Facilitate Wonder

She was my first true love and for most of our twenty years together it was an affair that brimmed with passion.  I loved teaching.  Loved it.  But now it’s over.  Too many broken promises.  Too much heartbreak.

I’m now reflecting on it a little over a year after The Straw That Broke the Camel’s Back.

Our affair started with a little innocent fooling around while I was in college.  Take an education class or two, teach a lesson here and there.  Then it intensified with student teaching.  As a physics teacher I got to play with toys in front of an audience!  And the audience, at least some of it, really seemed to like it!  And some times I got that special rush that comes with seeing the light bulb come on.

That feeling, the feeling of kids “getting it,” is what I imagine a hit of heroin might be like.  The shiver that ran down my spine; that look of appreciation and understanding; and especially when a kid could do something worthwhile that he or she couldn’t do before.

It turns out I was being deceived and deceiving myself at almost every turn.  In my last few years as a professor, I routinely had course evaluations telling me that mine was the best class they’d ever taken.  But I also routinely had students weeping in my office, unfairly dealing with my love’s capricious heart; unfairly dealing with the reality that, on its face, teaching is simply a bad idea; and unfairly dealing with the fickleness of who evaluates you.

It seems that at the ends of the continuum, the system works pretty well.  In the early grades, I learned to read and write and add and subtract.   In graduate school, I learned to analyze and craft an argument (and, I think, to read and write much better).  In between the ends I learned a great deal, but most of that learning came by doing and you don’t really do things that matter in classroom settings.

You mostly sit still.

Thus, most of us leave formal schooling knowing how to sit still, and to read and write and there isn’t much else that most of us know.  We’ve all been taught about geometry, evolution and the Civil War.  We’ve been taught many of these things many, many times.  But if you scratch through the surface understandings, you won’t find much underneath.  In spite of being taught the so-called scientific method over and over and over again, few adults think scientifically.  In spite of being taught over and over again about diet and exercise most of us are fat.

I’d learned in graduate school to look critically at the system and at the individuals within it.  For most of my twenty years in teaching, I’d not only been passionate about teaching, but also about the study of teaching and learning.  That study led me to understand that global warming had led glacial change to exceed academic change and, therefore, it was time for me to change direction.

I’d worked for most of my twenty years in the profession trying to make schools better.   Joining the faculty at a new charter school, I wished to make better schools.  I had an epiphany there that led me to want to make something better than schools.  And that epiphany ended my twenty-year romance with teaching.

And left me feeling alone in my new paradigm.

Standing there, in a room with 25 teenagers, trying to get them to think about why convection matters,*  it hit me that teaching is a fundamentally bad idea.  I don’t mean (just) a bad idea for me.  I mean a bad idea.

Put aside for a moment what you know about schools and focus on how you came to understand the things you understand most deeply and remember too what you know about kids.  Now, imagine someone suggesting the following:

Hey!  I’ve got a great idea!  Why don’t we put 25 teenagers in room together for an hour and have them listen to a single adult tell them about the Magna Carta!  And then, have them move down the hall and listen to someone else tell them about parabolas!  And then how heating causes expansion!  Isn’t that a great idea!  We could have them do something like this hour after hour after hour, day after day after day, year after year!  We could put 2000 fifteen to eighteen year-olds in a building!

Clearly, that’s just not a good idea.  I think I realized that when I was a teenager, but had managed to suppress that realization until I was faced with the realities of school in a new way.  I’m convinced that we’ll look back in another 20 or 30 years and be shocked that we did this to damn near everybody, much as we look back now on the horrors of segregation in America 30 and more years ago.

So, the affair is over and I’m trying to figure out how to move on.  I still have the things I learned from years of studying the system.  The creative destruction of my conceptual framework is both creative and destructive.  I’m saddened by my loss, but hopeful about the future.

I raise my question about what to do next in a way clearly derived from the way the system has made me think – an SAT analogy question:

Typewriters are to computers as schools are to: ________________.

I have ideas about how to complete the analogy, but I can’t do it alone.  I need partners in my paradigm.  Who will join me?

*Yes, convection really matters.