Emotionally Charged Engagement

Pettis' manifesto demands the freedom needed
to make things work. Educators might get
excited about Maker philosophy like this,
but it isn't what they want in classrooms.

This talk of Making at ECOO had me thinking about my own process of building, repairing and creating.

My engineering process is closely related to my creative process.  Creativity came first as a toddler mainly because I found visual art intuitive to step into.  Engineering followed shortly thereafter (about 6 years old?) when I found myself dismantling bicycles and toys, sometimes for creative purposes but mainly driven an intense desire for understanding how things work.  My mother was an artist, my father is an engineer; my behaviour wasn't a happy accident.

Both my processes have evolved and entwined, and both demand absolute ownership.  I find myself fully committed to my process which makes the idea of going to committee abhorrent.  If what I'm doing ends up not working it's on me and me alone.  That focus and responsibility is what allows me to work through frustrating, stochastic, non-linear builds and repairs that would cause most people to shrug and give up.

I prefer to work alone.  If I'm going to seek help, I will initiate it.  Being forced to accommodate collaboration prevents me from doing what needs to be done to make the thing work.  Lateral thinking never works well when you've have to constantly explain every intuition, it breaks your flow.

How much faith do I have in my process?  I drove my wife and newborn son home in a car I rebuilt the brakes on.  I ride a motorcycle (with my son on the back) that I rebuilt from scrap.  If I did it, it's done properly, I regularly bet my life on it.  This is what competency looks like when making something work is the priority; mechanical mastery can't exist in any other circumstance.

intuition works best
in silence

When I'm working on an engineering problem or a creative project I am radically engaged (fixated?) with what I am doing.  This isn't the kind of directed, controlled engagement that teachers encourage in classrooms.  Being interrupted by a well-meaning teacher who wants to make my process transparent antagonizes the hell out of me.

Teacher interruptions in my process are vexing.  I don't seek an expert to do it for me, that doesn't teach me anything.  I'd prefer to ask another capable student who is struggling with similar issues and figure it out with them rather than ask a teacher who has done it a hundred times before.  

This comes from my first post-secondary learning experience as a millwright apprentice.  I left high school before graduation because it felt like a holding tank rather than a learning opportunity.  In that apprenticeship I didn't have teachers assessing my learning, I had people who were invested in it because it meant less work for them.  That we were all doing the same work went a long way toward me valuing their expertise.

Collaboration isn't the point of any engineering activity.  It shouldn't remove the focus from a project, it should amplify it.  When teachers say things like, "we're going to be makers, but what the kids are really learning is collaboration!" I would expect to see a group of frustrated students and a pile of newly purchased Arduinos and Raspberry Pis gathering dust in boxes.  You've got to respect the skill and focus needed to make things work first.

My favourite kind of teacher is the one I try to be.  I encourage skills development and provide expertise if asked (though I am reluctant).  I provide materials and offer multiple avenues into how to get it done, but then I get the hell out of the way.  What I hope to see is a student lose themselves in their process and improve as a result of this intensive engagement.  You learn more in the doing of a thing than you ever do in the theory of it.

I observe, I offer help if it's asked for, but I also allow students to fail if they refuse to take risks and engage in a meaningful engineering process.  In the best cases I'm able to look at a finished prototype that shows resiliency, creativity, and works.  That last bit is important, I'm not grading how hard they tried, or how well they get along with each other, I'm grading engineering.  The student who built a working prototype feels a genuine sense of achievement because they went through real struggle to resolve complex, non-linear (non-textbook) problems.  They seldom worry about what kind of mark they got, the value is self-evident.

Assumptions and cultural influences won't get you far
in mechanics -  you need to be stringent and respect
reality because it doesn't care about your perceptions.

A highlight of a recent unit was watching a student who found the process of building Arduino circuits very challenging.  In his presentation of a partially working prototype he angrily said, "... and it didn't work again, until I realized, like a n00b, that I hadn't plugged the power wire into the rail."  He was absolutely right, he is no longer n00b, and he should be frustrated with having made such a rudimentary mistake.  His emotional engagement with his failure was telling - he is beginning to take pride in his skills.

Emotional engagement is at the root of my work with machines.  Radical engagement makes my process an emotional one  (or is it the other way around?).  The sometimes stochastic, often non-linear and usually frustrating nature of building and repairing complex machinery requires an emotional edge.  That edge is what powers my resiliency.  I refuse to let a complication derail me, sometimes not giving up even when I should.  If it continues to not work, emotion not only powers my resiliency but also my imagination, driving me to think laterally around problems.

Class bells, rubrics, teachers showing you how and assigned groups are the antithesis of my kind of radical engagement.  Schools seem designed to prevent this kind of focus and break learning up into an arm's length, carefully managed chunks.  Learning is an organic process, until you see it diced up into curriculum and fed to students who have no idea what it is they are supposed to be learning or why.  The education system might work for basic skills but mastery isn't what its set to produce.  Education elbows its way between student curiosity and their natural tendency to learn in order to manage the process.

Radical emotional engagement is the antithesis of the clinical, rational engagement educators look to manage, but this emotional engagement is at the root of my empathy with machines,  Education spends a lot of energy encouraging collaboration, linear consumption of curriculum and a cold kind of empathy between students, but ignores (stamps out?) human emotional engagement in order to retain control.

The difference between how I and many others learn, and the mono-cultural, rationalist's philosophy of education is why you seldom see radical engagement in a classroom.  It's why you see outliers do poorly in school.  Education is designed to hit the medium, the comfortable middle class child who requires no emotional connection because they have it elsewhere.  Deviants, whether they are eccentrics who want radical engagement in something they are fixated on, or students who need more from a teacher than grades, aren't a good fit with the system.

The difference between applied and academic students has
a lot more to do with family dynamics and the need for
emotional engagement than it does with intelligence.

Education's discomfort with emotional engagement lies at the root of Ontario's high school streaming system.  Applied students tend to come to school from less stable home lives and look for more emotional engagement with their teachers.  This freaks out the academics who teach them.

Academic students (and the teachers they turn into) prefer to treat school at arm's reach - rationally and emotionally distancing themselves from it because information is all they require from a classroom.  To these academics school is a job, one they have figured out and are good at.  These are the students who get mad at you when you saddle them with a problem that may not have a solution.

This distance between student need and teacher approach is probably the single largest difference between academic and applied students.  Some of the smartest kids I've ever taught have been applied level students.  Teachers willing to support emotional engagement with learning often find these students are the ones who make the biggest leaps in high school, but they are challenging, and often emotionally exhausting.  Especially when the rationalists who run the system think 30+ students in a classroom is manageable (and it is if you don't treat students like people).

Ironically, all of those teacher movies that educators so love are the ones that emphasize this emotional learning connection, but it just doesn't happen that often in the real world.

At a recent Heads' meeting a rule was put up saying that people have to be rational and unemotional when making suggestions.  They can't be emotionally engaged in any debate.  That's how ed-quants like it in the classroom too.  What a sure way to make something tedious.

Radical engagement is powered by emotion.  It makes for a messy, demanding learning environment, but it also is a vital key to differentiating learning that the vast majority of educators don't just ignore, but actively seek to stamp out.  The doorway to mastery is one you have to walk through yourself, and you'll never manage it if you're dependant on the advice of others.  It takes resiliency, courage and a lot of work to become that kind of proficient.  Emotion is a powerful ally in getting there.

The Tyranny of Collaboration

I was talking to a digital native the other day in English class about Shakespeare.  This particular Millennial is a top 5%er who will go on to do great things.  She was wondering who the people who wrote Shakespeare were.  I was surprised at the question as I've always thought one person wrote Shakespeare.  I even have trouble with the classist conspiracy types who think an actor couldn't be that smart so a noble must have done it.  Having read a lot of Shakespeare (all of it actually) over decades, I know his voice, and it isn't a voice by committee; that kind of brilliance doesn't happen around a meeting table.

I thought it interesting that the Millennial mind assumes collaboration, infecting her own generation's constant interaction across history.  The internet has turned the digital natives who live in it into a hive mind.  They can't form an opinion without socializing or turning to the internet for information. Their waking lives are awash in constant communication.  They describe moments 'trapped' in their own mind when they are unplugged as boring.

The modern mind is open in a way that someone from 20 years ago, let alone 400 years ago, would find alarming. Our marvellous information revolution has not only made our data public, it is also changing what we think we are individually capable of.  Needless to say, if we start thinking that individual genius can't happen in the quiet of our own minds, it won't.

A smart, capable digital native can't conceive of a single mind being capable of producing great works, they must be the result of never ending communication and collaboration.  A couple of centuries from now people who have been immersed in digital communications for generations will wander around The Van Gogh Museum or read Macbeth and think that people from back then must have been mental giants to do these things alone, that or they'll reinvent history as each age does, in its own image, seeing collaboration and minds peeled open under a barrage of constant communication where none were.

Education hops on the back of this communication revolution (flood?) and has integrated collaboration into just about every aspect of learning.  Leveraging technology to find new and exciting ways of collaborating is one of the pillars of early Twenty-First Century education.  Students have lost the idea of personal mind-space thanks to current communications habits.  The classroom, one of the last places where a student might find privacy in their own heads has been crushed under the weight of expectations from this social shift.  Much of this is shrouded in talk of engagement and preparing students for the modern world.  I just hope that preparation has real advantages for the student in terms of personal development.  I'm starting to doubt that.

Brainstorming about the advantages of deep thinking in your own head - from an ENG3u class two years ago...

Gaming Everything

Via NBCnews: the glory of the hardcore video gamer.  Not
 the kind of thing that's ever going to challenge the Olympics
for public attention I think.

I've had a lot of trouble playing video games lately.  My problem seems to be around that idea of scripted experience.  If I'm playing a video game I'm working through a narrative someone else created.  I enjoy narratives but what irks me about video games is they pretend to have an element of choice in them when in fact they don't.  They suggest that they are the next evolution in entertainment but the interactivity they offer is so limited that it's really just a hidden script that you follow under the illusion of choice.  Gamification in general seeks to use this illusion to hook people into otherwise tedious situations.

The first step away from video gaming occurred when I found I couldn't get into single player games anymore.  Even the good ones with epic narratives felt banal.  I went to multi-player games for several years hoping that the human element would create choice, but I find that these too are scripted, and worse, they force players into scripted responses to the point where you can't tell the players from the bots.  When a game is so restrictive that it makes the people in it act like machines it's not a game I care to play.

There is a particular situation in which we're happy to turn people into bots if the illusion of engagement is preserved.  That situation also happens to be seen as quite tedious by many of its participants.  Education is eager to digitize if it ensures engagement, even if that engagement mimics the dimensionless engagement found in online activity.  Standardized testing feeds this thinking, producing learning outcomes that are easily quantifiable as data even as they fail to demonstrate learning.  Deep contextual human activities (like learning) are lost in simplistic digital data.

Doubt is cast on an individual teachers' ability to teach a subject.  Consistency is demanded in modern education as a result of this doubt and the slippery nature of digital information encourages this by eroding the space between classrooms and lessons.  This is shown as some kind of great step forward in terms of fairness, but what it really does is reduce teaching (as it has done with many other human activities) to a vapid exchange of information, incidentally, what digital machines do best. 

We fill in templates, teach centralized material and are encouraged to sync how we teach it.  Proof of success is found in standardized test scores.  There is little interest in assessing teaching or learning in any other way.

This digital infection also carries the parasitic idea of gamification, usually championed by video game evangelists who believe that the structure of gaming can overcome every obstacle.  Teachers are encouraged to design student success through scripted outcomes, pretty much like a video game does.  If the game you're playing is designed to have you eventually win, it isn't much of a challenge, and certainly isn't something you can be proud of, but then modern learning isn't about challenge, it's about engagement.  The idea of gamification makes me uneasy for this very reason.  When we gamify situations that aren't games I'm afraid that we pollute complex situations with the implied success found in most gaming outcomes.  If education is supposed to prepare students for the world beyond school, this isn't going to do it.

When you're gaming everything, you've lost the ability to
immerse yourself in anything.

If you offer open ended, 'real' experience many digital natives shy away from a situation where the rules can't be gamed for advantage.  The hacking mindset implies that the system is more important than the content.  Perhaps that is why I can't play video games anymore.  It's hard to get lost in a narrative when you're constantly looking at ways to subvert the delivery method.

Wilful suspension of disbelief is lost in the digital age.  This is the root of the pessimism and disengagement you see in many students.  When education becomes another process you hack to guaranty your own success, it becomes increasingly impossible to do anything useful with it.

This grew out of Scripted Lives which itself grew out of Unscripted Moments.  I'm pulling at a lot of threads here.  I've been a fan of RPGs since I got into D&D when I was 10.  I love sports and would describe myself as a serious gamer.  I've spent most of my life learning digital technology, so I'd hardly call myself a tech-hater either, but watching digital technology and gamification aiming for society wide acceptance has made me very uneasy.

Learning Without A Safety Net

As a learner I tend to have problems following curriculum (I have trouble following it as a teacher too).  For me, learning is a challenging, self-directed, non-linear activity.  It's a delight  when you have that eureka moment and frustrating when you're can't grasp a concept because you don't have enough context around it.  I don't want it to be easy, and I don't want it to be fail-proof.  Classes that are unfailable are pointless in my eyes; difficulties in learning are what make it empowering!  Success shouldn't be assured, if it is, you've sacrificed any real sense of accomplishment.


If a teacher, closely following set curriculum, spoon feeds me a lesson, I don't feel that I've learned it, so much as learned the wrong thing (being told how to do it rather than figuring out how to do it).  When students ask me to resolve a problem for them, I point them in the right direction, I don't fix it for them.  They aren't in class to learn how to ask someone to correct their grammar, operate Adobe Flash or build a computer, they are in class to learn how to do these things for themselves.  If they're miles from figuring it out for themselves, I simply try and close that gap, but never take the last step, they need to do that themselves, or they won't own their learning.  To quote the mighty Morpheus, " I'm trying to free your mind, Neo. But I can only show you the door. You're the one that has to walk through it. "


I set up my classrooms as research centres and each assignment as a project.  The environment should quickly and easily provide the tools needed to learn in a hands-on way.  Failures aren't failures, the only way to fail is to do nothing (which an increasing number of students seem to be doing once they realize how hard it is to fail in the current system).  I encourage experimentation, and the opportunities found in resolving your own misunderstandings.  Most of all, I make it very clear that the only way to fail is to make no attempt.  Once students are engaged, they inevitably find success in a supportive learning environment.


I did this in English and it often caused conflict with the force-feeders who feel that you're not teaching unless you're talking at the class.  Those force-feeders are as often students as they are teachers; the expectation of most academic students are that the teacher will give you information, you'll repeat it back, and see high grades.  Giving them room to fail makes them very nervous.  Seeing that the technology curriculum is actually based on this idea of broad based, project focused learning, I'm looking forward to teaching a subject built upon this open, student centred approach.  I loved teaching art for the same reason; project based, hands-on learning with lots of time for me to work one on one with students as they develop tangible skills.


In a tightly restricted, curriculum based classroom, I feel like I'm trying to dance in a straight jacket (both as a teacher, and as a student).  I'm not saying that there shouldn't be some focus, but the moment you dictate the entire process of learning, you effectively kill any personal meaning or satisfaction in it.