Flashbacks to my education professors warning us of the “Taylorization” of teaching — the gradual transformation of a creative human art into a gearwork process ruthlessly
(whoops, thumb slip!) optimized to the legible goals passed down by higher-ups.
I think that, at the time, I pushed against this demonization of Taylorization. Time IS short, and what we teach matters. We’ve all had some teachers who frittered their/our time away; no doubt some of them justified it through a romantic philosophy like anti-Taylorism.
As I saw my kids’ classrooms in subsequent years, though, I thought I could see the impact of Taylorism: the classes seem to try to optimize stupid little things, but be empty of the bigger picture of the life of the mind. They seemed un-human places.
Trying to identify what we ACTUALLY want, so we can optimize for it, seems of high importance.
Yea I think that's just a tension teachers have to deal with: we have limited time and it's our responsibility to make good use of it, but we also can't let limited time become an excuse to justify a narrow focus. And we have lots of goals in schools, content learning matters, but lots of other things matter too and in the day-to-day it's easy to lose sight of things.
First of all, thank you for the link to the SSDD problems - I've already found a set that I am planning on incorporating into a future lesson I'm planning for a tutoring student!
Second - this might be fairly obvious, but - I feel like everything that you said underscores yet again, why it would be impossible/impractical/detrimental to keep pushing for teachers to be replaced with AI or purely digital learning platforms. There is so much flexibility and recursive planning that we do that would not be able to be duplicated by an AI platform... which would probably be more purely "goal-focused" on the surface.
Last but not least - in the past five years, one phrase that that I've used a lot when talking about math to my students and colleagues is that math is truly an "open middle" discipline. As in, it is true that there is often *one* correct answer, but there is almost always a multitude of ways to get to that answer. In some cases, perhaps there is a "fastest" method to get to that answer... but the "fastest"doesn't necessarily mean "best" - that the "best" way is ultimately the way that allows you to solve the problem in using a method that is the most efficient and accurate for you. (Also, for my advanced math students, I often want them to be able to solve problems using a multitude of methods!) I've found that this allows students to take the space to explore and actually understand what's happening instead of mimicking a process that they don't really understand. Similarly, there are obviously a set of "goals/understandings" you'd like to reach for your class by the end of the year... but I think there should be a lot of flexibility in the road you take to get there. Sometimes it may seem like you're going "backwards" so to speak, but that might be what the students need to truly understand the next step.
I agree about AI. This post is the type of thing that I think lots of teachers know, but often goes unstated. That's the type of knowledge that AI will always struggle to understand.
The open middle thing also plays into how different topics can be in math class. My current curriculum uses the exact same structure for every lesson - an intro, two problems to introduce students to the content of the lesson, a check for understanding, and then one page front and back for practice. That can be a good model for some topics, but not every topic is the same. It requires flexibility, sometimes I add stuff and spend five or six days on a topic, other times it's less than a class. It all depends.
Flashbacks to my education professors warning us of the “Taylorization” of teaching — the gradual transformation of a creative human art into a gearwork process ruthlessly
(whoops, thumb slip!) optimized to the legible goals passed down by higher-ups.
I think that, at the time, I pushed against this demonization of Taylorization. Time IS short, and what we teach matters. We’ve all had some teachers who frittered their/our time away; no doubt some of them justified it through a romantic philosophy like anti-Taylorism.
As I saw my kids’ classrooms in subsequent years, though, I thought I could see the impact of Taylorism: the classes seem to try to optimize stupid little things, but be empty of the bigger picture of the life of the mind. They seemed un-human places.
Trying to identify what we ACTUALLY want, so we can optimize for it, seems of high importance.
Yea I think that's just a tension teachers have to deal with: we have limited time and it's our responsibility to make good use of it, but we also can't let limited time become an excuse to justify a narrow focus. And we have lots of goals in schools, content learning matters, but lots of other things matter too and in the day-to-day it's easy to lose sight of things.
I really appreciate this post!
First of all, thank you for the link to the SSDD problems - I've already found a set that I am planning on incorporating into a future lesson I'm planning for a tutoring student!
Second - this might be fairly obvious, but - I feel like everything that you said underscores yet again, why it would be impossible/impractical/detrimental to keep pushing for teachers to be replaced with AI or purely digital learning platforms. There is so much flexibility and recursive planning that we do that would not be able to be duplicated by an AI platform... which would probably be more purely "goal-focused" on the surface.
Last but not least - in the past five years, one phrase that that I've used a lot when talking about math to my students and colleagues is that math is truly an "open middle" discipline. As in, it is true that there is often *one* correct answer, but there is almost always a multitude of ways to get to that answer. In some cases, perhaps there is a "fastest" method to get to that answer... but the "fastest"doesn't necessarily mean "best" - that the "best" way is ultimately the way that allows you to solve the problem in using a method that is the most efficient and accurate for you. (Also, for my advanced math students, I often want them to be able to solve problems using a multitude of methods!) I've found that this allows students to take the space to explore and actually understand what's happening instead of mimicking a process that they don't really understand. Similarly, there are obviously a set of "goals/understandings" you'd like to reach for your class by the end of the year... but I think there should be a lot of flexibility in the road you take to get there. Sometimes it may seem like you're going "backwards" so to speak, but that might be what the students need to truly understand the next step.
Glad they're helpful, SSDD problems are great!
I agree about AI. This post is the type of thing that I think lots of teachers know, but often goes unstated. That's the type of knowledge that AI will always struggle to understand.
The open middle thing also plays into how different topics can be in math class. My current curriculum uses the exact same structure for every lesson - an intro, two problems to introduce students to the content of the lesson, a check for understanding, and then one page front and back for practice. That can be a good model for some topics, but not every topic is the same. It requires flexibility, sometimes I add stuff and spend five or six days on a topic, other times it's less than a class. It all depends.