Critique Needed of An Image Gone Wrong

Boston (Reilly, 2015)

I. 

Sometimes when I make an image, I know it is failing.  
The composition is off.
The clarity of the work is too opaque.
I really don't have a clue what it is I'm trying to express.
And the more I try, the worse it gets.

I don't publish an image that is failing.  I keep those unfinished works quiet, private.


II. 

A few days ago I read Joyce Carol Oates in The Faith of a Writer discuss failure. She writes:

The artist, perhaps more than most people, inhabits failure, degrees of failure and accommodation and compromise; but the terms of his failure are generally secret (p.52).

I thought--this blog of mine can also be a place where work is more tentative, unfinished, error-ridden.  So today I placed at the top of this post an image that I tentatively titled, Boston.  I'm not sure what I'm trying for, nor what the image is expressing.  Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Thinking About Power, Schools, Teaching, Technologies, and God

 I. Channeling God

A few weeks ago, Pam Moran (@pammoran) sent me the transcripts of extended talks that Drs. Ackoff and Deming had back in the early 1990s.  It was most fascinating. This one extended comment by Ackoff really caught my ear.

"And when we started to talk about an enterprise, we looked at it exactly the way that Newton looked at the world. The enterprise was a machine created by its god, the owner, to do his work, and the worker was a replaceable machine part. Okay? The owner was a visible power that had virtually no constraints imposed on him by government or anybody else. He could hire who he wanted to, when he wanted to, pay them what he wanted to, and so on. That concept went through a transformation after World War I for a very important reason.

The American economy grew so rapidly that even if all the profit the corporations were making were reinvested in them, they would not be able to grow as rapidly as was possible. Therefore, the fundamental problem that confronted American management in the 1920's was: Do we constrain growth and retain control, or do we encourage growth and sacrifice control in order to get the financing necessary to get the growth. In other words, do we stay private or go public? And the 1920's was the major period in which corporations converted from private ownership to public ownership.

What happened? God disappeared --a very fundamental change. God was no longer present and powerful. He became an abstract spirit - two hundred and fifty thousand shareholders out there. Now, there's a difficulty in communication between the ordinary worker and that abstract spirit. Peter Drucker recognized that was a problem we had confronted almost 2,000 years ago when God disappeared in the Western World, and he said industry did exactly what the Western World did. It created an institution whose function it was to communicate between man and God, and he called that institution management. And management knew the will of god, the owners, the shareholders, exactly the way that the clergy knows the will of God, by revelation, because they sure don't know it any other way. 
 - Dr. Ackoff (Transcript: Conversations between Ackoff and Deming, 1992)

Wondering what you make of this...what, if any, parallels you see with the shift from private to public in the 1920s and the  increasing interest to make public schools private now. What should we make of that? Are the motivations connected?

II. Thinking About Learning

Today I watched this excellent screencast (Embracing Uncertainty) by Dave Cormier (@davecormier) who boldly states that we need to embrace uncertainty and that cannot measure learning.

Take a look:


Now take a look at this quote by Deming.



Is the push for making public schools private, a response in part to the indeterminacy one might feel when God has been replaced by an abstraction?  Take a look at Will Richardson's (@willrich45) recent column in District Administrator, "Coming to Terms with Five New Realities." Specifically, I connect Will's first assertion with the idea of an uncertain future. Will writes:

It’s becoming clearer by the minute that, as Web technologies open more and more doors for learners, they also pose more and more challenges to traditional thinking about schools. At the center is figuring how best to prepare students for the vast learning opportunities they have outside of the traditional education system.

How do we respond to such challenges? How do institutions respond?

I see these ideas as being connected.  How do we respond to uncertainty? How do we leverage uncertainty and how might it connect to economic methods?

Some things I am thinking about and wonder what you think:

1. Do private institutions create a public need for certainty by establishing its role as interpreter of God--thus reasserting God, not as an abstraction, but as the Deity? (Great Chain of Being, revisited?) Is this related to the increased pressure to move from public schooling to private forms of schooling?
2. What do we do when faced with uncertainty?  Is embracing uncertainty a learned behavior?
3. What does it mean that we need to learn to live in a world of mistakes? How do we do that and how do we avoid that?
4. What role(s) might web technologies play in leveraging/attending to/obfuscating/intensifying these tensions? Is the current backlash against and imposed restrictions of web technologies connected to how well we attend and/or fail to attend to uncertainty?

To Err is Human, Yet at Schools...

An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field.  ~Niels Bohr

On Gaming and Errors

Yesterday while driving in the car my son explained that he is improving at writing code:

Invention. (Reilly, 2008)

When I first started last summer I would get about 800 error messages and I got that down to 60 by the end of summer. The other day I got it down to 5 error messages.

My husband, Rob, quickly added that this is a gaming mentality.

Ask any gamer and he'll tell you that you learn through trial and error.

This struck me as significant.  Each week, either Rob or I have to sign a paper acknowledging each quiz and test grade my son received/earned during that week.  Next to each number, one of us signs his or her name. Some weeks Rob does this, other weeks I do it.  But it never stops or changes.  The numbers are final and we must acknowledge with ink, each performance and each "counts" towards a final marking period grade. Tests count x percentage points and quiz grades and homework count as well. 

It's all quite logical and explained at back to school night. Yet, it seems to me as if the logic is really faulty if the outcome is learning. For there are no second chances or even the understanding of how any one performance may be viewed in light of any other performance.

Eggs in a carton. Each separate, never mixed for fear of cracking.

There is no learning along the way. There are starts and stops and even these don't seem to be connected.

On Schooling

from this website

Last year, my son arrived at a new school in March and took a mathematics test three days after arriving. He failed the test, earning less than half of the available points.  A week of so later the mathematics teacher phoned to tell me she thought my son should be moved from the advanced math class as he was not doing well.  I inquired why and she mentioned the test score.  As we talked a bit it became evident that he was tested on material he simply had not been present to learn.  There was an assumption that "he should have known" the material. The test score would count toward his final average, I was warned. This seemed like misinformed mathematics to me.  I suggested as much and although the teacher agreed, the test score remained an indicator of his knowledge and performance.

But what did it actually mean?  How was it received? What did my son learn about his potential as a mathematician?  This is a child who at 21 months took the condiments from the refrigerator and organized them into two groups in an attempt to balance the lot. 11 years later he would confide to me that he just isn't' good in math, as in the class.  This is what he has learned at school. He has confused mathematics know-how with mathematics performance at school.

I never hear my son say, I am not a good gamer.  800 error messages and he sees these as an indicator of what he will learn, not as an indicator of how 'smart' he is.   School is something quite different.  In September, a friend told me about a virtual Java course at Stanford and I mentioned it to my son.  At first he seemed interested in attending. Yesterday he announced he had decided against this.

It's school.  I'd rather figure out Java like I do everything else. On line and figuring it out with friends and YouTtube.

Occupy Your Classroom

Circa 1967 (M.A. Reilly, 2009)

We make much of NCLB, its restrictive and onerous assessment practices, and we are right to do so.  I often wish though that the same educators who are vocal about state assessments might deeply inquire about their own assessment practices.  Now, I realize that there are many who do.  There are many who have more informed practices.  And there are many who simply issue grades based on some simple algorithm.

How is it that in a gaming culture, error is a way of learning and yet at schools, error is a form of damnation?  How many children sit in classrooms where they are terrorized by failing?  How many hear their teachers say to them or someone else in the class that if you fail you will be left back?  How many parents use their children's performances via grades at school as bragging rights, as bumper stickers? What is a way out of this mindless entrapment?

Karl Fisch (@karlfisch), Jose Vilson (@TheJLV) and Chad Sansing (@chadsansing) recently blogged about educators occupying their own classrooms.

Jose offered five ways for educators to occupy their classrooms.  He closed by writing:

We ought to rebel. Our best rebellion must come in the form of assuring our students do as well as possible. Outside politics have deteriorated, not elevated, the classroom experience for far too long. Before we can truly have a revolution of any nature, we must first shore up the parts of our job we can immediately control. It starts with the 30 / 60 / 90 / 150 students we have under our care.

Shore up the parts of the job we have immediate control over.

In a post dated October 7, 2011, Karl wrote:

That instead of blaming “the system,” we should realize that we are the system, and we should advocate for our students when we see things that we don’t believe are in their best interests. And that we, just like the protesters in the middle east, and just like the #occupywallstreet folks, have access to tools that Clay Shirky has shown us make it much easier to not only organize, but to actually effect change. That, really, this thing we call school doesn’t happen without us.

Be responsible as we are the system.

Chad closed his post by suggesting five proactive actions.  The last one, Build communities instead of reinforcing expectations, seems to be at the heart of what I am attempting to convey here.

Want to occupy your classroom?

Begin by asking yourself: Do the practices I espouse help to build a culture where to err is not only human, but necessary? As James Joyce penned in Ulysses,  "A man of genius makes no mistakes.  His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery"

What portals will you afford your students?