I am not really talking about movers and shakers. I am talking about movers as in the game of Chess. In a prior blog, I presented the idea that people can be divided into groups on the basis of whether or not they are one movers, two movers and so on. If you read that blog, you have the idea. Most people are just one movers and only look at things in the "present" like dogs and cats. They get by just fine in most cases and can do well in school because they are only tested on the basis of one move. That is, read the book and see if you can get the questions right from memory or add up these numbers or divide this number by that number. It is like teaching dogs to do tricks, there is no thinking involved and no consideration of what happens next. We have been rewarding this type of behavior since the beginning of time. We taught history so that people could look back and know what to do today and tomorrow. It worked because things did not change much and all people had to do was to keep doing what people had been doing in the past. Yesterday was much like today and tomorrow was much like today, but what do you think would happen if tomorrow was much different from yesterday or today? That is the problem that we face. One movers do not have the ability to look ahead.
Before I get going on this new concept, how about this. Did you know that the population of the world grows by 1.8% per year and the world's gross product increases by no more than 0.5%? Those are the facts and I ask you, "so what"? What is your answer? If you are a one mover, you will find the numbers interesting, but little more. If you are a two mover, you will notice that the human race is getting poorer. The number of people is growing faster than the value they are creating. If you are a three mover, you will see that there is no end in sight and that at some point us humans will start to starve. If you are a four mover, you will wonder how long ago did we hit the peak of human per capita wealth creation and how high was it? If you are a five mover, you will wonder how much wealth was built up by us humans prior to reaching that peak and how long it is going to be before we have used up all of the savings.
Notice how just a few simple numbers can be viewed by different people who are different movers. This has little to do with education since what kind of mover you are is not a function of education. If you are not a one mover, you must be asking how we can get more people from being one movers to being two or three move people? That is the question. I am an advocate of Darwin and think that we all started out like dogs and cats as one movers and over time Darwin rewarded those who were two and three movers over one movers and thus increased their numbers. Darwin, how ever, works very slowly, but in the right direction. Our problem is that our environment has changed much faster than Darwin can adjust. You know what happened to the dinosaurs? The environment changed a lot faster than they could adjust. Had things changed slower, the dinosaurs could have adjusted by getting smaller and changing their diets, but it did not happen that way. Are you starting to see the significance of this concept of us humans being different kinds of movers in terms of how we think and solve problems? If so, let's go on.
First, I am not sure that you can change a one mover to a two mover, but that is just what I think. It would be great if there were some way to move people from being one movers to being two movers and that is what this last part is all about. I was talking to a guy who had to select and train people to be trouble shooters on complex aviation systems. What he noticed that given all the people passed his selection test and graduated from his training programs that some were a lot better at trouble shooting than others. Some had to be transferred out of trouble shooting even though they had passed all the tests because they just could not to the job at the level required. I don't know what his batting average was, but he saw it as a serious problem and a waste of money trying to train people who never worked out. He noticed that the good ones seemed to have this ability to see ahead as they worked the problem. What he had done was to have identified people who were two and three movers. If he could pick the two and three movers out ahead of time, he would have saved a lot of time and money, but it still does not address the problem of what to do with the one movers. It is complicated.
Another side note. When I was teaching, I wrote my tests so that there were no "give me" question. I noticed early as a student that 90% of the class got 50% of the question right and they were all the same questions. As a teacher, I thought, "what a waste of time". This meant that I had to determine the grades based on just 50% of the questions. What I did was to eliminate all the "give me" questions so I had 100% of the questions to use to spread the grades out. For some of the students it meant that they got "zero" on my test where as in the past they had gotten 50% correct. See the problem with most testing? I went one step farther. In some of the questions, I did not provide enough information to solve the problem and in others, I gave too much. Now what do you think happened to the one mover students? I did not realize it at the the time, but what I was doing was giving one movers low grades and two and three movers higher grades. I had several students who got 100% on my tests while at the same time I has those who got "zero". These were junior, senior and graduate students too. It was a wake up call for some. This side note points up the problem that we have as humans and with our teaching and grading systems that have been handed down over the years and not questioned.
Have you noticed that we don't give essay questions any more? The new thing is multiple choices. In some of my multiple choice tests, "none" of the choices are correct and in some there is more than one choice that is correct. Do you think that I am a rat? I think we need to bring back the essay type test, even for math. There is a lot more to math than just getting the right answer and you know that. How the person got the answer can be just as important and the only way you can find that out is for the student to explain in an essay just how they solved the problem. How else can the teacher help a student get the correct answer if they don't have some insight into how the student went about trying to solve the problem. It is not just a process of throwing the material against the wall and seeing if some of it sticks. Teaching is teaching and to do that you need feed back more than the multiple choice test results. I want to figure out how to get students from being one movers up to at least two movers. How about you?
This has been a long winded blog and I hope that you appreciate the effort that I have put into it. I don't have the solution, but I do know that if we are going to be able to deal with the future, we need a lot more people who are two and three movers.
PS----It has also been my observation that the correlation between getting good grades and having this practicle ability is not very high. In other words, good grades from our education system is only a poor predictor of the two and three mover charactoristic. I feel that if you are going to become a two or three mover, that something has to happen early in you life when you brain is developing or you will remain a "one mover" for life. I know that this is true with respect to being able to decern certain sounds. This was proven with Native Americans in Canada who did not try to learn their native language until they were beyone age 6 or 7. For them it was too late. I suspect that something like this my be true for becoming a "natural" two or three mover. I plan to explore this idea further in my research.
