{"id":158,"date":"2013-10-11T17:45:29","date_gmt":"2013-10-11T17:45:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cohort21.com\/ckirsh\/?p=158"},"modified":"2019-08-19T23:43:15","modified_gmt":"2019-08-19T23:43:15","slug":"what-is-the-purpose-of-school","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/teachingtomorrow\/2013\/10\/11\/what-is-the-purpose-of-school\/","title":{"rendered":"What is the purpose of school?"},"content":{"rendered":"

For the Klingenstein Summer Institute<\/a>, we had to write our philosophy of education statements before the two-week intensive began. What I wrote for the experience was fine and, I think, accurately captured some of my hopes and challenges as a teacher.<\/p>\n

But then I read the philosophy of a slightly older, much wiser teacher friend of mine who teaches at Spence in New York<\/a>. This friend is also a lead teacher at Klingenstein and is one of those teachers that I might always look up to. Her philosophy inspired me to reconsider how I am approaching my awareness of myself as a teacher. Specifically, she quite meaningfully reflected in her philosophy on what the purpose of school should be.<\/p>\n

This is, I believe, the essential question that should be underpinning all of our practices: why do we do what we do? I know on a deep, guttural level that my calling as a teacher has nothing to do with raising standardized test scores, enabling students to perfectly parse a sentence, or persistently plow through a pile of novels. So what then, is the point of school?<\/p>\n

[youtube]http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=068Xv-J7fEw[\/youtube]<\/p>\n

And with this question bubbling through my imagination, I watched this animation of a talk Ken Robinson gave (I\u2019m just going to say it, Ken Robinson could give a talk about cereal boxes and I would probably love it and share it with all my friends) and I am struck by the simplicity of the idea that we should be waking up students to the treasures and passions they have within themselves<\/span>.<\/b> This should be the purpose of an education: to give us the freedom, structure, supports, mentors, challenges, and encouragement that young people need in order to discover themselves and what their purpose is in this world.<\/p>\n

When I float down from these lofty ideals and settle into the day to day reality of my life and existence in the classroom, I have to keep asking myself: how does this manifest in my classroom? I teach Grade 7 English. While I could be teaching my students the skills to write a fantastic short story or how to understand metaphor in a novel, there is something more important that I can be exploring with my students. With my whole heart, I want to know: How can I use the vehicle of Grade 7 English to help my students discover their passions, talents, and purpose in this life?\u00a0<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

Last year, my investigations with Cohort 21 were centred around personalizing the learning process with flipping my classroom<\/a>: this was awesome and<\/i> it was so safe. Not to belittle my work (because I am genuinely proud of what I learned), but I can challenge myself to do something more with this research opportunity. This idea, I think, actually runs in tandem with our potential as teachers: we can play it safe, we can do what is expected of us, we can tow the line, and produce the status quo\u2026but what a waste of a beautiful gift?! We have the power and ability to change the world by changing our classrooms; why wouldn\u2019t we engage with that?<\/p>\n

I know of no better way to end this but with this excerpt from the Mary Oliver poem, The Summer Day<\/span>:<\/p>\n

Tell me, what is it you plan to do
\nwith your one wild and precious life?<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For the Klingenstein Summer Institute, we had to write our philosophy of education statements before the two-week intensive began. What I wrote for the experience was fine and, I think, accurately captured some of my hopes and challenges as a teacher. But then I read the philosophy of a slightly older, much wiser teacher friend … Continue reading “What is the purpose of school?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":34,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wds_primary_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,81],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-158","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-actionplan","category-blog-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/teachingtomorrow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/teachingtomorrow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/teachingtomorrow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/teachingtomorrow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/34"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/teachingtomorrow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=158"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/teachingtomorrow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":908,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/teachingtomorrow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158\/revisions\/908"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/teachingtomorrow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=158"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/teachingtomorrow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=158"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/teachingtomorrow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=158"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}