Encomium

In grade 9, at the age of 14, I had Mr. Sharpe, the English teacher, for my first high school homeroom class. On the very first day, he came into the classroom and without a word, started to write (in a beautiful cursive hand) on the chalkboard. “The motive for metaphor…” he wrote, then proceeded to fill all of the chalkboards in the room with his explanation. When he was done, he walked back to the first chalkboard, erased it and continued writing. He never stopped writing, or spoke a word, during that 90-minute class. 

Nor was that his only quirk of teaching. He was in the habit of writing, on foolscap paper, these seemingly unrelated treatises on such things as the history of language, or a caricature of one of the students who had expressed a dislike for the book we were reading at the time, and dropping these artifacts, without a word, onto the student’s desk. I’m pleased to recall that I received several of these transmissions, including an explanation of the physics of flight for 20^th-century airplanes, and another that quoted Aristotle, Søren Kierkegaard and Cyndi Lauper. Like most of the students to whom these comments were given, I was perplexed by their meaning and relevance to the course, but unlike them, I quickly grew to cherish these wacky but somehow fruitful scribblings because they gave me new ideas to consider and different perspectives to explore. I began to write poems and stories based on Mr. Sharpe’s notes, and though I found it too difficult to emulate the style of his favourite poet, e. e. cummings (see “In Just” at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/176657), Mr. Sharpe and I enjoyed a correspondence throughout that year that has certainly formed the basis for everything from my preferred method of learning to my love of modern literature to my preference for wordy handouts.

Sometimes I wonder what Mr. Sharpe would make of the material covered in this course. I wonder if he would agree with Michael Tomasello’s final claim in The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition that “all human cultural institutions rest on the biologically inherited social-cognitive ability of all human individuals to create and use social conventions and symbols” (1999, p. 216), which I take to mean that our cultural achievements rest on the foundations of our ability to create and understand metaphor. I wonder if he would read Etienne Wenger’s Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity and interpret its fundamental educational paradox in similarly metaphorical terms:

if one needs an identity of participation in order to learn, yet needs to learn in order to acquire an identity of participation, then there seems to be no way to start. . . .In the life-giving power of mutuality lies the miracle of parenthood, the essence of apprenticeship, the secret to the generational encounter, the key to the creation of connections across boundaries of practice: a frail bridge across the abyss, a slight breach of the law, a small gift of undeserved trust – it is almost a theorem of love. (1998, p. 277)

And finally, I wonder if Mr. Sharpe would recognize his unpredictable yet stimulating foolscap notes in the last words of Mark Bracher’s Radical Pedagogy: Identity, Generativity, and Social Transformation: 

To the extent that we can formulate pedagogical practices that help our students develop more capacious and complex identity structures, integrate more of the rejected components of their selves, and experience their sense of self more through benign identity contents and less through malignant ones, we will contribute significantly not only to our students’ psychological development and educational achievement but also to social justice and the reduction of human misery in the world at large. (2006, p. 207)

This is not to say that I don’t see omissions in the writing we’ve read for this class: I think the biological determinist perspective of Tomasello is a little limiting for understanding the ways in which learning can potentially occur, though I don’t necessarily dispute Tomasello’s version of events. I believe that Wenger’s myriad functions of communities of practice and their tools are overly structural for the fluid nature of exposure, practice and mastery of knowledge, again that may or may not take place. Finally, although Bracher’s radical pedagogy of supporting multiple identities within learners satisfies my own fantasies, and I feel comfortable in his context of literary studies, I see major issues of disconnect if historical thought and canonical works are no longer taught to students.

But these considerations are ongoing; I am sure they will remain, or be resolved, or be replaced with new considerations as I continue in this program of study. I will continue to puzzle out those concepts I don’t understand, disagree with those ideas that I think disadvantage certain groups or learners, and, when all else fails, write myself a little note or doodle (thanks, Mr. Sharpe), say, perhaps, one that turns lifelong learning processes into the metaphor of a blog: you work hard, share it with the people you can, thank your lucky stars the Internet exists, and sign off as gracefully as possible. 

Best of luck to everyone,       

     

Stephanie

References:

cummings, e. e. [in just-]. Retrieved March 31, 2012, from http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/176657.

Bracher, M. (2006). Radical pedagogy: Identity, generativity, and social transformation. New York: Palgrave.

Tomasello, M. (1999). The cultural origins of human cognition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: learning, meaning and identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

P.S. As this is a blog about endings, I couldn’t really leave without a final comment on 

The Best Endings Ever

1.       Post-scripts.

2.       Elmer Fudd’s sign-off from Warner Brothers cartoons: “Th-th-th-th—that’s all, folks!”

3.       The final bite of your meal that has equal parts sauce and food.

4.       Consummation (relate it to what you will)

5.       …..