Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?: And Other Provocations, 2006-2012 (69 page)

Find the best homework questions ever devised and create world-class tutorials in how to solve each one.

Go one step further and generate useful reports about which assignments were answered easily and which ones frustrated each student. Connect the data with people (human tutors and teachers and parents) who can actually pay attention when attention is needed.

When teachers nationwide coordinate their homework, we don’t waste the time and energy of thousands of people. When students can get patient, hands-on, step-by-step help in the work they’re doing, they learn more.

All of this was impossible five years ago. Now it’s obvious.

It’s not surprising that early on, many teachers found support in unions. The industrial nature of schooling set up an adversarial system. Management (the board, the administration, and, yes, the parents) wanted more productivity, more measurability, and more compliance, not just from students but from teachers as well. Spend less money, get more results—that’s the mantra of all industries in search of productivity.

In the post-industrial model, though, the lectures are handled by
best-in-class videos delivered online. Anything that can be digitized, will be digitized, and isolated on the long tail and delivered with focus. What’s needed from the teacher is no longer high-throughput lectures or test scoring or classroom management. No, what’s needed is individual craftsmanship, emotional labor, and the ability to motivate.

In that world, the defend-all-teachers mindset doesn’t fly. When there is no demand for the mediocre lecture reader, the erstwhile deliverer of the state’s class notes, then school looks completely different, doesn’t it?

Consider the suburban high school with two biology teachers. One teacher has an extraordinary reputation and there is always a waiting list for his class. The other teacher always has merely the leftovers, the ones who weren’t lucky enough to find their way into the great class.

When we free access to information from the classroom setting, the leverage of the great teacher goes way up. Now we can put the mediocre teacher to work as a classroom monitor, shuffler of paper, and traffic cop, and give the great teacher the tools he needs to teach more students (at least until we’ve persuaded the lesser teacher to retire).

The role of the teacher in this new setting is to inspire, to intervene, and to raise up the motivated but stuck student. Instead of punishing great teachers with precise instructions on how to spend their day, we give them the freedom to actually teach. No longer on the hook to give repeat performances of three or four lectures a day, this star teacher can do the handwork that we need all star teachers to do—the real work of teaching.

When the union becomes a standards-raising guild of the very best teachers, it reaches a new level of influence. It can lead the discussion instead of slowing it down.

The Harlem Village Academy, like most charter schools, has no teacher’s union. No tenure, no contract-based job security.

The thing is, the teachers here are more engaged and have more job satisfaction across the board than just about any school I’ve ever visited.
And the reason is obvious: they are respected professionals working with respected professionals. There’s no one holding them back, and they work in a place where their bosses measure things that matter.

I’ve spent hours talking with school administrators, and when the union comes up, they invariably sadden and shake their heads. So many great teachers, they say, held back by a system that rewards the lousy ones. The union is held hostage by teachers in search of a sinecure instead of driven forward by those that want to make more of an impact.

And the message of the Harlem Village Academy becomes crystal clear when held up against the traditional expectation that the union will protect the bureaucracy wherever it can. What happens when the great teachers start showing up at union meetings? What happens when the top 80% of the workforce (the ones who truly care and are able and willing and eager to get better at what they do) insist that the union cut loose the 20% that are slowing them down, bringing them down, and averaging them down?

In a post-industrial school, there is no us and them. Just us.

Lewis Hyde’s essential book
The Gift
makes a distinction between work and labor.

Work is an intended activity that is accomplished through the will. A labor can be intended but only to the extent of doing the groundwork, or of not doing things that would clearly prevent the labor. Beyond that, labor has its own schedule. Things get done, but we often have the odd sense that we didn’t do them.

Paul Goodman wrote in a journal once, “I have recently written a few good poems. But I have no feeling that I wrote them.” That is the declaration of a laborer …

… One of the first problems the modern world faced with the rise of industrialism was the exclusion of labor by the expansion of work.

Labor, particularly emotional labor, is the difficult task of digging deep to engage at a personal level. Emotional labor looks like patience and kindness and respect. It’s very different from mechanical work, from filling out a form or moving a bale of hay.

Every great teacher you have ever had the good luck of learning from is doing the irreplaceable labor of real teaching. They are communicating emotion, engaging, and learning from the student in return. Emotional labor is difficult and exhausting, and it cannot be tweaked or commanded by management.

As our society industrialized, it has relentlessly worked to drive labor away and replace it with work. Mere work. Busywork and repetitive work and the work of Taylor’s scientific management. Stand just here. Say just that. Check this box.

I’m arguing that the connection revolution sets the table for a return of emotional labor. For the first time in a century, we have the opportunity to let digital systems do work while our teachers do labor.

But that can only happen if we let teachers be teachers again.

The fun things that matter in school have no shortage of applicants. School government, the class play, and, most of all, school sports are all about tryouts and elections.

Those who run these organizations are pretty sure they’re sending the right message—life is a meritocracy, and when a lot of people try out for a few slots, we should pick the best ones. After all, that’s how the world works.

So if you want to have a speaking part in the play, try out (even if you’re eleven years old). If you want to get any time on the field, better play well (even though it’s time on the field that may lead to your actually playing well). If you want to find out if you can contribute to budget discussions in the school government, better be preternaturally charismatic so that you can get elected (even though this creates a cycle of shallowness that we all suffer under).

The freshman soccer team at the local public school has a fairly typical coach. He believes that his job is to win soccer games.

Of course, this isn’t his job, because there isn’t a shortage of trophies, there isn’t a shortage of winners. There’s a shortage of good sportsmanship, teamwork, skill development, and persistence, right?

There are sixteen kids on the squad. Eleven get to play; the others watch. One popular strategy is to play your top eleven at all times, and perhaps, just maybe, if you’re ahead by five or more goals, sub in a few of the second-string players. (Actually, this isn’t just a popular strategy—it’s essentially the way nearly every high school coach in the nation thinks.)

The lesson to the kids is obvious: early advantages now lead to bigger advantages later. Skill now is rewarded; dreams, not so much. If you’re not already great, don’t bother showing up.

If the goal of the team was to win, that would make sense. But perhaps the goal is to teach kids about effort and opportunity and teamwork. Isn’t it interesting that the movies we love about sports always feature the dark horse who dreams, the underdog who comes off the bench and saves the day?

What would happen to school sports if the compensation of coaches was 100% based on the development of all the players and none of it was related to winning the game at all costs?

Malcolm Gladwell has famously written about the distribution of birthdays in professional sports, particularly hockey. It turns out that a huge percentage of hockey players are born in just three months of the year. (About
twice
as many NHL players are born in March as in December.)

The reason is simple: these are the oldest kids in youth hockey in Canada, the ones who barely made the birthday cutoff. Every year, the peewee leagues accept new applications, but those applicants have to have been born by a certain date.

As a result, the kids born just after the deadline play in a younger league. They’re the biggest and the strongest when they’re seven or eight or nine years old. What a terrific advantage—to be nine months older and five pounds heavier and two or three inches taller than the youngest kids. The older kids (remember, they are still eight years old) get picked for the all-star squad because they’re
currently
the best.

Once picked, they get more ice time. They get more coaching. Most of all, they get a dream. After all, they’re the ones getting applauded and practiced.

The rest of the kids, not so much. Dreams extinguished, they realize they have no right to play, so they settle for a job, not their passion.

The hockey parable extends to so many of the other things we expose kids to as they’re seeking for something to dream about. Be good now, and you’ll get even better later.

“Maybe your son should do something else. He’s not really getting this.”

That’s what Brendan Hansen’s coach said to his mom. When he was four. In the pool for his third day of swim lessons.

You can already guess the punch line. Brendan has won four Olympic medals in swimming.

The industrialized system of schooling doesn’t have a lot of time to jump-start those who start a bit behind, doesn’t go out of its way to nurture the slow starter. It’s easier to bring everyone up to a lowered average instead.

In Hansen’s estimation, it’s easy for natural gifts to escape the notice of people who aren’t focused on finding them and amplifying them.

Much of this manifesto echoes the attitude of the hacker. Not the criminals who crack open computer systems, but hackers—passionate experimenters eager to discover something new and willing to roll up their sleeves to figure things out.

Check out this sixteen-year-old student from Georgia:
http://boingboing.net/2012/02/04/16-y-o-girl-accepted-to-mit.html

After getting admitted to MIT at the age of sixteen, she did what any hacker would do—she turned her admissions letter into a space probe, wired a video camera into it, and sent it more than 91,000 feet in the air. And made a movie out of it.

Someone taught Erin King how to think this way. Who’s next? Isn’t
that our most important job: to raise a generation of math hackers, literature hackers, music hackers, and life hackers?

Getting called an egghead is no prize. My bully can beat up your nerd. Real men don’t read literature.

We live in a culture where a politician who says “it’s simple” will almost always defeat one who says “it’s complicated,” even if it is. It’s a place where middle school football coaches have their players do push-ups until they faint, but math teachers are scolded for giving too much homework.

Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson were legendary intellectuals. Bill Gates and Michael Dell are nerds. But still, the prevailing winds of pop culture reward the follower, the jock, and the get-along guy almost every time.

Which is fine when your nation’s economy depends on obeisance to the foreman, on heavy lifting, and on sucking it up for the long haul.

Now, though, our future lies with the artist and the dreamer and, yes, the person who took the time and energy to be passionate about math.

John Cook coined the phrase “leadership and followership” when he described a high school student practicing his music conducting skills by conducting the orchestra he heard on a CD. When you are practicing your leadership in this way, you’re not leading at all. You’re following the musicians on the CD—they don’t even know you exist.

This faux leadership is what we see again and again in traditional schools. Instead of exposing students to the pain and learning that come from actually leading a few people (and living with the consequences), we create content-free simulations of leadership, ultimately reminding kids that their role should be to follow along, while merely pretending to lead.

Leadership isn’t something that people hand to you. You don’t do
followership for years and then someone anoints you and says, “here.” In fact, it’s a gradual process, one where you take responsibility years before you are given authority.

And that’s something we can teach.

It doesn’t take very much time in the teacher’s lounge before you hear the whining of the teacher with the imperfect students. They came to him damaged, apparently, lacking in interest, excitement, or smarts.

Perhaps it was the uncaring parent who doesn’t speak in full sentences or serve a good breakfast. The one with an accent. Or the teacher from the year before or the year before that who didn’t adequately prepare the student with the basics she needs now.

And the boss feels the same way about those employees who came in with inadequate training. We sell teaching and coaching short when we insist that the person in front of us doesn’t have the talent or the background or the genes to excel.