Chapter 9B

What It Takes to Succeed

Standing in front my class, I prepared to say number five on what I’ve been told was their list of “top ten things you never want to hear from Mr. Brock.”
“People,” I announced grimly. “We have a problem.”
Expressions of concern flashed across faces, and there was a collectively swallowing.
“These are your homework from last class.” I said, holding up a pile of papers in my right hand. “And they are not good.”
“In fact,” I declared, starting to pace. “So many of you didn’t even come close to passing that after a while, I just stopped grading. There was no point to it. It was so clear that you all had no idea how to answer what I thought were two simple questions that I knew I would only be punishing you if I kept correcting your papers.”
Concern turned to worry, and Allegra’s hand shot up.
“Mr. Brock, what did we do that was so bad?” She asked anxiously. “I mean, I thought the assignment was pretty simple, too. How could we have all done so badly?”
There were several nervous murmurs of agreement.
“Good question.” I replied as I halted my pacing to address the entire class. “Either none of you have figured out yet what kind of work is expected of you in this course, or else none of you seems to know how to use a textbook. Since it was not just a few of you who failed but practically every one of you in both classes, I’m going to assume for now that it’s because you just don’t know how to read the book.”
Puzzled frowns now joined worried looks.
“Therefore,” I declared firmly. “Instead of doing what we were originally going to do at the start of class today–which was to begin the next lab on how cells regulate their environment–we’re going to spend time learning how to use a textbook to complete a homework assignment.”
A few of my very best students struggled not to roll their eyes, and there were the beginnings of some protestations. But I silenced them all with a slight glower.
“I agree, Cassie.” I said, looking directly at one of my almost eye-rollers. “I would have thought that by ninth grade that you’d know how to use a textbook correctly, too. But I’ve got a stack of evidence that suggests otherwise. So please take a moment to get out your textbooks and open them to the pages of the assignment.” I said firmly.
They complied as I pulled the projector screen down and brought up the images of the text on my computer. I waited patiently, then, until everyone had her book out and I was certain that I had eighteen pairs of eyes on me.
“Okay,” I asked. “Whenever you have any assignment where you have to answer questions from a chapter in the book, what is the very first thing you want to do?”
Various hands went up, and I waited a five-count before calling on Naina.
“You make sure you know what the questions are asking in order to know what you’re looking for?” She stated, cautiously.
“Good. You’re seeking a body of information and you want to give your search some focus.” I answered.
I studied the room, and now the look on their faces was even more bewildered than ever. I could almost hear them thinking: what has gotten into Mr. Brock? We’ve known this stuff since the fourth grade!
I asked what was next and called on another student.
“You write down the answers as you read along?” Christine said slowly, clearly uncertain as to why she was having to say something so obvious.
“Which is exactly what I’m guessing most of you did.” I replied. “Right?” They all nodded. “Wrong. That’s exactly what you don’t do.” I told them.
The collective look of shock was quite dramatic, as if I had chopped down one of the fundamental pillars of their worldview.
“Why not?” I asked the class.
They sat and thought for a long time before a few hesitant hands began to go up. I saw that one of them was Christine’s again, and I wanted to reward her brave willingness to risk another answer; so I called on her a second time.
“Because we might miss something important?” She said uncertainly.
I nodded at her and gave her a big smile. “Very good. If all you do is write down an answer as you read along, you can miss critical information.”
I turned to point at the projected page on the screen.
“What was your first question on last night’s assignment?” I asked. “Kelly?”
“To compare and contrast the parts of plant and animal cells.” She replied.
“And what is on page 128?” I asked rhetorically.
She studied the screen for a moment, glanced down at the open book on her desk and blushed. Then she looked at me in open embarrassment.
“A diagram of an animal cell.” She responded quietly.
“And on page 129?” I continued. “Anyone?”
“A plant cell!” came the chorus of groans.
“In fact,” I stated. “Both diagrams take up over 80% of the space on these two pages. What’s that probably tell you?”
Cassie raised her hand again, and I called on her.
“That the information in them is important.” She droned, clearly miffed at herself.
“Uh, huh.” I nodded. “And the moral of this story is? Allegra?”
“To remember to go back and look at the diagrams as well as read what’s written.” She responded glumly.
I gave one of those head shakes that is both a ‘yes’ and a ‘no’ and pointed intently toward the screen with an outstretched arm.
“Yes, but it’s not just diagrams.” I told them. “It’s pictures, graphs, and even the text itself. The point is that whenever you’re using the book or any resource for an assignment, you always want to use the questions to focus your attention as you read. But you also always want to retrace your steps a second time to make sure you didn’t miss anything.”
I paused to let that sink in and then held out the pile of their failed homework again.
“That’s what it is going to take to succeed in this class.” I declared. “And that’s what’s missing from these. You didn’t go back and double check that you had found all the information you actually needed to complete the assignment.”
I pointed at the diagrams to underscore what I was saying once more and then studied their faces for understanding.
“Do you all now see what you should have done?” I asked.
Many nodded and several said “yes,” but in addition to the new understanding, I also saw a lot of frustration in their eyes—this was extra work!—and I pondered momentarily about how to address that apprehension.
“Look, I’m not angry, people.” I shared sincerely. “I don’t blame you for what happened with this assignment because you clearly weren’t prepared to do it correctly and that’s my job. It’s why we took the time today to learn how to read a textbook better, and it’s why you’re going to redo this assignment tonight. I want you to be able to succeed in this class, and it’s my responsibility to show you how even when I think someone else ought to have done so already.”
That brought a few smiles of relief, but I shook my head; I wasn’t finished.
“However,” I stressed. “The reason I let you see how disappointed I was today was because I want you to understand the seriousness of what happened. Only you are ultimately accountable for how successful you are in this class, and the same is true of everything you do in life. It’s my job to help you get ready, but once I know that you know how to do something successfully, you will be the ones who decide how well you want to accomplish it. I’m simply responsible at that point for determining how good a job you actually did.”
Again, I paused to let them absorb what I’d said and then continued.
“Remember,” I said. “I grade nearly everything you do in here because the universe ultimately ‘grades’ everything you do out there. And I want you to do a better job than the people before you have been doing.”

Their Missing Voice

There is a time honored truism in teaching that you have to meet your students where they’re at to get them where you want them to go, and for many years, I think most of us in education–myself included–have met them where we felt we could assume they would be given our own educational experiences and upbringings.  However, in today’s world, the technological revolution of the past twenty years has changed all that, and I would argue that we can’t make this assumption anymore at all.  I can still recall almost viscerally how frustrated and discouraged I felt reading that failed homework assignment now fifteen years ago and how hard the entire year was with that class.  Yet, unfortunately, one group has simply been followed by another who seemed even more under-prepared to do the work required of them, and I have recently actually had to start deliberately pointing out the diagrams when presenting that particular assignment—and I still have students fail a seemingly basic comparison task.  It has been enough to compel me seriously as someone who practices scientific observation to wonder if perhaps my students really are getting dumber with each passing year.

            Of course, such thoughts are not uncommon as individuals begin to experience the generational differences that come with aging, and I am too much of a historian and philosopher not to recognize that every older generation since there have been such things has regularly dismissed the younger as the inevitable end of civilization.  However, that historian in me also knows that sometimes the elders have been right, and perhaps “something has gone way wrong”¹³ this time.  After all, there is ample data that students everywhere “are showing steep declines in their performance, behavior, and values”¹⁴ due to the impact of technology,¹⁵ and in fact:

This [impact] has been studied extensively, with researchers linking nearly every type of in-class technology—including email, texting, laptop, social media and more—to decreased classroom performance regardless of how that performance is measured (grades, work productivity, etc.), and across all grade levels ranging from elementary school to college.¹⁶

Hence, maybe the children in our classes genuinely are getting dumber.

Yet a decline in standardized test scores and a decrease in intellectual preparedness for school work (including even preschoolers¹⁷) do not in and of themselves imply a diminishment in student intelligence, and as I have wrestled with the frustrations of this issue, I have come across a paradox in my work that points to what I think is really happening.  In examining recent final projects of my 9^th grade biology students–a project which is a month long culminating investigation into soil ecology to assesses their mastery of everything they’ve learned all year¹⁸–I have found that while my students have been arriving in my doorway less prepared to do the expected work, the overall quality of their projects by year’s end has actually been going up!  Somehow, they are arriving “dumber” and yet leaving “smarter.”  How can that possibly be?

It is indeed a paradox, and in finally seeing it, I have come to realize that my more recent students have been coming to school “dumber” but not in the sense of more stupid.  Instead, they have started arriving in the original sense of that word: mute or voiceless.¹⁹  They don’t know how to “speak” as they once did, and it is this silence that is the most significant reason for why the current situation in education “is nothing short of a crisis.”²⁰ Because until we can get kids to “speak” in the first place, any attempt to discuss what gets “said” is utterly pointless.

One cause for this silence, of course, is the disregard and devaluation we have already discussed in Chapters 7 & 8, and this abandonment has only grown worse as the remorseless new economy of the information age has destabilized conventional life cycles²¹ to the point where we are all “struggling to maintain meaningful connection with each other.”²² Hence, as our children’s marginalized status has only increased “is it any wonder that students, having received such messages from a dozen sources, stay silent in the classroom rather than risk another dismissal or rebuke.”²³

However, in addition to this marginalization, I think there is a deeper, more profound answer to what has changed to make the ones in my classes more voiceless, and that is technology’s relentless attack on their inner life.  In our always-on world, we not only “seem to have lost the ability to single task…we appear to have lost the ability to simply be alone with our thoughts.”²⁴  Yet solitude is critical to the development of the self that is essential to the learning process because, as we have already seen, all authentic learning and knowledge can only happen in the genuine relationship between the self and the “Other.”  Therefore, anything that introduces barriers to the authenticity of that relationship introduces barriers to these capacities, and thus, the more the technology of the smartphone and the computer screen introduce actual barriers to the intimate interaction that creates a real relationship, the more our modern technological world hinders the educational process and silences the mind’s capacity to “speak.”²⁵

Furthermore, since “not every issue has an answer that can be googled…this lack of internal and external solitude can have negative long-term repercussions.”²⁶ To know something, you have to be able to stand still long enough to enter into community with it and to listen to what it has to say to you; you have to “allow the subject to occupy the center of [your] attention”²⁷ in the way two friends do with each other when sharing an intimate experience.  But because this “requires a level of solitude and reflection that makes [today’s youth] feel uncomfortable”²⁸—and we cannot understate that discomfort!²⁹—the external pressures of a digital age leave them nowhere to stand still at all anymore (let alone long enough to realize that they have lost the balance of their inner life that allows for standing still in the first place!).  Thus, unless we change this situation (at least in our schools), our children will continue to grow “dumber” until they are no longer simply “voiceless;” they risk becoming genuinely stupid.