Summer 2021: Post 5: Complexity and Education

Many of my students are initially frustrated with my approach to education, so I thought I should explain it. Learning is a willingness to change, to move beyond what you already know and can do. When you move beyond what you already know, then you enter the complexity zone of life where things are more open-ended, uncertain, and unpredictable. Generally, students don't like working in the complexity zone, as they prefer to work in the simple, predictable zone where they can guarantee a good grade. Sorry, but that ain't education. Education is when you leave a class different than you came in, and that can be difficult.

I believe that people learn when they first recognize that they don't know something and then they rearrange themselves — make internal physical and mental changes — in response to what they don't know. I believe all living systems — maybe all systems — can learn. For instance, slime mold can recognize food or danger (say, an acid solution) and then rearrange itself to move toward or away from the food or danger. This is rather simple learning, but it illustrates the behavior that we humans do on a more sophisticated level, though we also do plenty of learning on this simple level, as well. For instance, we learn to recognize foreign viruses and to eliminate them from our bodies, and we do this unconsciously through our immune system, but the principle is the same: recognize an anomaly and respond appropriately.

Our narrow range of vision

Learning implies certain capabilities within the system that is learning: first, a system must be capable of recognizing an anomaly, an issue that it should avoid, seek, or correct. Many simpler creatures such as slime mold do this rather automatically and within a very limited scope using a very limited sensory apparatus. We humans can sense so much more with our more sophisticated sensory apparatus, but we also have significant blind spots. For instance, we see only a narrow range of the available light spectrum. Most of us — including me — don't know how much we can't see and don't know.

However, even if we are physically capable of seeing something new, we also have to be willing to look. So in class, the first order of business is convincing students that they don't know something that they really need to know. At the beginning of my classes, I ask students to do lots of technical, time-related tasks such as sending me a Gmail or setting up a blog to see who can do it and who can't. I congratulate those who can and give them a good grade. I help those who can't and often give them a poor grade to motivate them. Typically, about 25-30% of the class reachea Week 3 with a 100% score, meaning that they were able to complete all tasks on-time with almost no instruction or encouragement from me. Good for them. The rest of the class struggles — a few with technical issues, most with time management issues. I try to address those issues, and it works for most students. Usually by midterm, almost all of my students are on track and capable of doing the class work on time. Most have raised their scores to a passing level. However, a handful of students decide the class isn't for them and drop it. This is typical.

I think this approach works, but it is stressful on those students who struggle to figure it out. Most of them receive some zeroes and have to scramble to fix them. In slime mold terms, they move too close to the acid bath and then have to scramble to get away. I'm sorry they have to do that, but the process seems to work for most students. First, try something, and then students either figure it out and feel good about themselves, or fail and figure out what they have to learn. If they are willing, then they will learn.

I learned this technique from coaching recreational soccer to kids. Performance first, then instruction. For instance, if I want to teach a group of six-year-olds how to make an instep pass, first I have them try the pass to see who can and who can't do it. I praise those who can, and I work with those who can't, often using those who can as exemplars and motivators for the others. People learn well from their peers. Soon, most everyone on the team can execute an instep pass. If I give instruction first, then those who can already do it are bored, and those who can't do it don't understand what I'm lecturing about. Failure clarifies the issue for them so that they can learn it. If they really want to.

And this brings me to a second capability for learning: desire. The issue is that too many students don't care if they don't know what I'm teaching. The slime mold, for instance, has real desire for learning how to avoid an acid bath, but my students have very little motivation for learning how to format an academic paper in MLA 8 format. This is a particularly difficult issue for a teacher to deal with. If a student is genuinely not interested in learning academic writing, then I have very few tools for motivating them. Of course, I can motivate through grades, and I do that, but I think grades are a rather poor motivator. I'm always looking for better ways to motivate students. For instance, I try using engaging essay assignments that ask students to research and write about issues that, I hope, have value for them. Sometimes it works, but I'm looking for more and better ways to teach.

Finally, learning requires the ability to change mentally, physically, socially, spiritually, and more. A student must willing and able to move beyond what they already know. Not everyone is willing to do that. In fact, as we get older, we seem to become less and less willing to change in significant ways. Real learning is more than just remembering a few facts about the War of 1812 for next week's test. Real learning is about changing how you see the world and yourself in the world. For instance, learning to be a nurse means changing the way you walk and talk from how you walk and talk now to how nurses walk and talk. If you don't believe that becoming a nurse (or a computer specialist, or a biologist, or an historian) will change you, then you do not understand education. If you can't change, you can't learn.

The desire and ability to change is actually rather easy for babies and children who don't have many expectations of the world to begin with and are quite flexible mentally and physically. We olders must contend with hardening of the arteries, concepts, and worldviews. Babies see everyone around them walking and talking, and by golly, they desire to walk and talk, too. They then start the most difficult and most significant learning that any of us ever do: to walk and talk like humans. And they fail over and over until they finally get it more or less right. And almost all of them succeed, even without teachers, schools, and grades.

You, too, can learn to write academic documents if I help you move out of your comfort zone and give you room to fail first. We'll fix it when we know what to fix.

Tell me what you think of this approach to learning how to write effective academic essays.

Summer 2021: Post 2 - Overcoming Writer's Block

All writers suffer from writer's block from time to time. Sometimes they are just procrastinating, and they call it writer's block to keep from dealing with it, but often, they really can't think of anything to write.

I have the same issue, but fortunately, I've learned some strategies for dealing with writer's block. For instance, I want to write a blog post along with the class each week. So what do I write? First, I do not want to write about your assigned post this week: the rhetorical situation of Doc1. Why? Because when a teacher speaks or writes about something in the class, then the conversation tends to stop. Students are very reluctant to contest anything a teacher says — as if we are speaking the Gospel — and I want you students to discuss the rhetorical situation without me dominating the conversation. So that's out.

What else can I write about?

Fortunately, I have lots of possibilities, and they all come from my rhetorical situation: I'm a teacher of college composition, my readers are students of college composition, our general shared subject is academic writing, and my text is this blog post. I can drill down from just about any of those four areas and come up with lots of things to write about. For instance, I know that your rough draft is due next week in time for our first peer review, so most of you are writing furiously to get several hundred words before then. I've looked at the papers you've shared with me, and a number of you haven't written much yet. Perhaps you don't know what to write. Perhaps you have writer's block. Well, I can say something about that. So I will, because I think it might help you. And there's one of the first strategies for dealing with writer's block: shifting away from thinking about content to thinking about what I want to do for my reader.

Josh Bernoff, the blogger that I follow, wrote a fine post entitled "The two words that (nearly) always cure writer's block" in which he talks about this shift as a technique for kickstarting your writing. He describes the method this way: 

Sit at your keyboard. Open a new document. Visualize somebody in your audience — somebody who really needs to hear what you have to say. 

Now type this: 

Look, stupid. 

Then start typing what comes into your mind next. What do they really need to hear? What do you want to unload? What do people just not understand? 

Keep going as long as you can. Build arguments. Make good points. Support your evidence. Show that stupid (actually, ignorant) person what you know, what they really need to know. 

Based on my experience, this will unblock the blocked. It doesn’t generate the most beautiful, well organized prose, but it does shake loose things worth saying.

Why does it work? Because you quit thinking so much about the content of your essay, and it's the content that likely has you frozen. Instead, you are now thinking about your reader, and a reader almost always tells you what you should write. Imagine you are sitting with a good friend who is also struggling with the same academic problem that afflicts you — say, procrastination. You know your friend procrastinates, and you know it affects their grades and makes them anxious. You'd like to help them, so what do you say?

You might help them understand why they procrastinate in the first place, but you also want to give them hope that they can deal with their own habits of procrastination. You might want to mention some specific methods and techniques that have been shown to work in managing procrastination. Those are all things that might help improve your friend's life. That's worth doing.

But what if you don't really know what causes procrastination? Then you haven't learned enough about the problem to be of any real benefit to your friend. So don't say anything — you'll probably just make it worse for them — and take time to learn something of real value that you can bring back to your friend. In other words, do some research.

Start your research by asking what you'd like to tell your friend. Want to tell them what causes procrastination? Then find out. And get the good stuff. Get information from the people who've done their own homework and know what they are talking about. Find the authoritative information that will be useful to your friend.

Take notes. Taking notes starts your writing, and it helps you remember more precisely what the experts are saying about procrastination. Now you're writing. Your essay is almost done.

So how did I overcome my brief paralysis about what to write in this post? By thinking about you, my readers. I've been teaching writing for more than forty years, so I have plenty of content. Content is seldom my problem. Rather, my problem is figuring out what value I can bring to my readers at this moment. I noted that some of you don't have much in your essays, so I decided to write about writer's block. Of course, some of you have already completed your essay, so this post doesn't address your immediate needs, but that's okay. You'll have writers' block soon enough. I hope you remember this post.