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Six Microlectures* of Educational Embodiment, some shorter than others.
1. Although often in the middle I would like to avoid being the center.
2. In the summer of 1958 the experimental composer John Cage proposed a course to be taught at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Upon finding out that no students had signed up for his course he declared that he would not teach any course at the college that summer. Presumably bound by some kind of contract, even if it was just a commitment of professional courtesy, Cage showed up to Black Mountain with the intention of attending all of the meals held in the college’s communal dining hall that summer. Sitting amongst the students he would have conversations with them. They talked about music and other things while merely being together. John Cage is an exemplary teacher.
3. An hour before lunch, while in fourth grade, my classmates and I would be dismissed from our main teacher's classroom and walked across the hall for our daily phonics lessons. Mrs. Dorothy taught us word parts: roots, prefixes, and suffixes. I learned that “-graph” meant write and that auto meant self; bio was life, sub meant under, pre meant before, re meant again. Seeing an “-i-n-g” at the end of a word implied an action; the suffix “-er” was one who, as in one who works or one who liberates, and “-logy”, very usefully referred to the study of. In one of these word roots was the seed to the kind of teacher I strive to be. Buried in the “C” booklet was the prefix “com” which shared it’s meaning with the slightly shorter “co” and it means with or together. Despite the contemporary connotations of the word “commercial”, which actually finds its root in the very noble notion of trade, “com” offers us a litany of other words from which to build a teaching philosophy from. By way of this prefix we get –among many other words:
Combine (of which -bine means two).
Companion (of which -panion derives from the Latin pan or bread).
Commune and common (of which –mune and -mon are from the Latin moenias, meaning duty).
Comfort (of which -fort means strength).
Complete (-plete meaning full from which we also get plenty and plenitude).
Compassion (of which passion, of course, means suffering).
And one of my favorites, Complex (of which –plex refers to a sort of braiding or twining, from which we also derive our word part -ply which means fold; as in the world multi-ply who’s corollary is manifold).
4. In our home live six individuals. This can be rough. We rub up against each other. I sleep well from 11 pm to 6 am. At six, Mateo who is 4 leaves his bed and lies between my wife and I. At 6:30, as the sun paints our morning bed-dance, Lucia who is 2 comes and occupies the space to the right of my wife on the edge of the bed. At 7 –the sun fully illuminating our pile of feet, butts, and elbows – Lucas (our 6 year old) dragging his plush toy buffalo nestles at the foot of the bed warming our toes. During this ritual of awakening, everyone’s eyes remain closed. At 7:15, Jorge Alberto the first born, blankets his body over all of ours –his four-foot-long, fifty pound presence finishing up our morning's work. The first thing I learned about teaching I learned from the Bible. In the book of admonitions -- Ecclesiastes -- we find a philosophy of relationality:
Two are better than one; because they have a good reward for their labor. For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow: but woe to him that is alone when he falleth; for he hath not another to help him up. Again, if two lie together, then they have heat: but how can one be warm alone? And if one prevail against him, two shall withstand him; and a threefold [or a manifold] cord is not quickly broken.
5. Sometimes things don’t go the way one plans. Thus is the natural operation of diversity. One thing grows or bumps into another and things often fail. Failure is not always a “teachable moment” sometimes its just failure, just like death is just death. But in the same manner life is also just life and hence in its mereness it is much less difficult than it needs to be. Devoid of difficulty doesn’t make it absent of complexity, after all complexity just means that it is made of many different parts; it contains multiple sides. Difficult (dif =pull away + ficult, from facile meaning ease), however is the “pulling away” from ease (or calm), from comfort (or strength), from pleasure (or enjoyment), all of which seems to put the responsibility of life on the individuals living it. Education is for life – of this there is no doubt. Yet our primary qualifier for education often is rigor, a.k.a. difficulty. For me, give me one other person and give us a sandwich and drink that we can split and I’ll show you a progressive education that has existed since the original "tree of knowledge" was picked.
6. When I’ve asked different children who go to school, what their favorite “subject” is, jokingly many of them have responded, “lunch.” Given eating’s intuitive learning potentiality, I’m drawn to agree with them.
*Note: "Microlecture" is a term borrowed from Goulish, M. (2000). 39 Microlectures in proximity of performance. Routledge: London.
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