Tag Archives: Mike Saenz

Odysseyware Educator Impact Award Winner!

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Hooray for me! I’m one of six winners for the 2019 Odysseyware Educator Impact Award. The good folk at OW flew me out to Philadelphia for the award ceremony, which was very fun and fancy. My acceptance speech is below.

Thank you to the good people at OW for this honor and celebration. I’ve used OW for ten years now, and I’ve been a teacher for ten years now, so in my mind, the growth and improvements of OW are tightly woven with my own growth and improvements as a teacher, and a person. 

So, thanks for the award, but more importantly, thank you for being a true working partner. A partner that participates in discussions with me about the nature of education and learning; a partner that listens to and implements suggestions; and a partner that gives suggestions, in part by continually providing me new and better tools to achieve our common goal, helping individual students learn and flourish.

Now my award was given for the category of mastery learning. And as a literature teacher, it shouldn’t be surprising that my philosophy on learning is perhaps best described, in a poem.

To Look At Any Thing   John Moffitt

To look at any thing,

If you would know that thing,

You must look at it long:

To look at this green and say,

“I have seen spring in these

Woods,” will not do – you must

Be the thing you see:

You must be the dark snakes of

Stems and ferny plumes of leaves,

You must enter in

To the small silences between

The leaves,

You must take your time

And touch the very peace

They issue from.

Mr Moffitt is not talking about being able to recognize a term or concept well enough to pick it out from three or four answer choices, but to really know something. 

And to really know something entails slowing down and looking at it long. Asking, how does this relate to other knowledge in my head? How do I know this is true apart from the lesson telling me so? And most importantly, how does this knowledge help me? Why is it important?

As Mr. Moffitt’s points sunk in over the years, and as OW’s customization tools became increasingly sophisticated and easy to use, I realized the ball was in my court. I could now easily design lessons to encourage the student to slow down and look at things long, to take his time and touch the very peace the information issued from. I could add content to give him new insights into the purpose of the lessons, including how the knowledge and skills attained will improve his life. 

And, in closing, that’s a question worth answering here; how will education improve our student’s life? Well, on a fundamental level, he will understand nature; animate nature, biology; and inanimate nature, physics and chemistry. He will understand man, man as he was, history; as he organizes himself politically, government; and man as he could be or should be, literature. He will understand quantitative methods of measuring the world and predicting its actions, mathematics.

In short, our student, once educated, will understand the underlying principles of his entire world, so that he will be able to operate in the world successfully and comfortably, and manipulate the world to his needs and desires. Isn’t that worth mastering?

Vico helps “Develop the Intellect”

Image result for giambattista vico study methods

In my last blog post, I critiqued the fragmentation of knowledge in our schools and promised another post that would better answer what it means to “develop the intellect.” This is part one in my attempt to fulfill that promise.

In 1708, the humanist philosopher and rhetorician, Giambattista Vico, wrote the book, On the Study Methods of Our Time. I think if there should ever be such a thing as a teacher training course (and that’s a big “if”), this book should be required reading.  In the book, Vico says,

“…(the) capacity to perceive the analogies existing between matters lying far apart and, apparently, most dissimilar. It is this capacity which constitutes the source and principle of all ingenious, acute, and brilliant forms of expression.”

Connecting things “far apart and, apparently, most dissimilar.” Notice that Vico’s point is backed up by near universal teacher experience. When does the teacher get most excited? When a student finally gets the lesson? I don’t think so. I think it is when the student makes a connection from the lesson that the teacher never thought of; that’s when he really gets excited!

That teachers and Vico both get excited about these kinds of connections make sense. Surely “developing the intellect” does not just mean having a lot of knowledge, but rather being able to do something with that knowledge, namely, making a connection that adds to the previous knowledge held. Aristotle addresses this early on in his Topics.

“Now reasoning is an argument in which, certain things being laid down, something other than these necessarily comes about through them.”

So as a teacher, you teach the student A and B. Hopefully the student understands A and B, but more importantly, can the student come up with a C? That derivation of C is the challenge of the educator because that’s real reasoning by the student. That’s an intellect being trained. And if Vico is correct, (and I think he is) the farther away C is from A and B, the more impressive the accomplishment. (Sadly, this derivation of a far away C is rarely encouraged in our schools today.)

Why is this kind of thinking so important? Because the individual, in order to survive and flourish, must be a value creator. The individual must take what is given (and A and B), and create something better (a C). Then, he can enjoy the benefits of the better thing he produced, or he can trade it with others and enjoy the values that others have created. Developing the intellect to do this kind of thing is what I call, “getting ready for adult life.”

Notice, this success is not just on an individual level; it is the story of mankind’s success to date. Mankind was given raw nature: rocks of various kinds, trees, bushes, dirt, other animals, etc. From these materials, mankind has created things so “far apart and apparently most dissimilar” that most people in history would consider them magical — things like airplanes, laptops, air-conditioning, space ships, etc. These are the products of the value creator mentality.

So developing the intellect involves reasoning, getting a C from an A and a B; and it involves analogical thinking, “perceiving analogies existing between matters lying far apart and apparently most dissimilar.” That gives a rough idea of what a developed intellect is, but how does one promote such a thing in education? That is the subject of the next post.