Deven Black, a special education teacher in the Bronx, on his four word education plan:
The distillation of my philosophy came to me as I was telling S how I realized she was different from almost every student I’ve taught. Whenever I ask a question requiring a higher-order thinking skill and the rest of her class stares at me as if I were speaking Klingon, she will raise her hand slowly and say, “I’m not sure, but…” That’s it! That is my education philosophy distilled to its most essential point. “I’m not sure, but…” I want all my students — all students — to feel safe enough, secure enough, challenged enough and supported enough to take the risk that S takes.
Then Frank Chimero:
That is my best students. That is my best work. And it is theirs too. It is the things I love reading and the work I love parsing and absorbing. It’s how we feel less alone. It’s a hypothesis. It’s everything. It’s how we perceive things to be, it’s how we define the world we live in, it’s how we come to grok our surroundings and the patterns of the world around us. It’s how we project our identities and define ourselves. It’s how we establish ourselves as loving, caring, inquisitive people. It’s verbally piking up a stick and poking it at the blurry life path laid before us. It’s our educated guess about not just the way things are, but it’s an attempt of grasping a vision of how things could be.
And count me in.
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