Tim King's homepage with images and writing about technology, education, visual art and motorcycles!
Author: Timothy King
An art student who became a millwright and then a computer technician before going back to school for English & philosophy degrees. Now a computer engineering teacher, digital creative and avid motorbike rider. Neuro-atypical thinker on the ASD spectrum. My students and I explore emerging digital technologies.
I’ve written about owning your digital self in previous posts, but how that ownership happens is a function of how capable you are of authoring it. Developing that authorship requires freedom of choice, you can’t make full use of any medium if you don’t have creative control.
I’m currently working toward my qualifications as a computer technology teacher, and this technical ability that allows for creative, deep use of technology is on my mind. The magic of being technically skilled is misunderstanding that I want to move past. Teaching technology means freeing up our access to it, and expecting anyone who wants to use it to be competent with it. 21st Century skills need to be as ubiquitous as literacy or numeracy skills.
When we are teaching writing, we don’t prescribe the type of writing tool or the type of paper. If a particular pen or type of paper encourages a student to write more, we’re overjoyed to use it. As soon as we can, we have students writing about their experiences using their own style of forming letters (within readability parameters). We encourage individualization of this complicated process in order to assist students in internalizing these complex skills; their ability to form letters is one of the most unique things they do as a person.
What we do with edtech is the equivalent of only showing students cards with words on them and then declaring them literate when they can string together a sentence of words. We don’t allow them to personalize their learning, and so make it impersonal, simplistic and ultimately forgettable.
A school computer is about as inflexible and impersonal as a computer can be made to be. If we’re going to recognize 21st Century learning as complex, inter-related skill sets that need to be nurtured and developed over time (like literacy itself), then we need to look at how we are presenting digital learning opportunities in education.
Our students currently teach themselves 21st Century skills outside education. When they come to school they meet panicky (usually older) teachers and administrators who fear the magic box of lights and discourage any use of them that aren’t understandable parallels of familiar analogue activities (word processing/type writer, powerpoint/slide show, etc). Activities that don’t have a pre-digital analogue are morally wrong / intellectually bankrupt / a waste of time… pick one and frown. Edtech is designed around this philosophy of belittling digital change, and ignoring the development of teaching in technology.
appears every time we open up IE, which forgets
all your settings when you log out again.. #edtechfail
If we want our students to be able to author their digital selves now and in the future, we MUST free up the technology and allow students to customize their digital experiences. The broken installation of Internet Explorer on my board computers (the only browser of choice) doesn’t cut it. Browser choice (complete with apps, mods and other personalization) makes all the difference in developing a skilled approach to accessing the internet. It should remember your customizations as well.
This flexibility needs to go deep into software. A student who has had access to multiple operating systems (Windows, OSx and Linux minimally) immediately has a better sense of how computers work because they are able to develop some perspective around how OSes make use of the hardware they are on, not to mention the software ecosystems each possess.
A truly agile edtech plan also breaks apart the hardware monotony found in every board. The minilab goes a long way toward addressing this while also addressing the software miasma. The only time in their lives they will ever be forced to use rows of identical desktops is in school (or a 20th Century factory). Preparing students for an IT environment that hasn’t existed for over a decade is positively backward looking
Educational technology is not about ease of administration for the board’s IT department, and it’s not about fear mongering about privacy that never existed, it’s about teaching students real, usable skills that will serve them in the future.
What got me on the Ninja as a first bike was listening to the engine. I was very rational about bike decisions prior to hearing that parallel twin purr. That it looked the way it did didn’t hurt either. I keep finding myself looking for reasons to take photos of it…
The Toronto Bike Show at the Direct Energy Centre at the CNE was once again a nice day out. What made it even better was that somehow managed to convince my highly educated, non-biking wife to join us, and she too had a great time. I’m glad she picked this show as her first. The TMS is a manufactures’ show case, so far fewer pirates and half naked girls and a much more professional presentation. Here are some pictures from the show…
The Honda NM4: a bizarre styling exercise that I could get into because it’s supposedly based on the bike from Akira… the seating position was so weird and cruisery that I shrugged and walked away. Would I like to see more anime themed bikes? You bet, but not if they are ergonomically set up like American cruisers. The more bikes I sit on, the more I prefer the good ‘ol standard riding position (every tall adventure bike I sat on was awesome) for long distance riding and the sport position for hard riding. Anything else isn’t for riding, it’s for preening.
Way to go Toronto Motorcycle Show! You got my wife out to a motorbike show! Why would you want her there? Well, she makes six figures, has two undergrad degrees and a Masters, has a huge social media presence and teaches other teachers how literacy and technology work. That Indian Motorcycles produced the beautifully modern and yet classical Scout and it caught her attention says good things for the future of the TMS and the Scout!
There are some bikes that just make you go all wobbly. The Suzuki Hayabusa is one of those for me. It also happens to be one of the few bikes out there that will get me to one of my bucket list items. That something this powerful also happens to fit me better than smaller bikes while looking so fantastic makes me think I’d rather be on a Hayabusa rocketing into the future than on the Honda NM4 pretending to.
The Ducati Scrambler. This bike is supposed to be designed for ‘hipsters‘. I’m not sure why preening pretty boys should get dibs on this lovely machine. The Scrambler is a light, Swiss-army knife of a bike that does what bikes used to do before marketing types decided what you should be doing with them and engineers started designing them only for niches. The Scrambler feels like a throwback to a time before marketing dictated riding, and I, a forty something bald guy, want to be considered for the ride!
The nearly weightless and astonishingly powerful Ducati Panigale 1299! It’s like putting on fantastic Italian shoes (I guess). Wow, what a machine!
Ducati Diavel… Ducati’s idea of a cruiser also appears to be my idea of a cruiser. This bike fit like a glove, and was stunning as well! I was surprised at how impactful Ducati was on me this time around. The Scrambler was magnetic, the Diavel was stunning and the Panigale was otherworldly! These jewel like machines deserve more attention from me.
The Triumph Speed Triple. What a beautiful machine! With Triumph dealers so far away, I’m not feeling able to make the leap to a manufacturer that represents my homeland so well, but I hope to one day!
Like the other big adventure bikes, The BMW GS fits a tall guy nicely. I’m hard pressed to find other bikes that feel as comfortable and capable as this kind of motorbike. The Suzuki V-Strom was also a mighty comfortable fit, as was the Kawasaki Versys.
We’re two hours in and the little guy is about done… the last bike I sat on, the BMW R9T. A beautifully put together bike that didn’t give me the same charge the Ducati Scrambler did. I also bumped into Glenn Roberts from Motorcycle Mojo and James Nixon from Cycle Canada. Glenn has a photographic memory of the hundreds of people he must talk to at these events, remembering the bike I rode from our last chat a year ago! The talk with James got into how photography isn’t the only way to graphically support a story in a magazine. It was nice to have a few minutes to chat with representatives from my two favourite Canadian motorcycle magazines. Once again, the Toronto Motorcycle Show was worth the 3 hour round trip down to Toronto. That it managed to be the focus of a great family day out and also managed to impress my new-to-bike-shows wife puts it in a special category of awesomeness. We’ll be back next year!
It used to be the desktop, but we’ve got more processing power than we know what to do with nowadays. The real bottleneck is internet access. I spent a frustrating day today in a public high school trying to fit an elephant of a live video feed through the doorway – it didn’t fit. If the school was empty, and the network dormant, it ran fine. Unfortunately, I had to share bandwidth with 1500 other people, facebook must go on.
All I needed was a 700kb/sec video feed to run continuously all day. I’ll blame the university for sending us an uncompressed, 640×480 monster of a feed. We could stream youtube or TEDtalks, but not the university live feed. The irony is it was one of the pre-eminent computer science universities in Canada, and they didn’t know how to feed it to us so we could follow it.
After doing backflips all morning trying to fix it, some awesome grade 12 students filled in the afternoon with some presentations on number theory, robotics and computers. It wasn’t a wasted day, but it’s hard to sell technology as a course of study when the guy teaching it can’t make it work.
I’d asked for a priority on the video feed over the 400 facebook accounts that were open, but apparently that’s impossible. I find this frustrating. I had no trouble prioritizing traffic or outright banning it when I was network admining, I’m not sure whether it’s a case of can’t or can’t be bothered. In either case, I’m at the end of a long day trying to make things work that simply won’t because the board won’t adjust bandwidth to need (it’s cheaper) and a university didn’t optimize it’s feed (it’s cheaper).
At the end of it, I got some grade 9s interested in robotics, and considering taking computers further on. I’m not sure that I got through to the half a dozen girls I convinced to come out. We don’t have a single female in grade 12 comp-sci or comp-eng, which I’d really like to fix.
I also wanted to backchannel the heck out of this. I introduced 90% of the students to twitter and showed them how universities use it during seminars, then the university didn’t use it at all, we were the only ones lighting up the hashtags or posting on the facebook page. I also tried running wallwisher.com. This thing could be brilliant. We had it running live on a wall through a projector. Alas, due to bandwidth restrictions, it crashed constantly and wouldn’t refresh at any time.
Until our school board starts taking traffic shaping seriously, the school network continues to be hijacked by facebook junkies and youtubers filling up the bandwidth with noise not remotely related to anything educational.
It’s been a long day watching technology not work.
With the ongoing frustrations with trying to run a 22 year old bike as my daily rider I’m thinking of rearranging things so that I have a more functional motorbike stable. At the moment I’ve got a KLX250 that I don’t throw a leg over very much and isn’t a popular choice with my pillion. I’ve also got the big old Yamaha project bike that isn’t getting any attention because I’m spending all my garage time working on the Concours. Rejigging things to have a more functional stable is on my mind. I miss having I.T. on at least one bike – having an onboard computer means the bike will self regulate and run more consistently. Being a computer teacher means I’m not really scared of digital tech either, so I’d welcome it back. The process might look like this: sell the KLX, get the XS1100 operational and sell it too, and sell the little Yamaha my son has never ridden. In a perfect world I’d bring in about $4000 with those bikes. What I’d be looking for is a second bike that could do basic commuting duties including two-up, would run all the time, and could ride a wider range of roads than the Concours is comfortable on. As a road tool the Concours takes some beating (when it works). It’ll tour two up comfortably with lots of room for luggage, cover highway miles with ease and makes for a surprisingly agile back road weapon when riding alone. What it needs is a break from the demands of being an always on motorcycle (it’s twenty-two years old!). That always on motorcycle should be light with a fuel injected/modern engine. Of course the Ninja was those things, though it was a very road focused machine as well. Kawasaki makes the Versys, based on the same ER6 chassis as the Ninja but with an enduro riding position. With a few tweaks that bike could become the light-weight all-rounder I’m looking for. At only 180kg, the Versys 650 is a mighty light, very dependable bike. Where would I find a Versys? They’re about. There is a well cared for ’07, albeit with pretty high kilometres, for under three thousand over in Kitchener.Starting there I could build out an adventure Versys. There are a lot of people doing something similar…
We are bouncing over some astonishingly bad interstate in Northern Michigan on our way to Flint. Retread carcasses litter the side of the road, the only thing missing are clouds of flies above the rubber corpses.
The Super10, Concours and three riders ready for an adventure.
We crossed the border (my first border crossing on a bike!) in Sarnia at lunch time on a Wednesday. It amounted to less than five minutes of waiting in line and thirty seconds with the US border guard, who looked like he was working out when he got off shift so he could join us. “So, where are you guys headed?” “To Indianapolis for the MotoGP!” After running our passports he asks, “you guys excited?”
“It’s Indy!” “Have a great time guys.” … and then we were off onto the broken interstates of Michigan. I’ll never complain about Ontario roads again.
Just when we think the roads can’t get worse, the interstate drops down to one lane each way because they are beginning to pull it apart and resurface. It doesn’t matter though, we were in America, heading to Indy! My ten year old son, Max, is on the back of our loaded ’94 Kawasaki Concours which is chewing up the miles with ease. That bike is the best eight hundred bucks I’ve ever spent. We’re making the trip with my friend and colleague Jeff, who is a motorcycle-Jedi. He’s been riding for decades, has owned dozens of bikes, and has ridden all over North America. If you’re going on your first long trip, he’s the guy you want with you. We pull in for our first gas stop just outside of Flint and fill up for fourteen bucks (93¢ Canadian for 93 octane super unleaded). The Connie is getting 48 miles per gallon. Back on the road we turn south on 23 to miss Detroit and head toward Ann Arbor. Twenty-three looked like a county road on the map, but in real life it’s a multi-lane, limited access highway. We are making epic time as we ride past a mountain of garbage covered in sea gulls and military convoys of Humvees. We get to Ann Arbor, where we’d originally planned to stop for the day, at 2pm.
Concordia U’s beautiful trees
Sitting on the beautiful lawn at Concordia University we look further down the map, reconsidering where we might stop. It only takes a us a few minutes to get around Ann Arbor and onto 12, which will take as all the way across southern Michigan to Interstate 69.
Best Philly steak ever!
We stop for a late lunch and stumble across Smoke BBQ and the best Philly steak sandwich I’ve ever had. Topped up and ready to roll, we head out on 12 and are treated to a crop duster doing hammerhead turns and giving us a wave as he flies past us next to the road. We’re in the mid-west now! Out of population we find ourselves on winding roads through the Irish Hills. We thought the ride to Indy would be flat and straight but these are some nice riding roads. We emerge from the woods to an astonishing sight, the Michigan International Speedway is right on the side of the road! A security guard tells us you can sign in at the main office and they’ll let you have a look around. This place is enormous, a real cathedral of speed deep in the Irish Hills. We spend half an hour wandering around a tiny corner of the massive complex. That we stumbled across it and were happily invited in to have a look around has us all grinning like fools. It’s a good sign of things to come.
It’s like that dream you have of being at
work and suddenly realizing you’re naked
Back on the road time is ticking past 6pm and Max is getting tired on the back. We’ve been on the road since 8am, but we’ve pushed way further down the map than we intended to. We finally reach Coldwater on I69 and stop at a Comfort Inn with a warm pool and soft beds. Every biker we see is riding around in shorts, flip flops and no helmet, and it’s giving us culture shock. We go to the end of the street to get take out and try naked biking, but it gives us both the willies. Riding around without a helmet just seems crazy.
DAY 2
After a good breakfast at the hotel we’re bombing south on Interstate 69 and quickly find the Indiana border. Before Fort Wayne we strike off west into the country on Six and quickly discover that unless a town is on a truck route it has dried up and blown away. The scale of the fields of corn beggar belief and stretch to the horizon, but there are no people. Roads are closed and we find ourselves on gravel stretches looking for ways south. The Concours has no trouble with this, but Jeff’s Super Ténéré looks the part as he takes off down narrow dirt roads. We try stopping in several towns but they are all derelict; beautiful nineteenth century buildings with boards on the windows and no-one in sight. Corporate farms run remotely from headquarters thousands of miles away don’t need local people.
We finally stagger into North Manchester mid-afternoon. This is a university town and it’s still vibrant. A local directs us to Main View restaurant and we sit down for another excellent, non-conglomerate lunch. Zigzagging south and west we soon find ourselves on bigger roads feeding in to Indianapolis. We get into town at the beginning of rush hour, but this isn’t Toronto. Everything is moving even though the road is still patchy from recent rain (it missed us), and there is construction everywhere. Other than having to cut into a line to get on the ring road (made easy by Jeff dicing traffic like a pro), we have an easy time navigating and we’re feet up at the Hampton Inn by 4:30pm. A short walk away is Chef Mike’s Charcoal Grill which has the best grilled fish and steak imaginable, and a healthy list of craft beers; America isn’t all Bud Light and hamburgers. It was so good we went back again the next night.
DAY 3
It’s been pretty good so far, but it’s about to get spectacular. We’re off to the Indy Speedway (15 minutes away) early the next morning. We pull into line and are told to ride around to the back and park in lot 10. After working our way around the city-sized Indy complex we start looking for parking and keep getting waved through gates by security. We go down a ramp under ground and surface only to be directed onto the back straight of the Indy oval.
Ever ridden on the Indy oval on your bike? I have!
Jeff and I are both thinking we’ve been accidentally put in with the VIPs and are expecting to be caught at any second and kicked out, but I make the most of it and give it the beans. Nothing sounds better than the sound of your own engine howling off the retaining wall of a straight at Indianapolis! We’re directed to park and stand there in awe. A guy gives us a kick stand puck saying he doesn’t want us punching holes in his race track. Damn skippy. We walk over to another guy scanning tickets, expecting to get kicked out. He scans our general admission tickets (twenty bucks each – kids under 12 are free) and tells us to have a great time. Did that just happen? Yes, yes it did! We walk through the infield, which is a golf course, and discover a circus of motorcycle going on inside. The Moto3 bikes haven’t even started practice yet but all the manufacturers have set up pavilions and there is an Indy kids play area that has Max hopping up and down. Our general admission, twenty buck tickets give us access to the entire complex, from the front straight stands to hundreds of viewing areas around the infield. The only place we couldn’t go was the paddock area. We wander around in a daze. One moment we’re watching Moto3s buzz down the straight, amazed that their little 250cc single cylinders can take them over 160 mph before they hit the big corner at the end. The big, 1000cc MotoGP bikes come out next. Where the Moto3 bikes sound like (big) angry bees, the MotoGP bikes sound like 140 decibel tearing silk (the Hondas) or the most frantic, staccato v-twin imaginable (the Ducatis). Lastly the Moto2 bikes come out, their 650cc twins sound fantastic to my ringing ears with a turbine like howl. Lunch is an Indy dog and some fries, sitting in the near-empty stands in the shade. The place isn’t empty, there are people everywhere, but Indy is so huge that it swallows the crowds with ease. We spend the afternoon watching the bikes bend through the esses, standing on the grassy knoll on the edge of the golf course.
You can get within fifty feet of the bikes pretty much anywhere on the track and unobstructed views are easy to come by; photography is easy at Indy. We head back out to the bikes at about 3:30pm as the practice sessions are winding down. We’ve been here since 8:30am and we’re sun-baked, overwhelmed and ready for a rest. On the back straight are hundreds and hundreds of bikes, as far as the eye can see. We slowly motor past row after row of every imaginable motorcycle before ducking out through the underpass. We’re back at the hotel in minutes. Jeff and I end up passing out for an hour before having another great meal at Chef Mike’s. We’re not done yet with Indy motorcycle culture though.
Motorcycles on Meridian shows the breadth of motorcycle
culture in America – it isn’t all Harleys and leather.
Motorcycles on Meridian is a satellite event to MotoGP that brings in thousands of riders. We saddled up and rode into town about 8pm and were stunned to see so many bikes. From guys who look like pilots riding on Goldwings to lost souls who look like they are just back from rehab, to lean sportsbike riders and everything in between, I was once again reminded that American motorcycling isn’t mono-cultural. Sure, the Motor Company pirate was well represented, but so was every other kind of motorcyclist. We did a slow pass through the middle of the chaos and then went for a walk. It was hot, humid and all the hotter for all the revving and showboating. I’ve never cottoned on to the look-at-me loud pipes and chrome thing that many bikers get excited about, and some of the stretched drag-strip like bikes looked virtually unrideable, but it takes all kinds. After a brief tour through the circus of LED lit v-twins and custom madness we had a cold drink and slipped out south to the highway. Tomorrow was the beginning of the long ride home.
DAY 4
The ride down had highlighted the agony that is the Concours’ stock seat. We stopped at Cycle Gear on the way out of town the next morning for a solution. They had gel seat pads on sale for forty bucks so I gave one a whirl. Max got himself a nice helmet with a tinted screen for sunny, highway riding. The service was great (as it generally was throughout our trip) and we practically tripped over the location on our way out of Indianapolis. The prices were also astonishing, especially when you aren’t paying 13% tax on everything, basically half what we would have paid for the same thing in Canada with less tax. Helmets seem to be especially cheap in a place where they aren’t a requirement. We made quick work of I69 north to Fort Wayne and were on the 24 heading toward Ohio before mid-day. Jeff wanted to try and make it home that day so we parted ways in Toledo. He took the I75 north to Detroit and was home by 7pm. Max and I headed north on 23 to Ann Arbor thinking to spend the night there before finishing on Sunday, but Ann Arbor was booked solid with a pipe-fitters convention (?) and the rooms left were over three hundred bucks a night. We pushed on and then got lost in the suburbs of Detroit (which are still surprisingly well kept) before finally stumbling into the Wyndham Garden hotel by the airport.
Like so much else in Detroit, the Wyndam Garden has the look of something that must have been super chic in sixties (it has an indoor forest!). It’s the kind of place James Bond might have stayed when he was Sean Connery, but now it’s run down and tired. People who went to Rome after the Empire fell must have seen something similar. I left Max in the room and ducked out for take out. Every store I went to had bullet proof glass and turnstiles between the customer and the clerk.
Day 5
The next morning we hit the road early. Max wanted to try the tunnel but we got there only to be told motorcycles weren’t allowed in. A sign would have been nice, but at least we got to see downtown Detroit on a quiet Sunday morning. My magic power kicked in at the Canadian border. Everyone else crossed in about ten minutes, but we waited twice that because we got the guard who wanted to chat with everyone. Soon enough we were bombing down the 401 toward home making excellent time. A couple of stops at ONroutes (which felt like time travel after a night in Detroit) later we were in Kitchener and winding our way down familiar country roads. We were home by 2pm. The Concours was faultless, returning mid-fifties miles per gallon on the highway and high forties everywhere else. It started at the touch of a button every time and showed me it could do the ton with two people in gear and all their luggage. The gel seat eased the pain but got incredibly hot, leaving me with heat rash and a scowl. A seat solution will happen before the next long ride, but there is little else I could do to make this wonderful machine any better.
The Concours has ridden on hallowed
ground. She wears it with pride.
If you don’t like crowds, the Indy GP is the one to go to. Indianapolis is enormous and easily swallows crowds of even one hundred and thirty two thousand. There is talk of cancelling the Indy round next year, but if it’s on I’m going to attend all three days. I think we can get within striking distance in one day, ride straight to the track on Friday, hotel in Indy Friday and Saturday and begin heading back after the race on Sunday, finishing the trip on Monday. After doing it once I know I can do it even better next time. After bombing down the Indy back straight once, I want to do it again! It only costs forty bucks to do a lap of the MotoGP circuit! That’ll be on the short list for next year along with a paddock pass so I can get Sam Lowes autograph. If you love bikes and live anywhere north-east in North America, you should give the IndyGP weekend in August a go, I promise you won’t be disappointed. The long ride through the mid-west is anything but boring and the hospitality is second to none. And when you get there you get to ride on the iconic Indianapolis Motor Speedway and experience the MotoGP circus in full swing, it really is unforgettable. NOTE: The Indy MotoGP is no more – glad we went when we did! I’m going to have to get more committed to riding to a MotoGP race if I want to do it again!
@banana29 got me thinking about the computer refresh going on at her school last week. We’re in the same process at my school.
In my case I’m the head of computers and trying to focus on keeping as many computers as possible in student hands. We waste a lot of machines at teacher desks to do online attendance and check email, work that could easily happen on an alternate, much cheaper and efficient device than a full desktop system, but even those changes would resolve into a desperate attempt to keep things the same.
I had a couple of my seniors do an inventory of the school. We have over 300 desktops. Each costs about $1500 when you factor in purchasing and insurance on them. We have close to half a million dollars of desktop computers in our building, and every year we squirm to keep as many as we can as we are refreshed down. If we were to drop the cost of those desktops, radically reduce the number of printers in the building (and the subsequent tens of thousands of dollars we spend each year on printing), and remove local server storage, we could easily produce over $500 for every staff member and student in the building; more than enough for a device per person, even if those devices aren’t attached to specific people. Some classes with Chromebooks, some with Windows, some with Macs, some on Linux, some tablets, some laptops, some BYOD. A startlingly wide ecosystem of technology that encourages broad familiarity with many digital tools.
We status quo our edtech because change is hard, and we’ve borrowed an educationally uncomplimentary business model of I.T.. We fight to keep antiquated desktops because many teachers barely know how to use a ready made lab, let alone what to do with a variety of hardware with various operating systems and software on them. With digital fluency removed from them by board I.T., many teachers have learned helplessness. Those that struggle against this forced ignorance often disappear into the cloud in order to avoid the stifling local computer environment… a choking environment that should be founded on learning, not on ease of management or paranoia.
I’d love to spring us free from the nineties corporate I.T. model we’ve been slavishly following and begin pushing widespread familiarity and fluency on digital tools of all shapes and sizes. I dream of an experimental, curiosity driven access to technology that encourages timely, relevant learning for our students.
I fear we’ll end up finishing another year still running Windows XP on five year old desktops with an increasingly irrelevant OSAPAC software image. I suspect I’m going to escape into the cloud again to escape that choking simplicity, all while playing the keep-the-desktop-game on the management side.
From a Zen Koan, anyone who has attempted to gain mastery in something has probably experienced this to some degree, but it doesn’t usually happen in the education system.
I always have my ear to the ground, waiting to hear from a student who wants something more than curriculum. On a good year I’m lucky to find one or two students who are looking for a career rather than a credit. I came across this saying the other week and it got me thinking about that hope I hold out for ready pupils. Teachers are paid to deliver curriculum whether students are ready or not (though the good ones try to minimize this friction); students are mandated to be there. The option to be formally uneducated isn’t available in Ontario nowadays, we’ve institutionalized education into a mandatory process. This regimented system reduces student readiness to engagement and throws the concept of patiently waiting for student readiness out the window. That patience suggests a process where student learning is the main focus. Have we lost the freedom to patiently wait for student readiness to the systemic efficiencies of regimented grading? That a teacher will appear when you need them to advance your learning is a wonderful thought. It suggests that teaching is implied in mastery, which isn’t the case nowadays. In a time before mastery was monetized, keeping it alive by passing on skills rather than maximizing personal income was a big part of mastery. Waiting on student readiness also places great value on the student, making their preparedness the priority in learning. Engagement isn’t an issue with the student who seeks a teacher. Perhaps the issue is that we’re buried in teachers nowadays.
That the teacher-student relationship has been subverted by the education system is old news. Historically, learning was an experience unique to each individual, usually prompted by innate skill and desire. Systematizing education might mean more people get educated, but not in with the same rigour and certainly not for the same reasons. Perhaps the most damaging aspect of systemic education is the externalization and abstraction of learning criteria. By setting standards and holding students to them we create a system that has measurable criteria for curriculum, teacher and standards effectiveness. We do this to create the appearance of academic credibility, so learning is not the focus of this kind of education, system integrity is. This modern approach to learning creates a strange distance in the classroom from learning which has led to such insightful comments as, “Those who can do, those who can’t teach.” When the Zen koan that kicked this off was written a thousand years ago people who taught did so from their own mastery and were driven to do it to keep their expertise alive. Students were driven to learn from a radical sense of self preservation; their learning was central to their lives and livelihood. Teaching wasn’t considered a skill in itself, but was an important tool to keep mastery alive. When we separate teaching from mastery, as helpful as that is for school systems to generate curriculum, qualify teachers and graduate students, it leads us to a strange place where teaching and learning have little to do personally with the people in the classroom. Education has only evolved into this odd system in the past two centuries. For the vast majority of human history education has been a bespoke experience, unique to the individual. It didn’t happen on a rigid timeline overseen by bureaucrats, and it often didn’t happen at all. When it did happen it was focused on mastery learning, which couldn’t happen until the student was ready for it. That kind of patience is missing from our classrooms and is one of the main reasons it feels so forced, and fake. Imagining that pre-industrial intensely personal world of learning from our perspective way up here in the regimented twenty-first Century is difficult, yet it is how human beings learned for millennia. In that long ago world many people were left behind, but for the few who were driven to achieve excellence the master would appear when needed.
The never ending tale of Concours carburetors continues. My most recent attempt was to check the fuel amounts in each bowl and then reinstall and test (I’m getting very quick at this). Once again the old Connie coughs and backfires and dies on throttle application. The removals and re-installations have upset the old connectors between the carbs, which have developed a gas leak, so the whole thing came off (again) and is now apart on the work bench (again).
I contacted the local Kawasaki dealer for parts last weekend, but they’ve been radio silent. The parts I need were easy enough to find, but maybe 22 year old carb bits aren’t sexy enough to warrant a timely reply. Maybe I should have ordered them online, in spite of a number of magazines lamenting people’s lack of support for local motorcycle dealers. Had I ordered them online they’d probably have been here by now. Instead I’m left wondering if I can even get these parts. The goal now is to take each carb apart, double check float depths and ensure all the internal jets and such are properly installed, then it’ll all go back together again with new connecting pieces and go back on the bike (again). With any luck I’ll get some sort of clue that I’m moving in the right direction. That’s been the most frustrating part of this process. I make changes and there is no change when I fire it up. Whatever the problem is, I haven’t come close to touching it yet. At least a fuel leak is an obvious and easy fix.
A timely article in 2019, but I originally wrote it in 2014: https://temkblog.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-end-of-public-education.html
What if public education was merely the result of the need
for factory workers in a newly industrialized society? What
if education has never been anything more than an
expression of economic need?
I was directed to this interview about capitalism and education by the wise woman of twitter. It always amazes me that intelligent people are able to see where society is going and can do nothing to avert the disaster. History is rife with intellectuals warning of impending doom, but the doom happens anyway because the weight of social expectation crushes any individual insight. You can find all sorts of people abolishing slavery before it finally turned into globalism and got hidden from sight in the third world. Slavery was abolished and re-instituted for centuries, and still exists today because it provides an economic advantage to the rich. If the rich can’t use you, then society is changed to suit. What is worrying about that article (which you really should read) is that the moneyed class no longer has need of a large swath of society. If the public education system was created to support industrialization, it’s about to lose that support as human capital becomes worthless. “as automation and globalization renders whole swaths of the labour force useless to capital. .. From the perspective of capital, an ever-increasing portion of the population is no longer seen as a resource to be cultivated” I believe that public education is one of the most powerful things we’ve ever created as a species. It leverages more of our population to maximize their potential than anything else we’ve come up with (yes, even democracy, capitalism or free markets). Even if it was slovenly economics that prompted it, the benefits of public education go well beyond making a few rich people richer. What’s worrying about that interview is that David Blacker has pretty much seen the future as it will unravel, though there is little we can do to stop the social momentum we carry. His description of schooling is sickeningly accurate: “in cities and other places, my argument is not that schools are going to dry up and blow away, that we will stop having things called schools. In fact, we might have quite well-funded places called “schools.” Prisons are more expensive than schools. So I think even though the things are called schools, their internal nature is moving further away from citizenship goals, forget learning for its own sake. Those institutions, their level of funding may even increase. To do surveillance and warehousing… maintenance of a school-to-prison pipeline can be quite expensive. So I wouldn’t see an increase in funding of school systems and school employees and school buildings as any particular cause for optimism.”
This warehousing is already happening in Ontario education. The learning to eighteen laws enacted in Ontario in 2006 ensure that students are warehoused in schools until they are eighteen years old by placing punitive limitations on them to ensure compliance (parents and students can be charged for not attending school). An increasing amount of money is spent in Ontario education every year to try and cater to a vanishingly small percentage of students who would rather be elsewhere, but the warehouse is where they must stay. I’d suggest that the edutainment and student engagement push in education also caters to this kind of thinking. The real crush comes when governments decide to cut education even while expecting it to move from a training to a holding role. It’s a no win situation for educators who are stuck between having to cater to high needs students who don’t want to be students at all and a system that wants to cut their pay, demand extracurriculars and increase class sizes. It’s especially confusing when many teachers assume that their job is still one of teaching. The problem is that governments are treating schools more like prisons than they are schools, but when you’re trying to game an economy designed around the devaluation of human capital by forcing kids to stay in school, the increasingly worthless people (that would be all of us) are the ones who lose. The only political cost is the vilification of teachers, something many people in the general public are happy to do. In the meantime we’re all trapped in a neoliberal agenda with no way out (unless you’re Iceland). We’re not even arguing about the same thing any more, education isn’t about teaching people or training them for jobs, it’s about storing all that now worthless human capital. If we accept that then the attack on teaching as a professional activity suddenly makes a very different kind of sense.
ative control.
