I think I might be waiting for a spring breeze. And just what I mean by that, I am still figuring out.

For example, you can’t argue with me about the iPhone’s appeal to the naturalist, because I agree. Peterson’s Guide to North American Birds smaller than your hand? Identify constellations from the photo lens? I know. With so many places it could slip unobtrusively into my backcountry pack, it’s hard to contain the drool.

And yet, and yet. Isn’t there a time when even bringing a book along on a hike– much less a book on crack like the iPhone– actually draws your attention away from…simple…observing?  From simple, visceral experience? The cataloging, the identifying, the compartmentalizing, the defining; doesn’t the din of the mind move us away, at last, and maybe permanently, from the fundamental reality of our senses? When I rush to pin my virtual map up against the stars, doesn’t it, in the end, block them out?

Schooling comes into this in several ways. One (and again): an uncritical love affair with technology does nothing for our students. If we do not give them the tools to see that every gain we make with technology takes something else away– something we may need very badly– then we leave them mired in the worship of what Neil Postman called “the god of technology,” a Faustian bargain at best:

Ask anyone who knows something about computers to talk about them, and you will find that they will, unabashedly and relentlessly, extol the wonders of computers. You will also find that in most cases they will completely neglect to mention any of the liabilities of computers. This is a dangerous imbalance, since the greater the wonders of a technology, the greater will be its negative consequences…

Perhaps the best way I can express this idea is to say that the question, “What will a new technology do?” is no more important than the question, “What will a new technology undo?” Indeed, the latter question is more important, precisely because it is asked so infrequently.

Ask it, friends. As educators, we must ask it.

(This quote  from what should be required reading for every educator, Postman’s mind-blowing lecture “Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change.” )

Second, we must recognize that school, in its very essence, also moves us inexorably away from visceral experience. Simply by placing a premium on reading and writing, it does so. This is not my thesis– that honor belongs to David Abram– but it is my belief, confirmed in experience, and it bugs me more and more with each passing day. Yes, this is the English teacher talking.

Yet hopelessly and irrevocably in love with words, I actually wonder if this doesn’t put me in the correct place to criticize their overuse. For if our education becomes a serpent biting its own tail– reading and writing about, well, reading and writing– then what are we actually reading and writing about? What are we really learning?

The whole thing seems to crumble, like a coal self-consumed; one push with a stick, and the ash collapses and blows away.

This is a lot to pile on the poor little iPhone, and you’ll note that I’m not actually placing the fate of the world on its delicate silver shoulders; that, too, would be overestimating its importance.

But there’s that spring breeze, though, moving through the room, or my daughter’s laugh. Hip-deep in apps, I may easily miss them both.

And it just gets easier and easier, doesn’t it.

I’m deeply aware– some might say obsessively so– about the moral dimension of teaching. Far more than irregular verbs or how to construct an engaging summative paragraph, I work to teach my students how literature can help ask and answer the questions that make living meaningful. And then I kind of kill myself trying to model such living in my own behavior, with varying degrees of success.

Why? Middle school kids notice. In fact, they have an eagle eye for justice that many adults lose. They notice when I slough something off, break a promise, or unintentionally flout my own rules, and have no compunction about calling me out. Some teachers call this disrespect, but I encourage and treasure it. The kids keep me sane and honest, especially when I feel the habit of rigor that they inspire, spilling– necessarily, I believe– into extracurricular areas. Ultimately, I can never forget that my integrity may be the only promise of consistency that some of these kids see. (Thanks, Kant. Some days I wish I never met you.)

So in this spirit, I committed personally to a strict adherence to contract regarding my paid leave use. This depleted my bank of personal days, while leaving a substantial bank of sick days untouched– and unusable for family emergencies. Imagine, then, my reaction yesterday to the fallout from the fact that I had to take nearly four days of unpaid leave in order to be with my dying parent.

(For you rule-mongers out there, The National Family Leave Act only legislates unpaid leave; and in my district, sick time may not be used in its place.)

I don’t publicize this as some kind of “how great I am” moment, or a snotty revenge against my HR department. I hold no grudges there; they’re just doing their jobs. Nor do I mean to whine about the lost money, although this is undeniably part of the steep price I am paying now.

Rather I remain reeling– as usual– in the moral realm; stunned at the message of a system that punishes me– never mind the folks not as luckily endowed with benefits– so swiftly and concretely, for doing the right thing.

And the first thing I wonder is, “How am I going to prepare my students for this inevitable disappointment? How will I ever begin to help them understand?” Because for some of them, an experience like this has the potential to knock them clean out of principled living forever, and make no mistake.

Anyone have some suggestions for pre-teen fiction where the protagonist is left at the end with only the satisfaction of a clear conscience?

“What is honesty worth?” my students ask. They ask this, explicitly and implicitly, every day. My answer today is tangible, secret, and unsatisfactory. It is not the touching and uselessly ephemeral Mastercard sentiment: “It’s priceless.” Today, honesty is worth a tired teacher, some tears, and eight hundred and thirty-nine dollars.

Argue as if you’re right. Listen as if you’re wrong.

Cheers to Don Burkins for linking to this in the comments.

I let the kids work on clipboards out of their seats. I assign homework once a week, if that. I spend inordinate amounts of time conferencing individually so I can match students with books they’ll fall in love with. And our first whole class assignment was to compile a list of, and vote upon, procedures for dealing with behaviors that violated the two root norms I gave them (participation and respect).

It’s important to note here that I list all suggested procedures for the vote, even those with which I disagree. This is one of the central components of the constructivist and autonomist learning theories on which I build my instruction. In otherwords: after laying down some tools and guidelines, it’s usually a better choice for a teacher to mainly shut up and let the kids figure things out for themselves.

I’d tweaked the rules-creating thing considerably since last year, and was really pleased with the reception. Kids were surprised, engaged, invested. I began with an idea stolen from a colleague: ask for a list of teacher behaviors that kids hate. This is an assignment for which students have no end of enthusiasm (or, sadly, material).

Among them were the hysterical (”Coffee breath. Could you people please chew some gum?”), the horrifying (”I hate it when teachers have long conversations on their cell phones in the middle of class”), the obvious (”I hate it when the teacher punishes the whole class for someone one person has done”), and this near unanimous statement: We hate it when the teacher deliberately embarrasses us in front of our peers.

Fast forward to our voting results. Imagine my seriously disconcerted amusement when out of approximately 80 kids, 42 vote to handle misbehaviors by putting the offending student in an isolated desk, in full view of all, in the middle of the room for the period. (The desk in question, ironically, was a temporary base for my digital projector and wasn’t supposed to be there at all.) The students were quite clear that the purpose of this was shame and mockery.

Interesting. Very interesting.

So I whip up a Powerpoint slide showing the voting results and the initial list of hated teacher behavior, with the bold red title: WE HAVE A CONTRADICTION. I gently ask a representative sample of my class sections to fill out index cards telling me how this contradiction could be.

Read their tallied answers, and ponder with me.

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#4: I don’t think kids took the voting seriously.

This, I think, was a key issue. No matter how earnestly and thoroughly I present a co-government model to the students, it goes so deeply against the grain of the majority of their classroom experiences that they refuse to buy in, despite themselves. Mark Windschitl calls this cultural dissonance one of the strongest forces working against constructivism in schools today. So much for our cherished myth of the Lone Ranger Teacher. (Or the Lone Hippie, as it were.)

#3: You’re not being embarrassed by sitting in a corner. You’re being embarrassed by your behavior.

A undeniably strong cohort of kids feel public humiliation to be an appropriate and effective punishment, even though– perhaps because– they hate it personally.

#2: We think it’s funny to laugh at our friends.

This commendably honest insight, you’ll note, has nothing to do with the efficacy of the punishment; it just highlights its pure entertainment. I find myself wondering all kinds of things when I read this. Is our generational gap so unbridgeable, our curricula so existentially useless, our instruction so god-awful boring, our teens’ collective media-shaped sense of humor so cruel, that kids rely on the enlivenment of a classroom solely via crime and punishment? This could keep me up at night.

#1: We don’t want to be embarrassed, but we want to embarrass other people.

It’s tempting to wash my hands of this ambiguity by attributing it to the traditionally regarded shift in preteens from Piaget’s concrete operations to formal operations. I do think there’s some broad truth to the idea that preteens are only just beginning to think outside their little bubbles. A Summer 2008 article from cognitive scientist Dan Willingham has me rethinking cognitive stages entirely, however. He makes this bold and terrifying statement: Recognize that no content is inherently developmentally inappropriate.

Whoa. So once again, it comes back to me. How am I, as teacher, actually asking my kids to move beyond their simplistic (if only human) concepts of equality and justice? How am I teaching them compassion?

And is this something I can even teach?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I don’t think any of this constitutes an infallibly damning argument against autonomist approaches for middle school kids. However, I think it does– painfully– point out that these approaches cannot be considered some kind of magical silver anti-establishment Bullet of Happiness. (Someone needs to do a cartoon of this. Any takers?)

Let’s summarize. Via autonomy, preteens are not only being asked to stretch their moral and social thinking in an already tumultuous time, but to do so in a wacked out classroom environment which is explicitly unsupported by the infrastructure of most public schools. Additionally, unlike younger counterparts, preteens will have that many more years under their belts to internalize and solidify survival tactics in the social totalitarianism that is standard fare in both the classroom and the lunchroom. Indeed, they may be well on their way to swallowing it all with a smile.

There will be backfiring, incomplete thinking, dissonance, resistance. These challenges need to be met very thoughtfully and carefully indeed. A mere vote on whether to use a dunce cap or not ain’t going to cut it.

For now, I’ve split the difference with the kids by going with their second procedural choice for misbehaviors, which is a system of warning cards used by two other teachers on my team. It’s effective, silent, respectful, and doesn’t re-invent the wheel. But at bottom this merely sidesteps the problem of how not to become an autocrat when when what the kids want, even democratically, is something that I don’t think is right. I’ve copped out, and I don’t like it.

The Hippie has some things to think about for next year.

Dan Willingham’s website: http://www.danielwillingham.com .

Or humor me. The mysterious commenter Dave (at dave@dave.dave, apparently) kindly provides this fast and super fun article at Slate from just last week, on the actual means by which we read on line differently from paper text. Michael Agger, who has won my heart with his snarky use of Net-bold type alone:

Humans are informavores. On the Internet, we hunt for facts. In earlier days, when switching between sites was time-consuming, we tended to stay in one place and dig. Now we assess a site quickly, looking for an “information scent.” We move on if there doesn’t seem to be any food around.

Sorry about the long paragraph. (Eye-tracking studies show that online readers tend to skip large blocks of text.)

Also, I’m probably forcing you to scroll at this point. Losing some incredible percentage of readers. Bye. Have fun on Facebook.

Take or leave his wordplay, but I’m going to be be thinking all summer about the ramifications of the Net reading meta-approach this discusses. Could it be– could it– treated as a new genre of reading, unto itself?