Learning
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Unlike the sewing machine, the Apple II began (in the form of the Apple I) as a pure hobbyist invention by Steve Wozniak. ↩︎
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Unfortunately, unlike the mythical sewing hobby, which could even save money when the girls made their clothes, the Apple II, initially, was expensive (I couldn’t afford one) and got its initial sales boost from businesses because it had the first personal computer spreadsheet. Cheaper computers that came along to fill the low-price gap became primarily game machines because they didn’t have the creative community of the Apple II. Ideally, bottom-up passions would come at bottom-up prices, that is, not become another path for socio-economic divide. ↩︎
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I use the term “homeschool” for convenience; home-mentored is more accurate. We required a minimum of book learning, pointed out various activities they might like, and otherwise left them alone. Our son did the so-called required work. Our daughter required that we leave her alone. ↩︎
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The school district created the resource center so they could count the users as regular students for which they got funded. ↩︎
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My sole reason for buying my first computer (at the age of 37) was its potential as a learning device for children and adults. I was not even aware of word processors or spreadsheets. My chief interest in computers is still as a learning device. ↩︎
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Often used interchangeably, video games are played on dedicated game consoles, such as the Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo Switch. Computer games are played on general purpose computers, such as the Windows PC or Apple Macintosh. ↩︎
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I had a similar experience: During the educational software boom in the late 80s and early 90s, I published a journal where I wrote lengthy reviews comparing the software in each category, for example, math or biology. Out of dozens of programs, I found two that were worth using. I took a look at games and discovered they were far better learning environments than “educational software.” Fortunately, educational software is dead. ↩︎
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Those who don’t play games may believe most gamers are still ten-year–old boys. On the contrary, children who grew up with games are still playing them decades later, so the average age of a gamer is mid-thirties. And though they tend to play different genres, the percentage of females who play games is equal to that of males. ↩︎
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Despite the years of training, I’m not good at martial arts, but I think I could hold my own against the older accountants and financial advisors. ↩︎
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I saw the documentary seventeen years before I started to train in Aikido but my intention persisted. ↩︎
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When she learned to read, our daughter read the Calvin and Hobbs books on her own. ↩︎
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Mastery is used in two ways: competence, which is how I’m using it, and excellence. ↩︎
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Seriously, I doubt a Google engineer could understand the Miele manual. ↩︎
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Those classes were colloquially known as “dumbbell English,” and I failed my first two attempts. Four years later, at a different community college, I finally passed English 1A, so I could enter my junior college year. ↩︎
Hard Fun
The phrase “pleasure of writing” makes me pause. At this very moment, writing is not altogether pleasurable. The ticking of the clock telling me that the deadline is coming close frustrates me. I am stinging from the pain of having to throw out a whole paragraph because “it wasn’t going to work” even though it had a phrase with which I had fallen in love. So maybe “pleasure” isn’t quite the right word. Nor is “fun.” We need a better word for it and maybe that first grader in San Jose provided the best one. We are talking here about a special kind of fun … “hard fun." —Seymour Papert (founder of the AI, MIT lab and researcher in cognition)
A girl is growing up in a rural American town in the middle of the twentieth century. She hits her teens and begins to notice that some of her classmates are wearing cooler dresses than can be found in the local department store or the Sears Catalog. She asks around and learns these girls are sewing their own dresses.
While the girls started on mother’s machine, most eventually save for or receive a gift of the trendy model that is simpler and cheaper, and they send away for catalogs of sewing patterns and cotton and wool fabrics. The girls begin to share patterns and catalogs and start a school club to talk about their hobby.
The local sewing enthusiasts discover a national club that’s sponsored by the manufacturer of the now ubiquitous machine. The club creates contests for best-sewn products and for sewing patterns invented by the girls. As amateur pattern design takes off, budding entrepreneurs launch commercial journals targeted to the hobbyists.
Manufacturers notice the personal sewing boom and launch both more expensive and cheaper machines, but they sell poorly because the sewing hobby is identified with the machine that launched the boom. While this low-to-medium priced machine eventually breaks down, they’re simple to fix and third-party businesses jump in to create fix-it manuals and spare parts. The sewing machines are kept alive well past the time the engineers who developed them would have guessed. Newer, more expensive machines are undoubtedly superior—more sophisticated, more robust—and eventually become favorites of those who start their own pattern-design business, but the masses stay loyal to their first machines because they alone retain the most important element—the community of creativity.
The oldest and geekiest of readers might realize that the hobbyist sewing boom I describe is a parable of the Apple II computer and the community that formed around it. (I know nothing about sewing.) First issued in 1977, Apple continued the model until late 1993, nearly a decade after the far more sophisticated Apple Macintosh, its intended replacement, was introduced and a dozen years after the more expensive and business-oriented IBM PC, the ancestor of the modern Windows computer, was released.
Why did the Apple II persist despite its inferior engineering and its own company’s attempts to lay it to rest in favor of the Mac? Because the Apple II became the foundation for the greatest modern example of creating a community of creativity and a community of learning. Let me summarize the points made in the sewing example: while the technology came from the top, the manufacturers,1 the community came from the bottom, the enthusiastic Apple II users. As they went on to design games and design business and home software, many of these early users became the driving force of modern personal computing. The hobby also hatched journalists, publishers, hardware add-on designers, and authors of how-to books and journals.2
Meow
My son and his younger sister were homeschooled,3 but when they hit ages eleven and seven, the “homeschool resource center” run by the school system opened.4 Our daughter, at the time our socially interested child, engaged enthusiastically in learning Spanish and American Sign Language and more enthusiastically in the musical theatre class.
Musical theatre became fashionable in the 90s, even hatching hit TV shows and movies. High schools had sponsored competitions, and parents of means got involved by supplementing the costs of production.
At the homeschool resource center, aside from the contracted theatre instructor, the kids were on their own. When they decided to put on the then-famous musical, Cats, they knew their involvement would have to go beyond rehearsing and performing. They constructed the sets and the complex feline costumes (no doubt sewed on the machines from the parable above). Not only did they pull it off, they became finalists in the school musical competition chosen by Seattle’s professional Fifth Avenue Theatre, going against schools with professionally made sets and costumes. The homeschoolers didn’t win, but they carried the satisfaction that the performance was all their doing.
My communities
I’m an introvert, not part of a religious community, rarely felt a kinship with fellow counselors, and know no one who shares my intellectual interests. My idea of a tribe is rooting for the Seahawks. Since I began at age forty-eight, any community engagement I’ve had has been in a martial arts dojo.
I believe a good martial arts dojo can be a model for a learning community, and all it takes to create one are instructors (the sensei) who have devotion to their art and care for their students. I’ve been lucky to find that three times.
Why a martial arts dojo? First, while the instructor says do it like this, any instructor with ten minutes of experience means do it like this according to your physical and mental ability; they don’t expect every student to move with equal grace. Second, martial arts sensei like to tell as much as the next teacher, but as they’re teaching a kinesthetic skill, their focus is on show, that is, modeling, which is more effective for all instruction. Third, while there is competition—explicit ranking, and in sport martial arts, organized competition—the tacit if not always explicit message is you’re competing against only yourself. In other words, you’re training to be better than you were the day before. Fourth, martial arts creates a we’ve-got-each-other’s-back camaraderie. Despite what you believe from TV and movie dramas, the most dangerous aspect of a well-run martial arts school is the car trip to the dojo. Still, even if restrained, martial arts is physical combat, so there’s always potential for injury. And you can learn only if you consistently face what my Aikido sensei called a “sincere attack.” That potential for causing injury and for assisting others to learn makes you aware of your responsibility to your fellow students. Aware students help others and don’t hurt others.
Last, martial arts tacitly gives responsibility for students to understand and fill the holes in their learning. While instructors can point to problems, I reach back to the limitations of human communication and cognition to point out there’s no way instruction can be fielded completely. I think that’s a good thing. Individual understanding evolves art and skill.
Hard fun
Seymour Papert was the cofounder at MIT of the first official artificial intelligence (AI) lab. Unlike the modern tech-bro culture, which is absorbed with self-interest, early AI culture was dedicated to learning, inventing, and sharing. To that end, Papert studied with the pioneering cognitive psychologist, Jean Piaget, for five years because he wished to contribute to the education of young children. He and fellow computer scientists designed a children’s version of the dominant AI computer language, Logo, and its accompanying “object to think with,” a turtle-shaped tethered mechanical robot that Logo could control.
The goal was to start a child as young as six to use turtle graphics to learn geometry. To begin, they’d walk the child through the steps the mechanical turtle would take to draw a square:
forward 10 (paces)
right 90 (degrees)
forward 10
right 90
forward 10
right 90 forward 10 right 90
The child would then type on the computer keyboard to give the same instructions to the mechanical turtle. The child was introduced to abstraction, the domain of math.
With the invention of personal computers, a version of Logo with virtual turtles that drew lines on the screen soon made their way to the Apple II and later personal computers.5
Using Logo, young children were among the first to experience computer graphics. Soon graphics far advanced from Logo would make their way to video and computer games,6 and Papert spent significant time with his nieces and nephews watching them play these games. He realized, if you look past the surface of cute animation, the games are difficult puzzles, and he was impressed that the reward for beating a level was a more difficult level. Papert concluded that the attraction of these games was not because they were frivolous fun, as we old folks may have believed, but “hard fun,” intellectual challenges that exceeded the dull lessons of the classroom.7 8
Seymour Papert was prescient. While there was a time the rightful descendant of the Apple II learning community was amateur web site development, that has become too complex for hobbyists. Games have become increasingly difficult as well but are still accessible to the determined, and users turn to forums, wikis (a Wikipedia for a single game), messaging platforms, and YouTube and other video channels, to gather playing advice. The most ambitious add their own content to games (called “modding”)—harder hard fun.
I’ve described various forms of learning communities and there are countless others: book clubs, writing groups, music jams, collecting, rock climbing, fan fiction, pet interests, role-playing, and many I’ve never heard of. What they have in common is the pursuit of hard fun, participation from members of various levels of competence, and sharing and mentoring. Contrast that with an increasingly common community, the tribe.
Learning communities versus tribalism
What largely separates learning communities from those defined by ethnicity, politics, religion, nationality, and the like is that the identity within the learning community is earned and the dominant part of that earning is what you give away as a mentor. Learning communities are also inclusive: anyone who shares the interest is welcome. Contrast with communities that are based solely on my tribe is better than your tribe or my tribe hates your tribe. Which community would you prefer to be part of, a community based on hard feelings or a community based on hard fun?
Mastery
Can I move? I’m better when I move.
Last year, my wife and I moved from Edmonds, Washington to Portland, Oregon to help with our newborn grandchild. At least that’s the explanation I put out. The real reason? I was scared to go out at night in Edmonds. I was afraid I’d run into the notorious gangs of dentists, lawyers, accountants, and the most chilling of all, the “lords of Edmonds mean streets,” the financial advisors. How else can I explain my continued practice in martial arts that I took up at age forty-eight? Yet, even with martial arts training,1 I was still intimidated by the ravenous hoards pushing their way to an eighty-dollar filet mignon. Hence: to Portland.
In truth, statistically, the most dangerous thing in my life would become the drive to the dojo, but after watching a documentary on the grace of Aikido,2 I wanted some of that. Unlike the Sundance Kid, I’m not better when I move, but I wished to become better when I move. Seven years in Aikido ended when the dojo closed. Two years in karate ended when my daughter could drive herself to the dojo. For the last fifteen years, my wife and I have pursued the more gentle-on-the body art of Tai Chi.
Speed thrills
“Oh, my-my, what a sensation”
—the Beach Boys
In a nearby Portland park, we initiated our then ten-month-old granddaughter into a new sensation. Nana (Joan) sits Nova on her lap, arranges the infant’s extremities for safety, and wheeee down the park slide. The one-second adventure is Nova’s first thrill of speed.
At my age of ten (years, not months), we visited the relatives we left behind in Chicago. My family took our first ride on a commercial jet. The acceleration on takeoff was so thrilling that for years I anticipated another jet ride for just those seconds.
As thrilling as those rides are for Nova and were for me, it’s more fun when you’re the driver not the passenger, that is, when you get to control the speed that gives you thrills, such as when I learned to ski (badly), and when I pretended I was a race-car driver in the sports cars I owned in my early adulthood.
In infancy, our caretakers tend to our needs and fulfill our desires. But they fulfill our desires only as they see fit. Nova’s smile informs us that she likes the ride down the slide. Her kicking and screaming as we put her back in her stroller informs us she’s displeased that she has no control over when the sliding fun ends.
When Nova gets a little older, she’ll get to go down the slide by herself, and she’ll get to speed down the sidewalk on her trike. The older she gets, the more control she’ll have over speed and other sensuous thrills. Perhaps, she’ll take up a team sport such as soccer or an individual sport such as her big brother’s rock climbing or her mother’s martial arts.
Calvin and Hobbs
When our kids were ready for chapter books, Joan and I created our own bedtime-story habits. I read our son adult books and his younger sister, young-adult books. Joan read our daughter newspaper comics and our son, from Calvin and Hobbs books.3
One day, we found Adam sitting on the couch reading through a Calvin and Hobbs book on his own. He had realized he had learned to read by following the words in the book. Could he read, or did he just memorize the words in the one book? The answer came when he picked up the nearest novel in sight and began to read Jurassic Park.
The yearning for “mastery,” and by that, I mean attaining and maintaining a skill that brings independence4 starts at the breast (or substitute)—the umbilical cord has been severed, and I’m hungry—and lasts throughout life.
We associate learning with school, and school with children, and we associate learning with practical needs such as reading. But most learning has no obvious utility, and we could go about our lives just fine without. To pay the bills, we could learn law or plumbing and spend the rest of our time watching Netflix. If I cared to acquire only practical knowledge, I’d forget training in Tai Chi and study the manual that came with our new computer disguised as a washing machine.5
But there’s no difference between baby Nova and me. She didn’t recently learn to walk because she foresaw soccer in her future, and I don’t train in martial arts for self-defense or for the health advantages promoted in the Harvard Medical Journal. We both pursue mastery for its own sake because we’re humans and that’s how our species evolved.
Learning-Introduction
On a flight, seated behind a teenage girl, a novelist was having a get-off-my-lawn moment. With the click sound enabled, the girl tapped away on her iPhone. Tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap… The nonstop cadence of the taps meant she could not be texting back and forth with friends. As the girl tapped away the entire flight, the novelist’s irritation dissolved into admiration and, finally, revelation. The girl was writing a novel.
I enjoy reading about how authors write and their opinions on the correct creative process. There’s no end of advice on how it should be done, which varies from “write every single day at the same time in a quiet space set up for only writing” to “write when the baby’s napping” or “take advantage of when you’re standing in line at Starbucks.” Or, if you’re on a jet at cruising altitude, stuffed into a tiny seat with no leg room, thumb tap on your iPhone.
Outlines and Notecards
In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.
—Mark Twain
I have a hunch my “dumbbell English” 1 class teachers felt the same way about me as Twain felt about the Parisians. Two attempts to pass a remedial English class at my community college resulted in grade F.
The goal of the class was to teach essay writing. We were instructed to begin our essay by making an outline and to take notes from our research on lined notecards. To produce the essay, we were to create an outline on which our notes would be distributed and transformed into prose. Voila (I know one more French word than Mark Twain did)—your essay.
Does anyone write this way? When I attempted an outline, I lasted as long as I would in the ring against Mike Tyson in his prime (or even on his deathbed). In retrospect, I believe most students created the outline after they wrote their essays, but at the time, I blamed myself for my failure.
Long motivated to become a licensed counselor, but aware of my academic deficits, I negotiated an academic path so I had to produce just two essays to get a master’s in clinical psychology. My undergrad degree was in applied art (which I’m terrible at), and my master’s was ninety-percent counseling internships with the “classroom” devoted to supervision. The downside? My writing woes plagued me well beyond those remedial English classes. My insecurities about writing contributed to my failure to complete my PhD.
My academic days ended long ago. In the meantime, computers and word processors came along to minimize my deficiencies in organizing and maximize my enjoyment of thinking on a screen and illustrating those thoughts with wordplay.
I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.
—Flannery O’Connor
When I start to write, I don’t have any plan at all. I just wait for the story to come. I don’t choose what kind of story it is or what’s going to happen.
—Haruki Murakami
So much for the expert writing advice to “have a plan.” My teachers’ instructions on how to write an essay presumed there was one best way (or, perhaps, just one way, as we were given no alternatives) to approach a writing project. And these instructions assumed that my brain works the same as theirs. There has to be a better way to nurture the abilities of a varied group of learners. Flannery O’Connor wrote before there were word processors, but some of us need more help.