Category: Philosophy

Just for perspective.

This number isn’t exactly hard-and-fast, as the start of these things is always hazy. But.

Email is 36 years old.

Think about that for moment. I’ll wait.

This is not new technology. This isn’t even close to new.

There is no excuse, 36 years in, for not being at least familiar with this tech.

BTW: email is 41 years old if you count from the first use of the “@” symbol in an address.

 

 

 

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Grabbing vs Sustaining.

So the Olympic trials have started (curling!), and that has me thinking. Oddly, about figure skating.

Let me explain.

It’s important to have an eye catching costume during a figure skating routine for a couple of reasons:

  • It captures your initial attention
  • It accentuates the movement of the skater
  • It helps tell the narrative story of the routine

All of these things are very important and also not. While they each serve their purpose, they exist only to further the actual demonstration of skill in the routine. That is to say, they adorn the skill and athleticism being shown on the ice. They are decoration. And at the highest levels of competition, when the differences between competitors are small and judgements must be made, those small adornments can matter.

In a classroom, there is no judging against competitors. When an educator presents, the only metric is the engagement they generate with students. To that end, we need to be wary about how much time and effort we invest in adornment. It’s ok to sweat the typeface and the transitions of your slides when there is no more ground to be gained in the content and delivery. The priorities of the skater must be clearly centered on the skating and not the costume, and there is no difference with education. Yes, details matter. The content, however, rules.

Goal oriented.

This is a simple thing:

When approaching a lesson, the skill is the goal, not the exercise to develop the skill.

For example, the prototypical five paragraph essay isn’t the point- understanding the structure of a position paper is.

As such, shouldn’t we be focused on the absolute best way to reach that goal? It seems the vast majority of the time is spent on developing the exercises, where it seems that focus would be better spent on finding more engaging ways to reach the goal.

 

 

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Decisions.

It’s time to decide:

Are we in the business of educating as many students as possible for as little money as possible?

or

Are we in the business of providing the best education possible for students?

 

 

 

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New England 1:1 Summit

It’s that time of year again: The New England 1:1 Summit is back!

The first, and the only dedicated to 1:1 without being tied to a specific device.

Come, hang out, learn, share, eat, and enjoy. Take a visit to a 1:1 classroom at any grade level.

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On ensuring mediocrity.

I listen to a lot of music. It’s always been something I’ve gravitated to, from listening to WBCN in the wee hours of the night on my bedside clock radio in the eighties, to exploring genres and artists through my young adult years. I started buying music on cd’s. I was just becoming music aware and ready to begin amassing a collection when cd’s came onto the market. They sounded good- even if I had to get permission to play them on my dad’s stereo. Later, in 97 or so, I started trading mp3 files. And that’s when I started noticing something.

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The music didn’t sound the same- it didn’t have the same punch or nuance, and when I listened on headphones (as I often did), it wasn’t anywhere near as good. Shortly after this time, I started buying vinyl seriously. My collection exploded, and I still have it now. People wonder why I’ve spent so much time and money developing a collection on a “dead” medium. There are a lot of reasons, actually, and I can make a fairly convincing case given the time. That said, there is an interesting advantage to listening to music on vinyl.

In the earlier days of rock, vinyl was the only medium that existed. The recordings from the 60’s and earlier 70’s are among my favorites. In those days, the music was pressed into the vinyl quietly. That is to say, the actual sound signal was lower than in contemporary times. This means the quiet sections of the songs are quiet, and the louder sections are louder- there is a large dynamic range to the sound. This is a really, really nice thing if you’re listening to music with subtlety.

As time passed, sound engineers found that louder records sold better. And since the name of the game was selling records, louder was the new rule. In fact, you can look at empirical evidence that modern recordings are significantly louder than vintage recordings. There’s a great article here that demonstrates this. By systematically making all portions of the song louder, the loud sections end up not standing out as much. When everything is loud, how can you tell what should be?

Teaching has faced a similar fate: in an effort to raise the performance of the lower levels of teaching, governing bodies have established protocols, evaluations, and ongoing training aimed at improving instruction. Some of this is no doubt good- but what has been overlooked is that in the establishment and focus of making hoops for lesser teachers to jump through you have forced excellent teachers to jump through those same hoops. And while lesser teachers must improve to jump through those hoops. excellent teachers must stoop.

What is left is exactly what has happened with sound recordings in the last forty years- the compression of signal. We have become so focused on raising the lower performing members of the profession that we haven’t noticed we’ve hobbled the upper end. Our push for “everyone doing better” has really been a move towards “everyone in the middle.”

There might be a glimmer of hope on the horizon, if we are to believe the analogy with music holds true: in the last few years, as studios have been able to exert less control and as audiences have begun to notice the deteriorating quality of the records, there has been push back. Bands and fans have begun to demand better sound, and as a result it is now possible to buy less compressed sounding music. My fear, however, is that unlike the music business, education is not driven by the fans. We don’t see a loss of sales and don’t have the same motivation to be responsive to our consumers. I can only hope we learn to listen.

 

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Why aren’t you making your own textbooks?

You should be. Let’s examine the advantages:

  1. Updated as often as you’d like
  2. Much less expensive than purchased
  3. Contain only the content you want
  4. A sense of pride for having created the thing

That last point is not to be overlooked, mind you. The pride a teacher feels for having created the very book they are teaching from is a powerful motivator. There’s a certain kind of passion that comes through an educator directly responsible for the creation of the materials they teach.

There are, I can admit, a few disadvantages:

  1. A large up-front investment in man-hours
  2. Understanding the many formats, conventions, and design decisions applicable to creating a textbook
  3. A willingness to be responsible for the text you teach

These are all surmountable, but doing so requires that the educators involved be willing to learn these things. If you are pushing staff into doing this, you will find they only encounter problems, each of which will become an excuse to kill the project. If the educators themselves are motivated to do this, you will hear only about the freedom and power it afforded them.

I’ve been using the word “textbook” a lot here- and I want to be clear: I mean everything from an analog textbook to a digital textbook to a “textbook analog (aka a conglomeration of materials that approximate the scope of a textbook). I don’t think it much matters what format the thing is eventually published in (though, again, there are some very distinct advantages to going digital here), as much as the thing existing in the first place.