Word: herndon
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Like most of the little revelations in How to Survive, Herndon came on this one by accident. About nine years ago, which was early-on in the movement for freer classrooms, Herndon and a fellow-teacher got permission from their school to organize a daily two-hour unstructured class, which students could elect to take in place of their study halls. They planned it blithely assuming that the chance to make King Tut journals and cigar boxes instead of wasting time pretending to be busy, would thrill the kids. And besides the fun and games prospectus, they went a step...
...Herndon decided to make a movie, and let his charges join in or go off as they chose, because that's what he wanted to do with his time. He proceeded without worrying about What The Kids Would Do With Film. Nor was he interested in making some film about Attitudes and Relationships, or The Question of Authority and-or Democracy In The Classroom. "(I) really wanted to make a Tarzan film," he said. As it turned out, the movie was "Son of the Hawk," the story of a mysterious hawk-faced intruder who terrorizes a junior high school...
...doubt How to Survive was written in part to educate parents and save children. But fighting the (school) Establishment is Herndon's problem as much as anyone's, and the book is for him as much as for anyone's, and the book is for him as much as for anyone else. Herndon writes...
...time anyone remembers that, he is 40(as Herndon is) and reduced to writing about it...In practice they (we) do or don't do things as a matter of reaction--as if we came into school each day as so many blanks, having wiped ourselves clean of desire between breakfast and getting off the bus or getting out of our car...Once officially in the school, we dispose of our cans of Coke and our smokes and await the presentation of our daily (streams of) lives by the school, and it is to that presentation that we respond...
...puppy over?" seem the only questions the schools care for--and not because they show whether a child can read, but because teachers and administrators can use scores to place children in groups for easy classification. The reading texts and tests have nothing to do with real books. Herndon says that reading is not a skill (to be measured) but an art which changes (and is best taught by someone who can already read and is willing to sit down with a child and read to a child and listen to the child read, while pointing out things which...