Episode 331: Erik Parsons

Dr. Fonz Mendoza: 0:30

Hello everybody and welcome to another great episode of my EdTech Life. Thank you so much for joining me on this wonderful day and, wherever it is that you're joining us from around the world, thank you, as always, for your support. We appreciate all the likes, the shares, the follows. Thank you so much for the feedback and making these wonderful connections. It's been wonderful to make many new friends across all social media. So thank you for engaging with this content because, as you know and I always tell you, we do what we do for you to bring you some great conversations, great perspectives and a lot of knowledge to help us continue to grow within our space and continue to learn.

For sure, and I'm really excited because I am welcoming back a guest that I have had. It's been a couple of years since he's been on the show, so I'm really excited and a lot has changed. But I would love to welcome to the show Eric Parsons, the PH dad to the show. So I'm really excited because we're going to have a wonderful conversation, just a lot about education, education theory. We're going to be talking about technology. We're going to be talking all sorts of wonderful stuff. So if you're tuning in, you're definitely tuning in to a wonderful show. So, eric, how are you doing today?

Great. It's a little warm and muggy outside, which I live in Chicago, so I can have cool weather and that's not happening right now. But that's OK, it'll. It'll come back, hopefully Going to soldier on, but it's not too bad it's. We had a little bit of a heat wave a little back, but yeah.

Yeah, don't even worry about it. I live in Texas, I live in the southernmost part of Texas, so muggy it's. It's really like we have two seasons. It's like hot and cool because it doesn't really get that cold down here, so it's always just either um brown and brown. We don't see seasons because our grass is always brown all year long. But anyway, I can definitely understand and I can definitely relate to that mugginess and all that good stuff well I'm excited, eric, because I know from the last time that you were on the show.

You know you talk a lot about ed research and one of the things that I do is I followed you on TikTok and, of course, you going through your dissertation and writing your dissertation and me also doing the same thing. Obviously, there's definitely some overlap there and the content and I was like, well, this is amazing. So now you know, a couple of years later, we're back on the show. I know we were just changing a little bit of the name. You know now it's the PH Dad, but the content is the same and we're going through those things. But now, of course, since 2022, a lot has changed technology. Obviously, you know classroom instruction. We're going to get into that. We're going to talk a little bit about ed tech and all those great things. But before we dive in for our audience members who may not be familiar with your content just yet and, by the way, I highly recommend you do follow Eric on TikTok and all socials for ed research but give us a little brief introduction and what your context is within the education space.

Yeah, that has a lot to do with sort of the name change as Eric the PhD, which was partly when TikTok was going down you know it was going to get closed and all that. I wanted to branch out to other spaces like YouTube and Instagram and threads and blue sky and all that stuff. And I had already kind of been using as a online moniker the pH dad or pH dad, because I have kids and I'm working on my I'm currently working on my dissertation. Last time I was in coursework, the last time we talked and in a lot of what was driving me to do stuff, post stuff was kind of going beyond just like ed research and more into like what it is to live as a parent, as a researcher, as you know, as a teacher and all of these things, and so that kind of brought everything together. So a lot of my content is it varies a lot Every day.

Yesterday I put up just a very silly post about why it's fun to have a handlebar mustache. Go check that one out. It's about 14 seconds. I promise you it's fun. And like, a couple days ago I did a bunch of jokes that my kid wrote, you know, posted a hey, two years ago I did this post about, or three years ago I did this post about Betsy DeVos and why the attacks on the Department of Education are really scary. This was three years ago and the idea of people getting into school boards specifically for the purpose of undermining public education and pushing forward the privatization of public spaces, you know. So, yeah, and you know, and I'll throw up research. I've got another post probably going up like today or so.

That's just a quick thing about how school lunches, the research around school lunches, is that if we make them universal, we know for a fact that students' learning improves and that internal school culture improves and that malnutrition decreases for the cost of feeding children. If it's universal, then you get rid of a lot of the stigma of who's on free lunch, who's on reduced lunch, who's paying for their lunch, who's bringing lunch from home, etc. Which I will tell you as a kid who dealt with food insecurity and poverty, that sucks. So, yeah, that's that's, that's a range of the things just off the top of my head. So, yeah, that's that's, that's a range of the things just off the top of my head.

And I think the biggest thing that I really love and I'd love to invite people to do is I love responding to comments and to questions that come in comments, comments and requests. Really, that's what drives me to do stuff. I get very excited when somebody is like, well, what do you think about this? Or what? I read this thing, and? But don't you, you know, and even if you disagree, please, I love the disagreement, I love to complicate things, so please bring it.

I love it. And you're absolutely right, eric does a phenomenal job. As you see his post. He's either posting something and then of course he'll get a comment and he always replies and it's really good natured back and forth and it's learning and that's the best part about it just having that discourse, which is something that I think is so important even in classrooms to be able to have classroom discussions for learning process and everything. But we'll get into that a little bit more. But, eric, I want to dive in because I know we're going to be covering just a little wide array of topics but to kind of try to interweave them together. Little wide array of topics, but they kind of try to interweave them together and I kind of want to start a little bit about talking a lot or talking a little about developmentalism and behaviorism. So I want first, before we get into that, just if you can help me and our listeners get a tight understanding about the difference of developmentalism and behaviorism so we can kind of get into the context of this conversation.

Yeah, so these are two terms that I use. I actually push hard against bifurcation, the idea that things are always one way or the other, but generally I find that there are areas where it's like when there are things that are distinctly different in terms of why you do them and therefore what the impetus and purpose of them is. And to clarify, like, I think, the one that behaviorism if you've ever heard of behavioral therapy, if you hear about behavior treatment plans, you know all these sort of behavior adjustment things, behavior charts, all of these things, the idea of we're going to solicit and get students to behave in the ways that we see are what we believe educational and productive, and I think capital B productive, because I think that's one of the biggest things is there's this expectation of we have to get students to produce work by doing X, y and Z. So it's very much. You know, the like, do it the way I told you, because this is the way to do it. And then it's also, you need to behave in these ways in order to get along in my class. You know, and, and, and, so that's, you know. Behaviorism will always be there, the, the. You know what Skinner found with the ideas of, like you know, reinforcement and those rules and positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, all of these things around those mechanisms are genuinely hardwired into us. But we have to think about how and why we are purposes in manipulating those mechanisms right Around, soliciting certain behaviors from people right, are we soliciting a behavior because it's genuinely beneficial to the individual or are we soliciting a behavior because it matches an expectation of what we want to see from an individual or a group, etc. Like classroom management? Now, developmentalism follows along, kind of comes from.

My view comes primarily from Vygotskyan approaches to education and learning. And Vygotsky says that all learning is social and that the primary mechanism of learning is through interaction and play. And through, the primary mechanism of learning is through interaction and play and through the imaginative process. And the idea that we're always going from a place of uncertainty to better knowledge, understanding, Right, and a lot of people keep hearing this zone of proximal development Right, and this is where this comes from. Is this idea of learning only have? Learning best happens when you are in the place where you have what you need to move forward, but can't just move forward without someone there in some way to assist you, the what we call the more knowledgeable, other right. So we have to find somebody who finds something, or something that provides us with more information than we currently have in order to pursue something we know.

Anyway, developmentalism also sees the individual as fully idiosyncratic. Your learning, fonz, is different than my learning and my experience. There's literally no way for us both to have the exact same understanding of something. We can come to agreement absolutely, and we only do that through speech, right, but we understand that every single person's actual learning, actual development, is their own right and, more importantly, that the learning belongs to them, right. So who's doing the work?

Okay, well, why are they doing the work? Is it for their learning or is it for them to perform in a certain way? And it's not that both of those things are. Those things are not entirely bad, but one of the things that happens, though, is we strongly externalize the process of learning when it becomes about repeat after me or do this? Show me now that you can do this, as opposed to a view of learning that it's fundamentally about, like your personal experience and the idea that, like you, are the very nature of development, the nature of becoming right, is based on this idea that you are always learning and development never, ever stops. Right, because learning never stops, and with that in mind, with it being socially mediated, that learning becomes deeply about connection with self and connection with others.

And from a developmentalist standpoint, that means that we're also looking at things as highly collaborative. Right, because we learn with and not just because. And so this is where I put myself very much on the developmentalist end of the world, because I thoroughly believe in the need to see every individual as having absolute value, basic human value and a deserved basic human agency. Right, meaning some sense of self-control, self-purpose, sense of the ability to make choices. Right, agency means having the ability to make choices. It's what we often talk about when we talk about freedom. Right, and my problem with the way in which we currently structure most of our curriculum is that it is inherently behaviorist. It is about managing what students do and so what it then becomes. It's about making kids comply over, collaborating with them to actually learn.

I love it. No, no, no. And this really what you explained is you know and I guess I just want to add to this coming into education from the outside world, you know, coming in from marketing and advertisement, learning a lot, marketing and sales and customer service and all of that, and then coming into education and seeing to me, you know treating it kind of as a business and understanding that not every student is going to learn the same way. And going back to a little bit about what you said, that every student or every participant in the learning has value and of course, at the end of the day, my goal is I want to sell them on the subject, but at the same time, I know that not every student is going to learn the exact same way. And so, going back to what you're saying, as far as behaviorism, one of the things that has really shocked me and it still shocks me to this day.

And I know I'm in education and I know I'm in a certain role where I see things, but I always see things different and I always feel like an outsider. Know, I'm in a certain role where I see things, but I always see things different and I always feel like an outsider, because I'm thinking to myself this should be more social. But, like you said, the focus more is on behavior. This is the behavior you need to behave because not because it benefits you, but because I, as a teacher, get the benefit of just going through my lessons and uninterrupted, and I don't have to worry about you at all whatsoever. So if there's an issue and things aren't going the way that I want them to do, then I'm going to put you on a behavior plan, because these are the best behaviors for you to be able to be successful. Well, is that? Is that? To me, it just seems more like you're pushing more rules on the student just so they can be successful in your class, but really it's just that behavior.

And so one of the things that I wanted to add to that is, in my experience, is coming into the classroom and I don't know if you've heard this before, maybe from other teachers or educators, but there was always. You know, if we work in a pod, you know there was three teachers, including myself, so it was actually all three of us. So it was weird that they would always say like, oh my gosh, mr Mendoza, man, this student is just, you know, he is off the walls, he is doing this, he is doing that, he can't sit, still, he, you know, do you have those problems in your class? I'm like, no, actually I don't. I don't no-transcript the fact that my class was very much social, where there was a lot of interaction, a lot of discourse, I found that I had very little behavior issues. So, in that sense, you know, being able to give them that agency, being able to allow them to speak, to talk and say, hey, mr Mendoza, you know what? Like I'm really not understanding this. Can you know, either try it a different way, or then, all of a sudden, I'd have a student that's like, hey, don't worry, let me help you. Like this is the way I learned it and explained it in their own way. I'm just thinking to myself this is, I don't know.

Sometimes I feel that we overcomplicate the classroom and it goes back to what you said. It's like this is the way we've always done it. And if you see, this is the way we've always done, it leads to your frustration and leads to the students' frustration. So isn't it about time we kind of think about this a little? And so I was recently started reading a book that's called Free to Learn, where it talks about recess and how students go out and how they learn and they have fun and they're able to cope and build communication, collaboration skills, critical thinking skills, because they have that time to play discourse. They're doing all of those things and now it's like no more recess, you can't have recess. So it's like what are we doing?

From a developmentalist standpoint it is. So it is completely backwards, right, because we take the thing that is most natural to human experience, which is learning through interaction and play, and we start to say, well, now you have to get serious about learning which the thing is is play is serious, because play is important, right? It's why you see kids get into so much discourse and you know, like about like, well, we're gonna play it this way. I don't want to play this way and this, that, that and the other Giving them. You know, when they have that agency, they will discover that they would rather play than argue. It doesn't seem like it, but it's true. They actually would rather play than sitting around and argue, because if they're sitting around arguing then they're not playing. So it becomes everybody's responsibility to create the space of developing the activity that's happening now and that everybody is a participant, because they all want to move forward together. Is that easy? No, is that simple? No? Will there inevitably be interactions and situations that are informed by lots of things from outside of that that will hamper and cause complications and conflict and problems? Yes, but does that mean we shouldn't promote that process of learning how to interact and work together towards creating something, and I love that you mentioned that, because at the foundation of my dissertation research I'm working around the interaction of improvisational theater and educational theory and curriculum.

What a lot of people in the United States well, almost nobody in the United States knows is that what we think of as improvisation in this country, in the US, is built off of the work of Viola Spolin, who literally wrote the book Improvisation for the Theater, right. Well, she developed all the games, all of her process, her entire philosophy of improvisation, which is actually a philosophy of learning, at Hull House, which was a social settlement project on the south side of Chicago, which was the epicenter of much of the progressive education movement, meaning, and particularly the democratic progressive education movement started by Jane Addams. Well, there, as a young person I think she was like 18 initially she worked with Neva Boyd, who is among the early social workers, and Neva Boyd was one of the big proponents of playgrounds, the idea that there should be spaces set aside specifically for children to play, at the beginning of the 20th century, and she also wrote a book capturing all of the children's games that she could find, actually recording. These are the games that children play and when you go through there you see so many of the same sort of things that you just learned as a kid because kids were playing them. You know, like without anybody going.

Well, here's how you play the game. They teach each other. You know it's. You know the kids who are in fifth grade one year then teach the fourth graders the game they played last year and you know forever and ever, a hundred years later, they're all still playing some of the same games. But this comes back to this idea that at the foundation of the progressive education movement, which is also developmentalist in that the idea of progression is you come in with this amount of experience, you come in with these educative experiences, things that you've held on to and reviewed and gone yeah, I want to remember that that's important. And then you have another experience and you're building upon that. You are progressing forward, much in the way that Vygotsky and others would say that you're developing throughout life. So, yeah, yeah, and so a lot of what you're talking about really really just resonates with all of that.

Yeah, and you know, and that's something now that I want to ask you because, as you know, you know, after, even slightly before COVID, but after COVID I mean it's just screen time like crazy. You know, it's like it just seems. Now it's it's students are there's a Chromebook open or some kind of device open at all times during at the desk for all subjects, like all day long, and I just feel like sometimes it's like, well, you know, it's like like it is, you know, as the learning engineers or teachers that we are, I mean, I understand you know there is that teaching component, but does everything have to be done on screen? So I want to ask you, you know, if you can paint me a picture of what we're just talking about. What does developmentalism look like and feel like in a tech rich classroom and what might be some of the things that students are doing differently?

So when this is a thing like, it requires a lot of it requires a lot of work to rewrite what is what we call the hidden curriculum of the like. Do things in these ways right, such that we give ownership over the experience of being in the classroom to the student, right, they are not in my class, they are in class with me. That is an important distinction, and so what that means is when I come to a student working the way that I do, who's on a computer or device of any sort and we have a bit of content that we're engaged in, right, that we've all agreed. Today we're looking at World War, I, you know whatever the topic is, I will come to them and I will say is this technology actually helping you better understand what we're on about here? Is the way that you're using this technology actually helping you gain a better understanding and develop your sense of the concepts here? Is the way that you are using and interacting with technology assistive to our collective goals and to your goals? Hopefully, as a learner.

You're in here because I don't want I tell students all the time I'm like, if you're just doing something because I said so, that's actually a waste of your time and mine, because I want you to actually be engaged in learning, right, and so the you know it's a lot of the relationship with the technology is kind of fraught, because it's you're only going to use technology in this way that I tell you now and that at no point will you ever work in the other way.

And of course, especially you know, I work primarily with high schoolers who are naturally rebellious, so of course it's going to be like well, whenever I can find a game that's like rebellious, so of course it's going to be like well, whenever I can find a game that's like you know, not that I can get through the school firewall, then that's what I'm going to do to just be able to say I have some control over my life, even for two minutes, right. But when we frame it in this, like this is your time in your space to do your work, and I'm here to help you to do your work, and I'm here to help you, well, as a teacher, I am there to occasionally be the more knowledgeable other. I cannot always be the more knowledgeable other because I can't be in your head. So, like when I ask you, as my student funds, if I come up to you and I say is the program you know, is the thing that you're doing now? Is this helpful to you for what we are studying in this class?

I don't know.

Okay, well then let's figure that out. You know, off-brand, browser-based Minecraft is actually going to help you get an understanding of what the causalities of history are, right? So how can we do that Like, is there anything on this device that's going to help you with that? Right now, are you able to use that device in a way that's going to be helpful? Because that's the other thing. Sometimes that's literally not the case. You know, and that's where we kind of step into the. We provide structure. Right, it's not that we don't have rules, but we provide structure in the form of saying you know, being able to provide evidence and say well, when I came by earlier, you were doing, you were watching YouTube shorts and none of those seem to be anything about what we're studying. I bet there's some that do that are. So if you're going to do that, I need you to. Can you show me five that actually inform this? And can you find, can you cross-reference, some resources for that? And that's harder usually than what we've already asked them to do. So they got to go. Oh wait, yes, maybe I'll just do it the other way, you know, but like it has to me, it is so important that it become about.

How are you, the individual, this student, interacting with the technology? And is that technology assistive or is it I don't want to even just say distracting, but it serving a you know, from a behavior standpoint a maladaptive purpose, right? Is it serving a place that it is me, because we do things to meet needs. This is where we get to be anger, is it right? It's not like we're throwing out the baby with the bathwater. We do things to, to get things to, to see. So a lot of times the way kids interact with screens and stuff, a lot of that is, like, you know, them trying to deal with the world and it's a way of controlling stimulus for them, and that isn't always the best way to do that, but if it's the way that they know, then that's what they're going to go with, right? That sort of self-soothing kind of aspect, yeah.

I was going to just add, going along with what you said, especially when you're putting in the tech, I know oftentimes, going back to the behaviorism in the sense of you know, there are certain programs it's like, oh, you got to do 30 minutes per day per week per subject and all this other stuff, and then so it just becomes like do, click, repeat and reward. You know, just because you did your, you know 90 problems or 90 additional problems for practice. So you get your little certificate there that's digital and so it still goes, goes along, I understand, with supplementing that learning, but is it truly the way that the student is needing to learn? Because oftentimes I see it that students will just go in, they just click, click, click, click. They get their time in, they do the problems that they need to do and there really is no teacher in the loop in the sense of hey, let me go in and see are, are there any issues, are there any troubles? And it's usually just so automated where it's almost like there's no teacher overseeing or overseeing, like, hey, do I need to stop here and say let's go ahead and talk as a class and do a reteach or maybe a specific group, because it just seems like we're moving so fast that you feel and I get it, you know, with teachers feeling overwhelmed, it's like well, the program will do it and if that's what they got, that's what they got. But I feel like kind of what you said is like hey, is this really helping you? And if it's not, like maybe let's see if we can figure out a different way. I love what you said, you know, especially if they're just like into YouTube and stuff like that, it's like hey, all right, let's see. You want to research this, let's go ahead and let's do research this way. But I need these citations, I need this rubric, I need this. And, mind you, this was something that I was doing, you know. This will be probably maybe like eight, nine, ten, maybe eleven years ago, when I was still in the classroom and I was doing it with fifth graders where I never gave tests. I never gave tests.

I would be there, as a, like my friend Kevin Doherty calls, says, learning engineer, you know, being in the front sort of engineering, that initial teach and saying, ok, guys, here is what I expect at the end. Teach and saying, okay, guys, here is what I expect at the end. And now I get to see the progress because we know that there's going to be a product at the end, and usually it's the teachers. It's like here's the product, okay, but what was the process? We don't focus on that process and here, in seeing them work together in groups or individually with that expectation of this, is this this is what I need.

I like the kids were, they were on it and I got to see so many different ways of thinking. I got to learn new things that I got to share with my other students in the other classes, and when I would introduce something, especially tech related uh, maybe I would just teach them the little that I knew, they went off and then after that they would say, oh, mr Mendoza, look what I learned. So when they taught me that by the end of the day I look like an expert because I already knew how to troubleshoot everything for the other students, so kind of, and that's the way that it worked for me. But I wanted what I loved about it is that they felt they had control over their learning, which they really did.

I just said here's my expectation at the end, but for me, visibly being able to see the process, I can initially go back right away and say, okay, hey, let's talk about this. Is this correct? What are your thoughts on this? Could we add this? Might we remove this and be able to do that, so that by the time they got the finished product, it's like they already knew that they were going to do well, but the learning took place. Socially, yes, and that's something that I loved about that, you know, and so I see that the tech being beneficial in that sense where it it almost takes not necessarily center stage, but when the learning takes center stage and the tech falls, you know, kind of on the side as a supplement, then I think that that's a really sweet spot there, where it's not just the screen in front 30 problems, 30 minutes per day, per subject, do click, you know, finish, reward and then do the same thing and just drone on through, and I think that that's something that yeah, no, you're absolutely on point, and it's.

I have so many different things that I want to touch on, but I want to be succinct.

I think what you're really pointing at is, and that I think we're both very much in the same place. Lot of the ed tech that's being produced is there, and this goes back before even the Internet. There has been this belief that somehow you can build a teacherless curriculum Right, in which is what any that any Yahoo off the street. You can hand them this stuff and say present these things from the students and make them do it and they will succeed Right. And what happens then is students end up very much, and I know we're getting to this transactionalism Right, which I think is a big problem within tech stuff that is getting reinforced a lot. But and I want to get to that remind me to come to that. But the aspect, one of the biggest things I see, especially when we talk about like using, like you were saying, these programs where it's like sit down. Do these number of problems show me that you've done this section where it's like sit down? Do these number of problems show me that you've done this section right? Because of the way that we do so much by the, you know the way in which we interact with students, in which, more often than not, what they're doing is about getting our approval as opposed to our input, and those two things are very different. Right, we can, as people who have more experience in this and have more knowledge in these areas that we're focusing on, we can absolutely provide critique.

Like you were saying, you can add leading questions, be like oh, how are you thinking about that? What's going on there and what have you? But the problem is is usually it's us going. That was right, that was wrong. That was right, that was wrong. Here's how you were supposed to do it. Go back and bring it back to me after you've done it the way I told you. That is really antithetical to internalizing a sense of learning and the learning process. Like to make it your own, because it then becomes about satisfying somebody else. Well, if all you're doing is trying to satisfy somebody else, are you going to be asking higher order questions? Are you going to be engaged in higher order thinking in which you're going to come to the teacher going? So I just did this thing within the program and it told me this. But it's doing this and I'm having a hard time figuring out where I'm going off. That's what you want students to do. That's a great interaction with the technology. That's a way to like make it so this student can be at their place that they're doing in math and the same student in the same room can be working at the level that they're ready for and doing. But they need to be able to come to the teacher and collaborate with them.

And and that biggest thing to me that I'm always telling the high school students about is, like when you get to college, one of the greatest superpowers you can have is coming to class and being able to ask good questions to clarify things you don't understand. So you have to be able to figure out what is the thing that I think I'm missing? What is this area, as opposed to most often coming and going, I don't get it. What don't you get the thing you assigned? Okay, can you just show me again what's the right answer? That's what they want. They want to know what the right answer is and they're not necessarily interested in the process which you were talking about, which brings me back to improvisation as an educational format, because it's actually a philosophy of education, the way that Viola Spolin wrote it, which I guess I didn't get to.

Viola Spolin wrote the book on improvisation in the United States. Her son, paul Sills, started Second City as well as a couple other companies. So like the American tradition of improvisation very much, she is the mother of American improvisation. Now there are other variations elsewhere, but in this case you have somebody who's explicitly talking about in her book about improvisation for the theater quote.

As teachers, we must constantly scourge authoritarianism from ourselves. That is, that is not like oh, this is just a theater thing. That is an understanding of like how we engage with learning and improvisation requires us to be collaborative. And what's important and I think a lot of people think of it as like pulling something out of your butt, and that's not it. The difference is especially from behaviorist or, you know, this sort of like capitalist construct, structuralist view. I guess I don't know, I'm supposed to be able to come up with epistemology, all these fancy words, but in the primary traditional system there is the sense that the goal is to teach a teacher and students how to do things Right. Well, that's the do this. You get this right, right in she when she writes, and what we talk about with improvisation.

You don't know how you're going to do anything. What you do know is. You know who is there, you know what is going to happen. What is the, what's the? Not what is going to happen, but what, what is going, what it is, what it, what is it about? You know what are we on about, and then where are we? And that is a structure. And with that also comes how long? How long are we going to do this? Right, but what you then do with your partners is you validate each other's things that they bring in, meaning that you know, fonz, you're going to contribute what you know or what you think you know, and then I'm going to respond to that with oh, that is what you think you know, that is what you know.

I have a different perspective that says maybe we need to look at this a little differently.

Now let's problem solve together and the how of the learning, the how of creating the project, we don't know that until that happens, it becomes the process, becomes the thing. So, yeah, we're going to do a project, and I would even argue that, like we don't even know precisely what we're going to get at the end, we shouldn't, because if we did, where would be the learning? Learning, because the whole point of learning is going from uncertainty or not knowing something, a big like oh I don't understand this, to understanding something that I didn't understand before and like so where's the eureka? Where's the discovery? Discovery matters, and so if the product that we get at the end is exactly what we anticipated, then that, really that, indicates to me personally that I have failed as a teacher, because what it means is they're only doing the, they're just trying to reproduce the example I gave them, um, and that isn't necessarily learning, because what that is is them going. I was shown how to do this. I'm going to do the thing I was told.

No, I totally get that. And so, going back to that, I just kind of want to tie that in because it just doesn't happen and I just want to let everybody listening to our show that it just doesn't happen. K-12 space. But I'm just going to share an example doing doctoral coursework and going into a professor who's fabulous, she loves, she always changed things up and everything. So this one semester she's like okay, guys, here's your learning, this is what you're going to do. You guys get a choice board so you have to complete six contact hours of this and six contact hours of this. But here's your choices. There you go and the look on the faces of my classmates deer in headlights, because they've, they were so used to show me an example of that product that you want. And I'm just going to mimic that same thing just with my own writing, and this is what we're talking about in high school.

So it's, they're programmed from such a young age that when they do get into that college setting and you do have a professor that says, hey, you've got a choice in voice in the way that you want to learn. As long as you do meet this, these six hours and this criteria, you're good. But it's like they didn't know where to start and for me, coming in from like one of my things that I always say is improvise, adapt and overcome. So I, without even doing or under knowing before you know about improvisation and education, it just became second nature and I was like, okay, this is easy. And actually I even raised up my hand and hey, can I do a podcast, like for one of these? And they're like sure, I was like all right, cool. And you know, you're not afraid to ask those questions because it's a matter of getting to that learning and knowing that. Hey, you know, we're each going to come to the end with different ways of knowledge because of our contact hours and the way we do things.

And I thought that that was fabulous. But going back to that, you're right, where students will raise their hands and, well, I don't get it. Well, can you show me again? And they're just really just trying to get to that finished product because they just want to please you by giving you the right answer, to show you like, hey, I will at least make you think that they understood. But really, in reality, they just say I just want to please my teacher, because I just want to make sure that we're good and then that way we can move on to the next stuff and I'm not singled out anymore.

So yeah, well, because you're going to pay them in the form of a grade.

And the thing is and this is really hard and I talk to students about this a lot.

It's like I tell them like grades are a problem, you need to do things, you need to find a way to do things for you and not for the grade. And they go yes, but grades matter. I'm like yes, grades absolutely matter, you know. So we have to find this space where we can recognize that grades matter, while also understanding that the grades are supposed to reflect a certain amount of engagement and understanding. And it's like if you do this for you and you really make the effort to understand and engage with it to the best of your ability, the grades will come and, honestly, a hard-earned B will always feel better than an easy A and, especially, it will feel even better than anA. Where you're like I have no idea what I learned and what I was supposed to learn in that class. I just did the things. And this is where we get to the transactionalism. Right, it's students are. There's this expectation. We mostly work with the stick, with an idea of this long term carrot for students who don't really think long term. So the long-term carrot is one day when you do all the things and you go to college, you get a degree and all this, you're going to go out in the world, you're going to be able to get a good job, you're going to not have to starve and have a roof over your head, because, of course, we have to weaponize poverty. And the thing is is like I think this is a big part of the problem with classroom behavior right now is that kids are looking at that and going, oh, that's a lot, oh, it's like so if I do everything you tell me, I will be successful and I will be able to have good relationships, I'll have a family or be able to be with the people I want and I'll have a stable living situation with food on the table on a daily basis. And, of course, when you go well, that's not true, because it really isn't these days. You know, especially for a lot of the millennials out there they came into when they started coming into the workforce in 2008, in the middle of a giant recession. You know when there just aren't jobs out there and that the jobs that are out there are not humanly enriching, et cetera. And you've got the kids of these people going like my parents have been miserable and can barely ever make anything do and they got straight A's in school and they have their degrees and they're struggling. You know, and, and so then it's like, okay, well, if that's the primary carrot, then then we have to get it. You know, it's like why can't we go with the more immediate carrot of you know what's awesome learning something? You know what's awesome becoming something different every day, becoming more, being able to explore more and developing the skills to be heard and translate this into something that other people can interact with and that you can build collaboratively. Be upon, because if you can't tell me anything, then there's nothing for me to work with. Right, and I can, I can't you know, if all you like. Going back to the like well, I don't know. Okay, well, you know something, and kids will tell you all day, like I did a.

I was subbing for a history class and they were about to go into Greek history, so I did a KWL, which is what do you know, what do you want to know and what have you learned, right? So I did the K and W with them and I was like what do you know? And I had, and I was like I want everybody, I want you can find a speaker at your table. That's fine, you know somebody can speak up for you, but I want everybody to be represented in something that you know, any little thing like something.

And I had kids flat out tell me I know nothing. And I'm like I find that hard to believe that you've never heard of anything from ancient Greece ever. No, no, don't know anything. Okay, so you've never heard of Hercules? Oh well, yeah, I've heard of Hercules. Okay, so you know something about ancient Greece and like, have you ever heard the word mythology? Yeah, that's like with all the gods and the pantheon and stuff, and like you know there's these old myths and like Zeus was a douchebag. And I'm like, yeah, so you do know things, but they come, we developed this. When we have this transactional relationship, they don't see what they're bringing in as having purpose and meaning and that they are building upon what they already have often yeah, it breaks my heart, you know coming in even at, you know, at the high school level.

When I first started high school, I started as an algebra teacher and I was getting the repeat testers, which is the students that didn't pass the state exam. They would come through me and it was just kind of like just the cycle of students coming in, so if they didn't pass it the first time they would do the remedial, which would be with me or another teacher, and then sometimes they couldn't even pass it, and what we were seeing is that now a lot of the students were actually getting out and being successful, but the students that were in that other class were not, and then I would see them and it was just constant in that sense of but the understanding, of building them up and understand and telling them look, what you learned over there, you do have that knowledge and then it's just putting it together and then just building them up. Like you said, you kind of have to pull that string, but then at the end they're like oh, I understand this, this makes sense. Now I see the connection, but again it goes back to everything just being a grade, being transactional and not really making that connection with the student and really just kind of taking the time even just to tweak our own practice to help a student. And I always say if I'm able to tweak my instruction to help one particular student, I know it's going to benefit all students. You know, because I said if it's good for one, it's going to be good for all.

Because some students may not want to raise their hands, some students might be shy and some students may felt like it's always been punitive for them to say hey, you know, can I have this question? Well, no, sorry, like where you got to move on and this is the way you do it and that's the way it's been. Transactional, I'm done. You know, here I go, I got. As long as I get my grades, I'm good. If you learned it, fine. If you didn't, fine, you know. And it just kind of breaks my heart and again, that's why I'm kind of seeing like an outsider, because, coming from the outside in and even to this day I still have that perspective because I was like there's so much wrong that is being done and that that we can improve on. So those are some of those things there. So now, as we kind of wrap this, is something new.

This goes back over a hundred years, like John Dewey, you know, is writing about this. And, by the way, john Dewey, like he's this big like guy about progressive education and democracy and education and all of this, and people, often teachers, often don't even read his stuff until until're doing a PhD or maybe a master's course, while they're working in a school called Dewey Right. And he even back then he's like you know, traditional models and they don't read. You know, and they don't read Freire, paolo Freire, who wrote Pedagogy of the Oppressed, pedagogy of the oppressed, and what he describes in this transactional model.

And I'd be interested to know how many folks are already familiar with this idea of the banking model of learning. Where it's, this idea of students come in as an empty vessel and your job is to put things into them. Your job is to educate them to, to teach them, to do something to them which is very different from teaching, which is doing with yeah, right, um and yeah. And what's funny is like kids will, kids will, they'll push back on you when you're like you get to have some agency here because they're not familiar with it, and they're like, oh, no, oh, I don't, and they believe. They genuinely believe and I think this actually does happen is a teacher will say I'm going to give you agency here, but then it's like, well, but the curriculum that I'm doing says they have to do X, y, z, so you can do whatever you want, as long as the product is this, and it's like that's not how. But they're very worried that if I say you do what you want in this way, that I'm then going to fail them on doing it. And I'm like, even if you do it terribly and I see that you've learned from it, that's way more valuable.

We learn through failure. We learn through, you know, testing things out. And that's where the collaborative thing comes in, because collaboration is about problem solving. Improvisation is all about problem solving. The setup for the moment is you're going to come into a scene with somebody else or people and you have to problem solve your way through it. Figure out, how are you going to tell the story of what's happening in this moment without knowing what comes next? And of course, we do this all the time. You and I are doing this literally right now. We didn't script out this conversation. We're just talking, listening, responding and going yes, oh, and this.

So, yes. Yeah, I love it. Well, as we kind of wrap up, as as we wrap up, you know, kind of. I still want to touch a little bit on this, you know 2022, chad, gpt, ai.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

And so one of the things too that, like you know, in my show I always sound very cautious advocate. So one of the things, too that you know, in my show I always sound very cautious advocate, very cautious of because of the word Everybody throws around the buzzwords because they are what sell, and you know it's like, you know, personalized learning and doing this I was like and you know I've had several guests and even myself I was like, how is this personalized learning? Like to me it feels like you're siloing students again to a Chromebook with a chatbot that doesn't really even know the student, and then the thing the common theme is is like you just put IDK three times on that chatbot and they're going to give you the right answer and that's it. So how is that really personalized learning? What kind of damage might we be doing to the students in that sense? And it just seems like it's almost a replication of what they are already doing 30 minutes per day, per subject, doing these many questions, but they're not really doing any learning. It's more of that click, do you know, finish, reward and I just continue. But they sell it as that personalized learning.

The other thing that kind of concerns me too and I've recently had a conversation with a guest is that the way that the AI is being used by teachers is still simply used as substitution. So if and he mentioned, he goes look, if the traditional worksheet worked like a handout worked, why are we just doing that worksheet on a computer or creating a worksheet on the computer, like there is no augmentation of the learning? So I want to get your thoughts. You know, now that you're doing your dissertation, you're doing your research, what are your thoughts on, you know, the cognitive offload to AI.

Oh, I love that. I love that term. The cognitive offload, I think, is really the big issue is we have to ask ourselves and this has been true forever, right? This is the. It's the same issue with just standard plagiarism Are you offload, are you offloading the process, the learning, to the tool? Are you offloading your involvement in the project to something someone else? Right?

So, if it's, if it's you need to, you know, if it's like, here's your prompt. I want you to be able to talk about, uh, what you just read when we read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Well, it's gone back for centuries that somebody could just go find a journal, you know, go find a magazine, a newspaper, some, you know something, some record and then just handwrite. They could even just handwrite and copy and paste something over and present somebody else's response and ideas as their own, right, it's the same thing. If that is what is happening, right, if the student is simply taking the prompt and going tell me the answer to this so I can turn it in Right, and at that point, even if it takes less time for them to get that grade, that's still a waste of their time from my perspective. And and so like that becomes an issue.

The other part of this that I have, to some degree, an even bigger issue with is the abolitionist view of technology that I have seen over my entire life, particularly as a late X. You know they called us Gen Y for half a second, but I'm in that generation when all of this internet technology, computers and stuff were all new, but they kept constantly changing and so I had to learn how to do dos, I had to learn how to do 3.1, I had to learn how to literally download uh, I had to learn to troubleshoot and download drivers for things. And then it would be like well, that no longer works with this program, you have to use this to do this program. And now you have to do things differently. And the technology was never as trustworthy or consistent. So I've always been healthily skeptical, right, of what the technology can do and been OK with the idea of like, oh, I have to learn a different thing in order to interact with it.

And I will tell you, like the, the kids these days don't trouble. Like when people talked about like, oh, the kids are the tech support, they're talking about my generation, they were talking about when we were kids, you know and that. And like the folks who are like a little you know, who are a little younger than me, like maybe a decade, in which it was like mom, it's this, that and the other. You just do this. And like I'm having to provide tech support to kids who are using Chromebooks, who've been on Google Drive, there you know, for years, who are like what, how do I? I can't find it and it's like well, did you put it in a folder? What's a folder, you know? Anyway, I know I'm sort of rambling a little bit, but to sort of bring it down and sort of simplify my, my biggest concern around the prohibitionist view of AI and technology is that most often, it's incredibly ableist, because it's this expectation that every single person, every single student, should be able to do the same thing in exactly the same way, regardless of their background, their physical situation, their neurological status, any of that.

So, as somebody who does have a neurological disability known as ADHD, who didn't get diagnosed until he was 44, and has PTSD and CGTSD as a result of a lot of other external things, I am a very good reader, I'm a very good writer, but I'm incredibly slow at both, incredibly slow at both. So it's not that I don't have my own ideas. I don't think anybody's ever going to accuse me of not having ideas or not having a perspective that I'm willing and able to share. That's never going to be the case. But and this is something where I show some of my age I have not actually engaged with the AI stuff Because I feel like it's going to take me so long to learn how to use it to meet my needs, to learn how to use it to meet my needs, but, like I see kids actually using it appropriately and making sure that they have their ideas put together, that they're writing stuff out and then they're putting you know, but that they're focused on the concepts, on their understanding, their knowledge, and then allowing using the program to help them figure out how they could rephrase a sentence more effectively, how to adjust their grammar, how to you know maybe there's another word that you can use that what they are now offloading is the essential, non-essential work, right, the stuff that isn't actually part of the learning but is a necessary part of the doing.

So if you physically don't have the physical ability to type well, right To type effectively, having a program that can take voice to text and be able to help.

You then adjust that in ways you know where you can point to something and say you know, being able to simply highlight something is very different than being able to type it right.

Highlight something is very different than being able to type it right. Um, you know, and and we have, you know, we've got kids with dyslexia. It's not that they don't understand things, it's that they're struggling with the literal process of dealing with the text. So if there's something that is helping them ensure that what is actually happening here and the learning they're doing is effective, then they should be able to use that. And when we make everything getting back to the sort of transactionalism, when everything is transactional, then there's a lot less incentive or reason for students to see the technology as assistive and as a way of better understanding than as opposed to a way of simply doing so that they can get the grade that oftentimes they feel like they couldn't get if they just relied on their own perspective, because their perspective doesn't really matter. Their job is simply to provide the teacher what they expect, and if the AI can produce the thing that the teacher expects, well, there you go.

There you go. I love that. And so, kind of going back a little bit, to me it just seems like a lot of the ed tech they say they get a lot of feedback from teachers, but I think not all teachers, because definitely we know there's different situations around the country and around the nation. But going back to that transactional aspect, I think that many companies that are out there that are kind of coming out with these chatbots for learning and everything. To me it just seems still very purely transactional, these chatbots for learning and everything. To me it just seems still very purely transactional. It's like you just go in there, you do your lesson, the chatbot says yay or nay or maybe gives you, you know, a resource here or there. But my thing was is is it giving? For example, if there's two students that are studying the exact same thing, are they getting the exact same answers, the exact same resources and sources and things of that sort? But but again, just going back to that transactional piece, it just it just feels like to me, like seeing so much tech go through it. I always say, like you know what? There's nothing new under the sun. This is like you said. You know.

I remember when they would assign me a book report, my mama would drop me off at the library. I get the encyclopedia britannica, I read it and then I would copy what's there and you reference. Okay, internet comes out, okay, I'm getting you know everything a lot faster. Here are my references. Now, with AI and things of that sort, yes, there is some utility on that and those things.

But for the learning aspect, that I just hope that you know, as companies continue to grow and put these products out, that they see that it's shouldn't make it just purely transactional. There should be more learning, engagement and discourse and things of that sort, which sometimes I feel, you know what? Like just no tech in the classroom, and I'm not saying completely remove it, but giving that time to just simply talk, like you said, and and figure things out, you know. And then, like you said, taking those and I love the way you said and figure things out, you know, and then, like you said, taking those, and I love the way you said it, taking those essential non-essentials and using that. But the learning is still taking place.

You know, you, the student has learned the content, they've worked through it, they've, they've been part of it, and then those non-essentials like hey, you forgot a comma here, quotation marks here, citation here. There is a educator that I know that still has the students work on their citations using note cards and that I remember back from you know, so they'll do note cards and everything. And even though I told her, I was like hey, did you know that they can go here in Google and then they click cite this for me in the Google Doc when they do the search, and and she's like, yeah, but you know they still need to know how to do it by hand and everything, I was like, all right, you know find balance.

You know, like for how long? You know? My thing there is like we should absolutely be inviting students to do these things, and I and I do, I talk to the. I talk to students all the time about, like you know, when they're getting frustrated with working with grammar, right, and they're getting frustrated with being told that, like you've got to check your spelling, you've got to make sure that you know you've got your punctuation where it needs to be, and all of this, and that when we are actively working on that in class, that is not a time to set that over to the AI, because what you need to know and I love it's always been the thing that I don't even know where I got it from specifically, it might have been one of my parents or something.

Grammar is this kind of the rules that tell you the primary way in which we can ensure that what we're saying is comprehensible to somebody else who we can't personally be like hey, here's what's going on, right? We can't clarify for somebody if they're reading our work at a separate time, not in front of us, right? That's why I like dialogue, because with dialogue I can go oh wait, you didn't get that. Great, let me clarify, right, but we can't do that. So the grammar and sentence structure and all of that understanding what is a participle, what is, you know, a conjunction, what are these things. And I tell the kids I'm like your job is to understand how these work enough that then, when you decide to break the rules, you're doing so for a reason, that you're doing so with intent, because the intent is to always be better at communicating your voice right. And if the grammar is inhibiting that, then you go. Nope, I'm doing it this way because it's going to be closer to, it's going to help me communicate what I want. But if you don't understand what the grammar is and how it functions, then you're not going to understand why, when you do something a different way, the reader goes wait what he eats, shoots and leaves. You know that's a great book Eats, shoots and Leaves. That's about. You know grammar and where the commas go and why we use an Oxford comma Oxford for life. But you know, to me there really is this kind of issue that we have of not taking the time to actually explicitly talk about why we're doing things. We're in this mode of like. You need to do this why? Because we said so because that's what's required, right, that's what's required, that's what the curriculum says you have to do. You have to be able to do this on this test. So you have to do this not, this is actually important to you so that you can, uh, have the skills to engage in these things.

Algebra who doesn't hate algebra? So many people, except for, like, math nerds. Well, I later actually like algebra, because what algebra does is it literally teaches you how to solve any problem in your life, anything, because it helps you understand how to compare and find relationships between things. What are the variables? And how do you isolate the variable that you need to figure out? That's in relationships. Even it's like, okay, what's going on? This person is here, they think this, and I really like them. And when we do this, you figure out what are the variables, what's going on, what are you trying to control? What's the thing that's missing, right? And but nobody told me that when I was learning algebra. You know, and it's that kind of thing of like do it because I said so, then means that of course, people are going to offload the do it because it? Because who wants to do everything they're told, when they don't know why what they're being told is what meaning it has.

And the thing is, is, after you have that time of going through this is how the grammar and stuff works. Then, when and this also has a lot to do with, like, what is the purpose of the particular assignment? Sticking to sort of the writing, because this is where the generative AI stuff really comes in when you're really sticking, if the purpose of the writing is to show, is to explain what you understand in the themes and ideas that you're seeing in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, then, yes, grammar is going to be important and noted, but we should not be taking off points on grammar. Right, we should be pointing it out and going hey, remember this, this, this and this. What we need to be looking at is are you making coherent sense? Does your introduction help me understand where you're? Give me a sense of where you're going. Do you have a hook? Are you catching on? Are you looking through the rubric and going I need to get to three themes. Right, that's the stuff that I should care about. But then kids are gonna focus on the like well, how do I make sure this is written the way that they want and how do I make sure I do all this and then just gonna put it into ai, when what they should be doing is writing it out as best they can and then putting it into the AI to go, hey, can you help me clean this up and help me find the grammar problems? Then I'm going to give them a zero and I'm like, are you insane? Because you know and again this gets back to the ableism Because there are kids who for whom that becomes this thing that is not essential to the assignment becomes the thing that you're saying well, you have to have this right too. And it's like well, let them have correction, let them bring it to an editor, let the AI be an editor that is helping them, and with the idea that then you go hey, this phrasing doesn't sound like your voice, right. So you know, I want you to like try and figure this out For anybody who's listening right now.

By the way, I think my favorite person's commentary on AI in the English classroom is Ms Gibson on TikTok. She's really only on there. I believe she's on threads personally, but like, just like, that's where she does her stuff. She is an absolute magic and joy and she went really big. If you go back, she's got a whole playlist of, like her commentary on AI and she immediately here she's been teaching for 30 years or something like that and she immediately was like, well, this is the thing that's going to happen, so I'm going to have to bring it into my class, talk to my students. We're going to have to figure out how does this work, where does it go? How do we not use it? How do we use it? And, like one of the I love the her story that we talked about.

One of the first things that she pointed out that I was like, yes, is she literally did have the students. She gave them the prompt and said I want you to put this. I want you to here's two prompts. One of these you're going to write on your own and the other you're just going to put in the AI, see what it gives you and put it over here. Now you're going to trade papers and I want your partner to tell you which one they think sounds more like you. And in one lesson, in one day, she managed to convey the concept of voice, which is something that she has struggled to get students. I mean, it'd take all year for her to be like no, you have to get your voice in there.

When I read something, I want to know that it's you and I want to know that this is your perspective and is coming from this unique, idiosyncratic place. From this unique, idiosyncratic place and AI gave that so quickly because it's like, well, if you dump it in here and you give it to somebody, they go this ain't you. I want to hear what you have to say. It's you know, and it puts the importance on that individual's agency. Right, it puts the importance on I don't care what the AI has to say, I care what you have to say. Is it going to be perfect? I hope not, because if it's perfect, then I've just wasted your time and mine. Right, because you're not learning anything. You're not going from a place of not knowing to knowing something more right?

A professor of mine said in a class on assessment it's when you really think about it. If you get 100% on a test, any formative test, that test is now useless. That test gives the student and the teacher no real data. What it says is this student knows all the things you expect them to know at this point. It doesn't tell you what they need to know. It doesn't tell you what's next and it doesn't tell you where they are not quite making the conceptual connections. So getting a C on a formative test is actually actually more valuable, actually genuinely more valuable, actually genuinely more valuable, because it now gives you information from you know.

Here's the ed researcher coming through. It gives us information to work with, right. It tells us oh, this is how much you do understand. This is stuff you really do have understood. Here are the things that you're not quite on, and here's something that, like you haven't, that that we need to, like go back and start at the beginning with. As a teacher, that's a gift, and as a student, that's a gift, because how many times do you, I mean, and you've had this experience where you see teachers or you end up having to start over from the beginning and just review everything that you just did and then do another review test to be like, do you get it now until everybody gets? You know all the things you know, and so it's like I want to know what I actually need to review and again.

So this also goes to one more thing about testing and transactionalism. I constantly something that breaks my heart is students will turn in a test where they just haven't even tried to answer most of it because they assume they're going to fail it. Right, they assume. They look at it, they're intimidated, they go I don't get this well enough, I'm going to fail this. Why would I put in the effort to put in a wrong answer, right? So then they turn in these mostly empty tests because they've gone. Well, I am not going to get the grade that I need, so I'm not going to spend the time that I'm that I have to take this test. Like you know, they're given 90 minutes to do a test and they turn it in in 15 with most of it incomplete, and I go no, you should take this back and keep working on it. And they're like I don't know it. I'm like well, then, try your best answer, take a guess, put something.

The only answer you, the only truly incorrect answer on a test, is the one you don't give. The only incorrect answer you give on a test, the only truly useless answer you give, is the one that you don't give, is when you leave it blank, because if you at least attempt to write what you know, it comes back to that like what do you? What do you already know? What are we building on? What do you actually? What sort of understanding do you have? Now I have something to work with, but if I have a bunch of kids who go, who go I did question one, I'm pretty sure I got it wrong. I'm not going to do the rest, but now it's like well, I guess I have to start and completely do everything over again with them. And half the time they're going. Well, yeah, I already know that.

Why are we doing this again and it's like well, you showed, you told me that you didn't know any of this, but where's the incentive for them to try if everything's about the grade and not about the feedback that the grade represents?

Nice, excellent. Well, we've definitely covered a lot today, eric, and I really appreciate it, because this definitely is eye-opening and it really ties into a lot to the research that I've been doing, and so I'm very thankful for that that you got to share. But also just some great insight, you know, at least for our listeners, for educators or really much anybody that listens to our podcast for our audience to understand, you know, just the learning process and the way that we do see things. Maybe they never get this type of feedback, and so it's great to hear this, and it's also refreshing to hear a lot of what you're saying that I have been able to do without me knowing or getting into that theory just yet. You know, and now looking back, I'm like, oh man, I totally get it, and so definitely I love that our kind of worlds kind of merge and we do have a lot of commonality in that, because there definitely needs to be more discourse on this and I that's why I really appreciate what you put out on social media and all that content. So, for our audience members, please make sure that you follow Eric, I'll make sure and link that information in the show notes too as well.

And just you know again, he's great at answering any questions you have. He will definitely go there, so please make sure that you ask away. But, eric, before we wrap up, I always love to end the show with the last three questions. So here we go. So, as we know, every superhero has kind of a weakness or a pain point. So for Superman, edu Kryptonite was his weakness. So I want to ask you, eric, in the current state of education, what would you say is your current edu-kryptonite?

Hierarchical authoritarianism in education, positionally above or below someone else in some way, and that therefore your job, you know, if you're at the top, it's your job to give commands, to give instructions to this person, whose job is to give instructions to this person, etc. Which leads to this very transactional like I tell you what to do, you do the thing because I've asked you to do it. And then and the reason I'm telling you to do this is because the principal said I have to do it because the school board said we're bought this curriculum, so I have to deliver this content, and here's this pacing guide that I have to do and then the principal's like well, yeah, but I have to make all the teachers do all this. And then the superintendent's like well, but the state testing standards say we have to do this in the curriculum that we've purchased. That aligns with this. So you know, I would say that comes maybe down to like the idea of the prepackaged curriculum.

I think the real kryptonite for me is the very concept that there is a top-down approach to how learning happens and that who's an authority, not who's authoritative, but who is an authority over what happens now, what we're doing, because then we don't collaborate, we de-socialize the process and yeah, and I guess the other one is the people who think that well, at a certain point you have to get serious. At the collegiate level, at the doctoral level, we should be playing. We should be engaged in play and creativity and trying new things, falling flat on our face, laughing at ourselves and getting up and trying again and understanding that there is so much to be done by playing around and going I don't know everything. Great, let's know more, let's figure something else out.

Love it. Great answer, I love it. All right. Question number two If you could have a billboard with anything on it, what would it be and why?

Oh, I might say it says embrace, uncertainty, the reason being and a link to like. Let me explain more. But I think one of the biggest problems is that everybody wants to be sure about everything and that we get very anxious. This comes back to the grading thing right, the I if I don't think I'm going to get this grade, then I'm not going to do it right. And the I have to deliver this curriculum, so that means I have to do X, y, z, this is the lesson plan, this is every minute of the day that I'm doing, and as long as I do that, then I'll get this.

And we don't leave space for discovery, which discovery only comes from a place of uncertainty. And the other thing that I say about it and this is more like personal, metaphysical, emotional end of things, especially when times are incredibly complex and hard and the world around you feels so difficult to navigate. When we think about, oftentimes we are told that it's like well, we don't know what's going to happen and so we should be afraid of that. But on the same notion, I would say that when you are in despair, despair is not about uncertainty, despair is certainty. Despair is that point when we give up and we go well, it's bad, it's never going to be better, it is this way. What I know is all that I'm ever going to know and I can't possibly learn anything new, I can't possibly become any different, and it's just bad and it will never be better. That is certainty.

And yet people are so afraid of not knowing what comes next, instead of going. But by doing what's next, by exploring, then I get to grow, I get to add, I get to find the thing I don't already know. Right. And the other big part is and you can't have hope without uncertainty, and hope is what you need when things are really really hard. You need hope. Hope is what brings us together, hope is what leads us and energizes us to move forward in spite of our reservations, in spite of our anxiety. But hope doesn't exist unless there's space for uncertainty, the not knowing, because if we knew, we wouldn't need hope.

Excellent, Great Gilbert, I love it. And just great explanation. Thank you so much for that. All right. Last question is if you could trade places with a single person for a day, who would that be and why?

That's so hard. You know it's crazy. I think I would literally want, I'd try to build a cohort of people who are as far away from my experience as possible, who you know just by where they are, who they are, their background, their ethnicity, etc. You know the language they speak, etc. As long as I would have the ability to function and have some sense of their experience. I would love that and I'd like to. Not I don't want to pick that person. I want there to be people out there. I'd want them to volunteer, to trade with me and to be able to quite literally step into somebody's shoes who's as different in their experience and what have you as possible so that I can? It would get. Let me have this opportunity to literally get into the head of someone else. Who, who, whose perspective is, offers endless novelty, endless newness to my experience.

I love that. That's actually a great answer, very unique. I think that's probably the most unique answer that I received for this question. You know, normally somebody will have it just like a specific person, but I love this idea. It's like why, and again, I just leave the question out there. But I love the fact that you know it's not like it wasn't a purely transactional question, like I'm just going to pick one person. No, it's like Eric did Eric things and he said this is what I want and I love it. This is wonderful, eric.

Well, thank you so much, eric. I really appreciate all the knowledge gems that you share. This was an amazing conversation and definitely is a bucket fulling conversation for me too, as well, and for all our audience members. I know that they definitely gained a lot from all of your shares. So, for all our audience members, thank you so much for checking out this episode. Please make sure you visit our website to check out the other 330 episodes. All right, that we've done over five years where I promise you, you will find amazing educators like Eric. You're going to find amazing professionals, teachers, all sorts and I promise you you're going to find some knowledge nuggets there that you can sprinkle on to what you are already doing great. So thank you, as always, for all of your support, and I want to give a big shout out to our sponsors, book Creator, eduaid and Yellowdig. Thank you so much for believing in our mission and allowing us to bring these episodes and again continue to help our education space, continue to grow. So, my friends, until next time, don't forget, stay techie.