The Medium Shapes the Learning

My students toured one of Edison's film studios.  They saw firsthand how something so lifelike is actually a production.  

Production.  

The filmmakers chop up bits and pieces of captured, vital life and reproduce it into something new.  

It's magic to us. We're mesmerized by the dancing light and the larger-than-life figures haunting us in their "not-really-here but not-really-gone" since of permanence.  Everything is smoother, grander and more seductive than the terrestrial reality of a school yard.

Yes, I know it is about light hitting a photograph and moving.  "Motion picture" sounds tame.  But given the nature of light, the paradox of ray and particle, I can't help but see the magic of the motion picture.  When they perfect the art of phonography, we'll have talking motion pictures.  Perhaps a century from now we'll have it all at the palm of our hands - the ability to pick apart and edit life and present it as something new and magical.  

*     *     *

"Why can't we get a film studio on campus?" a student asks me.  

"I'm not sure about the medium," I tell him.  

"So, just teach like you normally would and add some motion picture parts.  I bet it would be fun. Imagine what we would produce."  

Fun.  

Produce.  

I'm thinking of the Roman notion of bread and circus.  I always assumed bread was the more powerful element.  I'm now understanding the pull of circus.  It's not that I am opposed to fun, per se.  It's just that often "fun" is the cheap replacement of "intriguing" or "meaningful" or "beautiful" or "life-changing."  Edison's studio is, in fact, a fun factory.  I cannot and should not reproduce it.  

*     *     *

Educators often believe that they have the power to wield each tool to fit their own purpose.  They assume that a lesson can remain virtually unchanged when a new medium is added.  Often, the metaphor is one of a tool - though, they would never use a tool in this way.  Who would ever say, "We need to screw this in with a hammer?"  

There is something inherently dangerous about taking every technological device and applying it to learning without ever asking the intended meaning of a medium.  A pencil, for example, is inherently individual, deliberately vague (shades of gray, ability to erase), intellectual, portable and text-based.  A film is, by contrast, visual, collective, emotional, geography-bound, visual and non-linear.  

If I begin with a lesson plan and simply pick a tool based upon "fun" or "productivity" or "student engagement," I am running the risk of teaching something entirely unintended.  If I introduce a telegraph as a source of knowledge, we send an implied message that knowledge should be portable, consumable and in small increments. 

I am not opposed to adding new tools to learning.  I simply want us to recognize that whatever tools we choose will reshape learning in ways that we often fail to recognize.

How I Got Roped Into a Satirical Workshop Presentation

We all had to fill out a sheet of paper (you should have seen the complaints teachers made about having to use pencils in professional development) describing what type of workshop presentation we want to deliver in our monthly district professional development.

I don't mind the notion of a monthly professional development, despite the reality that the best skills I have learned occurred in a relational context, within the process of teaching and only among a small number of people.  That and it usually involved a pint or two.

I simply don't have anything to teach, which makes it a dangerous venue for me.  I play Icarus with the group and take the wings they offer me and then sail beyond my area of expertise.  I get arrogant.  I put on an act.  It's not that people dislike it.  In fact, they are often enjoying the show.  It's just that it's dangerous for me when I fall into the sea and I'm left in isolation to tread water with my arrogant self.

So, when I filled out my application, I wrote the following answers as a joke:

1. What is the most important element in a thriving economy?
The human element.

2. What do business leaders use to create economic growth?
They use humanity.  All of us.  Those who figure out how to manipulate people learn how to manipulate systems and create revenue for personal gain.

3. What is the most necessary skill needed in an industrial economy?
For those at the bottom, it is obedience and conformity.  To those at the top, it is figuring out how to get people who are naturally inclined to freedom and individuality to sacrifice these ideals to serve the needs of the company.

Yeah, I realize it had an anti-capital streak to it.  I'm a bit of a civil libertarian myself.  More of a Thoreau  than an Emerson than a Marx or a Tolstoy. (Though I was involved in the Haymarket Square protests back in the day)

Then again, it was a joke.  So, I was a bit surprised when I received the telegraph explaining that they would love me to give "The Human Element" as a PD explaining the dangers in being obsessed with education-for-job-growth and missing out on the notion of education-for-life.  Perhaps I could even go in character as a representative of a robber baron and force the audience into deconstructing the satire.

It will be interesting.

I'm thinking "The Human Element: Ten Ways to Teach Students to Use People for Personal Gain."  I heard people love lists and numbers at PD.

No, I Won't Address Pencil Bullying

"Mr. Johnson, I think you need to talk to your class about pencil bullying," a district office representative explains to me.

"Can you elaborate on this?"

"Well, there was an incident where a student pinned up a note on the wall of another students' home."

"Was the wall private or public?"

"It was private, I suppose. But the point is that it was a clear act of pencil bullying."

"So, what would you like me to do about it?" I ask.

"Talk to your class about the severity of pencil bullying.  Let them know that this type of behavior will not be tolerated."

Zero tolerance.  Bad behavior.

We're missing the point. Our lack of tolerance and militaristic mindset is part of what causes bullying.  When we fail to create a safe space for children, bullying increases. Furthermore, our obsession with behavior rather than the human condition only enhances the problem, because it fails to question why students choose to bully other students.

Is it the social capital they gain?  Is it their own insecurity?  Is it what they have seen modeled for them?  Is it the result of being bullied?

I don't have the answers to any of those questions.  However, I do know one thing: bullying is not a result of pencils.  Yes, a public note can amplify the bullying.  Yet, information spread verbally is just as devastating.   A rumor can move just as quickly as a pencil-based message.  However, it doesn't have a paper trail, making it stickier and more organic.

What if pencils do not change bullying so much as help us see that it is a part of the reality of childhood?  What if the paper trail is now the collective voice of all the students who live in fear on a daily basis? Is it possible that bullying is not a new trend so much as it is a part of our public memory that we have deliberately forgotten in order to perpetuate a myth of the innocence of childhood?  What if the deeper reality is that humankind can be dark, even at an early age?

Perhaps the answer isn't a classroom chat about pencil etiquette.  Instead, the answer might be that we truly ask what it means to be human and what it means to love one another in the context of community. Instead of obsessing over pen pal networks and sharpened pencils, we might want to think about the nature of humanity and the darkness that we all share.

As I leave his office, he hands me a stack of fliers and a curriculum for pencil bullying entitled "Let's Erase Bullying."  It has a smiling pencil giving a thumbs up.  I'm doubtful that peppy propaganda will change things.  I'm skeptical that Zero Tolerance will fix it as well.  In fact, I don't have the answers on how to fix it at all, but I suspect it might be more simple and more complex than we imagine.  It might just be that the only solution to "pencil bullying" is love.

Put the Pencil Down

The rainclouds gather and the class grows antsy in anticipation.  For all the brick and concrete and steel of the school, the natural element has a way of awakening something primitive in every student.  It's not that primitive is bad, either.  It's simply deeper, more human, more earthy and real than dividing fractions.

The claps of thunder disrupt my monologue.

I let go.

Students gather near the windows and watch, studying first the drops and then the hail.  A few brave souls venture outside and experiencing the pummeling of a lifetime, but the fist-fulls of atmospheric ice are a prize they relish.

"Is it safe to eat?" one asks.

A girl pulls out her paper and begins to draw.  Her twin sister slaps her hand away and says, "Not yet.  You can sketch later.  Right now we can watch."

A boy standing by our class camera takes the twin's advice and sets down the machine.

When we study conflict, we study Man versus Nature and Man versus Machine.  Today, though, we are watching Nature versus Machine and though the war may be lost, this battle belongs to the clouds.

How will people see us?

We take a few pictures with the Kodak we got last year.  The students keep a serious pose, because this is the Guilded Age, very serious times and all.  What with the rise of industry, might as well look industrious.

"Mr. Johnson, do you think people will confuse us when we're gone?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, when we're all dead, will people look at the pictures and get the wrong picture?"  Kids say some of the most confusing and morbid things.

"I'm still not seeing your point."

"I mean, after we're dead and our children are dead.  Not that we should be having children since we're children.   But generations from now, will people look back at the scowls on our faces and think that things were more serious back in the day?  I mean, will they think kids never through a paper or slammed a slate down or smiled when they hit a home run or told a joke?  Will the picture be telling a lie?"

"Like Jesus," another girl adds.  "It never says he smiled, but I don't know, I guess . . . I guess I just always pictured him smiling when the kids ran up to him."

I stop the class at this point as we discuss what we record, the artifacts we leave behind and the huge gaps that are missing in history as a result.  Sometimes it seems that technology itself creates a narrative of a whole people group and its an image, but a very incomplete image.  It's what society wants people to think of itself rather than who the people actually are.  It has me thinking that maybe that's the tragedy of technology and the pitfall of posterity.  It always leads to selective memory.

we still use slates

"What are these doing here?" a student asks.

"Yeah, they're slates.  You've used them, correct?"

"But this is a pencil classroom.  We have paper.  What are we doing with individual slates?"

I explain to my students that there are times when students will use paper and times for pencils and times for slates.

"But slates are so old school!" the student explains.

"True, but so is the human voice.  Don't we still discuss things in class?"

"I thought you believed in the twentieth century classroom?" the student points out.

"I believe in learning. Ultimately, that's what it's all about."

show and tell

I know that I teach older students and therefore Show and Tell seems a bit like child's play.  However, I allowed my students to choose one item and then use our snazzy new set of pencils to sketch the item and describe each one in a few paragraphs.  Students took home the paper and pencils, finished the activity and then brought the item into class.

At first, students were reluctant to talk about the items they had brought. In kindergarten, the children nearly bludgeon one another to death with their swaying hands and "ooh, ooh, ohh, pick me."  Yet, here I ran into a wall of apathy.  

"Why do we have to present if we can just publish this to our plogs and read about it?" a girl asks. 

So, I begin with my item.  I share the red rock from the western frontier where I was born.  I talk about how I kept it as a child so that I wouldn't forget it when we moved back to the flat, dull land of Kansas.  I mentioned what the land represented, how I had been shaped by the sense of the wild freedom out west and why I get depressed in this urban enclave when the smoke stacks and the gray terrain makes me feel trapped.

This opens the door for the students.  A boy shares a deck of cards that he used when his dad was in the hospital and since they had little in common to talk about, the cards became another language for them to speak.  A girl shares a stack of recipes her grandmother wrote out with the note, "This is my legacy.  Don't lose it.  I know you've committed this to your mind.  I know you will modify these meals to make them your own.  But if you ever feel yourself pulled to far by the city, look back at these recipes."  

When it's all over, a student says, "Why can't all school be show and tell?"  

It has me thinking that maybe he's right.  What if it was always this personal?  Or at least, what if there was always a personal element that they could hold onto in each subject?  And what if, instead of "judge and label," the model was "show and tell?"  What if the goal was to demonstrate their knowledge with a tangible item that they could show the world and talk about in a one-on-one conversation.

The beauty of pencils and paper is that it's permanent.  Sort of.  At least more permanent than a slate.  It's portable, too.  Kids can publish on plogs and write on shared documents.  What this means is that the potential for a classroom based upon show and tell becomes more feasible.