Every so often I stop wondering what I am doing and how I do it. It is probably an inherited exercise that has given me results in life and that has led me to take the great paths where my life happened and continues.
Alberto, a year or so ago he lost his job, he was fired, a hard experience if there is any and that affects the entire environment of one even the most nuclear that is the family. One listens and has repeated in some circumstances that "things are opportunities", that "nothing happens just because", "something better awaits you"… to tell the truth these phrases are quite irritating at first and you really have to stop listening to them and pass the bitter drink to continue living…
It is common for the dismissed person to get up the next morning at the same time, dress in the same way and wonder why… is that routine, rituals, unfailingly structure our life. The repetition of these rites gives us a framework of security, they order us, allow us to develop… but at times they become meaningless, annoying and even aggressive. What would you think of a person who gets up at the same time every morning, takes a bath, has breakfast, prepares his briefcase, says goodbye to his family and walks the six blocks to the transport that leaves him in front of his workplace. Probably that he is an orderly person and fulfilling his responsibilities. Well now what would you say if you know that that person does all those things but comes to the door of his former job and goes to a bar to spend the morning…
When I was a boy they taught me that bees were geniuses because they worked they were clean and the hive was a highly efficient production system. On the other hand, flies were dirty, useless and annoying, as Machado would say, they are “inevitable sweet tooth that you neither work like bees nor shine like butterflies; little girls, unruly ”. The bee is industrious, it has a goal, it fulfills its goals, on the other hand, the flies… Although this knowledge has some truth, the flies have something that allows them to continue living. Let us revalue the flies as suggested by Belén Varela, in his book 'The Rebellion of the Flies': “The fly has been slandered, supposing it more stupid than the bee. A famous writer says that if they put in a bottle with the bottom facing the light and the mouth open in the opposite direction, the bees, always looking for the light,They do nothing but stir against the glass at the back, unable to convince themselves of that invisible obstacle, while the giddy flies, fluttering from one side to the other, find their way out when they least expect them. Which is to say that the bee is more logical, that is, more stupid than the fly, and is more aesthetic, that is, more spiritual than that. The imbecile bee is scratching itself against the glass and towards the light, unconvinced, while the cheerful fly, convinced of course that it has fallen into a prison, or rather convinced that it is prison everything or nothing it is, he explores it everywhere, he walks around to have fun without caring about flying from behind to the light, and thus by returning to the light the rear achieves, playing, freedom ”.while the giddy flies, hovering from one place to another, find their way out when they least expect them. Which is to say that the bee is more logical, that is, more stupid than the fly, and it is more aesthetic, that is, more spiritual than that. The imbecile bee is scratching itself against the glass and towards the light, unconvinced, while the cheerful fly, convinced of course that it has fallen into a prison, or rather convinced that it is prison everything or nothing It is, he explores it everywhere, he walks around to have fun without caring about flying from behind to the light, and thus by returning to the light the rear achieves, playing, freedom ”.while the giddy flies, hovering from one place to another, find their way out when they least expect them. Which is to say that the bee is more logical, that is, more stupid than the fly, and it is more aesthetic, that is, more spiritual than that. The imbecile bee is scratching itself against the glass and towards the light, unconvinced, while the cheerful fly, convinced of course that it has fallen into a prison, or rather convinced that it is prison everything or nothing It is, he explores it everywhere, he walks around to have fun without caring about flying from behind to the light, and thus by returning to the light the rear achieves, playing, freedom ”.and it is more aesthetic, that is to say, more spiritual than that. The imbecile bee is scratching itself against the glass and towards the light, unconvinced, while the cheerful fly, convinced of course that it has fallen into a prison, or rather convinced that it is prison everything or nothing It is, he explores it everywhere, he walks around to have fun without caring about flying from behind to the light, and thus by returning to the light the rear achieves, playing, freedom ”.and it is more aesthetic, that is to say, more spiritual than that. The imbecile bee is scratching itself against the glass and towards the light, unconvinced, while the cheerful fly, convinced of course that it has fallen into a prison, or rather convinced that it is prison everything or nothing it is, he explores it everywhere, he walks around to have fun without caring about flying from behind to the light, and thus by returning to the light the rear achieves, playing, freedom ”.and thus by returning to the light the rear achieves, playing, freedom ”.and thus by returning to the light the rear achieves, playing, freedom ”.
Our study character, the fired one, has to learn to be a fly. For a long time it was a bee and a good one. Well now if you don't want to succumb locked in the bottle you have to learn to be a fly…
The question I've been asking myself for a long time is why they didn't teach us to change, to go from bee to fly. Or rather and this would be the ideal, to be fly bees or bee flies.
The education we receive is that of bees, but the world we live in is that of flies. And the worst thing that the system that teaches our children today is the one that makes good bees.
Let me explain better. When we read, we hear that today's society is characterized by knowledge, that the future of productive differentiation, that the worker will be qualified by knowledge, all speak of the knowledge and information society. But with knowledge we can go from being flies or bees. No one can deny that bees possess a knowledge of mathematics, language, administration, organization, squadron flight, etc., etc. very high and of proven efficiency. This knowledge has led them to the success of survival in the biological fight. Education has followed this model since the enlightenment: the model of repetition and crushing. We made equal sticks line after line until we acquired the skill of handling the pencil,we repeated the tables until we dreamed of them and we could even repeat them sung and with intonation, but the tone was not of the cumbia or the regee, but that lilting rhythm of the aulic chorus that repeated "one by one, one…." They taught us to be good bees, we genetically accumulate great information, data, wars, classifications, formulas that, like bees, helped us to enter university or a tertiary study to continue accumulating “things”. Our head resembled the attic of the grandmother who kept the photo of my father when he made his first communion in 1968 and the microwave that stopped working last week and is not encouraged to throw away (because he learned that there is no throwing anything, no nothing is wasted). This served in a stable society, when knowledge was generated and learned which production line.
The bee in the bottle repeats over and over again what it has learned, it applies its knowledge but cannot get out of the bottle, it is probably angry with itself and criticizes itself that it does not apply what it knows well and that is why it fails. What the bee does not know is that it will die in the battle against the bottle. If the bee imitated the fly, it might survive.
Knowledge is like the erratic fly, imprecise in how it is generated and acquired. Today it is essential to understand that we do not find the knowledge we need on a library shelf… the network perhaps transmits much more information and knowledge than the best library. Today knowledge is in the environment and I have to take it. The fly does not know how to build a honeycomb, it does not know how to produce honey, it does not know how to be a bee, but it is the one that comes out of the bottle. Why? It comes out of the bottle because it encourages itself to think differently, to try and make mistakes. She is "convinced… that she has fallen into a prison, or rather convinced that everything is prison or that nothing is…" She knows in a different way and uses her knowledge, what she already knows, in different ways until she succeeds.
Fly or bee is not born, it is made
Many times it is heard when faced with the success of a person in business, in life, it is that he was lucky, that some are born "with stars and others with stars"…, unfortunately this way of thinking is the certificate of mediocre. There is probably a quota of luck, of being in the right place, at the right time… But unlike Rawls I do not believe in the "lottery of life". I think that if Camus's mother had thought like that, she would never have won the Nobel Prize and would have deprived us of the pleasure of reading “La Peste”.
Everything lies in our way (as a society) of understanding learning, and therefore teaching. Much has been written in and about pedagogy, theories and teaching methods, I am very far from getting into that field. I am simply going to relate experiences, factual facts, which may be thought triggers. This is the end of these lines that we think together…
We can enter a classroom from any point of the country, from any sector of society and the physical scheme that we find is a number of benches aligned or not intended for students, a space, a desk for the teacher, in front of a blackboard (of chalk, fiber or virtual), some illustrations on the walls… More or less is what we find in our classrooms. Institutional spaces, like body postures, speak louder than curricular plans and designs. They say how we understand the teaching-learning process. Today we still understand teaching as an accumulation and repetition of knowledge, the classroom space as a powerhouse of knowledge. We measure accumulation of knowledge…
In a school, Laura is a 2nd year high school student who already understood what the system is like, how it works. Without much experimental method, she found that during the school year she can take care of things that are important to her and not study. At the end of the year Laura takes 4 subjects to a colloquium: mathematics, history, art and biology. You know your parents will grumble for a while but then it goes away. She is going to spend the year because in plastic she has to deliver 11 drawings that her friends help her to do in an afternoon, history has to know a unit that is what the teacher told her, it is complicated with biology and mathematics but she has good Memory and a night of study are enough for him to know the geological ages, the difference between pro and eukaryotic cells… if he cannot explain it, the examples are enough.Mathematics is complicated but you have until December of next year to pass it…
During the December colloquia, the school's teaching staff holds a workshop on continuous evaluation of educational processes…
Indeed, Laura passed the year and the system confirmed that the processes are not of interest but what she remembered and accumulated. He also confirmed that there are things more important than school and they are what she chose to do throughout the year…
In another school, at a teachers' workshop-retreat, they wondered what graduates we want in 5 years. In almost all the working groups he was in the first place (in some in the second or third place) we want them to “be critical people” contesting the position with creativity. A historical teacher at the primary level internally wondered (because doing it out loud was equivalent to institutional suicide): we really want creative and critical students, if it is enough to see the canned national acts that we do and that we repeat year after year to see that this is not the case. And above all, the provincial state privileges the tourist opportunity and we are not in school to celebrate July 9.
Nobody denies the pedagogical value of the celebration of our national dates, but we have to admit that we are not very creative in them and every year we make him repeat the crossing of the Andes of San Martín and wow, don't let the clouds or snow do eternal with cotton!
How long have we been repeating and repeating the same patterns. We educate our teachers with chalk and blackboard and our students are with the blackberry, the lphone, internet, wii, SMS, etc. The media are not going to replace the interpersonal relationship of the pedagogical fact, but I wonder if we are educating our teachers to be new bees or will they be the flies that our children need.
One day I asked a European teacher (German) if he could give me the program of the course that I was going to develop the next semester, he replied:
“I don't know who my students will be so I couldn't answer your question. I know how I'm going to start, not how I'm going to end ”.
If we understand education as accumulation or repetition, this man does not teach, he is a blackmail. But, he was an excellent teacher. He believed that each group of his students made their own way in the classroom. For him, each student chose what they wanted to learn with him. He was a facilitator of knowledge.
I recently heard this phrase that made me think a lot about what I have been doing for 32 years, teaching is providing safe spaces for others to make mistakes. It made me remember my children starting to walk, what one did: it gave them restraint, security, but we couldn't avoid all the blows that occurred.
To be a teacher, an educator for me is to awaken others to the world of knowledge and to awaken myself with them. It is incredible the experience of fullness that is experienced when together with a student we arrive at a new synthesis.
We know that group thinking is more creative than individual thinking, but we still have our students sitting on individual benches or in pairs at the most, but the work is always individual. We do not prepare our children and young people to move in a networked world that works as a team and thinks globally.
We worry about the lack of interest of our students in learning, lack of interest in the subjects of the subject, but we never ask ourselves if what I propose, the way, the means I use are adequate. The teacher is not intended to be a clown, a guru who almost hypnotically captures the student's attention. It is necessary for the teacher to awaken the interest of knowing. That it is capable of awakening in the other the desire to know, not an accumulation of formulas and dates, but that it is capable of awakening in the student the interest of adding knowledge for their personal project. Encouraging another in knowledge means that I am first excited as a teacher to know. That is why I insist that repetition kills education. If we limit ourselves to repeating what happened last year, what happened to another, what served me 4 years ago, I am killing education.
The worst thing that can happen to us in education is to believe that stimulating to know is giving the other what they want. This would simply further reduce his world and his future possibilities. Or, that to stimulate is to leave you always happy, never wanting more. The human being advances in life moving from what he has to what he does not have. If this were not the case, the virologist Sabin would have settled for the intramuscular vaccine for polio, he would never have modified it to the point of a few drops in a sugar cube. Being restless is the basis of knowledge and progress in it, but we want our children static and limited to 48 cm 2, which is the surface of the chair where they must stay at least 4 hours a day.
I believe that the need to change the way of teaching is ever more profound, we all see it, we experience it as teachers, but we lack the will to find how. Unfortunately, education is like the bee locked in the jar, I hope that many flies will be raised to help us find the way to grow.
As a complement to what has been stated so far, we want to recommend you a couple of great talks by Sir Ken Robinson, an expert in matters related to creativity, the quality of teaching, innovation and human resources, in which he exposes some of the reasons why that a transformation of the educational system is necessary to serve as a driver of creativity (and happiness) of students and not as a brake on their potentialities.
