• I haven’t been in a classroom at all for a couple of years, I haven’t been the primary instructor in a classroom for almost nine years, I haven’t seriously experimented with new ways of structuring courses for about eleven years.
• The symposium in question took place three weeks ago, I don’t trust myself to remember the details of Roger’s position, and he didn’t actually put a concrete position statement on the symposium blog post. (See the Pericles Group website for some information about his approach, though.)

So, in other words: what I’m about to do is talk about a woeful misrepresentation of somebody else’s point of view based on knowledge and experiences of my own that are equally woefully ill-informed and/or out of date. (Alternatively: I’m about to write a blog post! *rimshot*)

Roger sees a close tie between games and teaching, and had some sort of pithy phrase that he used to express that tie. I can’t remember what the phrase was, but I believe its gist was that classrooms are always a game, and that students are going to perform according to the rules of that game: so make active, conscious use of that fact, designing as good a game as possible and one where success in the game is as closely tied to your learning objectives as possible. And, as far as I can tell, he and his co-conspirators are extremely successful in this—I can’t imagine reading some of Kevin Ballestrini’s posts from last school year and not getting the feeling that something special is going on there. So I’d like to understand it, to relate to my own experiences and philosophical predispositions, and see what I can learn.

On which note: my philosophical predispositions towards teaching are strongly shaped by reading Alfie Kohn. His book No Contest had a huge effect on how I structured my classroom time; his book Punished by Rewards had a fairly strong effect on how I structured my assignments and grading, contributing to my feeling that I wasn’t a misfit in academia solely for research reasons, I ultimately was probably more of a misfit for teaching reasons, even though (because?) I cared about the latter more than the former.

And certainly there are many ways in which Kohn agrees with (my interpretation of) Roger’s point. For example, Kohn rails at length against standardized tests, and one of his main points is that standardized tests encourage students, teachers, entire school systems to do well on those tests even if that comes at the expense of learning; to me, this dovetails quite nicely with Roger seeing classes as games, because you’d better make sure that the rules of the game enforce the behavior that you want! Standardized tests are, of course, a lousy game with lousy goals; Roger does much better on that end, and I’m sure that Kohn agrees that the sort of richer feedback mechanisms that Roger’s methods provide are a huge improvement.

Where I suspect the two would disagree (or, more concretely: my reading of Kohn gives me pause) is on the nature of the motivators that are involved. The point of Punished by Rewards is that intrinsic motivation is much more powerful than extrinsic motivation, and that the latter drives out the former. Now, classes are already chock-full of extrinsic motivators (grades in particular); if you accept that as the basis that you’re starting from, then sure, craft your extrinsic motivators to promote learning in the areas that you’d like, and overlaying role-playing game mechanics may help with that. But if you start from an environment that’s trying to work with and nurture intrinsic motivators, then while role-playing sounds good, I get nervous about game mechanics: it’s hard to do that without bringing extrinsic motivators into play.

Looking at this from a slightly different angle: I like learning. I think feedback is inextricably bound to learning. But I’m a lot more dubious about certification: its coupling of feedback with extrinsic motivation can be actively counterproductive. And that coupling is often very strong, and is expressed as a refusal to give feedback without submitting to those extrinsic motivators: e.g. most colleges will kick students out of school if they refuse to engage in actions that lead towards them getting graded.

(Tangent: in my last year and a half in academia, I taught calculus. Those courses were full of pre-meds; as far as I can tell, the course served much more of a weeding out role than a thoughtful attempt to ensure that those students learned mathematical concepts that would help them be more effective doctors. Most of the students put in a decent effort to learn the material—you generally don’t get into Stanford without such habits—but not all were particularly interested; from my point of view, not being interested was a perfectly reasonable possible choice, indeed one that probably more of the class should make, and I did not enjoy working within a system with strong forces pushing against students making that choice, or even being aware of the possibility.)

So the question that that raises is: are games simply feedback mechanisms that can be used in a variety of ways, or are they certification mechanisms? I was going to say that, whenever you bring in scoring, you’re already moving in a certification direction, but upon reflection that’s too strong: if a game really is about itself (go or, I assume, Starcraft), then the scoring mechanism is feedback pure and simple.

But if the game is about something else (as classroom-based games always are, though Roger’s approach works at narrowing that gap), then scores make me very nervous. For one thing, if the score is tied to something else (e.g. a course grade that is necessary for getting a degree) then it’s certification, not simply feedback; for another thing, the distance between the score and the broader topic means that you aren’t getting feedback about aspects of the topic that aren’t covered by the scoring mechanism. I see both of these all the time in video game RPGs: if you don’t fight and level up, RPGs will refuse to give you access to the game’s content, and even if you are willing to go along with that, that focus on combat and leveling encourages you to neglect other aspects of role-playing. (Fortunately, there are people whose drive is strong enough to withstand such discouragement.)

If you’re sensitive to these issues (as I’m sure Roger is), you can design your games to open up as wide a space as possible for learning. Take Rock Band as an example; in this context, we’ll think of it as a tool to learn about music, e.g. by introducing you to a range of music, to help you pick out the different parts of a piece of music (Paul McCartney’s bass lines), even to teach you concrete physical and mental skills involved in playing music. The first iteration of the series was relatively prescriptive: it wouldn’t even let you try to play harder songs until you’d performed adequately (according to the game’s criteria, not your own!) on the easier songs. I suspect no-fail mode existed in the first game, but I felt that its use was discouraged; in contrast, the second game turned no-fail mode on by default if you’re playing in easy mode, so if you want to listen to music with a bit of guidance from the game as to the shape of one of the parts, you can do that without having the game punish you if you don’t conform properly.

By the third game, the amount and range of possible feedback has expanded enormously; because of that feedback, I’m finding the experience much more powerful as a teaching tool, with my actions being much less driven by the scoring mechanisms of the game. I almost always have no-fail mode turned on (and I wish there were a way to turn off the missed note sound: frequently I find that sound to be useful feedback, but in some circumstances it’s actively counterproductive to my learning goals), and while the game’s scoring system (and other metrics, e.g. streak length) can be a useful feedback mechanism (e.g. breaking a streak while playing Outer Space last weekend pointed out that I was missing a bass line transition), the extrinsic motivation aspects of that feedback, while still relevant to me, is no longer as dominant as it once was.

And with Rock Band 3 in particular, there’s feedback that’s provided outside of the game context, that your ears and hands give you. That game is, admittedly, a quite special case, but its nature may make it particularly well suited to provide examples for how to design games to work in a classroom situation.

Returning to what I said earlier: I’m convinced that Roger’s methods are effective, but I’m not sure I really understand the sources of that effectiveness. Continuing the theme of talking about areas that I’m ignorant of: how much of the effectiveness of these methods is due to a magic circle effect? Bringing in an explicit game mechanic (instead of the implicit mechanic that’s provided by grades and testing) may serve as an inoculation against extrinsic motivators, as an explicit acknowledgement of those motivators coupled with a refusal to give them undue power. And role-playing mechanisms in particular may be a particularly strong inoculation, with the dual role allowing for one of those roles to be motivated by intrinsic motivation while the other role goes along with the more certification-y aspects of the feedback systems.

Which, in turn, raises the question: what would a classroom look like with magic circle effects but without game mechanics? That puts an unexpected light on some of my own teaching experiences. One of the most powerful such experiences that I had was in the very first course I taught at Stanford: it was a differential equations course, and I’d spent a lot of time thinking about how I wanted to design the course. I balanced student work and lecturing in a very different way than in courses I’d been in as a student, and had a quite unusual homework / exam policy. I continued feeling this out as the quarter went along; I had a great time, the students seemed to be enjoying it, and the students seemed to be learning something.

So I was ready to declare the methods a success, and indeed I think the methods I used were good ones; but subsequent iterations of the class didn’t have the same feel. Part of that is doubtless chance (e.g. the specific students involved), and part of that is that I was less actively investing mental effort in the later iterations. But I bet that the fact that I was clearly experimenting had an impact on how the students saw the course, and did so in a way that’s similar to a magic circle effect, treating it as an explicit alternate space that muted the impact of certification on their learning.

Interesting stuff, I wish I understood the interplay of forces here better. I hope we’ll talk about this more in future VGHVI Symposia (of which there will be one this Thursday); follow the VGHVI blog if you want to participate!

On easy, I was playing single notes; in chord sections, I had almost no context, and in solo sections I was missing the vast vast majority of the notes. On medium, the solo sections still aren’t particularly satisfying, but the chord sections have much more substance to them: in fact, on songs that have G, D, and C chords, you’re expected to play the full chords. (And it helped that the small amount of guitar learning that I’d done a couple of decades ago left me with some slight familiarity with those chords.) Of course, most of the songs on the disc are instead full of A and E chord shapes (typically barred), and there the game only has you play the two lowest strings of the chord; still, that’s enough to at least reinforce the fact that you’re not playing standalone notes, that chord progressions underpin the notes that you’re playing.

And the chords (and notes) come faster in medium than in easy, enough so that they took a bit of time to learn: once I got past the very easiest pieces, I went through training mode on every song, and I’m glad I did. My left hand had to shift more quickly and over longer distances than I was comfortable with, and even two-note chords required me to be surer in my transitions than the “move your hand and then correct” style that easy allowed me to use. Of course, my hand was generally in an unrealistic shape, because I didn’t try to pretend to play barre chords, and I may end up regretting that a little bit; though even there on some songs I actually found it easier to use a barre chord shape than to hit the two notes precisely.

I’m curious how many other people playing the game are taking my approach of going through everything on medium, versus the approach of focusing on individual songs and learning how to play them on hard (or even expert?) before moving on. I’m (barely) in the top 2% of pro guitar players in terms of total score, which I find ludicrous, and which I assume means that my approach of going through everything on medium isn’t very popular. (I also assume it means that I’m simply putting in more time, though I would imagine the price of the controller selects for people who at least intend to put in some amount of effort?) And if other people are focusing on individual songs to the extent that they actually sound decent playing those songs, more power to them: I’m looking forward to reaching that level myself, but I’m certainly not there yet.

But I’m not having second thoughts about my approach, either. I found the micro goals that playing on medium gives me to be very compelling: I’m not diving head-first into the game or anything, but I’ve put in three or four hours on pro guitar pretty much every weekend since I finished pro keys, and there’s something pleasant about spending twenty minutes with a song (involving training and a couple of playthroughs), feeling that I’ve had to deal with some challenges while doing so, and then moving on to another song. And I have absolutely no question that I’ve learned something over the last couple of months: my hands are much better at leaping between frets and strings than they were when I started this project, so while I’ve got a huge amount of work ahead of me, I don’t want to discount the progress that I’ve made it so far.

Having said that, I’m also very glad that I’m done with medium and about to hit hard, because my best guess is that this is where the game starts to get a whole lot more musical, in the sense that if I were to memorize the songs and play them without the game on, I would be recognizable as actually playing the songs in question. That’s just a guess, though: I haven’t played any songs on hard yet, all I’ve done is dipped into the barre chord lessons, made it through the first few with some difficulty (and some pain!), and ended up with a fair number of questions. (Fortunately, my twitter feed is blessed with a wealth of people named Dan who give great advice!) Because of the difficulties that I had there (including difficulties telling when I was holding down the strings firmly enough), I’ve actually put in a bit of guitar time every evening this week outside of game, with the controller unplugged and unmuted; the fact alone that I’m doing that makes me happy, and it seems to be paying off a bit.

We’ll see how much progress I’ll make this weekend; it would be nice if I could make it through all the barre chord lessons, though I imagine that (unlike all previous lessons in the game) I’ll end up returning to those even after I’ve passed them, in order to get to where I can pass them reliably. And I’ll probably dip into a real song once I’ve done that, though I’ll also give the rest of the hard level lessons a try; who knows what my progression pattern will be like when trying the hard songs. (I certainly don’t have confidence that I’ll be able to make it through all the songs on hard without more work than I’m willing to put in, but who knows.)

And I’m also going to try to actually learn some of the songs. I’m planning to buy a (cheap) amp, so I can hear better what I sound like; any recommendations? My neighbor gives guitar lessons, so I may see if I can sign up for a few one-off sessions with her as well. (Which I imagine will lead to some odd conversations: no, I don’t want to go through your standard lesson plan, I just want focused advice to answer questions X, Y, and Z that I can’t figure out the answer to when playing Rock Band!)

Great game, and to me it looks like a great teaching device. It’s giving me a lot of appreciation for the power of game mechanics in that context: having a set of focused challenges with a game infrastructure (including amplifying your actions to make it feel like you’re doing something much more impressive than you actually are) is working very well for me.

He began by talking about incompatibilities between schooling and technology: uniform learning vs. customization, teacher control vs. learner control, teacher as expert vs. diverse sources, standardized assessment vs. specialization, knowledge in head vs. reliance on resources, coverage vs. knowledge explosion, learning by absorption vs. learning by doing, just-in-case learning vs. just-in-time learning.

The result of these incompatibilities is that school becomes less and less important, with a new system emerging. The industrial revolution brought universal schooling; the digital revolution leads to lifelong learning. Home schooling workplace education distance education, learning centers, web communities, other examples.

He then compared shifts over three eras of education:

• Responsibility: parents -> state -> individuals
• Content: practical skills / literacy -> basic skills / disciplines -> generic skills / learning to learn
• Pedagogy: apprenticeship -> didacticism -> interaction
• Assessment: observation -> didacticism -> embedded
• Location: home -> school -> wherever you are
• Culture: adult -> peer -> mixed
• Relationships: personal bonds -> authority figures -> computer-mediated interaction

What is lost, what is gained in this transition? Here, I think he went pretty far off the rails. His list of losses, prefixed by some confusion about games, and with a ridiculous claim in the middle that we’re now not learning to work together, was: equity, citizenship (seriously? Blogger/Wikipedia culture somehow hurts citizenship?), social cohesion, diversity, commercialism, isolation, broader horizons. And his list of gains: more engagement, less competition, customization, responsibility, less peer culture (again, WTF?; I think, actually, what he meant here is that we’re losing a learning-hostile peer culture and replacing it with a more positive one, but I could be wrong).

Where do we go from here? We’re in a state of flux, a time when visionaries can have a real impact. The imperatives of technology: customization, interaction, learner-control, production. Specialized certifications. Rethinking high school.

(And then I stopped taking notes; more of the same, a curious mixture of sensible statements with claims that much of this conference gives lie to.)

11:00am: Compromising among Gaming, Learning, and Society, by Ruhui Ni, Mete Akcaoglu, and Ken Dirkin.

This was a Chat and Frag about a Chinese-language learning game / virtual world called Zon. And I really enjoyed it: I have no idea what the speaker said, because I spent the whole hour playing around with the game! It was gratifying to see that I’d learned something from listening to Chinese Class 101 sporadically over the last few months…

12:30pm: The Intertwingling of Openness and Data in the Future of Education, by David Wiley.

Here are his slides on Slideshare:

He started by talking about the history of lectures. First professors read texts to students that they copied. Then, the printing press: professors read annotations of texts to students that they copied. So: if the book couldn’t change teaching, can technology? He’s not optimistic, based on how laptops are getting used. (Or based on the way that I’m blogging this…)

He then moved into a discussion of copyright, openness, remixes. His claim: openness is the only possible means of doing education. If there is no sharing, there is no education.

Expertise is nonrivalrous: you can give it away without losing it. Expressions of expertise used to not have that property (books), but now they do (electronic copies). So: more sharing, which means, by the above, more education.

But: policy fights this technological advance. We saw this back in the 15th century: you could print the bible the Latin, but you could be killed for reading, let alone publishing, it in your native tongue. And we see this now: “learning management systems” exist to prevent access to, saving of, dissemination of learning, of expressions of expertise. Or closed laptop policies: if I’m not more interesting than your sisters updates about her breakfast, then I don’t deserve your attention. (Crazy example: a professor claimed copyright not only over lecture but over derivative works, like students’ lecture notes!)

The church’s policies around the printing press led to the Protestant reformation; are we going to have our own reformation, are we going to have a splintering of sects?

There’s a huge divide between everyday life experiences and education experiences: the former is open, tethered, customizable, digital, while the latter is closed, mobile, generic, analog. Sure, we have e-learning, which advances on some of these dimensions, but not on most. In particular, it generally fails on openness, which is the key to the other attributes. (Though some schools are pushing against this, fortunately.) (He also gave a plug for a company that he’s working with, Flat World Knowledge, which is a textbook company that publishes their works under a Creative Commons license.)

In his courses, he requires students to post their work on a blog. Not infrequently, one of these blog entries gets linked by an academic aggregator, so all of a sudden thousands of people are aware of it, maybe commenting in it. If this happens in week three, then in week four the quality and ambition of students’ work dramatically improves, much more improvement than traditional academic motivators manage to produce.

He also opened up participation in his class to the public. Assessment didn’t scale in that context; he looked to MMORPGs for inspiration, with classes and leveling up. (It wasn’t completely clear exactly how the mechanics of that worked to solve the scalability problem.)

He then shifted to data collection for the purpose of continuous improvement. Amazon does a great job with this; educators, even when they have that information (e.g. server logs for online education components), and just throw it away. One vision for how to use this: tutoring is very effective, but doesn’t scale. Can we use information about what students are doing online to discover moments when we can intervene with tutoring most strategically? (They’re doing this at the Open High School in Utah. Which tutoring, incidentally, they’re logging in a customer relation system, to make sure that data gets preserved. Businesses know how to keep and use data!)

Another vision: use that data to discover which curriculum materials are most effective, and hence to improve it? Which gets back to the openness issue above: you need to be able to modify it. So the Open High School is only using open instructional materials.

To sum: openness

• Increases access
• Gathers more data
• Improves sharing
• Creates local control
• Makes data actionable
• Permits alignment with societal changes
• Facilitates the unexpected

And the the conference was over! I hung out with Roger Travis, playing some Rock Band and some Roll through the Ages (which he repeatedly beat me at); I had dinner with him and Mike Young and Erik Hanson.

A very pleasant conference; I enjoyed the content, I hope I learned a few things, and it was great seeing friends in person.

9:00am: Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap: Design Lessons Learned from Rock Band. Which began with the question: what do you do about the fact that everybody wants to have input into the design of your game? If a designer has tight control, then other people get mad when their ideas aren’t used, and you lose good ideas. But design by committee doesn’t work, either.

To solve this, you need a way to get everybody on the same page. Their answer: each game has One Question that you can always come back to as a touchstone. Compare this to Level 5′s answer from Wednesday (or, for that matter, Bioware’s answer from later on Friday); note also Iwata’s / Miyamoto’s claim that design documents don’t work to this end, because people don’t read anything. In addition, as an audience member pointed out to me after the talk, just phrasing your touchstone in the form of a question has benefits, in that merely repeating it gets you thinking about whether or not it applies to what you’re doing.

For Guitar Hero, the question was “Does this rock?”. For Rock Band, they began with the question of “Is this different from what we’ve done before?”, which is of course a lousy question: there’s no way to focus a team behind it. After a lot of experimentations/investigations, they settled on a much better question, “Is this an authentic band experience?” So, for example, for the gameplay, this suggested adding big rock endings, coming back from the brink, and solo bonuses; it suggested avoiding powerups, guitars that caught on fire, and minigames.

So that gets everybody on the same page. Still, though, to really understand others’ suggestions demands mind reading, and can lead to graceless compromises. His solution involved something called perceptual control theory, which I don’t really understand, but the example he gave (which sounded kind of like a Theory of Constraints evaporating cloud to me) was: people complain about hard songs in random setlists. One bad solution is to say “what part of random don’t you understand?” and tell people to learn to play better. Another bad solution is to come up with some complicated algorithm to improve the setlists and make them not, in fact, random. A better solution: give people some info in advance about the difficulty of the setlist. (Editorial note: though, personally, I wouldn’t mind if I could pick the difficulty of each song in a random setlist independently.)

More on the theme of feedback from players: hardcore players will tell you, frequently at length, what they think about your game and what they think you should change about it. (See the previous sentence for an example!) One thing to keep in mind here is that the term “hardcore” contains multiple cultures; you have to interpret the advice you get in the context of the culture that spawns it. More casual players won’t tell you; fortunately, achievement data gives lots of information there. For example, in the original Rock Band, they were surprised at how much more popular the band tour mode was than the solo tour instruments (they’d thought of the former as relatively hardcore); they reacted by adding a patch to make the band tour even more accessible, which proved to be quite successful, and removed the solo tour style from the sequel.

Other tidbits:

• Separate design from content as much as possible. E.g. they needed to make it easy to drop in songs at the last moment; to make this work with all the various playlists that a song might appear in, they added a layer of indirection by having the playlists generated from metadata associated with the songs, instead of writing the playlists directly.
• Don’t design for some sort of ideal situation in your head: it will take a long time and probably won’t be what people actually want.
• A good use of user suggestions: one of the Rock Band 2 battles of the bands was entitled “Schrödinger’s Cat battle”, containing the songs “Dead” (The Pixies), “Alive” (Pearl Jam), and “Wanted Dead or Alive” (Bon Jovi).
• They’re the world’s largest manufacturer of drum sticks.

10:30am: Stretching Beyond Entertainment: The Role of Games in Personal and Social Change. A panel discussion including Peter Molyneux, Will Wright, Bing Gordon, Lorne Lanning, and Ed Fries. But, apparently, you weren’t supposed to be interested in what any of those guys might have to say, and the real draw was supposed to be the moderator, Rusel DeMaria, because for the first fifteen or twenty minutes of the panel, the moderator spoke more than all five of the panelists put together.

I was kind of expecting to be annoyed by Lorne Lanning, and my expectations were met: he even discussed Abe’s Oddyssee, and presented it as a game where, if you choose, you could kill the Mudokons with gruesome and entertaining death animations, only to realize the error of your ways when confronted with the bad ending. (I believe he even used the phrase “profound impact” when talking about this.) Whereas my experience was that you could choose to dutifully slog through the game’s puzzles, saving as many Mudokons as you could, and realize when you nonetheless got the (gratuitously callous) bad ending that the error of your ways was letting the game come anywhere near your console.

Will Wright said some interesting things, though; the one that stuck with me was his claim that the works in other media that have brought about the most social change are those that have honestly depicted bad behavior instead of those that have depicted good behavior. (So, hey, video games are halfway there!) The John Holt fan in me was amused by Bing Gordon’s anti-schooling rabble rousing. But, all in all, not a good choice.

12:00pm: The Dating Game, with Dustin Clingman, Richard Dansky, Wendy Despain, and Steve Meretzky. (And with much more active and effective audience participation than any other session I attended.) This was my most pleasant surprise of the conference: I mostly went because I loved Planetfall and because, frankly, there wasn’t a lot else in the time slot, but it turned out to be thoroughly delightful.

The question that the session posed: in the U.S., the canonical thing to do on a first date is go to a movie. (Well, dinner plus a movie.) What would have to change for playing a video game to replace going to a movie? They broke down their analysis into a number of subquestions; basically, it came down to why are movies an actively good first date and why are games an actively bad first date? But the discussion went in all sorts of directions at different times, so I won’t stick to the script, instead just listing some of the points that were raised:

• Movies are in a public, neutral space: currently, video games usually aren’t played in such a space.
• That public space is dark, giving you some privacy.
• Movies are a shared experience, with no scope for dominance in your shared experience. In particular, competition is bad, which is one strike against games.
• But cooperation is good: you can imagine bonding more strongly while working together to create something while playing a game than you might while watching a movie.
• One audience member reported a game date working well when they were playing a cooperative light-gun shooter side by side in a sit-down semi-enclosed arcade cabinet, which addressed all the above issues.
• In a movie you have your hands free, and you won’t die a gruesome death if you look away from the screen and at your companion for a bit.
• When going to a movie, it’s typically the first time both people have seen it, and you don’t have to worry about differences in prior expertise, so both participants are on a more level playing field.
• Multiple audience members brought up the example of a carnival as a successful first date, and a Japanese audience member said that was quite common in his company. And games are part of the carnival experience; they can provide a way for people to show off something they can do well (while dominating an external situation instead of the other person), which can certainly be attractive.
• Movies give you something to talk about afterwards, allowing you to get to know the other person without exposing too much of yourself right off the bat.
• There’s an established “date movie” genre; what can we learn from it, what makes it successful?
• Movies (especially date movies) hit on emotion a lot.

They didn’t come to any grand conclusions—it was much more in the spirit of “let’s see what we can come up with when thinking about this together” than “here’s how to solve this problem”—but I thoroughly enjoyed the meandering discussions that occurred.

1:00pm: Lunch, in the delightful company of Michael Abbott, Wes Erdelack, and Manveer Heir.

2:30pm: Lionhead Experiments Revealed. Molyneux speaking, and I expected more out of him. Lionhead lets people propose/run experimental projects between games (kind of like Google’s 20 percent time, but less bold), so Peter talked about that and showed some examples as experiments. But nothing about the details of their structure or about the experiments he showed particularly grabbed me.

4:00pm: The Iterative Level Design Process of Bioware’s Mass Effect 2. My writeup for this turned out to be long enough that I’m splitting it off into a separate post.

Cna yuo raed tihs?

Aoccdrnig to rscheearch, it dseno’t mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are; the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses, and you can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef but the wrod as a whloe. Azanmig…

Azanmig indeed: I was pretty shocked to find that I could read that paragraph pretty much as fast as I could have if it had been spelled correctly. especially once I relaxed a bit. (Typing it in was another matter…)

Another datum for the “kids new to reading and writing are doing a completely different thing than I am” point of view. (Or is it? It’s related somehow, but I’ll have to think about exactly what it might imply.) I wonder if we should put something like this in the PACT parent ed new parent training, to give people a bit more sympathy for what K-1 kids are going through?

I think I’ve said this here before, but I’ll repeat it: it wasn’t until I started learning Japanese that I really had sympathy for what kids were going through. (My experiences with Greek and Devanagari scripts are far enough in the past to not have a current impact.) I’ve been studying it for a while now, and I still can’t even read Hiragana script with anything like the fluency that I can read Roman: I’m literally unable to misread Roman script in ways that I’m quite capable of misreading Hiragana and that first-graders are quite capable of misreading Roman. But that’s just script-to-sound translation; the above points out that that’s not what’s really going on when fluent readers read…

You can also watch it at its web page; I like the chapter markings on the full-screen version of the video player on their page. (Not the embedded one here.)

I heard about this talk via two separate routes: Presentation Zen and Evolving Excellence. Two blogs which don’t normally have much in common, but in retrospect it makes sense that you’d see this in both places: in particular, the lean folks know as much as anybody about the value of encouraging creativity at all levels of your organization.

Lots of good stuff in the talk; some ideas I particularly liked:

• Students who are in school now will still be working half a century from now, yet we have a hard time predicting what the world will be like half a decade from now; can we afford to do anything other than do anything other than encourage their creativity and capacities for innovation?
• To be creative, you need to make mistakes; yet schools punish you ruthlessly for making them. (They could take a lesson from Super Mario Galaxy: feedback doesn’t mean punishment. Or, for that matter, from more sandboxy games: you don’t need pervasive feedback, either.)
• Different people have different strengths, yet schools focus on an obscenely small portion of those. If somebody is fidgeting in your math class, perhaps discovering that they’re a dancer is a better idea than putting them on ADHD drugs.

As always, I’m very glad that we found PACT. It’s not perfect, but it’s worlds better than what I hear of schools elsewhere.

• In a recent lean blog podcast episode, Norman Bodek talked about how great mistakes are, because making a mistake is the best way to learn something.
• In an episode of The Cranky Middle Manager that I just listened to, Patrick Lencioni talked about how one of the signs of a bad job is that you can’t tell whether or not you’re doing a good job at it.

Everybody wants to do things right. But if you make a mistake, don’t freak out about it: notice that you made a mistake, figure out how to do things right the next time.

This has two hard parts: you have to notice that you made a mistake, and you have to not freak out about it. Which points at a problem with our educational system (among other aspects of our culture): it’s designed to get you to freak out about making mistakes, without giving you nearly enough tools to help you notice that you’ve done it. As math teachers all know, telling students to check their work isn’t sufficient support; helping students develop the skills to notice when they’ve made a mistake is hard, and I suspect that attacking them when they screw up probably isn’t the best way to go about it.

Of course, while making mistakes is all well and good from a learning perspective, we don’t want to go too far with that. Which is why, as Bodek continues, we should distinguish between mistakes and defects. Making mistakes is all well and good, but we don’t want other people to suffer from them. This is where poka yoke devices come in: they help improve quality by making it as easy as possible for people to notice when something is going wrong.

The big news around here for the last week has been the oil spill in San Francisco Bay. The news coverage has been all about whether or not it was the fault of the pilot or of a machinery malfunction: train wreck management, or at least train wreck news coverage, at its best. I have no idea what really happened there, but I hope the actual investigation is focusing more on learning about what went wrong and preventing this in the future than on figuring out whom to point fingers at.

(I can’t remember where I read this – Gerald Weinberg somewhere, maybe? – but if you really feel a need for a rule on how to point fingers, here’s one: if you aren’t authorized to sign off on a purchase for X dollars, then you’re not ultimately responsible for a mistake that costs your company X dollars. Again, I don’t want to excuse defects, but people higher up in the company should be growing an environment that minimizes the chance of defects happening at an unacceptable frequency.)

• Listens in class
• Follows directions
• Works independently
• Works neatly
• Completes work on time
• Accept [sic] responsibility
• Respects classmates
• Respects authority
• Uses time wisely
• Communicates effectively
• Works collaboratively

A quiz for my gentle readers (or, even better, my snarky readers): which of these items

1. Support life-long learning?
2. Actively work against life-long learning?
3. Are neutral towards life-long learning?
4. Could be interpreted in ways that either support or hinder life-long learning, but guess which way teachers are going to interpret them?

I was going to rant about this on the PACT mailing list, but I’ve gotten chastized recently for complaining there near the start of the school year, when there are so many new families around who still aren’t sure if they want to be in PACT or not. (Which is, I think, a sign of mild dysfunction in PACT: we should be constantly discussing things we like, things we don’t like, and ways for improvement. Go retrospectives, or something.) New PACT parents, if you’ve clicked on this link: PACT is super-tiptop-wonderful, and Castro’s actually a pretty nice place as well; neither of them are perfect, but That’s OK.

Anyways, since the point of having a blog is to be able to rant, I figured I would just move the venting part here. But I did want to warn my regular readers that they might be missing some of the context. The part of the message that I did post on the mailing list is a report of a discussion that I had with the principal on the matter. (I should emphasize that I’m quite impressed with the principal; I think she probably made the wrong choice here, but, well, that hardly makes her unique in the world.)

Context ends; rant begins:

The one thing that really bothered me about our discussion was her presenting this as a choice between curriculum versus convenience. The assumption underlying that statement is that chorus is not a natural part of the curriculum, and the only reason to hold it during school hours would be to save parents some driving. I’m not sure it’s a matter of mere convenience for parents, given the realities of work schedules, but setting that aside, I very much object to the notion that chorus should be considered a second-class member of the curriculum.

Certainly when I was growing up, chorus (and related activities, orchestra and band) were held during school hours. It’s possible my experiences were unusual, but I don’t believe they were too unusual at the time. One of the frequent laments triggered by the loss of school funding over the last decades is that arts/music programs are being pared to the bone; one of the reasons why it was supposed to be a good idea to close Slater was that it would free up more money to fund arts/music programs. So I don’t believe that I’m alone in believing that chorus (and related activities) have historically been part of school curricula, and rightly so.

I also see no reason why music should be considered so much less important than, say, reading/writing and math that we can’t spend a couple of hours a week of school time on it. I’m an ex-mathematician, so my experiences in that regard are very far on one side of the spectrum, but I nonetheless spend much more time in an average week listening to music than doing math, and I’m pretty sure that I spend more time creating music (singing, whistling, playing the piano) than doing math. Admittedly, I spend a good deal more time reading, or even writing, than either, but music is wired extremely deeply into our brains.

And, while I don’t have evidence one way or the other, I would be surprised (not shocked, but surprised) if it proved to be the case that students who participated in chorus (or other similar activities) did less well academically, or indeed didn’t do better academically, than students who didn’t participate in such activities. And, of course, our schools’ focus shouldn’t be solely on academics, but should be geared towards helping our children become the best people they can be in a broad sense.

So, from my point of view, this is not a choice between curriculum and convenience: it’s a choice between two different views of curriculum. And the wrong view won.

Then there’s the whole program improvement thing. (Context: Castro is a “program improvement” school, which means that our test scores didn’t pass muster by the powers that be.) I don’t really understand what pressures the Castro faculty are under because of this, but I’m sure they are considerable. This situation seems to me to exemplify one of the evils of our nation’s current zeal towards test-driven schooling: rich schools, where the kids do well on tests, are free to provide a broad curriculum for their students, while schools that are already less well-off have further pressures to narrow their curriculum beyond what funding constraints would force them to do.

So I can accept that, because of Castro’s PI status, some people might feel that the pragmatic thing to do would be to reschedule chorus and spend more time on the basics. But, if we’re going to do that, we should be clear what our reasons are for not holding chorus during the school day. Are we doing it because:

• We think that chorus shouldn’t be part of the school curriculum, irrespective of test-imposed pressues, or
• We think that chorus should be part of the school curriculum, but regretfully bow to external pressures?

If the former, then PI status is irrelevant, and it makes me sad that teachers at my daughter’s school feel that way. If the latter, then we should think hard about whether more courage would be appropriate here: do we really believe that chorus students do worse in school or in life, and what messages do we want to send our students?

One unfortunate aspect of the current situation is that either the decision makers haven’t consciously thought about whether the decision is made out of principle or as an accomodation; or, if they have, they haven’t communicated that to the rest of us. Or they have communicated it to the rest of us, and the communication is that they’re doing it on principle. Which I fear might be the case, as much as I would like to believe otherwise.

Another thing that bothers me: I think people should be able to choose their educational priorities whenever possible. So I’m quite happy to accept that music isn’t as important to other people as it is to me: those people may well prefer to have school time devoted to other matters. In which case, great: that’s why chorus is optional! Why not let parents vote with their feet in this matter: parents can choose to either send their child to chorus or to let their child have 25 or 40 minutes (depending on the grade) more of educational time each week? Instead, we have teachers and a principal telling us that such a choice is an inappropriate one.

(Admittedly, that argument has weak points (as of course do all my arguments): in particular, my preferred solution would make it impossible for parents to choose to get the extra instructional time and also get the chorus time by sending their child to chorus after school.)

At the end of last school year, all the schools’ choruses put on a performance. Some schools, including Slater (Miranda’s late, lamented school) had more than fifty students there (it might have been closer to a hundred than fifty). Almost all schools had at least a few dozen students there. And then there was Castro, which had a grand total of six students present at the concert, or approximately one percent of the student population. At the time, I thought that was a bit weird, but at least PACT’s presence at Castro would change that. Now, it looks to me like it wasn’t a fluke at all.

In the years before I met Elizabeth, I had visited many elementary schools in the South Bronx and in one northern district of the Bronx as well. I had also made a number of visits to a high school where a stream of water flowed down one of the main stairwells on a rainy afternoon and where green fungus molds were growing in the office where the students went for counseling. A large blue barrel was positioned to collect rain-water coming through the ceiling. In one make-shift elementary school housed in a former skating rink next to a funeral parlor in another nearly all-black-and-Hispanic section of the Bronx, class size rose to 34 and more; four kindergarten classes and a sixth grade class were packed into a single room that had no windows. Airlessness was stifling in many rooms; and recess was impossible because there was no outdoor playground and no indoor gym, so the children had no place to play.

In another elementary school, which had been built to hold 1,000 children but was packed to bursting with some 1,500 boys and girls, the principal poured out his feelings to me in a room in which a plastic garbage bag had been attached somehow to cover part of the collapsing ceiling. “This,” he told me, pointing to the garbage bag, then gesturing around him at the other indications of decay and disrepair one sees in ghetto schools much like it elsewhere, “would not happen to white children.” (pp. 40–41)

During the 1990s, physical conditions in some buildings had become so dangerous that a principal at one Bronx school, which had been condemned in 1989 but nonetheless continued to be used, was forced to order that the building’s windows not be cleaned because the frames were rotted and glass panes were falling in the street, while at another school the principal had to have the windows bolted shut for the same reason. These were not years of economic crisis in New York. This was a period in which financial markets soared and a new generation of free-spending millionaires and billionaires was widely celebrated by the press and on TV; but none of the proceeds of this period of economic growth had found their way into the schools that served the truly poor. (pp. 43–44)

I don’t mean to be picking on New York here: he gives examples from elsewhere, here and in other books.

But the differences in teaching style are a good deal more chilling:

“Taking their inspiration from the ideas of B. F. Skinner…,” [...] proponents of scripted rote-and-drill curricula articulate their aim as the establishment of “faultless communication” between “the teacher, who is the stimulus,” and “the students, who respond.”

The introduction of Skinnerian approaches, which are commonly employed in penal institutions and drug rehabilitation programs, as a way of altering the attitudes and learning styles of black and Hispanic children is provocative, and it has stirred some outcries from respected scholars. To actually go into a school in which you know some of the children very, very well and see the way that these approaches can affect their daily lives and thinking processes is even more provocative.

On a chilly November day four ears ago in the South Bronx, I entered P.S. 65 [...]

Silent lunches had been instituted in the cafeteria and, on days when children misbehaved, silent recess had been introduced as well. On those days, the students were obliged to stay indoors and sit in rows and maintain silence on the floor of a small room that had been designated “the gymnasium.” The school still had a high turnover of its teachers [...], but the corridors were quiet and I saw no children outside of their classrooms.

The words “Success For All,” which was the brand name of a scripted program used within the school, were prominently posted at the top of the main stairway and, as I would later find, in almost every room. Also displayed throughout the building were a number of administrative memos that were worded with unusual directive absoluteness. “Authentic Writing,” said a document called “Principles of Learning” that was posted in the corridor close to the office of the principal, “is driven by curriculum and instruction.” I didn’t know what this expression meant and later came back to examine it again before I left the school.

I entered the fourth grade of Mr. Endicott, a man in his mid-thirties who had arrived here without training as a teacher, one of about 15 teachers in the building who were sent into this school after a single summer of short-order preparation. [...]

On the wall behind the teacher, written in large letters: “Portfolio Protocols: [...]” To the left side of the room: “Performance Standards Mathematics Curriculum: M-5 Problem Solving and Reasoning. M-6 Mathematical Skills and Tools…”

My attention was distracted by some whispering among the children sitting to the right of me. The teacher’s response to this distraction was immediate: His arm shot out and up in a diagonal in front of him, his hand straight up, his fingers flat. The young co-teacher did this too. When they saw their teachers do this, all the children in the classroom did it too.

“Zero noise,” the teacher said, but this instruction proved to be unneeded. The strange salute the class and teachers gave each other, which turned out to be one of a number of such silent signals teachers in the school were trained to use, and children to obey, had done the job of silencing the class.

“Active listening!” said Mr. Endicott. “Heads up! Tractor beams!”—the latter meaning, “Every eye on me.”

On the front wall of the classroom in handwritten words that must have taken Mr. Endicott long hours to transcribe: a list of terms that could be used to praise or criticize a student’s work in mathematics. At Level Four, the highest of our levels of success, a child’s “problem-solving strategies” could be described, according to this list, as “systematic, complete, efficient, and possibly elegant,” while the student’s capability to draw conclusions from the work she had completed could be termed “insightful…, comprehensive.” At Level Two, the child’s capability to draw conclusions was to be described as “logically unsound”—at Level One, “not present.” Approximately 50 separate categories of proficiency, or lack of such, were detailed in this wall-sized tabulation.

An assistant to the principal remained with me throughout the class and then accompanied me wherever else I went within the school. Having an official shadow me so closely is a bit unusual in visits that I make to public schools. Principals who feel relaxed and confident about their teachers typically invite me to sit in on classes without constant supervision and to visit classes that have not been pre-selected. Also unusual, I realized later, was that Mr. Endicott, whom I had met before, did not say hello to me until nearly the final moments of the class and didn’t actually acknowledge I was there except by stoping by my desk and handing me the worksheet on perimeters.

[...] It is one of the few classrooms I had visited up to that time in which almost nothing even hinting at spontaneous emotion in the children or the teacher surfaced in the time that I was there.

I had visited classes that resembled this in Cuba more than 20 years before; but in the Cuban schools the students were allowed to question me, and did so with much charm and curiosity, and teachers broke the pace of lesson plans from time to time to comment on a child’s question or to interject a casual remark that might have been provoked by something funny that erupted from a boy or girl who was reacting to my presence in the class. What I saw in Cuban schools was certainly indoctrinational in its intent but could not rival Mr. Endicott’s approach in its totalitarian effectiveness.

The teacher gave the “zero noise” salute again when someone wihspered to another child at his table. “In two minutes you will have a chance to talk and share this with your partner.” Commuication between children in the class was not prohibited but was afforded time-slots and was formalized in an expression that I found included in a memo that was posted near the door: “An opportunity … to engage in Accountable Talk.”

Even the teacher’s words of praise were framed in terms consistent with the lists that had been posted on the wall. “That’s a Level Four suggestion” said the teacher when a child made an observation other teachers might have praised as simply “pretty good” or “interesting” or “mature.”

There was, it seemed, a formal name for every cognitive event within this school: “Authentic Writing,” “Active Listening,” “Accountable Talk.” [...]

These naming exercises and the imposition of an all-inclusive system of control on every form of intellectual activity consumed a vast amount of teaching time but seemed to be intrinsic to the ethos here: a way of ordering cognition beyond any effort of this sort I’d seen in the United States before. The teacher, moerover, did not merely name and govern every intellectual event with practiced specificity; he also issued his directions slowly, pacing words with a meticulous delivery that brought to my mind the way the staff attendants spoke to the Alzheimer’s patients at my father’s nursing home.

[...]

I remember, too, another aspect of my visit that distinguished this from almost anyother class I’d visited up to this time: Except for one brief giggle of a child sitting close to me which was effectively suppressed by Mr. Endicott, nothing even faintly frivolous took place while I was there. No one laughed. No child made a funny face to somebody beside her. Neither Mr. Endicott nor his assistant laughed as best as I can recall. This is certainly unusual within a class of eight-year-olds. [...]

When I was later looking at my notes, I also noticed that I couldn’t find a single statement made by any child that had not been prompted by the teacher’s questions, other than one child’s timid question about which “objective” should be written on the first line of a page they had been asked to write. I found some notes on children moving from their tables to their “centers” and on various hand-gestures they would make as a response to the hand-gestures of their teachers; but I found no references to any child’s traits of personality or even physical appearance. Differences between the children somehow ceased to matter much during the time that I observed the class. The uniform activities and teacher’s words controlled my own experience perhaps as much as they controlled and muted the expressiveness of children.”

Before I left the school, I studied again the definition of “Authentic Writing” that was posted in the corridor. Whaever it was, according to the poster, it was “driven by curriculum…” That was it, and nothing more. Its meaning or its value was established only by cross-reference to another schoolbound term to which it had been attached by “drive” in passive form. Authenticity was what somebody outside of this building, more authoritative than the children or their teachers, said that it shall be. (pp. 64–71)

There is a huge amount of education inequality within our nation, within our states, within our school districts, within our individual school buildings. Which raises the question: am I part of the problem, or am I part of the solution?

My daughter is part of a special program which is housed within one of the schools in our local school district. I’m all for different schools having different educational programs: I don’t believe in uniformity, since different students, parents, and teachers have different goals, different philosophies, are simply different people.

Having said that, different programs is one thing; different resources is quite another. Some of the resources I don’t feel guilty about: parents volunteering is one thing, grant money is one thing. And donations in kind can be fine, too. (Not always, but in certain contexts: I would be bothered by rich parents giving dozens of computers, but I wouldn’t be bothered by, say, people bringing in food to some sort of get-together.) But asking for a financial donation from parents who participate in the school? It’s not required—I hope that requiring a donation would be forbidden by law—but even the suggestion very much strikes me the wrong way.

The next question: how do I act on this in a responsible fashion?

Part of the reason, too, is that Okami is tiptop stunning excellent. So I spent all of last weekend playing it, several evenings playing it, and am doing pretty well this weekend so far. I don’t think I’ll quite finish it this weekend, but next weekend certainly. So I guess the game isn’t going to fill the gap until the Wii launch after all; what next? Lego Star Wars II?

Another possibility: I could just not play video games for a month and a half. I would seem to be in a bookish mood these days; or I could spend more time programming. Or spend more timing thinking about stuff and writing about stuff. (Combined with the bookish bit above.)

The latter is increasingly attractive. My thoughts on some of the matters that I’ve been obsessing on over the last few years are starting to settle down. And I’m being reminded (e.g. by helping out with the PACT Parent Ed classes) that there’s stuff that I used to spend a lot of time thinking about that I haven’t recently revisited. So maybe it’s time to, say, go through the complete works of Alfie Kohn (who has a new book out, I should read it) and John Holt and see what, if any, points of contact they have with what I’ve been thinking about recently. Or maybe I should try to actually put some thinking tools into action. Or maybe I should spend every waking hour reading about lean. Or maybe I should spend time thinking about whether my actions are congruent with my stated beliefs and, if not, why not.

Or maybe I should play video games. That would certainly be easier…

The other interesting thing about this particular grouping was that two of the four kids were boys. (All around fourth grade, I think, plus or minus one year.) And their hands were flying just as fast as the girls’ hands: clearly they’d done this before. The particular chant they were doing, lemonade, has a “freeze” bit at the end, and they were more into the competitive aspect of that than the girls were, but not so much as to harm the game for anybody else.

They were playing with a hula-hoop: the older boy sent it spinning along the blacktop, while the other two ran after it. The girl usually got to it first; I don’t know if she just had more energy (she clearly did, but that might not have been sufficient), or if the other boy was just being nice and making sure that she was getting it her fair share of the time.

This went on for several minutes; all three were clearly enjoying themselves.

I am happy that my daughter goes to a school where this sort of thing can happen. And if PACT has anything to do with it, then go PACT! PACT may or may not have anything to do with it, actually: the school in general has many nice features.

I don’t want to paint it as the norm: in general, kids of about the same age (not exactly the same age, doubtless helped by the mixed-grade classrooms) and of the same gender play together. But this isn’t the only exception I’ve seen, though it is one of the more dramatic ones, in its own quiet way.

On the surface of it, this is reasonable enough – who could complain about having Miranda practice reading and writing at home? But the second night of the blue folder, we already ran into problems: the book was a little harder than her reading level, so while she could struggle through it with help, it took quite a while, and wasn’t something we’d want to go through every night. Fortunately, the next day was my classroom day (I got to meet the kindergartners in her class; fun), so I asked the teacher about it. The teacher said that she didn’t want it to be a big time sink – Miranda should either read the book three times or for 10-15 minutes, whichever comes first.

And 10 minutes an evening sounds pretty reasonable; who could complain about that? It turns out, though, that the answer is “I could”; here’s why.

We wake up around 6:45am. From 6:45 to 8am, we’re trying to get ourselves fed, dressed, showered, lunches packed, etc. Then we bring Miranda to school; she’s at school and daycare all day. We get home a little after 6; we have to walk the dogs, examine the mail, check answering machine messages, take tupperwares out of backpacks, etc., so assume it’s 6:15 by the time we’re done with all that.

Miranda starts getting ready to go to bed at 8:15. So, in a weekday, I have at most 2 hours of unrestricted free time to spend with my daughter. But it’s actually a lot less than that; for one thing, cooking and eating dinner take about an hour of that time. For another thing, I usually want to spend a little bit of time relaxing right when I get home, instead of playing with Miranda. And, for that matter, Miranda frequently wants to spend a little bit of time doing something, too. So 30 minutes a day is a more realistic estimate. (For weekdays; weekends are much better.)

And all of a sudden, taking 10 to 15 minutes a weekday to do homework looks flat out insane: who, in their right mind, given 30 minutes a day to spend just hanging out with their 6-year-old daughter, would give up half of that to homework? I for one am not willing to do so.

I’m sure that her teacher hasn’t worked through these numbers (she’s fresh out of school, for one thing). We have a parent teacher conference coming up, so I’ll talk to her about it, and it will doubtless be fine. And, even if it isn’t, this is a situation where we can simply say “no”. But it really scares me: for one thing, I doubt situations like this are at all uncommon, especially with the ratcheting up of “standards” that is infesting our country, and I can’t imagine that the results are good. And, for another thing, 30 minutes already sucks; I hadn’t realized the problem was so bad.

And school can already take some amount of blame for the latter. Of course, there’s only so much that can be done: Liesl and I are going to spend most of the day at work, so even if she didn’t go to school at all, she wouldn’t be hanging out with us. But if Miranda didn’t have to be at school right at 8:10 every day, then mornings could be a little more relaxed, bed time could be pushed back a bit, and bed time could be more flexible if we wanted to do something later in the evening some day.

Given the situation, I’m not even sure what the next step should be from a tactical point of view. At first I was considering asking that the blue folders be moved to weekends instead of weekdays, like last year, but, thinking about it, I think just working through the red bookbags is probably a bit more time than I’d ideally prefer to spend on homework even on weekends, though I’m willing to do so. So I’m leaning towards explaining that we simply won’t be doing the blue folders (at least regularly; Miranda may want to do them sometimes), and leaving it at that. Liesl and I will have to think about that before the conference.

At least PACT manages to ease the blow: Miranda’s brought home a lot of stuff this week that she did over the year, and we had a very nice class potluck on Monday evening, where we all got to see each other one last time, do some celebrating, and look at stuff. The first graders had been doing autobiographies; I got to look at a couple of them, and they were great! Also, they handed out CD’s with a few hundred pictures (and some movies, I think) on them. So lots of stuff to remember people by; who knows, maybe I’ll even put some of the pictures on my home page, so people will be able to see pictures of Miranda without, say, a pacifier in her mouth…

• Public schools are an important democratic institution, one worth preserving and working to support. (And improve.)
• Kids learn a lot from collective intellectual exploration and knowledge testing and construction.

Which makes sense; I can’t say either of those reasons are show-stoppers for me, but they’re both good ones nonetheless.

Fortunately, we have several years to figure all this out. (And perhaps to improve Mountain View’s post-fifth-grade programs.)