The Week I Accidentally Taught Seeing Like a State to Sixth Period

I was mid-unit on ecosystems, specifically the section on monoculture farming and why a single-crop field is more fragile than a mixed one, and I went on a tangent I hadn’t planned, about a book I was reading at the time for the site, and by the time I noticed what I’d done I’d basically taught half of James Scott’s argument to a room of twelve year olds without meaning to.

The book is about why big, centrally planned schemes, scientific forestry, collectivized farms, planned cities, keep failing in similar ways even across totally different governments, and the short version I gave sixth period was something like: when you simplify something complicated so it’s easier to manage from far away, you often lose the exact stuff that was keeping it working in the first place. A single, uniform, easy-to-count tree species planted in neat rows is simpler for a government forester to manage on paper. It’s also more fragile than the messy old-growth forest it replaced, more vulnerable to a single pest or disease wiping out the whole planted area at once, because the exact “messiness” that got simplified away was doing real ecological work.

I watched about a third of the room actually connect this back to the monoculture farming content we’d already covered, unprompted, which almost never happens with a spontaneous tangent, usually those just eat five minutes and go nowhere. One kid asked if that’s basically why we’re told not to plant the same thing in the same spot every year in a garden, which is close enough to the actual point that I gave him credit for it out loud.

I don’t know if this was good teaching or just me indulging a personal interest in front of a captive audience who couldn’t leave the room. Probably some of both, honestly. But it’s made me think differently about how I plan lessons generally, that the tangent isn’t always the enemy of the actual content, sometimes it’s the thing that makes an abstract principle land because it shows up somewhere unexpected instead of just where the textbook says it should.

I finished the actual review a few weeks after that class, and I kept thinking about those twelve year olds while I wrote it, wondering if any of them would ever end up reading a book like this on their own or if the sixth period tangent was the only version of the argument most of them would ever get. Either way’s fine by me. That’s kind of the job.