Design Communicates Philosophy

I promise this post is about education. It just takes me a minute to get to it. Hang in there.

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If I ever get to visit Europe, there is one spot that interests me more than any other - Florence, Italy. Much of that desire is due to my college Humanities classes in which I learned about so much of the great art that resides in that place (I'm the personal general ed classes were made for). Another reason is that Florence is the home of the Galileo museum, which I believe I would enjoy very much. But high on the list of reasons I would love to visit Florence is that I would love to see this building, the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore. The design and history of this cathedral, and specifically of the dome is a thrilling part of engineering history for nerds like me. When construction of the cathedral began, they did not actually know how they were going to construct the dome, but they knew it would be generations before they got to that part, so they started blind. One hundred years later, technology had advanced, and the initial vision of Neri di Fioravanti was realized by Filippo Brunelleschi. I'll save the details here because they are not the point of this post, but they are well worth reading, so go here when you are ready.

I'm sure you are wondering where this is going. Fear not, friends, I am leading up to something. 

Ask yourself why so much time, money, energy, and thought would have been put into something like the dome of this cathedral when no one knew how to do it. And no one would know how to do it for five generations!

It's because cathedral builders understood something we have mostly lost today. Design communicates before words are ever spoken. When you enter the worship space, your eye is drawn upward, toward paintings that teach as well. If your mind wanders during the sermon because it is in a language you don't understand, you see stories from the Bible illustrated as you look at the ceiling. 

(Yes, I'm aware that that this part of history is also filled with the corruption of popes selling indulgences for places like this. Again, I'm not trying to provide a detailed account everything, I'm using this make a point about design.)

We don't build a lot of these sorts of buildings anymore. Our values have changed. That's not a criticism; just a fact. A lot of churches now are more likely to build for efficient usage of space. Because they don't have the kind of money it would take to create separate spaces, they design for multi-purpose use. The room that serves as the sanctuary on Sunday might have the chairs cleared out for Upward Basketball on Saturday or tables put in for a church dinner on Wednesday night. What is the philosophy they are communicating? It is that they want to provide many services for their community. The cathedral drew you into a vertical perspective while most modern churches make you think horizontally.

My church strikes a balance of having simple architecture that is not ostentatious in expense but still looks like a church (steeples and pointed arch windows draw the eye upward when outside) along with an interior that draws the eye forward, landing on the communion table. It communicates both the vertical and the horizontal simultaneously. It communicates that they invested in architecture for a purpose, but not in the monetary amounts cathedrals did.

Let's look at a secular example, the recently opened Barack Obama Presidential Center in Chicago. I'll go ahead and admit that I think this exterior of this building is ugly. According to the Wikipedia page, it conveys seriousness by being undecorated and mostly without windows, calling it "tailored and understated." For me, it's feels a little like Star Trek's Borg cube mated with the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey. But that's a matter of taste. Photos from the inside of the building are lovely, and the words on the corner are meaningful. 

But the Obama Presidential Center is more than just the museum tower. There are four buildings surrounded by a multi-acre public park. The design of the tower has obviously gotten most of the attention for its unusual nature, but the design of the entire center communicates investment in the future and in community. There is an actual public library on the grounds and an athletic center, all with public gathering spaces for people to hold meetings or events. Given that his pre-political career was often referred to as "community organizer," this seems appropriate. 

Okay, I promised that his would come around to education at some point, and here we are.

The design of your classroom is critical to communication with students from the first day of school. In this case, it's not the architecture; you don't have control over that. But everything from the decoration of walls to arrangement of chairs, even the choice you make about where your "perch" is sends a message. 

Do your classroom displays distract from learning or enhance it?  There's research about over-decorating creating a working memory challenge, and as much as I didn't want it to apply to me, it did. My walls were shouting a students all day and competing with me for their attention. 

Where do you spend most of your time as a teacher?  The front of the room, the back, the side, or walking around. There's not one right answer to this question, but what you choose communicates something to your students. Make sure it is what you want to communicate. 

One of the latest Twitter dust ups involves a comparison of two seating arrangements. Layout 1 is a room full of triangular desks that fit together to make a circular, almost daisy shaped pod of desks. It also included "alternative seating" like exercise balls and stools (the lack of back support is making my middle aged muscles sore just looking at it). Layout 2 has traditional classroom rows. While I would choose Layout 2 with a seating chart every day of every year, I'm not actually writing this to judge those who like pods. I know, love, and have observed some phenomenal teachers who would rather cut of their left hand than arrange their class in rows.  It works for them, and they communicate the kind of teacher they are through that arrangement.

What I am saying is that when students walk into your room on the first day of school, the arrangement speaks volumes about what your class will be like. Pods indicate that there will be LOTS of group work, so much that you don't want to spend any of your class time arranging the furniture for groups. Traditional rows communicate that the teacher is the teacher; you might sometimes move the desks into groups, but most of the time, you'll be paying attention to the front of the room. Do what you want; but do it in the way fits your teaching style. What you don't want to do is put desks in pods if you aren't going to be lot of group work because you will have already communicated that they should pay more attention to each other than to the teacher and will have to fight that every day.

Recognizing that design communicates philosophy will save you a lot of stress. Make your classroom communicate your philosophy, and you don't have spend us much time explicitly communicating it. Think that through this summer as you make decisions about next year.  

Observations on Juneteenth

Note: This blog is normally focused on education, but I occasionally veer off into political or religious meddling. This is one of those posts.

As I write this, I have just spent some time scrolling through Twitter and Facebook on June 19, or Juneteenth as it has been known to African Americans for almost 150 years. Because people feel safe saying things online that they wouldn't say to someone's face, the results were predictable. The most benign was, "We already have July 4th for Independence Day, so we don't need Juneteenth." The vast majority of posters call it a "made up holiday" as though other holidays are organically grown on trees. Others, of course, called it "woke" because do you even social media if you don't use that word? And, I am not going to repeat the disgusting ones here, but there were quite a lot of them. It seems that this holiday really strikes a nerve with some people. And of course, we have to fly the colors of our partisanship these days, so if we are told to be for or against something by party leadership, we have to be too.

So I want to attempt to set aside the vitriol for a second and address the objections to this holiday and what our response should be as Christians. 

"It's a Made Up Holiday."

Let's start with the argument I consider the weirdest and weakest even though it is the most common - the assertion that it's a made up holiday. People who know me or have ever read my blog in January know that I consider it pretty dumb to celebrate New Year's Eve. There is no religious significance, and it commemorates nothing. That, friends, is what I call a made up holiday. Yet, billions of people are happy to drink, kiss, and sing (sort of) the words to a song they don't understand. They resolve things under the slogan "New Year - New Me" as though calendar dates have power to change us. 

Almost all holidays are made up. Some have real meaning while others have none. So what makes sense when judging a holiday is to look at what it is meant to honor and whether or not we observe it as intended. 

• Christmas is meant to commemorate the birth of Christ, and obviously good thing to celebrate, even though we have devolved into doing it in the most consumeristic of ways. 
• Memorial Day exists to honor the fallen dead, another important thing to do, even if we have turned it into an excuse to get drunk at the beach instead. 
• Thanksgiving was proclaimed so that we might express gratitude to the source of our blessings.
• The same people who object to Juneteenth didn't mind a White House cage match on Flag Day (sorry, my politics slipped out - it was bound to happen at least once), a day in which we are supposed to remember adopting the flag or celebrate Betsy Ross or something. If you are going to accuse a holiday of being meaningless because it is made up, Flag Day seems to fit the bill. 

So, let's look at what Juneteenth is meant to commemorate and ask ourselves if we find that an important thing to mark each year . 

President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. Legally, that should have meant that all enslaved people were free. But, we didn't have mass media. Lincoln didn't issue the proclamation in a tweet to be seen instantly by all. Also, executive orders must eventually be codified by Congress to carry the weight of law, which didn't happen for two more years when the 13th amendment was ratified. Word spread somewhat slowly, so slavery ended at different times in different places - the last of which took place when troops entered Galveston, Texas on June 19, 1865. That was the actual end of slavery, not just the declaration of its end, but the final freeing of human beings who had been owned by other human beings.

Try to set aside politics for a second. Can you imagine a more meaningful thing to celebrate every year? Other than the birth, death, and resurrection of Christ, I truly cannot.

All this "woke" nonsense is a recent development. We've gotten by fine without this holiday.

Whatever you may think of the recent developments in our culture, Juneteenth is NOT new.  The first time a lot of white people heard of it was in 2020 when Trump was holding his first in-person campaign rally in Tulsa since the Covid lockdown, which they had originally scheduled for June 19. It was then recognized as a federal holiday for the first time in 2021. So, it is fair if it seems recent to you, but the first celebrations of Juneteenth happened in 1866, exactly one year after the event. 

As for the word "woke," it's just a lazy thing to use as a criticism. Originally, woke was used to mean that we should be aware. We should wake up to the fact that our experience is not the norm for others. It was simply meant to bring your attention to things you might have been "sleeping on" before. 

But the extreme MAGA right loves nothing more than to take something to its most absurd extreme and beat it into the ground until it becomes meaningless, a logical fallacy known as reductio ad absurdum. They've done it with cancel culture despite the fact that very few people have truly been canceled. They've done it with pronouns, introducing themselves at conventions with statements like, "My name is Ted Cruz, and my pronouns are kiss my ass." The left does this too, but not nearly to the same degree. When they accuse math textbooks of being woke, they really lose credibility, so it carries little weight with me that they criticize Juneteenth of being woke (although the irony is that Juneteenth very much falls under the original, positive meaning of woke because it would help us to remember the experience of marginalized people). 

"Independence Day is for everyone, so we don't need a 'Black Independence Day'."

Independence Day is for everyone. That's true. Now, anyway. 

But it is probably a lot easier to think of it that way if you don't have enslaved people in your family history. It might not be easy for those descendants of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings to celebrate a document in which he declares that it is self-evident that all men are created equal, given that their eighth great grandparents were enslaved at birth by their own father. (Yes, nine of his own children were also his slaves - a fact I have a hard time wrapping my brain around even though I know it to be true.)

I wrote about this in a different context several weeks ago, but I think we all need to exercise our imaginations a bit more. We make big assumptions that everyone experiences life exactly the same way that we do. Therefore, if we don't see the need for a separate holiday that expresses freedom for us that other must not have that need either. Take five minutes to think about it. What if it were, in fact, your ancestors that were kidnapped from their homelands, transported in deplorable conditions, sold to other humans, and treated as animals for multiple generations. You know as well as I do that you would be unlikely to think positively of the day celebrated as a day of freedom by those people who denied freedom to your family. You know you would; it's just uncomfortable to think about it for very long. 

I've heard similar arguments against "Lift Every Voice and Sing," the song some refer to as the black national anthem. Of course, people respond to that description the same way they do the holiday itself - unnecessary because we only have one national anthem. Maybe, if people didn't call it that, we might be able to see that song for what it is - a hymn of hope, of optimism during difficult times, a song that says we can have faith in the future because of how far we have come from the past. I'm linking to it here, so you can listen to it with that in mind.

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When Jesus was asked what the most important commandment was, he could have restricted himself to just the one about loving God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. But He didn't do that. He gave a second one to his followers - "Love your neighbor as yourself." This was no accident. And to really make the point, he answered the question, "Who is my neighbor?" with a story explicitly designed to be provocative. We now use the word Samaritan to mean "good guy," but that is not what that word meant to the first century Jew. The Lord was asking them to recognize the humanity of the very people in whom they were least likely to see it. 

This was radical then, and it is still what Jesus is calling us to do today. If you love God, you must also love those made in His image. Set aside nationalism, party affiliation, and prejudice; and just love your neighbor. Stop arguing why they shouldn't feel the way they feel, and just love your neighbor. Stop asking why they get a holiday and you don't. JUST LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR.

"You Too" - The Power of Automatization

When I work at the access desk at the Y, I frequently tell people to "have a good workout" or "enjoy your swim." 

The most common reply?  "You too."

I am clearly not going into the pool fully dressed during my shift, but we were all trained well in manners. As a result, this is not something we think about and make a choice to do; we just do it reflexively. People have answered the same way when I wished them a happy birthday. I once talked to a man whose wife was in state of low consciousness (not quite a coma). He said that she couldn't say his name or ask for water, but when someone gave her water, she said, "Thank you." It was just automatic.

And the reality is that much of what we do during the day is not borne out of conscious decision making. We rely on habit for everything from our morning caffeine hit to the route we drive home from work. Something might interfere with the norm that requires us to consciously make a change (failed alarm, crash slowing down our normal route), but for the most part, we operate on autopilot for much of our daily activity.

This is a design feature, not a bug.

For one thing, our brains don't like to think. It takes energy to think, so the brain conserves where it can by taking shortcuts. Rational decision making takes up space in our working memory. How does our brain free up that space? Yep, shortcuts. We have a variety of biases, heuristics, and habits to allow ourselves lower friction throughout the day. My favorite book on this subject is You are Not So Smart by David McRaney; if you want a deeper technical dive, try Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. 

Life would slow down considerably and undesirably if we didn't assume a chair would hold us up when we sat down or if we had to stop and really consider whether we would be able to make it all the way to the top of a flight of stairs. If I have to weight the pros and cons of brushing my teeth before I leave the house every day, I'm not going to have time to think about what shoe goes on which foot or whether I should lock the door behind me on the way out. Do you see what I mean? We can't possibly make all of these decisions that require conscious thought, or we would go insane.

So, what does that mean for your classroom? 

It means that automatization is powerful, and we can harness that power if we are crafty about it. If there is something you want students to do as they enter your classroom EVERY day, explicitly teach it and practice it until it becomes automatic. Don't do it once and hope they will remember. If you want them to respond to your cue for quiet, you have to require it every time until it is a reflex. You can't hope they will absorb it, or they will automatize something else. 

And that's important to remember. They will do SOMETHING automatically. They will. As I said earlier, our brains just can't help it. If you let them create their routine without guidance, your classroom will be a chaotic mess of 30 different habits (The kid who comes in and sets his books down and asks to leave for the bathroom does it every day because he's made it his routine. The kid who comes in and says, "So, what are we doing today?" hasn't made a decision to ask; it has just become his reflex a few weeks into the school year. If you want them to come in, get out their class supplies, and look at the board for the Bellwork "(Do Now" for my friends across the pond) every single day, then you must teach it, practice it, and hold them accountable to doing it every single day. Early on, it feels ridiculous to say, "Sorry guys, we didn't do that correctly, so we are going to do it again the right way." But, when the routine is something they do without thinking about it, you'll be glad you powered through those awkward moments. 

Liturgy and Phonics - But Won't They Be Bored?

Note: I know some of my readers are not religious. In the beginning, this is going to seem like it is a post about religion, but it isn't. I just sometimes have insights from different parts of my life that relate to education, and this is one of those times.

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I have attended a liturgical church for two and a half years. If you had asked me 10 years ago whether or not I would do that, I would say, "I appreciate ceremony and tradition, but I don't think I want to go where they say the same things every week. That seems like it would get dry and boring." Well, I would have been wrong.

As it turns out, repeating the same thing every week makes it so firmly planted in long term memory that I don't have to think about remembering the next line and can truly focus on the meaning of the text. And depending on what is happening in my life on any given week, some part of the text might be more salient than others on that day. "Give this day our daily bread" is likely to stand out during times of financial stress, but "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us" is likely to be more meaningful during a time of strained relationship. During the week of the Artemis II mission, "Creator of heave and earth, all that is - seen and unseen" jumped out of the creed in a different way, but in a different week, "He has spoken through the prophets" might take that spot.  

All of that is to say that what I thought might be boring before I experienced it was anything but once I was doing it on a regular basis.

Our brains crave two seemingly opposing things - novelty and familiarity. It's why we want new movies and tv shows, but we also seek out reruns, remakes, reboots, and sequels, particularly during stressful times.

When it comes to learning, we live in the tension of the new and the familiar as well. We can only learn new things in the context of their relationship to what we already know. And that's anything but boring. It is how the new knowledge attaches the old neural patterns, creating something psychology calls schema. 

"What does this have to do with phonics?" I hear you asking. I'm so glad you did. Before I address that, I do need to point out that I am not a reading teacher. I taught middle and high school students. But I have read a fair amount about the reading wars, have talked to elementary school teachers, and remember much about my own experience of learning to read. 

A big part of the push away from phonics and toward the whole language and 3-cueing models came about because adults thought kids would be bored by phonics. (They did the same thing, to everyone's detriment with math facts, but I'll leave that for another post.) 

This is not my memory at all. Phonics, like anything else, can be taught in a boring way. But it lends itself well to song and chants and hand motions and all the other ways we teach things to small children, none of which are boring. Phonics was tied to my existing schema with the "as in"chants you might remember (e.g. "A says aa-aa-aa as in apple. B says buh, buh, buh as in bell."). Those things help fulfill our craving for familiarity and allow the new knowledge to attach to something we know.

Chanting that would be boring to an adult because we are TOO familiar with it; we aren't attaching anything new, just repeating the old.  But to a child, this is the perfect blend of novelty and familiarity. 

It also opens the world of reading to them, which we have forgotten is magical. We have done it for so long that we see it only as a way of getting information, but for a child that is first learning to read, they now realize the world is bigger than they previously knew, and that could never be boring to them. It's been a while since I listened to the Sold a Story podcast, but there was a moment that stayed with me. I believe it is in the last episode, but I could be wrong about that. The daughter in the piece is finally able to decode words rather than faking herself out with cueing. The interviewer is talking to the dad, but you can hear the daughter in the background say, "WOW! This is amazing!" 

Now, I know from talking to elementary school teachers and from reading that there is more to reading that decoding. Of course there is. Because I am not a reading teacher, this post is not meant to address any of those things.  What I do know is that none of that stuff is possible if a child can't decode. 

My point is that an adult should not presume to know what a child will be bored by any more than I should have presumed that liturgy would be dry. Children aren't short adults; their minds work differently than ours do. It's important we remember that, or we will teach in ineffective ways without any good reason to do so.