SpeEdChange

...in which I may suggest that I oppose literacy

noreply@blogger.com (narrator) — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 21:21:00 +0000

"Skill in reading is desirable. However, the importance of reading may be overemphasized in schools. Reading skills are determined relatively and not absolutely. Thus, relatively poor readers will persist. Schools cannot eradicate individual differences. Biological makeup and societal pressures are the important factors in determining reading skill. Present methods of reading remediation are of questionable efficacy and are traumatic to some children. Time with its associated normal development succeeds in remediating the majority of children with dyslexia. Most poor readers eventually attain reading levels that enable them to comprehend the types of printed materials commonly encountered. If a child finds reading difficult or distasteful, that child should be encouraged to read but should have the right not to be forced to read." - R.D. Snyder, 1979

I have been introduced, more than once, as, "this is Ira, he's against literacy."

It's a funny introduction. I think of myself, in some weird ways of course, as a "prophet" of literacy, bringing the love of stories, yes, of books, to many who have grown up without it, but when I run into your typical "literacy advocate" I often fly into a rage.

My rage now has been created by two things, first, this "What if everyone could read" campaign by Pam Allyn and her organization "LitWorld and LitLife," and a Guardian article somehow mixing Dickens 200th Birthday with government mandated phonics ("Please sir, may I have another Pseudoword?"), and the British government's desire for all students to visit the libraries the British government is closing as an austerity measure.

Allyn is perhaps less ironic, and more hateful, fully demonizing me and all others who struggle with decoding text - she actually extends this generationally, choosing to bash our children. "When a child cannot read or write at an appropriate level for her age, it affects her ability to understand other subjects. Struggling readers connect learning with embarrassment and frustration, which puts stumbling blocks in their way and prevents them from reaching their full potential. Later in life, struggling child readers become struggling adult readers who are far less likely to vote and secure jobs than their literate counterparts. In addition, literacy levels correlate with health outcomes, both for the individual him or herself as well as his or her children." Thank you dear, I feel all better. May I now psychoanalyze a person who chooses to make their living describing others in pathological terms?

I like to read sci-fi and mysteries as I fall asleep...

The Decoding Obsession

Who reads? Who reads well? What does "reading well" mean? "In the hypothetical “average school,” 50% of the students will read at or below grade level when grade level is defined as the class median. This statistical fact is generally not recognized. Educators and parents tend to view below average performance as unsatisfactory. A student performing below average in a classroom should not necessarily be considered an adverse reflection on either the parent or the teacher." - Snyder, 1979. Actually, "below" is the "norm." 67% of American fourth graders fail to read "proficiently" for their imagined "grade level," along with 66% of eighth graders, raising questions about that "grade level" concept. According to "KidsCount" from the "Annie E. Casey Foundation," in all of the United States, only Massachusetts has 50% of fourth graders reading "proficiently." This is no doubt due to the individual health insurance mandates, and required services provided by religious hospitals, of RomneyCare.

So, if so few are reading well... how the hell are people getting information or working?

If you listen to this, you simply will not know anything of
Dylan Thomas's A Child's Christmas in Wales

The argument made is that our failures, whether "our" means the United States or the United Kingdom, lie in the failure of schools to beat more children into submission via phonics. If only our kids were better at decoding alphabetical text into tiny fragments of words which are tiny fragments of ideas, we'd beat those damn Chinese, Germans, Brasilians, Singaporians... whoever. Then the argument accelerates, abetted by educators who talk to human resources mismanagers. You can't do any job anymore unless you can decode alphabetical text and prove that by answering multiple choice questions on trivia included in the text.

"Although this is a common argument today, it ignores the fact that modern science and technology create many jobs in which literacy demands go down, not up, thanks to human skills being replaced by computers and other sorts of technological devices (Aronowitz & DiFazio,i994; Carnoy, Castells, Cohen, & Cardoso, 1993; Mishel & Teixeira, 1991). This is true not just for service-sector jobs, but also for many higher status jobs in areas like engineering and bioscience. Indeed, there is much controversy today as to which category is larger: jobs where science and technology have increased literacy demands or those where they have decreased them." - James Gee, 1999.

Of course Gee, here criticizing the general "Educational Industrial Complex" belief system, is talking about the narrow definition of "literacy" adopted by way too many, rather than the broad definition of "reading," "Reading is defined as getting information from a recorded source into your head, Writing is defined as getting information from your head into a form which others can access," which I, and Gee, advocate. People like Pam Allyn of LitWorld, and the current British and American governments, believe in an untruth: "Is it intrinsically incorrect to learn from audiovisuals or even from actual experience?" Gee asks. "Why should a student be forced to take written notes or written examinations when a recorder or a direct personal dialog might be used equally well? For many students with severe reading deficits, the oral-aural route is the major alternative route for education." And I will add that, since Gee wrote this, the ability to convert text to speech and speech to text has become not just absurdly inexpensive, but completely ubiquitous everywhere except in schools. Gee goes on to make the key point...

"Remedial reading programs may be emotionally damaging to a child. These programs focus not on the child’s strengths and accomplishments but on his failure. With our present methods of remediation, a child with dyslexia can very rapidly become a child receiving special attention to reading during school, remedial instruction after school, and special tutoring from his parents at night. A large percentage of the child’s waking day can be occupied by the very thing he cannot do and often finds distasteful. Childhood can thus be marred by systematic humiliation. Any interest the child may have in the reading process can be abolished."

Obviously, its not just literature which can be transmitted - and learned - without "decoding literacy"

The instruction manuals of this century...or earlier

So, every day "we," led by politicians of dubious education and intentions, and by self-enriching dogooders like Pam Allyn, label children as pathologically diseased because their brains don't work exactly like "our" brains. And then, we administer daily doses of humiliation because we somehow forget that someone like Socrates managed to know a whole hell of a lot without being "literate" at all - and, in fact - opposing literacy in every form. We forget that almost nothing comes with instruction manuals anymore - unless its from Ikea - because when "we" need to learn to do something, we go to YouTube, or we ask for help - in person or perhaps via Twitter. We forget that storytelling - that critical transmission of culture - occurred long before alphabets were created and continue to occur in this Post-Gutenberg age.

We also forget that the tools to switch media, as I said above, are everywhere. Right from the post below: "Read the book on paper. Listen to it via WYNN (the tool which changed my life), via Balabolka (Free), via WordTalk (Free), via FoxVox (Free), or via an audiobook,or watch the video, or talk with someone, it makes no difference cognitively."

As I said, I love books, I've written books. I've "read" tons of books. I want to share this with kids. And I want to tell all those who will unwittingly support Allyn's "Forced Reading Day," or other sad initiatives, that I'd much rather you help kids learn how to use Kindle for PC and Balabolka (or some other combination) to let them access the books they want than do any or all of your "reading interventions."

What we need to get better at is accessing information and expressing ourselves. And if that is what we want to do, and decoding - or handwriting - is likely effective for us, the evidence suggests that we will learn it. And that evidence is a hell of a lot stronger than any evidence you can present for your "teach me to read" programs.

- Ira Socol

Technology and our misunderstandings

noreply@blogger.com (narrator) — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 21:43:00 +0000

The Los Angeles Times trumpeted a bizarre column on Super Bowl Sunday from Michael Hiltzik titled "Who really benefits from putting high-tech gadgets in classrooms?" It was an attack on Arne Duncan's Digital Learning Day pronouncement that his goal for Obama's second term was the enrichment of Apple, which I've already attacked on much firmer pedagogical grounds. But what was really ironic in the column was the contribution of University of Southern California professor Richard E. Clark.

"The media you use make no difference at all to learning," Clark, director of the Center for Cognitive Technology at USC, is quoted as saying. "Not one dang bit. And the evidence has been around for more than 50 years." Which is all quite true, and I do not know here if Clark's statement is being used completely out of context here or not by Hiltzik, because Clark is not heard from again.

And Hiltzik leaps to a different academic, and a different argument immediately. "Almost every generation has been subjected in its formative years to some "groundbreaking" pedagogical technology. In the '60s and '70s," he writes before another quote, '"instructional TV was going to revolutionize everything," recalls Thomas C. Reeves, an instructional technology expert at the University of Georgia. "But the notion that a good teacher would be just as effective on videotape is not the case."'

Then Hiltzik rushes back 16 years, back to when I was integrating technology - I believe very successfully - into both high school and university classrooms (full, up-to-date research tools in every room, simulations in science classrooms, interaction in learning second languages), and writes, "Many would-be educational innovators treat technology as an end-all and be-all, making no effort to figure out how to integrate it into the classroom. "Computers, in and of themselves, do very little to aid learning," Gavriel Salomon of the University of Haifa and David Perkins of Harvard observed in 1996. Placing them in the classroom "does not automatically inspire teachers to rethink their teaching or students to adopt new modes of learning."'

Typewriters can be beautiful, they can be nostalgic, but what exactly does one do
with text typed on a typewriter? How do you share it? publish it? have it edited?

There are a ton of media choices,
the point is not to choose just one.

Yes, this might be one more attempt by the elites of the publishing world to maintain the socioeconomic status quo. The column seemed designed to confuse and frustrate parents, teachers, and students. But... hang on... let's go back to the top... to what Dr. Clark said: "The media you use make no difference at all to learning. Not one dang bit. And the evidence has been around for more than 50 years."

Again: "The media you use make no difference at all to learning. Not one dang bit." In other words, those who have tried, and keep trying - albeit without any evidence - to convince us all that decoded alphabetical text is somehow cognitively superior to any other way of bringing information into your brain, might be completely wrong.

Read the book on paper. Listen to it via WYNN (the tool which changed my life), via Balabolka (Free), via WordTalk (Free), via FoxVox (Free), or via an audiobook,or watch the video, or talk with someone, it makes no difference cognitively. The brain processes the information into memory, and that's the story.

Many of us have been arguing about this for years. People have routinely told me that, for example, listening to a book isn't hard enough (?!), or that the blind don't actually ever read, unless (maybe) they read Braille, then its OK, or that, as I was told on Twitter today, "I think allowing kids to grow up text-illiterate is a real disservice to them." I responded to that Tweet, which I listened to via Vlingo, by speaking into my phone as I sat in a parking lot.

Well, if there is no real evidence that print is superior, if we now have the tools to let all choose the information gathering tools and communication tools most effective for them at the moment, what's the issue with "technology" in schools?

For me, I have two responses: Short answer - we need tools in schools which allow students to learn to make those choices. This is what "Toolbelt Theory" is all about. Printed books cannot do this, but "Bring Your Own Device" plus a "Tool Crib" will offer every student the access path they need.

For the long answer... below is an updated version of a blog post from Change.org in 2009...

Technology: The Wrong Questions and the Right Questions

"A black board, in every school house, is as indispensably necessary as a stove or fireplace; and in large schools several of them might be useful."
"Slates are as necessary as black boards, and even more so. But they are liable to be broken, it will be said, as to render it expensive to parents to keep their children supplied with them."

"But are not books necessary at all, when the pupils are furnished with slates? I may be asked. Not for a large proportion of the children who attend our summer schools, nor for some of them who attend in the winter. To such I believe books are not only useless, but on the whole, worse than useless. As they advance in years, however, they may be indulged with a book, now and then, as a favor. Such favor will not be esteemed a light thing; and will come in time, to be sought more frequently, and with more and more earnestness."

"At first, it will be well for the small portion of each day in which very young pupils are allowed to have slates, to let them use them much in the way they please. Some will make one thing, some another. What they make is of comparatively little consequence, provided they attend, each to his own business, and do not interfere with that of others."

In 1842 William A. Alcott, a now forgotten member of that legendary American family of letters, wrote a series of articles for the Connecticut Common School Journal, asking teachers across America to make use of the newest educational technology - the black board and the student slate. Well, it wasn't really new. West Point had been using these for instruction since at least 1820, but then, as now, schools were slow to adopt new ideas.

But in the 1840s everything in communication was changing. Wood pulp based paper and the rotary printing press had created the penny newspaper, an entirely new way of spreading news - and often gossip. The telegraph had arrived creating the revolutionary concept of instantaneous communication across great distances. And the world itself was shrinking as steamboats and railroads rushed humans from place to place at unheard of speeds.

William Alcott's ideas, handheld - "1:1" slates, the chalkboard, individual seats (allowing children to leave
without disturbing others), kids moving around, good heating, big windows...

These new technologies spawned new forms of writing. Authors such as Charles Dickens began serializing fiction for the masses - one no longer needed to buy expensive books and sit in that big leather chair. Writers even created the first blogs - think of American Notes. Others, people like Horace Greeley, were redefining journalism.

The world was changing, and certain people, led by Alcott, were desperately trying to drag the schoolhouse into the present.

The Question

Then, as now, there was furious opposition. Alcott admitted that he was seen as being "against books." He was perceived as disruptive. He was already forcing schools to buy costly new furnishings (individual student desks and chairs, to replace tables and benches), and now he was advocating a radical change in how teaching took place.

Then, as now, the wrong question was being asked. In 1842 the doubters wondered what these new technologies could do for schools as they existed. Today, educators and policy makers constantly wonder what computers, mobile phones, and social networking will do for a curriculum largely unchanged since 1910.

That was the wrong question then, and it is the wrong question now. The right question is, what can schools, what can education, contribute to these new technologies?

Just as in 1842, just as in Socrates' time when literacy appeared, the technologies of information and communication have changed radically this decade - the ways in which humans learn about their world have changed radically, and schools will either help their students learn to navigate that new world, or they will become completely irrelevant.

How you learned doesn't matter at all

If you are a teacher, a parent, an administrator, or the President of the United States, I do not care how or what you learned in school. Or, let me put it this way, your experience in school, or in sitting with your mom studying books in the wee hours of the morning, is completely irrelevant to any discussion of the education of today's students.

Maybe worse than irrelevant. Maybe dangerous. The belief that "your" experience is relevant leads to a nightmare loop. Students who behave, and learn, most like their teachers do the best in classrooms. Teachers see this reflection as proof of their own competence - "The best students are just like me."

And thus all who are "different" in any way - race, class, ability, temperament, preferences - are left out of the success story.

Choosing everything: A student listens to text while creating
his own seating and desk... (Michael Thornton)

The majority of our students do "poorly" in school, do not achieve their potential in school, do not enjoy education. Doing it "the old way," utilizing the old tools, ensures that they never will.
Mobile phones, computers everywhere, hypertext, social networking, collaborative cognition (from Wikipedia on up), Google, text-messaging, Twitter, audiobooks, digital texts, text-to-speech, speech recognition, flexible formatting - these are not "add ons" to the world of education, they are the world of education. This is how humans in this century talk, read, communicate, learn. And learning to use these technologies effectively, efficiently, and intelligently must be at the heart of our educational strategies. These technologies do something else - by creating a flexibility and set of choices unprecedented in human communication - they "enable" a vast part of the population which earlier media forms disabled.

Back in Socrates' time it was all about the information you could remember. With this system very, very few could become "educated." In the ‘Gutenberg era' it was all about how many books you could read and how fast you could decode alphabetical text; this let a few more reach that ‘educated' status - about 35% if you trust all those standardized tests to measure "proficiency."

But now it is all about how you learn to find information, how you build your professional and personal networks, how you learn, how to learn - because learning must be continuous. None of this eliminates the need for a base of knowledge - the ability to search, to ask questions, requires a knowledge base, but it dramatically alters both how that knowledge base is developed, and what you need to do with it. This paradigm opens up the ranks of the "educated" in ways inconceivable previously.

Technology is NOT something invented after you were born

Technology is everything humans have created. Books are technology - a rather complex and expensive one actually, for holding and transmitting human knowledge. The schoolroom is technology - the desks, chairs, blackboards, schedule, calendar, paper, pens, and pencils. These are not "good" or "bad," but at this point, they are simply outdated.

Yes, we still have stone carvers. Yes, we still have calligraphers. But we no longer teach students to chase the duck, pluck the feather, and cut the quill. We no longer teach Morse Code. We no longer teach the creation of illuminated manuscripts.

Now we must give up teaching that ink-on-paper is the primary information source. It is not. We must give up insisting that students learn "cursive" writing. Instead, they must learn to text on their mobiles and dictate intelligibly to their computer. We must toss out our "keyboarding" classes and encourage students to discover their own best ways to input data. We must abandon much of Socrates' memorization and switch to engagement with where data is stored. We must abandon the one-way classroom communication system, be it the lecture or use of the "clicker," and teach with conversation and through modeling learning itself. We must lose the idea that "attention" means students staring at a teacher, or that "attendance" means being in the room, and understand all the differing ways humans learn best. We must stop separating subjects rigidly and adopt the contemporary notion of following knowledge where it leads us.

And we need to start by understanding that we are preparing students for the world that is their future, not the world that is our past.

- Ira Socol

Textbooks and Encyclopedias and Lectures, Oh My

noreply@blogger.com (narrator) — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 21:36:00 +0000

When I first met Dr. Rand Spiro, the man behind Cognitive Flexibility Theory, he launched an attack on Wikipedia. So, my initial reaction was,"not again." But as I listened, I realized that he was not against the crowdsourced authorship, or anonymous authority, and, in fact, he was a bit more positive after I introduced him to the "Talk" pages, what Rand was complaining about was the recreation of the Encyclopedia format.

Why, he wondered, would we reproduce this first century (AD) form in this age? Couldn't we envision anything better? Yes, Wikipedia is crowdsourced, and thus both more accurate, more diverse, and more updated, but it remains a work constructed on the oldest of classification systems.

The machine is us, Michael Wesch

Digital Learning Day 2012, and I found myself back in 1996. "WASHINGTON -- Hardbound textbooks could go the way of slide rules and typewriters in schools. Education Secretary Arne Duncan and Federal Communications Commission chairman Julius Genachowski on Wednesday challenged schools and companies to get digital textbooks in students' hands within five years. The Obama administration's push comes two weeks after Apple Inc. announced it would start to sell electronic versions of a few standard high-school books for use on its iPad tablet." In 1996 I was working with a high school librarian on developing ways to teach students about search strategies. This was, in historical perspective, at a point just before Larry Page and Sergei Brin would write:

"Some Rough Statistics (from August 29th, 1996)
Total indexable HTML urls: 75.2306 Million
Total content downloaded: 207.022 gigabytes

BackRub is written in Java and Python and runs on several Sun Ultras and Intel Pentiums running Linux. The primary database is kept on an Sun Ultra II with 28GB of disk. Scott Hassan and Alan Steremberg have provided a great deal of very talented implementation help. Sergey Brin has also been very involved and deserves many thanks.
-Larry Page page@cs.stanford.edu"

"You've got mail" The AOL home page

So, early in the process, when Page and Brin's Stanford predecessors were dominating 'web search' with Yahoo! which was, of course, a huge leap from what America On Line was offering. There were actual search engines back then, the dominant one being AltaVista, and we needed to explain to students the difference between a "web directory," Yahoo! and AOL, and a search engine such as AltaVista, Lycos, Excite and even a "metasearch engine" like dogpile. Directories were like physical libraries, we explained, curated collections organized into categories, while search engines represented something entirely new. We asked kids - high school freshmen - to find cars they could buy, finding prices, reliability reports, etc, and we asked them to try both routes.

The search engine was radical in 1996. It opened up a new kind of library, a library without walls, without curation, without limitations. And it was uncomfortable for many, including those who built Yahoo! (and who have never quite recovered). But the search engine is not new now, and I think it is time to embrace what Michael Wesch at K-State has been talking about for years, that the end of the Gutenberg Era gives us dramatic opportunities to re-think.

"They put the shelf back" - Michael Wesch in Information R/evolution

The future is not what you think...

And not just the distant future, the near future. I'm always amazed that Sears shut down their catalogue operation the year before Jeff Bezos founded Amazon. One group of corporate whizzes saw home delivery as a thing of the past, and some guy out in Seattle thought it was the future. The F.W. Woolworth (the original "five and dime") chain shut down its US operations just as "Dollar Stores" were exploding. General Motors axed their high gas mileage small Corvair (with the encouragement of Ralph Nader) just before the Arab Oil Embargo made gas mileage the number one issue for car buyers. We needn't even include the legendary Time-Warner/AOL merger...

We probably cannot expect a better track record from education leaders or politicians than we've gotten from our highest paid capitalists, of course, but we do need to challenge the decisions which are made which seem targeted to the past. And right now in education we seem to still be investing in the past in huge ways... in textbooks, in lectures, and in the teaching wall. The only reason we're not investing in encyclopedias is that now, that's free, though we still have those who oppose even that tiny change.

it is time to re-think education and what we can do with technology

The idea that the best use the US government can imagine for a digital device is to reproduce a 15th century format with a couple of 3D animations is sad, though hardly surprising. Apple is just the latest organization to try to rip off schools embracing textbook delivery. "In the early 1900s, textbook purchasing at the local level was notoriously corrupt," many scholars have noted, discussing all who profiteered at the expense of that early 1:1 initiative. That the best way to spread "ideas worth spreading" is by lecture and PowerPoint, seems equally unfortunate. That the best way to re-imagine the classroom is with an incredibly expensive projector system which reinforces the "teaching wall," is, surely, horrifying. But if you don't have a teaching wall, where will all those "sages-on-the-stages" stand? (science of school room re-design?)

Revolution doesn’t happen when society adopts new technologies - it happens when society adopts new behaviors. - Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody, p. 160

I visit many schools that have 'new technologies,' but not enough of them also have 'new behaviors.' It's time for us educators to raise our game (leaders, I'm pointing to you first). - Scott McLeod.

There are better ways to do things like textbooks, free ways for teachers, or better, students, to assemble information. And these should be allowing us to fundamentally consider new ways to assemble information, rather than a pre-cooked, pre-arranged text.

CK12
Flat World Knowledge
California Open Source Textbooks
MIT OpenCourseware
Stanford on iTunes
Michael Thornton's Third Graders build their own Textbook in LiveBinder

And there are better, more interactive ways, to "spread ideas" than putting someone on a stage to talk, uninterrupted, for 20 minutes. And better ways to use projection technology than reinforcing the traditional classroom. When I spoke, two years ago, to Glenn Vos, a Christian school superintendent in Holland, Michigan, "he talked about rebuilding classrooms so there was no "front" anymore. He talked about wide hallways where students could gather. He talked about attendance policies which allowed students to sign into classes from elsewhere in the building if that made them more comfortable. He talked about multiple projection screens in every classroom to break "single focus learning." He talked about dropping text books for authentic materials and the acceptance of multiple - and student chosen - ways of demonstrating knowledge."

PowerPoint, circa 1958

If we do not alter our expectations for how we expect new technologies to be used, they will be used like old technologies. PowerPoint becomes FilmStrips. Computers become typewriters. IWBs become chalkboards. And the tablet form becomes a way to enrich corporations.

We need to seize the moment, when moments like this come. We need to break the bounds enforced by old technologies, not reinforce them. So, let's forget "the textbook," they were probably wronganyway...

- Ira Socol

Algebra without Numbers

noreply@blogger.com (narrator) — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:16:00 +0000

This post began with this Tweet from a high school math teacher (and "Ed Leadership" student)

Bored in Math Class

"Had 8 out of 9 stdts not complete an Alg I test 2day. Said we never did it b4. Unit started Jan 2. Had flash cards and cheat sheet. What now"
I responded
"Algebra is a method for finding unknowns from knowns in a logical way. You could use numbers, or real things... mysteries are solved through algebra. Kids don't get it because we disconnect it from reality"
The answer?
"or because they don't do homework, take notes, participate, or pay attention"
Me again,
"I always say, kids make rational micro-economic decisions. If they see no value in the course, they will not invest in it"
And this response,
"then maybe they will see value in it when they take it again next year"
followed by
"I shouldn't have to reteach because they were to lazy to try or participate this time. It sucks."

Obviously I could write about many things here, from public disrespect for students to a bit of unfortunate egocentrism ("I shouldn't have to reteach"), but I'm going toward the math here, first, repeating an old joke...

A man walks into a pub with a dog and orders a pint. The barman says, "you can't bring that dog in here." But the man says, "This is different, this is a very special dog, I taught him to sing Grand Opera." The barman is impressed, "Well," he says, "lets hear him sing." The man pats the dog on the head, says, "Sing!" and the dog begins to howl. "I thought you told me you taught him to sing Grand Opera," the barman says. "I did," the man responds, "he just didn't learn."

"Teaching" means nothing without the learning. And in order for learning to take place, whatever is to be learned must be accessible, and attractive (in some way), and must occur in an educational space where students are physically and emotionally comfortable enough to allow for the cognitive discomfort which opens the pathways in the brain.

How does your classroom meets the needs of the teenage brain?
Teens make rational decisions, microeconomic decisions, about
what is worth investing in... Ever watch teachers at a boring
Professional Development Day?

I do need to note that I did try teaching in the exchange above, I offered many links, including these:
Real World Algebra: Budgeting and Lifestyle Design.
Algebra in the Real World Movies
Karl Fisch Student Algebra Blogs
Learning Algebra on the Right Side of the Brain
The Changing Way That Math Is Taught To Children
but clearly, I failed. I was not, of course, meeting this teacher where he or she was. First, this teacher really wasn't looking for pedagogical learning with the first "question," just as many of the students probably aren't looking for equations to learn when they enter that classroom. The teacher wanted to rant and complain about "the world being insufficiently cooperative," which is often an idea filling the teenage brain as well. Second, the teacher was not ready to make any big leap in terms of teaching. What was wanted was a method of forcing students to comply. By offering new kinds of lesson ideas, or alternative ideas to run a classroom, I was creating the same kind of disconnect between interests and curriculum which is clearly occurring in that classroom.

What I was not doing was attracting this teacher to new ideas. Which is what isn't happening in that classroom. And we can not get students interested in investing in our curriculum unless we can attract them to it, any more than I can get most teachers to give up their evenings to reading the works of Edward Said, Antonio Gramsci, and Michel Foucault, no matter how essential these works are to teaching all students effectively. So, if I want either to happen - the kids to come to the math or the teachers to come to an understanding of power - I have to "teach and reteach" trying this and trying that, looking for the hook that works. Going out fishing with just one kind of bait or lure can result in disappointment.

I cannot sit through a TED talk - rehearsed stage lecture plus PowerPoint will never hold my interest, but obviously it works for some folks. But give me a decent football (soccer) game on television and you not only have me for two hours, you can get me into everything from mathematics to culture. Put a Khan video lecture in front of me and I'll be a behavior problem, but ask me to find three different ways to explain the same thing online, and you may have your most engaged student. It all goes back to the "amazing" statement I almost always hear - stated as if it is a problem - in IEP meetings about boys, "He pays attention when he's interested in something." Duh, yes, I think the vast majority of us do.

Relevance... Why would anyone learn this? Start with an attractive purpose
and the work behind it becomes worth investing in.

Algebra without Numbers, Algebra without Computation

The idea here is that instead of presenting Algebra as a system of mathematics which is essential to learning some other things kids probably aren't interested in, or cannot imagine why they would be interested in, we present it as what it truly is: a system of formalized problem solving used to discover an unknown from knowns. It is, essentially, detective work, and we must let kids understand that. The numbers in Algebra are incidental, the concepts are important.

And I am suggesting that it is often essential to start without the numbers, largely because of the damage done to the interest in mathematics by mathematics education before kids get to algebra. Schools work so hard at making mathematics boring, disconnected, almost absurdly repetitious nonsense, that by the time they walk into an algebra class, they do so with a combination of dread and disinterest. If you don't break through those walls first, you might as well call in sick for the year.

Philo Vance on film, with William Powell as Vance, in The Kennel Murder Case (1933)

I've been falling asleep to Old Time Radio shows lately, and one really hokey old drama, Philo Vance, a detective series from 1948-1950 has been pretty entertaining. As I thought about Algebra I thought about an episode I heard last night, The Vanilla Murder Case (clicking will let you download the mp3), and thought about using this in an Algebra class.

The murderer, "X" equals one set of facts (the whole of observations) minus another set of facts (the irrelevant).

So the class might begin by listening (which will be a bit more universally appealing than reading, but a little complicated for a generation not typically raised on audio-only storytelling, and thus, a little challenging) and collecting all the observations, as those observations begin to build up, some will begin to slide into the "irrelevant parentheses," others will be added together.

This is not a "side path" on the way to algebra, this is the path to algebra. The trick to algebra is understanding that formalized, logical thinking can help make sense of the world. That kind of thinking begins with attention to the issues in question. In the Vanilla Murder Case, in any mystery, there are many facts. Some facts cancel out other facts as we add them together. Some facts multiply the importance of other facts. If this does not sound familiar, you've been teaching arithmetic instead of mathematics.

We do this kind of "algebra without numbers" all the time. How do we decide who has not shown up yet? X = (all the people we expected to show up) - (all the people here) What is the best time to meet for this movie? X = (the people who can show up at this time) - (the people who can show up at that time) / (who are the people we really want to be there)

In other words, we are not just giving experience in this formalized structure of data collection and data assembly, we are proving that far from being some worthless foreign language, algebra is a basic part of our lives.

Once Algebra is something of value, the microeconomic decisions of the students change. Once you have brought the "cost" of engaging down for students, their microeconomic decisions change, and then, classroom behaviors change.

Next, you may want to bring coding into class, so that "right" and "wrong" and replaced with "works" or "doesn't work," which makes a whole lot more sense to most of us anyway. "It turns out that programming is just so much fun that students can't help but get engaged, which is a far cry from what usually happens in math class. Sure, we can make math fun with activities, and once in a while you hit upon a topic or a problem that kids are naturally drawn to. But much of the time I would loosely equate teaching math with pulling teeth, and programming couldn't be more different."

If you'd rather listen to a TED talk lecture than me, here's Conrad Wolfram...

"Conrad Wolfram says the part of maths we teach -- calculation by hand -- isn't just tedious,
it's mostly irrelevant to real mathematics and the real world."

"Right now in schools we're spending 80% of our time teaching students to do something by hand which computers do much better and faster. Calculating used to be the limiting step, but now it isn't. Computers have liberated math from calculation," Wolfram says.

In other words, concepts matter. And we need to change everything we do in mathematics classrooms.

- Ira Socol

The Wager

noreply@blogger.com (narrator) — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 01:58:00 +0000

Let's bet on this...

Since Republicans seem to be ready to nominate America's Gambler-in-Chief, I thought this might be a good moment to make a bet with America's Governors and State Legislators.

Listening to this NPR News story today, I considered that, if our "standards" in education are to have any meaning at all, they must be standards for policy makers as well. Because, if you've ever been in any school, I mean really been there, you know the disconnect between standards and reality. "“I went to a remedial reading class for students, there was a girl there who was getting mostly A’s in her honors classes, and she was sitting in a remedial class learning how to read,” Rick Roach of the Orange County (Florida) School Board said. “She would be taking piano if she wasn’t taking that [remedial class]. These kids get put into an academic jail because some test says they can’t read. It’s just not right.”

put up, or shut up, as we learned on our playgrounds

Roach, had just voluntarily taken the FCAT, Florida's "high-stakes" 10th grade exam. “I won’t beat around the bush. The math section had 60 questions. I knew the answers to none of them, but managed to guess ten out of the 60 correctly. On the reading test, I got 62%. In our system, that’s a ‘D,’ and would get me a mandatory assignment to a double block of reading instruction… It seems to me something is seriously wrong. I have a Bachelor of Science degree, two masters degrees, and 15 credit hours toward a doctorate. I help oversee an organization with 22,000 employees and a $3 billion operations and capital budget, and am able to make sense of complex data related to those responsibilities….”

And Mr. Roach's experience (hear a long interview here) led me to this idea. I want to bet every US Governor, along with every State Legislator who has supported or voted for standardized testing, supported or voted for "more rigorous" curricula, or who has supported or voted for holding back diplomas or retaining children, to take the tests. The real tests. To make this completely fair, let's do it soon (on "our" schedule, not that of the test takers), and lets give each one of these state 10th grade exams randomly chosen. So when our "leaders" sit down, they might get a test from their state, or any other state, being that we're all "Common Core" you know.

The Case Against Standardized Tests

The Case Against High-Stakes Testing

Standardized Testing and its Victims

When Learning No Longer Matters [pdf]
The Threat to Authenticity

Testing cannot be anything but political and abusive [SpeEdChange]

Quantum Theory, the Uncertainty Principle, and the Alchemyof Standardized Testing

What Happened to Recess and Why Are Our Children Struggling in Kindergarten? [book review]

And here's the bet. Standards being standards. You governors and legislators, you take the exam in front of you, under the conditions your students take it, and if you fail, you resign immediately.

Doesn't this seem fair? Wouldn't this prove your political point - that the ability to pass these exams is all important?

And if you "guys" cannot pass the test, well... what might that prove?

So this is a serious wager, a serious challenge. I'm quite for that if I ask the teachers of America, they'll be happy to even come in on a Saturday - on their own time - and proctor the exam. Let's get going. If you all pass the tests you'll be sending an important message to your state's students, and surely you want to do that, right?

- Ira Socol

who asks you to copy this and email it to your Governor and legislators.

Edu-Incarceration and The Big Mac Effect

noreply@blogger.com (narrator) — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 21:21:00 +0000

President Obama baffles me. He is clearly an incredibly intelligent guy, for the most part he believes in what I might call, "the right things," he's highly educated, and the child of incredibly educated, curious parents, he has lived in a variety of places which should have given him a global perspective...

And yet...

Listen, Barack Obama isn't amoral like Mitt Romney or immoral like Newt Gingrich or a potential Taliban leader like Rick Santorum or even a guy totally confused about the meaning of "society" like Ron Paul, but he appears, as I've thought about it, to lack anything resembling empathy.

I don't want to pick and choose from the President's words, so let me quote the entire education section of his State of the Union address, and then, break out a few things.

"At a time when other countries are doubling down on education, tight budgets have forced States to lay off thousands of teachers. We know a good teacher can increase the lifetime income of a classroom by over $250,000. A great teacher can offer an escape from poverty to the child who dreams beyond his circumstance. Every person in this chamber can point to a teacher who changed the trajectory of their lives. Most teachers work tirelessly, with modest pay, sometimes digging into their own pocket for school supplies - just to make a difference.

"Teachers matter. So instead of bashing them, or defending the status quo, let's offer schools a deal. Give them the resources to keep good teachers on the job, and reward the best ones. In return, grant schools flexibility: To teach with creativity and passion; to stop teaching to the test; and to replace teachers who just aren't helping kids learn.

"We also know that when students aren't allowed to walk away from their education, more of them walk the stage to get their diploma. So tonight, I call on every State to require that all students stay in high school until they graduate or turn eighteen.

"When kids do graduate, the most daunting challenge can be the cost of college. At a time when Americans owe more in tuition debt than credit card debt, this Congress needs to stop the interest rates on student loans from doubling in July. Extend the tuition tax credit we started that saves middle-class families thousands of dollars. And give more young people the chance to earn their way through college by doubling the number of work-study jobs in the next five years.

"Of course, it's not enough for us to increase student aid. We can't just keep subsidizing skyrocketing tuition; we'll run out of money. States also need to do their part, by making higher education a higher priority in their budgets. And colleges and universities have to do their part by working to keep costs down. Recently, I spoke with a group of college presidents who've done just that. Some schools re-design courses to help students finish more quickly. Some use better technology. The point is, it's possible. So let me put colleges and universities on notice: If you can't stop tuition from going up, the funding you get from taxpayers will go down. Higher education can't be a luxury - it's an economic imperative that every family in America should be able to afford.

"Let's also remember that hundreds of thousands of talented, hardworking students in this country face another challenge: The fact that they aren't yet American citizens. Many were brought here as small children, are American through and through, yet they live every day with the threat of deportation. Others came more recently, to study business and science and engineering, but as soon as they get their degree, we send them home to invent new products and create new jobs somewhere else

"That doesn't make sense."

OK, now, piece by piece:

It is clear that Barack Obama cannot be bothered to do the
math when the impact is on people unlike his family.

The Big Mac Effect - and - its the teachers' fault: "We know a good teacher can increase the lifetime income of a classroom by over $250,000. A great teacher can offer an escape from poverty to the child who dreams beyond his circumstance." This is the Horatio Alger nonsense peddled by the American right for years. There is nothing wrong with our schools, if only those lazy, unionized teachers were better... poverty would disappear. First, the President bases his claim on a suspect study which does indeed suggest that a "great" teacher (that is, one who raises test scores) might raise the weekly earnings of an impoverished student by almost enough to buy a Big Mac each week.

It is surprising, in light of all the publicity, that the differences produced by the high value-added teachers are relatively small. Baker shows that the income gains are only about $250 a year over a 40-year working span for each of the students.

As [Rutgers University Professor Bruce] Baker writes: "One of the big quotes in the New York Times article is: 'Replacing a poor teacher with an average one would raise a single classroom's lifetime earnings by about $266,000, the economists estimate.' This comes straight from the research paper. BUT ... let's break that down. It's a whole classroom of kids. Let's say ... for rounding purposes, 26.6 kids if this is a large urban district like NYC. Let's say we're talking about earning careers from age 25 to 65 or about 40 years. So, $266,000/26.6 = $10,000 lifetime additional earnings per individual. Hmmm ... no longer catchy headline stuff. Now, per year? $10,000/40 = $250. Yep, about $250 per year."

Obama's disregard for the facts when it comes to escaping poverty is only one example in this one quote of his empathy and understanding problem. "A great teacher can offer an escape from poverty to the child who dreams beyond his circumstance," which, obviously, implies that the reason we have so many people in poverty right now is that we don't have many great teachers. Take that all you fools who waste your days with our children. Now, yes, to be honest, we don't have great teachers everywhere, just as we don't have great people everywhere in any job - even President - and I'm the first person to criticize bad teaching, but, Mr. Obama, teachers are not the cause of poverty.

To explain this let me first turn to Chris Lehmann of Philadelphia's Science Leadership Academy:

"The nation - or at least its politicians, its pundits and its billionaires - has made this debate about labor (read unions) by atomizing this debate down to the teacher level. And while there is room for conversation there, it misses the larger picture. Our schools are structurally dysfunctional places which, therefore, makes teaching and learning much harder than it needs to be, so that teachers -- and students -- have to succeed despite the system, rather than because of it.

"As long as high school students have to travel to eight different classes where eight different teachers talk about grading / standards / learning in eight different ways, students will spend far too much trying to figure out the adults instead of figuring out the work. When that happens, too many students will fall through the cracks and fail. If we built schools where there was a common language of teaching and learning and common systems and structures so that kind people of good faith can bring their ideas and creativity and passion to bear within those systems and structures and help kids learn, we will find that more teachers can be the kind of exemplary teachers that Mr. Kristof wants.

"As long as there is little to no time in the high school schedule for teachers and students to see and celebrate each other's shared humanity, too many students will feel that school is something that is done to them, that teachers care more about their subjects than they do about the kids. As long as teachers have 120-150 kids on their course roster, and there is little continuity year to year so that relationships cannot be maintained, too many students will be on their own when they struggle. If we build schools where teachers and students have time to relate to one another as people - if we create pathways for students and teachers to know each other over time, so that every child knows they have an adult advocate in their school, we make schools more human -- and more humane - for all who inhabit them.

"Let's stop falling victim to the soft thinking that just finding more "great teachers" and getting rid of all the bad ones is the way to reform education and start asking ourselves - "How do we create schools that make it easier for all students and teachers to shine?" '

and then let me quote from David Britten of Michigan's Godfrey-Lee Public Schools:

"None discussed the need to address the growing funding gap between rich and poor school districts, and the resulting lack of equitable opportunities for disadvantaged kids to achieve the same goals as every other child in Michigan. Of course not, since that would not be self-serving panning to their respective constituencies.

"It’s ironic that the legislature and governor would tout the term “best practices” while at the same time they employ some of the worst practices in public school funding. Purposely ignoring the needs of disadvantaged students, who by the way are expected to achieve the same goals as students from more affluent areas, is not what I or any person of intelligence would consider to be a best practice."

Simply put, Mr. President, perhaps if you and our national leaders start to do your job regarding our children, great teachers will be able to do their job, and, I'll bet, a whole lot more teachers will look "great."

The Hypocrite - or - why does Barack Obama think we're stupid?: "Teachers matter. So instead of bashing them, or defending the status quo, let's offer schools a deal. Give them the resources to keep good teachers on the job, and reward the best ones. In return, grant schools flexibility: To teach with creativity and passion; to stop teaching to the test; and to replace teachers who just aren't helping kids learn." Really? Why would this man assume that we are all "that dumb." Does he think we have not been watching the work of his Department of Education since 2009? The mandates, the requirements, the curriculum written by Pearson and friends. Obama and those governing the American states have denied us the resources children need in order to cut Mitt Romney's tax bill. Teacher pay has been slashed in many places, class sizes have grown, budgets shrunk, meanwhile, do anything Arne Duncan and his Ministry of Re-education doesn't like, and you'll be labeled a failure.

Sorry Mr. President, I know that dealing with the NEA Leadership and your "Reform" friends may have given you the wrong impression, but some of us in education are smart enough to know the gap between your words and deeds.

The Daily Show
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

Edu-Incarceration - or, why would anyone stay in an Arne Duncan school if it wasn't the law: "So tonight, I call on every State to require that all students stay in high school until they graduate or turn eighteen." Well, there's the answer. Our schools have become miserable dungeons of worksheets and tests under the Obama Administration, and many are deciding to Walk Out, so the solution lies in one more giant step toward criminalizing adolescence. We can't be bothered to create better schools, but we sure can lock the kids in.

Yes, I know the President, the son of two PhD students and a private school student who is now a private school parent, cannot comprehend children not being in school. It is simply beyond his rather inflexible grasp, but he ought to at least know that coercion is not the answer. "The president’s proposal is therefore merely the latest example of our tendency to craft policies that address the symptom, and ignore the root. And that’s not change I can believe in," says Sam Chaltain in the Washington Post.

Mr. Clueless about university costs: "So let me put colleges and universities on notice: If you can't stop tuition from going up, the funding you get from taxpayers will go down." This is tough for an Ivy League graduate, I know, and to make it all funnier, good ol' Justin Hamilton, Arne Duncan's Press Secretary - @EDPressSec - DMed during the speech to insist that I was wrong - that universities were spending more than ever,1 but those in Washington might want to know that the actual cost of running public universities has been going down. Those who have been on public campuses during this administration have seen budgets - yes Mr. President and Little Justin - that's the total cost of running the institutions slashed.

Universities aren't spending more Mr. President,
but students are.

Here's why tuition has gone up boys. These "State Universities" which were once strongly supported by their governments don't get that kind of support anymore. "In the 1970s, the state covered three-fourths of university costs and the rest was covered by tuition. Now it’s almost reversed– state funding provides one-quarter and the rest is tuition," says Michael Boulus, executive director of the Presidents Council, State Universities of Michigan, with, "funding for higher education has been reduced by [an additional] 15 percent for 2012... higher education has lost a billion dollars in state aid over the past decade, amounting to cuts of more than $2,000 per student."

Yes, we need lower costs Mr. President, but the way to do that is not to threaten our universities as you threaten Iran. Not all of us can - or even want to - go to the places you were educated and taught.

You know Mr. President, there were probably parts of your speech which I might have approved of. I surely, for example, appreciate the difference between you and Mr. Romney et al on the automotive industry. I favor, unlike Republicans, people paying reasonable taxes. I wish work were taxed less and sitting at home living off unearned money was taxed more...

But it isn't just that I work in education which makes me so angry about your complete lack of empathy, your complete lack of understanding regarding our children and our schools. I am angry because you are leading an assault on our future, and you are doing it simply because you will not open your eyes.

I expect better from you Mr. President. I really do.

- Ira Socol
1 - "You don't have your facts straight (though that's not new). Sticker price and net price have skyrocketed." from @EDPressSec around 10:00 pm on January 24, 2012

If you say "scale up," you don't understand humanity

noreply@blogger.com (narrator) — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 21:37:00 +0000

The entire "educational reform" "movement" is based on an impossibility. But it is an impossibility which is, sadly, foundational to both British and American social thought. Which is why it is so difficult to explain to those in power in either British-formed or American-formed societies why they are wrong about "everything."

British society and the American society which sprung from it, assume that all relations between humans are based in two mutually exclusive concepts: Exceptionalism - Anglos, and particularly "our" Anglos, Brits in Britain, Americans in America - are 'by birthright' better than everyone else on the planet, and Replication - everyone on the planet can be converted into a copy of an Anglo. This comes from the common "Liberal Ideal" in which it is the duty of those who have achieved rational perfection, "The last best hope of earth," to convert all others to the same rational ideal so that the world becomes a safe and good place for a benign capitalism.

São Paulo, Brasil

In order to do this, we need replication. Parliament must look the same in New Delhi, Johannesburg, Nairobi as it does in Westminster. Language must be the same in Jamaica, Zambia, and Hong Kong. Walmart must be the same in Topeka, Brasilia, Shanghai. Scaling up, we take the "ideal" and we replicate it everywhere.

Of course "ideal" is a perfection designed to match a particular vision: If this be government it is represented by a structured, limited form of "two-party," prescribed choice, "representative democracy" - a very conservative system designed to make change extremely difficult. In retailing it is the low-cost, high-profit, globalized sameness whether Lipton Tea or Walmart. In education, this is the test-prep academy model, preparing students for lives of compliance.

In all of these this replication has different forms for the powerful, so both Rupert Murdoch and Mitt Romney have different relationships with their governments, since they pay people to write laws, they shop at different stores, and they send their children to different schools.

Terroir and "scaling across"

Googling "Flat World"

"Scaling Up" fails because it imagines, in the language of right-wing New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, that "the world is flat." To imagine that 520 years after the voyage of Columbus we'd love the phrase "flat world" is both highly amusing and deeply saddening, but it represents the desperation for sameness which has long characterized British and American imperial thought.

This idea would have never come out of French culture, or even German culture, where notions of difference are embedded. Hamburg, Berlin, Munich have very little in common. Saigon, Algiers, Martinique (to name three French colonial capitals) in no way operated along the same lines.

Though British colonialists always ate the same foods, drank the same tea, played the same games of Cricket, and Americans carried Hiltons and Holiday Inns around the world with them along with their hamburgers, French cuisine and culture "went native" - in the British term - everywhere. Victoria, British Columbia might be "little London," but Montreal and Hanoi could never be called Parisian. It is perhaps inconceivable that Heart of Darkness could have been written by a French author.

Tea in Victoria, British Columbia

This is a conceptual difference with vast implications. And it may begin with the word "terroir," a word I've known for a long time but which was re-imagined for me by the brilliant book Walk Out Walk Onby Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze. Terroir, in French, means something like, "a sense of the place," and is used most often to describe why the same grape vine will produce different grapes depending on where it is planted. Terroir is not simply a "natural" phenomenon. The French vinoculture understands that it isn't just the weather, the unflat world slope, or the soil which causes variation, but the way that the farmers themselves function, how they care for the vines, how they pick the grapes. So, it is presumed in France that every wine, from every year, from every different place, will be different. This is quite a different concept from the T-test which lies behind both Anglo-style brewing and American education.

"French" food in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietna

"The t-statistic was introduced in 1908 by William Sealy Gosset, a chemist working for the Guinness brewery in Dublin, Ireland ("Student" was his pen name). Gosset had been hired due to Claude Guinness's policy of recruiting the best graduates from Oxford and Cambridge to apply biochemistry and statistics to Guinness's industrial processes. Gosset devised the t-test as a way to cheaply monitor the quality [consistency] of stout."

The world, apparently, is as flat as we choose to see it.

A few years ago I sat in a session at a comparative education conference and heard people working with Intel Education describe their intention of doing the exact same thing in every school, whether that school was in San Jose, California or rural India. After the session I asked one of the presenters if he really thought that there were no differences across the planet. "Well, sure," replied, "but for the sake of this project we've chosen to ignore that."

Which describes the "flat world" cultural concept perfectly, and makes "scaling up" possible. If the world is all the same, we can find the model which works in Oklahoma City and replicate it exactly in Lagos. If this is how math is taught in Beijing, we will teach it this way in Newark.

I see this all the time when I speak to young men and women who have scored badly on community college placement tests. If they lack the proper "Anglo" stylistics in their writing, that is, if their narratives are not expressed in the straight-line form expected in British and American writing, they are deemed to be less intelligent, just as African-American children are likely to be deemed both "disabled" and "defiant."

"...it smells like victory." The Apocalypse Now version of Heart of Darkness expresses a significant
difference between American (above) and French (below) colonialism, despite the brutality of both.

"It is the French plantation sequence that gives me the most pause. It is long enough, I think, that is distracts from the overall arc of the movie. The river journey sets the rhythm of the film, and too much time on the banks interrupts it (there is the same problem with the feuding families in Huckleberry Finn). Yet the sequence is effective and provoking. It helps me to understand it when Coppola explains that he sees the French like ghosts; I questioned how they had survived in their little enclave, and accept his feeling that their spirits survive as a cautionary specter for the Americans." - Roger Ebert

Seeding and "Scaling Across"

No two children are the same. No two teachers are the same. No two communities are the same. No two ecosystems are the same. But these facts dispute the rationalism and science of the last 300 years of "Western" thought. The entire goal of statistics is to create "norming," so that, for example, one looks at the North Atlantic and the South Pacific and says, "ocean," about both. In educational terms, Arne Duncan looks at any two children who are six-years-old and says, "first grade." It makes life so much easier if we can imagine the world this way. You barely have to look to be sure you know. Which is why Arne Duncan, and The New York Times, know a failing school, even if he or they have never seen it.

If you believe in that rational, flat world, everything can be scaled up. You define a "best practice" or a "successful design" and you just repeat and repeat.

But if you don't see humans that way, you need a different path. That different path accepts that the surfaces tell us a lot less than we think, and that no matter how much the global economic engine tries, whether that's Benjamin Disraeli/William Gladstone or JP Morgan Chase/Apple Corporation, the world will always be a stubbornly diverse place.

So instead of modeling, scaling up, building replicas, we seed, and watch ideas take root in many soils and grow in many ways. This, according to the authors of Walk Out Walk On, is "scaling across." A human representation of Cotton Mather's observations regarding the hybridization of corn.

Monocultures require constant interference with nature in order to hold,
nature diversifies and hybridizes at every opportunity (Cradling Wheat, Thomas Hart Benton)

The trick to sharing "best practices" is to stop doing that. Instead, share "our practices" and let ideas meet, collide, mix, and take root differently in each place. The trick to "scaling up" is the same - stop trying. If BMW has to "Americanize" their cars in order to sell them in the United States (adding cup holders, etc), what makes people like Intel or the KIPP or TFA foundations so arrogant as to imagine that they can replicate themselves among vastly different communities?

Instead we imagine, attempt, describe, converse. We pass along concepts, not plans. We share observations, not blueprints. We accept that whether it is a child or a school, we can not evaluate anything with a checklist or a score, but only with very human description.

That's a less rational world which requires more humane effort, and it contains troubling mountains and deep valleys because it is not flat. But it is the world in which we actually live.

- Ira Socol

Changing Gears 2012: why we fight

noreply@blogger.com (narrator) — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 18:27:00 +0000

(1) ending required sameness (2) rejecting the flipped classroom (3) re-thinking rigor (4) its not about 1:1 (5) start to dream again (6) learning to be a society (again) (7) reconsidering what literature means (8) maths are creative, maths are not arithmetic (9) changing rooms (10) undoing academic time (11) social networks beyond Zuckerbergism (12) knowing less about students, seeing more

This is the last of these "Changing Gears" posts. I began this to get myself to think about where I was right now on a bunch of issues in education. Now Matt Richtel, a reporter with a Pulitzer Prize in misusing data, and his New York Times employers, think blogs have little value, but in my mind they beat the "essay" or even the "dissertation" on almost every level of communication. So, I'm happy I've taken this journey, and if you've ridden along, I hope its been interesting for you as well.

I end this way because, all of our changed thinking means little without action, and so each of us has to decide what we will fight for, and how we will fight...

My father never had a good word for World War II. He might have. He might have mentioned a rather glorious if wholly unauthorized flight in a captured German glider over Plzeň, or a few supposedly amazing weeks in north London, or marrying my Ma, but, those were separated in his mind. He never had a good word for World War II, but be thought it was undeniably necessary. He saw this necessity in no other wars. His only involvement with any veterans' organization was with the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and he refused any acclimations of heroic service. But he had been among the very first Americans to see a Concentration Camp, rushing his tanks to the aid of the infantry troops who had discovered Dachau. He had seen great evil. And so he had seen his nightmare in Europe as something required.

(above) Band of Brothers: Why we fight

(below) liberating Dachau, April 1945

I do not make spurious comparisons of various evils to Nazism. When those comparisons are due - from Cambodia to Bosnia to Rwanda - they are obvious. But we all know that, whoever we are, there are things we will fight for, things we will take risks for, and things which do not rise to that level of importance for us. My father found his "line," it is up to us to find ours.

There is a crisis in America today, and in England, and in Ireland, and in Australia, and many other places, and I believe it is a crisis caused by an evil, an evil I believe that we must fight. It is a crisis of the future, because it is a crisis of our commitment to our children. And our children are, or are supposed to be, the most important things in our lives.

There are many attacks on our children these days, and those attacks are stripping away our chances to radically improve the lives of all of our children. We live in a moment when global wealth, and technological capabilities, make it possible to give every kid a real opportunity to make the the most of themselves, but greed, pure greed, is ensuring that this will not happen.

US Republicans don't just favor "open marriage," they like the
idea of using poor children as slave labor.

My good friend David Britten - @colonelb - has put together a brilliant manifesto on the concept of educational opportunity - a concept everyone in the leadership of the United States, from Barack Obama on down - refuses to engage with:

"Equity of opportunity is the missing key ingredient to improving public education in Michigan and across the U.S. “…the key driver of education-development policy in Finland has been providing equal and positive learning opportunities for all children (emphasis added) and securing their well-being, including their nutrition, health, safety, and overall happiness.” (Pasi Sahlberg, Finland’s Success is No Miracle, Education Week Quality Counts 2012)"

Equity, not equality. Equality of opportunity, especially in educational institution terms, is not only impossible, it is probably not desirable. Here's The Colonel on the situation in Michigan...

"[E]conomists, elected officials, and policy wonks gathered in Lansing, Michigan to update revenue projections of the past and forecast revenue for the future. Before the ink was even dry on their predictions, legislators and educators started positioning themselves on what to do with large unexpected projected surpluses. My inbox was exploding with news and recommendations from associations (MASA, MASB, and the like) and the mainstream media began reporting out interviews of anyone and everyone running to the bright lights.

"None discussed the need to address the growing funding gap between rich and poor school districts, and the resulting lack of equitable opportunities for disadvantaged kids to achieve the same goals as every other child in Michigan. Of course not, since that would not be self-serving panning to their respective constituencies.

'“The hierarchy of bureaucracy and the power of the status quo are such that, in our country, poor children and communities are treated differently compared to those children and communities from upper class backgrounds.” (Orfield, 2005, as cited in Rios, Bath, Foster et. al., Inequities in Public Education, Institute for Educational Inquiry, Aug 2009)"

So this is why we fight. We fight because every child deserves, not the f-ing chance to President, but the opportunity to do anything that they can do. Not just because without that opportunity the United States, Canada, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom (et al) are no more "democracies" than China is, and not just because we are supposed to be ethical societies, but because our future on this planet of eight, nine, ten billion people trying to share our resources depends on our ability to best use the talents of everyone. Not just the kids who now inherit wealth and position.

Michigan Governor Rick Snyder: Here, his daughter's private school explains why $21,000 per year
tuition just can't cover the costs of educating rich kids. Snyder cut Michigan public school per
student/per year funding to $6,846.

And creating that equity of opportunity requires that we not just change funding so that kids who need more, get more, but that we change our schools so that we do not insist that kids from the homes of the "not traditionally successful" begin far behind, and stay far behind.

I talk a lot about "colonialism" in education and the need to embrace a "postcolonial" ethic, and I understand that - especially in North America where "colonialism" usually means funny hats and kind of chalky paint colors - these are sometimes difficult ideas, but the essence is that, in simple terms, we either expect all children to behave and operate as if they are white, protestant, upper middle class, English-speaking, heterosexual, passive, and externally motivated (bribery/punishment), or we do not. And if we do - under the claim that this is what makes people "employable" - that there is simply no way that children who are not all of that can ever catch up.

They will begin school "behind," and - unless all those rich, "normal" kids stop dead in their tracks - they will remain "behind" no matter what they do.

It doesn't take an accredited scholar to know the "bullsh**" spouted by those trying to keep
the colonial educational apparatus in place. Above, John Wittle on YouTube, below,
Rashaun Williams of the Science Leadership Academy.

Thus, along with funding solutions, our classrooms and schools must transform, so that the culture of our educational spaces becomes inclusive in real terms, accepting that we will not all be the same and that we should not all be the same, which includes rejecting the structures of "learning" which limit who we are and how we communicate.

"[M]y students always write more than they think they are writing because the context is so urgent, compelling, and interactive that they enjoy it and it doesn't seem like drudgery. They work so hard to articulate and defend ideas about which they have strong convictions that it does not feel to them like the exercise of "writing a term paper." When I put their semester's work into a data hopper, even I was shocked to find out that they were averaging around 1000 words per week, in a course about neuroscience, collaborative thinking, the technological and ideological architecture of the World Wide Web, and the "collaboration by difference" method that I prescribe as an anecdote to attention blindness, the way our own expertise, cultural values, and attention to a specific task illuminates some things and makes us blind to others. I argue that the open architecture of the Web is built on the principle of diversity and maximum participation--feedback and editing--that gives us a great tool for compensating for our own shortcomings." - Cathy N. Davidson

What came before this post in this series are my ideas about how to transform schools into places of universal opportunity, but this is neither a comprehensive nor authoritative list, we all keep thinking together, and the list will build, grow, and improve. But - to use a phrase I use far too often when I speak - my version of "ummm" - "Here's the thing": I was at my friendly local Ford dealer last week getting my oil changed and talking to the chief salesperson who has become a valued friend. He told me a story about a "severely" autistic boy in his wife's classroom. He cannot handle the classroom, but he told me about how the parents described to her that he is a remarkable skier, who loves the sport and becomes - well - entirely different on the slopes. I said, I know. I hated classrooms, I still hate most classrooms. "Back then" my escape was in swimming ("a great sport, you can't even hear the coach"), now it is other things. The "disability" is not with the child, it is with the system and the environment.

This is what I fight for. This is what I ask you to fight for. Fighting, of course, involves risk - not the fake risk of Wall Street or people who begin corporations (the corporation itself is designed as a means of avoiding actual risk) - but the facing of true danger. There are the dangers of losing your job, of not being promoted, of exclusion from certain communities and honors, there are real dangers in terms of time involved (and thus costs to families and in terms of other life opportunities), there are real dangers to comfort. I will not minimize any of this. Yet, I ask you to fight anyway.

We will not change the future of our children through passivity or by waiting. But if it was not this important, the forces arrayed against us would not be either so powerful or relentless. They would not include both American political parties (both Australian political parties), the richest guys on the planet, the biggest banks, the biggest corporations, and they would not have the capabilities to co-opt and bribe seemingly anyone.

These people want the poor and the different to fail, because they have done extremely well with the planet just as it is, with social stratification just as it is, with inequitable opportunity just as it is. They have no real desire for David Britten's kids to be able to compete with Barack Obama's kids or Bill Gates' kids. Those private school kids have, pretty much, a free ride to the top right now, and - parents being parents - they are defending that free ride with everything they've got.

Which means we need to be stronger than they are, better than they are, and take the kind of real risks they do not have to.

We fight for our children. And unlike Arne Duncan, Bill Gates, and friends, when we say "our," we mean it in the most inclusive way imaginable.

- Ira Socol

Blackout

noreply@blogger.com (narrator) — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 15:15:00 +0000

The freedom of people

and their right to be informed,

to govern themselves,

to educate themselves,

must matter more than

lifetime guaranteed profits

for the one percent.

For more on the Blackout
Protest on Web Uses Shutdown to Take On Two Piracy Bills (The New York Times)
Stop Sopa or the web really will go dark (Guardian)
The Media Tycoons (The New York Times)

For more on SOPA and PIPA
The Guardian Explainer
Obama Position (The New York Times)
Google "Take Action Google's Position
Mozilla
Wikipedia
Sopa Explained (CNN Money)
Why SOPA is dangerous (Mashable)

For more on the unified tactics of the corporate right
For God so loved the 1%... (The New York Times)
The ALEC Agenda for Education (Parents United)
ALEC, the Koch Brothers, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the "Conservative" Agenda (Daily Kos)

https://blacklists.eff.org/

Vote with your votes, and vote with your purchasing power.

See SOPA Supporters List Here

Do not support those who work against you, whether in big box stores, online, or on your main or high street.

(If your local Chamber of Commerce is on this list, tell every member you meet to dis-associate or you will stop doing business with them)

Changing Gears 2012: knowing less about students, seeing more

noreply@blogger.com (narrator) — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 21:05:00 +0000

"the passing of laws that made the US the only
developed country to lock up children as young
as 13 for life without the possibility of parole,
often as accomplices to murders committed by an adult"

"The charge on the police docket was "disrupting class." But that's not how 12-year-old Sarah Bustamantes saw her arrest for spraying two bursts of perfume on her neck in class because other children were bullying her with taunts of "you smell."

'"I'm weird. Other kids don't like me," said Sarah, who has been diagnosed with attention-deficit and bipolar disorders and who is conscious of being overweight. "They were saying a lot of rude things to me. Just picking on me. So I sprayed myself with perfume. Then they said: 'Put that away, that's the most terrible smell I've ever smelled.' Then the teacher called the police."'

OK, yes, the United States is an extreme example of how societies see children and adolescents these days, and within the extreme of the United States is the uber-extreme of Texas, and yet...

Yes, State Representative Agema, let's
teach our students about their rights.
(download this student rights pdf)

I had to laugh recently when I saw a Republican State Representative from Grand Rapids, Michigan introducing a bill to force the teaching of "a sound education in our constitutional underpinnings," the "Declaration of Independence" (not actually part of American law you understand, but the US right always gets these things confused), "the Federalist Papers, the Anti-Federalist Papers, the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights (yes, this is part of the Constitution, but again...) ... in public schools. Really? OK, but I'm not sure that "the most conservative member of Michigan's state legislature" truly wants teenagers learning their rights... they might, you know, start to object to life in the prison state many of them live in today. But if he drops the Third Reich-esque required loyalty oath each morning, I'll support his bill, then I'll sue to force that the ACLU position be brought up in every lesson.

"In the United States today, our public schools are not very good at educating our students, but they sure are great training grounds for learning how to live in a Big Brother police state control grid. Sadly, life in many U.S. public schools is now essentially equivalent to life in U.S. prisons."

Violent Crime Rate in American Schools,
since Clinton presidency

I have begun here because we have to understand the way that students are "framed" when adults in school see them these days. The big frame is provided by a society in which - in the US - the only way that anyone under the age of 25 can be treated as a full adult is to commit a crime. And by a society in which adolescence, and in many ways childhood, has been made illegal. "As almost every parent of a child drawn in to the legal labyrinth by school policing observes, it wasn't this way when they were young," the Guardian notes accurately. Of course the "juvenile crime rate" has risen, almost anything a teenager can do these days is illegal - well, except, the actual juvenile crime rate has not risen, violent crimes in school, for example, have dropped over 75% since today's 40 year olds (i.e. "parents") were in high school, and most of the beliefs which drove the "crackdown" on kids were based in a massive lie perpetrated by a rich conservative "christian" from Texas named T. Cullen Davis.

It isn't even 'just' criminality, it's that whole thing about kids, as "economics writer" Robert J. Samuelson argues, "The reality is that, as high schools have become more inclusive (in 1950, 40 percent of 17-year-olds had dropped out,1 compared with about 25 percent today) and adolescent culture has strengthened, the authority of teachers and schools has eroded. That applies more to high schools than to elementary schools, helping explain why early achievement gains evaporate."As Alfie Kohn summed it up succinctly, "School Would Be Great If It Weren’t for the Damn Kids."

There are those who oppose this, of course, to quote one commenter on the above Guardian article, "In short, this country, across many of its institutions, endows mentally and morally unqualified people with a great deal of power over the lives of children and parents: they are so benighted that they have turned public schools into daytime prisons and public institutions into instruments of persecution of those without resources to defend themselves. Because of this mentality, public schools are the last place in which I would want to place my children, or grandchildren," but we have a long way to go to undo this faked model and this disdain (or even hatred) of childhood, which has damaged tens of millions of children and young adults over the past generation plus.

Step twelve of Changing Gears 2012 is to stop knowing what you know about your students, and to start seeing them for who they are, and who they are, because of their stages in life, will be new each day. The fact is, that teenager in your classroom is far, far more likely to be inventing, say, "facial recognition software [which] signals death of passwords" or "devis[ing a] possible cancer cure," than to be dangerous to you or anyone else. And once you realize that, that you have with you in your learning community human equals who can teach you just as much as they can learn from you, you will stop "managing" these students as if they were products to have "value-added" to them, and you will stop controlling them as if they are criminals, or cattle, and you will begin to learn together.

My friend Rand Spiro on embracing cognitive flexibility in schools

The concept of "knowing less" and "seeing more" stems from the facts of cognitive brain development. As neuroscientist Alison Gopnik says, "As we know more, we see less." Which is why medical educators are so interested in Cognitive Flexibility Theory, and whatever techniques they can utilize, to improve the vision of people in the medical field. How to see what you do not expect to see. "Cognitive Flexibility Theory is about preparing people to select, adapt, and combine knowledge and experience in new ways to deal with situations that are different than the ones they have encountered before,” says Rand Spiro of Michigan State University. “It is the flexible application of knowledge in new contexts that concerns me. There are always new contexts and you just can’t rely on old templates. Cognitive security is what people want. It doesn’t work in the modern world of work and life."

"[using] the analogy of Sherlock Holmes, because Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of the great fictional detective, was also a physician, and, as all Holmes fans know, the detective’s genius lies in his observational powers. This link is not lost on Dr Brenda Moore-McCann, who set up a course for first-year medical students at Trinity College Dublin. Moore-McCann trained in medicine before she took a doctorate in art history. Her husband, Shaun McCann, then professor of academic medicine at Trinity, helped to put the course in place.

“In spite of all the gizmos, medicine is still about listening and looking, 90 per cent of the time,” says McCann. “Art is about adding a skill set. If this generation can come out of medical school less cynical, and with a broader view of the world, that would be brilliant.”
"Moore-McCann’s course is one of 11 modules, including creative writing, philosophy, ethics and literature, that first-year medical students choose from. “We’re using art to try to get them to perceive in a more attentive way, and to establish independence of thought,” she says. “It’s about not being afraid to say that you don’t know something, and I’m also trying to get to something very fundamental about the way people think.”

"In a sense, Moore-McCann’s course and the other modules are about going back to the original idea of a university: broadening the mind, encouraging different fields of inquiry and pushing the boundaries laterally; before the emphasis changed to promote goals, quotas and results-driven courses of study."

If we are to help our students to see this way, we must learn to see these ways as well, and the first place to learn to see the unexpected, is with our students.

Characters in this turned into a teacher, a lawyer, two world renowned architects, a cop,
a librarian, an important graphic designer, a unionization leader, key people at
major newspapers... Our students will change, if we didn't believe in their
capacity to change, we wouldn't (shouldn't) be in education.

"Another time, [the future Dr. Carson] inflicted a major head injury on a classmate
in a dispute over a locker. In a final incident, Ben nearly stabbed to death a friend
after arguing over a choice of radio stations. The only thing that prevented a
tragic occurrence was the knife blade broke on the friend's belt buckle."

What happens when you "know all about a student"?
Stand By Me- from Stephen King's The Body

When I first meet students to do "Assistive Technology Evaluations" I almost never read the reports from schools or other practitioners before the meeting. It's not that I doubt the information contained therein or presume that it will be "wrong" or "right," it is that I need to keep my eyes as clear as possible as I watch and listen to this human. Prior information, if I take it in, will grind my learning lens in one way or another, and staying the "neutral observer" is difficult enough without making it much harder by imposing diagnoses. This is my way to keep myself as cognitively flexible as possible, so that as I ask the student, "what works for you? what doesn't work for you? what to you love? what are the biggest issues? what's the best time of your day? what's the hardest time of your day? where do you like to sit? do you like to sit" ..." I can hear that student, and not their parent, their teacher, their principal, or their psychologist or medical doctor. And in doing this, I've found that not only do my initial recommendations vary greatly from those of others, but often whatever my "diagnostic thoughts" are do as well.

We see the failure of our dense cognitive frameworks about school and students and the presumptions which go along with them, and our "adult spotlight" vision, most clearly, perhaps, when we look at the issues surrounding "ADHD" and "medication." Gopnik: "...science isn't about applying the causal principles we know about. It's about discovering causal principles we don't know about. Psychological science, in particular, is about using evidence to find new and unexpected causal explanations for our actions and experiences. It's not about using our everyday psychological knowledge to explain what we do. When psychologists do that, we rightly accuse them of just telling us what we already know. This is especially true when scientists are trying to explain the conditions we vaguely call "clinical" or "dysfunctional" or "pathological." After all, people aren't pathological when they are angry or frustrated or sad because of what they want or believe. They are pathological precisely when we can't explain their miseries in the normal way—when the successful author suddenly kills himself, or when the bright child with loving and concerned parents just can't read no matter how hard she tries. Clinical scientists try to use evidence to discover the less than obvious causal principles (his serotonin level was too low, she can't process language sounds) that can explain these events."

"[Judith Warner's We've Got Issues] also reflects a common confusion in popular writing about psychology. She writes as if there are just two kinds of explanations for human behavior. Either the everyday narratives are right—so that children are unhappy because their parents don't care about them, or they fail at school because they are lazy. Or else the right answer is that the children's problems are the result of "something in their brains." Warner's logic seems to be that since the parents do care about their kids, the problem must be in the children's brains and therefore drugs will fix it." This fixed set of visions - a cognitive framework built so densely - that we only have two possible slots into which we might plug what we know about a child.

This is not the same child who came to school yesterday.
Can you see him for who he is today?

And we need many more ways than that of interpreting the humans around us, especially the young humans for whom we have significant responsibilities.

It is not easy to ignore all that you've heard, all that you've seen, but it is essential. All of us who have been parents, or coaches, or yes, teachers with open eyes, know that what was impossible for a child yesterday might be possible today. We all know that when we make assumptions based only on previous experience, we discover that the baby has rolled off the bed or climbed to the top of the ladder, or, whatever. So, despite the difficulty, this is something we must do.

We walk into our school in the morning, and what do we see? If we are good, we see boundless possibility and a whole new day for a lot of kids who have changed - in one way or the other - overnight.

- Ira Socol
next: why we fight...

1. It is important to note that in 1950 40% of U.S. students never went beyond 8th grade, and high school graduation rates may have been as low as 25% in 1960. This, to me, does not suggest that there is now, or was then, a problem with students, but that clowns like Samuelson and his ilk need to learn history, or to admit that their purpose for public education remains what Woodrow Wilson hoped it would be, a way to fail 80% of students and preserve the wealth of the ruling class.

Changing Gears 2012: social networking beyond Zuckerbergism

noreply@blogger.com (narrator) — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 14:36:00 +0000

Facebook began in the toxic social environment of the Ivy League...
The Social Network as a ranking system, if I win, you lose

Mark Zuckerberg isn't really an evil guy, as I think the film The Social Network made quite clear. He is simply a guy without the social skills which would allow him to understand the impact of his work. I don't just say that because I watched the film, I know people who know Mark, surely who knew Mark growing up. He is a great success in many things, but has always been a total failure with humanity, which makes it unfortunate that he created a tool with so much impact on humanity. Ah well, that is simply not a rare thing. Mitt Romney, who seems about to be chosen by the Republican Party to run for president of the United States seems completely unaware of what a human is, despite growing up with a remarkably humane father. Our leaders, whether from the privileged economic background of David Cameron or the privileged intellectual background of Barack Obama, all seem to struggle with this. We know this, the exceptions who can actually communicate in two directions with other humans, whether Robert Kennedy, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, or Tony Blair, stand out in shocking contrast against their "peers."

One of the things which comes with this lack of humanity in our leadership is a belief in human competition which is wholly at odds with actual human experience - when that competition has not been aggressively trained in to people. Most humans do not really compete in their family groups, their "tribes," their "clans," or even their workplaces. Most people try to cooperate, to build things together, to move forward together. "[T]here are theoretical reasons to suppose that mentalizing demands of cooperation and competition differ in some aspects," says an fMRI study from 2004, "In case of competition, the opponent’s upcoming behavior is less predictable than in the case of cooperation in which there is a clear expectation for the behavior of the other agent. Research ... demonstrated that one’s own actions are facilitated when actions of the other are at the disposal of the self. This is the case in the cooperation trials, but exactly the opposite during the competition trials."

In other words, though both competition and cooperation are "natural," cooperation is not just more efficient for humans - "In accordance with evidence from evolutionary psychology as well as from developmental psychology, we argue that cooperation is a socially rewarding process ... these arguments are consistent with the hypothesis that executive functions evolved to serve social planning in primates and, in humans, are applied to both physical world and the social realm" - but that we see with less prediction - we see more clearly and innovatively - in cooperative mode than in competitive mode.

Cooperation is not something foreign to the human race.

I'm certain that Mitt Romney once knew
why Mormons chose the beehive
as Utah's symbol, but life in the
culture of Harvard and Bain Capital
stripped that knowledge away.

Richerson, Boyd and Henrich (2002) call this the "tribal social instincts hypothesis," "Humans are prone to cooperate," they say, "even with strangers," yet, the enculturalization is key to these behaviors, "The elegant studies by Richard Nisbett’s group show how people’s affective and cognitive styles become intimately entwined with their social institutions. Because such complex traditions are so deeply ingrained, they are slow both to emerge and to decay. ... The slow rate of institutional change means that different populations experiencing the same environment and using the same technology often have quite different institutions."

Mark Zuckerberg, like most of our leadership, grew up in the rather anti-human confines of the wealthy, Wall Street obsessed, suburb. In these places where the institutions of the culture have embraced selfishness and competition in all things as a "good." Though, yes, "Human societies represent a spectacular outlier with respect to all other animal species because they are based on large-scale cooperation among genetically unrelated individuals" (Fehr and Fischbacher 2004), the social norming those authors describe seem to overwhelm the natural, creating places in which competition, in every single thing, is trained in from birth. My kid's Apgar score is higher than your kids, and onward and upward to 5,000 square foot homes for four people and Mercedes-Benz station wagons in the driveway, and $5,000 commercial ranges in kitchens that are turned on twice a year, and SAT test tutors and paid preparers for those Harvard applications.

In that world, as the Zuckerberg character in Aaron Sorkin's film makes clear in the first scene, being in one of the most prestigious fraternities of the most prestigious university in the nation is simply not enough, because it is not the "most of the most." Now Zuckerberg has neurological issues (I'm pretty sure) which make this especially difficult for him, but no matter the brain wiring, the world of Harvard and Harvard-like places is built on this essential set of what might be called personality disorders. A "zero-sum" world in which your success is only possible through the (relative) failure of those around you.

Able to not just speak to those different
from himself, but to hear them as well,
Robert Kennedy was a remarkably
rare type of political leader.

"It is a revolutionary world we live in. Governments repress their people; and millions are trapped in poverty while the nation grows rich; and wealth is lavished on armaments. For the fortunate among us, there is the temptation to follow the easy and familiar paths of personal ambition and financial success so grandly spread before those who enjoy the privilege of education. But that is not the road history has marked for us. The future does not belong to those who are content with today, apathetic toward common problems and their fellow man alike. Rather it will belong to those who can blend vision, reason and courage in a personal commitment to the ideals and great enterprises of American society." - Robert Francis Kennedy, 1968

We need a different kind of leadership in education. "The future does not belong to those who are content with today, apathetic toward common problems and their fellow man alike." We need a believe in our shared capabilities as people. And it has to begin with a radically different conception of our educational social networks. We need a concept of social networking where we are not comparing schools, teachers, and students in ways little different than Mark Zuckerberg's FaceMash.

Because I simply do not want schools to compete (the goal of the profiteers of "ed reform"), teachers to compete (the goal of Barack Obama, Bill Gates, Michael Gove, and many of America's Governors), or students to compete (the goal of way, way too many adults in schools and around children), I want them to succeed in their own ways, in their own time, and mostly, cooperatively. I want them all working together, helping each other...
• Might this student do better in your school? This student with that teacher? These three students if working together?
• What can this school learn from that school? How can this teacher help that teacher? What can this student learn from that student?

FaceMash: Which school is hotter?

Not competing, not ranking, not rating, but doing something much more directly human... helping each other.

We don't really want schools fighting over the "easy to educate" students, or teachers refusing to help other teachers escape that "bottom 5%," or students refusing to help each other do better, do we? And if we do, what are we suggesting? About ourselves, about society, even about our businesses?

Now comes the hard part, rethinking our own positions. Because if step eleven of Changing Gears 2012 is going to be "un-competing" in our social networking, we need to begin with our own behaviors. We do a lot of things which, often unintentionally, send the wrong messages, and those messages not only impact our students, they impact ourselves.

I've had my fights with online colleagues/friends I respect over stuff like the EduBlog Awards, and I know they "recognize" many people, but determining quality by letting people organize "vote for me" campaigns is the essence of building competition into something in which competition serves no positive purpose. And I'm troubled when people beg for more followers on Twitter (or friends on Facebook, or...). That's competition based in the most meaningless count, quantity where you don't even know what you are counting (bots, multiple accounts from one person). (I tend the other direction, I remember blocking new followers when I approached 500 followers, for whatever reason "500" seemed like a lot, and I wondered if "a lot" of followers would change the way I was communicating.) I'm troubled when people quote stats about number of readers of blogs too often. And I know I don't want to be that person people ask for help most often.

Obviously, our "official" rankings are problems - those "Honor Rolls" (I mumble, being one of the perpetually unhonored), class rankings, the whole idea - I'm always stunned by this - that the instructor is doing something wrong if everyone does well in the course, concern about "grade inflation," or the dreaded "awards ceremony."

Perhaps I'm strange, but I always think that being at the top - in this (especially American) work - encourages you to worry about staying at the top instead of encouraging you to do what you need to do. One issue. The second - and far more important issue is this - when you rank you are turning to artificial and external motivators to replace your own heart and soul. You are no longer trying to be the best you can be, you have given away your own internal measures for some flimsy badge which represents someone else's ideas.

A top retailer, 1972. Fighting to be on top
doesn't always work.

But perhaps I'm not alone. Toyota is still trying to recover from the disastrous quality control lapses they accepted because their goal was to sell more cars than General Motors. I've seen many businesses over-expand themselves out of business. The jury is still out on what Volkwagen's desire to be number one in sales will do to their long term reputation. Sometimes, a decent slice of the pie is better than either none of it or even all of it, because "number one" can be a tough thing: If I go back forty years to 1972, the top American retailers were: Sears, A&P, Safeway, J.C. Penney, and Kroger. The top airlines were United (yes, still up there), TWA, Pan Am, American, and Eastern - with only two of those five still even existing. I couldn't find my way back to 1972, but in 1976 the top selling cars in the United States were: the Oldsmobile Cutlass, Chevrolet Caprice, Chevrolet Monte Carlo, Ford LTD, and Chevrolet Malibu. No real need to point out that the basic design of our schools, the functional engineering of our schools, is a lot older than 40 years, as is our systems management, as are our grading systems, subject structures, and most of our course materials designs.

The change, among smart businesspeople, was apparent in late 2008-early 2009 when Ford joined the rush to Washington to get help for, yes, General Motors and Chrysler. Ford put considerable muscle, and took a lot of absurd abuse from Republicans, behind efforts to not just keep their competitors in business, but to reduce their debts far below those of Ford's. Why? Ford knew that their supplier chain needed healthy customers beyond themselves. Ford also knew that a health industry would be good for the country, and Ford knew that a full-scale depression spinning out from the nation's center wouldn't do much for its sales. Plus Ford knows that a healthy multiplayer industry is good for everyone. The Big Three in the US, Volkwagen, BMW, Daimler in Germany, Toyota, Nissan, Honda, Mitsubishi in Japan.

It was also apparent in Google's recent conversations about Mozilla: "So it's very easy to see why Google would be willing to fund Mozilla: Like Google, Mozilla is clearly committed to the betterment of the web, and they're spending their resources to make a great, open-source web browser. Chrome is not all things to all people; Firefox is an important product because it can be a different product with different design decisions and serve different users well. Mozilla's commitment to advancing the web is why I was hired at Google explicitly to work on Firefox before we built Chrome: Google was interested enough in seeing Firefox succeed to commit engineering resources to it, and we only shifted to building Chrome when we thought we might be able to cause even greater increases in the rate at which the web advanced. It's not hard to understand the roots of this strategy. Google succeeds (and makes money) when the web succeeds and people use it more to do everything they need to do. Because of this Chrome doesn't need to be a Microsoft Office, a direct money-maker, nor does it even need to directly feed users to Google. Just making the web more capable is enough."

So, the world's biggest companies know something educational reformers, and our political leaders, can't quite figure out. I know Ford would like to sell more cars in the US than General Motors, but that kind of win is not their goal. And Google, which could dominate many things, chooses not to.

The Nash Equilibrium: It is not all about competition
"Adam Smith, is wrong"

Mark Zuckerberg doesn't understand that, which is why Facebook will always be about rankings and superiorities. More friends, more messages, more writings on the wall. Even Barack Obama, doesn't fully understand this, he wants America to be triumphant - whatever that may mean - in education. But we look around our schools and we see so many differing talents, so many differing personalities, so many differing skillsets, and we know that we'll always be better together.

I don't want FaceMash or SchoolMash or Students-in-MathMash. I sure do not want algorithms which will artificially rate people. I don't want counts of followers or popularity contest awards, and I don't want kids accorded an "honor" because they got one more answer right on some multiple choice test than another. I don't want teachers rated on test scores or graduation rates, and I don't want schools rated those ways either. We've tried that for generations. It sucks for just about everybody.

So let's try something different. Let's join together, in all of our learning spaces, with as little hierarchy as we overtrained animals can muster. Maybe we'll discover something.

- Ira Socol
next: knowing less about students, seeing more

Changing Gears 2012: undoing academic time

noreply@blogger.com (narrator) — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 15:07:00 +0000

School schedules frame the world, creating limits on every kind of learning.

Let me begin with a Chris Lehmann quote:
"As long as high school students have to travel to eight different classes where eight different teachers talk about grading / standards / learning in eight different ways, students will spend far too much trying to figure out the adults instead of figuring out the work. When that happens, too many students will fall through the cracks and fail. If we built schools where there was a common language of teaching and learning and common systems and structures so that kind people of good faith can bring their ideas and creativity and passion to bear within those systems and structures and help kids learn, we will find that more teachers can be the kind of exemplary teachers that Mr. Kristof wants.

"As long as there is little to no time in the high school schedule for teachers and students to see and celebrate each other's shared humanity, too many students will feel that school is something that is done to them, that teachers care more about their subjects than they do about the kids. As long as teachers have 120-150 kids on their course roster, and there is little continuity year to year so that relationships cannot be maintained, too many students will be on their own when they struggle. If we build schools where teachers and students have time to relate to one another as people - if we create pathways for students and teachers to know each other over time, so that every child knows they have an adult advocate in their school, we make schools more human -- and more humane - for all who inhabit them."

Chris, the Principal of Philadelphia's Science Leadership Academy and someone I love to both agree with and disagree with because either way I learn, was responding to a column by New York Times writer Nick Kristoff on - well basically - poverty not being important in education (Like many at The New York Times Kristoff is a great reporter outside the United States, but often a lazy, sloppy front man for the power structure inside the United States), an article retweeted so many times by Arne Duncan's flak boy Justin Hamilton, that my Twitter-stream was literally spinning.

Anyway, Chris is, of course, right. Its one of the things he and I have talked about over the past year, that is, the need to break through the structures that confine us to failure.

And one of those key structures is time, or more specifically, the way we use clocks.

The clock is not always on our side: Harold Lloyd, Safety Last
Scene re-scored by a music composition student.

When I began writing about space in school, I said, "The "first technology" of school is time. That division of "educational time" from other time, and the subsequent divisions therein. School Days and weeks, and semesters, and years. Periods of time which are separated out for this and that. "It's time for reading but not science, science but not physical education, history but not literature."'

Time is the "first technology" because it is the most controlling of all the structures which define "school." Learning is, of course, timeless. It exists in its own temporal zone, unique to each individual, and different for each thing "learned." But school is all about the clock. In Peter Høeg’s Borderliners the main character creates complete panic among a school's adults simply by messing with the bell schedule. So trained are the faculty to the clock that be creating just an extra ten minutes at one point in the day, he can destroy the school's operation.

It's more than a great story, it makes perfect sense.

Studebaker was endlessly rushing new models
out for September "model year" starts,
too often, the parts didn't fit together

All my life I have clashed with schools over "deadlines." These are deadlines unlike almost any I've run across outside of school, because they are completely arbitrary. OK, in the bad old days of American car companies and the "good old days" of American TV networks, they rushed products, mostly incredibly lousy products, to market for pre-ordained moments in time, but wisely, the rest of the world sort of ignored that system, and now, cars come to market when they are ready.

American TV series had to be these things which would run and run and run. That could happen in Britain, but the BBC was also willing to call eight episodes a season, if it seemed appropriate.

But schools, from Kindergarten up through Graduate Schools, persist in the same nonsensical calendar system in which the clock overrules the idea of doing what you do well. Stop paying attention to American History kids, we're done with that. I'm sorry you got deeply interested in cognitive theories, the semester is over. And of course, a mediocre work turned in "on time" trumps a great work that's "late."

Then, within each day, we make it far more ridiculous, as Chris Lehmann says up top. Fascinating math concept? Ding! Sorry, the bell says its time for Charles Dickens. Great discussion of Dickens? Ding! Sorry, the bell says its time for gym! We defeat virtually every potential student interest, and short circuit learning moment after learning moment, because we think that the most important thing to respond to is, a clock.

And if we back off further, we are so intent on dividing "learning time" ("school") from "non-learning time" ("home") from "homework time" (school directed but not supported), that those who want to use "homework time" differently think they've discovered the equivalent of gravity.

Sad, because before children are introduced to our schools, they are learning every minute they are awake.

Step ten of Changing Gears 2012 is to do everything we can to break apart every notion of academic time. Admitting, that since the clock and calendar are the foundational technologies of what we call "school," that this is the most difficult thing of all. But only by attacking these rigid foundations can we begin to liberate learning from the industrial straitjacket of the past century and a half.

Summerhill physics?

We must do what we can to stop processing children as if they were products with "value to be added" at key moments. And let us use the absurdities of today's political class as our leverage. If poorly educated governors in Iowa, Florida, Virginia and elsewhere want to set rules about social promotion - and nothing is more ridiculous than attacking "social promotion" in a system entirely based on student age - then you have every reason to make all of your schools multi-age, so promotion is no longer an issue. That breaks calendar foundation number one, the absurd NCLB notion that age determines learning.

"To allow children to be completely free to play as much as they like. Creative and imaginative play is an essential part of childhood and development. Spontaneous, natural play should not be undermined or redirected by adults into learning experiences. Play belongs to the child." - Summerhill Policy Statement

Then, within schools, we must stop dividing time between "play" and "learning" as if these are somehow mutually exclusive. Or between "learning" in an active mode, and "learning" by reflecting. Kids need to learn to manage time, and they need to discover. It is fine if three are playing, six are reading, two are staring out the window, etc. It is fine. This is natural. This is what humans do.

"The function of the child is to live his own life – not the life that his anxious parents think he should live, not a life according to the purpose of the educator who thinks he knows best." - A.S. Neill

Assignments need to stop having dates on them. Assignments - such as they may be - need to have goals instead. What are you hoping to accomplish? to learn? to create? to build? to know? to demonstrate? to provoke? How do you think you'll get from "here" to "there." What in the world does a date or a time have to do with that? Why would you even begin to interfere with the learning process by limiting the time? I'll explain, because in the industrial process of schooling 70% of a subject "learned" by a specific moment trumps mastery at some other time. Do I really need to explain how ridiculous that is?

Is late worse than best? The Boeing 787 Dreamliner

I, myself, am rather glad that Boeing was quite late with their 787 Dreamliner. Had they been on-time, well, from what I hear, the wings would've fallen off. Which is a classic "school 70%." The 787 is unlike any other plane ever built, imaginative, and quite remarkable. We don't get that with fixed deadlines. Something the "real world" already knows.

We all need caves, campfires, and watering
holes, and the right to choose which when (Summerhill)

"In other words, we are assuming (1) that learning takes places best not when conceived as a preparation for life but when it occurs in the context of actually living, (2) that each learner ultimately must organize his own learning in his own way, (3) that "problems" and personal interests rather than "subjects" are a more realistic structure by which to organize learning experiences, (4) that students are capable of directly and authentically participating in the intellectual and social life of their community, (5) that they should do so, and (6) that the community badly needs them." - Neil Postman and Alan Shapiro

"Our schools imagine that students learn best in a special building separated from the larger community. Teachers and administrators are included in the group of educators; parents, employers, businessmen, ministers are excluded. The year-around Parkway Program sets up new boundaries and provides a new framework in which the energy of all of us can be used in learning, not in maintaining an obsolete, inefficient system. ... There is no schoolhouse, there is no separate building; school is not a place but an activity, a process. We are indeed a school without walls. Where do students learn? In the city. Where in the city? Anywhere and everywhere." - Greenberg and Roush. A Visit to the 'School without Walls': Two Impressions

"School work" needs to stop being separated from life by the hard line of "school time" and "non-school time," which is one of the reasons why - earlier in this collection - I find the "Flipped Classroom" so lacking. Learning needs to occur within and around the world as a whole, and "school" should be the place where we help students make sense of their global learning and get them ready to go solve the issues - personal, family, community, nation, world - which they encounter elsewhere. But to do this we must stop pretending that "school time" is something absolute. Remember, before Henry Barnard and the industrial model of schooling, students came to school when their chores were done, and left school when they were "done" there. They took breaks from school when other things intervened. As far back as the 1850s the "Land Grant College" movement hoped to bring the life of the nation into the school experience, and the value of education to the society (a concept often still dimly, if at all, understood, even by Land Grant University faculty).

This is part of the reason for Passion-Based Learning, Project-Based Learning, and the entire School-Without-Walls concept. Breaking down the walls, starting with the walls of time.

"To allow children to experience the full range of feelings, free from the judgment and intervention of an adult. Freedom to make decisions always involves risk and requires the possibility of negative outcomes. Apparently negative consequences such as boredom, stress, anger, disappointment and failure are a necessary part of individual development." - Summerhill policy statement.

How does your "school time" help your kids prepare to work here?
(Virgin Atlantic headquarters)

The thing we have become worst at in our schools is helping students get ready for anything except more secondary schooling. We usually do nothing to even prepare students for universities, much less anything else, and here, time is the key factor. How do you choose to "study?" Where do you choose to "study"? and of course, When do you choose to "study"? Those key questions which determine university success in many ways are completely blocked from the primary and secondary experience because we insist on running our students as if they were a (French, not American) train system, with every moment accounted for. How, with your clock training, will your students even know what to do with themselves if they get a job where some of the time-use decisions are theirs?

So stop it. If a student comes to class "late" or leaves early the question is not one of "bell compliance" but of how to do that politely and without disrupting others. If a student falls asleep in class, assuming the snoring is muted, that's only your concern insofar as it may be a review of your performance (more often its a review of our absurd secondary school scheduling ideas). If a student chooses an extended lunch (usually "extended" from something obscenely short) over class attendance, this needs to be viewed as a micro-economic decision, and not a behavior issue.

"Class-oriented? Who or what has ever made anyone in the 3Is take more classes than he/she wants to take? First year student Richard Hobbs during his two years in the 3Is probably didn't take more than one or two and, if I remember correctly, didn't even get credit for them. He graduated. (See Ira Socol and Tom Murphy on the art of not taking classes; on the other hand, for the art of taking classes, see Kim Jones, who amassed something like 12 credits and graduated after her sophomore year.)" - Alan Shapiro

Why can't students control their own academic time? Why can't every school allow students the freedom to go at their own speed? If you really believe that your school is not an industrial processing plant, or not a holding tank for adolescents (to keep them off the streets/out of the job market) than I challenge you, in 2012, to start to prove that.

Academic time is wrong. It is wrong in every way and at every level of education. And we need to start working to destroy it.

- Ira Socol
next: social networks beyond Zuckerbergism

Changing Gears 2012: changing rooms

noreply@blogger.com (narrator) — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 18:49:00 +0000

Spaces matter. And I have come to understand that spaces matter much more than places.

"Place" is a physical construct, "space" a conceptual one, and somehow we need to begin to carve out a series of effective "learning spaces" in the "places" we call "school."

Yes, there is power in both, memory in both, opportunity in both. But "place" is both more tribal in nature, and even when sublimely lovely, much more constrictive by nature than "space," which is an ever-changing idea.

In one of those many "previous lives" I have had, I once was part of a production of David Storey's The Changing Room. Storey's play was about space, and the power of space. There is no actual plot, and the place hardly matters (no matter how apparent in expected accent and character descriptions), but Storey writes about how this conceptual space between a cruel society and a cruel game offers those within it something unparalleled elsewhere in their lives. The physical "changing room/locker room" is one thing, and it might look like anything and be anywhere, but here we are diving into something entirely different from the architectural.

Yet, the architectural always matters. Buildings matter. Landscapes matter. Views matter. Acoustics matter.

"The purpose of Why Architecture Mattersis to “come to grips with how things feel to us when we stand before them, with how architecture affects us emotionally as well as intellectually”—to show us how architecture affects our lives and to teach us how to understand the architecture that surrounds us every day. “Architecture begins to matter,” Paul Goldberger writes, “when it brings delight and sadness and perplexity and awe along with a roof over our heads.” He shows us how that works in examples ranging from a small Cape Cod cottage to the “vast, flowing” Prairie style houses of Frank Lloyd Wright, from the Lincoln Memorial to the highly sculptural Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and the Church of Sant’Ivo in Rome, where “simple geometries…create a work of architecture that embraces the deepest complexities of human imagination.”'

Of course architecture also matters when it does something opposite "bring[ing] delight and sadness and perplexity and awe along with a roof over our heads," whether that be the classic leaking roof in a rain storm or rectangular boxes which separate students into production cells.

Entering Trinity in Dublin, welcoming but safe,
many ways to gather, or not.

"Your architecture should ennoble all who pass through your design," a Pratt Institute professor once told a studio I was part of. I think it must ennoble and empower, engage and comfort, and the best designs I know, do that. Great learning spaces make things possible, this is true of Prospect Park, or the Temple of Dendur wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, or Trafalger Square, or Orestad College in Denmark, or the Bois de Boulogne, or the lawn at the University of Virginia, or Millennium Park in Chicago, or the Seattle Central Library, or many a great cathedral or city square ... theses spaces allow gathering and solitude, inspiration and reflection, communication and study, performance and observance, communion and acceptance.

This is true online as well. The QR Code Advent Calendar created by #ccGlobal kids last month allowed, inspired, and introduced so much. Twitter, and on a smaller level, TodaysMeet, are blank canvases which offer those opportunities, perfect spelling, grammar, complexity in language not required - but it's open to anyone and anyone can link to anything. Hybrid online spaces, say, Skype + TodaysMeet + Google Docs offer another "big opening" kind of space, as, I suspect, do Google + Hangouts with the ability to combine many tools.

Honestly, I looked for great classrooms, but... well, these are rarer, of course. Yet, not impossible to find. Not impossible at all...

Without removing walls, without big money, we can go from teaching places
to learning spaces

Ewan Mcintosh has one great framework, his "Seven Spaces" which exist both in "reality" and "virtually" ...

In Mcintosh's beginning thoughts for those designing, planning, or furnishing "schools," he puts it simply, "There's a difference between: "What kind of building would help you teach and learn better?" and "What kind of teaching and learning would you like to do, and what things could we help with in making that happen?"

Which is the opposite of what we see in the TEDtalk below, where the goals are established from the top, and thus, no matter how "cute" the walls get, the computers and their student users still sit alone facing walls, and though drill and kill has moved outside, it has not changed.

Failed Space... the TED space, sage-on-stage + passive audience, rehearsed lecture + PowerPoint,
is - by design - a "limited to the elite" structure in which alternate expression is blocked.
(Admission: as with every TEDtalk I've tried to watch, it took me four sittings to get through this)

Step nine of Changing Gears 2012 is creating Learning Spaces which have choices, create opportunities, allow comforts, provide safety. We build these differently wherever we do them, but we craft these environments in a way which allows the maximum possibility for flexibility and continuous adaptability. Learning Spaces cannot be places which create continuous irrelevant discomfort: "'Who wants to be locked into a room with 30 people dressed just like them, to be startled by a bell every 35 minutes, to queue for lunch for 40 minutes and be made to stand outside in the cold twice a day?' says Jenn Ashworth in a Guardian piece on truancy titled "Why I refused to go to school." I have been in classrooms so visually chaotic - in every direction - that I could not last 5 minutes in them. I have been in classrooms so coldly sterile that I imagined someone was about to perform surgery on someone, which creates more tension than anyone should have to handle.

Learning Spaces must offer options which support every child. This is true whether learning is happening dominantly in-room or online. You can't just send kids off to their computers from their homes and call yourself an educator (you can, however, do this and call yourself a Republican governor).

Choice is one of the things which create learning spaces.

There is plenty of science here, although education invests less in research regarding space than almost any other industry (think restaurants, or retailing). "A common complaint in the classroom is eye fatigue and in order to relieve it, Engelbrecht suggests that the end wall of the classroom behind the teacher should be a different colour from the other walls," says one design study which also notes, "there are some suggestions that the colour of surroundings might have a distinct impact on mood and behaviour, perhaps sometimes, Sundstrom (1987) suggests, through changing perceptions of room temperature or size. Read et al (1999) consider that both colour and ceiling height affects children’s cooperative behaviour. Engelbrecht argues that the colour of walls in the classroom affects productivity and accuracy while Brubaker (1998) argues that cool colours permit concentration," but, indicates something a look at schools might make obvious, "that children thought colour was important and that they thought the colour of the walls in their school was uninviting and boring. However, in this study Maxwell also found that teachers and parents were not concerned by the colour of the walls."

Color is just one little part, to quote a student from one class where a teacher embraced a radical reshaping - of both room and assignments - based in choice and comfort, "we have freedom of choice in here-we are more creative-not having choice takes fun out of writing." In the same space another simply said, "I think better and work harder when I am comfortable."

Comfort, choice, pleasure, the ability to see outside and find momentary escapes, varieties of light, transparency which allows learners to see the work of other learners (contagious creativity, contagious inquiry), multiple "entry points" for beginning an effort, and, of course, tool choice... Yu know I've written a lot about all of this:

old furniture, new uses.
learn to "alert" on discomfort
instead of movement

And I have because it matters. We need to get past that old Calvinist notion (more American Calvinist than Calvin, for those religious historians playing along at home) that misery and discomfort are important to learning. In fact, as Maslow suggests, the uncomfortable student cannot possibly focus on the higher-level learning skills, the brain simply doesn't allow that. Discomfort, a feeling of being unsafe, will always trump the more complex. Let me say it this way again: "In order to learn you must be cognitively uncomfortable, but you can't be cognitively uncomfortable if you are physically or psychologically uncomfortable."

Which brings us back to one of my other key arguments about educational spaces. While safety and comfort are vital, so is change, and these elements must co-exist. I am always stunned that so many educators seem to believe that the "school day" or a "learning experience" should begin with automaticity of operation - that is, without consciousness, without thought. Why would learning begin in an unconscious state? So, you need not shock your students - there's that safety thing - but you do need surprise and difference which gets the human brain operating, and, if your students get off a bus, go through the door, go down the corridor, and arrive at an assigned seat each morning, or follow completely predictable paths to an online experience, you have begun your interaction with your students by turning off their brains... Why do you think the world's simplest, and most successful, website loves to surprise its visitors?

Willing to completely distract our students on the way to their tasks?
Google's legendary Pac-Man doodle

Take the idea of "Learning Spaces" seriously this year, because they matter.

- Ira Socol
next: undoing academic time

Changing Gears 2012: maths are creative, maths are not arithmetic

noreply@blogger.com (narrator) — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 19:30:00 +0000

(1) ending required sameness (2) rejecting the flipped classroom (3) re-thinking rigor (4) its not about 1:1 (5) start to dream again (6) learning to be a society (again) (7) reconsidering what literature means (9) changing rooms (10) undoing academic time (11) social networks beyond Zuckerbergism (12) knowing less about students, seeing more (13) why we fight

"In Essays in Humanistic Mathematics, Philip Davis likens mathematics to literature. Like literature, mathematics has metaphor, ambiguity, paradox, and mystery. It has history. Mathematics has contributed mightily to philosophy. It has a sense of outcome, a feeling of rightness, a sense of catharsis... Like music, mathematics has harmony and dissonance." from Cut the Knot by Alex Bogomolny

I am really tired of schools chasing students away from mathematics. And I am really tired of schools confusing arithmetic - a mechanical grammar of numbers - with the field of mathematics. We need kids to get interested in maths. Mathematics is something essential in our society, and in our future, and we just cannot afford to continue to chase the bulk of kids away from the possibilities which come with math skills, interests, and capabilities. We cannot continue to either allow the assumption that there are "math kids" and "non-math kids" (as if math is a magical gift), or to separate students into "creative types" and "math types."

Because the "next world" - the jobs of the future which are, as we speak, constructing the world we will live in tomorrow - is being built by the creative mathematicians of the world, and our students will either be part of that, or they won't. They will be able to develop their own solutions and have power over their world or they will be helpless consumers locked into their "App Store Education" (Will Richardson must read) and "App Store Existence." They will be participants or bystanders. And largely, that is for us, as educators, to decide.

"Why is this exciting? Why do I want to tell you this story?"
"Mathematics is not about 3+3..."

Let's begin here, with a quote from the end of the clip above, "Adding in clock notation, all of computer science begins when you say 1+1 = 0. It's not that you were wrong when you said 1+1 = 2, its just a different way of seeing it."

If this is over your head in some way, and you teach math in school, we need to talk. We need to talk now, because step eight of Changing Gears 2012 is re-understanding what mathematics are, and how we bring kids and mathematics together.

Two primary issues which lead to the bigger ones, no matter what age kids you teach. First, maths are creative, they are imaginative, they are powerful, and they are fascinating. Second, arithmetic cannot continue to be your gateway, your filter, blocking children from mathematics.

For the first, what have you done with Fibonacci lately, just as a first question? How does a maths idea shape how students perceive the spaces they are in? For the second, well, lets go back a month to a post I wrote, "In a math lesson a day later I watched a seventh grader, a kid who really struggled to divide 64 by 2 in his head, or 32 by 2, or, for that matter, 16 by 2, work diligently to explain to his disbelieving teacher how he knew - and he knew instantly - how many games are in the NCAA basketball tournament. He knew, because math is about rules and logic, and his logic was perfect and his understanding of the rules I had described was perfect, and because math is not arithmetic, no matter how much our poorly educated national and state leaders think it is. He and his classmates also understood, almost instantly, that the question - no calculators or paper or Google allowed - "If the temperature in Detroit, Michigan is 50 degrees what is the temperature likely to be in Windsor, Ontario? was about (a) culture, and then (b) understanding comparable scales, and then (c) order of operations."

If we get past these two ideas, we can begin to bring students into what mathematics is...

Pulling two quotes from a mathematics discussion board begins to get at the issues, the question being that old classic, does two plus two always equal four...
"I think this discussion goes right back to Aristotle (or another Greek of similar vintage). The question is pretty much: Three clouds; three pebbles; three goats; three thoughts; three olives; when you take away clouds, pebbles, goats, thoughts, olives, then what do you have left? The concept of threeness! Each such ....ness is an integer, and there is a reasonably obvious rule to move between such concepts. This rule permits of repetition, and thus establishes the countable numbers."

however...

"For a cook, 2 apples + 2 apples might well accurately equal 5 apples if those 4 apples are larger than normal. The mathematician would argue that 2 large apples + 2 large apples must equal 4 large apples. Correct. That’s the mathematical axiom Jon Richfield is talking about. The trouble is, in reality no apple is the same size as another, so the mathematician’s axiom is limited somewhat to arithmetic theory. So why should mathematicians get the final say? The cook’s application is commonsensical and thus more accurate and fair, so in real life 2 + 2 doesn’t always equal 4. Using the equation 2 + 2 = 5, the apple pie turns out normally, as intended. Nothing meaningless about that."

10 candies? Can these be evenly divided in half?
Or are these all completely different things?

And here we have established the arithmetic conundrum which pulls kids away from mathematics. It should never be taught in a reductionist form which removes the possibility of creativity.

Every child knows that not every apple, every piece of cake (even if the same size you have those differences in frostings), every student, is the same (a fact those who work in quantitative educational statistics have been trained to forget). Thus, the question about two apples plus two apples, as suggested above, becomes one we can argue and debate, even with five-year-olds.

That is not a path to nowhere, it is, rather, the path to understanding, and to bringing students into mathematics. We have to help them learn that mathematics is a set of systems which we can apply when helpful, or rethink and re-imagine if not helpful. A long time ago I wrote a piece called "Real World Math" and one of the things I talked about was why I loved sport statistics in school maths. You cannot compute a batting average in baseball without knowing the rules about what an "At Bat" is and how that differs from a "Plate Appearance." You need to know the difference, in football, between a "Shot" and a "Shot on Goal." You need to know, in American football, how a quarterback "sack" is counted in "run yards" even if that quarterback was tackled while running forward. So these statistics do not just connect maths to a kid's interests, they explain how mathematical systems work, and how a slight change in the rules which govern that system, would change the answer.

At the grocery, sometimes 2+2=4,
sometimes not...

Here we go...

"A particularly vexing problem is comparing players from different eras. One complicating factor is that the baseball rule book has changed every year since the first rule book for the National League was issued in 1877.

For example, did you know that prior to the 1930 American League season, and prior to the 1931 National League season, fly balls that bounced over or through the outfield fence were home runs! All batted balls that cleared or went through the fence on the fly or that were hit more than 250 feet in the air and cleared or went through the fence after a bounce in fair territory were counted as home runs. After the rule change the batter was awarded second base and these were called "automatic doubles" (ground-rule doubles are ballpark-specific rules) and are covered by rule 6.09(d)-(h) in the MLB Rule Book."

Change the rules, change the results. Could you add fruits as 2+2? Or just the same kind of fruit? Three clouds; three pebbles; three goats; three thoughts; three olives; when you take away clouds, pebbles, goats, thoughts, olives, then what do you have left? The concept of threeness! Each such ....ness is an integer..." But an "integer" is an idea, it is a "construct," which students should learn to decide is either useful or not useful. Do we count "the number of people on the earth" (US Census is at odds with other counters) or measure the cumulative carbon footprint? (and what system of maths do we use to do that?).

Toss this into the mix... "three clouds"? the sky is full of water vapor, where does one cloud start and another stop? Is a three day old pygmy goat the same as an adult mountain goat? This "integer" idea, "threeness," what does it mean and how can we use it?

New York's Polo Grounds,
an interesting field made for
interesting stats.

Now, how many home runs did Babe Ruth hit? How many home runs did Lou Gehrig hit? But wait,

"With the exception of a couple of months at the start of the 1920 season, from 1906 to 1930 the foul lines were "infinitely long": A fly ball over the fence had to land in fair territory (as determined by the infinitely long foul lines), or be fair when last seen by the umpire, in order to be a home run. In other words, a fly ball that went over the fence in fair territory but "hooked" around the foul pole (if there was a foul pole) was ruled a foul ball." How many home runs did Babe Ruth hit? How many home runs did Lou Gehrig hit?

So, the rules matter, and the rules are changeable - assuming you can make the right argument. And this is creative magic which infiltrates everything, from the music you listen to to how that classroom window frames the world beyond. Years ago I taught an Intro to Architecture course at Pratt Institute. I'd take my students to the corner of 53rd Street and Park Avenue in Manhattan, and we'd look. To the southwest was Charles McKim's 1916 Racquet and Tennis Club, to the northwest the 1952 Gordon Bunshaft Lever House, to the southeast Mies van der Rohe's incredible 1958 Seagram's Building - three absolute architectural masterpieces. The fourth corner, the northwest, is occupied by "399 Park Avenue," a 1961 structure by Carson Lundin, Kahn and Jacobs. It is an awful building, by just about anyone's standards.

We'd spend a long time standing on that corner trying to figure this out, and eventually, we'd get to maths and ratios and Fibonacci and the Golden Mean. 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144... Because it is that concept of ratio - embraced in three of those structures, ignored in the fourth - that so much of human comfort with proportion occurs. Europeans called it, "the divine proportion." Why? well, here you would seem to have a year long project which might carry your students anywhere and everywhere in mathematics.

Architects, artists, Wall Street traders, even, yeah, that student ID card or credit card
in your pocket... What makes this "the divine proportion"?

OK, that's one route. Another, hinted at near the top, is Coding. Coding is not just that mix of logic and creativity which is essential to maths, but it has a "real" feel. You don't get things "right" or "wrong," they work or they don't work.

Bring coding into your classrooms. Here's one simple free tool called Notepad++ which we have on our MITS Freedom Sticks. But better, take a look at student coding efforts around the world, from Mozilla's Hackasaurus to Ireland's CoderDojo and Scratch for Kinect which are all bringing kids into this in a big way.

As Stephen Howell (above) says, this is very different than working in that Steve Jobs iOS world where you buy the solutions you need in life. This is using the heart of mathematics to build your own world. Starting simply, kids get interested, they gain competence, they dig behind the curtains - something Jobs and Apple have never permitted - and they move deeper and deeper into what, eventually, begins to look like a much more engaging version of our curriculum. Eventually those Scratch programming kids will be building their own Lego blocks, teaching each other how to do it, challenging each other, and, yes, becoming the builders of that "next world."

So please, take the way you currently teach mathematics apart. Become a mathematics educator instead of a curriculum teacher. It might make all the difference in the future of your students.

- Ira Socol

next: changing rooms

Changing Gears 2012: reconsidering what "literature" means

noreply@blogger.com (narrator) — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 22:20:00 +0000

(1) ending required sameness (2) rejecting the flipped classroom (3) re-thinking rigor (4) its not about 1:1 (5) start to dream again (6) learning to be a society (again) (8) maths are creative, maths are not arithmetic (9) changing rooms (10) undoing academic time (11) social networks beyond Zuckerbergism (12) knowing less about students, seeing more (13) why we fight

What's in your Canon? What works of "literature" represent our society, its history, its values, its breadth, its ways of communicating? And, how do you define "literature" anyway?

Not many more classic bits of dialogue in the English language,On the Waterfront, 1954, Budd Shulberg (Elia Kazan, director), Rod Steiger, Marlon Brando

For me, and I think most of us who have grown up since the Second World War ended (which is almost 70 years ago now), our "literature" includes many things, and our "canon" is composed of many types of things. There is music which might, "define a generation," or "speak to great ideas," or express "ultimate frustrations," or "great hopes." There are films which have re-set a society's vision of itself, or which might make clear an essential moment in time, or perhaps would encompass all of our doubts, or, again, all of our hopes.

There are television shows which have helped us define ourselves, or understand ourselves, or doubt ourselves, or re-think our history, or speculate on gains and losses as times have gone on.

Challenging our sense of reality, our sense of time, and our reverential sense of literature,
Life on Mars, the BBC television show written by Matthew Graham, Tony Jordan,
Ashley Pharoah, Chris Chibnall and starring John Simm.

Not, of course, to discount novels and poetry and theatre, which have re-defined our world, our language, even our way of getting news. Taken us on incredible journeys, and brought us into incredible bodies. Or has turned our darkest moments into reflection.

Seamus Heaney

This is the power of "literature," it is the power of the story, the power of human-to-human transmission. As Seamus Heaney said in his Nobel Prize "Lecture" "I had already begun a journey into the wideness of the world beyond. This in turn became a journey into the wideness of language, a journey where each point of arrival - whether in one's poetry or one's life turned out to be a stepping stone rather than a destination, and it is that journey which has brought me now to this honoured spot." ... "Even to-day, three thousand years later, as we channel-surf over so much live coverage of contemporary savagery, highly informed but nevertheless in danger of growing immune, familiar to the point of overfamiliarity with old newsreels of the concentration camp and the gulag, Homer's image can still bring us to our senses. The callousness of those spear shafts on the woman's back and shoulders survives time and translation. The image has that documentary adequacy which answers all that we know about the intolerable."

Or, as I said to a group of seventh graders last week, troubled - and maybe even troubling seventh graders, "People need to hear the things you think about, dream about, and worry about. They have to hear it in your voice which isn't the same as anyone else's voice." Because this is how we learn to become more human, by learning to share our voices, no matter how those voices are expressed."

We, as a community, grow smarter the more voices we hear, the more voices we embrace. It could be the students of a Middle School...

...or it could be a "badly" danced interaction with the globe...

...but whatever it is, it expands us, it improves us, it opens us.

The Window, 1952, an amazing short story by, Frank De Felitta (teleplay), Enid Maud Dinnis (story),
now even more interesting because of its view of early television. Series, Tales of Tomorrow

So my seventh step in Changing Gears 2012 is to look as widely as you can for the literature which will touch your students, for the canon which will help them know themselves and our world. This matters. When we prescribe a Common Core we proscribe all that lies beyond that, and what lies beyond is truly the 99 percent.

Literature, that transmission of culture, of who we are, is a huge thing, and it involves every one of us. I was lucky enough, as a young kid, to watch one of my friend's mothers - Jean Fagan Yellin - unearth the story of Harriet Jacobs, and bring truth to light. This taught me something important about who an "author" might be. At the same age I was also lucky to be near enough to Manhattan to sneak away and watch Alvin Ailey tell stories, and near enough to Brooklyn to see the Assyrians describe their lives almost 3,000 years ago. I got to see Pablo Picasso describe war, which was different than John Wayne describing war. I even had the chance to see Frederick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux describe calm, and Philippe Petit describe tension. It was an education in the art of communication for which I will always be grateful.

But it it is also an education in the art of communication which I think we owe all of our students. "People need to hear the things you think about, dream about, and worry about. They have to hear it in your voice which isn't the same as anyone else's voice." Because this is how we learn to become more human, by learning to share our voices, no matter how those voices are expressed."

- Ira Socol
next: maths are creative, maths are not arithmetic

Changing Gears 2012: learning to be a society (again)

noreply@blogger.com (narrator) — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 15:49:00 +0000

(1) ending required sameness (2) rejecting the flipped classroom (3) re-thinking rigor (4) its not about 1:1 (5) start to dream again (7) re-thinking what "literature" means (8) maths are creative, maths are not arithmetic (9) changing rooms (10) undoing academic time (11) social networks beyond Zuckerbergism (12) knowing less about students, seeing more (13) why we fight

The adults could argue about anything,
and did every night.

I grew up in a family, in a place, in a community, in a culture which could and would debate anything anytime. It could debate politics and religion and sport and music and literature with wild passion, and it did, wherever two or more people gathered.

I remember very clearly how my father would play sports on Sundays, and he, an absolute socialist, was in constant debate with one friend who was a true Communist (he subscribed to Soviet Life magazine and New York Communist newspapers) and another friend who was a very-right-wing Republican State Senator. They agreed on almost nothing, yelled a lot during their conversations, but, and here's the thing... they were never anything but the best of friends, they never doubted each others' patriotism or each others' positions as respected members of society, they never threatened each other with anything more than electoral defeat.

I was thinking about this on a Friday night when my "spousal equivalent" looked at her Facebook stream and saw, from the friend of a friend, a person threatening to "shoot all liberals with a rifle." Nice. This came at the end of a week in which certain commentators on the American political right appeared willing to stir up threats of violence against an elementary school because they disliked something eight-year-olds had said.

You understand what I'm talking about. All over the US supposed "leaders" are willing to describe their opponents in terms so vile that it cannot be surprising that some are inspired to violence. But don't let that kind of ultra-extremism fool you into thinking this is a fringe thing: The governor of New Jersey has built a big political career out of insulting people in public. More Republicans in Iowa voted for a man for President who routinely insults large segments of the population in vile terms than voted for anyone else. Chicago just elected a mayor who's political career, including White House Chief of Staff, is based on incivility.

And it is certainly no surprise that our children learn the wrong things. "We" are the models, and "we" are acting in some horrible ways. Yes, I include "me" in "we" - it is not that I casually advocate violence, I don't, but I'm surely guilty of "saying" things on-line which go beyond provocation (which I think is generally a good thing) into angry denunciation (which, while perhaps being required on occasion, should be used very sparingly).

A Civil Education

Civility among us might be described in various ways, and, depending on the environment, things change. This is, and has always been true, which is why the larger the audience we seek, or agree to (Facebook, Twitter, blogs) the more careful we must be. Where I live in Michigan, for example, people often say, "Eye-talian" when referring to people (or food) with an ethnic background in the nation of Italia. And in West Michigan, that's usually simply written off as lingual ignorance, no big offense taken. Where I grew up, however, a place where every phrase used in the classic "ethnic insult" scene from The Godfather was used and accepted, "Eye-talian" would have gotten you punched out pretty instantly. So would "Jewed," as might some reference to the mascots of either Lucky Charms or the University of Notre Dame. On the other hand, the simple "God Damn" I was raised with can really offend the people who grew up where I live now...

This is the only version I could easily find on YouTube... Whatchagonna do?

But I was raised, I think, well enough to understand that when I left the confines of the "New Rochelle to City Island culture zone" I watched what I said much more carefully. No reason to start a fight with someone before you even actually meet them. This was reinforced when I attended the Police Academy. "First do no harm," one of my instructors said, "no one ever became less of a threat because someone called them a motherf***er. Watch your language. Be a professional." So, I am always stunned, and deeply disappointed in the training, when I hear cops cursing. What part of a "be a professional," or, "be a role model," don't they understand?

No, not everyone understands, one writer, complaining about "PC gone hardcore" in The Observer, suggests that, "perhaps we should all adopt the kids-on-the-bus attitude: accept that everyone is different, make jokes about it, but don't take offence unless it's meant. As Finn said to me: "It's about how you take a word, as much as what people mean by it. It's just words." How personal do you want to get?"

But I do, and we all should. Basic civility is what allows us to hear each other, to meet each other, to work with each in this thing called "society."

Less than two miles to the north, Thomas Paine tried to retire in peace,
but he was already too radical for the United States.

"The mutual dependence and reciprocal interest which man has upon man, and all the parts of civilised community upon each other, create that great chain of connection which holds it together. The landholder, the farmer, the manufacturer, the merchant, the tradesman, and every occupation, prospers by the aid which each receives from the other, and from the whole." Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man

Now Paine was a "provocateur" of the highest order. He truly made the American Revolution possible through his writings. He raised a large part of British North America up to a point of armed revolt against their government, then he helped do the same in France, and yet, it was never his goal to divide the people of a nation against each other, or against the people of other nations. He was English, yet he was equally at home in America and France. He was a Marxist more than a generation before Marx was born, but he worked comfortably with landed gentry like Jefferson. In doing so, he changed the world.

The Power of "Consensus"

I always believe. Faith in the Gunners, the Mets, the Jets, the Spartans,
the Gaels, the Rangers, and once they're back across the Hudson, the Net

Consensus, is one of those good and bad things. A consensus which is "fixed," which is impervious to new information, say, "African-Americans are not really the same species as Whites" in the "old American South," are toxic. This is where "faith" and "education" come into conflict. Faith being a belief in things despite facts or despite the lack of facts - I begin each English football season believing that Arsenal
will win the Premier League, the FA Cup, and the Champions League. I begin each American football season believing that the Jets will win the Super Bowl and Michigan State will win the Rose Bowl. I begin each baseball season believing that the Mets will win the World Series. These are "faith" beliefs, facts can not shake them. In sport that is fine, the social contract surrounding sport is that we root for differing teams, believing in them absolutely. No one in Green Bay, or Ann Arbor, or Philadelphia has to agree with me for the world to keep spinning. In other areas this creates bigger problems.

Consensus is a particular problem when it is based in majority opinion alone, and majority opinion, apparently, takes on real power even before we get most children into school.

"In this study, three- and four-year-old children watched as a small group of people (either three or four members) named a novel object. The majority of group members would use the same name for the object; the lone dissenter would pick a different name. The children were then asked what they thought the object was called.
"The results revealed that majority rules when it comes to influencing the opinion of preschoolers. The children in the study would consistently select the name that was used by the majority of the group members. And even more interesting, in a follow-up experiment in which only two members (someone from the majority group and the dissenter) remained in the room and named a different object, the children would still go with name that was provided by the majority group member.
"These results indicate that children as young as age three and four are able to recognize and trust a consensus."

Thus it is important that we help our students, from the very start, how to do multiple things: How to separate faith from fact. How to separate belief from knowledge. How to accept new information and incorporate that into a belief system. How to listen to a group, and yet, how to stand up for one's own beliefs. How to persuade. How to be persuaded. And, in all of these sometimes contradictory things, how to do all this without making enemies, how to do it without insulting people... essentially... how to argue in ways which allow you to argue with the same people the next day.

Step six of Changing Gears 2012 is committing ourselves to helping our students to be part of a civil society. Because we cannot exist long as a society if we continue to act towards each other as we have been doing.

It must be OK for us to say that our leaders are using
language which should be unacceptable.

We have to help our students understand that the words we choose matter. That our willingness to listen to diversity of opinion matters. That our willingness to respect each other matters. We have to say to parents who object to their children hearing divergent views, "you can keep your child at home, but this is public education in a nation founded on the principles of freedom of speech and freedom of religion, and respectful differences are welcome here." At the same time we must be clear, "disrespectful opinions are not OK."

This isn't really difficult. I went to school in a multi-ethnic, multi-religious, multi-racial community with very strongly contested politics. Republicans came to speak in school, Democrats did, extreme Conservatives did, the Black Panthers did. All of our religious schools brought all of us to all the other religious services as we moved through our studies there. So I sure knew that my father thought Mayor Ruskin of New Rochelle was dangerous,1 but he would have gone ballistic if I had refused to listen to him when, running for re-election, he visited my seventh grade. So, I was appalled that there were American parents who objected to their children hearing the President of the United States in September 2009. I didn't like what he said, but that has nothing to do with anything. I would have listened to him as I listened to New Rochelle's Mayor as my son listened to the State Senator from Holland, Michigan... with critical listening skills, and the ability to debate.

That is step one. We can learn to listen. Step two, is we can learn not to insult. And we can begin not insulting by considering the weight of words. Let me give you an example, less apparently loathsome than say, Newt Gingrich telling young Americans, including many veterans, to "take a bath," or Mitt Romney attacking former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman for serving his nation. I tend to get insulted when a certain political group describes themselves as "pro-life," because the implication is that those of us who disagree are somehow "anti-life." Now I can - and have - defined being "pro-life" differently, I think a "pro-life" politician or voter is one who favors universal health insurance, family and parental paid leave, higher "living" minimum wages, required minimum vacation time, and a right to housing, which, I guess I could say, makes all against those bits of legislation "anti-life." I am also very happy that a number of young women I know, faced with "accidental" pregnancies, could depend on Welfare and Medicaid systems which allowed them to give birth and begin raising their children safely, and so I could declare that my state's Republican government, which has drastically cut those programs, is "anti-life," but here's the thing... kind of like that instructor told us in the Police Academy, it's probably true that you rarely begin to win someone to your side by calling them a murderer.

'"The Catholic public official lives the political truth most Catholics through most of American history have accepted and insisted on,” [New York Governor Mario] Cuomo declared [in a 1984 speech on abortion at the University of Notre Dame], “the truth that to assure our freedom, we must allow others the same freedom, even if occasionally it produces conduct by them which we would hold to be sinful. I protect my right to be a Catholic by preserving your right to believe as a Jew, a Protestant or nonbeliever or anything else you choose.”'

Mario Cuomo, 2000, "We owe one another an obligation to treat each other with dignity, with respect."

"I know it may be hard for Mitt Romney and some people to take," Jon Huntsman said this Saturday night, "but most of America is with me because in the end they want this America to be working together,” and he is right. We need to be a nation which works really hard to find ways to speak across our divides, we need to find ways of speech which allow us to listen across our divides, we need to find ways to respect each other. I don't ever want to see a crowd of American "patriots" boo a combat veteran again, or cheer the idea of letting fellow citizens die. And I don't want anyone to call anyone a Nazi ever again, that is, unless the person is an actual Nazi (and if you can't tell who is an actual Nazi, you may need to go back to school).

Third, we need to practice. We cannot learn to be better by avoiding the difficult issues, we can only learn to be better by helping our children to learn how to confront the ideas which most challenge us. "A good citizen questions, informs himself or herself, thinks issues through, reaches conclusions, and participates in public life. A good teacher helps students to understand that controversy is the lifeblood of democracy, to learn how to inquire into past and current controversial issues that are meaningful to them, and to participate in public life," AlanShapiro wrote in an essay in teaching controversial issues, which is where I am sending you readers next.

Bring the controversies to your students, but... (in shorthand)

(1) Examine yourself and your own prejudices,

(2) Create a safe environment where disagreement and minority ideas are not threatened,

(3) Find out what students know and think about an issue before beginning an inquiry. Start where the students are - wherever and whatever age they are,

(4) Examine questions. After listing student questions on the chalkboard without comment, the teacher invites scrutiny of them. Which require factual answers? Which call for opinions? What words may require definition before a question can be answered intelligently? Which contain assumptions? Which are unclear and need to be reworded? Which are impossible to answer or useless to the inquiry?

(5) Have students experience multiple perspectives and the complexity of public issues. Exposure to different points of view on a controversial issue is necessary but insufficient,

(6) Promote dialogue. Students usually need help in understanding the differences between dialogue and monologue, between dialogue and debate. Dialogue aims for understanding, enlargement of view, complicating one's thinking, an openness to change,

(7) Be responsive to students' feelings and values,

(8) Encourage both independent and collaborative work. Students need opportunities to pursue inquiries by themselves and with others. In either case, they need to understand the purpose, what they are going to do and how to go about it, ways to communicate findings and conclusions,

(9) Provide opportunities for students to act on their conclusions. The idea of taking action may seem pointless and hopeless to students. Confronting and dealing with students' sense of powerlessness then becomes essential.

Yes, this is can be hard in today's toxic political environment, it can be really hard. But if we are to have a true democracy it is essential that our children learn to be better than we have been.

- Ira Socol
next: re-thinking what literature means
1 - Republican Mayor Ruskin sold David's Island, the former Fort Slocum, to New York's Consolidated Edison Corporation to be used as a spot for 12 nuclear power generating plants. Those of us living a half mile away were understandably troubled by this plan which, they said, "would "only raise the temperature of the surrounding Long Island Sound ten degrees." A great guy named Dr. Jim Egan, a professor, devout Catholic, powerful liberal, ran against Ruskin in 1967 and was crushed, but I met Bobby Kennedy when he came to New Rochelle to campaign for Dr. Jim.

Changing Gears 2012: start to dream again

noreply@blogger.com (narrator) — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 04:43:00 +0000

(1) ending required sameness (2) rejecting the flipped classroom (3) re-thinking rigor (4) its not about 1:1 (6) learning to be a society (again) (7) re-thinking what "literature" means (8) maths are creative, maths are not arithmetic (9) changing rooms (10) undoing academic time (11) social networks beyond Zuckerbergism (12) knowing less about students, seeing more (13) why we fight

Sometimes, we need to fantasize about what school is, and what we want it to be

Dream, my friend Adam made clear to me this week, is the wrong word. What we need to do is to begin to fantasize. Dreaming is a sleeping thing, and though many of us (most of us?) have slept through various parts of our education, I'm hoping for something a bit more "conscious."

I want you, us, to fantasize about school. Fantasy is not just conscious, it is dangerous, passionate, engaging, embodied, and incredibly powerful.

And all of this is the opposite of the quantitative, evidence-based, best practices crap which has led us, these past fifteen years, into the worst period of educational policies the English-speaking world has known - and, yes - it has known some pretty terrible educational policies. The problem with "the science" (as most horrifically constructed in the most destructive book of the 21st Century, Scientific Research in Education) is that it locks us into the systems and questions of the past. "Evidence-based" means it already exists. So does "best practices." "Quantitative" means it has been compared to something already existing, though rarely has there been any actual analysis of that which has existed. And "quantitative" also assumes - in the most absurd kind of faith - that we are capable of averaging humans. You understand, Diane Ravitch + Michelle Rhee + Me/3 = the average person talking about education.

In the world of human affairs we rarely do things because of science anyway, rather, we create sciences to justify ourselves. “...consider : is its science, sir, that motivates us when we transport English rule of law to India or Ireland? When good British churchmen leave hearth and home for missionary hardship in Africa, is it science that bears them away? Sir it is not. It is Christian duty. It is the obligation to bring our light and benefices to benighted man. That motivates us, even as it motivates Treves toward Merrick, sir, to bring salvation where none is. Gordon was a Christian, sir, and died at Khartoum for it. Not for science, sir.” (Pomerance 1978 p. 21) So let us admit to faith and art and move forward toward the schools we want, not the schools Bill Gates and Walmart want.

Fantasize. Yes, step five of Changing Gears in 2012 is to imagine, imagine freely, imagine wildly, imagine sensually... to think of what seems completely out of reach, of what seems impossible, of what seems unachievable.

"Some men see things as they are and say 'Why'?
I dream things that never were and say 'Why Not"?"

So start to think beyond everything you know. Start looking at all the ways, all the places, people learn. And let your fantasies run wild. The school below gave this some serious thought...

But what if we went even further...

Adam and I have started to develop this theory, that the way to end the colonialism, the social reproduction, which dominates our schools and limits the future of our societies, is to allow our students to fantasize. They are already rejecting what they are inheriting, Occupy Wall Street indicates that, as do surveys on gay marriage law and - even in the US - socialism. So, we can continue the indoctrination method (which America's right hates but deeply embraces, and America's left enjoys but opposes), trying to browbeat our youth into becoming like us, or we can love and trust our children and give them the tools to imagine something better than what we have to offer.

I'll suggest that the former path is not likely to work. If those under 25 now reject our societal dreams - and these are kids who've grown up mostly in "good times," imagine their younger siblings, who've seen their own opportunities stripped away from them by adults more concerned with filling three car garages and being terrified that two guys in love might get married. And if the former isn't going to work, why not embrace the latter?

Lord of the Flies, what if these boys could have thought
beyond the societal models they had been given?

The latter, after all, the idea of allowing our students to imagine, to fantasize about, and eventually to build something less tethered to the persistent mistakes of the past, is a powerful way for ourselves to re-imagine education - to see education as a solution to a broken society rather than as a way to prepare children to become types of adults we are.

To quote a Virginia sixth grader, "People keep making the same mistakes over and over again, and we have to stop."

When that sixth grader said that, I asked him what he, what "they," needed to do to begin developing a better world? Really, I should have asked that of myself and of my colleagues, "What do I, we, need to do in order to let that child, his classmates and his generation, stop, and try something new?"

What must we do to stop "tinkering" around the edges of a fundamentally flawed system, and imagine an educational "structure" that is radically transformed?

Movement with prior plan of direction:
Walk Out Walk On

Instead of setting the bar, NCLB-like, based on what exists now, might we not set the bar where we want it to be?

Would it look like the phenomenally successful Parkway Program of Philadelphia's 1960s-1970s, or like my "3I Program" - also amazingly successful of the New Rochelle of the 1970s-1980s? "The whole scene oozed with activity and life and while there was no apparent order to it all, a sense of purpose seemed evident... I asked [the head teacher] if he would identify the kinds of things that were going on about us. His response - quick and unqualified - was to the effect that he had no idea what the activities consisted of, that it was furthermore not his business to know, and that the participants had defined the content, value, and details of their pursuits and were probably doing whatever it was they felt it important to do." - Greenberg and Roush. Philadelphia Or like Summerhill? Or like any other model?

No.

No, we do not know what it might look like, because that will be constantly evolving, if we are doing our job and empowering our kids. A middle school principal wrote to me today, "Our furniture is arrive this Tuesday and although we planned out were it would go, Sarah and I are realizing that because the media center is a transformational learning space that the plan of where the furniture will go will change again, thus it’s transformational…" We do not know, it will change, things are not fixed, plans are not fixed.

Listen, I do not want the future which replicates this present. More importantly, our children do not deserve a future which replicates this present. And the only way to avoid that replication is to free our children to conceive of something different.

Please. Fantasize, and help your students do the same. Give them the chance to seek a newer world.

- Ira Socol
next: learning to be a society (again)

Changing Gears 2012: its not about 1:1

noreply@blogger.com (narrator) — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 20:36:00 +0000

(1) ending required sameness (2) rejecting the flipped classroom (3) re-thinking rigor (5) start to dream again (6) learning to be a society (again) (7) re-thinking what "literature" means (8) maths are creative, maths are not arithmetic (9) changing rooms (10) undoing academic time (11) social networks beyond Zuckerbergism (12) knowing less about students, seeing more (13) why we fight

When 1:1 keeps school looking like school has 'always' looked. (Vermont)

One-to-One is not a new concept. In the early 1840s William Alcott pressed for adoption of 1:1 slates for students in Common Schools, even the poor, rural farm kids who attended summer school. (There is vast mis-information regarding the root of our American school calendar, but we'll leave that for another time...) Alcott thought 1:1 slates far more important than 1:1 books, which was an idea which came to most public schools much later. But 1:1 books were thought to have great advantages as well.In 1883 Britain adjusted its educational code so that it, "stipulated that schools should have ‘sets’ of readers – a ‘set’ denoting that there should be enough so that each child could have access to the text." (Yeandle) Though Noah Webster introduced the first widely used textbook into America during the early decades of the republic ("The Blue-Backed Speller"), adoption of 1:1 textbooks was very slow. Until World War II it was common - certainly in urban schools - for there to be one textbook per desk, with desks shared by two students. Teachers often arranged seating to match-up reading speeds (related by many former New York City Public School students). Even in 2004 Oakes and Saunders were troubled that in California, "shortages and poor quality of textbooks and instructional materials often exist," shortages, meaning that students could not take textbooks home, and sometimes had to share textbooks in class.

Complete books under student control were seen as especially valuable "universal design" tools, "Previous to January 1, 1898, the students received their textbooks in the form of paper covered pamphlets, averaging about 50 pages each, and these were sent only one at a time to each student as he progressed with his studies. The result was that if a student failed to complete his course, he had on hand not more than two instruction papers in advance of the last one he had studied. This tended to create a dissatisfaction, and, to overcome it, we reprinted the entire text of the course, and sent to every student, at the time of his enrollment, a set of what we term bound volumes. These volumes contained everything that the student would receive in connection with his course of instruction, and if he failed to complete the course he had his bound volumes at any rate, and could continue studying by himself if he so desired."

Game-changing? not necessarily... (Hawaii)

There were problems, of course. Tyack (1974) talks about huge textbook graft scandals between 1890 and 1910 as schools tried to acquire masses of these volumes (p. 95). Another issue was funding this new technology rather than teachers. Textbooks assumed "primacy" in the classroom, Tyack (1974, p. 47) and many others note, because the teachers being hired, usually minimally educated women, lacked the knowledge to teach subjects themselves.

Or...this kind of looks like turning an iPad into a worksheet... (Scotland)

So, 1:1 is basically designed around two things which are, interestingly, contradictory. First, they allow "everyone," all students, to do the same thing at the same time. But second, they also allow control to flow from the room instructor to others - either a remote "teacher" such as a textbook author or publisher, from McGuffey to Pearson, or to the students themselves.

On this anniversary of one of the great 1:1 efforts of all
time, The King James Bible, we pause to consider
the purposes...

To really understand, let's move back one step further, to the real origins of 1:1. The book in every hand comes from Calvinism and Lutheranism. The use of 1:1 in the Reformation was for the very same contradictory reasons above. The distribution of printed Bibles, and then, in the Anglican Communion, the Book of Common Prayer, allowed "control" of the message to shift from a local priesthood - stories shared orally as in the Catholic Church - to a "remote teacher," be he John Calvin, Martin Luther, Henry VIII, or whomever created the translation.

However the flip side, again, was a new level of individual control in time and space. Though the Reformation introduced the idea of "fixed text"1 for the first time (previously every copy of a book had been individually created, and so was different from all previous versions in both fact and in understanding), people who now owned a Bible, or simply had access to the book themselves if they were quiet about it in the back of the church, might - on their own, flip between pages. Our schools, created in both the United States and the British Empire along the model of the dominant church experience, replicated this system. Unlike Catholic Cathedrals focus in the room is singular. Unlike the Catholic Mass, everyone holds a book. Yet, at the same time, it is expected that all in the room are on the same page.

Both of these missions, the "remote control" and the personal control, offer opportunities and create problems. So the question is, step four in Changing Gears 2012 - as we approach "the next 1:1" - how do we do something different?

"It is true we should not allow the pupils to have slates in their hands the whole time. Though it should be our aim to give them constant employment, yet their employment should be varied. Even the slate, if it were at their command continually, would become tiresome." (Alcott, 1841, p. 11) Basic fact, 170 years ago and today, one tool is tiresome, whatever it is. So is one chair, one kind of desk, one kind of light, one kind of book, one noise level. Kids need choice, variety, challenge, and that is what is too often in short supply in classrooms.

No matter how engaging that slate was - and Alcott was a strong believer that kids needed significant free play time with the device if they were going to use it well - no matter how engaging that tablet from your favorite "cool" manufacturer is, one type of device in a 1:1 environment, in any environment, is a huge mistake.

Alternatives to 1:1: Wall newspapers, read by communities.

We have proof of this. Our 1:1 with textbooks clearly has failed. Our 1:1 with the dreaded Middle School Organizer is a nightmare. Our 1:1 with all-the-same classroom furniture, lights, noise has left teachers spending the bulk of their time on discipline.

If 1:1, that is, all-the-same 1:1, has failed "us," or, at the very least has limited the population which can succeed (in that very Calvinist notion of a limited number of places in heaven), then, where do we look for other ideas? And what are the consequences of moving away from "one to one"?

One step is to move backwards conceptually as we move forward technologically. I am not one who really sees "the Gutenberg era" as a real bit of progress, but as an aberration in human communication and tool use created by technological progress.2 Before Gutenberg text was highly flexible, highly personalized, and usually created for a particular community. Tools were, in that pre-industrial era, much the same.

Not 1:1: Brooklyn streetcorner class in English

That system, which we may indeed see if we enter a large urban Catholic Cathedral in most parts of the world, functions in a different way. Everyone is not seated. Everyone is not using the same tools. Multiple representations - and interpretations - of "the stories" are everywhere, in stained glass windows, in sculptures, in candles, in incense, in music. People come to Mass at one time, or they come at another, or they choose to pray by themselves, or in small groups, or they just come to think.

We can also see it wherever people gather "naturally." In city squares, in front of schools, on the lawns of university campuses. I always begin thinking about great learning spaces with my vision of The Long Meadow in Brooklyn's Prospect Park. On a warm day there, in Frederick Law Olmstead's greatest creation, you will see people learning in every way with every conceivable device. Many read print books, many work on their phones, many learn kinesthetically - on one walk I watched three Jamaican guys teaching two Orthodox Jewish guys how to play Cricket. Truly, we can see it anywhere adults gather to work, devices are different, are used differently, people choose different chairs, they work together or alone.

How do we then, in a school, offer "remote teaching" but not insist on it, offer individual control but make collaboration the more normal "norm," allow for choice, for preferences, for differences?

Watch this video again, choice of tools, choice to collaborate, choice of where
and how to work, and choice of time for completion as well.

My argument is for a mix of "BYOD" and the "Tool Crib" within a context of open scheduling, open spaces, and hybrid opportunities within the school itself. With "BYOD" [Bring Your Own Device] meaning we use open networks and allow kids to bring their own tools if they have them, "Tool Crib" meaning we have a range of devices, different types, brands, sizes, for kids to choose to support their learning, "Open Scheduling" meaning we no longer insist that kids stop learning because a bell rings, "Open Spaces" meaning we don't trap kids in places they cannot be comfortable, and "Hybrid Opportunities" means that while on-line learning is great, it is our job as educators and as adults to actually see our students, to hear them, to watch their body language, to be able to intervene - in other words, on-line learning should not mean leaving children "home alone."

Learning via choice and comfort. A high school library on a Friday morning.

If I want to write on the floor of the corridor and you want to write on an iPad and Jimmy over there wants to dictate into the TabletPC, that's all cool... learning intelligent, effective tool use is task number one for humans. If Jenny wants to listen to the teacher explain this equation and I want to use my phone to go on-line and find something else, that's cool... knowing how one learns best is probably task number two for humans. If Kristin wants to sit in the classroom in a chair, and Willy wants to sit in the classroom on the floor, and I want to participate but via Skype from the corner down the hall because I don't want to be around people today, that's cool as well... its the 21st Century, we live and work everywhere.

In the end, I'm asking you to resist to lure of 1:1, which all too often in practice looks exactly like school has "always" looked - a whole bunch of kids, facing one way, doing the same things at the same time. Outfit tool cribs for your students, a whole range of devices which all offer different capabilities, different affordances, and cater to differing preferences and capabilities. Offer tool cribs from the start, so kids learn the power of choice, and encourage kids to choose to work alone or together.

If I hadn't offered kids real choices I would not have heard middle schoolers dismiss iPads as "granny phones," I wouldn't have learned how great Dragon Light on the iPad - iTouch - iPhone is, I wouldn't have learned all you can do editing video on an Android Phone, I wouldn't have seen kids love tablets for sharing and hate them if they had to carry them. But more importantly, the kids would not have learned, not for themselves, and not from each other.

- Ira Socol
next: start to dream again

1. The "fixed text" applies to concepts of interpretation and Calvinist notions of "free will." The Calvinist notion of humans as "so depraved" as to lack even the ability to choose "grace," suggests that authorial intent is in control, as far from "reader response theory" as possible. We can see the impact of this half a millennium later. Catholic Bibles are traditionally footnoted with references which offer paths to other places of knowledge. This is almost never true of Protestant Bibles.
2. Thanks to Bill Sterrett for including this video (from the 2010 CESI Conference) in his new book, Insights into Action: Successful School Leaders Share What Works. (bit of self promotion)

Changing Gears 2012: re-thinking rigor

noreply@blogger.com (narrator) — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 21:55:00 +0000

(1) ending required sameness (2) rejecting the flipped classroom (4) its not about 1:1 (5) start to dream again (6) learning to be a society (again) (7) re-thinking what "literature" means (8) maths are creative, maths are not arithmetic (9) changing rooms (10) undoing academic time (11) social networks beyond Zuckerbergism (12) knowing less about students, seeing more (13) why we fight

"Rigor"
Etymology: From Old French, from Latin rigor (“stiffness, rigidness, rigor, cold, harshness”) < rigere (“to be rigid”).
Pronunciation: Rhymes: -ɪɡə(r) - Homophones: rigger, rigour
Noun: rigor (countable and uncountable; plural rigors)
1. (US) Alternative spelling of rigour.

2. (slang) an abbreviated form of rigor mortis.
"It's time to hold ourselves and all of our students to a new and higher standard of rigor, defined according to 21st-century criteria. It's time for our profession to advocate for accountability systems that will enable us to teach and test the skills that matter most. Our students' futures are at stake," Tony Wagner wrote in 2008 in a piece where he noted that, "Across the United States, I see schools that are succeeding at making adequate yearly progress but failing our students. Increasingly, there is only one curriculum: test prep. Of the hundreds of classes that I've observed in recent years, fewer than 1 in 20 were engaged in instruction designed to teach students to think instead of merely drilling for the test. To teach and test the skills that our students need, we must first redefine excellent instruction. It is not a checklist of teacher behaviors and a model lesson that covers content standards. It is working with colleagues to ensure that all students master the skills they need to succeed as lifelong learners, workers, and citizens. I have yet to talk to a recent graduate, college teacher, community leader, or business leader who said that not knowing enough academic content was a problem. In my interviews, everyone stressed the importance of critical thinking, communication skills, and collaboration."

School Is [already] Hell, as they say.

"Rigor" - stiffness, rigidness, harshness, inflexibility. Well, certainly we could entertain adolescents on the "values" of this in our schools, but after the snickering dies down, we're really back at rigor mortis, and we need to wonder why anyone thinks this is what education needs.

"There’s a lot of talk in education circles today about rigor," Debbie Shults writes, "Educators all over America are frantically waving copies of Thomas Friedman’s, The World is Flat, as they attempt to awaken their colleagues to the impending doom our nation faces if we do not deliver a rigorous and relevant education to every American child. Politicians talk about the need to return rigor to the classroom. Parents demand rigorous programs for their children. School administrators performing classroom walk-throughs look for signs of it, and teachers are resolutely attempting to prove their lessons are full of the stuff. But what is rigor?"

The Washington State School Boards asks similar questions: "It’s easier to start with what rigor is not, at least when we’re talking about learning. My dictionary uses words like “severity, rigidity, hardship” which, in education, might look like endless repetition, or long hours of filling out worksheets. Rigorous learning is not a measure of the quantity of material covered or the number of times it’s covered. Rigor isn’t increased graduation requirements, either, although they may be needed to prepare more students to enter college. Adding more courses, important as that may be, won’t necessarily increase rigorous learning in our classrooms."

Well, Shults points us to a definition from Teaching What Matters Most: Standards and Strategies for Raising Student Achievementby Richard W. Strong, Harvey F. Silver and Matthew J. Perini. According to Strong, Silver, and Perini, “Rigor is the goal of helping students develop the capacity to understand content that is complex, ambiguous, provocative, and personally or emotionally challenging.”

Washington State asserts that rigor is, "Active, either through conversation or hands-on or minds-on activity. There’s questioning and discovery going on. Deep rather than broad; project-based. The learners are digging into a topic or project. Engaging. Either on his or her own or with the help of a teacher, each learner has made a real connection with the material to be learned. In every case, there’s a sense that the learning was “hard but satisfying.”'

Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, New York University and University of Virginia professors respectively, on the other hand, seem to know exactly what rigor is, "Part of the reason for a decline in critical thinking skills could be a decrease in academic rigor," Arum told NPR, "35 percent of students reported studying five hours per week or less, and 50 percent said they didn't have a single course that required 20 pages of writing in their previous semester."

Which may be all fine, I think "education" is about "helping students develop the capacity to understand content that is complex, ambiguous, provocative, and personally or emotionally challenging," along with a bunch of other things, and I can't argue with "active," "deep," and "engaging" either, but I'm confused about why we want to preserve the word "rigor" while abandoning all of its historic definition.

On the other hand if "education" is simply a measure of time spent and pieces of paper used, then perhaps "rigor" is the word, and I am simply against "education." I have been accused of this for many years, so you shouldn't just discount that possibility.

The "definition of rigor" battle reaches high comedy when Columbia University's Justin Snider (after work funded by - who else - The Bill and Melinda Gates Anti-Education Foundation) wrote a long piece on Valerie Straus's Washington Post blog on "rigor" in which he fails to define anything. He does refer us to PowerPoint slides and articles full of gems like, "In the U.S., it is socially acceptable to do poorly in math and science," "If you think of the brain as a learning machine, the more you push it to learn, the more powerful it becomes," and my favorite, "In winter 2008, four Alabama college students designed an independent study course that involved eating barbecue in as many states as possible and writing about their meals. Asked by a reporter to respond to faculty skepticism about such student-designed courses, an accreditation agency official defended them as rigorous because students sign a contract to complete a learning plan."

Here's a thought, if you are spending all of your time worrying about a term no one can define, its time to get a different hobby.Thus, step three in Changing Gears 2012 is to stop using the term rigor, and to start to actually define what you want from education for your students.

The well intentioned Phil Kovacs wants to use the word "vigor" -

"In an interview with Learning Matters, Phillip Kovacs (columnist for EdNews.org) suggests we replace rigor with vigor. Consider the defintions for vigor: active strength or force. healthy, physical or mental energy or power; vitality. energetic activity; energy; intensity: the economic recovery has give the country a new vigor. force of healthy growth in any living matter or organism, as a plan. Consider some of vigor’s synonyms: drive. strength. force. flourish. vitality. Doesn’t vigor sound like a far more engaging and purposeful learning environment?"

But I am tired of buzzwords, and I don't want to pick a replacement for "rigor" from my rhyming dictionary. What I want instead is an understanding of what educational opportunity means.

Educational opportunity certainly comes from expecting the most from every student, though I disagree with President Obama, who, being the highly competitive guy politicians usually are, said, "It is time to expect more from our students... It is time to prepare every child, everywhere in America, to out-compete any worker, anywhere in the world. It is time to give all Americans a complete and competitive education from the cradle up through a career.” What I want is for every American child, every British child, Canadian child, Irish child, Australian child, Indian child, Afghani child, Palestinian child, French child, Lapp child (et al), to be able to work with everybody on the planet, to lead anyone on the planet, to learn from anyone on the planet. I want them all to know how to effectively access and evaluate the information they need, whenever and wherever they need it. I want them to know about all of their possibilities, about everything they can do. I want them to be effective communicators, not just in business, but in their own lives. I want them to want the best not just for themselves and their families but for their societies and their world, and I want them to have the tools - thinking tools, communication tools, information tools, productivity tools - which allow them to chase their dreams.

Titanicat research in action.

That requires "real" education, but it requires no "rigor" at all. Rather, it requires the opposite.

Let me talk about "expecting the most," and Twitter followers will know some of this as "the Titanicat lesson." In early December, in a school in one of those "most at risk" communities in America, I worked with a class of 25 or 26 fourth graders. Not a tiny class. Not kids who come from families with college educated parents. Not kids with computers or broadband at home. Not kids - often - with family food money. These are kids who people often do not expect much of. The kind of kids Teach for America thinks need untrained teachers. The kind of kids Arne Duncan thinks need KIPP Academies with training in staring and chanting.

We decided to try and teach these fourth graders to effectively multitask. So as the school's librarian read Titanicat, a book about the Titanic which takes place in Belfast and Southampton, I played on an Interactive White Board bringing up maps, and the students, armed with 15 new MacBook Airs (we had 20, but I held 5 back to encourage sharing and cooperation instead of 1:1 individualism), searched for anything in the story they did not know or didn't understand, or for things the story got them interested in.

It was pretty magical. While neither the kids nor their teacher had any preparation for this, the students were brilliant. "What's Belfast?" I asked, "Where is it?" They all found Belfast, despite my refusal to help them spell it ("I'm not sure how to spell it," I told them, "why don't you try and see what happens?"). "Where is it? What country is it in? I asked. "It says, 'U.K.'" a few yelled. So, "What's 'U.K.' mean?" I asked.

"University of Kentucky," one girl called out. "University of Kentucky?" I asked, "does that make sense?" "Kentucky doesn't have an ocean," a boy said very quietly. I repeated his statement. Quickly, "United Kingdom," came as an answer. "United Kingdom?" I said, "what's that?"

We rolled through the story and all of its places and ideas. Was the United Kingdom in England or England in the United Kingdom? If Belfast was in Ireland, why did it say U.K.? Did they still build ships in Belfast? Where, exactly, is Southampton? Didn't the founders of Jamestown, Virginia also sail from there? Why didn't ships sail from London? Why did they sail across the ocean? Were there airplanes in 1912?

Students found this 1913 German Film In Night and Ice (Part 1, all parts are on YouTube)

Alone, together, with or without adult help.

The students raced through searches, finding movies old (even silent) and new (Leonardo DiCaprio), finding the streets of Southampton, yes, even wandering in Google Maps to find their own school, their own houses. They found pictures of 1912 airplanes. They found other old ships. They found stuff about southern England. And, let me add this, these are children who often have yet to visit their county seat, much less anywhere further.

But they were being pushed, yes, pushed, to engage with the world in terms of expansive space, expansive time, and expansive ideas, and they weren't resisting, they were leaping forward to engage in this very active learning. And I'll add something else, though none of this directly linked to anyone's curricular content for nine-year-olds, though none of this required long hours of homework to reinforce learning, the kids were high-fiving me in the hall two hours later about how excited they were.

So here was the follow up, and it was for me - the educator - to do. I got back to Michigan and I ordered Titanicat, I Survived the Sinking of the Titanic, 1912, and A Night to Rememberand sent all three books, along with digital and audio versions of A Night to Remember, to the school library. Now, if any kids want to go further in investigating this tale, this bit of history, they have both the tools and the opportunity.

This is what we can offer every child. Opportunity and access. We gave these kids something to be excited about which introduced them to other nations, to geography, to science, to history. We gave them the tools with which they could all find ways to research - alone, together, which adult support, whatever each student needed. We gave them the time and the freedom to learn - did all hear the whole story? of course not, half said they got lost in what they were doing. Was that wrong? of course not, I simply said that this kind of "multitasking," knowing how to find out what you didn't know as you read or listened, was something we all need to get better at, because we have to do it all the time. They even had ideas about getting better, "we have to be quieter when we search," more than one child said.

"Helping students develop the capacity to understand content that is complex, ambiguous, provocative, and personally or emotionally challenging.” "Active." "Deep." "Engaging."Complex and deep. What is the difference between mapping John Smith's journey to Virginia on an outline map (the fifth grade history curriculum for these kids next fall) and knowing what the Quay in Southampton looks like? Provocative. What happens when children attending what was once a "Colored School" (by law) discover that in Belfast discrimination like that happens among white people? Personally or emotionally challenging. What to make of the story of a twelve-year-old living on his own, when you are nine? Ambiguous. Could this story be true? Does it make sense? Active and engaging. Well, yes it was.

And for every child? It was clear to me that there was not a hair's worth of difference - if any - in intelligence, capability, and possibility between these "at risk" kids and the wealthiest kids in the nation, because we were not measuring parentally-granted capability.
See, it is not "rigor" that we need. Nor should we seek it. "Rigor" is a word which comes from our Reformation past, in which text was fixed and unchallengable, and the boundaries of what was worth learning were clearly described. You read the Bible, then McGuffey's readers, then your secondary textbook, and that was all there was worth knowing. Fixed, Rigid.

Freedom to be.

If we are real educators we now know that our students need something else. Not more hours, but better used, and much more flexibly used time. Not seat time but imagination time. Not 20 page papers but the chance to explain our ideas to people who do not know our answers. Not reams of arithmetic problems to do but lots of ways of understanding the systems which make maths work. Not memorized formulas and dates but basic understanding of relationships and great search skills combined with powerful "crap detection" skills.

Flexible. Adaptive. Active. Communicative. Collaborative. Efficient.

There is literally a million times more to know in this universe today than when Barack Obama sat in his classrooms in Hawaii and in Djakarta. Literally. The universe is both much, much larger, and much, much smaller. We can, any day, look back billions of years in time, and we can watch neurons fire in the brain. We can speak with almost anyone on earth anytime, and we will probably have to work with everyone on earth at some point in some way.

"Rigor" was an idea for a fixed universe with a fixed set of knowledge. There is nothing in that word we need in our schools today. Except for an adolescent snicker or two.

- Ira Socol
next: It's not about 1:1

Changing Gears 2012: rejecting the "flip"

noreply@blogger.com (narrator) — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 17:45:00 +0000

(1) ending required sameness (3) re-thinking rigor (4) its not about 1:1 (5) start to dream again (6) learning to be a society (again) (7) re-thinking what "literature" means (8) maths are creative, maths are not arithmetic (9) changing rooms (10) undoing academic time (11) social networks beyond Zuckerbergism (12) knowing less about students, seeing more (13) why we fight

"I can't wait to watch my Khan
Academy videos tonight..."

Maybe I'm highly sensitive to this. I grew up in a 420 square foot home with two parents and four kids. This was not a place for the calm production of homework. Now, yes, I had two university educated parents, smart, dedicated parents who did whatever they could, but both worked or went to school or both, and if my older siblings were struggling to help the "dumb little brother" with his homework, obviously, they weren't doing their own.

Anyway, this is not to be confused with an Oprah-style faux memoir, that's not the point. The point is that in my memory, my home had more important things to worry about than getting up at 4.30 am to do a kid's homework, the way President Obama remembers in his "tough" family life.

In later years, as a cop in Brooklyn and The Bronx, as the computer co-ordinator for a homeless mission with before and after school programs for homeless kids, and in work in high poverty schools, I know what kids in poverty face at home. And it isn't a few hours curled up with their own laptop watching video instruction anymore than it was ever my siblings and me curled up with textbooks. Real life, as they say, is different.

So in changing gears for this new year,
step two is "rejecting the flipped classroom."

Let me begin here: Any pedagogical design which relies, in essential terms, on homework is a problem for me, and many others.

"There is a growing number of parents and educators who don't believe we should rob children of the time after school with mandatory homework. We believe time at home should be for pursuing passions, connecting with friends and family, playing and engaging in physical activity. In some families it might be the time needed to take care of a sibling, work a job, or take care of their own child. Let us leave children to the activities they and their family choose or find necessary and instead as John Taylor Gatto suggests (in lesson 7), that we should "give children more independent time during the school day" at which time they may also choose to watch flipped classroom lessons." - Lisa Nielson

in the family room, time for homework

Students, as I noted at the start, "go home" to radically variable environments. Some head home to houses with university educated parents with the time and inclination to support their learning, others to university educated parents with an inclination to do their work for them, others to university educated parents who are either not home or are 'not present' in their children's lives. Many more go home to homes without the parental resources or skillsets to support student learning, or go home to houses where the children themselves have real responsibilities - including child and/or parent care and/or employment which is essential to their survival within a family unit. Further, home resources vary dramatically. There are broadband - everybody has a computer at home - homes, and there are disconnected homes (see New Rochelle, NY's attempted solution for students who lack Broadband) - but these requirements are never mentioned by either homework or "Flipped Classroom" advocates. So, "Homework" - an essential part of the "flip" - has always been controversial for many good reasons.

"Structurally, homework might have one of two fundamentally opposite effects on the home. On the one hand, homework might be viewed as an intrusion by the school into hours reserved for the family--a direct threat to parents' authority to manage their children's time outside of school. According to this model, homework is an exercise of what might be termed "school imperialism" at the expense of parents. It interferes, for example, with chores, with music and dancing lessons, and with the social intercourse that parents and children may expect from each other in the evening.

"Alternately, parents might perceive homework very differently: not as an intrusion or a threat to their authority but, rather, as the primary means by which schools communicate and collaborate with parents on academic matters and engage them in the educational process. According to this model, homework is a link from school to home that keeps parents informed about what the school is teaching, gives them a chance to participate in their children's schooling, and helps to keep the schools accountable to parents. Not to assign homework is to exclude parents from playing an active role in their children's academic development." - Gill and Schlossman, 2003, TCR 105-5 846-871

"Children explained that the parents are `hardworking' people
who try `to support their children' and `keep their children
safe' and who `worry a lot about how they can make (it so that)
their kids go to college'. [They] witness at an early age that
even if parents work hard, they may not be able to protect and
support their children. Poor children who witness people who
are working hard and not getting rewarded may well be likely
to have a more profound, complicated understanding
of the consequences of poverty." (Weinger 2000)

From the 1890s until World War II homework was consistently highly controversial, with laws against it (California 1901 among many others), the muckraking work of Joseph Mayer Rice The Futility of the Spelling Grind, 1897), editorials in publications such as Ladies Home Journal, "It forced families to play a nightly "comedy of fathers and mothers teaching the children their lessons, with the teachers playing the detective the next morning to see how well the parents have done the work of instruction."' (from Gill and Schlossman among other locations), and the general weight of the Dewey-inspired progressive education movement. Homework was and is "unequal" because of home difference. It was/is "unhealthy" by virtue of trapping children inside and keeping them inactive. It destroys/destroyed "family time" wrecking the transmission of family culture between generations and between differently aged children within families and communities. It did/does undermine parental authority by making parents nothing more than enforcers of the schools' discipline codes.

Kralovec and Buell(2001) make the argument contemporary with their assertions that homework works against the poor and working class children via home inequity, Kevin Thomas explores the demographic impact of immigrant status combined with homework in this century, ("English-language proficiency, for example, affects the ability of immigrant parents to navigate the vicissitudes of parent-teacher relationships and labor market conditions and is also likely to affect their ability to help their children with their homework.") (see also Lareau, Home Advantage), and Alfie Kohn has loudly brought the Deweyan arguments into the present.

So, first, the "Flipped Classroom" is homework dependent, and I would argue that "homework" is, and always has been, a socially reproductive construct, which rewards the wealthy and educated parents by giving their children a huge advantage in school.

Here Comes the Neighborhood
Get More: SOUTH
PARK more...

Nobody says it better, South Park explains homework as Social Reproduction in "Token is Rich"
(much as I hate to say that Cartman is right)

But the "Flipped Classroom" is worse than 'typical homework' - it literally shifts the explanatory part of school away from the educators and to the home, however disconnected that home might be, however un-educated parents might be, however non-English speaking that home might be, however chaotic that home might be. So, kids with built in advantages get help with the understanding, and kids without come to school the next day clueless. Those "flip" advocates who acknowledge this talk about ways of "catching kids up," of providing school time for those without access or resources at home, but what this really means is putting the kids from homes in poverty into perpetual remediation as the wealthy continue to blaze ahead.

Homework under the Streetlights (New York Times)

This is the same as the teacher who gives kids "free time" or extra study advantages if they complete work or tests quickly. What they are doing is punishing kids who require or prefer more time. Punishing those who read slowly or who use alternative text, for example. Recently my "spousal equivalent" moved through the first 375 pages of Wonderstruckas we sat in a Barnes&Noble on a Saturday afternoon. I bought the book, brought it home, and after three days was on page 23. In school, and especially under the Flip Principle, she's have 2.75 extra days of doing other work - more advanced work - already, while I'd be locked in remedial hell.

In the worst cases, the Khan Academy model, the flip is just an especially brutal version of the old, "go home and read pages 741-749 and do the problems on 750-751," but with videos instead of text. Now videos might be better than text for some kids, but there is no more choice, no more explanation, no more interaction than in this worst model of schooling. I think these are the parts of education which require the most care, the most individualization, and the most interaction between educator and learner.

School is the place for schoolwork. School is also the place where we can help children make sense of their "outside of school" lives. It is the responsibility of educators to help students with their outside lives, not the reverse. And if there is homework - as I told Virginia educators last month - that homework should be, "what can I bring home from school which helps my family and community."

Especially in these times when the economic divide in the United States and in the United Kingdom is at or near historic - Dickensian - levels, the embrace of a pedagogical system designed to increase educational outcomes disparity on the basis of home life seems particularly horrible. We need to be better educators than that, better people than that.

So while I fully embrace, encourage, am even part of initiatives which bring the information resources of school to all children's homes - I think we must move beyond WiFi to 4G-WiMax efforts which connect our students and their families wherever they are - I believe the uses of those technologies and information access at home should be in support of the students themselves, their families, and their communities, and not in support of narrow pedagogical efforts which belong within the school day.

So please, reject the flip. Re-imagine your school day and everything you do instead. A "flipped classroom" is the same classroom, just re-arranged. Our students deserve more imaginative thinking than that. And all of our students deserve an educational environment which moves us toward equality of opportunity, not further away from that.

- Ira Socol
next (delayed by a day or two): re-thinking rigor

Changing Gears 2012: ending required sameness

noreply@blogger.com (narrator) — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 16:28:00 +0000

(2) rejecting the flipped classroom (3) re-thinking rigor (4) its not about 1:1 (5) start to dream again (6) learning to be a society (again) (7) re-thinking what "literature" means (8) maths are creative, maths are not arithmetic (9) changing rooms (10) undoing academic time (11) social networks beyond Zuckerbergism (12) knowing less about students, seeing more (13) why we fight

"in this...I could always just play..."

Humans are born different from one another. Anyone who has ever seen more than one new-born human should know this, though clearly, many do not. It is the magic of genetics, the constant search for new mixes that will push any species forward. You have to cheat nature to make multiple replicas, the "breeding" of animals, the genetic engineering of plants, and we know that when a "monoculture" is created, flexibility and adaptability fall off the scale.

When I was in third grade, so, eight-years-old, I could remember and work with all sorts of information, and I discovered that, when shown blueprints of a building, I could see it clearly in three dimensions in my head. I could read music, and play a decent horn. I could swim much better than most, though I'd never learn to skate like my father, nor grow as tall as him. And I really could not read at all, or make things recognizable as letters.

No one I knew, no one in the huge (160+) third grade at Trinity Elementary School, had the same exact skillset that I had. There were kids who were incredible readers, phenomenal baseball hitters, incredible musicians, who were faster than anyone on the playground, or who could turn a lump of clay up in the art room into beautiful things while most of us struggled to make ash trays as Christmas gifts for our parents.

This is important for the human future. There are a million plus different things which need to get done by the human race, and no one human can possibly do all those things well, so we - social animals that we are no matter what American Republicans claim - have vast differentiation as a species because no human ever really thrives, or even survives, alone. (The "survivalist" armed with all sorts of weapons which are the work of hundreds of thousands of others simply proves the point, as does the "bootstrap businessperson" who relies on an economic system and on an infrastructure which are the work of millions and millions of others.)

But there is a place where human diversity is considered something quite negative... that's in the traditional school, in the traditional classroom. In those places we assume that all humans are essentially the same, that they develop at the exact same pace, that they have the same skills - and should have the same skills. This is not just an assumption, it is the law in the United States and many other nations. It drives almost all educational policy coming from Washington, Westminster, Canberra, Ottawa. It is even "built in" in most spaces, where matching desks line up in matching rooms and matching schedules move children through matching days.

And it is time for us, as we head toward the middle of the 21st Century, to stop all this. It is time to dispense with age-based grades and grade-level-"expectations," time to rid ourselves of assignments where everyone works on the same thing much less in the same way, time to rid ourselves of time schedules which limit learning, time to move beyond "Universal Design" to learning studios where differentiated humans learning to live and work together.

when students make choices, contagious creativity explodes

We all understand how this works if we've ever been allowed into "natural" human learning and living situations. I've sat at summer barbecues and been the "lifeguard" because I could get to a struggling kid in the water faster than anyone else there. But someone else has the patience to keep the pig roasting. I am better at framing the walls than at hanging - or especially finishing - drywall. I'll help you learn how re-think your classroom, you help me learn to keep track of money. These are the trade offs upon which human society is built, upon which human survival is built, upon which the rise of humans to the top of the food chain are built. Why begin differently, we develop differently, we learn things at different rates, we help each other learn, and we take on differing tasks in life.

Even Frank Lloyd Wright, who knew he was better than everyone, knew that
no one could draw up his designs as well as Marion Mahony [Griffin] could.

Does this suggest that we need no "common time"? Of course not. In the realm of humanness we need caves (for privacy and introspection), campfires (for collaboration), and watering holes (for communion). The gathering to eat and socialize is critical - and should never be rushed into the 15 or 20 minutes we often give schoolchildren for this activity. Funny, we constantly bemoan the loss of the Cleaver-style family dinner at home, but we have turned the act of eating together into school into a terrorizing rush.

Communion - the act of eating together while sharing - is the essential act
of human society

We need to eat together, sing together, play together, share constantly. The "Learning Studio" is a place where all this will happen continuously, and sort-of naturally. Where those ahead in one thing help those they can help, while getting help in things where others are ahead. Where we learn to use the tools we need to manipulate the world to our benefit. Where we learn to work well alone and together. Where we learn to be safe ourselves and how to make safe environments for others. Where we develop skills at our own rates.

This is so different from the standard graded classroom where at the very best, one-third of kids will almost always be bored, and one-third always be left behind. Or the classroom where kids compete for grades, or stickers, or approval, based on the way the teacher wants the kids to learn.

I'm not suggesting anything new. From the start educators knew that age-based grades, "required sameness" was a really bad idea, but then, as now, their understanding was over-ridden by the corporate desire (then Carnegie, now Gates, et al) put all children through an industrial stamping process. Michigan's Superintendent of Public Education wrote the following in 1901, you may want to read it, and then vow to change gears in 2012.

"Another question is that of grading and promoting pupils. Close grading assumes that every pupil can do nearly the same school work in the same time. We think we understand the normal five-year-old, six-year-old, seven-year-old, and know how much reading, numbers, language, science, etc., he ought to compass. Having arranged the course of study accordingly, we attempt to fit every pupil into it. But every teacher finds that pupils do not easily fit into these grades, and then begins a struggle distasteful to pupil and nerve-destroying, sometimes conscience-destroying, to teachers. The questions of aptitude, intellectual development, character-building, are made subservient to "making the grade." Then follows the inevitable cramming process, and the resulting destruction of originality, personality, and self-reliance—a devastation that never ought to be truthfully charged against any institution, much less an educational one.

"On the other hand, there are those pupils who by nature or because of environment have a grasp and comprehension that is far beyond that of the normal child. Such find the work too easy. They make no great efforts, and are thus defrauded of the best results of study. The easygoing work makes them easy-going pupils. They become indolent; they are put to sleep. In this manner many a brilliant intellect has been lost to the world. If it is an injury to the dull child to stretch him to the grade, it seems a crime to the brilliant one to cramp him into it.

"Thus there arises the mooted question as to what class of children should be made the basis of rigid grading. It would be well for us often to address ourselves to the question as to what makes the apparent difference in the mental powers of children, and as to whether there is much difference. If we do this we shall find some puzzling paradoxes; for instance, we shall find that many "dull.. pupils are mentally strong, and in their sports are often leaders; and that in those sports that demand quick thought and originality their minds often work with rapidity, accuracy, and great ingenuity. If we carry the investigation into the activities of life, we shall find many successful business men with minds vigorous and active, who confess with sadness that they "never could learn books." And sad it is; but in my opinion it would not be true, except that some one "blundered.."

"We are led to conclude that the so called difference in the mental power of the mass of pupils is usually apparent only. The average child is an average child. What seems dulness in some is usually ignorance of methods of study, while the so called "bright child" has simply adaptability. He, by intuition or practice, has learned how to attack a subject. His lesson, therefore, is easily mastered. He really makes much less mental effort than the sluggish pupil. What teacher cannot call to mind many "dull students" who later became excellent scholars? The explanation is not that by a miracle a better brain was supplied, but that the pupil accomplished the miracle of learning how to study. Indeed the one necessity in accomplishing the work of a course of study is really to teach pupils how to study."

- Ira Socol
next... Rejecting the Flipped Classroom in 2012

for whom the medium is the message...

noreply@blogger.com (narrator) — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 19:18:00 +0000

Telling stories without words. George Méliès, 1902

"Enough is enough. No more computers, cameras or consoles. No more watches, neckties or perfumes. Heck, no dead tree, no annoying lights, no overstuffed duck, either. I’m casting an ink-and-paper pall over the holiday, whether Christmas, Hanukkah or Kwanzaa: This year we’re going to give each other a book.

"A real, hold-in-your-hands paper book. Nothing more, nothing less. Already, the book edict has gone out on paperless email to the two key recipients of holiday love: my children. Noses have been turned up, derisive shrugs have been given: What a downer the old man is. A book? Come on."

The above was the holiday missive from International Herald-Tribune "senior editor" Kyle Jarrard, who went on to describe how all the folks say about digital devices and distraction are nonsense, "I’ve been known to drive the car while reading. Reading is the answer to everything, I’m fond of saying. More long stares have been given in my direction for years regarding my inability to not read," and finally to describe himself as absolutely and completely clueless about literature in general...

"A book allows you to time-travel, or just plain travel to real and imagined places, a not un-neat trick considering the price of airline tickets or space tourism. It allows you to meet evil, wonderful, mysterious, odd, crazy, fun, and not-fun people who often end up being more “real” in your life than real people. A simple tome of paper links you back, for instance, to the age of François I, Renaissance poet and book collector supremo, when the printing press and its wild spread across Europe was as exciting to us all as are e-books today."

Mr. Jarrard is, of course, the kind of easy target I enjoy beginning an argument with. His argument is so patently ridiculous that it creates its own parody, but, as I hope you know, if he was alone in his self-deception, and probably if he wasn't a powerful personage in the world of news distribution, I wouldn't bother.

But he is not alone, and his is a powerful voice, and so there is a problem.

Faith in a medium. A scroll made of sheepskin, lettered by hand.
No vowels, no punctuation.

Now, I can "show" Mr. Jarrard how he might travel to space or even back to 1954 New York City without touching paper, without even opening his eyes. Or how he might travel to space or back to the 14th Century without decoding a single letter, but is this really necessary in this second decade of the 21st Century? Really? Must we point out to an educated, responsible, journalist that one can read and understand Genesis even if it is printed on paper made from cotton or wood-pulp, and printed mechanically? Must we point out to someone like this that blind people managed to understand books even before Braille was developed? Or - perhaps more significantly - must we explain to a senior staffer in The New York Times organization that Homer's Iliad and Odyssey were great literature long before anyone had ever written either of those "books" down.

visiting space without the smell of paper and ink

Mr. Jarrard, like too many in education, has a faith-based belief in a medium. Actually, his - their - belief is much narrower than that. It is a faith-based belief in an industrial process, in paper-making machines and rotary presses, for it is a belief in "print," not even in "text." To this group Homer and Socrates were illiterate morons, incapable of experiencing literature, the Blind are a sad, pathetic group forever banished from the corridors of knowledge, and anyone who accesses a newspaper on-line is exchanging depth of understanding for convenience.

And that is very sad. Or worse than sad. It is a kind of evil, an insistence that one's preferred medium, or in this case, textural and olfactory experience, is superior to any other. It is the worst kind of cultural imperialism.

Y. The Last Man. Book One.

My house is full of Christmas books this week. They range from an epistolary novelI gave to my "spousal equivalent" (a Gary Stager term), to a collection of Shel Silverstein storiesdone for Playboy Magazine in the 1960s, to the Momofuku Milk BarCookbook, to Brian Selznick's Wonderstruck, to the first three Vertigo-Paperback installments of Y: The Last Man, a graphic novel.

All tell stories, all take the "reader" places they perhaps have never been, just as the stories included on our #ccGlobal St. Nicholas' Workshop Christmas Site do. There is no actual hierarchy of information delivery here, no matter how anyone, Mr. Jarrard or otherwise, wishes there were. Stories are told well or badly, effectively or ineffectively, entertainingly or boringly, imaginatively or not, in ways accessible to the many or the few, no matter the medium. Poor Shakespeare does not rank below Tom Clancy because he worked in the Elizabethan equivalent of television rather than print. Socrates is not a lesser light than Malcolm Gladwell because he spoke his words and never had them printed and bound. Charles Dickens, that "blogger" of the penny-paper era is not less important than Jack Kerouac even though Kerouac chose to write, like those ancient rabbis, on a scroll.

Brian Selznick, author but child of film-makers, has worked out a literary
mix of comic book, cartoon, and text for himself.

It is essential that we understand this now. It is essential that we stand up to those, from Mr. Jarrard to those who push "Common Core" standards, who seek to rank media in a hierarchy according to their personal preferences and in order to preserve their own status, wealth, and power ("I am important and intelligent because I am highly literate.").

Our students can, and will, tell stories in many, many ways. They will read stories in many, many ways. Sometimes they will read certain ways because that is how their brains work - which is neither, I need to tell you, neither better nor worse than the way yours works - and sometimes they will read certain ways because that is their preference, and thus their human right. And sometimes they will read certain ways because that is the way the author offers access to the story, and sometimes they will need help to convert media because the author's preferences and their needs do not match up - I understand - I have witnessed professors and teachers reading Shakespeare, and though this seems odd to me - the performances are routinely available via YouTube - I do not criticize them. Perhaps they can not hear well, or perhaps they cannot easily sit through a whole performance.

So give your students stories this year. And give them the freedom to tell stories. The medium may matter, but the medium is only the message if the message can effectively be received through the medium chosen. Otherwise, an unreceived story, is, well... not much at all.

- Ira Socol