learning – Page 2 – Mechanical Sympathy

“You Never Teach Us Anything”

Originally published on Dusty World in May of 2014:

I had an interesting chat with a student yesterday. He’s yellow, I’m green:

“You never teach us anything.”
“By teaching do you mean do it for you?”
“Um, yes?”
“I don’t do everything for you because unless you figure it out for yourself, you haven’t figured out anything at all.”
“… but you never help.”
“I don’t think that’s true, I offer suggestions, and give you a framework to develop ideas in, I’ve provided you with thousands of dollars of free equipment and access to professional level learning resources. Have I never helped?”
“Ok, so you’ve helped, but you don’t teach.”
“What do you think teaching is?”
“When someone tells you what you should know…”
“Do you think that’s what a lesson is? When someone gives you information?”
“Yeah, isn’t it?”

Good question that, isn’t a lesson when you tell people what they should know? Isn’t teaching when you do everything for the student so they can be passive receptacles?

That a strong student who has ‘figured out’ the education system has such a poor view of our profession is worrying. I wonder how many lessons it took before he came to see pedagogy as little more than a fill in the blank exercise.

I wonder what it will take now to have him take possession of his own learning. I don’t imagine that will happen before post secondary, and when it does it will be a shock.

Ebb & Flow

Originally published on Dusty World in March, 2014.

Many moons ago I found myself hiring automotive technicians for Quaker State. There were a couple of odd things I did that helped find people who could survive in our tough working environment. One was toss any résumé that was full of grammar and spelling errors. I didn’t care if a tech had perfect grammar and spelling, but I did care that if given the time they didn’t take pride in their own work. The other thing I did was invent an emergency that interrupted the interview. The whole point of this was to test their initiative and see how they would respond to a change in tempo.

These interruptions became more and more complicated as the other guys on the shop floor got involved. What started off as a, ‘could you help me move a heavy thing’ turned into faked medical emergencies or whatever else struck the fancy of the staff. The guy who just sat there while everyone else shifted into overdrive wasn’t getting the job.

You see this kind of unresponsive stuck-tempo everywhere; employees who work at a walking pace are the new normal and it’s no different with students. This kind of thinking isn’t just found in work or school, but even in sports. People who throw themselves at something with any kind of intensity are becoming vanishingly rare. I suspect this is a response to modern management tactics based around fear and control. Those tactics have also been adopted by education, and students have responded with a similar protective apathy.

This apathy is a combination of digitization, systematization and the business-think that oversees these processes. Current business leadership revolves around creating an unbalanced workplace where fear and uncertainty drive employees into blind obedience. This highly charged methodology is completely unsustainable, but then it doesn’t have to be, there are always more employees to throw on the fire. Realizing potential and maximizing efficiency are irrelevant to a modern manager, the goal is short term gain and control. Digitized, data driven workplaces (and classrooms) are designed systemically to collect data that supports the system; statistics are as opinionated as politics. This Taylorist wonderland is overseen by caffeinated managers whose only approach is to spin their employees into a panic at every turn (those managers themselves are managed in the same way). The permanent engagement approach to learning is modelled on this thinking.

Days of lower energy, contemplative work and periods of off-task behavior are perfectly normal and even beneficial to the development of complex skills, but this is considered a failure in the modern world. When working on anything you should aim for sustainability as well as intensity, but education has followed management thinking in an effort to systematize and control.

A byproduct of this shortsightedness is the inability for students to amp up their focus and overachieve because modern education wants them to be giddily engaged all the time. The only way to achieve the highly agitated state of permanent engagement is to present simplistic, short term learning that offers constant reward. Working toward anything other than immediate gratification is a sure way to turn off the hyper engaged learner.

I have this up in my classroom. Any student that thinks a flurry of activity in the final weeks can make up for weeks of absences and apathy is kidding themselves.

The issue I’m seeing in many students is a benign neglect toward developing complex expertise. I’d argue that the decline in mathematical ability in Canadian students is a result of deemphasizing foundational skills in favour of short term learning strategies. These short term strategies stress engagement and success for all at the cost of building complex expertise.

Expecting students to work towards something other than immediate skill (the kind found in most video games) is becoming a lost art. Long-term, complex skill sets fall apart when we can’t expect students to follow along for more than thirty seconds at a time without some kind of Pavlovian payoff.

There is an ebb and flow to everything we apply ourselves to. For someone seeking mastery, even the ebbs have value, creating a deeper sense of familiarity and comfort. Anyone who has soaked in their discipline without a clear sense of direction knows what I’m talking about. From the confidence that arises out of those ebbs we push beyond boundaries and surprise ourselves with new learning when we are flowing again.

Whether it’s the workplace or a classroom, being hyper-engaged all the time just isn’t that productive, especially if you’re building long-term, complex expertise. If we’re all really just edu-tainers, then I guess we don’t have to worry about that, just be sure to collect the data needed to justify how well the system is working.

Mastery Learning, Digitally Empowering Idiocy & Being Humble Before the Task

I ended up presenting on what mastery learning is and what mastery might look like in digital realms at ECOO13 last week .

HERE is the prezi.

Developing digital mastery in a digital world

The Humble Egotist: A teacher who encourages learning…

In untangling what digital mastery might look like I had to back up and describe mastery learning in general. This ended up clarifying my ideas around the process of learning itself. As much as we’d like to think we impart learning as teachers, the process itself is very much internal to the learner. Teachers aren’t nearly as central to the process as they like to think they are.

I started studying instructional technique when I was still a teen in air cadets and through coaching sports. That progressed into technology instruction in business and then language instruction in Japan. Finally getting my B.Ed. years later was just the latest in an ongoing personal journey to understand learning.

I’m self taught in so many things that I have trouble remembering being taught. I’ve dropped out of every kind of education you can imagine, and finished some too. I have real trouble with authority for the sake of authority and I’ve always found a strong element of that in teaching. There is no doubt that a teacher can be an important influence in a young person’s growth (I have several who were, we all do), but those people were never magical because they taught me something, they were magical because they enabled me to learn something. No one else has ever been the architect of my learning, it has always failed or succeeded because of how I tackled it. A good teacher looked at me and figured out how to enable my tendencies toward learning something effectively. A bad teacher would sabotage my learning, usually because my hero worship wasn’t up to their standards.

Teaching is a tricky business. It takes a lot of self confidence to do the job, but it also takes a lot of humility to get out of the way and let people learn. Self confidence and humility seldom co-exist comfortably in the same person. The urge to sage on the stage is strong in a lot of teachers, they really enjoy the attention and the social status (no matter how staged it is).

Not unless you do it you don’t,
learning isn’t downloaded,
it isn’t given, it isn’t easy

But learning is an internal process, you can’t have learning implanted in you (this was one of the reasons it seems so magical in The Matrix), as the learner you have to be the active agent, learning is hard work. We confuse this with a lot of edu-babble about engagement and over-focus on how entertaining a teacher can be but this ignores the essential issue. If a student doesn’t want to learn then they won’t. The value of learning should be self evident. It takes a colossal amount of work by the education system to assume responsibility for learning and hide the truth that students are the real agents of their learning.

During the ECOO presentation I described a good teacher as an awesome roadie, you can’t even tell they are there until they adjust or fix something to better enable the show. The learner is the one on stage doing the learning, a good teacher, like a good roadie, makes the show run smoothly but they aren’t the main act.

I see far too many full period lectures with sages on stages. Those people retire and are immediately back in the classroom because they miss the audience, they miss being in a socially constructed place where people have to listen to them. They don’t do much in the way of encouraging learning, but boy do they talk a lot, and they have no idea that students live in an information rich world and don’t have to wait for the slow drip of a teacher’s talk to learn a fact.

This isn’t to say that the flipped classroom is the obvious way to manage this. Learners have to internalize their own learning, but students who are many miles away from what they need to be broken out of their habitual patterns if they are going to learn something new. Sometimes this takes a teacher who is the centre of focus in a classroom.

How do you manage a room full of digitally super charged ids?

This is especially true when educators attempt to integrate digital devices into learning. Digital devices slavishly satisfy the desires of their users no matter how asinine or repetitive. An idiot on a digital device becomes an empowered idiot. A teacher can be a vital influence in breaking that destructive, repetitive cycle, but not if they are as habitual and limited in their use of digital tools as their students. Being humble before the task of learning gets even harder in a digital environment where every stupid urge is moments away from being satisfied. The teacher cannot facilitate student learning in an environment that they themselves are also oppressed by.

One of the key pressure points in learning is breaking someone out of
habitual use in technology (the pink bit), but that’s impossible if the
teacher is as habitual and illiterate as the student is…

If you’ve ever seen how many students (and teachers) treat school computer labs you know what I’m talking about. Rather than selecting the tool for the job, a teacher with low digital fluency will ask students to use computers as an analogue for something else. The computer is treated like a book, or a paper and pen. Booking a lab for this purpose is akin to renting a car to drive to the end of your street. You’re not using the technology for it’s capabilities, you’re using it to exacerbate your own habits.

That’s assuming the teacher didn’t book the lab as a digital babysitter while they get marking done (or so they could just surf the net in the same way as their students). In those classes I’m having to replace vandalized computers and students may as well be at home doing whatever they do there online. This damages digital fluency for everyone in the room by actually encouraging habitual usage, and it’s expensive.

Trying to focus on learning is difficult in the hyper-personally empowering digital realm.

Developing mastery of any kind isn’t a focus in education, trying to do it now with digital narcissism at every fingertip is even more difficult. Classes are set with 50% credits and minimal expectations around attendance in order to facilitate pass rates. In terms of digital mastery, administration seems to think this is about device access, but it’s more about people, self-discipline and work habits. Digital mastery falls back on the habits of the learner. A strong, self-directed learner is empowered by a digital environment, a weak, dependent one is impoverished by it. For the strong it empowers their ability to learn, for the weak it offers them a constant stream of distractions so that they can stay in the most base, trivial, superficial and habitual parts of their minds.

If we practiced mastery learning across education then digital mastery would follow. If we took teaching digital fluency seriously (in both staff and students) we would have a chance at using technology to create amplified learners who are able to access information and self direct their learning at a rate unseen before.

Sometimes I wonder if we aren’t dropping the digital football just to keep the traditional power structures in play.

note: this is the 4th re-write of this post, it’s an ongoing attempt to figure out some big ideas, I’m still not happy with it but I’m going to let it lie and move on. I suspect I’ll be trying to clarify the ideas in here in future posts.

Coding Is A Hands-on Skill

Originally published on Dusty World in July, 2013 – WIRED caught up to me in 2017 with The Next Big Blue Collar Job Is Coding.

I’m frustrated at how computer science seems to own coding. In Ontario it is now an orphaned subject unto itself. There is no way someone without a degree in computer science can teach coding, though coding isn’t computer science any more than auto mechanics is theoretical physics.

This reminds me of the Big Bang Theory when Leonard’s car breaks down. He asks, “does anyone here know how internal combustion engines work?” and all the the scientists in the car laugh and nod. He then asks, “can anyone here fix a car?” And all the heads go down and they say no.

Computer science is the theoretical end of a spectrum of coding that goes from hands-on hacking through professional coding and into academic research. That only math quants who were looking for a second teachable pretty much like their first can teach it greatly limits its appeal to the general population.

Code.org agrees with me, as does Steve Jobs, as does Codeacademy, Khan Academy and many other online groups. These organizations are proliferating because we are not offering our students meaningful access to computer programming.

If we’re going to treat coding (as a part of digital fluency in general) like other basic skills (literacy, numeracy), then we need to free up coding from the bizarre limitations placed upon it by the Ministry of Education and computer scientists.

Can you imagine if all the autoshop teachers had to be theoretical physicists or engineers before they could apply that knowledge to repairing vehicles? It’s a ridiculous idea, yet that is precisely what we are doing with coding in Ontario schools. There are many ways a teacher could approach computer programming, limiting it to an extreme, theoretical end of the spectrum doesn’t respect the variety of people who get into coding, and it doesn’t offer students that variety in the classroom. Coding isn’t a theoretically biased branch of knowledge, in fact I’d argue that coding has much more in common with stochastic technical skills.

We are killing a vital 21st Century fluency stone dead with arbitrary limitations. Coding should be a technology course, it should be hands on, and it should work hand in hand with engineering (because that is what it is and what it does). That it is artificially separated into a null space between mathematics and computer studies helps no one other than old school computer scientists, and there aren’t many of them. The irony is that many of the math teachers with comp-sci as a teachable don’t want to teach it because they never kept up with it other than as a theoretical/academic course of study in university; they don’t love coding, it was simply an easy way to extend their mathematical degree work.

Computer science, like theoretical physics, is a vital subject, but it’s highly specialized and how we teach it should recognize that. Coding is a skill anyone can learn, and should.

Fear & Arrogance

Quote from Bull Durham

The industrial mindset around education tends to look away from this approach to learning, but there is something to be said for bravery in the face of overwhelming odds; it’s a true commitment to what you’re learning. Of course, if you’re going to learn something like it matters then failure should be an expectation if anything other than competence is demonstrated. In a school system that prides itself on stats it generates about itself, this kind of without-a-net learning doesn’t happen.

When I say true commitment I mean a willingness to put your learning to the test (and I don’t mean a standardized test). There is a reflective aspect to learning that we tend to ignore in education. We like to say we’re looking at meta-cognition and self-aware learning, but only without questioning the context we frame it with. Unless a student is considering the school system in which they find themselves complete with all its financially forced lunacy, the metacognition they are asked to endure in class is little more than another attempt to pretend rows of desks and student numbers are the ideal. In that environment the student who shrugs and walks out of class in order to truly test themselves in a trade or other real pursuit is the only one answering the metacognitive question correctly.

Learning without concrete, relevant feedback is empty, pointless. The type of feedback students get in school tends to be abstract to the point of emptiness. We then wonder why their poor grades don’t motivate them to try harder to get better abstract numbers, and then teachers agonize over how to ‘engage’ them.

When I first started to teach in Japan I tried to understand why my classes were so different even though the lessons were the same. In looking at my learners I realized that some were intrinsically motivated and some extrinsically motivated. The doctor who came in to work on their presentation to have their work shared in an international conference? Those classes were stellar. The employees who were required by management to upgrade their English? Tedious. Intrinsically motivated learners are a joy to teach though also a great challenge because of how voracious they are. When we create an education system we iron out intrinsic motivation in favour of standardized, extrinsic motivations (grades, standardized test scores, report cards). Any fear or arrogance in daring to explore and expand beyond our comfort zone is stamped out in favour of standardized assessment.

I’ve been learning the art and science of motorbike riding over the last couple of months. I can’t think of an activity that requires a greater commitment (except perhaps tight rope walking). The learning process for this activity is ruthless and demanding. I don’t get days off or time to relax when I’m working on my craft. I don’t have someone constantly correcting my behavior to keep me on task. And it hurts doing it, let alone if I do it poorly. What got me on a bike in the first place? Fear and arrogance; the chance to do something difficult well. Thinking that I could learn this thing with grace and skill was a dare I’ve always wanted to take. That I want to be successful in something I’ve seen kill other people is perverse and satisfying.

We don’t like students to learn things that are challenging to them, we like them to all do the same thing on a bell curve. We process them as statistics that we can then manage. If you’ve ever tried to submit a class of all failures or all perfects you know this to be true; they want a bell curve of grades with a median in the Bs. Student centred learning tries to put an individualized face on this, but the assessment rubric will quickly bring it back in line again. It’s unreasonable to expect a teacher to individualize learning for thirty people, but if we’re going to run this like an assembly line we can’t bemoan the loss of individual learning.

The real trick with learning is to want to do it. Once you’re there and you have a deeply seated need to figure out what it is you want master, you can begin to develop those skills. In addition to fear and arrogance (two methods of not being daunted by learning a challenging skill), you should also embrace patience and a willingness to laugh at your failures without ignoring them. With a flexible, resilient approach to learning in place you are sure to succeed at your craft, though not always in ways you may have imagined.

Mastery takes longer, but this’ll get you over the steep bit
at the beginning of the learning curve

I stumbled across the chart on the right a few weeks ago on Google+. Whenever I hear someone say, “I wish I could draw”, or, “I wish I could code”, or any other longed for learning you care to name, I think back to this chart and wonder why they never spent the time if they wanted it that badly; they obviously never wanted it that badly. Learning isn’t magic and teaching isn’t a dark art. The learner has to recognize the value of the learning and have an emotional need to achieve it. The teacher has already walked that path to expertise and cultivates that love of the material by challenging the student to achieve that which is barely within their reach. Their expertise allows them to dare the student to appropriate challenges. Learning is a visceral, thrilling self-driven, emotional experience, not a pedantic, systemic process to be forced on rows of victims.

These moments of learning greatness where students reach for more than they should and see success (and failure) happen in schools all the time, but they are usually the result of a good teacher trying to protect students from systemic processing. They also tend to happen in stochastic learning or extracurriculars more than the ordered learning of the class room. In the kinetic action of arts, technology or physical education students still have the freedom of unregimented, hands on learning toward less specific ends. That stochastic space allows them room to attempt greatness, to bypass the routine learning and realize a eureka moment. Formal classroom education irons that out with curriculum, formalized assessment and systemic teaching practice. The freedom still evident in stochastic learning tends to unnerve the professional student and educational administrator, both of whom have learned to play the game of Education rather than simply encourage people do what they are naturally predisposed to do. For the true apprentice hands on learning is the last bastion of real learning in our education system. It may be the unspoken reason that killing extracurriculars in Ontario this year cut so deeply. Only in sport and other physical activity can we appreciate the immediacy of failure and the joy of real success. You can’t bell-curve reality.

All is not lost. We could begin revising education towards learning rather than self serving statistics gathering.

Imagine an education system that didn’t work to generate its own self-serving statistics. A school system that was focused on developing an environment in which students were able to develop a deep, intrinsic love of learning, where no extrinsic motivation existed to force them into a mold of grades and average expectations. Failure in this system could be brutal and obvious, but students would be encouraged to attack their learning with fear and arrogance (and patience and humor) knowing that they would never be demeaned for failing but only for ignoring their failures.

A Quiet Mind

A conversation a colleague tole me about a while back:

Teacher to student: “You look pensive”

Student: “No, I’m just thinking…”

***

Before the break we were discussing reflective reading practices in a senior English class.

Students had a real hate on for journal writing while reading. The argument, when it wasn’t that it was too much work, was that it wasn’t reflective but merely make-work.

Even when journal writing was on the table I had to keep emphasizing that there was to be NO retelling of the story (I’ve read far to many poorly retold stories and they aren’t reflective). With journal writing off the table, I asked for suggestions and got none whatsoever.

So, students didn’t want to do the standard journal writing assignment for reflecting on their ISU reading, but they didn’t have any other ideas either. I took a moment and threw out some ideas on our class online discussion board:

a prezi mind-map of the story looking at plot/narrative, character, themes, setting and how they interact in the novel over time (a timeline of plot with other idea structures interacting with it might prove interesting and instructive)
a series of key moment symbolic representations of the novel, graphic in nature with short written explanations of specific elements in the images and how they relate to the novel
a film adaptation pitch, complete with actor, costume, set and prop suggestions linked to specifics (quotes) in the novel.
author biographical research review: based on author research, an 4-6 paragraph explanation of how the author’s background plays into specifics in the novel
non-journal, but reflective reading notes from when you read the novel (can’t be done after the fact). If you have an extensive set of notes based on the novel as you read it, these might work.
Script (or scripted video) of an interview with the author (you have to play the author if you’re videoing it), speculation on themes you’re curious about based on your close reading of the novel.

Even with this many suggestions (and open to others) the class felt that reflecting on their ISU novels was something being done to them. Unfortunately reflection doesn’t work very well as a forced exercise.

What followed was a brainstorming session about what a meditative, reflective mind looks like:

Yes, I photoboarded that :p

Students found the ideas behind the discussion foreign. School was something done at them; idea transmission, skill development, habits and bells. The goals behind reflecting on reading assume many things that most students simply don’t do in school because schools aren’t designed for that kind of thinking.

Meditative response relies on deep reading. Only an uninterrupted, contemplative reading of a text can get you to a reflective, contextual, personal response. The hacknied, piece-meal approach to reading that the majority of students undertook (because the assigned reading was ‘done’ to them, and they are in a state of constant digital distraction anyway) precludes reflection.

Even the idea of reflection was foreign. Students kept asking for clarification on exactly what it was they were supposed to be doing. What specifically should they write about? Can they offer opinion? Do they have to quote the text? What they were digging for was an ‘A-B-C’, ‘this then that’ set of instructions. Something easily gradable and fill in the blankable – exactly what school has taught them to expect from learning.

Meditative reading, reflective response, and deep study in general is a dying art. Artists create using it, scientists invent using it, but students seldom come close to it in school. Standardization kills it, digitization simplifies it and the marks hungry university bound English student is less interested in developing a quiet, meditative mind that offers deeply connective thinking than they are in keeping it simple, direct and easily achievable.

Post note:

While in teacher’s college I had a senior English student, desperate to squeeze marks out of an assignment begging me for details on his Hamlet grade. He’d done a good job analyzing the text, though he had made a couple of errors in his explanations of quotes, and didn’t always demonstrate consistent knowledge of the narrative. He begged for a higher grade than his 93%. I told him about the errors, but he wanted more grades anyway, so I asked him a harder question: “Years from now you’ll be able to go to Stratford and immerse yourself in a piece of Shakespeare and really enjoy it. Isn’t that a wonderful thought? So many people will never get it, but you do, and your understanding will only deepen over the years. It’s exceptional now, and I don’t doubt it will get better. Do you really need more numbers on this paper?”

Turns out he didn’t.

Driving Your Own Learning

This quote was used in a presentation I gave in 2013. The revolution is
sneaking up on us, changing our habits and how we think and learn
without us even realizing it.

Recently a number of people have told me something along these lines: “I don’t have to remember anything any more, I can just Google it.” I don’t necessarily disagree, but this approach to off-loading knowledge does raise some interesting questions. In a best case scenario we end up with people who have the cognitive freedom to make more diverse and interesting connections, but more often I see the other side of the coin, where people are using technology to reduce their effort and involvement.

With information readily at hand, we still fall back on old
concepts of information management in order to try and
understand it. Computers don’t use file folders, the text we
save on a computer isn’t even text, but rather than update
our ideas of how information is being stored, we force it into
paper based memes so we can relate inaccurately..

When knowledge was rare and few people read or owned books the holding of knowledge internally made you powerful. Being able to learn and retain information was a key focus of education in those days. That rigorous approach, which was a necessity because of the scarcity of information, produced tough minded academics who could dismiss the unintelligent if they couldn’t internalize what was needed. Our school system today is a historical descendant of that information scarce world – still testing students on information that is readily available to them.

Yet we still value that academic rigour, and for good reason. A student who develops the mental toughness to internalize and retain information, even if they could just Google it, is building habits that will allow them to tackle increasingly complex materials and processes, especially when that knowledge is implicit to skillsets that demand immediate response. If you’ve got to Google how to spell every word in your essay, you aren’t going to write a good essay. If you have no understanding of the French Revolution, including what led to it and what happened after, you’ll be hard pressed to create a nuanced presentation about it, no matter how handy you are at Google Presentations and searches. Using the proliferation of information as an excuse to do less is where we run into problems.

The information revolution has pushed cross curricular
collaboration into overdrive. Formerly siloed branches of
academia are finding connections through the free-flow of
digital information – a good example of the information
revolution being used to enhance rather than minimize effort

Vehicle based digital control systems offer an interesting parallel to information technology and learning. In racing the electronic subsystems that have evolved in vehicles aren’t used for safety, they are used to increase lap times and allow the vehicle operator to reach limits and stress equipment to levels before unimaginable. They don’t crash less than they used to, and when they do crash they tend to be going faster than before. Digital enhancement of driving skill is the focus of racing electronics.

Electronic controls on vehicles designed for the general public don’t increase operator ability, they leap in and interfere with it. As a skilled driver I am able to stop a car in snow in a significantly shorter distance than computer controlled anti-lock brakes (locking the wheels causes them to build up snow in front of the tires stopping the car sooner, but anti-lock braking keeps the wheels spinning, preventing that from happening). For most people who are happy to operate a two ton vehicle with no understanding of vehicle dynamics or interest in improving their skills, anti-lock brakes are a saviour – they prevent those incompetent drivers from having to care. Most cars come with anti-lock brakes nowadays for that reason. Instead of improving the humans we developed systems to take over from them.

Google’s self-driving car is the logical conclusion of the electronic controls that have been seeping into vehicles over the past thirty years. For the vast majority of people a self-driving car is a far better way of getting around than them doing it themselves because they do it so poorly. For the few who are willing to work at it, electronics could amplify their skill, but those kinds of electronics aren’t an option in cars sold to the public. The lowest common denominator (the indifferent human operator) dictates public sales and determines what everyone can have. The result of this human expectation deflation is to demand less from everyone. Even those who want to learn more eventually won’t because the skills required are obscured by mandated electronics.

I can’t wait to get stuck behind one of those when I’m parking.

I need to develop a jammer so I can stop that car and drive around it

The trajectory electronic vehicle controls have taken parallels the path that information technology and learning is on. If we’re not bothering to remember anything any more because we can Google it and not bothering to learn anything any more because a computer can do it, we end up at a pretty dark conclusion.

Ignorance of computers in people who use them constantly gets me so wound up because you can’t effectively use a tool if you don’t know how it works. Before school our cafeteria is full of teens using information technology with no understanding of how what they’re using works. I walked by a health class the other day and the teacher said, “you guys and your phones… I’d be happier if you were all just talking to each other (and not doing class work) than I am with you all looking at screens.” Less than 1% of students in my school take any computer courses in order to understand how they work, yet pretty much all of them depend on computers every day all day – and many teachers are expecting them to integrate that same technology into their learning.

Your modern race-car steering wheel has more in common
with a space shuttle console than a wheel.

The race car driver who is tweaking their electronics in order to improve lap times does so because they have an in depth understanding of how the technology at their disposal can improve their process. You can’t use electronics to improve your performance if you know nothing about how this technology works; modern racing drivers and engineers are all electronics experts, modern students are not and neither are the vast majority of their teachers, yet electronics continue to insinuate themselves into learning. Like the intervening vehicle management systems that assume control in order to do a better job than indifferent drivers, so educational technology is stepping in to assume control of learning for indifferent students and teachers.

Until we start treating education technology as an enhancement to learning rather than a replacement for it we remain headed on the same trajectory as the driverless car. If that is the case we’d be more pedagogically correct to ban digital tools in learning until we’ve clarified the learner as the race car driver who will understand and use educational technology to amplify their effectiveness, and not the gormless driver on public roads who needs technology to step in and do their work for them.

Emotionally Charged Engagement

Pettis‘ manifesto demands the freedom needed to make things work. Educators might get excited about Maker philosophy like this, but it isn’t what they want in classrooms.

This talk of Making at ECOO had me thinking about my own process of building, repairing and creating.

My engineering process is closely related to my creative process. Creativity came first as a toddler mainly because I found visual art intuitive to step into. Engineering followed shortly thereafter (about 6 years old?) when I found myself dismantling bicycles and toys, sometimes for creative purposes but mainly driven an intense desire to understand how things work. My mother was an artist, my father is an engineer; my behavior wasn’t a happy accident.

Both my processes have evolved and entwined, and both demand absolute ownership. I find myself fully committed to my process which makes the idea of going to committee abhorrent. If what I’m doing ends up not working it’s on me and me alone. That focus and responsibility is what allows me to work through frustrating, stochastic, non-linear builds and repairs that would cause most people to shrug and give up.

I prefer to work alone. If I’m going to seek help, I will initiate it. Being forced to accommodate collaboration prevents me from doing what needs to be done to make the thing work. Lateral thinking never works well when you’ve have to constantly explain every intuition, it breaks your flow.

How much faith do I have in my process? I drove my wife and newborn son home in a car I rebuilt the brakes on. I ride a motorcycle (with my son on the back) that I rebuilt from scrap. If I did it, it’s done properly, I regularly bet my life on it. This is what competency looks like when making something work is the priority; mechanical mastery can’t exist in any other circumstance.

intuition works best in silence

When I’m working on an engineering problem or a creative project I am radically engaged (fixated?) with what I am doing. This isn’t the kind of directed, controlled engagement that teachers encourage in classrooms. Being interrupted by a well-meaning teacher who wants to make my process transparent antagonizes the hell out of me.

Teacher interruptions in my process are vexing. I don’t seek an expert to do it for me, that doesn’t teach me anything. I’d prefer to ask another capable student who is struggling with similar issues and figure it out with them rather than ask a teacher who has done it a hundred times before. This is what mastery learning is and why it seldom happens in a classroom.

This all comes from my first post-secondary learning experience as a millwright apprentice. I left high school before graduation because it felt like a holding tank rather than a learning opportunity. In that apprenticeship I didn’t have teachers assessing my learning, I had people who were invested in it because it meant less work for them. That we were all doing the same work went a long way toward me valuing their expertise.

Collaboration isn’t the point of any engineering activity. It shouldn’t remove the focus from a project, it should amplify it. When teachers say things like, “we’re going to be makers, but what the kids are really learning is collaboration!” I would expect to see a group of frustrated students and a pile of newly purchased Arduinos and Raspberry Pis gathering dust in boxes. You’ve got to respect the skill and focus needed to make things work first.

My favorite kind of teacher is the one I try to be. I encourage skills development and provide expertise if asked (though I am reluctant). I provide materials and offer multiple avenues into how to get it done, but then I get the hell out of the way. What I hope to see is a student lose themselves in their process and improve as a result of this intensive engagement. You learn more in the doing of a thing than you ever do in the theory of it.

I observe, I offer help if it’s asked for, but I also allow students to fail if they refuse to take risks and engage in a meaningful engineering process. In the best cases I’m able to look at a finished prototype that shows resiliency, creativity, and works. That last bit is important, I’m not grading how hard they tried, or how well they get along with each other, I’m grading engineering. The student who built a working prototype feels a genuine sense of achievement because they went through real struggle to resolve complex, non-linear (non-textbook) problems. They seldom worry about what kind of mark they got, the value is self-evident.

Assumptions and cultural influences won’t get you far in mechanics – you need to be stringent and respect reality because it doesn’t care about your perceptions. This is the reason why two mechanics from opposites sides of the world with no shared language can still effectively communicate with each other. Reality is a shared language.

A highlight of a recent unit was watching a student who found the process of building Arduino circuits very challenging. In his presentation of a partially working prototype he angrily said, “… and it didn’t work again, until I realized, like a n00b, that I hadn’t plugged the power wire into the rail.” He was absolutely right, he is no longer n00b, and he should be frustrated with having made such a rudimentary mistake. His emotional engagement with his failure was telling – he is beginning to take pride in his skills.

Emotional engagement is at the root of my work with machines. Radical engagement makes my process an emotional one (or is it the other way around?). The sometimes stochastic, often non-linear and usually frustrating nature of building and repairing complex machinery requires an emotional edge. That edge is what powers my resiliency. I refuse to let a complication derail me, sometimes not giving up even when I should. If it continues to not work, emotion not only powers my resiliency but also my imagination, driving me to think laterally around problems.

Class bells, rubrics, teachers showing you how and assigned groups are the antithesis of my kind of radical engagement. Schools seem designed to prevent this kind of focus and break learning up into an arm’s length, carefully managed chunks. Learning is an organic process until you see it diced up into curriculum and fed to students who have no idea what it is they are supposed to be learning or why. The education system might work for basic skills but mastery isn’t what its set to produce. Education elbows its way between student curiosity and their natural tendency to learn in order to manage the process. The ultimate purpose of the education system is not to teach but to produce grades which everyone believes are an expression of student learning but are actually entirely fictional.

Radical emotional engagement is the antithesis of the clinical, rational engagement educators look to manage, but this emotional engagement is at the root of my empathy with machines, Education spends a lot of energy encouraging collaboration, linear consumption of curriculum and a cold kind of empathy between students, but ignores (stamps out?) human emotional engagement in order to retain control.

The difference between how I and many others learn, and the mono-cultural, rationalist’s philosophy of education is why you seldom see radical engagement in a classroom. It’s why you see outliers, especially highly engaged ones, do poorly in school. Education is designed to hit the medium, the comfortable middle class child who requires no emotional connection because they have it elsewhere. Deviants, whether they are eccentrics who want radical engagement in something they are fixated on, or students who need more from a teacher than grades, aren’t a good fit with the system.

The difference between applied and academic students has
a lot more to do with family dynamics and the need for
emotional engagement than it does with intelligence.

Education’s discomfort with emotional engagement lies at the root of Ontario’s high school streaming system. Applied students tend to come to school from less stable home lives and look for more emotional engagement with their teachers. This freaks out the academics who teach them. Academic students (and the teachers they turn into) prefer to treat school at arm’s reach – rationally and emotionally distancing themselves from it because information is all they require from a classroom. To these academics school is a job, one they have figured out and are good at. These are the students who get mad at you when you saddle them with a problem that may not have a solution.

This distance between student need and teacher approach is probably the single largest difference between academic and applied students. Some of the smartest kids I’ve ever taught have been applied level students. Teachers willing to support emotional engagement with learning often find these students are the ones who make the biggest leaps in high school, but they are challenging and often emotionally exhausting, especially when the rationalists who run the system think 30+ students in a classroom is manageable (and it is if you don’t treat students like people).

Ironically, all of those teacher movies that educators so love are the ones that emphasize this emotional learning connection but it just doesn’t happen that often in the real world. At a recent Heads’ meeting a rule was put up saying that people have to be rational and unemotional when making suggestions. They can’t be emotionally engaged in any debate. That’s how ed-quants like it in the classroom too. What a sure way to make something tedious, distant and uninspired.

Radical engagement is powered by emotion. It makes for a messy, demanding learning environment, but it’s also a vital key to differentiating learning that the vast majority of educators don’t just ignore but actively seek to stamp out. The doorway to mastery is one you have to walk through yourself, and you’ll never manage it if you’re dependent on the advice of others. It takes resiliency, courage and a lot of work to become that kind of proficient. Emotion is a powerful ally in getting there.