Re: The Teaching Gap

["Quan, Cao" <QCao009@AOL.COM>]

In a message dated 11/11/99 11:34:06 AM Central Standard Time,
LeoCasey@AOL.COM writes:

<< What you have is an extended reflective conversation among Japanese
teachers
 about teaching and learning, which starts from a problem, crafts a solution,
 observes that solution in practice, analyzes and discusses that solution,
 revises the solution, and so on. What you have is a community discussion
 among teachers on teaching -- what it should do and how to improve it to
 accomplish that end. What you have is a community of professional as
 reflective practitioners, to use Donald Schon felicitous phrase. And, that, I
 submit, is what you need to have if you want to improve teaching. >>

Leo, I agree with your interpretation of the text, but I also have to ask:
are we not all begging the point in looking at it as a Japanese-American
comparative schema?  I teach a Composition class on-line for students in 27
different countries, and I find the process of community-building to be much
more complex than what Jungian paradigms would even begin to elucidate for
me.  Sure, we are all reliving archetypal, mythical stories of old, East and
West, but in some way, we are also creating and recreating, and reaching and
overarching.  I continue to see how my definitions of this reality from my
one point of view, as much as I try to read and learn, in quietude and in
interaction, enriched and challenged by the many different ways that my
students approach my present to them of my limited knowledge.  The teaching
and learning gap comes from actualizing and descending into the abyss:  the
colors are in many ways the many hues of "What Dreams May Come", and on any
given day, the extremes become joined, and East is no longer East, and I find
our arguments and discussions on this listserv not only compelling in their
linear and spherical dimensions.  I also find the silence they evoke quite
deafening, and I wonder if you hear the same.

I also wonder since TQM could not blossom in Detroit, and did in Tokyo,
before it was brought back and failed again here, whether individualism is a
lesser stage of development in the Maslowian scheme of things.  Just a
question...may be it will stir some theoretical paradigms, may be I should
let sleeping dogs lie.

My old Zen master told me when I was seven the story of the passing of the
Sixth Master, and the choice of the Seventh.  It was done through the
response to a "koan" about keeping the mirror clean, so the reflection can be
true.  The self-professed  progeny of the Monastery, the student everyone
expected to succeed the Master, wrote a long poem about what a fastidious job
it is, and how each of us needs to wipe the glass clean every day, and
prepare so we can have a good reflection.  After a long waiting period, the
Sixth Master chose as his successor the janitor boy, who stood every morning
outside the lecture hall, and listened after he finished his daily sweeping.
In his four-line poem, the boy had written that there needs to be time for
the dust to settle, and that wiping things clean will just stir up the dust,
and if the mirror has inherent cracks, the cracks need to be faced before one
can truly see one's reflection.

I wonder in a system that profess to be classless, where the best young minds
are driven by the quest of a better life to choose careers other than
teaching, no matter how much they love it, where everyone thinks they know
how to create a better mousetrap of a school system, where very little
respect is paid to knowledge, if the cracks can ever be overcome.   As
Kissinger once talked about the fissures of communism and predicted its fall,
there are days I wonder about the psychological dead weight of capitalism on
the citizens of this country and of the world.

Quan

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