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The Didactron
A Tale of Educators' Lives in a High-Tech Teaching-Learning Space ©
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The temperature had been set at 69° F so that the 80 attending would raise the room temperature to 74° at this part of the lecture. After that, controls would take it back to 69°. The sleeper had thrown 32° water on the lecturer. He hitched up his coat, walked to the podium for the notes, though he didn't need them, and began again. Here the sleeper was, and he was effectively teacher number two. He might as well have been talking.
"Is the lecture not as exciting as it should be? Shall I wake him? Shall I denounce the class for letting him doze? How much more enthusiastic can I be? Professional are you! -- can't you get over a distraction?" A sleeping student to a serious teacher is the same as a reviewer shouting out opinions during a play, but worse, for both the presentation as well as the content are being rejected. He continued coldly.
"The purpose of this lesson is to generate change. At least it may generate hope for change. It may show what education might be, to establish a beckoning image of what an educational system becomes.
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"No one has ever seen one of these things, this neodidactic concept, so I cannot prove it will work. We are artists; we create. We try. The better our technique and the greater our experience, the less likely our failure. The better our science the better. But there can be no failure. At worst we shall only start again. At best, we shall adjust."
The picture was flashed on a large screen in front of the student. First the names of the corners were highlighted, then the arrows showing interactions were emphasized in color. An assistant brought out a 4-foot tall scale model.
You may think there is nothing new here. Perhaps not. There is little truly new in the world. There are, however, some exciting new combinations of things." A baby, a beautiful woman and a beautiful man were flashed on the screen in rapid succession. "I contend neodidactics is beautiful. It is, as the human, a unique integration and execution of some very fundamental ideas that have become well understood only recently. There is newness here and great need. We need neodidactics more than ever before.
Now let us look carefully at ourselves as students, for we are the stuff of this system. We are both creator and benefactor. We, students, are the citizens.
"To look intently at people who are student-like is fruitful introspection. Students, are today a costly, administrative pain-in-the-bottom; a pedogogic schizophrenic; a research-impeding, overstuffed curriculum-taker; a publication-impairing test-taker. You are a challenge, not only to those of us who would teach you, but especially to those who wish you the best for the good of all of us."
Curtains on motorized tracks moved to cover all projection screens and technology. The room was as if in candleglow. Four different professional voices from the stereophonic system of the group space read:
I
Ours is a Mickey Mouse world, full of dancing children, joyous but unhappy. We live life like a game of tag, never being "it," or never really knowing from whom we run. We play at life in an environment that is lighted by neon, darkened by walls, stifled by smoke, fed by candy, and watered by waste. We jump rope in fear of missing, catch balls to avoid chasing them, climb hills to get ahead of others, play mean tricks…and do not know why. Ours is a small world, even for small children-people, and we are crowded by everything.
But, do not complain, Mom and Dad know best, and they will take care. They will protect, comfort, pat, smile, praise, and nod approval, and one day, maybe one day, we can grow up. But it is already half-past, and up has come. Where is Mom and Dad? Who is Mom and Dad? Oh, well, they've just stepped out. Back to the games. Yes, wiggle your ears!
II
Life is rich like raisin sauce. Life is big and true and sweet. Life sounds like a kettle drum; life smells like an old barn; life is round like a young breast, feels like a brick-mason's handshake. It is a dare, a new thing. Life is safety in danger, freedom in failure. Life is a meaningful death. On with it, all of It!
III
I am tired. I am past exhaustion a hundred times. Who cares? I see success -- that's nice; I see failure -- that's too bad. How's the temperature? 98.6? That's perfect! I 'want' but shall not seek; I 'need' but will not tell; I revel but am unhappy; I like but cannot love.
There are things to be done, you say? My measure is shallow. Success and happiness? Oh, yes. Success is survival, happiness is security. The strong give in and survive; continuance is success. Life is nest-like; "do not disturb" hangs on my nest-door.
IV
I don't know and I don't even know what I don't know. I ricochet and spin. I like poverty and richness. I seek solitude with people, cry out alone; I am silent in crowds. I fight and never go for win. thrash in my sleep. I dread the Mondays; I rejoice for Friday; I lost Sunday -- who cares. I shall be great, but…I shall be famous, but…I shall be rich, but…I am a tiger in wool…or am I really a lamb In stripes? I'll decide soon. No, right now! I'm a woolly lamb and a striped tiger, taking turns. What shall I be? That's no question! I don't know what I am. Yet, I know myself better than anyone! Maybe the professor knows me better. I'll take his word. What's that you said? You re right, I am!…perhaps.
* * *
He continued, "Most students who come to the university for education are job seekers. They come as if they were going to a general store where they want to buy something. They want to buy a right to the guild for security. They see learning more important than the spirit of learning, and the pursuit of facts more central to their purposes than the pursuit of truths. They awake too late, if ever, to the truth that acquiring knowledge for the sake of knowledge is passe´. The knowledge that a person learns today is obsolete tomorrow. They rarely make the radical shift of seeing the broadened concept of education as self-realization, competence in an area, disposition to act, and dynamic growth.
"The last real generalist was a grunting fruit-eater. He has been replaced by specialists. The university, no school, can expect to transmit the totality of human experience to its students. It is an impossible task to transmit to a student within four years an outline of the context within which the major works, Ideas and problems, even of Western society, has emerged. It is impossible even to mention or classify each element at least once in the time available. The educational goal of increasing the depth of student understanding is easily subverted by merely piling on more work.
"The alternative educational objectives within neodidactics are:
At the end of a recorded stringed-instrument glasondo, the goal statement was flashed on the screen of the group space. There were the elements of general systems theory: inputs, processors, adaptive mechanisms and action, special contexts, and working the future. There was the principle used to shape the principle. Rostock attempted to be consistent to use the principle he advocated for others because he had been through too much denial -- people who lectured on how to create and show slides, people who showed movies on how to use television, people who used images to articulate philosophical constructs. Too Much! Enough!
One picture, a diagram, was shown, then it faded away. No one copied it -- (the damnable inhumanity and diseconomics of students copying text from a display!) -- for they knew it would be in notes and they could play it back from the recording of the lesson if they desired to.
"Within the University of today, as in the Church before Luther's day, there is little change, no recognition of reformation. The intelligentsia did not revolt since the church was of their mind and mood. Why revolt if everything, in relative terms, seems to be in satisfactory condition? There is some revolt in the university and among educators, but little reformation. You can't revolt against something that won't fight back. Any student who can sit through four years of a university experience without once getting excited enough about anything to investigate the problem and find others who agree and then to make some public statement has undoubtedly been wasting his or her time. Any student so dense or so selfish who has not perceived the relation between a university education and the pressing questions of society is the "trained" product of the University.
"Training," said Dr. George P. Berry, former dean of the Harvard Medical School, is something that we can do to seals, to dogs, and - alas! to medical students.' And to that we can add almost any student.
"I perceive that most of you, dear people, are only a generation away from a Germanic education for service to the state, a forced attempt to fit the mind, taste, and spirit to a particular culture. There was once a polish-and-finish type education with its superficial mastery of jargon so that a ruling role for graduates could be gained and held within society. It persists, but has been bruised and beaten by the permissive and protective souls whose children, burdened by the Vietnam War, watch their non-communicative TV-children gain diplomas. In neodidactics it will wither. Here is our secret. It is why an elitist education will wither. It is why it must wither." [The lights dimmed; he leaned to the audience.]
"Students are penultimate humans. The reason and rationale for any meaningful action is to become more human.
"The argument I present is as simple as this: Students must seek to become more human. Students are seekers.
"Second, to teach is to aid in that process. Aid is the key. You'll not shoulder me with that responsibility! Tell me to "fill it up" as if you are a brain cavity, and I am some educational service station and I'll tell you where the nozzle goes. Aiding in the process; causing learning to occur; causing change -- these are the elements. The university just might be able to aid seekers.
"Third, to learn is to have become more human."
"This fundamental seething, organismal broth of neodidactics is not very spectacular…but what broth is? This concept says people are most important. It says we are all students -- especially those of us paying tuition and thus having bought a license to learn. It says that the university exists to serve students -- not itself, parents, industry, government, not any other thing…just students!
"And the service provided, is not how to build better,or grow plants better, or to analyze better ,but how you personally and us collectively, interactively, all of us, can become more fully human. The secret is that the student is primal.
"The second part is that the student is so complex that simple slogans will not suffice for creating a service system for them. The service system must be as complex as the student or it will fail…as I perceive it has in the past. The student is a buyer of education. Some product is expected. Of course one part of the problem is that society buys too and it pays 'big time' but students do not see the money or realize that it is theirs. Society expects general good to come from its investment. Storage of knowledge of knowledge -- the passage of the tribal lore -- has not changed over the millenia. (It only appears that way.) Venture or risk capital are spent on the expectation that creativity and new knowledge will be gained. Some even expect that leaders will emerge to keep society on the path or to lead it over new trails. These are four very different views of the student. They are very real expectations. They exist but they are false expectations for every student. They are realistic for the population and for small groups, unrealistic for each student.
"The student is becoming human: seeker, collector, storer, creator, implementer. The student is the focus of education. That concept is a major entity to be thrown into the educational void that now exists.
"Some will view what I'm saying as air, even smelly. Others will view it as an auto airbag, somewhat functional and fitting well the analogy of filling the void. I view autodidactics as filling a real void and that the stuff of that filling is as practical and as real and functional as a national constitution or a set of club bylaws. I'm not drawing puff figures, ladies and gentlemen. When I say lay foundations and fill voids I mean for you to sense the hole in which you've just spit before the cement truck empties its bowels around your steel construction rods. I speak of real foundations. Now we can build!"
Every brow in the group was furrowed. The Internal wars of the students had begun: Why the emphasis on the student? Why not on knowledge, or the university, or real-world needs? Why now? What's new about it or why hasn't it already been done?
"You may persist in asking why I make this emphasis and why hasn't it been done before? You'll appreciate from the references given you the various emphases given in the past. As you find the time over the next few weeks, I encourage you to test my logic and the route that has led me to the student.
"I appeal now, not to history but to your personal observations and feelings. You've seen in the recent news examples of graduates of this university implementing programs that are now as unwise as they were 30 years ago when they were taught how unwise they were. You probably sense you could be getting a better education, just because you know what can happen to you in the one or two very bad classes that you've taken in two years. It takes no intellectual giant to cast a line from the relative goodness of the worst class to the best class actually taken and to see that there is a place there for a theoretical "next-best" class. You know you're not getting the best you can get. You sense there are better universities -- at least where the percentage of great classes must be higher. You see the evidence in the Weekly Rag that shows attention is not on students but administrivia. You overhear faculty discussion and note the rarity of student-centered discussion. You feel the hardness of the seats in places other than in the Didactron and you sense 'institutional-cheap' is the campus decor.
"The emphasis of the university is not on the student and I contend it has never been. It can be through our work. Here are the types of work we must do. These are the minimum changes. I am sorry, I have no quick and easy solution, but, mind you, I do have a solution and unless you accept it, I shall claim check in this awful chess game, and then it will be your move. And I suspect that that move will then place us all in the prison called subhuman.
"You must take much more seriously this business of being a student. That includes :
No one had taken notes (as was the practice). Four assistants quickly handed out two pages of notes on the ideas.
"These are 14 things that you must do. Instead of spending a week combing a sheep, or a month preparing for a money-losing dance, or a year on a worthless-to-everyone-but-the-editor-yearbook, spend it on the meetings and negotiations needed to get these 14 things going in at least one dorm. Move some people out; trade rooms. Work at it! Not one of them needs approval. Getting approval will only slow you down. There are people your age out in the business running entire corporations. You can do it; you must.
"The hardest change comes at the interaction between student and teacher. I emphasize the action from the student to the teacher." Another picture on the screen provided color emphasis to the 15th need.
"The 15th suggestion is to see that you are taught about the teacher. Students in grade schools have been taught how to 'work a teacher.' A teacher comes to a class, introduces the regular teacher who will come to the class soon, and tells them how to gain maximum benefits from her. Some suggestions are little more than courtesy, but they fall under the concepts for conditioning. Students can condition teachers and these studies demonstrate significant improvements in classes taught about sophisticated student classroom behavior. There are many possibilities that range from the trivial to the profound. In working the teacher, sit up close in class, stay awake, stay attentive, nod knowingly or frown when you don't understand and probably can't figure it out yourself. Ask skillful questions to help the teacher make a point or test whether you understand; help keep the teacher on the topic; take notes and ask about them later; suppress colleagues who are distracting or off the track (work with them to assist them to prepare for class); challenge the teacher with readings from a recent journal, and state openly if subject matter is being duplicated for other classes so it can be avoided or specific differences noted. Body language is read by most teachers and 'upright and alert' is as well understood as 'laid back and impudent or hostile.' Students should 'challenge' courses frequently and encourage teachers to find out what they know before class starts so as to reduce the boredom and wasted time of duplication and 'learning' what is already known. Students should survey themselves and present a summary to the teacher. 'This is what we know; for Pete's sake, do not tell us things we already know well!'
"The 16th suggestion is for the student is to sue the university. There is fraudulent marketing, pricing collusion among universities, substandard labeling, and dilution of product (grade inflation, hours required, artificial courses without teacher involvement, and content overlap)" He made the suggestion in the same tone of voice that he had used to suggest grinning in order to stroke the teacher. The class had been mentally coasting. They were caught up by the ideas, words, and sounds and were nodding agreement. They were doing nothing personally. They were seeing the picture being painted, taking it in, getting some context. Understanding it, they were mentally inactive. The vast difference in the level of idea 16 changed the situation.
Had Russ been a new teacher and had he not dealt with these groups before, he would have been more aware of the Heed. Heed was a system operated by a mini computer that monitored the attention indices of the entire class (pulse rate, body movement, etc) from sensors in each of the learning consoles In which each student sat and from which they operated. All were aggregated and the central tendency of the class performance shown. On a TV screen he could observe the changes in class response throughout the lesson. He knew the downward trend was there; it had been time to change it.
"For centuries, college students have suffered under teachers. There have been excellent ones but no graduate will speak of more than one or two out of about 70 contacts during college attendance. Nowhere else in society is such poor performance tolerated. Nowhere are the standards so lax, the evaluations so slipshod, the buyer of educational performance or opportunity so gullible or lackadaisical. Nowhere are charges so high or unjustifiably increased. Nowhere are social benefit so questionable, and nowhere is the gap between modern knowledge of educational principles and practice so great.
"No major progress was made in the civil rights movement until suits were filed.
"No major progress was made in admission standards to professional schools until suits were filed.
"No major progress was made in stopping major environmental degradation until suits were filed.
"I hate recommendation number 16, but I now call 'intolerable' the abuses, injustices, fraud, indolence, rudeness, professional snobbery, and reticence to serve the students. Customers now deserves redress. If it cannot come from within the university (and it is so lifeless it does not realize it is under attack and must take action), then it must come from the student. Only the court can adjudicate this most complex, intricate, and often personal relationship between student and teacher. The problem is that the condition has deteriorated very far. It may not be possible for internal 'fixing'. Only legal suit may work. The student likely has contractual grounds, economic grounds, grounds under professional certification (or failures within that certification), and grounds under the misrepresentations of college catalogs for these suits.
"For me, the situation appears dangerous. I dislike discussion of alternative number 16 but it is as clear a case as I can find of the ends justifying the means. The end is clear: I, as a student, desperately need a superior education, one more superior than ever before. I shall pay well and I shall participate fully, but I shall pay for a set of equal or superior partners in my education. If I do not get that, then I shall sue until I succeed or can find no other recourse."
He stopped abruptly, sensing the need for time for alternative 16 to work its painful magic. The time was proper for standing and adjusting the body fluids in which the brain worked.
"Let us take a 30-minute break. [The spotlight flashed on the large wall clock.] When we return we shall examine other parts of neodidactics."
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Last revision, January 2008.