The Classroom

Encounter and Engagement

A. Block

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137449238
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Early Childhood Education

What goes on in a classroom? can mean "Are teachers imparting knowledge that will raise test scores?" or it can mean much more. In this series of essays, Block addresses the nature of the classroom as a place for encounter and engagements: with curriculum materials and books, between teachers and students, and with the self.

CHAPTER 1

ON THE BEGINNINGS OF ENDS AND THE ENDS OF BEGINNINGS

A FIRST STEP: (ON THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF THIS PREFACE TO A SERIES OF PREFACES)

I HAD SET AS MY SABBATICAL PROJECT TO WRITE A SERIES OF PREFACES. I had originally planned to write prefaces for books I would never have the opportunity or the time to write. In this endeavor, I thought, I might design where I was going and see, perhaps, where I had been. These planned and forever-to-be-unwritten books represented life-long concerns that had been left behind on the road to somewhere else. Nevertheless, I believed that these prefaces would serve as appropriate markers where once I had considered pausing before traveling on to seek the Wizard in the Emerald City. After all, I considered, what else were prefaces but summaries of anticipated adventures? What else would a preface be but a road map for an anticipated undertaking?

But from the outset I was beset by problems and contradictions. I understood that I was attempting to introduce where I was going as if I had been already there; I realized that my task compelled me to describe the path on which I would venture before I had taken more than a single step. I was going to construct a preface for material I had not yet learned. My prefaces were travel plans without the anticipation of travel; I was arranging lists no bucket would ever hold. I felt confounded by the contradictions.

Fortunately, I had learned in my previous studies that I was not obligated to solve these contradictions so much as to continue to struggle with them; I need not resolve the contradictions so much as explain why these seeming contradictions were not illogicalities at all! I was learning that I couldn’t write a preface for a book I had not written because, as I attempted to do so, I came to understand that the function of the preface was to describe not where I was going but, rather, where I had been. What I had originally thought of as a preface turned out to be, in fact, more like an afterword. But I hadn’t yet been anywhere! Even this preface to a series of prefaces might be considered a starting point, but where it might lead remained unknown. And I understood that it was this uncertainty that provided all the excitement of the journey. I shouldn’t know exactly where I was going if I was going to learn anything along the way: I couldn’t write a preface until the end of the journey. But I had taken no journey; I couldn’t write a preface.

In education it is taught that the statement of aim—the stated objective—is essential to the classroom; without this aim the classroom is deemed without direction, rudderless, without purpose. The objective—a preface in a classroom setting?—is a statement written by the teacher (or a textbook author) defining exactly what the student will learn during this particular class period, even as I considered a preface to be the destination toward which a reader might be directed. During the twentieth and twenty-first centuries these educational objectives have taken on an importance of biblical dimensions: without them, it is claimed, there is no lesson and can be no learning. But like my prefaces, these objectives for the student were accounts not of the journey but of the destination, and the existence of such objectives precluded adventure and learning. John Dewey (1910/1991, 208) remarks, “If the statement of the aim is taken too seriously by the instructor, as meaning more than a signal to attention, its probable result is forestalling the pupil’s own reaction, relieving him of the responsibility of developing a problem and thus arresting his mental initiative.” An objective defines what is to be learned, and all of the remainder of activity and learning is irrelevant. The presence of objectives suggests that there should be no adventure in education. In fact, I thought, objectives obstruct the educational journey rather than facilitate it: they keep asleep the curiosity so essential to learning. No wonder students suffer such boredom in the classroom!

My anticipated prefaces would be like those objectives: they would define the ending without having to engage in any beginning. My prefaces would make any journey irrelevant because the destination was already present at the outset: in these prefaces my gaze would be fixed on some end without any thought of means. And I came to understand that it wasn’t prefaces I could write because, really, I didn’t know where I was going. Nor was it objectives I wanted to construct. Rather, it was in huckleberrying I wished to engage with the classroom—in which I have spent most of my life—as my beginning, my means, and my destination. My anticipated prefaces became transformed into pedago­gical journeys in the classroom where existed my uncertain past, my pleasantly confused present, and the voyages I would now undertake. What I would know at the end was in the present unknown to me. Who I would be at the end was not who was now writing. I had some starting points but I did not know where they might lead. I considered this lack of objective the interesting point. How could I have ever thought of writing a preface for what I had not yet written?

But I did want to consider some things in which I had taken some interest during my life in the light of my present life both in and out of the classroom. Bob Dylan says in “Mississippi,” “You can always come back, but you can’t come back all the way.” Well, if you can’t come back all the way, then you can’t really come back at all. These prefaces I couldn’t write had to be conceptualized as something else. I considered: if I had continued to write about the topic I had earlier passed by, then when I was all finished I might have created for this teacher a self-portrait in mosaic, a memoir in the form perhaps of graffiti, a travel book that recounted some of my journeying. And perhaps for that project I could use a preface. Thus, I offer here a rationalization for the appearance of this preface that is not exactly a preface: rather, it is a rationale that attempts to explain where in my failure I found success.

A SECOND STEP: ON AN END TO BEGINNINGS AND ENDINGS

Of its origins as a word—and therefore a concept—I looked into my trusty Oxford English Dictionary (OED) and read that ­preface was a noun (a preface, late fourteenth century) before it became a verb (to preface, late seventeenth century), and originally the word had both a liturgical and secular meaning. In 1387, a preface referred to the introduction or prelude to the central part of the Eucharistic service and was comprised of an exhortation to thanksgiving and an offering of praise and glory to God; the preface concluded with the sanctus. A preface prepared the celebrant—made her spiritually ready—to partake in the sacred rite of the last supper that Jesus allowed would substitute for himself: “Here, this is my blood. Here this is my body.” The ­preface prepared one to receive divinity. Now, I certainly respect my writing, but I never imagined it would lead anyone to any form of holiness.

For Jews, liturgically the P’sukei d’zimrah serves as a preface, though this service is not named so, as it is by Catholics. P’sukei d’zimrah are prayers of praise that precede the formal service; this particular preface ends with a formal call to communal prayer. For Jews, this preface represents an engagement in prayer to make prayer possible. In both Christian and Jewish senses, a preface serves as preparation for the main event. My preface to a series of prefaces would not introduce the book but would make the book—the sacred act—possible. It is always best to start at the beginning. I wrote, “I had set as my sabbatical project to write a series of prefaces.” But now I was stuck. I had in mind only prefaces and no book. My preface prefaced nothing because I intended my prefaces as the main event! I continued to read in the OED.

In the previous year (1386), the word preface was attributed to Geoffrey Chaucer and referred to an introduction to a literary work; the preface usually contained some explanation of the work’s subject, purpose, and scope, and provided some explanation of the method of treatment. It would seem that at one time the preface served the function of what today we might refer to as an introduction. However, today books sometimes contain both prefaces and introductions, and so I wondered about the actual nature of the prefaces that I had intended to write. My well-worn Thrall and Hibbard (thank you, Dr. Wise!) adds that a preface often “points out difficulties and uncertainties in connection with the writing of the book, and in general, informs the reader of such facts as [the author] thinks pertinent to a reading of the text” (1960, 374). Here the preface addresses the intent of the author more that it does the content of the book. The preface presents not the substance of the book but offers the reader insight into the process of its creation. Hence, the first words of the preface may note its beginning, but in fact the preface truly begins after the book ends. If the preface elaborates on the process undertaken in order to write the book, then the preface must be written last, after the book is finished.

But in the work that I had intended this to be, there was to be no book for which the preface would serve as preface, and hence, I could not say that this preface—that was originally meant to be a preface to a series of prefaces—begins or ends anything, except perhaps itself. And the failure of this preface suggested the necessary failure of the prefaces with which I intended to follow this preface: it and they would exist sans book. And so I considered: if I had no book for which this preface would serve as preface, then either I had no book at all or the book of a series of prefaces did not have to have either a beginning or an ending. This preface to what once was to have been a series of prefaces came into existence in medias res: it entered in the midst of my life that is thankfully not over; and the prefaces, now no longer prefaces because there was no book that would follow them, had become a series of not necessarily connected but certainly related explorations along some meandering brook that might at some point offer someone (even myself) opportunities for further exploration into education and the classroom (which are not necessarily identical) for as long as we breathe and think; and that what would connect these divergent and even disparate pieces would derive from the very life in the classroom that they revealed. The chapters that follow, then, represent some of the markers at which I have paused for various amounts of reason and time throughout my life, but from which, for any number of reasons and time, I have also moved. The book that follows this introductory piece represents a series of beginnings, but, unlike a preface, the book exists neither as nor at an end. The chapters will speak for themselves as beginnings, but since they are only beginnings with no book to follow, then they are also ends. This book is constituted as beginnings without ends and as endings without beginnings. This book, like me, enters in media res. I did not enter at the beginning but I was a beginning. Perhaps this book I write now begins as a book concerning ­endings and beginnings. It is a book about education! This preface is a beginning but it cannot tell you what it begins. Hence this preface is also an end because what follows doesn’t belong to it. Let’s say it’s just part of the conversation.

The Good Witch Glinda has said that it is always best to start at the beginning, but the beginnings of any book are problematic. The idea of prefaces led me to consider the artificiality and arbitrariness of endings and beginnings: they do not, in fact, exist but are expediently created. The narrator in Anthony Trollope’s novel Barchester Towers (1857, 2005) concludes his already lengthy story with the following extended apology:

These leave takings in novels are as disagreeable as they are in real life; not so sad, indeed, for they want the reality of sadness, but quite as perplexing, and generally less satisfactory. What novelist . . . can impart an interest to the last chapter of his fictitious history? Promises of two children and superhuman happiness are of no avail nor assurance of extreme respectability carried to an age far exceeding that usually allotted to mortals. The sorrow of our heroes and heroines, they are your delight, oh public! Their sorrows, or their sins, or their absurdities; not their virtues, good sense, and consequent rewards. When we begin to tint our final pages with couleur de rose, as in accordance with fixed rule we must do, we altogether extinguish our own powers of pleasing. When we become dull we offend our intellect; and we must become dull or we should offend your taste . . . And who can apportion out and dovetail his incidents, dialogues, characters, and descriptive morsels, so as to fit them all exactly into 567 pages, without either compressing them unnaturally, or extending them artificially at the end of his labour? Do I not myself know that I am at this moment in want of a dozen pages, and that I am sick with cudgeling my brains to find them. And then when everything is done, the kindest-hearted critic of them all invariably twits us with the incompetency and lameness of our conclusion (p. 493).

Endings are impossible, Trollope says, because they put the quietus to events that really do not end: our lives may end, indeed, but not the events we have begun in our lives. Though death ends a life, it does not end Life; for the most part, we keep on keeping on. Thus, endings in novels are all artifice: we read to the end to learn how things turn out, but on the day following the novel’s end everything might be changed. Indeed, it is often the reader’s hope that they will have done so, and it is also true that this wished-for change may not necessarily be for the better. Often, Trollope says, we are dissatisfied with happy endings; readers ­prefer to read about sorrow and unhappiness because they make us feel better about our own lives. We prefer in our reading to keep company with those whose misery gives us comfort, and not with those whose good fortunes reveal us as the inadequate, unfortunate creatures we truly are. Writers write endings that satisfy our biddings. Endings that promise future delight remain unsatisfactory and inconclusive: we know from our pasts that things rarely, if ever, turn out the way we had planned. And when the novelist imposes the rose-colored filter over his narrative, the story pales.

In fact, endings are impossible and certainly unsatisfactory. For example, the last day of classes always makes me uncomfortable as I contemplate all that has not been finished; I am often troubled by how ineff...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• HALF TITLE PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT
• DEDICATION
• CONTENTS
• CHAPTER 1 ON THE BEGINNINGS OF ENDS AND THE ENDS OF BEGINNINGS
• CHAPTER 2 WHY READ THE BOOK?
• CHAPTER 3 ON THE ASKING OF QUESTIONS
• CHAPTER 4 SAINT JOAN IN THE CLASSROOM
• CHAPTER 5 THE LAST LESSON
• CHAPTER 6 CABINS, PEQUODS, AND CLASSROOMS
• AFTERWORD(S)?
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX