Notes from Aug 24, 2026
“The room is set up in kind of a weird way because we were doing something there on Friday.” The administrative assistants warned me as I headed to the flexible room where multiple types of events happen, including my classes.
“Good! I like weird.”
And they were right. The movable tables were set up in a kind of connecting serpentine arrangement, which the students called an “S” shape.
I had two classes and wanted to set the tone, with the overall message, “This class will not be schoolish, or at least not fully.”
In my book Schoolishness, which was my attempt to describe and analyze the structural elements of what people think of as prototypical school (I organized them into ten dimensions, including being inside, sitting at tables or desks while a professor speaks, using textbooks or PowerPoints, worksheets, papers and tests, rules for compliance and interaction, constant judgment, etc). For nearly twenty years, even before I had the organizing term, I have been trying to reduce the schoolishness of my own classes (after celebrating them during the first half of my career). I have learned from others, including the rich literature on progressive pedagogy, about how people learn, analysis of interaction, and more, as well as ongoing autoethnography and a lab devoted to understanding school.
The first day sets the tone.
In my class The Anthropology of Childhood and Education, where I retained the S arrangement, I gave each student a small physical notebook and asked them to put away devices. I asked them to notice things about the room.
They remarked on the arrangement, of course. The multiple screens. The whiteboard. The windows. The white soulless walls. One person said they liked the lights. Why? It seemed that they were more than just utilitarian, because of the broader frame, like “polite lights.” They noticed that they were sitting and I was standing. Some commented on the sofa near the window, and the large speakers, maybe for music or entertainment. What kind of room is it, actually?
We talked about how they might figure that out. They noted the computer setup at the front of the room, the whiteboard, the tables.
We talked about what they usually expect on the first day of class: The teacher telling them what the class would be about, and what the requirements would be.
“The opposite of what this is,” one student said.
I liked that.
I told them that we would be doing a lot of observing of things that we usually take for granted.
Then we went outside and did a “barometer” exercise. No right answers. No judgment. Just to get a feel of these topics.
Are you an adult?
Does learning need teaching?
Are kids inherently good?
Do you prefer lectures or active learning?
Do you like grades?
Are you stressed right now?
What should the age be of the following:
Coffee
Alcohol
Driving
Voting
Buy cigarettes
Buy guns
Have sex
Serve in military
Marriage
Have children
It was a sunny day, but a little cool in the shade. One student was nearly shivering. We were glad to be finished. I skipped a few items, but they got the point.
We went back in and talked about the three major terms of the class title. They numbered off and divided up into 3 groups. “Anthropology.” “Childhood.” “Education.” They discussed the terms and what they already knew, and came up with bullet points or a definition, which they put on the whiteboard, and they presented it briefly to the class. I took pictures. One student, I think a first-year student, said we should get in the same groups on the last day of class and see how our understanding has changed. Great pedagogical idea!
(As I wrote this, I decided I would create a tab on the syllabus/Google doc called Gallery to post images from class.)
I pointed out that I could have lectured about these terms, but they wouldn’t have had to grapple with them. They could have asked Chat or Claude for definitions. But this way they began to wonder, on their own.
Our day was analog.
The activities were social (but gentle and optional).
We aimed for students to construct their knowledge from where they were.
We emphasized curiosity.
This activity primed them for the book The Anthropology of Childhood 3rd edition, by David Lancy, a favorite book of mine.)
I have written at length about these concepts, which I tried to enact:
Time for telling.
Curiosity.
Constructivism.
Active learning.
Then I asked them to help classmates who had not yet signed up for Slack (I’d sent the invitation link on Thursday of last week), and a scheduled message arrived via Slack with a link to the syllabus, a Google doc. I am not required to use Canvas, our LMS, to which I have multiple objections. Over many years I’ve developed a simplified system so students now need bookmark only one link. (Thank you Google for creating the Tabs feature. This has made a huge difference. I used to use organized folders but students don’t “file” mentally that way. They only search. There is research about this. See this article.)
the concept of file folders and directories, essential to previous generations’ understanding of computers, is gibberish to many modern students.
The first assignments are to create a learning journey document where they and I can have conversations, privately, and a few questions about their goals, and to write a preliminary philosophy of learning.
It went well, as far as I can tell.
There was energy, people understood what we were doing, there were several students with social energy making introductions with strangers.
We’ll see how many drop!**
My other class is a more technical one and it’s something I’ve been teaching annually for my entire career. I have experimented regularly with it. I set it up similarly to the other class with a Google doc for a syllabus and Slack and all of that. But it was also different: we began with two videos, to show them that the field of linguistic anthropology—which few of them knew anything at all about—can actually address anything and that it has practical and social implications. The first video, “The Linguistics of Peeing,” was from Etymology Nerd (Adam Aleksic), about the linguistics of “urinal conversations.” It was a one-minute video and we got to look at his questions and his methods, which surely involved observation, which also raised the issue of who can observe urinals. He had graphs, so clearly there were some metrics. And he had hypotheses about which settings and which relationships would yield which kinds of conversations and how long. He had technical terms such as “urine onset time” and it was both hysterically funny to me and also real science.
I think the students were stunned.
Also just as an aside, I made a comment about the fact that I was not privy to such conversations, not being a male, and I made the kind of gesture that one makes when you do a pun, in this case privy, meaning “allowed to access,” which is etymologically related to a privy, or a toilet and possibly an outhouse. I looked at them and I asked, “Do any of you know what a privy is?” and they all looked blank. So that was interesting to me.
We also watched a video of Key & Peele called Phone Call, in which the two men were on their phones but when they saw the other person, they changed the way they were talking.
I was trying to get them to wonder what was going on there.
One person suggested the term code switching, which was helpful.
Some of them talked about trying to be safe, and danger, and different social groups.
I raised the topic of race, which is often taboo in US classrooms but will keep coming up all semester as we address factors that influence and perceptions of ways of talking.
Then we did an exercise which I’ve done many times before but not always, called a Human Scavenger Hunt, in which students circulate and try to fill in boxes about who has which characteristics, some related to the class and some general, and many silly. I emphasize that students need not disclose anything they don’t want to. It’s kind of like bingo.
I emphasized that there were no right answers and not to worry about it. And I asked them to talk to one person at a time.
But when they began, I noticed that they were sitting at their tables of three or four, and trying to fill in as many boxes as possible. I stopped them. I said, “Yes, that would be very efficient, if the goal is to fill in the boxes. But actually, our goal is to be inefficient. Our goal is to circulate and to speak to one person at a time, not so much to fill in the boxes, but to get to know each other. So let’s aim for maximal inefficiency.”
I have decided that this concept may be one of the things to keep in mind this whole semester as we navigate the AI and digital, in contrast to the human and analog, universe. The goal is not to get to the end of the route for a marathon, just as the goal in exercise is not to get the weight lifted so many feet above the lifter, but the goal is to do the running, to actually do the hard work of lifting the weight.
And here the goal was to do the work of circulating and speaking with classmates, not so much for the box completion, but more for the experience. I know people have contrasted the product (a completed form) with the process (talking to other people) and that’s a helpful shorthand.
Just as some people talk about slow food, and slow education, and I have written for decades about industrial agriculture versus permaculture, analogizing industrial education and permeducation, I think that seeing the cult of efficiency as problematic could also help us think about these issues.
So in this confusing year, my aim is to slow way down, to do less, to do as much as possible with physical objects while still respecting people’s varied needs and tastes and also sometimes taking advantage of the affordances of the digital.
Perhaps I can keep the word inefficient in my mind.
** Ten day update: nobody dropped that class. One person added. My other class had a little more instability, with two or three drops and three adds.
