We lied to you and we'll do it again

Coincidentally enough, yesterday, @kfwyre wrote a really good comment touching on this topic, and educational work/pseudowork. Hopefully he doesn't mind me sharing it here:

There’s a pretty big philosophical split in education about this sort of thing.

One camp says that we should teach the complexity and indulge discovery, particularly as a method of introduction to a topic. Oversimplifying things teaches to the wrong target and often drains the topic of its hooks and interesting edges.

The other camp says that too much complexity initially, especially when someone’s understanding of a topic is forming and fragile, can be detrimental. It can lead to learning the basics wrong, and the hooks and interesting edges of complexity often don’t land because the person doesn’t have the framework in which to appreciate them.

I don’t think there’s one right camp, and I think it varies depending on the person, discipline, and level of study. I personally lean more towards the “introduce complexity only after leaving fragility” mindset, as it’s been my experience that genuine “aha” moments only have that quality when they have a foundation on which to stand. Without that, it can just seem to a student like everything is new and nothing is noteworthy, and the desired “ahas” just sort of come and go without fanfare.

With regards to work, I used to describe teaching as a sort of fractal of work, in which you can continue to spiral down into minute parts which blow up into full-size demands, each with smaller parts of their own. The job allows for a constant and unending unfolding, which is why so many beginning teachers overwork so much (I sure did). Part of growing in this career is learning when to exit the set rather than continuing to indulge its ever further demands.

It’s not exactly pseudowork (though some of it is, like our bullshit meetings and documentation), but more that a mindset of “wanting to do right by the kids” can lead to thousands of different actions across dozens of different fronts without satisfaction, because it’s always, always possible to do more for kids, especially those who need it.

This is what burned me out after a decade of low-income education, and why I sold out to a school in the suburbs. I’d spent so much effort hoping that, in time, the fractal would stop, or I’d get better about navigating it. Instead, I just got told that more and more of it was my responsibility or, even, my fault. Also, I was given less and less. Poverty created a fractal of need and an absence of resources, then held people like me responsible for both its creation and resolution.

After a decade I saw how unwinnable this situation was — how permanent it would be — so I exited the recursion and took a position where my view is more rigid and unchanging. It is much easier and more manageable, but it is also less complex and, honestly, less beautiful. Though I would never go back to the fractal, I do still miss it frequently.

There’s a depth there that I don’t get experience anymore — a dizzying yet breathtaking perspective I don’t get to have anymore. In my current job my actions can feel like they have a limited surface area, which is easy and manageable and what I wanted when I took this position in the first place.

But in the fractal, where there is the greatest need, there is the greatest potential for impact, and it was there and only there where my actions, at times, felt truly lasting — truly infinite.