Finding a Path Instead of Forging the Road

Photo by caleb weiner on Unsplash

One of the most defining features of having an extended break from teaching, is the gradual returning of ease that always accompanies rest. Depending on how long I’ve been teaching before a break, it can take anywhere from 5-7 days before my mind and body no longer feel the frenetic grind of the typical school day. I am no longer measuring my days in minutes; I can go an entire day without looking at a clock. Instead of the siloed thinking required of teaching five subjects over a seven-hour school day, I lose myself in books or nature or sleep. I never realize how tired my mind and body are until I am resting. Unfortunately, during the school year, my weekends are rarely restful, filled with all of the required errands that I don’t have time to do during the week. Between the grocery shopping, cooking, cleaning, and appointments, it is soon Sunday afternoon, and I am preparing for another week of school.

That school is a whirlwind of transitions from one subject to another, is something we take for granted in our industrialized and expedient society. Progress is fast and requires efficient uses of time. Success is defined by the miles traveled or the hours worked. We don’t budget for slowness in many things, but especially in teaching and learning. From Kindergarten to senior year (either high school or college) the road is paved with curricular standards, lesson plans, standardized tests, and grades. The destination to graduation is valued more than the academic journey of learning.

Wendell Berry, in an essay titled A Native Hill, writes of our relationship to the land, comparing the road-builders of colonialism and progress, to the symbiosis of the Indigenous peoples, slowly creating paths in relationship to the surrounding land.

The difference between a path and a road is not only the obvious one. A path is little more than a habit that comes with knowledge of a place. It is a sort of ritual of familiarity. As a form, it is a form of contact with a known landscape. It is not destructive. It is the perfect adaptation, through experience and familiarity, of movement to place; it obeys the natural contours; such obstacles as it meets it goes around. A road, on the other hand, even the most primitive road, embodies a resistance against the landscape. Its reason is not simply the necessity for movement, but haste. Its wish is to avoid contact with the landscape; it seeks so far as possible to go over the country, rather than through it. It is destructive, seeking to remove or destroy all obstacles in its way (14).

Public education is a system created by road-builders. Even though the purported purpose of public education was general knowledge, citizenship, maintaining social order, and reinforcing obedience, the rise of mass schooling led to the spread of industrialization in the 19th century. In a time when hurried expediency meant more profit and growth for our economy, schools quickly mirrored the factory floor. Bells rang to force students to transition from one seat to another, one subject to another. Days were measured in minutes and everwatchful accountability led to higher and higher productivity.¹ Over time, hurriedness became the status quo. Teaching and learning became a race against the clock, with time becoming more and more scarce.

As Berry wanders through the Kentucky countryside, he slowly realizes that he is following a path where others have gone before him. Over time, he begins to wander by deliberation. There is no reason to hurry and, as he moves through the landscape, he begins to look and understand the natural world around him.

Learning cannot be hurried. Professor of Higher Education Auli Toom, explains that learning “takes time, discussion, and collaborative knowledge-building as well as an understanding of causes and consequences.”² These are routinely cut from the typical school day in the name of teaching the mandated minutes of standardized curricula.

In society, there is enormous pressure to increase efficiency and make a lot of things happen at a rapid rate, but that cannot possibly be done at the expense of effective learning.

Auli Toom, University of Helsinki

Teachers and students have become hostages to standardized pacing guides. When a new initiative is introduced, teachers are left trying to figure out how to fit it into the school day. When administrators and teachers are pressured to cut activities that do not fit in the mandated curriculum, including the arts and recess, students are left with the assumption that the only things of value in the real world are compliance and excellent grades. Creativity and collaboration have become buzzwords, tricking us into believing that we are preparing students for the real world. Is it really creative thinking when there is only one preferred answer in the teacher’s guide? When students are following specific prompts for a small-group discussion, is this really collaboration?

Berry, speaking of humanity’s biased assumptions that white men always know what is best for the world, believes that we are wrong. As an educator these last 21 years, I too, believe that society has made a grave mistake in the name of students’ success. Just as Berry states, “We must change our lives [and] make an effort to know the world and to learn what is good for it”, (24)³ I believe that teachers have a responsibility to resist the destructive schism between teaching and learning and our own humanity. We must make an effort to slow down and know our craft and what is good for students.

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Our most recent science unit was the study of the life cycles of living things. After teaching students about producers, consumers, decomposers, food webs, and where plants get the materials they need for growth, I showed students a compost bin. Unfortunately, my compost bin was a time-lapse YouTube video quickly showing how organic materials decompose and turn into humus. In an ideal world, I would give my students the opportunity to go out in nature and see where fallen leaves go. Together, we would walk in the woods (as Berry often does) and examine the topsoil. Instead of the anxiety of trying to quickly get students to understand the life cycles of nature, we would collectively experience the peaceful patience of the natural world.

In his 1988 essay The Work of Local Culture, Berry describes an old galvanized bucket that hangs on a fence post in the Kentucky wood that was once his grandfather’s farm. In the bucket, ever so slowly, soil is being created:

The old bucket has hung there through many autumns, and the leaves have fallen around it and some have fallen into it. Rain and snow have fallen into it, and the fallen leaves have held the moisture and so have rotted. Nuts have fallen into it, or been carried into it by squirrels; mice and squirrels have eaten the meat of the nuts and left the shells; they and other animals have left their droppings; insects have flown into the bucket and died and decayed; birds have scratched in it and left their droppings and perhaps a feather or two. This slow work of growth and death, gravity and decay, which is the chief work of the world, has by now produced in the bottom of the bucket several inches of black humus. I look into that bucket with fascination because I am a farmer of sorts and an artists of sorts, and I recognize there an artistry and a farming far superior to mine, or to that of any human.

My virtual compost bin is not patient, hurriedly rushing us to the inevitable humus. I am a teacher, and possibly an artist of sorts as well, and I recognize that this is not a pedagogy that respects the cultural traditions and excellence of teaching and learning.

Berry explains that white people have lived in America throughout history with a sense of urgent imposition on land and people. Our history teaches us that me must impose our beliefs on others in the name of righteous efficiency. It is not surprising, then, that this white supremacy ethos has permeated our public school system. Instead of making time for the idiosyncrasies and abundance of humanity, being patient for the process of learning to evolve naturally, we have hyper-focused on the end of the road, and ignored the paving of the topography of learning and it’s eventual destruction. We are forced to idealize the final product, not the process. There is no longer an exquisite alertness or curious deliberation⁴ in our pedagogy. Nothing is done leisurely. Students are not allowed to lean and loaf at ease observing a spear of summer grass.⁵ Teachers are forced to be in a habit of contention (34) between teaching to the test or teaching to the humanity of their students, and in the process, we lose the path.

According to Berry, school systems innovate as compulsively and as eagerly as factories (111).⁶ Instead of revering the great pedagogies of the past, we hate whatever went before and look on its obsolescence as a kind of vengeance (113). Each year, we become obsessed with using technology to learn (and assess that learning) faster and faster. This is why I am reluctant to integrate AI into my classroom. 15 years ago, I was an early adopter of 1:1 Chromebooks. I encouraged students to read on screens. I proselytized media literacy, promoting the use of YouTube videos as sources for analysis. Now, 15 years later, my students struggle to hold a paper book in their hands and read uninterrupted for more than three minutes. We’ve lost our collective, perhaps even filial, admiration for reading books slowly and thinking deeply.

In the name of acceleration, I forsook deep thinking, instead teaching students to scan texts for answers to questions at the end of their workbooks. Now, when introduced with ChatGPT, a paved superhighway tearing through the woods, I ask myself, Why would I use technology to allow my students to completely offload their thinking? Teachers believed unconditionally in the idea that innovation would solve all of public education’s problems. I believed it. I was hypnotized by the tech bros’s propaganda of move fast and break things. I moved quickly toward college and career preparation, and forgot the love of learning inherent in students’ natural curiosity.

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I recently inherited my father-in-law’s great, great, grandfather’s clock. It was crafted by the Waterbury Clock Company some time in the early 1880s, and has been passed down four generations, now to me. I have spent most of my vacation time in my office reading novels and writing to the metronomic ticks of the clock. I’ve been carefully comparing the clock-face time with my phone, making small adjustments to the clock’s pendulum bob. It is a slow process of raising and lowering the nut, and then waiting a full day to see if the time is more accurate than before. I enjoy this pace.

I feel most like myself when my circadian rhythm is in tune with nature. There is no hustle; just extended periods of flow states where I lose myself in learning. Alan Lightman reminds us that the mind needs to rest. The mind needs periods of calm.⁷ Thoreau wrote in Walden, “Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity. I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand.”⁸ No part of my school day is unscheduled. There is no time for mind-wandering. Every day requires increased productivity in the name of increased standardized test scores. The world is numbingly faster today than it was in the 1880s. As such, the public school experience is more scheduled, more fragmented, and less patient than it was when I started teaching 22 years ago. It is not surprising, then, that I must brace myself for the reentry into the whirlwind of school. I have been teaching long enough to know what to expect. I will be exhausted during the first week back. Inundated with professional development and meetings, I will be swept up into the frenzy of daily lesson planning, curriculum mapping, student-data talks, and benchmark assessments. Every day will mark another step closer toward standardized testing.

The question remains: Is it possible to disrupt this hurried cycle and find a path toward a slower and more thoughtful pace? I do believe that it is possible, but requires teachers to actively rebel against the scarcity of time and the unrealistic pressures of standardized teaching and learning. The possibility of change depends on our willingness and willpower for a more humane schooling experience. We must be willing to pressure administrators and be steadfast in what we believe is healthier for students and teachers.

I wish I could end here with a list of ways you can resist the maddening pace of school. I do not have answers. I am saying that the current status quo is unsustainable. Public education must abandon its obsession with metrics and efficiency at all costs. Teaching and learning can, and do, happen in slow and messy ways. Instead of burying what we know to be true about how humans learn under miles of concrete, we must pause and look around for the overgrown path. We should wander with deliberation through this second-half of the school year, building strong student relationships and helping our students fall in love with learning again; not the synthetic standardized learning for tests, but learning in its most organic sense. By the time I come to the summer months, I want to be able to look back on the spring semester with a sense of peaceful joy because I took the time to teach, actually teach.

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I hope everyone has rested and recharged and is ready to tackle another semester.

Have a great week!

— Adrian

Resources

Crash Course Philosophy

• When I was designing a Philosophy learning experience for my students, I was thrilled to discover this trove of Crash Course videos.

Walking by Henry David Thoreau

• This is one of my favorite Thoreau essays. Whenever I feel overwhelmed, I go outside and walk. Walking is a great comfort to me, allowing my brain to wander.

• As a young teacher, I remember first reading Civil Disobedience, and feeling emboldened to resist and subvert unjust systems in public education. In light of our recent election, I reread Civil Disobedience, and found it incredibly poignet. I especially love Alain de Botton’s voice and the School of Life videos!

To a slower life By Alan P. Lightman

• I reference Lightman’s essay above. It is so good, I highly recommend you read it in its entirety. I first discovered it in a collection of essays about Thoreau titled, Now Comes Good Sailing: Writers Reflect on Henry David Thoreau.

The Era of “Move Fast and Break Things” Is Over by Hemant Taneja

• I found this article by Hemant Taneja of General Catalyst fascinating! I remember the excitement of the early Silicon Valley tech bros. As a young teacher, I was susceptible to this mantra and tried to incorporate it into my pedagogical practice. 20+ years later, I tend to exercise more temperateness in my craft.

• If you are not already subscribed to Christopher Perrin’s Substack, Renewing Classical Education, I recommend you do so immediately. As a public school kid in the U.S., I never had any experience with a classical education. I never read any of the literary canon, something I am slowly remedying as adult.

• In the above video, Perrin discusses the 8 essential principle of classical pedagogy.

• I recently read Stolen Focus by Johann Hari, which as led me to try to let go of how much time I spend on social media. If you are interested in the book, but can’t commit, the following interview provides a nice synopsis of Hari’s findings.

1. The Hawthorne effect

2. Toom, A. (2023, June 3). You cannot hurry learning even though the pace of society is accelerating. University of Helsinki. https://www.helsinki.fi/en/news/education/you-cannot-hurry-learning-even-though-pace-society-accelerating

3. Berry, W. (2017). A Native Hill. In The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry (pp. 3–37). essay, First Counterpoint.

4. Both exquisite alertness and curious deliberation come from Wendell Berry.

5. Song of Myself (1892 version) By Walt Whitman

6. Berry, W. (2017). The Work of Local Culture. In The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry (pp. 102–117). essay, First Counterpoint.

7. Lightman, A. (2021). To a Slower Life. In Now Comes Good Sailing: Writers Reflect on Henry David Thoreau (pp. 95–103). essay, Princeton University Press.

8. Henry David Thoreau, Walden (New York: W. W. Norton, 1951), 106.