My World View
As I approach my sixty-eighth year, describing my background is a bit more challenging than for younger students. I grew up in Nashville Tennessee in a middle-class Christian family. My life perspectives were not identifiable within a special group such as race, gender or religious division. There were plenty of professional females in my family, I knew and loved people of non-Christian religions, and I was unaware of race until I was almost twenty years old. Yes, I sang Jesus Loves the Little Children with its “red and yellow, black and white…” but my youthful mind never associated those colors with people. Most of us can’t remember the eye color or hair color of the last three people we met, and I was the same regarding race, sex, and religion. Yes, I knew the difference between girls and boys, but I had no concept of misogyny. All of the contemporary social issues of our day were outside of my child’s world. Today, I understand that all these divisions are taught to us by our ruling power structure to divide and control us. As early as 1667, our ruling class was changing English common law to create a black vs. white class from a Christian vs. Savage segregation (Takaki, 1993, p. 59). I believe I was blessed with a family that did not exhibit prejudice views in their daily lives and did not pass on such perspectives to their children.
I was taught to work for what I wanted and set goals for myself all along my life path. Politically, I was socially liberal and fiscally conservative at age twenty-one, and I could hold my own in debates based on logical arguments. I was a senior business manager for twenty-five years, retiring as President and Chief Operating Officer of a small automotive firm in Detroit. My businesses were profitable, and we managed our growth over long periods of time. I made money while being environmentally conscientious, and I was an equal opportunity employer before the term was coined. When I retired, I recommended a female Vice-President of Engineering as my replacement.
My worldview is but a fleeting opinion on issues related to life that I change in my mind on a daily basis. Changes manifest themselves as I learn and build constructs in my mind with every new piece of information. I have been a heathen and an angel, a scientist and a mystic, a power broker, and a humble man. I care about people and have hated them as well. Today, I focus on a few resilient perspectives, born of my science and my mind. I believe in God because science clearly proves a creator’s presence. Most scientists do not deny this presence, and I find most creator deniers have simply failed to study the subject seriously. I am a Christian of faith and believe that I must love my Lord and all people, as well as remain a humble man. For example, all of my suits, dress shirts, and ties are handmade by Paul Cicchini of Birmingham. However, I made a promise to myself about ten years ago to remain humble in dress and demeanor. Thus, you will not find me dressed in more than a casual polo shirt and slacks, save for an occasional funeral. Christianity sets forth many guidelines for my life, and I attempt to live within those parameters. As a citizen, I must respect the laws of the land, “render unto Caesar” (Mathews 22:21) and be mindful that sovereign authority is most often deceitful in its intent and direction. Humility, as commanded, does not suit me well to be a rebel for social justice. Thus, I must conduct my direction toward righteousness without anger and lawlessness. My search for the improvement of the human condition must come from articulated logic submitted into the public discourse. I love and respect my country and continue to peacefully work for its repair when it deviates from the pursuit of goodness into the evil one’s grasp.
A combination of Christian values drives my second career in education. I saw so many young people without math skills that I knew they were going to fall by the wayside in today’s technological society. Perhaps there was a time when a farm or a factory job was the destination of most young men and women, but those days are behind us. If you do not have skills in math and language, you are bound to a life of poverty. The desire to help my neighbor became a primary motivation. Second, was the realization that teachers cannot help their students unless they truly love the students and the students are aware of their teacher’s emotion. Love of my students became a second driving motivation. Love comes to a classroom in many ways, from respect to nurturing. Teachers who work without love are just going through the motions utilizing a set of practiced skills (Jardine, 1998, p. 5).
I was prepared to retrain to enhance my teaching skills, I repeated thirty-two hours of my undergraduate mathematics and began a pursuit of a master’s degree as I taught math. I was not prepared for the observation that so many math teachers are unable to teach their subject. The science fields allow teachers in the classroom without any exposure to the education discipline. I decided that I needed a master’s in education if I ever expected to be competent in the classroom. This new expectation would prove to be a huge transition for my worldview. I fell out of the sciences and into the arts. Today, I am reminded of Michael Serres as world events tore him from the path of a mathematician into the arms of philosophy (Serres, 2012). Today, I find myself with a dual life mission; to learn to be a professional teacher of mathematics and to uncover the problems in math curriculum that result in student failure.
As I teach, I discover student pitfalls that prevent them from top performance. An example of a pitfall might be failing to learn their multiplication tables in the third grade. To correct this situation, I need to know why the student did not learn the material. I find most students who lack this skill are still intellectually proficient. “You can remember seventy-five football plays, but you can’t multiply 7 times 4.” In this situation, I need a scholarly background in several research techniques and a deep understanding of epistemology to find answers. Yes, I can and have taught college freshmen their multiplication tables, but I am interested in how to curtail this situation in third-grade classrooms all over the world. Again, I find my life course following a positivist (Comte, 1884) approach to problem-solving and new direction discovery. If I can uncover the root cause (Keptner-Tregoe, 2015) of student failure, I can research the issue with my new found skills provided to me through my doctoral program. With these same skills, I can develop recommendations to make a problem manageable or perhaps eradicate the issue for all students.
My positivist approach to problem-solving will most likely drive my future research direction. It should be of no surprise to anyone who knows me, that I begin problem-solving from a pragmatic approach to research. I can apply Polya’s problem solving to everything (Polya, 1957). Just evaluate the data and give me the facts. Research methods of pragmatism and grounded theory will suit for most information; unfortunately, these methods fall short when I begin to examine why something happens within a student’s experience. I find that I need more tools in my toolkit, and phenomenology (Savin-Baden, 2013, p. 26) comes to mind when I want to know what the student was feeling in the third grade when presented with multiplication tables or in eighth grade when presented with letters in algebra problems. As Seidman said, “phenomenological review: provides access to the context of people’s behavior” (Seidman, 1998, p. 4). Summarizing my research approach tends to be a selection process depending on the information I need to know to accomplish a mission. The availability of so many approaches is like a big bonus package available for application as mission trails become foggy. I suspect that good research depends on good methods applied as required.
Comte, A. (1884). Testament. Paris.
Jardine, D. W. (1998). To Dwell with a Boundless Heart. NY: Peter Lang Publishing.
Kepner-Tregoe. (2015, March 18). Root Cause Analysis Process. Retrieved from Kepner-Tregoe: http://www.kepner-tregoe.com/consulting-services/root-cause-analysis/root-cause-analysis-process/
Polya, G. (1957). How to Solve It. New York: University Press.
Savin-Baden, M. M. (2013). Qualitative Research. N.Y.: Routledge.
Seidman, I. (1998). Interviewing as Qualitative Research. N.Y.: Teachers College Press.
Serres, M. (2012). Biogea. Minneapolis: Univocal.
Takaki, R. (1993). A Different Mirror. NY: Little Brown and Company.
Curmudgeon Fun 