This Is Not News

I’ve been thinking about ways that I can use the upcoming conventions and elections in my World History and Ethics classes this year. Right now I’m thinking a lot about those biographical videos the candidates produce. I was already planning to have the students make short videos about their own personal history or their family history, but now I’m wondering if we should spend a day or two studying those videos and how they use history to tell a story that makes an argument. Then with that example in mind, students would have more of a framework in mind, although they could also go in a different direction if they choose.

I really don’t know if the press coverage of the election is going to be useful enough to use. I’m really worried about the background knowledge issue, because I don’t think a lot of political reporting goes into enough depth about the substance of candidates’ policies and proposals. Horse race stuff would be useful in a poli sci or government course, but I don’t know if it hits what I’m aiming for in history.

I want to use contemporary media reports and current events in my teaching, but it doesn’t always work as well as I want it to work. Reading the British press last month gave me some ideas that might help out this year.

Let me set the stage. I like to keep track of efforts to improve the basic institutions and procedures of democratic governments around the world. It’s very easy to get used to the system and the institutions that you grow up with, and you stop asking the “Why do we do this?” questions. (For example, why do we usually vote on Tuesdays?) And if you don’t ask the ‘Why do we do this?” questions, you probably don’t get to the “Should we keep doing this?” questions. So I try to keep an eye on the ways that other democratic nations handle their elections and lawmaking. As a result, I was like a kid in a candy store last month when the House of Commons in the United Kingdom began debating a proposal to change the structure of the other house of Parliament, the House of Lords.

But I’m going to put off the discussion of the actual proposal for a day or so, because I realized that the process I was following to try to figure out what was going on was something I really needed to pay attention to. Like I said, I’m pretty used to the American system of government. So when I read a story in the newspaper or online about the American institutions, I have a ready store of information that I can use to add context and fill in the blanks. This is a good thing, because most of the time, the press is relying on its audience’s background knowledge so that each story doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel.

But a lot of my students don’t have that background knowledge, and it makes following the news a frustrating experience for them. And as I was reading the Guardian’s coverage of the House of Lords debate, I realized that I didn’t have that knowledge either. The British press was assuming I had the kind of day-to-day familiarity with British government that would come from, say, living in Britain. This gave me an opportunity – if I paid attention to how I filled in the gaps, maybe it would help me improve the process for my students.

One thing I realized is that I was skipping over some things that I didn’t understand completely. I had read several stories about the current British government’s effort to reform the House of Lords, but I had been reading them in the context of the relationship between two parties in the UK’s government, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. For a long time it didn’t matter to me that I didn’t fully understand the actual proposal – I registered that the two parties had different ideas about it, and that was enough to keep reading about how those different ideas would affect their ability to work together. So knowing what I was interested in was a big help in getting past the details that might have frustrated me.

Eventually, though, I became interested in the proposal itself. And the news reports generally did a good job of mentioning what the new changes would be. That makes sense, because what would be new pretty much meets the definition of news. But the news reports were not explaining how things are in the present. Why would they? It hasn’t changed, it’s not news. So I had to go beyond the news reports to get the full context. And I realized that I needed the full context in order to understand the importance of the story, because I realized that I could not give a clear answer to one important question: What power does the House of Lords have that makes reforming the House of Lords important? I knew I needed to go outside of the press reports to expand my background information, and I had framed a specific question to help guide my search. This was big, and I’m going to come back to this idea.

The search took longer than I expected it to take. Some online news resources, like the BBC, have a lot of articles of background information that they make available. I clicked on a lot of links, but could not find a succinct explanation of the House of Lords’ power.

I did a Google search for the House of Lords and found myself on the official site of the UK Parliament. Again, it took a lot of clicks to get through the simplified version of parliamentary procedure that they explained. And the answer to my specific question was hard to find – no one would nail down exactly what power the House of Lords has. I did a Wikipedia search, and finally, between that and the Lords site, I got together a working idea. But the only reason I could do that is because I had noticed a key term that kept coming up in my reading: the Parliament Acts. Those had sounded important, so I made sure to look for an explanation of the Acts in the articles I was reading.

Now here’s the thing – I spent about an hour doing this, at least. I would not have done well if this were a classroom assignment where I needed to find the answer before the end of the class period. So I have to remember to frame my questions and assignments properly.

One of the things I think I’m going to do to that end is to use the start of the year to build up the shared frames of reference. In the past I have had students read articles and answer questions about it or maybe paraphrase. I think what I want to do at first is emphasize the idea of the article as a launching pad. Have the students read it, tell me what they got from it, and then identify names, places, terms and so on that they didn’t fully understand. Maybe ask them to form one specific question they would like to get an answer to. Then, once they’ve identified a term or concept as a stumbling block, we can talk about it or review it. Hopefully as we go through this a few times, the students will start to form some connections and have an easier time with future articles.

I’m still working out the process here, but I’m really glad I had the experience. In retrospect it seems kind of obvious, but I missed it for a long time. When we stretch out of our comfort zone to learn something new, we should always keep one eye on how we’re learning it, so we can be prepared to use those techniques again in the future.

In my ongoing effort to find new ways to help my students work through and think through issues, I tried to design a simulation that would give them a rough idea of how the alliance system helped lead into World War I. It still needs some work, and I would definitely do some revisions before I tried it next year. But here’s what I came up with – the link goes to the Word document I have in my class’s Google Docs collection.

Alliance System and World War I

I need to tweak the allotted forces, and possibly do some more research to make them more historically accurate. I need better rules for handling multiple conflicts. The first two classes I did this with created very complicated four- and five-way alliances where the partners didn’t know who else was in their alliance, so after that I printed up blank Treaty forms and made every pair sign a form before they were considered allies.

What I really need to do is spend some time studying game design so I can write better simulation rules. 🙂

But I think at the end of this a lot of the students understood why nations formed alliances for protection, and how that could backfire. Hopefully they’ll keep that idea with them when they study the war again some day.

The middle conversation of my EduCon experience was right up my alley. Jennifer Orr conducted a session on Thinking About Thinking, which encouraged us to think about the processes that we all use while thinking and how we can encourage our students to observe and develop those processes. There is so much content in the World History curriculum that I’ve decided to de-emphasize a lot of it. It’s so much to absorb in a short time, and I’d rather help the students assemble a toolbox that they can use in future courses and experiences. Some of those tools will be content-related, but a lot of the really transferrable tools will be driven by process.

Jennifer’s presentation used the four thinking patterns identified by Derek Cabrera as a starting point. I’m still researching and processing the work. To a certain extent, trying to boil all of the thinking we do down to four patterns seems a little too pat. But I also think that there’s a value in showing how flexible a few basic tools can be. Whether these four are the four I would focus on . . . well, that’s why EduCon is the start of a conversation, not the end of one.

The first pattern was based on identity, or Distinction. A lot of what we do when we think is put things in categories. This is day; that is night. This is up; that is down. This is a good idea; this is not a good idea. This pattern can be the basis for a simple but useful brainstorming exercise. Ask students to identify what a thing is, and what it is not. Our second semester began a few days after the conference, and I wanted my students to talk about what they felt a rewarding educational experience would be. So I put a four-quadrant grid on the board. I labeled the top row “What are good ways to learn?” and “What are not good ways to learn?” The bottom row had the questions “What’s a good way to show/use what you’ve learned?” and “What isn’t a good way to show what you’ve learned?” It gave the students a chance to voice their opinions and safely say what they didn’t like. I’m still trying to implement the suggestions and get the students to take ownership of the things that they said were good ways, and make sure that they take those things seriously. But it helped me to organize my thoughts.

As I was listening to Jennifer, the thing that jumped right into my head was that this is a very Western way of thinking about thinking. When I read Toward a Philosophy of Zen Buddhism, one of the first things that the author pointed out was that Zen denies the importance of the laws of identity and contradiction. The universe is a whole; day and night blend together like the white and black halves of the yin-yang symbol. Saying that “this is this” and “this is not that” forces us to cut up the world and break the threads that connect everything together, and Zen encourages its practitioners to move beyond this approach and give up the project of separating themselves from the rest of the universe. So right off the bat, I’m not sure if this is as universal as I think Cabrera is making it out to be. But the resistance that Zen gets from many people also indicates that these patterns are very much ingrained in many thinkers around the world.

From saying what things are, our minds often move to connecting those things to other things. This is where the other patterns come to play. We start to see things as parts of a whole, or Systems. We see how different things are connected one another, or form Relationships such as cause-and-effect. And we start to look at things from different Perspectives in order to get additional insights. They form ways of seeing the world as a system or a system of systems, with parts that interact to form a whole. It never quite gets to the gestalt stage that a lot of Eastern thinking (or continental philosophy like Heidegger) does, but it does build up the complexity of our thought. It was a little difficult for me to see the three other patterns as fully distinct; they seemed more like different angles on the same idea, but that might just be me resisting the idea that you can make hard and fast distinctions.

Once we had the basic idea of the patterns, Jennifer asked us to try to apply them in small group discussions about the concept of school choice – a topic that she was pretty sure most of us in the room had opinions about. I enjoyed the conversations that developed here, especially when one of the other teachers in the group decided to draw in the SLA student who was helping out with the technical matters in the room. I want to save that part of the conversation for my overall impressions reflection, though. (There I go, categorizing again.)

One thing I did notice about my own process is that I wanted to make a decision about which of the many senses of “school choice” we were talking about, because any one of them could have been fodder for an hour-long conversation. Were we talking about students choosing schools, or schools choosing students? Were we talking about the freedom of schools to choose their approach to education, or the responsibility of the government to fund any possible approach that someone wanted to try? If private schools were a part of the school choice conversation, how would we incorporate cost? Part of this is the Western philosopher in me that likes precision in my terms. Part of it is a habit that my mother observed a long time ago – I could never just play a pickup game of baseball, I had to try to design the stadium first. Problem is, if you spend too much time on setting up the ground rules, you wind up getting called home for dinner before you can throw the first pitch

But that’s one place that having some clear thoughts about thinking can help. When it seems like the person you’re talking to is having an entirely different conversation than the one you think you’re trying to have, it can be a good thing to quickly reflect on how you’ve gotten to where you are and what alternate paths someone might take. Then you can decide whether to try to redirect things back to the way you were heading, or to throw out the map and see where the new direction might lead. Knowing how you got where you are can help you figure out where you’re going.

Hey, I’m a history teacher. What else did you expect me to say?

It’s taken two weeks longer than I wanted, but I’m finally getting my EduCon reflections down in written form. It’s from no lack of reflecting on my part . . . I haven’t really stopped thinking about the conversations and experiences, but oddly enough all of that thinking has left me without energy to write. But now’s as good a time as any to get started. I’m going to go backwards in talking about the sessions I attended and then hopefully zoom back out for an overall perspective.

I’ve mentioned former SLA teacher Zac Chase before; his presentation with Diana Laufenberg at the 2011 EduCon was a real kickstarter to some of the things I’ve tried to do in the last year, and I’ve been following along as he talks about his studies at Harvard, so I didn’t want to miss his session about inquiry. Promoting and cultivating a sense of inquiry is one of my major goals as a teacher; I don’t think you can get into the philosophy business without a healthy sense of inquiry, but my own enthusiasm isn’t something I can just bottle and pass on.

There was an interesting dynamic in this conversation. Fairly often the conversation moved from addressing inquiry head-on to discussing themes like power relationships in the classroom. There was a slight tension in the room between people who wanted to take the conversation even further in that direction and others who weren’t sure what the devil authoritarian structures in the traditional classroom have to do with the sense of inquiry. (It’s very easy to look at that as a case study in the messy nature of inquiry – one question can lead to any number of places.) I think I get where the overlap is – if students aren’t empowered to ask questions and follow where they lead, there’s not a real sense of inquiry. And the traditional classroom structure where the teacher is presumed to have the answers and the students need to figure out those answers can short-circuit the sense of the true unknown that’s required for inquiry.

That said, I think I’m a bit more conservative than Zac, at least based on an exchange near the end of the conversation. I mentioned that as a teacher, it’s very hard to figure out how to phrase a question in such a way that students don’t feel lost when they try to answer it but also don’t feel hemmed in by the search for One Right Answer. Other people had similar thoughts, and Zac asked the question, “Why are the teachers the ones asking question? Do we think that the students need to be taught how to ask questions?” As I nodded my head yes, Zac continued. “Why do they have to be taught? They seem to be naturals at it. You don’t have to teach a kid to walk . . . they see people doing it, they figure out for themselves.”

And that’s the point where I got off the train. When I look at the adults of the world, I do not see a lot of expert questioners. Unlike walking, where the rewards are pretty obvious and most of our evolution has worked to build up the structures of the body that make it possible, we don’t always have the incentive to think and ask questions. Asking questions takes time, and by the time you formulate a really good question about the importance of carnivorous behavior to lion survival, you’re lion food. So there are parts of our brain and nervous system pushing us to inquiry, and some parts pulling us away from it. If you look at the people who don’t really question the world around them, I think you’d agree that the pull is pretty strong. There’s an anti-intellectual aspect of our culture, and there’s a comfort in certainty that many of us are unwilling to give up.

So even though we can all imagine the little kid who never stops asking questions, we shouldn’t presume that every one of those little kids will keep asking questions and get better at asking good questions. (And I do think there are some questions that are better than others, but that may be another story.) I absolutely believe that as educators we need to give students room to frame and pursue their own questions, but I also believe that we should help prime the pump and spur them on with questions of our own. As it so often is, the trick is finding the balance.

Two warnings:

First, I’m not entirely sure where I’m going with this, but I think the journey is one I ought to take.

Second, parts of this are going to make me sound like an arrogant jerk. I promise to beat myself up a bit to make up for it, and I ask your indulgence because I think it’s necessary.

Another of my recurring arguments with myself boils down to my own ego. There are lots of truisms that talk about the value of our personal experience. There’s the old expression that writers should write what they know, and one can certainly see the logic of extending the advice to teaching. (I mean, discovering new things with the class is a great thing, but there’s a reason I’m not a Spanish teacher.) From the start of my teaching career, I’ve drawn on my experience as a student. The first semester I taught, I was assigned an Intro to Philosophy course, and got little to no advice on how I should structure it. So I went to my bookcase and started pulling down the books that I read in my first couple of philosophy classes at Fordham and built my classes around them. I still think back to my own high school experiences when I look for models of what I want to achieve as a teacher – my desire to be a teacher was inspired in large part by the credit I give to my own teachers for the person I am today.

But that path from student to teacher has included a number of experiences that make me critical of the status quo in education, so I don’t want to just copy what I did verbatim. The trick is, as I try to figure out ways to change the system, I am also a product of the system. Challenging the validity of the system also challenges the validity of my own accomplishments.

For starters, I am really, really good at standardized and objective tests. I don’t know why; this is one of those things where I don’t ask the centipede how it keeps all its legs moving. But whenever a standardized test has served as a filtering mechanism or checkpoint to an opportunity, I have not had to worry about the test blocking me, and I have known there was a good chance that the test would help me. From what I understand, it was my GRE score more than anything that got me into graduate school and is certainly the reason I got the aid that I did. On the one hand, I might criticize a merit pay proposal for teachers because I think it puts too much weight on standardized test results. On the other hand, I make sure I let people know about my own results if I think it would help me. On the one hand, I get frustrated when test prep becomes a focus in my lesson planning. On the other hand, I know that test-taking is a skill that affects my students’ future well-being even though it shouldn’t be, so shouldn’t I try to help them build that skill?

Even when you get past the tests, the bulk of my education wasn’t in the “progressive” mode that I discovered in Dewey and consider ideal today. From high school to grad school, I read books – some textbooks, some full books, some anthologies – and went to class, where I listened to lectures, participated in class discussions, and took notes. When it was over I took a test or wrote an essay or both. That’s how I learned about history. That’s how I learned about politics. That’s how I learned about Dewey, and let me tell you, reading Democracy and Education is no Deweyan experience, even though I wouldn’t trade reading it for the world. And those experiences still permeate my teaching today. I teach my students how to outline a chapter because I learned how to outline a chapter, and that’s how I took notes for almost 25 years of schooling so gosh darn it, it must be a good idea. And truth be told, I think that outlines, when done right, provide good practice at tying ideas and facts together, and it would benefit a lot of people to improve those organizational skills. I’m not just doing t because of tradition.

Of course, the guy in class next to me who never got the hang of outlines probably didn’t have as positive of a school experience as I did, so he doesn’t have the emotional reasons to be a teacher, so there we have the system perpetuating itself even if the system shouldn’t be perpetuated.

But if the system that produced me is so flawed that it should be overhauled, on what basis do I make my claim that I should be part of the new system?

To a certain extent, this is the self-examination that every society should be doing. What parts of my self, and my society, are worth passing along to the next generation? What parts are better left to pass away with my generation? How can we become something even better than we were? How can I become someone better than I was? (I swiped those ideas from Dewey, by the way. Told you all that reading was good for something.)

It’s just that sometimes it’s really hard for me to trust myself or my answers to these questions, and the arguments I have with myself leave me paralyzed. I have to hope that all of those essays and class discussions and tests also allowed me to build a skill for critically examining and understanding the world. I have to hope they give me insights on how I built those skills, and how the system might have impeded some of my colleagues from making similar progress. And I have to hope I have the chance to use those skills to build something even better than the system that produced me, even if that means taking a hammer to some of my own achievements – and even if it means doing some things the old fashioned-way. And to the extent that some of those skills and opportunities are the result of unfair advantages that I have had, all I can do is try to remain aware of my good fortune and do my best to turn it into good fortune for others. These days, I’m often finding that easier said than done.

I sort of left my Roadblocks series alone for a few days, although many of the little posts I’ve made this week have been beating around the bush. This is an argument that I get into with myself a bit, because it’s a situation where I have to have faith in something when the visible evidence doesn’t always support it.

My philosophical background is in John Dewey’s version of pragmatism, and the theories of democracy and education that he produced as a result. It’s a vision that says that human beings have the capacity to grow by using their intelligence to understand the world around them. It says that this capacity is best utilized in a free and democratic society, where everyone serves as a partner in the project of inquiry. When we can share what we have learned, listen to what others have to say about it, and add their contributions to what we originally figured out, we get a richer, clearer picture of the world around us. We also build skills and tools that we can use to solve the next problem that comes along.

I believe in this vision. The reason I have chosen teaching as a career is that I believe that I can use what I have learned to help students develop the tools to be good citizens. In the process I expect to improve my own skills as well.

But you know, there are days when my faith in the vision is sorely tested by reality. There are decades of data that suggest that Americans as a whole are not very well-informed about policy issues. Elections are frequently decided by a minority of the eligible voters because two-fifths or more of the eligible voters don’t show up. The voters who do show up often don’t really know who or what they’re voting for, so we get wild swings in policy direction and ridiculous forms of institutionalized gridlock. There’s a strain of anti-intellectualism in our society that suggests that people who do intelligently investigate the world shouldn’t be trusted (unless they’re figuring out how to get more channels into our TVs).

When I see the state of the world I wonder if we’re really the intelligent inquirers that pragmatism makes us out to be.

Now, part of my job as a teacher is to help change that. Dewey’s theory of education is built on the idea that as children we are naturally prone to inquiry about our world, and educational institutions should be built to harness, channel, and amplify that natural inquiry so that “our world” gets wider and wider as we grow older. But if adults aren’t always interested in inquiry, might it not stand to reason that not every student is going to be, either?

Inquiry-driven, performance-based learning demands a lot of work on the part of the learner. The independence that it offers leaves the students with less of a road map than some other models of education. I haven’t figured out the way to make that appeal to every student, to inspire them to take ownership of their own education. Some do because that’s who they are, and some don’t because that’s who they are. So the ongoing challenge for me is to figure out how to grow that first category, and that’s the argument I often have with myself at night.

My class wikispace isn’t working properly in school, so I’m using this page as a backup for a project we’re working on in ethics.

Presidential Project Phase 2: The Days Before New Hampshire

NPR: New Hampshire Boost or Bust

1. History suggests that if Mitt Romney wins the New Hampshire primary tomorrow, he will win the Republican nomination for president. Why is this so?
2. What did Pat Buchanan accomplish in New Hampshire in 1996? Why does Buchanan think he was able to accomplish this?
3. What challenge does Buchanan say that Romney will have to overcome if he does win the New Hampshire primary?

NPR: Debate Coverage

1. What advantages does Mitt Romney have in New Hampshire?
2. Why were his opponents attacking him anyway in debates on Saturday and Sunday?
3. Why do Romney’s opponents think that they will have an easier time beating Romney in southern states?
4. Summarize either Newt Gingrich’s or Rick Santorum’s attack on Romney, and Romney’s response to that attack.

CNN on Ron Paul

1. What is Ron Paul’s plan for Tuesday night/Wednesday morning?
2. Why does Paul say he wants to end America’s financial aid to Israel (and to other countries)?
3. What advantage does Paul think he has with New Hampshire voters? Does available data support or contradict that claim?

NY Times on NH Debate

1. Summarize the criticisms of Romney by Gingrich, Santorum, and Jon Huntsman.
2. What concerns does the Romney team have, given that their candidate is seen as the leader in the race?
3. Why is Romney trying to convince voters that he understands what it’s like to be worried about losing your job?
4. What comment did Romney make during the debate that Gingrich is now using as the basis for an attack?
5. Why are some candidates starting to look ahead to South Carolina?

Washington Post on Jon Huntsman

1. How is Jon Hunstman’s campaign different from many of the other Republicans’?
2. What mistakes do political analysts believe that he has made?
3. What evidence does the article offer that Huntsman is a conservative candidate?
4. What evidence does it offer that he is not?

General – Use these articles and other articles at the news/politics sites to answer these questions:

1. Why do you think Romney’s rivals are focusing on Bain Capital? Do you think this is a good strategy for making Romney unpopular?
2. Given the comments by Pat Buchanan about his success in 1996, would you expect Rick Santorum to have a strong or a weak chance of success in New Hampshire? What about Ron Paul?
3. Do you think that any candidate other than Romney, Santorum, or Paul will do well enough in New Hampshire to have a good chance to win the nomination? Why/why not?
4. If you were on President Obama’s campaign team, how would you criticize the Republican candidates in order to increase Obama’s chance to be re-elected?

So this week in World History we’re starting a set of units that have revolutions as a theme. To help introduce the topic I ask my students to analyze the lyrics of The Beatles’ “Revolution” because I think John Lennon does a pretty good job of incorporating a lot of the themes we discuss. The worksheet we use is in my Google Docs collection; I need to do a double-check on the lyrics transcription.

Some time in the next month or two I’ll ask students to create a video for the song based on what we’ve learned. (Which I suddenly realize means I need to figure out what I’m going to do about the student acquiring the song and whether I’m condoning or even encouraging piracy, or whether I can justify this to myself as a fair academic use. But that’s for later.)

The funny thing is, today we were talking about the idea that revolution often involves destruction – not just physical destruction as in war, but destruction of old ways of life and doing things. We talked about a lot of technological revolutions, and all of the old businesses that have been destroyed by the digital era. We talked about cassettes and record stores and film cameras. And right after we had that discussion, what do I read? That the Kodak company might be filing for bankruptcy.

Never mind ripping from the headlines, the headlines are ripping from me. 🙂

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.