Tuesday, May 19, 2009 by Jay T.

I’m looking forward to volunteering next month with Bike First, the Portland affiliate of Lose the Training Wheels.  We help people with disabilities learn to ride two wheeled bicycles.

The teaching I do there is quite different from my usual work in the school year.  The teaching system at these bike camps was founded on the insights of a mechanical engineer.  It relies on some very cleverly designed machines to do the teaching.  Had it been designed by teachers, it would be focused on the interaction between cyclist and teacher, rather than the interaction between cyclist and bicycle.

Bike camp is a unique experience for me.  There’s nowhere else I practice my teaching craft that my own personal style is so clearly secondary to another element in the learning relationships of students, skills and objects.

Because of  the reliance on the innovative machines, limiting the curriculum to just one skill set, and limiting the students to those who can walk, keep feet on pedals and want to learn this skill, we succeed at a high rate.

I reflected on this on Sunday morning.   Is there a technology to teach the insights and skills of silent worship?  Quakerism is not something I believe so much as something I practice.  Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Physical activity, Prayer | 3 Comments »

Friday, May 8, 2009 by Jay T.

This morning I came to see what seminal work the Friends were doing in 1755–1758.  You relate it well in Chapter Five of the Journal.  I notice that you and the editorial committee have brought together many of the entries you made on the scruples of Friends about war–particularly about paying taxes to support it.  Some of these events are taken from events that happened before the close of the previous chapter.

This grouping that has been done has been juxtaposed in my mind with the biography I’m currently reading about John Adams, the Massachusetts representative to the Continental Congress that convened in Philadelphia less than a decade later.  From Adams actions I came to see how they were learning to put the understandings on natural law of John Locke and other thinkers from the century before yours into plans and resolutions about government and its role in the lives of men. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Conversations with Remarkable Friends, Journal | 2 Comments »