New+and+Noteworthy

 · “A Radical Alternative: Real Teaching” by Margaret Wente (//The Globe and Mail//, Tuesday, 29 September 2009) [] Read Wente’s short article with a critical eye and see where you think she does and does not connect with and give concrete application to Deborah Meier’s argument that we have read previously:

“Neither happy teachers nor happy students are our goal. What we need is a particular kind of job satisfaction that has as its anchor intellectual growth…During our first year at CPESS we went around muttering under our breath that our job was not to make children happy but to make them strong.” (from “Reinventing Teaching”, Course Reader, p. 504)

· For those of you who found John Taylor Gatto’s provocations to invent better modes of schooling helpful, you can find out more about Gatto and his projects by visiting the Odysseus Group website: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/

· You might want to take a look at John Taylor Gatto’s acceptance speech for his first New York State Teacher of the Year Award, which he received in 1990. The speech provides an insight into Gatto’s appreciation of good teaching and good teachers. Take a look at the first paragraph in order to see Gatto in his affirmative mode:

“I accept this award on behalf of all the fine teachers I’ve known over the years who’ve struggled to make their transactions with children honourable ones, men and women who are never complacent, always questioning, always wrestling to define and redefine endlessly what the word “education” should mean. A Teacher of the Year is not the best teacher around, those people are too quiet to be easily uncovered, but he is a standard-bearer, symbolic of these private people who spend their lives gladly in the service of children. This is their award as well as mine.”   If you would like to read Gatto’s full acceptance speech, you can find it at: http://www.home-ed.vic.edu.au/2002/02/26/john-gatto-teacher-of-the-year-acceptance-speech/

· If you would like to learn more about Dr. Andy Hargreaves, co-author of “Induction or Seduction? Postmodern Patterns of Preparing to Teach” and now Thomas More Brennan Chair in Education in the Lynch School of Education at Boston College, go to:  http://www2.bc.edu/~hargrean/

· “Not Another Brick in the Wall” by Bryce Warnes – an interesting article in which the freshman author speaks of his own transformation from a “schooled boy” into an independent learner. It appears on //globecampus// on the web page of //The Globe and Mail//. The reference in the title is, of course, to Pink Floyd’s //The Wall// and what it has to say about schooling. http://www.globecampus.ca/blogs/freshman-life/