Scylla and Charybdis

I came across this in a blog entry by Alfie Kohn the other day:

"Finger-wagging adults who exhort students to “do their best” sometimes don’t offer a persuasive reason for why a given task should be done at all, let alone well. And if the rejoinder is that it doesn’t matter if the assignment is just busywork because kids need to develop “good work habits” across the board, well, a reasonable person would wonder who stands to benefit when children are taught to work hard at anything that they’re assigned to do by someone with more power."

This is a great and dangerous idea, as it requires educators to defend the Scylla and Charybdis of "because I said so" and "learn no work harder." We see far too much of that in schools. I hope to replace that kind of thing in my classes (and maybe my own school some day) with "because you want to" and "true learning feels more like play than work."

The Figures of My Childhood

This post is written as part of my homework for the MIT Media Lab's MOOC, "Learning Creative Learning." For this assignment, we were asked to write a response to the essay,"The Gears of My Childhood," by Seymour Papert. It was the foreword to his 1980 book, Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas, which I keep hearing great things about.

When I think back to the prime intellectual and educational influences on my childhood, I come up with two things: reading and painting D&D figurines.

For whatever reason, my parents didn’t have a working TV in our house until I was 10 years old. This meant that my brother and I had to figure out other ways of occupying ourselves in all the odd little intervals during which our peers would have watched a TV show. We had our outlets—my best friend who lived right down the street was from a TV-centric family. I don’t even think they had a dining room table, as it would have been unnecessary for them. They had TV dinner tables. But because of the age difference between my brother and I (six years), we had different ideas about the best way to spend our time. Most often, we both chose reading. Looking back at my 5-10 year-old self, I would probably say that I was a prodigious reader. Thanks to the fact that I had nothing else to do, and parents who were readers themselves, and who didn’t feel the need to tell me what I should be reading, I read widely and curiously. I lost myself in books on a daily basis. I remember existing fully in the worlds that I read, losing hours to be with the Five Children and It, or searching for the Weirdstone of Brisingamen, or wandering with Taran. Being called to dinner five times because I just didn’t hear my mom calling me against the pull of a great story.

I suppose that this taught me a thing or two about imagination, about what it means to be invested in a story. It taught me to not be afraid of books, for sure. I still love books, and easily could spend hours in both libraries and bookstores—my wife and children usually have to drag me out of both places. It taught me that just sitting around reading is a great way to spend my time, and that one can almost always gain something from that pursuit. I also learned how to sit for hours on end reading a book, which came in very, very handy when I was in college and grad school, and still occasionally comes in handy when I have a stack of papers to grade.

When I was eight or so, my brother and his best friend discovered Dungeons and Dragons. As they started to play, they started to collect the little, lead figurines that made imagining one’s placement on a dungeon map more manageable. My brother and I both started to collect the figurines, and along with that came the process of painting their dull, gray skins with more lifelike colors. Because the average height of these armored warriors, mages, trolls, and skeletons was about two inches, this meant manipulating tiny brushes and many different colors of paints, both acrylyc and oil-based. The attention to detail necessary, as well as the planning needed to figure out how you wanted a character to look, gave me an appreciation of really trying to do something well because I wanted it to come out well. My parents didn’t care, though they gave praise when I painted a nice one. My brother was pretty wrapped up in his own painting, but not so much that he wouldn’t point out places I’d messed up. Those tiny, fantastical figures pushed my little fingers’ coordination past their capabilities, but my failures to pant accurately never made me want to quit, and they made the successes stand out like beacons, leading me to more complex and intricate ideas for the next figurine.

So, in short, the lessons I learned from the big influences in my childhood were to sit still, lose yourself in a story, and pay attention to detail. Not bad, in the long run.

Seeking relevance

For some number of years, I have assessed my students' understanding of the Enlightenment by having them write an essay on the question, "Are we Enlightened yet?" After reading several hundred versions of "no," and reading several hundred papers that followed very similar formats, I got bored.

This year, I asked students to analyze the relevance of the Enlightenment, and opened the doors to them to figure out how best to present that analysis. Two students wrote papers and some did oral presentations using both PowerPoint and Prezi. These were predictable responses. I also got a news/interview show, complete with outtakes; two Tumblrs (here's one of them); an analysis of articles from the front pages of major news websites; a rap(!); and, my favorite, a sock-puppet conversation between Rousseau and Hobbes. We sat on the floor to watch it while they performed behind a big piece of cardboard.

While a few of my students worried more about their project than gaining understanding of the Enlightenment, most of them got a great deal more out of this year's assessment than other students have gotten in the past. They were able to talk about the major thinkers by name, quote them, and then relate those old ideas to what is happening in the world around them. And they did all that in ways that kept their creativity flowing, that challenged them appropriately, and that amused and educated their classmates. This was not a great example of true Project-Based Learning, but it was a step in the right direction, and I will have more assignments like this in the future.

So what has prevented me from doing an assignment in this way in the past? Fear? Laziness? The need to have them write more five-paragraph essays? The desire to grade those essays?

None of those is a worthwhile reason to keep going with the status quo.

Because this all started with the Enlightenment, I'll end with a quote from Kant's excellent summary of the movement. "Enlightenment is man's release from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is man's inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this immaturity when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another."(Kant, "What Is Enlightenment?")

Have resolution and courage to try something different! Give your students the reins and go along for the ride--they can bring you to some pretty great places.

Lengthening the school year

There is a lot of buzz in the educational world today because of the news that some districts in five states will experiment with lengthening the amount of time students spend in school each year. Some commentators take the position that adding more time to a broken system is not the best answer to the country's educational woes. Supporters of the programs laud their flexibility, in that each participating district will be able to design exactly how the time gets added.

I have not heard mention, however, of a calendar change that would bring us out of the agricultural age for which our school year was designed and into the 21st century in which less than 2% of Americans are farmers. Sir Ken Robinson famously addressed that issue here.

So, knowing that

• we no longer need a summer vacation for all our farm children to help out;
• adolescent children's brains prune about 20% of their synaptic connections, thus making them forget what is not repeatedly used;
• we need to teach our students more in terms of both material and skills than our 20th-century forebears;
• there is general agreement that we are in need of radical educational restructuring,

Why aren't we discussing having a school calendar that uses the entire year?

Here's my proposal:

1. First term meets from January 15-April 15. Vacation from April 16-May 14.
2. Second term meets from May 15-August 15. Vacation from August 16-September 14
3. Third term meets from September 15-December 15. Vacation from December 16-January 14.

This would give us shorter vacations to enhance retention, provide more school days to enlarge our curricula, and create an updated school calendar that better fits with the times.