stimulant

So let me know, if you run into any trouble.

When most teachers walk into a classroom, they’ve already put in hours of work preparing for the next forty minutes. What they say, what they do, what materials are made available, how they organize students — to some extent, all the teacher’s moves have been orchestrated ahead of time. For many teachers, careful orchestration is necessary: the only way to squeeze in a burgeoning curriculum is micromanaging class time. Most schools even require the advance submission of a lesson plan, in some form.

When people talk about good teachers, they usually mean that a particular teacher is effective. Even people excited about educational reform and those critical of traditional education conflate being a good teacher with effectively transmitting information and skills.

I won’t try to define, “a good teacher.” Instead, let’s examine teachers’ interactions with students. We ask teachers to excise their personal life and opinions from the classroom. Touching is prohibited. There is no room for informal conversation or off-topic discussion. The classroom is regulated into an artificial, bloodless place.

Teachers strategize constantly to keep students’ attention, to evoke a desire to work, to foster willing — even eager — obedience. We have made the teacher into a behavioral engineer. Unfortunately, the line between behavioral engineering and “pedagogy” is not as clear as connotation would suggest. We measure teachers via students’ performance on tests which at best [attempt to] measure the retention of knowledge. What else do we expect?

We have defined education in such a way that coercion is intrinsic. To compensate for tihs, teachers call on a variety of tools. “Great” teachers master the art of drama, crafting a stage persona to engage students. Hours are spent “sugarcoating” a subject to make its study palatable, as with naturally noxious but unfortunately necessary medicine.

As teachers, when we walk into a classroom, we try to hide all the preparation and microengineering that goes into the lesson. “Effective” preparation is invisible: the activity will run smoothly, students will enjoy it, and they’ll learn something, to boot! What’s wrong with that?

Basic to our efforts is a duplicity that is compatible with the best of intentions. When I teach, there is an unresolved tension: do I work to effectively teach knowledge, or do I aim to create the type of environment I wish were available for students? There is a hidden battle between the implicit purpose and explicit aims of education. In differentiating aims and purpose, I mean to separate what many people refer to as “deliverables” (verifiable, explicit goals) from the long term reason for our efforts, the underlying motivation bringing us to articulate these “aims.”

When I teach, I could set out to transmit skills and information as effectively, pleasantly, and engagingly as possible. Or, I could create an honest and empowering environment. These are incompatible insofar as they occur within a coercive institution, no matter how pleasant and well-mannered the coercion is.

Education is a myopic institution oblivious to its own disability. Unaware of its own systemic design flaws (though not its real-world failures), educators — and in turn, the public — inadvertently hyperfocus on the explicit aims of education.¹ I fundamentally disagree not only with the methods employed to satisfy our current, explicit, educational aims, but the underlying trend they comprise.

Generally, solutions that address issues closest to a problem tempt people most strongly. The proximate cause is more prominent than the underlying cause when people see a problem. This human instinct is disastrous qua social reform, where the infrastructures involved are so large as to preclude looking at only proximate causes. In most large systems, the network of causality is dense and subtle, and it is foolish to mistake symptoms for causes. This problem is well understood in medicine. There is a clear difference between symptomatic and curative treatment. Both doctors and patients distinguish between the two; furthermore, everyone is aware of the potential for interacting symptoms, treatments, and disseases.

Unfortunately, most people fail to bring the same subtlety to a consideration of schooling (or most other social institutions). Certainly, teachers will gladly cite home, neighborhood, or cultural factors as causes of in-school problems. And this is even true! These problems are also outside of the control of educational institutions. While I would never suggest expanding schools’ jurisdiction, I do think that this handicap should inform our strategies. But, these are not the most salient factors. At best, we should acknowledge that our current policies interact poorly with problems of this type. The cultural factors fingered as problematic deal in terms like empowerment, happiness, safety, and respect. Our institutions should foster these in students, rather than looking to solve society’s ills directly.

For instance, misbehavior in the classroom is often seen as a result of boredom. And it’s true: boredom is a proximate cause which, if removed, can suppress the symptom of misbehavior. Some teachers see disrespect as a proximate cause of classroom trouble, and strive to enforce obedience. With obedience in hand, they declare the problem solved. But it isn’t. School is still a fundamentally coercive institution that does harm to students’ autonomy, intellect, and spirit.

Despite MIT students’ mastery of the educational system, they often have a perverse relationship to their own learning. Without a schedule and teacher in hand, they find themselves incapable of learning academic content. Worse, they have no idea of what they would like to learn. Setting their compass by the prudence or popularity of a given choice, natural curiosity disappears. Yet these students love class: they are among the best schoolgoers I know. Assignments excite them, questions incite further investigation, tests prompt all-night study sessions. Overachievers have mastered the art of teacher-pleasing to the point that this feedback is a basic value. Doing well — notably, as defined by others — is fundamental to their self-worth. Countless conversations with students have highlighted grades and tests as both stressful scourges and necessary metrics to give students a sense of their own progress. “Tests let me know if I’ve really learned a subject,” many will say.

Step back for a moment and reconsider that statement: school has created an environment in which its best and brightest have difficulty understanding how well they know something without one-dimensional and ultimately shallow feedback about their mastery. This is the result of solving a systemic problem incrementally, improving the local situation by moving up the gradient of academic performance. Obedient, motivated, hard-working, attentive, and “gifted” students are not enough: this is what our academic trials cull.

This trend toward disempowerment and dependency is the closest thing to a purpose our educational system has. Words like “purpose” and “mission” bring along the assumption of intent. While I would never suggest that teachers wake up in the morning and rejoice in another opportunity to disempower the next generation, I would suggest that they set other goals that end up equivalent (e.g. “preparing students for the job market,” or “teaching students to follow directions,” etc.). Within a coercive institution, it is still possible to create compelling, creative classes. And this is dangerous.

Seymour Papert first introduced me to this problem in his book, Mindstorms:

Knowledge is a collection of facts about the world and procedures for how to solve problems. Facts are statements like “The earth is tilted on its axis by 23.45 degrees” and procedures are step-by-step instructions like how to do multidigit addition by carrying to the next column.

The goal of schooling is to get these facts and procedures into the student’s head. People are considered to be educated when they possess a large collection of these facts and procedures.

Teachers know these facts and procedures, and their job is to transmit them to students.

Simpler facts and procedures should be learned first, followed by progressively more complex facts and procedures. The definitions of “simplicity” and “complexity” and the proper sequencing of material were determined either by teachers, by textbook authors, or by asking expert adults like mathematicians, scientists, or historians — not by studying how children actually learn.

Today’s educators have allegedly renounced this knowledge- and skill-centric philosophy, trading it in for a “constructivist teaching philosophy.” What’s ironic about the transition is that constructivism is an epistemological theory concerning learning, not teaching. Papert clarifies the distinction by coining the term “instructionism:”

What I was going to talk about if I had been [at the site of an intended speech], is about how technology can change the way that children learn mathematics. I said how children can learn mathematics differently, not so much how we can teach mathematics differently. This is an important distinction.

All my work is focused on helping children learn, not on just teaching. Now I’ve coined a phrase for this: Constructionism and Instructionism are names for two approaches to educational innovation. Instructionism is the theory that says, “To get better education, we must improve instruction. […] “

Well, teaching is important, but learning is much more important. And Constructionism means “Giving children good things to do so that they can learn by doing much better than they could before.”

People see learning not as a skill, but as a process determined primarily by a combination of talent intrinsic to the learner and difficulty intrinsic to the topic. This misconception offloads responsibility for learning from learner to teacher. Unfortunately, the reality is that the difference between teaching and learning is the difference between giving a man a fish and teaching that same man how to fish. Empowerment and satisfaction differ fundamentally. Worse, the teacher ends up fighting a losing battle, holding the teacher accountable for something over which they ultimately have no a priori control.

This confusion is central to the friction created by inflexible curricula. Educators’ contortions aim to finagle attention and effort from students, procuring motivation where there is none. To torture our analogy a bit, this is something like starving the man to whom we give a fish for the purpose of teaching them the specifics of gutting and cooking seafood.

The fundamental duplicity into which all teachers buy unwittingly grows from the fact that we are dealing with a captive population, unable to choose their intellectual course and constrained by legal, social, and economic pressures. No matter how personable or hard-working we are, we cannot erase that fact. But we can mitigate it. It is in doing so that our duplicity takes root.

We try to trick students into learning. We are not honest about our motives, we are not transparent in our expectations, and we draw inconsistently on the capital provided by the students’ captivity. And it is here that my dilemma arises: providing freedom and providing an effective learning environment are different — though thankfully compatible — goals when pursued within current educational institutions.

During every afterschool program I run sans school supervision, I make it clear that not only do I not expect students to participate if uninterested, but I am eager to cover for them if they would like to leave school or otherwise skip class. I try to create a haven for the type of real freedom and autonomy to which I believe everyone has a right. These efforts are often at odds with attempts to create the focused atmosphere of energy that characterizes effective learning environments in schools, often resulting in a range of engagement. Instead of having a class in which three-quarters are excited and entirely engaged, only one third of the group entirely engaged, one half is interested and partially engaged, and the remainder are engaged with something entirely unrelated to my efforts.

I am uncomfortable with this compromise. I know I could easily improve how effective and engaging my teaching is in the narrow context of “education;” furthermore, I know that in doing so, it is likely that students’ experiences with me will contribute significantly not only to their long term academic success, but to their long term intellectual (and academic) acuity and creativity. But for me, their attention is poison fruit, tainted by the methods providing it. And until that tension is resolved, every attempt to “teach better” will be an effort in well-intentioned duplicity.

1. This is one reason testing such an easy cause — or, addiction — to pick up. [↩]

a few, tasty links (march 17th - march 22nd):¹

• The accidental pocket jet engine… - Instructables - DIY, How To, tech, offbeat
• MAKE: Blog: Weekend Project: Make a fireball shooter
• JACOB’S FORKS?: SPLICE - Instructables - DIY, How To, tech, science
• Self-Experimenters Step Up for Science: Scientific American
• Submit A Business Plan
• Super simple high power LED driver - Instructables - DIY, How To, tech, home
• AVR projects
• Coil Gun version 1
• Read wii nunchuck data into arduino | Windmeadow Labs
• I-Hacked.com Taking Advantage Of Technology - DIrtY MIRT (Do It Yourself Mobile Infra Red Transmitter)
• neilvandyke.org - SICP in Texinfo Format
• AngelaBuilds - BuildStuff
• Electr
• Neil Fraser: Hardware: Computerized Etch A Sketch
• Small Press Center - Articles - Ten Basic Steps to Writing a Book Proposal
• Digital 3D Picture Viewer - “The DigiStereopticon” - Instructables - DIY, How To, photography, offbeat
• en:eagle3d:eagle3d [www.matwei.de]
• Electronics Projects: Constant Current Power Supply using Pulse Width Modulation - Instructables - DIY, How To, science, tech
• DIY CO2 Reactor for a Planted Aquarium - Instructables - DIY, How To, tech, pets
• Cython: C-Extensions for Python
• The Latexki Latex Wiki Wiki - index
• MIT World » : The Second Law and Biophysics

1. If you’re interested, you can access my del.icio.us bookmarks here. [↩]

Grades take on undue precedence:

G: You told me a few specific things [I could improve about my paper], but like, I wasn’t sure if like, if those things would make the difference between a ‘B’ and an ‘A’.

So, I’m retiring the beautiliful page for lack of use. firstnamebasis will still function. As a token replacement, I’m linking to a growing Google Notebook of quotations I collect¹ on my reading page. Quotation, source, and citation, slowly refined. Feel free to suggest quotations for contribution.

1. And yes, eventually I’ll have them all tagged [↩]

a problem

Reform efforts exist on a spectrum spanning two extremes. One extreme feels that reform can only start outside the ailing institution. The other extreme thinks that only by working within the system can we change it. Unsurprisingly, the answer usually lies between the two extremes. Those who think that outside reform is the only possibility think the existing infrastructure offers no hope, that the system is beyond repair. These reformers feel disenchanted with and disenfranchised from the channels that are intended to address their calls for change. These channels typically include the judicial and legal resources nominally available, as well as the organization within the object of reform itself (i.e. the mythical complaint department and its relatives). Unfortunately, those dedicated to working solely from within [the system] are often also disempowered, being sabotaged by their misplaced trust of the creaky institutions “outside” reformers eschew.

Given that the sweet spot of empowerment is somewhere in between refusing to participate and being co-opted by the existing infrastructure, it is unfortunate that the methods of education reform are so polarized. In relying on existing infrastructures, “insider” efforts are intrinsically self-documenting, but stagnate quickly. For this same reason, “outsider” efforts are intrinsically incomplete and poorly documented, which is a shame, since they are often more dynamic, but less influential.

a linchpin

Both approaches to reform seek to empower collective action. Insiders point collective action at our governing institutions, outsiders seek to empower collective action to create alternative institutions. It is a truism that grassroots efforts are desirable, robust, and effective. Despite this, Barack Obama’s netroots campaign has captured a great deal of attention for its success. The success of Obama’s campaign is due in part to his ability to create emotional and social capital among voters. But I think the piece missing historically has been a good understanding of the profile of scales involved. By this I mean the character of the organization of power and action within an effort. While it’s clear that we’re looking to differentiate between top-down and bottom-up organization, this vocabulary ends up being incomplete.

Consider the United States government: we have multiple scales (federal, state, and municipal), and at each of these, there is a strongly hierarchical bureaucracy in place. What we’re really talking about are the scales at which structure exists, and then the type of structure in place at these scales.

My involvement with the Center for the Future of Civic via MAS.712 has shown me a number of projects aiming to empower people in civic contexts by creating tools intended to facilitate collective action and communication. Historically, I’ve found efforts that focus on raising awareness or fervor around an issue underwhelming. Typically, they fail to mobilize the emotional and social capital they create. For many reform movements, this means that their primary functionality is promoting socialization and bringing like-minded people together: a function that falls frustratingly short of the promise (and often, self-stated mission) of these organizations.

Reform efforts frequently couch themselves one-dimensionally, in opposition to the status quo, failing to offer — and make central — the positive, alternative they propose.¹ An unfortunate consequence of this habit is the marginalization and isolation of the reform effort. The more serious this mistake, the less permeable the line between the reformers and everyone else, meaning the reform efforts are more likely to be seen as extremist.

To oversimplify: successful reform efforts focus on the problem, not the problem-solvers. This is not to say that the problem should be the focus to the exclusion of the problem solvers, but reform efforts emasculate their efforts by hyperfocusing on the group’s identity. When everyone is working on a problem, the primary function of a reform effort is not social[ization]. When a reform falters, taking longer and occurring slower than expected, reformers understandably band together, seeing themselves as a cohesive (and unfortunately, separate) social unit. Integrating opposition into your identity encodes at a very low level the assumptions your group makes. Reform efforts set themselves up for failure by taking for granted an adversarial rather than cooperative process.

a recipe

Thus we seek to bestir the people into an awareness of their own condition, provide inspiration for their thoughts and rouse them to pursue their true interests.

So ends the principles of the Knight Foundation. It’s an exciting, articulate sentiment that directs our attention to the raw materials of change: awareness and motivation.

Many projects aiming to empower a population first focus on bringing those involved together, facilitating communication, and enabling the group to make their needs and desires heard in a cohesive way. Given that we can “rouse them to pursue their true interests,” how do we capitalize on that? This is a question reforms rarely answer. Bringing people together gives you access to social, emotional, technological, and even fiscal capital. But how do you transform that into meaningful action? While grassroots efforts are made robust by the power of decentralized systems, the problem of coupling that to action is difficult. Essentially, we’re looking to design leadership into an effort, from the ground up. The concerns raised by the types of infrastructure in place at various scales is difficult and poorly addressed.

I have no general answer for this question. Even the direction to proceed is unclear. But going back to the specific case of education makes clear that this framework makes some progress.

a guess hope

a friend of mine runs summer camp which will be in its third year this summer. Parents and kids love it.

Camp Kaleidoscope, a summer day camp in Somerville for 6-12 year olds, will be running this summer for its third year!

At Camp Kaleidoscope we build kites, launch rockets, make video games, paint pictures, control robots, and do whatever else seems like a good idea.

Essentially, Camp Kaleidoscope is a hands-on instantiation of a free-school for two months. This same friend is looking to start a creative, hands-on school for kids this fall. Whereas parents beat a path to his door to enroll their kids in camp, finding parents willing to employ the same pedagogy during the school year are few and far between. Parents have a prudential interest in their children’s future, meaning that they see school as a serious endeavor (in contradistinction to summer camp).

We see a diluted analogy to this in the progression of pedagogical flexibility from pre-school to high school. Unfortunately, this makes extending pedagogy shown to be successful in the primary grades an uphill battle. But, I had fingered the relative ease of experimentation as the cause of primary school’s comparative progressivism.

It wasn’t until recently, when reading Scott Nearing’s The New Education that I came across a historical explanation for this, as well. The early 20th century was a time wherein many students (particularly among poor and rural neighborhoods) did not finish middle school. Progressives decided that if they were to be reached by the edifying hand of the Movement, this must be done in primary school.

Setting history aside, what lesson do these observations suggest about the nature of successful reform? How do we design an educational revolution?

a guess

What if a university were to plunge students into real world pursuits? What if students were innovators and inventors who were learning core skills and knowledge on the fly, as they solve real world problems? What if this school were revolutionary in a host of ways which did not threaten the conventionally prudential value of the education? I’m betting that the vision of high school students taking on world-class research and design problems is not only possible, but the closest thing to a positive defense available to pedagogies implemented within the traditional schooling framework.

I’m guessing that the successes of students at this university will endorse our pedagogy strongly enough to catch people’s attention. This attention would lubricate dealings with the traditional educational infrastructure, and the model and design of the university itself would be scalable and easily decentralizable, giving grassroots support a natural, actionable outlet: making your own [university]!

The fundamental tension between top-down and bottom-up reform efforts comes from the fact that the institutions involved in each approach are coupled by design. Our government is designed to serve our needs and desires. Unfortunately, we are afforded a tiny sliver of experimental leeway to explore how we want to solve the problem of education, meaning we end up with poorly articulated — and worse, wrong — “desires” because we haven’t had the time and space to iterate. My hope is that a single, educational institution will be able to not only capture the ear of the traditional infrastructure, but provide people with a blueprint for changing education at its most flexible point by anticipating the excuses people usually use to exclude evidence (dissimilar demographics, financial situation, etc.)

a rain check

I’m sure my rambling has made it clear by now: I’m struggling with the framework and vocabulary with which I want to discuss and design this reform effort. Everything feels sloppy, still. Nonetheless, I believe that there is a fundamental structure to reform, and I think that we can take advantage of this for real change. However, I am dubious of my tendency to abstract and generalize. I’m wary of hidden assumptions and this convoluted discussion. So please, push back and help me refine these ideas.

1. Worse, they often lack a sufficiently concrete, positive, alternative vision. Even if the status quo were to do an about-face and give reform groups the reins, many would not be prepared to take action [↩]

Updated OPML/feed file; read everything I do. Still behind on updating the rest of that page.

a few, tasty links (march 12th - march 16th):¹

• Bench Marks » Blog Archive » Why Web 2.0 is failing in Biology
• Home Chemistry: Breaking Molecular Bonds - Jello and Pineapple
• Overcoming Bias: Reductionism
• Ultra Thin, Credit Card Speaker. - Instructables - DIY, How To, tech, music
• Biology Animation Library
• 10 Guy Movies You’ve Probably Never Seen | Just A Guy Thing
• celemony_ :: Direct Note Access
• IR Detector - Instructables - DIY, How To, tech, home
• etherrape project page
• RS232 serial to USB converter cable schematic | YourITronics
• PIR CAMERA
• swissmiss: Baby Doll Coat Rack
• Universal lamp shade polygon building kit - Instructables - DIY, How To, craft, home
• Greg Price
• It’s Character Forming - night light
• Arduino-Based Optical Tachometer - Instructables - DIY, How To, tech, science
• How to build your first robot - Instructables - DIY, How To, tech, science
• Electronic Crafts | Main / Shakelight
• curved frosted polyprop on Flickr - Photo Sharing!
• The home page of Patrick Henry Winston

1. If you’re interested, you can access my del.icio.us bookmarks here. [↩]

G: I can’t even calculate the probability of like a roll of the die. I’m just praying I didn’t fail.

I have no idea what the justification for this ridiculousness is, but please contact Jeffrey Hampton, Senior Zoning Planner for the City of Boston and register your protest.

A new city regulation in Boston will limit the number of undergraduate college students sharing the same apartment to no more than four.
more stories like this

The Boston Zoning Commission unanimously approved the measure Wednesday after a tense City Hall hearing. Opponents of the restriction include property owners and college students who say the occupancy limit violates property rights and unfairly singles out a specific group of people.