Rancière's Ignorant Schoolmaster: The Middle Chapters

I can only say, in the most ridiculously anti-intellectual parody possible, that I don't need this kind of mumbo jumbo.  It's one of those moments where you realize you're reading something great but the task at hand is almost completely utilitarian, so the gems slip by.  I don't have any use for 45 pages on proof of the equality of intelligence, both because I already believe in it and because my task is to encourage it, not convince others of its existence.  That sounds paradoxical, but I find that the first step should never be to tell a student that she already is smart.  Getting her to do something she thought she couldn't do and then pointing it out, that's a different story.  I'm getting bogged down in method and institutional teaching questions, but I still think there's a synthesis that can be cobbled together between Jacotot,  Rancière, and myself. 

I'm going to be teaching a course that contains a component of Latin at a brand new school in the Fall.  I have a lot of flexibility in my curriculum.  I'm looking at a literal word-for-word translation of Ovid's Metamorphosis, imagining an Animus fert dicere formas mutatas moment, akin to the Calypso could not that Jacotot began with.  We'll see we'll see . . .     

Rancière's Ignorant Schoolmaster: Chapter 2

I have to stop for a note on Rancière's second chapter, “The Ignorant One's Lesson.” I probably should've written something about the first chapter – something about stultification or the first mention of universal teaching maybe – but I'm not being that rigorous here.

The thing about the second chapter is that it seems to touch on my sense of a reading methodology that asks students to just read by looking at what they do understand and building from there. So often, students read a passage (we've just been working on literacy skills for science passages on the Living Environment Regents) and get to the end and say “I don't get it.” I infuriate them constantly with my stock response “Of course you do – let's look at it.” I could just as easily be saying the more brusque “Don't say that you can't. You know how to see, how to speak, you know how to show, you can remember. What more is needed?” Jacotot and Rancière agree with me - to say what is on the page is to tell me you know what it says. Meaning is strung together later out of the things you recognize. The "Red Death" had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. The Red Death is wrecking the land. What the Red Death is and how it's wrecking the land and who the story's about and all the rest of it will come later.

Even better is the big realization for students. Rancière points out that “precisely what must be discovered is that there is nothing hidden, no words underneath words” and it is a fear of this master narrative that students must be taught to forget. Just read. It's here on the page. Of course, there's context and the call and response of text to text and polyphony and whatever other way you want to put it, but to read what's on the page is the thing in question. All the rest of that is discussion of what you could say about the text. Our goal is to read without resorting to condescension.

Is that the same sort of thing that Rancière detests? The constant holding off of more meaning from the student? Is it only in the presence of the Old Master that this unveiling of connection and context can happen? Or is there something more complicated going on here?

Probably the most relevant question I have at this point is whether or not Rancière's “Power of the Ignorant” is necessary as a condition or as a position. He claims that, for the ignorant schoolmaster, “there's no risk of this master sparing the child the time necessary to account for the word Calypso.” I fall into this sometimes – pestilence means sickness, let's move on – although I'm getting better bit by bit. But that doesn't mean that ignorance is a necessary condition, maybe. I can even imagine how a knowledgeable schoolmaster could play the role of the ignorant schoolmaster – I know it but what does that have to do with you? Or am I just justifying my position or, hell, my authority?

Rancière's Ignorant Schoolmaster: a First Thought from One Teacher

This is how things get messy just as Spring's turning into Summer. Months ago, a former professor read a couple of the first entries on my literacy pedagogy and suggested that I read Jacques Rancière's The Ignorant Schoolmaster a discussion about emancipation and (sort of) pedagogy, based on the teaching of Joseph Jacotot. School years being what they are, I'm just getting around to it, but it's pretty clearly important stuff. After finishing the translator's introduction, I've got to get a little bit of this out.

The thing that struck me most tonight was the notion of story telling as an antithesis to explication. Because it presumes an equality of intelligence, story telling is egalitarian, while explication is (obviously) not. I'm trying to figure out how to get my head around this on a practical level. When I first started teaching middle school, I found myself telling a lot of stories – it actually was a source of guilt – as a means of helping my students to see connections. It was certainly explication in any real sense of the word, but in a textured narrative style. It took the form of the “so you see . . .” Besides creating a human connection between myself and my students, it gave me the chance to convey knowledge as an anecdote without the presumption that I was more intelligent – just more experienced in one particular instance. In hindsight, I had much better relationships over the long run with these students than I did with students from other periods where I was less narrative (and, to be honest, less egalitarian). So there's something to story telling, surprisingly enough.

This all comes in the context of my grappling with the deskilling of teachers that is at the forefront of the effort to destroy public education and one of the last (remotely) powerful sectors of organized labor in America. I know the danger of speaking of a teacher as an equal with students because the Common Core and Danielson frameworks are being used as a cudgel throughout New York City to beat all content specialty out of the profession. The New New Criticism's insistence that students need only to read and never to take in context or make crucial connections certainly makes it seem like there's no need to have any content knowledge, but of course that quickly devolves into something ridiculous and hollow. “A Modest Proposal” without context is satire without the sideways glance – a bare call for cannibalizing infants that is both confusing and uninteresting beyond its shock value.

I'm appealing to the canon though, and that's tantamount to elitist rearguard knee jerking, right? But how would Stephen Colbert be funny without context – the awareness of the satire, given the absence of a wink? For that matter, how would his show be remotely comprehensible on any level without knowledge of external specifics? Or, to hit at the heart of what matters most to the neo-liberal education “reformers,” are really all about, how would an instruction manual be comprehensible without contextual working knowledge? A lathe worker cannot simply be handed a machine and a manual, no matter how well trained in the ability to decipher texts. A farmer cannot be dumped on a tract of land with a Monsanto starter kit and expect results. Knowledge has to accompany texts or they are at best inefficient ways to convey information; at the worst, they are rendered useless. Of course, that's not really what neo-liberal education theorists are talking about though, is it?

So I'm interested in what Rancière will add to these ideas for me. Is it merely an esoteric summer musing that I only have time for because I'm wrapping up the year? Is it a guise for a process of deconstructing education without simultaneously doing anything real about context in which that system exists? Is it just an excuse for me to tell more stories in class?

Good Luck on the Half Court Shot, Suckers

It seems like these ads just get more and more insulting (antagonistically so?) to students.

Reading Increasingly Difficult Texts

One of the students I've been tracking has moved from the prose summaries of The Odyssey to the Fitzgerald translation. Compare these annotations from the first pages of Book XXII to the same students' earlier annotations - the second student in my 2 Odyssey Sample Annotations.

The nuance is certainly improving and I don't think I see any of the character confusion found in the earlier example.

The Painkiller Before the Knock in the Jaw

Riding to work this morning, I saw this ad. Apparently, the DOE has been footing quite a bill to set parents up for the idea of their children bombing the State Exams this Spring. My camera on my phone is lousy, so it's hard to read, but it says:

"This spring, state exams for students in grades 3-8 will be different and more challenging. And test scores will reflect that at first ( . . . ) We're not satisfied with just teaching your children basic skills. We want them prepared for college and a career."

Does the expenditure suggest that the city is concerned about growing public dissatisfaction with the fetishization of standardized tests? About the growing number of parents who are opting their kids out of the tests?  Or is this just damage control, trying to seem benevolent in the face of ever-increasing separation of the public from any form of control over public education in a world where tests and corporate educational trade secrets are strictly protected while student and teacher information is constantly for sale?

Maybe it's just a warning shot fired across the bow of students, parents, teachers, and anyone else genuinely interested in this junk science profit glut.  It's going to be painful, that much is certain.  

2 Odyssey Sample Annotations

Again, here are a pair of snapshots - this time from a class that is a tracked SPED section. Instead of the Fitzgerald trans of The Odyssey used in my other classes, this section has been working largely with a narrative summary. After reading these, we work with selections from Fitzgerald.

The two students couldn't be further apart in terms of approach to work, but both images illustrate the ways that annotation could be used as a reading comprehension strategy.

The first was concerned with her ability to read the text at all, despite the fact that the vocabulary wasn't terribly beyond her. After conferencing, we nailed down the nonstandard syntax as the main source of her problems. This image was the result of a period's work.

The second is from the same day, done by another of my target students. I especially like the second note from the top on the left, where you can see him parsing out a little bit of the meaning so that he has enough to read on with. Further down on the same side, you can see him still doing a bit of copying of the wording from the text itself - I can't be sure of his level of comprehension here - and near the bottom, he summarizes with the brief "The cyclops ate Zeus people." This character misreading is potentially disastrous, even though he's able to get the general events out of the story.

What about this passage suggested that the sailors belonged to Zeus? Just a misreading, based on speed or carelessness? The mention of praying to Zeus?