Musings on my progress as a teacher of Language Arts Literacy, Music, Drama, and Film after a 20-year career in Entertainment Law.
"[I]f I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week…The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature." --Charles Darwin
Autisum made its first splashy appearance in pop culture back in 1988 with Rain Man, then subsided in a flurry of jokey references to counting toothpicks and watching Wheel of Fortune. But it seems to be undergoing a revival of attention in the entertainment media as of late, what with the obsessive-compulsive detective, Monk; one of the children on Parenthood, HBO's Temple Grandin (which is of course the true story of a woman who describes herself as a recovering autistic), Sheldon Cooper on The Big Bang Theory, and the BBC's updating of Holmes and Watson simply titled Sherlock, in which the title character appears to be aware of his diagnosis and attempts to take positive steps toward more standard socialization.
A few seasons ago, Boston Legal clearly bungled with its Asperger's character, sending him completely off the rails and given to random violent threats, despite a rather meek nature. But the current crop seems to be more acceptable to those familiar with the disorder, and in the case of Sheldon Cooper, quirky enough to be entertaining, but not so difficult as to be intolerable.
The good side of this is obvious: mainstreaming any deviation from the norm makes that deviation seem more familiar and comfortable, and those who possess the deviation or more likely to be accepted and understood. But sometimes these things are picked up for a while, distorted by the media and then dropped. PTSD is in danger of becoming a narrative shorthand which transforms into the old old trope: Deranged War Veteran Who May Blow Up and Take You With Him, which has been around at least since the First World War and perhaps longer.
Let's hope the heat around autism generally and Asperger's in particular produces light on the subject and promotes understanding of the syndrome and the people affected by it; and that it doesn't, like so many rapidly heated objects, just dissipate the energy into coolness, or else spark into something unanticipated, such as a new kind of character-typing for lazy writers and producers. Meantime-- *knock**knock**knock* "Leonard"*knock**knock**knock* "Leonard"*knock**knock**knock* "Leonard" -- you better answer the door. Sheldon's waiting.
Ever since the motor in my treadmill decided to die just as winter was about to begin (donations cheerfully accepted), I've had to do my daily walk outdoors. And as we got through an unusual February thaw, I am acutely aware of that most unsightly of apres-party phenomena, dirty snow.
As I notice the variant melting patterns around the neighborhood and the different ways the residents deal with the reality of ice made mostly of dirt and stone, I contemplate what is the best way of disposing of the detritus of a now-departed Winter Wonderland.
How you feel about old snow and what is to be done with it might be an interesting indicator of personality and outlook. I would divide it into three categories. One might be the aggressive problem solver, seeing that the ice is melting and starting to break up, grabbing a chopper and a shovel and removing that last frigid shelf from the curb to allow cars and people to move freely and safely, without fear of wrenching a back or breaking a hip. Another personality might long for the days of beautiful pristine white snow, perhaps wishing for another storm to cover up the nasty, dirty stuff and return us to the lovely fairyland world. And then there is the pragmatic middle, exasperated with the ice, but knowing that it will melt in time, and that things tend to sort themselves out in the long run, and you just have to hope that nothing too bad happens until then, but that excessive exertion right now is pointless because the ice will melt.
Where are you along this spectrum, as a person and as a teacher? Do you leap in, even with the possibility that things will sort themselves out? Do you keep hands off? Do you try to crank things back to where it was before the problem started?
Meantime, don't slip, because that ice is not only slippery, but by now it's filthy.
I don't have much to add to this story in the New York Times about a historical research quarterly written entirely by high school students (mostly public school students, by the way). These kids are researching, analyzing and writing up ORIGINAL RESEARCH for no school credit, no money, no headlines, no appearance on Jersey Shore. So why do it? Why does anyone want to be excellent? Do we really have to ask this question? (Yes, it will help with admission to college, but that has to be viewed as a secondary outcome, given the complexity of the task and the unlikeliness of one's paper being singled out.)
William Fitzhugh, who runs this journal, The Concord Review, is reportedly difficult and disagreeable. Maybe so, but maybe it's because he's swimming against the dominant school current of diluting and lowering standards. This impulse comes from a good place -- we want to provide success scenarios for all students, especially those who struggle and are likely to be frustrated. But the problem comes when we exchange interim, partial goals to be celebrated in order to spur students on for ultimate goals of excellence by objective standards.
The other reason that Fitzhugh may be difficult may be that his values conflict with parent's values, and those are always a problem for us classroom teachers. Let's be honest: the surest way to lower standards in education is to give parents more control. Parents are, as a rule, more interested in outward measures of success than in actual success. They press for higher grades for less work. They prioritize family activities, sports and other extracurricular obligations over school work. The Concord Review was not created by parents, nor would it likely to be run by them. It doesn't hand out "A"s or cash prizes or guaranteed school admissions. It's about learning a process, not rewarding an outcome. And the process should be its own reward.
Also, it's elitist. There's a mistrust of experts today, and that also comes from a reasonable place. "The Best and the Brightest" told us to trust them and led us into the Vietnam war. Experts lie and misrepresent. But that didn't make us smarter, didn't make us experts. It's not that we should disdain the hard work it takes to become expert in a field -- it is that we should question ALL AUTHORITY, including academic authority. Don't discard it, don't subvert it, but question it -- in an intelligent way, which requires being informed. Every time a politician compares the national debt to a household budget, you know either he's an idiot or thinks he's talking to idiots. The budget of a nation which has its own economy and its own currency is NOTHING LIKE the budget of a household. This is like saying, "I know all about defense appropriations because I own a Hummer."
We need smart, informed, hard-working people in the next generation and our school culture is moving in the opposite direction. Let's celebrate The Concord Review and identify the students we can get excited about writing for it, before it's too late.
Since I started teaching, early in the previous decade, it has been accepted wisdom to treat video games like television, instant messaging and pop culture -- a distraction that pulls students away from a disciplined program of learning.
I've learned better. Video games ARE learning. We teachers need to not only accept this, but embrace it. As long as we abandon the field to commercial game-makers, we are surrendering important real estate in our student's brains which could yield better and deeper learning than we have seen in our generation as teachers.
I was converted largely due to this episode of On The Media, an NPR show I am seriously addicted to. The episode made two points that were clinchers to me: First - of all the things video games are teaching, they are teaching perseverance. So many of us are convinced that kids don't want to do anything that's hard or that takes a lot of time and has a lot of obstacles. Beating a video game is hard, takes time and has many obstacles to success. The key difference is that players are motivated to play and to win. That is obviously the piece that we are missing when we are teaching. We do not create tasks that students want to succeed at. Some will be motivated by secondary rewards like parental approval, better GPAs with possibilities for better futures, but not everyone is wired that way. That has nothing to do with our "modern high-speed culture." Twas ever thus. Most people need reinforcement while they are working and they need to be able to visualize the goal right in front of them. Video games do that.
The second clincher was this: 10,000 hours. According to this podcast, studies show that students will spend 10,000 hours playing video games during their school careers. Anyone who has read Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers knows that 10,000 hours is what is required to create an expert or a virtuoso. That's the amount of time young Bill Gates spent learning to write programs; it's the amount of time the Beatles spent in dirty German dance clubs learning to become a band; it's the time Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan needed to become who they are. So like it or not, are students are becoming experts, and the problem is that we don't know at exactly what yet.
Another important element, which I picked up from a book called What Video Games Have To Teach Us About Learning and Literacy by James Paul Gee is that despite the stereotype of the lonely, isolated nerd, gaming at its best is intensely social. First of all, many games, especially online games require one to enter a milieu, adopt an identity and interact with others. Right away, the gamer is performing critical learning and synthesis functions, taking information about the environment and the persons one finds in that environment and transforming the data into tasks and choices. This is higher-order learning, and the learning increases. Moreover, one can work cooperatively with other players, or learn about cheats, shortcuts and easter eggs from other players. And most experienced players don't mind helping out novices, and teaching them how to avoid rookie mistakes. This is exactly the kind of cooperative learning that we are trying to implement in school, both because it is an element in workplace preparedness and BECAUSE IT WORKS. Students learn better by teaching and learning from each other.
Game playing transforms the learners relationship with text. As Gee notes, people under 40 don't pick up manuals to learn to play a game, they start playing. And if you pick up the manual before you play, it doesn't make sense. After you have some expertise, the text starts to make sense. So it is with reading. For a 14-year-old to pick up a 19th century novel makes no sense. The entire environment is foreign, and it works by rules the reader has not yet learned. How much more sense it would make in cooperation with an integrated course which included social studies which laid the groundwork for the novel and made acquisition of both texts more comprehensible and enjoyable.
I'm not saying that schools should buy video games with educational content pasted in to Make Learning More Fun. What I'm trying to say is that we need to understand how it is that students are becoming willing and enthusiastic learners for thousands of hours without coercion or compulsion, and use those discoveries to make our students into motivated learners, without regard to external rewards and punishments.
Here's an example: Learning is more engaging when it's embedded in narrative. I'm not saying everyone should teach literature. We English teachers have made the teaching of reading into a stunningly boring process by dissecting the beast, tossing the juicy meat of storytelling away and forcing students to chew on the gristle of literary devices and "authorial voice" and sociological interpretation and a whole lot of rubbish. So don't look to us to help. Here's an example. You have to teach trig. You have to. And as you begin to draw charts of sines and cosines, the students ask "why do we have to learn this?" and you get pulled down that boring road.
What would happen if you never mentioned trig, but simply started with a blood-spattered crime site, one which required you to figure out from the angle of the spatter on the wall, exactly where the bullet impact had taken place. What if you arrived at trig inductively from a narrative, rather than introducing the narrative AFTER the boring bits. Suddenly the "boring" bits become a means to an interesting end, and I would bet that students would breeze through for the opportunity to solve a murder.
That's just one example of what we learn about learning from gaming, and I for one will need more time and study to glean what I can. But I know that I need to start now.
A lot of real smart people have given a lot more thought than I have to this, and one of the most inspiring is Jane McGonigal, as you can see in this TED talk:
In the interest of full disclosure, there are educators, such as Ali Carr-Chellman, seen below, who believe in the actual use of video gaming in instruction, for the specific purpose of re-engaging young men who have become disengaged or even absent from school, a observable trend over the last 40 years. This is a more localized application of the concept, but may be of specific interest to some of my fellow teachers:
I've been kicking and screaming about kids playing video games instead reading Hawthorne for many years now. I'm convinced now that the video games are not the problem, but the way I've presented Hawthorne; and that, moreover, the solution is found in a discerning analysis of what it is that makes those games so compelling.
They're your former students. They're wonderful. You remember them fondly. You help they're doing well and that they're happy. You'll never forget something or other they did or said.
You can't remember their name.
I wrote back in September about the annual duty of learning names of new students. But these are people you're meeting for the first time. Most students will cut you a little slack if it takes you a couple of weeks to get all the names down.
But when students you've known, often for years because you were involved in extracurricular activities together, drop in for a little pre-holiday visit, misplacing a name in your head brings on shame and disgrace, not to mention the implication that you've forgotten that student. They'd have to be a fool not to realize when I greet them with a "Hey, there you are! How are you?" but no name, that I just couldn't care enough to recall their name.
But it's not true. It's just that, for me anyway, I use the mode of memory I developed in school myself and employed so usefully when I was (briefly) an actor, often juggling three different scripts in my head at a time. You have to work on a "need to remember" basis. You put that temporary information in a high-traffic space which gets plenty of stimulation, but not into deep storage where you put things like the year of Shakespeare's birth and what exactly anaphora is. That way, when you don't need that temporary info, you can easily dump it without bruising your brain cells. Otherwise, you remember that stuff forever, along with other things you have no use for, such as the batting average of every member of the 1969 Mets and names of all the Marx Brothers films in chronological order.
But faces seem to go into deep storage whether you need it or not. We are evidently pre-verbal animals, or at least those parts of our brains are the last to go. So, beloved former students, when we see those glowing faces, sometimes buried under beards and strange tattoos (not to mention how the boys have changed), we do know EXACTLY who you are. We just wish that you had a bar code tattooed on your neck that could be automatically scanned as you enter our classroom so your name would pop up on a display on our desks. (That would be super-cool, wouldn't it?)
Don't be hurt. We remember you, we know you. Some of you -- we love. Just-- when you visit us, come with a friend who keeps saying your name over and over out loud to help us out.
Follow Student Rush here. (http://twitter.com/#!/StudentRushNYC). They offer free tickets to Broadway & Off-Broadway shows to benefit students and other theatergoers.
As a high school teacher I am frequently called upon -- formally and informally -- to support students writing research papers in other disciplines, especially the social sciences. One of the biggest challenges is teaching them how to identify and use the best possible sources, and especially how to track back as far as possible to the source of a generally reported or accepted conclusion. That is, not necessarily a primary source, which is rarely absolutely necessary, or even desirable in a 1500 word student paper, but perhaps the academic paper which first reported the material or provided an influential early interpretation of the material, which has guided subsequent research and discussion on the topic.
So we go through all our searches and we find the right combination of search terms to find what we want and cast aside the irrelevancy and there it is--we find Exactly The Right Source. And the URL indicates it is at JSTOR, a wonderful online source of a variety of academic journals, but one which is subscription-based. In fact, I don't believe JSTOR even offers single articles. You have to be attached to a big institution which can afford the big subscription fee to get at all that good stuff, and that does not apply to most public high schools.
However, a brilliant friend of mine, a doctoral candidate at the University of Chicago (who just happens to be my future daughter-in-law), having heard my bellyaching about this at Thanksgiving has sent me this link to the Directory of Open Access Journals. Here's the headline:
This service covers free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals. We aim to cover all subjects and languages. There are now 5832 journals in the directory. Currently 2432 journals are searchable at article level. As of today 484097 articles are included in the DOAJ service.
I haven't had a chance to use it yet -- the next batch of papers will be in the second semester, but a quick browse through shows it is pretty amazing. Most of it is way above the needs, and perhaps the reading ability of most of our high school students. But it is important to teach students that new information and ideas do not come from Newsweek or TMZ, but often from peer-reviewed academic journals, and that is better to source the journal itself than US News and World Report's digest of it.
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.
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...
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