Education
Education
Back to School Night
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 09/17/2015 - 22:04As we went through our final back to school night at Amity Middle School in Bethany, there were several things going through my mind. This was the school that Kim went to and she talked about remembering which seat she sat in for different classes. Fiona’s social studies teacher gave us a pop quiz in which we were asked things about what we remembered from junior high school. It raises an interesting question: What do we want our children to get out of junior high school?
It seems like by the time junior high school comes around, many parents are focused on making sure that their kids will do well in the rat race. They need to get good grades in junior high school so they will do well in high school, so they will do well in college, so they will get a good job, so they can support their family as their kids repeat the same cycle.
The high stakes testing just reinforces this. Yet is this really what we should be striving for? Or, are we testing the wrong thing?
I thought back to the nursery school each of my daughters attended. It was part of an alternative private school that focused on love of learning as being the ultimate goal. What makes learning exciting? Some of it is how interestingly it is taught. Some of it is how well it is related back to everyone’s life. Some of it is simply, well, how much fun it is.
I believe that love of learning is much more important than just about anything that is tested these days. Love of learning will make just about any career, any life, more enjoyable.
If you look at the current social climate, you can see the effects of what is going on in education. Are more of your friends talking about how much they love their job, or how much they hate their job? Are they talking about how much they like current political leaders, or how much they dislike current political leaders?
Our system is broken, and a big part of it is the loss of fun, something we are losing earlier and earlier in life. So, as I think back on Fiona’s teachers that I met this evening, I find I remember the ones that were talking about what they do to make the material fun and interesting.
Discernment MOOC
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 09/15/2015 - 22:14In the middle of what I described yesterday as a week that I expect to be very long, I received an email today about another step in my spiritual journey. The Diocesan Dean of Formation sent me an email saying that she had invited my parish priest to form a discernment group for me.
For those not acquainted with the language or the process it describes, people seeking a greater understand of how they can best serve God, including the possibility of becoming a priest, enter a discernment process. In Connecticut, a parish will organize a discernment group for a person in this process. It is a small group that meets around nine times to help the person get a better sense of what God is calling the person to.
As a blogger, living much of my life out loud, online, I am looking for the best ways to connect this process with my online writing. It is challenging because the face to face group is confidential. So, instead of writing about that group I hope to write about the questions being posed and the insights I gain from the group and invite a larger online community to share, in a more public manner, their thoughts which might also help me in my discernment process.
This online process, might take the form akin to a connectivist MOOC. I hope to learn more about my journey both in a private confidential small face to face group as well as in a large public online group. I hope that others, participating in the online group, might learn more about their journey as well, and that we might all learn more about how learning and spiritual growth can take place online in the twenty-first century.
I expect it will still be a few weeks before my face to face discernment group starts, and I’m thinking that the Discernment MOOC should parallel that, so I won’t dive into the core of the discernment MOOC for a few weeks. Until then, I am just floating this idea. What are your thoughts? Are you interested in participating? Do you know others that might be interested? Are there things I should consider or avoid?
Confession, Repentance, and Commitment to End Racism Sunday
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 09/06/2015 - 19:18Today was “Confession, Repentance, and Commitment to End Racism Sunday” in the Episcopal Church. It brought the typical reactions online. For example, one person posted,
Are Episcopalians racist enough they require a letter to be read to them to not be racist? I find this strange.
Yet I think this reflects part of the problem. We don’t use racial epithets or display symbols of racism. We all go to church. We confess that we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. We get forgiven and that’s good enough, right?
Maybe some of us even admit having privileges as white people that people of color do not have. We acknowledge that. It is good enough, right?
We nod appreciatively as a letter from the Bishop is read about racism, and we say a special little prayer during the service, and it’s all better, right?
Maybe we’re even church leaders and we are going to attend a training about racism, and we’ll go, reluctantly, because we feel like we’ve already dealt with our own racism. We’ll go without too much grumbling. That’s good enough, right?
I don’t think so. I think God is calling us to much, much more. Our parish is going to have conversations after church for a couple of Sundays starting at the end of the month. I’m not sure what the goals will be, what the format will be, or what the outcome will be, but I am praying for this. It is really important.
I’ve spent a bit of time working on racial health disparities. Did you know that as of 2012, the most recent data I could find, the infant mortality rate for black infants in Connecticut is nearly twice that of white infants in Connecticut? In Hartford County, it is almost 2 and a half times, and this is after significant progress in recent years. I mention infant mortality, because it is something that many of us understand how horrible it is. There are plenty more examples.
Why is this? Perhaps some of this is because of racism. Not the racial epithet shouting confederate flag waving racism, but a subtler racism that is built into our system, that we participate in, perhaps unknowingly.
What do you see when a young black man runs across the street in front of you? A thug who’ll probably end up in jail? Another potential headline of a black man killed by police? A future President or future Presiding Bishop of The Episcopal Church? If we are honest with ourselves, it isn’t always pretty.
A longtime friend of mine wrote a blog post about this the other day, Enforcing the Pattern. What do you see?
Then, think about this in terms of what it must be like to be seen this way, all the time. Here, I think about the blog post I shared yesterday. “Picture yourself as a stereotypical male” explores how people do on tests as a result of their self-perceptions. How does our view of the young black man crossing the road change the community and culture we are part of? What happens when we see ourselves and those around us, like the young black man crossing the road, as beloved of God?
We’ve got a lot of work to do, or at least I know I do.
“This is going to be a legendary year.”
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 08/26/2015 - 18:14The Roanoke Times, in there article, Our view: Sweet Briar does what it wasn't supposed to do; it reopens quotes a banner welcoming students back to Sweet Briar College saying, “This is going to be a legendary year.” They note that in other years, this would seem just sloganeering, but this year at Sweet Briar is going to be legendary. It already is legendary.
For those who missed my previous blog posts about Sweet Briar, this was the women’s college in Virginia whose board of directors voted to close the school last spring. It was cited as another casualty of changes in higher education, where liberal arts, and women’s colleges just aren’t valued as much anymore. Yet not everyone shares the same view about the value of women’s colleges and liberal arts education and a group of alumna and other concerned people gather, and fought successfully to keep it up.
Yes, this is going to be a legendary year for everyone at Sweet Briar. It is the spirit and attitude that we should be encouraging students with. It makes me think of how leaders in Hartford welcomed students to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. School
The group — Hartford businessmen, lawyers, community organizers, city politicians, artists, neighborhood dignitaries, a police officer in uniform — erupted in cheers and whoops for Jamar, giving the boy high-fives and handshakes as if he were LeBron James being introduced at Game 7 of the NBA Finals.
I hope it will be a legendary year for those students in Hartford as well.
All of this provides a stunning contrast to how freshman women were welcomed at Old Dominion University in Virginia, 200 miles east of Sweet Briar. The Sigma Nu fraternity there made national news, when their activities were suspended after putting up banners saying “Rowdy and Fun, Hope Your Baby Girl is Ready for a Good Time.”
In all the discussions about charter schools, high stake testing, and so many other educational issues today, we tend to overlook the educational culture and climate. Sweet Briar College in Virginia and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. School in Hartford get it right.
“This is going to be a legendary year.”
More Random Wanderings
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 07/17/2015 - 20:39The other day, I stumbled across a blog post by Jeffrey Keefer, Why I am no longer a Critical Theorist. Now, I only have passing knowledge of critical theory or actor-network theory, which he goes on to talk about, so my reactions may make a lot of sense.
In his post, he writes:
However, people are so complicated and networks create, hold together, and modify with forces beyond just the human actors (cf. actor-network theory) that is it difficult to speak for the whole as if there is a unified whole.
My mind wanders to a couple different thoughts here. On the one hand, I think about the transcendent, the mystical, that which passes human understanding. How, if at all, does this fit into of critical theory or actor-network theory?
My thoughts also go to my interest in the relationship between group relations, group analytics, and artificial neural networks. The network is more than just the nodes. The group has reactions above and beyond must the members of the group.
Jeffrey starts off referencing Maha Bali’s blog post, Embracing Paradox: Both/And Mentality and Postmodernism. At the top of the blog post, she suggest a three minute reading time. Then, she links to “Matt Croslin’s blogpost on metamodernism and heutagogy”. My thoughts wander off to metamodernism and how it relates to modernism and postmodernism, another area, I could spend a lot of time exploring.
Oops. My three minutes is up, and I haven’t even gotten to her link to “Martin Weller’s post on the role personality plays in MOOCs” or Lee Skallerup Bessette post about “social media activity as service”.
So, I back my way out and am back with Jeffrey as he references Lyotard. It seems like just digging through all that underlies these few blog posts could give me plenty to study for a long time.
Meanwhile, the link to my previous blog post in Facebook group brought a lot of comments. Some of it was around the conflict of colleges and universities as degree granting organizations and learning institutions. That is an old discussion that I find tedious. However, I did get the discussion back on track about the subject matter, which I’m still not sure how best to describe. Currently, I saying something like Metamodernism and Sacred Aesthetics. One link that looked promising was The Modern and the Postmodern (Part 1) and Part 2. Part 2 is the part that sounds most interesting to me, but I might do both of them.
Others suggested, “Douglas Crimp at University of Rochester and Yvonne Rainer at UC Irvine” and “Athabasca University in the MAIS program Master of Arts integrated studies and see what they say. See if you can talk to Wendell Kisner”
So, there are plenty of things to explore, on top of the poems to read, plays to see, folk music to listen to, and my greater spiritual quest.
Buen Camino.
