On Finding a Way, Rocking Horses, Blueberry Muffins and… Learning?

The horse

I don’t know why, but this memory keeps surfacing for me these days. When I was maybe three or four years old, I remember clearly, my dad leaving the house and telling me, from the door, “would you like anything?” and I said “I want a horse!”. And he came home. And he had one with him. Only it wasn’t a horse horse, it was a rocking horse. I remember in that moment thinking, “what is he, stupid? Does he not know the difference between a real horse and a rocking horse? When you ask for a horse, it means a live horse; did I really have to qualify that I wanted a real horse?”. I don’t know if at that age I was smart, wise or kind enough to stop myself from expressing exasperation out loud. I hope, I truly hope, that in that moment, I appeared delighted and grateful and that I thanked him. I know, from my photos growing up, that I truly loved that rocking horse and spent hours and hours of my life on it. I know I love swings and rocking chairs (to this day, I can’t resist a swing), so I’m sure I really enjoyed this rocking horse. But I still remember the disappointment at the moment. In hindsight, though, I think my dad was supersmart that day. He didn’t ignore my impossible request of wanting a horse. We lived in an apartment in Kuwait, nobody rode horses, nobody had a place to raise a horse – I realize some people live in places where maybe a horse is a manageable thing. This was not at all the case for us. My dad didn’t want to just ignore my impossible request for a horse. In hindsight, it was such a great way to actually show me that he had listened to what I asked for, and he did not ignore it. I was maybe too young to understand I had asked for an impossible thing, but he did try to get me the most possible thing, the next most possible thing. He found a way. Of course it was nowhere near the same, but it worked, and it was great in its own way. I hope that every time my child asks for something impossible, I can find a way to show her I listened, and that one day she will appreciate that I tried.

Blueberry Muffins

Today, my husband and I were having breakfast at a cafe, and we both ordered blueberry muffins. Only, I started eating my muffin, and it was totally empty inside. This place only has chocolate muffins and blueberry muffin options. So this couldn’t have been like a vanilla muffin or something, you know? My husband doesn’t like to make a big deal out of these things, and I didn’t want to make a big deal, either, but I did want to let them know. So I called our waiter and said, “listen, it’s not a problem, and I’ll eat it, no problem, but I did want to tell you that my blueberry muffin didn’t have any blueberry in it”. Someone from the kitchen came, took a photo, examined it, and then he did something kinda smart. He got me some blueberry sauce in a little cup, and said, “you could add this in?”. It wasn’t bad. I mean, it wasn’t as good as having real blueberries, but I suspect in Egypt they just use frozen blueberries or blueberry jam or something… so the blueberry sauce is probably what they’d put like on cheesecake or something? It wasn’t as good as the real thing, but he still found a way to make me feel listened to, even though he couldn’t fix the initial problem [OK, he could have fixed the initial problem by getting me a new blueberry muffin, but I explicitly did not ask for that because I was OK to eat it without the blueberries]. I just liked that he found a way, even if it wasn’t maybe the regular way.

Learning

While the blueberry incident was happening, I told my husband the story about the rocking horse, and my face must have shown it, because he could see the wheels turning in my head, and he said, “look, if you’re gonna speak publicly about the blueberry incident, don’t mention the name of the cafe”. That made me laugh, because I’d been thinking the same thing. So here is what I’m thinking in terms of learning.

I am thinking about three things: experiential learning; educational technology; and AI.

With experiential learning, we’re trying to build on the importance of learning from and reflecting on concrete experiences, exposing learners to as authentic an environment as possible, to enable deeper learning of complex concepts, skills and attitudes, to clarify for learners the relevance of what they’re learning, and to enhance transferability, right? The more authentic and complex the experience, the better the potential of achieving all of these outcomes. However, in some instances, this is not possible, and we have to settle for a role play or simulation, because, for example, we can’t send a bunch of 18-year-olds to the united nations when they’re not yet well-versed in the topic they’re talking about (Greta Thunberg and Malalah Yousufzai notwithstanding); you can’t let a medical student operate for the first time on a live human body unsupervised – you train them on cadavers or artificial bodies or whatever they do these days; you don’t let a chemistry student design an experiment with the most dangerous chemicals and risk blowing up the school, you can do a virtual experiment, or you guide them to use particular chemicals in safe ways.

With educational technology, sometimes, it’s like the example of the virtual experiment or simulation of an experiment or a surgery, or such. You use the technology as “find a way” and a “next best thing” to the real thing, because the real thing isn’t possible. Sometimes tech can allow you to do things that weren’t possible before, but I think a lot of people stop at the “next best thing” in situations like COVID (we can’t meet in person, so let’s do the next best thing that is closest to the real thing). And that requires imagination, but there is a higher degree of imagination that enables us to to something we couldn’t do without the tech. I’m always all about simulating the “Zoom chat” with an in-person back channel (I use Slack, and I use Mentimeter/Slido for that) because I want people to be able to participate all at the same time in writing as well as have an oral conversation.

Anyway.

But here is my point, though: this whole “finding a way” and “next best thing” is not supposed to be the end goal all the time. If we’re always seeking the “next best thing” rather than finding ways to achieve “the thing”, we’re always shortchanging people. The surgeon has to, eventually, learn to operate on a real person under supervision, then on their own. We can’t graduate someone with a degree in surgery who’s never practiced (and succeeded) on an actual human being. It scares me to write this because who wants to be the body that is being “used” to train a medical student, but they must have some really good safeguards, because I think it works out OK in the end? Usually?

And now with AI. Because it’s so hard to think of anything these days without wondering where AI comes in. I wish I could just skip the AI sometimes. I’m sure I could 🙂 But here it is… I think that a lot of times when people talk about how AI is doing something well, how it is approaching human intelligence, they don’t really mean it’s approaching human intelligence; if they had a human who was really experienced in the thing they’re trying to get AI to do, the human would do it well, almost definitely better, than a generic generative AI tool that isn’t uniquely trained on that particular thing.

I’m wondering now when students use AI in the “wrong place” (wrong place not because I told them it’s not a good place to use AI, but because it’s just not appropriate to use AI instead of doing this thing yourself, it can’t possible know your experience), they’re not realizing that what they’ve done is NOT at all the “next best thing”, but they are trying to “find a way” because they can’t make itme or figure out how to do the other thing in a reasonable amount of time with a reasonable amount of effort. For example, if a student writes a reflection on something personal using AI, they really aren’t at all offering “a way”, they’re just not doing the work of thinking about something and learning. This is not an approximation of learning. This isn’t like doing a surgery simulation, this is like watching a video of someone performing surgery, while you multitask. If you do something a little bit more acceptable (to me, most of the time) and let an AI tool summarize an article that is above your level of comprehension, this is like using AI to help you do something you couldn’t otherwise do; if you’d asked a human to help, you might have gotten a better summary, but in the absence of that human, maybe the AI tool is a good start; if you stop here, this is like watching that surgery video in high speed while focusing, but it’s still not the same as doing the work yourself; however, watching that video (maybe in slow speed or real speed), but maybe it’s an OK starting step before doing the surgery yourself (maybe better to watch a real surgery in 3D but perhaps not possible to watch the same one over and over?).

In any case, I think my point is that “finding a way” is sometimes necessary, and sometimes good, but should not be our end goal all the time. I think young people (and older people) sometimes don’t know where the line is. I think a lot of the talk about using AI (and tech generally) is about finding alternative ways that aren’t ideal, they’re blueberry sauce on top of a muffin, but not real blueberries baked inside the muffin… it’s a band-aid when we sometimes need something so much more. But you know, if you really, really can’t get a horse, you can get a rocking horse. But most problems in education that people are thinking of solving with AI don’t fall into this category. The rocking horse won’t always cut it. No offense to my late dad.

Featured image of a rocking horse with dreamy forest background by Bianca Van Dijk from Pixabay