February 2018 – EduCommunicate

In The Tempest, Prospero sends the spirit Ariel to wreak havoc on the king’s ship to drive his enemies to land on the island. When Ariel reports back, they have the following conversation:

PROSPERO

My brave spirit!
Who was so firm, so constant, that this coil
Would not infect his reason?

ARIEL

Not a soul
But felt a fever of the mad and play’d
Some tricks of desperation. All but mariners
Plunged in the foaming brine and quit the vessel,
Then all afire with me: the king’s son, Ferdinand,
With hair up-staring,–then like reeds, not hair,–
Was the first man that leap’d; cried, ‘Hell is empty
And all the devils are here.’

This coil has infected our reason. Our response? “Hell is empty/And all the devils are here.” Evil, people say, causes massacres. Hell is empty. The devils, all of them, are here.

To me, evil lets us off easily as people. Evil sounds like a curse, or a motivation from beyond the human. Violence is very human, and it is, of course, everywhere. Reason is overrated these days, and maybe the history of violence suggests why; violence responds to violence with its own kind of logic, which is a sort of reason.

Arm teachers, say people like the President. Of course, as the first author points out, the state of school funding and the general zeitgeist about teachers is not one of deep respect for competence in any other realm, but to some, the logic of violence says prepare for more violence. After all, evil – Trump’s “sickos” – lurk. These people are, of course, deeply wrong.

And now that the children who survived the horrific attack on their school, on themselves, arise and speak they are, almost unbelievably, again attacked by fearful mariners whose reason loops tightly, fearing devils at every turn. Hell is empty.

#Neveragain seems like another conspiracy for everyone on the king’s ship – this is evil, nobody can stop it. Conspiracy addled and propaganda poisoned, these citizens don’t believe in the power of possibility or change, but only fear. Guns make fear. Guns break people. To stand and speak after guns is to be aglow with St. Elmo’s fire, possessed.

But the kids don’t care. Cameron Kasky, my new hero, “told CNN that anyone who had seen him in the school’s production of ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ knows that ‘nobody would pay me to act for anything.'”

Humor might help. Bless that kid.

The terrified are humorless, as the terrified always are. They are beset by devils. Hell has emptied.

Of course armaments are worthless as protection against devils. Instead, guns make the imagination real, devils corporeal. This is the madness. Hell is only an idea we make real.

Educating the whole child means, in our 21st century, creating the conditions for social-emotional learning (SEL). Often, in my experience, out of a love of children and a desire to build resilient, compassionate learners, SEL is moved out of the classroom context into pastoral care environments, especially in independent or international schools. Private schools seeking to prove a value addition may lean on advisory or pastoral care programs within the school day from this desire to serve each child’s need and to most easily package their whole child approach.

In fact, I wonder if schools that chose to promote their SEL within the classroom approaches might spur a revolt among their community by a perceived dilution of academic rigor or contact time? Seems possible. If we love educating for “The Big Five” personality traits (or the positive factors while mitigating those which may form obstacles to success, like “neuroticism”, through “grit” activities, etc.), we may change our minds quickly if we catch a whiff of time away from math instruction.

Here lie some of the inherent tensions and contradictions within schools – the tension between doing something important well and searching for a place to do a little of something important because it seems important to do or the contradictions between what we do and how we do it.

Trusting relationships provide the foundation for learning. One of my past professors described Vygotsky’s concept of the “More Knowledgeable Other” (MKO) guiding a learner through the Zone of Proximal Development as the definition of care in education. Many online guides to Vygotsky quickly point out that the MKO need not be a person, but could be an electronic tutor or the like. That’s true, but the student needs to trust the source – its knowledge and its raison d’être to aid the learner. In my opinion, research by another former professor, Dr. Anastasiya Lipnevich, that shows college students improved faster when rubric feedback was perceived as coming from a computer than from a professor suggests how distrust or the perception of disinterested or cursory grading renders feedback worthless more than it suggests electronic grading has value.

In short, we learn from one another in rich, safe contexts when we do real things – or do tasks in academic environments in which we trust each other and care about the outcome. The same is true of SEL. We learn positive behaviors from models who we trust and care about, and the only people from whom we can receive and integrate feedback on our bad behaviors are those we care about and trust.

The key point is that all behaviors must arise in an authentic context if we are to learn from them. School and classrooms may be arbitrary, but like fiat currencies, they are the coin of the realm. What are we to do? The gold standard should be real, authentic, meaningful environments in which we engage together in shared journeys of learning and discovery, but sometimes, paper money has value, too. It’s easier to carry. It scales.

SEL in arbitrary environments, like an advisory in which no authentic or contextually meaningful tasks are engaged in together, proves a hollow enterprise, often something like an online activity to uncover our strengths or a team building activity to highlight “grit”. These context-free activities demand an exceptionally talented teacher to maintain student interest and focus, or at least an exceptionally agreeable teacher (#BigFive).

I can’t do it. And I question any claims that building a marshmallow tower together once per year provides sticky learning on the nature of one’s own character. Relationship building and social emotional learning stand as essential pillars of a complete education, but should occur in the context of nothing less arbitrary as a classroom, to say nothing of other domains of school, like sports fields or service work. This learning is too important to fake.

Month: February 2018

Maybe One Reason Guns Make Americans Crazy