It's Time For You To Go

The ZPD: something all those people critical of
teaching have never heard of, but it's where
teachers live all day every day.

If your teacher-craft is good you are a natural differentiator, going to great lengths to provide each student with what they need.  Teachers are the pressure point between a system trying to do things as cheaply and generically as possible and individual students all learning from their own context.  That stretch is why replacing teachers with elearning systems or creating enormous classrooms will result in a substantial drop in pedagogical effectiveness.  You need a trained professional to attempt to bridge this enormous gap in a reasonably sized class, at least if you want it done well.

In an optional course like computer engineering this is stretched to extremes.  In the same class I will have functionally illiterate students who verge on being developmentally delayed sitting next to gifted students who so aggressively pursue the work that they are operating well beyond the expectations of the grade or even the curriculum.  I'm the mechanism that tries to make sure both those students (and the other twenty-two in the room) are all in their zone of proximal development, and yes, it's exhausting at the best of times.

On top of that, because I'm teaching high school students I get to attempt this stunt with kids whose brains haven't yet developed the ability to forecast the consequences of their actions.  When their amygdalas finally develop in their early 20s their executive functions will come online and their post-secondary instructors will get to enjoy a more complete human being, but we never see them in high school.  Most of the general public are also oblivious to the brain research teachers keep up on.

Because all of that isn't enough, Ontario also likes to Victory Lap students, allowing graduates who have already finished to come back for another year at great public expense.  The system used to enjoy the extra financial injection that these students brought with them, but cuts have meant that schools aren't being funded completely to support these students properly any more.  This week I'm spending more attention on two victory lappers than I am on my other 70 odd students who are actually supposed to be there.

I've had mixed experience with Victory Lappers.  In some cases that extra year was just what they needed in terms of maturity to prepare them for post-secondary life, but too many times it's a privileged kid enjoying an easy year in a fish tank they've outgrown instead of taking the big step into the unknown.  That this is now happening in an unfunded and overly stretched system is causing stress cracks to appear where they didn't before.  Maybe a way forward in this is to only allow students with individual education plans (those who need special supports) the opportunity to victory lap, but whatever we do, it needs to have been done several years ago.  If we could stop playing politics and actually manage Ontario's education system effectively, we could find cost savings in something like this immediately.

The Money Trap

I know it's hard to imagine, but there was a time when money did not dictate your self-value. This seems a foreign concept in the twenty-first Century, but prior to the neo-liberal ideas that we now take for granted, humans valued themselves in very different ways.

Bucky's quote popped up the other day and got me thinking about self-value. Can you imagine a world where the purpose of people was to push the boundaries of their thinking instead of being forced into servitude to an economic system that reduces them to drudgery?

Rather than battle this kind of reductionist and inhuman economic thinking, education has been struggling to get on board with it (there is nothing worse than looking like you're out of step with society - it's never wrong).  Pathways to employment is modern education's reason for being, and it plays nicely into 1% thinking that earning money is all that matters, all that makes you worthwhile.

The rich want you to self-identify with your earning potential, then they own your means of happiness. When your self-worth is tied to your ability to earn a trivial income you are drip-fed your reason for being by people who (according to your own core belief that money is what makes you valuable) will happily starve you for their own ends.

Asking a 21st Century person to believe that their income does not dictate their self value is impossible. This kind of viral capitalism is every bit as limiting to human potential as medieval serfdom, dogmatic church states or god-kings.

People are fond of criticizing history for ideas that seem silly in retrospect.  These are the very same people who argue for and justify our current woeful state of being.  Our unsuccessful students aren't high earners.  Our successful students go to work for those oil companies.  It's a difficult thing to see past the myths, misinformation and indoctrination of our own culture, but I suspect you'll never find happiness if you don't, especially in the early twenty-first Century.

***

It's the day before classes start again and I'm up at 6am after too many tedious work anxiety dreams (not of being in the classroom, but of being in school.  Teaching doesn't freak me out, the systemic nature of modern education does).

I had a good break, but now I'm back to seeing how far I can encourage free thinking before I crash into The System again.  I'm a 20%er at heart.  I always tend toward the more difficult road, I get more out of travelling on it but it's tiring being a minority all the time.

This isn't the first time I've been away from the classroom for a few days, found some perspective and wondered if I'm in the best place to learn.  The irony isn't lost on me.

Simulation: the ideal summative

I've been a RPG (role playing game) player since I wandered into the original Dungeons & Dragons at eleven years old.  My adolescence revolved around marathon games when I wasn't working.  My first non-family road trip was a drive from Toronto to Milwaukee in 1988 when I was seventeen for GENCON, the original D&D and RPG convention.  For the next four years that trip became a staple of our August holiday, though the first time in a barely functioning Chevy Chevette stuffed with four of us was by far the most epic (and least likely to succeed).


I quickly found myself in the Dungeon Master's chair when playing.  I had a talent for creating consistent, exciting worlds that balanced on a knife edge, often determined by the roll of a dice.  I was a  natural at paracosmic world building without realizing it.  When others took the chair they tried to force the story back on to their planned narrative if the dice didn't cooperate, which made the entire experience fall apart.  Random influences were vital for the game to become alive, a bad DM would break the forth wall when they tried to force the story back onto a planned track.

I recall one game where I'd planned out the evening in more detail than normal.  The beginning of the game was supposed to start with the players mocking Death (as in the grim reaper), and getting killed as a result.  The story would then continue in the after life.  But telling players they are just dead goes against everything the game is about, the dice have to decide, so I gave the last standing player a 1 in 20 chance of successfully assassinating death, assuming it would never happen, but it did.  I had to change direction and start laying track down in front of them in a new an unexpected direction.  I've seen a lot of classroom teachers stubbornly try to force a class not in the right mental space in the same fashion.

Those DMing experiences greatly influence how I teach in the classroom.  I keep the big ideas in mind, but try and lay down track in which ever direction students in the class seem intent on going.  One of the ways to feel like I'm not standing there unprepared is to put them in a transparent simulation.

Simulation is an edu-speak friendly word for what many of these students spend vast amounts of their free time doing.  World of Warcraft?  A massively-multi-player simulation (it often feels like a D&D table with a hundred people sitting at it).  Even online shooters reach into the RPG bag of tricks to introduce team based game play in a consistent simulation  that people find very engaging.

A simulation in class can often work to the big ideas you're going after, while giving students the power to get there themselves.  As I often say in class, "I could show you how to do it, but then you'd know how to ask me how to do it.  If you figure it out for yourself you're much less likely to forget it."  The sim lets students know the goal (so it's very backward planning friendly), but doesn't goose-step them through a process to get there.  By the time you're doing a summative you need them to find their own way through a forest they are now familiar with.

If learning is about developing a new way of getting something done then simulation is the ideal last step in summative assessment.  Before a sim you'd do the basics around concepts, language, skills development and make sure all students are in the ZPD.  Once the foundation is laid it's time for them to show what they can do, it's time for a simulation.  Nothing got me ready for that like D&D dungeon mastering did.