Play Another Octave

In a recent episode of Bill Moyers Journal, John Sexton, the President of NYU, spoke on God, baseball, and education. In the process, he described a teacher named Charlie who was particularly influential on him. This teacher's philosophy can be best described with the phrase, "play another octave." The link for the transcript is here. http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/03122010/transcript4.html

Sexton goes on to discuss Charlie's approach to life. "If there's food you haven't tasted, if there's a symphony you haven't heard, if there's a type of music you haven't heard, play another octave of the piano. Reach out, stretch yourself.

And Charlie, who for generations of young men at this high school would be the greatest teacher they ever encountered. Charlie began to lead us down a mystical journey of thinking strange. He taught us to see things we never would have seen by looking at them in a way we never would have thought to look at them. So, he would ask questions or say things to us that would just jog you to a different vantage point."

As I listened to Moyers' interview with Sexton, I considered myself fortunate to be working with adolescents and hopefully teaching them to stretch themselves. However, like most educators, I realize how difficult this is to do. All too often, and for a variety of reasons, teenagers will opt to not play another octave-to not take risks and try something new or different. While we realize that teenagers will engage in risky behavior in certain areas, they may actively avoid walking out on the limb in other places.

One reason that students may not push themselves is they may not consider what we're asking them to do to be worth the risk. The same student who will not speak up in class will want the ball when the game is on the line or play the solo piece in a concert. It's not that they're unwilling to put themselves out there; it's that they don't see the value in putting themselves on the line for the task we have asked them to do. I once heard the educator Theodore Sizer explain to math teachers in Miami, FL who said that students could not do the math in their class that those same students were working in multi-millionaire drug operations and doing very complex mathematical operations in their head. His point was that they were fully capable of doing math that they considered worth their while.

Another reason that students may not try something new is the potential for humiliation by their peers. In too many schools, adolescents, who are at their most vulnerable, live in fear of ridicule by their class or school mates if they try something new and it is less than perfect. For this reason, students judiciously decide to not try at all. In a twist on the line by Tennyson they feel that tis better to have never loved, than to have loved and lost. As educators, we must make our schools havens where every child feels supported and encouraged to takes risks and try new things. I am reminded of this again and again when I witness the courage of the students at Crossroads College Prep who are willing to do something different and even a little scary; I am just as proud of those students' classmates who cheer them on and pick them up when they fall.

How often do we parents inadvertently send them messages of playing it safe because it prevents them from experiencing the pain of failure or it allows us parents to avoid having to argue with an adolescent whose goals may not match our own at that moment? Our hearts ache when their feelings are hurt or their disappointment is keen. In addition, there are times when we would rather avoid the fight with our child as opposed to pushing them yet again to do something they don't want to do. However, we know that we're not doing them any favors. Dr. Wendy Mogel's book, The Blessings of A Skinned Knee, gives a particularly potent argument for why we parents need to let our children experience failure so they can grow up to be confident adults.

One definition of the word risk is "to expose to a chance of loss or damage." None of us want our children to experience loss or damage, but we also know that if they do not put themselves out there, they will not move to the next level and they will never truly experience success. I remember the old Wide World of Sports tag line, "the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat." The two go together, and we cannot provide our children with the opportunity to experience one if there is not the possibility of their suffering the other.

As parents and as educators, we must encourage, perhaps even demand, our students and children to take risks, to try new things, and yes at times, fail. In this way, we offer them the opportunity to live lives of purpose and engagement. We should encourage them to follow the words of Henry David Thoreau when he explained why he went to Walden Pond. "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."

What If?

Just recently, I had two experiences where the phrase "what if" was cited as a way to describe people seeing the possibilities inherent in our world. In the first case, I spent two hours with my ten year old son watching a silly movie called The Tooth Fairy. In this sappy and predictable movie, which my son loved, a roughneck hockey player learns the painful lessons of cynicism and the joyful possibilities of living a happy life if he only looks at the positive change he can make in his world. As one would expect, everything turns out well when he asks "what if" for the first time.

In a more interesting and far more profound discussion of the power of asking "what if", physicist S. James Gates, Jr. reflects on the life of Albert Einstein in an episode of American Public Media's Speaking of Faith with Christa Tibbett. In Einstein's Ethics, the second part of a two part series called Einstein's God, Gates compares Einstein's approach to ethical issues to the way he studied meta-physical events in the universe. Einstein's asking "what if" as he watched trains passing from his position in the Basel patent office led him to consider the relative nature of time; similarly, his escape from the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany made him question the racism in American society as he asked "what if" a country treated all of its citizens justly.

As educators and as parents, our teaching our children to ask "what if" may be one of the most powerful gifts we can give them. All too often, young children ask why things are and how they could be different, but as they age, they become inhibited and lose the power to imagine things differently. They become imprisoned by the here and now, and we fail to encourage their creative imaginations. In the process, they only go so far and settle for the probable rather than envisioning the possible. In a world characterized by rapid change, it may be more important than ever to help children see things that are not there and not allow them to settle for seeing only what they have in front of them.

I recently read in an article that Apple made more than two billion dollars on iPhone apps last year. Think about that; the iPhone is less than three years old, and already Apple is making billions of dollars on the applications alone. We have no idea what the next iPhone is, but somewhere out there, someone is asking "what if.....?"

In science and math, students need to study what they can, but they need to seek out the things the less visible. Not only should they learn about history, but they should consider alternative histories and ponder how things today could turn out differently. Mark Twain once said, "history does not repeat itself-it rhymes." I can remember many years ago overhearing a tutor helping a child learn about the American Civil War. The student stopped for a minute, had a far-away look in her eyes, and said, "I wonder how things would be different if the South had won." My heart broke when the tutor said, "that's not important, and we don't have the time to talk about it." The tutor should have reveled in that act of historical imagination and allowed the student's creativity to soar. The historian Barbara Tuchman once said that we should teach students historical empathy so they can place themselves in the minds of our predecessors and really try to understand both the slave and the slave owner. Studying literature allows us to live in the mind and the times of others, and learning a Foreign Language should be as much about gaining a window into another culture as it is studying the conjugation of verbs. In all these ways, we are teaching children, and adults, to be inquisitive and empathic.

Perhaps what we really want is for all of our children to echo the line from Bobby Kennedy's speech when he quoted George Bernard Shaw and said, "Some people see things as they are and say why? I dream things that never were and say why not?"