An Educational Contrarian

(This was adapted from the most read post from another blog I wrote that seems to fit with the theme of Ed Contrarian) The educational environment suffers from imprecise language about the most important elements of our activity and the lack of clarity harms us in subtle but significant ways. The word “rigor” refers to the quality of being thorough, exhaustive, or precise. Its secondary meaning is severity or strictness. Only in its noun form (rigors) does it take on the idea of being demanding, but this refers to things like “the rigors of the harsh winter.” The etymology of the word comes from Latin and literally means “stiffness”: think rigor mortis . Nowhere in the history of the word has it meant what we seem to think it means when used today in education. Strange that in education today we hear a great deal about the need for rigorous standards, rigorous tests, rigorous passing scores on those tests, and rigorous accountability standards. Google "rigor" an...

One way to create real understanding of something is to shine a new light on it in the hope that something new will be revealed. Due to the way the human brain works this is actually harder to do than it sounds. Our brains seem wired to pay attention to smallest amount of material possible in the construction of meaning. It isn’t that they are lazy, but rather, we seem to have limited amounts of memory and processing power and natural selection seems to have made us very efficient in this regard. We take what we need to generate meaning and then we’re on to the next thing. That’s why metaphor works. I can read “my love is like a red, red rose” and imagine the vibrant color and the rich fragrance and my associations are positive, and yet that ignores the fact that roses have thorns such that gloves have to be worn when you pick them. Or in the case of the Christian image that Jesus’ followers are like sheep, our brains go to the caring part of the image in which the shepherd will spe...