Tim King's homepage with images and writing about technology, education, visual art and motorcycles!
With snow and cold all week it’s been a garage door closed situation, but the sun came out on the last day of the break and that full spectrum light likes to point out details for the camera. A little industrial art courtesy of Triumph and Kawasaki.
Old bikes tell stories:
from Blogger http://ift.tt/2n65wE9
via IFTTT
 |
| 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.
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.
As artificial intelligence continues to improve through both hardware and software engineering advances it’ll get to the point where it starts to overtake low functioning human beings. Then it’ll overtake average human beings. At some point it’ll overtake the smartest human beings on the planet. Ray Kurzweil called this point the technological singularity. It’s the point where we won’t know why machine intelligence is doing what it’s doing any more than an ant would understand why the humans are having a picnic.
You can read up on GPT-3, the latest step forward in A.I. here, or here, but I’m curious about it from an educational point of view. GPT-3 is the latest iteration of OpenAI‘s research into text prediction machine intelligence. Version three isn’t that architecturally different from GPT-2, but it’s much, much bigger, by many orders of magnitude. This brute force approach allows it to adapt and respond much closer to a human level of response. It’s so good it surprises people.
What does this mean in education? GPT-3 based online systems are going to start appearing in the next year. These systems will take a few suggestions from a human user and create text outputs that will stress a Turing test in terms of how well they are put together and what is being said. With sufficient training and some smart engineering around focusing inputs, GPT-3 based online systems will write an accurate, original essay on any subject. It could be used to answer any questions in any subject or formulate text responses even in abstract areas like poetry . It’ll also translate better than anything we’ve seen so far. It’s GPT-3’s brute-force Swiss-Army-knife effectiveness that will see it falling into student hands sooner rather than later. Which students? The ones it already sounds like:
“GPT-3’s ability to dazzle with prose and poetry that sounds entirely natural, even erudite or lyrical, is less surprising. It’s a parlor trick that GPT-2 already performed, though GPT-3 is juiced with more TPU-thirsty parameters to enhance its stylistic abstractions and semantic associations. As with their great-grandmother ELIZA, both benefit from our reliance on simple heuristics for speakers’ cognitive abilities, such as artful and sonorous speech rhythms. Like the bullshitter who gets past their first interview by regurgitating impressive-sounding phrases from the memoir of the CEO, GPT-3 spins some pretty good bullshit.”
Dig up some GPT-3 output online and you’ll see it uses the fact that it has figured out human speech patterns to smoothly say very little; it’s like listening to a slick salesman This complex machine learning formula is the perfect tool for weak students answering rote, systemic school assignments, because both those students and the school system they’re responding too are so low functioning that this rudimentary A.I. can do the job better (and in less than a second).
“As AI researcher Julian Togelius put it: “GPT-3 often performs like a clever student who hasn’t done their reading, trying to bullshit their way through an exam. Some well-known facts, some half-truths, and some straight lies, strung together in what first looks like a smooth narrative.” (Though as many have pointed out: clever students who know how to bullshit go far in this world because people don’t always scrutinize what they’re saying.)”
So, the bar for human expectation has just moved again. If you’re operating as a teacher or student at the sharp end of human achievement, this is well beneath you, but if you like to trot out the same old material year after year, don’t bother assessing process and don’t really pay much attention to student work you do mark, this’ll fool you. For a student looking to get something for nothing, this is a dream come true.
“GPT-3 would never kill jobs skilled developers. Instead its a wake-up call for cargo coders and developers. It’ll urge them to buckle up and upskill to ensure they’re up for solving complex computer programming problems.” (cargo coders are weak programmers who copy and paste code rather than generating it themselves – they’re like many students)
The obvious answer to this is to assess process, since a student attempting to hand in work this way would have none. Of more interest from a pedagogically standpoint is how we should integrate this evolving technology into our learning processes. OpenAI isn’t doing this in an evil attempt to create an entire generation of illiterate children, they’re doing it to create A.I. that assists and supports human endeavour and raises it to a higher level.
The last year I was teaching English I had my 3Us try and beat Turnitin.com. The standard usage seemed to be an ‘aha, I caught you plagiarizing!” punitive response after a minimally reviewed writing process, all done behind a curtain. By turning that all around and giving students transparent access to this punitive tool, I had students come to the realization that they could beat turnitin’s plagiarism check, but it took so much work to do it effectively that it was easier and more functional to just write the damned thing yourself. Instead of depending on tech or banning it, we used it to test limitations.
I imagine education’s first response to GPT-3 driven plagiarism tools will be to try and ban them, but as usual that’s backwards. A.I. supported human intelligence isn’t being developed for us to do less, but to enable us to do more. From that point of view, an A.I. supported writing process should move rubric expectations for everyone upwards. What used to meet expectations should now fail to meet expectations. A digitally supported writer should already be leveraging tools to mitigate grammar and spelling errors, and teachers should be teaching effective use of these tools. Where 5-10 grammar errors in a paper might have gotten you a level three/meets expectation before, there should now be none because digital supports should be integrated, proficiency in them expected and output from them meeting raised expectations. With that technical work supported, student writers should be focusing on developing continuity of thought, voice and style.
The same goes for A.I. supported writing as we enter the Twenty-Twenties. We should be evolving writing processes to include A.I. editorial review, A.I. supported enhanced research and maybe even A.I. driven originality of thinking. Can you imagine a Turing test as a part of writing process that tells a student that their writing isn’t as human as a GPT-3 piece? That’s using A.I. to raise the bar. Can you imagine what student writing might look like if advanced word prediction A.I.s like GPT-3 were integrated into student writing processes? We all need to be thinking about that, now. It’s what literacy is going to look like in the next decade.
Beyond writing you’re going to see GPT-3 driven online tools rock rote, standardized (lazy) learning. Like your worksheets? A student will be able to scan a worksheet and receive accurate, textually correct responses instantly, to any question, in any subject. If you’re using the same old assignments over and over, the A.I. will find that and use previous examples to produce even more complex and relevant answers.
The irony is the teachers who struggle most with this new threshold of human expectation are also the ones who will use it to mark student work. In those teach-like-it’s-1960 classes, A.I. written papers will be handed in by students and then marked by A.I. markers – no humans will have played a part in any of that ‘learning’.
OTHER READING
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/gpt-3-openai-examples “the world’s most impressive AI. Humans are being given limited use – for now – to make sure things don’t go wrong”
https://lambdalabs.com/blog/demystifying-gpt-3/
A technical analysis of GPT-3: OpenAI recently published GPT-3, the largest language model ever trained. GPT-3 has 175 billion parameters and would require 355 years and $4,600,000 to train
from Blogger https://ift.tt/39LreUD
via IFTTT
The snow’s flying. I like watching Waiting out the Winter for some inspiration at this time of year:
WAITING OUT WINTER from Andrew David Watson on Vimeo.
I did my own less cool and moody version of it here:
In the process of cleaning up I noticed a missing rubber on the bottom of the seat. Gotta figure out how to get that, the cracked rubbers on the mirrors and the rubber thing that covers the rear brake wiring.
The Tiger’s going on fourteen years old. Fourteen years in Canada means wild swings in temperature. The rubbers need renewing. There’s a winter project.
from Blogger http://ift.tt/2mITyCj
via IFTTT
Jon Campbell on Google+ shared updated colours on the Aerostich line of motorcycle clothing. I’ve always loved the look of Aerostich kit. Unfortunately, a Roadcrafter suit costs more than most of the motorcycles I’ve purchased.
One of these days I’ll get the coin together and spring for an Aerostich one piece suit. By all accounts it’ll be the last time I need to.
They have lots of custom options so I should be able to find a long in the body, regular inseam that fits me properly. With colour choices aplenty, making an original looking suit that fits is an ongoing pastime.
***
Keeping with the orange kit theme, I’m also wishing for a go with the updated Desmo RO32 transformable helmet. Quieter, more comfortable and more spacious, it’s my go-to Desmo helmet evolved. Short of buying one from overseas untried, I’m stuck. If we end up in France this summer, a trip to Roof might be in the cards through.
***
With the Tiger’s winter maintenance done, I’m hoping to return focus to the Concours ZG1000 Fury streetfighter I’ve got half finished.
On the to-do list is getting a rear light and indicators. I’d ordered them through Amazon but the dodgy Chinese company that makes them never evidently sent it, though they charged me for it. The Amazon marketplace seems to be increasingly filled with overseas companies that have a very slow delivery time, assuming they ship at all.
It’d be nice to get this running smoothly by the summer for some blistering solo rides where I finally get to find out what those new Michelin tires feel like. In a perfect world I’d enjoy the summer on it, ride it to the Distinguished Gentleman’s Ride in Toronto next September where someone offers to buy it for what it cost me to make it. I could then role that over into next winter’s project.
***
A couple of road trips this summer would be nice. I’ve had a trip around Lake Superior in mind for a while now. It’s about 2000kms around from Manitoulin Island and back again, and another couple of hundred kilometres and a ferry ride home.
Launching from Little Current at the north end of Manitoulin, I’d go the Ontario side first just to avoid the misery that is the border crossing into Michigan at The Sault. After sitting at that for almost two hours last year, I’ll go backwards around Superior just to avoid it. Doing 350km/days on average, we’d get around Superior in about six days. If we wanted a day off, we could push for a couple of days to get a day of rest. A day up to Manitoulin and a day back at the end means eight days on the road.
A trip down the Appalachians to see the full solar eclipse this summer is also on the short list. Doing this one for ten days means we’d have a couple of days to explore areas on the way down and on the way back instead of making miles every day.
From just over the border in New York state all the way down to Tennessee, this is motorcycle nirvana with mile after mile of twisting mountain roads.
***
Racer5 is running their introduction to track riding again this year. A May long weekend getting familiar with the racing dynamics of a motorcycle would be pretty wicked. By the end of the course I’d be qualified to race. The next step would be getting myself into the VRRA for some vintage racing.
***
I never get bored of imagining throwing a few grand down on some motorcycle racing gear. My two pairs of Alpinestar boots have been excellent, so I’d probably base a lot of the racing gear on what they offer. I’d read reviews of the Handroid Knox racing gloves and they sound totally next level. An Arai helmet has always been a long term, top end motorcycle helmet wishlist item, and they have a nice Isle of Man special out this year.
***
A track-day specialist bike would also be nice to have tucked away, only to be trailered to the track for hard work. This ’99 CBR600 F4 is well cared for and going for about three grand. I’d strip it down to bare essentials and put a carbon single seat cowling on the back. After wearing out the tires on it, I’d go to racing tires and continue to evolve the bike into a track specialist.
***
Guy Martin did a race in his Ford Transit van last year where he averaged well over 100mph for an extended length of time. I wouldn’t spend much time in one the other side of 100mph, but having a van would sure be handy. From transporting my own bikes out of the snow for a cheap ride in the winter, to taking the race bike to the track, having a bike transport system would be mega. With taxes, a new one nicely spec-ed out is just north of fifty thousand of your finest Canadian dollars.
***
Some top shelf gear, getting race ready and having the custom Kawasaki on the road… if I came into cash in 2017, that’s what I’d be spending it on.
from Blogger http://ift.tt/2ld7dLE
via IFTTT
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.
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:
A colleague‘s retirement party at the far end of our school board meant an excuse to ride over an hour each way to the Dufferin County Museum, scenically perched atop the highest point in Southern Ontario. It also happens to be within ten minutes of two of my favourite semi-local rides (there is nothing closer with any twisties).
I rode over to Orangeville and then down Hockley Valley Road. We’re getting over a flood, and the Hockley River was eating its own banks where ever I saw it. The ride up Airport Road into the highlands was very green and equally floody. The retirement party was unique in that more than 50% of the speeches weren’t tedious and so filled with inside jokes that only the speaker thinks them funny – with a few exceptions I wasn’t bored with the speeches, which never happens.
I didn’t take any photos on the way out, but I met my wife at the party and then we thought we might go over to the Terra Nova Public House for dinner, but they had nearly an hour wait on a Friday Night, so we aimed elsewhere. The Mono Cliff’s Inn was both immediately welcoming and only ten minutes away over the glacial moraines of the Niagara Escarpment.
This time I kept the Ricoh Theta handy and took photos as we went into the setting sun:
After a great appetizer smorgasbord in the unique atmosphere of the bar downstairs at the MCI we headed home in the twilight. I wasn’t expecting much out of the Theta camera in the dying light, but as it has before, it exceeded my expectations:
By this point the light is all but gone and I’m beating up on the Theta. A fixed lens fully automatic camera, 360° or not, struggles to manage low light, so this isn’t where the Theta was designed to work, but it still does a credible job. It’s all but dark out when I take the last photo while travelling under the power lines. I had to beat it up in photoshop a bit to restore some sharpness, but sometimes going with the blur gives you a painted feel to a photo which can give it an abstract feel. Photography doesn’t have to be all about focus.
You can do quite a lot with the desktop software that comes with the Theta,but there are some special formatting options in the online version that are cool. The Tiny Planet view in the online viewer is probably my favourite. The embedded image at the bottom lets you see the whole photo in the raw.
| The original |
| Some Photoshop on the original |
| Alternative photoshop a bit closer to the natural light |
This is the original image in the online software. If you click on the mirror ball icon and then tiny planet you’ll see where I got the still images above.
Post from RICOH THETA. – Spherical Image – RICOH THETA
from Blogger http://ift.tt/2t5teDY
via IFTTT
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.
