policeman pedagogy

Sunday morning, drunk guy is trying to parallel park in front of our house. He kills the engine and gets up on the curb several times. If he'd stop, get out and stagger away there'd be no story. Instead, he back and backs into and up onto another car in the street. And then he peels away. A 911 call. They catch him (almost up onto sidewalks along Main Street) on an otherwise peaceful Sunday morning. A cop comes buy to document the damage to the hit car. And since it's a nice day, he stays to chat.

First he wants to assure me that the guy is in custody and will go to jail. Then he says this beats his earliest DUI arrest by a half hour. And he shakes my hand to tell me I did a good thing. Otherwise, the driver might have killed somebody. None of this really matters … except that he took the time. On one level he was maybe just working me, trying to get me to be that citizen who is quick to call in when there's trouble. But then I realized maybe I was being schooled in a good way.

Part of what the policeman was doing was trying to build rapport and relationships with the community. I never much thought about that before and I never really understood why "beat cops" were such a nice part of cities. But when the shit comes down and the police must act, their efforts are probably successful to the degree they are assisted and supported by citizens. In the end, it really didn't matter that he was unable to offer an easy solution to my spouse's query about how to stop cars from honking instead of bothering to ring a doorbell. What did become apparent is that this policeman was teaching us how to help him do his job and make us happy citizens at the same time.

In another context, Zero was dismayed that he was being treated as an educational expert as if he knew the answers. I now wonder whether just taking the time to talk about the situation might not be good pedagogy. Having conversations, and dare I suggest this could be social capital investing, might just be a reasonable way to spread expertise and educate others.

the teaching life

Last fall I attended a short meeting in California in which a kit-based organization was exploring ways to bring their products into the realm of preservice teacher education. To introduce ourselves we were to share our relationship to the curriculum. I found myself listing all the units I'd used: Earth Materials (grade 3 in Cleveland), Fabric (kindergarten in Cleveland), Air & Weather (2nd grade in Salt Lake City). What struck me about this sharing was first that I had a considerable amount of experience (ALL joyous and enlightening) but also that I had not done this kind of stuff in my current location. So I wrote myself a note that reminds me I needed to return to this. This week, it happened and what a joy.

The reality is that the kit did not arrive so I had to borrow stuff from the physics department. They had only 9 bar magnets but a bunch of cheap little compasses. The morning of the lesson, I decided we'd start with the materials that were in the greatest abundance. All I asked the kids to do was to record observations of the "object" in their science notebooks. They didn't have to worry about using scientific vocabulary. And although they were supposed to feel excited and happy and so on, those did not qualify as "describing words" for their journal. Emotions were important and it was great to hear those being expressed. But not so they appeared in writing.

They witnessed some unexpected phenomena including that the objects felt cold, smelled like metal, and rolled really well. It was when each child received a second compass that things got interesting. My expectation was that they'd put compasses side-by-side and notice how the head of the arrow always pointed toward the tail of the next arrow. But most importantly was when they put one compass on top of the other: the two arrows always went different ways. So I told them about the phrase "opposites attract." And we met the objective for the day even though I was not certain what a reasonable goal was for this day.

The reader will have to trust my claim that the students were interested and engaged in the activity. And everybody wrote observations without too much pressure. When I asked what might be causing the arrows to move, some child ventured that it was a force -- apparently a topic the teacher had been covering. I then asked what kind of force: wind? (nope: they tested that by spontaneously blowing on the compass) light? (no again: shading the compasses didn't change anything). Two faint voices proposed magnetism. I responded by producing the bar magnets and we all delighted by the discovery that the red end stuck to the blue end, but not vice versa. That the bar magnets were too weak to obviously repel was just fine. And we were all delighted and amused that waving a bar magnet over a flotilla of compasses made the needles dance and spin. Not only have I been encouraged to return next Wednesday morning but two giant boxes of equipment were waiting for me on campus today. Quite a life to be having.