Short Thoughts for the New Year: Zero Tolerance for Zero

If we must have grades - and I would argue that grades, letters or numbers suggesting some percentage of accomplishment, range in actual value to the student from meaningless to worthless - then, at least we ought to have fair grades.

So here's a school year start plan for administrators. Let's have zero tolerance for any teacher ever giving any student a "zero" on a "one hundred point scale." In fact, if you use digital gradebooks, and in the US and Canada you probably do, go in right now and change the parameters to make this impossible.

The reason we cannot tolerate zeros? It is completely absurd to give any student a grade below zero on any assignment, test, or task just so the teacher can f--- up the student's semester and year. And zero is always far below "zero."

In traditional grading there is a 36 point scale, with "64" equalling "failed to meet a minimum" and "100" equalling "did I everything I told you to do." This equates to the classic US university "Four Point Scale" in which 0.0 is "failed" and 4.0 is "totally compliant." And no one at a university ever gets a grade of -6.4, because, well, that's ridiculous, as is any teacher giving any student a -64%.

A scale is a scale, and failure is failure, if you believe in quantifying failure rather than teaching with it. There is nothing - in any rational grading system - below failure.

Zeros are one of those brutal coercion tools some teachers use, and brutality has no place in our schools.

Hypocrisy Alert:

"Five Kent County high schools are requiring students who park on campus to be signed up for a sheriff's department program that notifies parents when teens are pulled over.

"The STOPPED program -- Sheriffs Telling Our Parents and Promoting Educated Drivers -- provides signed-up families with a stop sign sticker with a unique ID number. That sticker is placed on the windshield in the upper corner of the passenger's side.

"When a vehicle with a STOPPED sticker is pulled over, deputies report the reason for the stop to the Michigan Sheriffs' Association using the ID number, which then sends an email to parents regardless of whether or not the teen is ticketed."

or, as we might say, "OMG!"

5 high schools require STOPPED stickers

Now, Kent County, Michigan has its problems with law and respect. After getting blasted by the state and the federal government for violating both minority group and disability rights in school suspensions, the Grand Rapids Public Schools (the county's largest school district), promoted the chief "suspender" to superintendent and vowed to continue to lead the state in kicking out the few students who haven't yet fled under Michigan's Schools of Choice law. (not a problem limited to one district in the county)

Voters in the Republican Primary just nominated a candidate accused of election fraud, and, of course, one school district there is famous for hounding a fabulous teacher to death because he got married. So little surprises me, but...

Whenever I see schools leaping onto the massive hypocrisy bandwagon, the "let's distrust all students" bandwagon, and even the, "let's usurp parental rights" bandwagon, I know the moral compass is way off.

For schools with no alternative parking options (which includes some of these), the right to, say, work after school is no dependent on a student giving away constitutional rights - that presumption of innocence. It is also dependent on giving away any right to privacy. If I attended one of these high schools, this rule would push me right out the door, permanently - and honestly, I think I'm a pretty damned good driver.

Why not just implant a GPS device under the kids' skin? Well, they'd probably like to do that. Most of these communities are incredibly unsure of their abilities as parents - so unsure of themselves and their morality that they automatically assume any child out of their sight will be doing "the wrong thing," so, again, no surprise, but...

I have another idea. I think that any adult involved in the school system - faculty, administration, staff, school board, should be subject to the same rule, except, in this case, every police stop will be reported to the students in their schools and to the newspapers and television stations. After all, mistrust is a two-way street.

- Ira Socol

Imagining

I came out of the pub, crossed the road which stretched in a pure straight line from horizon to horizon, and stood at the edge of a vast cold swale, the landscape feature which had once convinced earth-bound writers that this planet was crisscrossed by vast canals. Unlike the deep green of the terraformed environment at my back, what lay before me was unchanged from the days of the first NASA rovers, unchanged since further back than anyone could imagine.

Had I consumed less alcohol the wind might have stung, but it did not, and the grey sky swirled with the slight, threadlike clouds which always stretched above, and I stood there for a long time, the blown sands scouring my face...

Earth rises above the Martian landscape. NASA

I'm no Ray Bradbury, but I believe that I retain the "child-like" capacity to imagine. And to imagine in a way which is human-centered, not technology-centered.

"Mr. Bradbury referred to himself as an “idea writer,” by which he meant something quite different from erudite or scholarly. “I have fun with ideas; I play with them,” he said. “ I’m not a serious person, and I don’t like serious people. I don’t see myself as a philosopher. That’s awfully boring."' (The New York Times)

Unlike so much of science fiction, which endlessly halts the storyline to explain one technology or another, Bradbury was less interested in the rocket which got you to Mars than in how you'd behave when you got there. He was as interested in the wide range of human experience as he was in the morals of his stories. And he was as interested in how the structures of his writing and how it impacted understanding as he was in the storytelling itself: When you turn the page to Chapter 31 in Something Wicked This Way Comes(the first Bradbury book I remember listening to), you are faced with nothing but, "Nothing much else happened, all the rest of that night," and the tension of the preceding story arc pops like an overinflated balloon.

Bradbury understood technology as a tool, not an end, and he understood human environments in transcendent ways.

The Pedestrian: Illustration by Joseph Mugnaini

"To enter out into that silence that was the city at eight o'clock of a misty evening in November, to put your feet upon that buckling concrete walk, to step over grassy seams and make your way, hands in pockets, through the silences, that was what Mr. Leonard Mead most dearly loved to do. He would stand upon the corner of an intersection and peer down long moonlit avenues of sidewalk in four directions, deciding which way to go, but it really made no difference; he was alone in this world of A.D. 2053..." (The Pedestrian, 1951 pdf)

As I read of Bradbury's death on this 6th of June, I thought of how different his "imaginings" were than too many of ours. Though, "The 1953 release Fahrenheit 451- inspired by the Cold War, the rise of television and the author's passion for libraries - was an apocalyptic narrative of nuclear war abroad and empty pleasure at home, with firefighters assigned to burn books instead of putting blazes out. A futuristic classic often taught alongside George Orwell's 1984 and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Bradbury's novel anticipated iPods, interactive television, electronic surveillance and live, sensational media events" (Guardian/Press Association), Bradbury was not overly invested in describing what had replaced books, or even why. He did not worry about making books look like books on an iPad, he worried about the maintenance of human stories, and storytelling.

I say this here because I get very tired of people imagining our future schools and seeing specific products - products which sit on today's consumer shelves no less. I ask people to "dream," to "fantasize," and they all too often come back with iPads and laptops, with iBooks and YouTube. But we don't need an imagination - and we don't need schools - for those things. They're out there, and they are not even "new" anymore.

The point becomes obvious when you consider Bradbury's strongly held attitudes toward "schooling," "Mr. Bradbury himself disdained formal education. He went so far as to attribute his success as a writer to his never having gone to college. Instead, he read everything he could get his hands on, by authors including Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Thomas Wolfe and Ernest Hemingway. He paid homage to them in 1971 in the autobiographical essay “How Instead of Being Educated in College, I Was Graduated From Libraries.”' (The New York Times) He sought an education as widely ranging, as unfiltered, as possible. He did not want the imposed frames of textbooks and lectures, but instead sought to observe the world (see post below). He didn't want homework, and he wouldn't have wanted video homework either, he wanted what he found in the stacks of his beloved libraries - the chaotic way humans actually learn by leaping from topic to topic and interest to interest.

Mars is Heaven, Ray Bradbury Theater, see parts two and three

But that is not to suggest that Bradbury did not understand the power of any chosen medium. As with the "turn the page to Chapter 31," he could magnify the power of any method of storytelling. '"What I have always been is a hybrid author," Bradbury said in 2009. "I am completely in love with movies, and I am completely in love with theatre, and I am completely in love with libraries."' (Guardian/Press Association)

So, to celebrate the life of one of our greatest authors, begin to imagine. But do not assemble your fantasies from shelves stocked by Steve Jobs or Larry Page or Bill Gates or George Lucas, assemble them from dreams of education embedded deeply in humanity, in the people - the society - the culture - we want to be, and perhaps in the technologies we imagine our students inventing.

When you fantasize what school might be, don't begin with school

- Ira Socol

Focused Chaos

When we created this video - Growing Iridescent Classrooms - we were really tapping into the basic learning idea of this century, an idea which has been growing and developing since the 1960s.

Growing Iridescent Classrooms

The ideas, in which 19th century factory production techniques are replaced by much free-er, much more human paradigms, might best be illustrated in the three videos below...

ABC's Nightline asks IDEO to recreate the shopping cart, 1999

There are a few phrases of vital importance in these videos. "Not organized chaos," IDEO's boss says, "focused chaos." For he finds too much organization self-defeating. You must "hire people who don't listen to you," he says, "but corporate America" - and I might add, most educational systems - "aren't ready for that." Ideas need "eclectic teams" - not all people with similar educational backgrounds, not all people with similar training. "In an innovative culture you can't have a hierarchy," he adds, noting that ideas flow from everybody.

We must get out into the world and observe, counting "seat time" is absurd. We must "have wild ideas. If everyone only came up with appropriate ideas, you wouldn't have any points to take from, to get to really innovative ideas." The team must do the evaluating. "Enlightened trial and error," "fail your way to success." Places of innovation are playful.

Now IDEO, and other groups, corporate and non-profit, from NASA to Data General, from Mozilla to Twitter, from Push Pin Studios to Xerox PARC, wherever true learning gets to run and move toward the future, we find the kind of chaos which allows new concepts to both emerge and be tested.

The era of the "open classroom" primary and "school-without-walls" secondary -
that much maligned time of "new math" and "whole language" - produced the thinkers
who revolutionized the world, creating Microsoft, Apple, Google, the supercomputer...

I was helping my sister's family move from California to Massachusetts when I entered my brother-in-law's new place of work. I entered a huge space filled with guys in shorts and T-shirts riding bikes and skateboards, laughing, yelling, throwing frisbees, footballs, baseballs... And I realized that this workplace, at that moment creating the world's most powerful computer, looked a whole lot more like my "free school" alternative high school than like any workplace for which the traditional classroom was prepping us.

I like this review of Tracy Kidder's capturingof the essence of that space...

"When you're young and you get interested in something, you get passionate about it. Maybe it's because you don't know the importance of money and responsibility yet, but you really get into a sport, or hobby, or any other interest, and you do that hobby or play that sport, you write stories or fix cars, making whatever sacrifices you need to just so you can do this thing you love, not because you want to make money at it, or gain respect or admiration, but because it gives you priceless rewards and satisfaction."

And that passion, that messy and barely controlled excitement, is what I see at places like Bridge21Learning, what I see at CoderDojos, what I see when I see kids at play, in fields, on streets, or online, what I see in good primary/elementary schools, but which I rarely see in secondary schools. - or in the often worthless virtual environments created by most educational software developers.

Play. Joy. Chaos. Argument. Movement. Absurdity. Laughter. Human Observation. These are all required parts of the kind of learning which leads to creation rather than replication.

Embracing the chaotic nature of learning... An Australian school at work

There's a point here. Schools must trust childhood and children. They must embrace the search-for-the-new of adolescence. They must stop trying to turn kids into compliant adults destined to build iPads for $8.00 a day. Instead they must help develop young adults who have kept their wonder and width of vision intact. Talking to Irish educators last month in Tipperary, I noted that their nation's exam driven secondary school system left Trinity College's Medical School with great test takers who were so clueless about the world that the first thing they need is art classes, so they can learn to see and describe. If Irish kids, or American kids, came out of secondary schools that looked a lot more like IDEO, that problem wouldn't exist. And, a whole lot more students would want to come to school, instead of trying to get out of it.

- Ira Socol

Fictional Interlude: Who sat next to me in eighth grade

my rarely updatedfiction blog is here...

 

Stevie Sodoni in homeroom, adjoining names, assigned seats. Fell asleep within two minutes every morning and drooled on the desk. I'd say "here" for me and him and then try to get thrown out before the class could go any further. 

Robert diNodo probably went through the whole year with a black and blue right arm. We shared this black-topped lab table in Science and Robert was an A student and all the tests were multiple choice which meant all I had to do was copy his answers but he was one of those kids who hunched over the page and wrapped his arms around it so you couldn't see so I would just punch him in the shoulder until he'd give up and move his arm and by that time I'd only have time to copy about half but still, it was one of my best classes. 

In dumb English usually Danny Nally who laughed at everything, all the time, and who was always throwing things at me, especially books and I'd take it for awhile then, inevitably, retaliate, then I'd get in trouble but trouble was just getting sent to the Resource Room most of the time which was better than sitting in English. 

Nobody in the Resource Room. There was this wide windowsill and I'd sit at the far end and just stare out the window and everybody would leave me alone because I had a reputation for hitting, and I really liked it there if it was raining. 

Nobody in Gym or shop either. In shop they let me weld but they wouldn't let me have a torch I could walk around with: that would have been crazy. So they let me arc weld instead which made me feel like the god of hell fire and let them be sure I was tethered to the electrical apparatus. 

At lunch me and Bill and Anthony and Jason were the first guys to cross from the boys side of the cafeteria to the girls side. The boys had benches at long tables and the girls had round tables and chairs and we started going over and sitting with Kelly and Jane and Mary Margaret and Wendy and they tried to stop us for a few weeks and other guys made fun of us but then they gave up and the other guys were just jealous. 

Bobby Castore and I sat in the back of Mr. Hudson's Social Studies class by the window. Me, right by the window which was an issue but I held the seat the whole year. I skated by listening for almost five minutes every day, giving one answer, and seeming like I was trying. Bobby got by cause he somehow passed the quizzes. If it got boring we'd get thrown out together, skip out of the building if the weather was ok, and go drink beers we had stashed in the morning up on the hill behind the tennis courts. From the right spot we could see the water. 

I only went to math once a week or so. If I was drunk from the last period I'd stay outside. If I wasn't I usually just went to the Resource Room, which was expected. If I went to class there was a desk way in the back corner where I sat by myself and drew pictures of stories I didn't know how to write down. 

Eventually the bell would ring and I'd go to a team practice, or just down to where the tidal pools let me watch life on earth be renewed. That was better.

© Ira David Socol 2006-2011

What is Childhood Anyway?

Mickybo and Me, Wendy and Dorothy, Rousseau and Wesley

a slightly re-written version of a response I wrote this week to a series of readings regarding how we understand childhood.

In the 2004 film Mickybo and Me1 two children, trapped by the violence and corruption of the adult world beyond them, flee mid-1970s Belfast for a fling of adventure and delinquency across County Down in the southeast corner of Northern Ireland.

As in J. M. Barrie’s Peter and Wendy (Peter Pan), the return to the adult world proves to be a negative experience. In this case, disastrous for the “Peter” character (Mickybo), while for the “Wendy” character (JonJo, the “me”) it is, as expected, simply sad and disappointing.

These visions of childhood are, obviously, deeply at odds with the more familiar vision, represented by everything from The Wizard of Oz, to television programs like Rugrats, to Home Alone. Though all of these also present children out on their own having unforgettable adventures, there is no doubt that safety and happiness lie in the return of the children to their families.

Do adults train/save/create children or do adults corrupt children?

When I began my graduate program in education I firmly believed that, for most children in the United States, not going to school would be better for them than going to school, so I probably find myself firmly on Rousseau’s side in the 17th Century's “Natural Child” debate. That debate, which has truly continued right through today, pitted those like John Wesley - "break the will of your child," "bring his will into subjection to yours that it may be afterward subject to the will of God" - against Jean Jacques Rousseau who "captured the imagination of Europe with his validation of nature, which espoused the natural goodness of children and the corrupting effects of certains kinds of education."2

Reading the "histories of childhood," and I suppose viewing them as I probably view everything, through lenses which analyze power relationships, I find myself struck by the formalization of an adult structure which, at least over the past 400 years, has been committed to “saying anything” that will ensure both the powerlessness of all children and strict definition of children not comfortably willing to accept complete social reproduction as “evil.”

This is even true when society deals with the counter-archetype. Peter Pan Syndrome suggests social immaturity and dependence, despite Barrie’s Peter Pan character being exceedingly competent and functionally independent. The play Peter Pan is most commonly presented with a woman performing the lead role of a boy “clad in skeleton leaves and the juices that flow from trees," a role which might otherwise evoke significant power, including a pre-adolescent sexuality. Is the strength of this young male character diminished when that part is filled by Sandy Duncan or Cathy Rigby?

I am forced to ask, are children powerful? They must be, if, for example, they require the levels of discipline and punishment that are part of family life, school life, and religious life in so much of American society. Without strength and power the molding process would be easy, and seemingly far more universally successful.

But if children are powerful, why do they need such elaborate protections? Especially from their own actions? In Mickybo and Me, in Peter Pan, though the children put themselves into stunningly risky situations, they survive every one. They do not need magic (The Wizard of Oz), or accident (Rugrats), or the police (Home Alone) to provide the critical rescue. But a parent or a school embracing the Peter Pan myth would likely be accused of child neglect, at the least.

Are children born evil? The thrust of Oz and Home Alone is that children get into trouble, head off into these adventures, because they are problematic children in the first place. Misunderstood, yes, but problematic at the core. Dorothy is unable to reasonably control her dog (or her ambitions), then runs away from home. Kevin is a terror. Both are subjected to trials which teach them the error of their ways. These tales seem driven by the Christian orthodoxy of original sin, and are very different from both Peter Pan and Mickybo, where parental actions push the children to discover paths outside the prescribed norms. (The problem begins for Mickybo in the sectarian hatred of Northern Ireland, for Wendy, it begins with the father’s vanity, “He had his position in the city to consider. Nana also troubled him in another way. He had sometimes a feeling that she did not admire him.”)

But if children are not born evil, why is school seen as a conversion process? Why do children need so many rules, schedules, controls?

On the other side, if Peter Pan and Mickybo are right, if the adult world corrupts a somewhat perfect natural state, what does that imply for society, for us as parents, for us as educators?

Because if we argue that children are innocent and vulnerable, then would not schools look radically different? Would discipline and coercion really be the dominant themes? And if we argue that children are both powerful and evil, then we surely need to re-imagine our roles as liberal parents. But if we argue, as we often seem to, that children are innocent (please protect them from sexualized thoughts), vulnerable (do not let them out of our sight), evil (they will get away with anything if you allow it), and powerful (you have no idea how much trouble they can create), we are simply mimicking the absurd arguments of colonialists – which, of course, may have been spun from early concepts of childhood itself. That is, you make whatever argument you must, at this moment, to defend your control over another human.

That seems wrong to me, though I wouldn't suggest that I know of any obvious solution to all this.

- Ira Socol

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1 which is based on Owen McCafferty’s play Mojo Mickybo http://www.backstage.com/bso/news_reviews/nyc/review_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003850925

2 Hendrick, Harry. (1997) Constructions and Reconstructions of British Childhood: An Interpretative Survey, 1800 to the Present. In James and Prout (eds), Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood. Falmer, New York and London. p. 36