xmca@weber.ucsd.edu writes:
>Diane-- I wanted to thank you for your description of Ozik's novel on
>learning.
thanks Mike. Ozik is always an extraordinary read.
>There is a lot to the following:
>
>Brill is forced to realize that while his curriculum assumes greatness,
>success in school is based not on originality or difference, but on
>mediocrity, those who aspire to "get the right answer" and achieve good
>marks, teacher praise, those students who cause no trouble but who learn
>quickly what the teacher will reward, and can provide the response in
>exchange for the reward.
>
>Once, in a prior lifetime, my colleagues and I at a branch of the
>university
>of California, voted to award honors on the variance of a students'
>grades.
>
>Seems like similar evaluations of the outcome of normal, successful,
>education.
'tis, to quoth the Bard, the rub, eh?
>
deeper in Ozik's novel is the contradiction and conflict of difference,
experience, and the dilemma of a "cultural fit," something i did not
discuss, but central to her fiction...it is the question of value, of
course, in terms of what we value, how, and why, and how these express
themselves in our desires, as well as (if indeed not more so) how our
desires are expressed in these values.
>
>One thing that may or may not have been in the novel, I am uncertain, is
>that
>the forms of testing used are an almost perfect model of directed
>forgetting.
>So, not only would the brilliant, trouble making student, but the average
>study, for different reasons, could be expected to remember nothing of
>their
>prior educational experiences.
>mike
>
i often ask folks what they recall of elementary and high school
education,
and really, most common, is the response of experience, not content or
curriculum; not textbooks but notes passed in class, not math, but drama
class,
social relations, not learning,
moments of humiliation, not triumph.
diane
************************************************************************************
"Waves of hands, hesitations at street corners, someone dropping a
cigarette in a gutter - all are stories. But which is the true story? That
I do not know. Hence I keep my phrases hung like clothes in a cupboard,
waiting for someone to wear them. Thus waiting, thus speculating, making
this note and then another, I do not cling to life."
Virginia Woolf, The Waves, 1931.
(...life clings to me...)
*************************************************************************************
diane celia hodges
university of british columbia, centre for the study of curriculum and
instruction
vancouver, bc
mailing address: 46 broadview avenue, montreal, qc, H9R 3Z2
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