An English teacher’s renegotiating of our view of the learning and the classroom.
In the face of AI–always in the face of AI, we are not allowed to write about something else!–here is an oddity I have been thinking this summer:
Humans are DIY-ish.
I’m not arguing that humans, from the get-go, develop by putting ourselves together with low-cost materials in an amateurish but successful way. I’m arguing that humans are of the DIY aesthetic. The way we are built, our biology, it’s kind of like duct taping a towel on the top of a chair back for a more cushiony headrest rather than spending serious money on a new, sleekly designed chair with an ergonomic headrest.
For one, the very thing that is supposed to bring us literal enlightenment, our brain, has so many flaws. We call them, in the academic world, “fallacies.” And there are many of them because our decision-making skills comprise both logic and emotion. That’s why we are terrible at large-scale statistics and have a hard time empathizing with humans beyond the “villages” we create. We are built for survival for an environment that existed more than 200,000 years ago and nothing more than that.
For instance, we are capable of developing Post Traumatic Stress Disorder from building habits to survive in distressing situations. We can “remember” these for years and years. But we also are just as good as forgetting. It is very difficult for us to recall the full extent of pain we have endured in the past, or it’s very easy for us to rationalize enduring pain for the greater good. What better way to make woman endure childbirth again or anyone to do something dangerously heroic.
On a morning commute, a month before this last school year let up–deep in the depths of the fuel warning light being on, only a gallon left in the tank, when you are focused on getting to that gas station and forgoing any new destinations–I began listening to a podcast episode called “Sensemaking and Cybernetics in Classroom Teaching w/ Christian Moore-Anderson” by the Human Restoration Project.
What I learned in that first 25 minutes was that there is this a way of looking at the human body in terms of mechanical structures rather than end-result of our perceptions. It’s called “cybernetics,” and it should make you think of a certain T100 robot. It put my brain in a wallop and was all I could think about as I exited my vehicle to walk into my classroom and setup for a day of teaching.
What got me was this water example that Christian Moore-Anderson, a biology teacher and author, went over: when you feel a drop of rain on your skin, you don’t feel rain or even “wetness.” There are no such receptors in your body. What you feel is pressure and temperature. The brain takes this data and checks it against your life experience and your other senses before very quickly, but not as quick as a lot of other things, arriving at a pretty certain and correct conclusion. Seeing human understanding in this way kind of blows my mind. Our bodies are wonky algorithms, more in common with the ways robots finagle the world with their limited sensory mechanics than we think.
It makes me think of this fad of my youth in which you reach into a box or a bag and try to guess what is in there. At worst, you are afraid you are going to touch something slimy or something everyone is going to laugh at you for touching. Truth was, most of the humor came from regular objects creeping people out. And I guess that’s the rub: we can be quite inaccurate if we start paring down our senses, which go far beyond the five senses we usually bandy about (talking about the sense of touch does not usually evoke temperature or pressure but what we usually call “feel,” which doesn’t do a great job being descriptively nuanced).
This may sound morbid, but with all these new shows and documentaries coming out about the tragedy of the Titan submersible and its violent implosion in 2023, I’m reminded that human receptors are always behind what reality is putting out–we are never experiencing the present; our perceptions are always lagging a bit behind. The lag is tiny or large depending on the receptor (some pain receptors are less than 10 milliseconds versus visual receptors which can be over 100 milliseconds). The implosion of the Titan was so quick that those who perished on that submersible had no knowledge of what had happened.
Before the tragic events of the Titan, knowing there was perceptual lag that all humans dealt with, even our best artists and athletes and fighter pilots, I would sometimes think of this when I was driving. Here I was hurtling at speeds that required concentration and reaction speed, and I could only see the past, like an astronomer looking at any star in the sky, even the sun, that 8 minute and 20 seconds old light.
Interestingly enough, this makes being a teacher feel plenty hard: with biological vessels like ours, no wonder so many things go wrong when we are trying to learn. Then again, look at how far these Frankenstein’s monster bodies have taken us. And this is not to mention how much our bodies filter out in terms of what’s going on around us. Hawks can see the ultraviolet part of the light spectrum; dogs can smell more than 10,000 times what a human can; bats can literally see with their hearing; snakes can detect thermal radiation; and catfish have tens of thousands more taste receptors than us humans. Not to mention animals, like the duck-billed platypus that have receptors and abilities that are beyond what us humans have.
Perhaps all of this is reason for our utter fascination with tools, from hammers to fire to cups that hold our liquids to the paper that stores language to artificial intelligence. And there is the point: we learn in archaic ways, still working with the same biological machinery that emerged from our ancestor species some 200,000 years ago. Tools augment us, but they do not change our genes, at least not in our meager lifetimes.
I’m sure it would be amazing if we could automatically imbed reading skills, an unnatural but wonderful ability our brains learn, but what gets lost in not doing the work to learn? Is it as negligible as not learning how to churn butter? Obviously not, but what comes with a fascination of tools is an efficiency spiral that we are ever in danger of going down.
Even with such things in mind, maybe we could grant that sometime in the future neurological implants will change our ability to process and remember. But we’d still have human emotion to contend with.
I bring all of this up because I am currently reading The Disengaged Teen by Jenny Anderson and Rebecca Winthrop, and I have to say that it is bringing up a lot of educational band-aids that I have been noticing more and more as my career has aged.
For instance, this line had many receptors lighting up:
Today’s learning scientists confirm what the ancient Greeks knew: that most humans need active inquiry and lively discussion to fully engage in their learning. (8)
I remember the confusion I had when I started my career in the hype of the “learning styles” myth (the argument that humans have a preferred learning method like visual, auditory or kinesthetic). How was I going to teach reading and writing while appealing to visual learners? And wasn’t everyone a visual learner? I couldn’t tell what I favored. I seemed to favor them all. I was relieved when it turned out that the science wasn’t ship-shape. We could leave it behind.
But I get what it was trying to do. The whole thing was trying to address the cybernetic limitations that we all have. Except it’s more complicated than whether someone favors watching a video over reading something. Our past experiences and how we slept last night and our tastes and our current relationships all affect how we learn during one single class period. When it is over, such variables as time, classroom student composition, or subject area changes everything–we are never just one thing throughout the day, hour, or minute.
All this to say, teaching students is simpler than we give it credit for. We can do a lot with what people had 2,500 years ago. I’m not saying we shouldn’t learn how to ethically and proactively use AI (in a way that keeps us moving forward and not dwelling in a heap of laziness) or whatever new technology comes our way. What I’m saying is that there is no super complex solution out there that is going to magically get education correct.
And for how students learn best, we know this already because we are all constantly learning throughout our lives. Humans learn best when we have enough of the following: discussions, alone time, break time, practice time, and repetition. That takes care of the logical side of us. For our emotional side, we have to feel connected, both in what we are learning and the community around us. The question we all considering, this thing called education, it’s not about human learning, it’s about human learning at scale. A classroom is a tool and therefore an efficiency. All we need to do is humanize it.