Kevin Hall

Mainly trying to get good teaching ideas. Especially Algebra 1. Personal account (views are my own). #MTBoS

[Kevin Hall @ijkijKevin]

I'm over at Bluesky now.

[Kevin Hall @ijkijKevin]

@MatRyanELATeach @Ed_Realist @TheLizMac Your insistence that what works for you would work for public school teachers probably comes across as smug to most public school teachers. Like, "make them read" and "just give reading quizzes." It's like a doctor who says, "I'd just tell my patients not to be overweight."

[Kevin Hall @ijkijKevin]

@MatRyanELATeach Some folks prefer to go with this attitude toward life (an approach I find abhorrent):

https://t.co/6l4NOH5WWt

[Aaron Rupar @atrupar]

Brian Kilmeade endorses euthanizing homeless people: "Involuntary lethal injection, or something. Just kill them."

[Kevin Hall @ijkijKevin]

@MatRyanELATeach @kalezelden Well, I think this conversation has reached its natural endpoint. I don't know if you learned anything about my perspective, but perhaps so. I find your take to be quite extreme.

[Kevin Hall @ijkijKevin]

@MatRyanELATeach @kalezelden Whose culture? How do you define the "we" whose culture counts as "our" culture?

My family came over on the Mayflower. I still don't think of Shakespeare as my culture at all. Because each generation chooses which aspects of the culture to keep and pass down.

[Kevin Hall @ijkijKevin]

@MatRyanELATeach @kalezelden The teacher constrains the options to high-quality texts. But then the younger generation's taste matters. If they want to replace the Odyssey with the Ramayana, or Shakespeare with Austin, it's their free choice. Certainly in public schools, we can't impose a culture on them.

[Kevin Hall @ijkijKevin]

@MatRyanELATeach @kalezelden I also think your goal of making sure students are engaged with very high-quality texts is good. Where I disagree is that in your taste vs judgment distinction, I think student taste should matter a lot in text selection. They are selecting which elements of culture to pass down.

[Kevin Hall @ijkijKevin]

@kalezelden @MatRyanELATeach @jonmedeiros @Teacher_Fulton What if a kid said, "Dante, Milton, Chaucer, etc are traditional texts. I do not like 'trad' culture (tradwives, etc). All this emphasis on traditional texts is an attempt by Mr. Zelden to 'establish cultural continuity' with a culture I don't want to embody. It's not my culture"

[Kevin Hall @ijkijKevin]

@kalezelden @MatRyanELATeach @jonmedeiros @Teacher_Fulton Are you suggesting that I was accusing you of being a right-winger? That's not what I said.

[Kevin Hall @ijkijKevin]

@kalezelden @MatRyanELATeach @jonmedeiros @Teacher_Fulton This is why it's so unfortunate that the right-wingers have twisted the meaning of traditional culture. Jesus of Nazareth used to be one of the culture's models of masculinity: tough, kind, honest, able to bear incredible pain. Now it's Andrew Tate and Donald Trump.

[Kevin Hall @ijkijKevin]

@kalezelden @MatRyanELATeach @jonmedeiros @Teacher_Fulton Before any discontinuity, it is clear whose culture to maintain connection to. After the discontinuity, the question arises. Whose culture to maintain? You can't wish the question away. Once it's no longer their culture, it's no longer their culture.

[Kevin Hall @ijkijKevin]

@kalezelden @MatRyanELATeach @jonmedeiros @Teacher_Fulton What if the next generation wants high-quality texts and cultural discontinuity?

[Kevin Hall @ijkijKevin]

@MatRyanELATeach @kalezelden When you want to constrain that aliveness so kids express it in the same way you do, that's when it becomes political. And in that sense, you are quite political as teachers.

[Kevin Hall @ijkijKevin]

@MatRyanELATeach @kalezelden ...at any time without thinking that they are losing some part of their humanity. When you teach well (as I believe you do), you are awakening something in kids, knowing that it has a life of its own. If they give up baseball, it's not bad or a loss.

[Kevin Hall @ijkijKevin]

@kalezelden @MatRyanELATeach A further thought: I found the evidence in this book persuasive that the original source of a lot of Enlightenment thinking was Native Americans, whose non-hierarchical thinking was transmitted to France via French Jesuits.
https://t.co/ppKklowRAF

[Kevin Hall @ijkijKevin]

@kalezelden @MatRyanELATeach Anyways, I think I'm going to bow out of this conversation now.

[Kevin Hall @ijkijKevin]

@MatRyanELATeach @kalezelden I don't know the history of other pro-democracy movements around the world, but I doubt they were grounded in pre-Locke thought. I bet Gandhi had his own completely valid ways of thinking when he fought for independence and democracy. And I wouldn't doubt his grasp of it.