Shreds of Truth

This is the second post in a series about adding independent study to high school.  My series was inspired by a single post by Dave Pollard on his blog, How to Save the World.  I invite you to read “No more teachers, no more books” (the first post in the series) for context and for a link to Mr. Pollard’s thought-provoking essay.

“Keeners” aren’t the only group of students who might be interested in trying the independent study concept described by Mr. Pollard.  He describes the most successful of his former classmates as “natural learners.”  These students were able to thrive by learning at their own (accelerated) pace and by working cooperatively to master the curriculum.  Another too-common type of student, a type I’ll call “unmotivated slackers,” should find similar benefits in this less-structured environment.  As I explain below, these two archetypes are really just two sides of the same coin.

Natural Learners

 Natural Learners are the stereotypical “gifted” students.  They are the students who love to read, get in arguments with their friends about philosophy or other abstract concepts, write poetry and short stories, and ask thoughtful, insightful questions that leave the teacher at a loss for an answer and perhaps a bit intimidated.  I would guess that about a third of my Honors students fit into this category.

The problem with putting Natural Learners into a regular classroom with more “average” students is that the teacher will either devote most of his or her attention to the Natural Learner’s questions and comments, which leaves the rest of the class feeling confused, then bored, then restless… or else the teacher will devote most of his or her efforts toward teaching and remediating the average or sub-average students, leaving the Natural Learners feeling bored with the tedium and restless as a result.

Even when Natural Learners are separated into an “advanced” or “honors” course, the necessity of following a curriculum can mean that classwork is repetitive or uninteresting.  Additionally, placing a lot of these kids into a confined space and forcing them to work together sometimes creates rivalries and explosive arguments as each student tries to demonstrate his or her intellectual superiority.  Even in a well-behaved honors class, there’s usually that one “smarter-than-thou” kid who does to class discussion what Ahmadinejad does to United Nations meetings.

In a different environment, all that can change.  Mr. Pollard describes the effect that independent study had on these students:

We discovered that, together, we could easily cover the curriculum in less than an hour a day, leaving the rest of the day to discuss philosophy, politics, anthropology, history and geography of the third world, contemporary European literature, art, the philosophy of science, and other subjects not on the school curriculum at all.  We went to museums, attended seminars, wrote stories and poetry together (and critiqued each others’ work).

The Natural Learners in this program were able to help each other cover the curriculum without wasting time with repetition.  They then went beyond the curriculum, learning and discussing subjects that a high school teacher would never have taken the time to introduce.  Presumably, the “Ahmadinejads” and other loners in the group ended up studying alone, preventing rivalries and clashing personalities from disrupting the learning environment.

Unmotivated Slackers

A common thorn in many teachers’ sides is the presence of students who simply can’t be bothered to pay attention or to complete assignments.  What many teachers fail to realize is that these Unmotivated Slackers are often among the most intelligent and curious minds in the classroom.  Natural Learners who become bored with repetitive, tedious, quantity-over-quality lessons and assignments often transform, as if by magic, into Unmotivated Slackers… often as soon as early adolescence.  This group makes up the last third of my Honors students… and they are almost always the students who don’t get recommended for Honors the next year.

The degree of “laziness” varies from Slacker to Slacker:  some will simply refuse to do anything useful, some will skip homework but take tests, and others will do the bare minimum necessary to pass the class by as small a margin as possible.  All of them, however, will be more willing to apply their intelligence if they see the chance for real rewards with a minimum of tedium.

While I hate assigning labels to individuals without actually knowing much about them, I noticed some interesting facts about Mr. Pollard in his post:

In Grade 11, my second last year of high school, I was an average student, with marks in English in the mid 60% range, and in mathematics, my best subject, around 80%.  I hated school.

Barely scraping by in at least one class?  Sounds almost like an Unmotivated Slacker, especially considering what happened when he saw that improving his grades would qualify him for the independent study program:

The chance to spend my days with this latter group, unrestricted by school walls and school schedules, was what I dreamed of, so I poured my energies into self-study.  By the end of the first month of school my average was almost 90%, and I was exempted from attending classes in all my subjects.

Motivation + intelligence = remarkable improvement.  After Mr. Pollard had been in the program for a while, his grades were even higher… because his peers had shown him the intrinsic rewards of learning.

My peers had done what no English teacher had been able to do — inspire me to read and write voraciously, and show me how my writing could be improved.

What have we learned?

This independent study program proved beneficial to the Natural Learners because it kept them from sinking into the depths of Unmotivated Slackerhood and allowed them to learn far more than they would have in the classroom.

The program helped the Unmotivated Slackers find motivation and transform back into the Natural Learners they were always capable of being.

My question is, why on Earth aren’t we doing this in more schools?

In the next posts in this series, I’ll explore a partial (and, to my mind, wrong) answer to this question, along with the benefits of the independent study program on the average, everyday student.

The full text of this post, including the excerpts from Dave Pollard’s essay, is licensed under the CC-by-nc-sa 2.0.

I found a fascinating essay on the subject of “unschooling” at Dave Pollard’s How to Save the World.  While I can’t say that I’m in complete agreement with Mr. Pollard’s essay, I was very much inspired by the narrative with which he opens his “Unschooling Manifesto.”  The copyright notice on his website indicates that the essay was published under a Creative Commons license, so I’m quoting a few paragraphs below (heavily edited for brevity; I’m already going to be posting my thoughts in a series of posts spanning several days).

In Grade 11, my second last year of high school, I was an average student, with marks in English in the mid 60% range, and in mathematics, my best subject, around 80%.  I hated school.

Then in Grade 12, something remarkable happened: My school decided to pilot a program called “independent study”, that allowed any student maintaining at least an 80% average on term tests in any subject (that was an achievement in those days, when a C — 60% — really was the average grade given) to skip classes in that subject until/unless their grades fell below that threshold.  There was a core group of ‘brainy’ students who enrolled immediately.  Half of them were the usual boring group (the ‘keeners’) who did nothing but study to maintain high grades (usually at their parents’ behest); but the other half were creative, curious, independent thinkers with a natural talent for learning.  The chance to spend my days with this latter group, unrestricted by school walls and school schedules, was what I dreamed of, so I poured my energies into self-study.

To the astonishment of everyone, including myself, I did very well at this.  By the end of the first month of school my average was almost 90%, and I was exempted from attending classes in all my subjects.  We discovered that, together, we could easily cover the curriculum in less than an hour a day, leaving the rest of the day to discuss philosophy, politics, anthropology, history and geography of the third world, contemporary European literature, art, the philosophy of science, and other subjects not on the school curriculum at all.  We went to museums, attended seminars, wrote stories and poetry together (and critiqued each others’ work).

As the year progressed, the ‘keeners’, to my amazement, found they were struggling with this independence and opted back into the regular structured classroom program.

My peers had done what no English teacher had been able to do — inspire me to read and write voraciously, and show me how my writing could be improved. My writing, at best marginal six months earlier, was being published in the school literary journal.

Our independent study group, a handful of students from just one high school, won most of the province-wide scholarships that year.  I received the award for the highest combined score in English and Mathematics in the province — an almost unheard-of 94%.

Now… I know what I said in my recent post “Broken pieces, broken whole,” and I stand by that.  “Fixing” things with educational instutions won’t get us where we need to go; we’ve got to fix the entire educational system, including the parents and lawmakers and so forth.

Even so… this “independent study” program sounds like it has promise.  Real promise.  There are a number of student archetypes described in the anecdote (as well as a few that aren’t), and I’d like to discuss the benefits of this program for each of them.

Keeners

Mr. Pollard refers to a group of students that he calls “keeners.”  These students are heavily motivated to succeed in their classes… as long as someone is breathing down their necks.  In the Honors classes that I teach, I’d say at least a third of the students are in this group.

These students have “extrinsic” motivations; they succeed because reward or punishment is offered based on the degree of their success or failure.  These students are typically afraid of their parents, often bursting into tears when they see a bad grade.

Keeners thrive on structure.  When a teacher is watching, they will behave.  When their assignments are being graded, these students will do their work.  When parents are checking report cards and contacting teachers, these students will work their keen little butts off to get things done.

It’s interesting… but not really surprising… to read Mr. Pollard’s description of how the keeners failed to succeed in the unstructured independent-study environment.  No work is being graded, no teachers are keeping an eye on them, and parents don’t have any feedback from the school that they can use to reward or punish their children.  The extrinsic motives and constant supervision are removed, so the keeners’ motivation withers and dies.

So how is this independent study beneficial to the keeners?  For one, it’s often hard to judge whether someone is extrinsically or intrinsically motivated to learn… that is, whether they are a “keener” or a “natural learner” like those who thrived in the independent environment.  When the keeners tried to motivate themselves to learn, they discovered their own limitations.  This could either help them to choose more wisely in higher-stakes circumstances in the future, or to identify and overcome their own limitations.  Self-motivation can be learned, and the earlier a student realizes that he has been relying on others for motivation, the sooner he can begin working to correct that difficulty.  I suspect the long-term consequences for the keeners’ grades were minimal, while using the independent study as a type of diagnostic exercise could have significant benefits.

To be continued…

As I warned you earlier, I can’t possibly fit all my thoughts on this independent-study program into a single reasonably-sized post.  Coming up next:  the “natural learners” like Mr. Pollard’s friends, and the “unmotivated slackers” whose motivation could be rescued by a program like this one.

The full text of this post, including the excerpt from Dave Pollard’s essay, is licensed under the CC-by-nc-sa 2.0.

I occasionally get a moment in which I can think straight enough to make a few observations about life, work, and other miscellany.

For example…

• I do not consider a peach shirt with an indigo bowtie to be professional dress (especially sans jacket), since I don’t consider clowning a profession.  Why is this oddly-dressed gentleman considered qualified to judge whether we’re running a school in a professional manner?
• If I hear one of the football coaches commenting on the cheerleading coach’s bootimus maximus, does that count as Pig Latin?
• Why have three different guys of Far Eastern origin, working at three separate Dairy Queen drive-thrus, commented on how nice my Honda Element looks?  I mean, they’re right, but that particular demographic seems to include my car’s biggest fans.
• How can there be a Lego Rock Band video game when there is no minifig-sized Lego guitar accessory?  Will Lego soon be producing such accessories?
• If retro clothing is such a big thing with every generation, how come the dirndl never made a comeback?
• Before that Central Office employee sent out an angry email denying the huge raise she allegedly received last year, why didn’t she check the public records to see whether her jump from $65,000 in Financial Year 2007 to $89,000 in FY08 might be viewable by pretty much anyone connected to the Internet?  (By the way… it is.)
• How can people justify charging $500 for an improve-your-blog’s-readership course that consists mostly of a two-word message:  “Use Twitter”?
• Will you pay me $500 if I tell you to use Twitter to promote your blog?
• Who has time for Twitter anyway?  Instead of spending hours of your time making flimsy and shallow “connections” with people in 140 characters or less, why not go out and find gainful employment?  The pay is better, and you’ll actually get to know someone.
• If I disappeared right now, everyone I call a friend would join in the search or otherwise assist law enforcement… and they wouldn’t let the search end until I’d been found.
• If Mr. I’m On Twitter disappeared right now, everyone he calls a follower would check Google in a week or two to see if he’s shown up on some other “social media” website… and then they’d forget about him.
• A man with one friend is more fortunate than a man with 1,000 followers.

And most importantly…

• Why did my SAM Infantry units (with bazookas!) on Civilization IV just get trounced by musket-wielding British Redcoats?

Hi… I was wondering if you had time to talk about God.

But first, let’s talk about the economy.

Normally, as I sit down to write this blog, I try to pretend that “the economy isn’t happening”… although, ironically, even Johnny Truant has recently been seen making occasional posts about the economy.

Sometimes, though, I have to face the facts.  Those facts are:

• Teachers in my system are being asked to “voluntarily donate” part of their salary to help offset our system’s budget shortfall.
• When teachers leave the system for any reason, their positions are not being filled with new hires (we can’t afford them, but that will increase class size).
• If I do have a job, the local school system may opt not to supplement the state’s salary I earn (resulting in thousands of dollars less for teaching more students… see above).
• There is no absolute guarantee that I or my wife will have a job next year anyway.
• Obama’s tax cut has added a tiny bit to my monthly paycheck, which may help offset a fraction of my lost income, but it has also significantly reduced the income of the government which helps pay me… probably resulting in a smaller education budget in years to come, which will (over the long term) most likely reduce my earnings by several times the tax decrease.  Save $50 (approximation) per month now so that I can lose $5000 (pure speculation) per year later… that’s the spirit…

At times like this, there’s one thought that does offer a little comfort.

And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin:

And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.

Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to day is, and to morrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?

Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed?

(Matthew 6:28-31)

I’m toiling, and I’m spinning, and I’m doing the best I can for myself… but it’s nice to remember that God’s got my back.

I hope that this thought offers you some comfort as well in these rough times.

(Image credit and license)

One of my oldest, strongest addictions is taking me apart again, brick by brick.

 I could spend time blaming my suppliers and enablers… but I know that really, I am to blame.  It’s my problem, my issue, and no one can take the responsibility away from me.

And now, because of this addiction, I am going to commit the cardinal sin about which I have been warned… against which I have been cautioned… despite all the reasons why I shouldn’t.

To satisfy my born-again need for all things Lego, I will be starting a second blog.  (Ahh, Lego bricks… even better than colored duct tape…)

(It’s awful, I know.)

I know all the reasons why a second blog is a horrible idea.  I know it will provide yet another demand on my already thinly-stretched time.  I know that I’ve only recently returned to this blog after a few weeks of ignoring it (and you, my loyal readers… yes, all three of you).

I’m doing it anyway, and this time I’m going whole-blog — er, “hog”… dabbling in SEO, networking, and similar time-consuming ways of getting “biggified.”  Only, since it’s Lego, it’s more like “Duplofied.”

I’m even going to monetize (somehow… still working on the details) to benefit (hopefully) from the social media marketing I’ll be doing.  I don’t actually expect to earn much… the income will more likely be “minifigures” than “six figures”… but you never know.  If I do make some money, I could use it to buy my wife a nice gift… like some of the classic Paradisa sets she keeps talking about.

Just to make absolutely certain that my last shred of integrity is thrown to the wind, I’m even going to write an occasional post here promoting my new Lego blog.  In fact, I just did.

I know.  Put that way, it makes me want to say horrible, nasty things about myself.

PLEASE don’t give up on me!  I can change!  I can return to the old devil-may-care, keywords-aren’t-important, who-needs-money-anyway Aylad you all know and love!  I can!  I can!  I…

…will keep you informed of the details as things progress.  (C’mon, it’s not like I’ll actually make any money off of it anyway.  People won’t leggo of their cash just because I ask nicely.  Also, does this post, in combination with the one about getting rich quick, make me seem like even more of a hypocrite?  Yes?  Cool…)

I’ll also let you know if I come up with any more horrible Lego puns like the four above…