about teaching and learning

I was doing two courses concurrently with my Masters. One is this Transforming Education, the other on conducting research. Given that I am only doing Masters to do some necessary research, I have to do the research paper. I have found it necessary to withdraw from the research paper this semester as the cognative dissonance was just too much.

On one side, I am being challenged to think about my own education and how the education system is rigged with its narrow definition of success that only suits the dominant naratives. I agree. I navigated that system effectively. Our assessment for this course was one that actually made me question what I think and want on deep level… How do you prove that? Assessment full stop. I rejoiced at the possibilities in the breadth of possible responces, so thought-provoking, so anti dominant paradigm! (I can hear David Seymour calling it woke in my head) I was happy with the lack of detail in the assessment. Of course, then I was at sea, as as a ‘good’ student I am used to answering to the rubric – a skill I learned to achive within the system, I would count the points made. Mostly, what I got from teachers college was follow the rubric – all my arguing in class was not seen as reflective unless I wrote the words down. This course is making me think about my assessment of myself, and my ideas. I am used to keeping my ideas to myself as I do not live within the dominant paradigm. I was brought up within a specific community that most people do not like…

Then I’d go over to my other course, which is so totally clear cut with the worlds tightest rubric and a specific language/code of its own. I could feel myself wanting to kick at the restrictive walls. I could feel myself loosing the will to participate, I could feel myself going down the slope of feeling lost and totally thick, that everyone else gets it, why don’t I?? To do that course will require me to learn a different language first to derive any meaning. So hard. It reminds me of a story a friend was recounting of a talk she went to at a teaching maths conference, where the woman talked to them about dimensional shapes. She got them to draw a one dimensional circle, a dot, and write how they felt about their understanding, then two dimensional, all the way up to ten dimensional shape. Of course, the audience drifted off as she got to the limit of their possible understanding and lots didn’t come back when she came all the way back to one dimension. This woman was the child of druggies and had not attended school until 18ish.