Recycling the Gift -- Full Transcript (part 1)

John F. Kennedy: Our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet, we all breathe the same air, and we are all mortal.

Emily Mather: We are kind of just taught to push our will onto other people and like we are right and therefore we have the authority to do this but there's not really any communication or compromise that goes on in that.

Carmen Johnston: We are already teaching our kids values, just by the structure of these institutions.

Emily Mather: It's so competitive you kind of lose the enjoyment of just learning.

Carmen Johnston: That setting up—again--a culture of competition rather than a culture of appreciation. That I think would help build community on this campus--on any campus.

(1:38) Narration: A symphony once played for us when there was innocence, and I swear the world was made to be our playground. Leaves flickered, columns rose, eyes watched. Ancient brilliance showed itself in the softest of ways. But what happens when we severe all unions from the nature the birthed us? Will we survive?

And is it possible that the orthodox institution of school suffers the systemic problem of being in direct contradiction to the systems of life—so severe that it’s endangering most living species within our planet? Once this proposition might have been considered unthinkable. However, it is this scenario we must now consider in order to change the all too passive culture that has led to an ecological tragedy.

Emily Mather: School’s kind of like in support of a capitalist society where everyone is on their own.

Eric Heltzel: It's about how well you can play the game of school.

Alex Neikirk:  I think school’s kind of like a joke in a sense that it says: can you jump through all these hoops, that would make you a professional person in today society?  Because once you do that, you get this piece of paper that says you are ready to enter the world.

Bobby John: I didn't really feel embraced by the whole community.

J. Doe: I think it's more of the community college feeling, it doesn't feel like an encouraging environment, everyone is in their own business.

Jeff Duncan-Andrade: The sickness in this society comes from a fundamental lack of connection and knowledge of self.

Emily Mather: We don't collaborate and we don't work together and it’s very cutthroat. And it doesn't necessarily benefit you to help each other and to help each other do better.

Jamie deWolf: The stronger selfish animals start to take over.

Eric Heltzel: It's survival of the fittest; you adapt or you literally die, you won't survive.

Jamie deWolf: It works in a Darwinian way already.

(3:54)  Narration: Long ago the narrative of competition was born. Adam Smith’s idea of “the free enterprise” and Darwin’s supposed “survival of the fittest” theory helped construct the competitive narrative of “the rugged individual” which swells our institutions’ walls to this day. Smith is quoted endlessly for saying that competition is natural and his work is used to defend a society that privileges individualism. But what’s forgotten is that Smith believed that in order for individuals to be strong and survive, they must be well fed, healthy, clothed, housed, and engage in complex activities. If an individual lacks these qualities, then the government and society must step in to help create a strong individual, and thus a strong nation.

Partly inspired by Smith’s ideas, Darwin later wrote “The Origin of Species,” which we associate with individual competition and “survival of the fittest theory.” However, Darwin disliked the idea of survival of the fittest, and wrote far more about cooperation than direct competition. Both Smith and Darwin looked to what was natural to inform their work, and both came to the conclusion that it is together we will survive and thrive. But a manipulated version of their ideas arose in order to support special interests.

Despite these manipulations, women and men for years have looked to earth’s timeless impressions as they seek to thrive in timelessness themselves. Should our schools not try to do the same? If schools continue to privilege competition, foster apathy and become divorced from the systems of life, then surely the individual produced by that school will not find their life matching the test of times.

J. Doe: Nature has gifted us with a conscious intelligence and we should return it in kind.

Ted Grudin: Ecology is actually pretty good at this too--seeing interconnections--but people still manage to think of ecology as a binary kind of thing with environment and organisms interacting.

Mark Anderson: It has so many different applications because it's basically a system design way of thinking.

Carmen Johnston: Because I do think when we think of ecology we are thinking about systems in nature. I was thinking about like systems at school.

Mark Anderson: It's more of an idea of an organizational system as a complex adaptive system as opposed to just a linear model or top-down model all.

Ted Grudin: Education and ecology are similar in that they both involve interactions.

Jeff Duncan-Andrade: It's not a factory; it's not an institution; it's not a public service; it's a community.

(6:38) Narration: Assumptions about competition plague our thoughts. We think we must isolate our growth, but the systems of life never create anything in isolation. Instead, they foster cooperation and dynamic linkages. Yet the institution of school rarely supports complex linkages and is entrenched with the idea that separation, isolation, and individual competion is better.

If we consider education as an interconnected community, we can look at education through the lens of a systems analysis. We can explore practices and concepts within education that echo the systems of life instead of being in contradiction to it. The first concept we will look at is organic learning.

Kate O’Neill: When a class becomes a class--not just a collection of individuals.

J. Doe: Organic learning would be more like something, how a friend would teach another friend.

Sophie Kang: It’s so great to see a conversation about politics and from that conversation about politics go into a conversation about the environment. These cross-sections come together and can inspire new thoughts about the first idea or discipline. I think that's how you bring about that sort of organic learning.

Mark Anderson: A school or a classroom are enhanced the more inclusive they are of a broader set of perspectives.

Ted Grudin: I’ll just call it a better more vivacious kind of learning that connects students and teachers to more interesting material, thinking and creating.

Narration: Organic learning offers a space full of spontaneous interactions. In any ecosystem the quantity of interactions dictates its resiliency. That’s why biodiversity is a signal of health; every encounter within an ecosystem has spinoffs that can end up being helpful to another individual in some other way. Greater diversity within an ecosystem or classroom means a bigger buffet. Thus the healthier the ecosystem or classroom can be.

Jasmine Garcia: My differences with another person can mesh together to create something better.

Alex Neikirk: I feel like my mind opens up more when you're actually explaining something to someone else because you're actually listening to yourself saying it rather than having a wall that you’re just blindly writing on.

(8:59) Narration: In the midst of organic learning, a delicate balance is often struck that puts the brain into oscillation. That feeling of being muffled in a bubble waist deep in words and voyages. What you’re feelings is the brain toggling between low and high frequencies. Oscillation occurs in times of low stress and high stimulation, which is when creativity runs rampant and the brain can refine ideas quicker as well as retain them longer.

Eric Heltzel: And in that way it led to some of our best work; it inspired a lot of interesting theses.

Alex Neikirk: It's an easy way for teachers to just provide more channels for the students without having to have the singular student-teacher relationship.

Ted Grudin: Encourage classrooms to have a lot of diversity in them so that people can share.

Bobby John: One of my instructors here he makes it so that everything is almost all discussion-based and I've learned a lot more from students than I thought could ever learn.

Eric Heltzel: It was no longer about trying to impress the professor or about being the best or competition. It was just a conversation with a group of people about some stories that we really liked.

Narration: Creating an environment in which Organic Learning flourishes does not mean that the teacher is hands-off, or that whatever happens happens. On the contrary the teacher pays GREATER attention to the budding moments of learning in class. And like a gardener of human potential, the teacher tends to these moments, nurtures these moments, so that that blossoming of learning can occur. 

Carmen Johnston: And I think the games allow that--allows for connections and allows people to relax and to be yourself.

Stephanie Zappa: I asked questions. I have students do their work while they are in the classroom because I want them to take it on as much as possible and as early as possible.

Eric Heltzel: you know the work that we were doing literally came out of the text rather than coming from a professor or some other authorial figure telling us think this, look at this, notice this.

Carmen Johnston: I think that’s where school is really important because we get to have these conversations, get to reach awareness, we get to critique and be in dialogue and get to feel the tension and get to agree and disagree and then we get to make choices.

(11:21) Narration: While imagination can be seen as our raw true self in its essence, imagination alone is not tangible. It is creativity that acts as the route for imagination to express itself and through these routes identity is discovered. Identity is a two-way street. On one hand it’s a tool for navigating the murky fogs of our memories, and on the other hand it’s our outward presentation to the world. To know yourself and to offer yourself up to the world creates identity.

Jeff Duncan-Andrade: When people know who they are and know who they come from then they don't need to posture a position, because they are concretized in their connection to their ancestors and their connection to their history.

Emily Mather: You learn the facts and you’re terrified of them and it's really overwhelming and disheartening to see that, but it's also about learning that you can be an individual who stands up--like you can kind break free of that.

Jasmine Garcia: I'm going to give back in my way not in a way that someone is teaching me to give back. That's my creativity and those are my thoughts and nobody is injecting them in me.

Jeff Duncan-Andrade: What would really push things is that if kids left school with knowledge of self, critical problem-solving skills because then no matter what the economy is they can plug and play.

(12:45) Narration: Creativity nurtures identity but also drives our ability to problem solve and engage in divergent thinking. This is the ability to investigate questions in multiple ways and consider multiple solutions while being new, innovate and resourceful. But the old orthodox way of thinking privileges “comparative advantage”—which is the idea that a society must do what it is best at in order to effectively compete in the world.

This too is a misconstrued narrative taken from Adam Smith that has resulted in economies and even education being structured in a way that has funneled people into a single market. Therefore spreading the idea that society and individuals should focus on one thing. This has created extremely fragile societies and individuals as their simplified ways lack resiliency and easily crumble when any sort of change occurs.

Smith foresaw such things as he wrote about how simple and redundant tasks create simple and redundant people. Such tasks, he said, were dehumanizing. Narratives that limit creativity, like the manipulated version of Comparative Advantage, do not work. They harm the planet and maintain a system of inequality. So to solve the major problems of today, divergent thinking is imperative.

Ted Grudin: There is a diversity of problems and there's a diversity of solutions. And that's something that can be taught in the classroom.

Kate O’Neill: The very different sorts of different geopolitical crises that we face now require creativity to solve.

Bobby John: I think creativity is being able to apply what you know and being able to pull it across to something that seems really different.

Jeff Duncan-Andrade: Because if young people are educated in this way, then when they do move into positions of power, they are much less likely to check out of their relationship to the community and check into preservation of their power.

(14:46)  Narration: Organic learning generates oscillation, yielding creativity, leading to the discovery of identity, building the individual’s resiliency, which is then offered and projected into society.

 In the midst of that discovery, divergent thinking takes place, strengthening and refining the individuals as well as the ecosystem. But how effective are orthodox ways of schooling in helping our students navigate identity? And is creativity, the “generator of identity,” even looked after?

Jamie deWolf: But it's so obvious that art and voice and your fucking thoughts and emotions of what you're going through are really not that important or relevant to a school system.  They're like, “Yeah, that's nice but that's going to be an elective.”

Jeff Duncan-Andrade: Okay schooling is a process of institutionalizing people to prepare them to enter into society and never shake things up; education is the process by which people learn first, to understand themselves, their own value, their own historical place in the world. But if you try to fit them as widgets in a current economic set of needs, it's ridiculous.

Carmen Johnston: Creativity is about humanness and I think that our education systems are about dehumanization—they are not about being more human.

Emily Mather: We value critical thinking skills and value strong independent people but then everything we see in public schools really teaches kids you need to behave, you need to do what I say, you need to do this specific thing in this specific way.

Bobby John: Memorization for some reason, it just it kind of takes priority over this creative style of learning.

Narration: Shallow memorization--meaning short term and formulaic here--is the exact opposite process of creativity. And the more we dedicate our time to it, the more we fatten our gray tissue in the prefrontal cortex causing creativity to process slower. Though this is great for absolute answers, it doesn’t help much with abstract thinking, and actually has been seen to disrupt efforts to discover a more authentic version of our selves.

Alex Neikirk:  I hate the way the teaching method works: you have a standardized test; everybody gets tested on the same material. I am the professor so I know all the material and you're the student that I try to transfer it to you and if you don't understand it then that sucks and I'm failing you.

Mark Anderson: I think the reality often is that when it's just taught as like this very basic set of 123--this is what you have to know--I think the reality is that that teacher probably doesn’t really know it very well and they are doing what's easy. You just lay out the facts and give a test.

(17:45)  Bobby John: Intelligence is not being able to get a high score on IQ test.

Stephanie Zappa: There are many many teachers that teach to a test. And I think that there is something wrongly profound with that because that's not the way most people learn.

Bobby John: Students are just interested about the test. They’’ll ask on the first day how many tests do we have? What is this? It is all questions about the test.

Ceanne Shine: Inevitably the whole grading system just leads to a false meritocracy.

Peter Mutch: And I think that that shows a little bit that school is doing its job, in that it helps you learn to have a practical skill and it comes up with the way to quantify that.  By saying that “Yeah, you put effort into this and I can see you put effort into this and I have seen improvement in what you’ve done and because of that you’re going to have a higher score.”  That’s how we quantify it.

Kate O’Neill: But if you are just teaching kids how to memorize, rote memory, etc, that’s the opposite. You’re teaching student to be subjects, rather than citizens. To really not have that agency to figure things out for themselves.

Narration: Shallow memorization creates homogenized thinking, just as homogenized genes create a monoculture. Homogenized thinking has dominated curriculum. But just as stressed ecologies lack biodiversity, and struggle to thrive without the ability to quickly adapt to the changing environment, so too will homogenized thinkers

Bobby John: It’s a mundane thing. Memorizing this, memorizing that, so I could go get this good job.

Kate O’Neill: Education in some ways prepares you not for a creative fulfilled life, but to be able to sit in an office or in a cubicle 8 hours a day.

Jasmine Garcia: It’s already been done. People already got these same ass degrees, certifications, whatever. Like why can’t I be different, you know? Be comfortably different?

Ceanne Shine: It just creates this system that turns into more of a robotic process rather than an actual, creative self-fulfilling, learning process.

Kate O’Neill:  The idea is not that you’re not sort of learning information that will be useful to you throughout your life.

Bobby John: It’s not really an inquisitive style of learning.

Ted Grudin: A lot of people aren’t engaged, and a lot, I think there’s a lot of there’s a lot of learning that doesn’t happen because of that.

Alex Neikirk:  There’s no dialogue going on between the student and the teacher. So, the student just knows that they are going to ask their question, and the teacher is going to say what it is, and that’s going to be it.

Eric Heltzel: Because we can’t do quote, unquote creative work.

Kate O’Neill: There’s a notion that the environment has to be boring.

Eric Heltzel: We are supposed to separate our creative work from our critical work.

Sophie Kang: And it is so much harder to convince someone who is 16, 17, 18 and above having to sit down, stay still and learn this.

(20:25)  Emily Mather: And if you don’t do it like that, you’re just uncontrollable, you’re a bad kid, you’re not going to go anywhere.

Ted Grudin: The culture seems to be really leaning towards a culture of spectatorship where people are trained to only watch things, but not to actively participate in it. That means if there is a monoculture kind of thing going on, no one is going to be challenging that monoculture.

Mark Anderson: As soon as any one culture or perspective dominates, then it can become unhealthy.

Narration: American education may have helped create brilliant minds, but this was far from its original purpose. For one thing brilliant minds might ultimately challenge the convenient monoculture, the status quo that serves only a few. No, instead our educational monoculture was built primarily for one reason: Jobs.

Ceanne Shine: Schools are run more like businesses and they are more focused on things that are lucrative rather than things that are beneficial to the students because the students aren’t really their customers.

J. Doe: School is preparing us to become cogs of bigger machines.

Jamie deWolf: It’s basically a programming device in many ways. It teaches you what is America in this world, right? Which is a whole lot of manipulative propaganda. It teaches you the American version of history, who is in control, who has power, how are you disciplined. These kinds of aspects that are really just manifested in a larger way as you move on. Having classrooms a certain size, having 7-8 subjects a day. Where did a lot of this format come from? It’s just something that we come to accept.

Carmen Johnston: We know that school was designed as an answer to the Industrial Revolution. It was designed with the same thing in mind. Factories and designing people to be workers.

Jeff Duncan-Andrade: There is no expectation there, there is no deeper purpose there, and it is in fact a factory.

Sophie Kang: I mean theoretically, kids from broken homes, kids from good homes, kids with 8 siblings, kids with no siblings can come to school, and by their education, be quote unquote equalized by all learning the same thing and interacting with each other.

(22:47) Jeff Duncan-Andrade: The myth is that Horace Mann came up with this great idea and he said to everybody this would be the great equalizer. That’s a lie. Horace Mann did say that.  He said that to working, poor, and immigrant folks. But he had a different narrative when he went to the business community because he needed them to back him. The business community was currently benefitting from those people because those children were working in those factories.

So he said, “I can get the federal government to supplement and subsidize your training costs and drop them to zero. And the way we'll do it is we will design schools just like factories. They’ll start the day at a factory start and end the day at the factory end. We will sort people and organize the school.” And so businesses from the very onset had major input on what would be happening in schools.

The parents were like "Fuck you. We will never send you our children. Do you think we're stupid? We know you're going to do. You're going to brainwash them. You're going to re-acculturate them and you're not going teach them our values. You're not going to teach them our language. You're not going to teach them our history.” No. So they invent child labor laws and compulsory schooling laws. And then, attendance goes up 80 plus percent.

Narration: In the late 19^th century, when Horace Mann began to implement universal public schooling, the business community played a large role. This was at a time when free enterprise, the division of labor, and natural competition became new trends in how businesses were run and regulated. And like a new religion, individual competition became the new norm. Today the ideas that sprout from such thinking are built on a shaky foundation, because they misunderstand the deeper connections that drive systems.

 How stable, then, is the institution of school if the narrative of its creation has never been confronted, challenged, or intentionally changed? Even today, under the new Common Core standards, there is a high emphasis on career readiness and millions of dollars are being poured into creating relationships with the business community. But perhaps our emphasis is too narrow. Instead of just looking at college and career readiness, maybe we should look at college, career and citizen readiness.

Carmen Johnston: To me certain people get to create and live big full lives and other people get to work for those people.

Ceanne Shine: In our society that's how we function, where we hire the better person and we look at their qualifications and that's a way of weeding people out.

Sophie Kang: There is a lot of justification that happens within an in-group to an out-group who’s not getting resources or the benefits.

Jeff Duncan-Andrade: You have to use schools as a sorting mechanism to figure out who's ready to enter the labor force and participate accordingly, embrace the status quo. Who's the select few that can enter into middle management and hold the line. And who's the group that needs to be punished. Who's the group that needs to be shown that if you fuck with this system we’ve got 13 years to bang on your dome and make it clear to you that this system cannot be fucked with. There's a clear history here that schools serving poor and working-class kids, and immigrant kids have always been a pipeline to the labor force.

Carmen Johnston: Like at a low income school it's more about remembering things, regurgitating information, coloring in the lines, following good behavior and things like that. Whereas at a school that's more prestigious there's a lot more room to try things, and network and have exposure to different things.

Peter Mutch: We had a really active band program and we had a lot of opportunities to compete with other schools and see how that went. And in that it was kind of similar to athletics, where the opportunity to perform and succeed is always there.

(26:37) Bobby John: If we have access to it then yeah, we’re naturally going to explore those things, but if it’s limited access or closed then there’s not much we can do.

J. Doe: Only the rich people get benefit from the system because the rich people have all the resources.

                                                              

Jasmine Garcia: I guess our expectations of succeeding is very unfair because we basically just think about it one way.

Bobby John: Intelligence is tailored to a few people.

Narration: If one part of a community is suffering, it impacts surrounding areas. The phrase “one bad apple spoils the whole bunch” originates from the observed occurrence of the gas ethylene being released from rotting apples which then ages and rots nearby fruit. So it’s more than a metaphor to say that when our schools are left to rot in violence and chaos, problems spread:  unseen talent is wasted and rejected communities remain a sorrowful piece of a larger machine.

Carmen Johnston: People that really need to be here, need an opportunity to be here, they don’t get to because things that are out of their control get in the way.

Kate O’Neill:  I think that the more lost opportunities that people have of feeling trapped and being pushed into a different sort of a life then the less likely we are to progress as a species and that means also progress environmentally.

Mark Anderson: You know all these different parts are all very much all interconnected. When we don’t recognize that, and try to harness that, and try to build that and develop that, we are doing a great disservice to our children.

Kate O’Neill:  You have ecologies, stressed ecologies that survive but, they’re not as functional, they are very brutal. I suppose if I’m thinking of human ecologies I worry about maintaining systems that are resilient. And that’s partly a matter of the people who are in them, but also the resources that are given to those people.

Jeff Duncan-Andrade: Nature is committed to the ecosystem. The ecosystem drives the appearance. Okay. So if you go into places in nature where it is an unhealthy ecosystem, is it beautiful? No.

Mark Anderson: It’s all the more important to start thinking about how to make things more resilient.

Narration: Too often schools do not help us to remember who we are. Rather it fosters forgetfulness and division. Division from our life at home, life in our community.  We sit in a box, unlearning the cultures that handed us life. How much more valuable would our education be if the lessons taken from our communities cultures and families were intentionally fused into the institution of school? Yet students’ adversities go ignored, social capital remains wasted, and bleeding stays invisible.

Alex Neikirk:  Example, I know this one kid. His sister had just gotten shot and he is worried about his walk home from school whether or not he will be put in danger.

Sophie Kang: It’s undeniable that where you come from in life can make a huge difference in how you do in formal education.

Jamie deWolf: You know some kids are walking by drug deals on their way home or are actually scared of getting shot; they know friends who are getting murdered.

Eric Heltzel: You know one kid has a better breakfast than another kid. Well that kid is more likely to go to a better high school.

Emily Mather: You know we’re taught that if we’re that if something was wrong in your life then it’s your fault.

Stephanie Zappa: This idea of social classes is still put in the context of the American Dream. Meaning you can be anything you want to be if you work hard enough, and therefore, people that are poor are there because they are losers.

(30:21) Narration: In biology K/R selection is used to describe different kinds of common patterns in things like parenting relationship, litter sizes, and life spans. One of the consequences of R selection is an unstable community partly due to the extremely large litter size.

Sophie Kang: Top-down, vertical learning is so easy. You hire one person to teach 30 people.

Kate O’Neill:  The ecology of the classroom is often determined partly by the structure of the classroom. It’s the ones that have no windows and are these big auditoriums sloping upwards. Well that’s a sort negative sort of ecology. It’s very hierarchical, where everyone is focused on the speaker. 

Ted Grudin: Often with teachers that are demoralized, not supported properly, not paid properly…

Narration: With only one parent to do all the work, little energy and few resources are devoted to the progeny; leaving them to fend for themselves while their parents carry little responsibility.

Alex Neikirk:  I don’t even pay attention to the lecture, I literally sit there, get out my smart phone and I online shop and I look at Facebook.

Jasmine Garcia: I think that kind of kills the sense of a person because it’s like our education system doesn’t appreciate us as much they want us to appreciate them.

Narration: Ultimately with few or no lessons passed on to the critters, the world eats them alive and most die within a short span of time.

Jamie deWolf: It’s very rare during the school day for an adult to actually ask a student, just fully don’t censor yourself, talk how you want to talk, say what you wanna say.

Peter Mutch: If the teacher had to take an investment into each and everyone one of those students, he just wouldn’t be able to lecture; he just wouldn’t have time.

Carmen Johnston: So then it’s like email and short conversations, but it doesn’t get to be, you know, this holistic in depth approach that we to offer, and then we can’t even follow up with the student.

Alex Neikirk:  My professor does not make it interesting; he’s a great guy, but he does not make it interesting. Lectures are super dry and super linear.

Peter Mutch: It becomes difficult to show the sort of investment. You just have to be like look, “Your homework problems are 1-37 odd and if you do those, then you’ll know how to take derivatives.”

Bobby John: If they give off the message that they are just here to teach you and I don’t really care then that’s how the students are going to act.

Jamie deWolf: That person shouldn’t be given that right, they shouldn’t be given the power to make a kid feel that way.

Alex Neikirk:  I’m just looking at this for what I am trying to get out of it, and if I can’t get anything out of your lectures I am not going to pay attention.

Ted Grudin: Students are angry and bored and tired of boring, meaningless hours spent in a meaning less room.

Carmen Johnston: Even if we get our tests back and like 50% failed, then teachers are gonna be like, “Well it’s just them, they just didn’t study.” There isn’t a lot of structures in place that help teachers become reflective about their teaching practice.

(33:16) Narration: Many teachers feel true heartache because they’re not able to give as much attention to their students as they would like. But the irony of R selection is that within our orthodox institution, teachers themselves are not shown enough attention, given enough support and are often left to fend for themselves. Educators need to be cared for too so they can care for students. Educators must be supported in navigating the depths of their identity so they can do it for their students, too.

Mark Anderson: Teachers are very isolated in their own classrooms; schools themselves are very much isolated from each other.

Jeff Duncan-Andrade: When you talk to teachers, who they are right now as a teacher is so far from what they wanted to be when they got into it, right? When they got into it they wanted to be this person that was a fundamentally influential factor in the lives of young people that didn’t follow the protocol and now here I am, right? The man, supporting this thing that deep, deep down I fundamentally disagree with but, I am so pot committed to it that I cannot unstick.

Jamie deWolf: You’re really like at the ground zero in the eye of the hurricane of everything that is just completely systemically falling apart, or succeeding, or victorious, or crushing failures of the whole front line of education.

Mark Anderson: What a major problem has been in our education system is we’re not explicit of what our narrative is, what we’re teaching is or what our content is.

Ted Grudin: Teachers are told to act and function in certain ways in their teaching education programs. As well as by their administrations and there is certain expectations.

Mark Anderson: How is that dominant narrative explicitly communicated and acknowledged within the school, and by the teachers, and by the community and by the district? Or is it something that is established as a dominant narrative unconsciously and has become a form of a hidden curriculum in that something is being taught but it’s taught through actions, and it’s taught through the culture and it’s taught through just the ways things are.

Jeff Duncan-Andrade:  What do I do? Because I have this day, it’s already mapped out for me that I have to execute. Where in that day can I rethink how to get us out of this mess were in?

Carmen Johnston:  And so I think that that in itself is part of the problem. That there just needs to be more in place to help teachers, become better teachers.

Jamie deWolf: Because the problem is that if you start to get jaded as a teacher, and you start to view it as just a job, then well you start to become a really terrible teacher. So it’s like you have to be amazingly passionate and dedicated, hopeful, you know, stubborn in the face of all these factors. Completely devoted with your time. You also don’t make a ton of money, so you’re kind of stuck in this whole systemic quality of it.

(36:12) Stephanie Zappa:  And that takes a lot of energy and time and thought, and care, so if you don’t want to do it, go do something else.

Jamie deWolf:  I think that’s why the burnout rate is so high. It’s because it’s really an “All or Nothing” sort of commitment.

Peter Mutch: Do teachers have an obligation to invest in their students? Sometimes. Whenever they can, I guess, is probably the answer.

Narration: In Biology, K selection is quite opposite from R selection and is more likely to create a stable environment. This is because the offspring spend a lot of time learning from their parent. With more time and resources spent on teaching the offspring, they’re better equipped to face the real world.

Alex Neikirk: This desire to apply the things that I learn in class was originally rooted in a teacher that I had through my time, like my one semester in high school.

Jamie deWolf: You are trying to make a space that’s open for them to be as honest about their own writing, their own thoughts, their own emotion, as possible.

Alex Neikirk:  When we would learn random things, he would be like, “Oh. This weird concept, you might not think it makes sense, but let me tell you how I use it when I take a shower.”

Sophie Kang: Even though he didn’t know me, he brought so many facets of his personal life, that I felt like I could go up to him.

Peter Mutch: Having a teacher take a personal interest in you and show their personality through what they’re teaching is incredibly helpful to the process of learning. It’s almost essential, right, almost.

Kate O’Neill: I think it also depends on how you can create an atmosphere in the room with sort of common endeavor. And just generally feeling like even if your students would approach you, then maybe you’re approachable.

Stephanie Zappa: You’re dealing with human beings; you’re dealing with people. You have ways that you can affect them, and ways that you can open them, and ways that you can lead them to themselves and to the larger culture, every single day.

J. Doe: Well if the students are in an encouraging environment then the students are more likely to learn. You might spark a passion in it.

Ceanne Shine:  It just makes you feel like you can do school. So I felt like, it just gave me the confidence academically.

Alex Neikirk:  Try to provide a classroom that lets their mind wander away from the negative things in their life and use education as a positive thing for them.

(38:30) Carmen Johnston: One of the challenges with education is that it does seem like there are these two paths that you can go: you can either be a robot or be a human. And so if you decide to be a robot, that’s fine, and that’s going to work for some people, but if you decide to be human, it’s going to be so much more better for everybody. And there is also the chance that the institution itself doesn’t really support the human.

(cont. in next post.)