0.56%, to Be Precise
You meet in Room 210 for English once a day for 42 minutes. Over 180 days of school, that adds up to right around 7560 minutes. Each class period is, therefore, only 0.56% of your total learning — and that gives us the half-percent problem.
We already work in a system that promotes a factory-line mindset. The system chops learning into periods, rings bells to force a kind of Pavlovian shift in us1, etc, which all compartmentalizes learning and truncates development. It somehow manages to be rigid and arbitrary at the same time.
This is all part of the “gene pool of education,” as Ken Robinson put it. Another part: the belief that each lesson is a discrete, repeatable artifact, with “Do Now” openings and scripted transitions. Traditional lessons are performative, even at their most authentic, and that’s true for students as well as teachers. Units are just larger versions of lessons.
I think this is why so much prescribed instruction is content-driven, and why grades are the transactional currency of it all. It’s also why not every 0.56% chunk is meaningful. Some periods are worth devoting more time and energy to — the period that has a test, the one with a presentation, the one with an essay due. The formative build-up doesn’t invite the same focus. The Skinner box does its job.
In here, you can’t have a half-percent mindset. Your learning is embedded in everything you do. You can’t use the same regurgitation skill you might rely on elsewhere, for instance, and missing or missed work requires your attention. In the past, I was guilty of converting missing work into a zero — at the beginning of this essay is a screenshot of my old gradebook — which does a strange thing: It tells you, the student, that the work isn’t necessary. You don’t need to do it; you can take a zero and move on, which is very much like saying that the assignment was non-essential.
This goes for poetry, novels, and other experiences we have to together, but the best example from the first month of the year is the complete set of grade abatement profiles. If you haven’t studied that yet, you must study it now. Again, most of you are used to a transaction: You don’t complete work, you get a bad grade, and you move on. The course can’t wait for you, so it doesn’t.
But you aren’t a bystander in here, swept along by a content-driven curriculum. You are the course itself.
In other words:
The bell rings, and whether you were ready to move on or not, you’re moving on. Your mind lurches to the next thing. ↩
The thing that stood out to me most in the post was the idea that learning does not take place within limited boundaries. Just because a bell rings doesn’t mean that you learned everything you needed to learn about that topic; just because you had a test doesn’t mean that you will never use that information again. Every time I think about Ken Robinson’s factory idea, it makes me question how we divide up learning into so many discrete segments. I used to think that if I worked hard enough, I could learn whatever was required in the time allotted and run out of things to do if I was productive enough. But if we divide up learning and allow each topic a set amount of time with no flexibility, how can students take the learning process where they want to? The answer is that they can’t- the learning process is no longer individualized, and consequently, we could argue that it is no longer as meaningful. I believe this is a big part of the reason we emphasize the process of learning, because every choice we make in that process is a part of a bigger decision about how we learn, what we learn, when we learn… Students shouldn’t be forced to dedicate certain amounts of time to certain mundate and concrete tasks that don’t have meaning to them. For me, the learning occurs when I leave the structure of the course behind and take my education wherever I want. So why do we have to be in classes that take that power of choice away from us?
Also, in case anyone was curious- a skinner box is defined as “an operant conditioning chamber, an enclosed apparatus that contains a bar or key that an animal can press or manipulate in order to obtain food or water as a type of reinforcement.” To me, this means that the animal is completely controlled- it’s reflexes are rewarded or punished in a systematic way. To relate it back to our focus in this post, we are like the animal inside because in traditional schooling methods, we don’t have control over where we take our learning- it is dictated to us with strict guidelines and deadlines that we are obligated to follow at risk of punishment: low grades. Sidenote: I realize I just compared the reinforcement we get from grades to the reinforcement animals get from food. Seriously, what does that say about our mindset if we see good grades as crucial to (not even success) survival itself?
This past week, my swim coach put the “21/90 rule” on the board, not telling us what it means but encouraging us to look it up. It looked and sounded like the 20/80 rule of the Pareto Project, so it reminded me of this class. It doesn’t really have anything to do with the Pareto Project, but it is somewhat related to this class. What it is saying is that it takes 21 days to form a habit, and 90 days to form a lifestyle. A majority of the articles on this website talks about “hacking” our brains to break our grade-driven learning styles and about working consistently in class. According to this 21/90 rule, it won’t be easy, and it won’t be done overnight, as we will likely have to work for 3 months in order to ingrain the course’s message in our brain.
Thanks for sharing that, Victor. I’ve noticed that a lot of students’ comments on Sisyphean High posts are meant to express that they believe this class will be a big shift for them. Similarly, Mr. Eure’s feedback on Sisyphean High suggests that it will take a lot of work to get ourselves away from those old habits. What I really like is how the 21/90 rule provides a concrete idea about just how long it takes for us to get us to do something because it lets us see exactly what we are in for, letting us be mentally prepared to tackle this shift in habit and perspective successfully.
Even if we do spend the time to break out of the grade driven system for this class, all other classes end up bringing us back into it.
It’s so odd having to go from Chemistry class to English class each day, and completely changing my work style for each class so suddenly.
I agree… The shift in classes can be hard sometimes. At times, you may be doing very productive work in a class and suddenly the bell will ring. Your mind was “in the zone” and now you’re shifting to a completely different topic/ class. The post talks about the tough shift between classes and I completely agree with the idea. I remember in Elementary school and maybe C.V. Starr, the teachers would structure the classes to be flexible. You could be working on a project that might take a bit more time and the teachers would allow you to keep working. I think that we need more of this in school. We need to decompress when shifting between classes. We might need to decompress from a stressful day/ class and take more time because we won’t be able to learn as well.
When reading about your comment about how shifting between classes messes up your mindset, it reminded me about a talk of school schedules I had heard a lot about earlier. Now, I can’t remember who had said this, but I do remember that they had said that they thought the schools should only have certain classes on certain days, but with more time allotted to each one to allow a longer, more fluid class time. An example of what they meant was something along the lines of say having only Science, Social Studies, and Gym on one day, and English, Math, and Foreign Language on the other. Each period would be allotted more time to make up for it only being every other day, and by the end of the year we would have had the same amount of class time for each class with less shifts in between.
Yes! I totally agree! I find it so difficult to be adapting my mindset to this course I constantly have to fluctuate in terms of my habits and my mentality. I feel like a waste a few minutes every class trying to re-immerse in the philosophy of the course before I can get started. What I have noticed though, is that if I start by creating about a specific topic, I can use my peers’ ideas as a starting point for developing my own thoughts- which will become a part of a discussion or described in an online comment or a part of my responsive writing or metacognition as the class period progresses. However, I think that you raise a valid point- that it takes a lot of energy to devote ourselves to this new philosophy and if our class period is sandwiched between two very traditional classes, how can we adjust effectively? I think it might help to see some sort of symbol on a poster as we walk in, an instant inspiration to get us on course as soon as we arrive.