William James
From Talks to Teachers
This essay focuses largely on a story by Robert Louis Stevenson.
In the story, boys feel excitement and joy while secretly carrying flashlights
under their coats. James comments that while we often feel joy ourselves
it is easy to miss or mistake the joys of others. A spectator will
often miss the importance of the actions of the doer, because he or she
is unable to interpret the significance of these actions correctly.
I agree with James in this essay. How often have we wondered
at the sport of others? My younger brother plays several physical
sports, including rugby. Arriving early to pick him up from practice,
I would often sit in awe of these young men who were willing to give up
their free time and comfort to get exhausted injured, and dirty playing
a sport. My brother feels a joy, though, of physical activity and
team participation, a joy that I cannot deny although I do not understand
it.
As teachers I think it is important to remember that the joy that we
feel reading literature or studying the human body might be totally foreign
to our students. It is all the more important, then, to try to make
connections between the material being studied and the lives of our students.
Pragmatism
Pragmatism is a philosophy that, at its core, focuses on results.
James defines it as "the attitude of looking away from first things, principles,
"categories," supposed necessities: and of looking towards last things,
fruits, consequences, facts" (85).
Although pragmatism can be useful in its ways, I believe that it is
a philosophy that can often be misused to justify a wide array of poor
actions that lead to some sort of concrete result. When the emphasis
in on result, or ends rather than means, people tend to ignore or de-value
the means to achieving a particular end. For example, if we focus
only on results we are likely to highly value grades, which are the culmination
of a term of academic work. Being pragmatic and seeing that good
grades are desirable, we might cheat to get good grades and then justify
this action by stating that a positive outcome (good grades) is more important
than the means to that outcome (cheating). Of course, it is not especially
effective to criticize James and other philosophers for the misuse of their
philosophy, and at its heart pragmatism is an interesting approach.
As a teacher I particularly like James' insistence that rather than
solutions we are looking for theories that give us advice on how the world
might be changed. Indeed theories in isolation are of little use,
while practical programs based on theorys can be used to good results.
Perhaps this is something to remember when our students seem downtrodden
by ideas: that action is preferable to ideas in that it can always bring
about results.
William James Web Resources
http://www.cc.emory.edu/EDUCATION/mfp/james.html
http://world.std.com/~albright/james.html
http://www.tekdok.com/James/jamesint.htm
http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/text/james/will/will.htm
http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/gthursby/fonda/james.html
Methods
I really enjoyed the explanation of stream of consciousness in terms
of that wonderful hypertext version of "We Didn't Start the Fire."
I thought that was an excellent use of internet resources and a familiar
song to teach a new concept. It was fun to do stream of consciousness
exercises, like writing in groups about the seasons. This method
was effective because it allowed us to DO something to improve our understanding
of this concept.
Hypertext "We didn't start the fire"
http://members.aol.com/jdsweeney/fire.html