"It is important to do what you don't know how to do. It is important to see your skills as keeping you from learning what is deepest and most mysterious. If you know how to focus, unfocus. If your tendency is to make sense out of chaos, start chaos."
-Carlos Castaneda, Peruvian author
Last night the movers came to give an estimate for moving our belongings from Ankara to Houston.
The decision to go back to the US for an indefinite period was in the making for quite a while, but we had thought of the move as a hiatus, taking a break after nine years here. We're leaving the school here in Ankara on very good terms (if they can forgive me for leaving) -- good enough in fact that they're holding the door open for us to return. Still, the ideas for a relationship during the interim never took shape, so we're doing the practical thing and moving on.
Today is the last day of school, and I said goodbye to a few of the students. I'll still be at work until mid-August, so I'm not saying goodbye to anyone else just yet. And there is still that thought of coming back in a year. But walking through our home with the movers yesterday, and saying goodbye to students today, reveal small fissures that will soon look like the Rift Valley.
This will be our fourth international move as a family in the last 20 years, so we've become familiar with upheaval: simultaneously feeling expectation and loss, losing the context that once defined you, but gaining the freedom to redefine yourself. Seeing new mountains and canyons appear out of nowhere. Discovering oceans where there used to be land. Redrawing the maps.
Hello, chaos. We meet again.
This week I enjoyed the public performance of a young man I've been tutoring in classical guitar. I've been working with Peter for several months, and though I wish I could take more credit, he is so diligent and motivated that I mostly just coach and encourage.
Still, I was a little surprised when, at the end of our lesson a few weeks ago, he mentioned he might want to perform in his school's spring concert -- in two weeks! I gave him several pieces to look over, and he chose a rondo by Carulli that highlighted some techniques that he had only just mastered. We looked it over and discussed the challenging parts, and Peter took over from there. His performance was great, and it was clear that he was well prepared and totally in the piece.
My approach to music lessons is coming into line with my thinking on most educational endeavors these days: teach how at least as much as you teach what. Give them tools and the skills, not just facts. Teach them how to learn.
To learn to play a musical piece, you have to spot the difficult passages, understand what can go wrong, and plan your attack. If you're not patient with yourself you won't get very far. And no matter how much head knowledge you have about the rhythm and the fingerings, in order to know how, you must practice, practice, practice.
I've made mistakes a few times when I've played passages for Peter, so our lessons (and the embarrassment) have challenged me to push myself harder on the guitar. I have to be honest that whatever I expect from my students I need to expect more from myself. As a teacher, I have to always remember what it's like to learn, and I need to let my students watch me as I learn new skills too.
So, well done Peter, and thanks! The lessons have been good for me too.
Daily visits to our garden to get encouraging images like these make the whole frustrating project worthwhile.
We've had lots of unseasonal rain in the last few weeks, which has been great for our endangered wildflowers. I have a new Canon PowerShot this year, and our visiting film student son Andy has helped me figure it out. I'm doing better at getting the shots I want, and I'm eager to share them.
I just uploaded a batch to a Flickr photo set, which I've embedded here as a slideshow. (If you are reading this post by email, you will have to visit my blog to see the slideshow.) The photo set on Flickr has more detailed general information about the project, captions for most of the photos, and links to other related photo sets and blog posts.
So go to the Flickr photo set for the project based learning main course. This is just the dessert:
P.S. If you're a new email subscriber, you might not have noticed that the highlighted text (like this: Tryangulation) is actually a hyperlink, to make it easier for you to find the websites I mention in my blog posts.
Today was the first school day in Turkey since the new ban on smoking took effect on Monday. The ban covers all enclosed public areas, with allowances for
designated smoking areas for certain institutions. It used to be that, although students were never permitted to smoke, school personnel could smoke in designated areas away from contact with students.
On Monday and Tuesday we observed a national holiday, so this was the first time for everyone to get through the whole day without lighting up. It's going to be dicey for a while, since most people that I know are smokers (even though the stats say only 51% of adults), and getting through the whole day without conflagrations of any kind will take some practice.
Of course, as someone who unwillingly smokes from the unfiltered end of the cigarette, I got used to the arrangement in about a minute.
There have been plenty of anti-smoking campaigns here through the years, but they just make people feel guilty and discouraged over how hard it is to quit. In fact, the percentage of smokers in Turkey has been on the increase: it grew by 50% in the 1990s! It's no easier when those who should take health most seriously (53% of all male doctors) smoke as much as you do.
Everyone knows it's bad, and they wish their own children wouldn't take up the habit, but wishing hasn't been enough to stop a growing number of young people (14% of boys aged 7-13 at last count) from falling into the same trap.
So, to my dear friends who are not as happy about the ban, please remember that this is not a conflict in which the smokers are losers and the non-smokers are winners. Yes, it will be difficult to implement, but it will make it easier for some people to quit and for others to avoid even starting the habit. Even those who don't quit will still get through the day with fewer cigarettes. We will all feel better, and I'll be very grateful.
Sigara içmediğiniz için teşekkürler!
Background links:
The World Bank Tobacco Atlas and its profile of Turkey.
Today's Zaman: Smoke-free life begins in Turkey
CNN: Turkey introduces smoking ban
I recently wrote about the problem of poorly built schools around the world in reflection on the tragic earthquake in China. I have just now read, and feel I must share with you, some very moving stories I have just read about the teachers in some of those Chinese schools whose love for their students led to the ultimate sacrifice.
These stories are part of a collection of several stories compiled by Chinese blogger Bob Chen and published on Global Voices Online. Taking a break from grading papers and exams to read these will certainly put our own work, and our relationships with our students, in perspective.
Here's the link: Global Voices Online » China:国殇; survival stories in QUAKE
A lot of the news about the earthquake this week in China emphasized the tragedy of students trapped and dying in poorly built schools. Unfortunately, outrageously, perversely, school buildings around the world are potential earthquake death traps. Remember Pakistan, where 7000-plus schools killed 17,000 students?
On Thursday the New York Times published an article by Andrew Revkin on this global threat. Revkin writes:
Experts on earthquake dangers have warned for years that tens of millions of students in thousands of schools, from Asia to the Americas, face similar risks, yet programs to reinforce existing schools or require that new ones be built to extra-sturdy standards are inconsistent, slow and inadequately financed.
Revkin cited an OECD report that states "schools 'routinely collapsed in earthquakes around the world because of avoidable design or construction errors, or because existing laws and building codes were not enforced." That last bit was a polite way of saying "corruption" -- the allowance of poor design and pathetic construction in exchange for personal favors. Here in Turkey, construction contractors have a nasty habit of fleeing the country when their buildings kill people, so the system apparently works --for them.
The reports by Revkin reminded me again of the latest such tragedy we witnessed here in Turkey. Five years ago this month, an earthquake in the Southeast killed nearly 170 people. Half of those killed were public boarding school students in a single dormitory building (click here for the CNN report). More than 90% of the schools in the area were affected by that quake.
Revkin has also published a background story (click here) and links the Coalition for Global School Safety (COGSS). It's horrible to think about, I know, but is your children's school earthquake/ tornado/ disaster safe? How do you know? As the COGSS Turkey case study says,
It is better to be ten years too early than one day too late.
The photo was taken by Chen Jianli, Xinhua/Reuters, and is titled A rescuer held the hand of a trapped student at Wudu Primary School. (image link)
I found out about this song today by way of CC Long on the Classroom 2.0 social network. It's Tom Chapin singing Not on the Test. One stanza goes like this:
Thinking's important. It's good to know how.
And someday youll learn to, but someday's not now.
Go on to sleep now. You need your rest.
Don't think about thinking. it's not on the test.
CC had a link to this NPR broadcast clip (link here), but I dug a little deeper and found that the song has its own website, Notonthetest.com, with additional lyrics that include a stanza about the US education policy package called No Child Left Behind. The website is actually advocating for more art and other programs to stimulate creativity, which are being wedged out of education that targets test performance rather than knowledge.
The website also provides suggestions for parents on how to lobby for change, although education policy out here in the rest of the world might be far less susceptible to parental influence. Here, for example, the system is highly centralized with a rigid national curriculum that shackles students to test scores even though its leaders know it shouldn't (here's something I wrote recently about that unfortunate irony). Still, pressing for change is always better than just singing along.
Last week when I shared our little flower's survival of winter and good intentions, I prefaced my post with a line from a Robert Frost poem, Mending Wall. While I was setting up the previous post just now about a local newspaper covering the reappearance of the flowers in the wild, I sorted through my own old photographs, too impatient to hold out for this year's crop of photos.
I found this one, which I had taken a couple miles from where we collected seeds. This image is perfect for another of my favorite Frost poems, The Tuft of Flowers, which, in its own way, is also fitting for all kinds of virtual co-labor.
The poem relates the melancholy of a field worker alone on a beautiful morning, after his co-laborer has moved on:
But he had gone his way, the grass all mown,
And I must be, as he had been,--alone,
`As all must be,' I said within my heart,
`Whether they work together or apart.'
The laborer is then surprised that his unseen partner has left uncut a tuft of flowers growing among the hay:
A leaping tongue of bloom the scythe had spared
Beside a reedy brook the scythe had bared.
I left my place to know them by their name,
Finding them butterfly weed when I came.The mower in the dew had loved them thus,
By leaving them to flourish, not for us,
Nor yet to draw one thought of ours to him.
But from sheer morning gladness at the brim.
Even though his coworker is still out of sight and earshot, this shared beauty unites their spirits and joins their separate tasks into one labor. We too can find things of beauty and leave them for our co-laborers in the next field, or across time.
... and feel a spirit kindred to my own;
So that henceforth I worked no more alone;
But glad with him, I worked as with his aid,
And weary, sought at noon with him the shade;
And dreaming, as it were, held brotherly speech
With one whose thought I had not hoped to reach.
`Men work together,' I told him from the heart,
`Whether they work together or apart.'
It was encouraging to see in the Today's Zaman online edition that our little flowers --or rather their still wild cousins-- got some press. Last year I didn't go out to the meadow where we collect seeds, so I didn't realize until reading this new article by Zaman that they were down to an area of only 30 square meters. I'm going to use that news article to do some campaigning!
Dear US educators: for a hard look at the logical extreme of teaching to the test, watch the news from here.
We've been too hard on the dears...
Stating that the current exam system in Turkey is turning students into workaholics, The Minister of Education Hüseyin Çelik said this week that (roughly translated)
of course we are preparing our children for higher education, but our goal is also an education that prepares them for life, provides opportunity for play, and ensures their happiness (literally, love and kindness).
He asserted that the Ministry's Counseling Research Center is researching exam trauma to find solutions to the problems that, admittedly, the education system itself has created. He added that the Ministry intends to improve the quality of education, which means introducing new educational methods, since "wrong methods don't bring right results."
... but they can't ALL go to university, you know
I suppose the reporters at that press conference forgot to ask the Minister about the news from two weeks ago, that reported an alarming increase in the enrollment at after-school exam prep courses. Traditionally, exam anxiety becomes a marketable commodity during 7th grade, as students get prepared for the post-8th grade OKS exam that determines their options for high school. This mania accelerates during high school as students prepare for the dreaded ÖSS university entrance exam (more precisely the university elimination exam), which I've written about here, here, and here.
The notorious 8th grade exam has been abolished, but in its place are new exams given over three years, whose average will be just as weighty as the old OKS. Enrollment at weekend exam prep courses has nearly doubled as students from 4th, 5th and 6th grades are now being registered by nervous parents. Word is spreading that many schools are still teaching to the old test, and that without outside help, unprepared 4th graders might miss their chance for the right university and specialization.
The increasingly detrimental exam system here is an administrative --not educational-- solution for the university openings available for only a fraction of the number of students who want to continue their studies. The purpose of the exams may be different from the US, but from here we can see the how 12 years of teaching to the test takes its toll on curiosity, creativity, and learning skills for self-directed learning. Take heed.
Türkçe haberlerini okumak için linkleri tıklayınız;
My wife brought to my attention just a few hours ago that today is World Malaria Day. I am a malaria survivor, and since my personal ordeal I need to do my part to promote more awareness of this disease.
Each year malaria infects more than half a billion people and kills more than a million. Most of those who die did not have what I had going for me: general good health and adequate body weight prior to the disease, and access to medical care and medicine.
Like so many preventable diseases that continue to ravage the underdeveloped world, malaria is so devastating because of poverty and powerlessness. Access to basic resources and information goes a long way to fighting malaria, dysentery, tuberculosis and other killers of millions each year.
For more information, you can see the officlal World Malaria Day website, or this excellent article on Wikipedia. The world needs young people who are inspired to put their
knowledge and creativity to work to change the world. We can all help
fan the flame.
