This summer, in lieu of so many complications in education in the 2024-2025 school year, I’m finding myself wanting to be grateful for what I know I have. My job is endlessly fulfilling, and it is only when I care too much that things are in danger of sparking and igniting, an energy-consuming path to burnout. Education moves slow, and this is both a good and bad thing.
So I find myself in the mode of whimsy. Hence, the position of creative focus that starts in the next paragraph and will probably end when summer does.
If we look at the arc of formal education from beginning to end, we’d have to say we are doing pretty good. Literacy skills in general have come such a long way, though we must say that they have had some trouble of late.
But, of course, engendering perspective can do much good for understanding of the context of our times. Here is one perspective: I just read a wonderful book celebrating Kurt Vonnegut’s work, Pity the Reader by Suzanne McConnell, wherein she tells the following anecdote:
Bill Styron pointed out one time, in a lecture I was privileged to hear, that the great Russian novels–which were more of an influence on American writers than Hawthorne or Twain or any American writer you’d want to name–were written for very small audiences because the literate population was very small, amid an enormous empire of illiterate people. (ch. 33)
It is a danger to look at such large historical progression and deplore any criticism of where we are now from where we were. But if appreciation of progress is the goal of looking back, then we can all look back and admire the compression of innovation our present circumstances afford. And maybe such a stance would help us downplay any out-of-proportion anxiety for the small things of today.
Humans have had to learn in unseemly situations for much of our early existence. It had to be hard to concentrate with the onset of the common flu–deadly back in those days (“days” which comprise most of the 200,000 years of human history)–or that rogue sabertooth tiger that’s been picking off children who stray too far from the outskirts of the village. And when academic education began, there was a very strong likelihood that you didn’t have the social status to be a part of learning at all.
As we’ve gone from age to age, we’ve amassed a palette of resources for building structures. Every age has answered the question of where best to perform education. Our age is quite the pinnacle, though that doesn’t mean we are building school’s out of gold. Is our answer the most right one for right now?With the resources we have, what should our buildings of education be made out of?
Perhaps nothing. Just open green spaces–our body’s calm-inducing signal that predators are accounted for. Or maybe quaint straw constructed buildings, even if susceptible to big bad wolves.
I’m partial to wooden structures with sturdy fixings–the use of wood is almost a natural human trait, perhaps too much so (nod to The Giving Tree)–but without the one room school design of the 1800s. Or maybe a castle, like Hogwarts with its wood paneling and antique desks, chandeliers dotting the ceilings of great rooms. But that’s crazy expensive, and we have sadly, in America at least, never considered building magical train systems.
We all know the answer to this question. This building material is now a staple of all institutions, from prisons to schools: cinder blocks.
Let us pontificate; let us really drill down into it. For one, a cinder block constructed building withstands its first priority very well: the weather. Extreme forces–tornadoes and hurricanes–have less of a chance to blow, blow our schools down. (For schools in earthquake country, you just need to build smaller cinder block structures so as to better distribute forces.)
Of course, we can’t forget that a school building is not solely cinder blocks. It needs a skeleton made of an alloy of carbon–the element of life–and iron, the last great age before it was iterated upon and became a part, literally, of the Steel Age.
A cinder block is a simple thing, yet not simple enough to be invented 100,000 years ago. Most of us that are living have had one heavily painted side of this building material included in a lot of our day-to-day peripheral vision.
Cinder blocks are rather sturdy and longevity-oriented; they don’t warp with age or crack too much due to settling. What better fitting material for a place of learning than a material that is made by pouring tiny grains of rock that have been pulverized by eons of Earth living (or just manufactured really quickly by humans) into molds, adding water–the substance of life–and then waiting patiently for the thing to solidify? Behold, a forever hollow yet solid building block ready to be reinforced and shaped with others of the same.
The natural state of a cinder block exterior is quite rough. Enough to, with a gentle scrap, file nails or abrade layers of skin. Perhaps advantageous for students on the more sadistic end of the school bully spectrum: they would have a field day with such coarse exposed concrete brick. On the other hand, left unpainted, teachers would love the stickiness quality that such grit allows. It would be so much more pleasant to put up posters without resorting to the industrialized glue that is necessary for anything to stick on the glossy, thick paint that covers all school building cinder blocks.
To boot, us teachers wouldn’t have to reaffix posters after the weather changes and the humidity increases or decreases, causing all wall-attached things to loosen and unstick. It would be so nice to come back from a week of Spring Break and not have to fix the poster floppage and general glue failure that is wont to happen in the absence of humidity-staving air-conditioning.
It is hard to secure foreign substances on a surface designed to be without foreign substances. More akin to soap technology, the bacteria and viruses sliding right off the skin into the sink drain. What a thing to coat our cinder blocks in! But then again, this same protective exterior can be found on our students–a craving for learning that has somehow become opaque by some “substance” that has glossed over their natural born tendencies of curiosity.
Here are some list-ish observations:
A cinder block’s true color is grey, the color of stark in-between. A yin and yang gone runny. Sounds about right.
Cinder blocks are as orderly as the layouts in school buildings. They are like real legos, far more so than the decorative bricks of suburban houses but far less in terms of color.
I looked up the origins of Legos and kept seeing this word: “interlocking.” Learning can’t be this way though the act of learning–the open way we should imbibe theories and the evidence for and against–should very much be interlocking. Cinder blocks are kind of interlocking.
We must update the song to “another cinder block in the wall.”
I once dropped a single cinder block and was amazed that it shattered into pieces.
I see the same formations of cinder blocks in my seating charts or the cells of the spreadsheets I have found myself using more and more, even as an English teacher, for this is the data, date, data age of teaching.
With all of this new and even newer educational software–what better name for something so amorphous, short-lived, and interchangeable–something like a cinder block is a relief. We will not have adopted the use of cinder blocked walls and then have to pay an exorbitant subscription–what is a society that allows companies to make money off resource deprived, publicly funded, service-oriented institutions?–to keep the walls up.
On the opposite side of the spectrum, it is hard not to question one’s career choices in a room constructed with cinder blocks while students sit in a grid of desks taking standardized tests scored by state hired robots. We often think of state tests as the ultimate standardizer of education. But what about school buildings?
And, yet, I have made a career in such places. I have grown and learned and helped others in such places. So have my students, hopefully.
Writing this essay has reminded me of something tangentially related when I was living in Shanghai and attending an American high school there. The school was in the process of relocating to a new building down the street. When we moved into this new building, it was still quite under construction. Nestled in the corner of the new soccer field was a temporary shack where the construction crew lived. I remember when our bus rolled up in the morning, you could see the builders, all in various morning-wear, sitting around a fire and eating breakfast.
It is normal to travel for work in America, but not to construct one’s living quarters for the duration of work. And especially not on a soccer field.
So many things about living in China fascinated me, but that makeshift shack, so normal-ish in the worker’s day-to-day, developed permanency in my memory. How much time were those workers away from their families? How sturdy were the likewise temporary bamboo scaffolding they used to help them build the school and pretty much everything else China. (And still use, I might add. Fascinating!) And, oddly enough, they were mirroring my time at that school. There when I arrived. Gone by the time I left for college.
We are all short-lived in terms of the robust things humans have wrought on this planet. And then, extrapolate from there: The planet’s age versus our impact on it? The galaxy versus our solar system? The universe versus our galaxy? It is a dream of humanity–though we disprove it multiple times within generations–that this next thing we are building, that’s the thing that’s really going to last.
We never learn. (Well, I’m sure city planners and architects and all that have learned, but the rest of us haven’t.) That’s the point, albeit a stretch of one, that we can never fill our brains with axons and neurons that contain the facts as they will be for the next week, let alone a measly life time. I suppose, with such certainty in uncertainty, a cinder block constructed school is more fitting than my students and I give it credit for.