The Nature of Teaching…The Teaching of Nature

YTC nurtures voice and self-worth.  Students are given the opportunity to be agents of change.  They restore computers, take them into the community, and foster their effective use.  And because of these values students have grown.  Their mastery of the basic mechanics of computer technology has led them to more advanced programs including A+ Certification.  It has also to a Business Entrepreneurship program where students learn to operate a small business through the refurbishment process.  YTC students are responsible for computer procurement, inventory control, staff management, client relations and customer service. For example, QuickBooks accounting is learned first as a class exercise then used in student fundraising.  The students sell a portion of their inventory once they have met their donation quota. The students come to appreciate how successful business management is incumbent upon fiscal responsibility.

There has also been a third core area of growth.  As the program grew in Chicago, it took an important step.  The students reached out beyond their immediate neighborhoods to the communities many of their families had left years earlier.  They reached out to Mexico.  Over the following years they have delivered approximately 700 computers for repair to Durango, Mexico, setting up sister programs in a host of schools.  There is now a lively exchange between students from the Chicago area and Mexico which is both technical and cultural.

And now YTC has reached out to the new STEM programs in high schools in North Carolina.  Students and faculty advisors from Chicago went to help set up programs in five communities.  In the course of a week the students from Chicago helped the North Carolina students to work on 100 computers donated by Office Max, teaching them the hardware side of computers: what’s on the inside, where the parts go, and what they do.  Approximately 20 of the used machines were used for parts and 80 were refurbished.  Many of these were given new homes in neighboring schools, senior citizens homes, and the like; while others went to form the basis for high school computer labs and to the homes of students who do not have computers.

There is a folk tale common to many communities about making soup with water and a stone.  But as the peddler observes it would taste better if you added an onion or two, and when someone suggests potatoes; that too wouldn’t hurt, etc.  Broken computers are important, but like the stone they are the least important ingredient.  They key to the YTC recipe is the way it values the full sweep of what schools are for…the respect it has not only for learning computer technology, but for growing these young men and women as team players and agents of change with an upbeat sense for their promise and their central place in making this world better.

There is much talk these days of incentives to improve our schools, including rewarding our best teachers.  A fine notion, perhaps, but surely we would measure how good our teachers are not simply by how well their students perform with a number two pencil.  Too much else of central value needs to happen in our schools: Not only reading, writing and arithmetic, but voice, a sense of self-worth, the capacity to lead…to listen, reason with others, and to act with an eye on the greater good.  I have, therefore, a nomination to place before you for effectively meeting the demands of schooling across the full sweep from information and analytical facility to self-worth and leadership:  The Youth Technology Corps.

YTC

YTC is an after-school program that began in Chicago about ten years ago.  Its focus is the refurbishing of used computers donated by individuals and businesses. Students learn how to disassemble computers, test the components, and replace the components into the newly functional computers. They repair hardware and learn to load software. Through this process, the students gain comfort and familiarity with computers from the inside out. This is the basic educational aspect of YTC.

A key quality of YTC is that it values the ‘going’ over the ‘getting there’.  That is, it’s more than a course in computer technology.  Students work as a group…solving problems, planning what they should do next, and what might be a good thing to try.   This is a critical aspect of the program because it sets the foundation for their outreach.

After a computer is refurbished, the students donate it to computer labs they have helped to establish in their communities.  In this way, the core function of schools to nurture social cohesion is extended to a core communal function.  Students are not only gaining a valuable 21^st century expertise, they are becoming part of a movement, gaining a mission…helping to make things better in their struggling neighborhoods.  Boys and Girls Clubs, senior citizen homes, local elementary schools and churches have all received the fruits of YTC labor. And it doesn’t stop there.  The students operate and maintain these labs and instruct others how to use the computers. Through teaching, the students develop leadership skills, reinforce the material learned, gain confidence, and earn the respect of others.

Pretty neat.

There was a piece on the radio a couple months ago about a program to reduce childhood obesity.  The focus was on schools, both in terms of nutrition and regarding more time for recess and physical activity.  One concern raised was how folk would feel about giving up 45 minutes or an hour from math or English.  And I asked myself:  “What is school for?”

Straight off there’s that sense of education that comes out of the material we teach.  School is where children learn information and gain facility at reading, writing, and reasoning.  But there is more.  In a civilized society, we need everyone to be civil, to appreciate the norms of everyday life.  So beyond spelling and the rules of capitalization and the multiplication tables, children are taught to be quiet and listen when others are talking, to wait their turn, to walk in single file, and so on.

But there is still more to our schools.  In a democratic society, we need a citizenry that will embrace its responsibilities.  It needs to inform its judgement about the matters of the day.  This is more than knowing the number of state legislators or the layers of appellate courts.  The citizens of a democracy need to be prepared to act when time comes for decisions…to value forums for deliberation, to campaign, petition, and vote.

With such an array of substantive matters, our schools carry a heavy role.  But there is yet another core mission to schooling beyond the sweep from linear equations to not running in the halls.  This final matter overlays all the rest.  It is the simple assurance that the child belongs.  That he or she has place, a rightful claim to a voice in the mix.  Without this, the other matters don’t matter.

It is from this assurance that students raise their hands to offer an answer or pose a question.  If assured, they step forward with an idea that just occurred to them that might solve the problem.  It is the foundation of community and of leadership.  When Isaiah so long ago offered to his fellows…”Come, let us reason together…” he offered them that assurance. In just that simple way, we too need to invite our students to join us as we work to make sense of the world and how it has come to be the way it is.

It is puzzling how little attention is given to asking questions.  We expend far more energy arranging and re-arranging what we will teach.  We set up standards, design curricula, work out necessary skills and how to spiral through major concepts, evaluate text books, and then there is the whole business of test preparation.  But I am convinced that what we teach is far less important than how we teach it.

I had a friend who decided to celebrate graduating from college with a fancy bottle of wine, but he broke it on the way home.  Never got a taste.  If your delivery system isn’t working, it doesn’t matter what the contents are.

The key thing is to teach well.  So how do we do it?

At the top of my list is engaging students.

I have spent a fair amount of time working with teachers, visiting classes, talking with them afterwards.  It has been stunning to see how quickly a routine takes over, a routine that basically turns everything over to the text book.  There’s a lovely book, Learning in Science by Osborne and Freyberg where they spent a lot of time talking with students as class was unfolding.  One child was asked what she was doing in a lab and she answered lesson 8.5 and next we’ll do 8.6.

I always felt I needed to frame what I did with a problem students could understand.  It gave us a goal, a purpose.  It wasn’t about covering the material in section 3 of chapter 4.  It was about understanding some aspect of life, the universe, and anything else.  This is where the whole conversation about puzzles comes in.  We are surrounded by puzzles.  It doesn’t matter what we are teaching or what grade level.  The world doesn’t make sense as it presents itself, and all of us know that in a visceral way.  We’ve been there.  We’ve looked at something and it just didn’t make sense.  Yet the material we offer students pretends that it’s all straightforward.  Tab A into slot B.  That’s all there is to it.

That’s why a course of study on atoms begins with a simple gesture…Wait a minute.  How could they have discovered atoms, if they are so small?  And if they didn’t.  If atoms were just an idea we had, then how could you make a bomb with just a bunch of ideas?

I’ve been writing about talk and this has led to the importance of puzzles.  If we look across the aisle, as it were, to the pieces I have been writing about Atoms in the “Teaching Nature” section, we can see a straightforward example.

Atoms are talked about with the youngest children, and they become increasingly central concepts in middle and high school classes.  Just last year I was in a 7^th grade class where the teacher was laying out the pattern of electron shells!  I think what has happened is that people know that atoms are important, but they have little idea what to say about them, other than that they exist.  So, we can find ourselves describing the properties of atoms and even the fine structure of s, p, d, and f orbitals because we know we need to teach about atoms.  But there’s lots to talk about before we start worrying about the ‘rule of 8’ and the numerology of electron packing.

The key step is to move back to the most essential questions, not forward to the elaborate finery of the answers.

The series on the Atom begins with the observation that you can’t experience an atom.  You can’t pick it up and hold it to the light to see its shape or color or anything else about it.  You can’t place one on a scale and weigh it.  You can’t feel it, taste it, or anything.  So how did we discover them?

That’s a good question.

Kids know about atoms.  They have all the authority of books and newspapers, and movies.  Even Jiminy Crickett talks about atoms (He was the narrator in a Walt Disney production, “Our Friend the Atom.”).  So asking them how we could have discovered them in the first place is a perfectly legitimate question.  It’s a question they won’t be able to answer and we can all see why.  Columbus discovered the new world by bumping into it.  You can’t bump into an atom.  It isn’t big enough.

Now the whole thing is far more engaging than it was a moment before.  Studying atoms is no longer a matter of a catechism of scientific sounding answers.  It has now become a puzzle.  And there is a bigger puzzle right around the corner.  Because if the atoms was invented, not discovered, then it is an idea and not a regular object.  And if it is an idea and not an object, how did we make a bomb out of exploding ideas?

We didn’t.

Somehow the atom as an idea became the atom as an object.  We talked our way from an idea to a thing.  That’s magic…not science.  But of course that was science, and that’s the story we need to teach.

Just the other day I met the young child of a friend.  I looked at her and said “Oh my, your two arms look so different.”  I then pointed to the arm without a cast and asked: “What did you do to your arm?”  She smiled and said, “I didn’t break it!”

So often we take the fun out of things, when just a little twist is a kick.  Puzzles do that, and there’s no shortage of puzzles in the material we teach, or for that matter, the material in our museums.  Instead of laying it out, ask a question first.

But it may not be clear how you can start with a problem.  Problems presuppose knowing something and that there are issues with it.

The material in the chapter of a typical text book is a set of answers…answers to questions that are not made explicit most of the time.  This was the argument put forward by an intriguing character, R.G. Collingwood, about a hundred years ago.  For Collingwood, the act of understanding was directly tied to figuring out the question a person is answering as they write or say something.  He came to this out of an interest in archaeology where he found himself routinely looking at artifacts and asking what problem they had been designed to solve.  Only by knowing what it had been for, could you understand what it was and with that, what life had been about for these ancient peoples.

There’s a charming book, Motel of the Mysteries, by David Macaulay that plays with this.  The story is set far in the future after our civilization has collapsed.  Future archaeologists stumble upon the ruins of a motel and attempt to decipher its meaning.  They see it as an elaborate burial chamber, as they found a body on a ceremonial platform (a bed) facing the great altar (a television).  Another body was found in an inner chamber (the bathroom) with a still more elaborate, polished white sarcophagus (a bathtub).  The opportunities for misunderstanding are staggering and in this case amusing. The point for Collingwood is that we do this all of the time.  Early on we develop a mental faculty where we construct what is on someone’s mind by trying to put ourselves in their shoes, as it were.  We ask ourselves: what would it mean if I were to act or say these things?

The point is that we are always archaeologists, a la Collingwood, trying to re-construct intent and purpose from what is presented to us. Even when they are giving us answers, we are faced with the problem of figuring out the questions they are answers to…problems at the beginning of the chapter.

So, why not make this process more explicit?  Find something tantalizing, something that is almost there, something that students or museum goers are likely to think they understand.  Then turn a corner.  By starting this way, with a problem, we acknowledge that the material is an answer to questions that people have been asking for a long time, and so we give the material the context it deserves.  The key is that the lesson or display is not organized around an answer, or a demonstration, or an interesting phenomenon, or some activity that is meant to show how everyone should think about a topic.  Instead it centers on a problem because what we really are after is for students to explore, examine, and come to make sense of things.  What we really are after is that they can explain things.  What we really are after is talk.

The importance of talk in the classroom is heightened once we appreciate that the material does not speak for itself.  Our textbooks present the material as if what it means and why we would hold these views is obvious; but it is not the case.

If this is so, then how can we speak for the material?  How can we focus the mind’s eye of a class full of students?  This is a central issue as we prepare for the classroom, and it proves to have many parts; but right in the middle is the notion of perplexity.

There is an interesting nuance here.  Not all things that don’t make sense are perplexing.  Perplexity seems only to really apply to those things that we think we ought to understand.  So, the classic Norman Rockwell-like image of a father scratching his head while standing in front of the various parts of a bicycle he’s been trying to put together is an apt image of perplexity.  While the fact that the same father might not know the sequence of nuclear reactions involved in the release of the vast energies of stars is more simply something he does not know.  This difference is crucial for the classroom; for perplexity is vital, it enlivens, while information is inert and deadening.

If we return to Sanders for a moment (A is for Ox), the importance of talk highlights the corrosive impact of television and other modern forms of passive entertainment.  Children are being stimulated, but not challenged.  Their time is occupied, but their imagination, their own talk and thus their own forging of notions, is not.  He offers this striking observation: “Young children need to feel lost, confused, and bewildered enough to concoct their own stories in order to climb out of tight situations.  They need to string together narrative threads from here and there to reach meaning in their lives.”

As with the development of children, so too with the development of students.  The logic of the material, as opposed to the logic of the exchange in a classroom, tends to foster a passive witnessing.  Students do not expose.  That has become the work of the text and the teacher.  The material does not provoke.  It lies there, inert.  The task is not to forge an understanding but to secure identification.  Students witness.  They watch.  And even the various hands-on activities we offer are programmed, formatted to provide a witnessing, a confirmation of the material.  There is no driving perplexity.

The moral then is this:  We need to perplex our students, to engage them with a puzzle that strikes them as puzzling.  Learning doesn’t begin with an answer.  It begins with something that doesn’t fit, and so, from the beginning, there is more going on than a witnessing. There is a problem to be solved.

This, then, is our first step.  In terms of the practice of teaching we have an orientation.  When we walk into the classroom we need a problem…

Not too long ago I attended a meeting where a publisher’s representative was urging the adoption of a series of textbooks.  After 10 or 15 minutes of describing various advantages of the books, he came to a new feature.  Teachers could access a web-site where lesson plans were available.  One needed only to specify the number of days to be spent on a given chapter, and out would come a breakdown for lessons:  5 minutes here, 10 for this activity, and another 15 for that…  In addition, each specified chunk of time would be related to state learning objectives and national education standards. I could feel the energy in the room.

Clearly, the teachers were pleased by the notion of a web-site that would virtually write their lesson plans.  But there was more.  The sales representative went on to say these lesson plans were especially good for new teachers who have a tendency “to get bogged down explaining things.”  That was the part I loved. Here was help making sure you wouldn’t waste your time explaining things.

It is my intent here to praise the virtues of getting bogged down.  This is more than a question of speed.  Choosing to go “slowly,” that is, choosing to stop for questions is choosing to have things make sense.  It is placing the authority of reason over that of right answers.

How different this talk is from sharing information.  Too often we tell students.  Too often we make the serious business of the classroom a kind of decanting where we pour information, however elegantly, into their minds.

Over the years, I have had many colleagues.  Several have stumbled over just this distinction between talk and information.  They could see that class was ‘flat,’ that students were not really enjoying class or activities, but they couldn’t see what the real problem was.  One colleague, very bright with a strong background, kept revising his presentations, his lectures, convinced that if he could just find the right way to organize the material, students would see what was going on, would do well on tests, and would be happy about their learning.  But students only became more disenchanted.

They hadn’t needed a still more elegant essay, a still more refined answer.  They needed questions to ponder, seeming contradictions to resolve, and issues to engage and make sense of.  Only when we do this are we nurturing their capacity to reason and so become more fully independently-minded –just as story-telling nurtures a fuller sense of identity.