Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

hang out with kids and get a new perspective on why stuff doesn't get done — 80%+ of the time, nobody thinks they're being avoidant; whatever remains to be done has yet to be explicitly approved, is better left undone than "wrong," seems to have an undoable next step

i love talking to my teacher friends about their student woes. some (many?) smart kids will give stupid answers to boring questions if they can get away with it because it allows them to save energy for more fun and interesting stuff like playing with friends

tbh, reading Holt has increasingly convinced me that most kids experience classrooms in a state of semi-unconsciousness w/ peaks of low-level terror when they're called on; whatever comes out of their mouths then is their strategy for social survival, variable between kids

i would affirm that to have been mostly true for my experience as well. i was good at improvising when called on, so not so much terror re: that. but terror re: teachers asking about homework i definitely hadn't done

kids are *always* trying to balance the goals of satisfying adult expectations + maintaining their social position amongst the other kids; in some peer groups, the optimal strategy is to keep teacher expectations low + avoid looking like a nerd — very hard to break that dynamic

imo, even in "good" schools, where all the game's points can be scored by giving "good" answers, the game is Make Teacher Praise Me, not Think Interesting Thoughts & Get Useful Feedback — I think the latter is a game that you just can't play within the parameters of most schools

Yeah, what if the game is of asking "good" questions? Would require a fundamental rewriting of schools.

yep — good questions require genuine curiosity & result from points of confusion within a work-in-progress model; it's very difficult to keep enough attention on one's own thoughts to do this while operating the is-teacher-happy-with-me & are-kids-accepting-me perimeter scans