Timothy King – Page 6 – Mechanical Sympathy

Drivetest: Everything That’s Wrong with Ontario

When I think back to the late ’80s (the last time I had to involve myself in driver testing), I recall reasonable wait times, full time employees invested in what they were doing and a general sense of competence. I left with my driver’s license feeling like my time wasn’t wasted and the people there knew what they were doing.

The lost souls trapped in the beige, fluorescent lit hell that
is Ontario’s Drivetest Centre. I got in trouble for taking
this picture, I hope you like it.

Since going back for my motorcycle license in 2013 I’ve had to attend Drivetest Centres several times and each one has been worse than the last. The stone eyed ‘funployees’ of Drivetest struggle to handle massive wait times and angry citizens whose time doesn’t seem to matter at all.

While waiting for more than ninety minutes yesterday in an overcrowded holding area I looked up Drivetest and discovered a poster child for why Ontario is failing like it is.

Up until 2003 Driver training was handled by MoT employees. These would have been unionized, government workers who make enough money to pay a mortgage and tended to stick around, meaning they have a vested interest in what they’re doing. In 2003 Mike Harris (aka: ass-clown of the century) decided to privatize driver training in Ontario (because the mess they made giving away the 407 wasn’t enough).

In a matter of months hundreds of full time employees were laid off in the name of efficiency. At the time the six week waiting list to get a license was considered proof of government incompetence and the private sector would come to our rescue! The current backlog is over sixteen weeks. Feeling that private efficiency yet?

At the Drivecentre yesterday I heard one of the employees say that they have a lot of people away on vacation so they are short handed at the busiest time of the year. Another came back after taking only 10 minutes for lunch. While reveling in this Kafkaesque corporate efficiency I thought I’d look up who we pay millions to now for driver testing.

Privatization seems to feed into globalization. Just as he sold off the 407 for a fraction of what it’s worth to a Spanish company, so Harris sold off driver training to another overseas firm, in this case Serco, a billion dollar a year multi-national out of the UK. Their spiel on the Drivetest website is exactly the sort of MBA drivel that makes me sick in my mouth:

Positive change and continuous improvement! All’s good in corporate speak fun-land! Based globally? That sounds tricky.

Ah, the countless possibilities. Fortunately, thanks to Serco’s crap-tastic personnel management I had a lot of time to consider countless possibilities. The Ontario Government is supposed to oversee the efficiency of this subcontract, but like most privatization they simply turn away from what IS the role of government and takes no responsibility for what has been and continues to be an out and out disaster.

You’d think it would be fairly easy to make licensing a zero-sum game. You charge for licenses whatever it takes to cover the cost of licensing and you keep that money in Ontario instead of shipping off millions of dollars overseas. You then offer bonuses based on accident rates of new drivers and the wait times in Drivetest Centres. The lower the rates and better the wait times, the better the bonus. Or… you could just give it all away to an off-shore concern that couldn’t give a damn about Ontario citizens, their safety, or their time, but sure knows a lot about business.

Meanwhile, we’re all sitting here wondering why Ontario is in the biggest financial mess in its history. Efficiency doesn’t mean off-loading responsibility and doing things cheaply unless you’re in the private sector, then that can be your reason for being. Efficiency and cheapness are not the same thing, though the private sector and conservatives often confuse the two.

Get your finger out Ontario. Stop off-loading important government services to incompetent multi-nationals and keep our money in-province! Fix this!

LINKS

The Dark Side of Privatization
Who we’re paying to administer Ontario Driver Training
Serco quality
We should farm everything out to these guys!
Actually, just do a google-news search of Serco and revel in the excellence

The real costs of privatizing hydro
Privatization: generally a really bad idea
The 407, The 407 again, The 407, it never ends, The 407, WTF?

For Whom The Bell Tolls

Once you’ve discovered riding a motorcycle, especially if you do it later in life as I have, you quickly come to realize that this isn’t something you’ll be able to do forever. Motorcycling is physically and mentally demanding and you’d be crazy to do it without your faculties intact. The thought of not being able to ride after discovering how freeing it is isn’t a comfortable one. If you get so decrepit that you can’t do the things you love, what’s the point of being here? Melissa Holbrook Pierson does a wonderful job of conveying that feeling in The Man Who Would Stop at Nothing. If you’re looking for a pensive, profound motorcycle themed read, that one will do it for you.

***

The other day my buddy Jeff was finally able to make a deal for an old BMW R100RT that has been sitting in a shed in the woods for over a decade. My son Max and I burned out of school on Friday afternoon and followed Jeff and his lovely wife up to their cottage on the shores of Lake Huron.

A neighbour five minutes down the road had purchased this BMW back in 1999 and had ridden it until 2005. On a cool September day eleven years ago he rode back to Kincardine from a conference in Peterborough and parked the bike, it hasn’t run since. Jeff discovered the bike a year ago while over there at a garage sale, but the old fellow didn’t want to part with it. There was hope that he’d eventually get it out, clean it up and feel the wind in his beard again. Jeff gently persisted, letting him know that if he ever did decide to sell it he had a buyer.

While over there getting the bike out of a shed hundreds of yards back in thick trees the owner told me, “I came to the realization that I’m not riding any bike, let alone this bike. When that happened I finally decided to let it go.” He’s still physically active even though that activity has landed him with metal pins where his bones used to be. Struggling against old age is a pointless exercise, but I was right there with him – I’ll be him in thirty years if I’m here at all. The real tragedy is that he’s as sharp as a whip; the mind is willing but the flesh is weak.

We were both enjoying the stories he was telling of how he went down to North Carolina to pick up the bike, and what it was like to bring it back across the border in the pre-internet age. This guy had always wanted a BMW but when he was younger he couldn’t afford it; this was his dream machine but it has been sitting in a shed as the seasons spin by outside, alone but for the sound of creeping rust. It turns out this Bimmer was Jeff’s dream machine as a young man as well, but you can’t buy a $3500 bike when you’re making six bucks an hour. You can when you’re older and it’s under a decade of grime though.

We were both so excited going over there to get this bike out of the woods, but Jeff had said the owner was having a hard time doing it and our excitement quickly turned to ambivalence and then reflection as we heard the story of how it ended up parked under the trees. While we struggled with conflicting feelings we were at least confident in the fact that we could bring this old machine back to the world. Machines can sometimes offer this kind of immortality.

If you never take any risks and lead a sedentary life of caution, being old is just another day like any of the others in your tedious, careful life. It makes me wonder what you hold up as your accomplishments if fear drives most of your decisions; I bet it’s nothing good. However, if you get out there and take risks and live, perhaps the memories of that life well lived, the chances you’ve taken and the adventures you’ve had, will make easing into old age less onerous, and perhaps even rewarding. To me motorcycles are a symbol of that belief in embracing risk. I hope anyone who has ever looked at me with a disapproving frown when it comes to riding is very comfortable in their old age; I imagine it looks like any other day in their beige lives.

Knowing me I’m going to be very bad at old age if I get there at all, but I’m trying to take care of that now, on two wheels.

If you’re looking at another clear eyed examination of death and our society’s inability to deal with it, check out: https://temkblog.blogspot.com/2020/06/a-psychologicalmetaphysical-one-two.html

Media Arts Lab 2.0

Redesigning media arts to create, not consume

http://prezi.com/9ow8h2urx1va/dream-media-arts-lab/

The Macs in our media arts lab are getting old and plastic. They can’t push the high-def video coming out of our latest cameras, so it’s time for a hardware upgrade, but it’s not just about the hardware.

One of the biggest problems we face in our static, desktop centred lab with ordered rows of imacs are the bad habits students fall back into. Because our lab is like every other lab in the school (factory like rows of desktops in Pink Floyd The Wallesque rows of conformity), students do what they usually do in a computer lab; they zone out and become passive media consumers. Passive TV viewing has evolved into passive computer use.

In a media arts class where they are supposed to be in a creative, active mind-space, this is an ongoing class management headache. Battling the Facebook zombies and youtube droolers becomes an ongoing headache in the typical computer lab, especially with the weakest students who tend to be the most non-experimental and habitual in their technology use.

I’ve looked at this from a typical school IT/lab point of view, advocating for a mini-lab concept that emphasizes diversified, mobile technology, but this is the media-arts angle.

Many of the ideas are similar, but the idea of mobile, adaptable media tools also spurred the realization that students in front of an online desktop act much the way that students in front of a television do; they become passive, unquestioning media consumers. In a media arts lab this is an ongoing crisis.

There is the culture of entertainment that most digital natives subscribe to. Computers with internet access are toys to be used for entertainment. Their habitual use of computers at home and throughout their school careers have only enforced these bad habits. Unfortunately, those habits extend to most educators too. From PD days where the presenter assumes that if you’re on a computer you’re not paying attention, to teachers booking labs to have a period off, computers aren’t considered anything other than an entertaining distraction by just about everyone.

We then get them into media arts where they are creating large amounts of digital media, and most of them are trapped in their bad habits and social expectations of technology. The fact that school related computer lab time is often unsupervised only adds to the problem.

Trying to break them out of that rut in a room with rows of desktops isn’t working. Time to free up the tech, and break the passivity.

Lunch in San Francisco

One Whacky Timeline:

12:46am our time: worst earthquake in Japanese history happens.

1:55am Fri Mar 11: woke up before the alarm and got ready. 3.5 hours of sleep, not bad.

2:30: On way with Roy by 2:30,on way to get Oliver

3:00: in Guelph, on our way to Pearson

4:00: at Terminal 1 meeting students and parents

4:30: printing tickets and checking luggage. No one has a phone because we’re all worried about horrific stories of cell phone charges from overseas trips

5:30: lined up in customs (no cell phones allowed anyway)

6:15: cleared customs with front end students, got food, went to the departure gate. The United Airlines floor manager is there. He had seen our group on the computer and had gotten out front, trying to find out if flights are still going in and how bad things are.

6:45: Our Narita plane is enroute to San Francisco (SFO) and will be ready to return when we land. We get on the Toronto to San Fran flight because of this.

9:30: Enroute, our (fantastic) flight attendant was on the radio to SFO, they confirmed that Narita is receiving flights, the damage is localized in the north.

Notes from the plane:

Rumours of an earthquake/tsunami in the ticket line – one agent said we were crazy to be taking kids into that, thought she was talking about the quake from a couple of days ago.

Through ticket line and into big customs line, cleared customs, got most expensive food ever and got to the San Francisco flight to see the CBC news images of the tsunami hitting North East Japan. Seemed terrible. Talked to the floor manager who was already there to intercept us knowing our final destination.

At 7am, Narita was open for flights and we were ok to board for the SanFran flight, so we did.

About 2 hours into the flight the attendant came up and told us that our plane wasn’t there. Unclear information about what’s happening and no access to news.

About an hour later, he came back to say our connecting plane made it out of Osaka and would be there for us in SanFran. It’s currently 11:47, about 4.5 hours into the first flight and above the Rockies. Currently we believe that Tokyo is open, Narita is open and we have a plane to take us there. Damage was mainly due to tsunami along the North East coast, and we are heading south after the Tokyo days at the beginning.

Will write again when we’re on the ground and know more. Will try to contact school with updated info (get on wireless in SFO).

12:50 (9:50local): We land in SFO and head over to the international gate immediately to find out what’s going on. The 747 is fueled and ready to go, Narita is receiving planes, no information whatsoever on damage in Tokyo, other than that the mass transit had been closed for several hours and is now operating again.

1:15 (10:15local): Finally get in touch with our tour group – they have been contacted by the board and we are being recalled. Students very disappointed, tears in the airport. We’re trying to balance keeping them on their feet and working out what we’re supposed to be doing now (we’re told we’re flying back, but no one at the airport knows anything about this).

1:45 (10:45local): We have a return flight in 2 hours. I call my wife, Alanna and my VP, Francis and get some clarity. Then I take some students to eat (the flight to SFO did not include a meal – the return flight didn’t either).

3:00 (12pm local): We’re at the departure gate of the return flight trying to get tickets printed. Computers aren’t cooperating, general confusion, but it finally gets worked out and we get the tickets.

4:00 (1pm local): we’re on the return flight getting ready to depart.

9:00pm: landing at Pearson. Clear customs immediately (unlike US customs, Canada customs actually hires enough people to process passengers in less than two hours).

9:30pm: parents pick up students and we stand there stunned.

Notes:

Watching the news Saturday morning, I have no doubt that Northern Japan around Sendai is a disaster. We weren’t going there, but many people think of Japan as one place. If you heard that there was severe flooding in Montreal, would you not fly to Toronto that day?

We tried to act on facts relevant to what we were doing and where we were going. I wish we’d have had more and earlier contact with the tour group, but we were trapped in US customs, surrounded by ABSOLUTELY NO CELL PHONES USE signs, for the better part of 2 hours right when we needed to be in contact with them. Had we been enjoying the efficiency of Canada customs, we probably would never have gotten on the first flight to SFO.

The lack of cell phones on the trip because of all the travel horror stories didn’t help. Don’t know that cell phone access would have helped, but we’re more likely to be able to do this than we are able to ask US customs at Pearson airport to actually respond to the busiest travel day of the year by opening up all of their stalls (less than half were open, the line went on for ever). Their indifference was staggering.

The news is sensational. Watching it the day after, the same pieces of the most exceptional footage. If I see one more stunned English teacher in Tokyo throwing around terms like “melt down” as if they know what they’re talking about, I’m going to pop. People keep saying 3 Mile Island or Cherynoble – two nuclear disasters caused by incompetence and poor management. What you’re seeing here is just how resilient and safe nuclear plants can be. These were hit by a freaking tsunami and one of the largest earthquakes in history, and they are contained, and any flooding and damage will be managed with Japanese efficiency. I really wish the news would stop skyping with wild eyed idiots with no background or knowledge of nuclear power generation and taking their sketchy opinions as fact, just because they live in Japan.

I suspect that in the next week, this will fall out of the 24 hour news cycle, when that happens no one will care any more. The nuclear plants are locked down and cooling, the damage up north is surreal, but it will get sorted out. I’ll be really surprised that if, in a week or two, Japan isn’t normalized and life in 95% of the country isn’t back to normal.

The field trip being recalled was the right move. You don’t bring other people’s children into such uncertainty. Ultimately, some students, many of whom hadn’t traveled internationally, got the chance to cross the continent, and return. Students were miserable, but perhaps learned the greatest life lesson: through no fault of your own, sometimes, circumstances will take from you what you most want. Learning how to deal with will be one of the most valuable things they ever learn.

Motorbike Magazine Mania

Since I’m in riding withdrawal I’ve been continuing my overdose on motorcycle media.

In one of the many magazines I’ve been picking up I came across the Overland Adventure Rally, which happens to be only about half an hour away from where I live. I won’t be participating on a Ninja, but I’m working on that.

The magazine picks have been many and varied. On the Canadian side I have picked up Inside Motorcycles and Canadian Biker.

IM is very race focused so I’ve been trying to use it to get a grip on what racing is offered/popular in Canada. I stumbled across the last MotoGP race of the year on SPEED and gave it a watch. Utter madness! But more entertaining than any F1 race I watched this season.

I’m still partial to British bike magazines and pick them up when I come across them. Motorcycle Sport & Leisure is written from older perspective but the mag holds up the quality end of British magazines. Few ads, lots of articles on a wide range of subjects, well written too.

BIKE magazine is a big one in the UK and I can see why. The writing is top notch, I was laughing out loud as I read one piece on all the ways an author has fallen off a motorcycle. I’d pick up Adventure Bike Rider again, but it was hard to find even when I was in the UK this summer. These hard to find British magazines may drive me to reading on a tablet just so I can get at them.

Cycle Canada is the only bike magazine I’ve gotten a subscription to so far, no regrets there.

The Future Coming Into Focus

This isn’t the end, it’s just a stage of evolution (an annoying one).

We quickly get used to the idea that things will always stay the same. For a while there it looked like we’d all be on desktop computers, then laptops became more common and wireless internet matured in response to it. With stable wireless data, computers shrank again and changed form into smartphones. We’re still living in the age of handheld touchscreens but that too is beginning to change, and I’ve been lucky enough to get a glimpse of what’s coming next.

Last year we got some SHSM funding to explore virtual reality in our software engineering class. Students quickly integrated the HTC Vive we got into their software engineering process and were able to turn out 3d environments that they could then explore and perfect in much higher resolution within the immersive VR space. This year we’ve joined Foundry10, a VR research group, and are participating in research into how students react to and assimilate VR into their learning (it’s a powerful tool).

There are moments when technology pivots rather than simply modifying an existing process, and VR feels like one of those moments. The way we design interfaces and software as a whole will have to evolve to meet the demands of VR. Repetitive models and game-play might work on a screen (that kind of game-play itself evolved out of the even more passive watching of television), but it doesn’t work in VR. Immersion demands better everything.

If you think desktops take up a lot of room in a class, you ain’t seen nothing yet! Don’t cross the tape when someone is immersed in VR!

I’ve only had the Vive up and running in the classroom for a couple of months, but hundreds of people have passed through it, experiencing VR for the first time, and their response never gets old. The sense of immersion can be quite profound. As you move your head you remain in the digital space, you can’t see past the edges of a screen. At this point your mind does a lot of the heavy lifting, placing you within the elsewhere that you find yourself in a way that no window-like monitor ever could. Students coming out of VR often look like they are awakening from a dream.

VR is the whole shebang, you’re somewhere else. With headphones and goggles on you might forget you’re in a classroom at all (students have). The Vive is heavy, and wired to a powerful desktop PC, so there are limits (now being addressed), but as a first step into a new form of media immersion it raises a lot of interesting questions. A student who reads about D-day might have a minor emotional response to a well written piece on it. That same student watching the opening scenes in Saving Private Ryan will have a more visceral response.

A student in a well made VR simulation of D-day might end up with a virtual form of PTSD. That kind of VR experience doesn’t exist yet, though developers are hard at it and I give them only a couple of years until we’ve re-jigged software development to catch up with the demands of VR. When that happens we will be able to experience history (or fiction) first hand in a visceral way.

The kind of immersion VR offers raises a lot of questions, but it also creates some unique learning opportunities. If you need to grasp 3d scientific principles, like, say, how elements bond in chemistry, a VR headset would be invaluable. If you want to grasp geological concepts in a real world (ie: 3d) context, then a VR headset can place you inside an earthquake. It’s in the softer disciplines, like history or literature, that opinion can creep in. VR, with its sense of immersion and involuntary emotional response, would make a powerful tool for indoctrination.

Google Glass was a jab into a future we weren’t ready for. Future augmented reality lenses will seamlessly allow us to flit between the real and the digital.

I, for one, am just happy to see the end of a touchscreen in everyone’s hands period of distraction. In 20 years people looking at smartphones will be a gag everyone laughs at (can you believe we did that?).

Immersive screens don’t just mean alternate realities, they also mean augmented realities. When we aren’t experiencing deep, emotionally powerful virtual experiences, we will be accessing digital information without taking our eyes off the world around us. A digital revolution that is about enhancement and powerful immersion is going to be an educational treasure trove.

Living in an Information Rich World

The other day I had a senior high school student who has been conditioned to be helpless say, “How am I supposed to know what aperture is? You’re supposed to teach us!” Aside from the fact that this student has evidently won photo competitions and got an 81% in grade 11 photography, I suggested that we have this thing now called the internet that has all sorts of information on it. I was genuinely frustrated at her unwillingness to resolve her own ignorance.

I may have been a bit curt, but this is an essential truth of our age: information is at hand. If you think education is about imparting information you’re about to become quite redundant. Education isn’t redundant, it’s more important than ever to prepare students for information that is no longer vetted by the forth estate for them. Unfortunately this isn’t a focus in education where bells still signal the start of ~~shifts~~, um, classes, and teachers can still be found talking the whole period long.

Digital access to information greatly emphasizes how out of touch the sage on the stage is nowadays. The teacher who talks for an hour straight giving their students facts has failed to realize that we no longer live in an information poor world. Instead of letting students access information pouring out of the technology that surrounds them, the sage teacher puts themselves in the middle of the class and drips information on them slowly, like water torture.

Assuming we have connectivity, something school boards aren’t very good at because they were never meant to be internet service providers (yet have taken on this task poorly), and assuming the people in the room have developed some degree of digital mastery, then information will fall to hand. Waiting for it to drip, drip, drip out of a teacher’s mouth or out of a static, out of date textbook shows a startling lack of awareness in how the world works nowadays.

The opportunity to collaborate and support each other is continuously available and learning reverts to the self-directed and driven activity it was before we institutionalized it. Questions of engagement quickly become irrelevant in a world where teachers aren’t vital because of facts they know. Those sages are going to have to find other ways to pamper their egos. If they aren’t expert learners themselves they will quickly find that they have no skill to share with students, and if you have no skills to teach you don’t serve much purpose in a world where any fact is a few keystrokes away.

There was a time when you needed a teacher to show you the way into hard to find information. Nowadays a good high speed internet connection has that information at your fingertips, assuming you know how to use it. Many teachers are still trying to be a font of information, even as the information revolution passes them by. The real losers in this aren’t the teachers struggling to keep things the way they were, but the students we’re graduating who have no idea how different the world on the other side of school actually is.

Texas Meandering & a Better Idea

While the ice-storm of certain doom forms outside, I’m watching Qatar qualifying and daydreaming about making a MotoGP race this year. The only one on my continent runs in a few weeks in Texas. This has me reviewing my Texas Ironbutt dreams.

I’d originally gone for an Ironbutt on the way down and a shorter finish up the next day. If I could push the limits I could condensify it even further (making it more excitingly possible!).

It’s just short of a twenty-four hour ride to Texas from here. An early wake-up Friday and I could do the Ironbutt to late Friday night (60mph avg for 17 hours 4am-9pm would do it). The last five hundred miles after an early wake up should get me to Austin on Saturday by about 2pm… just in time for qualifying. A good sleep Saturday night and then I’m at the race Sunday. It wraps up about 4pm. A good push to 10pm should put me a third of the way back, I could finish up the rest on Monday. In theory, only two days off work!

I could fly down and back if I was loaded, but a quick look around found a flight out of Detroit (4 hour drive away) leaving Friday at 10:30am and getting in to Austin just before 3pm. Flying out of the local airport meant layovers and a long time waiting.

I found a KTM 390 Duke to rent for the four days from Lone Star Moto Rentals. I think i could fit riding gear in carry on luggage, so there’d be no waiting for luggage and I could be in and out of the airports quickly enough. With the bike rental, hotels and flights I’d be looking at about $3000.

By comparison the ride down would be $1000 in hotels, $200 in gas and I wouldn’t be herded onto a plane at any point. Call me perverse but were I to go, I’d ride down.

Having said all that, I’d rather spend a thousand bucks on Racer5’s introductory track riding program. I could buy some quality race kit that’d do for years and still come in at less than this abbreviated weekend. It’d be nice to see the MotoGP boys doing their thing again, but short of an unlimited budget it doesn’t make much sense.

Big Digital Magic

I’m really enjoying teaching English again, especially the university bound group I’ve got. I don’t have to worry about explaining why they are there as I do in many computer-tech classes. The students come complete with their own resilience and competitive nature. When you’re not reduced to hand holding all the time you can get into concepts deeply and quickly.

An opening unit from the text is “Fire of the Human Spirit”. In it we look over Mandela’s inauguration Speech, a Susan Aglukark song and a June Callwood essay amongst other media, all of it pointing at the concept of FotHS.

After a few examples and some discussion we set up a wikispace where students each found a song that they believe described FotHS. They each made a wikipage on which they provided a link to the song, the lyrics, and a personal analysis of why this song exemplifies FotHS.

Because this class comes ready to play I tend to approach it as though I’m a participant in a hot group; I like to bring gifts to the group. In this case I knew that I could export the content out of the wikispace relatively easily. Since that text consisted only of the lyrics and student written analysis I thought it might be interesting to look at what we’d created from a group vocabulary usage point of view. What words found in the lyrics of 28 songs and accompanying student analysis point to our concept of Fire of the Human Spirit?

Exporting the wiki is a one click process. Once I had the text I had to do some magic to combine all the HTML pages into a single document. Wikispaces also exports to text but it takes the html coding with it, which made a mess. Google-docs didn’t seem to have the mojo I needed to combine multiple documents into a single one, but the Phantom Foxit PDF creator I had did. Once I had a pdf with all the text from twenty eight wikipages imported together I dumped it into the text window in Wordle and voila:

Katy Perry single-handedly got ‘oh’ in there! Looking at verb usage is interesting. Fire of the Human Spirit seems to demand action! The nouns are also enlightening when creating constellations of meaning around this concept. We’re going to use this class produced conglomeration of ideas to develop thesis around the concept next week.

As an aside, several English teachers turned their noses up at what we were doing. Apparently it’s widely believed that you can’t learn English in a digital context. I beg to differ. If we’re going to turn to media to teach English, I’d much rather it be personalized, self created media like this. The students themselves were surprised at how much depth something this simple offered. That they created it as a class seemed to produce a sense of satisfaction.

Here is a FotHS 2.0 with some common words removed to emphasize specific vocabulary:

Sympathetic Teachers

For the past couple of weeks my yoga instructor has been away so I’ve been learning with another teacher. I’ve been with the same instructor for about a year and I’ve gotten used to her ways. Our fill-in instructor is actually the studio owner and a more experienced teacher, but I’m used to what I’m used to and I’m finding the change challenging.

The differences in how each teaches got me thinking about how learning and the relationship it is based on works.

My regular instructor pushes herself and her students.
It works for me.

I’m the furthest thing from a yoga expert but I enjoy the process and I’ve gotten better at it in a year of practice. My regular instructor is very focused on form and pushing through physical barriers. Her own practice is flawless. Our current instructor is much more mentally focused, asking us to be mindful of what we’re doing and de-emphasizing the physical side of things (though I still find her classes very physically strenuous). Neither is right, but they are very different in how they demonstrate their mastery and what they focus their students on. I’ve enjoyed the change but I’ve bonded with my regular instructor and I’m looking forward to getting her back.

The personal nature of the relationship between a master and apprentice is based on choices by both. Masters tend to select for apprentices who they can work with, and vice-versa. Back in the day when apprentices were unable to select their masters this wasn’t the case, but nowadays you see this self-selection all the time. When a student finds a teacher they share a wavelength with they tend to latch on. Variety is the key to this selection process. I probably wouldn’t have stuck it out (yoga is hard work) if I hadn’t connected to the instructor’s approach enough to overcome the difficult early months.

Another philosophical thought from my regular instructor.
She wants you to develop quickly, find your limits and
then push through them. In that struggle is found yoga.

In my first year of university I asked my history TA how she knew what to focus on. She laughed and said it was all about the prof, why else would she be doing her Masters in Scottish history? That personal relationship is an important part of a student’s willingness to put up with the pain of learning a discipline.

In the education system you get the impression that this individualism is a bad thing. Teachers are encouraged to adopt whichever educational philosophy is in vogue and be ready to move on to the next one when the next book comes out. Most experienced teachers have learned to not get caught up in this kind of thinking (one of the key failures of professional development). It tends to be the game of educational leadership to push a school-wide vision of teaching in order to establish some kind of standard. Teacher assessment uses checklists and fill-in-the-blank templates based on the school system’s idea of an ideal teacher. This implies that there is only one way to teach properly which would kill any chance of a student finding a teacher who speaks to them, unless your students are as generic as your teachers. When the system assumes surrogacy for learning, human relationships are diminished and the ability to learn is compromised.

Ease of learning is another aspect of this problem. I like my yoga instructor because she doesn’t make it easy, she demands hard work but she’s quick to praise both the effort and the improvement that comes from it. Many students came and went but this only reinforced the success of the ones who stuck it out. This is the opposite of the everyone succeeds approach in the current education system. Learning is not easy, nor should it be, but that doesn’t mean a teacher should be cruel or dismissive, quite the opposite actually (watch Whiplash for a complex look at this idea). If learning is a challenge (and someone is trying to sell you something if they say it isn’t) then a teacher should offer an individualized and sympathetic means of accessing a discipline rather than making an already difficult task harder. Empathy is implicit in teaching, but especially so when it’s between a sympathetic student and teacher – their shared ideals allow them to tackle ever more complicated learning on the road to mastery. Not only is this an emotional support while dealing with difficulties, but it’s also an aid to communication. Much less needs to be explicitly stated when you’re working with someone you understand. I’d actually argue that mastery learning can’t happen without this relationship.

The concept of edutainment seems to have infected all levels of the education system. Fun, happy learning where the teacher must provide so much entertainment value that students don’t even feel like they’re learning (!) is the mantra of modern education. Expecting students to put up with difficult lessons and experience failure isn’t the way nowadays. The vast majority of the coddled students I deal with wouldn’t have come back after the first week in my yoga class.

Perhaps the gee-wiz, ‘learning is fun and easy’ philosophy of education is really another attempt to undermine the pivotal personal relationship between teacher and student. When students aren’t expected to overcome any difficulties and can’t fail you also don’t need to depend on the personal bond between teacher and student to encourage a student to withstand defeat, build resilience and eventually experience the kind of confidence that isn’t systemically assumed.

That muppet knows mastery learning! The modern education
version would be, “just show up (optional)
and we’ll get you a diploma.”

I was looking for a challenge when I started yoga. I was feeling stiff and old and I was willing to work at fixing it. Being dared by my instructor to push beyond the obvious discomfort I was feeling only worked because I respected her approach to the practice. The first time I found my toes again or got heels down in downward dog I was ecstatic. It took me months to get there.

Almost a year later I weigh 20lbs less, my flexibility is always improving and I find yoga much less painful than it once did. It wasn’t easy and I was tempted to quit a number of times. The day after often felt like I’d been ‘hit by the yoga truck‘. I was able to see improvement, but it happened slowly and sometimes I regressed. Trust and respect in my instructor is what got me through the urge to quit early. Why would my instructor spend all this time on her students who stick it out, pushing herself to demonstrate her practice in order to benefit us?

I’ve taken many aspects of my instructor’s practice and made it my own. Her practice is uniquely her’s, but as her student I’ve been able to closely observe and internalize various aspects of her practice as well as her overall philosophy in order to develop my own yoga. As a teacher my approach tends to be copied in part by like minded students (the incompatible ones aren’t even aware there is an approach, they think it’s all about facts). It’s thrilling for me to see a student tackle a difficult problem and see a bit of myself in it – it’s almost like I’m the parent of their practice.

I speak with the voices of the sympathetic teachers in my life, any good student does, but if we continue to push for a systematized version of teaching that de-emphasizes the human connections through which we develop resiliency and master challenging learning, we’ll end up with students who are unable to do anything other than exist within an ineffective education system.

We should be celebrating differences in teachers because they all speak to different students and allow a wide variety of learners to find their own way to mastery. The standardized, generic teacher who follows the lesson plan template using the educational philosophy of the moment is no teacher at all (though you sure could pay them less!), and they would be teaching to a standard student that doesn’t exist. Had I walked into that on my first night of yoga I would have walked out again.