When We Were Young...
A reflection on the stubborn educational structures we cling to and romanticize.
When talking to my children, I try—as difficult as it is sometimes—not to preface any comments with “when I was your age.” I know I need to move past these kinds of comparisons and work to see the world through their eyes—and it surely is a new world entire with its dizzying bombardment of instantly accessible information, the ability to video-call in the blink of an eye across time zones, the steady drone of the twenty-four hour news cycle, cars that drive themselves….
I sensed a similar dynamic at play a number of years back when making phone calls to try to convince people in my local community that the time was right for our small town to invest in a new elementary school building. Many residents I spoke with nostalgically told me what things were like when they were in school—how cramped the classrooms were, how bedraggled the textbooks, and one person told me, in an odd moment of near-rosy retrospection, how they got their knuckles rapped with a ruler.… Their logic: if they ended up “just fine,” then nothing new was needed now for our children.
In education, as with parenting, change often comes slowly. When I taught at the University of Maine in Presque Isle, my first full-time teaching position, schools in northern Maine still took a week break in mid-October for the potato harvest—a vestige of the days when all able-bodied people were called on to be out in the fields picking potatoes.
In my most recent teaching job, where I taught for ten years (at a small, private school in Connecticut), most classrooms most of the time felt the same as ever—students sitting in tidy rows, a lone teacher at the whiteboard jotting down important information for students to scribble into notebooks (or tap into their computers and tablets)—knowing they would soon be required to shake this information out of their brains—much of it memorized—down onto test and quiz pages or into the paragraphs of their essays. Class periods were divided into tidy chunks of time, 55 minutes, an hour and a quarter, courses divided into neat delineations of subject matter—Biology, Algebra, 9th-grade English, Spanish 1, 2, 3… So long as you passed a course, you were allowed to move up to the next level (even if you only mastered 68% of the material). Grades were calculated from averages of test and quiz and paper scores with the occasional allowance for retakes/rewrites and the rare collaborative project or presentation.
Clearly the way we use information, knowledge, skills has radically shifted, but the way we prepare students for the world we live in now often clings stubbornly to old, “tried and true" ways.
While most of this to many of us seems normal, ordinary, expected, for me it’s striking that while so much has changed so steadily (and continues to change ever-more-rapidly) in society at large, so little has changed in so many of our educational institutions. Clearly the way we use information, knowledge, skills has radically shifted, but the way we prepare students for the world we live in now often clings stubbornly to old, “tried and true" ways.
In my classes, I frequently attempted to work within the confines of the institutions where I taught to make my classes feel different, more in tune with the world at large, more authentic. Once, at the small liberal arts college in the midwest where I taught for 9 years, I designed a contemporary poetry class around the paradigm of a magazine. There would be no tests, no quizzes, no papers in the traditional sense. The students would work as a team to produce issues of a magazine, each issue devoted to responses to two contemporary poets we had discussed during class time. For each issue, a student would be a writer, an editor, or an artist. Some editors’ jobs were to work closely with “their writers”—guiding the development of the essays from start to finish. Artists were to produce artistic responses to the poems, encouraged to write their own poems or imitation poems. Some editors were tasked with the production and printing of the magazine using publishing software (this back when most students didn’t have their own computers and were largely unfamiliar with their use). My job as “editor in chief” was to assist at all levels of the production—and I took a special interest in advising the writers (critiquing their drafts) and often spent countless hours helping out with the finicky software and layout challenges.
From my perspective, the class was a tremendous success, and when I happen upon one of the spiral-bound magazines we produced that term, I’m always amazed at the quality and diversity of work. I recently unfolded and “played” a pullout game board, complete with cut-out playing pieces, one of the issue’s artistic responses to Galway Kinnel’s Book of Nightmares. It inventively used many of the same, alchemical symbols and imagery Kinnel used in the collection.
Unfortunately, I also remember how my teaching evaluations nose-dived that term, how harsh many student comments were:
“If I wanted to take a computer course, I would have signed up for one.”
“Students shouldn’t be forced to be creative in a literature course.”
“I was only allowed to write two papers, the rest of my grade was based on tutoring other students or learning technology I have no interest in.”
I ended up in my department chair’s office trying to defend what I was going for, why I valued “authentic education.” I made a separate defense of the course to the provost, explaining that the negative evaluations stemmed at least in part from my desire to experiment with the fundamental structure of a college English course and student unfamiliarity with these expectations.
I would forever feel, however, that far too many vestigial educational structures were considered permanent and essential, looking backward toward what had always “worked,” not forward toward what could work infinitely better in the world of the 21st century.
As it turned out, I never taught the course like that again. Without institutional support, it was just another thing to jeopardize my time there. A few years ago, I conveyed the story of this course to the department chair at the private high school where I recently taught, wondering aloud if anything like it could be done there, and he guffawed, rolled his eyes, saying to not even consider it.
Throughout my teaching career, I worked in many small ways that didn’t push back too hard against the walls of the machinery I was a part of, trying to make students feel as if what was being learned had a place and real value outside those walls. But this was often a hard sell, and rarely received administrative approval. Their report cards came with regularity, their learning calibrated down to a numeric value that would potentially make or break their aspirations to attend good colleges and universities, ultimately to secure a good job…. I would forever feel, however, that far too many vestigial educational structures were considered permanent and essential, looking backward toward what had always “worked,” not forward toward what could work infinitely better in the world of the 21st century.
In today’s workplace, an increasing demand for creativity and innovation call out to us. Workers in all areas are expected to be nimble thinkers with an array of skills and abilities and to work collaboratively with their colleagues, implementing their broad skill-sets, communicating effectively, being “team players.” Yet in the traditional classroom, students are asked to strive toward goals in a mostly independent manner, often even shut off from the person sitting right next to them. When my daughter was taking an English class that I was also teaching (10th grade English) from a colleague (yes, free tuition for my children was a guiding factor in taking the job there), she surprisingly told me she had no idea what other people in the class were writing about, that even after the essays on 1984 had been written, none had shared their completed essays. There was no way for students to know what others had written about unless they asked each other—and that ask was generally centered around the grade—“what did you get?” replacing “what did you write about?” In my classes, I always published an electronic “magazine” of finished essays, so that, even if nothing else were done with the publication, students could at the very least see what others had written and feel their part in a community of writers. Imagine being on a sports team or in an orchestra and never being allowed to see/hear your teammates’ play….
A cornerstone of my teaching was that just as real authors never write for an audience of one, students shouldn’t be required to do this either. Writing for an audience of one only happens in college and high school classrooms—(or in private letters, texts, emails). Simply by letting students know that their audience is their classroom of peers is a kind of magic trick. People will read this and appraise it other than you? With something as simple as that, students have to reconsider the fundamental nature of their written work, which is no longer a personal communique with a teacher or professor. And while I’ve written this before here, the 1-to-1 discourse situation asked of students of English creates the most intimidating one possible—writing for just one person who is more expert, or even an expert, in the field.
I’ll end with a thought experiment. Envision if suddenly all memory of how education has always been structured and implemented were somehow wiped collectively from our minds. How might we go about creating a period of learning in people’s lives that would make us better, more engaged, smarter, more fulfilled individuals even as we assured the smooth, fair, just…functioning of our society? Would courses be so rigidly broken into subject matter? Would “classes” be so rigidly separated into birth age? Would grades be issued at all?
The one room schoolhouse, the school calendar, dividing students according to age, grading…like the northern Maine potato break, however, were often dictated by other factors of convenience.
In Paolo Freire’s famous The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, he makes a convincing argument for educational structures being grounded in capitalist structures—whereby the upper, oligarchic classes sustain their superiority in part through an educational pedagogy that restricts real critical thought and ultimately teaches blind obedience. While this may well be true, I would also argue that the structures of education are far too slow to adapt, and we needlessly romanticize and cling to the way things were done in the past. The one room schoolhouse, the school calendar, dividing students according to age, grading…like the northern Maine potato break, however, were often dictated by other factors of convenience. In mostly rural, 18th and 19th century America students didn’t attend school in the summer because they were expected to help in the fields….
Many wonderful teachers work daily toward substantive change. Some schools have rewritten their mission statements to reflect the fundamental need for new approaches. Change is happening and has happened in many corners of the educational universe. In my extensive classroom teaching experiences, I’ve only once worked for an institution that embraced an educative strategy that truly nurtured deep, authentic learning. At the arts magnet school where I taught for 7 years in New Haven, I team taught courses in Film Noir, flash fiction and narrative painting, witnessed students regularly preparing texts for public presentations and a yearly literary magazine. Students frequently took the same workshops more than once so they could both continue to hone their craft and serve as mentors for younger writers. No individual pieces of writing were graded, and I don’t remember a single student pestering me about or being stressed about their grade. But this was rare in the world of education, especially one where I recently read that Shakespeare may well soon be banned from curricula in Florida due to “inappropriate language and subject matter.” While many schools are embracing change and moving forward, far too many schools move ever-backward toward the days when we were “great,” when our generation was their age now, and we all turned out “just fine.”
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Oh this is so true. I love your question: how might we envision a new form of learning? It’s one I ask my postgraduates studying for an MA in education, and they get to write a new future-facing curriculum based on what their learners actually need, rather than what they’ve always done. They enjoy it but it’s so hard getting them to radically re-imagine what learning could look like. I keep trying though. For me, 80% of it, cat least, would be outside 😊
Thoughtful and thought-provoking. Point by point, beautifully written.