Four essential skills

We need a fundamental reassessment of the goals of education in the 21^st century.  Students deserve to be prepared for lives that are fulfilling and uniquely their own.  They need to learn how to become life-long learners.  Their creative potential must be unleashed, for the sake of each individual, and for the benefit of society.

Students need to practice and become ready to refine throughout their lives the following skills:

• find relevant information
• choose thoughtfully
• create boldly and intelligently, and
• communicate effectively

Essential skill: Find relevant information

Information is no longer a precious commodity, confined to books and libraries.  It is no longer accessible only to those with money or advanced degrees.  It is available to anyone – often in the palm of their hand – and in greater abundance than would have been thought possible even a generation ago.

Students need to have the technical and intellectual tools to select the information that will be the most useful to them.  They need to develop the ability to discriminate among the vast resources on the internet, what is reliable and what is not.  They need to be prospectors and detectives, and most of all critical thinkers.

Reflection: Finding information in the world where you live

My sons and I are from different worlds.  When I was young, I listened to radio and purchased recorded music on either 45 rpm records with one song on each side or on 12-inch “long-playing” record albums (LPs) that contained a number of songs.  It was years before I learned that the term “album” when applied to recorded music had originated at least a generation earlier.

You see, my father and I are from different worlds as well.  In his day, records played at 78 rpm, and even though the discs were larger than the 45s I had in my collection, they could only hold one song on each side.  So there were hardcover books with pages that were actually sleeves for the 78 rpm records.  The original format for “record albums” was this type of book that looked like a photo album – but was in fact a place for organizing and storing recorded music.  The term “album” was retained for the collections of songs on one long-playing disc, even though the hard-cover book was a thing of the past.

My father’s childhood records were replaced by the LPs of my youth, which were replaced by the CDs of my young adulthood.  My sons know about CDs, but it is entirely possible that they will never own one.  Their music comes from the internet. They never listen to the radio unless they are in the car with me.  The term “album” has no meaning for them in the context of music.  But they do know what a playlist is.

When I was young, I read books and watched television.  There were some books that everyone (or so I thought) read, and some “events” on television that everyone (I believed) experienced.  When I was very young, the film The Wizard of Oz was played on television every year.  I recall it being on the weekend after Thanksgiving, but I’m not sure about the accuracy of that memory.  I could look it up, I suppose, but I don’t feel any need to do so.  The memory serves me well as a place marker for a period of time when I felt that the country where I lived had a common culture, and a finite set of shared experiences that were essentially universal.  It wasn’t literally true, of course, but at one point in my life, everyone I knew could sing along to “If I Only Had A Brain.”

My sons don’t have any patience with the kind of hazy memory I hold related to the broadcasts of The Wizard of Oz.  Too many times for me to count, I have described a partial bit of knowledge and within a minute or two my 13-year-old has found the missing pieces in a quick online search.

My sons don’t have any real sense of the kind of shared experiences I had as a child.  Not long ago a new television series based on a comic book superhero premiered.  I asked my 11-year-old to watch it with me.  He said he would rather catch it later online.  And when he does, he may watch it over and over – something that is perfectly natural for him to do, but to me that seems an odd investment of time.  Not only does it diminish the special quality of the unique event, and it takes time away from the potential new experiences he is giving up.

The generational differences in the way we encounter information – and in this context I include experiences like listening to music and watching movies – are significant in framing the way we think about information.  In fact, the reality that we go to the same source for mindless entertainment that we access for research for a term paper also frames the way we think about information.

Experiencing information is less precious if it is an experience we can have at will, on our own schedule, without raising our eyes from our tiny screens.  When filling in the gaps is easy, there is less opportunity to reflect on why we need the information in the first place.  There is some virtue – it seems to me – in having to work for it, and sometimes having to wait for it.

But I approach this from my own cultural context.  Anyone born in this century, and probably also the last decade of the 20^th century, is likely to be able to find information in great detail with casual and refined ease.  It is less clear that they will be able to use this information effectively.

Schools have a role in teaching about the nature of information, the ways to distinguish between information in terms of quality and reliability, and the ways to use information to reach original conclusions that have merit and significance.  Schools should be operating in the same world as their students.

Essential skill: Choose thoughtfully

Life in human society for countless centuries involved very little real choice.  Between economic necessity and social stratification, lives were pretty well laid out for most people.  But today in the United States we are faced with an often bewildering variety of choices in everything from career decisions to family planning to political issues to how we are going to spend our money to fill our leisure time.

Students need to be empowered to make good choices based on a genuine understanding of their individual needs and of the available options.  In terms of instructional practice this means that students should be shown how to direct their own learning, and given the opportunity to become experts in the field of their own choice.

Reflection: Choosing the perfect job

How many of us love our jobs so much that if we didn’t have bills to pay, we would still go to work for free?  How many of us if given the opportunity to look for such a job would know what to look for?  How many of us would even recognize such a job if we saw it?

In the final project of a high school economics class, I had the students select a career they would like to pursue.  There were various research tools they could use to discover the relevant numbers – compensation, rate of growth of the position, years of training required, expense of that education, etc.  Students were also required to identify where they would live and to research living expenses – cost of their residence, utility bills, transportation costs, cost of food, cost of clothing, cost of entertainment, and so forth.  The kids were given a detailed questionnaire that set out the categories of information they would need to find.  Their task was to find the information and make choices.  I was somewhat disappointed and quite concerned with the results.

A majority of the students chose their future career strictly on the basis of income potential.  This is not a supposition on my part – I took a poll and the students were very upfront about it.  Very few strongly considered their level of interest in the profession, fewer still considered their aptitude.  Students who had proved to me over the course of months in my class that they were not dedicated students opted for careers as doctors and lawyers.  Students who showed average athletic ability on the school’s playing field projected themselves having long careers in the NFL.  It is good to set one’s sights high, I suppose, if one is willing to be realistic about what it takes to attain their goals.

But a surprising number of these students also imagined themselves living in the same suburban community where they had grown up – even if that meant a horrible commute to the central business district and forsaking the choice of a nicer neighborhood closer to work that was more in line with their substantial new income.

It was as if they could not quite imagine actually attaining the career goals they had set, so they were free to shoot the moon.  But they also could not summon the courage to imagine moving away from the familiarity of home – even if staying in the community would mean a clear concession in their quality of life.

Most of my students were making choices on the basis of fantasies of wealth and sentimentality, not on the basis of aptitude and practicality.  I was left feeling frustrated and concerned that these high school seniors were about to go out on their own so ill-prepared to make important decisions, and so lacking in insight about their own true potential.

We all have talents and abilities that are uniquely ours, and which make us happy when we use them.  Unfortunately, most people have little awareness of their true gifts.  Most of us don’t know what will make us truly happy.  We feel lucky when we stumble across that rare and beautiful feeling that everything in life fits together perfectly.  And yet never before in history have there been so many choices for us to make, and so many opportunities for us to find that perfect fit.  We need to provide the next generation with better tools for building happy, productive lives.  We need for our schools to help students learn how to make better choices for themselves.

Essential skill: Create boldly and intelligently

Wealth is generated, and personal pride is grounded in personal accomplishment.  The human race is imbued with incredible talent, and historically, we have only allowed for relatively few bright lights to shine.  The economic growth of the 21^st century will be spurred by creativity.

Students must be given the freedom to generate new ideas and create practical solutions to problems.  Their work product should be assessed in its totality, not according to answers selected on a standardized test.

Reflection: Creating something new

“Everything that can be invented has been invented.” 

This quotation, attributed to Charles Holland Duell, commissioner of the U.S. Patent Office from 1898 to 1901, has often been used to ridicule the notion that the product of human inventiveness was finite – and that we had reached its point of exhaustion.  A pretty short-sighted perspective from anyone living in the modern era, and particularly coming from the man responsible for the registry of new inventions.  But did Mr. Duell actually utter these words?

The quote was traced by researcher Samuel Sass to a book that had been published in 1981, long after Mr. Duell had died.  In 2011, law professor Dennis Crouch conducted a Google search for mention of the phrase “everything that can be invented” and essentially corroborated Sass’s finding.  Google found no mentions of that phrase from prior to 1981.  But Crouch did discover another possible origin – a 1899 edition of Punch Magazine.  Neither researcher found a contemporary attribution of the quote to Mr. Duell.[1]

Consider for a moment the idea that a person living at the dawn of the 20^th century could think that technological advancement had run its course at the end of the 19^th.  Now consider how much easier it was for Professor Crouch to do his research circa 2011, than it had been for Mr. Sass circa 1989, before the internet had come into widespread usage.  Even the process of debunking the erroneous attribution was affected by new inventions.

One invention opens the door for another invention.  Information technology facilitates the exchange of information, and leads to the generation of new ideas.  We keep trying to make our lives easier by turning what used to be laborious and time-consuming into a simple operation that might require just a few keystrokes.  Progress is measured by how much work we can turn over to the machines we have made.

We have disassembled the old order in which we used our natural skill at problem solving to devise better ways to do things by hand, and replaced it with one in which we interact with machines that do these things for us.  Freed from labor, we are now infinitely more free … but to do what, exactly?

In his book A Whole New Mind, Daniel Pink points out that manufacturing technology has eliminated much of the role of skilled craftsmen in our economy.  Furthermore, information technology has led to the creation of machines that can solve problems by evaluating far more information than a human mind could. So what is left after machines have taken over the jobs making things, and taken over the jobs figuring out how to do things?

According to Pink, it is creativity and empathy – the ability to generate new concepts and the ability to operate on the level of our shared humanity.  Medical schools are now teaching students how to understand patient histories through narratives rather than simply through questionnaires.  Corporate recruiters are now seeking applicants with Master of Fine Arts degrees, not just the usual crop of MBAs. [2]

Recognizing the importance of creativity and empathy requires a significant paradigm shift.  We have spent generations creating tools that can do what we can do, better, cheaper, and faster.  But by living among the machines that are supposed to free us from the rote and the mundane, we have to some extent made ourselves more machine-like and less free.

This is not some science fiction story in which the hapless humans become servants to their own machines.  But there is a reason stories like those have some resonance in our collective consciousness.  When our school systems invest enormous energy into preparing students for multiple-choice tests to generate data and measure progress, one must wonder – is this what we really need our schools to do – to train students to feed information to a computer?  Is it in anyone’s best interest that we reward only the kind of intellectual achievement that can be demonstrated with a No. 2 pencil on an answer sheet?

Fortunately, some decision-makers on the leading edge of economic growth have recognized the importance of creative thinking.  The medical schools and corporate leaders cited above understand the vast potential in individual human expression.  Even more encouraging are the growing possibilities for small start-up business using the internet for those who have imagination and faith in their creative powers.

But public schools are not contributing to this growth the way that they should.  We need to encourage creativity and empathy.  We must recognize the danger in standardized curriculums and standardized testing that are robbing us of our individuality and our ability to imagine the unimagined.

Essential skill: Communicate effectively

We live in an age of communication, and yet as our means of connecting with one another proliferate, our schools treat this new reality as an unpleasant distraction that must be stopped.

Students should be encouraged to use technology appropriately, and more importantly, to communicate with others in a productive manner.  This means according text messaging its realistic place in students’ lives, and it also means teaching spoken and written communication that will enable students to communicate effectively no matter the context or medium.  Communication in the 21^st century involves both traditional modes with all their rules, and means of connecting that have yet to be invented.

Reflection: Communicating in many languages

“Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.”  (Genesis 11:7, KJV)

Genesis tells the story of the Tower of Babel, which ends with the Lord scattering the people across the world and giving them different languages.  Maybe that’s where it began, but the process of creating new languages is ongoing.

The lifeblood of human society is communication.  It is what holds us together.  It is what enables us to move forward together.  It gives us the power to name the things in the world in which we live, to define the roles we play in life, to share traditions as well as newly conceived ideas, to express devotion and fear, and attempt to capture the mystic.

Communication is not limited to speech, or writing.  People can communicate through non-verbal sounds, through gestures, through music, through dance.  It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words.  We have developed a universal language for saying “no,” by using a circle with a diagonal line through it.  We have devised a language that is capable of describing with precision quantities, volume, shapes, movement through space, and degrees of force – the language of mathematics.

The languages we use are in a constant state of change.  New words appear, old words change their meaning.  “Wherefore art thou, Romeo?” Juliet asked, as Romeo hid beneath her balcony.  Modern readers assume she was inquiring as to his location, but none of them actually use the word “wherefore” in their daily speech as people in Shakespeare’s time did.  It meant why, not where, and Juliet is asking why the boy she just developed a crush on had to turn out to be a member of a rival family.  Her next line is “Deny thy father and refuse thy name.  Or if thou wilt not … I’ll no longer be a Capulet.”  She is questioning fate, not her GPS.

Within each language, dialects appear with words that may or may not ever enter the standard version of the language. At any given time there might be a multitude of these variants from the standard, which may be perfectly suitable for communication for their users, but which could be confusing and seem “incorrect” to non-users.

Dialects can arise in ethnic communities and be nurtured in relatively closed environments.  Dialects can sweep across the land borne by mass media targeted at specific audiences.  Specialized versions of the language can develop along with technology – a whole vocabulary that is transparent to the tech-savvy, but opaque to most others.  And there can be a specialized language that develops for use in a particular medium, such as the abbreviations commonly used in texting.

Recently, a school administrator shared with me an insight that he seemed to find particularly encouraging.  He told me that kids are actually writing more today than they did 10 years ago – because of all the texting they are doing.  I had to fight the urge to LOL.  Could he really be suggesting equivalence between texting and, say, writing a persuasive essay?  Is the quantity of writing the relevant measure here?

The fact is that we all communicate, all the time. Many of us are fluent in more than one language.  Most of us are fluent in more than one dialect. Almost all of us, whether we are conscious of it or not, practice code-switching – alternating between two languages or dialects – on a regular basis.  The key is to choose the appropriate language for the setting in which it is used.

Schools should not deny the validity of dialects, especially those that are in vibrant use by students.  In fact, they should embrace and even celebrate the fact that students can communicate effectively in different modes.

But schools should not ignore their responsibility to teach effective means of communicating that the students may not be picking up on their own.  Students should leave high school able to use standard English in verbal discourse.  They should be comfortable with the conventions of public speaking.  They should be able to write a business letter, a persuasive essay, a research paper with proper citations.  Students should be cognizant of their own code-switching, understand its utility, and should not be trained to think that one form of communication is per se inferior to another.

The lifeblood of human society is communication.  We can’t allow ourselves to be confounded by the many forms it takes, or distracted by the mistaken idea that there is only one style of communication that is always appropriate and correct.  Form is dictated by content, by audience, and by purpose.  It is only incorrect when the intended message does not get through.  We need to be able to communicate effectively in all of the many languages that are spoken in the different areas of our lives.

Conclusion

These four skills are essential to modern life, but the standard practices in many schools work to discourage their development.  Providing a set body of facts for students to learn denies them the opportunity to find the knowledge they need, and the practice it takes to learn to distinguish what is relevant and valuable from what is not.  Enforcing compliance with established procedures denies students the opportunity to choose and experience the real-world outcomes of their choices.  Making standardized multiple-choice tests the measure of success in school denies students the opportunity to create and to demonstrate their learning in an authentic manner.  Restricting technology, a practice that is so clearly at odds with the real world needs of students in the 21^st century, hampers their ability to connect meaningfully with one another, and denies the reality that communication is not limited to one approved medium or one appropriate form.

We must do better by our children, and we can.  But it will take a fundamental reassessment of our goals and a willingness to revolutionize our approach to public education.

_______

[1] http://patentlyo.com/patent/2011/01/tracing-the-quote-everything-that-can-be-invented-has-been-invented.html

[2] Pink, Daniel. A Whole New Mind. New York: Riverhead Books, 2005.

Being recorded

I remember things adults told me when I was a child 50 years ago.  Sure, there was a lot that grown-ups said that didn’t make much of an impression.  Between about age 5 and 16, the majority of the adult words I heard were from the mouths of teachers, and in the aggregate, these words had a huge impact on me.  But the ones that really stuck with me were the words that were addressed directly to me.  Some were words of encouragement, some were insights that I could use, and a few were discouraging.  But in my own life, the support I got from parents, teachers, and even from my peers sustained me and kept me going.  A few setbacks and put-downs were not going to get me off track.

Not every child is so lucky.

Last week, a teacher in Greene County, Georgia resigned over a remark he made to a student in class three months ago.  Facing the threat of a lawsuit against him and the local school if he didn’t lose his job through resignation or termination, he gave up the fight.  News reports stressed the support this teacher and coach had in the local community, and how the remark, recorded on a student’s phone, could have been taken out of context.

In the recording, the teacher mentions Sojourner Truth, the abolitionist activist.  The student then says, “Who?”

The teacher responds, “You know what? You might be the dumbest girl I’ve ever met in my life, and I have been around for 37 years, and you are the dumbest girl I have ever met. … You know what your purpose gonna be? To have sex and have children because you ain’t never gonna be smart.”

I don’t know if there is any context that can justify an adult authority figure making a series of statements like that to a student who does not have the freedom to leave the room, and who is asking for clarification of something her teacher said.

One member of the community explained that at the beginning of the school year, the teacher routinely announced, “I like to joke, so if you can’t handle that, get out.”  There was not explanation offered as to how a student would “get out” of his class, or how students would know that a “joke” might include a personal attack on an individual student.

Another member of the community opined that only the student and the teacher know the background of the recorded exchange.  “He made those comments not knowing they were being recorded,” she explained, implying that he might have chosen his words differently if he had known they would be immortalized.

This was the response that caught my attention.

Let me tell you, as a teacher, a student, the parent of young children, and an adult with lots of experience working with young people – everything is being recorded. Adults in a position of authority over young people have tremendous power, not only over their behavior, but also over their self-image.  The only context that matters is the one that students carry around with them. This student reported that she was bullied by other students, so that was part of the context in which she heard the teacher’s remarks, and other students in the class undoubtedly understood from the teacher’s behavior that insulting this girl’s intelligence was acceptable conduct.  Teachers’ actions matter.

Does this mean that teachers must always watch their behavior and police their words so as not to offend the sensitive sensibilities of impressionable young minds?

Yes, that is exactly what I am saying. Growing up is difficult enough without having to run a gauntlet set up by those who are charged with nurturing and educating young people. Anyone who lacks the self-control or empathy to avoid deliberately causing harm to students – psychological or otherwise – should get out of the profession.

_______

Most of the background for this post came from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution article “Teacher quits after mocking Greene pupil” by Ernie Suggs, which appeared on pages B1 and B6 of the March 16, 2016 print edition.

Creating …

“Everything that can be invented has been invented.”

This quotation, attributed to Charles Holland Duell, commissioner of the U.S. Patent Office from 1898 to 1901, has often been used to ridicule the notion that the product of human inventiveness was finite – and that we had reached its point of exhaustion. A pretty short-sighted perspective from anyone living in the modern era, and particularly coming from the man responsible for the registry of new inventions. But did Mr. Duell actually utter these words?

The quote was traced by researcher Samuel Sass to a book that had been published in 1981, long after Mr. Duell had died. In 2011, law professor Dennis Crouch conducted a Google search for mention of the phrase “everything that can be invented” and essentially corroborated Sass’s finding. Google found no mentions of that phrase from prior to 1981. But Crouch did discover another possible origin – a 1899 edition of Punch Magazine. Neither researcher found a contemporary attribution of the quote to Mr. Duell.[1]

Consider for a moment the idea that a person living at the dawn of the 20^th century could think that technological advancement had run its course at the end of the 19^th. Now consider how much easier it was for Professor Crouch to do his research circa 2011, than it had been for Mr. Sass circa 1989, before the internet had come into widespread usage. Even the process of debunking the erroneous attribution was affected by new inventions.

One invention opens the door for another invention. Information technology facilitates the exchange of information, and leads to the generation of new ideas. We keep trying to make our lives easier by turning what used to be laborious and time-consuming into a simple operation that might require just a few keystrokes. Progress is measured by how much work we can turn over to the machines we have made.

We have disassembled the old order in which we used our natural skill at problem solving to devise better ways to do things by hand, and replaced it with one in which we interact with machines that do these things for us. Freed from labor, we are now infinitely more free … but to do what, exactly?

In his book A Whole New Mind, Daniel Pink points out that manufacturing technology has eliminated much of the role of skilled craftsmen in our economy. Furthermore, information technology has led to the creation of machines that can solve problems by evaluating far more information than a human mind could. So what is left after machines have taken over the jobs making things, and taken over the jobs figuring out how to do things?

According to Pink, it is creativity and empathy – the ability to generate new concepts and the ability to operate on the level of our shared humanity. Medical schools are now teaching students how to understand patient histories through narratives rather than simply through questionnaires. Corporate recruiters are now seeking applicants with Master of Fine Arts degrees, not just the usual crop of MBAs. [2]

Recognizing the importance of creativity and empathy requires a significant paradigm shift. We have spent generations creating tools that can do what we can do, better, cheaper, and faster. But by living among the machines that are supposed to free us from the rote and the mundane, we have to some extent made ourselves more machine-like and less free.

This is not some science fiction story in which the hapless humans become servants to their own machines. But there is a reason stories like those have some resonance in our collective consciousness. When our school systems invest enormous energy into preparing students for multiple-choice tests to generate data and measure progress, one must wonder – is this what we really need our schools to do – to train students to feed information to a computer? Is it in anyone’s best interest that we reward only the kind of intellectual achievement that can be demonstrated with a No. 2 pencil on an answer sheet?

Fortunately, some decision-makers on the leading edge of economic growth have recognized the importance of creative thinking. The medical schools and corporate leaders cited above understand the vast potential in individual human expression. Even more encouraging are the growing possibilities for small start-up business using the internet for those who have imagination and faith in their creative powers.

But public schools are not contributing to this growth the way that they should. We need to encourage creativity and empathy. We must recognize the danger in standardized curriculums and standardized testing that are robbing us of our individuality and our ability to imagine the unimagined.

____________

[1] http://patentlyo.com/patent/2011/01/tracing-the-quote-everything-that-can-be-invented-has-been-invented.html

[2] Pink, Daniel. A Whole New Mind. New York: Riverhead Books, 2005.

Holding the door open

One of the most dedicated teachers I know is my own sister, Rebecca Patton Falco. Rebecca is the mother of five children and is very involved in their lives as well as the life of her community. She hasn’t been formally employed as an educator for decades, but she does the most important work teachers can do every day. She inspires people with her energy, her devotion to causes, and her empathy. She works tirelessly to provide for her family experiences and learning opportunities that enrich their lives and will better enable them to make good choices about how to direct their own lives as adults.

Like a lot of parents (and teachers, and others who work with kids) Rebecca often doesn’t get the credit she deserves from those closest to her. But she does have a lot of fans. Rebecca has written a book about her family’s experiences with adoption, and maintains a blog. Her readers are treated regularly to insights about growing up, parenting, and the nature of family.

Rebecca took me to task last week on one point I made in my last post. I was saying that learning is innate, and that kids need the freedom to pursue their own interests so they can better enjoy the experience of learning.

“In my family,” she wrote to me, “it has often been more about exposure than an innate drive to learn, and sometimes it has been about a particular teacher’s manner of teaching a subject.” Rebecca went on to point out that in addition to the external stimulation children may receive, other factors can affect how they can process this information. “For some kids, undiagnosed or unaddressed learning differences or mental health issues are going to make a difference.”

Of course, this is absolutely true. Intellectual, physical, emotional, and social factors can affect both motivation and the ability to learn. Sometimes these obstacles prompt children to reject learning activities. Sometimes, struggling alone and without outside assistance, children find it easier to regard such obstacles as barriers and refuse to go further.

Anyone who knows kids has seen them bored and frustrated by school and by any number of the challenges that adults place before them. In fact it is a milestone of cognitive development (albeit a bit of a mixed blessing) when children acquire the ability to condemn certain things they are required to do as a waste of their time. That kind of self-awareness is essential for children to understand how they learn and how best to help themselves, but it is often expressed initially as a refusal to do something adults know will be good for them in the long run. It doesn’t take a learning disability or mental health issue to be bored, or to be frustrated by something that doesn’t make sense, or to feel that the effort required to learn something new could be better used for some more enjoyable task.

Parents, teachers, as well as coaches, clergy, sponsors and mentors have an important role in helping children learn, and it is perfectly natural that this role is carried out in a collaborative fashion. Children have more than one teacher, and there are at least three distinct parts to this role.

Teachers (and by this term I include parents and all the adults who contribute to a child’s education) can help kids overcome the obstacles that make learning less enjoyable. Kids need strategies they can use to acquire the knowledge they will need to be successful in life.

Teachers can provide stimulating learning opportunities – a variety of information and experiences that can spark interest and imagination and prompt the desire to engage in independent learning.

And finally, teachers can give children time and approval for them to explore and learn on their own – to become experts in a field that excites and engages them. Teachers can allow them to discover the pleasure in knowing, and in being able to do something only they can do.

No child loves learning so much that they enjoy it no matter what they are asked to learn. But teachers can hold the door open for them by providing opportunities for freedom and choice, and giving permission to make their learning goals their own. The good feeling children get from learning about the things they love is a pleasure that can sustain them through the chore of learning all the things they need.

_______

Rebecca Patton Falco’s website can be found at: http://www.rebeccafalco.com/

Rebecca’s blog, Adoption Makes Seven is at: http://rebeccafalco.wordpress.com/

Guns are extracurricular

It is sad, really, the frequency with which gun violence forces its way into our national consciousness.  Whether it is mass murder on a college campus, in a shopping center in Arizona, in a crowded movie theater, at a place of worship, or at an elementary school, the spectacular injustice of wholesale slaughter has become a familiar story.  It is a recurring theme of our national narrative.

The sadness of the situation is double-edged.  On one side is the personal tragedy endured by the victims and those who love them.  This is a sadness mixed with grief and anger at the unfairness of it all.  On the other side is the recognition that our collective horror is by now numbed by the familiarity of the story.  This is a sadness that comes from helplessness.  We are lost, and there is no clear signpost leading us to a place of safety.

The voices that emerge in the wake of these tragedies are familiar.  We hear calls for vengeance, prayers for the victims, and loud trumpeting for reforms that will prevent this from ever happening again.  We also hear the somber voices of the status quo, telling us that the worst thing we can do is to overreact and infringe on Americans’ right to bear arms.

In the state of Georgia, our legislature, which has convened for its annual session this year in the chilly aftermath of the murders at Sandy Hook Elementary School, may consider another kind of reaction.

House Bill 35 would allow for public school administrators to possess and carry firearms while on school property, at a school function, or on a school bus.  This proposed law would allow for specific school office workers to carry loaded weapons anywhere within the “school safety zone.”

There are a lot of potent and provocative arguments in favor of and against gun control.  There are many theories as to why the United States seems so addicted to gun violence, and a correspondingly large number of theories on what should be done about it.  I am content to allow others to parse the constitutional issues for the solution to this dilemma.  My concern here is the impact of training professional educators to serve as armed guards – on students and on the educators themselves.  This proposed policy raises serious questions about the role of school in teaching children how to cope with violence in our society.

As a teacher and a parent, as an individual concerned with education policy and the way schools interact with society at large, I see these kinds of moments as tests of our institutions’ ability to deal with the extraordinary and horrific.

When the shooting at Sandy Hook occurred, my children came home from school talking about it.  One brought home an anxious and sincere letter from his school’s principal.  Both of them seemed to understand that something dire had occurred, but there was a curious disconnection between their reaction and the fear experienced by the adults.  Adults are swept up by their imagination – what would I do if this happened to my family?  They are capable of being stunned by the news because they remember when such things were exceptional if not unthinkable.  To the kids, these incidents are practically a regular part of life – not unlike the many other aspects of the world that they are too young to experience personally, but are assured by adults to be normal and natural.

What does it say to impressionable young people that episodes of mass murder are regularly in the news?  What message does it convey when one man snuffs out the lives of innocent children, and people rush to defend his right to possess the tools he used to commit this atrocity.  At an age when children are developing their ideas about how the world works, what ideas are natural consequences of such an event?

What is the message if children now see their principal patrolling the halls with a sidearm strapped to his leg?  Will they feel protected, or will they feel the fear of an impending incident?  Even if panic is not the result, how can they fail to see that the principal’s answer to the threat of danger will be deadly force?  What attitude does this teach about how to deal with adversity?

School officials should not carry guns.  The remote possibility that these guns would actually prevent physical harm to anyone is vastly outweighed by the significant psychological harm that would occur.  School administrators are authority figures and role models for our children.  To communicate that any part of their authority comes from a firearm is to send a very unhealthy message to the children of this country.

Empathy in learning

Empathy is the ability to understand on an intuitive level how another is feeling, the attitude that person has toward his or her experiences, or the intellectual framework that shapes what the other is thinking.  Empathy of a form of communication that does not rely on words, and often serves as the medium for information that cannot be effectively reduced to words.  It is different from sympathy, which is simply a harmony of feelings, or more specifically the feeling of compassion for another who is in distress.  Empathy is a type of bonding between people that engenders trust and enables further and deeper communication.

In the art of teaching and learning, empathy is essential and is at the same time vexing.  In traditional education, we pass information through words – carefully constructed expressions of abstract concepts, time-honored formulations of big ideas, lessons for life rendered on the canvas of our common language.  We teach history through written records.  We teach science and math through problem-solving experiences, but in the end this quest for answers is described in very concrete terminology.  When we teach literature, we explore the artistry of words – the power of these everyday fixtures of our lives to move us beyond the everyday to a different plane.  But empathy exists on a different plane, and it does not rely on the power of words to take us there.  Empathy is not subject to grading rubrics and cannot be measured on standardized tests.  Yet its presence in human interactions may make the difference between real learning and forced compliance.

Learning is an interactive experience, and it can occur strictly between the learner and a body of information.  But humans are social creatures, and schools are public forums.  Furthermore, even in the case of solitary, self-directed learning, our motivations are often shaped by our relationships with others, and by our anticipation of future interactions with others.

The two most recent posts on this site (Learning from trust, A safe place to learn) have been about the importance of empathy in the school setting.  In the stories conveyed in those posts, the message is that a teacher who establishes a level of trust and common purpose with his students is far better able to reach these learners on an intellectual level.  But it is not enough to recognize empathy as a kind of gateway into more effective instruction.  Empathy not only facilitates communication, it is communication.

We understand each other not just through words, but also through the rhythm and pauses between those words, through actions, through facial expressions.  We form first impressions.  Sometimes cultural context or social programming causes us to react to superficial appearances more quickly, but very soon other signals come into focus.  There is a vast unspoken vocabulary of gesture.  A person may lie and get away with it in writing, but doing so face-to-face is not nearly as easy.  In appeals of the verdict in criminal trials, lawyers may argue that a judge’s rulings were incorrect as a matter of law, but may not argue that the jury was wrong in forming its opinion about the witnesses’ testimony.  It is a well-established principle that the only people qualified to judge whether or not a witness was telling the truth are the people who were in the room who could hear the tone of the voice and see the look in the eye.

Understanding others leads to greater understanding of ourselves.  It enables us to see the world through eyes and ears that have a different vantage point, and yet we can grasp the meaning of what another perceives.  Empathizing with success allows us to enjoy the thrill of another’s victory.  Empathizing with fear allows us to share in the emotion, but also enables us to offer ways to cope with it.  Empathy allows us a broader experience with life, and ties us more closely to the fabric of human society.

Teaching and learning is a shared human experience.  The quality of that shared experience can determine the quality of the learning.

A safe place to learn

There are times when a teacher has to learn some things about his students before he can know what to teach them. Sometimes students will tell the teacher that what he teaches is less important than how he teaches.

In a middle school class at a private school where I had my first teaching job, there was a student who seemed especially eager to please. This girl, whom I will call “Karen,” was attentive in class when her friends were preoccupied with chattering about the manufactured drama in their social circle. She offered to help clean up the room after class was over. Unlike a lot of kids her age she was openly friendly to teachers when she encountered them around campus.

In this nontraditional school, there was no guarantee that all of my students had arrived in my class with the same background knowledge or skills. I did a lot of guesswork. I also invented assignments that were designed to reveal what areas they were proficient in and the areas where they needed help.

One assignment I gave the class was 2-3 page paper that required some historical research in order to answer a fairly straightforward question. This was an eighth grade social studies class, and so I tried to keep my expectations reasonable considering their age and limited familiarity with research methodology. I tried to teach the skills I expected they would need, and I modeled a good answer to the type of question I was asking. But my primary purpose in making the assignment was not to assess how well they had learned what I had taught them, it was for me to learn what they could do well and what I would need to teach them.

As I read the papers that were turned in, I noticed that there was a significant range in the quality of the students’ work. I was faced with every teacher’s quandary – how am I going to help the students who seem not to understand at all what to do, while moving forward with the students who met, or even exceeded my expectations?

Most of the differences among the papers fell into predictable categories, and as I read the papers, I categorized them and formulated plans for addressing their deficiencies.

Some students were very weak in providing the kind of information they should have gotten from research. I noted that I could teach research skills. Some students did not organize their papers very well – a few seemed never to have been exposed to the idea of using different paragraphs to discuss different topics. But I could teach outlining and structure. Some students did not have an impressive command of language – their choice of words, their phrasing of sentences, revealed an awkwardness in writing that was not evident in their spoken expression. I could do some things to help here as well. Studying history is parsing meaning from someone else’s writing, and learning to write more fluidly makes one a more critical and astute reader.

Karen’s paper did not fit in any neat category. First of all, it was beautiful in appearance. She had drawn an illustration for the cover, and bound the paper on the left side. Inside, there was a page that had just her name, and then another page that had the question I had given the class and her paper’s title, presented as an answer. The text of the paper itself was neatly written with crisp margins and deep indents for the first line of each paragraph. The length was impressive, slightly over the 3-page maximum I had requested. There was a blank page at the end to serve as a back cover. None of the other papers that were handed in showed any of the care Karen had taken with the presentation of her work.

But when I read the paper, I saw that it was just a jumble of information. She had clearly done a lot of research, but much of it seemed off-topic. She had beautifully phrased sentences interspersed with incomprehensible sentence fragments. There was no thesis statement, and try as I might to infer one from the paper, I could not make out what she was trying to say. Instead of answering the question I had posed, she had accumulated a lot of information that was at least tangentially related to the topic, and then dumped it out in a pile.

I talked with her, and told her that while the appearance of her paper was impressive, I wasn’t grading on looks. There were serious problems with the content and organization, and she was going to have to go back and do a lot of work to get this paper into shape. Fortunately, she probably had gathered all the information she would need. I urged her to start by looking at the question I had asked, and trying to answer it verbally in simple, straightforward terms. Once she could do that, it was a matter of organizing the information she had gathered in support of her thesis.

Karen said very little during our meeting, but the next day I was called to the principal’s office. She told me that Karen was terribly upset because I had criticized her work so harshly.

“Don’t you know,” the principal said, “that Karen has struggled since she started school with reading and writing? She came to us after several years in a school devoted to addressing students with verbal processing issues. I saw her paper, and despite whatever flaws it has, it shows remarkable improvement over where she was just a short while ago.”

I was chastened to be much more encouraging to Karen. I tried. But it was too late. From the time of our first conversation about her paper, Karen’s attitude towards me changed completely. Instead of being friendly and seeming to try to curry my favor, she now practically snarled at me. She stopped paying attention in class. She even said unkind things about me to her friends knowing that I would overhear her. It was disappointing to lose her cheery disposition, but even worse, it was now nearly impossible for me to teach her anything. Instead of being open and trusting, she was hostile and deliberately uncooperative.

There were some difficult but important lessons to be learned from the experience with Karen. First and most obviously, I realized that it is important to know as much as possible about the academic past performance of my students. It is also good to have relevant information about their styles of dealing with school, with stress, with other teachers. We are all human beings with different strengths and weaknesses. How we cope with the challenge of learning can have a great impact on our ability to succeed in school. Teachers can do a lot to make learning easier if they know what kinds of things have troubled students in the past. As a new teacher, I did not fully appreciate the value of student records and the important insights that could be obtained from my own colleagues. I could have done a better job of tailoring my lesson plans to the actual needs of the class if I had just done a little research.

But another more important lesson was found in the way Karen reacted to my critique. While I did not think at the time that I was being unduly harsh, I clearly had misread the situation. At first, I attributed my error to simple lack of knowledge about a student who was uniquely sensitive. Over time, however, I realized that the kind of sensitivity she exhibited was not unique to her. In fact, it is nearly universal.

As I reflected on the episode, I was reminded powerfully of a fundamental truth about my own experiences as a student. It stinks to be reminded constantly that you don’t know enough. It is somewhat better on the occasions that you can demonstrate proficiency in some small area – on a test, in a writing assignment, through a performance task – but these are breaks in the long uphill climb through school. Students are required to consume a mountain of information, and no matter how much you love learning, you spend most of the time unable to see the top. All too often, the school experience consists of being confronted with your own incompetence. It finally breaks some kids. Others learn how to cope. There is really no way to avoid this challenge, but a good teacher can help students learn how to cope rather than give up.

Several years into my teaching career, and some time after the experience with Karen, I taught Advanced Placement U.S. History in a public high school. My A.P. students were kids who had been mostly successful making good grades in school. Most of them came into the class knowing that it would be tough, but feeling pretty confident nevertheless. A lot of them had always been “good students,” and had never had much need to question why this was so. I aimed to change all that. One of my goals for the course was to challenge them as they had never been challenged before, and force them to find a way to cope. A.P. courses are supposed to prepare students for college work. If these kids had never felt that they were in over their heads and had to figure out a way to deal with it, then they weren’t really ready for college.

But I didn’t want to make it such a harsh experience that the kids who really struggled would finally throw up their defenses and stop trying. I spend a lot of time in class talking about learning, and about overcoming steep odds. I told them that no matter how successful you have been in the past, everyone is eventually confronted with a situation in which the things you know how to do to succeed don’t work. That’s when you have to recognize your limits and work on expanding them. It’s humbling, and it may be difficult, but it makes you stronger in the end.

I delivered this message to my classes on a number of occasions, and to individuals who came to me with questions and problems doing their work as well. Invariably, if a student shared with me a problem he or she was having with an assignment, I focused my response not on the problem, but with the ways to resolve it. I consistently validated their frustration by assuring them that if they were really struggling with it, it meant they were learning something very valuable.

I think the message got through. For years, the school counselor shared with me that students had told him that I was the teacher who understood them best. The curious thing was that the names he mentioned were generally not those of kids I had counseled individually. They were the quiet kids who struggled without complaint, but somehow felt reassured in the knowledge that in struggling they were doing right.

Students need to feel that they have a safe place to learn. They need to trust that their teacher is on their side, and not just setting them up for failure. They need to know that failure is not a defeat, but a temporary stage on the path to learning.

I didn’t know how to create this kind of safe place when I first started teaching, and Karen and I both lost an opportunity because of it. But as time went on, I think I became rather good at it. Still, there were some students I was not able to reach.

One day in the late Spring, a former student came to visit me in my classroom. He had just finished his first year of college. I remembered him from class as a young man who had seemed pretty unhappy to be there. He asked questions only when absolutely necessary, and otherwise seemed to avoid talking with me or even making eye contact.

On this afternoon, he came to tell me that he owed me an apology.

“Back when I was in your class, I thought the way you taught it, you know …” he said, looking for the right words, “I thought it was just because you were a jerk.”

“But after I got to college, and saw how it was, I realized what you were trying to do.”

That was one of the best compliments I ever got as a teacher, delivered of course in a rather bittersweet package. I guess I never made him feel safe when he was in my class. But I am enormously proud of the fact that he felt safe enough to come back.

Learning from trust

My student flung the door open so abruptly and forcefully that it banged against my foot and nearly hit me in the face, and then he stormed into the classroom.  Several of the other kids in the hallway jumped back, startled by the abrupt turn the student had made from sullenly uncooperative to physically aggressive.  Another teacher who was in on the confrontation, a retired Army colonel who ran the JROTC program, balled his fists and looked at me through narrow eyes.

“I wouldn’t let him get away with that,” he said.

I was teaching in a high school program for kids who had been identified as at-risk for dropping out of school.  All of my students had fallen far behind their peers academically, but most were bright kids who had family and other issues that prevented them from focusing on school work.  Some of them had developed strategies for coping with the turmoil in their lives that helped them feel more in control of their situations, but which in the end contributed to their problems in school.  The student who had just charged through the doorway into our classroom tended to react to criticism with outbursts of anger.  I had walked into a situation that was already in full swing.

The classrooms for the drop-out prevention program were located on the same school basement hallway as the JROTC classrooms.  That day, on his way back from lunch, my student had somehow drawn the ire of the colonel, and the colonel had followed him down the hall.  I didn’t know what exactly had transpired between them, but the older man was clearly expecting my student to show him some sign of respect that my student was unwilling to give.  Now he was ready to step back in deference to me, and fully expected me to react forcefully to my student’s rude behavior.

I looked at the colonel, a man I respected for his ability to inspire hard work and disciplined habits among the students in his program, many of whom had track records of poor academic performance and misbehavior in class.

I considered his comment for a moment, and then said, “I’m not sure why he is so upset today, but I don’t think it has anything to do with me.  And I don’t think he meant to hit me with the door.  It looked like he just wanted to get away quickly enough so that we couldn’t stop him.”

“I am going to let him cool off a bit, then find out what his issue is.  He can take responsibility for his mistakes better if he is thinking straight.”

The colonel seemed a little taken aback, cocked his head, and paused a bit before he spoke.  “I don’t know how you can keep from taking a thing like that personally,” he said, gesturing towards the door.  “I would have dealt with it immediately.”

Then he nodded and left.  It was my student, and my problem.  The colonel had no need or desire to overreach.  Different programs, different expectations, different outcomes.  I don’t think the colonel was impressed with my plan for dealing with the student’s behavior, but I believe he was a little impressed with my self-control.

Since that afternoon several years ago, I have told this story many times to make a point – that the people we work with, and maybe especially teenagers, are often in difficult moods.  It is natural and quite tempting to react emotionally to rude or uncooperative behavior.  This is usually a bad idea.  More often than not the offending behavior has its origin somewhere other than with the teacher, supervisor, or coworker who is experiencing it.  It may feel like you are under attack, but actually you just have a front row seat for a performance that has little or nothing to do with you.  There is really no good reason to volunteer to play a part in someone else’s melodrama.

But as time has gone by, I have come to realize that the most important part of the story is what came later.  I did enter the classroom shortly after my student, and within 10 minutes had him telling me what was bothering him.  By the end of the period he had agreed to apologize to the colonel the next time he saw him.  I was able to have this conversation with my student because he trusted me.  He knew that I cared about him being successful in class and also about his success in dealing with the people around him both inside and outside of class.  My choice not to be drawn into his bad mood allowed me to approach him without putting my own needs ahead of his.  But it was empathy, established over many weeks of working and learning together that allowed us to communicate.

In school, it is very easy to be seduced by the need for rules and structure.  It is easy to adopt the roles that we play as surrogates for our identity.  In any big institution with lots of individuals doing many different tasks and moving from place to place on a tight schedule it is easy to look for ways to depersonalize the experience, just as a way to get the job done.  Recent school reforms have brought the depersonalization of education to new levels.  We have online learning that we experience in isolation.  We have standards for content and classroom methodology that seem to be constructed to idiot-proof the teaching profession, reducing the creative role of the teacher to little more than a hall monitor – a rule enforcer.

Not that rules and structure are bad, and not to deny the advantages of modern technology, but the focus in improving education always seems to be on the mechanics of the process, not on the quality of the experience.

Whether or not we have schools, human beings will learn from each other.  We learn because we want to do things we don’t know how to do.  We learn because we need to be something other than what we already are.  We learn because we like knowing.  But we learn best if the experience is meaningful to us.  If we truly desire the advantages that come from acquiring new knowledge, we are enthusiastic learners.  If we are indifferent to, or don’t understand the goal of all this effort, we are reluctant conscripts.  If we don’t like the person leading the effort or the environment we find ourselves in, we fight back.

The human element is crucial in shaping the experience.  A teacher’s ability to connect with students can transform learning from a chore of discrete and unpleasant tasks into an enriching experience that combines intellectual with interpersonal satisfaction.  I learned this lesson forcefully in my years as a teacher in the drop-out prevention program.  And in spite of the implied criticism in my story of the colonel and his emphasis on rules, I am sure that he knew it too.  His success was not due so much to the inherent strengths of his program, but to the fact that his cadets knew that he was interested in their welfare and wanted them to live up to their potential.  His expectations of how a student would attain that goal was different from mine, but the belief in the ability of the student to grow and learn from experience was very much the same, and was communicated in every interaction we had with the kids who were entrusted to our care.

Teaching is at its core a human experience.  There is no set of rules, no program of instruction, no advance in technology that can match the effectiveness of a teacher who has won his students’ trust.