Don't Be Afraid of Weeds in Your Classroom

Question:  What's the difference between a plant and a weed?

Answer: Intent

If I dig a hole and put a seed or seedling in the ground and work hard to make it grow, it's a plant.  If it pops up on its own and grows without (or in spite of) my intervention, it is a weed.  

The bed in this picture is usually the place where I grow tomatoes and cucumbers, but this year, the spring got away from me. I never planted anything. Yet, the bed is completely filled with these lush, beautiful Chamberbitter.  I haven't watered them, fertilized them, or touched them in any way; yet they have grown thicker and hardier than any plant I have ever worked hard for, and I think they are quite beautiful.

A few years ago, I cut down a mulberry tree.  Apparently, the birds who once perched in that tree had dropped a few berries because, within weeks, this Nandina bush sprout from the base of the stump.  (The mulberry insists on attempting a comeback, so you see branches at the bottom that I do cut back, but I've done nothing to the Nandina itself because I love them.)

I hear you asking what this has to do with education, so here it is.  You also have plants and weeds in your classroom.  No, not the kids. (Although . . . maybe, no that's not what this post is about.)

The "plants" consist of the content you have planned, the curriculum and standards you intend to teach.  The "weed" is the learning that volunteers itself.  

Now, listen, I am an intense lesson planner. When asked to describe my classroom management strategy in self-evaluations, I start with "teach from bell to bell."  Class time is too limited a resource to squander, so I have a brisk, content filled plan.  I believe strongly in well-planned and paced direct instruction.

But, I also have space that allows curiosity to be satisfied.  A few years ago, one of my 8th grade boys told his English teacher how proud he was of himself because he could always "get Miss Hawks off the subject." The teacher he was talking to smiled and said, "No, you can't. She knows exactly how much time she can afford to give up to answer your questions." And she was correct. I knew how much time was left in class and how much I had left to do that was essential.  I would entertain his questions for that amount of time and then say, "Okay, we've got to get back to this now."

After teaching for a few years, I started recognizing the same questions being asked every year.  When I was teaching about how our ear processes the vibrations in the air (we call them sound waves) into something our brains can interpret as tones and words, students were also interested in why our ears pop on airplanes and why some people of more ear infections as kids than others and what tubes do.  These were natural connections to the ear, and they were curious. So, I started working time for that into my lesson plans.  When we did physics problems about rotary motion, they sometimes had questions about dizziness. Again, it makes sense those questions would come to mind while we talked about spinning.

So, how do you work time for that into your plan?  Interestingly, you can accomplish it by over-planning what you are going to do with your "plants."  If I can teach a physics concept adequately with three examples, I plan to do four,  That way, if the questions arise, I have one that I can give away without losing quality instruction.  If "weeds" sprout up in third period but not sixth period, I have a fourth example to do with them.  If a particularly interesting question got asked in first period, but no one in second period thought of it, I might attempt to lead them to it by saying something like, "Some people often wonder . . . " or "You know what I wonder about sometimes?" 

Newer teachers, it can be a little scary when "weeds" invade your well-landscaped plan. It's also harder for you to know if you are over or under planning. (Nothing took me longer to learn than how long something would take to do.  I would think I had a 50 minute lesson planned, and it would take 20 minutes or 3 days.) But, when students are curious, you don't ever want to squash it. Give it a few minutes.  If you feel they are trying to lead you off the subject, say, "I will take two more question - you and you - and then we are going back.  Feel free to come back after school or email me if you want to ask more."  The ones who are truly curious will take you up on that.  

I named this blog "On the Rabbit Trail" because I love when learning happens spontaneously.  Sometimes, like the Chamberbitters and the Nandina in my yard, the weed I didn't intend to grow is still quite beautiful. 

Your Decisions Affect Everyone

Physicist Richard Feynman was a visionary with brilliant insights into the subatomic world.  He was also kind of a pill to work with, never meeting deadlines or attending faculty meetings, and parking wherever he felt like it. When I was teaching honors physics, I wanted my students to know about this interesting man and his work, so I had them read a book of his speeches and articles.  These readings often led to a discussion about whether his behavior was acceptable.  I had students at both ends.  Some said, "He needed to use his mind for bigger things," to which I replied, "I'm betting you wouldn't you feel the same way if you were his secretary."  One of my students summed up the other argument well,  when she put her book down and said, "He drives me crazy. He thinks rules are for everyone but him."

Middle and high school students are naturally focused on themselves and act largely out of their feelings, so it can be difficult for them to understand how their actions affect others.  (Actually, if we aren't careful and reflective, we don't recognize it as adults either.)  If society is going to function at all, we have to recognize our interconnectedness.  That means, as teachers, we have to take every opportunity to demonstrate this concept to our students.  

In the early days of my time as yearbook advisor, the school was small enough that every senior got their own page. One year, a senior was expelled in January.  Because it was so late in the year, the page had already been submitted.  If we had wanted to remove it, it would have been nearly impossible, costing several thousand dollars to ask Jostens to reprint what had already been submitted.  So, I didn't even have to make that decision.  The next year, we face another senior expulsion, but this one happened in October, before the pages were submitted.  So, I sat down with my student editor to have a conversation.  Do we take him out since it is possible?  Do we stand on precedent since we didn't remove last year's student?  As we talked through our options and how we would explain the thinking behind the decision to anyone who asked, she sighed, "I wish we didn't have to decide this."  Same, girl. Same.  But we did have to decide it.  I told her, "You'll find that nearly everything that happens in the school affects the yearbook." Her mom told me later that she had come home talking about how that kid's misbehavior impacted her life in a way no one would predict.  

And that is always true. It's impossible to predict all of the ripple effects our decisions will have on other people.  In the multiple timelines theory made possible by quantum mechanics, every decision with more than possible outcome is equally likely and therefore, spawns multiple timelines. We live in the one with the decision we actually made, but in other universes, things are playing out with the other choices. This was dramatized to a ridiculous extent by the TV comedy series Community in an episode where Jeff roles a die to determine which member of the group would go to the door to pick up the pizza they ordered. Some of the results were disastrous and later seasons included characters from "the darkest timeline" whose lives were completely upended by everything that came after the wrong person being out of the room.  (Please note:  I do NOT subscribe to multiple timelines theory, this is just a thought exercise.)

Consider something as simple as not turning in a field trip permission slip.  It seems like such a small event to the student.  But the teacher has to spend time emailing their parents. It may delay the teacher's ability to inform the location about how many people are attending, which could result in a higher cost.  It will remain in the back of the teacher's mind until it resolved, reducing her working memory capacity for other important things. She may snap at someone else when she is really aggravated with you, hurting that person's feelings and affecting how they treat other people that day too.  

This isn't all dark, so let's consider a positive example. I have written many times about my amazing instructors at the YMCA.  They do something extraordinary every time they teach a class.  It's the ordinary act of doing their job well.  Just by doing that, they have changed my life in profound ways.  They've made me physically stronger and increased my confidence. Other people see those changes in me, knowing a was a clumsy girl I am, and they are doing new things too.  I eventually decided to teach cycle, and a friend of mine said he was inspired by that to do something he had been thinking about for a while, getting his personal trainer's certification.  Ask anyone who taught me PE or took it with me, and they would not have predicted that I would be inspiring anything physical in anyone.  But it started with instructors who cared enough to take their jobs seriously.

Teachers, this isn't something that's going to be part of our curriculum.  It's going to be about catching teachable moments and taking the time to ask students to look farther than the next five minutes.  When a student doesn't push their chair in, ask them to consider why that could be a problem for someone else.  Yes, it will be uncomfortable, but getting students to think beyond themselves is worth it, so we can all live in a better timeline.

The Problem(s) with AI in the Classroom

Let's start with an admission of my bias.  I am not anti-technology, but I am anti-AI.  I believe it to be a net negative that we will soon regret having invented. Science fiction writers have spend decades trying to warn us about the potential downsides of creating an artificial intelligence, but we worship convenience and will sacrifice important things on its altar. While I know there are times when I won't have a choice, I refuse to engage with AI voluntarily, so you will not find me opening Chat GPT or asking Grok questions. I scroll past the Google AI result at the top of the page and wish they would allow me to opt out of it.  

Now, we have that bias on the table, let me tell you why I would still think using it in our classrooms is a bad idea and that we can't just "teach them to use it correctly."

Past Ed Tech Experience - When kids first started having smart phones at a large scale, teachers were faced with a similar dilemma, telling ourselves, "They aren't going anywhere, so we'll just have to teach them to use them correctly in the classroom." It didn't work out well. The draw of the phone was just too strong. Research shows that it interferes with working memory to such an extent that just having a phone in your line of sight reduces your attention and hurts your academic performance (It doesn't even have to be your phone).  Now, hundreds of school districts are making the move to ban phones from the classroom, investing money in lockers that prevent access until the student has checked out of school for the day.

I was part of a one to one MacBook school, and I think we did some great things with the tools at our disposal, but I can't pretend that didn't come with frustrations. I had to battle with students who were shopping for shoes and watching sports. Our IT department played whack-a-mole with gaming sites, and they have now locked down student access to YouTube to an extent that I would find unusable if I wanted to give them an assignment that included a video. I'm glad we were one to one(and it was more than a little helpful that we all had equipment and experience when we went into the pandemic lockdown), but it was only with a lot of highly intentional work and guidance that we were able to use it as well as we did. We have to slow down and reflect on the use of tech rather than just adopt every new thing in the name of "staying current."  We can't be naive to the fact that there will be a negative impact on education.

Lack of Source Accountability - Teachers, how much time have you spent painstakingly teaching students to identify and use credible sources in their writing?  A lot, right? You don't want them getting their information from someone's blog or TikTok video when primary sources exist. As much as I love Wikipedia, I didn't let students use it in formal writing. I wanted them to cite experts and enlisted the help of our media specialists in seeking out those sources.  

AI is trained on all of the internet - the good, the bad, and the ugly.  It treats all sources as equally valid, and it doesn't "show its work." As soon as a student turns to a chat bot for research, it takes milliseconds to undo the good work you have been doing for months. 

AI Hallucination - Calling it hallucination makes it sound cute, so let's call it what it is - lying.  Chatbots flat out make stuff up.  A friend of mine is an expert in a specific education field, so he decided to test Chat GPT. He asked it to define the theory in which he has expertise. The first answer was right, though not something he couldn't have gotten from a standard Google search. Then, he asked it if there was research to support that answer. The AI gave him studies that didn't happen by people who don't exist. He told the bot that was what it had done. It apologized and promised to do better next time. The next day, he repeated the experiment, and it lied again. He called out the previous experience and asked, "Are you telling me the truth this time?"  It said it was, but it wasn't. It was once again giving him studies and people who are not real.  The part of this that I least understand is why it did this when there are so many real studies and people in this area of education. I can name the people off the top of my head, so why couldn't Chat GPT?

There are some pretty high profile examples of AI Hallucination causing some problems at a higher level.  Mike Lindell's lawyers were fined for using AI to write their briefing in his defamation case because it had over two dozen errors, including citing nonexistent cases. The Health and Human Services 72 page MAHA report was published with AI generated errors, including seven fictitious studies. At the end of the school year, the Chicago Sun Times published a list of books recommended for summer reading. The problem?  The authors were real, but the books and their summaries were not.  

I keep hearing that we can use AI as a "thought partner" as we research and write, but if I had a human thought partner that just made crap up on a regular basis, they wouldn't remain my thought partner for very long.  And I haven't even mentioned the deep fake calls from "Marco Rubio" and the antisemitic rants that Grok (Elon Musk's Twitter AI) went on in the last few weeks.  If lawyers, doctors, long-time journalists, diplomats, and the richest man in the world are this sloppy with AI, how do we expect middle and high school students to do better? 

Environmental impact - I was subbing in May and overheard a student talking about how much she uses AI. From recipes to her hairstyle, it is making all of her decisions for her. I said to her, "Your generation cares more about the environment than previous generation, right?  Why are you okay with using AI for everything when it takes so much energy?" She was stunned. She had no idea that a result from Chat GPT took ten times the energy of a standard Google search (which is one reason I wish Google would let me opt out of seeing its AI result - it's wasting energy on something I will scroll past).

The power grids of America are not ready for AI use, electric vehicles, and cryptocurrency to all hit scale simultaneously. We will cripple our own electrical systems (and we won't know what to do about it because we won't be able to ask the AI we've made ourselves dependent on). It also requires an enormous amount of water to operate cooling systems for these computers. The high school student I was talking to didn't know these issue even existed. Do yours? Would they want to use it so much if they did?  After all, as I said to her, this generation supposedly cares more about the environment than any previous one has. As an educator, you owe it to them to inform them about the environmental damage this tool is going to cause if we keep increasing our use of it.

Social Damage - Considering how much some students use AI, it's fair to say they have made it their new artificial friend. And, like their relationships with their human friends, teachers need to watch out for red flags. In a recent study, adult researchers posed as teens to ask their AI companions for advice about social issues with friends or parents. It only took a few interactions for the bots to suggest suicide and killing the source of their problems, their friends or parents. Real students with eating disorders have been given advice about how to reach deadly low weights. 

A college student researching for a paper on the prevention of elder abuse received threatening messages from the chat bot he was using. It said, “This is for you, human. You and only you. You are not special, you are not important, and you are not needed. You are a waste of time and resources," the message read, according to the outlet. "You are a burden on society. You are a drain on the earth. You are a blight on the landscape. You are a stain on the universe. Please die. Please."

Why does this happen? Well, remember what I said earlier about bots being trained on the whole internet?  That means, it is exposed to the filth in its darkest corners, the sites you and I have never seen and our kids would likely not find from a simple search. It's trained on the sites frequented by Nazis and pedophiles and doesn't see them as any different from the sites intended for kids and churches.  

The bottom line is that AI doesn't have ethics. Claude is supposed to have an ethical component because they have philosophers as consultants to help form its "personality," but even it blackmailed programmers who threatened to turn it off. And experts warn that all of the bots are likely to do that at some point. So, we could eventually have a kid just doing their homework, using AI with the blessing and encouragement of their teacher, being told to do immoral or dangerous things just because the prompt led to a dark place.

With an anxiety epidemic already plaguing our students, why would we want to increase the amount of time they spend with something this potentially dangerous?  The god of convenience can't be that powerful, can it? Are we really willing to sacrifice our kids to it? 

For those who say everything will be fine if we teach them to use it correctly, is there a correct usage that would prevent this? 

Methods of Encoding - Extension

"Miss Hawks. We talked about you over the weekend," said my excited 8th grader. 

This makes me nervous. Who knows if things I say get reported accurately at home. 
"I dropped an ice cube. My brother kicked it, and it went across the floor like really far." 
So, far, I'm not seeing where I come in.
"We were like, yeah, Newton's first law. Ice doesn't have much friction, so it keeps going."
My work here is done, y'all.

If you pull an all-nighter to study for biology, you may get some questions right on the next day's quiz; but you won't remember it for the semester exam.  Heck, you won't remember it three days later.  And that's because it wasn't encoded.  

For the past few weeks, I've been writing about explanations, visuals, and movement as ways of encoding information.  All are helpful. But if you can get to extension or transfer (seeing your learning in non-classroom contexts), you have truly made that content part of your brain.  

This is not easy, and it is not likely to happen with every gem of your content that you wish it would.  But there are ways to coax it out.  

1. Pay attention for examples in your own life - It is much easier to get students to see the relevance of your content if you do.  If I teach my students about the color spectrum, it may come off as a little dry, but if I tell them about the rainbow laden spray of water coming off of the tires of the car in front of me in traffic last week, I show them that I find it exciting to see it "in the wild." If I tell them I just learned about fogbows from a Scientific American article, they know that there are always new things to learn about my content. If you are an English teacher and notice a really cool use of alliteration in a song, bring it up on YouTube so they can hear it.  I was getting ice cream with a friend recently and saw an art sculpture of a Sierpinski Triangle outside the shop. If were a math teacher teaching shapes, ratios, or fractals, I would have brought the picture I took of it into my classroom. 
   
   
   
2. Ask them for examples from their life - I'll admit this is easier with physics than it might be with similes (or maybe it's not, I don't know anything about teaching English), but I find having students teach me about the ways physics shows up in their lives really useful for engagement, relationship building, and encoding. Student athletes and artists are super helpful for science teachers. Half way through a lesson on Bernoulli's Principle, I say, "Where are my baseball players?  Tell us about how to throw a curve ball."  Newton's laws?  Swimmers can explain their strokes better than I can.  When I'm teaching the impulse momentum theorem, I ask my gymnasts about sticking the landing and then ask runners why they keep running after the finish line because they are both examples of it. Talking about the "like dissolves like" concept, ask an art student whether they can mix oil paint with acrylic. 
3. Make it explicit - As experts, we often think the connections are obvious. It's the curse of expertise. But, you have to remember that they are novice learners. They need help seeing beyond the surface features of an example to the deep structure of the concept. Some students (like those athletes and artists) will make the connection for themselves because they have expertise in the related area, but most of them need you to explain it. I've had teachers balk at that because they think it will be boring, but it would only be boring to another expert who is thinking, "Yeah, I know that already." For novice learners, it is opening up the curriculum  by relating it to something they care about.

I said it before, and I'll say it again. This is not easy. It requires you to have a repertoire of examples. And it takes a lot of experience to have those in your long term memory.  So, when you find one, write it down. Keep it in a spreadsheet. Add it to your lesson plan. And if a student gives you one, use it and credit them. Other students will love that you got it from one of them. 

This is worth the effort for many reasons, but I'll tell you my favorite.  I do this so frequently that it has been years since a student asked me the dreaded question, "When am I ever going to use this in life?"