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Welcome to Arts and Ideas in the Air Talk About Tuesday, where I talk about some issue related to Sudbury model, schooling, what have you.
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Last week, I talked about the idea that, you know, there was this mathematical technique where essentially you start somehow,
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you make some guess, you fail at doing something, you don't get the right answer, but you get feedback and you use that feedback to go the next step.
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And it's a very simple-minded linear process and you rapidly get to the answer.
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And so I was positing that one thing that our students do here is really practice that sort of feedback sharpening skill.
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So, you know, really embracing how to fail, how to play around, like that's what kind of play is.
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So today I want to kind of expand upon that starting point.
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So in the proper Newton's method of math, the hard part is really picking that starting point.
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If you pick a bad starting point, you can go off to infinity, you could bounce around in some sort of periodic thing back and forth,
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just dancing all around and you might get captured into another solution far away from where you were trying to start.
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Bad things can happen and it can be a hard problem to deal with that.
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Usually you take a lot of different starting points and you see what happens and maybe you have some other reasons and whatever.
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It's a saga. Versus the actual method, if you had a good starting point, boom, boom, boom, boom.
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It's like no saga at all. Three or four steps, you're good. Good.
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So how do you make a starting point? Well, so this is what I think is really has a lot of crucialness to what kids are doing.
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They are assembling enough info and data to really be able to come up with great starting points for a lot of different things and particularly social situations, obviously.
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Everybody, well maybe not everybody, but you know, almost everybody has to deal with people socially in a good way.
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And so you want to have a lot of those experiences and you have to have all these emotions that you got to deal with and so forth.
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And so really learning how to deal with that is good. And so that's about having all these starting points.
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So one thing I wanted to mention was this book I heard the author talking about. I haven't read the book yet, but it's Margaret Heffernan's Uncharted, How to Navigate the Future.
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And in the interview that I heard her speaking on, she put forth the idea that the mind is constantly kind of predicting the future based on matching pieces of the past kind of to the present.
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So I think she gave the example of you're driving along, you see a roadwork sign, you know, ahead. And so one instantly thinks about, you know, past experiences with roadwork, kind of extrapolating it to past experience along this roadway.
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And your brain starts getting, you know, in a state to be able to handle dealing with roadwork.
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Not a particularly complicated example perhaps, but I don't know, maybe it's hard for self-driving cars, I have no idea.
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But the point is, you know, the brain has this huge library of past experiences to help propel it to navigate the future.
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And what I really think it is, it's having this large library of starting points, of saying, okay, this is roughly where I'm going to start.
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And if you're roughly close to where you need to be, then one can rapidly adjust and deal with it in a really great way.
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And so the question is, well, how do you get all these past experiences? And the answer is pretty obvious, right? You live. You live those experiences.
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And so when you start thinking about conventional versus Sudbury, well, what's the conventional experience?
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The conventional experience is sitting on a desk, listening to the teacher drone on, maybe you have these prescribed activities that you do,
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maybe you're in a group and you're talking about that in sort of prescribed fashion.
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But there isn't a lot of capability for students to legitimately explore, okay, how am I interacting with this group?
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How do we choose what to do? How do we do all these things? It's all very limited.
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The more exploratory one gets, the more in trouble one gets.
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And so, and, you know, the actual experiences, you know, I'm sure any scientist who looks at a so-called lab experiment in middle school or high school would be like,
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well, yeah, that's not how things are done. And in particular, you don't have a list of directions saying, well, you do this and you can do that, right?
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It's all about sort of exploring and investigating. In math, it's the same thing.
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The stuff that one sort of really works with, you know, it's not nice. You usually can't do algebra.
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You usually have to do, you know, explorations in various ways, simplifications, all sorts of messiness that just isn't present in math education classes.
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And, you know, and the things go on like history and literature and stuff. You have all these books with these stories.
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And, of course, there's emotional components to some of those things, and I think people reading that can kind of glom on to that.
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But I don't think it really delivers quite the same kind of impact as like living through those experiences.
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Obviously, history can't live through all of that. But, you know, really the point is it's very constrained.
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And you can also see this just with simple arithmetic in a couple of different ways from two different perspectives.
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One is a perspective of something that Caroline cited in a newsletter article a year or two ago,
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where, you know, they would have these kind of -- they had kids in school, but when they were out of school, they were selling stuff on the streets.
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And they were doing all sorts of kind of mental arithmetic, you know, "Well, I want this number. Okay, got to do this, and here's that. Okay, I need change. Okay, that, that, that."
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Right? So they're doing all this arithmetic in their head really quickly.
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And then they'd come into the classroom, and they'd be doing the same exact math,
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but now it was on the context of this class, on paper, stripped of the meaning, and, you know, basically it was a different experience, and they were clueless.
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So their brain could do the math in the right context, but not that generalized thing.
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And we also see it the opposite.
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We see people who have, you know, say, gotten A's in math class, and then they're given some numbers in real life, and like, you know, they kind of fall apart.
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I mean, not everybody, of course. Some people are quite fine with it, generalizing it, right?
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But they probably have had experience of taking that arithmetic to other places, and then, yeah, their brain kind of gloms on, "Oh, that's the general thing," right?
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So this is a very long-winded way of saying that the, a large part of the value of this model is all those multitude of experiences that students are picking up.
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And then once they have those experiences and they can lock it into kind of whatever it is they need to do in the future, they have it, right?
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They have a huge reservoir of possibilities to draw on, and not least of which is socially and emotionally, which is, of course, I mean, regardless of the job,
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almost any job, if you had to choose between someone who could, you know, do all the calculations or understandings or whatever it is of the mechanical nature of the job perfectly,
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but couldn't talk one sentence to someone else or, you know, can't communicate, don't want to say you have to talk, but, you know, cannot communicate at all with anybody else, that person's pretty much useless.
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Whereas somebody who may not be as good, you've got to have some ability, but, you know, but can really talk with people and learn from them and communicate with them
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and teach them eventually when they're good, you know, that's the kind of person I think that almost everyone would want to hire rather than someone who just has one specific domain.
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I mean, this wasn't really part of the short story profession by Asimov that we read last week, but, you know, it's kind of along those lines. One doesn't want an automaton, one wants a fully fleshed out human.
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A large part of that is the social and emotional ability to communicate and that involves having a wide range of experiences with a wide range of people, you know, like constantly talking and seeing facial expressions and all these things.
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And their brains are really well adapted to this and, you know, one can tell that with the whole face masking stuff, they've picked it up quite easily, whereas adults have a much more difficult time with that.
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So that's kind of interesting. I don't know. I've kind of lost the tangent here, but, you know, in short, you know, the experience is so very valuable, not for necessarily exactly what they do, but getting them in the right ballpark of whatever it is they're interested in doing.
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And then they can do, you know, whatever they want. So, I don't know. Hopefully that was useful. Until next week.