How to help students see differently

There is a reason that, when the American Film Institute surveyed people, Atticus Finch from To Kill a Mockingbirdwas chosen the greatest hero in American film history.

For me this heroism is not simply represented by the fact that Atticus is someone "born to do our unpleasant tasks," as Maudie says, or by his unstinting sense of justice, but in something even finer.

Atticus teaches all three children in the story to look at the world in ways unknown to the society which surrounds them. Because of this they are able to see Boo Radley and Tom Robinson and Mr. Cunningham in new ways, and - much more importantly - those children, at least two of them, grew up able to transform our ways of seeing. 

So when we read - or see film versions of - To Kill a Mockingbirdor Breakfast at Tiffany'sor In Cold Blood, we are enmeshed in unique world views enabled by Atticus Finch, or at least by Amasa Coleman Lee, father of Harper Lee, neighbor of the child Truman Capote.

On Sunday evening on Twitter @stardiverr and I were discussing the concept of hypothesis. I tend to think schools, and especially the dreaded Middle School Science Fair, should avoid the "hypothesis" idea entirely.

I think this because hypothesis in schools - as in the social sciences - too often means "guess" or - worse - "desired outcome." We "guess" that 'fertilizing' a bean plant with nicotine will damage it, we "want" our reading program to be effective. The result of both is bad observation - confirmation bias - and bad science.

I said that I thought the most important thing we could do with our students - in 'hard' sciences, in social sciences, in literature, in history, across the board - was to teach them to see differently, to look beyond the obvious. @stardiverr agreed, but said that is a hard thing to do. I agreed with that, absolutely.

Invention comes from new ways of seeing. Most of us can not really imagine pulsed signals moving across a wire, yet those who could "see" that, from Samuel Morse to Nikola Tesla to Bob Taylor and his ARPA colleagues, have fundamentally redefined our world. Most of us can only see gravity when we, or something else, falls, but Albert Einstein saw this radically differently, because he saw time and space differently - Einstein saw so differently that we are still confirming his ideas. Most of us can't see a lawn as Scott Fitzgerald did, "The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens--finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run. The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold, and wide open to the warm windy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs apart on the front porch," but because he could merge the new art of the motion picture with the older art of writing in his mind Fitzgerald could create a timeless masterpiece about the American dream.

Is there a way to teach this skill? Or, perhaps more to the point, is there a way not to drive this skill out of children? I ask this the latter way because we all know that if we listen to young children, they see the world in amazing ways, they ask amazing questions, they haven't yet been taught the expectations which limit our vision. Young kids might ask if trees speak to each other, which, it turns out, they seem to do. But older kids, facing "science," stop asking those questions because they are beyond the ability of kids to effectively test. Young kids might wonder what it might be like to live under a purple sky or what would happen to a fish in bowl which somehow ended up in earth orbit. But older kids know these as "dumb questions."

Young kids might be marvellously inspired to rethink what they see as they come and go by a book like And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street, but soon enough, their writing is reduced to essays "comparing" and "contrasting," or worse, re-writing Wikipedia articles so they can explain who John Adams was to a teacher who already knows.

Dr. Seuss's first book

Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner in their classic book Teaching As a Subversive Activitysuggested prohibiting teachers from "asking any questions they already know the answers to." (p. 117) That's a good start, it would, as those revolutionary authors suggest, "not only force teachers to perceive learning from the learner's perspective, it would help than to learn how to ask questions that produce knowledge." Yet that's only a start.

No science experiment should ever begin with anything but observation. "I see this and I wonder..." "I hear this and I wonder..." "I smell this, feel this, taste this..." Let us observe, and wonder, and then ask systematic questions which help us get to a hypothesis - an idea far closer to the "end" than the beginning of scientific learning.

No writing assignment should ever begin with anything but, "What questions do you have about this?" or, "What do you imagine about this?" We need to push our children to investigate, to imagine, to dream, to play, to never be satisfied with the canned explanation.

We need to help our students stand on their heads, or look down from a high tree, or to look up from under water, or whatever, as long as we help them to find new ways of seeing. Once they have this new view, then structure can help us climb down into the questions. But before they have this new view, all structure does is prevent people from climbing to new places.

So, we need to create environments in our schools, real, virtual, and academic environments, which allow dreams to evolve and collide, develop and connect.

What we don't need is structures which end up as prisons for the mind.

- Ira Socol

The Question of Attention

"He came the following Sunday afternoon. I had a television set. We played one ballgame on the TV, another on the radio, and kept switching to a third and kept track of all that was happening every moment. "Remember, Sal, Hodges is on second in Brooklyn so while the relief pitcher is coming in for the Phillies we'll switch to Giants-Boston and at the same time notice there DiMaggio has three balls count and the pitcher is fiddling with the resin bag, so we quickly find out what happened to Bobby Thomson when we left him thirty seconds ago with a man on third. Yes!"' - Jack Kerouac, On The Road

It is 1949 and Kerouac and Neal Cassady are experiencing new media multitasking. Who knew that 60 years on that idea would be more controversial than anything else in that breakthrough novel?

"Thus far, the neuroscience of multitasking has tended to follow a predictable pattern. Scientists take a handful of test subjects out of their offices and make them watch colored squares dance on a screen in a lab somewhere. Then they determine that multitasking makes you slightly less able to focus. A study reported on early this month found that heavy multitaskers performed about 10 to 20 percent worse on most tests than light multitaskers." - Steven Johnson in The New York Times

The kind of research "proving" multitasking is "impossible" [NPR] is available in this New York Times test.

Is your ability to attend to random flashing red rectangles a fair measuring system? Well, that's what always makes research funny. In order to quantify the human experience in a "valid" way you have to strip it down to a point where the experience itself is completely out of context and thus meaningless.

This "out of context research" is why, for example, I see so many high school graduates these days who can read perfectly fluently (which "research" says is important) while not comprehending one word. And, in the case of "attention," it is why we have so many smart people suddenly declaring that they are unable to "walk and chew gum at the same time."

And this matters because, at least since the end of the World War we have been fighting a bizarre battle against our children. "You can't listen to the radio and do your homework." "You can't watch television and do your homework." "You can't look out the window and hear the teacher."

This notion of "attention" is, of course, religious, not scientific. Early Calvinist churches stripped everything but the book and the minister from the worship space because your mind was supposed to be single-focused, not wandering as in a Catholic Mass in a Cathedral. On the other hand humans would never have made it out of the trees if they hadn't been able to gather berries while watching out for large cats. Yet, because brain science remains cultural, our scientists still pursue that Protestant notion of "attention" as if it is a scientific ideal. And this crushes children's learning - and comfort - in school.

What's funny is that NPR will broadcast this story to an audience that is 70 percent driving. Yes, all those NPR listeners are dealing with the complex issues of Science Friday while navigating a two ton vehicle moving at over a kilometer and a half every 60 seconds. The rest of the audience is at work, or cooking dinner, or whatever, but damn few are single-tasking.

The New York Times is writing that story for an audience that is eating breakfast, riding the subway, opening mail at their desk, listening to a meeting in their conference room. Probably more are multi-tasking than not.

Yet, the stories are put out there, despite the overwhelming evidence that they really cannot possibly be true.

See, scientists can debate whether we are multi-tasking or "rapid shifting," but that's theoretical entertainment only. It does not matter. While you are driving, listening to NPR, you don't drive off the road because you "rapidly shift" to looking in your rear-view mirrors. You don't stop the car to change the air conditioning setting. The previous task continues, in actuality and in your brain, until you fully return to it.

So, this is one fight we should stop having. We are human. We multitask. We can understand it and get better at it, or we can stop functioning in the world and hide in a corner with our linear print books.

Let's go back to Steven Johnson:

"It’s no accident that most of the great scientific and technological innovation over the last millennium has taken place in crowded, distracting urban centers. The printed page itself encouraged those manifold connections, by allowing ideas to be stored and shared and circulated more efficiently. One can make the case that the Enlightenment depended more on the exchange of ideas than it did on solitary, deep-focus reading.

"Quiet contemplation has led to its fair share of important thoughts. But it cannot be denied that good ideas also emerge in networks.

"Yes, we are a little less focused, thanks to the electric stimulus of the screen. Yes, we are reading slightly fewer long-form narratives and arguments than we did 50 years ago, though the Kindle and the iPad may well change that. Those are costs, to be sure. But what of the other side of the ledger? We are reading more text, writing far more often, than we were in the heyday of television.

"And the speed with which we can follow the trail of an idea, or discover new perspectives on a problem, has increased by several orders of magnitude. We are marginally less focused, and exponentially more connected. That’s a bargain all of us should be happy to make."

- Ira Socol