Special Education

Near the end of my teacher's college program, Nipissing put on an assistive learning tools workshop. We were all duly wowed by the latest version of Dragonspeak, the latest in PDAs and how they could be used in learning, and a surprising array of speech, numeracy, literacy and subject specific learning tools. It was an all day seminar, and it really had an impact on me. It also made me question the intent of all of this fantastic equipment.

Over and over, it was targeted at at-risk/below grade students who struggled with whatever the technology was supposed to help them overcome. Dragonspeak, there is no doubt, helps students see language in terms of the written word, but why does it need to be so carefully guarded from the general population? If a student struggling with literacy could use Dragonspeak to gain a foothold on something beyond their reach, couldn't it just as easily help a group of media students get their ideas down in solid form while they were storyboarding a video? Couldn't it assist a gifted writer who wants to try a different way of getting over writer's block? These people aren't anywhere near failing, but if we're only using assistive tech to help those failing expectations, I think we're wasting a valuable opportunity.

Those many learning tools we saw that day impressed upon me just how helpful technology could be in learning, I just didn't understand why it all had to be so Special focused. Any one of those tools could help anyone learn. Learning isn't easy, for anyone, it's a challenge to stay focused, it's a challenge to make the time and space to write, even if you think of yourself as a writer. It's a challenge to get work in on time, even if you're a top student. I watch excellent students in the form of teachers doing their Masters struggling with this very issue all the time.

In my senior year of high school, my grandfather died, our family pet died and shortly thereafter my father was involved in a near-fatal traffic accident. Always a B student (why draw unnecessary attention to yourself), my grades slipped, assignments weren't handed in and things went from mediocre to worse. My teachers berated me for time management, I was not working "to expectations". I didn't tell anyone about what was going on at home, I was trying to hold it (and a shaky family) together as the oldest son. I'd never been special enough to get a special education, and the standard one wasn't fitting now. I squeaked out of high school and it took me 3 years to get my self together and take another run at it in order to get grade 13 and go to university.

Whenever I have a student, regardless of what their Individual Education Plan does or doesn't say, suddenly miss work, or class, I don't start grading them in terms of expectations, I ask myself what's going on in the other 99% of their lives that has little or nothing to do with my classroom. Sometimes I ask, sometimes they tell me, often they don't, but I don't take that as license to grade them to Ministry expectations.

Dealing with the system now as a parent for the first time has only enforced my understanding of how streaming generally works. My son is lucky in having 2 educated, very motivated and able parents who advocate for him strenuously. His challenges at school aren't overwhelming, but many students face much worse obstacles, and don't have the support at home to take on the system effectively. On a purely experiential basis, we could as easily stream academic/applied and essential into stable family/broken family/no-visible family, and you'd find a startling correlation between our current "academic" system of measurement and an often ignored key indicator of school success.

Differentiating, student centred learning and assistive technology all aim to produce an education that helps a student on as much of an individual basis as we can manage in a system that often has too many people and not enough money. In a perfect world, we wouldn't have Special Education, it would all be special education, in the meantime, you have to ask yourself, how often have you had grades dictated by a lack of access to assistive technology or poor student performance due to their circumstances beyond school?

Maybe one day education will just be special, but I don't see that happening as long as we set up static, specific expectations and expect students to achieve them like automatons. An education has surprisingly little to do with building a better person. It's a biological process, deeply tied to our physical development, circumstances and opportunities, but we still want to assess it as though it were a Victorian industrial process.

Sustainable Anything?

My on going reading has led me through Coupland's Player One, Saul's The Collapse of Globalism, and Wright's A Brief History of Progress. I'm currently on John Birmingham's After America, an alternate history novel about what would have happened if a freak event had wiped out almost all of Continental North America on the eve of the Iraq invasion (if you like Tom Clancy, you'll love Birmingham).

Alternate histories aside, there seems to be a rising sense of urgency in both fiction and non-fiction about the predicament we are getting ourselves into. I've long thought that the zombie apocalypse sub-culture (and believe me, there is one - Zombieland and Shaun of the Dead are just the tips of the iceberg) is a subconscious response to the impending Malthusian collapse we face. http://desip.igc.org/mapanim.html I saw a version of this at the ROM the other week. How can we not see this ending in disaster? In our lifetimes?

The interdependencies of modern life make it inherently frail. We're so isolated from the necessities of life that virtually all of us never give them a second thought. Food is never a problem, neither is clean drinking water. These things becomes immediate, panicky concerns when Walmart and all the rest aren't delivering at the lowest possible price. We don't have a grasp on what the actual costs of life really are; we are increasingly unprepared for a breakdown.

Human history has lasted for tens of thousands of years. All of those lifetimes were, with precious few exceptions, dependent on the individual being able to contribute to their own and their immediate society's good. You didn't get an extended childhood (into your early 20s) or a retirement where you could 'stop' working. Civilization grew out of our ability to sustain ourselves through increasingly complex group work, making these moments of non-responsibility possible. But as Wright mentions in "...Progress", there isn't a single example of a great civilization that hasn't collapsed under its own weight. As an experiment in civilized growth, we seem incapable of recognizing our own unsustainability until it is too late. We seem intent on building civilization to the point where it can carry a large number of members who contribute little or nothing, or actively work to take more than they need. Wright's case studies on Easter Island and the Roman Empire especially ring true - 2 successful civilizations that died under their own weight by destroying their own ecosystems. Wright's conclusion is that we face a mass extinction when we finally exhaust the ability of the small planet we're on to sustain the groaning weight of billions.

If we're ever to truly develop a successful civilization, it must recognize our ability to overcome natural limitations, and it must recognize our need to self limit our own growth, even though that works against every evolved fibre in our animal beings. Some people appear to recognize this, but the vast majority of the human race does not. We will not have a civilization for millenia until we develop the self-discipline at an individual and societal level to recognize what an industrialized human being is capable of. If pursuit of technology and science are a pure goal, this understanding has to be at the basis of it, or else everything built will consume itself.

Nature is a wonderful system because it can balance itself. It can seem cruel (from a self absorbed human point of view), but it is sustainable, and had been for a billion years on Earth in many forms. It is nuanced, non-linear and complex, unlike our ridiculous systems based on simple greed, self-interest and insulated simplicity. Perhaps its time to start taking a serious look at how nature does its business, and create a human civilization that recognizes some fundamental truths.

I read an article in the Economist in which they suggested we can reduce population by increasing standard of living (this has already happened in many industrialized countries). Their solution to world overpopulation? Make poor countries more like rich countries, and they'll have less babies (and more ipods). China tried this, and it worked... for a while, and now they find they can't look after a massive bubble of aging population with too few children, and want to relax the one child policy (which is responsible for half a billion less people in the world today). The Chinese are richer than they have been, but in a population crisis. Economics won't lead to a solution here. Neither will simplistic birth control measures.

So we can't have less babies or we end up with many older people living much longer while not contributing. We are forced into a continuing growth bubble in a world that is running out of resources and is focused primarily on individual wealth rather than societal good.

Maybe we'll get it right next time, after the impending crash.