboarding skills can barely keep up with my usual verbosity, and writing is like uninterrupted talking. That's blogging, I guess: Think something, try not to oversay it, mash it all out on the laptop keyboard, publish, and wait to see if it made sense to anyone but me. Easy.

But when the prompt is official and external, writing is like trying to do origami, using nothing but my elbows and big toes. The result is an excruciatingly clumsy facsimile of something other people seem able to do with ease, or fingers.

That's how it was when I had to write a teaching philosophy for one of the classes I took last year. Working on my Elementary Education degree, I was zooming through an assignment until I got to "What is your teaching philosophy?"

I could have done a better job if I had taken the 15 most frequently-used words in my courses thus far, put them on magnetic refrigerator poetry tiles, donned a blindfold, picked words off my fridge randomly, thrown them on the floor, removed my blindfold, and read them aloud. The first draft was something like, MY TEACHING PHILOSOPHY IS MEANINGFUL SUPPORT STUDENT LEARNING ENGAGEMENT HUNDRED PERCENT PIAGET ACCURACY VERY LONG TIME.

Maybe not quite that bad, but none of it meant anything to me. And it was supposed to be why I do what I do for the foreseeable future of my career as an educator.

Hm, maybe I could do this thing better. I tried a trick I use sometimes, when hitting a writing block. I imagined the statement I wanted to write, in this case my teaching philosophy, as something that already existed, pre-defined. It didn't have to be a lofty goal. It could be what I've already been doing, or why I've already been doing it. The trick worked. All the jargon faded away and my real intentions stood there, clear as they always are.

My teaching philosophy is based on the assumption that the student is always my best partner in the endeavor to educate them.

Yes, it's basically "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make 'em drink." in school form. You can compel, cajole, threaten, and bribe a child to sit, and hold a pencil and paper or book, but you can't make 'em think.  They have to be down wit it, to some degree. We go together, or not at all.

Many who tried our hand at huh?-schooling our own kids read John Holt at some point in our studies. (Or, unstudies, as the case may be.) He was no fan of school, insisting that the expectations imposed by a formal learning environment destroy a kid's natural tendency to be voracious learn-o-matics. Kind of a downer if you plan to work in public education, but a real punk rocker if you've declared your home a hands-on exploration zone of anything goes.

Holtism may have gotten a little out of hand, here at the BU, during the years the kids and critters were trashing the place. I mean "discovering knowledge."

My li'l "partners" in "education," were free range freight trains at times.

 But I guess that was kind of the point.

Pro Tip: If pseudo-feral un-raising kids in a backyard petting zoo is your idea of school, prepare to live in a world of undone housework and a bramble of untamed habits. Watch out, because behaviors that soothe, in absence of other obligations, can get out of hand. Like our raging case of invasive backyard bindweed.

You know if it's true if there's a garden metaphor for it.

Maybe we had to figure it out for ourselves to really get it, but all of that unfettered freedom taught us to love limits. Seeking balance actually makes us happier than seeking happiness, but balance is a moment-by-moment accomplishment. One year, thirty minute increments of screen time are exchanged for chores, followed by an afternoon of tree-climbing. Before you know it, it's a year later and you're taking all day to write a teaching philosophy while your tree-climber spends way too much of her morning in headphones, mouth-breathing over her Kitty Kats RPG.

After an informal formative assessment, I decided to propose a New Year's Resolution.

But, but, resolutions, man. Who cares? Live your best now now, man. You don't need some stupid white man's holiday, right? Do chickens wait for an arbitrary date on the calendar to start being better chickens, man? No, they just peck the calendar to pieces. Maybe eat some of it.

Be like chickens, man.

Okay, so what if saying, On ___ Day, I'll Stop Shoulding and Start Doing is just a human construct? Man? I do happen to be a human, and kind of a constructivst, I have discovered. If we build our own reason for doing, or not doing something, then we really might do or not do it.

In that spirit, four weeks ago, we began a concerted effort to limit everyone's screen time. It has been surprisingly popular among the alums, as was the idea that I Shall Be The Enforcer Of It. For now.

Since beginning, we have had a rough aim, accomplished through my rough act of putting everybody's cell phones in a shoe box and declaring how long the break will be each week.

And sure, I can keep doing that. But, as usual, I have ulterior motives, I mean "learning objectives." Pesky ole' John Holt won't let me rest at merely training them to do less phone-staring.

      A life worth living, and work worth doing: that is what I want for children (and all people), not just, or not even, something called 'a better education.' 
         -John Holt Instead of Education:Ways to Help People Do Things Better

We can toss the cell phones in a box, do origami with our fingers for a rainy Sunday afternoon, and blog about it later. But, by the power of Bloom's Taxonomy, how can I really make this engagement more meaningful? Holt help us, how can we all learn to do life better? And then blog about that? Stay tuned.