Here is a letter that my friend Graham Watt sent to our local paper, and one that I would like to share, with Graham’s permission:

How often do we run into someone who has the power to change lives for the better? Someone with a simple take on life and especially the teaching of learning.

I would say not often, especially in this manic time of cell phones that take pictures and computers in schools purpoted to solve the youth learning dilemma.

But this spring and summer, Stephen Haff, now a Crake Fellow at Mount Allison, came in and very simply changed some young lives for the better.

Through the continuing benevolence of the Live Bait Theatre Company , Stephen ran two wonderful drama workshops for young people. Not workshops to learn drama, workshops using drama to learn.

Teens and pre-teens worked together, all equals, visiting elderly Sackville people, listening to their life stories, learning of their lives, and then, together, taking these stories and re-telling them in the context of their own young lives.

Stephen Haff is an educational activist, an agent provocateur, and his insurgents are the young and restless kids who want to know that there’s more to life than copying trendy styles.

He seems to have little time for the trappings, propos and visual effects which are so prevalent in our visually-obsessed culture that they’ve become the culture.

Instead he believes in simple storytelling wonder, the importance of relationships, and especially the vast and unacknowledged potential of each and every young person to thrive.

Stephen Haff, a Mount Allison grad, went on to a Masters degree in English at Yale then plunged himself into one of the most violent ghetto schools in New York, where murders and stabbings replace simple bullying (of 600 students just 60 would graduate).

Such a high level of waste of human sensitivity and potential gave him a gift of his own, a realization that within each child exists a need to belong, and to be confident enough to love others.

None of this would have come to our little Sackville without the foresight and courage of Charlie Rhindress and Live Bait to provide and encourage it.

At the same time, Live Bait brought together another talented group of younger actors from seven to 11 years old to strut their stuff in a wonderfully entertaining and very funny play.

So we were exposed not only to the considerable natural talent of our local children, but the opening of young minds to life itself.

Alas Stephen Haff is leaving Sackville for a private school position in Halifax. Let’s hope he can return to continue spreading the gift of learning.

Our son acted in four productions that Stephen directed over the past year, and during that time we watched as a boy became a young man. As one learning activist to another, thank you, Stephen.

Stephen showed us what can happen when we reverse the teaching model and allow people to become responsible for their own learning. In his address to parents and friends after one production, Stephen allowed as to how the final product was not important, as it was the process of problem-solving through drama that helped the actors to grow. The final production was just one more problem-solving excercise. Or to put it another way, the voyage is the destination.

Stephen Haff’s vision is evident on his website, RealPeopleTheater.org, and he has left us another initiative, the Reciprocal Learning Network, that I hope to incorporate into our town commons.

Here is a picture of Stephen as Leontes, from A Winter’s Tale. Note the emphasis on intricate period-specific costumes ;-)

I attended a learning lab at the Masie Center in January 1997, the same year that Learning Trends was launched. Elliott Masie has now published the 400th Learning Trends newsletter, available as a 39 page PDF. It comes complete with a Creative commons license, which is a great advance from the previous blanket copyright statement.

Trends400 includes comments and prognostications from a wide variety of contributors. Informal learning is frequently mentioned and it is evident that there is a growing use of open source tools for learning – two subjects dear to me. The articles submitted by dozens of readers show how your audience [learners] can be the major creators of your content.

Here is what I found to be the best piece in Trends400, as it addresses some of the core issues around human learning:

Dear Elliott, A bit more than a year ago we met in the Swiss consulate in Boston and I remember how you walked around with a Sony Play station in your hand and talked about the opportunity to use this tool for locating people with similar interests in one’s environment and to learn from or in the community.

That reminds me of the situation that taught me how I learn and how my children learn best. I was shoveling gravel to create a new patio some years ago and my son, Leonhard, then 3, wanted to help level the ground. But since he was always between my legs or just where I wanted to either take or put the gravel, I decided to create a small heap of gravel just for him. It took him about ten seconds to find out that his heap was not where he could learn what he wanted to learn. The Center of Action was clearly my shoveling and that was where he wanted to be.

So, I adapted my mode of working to enable him to participate at the Center of Action. I learned a lot from participating – maybe not being of real help – at the Center of Action. And the Center was the only place where I did not mistakenly take the wrong cues. How to watch, how to move, what is efficient, what is a problem, what counts: it is all there. I believe that each child and every learner will immediately detect whenever he or she is distracted and pulled away from the Center of Action. The children and students lacking attention are just indicators that we do not radiate the feeling of being at the Center, or worse, that we are not there and therefore cannot teach.

Ulrich Gysel

In a nearby school classroom is a sign that states, “for whom the bell tolls” and the teacher says to the students that “it tolls for me, not you”. This reminded me of John Taylor Gatto’s teacher of the year acceptance speech in 1992, as he described the seven lessons that are taught universally in western education.

The third lesson I teach kids is indifference. I teach children not to care about anything too much, even though they want to make it appear that they do. How I do this is very subtle. I do it by demanding that they become totally involved in my lessons, jumping up and down in their seats with anticipation, competing vigorously with each other for my favor. It’s heartwarming when they do that, it impresses everyone, even me. When I’m at my best I plan lessons very carefully in order to produce this show of enthusiasm. But when the bell rings I insist that they stop whatever it is that we’ve been working on and proceed quickly to the next work station. They must turn on and off like a light switch. Nothing important is ever finished in my class, nor in any other class I know of. Students never have a complete experience except on the installment plan.

Indeed, the lesson of the bells is that no work is worth finishing, so why care too deeply about anything? Years of bells will condition all but the strongest to a world that can no longer offer important work to do. Bells are the secret logic of schooltime; their argument is inexorable. Bells destroy the past and future, converting every interval into a sameness, as an abstract map makes every living mountain and river the same even though they are not. Bells inoculate each undertaking with indifference.

Want to improve learning? Get rid of those damn bells.