I estimate state education has set my technical ability as a coder back about a decade. This is annoying, and understandable, and now I have my finger on a thread that I really think needs pulling.
I really value conciseness so here's what I think the essence of it is:
power dynamics hamper learning; what a waste of potential.
There's a chance I'm wrong, or that's too dense, so I've left the story for you to parse for yourself.
As an inquisitive (and naive) teenager I measured coding largely by what was offered at school - a boring and unchallenging topic. So I set my mind to topics with more challenge, like maths and sciences.
I followed a fairly standard course, and after failing as a post-graduate research assistant (employed to model blood splatter of blunt weapon trauma), I took a government subsidy to train as a teacher.
I'd really enjoyed tutoring at university, but found that my higher education on education guided me into surprisingly unsavoury amounts of acting and crowd control.
I wore ripped jeans to 'meet the principles' day, and had to get a special note to teach because apparently you can't graduate in absentia without filling in a form. I refused to take any job other than one at an anomoly of institution called Unlimited Paenga Tawhiti. I wasn't a rebel so much as picky, stuborn, and lucky enough to be able to afford it.
What was so attractive about Unlimited was how the people were. (Oh, Unlimited is a state funded public secondary school that exists because of a loophole in the law which allowed the bending of a rule meant for the integration of church schools into a rule which allowed the school to write its own assessment rules)
I can talk a lot about what makes the environment in that place transformative, but I think the key state it achieved was one of radically more equal power dynamics. As a Learning Advisor there, I didn't assert authority through uniform whipping, I had conversations on first name-basis with people about what they cared about in life. Classes that were run didn't have age-barriers, and students can choose what they want to do every 5 weeks, so instead of segregation and age-based hierarchy, there was just conversation.
It felt good. People were kind (not to be confused with nice), and they learnt a lot. Like instead of negotiating bullying and claustrophobia, doing things like attending university level classes, running New Zealand's only openDNS server from your bedroom, or working together to support a friend with depression. Some of the experiences move me so deeply I cry.
It makes me thoroughly sad (or angry?) thinking about how much average state education is missing the mark.
After leaving teaching (and the quake-wounded Christchurch), I found myself programming at art school. I was the worst adult student - I know what good education looks like, and I like giving feedback.
Over summer break Joshua Vial taught me (and several others) to be web developers. I left art school and helped build Loomio (an open source collaborative decision-making tool).
The people of Loomio - and the garden-nebula Enspiral within which is grew - were the next group of most excellent people I met. Here I learned many things, and was introduced more excplicitly to discourse around power.
4 years on I'm now a teacher at Enspiral Dev Academy (the mark 2 summer-length course which trains non-techinical people to become junior web developers). It's a synthesis of my interests to date - programming, learning, and good people.
This is my learning edge. I take myself, and those around me to and beyond the limit of our technical ability. The only way you can do that effectively and get anything out of it is to be super up-front about what you do and don't understand.
This is a challenge because not knowing things for some reason brings up shame a bunch with people. The most dangerous thing for a student is self-doubt, and sitting on shame is a good way to get that.
I think that might be a study in itself, but I'm more interested in how not knowing plays our for teachers, because I believe this is the reason I'm not currently an ascendant cyber-wizard.
When you don't know a thing as a teacher a very interesting decision path which emerges :
A) lie / undermine the question
B) say you don't know
Well, if your position as teacher is predicated on your knowing more / being the source of truth , then not knowing might seem to contradict that. Why would anyone think a person could know everything?
Ummm, why else should they be able to tell me what to do? The average high-school teacher is in a surprisingly precarious power-position - it might look like they have control, but only through carefully guided consent of the class.
The side effect I think I see, it that for a teacher in a position where their authority is coupled to their knowledge, it is awefuly appealing to never take the conversation near topics which might erode your position. I think this is why classes on computers suck so bad in highschool - they are born of institution, which is established in such as a way as to bind teaching to the bounds of individuals mastery, which is finite.
I think education around computers offer a unique window into the future of learning - the field is moving so fast, that the only reasonable path is to say "I don't know" when someone asks a difficult question.
This has some fantastic cascading effects :
- you can continue "...but how would we find out?!"
- oppertunity to model the fuck out of good learning
- everyone learning!
- it removes as an option the "authority through knowledge" engine
- conversation predisposed towards being more equal
- less lieing
- more human
- better conversations
- undermines weird not-knowning shame thing
- you don't have to explore boring safe topics
- unlocks play
So optimal
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