Cairns #55
Beginning of the Long Nights, 2008
The mission of H.O.P.E. is to turn the prow of our entropyship, the Earth,
back upstream so that Earth’s evolving consciousness may explore the
headwaters of the Universe for billions of years to come. The work of H.O.P.E.
is to make visible the larger relationships we live within - relationships that
inspire visions of wonder and works of hope.
Leaves
It’s a tricky mental state I’m in. One of my very favorite things in my whole life is go out in the pouring rains and do my erosion work. Information flows in the runoff, drawing my attention to new patterns, especially in response to my previous work. I learn so much and am uplifted by the lives around me.
It doesn’t rain in
Well, it is now the beginning of January and I am still biding my time. We’ve received only gentle rains that soak in without runoff and that’s what generates the tricky mental state. In terms of helping heal the gullied slopes, I should delight in these months of gentle rain. Plants are growing a thicker and thicker protective vegetative layer over the soil. Nothing is eroding. But for my own selfish reasons, I really want some heavy rains and runoff (which contributes to erosion) so I can go out on rain walks. Fortunately for the hills, I can’t control the rains. Otherwise I might blast them to death in my desire to be out there helping heal them.
In November, the leaves start falling. I get down on my knees and scrape the leaves out of my divergences. Though the leaves fill only part of the channel’s volume, I know that runoff will float the leaves along my channel until the soggy leaves clog and dam, forcing the runoff prematurely out of my channel.
Fallen leaves are wonderful. When their surfaces become wet they develop strong adhesive forces that create dams or mats covering the ground, shielding it from the pounding rain. They aren’t “soil”; they aren’t the magic stuff that encyclopedias describe as taking a thousand years to create an inch. But leaves are like blood, able to “clot” and quickly cover a wound with a volume twenty times thicker than skin. Though they will eventually decompose, they have an enormous surface before that time that has effects very different from the humus they will eventually become.
Since we still haven’t had a hard rain, the leaves are still lying on the ground, unswept away by runoff. I am curious and will be on the lookout for whether grasses, having now grown for almost three months, will thread their stems through the leaves and “sew” them to the ground so they will be held in place even if a hard rain comes to float them away.
This makes me think that a distribution curve of natural
events, continuous and smooth in its causes, can be discontinuous in its
effects. For example, the typical combination of gentle and hard rains results
in most of the leaves being washed away by the end of December. But an
improbable but not impossible string (like flipping seven heads in a row) of
gentle rains can lead to the leaves becoming a major player throughout the rainy
season – perhaps significantly influencing the surface of the ground in future
rainy seasons to come.
[I receive editorial help from both Alysia and Robert Holt, a retired psychology professor, who grammatically tightens and clarifies my sentences and occasionally enters into dialogue with a topic. I have left in red two of his dialogues in this section. Receiving his editing is always one of the highpoints of crafting each issue of Cairns. Thank you, Robert.]
They go together
They go together – the rocks and the water and the
dissolved oxygen and the insects and the swallows. Two Cairns ago I wrote of a spring kayak run where the swallows were
incredibly abundant. I did that run again in November and passed cliffs where
the mud nests of cliff swallows were thick beneath the sheltering overhangs of a
lower strata and the holes of bank swallows were thick in a higher, softer
stratum. And I realized that, of course, the swallows are going to be thick
where river has cut into bedrock. Not only will the cliffs provide nesting
sites, the turbulent, channel-cutting flow will stir and dissolve oxygen into
the water so that billions of insects can thrive there, enough to support all
the swallows and their young.
Then I went kayaking in Ahjumawi, a basin and range lake fed by massive, underground springs. Most of the lake is shallow, warm, and green. But whenever I approach one of the springs, the water cools and clears and I gaze down at thousands of fingerling trout swirling around the cold inflow. They go together – the springs and the preceding lava flows and the productivity of the water column and the trout.
I found myself thinking back on the Law of Requisite
Variety which I learned from a systems thinking book I read a long time ago). It
read something like ‘a system of less variety can not understand a system of
greater variety – unless there is constraint.’ As I understood it then, our
minds, even though they are incredibly complex (variety of neuronal
connections), can not understand the universe – which is even far more complex
(has even more variety). However, this universe has constraints which limit how
the complexity of the universe can express itself. These constraints allow us to
understand more of the universe than we could if the universe had no constraints.
Science is the discovery and exploration of these constraints. Law of Universal
Gravitation, Laws of Thermodynamics, Newton’s Laws of Motion, Boyle’s Law,
etc. Part of the joy of science is that each discovery of a constraint allows
our limited minds to understand more of the universe around us. [an
interesting point, but I found the word ‘constraint’ a little confusing, its
meaning not obvious. Especially
because you deny that our minds can supply useful constraints, themselves.
[My intent is not to deny that our minds can supply useful
constraints. The challenge, rather, is when does an internal constraint
accurately mirror the universe and when does it not.]
Remember Piaget’s basic point, that our minds work by both assimilation and
accommodation: we cannot accommodate more new information until we can to some
extent assimilate it to existing schemas (categories), which are—in your
sense—constraints. There’s a
little of the mind-body problem here, since you speak as if mind and brain are
the same. In one sense they are; at
least, I think of them as subsystems of a larger, “psychophysically neutral”
system. But the brain is arguably
more complex than the mind; the incredibly prolific interconnections between
parts of its billions of cells, glia as well as neurons, interacting under the
influence of a great number of chemical compounds in their watery matrix,
constitute a system some thinkers believe to be more complex than anything else
yet discovered in the entire universe (which, since it comprises them, is
unquestionably more complex). It seems, intuitively to me though I don’t
wholly trust that, evident that the minds that are generated by the activity of
brains are less complex, just as the works of art generated by an artist are
less complex than s/he is.]
But the Law of Requisite Variety cuts both ways. We can
constrain our own minds, limiting the variety we bring to a new situation. I
remember hiking in the Inner Gorge of the Grand Canyon shortly after taking a
college geology course. I came upon a rock wall that I could “understand.”
With that understanding, I could extrapolate its “story” to the surrounding
rock. Except when I did, it didn’t work. Within a few yards, the rocks had
been faulted or intruded or folded by some other story. I didn’t like that. I
wanted the entire wall to fit into the simple story I understood. The simplified
story I wanted to impose on that rock face is an example of a constraint arising
within my mind, limiting the variety within my mind even more. [a perfect
example of Piagetian assimilation.] The universe is so much vaster than the
capabilities of our mind that we need to keep our mind
as unconstrained as possible in order to grasp it. It’s a great challenge,
striving to dance with the world in a way that understands the world’s
constraints to the maximum extent possible without constraining and reducing the
variety in one’s own understanding of the world. [could
you somehow indicate the further paradox here, that we learn by remaining open
to accommodation but only through existing (and always in part assimilative)
cognitive tools? When the synapse was discovered, many neurophysiologists
discovered that it was visible in many of their existing slides but invisible to
them until they had the constraining concept—which then made it possible to go
on and gradually discover the enormous complexity within synapses.
It’s a subtle point but profound; reminds me of the mind-blowing
experience of reading Goedel, Escher, Bach
years ago.]
Standards,
Frameworks, Textbooks, and Tests – Brittle Schools
The following is a geek discussion on a certain part of public education. Much of the discussion I encounter in the media about improving public education feels out of touch with the learning that is supposed to be the purpose of public education. “Standards-based” and “alignment,” often given foundational status in these discussions, are good examples of this mistake.
The idea of standards most people have is a matrix of certain concepts organized through the grade levels to assure that students, upon graduation, have mastered a coherent body of knowledge. On first appearance, this seems to make sense and I don’t object to standards by themselves. So it is also with the second term. “Alignment” means that if there are certain facts and concepts we want the next generation to know, then we should make sure that the teachers have classroom materials to assist teaching those ideas and testing material to assess a student’s progress towards mastery of these concepts.
These concepts make sense in theory but in the real world of bureaucracy and money flow, they become problematic. The process of “alignment” begins when the state department of education drafts standards for a specific subject such as mathematics from kindergarten through high school. Then there is another step which gets less attention in the public eye. States create a “framework.” This lists all the attributes a math textbook at each grade level must have in order for that publisher’s textbook to be approved. Without this approval, public textbook money can’t be used to buy that particular text.
This link between standards (guidelines for the teaching) and frameworks (guidelines for the textbook industry) creates the first problem. Standards should drive the framework but the requirements of the textbook publishers influence the standards. A textbook covers a certain topic in a minimal way – some explanatory text, some illustrations, some review material, some suggestions for further study. Any teacher passionate about that particular topic can easily expand the learning from a 45 minutes textbook lesson into a two-week immersion. However, a textbook must be based on the assumption that a teacher won’t do this extra work and will depend completely on the textbook. This means that the textbook must contain enough material for around 170 forty-five minute lessons. So the textbook industry looks for guidance from the states via the frameworks as to what should be covered in all those lessons. And that, in turn, puts pressure on the drafting of standards to put in enough of them to enable frameworks specific enough for textbooks to generate that many lessons.
This process creates so many standards that now those teachers who used to embellish certain areas of their curriculum don’t have time to because they have to “cover the standards.” The pacing of a textbook subtly becomes imposed as the pace for the classroom. When the number of standards gets inflated, teachers lose the freedom to go deep. Classrooms get locked into a textbook approach because that is the fastest way to get through the material. Ironically, to help these teachers out, the upper levels of the educational hierarchy have come up with a list of the standards in which the standards that have the most test questions are in bold. Realistically, just those standards should be the required ones and the rest should be presented as suggested supplemental material for textbooks. This would give teachers breathing room.
Two consequences flow from too many standards. When you realize that the same surge of standards is happening in all subjects, overwhelmed teachers respond in at least two ways. Because standards begin “fourth graders shall learn…,” the consequence can quickly turn into lock-step, whole-class instruction. In sequential subjects like math, this approach can leave the slower student behind and bore the faster student. The more young people I have the privilege to teach, the more profound becomes the absurdity of assuming that “all fourth graders shall…” The uniqueness of each child is one of the most precious and fundamental aspects of humanity and it must be honored.
Alysia adds: “Nature dictates that we all grow at different rates and learn in different ways. This is the natural way human beings are. A massive tragedy is occurring for the students on the backside of the developmental curve. The material is coming at them too early and so fast that they can not assimilate it. Then they move up to the next grade and get new material based on the material from the last year which they did not understand. This goes on up the grades until you get students in the upper grades that have a big pile of nothing. I get 6th grade transfer students who are so confused about all the procedures they tried to memorize that they are functionally illiterate in basic mathematics. If I make the choice (which I do) to go back and reteach them the concepts they don’t understand, it will assure that they won’t get the sixth grade standards this year and will do poorly on the test. So I am forced to choose between what is best for a child’s future success in math or trying to cram the sixth grade standards in to make our test scores higher. This is painful for all concerned.”
The second consequence is that overwhelmed teachers fall back to “scripted” teaching. Textbooks are organized so that a teacher can “cover” the material with very little preparation or thought. The lessons are all laid out with teaching material and a script with which the teacher talks the class through the lesson.
Paranoid as it may sound, I fear this is the direction in which a variety of forces, consciously or not, are moving public education. More of the public education funding would flow to textbook publishers. Teachers would become non-unionized, low-paid drudges who read scripts. Public schools would become the holding pens for all those who can’t afford private education. These public schools would, for thirteen years, mold children with boring, scripted work where the child has no influence on what he or she will learn and is mostly learning to do drudge work in compliance to authority. I say “holding pens" because as I’ve written many times in Cairns, I believe one of the ingredients most essential to education/learning is responsiveness. Learning thrives when the world (which includes the teacher) responds to the thoughts and actions of the learner. From this perspective, scripted teaching borders on a nightmarish joke.
We move even closer to this joke when “alignment” brings in standardized testing. As I assume you know, public education is under the gun to produce high standardized test scores. As the saying goes, “what you measure is what you get, so be careful what you measure.” As one teacher lamented to us, her students now read only “selections” (rather than stories) because in hour-long, standardized reading tests, students only have time to read “selections” (a couple of paragraphs) and then answer multiple choice questions. Therefore, all through their schooling, they are preparing for the test by reading only selections rather than stories long enough to spin spells, communicate wisdom and nourish the love of books. What are we doing to our children when we condemn them to hours of reading selections that carry no magic, only opportunities for multiple-choice questions to be asked of them?
This topic grows weirder when we understand the relationship between textbooks and standardized tests. Because of the emphasis on test scores, textbooks and teaching materials are evaluated on whether they can improve test scores. This creates a strange feedback loop in which the nature of the tests shapes the teaching material. Realize that most of the standardized test items are a one to three sentence question followed by four possible short answers. A textbook series that raises test scores will be one that presents the material in a way transferable to test-taking.
Many years ago, back when we were crammed together in small rooms, I had a very strange experience. In California, only eighth graders take a standardized social studies test which covers the sixth through eighth grade history standards. I was supervising this test in a small room while the sixth and seventh graders were in their history class in the next room. Their teacher was showing a video she had checked out on world religions (which are part of the sixth and seventh grade standards). The eighth graders gave no indication of awareness of the video playing in the other room, so focused were they on working on the test. But I could hear it faintly in the background and I was amazed at how the narrator in the video was saying almost the exact wording of one fourth of the questions on this history test. Now that is one example of alignment. It makes me wonder how many times in three years the students will hear the same sentences incanted. Instead of tests being aligned to the teaching, the presentation of material is being aligned to the specific questions on the tests. The classroom is taking on the format of a multiple choice test. The standards are filled with verbiage about how the students will understand, draw conclusions, make connections but what’s being measured is selecting one answer of four to a question that can be answered in a short phrase.
So when you hear or read discussions about standards and alignment, take it all with a healthy handful of salt. The reality is different than the rhetoric. The magic lies in the unique response of unique individuals grappling together with deep, important ideas.
Chrysalis Update
Our new site is fantastic. Everything is so much easier, so much freer. The only downside is that rent and utilities for the site are about 50% more than our previous sites. But the new site has much more space and advantages - including the opportunity to increase our enrollment to cover the increased cost of facilities.
Unfortunately, California’s economy is such that the state needed to reduce the education budget by around 6% and they might make another 6% mid-year cut next month. But the heart of Chrysalis is strong. In moving ten miles, we lost about a fourth of our families but picked up more families so our enrollment has increased by about five students. Because of the influx of new families, we budgeted a lot of energy to welcoming and guiding them into the precious parts of our school’s culture. We also have a school bus. It’s expensive but it allows us to easily do field trips and it uses less gas than thirty family cars driving to and from the school twice a day.
Now that we have a home, we can finally devote the
appropriate amount of time to exploring and developing the science/nature
curriculum I’ve always dreamed might come from Chrysalis. The following is a
link to a very good article, “Save the Phenomenon” from the Nature
Institute’s newsletter, In Context,
that speaks eloquently about this special something.
http://www.natureinstitute.org/txt/mw/save_phenomena.htm
Blue-white Giants - a poem that grew while kayaking at Ahjumawi
Rigel and Shasta,
Vega and Denali
The gibbous moon beyond the
morning’s sky.
The blueness of their white
ignites my soul.
© 2008, Paul Krafel, 18080 Brincat Manor, Cottonwood, CA 96022-0609