Monthly Archives: January 2022

Subversive Teaching Suggestions

These suggestions on subversive teaching techniques are from the 1969 book Teaching as a Subversive Activity by Postman & Weingartner:

  • Declare a five-year moratorium on the use of all textbooks
  • Have “English” teachers “teach” Math, Math teachers English, Social Studies teachers Science, Science teachers Art, and so on.
  • Transfer all of the elementary-school teachers to high school and vice versa.
  • Require every teacher who thinks he knows his “subject” well to write a book on it
  • Dissolve all “subjects,” “courses,” and especially “course requirements.”
  • Limit each teacher to three declarative sentences per class, and 15 interrogatives.
  • Prohibit teachers from asking any questions they already know the answers to
  • Declare a moratorium on all tests and grades
  • Require all teachers to undergo some form of psycho-therapy as part of their in-service training
  • Classify teachers according to their ability and make the lists public (LA School District has recently made a lame attempt at something like this)
  • Require all teachers to take a test prepared by students on what the students know.
  • Make every class an elective and withhold a teacher’s monthly check if his students do not show any interest in going to next month’s classes. (this would sort the wheat from the chaff in a hurry, wouldn’t it? Everyone would be forced to step up their game, or go hungry!)
  • Require every teacher to take a one-year leave of absence every fourth year to work in some “field” other than education (my biggest gripe about education is that educators often have little connection with the world outside of education. It’s why I do faculty internships and help with my wife’s home-based business to help me remain connected.)
  • Require each teacher to provide some sort of evidence that he or she has had a loving relationship with at least one other human being. (what a fascinating job requirement!)
  • Require that all the graffiti accumulated in the school toilets be reproduced on large paper and be hung in the school halls.
  • There should be a general prohibition against the use of the following words and phrases: teach, syllabus, covering ground, I.Q., makeup, test, disadvantaged, gifted, accelerated, enhancement, course, grade, score, human nature, dumb, college material, and administrative necessity.

Don’t Let Powerpoint Take Over Your Screen

When you are making a Powerpoint presentation over a Zoom session, you are working with two applications that think they are the center of your computing universe. That makes it very difficult to know what is going on in your Zoom room if you are showing a Powerpoint that has taken over your screen.

Don’t do that! You don’t have to operate Powerpoint in “Full Screen” mode, make it into a window so you can see other things too!

To display PowerPoint presentations in a window and not full screen just do the following:

  • Select “Set up Slide Show” on the “Slide Show” tab
  • Select the radio button for “Browsed by an individual (window)”
  • Start your PowerPoint show

That’s it! Now you can see what’s going on in Zoom while you are presenting a PowerPoint.

How Pope JPII ended communism in Poland

It was going on while I was in high school and after that, I was in the Navy. After a crackdown by the communist regime in Poland, the people had had enough. At the time, I wasn’t paying too much attention to world events. Sure, I had a good social studies teacher     who taught a required course called International Relations, but our main emphasis was on Russia and China. We learned enough in that class to know that people behind the iron curtain were not doing well. And that America was something to be proud of.

I had heard about the Solidarity movement in Poland some on the news, but I did not realize the significance of Pope John Paul in helping with toppling communism in Poland and setting in motion world events that ultimately would see the end of the Soviet Union.

Here is a really interesting read about it: https://reason.com/2021/11/20/the-pope-who-helped-bring-down-communism/

Humility – A Hidden Source of Strength

Humility is the virtue which is perhaps more easily misunderstood and underappreciated than any other. Our culture values personal confidence, self-belief and resolution, and rightly so. And we are acutely aware of the psychological dangers of low-self-esteem, with which so many people struggle today, especially the young. Yet true humility is not in opposition to a positive attitude and healthy self-confidence. For Christian humility consists of nothing other than honest self-knowledge, a recognition of who and what one is in relation to God, to the world, and to one’s fellow human beings.

Read more…