Category: Philosophy

I can’t stop thinking about breakfast.

I wake up every morning, and the first thing I do is eat breakfast. I’m unlucky, and my body isn’t a big fan of waiting to put fuel in the tank. If I delay this part of the day, I’m setting myself up for a morning full of fog and grogginess. It’s not a matter of caffeine intake, mind you- that usually doesn’t happen until an hour or three after I’ve woken.

As a result of knowing this about myself, I make sure two things are always true:

1. My house has supplies for breakfast
2. I am up early enough to allow time to utilize those supplies

I’ve begun to realize in recent years that both of those things are not true for many people. Often there’s a trade off between sleeping time and waking early enough to eat. Or there isn’t (for one reason or another) food around to eat. Or- and I’ve seen this in my own very young children- some people need to wake up a bit before they eat a meal.

But, sooner or later, not consuming calories in the morning begins to have negative effects on people. It’s science, folks.

Time for an analogy, people. If we, as educators, are a race car team, we are looking to extract as much performance out of our cars as humanly possible. We try to buy the right (and best) equipment. We try to hire the best and most dedicated staff and drivers. We work long hours and think hard about changes that we might make to extract more and more speed and performance. So far so good, right?

So why would a race car team not care about the quality of gas they put in their car’s tank?

Many of you might not know that race cars don’t (usually) run on pump gas- what we buy at the gas station. Typically, normal household cars run on something like 87 octane gas. High-end cars might require 91 or even 93 octane to run properly. And when I say properly, I don’t mean “best” or “at maximum potential.” I mean run. Once, years ago (and before kids) I owned a silly car. As a result of some changes I made to it, it would not run on less than 93 octane. The engine computer simply wouldn’t allow it. Running anything less than 93 octane had a very real possibility of physically damaging internal engine parts (bending valves being the most likely).

If we want to maximize the performance of our students and prime them to be in the best possible learning condition, how do we ignore the fuel they use? We can’t. I know there are long and in-depth laws regarding what may and may not be served in a school. Fine. That’s great. But for our best bang for the buck we need to be dealing with breakfast. Here’s couple of reasons:

1. Most of the school day is before lunch.
2. The way you start a day has a lasting effect on the quality of the rest of the day
3. It’s a chance to front load nutrition for the day
4. It’s the most neglected meal

I’ve written before about my thoughts on a school fruit bowl. That’d be a great start. I don’t think you even need to go wildly beyond that. Some yogurt (can you imagine home-made yogurt? Awesome). Some granola, maybe. Maybe, if this is a working thing, we do a once-a-week big breakfast event thing. Trot out the big guns. Eggs. Who knows?

I know we have breakfast for a population of students that need it right now. That’s a good thing. I’m simply arguing that they all need it- and that if they need it, it’s an opportunity to tilt the field in their own favor and set them up for success.

Now, where to find the money?

Revolutionary ideas are nearly useless in education. They won’t happen. Nobody is willing to dismantle the educational system entirely to rebuild it some other way. It’s too much work, with to many vested interests, with too little money available and too much money at stake. This idea of revolutionary change is like moving something heavy with one big, hard shove. Possible, but dangerous. Risky. Unlikely.

What we need to aim for are sustained small changes. Incremental moves that slowly and surely move us in the right direction. If you found my previous article about fruit in schools small and trite, put it in this context: I might actually get that change in place. I might also be able to get other small changes like that in place. The cumulative effect of these seemingly small changes can cause large and meaningful changes to a school or district. Think of this like moving that same heavy thing with small, measured, incremental shoves. Metered. Doable. Sustainable. Likely.

 

I tend to research compulsively. It’s a habit/hobby, and what I love most about it is the ability to bump into seemingly unconnected topics that inspire my teaching and worldview.

One of the things that I run into is people who think or assume that going entirely digital with everything is the right thing to do. I disagree. I’m clearly a proponent of utilizing digital technology in classrooms, but I believe that there’s a correct tool for every job- and that you should use that tool whenever possible. Sometimes, that tool isn’t digital. There is something about pen on paper that for some tasks seems to trigger different neurons. Sometimes a wall covered in post-its works best. A whiteboard is still a useful tool.

I ended up reading a bunch about Seymour Cray, the designer and, arguably, godfather of supercomputers. He designed some of that fastest computers in the world in the eighties and early nineties. I should note here that I’ve always been entranced by Crays. While other kids had sports car and football posters on the walls of their rooms, I had pictures of supercomputers and bicycles (a Bottechia Cronostrada, if you’re interested). As I read about how he designed, I stumbled across the following excerpt from Wikipedia:

When asked what kind of CAD tools he used for the Cray-1, Cray said that he liked #3 pencils with quad paper pads. Cray recommended using the backs of the pages so that the lines were not so dominant. When he was told that Apple Computer had just bought a Cray to help design the next Apple Macintosh, Cray commented that he had just bought a Macintosh to design the next Cray.

And there it is- some of the fastest computers of their day were designed with a #3 pencil on quad paper. Sometimes, it’s the right tool for you that matters.

 

Nutrition and students is a huge topic in schools- what with obesity rates climbing and the health problems associated with that. As a result, Massachusetts has a law on the books that requires students buying lunch at schools to take a piece of fruit. It isn’t mandated that they eat the fruit, but it has to be on their tray when they check out.

Fine.

Except much (most?) of the fruit ends up in the trash barrel five feet away. Not eaten, not handed back- tossed. It seems a waste. And in thinking about what makes people want to eat fruit, three things came to mind:

1. Availability. Fruit that’s easy to get will get eaten more than… well, this is pretty obvious.

2. Quality. Fruit that looks/smells/feels/tastes good is nearly impossible to resist. In parties with little kids, someone always brings a platter of cookies. Someone else brings a platter of fruit. The fruit is always gone first.

3. Cost. If the fruit costs less than other options, it’ll get eaten more. Again, obvious.

So with those three givens, I propose the following move: the school fruit bowl.

We’re already buying the fruit- so that part of the cost is done. I realize we recover some of that cost when we sell the student lunch, but still. We should be able to swing this. Anyway, it’s simple. Park a big bowl (or bowls) around the school with free fresh fruit in them. Free satisfies #3, and bowls around common areas satisfies #2. As far as quality goes, I’d argue that buying the in-season fruit would help keep costs down and quality up.

Think of the problems this solves: any hungry kid, at whatever time of the day, could easily pick up a readily available free piece of fruit to eat. It’s healthy, yes, but it also provides an elegant solution to both the health problem as well as the I-didn’t-eat-breakfast-for-whatever-reason problem.

But I think the advantages run deeper- just like the bowl of fruit on the kitchen table at home helps provide a central point for the family, I think a bowl of fruit in a school can provide a similar function. It can provide a better sense of community. It can provide a location for accidental interactions- with both students and staff- that might not otherwise meet. Those chance encounters provide all sorts of fertile ground for staff and student interactions- and those interactions can lead to some meaningful connections and relationships.

And for the cost of some fruit. Seems like a bargain.

 

My friend (and boss) Patrick Larkin has been writing a lot on the topic of cheating in classrooms- and how we respond and treat such circumstances. I thought I’d offer my thoughts.

Patrick quoted George Couros in saying that if a student can answer a test question with a simple Google search, it’s not a very good question. I have to agree. In fact, I’d go a bit further, and suggest that we might begin to think about allowing Google searches and structuring the test with that taken into account. It’s an interesting idea, but not really what I want to talk about here.

Cheating is a cultural problem. Our emphasis above all things of getting the “right” answer contributes to this. Our stress on regurgitation of fact encourages this. Our artificial stress on students completing tests in absolute isolation (and at odds to the way the rest of the world functions) rewards this. We need to think about changing that culture.

As educators, we have to set a better example ourselves. We need to cite the work of others we use. We need to note where the image we took from a Google search came from. We need to cite where the article we photocopied was published. We need to credit who made the activity we adapted. We need to make it the standard operating procedure to cite work that is not ours in all venues- and we need to do this in all grade levels. In doing this, we might be able to create a culture where open citation of work and influences is the norm. We might begin to cause change.

We must think first about what we are trying to teach. Traditionally, when data was scarce and static, we distributed information. We built schools and tests to measure how much information students could accurately regurgitate. This, I would argue, should no longer be the case. We should be teaching students how to analyze.

This is a good thing on two levels: we are imparting a much more powerful and versatile set of skills AND we’re able to build assessments that are un-cheatable. If we build a test that looks at a student’s ability to analyse and explain that analysis, we are free from a cheatable set of facts.

Above all, we must to a better job with our education of the nature of cheating. We cannot hold students responsible with an ever-harsher set of punishments and expect real change. It has been long established that longer prison sentences don’t dissuade people from committing crimes. We create a dynamic of adversary and punishment which precludes learning.

Forgive me if this starts strangely, but I promise: I’ll get there.

For the last several years I’ve been interested in exploring somewhat esoteric soda fountain drinks. I know, but it’s a hobby.

Anyway. The most recent drink to have caught my view has been the Egg Cream Soda- which has peaked my interest since I learned it contains neither egg nor cream. Instead, you start by making a fairly small amount of chocolate milk. Specifically, the chocolate sauce must be Fox’s U-Bet chocolate syrup and whole milk. Once mixed, you top the majority of the glass with seltzer. It develops an impressive, frothy and creamy head, and is far better than I would have ever thought. I’ve no idea why these ever fell out of favor, but boy am I hooked.

As is my custom, once I got the hang of the original version, I began to branch out. I tried a vanilla Egg Cream (don’t). I tried using half & half for the “milk” (do!). Eventually, with all my experimenting, I ran out of Fox’s U-Bet chocolate syrup. I bought a bottle of Hershey’s and moved on. But something was wrong. The drink wasn’t as good as before. It took me a bit- I kept thinking that I was missing something or prepping things differently. I thought I was messing with the proportions too much. That I had blown it.

But it was the chocolate syrup. The brand really did matter- the results using the original are far superior to any variation I’d made. Which got me thinking. Sometimes, the specific details are what make something exceptional. Sometimes, in the rush to make things easier or “better” or more straightforward, we lose the detail that allows the finished product to really shine.

All this made me think about education and the classroom. I’ve always sweat the details in the classroom- the setup of the desks, the position of the whiteboard. The sound system. The typeface on the handout. The resolution of the video file to be played. And, I think, the odd story of the Egg Cream exemplifies this: the details are what allows the product to be so much more than the sum of it’s parts.

 

I just saw this article pop up on my feed- it’s about the “Seven Tools for Thinking”

This, I think, represents an excellent distilling of the basic elements we must understand as educators in order to be effective. We loose track, sometimes, of the very basis of what we do. We get caught up in Common Core or assessments or scaffolding or flipping or whatever high-level representation of technique has peaked our interest, but these are the basis of all of what we do. They are the foundation. They are the bedrock.

Not only do I fear we loose track of them ourselves, but I fear we don’t explicitly show them to our students. More than any single set of facts or knowledge we might believe we should fill students’ heads with, the ability to think flexibly and well trumps all. Thinking is more powerful than knowing. Knowing will always run out as you approach the bounds of what is know; thinking never runs out.

 

I was reading Jason Kottke’s blog the other day, when he posted this excerpt from Vonnegut’s Bluebeard:

Slazinger claims to have learned from history that most people cannot open their minds to new ideas unless a mind-opening team with a peculiar membership goes to work on them. Otherwise, life will go on exactly as before, no matter how painful, unrealistic, unjust, ludicrous, or downright dumb that life may be.

The team must consist of three sorts of specialists, he says. Otherwise the revolution, whether in politics or the arts or the sciences or whatever, is sure to fail.

The rarest of these specialists, he says, is an authentic genius — a person capable of having seemingly good ideas not in general circulation. “A genius working alone,” he says, “is invariably ignored as a lunatic.”

The second sort of specialist is a lot easier to find: a highly intelligent citizen in good standing in his or her community, who understands and admires the fresh ideas of the genius, and who testifies that the genius is far from mad. “A person like this working alone,” says Slazinger, “can only yearn loud for changes, but fail to say what their shapes should be.”

The third sort of specialist is a person who can explain everything, no matter how complicated, to the satisfaction of most people, no matter how stupid or pigheaded they may be. “He will say almost anything in order to be interesting and exciting,” says Slazinger. “Working alone, depending solely on his own shallow ideas, he would be regarded as being as full of shit as a Christmas turkey.”

Slazinger, high as a kite, says that every successful revolution, including Abstract Expressionism, the one I took part in, had that cast of characters at the top — Pollock being the genius in our case, Lenin being the one in Russia’s, Christ being the one in Christianity’s.

He says that if you can’t get a cast like that together, you can forget changing anything in a great big way.

It seems to me that if we really want to change education for the better, these roles need filling. If you’re asking yourself if you’re helping make that change, then think hard about which of the three roles above you fill. Or, if you’re not one of those three, then be ready to deal with another reality: you might be holding things up.

So before you write off some off-the-wall idea from some nutjob, think hard about what you might be doing.

It seems that no matter where I go, I hear high school teachers complaining about the same thing: student trips to the bathroom. It seems such trips are always “too long” and “just so they can get out of the room.” I have a couple of observations.

**1.** Yes, they are leaving your classroom for reasons other than going to the lav.

**2.** They are leaving for as long as they think they can away with it.

**3.** They are leaving because wandering the halls is more interesting than your class.

I always feel that if you’re having issues with this sort of thing, you need to spend some time thinking about what sort of engaging activities you are doing in your classroom. Honestly: if walking the empty halls is more fun than what you’re doing, I’d leave your classroom too.

It also seems that the people who complain most about this sort of thing are the same folks who have their class standing by the door waiting to leave four minutes before the bell. That, I’m afraid, makes you a hypocrite. You can’t complain about kids leaving your room for ten minutes when you’re throwing away twenty minutes a week.
Rant over.

There are two ways to look at this: you can either stay in education and help from the inside, or you can leave and try to fix it from the outside. Here’s why that’s a problem:

1. As an educator, you feel as though education is your strength- not policy writing or fund raising or politics. Anything other than education, and we give up our advantage of knowledge. That sits poorly with me.

2. We, as educators, want to help students succeed. That’s what we do. We don’t want to sit in endless meetings fretting about getting re-elected.

3. Politics rewards “good enough.” People aren’t excited to rip apart a functioning system for the promise of a better one. If what’s working now is working, the consensus seems to be to let it be.

Given all this, it’s no wonder that the politicians that decide education policy and the educators that execute that policy have so little in common.