And it didn't take much for me to catch
on that a question started conversation. Indeed, the art of
conversation almost always starts with the simplest of questions:
“Hey, how the heck are you?”; or “Whatsup?” or “Whatsdewin?”
Naturally, there are moments when the questioner really has no
interest in having the question answered, but uses it as an opening
to let the other enter the mutual exchange. Nevertheless, it is the
question which prompts the conversation.
The consistent use of the opening question inside my family circle
must have begun well before the time when today I can look back and
remember a first time, but there isn’t a moment in memory when I
can recall any other way conversations were started. And the
territory covered by conversations overheard between my mother and
father, house guests and assorted relatives and in which I was
invited to engage when beginning as a teen I was thought mature
enough ranged the width of the universe and the depth of the human
soul. Neal Postman, a true lover of conversation himself, echoed
Marshal McLuhan when I heard him say that television supplies the
first curriculum. While we did enjoy our television, for me from the
earliest age, it was conversation which supplied my first curriculum
and my earliest experiences of being taught. It seemed to me then
that learning what was important to know came through conversation,
that a deep desire to know could be quenched through conversation,
that the opening to conversation, to learning, was always through a
spoken question and that the transformational moment moving the
object of learning wider and deeper was centered in a spoken
question. It was not so much later consequent to seeing my father
and mother frequently reading and then referring to what was read in
conversation I understood that silently engaging writers in their
books and articles stimulated the inner reflective thinking on which
verbal expression through conversation rested and in which questions
were formed, leading me to unselfconsciously know the intimate
connections among reading, reflective thought, questioning,
conversation and learning. Thus, from the earliest of ages I knew
learning was a process of reflective inner thinking stimulated by
reading and conversation ignited by a personal impulse of wanting to
know given voice through asking questions. And teaching is,
conversely, putting reflective inner thinking opportunities in the
way of individuals and providing external expressive pathways to
individuals while allowing individual questions to drive reading,
thinking and conversation.
But, when I entered kindergarten, teaching and learning wasn't
exactly like that. In fact, there were all these experiences of
color, of shape, of letters and numbers, of all sorts of combinations
of things, and there was free play. There was also being read to and
sing-a-longs and play acting. As I moved through to the first grade
it occurred to me at an instinctual level that learning was more than
an effect of reading and talking. Ultimately, I “refined” my
unconscious understanding of learning: I intuited learning to be a
process of reflective inner thinking stimulated by sensory and
mediated experience ignited by a personal impulse of wanting to
derive meaning from these experiences through asking questions of the
individual and collected experiences. Indeed, at the dawn of the
academics of first grade I was quite the activist learner.
But, I was also fairly compliant and so when told to do whatever
academic thing I obeyed, perhaps not doing as well as I could, but
not rebelling, not self-sabotaging, either. Still, anytime when the
teaching resonated with my activist predilections, I excelled.
English-what is now called English Language Arts-was the area
teachers engaged us in asking questions of what we read, and to the
degree us little kids could talk about how we interpreted what we
read we had class discussions. However, since the rest of elementary
school required youngsters to be passive learners, completely
accepting teacher supplied information into our little brains for
ready recall on tests, I did not excel in these other subjects and to
the degree that even English had us strictly obedient to teacher
demands, my drive to being an “A” student was blunted.
Nevertheless, up until sixth grade, I remember feeling okay and doing
well enough. In sixth grade, though, the bottom started to fall out.
I wanted to assert my way of learning beyond an occasion in English.
But, that was not happening. And so I got depressed and while I
remained a well mannered young man, I struggled to do the school work
I was told to do. And consequently my grades suffered. I did not
fail any subject, but came close to it at times.
English was the high school subject in which I did best and for the
same reasons as I did in elementary school. Yet, the need for me to
be a compliant passive learner remained. I did okay, but felt
miserable suffering a deep depression my sophomore and junior year.
Even today, I do not understand the reasons I come out of it at the
very start of my senior year, but I did. Then, I was more like I was
in early grade school with pretty much the same results, feeling okay
but doing mediocre academics.
It took ten years for me to earn my undergraduate degree as I was in
and out until I was old enough to accept the passive role I had to
affect. And when I did, I was able to excel and graduated Summa Cum
Laude. And go on to do my Masters and complete all the course work
on a Ph.D. And then the active learner revolted so disagreeing with
my dissertation chair as to self-sabotage the dissertation process.
In the meantime, I pledged to myself that whenever I got the
opportunity to teach, I would employ instructional strategies
requiring all students to be active learners. In fact, as I
traveled through course work at all levels, but especially at the
undergraduate, I would note the points of disagreement I had with the
passive strategies professors were employing and cook-up methods
transforming them into active strategies. I would listen closely to the lectures and as it droned on I would turn what the professor was saying into questions he/she could ask the class. I would occasionally, raise my hand to ask a question to see if I could start a conversation among my fellow undergrad classmates, but it was always unwanted and thus to no avail. Still, when I was hired for
my first college course, I already had a good idea on how to organize
instruction. Unfortunately, my active learner approach-which I learned is called the Socratic Method-along with my
unique organization of course content put me at odds with some
students and with supervision and so I was not invited back. As I
keep on saying, I should have taken the hint, but I didn't and went
through the 1980's from college to college as an adjunct working well
with most students, upsetting a few and greatly annoying supervision
until the hard economics of the City University of New York kick me
out to the street.
So, I took my activist learning proclivities and pedagogical pledge into the New
York City high schools.
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