I once had a student come to me and ask me what he had to do to get an A in my class.
"I'll do anything!" he said.
So I said, "Okay, run through that wall over there, and when you're done, run through this wall here."
Well, he tried. He bounced off each wall in a mock effort to do whatever had to be done to get an A.
So I said, "Well. Now I have to give you an F."
"Why?" he asked incredulously.
"Because the first lesson in the humanities is not to do stupid things just because someone in authority tells you to do them."
Many of us, children, adults, and some who fit neither category clearly, will soon be going back to school if we haven't already. This diary, therefore, is a collection of thoughts on the American theme of going back to school.
And, as always, BPI's policy is open enrollment. If you've learned something this week, you are invited to share it in a comment. Please do. We all benefit when we learn from each other.
Spitwad Sutras
The opening story above is related in Inchausti's Spitwad Sutras, an insightful and inspiring treatise on the many paths a beginning teacher may take in finding his or her way through the formative months and years of a (hopefully) lifelong profession.
This text is full of shiny gemstones:
Genius does what it must. Talent does what it can. Genius generates imperatives; talent avoids errors. Genius learns from its mistakes to make adjustments to accomplish sublime ends; talent learns from its mistakes how to trim its wings to deflect criticism.
When we look at students, we see through them into our pasts. When they look at us, they see through us into their futures. Both acts of imagination are fraught with inflation and distortion...very little of what takes place in the classroom takes place in the present.
You've got to learn to read your students like characters in a Chekhov play - not by their outward appearances, but by their emotional preoccupations. What is fascinating about them is not their ages or their times, not their clothes or their fads, but their feeling life - and that is something secret and often hidden, even from themselves.
I've been going through old files and articles I've read in the past to prepare for teaching a course at Teachers College this fall. One of the things I spent some time with in my review was the Spitwad Sutras text, even though it has almost nothing to do with the content of what I'll be teaching, it had everything to do with the spirit and style of how to teach it. One thing I wish was more conscious in the professional lives of teachers is exactly that, paying more conscious attention to the impact our teaching style and the spirit with which we go about our work has on our students and ourselves.
For that matter, what about the spirit and style with which students go about theirs?
Learning, and...Schooling
Where I go to school now, as did Mark Twain before us, we talk a lot about the difference between the learning that takes place in school and the learning that takes place in the parts of our lives outside of school. Why is it, for instance, that what we learn outside of school is so many times more interesting and just sticks with us better and longer than what we learn(ed) in school? And, why do schools so underestimate and undervalue the life-learning that every student brings with her into the school halls and rooms from outside of them?
This concept of stickiness may have something to do with it.
A couple of brothers wrote a book about it, even. Their thesis is that there are a few traits that make an idea especially sticky. They are:
- Simple
- Unexpected
- Concrete
- Credible
- Emotional
- Story
There may be more to some sticky ideas, and less to others (personally, I disagree with "concrete," knowing what I do about metaphor and analogy and how the human brain learns by employing them), but this is an interesting way to define what makes some things we learn more salient to us than others. If we recast this list in terms of frames, as we've discussed them in Morning Features past, I think we may be looking at something of the same theory, just explained differently. Frames in Lakoff's theory help explain points of view, stickiness in this theory help explain why those points of view can be particularly compelling and hard to let go of...
Empathy
Every teacher was also once a student. The really good teachers continue to be. Always learning new ways to better teach their content, and learning more of that content to begin with.
Even better teachers remember what it was like to learn what they teach the first time through. This empowers them to take the perspective of their own students, if not understanding, at least empathizing with them in their experience of what learning might be like in their own classroom(s). Many of us operate from deficit motivations, the desire to do something better than had been done before, or to provide a better experience for someone else than we had experienced ourselves in a similar situation in our own youth. But, just because we think we've found a better way to do something than someone we think did it poorly before us never means we're doing it the best way possible for the people in front of us in the moment. To be constantly asking, "What works best for this student?" or "How do I best teach this to 32 individuals rather than 1 group?" is exhausting, but where good teachers strive to be. Constantly asking such questions over, and over again. Every day. Every year.
Asking such questions I've realized that teaching is never perfect. It can't be. There are too many variables and uncertainties.
But, if you are sincere, honest, thoughtful, and genuine, then things go better both when they work and when they don't, than if you're perceived as insincere, dishonest, thoughtless, and fake.
Independence
One of the hardest things for many of my students to understand is the concept of being an independent learner. Learning independently of what a textbook delivers as gospel, or independently of the authority or approval of a teacher. This is especially true of students in classes where a teacher takes it upon himself or herself to be autocratic, to position themselves as the only authority to which their students are to be held accountable. Why do we teach students that all authority over their learning exists externally to them? Why doesn't our system work more to instill a rigorous internal sense of self-authority in young learners?
There are many, many difficulties exacerbated by such a teacher in the minds and lives of sensitive or struggling students. Students who do well in such classes don't seem to mind as much, in my experience.
But, when faced with the question, "What can I do in Mr. Whoever's class, Mr. C.? My questions are ignored or dismissed, when I ask for extra help I'm just given extra problems to do from the textbook, and I've never felt so dumb in my life!" I usually offer 3 thoughts. I can't vouch for their quality, YMMV, but I've never had anyone ask for their money back:
- You are not dumb. Never give a teacher the power to make you feel dumb. Some may try. Don't help them by giving in to that feeling. Resist it.
- Instead, what you are feeling is the sense of being limited. Education should remove limits. True education expands your horizons and your sense of what is possible. You are not indentured to teachers whose style and spirit are the opposite of those.
- However, you may be stuck with that person for a full school year. Don't blind yourself to the tasks at hand and the solutions for achieving them by becoming self-absorbed in your frustration and anger. Instead, take increased responsibility for your own learning. Know that the subject you are learning and the person teaching it are two different things. Don't let your dislike of or mismatch with the teacher influence, change, or depress your relationship with the subject. The same material taught by someone you have a better fit with could just as easily become your favorite subject. Find other ways to learn it. Work around the obstacles and limitations in your path. Re-center authority for your own learning in yourself. Own it. Become your own best advocate.
In other words, if you need to learn something that is neither simple nor unexpected, has no sense of story to it, and is unemotional, well, you as a learner can provide those things for yourself if you're not receiving them from someone else. You just have to know that they help and then take it upon yourself to do something with them. Like we do with so many things that we learn outside of school.
Authority
For those who want to learn, the obstacle can often be the authority of those who teach. - Erasmus
We can submit ourselves so wholly to the authority of others that we forget our own powers of agency, independence, and authority. There are work-arounds. Some may be more difficult, time-consuming, and resource-burning than we want them to be. But compared to relinquishing agency, independence, and self-possession, difficult work-arounds are still a bargain.
I took college statistics and failed it. The first course I had failed in more than 25 years, and I had taken dozens and dozens in between. I retook it. To prepare for the 2nd time, I went to 3 different big-box bookstores and took notes on each statistics book they carried. I flipped their pages. I looked at their graphics. I read their language to see how it compared to what I had been taught and failed to master the first time through. I looked online at other statistics professors' reading lists and student suggestions for texts, workbooks, and supplements. I bought 4 textbooks on my own, and one workbook. I worked through them, matching their chapters and problems to the ones being presented in class. I learned statistics from those books and from talking through problems with my classmates, in person and on the web. I intentionally retook the course with the same professor. I got a B+ the second time.
The Spark/Cliff Notes Version
Be curious. Embrace uncertainty. Appreciate ambiguity. Trust yourself but know your limits. Work hard to expand them, never accept them, especially when they are put on you by someone else. Pursue your thoughts outwards, into the world. Learn something. Act on what you learn, even if that action is simply sharing what you've learned with someone else. Strive to become better tomorrow than you were today.
These things are education. And, quite possibly, more-so than any standardized bubble test you'll ever be likely to take or have taken. Unfortunately, the bubble tests are required. Curiosity, uncertainty, comfort in ambiguity, self-examination, and engagement with your community are all recommended.
I encourage each of us to think of the recommended as required, and the required as the temporarily necessary. If we do this, the bubbles will take care of themselves, and so will we. And we will be more likely to take care of each other, too.
Good luck to you this year, wherever you are and whatever you're about to learn.
TWLTW
- Economic activity is depressed, on average, $800 million on Fridays the 13th. Did you avoid doing anything this past Friday that you normally would have done, or spent money on?
- Some new quotes (well, new to me, at least):
Mankind is always advancing, and man always remains the same. -Goethe
Saying what we think gives us a wider conversational range than saying what we know.
- Cullen Hightower
Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.
- Marie Curie
If I have the belief that I can do it, I will surely acquire the capacity to do it, even if I may not have it at the beginning. -Mahatma Gandhi
Promise me you'll always remember: You're braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think. -Christopher Robin to Pooh
- And vocab...
- xenodochial - "friendly to strangers." From here
- Phlebotinum - "the magical substance that may be rubbed on almost anything to cause an effect needed by a plot." (For the writers in the room this morning, this might be fun to check out...)
- Words - A Radio Lab special on life with, and without words. Radio Lab is produced locally here in NYC, and is consistently one of the highest quality science-radio shows I have every found. So, while not a new vocabulary word in itself, this report on all vocabulary certainly has me thinking about it days after having heard it.
- Neat American flag sculptures from a Viet Nam vet who merges 200 year old farm wood and discarded computer parts into some really nerd-tastic and simultaneously down-homey patriotic coolness. For the techies amongst us, may be worth a peak just to see some neat ideas in terms of reuse/recycling of tech and art.
- Attractions worth your attention at Swedish campgrounds are marked with a symbol that is also a famous part of Apple keyboards since the early days. (El-Steverino didn't want Apple's apple to get overused.) Other computer symbols and their origin stories are available here.
- Spiderman, Spiderman, does whatever a spider can...will hit Broadway...4 days before Christmas, 2010? After being delayed for nearly a year, the opening date of the Julie Taymor, Bono, and The Edge musical is now set for Dec. 21st, 2010. Rehearsals begin this week. At $50 million, it may be the biggest Broadway musical ever produced. Running costs may exceed $1 million per week for cast, crew, and special effects.Most Broadway hits make between $500,000 and $1 million per week, with 6 or 7 shows regularly making more than that. Julie Taymor's most famous production, The Lion King, has more than $713,000,000 and is still going strong.
What Did You Learn This Week?