Alex the parrot, Elizabeth Bennet and the soul’s code « Birds fly, fish swim

May 27, 2009 by Steve Shann

As I read Maja Wilson’s Rethinking Rubrics and followed the discussion about this book on the English Companion Ning, I kept thinking about a growing divide amongst teachers around the question of what we’re meant to be doing in the classroom. Are we preparing kids for the next stage in their education, or is our business bigger than that? Maja is strongly of the second camp; we are teaching kids to write well, not to jump the next hurdle. The older I get, the more I see this divide as problematic and significant . I think this blog post is going to be about this divide. But, if so, it’s going to get there in a very roundabout way.

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In last weekend’s Canberra Times, Ian Warden wrote a scathing review of a book called Alex and Me: How a Scientist and a Parrot Discovered a Hidden World of Animal Intelligence and Formed a Deep Bond in the Process. Warden writes:

You do have to have a heart like a pebble not to be left teary by her story of a parrot whose last words to her were: “You be good. I love you”, but you need to have a mind like a souffle to admire her whole, schmaltzy, ultra-anthropomorphic book. It offers hardly a glimpse of Alex as a bird. Instead, he’s discussed throughout as a feathered toddler.

Alex the bird had some considerable attributes; he could speak, think deductively and communicate in some interesting ways. You Tube has video of Alex working with Dr Pepperberg. But, says Warden,

… it’s not obvious why this is of enormous consequence.
Pepperberg thinks that it’s of enormous consequence because we can no longer dismiss animals as mere brutes – but does any thinking person think of birds, say, as stupid things? Don’t we marvel at them and their mysteriousness? Nothing about them is fully understood yet. The complexity of their songs and shouts and of their social arrangements! Their bewildering feats of migration! Their sensational aerobatic abilities! Birds, as birds, inspire awe in thinking people.
…Pepperberg expresses no interest in Alex’s birdness and no appreciation of birds per se.

I loved this angry review. This is how I feel about some of what goes on in our classrooms, with children being made to perform unchildlike tasks, often to please a teacher, parroting back information for which they can see no use and to which they feel no connection.

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A couple of days ago, a much-valued Twitter colleague Karen LaBonte suggested that we have a look at the following YouTube video.

I found it deeply moving. As I watched those little faces live the song, I was catapulted back in time over 55 years ago when, as a very young child, the world was a place of heart-quickening wonder.

Birds as birds. Children as children.