Technolandy

Day 184 (of 2024/25) the hypocrisys of schooling (a reflection to end the year)

From time to time to time, I point out some of the many lived double lives/meanings that make hypocrisy part of the educational experience, though my reflection of the year does not see hypocrisy as a bad thing. The word tends to get negative connotations, such as one rule for adults and another for students, but isn’t always the case that it has to be a “claimed moral standard to which ones own behaviour does not conform”… I’d like to propose that by living with hypocrisy we are able to do a mindful job of scanning for justice, equity, diversities, and ex/incluson. Knowing that fair is not equal and that we need to look at and live beyond a right/wrong universe.

Late note – after I posted, I then read a better concept for hypocrisy as associated with education – via the fabulous Will Richardson and his BQI (Big Question Institute) I think the more apt description of educational hypocrisy is: Holding Multiple Truths at Once… great reading and thinking when connecting with the BQI!

Wearing ties vs shorts and t/shirt – actually had a student say he didn’t recognize me on the ferry because it was the first time he has seen me wearing a tie (his trips to our building have seen me dressed for our comic cons… most kids get nervous when I’m NOT wearing a colonial noose or #bowtietuesday representation… I was once not recognized because I was in shorts, collared shirt (T-shirts are saved for #nerdyTshirtFriday 😎), sunglasses, and a hat as I came inside…. But there are many things that we do that can make us feel … awkward when it’s in progress… and why it’s important to model what we want to see, not just follow what I say…

Leading by not leading…

Gotta say that we have been putting some of the “body doubling” ideas into practice with our online school – it’s counterintuitive but students logging in with an ea and not interacting has been effective!

Some other hypocrisies that we have to comfortable with:

Tell students not to throw snowballs, and 15 kids will be sent to the office for that infraction (we can’t help it – there is a compulsion that not all of us can control… when told “don’t push the red button marked self-destruct”, someone will…

Saying Reading is Important and then not doing it ourselves… if we want to see students read, we have to model it ourselves – and (unfortunately) that means not only reading with a student for an assessment, but reading for pleasure. Anecdotally I can share that this model helped a group of resistant (more than reluctant) readers into independent book readers… after almost all 10 months of schooling admittedly…

Assembly line mindsets – it logically makes sense that we could schedule every grade 2 student to be doing the same learning at the same time so if they moved, there wouldn’t be any gaps or missed learnings – but since no brain works exactly the same… no two classrooms have the same makeup – neither in class size nor in composition. So (as a saying my friends and I had in school) while it might make sense on paper – it doesn’t work in our lived reality.

Platooning failures – again, it seems to make sense to put all the learners working at ‘an ability level’ (eg grade 3 math but a grade 7 student) – a concept referred to as ‘platooning’ – but research shows that the homogeneous groupings are not as successful as heterogeneous herding because there needs to be a range of understanding to co-create concepts and deconstruct sharing. It’s why multi-ability common grade level classrooms are so popular…

The misbelief of ‘straight grades’ – while some wish for a class of only one grade level rather than a ‘split’ (eg grade 5 rather than a 4/5 split) the abilities and diversities within any class mean that no matter what, you are working with students who may be reading (I’ll pick on that subject this time) at a pre-primer (sight word) level sitting next to someone exploring a text for a grade 10 reader… it’s not logical, which is why it works!

We say we want to get students ready for the real world, then see many rally around the value of testing – yet I don’t see many adults prepping for a multiple choice test for their own jobs… hmmm nor do I see many professional Mathers sharing their mad minute scores… 

Award Assemblies and similar upon graduation – and I am not saying that we don’t recognize students, but there needs to be better equity than going on for one student for minutes on their scholarships et al, then the next student just has their name mentioned… and I’m not saying this is easy, but there are ways to recognize all students… not all successes need to be academic ones ~ even in the game of school where… scores still matter , if they didn’t there wouldn’t be a prize… the governor generals award… for the top %.

As I reflect on the variety of “choices” available and see more and more educators of similar age starting to retire… and still having a lot of ideals to achieve… I think that confronting our split minds will be good.

There is no ‘one best consequence’ based on an action.

We can’t say ‘do things’ without modelling them… no matter how small or assumed that ‘everybody knows’…

Discrimination and inequity hide in plain sight… where/what are the hypocrisies you see around you as the 24/25 school year comes to a close and we look to make the 25/26 school year even better!?!

And as I recently commented about AI (along with screens – most powerful tools to impact and influence education since the book stopped being seen as a corrupting influence on youth… AI is one of many lived hypocrisies that I believe we need to get more comfortable with in education (when things make sense on paper, they rarely do in practice…) and the nuances of AI are empowering… and enabling… much as a rethink had to happen with the math calculator, the language model is leading to a paradigm shift… and we need to understand it quickly lest school classrooms are further alienated from reflecting any part of ‘the real world’. Mindful curiosity is my temperament right now… It does a lot of things really well… and a lot of things that are “school exclusives” (eg 5 paragraph essay) that don’t really have continuity beyond K-12 (and some university) – but empowering some communications that would not be able to be done without it.