homework has almost no pedagogical basis and mostly exists to get young children to tie their self-worth to hours of unpaid, unexplained, and arbitrary overtime so that, as adult workers, well... https://twitter.com/lukeisamazing/status/1280334432184995841

there's this sociological concept of a "third space" -- a place that isn't home and isn't work, where we might have thoughts and form connections and feel emotions that do not lend themselves to the home rhythm or work rhythm.

what if classrooms were that, and not Office Jr.?

actually, I want to go a step further: I truly believe that our modern society gives a human only a few frames with which to explain themselves to themselves and others. Primarily, we are Worker or Consumer (perhaps also partner/parent).

This is not sufficient for anybody.

I believe that the most basic job of the teacher -- the reason we are to do all that loving and questioning -- is to establish, and then guard like hell, a frame for someone to see themselves that is not worker consumer partner parent.

If I did not believe that I could and must create an alternative to that via teaching, I'd be doing some other job that wasn't teaching. I'm going to try to do that, and you'll know if I succeeded or not because if I can't, I'd find a way to switch careers.

(a life that you can accurately and wholly summarize via "he produced and he consumed" is not the life any of us want or deserve to live, but when we flatten 'student' into 'Worker Jr.', we make that fate more likely.)

What I like about 'student' as an identity, and why I still call myself one:

1. It implies submission, and not the gross humiliating kind with a violent power imbalance, but the focusing peace that washes over me when I admit a topic is bigger than me, both ancient and new.

2. it also implies communion/solidarity -- "hey, since this big ancient new thing is beyond either of us, d'you wanna team up and try to solve it?" We are fundamentally on the same team as we both gaze at the Big Vast Thing. We are not competing, but we are also not idle.

3. it only really requires Want. if you want to be a student of astrophysics or English literature or the skeletal system or bird migration patterns, you are. There is no capital upfront, there is no initiation. Wanting to be on the journey is automatically the journey.

but also 4. it definitely implies a kind of cyclical disturbance. The student with the bold idea becomes the teacher, who becomes the student, etc. It's not a hierarchy, because it's designed to disrupt itself over time, and often rapidly.

But so yeah! To summarize, a list of things I definitely believed before today but did not know I believe.

1. The role of the teacher is to, through loving and probing and communal questioning, create the role of the Student.

2. The role of the Student, when adopted for life, allows a person to exist, sometimes, in humble and communal service to a network of questions bigger than themselves.

3. This creates a role for a person that is not Worker or Consumer or Boss or Parent or Partner.

4. and is therefore inherently a threat to capitalism, which would rather us not exist in any role except those for any length of time. Capitalism depends on us flitting neatly between those hierarchical roles.

5. and so we flatten the role of student to Worker Jr. We must not.

(6. Because no one who lives and dies solely as Worker Consumer Boss Partner Parent dies fully happy. Some of those roles are valid and happy-making, but we all hunger on some level for a frame outside of them.)