Splitting the Atom
GAP, gaps, and other fissile elements
Originally published on November 29, 2015. Updated in November of 2017.
There are two sites that organize the last 7–8 years of iterative change in our classroom. The first is the current hub for instruction, where students go for lectures and lessons and discussion; the second is the erstwhile home for the most recent versions of whatever we’ve cooked up:
I say “erstwhile,” because that site doesn’t have the most recent iterations of, e.g., our assessment system. Until the small human beings in my house are older than two and four years old, I’m not sure I can maintain two distinct thoughts at a time, let alone two websites. The efforts to package this paradigm shift are going to be desultory at best.
What I can do is pull from an older step-by-step guide to grade abatement profiles:
analysis | Via medieval Latin from Greek analusis, from analuein ‘unloose,’ from ana- ‘up’ + luein ‘loosen.’
All analysis requires a loosening of matter. The set of what you’ve accomplished… must be atomized, sorted, and then processed. More than ever, you must treat the process as evidentiary — as objective and scientific, not persuasive or argumentative.
In our current course, I’ve streamlined the process of self-assessment and numerical evaluation so it fits on a poster, with the hope of automating student investment:
But analysis is still the key to growth and learning. We all need to analyze our progress in a granular and meticulous way — loosening the stuff we do to examine it more closely. We need to think critically about ourselves, our habits of mind, our assumptions, etc.
That said, too much analysis — or too protracted an analysis — turns everything sour.
Part 1: An Explanation of What that Means, Using a Meta-Example of Over-Analysis
Notice the use of “atomized” in the paragraph quoted from the GAP protocols. It’s a word that echoes this Ken Robinson speech, which has been a staple of this makerspace since before it was a makerspace. Around the 10:45 mark of the video, Robinson argues that
you have to recognize that most great learning happens in groups, that collaboration is the stuff of growth. If we atomize people and separate them and judge them separately, we form a kind of disjunction between them and their natural learning environment.
That’s a complicated idea to invoke when we talk about self-assessment, numerical evaluation, and report cards. Robinson is arguing against atomizing students. Our emphasis on collaborative and collective work helps, but the system ultimately requires us to separate students and judge them separately.
“Atomize” is also a complicated word in an etymological sense. It stems from the Greek atomos, which means “indivisible,” but that root itself stems from the Greek temnein, or ‘to cut.’ Robinson is warning us against slicing apart a whole learning community.
The problem is finding a balance between idealism and realism. To begin to do that, look back to the second paragraph of this essay, where the word “desultory” is applied to our work. One of the roots of that word is desultor (n.) “a rider in the circus who jumps from one horse to another while they are in gallop,” which is certainly what it feels like sometimes to be in education.
So what does it mean to atomize? Well, if we look …
Right. Most of us just dozed off.
That’s the lesson: Even in a class about the Humanities and the way language shapes us as human beings, and even in essays designed to instruct students, digging too deeply can get pedantic. If we keep parsing every element of every artifact for meaning, we’re eventually so deep that we’re splitting atoms — and that’s not really the safest course of action. To wit:
To be fair — and to take a side road for just a moment — this is exactly the kind of unbridled curiosity that we are trying to develop. I might advise students to stop before they blow up your kitchen, but there’s not much wrong with learning how this stuff works:
By the way, the most amazing thing about the wikiHow on how to split an atom — other than the fact that there is a wikiHow on how to split an atom — is the warning at the end: “As with any equipment, follow the required safety procedures, and don’t do anything that seems risky. Be safe.”
Good advice! But I wonder if “risky” and “safe” lose all meaning when it comes to kitchen-based nuclear fission.
While we’re discussing atomic annihilation, check out this post on the subreddit ELI5. It answers the question, “How does splitting the atom cause such a big explosion?” and also illustrates a number of skills and traits we seek to inculcate, viz.
- Crowdsourcing an answer
- Sifting critically through answers
- Communicating effectively to a specific audience
This kind of brevity helps when explaining grade abatement, finding the crux of an essay, and describing rhetorical strategies, among other elements of a course in the Humanities. Furthermore…
Part 2: When and How and to What Extent Analysis Helps
Let’s acknowledge that there is, in fact, a level of analysis that is counterproductive. This probably feels like vindication to those of you who dissected, say, The Scarlet Letter and thought, “You’re reading way too much into this.”
But analysis has to reach that level before we can shut it down. There is a vast tract of land in between laziness (or SparkNotes) and the kind of plodding, painful over-analysis most of us experience in school. We need to figure out how to map that middle ground, and that takes practice.
This applies to metacognition as much as reading and writing. You want to loosen things enough to understand them — to see how they work — but not so much that you vaporize the work.
At its best, this kind of learning is individualized. It happens over time and in sudden epiphanies, so it is, as a result, kind of hard to describe. The word for that is “ineffable” — too powerful to be put into words — and often the ineffable should be left alone. David Foster Wallace put it this way:
We all know that there is no quicker way to empty a joke of its peculiar magic than to try to explain it — to point out, for example, that Lou Costello is mistaking the proper name “Who” for the interrogative pronoun “who,” etc. We all know the weird antipathy such explanations arouse in us, a feeling not so much of boredom as offense, like something has been blasphemed. This is a lot like the teacher’s feeling at running a Kafka story through the gears of your standard undergrad-course literary analysis-plot to chart, symbols to decode, etc. Kafka, of course, would be in a unique position to appreciate the irony of submitting his short stories to this kind of high-efficiency critical machine, the literary equivalent of tearing the petals off and grinding them up and running the goo through a spectrometer to explain why a rose smells so pretty.
That idea that the magic of the artifact — the wonder of the performance, the power of the story — is ruined by analysis is at the heart of some anti-intellectual criticism. It’s also why John Holt gains a few fans every year. In his essay “How Teachers Make Children Hate Reading,” he calls it “the microscope and x- ray treatment” and a “mean-spirited, picky insistence that every child get every last little scrap of ‘understanding’ that can be dug out of a book.”
He wrote that 50 years ago. Now more than ever, we want to leave the thing be.
That’s forgetting something important, though: These things you want to enjoy without analysis were crafted. They are artifacts made by artists. When you listen to Abbott and Costello, for instance, it’s hard not to appreciate the craftsmanship:
Of course, when you are only an audience member, over-analysis ruins the ineffable part of the show. To get the joke, you just need a passing knowledge of English and baseball. Anything more might ruin it.
To tell that joke, however, Abbott and Costello had to understand how it was constructed. They had to practice and practice and practice. Comedians aren’t just folks with a sense of humor; they are craftsmen who atomize and sort and refine the language of each and every joke.
Writers do the same thing, and just like comedians, they get better by studying the best. When you are a creator, you need to emulate other creators. You need to develop that ETA skill — that emulation-through-analysis mindset — that helps you get better at what you do. That’s the difference between wanting to create and just wanting to enjoy the creations of others.
Of course, you can do both with a little compartmentalization and self-awareness. When it comes to reading, for instance, whether you’re reading an essay or a poem or a canonical novel, you should be able to turn off the over-analysis.
You can find that comfortable space, I think, between turning off your brain and thinking critically, because you are students — students looking to be better writers, readers, thinkers, etc. You are students looking to have greater empathy and greater collegiality. You are making the choice between being a passive audience in your own life and becoming something better.
(And here is where I apply some analysis to myself and notice that I’ve shifted to the second-person “you,” addressing not all of us anymore, but students specifically.)
In brief, then: When it comes to self-assessment and self-analysis, especially the granular kind required by our course (and the student-centered responsiveness of grade abatement in general), you need to walk a sometimes fine line between refining what you do and overthinking it, between having knowledge of the discrete elements of, e.g., writing or collegiality, and obsessing over minutiae.
