I wrote this a couple months ago as a kind of manifesto to take to a school leadership team meeting for which we had been asked to bring suggestions for where the school should go next year. I churned out two pages of righteous not-quite-fury without getting around to making any policy suggestions, then ultimately decided that however great my passion, the tone was not right for the venue. So I left the screed at home and just showed up and talked about my ideas. I’m confident it was the right call. Still, I hate to waste a good rant…
And I do have a blog…
So…
Enjoy
I like my job. While it would be a big exaggeration to say that I leap out of bed each morning eager to teach and reach every precious young mind places before me, it is true that no matter what attitude I begin the day with, once I’m standing in front of that classroom, I’m at home. Whatever woes I may have come to school with in the morning melt away for seventy minutes at a time, and I’m a teacher. That role brings its own stresses and challenges, of course, and most days I’m as happy as anyone to see 2:25 roll around. Usually, though, the challenges I face are the kind I derive satisfaction from the grappling with, and most days I count myself enormously lucky to work at BMS.
All of that is a roundabout way of acknowledging upfront that I have a vested interest in the status quo. I don’t have delusions that our school is perfect, but it’s pretty darn good, and the laws of probability say that if you take a complex well designed system and start making big changes to it, you are far more likely to compromise its effectiveness than to improve it. Nonetheless, I understand that with the new school opening and our student and faculty population projected to decrease substantially next year, some changes are inevitable. Further, I believe that there are opportunities to make our very good school better, and as someone who tends to let himself get thoroughly stuck in comfortable ruts, I am grateful for leadership that urges us all onward to greater things.
Still, I have serious concerns about the direction BMS may go in over the next few years. There are loud and insistent voices in education these days advocating for schools to align their practices with students’ culture. I believe this approach is not only deeply dangerous and wrong, but in fact flies in the face of whole idea of education. So in what follows I will be the voice in the other ear, arguing that as we go forward that BMS focus on remaining (and becoming more) learning centered, not student centered.
An analogy: Anorexia is a serious, life threatening disease, and certainly a risk to the health of our students that we need to be aware of. Does that mean that our cafeteria should serve ultra-high calorie meals as a prophylactic measure? Of course not, for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that we realize that obesity is a health risk that confronts many, many more of our students than anorexia. To put a finer point on it: In the environment in which we live, our students are far more likely to make poor food decisions of overindulgence than underconsumption. We need to be aware of and intervene in the cases where the students we care for may be starving themselves, but anorexics are a small minority, and it would be clearly wrong to create an environment of unhealthy temptation for the majority on their behalf.
I have probably already belabored the analogy to the point of pedantry, so let me go ahead and state clearly how I believe this applies to our work in running a school: I believe that the vast majority of our students have more than enough outlets for their social, emotional, and recreational needs outside of school and that when we make those needs a priority at school we not only waste time and energy that could be spent on teaching and learning content, we are culpable in the creation of students who are emotionally obese, fat with good feelings but intellectually too malnourished to be productive adults in the 21st century. Yes, there are students who are lonely, unhappy, or uninvolved and we should have structures in place to help those students. But as to the majority, consider: cell phones, Facebook, online games, Pop Warner football, rec league basketball, church league basketball, fall soccer, spring soccer, rec baseball, travel baseball, gymnastics, cheerleading, church youth group, Friday night at Sandhills, talking before school, talking after school, talking at lunch, talking between classes, talking during class downtime, talking when they’re supposed to be working, passing notes when they’re supposed to be working, texting when they’re supposed to be working… These kids are absolutely not hurting for opportunities to participate in their own culture, nor are they shy about seeking them out. If school were the only influence in students’ lives, I would agree that we’d have a responsibility to balance learning against the more visceral aspects of human experiences. But in fact kids have no shortage of influences pulling at their strings (including, indeed, their own viscera) and few of them are pulling in the direction of learning algebra or how to write a robust, grammatical sentence. Given the competition we face in the marketplace of ideas, I think it vitally important that schools be fiercely, monomaniacally devoted to the value of learning.
But there is more at stake here than simply seizing back academic time we have surrendered unnecessarily in the name of being student centered. The medium is the message. When we sacrifice class time in the name of something “fun” or “social”, be it a pep rally, an away football game, or Muffins For Moms, we teach students that we think these things are more important than learning. Since the students probably already think they are, it’s a pretty easy lesson to learn. Teachers love to say that “Learning is fun!”, but that is only partially true. Learning milestones, those “Aha!” moments are fun. But often getting there takes repetitious practice that brings little pleasure in itself, at least until the learner catches on that the practice means the “Aha!” is coming. In short, students must learn to delay gratification, but that is precisely the learning we deny them when we try to make every learning experience a delight in itself.
To be clear: I am not suggesting that we use delayed gratification as an excuse to teach dull lessons. Rather, I am saying that “progressive” educators often look down their noses at drill and practice, but that not only is it an essential component in learning certain tasks, it reinforces the value of delayed gratification, which is important for all learning.
There is science behind this assertion. In the early 1970s, Stanford psychology professor Walter Mischel tested four-year-olds by giving them an opportunity to eat one marshmallow immediately, or, if they were willing to wait a few minutes while he stepped out of the room, to eat two marshmallows later. Most of the kids tried to wait but couldn’t manage it. Some could, though, often by distracting themselves from the tempting marshmallow via such strategies as covering their eyes or kicking the desk. When Mischel checked back in with his subjects as high school seniors, he found that the ones who had managed to hold out for the second marshmallow (or even just to wait a few minutes before giving in to temptation) had SAT scores that were, on average, 210 points higher than those who ate the marshmallow right away. They also had fewer behavioral problems and were less likely to do drugs. Incidentally, one of our eighth graders carried out a version of this experiment for the science fair. This time the choice was a Now or Later today or two tomorrow. The results seemed to parallel Mischel’s, with the delayers having better grades in science on average. Now correlation does not equal causation, but these results suggest strongly to me that if we can teach students to delay gratification, we can make them better learners. But to do so, we must be deliberate in our opposition to the culture of immediate gratification.
Once we recognize that we are free from any obligation to make school a space for students to indulge their own culture (because they have plenty of other such spaces) and are obligated to continually preach the gospel of delayed gratification, I think our path is clear. We must create and promulgate our own school culture, one in which the only mantra is “We are here to learn”. That seems obvious, but we so often let ourselves and our students get distracted by other “stuff”: sports, dances, relationships, bad hair days, lunch… All of these things probably have their place at BMS as we go forward (especially lunch), but we should we know and articulate to our students that that place is determined by our mantra: “We are here to learn”
