Teaching, Living, and Learning

Thursday, September 03, 2009

DISTRIBUTION AND CIRCULATION IN ROOM 2

I’ve come to think of teaching and learning as more of a distributive process than an accretive one. When I’m teaching, I’m not adding anything to the students’ academic lives as much as I’m helping them distribute the wisdom of the universe among themselves. Learning doesn’t happen by piling up facts and insights, but by being open to the free dispersal and circulation of understanding. The universe we inhabit is teeming with knowledge, and all the students have to do is feel and enjoy it as it flows through their lives, and all I have to do, really, is make sure I don’t get in the way.

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I found this quote (below) in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park. She's describing Fanny Price's home at Mansfield, but the words exactly remind me of the atmosphere I try to maintain in my classroom:
" ... no sounds of contention, no raised voice, no abrupt bursts, no tread of violence, was ever heard; all proceeded in a regular course of cheerful orderliness; everybody had their due importance; everybody's feelings were consulted."

...........

The following quote is from David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. I would like my classroom to be like Dr. Strong's school:

"Dr. Strong's was an excellent school...It was very gravely and decorously ordered, and on a sound system; with an appeal, in everything, to the honor and good faith of the [students], and an avowed intention to rely on their possession of these qualities unless they proved themselves unworthy of it, which worked wonders. We all felt that we had a share in the management of the place, and in sustaining its character and dignity."

If I replaced "agent" with "teacher", this passage from a short story might, I hope, describe me in my classroom:
"The agent spent his days in following what seemed to many observers to be only a dull routine, but all his steadiness of purpose, all his simple intentness, all his gifts of strategy and powers of foresight, and of turning an interruption into an opportunity, were brought to bear upon this dull routine with a keen pleasure."
-- from "The Gray Mills of Farley" by Sarah Orne Jewett