We are Living in a Techne World

Ageism is a thing.  The progressive ennui caters to the young.  Modern technological advances, and the rapid rate of innovation in machines that are used to “get it done” ensure that older folks feel bedazzled, befuddled, and stressed by the constant flow of “new tech.”  Education is not immune to this plight.  Older teachers struggle to keep up with the latest learning platforms.  Fueling this frustration is a tech industry that is never satisfied, but rolls out some new idea almost weekly.  But all this innovation of teaching tech is not actually resulting in better education.  We seem to have moved from focusing on the skills necessary to teach the soul well to a focus on new techniques or means for teaching that produces a better product.

This post is not a pushback against all the tech.  Really, it is not.  But it is a concern of mine that as money comes into the equation, we become less objective at evaluating the efficacy of the “new” ideas and objects being poured into our field of education.

Some defining of terms are in order because the terminology has changed over the years.  Technology comes from the Greek term, techné, meaning “the art or skill necessary to gain something of value.”  For a long time, when the West considered this idea of technique, we were talking about skills in a given art, including the art of teaching.  As industrialization convinced man he could save himself a lot of trouble and time by using machines, technique gave way to a newer use of the term, technology which now seems to be used in a wide variety of ways. At a minimum, we use this term today in education to refer to processes (especially automated ones) of teaching, objects (especially electronic ones) used to teach, and knowledge of these processes and objects.

As with any new technique or machine, there is a learning curve.  Given that most educational technology is modeled upon the cutting edge products of human productivity it is often true that older teachers feel like they are playing catch up, while the younger generation is more natural with the latest gadgets.  The analogy may be that of the carpenter and hammer.  The young carpenter grabs the newest, nicest hammer and starts swinging.  The older carpenter, after years of using that one specific hammer that is his, will only begin work when he has “his” hammer, the one that feels right and he knows so well.  Moving from my analogy back into the classroom, let me ask, “Which ‘carpenter’ do you want to hire?”  The younger one seems at ease with the newest, latest, flashiest educational tools, but his artistic ability is way behind the experienced veteran who may still be using “old school” stuff but knows how to use it really well.

Perhaps this is one of the first implications I would draw out of this distinction between skill and tools that I am making is that a tool is useless or even dangerous in the hands of a non-Artisan.  With education, we all have basic aptitude for teaching: it is a humane endeavor.  But just putting powerful tools of communication or education into someone’s hands does not mean he can use them well.  Just swinging a nice shiny hammer around could cause damage rather than building a nice birdhouse.  And the solution to this is not professional development classes on using the tech, but on those things fundamental to education that the tech can aid you in accomplishing.

I am suspicious that much of the tech issue I am addressing is just a part of the larger issue of how rich education is today, especially here in America.  Even as we spend enormous amounts of money on education, we sink further and further behind less-resourced nations in the actual accomplishments of our educational establishment. I hold to the controversial opinion that money is the big problem in education: too much of it, not its paucity.  Every attempt to reform seems to be an enterprise, rather than a grass-roots movement.  A new set of curriculum is rolled out (at a significant cost) followed by new ways to assess that curriculum (cha-ching) and then a whole cadre of consultants hit the circuit teaching schools how to implement the reform and game the tests (while charging exorbitant fees and getting kickbacks and incentives from the curriculum and testing companies.  The educational technology industry gets its cut by marketing things that will aid the haggard teachers in keeping up with the current reform directives.

Meanwhile, the student has become something for the tech to be used on, rather than being seen as a young and growing human soul.  I won’t develop all the thoughts I have about widgets, factory conveyor belts, and the mathematics of efficiency dominating modern education, but the tech seems to be one further layer placed between the human teacher and the human student.  It concerns me.

And at the heart of the technological educational factory is a problem of purpose.  Are we teaching so as to get students into a great job, or ensure we continue to get our funding by getting a high test rate?  Is teaching a matter of means or ends?  As is often the case with human activity, we get distracted by the means and forget the ends we are seeking.  If I have written it once, I have written too many times to remember: education is the cultivation of wisdom and virtue.  Those are the ends.  That is what all the artistry, action, knowledge, and technology of education should be aiming toward: good people.  

There seem to be a lot of questions about our penchant for educational technology.  Let me ask the ones on my mind.  Is there one or many categories for science?  Can we only know material things, or are there immaterial, metaphysical things to be known as well?  Recovery of the four sciences seems long overdue.  The large expenditures we are seeing on a failing system seem to mostly be going toward the window dressing, not the foundational interests of a good education.  I am not pushing back against tech in the classroom.  I have it, I use it, I am grateful for it.  But cannot distract from the real issues of recovering good education.  I wonder if we would benefit from becoming poorer: using our own curricula, assessing in local ways, and firing all these strangers driving by our schools to “consult” during that half-day off school.  Solutions to these issues are not out there somewhere, they are here, wherever here is for each of us.

In Defense of Poetry Recitals

Friends, Romans, English Teachers, lend me your ears.  

I come to praise the Poetry Recital, not to bury it.  

The evil of such hardship is quickly forgotten;

The good lives on, sinking deep into the soul.

So let it be with good poetic memory.  The noble Elliott

Hath told you memorizing poetry is good:

And such it is, without doubt,

And attested much throughout history.

Here, under leave of the modern English class –

For The Modern is an honorable man; 

So are they all, all honorable teachers – 

Come I to speak at the Recital’s funeral.

Poetry was my friend, faithful and just to me:

But the Modern says it was too hard; 

And they should know what their students can handle.

Poetry hath brought much beauty home to Rome

Whose rhymes and tropes did my mind fill:

Did this seem inefficient to the Modern?

When that the poor have cried, Poetry hath taught them how to weep:

Good English learning should be made of sterner stuff:

Yet the Modern says he was too difficult;

And the Modern is an honorable man.

You all did see the look on the student’s face

When he did finish his recital well: was this too hard?

Yet the Modern has said that memory work is outdated;

And, sure, he is an honorable man.

I speak not to disprove what the Modern spoke,

But here I am to speak what I do know.

You all did love Poetry and Memory once, not without cause:

What cause withholds you then, to call them back to use?

O Beauty! thou art fled to brutish beasts,

And men have lost their reason. Bear with me;

My heart is in the coffin there with the Poetry Recital,

And I must pause till it come back to me.

My apology to Shakespeare and Caesar, but it seemed to fit.  I wish to see students at every level of learning being led by their teachers to commit a great poem of at least 14 lines to memory every year of their schooling and being asked to at the very least perform it with heart and soul in front of their classmates.  The more it can feel like a display of love and less like required torture, the better. Change my mind.

The Spokes of the Logos Wheel?

It is summer and my thoughts are running wherever they want to go.  This summer I have returned often to the theme I wrote about here last month: Jesus as the Logos.  I want to tease out this idea a little further in my thinking, so here I sit writing again.  Perhaps a little more history on the concept will get us back into the concept and thinking deeply about it again.  The conception of there being a logos or one idea/thought that runs through all the Cosmos, giving it meaning and unity, goes back in the Western tradition to at least Heraclitus.  But the same sort of oneness, unity, or harmony certainly is present in Indian, Egyptian, and Persian thought, as well as the Hebrew theology out of which comes Christianity, the religion that has used the concept the most.  At the heart of Christian teaching on Jesus and His incarnation is the concept that Jesus was active in Creation, Salvation, and the moment-by-moment continuation of the Cosmos.  Creation is of Him, and by Him, and through Him.  In Him, we live and move and have our being.

The analogy of my title is weak, but the best I can muster at the moment.  Given that Jesus holds this role in the Cosmos, that which brings unity, meaning, harmony to all of it, then it should follow that this is central to any study of that cosmos, and thus key to understanding education.  Learning cannot be successful if it is random.  Purpose, order, direction, “the point” is necessary for there to be any pursuit of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful that we might be wise and virtuous.  So the picture I wish to make is something like this:

With Christ in the center as the Logos, what does a school’s curriculum look like?  I would add Theology into the center, place the various “subjects” or areas of study as the spokes, and have wisdom and virtue as where the rubber hits the road.  This leads all things studied in school toward its ultimate telos – Christ.  We don’t study Math to become mathematicians, though many of us can become such.  We study Math, or anything, that we might better understand and become disciples of the Lord Jesus.  The practical outworking of this study is not a great job or more prestige, or even a diploma.  It is wisdom and virtue, both of which are the direct result of being those who love The True, Good, and Beautiful (in a word, Jesus).

Cutting to the Core

Some thoughts on Analysis and Synthesis

I have an ongoing argument with my friends in the Biology class.  It should be noted that I have earned my undergraduate minor by taking 27 hours of Biology classes, so I am not without some insight into how this subject is often taught.  My concern is with the common lab activity of dissection.  This is not an argument from ethos or pathos, but from logos.  Why would students who are studying life do so by cutting up dead animals?  But this article is not about that, so let me take the introduction it provides and move on without discussing all my arguments for that discussion.  Dissection, the art of cutting up dead things, is synonymous with analysis.  Analysis is literally to cut apart.  And we are really good at this in the West.

I do not wish to argue here against analysis.  It is a necessary part of knowing something.  If one cannot distinguish the parts of a given body of knowledge, they just don’t know their way around that subject.  What I do wish to argue is that analysis does not bring us complete knowledge.  Analysis without synthesis is dangerous for the well being of Truth, our souls, and education.  Before I argue this, let me give an analogy from my past so that I might use it throughout my argument.

I bought my first car when I was fourteen years of age.  Back in my day, in my home state of Kansas, one could drive at a fairly young age as families depended on such given the fact that many in that state live quite a ways from school, work, stores, etc.  I purchased from a local used car lot a ten year old car: a 1969 Chevy Impala.  It ran, but not as smoothly as my father wished.  I should mention that my father grew up on the farm, had worked in the Air Force as a jet engine mechanic, and after that had spent time as a mechanic at a local service station, so he knew his way around a car engine (back when such was a fairly simple forthright piece of machinery).  I came home from school on the day of this story to find my father in the back yard with my car’s engine scattered around on the lawn.  It was in an orderly fashion and he assured me that he would get it all back together, but he had to assure himself that all was in good working order if I was going to be driving it around central Kansas.  

NB: This is not my car, but one quite similar in appearance to what I owned.

I was impressed that he had got it apart, but I was nervous about him getting it all back together and the engine working as well as before, let alone better.  Over the weekend (this started on a Friday) he patiently cleaned, inspected, and then reassembled each piece laying on the lawn back into a working engine.  He also attempted to instruct me in what each part was, what it did, etc.  I was thrilled when we cranked the engine on Sunday and it successfully roared to life, actually running better than before.  To this day I have no hope of doing what he did, but that is beside my point.  My father demonstrated his knowledge of a car engine in two ways: he knew the parts, and he understood how they came together to form a whole engine.

With that story in mind, let me shift to my own work in the classroom.  Any given science (and remember that I distinguish arts and sciences in the very old way) or area of knowledge has its parts and its whole.  Both must be addressed for the “subject” to be learned. There are two ancient ways of doing this logically: inductive and deductive logic.  Inductive reasons from the parts to the whole, deriving an understanding by, let’s say, starting with the parts of an engine and coming to greater understanding by assembly.  Deductive is the opposite, starting with a concept or principle and through logical analysis, determining what the parts to that principle are.  The goal of such logic should be wisdom, which comes when the knowledge of specific facts or parts coalesces into a meaningful whole by the student’s understanding both the parts and the whole and then acts based on that understanding to live more closely aligned with the Created Order of the World.  Some exemplifications might help.

I don’t think a student really knows a story like Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe if he struggles with the who, what, and where of the story plot and details, the facts, if you will.  He should be able to recreate the story by stating the parts, making sure Tumnus takes his walk, Lucy gets lost, Edmund wants his Turkish Delight, Aslan dies, etc., etc.  But the student is lost as well if she cannot move beyond the parts.  Knowing the names of the Pevensies, or identifying the White Witch, etc. is nothing more than seeing all the engine parts laying about on the lawn.  

Even if there is a chronological or thematic organization to the parts, the student must press on from factual acumen to what is often called understanding.  Seeing that Lewis has arranged these parts in a way that elicits comparison with Christian teaching, or various moral implications behind the actions of the characters is the synthetic act toward this work that corresponds to the engine parts being placed onto the engine block in their proper place.  

She thus begins to understand the work as a work, not just show felicity with the parts.  I press further that Lewis’ story is still useless until it in some small or large ways leads the reader to live differently.  This knowledge leading to understanding resulting in wisdom arc is basic to my view of how a science needs both analysis and synthesis to truly amount to learning.

I return to my first example, that of dissection, to conclude these thoughts.  For thousands of years students have been taught to understand and admire the living organism by the cutting apart of a dead specimen to better understand the internal organs of the animal, which cannot be done to a living organism without killing it.  Setting aside the ethical arguments, and focusing simply on the educational goals, I am not opposed to this use of the dead to understand the living, I just have little experience to indicate that your average student is led from observing dead things to their living counterparts.  I understand a leaping frog better if I have seen his innards, but only if I then have observation of the jumping live frog and apply what I have seen as the parts to the whole.

Good teaching, whatever the subject, cannot neglect either the parts or the whole.  My final assertion would be that the reason we are so good at analysis is because it is the easier of the two modes.  Synthesis takes a lot more work and time.  In our pursuit of educational efficiency this is a problem.  And because we have the modern demand upon us to generate numerics for our reporting of a student’s progress, analysis assessment is also easier.  You can generate a test on the parts and grade it much more easily, quicker, and with a numeric result than you can assess a student’s synthesis of the lesson or subject into a meaningful whole.  

And again, this is not bad in my mind.  Analysis must be done and must be assessed.  But don’t stop there.  Don’t make that the sum total of learning.  The harder part must also be done or the engine is still laying about the yard and the fourteen year old is frustrated with an unmoving car, regardless of how many practical benefits the adults tell him there are to his experience.

Imagining an Integrated Humanities Program

This is one of those “thinking out loud” posts of mine, where I try to think clearly about some practical issue from my own teaching context, so let me set the stage.  I am currently teaching English and Philosophy in a Catholic High School.  As the Director of Academics, I am trying to help the school realize its full academic potential in a manner that is in keeping with its mission and that is centered around Christ as our Logos.  I am a long time fan of the concept that a school should have a singular Humanities Department made up of those who teach from the Trivium section of the Seven Liberal Arts.  That means in our day of Departments: the English, History, and Theology departments. 

At the heart of my predilection for this set up is the notion that education is the cultivation of wisdom and virtue and that it is the Humanities where the student comes to the words that will act as seeds in this cultivation. At the heart of a true Humanitas program is the Incarnation of Christ.  As our patron saint, John Paul II so beautifully put it, “only in the mystery of the Incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light.” That “mystery” is the mystery of all of humanity who are created in the image of God. Not just Christians. The study of History, Western Culture and Literature, and especially formal Theology should be to bring our students (and faculty) to a closer, clearer, more complete comprehension of this mysterious “light,” namely, “what does it mean to be truly human.” The rest of this post are ideas I am trying to think through to make our school’s Humanities program really rock.  I have a lot more ideas, but I am going to only develop three in this blog post.

The Faculty Academy

Our faculty must be what we wish to see our students become.  If the goal is to produce life-long learners, such we must be as well.  The following bullets develop some practical ways for this to happen.

• Faculty Seminars – perhaps we would grow together and upwards if we had period occasions that resemble the Seminar program our Seniors do every day.  Some text or artifact (movie, music, visual art) could be contemplated individually and then together to promote our growth in understanding the Great Questions of human life.
• Faculty Highlights – it seems that as we grow, we could periodically highlight in a meaningful way (assembly, social media, special assembly, YouTube video, …) the continued study and work our faculty are doing outside their teaching duties.  If Teacher A is working toward an art show or Teacher Z is gathering materials on The Battle of Tarawa, such “cool” things should be highlighted to the students to inspire them and encourage the faculty in their work.
• Faculty Hangouts – while the Seminar would be something formal and “serious” or focused, a Hangout would be the opposite.  One of the obvious lessons from Covid lockdown was that the faculty missed our lunch time chats.  While those might be renewed soon, the need to just talk, encourage, discuss, vent, be people together is a valuable thing.  

Integration

If “the Academy” were a thing, the desire for true integration would come much easier.  A major problem with the modern mode of schooling is its analytical nature.  We tend to divide truth into parts, and thus is born the divided multiversity, as opposed to the university.  Rather than bringing all things in a school into one in Christ, many today promote a vision of competing departments that each seek to justify their existence apart from the other subjects rather than to pursue the older nobler concept that all subjects are one. But what would it take for the students of our school to perceive that every class is really about the same thing, and that thing only in passing has to do with college or career?  Some thoughts of mine would include:

• Writing is the clearest form of thought.  The English Department demands a lot of writing from our students.  At the moment, that writing is totally concerned with the literature they are reading.  I think they would value their writing opportunities more if the writing brought together what they are doing in History, Literature, and Theology.  There are numerous ways to bring this about, but it seems imperative that the “faculty academy” be functional for this to happen.
• Guest lectures.  All three departments have great overlap in their content.  I would think it would be great if, for one instance, the Sophomores had the opportunity toward the end of Dante’s Comedy to ask questions, hear input from both the History and Theology departments about that great historical, literary, and theological work.  The Fine Arts Department could easily be looped in as well.
• Broad projects – if the Faculty are talking regularly, the opportunity for something akin to school-wide projects becomes possible.  Something that allows for many students across multiple courses and grades to all work toward some final project would meet many goals we have for student life, spiritual life, and academic life in our school.  Again, just to give one example, students could design, write, produce, and publish a video about our patron saint, JPII, that brought studies in history from JPII’s work politically, obviously time in English writing a screenplay, time in Fine Arts with story boarding, acting, film production, etc., and of course time in research with the Theology Dept.  

Modeling

I am suspicious that much of the reason why students feel school is a game these days is because we model such for them as faculty.  My focus on modeling is multi-faceted.  We need to encourage thoughtful, contemplative, well-read habits in our students by showing them such in ourselves.  To that end…

• Debate – I am confident that there are plenty of “hot topic” debates that we could have among ourselves, but in front of the students would be better.  We, as a strong high school faculty, should be able to take either side of a current issue and display open, civil, well-researched and prepared debate as a model for the students.  There is room in this idea for the school to sponsor debates between scholars outside our school as well. Certainly the students should have ample opportunities to debate in the classroom, through debate club, etc, but they need to see us engaged in it to gain any passion for it themselves.
• Writing – I teach writing, so this serves as two things at once for me: I really can’t teach an art if I do not practice that art myself.  But all of us in the Humanities should be thinking deeply about our own interests in the field and be willing to produce written work on those thoughts that our students might see as an exemplification of what we are calling them to do.  The ways to do this are quite wide: blog, in house publications, school newsletter, or simply reading something you wrote to your class, etc.  But the doing of such work is far more important than how it is published.  Obviously, ultimately, it would do the school great help to have its faculty publishing for a much larger audience.
• Poetic Knowledge Panel – this is a stretch in our day, but it has a track record.  Once (in the early 1970’s) several professors at the Integrated Humanities Program of Kansas University developed a panel that was required of their students to attend.  The students showed up to a large lecture hall, seated themselves, and knew they were there to watch these three friends discuss something.  There was a “fourth wall” as it were: no interaction was allowed between the audience and the friends.  Three wingback chairs were on stage, along with a small table, three glasses, and a bottle of wine.  The professors came in, sat down, poured a glass, and commenced to converse about some artifact, poem, passage from the classics, Bach cantata, frankly whatever they had chosen in advance to consider.  The students who stayed awake and tracked the 90 minute discussion learned a great deal not only about the work being discussed, but much more so about what a good conversation looked and sounded like.  They were, as it were, watching a game but without a “ball.”  For high school students, this could be shorter, perhaps even with topics they request, but the benefits of such are worth considering.

To send these thoughts out to the rest of the school is to hope that a lot more and better ideas will be forthcoming.  I love all the accolades and happy moments our robust athletics program brings to our school.  I do not envy it one moment of glory.  I just believe that we can bring that same shine and honor to Christ in the classroom that we bring to the field of athletic endeavor.  Let the conversation continue…

Freedom to Teach Well

Context matters a great deal in education.  If Plato is right, the cave is much different from the bright outdoors.  LED lighting and drab paint schemes are not the same as mahogany walls and large windows.  But my focus in this piece is specifically the context of administration. Who oversees your teaching and how they do it determines a great deal about how free you are to teach.

The three main forms of school context in this regard would be the government run school, the private school, and the home school.  Each has a unique feel and allows various levels of liberty to the teacher.  I am not expressly trying to argue for one or another, but rather thinking about the differences between these contexts.

By its nature as a collective form of education, government schooling allows the teacher the freedom to simply follow the map laid out for them by the central agency of control.  The choices are not up to the teacher; the teacher is there to implement the decisions of others.  There is minimal room for creativity, but the authority of the teacher is bolstered in this regard.  Nothing needs defending, because it all flows out of the centralized expertise of the home office and its hired experts.  With the large picture of instruction given to him, the teacher needs only consider the daily choices of implementation.  And even there, he is flooded with “best practice” options that help him make his way through the world of government education.  He is free to follow.

In private education, the school can pursue a more creative or out of the government box type of model.  The size of the model is now shrunk to the size of the individual school, not an entire district, state, or nation.  This obviously allows more freedom.  Certainly the private school must ensure quality learning is occurring, and to do so they will want an aligned curriculum with consistent quality teaching throughout the classrooms, but unless they choose to join a larger group of schools, they only answer to their own vision.  They have the freedom of a unique vision.

In many ways it is the home school that affords the teacher the most freedom to teach in any way they wish.  They can have a schedule, textbooks, tests, desks, and other such accoutrement of a traditional classroom, or they can choose to learn way outside such traditions, most of which are not in place due to good learning, but choices made for teaching many students at the same time.  This form of schooling has the most freedom, the freedom of the individual.

I make one last observation about this meditation on freedom.  Fear kills freedom. The government school fears losing its funding by poor performance on state and national tests.  They cannot pursue other higher ends when their funding is tied to these tests.  This myopic focus builds tremendous stress, and with stress and myopia among the administrators and faculty, the students become convinced this is more a game of adults than any real benefit to their actual lives.  When parents sense this fear and misplaced focus, they often decide to enroll their beloved student in a private school, pay the extra money, and hopefully get more than what they were getting from government schools.   

But fear comes in at this point in many private schools.  The notion that the private school is somehow in competition with the government school is common among educators, even if that notion is also uncommonly wrong.  If a parent wants the education offered in a government school, why would they pay for the same thing in a private tuition based situation? The very freedom of a private school is to pursue its unique mission.  If a private teacher is indistinguishable from their government counterpart, they are not using the freedom they have. Fear kills their freedom.  

And do not think for a moment that many homeschool parents are not constantly battling with fear as well.  Their fear is something along the line that if they use their freedom too well, their child will not be able to play the game of higher education or adult life.  This is now a discussion outside the boundaries of simply freedom in learning and has more to do with differing definitions of education and goals for a good education, but I think I have made my comparison of the three models clear, and my last observation, which – to repeat – is that fear kills freedom.

The Art of the Farm

I am returning to some already expressed thoughts here and here.  In the first I discussed the differences between art and science in the older medieval way of thinking.  I argued that while there is a certain amount of knowledge or book learning that will benefit someone who is seeking to teach, teaching is much more an art (something I do) than a science (something I know).  In the second blog, I had considered two possible analogies for learning circumstances.  I felt the older forms of schooling could be favorably compared to a small family farm, while the newer post-WWII American form of government schooling compared better with that of a huge corporate factory.  I recently discussed all this with a colleague (HT Charles Wright) and kept baking the discussion a little further.

As we have turned from thinking of teaching as mainly an art and begun instructing future teachers in education as if the subject were a science, we have also made a pivot from the farm analogy to that of the factory.  It is a natural move.  Art demands that we conform to the medium; that we adjust to the nature of the student, the environment within we teach, the modes of instruction that best fit the context of the learning we wish to see occur.  Wisdom and virtue, if that is our end, is better cultivated than produced.  However, if our end is to efficiently school children in being productive or successful citizens (I almost resisted the urge to write consumers here), then the factory begs for a formula, a conveyor belt, a fast moving row of students (widgets?) moving along having learning applied to them.  I wrote about this many years ago when I was seeking to shift the paradigm of a school I was at from factory to farm.

All kinds of things flow out of these two distinctions between farm and factory and art and science.  Grades, aged instruction, standardized testing, what constitutes credible education — there are just too many things to even list them — all this and way more tumble out of these two comparisons.  I think the best hope for reform in our day may lie within the conversations we have over metaphors for education, or over distinctions such as these things.  We cannot fix what we cannot “see” clearly.  Analogy, metaphor, clear definitions and distinctions, will all help us see where we ought to be headed.  

My main way of thinking about education these days is on my podcast with my dear friend Jason Dulworth.  If you have not found your way there, here is our website, and here is our discussion of Farm/Factory and Art/Science.  Join in the conversation any way you are able.  We must keep talking about these things.

The Covid Gap

The global phenomenon of the Covid-19 Pandemic which has included the mass movement of education into an online setting will have long term effects on the educational world moving forward and leave this current schooling generation with serious gaps in their education.  I would gladly consider arguments to the contrary.

Even as many in the education world hail this situation as a real opportunity to fundamentally change how we do schooling, I am concerned that as poorly as we have been doing it for the last century or so, this will make it worse.

For the use of this blog, I am going to refer to all forms of online learning as Distance Learning (DL) here.  And the face-to-face instruction of students with students and a teacher in a room together will simply be called the Traditional Classroom or Classroom.

Distance

By definition, distance between a teacher and student is an educational obstacle, not an opportunity.  I am aware of the ballyhooed benefit of a teacher in Iowa being able to engage with students around the world, but the distance between them presents a net set of difficulties greater than the benefits.  In the traditional classroom, we tout low teacher to student ratios as superior to high ones.  The class of ten students out performs the class of thirty five.  And the modern lecture hall in University that seats seven hundred is full of those who complain they have no connection with their teacher.  

Sometimes the difficulties imposed by distance force the teacher to seek solutions that result in better attempts at instruction.  In fact, many such strategies used online would be great, if the student was able to handle it.  Distance is an obstacle to be overcome, one that most traditional classroom teachers can deal with more easily than those using DL.  Much of this obstacle has to do with the remaining issues below.

Autodidacts

Distance learning places a great deal of responsibility on the learner.  I believe this is why we started trying it at the top end.  The idea is that a college student has gained sufficient intellectual virtue and skills so as to be able to handle the responsibility of self-learning or autodidactic education.  Even in the traditional classroom of higher ed, this has been the case, with the professor expecting a great deal of learning to go on via the assigned readings, the writing of papers, research, etc. outside the classroom per se.

To be clear, I love autodidactic approaches to education.  But the skills necessary to learn on your own, if not in place, will crush distance learning attempts.  This goes back to the distance issue: the teacher is not present to solve the many issues that a lack of skill will bring about.  The teacher in essence is demanding something of the student that they have not been prepared to do.

If the call to replace traditional classrooms with distance learning are to be taken seriously, then a return to teaching real learning skills at the youngest grade levels is imperative.  But with our desire to make education efficient seems to argue against such.  Early ed folks will quickly burn out if they are held responsible for using DL modes to bring about strong young readers with full compliments of math skills, thinking skills, and study strategies.  Do we think we can do this online when it has not been happening in the classroom?

Accountability

One of the biggest issues I hear from my colleagues and see in my own DL experience during Covid has been the issue of knowing that I as the teacher have an accurate way to assess what is being learned by my students.  There is a broad range of related concerns here: during synchronous learning events, knowing all students are attending to the lesson and not doing some other activity behind their avatar, building online assessments that are addressing higher level thoughts, and then just the plain concern of honesty.  Within the walls of a classroom, the teacher is able to monitor these things much more easily than online (see the Distance issue above).  

I am not simply “old school” here and unaware of all the gizmos available to try and deal with academic integrity online. I use the Google originality check, Turnitin.com’s powerful help, and other tech to try and help with this, but I would be naive to believe that students won’t always be one step ahead of the tools teachers have for this issue of honesty.  Again, the issue for me is the group calling for us to move from the classroom to DL permanently as though such was superior to the traditional way.  The fact that we can do it does not prove that we should.

If we had students raised in an ideal culture that loved learning, feasted upon truth, goodness, and beauty, and did not treat education as a job, a game, or a system of grade hounding, then I might concede the point.  But we obviously know that students are mostly trying to survive school, that all of them want to be in the top 5% of their graduating class, and that getting an “A” is way more important than learning anything or maintaining any ethical standard.  I just don’t think an online “A” is the same as one earned in the classroom.

Shocking the System

Finally, there is the way in which we have had to jump into DL due to a crisis.  Many believe that this jump has been a God sent blessing, forcing us out of the patterns of the traditional classroom and all the malaise of recent educational difficulties.  This is the school of the future is the battle cry.

I know that in some circumstances of poor performance it is best to practice the notion of ripping the bandage off quickly, of making the pain of change as quick as possible.  But education is too cumulative and complex for that analogy to work.  If we had philosophically believed that distance learning was superior to the traditional classroom, then we should have approached it incrementally, beginning at early learning and moving it upwards slowly.  The fact that we have welcomed DL mostly at the top (college) first brings up the question raised earlier, does the student have the necessary skills to deal with the independent nature of distance learning?

More or Less About Virtue

Someday.  Probably after I am forced out to pasture as being way too old to be of any help to students anymore I will sit down and work through all the blogs from over the years here at this little collection of musings and try to see how many times a certain theme pops up.  I ran a search on “virtue” and found 7 pages of truncated (just showing first few lines) articles on the subject.  I have been writing on this blog since 2005 or so.  I am not really consistent, but in that time the thoughts have accumulated.  Here is more.

We believe in virtue despite our best attempts to not be held responsible for such.  I hear regularly the old subjectivism that truth, virtue, the rules, morals, etc. are a personal thing that each of us has to form for ourselves…until there is a virtue we want others to agree to.  Virtue implies a norm, a standard, something beyond me that speaks to how I ought to live.  For me, this is a number of collected oracles that all speak to me about God’s will for my life.  The Scriptures, the Church and its traditions, something we call natural law, and certainly to some extent my own time and culture.  I don’t mind having multiple sources of moral authority, as long as I am fairly sure they are coming from the same ultimate Source.  My own time and culture is the least authoritative, but also seems the most insistent if I am not careful.

To the extent that one listens intently, carefully, quietly to moral instruction of Scripture, using every faithful means to obtain that instruction mentioned above, one finds their views at odds with those listening to another source of morals. If one engages in true dialogue with the other, this can be an experience of growth and broadening.  But often dialogue is broken by our clinging to our limited knowledge of our chosen source of moral teaching.  It is not the source that is at fault, it is our fear of having our understanding shaken.  I was reminded of this recently in working back through Dante’s Purgatorio in which Dante has his world shaken by blinding light right as he thinks he has arrived at paradise.  In short, Beatrice comes along and shows him that all his learning so far has been insufficient to ready him for the glories in store in Heaven.  

So that is where I came out on the other end of my thinking.  I love teaching, and I love watching young minds wrestle their way toward a better understanding of what they believe is true.  But none of us, in this life, “get there.”  We are all still seeking to know more.  And the next life is more of the same. Perhaps the most contentious and dangerous place in this life to be is think you have it figured out.  I am not dismissing all that I do know about truth, goodness, and beauty, I am just saying that if my theory is true, all that I know now, placed up against all I have yet to learn, looks fairly small and should cause humility.

Humility is not disengagement, but rather a way of engaging that does not fear being wrong, or being limited in how one understands something.  True humility does not back away from truth but rather boldly plunges further in with those powerful and wonderful words, “I don’t yet know this as I would like to.”

Covid Musings

I have been overlooking this blog due to the upheaval of my routines during this pandemic time.  I hope I will get back into a regular routine of posting, but as the event is not over I cannot be certain.  But Covid-19 has produced some thoughts regarding education as it has swept over us.

1. This whole desire to return to “normal” or learning to deal with the “new normal” is interesting.  I don’t think there is such a thing as “normal” in life.  We do experience routines, to be sure, but those change regularly.  What I think is being bandied about here is freedom and the loss of such.  Before Covid struck, I had freedoms that have since it’s commencement become restrained.  What I (and others) are desiring is a recovery of lost freedoms.  Not sure when or if that will happen, but I think that is what is being discussed when we talk about “normal” right now.
2. I have discussed virtual reality before (some here and a lot more here), but having remote learning thrust upon me and my colleagues has done much to confirm or change my theoretical musings of the past.  Remote learning is not the same nor can it be made to seem the same as in-class instruction.  Trying to fit that square peg into the round hole is very frustrating.  The main problem I encounter with screens seems to have two parts:  screens do not by their nature encourage sustained rational thought, and the culture of screens in our day actively affects the user’s appetites such that it places my class content in competition with the other things a student accesses with a screen, such as YouTube, Netflix, gaming, etc.  So these two things together challenge me to no end:  I can’t justify changing the content of my course to become like a movie, or a game, or a stupid cat video.  
3. When I am in class, I can relate directly to a student.  When we are separated by the screen, we are not able to relate nearly as well.  My relationship with a student is what I use to develop their attention to our content, to adjust to them as I see, hear, observe their body language, etc.  There is no way around the fact that distance learning puts more weight on the shoulders of the learner, who has to be able to do more “on their own.”  Teachers have to deal with what I mentioned above, that they cannot treat the student as though they were still in the classroom, but even if that is dealt with, I see no way in which to avoid placing more responsibility on the student than would be necessary in the classroom.
4. And by golly, screen fatigue is REAL.  Don’t get me wrong, a full day of classroom teaching is exhausting, but not in the same way and at least for me, not to the same degree as remote learning.  I feel bad at the end of the day, but the students must feel worse.  It is no wonder that most of them don’t engage the whole day, I am not sure they are physically or spiritually capable of such.  The classroom experience, again, allows for wisdom and virtue, whereby I as teacher relieve the classroom tension with a joke, or have everyone stretch for a moment, or the bell rings and releases them for a few minutes.  The marathon that is a day of remote learning is dehydrating to the human soul.

There is more, but that is enough for now.  I got get up, go take a walk, talk to a real person.