Posted by Mike Curtin on June 30th 2007 to Books, General
I just finished Erik Larsen’s Thunderstruck, the tale of Guglielmo Marconi’s quest to bring wireless telegraphy to the world and the famous Hawley Crippen murder case that finally established its viability and value. I guess the more things change, the more they stay the same. Marconi may have founded the world’s first tech startup, and his company suffered all the trials, tribulations, and breakthroughs that have come to characterize the startup experience a century later. There were fights over intellectual property and patents. There was the conflict between the core team’s R&D efforts and the board’s desire to produce commercial products. There was even a debate over closed protocols versus open standards. There were spectacular breakthroughs, catastrophic failures, and moments when coincidence and luck saved the day - or completely ruined it.
Marconi - in his early 20’s when he first stumbled onto the world stage with his new invention - was the quintessential nerd hacker. He came from outside of the scientific establishment and knew little of the physical laws that governed the workings of his apparatus, relying instead on tinkering and dogged experimentation to forge ahead. He had all of the social graces of the modern-day geek, too, leaving behind him a trail of failed personal and professional relationships which either withered away when they could not compete with his work interests or exploded due to a more or less complete lack of empathy on his part.
Thunderstruck also offers a glimpse at the dawning of a new age of instantaneous, global communication, what the author calls the close of “the great hush.” The world’s fascination at daily reports of the flight of a murderer aboard a cruise ship in the middle of the Atlantic perhaps parallels the excitement that we all felt 15 years ago when we first read (or published) that first web page. Even then, people were starting to get excited about the power of networks.
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about something that has nothing - and everything - to do with educational technology. I’ve been thinking about higher order thinking skills and the emphasis that educational reformers place on them. There is definitely a bias among progressive education critics against rote memorization and towards critical thinking, synthesis, and creativity. Let me start by saying that I would generally place myself in that group and I do think that it is important for students to build those skills throughout their educational careers.
Yet something’s been troubling me lately. In reflecting on teaching and learning in schools, I oftentimes find it helpful to consider my own learning experiences outside of the classroom. I think it’s healthy to be someone else’s student and to struggle with something that is new, foreign, exciting, maybe a little intimidating. My recent return to guitar lessons and time spent a few years ago studying karate have helped me to remember how simultaneously fulfilling and frustrating it can be to learn.
As I’ve thought about these experiences lately, though, I keep coming back to one fact: both rely to a great extent on rote memorization, “drill and kill.” In karate, there are the kata: memorized sequences of punches, kicks, blocks, and dodges performed against invisible opponents. To move from level to level, students must spend hours practicing and then perform these kata perfectly. There is no room for improvisation, no room for personal styling. In a sense, it is the most inauthentic assessment possible. You are fighting invisible people according to a script. What good would pinan-nidan kata do me if I launched into it after being jumped in a dark alleyway?
In music, there are the scales. Major, minor, pentatonic, dominant, and on and on. To what end? Who wants to hear a musician walk on stage and play the A major scale in five positions up and down the guitar neck? This is particularly ironic given the association of musicianship with creativity. Musicians are supposed to “just let go” and “play what you feel.” How does memorizing and tuning scales help with that?
I think in both cases, the masters would say that the benefit of these exercises is discipline and automaticity: after a few hundred times, those scales are in your fingers and you don’t need to think about what note you’re playing before you play it. With kata, the form of the kick is perfect because you’ve done it thousands of times. Internalizing the fundamentals and relegating them to muscle memory frees up mental resources to concentrate on the big picture: what are my opponent’s strengths and weaknesses? what mood am I trying to create in this solo? In a recent edition of the excellent Smartboard Lessons Podcast, Ben Hazzard and Joan Badger discussed an online poetry generator that, according to Ben, allows students to focus on content rather than struggling with form. It’s about giving kids a structure, a toolbox to help them be creative, rather than just pushing them out on stage and saying, “do something creative. Do something smart.”
Is there a valid connection here to what we do in K-12 classrooms? What are the implications for technology use in instruction? And if we decide that this is indeed an important activity to include in a meaningful way in our curricula, how do we integrate it to support and not displace those very-important higher order thinking skills at the top of Bloom’s Taxonomy? I think educators are right that students can quickly become bored and frustrated when faced with this kind of work. But maybe we can’t afford not to engage our students in these activities…
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