resistance
It's a deceptively simple concept, struggling to learn, but I don't think I'd ever internalized that thought before. It's so profoundly basic in its brilliance - and sadness - and seems so obvious now - but I never questioned that fact as a child. I just accepted that learning took effort. And that in order to succeed at learning (or memorizing, or studying for a test, etc.) I had to put in the late night hours to do it. In addtion to the nuggets of insight I'm gleaning from Smith, a statement from the video I watched from Alfie Kohn last week has stuck with me, too. Paraphrasing, he asks us why we expect kids, after working all day at school, to put in a second shift of work in the evening? "Well, duh," was my initial reaction, (I'm embarrassed to admit) "that's just what it takes to get the work done."
I mean, homework is to be expected, right? It's just the way it's is. Because that's the way we did it when I was a kid. Because there aren't enough hours in the traditional school schedule. Ad nauseum. But the fact that this isn't how it's always been was a shocker. At least, as Robinson tells us, since the age of the Industrial Revolution, when schools turned into factories manufacturing batches of similarly-aged children with similar expectations of skill sets. "It worked for me," I thought to myself, "didnt' it? And I was just an average student." But now I start to wonder. What there a cost that I wasn't aware of? Did I miss an important part of the learning experience; truly learning something - taken in and not forgotten in the amount of time it takes to turn in a test. Fragmented pockets of learning in a fragmented schedule of coursework and time periods. 
When the era of the one-room schoolhouse ended, Smith says, it wasn't that "just the physical structure of schools was split into largely meaningless parts. So was time itself. The school day became a grid of 'periods,' devoted to compartmentalized aspects of learning ... 'Systematic instruction' was the systematic deprivation of experience (p. 48)."
But I'm still left wondering how we expect teachers to change the way they teach from the way they learned? Those same bad habits we (teachers/mentors/guides/et al) had instilled in us as students have to carry over in some measure, don't they? Can we change our expectations or the behaviors that are engrained in us - can we unlearn decades (a century?) of "official" learning theory? I read somewhere that it isn't change so much that we resist - what we really resist is being changed. Is this a subtle difference, or huge? Am I imagining that this difference in perception is significant? It seems to say so much about why schools aren't changing to reflect the damage done to our kids as a result of enforced standardized testing. Or maybe even why they can't. If the "average joe" has trouble admitting a mistake, we shouldn't expect any less from our politicians and school administrators. Or if they would even knowledge that the system (for the majority of learners) doesn't work. And apparently hasn't for quite some time now. You know they know. But if the risk is financial in nature, (and not just emotional, spiritual and intellectual hardship) you can bet they'll never say a word.
mirror , mirror
In the video, Minds of Our Own, the narrator tell us that in our lifetime, the average adult will have about 50,000 experiences with mirrors. Nearly all of us assume that what we see in the mirror at a close range changes as we move further away from it. But the camera experiment shows clearly that if we see only our face and torso from a foot away, we will see exactly the same amount of ourselves (face and torso) from several feet away. We will see more of the area that surrounds us - but not more of our bodies. "Something about this problem defies intuition. And hands on experience does little to help us understand...Our intuition is built from a lifetime of experience, but rarely do we have an opportunity to think through this experience in any systematic way." Clearly, experience alone doesn't help us understand how something works. Often, the learner has to reconstruct what has been learned - and it's hard to let go of what you think you know.
This resistance to "re-learning" is demonstrated by the kids in the video who insist that their eyes will adjust in a completely dark room. They reiterate that in total darkness, you will still be able to see - because of the "stuff they know in their heads." Both students believed they'd experience complete darkness themselves. Yet even after six minutes of being in a dark room, without her eyes being able to adjust, the student still insisted that her theory was right. It was just going to take longer to accomplish that she initially thought. "We see what we believe we'll see...When what we see doesn't make sense, our minds simply reject the things we see," the narrator tells us. Regarding the lightbulb experiment, I felt the teacher's frustration, when one of his brightest students couldn't remember the basic electrical problem she'd learned a few weeks earlier. Even though she understood it at the time, her previous thinking overrode what she'd learned. Or as Smith might remind us, the official theory of learning would have us believe that disconnected pieces of information learned in disconnected sections of time (Tuesday, second period, for example, followed by Wednesday, second period) are more than enough to cement that knowledge in our brains. Quick-setting cement, anyone? The new knowledge didn't have a chance to take hold. What we find is that when presented with the same lesson plan again, she makes the same initial mistakes and wrong assumptions she had before learning the correct answer in the classroom. Inspite of a teacher-mentored, yet constructive-based learning lesson. What a powerful demonstration of the human resistance to change. Or the fact true (classical) learning takes more than an afternoon lesson or two. Or is it just our need to believe that what we think we believe is right.
teaching kids to think; we think...
I felt compassion for that teacher in particular, toward the end of part one of the Minds of Our Own video. He talked of his realization one day that his students weren't learning what he thought he was teaching. It's a daunting task, I would imagine, overcoming years of "wrong learning" - students entering the classrooms peppered with misinformation. (I can't help wondering how many "facts" in my head are assumptions or hearsay - or just plain wrong ... I failed the earlier mirror test, too, by the way. And there's no way I'd have known how to make the lightbulb glow.) Students have to want to change what they believed before (if proven incorrect), but the instinct to resist is powerful, even if scientific theory proves them wrong. It's not just about assimilating new information into our schemas, but changing the foundation of pre-learned ideas. And as for his students being able to think critically and independently of their teacher? Nuh uh. "As long as I asked questions the students were trained for," he said, "they did fine. But if I snuck on them just slightly, and went for some depth of understanding, then they were in trouble. And that bothered me." That turned out to be a turning point for this teacher - the recognition that deep learning was not part of the equation for his students.
Paul and Elder note the likely misuse of using a "critical thinking" approach in the classroom. It is common to confuse thinking critically with what it isn't: cooperative learning, construcivism, common sense or expressing opinions in a subjective (not necessarily substantive) way. This is just a true for teachers as well as students. "[V]irtually all teachers erroneously believe that they understand and practice critical thinking already and that the problem of 'uncritical' thinking is fundamentally that of their students (p. 45)." Seems like many of us need to refer to the mirror in more ways than one. Wrong thinking is something we can all be guilty of. The aforementioned teacher had this epiphany, and it moved him to re-think his teaching strategies. How many teachers are this self- and student-aware? Probably not enough, or we would probably hear louder cries for revolution in the system.
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