Working Harder, Not Smarter

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            Throughout time humans have inevitably solved and created many problems. These problems include going to the moon, ways of transportation, global warming, big business, and etc… The list could continue on forever and ever starting as simple as an idea like the wheel to the complexities of the ecosystem. In order for humans to be smart there are several ideas that need to fall into place and several problems that stand in the way. In the book The Anti Education Era by James Paul Gee he argues that although humans have the ability to be smart, due to the obstacles that interfere with human learning, humans really are quite stupid.

      According to Gee, in order for a human to solve problems in a smart way five conditions must occur. “The conditions are: (1) initial mentorship to get us prepared to learn from experience in specific domains ; (2) lots of prior experience; (3) clear goals; (4) something being “at stake” (mattering to us emotionally); and (5) the opportunity to act in a way that elicits a meaningful response from the world.” (p. 13)

            I find these conditions extremely important in the day to days of my teaching career. I can not emphasize the amount of times I have heard the students say in my Algebra class “why do I have to learn this” or “my parents don’t know how to do this and they say I will never use this.” The first three conditions as a teacher I have a decent amount of control over. My students are given mentorship through myself, most have prior experience necessary to begin my class (but those who do not often do not stand a chance), and as a school it has been a clear expectation that goals be focused and woven into classroom lessons with meaning. However, it is often hard to make the content meaningful to a students emotions with the resources, infrastructure and funding of the school system. It is also extremely hard to create something that will have a meaningful response from the world. Quite often what is taught requires little action by the student, rather students are encouraged to read, listen, and memorize. This leads to one of the many problems Gee speaks of, the human memory.

            As a teacher, one of the topics that I have to teach my students is the idea of author bias. This is often pointed out by finding readings on a historical account of an event where the authors have very different accounts of what really happened. For example is Christopher Columbus a hero or a murderer? It really depends on whose point of view you account for. In his work, Gee states, “what we store in our heads is not ‘the truth,’ but a version of reality as we see it and sometimes as we wish it to be” (p. 20) Just like accounts of history, our minds create memories based on the five conditions necessary to learn. What matters and what the person wants to believe creates that persons account. The memory is not like a computer and should not be used for this reason.

            There are two problems Gee speaks of that as an educator I see the most. The first is “frozen thought”.  Gee describes this as, “once a solution is frozen, it takes lots of work to unfreeze it, to get people to rethink it and refreeze” (p. 88). There is not a better description that could describe people or schools. People do not like change. One of the hardest jobs as an administrator (I have seen my boss get frustrated with this when trying to sell the idea of formative assessment to the staff) it to create change for the better. The second problem I identify with is the need for quick solutions to complex problems. Gee references the idea of adding species into different ecosystems without knowing what will happen. Sometimes this is a great solution, but at times it causes chaos and more problems than were needed. Humans need to take a step back and test hypotheses in simulations.  

            I believe that Gee has some extremely interesting concepts that could positively impact the learning community. If as an educator we know that these conditions must exist and we understand the problems at hand, then maybe we can learn to accept change and create a system that allows our students to take action, reflect, and have patience to solve complex systems and create a smarter people. We can adapt from old primitive methods to work less hard and much smarter.

Gee, J. P. (2013). The anti-education era: Creating smarter students through digital learning. United States: Palgrave Macmillan.