Students, Philosophy, and Quarantine

Lucius Annaeus Seneca, 4 B.C.-A.D. 65

My Latin V students read some of the philosophy of Seneca during the fall semester.  It wasn't my idea, but that was what they wanted to do, and when they had finished, they insisted that I include his writings in my curriculum.  According to them, Seneca wrote advice that was especially well suited to high school students, and so I got to work.  I read through all 124 letters, grounded in the thought of Stoic philosophy, that he had written his friend Lucilius.  From those I chose selections from twenty-two epistles for the students in my Latin III classes to read.  The goal was to discuss them together as we headed toward a special project at the end.

And then we moved to e-learning during the time of quarantine.  There was nothing we could do that would possibly replace the richness and depth of discussing this ancient philosopher in person, yet I was unwilling to scrap the idea since the Latin V students had been so passionate about our reading these letters.  I recorded videos that offered some background and discussion of each letter, and the students then translated the works and sent them to me along with their thoughts.  The special project, however, was something we kept.  After having read these letters that Seneca had written his friend, letters filled with sound advice and wisdom, the students were tasked with writing an epistle to one of their own friends in which they shared the wisdom from one of Seneca's letters and explained why it had particular value for them.

The letters they wrote proved that even during e-learning, they had grasped the essence of what Seneca had written even as the depth of their letters made me wish ever more that we had been able to discuss these works in person.  One, however, stood out.  The young man who wrote it based his letter on Epistle XXVIII by Seneca in which the philosopher wrote, "You ought to change your spirit, not your climate.  To a certain person complaining about this same thing, Socrates said, 'Why do you wonder that your travels do you no good since you carry yourself around with you?  The same concern presses down on you that drove you forth.'  Do you seek to know why escape does not help you?  You escape with yourself.  It matters more who you are than where you are going."  As you will see, this student reached back nearly two thousand years to find wisdom that he could apply in the 21st century and during a time of pandemic-induced quarantine.  This, my friends, is what learning looks like.

Dear _____,

I have been thinking over our present situation, being stuck at home, and I have realized something that I thought I should share with you. When we are at school, we were always worried about upcoming tests and homework we were assigned. We tried to juggle our athletic, social, and academic lives. Now that we are learning from home, one would think that those worries would be gone. But I have realized that for many, these same worries persist. We have grown so used to having these concerns in school that we cannot let them go at home. I think of a letter by Roman philosopher Seneca, his epistle XXVIII. In it, he claims that we cannot change our spirit by simply moving location. This really resonated with me because I have thought similar things about learning from home. Even though our location has changed, many of our same worries and problems persist because we cannot let them go. We thought that at home learning would be easy because it let us do our own work on our own schedule. But in reality, the change in location is not enough. We must examine ourselves in this time of isolation, and many do not have the desire to self-reflect. Instead, we claim that the superficial change in surroundings has changed us, and that in quarantine we are less stressed. But for many, this is not true. We procrastinate and we put less effort into our work. We end up with a similar level of stress as we had in school. We rely on our surroundings to change us, Khaya, instead of ourselves. When we were first told that we would be spending all our time at home, many people claimed that this would give them time to finish all the things they were doing and let them accomplish things that they had always wanted to do. But for almost everyone, this turned out to be false. By relying on our environment to change us, we squandered the opportunity to do these things. We need to change our mindset. We must realize that we are the same person we have always been and that if we want to become more productive or less stressed or change anything about our lives, we must first change our mindsets and our attitudes. Only then will we be able to accomplish our goals.

A Teacher's Teacher

Psalm 90 says that our lifespan is threescore years and ten, and if that should be true for me, then I am well beyond the midpoint at which Dante began his famous journey.  Yet even at my age and with my decades of experience in education, I still need a teacher.  I have been blessed since Kindergarten with outstanding teachers, but over the past twenty years there has been one who has gently and carefully guided and shaped my thinking in ways that even he may not know.  Do not bother skipping to the end of this piece in search of his name, for you will not find it.  I doubt he would want the publicity, but I do want to share his latest lesson.

Mine is a logical mind that takes great pleasure in wit and good turns of a phrase, and this combination can lead to the sharp skewering and harsh condemnation of things that are wrong.  To be sure, there are wrongs that need to be skewered and condemned, but there is such a thing as grace, and my friend reminded me of that when we talked today about the expectations we all have of each other during this unprecedented time.  No one has experienced what we are living through in these days of COVID-19.  No teacher has ever taught in circumstances like these.  No custodian, principal, or superintendent has worked in such conditions.  In fact, there is not a banker, barber, mechanic, librarian, elected official, lawyer, doctor, firefighter, police officer, pastor, rabbi, plumber, architect, IT specialist, mother, father, or child who has ever experienced a pandemic and its consequences such as we all are experiencing right now.  What does that mean?

It means that the best leader before this moment and the worst leader before this moment are now trying to lead in a unique moment.  Yes, some will be better prepared for it, and when we say that we are all doing our best, the best by some will serve better than the best by others, but it is perhaps unfair to judge too harshly those whose best is not all we would want it to be.  I have certainly dropped a few balls and thought of some wonderful ideas after the time had passed when they would have been useful. 

We should have high standards, both for ourselves and for those we lead.  Parents rightly maintain high expectations for their children, just as bosses do for their employees and employees do for their bosses, but it is not helpful for the backseat driver to scream at the one behind the wheel who is driving the car across unfamiliar terrain.  If the vehicle is about to go over a cliff, then by all means, yell with the full capacity of your lungs, but if it is merely a bumpy ride, it may be better to sit back and hold on tightly.

What Is Quarantined Education Teaching Us, Part 2

Some students find themselves more productive during e-learning, and some find themselves less so according to this decidedly unscientific study that I discussed in an earlier post.  I have questions about the usefulness of data-driven studies in a field like education, but that is a topic for a different article.  My uncertainty regarding such methods does not, however, prevent me from offering an equation and a discussion of it.  A lower student-teacher ratio plus less time spent in class plus more independent learning can equal true education.

I've lost you already, haven't I?  If I didn't lose you at "lower student-teacher ratio," then I surely did at "less time in class."  We all know that the best learning environment is one with the lowest possible student-teacher ratio, right?  Countless articles like this say so.  Then again, countless articles like this one say the opposite.  Of course, we can all agree that students need more time in class.  There are, after all, countless articles such as this, that support the notion.  Yet there are countless articles like this one suggesting the opposite is true.  The seemingly infinite number of articles on both sides of these two points is one of the reasons I question the usefulness of certain kinds of research in education, but as I said, that is for another time.  For now, I want to discuss the components of my equation and one all-important word.

Students want to ask questions, but they don't want to feel foolish doing so, and we will never create a classroom environment in which all students can achieve this.  No matter what or how many procedures we establish, students are people, and people care what others think about them, and if knowing something is valuable, as it must be since we award those who know things on tests and assessments, then not knowing something must be of less value, and what demonstrates not knowing something quite like asking a question?  We can pontificate all day long about the value of asking questions and the importance of failure as a part of growth, but deep down, at a gut level, none of that matters for most students under age eighteen, and perhaps for a large number above that.

I am the first to write glowing paeans of praise about students who ask penetrating questions in class, but I also know that there are students who will ask their questions only when in a small, after school environment, or one-on-one with the teacher between classes, or from a certain distance through email, or via the combination of comfort and distance afforded by something like Zoom.  And I also know that it is too easy for students to indicate understanding in a larger class when that simply isn't the case.  Perhaps they do so because they do not want to seem foolish or do not wish to be the one who drags class out by asking something, and because of this, it is too easy for teachers to assume understanding and to move on.  In short, then, a smaller student-teacher ratio is better for some, perhaps even many, students.

The same is true for spending less time in class.  We can certainly line up the studies and provide our own experiential evidence to support the claim that more time in class is required for success, and indeed this may be the case for some.  For others, however, it can be not only a waste of time, but an experience that dims and dulls their creativity.  Before the days of increasingly locked-step conformity demanded by standardized tests and their curricula, teachers could allow students to work at their own pace.  If some finished early, they could work on other matters, whether for that class or another, as the teacher spent more direct time with those who needed it.  Undoubtedly this is still the case in some, hopefully many, classrooms, but this sort of half-guided, half-independent learning is increasingly vanishing from our landscape, in part because of the aforementioned standardization of so much of education, but also because of teacher evaluation tools that require everyone in the room to be actively engaged in one particular activity all of the time.  Students quietly reading for another class are seen as being off task, and this results in a tick in the wrong box for the teacher.

In any given class, there are students who simply need less direct instruction and less practice with the material to achieve mastery.  If there is one thing that quarantined education is teaching us, it is that students are quite capable of achieving what is required and then doing something else. For them the result is a much healthier study-life balance, one in which learning and living are not so artificially separated.

This leads to the third element on the left side of my equation, independent learning.  There will always be students who go through the motions of learning, just as there will always be adults who merely go through the motions of life.  Yet when given the freedom that less time in class brings, many will discover or rediscover their natural curiosity and love of learning.  And while that may not hold true in every class, it will hold true in some.  I have talked with fellow educators and can bear witness myself that there are students who, during this time of quarantined education, are asking the truly curious questions and exploring ideas of their own inspiration that they simply would not have if they had progressed like a can of soup down the assembly line of their traditional day.

All of this, I contend, can lead to true education, one in which students and teachers embark on a shared journey of discovery that is sustainable, every widening, and of more value than one that produces fact-recalling automata that are less efficient than a basic search engine.  Yet the most important word in my equation is "can," which is related to words like "may," "perhaps," and "many" that I have used throughout this piece.  These are words that suggest vagueness, and we don't like that very much, for ours is a data-driven society that worships at the altar of the hard sciences.  Human beings, of course, are known for their refusal and even inability to fit into narrow categories.  Will all of the things I have suggested work for everyone?  They will not, just as no other curriculum or program or educational theory will do.  They are simply ideas to work into the mix, to make available as we seek to provide the widest variety of opportunities for human beings in their education.  That there is a wider variety than we have imagined may just be the greatest lesson that quarantined education has taught us.