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. ↩