In one class I am in teachers engaged a discussion about obstacles to innovating with and integrating technology in schools. The conversation was fairly predictable (I said nothing notable), revolving mostly around limited resources and time.  Then one gal, Mary Ann Hudziak, said this so well I was taken aback. I thought I’d pass it along, hopefully as an encouragement, and possibly as a rebuke to those of us who want to easily declare any shortcomings to a lack of time:

A few years ago, I would have given TIME as the number one obstacle.  I do not see this as number one in our district anymore.  Our teachers find the time for things they value.  This has been a great discovery for me because now I spend my energy working with staff to understand the value of things and the rest tends to fall into place.

I have had lots of trouble finding time to fix the faucet for the kitchen sink, or to continue repairing our basement, or to dig the trench in my yard to improve my roof’s drainage, or–well, I’ll stop the list there and figure that half of my point is made. I do manage to find time to play with my kids while my wife cooks dinner. Amazing dinner. Mmmm…

This shot actually wasn’t her creation, but it now can be because our guests  showed her how to make it as authentically Mexican as possible. And when my wife does decide to make it herself, I’ll have the time to play with the kids–as always.

Thanks for reading.

Me, to the girls as I show them the following  photo on the camera: Now, girls, you know how we teach you to obey us and tell you how important it is to obey? Here’s another way someone could do it. Isn’t it better to obey?

Girls, nodding in amazement: Yeeeessss.

We can teach kids right and wrong, or we can try to tie them up and restrain them as long as it lasts. The problem is, someday you have to release them from the leash, and at that point the strategy has not done the poor kids any favors.

Thanks to my brother-in-law for snapping this shot with our camera while my wife and I were with our children for their naps and rests. He said both these kids were at least kindergarten age. My, oh my.

Thanks for reading.

Though I already spent some time working through my thinking about Ted McCain’s Teaching for Tomorrow, I wanted to return to the feeding trough for a couple moments because McCain’s book seems to bring out some things that I have perceived before but not necessarily interacted with formally. These things raise questions for me and I wanted to pose them here, and that will likely be the final time I’ll mention McCain’s book.

When we critique education, are we critiquing the reality or a caricature we’ve developed?

In reading McCain and others, I honestly feel like we fall into calling for reform of caricatures. Perhaps these terrible schools exist, where teachers stand in front of the room all day and demand that students memorize meaningless facts and never ask them to analyze or evaluate anything. Perhaps the school is out there that hires according to those standards, but I have yet to interact with it, and I didn’t get my education there, so I have a hard time buying it.

McCain pits teaching the process against teaching for product and holds up the process-focus as 21^st century learning, the idea being that in a world of change and unknown future the most valuable skills and knowledge students can have are  problem solving skills and knowledge of those  processes. Yet he openly quotes the classic “teach a man to fish” metaphor, showing that this is not something new, that people have been trying to do this for . . . millennia?

When it comes to actual classrooms, it seems to me that the process has always been important, but that the product is more tangible, so it’s easy to get sidetracked by evaluating it alone. I take two broken cars to two mechanics and ask them to fix them. One fixes a car and gets it running, the other breaks a car into more pieces. The one who produced the working car (product) engaged in the better process. On the classroom side, we’ve got 10 million students (at least that’s what it seems like some days), it’s hard to examine each step of the process in a manner that is seriously worth a hill of beans, so we evaluate what we can—the product.

Now the product is not wholly unfit for judging process. Even these high stakes tests that we lambaste for focusing on product don’t always examine just product. I earned a 4 on my AP Calculus exam in high school even though I got the big problem on the test wrong—I got the decent score because the graders examined the process and apparently could see I was doing calculus at a high level but had botched something along the way. And that was the 20th Century . As a teacher of writing, I see the process by examining the product. It’s a mentality I take with me when I construct feedback and grade papers, a mentality I share with my colleagues, a mentality that is not a rarity. Thus, I am convinced that we are attempting to teach process in classrooms, or at least, many of the folks I know are, and if we are going to claim no one is doing it, I’d like to see some empirical proof of the claim.

Is it always better to insist upon structured thinking?

I am aware I might be on my own on this one, but I tend to think that when we teach processes that we can accidentally teach students to do things a certain way when their way is perfectly adequate, and perfectly opposite.

I was on a team a few years ago where the folks wanted to take us constantly back to the process and explicitly point it out (I think with the idea that we would use similar techniques to teach the problem solving process to our students). We had this chart on the wall that was shaped like a stair case and there were words on each step reminding us of every step of the problem solving process. It was clearly based on solid research for problem solving and it was obviously something that folks high above our salary grade thought worthwhile.

It drove me absolutely bananas. It took something intuitive, like looking at a situation and figuring out what the heck to do, and made it oddly complex. Now I had to run my thinking, which could often be random and could jump in ways that were honestly beyond my understanding of exactly why it went the way it did, through some other format. Instead of engaging all my energy in solving the problem, I was engaged in a second problem–making the way I might discover a solution fit through the form given to me, even when it didn’t seem like it was the perfect form every time.

I was asked to use structured thinking—a formal process—but that’s not what I’d done before that. Even if my thinking actually progressed similar to that process but had just been so quick or jumbled that I didn’t realize it, it is hard for me to see how slowing me down and confusing me bears worthwhile fruit.

I had a math teacher in high school and she taught us what we needed to know and insisted that we show our work, like most all math teachers I’d ever had. I thought I did everything according to the rule, but one day while standing at the board explaining how I reached a solution to a problem, a classmate got confused. The teacher interrupted and basically said, “Ignore him. He skipped about three steps and didn’t show you.” That was the first time I was made aware that anything I’d done was unconventional. She’d never criticized me for the methods I’d used, apparently because they worked. I wish at times that we could do this more often with students. Perhaps a student writes an essay that blows off the traditional essay format—but perhaps that student’s essay is just as effective at communicating its message.

I suppose I can’t win this argument no matter how many anecdotes I produce. One can say that too many students don’t know how to engage a problem and how to begin working through it (that’s what McCain argues) and thus it is crucial to teach them a process to engage a problem. One can also say that if we teach the process well students will internalize it and follow it naturally, feeling like they are returing to an “intuitive” method but really following the structured method in a loose way.

Yet I am traditional enough at heart that I thought it was valuable to throw lots of problems at them through high school and force them to figure out their own process for encountering a problem, one that works for their own manner of thinking. I do think they should be made aware of their learning as they go, so they can reflectively decide whether their methods are the best . . . but it may be the poet’s heart in me that says you can’t tell a poet how to sit down and think of a good poem. He’s got to figure it out for himself.

Is teaching process explicitly going to make a difference in education?

McCain presents four steps in the problem solving process through which he guides students: Define, Design, Do, and Debrief. They’re fine and nicely broad, and again, I realize engaging in these steps will helps students figure out what they don’t know about a problem and what they need to ask, but I am feeling rather pessimistic about it. There are many equivalent ideas in education that I have used as a teacher and as a student—for example, making students outline before they write—but when it comes to actual work in my actual classroom, most of my students want to skip these preparation steps and get through whatever it is I give them as fast as possible.

Here’s what I mean more particularly. Those first two D’s sound solid to me, but they also sound like work, and frankly, I always lose the most students at the point where concept turns to work. Ask a digital video teacher who’s tried to make students realize the importance of a storyboard, or a writing teacher who has attempted to convince students to outline before beginning an essay. The students don’t want to do it. Sure, most of mine will do it when I hold them accountable with serious points, but if there is ANY way to avoid what they see as an extra step (like, say, on a high stakes writing test when there are no points awarded for an outline), they’ll skip it.

What is the problem?

I suppose I broke with McCain somewhere earlier in the book, because I don’t think education is floundering as badly as he seems to think, and my hunch is that basic human laziness is responsible for a whole lot more than we care to admit. I LOVE my students, but I do have to trick 50% of them into working about 80% of the time. It seems to me that McCain’s role playing (a method he details midway through the book) is a ploy that works for him and is what has tricked his students into working–that seems more responsible for the success than the 4 D’s.

I imagine I am way off with many of these thoughts, but if anyone made it this far in the article, I’d love to hear how.

Thanks for reading.

I’m spending today and tomorrow in Deadwood, South Dakota learning the history of the early days of Deadwood–1876-1890, before the train arrived, the rough and tumble days of gold camps and gambling and brothels. In Of Mice and Men George calls a brothel a “cat house” and today I discovered that the term apparently originates in Deadwood. A gentleman whose name I didn’t bother to write down Fatty Thompson was on the same cattle train from Cheyenne that brought Bill Hickock to Deadwood. He was returning home with a load of cats to sell to a local  madame. Apparently the brothel was infested with mice and rats and when the rodents would appear the customers had a habit of drawing their weapons and firing away–a dangerous situation for those on the floor below. Bringing in cats dramatically increased the safety of the first floor patrons even as it garnered a new reputation and name for the brothel.

My instructor teaches another class that spans the later years of Deadwood’s history, covering . . . the gold mines and gambling and brothels. I suppose the character of a town doesn’t change that much with the passing of time. I was surprised to learn that I was three years old when the last brothel in Deadwood was shut down (1980). One gentleman who grew up in Deadwood says that during hunting season his dad would go out and shoot deer and then sell them to men who, having never made it to the woods on their Northern Hills hunting expeditions, needed to bring home evidence of a more wholesome recreation. We learned that during hunting season the girls were barely allowed out of the house because business was so brisk. Joking about brothels is one thing when you’re talking about 1880, but–for me anyway–talking about 1980 seems to highlight the sad above the  silly.

A day touring a town of stories supplies me with more than I can tell in a day. Sitting down to dinner, Eldest peppered me for my tales. With a full page of notes listing details my children might like, I was prepared for the grilling. The tidbit they latched onto most tightly concerned the Adams House. You see, part of the Franklin family’s motives in building their house was to display ostentatiously their wealth and success. Thus, among features like electricity and an abundance of indoor sinks, the house was outfitted with a series of call-buttons for the servants. Press a button and a light goes on in the kitchen letting the servants know not only that they were needed, but where they were needed. The buttons were near the light-switches in most rooms, but in the dining room, the call-button was conspicuously absent. Wouldn’t this be the most important room for such a button?

In this room, the button was placed more strategically than on the wall. You see, like my family, members of the Franklin family always used the same seats at the table. This fact made it possible for special call-button arrangements. Under the rug in front of her chair, the lady of the house could press the call button with her foot, surreptitiously summoning the staff to address any needs at the table.

My girls liked this. Eldest asked somewhere around six million questions about it. When would the lady ring it? How would the servant know? What would the servant do when she arrived? What would the lady say when the servant came? The questions inevitably led to presentations and before long we had summoned our make believe servant to the table to fill Eldest’s water and to squeeze more syrup onto Smiles’s plate. The girls eagerly joined the make-believe, eventually clearing the entire table, one dish at a time, as I continuously stomped on my call button.

Tomorrow I return, my ears attuned for something as wonderful as a secret call-button.

Isn’t history great? Aren’t stories wonderful? I like to make things up for my children–I claim authorship over some half decent tales about a humble farmer name John–but reality usually fuels my imagination and those of my kids with more than I could concoct.

Inevitably, I come to thinking about teaching amidst all this. When we have to battle to make students enjoy this kind of thing, we must be missing something. What’s not to enjoy? If stories like this are not enjoyable, what is? If students are complaining about why they need this, perhaps it is because we have buried our leads, to steal a reporter’s terminology. Perhaps we have buried the fascinating information beneath dates or literature devices. Perhaps we have forgotten that the most interesting thing about the Adams House is not that an opulent seller of cigars built a house, but that he put in a little button for his wife to secretly call the servants.

I never thought once about the relevance of what I learned today; certainly neither did my daughters. I think when August rolls around and I begin to consider my school-year plans I’ll spend a bit of time reviewing the material I pass along. I’ll have to ask myself what kinds of call buttons and brothels I may have hidden under the rugs.

Thanks for reading.

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• Original Image: Deadwood, South Dakota 1959 by Allen

I dropped a link last week to an article from Sally Thomas on poetry–”Re: Is Billy Collins Killing Poetry?“–because I was intrigued by her thoughtful explanation of the oral tradition in poetry. She draws attention to the link between the sound of a poem and our ability to remember it:

I’m an avid reader-aloud of poetry, especially to my children, and I’ll tell anyone willing to listen (again, my children, who really have no choice) that it’s our ears primarily, not our eyes, which remember poems.

When I teach poetry to my freshmen and we ask the question, “What is great poetry?” one of the sub-questions we ask is, “Is it the sound of a poem?” The question is an important one for me, and students can tell I love the sound a poem makes. I suppose they pick this up from my passionate readings of every poem we encounter–I usually read as if I were auditioning for a the book-on-tape version–but I also like to tell them about my love for John Keats, a love borne almost entirely out of the sounds of “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and “Ode to a Nightingale” (admittedly a fascination with his early death helped). These were my favorite poems before I comprehended half of what they said.

Not that I remember them that well–they’re a bit too long to remember without expending actual effort, and I have yet to try–but what I do recall, I recall through my auditory experience.

Thinking about the poetry I have memorized, the rhyming appears to be the dominant thread of success. Mrs. Sutton had us memorize  “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” in fourth grade, and when I walked into my student-teaching 17 years later and heard a class reciting it, I had it down again within two minutes. Could I have done so without the rhyme or the meter to guide me? I highly doubt it.

I also remember a handful of poems from William Carlos Williams, but that’s mostly because it’s not that difficult to recall one sentence. Even then, I can’t say with confidence whether so much depends upon a red wheelbarrow glistening with rain water beside the white chicken or whether it depends upon the red wheelbarrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens (by the way, it’s neither). And as much as I enjoy Billy Collins and Jane Kenyon, I keep losing “An Introduction to Poetry” despite opening my poetry unit with it every year, and I am so bad at remembering “Whirligigs” that I haven’t ventured to commit any of Jane’s more powerful work to mind.

Yet I spout off Puck’s last words in A Midsummer Night’s Dream with nary an effort and accidentally memorized the prologue to Romeo and Juliet. What a mess I am.

Or rather, what a fool I would be to give up on the power of the rhyme and consistent meter, which is exactly what I have done in recent years while reading poetry. I tend to develop an obsession with a new poet each year, usually beginning the affair about a month before my teaching of poetry (this is why poetry is consistently my favorite unit), and as I think back to the last five or six obsessions, I can’t recall anyone who used rhyme more than sporadically. Not surprisingly, I also cannot recite any poems that I encountered for the first time within the last five years. For the most part, I have gravitated towards the insight and the image, neglecting the meter and the rhyme almost completely.

I don’t use meter or rhyme in my own poetry–I tend to mimic  Collins and find that he is right: when I read his poetry, “it encourages the writing of more poetry.” Not being a poet, I imitate that which is possible for me to imitate. That does not compliment Collins, a man whose poetry has brought me much pleasure, but it is the truth. For me, rhyming simply alerts me of the limits to my vocabulary, so I avoid it. It is easier to build a poem off one image and to tie that image to a more general insight, letting the lines break where they will, than to make the poem regular or rhyming. Saying that reminds me of an admired colleague who always discourages her students from using rhyme in their own poetry–perhaps she discourages it because their vocabularies cripple the first couplet and then paralyze the work that follows.

But, oh, this is not the fault of the device! Inspired by Thomas’s stories about her children’s favorite poets, I have been reading poetry to my daughters this week. I like Jack Prelutsky a lot and we did listen to Shel Silverstein’s “A Light in the Attic” readings, if for no other reason than to let me recall the cassette of Shel I wore out in my Fisher Price tape deck. What my eldest has begun to do is ask me for more. That’s nothing notable, I realize. What is notable is that she doesn’t ask for another poem. She asks “for another rhyme.”

Prelutsky’s vocabulary is frequently beyond her ability to comprehend. A tomato’s “unmitigated rancor” would stupefy most of my freshmen, let alone a four-year old. Yet she knows enough to follow it (I help with the details) and worries none about the words she doesn’t understand.  To her, language is play. She wants the silly situations, the wild characters, and the playful words we encounter. Ultimately, she wants “rhymes,” not poetry.

She’s not quite five, but she is more in tune with Sally Thomas than I have been for the last few years. I plan to remember both of their opinions the next time I head to the library to discover my next poet of obsession.

Thanks for reading.

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• Original image: On a Snowy Evening by: Bob Aubuchon

Beyond these scattered papers and intimidating due dates

I find strange things to do

during finals week.

Investigating the oral tradition in poetry

and the role of media in communicating a poem

has proved intriguing.

So have search engines,

which lead me to the depths of the National Archives, powered by Clusty–

and the discovery of a document “signed” by Sioux tribal leaders

with a simple column of x’s.

Oh, I was working then,

albeit in another browser’s tab,

on creating a research project — one steeped in works cited

rehearsal and resource evaluation.

Eventually I’ll have to grade those, but for now

I’ll head to the office next door, where my colleagues,

who are primarily mothers,

have assembled a feast upon the table.

Thanks for reading.

I have begun Ted McCain’s Teaching for Tomorrow for another development class and I will admit he’s kind of set me off on the wrong foot. In the first chapter he mentions the idea of there being real world skills and school skills, and I cannot say I’m sold on what he presents.

I really think there’s a false dichotomy in here and that somehow we miss something by separating the real world skills and school skills too much. Sure, there are skills that are particularly used in school and some out of it, but to separate them all creates a conflict I don’t think is there. I have gone to a lot of conferences and read a lot of commentary on these kinds of things, and one common idea I have seen is a lack of creativity in envisioning how traditional educational curriculum can be effective.

For example, a kid in my sophomore English class researches an issue and writes a report on it, a traditional school skill. McCain lists writing a report as one of these school skills, but then later his big call is for school to increase students’ ability to reason. Since when does good writing not involve reasoning? How does organizing writing and working with abstract concepts like ideas not help students think at a higher level? A great colleague of mine justifies the teaching of writing by pointing out that when she teaches a student to write, she is really teaching that student to think.

One thing about this line of reasoning that concerns me is that it is focused on a fear of an unknown future (for what generation was the future known? How did the Greatest Generation survive?) and once we begin to axe curriculum according to the standard of obvious relevance, few things can survive the litmus test.

Reading often comes under the chop with this line of reasoning. We should read something more relevant, so we throw out boring old white men like Shakespeare and read random pop novels that have no cultural ties and debatable literary merit. Give them choice, we claim, and so there goes Steinbeck, Hawthorne, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald–writers who take work to read. Few of our students will choose challenge and hard work, it’s the nature of the human individual, it seems, but we succumb to the call for obvious relevancy anyway. Seniors from my school don’t read Chaucer–not even a line of The Canterbury Tales. Men and women on horses in medieval England are not obviously relevant, but when we can’t make The Canterbury Tales relevant, we have lost our imaginations. Following this line of reasoning, I am convinced that soon literature could be deemed irrelevant, because it is just fiction. Poetry, too, surely can’t stand up to such a staunchly utilitarian evaluation.

In place of these academic items, we often feel an obligation to teach anything students don’t know, including life skills that students should be learning outside our premises (or at least skills students apparently used to learn outside of school). Thus we think we need to teach them how to write a check or cook a meal or do the laundry or buy insurance. The home is where these things occur, convincing me beyond doubt that these are things families should be teaching. I know many of my students don’t have families with structured lives, but I can’t see that we’re doing them any favors by withdrawing the curriculum and substituting it with this stuff. Should we add supplementary curriculum for those in need? Sure, but if we replace curriculum, then schools are succumbing to the idea that we are responsible for every scrap and tittle of a child’s education. How are these students better for it?

I know I’m Mister Negative here, but I am convinced that our content is relevant and the skills students develop while studying it (even the memorization) are worthwhile and can transfer to the “real world.” Don’t pin the damage done by unimaginative teaching and its brainless worksheets and regurgitation-tests on the content that is being covered. Pin it on the poor methodology.

This is not to say I think there are no real world skills that one learns out of school, however. I value greatly the knowledge one gains from experience, and I can’t see that it will ever be possible for school to replace what good ol’ fashioned experience can provide. We call it “learning the ropes” and I think it is a valid expectation that our students are willing to work hard and go through the entry level positions to work their ways up, no matter what they’ve done in school. What I think is silly is to put in on the schools to do the training that only a real life experience can provide.

McCain brings this issue up with a personal anecdote. He excelled in school and then won himself a job with a cartography company. Fresh out of college, he convinced the company’s owner that the company needed a computer to make maps. The owner agreed and then hired McCain to research computers and choose one for the company to buy. McCain failed at the task so miserably that he was fired. In his reflection, he states that his education failed him for the tasks the real world presented him with.

I am sincerely confused at the profundity of McCain’s experience. To me, the fault of McCain’s failure was not McCain’s education, as he labels it. From his description, I thought the fault was either McCain’s or the owner of the company who hired him. McCain was so busy selling his idea he may never have stopped to realize he was in over his head. The owner then assigned a major project to a guy who should have been in an entry level position.

That’s why college graduates who go to Washington DC get hired as legislative associates, then get promoted to legislative assistants, and don’t get hired out of the box as Chief of Staff. It strikes me as odd to pin on schools the responsibility to teach what the world teaches you. Schools cannot teach you what the world can.

Consider some of the obstacles and structural differences. We cannot fire you when you stink. As a matter of fact, if you are lousy at your job, we are pressured to change our tactics so you can stay on board. When you do something lousy and we call it that, we then receive pressure to change our assessment of your performance, to rate you on effort, not the objective quality of the work. It’s completely opposite of the “real world.”

McCain defends his anecdote in part by citing the numbers of students who are staying in school instead of getting jobs, or moving in with their parents, because they are not qualified for real world tasks. But in my mind it seems odd to say that the reason for this trend is clearly because their schooling was bad . Perhaps these people possess this wonderful sense of entitlement that is sweeping the land and don’t want to work hard at entry level positions. Perhaps they don’t particularly want the commitment of a full time job after enjoying summer and winter breaks for so long. Perhaps they don’t know what they want and never stopped to figure it out. Perhaps they want something they can’t have and find it easier to mooch off their parents because their parents are letting them get away with it.

Perhaps it’s more complicated than McCain lets on is my main point. He has a hunch for how the world works, but he’s not presenting empirical research. My concern is that there is a solid wave ready to overthrow a grand quantity of the curriculum I teach on a hunch and an interpretation, rather than on research.

There are other ways to address McCain’s claims, but this pitting of real world skills and school skills is one area that strikes me as simplistic. Any thoughts on this?

Thanks for reading.

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• Wok of Dong by Ricardo Liberato

For another professional development class I have finished recently I read Chip and Dan Heath’s Made to Stick. This book has a lot going for it, including a cool cover with a pretend piece of duct tape that feels like duct tape when you touch it. These guys are seizing the judge-a-book-by-its-cover audience. Sort of. The tape makes purchase almost a sure thing while in the store, but it’s tough to feel it over Amazon.

These brothers have spent a lot of time analyzing ideas and seeing why some stick and others don’t, and they narrow it all to six basic traits that the stickiest ideas have in common. These ideas are

• Simple
• Unexpected
• Concrete
• Credible
• Emotional
• Stories

I finished the book two weeks ago and credible was the only one I couldn’t remember anymore. That bodes well for the stickiness of the book’s ideas; in 20 years I bet I could still name two.

That said, most of it did not shock me. As an English teacher who attempts to speak to students through stories as much as possible, I didn’t need anyone to tell me that concrete stories that speak to one’s emotions are more affective than abstract explanations of facts. Of course, I still enjoyed reading those sections of the book–they were filled with fun anecdotes and real case studies–I just didn’t find that I needed to adjust much about my teaching to introduce those characteristics.

What I did find greatly interesting were the first two characteristics: simple and unexpected. The simple idea hearkened me back to my radio days when I wrote advertising. The ads I wrote were 30 seconds and whenever I’d pitch something, I had to be clear and keep the message simple. Yet the Heaths resold me on this concept in the arena of teaching (and about everything else) and convinced me that I need to do a better job of tearing the core idea out of each unit and lesson so that students can recall that idea when all else fades.

One helpful example they offered was of military leaders who have to write at the top of all plans something called the “commander’s intent.” The commander’s intent is one line defining the ultimate goal of everything that follows on the page. If all fails and no plans can be followed, the audience knows the commander’s intent and can pursue that goal.

If my memory works at all, I recall Stephen Ambrose positing this idea as a key to the Allies’ success on DDay. Everything fell apart; no plans made it to the beach. Despite the disaster, the exceedingly talented and well-trained Allied soldiers pieced together new plans from the simple goals they each knew well. And the result is part of what we celebrated this past Monday.

For my teaching this might mean taking my works cited lessons and shouting just one thing over and over and over again: MAKE IT PERFECT! Students won’t remember what order to put the works cited entry when they do it next year, but if they can remember it needs to be perfect, perhaps they’ll consult a resource to remind them how to do it. Perhaps.

The second characteristic I liked a lot was the unexpected idea. The unexpected concept grabbed me when the Heaths shared George Loewenstein’s theory that “curiosity . . . happens when we feel a gap in our knowledge” (84). If as a teacher I can point out to students that they don’t know something, they just might care enough to be interested.

Of course, there’s more to it than that, since students know they don’t know grammar and insist that they aren’t interested in learning it because they don’t know it. In that case I may need to give them a little knowledge to get them to a starting point where curiosity can begin. It’s where we teacher-dweebs would throw in a jargon term like scaffolding, but I’m going to avoid expanding the jargon in favor of a passage from Made to Stick. The passage follows a story about a TV producer who got national audiences interested in college football by highlighting during the broadcast the universities and towns where the games were played:

How do you get people interested in a topic? You point out a gap in their knowledge. But what if they lack so much knowledge about, say, the Georgia Bulldogs, that they’ve got more of an abyss than a gap? In that case, you have to fill in enough knowledge to make the abyss into a gap. (91)

That’s a nice little strategy there, and when I read about it I realized that when I have used it, I have found success. For example, when reading Romeo and Juliet, I explain enough of the plot to students that when reading the text they actually give it a shot. The same 15-year olds who won’t attempt grammar without a seismic Armageddon-like event will read the Bard? Why? According to the Heaths’ way of telling it, my students may feel like their knowledge shortage is a gap, not an abyss, so they’re willing to attempt to bridge it.

If that is true, then what I need to do now is realize what was happening there is part of this unexpected concept, this little surprise that students have that they don’t know something. Then I can tease them along and hopefully use their curiosity to their benefit.

I’m not sure how I’d continue to do this, but one idea might be to  use questions to guide units more frequently, kind of like when I ask, What is great poetry? Other ideas might be look like what I did recently before reading Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil.” Students and I talked about what they’d do if I showed up at school wearing a black veil and never took it off. Then instead of telling why I might do such a thing, I asked them why I would, or why anyone would, and we moved to the story. In a sense, that curiosity put them in the position Hawthorne meant for them to be in, that of the questioner, the person wondering what was up with this black veil . . . And they began the story aware of a knowledge gap.

When I think back to the Heaths’ book I want most to recall these two of the six ideas:  simple and unexpected. I want to convey core ideas in ways that create unexpected knowledge gaps, igniting curiosity. If I can manage that just once a month I think my content will be stickier than ever. If I can’t manage it, I may just attempt something with duct tape.

Thanks for reading.

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Borrowed Image

• D-Day: The Normandy Invasion

Technology-wise the things that get me most excited are the ones where I can’t quite see the purpose. I can see the potential for usefulness but the potential is wide enough that I can’t quite imagine its practical use. Thus, today I am thrilled with Stephen Wolfram’s new search tool called Alpha. He dubs it the computational knowledge engine, and it apparently uses data gleaned from elsewhere and computes it for you according to your query.

He offers suggested querries for you to try, but I decided to begin by asking about the temperature in my hometown the day I was born. I didn’t know how to phrase it so it could make sense, so I just asked it: “What temperature in _________ on _____________?” A tad later I was looking at a line graph detailing the temperature each hour of the day and a note affirming that the high had been 80 degrees and it hit that at 3:00pm.

Cool.

Next I asked it what the temperature was in Washington DC the week Sputnik launched–maybe the politicians’ fear raised the temp a bit? My first query confused it and it asked me if I meant Sputnik, so I clicked on the option it offered and found out immediately, without leaving the site, what day Sputnik launched  (I didn’t have to go away from my search engine to find the answer, which is why I don’t know that I’d call this a search engine and why I think Wolfram is justified in calling this something strange–”computational knowledge engine” is definitely strange). I then re-entered my phrase: “temperature in washington dc the week of october 4, 1957″ and it delievered the results:

As you can see, my theory about rising temperatures when Sputnik launched are bogus, as Wednesday the 2nd was the hottest day of the week, at 73 degrees.

Another cool part of Alpha is the specific nature of the url. For example, I searched for a more relevant and controversial number after playing with Sputnik’s influence: the average temperature in the USA since, say, the Civil War. The resulting data did not chart back to the Civil War, but it did head back to the 1930s. Overall, it looked pretty steady, but if you’d like to see for yourself, I can simply direct you there with a link, and you can see what I saw without any trouble.

Now I am a humanities guy by trade, but I openly loved mathematics in high school and when I entered college I wished that math could have been less theoretical and more fun, like trig and calculus had been. Perhaps that is why I think this is so awesome–it computes whatever I want, but I don’t have to have a reason to compute it besides my own curiosity. For the sake of curiosity, I am rooting for Stephen Wolfram on this one, because I want to be able to produce any data I can conceive of. Average number of deaths per battle in the Civil War. Average number of home runs hit during the 1990s compared to the 1980s. Number of political commercials aired during the last 30 elections. Adjusted average SAT scores over the last 50 years. Just type it in to a computer and the next thing I know, there it is.

Who knows how we’ll verify the accuracy of all that data, but that is not my concern today. Today I’m just excited about the foggy possibilities, however relevant they might not be.

Thanks for reading.

A student giving a demonstration speech about how to make no-bake cookies finishes adding ingredients to the bowl and then puts the bowl on the pretend burner:

“While that is boiling I’m going to tell you about what happened to me while I made these last night. I made them in the microwave, and when you use the microwave it’s important to use a microwave safe bowl. I didn’t.

“So today my parents are out buying a new microwave.”

A shout from the peanut gallery: “Did you put the metal pot in the microwave?!”

Sheepishly, “Yeah.”

Moms and Dads, there is much to teach your children that we don’t cover at school. Please, please, participate in the education of your children. It could save your life.

Thanks for reading.

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• 29: The microwave tale by: Kit