I was glad to see that yesterday's post was well-recieved by a lot of the people I like talking to these days. My twittering has increased the size of my "Professional Learning Network" by several orders of magnitude, and it was nice to see that I could spend a good portion of a lazy Saturday afternoon having casual, tangential, conversations with quite a few folks:
One person who was less impressed was my father, who left me this comment on Facebook:
What ever.
This was followed shortly with
I truly do not understand this. And I thought that Cosmology was obscure.
Full Disclosure: My father is a super-great guy, who spent his professional career teaching science to teenaged children. We don't tend to talk job specifics, which is all the more reason why I respect his opinions on education wherever and whenever they are offered.
He didn't dig the post. I can respect that. Still, I think he probably agrees with the underlying point, which is that teachers often fall into patterns, and assumptions for no other particular reason than their frequency of use, and that a process for evaluating these habits is useful in determining if they should be changed, and how to go about making those changes.
I agree that the language we use to talk about these things is frequently difficult. And I'll cop to being a bit overdone in the peice. I was going for a certain style that is not one of natural comfort. This venue exists to provide me with an arena of "warts and all" compositional practice as much as it serves any other purpose. In that capacity, I'm not sorry for trying new things, even if they are only half-successful.
I suppose I'll just have to redeem myself the next time. At the very least, I'm glad to know that if I don't, he'll tell me so.
