June+2016

June 23rd, 2016.
So we just passed by the full moon in June. There was a bit of a buzz about the "Strawberry Moon" this time around since it also happened to land on the same day as the summer solstice. Apparently that hadn't happened since 1967 and won't happen again until 2062. The [|full moon/solstice coincidence] is a completely predictable phenomenon. Many coincidences are completely predictable, I suppose.

Coincidentally, I happened to learn a little bit about the [|Antikythera Mechanism] from a news story pointing out that smart people with good tools and a lot of patience had figured out a good portion of the writing on that old, old gear box. Fascinating thing, really. A 2000 year old set of gears that help to tell the stories of the moon and stars and the sun, all in relationship to the Earth. And sometimes the old math even worked out to predict other coincidences, like equinoxes, for example.

So, what does all this have to do with my life at Dakota Collegiate, finishing up classes, tending to exams, writing report cards and phoning the families of those who should re-visit this course before heading off to greater challenges? It is true, not all students are successful the first time through a course. In talking with a few community members recently they were not sure if anyone is ever held back anymore. Some school practices have disappeared, like teachers smoking in the staff room and [|strapping children] when they were defiant. But other practices remain, such as making children repeat coursework and interpreting their success as a number. Everybody knows that a 49 is bad and a 50 means you move on. Why do we still do this? I'm 48 years old now, so I suppose I've been thinking a bit about 48, 49, and 50. I hope those numbers have better meanings as I head into them over the next couple of years.

June filled up with a frenzy of academic activity here at Dakota; projects, essays, exams, presentations, and most of those things were translated into numbers, added to columns in computer software, and employed to tell a story about the ability of children to demonstrate what they know. Again, the Antikythera Mechanism and the way it tried to capture the movements of the solar system using mathematics and engineering jumps to mind. [|People have imagined machines with gears and sensors that would aid children in learning]. However, it seems that understanding the movement of the stars and the ways of the mind are beyond our machinery. Some of the work of [|Michio Kaku] jumps to mind here, but that's probably just a coincidence.

It seems to me that a classroom is a sort of machine, inside a larger machine called a school, inside a larger machine called a division or district, inside a larger machine called a state or province, inside a larger...well, you can take it from there. While some might cringe at the idea of a classroom as a machine, it certainly serves a mechanistic role, and the "product" of the classroom machine is a bunch of numbers. Children learn in a classroom, certainly they do, but that flame of understanding that is lit in the lamp of learning (another machine metaphor, by the way) is momentary, transient and fleeting. What's left at the end of June? The learning is gone, but the numbers remain.

So much of learning is coincidental, and a classroom serves an important purpose in that it draws together people who can then experience thousands of predictable and planned coincidences that will foster learning. All sorts of happy, chance coincidences occur as well, and it is the serendipity of classrooms that most people come to enjoy and remember. For example, you more likely remember the funny science experiment that went wrong more than the twelve experiments that worked perfectly fine. The novelty of those moments tends to live on in the mind.

If classrooms are only machines that spit out receipts with numbers about learning then schools are about as dead and impenetrable as the Antikythera Mechanism itself. The heavens didn't stop spinning when the Antikythera Mechanism sank to the bottom of the ocean, and learning won't stop when schools (as we know them) cease to exist. Every generation does it's best to understand the universe and share that knowledge with the youngest among us. Right now we do that with computers, classrooms, and exams. Maybe someday all of those mechanisms will seem antiquated and quaint. This reflection I'm writing isn't really a condemnation of our current practice so much as it is a condemntaion of enshrining that practice, or viewing it as immutable or unchanging. The only schools which become irrelevant and inaccurate are those that can't change. I think I'm in a school that keeps changing, keeps growing, even when that change is difficult to understand, to predict, or becomes uncomfortable.

So, here's to the class of 2062, celebrating the culmination of their formal education in whichever way seems most reasonable to them at the time. A few of them will think of us, I think.

After all, it will be the first full moon/solstice coincidence since 2016. Even the Antikythera Mechanism might have told them that.