Jay Mathews of the Washington Post has full page article in today's A section entitled
Educators Blend Divergent Schools of Thought. I bring the article to your attention not merely because I am in it (and I will reproduce the section about me below the fold)because it is an exploration of the idea of blending more traditional approaches on education with more progressive ideas as well.
As Mathews often does, he solicited responses from people with a variety of points of view in order to expose his readers to as broad a range of opinion as possible. That is partly how I came to be included.
Jay recently did on online column where he presented the thoughts of two teachers, Mark Ingerson and myself, entitled
Two Great Teachers Teach Me, and he asked both of us for our responses to the material on which he was going to focus for this article.
I wrote a long response, and really did not think he was going to use anything from my email, but he did. So if you really don't want to read the whole article (which won't take THAT long), if you understand the concept of the article, that the best approach is the blending of the traditional approach to education with the progressive idea of linking learning with real-life experiences, then perhaps you will be able to make sense of what he quotes from me.
Here it is
Kenneth Bernstein, a teacher at Eleanor Roosevelt High School in Greenbelt who tends to be on the progressive side of the argument, said, "I have no trouble with people trying a variety of approaches to education. What is, in my opinion, most likely to make a particular approach successful is that the persons using that approach believe in it, get a buy-in from students and parents and not apply it rigidly when the needs of the students are otherwise."
In case you are interested, it is accurate to describe me as more of a progressive, but that does not mean I don't require learning of content. My students often must learn far more than, say, the state requires them to know for a test because I am trying to provide enough context for deeper understanding. But I always try to link anything we study with the reality of the lives my students live.