Slow Education

"When God was young
He made the wind and the sun
And since then
It's been a slow education" - D. Berman

I must have given away thousands of pencils at my last job. I taught ESL at a middle school in Lynn, hired a month into the school year- the person I replaced quit after three days. I lasted three months.

But back to the pencils.

I had quite a bit to learn on the job and would spend hours preparing lesson plans, painstakingly going through the curricula, reading about benchmarks to meet the right metrics, making sure I printed out enough copies for my four classes and then no one would have a pencil. I went to the office and got boxes and also got some at CVS and Staples but it would never be enough. My coworker gave me a box filled with maybe a hundred of these tiny pink golf pencils and I somehow ran out of all of those. It was nuts. The thing that everyone tells you and they don't mean it in a flippant way but what everyone tells you is that you should do the best you can. You were given a seemingly impossible task. A job that was already difficult before the pandemic or smartphones or laptops or social media. I honestly have no idea what I was thinking when I decided to take the job. When I explain it to people they are all polite but they must also think I was crazy for taking it in the first place and perhaps I was. But when I accepted it I was in something of a panic because I had mistakenly thought another job had been offered when it hadn't. So I was scrambling and this job teaching ESL came up and I was offered the job on the spot and accepted. The salary was pretty good and it came with nice benefits and I told myself I enjoyed a challenge.

On most days I would get up before 6, before the sun, get onto 93 and sometimes while waiting in the drive-thru at Dunkins I would think back to my first teaching job on a 70 acre farm in southern Vermont. That commute ran parallel to the West River and people came from all over (especially in the fall) to witness the vibrant landscape- the winding roads and riverbeds and birds. Driving to work was a thing of beauty most mornings, when the weather wasn't brutal (I owned a 1996 Camry with more than 100,000 miles when I first lived there, later I bought a Subaru). Many years before I lived there there had been a train that traveled down the same route. The train ran for 36 miles from Brattleboro to South Londonderry and was notorious for breaking down. By the time I lived there it had been turned into a bike trail.

It was in that picturesque surrounding where I worked as a para-educator at a K-12 school for kids with behavioral problems, the ones that proved too much of a handful for the public school system. Most of these students were victims of poverty, like their parents and their grandparents. But in Vermont, where there are a lot fewer people and you are surrounded by nature, there is a vast wilderness to explore. Kids get outside all the time, swimming, hiking, catching fish, biking, and running around the woods. For kids in Lynn there is almost nothing resembling the natural world. They live in apartments in crowded neighborhoods and stare at digital screens for 12 hours a day and go to school in an ancient building.

One of my main tasks when I taught in Lynn became policing technology, knowing full well that most people these days are addicted to their phones. My old students never stood a chance. The most sophisticated computer scientists from MIT and Stanford have engineered these devices to keep everyone hooked through algorithms and the endless scroll-what do we expect from a 12 year old who just got here from Guatemala?

I have always been a slow adopter when it comes to technology and in my last job it totally backfired. There were so many platforms to learn. At the last professional development meeting I attended we were introduced to yet another new platform to automate standardized testing. I was confused from the very beginning and I knew (because we were told explicitly) that administering these evaluations in the correct way was crucial. It seems that we are heading down the path of more tests, more automation and my heart goes out to these students.

Though I did not last long I do not consider my last job a total failure. It is good to be humbled in life, especially if it is in pursuit of something important. Many people will tell you how much they admire teachers and how important the work is but also that they would never consider it as a career. I get it. One of the things I most admire about children is their honesty, so if there is something you're self conscious about they will come right out and say it. This is especially true for younger children.

I never thought I would end up as a teacher when I was in school. Last summer I went to my friend Henry's wedding four hours north in a beautiful part of Maine. When he was introducing me to one of his uncles he told him that yes I was indeed a teacher now but that I had been kind of a knucklehead back when he knew me in middle school. We gave each other a knowing smile.

He was right of course.

I always wanted to do well but never got very good grades though I excelled in extra curriculars like the student newspaper. When I was in college and the writing was on the wall for print journalism my professor asked us what we wanted to do I was one of only two students to say fuck it, we want to write for newspapers! We don't care! Fuck social media, it's bullshit and will never last.

Haha!

And I did write for newspapers for a stretch. One of the papers I freelanced for was established in 1902 and had an office on what was once called Newspaper Row downtown but it no longer exists. Years ago it was purchased by the ex-husband of Sumner Redstone's daughter (Viacomm, CBS) who hired a highly qualified former Boston Globe editor. That guy hired me as a freelancer and was a great editor but they paid next to nothing, along with the handful of other papers I was freelancing for so I began looking for something else.

The last job I had as a salaried professional writer ran the following classified ad on Craigslist: Digital Newsroom Seeks Online Journalists or something like that. It was a massive bait and switch and turned out to be a job writing copy using SEO, which is a way of tricking an algorithm into getting you better placement on a search engine. It was a pretty good job in retrospect and I worked with many smart and wonderful writers but I was devastated when I found out what I would actually be doing.

The sad reality is that I long for those days when there were places that would pay you a decent amount to write. Everything you see now has to do with feeding information into an AI machine. Several months ago when I was looking for work I was hired by a woman to write for her website. She did something with mortgages I did not really understand but kept insisting that I use ChatGPT and I would continually explain to her how that defeated the whole purpose of hiring a human writer and how the whole notion was a bit demeaning but we got nowhere.

Ultimately what she wanted was someone who could generate revenue by gaming an algorithm. It was just another version of the job I had for almost three years writing copy for the SEO company. They don't give a shit about what you are actually writing, it is all just a means to an end. And it's a big reason why AI has been so successful. It was designed by people who are only looking for an end product.

But the whole point of writing itself is to learn critical thinking. Feeding prompts into a machine is creating a whole generation conditioned for learned helplessness. When I had students write papers comparing Rome's form of government with the Greeks is it because I think this topic is crucial to know about? Not really. The point is to develop critical thinking skills. If you have a thesis then you need to give me evidence to support it. This is challenging at first and takes time to learn but human beings are capable of it and have been doing it for a long time. One question to ask is who benefits from this? A whole population that relies on machines to make decisions is a dream come true if the whole point is compliance.

A couple of years ago I attended a professional development conference where the speaker was a tech industry representative. She told a crowded room of teachers that in the future students would no longer need to learn how to write or even read difficult things because machines would do all that. The main thing to teach the students- according to this woman who was paid to push the technology-is how to ask computers the right queries. Only one person raised her hand to express concern and I felt like saying something too but kept quiet.

One of my favorite students at my last job was a 7th grader who seemed to hate me at first. On my first or second day I walked up to his desk and warned him he would not be getting credit for the assignment. He was slouched, looked at me with pure disdain and said "Man, who gives a fuck?! Where you from?". He had a certain swagger I admired and I had worked with some kids like him before. I was determined to win him over and by the time I left we had an understanding.

He worked a lot for his cousin's landscaping company and told me he liked money but didn't like school. Eventually he started doing my assignments all the time and quickly, I was encouraged and could tell he was bright. One day I created an assignment online that asked the students to respond in complete sentences and he proudly walked up to my desk to show me what a great job he had done. It was indeed impressive, certainly for someone with his limited ability. In fact it was a bit too impressive. It was painfully obvious he had used ChatGPT or something like it. I had to explain to him that it was better for him to leave it blank and ask for my help instead of trying to get away with cheating. And then I began questioning how long he had been using it for, if I had been duped the whole time and felt defeated. But who could blame him? Everywhere you turn these tech giants are pushing it in our faces, as if it's the solution to every imaginable problem. But they are missing the point. When you come to rely on machines to do everything for you it makes you subservient. It is learned helplessness. Why learn to do anything if a machine can do it for you, right?

When I was in high school I knew a kid-also named David-who was very smart but extremely awkward and off putting. Naturally he was good with computers and went on to work for Google soon after graduating college. I remember we were at someone's house playing poker and David found a large booklet of CDs owned by the kid who was hosting the game. He asked the kid, who had spent years and years collecting this music-going to different record stores or shows or wherever-if he could pay him $20 to copy all of his music onto his computer. And for me that has always been representative of how a certain segment- the same people telling us we can have machines do everything - tend to think. It's all just a means to an end, the experience itself doesn't matter- these are the people who worship metrics.

I often wonder how I would feel going to school in an era that is so heavily focused on technology. We barely used computers compared to kids these days and now thanks to the pandemic laptops in classrooms are here to stay. But I wonder what I would have done because to this day I have issues using it. My self-diagnosed learning disability with technology may or may not be real but the point is I don't like to be on screens when I don't have to be. We are "dancing animals" as Kurt Vonnegut once wrote, I don't think human beings as a species were ever meant to become the humans portrayed in the film Wall*e. But that's where all the money is going. They are spending billions to tell us to leave it up to the machines, don't worry about it. The machines know better.

The best job I ever had in teaching was as an outdoor educator. I've written about it before in other blog posts but it paid almost nothing and I had to live with a lot of people who liked to party too much. But the job itself was the best. It was wandering around the woods, exploring trails and bogs. I made up my own courses and adapted others. I got middle school boys to sit under trees silently and write poetry. We built fires and outdoor shelters and I retold Native American folk tales. We had sing alongs at night and most importantly, it was all outside.

It's been several years since I've published anything. I don't know why that is but it happens. I am still a writer in my heart and most of my heroes are writers. Anyway, this is officially my re-entry back into the world of publishing my blog and there will be a podcast- details to follow.

If you are interested in being on my podcast (which is focused on local arts and culture) email me: DaveSHurwitz@gmail.com