Connect the dots (E)

0:09Do you remember at two o 'clock in the afternoon, watching the giant centrally controlled West clock's clock at the front of the room without a sweep second hand where the minute hand would jump once a minute but it always took too long especially at two o 'clock we were trapped trapped in a system we didn't like just waiting for the minute hand to move hey it's ajay and this is a special archived episode of Akimbo. An entire episode devoted to talking about your questions about last week's episode, Stop Stealing Dreams. Hey Seth, it's Maria. Hey Seth, my name's Kyle. Greetings, Seth. This is Stephen out in Madison, Wisconsin.

1:05Hi Seth, Alicia from Charleston here. Hi Seth, this is Anupam. Hi, this is Caitlin. Hi Seth, warm greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth, My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey, Seth, this is Rex. Hey, Seth. Hi, this is Vasilis from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is... And that completes my question. So my question is related to the Stop Stealing Dreams episode. This year, about 3.3 million students are going to graduate from America's high schools, and it's really important. There are so many people that are involved as stakeholders in education, from politicians to parents to teachers to students, and everybody has thoughts and opinions.

1:48And I'm wondering if it's important to identify and prioritize those audiences or if it's important to just energize and work with people that are going to listen regardless of their position or status or perhaps both simultaneously. So I'm interested in whatever thoughts you might have on that approach. And thank you again for all that you do. What a great place for us to start, Joel. Thank you. One of the reasons that we're stuck, and judging from the extraordinary response I got to last week's episode, we are stuck. And as parents, as teachers, as taxpayers, as students, the frustration continues to rise.

2:33Why? Well, one reason is that we're stuck. And the reason that we're stuck is we don't know how to talk to one another. that what the administrator wants, what the person on the board of regents wants, what the school janitor wants, what the parent wants, what the student wants, they're not the same thing. So it's very difficult to have a conversation about it because it means telling each other the truth about what we want. And so we hesitate. We hesitate to bring up what we are seeking, which makes no sense at all. If you go to the dermatologist because you have a wart on your finger, the dermatologist doesn't get to do knee surgery.

3:15You're there for a specific reason. So the purpose of my rant is to help people begin to have the conversation, to simply ask the question, what is school for? If you work at a teacher's college, say the normal college, you need to be honest about what it is you're seeking to do there. Are you trying to avoid responsibility? Are you trying to maximize the yield? Or are you actually trying to redefine what education is? So I'm going to begin here. In order to make change happen, as I talk about in the new book, as I talk about in my work for the last decade, we must shun the nonbelievers. We need to talk to people who are listening.

4:03We need to find people who are aligned with us first. Find the others. The people who don't get the joke, we can ignore them for now. The hard part is getting clear with each other, with other parents or with other students or with other teachers. Why are we here in the first place? Can we talk about it truthfully and honestly? Can we measure the right things and stop measuring the wrong ones? This is uncomfortable. I am not denying how uncomfortable it is. But that doesn't mean it's not important. Hello, Seth. My name is Carly from Spain. I'm the president of the Parents' Committee in the School of My Children.

4:51And I think a lot about how the school can give better tools to our kids to face their future challenges. What is the first step that a single school can take to begin to change this culture? And I also love when you say, are we asking our kids to collect the dots or to connect dots? My question is how a school can teach how to connect the dots, but at the same time ensuring that the students collect enough dots to pass the test. So here's a great example of what I'm talking about. connecting versus collecting dots. There used to be a huge imperative to be able to collect the dots. It's very difficult to remember what life was like before we had a supercomputer in our pocket.

5:45That's because we've forgotten how to memorize. We've forgotten how to remember. Before Wikipedia, before access to all the information, if the library was closed, you were out of luck. Years and years ago, I created a book called The Information Please Business Almanac. And one of the great coups that we included in that book, which was 800 pages long, was a phone number. We said, if you can't find the answer on these 800 pages of information, here's the phone number for the Hawaii Public Library located in Honolulu. Why did you need that number? Well, the answer is simple. Because if it was 8 o 'clock at night in New York, or 10 o 'clock or 11 o 'clock at night in London, you could still call the Honolulu Public Library, because they were open, and they would answer your question.

6:39That's absurd. It's absurd that we needed to go to those lengths, because now the answer to the question is right there, one click away. We don't need to teach you the answer to the question. We need instead two things, to enroll you in wanting to know the answer to the question, and two, teaching you how to go get it. That is not about collecting dots. Those are the acts of connecting dots. And the people who are happy and successful and influential and highly leveraged are not that because they know more stuff. They are that way because they have access to the information that they need and the desire to go get it.

7:29They also have the insight and intuition to connect disparate streams of information and turn it into a whole new way of thinking. So my answer is, let's just stop teaching kids to collect dots. Let's just stop. Hi, Seth. It's Adam from Perth, Western Australia. Jamie Oliver has spent half his career trying to educate vulnerable people to cook more fresh food for the kids, for their health reasons, And in the corporate world, behavior training and team dynamics make up a huge chunk of time that we spend on training. Obesity, domestic violence, ignorance of our natural environment and poor money habits are leading to incredibly expensive public issues.

8:18And yet, in school, which is the one leveling field we all have access to, they're doing nothing to address any of these problems. Jamie Oliver and enlightened corporate trainers have a whole bunch in common. And one of the things is this. They are trying to do really important work. They are trying to help teach people the right answer. To help them see, for example, that a homemade, nutritious, balanced meal is not only good for your long-term health and cheaper, but brings your family together way more than going to some fast food restaurant yet again. Here's the problem. The problem is not that people don't know this.

9:03The problem is not that people don't know that they should wash their hands before doing surgery or after using the laboratory. The problem is not ignorance. The problem is culture. And that's part of the magic, as you pointed out, of what happens in school. And it's one of the reasons why public school is so important. Because public school is a chance for everyone from the community who's seven years old or ten years old to engage with each other. Not separate, but together. And it's a way for us to begin to plant the seeds of culture. What's missing is not access to information. What's missing is cultural change.

9:46I was in a little village doing work with Water Health International. Water Health International sets up a kiosk in a village, say in India, and sells clean water for a few pennies a gallon. These few pennies save the villager hours of walking to get dirty water. It saves them many dollars in sickness, illness, missing out on what happens when they're not feeling very well. So it's a bargain. And yet, not everyone signs up to pay for this clean water. This clean water, that's a bargain. Why is that? Because it takes a while for the culture to establish that people like us do things like this. So one thing that they did that I thought was fascinating is they got some battery-powered microscope projectors, and they brought them to the local schools, second graders and third graders.

10:45And they said to those kids, go home and bring in some water, the water that you're drinking. Bring it to school tomorrow. And they took that water, and they put it on the slides, and they put the slides on the wall, and they showed kids what was growing in their water. Those kids then went home and talked to their parents. And they said to their parents, hey, mom and dad, did you know that there's all these little horrible creatures swimming in our water? Now, the parents aren't stupid. They know that drinking dirty water is a problem. But all of a sudden, it became a cultural problem, a status problem, a problem of your kid not being proud of what was happening in your home.

11:31That forward ratchet begins to change the culture. And so, even in communities where parents don't have a lot of time, we see that if the cultural dynamic is that the family eats together, if the cultural dynamic is that you don't have a bag of Doritos for dinner, then it starts to shift. So the hard work of being a trainer in a corporation or the hard work of being Jamie Oliver is that drip by drip we are trying to change the culture. And in this case, what we're talking about is changing the culture of school. People like us, when we send kids to school, what do we measure? What do we want? Hey, Seth, I'm Marcel.

12:18I'm from Colombia, but I teach English as a foreign language in France. First of all, I would like to thank you for the work that you do. I love teaching, but I feel trapped in a very traditional system that values academic performance at all costs, conformity, and expects me to be creative in order to make compliance fun. How can my students and I make art and still meet national standards? Is that even possible? I feel they want us to teach students how to fly, but we'll judge them based upon how good they are at swimming. Thanks. Thank you, Marcel, for this and for the work that you do. I hear the pain in your voice because it is a challenge.

12:58How do we meet the national standards? How do we get kids to fly and to swim? Well, the question that we're not asking is, why are these the national standards? Are we measuring these things because they are easy to measure or because they are important? I think standards are hugely essential. In an industry with 3.3 million people in it per year, taught in a largely unsupervised way, if we don't have standards, then we're going to have variables all over the place. We need standards. That's not the question. The question is, why is the standard that you know how to do long division? When did we decide that knowing how to do long division by hand is a good way to show that school was worth it?

13:56Perhaps if enough parents speak up and ask the question, what is school for? We might measure something else. Hi, Seth. This is Ami from the UK. Thank you so much for your thought-provoking podcast. I really enjoyed the last one, Stop Stealing Dreams. In it, you talk about not complying and non-conformity as a way to stimulate our minds, be more creative, and help children connect dots and you know solve the problems of the future there's one thing that you also mentioned about not fitting in as a short-term strategy that doesn't work and I wondered whether that's entirely true because I feel that in order to be completely effective and for people to accept us and knowing where the world is we have to meet people where they are so part of that does mean that you have to fit in to a certain extent you do have to comply to a certain extent because does that not then give you the credibility for people to accept what you're saying because then it's harder to reject what you're saying if you are a little bit like most people whereas if you people can't identify with you at all then they can just reject right off the bat what you're saying.

15:24So I think, you know, and I don't know the answer to this. I think you do have to fit in a bit for people to accept your ideas. And I know how painful that is. For me, especially, I don't like doing it, but do we not need to do that to be effective, to almost create that safe space to then plant the seed of ideas? I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. This is a great point. And of course, we're still talking about culture. What we're talking about is that people need to use intent on purpose, fit in when it helps them make the change they seek to make. that their contribution isn't to be a compliant cog at all times, that being compliant in service of the change you seek to make is how we end up making change happen.

16:22So what we need to do is establish a culture and a standard for kids from an early age that the reason they should fit in is not because we told them to. They should fit in because it works. it works to establish a platform where they can make change happen. Hey Seth, this is Matt from Connecticut. In your last episode, you asked the question, what is school for? And I think on a basic level, it's to get us all on the same page so we can communicate and understand one another. But as a parent of four, how do you suggest we supplement our children's factory worker-style education without spending a fortune on some cutting-edge schools or quitting our jobs to homeschool.

17:10Thanks, Seth. I really enjoy your work. This was the most common question. I got it from a few people, and basically it goes like this. School is broken. Things are paralyzed. We're unable to talk about what school is for, So therefore, I need to homeschool my kids, and I can't afford to. Or maybe I won't be good at it. Well, my take goes like this. I think public school is essential. It's important that we have a common denominator and that we don't leave people behind simply because we can afford a private school or a homeschool situation and others can't. On the other hand, at the same time, sooner or later, all kids are homeschooled.

17:56They're homeschooled for five years before they even show up at public school. They're homeschooled every day from 3 in the afternoon till 11 at night. That's on us. That's on the parents. What standards are we setting? What is the culture like at home? Which is a better afternoon when your kid comes home with a bunch of B's and A's in classes they don't care about, or when your kid comes home with a letter from the teacher who says that your son isn't paying attention in class because he's busy designing mechanical devices in his notebook. Because if you're going to reward your kids for complying slash excelling in the given system, don't be surprised that that's what they set out to do.

18:44There are choices that parents make all the time. They range from enlisting your kid in a team sport that's based on compliance instead of encouraging them to engage in an individual sport that's based on establishing standards and then surpassing them. Or perhaps it's about setting a standard about what gets talked about at the dinner table. What tools are in your kid's hands? Yes, you can afford that$80 tablet from Amazon. Did it end up in your kids' hands from the time they were two, eating chicken figures in a restaurant and watching videos because it's more convenient? How often are the kids in your family challenging the status quo of ideas and having intelligent conversations with you about what they think and why they think it?

19:38How do we deal with failure? How do we deal with challenges? How old should a kid be before she publishes her first poem online? Homeschooling kids in the afternoon, homeschooling kids in the weekend, doesn't mean helping them get better at the test. It certainly doesn't mean sending them to Stanley Kaplan or some other online course so that they can do better on a test. It means when we say people like us do things like this, being really clear about who the people like us are and what the things like this are. If you grew up in the United States in 1955, you might have been in a Leave it to Beaver household.

20:19Dad took his briefcase, disappeared to a job that no one really understood, came home at the end of the day, had a drink, and then everyone watched television. Well, that's what you got taught was normal. if that's not what you're trying to create going forward, then perhaps we need to be significantly more overt in the culture we seek to create at home. And I don't think we have to pull our kids out of school to do it. I think we have the chance to recognize they're in school every time we're with them. Hey Seth, Elena from Alberta, Canada. Your podcast, All Rights Reserved, hit a sore spot. I recently started teaching second-year college students, and I was surprised how important the ABA citation standards have become.

21:10ABA standard is as important now as the quality of reasoning and ideas in student reports. Instructors are expected to police student papers for plagiarism with new apps like Truditin, while students are mastering the skill of paraphrasing the internet resources and textbooks. So my question is, if I use ideas from your book, This is Marketing, properly referenced in class, of course, and the students repeat or paraphrase your ideas in their assignments without proper reference, should I decrease their mark for plagiarizing? Thank you for sharing your ideas generously. This question came in too late for last week's episode, but it's totally relevant for this week's, which is this.

21:54There is a very big difference between wholesale plagiarizing and paraphrasing to connect the dots. I agree that citations are really important in real research, that we must figure out how to create a web of who is referencing who, that this web of hyperlinks between scientific papers, academic papers, social sciences, is essential to create new knowledge going forward. But in high school or college, what we want to teach kids to do mostly is to connect the dots. And if that means paraphrasing one thing after another, I'm totally in favor of it. and using software to stop kids, that's not the point.

22:48That's not how we will get it to work. The point is, can you cogently explain to me in just a few sentences what you believe? What are your assertions based on your research? In your own words, what do you think? We don't teach kids to do that. Too often, we teach them to be cogs in this weird machine that makes unreadable papers that are scored by systems we don't understand. It's another form of compliance. And so I'm ranting here, but I'm ranting for a good reason. Because compliance at scale is at the heart of so much of what we are having our kids do. The SAT is nothing about compliance to a system.

23:36The standard paper we ask a kid to write, compliance to the system. They will never need to write a paper like that again unless they become an English teacher at a second-rate college. What we need them to be able to do is to stand up and in speech or in writing, tell us what they believe and tell us why. That is what we get when we challenge kids to connect the dots. That was fun. Thank you for sharing your questions with me and the audience. and more important, thank you for caring so much about the future of education and what to do about it. Next week, we'll pick up again with questions. I've already got one waiting for me about meetings, but if you'd like to chime in with a question about anything we've covered in the last three seasons, just visit akimbo.link, that's A-K-I-M-B-O dot L-I-N-K and click the appropriate button.