[From Bruce Nevin (991201.2343 EST)]
Bill Powers (991201.0953 MDT)
You and I are
basically friends, and I want matters to stay that way.
Our friendship has never been in question here. Thanks for reaffirming it.
I, too, have qualms about the verb "choose" here. However, I think the
reasons you have given for rejecting it are mistaken, and contribute
nothing to the creation of any better alternative because they are
inapplicable in a classroom and do not reflect some of the purposes of the
RTP process. I don't understand your talk about rewards and punishments--if
Ed uses such concepts I agree he is purveying profound misconceptions, but
I haven't seen that. Nor have I seen any evidence of the mounting animosity
that you predict must necessarily follow from the "I see you have chosen"
statement.
The RTP teacher and the students construe the entire interaction in terms
of a few pre-established rules, just as kids do when they play a game. The
logic is no more convoluted than rule-specified consequences in games that
children play every day. Your attribution of lawyer-like verbal
convolutions may reflect on my ineptitude with words, but is completely off
the mark for the RTP situation as I understand it.
You cannot judge a person's
intentions by watching that person's behavior, no matter what that person
has previously said.
The teacher is not watching behavior and inferring intentions, the teacher
is watching a disturbed variable (interference with students' learning) and
referring to a mutual commitment, on the part of all present, to control
that variable. Referring, not inferring.
When the rules constrain the choices to two, depending on the value of a
variable, you know much more than you would otherwise. The person is making
one choice, or the other, or they are no longer in the game.
1. We are playing chess. I move my knight to a square whence it attacks
both your queen and your bishop. You have no piece attacking my knight, and
in the nature of a knight's moves no piece can intervene. You have no piece
that can put me in check or attack my queen on the next move. You move your
queen. As I take your bishop, I say "I see you chose to save your queen."
2. In the above situation, you move your bishop. As I take your queen, I
say "I see you chose to give up your queen." "Oh no!" you say. "I didn't
see that!" I have a problem with the verb "choose" here. But notice that to
be analogous to the RTP situation I would have to have set up the fork and
shown you how it worked just a short time before. You have to really not be
paying attention. Why are you so inattentive? Maybe you don't want to play
at all. So here is where the coerciveness of compulsory education comes to
bear.
3. In the above situation, you say "I resign" or (a different thing) "I
don't want to play any more." This is analogous, for example, to the
student saying "Home school me! Please home school me!" the way our
youngest daughter has been doing. In this situation, I don't think the
teacher would say "I see you have chosen to go to the RTC." Tim could maybe
clarify that. Here we run into the problem of distinguishing 2 from 3.
Maybe some time in the RTC to chill out and figure out what's needed is
just the thing. Not easy, not obvious.
I think it's likely that most disruptions are variants of "I didn't see
that." For some reason the kid is really not paying attention, even after
the reminding dialog that just took place. I'm desperately bored, or my
blood sugar is crashing and my body's getting frantic, or I'm sitting on
some disturbing emotions, for example. Even if the student is aiming to
distract another one, the distraction is means to some other purpose,
gossip, or blowing off energy, or maybe provocation of the teacher--but
given the rules of the game, that last would count, I think, as choosing to
go to the RTC.
I have had some conversation with Tim about finding a better way to phrase
that part of the dialog, without much satisfaction with what we came up
with. I understand that RTP teachers try various alternatives. Finding an
alternative that serves all the intended purposes is a useful goal. A
prerequisite is understanding what those purposes are.
One purpose is to teach the students to control the variable "no
disruptions to other students' learning" and to control the rule "second
disruption, then go the the RTC to figure out how to be in class without
disruption." I think the reason for the verb "choose" was to re-frame
"misbehavior" (the disruptions) as the first step of a constructive
program. In this way of construing events, the student is in charge of
carrying out this program and has taken the first step in doing so.
Try this:
"Second disruption, right, Gil?"
"Yeah."
"What comes next?"
"OK, I'm going to the RTC."
Here, the student is choosing. The semantic problem of the teacher
attributing motives is cleared away. Whether there is coercion is an
empirical question. There is a problem though. This does not clearly assert
the student's responsibility. It could very easily be the teacher's choice.
"OK, you could have let this slide, but you've chosen to enforce the rule
and now you're sending me to the RTC."
But this is the very problem that you see with the "choose" expression. It
is not cleared away by removing that troublesome verb. It is not eliminated
by avoiding any attribution of motive. You are saying that when the teacher
says "I see you have chosen" it is really the teacher's choice, and the
teacher is just pretending that it is the student's choice. I don't know
the last time you were in a classroom, but in my experience a rambunctious
student will say "Hell no, I ain't choosing no such thing! I'll go if I
gotta, but you can't say it's my choice." You can bet my daughters, all
three of them, would have said something like this, and more, if they did
not feel that it was indeed their choice. And in fact you said as much,
talking about animosity. (I'll return to that.) But evidently students in
RTP schools do not object to their second disruption being construed as
their choosing to go to the RTC rather than control disruptions to other
students at zero. What gives? Are they deluded? Or are they controlling the
rule as they agreed to?
The very least you can do to find out what the child has chosen to do is to
ask the child. "Do you still agree that people who disrupt a second time
should go to the RTC?"
This is not a laboratory, it's a classroom. The aim is not to find out what
the child has chosen to do. The aim is to assert that the child has an
obligation not to distract other students, and that if this is not working
out the child has the alternative of going to the RTC to figure out how to
make it work.
And if the child says "No," the teacher says, "Well, it's _my_
rule, so off you go to the RTC." Anyway.
Does Ed say that this is what the teacher says? Does anyone report teachers
saying this? "It's _my_ rule, so do it." I think you're making this up.
There is no analogy to the terrorists because on that airplane there was no
prior agreement by the passengers. I know you said you brought this in only
to depict a slippery slope and so forth, but it is so far off the mark one
has to climb over a hill rather than slither down a slope to get there.
Adults can easily browbeat children into agreeing -- that is, say in words
that they are agreeing -- to any conditions the adult wants to impose.
Yes, abusive bullying can be made to look superficially similar to RTP. I
do understand how easy it is to misuse this sort of attribution of motive.
But it seems to me that one important thing that teachers, students,
parents, and everyone else involved with RTP reportedly learn is the
difference between inferring a motive and referring to a commitment.
However, it appears as though teachers and students in RTP schools are
learning to recognize the difference and keep it clean. And it seems to me
that is what Ed says they should do.
That's an empirical question. Are RTP students more susceptible to this
sort of deception, "softened up" as it were by chronic deception by their
teachers, or are they better skilled than other students at distinguishing
a call to responsibility from abusive browbeating? What's the word from the
field?
I am using this example only to show, in a
context where the hypocrisy and falsehood can easily be seen, what I have
against this particular way of shifting responsibility. And that is we are
talking about: a way to shift onto the child's shoulders the responsibility
for an action that the teacher is about to take or has already taken.
My argument is primarily about the irony of teaching responsible thinking
to children by refusing to take responsibility for one's own actions.
I think you are missing the point. Yes, "choose" is a problematic word to
use, especially under so literal and punctilious a reading, and yes we
should find better ways to say it, but no it is not the teacher's
responsibility it is the child's responsibility not to interfere with
others when they are learning, and teaching that is the point of the process.
The RTP process is a formalization of learning that the kids have been
doing from daycare and playgroup and preschool onward, about being
interfered with and about interfering with others. It's obvious. It's not
complicated. It makes sense to them.
It seems to me there may be a poorly articulated part of the process in the
case where a child is recalcitrant. Ed told you verbally some time ago that
if a child refused to go to the RTC he would be taken there bodily. IMO
this is wrong. This child is taking the third option, saying "I don't want
to play at all." Yes, that invokes the coercion that lies behind compulsory
education. No, the RTC is not the appropriate mechanism for that, and Ed
says as much in his cautionary words about being very sure that no teacher
or administrator ever uses the RTC for punitive detention. There are other
mechanisms for the state to enforce its requirement for compulsory
education, and the child who drops out of RTP becomes subject to them. It
may be that this aspect is poorly articulated because it does not come up
in RTP schools. Maybe Tim could comment on that.
I do not think children learn to behave better
because privileges are taken away from them and then are restored on
condition that the children make a written committment to behave better.
What privileges are taken away as punishment and restored as rewards? I do
not know about this.
That is what Ed says, but I think that such punishments and rewards work
against the aims of the program, not for them. I think they create
animosity rather than curing it.
What evidence do you have for the childrens' growing animosity towards the
teachers? What evidence do you have for an addition of new animosity
without a decrease of prior animosity? I have heard nothing of this. I
think you are imagining it as something that must be so, rather than
reporting it as something that has been observed.
I will be travelling over the next 5 days.
Bruce
···
At 11:42 AM 12/01/1999 -0700, Bill Powers wrote: