Are you a conservative or a liberal or like me, someone in-between those two labels??

The word conservative, according to The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (fourth edition)  means "favoring traditional views or values, tending to oppose change, moderate, cautious." From the same source, conservatism is "the inclination to maintain the existing or traditional order, a political philosophy or attitude emphasizing respect for traditional institutions."

Besides in education, which I will write about in a moment, I know that I am a conservative (or a preservative) concerning Nature and our wildlife and natural resources. As our Native Americans teach us, we owe it to the Earth, our home, "Mother of us all," to protect her from injury, peril, harm, or loss. Like many people, I fear the harm that we have already done to Earth and her environs may have irreversible consequences. I pray that our harm to her will be abated, and I will work toward this end. As Tracy Chapman sings, "it is the deadliest of sins" to "rape" the Earth https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WHrhWRsiC4.

Just as with images of liberalism in my last bog post, I also had trouble finding images of conservatism that were not negative. Once again some wordsmiths or spin doctors have been working hard to put a negative, evil spin on the words conservative and conservatism.

As a matter of fact, it occurs to me that the powers that be are working really hard to turn us against each other! And unfortunately in too many cases, they are succeeding in spades. Let us not be taken in by their desire to control us. Let us think for ourselves and try to understand each other and to recognize all sides of an issue. Let us not be haters but to love one another. Our love for one another will completely stump those who want to control us!    

Luckily for me, some of my best friends are conservatives, and some of my best friends are liberals, and we like to discuss the issues with one another. So I get to hear both sides on the issues that confront all of us Americans. In searching for images, I did notice that both conservatives and liberals seem to claim Lincoln as one of their main advocates!

Besides being a preservationist, I am also a conservative in education. I am an essentialist in education: I believe that there are certain basic/essential things that all educated people should know about or have been exposed to--such as proper grammar, certain writers, "true" American history (as in The People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn), how to add, subtract, multiply, and divide (without using a calculator!), etc. 

Some things about learning and teaching just haven't changed. It still takes discipline in the classroom and in the individual student. I believe that students and parents need to respect and trust a teacher unless the teacher proves otherwise.

Teachers still set the atmosphere in a classroom, they still plan what to teach and when, they plan lessons and evaluate those lessons' effectiveness, and they evaluate students' responses to those lessons, etc. To learn, students still need to put forth effort, to want to learn, to listen to and follow directions, to listen to and comprehend lessons, to practice the material being taught, and to perform effectively on some type of evaluative instrument.

As educational author Larry Cuban says, "Things have changed in classrooms. Desktops and laptops are prevalent in schools; teachers use the Internet for videos in lessons; students give PowerPoint presentations; teachers take immediate polls of student answers to multiple choice questions with clickers; new textbooks, some of which are online.

"Yet amid those changes, there is a commonness in the unfolding of a lesson, the activities that teachers direct students to do, and Q & A that characterizes the back-and-forth between teacher and students. There is a familiar continuity in teaching.

"Change occurs all the time in schools and classrooms but not at the scope, pace, and schedule reform-driven policymakers lay out in their designs for reform. Sadly, such policymakers fail to understand the complex interaction between stability and change in nearly all organizations. In this failure of understanding lurks the many errors that decision-makers make in repeated efforts to transform schooling, teaching, and learning."

So I think that what Cuban is saying is that we need to respect the things in education that don't change: the way teachers teach and the way students learn. When it comes right down to it, let's conserve the good things about teaching and learning. And again let's quit disrespecting our teachers, and let's trust them to do what they have been trained to do or what they intuitively know how to do. Let's stop being haters. Oh, but I digress!

So wow, now I see more clearly how I am both a conservative and a liberal! After taking the time to do some researching and some thinking, I better understand both sides, and I see that we don't really have to choose a side. We can choose not to stereotype each other nor to assume things about one another, instead we can choose to understand and yes, to love one another. That's my Christmas message, or wait a minute, perhaps "love one another" is not original with me!