from Terry Haik
In his essay Two mindsWendell Berry, surprising enough, offers two tonnes of thoughts produced by two types of “mind” – rational and cute.
One is guided by logic, deduction, data and measurement, the other by attachment and other extravagant abstractions – intense, reverence, joy and faith. These minds are struggling to manifest themselves in our collective behavior. That is, they both strive to control our actions – what we say and do.
Berry explains their honors:
“The rational mind is motivated by fear not to be misled, to be wrong. Its purpose is to exclude anything that cannot be empirically or experimentally proven by fact.
The cute mind is motivated by fear of a mistake of a completely different kind: the mistake of negligence, the unloved. Its purpose is to be careful about everything that is present, not to leave anything out. “
It is no surprise that these two minds also exist in education. These are instincts you may have had as a teacher – teacher, administrator, developer or designer. Probably as a parent, too, if you have children. The need to be rational and deductive and strategic clash with the enormous complexity and scale of the circumstances you face.
You are told that you are based on data-that is, to design experience in training with “strategies” that come from some measurement you have done.
You can plan lessons and units by asking yourself why this instruction strategy? Why this evaluation form? Why group at this moment of the lesson, not at that moment? Why this standard with this novel?
This is your rational mind.
But your rational mind is an employee of another kind of thinking – he is actually awakened and encouraged by one kind of uncertainty that realizes that the infallible meaning and the coincidence of the inability of what you have done to end your life: learn dozens and dozens of other human beings what they need to know (insert your content here).
The rational mind (the same mind that manages policies and standards) wants to analyze this task – to answer with logic. Prevention, strategic and analytically.
So, not Worry that this student I can’t read And this student is a brilliant artist ready for a professional mentor to encourage his gift and this student needs both a hug and self -knowledge more than the content knowledge, you respond analytically. Your rational mind takes over.
You are staring at standards and bar graphics and skimmed books by Marzano and Hattie, which list teaching strategies that say their rational minds say they will work. You listen to your colleagues, your instructive trainer and anyone else who wants to offer tips. Then you teach, evaluate, redirect, re -evaluate, remove, extend and move on.
However, you are aware of the tearing that has happened, acting with logic. You have separated a student from their very human circumstances – their interests, previous experience, insecurity and attachments.
Academic content from their native scheme.
Mastery of curiosity.
Scientific concepts of the application of science.
Level of reading from the love of reading.
The rational mind necessarily excludes curiosity, love, love and joy, because they are inherently irrational. We live in an era of information, which in itself takes the era of enlightenment. By design, data and rationality, they cannot tolerate abstraction and humanity or would be shaken into confusion.
But this requires a correction on our part. We need to stop being stubborn by what we are increasingly seeing in our students. Apathy. Distraction. Superficiality.
As an industry, we are not only driven at the moment, but they are dangerously engaged in research and science and what is measurable and observed by driving to our profession of superstitions such as “patience”, “self -discovery” and “community”.
We leave it to teachers to buffer the clash between students from policies or sterile academic standards with communities who need more than students’ skills. But if we are “attentive to everything that is present” and want to “leave nothing out”, we can now see that pure rationality is not a completely “mind” but an instinctive reaction to the scale of our task.
The challenge for you and I may be to raise teaching beyond the peculiarities through a kind of marriage – to join our rational and sympathetic mind in something inclusive and awake and whole.
Always insist on, no matter what we resort to rationality or even sympathy, but more recently acting as “whole teachers” in each of our interactions and analyzes of students and thus to model for the significant practice for them to be human.
Image Attribution Flickr user NASA Goddard Space Flight Center; Becoming a “whole teacher”
