On May 31st, 2023, the New York Times published an opinion piece about Mississippi's stunning improvement in literacy over the last decade or so:
Mississippi Is Offering Lessons for America on Education
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/31/opinion/mississippi-education-poverty.html
With an all-out effort over the past decade to get all children to read by the end of third grade and by extensive reliance on research and metrics, Mississippi has shown that it is possible to raise standards even in a state ranked dead last in the country in child poverty and hunger and second highest in teen births.
This is laudable of course. It demonstrates that throwing more money at a problem like education is not always the answer. What works much better is to spend resources judiciously and carefully. The US spends more on education per student per year than almost any other locale on earth, but gets very poor outcomes in return for this substantial investment.
It is also beneficial to use "evidence-based" approaches, as this article mentions. It is amazing that "evidence-based" or empirical procedures are so seldom employed in the public policy arena. This is particularly true when fields that are based on these kinds of methods, like science, engineering and quality controlled manufacturing, are able to exhibit tremendous advantages because of them.
However, one passage in this article struck me. Consider the case of Allyson, a child in a class learning about light in Mississippi:
Most of the class was sitting on the floor and enthusiastically answering the teacher's questions. Meanwhile, Allyson was running around the classroom, trying to see if she could run faster than her shadow. "Every classroom has an Allyson," another teacher said with a sigh.
Of course, it can create chaos and distractions in a classroom when a student like Allyson is "acting out". Teachers just want to go through their regimented program. I understand that. It is even reasonable, in some ways.
However, if you think about it from a different perspective, Allyson was showing initiative and creativity and resourcefulness. She had an idea and she was attempting to perform an experiment. This kind of thinking needs to be encouraged and maybe even accommodated, not hammered down.[1]
There are a lot of ways in which this "problem" with Allyson could have been handled. Perhaps the teacher could have recognized what Allyson was doing, and invited the rest of the class to do something similar, burning off excess energy while exercising their imaginations. Allyson would have then been cast in the role of a thought leader, instead of a troublemaker.
Here are just a handful of the interesting ideas to explore that could have been stimulated by Allyson's clever example:
a. the concept of "diffraction"; how sharp are the edges of the shadows? What do the edges look like? Why do they look like this?
b. The shape of the shadows can lead to the investigation of projections, and sundials, and Eratosthenes' experiment to measure the circumference of the earth.
c. a pencil placed in a glass of water can display another property of light; refraction. The pencil after it enters the water looks slightly bent. In some circumstances, its colors will be altered slightly by dispersion as well, associated with the different speeds of different frequencies or colors of light.
d. A discourse about rainbows and the refraction of light.
e. a careful consideration of reflections, in a mirror or in a pool of water. Why does a mirror reflect left and right, but not up and down? [2]
f. A discussion of the speed of light and the Michelson-Morley experiments that attempted to measure the speed of light in different directions, with the movement of the earth and orthogonal to it. This of course is associated with Einstein's theory of relativity.
g. A few questions about wave-particle duality for light, and possibly even the Double Slit experiment, which is one of the foundational observations in Quantum Mechanics.
h. pinhole cameras
i. lenses and optics
j. the Eddington observation of the "bending" of starlight by gravity
Simple demonstrations can lead to interesting questions and discussions and revelations. So rather than squelching Allyson's mildly annoying traits, perhaps they could be harnessed in a productive way.
In my own education and subsequent career in research and development, I have personally run right smack into this "Allyson problem", repeatedly. I was always a bit of a "goody two shoes", and very academically competitive. Teachers loved me at this stage, in general. I was diligent and thoughtful. I easily absorbed the material they were teaching.
But as I aged, and became a teenager, and then entered my twenties, I started to encounter problems. My brain was developing and I was probably starting to exceed the capabilities of the teachers. This caused a certain amount of consternation and resentment among my instructors.
I insisted in learning stuff that was not quite in the curriculum. I knew more about certain topics than the faculty. I took extra classes to satisfy my interests, which upset those who were trying to insist on and even demand uniformity and conformity. I pushed myself to the limits. I took graduate classes in statistics and signal processing as a sophomore, which infuriated some in the physics department. I spent endless hours developing novel computer algorithms in my spare time.
During my career, this became more and more of a stumbling block. I thought "outside the box" and came up with novel solutions to extremely challenging problems. I slowly started to develop a reputation for insubordination, as much as I tried to do whatever was asked of me and to comply with all requests. I did not fit the role that the managers envisioned for me.
At jobs at which we were supposed to innovate, I discovered that managers mostly tried to discourage innovation. Innovation was too risky and too threatening. It made them uncomfortable.[3]
In this respect, I am in good company. Reading the biographies of most innovators in STEM, one discovers that they invariably ran into the same barriers that I did. I still continue to confront these issues.
The 2019 book "Loonshots" by Safi Bahcall describes a very large number of technical and scientific innovations. Bahcall's thesis is that these advances were only possible in small organizations, not large organizations. I disagree, and there are lots of counterexamples.
Bahcall himself has never really innovated, aside from possibly some flirtation with it in graduate school. From my experience and that of my friends and colleagues and even many of the examples listed in Bahcall's Loonshots book, low level and medium level managers try desperately to squelch and stop all innovation. There are almost no examples of significant progress in the last couple of centuries where this did not happen. It has nothing to do with the size of the enterprise. It has to do with attitudes.
And Allyson is a perfect example of these attitudes. The NYT author Nicholas Kristoff or the NYT editors or the teachers in Mississippi did not spot this. Allyson was a disruptor, a troublemaker, an irritant. But so am I.
And maybe we need to encourage the "Allysons" out there a bit more.
Notes
[1] Those who are familiar with the history of science will recognize the similarity of Allyson's questions and behavior to those of Einstein at about the same age. Einstein liked to imagine himself riding on a light beam, and wondered what the world would look like from that vantage point.
[2] This is true at least for planar reflecting surfaces, not funhouse mirrors and other odd situations.
[3] It was even viewed as "insubordination."
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