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Monday, September 19, 2011

Why not?

This week we explored the introduction and the first chapter in Teaching to Transgress, by bell hooks.  During these pages, hooks relays her first experiences with education as a “black girl from [a] working-class background” in “the apartheid South” (p. 2).  She tells of black teachers teaching black children with a fervor and commitment more akin to the pulpit than to the classroom.  She says that “teachers worked with and for us to ensure that we would fulfill our intellectual destiny and by so doing uplift the race” (p. 2).  With such a beginning, you would think that the explanation of the latter half of the books title, Education as the Practice of Freedom, would be self-evident.  But as I read further, I came to discover that her message is at once more elemental and universal.  That is to say, you don’t need to suffer institutional oppression to the scale of apartheid to appreciate the liberating effect that education can have on the mind, body and soul. 

hooks writes that “home was the place where I was forced to conform to someone else’s image of who and what I should be.  School was the place where I could forget that self and, through ideas, reinvent myself” (p. 3).  When I read that I thought to myself, “Really?  ‘Cause that ain’t the school I remember.”  I remember a lot of conformity to images, ideas, and methods of doing things.  Yes, there was the odd teacher who, in my formative years, let me be in charge of my formation.  But they seemed to be few and far between in my recollection.  One of those neo-hippie, substitute teachers who wasn't really around all that long but long enough for the regular teacher to ask upon his/her return, "You didn't cover this?"  But then I remembered a specific teacher who taught me the idea that even though school may give you the formula there is no reason why you can’t question it and even design your own.  That teacher was my Dad.

As a senior in high school, my Dad, a high school physics teacher, thought that I would “enjoy” calculus and convinced me to select it as one of my electives.  I enjoyed it so much that I ended up taking it twice.  One day, I brought my calculus homework to my Dad so he could share in my enjoyment.  Never having taught calculus (or at least not in his recent memory), he reviewed my text and the handout from my teacher that detailed the formula to use in order to solve the problem.  Now my Dad is a pretty smart guy and I understand that there is a relationship between calculus and physics (don’t ask me what – I didn’t enjoy it enough to find out).  But, I watched in amazement as my Dad worked out the problem in a different way and said to me, "Why don't you try to solve it like this...".  Until that moment, I hadn't considered that you could "do" calculus a different way than the way that I was taught.  I said to my Dad, "You can't do that".  His response to me: "Why not?" 

I think that what hooks is saying is that the very act of teaching and learning should be liberating; that is to say teaching and learning should not be about memorizing and reciting "facts" but rather, recognizing that fact can be influenced by bias. Teaching and learning should be about questioning, being encouraged to have the stones to say, “Why not look at it this way…”.   Why not, indeed. 

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