The Mad Ones

In addition to school counseling which keeps me busy and them some, I also teach Theory on Knowledge (TOK) which is a core requirement of the International Baccalaureate Diploma Program. I teach this course because I absolutely love the process of seeing individual students blossom into intellectual beings who have the skills to think critically,to analyze, and to express their insights with compelling conviction. I like being there when it happens but don’t take any real credit for what occurs for students in the process of the course. I try like mad to help them but ultimately when they are ready, deeper levels of understanding unfold at a pace that I sometimes have far less influence over than I’d like to admit.

As part of this course, I use Bloom’s taxonomy to help students recognize the difference between the level of current thinking and the kind of thinking expected of them in TOK. Unlike the comprehension tasks of lower grades characterized by accurate description, TOK seeks only the bare minimum in details about events or circumstances so that the majority of the effort can be applied to developing answers to meaningful questions about the certainty of knowledge and the potential flaws in our  understanding. This ability to think with energy, precision, and insight for me is one of the most gratifying experiences of life.

“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!” – Jack Kerouac

I’d like to think that someday even those students that don’t get it in high school, will look back in 5 or 10 years when the blue centerlight pops and think, “oh…this is what Mr. Clark was on about…”

Bloom’s taxonomy  was given a 21st century facelift in 2008 (click here) with lower order skills centered on remembering and understanding and higher order skills oriented to evaluating and creating.

The value in this overhaul that I see is that the tools of networking and of production have never been so advanced. Anyone who is switched on and plugged in has the tools at their fingertips to make professional presentations in a huge variety of media. It has never been so easy to create and share.

By the same token, however, because of this ease of production and exposure, it has never been so important for people to exercise the higher order analytical and evaluative thinking skills of the original Blooms taxonomy so that the incredible creative and distributive tools are not wasted on meaningless agendas.

It is the junction that explains why I burn to help cultivate the creative, technological, and intellectual capabilities of my students. There’s a part of me that is possibly altruistic about this but really it’s self-serving. I love to see what they create! – AC

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