The Scrap Drawer
A collection of first drafts, sketches, outlines, thoughts, poetry and prose.
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Reading List
I like lists and I like reading, and so I’ve made a list of what I’m reading: http://t.co/vcOoLe4m
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On Pedagogy
(A post that I wrote for http://insync21.com)
I have known some teachers who, without realising it, saw their classroom as an accident of location. There is a classroom, in which there happens to be one knowledgeable adult amid a group of ignorant children. It almost goes without saying that these classes were as much of a burden to the students as they were to the teacher, and in them I learned precious little. By contrast, I have also known some teachers who consciously view their classroom as a place of relationships, in which there is a teacher in the midst of a group of students. These classes were a delight, and I carry much from those classes with me in my mind and in my heart to this very day.
That which separates these two extremes of a poor experience and a very good one is this: the first teacher acts as though ‘teacher’ were merely his job (or, worse, his burden); the second acts as though each relationship between him and a student is significant and important. The former does his work grudgingly; the latter, with much thought and care. So essential is this deep thought and tender care to the teaching profession that it has its own name, that of pedagogy.
As a student of language, I cannot help but go in search of the root of this word. It is, in fact, the Ancient Greek word for education, and is formed from the two root words παίς, (pais, a child) and ἄγειν (agein, to lead); thus, it may be said that one who practices pedagogy is one who leads children. Similarly, the word ‘education’ comes to us from the Latin verb educare (to raise a child), which is itself from the verb educere, to lead forth. So a good education involves being led … but whither? The answer is sweeping in its implications, for he is being led into adulthood, and into the future.
In his classroom, a teacher demonstrates love for his students and for his field; a teacher demonstrates thoughtfulness in reading as well as in writing; a teacher demonstrates honesty in academics, and in life generally. In short, in a world that has the technology we have, and in a world that relies as much on skills (as opposed to knowledge) as ours does, it becomes imperative that the teacher be more than a mere transmitter of information. It is crucial that the teacher model how a scholar and a human being thinks and behaves. For it is becoming increasingly clear that all of the planet’s resources are finite, and that there is no way that the cutting-apart of our home will cease nor that poverty and violence will be acted against unless the academics, activists, politicians and citizens of the time to come are filled with passion and compassion, with thoughtfulness and honesty.
This, then, is the great and noble work of the teacher: to lead, with deep thought and tender care, the young ones entrusted to him into the future with the skills and moral resources they need, that they may play their part in the betterment of the human race and of the little planet they inhabit.
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The Horse and His Boy
Aravis also had many quarrels (and, I’m afraid, even fights) with Cor, but they always made it up again: so that years later, when they were grown up, they were so used to quarrelling and making it up again that they got married so as to go on doing it more conveniently.
(from C.S. Lewis’s The Horse and His Boy, the third novel in The Chronicles of Narnia)
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First 3 paragraphs of a story
The women were in the yard between the tenants’ houses, talking and preparing the evening meal. Sisi, a short, stocky young woman, sat in the last, shrinking pool of sunlight. She, together with the other young mothers, was pounding the small hard beans found in that country for the stew. As the pestles rose and fell, so their tongues trattled along the usual courses of women’s talk. One woman, heavily with child, was nervously accepting wildly-conflicting advice on childbirth from the other women who, though they spoke like seasoned matrons, were themselves only greenly come from their first birth. Sisi had put in her piece but, having been immediately contradicted, fell back into thinking of her daughter. She kept up with the conversation, of course, putting in words of accord or cries of disagreement. Her heart, however, walked in the memories of the four years of the little girl’s life.
As the sun continued to sink behind the housetops, Sisi shifted to another place on the ground to avoid the growing shadows; spring had truly come, but the evening shadows were still chilly. Seeing her move, one of the matrons on the far side of the yard called out, ‘Oi! Stop basking, girls, and start pounding! The stew is ready for the beans.’
At this, the girls were a-twitter with counter-admonishments, all too playful and too clearly in the bounds of courtesy to cause offence. Sisi, however, set her rough jaw and pounded more vigorously than before. Her thoughts wandered back to her little girl who, at that moment, would be being led back to the homestead with the other children from their afternoon on the hills, as sheep are led back to the fold after a day at pasture.
