Interview with Jack N. Cole

Speaker 1: Jack N. Cole earned his bachelor's degree in English from the Catholic University of America in 1968. He received his MAT degree in secondary education, English and Social Studies in 1970 from Wayne State University. Speaker 1: Dr. Cole served in numerous capacities and public education for over a decade. He worked in the computer industry for 15 years. In 2003, he joined the faculty of the Department of Secondary Education at Towson University. These are his reflections. Karen Blair: Dr. Cole, thank you for sharing with us your thoughts about your own teacher preparation and your subsequent career in education and elsewhere. I think we should begin at the beginning, and so I will ask you to share with us your early social context, where you grew up, Karen Blair: what kinds of career aspirations you were considering as you went through high school, and why you decided to be an English major when you got to college.

Jack Cole: I grew up on army bases in a large number of places. I was an army brat with a capital B. Army brats, by the way, test better than a lot of other kids. They're more obnoxious and they take control of their environment. They have to fend for themselves. And I did. So the real stable thing in my life for years and years and years was I would walk into a classroom during the school year and there would be a teacher. Jack Cole: So I saw a succession of teachers, Catholic nuns, Christian brothers, laypeople, citizens of the United States of America who are teaching in public schools, and it always seemed like an interesting thing to do. When the class was over and they disappeared, I always wondered what happened to them, where they went, and what they did. Jack Cole: I was schooled by the Christian Brothers in high school, at a school similar to Calvert Hall. Jack Cole: Sister school in Virginia at Bishop O'Connell, and became really, really impressed with the brothers that I had teaching me, particularly English, history, and Latin.

Jack Cole: One day during my second year, brother Maurice comes around and recruited me to join the order. Told me that if I would enter the order to become a Christian Brother, I could go to Annandale in Beltsville, MD, and they had an Olympic size swimming pool and they had an Olympic size gymnasium and they had an apiary. Jack Cole: All sorts of other things, so I signed up. Jack Cole: First day I got to Annandale off of route one in Beltsville, I walked out the back door of the place and somebody handed me a shovel. Jack Cole: I said what's the shovel for? He said it's work time. Come help us dig the foundations for the gymnasium. So over the next two years, I built the gymnasium I ended up playing basketball in. The Christian Brothers is a teaching order of Catholic men. They're not priests. And they run Calvert Hall,

Jack Cole: St. John's College High School in DC, Bishop O'Connell down in Arlington, Jack Cole: LaSalle Hall and LaSalle College up in Philadelphia and a number of other places around the country. Got into my post senior year after I graduated. Decided that wasn't for me. Jack Cole: But the teaching wasn't such a bad idea. Went to Catholic University after I got out of the Christian brothers and signed up for my first year as a math major, Jack Cole: which, considering that I hadn't taken trigonometry in high school, turned into two semesters of calculus and a grand total of four points out of 1200 for the year. Saw the light and switched into English.

Karen Blair: Interesting. And what area of English, were you a writing person or a lit person, or a combination of the two? Jack Cole: Medieval British drama. Jack Cole: And philosophy and theology. Jack Cole: And I took courses in the Department of Theatre and I took courses in liberal arts.

Jack Cole: Tried to get a well-rounded education and took a large number of courses, of course, in philosophy and theology. Didn't do particularly well at any of them, but good time. Karen Blair: Yeah. Did you, as you were going through that degree, did you have a sense of what you might do once you got out? Jack Cole: No. Went to work with the Vista Volunteers sophomore year, over break. Jack Cole: Spent four years doing things in the fraternity that probably don't need to be recounted, and got to senior year, and the idea in my head was, my girlfriend is going to Wayne State in Michigan to pursue her master’s degree in nursing. Maybe I should follow along and see what the possibilities are.

Karen Blair: Uh-huh. So you wound up at Wayne State? Jack Cole: In beautiful Motor City, Detroit, MI. Karen Blair: And when you went, were you aware then that you would go into an MAT program? Did you go with that purpose in mind? Jack Cole: No. I had previously interviewed for the MAT program at Temple, and that didn't work out for a number of reasons. The MAT program at Wayne State was more or less accidental. I went to the English department and they were at least as impressed with me as the English department at Catholic U,

Jack Cole: which is to say, not very, so I ended up in the College of Education wandering around one fine day during the summer and saw a big cloud of smoke billowing from this office on the third floor. Jack Cole: And there were 100 people lined up outside the office with papers in their hands. So I walked to the front of the line and walked in the door into this cloud of smoke. And I saw paper stacked on the floor, three or four feet deep, covered with what looked like chemical equations, turned out that was the department chair of secondary ed a guy named Samuel Stone, Jack Cole: and that was transformational linguistics. So I sat down. We had a cigarette together while the other hundred people sat outside and we talked about what all this stuff was. And I ended up signed up for the master’s in teaching program. True story. Karen Blair: I believe it.

Karen Blair: What did that program entail? Jack Cole: 84 quarter hours of work in education, in psychology, anthropology, linguistics and architecture. Pretty much anything I felt like taking. Sociology. Jack Cole: And it was a bunch of the most radical people I could have ever conceptualized in my life, so they were the radical reformists that inhabited Michigan at the time. Karen Blair: And can you talk a little bit about what that means?

Jack Cole: What that means is I taught myself how to teach. I taught myself most of the courses, the most coherent course I had was analysis of teaching that involved the Flanders Amidon Classroom interaction coding system, Jack Cole: as well as one in transformational generative linguistics and another one that involved us creating our own philosophy of education. The methods courses were basically content free. Karen Blair: OK. Jack Cole: You went and sat and listened and tried to stay awake.

Jack Cole: And that was the end of the course. And you got an A. Karen Blair: There you go. Jack Cole: Not very impressive. Jack Cole: During that same time, I was substitute teaching in the Detroit Public Schools. So I got to see inside of classrooms and inside of schools,

Jack Cole: and observed that, regardless of the circumstance, schools pretty much ran like schools, Jack Cole: and weren't the violence-ridden adventure movie scripted insanities that were projected to the general public. People were trying to do a good job, and most of the kids that I saw were fairly serious about learning. Karen Blair: But you did that on your own. You did that in as a substitute teacher. You did this so the program did not provide you with any opportunity to do that. I assume that at some point you must have done something akin to student teaching. Jack Cole: My last semester was 12 credits of student teaching.

Karen Blair: But before that, before student teaching, you didn't go into schools at all. Jack Cole: Not a tap. The only experience I had with Detroit was in my sociology course, taught by a man named Archie Allen who walked us in the first day, gave us a map of the city with 10X's on it. Jack Cole: Said, come on back when you've seen all these different parts of Detroit. Jack Cole: And he was one of the best professors I ever had.

Karen Blair: What did you do with that information when you came back? Jack Cole: Integrated it into what I thought and felt. I saw all the different parts of Detroit. Detroit looks a lot like Dresden did after the fire bombing. It looks a lot like it does in today's movies. Alex Cross is set in Detroit, Sixto Rodriguez, about the singer that was bigger than John Lennon. Jack Cole: Every place except in the US is set in Detroit. Jack Cole: There's a film called Detropia, which is a documentary about Detroit, just finished running in the in the theaters.

Jack Cole: And the city is in decay and on its back. The people there have... Let's get back up and go make it work again spirit. So I saw all of that and realized that as bad as things had gotten in Detroit, people were always hopeful for the future. Jack Cole: So the kids at my high school came to learn, most of them. I mean, you know, you got some that have other agendas. Jack Cole: They're all pretty straight. There was a serious look at academics. Jack Cole: The school I taught in, Northwestern High School, dead center in Detroit, at the corner of the two biggest streets in Detroit. And it was their flagship high school for downtown Detroit.

Jack Cole: I was one of three minority people in the school, everybody else was African American. I didn't know what white kids were like until I came to Havre de Grace and started teaching, and that was a culture shock. My students were serious. They were so into what they were doing in high school that in Detroit they would walk around on the streets for two weeks after graduation, wearing their caps and gowns because they were proud of graduating from high school. Jack Cole: You can't see that any place around here. Karen Blair: No. Isn't that interesting? Jack Cole: Taught English. Nine, ten, eleven.

Jack Cole: Still remember some of the kids. wonder what happened to them. Every Friday, they would send somebody from Motown Records to practice in the gymnasium. And the reason for that was they moved Dark Shadows. Remember that, the vampire serial? They moved that from 4:30 to 1:00 on television. Jack Cole: And all of a sudden the girls all disappeared at 1:00 after lunch. So Barry Gordy took to sending artists up to the high school to rehearse in the school, so the kids would stick around to hear the music. Attendance went way up when he started doing that. Karen Blair: I guess so. What a great idea. Karen Blair: Well, when you did your student teaching, did anybody come and observe you?

Jack Cole: Never saw one of them. Not all one. They were afraid to go there. I rolled in my first day on my motorcycle, Jack Cole: and stood in the parking lot with 100 kids standing around watching me trying to get the engine to stop. Jack Cole: I took the key out. I turned the thing off and it kept running. Come to find out the noise from behind me was a Detroit motorcycle cop writing me a ticket because I'd made an illegal left turn into the school and blown smoke in his face as I passed in front of him. So he wasn't very happy. So I got along real well with the kids. Karen Blair: I was going to say, probably made you a folk hero of sorts.

Jack Cole: Maybe. Maybe. We got along very well. Jack Cole: Great bunch of kids. Karen Blair: So you come out with your master’s in the art of teaching, and where do you go next? Jack Cole: Sent applications throughout Maryland. Ended up with an interview and a job offer from Harford County in beautiful Havre de Grace at the high school. Taught English, social studies, journalism, geography, volleyball team, and drama.

Karen Blair: And so how were you feeling about that? You said that there was a degree of culture shock, that this was a different group of students altogether. Jack Cole: Yep, it's a drug culture. Lot of the kids were drugged up, a lot of them were… They called them river rats. Jack Cole: The kids from Havre de Grace, that had been there. Their parents have been there forever. They would disappear every year at the beginning of crabbing season because they went out on the boats. Nice kids. And then we had the kids coming in from the proving ground. And the town kids and the proving ground kids didn't mix all that well. Jack Cole: But we all got along, but it was it was a culture shock. It took me a while to adjust to the rhythm of the classroom, and to what people reacted to and what they didn't react to.

Karen Blair: So at some point you make a decision that you're going to pursue a master’s degree in literacy and reading. Jack Cole: A doctorate. Jack Cole: I was minding my own business at the end of my second year and in walked our supervisor, Big Ruth, Ruth Perkins. She's pretty much a legend in the state. And fired the guy in the classroom to the left of me and fired the guy in the classroom to the right of me, Jack Cole: and looked at me and said, you ought to go to College Park and get a doctorate and learn something.

Jack Cole: Which I did. Karen Blair: And you did that full time. Jack Cole: Full time for four years. Jack Cole: Worked as a graduate assistant, worked at the Study Skills Lab, worked in the College of Ed. Worked for the department chair.

Jack Cole: Took courses. Karen Blair: Well, tell me about your areas of emphasis when you were doing that doctorate. What did you intend to do professionally at the end of that degree? Karen Blair: Where did you see yourself going? Jack Cole: It was a pretty research intensive bunch of people at the time. They had two strengths, research and then schools, and my intent was to go into reading research,

Jack Cole: cognitive science, learning research. Working with people to find out what learning was, how it operated, how you could affect it, how you could deal with it, Jack Cole: and beyond that I didn't really have any focus to my thinking. Jack Cole: Worked at the Study Skills Lab for five years, learned a lot of what's been around since 1930s and mostly disdained as remedial stuff, but mostly effective in the classroom, Jack Cole: and went to many research conferences. I did a psycholinguistics sequence over at Georgetown.

Jack Cole: Went to the research conferences, went to the IRA conferences, Jack Cole: did school type in-service with teachers in the schools that are in and around Maryland, so I guess practicality and theory were the two things on my mind. Jack Cole: And as our friend Carl von Clausewitz, the military theoretician of the 19th century, said, theory is practice, and that's something I learned doing it at that point. Karen Blair: So, with degree in hand…

Jack Cole: Degree is reading education with minors in research methodology and evaluation and statistics. Jack Cole: Senior, last year, I was there, I was approached by the recently ex reading supervisor in Prince George’s County, Jack Cole: who was then the director of instruction, and she needed somebody to replace herself. So I got the job of coordinating supervisor of reading in Prince George’s County. Well, design, develop, deploy, implement, monitor and maintain reading and language and learning programs for 176,000 kids and 7,600 teachers. Karen Blair: OK.

Jack Cole: That's what I said. Sounds good. Didn't really know what I was doing, but I learned quickly. Karen Blair: Well, you were there for a while. Jack Cole: Yes, and… Karen Blair: So you must have learned something in a hurry.

Jack Cole: Learned how to do it. Jack Cole: Learned how to do it. Wish I'd have known then what I know now. I would have done it a whole lot better and a whole lot more effectively. Developed the comprehensive reading program curriculum K to 12, developed a program in learning strategies K to 12 in mathematics, English, social studies… Jack Cole: English, social studies, mathematics… Four areas. English, social studies, math and science. Jack Cole: And implemented that K to 12. Got holed in by the Nation at Risk study because I had done that and they interviewed me and cited the thing in their Nation at Risk documentation. Did content reading K to 12, did the functional reading stuff when it came out, I did a whole lot of in-service for the 7,600 teachers.

Jack Cole: Got involved with the International Reading Association. I was state president at one point. I was chair of the Legislative Committee at one point. Jack Cole: So I did a whole lot of top to bottom, side to side work with administering and documenting and running their program. Karen Blair: And what did you take away from that experience in terms of effective instruction? Karen Blair: This was not one of the questions I asked.

Jack Cole: One of the things I was reprimanded for was spending time in schools. I used to go to schools and work with my friends’ classes and do stuff like memory note taking, listening, things like that. I learned a lot about kids in a large major school system. I learned that when you have a system that big that was integrated there- Jack Cole: I graduated from high school, I graduated in Beltsville from a small institute, it’s a normal school, Christian brothers, but at that time they took the Prince Georges County public and the Prince Georges County consolidated school systems, put them together, Jack Cole: and then started busing kids across the Beltway up and down. I found out that when I got there later on and the choice got to be, let's go from having 25, 30 basal readers in an elementary school, they were going to allow us to select two. Jack Cole: So I developed committees of a couple hundred people. We had all of the publishers come in and show us their wares and they settled on two of them, Houghton Mifflin and Scott Foresman, which were the Dick and Jane readers that many of us remember from elementary school. Turns out that the teachers outside the Beltway selected the Houghton Mifflin,

Jack Cole: by and large, and the teachers inside the Beltway selected the Scott Foresman, because those kids can't handle the Houghton Mifflin and guess, which kids were where, predominantly speaking. Jack Cole: That got on my nerves, because when you deprive kids of the opportunity to have the best of the best, they're systematically destroying their education and their brains and their life prospects. Jack Cole: So one of the things I took away from there was, I don't like this. That's one of the reasons I decided to leave. I had done everything I thought I would be able to do and got itchy feet. I also took away that no matter how bad school systems are cracked down to be by the media and by the public, Jack Cole: they're full of men and women that are breaking their backs, doing the best job they possibly can, looking for any way they can to do a better job and to have what they do have a greater effect with their students,

Jack Cole: and they're also full of a large number of students that are serious about learning. Jack Cole: Took that away with me. Also over the years I've evolved a sociopolitical historical analysis that leads me to believe that our schools are in the process of morphing into something else and entirely different. And much of it is out of the controls of the people that run the school. Jack Cole: And what it's going to be will be very, very exciting and much better for the human psyche and for the development of our young people. And it will come to pass because of individuals who decide they're going to pioneer little tiny pieces of it and get from zero to wherever we end up over the course of time. Jack Cole: Learned that at Wayne State. I ran into a fellow named William Carlos Williams. Historian. You heard of him?

Jack Cole: And his theory about “manifest destiny” wasn't so much that we were out there to win the world in the name of God and whatever church was behind us, but manifest destiny was, people went across the continent going another 100 yards at a time, Jack Cole: and by the time the century was up, we'd gone all the way across the continent, but nobody was thinking about manifest destiny except the politicians. The little farmer, the little rancher, the little sheep herder, whoever, was just thinking about making life little tiny bit better by going just a little bit further along whatever developmental path it is. Jack Cole: And I think that's where schooling Is headed. Karen Blair: But you decided to take a break.

Jack Cole: Yeah, I went to work for a software company because I was really, really into software. Jack Cole: I had bought a computer. I had bought a computer and I found that I was able to outproduce my three secretaries. Jack Cole: In an hour. It would take them a week to do what I could do in an hour. Jack Cole: And I got itchy feet, and so I wanted to go into the world of software and see what was going on out there in terms of computers and things like that.

Karen Blair: This would have been very early then, not only in your introduction to computers and software, but everybody's. Jack Cole: Oh yeah. Karen Blair: So that was an exciting time to sort of take that leap and go into that field. Jack Cole: That’s when I was president of the State Reading Association. I got them their first computer, which they use for all the conferences. I'm sure it's a new different computer than it was then.

Jack Cole: And I became engaged with the State Department of Education Principles Academy, writing and conducting the principals academies in technology and gender equity. Jack Cole: Where we found out that although social justice has always been an issue of mine, it was also like spitting into a hurricane. Jack Cole: People will do stuff because it's the right thing to do. People will do stuff if it's profitable, which is why the diversity movements gotten as far as it has. Jack Cole: And people will do it if it makes sense to them or makes their lives easier. So we approach gender equity from the standpoint of, if you use the technology to make life easier at the school, it'll be a more equitable environment. So they were putting girls into classes that typically had only boys. They were putting boys in the classes that were typically only for girls.

Jack Cole: One of the supervisors here in Baltimore County took about a million and a half books away from a poor high school. Jack Cole: And gave them to a high school that was classified as rich because for years the poor school had gotten all these resources it couldn't use. They were stacking up and the rich high school was using 10 and 15 year old textbooks. So he redressed that imbalance, which sounds like a strange imbalance to have. But things got weird back during the 80s and the 90s. Jack Cole: Did about 8 years’ worth of those principles academies, and the men and women in there were excited by the hardware and the software, love to have the time to play with the toys, and came up with ways of using them that help balance things out in their schools to the benefit of everybody. Jack Cole: It's like if you’re gonna make Title 9 happy, or if you want to make Title 9 work without a bunch of grumbling, figure out a way to make it less work rather than more work.

Jack Cole: Principals used to obsess over scheduling. Jack Cole: All summer they work on these schedules by hand, and the Superintendent would come in in August and say, well, now, do this, and it's just, redo your schedules and it's no big deal. And they'll be pounding their heads on the tables. Now you push a button and things sort out in, you know, under 30 seconds. Jack Cole: So when the computers got into the principals’ hands, they started doing incredibly smart stuff with them. Jack Cole: And they were tinkerers. They did stuff they weren't supposed to do. Computer’s not designed to do that. But they made it work.

Jack Cole: So I was kind of an early adopter in that regard. Karen Blair: Yes. Yeah. Absolutely. Jack Cole: And then I ended up one day teaching a software program and a bunch of federal guys came through from healthcare financing administration. They had to do a national network for all of the health of the blue crosses and blue shields, to bring their information into Baltimore and look at the cost data for administration. Jack Cole: And they wanted to know if I could do them the network.

Jack Cole: And I said yep, so for a couple of years, I developed the Medicare automated network, Jack Cole: over at HCFA here in… Used to be off of Security Boulevard. Now it's way out Security Boulevard. It's a large castle. Jack Cole: So that evolved from the first and all the way along I was training, I was developing things, and I was involved with education at the Community College level, local level, and through the State Department of Education. Karen Blair: So you really didn't go away?

Jack Cole: It's all the same career. Jack Cole: I just took a turn. Karen Blair: Did a little meander and. Jack Cole: And all fit together.

Karen Blair: So when did you get involved in higher education? And in what capacity? Jack Cole: Let's see. Jack Cole: After all of that, I ended up working with the Community Learning Information Network, which was the National Guard’s distributed network of areas around the country where people could go and take anything they wanted to on the computer. That disappeared the day after 911 because it had to be secure and there is no way for it to be secure. Jack Cole: 911, I stood in my office and watched the smoke rising from the Pentagon. I was down on K Street. working at that point. So eventually I ended up working for a consulting firm, Community Eris, and at Eris were people you might have run into in your travels,

Jack Cole: Sandra Crowley and Larry Nash, who were pretty well known at the State Department for many, many years for the State Standards and Technology Assistance programs, Jack Cole: where they took the state standards into schools, and they worked with them. Jack Cole: And so I worked with them as a management organizational change and diversity consultant for several years. One day, when I was working, I was at the power company doing diversity training. Larry walked in. He said, how would you like to teach at Hopkins, huh? Jack Cole: I said, sure, why not? Sounds like fun. So I did up my CV for them. He took it over to Hopkins and showed it to the people there. And when they stopped laughing, I got a phone call to go teach marketing.

Jack Cole: ‘Cause I had marketed computers, I’d marketed software, I’d marketed components. I'd been a marketing representative for a company called Prodigy, that was like America Online, for a good long time. So I ended up out there teaching marketing, and then I got to teach adult learning. And then I got to teach organization management in technology situations. Karen Blair: And this is all at Hopkins. Jack Cole: It's all at Hopkins. Taught there for about 10 years. And one day I was minding my own business and Lynn comes in and says, they need somebody to teach a reading course over at Towson. Karen Blair: And she was already at Towson.

Jack Cole: She’d been there several years at that point. So I met, re-met Gloria Neubert. I had known Gloria at College Park, Jack Cole: when she was, we did our degrees at the same time, so the circle came around and ended up back here working in secondary ed. Karen Blair: Isn’t that interesting. Karen Blair: So, and what kinds of things have you done in your position here? What things…

Jack Cole: Bunch of stuff. Jack Cole: Worked with the multicultural committee. Jack Cole: Taught the diversity course, Teaching the Urban Perspectives course, which is a similar kind of thing that's going on now. Taught methods courses, taught the reading course, taught the how to teach course, the principles course. Jack Cole: Started a research project about learning that's kind of what we're doing here, only the topic is, what do you do when you learn?

Jack Cole: And I'm slicing the population by age. So what do 20 somethings do when they set out to learn, what do 30 somethings, 40 somethings, 50 somethings, and the answers are different, very different. Jack Cole: I'm doing a development of a platform for my teaching because I've decided the teaching isn't only what you do in your classroom, Jack Cole: it's what you do in your career. And the far wall of my classroom is somewhere in Shanghai or beyond. Jack Cole: Everything you do that fits your mission as a teacher can be broadcast, or can connect with human beings in lots of different places, in lots of different ways, and it should be possible to think of yourself as a content management system. So something I develop turns up on a website,

Jack Cole: on Twitter, as a monograph, at a presentation, as a piece of a research project. And that's my current project. That's one of the things I'll be talking about in January at the technology conference over in the college. So basically, since I've been here, I've been developing ideas like that, trying them out in my classroom, floating them with students and staff, Jack Cole: and basically just trying to stay alert and do more. Karen Blair: One of the things that you have been very much involved in is our partnership with China in terms of preparing post… Karen Blair: I don't know how to say it.

Karen Blair: Leadership candidates at the master’s degree level. Karen Blair: Tell us about that involvement. How did that come to pass? Jack Cole: About eight years ago, they, Jim Lawler and Barbara Ellis, God bless them, Jack Cole: were putting together the I think the second year of the China project, and they had an opening in an area where I felt fairly comfortable teaching. And so they signed me up to go over there and teach the final course in the Master’s program

Jack Cole: to the second cohort of teachers in that program. Jack Cole: And I went, and I went back, and I went back, and I went back. Loved China. Karen Blair: What drew you back for a number of years? Jack Cole: China is like a big hardware store.

Jack Cole: It's like Disneyland. It's different place. Historically it's different, culturally, It's different. There's always something more to see. It's just exciting. Jack Cole: There really are no rules for much of anything, and so for someone in my position, it's just a wonderful environment to go and try new things out and learn new things and see how people think. Same thing as when I went to Detroit. Same thing as when I went to Havre de Grace, they're just people. Jack Cole: And the big learning involved is that people everywhere are just like people everywhere. Jack Cole: Same thing I discovered when I went to the Million Man March. I was the only pale face I saw at the Million Man March all day.

Jack Cole: And nobody noticed it. It was not a matter of any discussion. It was just a bunch of guys that were there for a common purpose, and everybody took that seriously. So what I love about China, it's just fascinating. Karen Blair: And are the are the students different? Jack Cole: Oh, God yes. Karen Blair: How so?

Jack Cole: The Chinese people relate to their culture with great reverence. They relate to their government with great fear and trembling. They tend to stay in a groove that they're in, Jack Cole: because it's a safe place to be, and it's difficult to get them to deviate from what has been working successfully for them for about 6,000 years. Jack Cole: The concept of creativity is much respected and much admired and much misunderstood there. Jack Cole: To get them to do something different is like blowing rocks apart with dynamite. It's very, very difficult to move that, that culture’s been in place for 6,000 years. What they have there now is an emperor system. Only instead of the emperor, it's a joint committee of, what did they used to call them? Warlords?

Jack Cole: Each of the main characters in the Chinese government has certain industries that are under his or her control, and the whole place functions like an oligopoly. Jack Cole: Nobody really believes in communism anymore, but everybody knows the language that you speak in order to survive and prosper. Everybody knows that belonging to the party is the way to get promoted, and it's not easy to get a membership in the Communist Party. It's a difficult thing. Jack Cole: It's worse than Masons. There's a lot to it, so they're just… And they're real eager and open to what goes on here in the US. They have a high regard for us at the same time as they see some of the downsides of what we have going. Jack Cole: The relative openness and disregard for authority here is something that they find refreshing, so they're looking at going in this direction with their schooling and their culture at the same time as we're looking at going in that direction with our schooling and our culture.

Jack Cole: So it's just a fascinating place. It helps me think, and it's warm most of the year. Karen Blair: There you go. Karen Blair: You have had a varied experience, and you've been involved in education and teaching for a couple of decades. Karen Blair: 40 years. OK. And you certainly have been involved in teacher education on different continents.

Karen Blair: And this leads us to my very long question, which is, essentially, with all that experience, what do you see as the essential ingredients in a successful teacher education program? What needs to be there? Jack Cole: Close connection to what happens in schools. Karen Blair: OK. Jack Cole: Without the kind of doctrinaire…

Jack Cole: meta structures for thinking that guide what you see. I think we need to take a real look at what goes on in environments that we call learning. Jack Cole: We need to understand that the assumptions that are in place in learning situations are on all sides, so we have our so-called students trained to react in certain ways when we do certain things. Unconscious. Jack Cole: So when you're in a class and you ask the question, the behaviors you see are some of them lower their eyes if they don't want to answer, some of them do this when they don't want to answer. Some of them do direct eye contact, and those are the ones that you think maybe I can call on, maybe they’re there. Jack Cole: Those kinds of unconscious behaviors rule a lot of what happens in schools, and we need to take another look at what's really going on with our learners to see what kind of directions we can move them in. Teaching is a combination of acting,

Jack Cole: it's a combination of sales, Jack Cole: it's a combination of psychology, and it's a relationship type of a business. And I think we need to incorporate more of those components in what we do with the people we're putting out as teachers, so that they have a better chance to engage with folks who are becoming increasingly disaffected, Jack Cole: increasingly driven by assumptions that you need to do 27 activities to get into the right college, increasingly driven by the feeling that if they teach it to me in school, it's the stuff that I need to learn, Jack Cole: increasingly driven by the unexamined assumption that you're here this year, you're here next year, you're here the year following, when people don't really follow that kind of developmental course. We also need to map out the development of human beings from cradle to grave. We have Piaget, we have Maslow.

Jack Cole: We have Howard Gardner. We have a bunch of people that have taken looks at the landscape, but their generalizations break down very, very quickly when you get a group of people together and start interacting with them. Jack Cole: And we need to develop our tools for working with people so that they serve us better than they have in the past. I use excel for a grade book. I know where every one of my students happens to be at the end of every interaction. Jack Cole: I have their numbers stored and calculated automatically. I have their grade calculated automatically. I have their learning predilections. Jack Cole: I have their learning strategies. I have their life circumstances. I have their health conditions listed, so I know if I hear from Kim today, and she's not going to come, and it's day five and it's because she had mono for three days,

Jack Cole: they released her to come back, and her father died, so that's two more days she's going to be out, that she's not a goofball, Jack Cole: that she's a serious learner and I need to adjust my expectations to move her on through the teacher preparation curriculum so that she can be a good teacher rather than get the spotlight shined on her and have her identified as a loser because all of a sudden her life fell apart. Jack Cole: I think that we need to build in an element of knowing what change is, societally, organizationally, and in within a school, and to teach our students the tools that they can use in order to bring changes about in the structures in which they're embedded. There's a saying in the federal government. Jack Cole: Put a good person into a lousy system and the system wins every time. Yet we know from history that you can put six committed people into a system and they can make a change.

Jack Cole: Six parents brought us the Athey bill in Anne Arundel County. Led to statewide testing in reading and math in grades three, five and seven. Five parents. Jack Cole: They coordinated their efforts. It would take a minimum effort on the part of five teachers in a school to bring about the kind of changes in the school that would be more beneficial for both the little people and the big people involved. We need to teach our students that they are not the passive recipients of guidance from the powers that be, Jack Cole: that they are independent practitioners and responsible for bringing about the best learning environment that they possibly can. Jack Cole: And at the point where they don't think they can, they can do what I did, which is go somewhere else.

Jack Cole: The system did not crumble because I left Prince George’s County, all those men and women kept working real hard and all those kids kept learning. Didn't have me there to help them anymore, but I had other fish to fry, leaving a position in education isn't like dying. Jack Cole: Where do you think they go after five to seven years? Jack Cole: They leave. Where do they go? Wouldn't it be much nicer if they expected, after five to seven years, you'd be ready for something else? And oh, here are 60 other places that you can work with a degree and training in education where they want to have you, Jack Cole: because you're smart, you work. If they pay you, you do a good job,

Jack Cole: you can speak and think clearly, and you're generally positive and upbeat. Jack Cole: Teachers are a great find for training corporations, organizations, the military, libraries, community colleges, just cause you go into a high school for five years and then go somewhere else… It's not that we shot you or that you've died. It's that you have evolved into something else. Why not set that expectation at the beginning? Jack Cole: My two years in the classroom, my time in Detroit, my teaching in the prison when I was teaching there, all prepared me for other things. Jack Cole: Would I want to be a lifer teaching in the Maryland State correction system? Probably not. I would get bored after a brief period of time. I wouldn't be any good for them and they wouldn't be any good for me. Would I want to stay at a high school for 20 years? Some people the answer to that one is, yeah.

Jack Cole: If I'm here for 20 years, I have 20 different years and I get twenty kinds of better. Other people stay for 20 years. They have the first year, 20 times. They would be better off realizing that, Jack Cole: and doing some of that other time working for the Girl Scouts, training Scout leaders, working for a bank, training people that work in banks, working for the Marine Corps, helping people learn to throw hand grenades accurately or whatever it is that they do with them these days. So I think all of those components need to be pre-thought and built in, Jack Cole: And perhaps what has to happen is more outliers have to be brought into the system and get a listen. Jack Cole: Because if you're in a system for 10 years, what you know is what's in the system, and as good as that is, it's always better to bring in ideas from the outside that can be fused with what's already working, to create something that works a little bit better.

Karen Blair: Thank you. Jack Cole: Thank you. Karen Blair: Is there anything that we haven't talked about? Karen Blair: I see some notes. Have we kind of had an opportunity to…

Jack Cole: You asked the best questions I've ever had asked. Nobody in my life has ever asked me questions this good. Jack Cole: Do you know that? Jack Cole: Thank you. And you know what Lynn told me? Same thing. Jack Cole: You really did a beautiful job with this.

Karen Blair: I know we have that final question, which is, Karen Blair: and we sort of got into my word choice on this one. But you know I'm going to ask it, which is, what would you share? What would you say? Notice my careful word choice here. Karen Blair: To an individual at whatever age who is considering a career or considering working as a classroom teacher. Jack Cole: I give them a rubber fish.

Karen Blair: OK. Jack Cole: And I'd give him a copy of Professor Agassiz and the fish, like I do in my first course, Jack Cole: where a kid wants to learn entomology, goes to the number one naturalist in the century, guy named Louis Agassiz, and asks, and Agassiz hands him not a bug but a fish. And this story is about how this kid learns everything he possibly can about the fish, Jack Cole: and the end of the story is something that's been in front of him the whole time, but he hasn't seen, and that's what learning is, when you start hopping from the particular to the general.

Jack Cole: He discovers that vertebrates are bilaterally symmetrical. You've got a right hand, you’ve got a left hand. Jack Cole: And then I would say what you need to do is to learn every single detail about every single thing involved in this profession that you have chosen. Jack Cole: Money isn't the most important thing in the world in education, but it's a lot like oxygen. You need it to continue to exist. Jack Cole: Money doesn't make good education. Good teaching makes good education. You need to learn to do that. Half of what you know today is obsolete. The other half will go obsolete in five years. You need to learn how to keep refreshing your store of wisdom and knowledge. Learn how the system works so that you can participate in it.

Jack Cole: Learn how to create change so you can cause it to change. And look at the people that get spit out by the system and the things that happen to them. Jack Cole: Jonathan Livingston Seagull's son, guy named James Bach, wrote a book called The Buccaneer Scholar. Jack Cole: He got spit out by the system. He ended up Vice president of creativity at Microsoft and Vice President of Systems Design at Apple without a high school diploma. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, a lot of people that got spit out sideways by the systems we used to keep people moving along in our society, Jack Cole: have a lot to teach us about what it is that we can do differently, what it is that we can do to make life better for everybody,

Jack Cole: and what it is we can do for the people that are in those classrooms moving along one classroom a year, to help them blossom, Jack Cole: and become the kind of obnoxious, obstreperous, I want to do it this way, low regard for authority people that constitute good citizens of these United States. Jack Cole: Because we aren't in business to create good Germans. Jack Cole: We aren't in business to create good Chinese. If we were in business to create good Canadians, we'd probably be better off. But the fact of the matter is that what you need to do is learn to enjoy the creative, evolving,

Jack Cole: totally different side of things that are going to present themselves to you every single day. And if you can't enjoy doing it, go someplace else because this isn't going to be any fun. Jack Cole: And if it's not fun don't do it. Jack Cole: Something like that. Karen Blair: Thank you, Jack.

Jack Cole: Thank you. I appreciate being included. Karen Blair: You're welcome. Jack Cole: Being somewhat of an outlier. Karen Blair: We like outliers around here, at least some of us do.

Jack Cole: It's good to have a few lunatics running loose. Karen Blair: Absolutely, they're integral. Jack Cole: Because the way the systems are going… Jack Cole: Systems exist to perpetuate themselves, which is healthy, I mean, that's why we developed them, once we came out of the woods in the jungles, we put systems together so people would survive. That created civilization. So they exist to perpetuate themselves, and they exist to grow.

Jack Cole: And those are only healthy up to a point. Jack Cole: At some point they should all be dismembered and start afresh, and the ones we're enmeshed in are no different. Jack Cole: Public Ed is going to morph into a combination of places where people go for various purposes, and other places in industry and government and out in the community where people go to continue their learning, and to flourish as human beings. Jack Cole: That's inevitable. It's in process and there's not a darn thing anybody can do to stop it. And that's what we shall see over the next 100 years. And that's where I want to be.

Karen Blair: Great. Thanks. Jack Cole: Nice pedestal.