Outlined against a blue-gray fluorescent sky, the Four Horsemen ride again. In dramatic lore they’re known as Famine, Pestilence, Destruction and Death. These are only aliases. Their real names are Inauthenticity, Complexity, Comfort, and Sterility. They form the crest of the apocalypse, before which another classroom is swept over the precipice.

Inauthenticity

The teenage nose detects the faintest whiff of inauthenticity, carried in by gentle breezes which inevitably churn themselves into a devastating hurricane.

• Category 1: students produce and submit work exclusively for the teacher’s eyes. Those students who do complete it surely do so out of blind, robotic compliance, or for pity–hoping that their work will illuminate for the poor teacher how he can finally factor a quadratic or determine the causes of the Civil War. Those who don’t (the majority, one hopes), are soon swept away with the others like coastal Alabama stilt-houses.
• Category 4: questions and puzzles that have no purpose other than to stoke curiosity or activate a human being’s natural pattern-seeking urges are papered-over with bogus, faux-thentic constraints and purposes. Example: “it’s on the test/curriculum,” “we need to learn this so later we’ll be ready to learn ____,” “we have only ten minutes left today,” etc. In the path of this over-rationalized hurricane, students stand as innocent mobile homes in a treeless Florida trailer park.

Complexity

To complexity, students respond the same way corporations do to thousand-page, 8-point-font legislation: they lawyer-up and settle into compliance-and-loophole-exploitation mode, or they ignore it and hope it all goes away. Either way, complexity is the brush buildup that serves as kindling for wildfires that lick every corner of a classroom, scorching all but the arbitrary desk, pencil, and soul.

• 2,500 acre: students have no voice in describing what constitutes excellence, because it is provided, as a rubric or standards, by the teacher or, worse, by The State. Precious time’s spent trying to understand what the teacher thinks good is, instead of creating good. The teacher becomes the bottleneck, and meanwhile the blaze crosses the field toward us, with no ditches having been dug.
• 5,000 acre: an overemphasis on task instruction delivery, and the requisite clarifying Q&A and one-on-one follow-ups to make sure everyone “gets it.” No matter how exquisitely a lesson’s designed, the more time it takes to explain, the less motivating it becomes. And teens can detect the problematic underlying assumption: that designing with such precision and control is possible (or even advisable) within the complex human-centric system of the classroom.  The baroque constraints emerge as flawed, arbitrary, or both, and soon enough, like the Topanga bungalow encircled by uncleared brush, the dream is over. 

Comfort

When only 10% of a student’s brain’s required for a given task, an environment of ease emerges. Students recline in their seats, clinically examine their cuticles, braid one another’s hair–a tableaux that, but for a few details, resembles a Turkish Bath. Precisely in this self-indulgent stillness, comfort gathers and twists itself into a tornado and so ferociously lays waste to learning and interest that it destroys even the desire to rebuild anything in that spot.

• Rope tornado: time moves glacially, and everyone moves together in lockstep. An utter lack of incentive for speed, a complete absence of individual agency. Out of the thunderous silence of this painful ease, the twister touches down, spiriting away student after student. Naught but emptiness remains, presided over by the undying clock’s maddening ticking.
• Wedge tornado: welcome to the world where everyone’s opinion counts. Each session here is a brainstorm; ideas are never ranked or evaluated; no one raises the level of discourse; no authentic constraints impose boundaries on fantastical thoughts or ideas; the only tension relates to endurance, and the only accountability is breathing, though this is not strictly enforced. No student or teacher, no matter how stout and tree-like, can elude uprooting and transportation to the other side of a dark rainbow.

Sterility

Whether out of compliance, or fatigue, or because of the perverse skill of the players playing the game, the very human soul has been sublimated away and what’s left is a landscape bereft of surprises, idiosyncrasies, peccadillos, and even questions. As the players go ghost-like through the motions, something wells up from a profound depth: first tremors, then indeed some serious shaking, and finally the earthquake that levels and swallows it all.

• Richter 4.0: the subject and the learning remain anchored firmly to the ground, never reaching for the profound questions of the discipline. Nor is excitement about the subject encouraged; it is merely the substrate of our duty. All subjects seem similar, and indeed all are subject to the earth’s great calving, into which we fall.
• Richter 9.0: the human beings in the room together are not encouraged–nor are any techniques designed or deployed to positively influence them–to recognize and value different skills, feelings, hairstyles, backgrounds, ideas, heights, etc. When the earth quakes and opens, they disappear without a sound.

These four horsemen ride with a dark and thunderous swiftness. First together in the distance, then dividing under the crack of whip and outraged bootheel. No one pits herself against them and emerges with body or soul intact. Defeated on the ground, fighting for focus, you glimpse the horsemen reconvening on the horizon, backlit by an otherwise glorious sunset that you can’t quite see.

Those who have tried to teach will understand.