My Wife Struck Again

My wife left a New York Times article on my bedside table recently. The title, “You Can’t Game Your Way to a Real Education” caught my attention. Molly Worthen, a University of North Carolina history professor, is the author. If you’ve read ABPTL for a while, you’ll know that my wife and I have a long-standing debate about technology and its impact on learning. It would be fair to say my wife is a skeptic when it comes to cellphones, social media, and artificial intelligence when it comes to learning. I’m more hopeful.

The article begins focusing on Paige Drygas, a high school English teacher at a private school north of Dallas, Texas:

“Paige Drygas…feels no pressure to make learning fun. She distinguishes between ‘fun’ – meaning stress-free amusement – and the burden she feels to ‘get students engaged as much as possible. ‘I can see it in their eye contact,’ she told [Worthen]. ‘I’m trying to get their minds going. For example, I don’t think many people would describe Emerson and Thoreau as fun.’”

“Maybe that’s why some teachers have their students play ‘Walden,’ a video game in which players simulate Thoreau’s solitary sojourn at Walden Pond. The game is free for teachers, but Ms. Drygas sticks to the texts. ‘The idea of self-reliance is really interesting. Once you engage that big idea, class moves quickly.”

“Ms. Drygas is not only a fun-skeptic. She also requires her students to hand write their essays, read books in hard copy and use laptops as little as possible. These countercultural classroom policies all go together, because fun used to be a wonderful thing in school. Then screen came to dominate instruction time and software developers answered the call to make school fun and personalize learning with a growing marketplace of online games.”

“This has been the greatest blunder in the past decade of K-12 education: the decision to give every child a personal computer and to gamify everything from standardized test preparation to recess. Mistaken ideas about the nature of learning have combined with a hefty dose of Big Tech propaganda to distort our picture of what school is for. Technology must return to its proper place in the classroom – as a supplemental tool, rather than the source and summit of education.”

No argument here. When it comes to learning, balance between devices and more traditional practices is key. But, because most teachers have not been trained how to reach this type of balance when it comes to making kids smarter and stronger, too many classroom instructors default to a strategy of opening the devices at the beginning of the period and not closing them until the end.

“Denise Champney is a speech pathologist in Rhode Island who has worked in public schools for 25 years, mainly with neurodivergent learners. ‘The persuasive design of computer games is meant to keep kids using, with no interaction with other people, just with a screen,’ she told [Worthen]. ‘I’ve seen it with iReady math. They’re just clicking; they want to get through it. They are not reading, because they don’t really need to read. They say, ‘I kind of know what they’re asking, so I’ll click on what I think the answer is.’”

What Champney seems to be missing here is the role and responsibility of the adult learning leader. Let’s be clear, in most American classrooms, young learners are engaging with devices absent an adult responsible for insuring a good balance between various instructional strategies, technology included, during learning time. Well-trained adult learning leaders know how to balance device learning with other types of strategies. The problem is most American K-12 school districts never have taken the time to make sure their teachers were well-trained when it came to learning with an iPhone, laptop, or other technology device.

Although Worthen is mostly critical of online gaming technology as a learning strategy, she seems to like Mission.io:

“I’m intrigued – warily – by Skyler Carr’s approach. He co-founded Mission.io after a few years working in charter schools.  As a STEM specialist, he tried ‘to reach students who were struggling to be engaged in a traditional classroom environment,’ he told [Worthen]. Mission.io creates simulations that embed Common Core grade-level standards in dramatic scenarios that inject real-life stakes into class material. Mission.io is trying to do gamification the right way.”

“Laptops become tools for in-person collaboration, rather than private gaming consoles (if – and it’s a big ‘if’ – players resist the temptations of the internet). At the end of the mission, students and teachers evaluate both the outcome and the process.”

Worthen ends her essay by writing:

“But no technology is philosophically neutral. The apps and games that provide a simulacrum of educational progress also encourage students to absorb a certain worldview, an idea of what they should strive for. They end up with the impression that learning is a matter of box ticking, pattern recognition, completing discrete tasks and ‘leveling up.’”

“When they get to college and face open-ended essay questions and other forms of ambiguity – when they begin thinking about what they should do after graduation and try to figure out the point of it all – they panic. When a professor asks them to read an entire novel, the task feels overwhelming.”

“They got into college by mastering a gamified system. But that’s a false picture of the world. Take it from Emerson. He wrote in ‘Self-Reliance’ that real education requires a person to learn that there is no algorithm for fulfillment: ‘Though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil.’ Serious intellectual work and moral reasoning cannot be gamified.”

Or maybe it can be. Truth of the matter is that Molly Worthen, or anyone else for that matter, really knows what learning is going to look like ten years, maybe even five years, from now. Although Emerson’s quote above is notable, how learners “toil” is turning out to be very different today compared to 1841, the year “Self-Reliance” was written.

Balance seems to be the key to learning success, and that balance depends on a healthy relationship between a young learner and their adult learning leader, and a vibrant learning agenda that defines, plans, executes, and evaluates the work necessary for every young learner to become smarter and stronger.

Til tomorrow. SVB