Parts and Crafts

I’ve been talking to lots of people lately about trying to create spaces where kids can be around creative people doing “real work”, with them and separately from them. I find myself saying that I want kids to be able to interact with people who aren’t “teachers”, not because teachers aren’t awesome and interesting people, but because teachers don’t, by and large, get the chance to fully be themselves in and around school. Kids basically get to interact with parents and teachers, neither of whom are allowed to fully behave as normal people, most of the time.

This summer I read a newspaper story about a school that was opening in Manhattan this year. The thing that made the school newsworthy was that its teacher s were going to be the highest paid teachers in the pre-university education system in America. I received a few different copies of this article in my inbox because, of course, I am one of my social-network’s go-to nodes for topics related to education. When I found the article myself, reading the paper with breakfast, I thought it was an interesting stepping off point for articulating some of my own ideas about teaching, and what schools should or should not be and how labor should be compensated. The question I asked myself was “why does the New York Times think that this is interesting enough to warrant an article, and why do I think that they’re wrong for doing so?” (Obviously, provoking my internal dialogue is plenty of justification for writing the newspaper article, but not for what I felt, at the time, to be the writer’s uncritical acceptance of the school’s premise. Journalistic objectivity might be reason enough for that, but its a sticky concept that I’m sure I’m all that happy with.)

My contention is that, underneath the obvious superlative, there is nothing exceptional about having the highest-paid teachers in the country, at least not pedagogically. Compensating teachers well is great, as labor practice, obviously. The article went to great lengths to describe the elaborate and time-consuming process that the administrators of the school had gone through to find and hire the best teachers in the country. It described how special all of the teachers were, some of the great things that they’d been doing in their classrooms where they had taught previously, and featured interviews with their former principals about how much the school would miss them. These were good teachers. The plan: get really good teachers by spending the most money. Clearly they succeeded.

All of which is well and good, but this whole strategy puts the burden of making kids learn squarely on the teachers, and, to a much lesser extent, the management. This is a combination of accepted wisdom of the economic and educational establishments, then. How do you get good teaching? Hire the best teachers. How do you hire the smartest, most talented, dedicated workers? You give them a lot of money. And health insurance.

Okay, fine. That sounds like it’ll work. Still, concentrating the best traditional school teachers in one place feels like a highly qualified good, at best. Who is replaying them at the schools they’re leaving? So we asked a boring question and got a boring answer. A better question: why is it accepted wisdom that good teachers are rare and exceptional? After all, the material that most pre-university level teachers need to explain is more or less common knowledge. Why is it so hard for caring people to convey information that they know to a body of students? Anyone who’s ever learned something in a really good class or workshop or school know how effortless and fun learning and teaching can feel, and anyone who has spent any appreciable amount of time in the compulsory school system knows that these moments are rare.

I think that too much thought about education goes into thinking about teachers, and that not enough goes into creating tools and environments that promote thoughtful discovery. If good schools depend on exceptional teachers, than good schooling will always be an exception to the norm. How can we set up structures and environments wherein normal people ,people who aren’t geniuses, who aren’t preternaturally empathic, who are sometimes impatient, sometimes frustrated, sometimes shy and awkward, people who care by who don’t always know how best to show it, can happily and effectively share the things that they know with people who don’t know them?

In the next few weeks I’ll be writing up a series of stories, mostly from summer camp, about how kids interact with tools and spaces, and how this interaction can promote the work of discovery and learning. This blog post, then, is the introduction.