onted – Page 11 – Mechanical Sympathy

Do you ride the horse, or does the horse ride you?

The idea that technology will somehow make teaching easier (or superfluous) makes me sad… and angry. The idea that it might be making us inferior to previous generations drives me right over the edge.

I’ve been reading Nick Carr’s The Shallows. If you’re a techie-educator, you might disagree with him, but the Pulitzer prize panel didn’t. Neither did the Laptops & Learning research which demonstrated that students retain less information about a lecture when they have a digital distraction on their laps. Carr’s argument that digital tools teach a plastic brain to reorganize in simplistic ways has resonated with many people, usually people that didn’t like digital options in the first place.

There is a big backlash against this single minded approach, which I think was addressed at the recent ECOO conference. If students aren’t able to recall details from a lecture, I think I have to start with the sage and the stage. The idea of passive learning is rapidly losing traction as the most effective way to teach. Countries that cling to the idea (usually as a cost saving measure and to try and adhere to standardized tests) are tumbling down world rankings in education.

A teacher who talks at their students for an hour will view laptops in their class as an invader who fights them for their (not so) captive audience’s attention. If you want to accept digital tools into a uni-directional, passive classroom environment, they are going to disrupt the learning.

Several of my students came up to me today and asked me how to perform a function in imovie (we’re editing videos we’ve been working on for three weeks). I told them both that I wouldn’t show them. Following the sage logic, I should have given them an in-depth 20 minute lecture on how to add pictures to credits, and then chastised them if their attention ever seemed to wander to the imacs in front of them. Instead, I suggested they look at the help information, and then go out into the wild west of the internet if they were still lost. I not only wanted them to resolve their own (relatively simple) learning dilemmas, I wanted them to feel like they had solved them themselves. Within ten minutes they both had figured out what to do without being spoon fed the details; they owned that information. For the rest of the period they were showing other interested parties how to do it.

If I had saged that whole thing, digital tools would have appeared to be a detriment to thinking and learning; nothing but a distraction.

The other side of this is the idea that teachers no longer teach, they simply facilitate, like trainers on a bench. This usually plays to the ‘technology will make my life simple’ crowd, and it isn’t remotely true. To begin with, many students haven’t learned to use digital tools in productive ways. When they turn on a computer it means hours of mindless, narcissistic navel gazing on Facebook. Students in my class are expected to use the computer as a source of information, a communication tool and a vehicle for artistic expression. They aren’t going to be the players if they don’t even know the game. I have to model and learn along side them, I have to demonstrate expertise on the equipment, and more importantly, expertise as an effective, self-directed learner. If I do this well enough, I can eventually step back, but I’m more the weathered veteran on the bench good for a few more pinch shifts when I’m really needed, than I am a towel jockey.

A good teacher challenges, and then is able to recede, but even that recession is a carefully modulated choice that balances student ability with student independence. This is never going to be anything but a challenging dance that you will always be leading, even if you’re not necessarily in front. We CANNOT assume that students know how to use digital tools effectively, any more than we can assume they will intuitively grasp band-saws, or nail guns.

If you’re into tech in education because you think it’s an easy way out, it’s time to realize that there are no short cuts, and that your job will constantly change, and you better be mentally lithe enough to keep up with it, or else the digital natives will use the tech in the most simplistic, asinine ways imaginable, and Nick Carr’s Shallows will become the truth.

Setting the Stage

I somehow managed to fanangle my way into an Edtech symposium this week on the sustainable development of digital technology in education. Amidst former deputy ministers of education, board CIOs and other provincial education types I got to see the other side of the equation.

This year as head of Computers/IT has been good for this actually, getting my head out of the classroom context and seeing the bigger picture. I’ve been able to attend imaging committee meetings at the board level and gained an understanding of why everyone can’t have whatever they want. At this past meeting I tweeted that I felt like a sergeant from the trenches who suddenly found himself in a 5-star strategic planning meeting; it was engrossing.

From Hamilton-Wentworth’s awesome curriculum push into 21st Century Fluencies to what New Brunswick has been doing to get ahead of the game, I found the board and provincial interest in pushing ahead with our use of technology in the class to be… a relief!

During any battle to use digital technology in the class room (getting access, getting it to work, getting students over their jitters), I often feel like I’m losing ground. I’ll take one step forward in implementing a new piece of technology in a lesson or on a school wide basis, and get knocked back two steps by angry senior teachers who feel out of step with what’s going on, or lack of access to equipment, or failure of the tech, or OCT/board restrictions that seem panicky and unfounded, or the union telling of a horror story that seems to justify panicky and unfounded restrictions…

One of my preliminary thoughts before I went was to ask about how to beat the malaise of that feeling; how not to give up. I’ve heard from colleagues about how they burn out trying to push that envelope, and ultimately just disappear back into their classrooms and do their own thing. John Kershaw had an honest and helpful response to the question:

During his talk he spoke of a big set back where the winning party in an election used his one laptop per student policy as an example of government waste, and won on it, after telling him that they supported the program. This is exactly the kind of thing that brings idealists to their knees. His solution was pragmatic: work on your environment. Set the stage so that what you’re doing becomes a certainty, if not now, then eventually.

In the case of the laptop plan, he’d done groundwork with business groups (who were onside for more digitally literate graduates), the general public (who wanted their children more literate with technology), and the school system (who wanted to better prepare their students for their futures). That groundwork meant that even though the politics turned on him in the moment, the plan eventually went through, and he got what he thought was important; a New Brunswick education system that actually mattered in a 21st Century context.

I’ve been thinking over his for a few days now. If you’re on the right side of history, if you know you’re fighting a good fight, you’ve got to shrug off the knock backs. If you keep working to create the environment you’re aiming for, and you know you’re part of a wave of change, have some faith in the fact that the truth of what you’re trying to do will eventually win out.

Get off the Bus and Drive

The transition from institutionalized, single platform education technology to a decentralized model is in full swing at our school. I’m getting blow back from various teachers who want things to remain as they’ve always been. I don’t think they mean ditto machines, facsimiles and telegrams, but they might. There is always a tendency to fight advances in technology, it’s difficult to change ingrained habits.

The difference between this and previous technological shifts is that we’ve institutionalized helplessness into educational digital technology. We’ve convinced teachers that computers are an appliance and networking is a utility. We treat internet access the same way we treat electricity or water delivery; it’s off loaded to a bureaucracy who guarantees delivery. As the old guard retires and their traditional thinking around passive technology use fades, we are left with whole generations of teachers who have been taught to do nothing except sit on the institutionally provided bus and go where it takes them. Complaining about it is about all they can do.

Any decision making about educational technology has long been taken from teachers. Digital learning tools are seen as remotely operated apparatus that should be dropped the moment they don’t perform as expected.

When I suggest that teachers can get off the #edtech bus and drive their own educational technology they get anxious; driving a car takes a lot of effort compared to sitting on the bus. You not only have to drive it, but you’ve got to look after it too, make sure it has gas, service it, take ownership of it. The reward is much finer control over how you travel on your journey.

If you want to get where you’re going (making education relevant and useful to your students?) driving your technology will get you there much sooner. You’ll get to decide what vehicle to take, what options to put on it, and even how you want various technologies to enhance your teaching. Diversification of technology is vital to a better understanding of what it is and how to use it effectively. Digital technology isn’t one app or one platform, it is a sea change in how we access and share information.

Driving your own technology usage does take a lot more effort than sitting on the #edtech bus, though it’s just a different kind of effort. All that energy you used to expend on worrying when the bus would show up? or why it’s so old and dilapidated? You can now spend deciding what to get, what options you want and how you want to implement it. You get to decide what, when and how your students are using technology to enhance their learning; you get to actually control your digital learning environment.

That last bit is perhaps the most enjoyable part of driving your own technology use; being able to control your #edtech environment is a key factor in customizing 21st Century learning to suit your students.

If we treated classrooms the way we treat digital learning environments, all rooms would be exactly the same, with the same seating plans, the same chalk boards and the same size. Those classrooms would also be years out of date, and the teacher couldn’t move a table or chair if they wanted to, because they’d all be nailed to the floor. If you dare to ask why the furniture is nailed to the floor you’d be reprimanded with a fear based diatribe on how not keeping everything locked down and the same is potentially dangerous to your students and staff.

A Digital Skills Continuum: Differentiation of technology is a key to technical fluency!

If you’re teaching using technology you’re also teaching technology, and it would behove you to know what’s under the hood. Being ignorant of the machinery you’re operating makes you a very bad driver indeed. You don’t necessarily need to be a full-on mechanic, but a tinkerer’s mindset allows you to understand and look after your own needs in terms of the technology you use.

There are going to be some crashes with all these new drivers coming onto the road, but each collision will result in a learning experience. I only hope that teachers who are inexperienced are willing to look past the messiness of their own learning to the possibilities opening up to them in a digital world. At some point we’ll tip over and teachers will accept that competence in technology isn’t someone else’s job but an integral part of their profession in the twenty-first century, just as it has become a basic fluency in so many other professions.

The Appearance of Credibility and Other Useless Pursuits

I’ve got two other posts on the back burner because I spent hours this weekend fabricating the appearance of credibility. It’s mid-term time, which means I’ve finally got to put together the dreaded markbook that I’ve been neglecting. I used to think I neglected it because I’m lazy, but that’s not really the case. I spend all sorts of time in and out of class getting materials, working on lesson plans and spending time individually with students. I spend most of my lunches with students offering them extra help or just space to tinker. I spend hours outside of school communicating with other teachers about education. These are not the actions of a lazy man.

So why am I so reticent to build up my markbook? Why does the idea of putting numbers into complex programs that divide and weigh marks make me roll my eyes and find something productive to do? Because it’s all about building a fiction.

Yeah, you are, but you’re a really difficult
to calculate number!

Like so much else of what we do in our nineteenth century education factory, the idea of reducing human beings to numbers so that we can define them smacks of reductive, Taylorist thinking, but reducing people to easily compared numbers is what the system demands. That grade has an aura of magic around it, we think it full of deep and profound meaning but it’s fabricated out of thin air.

Learning is a complex, rich process, but we don’t focus on that in education, we focus on gross simplifications in order to spin out self supporting statistics. We create numbers to justify the system, to give it the appearance of credibility and meaning. The system feeds the system with evidence of its own success. This goes well beyond k-12, post secondary is predicated on this fiction.

Each year we fabricate grades using complex alchemical processes. Last year I had staff say they couldn’t use Engrade because it didn’t offer enough fine control over category weighing. Our Ministry goes to great lengths to on this, and teachers agonize over it, yet no two do it the same, even in the same course, even on the same assignment.

The process of grading, from the teacher assessing a piece of work (and some of them also taking into account what the student’s sibling was like, or that they are in a bad mood that day, or that this is a nice kid who should be forgiven the odd error) to how it is entered in what mark program (it varies from teacher to teacher), makes this a very slippery slope. We’re asked to assess curriculum but in most cases the personality and circumstances of the student interfere with this to the point where getting a good read on the last, best example of their demonstrated skill is impossible. Even if it is possible, reducing their learning of complex subject areas down to a single percentage grade is absurd, yet that is what we do.

When someone says that grading is killing education I agree, but not because we should be living in a hippy commune doing whatever strikes us as fun. The fiction of grading supports other fictions, like passing. I wouldn’t trust anyone to do anything if they got it right 50% of the time, yet that is a pass in education. Grading is killing education because it is meaningless in terms of learning.

Now that I’ve built that set of grades up all is safe from questioning. You can’t question modern marking practices, they’re designed to prevent simple analysis. That markbook I built is really to make the grade I give appear credible. Look! There are mathematics at work here! This number must mean something important because it was calculated by a machine. Grade production is an arbitrary, fictitious structure based on the constantly moving sands of circumstance and personality. That it is used to discipline and direct students has more to do with enforcing the absurdity of the classroom situation than it ever did with learning. If you don’t sit in rows and capitulate you’ll fail!

If anyone says, ‘Hey! Why is that my mark?!?” I need only crack open the byzantine markbook and baffle them with categories and weights to quell any further questions. Assessment of learning has been made sufficiently obscure as to defy questioning.

What do I do? Nothing dear, you’re not qualified!
This may as well have happened in a classroom, it’s the
same approach.

We receive a great deal of PD around assessment and evaluation (you can’t serve the system unless you know what the system needs). You’d think, based on how assessment works, that learning was a professionally mandated enterprise that the layman couldn’t hope to comprehend, just the way the education complex wants you to think about learning, it’s something done to you not something you do yourself.

Unfortunately, until parents stop expecting us to reduce their children to numbers this isn’t going to change.

Until post-secondary institutions stop empowering the mythology of marks by basing entrance requirements mainly on high school grades this isn’t going to change.

Random Inquiry Based Learning

Inquiry based learning is the current buzz in educational circles, but until we truly free students from the yoke of expectation, they can never be free to own their own learning. In order to recognize the entirely arbitrary and capricious nature of the world, we take a page from Zen.

The RIBL classroom

Inquiry based learning depends upon the teacher to create an environment in which students pursue their own goals in their own way, Random Inquiry Based Learning (RIBL) takes it a step further. In order to experience RIBL, a student must be surprised by the learning. Taking a page from Zen teaching, RIBL thrives on coincidence, serendipity and happenstance. Any attempt to organize RIBL results in a RIBL-less outcome.

RIBL cares nothing for fairness or rules. RIBL capers in the chaos of a dancing star.

In a RIBLed classroom the teacher must take on the roll of instigator, chaos clown and mischief maker, unless of course students are expecting that; only the unexpected can yield RIBLed results. RIBL thrives in the unexpected.

The RIBL teacher recognizes that life is essentially meaningless and doesn’t force a false sense of security on their students. They discourage any belief in social norms and try for existential angst whenever they can.

RIBLed rubrics contain sections like: shock, awe, bewilderment and eureka. If the learning is unexpected and creating an epiphany in the learner, then RIBL has been achieved. If a student learns what they are supposed to be learning, the teacher has failed. Only when students discover momentous breakthroughs in calculus while studying Shakespeare, or suddenly grasp photo-synthesis in phys-ed class, is RIBL being achieved.

RIBLed students are often nervous or completely terrified of what may happen in class. They often cower in groups in the hallway, refusing to make eye contact with their terrifying, unpredictable teachers. Many high schools seem to have adopted RIBL approaches to learning already.

There is only one rule about RIBL, you do not talk about RIBL! (unless you unexpectedly do)

RIBL defies optimization or organization, in fact, it actively dismantles them. The RIBL that can be explained is not the true RIBL. Only through lack of certainty can students truly exceed their own expectations and learn something new about themselves.

Beware staring into RIBL, for

the longer you stare in to RIBL,

the longer RIBL stares back into you!

Graduates of RIBL schooling include: Vinny VanGogh, Freddy Nietzsche, Gini Wolfe and Bertie Einstein. Students of the RIBL school produce unpredictable results, and surprise their teachers with amputated body parts or dramatic suicide attempts. Collateral damage is a certainty if you’re RIBLing properly, but if you’re a committed RIBLer you gain more from failing than you do from succeeding. Safety is another false belief that the RIBLer discards.

A student who produces work that annoys or seems irrelevant to the work at hand is a strong candidate for a good RIBLing.

Engagement is never an issue in the RIBLed classroom as RIBLed students are often in great peril and tend to approach classwork in a defensive/survival stance rather than with sighs of boredom.

RIBLing is the most divine form of teaching, it’s what the world does when class isn’t on.

Death of Vision

I was listening to CBC radio the other day and Ideas had a review of the repatriation of the Canadian Charter. One of the people pondering the politics of the day noted that modern politicians don’t stand for anything. They remorselessly chase poll numbers, trying to place themselves in front of whatever the herd currently believes is worthwhile (itself dictated by big media interests). McGuinty’s shameless chasing of right wing votes while throwing teachers under the bus this summer is a fine example of that approach.

Don’t look for moral standards, or even any kind of consistency in modern politicians. As the radio interviewer suggested, we look back on our political leaders as giants and see the modern ones as dwarfs. The old ones would push for a vision based on belief, even if it wasn’t always rational. The current ones shamelessly chase data in hopes of power. It makes the business of politics very economical (and I don’t mean that in a flattering way).

CTV is quite excited by this as ads for their Powerplay political commentary show declare, they are all about watching how politicians get and keep power. I thought politics were about developing visionary leaders who take Canada toward a better version of itself. It’s now all about holding power, and not standing for anything in the process other than a Machiavellian quest for control.

Last summer I was once again listening to CBC, this time Matt Galloway interviewing the CEO of RIM. As the agonizing interview went on, it became clear that this MBA wasn’t put in charge of RIM to lead it, but rather to manage it into successful insolvency. He shrugged off a question about RIM failing by simply suggesting that investors will make money on the deal because he’ll just cut the business into pieces and sell them off.

Can you imagine if Churchill had suggested that? Instead of we will fight in the fields, we will never surrender, how about we give you Scotland and Wales and call it even? Everybody ends up happy, and so much more productive.

We value leaders because they stand for something, and never back off it, even (or especially) if it makes them difficult. Wired did a recent article on Steve Jobs as either angel or demon. The man was difficult, almost impossible to work with, and the result was market dominance. He took over from a bumbling committee of MBAs who had discussed Apple into insolvency and took the company from the brink of destruction to an enviable market position before his death. I have difficulty liking Apple products due to their closed nature and proprietary design, but I have to appreciate the power of a Steve Jobs. If you want to be a visionary you aren’t looking for consensus, you’re driving for the best vision even if it seems unattainable; Churchill would have approved.

It’s a pity that RIM went to the MBA pool to find another finance monkey to further run the company into the ground. I’d much rather see a visionary, a true believer, attempt greatness rather than a controlled slide into insolvency all to benefit the moneyed class. This German jackass they’ve hired couldn’t give a damn what will happen to Waterloo and the many RIM facilities that communities depend on around the world if he manages to successfully dissolve Research In Motion into the highest bidders.

John Ralston Saul talks about the death of leadership and the rise of management in his The Collapse of Globalism. Using false economics (there is no other kind), Saul cuts apart the chop logic of globalism and how it is used to manage people into a massive mono-culture with no way out. Globalism comes complete with a data driven wrapper that is self justifying, and that desire to base leadership action on data driven decisions has been conditioned into us for decades now as the only credible justification for planning; it’s scientific, logical!

In an age of computing it serves our current mindset to over value the potential of computed statistics

The MBA manager/priest uses incomplete/fictional statistics (are there any other kind?) to manipulate belief, founding all decisions on the inherently logical and statistically valid benefits of globalization, all while ignoring simple truths. Those truths don’t go away. When you found your system on the idea of an unlimited, limited resource (cheap oil) the truth will make itself evident. The problem with globalism (and the politics, media, and education it has infected) is that we have all been conditioned to swallow statistics like they are Truth.

The last half century of post-modernism, globalism and mass media have weaned us from visionaries and simple truths. These things are now aberration s rather than a cause for celebration; panicky by-products of a lack of control in an era of false computational certainty.

I am NOT a committee!

Next time your data-driven boss/principal/MP tries to base future plans on data that are obviously minimalist, fictional and/or fabricated (and what facts born of data aren’t?), ask yourself where our sense of vision went.

I don’t want to base my very important job on data. I’m not interested in grossly simplifying teaching to suit ease of management for MBAs looking for efficiency. What I’d like is a leader with vision, maybe even someone who asks for the impossible and leads us on a charge into it. Even a near miss in that case is better than the best laid plans of a data driven committee, and sometimes the results are revolutionary. Even the failures are more helpful than statistically supported fictions leading to more data that prove how right everything is; simplifications supporting simplifications.

I’d rather take the road less traveled and risk failure while attempting greatness. I’d rather fail trying to address hard truths than present false successes best seen in standardized test scores. Most importantly, I’d rather believe in what I’m doing rather than being told what to think by a spreadsheet.

I guess I’m a man out of my time.

Shop Class as Soulcraft

Originally published on Dusty World in way back in August of 2012: https://temkblog.blogspot.com/2012/08/shop-class-as-soulcraft.html

It might sound very tech-specific, but this book contains many education related thoughts. Here are some of my favorite bits from Shop Class As Soulcraft, along with some observations in blue:

In schools we create artificial learning environments for our children that they know to be contrived and undeserving of their full attention and engagement… Without the opportunity to learn through the hands, the world remains abstract and distant, and the passions for learning will not be engaged – Doug Stowe (Wisdom of the hands Blog)

“We have a generation of students that can answer questions on standardized tests, know factoids, but they can’t do anything” – Jim Aschwanden

I never failed to take pleasure in the movement, at the end of a job, when I would flip the switch. “And there would be light.”

I too feel this whenever I finish building a computer. I call it ‘first light’ (a term I stole from astronomy for when a telescope is first turned to the sky and used). I get a thrill every time, when all of those complex components work together for the first time, and attain a kind of dim intelligence. If AI ever happens, I would happily propogate it, it feels like birth!

Boasting is what a boy does, because he has no real effect on the world. But the tradesman must reckon with the infallible judgement of reality, where one’s failures or shortcomings cannot be interpretted away. His well founded pride is far from the gratuitous ‘self-esteem’ that educators would impart to students, as though by magic.

This focus on student self-esteem seems cart before the horsish to me. You develop self esteem as a by-product of making your way in the world under your own steam. It is one of those things that cannot be given to you, yet so much education theory revolves around building self esteem in classrooms. Unless you allow failure, self esteem is meaningless. My soccer players gain more self esteem in a draw against a better team that should have crushed them than they ever got in a classroom designed to hand it to them.

The craftsman is proud of what he has made, and cherishes it, while the consumer discards things that are perfectly serviceable in his restless pursuit of the new. – Richard Sennett, The Culture of the New Capitalism

You won’t find a better description of modern, globalized capitalist consumerism than in these two quotes. Why this is a standard for economics, let alone ethics, is completely beyond me. I’ve always believed that if you can’t build it, you shouldn’t get to use it. Can’t build a working computer? You don’t get to use one. Can’t build a car? You don’t get to drive. Were this the case, we’d have far fewer incompetents operating equipment they are far too dim to be using.

Since the standards of craftsmanship issue from the logic of things rather than the art of persuasion, practiced submission to them perhaps gives the craftsman some psychic ground to stand on against fantastic hopes aroused by demagogues, whether commercial or political.

On of my greatest frustations… trying to have a rational discussion with fanboys (and girls) about technology. Mac users are the worst… though AMD fanboys aren’t far behind. I’m interested in the brilliance of the engineering, not whether or not you’ve been convinced by witty advertising, though many people make their technology (all?) purchases based on little other than a cult of personality.

Persig’s mechanic is, in the original sense of the word, an idiot. Indeed, he exemplifies the truth about idiocy, which is that it is at once an ethical and a cognitive failure. The Greek idios means “private,” and an idiotes means a private person, as opposed to a person in their public role – for example, that of motorcycle mechanic. Pirsig’s mechanic is idiotic because he fails to grasp his public role, which entails, or should, a relation of active concern to others, and to the machine. He is not involved. It is not his problem. Because he is an idiot… At bottom, the idiot is a solipsist. (p98)

Many a student I’ve seen be idiotic in the truest sense of the word. They fail to grasp what being a student is, and then create all sorts of social tension as a result. I once had a student in media arts who was having a rough time. She stormed out of class one day and another student wondered aloud at all the drama. This troubled student didn’t do anything, failed everything, and otherwise used an disproportionate amount of school resources to keep them from wreaking even more havoc. I asked the questioning student why she was here, at school. She said, “so I can get good grades, do post-secondary and get a satisfying job” (which I thought was a brilliant answer from a 15 year old). I told her that other student has no idea why she is here. This is a cruel, jail-like torture for her. She sees no value in it for herself (likely because her life isn’t full of parental role models that demonstrate the advantages of a good education). The whole class stopped to listen to our conversation, I suspect many of them wondered why this student was this difficult.

Management: a “peculiarly chancy and fluid” character (Robert Jackall) … vulnerability of managers in managing abstract, non-objective work develop a highly provisional way of speaking and feeling. Staking out a position on all sides of a situation, so you always have plausible deniability of a failure (that’s not what I meant). Vague language to protect a vague job. Managers are always on probation, constantly vulnerable and anxious about the essentially meaningless role they play in a fickle corporation that could shift the ground under their feet at any moment.

Up in the Air for a poignant look at this kind of management in the middle of the 2008/9 1% money grab… and one of the reasons I never worked well in business. Also one of the reasons I’m fairly relentless with people when they start talking about private business/corporate work ethics, organization and effectiveness. I worked in a number of private companies before I became a teacher, I was lucky to find one in five run competently, let alone effectively.

A last, favorite piece, and a brilliant analysis of the apprenticeship process:
Often someone working at a speed shop spent his younger days lingering around the counter, then, as he penetrated the social hierarchy, in the back, allowed now to pull his car around and perhaps use a floor jack to install some shock absorbers purchased at the counter. Such an exposure to injury liability would give a lawyer fits; implicit in the invitation to the back is a judgement of the young man’s character and a large measure of trust. He will get some light supervision that is likely to be disguised as a stream of sexual insults, delivered from ten feet away by someone he cannot see (only his shoes) as he lies under his car. Such insults are another index of trust. If he is able to return these outrageous comments with wit, the conversation will cascade toward real depravity; the trust is pushed further and made reciprocal. If the young man shows promise, that is, if he is judged to have some potential to plumb new depths of moral turpitude, he may get hired: here is someone around whom everyone can relax. p 183

That sense of relaxation and trust is something I really miss from mechanics. The education environment, so focused on political correctness, is the antithesis of shop culture; even justified swearing is a real no-no.

When I showed this to my wife she just shook her head and said, “I have no experience in this.” This sort of environment is created in groups of males. I see it in hockey change rooms, on shop floors, and in warehouses where I’ve worked. It’s not that women are incapable of working in that environment, I’ve known a number who have successfully done it, it’s that the vast majority of women see this as cruel, degrading and pointless.

This is a complicated issue, one that I’m still working out myself. There is a direct roughness, a kind of honesty, to how men socialize that has been squeezed out of business (education being a subset of that culture). Boys in school respond to it. If we’re playing soccer and player goes down having been kicked in the groin, I go ballistic at the ref and get a warning. I then attend to the kid on the ground. He’s hurting. I say, “how did that feel?” The kid laughs despite the pain. He knows I’ve just almost been removed because of what happened, he has no doubt of my stance on what’s happened, and the flippancy helps him deal with the agony. Those opportunities don’t come up in class; another reason to protect extracurriculars, they let you create a more genuine bond with your students.

In Crawford’s brilliant analysis above, he emphasizes the honesty and familiarity that can come out of this kind of ribbing, a real sense of camaraderie. It’s the kind of thing that makes Fight Club resonate with boys, and men, who read/watch it. You can’t relax around someone who tells you to trust them. You can relax around someone who is able to display real ‘moral turpitude’ in response to your own baiting. The lack of understanding of how this works separates many men from developing a close working relationship in feminized work environments.

Whether you agree, disagree or simply want to try and understand, Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft makes a compelling argument for value of skilled manual labour, and the culture that surrounds it.

Expectations

In a very hands-on computer technology grade 12 class, we’ve built our own network from scratch and students have been working through the A+ CompTIA technician‘s course. The final goal of the course is to get students into the position of actually getting certified as PC technicians. If they go on to college for courses, they’ll already have the first certification they need. If they go to work, they’ll be able to work in Futureshop, Staples or whatever (all those computer support people must have A+ certification).

The goal was a relevant, purpose driven class with real world value and as much technology as I could possibly provide.

I’ve spent a lot of time and energy getting my hands on equipment and making space for the students to be able to develop technology from the ground up. I hadn’t spent as much time walking students through some very information heavy review, my hope was that the hands on technology would offer us in-class opportunities to review the material.

Some students, once they got the network to a functional level, got very distracted by the fact that it can play networked games. This conversation happened recently when I suggested they needed to be ready to review the entire course because we were running out of time. One student felt that he hadn’t been handed the learning on a silver enough platter:

Grade 12 student: “but you’re the teacher, shouldn’t you be making us learn this?” (instead of letting us play games)

Me: “I’ve done back flips to get you guys access to multiple A+ courses, material and testing practice. I’ve also drilled you on the material on a daily basis. When we get done with that, you are given time to read ahead on future material, review what you missed, or apply your theory hands on. At that point I want to help people on a one on one basis. If you choose to play games with that time, it’s my job to force you to learn?”

student: “…”

me: “I’m not here to force you to learn, no one can do that. You’re senior students on the verge of graduating. If this were a junior class, we’d have more regimented lessons, but it isn’t. I expect you to be able to address yourself to what’s going on. I’m not about to force your head into the learning water here, if you don’t want to drink, that is your choice. It puts you in a bad place in post secondary though, they don’t spoon feed at all.”

student: “but we’re not college students, you shouldn’t run the class like that.”

me: “you’re about to be, at what point would you like to transition into post secondary if not in grade 12? Do you think they are going to spoon feed you next year?”

Not ten minutes later we wrapped up the chapter review and students were let loose on the network. Guess what he did…

me: “After our recent conversation, what you’re doing there is quite provocative. Are you trying to aggravate me?”

He didn’t stop, he just minimized the window. I feel sorry for the guy.

This class has a truly awesome amount of technology at their disposal, I’m jealous. When I took my certifications, I had to take apart and reassemble the only PC we had in the house, and look at pictures of other ones because I had nothing on hand. I didn’t have a certified technician there enthusiastic about experimenting and throwing everything from imacs to netbooks, to laptops to multiple desktop formats into the mix. I also had to pay four times what I’m getting the certs for this group of students for. This guy is spoiled for choice but all he wants to do is play lame, online games and whine about not being treated like a ten year old. I’m not saying they shouldn’t take a break and blow off some steam, but they seldom put in the effort to deserve the break.

I’ve got some good students in that class, but they’re all bitten to a greater or lesser degree by their wealth; it makes them complacent and lazy. When I think about what the students in my computer club at my old school in the suburbs would have done with all of this equipment, it makes me sad. Even when you make the learning, meaningful, individualized and pack it with technology, you can’t force a spoiled, lazy horse to drink it up.

I Just Wish They Could Finish A Thought

At the ICT conference I attended yesterday we did an industry panel discussion. The thirty year old VP of a major printer company passionately responded to a teacher question: “What can we do to prepare students for the workplace.”

“I just wish they could finish a thought! They can’t close sales, they can’t even perform basic customer service. They get halfway through a sales pitch and forget what they’re talking about, and they don’t listen! If a customer is telling them a problem, they respond by ignoring what the customer has just said. If grads could just finish what they started, we could take care of the rest.”

I’ve seldom heard the distracted digital native described in such (frustrated) clear terms. If business can’t use them because they can’t actually finish anything, then this puts older people at a distinct advantage.

Another of the panel told the story of a friend’s son who did an IT contract for him. He started off great, but once the big install was done and he was in beta testing the system, he seemed to slack off. About halfway through the contract he noticed the twenty something was on Facebook, so he made an account and befriended the kid. His stream was full of comments like, “I’m doing nothing and getting paid for it!” and “another day on Facebook on company time.” This manager contacted HR, revised his contract (which still had over a month in it) and ended it two days later, that Friday.

That guy’s inability to think through (complete a thought) about what he was doing (broadcasting his laziness), led to him being unemployed. There is a direct correlation there that any thinking person would understand, why don’t these digital natives? Because they don’t finish a thought. Even cause and effect are magical happenings beyond their understanding.

This question came up again later from a senior federal government manager who couldn’t understand how fractured the thinking of recent Ontario graduates appears to be. I suggested that Mcguinty’s in-school-till-18 program has resulted in a system wide lowering of expectations. Rubrics start at level 1. The implication there is that you pass if you do anything, anything at all.

Failing students has become almost impossible with student success and administration jumping in to offer alternatives (usually taught by teachers with no background in the subject). A great example is a failed grade 11 English student who was taking our credit recovery program. She got a B+ on her ISU paper, it had two grammar mistakes in the title alone and was marked by someone with no English background. I had to wonder how much of it had been cut and pasted, but that wasn’t looked into either.

The example that federal government manager gave was of a student who had missed dozens of classes at a community college and hadn’t completed any work. His argument? “Can’t you just pass me?” He was confused when the college prof said no, his high school teachers had.

Apparently we’re graduating students who can’t complete a thought and have systematized secondary education to minimize (if not remove entirely) cause and effect. I wonder how long it takes before we see persistent and ongoing economic problems related to this. That young VP’s passionate plea for graduates who can finish a thought might just be the tip of the iceberg.

Final OISE Blog

The final blog entry from my OISE computer engineering program:

Name and describe the school, board and ministry standards you must follow.
Our school and board follow Ministry standards and our collective agreement based upon it. One of the challenges we have is in following changing standards. One of those specific problems is the adoption of skills based assessment (a holdover from the Harris years). Many teachers have a great deal of trouble following this protocol (the learning to 18/student success plan works with it extensively).

I recently had to do a heads thing and sit on a committee that would create school level language around assessment. The fights were pretty epic. Many of the academic teachers believed that students should be marked on their behavior, not what they know about their subject. To them, school is about control and discipline, not subject matter (this dovetails nicely with a conversation I had with my wife last night – I think I’ll be blogging about it on Dusty World shortly).

In any case, our admin is determined to even out the radically different approaches to assessment that go on in our school (even within the same department). I’m curious to see how much this affects teachers this coming year. There is a great deal of professional latitude given to teachers whenever the door closes to the classroom. Unlike the US system, our lessons aren’t mandated and while we have invasive standardized testing, we aren’t held too tightly to them. US schools are required to force feed students lessons year round to feed standardized testing. They then rank poorly world wide.

As much as a loose, teacher centred approach grates on the nerves of hard core curriculumists, it does produce broad based learners who score well in general testing (and adapt well in a changing work environment).

I personally have issues with student success and many of the shortcuts they take in getting students diplomas. But even that process is one I can live with if it allows the majority of students to maximize their learning.

What would you see changed?

One of the few countries ahead of use in world rankings is Finland. Finland does a couple of things that I think would fit well with Ontario’s approach to education. Firstly, they expect teachers to be highly trained specialists in education. In order to teach in Finland, a teacher must have a Masters in Education. I think university focus on this isn’t a great idea, but I’d like to see teacher’s college be much more rigorous in producing teachers. A two year program that offers easy outs into other programs (teaching assistant, educational support worker, business training, etc), or out of education entirely, would be helpful. A greater stress on teacher’s college as an apprenticeship with many more weeks spent in-class with an associate teacher/mentor would also shake out the applicants.

I found a number of candidates in my program who wanted to drop out, but were given no option other than withdrawal with financial penalty. I’d really like to see a first semester drop out option (available after the first in school, teaching COOP session), that offers escape with no financial penalty. I’ve seen too many people teaching who aren’t particularly good at it, have no interest in changing that, and are doing it because they feel trapped into doing so. A more stringent, apprenticeship based, exit enabled teacher training system establishes higher standards (like Finland’s) without the university bias, and with a firm focus on developing teachers actually interested in teaching well.

The other thing Finland did was abolish all standardized testing. Standardized tests do not produce broad-based students who are able to adapt to new situations in creative ways. Standardized testing produces myopic, specifically focused students who fail in open, changing environments (the kind most students will be facing when they enter the workforce).
I’d also like to see a huge push away from the walled garden/board run IT model. The language around protecting students produces overly restrictive access to technology that reduces students’ ability to learn how to author, manage and effectively use current digital tools. If we want to remain relevant, we need to be able to meet students where they live, and show them how to manage modern digital tools effectively.

Develop an action plan to push forward your idea(s).Process:

Figure out what my stance is on effective educational reform

Read other theory, review statistics (don’t be Ontario-centric, look at educational theory from around the world), establish an understanding of what you believe effective reform is

Metacognitively, reflect on your own experiences in the classroom. What is a modern student like? What is needed to reach them? What would an effective learning environment look like in 2012 and beyond?

Develop your own ideas

Collaborate with others to organize and present them

Publish your thinking and invite critical response

Build a following or establish connections with other people who share your vision

Continue to respond to conditions in education,

I’ve done this by starting a blog that continually looks at current digital learning. I use it to reflect on my own experiences, think of ways to produce better results, publish my ideas and continue to evolve my own understandings of this very complicated (and very simple) profession. The blog led to presentations at Edcamps, conferences and PD. It’ll lead to a book at some point me-thinks.

The most important step in this action plan is to take action, and make other people aware of what you’re struggling with in education. If you’re a teacher who doesn’t think twice about teaching, I’d suggest that you’re probably not a very good teacher. If I had to mandate any Ministry requirement for teaching, it would be that teachers should be life long learners, who love the process of teaching and learning, and demonstrate how they are actively working to improve it, in themselves, their classroom, their board and their profession in general.

http://pinterest.com/scottmcleod/slides/ Some good (and funny, and sometimes nasty) comments on educational irrelevance