Learning, Healing, and Change

An excerpt from Chapter 8, "Word Wars" : We need to learn as a people the real and great skill of governing ourselves with healthy debate and discussion. What we do instead is engage in yelling matches—or the Facebook meme, lawn sign or bumper sticker equivalent. These things solidify stances, both ours and our opponent's, without doing much to strengthen our argument—that would require thorough discussion and debate. It seems very important to many people these days to feel that their mind is a fortress, strong and impenetrable against any threat, including challenging or opposing thoughts. I have come to view an attitude of moral self-righteousness as a real personal and societal problem. I do not believe that we need to be pure of the problems that we are criticizing in order to have a valid point to make. This is a hang-up we have all inherited from the Puritans. It seems to me that the people who are most in a position to discuss mistakes are t...

An excerpt from the Introduction: This piece is a product of my time as a primary teacher from 1996 – 2009—the last ten years of which were in a low-income, Spanish-speaking community—when I experienced both the fruits of a renaissance and a subsequent reactionary clampdown in the field of public education under federal reforms .  The school culture mirrored the changing tenor of the times, from the post-Civil Rights/Vietnam era when everything could be questioned to the dawn of the post-911 era when meaning at its most limited was strictly enforced through a rigidly Top Down, one-way flow of communication. Under the rule of the standardized tests with its associated punishments, we went back to presenting truth as a long list of uniform right answers, enforced by fear of punishments, and coming from an impersonal, anonymous and supposedly objective authority—a “Because I Said So” approach to learning. We returned to a highly competitive view of learning which extends to labe...

 An excerpt from the Introduction: All kinds of connections help us make sense of information. There is the connection between people, such as the critical adult-child relationship so easily sacrificed to bureaucratic paperwork and demanding schedules. There is the connection between ourselves and the rich world around us—the world of people and the natural world. There is the connection between the left and right brain, which both serve important functions. There is the connection between neurons, new knowledge connecting with old. We learn by associating one thing with another. (As teachers, we were trained to say “Good connection!” when our students shared what something reminded them of. There was much richness there.) And there is the critical connection between mind and body, now known to be not two things at all, as Western language and tradition say they are, but one intricate circuit of information.. This foundation of connection contrasts with o...

About my book, Learning, Healing, and Change: Notes on Teaching in Testing Time s, due out by Austin Macauley in 2020: Drawing on illuminating stories from thirteen years as a public school teacher during the institution of No Child Left Behind, Ms. Coolidge challenges cultural assumptions about effecting learning and change, making a compelling case for a Bigger Picture perspective in the classroom and in society at large. She shares personal insights about learning as an innate gift, similar to healing, which is fed by responsive interactions. Learning is at the core of all human endeavors and is essential for individual well-being, democracy and social progress. Although rigid separation is our cultural habit, good teaching is embodied, integrated with the arts and play, and engaged with diverse perspectives. Ms Coolidge offers food for thought on how Twenty-first Century federal education reforms, by elevating the status of words and right answers ...