Changing Gears 2012: rejecting the "flip"

(1) ending required sameness     (3) re-thinking rigor     (4) its not about 1:1      (5) start to dream again    (6) learning to be a society (again)     (7) re-thinking what "literature" means       (8) maths are creative, maths are not arithmetic     (9) changing rooms     (10) undoing academic time     (11) social networks beyond Zuckerbergism     (12) knowing less about students, seeing more     (13) why we fight

"I can't wait to watch my Khan
Academy videos tonight..."

Maybe I'm highly sensitive to this. I grew up in a 420 square foot home with two parents and four kids. This was not a place for the calm production of homework. Now, yes, I had two university educated parents, smart, dedicated parents who did whatever they could, but both worked or went to school or both, and if my older siblings were struggling to help the "dumb little brother" with his homework, obviously, they weren't doing their own.

Anyway, this is not to be confused with an Oprah-style faux memoir, that's not the point. The point is that in my memory, my home had more important things to worry about than getting up at 4.30 am to do a kid's homework, the way President Obama remembers in his "tough" family life.

In later years, as a cop in Brooklyn and The Bronx, as the computer co-ordinator for a homeless mission with before and after school programs for homeless kids, and in work in high poverty schools, I know what kids in poverty face at home. And it isn't a few hours curled up with their own laptop watching video instruction anymore than it was ever my siblings and me curled up with textbooks. Real life, as they say, is different.

So in changing gears for this new year,
step two is "rejecting the flipped classroom."

Let me begin here: Any pedagogical design which relies, in essential terms, on homework is a problem for me, and many others.

"There is a growing number of parents and educators who don't believe we should rob children of the time after school with mandatory homework. We believe time at home should be for pursuing passions, connecting with friends and family, playing and engaging in physical activity.  In some families it might be the time needed to take care of a sibling, work a job, or take care of their own child.  Let us leave children to the activities they and their family choose or find necessary and instead as John Taylor Gatto suggests (in lesson 7), that we should "give children more independent time during the school day" at which time they may also choose to watch flipped classroom lessons." - Lisa Nielson 

in the family room, time for homework

Students, as I noted at the start, "go home" to radically variable environments. Some head home to houses with university educated parents with the time and inclination to support their learning, others to university educated parents with an inclination to do their work for them, others to university educated parents who are either not home or are 'not present' in their children's lives. Many more go home to homes without the parental resources or skillsets to support student learning, or go home to houses where the children themselves have real responsibilities - including child and/or parent care and/or employment which is essential to their survival within a family unit. Further, home resources vary dramatically. There are broadband - everybody has a computer at home - homes, and there are disconnected homes (see New Rochelle, NY's attempted solution for students who lack Broadband) - but these requirements are never mentioned by either homework or "Flipped Classroom" advocates. So, "Homework" - an essential part of the "flip" - has always been controversial for many good reasons.

"Structurally, homework might have one of two fundamentally opposite effects on the home. On the one hand, homework might be viewed as an intrusion by the school into hours reserved for the family--a direct threat to parents' authority to manage their children's time outside of school. According to this model, homework is an exercise of what might be termed "school imperialism" at the expense of parents. It interferes, for example, with chores, with music and dancing lessons, and with the social intercourse that parents and children may expect from each other in the evening.

"Alternately, parents might perceive homework very differently: not as an intrusion or a threat to their authority but, rather, as the primary means by which schools communicate and collaborate with parents on academic matters and engage them in the educational process. According to this model, homework is a link from school to home that keeps parents informed about what the school is teaching, gives them a chance to participate in their children's schooling, and helps to keep the schools accountable to parents. Not to assign homework is to exclude parents from playing an active role in their children's academic development." - Gill and Schlossman, 2003, TCR 105-5 846-871

"Children explained that the parents are `hardworking' people
who try `to support  their children' and `keep their children
safe' and who `worry a lot about how they can make (it so that)
their kids go to college'. [They] witness at an early age that
even if parents work hard, they may not be able to protect and
support their children. Poor children who witness people who
are working hard and not getting rewarded may well be likely
to have a more profound, complicated understanding
of the consequences of poverty." (Weinger 2000)

From the 1890s until World War II homework was consistently highly controversial, with laws against it (California 1901 among many others), the muckraking work of Joseph Mayer Rice The Futility of the Spelling Grind, 1897), editorials in publications such as Ladies Home Journal, "It forced families to play a nightly "comedy of fathers and mothers teaching the children their lessons, with the teachers playing the detective the next morning to see how well the parents have done the work of instruction."' (from Gill and Schlossman among other locations), and the general weight of the Dewey-inspired progressive education movement. Homework was and is "unequal" because of home difference. It was/is "unhealthy" by virtue of trapping children inside and keeping them inactive. It destroys/destroyed "family time" wrecking the transmission of family culture between generations and between differently aged children within families and communities. It did/does undermine parental authority by making parents nothing more than enforcers of the schools' discipline codes.

Kralovec and Buell(2001) make the argument contemporary with their assertions that homework works against the poor and working class children via home inequity, Kevin Thomas explores the demographic impact of immigrant status combined with homework in this century, ("English-language proficiency, for example, affects the ability of immigrant parents to navigate the vicissitudes of parent-teacher relationships and labor market conditions and is also likely to affect their ability to help their children with their homework.") (see also Lareau, Home Advantage), and Alfie Kohn has loudly brought the Deweyan arguments into the present.

So, first, the "Flipped Classroom" is homework dependent, and I would argue that "homework" is, and always has been, a socially reproductive construct, which rewards the wealthy and educated parents by giving their children a huge advantage in school.

Here Comes the Neighborhood
Get More: SOUTH
PARKmore...

Nobody says it better, South Park explains homework as Social Reproduction in "Token is Rich"
(much as I hate to say that Cartman is right)

But the "Flipped Classroom" is worse than 'typical homework' - it literally shifts the explanatory part of school away from the educators and to the home, however disconnected that home might be, however un-educated parents might be, however non-English speaking that home might be, however chaotic that home might be. So, kids with built in advantages get help with the understanding, and kids without come to school the next day clueless. Those "flip" advocates who acknowledge this talk about ways of "catching kids up," of providing school time for those without access or resources at home, but what this really means is putting the kids from homes in poverty into perpetual remediation as the wealthy continue to blaze ahead.

Homework under the Streetlights (New York Times)

This is the same as the teacher who gives kids "free time" or extra study advantages if they complete work or tests quickly. What they are doing is punishing kids who require or prefer more time. Punishing those who read slowly or who use alternative text, for example. Recently my "spousal equivalent" moved through the first 375 pages of Wonderstruckas we sat in a Barnes&Noble on a Saturday afternoon. I bought the book, brought it home, and after three days was on page 23. In school, and especially under the Flip Principle, she's have 2.75 extra days of doing other work - more advanced work - already, while I'd be locked in remedial hell.

In the worst cases, the Khan Academy model, the flip is just an especially brutal version of the old, "go home and read pages 741-749 and do the problems on 750-751," but with videos instead of text. Now videos might be better than text for some kids, but there is no more choice, no more explanation, no more interaction than in this worst model of schooling. I think these are the parts of education which require the most care, the most individualization, and the most interaction between educator and learner.

School is the place for schoolwork. School is also the place where we can help children make sense of their "outside of school" lives. It is the responsibility of educators to help students with their outside lives, not the reverse. And if there is homework - as I told Virginia educators last month - that homework should be, "what can I bring home from school which helps my family and community."

Especially in these times when the economic divide in the United States and in the United Kingdom is at or near historic - Dickensian - levels, the embrace of a pedagogical system designed to increase educational outcomes disparity on the basis of home life seems particularly horrible. We need to be better educators than that, better people than that.

So while I fully embrace, encourage, am even part of initiatives which bring the information resources of school to all children's homes - I think we must move beyond WiFi to 4G-WiMax efforts which connect our students and their families wherever they are - I believe the uses of those technologies and information access at home should be in support of the students themselves, their families, and their communities, and not in support of narrow pedagogical efforts which belong within the school day.

So please, reject the flip. Re-imagine your school day and everything you do instead. A "flipped classroom" is the same classroom, just re-arranged. Our students deserve more imaginative thinking than that. And all of our students deserve an educational environment which moves us toward equality of opportunity, not further away from that.

- Ira Socol
next (delayed by a day or two): re-thinking rigor

Changing Gears 2012: ending required sameness

(2) rejecting the flipped classroom     (3) re-thinking rigor     (4) its not about 1:1      (5) start to dream again    (6) learning to be a society (again)     (7) re-thinking what "literature" means       (8) maths are creative, maths are not arithmetic    (9) changing rooms     (10) undoing academic time     (11) social networks beyond Zuckerbergism     (12) knowing less about students, seeing more     (13) why we fight

"in this...I could always just play..."

Humans are born different from one another. Anyone who has ever seen more than one new-born human should know this, though clearly, many do not. It is the magic of genetics, the constant search for new mixes that will push any species forward. You have to cheat nature to make multiple replicas, the "breeding" of animals, the genetic engineering of plants, and we know that when a "monoculture" is created, flexibility and adaptability fall off the scale.

When I was in third grade, so, eight-years-old, I could remember and work with all sorts of information, and I discovered that, when shown blueprints of a building, I could see it clearly in three dimensions in my head. I could read music, and play a decent horn. I could swim much better than most, though I'd never learn to skate like my father, nor grow as tall as him. And I really could not read at all, or make things recognizable as letters.

No one I knew, no one in the huge (160+) third grade at Trinity Elementary School, had the same exact skillset that I had. There were kids who were incredible readers, phenomenal baseball hitters, incredible musicians, who were faster than anyone on the playground, or who could turn a lump of clay up in the art room into beautiful things while most of us struggled to make ash trays as Christmas gifts for our parents.

This is important for the human future. There are a million plus different things which need to get done by the human race, and no one human can possibly do all those things well, so we - social animals that we are no matter what American Republicans claim - have vast differentiation as a species because no human ever really thrives, or even survives, alone. (The "survivalist" armed with all sorts of weapons which are the work of hundreds of thousands of others simply proves the point, as does the "bootstrap businessperson" who relies on an economic system and on an infrastructure which are the work of millions and millions of others.)

But there is a place where human diversity is considered something quite negative... that's in the traditional school, in the traditional classroom. In those places we assume that all humans are essentially the same, that they develop at the exact same pace, that they have the same skills - and should have the same skills. This is not just an assumption, it is the law in the United States and many other nations. It drives almost all educational policy coming from Washington, Westminster, Canberra, Ottawa. It is even "built in" in most spaces, where matching desks line up in matching rooms and matching schedules move children through matching days.

And it is time for us, as we head toward the middle of the 21st Century, to stop all this. It is time to dispense with age-based grades and grade-level-"expectations," time to rid ourselves of assignments where everyone works on the same thing much less in the same way, time to rid ourselves of time schedules which limit learning, time to move beyond "Universal Design" to learning studios where differentiated humans learning to live and work together.

when students make choices, contagious creativity explodes

We all understand how this works if we've ever been allowed into "natural" human learning and living situations. I've sat at summer barbecues and been the "lifeguard" because I could get to a struggling kid in the water faster than anyone else there. But someone else has the patience to keep the pig roasting. I am better at framing the walls than at hanging - or especially finishing - drywall. I'll help you learn how re-think your classroom, you help me learn to keep track of money. These are the trade offs upon which human society is built, upon which human survival is built, upon which the rise of humans to the top of the food chain are built. Why begin differently, we develop differently, we learn things at different rates, we help each other learn, and we take on differing tasks in life.

Even Frank Lloyd Wright, who knew he was better than everyone, knew that
no one could draw up his designs as well as Marion Mahony [Griffin] could.

Does this suggest that we need no "common time"? Of course not. In the realm of humanness we need caves (for privacy and introspection), campfires (for collaboration), and watering holes (for communion). The gathering to eat and socialize is critical - and should never be rushed into the 15 or 20 minutes we often give schoolchildren for this activity. Funny, we constantly bemoan the loss of the Cleaver-style family dinner at home, but we have turned the act of eating together into school into a terrorizing rush.

Communion - the act of eating together while sharing - is the essential act
of human society

We need to eat together, sing together, play together, share constantly. The "Learning Studio" is a place where all this will happen continuously, and sort-of naturally. Where those ahead in one thing help those they can help, while getting help in things where others are ahead. Where we learn to use the tools we need to manipulate the world to our benefit. Where we learn to work well alone and together. Where we learn to be safe ourselves and how to make safe environments for others. Where we develop skills at our own rates.

This is so different from the standard graded classroom where at the very best, one-third of kids will almost always be bored, and one-third always be left behind. Or the classroom where kids compete for grades, or stickers, or approval, based on the way the teacher wants the kids to learn.

I'm not suggesting anything new. From the start educators knew that age-based grades, "required sameness" was a really bad idea, but then, as now, their understanding was over-ridden by the corporate desire (then Carnegie, now Gates, et al) put all children through an industrial stamping process. Michigan's Superintendent of Public Education wrote the following in 1901, you may want to read it, and then vow to change gears in 2012.

"Another question is that of grading and promoting pupils. Close grading assumes that every pupil can do nearly the same school work in the same time. We think we understand the normal five-year-old, six-year-old, seven-year-old, and know how much reading, numbers, language, science, etc., he ought to compass. Having arranged the course of study accordingly, we attempt to fit every pupil into it. But every teacher finds that pupils do not easily fit into these grades, and then begins a struggle distasteful to pupil and nerve-destroying, sometimes conscience-destroying, to teachers. The questions of aptitude, intellectual development, character-building, are made subservient to "making the grade." Then follows the inevitable cramming process, and the resulting destruction of originality, personality, and self-reliance—a devastation that never ought to be truthfully charged against any institution, much less an educational one.

   "On the other hand, there are those pupils who by nature or because of environment have a grasp and comprehension that is far beyond that of the normal child. Such find the work too easy. They make no great efforts, and are thus defrauded of the best results of study. The easygoing work makes them easy-going pupils. They become indolent; they are put to sleep. In this manner many a brilliant intellect has been lost to the world. If it is an injury to the dull child to stretch him to the grade, it seems a crime to the brilliant one to cramp him into it.

  "Thus there arises the mooted question as to what class of children should be made the basis of rigid grading. It would be well for us often to address ourselves to the question as to what makes the apparent difference in the mental powers of children, and as to whether there is much difference. If we do this we shall find some puzzling paradoxes; for instance, we shall find that many "dull.. pupils are mentally strong, and in their sports are often leaders; and that in those sports that demand quick thought and originality their minds often work with rapidity, accuracy, and great ingenuity. If we carry the investigation into the activities of life, we shall find many successful business men with minds vigorous and active, who confess with sadness that they "never could learn books." And sad it is; but in my opinion it would not be true, except that some one "blundered.."

   "We are led to conclude that the so called difference in the mental power of the mass of pupils is usually apparent only. The average child is an average child. What seems dulness in some is usually ignorance of methods of study, while the so called "bright child" has simply adaptability. He, by intuition or practice, has learned how to attack a subject. His lesson, therefore, is easily mastered. He really makes much less mental effort than the sluggish pupil. What teacher cannot call to mind many "dull students" who later became excellent scholars? The explanation is not that by a miracle a better brain was supplied, but that the pupil accomplished the miracle of learning how to study. Indeed the one necessity in accomplishing the work of a course of study is really to teach pupils how to study."

- Ira Socol
next... Rejecting the Flipped Classroom in 2012

for whom the medium is the message...

Telling stories without words. George Méliès, 1902

"Enough is enough. No more computers, cameras or consoles. No more watches, neckties or perfumes. Heck, no dead tree, no annoying lights, no overstuffed duck, either. I’m casting an ink-and-paper pall over the holiday, whether Christmas, Hanukkah or Kwanzaa: This year we’re going to give each other a book.

"A real, hold-in-your-hands paper book. Nothing more, nothing less. Already, the book edict has gone out on paperless email to the two key recipients of holiday love: my children. Noses have been turned up, derisive shrugs have been given: What a downer the old man is. A book? Come on."

The above was the holiday missive from International Herald-Tribune "senior editor" Kyle Jarrard, who went on to describe how all the folks say about digital devices and distraction are nonsense, "I’ve been known to drive the car while reading. Reading is the answer to everything, I’m fond of saying. More long stares have been given in my direction for years regarding my inability to not read," and finally to describe himself as absolutely and completely clueless about literature in general...

"A book allows you to time-travel, or just plain travel to real and imagined places, a not un-neat trick considering the price of airline tickets or space tourism. It allows you to meet evil, wonderful, mysterious, odd, crazy, fun, and not-fun people who often end up being more “real” in your life than real people. A simple tome of paper links you back, for instance, to the age of François I, Renaissance poet and book collector supremo, when the printing press and its wild spread across Europe was as exciting to us all as are e-books today."

Mr. Jarrard is, of course, the kind of easy target I enjoy beginning an argument with. His argument is so patently ridiculous that it creates its own parody, but, as I hope you know, if he was alone in his self-deception, and probably if he wasn't a powerful personage in the world of news distribution, I wouldn't bother.

But he is not alone, and his is a powerful voice, and so there is a problem.

Faith in a medium. A scroll made of sheepskin, lettered by hand.
No vowels, no punctuation.

Now, I can "show" Mr. Jarrard how he might travel to space or even back to 1954 New York City without touching paper, without even opening his eyes. Or how he might travel to space or back to the 14th Century without decoding a single letter, but is this really necessary in this second decade of the 21st Century? Really? Must we point out to an educated, responsible, journalist that one can read and understand Genesis even if it is printed on paper made from cotton or wood-pulp, and printed mechanically? Must we point out to someone like this that blind people managed to understand books even before Braille was developed? Or - perhaps more significantly - must we explain to a senior staffer in The New York Times organization that Homer's Iliad and Odyssey were great literature long before anyone had ever written either of those "books" down.

visiting space without the smell of paper and ink

Mr. Jarrard, like too many in education, has a faith-based belief in a medium. Actually, his - their - belief is much narrower than that. It is a faith-based belief in an industrial process, in paper-making machines and rotary presses, for it is a belief in "print," not even in "text." To this group Homer and Socrates were illiterate morons, incapable of experiencing literature, the Blind are a sad, pathetic group forever banished from the corridors of knowledge, and anyone who accesses a newspaper on-line is exchanging depth of understanding for convenience.

And that is very sad. Or worse than sad. It is a kind of evil, an insistence that one's preferred medium, or in this case, textural and olfactory experience, is superior to any other. It is the worst kind of cultural imperialism.

Y. The Last Man. Book One.

My house is full of Christmas books this week. They range from an epistolary novelI gave to my "spousal equivalent" (a Gary Stager term), to a collection of Shel Silverstein storiesdone for Playboy Magazine in the 1960s, to the Momofuku Milk BarCookbook, to Brian Selznick's Wonderstruck, to the first three Vertigo-Paperback installments of Y: The Last Man, a graphic novel.

All tell stories, all take the "reader" places they perhaps have never been, just as the stories included on our #ccGlobal St. Nicholas' Workshop Christmas Site do. There is no actual hierarchy of information delivery here, no matter how anyone, Mr. Jarrard or otherwise, wishes there were. Stories are told well or badly, effectively or ineffectively, entertainingly or boringly, imaginatively or not, in ways accessible to the many or the few, no matter the medium. Poor Shakespeare does not rank below Tom Clancy because he worked in the Elizabethan equivalent of television rather than print. Socrates is not a lesser light than Malcolm Gladwell because he spoke his words and never had them printed and bound. Charles Dickens, that "blogger" of the penny-paper era is not less important than Jack Kerouac even though Kerouac chose to write, like those ancient rabbis, on a scroll.

Brian Selznick, author but child of film-makers, has worked out a literary
mix of comic book, cartoon, and text for himself.

It is essential that we understand this now. It is essential that we stand up to those, from Mr. Jarrard to those who push "Common Core" standards, who seek to rank media in a hierarchy according to their personal preferences and in order to preserve their own status, wealth, and power ("I am important and intelligent because I am highly literate.").

Our students can, and will, tell stories in many, many ways. They will read stories in many, many ways. Sometimes they will read certain ways because that is how their brains work - which is neither, I need to tell you, neither better nor worse than the way yours works - and sometimes they will read certain ways because that is their preference, and thus their human right. And sometimes they will read certain ways because that is the way the author offers access to the story, and sometimes they will need help to convert media because the author's preferences and their needs do not match up - I understand - I have witnessed professors and teachers reading Shakespeare, and though this seems odd to me - the performances are routinely available via YouTube - I do not criticize them. Perhaps they can not hear well, or perhaps they cannot easily sit through a whole performance.

So give your students stories this year. And give them the freedom to tell stories. The medium may matter, but the medium is only the message if the message can effectively be received through the medium chosen. Otherwise, an unreceived story, is, well... not much at all.

- Ira Socol

Stop asking questions if you know the answer

I was working on a lesson with sixth graders and middle school teachers in doing math without any tools, just in your head. Not memorization, but logic.

So I said, "I've never really gotten the "9 x" table, so, if I asked you what 9x12 was, how would you figure it out?"

See, this is a question I cannot possibly answer for them. There is no "correct" answer possible.

"I'd say," one student quickly responded, "that 9x9 is 81 and 9x3 is 27," he paused, you could see him looking at the addition in his head to check himself, "and that adds up to 108."

"That's not the way to do it," a teacher sitting at his table told the student, forcing me to intervene instantly. "That's great," I said, "perfect. But I can never remember that 9x9 thing like you can, so, does anyone have another way?"

This connects, just keep reading...
Newt Gingrich says that every nation shown here (in color) is "invented"
and thus has limited rights. Do your students agree?

 The teacher had her answer, and she was thinking of traditional school questions, which are really not questions at all, whether asked on paper, or verbally, or via computers, or via clickers, but traps. 'Gotcha' devices to train kids to respond exactly the way they've been taught. When we ask real questions, kids stop repeating and start thinking, and learning.

For me one of the critical ideas in education comes on page 138 of the Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner 1969 masterpiece, Teaching as a Subversive Activity, "Prohibit teachers from asking any questions they already know the answer to," the authors recommend, "This...would not only force teachers to perceive learning from a learner's perspective, it would help them to learn to ask questions which produce knowledge."

The teacher who asks, "what is 9x12?" teaches nothing. The question I asked, among other things, introduces the concept of algebra. For the "9x9" kid, x = (9x9)+(3x9), finding the unknown via knowns, and he is thinking, not parroting.

Why critical? You should never ask any question for which you will not allow unexpected answers. If you don't allow unexpected answers, you are declaring that you "know everything," and, as I told some UConn grad students last month, all saying, "I know everything" does is tell students that you are a liar, a bad way to begin a learning relationship.

Now, if you are an American, I understand that your nation prizes simplistic, expected answers and efficiency over learning and democracy, so this is difficult, but it makes it doubly important if our kids are to build something better. Do you, do your students, know that most governments in the United States begin every election by declaring that they have absolutely no intention of counting every vote? They do this - refuse to count write-in votes for "unregistered" candidates - because they can't handle anything unexpected, because it might take too long, whatever. Of course, the unexpected answer is invention (we don't need an improved gas lamp, we need something else), and it is democratic, and it forges new cognitive paths, but yes, it is slower (In Ireland it can take many days to count votes in an election, which would really mess CNN up). OK, maybe a vote for Mickey Mouse is odd, but say 10% of the electorate chose to do that, might we not learn something?

What works in math, in elections, works everywhere. The reason I brought the Andersonville Trial to sixth graders last week was that this is a question impossible to answer definitively. Did the United States government really insist that it was an obligation to take up arms against it if that government behaved immorally? And if so, what does that mean? What did it mean at Nuremberg? What does it mean at Zuccotti Park for Occupy Wall Street?

It was why I asked students, "Where does 'space' begin?" because, well, we've been arguing over that for years.

Newt Gingrich gave us a fabulous history question this week... does the fact that your nation was once part of an empire mean that you have no rights? So, because the United States was part of the British Empire, is it an "invented nation" with no rights? Because England was part of the Roman Empire, is it an "invented nation" with no rights? Because Greece (like Palestine) was part of the Ottoman Empire, is it an "invented nation" with no rights? Obviously the nation of Israel was part of the Greek Empire, the Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the British Empire, is it an "invented nation" with no rights?

Is there a "correct" answer to any of this? Gingrich thinks so, do your students? How might they research this, how might they argue their opinion with real information?

British Empire in 1700, is the United States an "invented nation"
and what exactly does that mean?

Even Christmas offers amazing inquiry opportunities... Was Scrooge redeemed or just frightened into behaving well? Does the Bible require taxation for income redistribution? Why do so many northern hemisphere cultures have holy days around the Winter Solstice? and why is the gift of food so common? Who created our Christmas stories and rituals, and why?

So the next time you start to ask what 2+2=, or when the Civil War began, or the formula for some physics thing... Stop! and ask a question you do not know the answer to, a question you can't possibly know the answer to. It will liberate your students and it will liberate you.

- Ira Socol

Among Schoolchildren - December 2011

Learning how to work on any device, anywhere
Monticello High School Library
Charlottesville, Virginia

I have spent another week in Albemarle County, Virginia, working with the people, of all ages, who make up the Albemarle County Public Schools. There are fabulous educators there, people who work every day to get better at what they do. People who seem to spend 24/7 reaching out across the globe to bring their students better learning opportunities, better connections, more far reaching experiences. But now I want to talk about the kids.

There are myths in America that our kids are, well, I don't know, "lazy," "uneducated," that they are "failing," that, to use US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan's words - just this week - that we are in "a race to the bottom." And believe me, I know our schools are a long way from perfect. The educators in Albemarle County know that their schools are a long way from perfect, and we are putting in some incredibly long days to try and get closer. That is what I joined them in for the past ten, very, very long days, but...

The last five days I worked with students, as I helped teachers re-imagine lessons. We're working on something called "The Iridescent Classroom" in Albemarle County, a form of Universal Design for Learning joined to a deep commitment to getting kids ready for the choices of their century, the choices of their generation, so that they have the skills, the passions, and the knowledge to do a better job than previous generations. This requires, for students who will, for the most part, begin their adulthood in the third decade of the Twenty-First Century, the ability to collaborate globally, to share transparently, to value all cultures and skills, to search rapidly and effectively, to choose tools wisely, and to do a lot more than read and comprehend, but to be constantly able to adapt knowledge to changing environments and situations. It also includes the ability to work anywhere (like an airport, as I am doing now), from many devices, with every kind of person, through every kind of interface. And it means thinking deeply, in transformative ways.

For, to quote one sixth grader this week, "People keep making the same mistakes over and over again, and we have to stop."

He said that in a lesson about the Andersonville Trial. They are starting to study the Civil War and they are beginning Middle School, and I thought a lesson bringing these things together might make sense. Now I don't know what you were asked to do at 12, but I wasn't asked to wrestle with one of the thorniest questions of national morality... when is a person obligated to disobey orders, to rebel against his government.

We started by watching the scene above, representing a crucial moment in United States history, in which the United States Government declares that even a military officer has an obligation to disobey orders, to take up arms against his government. A position the U.S. reiterated (with the death penalty) at Nuremberg, and reiterated again when My Lai occurred.We started them with these websites:

Trial Transcripts of Trial of Henry Wirz
Nuremberg Trials
My Lai Court Marshall

And we asked these 12-year-olds, not rich kids, not kids from great neighborhoods, not kids whose parents have university degrees, but kids from some incredibly poor places, kids who came from an elementary school where teachers join local churches in sending food home every weekend when kids will be away from free school lunches, the kinds of kids Arne Duncan thinks can only handle KIPP education so they learn to stare at their teachers, we asked them what they thought... and it was remarkable.

They understood all the implications, the difficulties, the issues - ranging from a crowd of kids bullying someone to nations invading nations. They looked stuff up on their laptops, they raised serious questions. They even challenged the adults in the room.

This is what education means to me. It may or may not matter much if these kids are slow readers, we can get them information many ways. It may or may not matter if they spell well, when I was asked, "how do you spell that?" I simply said, "I'm really not sure, try spelling it in Google and see what happens." They did, it worked, they found what they needed. But what these kids already have are deep inquiry skills, deep comprehension skills, and effective technology skills. And you know what? That other stuff, well, its not easy, but they live in a century when all that is solvable.

In a math lesson a day later I watched a seventh grader, a kid who really struggled to divide 64 by 2 in his head, or 32 by 2, or, for that matter, 16 by 2, work diligently to explain to his disbelieving teacher how he knew - and he knew instantly - how many games are in the NCAA basketball tournament. He knew, because math is about rules and logic, and his logic was perfect and his understanding of the rules I had described was perfect, and because math is not arithmetic, no matter how much our poorly educated national and state leaders think it is. He and his classmates also understood, almost instantly, that the question - no calculators or paper or Google allowed - "If the temperature in Detroit, Michigan is 50 degrees what is the temperature likely to be in Windsor, Ontario? was about (a) culture, and then (b) understanding comparable scales, and then (c) order of operations.

Yes, I showed them this map. Yes they were surprised that Michigan is north of Canada (as you may be). But they got it, and could do it in their head, and understood that if you divide by 2 first then subtract 32, you're in trouble, they even understood that when they said "9" and a teacher said, "well actually 9.9," that it didn't matter, the point of mental math is to know that if someone anywhere outside the U.S. says, "it's 10 degrees," that the person isn't very cold.

With other sixth graders we rocked through a Yuri Gargarin lesson, heading deep into what "space" means and ideas of distance. I met one of the fastest, most effective, users of a search engine I have ever met... a kid usually labeled, "a problem."

I watched fourth graders listen to a story while using computers to look up everything they didn't understand.We were reading Titanicatand we were flooding them with ideas. We used Google Maps to fly from Esmont, Virginia to Belfast. Belfast? They all found Belfast. What country is Belfast in? What does "UK" mean? OK, does, "University of Kentucky" make sense? What is the United Kingdom? Is it in England or is England in the UK? Where in Belfast was the ship built? Do they still build ships there?

The story moves to Southampton, and on the big white board we showed them the Quay at Southampton. They found that. Where was London? "Who else sailed from London that we talk about in Virginia?" OK, they got me there, they knew the name of the ship and the captain who brought the colonists to Jamestown in 1607, something I didn't.

It was a wildly chaotic environment... and yet... it was not. The kids were all working, really working, learning search, learning maps. If some found their houses or ended up looking at London or missed half the story, its no big deal. They'll read the book later. They were learning skills and doing things many of the people who write the laws about education probably cannot do. Mostly, they were reveling in inquiry.

I ended the week in a high school, talking to seniors who wanted to ask questions for a citizenship/service capstone project. We sat in a library filled with students working in all sorts of ways with all sorts of tools, and they asked what I thought about requiring all Americans to have health insurance and offering in state tuition to "illegal" - undocumented - immigrants who live in the state.

I challenged them to stop thinking politically, or even constitutionally (which is, by nature, open to varied interpretations), and to think about what kind of society they wanted to live in. Why do we have laws? Why do we require anyone to do anything? Why can they tell you not to drive 100 miles an hour or tell you to wear a seat belt? The kid working on the tuition issue, who is putting together a public forum with elected officials and experts, and who invited "Rick Perry, because, why not?" asked what I thought. I suggested first that he think back to 1607 and Jamestown, Virginia. Weren't those illegal immigrants? Didn't they come without permission, not knowing the language, not willing to learn the language or rules of the society? Weren't they sloppy people so uninterested in health that they began a pandemic? Maybe, I suggested, the otherwise conservative Texas Governor Perry believes in this because Texas too was created by illegal immigrants from the United States?

They rolled with all this, wonderfully neither accepting my opinion nor rejecting it. They were considering, wondering what to ask next, who to ask next. They were as smart, as educated, as engaged as any 18-year-olds I have ever met.

So I brought up the idea of "equal vs. equitable" to them.I asked if Finland's income-based system of fines sounded good to them. This is a tough concept for Americans to consider, and they immediately began debating it. I should have brought up the pilot of The Andy Griffith Show, which, back in 1960, was all about that...

"Danny finally agrees with his wife and decides to the $5 fine. He takes out a huge wad of cash, and he gives him more money and more money. Danny doesn't care if Andy is robbing him, after all he's a big time star. Andy sees this as a time to get more money, and tells Danny he has to pay $100 or spend 10 days in jail. meanwhile Any fines another motorist $2 for the same offense.
 
"Danny is furious! He goes in his jail cell talks about tyranny in this world, and how he languishes in a cold, damp, dirty cell. Andy is offended by this and says "Now hold on a durn second!" Andy says his Aunt Lucy cleans the cell and does a fine job! The host then cross-examines Andy, and Andy says he had to raise the price to make an impression on these city folk, who can get $5 or $10 very easily. Danny realizes he was wrong and apologizes to Andy in the end after hearing his explanation"

but... I now know these kids, and I suspect one of them will find that, and a whole lot more.

So I just want to tell you, that the kids are all right, and if we trust them, and challenge them, and stop sweating the meaningless stuff every day, they'll be great. They'll be a lot better than we ever were.

- Ira Socol

Learning to see your students every day

In the film Smoke(1995) Auggie Wren, a Brooklyn cigar store owner, explains his "life's project" to grieving widower, and frozen writer, Paul Benjamin...

Auggie: "You'll never get it if you don't slow down my friend."
Paul: "What do you mean?"
Auggie: "I mean you're going too fast, you're hardly even looking at the pictures."
Paul: "They're all the same."

 

Auggie: "They're all the same, but each one is different from every other one. You've got your bright mornings and your dark mornings, you got your summer light and your autumn light, you got your weekdays and your weekends, you got your people in overcoats and galoshes and you've got your people in T shirts and shorts. Sometimes the same people, sometimes different ones. Sometimes the different ones become the same, or the same ones disappear. The earth revolves around the sun, and every day the light from the sun hits the earth at a different angle."

Paul: "Slow down, huh?"
Auggie: "That's what I recommend. You know how it is. "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, time creeps on its petty pace."'

You walk into your school, into your classroom, and what do you see? Do you see the same place, the same students, the same children you saw yesterday?

Do you see the kids who is "always the screw up"? The one who "always understands"? The one who "never figures it out"? The one who is "always happy"? The one who will "cause a problem if you take your eyes off him" (or "her")? The one who is "good at math"? The "slow reader"?

Any student, and anyone who can remember being a student - K-12, primary, secondary - understands the assumptions the adults make about them. How students become "fixed" in description, and how hard it is - how impossible it often is - to change that reputation.

Last week @MissShuganah sent me a note about how one of her daughters suddenly did some thing for the first time. Something she'd been unable to do for years... and then, one day, one random day, something changed, and what was impossible became possible.

Working with Middle Schoolers the last two days, I watched kids amaze me. And sometimes they changed across the brief period I worked with them. Because kids, really all humans who are willing to learn, are like that. Constantly changing.

They're the same kids, but each one is different from day to day and sometimes hour to hour or minute to minute. You've got your bright mornings and your dark mornings, you got your tired days and your days filled with energy. You've got your sad days and your happy days. You've got your days when things click, and days when nothing does. Sometimes students make leaps, sometimes they move very slowly. The brain chemicals change, and connections link, or become elusive. The slow, the sad become quick and happy, the happy and fast have bad days and moments of intense struggle. The earth revolves around the sun, and every day the light from the sun hits the earth at a different angle. And no student is exactly the same ever again as they are in that moment.

But teachers and school administrators, and yes, even parents, miss much of this. They see students as they see furniture and the walls of their classrooms - as permanent things. When you listen, they describe students with terms like "always," "every time," "never gets it," "always behaves perfectly."

When we do that, we give up on being educators, we give up on being the transformative adults we must be around children, and we surely miss out on the chance to intervene in so many moments.

So how do we see anew every day? First, we must want to do that, because it isn't easy throwing off years or decades of filters on our eyes. Second, we must give kids choices every day, because without children having choice, all you will see are patterns, all you will see is a repetitive scene.

If your classroom has real choices, children will do many things, and you will see them many ways. In the video below, Mike Thornton's third grade class is doing a familiar exercise - write five sentences about what you did over Thanksgiving break, put a picture with one - but, because they have choice in tool, in work environment, in many things, we not only see work and learning happening, we see it happening with individuals, individuals who have never been exactly like this before, and who will never be exactly like this again.

Once you have allowed your students to be the individual humans they are, rather than actors doing a performance for your benefit, you have the chance to see them in all their human differentiation, and they have the chance to stop playing their roles - the smart kid, the dumb kid, the disabled kid, the teacher pleaser, the kid with one skill set or one interest, the behavior problem, the silent kid - and start being the evolving human learners they are away from adult preconceptions.

Slow down tomorrow. Walk toward your school as if you haven't seen it before. Walk through your hallways as if you are fully "ADHD," sucking in every sight and sound. Look at you classroom as if you are a kindergarten student observing a place for the first time. And watch your students the way you look at a new group of friends, figuring out how you might approach each of them in a way which personally connects.

Then try to do that every day. You'll find you are in a new place every time our planet spins.

- Ira Socol

The conversations we need to have about Occupy Davis

There have been two "grass roots" movements spring up in the United States since President Obama was elected. The "Tea Party" and the "Occupy Movement."

University of California at Davis students reoccupy their campus's Quad Monday
the way kids at a geek/ag school do, with high-level engineering

One, though I do not doubt either the passions or energies of many followers, has been revealed to not actually be "grass roots," but "astroturf roots" in our political parlance of the day, that is, the movement was either wholly created, or hijacked at birth, by the Koch Brothers and other extreme right wing corporate types - you know, the kind who argue that a corporation must be treated as a citizen in all ways except liability and tax rates.

"No taxation without
representation," here in a
protest document signed by
John Hancock. Sadly, only
half the quote can be
recalled by Republicans.

The other, the "Occupy" movement, is very clearly a bottom-up mass movement which owes its capabilities to the powerful affordances of those "new technologies" so many in education find unimportant.

Thus, one is a classic movement of the modern era, the Tea Party is a top down, wealth-financed movement which owes its strategies and techniques to the powerful political class - they even have their own cable television network in FoxNews. It is, of course, limited by national boundaries and has very traditional goals.

The other is of the contemporary world. Its television is LiveStream and UStream, its media is Twitter, Text-Messaging, and Blogs. Its strategies are ad hoc and constantly evolving. It has proven itself to be global almost overnight. And one more thing, which traditional politicians, leaders, even many educators fail to understand, it is non-specific about most goals because it is about democracy. It is a global pro-democracy effort, and naturally it terrifies the oligarchs, whether American, British, Russian, whatever.

Both groups have some connection to American roots. The Tea Party - and perhaps this works because of the memory issues of many Social Security and Medicare collecting adherents of the cause - bases its appeal in the first half of the four word slogan of the 1773 Boston Tea Party. It is stunningly amusing that this movement which now paralyzes most American government cannot recall all four words, although, to be fair, two of the four words have multiple syllables, so, ya know... but it is also horrifyingly sad that Americans know so little of even their own history.

The "Occupy Movement" comes, on the other hand, from something very deep in American history, and something universally appealing: true democracy, where the voices of all are heard and the needs of all are respected. There is much about the Occupy Movement, laughed at as it was when born from powerless unknowns two months ago as Occupy Wall Street, which links directly back to Ethan Allen's Green Mountain Boys, equally opposed to power from London, Albany/Kingston (New York's seat of government at the time) or Portsmouth/Exeter (New Hampshire's seat of government at the time), and to those who formed the Free Republic of Franklin in 1784, and maybe to those who made Woodstock the safest large city in the United States in 1969.

"The [Free Republic of Franklin] legislature made treaties with the Indian tribes in the area (with few exceptions, the most notable being the Chickamauga), opened courts, incorporated and annexed five new counties, and fixed taxes and officers' salaries. Barter was the economic system de jure, with anything in common use among the people allowed in payment to settle debts, including federal or foreign money, corn, tobacco, apple brandy, and skins ([The Governor] was often paid in deer hides)."

This is a global, a universal, a human idea. Unlike the Tea Party's commitment to selfishness - "I don't want to pay for anything anyone else may receive." - the Occupy Movement  is based in basic humanity, we all deserve opportunity, we all deserve to be included in society, we all deserve to be heard. And this is a radical re-understanding of democracy, because, though the roots of this run deep in early America, it is not what we've taught in school the past 150 years, where the concept that "majority rule" = "democracy" has taken charge, along with the idea that "democracy" = "you get to vote occasionally."

When Norman Rockwell described "Freedom of Speech"
as one of the Four Freedoms we fought WWII for,
he used the Occupy Movement's "General Assembly"
as the model.

The "General Assemblies" which drive the Occupy Movement are nothing more than the "Town Meeting" which Americans once saw as democracy at its best, people gathered together to listen to each other and to respectfully make decisions. It is a different notion of democracy than in which Americans get to vote among highly limited choices. And it is a cross between the democracy early Americans understood and the European vision of democracy in which the tyranny of the majority is to be prevented at all costs, and in which the human rights to education, health care, and shelter are every bit as important as any right to vote.

The Occupy Movement is not a counterpart to the Tea Party notion of selfishness and our society doing less for each other, rather, it is call for a fundamental rethinking of what democracy is, and what priorities we, as a society should have. No wonder it scares Democrats in Washington almost as much as Republicans.

Which brings us to Davis, California...

On a couple of autumn days when we would expect university students to be focused on (a) football and (b) getting home for Thanksgiving. After all, when we last looked at an American university campus we were watching Penn State students riot because a football coach had been fired for covering up child sexual abuse for a decade, while allowing that to continue. So Davis took us by surprise, but it also revealed a series of key questions we must be asking in our schools... in every one of our schools.

One: What can we learn from the actions of UCD PD Lt. John Pike and his fellow officers? I have watched the videos very closely, and a few things stand out clearly, beyond the "humans should never do things like this to other humans, or even most animals." Pike is so disassociated it is bizarre. He has completely separated himself from humanity, even from his own humanness. As many have said, he looks like he is spraying a rose bush for aphids. He is, to put it simply, "doing his job."

How does this happen? I am not advocating for removing personal responsibility, I agree with the United States government position from Andersonville to Nuremberg to My Lai, your orders are secondary to your humanity, and yet... as in all of those cases, the question is rarely a clean one.

I encourage you to watch the video above with your students, and also watch The Andersonville Trialor Judgment at Nuremberg, or both, and to let your students face this question: Orders and rules? Or morality and humanity?

This is a question which defines us, and though - thankfully - rarely as dramatically as in the case of Lt. Pike, it is a question which controls the course of our lives.

Two: Where were the educators? When UCD education professor Cynthia Carter Ching wrote her open letter to Davis students and faculty she apologized to the students, "You know, it wasn’t malicious.  We thought it would be fine, better even.  We’d handle the teaching and the research, and we’d have administrators in charge of administrative things.  But it’s not fine.  It’s so completely not fine.  There’s a sickening sort of clarity that comes from seeing, on the chemically burned faces of our students, how obviously it’s not fine. So, to all of you, my students, I’m so sorry.  I’m sorry we didn’t protect you.  And I’m sorry we left the wrong people in charge."

The fact is, we've become so institutionalized in so many places, that we, in education, forget what our purpose is, and as Ching says, "It's not fine."

I suggested on Twitter yesterday, "Dear University Presidents, if you find students "occupying" their own campus, sit down with them and be an educator," but this goes far beyond those at the very top, as Ching says, we all need to widen our roles, our vision, and our functions because the full environment of our educational institutions is part of our "teaching." When Michigan State University is really bad about disability rights, it quite loudly undoes much of what I try to do in the classroom. When Linda Katehi orders riot-geared police to remove a few students sitting on a lawn, it undoes so much that UCD faculty are attempting to do. Hell, every time a bell rings in our high schools or middle schools and interrupts an important conversation, we are undoing all the try to teach about learning and dignity.

So, this is a time to listen to your students. To, yes, shut up and listen. Let them record their day with the video cameras on their phones, or give them flip cameras. Let them show you what "you" - their school - is teaching. And then, truly respond to that.

Three: What does democracy mean? I remember that my father, discussing the aftermath of the World War II in which he had been a central combatant, told me that, "We all fought for the Four Freedoms, but afterwards, the U.S. decided to only worry about two, and the Russians decided to only worry about two." Once again, the inability to remember four - must be a lesson here.

My father meant that while the U.S. focused on Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Religion, the Soviet Union focused on Freedom from Want (jobs, food, housing, health care, education for all) and Freedom for Fear (a huge border area of nations controlled to make sure that the Germans did not come back). He wasn't making excuses for either, he was faulting both.

For my father, the reason he had fought his way through the nightmares at Metz and Bastogne and Dachau, and had crossed Germany to end up in Plzen, was to assure people's rights, from America to Prague, to all four. He felt badly cheated.

I've talked about experimenting with different forms of voting before, letting our students learn options and ask questions, but this needs to go beyond that. What are the purposes of our society? What should we do together? What things are all of our responsibility? What is government supposed to be? How are decisions made? What are the rights we should all have? What are the responsibilities we should all have?

You cannot limit this to the United States or whatever nation you are in, you need to allow students the range of options contemporary societies have chosen, from French right to health care and education to the Finnish right to broadband to the East German right to long family vacations at the beach.

Democracy deserves better than a short answer. The Occupy Movement understands that, and we, with our students, need to start asking the same questions.

Happy Thanksgiving to all in the United States, and welcome to Advent to all.
- Ira Socol