First Order Retrievability

I count actions. Recently I boycotted – and nobody seemed to care – the electronic sign-in process at my daughter’s daycare. Why? It involved 13 distinct actions. Unlock phone, open app, sign in, confirm plan to attend, check covid protocols waiver…and we’re not even halfway there. So needlessly clunky.

This is not a new trait of mine, this impatience with a poorly designed world, however I didn’t have a name for it until I read an excerpt from a book by Adam Savage (of Mythbusters fame) about how he organizes his tools. His basic premise is that you should never need to move a tool to get to a different tool, a perspective he dubbed “first order retrievability”. 

To retrieve a plate in my kitchen, one must reach up to where the plates are and grab one. That’s it. There are no cabinets to open, nothing on top of the plates to move. You just take a plate. Surely you’ve been in houses where the plates are in a cabinet, under smaller plates. That’s five steps. Open cabinet, move smaller plates, retrieve large plate, replace smaller plates, close cabinet. Every now and then I’ll be in a kitchen that has coffee mugs hanging down in front of the smaller plates, so you need to remove (and replace!) those. Seven steps.

I organize much of my life with first order retrievability in mind. High use items are either accessed with only a single action or, if that’s not feasible, the route to them is as streamlined as possible. After sufficient admonishing, my six-year-old has finally stopped using the lid of the garbage can as a shelf. To my ongoing chagrin, my mom still uses her magnetic bottle opener to pin things to the fridge. This is like storing a hammer as a window prop rather in the tool box (or better, hanging on a wall). Want to open a beer in my mom’s kitchen? Find some place for the CVS receipt/random photo while you do it, and then put it back. 

Much of the struggles I see with my students relate to first order retrievability – or more accurately, ninth or tenth order retrievability. Need to start on homework. Have to clear a spot on desk. Where to put big pile of stuff? Bed too messy, floor has cords and assorted junk. Hallway? Maybe sister’s bed. Ok, now for paper. Where did that go? Probably in binder. Binder in backpack; backpack downstairs. Maybe there’s some in this drawer? Drawer stuffed with random drawings and Pokemon cards and candy wrappers and gum. Is blank printer paper ok? No pencils in sight…none of these regular pens seem to work…I guess I’ll just use a sharpie? 

It’s painful to watch, and I don’t care how good your mathematical reasoning is, when you turn in a printer paper/sharpie combo, most math teachers aren’t impressed. 

This is obviously where I come in, and where other adults can step up as well. Most of the 12-14 year old boys that I work with (and a fair amount of the girls) lack the ability to self-organize. Nearly all of them, once we set up a clean workflow, are deeply relieved. A well-organized binder, a well-organized desk – it’s not that they disdain these, it’s just that they lack the skills to set these environments up for themselves. As some semblance of order is usually required for actual work to take place, this is a great opportunity for adults to help. The trick is knowing how and when to offload some of this organizing onto them. A decent analogy would be band-assisted pullups. If you lack the strength to do a pullup, no amount of encouragement (or lecturing!) will help you. You need to build those muscles, and a band is a great step. For now, we’re the bands. As they see how it works (successful modeling), over time we can give them more and more responsibility for self-organizing. There are a ton of variables here (age, maturity, gender, learning differences/ADHD), so we take it incrementally and with the appropriate balance of challenge and support. As the (executive functioning) muscles grow, we remove some support to keep the student positively challenged. 

The same concept applies to mental retrieval. Far too many of my students haven’t memorized their arithmetic facts or basic formulas. If you’re allowed to use a calculator for everything and use notes for the formulas, you can maybe get by – until you switch schools or teachers or take a standardized test and they take it away. There’s a different argument for whether we should be letting kids use calculators for everything, but as full calculator access isn’t yet a standard of American education, kids should know their multiplication tables. Getting stuck halfway through an algebra problem because you need 15 seconds to figure out what 9×4 equals crushes the mathematical spirit. We need those math tools quickly retrievable so that they don’t hold up the actual mathematical reasoning. 

One of the first actions I typically take with new students (especially for test prep) is to see how well they know their formulas. Rarely do I have a student who knows them as cold as I’d like, so we start there. Then, when the situation arises to use the formula, they’re shocked at how easily they’re able to execute it. The tool is right there for them, with first order retrievability.