Classroom Teaching and Learning – Broken Chair and NCLB
There is a chair falling and sliced in half by a sheet of glass
which keeps it from hitting the floor. The chair appears solid but it
is unusable- both because it is broken in half invisibly and with a
shard of glass jutting out of the seat to keep it from being
comfortable. This sculpture really struck me because it showed the
juxtaposition of the appearance of success and/or safety and actual
success and safety. In the classroom, the teachers are or primarily
should be concerned with actual learning, success, safety, and
happiness of the students. Everywhere outside of the classroom is
different, however, with the rise of No Child Left Behind and other
standardized test benchmarks. These trends and initiatives make it so
that administrators and school boards all the way up to the national
level only care about the numerical scores and statistics that the
students make, even when the algorithms for putting these statistics
together can be flawed. These numbers are like the glass breaking the
chair- providing the illusion of something whole and successful, but
invisibly ruining the function.
What's that old adage about not everything that can be counted, counts?
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