The Zigzag Life
On linearity, lost paths, and what we find along the way
I came across a TED talk by Sir Ken Robinson the other day. It appeared, seemingly by magic, in my Facebook feed. I first watched it years ago when I was still teaching junior high school students, and similar to what I took from his other TED talks, his thoughts on linearity in education and in life resonated with me at a deep level. At two levels, actually: one personal, one professional. I want to talk about both, though my emphasis is on my own long battle against linearity.
When I say I battled against linearity, I mean that I actively struggled with it starting from my high school years. But I’ll get to that shortly.
Robinson questioned why college should be the ultimate goal for everyone. The cookie-cutter, industrial model of education where we all start at the same place and are expected to end up at the same place has never really served every student. As Robinson put it, “life is not linear; it’s organic.”
Image by Dorothe Wouters from Pixabay
In the Fourth Grade, my teacher Miss McNamara, whom I dearly loved, noted on my report card that I always worked ahead in the math book. That was not a good thing. She told my parents at their conference that I was so far ahead I would finish long before my classmates, and then what? Her complaint, put as gently as possible because she knew how much I adored her, crushed me on one hand and confused me on the other. I was hurt because I felt I had somehow disappointed her. I was confused because I didn’t understand why I couldn’t work at my own pace. The other subjects, social studies, science, music and English, didn’t speak to me the same way. I did the homework, read the textbooks, followed along with everyone else. But in math I just wanted to be free to explore.
Personalized lesson plans weren’t common back then, and even when I was teaching twenty years later, mainstream education still hadn’t fully adapted to the understanding that people learn at different rates and bring different interests to the classroom. A friend who taught at a well-known international school told me he was once reprimanded for not being on a certain page of the textbook at a specific point in the school year.
A few years later in middle school I was singled out for having special abilities in math, and in high school I was placed in an honors math course. I was thrilled. Mathematics felt like a pure language to me. I could visualize problems, see them with my eyes closed. I couldn’t have guessed then that I would change my mind about math, not once, but several times.
During my sophomore year, I discovered philosophy entirely by chance. I had started going into downtown Chicago on free weekends, and one afternoon I came across a small tobacco shop on Rush Street. It was tiny and dark, with a lovely smell of all sorts of tobacco. The owner’s son was a philosophy student at Roosevelt University. While I stood there breathing in French cigarettes and Turkish cigarettes and Russian cigarettes, he talked to me about Transcendentalism and Existentialism. My mind literally exploded.
Suddenly I wanted to be reading Thoreau and Emerson, Sartre and Camus and Heidegger rather than studying math. Math became a tool for solving problems, but not a way of recognizing what the problems are, why they matter, or how to think about them.
Over the past 67 working years I’ve had 29 different jobs. Some lasted only a few days, several lasted decades. At no point did I plan any of them, with one exception: I did intend to become an anthropologist. And somewhat ironically, once I could finally say I was an anthropologist, I found I was no longer interested in doing it professionally, as a professor.
In the many job interviews I’ve been forced to endure over the years, I was always puzzled by the question “where do you see yourself in five years?” I wasn’t in the habit of thinking that far ahead. In a few interviews, at a loss, I replied, “I could be dead by then.” That never went over well, so eventually I settled on “The same thing, but better.” Interviewers always accepted that, which tells you something.
The point, perhaps a bit belabored, is that from my high school days I never bought into the linear model of success in education, in employment, in life. That model goes something like this: Birth > School > Work > Retirement > Death. Each stage advances relatively seamlessly into the next. Life, of course, rarely works that way, even though we like to think it does.
I was told once by a boss that I would never get anywhere if I kept changing jobs every few years without developing real expertise in a field. I did eventually teach for over twenty years, which is quite stable for an international teacher. I started with second grade, moved to middle school math and elementary computers, then added high school anthropology. After retiring from education I became a freelance writer, then an online teacher, and eventually a guest lecturer on a cruise ship. And right in the middle of that educational journey, I left for a while and took a job in a factory.
If you mapped that out it would look more like a zigzag than a straight line. Did I fail to live up to my potential? Did I waste my talents? Some people in my life have thought so. But looking back on that less than linear path, I learned new languages, taught students from around the world, been mistaken for a ghost in the highlands of New Guinea, and evolved from a somewhat shy teenager into someone who ran for union vice-president and won. Pushing back on linearity allowed me to discover talents and interests I would most likely never have known had I followed the prescribed route.
Traditional linear education operates on what Robinson called the industrial model, valuing conformity and standardization over individual talent. It moves students along a fixed track: preschool, elementary, middle school, high school, and finally college, the assumed destination for everyone. Those who can’t or won’t follow that track tend to get framed as failures, unable to fit the mold, unable to feed the machine. The model doesn’t account for the diversity of interests, the range of strengths, or the individual circumstances of the young humans being pushed through it.
And yet some young people know exactly what they want from early on. Years ago I had a middle school student who showed little interest in social studies, reading, or computers, but loved math and science. His parents came to see me one afternoon and explained that their son wanted to be an electrician like his older brother, who was his hero. He was also, at that age, an excellent surfer. His plan, and his parents fully supported it, was to work as an electrician six months a year and surf the other six. They weren’t concerned with his grades across the board. What they asked was that I focus his work on math and science so he could get into a technical high school and eventually earn his electrician’s license. We worked out a plan. He reached his goal. He became an electrician, and he has spent his working life doing exactly what he said he would: six months working, six months surfing.
In the 1980s, collaborative learning began to take hold in some American schools. I was a young teacher during that period, and while the early models were often difficult to work with in practice, many of us moved from there toward project-based learning, which gave students more freedom and the chance to take genuine responsibility for their own learning. Even so, standardized testing, large class sizes and political interference remained stubborn obstacles to building classrooms where students could take an active role in creating knowledge rather than simply moving through the system.
The country most often held up as an alternative to the industrial model is Finland. The Finnish system has become well known for emphasizing individualized learning, student well-being, creativity, collaboration and minimal standardized testing. Schools there generally avoid rigid ranking systems and place strong trust in teachers, who are highly trained and given considerable autonomy. The philosophy is less about producing uniform outcomes for an industrial economy and more about cultivating balanced human beings with different talents and different ways of learning. Students are not sorted into competitive hierarchies from an early age. There are fewer exams, shorter school days, and more flexibility in how children develop intellectually and socially. The system works from the assumption that people learn differently and at different speeds, and it treats that diversity as normal and valuable rather than as a problem to be managed.
Can the industrial model meet the needs of a society that requires a genuine diversity of talent, skill, motivation and dream? Is there room in that model for the kind of flourishing that will be necessary to meet the challenges ahead, or is it time to rethink what education might look like if we designed it around people rather than around the system?
As I write these concluding words, I’m reminded of a student who dropped out of high school because he simply couldn’t fit in. He joined the military for a while, worked to earn his GED, enrolled in university where I met him, dropped out again, and finally found his place in the mountains, working as a master luthier. It was a long road. But his willingness to leave the system and find his own zigzag path is what allowed him to get there.