Hope you feel better soon. And knowing that you are continuing to write Ordinary Plots while you recover, that you continue to help us also pause and reflect in the midst of our chaotic lives, makes it more special.
I'm a fan of Hirshfield as well, and I enjoyed your commentary. But what you said about care in teaching really resonated with me. I spent more than 50 years in the classroom (elementary, middle, and high school) and the narrow-minded focus on assessment has always felt misplaced to me. One of my philosophy professors in college talked about how all philosophy arises out of a sense of wonder and a sense of care. Cultivating those in each student seems to me to be a much more important educational goal than preparing them to pass tests. Relatively late in my career, I head a presentation by Everett Kline on educational assessment in which he said, "If you want to find out what kids know and what they can do well, why don't you ask them?" I began designing my classes around giving the students the chance to do exactly that, and it wound up changing all of my interactions with my students for the better. As you say, the goal was to make them "feel safe enough to be challenged, seen enough to feel valued." That's exactly right. Thanks for putting it out there.
Hope you feel better soon. And knowing that you are continuing to write Ordinary Plots while you recover, that you continue to help us also pause and reflect in the midst of our chaotic lives, makes it more special.
I'm a fan of Hirshfield as well, and I enjoyed your commentary. But what you said about care in teaching really resonated with me. I spent more than 50 years in the classroom (elementary, middle, and high school) and the narrow-minded focus on assessment has always felt misplaced to me. One of my philosophy professors in college talked about how all philosophy arises out of a sense of wonder and a sense of care. Cultivating those in each student seems to me to be a much more important educational goal than preparing them to pass tests. Relatively late in my career, I head a presentation by Everett Kline on educational assessment in which he said, "If you want to find out what kids know and what they can do well, why don't you ask them?" I began designing my classes around giving the students the chance to do exactly that, and it wound up changing all of my interactions with my students for the better. As you say, the goal was to make them "feel safe enough to be challenged, seen enough to feel valued." That's exactly right. Thanks for putting it out there.
❤️❤️❤️ get well soon brother