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Thought of the Week Archives
October 2001
October 1
- Two thoughts from Herbert Kohl on the conscious choice many students
make to "not-learn" from people and a system which they feel disrespects
and rejects them.
Over the years, I've known many youngsters who chose to actively
not-learn what their school, society, or family tried to teach them. Not
all of them are potential victims of their own choices to not learn. For
some, not-learning was a strategy that made it possible for them to function
on the margins of society instead of falling into madness or total despair.
it helped them build a small, safe world in which their feelings of being
rejected by family and society could be softened. Not-learning played
a positive role and enabled them tot take control of their lives and get
through difficult times. (p. 10)
It's interesting how stuck parents and school authorities are on
a single way to live and learn. Any youngster who refuses to perform as
demanded is treated as a major threat to the entire system. Experts are
consulted, complex personal or family causes are fabricated, special programs
are invented. all to protect the system from changing itself and accommodating
difference. (p. 11)
- Herbert Kohl
- I won't learn from you and other thoughts on creative Maladjustment
(New Press, 1994).
October 8
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October 15
- xx
October 22
Looking back, I realize that I was blessed with mentors at every crucial
stage of my young life, at every point where my identity needed to grow:
in adolescence, in college, in graduate school, and early in my professional
career. But a funny thing happened on the way to full adulthood: the mentors
stopped coming. For several years I waited for the next one in vain, and
for several years my own growth was on hold.
Then I realized what was happening. I was no longer an apprentice,
so I no longer needed mentors. It was my turn to become a mentor to someone
else. I needed to turn around and look for the new life emerging behind
me, to offer to younger people the gift that had been given to me when
I was young. As I did, my identity and integrity had new chances to evolve
in each new encounter with my students' lives.
Mentors and apprentices are partners in an ancient human dance, and
one of the teaching's great rewards is the daily chance it gives us to
get back on the dance floor. It is the dance of the spiraling generations,
in which the old empower the young with their experience and the young
empower the old with new life, reweaving the fabric of the human community
as they touch and turn.
- Parker Palmer
- The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher's
Life
October 29
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