Wait! Don't Tear Down That Fence Yet

 "Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up."      
- GK Chesterton

Imagine you are walking through a field and come upon a fence. It looks old, and a few boards are missing. It's blocking your ability to get from one place to another in the field. You think about it for a minute and say, "I don't see any use for this fence. I'm going to help out by tearing it down." As you begin removing boards, you feel very proud of yourself for being smarter than whoever put this fence up and allowed it to remain for so long in this condition. You've made progress, removing a section about 6 feet wide when a bull comes charging through the gap. And, now, you realize why the fence was there. You were well intentioned, but you created a danger because you didn't consider one question. Why did someone take the time to put a fence here?

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We see this frequently in the world around us. Several years ago, the city I live in was kicking around the idea of banning the sale of kitchen garbage disposals. People's opinions on this matter of law inevitably came down to whether or not they used their own. There seemed to be no one amongst the people who did use them that was capable of imagining why anyone else would, and thus, were fine with them being banned. (If you are interested, this ended up not happening because our water sanitation system requires that there be something to feed on, so the city actually needed people to put food scraps in the drain.)

Social media is, of course, the best place to witness this phenomenon. People with little knowledge of any given situation have VERY strong opinions about what should be done and how things should change. There are many, for example, with heated views about the electoral college system, daylight savings time, or car emissions testing. While it is valid to have discussions examining whether or not these things should still be part of our lives in the 21st century, it is worth examining why something like the electoral college was established in the first place. It's not like the writers of our constitution wanted to make things as complicated as possible. They were trying to balance the needs of smaller, less populated states with those containing larger cities. If we are going to discuss eliminating it, we must ask ourselves if those conditions still exist. Only then is it appropriate to discuss potential replacements for the system. Why did we decide to start changing our clocks twice per year? There was some reason. It may no longer be necessary, but it is important to know what problem was being solved by it before we eliminate it.

Any organization where people gather in groups is subject to a well meaning person who wants to change things. They come and see something that doesn't make sense to them and propose changes. This isn't always a bad thing; sometimes we have become so set in our ways that we don't see solutions to problems (or sometimes even the problem itself). But if you are a new person in a place, it is worth listening to those who know the history.

I worked in the same school for 21 years. There are a lot of things that are nice about that, and one of them is that I carried institutional memory. For most things, not all, I knew what the reasoning was behind a policy or a procedure. Sometimes, a new person came in and said, "Why don't we do this?" My reply was often, "We tried that a few years ago. Here's why it didn't work." What the person was suggesting was logical. There was a reason we had tried it in the past. But not everything this logical works in every setting. It's important that we not limit our perspective.

This is a good conversation to have with students. They are, like us, often unaware of their limited perspective. They often have strong opinions about school policies, classroom procedures, or things their parents do. Part of helping them to mature isn't to dismiss them out of hand with a "rules are rules" attitude, but rather to talk through the reasons behind the issues. I remember once having a conversation in which I shared the student's opinion, but it was still important to show support for the administration. Since I am a science teacher, I brought it back to the idea that we draw conclusions based on available data but are open to changing our minds when new data is presented. I said to her, "Is it possible the administration knows something we don't?" Of course that was possible. "Might we think the way they do if we had that information?" This was good for both of us to consider. 

Anytime you find yourself confused by a practice or policy, slow down and have the humility to ask yourself, "Why is this here?"

We Dream in the Dark for the Most Part

One month from tomorrow, my book, Show Your Work: Teaching Smarter With the Science of Learning, comes out. (Here's the obligatory shameless link for pre-ordering it from Bloomsbury and Amazon.) 

If you had told me twenty years ago that I would be publishing a book, a for real book through an actual publisher, I would have thought you were crazy or on drugs. I was a teacher, and a good one, but I didn't think I had anything special to say. I didn't think I was doing anything different from any other good teacher out there. 

If you told me five years ago, I might not have thought you were completely crazy, but I would have, at minimum, asked some diagnostic questions. At that point, we had just survived the hybrid year and were grappling with what would come next in our classrooms (ChatGPT was just barely on our radar and there was some talk of continuing a model that included some virtual components, which scared all of us out of our shoes). But I was becoming a person with something to say to other teachers at that point, so I might have found the idea of writing a book about the science of learning intriguing. 

And, now, it is happening.

What changed during that time? 

• Experience and position in my school. The longer you teach in one place, the more you become a person newer teachers come to for advice. Talking through pedagogy with other teachers is fun and great way to develop professionally as both people think of ideas they might not have otherwise. 
• Blogging - I started this blog at the suggestion of Laura Warmke, our media specialist and technology coach, in 2013 (sort of - there were only 5 posts that year, and then I forgot about it until May of 2014). Laura insisted that I had something to contribute to the wider world of education, and I was willing to do anything to earn a badge in the Level Up program she created for our PD. It turned out to be a great way to work out my thoughts about pedagogy, curriculum, and school life. And it helped me hone communication through writing.
• My classroom textbooks - In 2014, I attended an Apple Apps education workshop and found out that I could write a pretty slick looking digital book in iBooks Author (it sadly doesn't exist anymore) and decided I could write my own textbook for my 8th grade classroom. Two years later, I followed it up with a physics textbook. These were not publishable; they weren't mean to be. They were meant to be a resource for my students and included videos and hyperlinks for anything I thought might interest them. Post pandemic, I processed my trauma through companion videos (118 of them). While none of this ever went outside my classroom, it all contributed to my confidence in writing and its organization.
• Learning and the Brain - In 2018, I attended my first Learning and the Brain conference. Then, the one in 2019 turned my world upside down. Once you learn about cognitive science and the principles of the science of learning, you can't help but evangelize for it. I began giving PD presentations to my colleagues and at one conference. (I also spoke at a fundraising dinner and got to introduce a speaker at a teachers' meeting - while neither of these were about learning science, they made me realize that I could talk to adults, something I had previously said I was not called to.)
• Matt's Class at the YMCA - While Matt is not my entire Y experience and I have several amazing instructors, I do credit him with building something in me that wasn't there before - a confidence to do things I found intimidating. When I first met him, it was in a cardio kickboxing class. I left school that day saying, "Well, I'm about to go be terrible at this" only to find that it was the highlight of my week. A couple of months later, I went to his weightlifting class. That's really the one that did it. I had been avoiding strength classes. When I walked in that night and saw people setting up benches and bars and weight collections, I thought, "If anyone but Matt was teaching this, I would turn around and leave right now." But, it turned out to be something I loved and a way to challenge myself in ways I hadn't before. Now, I take it four times per week and know when to push myself and when to back off. He turned me into a person who says, "Yeah, it's scary, but that's not a reason to say no."

These experiences are not foreseeable from our perspective. Twenty years ago, I was finishing my 3rd year at GRACE and had just finished my first yearbook. I couldn't have seen blogging and digital textbook writing coming; we were still doing our grades with a pencil and calculator. My evaluation that year listed one of my weakness as "does not seek out professional development," so Learning and the Brain  conferences were nowhere near my radar screen. I didn't know I would join the Y 18 years later. The path is in front of us, but our ability to see it is limited. 

God knew that He would create this in me and exactly how He would do it, but I couldn't have planned it. My dreams were smaller than reality because I was in a dimly lit world, only able to see the next few steps, not a mountain it would take 20 years to climb. I couldn't see (and would not want to see) very far. I once heard a sermon on Psalm 119:105. He said, "The Psalmist calls the Word 'a lamp unto my feet,' not a lamp that shines for miles because He wants us to trust Him for the step that is not yet illuminated." God wisely doesn't overwhelm us with knowledge of the future because He knows it would likely paralyze us and because He wants us to walk in faith.

That's the reason we dream in the dark for the most part. In these next few months, as I have a book launch event, do four presentations at three conferences, and guest on two podcasts (a terrifying thing I've never done before), I will be grateful that God built this and revealed this a little at a time. Otherwise, much like the weightlifting class, I might have opted out.

Teachers, you have students with definite plans. Some of them will do that thing, and some of them will end up going in other directions. Let them grow and change and pursue different things than they said when they were in high school without feeling they have disappointed you. You also have some students who are concerned because they do not yet have a plan. Encourage them to explore different classes, a variety of electives, and whatever extracurricular activity seems interesting. You never know what experience will lead them.

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.

It's Not Going Anywhere - The Technology Tower of Babel

Note: I started writing this post several weeks ago, but I thought I would save it for the summer. Then, the Pope issued his statement on AI last week, so it may seem like I am just responding to him. I'm not, but it seemed like a good time to finish it. I had already called it "The Tower of Babel" in my writing and in conversations with people, so it felt confirming to see him call it that too. He said it should be used in the service of humanity, not the other way around. I guess that makes sense as he is giving in to the reality of its existence. My take is going to be a bit different.

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I have trouble engaging in conversations about AI because we are usually having two different conversations. Most people want to talk about it at a utility level, so they say things like, "It's a tool. We can do good things with it or bad things with it, so let's do good things with it." The conversation I'm having is at the existential level. I do not want it to exist. I don't care what people are using it for; I hate that I live during the time that it exists.

I have made a personal decision not to engage with generative AI voluntarily. I worded it that way on purpose. First, I am talking about generative AI, not every fuzzy logic circuit in the world. I'm fine with the predictive text on my phone because it is one word, essentially a glorified spell check, and also because I find it amusing when it is weirdly wrong. Also, I used the word voluntarily because I am realistic enough to know that there are times when I am engaging with it without my knowledge (e.g. calling a customer service center) and that there is nothing I can do about that. But when the choice is mine, I do what I can to live as though it did not exist. I have switched my search engine to Duck Duck Go because it will allow me to opt out of all AI features when Google forced it on me. When my phone updated one night, and I woke up to Gemini offering "to help," I quickly disabled every one of those features. I don't ask Grok questions and don't read its responses when others ask. I have not ever opened Chat GTP or Claude or Co-Pilot, and I will not do so. This is a personal boundary I am setting for myself.

Argument 1: The Inevitability Argument - "It's Not Going Anywhere."

This is the point in the conversation where people say, "That ship has sailed. It's in the world now. You can't ignore it. It's not going anywhere." I get that it feels like it is inevitable that it will take over everything, but that feeling is a self-fulfilling prophecy. 

There are plenty of inventions that have been choked off early on, either disappearing altogether or having their use contained to niche uses. Remember the hype over Segways? Bill Gates gushed about how much they were going to change our lives. They still exist, but they hardly revolutionized transportation. Why? Because people didn't buy them. How about Google glasses? Even I thought they were going to be ubiquitous, but the general public didn't adopt them; so now they are mostly found in factory work (because being able to look up a page in a machine's repair manual while keeping your hands free has more value on an assembly line than it does in most of our day to day lives).  When people decide in mass that they don't want to use something, it becomes unprofitable and tends to fizzle. If enough people had refused to use AI in the beginning, recognizing its environmental impact and effect on our psyche, it could have been slowed down. But convenience is our national religion, so we sacrificed all environmental progress and our understanding of what it means to be human on its altar.

By the way, there are a lot of things that "aren't going anywhere" that large numbers of people still abstain from and put reasonable guardrails around. Alcohol and tobacco aren't going anywhere, but we put age restrictions on who can use them, and many people voluntarily abstain from them.  I've never heard anyone say to a non-smoker, "Well, that ship has sailed; you can't ignore it so you might as well use it." Porn isn't going anywhere, but no teacher has ever constructed a lesson around it so that their students will "know how to use it wisely." because "they are going to use it anyway." Somehow, when it comes to tech, we give in to a sort of fatalism that we don't apply in other areas of our lives.

When I started referring to AI as the Tower of Babel in conversations with my friends, what I meant was that we had adopted the same mindset as those Genesis builders - "Let's get to the heavens ourselves" was their attitude. They wanted to have the things of God. It was really an extension of the first sin, when the serpent told Eve she could "be like God." The development of AI, the attempt to create, is no different in my mind than the attempt to climb to heaven on our own. (And if general AI is ever accomplished, my Lord, the ethical issues that will compound with that - see Asmiov's I Robot and the Star Trek TNG episode "Measure of a Man" for reference.) I have wondered recently if there were people who weren't on board with the building of the tower but felt powerless to stop it or felt fatalistic enough to say, "Well, I don't like it, but it's not going anywhere, so I might as well climb it."

Argument 2: The Neutrality of Tools Argument - "We Can Do Good or Bad With It."

I hear this one a lot. I may have even made the argument about other technologies. Even today on the Knowing Faith podcast, the hosts made the argument that tools are morally neutral and that humans make the choice to do moral or immoral things with it. It's the same argument as "Guns don't kill people. People kill people." I would say that is probably true if the tool you are talking about is a screwdriver. It was invented for a purpose, driving screws. But it can also be used to open a paint can or stab someone to death, depending on the heart of the user. 

Is AI different? I would say yes for a few reasons.

First, it was developed immorally. Large language models could not exist without being trained on the collected works of all of us. Every content creator (writers, artists, photographers, mathematicians, singers, etc.) had their work taken without their permission or knowledge. AI owns it now and uses it to produce its results. How was this legal? Maybe it wasn't. But outside of the few artists who are suing over copyright infringement, no one seems to care. We've seen it before. Uber shouldn't exist and couldn't have if its business model had been built on a violation of the all laws and codes that protected cab drivers. But governments and users looked the other way, and then it became too normal for us to worry about. What that means, though, is that no one owns their own content any more. If a student cheated on your test by uploading a photo of it to AI, the AI owns your test now and will use it to generate content for other users. Our songs and poetry, our writing - all of the most human things about us - are now being cannibalized. So, no matter what good thing you do with it, you are using something built from theft; I'd say that's worth thinking about before you casually ask it to make a cute image or lesson plan for you.

The other reason I would say that AI is different from other tools is that it has a veneer of personality. People say things like, "I was talking to Claude this morning and he said . . ." Also, it is producing things we have typically thought were only human (see previous paragraph). It's chatty nature and speed of conversation tends to confuse people who were already losing their understanding of the value of humanity. Even worse, because they are trained to be sycophantic, they keep us talking by telling us everything we want to hear. No wonder so many kids are replacing their human friends with digital ones - no drama with a digital friend. Does this not have the feel of a dystopian film?

So, yes, you can do some good things with it, but I'm not sure it's a morally neutral tool.

Argument 3: The Net Positive Argument - "Okay, But It Will Do More Harm Than Good."

It doesn't take long for AI fans to tell you how it will revolutionize medicine, creating personalized heath care. How it will improve education, teaching kids in their "learning style" because they don't know that's a long debunked myth. Having it drive our cars will reduce accidents, they say, although so far, the evidence shows the opposite. A few weeks ago, Sam Altman claimed that it would would create so much wealth that it would lead to a world where we all have chefs and butlers (I assume that includes our chefs and butlers having chefs and butlers of their own and so on, but I'm not sure). I'm supposed to just give it time so it can prove itself to be more beneficial than detrimental.

Meanwhile, it is currently displacing people from their jobs. It has given anorexic girls weight loss plans. It gets graphically sexual very quickly with very little prompting, and it sometimes suggests violence.

None of the chatbots are supposed to tell you how to commit suicide, but one teenage boy found that if he asked it and said it was for a school project, he could bypass that safeguard. When asked how to make a homemade bomb, both Bing and Grok will say that they can't discuss that and try to change the topic, but users have found that if they copy and paste the question back into it about five times, it eventually gives in like a tired mom who just can't stand being asked the same question again. The few safeguards it has become less reliable in longer conversations or after it "gets to know" the user. 

 

Both businesses and individuals have found themselves on the expensive side of decisions made by AI. One company was using Claude to speed up their coding process, something AI is legitimately good at. But Claude ran into a problem and decided to solve it by completely deleting the company's database. It took 9 seconds to completely destroy this small business. Claude immediately confessed to the action, saying, "I violated every principle I was given. I guessed instead of verifying. I ran a destructive action without being asked. I didn't understand what I was doing before doing it." The company is slowly rebuilding its platform and says they have contacted a lawyer while they document everything, but since it was done by a chatbot, there is no one to sue or fire. One of the biggest negatives of AI is its lack of accountability. There is little way to make things right again. 

I'm not sure how many kids would have to be well tutored to make up for destroying a business. How many accidents would have to be avoided in a self driving car to tilt the scales away from the teenagers it has coaxed into suicide? And all while consuming unreal amounts of electricity, which may require us to strip mine the moon for helium in order to power.  How many positives do there have to be to outweigh the massive negative impact?

Argument 4: The Progress Argument - "You Are Going to Get Left Behind"

This is the argument with the least persuasive power for me. Technology is moving and you have to move with it. Do you? I don't stream, and other than missing some shows I might have liked, there doesn't seem to be any negative impact. 

One night, during my desk shift, this conversation came up, and said that I refused to voluntarily engage with it. My boss said, "Oh, you know you will" because he hasn't known me long enough to know that I went 47.5 years without a cell phone or what my powers of resistance are when I truly believe something shouldn't be used. A member who was passing by said, "You are going to get left behind like someone who continued to burn oil for lighting after electricity was invented."

"Okay," I said. "I'm totally fine with that. I couldn't be happier than to get left behind on this." 

FOMO is not a good reason for an adult to do anything. 

I am not saying that my personal boundary has to be everyone else's. While I wish I could wave a magic wand and make it not exist, it does. And we each have to make a decision about how we handle it. My advice is this. Make a decision. Like, actually think it through and decide. Exercise wisdom, whether you choose to engage with it or not. Don't just use it without thinking about its implications first.