Spaces and Structures, Part One: The Hope

When I returned to higher education as an adult, I never anticipated finding so much friction with my education department.  Between the behaviorist content, the lecture-centric professors, the awkward PowerPoints, and then the field placements. I think the field placements really had them pretty fed up with me.   A supervisor complained when I tried to engage the students in more seminar-style dialogue, the mentors never wanted to workshop or discuss lesson plans, never had time to talk about their classrooms, it was all lectures and worksheets, lectures and worksheets.  Eventually I found myself in the director's office (again) and they told me that if I couldn't fall in line with the lectures and the worksheets then I couldn't be certified to educate by their program.

So it's funny, really, that I went into my last required education credit on the heels of this chastisement - and was offered the most relevant and flexible assignment I’d ever seen.

The prompt of the assignment was to demonstrate that I could map out a unit plan, like a teacher would.  But now I wasn’t going to be a teacher, as much as I once wanted to be.  Still I felt compelled to map out…something.  With no clear models or mentors, and here the very first (only?) assignment in a full course of academic Education which seemed even slightly curious what I hoped to do or to learn, or to teach.  So I would have to stumble through a sort of sketchboard thought process here.  

The Hope   

First I’d better outline what and why I’m trying to do.  My experiences in education so far had been distressing.  The standardization, the high-stakes testing, the abuse and overwork of students and teachers alike, with the ghost of B.F. Skinner seeping poison into the roots of it all - I spent my observations witnessing horrors, then returned to higher education to be mocked, gaslit, and ignored.  Which, huh.  When I think about that, what a mirror it is to the experiences of so many neurodivergent students and other sundry misfits failing to navigate the bureaucracies of our educational systems.  Or, put another way, systems which are failing the children they were nominally designed to serve.  And even when they do “successfully” navigate those systems, often the result has nothing to do with learning - I remember being a straight-A ‘gifted’ honor roll kid for a large part of my schooling, and I can look back at that curriculum now as a would-be teacher and wince.  

It’s funny how many intersections of my generation are defined by mourning lost youths and what might have been.  All the queer/neurodivergent masking, all the code-switching.  So many of us just want to be the adults we needed when we were children.

Mutual aid is defined by the construction of structures and systems of support existing outside the official channels.  It’s notably different from charity in that charity remains hierarchical, whereas mutual aid is lateral, dependent on community-building and interconnection rather than disconnected benefactors.  Its goal is operation independent of the (often oppressive) structures of the status quo.  

Traditionally, this is a precarious conversation to have with regards to education.  The alternatives to public education are either private/charter schools, or homeschools - both of which are unregulated, often overrun by fundamentalist horror shows in grotesque mockery of anything any educator might call learning.  It’s the wild west out there!  Which is increasingly worrisome, given the state of public education.  We’ve gotten to a place where any standard in this country - across the board, private, public, or home - is alternating abuse and neglect.  (The inevitable result of a society which disenfranchises children as much as any minority, but never says so out loud.)  There are outliers, of course, whether that’s one school in a district or one class in a school, maybe one grand experiment of a private school or one progressive homeschool co-op.  They exist, here and there, in hidden pockets.

My remaining hope is somehow to find or build a little pocket, some small space where I can still be a valued educator?  Is that even what you’d call me, is that even possible?  Is it useful?  I had wanted to be a schoolteacher, to be the kind of adult I needed when I was a kid.  I don't care so much about ‘molding young minds,’ I just wanted to be helpful to them instead of yet another barrier.  Could I still do that?

And because these outliers are so few and far between, there are no consistent molds or diagrams to draw from.  It would be another matter if my education had prepared me for this job or put me in touch with people doing similar things and helped me to observe those processes.  (Though to be fair, they don’t do that for ordinary teachers either.)  

In looking to other educational structures, a lot of what I find are strictly outlined schedules and calendars - even the templates for lesson plans have estimated activity timelines to fill in.  Isn’t that wild?  Our systems never match the pace of the student.  Pace isn’t even discussed, neither as a teacher nor as a student; it’s only expected of us.  The first time I heard the word mentioned was in a stray podcast, a psychologist fielding questions from parents about why their kids can remember every detail of their favorite videogames and remain focused, engaged not only for long periods of time playing but in conversation and even research and community afterwards!  Why can’t they shut up about the hours of strategizing they put into some game, the repeated trials and failures they’ve worked through, but they can’t pay attention to their schoolwork for an entire twenty-minute class period, or recall one single thing about their day?  

What an indictment of our current format of education!  Parents, of course, blame the children for this - I’ve even heard it from teachers, “Oh, he was probably up all night playing videogames, and that’s why he’s tired and not paying attention to my class.”  While in reality, those games are the only progression systems children have access to which operate at their own pace.  Human brains love to feel productive; that’s why gamification makes such good advertising!  And that’s why it feels bad and demotivating to be rushed through a course of education at some arbitrarily standardized pace, with no regard for our interest, energy, or focus.  If a game requires you to master the skills used across level one in order to access level two, then you will spend exactly as long in level one as it takes you to master those skills.  But when a unit plan requires you to master the skills used in Chapter One in order to understand Chapter Two, we charge right into Chapter Two regardless of who’s done engaging with Chapter One.  In fact, there’s a punishment!  If you start to fall behind, you’re going to be doing worse on all the standardized grading (so, failing grades and all that associated anxiety) in addition to the extra work of still having to master chapter one, only now in the background, while simultaneously keeping up with Chapter Two - which requires mastery of its predecessor to understand!  It’s absurd.  And we do this on a micro-and-macro scale - within one unit, and within one course, and across grades!  

Half of the students I’ve observed in middle and high school English courses struggle with basic reading comprehension; the students in the Social Studies courses I observed could not consistently pass a quiz filling in the major oceans and continents of the world.  And if you ask all the thinkpieces and the TikToks out there complaining about kids these days, their solution is to schedule harder.  Pile more standards and tests and demands onto those piles!  They always have some complaint about the content, about what we are or are not teaching, or how aggressively, how rigorously we’re teaching it.  

Meanwhile, those teachers have schedules to keep to, standards and objectives to check off (even if it means drilling kids specifically to learn the tests, to keep those numbers up, and forget it all by next year).   Now that’s all I can see when I look at “unit plans.”

‍Maybe we need a little less RIGOR and a little more flexibility.