Taking Stuff Out of Boxes

Here's a summary of the last few weeks: find out about a humanitarian plane from Costa Rica to Chile, sell everything, get confirmation 48 hours before leaving that we were on the flight, get on the plane. 

Zero social distancing or, unexpectedly, food on the plane.

Arrive to 14 days of quarantine in Santiago, pack up a house, punctuate kid’s bacchanalia of screentime with a bit of education; shove stuff into two vans, drive to a new temporary home in the countryside. 

Doing this, I’m now a grandmaster of a shit game called putting stuff into boxes then taking them out again. 

Open drawers, look at foreign coins and random paperclips at bottom of drawers, observe the unidentifiable keys, thumb through old pictures and school yearbooks, then guiltily pack it all into a box marked "bedroom drawers" - arrive at next location, unpack, and then put the things back into drawers not to be seen again until next move. 

Top tip for anyone considering international teaching, if you don't like this game, don't go into international teaching. I have realized I don't like this game. 

That bit about packing things into boxes is a semi-lie. I'm a thrower-away-er. No, if I don't have a purpose for that cable/empty candle holder/video cassette — out damn spot! Marie Kondo was onto something when she wrote about the importance of decluttering (she wrote a book about tidying up, just in case you've been reading stuff other than books about tidying up, so haven't heard of her).

One of her tips is, "hold the item in your hand, if you don't love it, throw it away" --- this would have led to dustbin overwhelm if I had taken it too literally.

Why am I talking about boring stuff like putting things in boxes and tidying up? Well, it's useful to think about education as a giant packing process. 

Stay with me. 

Teachers, admin, policy-makers, all think about where society is going, and what can be packed into the available containers of time. 

In crude terms, the box could be a child's mind, a classroom, a school, a meeting, or a general policy goal.

How does this apply to an individual mind?

"What you think about is what you remember," - Daniel Willingham. This is an oft-quoted line from why children don't like school which gets right to the heart of learning. One of my goals as a teacher has been to find ways of ensuring that what children think about what it is I want them to remember. 

It's still (too) common for people to say stuff like, “I’m more interested in thinking skills than remembering stuff because kids can always use Google". Cue phrases like "deep conceptual learning".

 We are led to believe that "merely" thinking about "stuff," in order to remember it, is boring, and only useful for producing test-taking, order-following, drone-like workers. 

What’s the alternative? THINKING of course. 

We should be training children how to occupy their mental resources to solve REAL problems - how to think. The contents aren’t important, the container is what matters. 

We should be teaching kids to make their own box bigger! 

Here's the problem with that argument... thinking and solving problems are inevitable conditions of being alive. There is a great collection of Karl Popper essays called, "all life is problem-solving" that explains why problem-solving is just about life's most fundamental process. And yet, merely by being alive, we don't become better at solving all of life's problems. We need to learn stuff. 

If our job as educators was just to get children to think and solve problems, we wouldn't need to send them to school at all. We are all engaged in thinking of one sort or another, all the time, whether we like it or not. 

Children who have had the misfortune not to be formally educated, still solve complex problems. Progressive education has wanted to encourage so-called "authentic problem solving" in schools, without recognizing that there are many children already solving the real-life problem of how to get enough money to survive, without the luxury of school. Real progress for them would mean, in fact, not having to solve those problems anymore. 

Real-life is very far from being, by necessity, more beautiful, meaningful, or even relevant (relevant to and for WHAT exactly?), than the stuff children learn in school. For many the opposite is true - authentic real-life sucks quite hard. So why this obsession with authenticity? 

What has all this got to do with taking stuff out of boxes? 

Children's cognitive resources are limited. When we ask them to solve a complex problem with multiple inputs or instructions, we have to consider the size of the box we are working with. This means their working memory capacity and prior knowledge of the topic. If it takes significant cognitive resources to work out what the hell to do to complete a task, only a few of their cognitive powers will be dedicated to solving the problem in front of them. They'll be thinking about what to do, not what they should be learning. 

We want to "reduce" cognitive load to that which is relevant, and keep the main thing the main thing.  

If working memory is the moving box into which we present information, what techniques do we have for reducing cognitive load and improving the ability of children to direct their attention to what is important for learning?

Alongside load from the outside - filling the box - another technique is to notice what is already in the box of conscious awareness. This means that they notice what they are thinking about, they engage in an act of “metacognition”. When children notice their thinking, it becomes easier to shift their attentional resources away from unhelpful thoughts, to those which are more productive. We aren't increasing the size of the box, but we can use the space we have available more efficiently.

Take a simple and common thought that might occur to a kid, "I suck at maths, it's boring". Most teachers probably agree that in order to improve attention or concentration, it would be helpful to reduce the intensity with which this thought, and others like it, fill the box of a child's mind. 

For a kid who really lacks confidence, breaking tasks down into manageable chunks, and giving small achievable steps, can really help them feel less like they suck at Maths. We allow them to feel successful, and this academic success leads to the motivation to work harder. 

Okay. So back to boxes. If working memory is the "seat" of consciousness - it's the place where stuff happens - then we don't want to overload it. We should optimize capacity. Within the box, we will strategically place items we want children to pay attention to, ensuring they are very well explained with lots of chances to practice and obtain the fluency that will lead to competence and confidence. 

However, there are also other sources of distraction and potential sources of overload, that cannot be directly controlled by the teacher's efforts. Many of these are of the type - “unhelpful things children say to themselves”. 

Self-doubt, self-limiting beliefs, anger, frustration, “what happened yesterday”, and what Robby said about me on Instagram, to name but a few. One of the purposes of meditation is to dissolve things in the box and get a bit closer to the nature of the box itself. 

When you have a direct experience of the un-box-like nature of experience, ideas, concepts, knowledge can flow into awareness from places where they were previously hidden. In other words, the process of creating space within working memory allows more productive thinking to arise. 

When children meditate, they can learn to dissolve unproductive thoughts. It won't happen overnight. Meditation is a discipline that requires an immense amount of patience. Yet if our intention to improve learning is to allow greater attentional resources to be directed to that which we want children to learn, it makes sense to teach children a practice which enables them to recognize and - to a certain extent - reduce those extraneous factors. 

My goal for the next few years is to work on ways to make this possibility available to schools. 

Eventually, children might come to realize there is no box. This is the ultimate goal. Develop the habit of noticing what is in the box, dissolve or let go of items you don't want in there, and begin to appreciate the un-box-like nature of experience itself. However on the road to getting there, and quite quickly, it becomes possible to have a little more say about what and how you pay attention.

When you get to the bottom of the box and realise there really wasn't a box in the first place, all of the "external" things we believe separate us from each other, our identity, our beliefs, our culture, our looks, seem less important. This is self-less-ness. 

The idea that, as you stop identifying so directly with contents of the box, you realize that the space in which the contents appear is in fact universal. We are all pretty much the same. When you realize that the contents - the stuff - and the box - you - you are different versions of the same temporary illusion, compassion, ethical behaviour, and kindness can unfold.