Warning: this blog post contains uncomfortably direct language that could be perceived as offensive but is not meant to offend more than it is to illustrate and defend the delicate balance needed to keep this community on the fast track to best practices in our CI instruction:
Yesterday Jim asked in a comment field here.
“It’s not clear to me what is overly “intellectual” for this discussion (about curriculum and assessment and what is “best for kids”.
Here is my response:
It’s like with restaurants. I have a restaurant that caters to people who like, let’s say, turnips. That is a small percentage of the population. Then people come in wanting lentils mixed with spinach and frankfurters.
I can’t serve that. It’s not in my kitchen. Jim you know that my “restaurant” has always catered to a certain kind of TPRS teacher. We do things differently. We don’t have any lesson plans, for example, because we think that they kill creativity.
We use scripts like yours and Anne’s because we feel that they encourage creativity. We try new things like the Invisibles. But not all people feel that way, and they want to eat lentils mixed with spinach and frankfurters and fried chicken and fried plantains and other things.
When I can’t provide those things to them I try to politely suggest that those people find a restaurant where those things are served. If they don’t, as we know, I kick them out of the restaurant for making a fuss and disturbing the other customers.
I do that not out of any enmity for the customer but merely to keep the peace in my restaurant, which is very small. I have had offers to expand into a chain but I refuse to do that because I like small groups. I think that the bigger my restaurant gets, the less tasty the food becomes.
(Our group is actually shrinking right now with the proliferation of all the new TPRS websites and products out there and I am very happy about that. This is not a chain. I have stated, you will remember Jim, that I always wanted my blog community to be small. Look at what happened to the moretprs list – it is just sad. Their restaurant got too big and certain customers started banging on tables saying that they only wanted their kind of food served and most of the customers took flight, naturally, and the moretprs list is now a ghost list.)
But that was a public list and this is private and focused on solving problems in teaching and creating effective strategies for teachers and kids more than it is in intellectualizing things as they do in some other groups.
This gets to your question, Jim. If I don’t protect that focus on problem solving in the interest of helping kids, if we go all intellectual on it, we run the risk of going back into the Forest of Mind just at a time when Claire has found a way out!
I won’t be a part of drawing our group back into the Forest of Mind. It has taken me ten years of 24/7 effort to find a way out and the key trail we never could find was the assessment trail. It has been the missing trail and now we’ve found it and that is why Claire, whose ESL expertise is a perfect fit for this PLC right now – she has fresh eyes – has become so important to this group lately.
Again, anyone who doesn’t like what I am serving here is invited to please leave. I want this group even smaller, in fact, and will be as rude as I need to be in my own restaurant to make it that way. Less is more.
This is a huge time in the history of this community. It is not business as usual. It is the apex of this community as I, now well into my 60’s, won’t be able to maintain what I have been doing here for too many more years. I spend hours and hours a day here and that has been fine in India since most of my family was in the U.S. this year except for Landen but when I get back (next week!) to the great mosh pit that we most wonderful Americans are I will be far less present here than I have been while sitting at this little table for hours and hours day and night for the past year.
The good news long term for the blog is that I am working with Tina and Claire behind the scenes because they truly get my vision at every single level of detail and and I have asked Tina and she has accepted to one day in the not too distant future “inherit” this PLC because I want people who like turnips to continue to be able to find a place in town to enjoy them.
(You will find that Tina Hargaden is the real deal – more than the real deal – and one of the great new minds in TPRS who is already transforming the Pacific Northwest into a fertile bed of extremely creative and energized teachers (can anyone say “Portlandia”) so I am very happy to be training her daily in continuing my work as I get ready now to hand the torch of this blog off to her.
There won’t be a blip in the quality of the turnips served with Tina, I assure you. And Jim she has been on this blog as long as you have, long before it became private ten years ago.)
Claire has her own answer to your question, as well, which I pasted below from the comments section. She addresses the overall underlying point of contention here generated by Lance, which has to stop because it is throwing us off the scent and making the discussion about him and ideas and not kids and strategies. This will be ample fodder for the behind-the-scenes gossipers, but that is fine with me. I am tired of vicious gossip and so is Carol Gaab.
I agree with every word Claire says below and would like to remind the blog community again that this is just one internet place and cannot be the place to solve all problems for all people, that people who love turnips can’t be trying to serve five course meals like the big restaurant chains.
Claire:
Jim, I agree, thinks can get confusing. We’re covering the basics of assessment and curriculum in just a few weeks. Please don’t worry that you will “upset the goal” by asking questions. Saying valid ideas just wouldn’t fly or trying to be subversive to the discussion is never something people want to see, but honest questioning of our practices is always welcome.
I think Ben’s vision as he’s expressed here is to simplify. Not give in to the demand for targets, themes, grammar, or even high-frequency wordlists. Not without a proper fight.
He’s spoken out against over-intellectualized debates because that’s how abusive curriculum starts. Each teacher wants to outshine the next and look better than the next with a more detailed curriculum than the person sitting next to them. In the meantime, kids get left behind. Curriculum should be built around what we determine is best for kids.
We need a healthy, respectful discussion about what curriculum should look like. However, we can’t cast a shadow of a doubt on the pivotal role curriculum and authentic assessment play in protecting our kids. In my experience, their mental health is a prerequisite to my own. We can’t watch children suffer through misaligned, antiquated curriculum and abusive tests any more. We have different capacities and limitations to how much we can do in our buildings, but we must all chip in ideas on how to make things better and get a real revolution started because it’s desperately needed.
So I say, let’s trust Ben’s judgement on this. He’s fought through rough patches and misunderstandings before, but he keeps the discussion focused because Ben loves kids. People who don’t agree leave and people who love his vision come to stay. I’m here to stay… and so are child-focused curriculum and authentic assessment.
Note: I do wish to make any apologies that are necessary to Lance on this very difficult issue. I don’t know how else to say what I have to say. It’s not like we can ignore the recent stress and the mega stresses we experienced when this happened before. But I have to keep my own vision or this won’t be my blog anymore. This space is tuned to a very different frequency on the TPRS radio spectrum. I know that Lance is all about getting better at this work, but I just don’t think that my blog is the place for the discussion he wants to have. This is not about personalities at all, really. I bow to your energy and vision, Lance.
