The Flaky Flowerchild and the Curmudgeonly Coach - Part 2

Usually in a call for reform, the innovator has little concern for individuals. And were it not for today's heavily unionized teaching profession, the innovator would throw certain individuals off the bus--those individuals ill-suited to the desired change. To the extent that it's possible, this approach has ethical merit, especially in cases of extreme teacher incompetency or malpractice.

Our Flaky Flowerchild and Curmudgeonly Coach are no strangers to the chopping block, as are all who reside at the fringes of any spectrum of ideas. And, as I said in my previous post, they are two major foes of mastery teaching and learning, so why not just send 'em packing?

Why not? Because each of them contains a seed of what mastery teaching and learning is all about. Both of them have one part of the truth and, as we saw in my first post, justice is defined as "conformity to truth."

What we have in the Flaky Flowerchild and Curmudgeonly Coach is the thesis and antithesis of pedagogical styles. Rather than eliminating one or both of these extremes, we might instead seek a synthesis, one that involves all that is best from both ends of the spectrum. According to Hegel, this dialectical process results in a higher level of truth.

One virtue these two opposites have in common is zeal. The opposite vice of zeal is lukewarmness, which is even worse than the considerable conflict that zeal from opposite ends of a continuum can cause. In the case of the Flaky Flowerchild it's a zeal for compassion. In the case of the Curmudgeonly Coach it's a zeal for rigor. Mastery learning requires both, and to a greater degree than is expressed in either teacher's style.

The Flaky Flowerchild and The Curmudgeonly Coach - Part 1

In this post, I introduce two foes of mastery learning: The Flaky Flowerchild and The Curmudgeonly Coach.

The Flaky Flowerchild is the ostensibly compassionate teacher who creates "loopholes" for kids, who tries "humanize" the rigid strictures of the institution, in part, through her grading. If pressed to create learning objectives for her classes, a lot of them would begin "The student will develop an appreciation for..." or "The student will think deeply about..." In other words, her entire curriculum is utterly unmeasurable, and, when it comes time to measure (i.e. the end of the term), she is usually willing to "have an open mind" about what a student has or has not accomplished in the class. The problem with the Flaky Flowerchild is that we have no idea what goes on in the bright, peace-loving confines of her classroom. Countless students emerge from her courses vaguely affirmed in their personhood but woefully unprepared in the subject areas she teaches. Her "compassion" is actually a form of injustice.

The Curmudgeonly Coach, on the other hand, doesn't budge for anyone. Come grades time, you'll hear him saying things like "A 59.4% is a 'E' and that's what he's gonna get!" and "For some of these kids, failure's the best thing that'll ever happen to 'em." He holds the line with an almost Kantian sense of rigor, as if the future of civilization depended on his unrelenting dedication to principle. The problem with the Curmudgeonly Coach, however, is that he is unrelentingly dedicated to the wrong things. His relentless dedication does not concern mastery, but rather the "hoops" of school--character, employability skills, attendance, and fastidiously filling out the little squares in his gradebook. He is also devoted to the blind "justice" of the 100-point scale and the mean (see a later post dealing with this topic). Alternative assessments are not even on this guy's radar. Students incapable of jumping through his hoops, eventually burn out or drop out. Good riddance. Unlike the Flaky Flowerchild, we have some idea what his "good" students can do, but we know little about the students he failed.