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Bored students: a classroom technique
Posted by Tim Joy on 12/31/2010
I would like, for a moment, to go way back to my beginnings with system dynamics when I was a wee dad of four children, 36 years old, and - at the time - teaching English to 155 sophomores. Went to Concord, MA, in summer 1994 and listened to Jay Forrester say things that made me go, "Huh?"
So, I tried this with students: why is it that tearing down low-rent housing helps mitigate poverty? Why is it that 100 years of forest fire suppression only makes our fires worse? why is it that people who drive four-wheel drives tend to get in more accidents? why is the flooding at Johnson Creek (SE Portland) worse now than before the Army Corps "fixed it"?
But these didn't work so well. However, these did:
why is it that at our college preparatory school even our honors students copy homework and cheat? why is it that school work doesn't teach you what you need to learn? why is the cafeteria always messy? Is it messier on particular days of the week? When is it cleanest? why are there more fights on Monday? why do some teachers have more difficulty with some students than other teachers do? Why do some teachers take a longer time to yell at you than other teachers do? draw a BOTG of your level of anxiety, or urine, or confidence on the field, or fear of girls, or books in your locker, or gas in your tank, or your desire to the homework I assign.
Really, Mr. Joy, our best students cheat? Yup, I said. By the way, how many of you - just once - copied someone's homework? Every hand up. Why, then, at our Catholic school with 98% on to college rate, do most of the students cheat? What time of year are you more prone to copy homework? How is our school set up so that it is more advantageous for you to copy homework than to do it yourself? These questions really changed the discussion among the students.
Once their own experience became the subject matter, the systems methodology of understanding change over time was of keen interest to them. From there, pretty easy to ask change-over-time questions about Jack and Ralph's relationship in Lord of the Flies or the demographic swing occurring in the historical period of The Grapes of Wrath. I had to get out of the way; things were, like, crackin', man!
At that conference, Forrester said - and I still have a hard time taking this in - every human experience or enterprise, every natural aspect of our universe can be understood with two variables - a level (stock) and a rate (flow). These two foundational concepts provide a universal and clarifying way to describe and seek to understand our experience. Elegant in its simplicity, unforgiving in its capacity to require a lot of the thinker. Seventeen years later, I still swim in that thought, am still a student of system dynamics.
A small start, this. But I think the right place to start - in the classroom, where the bored student sits. And sits. In the classroom is where a moral teacher must act.
But let me open this along a few lines: you'll note how I changed the thread title. There are other threads people might pursue:
*Bored Students: how SD puts the learner at the CENTER of the learning experience
*Bored Students: a school-wide approach using SD methods
*Bored Students: teacher/team training in learner-centered, SD methods
*Bored Students: SD/ST in the social sciences
*Bored Students: redirecting district (or school, or departmental) funding sources to SD training
*Bored Students: creating engaging curricula using SD methods
*Bored Students: using a trojan horse in Health courses
*Bored Students: discovering the systems that shape school culture (students should do this one, by the way)
You get the idea. Pick one. Stay in control, stay attuned, propose real, doable things so that we can start doing them.
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