It’s a “Whole New World”
I feel like singing that. As I record this, the world is in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic, and most countries have moved to providing education through distance learning. You can tell we are not in school, because I needed a haircut five weeks ago, shaved my head completely, and now need a haircut again.
Zoom, Meet, Classroom, etc. -- these sites and applications were mostly unknown to teachers and students last year, but are now a daily part of their lives. Teachers are struggling to figure out how to deliver content and build skills effectively without standing next to the student. China is beginning to open schools, but classes are half full to keep distancing. Are they rushing? Teachers, administrators, parents are all posting to social media about how they want kids to be back in school as soon as possible. Everyone in education, it seems, is desperate to get back to the way things were.
Not me. I’m happy to have the system shaken up a bit and do a little self-reflection on exactly how broken it is.
The majority of the kids aren’t screaming to get back into school, either. The kids are busy gaming or playing music or drawing or whatever their passion is, and in their spare time they seem to be Zoom bombing, trying to get apps taken off of app stores, or otherwise ingeniously coming up with ways to extend their apparent vacation. For a lot of them
I’ve always been an education rebel, both as a student and as a teacher. It seems in my life, I didn’t complete almost anything on the timeline the system wanted me to. I was far ahead in some areas and struggling in others. Those subjects weren’t static, either. Which subject I excelled at changed as the focus of that subject changed. I’m sure many of you can relate.
The seven steps of education
I’m old. You can tell by the white hair. For those of you who are younger, I’ll let you know how school worked back in my day.
The teacher started a new unit and if we were lucky, kind of brought in some previous knowledge for other units or previous years. General not, though. Most units were self-contained.
We did a series of discoveries, lectures, exercises, or similar in order to get us to the level that was expected. Good teachers tried to adapt to help out as much as they could given their 25-35 students in the classes.
Some of the teachers were awesome at content and terrible at teaching, leaving those of us with poor preparation or low motivation in the dust. Others were inspiring teachers with awful classroom management, so theri inspiration fell on ten of the sixty ears in the classroom. Some just threw us a worksheet and read the newspaper. Some were substitute teachers there for a few days and making minimum wage. Some were covering a subject they didn’t know. A few were absolutely brilliant and changed my life. Some were absolutely brilliant for a completely different set of students and change their lives.
We had an end of unit quiz.
We moved on to the next unit and repeated the process.
After some time and units had passed, we took a midterm or final exam asking us questions about all that we had studied since the last one. If I was good, I went back home and reviewed all the units I had forgotten about. Sometimes I was good. Other times I wasn’t so much.
After a year or two or three, the government would want to get a reading on how my education was going, and since they couldn’t count on my daily work, quizzes, unit tests, exams, or even final grades meaning anything, we had big, long, mostly multiple-choice tests to tell us, the administrators, and the government how we, the teachers, the schools, and the curriculum were doing in moving students along the path to minimum proficiency in all important areas. Important to someone, in any case, if not necessarily me at the time.
I know that this system seems so odd to people in the system now. They really can’t relate to my problems or situation at all.
Of course I’m kidding. Most features of the system haven’t changed at all. All those things still happen.
Conspiracy?
Rebels will tell you those seven steps repeated on lockstep are all the fault of big business or maybe big education business or the teachers’ unions or the military industrial complex. In the words of Forrest Gump, “I don’t know about that.”
Rebels often identify similarities between prison, the military, and education, and scream bloody murder about it. They’re right that the similarities exist, but those similarities are more a case of convergent evolution than of some giant conspiracy. Now, I was never in prison, but I was in the military for a good, long time, and I can talk about some reasons for the similarities. In fact, I use a lot of the same principles in classrooms that I used (or maybe more accurately, were used on me) in the military.
We have a lot of people who might prefer to be somewhere else.
They are required to be there.
We need to ensure their safety from various factors, including each other.
We need to move large groups of them from one place to another in a generally orderly manner.
And finally, in A Bug’s Life, if the ants decide to rise up and rebel against the grasshoppers, Hopper is going to die. The deaths may be literal in the case of prison riots or grenades under pillows, or of our careers in the case of education.
So in the end, this whole similarity comes down to being outnumbered. No conspiracy really is needed to explain the seven steps or the construction of schools. It’s a staffing and logistics matter.
Managing classrooms full of students
I train a lot of new teachers, so I have some standard lines and speeches. One of them is about the role of classroom management in teaching. The speech goes something like this. “If you are teaching a couple of people, or even your own kids, there’s not much management required. It’s just basic behavioral stuff, operant conditioning a la Skinner with the young kids, and making sure your position is respected. You can keep an eye on everything that’s happening with little effort. As your classes get larger, you have to develop some skills and techniques to make sure you can keep that eye on everyone. Increase it more, though, and soon it’s not possible to keep an eye out -- no one literally has eyes in the back of their heads. Not everyone can sharpen their pencil at the same time, anymore. You start needing routines and procedures. Once the class hits about 25 students in my experience, routines and procedures count for more than 50% of what happens in class, and almost no real learning happens in classes of this size without proper classroom management.”
So that’s my speech. Those seven steps come from needing to teach twenty ot twenty-five or thirty students. In Korea and Thailand, a class can be forty.
Teaching “to the middle”
Teachers teach to the middle. They’re not allowed to, but they see no real other option. The best teachers differentiate, modifying parts of the lesson for students at various stages. They provide some time for independent work at levels that work for kids. But on the whole, it’s to the middle. I know some teachers are going to push back on this statement, so let me explain.
Education has standards. Each year’s curriculum has different standards. Teachers are generally required by law to teach those standards and make every attempt to get students to proficiency on those standards. Teachers have scopes. What are they going to teach, and when. Teachers have to submit grades. Those grades ideally should represent how well the students are doing on those standards. (They don’t do that at all, but we can discuss that deficiency later.)
Let me give you the most obvious example of teaching to the middle. Teachers who have students come in three grade levels below expectation on reading still need to teach the grade-level standards, even if moving a student ahead four years of proficiency in a single year is obviously not going to happen. Students who come in that far behind have reasons for being behind, and very few of those reasons suddenly disappear and result in a student who wants to catch up to everyone else. Exceptions exist. I’m not saying they don’t.
So the schools are doing what they can to backfill while still moving forward, in essence working on fixing the plane while it’s in flight. Everyone who has seen an action movie involving a scene like this knows that it’s all splicing wires and jamming wrenches in place to hold everything together until they can land, hopefully at some kind of base and get some proper repairs. (I’m talking to you, Han and Chewy. Get that hyperspace working, get out of trouble, and get back to base!) My student never gets to land and never gets back to base. It’s all flights all the time with in-flight refueling.
My point is that this struggling student becomes less and less of a functioning aircraft and more and more twine and duct tape. At some point, the student stops being able to fly at all. Education is over at that point, because flights have to happen and schedules are fixed.
To switch metaphors for a second, there’s an urban legend about English trains running through stations, leaving customers behind so that the trains can be on time. Education is a hurtling train leaving too many students behind, and schedules only get tighter and tighter as more and higher standards get put in. I’m not arguing for lower ones, by the way. Living in the world requires more every year, not less.
The road trip
Another kind of standard training that I do with teachers is about backwards planning. I’ll explain for the non-educator in the audience by using the analogy of a road trip -- the same one I use for new teachers. Another aside -- a road trip exists in few English-speaking countries -- Australia, the US, and Canada, as far as I’m aware. I’m sure someone will correct me in the comments. It’s basically a multi-day journey across the country.
I grew up in Hawaii, which is not a place you do road trips, but I have done them before. If Im in LA in the US and want to get to Washington DC, what do I do? I get out a map and find a reasonable route. I then figure out how far I can reasonably plan out how far I’ll drive each day and figure out where I should stop for lunch and what motel I’ll stay at. (Note that I very rarely just start driving east and hope, which is how the worst education operates.)
Most of my road trips weren’t casual traipses across the country, though. They were under time pressure. In those cases, I said to myself “I think I can make the trip in three days. Cut it in thirds” How far is that each day? Ok, I need to average five above the speed limit for seventeen hours a day. I think I can do that. Maybe.” All of education is built like this kind of road trip.
Except it's worse, because It’s not just one car. Its a caravan of thirty cars. And the psycho person in the lead -- with the map and the plan -- isn’t really sharing it with anyone. And they have a nuclear-powered vehicle that never has to stop. And it’s on cruise control. And it has restrooms. If you have to stop for gas, that’s on you. Fill up as fast as you can and try to catch up. We’ve got CBs, so you can speed and catch up to us if your car can do that. (No worries -- I’ve got a packet for the days you missed, right?) You’ve got a flat? Much less chance you’ll make it back to the convoy. Something more serious? Well, just keep driving East, keep your eyes out for us, and hope.
What’s the answer?
I’m a guy who prefers to focus on solutions instead of obstacles. I’m not a cheerleader. In this team sports metaphor, I used to be a player. Now I’m more like a coach. I have to know my opponent and realistically evaluate the chance of success with various strategies. I’m also an incremental improvements kind of guy.
