Erik Westlund

Please join us for the I.B. global lesson on October 22, 2008 at 7:17am in the auditorium at Annapolis High School. The theme is “Global poverty and its ethical implications.” Details here.

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I’ve agreed to write two TOK Essays along with my class. It’s only fair, right?– I’ve asked them to write three.  Thus, I am allowing people to vote on which one I should write. The questions are below. Choose the one you prefer and vote for the accompanying option on the menu to the right. Please vote only once and only if you are a member of the class.

I will write the firstmost voted one on my own and pass it out. I will write the secondmost voted in class, showing the writing process I would use along the way.

TOK Essay Prescribed Titles, 2007-2008:

1. Evaluate the role of intuition in different areas of knowledge.
2. Are reason and emotion equally necessary in justifying moral decisions?
3. “History is always on the move, slowly eroding today’s orthodoxy and making space for yesterday’s heresy.” Discuss the extent to which this claim applies to history and at least one other area of knowledge.
4. Does language play roles of equal importance in different areas of knowledge?
5. “…we will always learn more about human life and human personality from novels than from scientific psychology.” (Noam Chomsky). To what extent would you agree?
6. In areas of knowledge such as the arts and the sciences, do we learn more from work that follows or that breaks with accepted conventions?
7. Our senses tell us that a table, for example, is a solid object; science tells us that the table is mostly empty space. Thus two sources of knowledge generate conflicting results. Can we reconcile such conflicts?
8. Are some ways of knowing more likely than others to lead to truth?
9. Mathematicians have the concept of rigorous proof, which leads to knowing something with complete certainty. Consider the extent to which complete certainty might be achievable in mathematics and at least one other area of knowledge.
10. “Context is all” (Margaret Atwood). Does this mean that there is no such thing as truth?

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Details on the summer seminar series are available here.

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It’s hard for any of my friends or students who have spent any time with me not to have heard me talk about my discovery of Heidegger’s philosophy and its impact on my thought. I found Heidegger through a podcast lecture series by Bert Dreyfus, a professor at Berkeley (listen to his lectures here). His courses on existentialism and God and Society are excellent too. Especially for the layman. No matter.

I was struck by the connection between Heidegger and the thought of the great educational philosopher, John Dewey. Dreyfus made a point about the connection between Dewey and Heidegger several time in his lecture series on Division 1 of Being and Time. Bill Blattner also makes the point clearly in his commentary on Being and Time. Since Dewey is the educational philosopher, I’ve been led to think more about what Heidegger’s phenomonology might have to do with education and teaching.

Heidegger’s work on fundamental ontology (a la Division 1 of Being and Time) and existentialism (a la Division 2 of Being and Time) offer many insights. His discussion on mood and disposedness (or as Macquarrie and Robinson mistranslate, state-of-mind) seem important to me for understanding classroom situations. The mood of a classroom looked at as something shared, as part of being-in-the-world, gives the teacher hints at how to manage a class. It doesn’t involve getting into some inner feelings any one student has, but rather getting a feel for the mood in the room and how kids are engaging with it, and making the right decisions based upon that evidence. There’s definitely something here that needs exploring.

His ideas in Division 2 on anticipatory resoluteness are also welcome as a teacher. To stand one’s ground and press in to possibilities as a teacher requires resoluteness. There is “a way one does things” as a teacher in any school — it is the culture of teaching. This is how Heidegger’s “the one” (das Man) would teach. Not to fall into “the one’s” way of doing things requires flexibility, resoluteness, and an awareness of why one does anything one does in a classroom. A boring, maybe even competent, teacher makes “the One” their hero.

This brings me to Dreyfus’s comparison of Heidegger with Aristotle’s phronimos. The phronimos (”common-sense man”) has an ability to size-up a situation and do what’s best. This can’t be taught. Instead it is a skill acquired. A good teacher is a phronimos of the classroom. She does not walk in with a set of rules about how the lesson will go, but instead draws on her experience and instinct to do what is best given the situation. What is best cannot be governed by rules. One just has to trust one’s instinct and make the best decision. It’s a risk.

Three selections from an interview with Dreyfus show this better than I can.

[T]eaching is peculiar but not probably so peculiar in that there really isn’t anybody telling you the rules to start out with, whereas if you’re a driver, or a chess player, or learning most things when you’re a grownup, you start by being told what are the things you’re supposed to pay attention to and what you are supposed to do when these things happen. But nobody told me that about teaching and I’m very suspicious if anybody goes around trying to tell anybody that about teaching. It would be a trap, because you might just get stuck there. People get stuck in what Stuart [Dreyfus's brother] calls being “just competent,” which means following the normal rules and doing the normal things. Well, in teaching there aren’t any rules, so in learning to teach you’re sort of like a child who also, at first, has to just do it and see what works and what doesn’t.

So, there I was doing things — I started out, I think, very badly as a TA at Harvard. I had in mind exactly what I wanted the students to learn, and I had a plan for the whole hour, and all this energy that I felt, and intensity, was to make sure that they got exactly where I wanted them to get in exactly the time I wanted them to get there. That was not the way to do it. You’ve got to take advantage of the accidents that come along, and follow them.

Falling into “the One” as a teacher may make a “just competent” teacher, but not a memorable, life-changing one. It also makes one fear one’s mistakes (”I didn’t have a rule for that! I’m a bad teacher!”). Obviously we should embrace our mistakes and learn from them.

When discussing why he is a good teacher, he says:

I’m told again and again — I won outstanding teaching awards at MIT and here [Berkeley] — that what I do is I involve the students in a joint process of learning. And I’m not faking it. I’m always learning. Again, you don’t figure these things out, they just happen. I didn’t say to myself, “Ah, teaching is really learning.” Oddly enough, Heidegger says exactly that. But I just wouldn’t want to teach if I weren’t learning something at every lecture.

I know that I learn more teaching than I ever have reading or even being a student. I find that I learn things about ideas and texts I never knew I knew until I started teaching about them. Likewise, the kids always put a spin on things I’d never come to because I’m trapped by my preconceptions of things. As Dreyfus notes, learning should be a joint endeavor between student and teacher (Freire stresses this as well). Teaching is learning.

One final comment by Dreyfus about risk:

But another thing I was going to mention is this business about risks. You have to just take a risk. You’re there in front of the class and if you get it wrong, you don’t want to be embarrassed or defensive or try to browbeat the students into thinking you’re right, like some of my colleagues do. I think I’m really teaching well when I come in the next lecture and spend the first ten or fifteen minutes at least confessing the things that I got wrong and that the students in office hours and the lecture were on the right track. I think that’s important for them to see that they can contribute new ideas. But I don’t do it because it’s important for them to see it, I do it because I have to straighten out what I messed up.

You’ve got to be able to take the risks and you don’t want to ask yourself, “What’s a rule that will enable me to keep from making that mistake next time?” This is a very important idea of Stuart’s which, I think, nobody else has. People think — you read about it — if something goes wrong, you try to formulate some kind of rule that says don’t do that sort of thing in that sort of situation again, and then you try to follow that rule. Well, that will make you rigid and routine and standard, and you’ll be stuck at competence. So, what should you do? Well, this is what Stuart says and it probably is right. You simply feel bad about your mistakes and feel good about what works and dwell on that. The really great basketball players, or musicians, or whatever, say that they do that, and I know in teaching I do it.

So how does one become a good teacher? Writing lesson plans a certain way? Reading books about how to teach? No! One becomes a probably dull and merely competent teacher that way. One becomes a good teacher by jumping in, being reflective, learning from one’s accidents (which are a gift), and developing one’s skill. Teaching is learning.

Perhaps this is why my patience runs thin for the formulas presented on how to teach well. It really is simple — give yourself to your students, your craft, and your learning. Make a commitment. Be resolute, but flexible. Feel bad about your mistakes, good about victories, and keep learning. Realize there is no one way to do things. Nothing is set in stone in teaching besides maybe caring for your kids.

As a final note, Dreyfus and Blattner are clear about the connection between Heidegger and Dewey. I’ve also been dwelling on one between Heidegger and Carl Rogers. Rogers also, like Heidegger, pleads with his readers to focus on the phenomenon. The phenomonon is the best teacher; not theory, not rules. In turn, Rogers suggests that the best way to be a therapist or a teacher is to trust one’s instinct and experience, to be oneself, not to dwell on one’s mistakes, and to open-mindedly and self-deprecatingly keep at it. As this happens, you’ll develop as a person and practitioner. Importantly, to be oneself is how one makes connections with students. They know when you fake it.

The connections between all these thinkers should be clear enough. They all read a lot of Kierkegaard, for one. I could go on much longer about this and I probably will at some future date… but I’ve got some lesson plans to write, which is kind of funny.

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It’s always shocking to read the thoughts of extremely smart people writing on education. Mainly because their thoughts tend to be common sense that utterly and appallingly goes against the grain of nearly everything that actually goes on inside the average school. The 20th century has seen several intellectual ‘rock stars’ write extensively on education — namely John Dewey, Bertrand Russell, Karl Popper, and Alfred Whitehead. Sadly, it’s rare to meet a graduate of a college of education who know who the latter three are, much less have a clue about their thoughts on education. (When I finished my undergraduate degrees in history and education, I only knew of John Dewey and had never been asked to read any of his work.) This is no fault of any one person, of course. But it’s really dismaying that very few people, myself included, were exposed to the very readable and extremely insightful thoughts they offer while training to become a teacher. All the more so because just a few paragraphs of their work often offer more insight than the whole of the unbearably long educational texts that are assigned and ignored by thousands of teachers in training every year.

Below are the opening paragraphs from the famous mathematician and philosopher Alfred Whitehead’s essay, “The Aims of Education”. Its insight and value stand on its own. It cuts me particularly deep when I think about the world history curriculum I teach and how I teach it:

Culture is activity of thought, and receptiveness to beauty and humane feeling. Scraps of information have nothing to do with it. A merely well-informed man is the most useless bore on God’s earth. What we should aim at producing is men who possess both culture and expert knowledge in some special direction. Their expert knowledge will give them the ground to start from, and their culture will lead them as deep as philosophy and as high as art. We have to remember that the valuable intellectual development is self-development, and that it mostly takes place between the ages of sixteen and thirty. As to training, the most important part is given by mothers before the age of twelve. A saying due to Archbishop Temple illustrates my meaning. Surprise was expressed at the success in after-life of a man, who as a boy at Rugby had been somewhat undistinguished. He answered, “It is not what they are at eighteen, it is what they become afterwards that matters.”

In training a child to activity of thought, above all things we must beware of what I will call “inert ideas”—that is to say, ideas that are merely received into the mind without being utilised, or tested, or thrown into fresh combinations.

In the history of education, the most striking phenomenon is that schools of learning, which at one epoch are alive with a ferment of genius, in a succeeding generation exhibit merely pedantry and routine. The reason is, that they are overladen with inert ideas. Education with inert ideas is not only useless: it is, above all things, harmful—Corruptio optimi, pessima. Except at rare intervals of intellectual ferment, education in the past has been radically infected with inert ideas. That is the reason why uneducated clever women, who have seen much of the world, are in middle life so much the most cultured part of the community. They have been saved from this horrible burden of inert ideas. Every intellectual revolution which has ever stirred humanity into greatness has been a passionate protest against inert ideas. Then, alas, with pathetic ignorance of human psychology, it has proceeded by some educational scheme to bind humanity afresh with inert ideas of its own fashioning.

Let us now ask how in our system of education we are to guard against this mental dry rot. We enunciate two educational commandments, “Do not teach too many subjects,” and again, “What you teach, teach thoroughly.”

The result of teaching small parts of a large number of subjects is the passive reception of disconnected ideas, not illumined with any spark of vitality. Let the main ideas which are introduced into a child’s education be few and important, and let them be thrown into every combination possible. The child should make them his own, and should understand their application here and now in the circumstances of his actual life. From the very beginning of his education, the child should experience the joy of discovery. The discovery which he has to make, is that general ideas give an understanding of that stream of events which pours through his life, which is his life. By understanding I mean more than a mere logical analysis, though that is included. I mean “understanding’ in the sense in which it is used in the French proverb, “To understand all, is to forgive all.” Pedants sneer at an education which is useful. But if education is not useful, what is it? Is it a talent, to be hidden away in a napkin? Of course, education should be useful, whatever your aim in life. It was useful to Saint Augustine and it was useful to Napoleon. It is useful, because understanding is useful.

Read the rest.

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Course web sites for spring 2008 are online. See the menu to the left.

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I just finished a successful lesson in TOK which took as its theme Wikipedia and the merits of democratic knowledge. I borrowed most of the presentation from Brandon Rogers who teaches at the Atlanta International School.

Anyway, the lesson itself as well as some conversations I’ve had with others has made me think more and more about Wikipedia and its merits and drawbacks. As I continued to think I had an idea, inspired partly by Wikipedia and partly by a project one of my teachers and inspirations, Dr. John Splaine, is currently carrying out with a graduate history class he is teaching.

In this class, each student is preparing a paper on a topic relating to educational history in the U.S. They are reviewed and editing these papers as a class, and when they are done, they will publish them online. This is both a great way to teach a history class and also a brilliant use of new media.

So why not do something similar with my TOK kids?

My idea currently is to have their final examination grade be on their — as a group of classes — successful preparation of a “TOK Wiki”. To make this work I think I will assign each student (or group of students) a topic on which they must prepare an article. Each person must then make a certain amount of substantial edits to several other pages of their choosing. And if they choose, as many other pages as they like.

The result will be a sort of student-prepared Theory of Knowledge online textbook.

If successful, this assignment will hopefully make students think and digest what they have learned and ultimately take responsibility for it as a community, not just as individuals. They will have to learn to compromise on their ideas and work together toward a consensus, as difficult as this may be.

My hope is that such an assignment will allow students participate in, instead of talking about, democratic processes in their own education. (I agree with Noam Chomsky: the more an educational system must talk about the values of democracy, the more likely that democracy does not exist in the school itself.)

I will try this as a dry run with my TOK students as the year concludes. If it works, this might be an interesting project to pursue for an entire year with future classes. Your thoughts?

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This web site will serve as a repository for both teaching resources I use in class and other thoughts and materials related to my teaching.

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