The Thing with Learning

How do we talk about education? What words can we use to name when a child learns? ‘Education is what happens between a Teacher and a Student’, a wise retired principal once said to me. Our principal, formerly a national award-winning science teacher, likes to tell us that no one knows how children really learn. And yet, I must talk about our school all the time. Local company leaders, interested in supporting educational success, or helping those most in need, or engendering the best in STEM education. Colleagues in other disciplines, of medicine, higher education, non-profit management. “How’s it going?” they all ask. “It is just block and tackle, day by day,"  I answer. They think I am describing problems, problem children.

I am not. I am describing how education happens. But what is that ‘thing’ that happens? What are teachers doing, students doing, together?  We lack a vocabulary to describe what this thing is. We borrow words from the world of business – “project-based learning." Or the stolen 1990’s wordage of “Need To Knows” and “Knows."  The too-broad verbs of our own pasts  - of ‘study and review.'  The words of math – ‘inflection point,' the ‘accelerating curve.' Or of sports – ‘block and tackle.'

We need our own vocabulary to describe – and to talk about – what happens inside a school when teachers are teaching and students are learning. We need a word for ‘started the year doing no work at a 40% and just kept plugging away so she now has a solid C in Biology." How about a word for ‘goes in for help with her favorite math teacher but won’t listen to anyone else’? Or “he and his dad spent an hour and a half at my husband’s office last night, viewing the Flipped videos and scribbling problems on the whiteboard’?

Perhaps we could steal from the vocabulary of mitosis, of cell division. Prophase is when the cell prepares for division. Some students surely are ‘coiling up their chromatins,' getting ready for the hard work of learning.  Metaphase is when centrosomes start pulling towards the two ends of the cell, bringing longitudinal tension from those two ends. Is this what we see when the children pitch a fit, dig in, say ‘this is too hard’? Are they feeling that tension of being pulled apart, between their childhoods of easy learning to the adult world of college preparation? Trying to stretch this metaphor to its end, I find the final stage of cell division, Anaphase, is too lengthy and complex. There is always more happening, the cleaning and mopping up, the next phase beginning anew. 

And although that fits in a way, this is not a linear process we want to describe. It is a series of events, a scatterplot of different moments, the easy, the hard, the brilliant, the infantile, over and over again, every day, every minute of that day. It is indeed ‘just block and tackle.'  But not by us.  By the students, the children. We watch, we feed, we nudge, we present and share. But they are the ones who must coil up, pull towards the opposite ends, endure and take advantage of the longitudinal tension.

And so, we lack the words to describe this work. Perhaps it is as in the ancient Jewish faith, where there are a hundred synonyms for the word God, but no actual saying the name ‘God’. Or perhaps it is as in the words of poetry, not ‘the things with feathers,' but the thing with calluses, with heart, with giggling, with aversion, with questions.  All I know is that our children are doing this thing, the thing with learning.