the conduit

LL: I appreciate your name choice but disagree with your lumping of inducing and seducing into the “less benign forms of leading.”
Now for the young children who are naturally excited about learning or the older young adults who have found their internal motivation and developed interests, a teacher does not necessarily have to induce or seduce.  I would argue that the teacher of the middle school child – particularly in the case of math teachers – needs to do a little harmless seducing to grab the child’s interest and motivate where motivation is not found in order to get to a place where we can get to your “benign” forms of leading.

RL:  I appreciate your reply but I am interested by the fact that after you disagreed with me you felt the need to qualify “seducing” with “a little harmless”–I think that proves my point about the connotation of the word.
What I really want to get into with anyone who “e-ducates” is the idea that in leading, we are expressing a certainty about knowing “the way”. This goes for the educational policy wonk in a government office, the teacher who corrects or the parent who complains. I think that in order to really foster democracy in education, we need to address this, discuss it, play around with it and make it a problem for ourselves. I think future democratic citizens will be best served if working out “the way” is something we do openly, consciously, inclusively and humbly and that they get exposed (and hopefully engaged) in the process.  Some days I’m going to be the expert but other days that might fall to someone else in the room. I hope as an educator to become the keeper of the values that allow that process to work itself out. I guess that means I’m still in charge, but in such a scenario I am in charge of the process not the outcome.  For this reason conducting has the nicest resonance for me–leading with.

LL: I certainly don’t want to Mary-Kay-Letourneau myself and publicly be known as the middle school teacher who encourages and insists on seducing her students BUT seduction has its uses.  Other than that, I can’t say I really disagree with you.  As a matter of fact I completely agree with you.

I think the question to how to make your ideas a reality is how do deal with a teacher’s ego.  Now I’m a humble sort and like to think that I can share the expert-in-the-room title with others.  I certainly have my own control issues but as a weekend spent with my sister shows they aren’t as severe as other’s.  But with educators we can be dealing with some pretty big egos and fairly intense control issues.  I think the key could be therapy.  I mean this in all seriousness.  We would all probably be better off if we were required to have regular therapy sessions about why we run the classroom we run.  Perhaps that is your job as coach.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 2nd, 2009 at 10:26 am and is filed under Philosophy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.