The Rock Tumbler: A Personal Essay on What We Lose When We Remove the Friction from Learning

Author’s Note: This is not typical Decoding Learning fare. It is not a research article. It is not a summary of studies or a practical guide. It represents my own views about reading, about education, about the society we are building and the one we are losing. I have been sitting with these ideas for a long time. I am publishing them because I think the questions matter more than my discomfort in asking them. I do not have all the answers. But I know what my questions are.

A few weeks ago while doom scrolling social media, I came across a video that went viral of an educator crying because his high school seniors couldn’t read. They couldn’t comprehend. He was not angry. He was heartbroken. A lot of people shared it. And a lot of people felt something watching it that they couldn’t quite name.

Then last week I wrote about building a reading life. It was about my own relationship with books, about the book Number the Stars and what it did to me in fourth grade. Somewhere between that educator’s tears and my own reflection, this essay started forming.

I have been thinking about it ever since.

The Rock Tumbler

Oddly enough, rock tumbling has also started appearing on my social media doom scrolls. When you pull a gemstone out of the ground, it doesn’t look like much. It’s rough, dull, and completely unrecognizable as the thing it will eventually become. It looks incredibly ordinary—like a rock you find in your yard.

What makes it beautiful is it goes in a tumbler with other gems and sand. Over time, the friction wears away the roughness. And what’s left behind is the gemstone. The jewel.

When we remove friction from our world, we’re removing the medium it takes — the grit it takes — to have profound experiences. What I kept noticing in classrooms, in society, in my own reading life is that we keep doing exactly that. We keep making things smoother, faster, easier, more convenient. And something keeps getting lost in the process.

This essay is my attempt to name what that something is.

It Starts With Me

I don’t read as much as I used to. That is a strange and painful sentence to write. Reading is not something I do. It is something I am. It is a long-standing, deeply embedded part of my identity. I read for my job. I listen to a lot of audiobooks and still read every day.

And yet I spend more time on my phone, computer, and tablet than I ever have before. I can clearly see the consequences of that. My audiobook listening is at an all-time high (and yes, I consider this reading). Reading literary fiction has evolved into cozy mysteries. The long, slow, difficult books — 700-page tomes — that used to be my natural reading choice feel harder to reach for than they used to.

I know that I am not alone in this. Friction is leaving my life and it is having a profound impact on how I read.

The Price of Convenience

We are bombarded day and night. We have miniature computers in our hands that are hooked to the Internet. When I was a kid, you didn’t have any of that. When I was in first grade, they put computers in our classrooms and it used a floppy disc. I had two game options—Oregon Trail and Number Munchers. That’s it. No access to the thousands upon thousands of games on a phone or tablet. I was lucky if I could use the computer twice a week. Twice a week. That’s it. Now I use a computer nearly all of my waking hours—to work, to read, to listen, to watch.

Instead, I had games, puzzles, books, and friends. I was not allowed to come inside until it was dinnertime.

With all the modern conveniences, we’ve turned into a bunch of indoor cats. Parts of our brains have atrophied. I am very guilty of this as much as the next person.

There is a price for having everything at your fingertips. It’s the same issue I see in our food system. The reason we eat so much junk food is because it’s quick and easy. Those conveniences, while saving us time, have also robbed us of something.

What have they robbed us of? Friction. There used to be a small (and sometimes large) friction built into our daily lives—resistance between what we want and what it takes to get it. When boredom set in, I would go to a book. Millions of others were like me.

Social media and short-form videos are engineered to be easy—one video after another, curated content, and instant gratification. None of this is true nourishment. And unlike a book, the internet has no end. As a species we are built to crave resolution but that is never possible on the internet. We keep scrolling and new content keeps appearing.

Friction is what transforms. It is what creates and shapes someone who can withstand challenges and complications. When we remove friction, we don’t just lose a gemstone. We end up losing the process that makes the gemstone possible.

The Pendulum

Education, like any large system, does not do nuance well. It does well with large swings. The pendulum in education just swings from one extreme to another. The answer has never been or. It has always been and. Phonics and joy. Structured instruction and inspiration. But the pendulum keeps swinging as if we must choose. We don’t. We never did.

Every time the pendulum swings it is an attempt to remove friction from the system. Whole language felt hard for struggling decoders, so we swung toward structured literacy. Structured literacy can feel rigid and joyless to some when it’s implemented without balance, so there is pressure building to swing back. Each time we are trying to make it easier, cleaner, more manageable for all stakeholders. But each time that pendulum swings, we are removing something from the tumbler that was supposed to be there.

I will not say that I grew up in the heyday of high-quality reading education. At the time, it was whole language. Many of my friends that I grew up with got left behind and were not given the support they needed to be successful. Looking back, I would say they were more than likely dyslexic and were undiagnosed. The downstream effects on those friends were profound—dropping out, behavior issues, and potential that was never fulfilled.

We are watching the pendulum start to swing again. There is lots of discussion around stripping iPads and technology from classrooms. While I agree that we need to be very thoughtful about the technology and programs we use in our classrooms, technology is a part of our life. Stripping it out of classrooms means stripping children of learning basic skills they’re going to need in the future. It can also mean stripping out supportive tools educators who are already overworked and underpaid rely on. It is stripping technology out with an axe instead of a scalpel.

For me, the cruelest irony is that the students who depend most on assistive technology (children with dyslexia, processing disorders, learning differences) are the ones who will be hurt most by its blunt removal. We have seen this before. The axe always lands hardest on the people who can least afford it.

When large system changes are made, it’s impossible to think of every consequence of those actions. Many people thought they were fixing the problem by swinging the pendulum back. But often, when we make so many large-scale changes all at once, there are unintended consequences. We end up intervening at the wrong level by solving symptoms not problems. That dramatic pendulum swing may fix an issue but causes others and the underlying issue becomes more difficult to fix. And worst of all, it is just changing which group gets left behind.

I am not a Buddhist scholar, but there is a concept in Buddhism that I keep coming back to. The middle way. The path between extremes. Across society we are not in the middle way. We have not found it yet. And we are feeling the consequences.

The Educator

Good teaching is a science and an art. You can learn the science. You can learn a little bit of the art. But to be a truly successful educator, there’s something innate within. I don’t think it can be fully taught.

I know this because I have seen it and have been changed by it. One of the most inspiring things that still lasts with me to this day is that my fourth-grade teacher put Number the Stars in my hands. That book had a lasting impact. The thematic, educator-driven passion for reading, and that passion rubbing off on children, is becoming harder to accomplish in today’s education climate.

My teacher was not following the script. She was following her love. A classroom full of children followed along right behind her. That is the brilliance of a great educator — the productive friction and resistance of a mind that pushes back on yours, that puts something hard and beautiful in your hands and says: try this. You are ready for it.

We’re not reading inspiring books. We’re less likely to delve into these great pieces of children’s literature that inspire children to want to read. Everything is just a race. Educators are expected to teach the curriculum with fidelity. I understand that: every child deserves a high-quality education. But every child in every classroom is different. Where are the opportunities to adjust for those differences? It is more difficult for educators to get inspired about what they’re teaching when the script doesn’t leave room for creativity.

We are pushing educators out of the classroom. We don’t pay them enough. We expect too much. We don’t give them enough support. Being an educator is heartbreaking at times. And it’s not the children. It’s the entire way we as a society treat our educators, creating a pressure cooker that is driving them out.

We are taking all these people with this innate talent and joy of teaching and forcing them into corporations and other places to make more money and to feel valued. And I truly, in my heart, believe that is a loss we are not fully reckoning with. We are removing the friction of the master educator from the classroom. We are replacing it with a script. And scripts don’t change lives.

Childhood is the part of life meant for building the kind of grit and persistence that reading requires. Not just reading but life. The child who struggles through a hard book and finishes it has practiced something. It is not just reading skills. They are the skills of a person who does not give up when things get hard. Childhood is when those muscles are built and strengthened long before the high stakes of adulthood. When we remove the friction — from books, from classrooms, from life — we are robbing children of the very practice they need.

Even if we get all that right and every classroom has the friction of a great educator and every child practiced persistence, it still wouldn’t be enough. The problem doesn’t start at the classroom door.

The Web

There is a quote often attributed to Desmond Tutu: “There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in.” I think the river metaphor is close to how I see the issue but not quite right. A river has one upstream source. What we are dealing with has dozens. It is not a river. It is a web. Pull one thread and everything moves.

The reading problem is not only an education problem. Instead, it is a web of issues.

Food insecurity, home insecurity, lack of free time for parents to engage in early reading activities, lack of good healthcare, dental care, and healthy food — basically, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs are not being taken care of. Then we expect these children to go to classrooms and be ready to learn.

I saw this every day in my classroom: Children who come to school hungry. Children who don’t know if they’re going home to the same house to that night. Children who watched a family member be arrested. Children who have been pulled from their homes and placed in foster care. Children who come to school in pain, or exhausted, or carrying something no child should have to carry.

When you look at that list, you are not looking at educational problems. You are looking at food insecurity, housing instability, crime, inadequate healthcare, and overwhelmed social services. These are not things a reading curriculum can fix. These are not things a new phonics program can fix. These are not things an educator can fix, no matter how talented, trained, or dedicated they are. These issues affect every classroom every single day.

We keep trying to think of the education system in its own box, with its own problems to solve, as if it doesn’t sit inside a larger, more complex web. You cannot fix the education problem until you start fixing these other problems too. You cannot teach a child who is not safe. You cannot reach a child who is not fed. You cannot put a book in the hands of a child who is just trying to survive the day and expect the love of reading to take hold.

What We Are Actually Losing

Everything I have described — the pendulum, the web, the lost educators, the pressure cooker — leads to the same consequence. And I want to name it directly.

I would never understand what it’s like to be the wife of Henry the Eighth if I had not read a book about it. I would not understand the plight of people in the 1930s Dust Bowl if I had not read a book about it. I would not have begun to understand the horrors of the Holocaust and the effects on everyday people if I had not read Number the Stars. I would not understand what it’s like to be dying without reading When Breath Becomes Air.

It is not a luxury to walk in shoes that do not belong to you. It is a necessity and the structure by which human beings extend their experience beyond the limits of their own lives. It is how we learn that other people’s pain is real. It is how we learn that history is not abstract. It is how we learn that a child in Denmark in 1943 was a child like us, with a best friend, a family, and a future that was suddenly in danger.

The consequence of not having that understanding is a bifurcated society. And we’re reaping what we sowed right now.

Empathy is a muscle not a feeling. Just like a muscle, it is built through use and practice. Reading is the exercise and each new book is the repetition. Every time you read a new book you understand something you didn’t before. That empathy muscle gets stronger. An aliterate society is not just a society that only reads when it has to. It is a society whose empathy has deteriorated.

The Messy Middle

Here is what I have come to believe: the middle is always messy. Always. It is always in a little bit of flux. Just think about any story, any movie, any TV show you’ve ever watched. The middle is messy. And we don’t want to live in messiness. We want resolution. We want clean answers. We want a curriculum that works, a policy that fixes it, a pendulum that finally stops in the right place.

But what if messiness is the answer? What if messiness is what inspires the joy of reading, the joy of learning, and the potential of a beautiful society for all?

The tumbler is messy. The stones inside knock against each other. The sand gets everywhere. You can’t see inside to watch progress happening. You just have to trust the process and let the friction do its work.

A difficult book is friction. An educator who follows her love of literature into territory the curriculum didn’t plan for is friction. A child sounding out a hard word, failing, trying again, and finally getting it is the tumbler turning. A classroom full of children from different homes, different lives, different experiences all trying to learn together — is friction. Productive friction. The kind that makes beautiful gemstones.

We keep trying to remove it. We keep making things smoother, faster, easier, more convenient. We keep swinging the pendulum toward whichever extreme seems like it will result in the least friction right now. We keep being surprised when the gems don’t appear.

The middle way is not easy. It is the tumbler. And we have to be willing to be inside it.

What I Am Going to Do

I want to be clear: I am not blaming anyone. Not educators. Not parents. Not technology companies, not curriculum designers, not policymakers. When you make large system changes, it is impossible to think of every consequence of those actions. Many people thought they were fixing the problem. The unintended consequences were real, and it would be overly simplified thinking to believe it is one person’s fault.

I know this: the potential of a beautiful society for all — one that is curious, empathetic, and capable of understanding itself — is not built by removing friction. It is built by trusting the tumbler and its process. By putting hard and beautiful things in children’s hands and believing they are ready for them.

I got a master’s degree in library science because I loved books and I wanted to spend my life helping children find that love. I put Number the Stars in the hands of every child I love who is old enough to receive it. I am going to keep doing that.

That is the one thread of the web I know how to pull. And I am going to keep pulling it.

Your Turn

This piece is different from what I usually write here. I would love to know what you think — whether you agree, where you push back, what I missed. The conversation matters as much as the essay.

What is the one thread you know how to pull?

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