In his book, You Are Not a Gadget, Jaron Lanier, “programmer, musician, and father of virtual reality technology” examines the effect the synthesizer had on music. MIDI is the Musical Instrument Digital Interface that makes the synthesizer possible. Lanier says, “Before MIDI, a musical note was a bottomless idea that transcended definition. It was a way for musicians to think…” He goes on to say that after MIDI, with its synthesized notes, came along, “a musical note was no longer just an idea, but a rigid mandatory structure you couldn’t avoid in the aspects of life that had gone digital. The process is like a wave gradually washing over the rulebook of life, culling the ambiguities of flexible thoughts as more and more thought structures are solidified into effectively permanent reality.”
If you can see the applicability of this idea to teaching, you may skip the next two paragraphs. But just in case you don’t see it, let me explain my take on how this idea idea of a “bottomless idea” versus “a rigid mandatory structure” applies to teaching. As I have previously stated in this space, when I began teaching, there were no standards, no high stakes testing, and no curriculum map or pacing guide. I was aware of competing theories of education, and especially of different theories of teaching literacy (whole language versus inquiry for example). But essentially I was given a room, some old literature and writing textbooks, and a job to do: teach them reading and writing. Teaching was, for me, “a bottomless idea that transcended definition.” I explored. I thought about not only what to assign my students, but what it means to be a healthy reader and writer. I created my own “standards” by thinking, “What do I need them to be able to do?” I experimented and figured out what worked for my students. Even though my career predates the internet, I would comb through books of essays looking for mentor texts and books of short stories looking for great stories to engage them. It was not a question of covering material, but of being responsive to what I saw my students needed.
But then came the standards, which interfered with my ability to think expansively about my subject and my students. And then came the tests, which put pressure on me to teach only the tested skills. And then came the scripted program and the curriculum maps and pacing guides, which put pressure on me to cover material the same as everyone else. For a while, as all of this started, I was still encouraged to think deeply and be creative and innovative, but once the maps showed up, that encouragement had to go underground. School administrators encouraged me. District people did not. The process was, as Lanier says, “like a wave gradually washing over the rulebook of life, culling the ambiguities of flexible thoughts as more and more thought structures are solidified into effectively permanent reality.”
Openness, flexibility, deep thought, and responsive teaching were replaced by a culture of rigidness.
The past 20 years of my career have been a never ending battle to maintain my openness and deep thinking in the face of the system’s rigidness.
And now the idea of parental rights has taken the rigidness to the next level. As I begin the school year, I am supposed to include in my syllabus a list of every text we might be reading this year. This assumes a rigid, set-in-stone school year that has “solidified into effectively permanent reality.”
There are activities and texts I tend to do every year as I teach ninth grade English and Creative Writing. But there are texts I plan to teach that I don’t have time for. There are things I discover along the way that suit my students’ needs – a new short story or current essay – that I find online. I have a huge library of reference books and depending on where a discussion is going, I will spontaneously pull a book off my shelf to share a quote or passage. I often do a poem-of-the-day each day (inspired by Billy Collin’s Poetry 180), especially with Creative Writing, and sometimes I try to find a new, fresh poem online that will address a writing technique we’ve been attempting to use, or an idea we’ve been exploring.
My approach to teaching, open and responsive, is undermined by a rigid idea that I am only covering certain texts. It is even more undermined by the idea that I need to know every single text that students might read in my class at the start of the year. I might share things that haven’t been written yet – including comic strips or blog posts I might write this year.
We have moved from a culture where encouraging reading was the prime directive, to one where we focused only on tested reading skills (who cares about lifelong reading habits?), to one now where all books are suspect and handing a student the wrong book can get you charged with a felony here in Florida.
I started my teaching career in openness and responsiveness. As I told my district’s school board last spring, I have never, ever had a parent complain about a book in my classroom library. It appears they want me to end my career in rigidness and paranoia. I refuse to let that happen. What would be the teacher version of MIDI? Perhaps TIPI – Teaching Infrastructure of Predetermined Instruction.
In his book, Lanier calls this phenomenon of a technology taking over a way of thinking and doing “lock-in.” “Lock-in,” he says, “…removes design options based on what is easiest to program, what is politically feasible, what is fashionable, or what is created by chance.” We are experiencing “lock-in” of what can be taught and how it can be taught.
As teaching is pressured to become more algorithmic, less open, more locked in, and more rigid, we are all apt to feel like the human element in teaching is being chased out by TIPI. It might be good to remind ourselves that, as Lanier’s title suggests, we are not gadgets.
And neither are our students.