What to Learn from Getting Knocked-Out?

The most memorable part (and I say this with all kinds of irony intended) of the two laps at Mid-Atlantic this past weekend was getting knocked for a loop on Electroshock Therapy on Saturday.  I'd heard stories about people who got knocked unconscious from a shock, but I figured that was hyperbole and that they just got knocked down.  Well, I can tell you, there's no hyperbole involved.  I was legitimately out of it for a second.

Since Miami was so intense, I knew that I wasn't going to simply go charging in and hope for the best.  Rather, I decided to stand at the starting point and watch a few other people as they went through.  I figured this would help me gauge how bad the shocks were.  If no one else was falling, then I thought it wouldn't be too bad.  There was a guy standing next to me looking very skittish about going through, and after I had watched about a half-dozen people make it through with no real problems, I turned to him and said something like "It's okay...it doesn't look too bad today" and went in.  The next thing I remember is opening my eyes, wondering where I was for a second, and realizing I was on my hands and knees about 2/3 the way through.  I tried to get up, but got shocked again, so I stayed down and crawled my way out.

If you haven't had this kind of thing happen to you, the best way I could describe it is to think of any movie or TV show you've ever seen where a robot has to be shut down and then restarted at some point.  In some cases, the restart will be shown through the eyes of the robot, and you'll get a chance to see the eyes open, everything come into focus, and then the robot comes back online.  Sometimes you'll even see a data scroll, like the Window's start up screen. The same thing happened to me.  I remember opening my eyes, and for a split second not knowing how I got there.  Perhaps it's because I'm a technologist, but the best way to describe it is as if my mind had been "reset" for a second, and I had to power-up.  It wasn't nearly as scary as you might think - particularly since I quickly realized that I still had other things to worry about at that point (namely, I had to get out of those damn wires).  This, of course, became fodder for lots of humor throughout the weekend, and I have absolutely no doubt that Danny and Brian will chime in with their well-placed two cents on the topic at some point (more than likely, this will become a running gag).

I started thinking about what kinds of lessons could be learned from this experience for educational practices (I know, it seems unlikely, but with enough time to reflect connections can be made).  I realized that some of our current school practices would benefit from this kind of hard-reset. It would be a great way to clear out some of the institutional inertia that takes place in educational settings.  Powering down and then restarting the system might be just the time to re-examine all of those places where things are "done that way because that's they way they've always been done."  We might be scared of the shock that causes the restart, but I would guess that the benefits would outweigh the costs.  If it's anything like my experience, I would guess that the really important things would come into focus most quickly.  After all, when I got reset I was much more interested in getting out of those wires than in how cold my beer was going to be at the finish line.