This past week I was taking first aid (again).  I’ve been first aid qualified since I first did it in air cadets thirty three years ago and needed to be current to take my cyber-security team to the national finals in New Brunswick next month.  As we were wrapping up the course our instructor First aid instructor shared a Will Smith video about surrounding yourself with good people:

It’s a good piece of advice from a talented fellow who has made a lot of conscious decisions to nurture and grow opportunities across many genres; you’d think this is good advice that would apply to everyone, but for a lot of people building this kind of social network is nearly impossible.

I’ve been recently reviewing various situations that have happened to me through an aspie lens.  It does a lot to explain why I’ve run into the problems I have.  Knowing myself in this way earlier might have helped me understand why I was doing what I was doing and might have led to different outcomes.  Being aware of a diagnosis would also have helped others understand why I’m not acting in a way they consider normal.

Back in air cadets I went for my pilot’s license.  I did well at the training, commuting for the better part of three hours every Saturday to get myself down to where we met at the opposite end of Mississauga; commitment wasn’t a problem.  I ended up missing a single meeting due to a work conflict and even though I communicated this, the guy in charge took the opportunity to drop me from the application for the summer flying scholarship course, even though I had the highest score in powered flight that year.  I ended up despondent and frustrated by the process, hundreds of hours of volunteer effort disappeared in a moment.

That situation ended up ratcheting up an already awkward relationship with that officer and did much to prevent me from advancing through the ranks.  In an organization I’d spent thousands of hours volunteering for, and one that I thought might lead me into a career, I ended up peripheral and bitter.  As I got older I began taking opportunities to sabotage situations and undermine the command structure.  I didn’t do this out of a maliciousness, I did it out of a sense of disenfranchisement.  I was capable, I was dedicated and I was keen but I was dismissed as a kid they neither liked nor trusted because I didn’t fit into the hierarchy and act like everyone else.

In school at about the same time, I was hanging out with a bunch of kids who started to get into teen-related nonsense, from smoking to drugs and other darker experiments.  Rather than value emotional connections with people over the nonsense, as everyone else did, I simply walked away.  This wasn’t easy, and I was lonely, but it wasn’t in my nature to prioritize friendships first and follow those guys down the rabbit hole.

That approach to things has always made me socially peripheral even though I played team sports throughout my childhood.  In many cases I played isolated positions like goalie that further limited my ability to interact with team mates, but then that was never the point of playing for me, as it was with pretty much everyone else.  As an adult, I couldn’t hang on to hockey because so many adult teams are friendship based and I was never good at prioritizing that aspect of the game.  The mandatory after game beers in any sport seemed like an awkward social moment, but for many of the guys there it was the point of coming out.

In university I managed to alienate a professor I thought was one of the best I’d ever had.  He got us to aggressively question the foundations of what we were doing, but in a case of Aspergers gone too far, I ended up questioning the group think he had generated in the class room and in doing so, once again made myself a pariah. I’m a perennially bad joiner.

At work I’ve run into similarly problems.  When I moved out of the city and up to a rural small town school I immediately ran into complications.  Being a big, white guy, you’d think the all white, all Canadian, mono-cultural class I suddenly found myself in would have felt more comfortable than the multi-cultural classes I’d just left, but the opposite was true.  In the previous multi-cultural environment, everyone tended to fall back on a more rational approach to interaction because cultural norms couldn’t be assumed, but in a mono-cultural, rural classroom all sorts of really offensive (to only me apparently) norms were accepted.  Students would use terms like, “he jewed me out of five bucks”, and drop the ‘n’ word in class like a  password.  They were doing this to confirm cultural conformity with each other.  It made them feel secure and meant they all believed similar things, it drove me around the bend.

I ended up showing this senior English class the Canadian-written academy award winning film Crash, as a way to make them question their overt racism and discriminatory thinking.  It’s a challenging film, but then that was kind of the point.  It put an end to kids talking like that in my class, but it also got me removed from the school.

Once again, I’d failed to adopt social norms and conform to group-think and instead went after a moral absolute.  People really don’t like that.  What people like is when you reinforce their prejudices and act like they expect you to.  In this case, one of the students in the class was the daughter of a local church leader and he decided this would be an excellent excuse for a good old fashioned witch-hunt.  I got moved out of there by the school board before things got sillier.  I’m sure nothing has changed up there and everyone is still more than happy being racist red necks – and this is precisely my problem.

When our teacher’s union lost the plot I couldn’t help but make a stand based on principle rather than supporting the people in the organization no matter what.  I’m a staunch believer in unionism – left to their own devices, the rich would happily disenfranchise everyone and return us to the middle ages.  An argument could be made that I should have supported the union at all costs considering this ever-present threat to the middle class, but I don’t think that way.  When the union broke its own rules around fair voting practices and forced an illegal contract on our members, I fought it tooth and nail.  No one had to strike and members got a contract (albeit an illegal one that has since cost tax payer millions), shouldn’t I have encouraged that?  I could have complied and ingratiated myself to the powers that be and found myself rising up the hierarchy, but not doing that is precisely my problem.  Rising up hierarchies depends on conformity of thought and valuing relationships before principles.  This is the single reason why I don’t pursue leadership positions.

Back to Will Smith’s advice.  I’ve always found it hard to make friends, let alone find supporters who will stoke my fire, though I’ve never lacked for flames.  I’m driven and capable, but I find it impossible to put social expectation above rational and moral consideration.  An inability to do that means I never develop the deep levels of trust that other people lean on in their careers.

Yesterday at PD we were looking at White Ribbon scenarios and they all seem absurd to me.  Cases where teen age boys agree to isolate drunk girls to take advantage of them?  Evidently it’s a thing now in Toronto where groups of high school boys are convincing girls to perform sex acts for money.  If that’s what neuro-typical, socially focused people end up doing with those tight networks they develop, then I’m glad it’s beyond me, but then so is Will’s empowering social network.

Of course, there are precedents for aspies building great success, but in a lot of cases they don’t do it with a supportive social network, they do it through sheer malicious will.  I tend to fixate on creative and technical challenges, people domination isn’t in my wheelhouse.  Most business-successful aspies are fixated on that kind of dominance.

Finding people with complimentary skills sets is a way around this impasse.  The problem for an aspie is that the people who tend to be very good at social discourse find our lack of it trying and don’t associate with us.  In many cases, those are precisely the people who have attacked me socially.  It has been the rare socially skilled person who has been able to see past my lack of tact and recognize what lies beneath.  Finding a leader who stokes my fire rather than pouring water on my inabilities is a rarity.  I long to find people worthy of being loyal to, but they are vanishingly rare.  When I do find people like that, I’m the staunchest ally imaginable, as long as we fighting the good fight.

Looking for people to fan your flames is a difficult proposition at the best of times.  Without the deep at-all-costs social ties most people leverage, the aspie is left depending entirely on their technical skills to get anywhere.  Most people factor in trust when making hiring and promotional decisions.  That trust is usually based on their sense of how loyal a person is to them.  In almost any management decision this emotional bias means the technical aspie loses out to nepotism – something that has happened throughout my life:  don’t expect fair or skills based promotion, expect nepotism.  In a world where who you know always takes you further than what you know, this is perhaps the single largest disadvantage this aspie has faced.

NOTES:
Asperger’s inside the ASD spectrum: high functioning autism without specific titles.
A survival guide for people with Aspbergers
ASD and aging: peaks and valleys of youth and old age
Zuckerberg: coping with Aspbergers
ASD as flavour:  this kind of thinking gives me hope that my son won’t suffer the same prejudices that I have – perhaps he’ll even be given a chance to take Will’s advice and build that empowering social network.
An interesting piece of ASD media:  Roman J. Isreal Esq…

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Recently, my son was undergoing his IPRC process to enter high school and I’m suddenly privy to how parents experience this aspect of the public education system.  The parties at this meeting seemed to genuinely have my son’s best interests at heart, but there are unseen forces in the education system more interested in saving money than promoting pedagogy.


One such area is technology support for IEPed students.  The goal here is to provide digital tools that allow students with special needs to keep up with their class work.  In many cases this can mean something like a Chromebook, which is essentially a web browsing laptop.  I’m not a fan of Chromebooks, they are a corporate means of collecting users into a closed ecosystem.  The intent of Chromebooks is to pass any online experience through Google’s corporate lens (Chrome) and to keep people within that singular view in order to benefit what is very much a for-profit business.  

Google struggles to treat education and students in particular as anything other than a commodity because people’s internet attention is why Google is one of the richest companies in the world.  Google is very aggressive about maintaining its monopoly which is why I’m reticent about things like GAFE, evangelizing groups like Google Certified Teachers and the Chromebooks.


Google is a powerful tool, no doubt, but if it’s the only way you ever interact with digital technology then you aren’t particularly digitally fluent, any more than you could call yourself truly literate and knowledgeable if you only ever read one publisher’s books.


The default response from the school board when we began talking about replacing my son’s very old (he takes good care of it) laptop was to give him a Chromebook.  Since we only pay lip service to developing digital fluency in Ontario and graduate a large majority of digital illiterates, this seems like a cheap and easy way to hand out tech, but in this case it is a kid who is already digitally skilled and who intends to make computer technology his life’s work.  He is already competing in robotics competitions and building computers.  The courses he has signed up for in high school focus on digital engineering.  Giving him a Chromebook is like giving a carpenter a toy hammer and expecting them to frame a house.  It’s neither individually appropriate nor particularly useful.

I have been pushing to get him the tools that he needs to pursue his interests, but I’m speaking for the trees here as well as for my own son.  I teach computer technology and have a high preponderance of ASD students who have a great interest in and a neuro-atypical approach to technology that allows them to tackle it in interesting, unique but usually never time efficient ways.  Handing any of those students a Chromebook is like giving a mechanic a twelve millimeter wrench and then telling them to disassemble an engine with it, in an hour.


When he is learning electronics next year in grade 9, he’ll need to install Arduino on his computer and then use it to code circuits.  It’s free on a ‘proper’ computer running Windows, Linux or OSx, but Arduino can only be done on a Chromebook with a monthly fee (not covered by the school board).   If he wants to run RobotC for his robotics classes, he can’t do it on a Chromebook.   If he wants to run 3d modelling software?  Code in the IDE of his choice?  Run the plasma cutter software?  Sorry, none of those happen on a web browser.  If all we’re aiming to do is teach kids how to browse the internet like the consumers we want them to be and through a single, corporate lens, then we’re doing a great job pitching Chromebooks at them.



A Chromebook isn’t cheaper than a basic Windows laptop.  It is only a browser whereas the Windows PC can install a massive ecosystem of programs for a wide variety of purposes.  The only advantage is that the Chromebook is easier to manage.  Because you can’t install anything that isn’t a simplistic Chrome extension on it, you have less headaches with software conflicts; it does less, is easier to manage and does a great job of performing it’s primary function:  feeding the Google data mining machine with much needed fuel.  Pedagogy designed to expand digital fluency in our students isn’t the reason why Chromebooks are now ubiquitous.  Management of educational technology is easier if you drink the koolaid and get on the magic Google bus where you don’t have to worry about all that messy digital diversity and the complications of actually teaching students (and teachers) how technology works.  Google (and Apple, and Microsoft) are happy to usher your classroom in to a closed system for your own ease of you, learning how technology works be damned.

In discussing this issue with the school board I was told that my son doesn’t need a full laptop because the specialty classes that require that software will supply it in class.  His IEP specifies that he be given extra time to complete work, but that is impossible if the technology needed to do his class work is only available in a particular classroom.  How does that help him finish his work after school, or on a weekend?  It doesn’t help him if he is trying to do work during his GLE support period either because other students are using the in-class equipment while he is elsewhere.  There is no guaranty that the technology would be available at lunch or before or after school either, so the ‘what he needs will be in the classroom’ answer seems to be intentionally ignoring the extra time his IEP clearly states he needs.


Differentiation of assistive technology with an eye on customizing it to specific student needs is exactly what the IEP (INDIVIDUAL education plan) is supposed to be doing.  If we were going to begin to take digital fluency seriously, assistive digital technology that encourages a diverse digital ecosystem and renders a wider understanding of how technology works would be a great place to start, especially with digitally interested students.  


A Chromebook should be the last thing suggested.  This, or course, begs the question:  if Chromebooks aren’t any cheaper and don’t improve digital fluency, why are we using them at all?  Well, it makes our monopolistic corporate overlord, um, partner, happy while not being any cheaper and doing less, but it sure is easier to manage.  


Whoever this is a win for, it isn’t providing my son with the technology he needs to succeed.  It also puts pedagogy of promoting an understanding of the technology we’ve made an intrinsic part of our classrooms on the back foot.  As near as I can tell, other than feeding a corporate partnership and rolling out something so simple it can’t really break (or do much), there is little to recommend the Chromebook, especially as an assistive device for a student who will need things it can’t do in his classes next year.

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Like many social trends, hacking came into education late. Decades after the concept reached world wide understanding in technology, education took it up as a great leap forward and a way to catch up with the times, except everyone else has moved on, again.  WIRED recently published an article that demonstrates technology’s evolving relationship with the hacker ethos.  In questioning the value of hacking as a moral and useful way of thinking, this article raises some interesting questions about the many teachers who want to hack the classroom, or teach children the magic of hacking.

Honesty, ethics and scientific method?  Surely it’s much better to be a cool hacker in a classroom, right?

If, as Joi Ito suggests in that article, “the hacker archetype had found its highest articulation in one Donald Trump”, then perhaps it’s time for educators to rethink their hacking fandom.  At its roots hacking is an act of hubris designed to beat a system at all costs.  It is driven by pride and arrogance and the results always justify the means.  A successful hack is a forced, rushed, short-term result that only has value to its user.  Hackers don’t build things, they break things, twisting the intentions of designers and diverting shared resources for their own needs; hacking is an inherently self serving and destructive act.

…but I can hack a fix that will save us in this moment but will take weeks afterwards to undo or everything will fall apart – hacks have nothing to do with sustainable engineering.

In certain circumstances (say, Scotty on the Enterprise jury-rigging together some dilithium crystals to make the warp drive work and save everyone’s lives), a hack might be just what you need, but to base your personal knowledge on hacks, or worse, teach it to many people as curriculum, is madness.  Whenever someone hacks together a solution in a complex system, it weakens the system.  You might get what you want out of it in the short term, but capable people will need to come in afterwards and repair what you’ve done or else the system will eventually fail.


It might seem romantic and exciting to call hands on learning hacking, but it’s also very inaccurate, to the point of being damaging to the students learning it because it doesn’t teach them effective engineering.  It is akin to teaching accounting by showing students how to cook the books, or teaching a sport by showing students how to cheat to win it.  As they mention in the WIRED article, the Russian team’s hacking of the last Olympics shows a staggering lack of understanding; the point isn’t winning at all costs.


As a former IT technician and now technology teacher I’ve always wondered why I find the whole hacker thing so eye-rollingly tedious, but in retrospect it was because I was the one who had built the thing they broke, and then had to fix their ‘ingenious hack’ so that the whole thing would work again.  It’s difficult to see a hacker as some kind of genius when you build and service a complex hardware and software network that serves hundreds of people well only to watch it get broken to serve one selfish person.  Yet many educators hold up hacking as this magical process that lets you beat technology.  Perhaps that’s what’s at the bottom of this, and opportunity to attack the technology that so many people feel is enabling them to belittle themselves.

“There is a trend in software development away from the ‘hacker’ jury-­rigging into a mature field, where things are ‘proven’,”

Virgil Griffith

You don’t have to advocate for technological terrorism to get into teaching science & technology, you just need to spend some time understanding it.  It isn’t magic, it’s knowable and teachable.

That mature field is called engineering.  It doesn’t have the gung-ho and catchy mythology of hacking, but it’s what builds space shuttles, Internets and makes the rest of modern society possible.  It is a creative and powerful expression of human thought made tangible and something that everyone should have at least a passing experience in otherwise they are ignorant of how the Twenty-First Century works.


If you want to have Maker Spaces and encourage hands-on learning I’ll be the first to applaud the effort, but you don’t need to dirty the name of technical creation with hacking, because it has nothing to do with it.  You’re encouraging a cheating-to-a-solution-at-all-costs mentality when you use the term hacking.  Engineering is a collaborative act of creation with a result that is beneficial to many people.  The reason hacking isn’t is because it has little to do with creation and is usually motivated entirely by selfish need, that’s why it’s usually a solo effort.  Is that really what you want for your students?  Ruthless, deterministic and selfishly motivated hands-on learning?


As educators I think we can do a bit better than that.

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