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Teaching as a Subversive Activity
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10 thoughts on “Teaching as a Subversive Activity”
I absolutely love this because it is absolutely true.
Why on earth are we so afraid to call a spade a spade in our business? The language teachers of the future will feel life and embrace it and bring it into their classrooms, because they know how to, have the tools for, authentic human communication in the TL in the classroom. I said this in a comment earlier today and repeat it here:
…the biggest thing I regret in my career, with nothing else even close, is believing those so called bigwigs, believing that what they said had value….
Why is there so much noise in our profession, so much noise in our world, these days? All that noise is the sound of the walls of what used to be considered good language instruction crashing to the ground. Krashen is aptly named. He brought the first and biggest bulldozer to that wall. I love him for that.
Thank you Bryan for sharing that superb quote with us.
You can “look inside” on Amazon. Worth it. Get some popcorn.
http://www.amazon.com/Teaching-Subversive-Activity-Neil-Postman/dp/0385290098
One of the things that I really love about CI/TPRS is how we celebrate everyday life. Not only that, we take everyday words, objects, and actions and elevate them by using our imaginations and playfulness. It’s like how a child can find a million and one ways to play with a box.
It also made me think of how the impressionists and post-impressionists celebrated the quotidien. After that the surrealists look(ed) at surpassing everyday life and attempting to reach our dreams / a reality that is more real than what we perceive to be our everyday reality. I think that has something to do with what we’re trying to do in our classrooms (and hopefully our lives).
Beautiful comparisons Bryan. Very much appreciated. Also love this line because it is so very true:
…we take everyday words, objects, and actions and elevate them….
LOVE IT! YES!
“It was Kafka, we believe, who remarked that he could not understand why some people were so disdainful of “everyday” life since that was the only one they had.”
A big point of the book is: “The medium IS the message.” So teachers send their kids messages, sometimes the content of their courses but often just HOW they teach, that is, the medium of HOW they teach becomes the message their kids receive.
I was just thinking earlier today of the HOW as our message, James. To me, this reminds me of the old adage that the results don’t matter, it’s the getting there that counts. Being happy in the moments of our daily work. What a gift! What better thing to teach a kid and not through words but actions. And it’s the polar opposite of test driven teaching.
I think of people whose only goal is to make money, or by comparison high scores on tests. At the end of their careers, they have lots of money or high scores (in a very low percentage of their students), but they didn’t have any fun.
As I look back on some of the stories I have been privileged to see being created in my classroom over the past fifteen years, I realize what is important. Ours really is a happier way to teach. We are so blessed!
The game is called ‘Let’s Pretend,’ and if its name were chiseled into the front of every school building in America, we would at least have an honest announcement of what takes place there. The game is based on a series of pretenses which include: Let’s pretend that you are not what you are and that this sort of work makes a difference to your lives; let’s pretend that what bores you is important, and that the more you are bored, the more important it is; let’s pretend that there are certain things everyone must know, and that both the questions and answers about them have been fixed for all time; let’s pretend that your intellectual competence can be judged on the basis of how well you can play Let’s Pretend.
-Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner, Teaching as a Subversive Activity
Very articulate quote you posted for us James. Lets Pretend is a game that gets under my skin! I don’t like to pretend about important things! For some reason I’m feeling like Dr. Seuss now after reading this post.
This reminds me about some of my “gifted students” and how several of them don’t love my class, and will not continue next year, because I don’t congratulate them when they asking boring grammatical questions (like they were use to with their previous teacher). At the same time these kids don’t want to write the quiz or record the story details (too much work, they answer!). So how “gifted” are they really?
I would like to add this to the compilation of language acquisition quotes to be hung up in my room next year.
We are free.
Today I thought I’d mosey into a cute Spanish picture book I bought at the school book fair, called, ‘El Zoológico de Calzoncillos.’ [Underpants Zoo]. (I had to rewrite it to narrow the language – I did some of that in real time in front of the kids as we meandered through….)
Talk about engagement!! My 2nd graders were guffawing at the pictures and questions I asked about all sorts of undies, including the elephant, whose had holes, and the camel’s, who had lumpy ones filled w/sand.
Postman’s teachers might have focused on subject/verb agreement, or masculine/feminine, singular/plural…as the pages were filled with plenty of opportunities for it!!
We just reveled in the silliness of the sloths’ fuzzy whities, and the anteater, whose pants were filled with ants…
It’s suddenly 85 degrees outside in Chicagoland (yesterday was in the 50’s) and with no A/C in my class, my lil ones were kinda beat. But our raunchy romp was like a cool breeze…