Author: ianhoke

Thinking About “Tools for Thinking”

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Now is an amazing time to be alive, but the context of now is clearly that of the past. A case in point – what you think of the uprisings of “the Arab wave” will likely be determined by how you view the world, based on your upbringing, education, and myriad other factors. The United States is behaving in these conflicts like a griffin of sorts – half Cold War beast, half Bush doctrine hawk – and the result is a superpower behaving unpredictably. Why, exactly, does this happen?

David Brooks suggests in a recent column entitled “Tools for Thinking” that such behaviors may be attributable to certain intellectual traps, like the Einstellung effect, which he describes as trying to “solve problems by using solutions that worked in the past instead of looking at each situation on its own terms.” Beyond simply applying solutions that have worked in the past, I would argue that we often view the present as more of the past, past 2.0. Of course, the context has changed over time, wildly differing causes can lead to remarkably similar effects. Knowing this is only a little helpful, however, as it takes a truly divergent thinker to break with deep-seated instincts like the Einstellung effect.

The Einstellung effect is somewhat related to another trap labeled Path Dependance, which “refers to the notion that often ‘something that seems normal or inevitable today began with a choice that made sense at a particular time in the past, but survived despite the eclipse of the justification for that choice.'” Brooks gives the example of the QWERTY keyboard, which we use today across the English speaking world. The QWERTY keyboard was designed not for ergonomic ease, but to slow the typist, reducing jamming of typewriter keys, which I think we can all agree will never happen on an iPhone screen. We use the QWERTY keyboard because it’s what we use, not because it’s what we should use. The difference is clear, yet…Path Dependance rules the day.

How does this relate to the classroom? In a number of ways, I’d venture. I have a Smartboard and projector in every classroom I enter, and I use it like a chalkboard from the nineteenth century roughly 80% of the time (that may be low). We want technology in the classroom, so products are designed based on existing, low tech products – like chalkboards/whiteboards – and the problem is solved! Sort of. Not really. Part of this disconnect is the path dependent design of the tool, and part of it is my own experience and sense of classroom context. Can the Smartboard be used to get the teacher out of the front of the classroom, or students away from PowerPoints, acting as teachers in front of the classroom? I don’t see it.  Breaking the model, changing the path – here lie innovative solutions. Here we are, 1 to 1 – why use a Smartboard to share information? We could use Google docs and Dropbox over coffee and conversation in the hallway.

If you, as a student, use your tablet computer as a notebook, a textbook, or even Scott Klososky’s “outboard brain,” how engrained is the path? Can you make your tablet into a sidecar easel, a portable printing press, an onboard media studio and darkroom, a compact global network? As a teacher, what are ways for me to facilitate the path shift? I think, first and foremost, we need to bring an attitude of play into each class, removing the life-and-death, fear of failure paradigm wrapped up in our AP/IB courses and start blazing divergent paths to the top of this mountain we’ve chosen to climb (worth it or not). Creative learning is learning, and if the tests have any validity, they test learning. If they don’t have any validity, we should be smart enough to change the path.

In our brave new world, a successful thinker is a free associater, one who can draw connections between broad sets of information and create new, valuable information for wide or specific audiences. Kevin Kelly, co-founder of Wired magazine, has something to say about this, as well, in his “Six Verbs for the New Web.” Check out the last one: Generate! If you want to make a mark, and have an audience, you must generate something new and useful, or at least fun. Can you take a fresh look at the world, de-Einstellung yourself (so, the solution is not on a single Wikipedia page, bout could be in 15 taken together), break with the path dependance of tools (see iPad), and make something new?

Can we? I’d love to hear any and all thoughts on this one.

Additional, tangentially-related, and fascinating discussion with Kevin Kelly via the good folks at Radiolab in a roughly 20 minute podcast here.

On Limerence

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David Brooks, in his latest piece in The New York Times has covered a fascinating piece outlining the basis of my philosophies of living, learning, and teaching: “The New Humanism.”

Brooks exposes the individualistic, materialistic, uber-rational philosophies of the past and present as single-faceted paradigms which ignore much of what is true about human nature. Brooks notes that this focus “has created a distortion in our culture. We emphasize things that are rational and conscious and are inarticulate about the processes down below,” to our collective detriment. In particular, Brooks recognizes that “When we raise our kids, we focus on the traits measured by grades and SAT scores. But when it comes to the most important things like character and how to build relationships, we often have nothing to say.” The message to students, which often becomes internalized, is that you are the sum of the numbers, or letter grades, and your worth is tangibly related to the outcomes. This message takes years to unwind, and that’s only for the lucky ones. Some people wind up tangled in the web of conflicting messages between innate human desires for social success or pleasing loved ones and their internal feelings of boredom, hatred, or disinterest in what they have been told makes them valuable. Who likes taking the SAT, and what happens when it’s over (answer: the GRE)? Who is motivated endlessly by a score; everyone gives up on Galaga eventually, because the numbers begin to look alike, or be meaningless. In fact, intrinsic motivation is identifiable most often in non-measurable forms.

In particular, Brooks points out that

research illuminates a range of deeper talents, which span reason and emotion and make a hash of both categories:

Attunement: the ability to enter other minds and learn what they have to offer.

Equipoise: the ability to serenely monitor the movements of one’s own mind and correct for biases and shortcomings.

Metis: the ability to see patterns in the world and derive a gist from complex situations.

Sympathy: the ability to fall into a rhythm with those around you and thrive in groups.

Limerence: This isn’t a talent as much as a motivation. The conscious mind hungers for money and success, but the unconscious mind hungers for those moments of transcendence when the skull line falls away and we are lost in love for another, the challenge of a task or the love of God. Some people seem to experience this drive more powerfully than others.

Equipose and metis are essential “talents,” or, more appropriately, learnable skills for most people. Courses like Advanced Placement Literature & Composition are arguably useful not because they make learners smarter, but because they lead learners to reflect and monitor their own understandings and skills, changing as they individually must: equipose. Or, useful because the course demands higher order thinking skills and integration of complex sets of data in the form of texts for synthesizing new understandings: metis (at least partially, or within a given set). If taught correctly, a course builds a sense of honest, authentic engagement, possibly limerence: loss within the challenge of a task, questing for Phaedrus’s Quality. But, the AP falters badly in May, testing, assigning a number. I love my task, I’m playing the game, and questing for improvement, but I’m not going to score perfectly on the AP test, so how likely am I to give myself to the task? To experience limerence?

If it were me, and it has been, the answer is not bloody likely. So the tests, the measurements, don’t help honest, prolonged engagement, but rather feed into our “rational,” materialistic selves. The symptoms are cramming, learning disposably, and widespread misery. Oh, how I wish for schools in which humans teach humans, explicitly, in which we respect our different strengths, foibles, blind spots, and in which we all seek to become more happy, healthy, and complete humans together through this shared process called school.

Written with limerence.

On “Modern Status”

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Living in a time when 20% of all American children live in poverty, David Brooks is on a search for Jane Austen’s America. Seriously. Brooks has his eyes on the ball in “Modern Status” when he notes that there is little difference between the mannerisms and noticeable intelligence of students from Arizona State versus Harvard, but he loses any sense of critical analysis when he notes that “employers aren’t looking for genius as much as energy and clubbability” without a hint of irony. Certainly, the club that Harvard students are game to join is that which “attribute(s) superior intellectual, moral and cultural qualities to people who can get into those places.”

Indeed.

Brooks goes on to observe that “The message, which one does detect on elite campuses, is that the actual academic content to be found in these places is secondary.” I looked around, but can’t find any numbers indicating how many freshmen admitted to Harvard went to test-drilling charter schools or failing schools where all arts, music, and extra curricular activities have been restricted or cut completely, but I bet 100% of those students haven’t spent much time on their sculling stroke. The message is academics first! and they don’t even cover academics. They cover testing, because if they don’t, teachers get fired. The problem, however, goes beyond vilified teachers and students who may not fit in easily to Harvard’s secret clubs.

This argument by Brooks is exactly why money has to be invested in all public schools, and why non “core” classes must be restored with vigor and respect: the culture that these kids lose when they spend all day on math multiple choice strategies goes beyond the critical thinking, beyond even the culture of not hating boring, awful school lessons, and right to class culture. Elites value those who know how to learn and how to live. Those who know pay attention to life beyond the walls of the school, and for the most vulnerable students, that world must be brought into the schools or they’ll miss it. Underpinning Brooks’s argument is a sad reality: modern status is the status quo, reinforced, and girded by taxpayer dollars flowing into banks and out of schools.

Reflecting on Past Expectations with Futureme.org

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One of my frustrations is getting students beyond grades and focused on learning and improvement in a personally meaningful way. Often, as students learn and grow in their abilities, they fail to recognize their own growth. Even reflection from assessment to assessment doesn’t necessarily provide the ah-ha crystallizing total distance traveled from day one – I visualize the academic equivalent of Ford Prefect’s ability to convey to anyone else the “incomprehensible sense of distance” between their places of birth. Snap – that’s how far, so whaddya think? I’m wondering tonight if futureme.org is a way. I’m thinking that I’ll create an anticipatory set of questions or comments on fiction and poetry for August, and have students mail their responses to their school accounts in December, and then do a similar activity for April in the AP Literature course, for example.  What attitudes might be revealed? What prejudices or preconceptions? What worries long past, what misunderstandings? Could a carefully crafted anticipatory set uncover learning such as improved higher order critical analysis, compositional awareness, or other elusive, complex skill sets, as the ignorant or partially complete voice from the past is encountered in the future? I’m going to try this next year and report back.

Learning Information is a Reflective Process; Get Started with a Test!

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A fascinating study has just been published in the journal Science regarding kinds of study strategies and their effectiveness in improving recall, or retrieval, of information later. An article on the study has been linked below and all quotes come from the linked text.

In brief, when compared to strategies such as repeated reading, cramming, or concept mapping, taking tests has proven to increase recall later. I find this terribly interesting because of the conclusion that making mistakes on tests leads the learner to revise their understanding:

The students who took the recall tests may “recognize some gaps in their knowledge,” said Marcia Linn, an education professor at the University of California, Berkeley, “and they might revisit the ideas in the back of their mind or the front of their mind.”

When they are later asked what they have learned, she went on, they can more easily “retrieve it and organize the knowledge that they have in a way that makes sense to them.”

It may also be that the struggle involved in recalling something helps reinforce it in our brains.

Maybe that is also why students who took retrieval practice tests were less confident about how they would perform a week later.

“The struggle helps you learn, but it makes you feel like you’re not learning,” said Nate Kornell, a psychologist at Williams College. “You feel like: ‘I don’t know it that well. This is hard and I’m having trouble coming up with this information.’ ”

By contrast, he said, when rereading texts and possibly even drawing diagrams, “you say: ‘Oh, this is easier. I read this already.’ ”

So, overconfidence about the quality of one’s knowledge leads to poorer retrieval, no doubt because the brain does far fewer reflective cycles over the information and is not forced to revise understandings for greater clarity or correctness, as it must after flaws or gaps are pointed out via a test. Of course, the learner has to experience the results of the test. As such, our practice AP tests are of much higher value in improving your knowledge of the subject than the final exams themselves, because you will be given the results and be asked to revise answers, consider errors, and generally revisit the material. In short, you will naturally reflect on the outcome and seek to improve. At least, this is my reading of this study.

Also important is the conclusion at the end of the article that this study doesn’t mean more standardized tests are needed in American public schools, for example. Those tests are generally worthless, as students never receive feedback on the test beyond a score. Sometimes, the lucky ones get a print out with numbers in categories. None of this leads the learner to reflect on the specific gaps in his or her knowledge, as determined by the test.  As such, tests useful for improving learning should be specific, meaningful, valid, regularly occurring, and (probably) fairly brief. Tests should be given back to the learner soon after their scoring, and the learner should be led through a reflective process by the instructor as much as possible. These are, of course, my conclusions and not necessarily the conclusions of the study.

What does this mean for the secondary school student? When you have an identifiable set of information to learn – say, a text like Slaughterhouse Five, in which recall of many specific details are necessary for writing and discussing, or dark and light photosynthesis, with myriad attendant details and process – find a partner and devise a little test for each other, focusing on the most important ideas and essential details, as you see them. Take, swap, and discuss. That process would utilize your study time much, much better than sitting in a room and rereading lines that flow in your eyes and out through your mouth, hanging open with boredom. Would any of you try that process?  I’m genuinely curious. Would a session on writing test questions be helpful as a study strategy?

“To Really Learn, Quit Studying and Take a Test” – The New York Times

Language & Learning; or On Poop Words

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Usually, we change and grow silently, invisibly. Sometimes, changes in our brains become obvious and pop out in crystalline detail. Only once, poop and pee has crystallized a real change in my life.

Yesterday, my wife, Kal, looked at our daughter of 2 1/2 years, Dot, and asked “Do you feel peeps muzza-muzza?” This sentence has meaning, unbelievably.

Kal’s links with this sentence begin in the deep past, her own toddlerhood. For some reason, pee, or its hyphenated variant pee-pee, wasn’t enough for her mother, wasn’t cute enough, sweet enough, or unique enough. So pee became peeps, which are offensively sweet marshmallow birds in my experience, capitalized. Peeps.

Peeps!
So, peeps is the language in our house for pee-pee. It works – it’s fun to say and the peeps meme is embedded deeply within Dot’s language understanding. Poop is also plural, in effect. Poops muzza-muzza is also a phrase, with true and useful meaning. So, how did the entire phrase gain meaning? Dot was showing mixed interest in potty training, sometimes willing to try the potty when prompted, but often having accidents that seemed to be increasing, rather than decreasing over time. We tried candy, stickers, high fives. Still, motivation was flagging amongst us all.

As we sought to motivate Dot’s potty training, Kal searched about for cool things to hook her attention and focus her on the process. Of course, as one would expect, Japanimation came to the rescue:

Shimajiro!

Shimajiro is a very popular cartoon character in a wide ranging series of cartoons for teaching kids skills and etiquette. When Shimajiro is ready to hit the head, he proclaims a feeling of “muzza-muzza,” or possibly wuzza-wuzza, which is what I hear. Of course, it doesn’t really matter. Shimajiro, via Youtube, gave Dot a vocabulary for bladder and large intestinal pressure. Overnight, she was into the potty. Dot was taking responsibility for heading to her potty and taking care of business.

For Dot, the language is real; she has no reason to question the meaning behind these words. But, even more interesting to me is how seamlessly Kal and I have integrated this new language into our daily experience. Kal didn’t think before she asked if Dot felt peeps muzza-muzza, because she didn’t have to. The language was integrated already and part of a communication circuit with Dot. Via Japanimation on Youtube.

Fantastic!