A Parable (for Homework)

A while back I attended an information session at the College for a new classroom management system (let THAT concept sink in for a moment). It’s called Top Hat. Now, of course, since FB (and therefore the entire Internet) knows everything important about Mee, I get regular ads from them in my news feed. I guess I need to be reminded where we are now, in the 21^stcentury.

A top hat.

So Top Hat is kind of a ramped-up Clicker system, where you can poll students, take attendance, pop-quiz ‘em, facilitate group work, make ‘em buy a ticket to get out of the goddamn lecture hall, and order your lunch — all using a system that links to the technology they literally already have at hand: their mobiles.*

It’s billed as a way to turn your lectures into TED Talks, to add ting-zing to your classroom, to improve your personality, and in general to join the march to the Land of All-Screens-All-the-Time. So they pitch to me with factoids** like: “87% of students say” Top Hat is a great way to use your phone while in class. And “59% of students report” being completely disengaged with their entire lives, let alone with their professors. And stuff like that.

A sugar donut

Of course, this is all supported by other factoids produced by the usual round of well-intentioned people with Doctorates in Nothing, who, not content with littering the English language with pseudo-technical argot (such as student learning outcome as a replacement for knowledge and knowledge delivery system, that is, teaching), and having already ruined high school by selling college, persist in asserting the uselessness of “lecture” in the face of “modern” students’ alleged inability to process verbal information in chunks larger than a donut.

Pythagoras...
not wearing a top hat.

The fact that the biology of learning has not changed at all since Socrates seems to have escaped these experts, whether by virtue of their having been educated into ignorance, or for more dubious reasons. In the end, lousy teaching is lousy teaching, and great teachers are born, not made. No collection of gewgaws will ever change these facts.

Although my inclination is rather more ludic than Ludditic, I am nevertheless reminded of the story of the man who decided it was time to reinvent the wheel. He thought, “This thing has worked for thousands of years, but there has got to be a better way to do it! Times have changed. We need new solutions to these old problems. The wheel just doesn’t cut it anymore.”

The Calendar of the Maya
No top hats here, either

So he worked hard and long. He began by studying Ancient Greek and Egyptian and Persian, so that he could consult the True Wisdom of the Eight Sages and the insights of Pythagoras, and of pseudo-Pythagoras and of al-Khwarizmi the Golden. He also enlisted an archaeologist to help him learn the Inner Meaning of the Calendar of the Maya (just in case).

A Great Physicist of Modern Times
and Khwarizmi the Golden,
neither of them wearing a top hat.

Not content with all that, he then gathered what he could of the Collected Wisdom of the Nine Great Physicists of Modern Times and the Four Behaviorists and the Neo-Behaviorists, consulted the works of the leading Doctors of Everything Known and Unknown, and studied in detail the life of Nikola Tesla…not to mention the entire library of Isaac Asimov!

He even went to a psychic. And a psychiatrist (just in case).

Isaac Asimov
not wearing a top hat, either

He tried all sorts of new shapes and materials and geometric formulas.

He kept at it and burnt the midnight oil and put his nose to the grindstone and burnt the candle at both ends. In short, he put his all into the effort. 

And in the end, he did it! His perseverance had paid off. He found that, low and behold, he had indeed reinvented the wheel. It was round and beautiful and completely functional. Exactly as functional, in fact, as it had ever been. 

And he considered it an astounding success, to boot.

And the moral of this story is: If you lose your keys in the front yard, it makes no sense to look for them in the kitchen, even if the light is better there.

A gentleman wearing a top hat.
Did he reinvent the wheel?

* One recent ad from them says exactly that: “Students already have their phones in their hands, they are probably looking at them in class, so why not turn that into something useful.” (sic.) It’s called an excuse that’s worse than the crime!

** factoid (n) a curious North American neologism, modeled on android (which refers to a machine designed to look like a human…think Commander Data), and humanoid(an animal that looks like a human) – the important point being that neither is, in fact, a human. Hence: factoid.

Image credits:

https://devils-dozen.com/product/cinnamon-sugar/ - https://www.shoes.com/scala-wf571-victorian-tall-top-hat/771383 - https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/203707.Pythagoras - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Hawking - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Al-Khwarizmi.jpg - https://www.pinterest.com/pin/354165958180734883/ - http://www.victoriana.com/Mens-Clothing/tophats.htm