Changing Gears 2012: maths are creative, maths are not arithmetic

(1) 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) reconsidering what literature means      (9) changing rooms     (10) undoing academic time     (11) social networks beyond Zuckerbergism     (12) knowing less about students, seeing more     (13) why we fight

"In Essays in Humanistic Mathematics, Philip Davis likens mathematics to literature. Like literature, mathematics has metaphor, ambiguity, paradox, and mystery. It has history. Mathematics has contributed mightily to philosophy. It has a sense of outcome, a feeling of rightness, a sense of catharsis... Like music, mathematics has harmony and dissonance." from Cut the Knot by Alex Bogomolny

I am really tired of schools chasing students away from mathematics. And I am really tired of schools confusing arithmetic - a mechanical grammar of numbers - with the field of mathematics. We need kids to get interested in maths. Mathematics is something essential in our society, and in our future, and we just cannot afford to continue to chase the bulk of kids away from the possibilities which come with math skills, interests, and capabilities. We cannot continue to either allow the assumption that there are "math kids" and "non-math kids" (as if math is a magical gift), or to separate students into "creative types" and "math types."

Because the "next world" - the jobs of the future which are, as we speak, constructing the world we will live in tomorrow -  is being built by the creative mathematicians of the world, and our students will either be part of that, or they won't. They will be able to develop their own solutions and have power over their world or they will be helpless consumers locked into their "App Store Education" (Will Richardson must read) and "App Store Existence." They will be participants or bystanders. And largely, that is for us, as educators, to decide.

"Why is this exciting? Why do I want to tell you this story?"
"Mathematics is not about 3+3..."

Let's begin here, with a quote from the end of the clip above, "Adding in clock notation, all of computer science begins when you say 1+1 = 0. It's not that you were wrong when you said 1+1 = 2, its just a different way of seeing it."

If this is over your head in some way, and you teach math in school, we need to talk. We need to talk now, because step eight of Changing Gears 2012 is re-understanding what mathematics are, and how we bring kids and mathematics together.

Two primary issues which lead to the bigger ones, no matter what age kids you teach. First, maths are creative, they are imaginative, they are powerful, and they are fascinating. Second, arithmetic cannot continue to be your gateway, your filter, blocking children from mathematics.

For the first, what have you done with Fibonacci lately, just as a first question? How does a maths idea shape how students perceive the spaces they are in? For the second, well, lets go back a month to a post I wrote, "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."

If we get past these two ideas, we can begin to bring students into what mathematics is...

Pulling two quotes from a mathematics discussion board begins to get at the issues, the question being that old classic, does two plus two always equal four...
"I think this discussion goes right back to Aristotle (or another Greek of similar vintage). The question is pretty much: Three clouds; three pebbles; three goats; three thoughts; three olives; when you take away clouds, pebbles, goats, thoughts, olives, then what do you have left? The concept of threeness! Each such ....ness is an integer, and there is a reasonably obvious rule to move between such concepts. This rule permits of repetition, and thus establishes the countable numbers."

however...

"For a cook, 2 apples + 2 apples might well accurately equal 5 apples if those 4 apples are larger than normal. The mathematician would argue that 2 large apples + 2 large apples must equal 4 large apples. Correct. That’s the mathematical axiom Jon Richfield is talking about. The trouble is, in reality no apple is the same size as another, so the mathematician’s axiom is limited somewhat to arithmetic theory. So why should mathematicians get the final say? The cook’s application is commonsensical and thus more accurate and fair, so in real life 2 + 2 doesn’t always equal 4. Using the equation 2 + 2 = 5, the apple pie turns out normally, as intended. Nothing meaningless about that."

10 candies? Can these be evenly divided in half?
Or are these all completely different things?

And here we have established the arithmetic conundrum which pulls kids away from mathematics. It should never be taught in a reductionist form which removes the possibility of creativity.

Every child knows that not every apple, every piece of cake (even if the same size you have those differences in frostings), every student, is the same (a fact those who work in quantitative educational statistics have been trained to forget). Thus, the question about two apples plus two apples, as suggested above, becomes one we can argue and debate, even with five-year-olds.

That is not a path to nowhere, it is, rather, the path to understanding, and to bringing students into mathematics. We have to help them learn that mathematics is a set of systems which we can apply when helpful, or rethink and re-imagine if not helpful. A long time ago I wrote a piece called "Real World Math" and one of the things I talked about was why I loved sport statistics in school maths. You cannot compute a batting average in baseball without knowing the rules about what an "At Bat" is and how that differs from a "Plate Appearance." You need to know the difference, in football, between a "Shot" and a "Shot on Goal." You need to know, in American football, how a quarterback "sack" is counted in "run yards" even if that quarterback was tackled while running forward. So these statistics do not just connect maths to a kid's interests, they explain how mathematical systems work, and how a slight change in the rules which govern that system, would change the answer.

At the grocery, sometimes 2+2=4,
sometimes not...

Here we go...

"A particularly vexing problem is comparing players from different eras. One complicating factor is that the baseball rule book has changed every year since the first rule book for the National League was issued in 1877.

For example, did you know that prior to the 1930 American League season, and prior to the 1931 National League season, fly balls that bounced over or through the outfield fence were home runs! All batted balls that cleared or went through the fence on the fly or that were hit more than 250 feet in the air and cleared or went through the fence after a bounce in fair territory were counted as home runs. After the rule change the batter was awarded second base and these were called "automatic doubles" (ground-rule doubles are ballpark-specific rules) and are covered by rule 6.09(d)-(h) in the MLB Rule Book."

Change the rules, change the results. Could you add fruits as 2+2? Or just the same kind of fruit?  Three clouds; three pebbles; three goats; three thoughts; three olives; when you take away clouds, pebbles, goats, thoughts, olives, then what do you have left? The concept of threeness! Each such ....ness is an integer..." But an "integer" is an idea, it is a "construct," which students should learn to decide is either useful or not useful. Do we count "the number of people on the earth" (US Census is at odds with other counters) or measure the cumulative carbon footprint? (and what system of maths do we use to do that?).

Toss this into the mix... "three clouds"? the sky is full of water vapor, where does one cloud start and another stop? Is a three day old pygmy goat the same as an adult mountain goat? This "integer" idea, "threeness," what does it mean and how can we use it?

New York's Polo Grounds,
an interesting field made for
interesting stats.

Now, how many home runs did Babe Ruth hit? How many home runs did Lou Gehrig hit? But wait, 

"With the exception of a couple of months at the start of the 1920 season, from 1906 to 1930 the foul lines were "infinitely long": A fly ball over the fence had to land in fair territory (as determined by the infinitely long foul lines), or be fair when last seen by the umpire, in order to be a home run. In other words, a fly ball that went over the fence in fair territory but "hooked" around the foul pole (if there was a foul pole) was ruled a foul ball." How many home runs did Babe Ruth hit? How many home runs did Lou Gehrig hit?

So, the rules matter, and the rules are changeable - assuming you can make the right argument. And this is creative magic which infiltrates everything, from the music you listen to to how that classroom window frames the world beyond. Years ago I taught an Intro to Architecture course at Pratt Institute. I'd take my students to the corner of 53rd Street and Park Avenue in Manhattan, and we'd look. To the southwest was Charles McKim's 1916 Racquet and Tennis Club, to the northwest the 1952 Gordon Bunshaft Lever House, to the southeast Mies van der Rohe's incredible 1958 Seagram's Building - three absolute architectural masterpieces. The fourth corner, the northwest, is occupied by "399 Park Avenue," a 1961 structure by Carson Lundin, Kahn and Jacobs. It is an awful building, by just about anyone's standards.

We'd spend a long time standing on that corner trying to figure this out, and eventually, we'd get to maths and ratios and Fibonacci and the Golden Mean. 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144... Because it is that concept of ratio - embraced in three of those structures, ignored in the fourth - that so much of human comfort with proportion occurs. Europeans called it, "the divine proportion." Why? well, here you would seem to have a year long project which might carry your students anywhere and everywhere in mathematics.

Architects, artists, Wall Street traders, even, yeah, that student ID card or credit card
in your pocket... What makes this "the divine proportion"?

OK, that's one route. Another, hinted at near the top, is Coding. Coding is not just that mix of logic and creativity which is essential to maths, but it has a "real" feel. You don't get things "right" or "wrong," they work or they don't work.

Bring coding into your classrooms. Here's one simple free tool called Notepad++ which we have on our MITS Freedom Sticks. But better, take a look at student coding efforts around the world, from Mozilla's Hackasaurus to Ireland's CoderDojo and Scratch for Kinect which are all bringing kids into this in a big way.

As Stephen Howell (above) says, this is very different than working in that Steve Jobs iOS world where you buy the solutions you need in life. This is using the heart of mathematics to build your own world. Starting simply, kids get interested, they gain competence, they dig behind the curtains - something Jobs and Apple have never permitted - and they move deeper and deeper into what, eventually, begins to look like a much more engaging version of our curriculum. Eventually those Scratch programming kids will be building their own Lego blocks, teaching each other how to do it, challenging each other, and, yes, becoming the builders of that "next world."

So please, take the way you currently teach mathematics apart. Become a mathematics educator instead of a curriculum teacher. It might make all the difference in the future of your students.

- Ira Socol

next: changing rooms

Changing Gears 2012: reconsidering what "literature" means

(1) 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)     (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

What's in your Canon? What works of "literature" represent our society, its history, its values, its breadth, its ways of communicating? And, how do you define "literature" anyway?

Not many more classic bits of dialogue in the English language,On the Waterfront, 1954, Budd Shulberg (Elia Kazan, director), Rod Steiger, Marlon Brando

For me, and I think most of us who have grown up since the Second World War ended (which is almost 70 years ago now), our "literature" includes many things, and our "canon" is composed of many types of things. There is music which might, "define a generation," or "speak to great ideas," or express "ultimate frustrations," or "great hopes." There are films which have re-set a society's vision of itself, or which might make clear an essential moment in time, or perhaps would encompass all of our doubts, or, again, all of our hopes.

There are television shows which have helped us define ourselves, or understand ourselves, or doubt ourselves, or re-think our history, or speculate on gains and losses as times have gone on.

Challenging our sense of reality, our sense of time, and our reverential sense of literature,
Life on Mars, the BBC television show written by Matthew Graham, Tony Jordan,
Ashley Pharoah, Chris Chibnall and starring John Simm.

Not, of course, to discount novels and poetry and theatre, which have re-defined our world, our language, even our way of getting news. Taken us on incredible journeys, and brought us into incredible bodies. Or has turned our darkest moments into reflection.

Seamus Heaney

This is the power of "literature," it is the power of the story, the power of human-to-human transmission. As Seamus Heaney said in his Nobel Prize "Lecture"  "I had already begun a journey into the wideness of the world beyond. This in turn became a journey into the wideness of language, a journey where each point of arrival - whether in one's poetry or one's life turned out to be a stepping stone rather than a destination, and it is that journey which has brought me now to this honoured spot." ... "Even to-day, three thousand years later, as we channel-surf over so much live coverage of contemporary savagery, highly informed but nevertheless in danger of growing immune, familiar to the point of overfamiliarity with old newsreels of the concentration camp and the gulag, Homer's image can still bring us to our senses. The callousness of those spear shafts on the woman's back and shoulders survives time and translation. The image has that documentary adequacy which answers all that we know about the intolerable."

Or, as I said to a group of seventh graders last week, troubled - and maybe even troubling seventh graders, "People need to hear the things you think about, dream about, and worry about. They have to hear it in your voice which isn't the same as anyone else's voice." Because this is how we learn to become more human, by learning to share our voices, no matter how those voices are expressed."

We, as a community, grow smarter the more voices we hear, the more voices we embrace. It could be the students of a Middle School...

...or it could be a "badly" danced interaction with the globe...

...but whatever it is, it expands us, it improves us, it opens us.

The Window, 1952, an amazing short story by,  Frank De Felitta (teleplay), Enid Maud Dinnis (story),
now even more interesting because of its view of early television. Series, Tales of Tomorrow

So my seventh step in Changing Gears 2012 is to look as widely as you can for the literature which will touch your students, for the canon which will help them know themselves and our world. This matters. When we prescribe a Common Core we proscribe all that lies beyond that, and what lies beyond is truly the 99 percent.

Literature, that transmission of culture, of who we are, is a huge thing, and it involves every one of us. I was lucky enough, as a young kid, to watch one of my friend's mothers - Jean Fagan Yellin - unearth the story of Harriet Jacobs, and bring truth to light. This taught me something important about who an "author" might be. At the same age I was also lucky to be near enough to Manhattan to sneak away and watch Alvin Ailey tell stories, and near enough to Brooklyn to see the Assyrians describe their lives almost 3,000 years ago. I got to see Pablo Picasso describe war, which was different than John Wayne describing war. I even had the chance to see Frederick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux describe calm, and Philippe Petit describe tension. It was an education in the art of communication for which I will always be grateful.

But it it is also an education in the art of communication which I think we owe all of our students. "People need to hear the things you think about, dream about, and worry about. They have to hear it in your voice which isn't the same as anyone else's voice." Because this is how we learn to become more human, by learning to share our voices, no matter how those voices are expressed."

- Ira Socol
next: maths are creative, maths are not arithmetic

Changing Gears 2012: learning to be a society (again)

(1) ending required sameness     (2) rejecting the flipped classroom     (3) re-thinking rigor     (4) its not about 1:1      (5) start to dream 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

The adults could argue about anything,
and did every night.

I grew up in a family, in a place, in a community, in a culture which could and would debate anything anytime. It could debate politics and religion and sport and music and literature with wild passion, and it did, wherever two or more people gathered.

I remember very clearly how my father would play sports on Sundays, and he, an absolute socialist, was in constant debate with one friend who was a true Communist (he subscribed to Soviet Life magazine and New York Communist newspapers) and another friend who was a very-right-wing Republican State Senator. They agreed on almost nothing, yelled a lot during their conversations, but, and here's the thing... they were never anything but the best of friends, they never doubted each others' patriotism or each others' positions as respected members of society, they never threatened each other with anything more than electoral defeat.

I was thinking about this on a Friday night when my "spousal equivalent" looked at her Facebook stream and saw, from the friend of a friend, a person threatening to "shoot all liberals with a rifle." Nice. This came at the end of a week in which certain commentators on the American political right appeared willing to stir up threats of violence against an elementary school because they disliked something eight-year-olds had said.

You understand what I'm talking about. All over the US supposed "leaders" are willing to describe their opponents in terms so vile that it cannot be surprising that some are inspired to violence. But don't let that kind of ultra-extremism fool you into thinking this is a fringe thing: The governor of New Jersey has built a big political career out of insulting people in public. More Republicans in Iowa voted for a man for President who routinely insults large segments of the population in vile terms than voted for anyone else. Chicago just elected a mayor who's political career, including White House Chief of Staff, is based on incivility.

And it is certainly no surprise that our children learn the wrong things. "We" are the models, and "we" are acting in some horrible ways. Yes, I include "me" in "we" - it is not that I casually advocate violence, I don't, but I'm surely guilty of "saying" things on-line which go beyond provocation (which I think is generally a good thing) into angry denunciation (which, while perhaps being required on occasion, should be used very sparingly).

A Civil Education

Civility among us might be described in various ways, and, depending on the environment, things change. This is, and has always been true, which is why the larger the audience we seek, or agree to (Facebook, Twitter, blogs) the more careful we must be. Where I live in Michigan, for example, people often say, "Eye-talian" when referring to people (or food) with an ethnic background in the nation of Italia. And in West Michigan, that's usually simply written off as lingual ignorance, no big offense taken. Where I grew up, however, a place where every phrase used in the classic "ethnic insult" scene from The Godfather was used and accepted, "Eye-talian" would have gotten you punched out pretty instantly. So would "Jewed," as might some reference to the mascots of either Lucky Charms or the University of Notre Dame. On the other hand, the simple "God Damn" I was raised with can really offend the people who grew up where I live now...

This is the only version I could easily find on YouTube... Whatchagonna do?

But I was raised, I think, well enough to understand that when I left the confines of the "New Rochelle to City Island culture zone" I watched what I said much more carefully. No reason to start a fight with someone before you even actually meet them. This was reinforced when I attended the Police Academy. "First do no harm," one of my instructors said, "no one ever became less of a threat because someone called them a motherf***er. Watch your language. Be a professional." So, I am always stunned, and deeply disappointed in the training, when I hear cops cursing. What part of a "be a professional," or, "be a role model," don't they understand?

No, not everyone understands, one writer, complaining about "PC gone hardcore" in The Observer, suggests that, "perhaps we should all adopt the kids-on-the-bus attitude: accept that everyone is different, make jokes about it, but don't take offence unless it's meant. As Finn said to me: "It's about how you take a word, as much as what people mean by it. It's just words." How personal do you want to get?"

But I do, and we all should. Basic civility is what allows us to hear each other, to meet each other, to work with each in this thing called "society."

Less than two miles to the north, Thomas Paine tried to retire in peace,
but he was already too radical for the United States.

"The mutual dependence and reciprocal interest which man has upon man, and all the parts of civilised community upon each other, create that great chain of connection which holds it together. The landholder, the farmer, the manufacturer, the merchant, the tradesman, and every occupation, prospers by the aid which each receives from the other, and from the whole." Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man

Now Paine was a "provocateur" of the highest order. He truly made the American Revolution possible through his writings. He raised a large part of British North America up to a point of armed revolt against their government, then he helped do the same in France, and yet, it was never his goal to divide the people of a nation against each other, or against the people of other nations. He was English, yet he was equally at home in America and France. He was a Marxist more than a generation before Marx was born, but he worked comfortably with landed gentry like Jefferson. In doing so, he changed the world.

The Power of "Consensus"

I always believe. Faith in the Gunners, the Mets, the Jets, the Spartans,
the Gaels, the Rangers, and once they're back across the Hudson, the Net

Consensus, is one of those good and bad things. A consensus which is "fixed," which is impervious to new information, say, "African-Americans are not really the same species as Whites" in the "old American South," are toxic. This is where "faith" and "education" come into conflict. Faith being a belief in things despite facts or despite the lack of facts - I begin each English football season believing that Arsenal
 will win the Premier League, the FA Cup, and the Champions League. I begin each American football season believing that the Jets will win the Super Bowl and Michigan State will win the Rose Bowl. I begin each baseball season believing that the Mets will win the World Series. These are "faith" beliefs, facts can not shake them. In sport that is fine, the social contract surrounding sport is that we root for differing teams, believing in them absolutely. No one in Green Bay, or Ann Arbor, or Philadelphia has to agree with me for the world to keep spinning. In other areas this creates bigger problems.

Consensus is a particular problem when it is based in majority opinion alone, and majority opinion, apparently, takes on real power even before we get most children into school.

"In this study, three- and four-year-old children watched as a small group of people (either three or four members) named a novel object. The majority of group members would use the same name for the object; the lone dissenter would pick a different name. The children were then asked what they thought the object was called.
  "The results revealed that majority rules when it comes to influencing the opinion of preschoolers. The children in the study would consistently select the name that was used by the majority of the group members. And even more interesting, in a follow-up experiment in which only two members (someone from the majority group and the dissenter) remained in the room and named a different object, the children would still go with name that was provided by the majority group member.
   "These results indicate that children as young as age three and four are able to recognize and trust a consensus."

Thus it is important that we help our students, from the very start, how to do multiple things: How to separate faith from fact. How to separate belief from knowledge. How to accept new information and incorporate that into a belief system. How to listen to a group, and yet, how to stand up for one's own beliefs. How to persuade. How to be persuaded. And, in all of these sometimes contradictory things, how to do all this without making enemies, how to do it without insulting people... essentially... how to argue in ways which allow you to argue with the same people the next day.

Step six of Changing Gears 2012 is committing ourselves to helping our students to be part of a civil society. Because we cannot exist long as a society if we continue to act towards each other as we have been doing.

It must be OK for us to say that our leaders are using
language which should be unacceptable.

We have to help our students understand that the words we choose matter. That our willingness to listen to diversity of opinion matters. That our willingness to respect each other matters. We have to say to parents who object to their children hearing divergent views, "you can keep your child at home, but this is public education in a nation founded on the principles of freedom of speech and freedom of religion, and respectful differences are welcome here." At the same time we must be clear, "disrespectful opinions are not OK."

This isn't really difficult. I went to school in a multi-ethnic, multi-religious, multi-racial community with very strongly contested politics. Republicans came to speak in school, Democrats did, extreme Conservatives did, the Black Panthers did. All of our religious schools brought all of us to all the other religious services as we moved through our studies there. So I sure knew that my father thought Mayor Ruskin of New Rochelle was dangerous,1 but he would have gone ballistic if I had refused to listen to him when, running for re-election, he visited my seventh grade. So, I was appalled that there were American parents who objected to their children hearing the President of the United States in September 2009. I didn't like what he said, but that has nothing to do with anything. I would have listened to him as I listened to New Rochelle's Mayor as my son listened to the State Senator from Holland, Michigan... with critical listening skills, and the ability to debate.

That is step one. We can learn to listen. Step two, is we can learn not to insult. And we can begin not insulting by considering the weight of words. Let me give you an example, less apparently loathsome than say, Newt Gingrich telling young Americans, including many veterans, to "take a bath," or Mitt Romney attacking former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman for serving his nation. I tend to get insulted when a certain political group describes themselves as "pro-life," because the implication is that those of us who disagree are somehow "anti-life." Now I can - and have - defined being "pro-life" differently, I think a "pro-life" politician or voter is one who favors universal health insurance, family and parental paid leave, higher "living" minimum wages, required minimum vacation time, and a right to housing, which, I guess I could say, makes all against those bits of legislation "anti-life." I am also very happy that a number of young women I know, faced with "accidental" pregnancies, could depend on Welfare and Medicaid systems which allowed them to give birth and begin raising their children safely, and so I could declare that my state's Republican government, which has drastically cut those programs, is "anti-life," but here's the thing... kind of like that instructor told us in the Police Academy, it's probably true that you rarely begin to win someone to your side by calling them a murderer.

'"The Catholic public official lives the political truth most Catholics through most of American history have accepted and insisted on,” [New York Governor Mario] Cuomo declared [in a 1984 speech on abortion at the University of Notre Dame], “the truth that to assure our freedom, we must allow others the same freedom, even if occasionally it produces conduct by them which we would hold to be sinful. I protect my right to be a Catholic by preserving your right to believe as a Jew, a Protestant or nonbeliever or anything else you choose.”'

Mario Cuomo, 2000, "We owe one another an obligation to treat each other with dignity, with respect."

"I know it may be hard for Mitt Romney and some people to take," Jon Huntsman said this Saturday night, "but most of America is with me because in the end they want this America to be working together,” and he is right. We need to be a nation which works really hard to find ways to speak across our divides, we need to find ways of speech which allow us to listen across our divides, we need to find ways to respect each other. I don't ever want to see a crowd of American "patriots" boo a combat veteran again, or cheer the idea of letting fellow citizens die. And I don't want anyone to call anyone a Nazi ever again, that is, unless the person is an actual Nazi (and if you can't tell who is an actual Nazi, you may need to go back to school).

Third, we need to practice. We cannot learn to be better by avoiding the difficult issues, we can only learn to be better by helping our children to learn how to confront the ideas which most challenge us. "A good citizen questions, informs himself or herself, thinks issues through, reaches conclusions, and participates in public life. A good teacher helps students to understand that controversy is the lifeblood of democracy, to learn how to inquire into past and current controversial issues that are meaningful to them, and to participate in public life," AlanShapiro wrote in an essay in teaching controversial issues, which is where I am sending you readers next.

Bring the controversies to your students, but... (in shorthand)

(1) Examine yourself and your own prejudices, 

(2) Create a safe environment where disagreement and minority ideas are not threatened, 

(3) Find out what students know and think about an issue before beginning an inquiry. Start where the students are - wherever and whatever age they are, 

(4) Examine questions. After listing student questions on the chalkboard without comment, the teacher invites scrutiny of them. Which require factual answers? Which call for opinions? What words may require definition before a question can be answered intelligently? Which contain assumptions? Which are unclear and need to be reworded? Which are impossible to answer or useless to the inquiry? 

(5) Have students experience multiple perspectives and the complexity of public issues. Exposure to different points of view on a controversial issue is necessary but insufficient, 

(6) Promote dialogue. Students usually need help in understanding the differences between dialogue and monologue, between dialogue and debate. Dialogue aims for understanding, enlargement of view, complicating one's thinking, an openness to change, 

(7) Be responsive to students' feelings and values, 

(8) Encourage both independent and collaborative work. Students need opportunities to pursue inquiries by themselves and with others. In either case, they need to understand the purpose, what they are going to do and how to go about it, ways to communicate findings and conclusions, 

(9) Provide opportunities for students to act on their conclusions. The idea of taking action may seem pointless and hopeless to students. Confronting and dealing with students' sense of powerlessness then becomes essential.

Yes, this is can be hard in today's toxic political environment, it can be really hard. But if we are to have a true democracy it is essential that our children learn to be better than we have been.

- Ira Socol
next: re-thinking what literature means
1 - Republican Mayor Ruskin sold David's Island, the former Fort Slocum, to New York's Consolidated Edison Corporation to be used as a spot for 12 nuclear power generating plants. Those of us living a half mile away were understandably troubled by this plan which, they said, "would "only raise the temperature of the surrounding Long Island Sound ten degrees." A great guy named Dr. Jim Egan, a professor, devout Catholic, powerful liberal, ran against Ruskin in 1967 and was crushed, but I met Bobby Kennedy when he came to New Rochelle to campaign for Dr. Jim.

 

Changing Gears 2012: start to dream again

(1) ending required sameness     (2) rejecting the flipped classroom     (3) re-thinking rigor     (4) its not about 1:1      (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

Sometimes, we need to fantasize about what school is, and what we want it to be

Dream, my friend Adam made clear to me this week, is the wrong word. What we need to do is to begin to fantasize. Dreaming is a sleeping thing, and though many of us (most of us?) have slept through various parts of our education, I'm hoping for something a bit more "conscious."

I want you, us, to fantasize about school. Fantasy is not just conscious, it is dangerous, passionate, engaging, embodied, and incredibly powerful.

And all of this is the opposite of the quantitative, evidence-based, best practices crap which has led us, these past fifteen years, into the worst period of educational policies the English-speaking world has known - and, yes - it has known some pretty terrible educational policies. The problem with "the science" (as most horrifically constructed in the most destructive book of the 21st Century, Scientific Research in Education) is that it locks us into the systems and questions of the past. "Evidence-based" means it already exists. So does "best practices." "Quantitative" means it has been compared to something already existing, though rarely has there been any actual analysis of that which has existed. And "quantitative" also assumes - in the most absurd kind of faith - that we are capable of averaging humans. You understand, Diane Ravitch + Michelle Rhee + Me/3 = the average person talking about education.

In the world of human affairs we rarely do things because of science anyway, rather, we create sciences to justify ourselves. “...consider : is its science, sir, that motivates us when we transport English rule of law to India or Ireland? When good British churchmen leave hearth and home for missionary hardship in Africa, is it science that bears them away? Sir it is not. It is Christian duty. It is the obligation to bring our light and benefices to benighted man. That motivates us, even as it motivates Treves toward Merrick, sir, to bring salvation where none is. Gordon was a Christian, sir, and died at Khartoum for it. Not for science, sir.” (Pomerance 1978 p. 21)  So let us admit to faith and art and move forward toward the schools we want, not the schools Bill Gates and Walmart want.

Fantasize. Yes, step five of Changing Gears in 2012 is to imagine, imagine freely, imagine wildly, imagine sensually... to think of what seems completely out of reach, of what seems impossible, of what seems unachievable. 

"Some men see things as they are and say 'Why'?
I dream things that never were and say 'Why Not"?" 

So start to think beyond everything you know. Start looking at all the ways, all the places, people learn. And let your fantasies run wild. The school below gave this some serious thought...

But what if we went even further...

Adam and I have started to develop this theory, that the way to end the colonialism, the social reproduction, which dominates our schools and limits the future of our societies, is to allow our students to fantasize. They are already rejecting what they are inheriting, Occupy Wall Street indicates that, as do surveys on gay marriage law and - even in the US - socialism. So, we can continue the indoctrination method (which America's right hates but deeply embraces, and America's left enjoys but opposes), trying to browbeat our youth into becoming like us, or we can love and trust our children and give them the tools to imagine something better than what we have to offer.

I'll suggest that the former path is not likely to work. If those under 25 now reject our societal dreams - and these are kids who've grown up mostly in "good times," imagine their younger siblings, who've seen their own opportunities stripped away from them by adults more concerned with filling three car garages and being terrified that two guys in love might get married. And if the former isn't going to work, why not embrace the latter?

Lord of the Flies, what if these boys could have thought
beyond the societal models they had been given?

The latter, after all, the idea of allowing our students to imagine, to fantasize about, and eventually to build something less tethered to the persistent mistakes of the past, is a powerful way for ourselves to re-imagine education - to see education as a solution to a broken society rather than as a way to prepare children to become types of adults we are.

To quote a Virginia sixth grader, "People keep making the same mistakes over and over again, and we have to stop." 

When that sixth grader said that, I asked him what he, what "they," needed to do to begin developing a better world? Really, I should have asked that of myself and of my colleagues, "What do I, we, need to do in order to let that child, his classmates and his generation, stop, and try something new?"

What must we do to stop "tinkering" around the edges of a fundamentally flawed system, and imagine an educational "structure" that is radically transformed?

Movement with prior plan of direction:
Walk Out Walk On

Instead of setting the bar, NCLB-like, based on what exists now, might we not set the bar where we want it to be?

Would it look like the phenomenally successful Parkway Program of Philadelphia's 1960s-1970s, or like my "3I Program" - also amazingly successful of the New Rochelle of the 1970s-1980s? "The whole scene oozed with activity and life and while there was no apparent order to it all, a sense of purpose seemed evident... I asked [the head teacher] if he would identify the kinds of things that were going on about us. His response - quick and unqualified - was to the effect that he had no idea what the activities consisted of, that it was furthermore not his business to know, and that the participants had defined the content, value, and details of their pursuits and were probably doing whatever it was they felt it important to do." - Greenberg and Roush. Philadelphia  Or like Summerhill? Or like any other model?

No.

No, we do not know what it might look like, because that will be constantly evolving, if we are doing our job and empowering our kids. A middle school principal wrote to me today, "Our furniture is arrive this Tuesday and although we planned out were it would go, Sarah and I are realizing that because the media center is a transformational learning space that the plan of where the furniture will go will change again, thus it’s transformational…" We do not know, it will change, things are not fixed, plans are not fixed. 

Listen, I do not want the future which replicates this present. More importantly, our children do not deserve a future which replicates this present. And the only way to avoid that replication is to free our children to conceive of something different.

Please. Fantasize, and help your students do the same. Give them the chance to seek a newer world.


- Ira Socol
next:  learning to be a society (again)

Changing Gears 2012: its not about 1:1

(1) ending required sameness     (2) rejecting the flipped classroom     (3) re-thinking rigor     (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

When 1:1 keeps school looking like school has 'always' looked. (Vermont)

One-to-One is not a new concept. In the early 1840s William Alcott pressed for adoption of 1:1 slates for students in Common Schools, even the poor, rural farm kids who attended summer school. (There is vast mis-information regarding the root of our American school calendar, but we'll leave that for another time...) Alcott thought 1:1 slates far more important than 1:1 books, which was an idea which came to most public schools much later. But 1:1 books were thought to have great advantages as well.In 1883 Britain adjusted its educational code so that it, "stipulated that schools should have ‘sets’ of readers – a ‘set’ denoting that there should be enough so that each child could have access to the text." (Yeandle) Though Noah Webster introduced the first widely used textbook into America during the early decades of the republic ("The Blue-Backed Speller"), adoption of 1:1 textbooks was very slow. Until World War II it was common - certainly in urban schools - for there to be one textbook per desk, with desks shared by two students. Teachers often arranged seating to match-up reading speeds (related by many former New York City Public School students). Even in 2004 Oakes and Saunders were troubled that in California, "shortages and poor quality of textbooks and instructional materials often exist," shortages, meaning that students could not take textbooks home, and sometimes had to share textbooks in class.

Complete books under student control were seen as especially valuable "universal design" tools, "Previous to January 1, 1898, the students received their textbooks in the form of paper covered pamphlets, averaging about 50 pages each, and these were sent only one at a time to each student as he progressed with his studies. The result was that if a student failed to complete his course, he had on hand not more than two instruction papers in advance of the last one he had studied. This tended to create a dissatisfaction, and, to overcome it, we reprinted the entire text of the course, and sent to every student, at the time of his enrollment, a set of what we term bound volumes. These volumes contained everything that the student would receive in connection with his course of instruction, and if he failed to complete the course he had his bound volumes at any rate, and could continue studying by himself if he so desired."

Game-changing? not necessarily... (Hawaii)

There were problems, of course. Tyack (1974) talks about huge textbook graft scandals between 1890 and 1910 as schools tried to acquire masses of these volumes (p. 95). Another issue was funding this new technology rather than teachers. Textbooks assumed "primacy" in the classroom, Tyack (1974, p. 47) and many others note, because the teachers being hired, usually minimally educated women, lacked the knowledge to teach subjects themselves.

Or...this kind of looks like turning an iPad into a worksheet... (Scotland)

So, 1:1 is basically designed around two things which are, interestingly, contradictory. First, they allow "everyone," all students, to do the same thing at the same time. But second, they also allow control to flow from the room instructor to others - either a remote "teacher" such as a textbook author or publisher, from McGuffey to Pearson, or to the students themselves.

On this anniversary of one of the great 1:1 efforts of all
time, The King James Bible, we pause to consider
the purposes...

To really understand, let's move back one step further, to the real origins of 1:1. The book in every hand comes from Calvinism and Lutheranism. The use of 1:1 in the Reformation was for the very same contradictory reasons above. The distribution of printed Bibles, and then, in the Anglican Communion, the Book of Common Prayer, allowed "control" of the message to shift from a local priesthood - stories shared orally as in the Catholic Church - to a "remote teacher," be he John Calvin, Martin Luther, Henry VIII, or whomever created the translation.


However the flip side, again, was a new level of individual control in time and space. Though the Reformation introduced the idea of "fixed text"1 for the first time (previously every copy of a book had been individually created, and so was different from all previous versions in both fact and in understanding), people who now owned a Bible, or simply had access to the book themselves if they were quiet about it in the back of the church, might - on their own, flip between pages. Our schools, created in both the United States and the British Empire along the model of the dominant church experience, replicated this system. Unlike Catholic Cathedrals focus in the room is singular. Unlike the Catholic Mass, everyone holds a book. Yet, at the same time, it is expected that all in the room are on the same page.

Both of these missions, the "remote control" and the personal control, offer opportunities and create problems. So the question is, step four in Changing Gears 2012 - as we approach "the next 1:1" - how do we do something different?

"It is true we should not allow the pupils to have slates in their hands the whole time. Though it should be our aim to give them constant employment, yet their employment should be varied. Even the slate, if it were at their command continually, would become tiresome." (Alcott, 1841, p. 11) Basic fact, 170 years ago and today, one tool is tiresome, whatever it is. So is one chair, one kind of desk, one kind of light, one kind of book, one noise level. Kids need choice, variety, challenge, and that is what is too often in short supply in classrooms.

No matter how engaging that slate was - and Alcott was a strong believer that kids needed significant free play time with the device if they were going to use it well - no matter how engaging that tablet from your favorite "cool" manufacturer is, one type of device in a 1:1 environment, in any environment, is a huge mistake.

Alternatives to 1:1: Wall newspapers, read by communities.

We have proof of this. Our 1:1 with textbooks clearly has failed. Our 1:1 with the dreaded Middle School Organizer is a nightmare. Our 1:1 with all-the-same classroom furniture, lights, noise has left teachers spending the bulk of their time on discipline.

If 1:1, that is, all-the-same 1:1, has failed "us," or, at the very least has limited the population which can succeed (in that very Calvinist notion of a limited number of places in heaven), then, where do we look for other ideas? And what are the consequences of moving away from "one to one"?

One step is to move backwards conceptually as we move forward technologically. I am not one who really sees "the Gutenberg era" as a real bit of progress, but as an aberration in human communication and tool use created by technological progress.2 Before Gutenberg text was highly flexible, highly personalized, and usually created for a particular community. Tools were, in that pre-industrial era, much the same.

Not 1:1: Brooklyn streetcorner class in English

That system, which we may indeed see if we enter a large urban Catholic Cathedral in most parts of the world, functions in a different way. Everyone is not seated. Everyone is not using the same tools. Multiple representations - and interpretations - of "the stories" are everywhere, in stained glass windows, in sculptures, in candles, in incense, in music. People come to Mass at one time, or they come at another, or they choose to pray by themselves, or in small groups, or they just come to think.

We can also see it wherever people gather "naturally." In city squares, in front of schools, on the lawns of university campuses. I always begin thinking about great learning spaces with my vision of The Long Meadow in Brooklyn's Prospect Park. On a warm day there, in Frederick Law Olmstead's greatest creation, you will see people learning in every way with every conceivable device. Many read print books, many work on their phones, many learn kinesthetically - on one walk I watched three Jamaican guys teaching two Orthodox Jewish guys how to play Cricket. Truly, we can see it anywhere adults gather to work, devices are different, are used differently, people choose different chairs, they work together or alone.

How do we then, in a school, offer "remote teaching" but not insist on it, offer individual control but make collaboration the more normal "norm," allow for choice, for preferences, for differences?

Watch this video again, choice of tools, choice to collaborate, choice of where
and how to work, and choice of time for completion as well.

My argument is for a mix of "BYOD" and the "Tool Crib" within a context of open scheduling, open spaces, and hybrid opportunities within the school itself. With "BYOD" [Bring Your Own Device] meaning we use open networks and allow kids to bring their own tools if they have them, "Tool Crib" meaning we have a range of devices, different types, brands, sizes, for kids to choose to support their learning, "Open Scheduling" meaning we no longer insist that kids stop learning because a bell rings, "Open Spaces" meaning we don't trap kids in places they cannot be comfortable, and "Hybrid Opportunities" means that while on-line learning is great, it is our job as educators and as adults to actually see our students, to hear them, to watch their body language, to be able to intervene - in other words, on-line learning should not mean leaving children "home alone."

Learning via choice and comfort. A high school library on a Friday morning.

If I want to write on the floor of the corridor and you want to write on an iPad and Jimmy over there wants to dictate into the TabletPC, that's all cool... learning intelligent, effective tool use is task number one for humans. If Jenny wants to listen to the teacher explain this equation and I want to use my phone to go on-line and find something else, that's cool... knowing how one learns best is probably task number two for humans. If Kristin wants to sit in the classroom in a chair, and Willy wants to sit in the classroom on the floor, and I want to participate but via Skype from the corner down the hall because I don't want to be around people today, that's cool as well... its the 21st Century, we live and work everywhere.

In the end, I'm asking you to resist to lure of 1:1, which all too often in practice looks exactly like school has "always" looked - a whole bunch of kids, facing one way, doing the same things at the same time. Outfit tool cribs for your students, a whole range of devices which all offer different capabilities, different affordances, and cater to differing preferences and capabilities. Offer tool cribs from the start, so kids learn the power of choice, and encourage kids to choose to work alone or together.

If I hadn't offered kids real choices I would not have heard middle schoolers dismiss iPads as "granny phones," I wouldn't have learned how great Dragon Light on the iPad - iTouch - iPhone is, I wouldn't have learned all you can do editing video on an Android Phone, I wouldn't have seen kids love tablets for sharing and hate them if they had to carry them. But more importantly, the kids would not have learned, not for themselves, and not from each other.

- Ira Socol
next: start to dream again

1. The "fixed text" applies to concepts of interpretation and Calvinist notions of "free will." The Calvinist notion of humans as "so depraved" as to lack even the ability to choose "grace," suggests that authorial intent is in control, as far from "reader response theory" as possible. We can see the impact of this half a  millennium later. Catholic Bibles are traditionally footnoted with references which offer paths to other places of knowledge. This is almost never true of Protestant Bibles.
2. Thanks to Bill Sterrett for including this video (from the 2010 CESI Conference) in his new book, Insights into Action: Successful School Leaders Share What Works. (bit of self promotion)