The one thing that stood out to me in this week's reading has to come from Chapter 11 "Creating Frameworks for Possibility." The reading revealed three main areas for a person to create the frameworks needed to make change happen.- Making a new distinction to help reframe the current one.
- Become a part of the framework around you.
- Distinguish what is part of being off-track, while remaining on-track.
This endeavor goes hand in hand with the third area. Part of making or reframing the current possibilities of life involves distinguishing between right and wrong. I, like the example given in the text about the orchestra in Sao Paolo, Brazil, was faced with something similar when I was playing high school baseball. We took a trip to New Orleans for a tournament. Our last instructions were to NOT go down to the quarter. When 16 to 18 year old young men are faced with being told not to do something, we chose to do the exact opposite. Our coach took a similar tact as the orchestra leader. We did not get the beat down reaming that we all probably deserved. Although we did not win the tournament, we went on to play some of the best baseball we had played up to that part of the season. Rather than playing for someone who we resented, we were playing someone who we felt we understood.
Images:
Downloaded from Flickr with Creative Commons Attribution Licensing
Schools Out - From Loozrboy
Football - From ElvertBarnes
JoAnne Green's comments to Tom’s Post:
ReplyDeleteI had a similar story when I was younger. I attended the same school where my mother taught and I was at a Saturday afternoon carnival. My mother told me to stay in the car until she returned because she had something to do first before we actually went into the carnival. I chose not to follow her direction and I just got out of the car for a few minutes outside the car door and stood there. In minutes, I was covered in ants because I was standing right in an ant bed. Instead of being yelled at by my mother, my punishment was getting bitten by the ants because I chose not to listen.
This is a prime example of rules are every where, whether is a small or a large rule.
We all have rules to follow and when we are off track while staying on track, following rules the best way you can be a benefit.
JoAnne ‘s comments to Tom’s Post:
ReplyDeleteI had a similar story when I was younger. I attended the same school where my mother taught and I was at a Saturday afternoon carnival. My mother told me to stay in the car until she returned because she had something to do first before we actually went into the carnival. I chose not to follow her direction and I just got out of the car for a few minutes outside the car door and stood there. In minutes, I was covered in ants because I was standing right in an ant bed. Instead of being yelled at by my mother, my punishment was getting bitten by the ants because I chose not to listen.
This is a prime example of rules are every where, whether is a small or a large rule.
We all have rules to follow and when we are off track while staying on track, following rules the best way you can be a benefit.
JoAnne Green's comments to Tom’s Post:
ReplyDeleteI had a similar story when I was younger. I attended the same school where my mother taught and I was at a Saturday afternoon carnival. My mother told me to stay in the car until she returned because she had something to do first before we actually went into the carnival. I chose not to follow her direction and I just got out of the car for a few minutes outside the car door and stood there. In minutes, I was covered in ants because I was standing right in an ant bed. Instead of being yelled at by my mother, my punishment was getting bitten by the ants because I chose not to listen.
This is a prime example of rules are every where, whether is a small or a large rule.
We all have rules to follow and when we are off track while staying on track, following rules the best way you can be a benefit.
People who don’t think that teaching is an art form have never stood in front of a class. While it isn’t difficult to stand in front of people and drone out the information straight from the slides, that is not teaching. It is much harder to draw the students into the discussion and lead them into wanting to learn, rather than marking time until they can go on break. When you can reach them and inspire them, then you are a teacher. I have to agree that you can’t reach all of them, unfortunately, but you still have to try. I also enjoyed the story about Sao Paulo and how, instead of berating the students or sending them into a guilt trip, he reminded them why they were there and what they loved to do. It would have been so easy to hammer them down since they knew that they had messed up. Lifting them up to inspire them couldn’t have been the easy path, but the results had to be so much better. That chapter (or practice) reminds me of a proverb about how much easier it is to fall. The climb can be so much harder, but it is usually worth it.
ReplyDeleteYour comments spoke to me. Not all teachers speak of their craft as an art form. Lets tie passion as an asset you have that goes hand in hand with with your teaching framework. Because you continue to "trudge on," you have a passion for what you do.
ReplyDeleteI was going to say that you passion helps you overcome obstacles and challenges. I guess we should identify those things as possibilities. As you profess your teaching as an art form, you make a difference in those who hear it. By making a positive impact with your students, you are influencing the dialogue in public education. Going back a few chapters, we do not know if the rhetoric on teachers is good or bad. It is. It may seem bad right now but we cannot see what is going to happen in the future and how the current dialogue will play into it. By keeping our passion, we can only believe that things will work out perfectly.