Scenes From a Broken Hand: Scripts vs. Protocols

Thursday, January 3, 2008

Scripts vs. Protocols

Nice post from NYC Educator on scripted teaching. The point he comes close to but doesn't make outright, by mentioning doctors, is that what we need in education are protocols, rather than scripts. Doctors are certainly creative, adaptive, and so on--but they work within very clear protocols that have been approved by the profession at large. That is something we are utterly lacking. As the writer mentions, by referencing Charlier Parker, you have to have a set of agreed-upon fundamentals to start with, before you learn how to "riff."

No comments:

Post a Comment

Scenes from a Broken Hand

CHESTER:
This monk I knew in Thailand... amazing man. He was always talking about these veils that stand between us and reality—and how you had to push them back to win the Hide and Seek.

JIM:
Hide and Seek?

MORDECAI:
It's a game, Pogo—the one I'm playing with myself—my real self, deep down.

CHESTER:
No, no. God, or the world, or whatever is out there, is playing it--with all of us. See, God is like this tremendous hand, and we, all of us, everything, are like the fingers. What God does is, he splits himself up into all these different parts, all these fingers: plants, fish, people, rocks—and then—this is the amazing part— he forgets! He forgets what he's done. He plays a game with himself, see? Hide and Seek! That's what the veils are for—so he can forget—so we can forget where it all came from. We see the fingers, but we never see the hand.

from Scenes From a Broken Hand,
a play by Andrew Ordover