When Musk the Merciless, chief fucktwit at Twunter fired some genius programmer he said that as far as he could see this guy “did no actual work”.
I’m retired, but if I still had a CV it would be titled
Tag Archives for Learning
The evidence is clear: learning styles theory doesn’t work | Aeon Essays
https://aeon.co/essays/the-evidence-is-clear-learning-styles-theory-doesnt-work
It’d be nice if amongst all this this academic verbiage, somebody mentioned Peter Honey who invented the Learning Styles Questionnaire and started the rot. His legacy? Endless mindmap diagrams never looked at again and a women’s magazine questionnaire that gives participants a lovely warm sense of ‘that’s me, that is’.
And no mention of the actual Kolb Learning Cycle on which this farago of reification is based.
The Kolb cycle is potentially profound, if understood and applied sensibly. If you add the extra stage of Publishing it becomes even more powerful.
Processes. Cycles.
Not points, not questionnaires, not tests.
Try thinking.
How dare you desertify a floral community and replace it with a floral clock?
teachertomsblog.blogspot.com/2022/03/creating-communities-of-mutual-concern.html
Superb.
Bolx to CoPs, as they were Wengerised away from the elegant ethnography of Jean Lave, in service of McKlumsey or was it SpiteWatereddownShysters. CoPs were emasculated at birth by theMan. Bolx to System Convening, a Learical senescent early-retirement community.
How dare you desertify a floral community and replace it with a floral clock?
It takes a village to raze a village.
Watch “Why You Need A Good Internal BS Meter” on YouTube
Rick Beato is a musician and educator.
This is the best statement on the need for Bullshit Detector since Postman and Weingartner wrote Teaching As A Subversive Activity, the whole text of which is around on the web, and is a must read.
BTW, I hate videos. Just give me the feckin’ words and the odd diagram. But there’s always an exception to every rule.
How the states have become “Laboratories of Autocracy” — and why it’s worse than you think | Salon.com
Coming to the UK as soon as the Electoral Reform Act is passed next week while you’re all whining and laughing abot BYOB Spaffel…
Former Ohio Democratic Party head David Pepper has a dire warning: Rigged state legislatures are destroying America
— Read on www.salon.com/2022/01/15/how-the-states-have-become-laboratories-of-autocracy–and-why-its-worse-than-you-think/
…it’s probably not playwork…
Greetings, loyal readers, and passers-by. Today’s topic is playwork (again).
“I know it’s wrong of me, but when I read the newspaper headline, Out-Of-Control Kids Driving Wichita Teachers Away, Union Says, I felt a little like cheering. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m against anyone hitting, biting, or engaging in property damage, which are among the things this article alleges. I am fully supportive of teacher’s unions that fight for both educators and students. And I have nothing but respect for public school teachers, whose already difficult jobs have been made even more difficult over the past couple decades as anti-child policies like No Child Left Behind (Bush), Race to the Top (Obama), and Common Core (Gates), are turning our schools into high-pressure, drill-and-kill, test-taking coal mines. Yet still, when I read that headline I could only think, “Damn straight, the kids are fighting back.”
“I mean, public schools have never exactly been a bastions of freedom, and kids, like all humans, love freedom.”
“I mean, public schools have never exactly been a bastions of freedom, and kids, like all humans, love freedom.”
What he is describing is recalcitrance. Kicking back against the System.
That’s why I called THAT presentation the Edge of Recalcitrance.
“It’s shocking, frankly, that we didn’t rebel more than we did: it’s a testament to the capacity of children to thrive under any circumstances. But now consider that the pressure has been slowly increased over the past couple decades: high-stakes standardized testing and the millions of hours of test prep; the narrowing of the curriculum to focus almost exclusively on math and literacy at the expense of life-savers like the arts, wood shop, physical education, home economics; the slashing of budgets leaving schools poorly maintained and and supplied; and a drive toward longer school days and school years. “
“I assure you that I, a generally well-mannered kid who was good at school, would have rebelled a long time ago.”
Playwork starts where teaching stops.
Teachers have to leave when they become recalcitrant. Resign or be sacked or obey the system, your call, pal.
Google John Taylor Gatto. New York teacher of the year. Three times. On the day of the award ceremony, to be his 3rd time as T of the Y, he walked. He walked, but not before he told them what he thought of what they were doing to the kids.
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=John+Taylor+Gatto&oq=John+Taylor+Gatto&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l5.826j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
Like teachers, playworkers have choices.
Teaching is about educating children, supporting their learning, not doing the stuff that Tom describes being done to them in his blog.
Your job, as playworkers, is to work with the recalcitrance of the weasels, to hold a space in which they can be free to become, to do, to be. To doo be doo be do, if that’s what they wanna do.If you can’t do that, then what you are doing may be useful, or worthy, or positive…
andnotbut™…
It’s probably not playwork.
provocation #3 ‘Why oh why did this happen, can you see what it is yet?’ (file under: contentious and and half-baked) | LinkedIn
An occasional series of provocations for management thinkers.
May contain elements of offense.
(File under: contentious and and half-baked)
provocation #3
WHY OH WHY DID THIS HAPPEN, CAN YOU SEE WHAT IT IS YET?
NB: My target here is managerialism, not committed, ethical, hard-working public sector employees and elected representatives.
Rearrange these into the correct order:
1. Give police targets determined by politicians, and managers subservient to them
2. Import managerialism into the public sector
3. Destroy the multi use approach to city and town street life – thanks planners, abandoning the streets after 8pm to ne’er-do-wells, clubbers, drunks, and the poor and desperate.
4. Think it clever to save social services budgets a few quid by buying cheap places in care homes for vulnerable kids in depressed towns like Rochdale.
5. Close your children’s homes and allow the market to create cheap children’s homes in low cost areas.
6. Send vulnerable kids half-way across the country
7. Don’t see children and youth as valid members of society with needs, rights, and AGENCY, so don’t cater for their leisure and affiliation needs
8. Rack up business rates so that only poverty-level wages for fast-food work are viable in town centres.
9. Prioritise car theft, based on public complaint, over missing children who don’t complain because they don’t matter (“scrubbers” anonymous policeman, BBC Radio 4 Friday, September 12, 2014 13:37).
That was a trick question: there isn’t an order only a pattern.
Then wonder why the Rochdale Child Abuse Scandal.
Discuss. Use both sides of the argument and the brain.
_____________Footnote
if you find this offensive is it less or more offensive than the Rochdale Child Abuse Scandal?
KIND THINKER OUT IN THE WORLD: an elegy for Perry Else
KIND THINKER OUT IN THE WORLD
Kind thinker, out in
the world, away
from the white towers;
down by the riv’r.
Forthright, flexible and firm —
the three frees.
Living, in the realm
of the possible:
not ‘they should’, only
‘well, maybe we can…’
Else we forget, the
value of play
and the value of
his playful life.
Arthur Battram
10:26 AM, Thursday, June 12, 2014, revised 2:02 PM Friday, September 5, 2014 , and again so the scansion is better Tuesday, September 9, 2014, 2:04 PM.
A fitting obituary is here:
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/people/obituaries/perry-else-1959-2014/2013792.article
REGENERATING THE PUBLIC REALM: Blenders, babysitters and burglars! – connecting neighbours in unexpected ways – Playing Out
“For my street – and the others who have shared their experiences – new and rich connections have grown from sharing time and fun on the street during playing out sessions. And they have changed the way I feel about living here for the better.”
We know more about regenerating a rainforest or a prairie than we do about regenerating the public realm.
We really need to get out more.
And we really need to study more.
PlayingOut, is one neccesary, but—of course—of itself, insufficient condition for this regeneration of the public realm to take place. Pun placed intentionally!
Read and follow their excellent bloggery.
via Blenders, babysitters and burglars! – connecting neighbours in unexpected ways – Playing Out.
Evidence you say? What is that? Away with you and your ‘evidence’! (NAMED AND SHAMED: GPs who miss cancer diagnoses)
Read this blog, please. If you value any of my bloggage, read this other bloke’s blog. We need to bring as much as we can of this level of surgical precision to management.
If psychology can be a science, (a claim I find dubious having obtained a degree in it from an excellent college ranked number 3 or 4 in the UK, Hindustani).
(Hindustani? How could this idiotphone think I meant that when I wrote incidentally? This is why the robots well not take over just yurt)
As I was saying, if psychology can be a science then so can management.
There was a brief kerfuffle in the business schools about why they didn’t see the crash coming and why they failed to teach ethics to MBAs. Six months later all forgotten. Gary Wossname would have put on a conference or earned a big fee for meaculpaing, or both. Business school profs make admen look shamefaced and moral.
I’m not advocating Taylor’s Scientific Management. We have some better science now. And proper true facts are harder to come by in management consultancy. But we could work a lot harder than we do to seek truth amid opinion and cant.
Please read the wise words of the junior doctor.
If you saw the Mail on Sunday today you would have seen the above headline.
According to Wikiquotes, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, 4-time US senator and academic, once said “You are entitled to your own opinions, but not to your own facts”. Rather than writing an extensive counter-diatribe of rhetoric on the ridiculousness of the article, the irresponsible attitude to health reporting and Jeremy Hunt in general, I have decided to try a new form of discussion. I call it ‘The Facts’.
Fact #1
Here are the National Institute for Clinical Excellence guidelines for referring patients to a specialist with the suspicion of cancer. http://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/CG27*
Fact #2
This is how common bowel cancer is: there are 47.2 new cases per 100,000 people per year (crude). This equals around 40,000 new cases nationally, which means nearly 1 case per UK GP per year.
This is how common breast cancer is: there are 155…
View original post 978 more words
“Work is about a daily search for meaning as well as daily bread…”
As some of you may know, I am a huge fan of Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple.
(I still respect him, but I’m no longer a fan of Apple’s products. Not since MacOS 10.4 in 2005. Just so you know I’m not a blinkered fanboy.)
Now, here’s one reason why I rate Jobs, which you can file under: “Insanely Great!” his most famous catchphrase.
When the Mac was produced in 1984, he insisted, at significant extra cost, in having the names of all the engineers who designed it engraved INSIDE the case, where almost nobody would ever see those names. I was lucky enough to see them, because I once watched an engineer remove the casing. (Oh yes, circuit boards can be beautiful, why are most of them ugly?)
You can also file under: respect for the dignity of the work of other human beings.
Which leads me on to my next couple of stories.
Studs Terkel has been described as a historian and a sociologist but he prefers to call himself a “guerrilla journalist with a tape recorder.” He created controversy we’re told when Tony Blair resigned and he asked: “Why was he such a house-boy for Bush?” Studs Terkel died in his Chicago home on 31st October, 2008 at the age of ninety-six. He asked that his epitaph should be: “Curiosity did not kill this cat.”
He said:
“When you become part of something, in some way you count. It could be a march; it could be a rally, even a brief one. You’re part of something, and you suddenly realize you count. To count is very important.”
Working (1974), is his account of people’s working lives. Terkel wrote:
“Work is about
a daily search for meaning
as well as daily bread,
for recognition
as well as cash,
for astonishment
rather than torpor,
in short for a sort of life,
rather than a
Monday-to-Friday
sort of dying.”
This is an edited excerpt from the interview that opens the book:
(Mike LeFevre was thirty-seven in 1972). He works in a steel mill. On occasion, his wife Carol works as a waitress in a neighborhood restaurant; otherwise, she is at home, caring for their two small children, a girl and a boy...
“You don’t see where nothing goes. I got chewed out by my foreman once. He said, “Mike, you’re a good worker but you have a bad attitude.” My attitude is that I don’t get excited about my job. I do my work but I don’t say whoopee-doo.
The day I get excited about my job is the day I go to a head shrinker. How are you gonna get excited about pullin’ steel? How are you gonna get excited when you’re tired and want to sit down? It’s not just the work. Somebody built the pyramids. Somebody’s going to build something. Pyramids, Empire State Building-these things just don’t happen. There’s hard work behind it. I would like to see a building, say, the Empire State, I would like to see on one side of it a foot-wide strip from top to bottom with the name of every bricklayer, the name of every electrician, with all the names. So when a guy walked by, he could take his son and say, “See, that’s me over there on the forty-fifth floor. I put the steel beam in.” Picasso can point to a painting. What can I point to? A writer can point to a book. Everybody should have something to point to.”
~
taken from this PDF which I found on the net,
so you can too: StudyGuide-Working.pdf
A Study Guide Of WORKING
From the Book by Studs Terkel
Adapted by Stephen Schwartz and Nina Faso
Original Production Directed By Stephen Schwartz
FORT WAYNE CIVIC THEATRE
IN THE WINGS Arts-In-Education Program
PERFORMANCES FOR SCHOOLS
AND SOCIAL SERVICES
Saturday, May 8, 2009 @ 2:00 p.m.
Out of sight, out of mind, out of the brain of Mr Chown, for your reading pleasure
Excellent blog by the wise Mr Chown. Sample quotes:
“20 years on I still see signs of children playing out, unnoticed by adults. Surveys and questionnaires provide only a partial picture of children’s independent mobility. We need more direct observation and engagement with children and families in their own neighbourhoods, not just in schools, if we are to create policies to support children playing out and to measure their success.”
“‘We have given up haunting the places where children play, we no longer have eyes for their games, and not noticing them suppose they have vanished’. Children’s Games in Street and Playground – Iona and Peter Opie.”
Reflecting on reflective practice: “A thousand mountain ranges separate the one who reflects from the one who is truly present.”
Photo from: http://www.walkingforum.co.uk/index.php?topic=2750.0
This is a blog about reflective practice, which like Western civilisation, I think would be a very good thing.
I’m quoting Gandhi, who was asked what he thought of Western civilisation, as he stepped off the boat at Southampton wrapped in a sheet, having been a lawyer in South Africa. He replied: “I think it would be a very good idea.”
I’m suggesting that a lot of what passes for reflective practice is nothing of the sort, and yet it so easily could be.
Playworkers make notes in diaries, they keep records. They take photos, to attempt to present their work to others. Some keep journals, some turn their journals into whole books, like m’esteemed colleague Eduardo Nuttall. Some write whole books, based on the work of a lifetime, or at least a significant chunk of it, stuffed with observation and reflection – I’m thinking of luminaries like Perry Else and Saint Bob himself (no offence). Some blog, like moi, and Joel, and Lily and many others. Some don’t do any of that, but they do think, and ponder, and talk about stuff down the pub or over a grotty cup of bad teabag tea in a hut.
But those honourable exceptions aside, often what passes for ‘reflective practice’ is nothing more than a few scrappy notes in an ‘incident book’ or an ‘office diary’, grudgingly scribbled as you rush to go home. Why do we need to write stuff up, we mutter. What’s the point?
Easy for me to criticise, but what am I doing about it?
Good and fair question. I’m currently developing what I hope will be a new and improved approach to playwork reflective practice. I have started by distinguishing three aspects of the thing I’m pointing at – avoiding using the term ‘reflective’ or ‘practice’ to avoid association with existing approaches, recognising that this may result in the usage of clumsy neologism, for which I apologise.
These three aspects are:
documentation – the recording of numbers and names and other details, as required by Caesar. “Render unto Caesar that which is Ceasar’s” said a Jewish prophet, and in our context that means: keep the records that your employer requires, for the good reasons that they require it. Chief among those reasons is, most likely, the keeping of funders happy.
promotion – the gathering of photos, and stories, etcetera, for reasons often confused with the above, to wit: to be able – at AGM or conference, or on telly or radio, or in print, be it press, or exhibition – to tell people what you do and why you do it and why it is deserving of their support, financing or involvement, be that as volunteer, worker or committee member or officer.
journaling – the writing of a personal and private journal of your personal reflective practice. By which I mean recording some of what you observed and thinking about it, and writing down some of your thoughts, and relating them to your work, presumably with the intention of improvement – the making something better. I’m referring to a thing my erstwhile chums in management consultancy call ‘change management’.
(I’m not interested in ‘change management’, I’m interested in ‘improvement management’, which is, admittedly, a subset of change management, but is much harder. Given that change is happening all the time, the real trick is to detect and amplify the beneficial things, while avoiding the bad things and hoping they’ll go away. I say this because if we focus on the bad things, everybody gets upset and the good things get neglected – better to focus on making the already good a little bit better, which is nice and not too challenging for any of us, is it not?)
Anyway, a personal and private journal. Can’t be done in the office dairy because you can’t be yourself in the glare of your office spotlight. What will they think if I write that? I can’t write that, so I don’t, and so I don’t think about it either, which means that I’m self-censoring. Not a good start. How can I reflect on the unthought and unwritten? Reflection is personal – what do I think about what happened? Not what do the Playwork Principles tell us to think (our very own PCness), nor what my boss wants me to think or do, nor what my mates or colleagues think, or want me to think. And, if it is personal it must be private, initially at least. I can always edit juicy bits for public consumption as part of our promotion or as an extension documentation later.
Hope all that helps. I’ll be piloting this approach soon, and I’ll let you know how it goes, if you’re interested.
This particular peak
Onwards and upwards to the top of this particular peak, which is the consideration of these words:
“A thousand mountain ranges separate the one who reflects from the one who is truly present.”
We don’t know who said this, the only reference we have is ‘Zen saying’.
M’esteemed colleague, Mr Joel Seath, has written about being truly present as a playworker. Bearing witness to the play of children, as our great play theorist* Gordon Sturrock, has it. He doesn’t blog, so you can’t read him online. Joel does blog, here:
http://playworkings.wordpress.com
What do we mean by being present, by witnessing?
Ben Tawil has a wonderful story about not interfering in play:
A teenaged boy is contemplating a leap from a high tower on an adventure playground. Ben, from a distance, is contemplating the situation. If the boy makes the jump, he will massively injure himself, that much is certain.
You’ll have to ask Ben if you need to know what happened. If you have ever been present, witnessing, you’ll know why you don’t need to know what happened. Of course you want to know what happened, as did I. I’ll ask him, and he might give me his version of the tale, which I can share here.
I know I’m being annoying and obscure: I can’t help it. I don’t have the time or patience to write a longer explanation or a shorter one for that matter•. In any case, this Zen stuff is not about Western-style explanation, it is about Eastern-style contemplation.
And contemplation is another word for reflection.
When I hear the word, I reach for my gun
Now pay attention, dear reader••, as I pick up my Zen gun and shoot myself in my metaphorical foot, by essaying that very Western sin – explaining the unexplainable. I may amuse.
So when we say: “A thousand mountain ranges separate the one who reflects from the one who is truly present.” I think we are saying that reflection is impossible if you have not been present, meaning that if you have not been present in the moment, living it, being there, witnessing everything that is going on, around you and inside you, outside of you and inside your head and your heart. Me, I don’t do that often, and I don’t do it often enough, not by a long chalk. I’m just saying that if you weren’t there, you cannot speak of it, can you?
So I offer you this: the key to reflective practice – key in the sense of opening the door – is being truly present.
And once the door has been opened, you may or may not choose to step through, of course – that’s up to you. And if you step through, you may fail to wander very far in the garden of reflection, but it’s a start. I’m exploring that garden myself, so I might bump into you there.
So…
Think on, as my dad used to say.
(Which is, of course, just another way of saying do some reflection.)
Footling footnotes at the foot of the present mountain:
*we have but a few truly great theorists of play: Bob Hughes, Bashō, Gordon Sturrock, Marc Bekoff, to name but a few (boys).**
** oh, and one token girl: Judith Rich Harris.***
*** oh, alright then, one more girl: Penny Wilson
• A wise man apologised like this for going on at length – well, I won’t take more time to explain, I’ll just refer you here:
http://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/
•• reader? I hope for plural.
Disagreement is good: think on…
This link won’t make a lot of sense unless you both value and regularly practice not agreeing with people.
I put it that way to avoid the term ‘disagreement’ which, in these politically correct times, appears to many pale souls to be synonymous with being ‘disagreeable’, which is not.
When did it become fashionable to believe any rubbish?
When did it become stylish not to challenge daft ideas?
When did not agreeing or approving become almost the same as a hate crime?
(And in the case of some causes/issues/groups, when did it ACTUALLY become a hate crime?
I am entitled to my opinion!
(Still, I think – last time I checked)
You can’t learn without disagreement, even if it is disagreeing only with oneself.
And you certainly can’t ‘do reflective practice’ without, at the very least, disagreeing with yourself, and preferably with others.
Have a read, and as we used to say, think on.
“Argument: When losing is winning” http://feedly.com/k/152O0ku
arthur~battram… 