Thoughts after reading "Building a Better Teacher"

Aside from having the right amount of knowledge and skills, what else do good teachers need to increase their chances of succeess in teaching? Read on. I promise you that the answer could not be found in the school situation.

Elizabeth Green's article titled "Building a Better Teacher" was published in The NY Times on 2 March 2010. Part of the story is about Doug Lemov, an American educational trouble shooter who works as consultant for schools that wish to improve the quality of education they offer. Green reported that Lemov found that abilities to command attention and to give clear and precise direction reside in the core of effective teaching. Another part of the story is about a group of educational researchers that piled up more evidence for the commonsense belief that effective teaching requires competence (i.e., sufficient knowledge, training, quick mind and sound judgment) to teach the subject . It seems futile thus to impeach any of the abovementioned elements of good teaching, for after all, these are some of the things that educators and great thinkers value as far back as the time before the pre-socratics were born.

But will the said elements of good teaching suffice to ensure a significantly improved performance in school? The answer is no, for we all know that even the best teacher, regardless of the amount of scholarly and professional qualities he/she possesses, could still fail to teach his/her students. It seems to me thus that Lemov and that team of researchers, Green including, are too absorbed with facts about formal teaching that they have unintentionally neglected the major role that other factors outside the school situation play in the advancement, stagnation, or retardation of learning. I think I'll have more to say about this if my time will permit me. For now I just want to say a few words about success and failure in teaching, a topic that is often ignored in debates on the principles of accountability and difference in schooling.

She said this time she'll dance

And she did! Who do you think is the finest dancer among these kids? Choose one, c'mon! There. Now, you can bet, that's my kid. Go Bebeh!

Congratulations JM dela Paz & G. Porter

I'm so thrilled to hear from my two former EDFD 120 students that they've been invited to join the UPIS faculty starting June next academic year. I'm confident that both of them will be an asset to the University as they're not only beauty and brains. They're also passion and energy.

Congratulations Gayl Porter and John Michael dela Paz!

You two make me smile with pride. I'm genuinely happy today.

Cooking is the best art!

Cooking is an art whose product could satisfy one's grumbling stomach. In cooking, learning from a great cook does not necessarily mean that you are going to do a cheap imitation of a master's work. In cooking, reasonable people don't say, "If the cook is Mike, then the food is great." In cooking, people don't normally raise the sort of questions people ask in painting: "Is this Monet?" In cooking, greatness always depend on the taste of food and not on the name of the cook, and that's another thing that seems to make cooking greater than what painters do. I still like to paint though.

In painting, whether the work that you possess is ugly or not, if it's an original work of a "master" like Monet, Van Gogh, or Picasso, then it must be a "good" painting. In painting, the value of the product may depend on the simple name of who did it, and that is to say, in painting, you can forget about beauty or the lack of which. In cooking, you can't just declare that the food is good without putting it in your mouth. Unlike painting, "beauty" (taste of food) in cooking is always an issue. And regardless of who cooked the food, if it is great, it is great.

Wittgenstein on his Tractatus

This is a startling find. Wittgenstein, referring to his book Tractatus, said in a letter to an editor:

"The book's point is an ethical one...My work consists of two parts: the one presented here plus all that I have not written. And it is precisely this second part that is the important one" (In Edmonds, D. & Eidinow, J. (2001). Wittgenstein's Poker. NY: HarperColins Publishers. pp. 158-159).

What else could he be meaning to say with "all that I have not written" if not the metaphysical, ethical/moral, aesthetic, and spiritual?

So, the unsayable or unknowable is after all more important--and not devoid of meaning--than what the logical positivists thought are the only utterances that are sensible (i.e., empirical and analytic statements).

But, perhaps, this is nothing earth-shaking for those who are afflicted hitherto with the disease that is logical positivism. The quotation however proves that the logical positivists, during the time of Wittgenstein, the early one, saw only what they wanted to see in his Tractatus.

It's odd, nonetheless, for logical positivism to have held sway on the the question of linguistic meaning for a number of years though they don't deserve the following they enjoyed even for a smallest fraction of a millisecond. Okay, let's just say that logical positivism, despite its spartan narrow-mindedness, was not an utter waste of time as we learned anyway a great lesson from its humongous mistake: requiring the use of a principle (verification) that cannot meet its own demand.

If only those who nodded to them realized that it's inhuman to confine language to what is either true or false alone, the world could have been spared the trouble of dealing with one unnecessary irritant.