Have you ever noticed in teaching that there seems to be some kind of unwritten rule that we’re not allowed to really know what our kids are thinking?
I mean, it would be so easy to just ask them, if the world were an honest place and direct honest discourse between teacher and students could really take place in the real way in schools.
I wonder which came first, the mistrust of the teacher or the mistrust of the tests. Probably the mistrust of the teacher. It probably came to us from Europe, where for centuries there was a “superior” class of slightly angry teachers, thus creating the distance.
I wish the distance had never happened. I wish that if a person loved some academic area and wanted to share it in a happy way with children just growing up, to kind of prove to them that life was worth living and that their subject matter is a wonderful things to study, they could just share what they knew without any heavy-handedness.
But instead it became a kind of game where we weren’t allowed to know what they were thinking, weren’t allowed to enjoy in a reciprocal give-and-take kind of happiness of learning. In happiness of learning.
Of course, the testing industry grew out of all that lack of openness and lack of sharing, etc. If we couldn’t ask them what they knew, we could test them. Once the distance was there, and the tests started to happen, school for everybody just probably unraveled in terms of its potential.
Now, in a new era era when the human reciprocal and give-and-take possibilities of real communication between students and teachers seems somehow more possible, oh hell I’m just probably dreaming. But not with the Star – it really brings those wonderful things. It brings wonderful things, if you dive deep into it.