Pat’s Polemics

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I apologize for the recent inability to comment on Pat’s Polemics. But the problem software has been removed and replaced.

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For years I have listened to radio talk shows, first the highly right-wing talk shows on AM radio back in the 80s and then npr with its panoply of deservedly famous interviewers. What has maddened me over all these years is the way everyone but classroom teachers is invited on the show to talk about education.

Driving me to distraction is the claim that so-and-so is a classroom teacher......... yes, who is on leave b/c he is heading a major project funded by XXX and whose funding is totally dependent on him saying just the right thing. Most often, we get administrators, usually very high up admins; we get the heads of unions, lobby groups, academics, activists, community organizers, promoters of specific methods, and even authors of books-turned-into-movies who spent one whole year in a classroom.

And all of these people are presented as classroom teachers. Yes, 35 years ago for five years of less. Not only are these people speaking for us classroom teachers - the real ones - but they claim to know more than we do. Someone who quit teaching after three years to get a Ph.D. in ed research and now heads a think-tank is not my idea of a classroom teacher.

The real sadness is that even their couple of years of experience has to be buried lest they say something that does not promote whatever they are promoting. The only time you seem to hear from classroom teachers is when they call in, and then, or so it seems to me, they are given short shrift because, after all, they are "just a teacher".

I hope someone joins me in writing a letter to npr (I hold no hope out for conservative venues) to ask them to please contact someone in their area who can give them the names of five or six real classroom teachers... five or six to offset the chance that they'll find a sycophant and suck-up who's bucking for an administrative slot. This panel could come into the studio and the first thing they could talk about was finding a sub for their classes and devising material the sub could handle.

Please join me in composing such a letter.

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One of the legal squelchers for these blog sites is the right of employers to come after you if you say something negative about them. If they can cite it as slanderous, you can be in legal trouble. So it behoves us all when writing to an open site like this blog to either be careful in how we word our comments and make them very general or disguised, or not say anything critical at all. That's how entities like agencies, corpoations, military units, schools, and so on pat themselves on the back and figure they don't have anything to change. No criticism from those in a position to know, so-called whistle blowers.

So you'll have to forgive me if I'm a little vague. It's not me; it's the law.

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A Swedish pop-star was just interviewed on npr and said she does not write songs in Swedish, her native language. She enjoys writing in English, in part b/c it offers a kind of resistance, something to overcome, which, she implied, spurs her creativity. She sang a song in Swedish and I was very happy that I understood the first few lines, having spent the summer studying Norwegian. They are indeed quite close. The singer's name is "Robin".

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If you are from Karlsruhe or near it, please contact me via Karlsruhe@Lang-Learn.us

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I'm listening to an interview with Daniel Carlat, a psychiatrist who has blown the whistle on the profession. He revealed, in two books (he is a Harvard grad and professor at Tufts), how psychiatrists use medication, often to good effect, in treating psychiatric patients. But they use only medications, relying on social workers and other ancillary staff to actually talk to the patients. The policy of the psychiatrist is to not talk much to patients so they won't get into details that will delay seeing the next patient.

That might work if the communication was excellent between the therapist and the psychiatrist. But it is not. He describes several patients who had life situations crucial to their healing that he knew nothing about b/c he just didn't talk to them.

This made me think what a good career move I made getting out of the field

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The following is a quote from Stephen Krashen's newsletter. I am printing it here to show people how it is possible to back up what you say with some evidence. This is not to say that citing a study settles everything; people disagree on the reliability, the applicability, the methodology of research. Nevertheless, it is some evidence other than "this is what I've seen (read: interpreted) in my 27 years of teaching and so it must be right").

In the Reading First Impact Final Report, children participating in
Reading First classrooms did better than comparisons on a test of
decoding given in grade one. Reading First children did not, however,
do better on tests of reading comprehension in grades one, two, and
three, despite considerable extra instructional time (Gamse, Jacob,
Horst, Boulay, and Unlu, 2008).

This is the pattern we always see with intensive decoding approaches:

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In a post in May to a listserv I mentioned "old paradigms" and noted it would be too long for a post to go into what I meant. So I would like to try here, briefly but with examples.

The term "dominant paradigm" has entered our vocabulary along with "paradigm shift" partly due to Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. A friend is outraged that the real originator of this idea, Ludwik Fleck, is ignored. It took me forever to find Ludwik on Google b/c I had only his last name on the tip of my tongue. I tried to read the book my friend owns by Fleck but found it daunting. Fleck uses scientists' collective views in investigating syphilis and the book consists largely of detailed discussions of microbiology which my friend follows easily and I not at all.

Nevertheless, this tangled skein of who came up with the notion exemplifies the difficulties we face in understanding why it is so difficult to get teachers to do what seems obvious: participate with your students in their learning of the TL. A film I show my students is titled The Business of Paradigms by Joel Barker. He is a pompous but entertaining presenter of Kuhn's ideas. It gets my students thinking b/c Barker does show how we sink into familiar patterns of thinking to the extent that we are blinded to demands for adaptation. Adaptation is what has allowed the human species to dominate the planet.

Leaving aside for the moment whether that's a good thing or not (I write this in the midst of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and spreading), what often kills groups of human beings is their failure to adapt.

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