There is no STEM

There has recently been a fair bit of push back against STEM as a focus in schools, but as a classroom technology and engineering teacher I have to tell you, there is no STEM.  By sticking science, technology, engineering and mathematics in an acronym, many people, especially people who aren't in classrooms, think that this is some kind of coherent strategy, but I can assure you it isn't, at least not in Ontario.

Maths and sciences are mandatory courses throughout a student's career.  Technology and engineering are not, ever.  Maths gets even more additional attention because of EQAO standardized testing, so numeracy is an expectation for all teachers throughout the school.  Science is mandatory throughout elementary grades and high school students are required to take two science credits to graduate.  Maths and science are baked into a student's school experience.

Want to feel the sting of irrelevance?  Waterloo University (and many others) do a fine job of underlining how little technology and engineering programs matter in high schools.  If you're signing up for their software engineering program you need lots of maths... and lots of science.  Engineering for an engineering program?  Well, there's no point in making it a requirement because it's an optional course that is barely taught anywhere in Ontario.  At one point I heard less than 15% of Ontario schools run any kind of coherent computer engineering program.  The technology prejudice is a bit different, that's more of a blue collar white collar thing, but engineering, as an academic focus, has been swallowed whole by science and maths.

SM has always been a foundational piece of public education, and remains so, but the entire 'STEM push' is really an SM push, engineering and technology remain barely taught and entirely optional and peripheral in Ontario classrooms, assuming they exist at all.  Tactile, hands on technology programs with their lower class sizes, expensive tools and safety concerns are the first to get canned when the money tightens up.  It's cheaper to stuff 30+ kids into an 'academic' (aka: text based/theory) course where you can sit them in efficient rows and learn linearly until everyone gets the same right answer.  It doesn't do much for them in the real world, but it's cheaper.  Math and science make sense in a school system focused on those kinds of academic economics.

Governments get voted in by creating panic about student mathematics skills, and how science is taught is another political hot-spot that gives politicians lots of traction.  I have no doubt that these two subjects enjoy the attention they do because of this political fecundity.  Engineering and technology?  The skills that build the critical infrastructures that allow us to feed, connect and house people?  Not much political mucking to be done there, it just needs to work.

Last year I had a student graduate and go on to college for computer technology.  He had some trouble in school, but was on track to be a successful computer technician.  In his first post-secondary computer technology courses he was feeling well ahead of his classmates and was confident of success, but not all his classes went so well.  He ended up failing his maths course and eventually dropped out of the whole program.  Talking to his mother after this happened, she implied that I'd failed to teach him the mathematics he needed to succeed.  I didn't argue the point (I don't teach mathematics other than in conjunction with what we're doing in computer technology).  There is an entire mathematics department with ten times more personnel, resources and infinitely more presence in the school than me an my oft-forgotten program, but with STEM ringing in her ears we're all lumped into that failure.

This year I'm rocking a budget (which I've already exceeded in the second week of September) that is 25% of what it was a few years ago.  Everyone is seeing cuts, but the mandatory departments are protected in a way that our optional courses are not.  Where they might see a 10% cut, I'm seeing 75%, because what I teach is not a priority.  That cut is happening while I'm actually up in sections due the success we've had in various competitions and the media attention we've received (but not in our own yearbook).

You can rail against STEM all you like, but there is no such thing.  If there has been any STEM funding with this focus it hasn't found my technology and engineering courses because not all STEMs are considered worthy of political attention.  The best I've seen out of this are a few more manipulatives in maths classes based on corporate tech-in-a-box, but building a kit isn't engineering.  When you're engineering there are no instructions and the end goal may not even be possible, you certainly don't end up with everyone looking at the same finished product.  That kind of stochastic process is another reason why eng/tech is frowned upon in academic settings; they like everyone to arrive at the same correct answer.  It makes for a clear sense of progress, but learning to deal with potential failure in reality isn't wasted time in school.

In the article that kicked this off, you get a very articulate and scholarly take on the value of a liberal arts education and how it can free you from economic bondage in our overpopulated and automated world.  The down-your-nose 'yeomanship' / servitude argument pasted on STEM and CTE as a preparation for the workplace ignores the many soft skills that hands-on technical training can provide in favour of the argument that students of technology are dimensionless corporate shills whose only interest is to find work in a system that doesn't really need them.  But aren't we all yoked to our broken economic system?  A degree doesn't somehow free you from that commitment, but it will bury you in debt and the attendant servitude to it.  A technical education costs less and teaches you some valuable soft skills that will help you in any vocation, while also offering you a shot at something other than general labour.  The engineering design process technology training is predicated on would help anyone in any aspect of life where they must self-organize and tackle a problem that may not have a solution.

I have a liberal arts education (English and philosophy majors) and I greatly value the discipline it has brought to both my thinking and writing, but that doesn't mean I don't value hands-on mastery and the attendant good habits that accompany it.  It took me a long time to value my technical, hands-on skills against the constant noise of academic/white collar prejudice and privilege.  Since moving to technology from English teaching, I face that pressure daily, as do my tech-teaching colleagues.  In speaking to many people I still get the sense that technical, hands-on skills are inferior to academic skills, but I find them complimentary, not less than.  It would be quite a thing if we could value a student's technical hands-on mastery as much as we value their academic grades... or even their sports abilities.

I get the sense that Professor Zaloom believes the future will be full of highly educated academics elucidating on the state of humanity while they float above economic necessities with their intellectual freedom.  I'd argue that learning hands-on technical skills gives you a variety of soft-skills (persistence, self-organization, resilience, humility to name a few) that will help students deal with that overpopulated, automated future every bit as much as a degree might.

If you follow that article through, it's less about STEM and more about what we're going to do in an increasingly automated world populated by more and more people with less and less to do.  In that no-win situation, the value of being able to repair your own technology and understand the hidden systems that regulate your life is another kind of literacy that I think all students should have, especially if they are going to depend on those systems and let them direct their lives.

A good read on the fecundity of hands-on mastery.

Technology education offers that insight along with a plethora of tough-soft skills that are wanting in many academic programs where established reality is whatever the teacher thinks it should be.  There is a hard, real-world edge to technology training that is often hard to find in the mentally constructed world of academic achievement.  Matt Crawford describes management thinking in Shop Class as Soulcraft as having a 'peculiarly chancy and fluid character' due to its success criteria being changeable depending on the whims of the people in charge.  That was my experience in too many academic situations.  You know where you stand in technology because reality isn't fickle.

It's a shame that this pointless acronym has thrown a blanket over the grossly neglected curriculums of technology and engineering, while giving even more attention to two of the Disney princesses of academia.  To be honest with you, I think technology and engineering would be just where it is now had this STEM focus never happened, which tells you something about how this ed-fad has gone down.


Additional Reading:

The rich intersection of a liberal arts background and technology expertise:  Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Shop Class as Soulcraft is a must read, but so is Matt's follow-up, The World Beyond Your Head.  A philosophical look at the power of tactile skills to free us from consumerism and the mental world of the digital attention economy.

Shopclass as Soulcraft: IT Idiocy, Management Speak & Skills Abstraction

A brilliant little book by Matt Crawford

I'm currently reading the very meaty and painfully direct "Shop Class as Soulcraft" by Matt Crawford. In the book he laments idiocy in professionals and the vagaries of management language in modern business where there is no objective means of determining an employee's competency. Both of these arguments come together beautifully in the relatively recent field of information technology.

I've been working in IT in both private and public sectors for going on twenty five years now. I've worked in small offices, and on massive installs, in engineering shops, manufacturing concerns, universities, schools and in offices. With a certain breadth of experience comes a pretty good bullshit detector. Crawford's ideas around professional idiocy and manager-speak appear to have, unfortunately, come together in a perfect storm of hidden incompetence in information technology.  There are few places more managed by people who have no technical background in it than there are in information technology.

THE IDIOT

Crawford talks about Robert Persig (the author of Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance - another great read)'s idiot mechanic, who is more intent on appearances and action than submitting himself to the truths the bike is trying to tell him and what that means to his public role as a professional technician. In the book, the kid ends up butchering Persig's bike while taking no time to actually try and diagnose what the problem is; he's all hands and no brain. Crawford describes the idiot:

"Persig's mechanic is, in the original sense of the word, an idiot. Indeed, he exemplifies the truth about idiocy, which is that it is at once an ethical and a cognitive failure. The Greek idios means "private," and an idiotes means a private person, as opposed to a person in their public role - for example, that of motorcycle mechanic. Persig's mechanic is idiotic because he fails to grasp his public role, which entails, or should, a relation of active concern to others, and to the machine. He is not involved. It is not his problem. Because he is an idiot... At bottom, the idiot is a solipsist." (p98)

That lack of involvement should spark a memory with any teacher reading this. The student who refuses, at all costs, regardless of the differentiation you throw at it, to do anything whatsoever, is an idiot in the technical sense of the word.

From the IT angle, I see people like Persig's idiot mechanic every day. You know the type, they know just enough to be dangerous (and have tools on hand). They tend to make grand assumptions, usually based on a non-existent knowledge base, and then act on them to make the situation worse. They talk loudly and use a lot of word whispers ("you know?", "right?", "know what I mean?", etc) to make sure you agree with them.  It's a handy way to externally monitor what's going on when you have no idea yourself and dovetails nicely with the idea of management speak presented later.

The disengaged idiot fits especially well with information technology because it's a dark art to the vast majority of people. You can talk out of your ass to 99% of the population and they have no idea what you're saying, freeing you to say pretty much anything you want. The bigger the words the better, and because most people are users they're more than happy to sit in on the tech talk and participate at the same level as the disengaged idiot.

Many moons ago, right out of high school I found myself working in a Canadian Tire shop. One day one of the mechanics burned himself on a Fuego. He proceeded to flip out and run up a bill of unneeded repairs to the order of a thousand dollars; a good example of the moral failure of the idiot and one I see all the time in IT, especially when dealing with older customers to whom the dark art seems positively Satanic.

MANAGEMENT SPEAK

Crawford also does a brilliant dissection of the 'peculiarly chancy and fluid' life of the corporate manager (substitute administrator or educational consultant for equal value here). In a world with no objective means of assessing competence the manager lives in a purgatory of abstraction using vague language "...staking out a position on all sides of a situation, so you always have plausible deniability of a failure." Crawford goes to great lengths to point out that this isn't done maliciously but rather as a means of psychic protection for the people trapped in this morass. At any point an arbitrary decision can make you redundant (shown brilliantly in Up In The Air - many of the people in the interviews are real people who have actually been downsized) regardless of your own abilities or actions.

In a world of meaningless management language actual technical competency is devalued with every spoken word, a central theme in Crawford's book. Objective competency is ignored in favour of MBA language that allows the initiate of globalized business speak to survive regardless of what decisions they might have made. In fact, the very making of decisions is discouraged. In places where reality matters your opinion is not as important as you've been taught to think it is.  I see this with students all the time.  They attempt poorly planned, grandiose engineering projects and then are frustrated by the simplest physical problems.  They aren't used to the absolutism of reality.   As Crawford so cuttingly notes: "This stance toward 'established reality,' which can only be described as psychedelic, is best not indulged around a table saw."

One of the many reasons I'm looking forward to teaching tech this fall is because there is no doubt of the student's focus, ability and honesty of effort when reality is judging them. If you made it, ignored lessons, examples and process, and it didn't work no amount of 'but you're still fantastic' student success talk will mitigate a failure staring you in the face. The fantasy of 'everyone's a hidden genius' so popular in education today is best not indulged when reality (and the objective assessment of it) is judging the results. Having no safety net in your learning isn't necessarily a bad thing (it focuses the mind) unless you're trying to peddle a new ed-theory on zero failure.

Management speak based on the the surreal, 'psychedelic', entirely provisional world of business became popular along with globalization, itself founded on many hidden assumptions. Grown out of the initial industrially driven abstractions of Taylorism in the early 20th Century, modern business is so far from the witness of truth (like the stock market it has spawned) that it has more in common with Alice in Wonderland than it does with a technical manual.  The best you can hope for are some vague metaphors to describe the massive fiction of modern commerce.

The IT Idiot Management Babbling: Making An Objective Technical Skill Abstract

Information technology is a new field of study. It began and grew in a well established, Taylorist, globalized, MBA driven, entirely fictional world. The language around IT maintenance is often clouded in mysticism, grown from the same vague, plausibly deniable language of business and finance. In education we feed that fire with talk of digital natives, people who magically have technical skills because of their birth date. In classrooms we ignore this vital Twenty-First Century literacy in favour of magical thinking about divine digital birthrights.  Education's adherence to the vagaries of business speak serves our students poorly.

I'm not saying every student needs to be a qualified information technology technician, but it is safe to say that every student graduating at the moment should be familiar enough with digital technology that they don't get white washed by an idiot's babbling, or convinced by the parochial and intentionally misleading language surrounding information technology. Auto shop is often taught this way - as a means of delivering a basic familiarity to students so they aren't bamboozled by an idiot. IT should adopt the same position as this older, wiser technology.

IT is a measurable skill. I take great pleasure in offering up the A+ certification practice test to the resident experts in senior computer engineering. When the best of them barely get it half right it sets the stage for systemic, meaningful learning of a technical skill they've always been told they magically gained by being born in the nineties.

People born in the 1900s weren't magically imbued with the ability to fix the new automobiles just coming out. What we do in failing to teach digital literacy is absurd as it feeds misinformation and empowers the idiot. It's bad enough when we purposefully remove objective standards from academic classes (and I'm not talking about standardized tests - they are about as far from objective standards as you can get, just another fiction), but to actively discourage objective standards in a technical field? That's just downright dangerous and expensive!

Master/Journeyman/Apprentice

I'm once again in the additional qualification classroom in order to gain another teachable.  This one was a bit tricky.  I'd been working in information technology since I graduated with an honours BA in English in the mid '90s.  When I went into teaching, I looked into getting my technical qualifications (I'd spent a fair amount of money on getting IT qualified and wanted to keep a finger in the pie, so to speak).  It didn't happen.  The Byzantine rules around what I needed and how I qualified were taking so long to get through, it was easier to just plug in my degree (to a very degree friendly teacher qualification system) and start there.


I did computer clubs and delved into #edtech relentlessly, but didn't get my computer engineering qualification until now because I needed it for a headship, and they'd recently made changes that cleared up some of the labyrinthine rules around getting the qualification.


So here I am, a qualified IT technician in a computer engineering class.  If we're doing networking, or computer repair, I'm aces, but soldering?  Circuit boards?  Not so much.  The funny thing is we have electrical engineers that don't know what a registry is or how to reset an IP address, but they are brilliant on a circuit board.  I'm starting to realize that computer engineering is another one of those subjects that collects expertise from various disciplines and files it all under the same heading.  I'm also beginning to see why some comp-eng teachers' courses look so different from other comp-eng teachers' courses.

Other than cutting networking cables, running them and installing hardware, I'm not really a nuts and bolts of electronics kind of guy, but after taking this AQ, I will be.  When I was a kid I got into cars and stereos and did some wiring then, it's nice to get hands on with components again.  My experience has all be around making it (IT) work for business, after taking this AQ, I get the sense that I'm going to end up delving more deeply into maker culture, something I've wanted to do for too long.


Getting my head back into wiring diagrams felt impossible in the first few days.  I'm finding the tools available, especially Arduino and Fritzing to be invaluable in bridging gaps in knowledge.  I know I won't be a Jedi knight at circuitry by the end of the course, but the 1-2-3 system our instructor has been using has recognized the varieties of skills in the room and allowed people to focus on what they want to improve in, and improve I have.


I'm looking forward to hitting my tech-class in the fall and getting my hands dirty.  In the meantime, I just started Shop Class As Soulcraft, suggested by our instructor on the last day of class.  Some mechanic's philosophy will help fill in the gap I'm feeling between my academic background, and my urge to work with my hands again.

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.