Pushing the Pencil

By Donald Wilcox Thomas

From the essays
Teachers must learn how to push the pencil, effecting
ease and simplicity out of hard learning that leaves a deep
and permanent impression upon youthful thought.
Having high expectations is laudable but woefully
inadequate for overcoming the disparities that lurk in the
deep recesses of our broad domain.
More teaching, whether good or bad, is lost somewhere
between class and lunch than could ever be recovered
from one year to the next.
The best lessons taught end up at the dinner table, not at
the end of the period.
That teaching is as much an addiction as it is a profession
need not be elaborately urged.
Teachers though born must nevertheless be made
and remade.
Schools do not improve teaching; teaching
improves schools.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 6, 2012
• ISBN: 9781469167916

Donald Wilcox Thomas

A graduate of Princeton and Harvard, Donald Thomas is a veteran teacher, principal, and professor. He has taught in a junior high school, an elite prep school, a comprehensive high school in Nigeria, a university academy, a graduate school, and an inner city charter school. But the bulk of his career was devotd to twenty five year in a suburban high school as a teacher of English, of semiotics, and as a department chairman. His signal achievement has been to found and direct a hih school in the former Soviet republic of Georgia, where he continues to visit and consult.

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Copyright © 2012 by Donald Wilcox Thomas.

Library of Congress Control Number:       2012902876

ISBN:         Hardcover                               978-1-4691-6790-9

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Contents

INTRODUCTION

PUSHING THE PENCIL

ATTITUDE

SKILLS FOR THE 21ST CENTURY

CLASSROOM TEACHING?

CRITICAL THOUGHT

DIVERSITY

LOST LESSONS

LESSON PLANS

THE TEACHING LIFE:

A BRIDGE TO NOWHERE

A LIFE IN TEACHING

EYE ON TEACHING

ATTORNEYS IN TEACHING

CUSTOM THOUGHTS

WHAT’S AN IDEA?3

DETAILS3

AMENITIES3

EXERCISE OF JUDGMENT

PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT

IN PURSUIT OF LEARNING

QWERTY

PRESCIPTION FOR THE HAPPY PRIMITIVE

SEMESTER PLANS

CURRICULUM SQUARED

THE SCHOLAR-TEACHER DILEMMA

TEACHER TRAINING

THE SECONDARY STUDY GROUP4

WHAT EVERY CHILD CAN LEARN

THE RHUMB LINE

UNION AMBIVALENCE

HEURISTICS

STRATEGIC VERSUS ORGANIC TEACHING

EATING OF SANDWICHES

WHAT’S NEXT?

NOTES

DEDICATION

To the Georgian staff and students of the

Guivy Zaldastanishvili American Academy in Tbilisi,

past, present, and future

In solitude be unto thyself a throng.

Tibullus

INTRODUCTION

We are each richer than we think, said Montaigne, but we are trained to borrow and beg; we are taught to use the resources of others more than our own.¹ Such an opinion, where it is held at all, is more likely to be held at the latter stages of life, occupied here by Montaigne himself, than in the time of youth. For in the early years of education more emphasis is placed on acquisition than on invention. We must first learn the best of what others have thought and said before we deign to set forth our own humble opinions. Wisdom, we believe, must therefore reside largely in the minds of elders who through years of hard study and experience have sequestered the great lessons of life.

And so in our years of higher learning we are taught first to read and to listen. In our reading we try to understand what others have said. In lectures we listen to what the learned have to say and duly record their thoughts. In scholarly treatises academicians are at pains to display their own learning by liberally quoting the works of others. And in our own writing, as in the writings of those we read, we are taught to incorporate the thoughts of others before exercising the privilege of saying what we ourselves think. Here it is research that is most highly prized. Research, as the dictionary defines it, is careful, systematic, patient study and investigation in some field of knowledge, undertaken to discover facts or principles. In other words, as Montaigne has averred, where we are taught to use the resources of others more than our own.

Wherein, then, lie the higher order thinking skills and the critical thinking that we so often proclaim as the aim of our educational institutions? And why should our most celebrated institutions of higher learning call themselves research universities? Certainly in the sciences and engineering it is research that duly guides inquiry into the nature of things where facts and principles hold sway. But how much weight should be granted to research in our education for life? How apply the wages of such research to our daily living?

In the essays that follow I must confess not to have conducted research as a careful, systematic, patient study and investigation of the field of education with an eye to discovering its fundamental facts and principles. I have instead taken Montaigne’s criticism to heart, reverting to my own experience in order to reveal some of what I have gleaned from my years of teaching. I have chosen essays as the most suitable form for relaying these thoughts, not wishing to pen yet another prescription for treating the manifold ills of our current educational endeavors. My hope is that in these essays readers will themselves discover their own better insights and likewise be encouraged to share them in the service of others.

I should add that the order of essays follows no special pattern or intention. They should be read like momentary conversations among colleagues who pause to consider their mutual endeavors to see what latent atoms of wisdom lie sleeping therein.

PUSHING THE PENCIL

I once asked my dowager landlady, herself an artist, what it was that aficionados such as she so admired about Picasso. She owned a small sketch by him, an image of a female nude, drawn in pencil with a single continuous line on a piece of cardboard five by eight inches in size. The line gave it a kind of free form that nonetheless clearly depicted the body of a woman. As such, it struck me as unexceptional, however famous. Pick up the drawing and hold it up towards the light so that you view it at an angle, she said. Notice anything? Despite its seemingly unfettered form, I saw that the line had in fact been deeply pressed into the cardboard, leaving a single minute channel. Picasso knew how to push a pencil, she said.

My miniature art lesson has stuck with me ever since. The magic of that piece was how deliberate yet free it was. One would have thought that he had hastily sketched the figure, giving it the minimal contours needed to convey his subject. He might have even imagined the woman rather than attempting to capture an actual person, the detail being so sparse. And yet, for all its airy simplicity, he had laid down that line with slow and deliberate intent, pressing hard into the cardboard, knowing precisely where he was going. Such a technique allowed no room for pausing or erasure, no going back. Once embedded, the line was there to stay, sunk into its bed. And there the lady lay, such as she was, gazing out upon the world.

We often say that knowing how to do something well makes it look easy. The carpenter with his tools, the athlete in his exertions, the musician upon her instrument: all these are taken as ordinary actions yielding grace without seeming effort, at least without the effort demanded of us if asked to duplicate them. Ignorance is clumsy, novistry (to coin a word)always labored. I remember watching my father working at his bench, whether sawing or planing, his movements so seemingly fluid where mine in imitation were so jagged. I marveled at his ease and despaired of ever duplicating it. For when one does not know how to do something well, there is no way to envision ever doing it differently, no discernible path to perfection. Competence is so easy to observe yet difficult to reconstruct. And even if we are instructed, told how we must proceed, the explanation fails to overcome our awkwardness, so that we despair of ever taking control of our ineptness.

It is the way of all learning. But Picasso’s picture also made me realize something about teaching, how its freedom and discipline go together, becoming counterparts of each other, married into a single entity. Everybody knows great teaching when they see it, including students. But defining it, reduced to a taxonomy of behaviors encompassed in a rubric, fails to capture its genius. Like Picasso’s nude, grace in the classroom looks easy as it wends its way towards some invisible understanding that lies in wait towards the end of the period. Fluid and purposive, the gifted teacher drives the interaction towards its goal with seeming nonchalance.

It is discipline that lends ease and grace to instruction, the underlying knowledge and experience accumulated through years of practice. Teachers must know their material personally and deeply, beyond what others may have said or done and apart from ordinary tricks and gimmicks. And, of course, they must know their students intimately, not only in regard to their characteristic behaviors, but also in respect to the tenor and level of their thinking. Such knowledge and experience cannot itself be taught; it has to be lived.

Little wonder, then, that novice teachers, despite careful preparation, find themselves inept when confronted with their very first class, scattering minds, as Robert Frost used to say, over taste and opinion. They have no style, no ease of interaction bred from experience. The wonder is that we expect them to succeed at so subtle a craft with so little preparation. They will have undergone practice teaching for perhaps a semester. Of course, teaching is not something you practice on people; either you are teaching them or you are not. Nor are there practice students. In dealing with people’s bodies, medical interns must undergo years of training before they become residents and finally full-fledged physicians. Dealing with people’s minds is evidently a less serious matter, one that rank amateurs are permitted to diagnose and treat with relative impunity.

Teachers must learn how to push the pencil, effecting ease and simplicity out of hard learning that leaves a deep and permanent impression upon youthful thought. We cannot all be Picassos in our own right, at least not until we come to understand and celebrate his genius as well as that of our own.

ATTITUDE

Research has recently revealed that the most critical factor in advancing student achievement is none other than the teacher. A good teacher, we learn, can heighten the level of achievement as much as a whole year beyond that of a mediocre teacher. This news comes as no surprise, as is so often true with research, confirming what we already know or perhaps only suspect. Nevertheless, in light of this now established scientific conclusion, we must now decide what course of action to take. The simple solution is to rid ourselves of bad teachers and focus our efforts on acquiring good ones. With only good teachers teaching, our schools will be saved, our children rescued, our country once again set on the path of its now diminished glory.

Our only problem now is to find a just and equitable way to separate the good teachers from the bad, the sheep from the goats. Here research once again shows the way by prompting us to rely on the results obtained, much as it has in deriving its own assertion that good teaching makes all the difference. To do this we merely have to replicate the research by focusing on the results produced, or to use the operative word, the data. Teachers must be evaluated by their performance. Through standardized tests we will assess what our children have learned and compare the results obtained. And to make this process more humane, we shall carefully supervise our teachers by visiting their classes to determine the effectiveness of their instruction.

But now we must ask why, given the odds against achieving successful learning everywhere extant and the disrepute in which secondary education is now held, any teacher would want to subject themselves to such a system. What test can justly claim prerogative in determining the true nature and extent of learning? What administrator can with certainty determine the quality of learning in process through occasional and irregular visits? True enough, teachers themselves engage in these activities each and every day. They regularly administer their own tests, constantly observe and record the progress of their students. And in the end they also render judgment on the quality and success of their children’s learning. Similarly, standardized tests and classroom visits have always occupied an important role in our schools.

So the question here is not essentially one of instituting a radical change in methodology. At issue is the more fundamental question of what makes one teacher good and another not as good. And to this question we may reasonably add