Sunday, April 20, 2014

selling tools we don't need

As a woodworker, I am constantly bombarded by tool catalogs in the mail and offers online that sell new "must have" tools that promise the capacity (if purchased) to make my woodworking life easier, more efficient and my wood shop more cluttered. My shop, in full production can get cluttered on its own pretty fast without he purchase of new tools, and each time I succumb to the acquisition of a new tool, there is a serial effect. Everything in my small shop must be moved to accommodate. So most tool catalogs and emails go immediately into recycling or the trashcan and only rarely is a new tool actually required.

Some new tools are useful and beautifully made and are the kinds of things you would treasure and then pass down to a grandchild. But other than a few basics that are intended to last years and years, most of my tool needs can be met by things I make myself and then throw away or recycle in the scrap bin when their time of usefulness is past.

Woodworking is not the only field to be bombarded by new tools that promise to be better and faster and to make better cuts. Education is like that. Just as I've learned in my own shop to make my own jigs and simple tools that keep me from spending exorbitant sums and from waiting for the UPS truck to arrive, educators have the capacity to do without the latest standardized tests if only they were trusted and trained to use their own innate abilities to measure their own success. Parents, too, have the means to measure their children's success in school. As parents are their children's first teachers, they also should be trusted and trained to make meaningful assessments of growth.

I can look at my iPhone to see if its raining, but did you know that looking out the window or stepping out the front door gives me a better and more immediate grasp of the weather outside?

And did you know that a teacher looking up from her desk across a classroom and seeing hands raised to answer questions gives that teacher the capacity to assess her students' level of interest in the material and potential for success? If you are a parent, seeing your child arrive home from school excited about something they have learned tells you about your child's school and his or her success within it. If your student goes to school with knots in the stomach and arrives home in a state of angst, you are being providing insight that standardized testing will only tell too late to make a difference in your child's life.

As a national policy for "school improvement," we've put all our eggs in a standardized testing basket forced downward through a system of rewards and punishments to near disastrous effects... further removing teachers and parents from their traditional roles in measuring,  observing, and monitoring growth. These standardized tests have been sold to the public by a profit making industry. When I see all the latest tool catalogs, I know that the inventors of the new tools may claim having my happy and successful woodworking in mind, but I know that they plan to profit greatly by their sale. We have given American education over to educational tool hucksters selling standardized tests and coaching programs to help students pass them and it has given us no joy in the educational workshop.

Make, fix and create...


9 comments:

  1. I wholeheartedly agree.

    In both the shop and the classroom there is an inverse ratio between convenience and excellence: the more a tool is designed to circumvent the connection between the hands and the head, the more it will intervene between them, distancing the craftsman and the educator from the making/learning process and the immediate feedback loop that makes crafting/teaching possible.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I wholeheartedly agree.

    In both the shop and the classroom there is an inverse ratio between convenience and excellence: the more a tool is designed to circumvent the connection between the hands and the head, the more it will intervene between them, distancing the craftsman and the educator from the making/learning process and the immediate feedback loop that makes crafting/teaching possible.

    ReplyDelete
  3. It's in every field and it's not just the hucksters it is also the "Suits" justifying their very existence. In my field we have such a long set of "boxes" to check there is no time to teach unless you lie like a rug merchant.

    ReplyDelete
  4. More precisely, when a tool intervenes, it inevitably interferes.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Balazs, in Educational Sloyd one of the important premises was to build the abstract on a foundation of the concrete. In schooling we need to keep anchoring and reanchoring in concrete experience.

    One of the biggest problems of standardized testing as a means of school improvement is that it's results are delivered as abstract data that cannot be applied to the teaching experience.

    It's like you dog has soiled on the living room rug. You've been away all day. So you then punish the dog for something that happened hours ago, when all the dog had been feeling was the joy of your being home.

    By the time standardized testing results are delivered to the school it is too late for them to be any good except to rationalize taking extreme and inappropriate measures.

    ReplyDelete
  6. That's right. It is not just a matter of the tools (standardized tests) abstracting the feedback, they also postpone it--both forms of interference.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Well said.
    I think that part of the problem is, that teachers are trusted less every day by the "system". The system doesn't acknowledge that a teacher is saying the progress of this class is according to the norm for the given year. The "system" needs to see a test score, so it can compare classes and schools nationally and even internationally. I suppose the industry likes it, because if you can prove that you have sold a learning system of books etc. to a school that gets a good score, then you can use that result as a leverage for even better sales.
    If teachers were trusted more, I am pretty sure all those tests could be kept to a minimum.
    Brgds
    Jonas

    ReplyDelete
  8. Balazs, I was thinking about your earlier comment. In woodworking, every tool leaves its mark, and the use of hand tools gives the craftsman greater sensitivity to the materials at hand than say a power planer or table saw. The power tools may add a level of efficiency, but not necessarily sensitivity unless that has been developed first.

    Years back, I was invited by an antique dealer to see a chair that he claimed was from the 17th century. Naturally as a woodworker, I turned it over and peered at the underside... where I found a big chunk of wood torn out by power planer. No one using hand tools (though there are many mistakes that can be made using hand planes), could have caused such a large wound on the material, as no one with tools not driven by water power, steam or electricity could have done such a thing. Anyone working with hand tools,would have had the necessary sensitivity to turn the stock around in the vise and plane in the direction that the wood would actually allow material to be shaved off.

    There you go with the circumvention of the hand and head in relation to the material... which may be OK if you are just planing wood... but if you are shaping the life of a young child, do you want there to be large chunks removed by a power planer? Or should we train teachers to be more sensitive in their work, give THEM the tools of immediate assessment, and trust them to use tools that more gently shape the life of the child?

    ReplyDelete
  9. I've just had to replace my 40+ year old circular saw, a Craftsman from back when that name meant something as far as quality. The old saw isn't quite dead, but the day is getting closer. My new 20-volt cordless is a wonderful tool, but it still hasn't quite fit my hand or my working style very well. In the same way, my 40+ years of experience as a teacher is being discounted by "the suits" as the OK guy phrased it. Retirement came just in time, and I ache for the bright but sort of non-standard students who are not easily measured by a paper test.

    Mario

    ReplyDelete