On selling the key to the universe to people who didn’t even know it was locked.

They looked like tinkers, but there wasn’t one amongst them, she knew, who could mend a kettle.  What they did was sell invisible things.  And after they had sold what they had, they still had it.  They sold what everyone needed but often didn’t want.  They sold the key to the universe to people who didn’t even know it was locked.” P24 The Wee Free Men Terry Pratchett  

He  appears more tightrope walker than floor sander, with tape measure clenched between his teeth and arms outstretched he treads gingerly,  making  his way across a floorscape made unstable by a complex inter layering of cast off teenage possessions. Finding a place where it is safe to pause and reflect on this obvious example of egregious early parenting he cannot help but turn and ask me what I do in the day job.

I tell him I am a teacher... and when I say “teacher” I see his eyes glaze over - I know this look - I am being categorised as someone who “thinks that they always know the right answer ..... even when they are obviously wrong” ...

It’s OK ....  I explain ....I was one of those kids who suffered from premature closure at school ..... I enjoyed whole school assemblies so much I couldn’t imagine myself not attending them regularly throughout my adult life ....He is not reassured by my explanation ...   and when I add that the debate, over who sets the criteria for acceptable levels of bedroom floor messiness in the house  rivals that over the significance of the Waiho Loop glacial moraine  ... I sense that he is tagging his “teacher category folder” with “unfathomable parenting practice”

All I ever wanted to be was a teacher ... and no matter what happens in the day job ... and how many times I find myself frustrated by people in education who don’t even know the universe is locked  .... it remains all I ever want to be ...And I wonder .... not for the first time .... how such certainty of occupation .... how such “I know what I like and I like what I do” ....came to someone whose mind is so restless ...

What is about teaching and learning ... The big “T and L” that so captures me?

I suspect it is the adrenalin rush, that raw intellectual and emotional excitement that comes from finding something new ... and from having “stuff I know” about, the content, the process, the how to do it and the nature of the learner undermined ... so that I can look again .... and again  ... and again at the same thing ... and find something different each time.

Pratchett had it wrong to imply that being a teacher is about selling “the key to the universe to people who didn’t even know it was locked” – rather being a teacher is discovering each day that the key you are selling is the wrong key and furthermore that you are often attempting to unlock the wrong universe.

It seems that it is the same with hairdressing .... when I asked the hairdresser today why she loved her work ... her answer mimicked mine ... She loves the uncertainty ... the not knowing .... that every client brings a different challenge .... and that every client allows her to experiment with “truths” of her professional knowledge and experience.  The daily work of the hairdresser may well look the same to an outsider but to someone who understands hairdressing in a more deeply abstracted and connected way  ... each day provides something tantalisingly different to learn.

We do a lot of work on curriculum alignment in the day job .... including sitting alongside teachers as they plan learning experiences (coded against student learning outcomes SOLO Taxonomy) for integrated units aligned against the Achievement objectives and Key Competencies  in the (new) New Zealand Curriculum.

This process includes integrating thinking and ICT interventions that enhance the conditions of value for identified student learning outcomes, and the creation of SOLO coded student self assessment rubrics so they can see clearly where they are in the learning process and what they can do to improve their understanding .

When the whole integrated unit comes together it is like entering a Csíkszentmihályi  flow state ...  euphoria for all involved.

We have many integrated units planned against the new New Zealand Curriculum with schools across New Zealand  ... so many in fact ....that claims about the newness of the curriculum document surprise me.

Integrating the ICTs in a way that enhances the conditions of value for student learning outcomes into these units is acknowledged as challenging when working with teacher technophobes.

However, I find the task equal in challenge to planning learning experiences with teacher technophiles who seek to recklessly introduce the latest piece of Web2.0 into everything they do with students.

And reading Postman’s Technopoly  whilst waiting for the hairdresser to rescue me from my unruliness today ... helps me understand why ... there is a bit about a “pedagogical peace” between “the gregariousness and openness fostered by orality and the introspection and isolation fostered by the printed word” that I had forgotten.

Postman argues that I am asking the wrong questions about technology in education when I focus so tightly on how ICTs might enhance the conditions of value in the identified learning outcome ...

I have the wrong key ... or even worse in my work I am attempting to unlock the wrong universe.
   

“we learn nothing when educators ask, Will students learn mathematics better by computers than by textbooks? .....”

    What we need to know consider about the computer has nothing to do with its efficiency as a teaching tool.  We need to know in what ways it is altering our conception of learning, and how in conjunction with television it undermines the old idea of school?

    New technologies alter the structure of our interests; the things we think about.  They alter the character of our symbols; the things we think with. And they alter the nature of community: the area in which thoughts develop.  “ Technopoly p17, 18, 19 and 20

I had a Billy Collin’s moment when reading this – Postman’s argument reminded me of Billy Collin’s argument  for the integration of technology into a “death by drowning experience” in his poem - The Art of Drowning.

It is a poem that never fails to make me smile ...

The Art of Drowning
By Billy Collins

I wonder how it all got started, this business
about seeing your life flash before your eyes
while you drown, as if panic, or the act of submergence,
could startle time into such compression, crushing
decades in the vice of your desperate, final seconds.

After falling off a steamship or being swept away
in a rush of floodwaters, wouldn't you hope
for a more leisurely review, an invisible hand
turning the pages of an album of photographs-
you up on a pony or blowing out candles in a conic hat.

How about a short animated film, a slide presentation?
Your life expressed in an essay, or in one model photograph?
Wouldn't any form be better than this sudden flash?
Your whole existence going off in your face
in an eyebrow-singeing explosion of biography-
nothing like the three large volumes you envisioned.

Survivors would have us believe in a brilliance
here, some bolt of truth forking across the water,
an ultimate Light before all the lights go out,
dawning on you with all its megalithic tonnage.
But if something does flash before your eyes
as you go under, it will probably be a fish,

a quick blur of curved silver darting away,
having nothing to do with your life or your death.
The tide will take you, or the lake will accept it all
as you sink toward the weedy disarray of the bottom,
leaving behind what you have already forgotten,
the surface, now overrun with the high travel of clouds.

I especially love linking this last bit to claims made for integrating technology in teaching and learning ...

But if something does flash before your eyes
as you go under, it will probably be a fish,

a quick blur of curved silver darting away,
having nothing to do with your life or your death.

I need to think again about; the things I think about, the things I think with, and the area in which my thoughts develop in education

At the moment it seems likely that in an educational sense I am the fish..