Questions Please

When I started my homeschooling journey I thought I was teaching my children. Not the case. Homeschooling is a humbling venture. On a weekly, if not daily, basis I am knocked down a few pegs until I am on my knees asking for help, asking for patience, and asking for answers. Homeschooling is a daily Inquisition. Initially I thought I had to have all the answers. Now I try to grasp the wonder that animates my children. Wonder is innocence. Wonder is wholesome and beautiful. Wonder about our world leads to questions. 

For the past two weeks my reading journey has involved lots of questions and moments where I almost grasp the answer. In Norms & Nobility, David Hicks lists a series of questions that will help the teacher understand their underlying assumptions about truth, education, human nature, etc. Answering these will act as a self-evaluation for me. 

1. Writing: how do you teach better writing and more intelligent communication? 

2. Thinking: How do you teach clear, forthright, incisive thinking? How do you go beyond the mere stroking of sensibility to the enlivening of intelligence? How do you give your students a more critical attitude toward what they read, see, or hear?

3. Knowing: Are your students taught to distinguish among the various specifies of knowledge and to appreciate the uses and limitations of each? Are your students alive to their needs for poetic truth, as well as scientific truth, religious truth, and historical truth?

4. Questions: How do you teach important questions? how do you provide from your students the important questions? How do you know the important questions? How does the scholarly community ensure that you are asking the questions that  a rigorous commitment to normative learning demands?

5. Communication: How and on what level does your faculty communicate with one another? How well do you know what your students are studying outside your class or what they have read and what questions they have developed before entering your class for the first time?

6. Attitudes: What your opinion of yourself as a teacher? What do you believe to be your true competence? Do you have an all-knowing manner in the classroom, or are your methods dialectical? How much reading and reflection precedes your entrance into the classroom? How much do you learn in the classroom? How often so you ask your students questions to which you do not presume to have ready answers? How eager are you to learn from your colleagues or to examine ideas outside your chosen discipline? How often do you encourage students to look beyond the borders of your particular academic discipline? 

7. Students: How well do you know your students? If you do not know them well, what does that say about your attitude toward them and toward teaching? How might that attitude affect your ability to teach effectively?

8. Responsibility: Why are your best students often the most arrogant and the least sensitive to the lively connection between ideas and actions, between knowledge and responsibility, and between ability and humiliation? I would assume that arrogant students think they know it all. They lack a need to know. If they do not know the answer, if they are afraid to look weak or vulnerable, they will simply say the activity is dumb or pointless. Maybe they are a bit self centered. "I know" is all the rage these days. I have been there myself. What can you do to make this connection more compelling?Take the choice off the student. Have them think like someone else. If the arrogant student feels that they are supposed to know everything, "knowingness", they are afraid if they don't know they are dumb. Using literature to ask what should this character do might remove their ego from the discussion. Do you take responsibility outside the classroom for developing the conscience and style of your students? I try to. Even with my older son it is hard to push back against the culture. 

9. Time: Can and do you make time to get to know your students and their parents, to engage in scholarship under and outside the rubric of the curriculum or of the academic discipline, and to discuss fertile ideas with your colleagues and students? Do your students have time to get to know you, to reflect on their studies, to read beyond the syllabus, and to pursue ideas in informal conversation with you? If so, are they encouraged to use their time thus?

10. Self-evaluation: What makes one educational experience better than another? Do you keep a written record of your teaching methods' successes and failures? Do you share this wisdom with your colleagues? How?

11. Values: When we fail to make the connection between our disciplinary parts and the whole of knowledge, education becomes valueless: bled of meaning for the individual. The hand cannot be studied apart from the body. The accumulation of discrete parts of knowledge does not add up to wisdom, that is. a workable understanding of where each part gits into the structured pattern of the whole. This dialectical principle suggests more questions: Do you understand your disciplinary parts and are you teaching them in relation to the whole of knowledge? Are you teaching what you can or what you should, they way you can and the way you should? Are you avoiding questions that lead you into other academic disciplines? Are you consciously predicating analysis upon a normative inquiry?