I’m looking for a new metaphor for educators. I’m tired of hearing, and using, the overly cliché, “…the pendulum is swinging back again”. Poet Audre Lorde said, “There are no new ideas. There are just new ways of making them felt.” While there is some truth that we oft see familiar things return in new, shiny packaging, I’d like to think that educators aren’t as fickle or uncreative as “the pendulum” implies.
In the late 60’s the trend was to “individualize” instruction, a concept that overwhelmed educators then as it does now when we call it “differentiating” or “personalizing”. Perhaps the formality of how we do it has changed, but essentially this is a pendulum instance. Or is it?
Could we give ourselves some credit that at points previously in history we weren’t prepared for some of the reform efforts we tried to pursue? That’s okay. If the soil isn’t ready, the seeds won’t root. I’d like to believe, and I’ve seen in plenty of instances, that we as educators should be some of the best prepared not to repeat our historical mistakes because we’re a reflective bunch. Can we find the esteem to honor our own professional progress? Let’s create the gumption and pride to admit that, yes, the old is sometimes new again. We’ve repackaged solid instructional practices from years of experience and renamed them “interventions”, but we’re applying them in new contexts than before, in environments that have progressed with us and are fundamentally not the same places nor are we the same people who tried them before.
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My hope is that you won’t short change yourselves or those around you by feebly accepting this pendulum theory. I envision a rope swing over a river. Sometimes it takes a swing back or forth before we’re lined up right, facing the right way, or just get our mind in the right place to jump. But there’s a point when we jump off that pendulum swing and into the river, whose flows and swirls blend all things, old ideas and new soil, taking us together, if we allow it, to better understanding.
Maybe that’s my new metaphor, “The river is flowing.”