A Socratic Seminar: Emmanuel V.

Either/Or Distinctions: The Flight from Complexity

“A great deal of our discussion, as we searched for ways to define goals, seemed to depend on out setting up a series of oppositions. I’ve come to see this way of defining goals as reductive and based on false dichotomies” (Page 195, paragraph 1).

Bob Denham goes on to compare their ceaseless set up of reductive oppositions as a ‘flight from complexity.’ That statement is exactly right. As pedagogues it should be our primary concern to foster a desire to learn in our students, if this means that we should assess less, then so be it. If it means we should refrain from elucidating every single little goal, then so be it. The construction of these ineffectual dichotomies only demarcates this discipline as an antagonistic one.

The Danger of Softness
“Someone remarks, ‘I don’t teach English, I teach students.’ In a reply, a sudden explosion of clench-jawed anger; ‘Don’t give us that old line. It’s fake polarization. It’s falsely divisive. Sentimental. Anti-intellectual’” (Page 198, middle of page).

It’s a palatable, sensible argument that this proclamation is divisive or polarizing, but is sentimentality unprofessional? It seems that caring about students carries an amateurish connotation. This reflects pathology of English education. I feel the notion that it’s wrong or impeding of the educational process to become involved with students is an unprincipled and erroneous repudiation of instruction. My question is this: how are we supposed to teach when we erect walls of impersonality around ourselves? If we distance ourselves from students, as educators, how can we do our jobs?

The Education of Intelligences

“Except for those relegated to teaching the youngest children, teachers have typically commanded great respect. In the past much of the educational processes came to center on a single magnetic figure- a guru, a mullah, a rabbi, a Confucian scholar who took promising students under his wing…” (Page 348, 2nd to last par.).

I think this is the idyllic teacher. Instead of an autocratic, tyrant of a teacher, we should command respect but only for the sole purpose of educating our students. If we demand respect for supremacy or power and we fail to administer any reciprocity then our students will feel beneath us and their willingness to learn will be nonexistent.





The Child and the Curriculum

“Abandon the notion of subject-matter as something fixed and ready-made in itself, outside the child’s experience; cease thinking of the child’s experience as also something hard and fast; see it as something fluent, embryonic , vital; and we realize that child and curriculum are simply two limits which define a single process.”
I believe there is interconnectedness between students and the curriculum, the word embryonic is preeminently suggestive of that; students require an almost maternal sustenance to thrive in an academic setting. Within the microcosm that is the classroom, if we are cold and calculating about everything we will overlook individualism in students, ultimately depriving them of a literary identity. Strict adherence to a rubric will only make the classroom a homogenous pool of people. We should embrace academic dynamism, our curriculums should be an expression of our students