Old School

Unbeknownst (I love that word) to many, Joy and I sent our 5-yr-old son, Eli, to the SLO Classical Academy this past year.  We did so for many reasons, but suffice it to say that the 12 to 1 ratio was reason enough.  Before Eli attended his first day of school, his father, a public school teacher, was torn.  How would I defend myself?  Why would I have to defend myself? 

The questions would come and I needed an answer.  

I love everything about the classical model, and would love to teach in such an institution, yet also love my current job, with the joys and challenges that it brings.

When I first began thinking about a project/theses, I thought I'd research how to incorporate components of  a classical education into my classroom.  I quickly realized my limitations as part of a larger (public) beast.  I cannot simply transform my 8th grade curriculum. Aside from the obvious obstacles of district, state and federal accountability standards, my (diverse) students would not have been exposed to the grammar stage of a classical education.  There is, however, much crossover, such as teaching critical thinking, interdisciplinary units, and the heterogenous makeup of classes.   

After much research and myriad discussions with my amazing wife, I've come to the conclusion that I'm currently working where I need to be.  I've always had a heart for struggling readers.  

Now that the stage has been set. . . speaking of struggling readers. . . 

According to Alverman's "Literacy on the Edge," because many struggling readers find their own reasons for becoming literate. . . "it is important to offer them a variety of reading materials." She suggests everything from graphic novels to comic books and, while she doesn't propose that these supplant any "accepted" curriculum, she insists that taping into students' multiple literacies "can sometimes turn students around in terms of their perceptions of self-efficacy and motivation to read."  

Susan Wise Bauer, in Well-Educated Mind, differentiates between being informed and being enlightened.  "When you read," she says, "you develop wisdom - or in Mortimer Adler's words, "become enlightened." "To be informed," Adler writes in How to Read a Book, "is to know simply that something is the case.  To be enlightened is to know, in addition, what it is all about."  To be informed is to collect facts; to be enlightened is to understand an idea (justice, or charity, or human freedom) and use it to make sense of the facts you've gathered.

It is Bauer's assertion that we become informed by studying the Classics.  She rails against the futurists' claim that "we are a postliterate culture (where) books are outdated forms of communication" and multimedia will replace "boring print."

I don't see these ideas as mutually exclusive.  I fall somewhere in the "radical middle."  Why can't we tap into students' multiple literacies to help them become "enlightened"?  

So, here's my suggestion.  We hire enough public teachers to lower the class size to 12 to 1 instead of the recently increased 33 to 1.  We can do this one of three ways: paying teachers significantly less than they deserve (not a new idea); coupling smaller schools with corporations, institutions of higher learning, or NPOs in a mutually beneficial arrangement; waiting for nuclear holocaust where there will be significantly fewer children to educate.  

I'm thinking option number two has the most promise.

Thoughts?