Recipe cooking

By disposition I’m not a follower of instructions, and so as a teacher I began by offering very few instructions. I gave students big general assignments, threw lots of materials and models at them, and let them figure something out, kind of on the Inuit model:

“I remember an essay by Jean Briggs, an ethnographer who studied child-rearing among the Inuit. One of the things that disturbed her was the practice of setting problems for children, not providing the materials they needed, and teasing them when they failed to solve them. She initially thought it was cruel. She then came to realize that if, for example, an adult Inuit was out seal-hunting on the ice and some of his equipment broke down, the inability to improvise a solution would kill him.” (Comment here by John McCreery)

Bonus: consistent with open-ended, inclusive, non-prescriptive feminist and post-colonial epistemologies! Because I lived through the 90s and paid attention. And I got back plenty of good work this way. But I also got a lot of really terrible work, stuff that made my eyes cross and my brain melt, stuff that was dreadful by any conceivable standard but ‘turn something in’. Stuff that would get ya killed if there were polar bears and sub-zero temperatures about. And that made me sad.

So in the spirit of figuring something out, I read the research and followed the discussions and listened to the students who were telling me that these assignments were too vague and confusing, and that some people just don’t know how to work this way, and some of those need more explicit instruction about what’s expected and what to do. A recipe. And I thought yeah, it’s probably not reasonable to expect students to do things we haven’t shown them how to do. And so after piecemealing more explicit instruction for quite awhile, a couple years back I completely redid my syllabuses, which no one was reading anyway, into dedicated instructional primers, dividing them into sections on requirements, guidance, and assessments, where anyone reading the syllabus and doing what it says would inevitably do pretty well in the class. And then I turned my classes into workshops, where what we did was work through the steps of good research, analysis, and writing described in the syllabus in a recursive developmental process, so everything had a chance to become familiar and settle into practices.

I still get back plenty of good work, and I get a lot less really terrible work. That’s a win. I’m less sad.

What I came here to write is that as far as I can see, there’s no particular correlation between wanting a recipe and actually reading and following a recipe. The ones who read and follow along get what they need. The students who previously would have come to me asking for more explicit instruction on ‘what I’m looking for’ still do, only now they have to systematically ignore all the places and ways I’ve already told, shown, and worked them through ‘what I’m looking for’. The students who would have struggled because they just couldn’t make sense of what was expected now do that in the presence of a dedicated and encompassing instructional framework of explicit expectations.

There’s a very sad scene in “The Joy Luck Club” where Rose, having at length and systematically demolished any expectation that she might be a competent or interesting person capable of making responsible decisions, begs Ted to just tell her what he wants. And what he wants is the Rose who was a competent, interesting person capable of making responsible decisions. But there’s not a recipe for that, or really any way of saying it that would get through the debris they’ve made of their relationship. That’s obviously a bit pat, and a bit sideways of the instructional situation I’m talking about here. But as to the students who want a recipe, as far as I can tell it’s not really a recipe they want or that would help. They want the task to be made familiar in a way that doesn’t take them out of their comfort zones or put pressure on them to be competent, interesting, or responsible.

There’s a whole lot more to say about this, but I’m not sure how much is at stake. Over the years I have also learned to be less confident that anything about my teaching in particular or the massive education apparatus in general was creating massive swings of achievement, for better or worse. As educational research keeps showing, for a whole lot of pretty interesting (and sometimes heartbreaking) reasons the distribution of performance is basically homeostatic in roughly a bell curve shape. In any given school or program or classroom your n=small enough to enable lumpy statistical anomalies, and there are also threshold effects where someone tips from one attractor to another, which can be really striking and feel like the whole transformative promise of education fulfilled. But those moments are striking because they’re not the norm, and so they just don’t work as the standard. For the most part there’s only so much education can do to overcome some pretty sticky priors, and it’s not much. The systems are complex, and they’re resilient.

It’s hard to maintain strong opinions about better and worse teaching in the face of these inconvenient facts. Not much difference with and without recipes; a bit higher floor, a bit more general competence overall. A more modest goal of calibrating and provisioning the homeostasis for its better expressions is cautiously supported. Unburdened of crushing infinity standards about changing the world, it is observably possible to set people up for more success in the general zones and trajectories of their aptitudes. Bad can become less bad. Good can become more good. Meh can become more robustly and effectively meh. The instruction and workshop format seems to do a better job of distributing the increments of progress in this way.

That’s a wrap

I just told a section of introductory World History they were going to make me cry, and let them out a half hour early.

Their second paper is due next week, so this week was for workshopping. My focus was on the analysis rubric: people, events, ideas, structures, dynamics. I had run through this several times over the course of the semester, not expecting them to learn it yet but just to get it familiar. (They don’t learn things until they need them for something. I’ve observed this over and over – we waste so much time teaching out of sequence with tasks! But I learned it first from Dyke the Elder years ago remarking that he’d had Calculus three different times but only learned it the third, because he needed it then for something else he was doing. Feynman says this in his famous lectures on physics, as well.)

Tuesday I asked the students to pull out their devices and look up structure and dynamics. Because the pump was primed, they found the ‘right’ definitions right away. We talked for a second about how these concepts could be helpful in organizing and making sense of the mass of information they’ve accumulated in their research. Then I pulled up one of their draft introductory paragraphs and we walked through it together, finding the people, events, ideas, structures, and dynamics it mentioned or implied. I diagrammed this all simply on the whiteboard as we went, and filled it up easily. I got the sense that this process really opened their eyes to how much was involved in even the simplest analyses.

Today we pulled up another paragraph, and with very little prompting they did the same exercise with it. The topic was Nazi propaganda, and the author had already figured out that their project was more about redirection than persuasion. By the end, we were talking about feed-in and feedback dynamics among citizens, the army, and the party. It was way cool.

I asked the whole group what they were learning for their own work from the discussion of their classmates’. One said it was seeing its research in a whole new light, as a way to figure things out rather than just amass and spout information. Another said it was now seeing a whole series of connections between its research and the rest of the class. A third chimed in that it was like we were writing a textbook together.

I asked if they wanted to workshop another paragraph and they said no, we’re ready. Which I thought was a good place to stop for the day.

Fixing a hole

(Crossposted from Dead Voles)

One of the themes of my history classes for the last little while is arrangement and assembly, both in relation to how history works and in relation to how the students work. If the little dinger goes ‘ding’ and they get that they’re part of history (I mean actually get it, not just spout canned homilies about it), so much the better.

I try to work this up into an appropriately complex analysis on the history side, in part by leveraging a more simple version of it on the student side. What’s been missing is a really clean image of the process of accumulation, arrangement, and assemblage that routinely goes into human works like, say, college essays – and their evaluation. You’d think you could just talk this through by direct reference to their own writing, but for reasons that are fairly complicated, many students are not receptive or actively resistant to direct writing instruction. I’ve found that a good metaphor sidesteps the blockage and creates leverage to move it. So, I finally just got around to accumulating and arranging a slideshow ( house presentation ) that I think may do the trick. It’s twelve slides of twelve pictures, which I’ll reproduce and discuss below (and crosspost on Attention Surplus to be part of that archive). The assembly will happen in each class discussion. I expect to take a whole class period with each group on this, timed right before they start producing process work for their first papers. Suggestions welcome.

The metaphor is building a house. First slide:

Easy enough. A plan. What is this, in relation to the assignment? Here I get to call their attention to all of the design guidance in the syllabus. Second slide:

Is this a house yet? Why not? What is it? Third slide:

Here we’re looking at raw materials. A tidy pile of lumber is obviously not a house yet, just like a pile of facts is not an essay yet. But wait, fourth slide:

Turns out that lumber wasn’t so raw, as materials go. We’re following the history of accumulation and arrangement here. (For me, and sometimes to the students, another image is a story Dyke the Elder tells about ordering a bicycle, ‘some assembly required’, and then having a truck roll up with a drum of raw latex sap, bauxite, petroleum, and so on.) Research; primary sources, secondary sources, interpretation, analysis. Fifth slide:

At this point we can safely say ‘and so on’, perhaps mentioning acorns and the strategies squirrels use to hide them from each other. We can also start to have a little side conversation about what it means to say ‘I built this’, which gets us to slide six:

– which affords an opportunity to humanize the discussion, reflect more deeply on the narratives of independence in relation to the realities of massive systems of enabling interdependence, and talk about the relative fungibility of materials – since this is clearly not a house, although it’s made of some of the same things as a house. This is also a place to begin to bring home the connection to authorship and plagiarism. (Speaking of plagiarism, all of the images except this one used in this post and presentation came right up on a google search and represent ‘types’ in a way that makes me feel comfortably fair-usey about them. This is not an official legal opinion. My thanks to all of the creators and rights-holders.) Slide seven:

Well that’s very nice, isn’t it. A finished house, a finished paper. What went into that? Planning, an image, materials, craft, elaborated skill and care. Slide eight:

Oh well hey, that’s nice too, and very different. Now we can talk about style. How would you pick between these too? Matter of taste here, but also who it’s for and what it’s trying to accomplish. Speaking of which, slide nine:

Nothing wrong with this, especially if you’re getting a bit older and the stairs have become a quandary, or if you’re moving up from a single-wide and don’t want your sensibilities too jostled, or you’re a developer looking to make the cheapest possible buck, or you’re a society seeking a kind of material consensus, or etc. So here we get to talk about how styles do things in relation to audiences and agendas. I anticipate this is where the conversation is most likely to get bogged down in defense mechanisms. Slide ten:

Everyone just relax. Of course people build to suit local purposes and materials. And of course we can read those right back off of what they build. Is the ranch a ‘bad’ house? How about the grass one? How about the victorian? Depends on what you’re trying to accomplish, what resources are available, who’s judging and by what criteria. But that ‘depends’ is not an ‘it’s all good’ depends. Slide eleven:

Most of the papers I get. In some ways an admirable contrivance, but we are still justified in reading a lack of resource, skill, and attention to detail back off of it. Not the sort of thing you’d want from certified accomplished fabricators like college graduates. And now slide twelve:

Is this the same as the one before it? Why, or why not?

Sticky

Patrick and I have been talking a lot about what makes education ‘sticky’. The reason being that we keep working through analysis discussions with both our groups of students, to where they seem to be ‘getting it’, and come back next time to find that we’re basically starting from scratch. I actually find this process so mentally exhausting that I don’t have much more to say about it right now.

Speaking of mental exhaustion, at least part of the problem is that they’re not doing the reading. This may be some playing limpy, but even when they do the reading, they don’t understand it. It’s hard. Which creates an obvious vicious circle. And a further problem is that the readings are in some ways deeply unfamiliar to the students, even when the conceptual level is not forbidding. And a further problem is that because these are history classes we can’t pause too long on a familiarization strategy to create interest and comprehension (‘this reminds me of me because…’) – time, place, and change matter in history. It’s how they’re NOT like us that we’re after, in large and essential part.

In my introductory World History classes I handle this by turning the bug into a feature and doing very close readings of very short texts in class, to get the process of critical reading, uptake, and analysis fairly well ingrained before getting too fancy with coverage. It doesn’t feel like I should have to do this as much in upper-division classes – these are ‘more advanced’ classes, more ‘in-depth’, and I want to be able to dive into a more extensive and conceptually rich content without grinding through the skilling preliminaries. But once again it’s not working very well. Eventually I may even learn from my experience about this. Apparently I need to think about what has made my own education in this area less than sticky.