The Teacher Power

I had an unexpected bonus conversation with my friend C.T. today, which revolved around some of my favorite topics: magic and the ability to change consciousness; the passion for creating art; the mysteries of saints; and the power of teachers.  During this last part of the conversation, we segued to a discussion of the challenge that some teachers put forward — which is that, in an effort to advance their own work and career and power, they wind up trampling on the capacities and capabilities of their students. Indeed, the teachers reap the rewards of the students’ labor, and the students take on the negative consequences of the teacher’s own bad work.

This rocked me back on my heels for a bit.  I’m still thinking about it.  We were talking about it in a magical/spiritual context. We’d both read a book recently in which a magical society’s inner circle of adepts was teaching rituals to their outer members which made the members feel powerful, but was in fact transferring power to the adepts… and shifting a lack-of-power onto the the students… not merely lack-of-power, but in fact negative-power.  A learned helplessness.

Which really rocked me back on my heels.

I mean, the nominal goal of teaching is to make our students more powerful than they already are.  Ideally, at the end of a year of teaching, when students go on to their next class, I want them to feel empowered and capable of doing work at a higher level than I am.  I mean, ideally, after a year or two in my classroom, they should never need me again, except maybe as a voice speaking to them out of their memories, “what would Mr. Watt do or say about this problem?”  If that voice ever comes up in their heads, though, I want that voice to be giving good advice, rather than bad advice.  I want them to feel empowered by memories of me, rather than disempowered.

This issue has been coming up a lot lately, actually.  Commenting on a friend’s Facebook wall earlier today, I noted that I hadn’t realized that he (much younger than me) had gone to a school where one of my college classmates taught.  This younger friend acknowledged that the college friend of mine had been a great teacher, because he taught critical thinking — but at the same time, this friend also acknowledged that the critical thinking he learned was a byproduct of my college-friend’s rants on a subject other than his official classroom subjects.  My young friend heard my old friend’s rants, and had to think about them: is this really true?  And the answer was often”yes, it is,” as often as it was “some yes, some no” and just as often as it could be “no”.

This is a serious complication in the work of teaching.  I mean, if I teach students what they need to know about history, simply in terms of facts, and fact-finding, great.  But what it means is just as important.  What are the overall themes of history? Are there patterns?  Is there some Hari Seldon-esque wisdom to be found in Nate Silver’s prognostications about the last election?  Are we empowering students by sharing resources with them, and making them fill out worksheets and take quizzes? Or are we disempowering them by doing the same?

C.T. and I spoke specifically about two magical teachers whose material we’ve worked with recently.  One of the things that magical teachers do (which exoteric/ordinary teachers like myself and many of my readers do not do) is give their students rituals to perform for their empowerment and spiritual growth.  C.T. had attended a workshop in which one of the presenters pointed out that some of these rituals do what they say they do — they empower the performers of the rituals so that they experience spiritual growth.  But, C.T. said that the presenter also warned about the opposite — rituals that disempower those who perform them, such that they think they’ve made spiritual progress, but in fact they have actually inflated their egos and empowered the teacher who has given them nothing of real value.  Meanwhile, the teacher gains power from the ritual performed — they get a toehold in the mental and emotional framework of the student, and the student is more inclined to treat further ‘empowerments’ as worthwhile and valuable, even as they are disempowered to seek further growth elsewhere.  Insidious.

And even as I think about it, I realize that this is something that many of us as exoteric teachers — in the everyday world of seventh grade classrooms and fifth grade math worksheets — have just as much temptation to do as teachers of esoteric systems of learning like Western Occultism or Tibetan Buddhism or Shaolin K’ung Fu. It’s easy to make students need us.  It’s easy to make students rely on us for the answers, or to make meaning of history or mathematics. Who among us has watched a student come back to our school, time and again, to seek advice from an old teacher or an old coach… the person that helped make sense in their lives when nothing else did.  I’ve had a few students continually return, until they saw through my veils and saw me as a human being; I know other students who continue to return to the same mentors, over and over again.  Which are stronger — the students who left us behind, and need us no longer? Or the students who keep returning to the same well, to drink of the same lessons?

I like to think that it’s the students who no longer need me that I’ve helped the most — after all, they can stand on their own two feet without me to carry them along any more.  And the ones who keep coming back, well… I help them, too, in my own way, and retailor my lessons to fit what they seem to need right now.  But part of me also wonders…

I’ve taught something like 75 students a year, directly, in my classes since I started teaching 16 years ago.  So I’ve had well over a thousand students (something closer to 1400 once I start calculating more precisely how many kids I taught in each year).  Yet I’d have to say that there are a fewer than a dozen who maintain any sort of regular contact with me. And I have to wonder — did I made them stronger?  Or did they recognize that I made them weaker in some way, and drop me as soon as they could?

It’s one of those deep imponderables that can really roil the soul of a teacher and make them question the validity of their career.

Kaplan on Education

Saul Kaplan of the Business Innovation Factory, published what he calls a ‘rant’ in the Mass High Tech, the journal of technology in New England. You can also read it on his blog.

And it’s a nice rant.  It really is.

It is time to move beyond public policy debates and institutional rugby scrums to try new solutions. What we are doing now isn’t working, and far too much of the federal stimulus investment in education is being spent to sustain the current system.

Isn’t that nice? I love it.  New solutions all around!

But what Kaplan (and so many others) are saying and writing and politicizing is the same old, tired polemic.

We need actionable platforms to enable real world experimentation for new education systems and solutions. We need to bring the voice of the student and student experience directly into the education innovation conversation. And we must create a purposeful network of innovators motivated to explore and test new system solutions. Join the conversation. The water is fine.

This is the language of business.  “We need to bring the voice of the student directly into the education innovation conversation.”  A network of innovators has to be created.  We need “actionable platforms” and “real world experimentation.”

Some of these things exist, actually, Saul.  That network of educational innovators you wanted?  They’re teachers using these odd social media services called Twitter and Facebook and Ning and WordPress.  We got tired of waiting around for educational authorities to give us access to these tools, so a lot of teachers went out and started up conversations online with each other (This blog has readers, though unfortunately not yet commentators, on every inhabited continent).

Chances are, though, that the teachers are using their home Internet services to use these tools, because the tools are blocked by filtering services from school.  And those student voices in the educational debate you wanted?  Those students are blocked from participating in the conversation in two ways — one, those self-same filters. And two, most of them don’t care about the education they’re getting in school. The majority of students have one, maybe two ‘good’ teachers, and the rest are “boring”, “mean”, or just plain “stupid.”

And this mirrors your own educational experience, so you believe the teens in your life when they say stuff like this: “School is boring.” “All my teachers hate me.”

Yet when you ASK kids to design as school — and I do this a LOT — the first thing they do is design the building.  Because kids think school=building.  When you dig deeper, though, and probe them with more questions, they imagine a school that operates much like today’s hybridized monsters.

What every solution I’ve ever read in a newspaper or on a website or a blog has failed to do… completely!… is tell us teachers what it is that all you non-teachers would like us to do during the eight or nine hours we have your children in our care and tutelage. When we ask, we get lists like this:

1. Explore real-world problems
2. Implement 21st century learning
3. Implement student-centered learning
4. Stop giving pointless worksheets
5. Stop teaching to the test
6. Make it relevant to the kids’ lives

Starting with #5., first — we’ll stop teaching to the test when you stop basing our salaries and likelihood of future employment on The Test.  And related to that, #4., half the pointless worksheets we give are related to “teaching to the test.”

Which brings us to this list:

1. Explore real-world problems
2. Implement 21st century learning
3. Implement student-centered learning
4. Make it relevant to the kids’ lives

Real-world problems require real-world data and real-world tools.  If you want chemists, America, you have to put top-notch chemists into your high school and middle school classrooms, you have to give them instruments and equipment and raw ingredients, and you have to convince the parents to sign liability waivers in case their kid blows himself or others up, or poisons them with toxic fumes, or wrecks the science wing of the school.  If you want architects and designers, you have to give them access to working designers, architects, and landscapers.  And you have to shell out money for gardens and plants and koi ponds and things like rakes and shovels and dirt.  If you want nuclear physicists or astronomers, you need to consider building a reactor pile in the school gymnasium, and a planetarium or an observatory on the baseball field.  And you need to hire a physicist and an astronomer who will take on some students as apprentices and teach them the ropes.  A climatologist needs a dozen weather stations all over town and an Internet link for the data she and her students collect.

But here’s the trouble.  What you’ve currently got are schools built around five core subjects, plus sometimes-art and sometimes-music, and sometimes-sports.  Your school’s payroll includes a huge number of English, History and Education majors plus some football and basketball coaches, a physics teacher and a biology teacher, and some administrators.  Your school’s budget includes line items for mice for the class snake and cage litter for the hamster.  There isn’t a line item for a used gene sequencer, or a 9″ refracting telescope or its observatory, or a plastics-moulding laboratory, or a digital recording studio with a green screen and a sound booth anywhere on the list.

Or the budget to hire personnel to operate, maintain, and upgrade these kinds of facilities.  So anyone who is going to do those kinds of 21st-century skills trainings in the classroom, Mr. Kaplan, is going to be a teacher who happens to already be interested in the tools. As a hobby. Not someone trained in their use, who uses them professionally.

And your current incentive system says

• No money for failing schools
• Only money for schools at the top
• more testing
• more testing
• more testing
• better discipline

and, oh, yeah:

• more computer use in the classroom if you can swing it
• NO Actual, health-oriented, real sex education. Ever.

I read somewhere that there’s like 144,000 schools in the United States, and that we’ve just allocated $4.6 billion for school ‘reform’.  So if you want Reform, and not ‘reform’, I suggest a Marshall Plan for schools.  Take that $4.6 billion, and give every school in America … $31,944.44.

Oh.

Better figure out your priorities, America.  Apparently you can send thousands of soldiers to Afghanistan, but you’re not interested in giving one more teacher to every school in America.

Egregors and Schools

For reasons that initially had very little to do with school education, I’m reading John Michael Greer‘s Inside a Magical Lodge. Greer’s book is published by Llewellyn Books, which usually publishes things about Tarot, Hermetic magic, Wicca, Druidism and other texts that most public schools would likely regard with some suspicion if they turned up in a student bookbag or locker, much less in a teacher’s bag or desk. Greer himself is an archdruid in the Ancient Order of Druids in America.

One of the concepts Greer introduced me to was the concept of the egregor (or egregore), which is the essential spirit of a lodge or magical working group.  Greer likens these spirits or geniuses (or muses) to the sudden emotional change that can sweep through a crowd that turns them into a mob.  In fraternal organizations like the Freemasons and The Oddfellows and the Grange, the egregor is made up of the thoughts, actions, and individual patterns and habits of behavior of the members — but the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

What does this have to do with education? Well, in Ira Socol’s piece at Change.org today, he argues (rather successfully) that the structure of modern schools was deliberately designed to separate an elite group from the lower-paid masses.  The goal was to provide every advantage for the children of the existing elites (through private schools), to find the best candidates from the vast majority of students who will be good-quality intermediate and high-level managers, and the ‘unwashed masses’.  He argues that the system is what needs to be changed, not the people in it.

And Greer’s point about Egregors suddenly comes into sudden relief.  Greer argues that when you connect an initiate of a fraternal lodge with the lodge symbology, you’re bringing them into direct contact with the subtle, spiritual energy of the lodge’s guiding spirit.  But there’s a risk when you’re forming a new magical organization — because the old spirits are out there, and they want to have a group of people to connect with magically on this side of “the veil” that separates their world from ours.  If your magical group connects with a spirit that does bad things, or at least doesn’t connect well with your your group’s intent… well, Greer says, you have to stop using the symbols that call that spirit, and probably even formally banish that spirit from being involved in your group.

Thanks to Harry Potter, we can sort of imagine what Greer is talking about even if we have no idea how magic is supposed to work.

But let’s consider our schools as magical organizations for a moment.  The state or national education department is perhaps the Grand Lodge, that maintains standards and hands out warrants to the individual schools.  The local superintendant or principal or head of school is the Master of the local lodge, and the teachers and students are members at various levels or degrees of initiation.

But all the schools are using the same symbols.  They’re all using the same symbol-set, and so they’re all seeking and using energy from the same symbolic framework — and they’re all charging the same energetic group of spirits/geniuses/muses. For my part, I can see that the egregor of a group like WildFire, where I learned to firespin, or the egregor of the Live Free or Die Tattoo Convention that left this hotel yesterday,  are much different from the egregor of my own school, and both are different from the egregor of my college or both of my graduate schools.

So let me ask…. if we were to anthropomorphize our school system, and describe it as a spirit or a god or goddess or an angel or something like the overarching Force from Star Wars, what characteristics would we assign to it? What virtues, powers, and capabilities would it possess? What symbolic tools invoke its presence? What would be its character flaws?

And is it something that we want running our lives, and the lives of our children?  And if not… how do we banish it?

Leader Day follow-up

Yesterday, I urged bloggers everywhere on educational matters to e-mail their heads of school, principals, whoever, and let them know that Leadership Day 2009 was underway.

Then I took my own advice, and e-mailed my head.

He wrote back yesterday to say that he’d skimmed through the sites, and read a few entries, and thanks for the information.  Just a quick note — three lines, no more, and no evidence of what he’s thinking or what he read. It may all come to naught, or it may be the beginning of something wonderful.

I’m inclined to think it can be rich, though.  If you haven’t written to your principal yet about Leadership Day, it’s not too late. Go do it now.

Reinvent the Wheel

In the last several days, six or seven people have accused me of wanting to “reinvent the wheel” when it came to education.  Most regarded this as a bad idea, and instead advanced several ideas about how to change existing schools rather than reorganize the idea of school completely.

The first wheel was a log.  Egyptians rolled massive multi-ton stone blocks over the ground using many logs together as rollers, and used themselves as motor power for these stone age vehicles.  Usually the rollers went one way — from the quarry to the pyramid.  Workmen carried the logs back to the quarry on their shoulders, because rolling them was difficult.

The second wheel, perhaps invented in Sumeria at the mouth of the Tigris and Euphrates around 5500 BC, was a section of tree trunk with a hole drilled through the middle of it.  It required a lot of effort to cut a tree just right, and the resulting wheel was rarely round.  Eventually, carpenters cut planks and fitted them together into wheels around a central hole.  There were no bearings, just the wheel.

Some clever carpenter realized, probably around 4000 BC, that having just the wheel, without any center support around the hole, shortened the life of the wheel.  He (or she!) added a central boss around the hole, in order to develop the attachment point of the axle.

A group of carpenters working together cut a group of planks in a highly technical and careful way about 3500 BC, in order to shape an outer ring.  The invention of the lathe allowed the insertion of spokes between the central boss of the wheel and the rim.  The discovery of iron-smithing allowed for an iron rim to hold the joinery of the wheel together. The chariot was the tank of ancient battlefields; the wagon became house and cargo hold.

The Chinese removed the wheel from the wagons, miniaturized it, and put it to work spinning thread to make into cloth.  The silk weaving industry expanded.

In the Roman era, and then again in the medieval period, Europeans designed an off-center wheel, attached it to human, animal, and water power, and began running machines.  The cam was born.  They put two wheels together with a whole lot of buckets between them, and invented the water wheel.  They took Egyptian logs, miniaturized them, and carved them with continuous rotating grooves; the screw was born, and with it the oil press, the wine press, and the printing press.  With them, the underpinnings of the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution were created, six centuries before we realized we needed them.

In the Renaissance and Enlightenment, metalsmiths and artificiers added teeth to wheels, and miniaturized them further. They built clocks, watches, orreries, armillary spheres, sextants and octants. They put grooved wheels inside blocks of wood, and re-created pulleys.Ships traveled around the world on that kind of control of tension.

In the Industrial Revolution, wagon wheels did not hold up under the force of machinery.  So they miniaturized them again, and filled the central boss with ball-bearings — three dimensional wheels — that turned any which way and reduced friction.  They cast them out of iron, and attached them to steam engines and pistons — the railroad was born.

Bicycles. Automobiles. Motorcycles. CD and DVD players. Early iPods. Each of these could warrant a paragraph of its own.  Every single one of them uses a “wheel.”  But not one of them uses a wheel in quite the same way as the things that went before them.  Each of them is an utter “reinvention of the wheel”.

Read any story you like about how newspapers are in trouble.  You are reading the future of schools without a radical overhaul, or radical reinvention, of at least half of our schools and orienting them toward new styles and forms, right now.

Higher education is expensive; the price of it has been climbing at close to double the rate of inflation for almost thirty years.  It’s utterly unsustainable, just as the housing bubble — which lasted for thirty years — is unsustainable.  Secondary and Middle schools, and to a lesser degree Primary schools, are top-heavy, paper-driven, over-regulated, and slow. They’re often also more about achieving conformity and regularity — making all wheels the same — rather than encouraging diversity — “if we built our wheels in a lot of different ways, we’d find what works faster.”

Unfortunately, wheels — like educational institutions — are usually the last part of a machine to be redesigned.  It’s only when the rest of the system is faster and more powerful and more effective and more efficient that everyone realizes how utterly terrible the interface point between machine and world really is.  Look at early engravings of cars, and you’ll see bicycle wheels supporting a car.  Look at prints of early trains, and you’ll see wagon wheels on rails.

So…. wheels get reinvented irregularly, but the reinvention always serves to blow the old society out of the water.  Schools get reinvented irregularly, usually on the tail end of the new society emerging.   Which is dumb.  Maybe we teachers should be on the forefront of the reinvention this time, instead of the back end.

If we reinvent the wheel earlier, then maybe we get a say in what the new society looks like.

Blog comment: At the End of the Anomaly

With regards to communication, the situation is a bit different. [...] there is no such distinction to be made between written word on manuscript page and written word on computer screen. The distinctions are only in what you do with those words, which then amounts to syntactical hub-bub which could produce a shift but which in and of itself is not the shift.

via TeachPaperless: At the End of the Anomaly of the Age of Printed Books.

Teach Paperless has a GREAT post which you should should go and read now.  Go ahead, I’ll wait.  Really. I’ll wait.

Have you read it yet, or are you still hanging around here?

I love when the old becomes new again, as I demonstrated in this post about the value of gesture in teaching.  So this article at TeachPaperless tickled me pink.  To sum up (in case you really didn’t read the article… he’s suggesting that the modern experience of online text is much more similar to the ancient and medieval world’s way of copying, redacting, truncating, elaborating on, and otherwise messing with, illustrating, commenting on, glossing of, text.   It’s an absolutely brilliant notion, and maybe the average k-12 teacher doesn’t care, but my mind is absolutely swimming in a sea of novel ideas.

Consider: In the Middle Ages, if you had a copy of a book, you had the ability to make a copy of it. It would take you time to do so, but you could do it.  The medieval monastic, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux circulated several of his treatises of various points to get editorial advice.  But then his editors simply copied the text verbatim.  Bernard in fact complains bitterly in several of his letters that he’s forwarded his manuscript to people, who have then copied out his words and circulated them.   He argues that they weren’t ready for publication, that his words have been misconstrued, that … that…

He sounds exactly like a blogger whose words have been taken out of context.  I didn’t realize it until I read TeachPaperless’ article.

As always, there’s a wrinkle. The Middle Ages didn’t have copyright laws, and it was perfectly acceptable to take someone’s text — anyone’s text — and improve upon it.  The Bible’s text didn’t reach a state of complete agreement on its books, its verses, and its Latin text until (I think) the Council of Trent.  That’s a long time, well after Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the Castle Church door in Württemberg.

But look — I’ve borrowed TeachPaperless’s text, and sooner or later I hope he’ll borrow mine.  You may borrow mine (with appropriate links and credit, of course), and I may wind up borrowing some of yours.  If he exercised copyright over the text, one of two things would happen: first, I might pay him a penny a quarter for the next five or six years until someone started reading this one post frequently enough to warrant attention.  More likely, I’d remove the offending text, delete the post, and huff and puff and get upset with him for asserting copyright.  He’d lose readership potential, and so would I.

But this post links to his, and I even encourage you to go read him.  Maybe one day one of his posts will link to mine, and he’ll encourage his readers to go read me.  We may get more readers for copying one another’s words to our own readers, rather than fewer.

Is it like a medieval Codex? No, not exactly.  But I leave myself open to comments, just as a codex does.  I welcome them, in fact.  Could you leave images or illustrations in the margins? No, not exactly, but you could send me links to images that you thought were relevant.  Can your references to illustrations and other relevant articles lead my readers on a merry chase of their own?  Why yes, yes they can.  The difference, though, is one of abundance. Medieval codices were scarce. If a particular manuscript were valuable, I might have to search for months for a copy of it, in the Middle Ages. If it were valuable enough, I might have to walk to its location myself.

Now codices — excuse me, blogs, photo-sites, wikis, nings, moodles, videos, and more — are abundant.  The thing missing are the links between them.  So remember this, and remember to put in links. Frequently.  If you don’t know how, learn.  It’s what will get you read in the vast abundance of material available online — access to your work, and connections to the work of others.  Indeed, it’s the only way to join the new cultural paradigm that’s forming.

Friday: Teacher Tips: Start a business

Here’s the teacher tip for Friday, June 11, 2009:  Start a business.

“What?” I hear you say. “But I don’t have anything to sell.  I can’t provide any services.”

But let’s consider the truth or falsehood of that.

The US government, and the governments of the states, want people to start businesses.  The vast majority of the US economy actually runs on small business efforts of various sorts, and if you read up on how to start and run a small business, you discover that running one requires you to master quite a lot of skills: bookkeeping and tax planning, customer relations and marketing, inventory control and data crunching, networking and information management and law.  You even get a basic grounding in economics.

A teacher’s primary value lies in knowledge obtained and redistributed, in the ability to conduct research, and in the ability to develop content.  Some content that we develop belongs to the schools for which we work, but some belongs to us, the teachers.

Put together a book of exercises. Develop an online course.  Learn to make a podcast.  Make some short movies.  Try to make some money doing these things.  Learn how hard, or how easy, it is.  You’ll be in a much better position to teach your students to be entrepreneurs and risk-takers if you take some yourself.

The most important thing to remember about running a business, though, is that you must learn what you are doing.  Take the time to read up on how to run a business during the summer, develop your business plan and create the needed materials carefully.

The second most important thing is to remember that you must pay taxes on the income you earn through your business.  I am not a financial planner, CPA, or tax advisor.  The only advice I can give you on this matter is “pay your taxes.”

Yet running a business on the side can empower you as a teacher, make you feel more in control, and give you a better entrepreneurial sense of how to empower your students.  Moreover, your students notice and respect your efforts in the marketplace; my students mock my game-writing career, until they find out how much extra it’s paid me through the years.  Then they consider ways to start businesses of their own.

NYT: Mice Squeak

In a region of the brain called the basal ganglia, known in people to be involved in language, the humanized mice grew nerve cells that had a more complex structure and produced less dopamine, a chemical that transmits signals from one neuron to another. Baby mice utter ultrasonic whistles when removed from their mothers. The humanized baby mice, when isolated, made whistles that had a slightly lower pitch, among other differences, Dr. Enard says. Discovering that humanized mice whistle differently may seem a long way from understanding how language evolved. Dr. Enard argues that putting significant human genes into mice is the only feasible way of exploring the essential differences between people and chimps, our closest living relatives.

via Human Language Gene Changes How Mice Squeak – NYTimes.com.

If your students do not study evolution and biology RIGOROUSLY, with experimentation and species identification and gene sequencing, your school is failing their future.

Plant a humanized language gene in a mouse, and the mouse sounds different.  Plant a different DNA sequence in the mouse’s skin cells, and it grows an ear.  Or regrows its hair.

This stuff is real, it’s important, and in order to be able to make it work you have to buy into the basic reality of evolution.  The next great economic boom in the world will be connected to unlocking biology and making these realities medically practicable.   

So why is your school still reading about biology, instead of doing it?

Education Quotation

Flickr Slideshow: Education Quotations

I want to be able to find this set of slides and quotations later on, so I’m linking to it now.  It’s also worth watching on its own.  Initially from Moving at the Speed of Creativity, the blog of Wesley Fryer.

Visual Thinking: Learning Cycles

Visual Thinking: Learning Cycles
Originally uploaded by anselm23.

Two of the things I learned at the Learning & The Brain Conference at Avon Old Farms this year was the importance of learning cycles, and the value of face-to-face time. The brain takes in 4,000,000,000 bits of information per second through the sensorium of hearing, touch, taste, smell, sight, and kinetics.

The RAS processes this information (compresses it or filters it, we don’t know) down to 2,0000 bps, and then the Amygdala analyzes it for stress or danger. If there’s no stress or danger, the brain turns on its own reflective mode, and learning can occur, as the brain releases dopamine and seretonin, and a host of other neuro-chemicals to activate first working memory, and then long-term memory.

However, that cycle is short; you only have about 6-8 minutes of time before the neurotransmitters get re-absorbed and the mind begins to become bored. The only way to stimulate it is with a new burst of novelty that is neither stressful nor dangerous (to keep the Amygdala placated and happy).

Hence, the need to use Visual (V), Auditory (A) and Kinesthetic (K) methodologies to create novel, happy experiences so that the brain remains in a relaxed, happy, multisensory mode for a 40-minute period — the average length of a class at my school. Furthermore, there must be a priming — through homework, through classroom modification, through exposure to art, and through exposure to vocabulary — beginning a month to six weeks before the material is taught in the classroom.

Once in the classroom, this chart comes into play, quite literally. The priming feeds the cloud of energy that could/should occur in the classroom. Novelty initiates the first lesson, which encourages the students to learn by playing with, and then reviewing, a new concept every six-to-eight minutes. In a 40-minute class, this should happen 5-6 times. Furthermore, by combining this path of learning in the classroom with Ned Hallowell’s FIVE STEPS of learning, any student (EVERY student) can in fact connect-play-practice-’master’-and-be-recognized in a 40-minute period. If I as the teacher am aware that the first 8-minute period is devoted to trying to get everyone to connect to the classroom’s Daily Main Idea, then everyone should get connected. The second 8-minute period is about playing with a new concept or skill. The third is about practicing that new skill; the fourth is about working that skill to become much better at it. The last 8-minute period is about reviewing the day as a whole, and recognizing each student for what they have accomplished that day.

Then there follows a period of reflection or fermentation, where the student isn’t in your class, but is interacting with and connecting to other ideas. The ideas bubble into long-term memory, and then have a chance to re-emerge during that night’s homework. With luck, the ideas explored in class and in homework then are explored in dream that night — when we do a substantial part of the processing of information and data. Further, the homework ideally contains some element that primes the learning for a lesson in the next week, and the next month.

It’s an ideal to work for, and I’m looking forward to trying it.