Gilbert Authors Network

Force may be useful in teaching from time to time, but even at those times, using more force than necessary creates resistance and slows the student’s progress. It may also reinforce the belief that knowledge must be pushed into the student. Pushing knowledge into a student, insofar as it is possible, is an excruciatingly slow business, especially when compared with the student who eagerly consumes instruction.

Let me distinguish between teaching about force, and using force to teach. You can teach about force with great gentleness, just as you can teach about peace with great force.

A gentler teaching approach can mean fewer waves, less resistance, minimalized conflict. Where we as teachers can construct an emotional and perceptual quiet space in which to learn, we may be able to open the door for the student to be the motive force, to take action in service of their own learning.

For those accustomed to force, gentleness can disarm, changing the landscape of learning radically. Where we offer gentleness and calm in our teaching, we also teach it. For some students, your demonstration of gentleness may be their first.

Some believe that students must be forced to learn. Certainly many students are trained to this pattern, making it so. But this is an inefficient approach, requiring the teacher to sustain and even escalate pressure while also avoiding going too far. This is hard work and distracts the teacher from subtler considerations of what the student needs.

When it comes to humans, to offer less to push against is to walk more softly on the landscape of agenda and intent, creating fewer irrelevant perturbations and complicating effects.

Gentleness is a powerful teaching tool. Give the student who is used to being pushed nothing to fight against and see what changes.

My offered practice: Explore the range of force available to you as a teacher. Consider how you might apply force in a given moment, perhaps by pushing the student, by subtly or overtly demanding compliance, or by applying pressure to their vulnerabilities. Then consider how you might apply force’s opposite to the same interaction. Learn to see the range of available force in your teaching, and what it accomplishes.

I want to hear from teachers of faith and deep conviction about their experiences teaching from a spiritual perspective. I hope this interview will be the first of a number of such interviews, and I welcome contact from other teachers willing to engage with me on these topics.

Matt Harmless is a Christian teacher and pastor who has taught in both religious and secular schools. I asked him about his views on deep teaching, on matters of faith, and on the challenges of bringing his views into his various classrooms. What inspires a teacher of faith? How does such a teacher bring themselves and their faith fully into the classroom?

Asher Bey: Matt, thank you for engaging with me on this subject. How long have you been teaching?

Matt Harmless: I’ve been teaching since 2000.

AB: And where do you teach?

MH: The majority of my teaching experience has been in private Christian schools. Two of them were fairly large, as far as Christian schools go, and the other was really small. All of my student teaching plus a year was in public schools.

AB: When you teach in public schools, do you feel a tension between your faith and the mandate given you by the school system? Or is this not an issue?

MH: The times that I feel the most tension is when I get “why?” questions. “Why do homework?” “Why should we be respectful?” “Why obey our authorities? Why?” When I answer these questions without an acknowledgment of God and His ways, I always feel like I have given a partial answer. I can still teach the principles in these moments, and I do. But I also hope to find an opportunity to get into the real reasons and share my faith.

AB: When you teach, how do you resolve this tension?

MH: Jesus once told his disciples that they were the “light of the world” and the “salt of the earth”. When I was teaching at a Christian school, being the “light of the world” was easy.

In the public school, geometry for example, faith still constantly intersects my teaching. Things like lines that are infinite, why do parallel lines exist, the existence of things that are true, and of course, why should you work hard at math? In the public schools I want to shed the light as I have always done, but they don’t exactly let you discuss God in Geometry.

Even if I could not be a “light” in these situations, perhaps I could be “salt.” Salt does not reveal things. Instead, it preserves and flavors things. Many of the men who paved the way for scientific thinking were Christians. Louis Pasteur, Sir Isaac Newton, Sir William Herschel, Blaise Pascal, Johannes Kepler, Francis Bacon. They all believed that one should strive to learn as much as they could about God’s creation. They were working to make the world better.

This year I will be teaching math at Georgetown-Ridgefarm High School, a public school. My hope is to be a “light” when I can, but to always be “salt” in my student’s lives.

AB: I appreciate the distinction between light and salt. What flavors do you hope to reveal by being “salt”? What deeper teachings do you want to come through?

MH: The first church fathers wrote, “the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever,” and if I truly believe that, then that belief, that faith, will permeate all that I do.

There is always a bigger picture. In English Class, to learn to communicate effectively. In literature, to learn how to communicate passionately and purposefully. In the sciences, to learn how to observe. In my math classes, I hope to teach my students to think and to be problem-solvers. I hope to build in my students a desire to do well, not only for the grade.

It is only a hop, skip and a jump from geometric proofs to questions of personal worldview… in many ways they’re connected.

AB: Can you recount a time when you felt good about bringing forth principles of your faith without referring specifically to your religion?

MH: One event I felt really pleased about came at the end of a year when a student told me that I had never become impatient with them, that all their other teachers had eventually “lost it” once or twice, but I never had. The simple attitude of patience had made an impact on this child. I didn’t have time to explain why or how this was related to my faith, even though my faith was the source of this patience. It isn’t because I’m a naturally patient person!

AB: Is God present in your answers only when you mention Him explicitly, or at other times as well?

MH: God is always present in my answers. (At least I hope He is.) More so, the older I get and the more aware I am of the world around me. He is most definitely present. Even when I am not speaking, He is present.

St. Francis of Assisi has been attributed this statement: “Preach the gospel always. If necessary use words.”

AB: Do you encourage students to question or challenge you on matters of faith?

MH: Oh, I absolutely encourage the questioning of faith. Everyone has something that they believe. Most students don’t know what their belief system is, yet they spend their lives living it out and functioning under its rules. I have found that a great way to encourage questioning of faith – or my faith – is to question their faith. Or to question what they do.

In my core I believe that you can’t learn without a question. A student needs to learn to question to learn. When you help a student learn to ask good questions, then (my hope is) they will begin to question more things. Teach them to question what they know and what they think they know and why they think they know it, and then you can begin to lead them to the truth. Since math, in many ways, deals with truth, then the questioning of truth bleeds over to other areas.

What sort of faith would it be if it couldn’t stand up to scrutiny?

AB: Indeed. But questioning belief systems can be dangerous. It is one thing to question the assumptions of mathematics – at least in modern times – and another to question the school’s belief system, the government’s, or a student’s religious faith. What sort of dangerous questions do you get? How do you answer?

MH: I have had some good ones so far this year, but not quite at the caliber that I am hoping for. We have done a lot of talking about truth, statements of truth and proofs of truth, and I feel that there are some ideas brewing with my students. They are starting to make some connections between Geometry and real life (and not just with triangles and parallel lines).

If it comes right down to it, I would answer any question based on my beliefs. I may throw in there that it is my opinion, but I would also add that I believe it to be the only logical conclusion.

Things are really going to collide when some of my students learn that I am also a pastor of a church. When my students acquire that little bit of knowledge, either by my telling them or via the grapevine, I am sure there will be questions.

AB: What sort of questions do you anticipate? And what do you hope for?

MH: I am hoping that they will question how these two things fit together. I want them to ask questions when they are going through hard times, to ask about suffering and death in the world. From someone who is constantly promoting logical, sequential thought, I hope that they put me to the test in this arena.

Paul the Apostle spoke about this type of readiness in the book of Colossians. He says, “Walk in wisdom toward outsiders, making the best use of the time. Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer each person.” I want to be ready for any question they might ask.

I would love to have some questions about how teaching math plays into my preaching on Sundays. They might be surprised at the similarities. People like Isaac Newton and Johannes Kepler were mathematicians and theologians. I personally feel like the two topics mesh really well.

AB: So how does math play into your preaching on Sundays?

MH: In both there is the core belief in the concept of truth, and that it can be found. In both there is a seeking of truth by way of reasoning. And just like in Geometry, there is the idea of having as little truth as possible be assumed truth, and everything else building off of those truths.

My logical training and my almost 10 years of teaching help me more than anything else during my sermon preparation.

AB: Many teachers face similar issues. What advice might you have for teachers of various faiths coming into secular schools, dealing with similar tensions and challenges?

MH: I would begin by reminding a teacher of faith that there is a “faith” that is already present in the secular school. It is important to understand that an individual’s or institution’s “faith” is its belief system. There are variations in this system, depending on the board and administration, but there is a system there.

If you walk into a Muslim school and begin teaching Christian principles, you better believe that you will meet opposition. So, it is not surprising that if you walk into a secular school and begin teaching Christian principles, tensions will arise.

My advice is to remain in the common areas as much as possible. There are many principles that are deeply rooted in true Christianity that can be taught without ever mentioning their source.

AB: Truth is clearly very important to you. When you teach, how do you know that you are teaching what is true?

MH: In Geometry there are the basic assumptions (postulates) and all other truth comes from those basic assumptions. Most mathematicians strive to bring those basic assumptions down to the bare minimum. This is where we get the great debate over Euclid’s fifth postulate. Is that fifth postulate necessary, or can it be derived from the first four?

Those postulates in Geometry are never so far-fetched or strange that one would question their truth. They are usually arrived at through a form of inductive reasoning. They aren’t testable, but they fit perfectly with the pattern of reality.

My basic “life postulates” would include things like God Exists and He has revealed Himself in the Bible. I would not at all consider my belief in these things as blind faith… in fact, I would consider the idea of blind faith to be an oxymoron. Faith (in the Bible) is always tied directly to knowledge and is always enhanced by knowledge. So, as I have evaluated the world and all that is in it, I have adopted these basic assumptions.

From these two assumptions I have derived all other truth.

AB: And so, if a student were to question your basic life postulates, how might you respond?

MH: When this has happened in the past, I usually start by asking them why they believe their basic “life postulates”. What evidence do they have to support their basic assumptions? I do this, not to try to detour off of the question, but to try to bring to the surface the shakiness of their own belief systems. Most people, especially students, won’t have any reasons whey they believe what they believe.

Recently there was a discussion in one of my classes about proofs. It came up, only partially by my manipulation of the conversation, that the reason why most students don’t like proofs (at least in this modern world we live in) is because nobody likes to answer to anyone else. In other words, most students like to just do whatever they want, and they don’t want to be bothered by accountability or hard questions. This is right where I want to go. If I can get them to think about what they actually believe, I will feel like I had accomplished something.

For myself, there is a load of evidence for the reliability of the Bible. It is so vastly different than any other piece of literature that exists, especially compared to any other ancient literature. It stands firm under textual, historical, and scientific scrutiny. I am prepared for questions about the Bible though, and hope that they come.

AB: In your teaching, do you explore other views such Islam, Judaism, or even atheism in order to help your students think about what they believe? How do you address these other religions or non-religions in your teaching?

MH: I haven’t had much opportunity to address other religions in the classroom. Mostly because I genuinely don’t want to offend any of my students. Besides, if I really want them to listen to me, ought I not be willing to hear their beliefs with the same respect that I want them to listen to me? I can be adamant without being rude.

AB: Can you teach those who do not believe in the Bible as the profound truth, or does this lack of belief represent a barrier to how deeply you can teach them?

MH: Can I teach them? Yes. Truth is truth, and there are elements of that truth that can be seen outside of the actual written word.

As I teach about the order, the precision, and the design manifested in the created world and displayed in the theoretical science of mathematics, that truth is being taught.

But does it represent a barrier to how deeply I can teach? Absolutely. The truth of a god can be seen in the created world, but who this god is cannot be seen until you read His word. That is where He really reveals Himself.

AB: Are there any questions you might be afraid to answer?

MH: I guess it depends on what I might be afraid of. Am I afraid of losing my job? Possibly. Afraid of having my beliefs probed? No, but that stems from my belief about truth itself. If truth is truth, then it doesn’t really have anything to do with me. It doesn’t depend on me.

But I want everything to do with it. I want the real truth, not just what I believe is true! The harder the question, the more it can clarify truth in one’s mind.

Some Christians behave as if they believe they have the answer before they even ask the questions. I don’t want to be like that. Bring on the hard questions. I want to really think, because I believe that there IS this thing called Truth.

AB: I appreciate how you depersonalize your search for truth. It reminds me of something one of my teachers once said: “if it’s true, you don’t need to defend it. If it’s not true, you don’t need to defend it.”

One last question: What motivates you to teach? What are your more and less profound motivations?

MH: I need a job! That is not profound, but very, very true. If I didn’t need a job would I still teach? Possibly. But most likely it would not be the same. I would only teach those who are interested in learning. That might be why I enjoy being a pastor.

There is an enlightening aspect about all teaching, as long as it is true (big truths or small truths). I truly enjoy experiencing those eye-opening events, whether in myself or in others.

In my own little corner of the education universe, I want my students to ask “why?” If they can ask “why?” there is hope for real change.

We love stories. We are intrigued by what happens to other entities, about the problems they face, the solutions they find. And we want to know what these events mean, to us, to our society, to the world. It is the storyteller who guides us through this meaning.

As teachers, whether we realize it or not, we are storytellers. When we discuss how our subject interacts with the student and the world, when we explore what has happened and what might yet happen, we are telling a tale. So it benefits us to study effective storytelling, to understand how the questions we pose for our students can be made more engaging from a narrative point of view.

I recommend to you this article by Garr Reynolds, and the accompanying video by Ira Glass.

I recently participated in a presentation about technology in education. Afterwards I spoke with a handful of educators who wondered at the resistance of educational institutions – and indeed some teachers – to try new teaching tools and approaches. Why is it, someone asked, that the very organizations we expect to live at the edge of new understandings in education – our schools – and the very people we employ to teach our young to learn – our teachers – often seem the most resistant to taking risks and learning new approaches?

This is the dirty secret of pedagogy, the core insecurity and unspoken fear in many teacher’s lives, and the hidden motivation of nearly all educational institutions: there is no product.

In most professions the practitioners can point to a product or an effect of their work. A better tool, a running program, a written document, satisfied clients, smoother operations. Yet there is no object produced in teaching and the teacher’s job is not to make people or institutions happy, but to draw the student to learn, to change. What is the product? It is not the curriculum, which is only one of many ways of organizing subject matter. It is not the student’s mind, which arrives mostly assembled. It is not an abstract ideal of knowledge which if it exists only exists inside this mostly assembled student’s mind. The teacher’s work is to lead the student to learn – perhaps the material, perhaps how to learn – but only the student can do the actual learning. So what is the product?

We must have a product, of course, so we can point to the result of the work. And so we have invented products: evaluations, grades, standardized tests, and so on, all attempts to prove the teacher and institution’s worth by measuring what can be measured, however irrelevant.

Having established these now-traditional means of proving their worth, having convinced the surrounding culture – rulers, taxpayers, elite, parents, students – that they are making something worth purchasing, educational institutions dare not risk change that might inspire purchasers to ask: do you know what you’re doing? Is your product worth buying? Fear of death is a powerful motivator.

But teaching does have a product, and it is hidden in plain sight: the teacher’s product is the teacher themself. Teaching is one’s ability to become a living and creative mirror that reflects a student’s best interest in learning. Not some abstract or theoretical student, but this one, now and here.

Such work requires the teacher to at least temporarily put aside what they know about teaching, about students, about institutional evaluations, and observe the situation, the subject, and the student as they are. To listen and look through the lens of their own insight.

This is hard work. Easier by far and less risky is to follow a textbook, to teach to a test, to do what has been done before.

My offered practice: consider those things you believe your teaching produces. These might be test results, student performance, projects, team research, attendance, classroom behavior, teacher evaluations, curriculum – anything that you believe your teaching produces. As you examine each one reflect on the change to your teaching if you no longer considered that a goal in your teaching work. How would your teaching change?

As a child I was often asked what I knew of the world. Could I count to ten? Did I know the capital of the state? Could I recite the capitals of all the states?

Sometimes I was asked my preferences. What was my favorite subject in school? What animals did I like? What movies? What sports?

Less often, I was asked what I saw. What did I see when I looked at that mountain? That tree? That person?

This is where questions become dangerous. Facts alone are relatively objective. Preferences typically follow cultural expectations and exposure. These are safe things to ask. But what someone sees is a reflection of what they think and feel. To ask about this is to invite them to participate fully in the conversation, to speak of things other than what they have been told is there.

The asking of ask such a question is powerful all by itself. It says that this person’s view matters. To ask a child what they see will change the way the child looks at the world.

My offered practice: consider a child or adult in your life. Ask them what they see. Ask them what they think. Notice what you are telling them by asking this. Listen not only to what they answer, but how.

All teachings end. Whether by graduation or circumstance or death, all teaching relationships, no matter how beneficial or profound, come to a close. But we are not so good at endings. It is a rare person who enjoys endings, who looks for them and seeks to perform them gracefully and fruitfully. Instead we ignore them, discount them, downplay them.

A teacher has great power to demonstrate good endings, to give the student a way to transition from one path to another, one level to another, one teacher to another or to no teacher. Even when the student is staying with the teacher, the teacher can help mark a place where one form of study ends and another begins, showing how things are ended well.

When a deep teaching is informal or unstructured in duration, it is rare to find a teacher deliberately ending the work at a useful place. More often such teachings end with life circumstance; someone moves away, loses interest, or there is a falling-out. It is rare indeed to hear a teacher say, “I think that we have done good work, and it is enough. Go do something else.”

For these and other reasons, it is sometimes the student who must end the relationship. One student I spoke with had found herself unable to function due to stresses with her teacher. Despite having gained a great deal from the work she had decided that it was time to end the relationship but was conflicted. The words of her teacher came back to her, making her doubt herself. Only when the cost was very great did she see ending as her best choice.

This can be hard for a student. The decision alone may be brutally difficult. Teachers are often able to evoke vulnerable and dependent feelings in their students, and if the teacher is reluctant to let the student leave, it can be difficult for the student to even consider this option.

Teachers, if your student cannot freely leave your teaching, they also cannot freely stay with your teaching. While there are times when the student’s learning is best served by a sense of needing to stay, there are important times when the teaching will suffer if the student does not feel free to leave.

From the teacher’s point of view, the work here is to enable the student to leave in a good way, and then, perhaps, if appropriate, also allow them to stay. Teach your student to think about what it means to end things, to move forward, to graduate, to grow beyond you and your teachings.

From the student’s point of view, the work here is to understand that the teacher is a means to a path, perhaps a doorway, and not the path itself nor the room beyond. The student may have come to trust the teacher, rely on them for direction, clarity, comfort, transformation, even deep spiritual bliss. A sense of rightness and belonging is often found in such relationships. These are hard things to give up.

The excellent teacher will have taught the student that the genesis of such profound experiences is not in the teacher. They will have taught the student to practice finding these things on their own, and will make the ending a positive and beneficial process, whether they leave the door open for the student to return or not.

My offered practice for students and teachers both: consider your most profound and powerful current teacher-student relationship. Reflect on ending it, and what it would take to do that gracefully and with beneficial outcome for all. What might you do now to lay the foundation for that ending?

Poetry is at times the best bridge between reason and understanding. Here is a piece about teaching which I found worth the three mintues to watch. Teacher-poet Taylor Mali is asked, at a dinner party, “You’re a teacher, Taylor. Be honest: what do you make?”

Here is his answer: What Teachers Make

Because deep teaching must transcend or encompass powerful symbols such as money, excellence in teaching requires we understand how such compensation affects our work.

Money is a strong motive force. If your students pay you to teach, money necessarily becomes part of what you teach them, whether you intend it to or not. By the very act of accepting payment you show and thus teach that your teaching may be bought. When students believe their ability to pay is why you teach them, it affects how and what they learn.

Being paid to teach also affect us as teachers. We may wonder at our value when it is represented by money. We may be affected by the control of those who pay us.

If the money takes steps around you, as it does for most public school teachers, traveling from citizen to government and then back to the school and to the teacher, the influence that your monetary compensation has on your students is blunted because they are less aware of the flow of these funds. If parents instead gave their children cash to give you directly, what those students learn and how they understand your teaching would change markedly, as would your own understanding.

For the student who pays you directly, it is important to take into account that influence while at the same time separating the teaching from that influence – not an easy task. Additionally, it is important to separate out the teacher’s need for compensation from the student’s need to compensate. We may not need the money, but the student may need to pay in order to learn. Or the other way around.

Further, what money means to one student is different from what it means to the next. A rich student and a poor student will not have the same experience in learning in the same environment, even while paying the same amount. While each teacher-student relationship is unique, students in a classroom expect to be treated similarly. A difference in base wealth creates a difference in the learning experience even though on the surface it may appear equitable.

Thus we must look for and understand the currencies in play. Money and its absence are both motive forces. A student who believes they pay a lot to be taught may feel they need not give much else, such as respect or effort. A student who pays no money may feel they are incurring an obligation and attempt to compensate in other ways. Such reactions may interfere with the teaching, or they may help it, and we must seek to understand the student and their motivations so that we can best serve their learning.

If you have paying students, you have two issues to consider: for yourself, how money affects your teaching and how to allow for that influence. For the student, how to separate out the money from the learning, or how to include it in your teaching, or both.

My offered practice: If you are paid to teach, consider how your teaching would change – or stop altogether – if there were no money at all. Or less money. Or more. Consider how your teaching would change if students paid you directly, or in differing amounts. Follow the trail of influence that money plays in your teaching. Consider how your deepest and most important teachings are affected.

We all carry voices in our heads. They are the voices of our teachers, parents, friends. They comment on our work, our accomplishments, our failures. Sometimes they cause us to wonder if we have missed something, to wonder if they would approve.

Over time, these voices – these imagined voices – become so familiar that we are no longer entirely conscious of them even while we act and react with them in mind. In this cacophony of judgment and praise our own capacity to see clearly and think for ourselves can be drowned out.

Our students have such voices as well, and over time our own voice may join them. We must be on the lookout for this because as flattering as it is to have a student follow our mental footsteps and wonder how we would view their actions, it is our task to teach our students to see the world around them and think for themselves.

There are many ways to address such thought patterns in a student, some of them overt, such as discussing how we model the people who influence us, and some subtle, such as exaggerating a voice for dramatic effect and seeing if the student recognizes the echo in their own mind.

Most teaching is about strengthening the student’s understanding of our views, but there are times when it is best to seek to weaken the shadow of our voice in the student’s mind. This is not because our words are not worth hearing and remembering, but because we have a duty to teach our students to listen beyond imagined voices of opinion and judgment, to see past the pitfalls and blindnesses of their friends, parents, and teachers.

My offered practice: look for a time and place in which you sense a reflection of someone else’s voice in your student’s thoughts, perhaps even your own. Can you highlight these imagined judgments or praises in a way that helps the student see through them?

Kermit’s a liar. You can’t trust a frog (and any princess worth her salt could tell you that). It’s easy being green, at least a pale sort of green.

Lying frogs aside, I can finally answer the pesky perennial question, that question that’s troubled techie types for the last decade or two. That question: Should you turn your PC off at night or over the weekend?

If you’ve been in with the IT crowd, the answer to this question has always been a hearty “Nope!” (No kisses, no frogs, no princesses.) Leave them on. (Go away.)

Enterprise-wise, you see, we need those beasts on and working; even at home, you’re screwed if you don’t let them have their way. It’s the updates you see. Miss an update and the zombies come calling.

If you turn your PC off… well, then all those nice automated things don’t get done — important things, like updates, and bug patches, and virus signatures, and disk defragging, and other gobbledygook sort of technical things. They’re necessary, unfortunately. They’re important.

When confronted, I typically explain the simple trade-offs: It’s a choice between “leave them on” or you’ll be responsible for immanentizing the eschaton, triggering the inevitable zombie apocalypse or another Republican administration — to some, no doubt, one in the same.

Moreover, you’ll suffer! If your PC is off at night; well then, all those pesky updates will have to run while you are actually trying to work, trying to finish your radically over-due dissertation about Romance in America: The Myths of the Frog Prince, or trying to put those ever-so-important final touches on your resume, or, perhaps you’re writing the great-American-time-travel novel about relativity and love across the space-time continuum. Whatever it is, it’s important stuff all, right?

Between you and me and the blue screen, there is no need to tempt the fates by actually choosing to run the automated Windows Update and Crash system while trying to actually use the PC. To do that is foolish; to do that tempts fate.

If you’re going to do that, you might as well just stop now, randomly delete the first ten files you find that end with “DLL,” slide a Kraft single into the DVD drive, and pound your head directly on the keyboard for twenty minutes. It’s easier, tastier, more entertaining to your co-workers, and, in the end, will have much the same effect on your PC. Don’t forget to un-wrap the cheese first.

(Hey,Mac-head: don’t get smug, bozo. It happens to Mac’s too. Remember, it ain’t the machine, it ain’t the manufacturer, and it ain’t the OS. It’s the universe that’s laughing at you — and the universe is OS-agnostic. Although I have heard that Mac’s will actually read a properly formatted Kraft single.)

The counter argument to all this is, of course, wasteful energy consumption — the collective impact off all those PCs and laptops leaving huge Al Gore-sized, carbon footprints all over the global rug; wastefully burning up the world, leaving us to play frog in the global green house’s boiling pot of water, not noticing that it’s getting kinda warm and wet.

It just doesn’t feel “right,” leaving all these machines humming all the time. There are more and more and more every day. It just ain’t right, right?

So, hold on to your frogs— now there’s a better answer. The answer is still “nope.” But now, the answer is “nope, but…”

Now you can leave them on “smartly,” a princely green; leave ‘em on, tuned to the heavenly sixty cycles of sun and moon and automated software-tuned power efficiency.

The answer to all this is smart, power management software. It’s all about real-time fine-tuning — my third force, the move from sampling to monitoring — has found a terrific home in Green IT. It’s time to kiss the frog.

It’s about time: It’s a fracking computer after all. It should be able to tune itself, start itself up, do what needs to be done, and then gently fall to sleep.

Previous power management was pretty stupid — essentially offering two choices — asleep or awake; governed by a timeout. Not all answers are binary, and — at least in my case — the needs varied by time of day and day of the week. I needed the pesky PC’s perky during the day, and wanted them to embrace their lethargy the rest of the time. Life is not static. All in all, my goals are simple:

• Maximize energy savings and minimize user grumbling
• Be smart yet cheap about it
• Make it easy to set up and manage

The solution is a relatively unique software and management service. The software is called “Surveyor” — it’s made by Verdiem. Centrally managed and administered, it lets us tune the power management, by time of day, by day of the week, of individual PCs across our network. It even lets us do periodic “wake-up calls” to check for those required zombie updates, and to minimize the end-user grumble factor.

With Surveyor running, you still need to leave the PCs on— but now you’ve got the ability to twiddle and tweak the power management scheme, on the fly, to suit the time of day and the needs of the office. Now, they’re on when needed, up and responsive during working hours and asleep when they’re not needed, blissfully dreaming robotic dreams of world domination or plotting to kill Sarah Connors.

 

Power profiles can be changed on the fly. We set up two, one for the “Workday” (basically 8:00 AM to 5:30 PM) and another for evenings, nights and weekends.

Then, we got fancy — modifying the power settings on the fly to maximize the so-called “user experience” (or minimize the grumbling) and to minimize our carbon footprints. It was item two — the user grumbling — that took some fancy footwork with the scheduling.

We solved that with a couple of what I call “wake up calls” — essentially the system automatically sends out the magic “wake-on-LAN” packet to wake the machine up. It does it once at 8:00 AM so that those early to work are greeted by a wide-awake PC; once again at 9:00 AM so that the late arrivals also get a wide-awake PC. The 75-minute Workday timeout covers lunch.

Off-hours we get aggressive, switching promptly at 5:30 to the shorter timeouts, effectively putting all the un-used PC’s to sleep by 5:35 PM. We wake them all at 3:00 AM to process any pending updates — if there’s nothing to do, they’re back to sleep by 3:05 AM.

I’m a skeptic. So I metered it. The promised to save money, to knock tens of dollars off my electric bill for each PC, and to be green, seemed too good to be true.

And so, armed with my trusty “Kill-a-Watt,” the results convinced me. For a 24-hour period, the software dropped the power consumption of a typical workstation from 1.28 KWh in 24 hours, to about .62 KWh (with average usage), resulting in an estimated annual savings per PC of a little more than $20.

 

Even given the software costs (about $15 for the first year and $2/year thereafter), there’s a net savings of $5 per PC in the first year, with around $18 in subsequent years. For 100+ PC’s that’s real green. Besides, it’s worth it to unmask Kermit’s perfidy. Go ahead, kiss that frog. It’s easy.