Carol Hillman was a teacher for many years in Pennsylvania, and she ran a consulting service that encouraged rural youth to attend college. When she and her husband Arnold retired (he is also an educator), they moved to South Carolina. They must have expected to lead a quiet life, but they immediately became involved with rural high schools, where the students are Black and impoverished. They worked tirelessly to help students set their sights on going to college.
Carol wanted to share some of her life’s lessons with other teachers.
She wrote:
To teachers everywhere……..
Regardless of what subject we teach we share the responsibility to help our students prepare for their futures. Middle school students need to begin to think about, and high school students must further explore, the ways in which they shape their futures through their own actions.
Each of these prompts provide a topic you might invite your students to consider. Students will appreciate the opportunity to share their own opinions and need to learn to consider the opinions of their peers. In examining these ideas students will be using abstract thinking and higher orders of thinking.
You can limit discussion to a set day and/or time or invite students to address concepts in a journal you are willing to read.
If you have a school newspaper or yearbook you might include student comments on different topics.
Do they agree that a particular idea is valuable? If so, why or why not?
Class discussion will help students give examples of how the concepts apply to real life.
•Enjoy change because it’s the only thing we can predict.
•Have the courage to face new challenges.
•Accept that you can control your own behavior.
•Surround yourself with people who value you.
•Embrace diversity so you can enjoy other people, places and things.
•Understand that the world needs good followers and good leaders.
•Define and redefine your personal goals.
•Know when to accept help and when to say, “I can do this myself.”
•Show that you value others so you can keep old friends and make new ones.
•Know the joy of celebrating small accomplishments as they are the building blocks of a good life.
•Welcome new experiences to expand your knowledge and interests.
•Cooperate so you can become a constructive member of your community.
•Keep your promises so people can trust you.
•Understand that successful people know when to quit and move on.
•Take pride in your accomplishments.
•Accept that while you can’t always control what happens to you, you can control how you react to it.
•Understand that the best motivation comes from within.
•Recognize that you can make the world a better place.
If you have questions about these prompts and how to present them, feel to contact me at carol@scorsweb.org
Thank you,
Carol Hillman
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“•Understand that the world needs good followers and good leaders.”
I do not understand this suggestion, probably because I disagree with this whole “leaders-followers” model as something beneficial outside the military.
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Haaa!!! Well observed.
“I long for the administrator who will pound the table and say, ‘We need more disorganization around here.'”
–Poet and English professor Theodore Roethke
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I didn’t take this as a global stance but as a situational/task specific one. There are people who are far better equipped to lead many endeavors than I am, and there are tasks for which I can confidently take the lead.
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“Good followers and good leaders” should not be mutually exclusive traits, but combined in each of us and expressed depending on the situation(s). No doubt some people will always be followers, but that should be their choice, not a situation forced on them intentionally or by lack of opportunities.
As teachers we should seek examples of leading and following within the subjects we teach, especially as both are combined in one person. One of our goals should be to help develop this self awareness in students so they can contribute effectively as essential followers, AND be able to lead when THAT ls appropriate.
(Being exclusively a leader is NOT a worthy goal–just look at trump and musk (and SO many more) and all the problems they have caused for themselves and others, primarily because they cannot and will not delegate, nor follow anyone’s advice.)
In the military model, each leader of soldiers below him or her must also be a follower of the commander above, and this applies to topics in history like exploration, resistance, unionism, environmentalism, religion, medical research, invention and industry, etc.
Both traits are also essential in the trades, if one wants to advance. In building construction, there’s a lead plumber, but he or she follows the contractor’s schedule and plans, etc.
In my field, musicians are expected to be able to perform solo, in small groups, and in large groups. In elementary school music classes students learn to match pitch with their voices, keep time together, and follow the conductor. BUT, they also should–and can–learn to lead!
Every student can give the initial count of the beat, the final cut-off, or the starting pitch of a song. Every student can sing or play a solo, even if they have to start with only a couple of notes or words. In doing so, they begin to learn that they must be able to follow AND lead if the music is going to good.
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Interesting starting points for Socratic discussion. However, one should avoid leading and present these as debatable. AND one should teach more advanced students to question the framing of the statements. See the excellent example provided by Máté Wierdl, above.
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So, modeling out to challenge the statements is a great idea, if students do not generate challenges on their own.
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cx: modeling HOW to challenge
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It would be great to make something like this exercise an occasional feature of a high-school class. OK, class, today we are going to have one of our “Life, the Universe, and Everything Discussion Sections.” The value of the discussion would depend enormously upon the skill of the teacher at leading discussion Socratically. This could be quite useful because high-school kids LOVE having a chance to express their opinions about BIG QUESTIONS, and if the teacher truly conveys interest in hearing what they have to say, this kind of activity could go a long way toward creating a learning community. However, and this is a big however, it’s really important that the BULK of instruction be about imparting to students NEW DISCOURSIVE AND PROCDURAL KNOWLEDGE that they did not have before.
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So, this kind of thing should be an occasional activity at best.
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I do not understand your reasoning, Bob. You don’t like lots of discussions in class?
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I LOVE lots of discussions in class. But we have a huge issue in the US that we have moved so far away from knowledge-based instruction that kids spend enormous amounts of time in class just bs-ing with one another and do not walk away from a class session with knowledge that they did not have when they entered the classroom.
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Discussion and even respectful disagreement are fine in a class. Students can learn from one another, and it’s called the peer effect. Cyber instruction cannot duplicate it because it often leads to divergent and critical thinking beyond the scope of the programming.
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“Accept that while you can’t always control what happens to you, you can control how you react to it.”
The ability to control one’s own emotional state, and the degree to which one is free to do so WHATEVER IS GOING ON outside oneself, is one of the two or three most important things that anyone can learn. It’s incredibly empowering.
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BTW, I do not see any of these topics being related to stuff we’d discuss in a math class.
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One of the saws that went around the Education Department when I was in college was, “I teach students, not subjects.” Well, I hope that people try to teach both.
Despite their protestations (and sometimes, appearance) to the contrary, high-school kids are, emotionally, still not much beyond toddlers. It’s important to win them over, and coaxing them out of their knee-jerk defensiveness and into free discussion is a powerful means for doing that, which in turn motivates them to learn. So, I allowed some free-flowing discussion in my classes, to that end. But I also knew how to rein it in. My students walking away with a lot of knowledge of English or Rhetoric or Film or Theatre (I taught all these) that they didn’t have before they came into my class was paramount among my objectives.
I have observed a lot of so-called English classes in which the students and teacher spent the entire period in bs sessions. The college student daughter of a friend of mine put it this way: “College is such a relief. We go into classes and are taught things we didn’t know by people who know what we don’t. In high-school, all we did was sit around in circles and bs to one another.”
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“I teach students, not subjects.”
This denigration of
a) actually knowing a subject and
b) actually teaching it
by K-12 teachers might go a long way toward explaining why 40 percent of American adults–almost all graduates of our K-12 system–are SO IGNORANT that they think that Donald Trump is knowledgeable and smart. They attended a lot of K-12 classes in which they literally learned nothing that they didn’t know going in. “OK, class. Let’s all get in a class and discuss how we feel about nature and how that relates to how Robert Frost feels.”
I’ve seen this kind of utter idiocy far too much.
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cx: Let’s all get in our circles and discuss how we feel
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Spot on!
The disparagement of content and procedural knowledge (and related vocabulary) by many so-called educators should be an embarrassment to us all. If you are a teacher who has been brainwashed into believing that soft, critical thinking and problem solving skills are teachable in an intellectual vacuum, I’d suggest seeking therapy that will allow you to reject this bogus idea. Please stop using failed, debunked, and disliked methodologies such as discovery (inquiry-based) learning and project-based investigations – your top end students will be forever grateful and infinitely better prepared for their futures.
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I have long thought that educators should establish a moratorium on the use of the term “skills” and use “procedural knowledge” instead because this would force them to think concretely about what they were arming their students with–what concrete steps the student would learn and be able to carry out to accomplish concrete tasks (like putting together a Works Cited page or creating a character analysis for a planned short story).
As far as discovery learning and projects go, these should be OCCASIONAL items in the toolkit. In my last high-school, teachers were required to assign so many projects per 9-week period. THESE WERE ALMOST UNIVERSALLY CONSIDERED BY THE STUDENTS AN UTTER JOKE. They would wait until the night before and throw together a poster and call it a project and get an A++ on it. ROFL. Idiotic. Years ago, I was living in Beverly, Massachusetts, and the district spent tens of thousands of dollars on a new discovery math program. A few months in, my daughter explained it to me in this way: The teacher assigns us a problem. We all go home and try to work it. Then we go in, and she reads to us out of her teacher’s guide how we could have solved the problem. After two years of this program, the district’s math scores dropped PRECIPITOUSLY, and the district threw the books out. OK, sure. Go ahead. Give the kids a bunch of triangles and have them measure the three angles in each and add them up and discover that these all add up to 180 degrees. Take a couple days doing that. But don’t expect kids to “discover” the whole of elementary mathematics on their own. That’s just freaking stupid.
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Bob FYI, a copywriter’s editorial aside for paragraph distinctions: I have found that, in this program, I have to add an extra space between paragraphs for the program NOT to run all content together with no paragraph breaks. CBK
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Thanks, CBK. I knew this already, though.
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Bob Well, your long text showed up on my end with no paragraph breaks . . . just saying . . . but maybe it’s my computer and it doesn’t do that for everyone.
This proves, by the way, that the world is really a glitch factory, and you cannot tell me any different. CBK
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This same (disastrous) approach is being pushed by states that adopted the K to 12 Next Generation Science Standards. This is on top of the foolish belief that students will benefit from a random and scattershot mix of topics, instead of presenting each of the key topics within any one branch of science. It is slow, ineffective, inefficient, and often leads to misunderstanding. If you are a science teacher reading this, the concepts, principles, laws, theories, and facts of each subject/topic are new and inherently interesting to novice learners (all students at all grades). They will much prefer to learn via engaging direct instruction and a healthy dose of Socratic method. Hands-on lab work and dramatic teacher demonstrations both require an extraordinary skill set and years of experience to ensure students do not lose sight of the content knowledge that is intended to be learned. The authors of the NGSS have conflated the ways that highly trained professional scientists make new discoveries with the ways that young science students best learn the fundamentals of biology, chemistry, physics, geology, meteorology, astronomy, etc. Don’t be hoodwinked by their ignorance or willful misdirection.
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a random and scattershot mix of topics, instead of presenting each of the key topics within any one branch of science.
The same thing has happened in ELA due to Common [sic] Core [sic]-based curricula. All coherence and sane sequencing of the curriculum, gone.
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I call this the “Monty Python and Now for Something Completely Different” approach to education. Or whatever the opposite of education is.
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And we’ve gone so far down these roads that most young teachers think that this insanity is normal.
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Don’t be hoodwinked by their ignorance or willful misdirection.
Preach it, Rage! I will happily rage alongside you on this one. We have created recipes for generating a nation of ignorant fools.
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Good advice for those of us in our ’80’s also
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This should be shared with all teachers and with all those who are in charge of setting “educational standards” and creating “assessments.” This is how teachers can help students grow; this is applied problem solving in a way that is meaningful and promotes both individual and societal growth!!
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