I am so glad that I went back into the classroom. This summer is going to be so revealing as I look at myself and my friends. I am actually even more excited about sharing with them what I learned in September. I wonder how they will react when I play back parts of the recordings of their teaching to them. I woke up thinking about this as I have been every morning lately and I was thinking about the whole idea of Bernstein's code theory and Wilson and the little British School Boys and Schooling in Capitalist America by Bowles and Gintis. I thought about all of that stuff and then I thought about how much difference the building administrators make and the huge influence of the culture of the school. I thought about a conversation I had with two educators this past Thursday about culture and how it can trump all of these other factors. I saw it happen at North Star Academy when I taught there. Of course, I know that with a charter school you are really handpicking parents and children who buy in to what you are doing, but that is not the case at Bloomfield High. Educators there saw a change in culture with the change in school administration. I actually saw the same thing happen at Central High when I was there. I just know - as everyone else who is dedicated to educating children knows - that parents are just not around as much anymore - they are working themselves half to death. But again, I wonder if we have become sort or archaic in our definition of parental involvement. I know parents who are living in the projects and working a bunch of different jobs - but they have cell phones and respond to text messages. Maybe we as educational leaders need to open up our minds about how to get people involved. Maybe it won't happen at back to school night or pta meetings, but there are other ways of communicating with people. I was thinking about what would happen if I had a cell phone line dedicated to parents. Of course, you know, I would only answer it during reasonable hours, but they could leave messages whenever they wanted. Anyhow - you just have to be creative about how you reach out I think and have lots of things for them to come to so that they can feel proud of their children. Now - more than ever - community is important. That's where the church comes in. Every church needs to hire teachers to run a program outside of school. And every church needs to have an active prison ministry - but that's a whole other topic.
But I woke up thinking about the whole code thing and wondering what I saw while I was teaching after having read and talked about all of that stuff. I am thinking about the Level 1 students who are supposedly not college bound. Even though most of them said they wanted to go to County College at least. And I guess it's true that they don't really have the language or the interest in the underpinnings of most scientific processes to engage in any heavy discourse about science. But who says they even need it. I mean even the most brilliant minds like Richard P. Feynman used every day concepts and language to describe quantum electrodynamics. Every genius I ever met understood that. So it really all boils down to culture, finding ways to communicate, and getting teachers to develop a "Feynman mindset".
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