Followship is so a word
Jan. 23rd, 2011 03:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pktechgirlbackupReflecting the unanticipated awesomeness of its participants, project "teach middle school girls to punch things" is being upgraded to project "lead tiny ninja army." Oh my g-d, those little girls are awesome. Also, the school seems to have implemented many of my ideas about the organization of gym class, only better.
The girls get three units a year: fitness, martial arts, and boxing-and-dance. That seems like a good mix, especially since I think they're also exposed to traditional sports through something else. There's only one class in each grade, but each gym class is composed of 1/3 of the kids in each grade, so they are seeing slightly different people than usual. It's also a natural way to give kids experience as both followers and leaders, because the classes build cumulative knowledge, which is something I hadn't thought of in the earlier discussion on age banding.
Leadership and followship fall into what I think of as "meta skills." They're useful to learn, but you can't teach them the way you teach math or history, you can just facilitate their development, and the time it takes to do so comes out of the time you could spend learning specific skills. In theory, I'm fine with slowing down reading, writing, and rithmatic to learn these soft skills, because they are extremely useful. In practice, I have no faith in any school's ability to consistently teach them, but I do believe that some school might, theoretically, be good at teaching academics. So when faced with an idea that will trade off academics for social skills, I'm usually against it. But my arguments are invalid in a gym class: the main point is to get them up and moving, any actual skills they learn are extra. So having them learn dance techniques slightly slower, but have solid chances to provide or benefit from peer leadership, is a fantastic trade off. Maybe that's why people always talk about sports as teaching teamwork.
Normally I would be against mixed age gym classes because the last thing you need when children have excuses to hurt each other is a large size differential. This isn't so critical with girls because puberty is significantly less helpful in our ability to beat each other up, but I also think that you maybe head off some of the problems inherit in pitting people of different sizes against each other as equals by explicitly designating the larger one as the leader. Kids like responsibility, and they will often rise to the challenge if they think you respect them. Of course, the kids I'm working with are a highly selected group, this won't be so easy everywhere, but it strikes me as worth trying.
The girls get three units a year: fitness, martial arts, and boxing-and-dance. That seems like a good mix, especially since I think they're also exposed to traditional sports through something else. There's only one class in each grade, but each gym class is composed of 1/3 of the kids in each grade, so they are seeing slightly different people than usual. It's also a natural way to give kids experience as both followers and leaders, because the classes build cumulative knowledge, which is something I hadn't thought of in the earlier discussion on age banding.
Leadership and followship fall into what I think of as "meta skills." They're useful to learn, but you can't teach them the way you teach math or history, you can just facilitate their development, and the time it takes to do so comes out of the time you could spend learning specific skills. In theory, I'm fine with slowing down reading, writing, and rithmatic to learn these soft skills, because they are extremely useful. In practice, I have no faith in any school's ability to consistently teach them, but I do believe that some school might, theoretically, be good at teaching academics. So when faced with an idea that will trade off academics for social skills, I'm usually against it. But my arguments are invalid in a gym class: the main point is to get them up and moving, any actual skills they learn are extra. So having them learn dance techniques slightly slower, but have solid chances to provide or benefit from peer leadership, is a fantastic trade off. Maybe that's why people always talk about sports as teaching teamwork.
Normally I would be against mixed age gym classes because the last thing you need when children have excuses to hurt each other is a large size differential. This isn't so critical with girls because puberty is significantly less helpful in our ability to beat each other up, but I also think that you maybe head off some of the problems inherit in pitting people of different sizes against each other as equals by explicitly designating the larger one as the leader. Kids like responsibility, and they will often rise to the challenge if they think you respect them. Of course, the kids I'm working with are a highly selected group, this won't be so easy everywhere, but it strikes me as worth trying.
no subject
Date: 2011-01-24 12:35 am (UTC)Can you "teach" leadership and followship the way you "teach" problem-solving? Set up situations where they ought to be learned, but have no control over whether the kids pursue the situations far enough...?
no subject
Date: 2011-01-24 02:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-24 04:12 am (UTC)Yes, the Boy Scouts teach leadership in fairly explicit ways and at different levels, but I think the insight on followship has to come from the United States Department of Defense, which holds that it is not a separate skill from leadership; even the juniormost soldier/sailor/airman has him- or herself under their own chain of command, therefore leadership skills are relevant to everybody and are taught accordingly, albeit with different emphases depending on current rank and projected career path.
no subject
Date: 2011-01-24 10:51 am (UTC)