"When will I ever use this?"

The question is a narrow one. It is a perfectly fitting question to ask of a vocational school preparing you to become a worker in a trade. But high school provides broad liberal education, not narrow vocational training. Liberal education, literally "the skills of freedom," empowers individuals with knowledge of the major endeavors of humanity, the disciplines of formal thinking, empirical investigation, informed judgment, practical decision-making, and appreciation of human ideals. Liberal education produces persons who are able to achieve in a vocation, to adapt as vocations change, and to develop new vocations as new needs arise. Liberal education produces free citizens who direct and reform the institutions of society to provide for the general good. It produces citizens who are capable a making democracy work.

A better question to ask is, "How will this make me a better human being?" The value of a worker in a trade is the product produced, and so the value of one worker is very much like the value of another. But the value of a human being is the breadth and depth of the individual in the whole of human affairs. Not every experience in high school can make you a better worker in a trade, but every experience in high school, no matter the subject, can make you a better human being — if you atune yourself to receive the improvement and to effect it within yourself.

A worker in a trade is dispensible when machines or cheaper labor come along to make the same product. But human beings with a liberal education, the "skills of freedom," will always be indispensible.  When the value of an endeavor has been exhausted, the workers are let go. But those individuals with the "skills of freedom" are retained and sought after, because they are the ones who are fundamentally innovative to find or create the next endeavor of value.

If you are able to leave high school with the abilities required to work at a trade, then you have received an adequate return on the time you invested. However, if that is all you leave high school with, you have left the far greater value behind. A liberal education, available to every young person at public expense in high school, is really an extraordinary opportunity, afforded only to the few wealthy in ages past. My advice is to shake yourself out of the notion that high school is something you have to endure in order to get a job. Instead of enduring it, take charge of your education and milk the high school experience for as much as you can, not just to become a worker at a trade, but to make yourself into a better human being. If you do, you will be valued far more than a worker in a trade throughout your life.

I Am an Introvert

I am an introvert.

When you are talking things through, I am busy with internal dialog and discussion, me vs me.

When you and I are discussing something, you are seeking your resolution through the conversation and you would like to talk until we are resolved. I am seeking information so that we can stop talking, because then I can begin my internal conversations and come to my resolution.

When you are talking through your thoughts with me, my internal conversations are disrupted. I will begin to see things clearly when my internal conversations get a chance to progress undisturbed to completion.

When you notice that I am passive, aloof, and unengaged, my mind is teeming with internal conversations about unresolved issues. My mind is so busy that sometimes I have to lie down in a quiet place to let the activity play out.

When you relax with other people and find refreshment in the stimulating talk and conversation, I relax in solitude and find refreshment as my swirling internal conversations settle and finally solidify through my keystrokes.

When we are together, you find your satisfaction in the moment-to-moment experience. I find my satisfaction in the quietness afterward, when I can rethink our interaction to fully process the pleasure I take in being with you.

You are a Type A extrovert. Something is always going on with you, and everyone can see it. I am a Type A introvert. Something is always going on with me, but no one can see it.

To Love

Love is not a mystery. It is the easiest thing in the world to know when you love somebody. It is when you stop thinking, "How can you please me," and start thinking, "How can I please you."

To Disagree

You people who disagree with me are valuable to me. You readily point out issues that escape my notice. The best solutions notice and address every issue. So...let's disagree together and find the best solutions.

Science Learning Ought to Enlighten and Liberate

Somehow we've made learning difficult for kids, when it ought to be the most natural, spontaneous, and enjoyable activity they engage in. Science, in particular, ought to enlighten and liberate, not obscure and burden. Students should leave school with a warm feeling about science because it has opened their eyes. Instead, many (most?) students leave school cool toward science because we teach it in a way that veils simple and beautiful truths behind opaque jargon. The refreshment students could be taking in a few key and abiding scientific truths enjoyed deeply is instead drowned in a shallow, overwhelming torrent of the entire body of scientific facts. We turn the excitement of personal discovery and connection into the drudgery of rote and disconnected "learning."

I believe that somehow we can have high student achievement with low stress and high enjoyment. And I believe a key component of this "somehow" is to select from our wealth of content, and use our selections to cultivate student breadth and depth.The focus needs to be on using content selectively to enlarge students rather than using students as receivers for massive content. We should teach the student, not the subject.

"I had fun in your class today."

"I had fun in your class today. I think MO Physics is a good idea," a student told me as I was leaving school today.

Students often tell me my class is fun, but I was surprised to hear it today. We didn't do a lab. We didn't play an educational game. We didn't watch a video. We didn't go outside. We did worksheets and bookwork! Since when did that become fun? Since she took charge of her own learning by doing MO Physics!

Following the lesson plan I publish online, she and her teammates assigned themselves bookwork to learn the next physics skill in the sequence and prepare themselves to demonstrate mastery of it to me. I watched them in class and I thought to myself that I'd never seen students dig in like this. They really were poring over the textbook, taking notes, discussing the concepts, calling me over occasionally to answer a question. Looking on, I would have characterized it as hard work, but not fun. I'm delighted that she had fun at such hard work as learning physics.

MO Physics is a program I introduced to my high school physics classes this week. I'm piloting it this year to work out the kinks and to determine whether I will continue with it next year or pull back from it. It is aimed at differentiating instruction toward the high-performing end of the class population, providing a way for them to move at a faster pace than the class, and freeing up my time to work more with the low-performing end. I've been surprised at the high level of enthusiasm it has elicited so far from the students.

Working with teens, I'm well aware that they will enthusiastically jump into something new and then let it quickly peter out. I'm eager to see how student engagement looks a few weeks from now, after the newness has worn off. The students are aware that this is a pilot program, and right now we are enjoying together the excitement of trying something unconventional.

Education-as-Factory

Having come from industry, my eyes have been opened now that I have moved into education. In industry, we rigorously measured our product at every step of the manufacturing process — and we reworked any work-in-progress that was found to be nonconforming. If one or two reworks did not correct the problem, we scrapped the material. That's a great way to run a manufacturing operation — stop spending good money on work-in-progress that will not yield a good final product.

It's a horrible way to run an educational operation.

We rigorously measure our students at every step of the educational process, and we find nonconforming work-in-progress. We put modest effort into remediation and special accommodations, and it works beautifully sometimes. But when these efforts do not correct the problem, a student is not a commodity that can be sent to the scrap heap and the cost written off — human beings stick around whether they get educated or not, and the costs expand and accrue over a lifetime. The only reasonable thing to do is to keep working with a student until she can rejoin the main educational flow, or, failing that, to customize her education and impart as much ability into her as she has the capacity for.

But this is expensive.

In our education-as-factory model we send her on down a pipeline flowing too fast for her to keep up with, perhaps with some limited tracking. We keep her in the main pipeline long enough to convince her that she is a failure by routinely administering standardized tests that she can't possibly pass, because the educational system has disengaged her and pushed her forward to challenges she is not ready for. On the other end of the scale, students who could move faster than the pipeline meet resistance when they try a faster pace. As a result, our education-as-factory model guarantees less-than-mediocre outcomes for most students.

We use the education-as-factory model for the same reason Henry Ford invented the assembly line — it dramatically reduces cost. Ergo, an education-as-customization model will dramatically increase cost. We need to decide as a nation that our values lie further toward the education-as-customization end of the spectrum than we are now.

This post was inspired by Whose children have been left behind? by Diane Ravith.