The Questions That Shape Lifelong Learners

Cox_skates is undefeated, top of the leaderboard; in real life, he's never once stood on an actual skateboard. Hand him one, and he lasts about four seconds before gravity takes over!

It's a strange little contradiction, but it's not really about skating. It's about two very different things that both feel like knowing how to do something until one asks which one actually holds up once the screen is gone.

In the language of learning research, this gap has a name: surface learning versus deep learning, first described by researchers Ference Marton and Roger Saljo back in the 1970s. Surface learning is about reproducing something: the fact, the move, the correct answer; "knowing" it well enough to recognize or try repeating it. Deep learning is about actually using the "understanding" to build it into something one can use: adjust, explain, apply somewhere new, do it again under pressure. Both can look identical from the outside. Only one of them survives contact with reality.

Recognizing the right answer is cognitively lower order. Our brain barely has to work; it just matches what's in front of us to something familiar. That's what the screen skating game gives us: the feel of mastery, minus the actual physical effort of falling, wobbling, catching yourself, falling again. Real skating asks our body to build balance the slow way, through failure. The screen game skips straight to the reward.

"Winning" in the screen game means timing the button press. "Winning" on real skates means our body learned to balance, to fall well and overcome fear. Same word — completely different thing being measured.

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I often see students describe this with honesty, if you listen attentively. When a child is asked to explain/write out their thinking, rather than just pick the right answer, and you'll often hear some version of: ahhh!! no!! it's a lot… It hurts my brain. That's not a complaint to brush off, it's an accurate report. Writing, explaining, and working something out from scratch are what researchers call "generative" acts. One has to produce the thought themselves, rather than just recognize it. That's genuinely harder. The discomfort during generative tasks isn't a sign something's gone wrong. It's a sign that real work is happening.

This shows up well past academics, too. A young dancer can watch a routine once and describe every step back perfectly and still stumble the moment she may have to actually perform it, because naming the steps and performing them physically are two very different things. A student can hum a melody back note-for-note after listening to it once, and still be nowhere close to actually playing it. In every one of these, there are two things that feel like competence: recognizing what mastery looks like, and being able to produce it on one's own, in real situations. Only the second one is real.

Today, answers, techniques, "how it's done", are all one search away, in a form fluent enough to feel like understanding. It isn't. It's familiarity showing up like understanding.

It takes a bridge to move from knowing to understanding and “effort” is that bridge. Crossing it feels uncomfortable, even like failing, at first. But it's persistence that carries one across, until what once felt shaky starts to feel like solid ground.

That's the whole difference between Cox_skates and a real skater. It's just about the will to try, fall first and get back up, which, it turns out, is most of what learning looks like!

“Oh! You’re a teacher! You must be so serious and strict!” These are words I hear whenever I meet someone new. I never know how to explain this in words, because if one hasn’t been on this side of the classroom, one cannot fathom what it truly means to be a teacher.

What I’d like to tell them is that to be a teacher is to be a fool.

You have to realize that you’re not teaching English, or math, or science, or economics, or DP or MYP. You are teaching someone’s child. You’re teaching their hope, their life.

You have to realize that “doing well” doesn’t mean scoring 99% or an A or behaving perfectly. It means having small ‘light bulb’ moments in class when their face and eyes light up because they have finally understood something. It means old students telling you they remember your subject years after you’ve stopped being their teacher. It means seeing your students do better and bigger things than you. Those are moments when the teacher earns an ‘A’. 

Indeed, a large part of being a teacher is being foolish. You have to be foolish enough to believe in each and every child that can learn, despite what anyone says. Foolish enough to know that learning comes in waves for some, smoothly for others. For some, it may even come in the last week you have them in your class. Foolish enough to show the child you believe in him/her, even when they have lost faith in themselves. Foolish enough to teach the same topic differently. Through words, pictures, videos, activities or even stand-up comedy and speaking gen-Z vocabulary, internally celebrating the moment when finally something clicks.

WHY? Because unless the teacher leaves the ‘throne of knowledge’ and comes down to the learning level of the child, true learning can never happen. From the throne, we can only look down upon others, we can only judge them, we can only feel superior. When you sit beside the child, we become equals, we can actually see them as individuals, experience their struggles, feel their frustrations and fears. From the throne, we can only show “You must be like me”, sitting beside them, you can say “I also feel scared, unsure and lost at times.”

Yes, this means that many times you have to let go of the lesson plans, deadlines and assessments. You may not have the ‘pin-drop silence’ class from the 1980s where everyone gives the right answers and takes beautiful notes. Your class may have a sort of organized chaos. To someone walking past your class, it may look like mayhem mixed with indiscipline. But the reward is that you get to laugh with the child placed in your care, know what they love, empathize with them, even cry with them! You get to know them as people!

To the teachers who can make a fool of themselves in the eyes of the bystander, I say, you will always win. Because you have found that the key to a child’s mind is to unlock his/her heart and free their spirit.

May we all be able to stop and breathe and reconnect with the child within us. May we be brave enough to make a fool of ourselves for a moment, laugh freely at ourselves, apologize genuinely when we make mistakes, look deeply at a child so they feel truly seen, acknowledged and valued. Because to be a teacher is to be a fool… a hopeful fool!

“The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes.”

Winston S. Churchill

Nobody has ever thanked me for a bus that arrived on time.

That isn't a complaint. It's the job. Most of my work only becomes visible when it fails — the washroom that isn't clean, the jersey that didn't arrive before the match, the first-aid kit that was short of something. When it goes right, it disappears. A student walks through an entire school day without once having to think about how any of it got there.

I've come to believe that disappearing is the point.

The morning before the morning

By the time the first students arrive, a fair amount has already happened.

Transport is usually first. Routes, timings, a change in a family's pick-up point, a driver caught in traffic, a parent who needs to know where the bus has reached. A bus arriving safely and on schedule looks like the most routine thing in the world. Making it routine is not routine at all.

Then the campus has to be ready. Housekeeping, security, facilities, the cafeteria, the infirmary — each team has its own morning, and a lot of my job is being the thread between them. Someone has to notice the thing that would otherwise be nobody's particular responsibility. Usually that is me.

Procurement is not shopping

The largest part of my week is getting things to the people who need them.

It rarely looks the way people assume. A teacher raises a requirement. We find suppliers, ask for quotations, compare them, check the specifications against what was actually wanted, get approvals, place the order, and then follow it through production and delivery until the thing is physically in the right hands.

Sometimes that takes a week and goes smoothly. Sometimes stock runs out, the requirement changes halfway, the timeline shortens, and the plan I made stops being useful. That is the part of this work I have had to learn — not how to follow a process, but what to do when the process no longer fits.

What I notice now

Working in administration has changed what I see when I walk across campus.

A clean washroom. A stocked first-aid kit. A uniform available on the day a student needs one. A certificate printed correctly. A visitor guided to the right place instead of left standing in a corridor. A team that has the equipment it was promised.

None of these matters much on its own. Together they are most of what it actually feels like to be in a school.

So a good part of the job is simply looking. Listening when somebody mentions something in passing, before it becomes a complaint. Asking whether a thing that has always been done a certain way is still the right way to do it.

An event is the same job, compressed

A field trip, a sports fixture, an inter-school competition. To a student it is one day. Underneath it there is transport, timings, permissions, food and water, equipment, security, housekeeping, communication, half a dozen vendors, and a plan for what happens if any one of those falls through.

Then something falls through anyway, and you deal with it while the day carries on around you.

The satisfaction comes from watching students enjoy something with no idea what it took. That is not a small feeling. It is the entire feeling.

Why I think this counts as teaching

Here is what I have slowly worked out.

A student who has to wonder whether the bus will come, whether the equipment will be there, whether the room will be usable, is spending attention on things that have nothing to do with learning. Attention is finite. Every question we answer before anyone has to ask it is attention handed back.

That is what the work is for. Not tidiness. Not efficiency. Concentration.

When teachers have what they need, they teach. When transport runs, families begin the day without anxiety. When the campus is ready, a student's whole attention is available for whatever they are actually here to do.

None of it shows up anywhere. It isn't meant to.

That is the reason to do it carefully.

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