Good Kid, M.a.a.D. City: Trauma and Education:

Trauma and Education: 

Addressing the Needs of Struggling Learners in Heterogeneous Environments

I. Art of Peer Pressure

My sister graduated from St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia last Saturday. Our entire family was attending, so my brother drove down from his home in Boston to pick me up in Jersey.  Steve has always had a strong love of Hip Hop, especially the emcee’s that are associated with the Consciousness movement.  We listen to The Roots obsessively, and for years have talked at length about how underrated they are as a group. I remember, vividly, driving through the streets of our childhood town of West Hartford, CT, listening to De La Soul, and A Tribe Called Quest. At that time, in our town, our high school experience was incredibly eclectic, our side of West Hartford boasted a very diverse population, both racially and economically. This diversity exists today, but it also calls into sharp focus the disparities at play between these different groups.

A homogenous experience would have created a myopic blindness around these issues.

In the car, Steve suggested we listen to an artist named Kendrick Lamar.  My only experience with him up to that point was an appearance on the Jimmy Fallon Tonight Show, and some related passing articles by Ta-Nehisi Coates.  I knew he was a West Coast rapper, from Compton specifically, and that he was generally considered an up-and-coming artist.

Steve suggested that we listen to his major-label debut, titled “Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City: A Short Film by Kendrick Lamar.” He explained that it was a concept album, and we began listening.

Track after track, and skit after skit, I realized that this was an experience as well as a collection of songs.  The album chronicles a young Lamar navigating his way around Compton as a 17-year old.  Over the course of the story, he details the various pressures and concessions he is forced to endure, often in brutal fashion.

Like the narrator of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” however, Lamar is viewing all of this through a lens of both art, and reflection.  The album was released when he was 25, a good 7 years removed from his time on Rosecrans.  Breaking out of the bubble allowed Kendrick to view his experiences from outside his singular frame of reference, and turn it into art.

As we drove, admiring the linguistic and sonic intricacies of the album, I felt myself becoming overwhelmed.  The album and its atmosphere were creating stress for me.  Kendrick’s portrayal of Compton put me in the car with him, driving around in a white Toyota with the constant threat of violence and death surrounding us.

At points, Lamar confronts these feelings directly:

“I suffer a lot, and every day the glass mirror

Gets tougher to watch; I tie my stomach in knots

And I'm not sure why I'm infatuated with death

My imagination is surely an aggravation of threats

That can come about,”

I thought about how suffocating, how madness-inducing that could become, and, as my mind tends to work, began to think about both the educational consequences and implications of that type of upbringing.

A child raised in that environment is almost certainly exposed to enough stress that it could be considered some form of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), but the problem, is that there is no “post” anything, the children are in a constant state of trauma and anguish.

II. Allostatic Load

In his book, “How Children Succeed,” author Paul Tough outlines the ways that neuroscience can help us as educators better understand the human learning experience.  One of the topics he discusses at length is the concept of Allostatic Load, and the role of sustained adverse experiences on the developing mind.

Tough uses for a definition and its effect as  “...the process of managing stress, which [McEwen] labelled allostasis, …[which is] what creates wear and tear on the body.”

There are consequences to Allostatic Overload.  The same process that is designed to help our bodies deal with stress, can eventually turn on people, literally affecting them physically:

“Although the human stress response system is highly complex in design, the practice has all the subtlety of a croquet mallet. Depending on what kind of stress you experience, the ideal response might come from any number of defense mechanisms… But the HPA axis can’t distinguish between different types of threat, so it activates every defense, all at once, in response to any threat” (Tough, 13).

From an evolutionary standpoint, our body’s ability to transfer resources, and allocate oxygen and antibodies to specific areas of our system is important if we are being chased by a Sabretooth tiger.  We escape, maybe with a few wounds, but this is followed by down time, a period of safety.  During that time, our bodies switch back to a normal state of being.  Unfortunately, the body cannot differentiate between threats, and is actually harmed by a state of constant stress.

Consequently, as teachers, we are faced with a system that contains children that are in dire need of intervention, and in a heterogenous environment, where these students may appear as simply “struggling learners”, it is incredibly important to have a way of mitigating the stress of these students.

III. Empathy and Individualization

If anything, the knowledge of neuroscience should at the very least result in a change in our attitudes toward struggling learners.  Developing an empathetic view of your students should be a non-negotiable on a personal level, but this must be reflected in our practice as well.  Gone are the days of a learning environment that is at best, static, and at worst, comparative in nature.

Looking at the mastery of standards called for in the Common Core, it is the height of oppression to gauge students successes and failures as tied to the achievement of their peers.

When we combine the idea of educational empathy with the movement towards a standards-based approach, a necessary change in both practice and classroom structure becomes paramount.

The only ethical way to mitigate the problems presented by these new understandings is to individualize curriculum at the district and classroom level.  The oft-referred to concept of differentiation breaks down under true heterogeneous groupings.

Many of the charter schools that have demonstrated “success” in helping struggling learners have made their hay from moving in the opposite direction.  The use of mnemonic devices or songs, strict emphasis on rote memorization, and even the implementation of dress codes and public shamings, seem to work initially due only to the homogenous makeup of said schools.  As the data has shown, intervention in this way has only created change at the schools where the students attend, with alarming dropout rates spiking after the student leaves.

A balanced or blended learning environment addresses the needs of individual students within any system, however, this is vital to the success of schools with heterogeneous populations. In schools where the label of “struggling learner” exists due to comparative norms, there must be a system in place that can adapt to student need at the structural level.

By using a mixture of technology, flipped instruction, direct instruction, small group and individual intervention, and a strong screening tool, schools with a wide variety of students can better assist students in taking control of their learning, regardless of their environment.

IV. Good Kids, Mad Cities

The ultimate realization that frees Kendrick from the cycle of violence and fear that surrounds him, is a focus on his art.  He uses this skill to escape his toxic environment, and much like the protagonist in Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave”, returns enlightened to shine a light on his experiences. I worry about the students that don’t have the ability to transcend their situations through raw talent and luck.

What are we doing with our systems of education to combat this?  How can we better provide access for these students that so often slip through the cracks?

These questions are at the core of not just the problems we face in inner city education, but in the suburbs as well, where a wider variety of learners often reside.

I dove into the album after the car ride, using Rap Genius and other sites to compile as much background as I could on the songs and messages it contained. The cover art is a picture, a purple Dodge Caravan, circa the late 90's. It's the same car I drove around the streets of West Hartford. I know for a fact that the worries and anxieties I felt within that car, were radically different, trivial at best, when compared to the night, one of many, that a young Kendrick experienced in his neighborhoods.

Schools must become outposts on the front line of triage. In order to do this, we must build systems that are able to handle the many issues and traumas facing all of our children.

Works Cited

Lamar, Kendrick, et al. Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City [sound Recording]: A Short Film. [Deluxe ed., explicit version]. Santa Monica, Calif.: Aftermath/Interscope, 2013.

Tough, Paul. How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character. New York: Mariner, 2012. Print.

Creating Relevancy through Meaning and Metaphor

“In a world of fixed future, life is an infinite corridor of rooms, one room lit at each moment, the next room dark but prepared. We walk from room to room, look into the room that is lit, the present moment, then walk on. We do not know the rooms ahead, but we know we cannot change them. We are spectators of our lives.”

“In a world without future, each moment is the end of the world.”

-Alan Lightman, from Einstein’s Dreams

Exercises in metaphor pervade our history, whether it is Sir Isaac Newton’s revelations concerning the physics of our universe from his experience with a small apple, or Christ’s ability to paint parables for his disciples that illuminated the word of God. Metaphors allow us to explain the sometimes unexplainable, as the early mythologies were less religiously intended as opposed to a necessary way to explain the terrifyingly inexplicable events that surrounded early man, such as bolts of electricity falling from the sky.  In his excellent novel, Einstein’s Dreams, Astrophysicist and Creative Writing professor Alan Lightman imagines the dreams of Albert Einstein.  The dreams are not mathematical equations or a blank slate blackboard filled with calculations and diagrams.  The dreams he imagines are the dreams of worlds.  The worlds all vary in one fundamental way, the role that Time plays in them.  In one, he imagines time as a fixed point, in another, a flock of birds.  He then observes the way that people react in those worlds: What would they love? What would they fear? These nightly meditations eventually lead him to his truth, that to understand how time works in our world, he merely needs to observe how the people around him behave. Like his non-fictional counterparts, this Einstein has learned through the power of metaphor, and a strong reliance on the learning principle of Meaning.

Meaning requires an emphasis on bringing relevant and engaging experiences to students. “The more meaningful or relevant the task or application of information is to the students’ work, the easier it is to learn. The teacher may make explicit reference to students’ personal experiences as a link to connecting content with the students’ lives or they may actually simulate the experience in the learning activity” (DBTC).  In the public school classroom, now more than ever, the diverse populations of students that enter our doors bring with them a multitude of different attitudes, experiences, beliefs and feelings about school.  The typical schema that we expect students to have, schema that represents a more culturally exclusive time, no longer exists in all our students.  For many teachers, the response to this inability to guarantee what students are bringing to the classroom, causes them to simply start over, treating the students as blank slates.  The prolonged effects of this “Episodic View of Reality” (Feuerstein, Feuerstein, Falik, and Rand, 2006) can have devastating long term consequences. A better, more ethical way to combat the diverse schema that students are bringing to the classroom, is to provide meaningful, metaphorical anchor experiences at the start of units, that will pre-load metaphorical and experiential schema for later reference, building relevant and usable meaning into the lessons that follow.

One issue brought forth when meaning is not addressed in the classroom is that there is little to no transfer of skills from class-to-class, or, more insidiously, from grade-to-grade. The episodic view is the result of a lack of connection that the student feels toward the subject matter.  In short, their education is something that is being done to them, not something that they are actively participating in. In some colleges, “Anchored Instruction” is being used to ground certain instructional practices in relevant life experiences.  In this case, a Computer Learning class, where students were learning how to use technology, was paired with a teaching and learning class that used the students own struggles as a basis for studying instruction.  A study of the experiment concluded that ““Evidence from other research projects suggests that a specific emphasis on analyzing similarities and differences among problem situations and on bridging new area of application facilitates the degree to which spontaneous transfer occurs” (Cognition and Technology Group, 1990).” by providing the students with a relevant and meaningful basis for discussion, they were more likely to retain, and later use, the skills they were introduced to.

Another anchor activity our district was introduced to recently was the Feuerstein Instrumental Enrichment program.  Based on the theory and research of Reuven Feuerstein, the program consists of simple instruments, such as recognizing pattern, or connecting dots, that are seemingly unrelated to content area studies. “Organization of Dots engages children in projecting virtual relationships in an amorphous cloud of dots to form specific geometrical forms. The resulting products must conform to given forms and sizes in changing spatial orientation. The exercises become progressively complex as the child gradually overcomes the challenges of conservation, representation, and precision” (Ben-Hur, 2006). As you bring the students through the instruments however, it becomes a metaphorical discussion regarding learning styles in general, that can be applied into almost any situation.  To teach us how to use the instruments, we were first tasked with completing them, and the frustration and learning that occurred even in the adults, was eye-opening, and empathy inducing.  We have used this experience with classes of all levels, and it has myriad connections that we continue to reference throughout the year.  Without providing this anchor experience, our ability to tap into relevance and meaning would be greatly diminished.

The ability to create transfer across grades is important, but it can be even more powerful when it is planned through the use of interdisciplinary anchors. The answer is that children learn by mobilizing their innate capacities to meet everyday challenges they perceive as meaningful. Skills and concepts are most often learned as tools to meet present demands rather than as facts to be memorized today in hopes of application tomorrow. Further, daily life is not separated into academic disciplines or divided into discrete time units; instead, the environment presents problems that one must address in an interdisciplinary, free-flowing way, usually in collaboration with peers and mentors” (Barab and Landa, 1997). By connecting experiences and metaphors that breach into different subject area, we increase the capacity for meaningful experiences, that also privilege the concept of transfer simultaneously. Again, the created meaning becomes a common reference point that teachers can refer back to in order to help students facilitate learning.

Lightman’s Einstein envisions a world where time is fixed, and everything that will happen is already known by the people that inhabit it. He describes this life as a series of rooms, with the absence of choice, its inhabitants serving only as “spectator’s in their lives”. Without meaning, a child’s education must feel this way. The student who is tasked with navigating these rooms, only to move onto the next, truly comes to believe as well that each day is “the end of the world.”  We must as teachers be sure to provide relevant  and meaningful experiences for our students.  We must help them to see that they have agency and choice, and we must create for them, reference points that they can use to put their education in the context of their own lives.  Short of taking them around the world, and covering all of the potential references they may need in our diverse curriculum, we can still produce metaphorical anchors that can be used to help students bring a common experience and schema to their day-to-day learning lives.

References

Barab, S., & Landa, A. Designing Effective Interdisciplinary Anchors. How Children Learn,54, 52-55.

Ben-Hur, M. (2006, December 1). Feuerstein's Instrumental Enrichment-BASIC. . Retrieved , from http://education.jhu.edu/PD/newhorizons/strategies/topics/Instrumental%20Enrichment/hur3.htm

Feuerstein, Feuerstein, Falik, and Rand (2006), Creating and Enhancing Cognitive Modifiability:  The Feuerstein Instrumental Enrichment Program, ICELP Publications

Principles of Learning. (n.d.). . Retrieved July 11, 2014, from http://d20uo2axdbh83k.cloudfront.net/20140516/950b5968383aac0612b95267241b6fbb.pd

Saphier, J., & Gower, R. R. (1997). The skillful teacher: building your teaching skills (5th ed.). Acton, Mass.: Research for Better Teaching.

Vanderbilt, Cognition and Technology Group. a. Anchored Instruction and Its Relationship to Situated Cognition.Educational Researcher, 2-10.

The Thick of It

I always found popular culture intriguing because it represents what is relevant RIGHT NOW.  I think many students share this sentiment but often find popular culture and current events quite distant from what goes on in their classrooms.  With the recent super storm, Hurricane Sandy, students in Morristown, New Jersey were in the thick of what was on the news and flooding social media networks.  I thought this was a great time to capitalize on their interest with what was going on RIGHT NOW.  When we returned from our seven days off from the storm, I immediately presented the students with “The Hurricane Sandy Relief Project.”  The project has two components, a short term (individual), and a long term (group).  The short term project involves donations, interviews with the those involved, and immediate relief for victims.  Often in our society, donating time and money is seen as the endgame.  I disagree.  While donations are essential and necessary, they do not change an infrastructure in a way that creates long term improvements for the community.  Therefore, students are spending more time on the long term aspect of the project.  Students are required to focus on one issue related to the Hurricane.  Some of their topics include the gas crisis, the electric grid, price gauging, and Morristown preparations, etc.  They are required to research how this issue unfolded during Hurricane Sandy.  Then, they will write a business proposal to the appropriate person with a plan of how to improve on their topic of choice.  They will include a statement of need, a budget, and an overview of their creative suggestion.  Lastly, they have to “sell” their idea to their classmates.  The goal is to eventually send off the best proposals/presentations to local government officials, power companies, or local community members, whomever the relevant recipient may be. 

                We are halfway through the project and students are collaborating effectively with Google Docs, sharing ideas at any time of the day via their computer, phone, or tablets, which allows me to immediately see any changes they make to the document and to keep track of their pacing.  Google Docs is a teacher’s dream as I don't feel the need to hover over them in class, I can keep track of who is doing what from anywhere.  It is a phenomenal monitoring system.  The greatest thing I have noticed is how invested students are in this project.  Because they feel an intimate connection to the Hurricane, they care immensely about the success of their proposals.  I (the teacher) am not the final viewer of their product, in fact, I am the first of many.  Their product will be judged by their classmates and ultimately their community.  The stakes are high for this assignment, students refuse to stay married to their product, they see it as adaptive and ever-changing.  They don’t want to continue with a “bad” idea, as many of them do with their traditional assignments.  Once they start a traditional assignment, they are hesitant to revise and change it, because they know that their perhaps sub-par idea will receive an acceptable grade.  This assignment is about more than grades, thus they are willing to revisit, revise, and reflect.

                From an educational standpoint, this project allowed for genuine, meaningful research, collaboration, and communication.  They are learning a variety of skills such as persuasive and informative writing, public speaking, and prototyping.  They are also beginning to think about important marketing questions; what presentation will impact their classmates the most?  What is the best method to capture the attention of an audience?  How will our classmates connect emotionally to our product or idea? I love that students are beginning to understand the process; discussion, research, discussion, dividing of tasks, writing the proposal, and  bringing the proposal to life with a presentation.  Ordering is difficult for many students, as they are quick to jump around and find it perplexing to follow a pattern.   This project guides them in how thinking should be sequenced for the best possible product.  I look forward to sharing their presentations and proposals in the coming weeks.

               

Portal Flash Learning: Part 2

Portal Flash Learning: Part 2

After the initial class, with it’s focus on “Learning” as its theme, the next two classes focused on “Collaboration” and “Communication”.  The class continued to use the free Flash version of Portal to accomplish this.

For the day on “Collaboration” the students were asked to find a partner and log in to their computers.  The game requires the your left hand operates the keyboard, which controls player movements, while the right hand controls the mouse, which is used to place portals in the testing room.

It is physically impossible to negotiate any of the puzzles without using both hands.

With their partner, students were instructed that only one partner could control one device.  One player could operate the keyboard, and the other could operate the mouse.  This task was also buttressed by three of our class rules, which they were asked to reflect on when they began playing.

The rules were as follows:

1.     My Words Matter

2.     I have a Voice, I will Use it

3.     We can’t do it Alone.

As expected, this caused a great deal of frustration, but eventually, they began to figure out a series of commands that they could use to accomplish their goals.  We ended with another discussion around the parallels between this activity, and the group work they are usually assigned in school.

The third and final day focused on “Communication”.  The students were asked to find a different partner from the previous class, and again log in to the game.  When they began however, I told them that they would not be allowed to talk or write directions to one another.

After 30 minutes of this, I began to allow them to write or draw as a way of communicating, and at the end of class, I allowed them to begin speaking.

Many of the students felt that this was extremely beneficial, as the silence in the room, and the need for forced listening that non-verbal communication created, actually made things easier.

We are currently starting a paper that will begin to address the overall experience and its efficacy.

Here is the prompt:

The Portal Flash Unit

Did you find this unit to be of value? Is it something that should be taught again in the future?

Think about the three themes:

1.     Day One: Learning

2.     Day Two: Collaboration

3.     Day Three: Communication

You will write a paragraph/section on each of these themes.  Each paragraph/section should answer and discuss the following questions:

·      How did the game address this theme?

·      Was it effective in teaching you about the theme as it relates to you?

·      Why should it be taught again next year, or why should it not be taught?

Portal Flash Learning Lesson

Now that the first few setup lessons have been completed, we are moving into some of the experiential learning that will shape the class.  Since the main thrust of the class is to break students out of their typical assumptions about what “school” can be, I wanted to provide an initial experience that was seemingly as far from these assumptions as possible.

The students were asked to log into their computers and run a Google search on “Portal Flash”.  This should bring up multiple accessible links to the game, Portal: The Flash Version.  The Flash version of the popular game Portal was not made by the developer, Valve, and is free on various Flash sites on the internet.  Unlike the console and PC version, the Flash version offers physics based puzzles in a 2-dimensional environment.  The puzzle require “portals” to be placed to allow the player to find a pathway to an exit.  As the game progresses, the puzzles get more difficult, and start introducing variables that affect the player’s ability to easily pass through the game.

When we began playing, I set up a few rules.  Students were told that their goal was to get to the highest level that they could, but that they could not ask me questions about the game, or I would simply reply with a question.  I told them that they could use the tools available to them such as Youtube or Wiki’s, to help them through.

Then I sat back and observed the chaos.

Invariably, even the most accomplished gamers in the class hit a wall, a point where they could no longer breeze through the levels without pausing to think, or ask questions of their classmates.  Here was where the game began to provide gold.

Kids became frustrated, agitated, excited.  They clicked the mouse too hard, or squirmed in their seat as the character fell into a pit or was incinerated on a laser floor.  They were animated, began asking questions of one another, furiously searched Youtube for the best walkthrough videos.

They were engaged in the truest sense of the word, despite the difficulty.

The students continued to play through to the lunch break, and when they returned, we started talking.  I asked the following 4 questions, giving them time to write their responses prior to sharing.

1.     What were the difficulties you faced during the game?

2.     How did you deal with these difficulties?

3.     How was this experience different from your idea of what “school” is supposed to be?

4.     What have you learned about learning, or how you learn best?

The discussion went well, with most of the students explaining the benefit of doing it themselves, and of not being given answers.  They said that there was a sense of accomplishment when they finished a level on their own.  Simply saying these things to my students would have paled in comparison to having them complete the activity first.  They need the experience of learning outside of what they have been conditioned to believe it is.

I was struck by some of the student responses in other avenues.  When a lecture is occurring, or they are being asked to participate in activities that “feel” like “school”, my students are constantly asking to get a drink or go to the bathroom.  During the 80 minute block, over 2 different classes, not a single student asked to leave for any reason.  I’m not surprised by this at all.

We need to think about how we can demonstrate LEARNING in our classrooms, not simply explain to our student’s why it is important.    The more we can begin to understand that learning is something that is happening within these children AT ALL TIMES, the more we need to be cognizant of the worthiness of the tasks we ask them to do.  Is it simply busy work?  Are we just padding a grade book? Justifying our own existence?

Take some time to try the game yourself.  What emotions does it elicit in you?  How do you deal with frustration and failure?  How do you manage a lack of ability or control in something as simple as a two-dimensional computer game?

What can you learn about your student’s educational lives from it?  

Log on, and get uncomfortable.

In the Face of Certain Destruction: An Exploration of Hope in Video Games

As you round the corner, you can begin to see the ashes descending from the sky.  You break into a run, avoiding the rubble falling from the exploding buildings that surround you; and even though this apocalyptic nightmare was a perfect and idyllic spring day not two minutes ago, your training tells you what is coming next.  The distant spaceship dominates the skyline.  Already, the pods have left the ship and are descending upon Central Park.  The invasion has begun, and thousands upon thousands of the alien legion will swarm the city streets by nightfall.  You face impossible odds, the only Space Marine to survive the off-world wars, and yet, a smile spreads across your face as you calculate the odds.

Somewhere in the ether, in another dimension even, the player that controls you shares your smile.

Promotional Still from Halo: Reach, copyright Bungie

***

The subject of gaming and its role in education is hotly contested on many levels.  At its basest, the argument most typically revolves around how and to what extent play represents “authentic” learning.  Rarely does the discussion broach the topic of Hope.

Hope in videogames is omnipresent.  The basic understanding when buying a game is that it can be beaten, mastered.  In fact, it has been designed to be completed, to create anything counter to this would doom the product to bargain bins.  With that knowledge, that the task is possible, failure becomes not a stigma, but a motivating challenge.  

The best games have mastered a subtle art.  They have balanced challenge with reward.  Earlier, when the local Arcade was the hub of electronic gaming, the harder the game was, the more popular the game became, as players attempted to reach and enshrine themselves as the “highscore” before eventually dying, allowing the next player in line to get a chance.  As gaming shifted away from the arcades and into suburban living rooms, the game design and intent changed.  When you look at how the use of “save” features, “infinite lives,” and “continues” have grown to pervade games, it’s easy to see that gamers are far more apt to take risks in this simulated environment.  Why?  Because they know that there is an answer, and that they will achieve mastery at some point, if they work hard.

A typical videogame is a relatively short experience when compared with the long weekly slog through childhood and adolescence that we call “school”.  We ask students to trust us that there is a greater goal waiting for them, but constantly restart them every new year with new rules and tasks.  Often, at the start of the year, the students are treated as blank slates.  Since the teacher is incapable of judging where each child is developmentally when they arrive cold, they start from the beginning to “guarantee” that they all get the same experience in the classroom.  This is misguided at best, and oppression at its worst.  By assuming that kids know nothing because there is no guarantee of what they know individually, educators rob students of the achievements they have accomplished in previous years, and they begin to see the process of school as a series of unconnected episodes, which are predicated upon satisfying an individual teacher, as opposed to developing a sense of their own mind.

Video games do the opposite of this.  They are tailor made for the ones playing.  Most games allow for “levelling up,” when the efforts put in by players results in a new power or skill that then becomes part of their persona.  Other games have collectible “achievements” or “badges” that the player displays on their personal viewable profile.  The game, and its subsequent sequels, never discounts the work done by players as they work towards the completion of the game.

I’m not sure that schools do this well enough.  In this metaphor, are grades the equivalent of “achievements” and “badges”?  By that rationale, do grade even represent what we are trying to engender in students, or are they simply a measure of compliance?

By the end of a school year, a students will have a variety of work-products from different classes across the subject areas that represent the “work” that they have done.  They know that almost NONE of it will be utilized ever again in subsequent years, and that come September, they will be starting over.  Is it possible that, after repeating this cycle year after year, students will begin to lose sight of why they are doing anything at all?  That there might not be an end?  That none of it is connected in any meaningful way?  If we were to overhear an adult expressing what I’ve just described as the way they view their life, we would call that person “depressed”.  And what is depression, if not a pervading feeling of Hopelessness.

In the Call of Duty series, a collection of heavily popular First-person shooting games that utilize a multiplayer match format, most players have “died” literally THOUSANDS of times.  In fact, the average player has a Kill/Death ratio that is in the negative, which means their character is killed more than they kill.  The series boasts 30 million players online across all iterations.  The second-newest game in the series, Call of Duty: Black Ops, has been played for over 600 million hours so far.  An outsider would look at the seemingly repetitive nature of the game and see no distinction between the tediousness of modern schooling and the hundreds of hours of gameplay an AVERAGE player puts into this virtual world.  They would miss the subtle nuances that make it far different.  Call of Duty uses a multi-tiered achievement system that is made up of levels.  Players accumulate EXP, or experience points, from kills and other in-game achievements.  Once they reach a new level, they are granted access to better or varied weapons, and “perks” (customizable enhancements that make the player better).  Upon reaching the highest level, players are offered the chance to “prestige,” which is a fancy term for starting over.  The caveat?  When they begin the process again, they will be viewed by others as a “2nd Prestige”,  or “3rd Prestige” and so on as they negotiate through.  The ability to move upward in the game is limitless, requiring an almost ridiculous amount of time, with very little physical reward, and yet, it is one of the most addictive experiences in youth culture today.  Why is this? What does it supply that differentiates it from schooling?  Simply, they know that success is possible, viewable and transferable.

As a teacher, I’ve been in situations where a student who clearly knows the answer is succumbing to some form of institutionalized apathy.  It became fashionable at some point, or maybe it was something I read, to further question the student in that scenario:  When a student says, “I don’t know,” teachers were to respond with “But what if you did?” or “Well, (Student’s Name), what would you say if you DID know?”  While I understand the conceit, I’m not sure if it is enough to truly change that willingness towards giving up and asking for the answer to be supplied.  “But what if..” is a question that transfers ownership to the student, but if it exists in a structure where there is no guarantee of success, and where the easiest route to success is to succumb to being told what to think, I’m not sure it is enough to change the trajectory the children are on.

Gamers, on the other hand, think about this all the time.  The difference is the situation in which they are engaged.  The presence of Hope is what drives this method of thinking.  When gamers are faced with a seemingly impossible task, such as an unscalable wall, or an undefeatable enemy, they ask themselves the following question, “In a perfect world, what would I need to solve this problem?”  Most often, the answers generated from this type of questioning will solve the player’s in-game issue.  The question can not exist outside the framework of a completable task, the understanding that no matter how difficult something seems, that there is a solution.  Gamers know that every task they are given is doable, eventually, if they work and think harder.  Isn’t that the type of student we are trying to create in our schools?  And if that is true, how do we better accomplish it?

As teachers, we are tasked with occasioning a classroom space that is best suited for learning.  The systems we create in our classrooms must be optimized for this end. Our classes contain boys and girls, Jocks and Nerds, The wealthy and the poor; but they also contain Starship Captains, Warlords, Farmers, Questing Knights, Puzzle Masters, Flying Dragons, Aspiring Detectives, and Cowboys avenging their past wrongs (things most of us as teachers have only read about).  At anytime during our day, we are teaching children that have saved planets, rescued damsels, and survived the Zombie Apocalypse; children that have faced absurd odds, and through their own wits and skill, smiled in the face of the seemingly impossible.  Every single one of them had an understanding, both tacit and explicit, that no matter how difficult the task, that it was attainable.  The way we provide Hope in our schools must change, if we desire to tap into the fierceness and voraciousness with which our students are capable of learning.