The Babies are in the Bathwater

Last summer, my husband was flying his little drone around the yard and it got tangled in a pine trees out of reach at 30 feet up.  I didn’t care about the drone. But, I got invested in solving the problem of how to get it down. He tried to reach it by throwing a wrench tied to a rope, but it would not dislodge, and we had to dodge the plummeting wrench.  We tried using the Chuckit we use to throw balls for our dogs. Maybe a ball hitting the branch would dislodge it.  It didn’t.  I suggested using a powerwasher to hose it out of the tree, but he said the water would destroy it.  So, after a short bit, he decided it wasn’t worth the time. It was a cheap drone.  But, I kept thinking… there must be some way to get it down. And so began the adventure of trying.

I decided that I would make a pole that would rise 30 feet in the air and be sturdy enough to manage.  My solution was an embarrassment of three pvc pipes, a tree limb and some blue painter’s tape.  I linked two lengths of the pvc pipes together by stuffing the tree limb into the ends of each for more height and stability.  Then, I attached a third pole between the two pipes to add a little stiffness (although not much) and wrapped the whole mess in a mile of blue painter’s tape.  It was not the solution of an engineer, but if held just right, it could be balanced at a full height like a pole in a circus act and be moved in wavy fashion higher and higher into the tree.  I didn’t have the strength to get it where it needed to go, so when Weldon came back to see what I had gotten up to, he lent his strength to the makeshift pole, pulled it into place in front of the branch that held the drone and whipped it back and forth on the branch until at last the drone moved a few inches and dropped to the ground.  Triumph!

A small triumph, but it reminded me that problem solving is fun, coming up with solutions on the fly is fun, using what you know and observe about the world is fun.  Letting your brain and body can take you where you want to go… is fun… and it’s learning.

What people understand about the world and their ability to navigate their circumstances is a product of what they have been confronted with in their childhood.  Children learn to do what they are exposed to, and, like any one else,  enjoy what they can control.  They need  to learn through doing and their teachers need to be freed to give that kind of learning to them.

Children, who have been taught the rigid control: perfect posture while learning, nodding in understanding (that looks a lot like agreement),  compliance toward a goal of someone else’s making, do not learn to problem solve or innovate or risk or experiment.  They do not learn to invest in, be inspired by or committed to what they learn.  Instead, they learn that learning is something that they are subjected to… and they see every experience through that initial lens.. the something they must do in life that they do not care about and would rather not do but must. The gritmeisters of malicious reform would immediately point to children who tolerate longer and longer tests of their ability to parse sentence level inference as problem solvers.  Some of them literally point to how good a kid can be made to feel if they are among the few who get a 4 on their standardized test.  It may not be fun, but (according to reformer logic) sustaining a fifth read of the same sentence gets them ready for the bleak realities of adulthood. And, when their teacher is trained to value that score, they soon learn to value it as a proxy for real accomplishments and real learning.  Their teachers find themselves needing to reduce access to lessons that make children most capable of problem solving, ingenuity and independence and serve up instead reworked units with lessons designed to mimic the test and encourage test taking strategies and endurance.  They are served heavy doses of compliance and lessons targeted to bring home the scores for the adults who are measured by them… a short term gain for the teacher instead of a long term one for the student.

Of course, there should be standards and times when we hunker down and just practice.  It’s good to know how to take a test, But the fundamental learning of the classroom should be embedded in real world problems and student autonomy not weighed down and measured in weeks-long tramps through one uninspiring paragraph after another with the sole concern that this learning will demonstrate on the dragon multiple choice test in April.

It simply isn’t healthy for a school culture to be organized around a test of such high stakes that it must be the central consideration of every adults when determining curriculum and emphasis.  The stakes can not be high and ignored also. A delay of four years in implementing bad practice was an insufficient response to bad policy. This year, that delay will be over and communities, schools, teachers, parents and students will be doubled down on.  Whether it’s today or tomorrow, a high stakes test that impacts student placement and identity, property values, jobs and local control forces the test to the forefront.   America’s children should be exposed to the same kind of learning that is demanded for and provided to the children of wealth and privilege and America’s parents should accept nothing less.  They should #optout2019 and then #optout every year after for as long as it is necessary.