On Mindful Work and Learners/Not Homework

To Think Away The Grass, The Trees, The Clouds (M.A. Reilly, 2010)

We've had a few days off from work here in New Jersey and during parts of the last four days, I have had the occasion to hear my son on line skyping with friends who were helping him to release his new Minecraft server which went public on Saturday. I sometimes forget that he is talking with other boys given the seriousness of the tone, the strategy of the play, the banter.  They talk a lot: the entire time they are each at their own homes with headphones on, audio skyping, and relaying step-by-step what they are doing/thinking.  The amount of talk is pretty significant.  There is no one to "call on" each player to talk. They talk at will and there doesn't seem to be any 'engagement' problems.

Really would like you to assist him, G as he is going to be a good client on the server. We need to make sure we pay a little more attention.
T, I need you to use your programming skills with a plug in. Can you help me there?

Did you vet him? 
I think he's a griefer. 
Check him out.
Wow, he's been banned all over.


I just claimed land so we're safe.
Oh they banned me. Oh well different account time. I'm going to come in with a different account.

Slash F closed.  Slash F, space, join then CIA. Do you have access to two?

Dude, he hacked my facebook account. You can't have him on the server.

My first objective is to mine diamond. Wherever I find diamonds there's always water. Why is there always an underground lake?

You've got like 40 diamond clusters next to you. Do you see them?
Yeah. You want me to get them?
Do it.

If I didn't make him get off the computer now and then (time to take a shower, eat dinner, rake leaves, etc.) I don't think he would move.  I am reminded as I watch the intensity with which he designs, interacts, and plays--how sharply this contrasts with the way he attends to most school-based work. For example, last week was the book report project: a paper bag he had to decorate with a drawing, a synopsis of the book, a paragraph about an internal conflict and a paragraph about an external conflict. Inside the bag he had to place 5 to 7 artifacts related to his book.  The book he had read was Joseph Heller's Catch 22. If you know the text, you know that finding artifacts to put in the bag can be a bit of a challenge. In many ways the text doesn't lend itself very well to the paper bag book project.

This example of homework, may in fact be an excellent assignment, but would more than likely work better if learners at least had some choice in the matter. There well may be books where putting artifacts in a bag makes great sense and learners who would think so.  Likely too, there will be learners and texts for whom this task doesn't make a lot of sense. Agency matters as it is directly connected to thinking.  And that is what I want to write about here. 

Failure to do homework or to value homework is not an issue of working hard. As the four-day Minecraft work shows, working hard is not avoided. Rather, failure to do or desire to do homework is a matter of agency.  We won't alleviate the 'problem' of not doing homework if we don't address the question of agency. 

For example, instead of asking a learner:  

How best do you think you might represent what you have learned here?  Or 
How would you show that you are confused by this?  Or 
What aspect of the work do you think is important to share and with whom? 
Is it important to represent your learning?
What do you do when you have nothing to say?
And so on...

We often simply determine the homework and issue the tasks to the students. These assignments are collected and often graded and then used as evidence of how well the learner is learning.  What does completion of the paper bag project actually demonstrate about the learner?  Does this assigning, grading, and reporting even remotely make sense?

I was reading Tobey Steeves's (@symphily) post, Curricular praxis: Representation as 'buggery' and legitimation for the public good, and was stopped by this section:

Are ‘legitimate’ forms of knowledge those which can be relayed on a multiple choice test, or – more broadly – those which can be represented or entextualized? If so, how might one paint a whisper, write a cloud, or sculpt a breeze? Common manifestations of representational thinking in schools include report cards, labeling deviance and naturalizing dividing practices, and interpretation. Report cards present the illusion of objectivity, reducing the inexplicable to abstractions like ‘A’ or 3.0, and problematically contribute to the sorting and managing of bodies. It must be remembered that labeling and dividing students according to essentialistic categories circumscribes the process of subjection, and the internalization of labels is a key element in the maintenance of hegemony... 

The internalization of labels is a key element in the maintenance of hegemony. Wow. That really makes me stop and take a deeper look at the book project, the B+, the quiz grade. These practices are often hegemonic as there is a subjugation of the learner as s/he has no voice in the matter. In many ways it mimics a Catch 22. The outcome has already been determined and regardless of logic/desire it cannot be redesigned.

I can imagine some of you may be thinking of possible counter arguments. One I have heard goes something like this:

Well, these kids are going to have to do work they don't determine when they get to the work force. They might as well get some practice now.  Not everything is fun and games.

And I don't doubt that could be true--that in fact my son, and perhaps yours, will work someday and be assigned work to do.  But isn't it shortsighted to think that the best way to learn how to figure out work you have been assigned is to  practice getting work on a nightly basis and complying for 10 to 13 years? Is it compliance that we are teaching? And if it is, is that the best we can offer?

Nothing would thrill me more than my son arriving home with work that mattered so much to him, that he designed and was so very essential that he jumped into the work with great intensity and interest.  We simply have never seen that happen, apart from independent book reading when has been allowed to select the text and read it as he likes (not being held to only reading 1 chapter a night, etc.).

How hard would it be to:

• negotiate curriculum and evaluation with learners?
• create enough space in the day-to-day work so that their voices would not only need to be sounded, but also heard?

 Bottom line?

If we don't start making these changes, learners will leave schools as soon as they can and opt for other ways to learn.

Hegemony Or Why I Will Not Talk in Class Anymore

Scene 1
A former graduate student shared that shortly after taking over a class (she's the 4th teacher this year) she reviewed the children's writers' notebooks.  She said she was dismayed to see that a few students had written the following entry:

"I will not talk in class anymore."

Scene 2
Last week a teacher I know discontinued working with a student teacher. She indicated that the student was not ready to teach given her lack of preparation that resulted in significant and consistent errors while teaching. The student teacher was denied a credential and returned to the college.

Scene 3

Some years ago I oversaw the literacy program for a public city school system. A neighboring charter school would hire the city's Reading Recovery teachers to work as after school tutors in order to teach those students who were most at risk for reading difficulties.  The leader of the Charter explained that he could not match the salaries of such senior and well educated teachers, nor could his school pay for the continuing contact and other costs associated with Reading Recovery.  What he could and did do was to pay for after school eduction for children. As he told me then, "Our teachers are too green to know how to do this (prevent reading difficulties).  They can help the Reading Recovery teachers and learn as the students are learning."

Scene 4
Yesterday, I passed by a charter school in an inner city.  It was a beautiful building in a neighborhood of mostly boarded buildings and largely littered sidewalks.  The building was well maintained and attractive with the sidewalks surrounding it, neatly swept. I thought about the number of studies I have read and the plethora of comments from public school advocates I have read all indicating that charter schools are no better or worse than public schools as measured by single test instruments and I wondered if such a measurement makes any difference to the people who send their children to this charter school.

I think of the players (teachers, students, student teacher, administrators) in these minor dramas and wonder about the complex issue that (in)form our understanding of schooling—a topic that ought to be fraught with positions, especially these days. Where one might expect to hear the clamor of different voices chiming, there seems to be just two dominant voices that relentlessly sound and sound again.  Are you pro-public schools or are you pro-charter schools?

Such a query is hegemonic posturing at best.  The current public discourse about teaching and learning is dangerously narrowed in order to position one's perspective and to obfuscate the more challenging realities we fail to discuss:

1. who has consistent opportunities to access high level curricula in this country and who does not and why is that;
2. what constitutes high level curricula (for whom?);
3. how do local values matter;
4. what are the relationships between poverty and learning and how do we create equitable environments for all;
5. how do we reconcile differences (who & what gets valued and not).

Instead of substantive conversations that take longer than the end page in a popular press magazine, we are subjected to smoke and mirrors. Consider the recent Newsweek column, A Case of Senioritis, Jonathan Alter penned. Alter writes:

After exhaustive study, the Gates Foundation and other experts have learned that the only in-school factor that fully correlates is quality teaching, which seniority hardly guarantees. It’s a moral issue. Who can defend a system where top teachers are laid off in a budget crunch for no other reason than that they’re young?

I am curious as to what study he is referencing (no citation was included) and take exception (and hope you do as well) with the syllogistic leap in logic that posits "top" teachers as being synonymous with youth.  Is Alter suggesting that youth and inexperience are correlates for fine teaching?  Is there some juried study that shows that?  The faultiness in such thinking is extraordinary, but no longer unusual in these Shoot Out at the O.K. Corral days. 

Lost in such binary advantaging (get rid of senior teachers and keep young teachers) are the necessary conversations about privilege, quality, relevance, context, opportunity, and empowerment we need to be having.  This us vs. them drama distracts and keeps us from addressing our shared responsibilities regarding democracy and schooling.  Recall John Dewey who wrote, “We naturally associate democracy, to be sure, with freedom of action, but freedom of action without freed capacity of thought behind it is only chaos.”  

I can't help but wonder what sense Dewey would make of the repeated calls for action (get rid of tenure, stop health benefits, do not pay for teachers' higher degrees, employ beginning teachers, privilege youth) by bureaucrats and billionaires who seem to make such utterances with mindfulness that makes me wonder to what end our democracy is secure.  Their posturing (employ young teachers, build charter schools) leaves not only public schools in chaos by undermining public trust, but our democractic system as well.  

I will not talk (in class) anymore may well be the first volley in this grand monologue about public schooling, especially as we seem to be running headlong into a two class system populated by those who have and those who serve those who have. Makes me wonder if all this posturing is a prelude to a return to serfdom.