Stuckness.

That’s what I want to talk about today.

How individuals and institutions and even nations can get stuck. And any conversation about being stuck has to refer back to that 70’s classic, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig, which has a great section on what it means to be stuck. In fact, the opening line of this post was lifted from the novel.

There is the physical stuckness of whatever it is that you’re working on that doesn’t want to move or change, and then there is the mental stuckness that results from the physical problem. Pirsig uses the example of a screw that sticks and blocks the removal of a side cover assembly. The manual was no help, and the lessons learned from experience–force it!–succeeded only in tearing the slot of the screw.

Pirsig also notes that these negative feelings get in the way of just the things that we need to find our way out of being stuck—creativity, originality, inventiveness, intuition and imagination. And I would add consultation and collaboration to his list.

This “isn’t just irritating and minor. You’re stuck. Stopped. Terminated…It’s a miserable experience emotionally. You’re losing time. You’re incompetent. You don’t know what you’re doing.” Even those of us who don’t know the joy of motorcycle repair are familiar with the feeling of being stuck and the frustration that follows in short order. From being stuck in snow or ice or an elevator to being stuck in a routine that has lost its meaning, we know how being stuck makes us feel.

“It’s normal at this point for the fear-anger syndrome to take over and make you want to hammer on that side plate with a chisel, to pound it off with a sledge if necessary.” And Pirsig also notes that these negative feelings get in the way of just the things that we need to find our way out of being stuck–creativity, originality, inventiveness, intuition and imagination. And I would add consultation and collaboration to his list.

He’s writing about an individual in a particular situation, but the idea holds true for schools, too. We get stuck in lots of different ways. Sometimes we don’t even know it–we just continue to do things the way we always have without stopping to think about what we’re doing or ways of doing things differently. The introduction of technology is one way to become unstuck, as it challenges us to re-think both the what (curriculum) and the how (pedagogy) of our work with students.

Sometimes we do know we’re stuck, but we can’t see a way out of the problem. Technology furnishes an example here, too. The internet exposes (bombards?) our younger students to inappropriate content and social networking opportunities before they are emotionally and cognitively equipped to deal with them. But what can any one teacher or school do about it? We’re stuck. Or are we?

Tomorrow, I want to talk about unstuckness.