Capacity

If you want to be a competent teacher who is respected and appreciated by your students, simply follow these four guidelines:

• Find out what your student wants to learn
• Notice the pace of learning that works best for them
• Notice the learning modalities that suit them well
• If things aren’t going smoothly, augment your own skill set as needed.

I feel like I ought to be able to just end this blog post there. The reason that I can’t is that in our culture we tend to think of learning as something that is imposed on us, rather than a consequence of our own curiosity, creativity, and motivation. 

Imposing learning on students does not lead to strong retention and integration of whatever it is you want them to know or get good at. It also does not foster a love of learning—quite the contrary. If the teacher’s agenda is anything other than helping the student understand or achieve something they personally desire to, things will not go well for either party.

Even a teacher who is dedicated to following the guidelines I proposed will find their pedagogy compromised if the institution where they teach brings an agenda to the enterprise (which all its teachers are sworn to support) that includes:

• Following a predetermined curriculum
• Requiring all students to learn and achieve at a set pace
• Limiting teachers and students to a single, inflexible learning modality
• If things aren’t going smoothly for a student, punishing them with a poor grade rather than adjusting any of the above or encouraging the teacher to augment their skill set.

Seth Godin published his educational manifesto Stop Stealing Dreams (what is school for?) in 2012 as a free download (get your copy here). This was how I first learned that the educational model developed during the Industrial Revolution (and which remains more or less intact to this day) was designed to prepare students to become compliant factory workers.

The enactment of child labor laws did not result in kids being sent to school for their own enrichment. School was not for the purpose of developing students’ interests and preparing them to enjoy a satisfying life, but rather to provide the skilled, obedient work force necessary to advance the productivity and profitability of industry.

The culture embedded in our schools is modeled after factory culture. It features bells signaling the beginnings and ends of sessions, standardized evaluations, and a rigid hierarchical arrangement establishing the teacher as an unassailable authority figure. It creates an environment where compliance is mandatory, poor performance carries consequences, and the interests and learning preferences of the individual matter not in the least.

In such an environment, a skilled, compassionate teacher can somewhat mitigate the crushing harm inflicted by the culture and somewhat affirm their students’ curiosity, creativity, and motivation. But their kindness and effectiveness will be compromised by the hierarchical, authoritarian, factory-inspired culture that continues to shape the curricula they are charged with teaching.

Despite this, our school culture has fortunately progressed in a direction that has made it increasingly difficult for those tormented by their own dysfunctional childhoods to become sadistic authoritarian schoolteachers like Matilda’s Miss Trunchbull. However, most of the curricula and other features of Industrial Age schooling continue to skew education in the direction of imposing learning on children, rather than honoring what children actually desire and need in order for meaningful learning to occur.

I do want to talk about the importance of inspiring a love of learning in others and some ideas for how to go about it, as I promised in last week’s post.

I also have to acknowledge how the educational paradigm into which most of us are indoctrinated sometimes makes it really, really hard to pull that off.

Your capacity is what it is.

That is true now, and it was also true when you were a child in elementary school.

No one else can tell you what your capacity is, or “ought to be”.

You also cannot tell yourself what your capacity is, or “ought to be”.

At any given moment, your capacity is what it is.

This post is turning out to be something of a bait-and-switch, because I don’t know whether it is possible to inspire a love of learning in others.

I think that a love of learning is something we are born with. Even before we learn to speak, when our attention is attracted to something, we immediately begin to reach for it, examine it, and become enthralled by it. But that love can swiftly be relegated to the back burner in the face of more pressing concerns. It is therefore more realistic to think in terms of helping others restore their love of learning, by helping to affirm and support their own curiosity.

Curiosity is the very heart of the motivation to learn. Nothing else even comes close.

The carrot-and-stick pedagogical paradigm typical of the schoolroom only appears to be effective because of the way our culture artificially creates conditions that feel more urgent to resolve than our own curiosity:

• We need the respect and validation of our caregivers and instructors in order to thrive. When respect and validation become contingent on our performance rather than generously and instinctively provided, we feel a visceral necessity to prioritize earning respect and validation over pursuing our own curiosity. That’s the carrot.
• We need to feel safe and supported in order to explore the unknown, aka what our curiosity makes us feel drawn to. When the learning process is poisoned by threats of bad grades or punishment, when we feel pressured to learn faster than we are able, we feel a visceral need to prioritize demonstration of good comprehension over pursuing our own curiosity. That’s the stick.

One of the most vital things our caregivers and instructors can teach us is awareness of and respect for our own capacity.

One of the things that makes it very, very difficult for them to do that, is an unwitting adherence to a cultural paradigm that fetishizes the imperative to be productive over the desire for satisfaction, that codifies respect and validation of our humanity as things to be earned rather than our birthright, and that defines our worth in terms of our perceived place in our respective social and economic hierarchies.

Such a culture can only be perpetuated by denying that capacity is even a thing.

Such a culture is premised on the lie that everyone’s capacity ought to be more or less the same, and that anyone who falls behind the anticipated learning curve either isn’t trying hard enough or is prey to some sort of pathology.

You might imagine that such a culture would privilege those with exceptional perceived capacity, while marginalizing those with substandard perceived capacity, but you would be wrong. Were there a privileged class, it would comprise the ones in the middle, whose perceived capacity is closest to the made-up norm. Those are the ones the teacher is likely to be the most comfortable working with and become the most invested in, because those are the ones for whom the curriculum was (sort of) designed in the first place. 

Yes: the ones with substandard perceived capacity will be marginalized, with poor grades, detention, and trips to the principal’s office. 

But the ones with exceptional perceived capacity are punished with neglect from the teacher, bullying for being a nerd, and general ill will for seeming to think they’re smarter than everyone else. Particularly if the teacher is sensitive about being “outclassed” in the smarts department.

That is what happened to me in elementary and middle school. Last week, I shared how I passed most of my class time with my nose in a book while pretending to pay attention to the teacher. I was able to grasp the point of the lesson well ahead of my peers, so as soon as I had it in my grasp I would return to my reading. 

By second grade the teachers had me figured out. Their solution was to relegate me and a friend to the hallway so we could read ahead in our textbooks together. While that was not the worst way to handle the situation, it did make me feel isolated and unsupported, and the “special” treatment did amp up the bullying.

But perhaps a memorable experience from fifth grade best illustrates my point. It was time for Spelling Class, and we had reached the part of the lesson where they had us practice in pairs. I had been assigned the class clown for my partner, presumably because our teacher thought I would bring him up to my level.

Instead, he brought me up to his! He had an exquisitely puerile take for every word on our list, and I had a very loud laugh. We both got sent to the Chokey the principal’s office.

When I returned to class the teacher admonished me, “You know better than to behave like that. You’re so smart, and you know how to control yourself. You need to bring kids like him up to your level, not get dragged down to theirs.” 

So no: My love of learning and capacity for schoolwork did not privilege me in school. The teachers expected me to teach myself, or even set an example for my peers. (And we haven’t even gotten around to talking about Phys Ed yet…)

But my point is not that I was victimized by a system that marginalizes the perceived over- and under-capacitated alike. My point is that this system marginalizes everyone, while not really benefiting anyone. Those at the extremes of the curve may be the ones who feel the most left out, but the perceived normies are also not having their individual desires or capacities factored into their education.

They just have a better shot at becoming compliant (thus successful) factory workers, in an economy that increasingly seeks to automate everything it possibly can.

The title character in Roald Dahl’s Matilda is a young girl with extraordinary perceived capacity. That outsized capacity was sufficient to enable her to navigate her lonely home life because (like me!) she loved reading and crafting stories.

That was what occupied most of Matilda’s time until she was sent to school, where it increasingly looked like the things that made her exceptional were about to get her into dire trouble. Her luck changes in part because Miss Honey, a compassionate teacher, cares more about helping Matilda and her peers get the love and attention they need than she does about being a compliant factory worker a teacher who serves an abstract curriculum and an abusive boss.

Now that the danger has passed, if Miss Honey wants to be a supportive mentor for her exceptional student, all she needs to do is follow these four guidelines:

• Find out what Matilda wants to learn (regardless of her perceived capacity in the area)
• Notice the pace of learning that works best for her
• Notice the learning modalities that suit her well
• Notice when things aren’t going smoothly, and augment her own skill set as needed.

I am sure she already knows that just because Matilda is good at telekinesis, doesn’t mean she’s gotta do the circus.

(We’ll talk about Phys Ed next time.)