The Tempered Radical: A different kind of teacher blog
At times I’m concerned that we have become too tame for our own good. As teacher, we rightfully stride to build rapport and leave our classrooms as open for the independent development of opinions as possible. However, this neutral approach to the big questions our students will pose to us a teachers, should not keep us from engaging these questions in our personal lives.
I found Bill Ferriter’s Blog through TeacherCerticationDegrees.com’s Top Teachers Blog by Innovative Educators. What caught my eye was the website’s very bold header of “The Tempered Radical.”
I found Bill Ferriter’s Blog through TeacherCerticationDegrees.com’s Top Teachers Blog by Innovative Educators. What caught my eye was the website’s very bold header of “The Tempered Radical.”
After seeing this, I thought to myself, “isn’t this supposed to be a teacher’s blog?”
In response to that question, I found that “it is a teacher’s blog, just a little different.”
After reading through a few pages of Bill’s blog, I can tell that his page’s header is no farce. He recognizes that teachers neither teach nor students learn in a four walled classroom bubble. In his October 22, 2016 post, “The Curse of Our Online Lives,” Bill warns us about what he refers to as “filter bubbles.” No, these aren’t the bubbles that come out of your home aquarium. Bill borrows the concept of online “filter bubbles” from Eli Pariser’s Ted Talk “Beware online “filter bubbles.”’ The idea being, having access to immense wealths of information through the internet can diversify our opinions as well as polarize them by giving us just what we want to hear.
The more I read Bill’s blog, the more the phrase the more I feel confident in characterize his writing style as audaciously honest. Take a look at some of his thoughts on classroom environments and questioning in his post titled “Where have all the Beautiful Questions Gone?”
“No one really asks us to ask questions. They just ask us to answer questions” — Stew in that for a minute, would you? Sadly, the goal in today’s test-’em-till-they’re-dead schoolhouses isn’t to get kids to ask beautiful questions. The goal is to get them to correctly answer the 50 crappy multiple choice questions on the high-stakes test we’re held accountable for.
The Bottom Line:
I’m a fan of Bill’s blog. His blunt writing style and ability to see the classroom for how it operates in a world context is refreshing and insightful.