It's Not the Shaker Way: Ethics in Teaching

Hello Dear Readers,

So the kids are partaking in "Independent Reading," one of the many pieces of the post-modern curriculum puzzle. Kids are "empowered" to select any book they want, provided they can find it among the 8 titles displayed in the classroom library, and by displayed, I mean face down on the floor, under a student's desk. The Wombury is a fan of Indie Reading. And he's reading quite a number of books as well, including A Day No Pigs Would Die, by Robert Newton Peck. It's all about Robert growing up in Vermont, living on a farm, dealing with life, death, and the Shaker Way. The Shakers were an oddball extremist sect of puritanism that eschewed all things frivolous, great and small, up to and including sex. (Is sex frivolous? Or just foreplay?). There's this collective ethos that forbids accepting payment for services rendered if said services are deemed to be what any good neighbor should be doing in the first place. "No thank you, brother Josiah, can't accept that sack of potatoes just for deliverin' your newborn daughter; I'd just done what any good neighbor would do."

I'm thinking of the Shaker Way because, as the Wombury types this posting down here in the teacher's computer room, ("the sweat box"),