In Praise of my Peers

Anytime you think you're doing something new, take a minute to appreciate history. 

We think of "advances" like smart phones and genetic engineering as cutting edge, but really they're just shiny new versions of cave painting and selective breeding.  Like watching your Lyft driver inch closer to you on your phone, Paleolithic people believed tracing their hands over pictures of prey on the cool stone wall of a cave brought the prey closer. An intersection of belief and ritual created a virtual reality of success. And people have been selectively breeding cattle, horses and each other for thousands of years in hopes of improving stock.

The cliche that "there's nothing new under the sun" is one part truism and one part metaphor.

Here in the Northwoods, I'm trying to undermine and reshape the traditional structures of institutional education, and I'm relying on old, but good, practices.  Good practices have always included a synergy of authenticity, community and personal investment to break down the dehumanization of un-examined institutionalism. I'm only doing what great teachers have done for years.

Take, for example, the fact that our students are developing personal interests into fully realized creative ventures.  The power inherent in an organic community of creators cannot be understated.  The range of skills necessary to ideate, create, communicate and demonstrate in community are part and parcel to self-realization.  My colleagues in the arts have been fostering student genius for years.

Mr. Cepress has built the best authentic creative writing experience for students in the state with Point of Convergence literary magazine, which is student written, edited, published and sold.  Follow on  @dcelitmag.

And our art department, aka Mrs. Clay-Reissmann, somehow juggles more preps than periods in the day in order to create a collage of opportunities for authentic expression. Follow her on Twitter @DCEArtDept.

This doesn't even begin to account for the great work done in band, orchestra, or choir, let alone the musicals. Follow them on Facebook at DC Everest Performing Arts Department. This performance based approach to learning is as important as, or more important than, funding the New York Philharmonic or Post Malone.

Nothing makes me laugh more when we think of the arts as "extra." What can embody the human experience in all its complex needs, desires and expressions better than the arts?

Speaking of the arts, our school's Career and Technical Education has also been promoting authentic and innovative experiences in the creative trades for years.  We have students going all over the state and nation to learn, compete and create. From masonry to woodworking to welding to automotive repair, students have been encouraged to plan and execute their own learning by doing for years.

The same praises apply to F.A.C.E., business, marketing and finance.  Students are planning, creating, editing and improvising all kinds of wonderful things.  The teachers and advisors have developed multiple real world experiences through internships, DECA, finance competitions.  Here we see teachers thinking outside of the confines of class periods, "teachers" or traditional assessments to encourage authentic experiences and networking.

For that matter, why does a "Marketing" class not earn students an English credit?  Is it the archaic and ridiculous idea that a marketing teacher with a college degree doesn't know how to make a claim, argue, manipulate diction, consider audience and purpose, develop ethos or point out all student mistakes with red pen? Consider this video produced by our student Gabby Anderson as an extension of her Creative Marketing course that clearly demonstrates proficiency in English related skills.

Student growth is clear when they pursue these timeless endeavors.  We've had great teachers showing how to cultivate that growth for years, and I applaud my school district's support of the opportunities and experiences.  At the same time, it's downright sadistic that these departments are the first to be considered for cuts or downsizing in economically taxing times.  Let's be honest, more students would like to build furniture or a business than read A Midsummer Night's Dream or practice inverse functions and their derivatives.  But I don't blame decision makers in the building or the district for annual threat of cuts, I blame the inertia of tradition in our system.

That system continues to suggest that Marketing and English, for example, are mutually exclusive and that math is a thing to do in math class, but when you do it in science, its science. It suggests that linguistic expression, musical expression, coding and foreign language shouldn't credit students equally, as if writing code is any less important than learning how to write an expository essay, or that studying Coltrane's A Love Supreme means you'll never be able to understand the rhetorical triangle.

So here's my take.  Years of thinking of education as a matrix, of isolating and classifying activities has abstracted the student mind and soul in such a way as to make their worldview as warped as a Dali painting.  We create and present a fundamentally warped understanding of reality by systematically dissociating epistemologies.  We further alienate knowledge and the human experience of the world by representing these approaches to the world with separated faculty members.  To the student, the very identity of their teacher is wrapped up in a "discipline" rather than in the shared humanity.

If we can continue to break down the arbitrary boundaries of time and space, we can find more opportunities for education to be about the whole person.  It's not that we have to do something new, it's that we have to do what's best.  Maybe its my bias as a history teacher, but I'm confident we can find the path forward by also examining the path we've been on.