Introduction and My Motivation

When I was trying to figure out what topic to pick for this assignment, I thought about taking a specific problem in education and trying to solve it. I thought about ways to make online learning more engaging and I thought about how to keep women and minorities in math and computer science. I thought about connecting students to older generations and ways that physical movement could be incorporated into classrooms. All of these topics are important to me, and I’ve thought about each a substantial amount. But then I decided to approach this assignment a different way.

This project has so much freedom, and I’m going to take as much advantage of that as possible. I don’t know if I’ll ever become a teacher (I don’t even know what I’ll be doing in the months to come), because I’m not a particularly great public speaker. My voice shakes when I talk to classmates that I’ve known for months, I get dizzy giving presentations to fifth graders, and I get nauseous every time I have to attend classes where professors call on students at random, or worse, use names written on popsicle sticks that they pull out of cups. I even try to deflect attention away from myself at dinner conversations. The point is, I don’t know if I could stand in front of strangers and present for hours, but I love education. So for this assignment I decided to design a class that I would love and be capable of teaching (despite my lack of knowledge in the topic) and that I would have loved to take in highschool.

            For both my imaginary teaching self and my imaginary highschool self, I’m designing a thriller writing course. For my imaginary teaching self I’m making lectures minimal, and the ones that exist will be optional and pre-recorded to be watched by students in their homes. My imaginary teaching self is also being given opportunities to get to know her students’ interests, and to foster an environment of self-reflection, so that her students will no longer be strangers.

            For my imaginary highschool self I’m designing the course to be as low-stakes as possible, so that she can explore any interests she wants and so that she can focus on the joy of the process over the quality of the content. I’m also going to be filling in some of the holes in my education that I wish had been addressed before I left for college: how to ask for help, how to self-motivate, how to listen to the other side’s viewpoint, and how to critically analyze social constructs.

My Inspiration

            Now that you know my motivation, I should also explain my inspiration. When I was in elementary school and middle school, I wrote stories all the time. I wrote about frozen ice skating rinks hidden behind bedroom walls, ghosts that were trapped in diamond jail cells, and giant zombies that could be deflated by removing the plugs on their feet. And like a lot of students, I stopped writing. School had taught me to analyze my work from an imaginary audience’s perspective, and imaginary eyes started judging everything I did. My writing started fading away because I could no longer enjoy imperfect stories. The catch-22 is that the only way to get close to perfection is to write thousands of pages of garbage. The writing class I’m designing is not intended for students to strive for perfection. It’s really a class meant to teach students how to pick up their swords and fight off the imagined judgemental audience hovering over their shoulders. This class is to teach students how to write their way through thousands of pages of garbage.

            The fact that I stopped writing complicates my ability to create a curriculum for a class. Luckily, I found the inspiration to start watching some online classes a few months ago on how to write. I may not know all the tips and tricks that go into creative writing courses, but I’ve learned a lot about the process of writing through these videos, and for the purposes of my imaginary writing class, the process is far more important than the content. I’ll be basing this course off of what I learned from Dan Brown’s Masterclass, and some inspiration will come from David Sedaris’ Masterclass. The class is intended to be a yearlong course, and I’ve divided it into six sections: (1) Pick a Topic, (2) Research, (3) Read, (4) Philosophize, (5) Write, and (6) Bind.

Step 1: Pick a Topic

            I think that a lot of us who want to write but don’t are waiting for inspiration to plop into our lives before we pick up our pens to begin. If there’s one thing that Dan Brown taught me, it’s that you can wait many lifetimes for that moment. Inspiration needs a nudge, and so the first section of my course is dedicated to chasing inspiration, rather than waiting for it.

            Students will be asked to think of anything they’re currently passionate about or something they want to know more about, because they’re about to become experts on that topic. It should be specific enough to not be called generic. If they pick something too broad to research efficiently, they’ll be asked to find a subtopic within that area that interests them. For example, if a student chooses baseball, the amount of research involved in studying baseball would be too overwhelming. The student would be encouraged to find a subset of baseball that they find interesting, like the use of steroids in baseball, women’s baseball, bets in baseball, etc. The topics are endless. Students could explore underwater archaeology, food science, computer hacking, the cold war, or a myriad of other subjects.

            The primary purpose of this section is to stir up inspiration and to find a world that they’ll be able to place their characters in. But this section also has several other purposes. It gives the teacher an opportunity to see their students’ interests, and it gives students the opportunity to share their interests with each other and with the teacher.

Step 2: Research

            This section has two parts. The first is general research. Students will take trips to the library, they’ll Google, and they’ll read news articles. They’ll keep files of fun facts about their topic. They’ll be told that in addition to general research, they’re searching for some kind of tension in their field, some place filled with moral ambiguity. A good place to start may be by looking up “[topic name] legal cases.” Finding moral grey zones might give them ideas for story plots, but it will also force them to look at two different perspectives, encouraging them to sympathize and hopefully recognize that contradictory points of view can both be right in a sense, and that contradictory points of view can sometimes be rooted in similar motivations.

            The second part of the research step is “asking an expert.” Once students have gathered a lot of information about their topic, they’ll have to call or email multiple experts with contradictory points of view. This is similar to Paulo Friere’s idea of presenting students with two videos of opposing opinions and having them debate the arguments. For this assignment students are being asked to find their own videos, and to already be knowledgeable about the topic. But similar to Friere, students would play both videos for the class, if they manage to get two responses, and the class will debate the arguments. This will give the student the opportunity to hear an even greater number of arguments coming directly from their classmates that they might later use in a story.

The point of this step is also to teach students how to ask for help. Students shouldn’t be expected to know everything, and in this way they’ll develop the understanding that experts want to share their expertise and that working with others to understand a topic is more constructive than working alone. They might also learn how to ask critical questions and how to engage with people of differing opinions. This is a skill I wish I had learned earlier.

An experience this year taught me the importance of at least understanding both sides of an argument: I was running a participant in the lab I work for, and my participant was very talkative. Right from the start, when he began talking about climate change, I knew we had very differing opinions. I didn’t start really engaging in the conversation until he started talking about abortion. I’ve always been on the pro-choice side of the abortion issue, and my participant was pro-life. And not just pro-life in a passive way. My participant was a very active member at abortion clinic protests, and he had a lot of statistics to throw my way. The conversation was fascinating. I learned that we both have the goal of protecting the woman, but we had very different views on how to make that happen. Our conversation didn’t change my stance on the issue, but it did give me an important look into another perspective, and it was a very humanizing experience.

Step 3: Read

Maybe this goes without saying, but there will be some reading in this course. Students will be asked to write notes in the margins of the book while they’re reading. They’ll be asked to note moments that they made them feel emotional, and why it made them feel emotional. They’ll be asked to note moments of suspense or curiosity, and what the author did to cause that. Often students are asked to identify the meaning in books. In this course there will be less of a focus on that, and more of a focus on how the author makes readers feel certain ways. This is more useful for writing a thriller, and it keeps a focus on how students feel rather than on what the author intended.

Reading can provide inspiration for other stories, and it also provides a framework for what stories look like, and having an example to jump off of can make writing less intimidating. Mimicking the writers that students have read won’t be looked down upon in this class. Reading thrillers might also inspire some students who generally don’t read school books to develop a love for books.

Step 4: Philosophize

            Stories are revealing of the author’s biases and opinions, even if they aren’t explicit. The characters that authors choose to be their heroes and their villains is an interesting minefield of who they consider to be “good” and who they consider to be “bad.” Step 4 is meant to help students consciously acknowledge their own biases. They’ll start off by being asked questions such as “Who are your heroes?” and progress to questions to “What is a hero?”, “What is a villain?”, “Who are some of your favorite heroes and villains?”, and “Why are they your favorites?”. They’ll also be asked some other fundamental questions in the field of philosophy of heroism, such as “What motivates people to act heroically and what prevents other people from being heroes?” and “In our culture today, what makes one sort of hero appear more heroic than another sort?”.

            These questions will lead to questions about the importance of diverse heroes in literature and media, and how the portrayal of particular races as “villains” in literature and media can be harmful. I’d also like there to be discussions about what type of characters are considered main characters versus side characters, and the current harmful issue of disabled characters primarily being cast and written as side characters. I hope that by grappling with these types of questions both in small groups and as a class, students will learn to critically analyze social constructs.

Step 5: Write

            One of the most important steps: write! I suspect that even with talks about fighting our inner critics and even having amassed pages of inspiration, this step will be difficult. Facing a blank page is still facing a blank page. This class will include five aspects that will try to alleviate the difficulty of writing: (1) in-class writing time, (2) flipped-classroom lectures, (3) brainstorming groups, (4) journals, and (5) talks about self-motivation.

            First, students will have time to write in class. They will also be allowed to write outside of class, but that will not be an expectation. I believe this to be an important aspect of the class because not everyone has a home life that is conducive to writing. Also, being surrounded by students who are also writing might be motivating.

            Second, there will be pre-recorded online lectures for students to watch at home if they want. The lectures will be about the specifics of writing: how to write a prologue, how to get through the middle sections of a book, how to create suspense, how to write endings, and a myriad of other lessons. This might be helpful for students who feel stuck and want more of a recipe for how to write a story.

            Third, students will be given a short period of time at the beginning of every class to socialize with their brainstorming groups. These groups will exist in case a student is experiencing writer’s block and wants help from friends. If nobody wants or needs help, it’s an opportunity for students to get to know their classmates, which I consider to be a crucial part of the class. Feeling as though a few students have your back can make all the difference in a classroom.

            Fourth, students will keep journals to reflect on their writing process once a week. They’ll write about their frustrations, successes, and roadblocks, which the teacher can then read to see where they can help out in a one-on-one setting. This part of the class is meant to keep the students focused on the process over the content.

            Lastly, there will be talks on motivation. Students will discuss what motivates them, and read about the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation (a topic that’s important in highschool and beyond). They’ll also be encouraged to write, whether or not the “inspiration strikes.” Sometimes inspiration is found in the process.

Step 6: Binding

            The last step of the class is to have each student bind their book, or to have all the stories put into a single book. This last step is purely celebratory. Often it feels as though final projects and papers are paper shredded into grades. This step may feel counterintuitive, since the focus of this class isn’t on the content, but I believe the book binding to be a celebration of the process. Stories won’t be ranked by quality, but rather celebrated for their existence. The books can be kept either in the classroom or in the library for future classes to read, or the students can take them home. This choice of sharing the book with the public or not is important, because forcing students to share their work could get in the way of their love for the process.

Concluding Thoughts

Thank you for following me on my journey of designing a class for teachers who are afraid of public speaking and for students who want to rid themselves of their inner critics. If you’re a non-writer who wants to write and you enjoyed this, I hope that even without a course you might still attempt the battle of writing through the fear of failure. Doing so would make you a hero in my book. If you’re a teacher who enjoyed this, I hope you’ll consider giving students the creative space to love the process. Students don’t remember most of the content from highschool; they remember the process of making the content, and they remember if they enjoyed it. And lastly, if you didn’t enjoy this, I hope you give me nine hundred and ninety nine more chances. Good writing takes a thousand pages of garbage, and I’ve put on my armor to write my way through all of them.

There’s been some overlap between the topics of my classes the past few weeks, a focus on the power of feeling heard. In this class, we read Freire’s insistence that “to impede communication is to reduce men to the status of things” (128). Understanding the oppressed by acknowledging and listening to their realities is the only way to change those realities.

In my Consciousness and Cognition class, we’d been talking about locked-in syndrome, a disorder that happens with damage to a part of a person’s brainstem. People with locked-in syndrome have the same level of consciousness and intelligence as before, but are paralyzed and mute. Communication is often limited to blinks and eye movements. I instinctually thought, “What kind of life is that?” When compared to all the things they’d been able to do before (running, cooking, hugging, speaking, everything), how can being limited to blinks possibly compare? As it turned out, people are bad at predicting how happy they will be under different situations. People aren’t as happy as they think they’ll be when they win lotteries, adapting quickly to the new lifestyle and dropping back to their typical level of happiness. And people aren’t as unhappy as they think they’ll be when they lose the ability to move anything except their eyes. Some even rate their quality of life as higher than before they had locked-in syndrome. In a few situations, doctors didn’t realize that people with locked-in syndrome were conscious. They thought they were in a vegetative state. When they were finally discovered to be capable of communicating, they were able to express how difficult it was to have been fully conscious and unable to interact with the outside world in any way.

The point is, feeling heard seems to be up there as one of the most important things in life. We must feel heard to have a high quality of life, and we must feel heard to be open to learning. I learned this, internalized it, and then we were all sent home. And at least for me, I felt like we stopped being heard. Pomona plugged its ears to its students without homes to go back to. Scripps came up with a policy of distributing work-study money that didn’t take the reality of my on-campus job into account (they used what we made in February as a basis for what we “would have made” for the remaining months, but January and February are the slowest months for those of us working for outdoor clubs and couldn’t lead trips because of the weather). Internship money shrunk or disappeared, counseling and health services got discombobulated, and a myriad of other decisions were made that students had no control over. They were made based off of the realities of the administration, but even those weren’t made clear to the students. 

Within the classroom, it’ll be interesting to see how virtual lessons affect communication. This class has done a great job so far of making everyone feel heard. Going around and hearing/giving life updates felt like a step that made learning more possible. In my previous STEM classes, though, the class culture did not center around students being heard, especially for students who have trouble speaking in front of a classroom of more than 30 students. Yet I still felt partially heard because I could talk to the students beside me before, during, and after class. Without that interaction, I would have felt like my eyes were swiveling around, trying to reach the world. Look, I’m here! I have thoughts! And nobody would have heard me. I’m not trying to say that my reality would have been as bad as a locked-in patient mistaken as a vegetative patient. But the quality of our education may drop due to the same silencing effects of not being acknowledged. The fight against loneliness, which reduces students to things, just got a little bit harder.

In Chapter 4 of John Dewey’s Experience and Education there was one quote that struck me because my life experience didn’t align with what he was saying. Dewey wrote, “As long as the game goes on with reasonable smoothness, the players do not feel that they are submitting to external imposition but that they are playing the game. In the second place an individual may at times feel that a decision isn’t fair and he may even get angry. But he is not objecting to a rule but to what he claims is a violation of it, to some one-sided and unfair action” (52-53). 

This quote immediately brought to mind two of experiences: Around the World and flag football. The latter experience occurred when I was working as a computer science education researcher at 9Dots. I was sitting in the corner taking notes on what was and wasn’t working in the classroom, and the first activity of the day was Around the World. To play, one student stands behind a student who is sitting in their chair. A math problem pops up on the board, and the two students have to say the answer as quickly as they can. If the person standing wins, they move on to stand behind the next student sitting in their chair. If the person sitting wins, the standing person sits in their chair and the sitting student now gets to stand behind a chair. The goal is for a student to beat every student and to end up back at where they had started.

In this 5th grade classroom there was an outlier. One of the male students was particularly good at solving math problems in his head quickly. In a typical classroom, students have to spend at least some time sitting before they end up back at their initial seat, but this student won round after round, never taking a seat. The students in the classroom started to get frustrated, and some started booing him. The game was fair and the rules were clear, but there was this unspoken understanding that students should have a semi-equal probability of winning.

The second experience that came to mind was playing flag football in PE. There were many students who dreaded playing flag football, and a portion of them were students who would have played flag football at recess for fun. The fact that it was during PE made it different. There are a myriad of reasons why the fact that it was PE made it less fun: you don’t get to play with the people you’d choose to play with, you’re getting graded, there’s an adult watching over the game, etc. I think that one of those reasons may also have been the fact that there wasn’t a choice to play. That lack of autonomy decreased the intrinsic motivation students had for playing.

I completely agree that experiences in the classroom should be more like games. Even with the problems I mentioned, game-like learning would definitely boost intrinsic motivation in comparison to traditional learning. I do think, though, that games at recess can’t directly translate to games in the classroom as Dewey seems to be suggesting. At recess, students wouldn’t play with their classmates who always win, whereas in the classroom students are encouraged to try their hardest regardless of how their winning affects the other students’ attitudes toward the game. And at recess students’ participation in games are voluntary, whereas in the classroom they are not. Is there a way to address this gap in recess versus classroom games?

In Experience and Education, John Dewey says that a bad educator is “unfaithful to the fact that all experience is ultimately social” (38). The role of the teacher is to interact with students, rather than treat them as sounding boards. Don Finkel then added that interaction between students is equally important. Students spark ideas in one another and are motivated by their peers.

For this blog post I want to talk about an alternative (or additional) type of social activity, because I believe that group work has many uncontrollable variables that may leave out some students from reaping its benefits. For example, if there are low and high-achieving students in the same group, it’s possible that the high-achieving students would end up teaching the low-achieving students, so that half the group ended up experiencing progressive education while the other half ended up with an unintentional simulation of a traditional education. Additionally, a socially ostracized student may receive a worse education because of their social position. They’d be discouraged from talking in their group, and this could develop into a habit of passivity that progressive education is trying to avoid. 

I do think that group workshops have their place, because there’s a lot of value in bouncing ideas off of other people and of articulating one’s thoughts. In addition to workshops, though, I was thinking that it might be useful to have assignments that harness altruism. If students are encouraged to work for someone else who is relying on them, they would be motivated for social reasons. Concretely, this could look like partnering with the community to make something it needs, or for younger children this could be an imaginary character that needs the child’s help solving something. 

In the computer science education internship I worked at, elementary school students were told that they needed to help two fictional characters (the Gamer Bros) program a game that was going to be released. When we asked students who their favorite characters were and why, many of them said that their favorite characters were the ones that needed their help. 

Altruistic homework assignments bring out the same motivation to contribute for someone else’s sake that workshops often bring out. So if some students feel shut down in workshops by their peers, altruistic homework assignments might bring out the motivation without the more complex social factors that might get in the way.

Admittedly, the complex social factors have other benefits. I’ve participated in many successful (and unsuccessful) workshops and group work in my life, and I don’t think my education would have been the same without them. But I never got to try a more altruistic-themed homework assignment, and I wonder if there would have been value in doing those alongside the workshops.

Socrates emphasises over and over again that in order for his kallipolis to exist, everyone has to have a job that fits their natural talent. He says that if anyone does a job that they aren’t naturally suited for, “these exchanges and this sort of meddling bring the city to ruin” (434b). 

What happens if everyone in the city has passions that don’t align with their interests? The cobbler is great at making shoes, but what if he’s dreaming of being a cook? And what if the guard is fantastic at guarding, but all she’s ever wanted to do is be a doctor? Then everyone in the city is unhappy, despite having jobs that they’re naturally suited for, and I think it would be hard to argue that the kallipolis is, on the whole, happy. They’re efficient, and very productive, but they would not be happy.

I thought about this a lot because I’ve spent the last two years wondering if I should stick with computer science as a second major. When I took intro to computer science, I loved the class. Solving puzzles felt very concrete to me, and I loved watching my code run and pass all the tests. But coding didn’t come naturally to me, and even as I moved into higher division classes, I struggled to keep up. I needed the class to move slower for me, but that wasn’t going to happen.

At some point, I started to question how passionate I felt about computer science. Was I not excited about going to class because I didn’t like the topic anymore, or was I afraid of looking and feeling incompetent? Was not being naturally gifted at computer science a sign that I should leave, or should I not let it get in my way? Socrates would have told me that my insistence on staying in computer science was ruining society. I don’t know if I agree with Socrates. 

My computer science skills are far better now than they were three years ago. I’m no longer a computer science major, but I also don’t regret taking those classes. 

I understand that for the sake of social efficiency people should be in jobs that they’re good at. I’d rather have a doctor who’s good at her job than one who’s passionate but incompetent. So how much should schools take this into account? Should teachers push students toward fields they’re talented at, or one’s they’re passionate about? I don’t think it’s fair to assume that the two always align. Should we assume that talent can turn into passion, or should we assume that over a long enough period of time, passion will turn into talent?

At the start of Book II of Republic, Glaucon talks about three different kinds of good: category one is stuff that we do for its own sake even though we don’t care about what comes out of it, category two is stuff we do for its own sake and that also has something we want to come out of it, and category three is stuff that we hate doing but that we do anyway because something good comes out of it. Glaucon and Socrates then argue about which category “justice” falls into.

These three tiers made me think of how the schools I’ve attended fell into similar categories of the different kinds of good, and how the external goal was different for each. 

The school that most solidly fell into category one was the Montessori school that I attended for seventh grade. There was no curriculum, we could take recesses whenever we wanted, and there were no grades. We never talked about what the “point” of school was. College was never discussed. We were given access to textbooks, tutors, and reading groups, and we were encouraged to use them. I had a fantastic year, I learned what I wanted to learn (meaning I read a lot of books, made videos, and baked), and I barely touched math. 

The school that fell more into category two was the Arts and Sciences charter school that I attended my senior year of high school. We had A days and B days so that students could take way more electives than schools that used the same schedule every day. It encouraged students to explore their own interests, and to learn by doing projects. At the same time, college was an ever-present underlying motivator. School was seen as a form of social mobility, an “equal access” way to reach the well-paid jobs. 

The school that fell most into category three was the public school I attended in Spain my junior year of high school. Nobody expected school to be fun, and the teachers weren’t expected to motivate the students. For example, in my psychology class the teacher would have a student read out loud from the textbook, then she would ask us to highlight certain passages, and for homework we would copy by hand the passages we’d been told to highlight. And we’d be tested on the material every few weeks. I noticed that unlike in my classes in the United States, students weren’t motivated by the idea of going to college. Most people preferred to stay in the towns they grew up in. The goal of the school, then, seemed to be to prepare students for the job market. Since the job market is stratified, school reflected that. Students dropped out and were held back at levels way higher than my schools in the United States, creating an educational hierarchy that matches the occupational hierarchy.

Did you guys notice an external goal that your school seemed to focus on? And did your school do anything to make learning fun for its own sake?

One part of the class discussion that stuck with me was Abby’s comment that Socrates’ method could be harmful to his interlocutors. The way he debates is aggressive and off putting, and not only do his interlocutors leave knowing less about the topic they’re discussing than they’d known before, but they also feel worse about themselves. 

In classrooms every day teachers have to find the right way of addressing incorrect answers, or ones that aren’t well thought through. There are a few different tactics I’ve noticed that my professors use that I’ve found really interesting and effective that I wanted to talk about in this blog, and I want to hear if any of you guys have noticed better or worse ways that your own professors have dealt with steering a student toward the right answer without hurting their self-confidence.

The first that came to mind was one of the computer science professors I’ve had. When he asked questions of the class and a student got a question wrong, he was often able to turn it around to sound correct. He would rephrase the student’s answer in such a way that he’d pick out only the parts that lead to the right answer, and then he’d thank them for their answer. In that way, a student’s self-confidence was always left intact, but it was unambiguously clear to the rest of the class what the right answer was. 

The second method that came to mind was used a lot by teachers at a computer science summer camp for elementary school students that I interned at. In CS we use the term “bug” to refer to a piece of code that’s causing the program to work in a different way than we’re intending it to. In this classroom, the teachers were using the word “bug” in reference to the code, but also in reference to their or their students’ thought processes. So if one of the teachers asked “How many times does this for loop run?” and a student said “five” when the answer was “four,” the teacher would say “I think we have a bug here because…, and maybe we can debug this by…” 

After a few weeks of camp I had a conversation with one of the CS education researchers about how the teachers were using the term “bug.” It had bothered me at first because in my mind, “bug” should only refer to code. The researcher asked me what I thought a bug was, and I said that it was a mistake made by the programmer, but that in CS culture it’s seen as an issue separate from the programmer despite the fact that the programmer caused it. The end of the conversation left me realizing that “debugging” can be used for anything, and that if all mistakes were treated as separate from the person who caused it, school and learning might be less scary.

I think that Socrates used this method for himself when he referred to his own thoughts as “hypotheses.” By making his opinions separate from his sense of self, he was making himself immune from being hurt if and when those opinions were proven wrong. Socrates wasn’t generous enough, though, to bestow that armor on his interlocutors. Rather, he forced them to acknowledge their opinions as their own beliefs. I wonder if Plato did this to make the interlocutors embodiments of their own opinions. Or I wonder if Socrates made them feel as though their beliefs were connected to their sense of self so that there would be more emotion in the arguments. Maybe the interlocutors wouldn’t care enough to keep arguing if they considered their beliefs to be separate from who they were.

In cognitive science there are two main theories to explain how people categorize objects and ideas: prototype theory and exemplar theory. According to the prototype theory, people have an ideal, typical member of a category in mind that they use to compare to a new object. It’s like the “center” of the category, and even though it doesn’t exist in real life, it’s seen as the “truest” member of that category.

When I was reading the texts about Socrates, it seemed to me that this was what Socrates was trying to find. He wants someone to tell him what the “prototype” of piety and of justice look like. 

His way of looking at concepts like justice and piety, though, might not be the only way to look at them. There’s the whole other theory of how people categorize objects called exemplar theory. According to this view, concepts are represented by all the examples (or exemplars) that we’ve ever experienced. This means that the category “bird” is represented by memories of all our previous experiences with birds. Rather than have an imagined prototype of a single perfect bird, we compare it to all the previous memories we have of what we’ve been told birds are.

Since piety and justice are social constructs, maybe their definitions are entirely based on examples of what we’ve been told piety and justice are. Although I don’t believe that all of Socrates’ arguments were sound (for example, it seemed like a leap to say that knowledgeable people don’t want to outdo knowledgeable people), maybe the whole point of arguing was to make the point that there is no “center” or “prototype,” and that our definitions of social constructs are founded in experience. 

Socrates’ potential lesson that piety and justice are social constructs reminded me of one of my first meaningful college experiences, which occurred before I came to college. All of us Scripps College incoming freshmen were assigned to read “Imagined Communities” by Benedict Anderson over summer. In it, we learned how powerful nationalism can be, and how people have historically been willing to die for people with whom they have an imagined sense of camaraderie, people they’ve never met and never will meet, tied together by a few shared beliefs. Learning about this had struck me, because I’d never given much thought to the power of social constructs, and learning of their imagined origins made me feel more powerful.

I believe that if “imagined communities” had been replaced with “justice” or “piety,” it would have been just as meaningful of an experience for me. If giving that lesson to others was Socrates intent, maybe he was educating them in a way that gave them more power over the imaginary.

I’m Kaitlyn Zeichick and I’m a senior at Scripps College. Although I love fuzzy blankets and eating popcorn while watching Netflix (I’m currently binging “You” and “This is Us”), I’m most at home when I’m outdoors. I rock-climb most weekends, making excursions out to Red Rocks, Yosemite, Malibu, Big Bear, and anywhere else I can get to in a car. I also love hiking, and am going to try and hike all of California’s 14ers (mountains over 14,000 feet tall) by the end of this year (I’ve done 4 so far). I’m not a runner, but I spontaneously signed up for a marathon in March, so we’ll see how that goes. When it’s raining or I’m at school and have some free time I play piano, read books, and bake cookies.

Going to Scripps has been the longest I’ve ever been at a school, and it’s the eleventh I’ve attended. I went to two preschools, three elementary schools, two middle schools, and three highschools. And I managed to cover a wide variety of different types of education systems in all those transfers: Spanish bilingual programs, Montessori, American public, Spanish public, private, online, and charter with a focus on arts. The Spanish public school was the one that got me interested in education because it was so different from anything else I’d experienced. I’d never been to a school where teachers stood on platforms, students and teachers rotated around classrooms, tests were all in essay format, and grades were read out to the class.

That interest in education is why I’m majoring in Cognitive Science: I love learning about learning, how the mind works, and how teaching styles and tools impact learning. And then I took most of the Computer Science major because I really like puzzles and I’d like to influence the computer science education space since the whole field is a powerful tool for social change. After two computer science education research internships, I realized I’d like to know more about education. What’s its history? What are the goals of education for the different players in the education system? What motivates students? Why is education so stratified? How can we generate change? Hence, Out of the Cave. I’m hoping this class will help answer some of my questions.