A learning story about Michael’s time of need

I am writing this in the grips of emotion produced by hearing that a teen-ager had written the first 60 pages of an autobiography. What follows is extracted from a paper published last year in the IBM Systems Journal in which I refer to an earlier encounter with him at a time when his school and other records led one to believe that he had never written as much as a paragraph, perhaps not even a full sentence. Confidentiality prevents me from giving full details: but you can know that this happened in Maine in one of the places for young people who have gotten into the most serious trouble.

Last fall I worked on almost daily with a small group of deeply troubled teen-agers. One day I brought a rat trap into our meeting place. Several boys, impressed by this ferocious-looking version of the familiar mousetrap, gathered around and began to make macho remarks: “you can break someone’s fingers with that” and “that’s nothing, I’ve set bear traps.” After this kind of talk had died down, a quiet member of the group, whom I’ll call Michael, piped up with: “Awesome. That’s a wonderful idea!” It took me a few minutes to be sure that he meant what I hoped he did: he was saying that the mouse trap is based on a wonderfully clever idea; he found it awesome that anyone could have invented it.

As I got to know Michael better I came to understand that seeing an idea where others saw an instrument of violence was characteristic of his mind. Ideas are what count for him. When we gave him the opportunity to work at building constructs out of mechanized/computerized LEGO he showed a flair for taking up an engineering idea and embodying it in a variety of constructs. In this he differs from the intellectual style I have most often seen when students of all ages from pre-school to college work with versions of the same construction material. Almost all give priority in their thinking to the performance or to the appearance of the product. For most the ideas are instrumental means to these functional ends. Michael often seems to work as if for him it is the end product that is instrumental to the means – a way of exercising a particular idea.

You might think that he is “the intellectual” of the group.

You would be led to a very different impression by his dismal school record. From the beginning he had been a regular habitue of “special ed” classrooms. As seen through school tests he appears as an incompetent person: virtually illiterate, devoid of mathematical knowledge … in brief “a failure.”

Working with Michael has increased for me the troubling awareness that failure in school can be the expression of valuable intellectual and personal qualities. Many do badly in school because their style simply doesn’t fit schools. Many react badly to school because its emphasis on memorizing facts and acquiring skills that cannot be put to use is like a prison for a mind that wants to fly. Perhaps the most saddening occurrence is when children come to understand, as many like Michael do, that they can buy relief from school’s pressure by getting themselves classified in the category of “special ed.” Often considerable problem-solving ability is brought to bear on getting oneself categorized as “dumb.”

For many this is a deadly trap: once categorized in “special ed” it is hard to get out. I do not know how Michael’s own relationship with school evolved. But I do know that it was perpetuated in a classical pattern: A kid who cares about ideas finds precious few of them in an elementary school where he is expected to learn facts and skills that he experiences as excruciatingly boring. He refuses to do it. School too often (though of course there are notable and wonderful exceptions!) responds by classifying him as having trouble learning and so places him in special classes that are supposed to be easier. This is exactly the wrong response: “easier” means even more boring, even more devoid of ideas. And so begins a downward spiral. He comes to hate school and everything associated with it. What he really needed in the first places was work that is “harder” in the sense of having more intellectual substance and requiring more real concentration. The form this work might take will differ from child to child: in Michael’s case it should certainly be some form of “idea work.”

The opportunity to spend four hours a day over several months building sophisticated technological objects gave Michael the chance to change his self-perception of not being “smart,” which easily becomes a devastating consequence of the special education trap. It remains to be seen whether the change will be firm enough to reverse the effects of many previous years.

P.S. This extract might give the impression that I attribute Michael’s gains to technology. Of course not: the technology provided the context in which some wonderful teachers could reach a wonder-full mind.

Seymour Papert is professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a Distinguished Computer Scientist at the University of Maine and a member of Maine Learning Technology Task Force. He may be contacted at Papert@midmaine.com.