Tuesday, January 23, 2018

life after Noel

An article about how and why my opinions about Noel Pearson changed based on 2 years teaching at Djarragun College, in Far North Queensland.
Alice: “I don't want to go among mad people”
The cat: “You can't help that, we're all mad here. I'm mad. Your mad”
Alice: “How do you know that I'm mad”
The cat: “You must be or you wouldn't have come here”
The full story is here: Life After Noel (4000+ words)

2 comments:

Graham Wegner said...

Hi Bill,
Thank you for sharing your experiences online - my recent experiences in schools in the vicinity of your old stamping ground (I had been an Assistant Principal at Woodville Gardens School) remind me of the thinking and trialling of approaches to cater for our indigenous students. I recall our then Head of School talking about learning and applying lessons from the work of Chris Matthews and Noel Pearson but it seems that Pearson had already walked away from ideas that we were contemplating implementing. And then tonight I read an essay from Noel Person about the radical centre - could it just be that he tried to juggle too much change on the Australian landscape at once, and something had to give?
Graham

Bill Kerr said...

hi Graham,

Great to hear from you again!

Chris Matthew's ideas are important IMHO as is YuMi Deadly Maths, about which he had a hand in developing. ATSIMA is having another conference this year at Latrobe Uni. I attended their 2016 conference and became aware of how deadly YuMi Deadly at that time.

About Noel, I have read that essay about the radical centre and once again agree he is a great writer with important ideas. In my journey from being a strong Noel supporter transitioning to harsh critic I had to think deeply about that transition. What I've concluded is that you can have great insights, great ideas but good leadership requires much more than that. You have to educate your supporters to think deeply and be flexible enough to listen and try out tweaks and alternatives. Noel's intolerance on that point is where he has failed.

So, while it is true to say that Noel took on too much I don't see that as the main problem.

Cheers, Bill