Inventing the Wheel
They could only ever imagine the next tiny step. Anything else would have been too much of an abstraction.
From On the Origin of Tepees, by Jonnie Hughes:
Unfortunately, our imaginations, despite being such fun to use, and so often used, are severely restricted. Let me demonstrate.
Imagine a blue sheep. It's easily done. You've seen a sheep before, and you know the color blue, so you have a perceptual memory of both entities, and because of that, it's easy to combine the two even if you have never perceived the two combined in reality. That's your imagination working. After imagining a blue sheep, you could conceivably go out and dye a sheep blue, and the result would be very like the vision you've imagined.
Now imagine a coquelicot fosa. Harder to do. Again, it's an animal painted a certain color, but only a minority of people will have a perceptual memory of both the animal and the color. If you are a French adventurer, you have a good chance. Coquelicot is an informal name in France for a type of poppy, and the color coquelicot is poppy-colored: bright red with a bit of orange. The fosa is the largest carnivorous mammal on the island of Madagascar (once a French colony and partly French-speaking, so a likely destination for a French adventurer). It looks a bit like a lean and mean medium-size jungle cat, but that's just an illusion; it's actually an overgrown mongoose that, marooned on an island full of tasty lemurs, has been forced down the convergent evolution route.
Now that you have DIY memories of these two entities, you may be just about able to hotwire a patchy vision in your imagination. It's much more difficult than imagining a blue sheep, because, unless you are a French adventurer, you've never (knowingly) seen these two things, so in imagining a coquelicot fosa, you're combining two memories that are themselves imagined combinations of genuine memories—the coquelicot fosa in your mind is an abstraction, a vision one step removed from memories of things you've actually seen.
What if I asked you now to imagine an alizarin fanaloka? And then I told you that alizarin was like a purplish coquelicot, and a fanaloka was a smaller, furrier, stripier fosa? It's starting to hurt now, isn't it? Even with all those useful tips, imagining that extra step is too much. You can't fix the image in your mind because you're too far removed from genuine memories, from perceptual inputs. The image of the alizarin fanaloka struggling to appear would be an abstraction of an abstraction—two steps removed from your perceptual memory; too far removed from your experiences to be easily imagined.
It was the same with the people who brought us the wheel. They could only ever work with the memories they had, the firsthand memories of what existed. They could only ever imagine the next tiny step. Anything else would have been too much of an abstraction. And that's what must restrict all Idea evolution. If accidents don't happen, the only way an Idea can adapt is with the help of our imagination, and our imagination is, unfortunately, severely restricted. . . .
A Plains Indian upon first sighting a French trapper sitting atop his wheeled wagon may well have thought, just as the eminent Victorian biologist Thomas Henry Huxley thought upon hearing Darwin's theory of natural selection, "How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!" But had he thought in that way, he would have been too hard on himself: the pool of memories in his culture was simply too far removed . . . for him to have pulled off such a feat of genius. There were too many tiny steps that had remained untaken.
Why, one might ask—and many have—do Rosenshine's Principles of Instruction place such low expectations on students? Why does it treat students as though they are less than capable right off the bat? Here are some of those principles:
Begin a lesson with a short review of previous learning.
Present new material in small steps with student practice after each step.
Obtain a high success rate.
Provide scaffolds for difficult tasks.
A simple answer—one that has been given many times, I think—is that your feelings about low expectations and students' feelings about their self-efficacy are irrelevant. The principles are derived from research around the most effective teacher behaviors for classroom instruction, so you should follow them. The deeper answer, though, is that, actually, your feelings about low expectations and students' feelings about their self-efficacy are out of whack with how human beings are built. The principles do not place low expectations on students. Your expectations are generally too high. And the principles do not treat students as 'less than.' People tend to think their abilities are greater than they actually are.
The distorted images provided by hindsight (we know how wheels work now) and overinflated ego (most of us couldn't build a usable, reliable wheel-and-axle if our lives depended on it) make it easy to believe that the wheel and its applications to solving other problems were relatively straightforward and easy developments in our species' inevitable linear march toward 'progress,' just as they make it easy to believe that "you guys should know this by now." But that's not how people work. Our imaginations, which are housed in our working memories, are too limited. The development of the wheel happened in fits and starts and incrementally, over a long period of time. The development of new learning must be seen in the same light.
