What Teaching in Prison is Teaching Me About Learning (Part II)

Part II

Ngram

Remember “digital natives”? I do. That narrative peaked in 2007. Seventeen years ago. Logic demands that these natives should be even more digitally indigenous by now. Even though it was a complete fallacy, “digital natives” is a term I now miss. I miss the idea that students had fluency that didn’t require our certification. In truth, we invented digital natives so we could avoid teaching the technology, which was too dispersed. A new tool every day. Now we invent the opposite. Pedagogically, we’ve become the “digital chieftains,” the leaders who, entirely without training and expertise, must teach students ethical uses for AI. We proclaim this with gravity. I teach people to read and write. Now I am asked to learn a technology to teach students to read and write in place of me. Another layer of noise. I am erasing myself.

Dual Authentication

My incarcerated students read Lynda Barry’s “The Sanctuary of School.” I ask them, “What do you notice about the moment she arrives at school early that day.” They pause. “Hold on,” a student says, and he and two other students whisper about the reading. The room awaits word from the huddle. They compare memory and recall. “No one asks her why she’s there,” the student says. “They accept her right away. And then that one teacher takes her to a room where she can paint and draw. Express herself.” One student is a former tattoo artist, another draws illustrations for his children and sends them in the mail. I tell them Lynda Barry is a renowned cartoonist. The student who led the whispered discussion tells a story. “I get this,” he says, describing how when forced to transfer schools, he ran away from school every morning to go back to his old school, to see his teachers. He says, “I’ve heard of lots of people running away from school. I never heard of anybody running away to another school.” When I leave that day, I finally say it aloud and mean it. “I wish all of my students were in prison.”

Turnitin

A student submits an assignment on an Emily Dickinson poem. The poem’s title is wrong. It is impossible to get the titles of Emily Dickinson poems wrong. I waste time sleuthing instead of teaching and assessing. Digital education turns all teachers into digital detectives. AI has done the reading for this student. Our future has added four lines to Dickinson’s poem that do not exist. Dickinson will die again soon, buried beneath the dirt of generative falsehoods. “Hallucinations.” The poem the student was to examine is eight lines long. It contains a total of 36 words.

Smartphones

A student in one of my traditional classes regularly comes to class with only their smartphone. They do not take notes. I talk about how writing things down, especially by hand, can improve recall. The student says, “It’s too hard to type on my phone but I don’t want to carry anything else.” I carry this response in my head for the rest of the day. Again, there are no classes for our students on how to incorporate phones into their education. This is not the future. Smartphones, which have reshaped our world, have controlled above 50% of the market share for over a decade.

Teams

My incarcerated students and I spend an hour making things. We make sentences by hand. I tell them that understanding the difference between a comma and a semicolon increases their writing ability by an order of magnitude. It is a generative leap. Where sentences were once all the same, the paths through their writing will now change. Some paths are short with quick endings. Some stretch on, piecing together observations like swatches of fabric stitched into a larger whole. We discuss Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use.” A student says he has read the story multiple times in order to unlock the metaphor he sees in the fabric of the story’s quilt. I ask how many times he’s read it. “Ten,” he says.

Breakout Rooms

For my assignment on Emily Dickinson, at least four students submit work with incorrect titles for the poem they are to have spent time engaging with. Reluctantly, I again don the fedora of an uncompensated detective. The first search brings me to an AI generated site. I close the digital window and vow not to search anymore. I will assess work without concern for origin. I am told that I am preparing students for the future. The future of work. I realize I’ve never been as good at my job as I am right now.

Dropbox

People ask if I am scared to teach in prison. They are curious if I know what crimes my students have committed. What I want to say, but never do, is that I am safer teaching inside a prison’s walls than almost every other teacher in America at that same moment. In fall, on my first day of class with incarcerated students, a fourteen-year-old walks into his school in Georgia with an assault rifle and murders two teachers and two students. Nine others injured. Every year now, students are killed in their schools. Every year, teachers are shot while working. When I am at work in the classroom on campus, I flinch when our door clicks without warning. I puzzle through what to do with the two doors that have no graspable handles and which only open outward. We’re on the second floor. The windows do not open. I am in class thinking through this. Fifteen seconds gone. Twenty. An air current clicks the door again. Ten more lost seconds. We are asking the wrong people if they are scared.

Ed Tech

I read an article where a college student is quoted as saying, “I am glad I got the chance to read a whole book when I was in high school.” This is straight reporting. I become generative. I try different versions of this statement. “I’m glad I got to watch a whole sunset once.” In the interview, the student says that with their focus now on a career, they will not need to read entire books anymore. The machine will pull out the important parts. In education outside of the prison walls we use dystopian phrases like, “from cradle to career.”

X

Our top administrator attends a weekend event on literacy. On Monday, he emails the campus community about the seriousness of the problem. Children are falling behind in their reading skills. The administrator commits us to solving this problem. There are subsequent emails and a press release in the local newspaper. A taskforce is mentioned. All employees are encouraged to volunteer time outside of work to read to children. Then ChatGPT. Then summer. Then our AI vertigo. Now we are encouraged to incorporate AI in ways where it reads and writes for our students. The literacy initiative is never mentioned again.

Reddit

I am not afraid of my incarcerated students. I admire them. They have made the conscious choice to not waste these moments. They have chosen to better themselves through their own intellectual work. They are never online, so their work lives in their minds and emerges through their hands and voices. Pens and pencils, writing on paper, the hard tapping on typewriter keys. The students are present. Two hurricanes hit Florida. People begin posting about how one political party is manipulating the weather to deliberately attack states with severe weather events. Some call for the murder of meteorologists. I am not afraid of incarcerated students. I am afraid of people who spend most of their lives online.

Online

My daughters attend a high school where all students submit their work through a learning management system. The introduction of this technology has changed the students’ lives in ways school officials have never discussed. Technology often creates more work than it saves. The amount of homework and assignments skyrockets. All deadlines are now 11:59 pm on school nights. Sleep cycles change en masse. It is Friday night, homecoming. My daughter will march with her band for the final time. She cannot meet her friends early to talk and reminisce because there is a homework assignment due at 11:59. On Friday. Homecoming. The teacher will not even think about these assignments until Monday. Ed tech is always unsupervised. Ed Tech has made it possible for schools to thoroughly colonize the home. The technology forbids my daughters from doing homework in the morning, before the drive to the physical building. If it is early in the morning, they are already late.

Asynchronous Online

At my dining room table, I read papers written by incarcerated students. They write about foster care, about growing up in a large urban center. The phrase “the streets” appears enough that it becomes a specific neighborhood in my mind, a place we can all visit. They write about absent parents. About a grandmother. Abuse. A lack of love. Technology is never mentioned in their work. Not once. No phones, no social media, no gaming. If the papers were scripts, they could be set during the 1970’s or 1980’s. Many of the students have the option to take asynchronous online courses. They take these courses only if no other options exist. They provide an unintentional choral response: “They’re not the same as this.”

Excel

In one of my traditional classes, I put a student on the spot. Scanning lines of poetry. I share my screen so all can see the first six lines of “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas.” I ask this student to identify the dominant rhythm of these lines. This thing she’s probably known her whole life, how does it work? How is it made? Then, she does something no one has done so far this semester. She reaches for a sheet of paper. I see it on the screen. Paper over video. Like my incarcerated students, she writes by hand, recites lines aloud and counts, emphasizes. She cares not one bit about how she might look or sound to other students. For her, there is urgency in this task. After a silence that would usually be uncomfortable, she offers, “It’s anapestic rhythm with iambic feet used as variations at the beginning of lines three through six.” She says this like she’s asking a question. I tell her that she is not only right, but exactly right. She gets it. She beams with joy. I’m so happy I feel like I’m in prison.

Prezi

I remember when the future was Prezi. Second Life is littered with deserted recreations of college campuses.

TikTok

My incarcerated students peer review their latest papers. They read aloud to each other to overcome any issues with handwriting. I hear writing in the air, real writing. The students ask questions of each other. They take notes. We talk about writing as a process, how I’m most interested in their work’s growth from first draft to finished product. Show me how far you’ve come. They are excited about this new idea: the writing portfolio, a collection of all their work. We discuss a paragraph written by Kate Chopin and unpack exactly how imagery and metaphor are being used to support the main idea and tone. They marvel at Chopin’s work in these few sentences. A student says, “Ohhhhh, I see. That’s crazy.” I agree. We all nod. When class is over, every student shakes my hand before they leave. I do not know why.

Outlook

Incarcerated students have time to focus, to read and to write, and they bring to these vocations a passion unmatched by the students in my traditional classrooms who are younger, still finding their way. The incarcerated students persevere under immense environmental pressures. Both populations work while pursuing their education. The traditional students have incredible pressures of their own, none greater than the pressure of distraction, instant gratification, shortcuts that present themselves without effort. The mistake is to see this as an analysis that is critical of traditional students. It is a criticism of the learning conditions outside of the prisons, how we have often, without examination or reflection, surrendered the terms of learning to education technology because we believe it always equals “better,” because such technology is always the future. It arrives with no burden of proof, no matter the size of our graveyards of old ed tech contracts and wasted dollars. We praise the graduate who describes how many jobs they worked while pursuing their degree. We never say, “that’s unfortunate.” We don’t admit that the person standing before us is less than they could have been. I am less than I could have been. When great problems arise, we believe a small elite will always be there, ready to fix the world for us. The kids at the Ivys who are “naturally smart” or do nothing but study.

ChatGPT

Next week I will give my incarcerated students a poem by Emily Dickinson. I will give it to them like a thing with feathers, another species pressured with extinction. I know it will be safe there. When I return, it will be as exactly as I left it.

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Chuck Rybak writes at…