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2 thoughts on “John Piazza”
I think we have beaten the drum so loudly because we are afraid, afraid that our little Fauntleroys won’t end up happy and successful and prosperous if they eschew any alternatives. So well said, John. By being present with our students, we do our main work – that is our main teaching work. Whenever we teach a class, we inevitably must do two things – we communicate the content of our instruction to our students, and we also, in every little moment, tell them what we think of them. Malcolm Gladwell beats this drum, the helping kids self-advocate drum, in his new book Outliers. By the way, there was another John in the Bay Area, some years ago. He couldn’t make it at Stanford. His name was John Steinbeck.
If you can ever get ahold of a copy of Gatto’s new book “Weapons of Mass Instruction” there is a chapter in which he talks only about the stunning amount and quality of people (people who we all know of) who did not go the traditional route of schooling and because of that are now extremely successful in their lives.
Ben, your email subtext says it best, the quote by Einstein, something to the effect of “if you measure a fish by its ability to climb trees, it will spend its whole life thinking it is stupid”.
I think I noticed a comment by Krashen in one of his latest papers, he basically states that what we are learning is forcing us to make school accessible (not just getting to the building accessible) to ALL students, not just the academically-oriented ones. I think this is important, as students are often chided for their lack of effort/ability in this realm.