Recently, as I was perusing the work output of my tutorial students, I came across one individual with two windows up on his laptop. In one he had a very nice piece of formal writing and in the other he was desperately trying to re-watch the first four seasons of Breaking Bad before the final aired the following week. Responding to this would have been a pretty simple decision for me a few years ago. The logic in my thinking was pretty simple: he should work solely on his formal writing rather than switching between it and ruminations on how the complex decisions facing Walter White, Jesse Pinkman and friends might make us further confused about what makes people good and/or bad. If he works solely on the formal writing he’ll get a better grade in English. There is clear evidence that switching between two cognitively complex tasks (conveniently ignoring the fact that some might argue that watching TV isn’t a complex cognitive task) leads to a lower level of engagement and quality with both. Not to mention the fact that tutorial time is for working! On school work I mean, not other work! And when I say school work, I mean minimal time on satellite stuff loosely connected with regular subjects and more time on really hardcore stuff like assessment work!
But it’s not really that simple, is it? If you’re writing me off as a bleeding heart liberal at this point, please bear with me as I do my best to outline how this once simple decision has now become a deeply complex and angst-ridden internal conflict. Well not quite angst-ridden but definitely a little more complex. Student S (as we’ll henceforth refer to him as) will potentially do really well with that piece of formal writing, regardless of whether he’s switching between writing it and watching Breaking Bad during tutorial time. The fact is, that he’s got more than enough time to get a pretty convincing excellence before the piece is due. Of course this adds some complication around consistency if another student without the same skillset isn’t able to finish theirs because they’re also watching Breaking Bad. I could, I suppose, argue that Student S’s piece of writing won’t be as good if he multi tasks for the next half an hour but to be honest I’m not even sure that’s true. On the other hand while it’s not all that likely he’ll decide to become a drug dealer (he isn’t taking chemistry, physics is more his thing) I can see how engaging with the complex and layered characters in Breaking Bad might, in fact, give him some ideas for his own final piece of creative writing later in the year.
My response to this complex moral conundrum could be to tell Student S that he can’t watch Breaking Bad on the premise that it would make a difference to his final formal writing grade or that it isn’t equitable if other students aren’t able to do the same thing. The latter argument might hold some weight with him but probably not the former (Student S does have a reasonable social conscience.) Another option might be to push for a school-wide ban on the watching of films or TV series during tutorial, thus taking the responsibility of the decision away from me altogether. Although I’m not entirely sure I like the idea of being an enforcer more than that of a being a philosopher. The option I took in the end was to try and convince him that watching Breaking Bad would make it difficult to engage in his formal writing and that if he really wanted to enjoy the entirety of the first four seasons, he’d be far better off doing it at home on a decent-sized screen without sub-standard earbuds for sound.
It seems strange to me that I’ve only recently considered how many variables there are in a conversation with a student on what learning is the most important for them at any one time and why. There is the student’s complex list of priorities, my list of priorities (not all of which will be based solely on Student S’s best learning interests), the learning interests of the other students around Student S and finally there is the overarching consideration of what’s going to be the most useful to all of those groups in the future. And once we get into thinking about the future, anything I say about how useful a piece of learning might be will always involve some degree of speculation. And crikey, if there’s one thing that makes it obvious I’m not the fount of all knowledge, it’s an admission that some of what I’m saying might be speculation.
Perhaps in the rare times questions around the utility and value of the learning we’re delivering did used to come up, we might have been giving the curriculum a read over and seen those learning area justification sections. For the most part, students arrive in our class at the beginning of the year and they’re stuck with us for however long and regularly the timetable says they should be, and also with any decisions we make on what learning is the best for them. It’s not that we’ve never had to justify these things before it’s just that we haven’t had to all that often.
Given how technology is changing the face of learning however, it seems a risky proposition to go on ignoring what makes a particular type of learning valuable to an individual student or engaging with these questions in a surface manner with responses such as: students must alway work on what I’ve timetabled in exactly the order I’ve specified because that’s what’s best for them. In a world which continues to be changed by technology at a fairly rapid pace, engaging in conversations with students about what learning is valuable along with why and how it might help in the future seem pretty jolly important. We don’t need to pander to every whim of every student all the time, but we do need to help model the process of thinking about the importance and relevance of learning and engage in this actively with students. These conversations can be pretty intimidating especially when we’re already pressed for time or by the knowledge that students do need to pass assessments on a clearly specified set of skills. Not to mention the fact that we’re not even totally sure our individual beliefs on what’s important are even going to be that much more helpful for them than arbitrary rules with flimsy or non-learning based reasons for their existence. Still, we don’t have to worry about knowing it all now either. If they want more ideas on what particular piece of learning is important and why, they’ve always got the internet to go searching for other opinions!
So while after nearly having finished watching Breaking Bad myself I’m still pretty clear on the largely negative moral implications of cooking crystal meth. I’m still sadly a bit unclear, however, on my ethical responsibilities when it comes to directing what students should be working on. But maybe like Jesse, Walt and Vince Gilligan, I’ll just keep doing my best to respond and develop stuff as I go along and hope everything turns out OK. Just as long as I can get it sorted in time before the future arrives…
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