Taking down the scaffolding

Since I began teaching about a decade ago, I've heard about scaffolding.  I was congratulated early on, before I had even begun Alternate Route courses for my instinctual scaffolding.

For those not acquainted with the jargon, and to grotesquely simplify it, scaffolding is supporting student learning by posing a problem, then guiding and coaching the student through the task, often relying on the students' prior knowledge.

The idea behind the metaphor is that one erects scaffolding to provide support to the workers who are constructing a building, and eventually the job is completed and the scaffolding comes down.  Thus, eventually the student achieves mastery and is able to perform problem-solving independently.

But I don't like the metaphor anymore and I think it leads down some cul-de-sacs.  Because I worked in Manhattan for 20 years and there's one thing a Manhattanite knows -- Scaffolding Never Comes Down.  That piece of sidewalk will never see the sun again.  Those contractors will figure out a way to keep the job going and going and going.  And your students will figure out ways to keep you from dismantling your scaffolding and maintain their dependence on you.

Second, scaffolding is not generally used in construction.  It's for renovation.  New buildings use cranes and elevators, not scaffolds.  Hopefully we are not renovating knowledge, we are building it afresh.

And third, we really aren't building knowledge.  Most of the time, we are exploring knowledge that already exists.  True, the student hasn't seen it before, but it is already there.  We are not creating anything.

We are laying down a path through this forest of knowledge.  We are mapping it out.  We are exploring.  Even when there are skills involved, those skills are not ends in themselves, but means toward acquiring knowledge.  To take my own discipline, one doesn't learn to write literary analysis in order to write literary analysis.  That is not a very valuable product.  It exists almost exclusively within the tight borders of academia.  One writes analysis in order to explain TO YOURSELF what you just read.  You may also be demonstrating your mastery to your instructor, but that is merely a by-product.  The chief end is to set out the metes and bounds of one's own understanding of the reading. 

We are not a construction crew -- we are explorers, hoping that the young explorers we train will go deeper into the woods and come back and tell us of the treasures they found there.  It is pure arrogance to think we are making something from nothing.  In fact, unless our students are creating genuinely new literature, conducting new research, fabricating new inventions, they are not building, they are mapping the terrain.  We take them through the part of the forest we know, then we let them go.  Some move beyond us, others wander back to home base.

So from now on, although I will use the jargon as required by professional courtesy, in my mind I will know that I am not a foreman, but a surveyor, training others mostly to be surveyors and a few special ones to go beyond our maps, out into the darkness, out toward the edges, out where there be dragons.

Literature as Videogame or Vice Versa, Part 1

What follows is a dialogue between Rob and Kerr.  Rob is a video game designer in the Chicago area.  Kerr is a literature teacher in Newark, NJ.  Also, Rob is Kerr's son.  

The posts will appear here on this blog and at Rob's blog on Gamasutra, found here.

Their topic is: 'What Shakespeare play would make the best video game, and what would that game be like?'

Rob:  Hey, Dad.  So your first impulse was to say 'The Tempest' would make a great video game.  I think that's a great choice, but just for giggles I said 'Julius Ceasar' would be the best.  I have some ideas, but why do you think 'the Tempest' would work so well?

Kerr:  The obvious aspects that make THE TEMPEST videogame fodder is that there is magic -- in fact the central character is a magician -- there are strange non-human characters such as Caliban and Ariel, and the fantastic setting -- an unspecified remote island which can take on any terrain that the designers and directors choose.  There are also many separate story threads:  Prospero overseeing Miranda's entry into adulthood; Ariel's quest to be free; Caliban's desire to be seen as human; Prospero's revenge on Antonio and Alonso; Antonio and Alonso's plots against each other; the romance between Ferdinand and Miranda; the hijinks among Stephano and Trinculo, as manipulated by Ariel.  And then there is the magical disappearing banquet, not to mention all the strange magic surrounding the titular tempest.

Moreover, many characters grow and change and learn, which, it would seem to me, should be a good thing in a videogame, whereas in Shakespeare, such growth and change often happens to a single character, such as Lear, who is chastened by his experience, whereas everyone else has been merely punished by the consequences of his foolishness.

JULIUS CAESAR, for one, is particularly trapped by the facts of history.  It is one of Shakespeare's most accurate exercises in history, especially when contrasted with something like RICHARD III or MACBETH (which is based on a more legendary history) in which, largely for political persons, Shakespeare inverts the real historical heroes and villains.  Today we might say works like this are "inspired" by history.  But even they have a  hard bright line around them in the form of historical fact.  This closes down alternatives -- Julius can never not be killed by assassins; Macbeth can never not ascend to the throne and then be killed in battle.

Of course, I am conducting my analysis under a handicap -- I am not as familiar with the format of videogames as you are with plays in the theater.  I recognize that all games do have a closed ending, a conclusion, some point at which some players have succeed and some have not.  It raises a philosophical question -- as narrative aspires to closure, do games in a perfect universe aspire to perpetual play?  Is ending a game merely an acknowledgment of either our desire to identify winners and losers or our need to stop playing periodically and eat and sleep and attend to other bodily necessities?  Or do games also need to end as an inherent part of their nature?  And do we even need to address this question in order to further our conversation?

So I bounce it back to you, Rob.  Of all 37 or 38 of Shakespeare's theatrical works, what caused you to light on JULIUS CAESAR as a potential videogame?  Perhaps your answer will instruct me in an aspect of gaming of which I was unaware.

Infusing Poetry in Language Arts instruction Part II

This began with my post urging English teachers NOT to celebrate National Poetry Month in April, because that shunts poetry into a calendar-bound ghetto, whereas poetry should be freely roaming around your curriculum, lurking behind every pedagogical corner.

One of your obstacles will be the general resistance to poetry, or, to be more precise, to the way poetry was taught to your students in the lower grades. Too much emphasis was put on rhyme and other technical matters, and the subject matter tended toward nature and other harmless warm and fuzzy topics. It would be surprising to find an elementary school teacher presenting students with poetry that talked to where they really live.

Slam poetry is all about where we really live here and now. It is not interested in posterity. It is literally of the moment, of the moment it is being performed. Even now, into its second decade, there are not a great number of printed anthologies of slam poetry, any more than there are books of rap lyrics. Slam is primarily an aural medium, meant to be experienced, which brings the focus back to the aspect of poetry most greatly neglected in the 20th century. Poetry had become reflexive, self-referential and driven by academia. (The exception in the United States, were the new Black and Latino writers creating a poetry of the streets, designed to be shouted and chanted from the pavement up toward the sealed windows of the people who run things.)

Slam, on the other hand, was born and bred in a barroom and the critics are not academics, but audience members selected at random and given no criterion. The pressure is on for the slam poet to reach the listener immediately and have them like what they hear. Frank Loesser described song lyrics as being written on the side of a train which the audience has once chance to read as it goes by. So it is with Slam. No chance to reflect on the reference to Baudelaire and the significance of post-modernism. Get it now and it goes.

Simply put it, you must understand it -- at least some if not most of it -- on first hearing. This will appeal to your students. Also, it must have a performance rhythm and audience appeal; typically, this is the long upward build to a climax with a denouement, perhaps witty, wry or touching. Performance requires poetry to take a narrative shape, even if the purpose is not storytelling but reflection on a subject -- that narrative shape asserts itself in nearly all oral presentation.

And in New Jersey, and probably your state as well, oral presentation is part of your core curriculum. So forget about making it optional. All students must get up and slam. I leave it to you as to whether you require memorization, they all must speak before the others, learn how to speak clearly and evenly, to emphasize what is important, to vary the speed and the pitch of their speech. I know a lot of them will fight you on it, but it is teaching abuse to leave your students unequipped and afraid of public speaking. I've backed off in this area before for fear of traumatizing children, but I believe that was a mistake. Like other times and places when you must move your students out of their comfort zone, you can't bully and threaten them on this. You must persuade and cajole and coax. But you must insist and be firm. (My thought about memorization is to announce that it will be required, then let them use the paper on the day itself. This provides the benefits of both thorough and complete preparation of the text with relaxation and security during delivery which allows them to focus on the quality of what they are doing rather than the brute effort of recitation from memory.)

And there is the competition factor. My first principal, who is a superb teacher, was always skittish around competition and its negative aspects, which I need hardly recite here. But I believe that many of those negatives are mitigated here, as there is no built-in advantage for the brainiacs or the jocks in this competition. Most years there is at least one or two surprises as to who will excel at slamming. But one of the great values of competition is that it is its own intrinsic motivation. I rarely, if ever, offer prizes in classroom competitions. Pride of success is sufficient. Most young people cannot avoid wanting to compete any more than my cat can avoid jumping on a shiny thing that is moving. Some kind of atavistic impulse kicks in and, provided that they each believe they can be basically competent, they will try to do well at slam.

Getting them to a confidence about basic competence will take some time. Months, probably. You need to start adding the writing of poetry onto other writing assignments right away at the beginning of the school year. Have them add a poetic reflection to their five-paragraph essays. Have them do their classroom warm-up as poetry. Most of all, break the doggerel habit. Too many children are swamped by the tyranny of rhyme and meter and their expressive instincts have been completely suppressed. Find organizing principles other than rhyme, such as repetition, anaphora, antistrophe, alternation of long and short phrases, controlling metaphor and the like. Most of all, get them to write and not worry about the process and the devices much.

A side benefit of writing poetry -- by having to break thoughts and stories into lines and stanzas, they will gradually fall away from turning in prose in one single unbroken paragraph. Personally, I find unparagraphed so literally physically difficult to read, that I will hand such papers back and demand they be resubmitted with some divisions. Again, teaching in the lower grades has damaged them a great deal, and they thrash around fearing they have no topic sentences and that not all the sentences will support that, and generally write as if the chief end of writing was to be able to be outlined easily. As you can see by my style in this blog, I think this is hooey. The chief end of writing is, obviously, communication of (1) emotion; and (2) ideas. (3) Information is OK, but it is a lower order of writing, valuable to know but not aspirational.

How you organize your competition, your teams, selecting judges, involving other classes or other faculty, you are a far better judge than I. I can no more engineer your methodology than you mine. I am just here to be a cheerleader. But make sure that it is fun, that it is competitive, that is emphatic, that is strong, that it is real and true.

And this is authentic learning, in that slam competitions are going on each and every weekend, if not each night of the week, all across this country. As far as introducing your students to the ethos of slam, there are a number of videos on YouTube you could cull. Here's one example:



I would also suggest the very selective use of HBO's Def Poetry Jam -- but you MUST preview this, because unobjectionable material alternates in rapid sequence with very adult themes. I like to use excerpts from a documentary feature SlamNation which although more than a decade old and with some technical lapses, shows a lot of the great early stars of the medium (Taylor Mali, Saul Williams, Beau Sia), and presents the heat of battle well. And the film has a bleeped school-appropriate edition which can be ordered here. Another resource is the Russell Simmons miniseries Brave New Voices, which is too long for classroom use, but excerpts from which can be used to show actual high school students preparing for competition.

All of this is to prove that poetry is not for the faint of heart. It's not just for flowers and clouds and unicorns and rainbows. Although maybe it is for rainbows, because it is a powerful medium for all the colors of your classroom to be heard.

DIY is authentic

Mark Frauenfelder in THE ATLANTIC :

Imagine a school where kids could do the following: clone jellyfish DNA; build gadgets to measure the electrical impulses of cockroach neurons; make robotic blackjack dealers; design machines that can distinguish between glass, plastic, and aluminum beverage containers and sort them into separate bins; and convert gasoline-burning cars to run on electric power.

No such school exists, but in August I went to Detroit and met the kids who did all these things, and more. They—along with 22,000 other people—had come from all over the United States and Canada to demo their creations at Maker Faire, a two-day festival of do-it-yourselfers, crafters, musicians, urban homesteaders, kit makers, scientists, engineers, and curious visitors who congregated to present projects, give performances, and swap ideas. Having attended eight Maker Faire events since 2006 (they’re put on by the same company that owns the magazine I edit), I’ve become convinced of two things about children and education: (1) making things is a terrific way to learn, and (2) schools are failing to teach kids to learn with their hands.

My son attended a technical high school and while he has a natural proclivity for physics, he struggled at first with chemistry. His chemistry teacher suggested that the problem may have been that he thinks with his hands. I don't know if that's true, but I know that the men in my family have an engineering-tinkering proclivity.

The challenge is to come up with some Language Arts DIY -- I mean beside the annual literary magazine and the increasingly irrelevant monthly newspaper, which are only semi-authentic as it is. They really only serve as a function of the school community without any direct outside use or application. But surely students can produce work of more general application. Perhaps they could develop a sustainability plan for the district, which would be a cross-disciplinary project with the Science Department. Or work with the police department and write a safety plan (although that may involve confidential matters which makes student participation impossible).

How about online wikis for the general community; job or recreation resources. Create study or discussion materials. Develop a One Book plan for the entire community. The municipal library may be able to steer students towards needs it or its patrons have.

But the point of these projects is not to look at them as something to earn Community Service points toward graduation. They each have literacy education value of their own. Remember, when our parents and teachers saw us acting out in frustration, they would tell us, "Use your words." Why not use our words to actually make stuff?

Interactivity is Authentic

If you've read much of this blog before, you'll know I am a strong advocate of Authentic Learning, having helped pilot a project to develop a community of educators sharing authentic learning design. But as an English teacher, some of the areas we stumble on in creating such designs are (a) ownership of the work; (b) working cooperatively; and (c) identifying or developing a real audience. Our solutions to these challenges can rude toward the crude, for example, in-class presentations of group projects. You have an audience, but it is not a real one. You may not have co-operative work, but parallel work. And who ever felt ownership of the experience of holding up a chart or a poster and talking about it?

Interactive fiction answers a lot of this. For people of my age, who came of age in the 1970s or early 1980s, you may remember these as text-based adventure games, which were infuriating to us old-school types because the rules and procedures are never set out in advance. You were endlessly lost in some cave trying to figure out how to go right or whether you should put down the candle in order to pick up the wand. And endless prompts as we endlessly tried to do the same thing over and over, despite ample proof that it didn't work. (Or anyway, that's what happened to me.)

But as you may have noticed, technology, especially computers and their programming have developed somewhat in the last 30 years or so. Those text adventures are now called interactive fiction, not least because (a) they are far more sophisticated and complex than they were and (b) they can be created by users, rather than merely existed in closed, pre-packaged forms. And they can be created by teams or groups of users. In short, text adventures have morphed into a quasi-literary activity, in which text can be as good or bad, cursory or detailed, reflective or aggressive as the creator or creators wish. And in the course of this development, interactive fiction is (a) owned by its creator(s); (b) mostly written cooperatively; and (c) is capable of developing a real audience, that is, the players who experience a story as a game, with alternate outcomes (which encourages repetition and re-exploration, a hallmark of good literature).

But our students have grown up completely in the era of interactivity, of the democratization of creativity. Stories told by a storyteller in only one way, as in novels and films, are but one way to experience a narrative, and probably becoming a minority taste. Our students have a natural feel for open-endedness, for the hope built into the idea that the end is not yet written, and that a story is not to be heard, but experienced and participated in. What I'm trying to say is that if you are over 45, this may require some mental adaptation, but I believe such an adaptation is not only advisable, but necessary.

The chances are that many of your students, especially the most imaginative and creative students are already doing this with your friends. You should ask who is participating in this, and what kinds of things they like and how they are interacting with their friends. You might want to scaffold your design with a pilot group, who can get you past your initial stumbles, presuming this is a new or new-ish area for you. (If it's not new to you, you really don't need to read this whole post -- just grab the link for Inform and begone with you!)

And, if like me, you're not sure where to begin among the competing aggregations of fiction, message boards and blogs, may I suggest a site and system called Inform, which was brought to my attention by a close friend who knows how enthusiastic yet clueless I can be about this kind of thing. Inform uses plain-language not just for the text that the players experience, but for the programming code. If you are a fogey like me, you need to adjust to thinking of narrative in terms of creating (or describing) an environment and setting rules by which the narrative will proceed. It's simply a matter of learning to turn over the some of the power of the storyteller over to the audience and relaxing one's grip over the order in which information is dispensed.

Obviously, this kind of writing is not going to yield a Harold Pinter or even a Dan Brown, whose craft is entirely based on the slow, calculated release of information in a particular order. On the other hand, many writers such as Cervantes, Dante and Raymond Carver and John Irving do not exert such tight-fisted control of the timeline.

Here is a video tutorial on some of the programming protocols and systems in Inform. You'll see they are fairly easy and intuitive

The challenge remains to incorporate this into our specified course of study. Of course, there are always ways and means to give encouragement, support and course credit to independent writing. But for the less naturally motivated student, interactive fiction can be used as an analytical tool, especially for those works which we teach with a strong focus on the temporal and geographical environment, such as The Great Gatsby, Lord of the Flies, or To Kill A Mockingbird or The Kite Runner. The environmental aspects and the choices made by the persons in the story can be parsed out in a very precise manner so that the player can see to what extent the narrative is driven by environment and to what extent choice.

"Bold, persistent experimentation." If it's good enough for a US president facing the worst economic crisis in our history, it's good enough for me. Plus IF is bound to be a lot more fun than the National Recovery Act.

Learning by video games

My first principal (who should win a humanitarian award for letting me learn to be a teacher in her school) was, for all her faith in her students, leery of the use of games and competitions in the classroom. She was concerned that students who do not function well in a competitive environment will failure scenarios reinforced for them, and tend to detach and denigrate themselves. The trick, of course, is to come up with competitions that different students with different skill sets can succeed in. Hopefully everyone reading this knows that games which rely solely on rapid recall and response favor a certain limited mode of learning and thinking over others, sadly a mode which is celebrated in traditional school environments at the expense of other modes. I often used a review game in which I arranged students to compete against students of similar skill levels. (And how I enjoyed being proven wrong about a student who had learned more than I thought, even if it messed up the game.)

By and large, however, students do not take classroom games and competitions as seriously as we think. (I say nothing about league or team sports or other extracurricular competition, such as pageants or dance competitions -- they do not fall within the purview of a school-oriented blog.) They can shake off small defeats and return to the game with renewed determination to master it, just as they do with any video or digital game. I have never seen a kid go into a spiraling depression at being beat at Guitar Hero or World of Warcraft. Win or lose, they just want to play some more.

It seems foolish not to harness this. Not only is it a benignly addictive activity (well, maybe not so benign for those college freshmen who flunk out due to video game obsession), but a person playing a game is always learning something, especially a game in which, as is true for most digital games, the rules are not explained in advance. Like the so-called "real" world, one enters the environment with a general goal, but the specifics of how that is to be achieved and what obstacles will be encountered along the way is not laid out for the player ahead of time. This is what might be called simulated authentic learning.

Therefore, it is quite natural that someone would build a school on these very principles. So, as described in a New York Times article, we have the school Quest to Learn, which incorporates both the instinct to play and technology into a more global learning experience. Here is the money quote from Katie Salen, a co-designer of the school, who comes from a design and technology background, rather than traditional education:

The traditional school structure strikes Salen as “weird.” “You go to a math class, and that is the only place math is happening, and you are supposed to learn math just in that one space,” she told me one day... “There’s been this assumption that school is the only place that learning is happening, that everything a kid is supposed to know is delivered between 8 a.m. and 3 p.m., and it happens in the confines of a building,” she said. “But the fact is that kids are doing a lot of interesting learning outside of school. We acknowledge that, and we are trying to bring that into their learning here.”

We are still living with the lingering attitude that Learning is a thing that happens in a certain place at a certain time and that everything else is Real Life. But as George Ade wrote, "There are At Least Two Kinds of Education." Learning is going on all the time. The trick for educators and parents is to harness that process which is going to take place anywhere.

Games teach the brain a habit of mind, especially games in which the rules or even the goal are not pre-disclosed. It teaches habits of inquiry, of exploration, of an interest in "what works" not "what is the Right Answer which I am expected to vomit up on a school paper." That is real education, and I for one am going to be fascinated to see how this evolves and how game-playing can be used not just as an occasional bit of spice in the classroom, or a term-end review technique, but an essential structural element in education going forward.

Because one thing becomes clearer and clearer as I get older -- if there are rules in this life, there's nobody around to tell you what they are. You're going to have to find out for yourself.

Some reactions to new proposed school models

I have heard from friends who are not professional teachers (just amateurs like most people) in connection with the new school models I have posted about so far. One reaction is found in the first comment under the previous post (below). Here are two others:

Bill Vinson taught 4th grade to [three of my children]. [Two of the them] were the kind of student who would excel in most modalities, but Bill's style was really wonderful for [the one] who has ADD. [He] hadn't yet been diagnosed in 4th grade, but upon review by the school psychologist in between 6th and 7th grades, he was fairly classic. He lacked the hyperactive "H", and he also functioned well above grade level in most skills, so he was labeled as lazy and a clown rather than receiving a correct diagnosis and an IEP.

The classroom functioned as an "office". The students sat at round tables with an interlocking partition which make "cubicles". [My ADD child] had a folder which was his "inbox". If he completed his assigned tasks he could receive a bonus, which was no homework. Assessment was built into the assigned tasks. Upon mastery he moved on to the next skill level, or did "specials" which were enrichment activities. [My son] thrived in this environment where he learned a task and built upon it. When he was not bored he loved to learn, and the energy he used to use clowning was now focused on what he going to do next.

Bill gleaned stuff for the daily work folders from everywhere and anywhere. He had found the old SRA reading system and several other reading systems where he could track performance while letting the students work at their own pace. He had an incredible classroom library and he knew the books well so that he could integrate them into the childrens' reading for vocabulary, spelling or other enrichment. He also knew the kids and their interests.

Bill had a computer program for the kids to do their spelling tests so that they could test themselves. He used computer games for spelling and math reinforcement. The programs were personalized for each student so that they would be working on their own set of spelling words or math skills. He used every bit of technology he could find from an old Atari up to a pentium PC (remember this was like 1995....). The school only paid for one computer in the classroom so he dug up anything he could find and made it work.

[My son]'s daily work could still include some of the dreaded xeroxed work sheets, but since they were for skills he was learning rather than stuff he had mastered two years ago, they were interesting. He would also have assigned spelling time on the computer. He might have to complete 2 sets of SRA for reading and 2 units in the basal readers. There might be a science experiment or activity to complete and definitely something about the state of New York (because that is part of the mandated curriculum for fourth graders per the New York Regents).

An unexpected bonus of all this is that the students push each other to excel. There was a lot of healthy competition and mentoring in the classroom. Ben enjoyed helping his friends and wanted to do well.

Having all the students working individually rather than as a group does take much more organization and planning than having everyone move along at the same pace. But so worth it.

Bill sounds like a master teacher. And here's from a friend who has been a life-long student--in the good way:

I like [the method proposed in School of One]. It acknowledges the student for who they are and where they are at at that moment of time in their life when they are learning. It also gives room for the turmoil that can be happening within the student's home life.

These days with forclosures and all else it has to be very difficult for a student who has to keep up with a prescribed learning schedule that is rigid. There is something to be said for discipline, too. Students need that balance. I've done quite a bit of college, but during my days [in high school] when talk of independent study was run by me I liked it.

I've been accepted into Empire State College which is much like this for my last two years for my BA. Guided study appeals to me for learning Chinese because a formal classroom wouldn't serve me as I have so much on my own learning in that language. Still there are holes. Students like me who are interested in everything do well with this. I hope the school system you teach in is open to this. It's very ZEN.

Thanks for sharing, and I encourage more readers to do the same. So more models coming up...

New models for schools and school buildings

Perhaps this is a road to frustration, but over the next few posts, I'd like to look at some new models for schools and school buildings that apply what we have learned over the past 30 years or so about teaching and learning. By and large, a high school teacher from 1870 would be completely comfortable with the way I am expected to teach most of the time in most American schools: 1 teacher with 25 kids seated at desks, stuffed in a box for between 40 and 80 minutes in a time. We now know that this serves about 15% of the students in front of us well. The rest of them are either forced to try and adapt or spin their wheels, which can interfere with the process for me and the other students.

I am not delivering any news here, but I hope I can spread some of the ideas people are playing with to get teaching to line up with what we know about learning. Above is the winning entry in a competition by Slate.com to come up with new models for the 21st century classroom. The hallmark of this design is the variety and flexibility of the space. As the article points out, the space for a single classroom incorporates

adjustable furniture, a messy art area, video screens large and small, communal areas for classes to share, carefully placed mirrors that allow for eye contact when a student and teacher sit at a computer together. Trish Fineran, the teacher on our panel of judges, loved that the tables were on wheels. She loved the integration of spaces enabling solo work as well as large and small group projects.

Check out some of the other leading proposals here. I hope I'll have the opportunity to highlight a few more from this competition, but first I want to get some other ideas from other sources in posts to follow.

In the meantime, I must still try and literally think outside of the box our 80-year-old high school buildings are made out of. I must try and make my plans more authentic, introduce more collaboration and capitalize on the skill sets and prior knowledge my students bring to the classroom. I don't know if my career will last to the day when we can fix these dreadful old buildings, but maybe I should pretend I'm already in one.

How smart is book smart?

I am hitting the books these days, not only to get ready for the school year but to prepare for another Praxis test in order to be certified as highly qualified in a field in which I worked, off and on, for 25 years, and which I have taught in the classroom for a number of years, by virtue of my two other subject-area certifications. I am reminded of the Wizard of Oz:

Why, anybody can have a brain. That's a very mediocre commodity! Every pusillanimous creature that crawls on the earth or slinks through slimy seas has a brain! Back where I come from, we have universities, seats of great learning where men go to become great thinkers. And when they come out, they think deep thoughts — and with no more brains than you have. But! They have one thing you haven't got! A diploma! Therefore, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Universita Committeeatum E Pluribus Unum, I hereby confer upon you the honorary degree of Th.D..Doctor of Thinkology.

With one hand we denounce this passive process in favor of "authentic" that is, real-world learning, with the other hand we base our educational credentials (and compensation) system on the conventional (and supposedly discredited) system.

The irony is that the field for which I am doing some book-larning in order to pass the test, theater, is an apprenticeship-based system, and has always been. New technologies and social structures have some impact on the the way theater is conducted and its subject matter. But the knowledge required to create theater is and has always been passed to the next generation on a one-to-one basis. There is no way to learn theater other than to do theater with experienced practitioners. Yes, you could start up all by yourself and be an auto-didact, but you will be doomed to re-invent a lot of wheels.

And that's what we do with new teachers. We make them re-invent wheels every day of the week. I was fortunate in that the among the first courses I taught was two double-sections of a team-taught course (Humanities--combined Social Studies and Language Arts). And as a matter of circumstance, I was teamed with four different teachers in four years. From two (luckily the first two) I took great positive lessons in classroom effectiveness; from the second two I mostly learned negative lessons and gained an opportunity to become a leader, at least in a small way. I have since gone on to teach in more conventional situations, and I realize how lucky I was. If I had been put out into the ocean of teaching in a boat by myself, I probably would have sunk long ago. But in most middle and high-schools, alone is what you are going to be most of the time. And teacher's room lunchtime anecdotes is no substitute for working with an experienced teacher and gaining a sense of what works and what doesn't.

And my career as a lawyer required some apprenticeship as well. A large firm handles this in a formal way. The place I started handled it more casually, but everyone involved understood that new lawyers must learn every day from more experienced lawyers, especially since rookie mistakes can be costly to clients and to the firm. Translated into educational terms, rookie mistakes can be costly to students and to the school. But we more inclined to laugh about those and treat them as inevitable, when they are so easily avoided.

We don't see the value of this passing-on of experience in schools, and so we won't spend the money to apprentice new teachers to more experienced ones. I don't mean meeting with a mentor from time to time; I don't mean professional development, in which we sit on our tails for hours at a time except for breaks to do a worksheet or to talk with each other (bleaah); I mean actual teaching in a classroom side-by-side for months at a time.

Oh well, back to the books. Let's see if they teach me anything I don't know.

Retention and rehearsal capacity

This is why students hate when you postpone a test:

Robots must learn in order to teach

There was a piece in the New York Times a few days back about robots being developed for classroom use. The scientists involved in this effort or quick to disclaim any intent or desire to displace the human teacher, but only to supplement the teacher, much in the way one might use an aide (a type of support which has become very vulnerable here in NJ, given our current budget crisis).

The takeaway from this story is twofold (beside the need for cheaper workers in schools). One is that facial recognition is rapidly increasing in AI, and not just identification of faces, but being able to read moods and feelings. The knowledge gained in this effort might be useful in working with autistic students who have difficulty reading other people. (The scientists had to learn how important social interaction is in primary learning.)

The other thing is that one definition of a good teacher is a person who knows how to learn. As the article says, "If robots can learn to learn, on their own and without instruction, they can in principle make the kind of teachers that are responsive to the needs of a class, even an individual child."

Then maybe those robots can train new teachers.

How do experienced learners learn?

Experienced people aren't necessarily smarter. Those of us who spend time around younger people know those minds are much faster and more creative than ours. The peak age for creativity in mathematics is 23-25. After that, it's all downhill for most mathematicians.

So what's the point of having experience, if your brains don't work so good no more? You spend less time observing, thinking about, considering, weighing all the stuff that's Just Not Going To Work. Every breakthrough requires the rejection of tons of unworkable alternatives. Experience teaches us to recognize those more quickly, saving time.

There's a brief Scientific American piece here describing an effort to quantify this in geology, by using eye-tracking technology to see what experienced geologists look at. By definition, that also means skipping over the stuff that's not worth looking at. The hope is that this will permit young people to become experts without experience.

Of course, there's a trap here. Many important possibilities are overlooked by older experts because of the It's Never Been Done syndrome or We Don't Do That or Everybody Knows That..., all symptoms of inherited and unexamined assumptions. Often younger people in a field leap ahead by going back and re-examining those brain-dead assumptions.

So it will be interesting to see just how useful and effective this attempt to describe and record the result of experience in a particular field will be.

Nerds: A powerful resource being wasted

Sadly, it may be news to some teachers that nerds hate your class as much as the "cool kids" do. Yes, those kids who always read the assignments, have their hands up in class and ace the tests have as much or more contempt for the way school is conventionally conducted as the kids who are struggling.

Following are some excerpts from an essay by Paul Graham, an expert on programming languages and on technology startups called "Why Nerds are Unpopular:"

I think the important thing about the real world is not that it's populated by adults, but that...the things you do have real effects. That's what school, prison, and ladies-who-lunch all lack. The inhabitants of all those worlds are trapped in little bubbles where nothing they do can have more than a local effect...

When the things you do have real effects, it's no longer enough just to be pleasing. It starts to be important to get the right answers, and that's where nerds show to advantage. Bill Gates will of course come to mind. Though notoriously lacking in social skills, he gets the right answers, at least as measured in revenue...

Another problem, and possibly an even worse one, was that we never had anything real to work on. Humans like to work; in most of the world, your work is your identity. And all the work we did was pointless, or seemed so at the time.

At best it was practice for real work we might do far in the future, so far that we didn't even know at the time what we were practicing for. More often it was just an arbitrary series of hoops to jump through, words without content designed mainly for testability. (The three main causes of the Civil War were.... Test: List the three main causes of the Civil War.)

And there was no way to opt out. The adults had agreed among themselves that this was to be the route to college. The only way to escape this empty life was to submit to it.

Teenage kids used to have a more active role in society. In pre-industrial times, they were all apprentices of one sort or another, whether in shops or on farms or even on warships. They weren't left to create their own societies. They were junior members of adult societies.

Teenagers seem to have respected adults more then, because the adults were the visible experts in the skills they were trying to learn. Now most kids have little idea what their parents do in their distant offices, and see no connection (indeed, there is precious little) between schoolwork and the work they'll do as adults.

And if teenagers respected adults more, adults also had more use for teenagers. After a couple years' training, an apprentice could be a real help. Even the newest apprentice could be made to carry messages or sweep the workshop...

Teenagers now are useless, except as cheap labor in industries like fast food, which evolved to exploit precisely this fact. In almost any other kind of work, they'd be a net loss. But they're also too young to be left unsupervised. Someone has to watch over them, and the most efficient way to do this is to collect them together in one place. Then a few adults can watch all of them.

If you stop there, what you're describing is literally a prison, albeit a part-time one. The problem is, many schools practically do stop there. The stated purpose of schools is to educate the kids. But there is no external pressure to do this well. And so most schools do such a bad job of teaching that the kids don't really take it seriously-- not even the smart kids. Much of the time we were all, students and teachers both, just going through the motions.

In my high school French class we were supposed to read Hugo's Les Miserables. I don't think any of us knew French well enough to make our way through this enormous book. Like the rest of the class, I just skimmed the Cliff's Notes. When we were given a test on the book, I noticed that the questions sounded odd. They were full of long words that our teacher wouldn't have used. Where had these questions come from? From the Cliff's Notes, it turned out. The teacher was using them too. We were all just pretending.

[Side note--personally I cringe whenever I administer a test in my classroom I have not written or created the database for myself. I believe that I should be testing what I taught and how I taught it. Thus I have a distaste for department-wide tests, although of course I comply with department and school policy. I just think those policies are misguided and dysfunctional.]

Everyone yearns to be of value, to do and make things that are valuable, which is exactly what most of schoolwork denies. That is why winning a game, or a band competition or putting on a successful show is so much more important to students than handing in an essay which only the teacher will read. This is doubly damaging to the super-competent students, who can see through the charade and recognize the emptiness of the entire exercise.

Judging from my own adult children and their circles of friends and associates, we have raised a generation of auto-didacts and sharers. This is exactly what we're supposed to be aiming for--to create lifetime learners. But I sense that this behavior has either developed in post-secondary education or in reaction against the style of secondary education dominant in the US today (or both). Young people today have become self-educators because we have failed them, yet the thirst for learning has survived nonetheless.

The downside to this is that we have lost the opportunity to direct this thirst toward areas and subjects that our former students might not have considered. People's interests and proclivities tend to be set in early adulthood (until perhaps late middle age, when we seem to start branching out again) and a high school teacher who has turned a computer geek off to literature, for example, has probably lost them for most of their adult life.

We need to tap the nerds in our classroom as a resource--not as little assistant teachers, but as learning leaders. And to do that, we are going to have to create learning tasks that are more authentic, that have more intrinsic value, and convey a sense of worth--both for the work and the worker--than much of the busywork we engage in today.

The nerds are watching.

Applying problem solving to...uh...solve problems

"Recall a time when you really loved something: a movie, song, an album or a book. You wholeheartedly recommend it to someone you really like. You anticipate that reaction, you wait for it. It came back, and the person hated it. That is the exact same state I spend every working day of the last six years. I teach high school math."
--Dan Meyer, March 6, 2010, addressing a TEDx. Dan teaches high school math outside of Santa Cruz, CA. In this brief 12-minute talk, he explores the intersection of math instruction, multimedia, and inquiry-based learning. His blog can be found here.



As I think I've mentioned. I don't teach math, but I think that understanding how math is taught and how it can be taught can be instructive to all teachers. Because it is a process about process. At the risk of belaboring the obvious, a math teacher cannot fall into the trap inherent in Social Studies, Science and sometimes in English, in which we become enraptured by our content and we start shoving the kids a big pile of "stuff", often referred to as "facts." Math, as a discipline, must always be a verb and not a noun.

At their best, Science teachers know this--that's why they have labs. Hopefully, they do not tell the students too much about how a given experiment should end up. (I can remember fudging results to match the prediction--don't blame me, it started with Gregor Mendel.)

In Language Arts, this is why I argue against diagramming sentences. It tells you a lot about what things are called and how to categorize them. It's a very useful tool for linguists studying syntax, especially in comparing languages or dialects. One teacher friend who advocates diagramming tells me the students love them. But that is not an argument in their favor. One thing students really like is questions for which there are certain and "right" answers. They hate uncertainty, ambiguity and personal interpretation. But that's the way the world is built.

And most importantly, I do not know any way to draw a line between skill in diagramming and improved writing. There may be a connection, but it has not been demonstrated to me. I believe the only way to teach writing is to (a) require a lot of it; (b) give a lot of feedback; (c) require rewriting. And the writing task must itself be authentic and have an intrinsic interest to the student. Exercises in literary analysis are lovely for college students of literature, but to induce facility in writing (if not love for it), there must be motivation.

My greatest music teacher was Lew Spratlan, not because of any information or wisdom he imparted. I took Composition with him and there was one simple, hard and fast rule of the class. "Come each day with a new piece of music to demonstrate, or don't come." We learned that the most important tool for writing music was the seat of the pants--that is, learning to apply that portion of the body to a chair in order to write. And write. And write.

When I taught general music, I made sure that students were making some kind of music at least two or three times a week--not just listening, or learning terminology or other non-functional facts. (I can't tell you how much commercial music instruction material tells you all about how many children Bach had, while telling you nothing about how he put music together.)

This corresponds with Mr. Meyer's example of waiting for the container to fill. Everyone wants to know how long that will take, even if they don't care the least about how to calculate the volume of an object. A more detailed explication of this approach to math instruction is Lockhart's Lament, which I stumbled across for obvious reasons.

This is hard, it's labor-intensive, and it means you won't "cover" as much "stuff." This runs counter to the politically-driven high-stakes testing system we have in place now. But this is what we teachers must juggle today. (I just hope the politicians who advocate these multiple-choice tests have got lots of jobs waiting for our students which involve taking multiple-choice tests. Because that system will not teach anyone to think.)

"'You can know the name of that bird in all languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. You'll only know about humans in different places, and what they call the bird. So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing--that's what counts.'" -- Richard Feynman, quoting his father in WHAT DO YOU CARE WHAT OTHER PEOPLE THINK?

Writing lesson plan

Greetings to all my new Twitter followers, mostly thanks to my friend and former boss Eric Sheninger, who is one of the country's leading advocates of the use of Twitter and Web 2.0 in education.

I feel a bit guilty that I haven't posted in a long time, partly because of a career upheaval I've had; but that does not overturn my passion to treat my (relatively) new profession as professionally as I treated my old one. I'm still excited about what I do (and probably about what you do), and I have generated a lot of ideas I want to write about, but there have been other priorities. In the meantime, here's a quick lesson idea from a news note I saw today.

According to this news story, President Obama has 10 letters from ordinary Americans directed to him every day. Reportedly, the President reads them all and personally responds to three or four. Now of course, we are always urging our students to write to public officials, but in my heart of hearts I can't help wondering if this is a feckless task, an empty gesture towards ideals of representative democracy.

Now comes the President with an authentic kick in the pants. Every letter to him is automatically entered into a lottery to be read, not just by a 23-year-old West Wing intern, but by the top man himself AND to be answered personally by the President. I don't know about you, but for me this kicks up the stakes tremendously.

So why not challenge your students to write a letter to the President worth his personal attention? I suspect a preliminary discussion of topics plus specific lessons on tone, and, depending the grade level of the students a basic lesson or a reminder lesson on letter format. Moreover, the letters themselves can be displayed in your school or online--maybe your school forms a Ning for letters to people in power. Help them start the dialogue, uncover their passions and harness the power of the word to that passion.

Speaking of letters, I am crazy about a site called Letters of Note. These are letters with historic or cultural significance, shown both in facsimile and in transcript. A lot of them are not safe for classroom, so I would not invite a class to run amuck at the site, but there are a lot of goodies to be found there for thought, analysis, discussion and writing for both social studies and language arts literacy teachers. Here is a marvelous recent post of a letter from Harry Truman to an old friend, begun just before he learned he was to become president with a post-script added just after. Simple and powerful.

High expectations vs. Uniform expectations

I am not breaking ground or being controversial when I say that most teachers accept the idea of accountability AND of raising academic standards. The question remains how that is to be done and how do we avoid turning the means into the end.

In that connection, there is a very cogent piece by Alfie Kohn in the current issue of Education Week called Debunking the Case for National Standards: One-Size-Fits-All Mandates and Their Dangers. The heart of his argument is as follows:

Are all kids entitled to a great education? Of course. But that doesn’t mean all kids should get the same education. High standards don’t require common standards. Uniformity is not the same thing as excellence – or equity. (In fact,
one-size-fits-all demands may offer the illusion of fairness, setting back the
cause of genuine equity.) To acknowledge these simple truths is to watch the
rationale for national standards – or uniform state standards -- collapse into a
heap of intellectual rubble.

This disconnect is evident every time you put the current Core Curriculum Content Standards next to a sample HSPA, which is the current high school graduation-requirement test in New Jersey. For example, here are some of my core content standards:

• Analyze how an author's use of words creates tone and mood, and how choice
  of words advances the theme or purpose of the work.
  
• Compare and evaluate the relationship between past literary traditions
  and contemporary writing.
  
• Recognize the use or abuse of ambiguity, contradiction, paradox, irony,
  incongruities, overstatement and understatement in text and explain their effect
  on the reader.

You show me the standardized multiple-guess, true-false, matching test that will effectively measure any of those. And yet those tests, despite DOE undertakings to the contrary, are the actual standard to which teachers and students are to be held.

The core curriculum content is one animal, and the standardized tests are another, and the twain does not meet. We have built a system around tests which measure things other than the things we are supposed to teach.

Can't wait to see what our politicians will propose to solve the contradiction...

Authentic learning at work

Here's a video of Dave Eggers, principal contributor to McSweeney's and author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius talking about a privately-generated public-service education project that only caught fire when the participants stumbled over real-world authentic tasks for the students. Very exciting.

Authentic learning plans can go too far

Last week, students from Fox Hill Primary School in Sheffield, Yorkshire, England returned from a school holiday to find police tape all around, blood on the floor, furniture in disarray and a teacher with a bandaged head. Happily, no crime took place; the apparent crime scene was part of what was intended as a practical, "authentic-style" problem-solving exercise to figure out "who broke into the school." Incidentally, the exercise continued for four more days.

The problem was that this was an elementary school and a good proportion of the kids were traumatized. Moreover, the community was not warned in advance and this article indicates that at least one autistic child cannot understand the explanations and is afraid to return to school completely.

An important part of growing up is learning to identify the line between pretend and reality. Perhaps school administrators at Fox Hill need to review that.

Student playwriting opportunities

Our administration is pressing for teachers to develop authentic-based learning, and having spent many years working in the world outside the classroom, I am in whole-hearted agreement with this goal.

In writing, there are few more authentic tasks than writing and presenting a play. Although most playwriting is a solo effort, the presentation becomes a collaborative effort. The process is riddled with problem-solving, there is a firm, real-world deadline (the first performance), and the audience is, well..the audience. Unlike other, more personal forms of expression, the playwright has the audience in mind at all times.

There are a number of playwriting competitions that have special significance for and connection to our students at New Milford High School (NJ):

Thespian Playworks is an activity of the Educational Theater Association, parent of the International Thespian Society, the theater honor society of which teacher our John Coviello has formed a chapter here at NMHS. Their competition is for plays 30 minutes or less. Each of the four plays accepted will be developed in a professional atmosphere with a director, dramaturg and full production. The deadline is February 1, 2010. You can read about the competition and the program here.

The New Jersey Young Playwrights Festival is an offshot of the Playwrights Theater. This competition is looking for plays up to 20 minutes in length, and (unlike Thespian Playworks) the plays may be written in collaboration. Semi-finalists receive a staged reading by professional actors in a festival in May at Kean University. The deadline is January 8, 2010, and you can read about this competition here.

Finally, we have our own intramural NMHS competition. Plays should be between 10 and 20 minutes in length, and all semi-finalists get semi-staged productions here in May. There are VISA gift card prizes. The deadline will be April 1, 2010 and the rules will be published shortly.

Naturally, any work can be entered in any or all of these competitions. I want to encourage my fellow teachers to incorporate this in their lessons, in order to demonstrate that writing can be more than a exercise to be judged by a teacher.