The questions that keep me up at night

Ok, yes, I'm a math teacher, and yes, I started this blog to join the online math education community. I want to share and steal good lesson ideas, good ways to frame mathematical topics, good explorations, good applications, good assessment tools, good classroom technology. Yes, absolutely. But I should be honest: the questions I obsess about, the ones I debate with friends and brood over while starting out windows, are not mathematical.

Don't misread me. I love math. I love its beauty and rigor. As far as I know, mathematics--and here I lump formal logic in with math--is the only subject in which a result can be proved deductively and then held as absolute truth, at least in the context of certain axioms. Still, my first love is philosophy. So the questions that keep me up at night (until 9:30pm) are philosophical. I can't stop questioning what Nel Noddings calls "the aims of education."

Here's a sampling of the questions that puzzle and motivate me:

• To what extent ought we to coerce students? Every day I essentially coerce students to learn math. They may not want to learn it, but the school says they must take four years of math, and I say they must perform certain tasks satisfactorily to pass my class. Yet theorists like John Dewey and even A. S. Neill appeal to me with their emphasis on student empowerment and free choice. Is there a way to empower students in a public school setting and still meet the standards imposed by the powers that be?
• What does equity really mean in education? I get this question from Noddings and from Matthew Crawford (Shop Class as Soulcraft). We tend to assume that equity means providing everyone with a college preparatory education, and so we push all students to attend college. It does seem that providing only a selection of students with an education aimed at college would create a deplorably aristocratic situation. Or is there a way to build a system that honors all learning styles and interests, and doesn't assume that the goal of earning a college degree is innately better than the goal of becoming a really good auto mechanic?
• Do grades destroy intrinsic motivation? Thinkers like Alfie Kohn abhor the use of external motivators to get students to learn, and this includes everything from candy to grades. I sympathize with this to some extent. The use of incentive-based learning models from kindergarten on tends to obscure the fact that many things in life are worth doing just because they're worth doing. But don't we need some way to measure student growth and learning? Is there potentially a hybrid model that starts kids with incentives and then weans them from such motivators?

I consider myself lucky to be able to engage in both theory and praxis when it comes to these questions. To me, the appeal of being a teacher comes from my dual role as philosopher and practitioner. In the future this blog will probably feature more practical reflections on pedagogy, but I think it's crucial never to divorce practical concerns from their theoretical underpinnings. So I begin here.