Affected Clapping

Open-Source Education:

Why Everyone and Everything Involved with Education is Interchangeable and Expendable.

Except the Students That is.

Part 2.1: Identifying Resources + Variables

ED: Due to the length of this section, it will be broken up into smaller pieces. This is the first piece.

The premise of open-source education is that there are a host of resources that are currently proprietary within any educational set-up: in most public schools, each room is its’ own entity, with its’ appetites, with resources allocated to feed the various hungers.

“I need information on whales,” Jamal whines. “Well, you can use this book to look up some facts,” his teacher replies.

That book won’t leave with Jamal, it’ll be put back on the bookshelf so that the next student who needs information on whales can access it.

Now, imagine that every resource a school has is divvied up amongst the number of classrooms fairly equitably, but that once this process has occurred (usually in August, before the students have shown up—why would they want to have a say in what resources are available to them anyway?) it is, for the most part, set in stone. The equation would look roughly like this:

At first glance this seems like a perfectly rational way of addressing basic resource distribution. All the students get the same amount of access to the same materials. The problem becomes clearer, however, when we realize that schools purchase their resources based on this model, and thus do the student population a great disservice by providing an extremely shallow, albeit diplomatic, variety of information. This model of buying and distributing resources rests on the premise that every student needs the same menu of resources, something simply not true.

In a perfect world, every student would have access to every material she’d ever need. She would have access to every library in the world, every museum exhibit, every lecture by every professor at every University. She would have the ear of every specialist in every field, and would be able to get first-hand answers to extremely specific questions. If she really wanted to know about pre-historic man, she would be able to sit down with an anthropologist and talk to her about it (or maybe simply video-conference if the anthropologist happened to be on a dig).
The way students and educators take advantage of technology (many lectures from such distinguished universities as MIT and Stanford are already available for free via iTunes) will be the subject of another post, as the mismanagement of technological opportunities is criminal. However, this post will focus on isolating the variables of a typical school, and showing the contrast between the current way these variables are used and alternative, open-source methods.

First, let’s group the resources that are variables, i.e. could potentially be changed, in a school into two categories: human and non-human.

Non-Human Resources

•    Books (textbooks, class sets of Shakespeare, and any other printed materials)

•    Electronics (Desktops, laptops, Smart Boards, projectors, USB drives, hard-drive space)

•    Bandwidth (the amount of Internet speed each student is allocated, presuming that each school has ONE connection that must be shared amongst the entire population of staff and students)

•    Space (the amount of room each student has to learn and play)

•    Design (the way each student interacts with his environment while in the confines of the school: think chairs, hallways, closed vs. open rooms, natural vs. artificial light, metal detectors)

Human Resources

•    Teachers (including literacy coaches and gym teachers)

•    Non-Teacher Personnel (College Counselors, Guidance Counselors, Social Workers)

•    Administrators (Principals, Assistant-Principals, Deans)

•    Parents

•    Alumni

•    Local Experts (this sub-category will be expounded upon in a future post)
When I look at that those two lists the first thing I notice is that the Human resources in most schools out-number the non-human, something, while true, is not immediately apparent when teaching in an isolated room. When I’m in my room, I feel very much alone; not in an especially vulnerable or exposed way, but simply on an island. Solutions have to be found from within; conflicts settled amongst the group. It’s why the difference, in my highly skewed opinion, between good and bad teachers is how much they rely on outside adults. Bad (you can call them inexperienced, or mediocre, or whatever other word you’d like, but they’re the opposite of “effective”) teachers ask for more help—they run the rooms that invite the administration in for support, and ship students out of the room to various “counselors”.  I certainly do this, particularly with difficult students, and it’s a crutch, a tool to use when I can’t “take it” anymore with a particular student. Sometimes I feel guilty about using this crutch, most times I don’t.

But the fact remains that human resources outnumber non-human ones, and yet there is only ever one teacher in my room…me. I’ve seen literacy coaches from time to time, and they seem to do a good job, and I’ve sent students out of the room to see various counselors, but when a student enters my room, she knows who’s going to be behind that desk.

My contention is that teachers are currently being used like desktop computers; and we need to become laptops. Having “blocks” of time at traditional high schools, where a student spends 60 minutes with a math teacher, makes little sense to me. What if, in the discussion of the Pythagorus, a student wants to learn the history of Greek mathematical thought, or, worse, Greek philosophy (yikes!)? The student waits, is what .The student waits for whatever time is left on the clock, that question in the back of their mind growing dimmer and dimmer, until they go to their Social Studies class and announce to their teacher, “I have to ask you something!” The teacher responds, “okay”, but the student can’t remember what it was that had piqued her curiosity, and dutifully learns about the Civil War instead. What if she had remembered, but the Social Studies teacher wasn’t exactly caught up on the history of Greek philosophical thought? If we’re talking about a traditional school, this is the end of the conversation. Student goes to her desk, told to “look it up later”, forgets all about it, and that’s that. If the teacher DOES know about the history of Greek philosophical thought, he can’t really talk about it to the student anyway, because today we’re covering the Civil War, not the Greeks. But you can “look it up later”, he console’s her.

The entire hierarchy of student learning is pretty close to the EXACT OPPOSITE of how it should be:

When I question the validity of having one teacher in the classroom, it’s easy to assume that I’m advocating for more teachers per classroom, or a lower student to teacher ratio. While I’d love either of those things, I also live in reality, and am more concerned with re-mixing our current resources, rather than begging for more (I personally think the educational system in the US is over-funded, leading to waste, complacency, and lack of innovation at almost every level).

End of Part 2.1

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