This Is Not News

Another roadblock that I encounter as I try to live up to the ideal of teaching that I have in my head is an ongoing conflict between two ideas. The first is my dislike of the idea that school should be a place where the teacher takes his or her knowledge and transfers it to the students; I am much more comfortable with the idea that students have to learn things for themselves and can’t just sponge it from another source. But the second, competing idea is that I see myself as an authority figure with certain expertise that should be used in the shaping of the learning environment. I don’t think it’s a bad thing for me to say, “Yes, you have to build the knowledge yourself, but right now you also have to listen to me tell you what knowledge to build and how to do it.” When I write that, part of me is turned off by the arrogance implied in it, but another part of me doesn’t see any way around the truth of it. When I look back at my own career as a student, I find numerous cases where a project that seemed utterly irrelevant at the time turned out to be quite important. In many cases, the teachers did know best.

I have the good fortune of being Facebook friends not only with a number of my high school classmates, but with several of my teachers as well. (It speaks volumes of my high school experience that my teachers and I each left enough of an impression on each other that we’d want to talk to each other almost 20 years later, but that’s another post.) Yesterday one thread evolved into a discussion of an assignment in my English class in sophomore year. We had to read Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and write a reflection journal that was supposed to run about 50 pages.

Now I can still remember that this assignment was the bane of my existence in 1990. Invisible Man is a dense novel, and the longest paper I had ever written was 5 pages. Now I had to go up by an order of magnitude. I don’t think I actually made it . . . I got to around page 35 before I just ran out of things to say. I honestly don’t remember if what I had to say was worth anything – those assignments are long gone, consigned to the dustbins of 5.25-inch floppy history. But what I do remember is that I wrote that much.

That’s an important memory, because when I got to Fordham I was admitted to the honors program, where I had to write and defend a 50-page senior thesis on the topic of my choosing. It was hard work, and the bane of my existence in 1996, but throughout the process I could look back at high school and know that I had done this, or something like it, before. So I had every reason to believe that I could do it again. In the end, I did, and while I have not really pursued any further research into artificial intelligence theory, I had to spend a lot of time thinking about the ways that human beings learn (and how they’re different from the ways that machines learn). That’s certainly information that’s come in handy in my current career.

Once I knew I could write a 50-page philosophy paper, I moved on to other academic mountains. When it came time to write a 200-page dissertation, I figured out how to divide the thesis up into chapters. Each chapter would be a chunk of about 35-50 pages. While those chapters were the banes of my existence from 2003-2006 (I have a very baneful existence, if you haven’t noticed), I did finish. Without that graduate research and dissertation, I would not have the grounding in philosophical pragmatism that I do, and I think I would be a poorer person, citizen and teacher as a result.

So 35-year-old Dave in 2010 could draw a line straight back to work that 15-year-old Dave did in 1990 and see how the 1990 work had made 2010’s successes possible. But if you had asked me as a 15-year-old to explain why I was doing that journal, the only thing I could have told you was, “The teacher told me to do it and I need to get a good grade.” The book and the reflection did not connect with my own experiences, and I was too young to realize how limited my own experiences were and how much more there was to understand in the world.

One more example that doesn’t paint me in such a flattering light: In my junior year, we had a religion class called Social Justice. I was very fortunate, and through a combination of my mother’s efforts, my own talents and hard work, and some meeting-the-right-people-at-the-right-time, I was able to attend a private Catholic high school in the suburbs. There were many advantages to this education, but one major drawback was that we were a very homogeneous group. Again, my own experiences didn’t tell me much about what people in different social or economic groups lived through, so issues of poverty or class were abstract notions. The Social Justice class was meant to help us look beyond our lives and think about the obligations that we have to our fellow people.

I am putting it mildly when I say we were a reluctant audience. We watched videos about how agribusiness companies affected the economies and environments of countries around the world. We discussed the Bretton Woods financial institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary fund. We read books about the life of families on welfare in the 1970s or the Catholic Church’s notion of a “preferential option for the poor.” And when we weren’t pushing back against the idea that we had some kind of unfair advantage in the world, we were bored. We doodled in the margins or made jokes after class about agribusiness, agribusiness, agribusiness. Around the time that we were discussing the IMF, the teacher saw some rather unkind doodles in my binder and gave me a talking-to about making a positive contribution to the class. The next day I gave my notes the subtitle “Contributing Positively.”

Yeah, feel free to give 16-year-old me a metaphorical slap. He deserves it.

The point is, in 1997 I was working in a PR firm whose client made financial planning software. So during this time period, I was trying to understand a lot of stuff about how the financial world worked. And right about this time, several Asian countries saw their economies run into major trouble. Suddenly I was seeing the World Bank and the IMF all over the news. Now why did they seem familiar?

Oh, yeah.

A few years after that, I’m married and trying to rely on something other than takeout and premade taco dinner kits to eat. Pattie and I start learning about the food industry and the influence of big agricultural companies over what we eat and how we eat it. Large agricultural companies. I feel like there was a term for that. What was it?

Oh, yeah.

Now, do I think that my English teacher or my Social Justice teacher could predict exactly which classroom experiences would provide me with useful insights or skills in the future? Of course not. If they could predict the future that well, I’d be disappointed if they were spending all their time teaching high school when they could be out making a fortune in the stock market or reshaping world culture. But they had pretty good judgment about what might be useful, and when I trusted that judgment, more often than not I was better off for it.

I believe that we learn things, and think about things, because knowledge is useful – it helps us make our way through the world and accomplish what we set out to do. But that doesn’t mean that everything we learn has to be obviously useful right now. William James wrote

[T]he advantage of having a general stock of extra truths, of ideas that shall be true of merely possible situations, is obvious. We store such extra truths away in our memories, and with the overflow we fill our books of reference.

One of the things that teachers can do is use their knowledge to help students build up that extra stock of knowledge, to have it ready in years to come when it may prove useful.

Now, as I look at our curricula and the classes that we require students to take, I definitely think that we can do a better job of this. (I learned about calculus in high school math, but I learned much of what I knew about the importance of compound interest in an elective social studies economics class.) And we need to have some space for dialogue with the students, so that we can understand how they view this collection of information that we (possibly) find fascinating but they find frustrating. As I work to do that, though, I’m also going to try to forgive myself for thinking that sometimes the teacher knows best.

As I get ready for the new year, I’ve been having a number of conversations with myself about how to implement the vision of teaching I have in my head. In my head, students take their questions about the world and seek out answers to them, while I provide resources and guidance to help them use the lessons of history to answer those questions. This works perfectly between approximately 3 AM and 5 AM, and then the alarm clock goes off and I face a bunch of realities that serve as roadblocks to that vision. My own limitations are certainly among those roadblocks, but they’re not the only ones. So in an effort to widen the conversation beyond myself and I, consider this post the beginning of a short series.

One thing I’ve been thinking about is the idea of authenticity in education. I like the idea of projects as a form of assessment – have the students create something that requires not just memorization of facts, but thinking about those facts. If there’s creativity and room for individual analysis and expression, then you’re on to something. And if it’s something that the students connect to, that they care about for its own sake and not because the guy with the grade book is telling them to do it, then you have a project that’s authentic.

Now, the roadblock I want to talk about now is that completing a project that requires 1) factual knowledge about a subject; 2) critical analysis of that knowledge; and 3) creation of content is going to require a number of skills. Part of the goal of the project is to help students develop those skills, but one challenge for the teacher is to match the complexity of the project to the skills that the students have. Ideally, you want the project to be near the edge or even slightly beyond the edge of the comfort level, so they have to stretch and build a little bit to get there. Without that, there’s no challenge, and that can lead to boredom. But with too much of a gap, students won’t know where to go, and they won’t feel like they can solve the problem themselves.

This means that the teacher is almost certainly going to have to put some artificial limitations on the project, and those simplifications run the risk of taking the project further away from something that the students feel is authentically relevant to them. Is there a way to get around this? I’m not sure.

When I was in grade school, I played snare drum for the grade school concert band. If you have ever been to a grade school music concert, you are probably familiar with the song Hot Cross Buns. It is a very simple tune that many music students learn when they are first getting the hang of their instruments. Now, whatever goals someone might have when they start playing an instrument, giving a rousing performance of Hot Cross Buns is not likely to be one of them. But learning this song lets you practice reading the music and hitting the notes, and hopefully after a little while you’re ready for something more engaging. I eventually played a few John Philip Sousa marches and a barely recognizable version of the Beatles’ “Yesterday” before hanging up my drumsticks.

Now, is there a more authentic way of helping music students get those initial building blocks? Or is Hot Cross Buns (or something like it) just something you have to grin and bear to get on with the good stuff? I honestly don’t know. I suspect that a certain amount of grinning and bearing is necessary, but that could be my lack of imagination.

And to being this back around to the high school classroom, if I need a Hot Cross Buns to help students build their research or their critical thinking skills, how can I get beyond that phase as quickly as possible and let them loose on more complex, and hopefully more engaging, material?

One possibility would be to build out my start-of-year introduction. In World History, instead of starting with australopithecus and the dawn of humanity, I begin with the last chapter of the book and discuss the present day. The Internet and global warming are a little more accessible than cave paintings and the Stone Age. I could try to create a few projects based on researching personal history, and put the focus more on the thinking and the application than the content itself. I might hit other roadblocks, like the assigned curriculum and its associated schedule, but that’s a hurdle for another day.