This isn’t a full set of coherent thoughts, but Seymour Papert’s Mindstorms detailing the why, how, and the why again of the creation of Logo is too much to try and fully digest before I sit down and process it.  So here’s my two-chapters-in mind dump.

I’ve known about Logo for a long time, but only recently had this book pointed out to me.  The biggest catalyst in reading this now were the repeated mentions of Mindstorms in and around Bret Victor’s critique on Khan Academy’s ProcessingJS-based programming lessons.  “For ****’s sake, read Mindstorms,” he proclaimed to the world in exasperation with us simple-minded proles.

So, I’m reading it.  And already two chapters in, wow, it’s really obvious that he’s read it too.

Remember “Kill Math“, Victor’s other major claim to edu-bloggery fame?  Right, it’s basically all here.

It feels like that scene from Good Will Hunting that I’m halfways remembering from watching the movie whatever-years ago, where the college student in the bar is trying to sound clever to the girl by talking high-sounding philosophy (history? whatever), and Matt Damon’s character shuts him down by pointing out exactly what books he’s stealing those ideas from and how exactly he’ll change his opinion next year when he reads XYZ in his next year’s courses instead.

Kill Math is like an iOS-age redesign of Papert’s arguments against “traditional, dead” mathematics.  Papert talks about how computer technology will allow us to create a “Mathworld” in which learning mathematics is learned naturally just as we naturally learn language today.  In Kill Math, we see Victor doing his best to design tools to make Papert’s vision a reality.

I’m writing most of this off the top of my head, so just to make sure I’m not crazy I went and actually looked back at Kill Math (it’s been a few months or a year or whatever).

From Kill Math, the introduction framing his entire page:

This mechanism of math evolved for a reason: it was the most efficient means of modeling quantitative systems given the constraints of pencil and paper.

From Mindstorms, an excerpt that forms a major theme of the first two chapters:

As I see it, a major factor that determined what mathematics went into school math had to do with what could be done in the setting of school classrooms with the primitive technology of pencil and paper.

Yeah okay, my memory is working okay.  You can see similar parallels crop up all over the place, especially in the role of technology to solve the problem.

So Kill Math is Victor’s answer to how to realize Papert’s vision of the future, and his programming design brainstorm is the parallel on how to teach programming (which is a close fit, seeing as how Papert’s Logo was meant to create an easy-to-use programming environment as a bridge to math, science, and the rest of life).

I still have a number of chapters to go, and reading Papert’s introductory chapters feel a lot like reading Friere’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed – super-ideological, full of good stuff, but so strongly hyperbolic that you feel like you need to work through one paragraph at a time, pin it to the wall, negotiate with yourself on where this would actually make sense and when it would be complete insanity, and then move on to the next.  Still, there’s a strong sense that we should look critically at the gap between Papert’s promises of a technological Mathland and the reality of the last forty years and work out exactly why that gap is there.  Reading Papert and looking back at Victor’s new promises, it feels like Victor has totally failed to think critically about that gap and has simply assumed that no one else has tried to make it a reality and he’s here to bring the Holy Word back down from the mountain for us.

I’m more suspicious and I think that Papert’s ideology, though awesome, needs to be moderated by both where our tech-reality has gone so far and what we are actually capable of doing at this point to correct it.  And I have this feeling that, like Scratch and Alice in teaching programming, there’s a difference between making a good introductory tool, vs actually bridging that to everything useful to learn in the future, and that at some point a lot of that old-fashioned “algebraic thinking” still needs to come into play even in a computational world.

Wow, this feels like I’m being a total jerk.  Bret, if you ever read this, sorry.  You are doing awesome, interesting things, but you sound like someone who has not actually had to teach math to a room full of kids, and this is my defense mechanism vs hyperbole.  Seymour, if you ever read this, well, find my later post because I still have a bunch of chapters to go.

One of the goals of good teaching that I’ve seen floating around over the last year or three is the concept of “life-long learning”.  The idea is to enable or train students to continue learning new skills and adapting to our wacky, changing world beyond high school.  This seems pretty hard to argue.

What I haven’t seen, however, is a serious look at just how effectively we destroy this in students.

I don’t think I really get it myself. But in the process of growing as a teacher, I’ve had chances to think back to my own key moments as a student.  Events that shaped my own beliefs in learning and what came later in life that had to tear those beliefs down and rebuild.

Here’s an obvious one for a starter, one which I’m sure teachers have heard before: students define their set of “things I’m good at” by the grades you give them.  It took me forever to realize that hey, I am actually capable of being an artist even though I got a C when I tried something unusual for an art assignment back in Grade 2.  (No joke.)

Okay, there’s the warm-up.  Here’s the bigger one that took me until now to see.

We are constantly telling students that they need to learn everything important for their life within the timeframe of K-12, and possibly university.

We tell them this every time we pressure them to be ready for university.

We tell them this every time we panic on their behalf at the idea of graduating a year late.

We tell them this every time we impress on them how important it is to choose the right college program.

Whenever a student asks, “Why do I have to learn this?” we never, ever answer back “Oh, well if you don’t learn it now you’ll pick it up later when you need to.”  Our system doesn’t let us, but even if it did I suspect we’d never let ourselves.

We tell them this by streaming.  (You didn’t get this now, so you’ll live a life where this isn’t important.)

We tell them this by setting them up in competition with each other.  This one’s got an anecdote, a truly bizarre one: I tried taking piano lessons when I was in grade 4.  I was mediocre at practicing, and when my first recital came up I was grouped with a bunch of other kids my age, nearly all of whom had been playing piano for the last four years.  I felt like a doof, and quit.  It took me until my 30’s to actually pick up music again despite the fact that oh my gosh, I love music.  I really and honestly believed at that point that if you were ever going to be good at something, you had to have started it from age 5 or it was too late.  I thought nine years old was too late to bother learning something.

This overlaps so much with the more obvious, or more general problem of setting up low self-efficacy in students that I’m not sure if it’s drowning my point or not.  It’s not just that we tell kids, “You can’t do this.”  It’s that we tell them, “If you can’t do this now, then you can’t do this ever.”

I don’t know of any solutions to this other than to keep learning.  Find something you thought you were bad at and try it, fail horribly and keep trying.  Let students know you love more than just math class, that you’re taking guitar lessons for the first time, that you’re having fun studying something you missed in high school.

Just a short FYI, I’ve decided to relaunch my personal blog as a place to show off whatever I happen to be making or working on outside of teaching.

So far there’s some knitting, some generative art coding, and an infographics assignment from a “massive open online course” that I’m taking.

When teaching InfoTech classes in the past, I’ve unashamedly let students’ final grade be based on purely project work. Creating posters, programming robots, etc is a hands-on activity, despite the digital nature of the work.

I’ve also always had math classes to deal with simultaneously, so I’ve let my assessment improvement efforts focus on that. There, using something like SBG is obvious – your content standards are mathematical skills and concepts, and they easily break down into small tasks.  (If we taught more than computation that’d be more difficult, but that’s another topic.)

Now my only classes to assess are my new Digital Media Arts classes for grades 6 and 7. And I have almost no set-in-stone standards here from the Ministry of Education.  The documents on computing education at this level are over a decade old and basically have a paragraph of guidelines that you could interpret into almost anything you want to do on computers.  I’ve talked to some other digital media middle school teachers in the area who use the Fine Arts requirements for their classes.  And this makes good sense given their focus, which is primarily working with digital images and video.  Those are something I should take a closer look at yet.

But my class is living in a grey area between art and tech.  Our school already has a solid Fine Arts explorations program, and it also has an unusually high-tech Trades-type program.  (They call it STTEM – Science, Tech, Trades, Engineering, Math.  It incorporates some great engineering-style design problems, drafting, and some computer-based labs with 3D modelling and physics simulations.)

So I get to create something in-between, which is fantastic for a bunch of reasons.  But it also means that the criteria I assess my students on is conceptually a bit hazy.

Right now I have students primarily working in Scratch and giving them assignments that give them room to grow creatively as well as technically (by exploring new code “blocks”).  So I have two layers of outcomes in mind – technical skills / understandings, and creative ones.  But they’re pretty hazy – “figure out loops and conditionals”, “explore an artistic topic into new territory beyond the examples”, “put together a reasonably good digital narrative with some branching”, “make an automated drawing program do something unique and cool looking”.

I think this’ll just get rolled into the rubrics for individual projects.  But I suppose if I really wanted to, I could SBG-ify this whole deal and actually assess those ideas across assignments.  In this case, though, is the reason as compelling?  Students can already redo / revise individual assignments easily, so I don’t need SBG to enable flexibility in reassessing.  On the other hand if I had a clear line of “these are the skills I want you to build” to present to students, it might give them more focus.

Structuring the gradebook around skills could make sense. But I think it’ll have to wait until next year for me to have a clearer idea of what’s achievable within the timespan I have with these kids.

My two “things-I-teach” have always been Math and Info Tech / Computer Science / Digital Media / whatever-else-you-want-to-call-it.  The community of math teachers online have stretched my teaching, my philosophy, my pedagogy (whatever that means) and also just been a lot of fun.  As such, that’s often what I’ve been trying to blog about here as well – giving a little back to the people who helped ease me into this job.

Plus, the challenge of teaching math is a huge one. Take a subject that’s not just the most abstract one around, but is in fact about abstraction itself, and try to present it to kids whose brains are only just growing the ability to deal with abstractions. Face kids’ math anxiety from years of past “failures” due to timed drills, being behind the curve, or just accepting the message of “not being good at math”.  Stare down that 48ton gorilla and try to help them understand trig functions anyway.

So as a learning challenge for me, math teaching taken a lot of my focus.  But I’ve had a soft spot in the back of my mind for letting kids play on computers.  “Here, kid, make something cool in Photoshop. Yes, we’re going to call it work, but shhhhh we all know better.”  I’ve been fortunate enough to get to hit both of these subjects in my career right from my practicum onwards, including one block of IT10 last year.

There are kids who struggle to understand layers, or get lost when trying to use control constructs in Alice, or don’t feel comfortable with their ability to build Lego robots.  But honestly, Info Tech classes have always felt like a break compared to a room full of math-phobic grade 10’s.  This is especially ironic because it’s not like I’ve ever had much time to sit still in Info Tech classes – there’s always someone unsure how to do something, or something glitching out to debug, etc.  But I haven’t sweated over how to keep a room full of kids engaged.

This year, I’m not sure if I just got an early Christmas present or if I’m hitting a new level of challenge-mode teaching.

I just got hired a couple of weeks ago as a just-over-half-time Digital Media Arts teacher at a middle school.  This is simultaneously exactly-what-I-dreamed-of, and totally a different world.  I’ve never taught for more than a month or so at the middle school level, and never taught a full course of Digital Media to this age group.  Plus, there is no prior Digital Media program here – I am it, and I get to invent it.

I started off with a ‘short list’ of things worth learning to do that I might be able to do with the kids. Then I quickly realized that I only see these kids for about 30 hrs per group, and my ‘short list’ started getting a LOT shorter. From talking with other Explorations (“Explo”) teachers I found out that it’s pretty normal to just stick with one topic of focus per grade and only get through somewhere around two or three major projects completed.

My super-short-list now includes:

• learning some basics in Office-type apps
• Photoshop Elements
• interactive storytelling (maybe leading into game design) via Scratch

Now, I had a longer list of “creative” skills in there before – video work, maybe sound? Web publishing via something like WordPress? Adding Scratch in there was something I felt like I was sneaking in, sort of a pet project that I would let slide in under the radar along with the other stuff.

But then I kept hearing from other Explo teachers – this is where you get to teach what you love, what you’re passionate about.  Pick something you know well and bring that to the kids.

So it looks like Scratch is coming out from under the radar and possibly becoming my main focus for Grade 6’s once we’re done with this Office-y stuff.  And I don’t know why I felt like I had to quietly tuck this in.  Scratch lets them create animations with cartoons characters.  It lets them make basic interactive games.  So they’re going to have a blast, and along the way pick up a foundation in computational thinking.  I don’t think anyone’s going to object here.

I’m not sure where this is all going to end up or how permanent this role will be. But it’s kind of weird how it’s bringing this blog full-circle back to my early pre-teaching ramblings on game design.  I’d imagined settling into a school teaching some standard courses and then maybe starting up a little after-school game design / development club for students.  Now it looks like I might not need to, because I could bring it to kids in the classroom.

Today I’m teaching on-call, and just finished up a morning lesson reviewing multiplying three-digit by two-digit numbers with some grade 6’s.

This was a weird experience. I’ll be seeing a lot of grade 6’s this year, as I got a three-days-a-week contract teaching digital media arts to grade 6’s and 7’s.  However I’ve rarely taught math for kids this young, and never done a straight-up arithmetic lesson with them.  It raises all kinds of questions for me.

My plan was to review the answers for a handful of questions, and then assign the rest of them. But I didn’t spot an answer key anywhere so I started working them out on the Smartboard.  I had also glanced at the textbook and seen that the notes on the previous page found there mention multiple methods of solving – an area model, a long-form method of breaking apart hundreds, tens, and ones and pairing them up separately, and then usual “short” method of multiplying by hand.

So, I mention to the kids that there’s more than one way to do it, but I’ll start by reviewing the way I usually do it (the “usual”).  We get one question in, and a kid offers to show us a method his teacher last year showed him for 2-digit-by-2-digit multiplication.  He draws a box that breaks apart tens and ones for each number and pairs them up to multiply in a grid.

(Drawing with a trackpad here, sorry.)

So at this point I am nerding out and rather happy about this! The kid only sees this as something that works with numbers under 100, though.  On a later question, I drew out a 3-by-2 grid and suggested they could see if it works for these numbers too. I think I heard some out-loud “aha!” moments there, woo yay.

However, only kids who’d seen this last year seemed to be following, and afterwards I had a number of them asking me what to do when a textbook question wanted them to describe why they picked a particular method. “I’ve only been taught one way to do it.”

On top of this, I also simply stumbled with writing out too many of these problems myself and spending a bit too much time on it. Add a laggy SmartBoard to the mix and it quickly became a distraction. I finally pulled out my iPod calculator to quickly give them the last few solutions.

So, why? What do we get by having kids sit for half an hour working on these problems quietly, without exploring what the numbers mean or other ways of seeing it? Part of me wants to believe that this is a useful skill, that at some odd points in my life I need to work out a few calculations by hand. But honestly, I rarely if ever am without a calculator now.

Without the extra layer of meaning in seeing the problem multiple ways, I don’t know what the value is to it. But the number of problems, while not overwhelming, was still enough that you’d be hard-pressed to make time for having kids work things out more than one way. (You obviously could cut questions to make time – but not all teachers are comfortable with that.)

Is this going to shift for the better? We already have these changes mandated in the curriculum. But how many people are okay with this? How many generalists (because everyone at this level is, to some extent, a generalist here) have the experience to be able to go beyond what they were taught when they were kids?  (Frankly if there were shifts in teaching Social Studies over the last twenty years I’d have no idea what they are.)

I’m glad I had the chance to stumble through that lesson.  I’ve got no idea how to wrap this post up coherently though as it, like me right now, is kind of a jumble of questions, hopes, and concerns.

Over the last year, I’ve seen a bunch of stuff about assigning zeroes, going easy on students, whether failure is good / bad / etc.  Today a job interview reminded me of this again so I thought I’d put my thoughts out there finally.

My job as a teacher is to help students achieve a learning goal.  That goal isn’t chosen by me, but even if it was, I’d want it to be a goal worth reaching.  What’s more, I’d want it to be a challenge – something that’s possible but not easy to attain.  The reason?  Challenges are more fun.  They’re more likely to keep you “in the zone” while learning, and they’re more likely to build up your confidence in your abilities.

Now, there have been some great essays / blog posts / etc about how “failure isn’t an option” for their students because they want their students held accountable from start to finish without giving them the “out” of a zero or a failed chapter.  And I respect this and agree.  There have been other people saying that if you’re unwilling to fail a student, you’re not doing your job, etc.  I also respect this and agree – because these are not talking about the same thing.  So let’s just admit now that the title phrase I used here is horrible and can mean too many things.

What we believe about failure sums up a LOT of what we believe about teaching, learning, and probably life.  So here’s how I glue this all together:

Failure is temporary

In 99.9% of life’s stuff-that-happens, failure does not kill anyone and can be recovered from.  Learning to recover from failure or setbacks is called resiliency, and it’s important.  Really important.  Because sometimes life sucks.

When I’ve failed courses before (it only happened a couple of times, honest), I was set back, and it was lousy.  But then I retook those courses next year and fixed the problem.  My degree lasted a bit longer and cost me a bit more money than I’d have liked, but in the end I learned what I needed to learn.

When I’ve failed at jobs before (again, only a couple of times), I was also set back and it was just as lousy.  But I moved on, I found other jobs, and in some cases learned more about myself and about what I’m best suited to do professionally.  It didn’t last forever.

(The small slice of humanity that end up being engineers in life-critical situations?  They still have failures – that’s why there’s QA testing, duh.  Heart surgeons I guess just make all their mistakes on cadavers in med school, but eww, I don’t want to visualize that.)

Failure is necessary for challenge

Or at least, the possibility of failure is necessary.  Think about it – if you knew it was impossible to fail at something, how could that possibly be considered a challenge?  Would it be as satisfying when you succeed?

This is something game designers know intimately well, although their approach to it varies wildly.  Some create insanely difficult games but keep the challenges as short, repeatable and rewarding as possible, or build up a relaxing atmosphere to keep players feeling welcome.  On the other end of the spectrum, some create games with simplified challenges but keep people engaged through narrative flow.  This can backfire though, as was seen in the mild internet backlash when a gamer posted a video of someone “completing” the first level of a new Call of Duty game without actually firing a shot (essentially, doing nothing but running along with the scripted events).

I try to make my math classes in the past as accessible as possible.  By “accessible” I basically mean, “I want it to be as easy as possible for you to succeed at this challenging goal.”  That might make the class “easier” in that I’m willing to remove unnecessary stumbling blocks out of the way – like poorly-worded word problems, for example – but that doesn’t mean I’m lowering the target.  If the goal is “climb that mountain”, I’m not going to pretend that climbing this small hill is the same thing.  (But I might point out that the west side is a lot less cliff-insanity than the one you’re trying.)*

So, yes, failure must be possible, otherwise what kind of a challenge would this be?

Failing is not a great choice to make, but it’s a choice

Remember the examples up there in the “failure is temporary” section?  Yes, I recovered and learned from them, but they were still lousy and often a sign that I’d made some bad choices.  Likewise, I don’t think I need to worry about glorifying failure to students.  On the other hand, there have been times where failing something was clearly a choice made by the student, whether consciously or as a result of inaction.  In some way, insisting that failure is “not an option” risks taking what control students have in their learning away from them.  But somehow you’ve got to mix this with a stubborn desire for students to not give up and realize their capabilities … man this is hurting my brain just thinking about it.

So, okay, sometimes failure happens.  Yes, it’s an option, although almost never a great one.  But failures are temporary, so I’ll let a kid upgrade their mark with a requiz whenever I can.  And also since failures are temporary, I’ll assign an F to a course grade at the end if the kid just hasn’t gotten there, because they’ll recover.  Acting like it’s impossible to recover from failure is a scary worldview to pass on.

* P.S. I have never climbed a mountain in my life and have no clue, it just sounded good.

This year has been chaotic.

Between courses I hadn’t taught before, class lists packed with struggling students, and hard lessons in student motivation, I was awfully glad to have made it through my one semester contract and go back to on-call teaching for a while. The mixed blessing since has been that it’s been too busy to feel like much of a break.  I’ve had a one-month stay at a middle school, I’m ending the year with what looks to be three weeks teaching Science 9, and there’s been plenty to do in between.  Add to that an unexpected tragedy that simultaneously hit both my church family and the school I’m ending the year in.  Yeah, I’m about ready for summer.

Lessons learned:

• I need to do more than keep a gradebook that makes sense to just me. I need to improve how I communicate my grading to the students. I need to take stronger steps to get kids away from feeling hit by failure when they see low numbers on quizzes. I’m thinking of stealing Frank Noschese’s SBG student folder structure pretty heavily; I’m awfully tempted to get rid of numbers on assessment results. So sick of points.
• The first week or two of a course are huge. Unfortunately, I didn’t get those this year – I was hired one week in, and my first week there was basically a scramble. Recovering from that was messy.
• Courses full of students who don’t care, don’t need the course to pass and are only there because they couldn’t get a spare and signed up to be with their friends are … challenging.
• I had some good middle school experiences in the second semester. I still don’t know if that’s where I’d want to end up, but I’m less opposed to it at least. Although I think my most likely path to ideal-job is to get hired somewhere to teach math, and then create / expand the computing program once I’m in the door. Not as likely to happen in a middle school model here from what I’ve seen.
• If I were teaching science full time, I would miss math. I’m two weeks in to a short-term thing right now, and it’s fun, but yeah, I’m more math teacher than science. (Although covering the end of a unit on circuits was pretty awesome.)
• I need a structure to homework checks from Day One, for myself as well as the students. In my perfect world, kids would figure out that homework matters because of the natural consequence of *actually learning*, not because of my gradebook. But I need to give them structure to lead them to that point, not just toss them in the deep end. (Also, I need the structure so I don’t just toss them in the deep end by default.)
• The only thing worse than a cheesy textbook is no textbook at all. (Unless you’ve got some other way of generating / finding good practice problems for kids that you don’t have to guard carefully in case they end up on someone else’s test.)

Two weeks to go.