Billy's Blog

Dr. King's Legacy

2012-01-18T15:52:00.000-08:00

For weeks, I had wrestled with what I would say to our students about the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday that was rapidly approaching. I wanted to move beyond the typical platitudes or “feel good” statements and give them something that would stay with them for more than one day off from school. Like most schools, we had shown the “I Have a Dream” speech in the past, and while this is certainly laudable, I wished to do something different this year. I desired to make Dr. King’s legacy of standing against injustice of all types real and relevant to them, but I was getting nowhere.

Part of my frustration stemmed from the fact that it’s been almost forty-five years since Dr. King was assassinated. While I can remember his funeral clearly, King is a historical character to today’s youth, in the same way that Woodrow Wilson was to me. More time has passed between the lives of our students and the life of Dr. King than between my youth and Marcus Garvey’s day. In addition, while prejudice is unfortunately all too alive and well, it’s of a different nature than in the 1950’s and 1960’s. What was unthinkable a half century ago - an African-American President, a former African-American female Secretary of State, and a female Hispanic governor in my home state - are all indicators of progress today. Nevertheless, the signs of institutional racism and income disparity are still in evidence as they were in 1968 when Dr. King planned a Poor People’s March in Washington, D.C.

My concern in preparing to speak with students about Dr. King is that if we deify leaders, we prevent young people from seeing the role that they too can play in making change. The real legacy of Dr. King is not to worship his memory (however, we should commemorate his life) but to devote ourselves to those ideals which he believed in and fight for them with the same determination as he did.

In addition, Bosque School has many students who are currently engaged in efforts to improve our world for others. This year, we have changed the name of our community service program to service learning, and this reflects more than merely a semantic difference. Our new approach entails a thorough analysis of the issues underlying the students’ service and includes a reflective component to help students see how their work not only benefits others but also can lead to systemic change. We want students to be agents of change and to feel empowered to lead others, as well as participate in movements that will lead to progress. This is more than merely noblesse oblige; it is helping students become the kind of people who try to improve American society for everyone.

So, how could I show that Dr. King’s message held just as much meaning in 2012, as it did in 1962, to those who are already “fighting the good fight?” Lecturing would not work and merely exhorting them to be good might just sound like yet another adult droning on. I could share some of my stories from growing up in Kentucky during the civil rights struggle: the fact that my father helped establish the only African-American owned and operated bank in the state at that time, the riots that accompanied the forced desegregation of our school, and the death threats we received in the mail or on the phone during that frightening time. This may interest them, but it probably would not energize them to act on their own.

Just a few days before I was scheduled to speak, I came across a TEDxTeen speech by Natalie Warne (http://www.ted.com/talks/natalie_warne_being_young_and_making_an_impact.html). In this speech, the twenty-year-old Ms. Warne shares her path to becoming an activist. She describes her life in high school, her learning about child soldiers in Africa, and her realization that she had to do something. It’s an energizing and inspiring address that I thought would interest our students. Showing them this speech after giving them some history might teach them about the problems that compelled Dr. King to speak out but also give them a model for action in today’s world.

The most compelling theme in Ms. Warne’s speech was her phrase “anonymous extraordinaries.” Ms. Warne explains that it’s not just the leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr. who make movements happen; it’s the thousands of people who work tirelessly with neither fame nor recognition but do so because they believe in a cause. As Ms. Warne makes clear, all of us can be extraordinary even if we’re anonymous. She also explains that this is difficult and at times frustrating, but if teens find their passion and pursue it with determination, they will be exceptional.

I am happy to report that the students enjoyed Ms. Warne’s address and found it inspirational. Many adults told me that they cried during her talk, and many students said that they thought the speech was great. The long-term impact on them is still to be seen, but at least for this year, they took something meaningful with them.

As we all know however, teaching students to participate in the arduous and tiring work of social change is more than a one-time experience; it must be taught and modeled constantly and continuously. Henry David Thoreau said in Civil Disobedience, “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.” If we can show students that instead of leading lives of quiet desperation, they can strive to be “anonymous extraordinaries”, we will have given them something irreplaceable and provided a fitting tribute to one of our country’s greatest leaders, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Courageous Conversations

2012-01-05T13:09:00.000-08:00

During a recent faculty professional development day, teachers and administrators discussed a protocol designed to facilitate difficult conversations around topics of diversity, including race, class, ethnicity, and orientation. We learned how to assess where we stand on these issues and how that might affect the manner in which we approach the conversation. We agreed that learning how to have these conversations can be helpful in a myriad of ways and will allow us to model for our students how to engage in dialogue that may be sensitive.

As educators, it can be intimidating knowing the “right” way to respond when a student says something that is offensive to someone. We wish our classrooms to be places of open dialogue, and we want our students to be able to explore ideas without fear of ridicule or shame. We want all of our students to feel comfortable, to be themselves, and to be at home in our hallways and other areas of school beyond the classroom.

Don’t get me wrong. This is not about how to respond when a student uses profanity or says something that is patently racist, bigoted, sexist, or homophobic. Those are relatively straightforward to address; we correct students and tell them that certain words and types of language are not permissible. We may need to explain why those words and comments are wrong. This may lead to a dialogue on the derivation of those terms or the history of the stereotype behind the comment; nevertheless, we have a responsibility to teach students that words used in certain ways can be just as cutting as a knife, and they are not allowed.

It’s the comment made by a student in a class or hallway that may reflect a lack of knowledge or context that is more difficult. When a student asks why there are stereotypes about Jews and money or why a certain percentage of African-American men are incarcerated, if they query why so many immigrants are of Asian or Hispanic heritage, or why there may be a high rate of alcoholism on Native-American pueblos, our response may be to either ignore the comment or to reprimand the student.

While that kind of response may be expedient, we have lost the opportunity to teach that student and his/her classmates, and one could say that we have abrogated our responsibility as educators. Knowing how to deal with this type of comment is difficult; however, not dealing with it is not an option. Very often, we do nothing because we don’t want to escalate the situation, risk making a student feel uncomfortable, or we may be afraid of where the conversation may go. Sometimes, we do not respond because we’re unsure where we stand ourselves, and we feel like we are on shaky ground.

This is where actually learning how to engage in these conversations can be so beneficial. In the same way that we are constantly improving our pedagogy so we can reach all students intellectually, we need to strengthen our teaching tool kit so we are capable of speaking with students about diversity and inclusivity. Of course, it’s not easy but as a friend of mine always says, “If it were easy, it wouldn’t be worth doing.”

Some may look at teaching students to engage in difficult conversations as a frightening and burdensome responsibility; isn’t it enough that I have to teach my students math or science? I prefer to view it as an exciting opportunity.

I recently attended a wedding of a Sikh bride and an African-American groom. The all-day wedding and all-night reception was a celebration of diversity and inclusivity. People who might never come into contact with one another spoke, hugged, and cried tears of joy with each other. Guests of all ages and ethnicities danced into the morning to a mash-up of rap, R&B, and Bollywood, and for a moment as I stood on the side of the dance floor, I had a view of where our kids may be headed; I was inspired!

We have the chance to prepare our students for this kind of world. What could be more exciting, meaningful, and rewarding?

Book Patrol

2011-12-14T11:28:00.000-08:00

Among the many pleasures of working with students in a secondary school is discussing what books they are currently reading. Whether a student and I are discussing her first encounter with The Lord of the Rings trilogy and how much she is enjoying it or another student and I are debating whether high schools should teach Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, these conversations are enjoyable and energizing. The students are experiencing the thrill of reading J.R. Tolkien’s fantasy classic for the first time or arguing passionately that the racist language of Huck Finn should preclude its being taught to high school students; it’s affirming to watch them reading and developing opinions around these books.

Although I have the opportunity to have these talks often, I thought about the fortuitous nature of these conversations as I read an article in the New Yorker called “Shelf Life: Packing up my father-in-law’s library” by James Wood. I say fortuitous because I know what they are reading by looking at the covers of their books. Many years ago when my wife and I would go on beach vacations, she would tease me for being on “book patrol.” I would look at what total strangers were reading and would often stop to ask what they thought of the book in which they were absorbed. She may be relieved by the proliferation of e-books since now I don’t know what people are reading; consequently, I can’t quiz them about their reading choices. (My own reading on a Kindle at times can also prevent others from subjecting me to their own book patrol, and I will miss that equally.)

In his essay, Wood describes the act of disassembling a library and what one can learn about a person by viewing the books on one’s shelves. Wood states, “Libraries are always paradoxical: they are as personal as the collector, and at the same time are an ideal statement of knowledge that is impersonal, because it is universal, abstract, and so much larger than an individual life.” Very often, when we go to someone’s house, we look at the books on their shelves as a way to learn more about our hosts. Do we have common tastes? Do these books reaffirm what we know about this person, or do they contradict our perception? If we are what we eat, are we even more so what we read? If I know what you read, do I know you?

On a fundamental level, I rue the loss of these spontaneous book chats. Reading can be both a solitary act as well as a social opportunity. We read to escape our physical world, and we read to be with others. We join book groups to discuss our latest read; we check out blogs or listen to podcasts (I recommend the podcast Books on the Nightstand) to hear the thoughts of other people and get their recommendations. Discussing books enables us to engage with people we don’t know; more importantly, they enable us to build social capital with strangers. Like breaking bread, we are sharing in an experience, and we are bonding with one another.

I see some of our students reading off their Kindles, and on the one hand, I am happy for them that they have discovered an entirely new way to read. On the other hand, I am sad for them since they may not have the opportunity for their own form of book patrol. They may not have the immediate connection to someone who is reading or has read one of their favorites, and I feel sad for them. Maybe the most important reason to keep physical books around has nothing to do with reading them; maybe the primary purpose of an actual book is that it allows us to connect with others, and this is something that we desperately need in today’s world.

The Relevance of Literature

2011-12-01T07:48:00.000-08:00

Visiting a ninth grade history class and an eleventh grade literature class, in succession, taught me several lessons. First of all, I was again reminded of the sense of humor of our students when a freshman compared a character in the Indian classic work of literature the Ramayana to Spongebob Squarepants, and a junior attempted to show how the descriptive introduction to Willa Cather’s My Antonia resembled the lack of plot in Seinfeld. While their comparisons might have been a stretch, they did have an internal reasoning and, in a way, they did make sense. (I also said that these two incidents might be a perfect example of the differing levels of sophistication between ninth and eleventh graders; as one might expect, the juniors agreed with this wholeheartedly.)

Beyond the humor of these two classroom visits, there were other concepts to consider. While studying great literature has its own justification, reading works from ancient India or the early 20th century American plains may pose certain obstacles for students. Can they relate to the protagonists of these works? How do they apply what they are learning to their own lives? What, ultimately, do they learn by reading these classic texts? While literature should not be judged merely by its applicability to students’ lives, the value of being exposed to its grand themes and concepts should not be underestimated.

At some level, this may be what we strive for in every middle and high school class. All too often, we hear students ask, “When will I use this?” or “How will I ever use this in my life?” and all too often, we give them a lame answer that fails to address their question. We hope that they will take what at first may appear theoretical or useless and come to see its relevance. Very often, the way to do this is to help them see that they can learn analogically. Certain concepts or pieces of information that may seem isolated or unrelated to their lives are, in fact, very similar to the struggles they are facing.

Maybe the Spongebob character is an archetype that has been passed down from long ago; perhaps, the beginning of a classic American novel resembles a sitcom from the 90’s. When students attempt to take what they are studying in class and show its similarity or relevance to their own worlds, they are digesting it at a deeper level, and in the process, they are making it their own. Isn’t that we wish them to do?

Recently, I listened to an interview with Azar Nafisi, the author of Reading Lolita in Tehran. During the interview, she explained how her students in theocratic Iran applied the themes of Nabokov’s story to their lives. Their reading enabled them to see that the Iranian oppressive regime seduced them into following its laws in much the same way that professor Humbert Humbert in Lolita seduces his young protégé Dolores Haze, and us the readers, into believing his side of the story. It was because Nafisi’s students could apply the classics of Western literature to their lives that they began to question their rulers and see how their lives could be different.

As Nafisi showed her students both the beauty and value in learning from texts that might appear to be foreign to them, so can we, as teachers and parents, help our students see the relevance of what they are studying to their lives and their futures.

2011-11-10T09:43:00.000-08:00

In his book The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything, educator Sir Ken Robinson discusses the importance of people finding their tribe and being on creative teams as integral components of achieving one’s potential, or being “in the element.” Locating one's tribe enables a person to be around others who are passionate and devoted; the synchronicity that results when excited and committed people thrive off one another brings out the best in everyone.

The concept of people finding their tribe carries great relevance for those of us who spend our days in middle and high schools. We all know the power of peer pressure, and often when speaking about adolescents, we focus on the possible harmful consequences of acceding to the wishes of one's peers. Psychologists like Judith Harris have written on the way that peers come to replace parents as the primary influence on teens’ behavior and attitudes. Anti-drug campaigns, like Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No" in the 1980's, acknowledge the difficulty which high schoolers experience in standing up to their friends’ attempts to influence them to try drugs or alcohol.

However, how often do we point out the powerfully good impact of students finding their tribe? Do we emphasize the life-affirming power of a creative team as regularly as we warn about the negative impact of the bad tribe? In his discussion of the tribe, Robinson points to three key components of creative teams that allow them to be successful.

To begin, Robinson states that creative teams are diverse. He says, "They are composed of very different sorts of people with different but complementary talents. It was their differences that made their creative work together greater than the sum of their individual parts." All too often in schools when students work on projects or group assignments, we allow them to choose their own groups, and unfortunately, they seek out those with whom they think they have the most in common. In doing so, they not only lose out on a social opportunity, but also we fail to teach them the efficacy of heterogeneous groups. As Dr. Scott Page from the University of Michigan has shown in his studies of diversity in the workplace, heterogeneous groups are much more creative and effective in the long run than homogeneous groups since the diversity of talents enables them to overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles.

Robinson further says that creative teams are dynamic. He says, "Creative teams find ways of using their difference as strengths, not weaknesses. They have a process through which their strengths are complementary and compensate for each other's weaknesses too." As we encourage students to work in diverse groups, we must help them learn how to go from being a collection of creative individuals to a cohesive group. As a long time basketball fan, I harken back to the New York Knicks teams of the early 1970's as an example of talented individuals coming together to create something greater than merely a collection of good players. The steady leadership of Willis Reed, the tenacious defense of Walt Frazier, the scoring ability of Cazzie Russell, the brilliant passing of Bill Bradley, the rebounding of Dave DeBusschere, and the steady play of Dick Barnett all combined to create a team for the ages. All of these players were good and in some cases great; nevertheless, it was in their determination to win and their willingness to sublimate some of their own egos that they achieved true greatness.

Finally, Robinson explains that creative teams are distinct. As opposed to committees that Robinson says "do routine work and have members who are theoretically interchangeable," creative teams "have a distinct personality and come together to do something specific." Consequently, they may be task-defined and when their work is done, they may move on. The New York Knicks have yet to replicate the glory years of the early 1970's even though they have had many great players over the past forty years. Like other great teams, glory may be temporary and ephemeral.

The same convergence of individuals creating something amazing can be seen in other areas, whether it was Abraham Lincoln's "team of rivals" in his wartime cabinet, the scientists working on the Manhattan Project, or the periodic coming together of musicians to create an album, as seen in bands like the English blues-rock group Blind Faith from 1969 that included Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker, Steve Winwood, and Ric Grech. In the book and movie Moneyball, author Michael Lewis shows how Oakland A's manager Billy Bean approaches the building of a team differently than his predecessors or contemporaries. Bean looks for different indicators of success than others do and, in the process, builds good teams that exceed the expectations of scouts and opposing coaches.

As we teach students the content they should know and the skills they must have, we need to show them the power of creative teamwork and how to bring out the best of everyone in their group. In a world that increasingly requires collaboration across geographic boundaries and time zones, teaching students requires showing them that when they are on teams that are diverse, dynamic, and distinct, they will produce superior work, which will make them better people in the process.

Finding the "Best" College

2011-10-27T09:02:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago when the sophomores and juniors at Bosque School took the PSAT, the freshmen left campus to engage in an all-day service learning project at a pueblo in north central New Mexico. With three out of the four grades in the upper school gone, the members of the Class of 2012 had the school house to themselves to work on their college applications, fine-tune their essays, and meet with their teachers and the college counselors. This annual event called Senior Application Day allows seniors to make significant progress on the various parts of their college applications.

On a morning when the atmosphere could have been extremely tense and competitive, our students helped each other and gave supportive advice and feedback. While there are few processes in secondary school that are as individualized as applying to college, the students at Bosque were aiding one another in a way that was beautiful to witness. The school felt like someone’s living room as students wrapped themselves in their blankets, sprawled on the floor, and typed away on their laptops while helping each other achieve whatever task they were taking on at the moment.

As I watched and admired them, I hoped that they would take to heart a recent essay by Dr. Stephen Joel Trachtenberg, former president of George Washington University. (Time for full disclosure - I am a proud alumnus of George Washington University from a year that is longer ago than I care to recall.) In this piece, which is linked below, Trachtenberg takes on the annual US News & World Report college rankings that purports to show which schools are best. While some colleges like Reed College in Oregon have refused to participate in the rankings since 1995, and even more colleges have decided to opt out of this rat race since 2007, there are still many prospective students, and consequently parents, who grab the annual issue of US News & World Report as soon as it comes out. In the process, they either make new choices or revise what they previously thought were good decisions based on what they read.

A Wikipedia article on the rankings points out that, “Some higher education experts, like Kevin Carey of Education Sector, have argued that U.S. News & World Report's college rankings system is merely a list of criteria that mirrors the superficial characteristics of elite colleges and universities. According to Carey, "The U.S. News’ ranking system is deeply flawed. Instead of focusing on the fundamental issues of how well colleges and universities educate their students and how well they prepare them to be successful after college, the magazine's rankings are almost entirely a function of three factors: fame, wealth, and exclusivity."

So how do we prevent our students and parents from buying into the hype and focus less on the “best” college and more on the college or university that is the best for them? People may know in their gut that there are hundreds of colleges and universities and they may intuitively understand that there is no one perfect school, but they still may find it difficult to avoid rear-window sticker envy. We need to say again and again that a school that is right for one student may be wrong for another, and this is not a reflection on either the student or the college.

As our students aid and encourage one another through the college application process, they realize with full assurance that there is no one “best” student in their class. If we can help them and their parents comprehend with the same level of surety that there is no one “best” college or university, we will help them to be even more successful and happy in their choices. Ultimately, we want all of our graduates to attend a college where they can do well in all areas and be happy. When they find themselves at such a college, they will know that they have found the “best” school.

Link to Trachtenberg article.
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/09/how-dangerous-are-college-rankings-and-the-rat-race-for-prestige/245850/?google_editors_picks=true

Leadership

2011-10-13T10:41:00.000-07:00

Listening to a recent Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) radio show called Ideas had me thinking about leadership, a concept that we attempt to teach our students, and we hope they will develop in themselves. We talk about servant leadership, ethical leadership, and leadership in school, on teams, and in life after graduation. However, we rarely explain what we mean by the term. We treat the definition of the word as it is obvious; unfortunately, in the process, we may hinder rather than help students become leaders in their own right.

In this episode of Ideas, called “Walking In Space,” the host interviewed Canadian astronaut Dave Williams, who has walked longer in space than any of his peers. At one point, the narrator of the show says, “ Because they’re working with advanced technologies in life-threatening conditions, each member of the Endeavor Team is a 21st century leader, collaborating in an invisible web of character, competence, honor, intelligence and courage. All of it is laced with random and excessive acts of kindness and a self-mocking sense of humor. For Williams and his crewmates, leadership and exploration are the same, their way of thinking about the wonder and beauty of natural and human-made worlds and their way of accepting difficult challenges and developing the mental dexterity needed to solve 21st century problems.”

We know that there are many types of leadership, and we know that different situations require different styles of leadership. In my class last year, my students and I discussed styles of leadership and leaders ranging from Osama bin Laden to Nelson Mandela to Colin Powell. We watched movies like Invictus and wrestled with what it takes to be a leader in various fields. While we never arrived at one definition of leadership, we were all clear that it is a term with many facets.

We know intuitively that the concept of leadership in 2011 differs vastly from 1911 or even from 1991. Changing times require changing leaders, and we need to teach our students that leadership is a fluid concept. Where earlier notions of leadership may have demanded a leader stand alone and realize that she might be wrong, but should never be in doubt, the definition outlined above demands collaborative skills and a self-effacing nature.

While some of this definition is a by-product of our times, we also know that there may be some elements that are timeless. Was Genghis Khan “thinking hard about the wonder and beauty of natural and human-made worlds” as he conquered Central Asia, or has this become more important as we grapple with climate change and the impact mankind has on our planet? We know that Abraham Lincoln could tell a joke about himself better than any politician (his line “If I were two-faced, would I be wearing this one?” comes to mind), and we still speak about George Washington’s character in terms of whether he actually chopped down a cherry tree or not. Leaders have always had to accept challenges (if they didn’t, would they be leaders?), and they needed to be as resilient as their times demanded.

Many times, we watch our students in class, in the school at large, and on the playing fields, and we recognize our student leaders. However, how many times do we miss the potential leaders in our student body because we don’t approach our studying and teaching of it with the same conviction and purpose as the other lessons we teach our students? If we want our graduates to lead, we need to teach them, and we need to be intentional in our aims and analytical in our methods. As there is both an art and a science to leadership, there is a creative and methodical way in how we instruct our students in leadership. The potential among our students is there; it is up to us to help them become the leaders they were meant to be.

The Emotions of Adolescence

2011-09-28T14:25:00.001-07:00

Joining our sixth grade students on their trip to the mountains of New Mexico last week and watching them interact with one another brought back to me how exciting and turbulent the middle school years can be. One would think that this would not be a revelation since I have been spending time with adolescents for over twenty years. However, last week’s experience was different as I watched eleven and twelve- year old students socialize and have fun with each other away from school. It was with a sense of nostalgia and humor that the other adults and I recalled our years in middle school.

The friendships then seemed closer and the emotions seemed more intense. As the narrator-character called “The Writer” in the movie Stand By Me, (which is based on a Stephen King short story called The Body) says, “I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?” At Apple Mountain, boys and girls walked arm in arm like they would never part. The laughter that sixth graders share with each other is deeper and more from the belly than the kind of laughter we have as adults; similarly, the tears that they sometimes shed can seem more full than what they might experience later in life. I remembered my friends from sixth grade and how their opinion meant everything to me.

I also shared with my colleagues my memories of the way I felt after a middle school romance went awry. Was it pain, humiliation, or a combination of both, that prompted me to ride my bike for miles and miles? As I watched the students last week, I wished for them that they would never experience the pain I felt, but I knew that sooner or later they would, and like me, they will eventually get over it (even though they might not think that’s possible).

Although what I experienced was no different than what almost every adolescent goes through, I thought at that time that nobody could ever understand what I was feeling. Maybe this is why plays like Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet resonate with us so deeply. When we remember that Romeo and Juliet were young adults in the throes of adolescence, when we recall that like other teenagers they were passionate and impetuous, the extremity of their emotions make painful sense; like so much else, Shakespeare got it right.

Stephen Marche, the author of How Shakespeare Changed Everything, says,
“Shakespeare described the terrifying beauty of the adolescent so early in its development, and so definitively and so thoroughly, that it is only slightly an exaggeration to say that he invented teenagers as we know them today. “Romeo and Juliet,” his extended study of the humiliations and glories of adolescence, is the biggest hit of all time and, unlike most of Shakespeare’s works, it has never slipped out of fashion.

This shouldn’t be surprising: People just love to watch a couple of dumb kids make out and die. (And they are awfully young, these dumb Veronese kids; Shakespeare doesn’t ever tell us Romeo’s exact age but we know that Juliet is just 13.) The great French scholar Philippe Ariès concluded that for most of the Medieval period “people had no idea of what we call adolescence, and the idea was a long time taking shape.” Yet our whole modern understanding of adolescence is there to be found in this play. Shakespeare essentially created this new category of humanity, and in place of the usual mix of nostalgia and loathing with which we regard adolescents (and adolescence), Shakespeare would have us look at teenagers in a spirit of wonder. He loves his teenagers even as he paints them in all their absurdity and nastiness.

Of course, the most important feature of adolescent rebellion is that it’s doomed. In this, as well, Shakespeare was right there at the beginning. He defined what it means to be “star-cross’d.” The opposition between the adolescent and the mature orders of the world can have only two possible endings. One is comic: the teenager grows up, develops a sense of humor, marries, has kids, moves to the suburbs, gets fat and becomes boring. The other is tragic: the teenager blows up in a blaze of glory. We much prefer to live the comedy. We much prefer to watch the tragedy.”

As adults, we should try to recall the turbulence of our own adolescent experience if we’re going to be able to relate to our children. We need to admire their passion and help them direct it in productive ways. We should be understanding when they believe that their world is in chaos. When we become impatient with their narcissism and their belief that nobody has ever gone through what they are dealing with, we should honor the fact that this is the first time for them, so what others have experienced may not be relevant. What may feel like teen drama to us is their lives being lived to the fullest, and while we know that things will be ok tomorrow, for them that can seem too long to wait.

Growing Up With The Internet

2011-09-15T06:04:00.000-07:00

While working out on the elliptical the other day, I listened to Krista Tippett, the host of American Public Media's radio show, On Being, interview MIT professor Sherry Turkle, author of Alone Together, about the way our lives on the web affect our teenagers and our families. Turkle, an expert in psychoanalysis and the way humans interact psychologically with evolving forms of technology, spoke on the way today's virtual world is altering our relationships with one another. Among the many insightful comments Turkle makes in this thoughtful and provocative interview, one stood out for me as a parent and as an educator. Turkle said, "Just because we grew up with the internet, we think that the internet is grown up."

Time and again, we watch teenagers live their lives, express themselves, and and engage in relationships on the web as if it's a finished product. In the process, they remain ignorant of, or choose to ignore, the potential ramifications of their actions in cyberspace. (For those who think that this phenomenon is unique to adolescents, see former New York Congressman Anthony Weiner.) Young men and young women, who are "works in progress" themselves, play games, make movies, and update their Facebook pages with an immediacy that can be frightening; what they once might have whispered to one friend or told to a couple of buddies is now broadcast to hundreds of "friends." In the process, what might have been meant for only a few to hear, now goes viral beyond their furthest expectations. I sometimes wish that adolescents would heed the advice that Daphne Zuniga's anal-retentive character, from Rob Reiner's 1985 movie The Sure Thing, gives to the slacker played by John Cusack, "Spontaneity has its own place and time."

With all of the changes in American society over the past one hundred years, adolescence remains the time when young men and young women form their identities and find out who they are. To do this, they need time in a safe environment that allows them to try out different selves and decide if they like the person they were on that day.

Unfortunately, many teens' sense of privacy has withered to the point that they share whatever they think or feel for all to judge. In a January 2010 speech, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said that "the rise of social networking means that privacy is no longer a social norm." While some may argue that teens still value privacy but in a different way than adults do, we see repeatedly what occurs when adolescents share feelings and thoughts that they may have wished, in retrospect, to have kept to themselves. They seem to have forgotten that there are things we think and things we say.

Katie Hafner's outstanding book, Where Wizards Stay Up Late:The Origins of the Internet, traces the roots of the web to the 1950's and 1960's and the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) and the ARPANet. It's a fascinating story of scientists engaged in continuous research with no idea where their ideas would lead. A half century later, the internet plays a ubiquitous role in our lives that may be far beyond those researchers' wildest dreams. However, like those scientists, we still have no idea where the web is going. Similarly, our teenagers are engrossed in the all-encompassing and crucial work of researching and discovering who they are, and they have no clue who they will be one day. The web is here to stay and to expect our children not to have virtual lives is not realistic. However, as parents and educators, we can join together and help them develop into healthy and happy young adults, in a way that allows them to make mistakes with repercussions that may not be quite so public and life-altering as they currently can be.

A Sense of Wonder

2011-08-30T11:49:00.000-07:00

As my teenage son and I hiked through the woods along the Rio Grande River recently and observed the snowy white egrets in the water, the shades of blue and pink of the Sandia Mountains, and the hot air balloons floating peacefully above us, I reveled in the beauty of it all. While I waited for something more profound to come to me, I recalled the tag line of a 1970’s beer commercial, “It doesn’t get any better than this." There was so much to behold in one place on one day that it was almost overwhelming, and I remembered the name of the Van Morrison album from 1985, A Sense of Wonder.

As a result, I began thinking about how we can help adolescents maintain their sense of wonder in today's world. On the one hand, the web offers them the opportunity to go anywhere, to talk to anyone, and to find out almost anything they want to know in the time it takes Google to pull up the information. On the other hand, teens today have the requisite world-weary skepticism that they have always had, and although each generation of adults may think that the teenagers of their time were the most doubting, the profusion of information available to today's young men and young women may make them the least awestruck of all time.

So, how do we help young adults maintain a sense of awe? In 1956, the naturalist Rachel Carson (who later wrote Silent Spring) asked the same question and produced an essay, in the magazine Woman's Home Companion, called “Help Your Child To Wonder.” In this essay, Carson says, ”It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood. If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children, I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength.” Although her essay focuses on her very young son, Carson's lessons would apply to most children and maybe even more so to teenagers.

However, Carson also acknowledges that aiding children in preserving their ability to marvel at the world around them is difficult and requires quite a bit from us adults. As parents, this requires time, patience, and energy. It may require putting down whatever is occupying us, spending time with our children, and demonstrating our excitement with the seemingly mundane. Some of this may come with time in nature or just being fascinated with what is available to us in this day and age. A good friend tells his children when they complain about being bored that "boredom is an insult to the gods." If there ever was a time when children could be bored, that time seems way beyond us now.

As educators, we should celebrate the opportunities to aid our students in nourishing their own sense of wonder. Through our words and deeds, we need to convey an infectious enthusiasm in the delights of everything around us. Beyond teaching facts and academic skills, perhaps the most important thing we can offer our students is how to marvel, how to be exuberant with all of the mysteries in front of them, and how to enjoy just how much there is to learn.

I recently showed our Bosque students a YouTube clip of the Swedish scientist Hans Rosling's innovative and exciting way of showing data demonstrating the correlation of health and wealth from 1810-2009. As Rosling proves, looking at seemingly dry data can be stimulating and fun. With an impish smile, Rosling says after he has wowed us with the data, "Pretty neat, huh?"

Like Rosling, truly successful scientists maintain their sense of joy in the previously inexplicable. At the end of her over fifty-year-old article, Carson says, “Those who dwell, as scientists or laymen, among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life. Whatever the vexations or concerns of their personal lives, their thoughts can find paths that lead to inner contentment and to renewed excitement in living. Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.” Let's all commit to helping our young men and young women appreciate the ineffable and revel in the mysteries around us.

Schools As Home

2011-08-16T15:55:00.000-07:00

At a going away party a couple of months ago, someone asked me if we had found a home in New Mexico. To my regret, I offered a somewhat snarky riposte and said that we had a house in Albuquerque, but we had a home in St. Louis. It was only later I learned that Webster’s defines a home as a domicile, i.e., the place where one lives. I was attempting, in my response, to differentiate between the house location in which we would soon reside versus the house in which we had lived since 1994. This “home” was where we brought our children when they left the hospital after their births, the living room where the brit milah (the Jewish circumcision ceremony) was performed, and also where we shared many of our emotionally-laden experiences over the past seventeen years. (If you’re the person who innocently asked the question, I apologize here.) Maybe it was our moving that made me draw such a clear distinction between two seemingly synonymous words, house and home, particularly as we watched the moving truck with all our possessions pull away, and I walked around an empty house and reminisced about the many things that happened there. The more I think about it, though, the more I believe that home connotes something more than merely being the place where we rest our heads every evening.

The notion of what constitutes home also applies to those of us working in schools as we endeavor to create learning communities where every child and adult can feel safe physically, emotionally, and spiritually. As we know, schools can be warm, joyful places where adults engage in meaningful work together; unfortunately, we are all too aware that schools can also be cold, cruel institutions that persistently devalue the people inside their walls. Ultimately, it is up to all of us to create schools where everyone can feel “at home,” but how do we do that?

To make a school a home, we must begin with the adults who work there. We need to make our schools places where every grownup feels valued, trusted, and supported. This does not mean that we do not have standards or that we approve of everything everyone does, but it does mean that we are honest with one another, we address issues when they arise, and we know that we can disagree with each other but still respect one another.

In a similar fashion, we need to teach our students that our school is a place where children are allowed to be who they are and to develop into the people they want to be. Here again, this is not an argument for anything goes; as parents, we don’t approve of all our children do, but we still love them as we’re correcting their behavior or reprimanding them. A major component of adolescence consists of the process of identity formation, where teenagers try on a variety of personalities much like they’re shopping and seeing how different clothes fit. In order for them to do this and to learn who they are, they must be able to experiment with a variety of personality types in the full assurance that they will not be ostracized or castigated. They must be able to take risks and know that they will still be accepted for the people they are.

If we can create schools where each child can be his/her full self every day, then we can give our students the opportunity to fulfill their dreams and become the people they were meant to be. As the writer Mary Angelou once said, “The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.” Our students want their schools to be a home for them; let’s do everything we can to give them what they so richly deserve.

Thought to Action

2011-07-19T07:07:00.000-07:00

In a re-broadcasted July 4th, episode of the American Public Media radio show Being, host Krista Tippett interviewed philosopher Jacob Needleman on what he has called the inward work of democracy. Needleman discussed the principles behind the creation of our government and the philosophical beliefs of America’s founding fathers. Although the entire show was fascinating, I was particularly struck by one of Needleman’s comments and its implications for those of us engaged in teaching children and adolescents. Needleman says at one point, “out of good thought will come right action.”

When we teach children academic content, we want them to pursue knowledge deeply and thoroughly. We hold our students to high standards, and we do what we can to help them learn what we believe they need to know and learn how to do what we think is necessary and worthwhile. Students must learn that a rigorous approach to learning enables them to be critical and analytical; this may be more important than ever with the profusion of good and bad information in front of them. In addition, according to Needleman, when we think with others, we produce good ideas that benefit all.

Concomitantly, a course of study that is lackadaisical will produce thought that is malformed and will disserve them. The old adage that “sloppy writing comes from sloppy thinking” is true and students need to understand that “an opinion completely unfettered by facts” may produce sound bites but will not advance any dialogue in which they’re engaged.

We also desire to show students that there is an inherent joy to learning new things, stretching their brains, and being exposed to new material. As taking on a variety of mental tasks plows new furrows in an older brain, so learning new material gives younger brains the workout they need. We want to convey to children and adolescents that learning feels good and it can make us happy.

However, in this day and age when we perhaps face greater and possibly more dangerous crises than ever, some people might argue that learning merely for the sake of learning is no longer enough. We have a responsibility to take what we have learned and apply it to issues like global warming, international poverty, or trans-national conflicts. If we were ever able to play the role of the by-stander, we can no longer do so today when there are so many issues that confront our world and the human race. Consequently, those of us in education must teach our children that they have a duty to act and to make their world a better place in whatever manner they choose.

In the process, we need to teach the applicability of what they are studying. However, they must have the requisite information to fight the good fight. Otherwise, they’re tilting at windmills and combating phantoms. Their efforts may be well intentioned, but they will be futile and possibly even detrimental. They need to have studied the causes behind the issue they’re facing and they need to have considered a variety of possible solutions to the problem.

It is this convergence of thinking and doing that can excite adolescents and produce thoughtful and effective adults. As the futurist Joel Barker says, “Vision without action is merely a dream. Action without vision just passes time. Vision with action can change the world.”

The Benefits of Co-Working Spaces

2011-05-23T16:08:00.000-07:00

A recent New York Times article discussed the concept of co-working spaces where people congregate to learn from and work with another. Sometimes, the people in these places may be collaborating on a project or they may be individuals sharing a space while doing their own work. While the life-span of co-working spaces may be short-lived in some cases, they offer those who work there the benefits of being around other people and the creative interchange that can result. As the media pundit Clay Shirky said, “we systematically overestimate the value of access to information and underestimate the value of access to each other.”

As I thought about the kind of work spaces we wish to create in this age of twenty-four/seven technological access, I also wondered how schools can prepare students for this new type of work environment. It seems that at times we want the best of both worlds: we want our children to have full access to technology in our schools so they can learn how to work in a wired world, but we also want them to be able to interact with and enjoy the company of others in real time. We wish them to be facile in the virtual and real world; consequently, we must help them learn how to navigate different contexts and communities.

Over the years, it seems like there has been a reaction among parents to the aspiration a decade ago for students to be on laptops for a significant part of their school day. More and more, we hear from parents that they don’t want their children to be on a computer all day, and I wonder if this is a response to the ubiquity of technological devices in the lives of our children. When many, many children have a laptop, an iPad, or a Smartphone, and they spend a great deal of time on the device at home, it’s no longer quite so exciting from a parent perspective to walk into a classroom and see every child looking at a screen and typing. Perhaps, we hope to right a pendulum that may have swung too far in the direction of technological devices. As we design our schools and plan our programs, we should strike to maintain a balance. This does not make one a Luddite: it speaks to the wish that children spend as much time with their peers in face to face dialogue as they do on Facebook.

Maybe the development of concepts like co-working spaces represent our desire to maintain some of our social nature of which Plato spoke while having access to the wonders of the web. Possibly, it is the combination of the two that will make us more productive workers and better people. As Tina Roth Eisenberg says in the article, “I just like being around nerdy creative people all day long. It helps make sense of all the information coming at us.”

Teaching Students About Contingency

2011-04-25T13:05:00.000-07:00

All too often, when middle and high school students study history, they tend to view events as inevitable. Looking through the eyes of the present when they already know what happens, students fail to see that the people of the past faced varying alternatives among which they had to choose. These choices may have entailed major consequences for individuals or countries, and the people in the position of having to make choices may have agonized over their decision in the same way that people do in today's crises. However, it is very hard for adolescents in today's world to remember when history is taught as names, dates, and facts that are divorced from the human element.

I considered the place of choice in history and the manner in which we teach students about this concept as I listened to a recent podcast on the secession crisis of 1860-61. As we commemorate the beginning of the Civil War one hundred and fifty years ago this month, we are reminded again that none of the states that seceded were forced to do so; people in places ranging from Richmond to Montgomery to New Orleans made the choice to leave the Union.

Similarly, people in the North had to figure out how to proceed in the face of the possible dissolution of their country. As President Barack Obama must decide what to do regarding today's rebellion in Libya, so Abraham Lincoln wrestled with how to handle an incipient insurrection in the South. Harold Holzer's book, Lincoln President-Elect: Abraham Lincoln and the Secession Winter, 1860-61, recounts the period between Abraham Lincoln's election and his inauguration and the many decisions the incoming President faced as he prepared to assume office.

Although we study the road to war as if it were foreordained, there was nothing inexorable about the choices made by ordinary people in Washington, D. C. and Charleston, South Carolina. People may have been swept up in the course of events, but they still had the opportunity to choose among compelling options. A historian on the weekly public radio show Backstory with the American History Guys said that the most important lesson young people can learn about the beginning of America's bloodiest war was the role that contingency plays in history, and that students need to learn that people's actions in the past were no more pre-determined than ours.

The recent film The Adjustment Bureau asks us to consider what role fate or destiny plays in our lives even when we don't know that we're headed in a direction that has been decided for us. Our freshmen consider this concept as they read and discuss Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, and ask themselves how much say they have in their lives. They know that they have many, many choices regarding the music to which they listen and the way they listen to it, and they know that they can shape the various forms of media they receive. Unfortunately, they may still feel that much of their lives is determined by others besides themselves.

If we can encourage students to understand that in the same way that people in the past had difficult choices in front of them, so do they and the choice is theirs to make, we will have served them well. As part of a unit on leadership in my class, I recently showed my students the movie Invictus after reading an article on Nelson Mandela's 8 Lessons on Leadership. If they learned nothing else from our discussions, I hope they take to heart the lines of the William Henly poem Invictus, and in particular the final stanza, from which the title of the movie comes.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the soul.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

Preparing Our Students for Independence

2011-03-29T03:30:00.000-07:00

All around the country, schools are beginning the final quarter of the year aware that as people say, “we’re in the home-stretch.” Even though the trees outside my window are draped in a cottony-white snow, it’s spring and we are in the final two months of the school year. We will do everything we can do to keep students focused on the work in front of them and encourage them to finish strong; they, however, will be fixated on the sunny days outside the window and the upcoming summer break.

While this holds true for all of our students, it is particularly germane for our seniors as they wind down. We want them to concentrate on their classes and not blow off the work they have remaining: they wish to Facebook with their new college roommates, look at the course catalogs to choose their first semester classes, and not be bothered with the final two months of high school. At this point, we need to make sure that they finish well, but we also need to be cognizant that they’re in another place mentally.

Thus, those of us who work with and parent high school students should be asking ourselves what we have done to prepare our students for the life of college. Beyond the academic preparation we have given them, we must consider whether we have provided them with the personal toolbox they will need to be successful in the next phase of their lives. Will they be able to handle the transition to college in all facets? We can hope that they will they be better off than my roommates from my freshman year in college, all of whom were more than capable of handling the workload; nevertheless, three out of the four flunked out, and the fourth colleague made it only after I carried him to the hospital where he spent a day in the De-Tox Ward and then entered AA. I also recall the story one of our recent alumni told us of the young man who was asked to leave their highly ranked college when he became so drunk that he stole the gun of a security guard and shot up a bathroom in his dorm.

These questions and these memories came to me again as I watched interviews with family psychologist Dr. Wendy Mogel, author of The Blessings of a Skinned Knee: Using Jewish Teachings to Raise Self-Reliant Children and most recently The Blessings of a B-: Using Jewish Teachings to Raise Resilient Teenagers. In easy-to-understand language, Mogel advises parents to allow their children to make mistakes and yes, even fail at a young age, so they can learn how to survive the difficulties that they will face later in life. Mogel’s latest book offers many lessons, including the following (some of which may be controversial):

1. Bizarre teen behavior, so annoyingly not in line with your dreams and plans, is a sign that your teenager’s unique personality is unfolding.
2. Teenage rudeness is a paradox. It lets you know that your teen is trying desperately to separate from you and that your are the "safe" person who can receive their frustration with not yet being all grown up.
3. One of the ways teens learn about the importance of hard work is by suffering the consequences of their procrastination and laziness.
4. Materialism and self-centeredness are normal during this period of rapid and shifting identity. Just as a pregnant woman focuses inward, adolescents are preoccupied as they give birth to themselves.
5. When teens break the rules, or even the law, it is often because they aren't satisfied with a merely rote knowledge of our ethical system. They want to know if adults mean what they say.
6. Teens getting into hot water provides an excellent opportunity for learning self-reliance: how to solve problems and how to mine difficult circumstances for their benefits.
7. Staying up late is sometimes a teenager’s shot at independence, and goofing around is a way to ease the stresses of growing up.
8. Finally, limited experimentation with alcohol, physical intimacy, and even drugs teaches teens how to regulate these powerful experiences and keep themselves safe while they are still under your guidance.

Knowing why teenagers act as they do does not excuse their behavior, but it does explain it. Not everyone will concur with all of Mogel’s tips, but we can agree that we must help our students learn how to handle independence and how to make decisions when they are out of our sight. As our seniors prepare to leave, we wish them the best and we hope that they will be resilient in the face of adversity.

Machines and Us

2011-02-28T15:48:00.000-08:00

One of the many benefits of working in a school with adolescents is the opportunity it provides us to have interesting and thought-provoking discussions with young men and young women about abstract issues. Whether we are discussing US policy toward the Middle East or the ethics of scientific research, the conversations we have with students in the throes of their teenager years are exciting and invigorating. We are truly fortunate to be teaching middle and high school students in this day and age.

I thought of how lucky we are to serve in the roles we do as I listened to the latest news about the performance of the machine Watson on the Jeopardy game show and as I read the cover article in this month's Atlantic Magazine called Artificial Intelligence? Why Machines Will Always Defeat Humans. Every so often, as we study the forms of technology we create, we ask ourselves what is different between them and us. Whether it was Mary Shelley's Frankenstein or Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (which was then made into the movie Blade Runner) works of fiction have forced us to consider what makes us human as the capabilities of our machines improve. (Remember the 1970’s show The Bionic Mind?)

We like to think that it is the uniquely human ability to emote and/or the capacity to reason that differentiate us from other species and machines. However, if our computers continue to improve and gain the capability to respond to a variety of affective as well as cognitive stimuli, the ground feels less sure beneath us. Machines can think but they cannot feel-can they?

Although other generations may have felt that they faced this same issue, it does seem to be more relevant in our times as our machines and gadgets play an ever more prominent role in our lives. (I say this as I type on my laptop, listen to my iPod, have my Smartphone close by, and look forward to reading a book on my Kindle or checking out something on my iPad tonight in bed.) How do we help our students separate themselves from their devices and help them continue to wrestle with what is human about themselves and their peers as we grapple with it ourselves? How do we show them that there is still a value to turning off at times and realizing that there is still something singularly human that no machine can replicate.

As they live more of their lives on-line, how do we help them develop a sense of self that does not require affirmation of total strangers in cyber space? How do we guide them so they can appreciate the beauty of silence and the value of being alone or spending time in close contact with someone face to face? We need them to understand that if there is something you would not say to a friend’s face, you probably don’t want to say it to her Facebook page; they need to realize that while brevity may be the sole of wit, there are times when one hundred and forty characters simply will not do.

At the end of The Atlantic article, the author Brian Christian says, “No, I think that, while the first year that computers pass the Turing Test will certainly be a historic one, it will not mark the end of the story. Indeed, the next year’s Turing Test will truly be the one to watch-the one where we humans, knocked to the canvas, must pull ourselves up; the one where we learn how to be better friends, artists, teachers, parents, lovers; the one where we come back. More human than ever.” Possibly more than ever, this is our charge with the children we have, and while it may be daunting, it is also energizing and life-affirming.

A School Where Nobody Has To Pass

2011-02-13T05:49:00.000-08:00

One of the benefits of working in an incomparably diverse school is the opportunity it provides for discussions of race and class. Students and teachers at Crossroads College Prep openly talk about how their lives are affected by their skin color, their socio-economic situation, and the way that they view themselves and others view them.

I thought about this recently as I listened to a fascinating speech by Princeton University historian Martha Sandweis on her book Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line. In her work of non-fiction, Sandweis traces the double life of Clarence King, a 19th Century scientist, explorer, and friend of Presidents and Secretaries of State. King was a blond haired, blue-blood member of the East Coast intellectual elite who dined with the upper echelons of post-Civil War America; however, unknown to many, King also had a second life existence as an African-American in Brooklyn with a wife and family who thought he was a black Pullman Porter named Clarence Todd. (I have attached a link to a New York Times review of the book below.)

Sandweis uses the story of Clarence King/Todd to explore uniquely American, and even more particularly New York, concepts of race and class. As Sandweis shows, this story could only have happened in New York City at the turn of the century, and while she may have been telling the tale of one man, she is really explaining America’s tortured concepts of race.

I thought about Crossroads College Prep as I listened to Sandweis. In a school that is almost fifty-fifty white/students of color, race and class are concepts that we are constantly thinking about and with which we are grappling. For we know that diversity is really only the first step toward creating the kind of community we want. As the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS) says, diversity is merely a quantitative measurement: it shows what the population looks like. To be the school we wish to be, we need to be constantly taking the next step and looking at how to be an even more inclusive community, and that’s why in the Crossroads College Preparatory School Mission Statement, we stress that we are both diverse and inclusive. In St. Louis, we can point out places that are diverse in terms of the types of people present, but the people that are there don’t really interact with each other in a meaningful way. We want our school to be much more than that and to be a refuge from the racial polarization that has characterized our city for far too long.

All too often, adolescents have to hide who they are for a variety of reason ranging from simple peer pressure to feeling like they truly don’t belong in the community. We hope that having young men and young women in a school that is both diverse and inviting allows them to be who they are so they can become who they want to be. If we can provide all of our students with this experience, hopefully, they will never feel like they have to pass for someone else.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/05/books/05masl.html

Reliving Great Literature

2011-01-24T09:21:00.000-08:00

As my son and I walked through the snow to school the other day, we discussed where he was in his reading of Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird which had been assigned in his English class. The more we talked about the book, the greater the mixture of emotions I felt as I moved among excitement, pride, nostalgia, and joy. What was it about this book that evoked this amalgam of feelings in me? More generally, why is it that we experience this same mixture of emotions when we watch our children encountering certain books for the first time?

In the case of To Kill A Mockingbird, was it the book itself or Gregory Peck forever etched in our minds as Atticus Finch? As embarrassed as I am to admit, I had not read this classic until I was in my 30’s, so it was not some warm recollection of myself at his age. Maybe part of the reason that I was heartened he was reading this book was that it would allow us to discuss the blatant racism and the struggle for civil rights I saw growing up in Kentucky in the 1960’s. Or possibly, it was that as a parent, I could both empathize with and admire Atticus as he attempts to be a good father and teach Scout some of the painful lessons of injustice. Maybe it was the memory of sadness I experienced when I put the book down after finishing it.

Perhaps, it’s the power of literature to evoke all of these emotions in us that compels us to read certain books. (Obviously, other forms of art can have a similar impact on us as we can all attest when our children discover music or movies that we enjoyed when we were their age.) It is one thing to read and love a book on one’s own: there’s a borderline illicit pleasure we experience as we become absorbed in the plot and fall for the characters in any great book, whether it be Odysseus in The Odyssey or Okonkwo in Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart. We have these people to ourselves, and we are in uncharted territory, unsure what will happen next. However, as much as we love that experience, it is magnified when we witness our students and our children have that same thrill for the first time and we watch them open new doors. This feeling is partially vicarious, but it is also the warmth of watching our loved ones being happy and growing up. There is a Yiddish word, kvell, that means to rejoice or exult, and maybe this is what we feel when we watch them cheer for Frodo in The Lord of the Rings Trilogy or cry for Francis Nolan in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

While there be many debates over what constitutes a classic, and these arguments are interesting and healthy, maybe one of the best definitions is that the book must be good enough to induce us to feel joy when we watch those of another generation open the cover and turn the first page. We may also feel a touch of envy and even some sorrow that we will never again read To Kill A Mockingbird for the first time, and that’s all right too.

Lessons for Seniors

2011-01-03T12:10:00.000-08:00

As I prepare for my upcoming spring semester class, I remember that teaching seniors can be a tricky thing. Although stories of “senioritis” are common and sometimes disturbing, we can also view this unique time in the life of a teenager as our final moments with them. It’s the last time that we can impart to them the “stuff” we want them to know, or we can try to make sure that they have the requisite skills to be successful at the next level. But we do so at the risk of our own frustration as we realize that they’re not really with us one hundred percent. Their focus is bifurcated between the world they’re living in currently and the one they’re going to inhabit in eight months. So, what do we really want to teach them in the last months we have with them?

I thought about this recently while reading an excellent new biography of Abraham Lincoln and listening to a fascinating podcast on the Persian Sufi poet Rumi. Eric Foner’s The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and Slavery in America tells the story of our sixteenth President’s grappling with “the peculiar institution” and the revising of his views on slavery over the course of his life. From his childhood in Kentucky and Indiana to his famous debates with Senator Stephen Douglas to his announcing the Emancipation Proclamation until his death, Lincoln’s view towards slavery evolved with the events occurring in the country. While many leaders held steadfast to opinions that failed to move with the times, Lincoln was able to reflect and acknowledge the need for change when presented with a new set of facts.

As Foner says at the end of his book,. “Lincoln did not enter the White House expecting to preside over the destruction of slavery. A powerful combination of events, as we have seen, propelled him down the road to emancipation and then to a reconsideration of the place blacks would occupy in a post-slavery America. Of course, the unprecedented crisis in which, as one member of Congress put it, ‘the events of an entire century transpire in a year,’ made change the order of the day. Yet, as the presidency of his successor demonstrated, not all men placed in a similar situation possessed the capacity for growth, the essence of Lincoln’s greatness. ‘I think we have reason to thank God for Abraham Lincoln,’ the abolitionist Lydia Maria Child wrote one week before his death. ‘With all his deficiencies, it must be admitted that he has grown continuously; and considering how slavery had weakened and perverted the moral sense of the whole country, it was great good luck to have the people elect a man who was willing to grow.’” (336)

Perhaps one of the greatest gifts we can give our students as they have one foot out the door is encouraging their innate desire to learn and to grow. We can show them that no matter one’s age, we are always developing and changing, and this is what it means to be human. We can show them that a hunger to learn is not something artificial that we ask of high school students; on the contrary, it is an integral component of being a whole human being. We are all works in progress. Lincoln was not the Lincoln we’ve come to know when he was a young attorney or when he was elected President. It was in his capacity to grow that he became one of our greatest elected officials; maybe this should be the accomplishment of his that we celebrate and attempt to emulate.

All too often, students leave high school burnt out and not having the fire in the belly to learn more. We need to challenge them to be open to and excited about the possibilities of growth and development. They need to know that as far along as they are, they are only beginning the process of becoming who they will be, and they need to be ready for what may come their way.

Professor Fatemeh Keshavarz from Washington University-St. Louis explains a similar concept when she discusses some of the lessons we can learn from the poetry of the Muhammad Jalal al-Din al-Balkhi al-Rumi in her interview with Christa Tippett on the American Public Media show Being. “On one level, you have to get on the road. You have to get started. You know, just like the earth that you know, have to plow the earth, you have to get moving. On another level, time and again, he reminds us that the destination is the journey itself. So there isn't a point where you say, 'OK, I'm here, I've reached, I'm done, I'm perfect. I don't need to do anything anymore.' In the incompleteness of that, the need to move forward is inherent in that incompleteness, in the process of going forward, that you make yourself better and better and you, in a way, never reach. So the separation is the powerful force that keeps you going. If you ever felt that, 'I have arrived, I've reached, this is it,' then you wouldn't go any further.”

If our seniors graduate excited about their next steps, confident in their ability to handle the world they are about to inhabit, and both humble and enthusiastic about the earth they will plow, then we can feel good about the work we have done with them.

The Science of Art And the Art of Science

2010-11-28T08:02:00.000-08:00

As I walks the halls, visit classes, and speak with teachers and students at Crossroads College Prep, I wonder at the frequency with which our artistic students perceive themselves as “bad in science” or how often our scientifically minded students see themselves as not being very creative. While the walls of our school are covered in jaw-dropping pieces of original artwork, the creators of those paintings, photographs, or sculptures all too often see themselves as artsy and fail to understand that the same process of thought that enables them to create that piece of artwork can be just as easily put to use in a lab. Similarly, the students who can do labs perfectly and produce exciting results do not always realize that they are in the process of creating something. While the teachers at Crossroads College Prep do as good of a job as any in teaching that creativity is present in any field, all too often students fail to understand this and they see the arts and the sciences as two sides of a dichotomy.

Reading Richard Holmes’ engaging book The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science,, I came across a quotation from the British scientist Sir Humphry Davy (1778-1829) that encapsulates what I have been trying to say for many years,

“The perception of truth is almost as simple a feeling as the perception of beauty: and the genius of Newton, of Shakespeare, of Michael Angelo, and of Handel are not very remote in character from each other. Imagination, as well as the reason, is necessary to perfection in the philosophic mind. A rapidity of combination, a power of perceiving analogies, and of comparing them by facts, is the creative source of discovery. Discrimination and delicacy of sensation, so important in physical research, are other words for taste; and love of nature is the same passion, as the love of the magnificent, the sublime, and the beautiful.”

As Davy states, one of the ways in which we see our world anew is through the power of analogies. When we apply what we know in one area to another by looking at the applicability of those concepts or process, we are in the process of making something new and different. We begin with what we know and we come to comprehend its relationship to something different. I am reminded often of the story Walter Isaacson tells in his biography of Albert Einstein and his formulation of the theory of relativity. Isaacson describes when the physicist, then living in Bern near the train station and the clock tower and working at the patent office, pondered the nature of time and space. It was Einstein’s ability to take the things he saw in one realm, in this case watching the trains go back and forth in the rail yard and considering the ways that the telegraph office used electrical signals to synchronize clocks within time zones, and apply those images and concepts to another arena, the physics of light and energy, that made him a truly exceptional thinker and scientist. This was an act of artistry as much as it was a function of science.

If we continue to teach our students that the worlds of art and science are mutually exclusive, we will continue to shortchange them as individuals and lose out as a society. We must help them see that they are artists and scientists in everything they do. As Holmes says at the end of his book, “The old rigid debates and boundaries-science versus religion, science versus the arts, science versus traditional ethics-are no longer enough. We should be impatient with them. We need a wider, more generous, more imaginative perspective. Above all, perhaps, we need the three things that a scientific culture can sustain: the sense of individual wonder, the power of hope, and the vivid but questing belief in a future for the globe.”

The Adjacent Possible

2010-11-09T06:41:00.000-08:00

Both in a podcast and a recent article, I came across the phrase “the adjacent possible” and being curious, I looked into it more. According to the scientist Stuart Kauffman, the adjacent possible describes the potential of what could be when we combine what we know currently with what is just beyond our immediate knowledge and in the process move toward a higher level of complexity. The writer Steven Johnson discusses the adjacent possible as “a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself.”

If you think about it, you realize we know this intuitively. How many times as children do we play on the floor with a variety of toys, put them together, and create something completely new? (Isn’t this a major theme in the Toy Story movies?) Whatever it is we’re making, we’re not devising it entirely out of the ether: we’re taking what we have, looking beyond its apparent possibility, and stretching its limits to the point that we have made something more complicated and potentially more sophisticated.

However, this view of slow, methodical invention where one thing builds on the next or combines with something else does not always correspond with the way we portray genius or creativity. We propagate an image of the lone inventor in his/her lab, slaving away on his/her own, and voila!, creating the next great thing. We look at inspiration as revolutionary rather than as evolutionary, and as a result, we may discourage those who are on the precipice of discovery.

I wonder if we teach students the power and the excitement of the adjacent possible in our schools and in their lives. Children are fully aware of this process of change in their own world, possibly more than ever as they use the web to mix and match and create cultural hybrids. They have no trouble taking the music to which the listen or the movies they watch, combining them with other media, and inventing something entirely new. While youth may have always done this, the ability to merge a variety of formats and produce something different and more complex may be more present than ever.

Is our fear of plagiarism and the failure of our laws to keep up with the changes in the marketplace of ideas preventing us from maximizing this form of creativity? Are we demonstrating to our students that this process of creativity is in fact how the greatest scientists and artists have functioned forever?

In addition, are we shortchanging our students and preventing them from meeting their own adjacent possibilities? We should be helping them see that they are always on the edge of something completely new, something completely different, and something very exciting and more complex. This is what schools can and should do, and we should celebrate the adjacent possible all around us.

To read more about this, check out Steven Johnson’s recent article,
ttp://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703989304575503730101860838.html?mod=WSJ_hp_mostpop_read#printMode

Good Work and The Joy In it

2010-10-26T05:05:00.001-07:00

In an interview with Krista Tippett from American Public Media’s radio show Speaking of Faith (it is now called Being), Physician and Professor Sherwin Nuland attempts to address the biology of the spirit. Nuland is a clinical professor of surgery at Yale University where he teaches bioethics and medical history and has written two books, How We Die and How We Live.

As Nuland discusses the connection between biological and spiritual matters, he also points to the joy we can experience by fulfilling our humanity. At one point, he says, “It’s the human spirit that got me through. It was the sense that there is a richness in this world that’s enormous fun if you can find it, and it’s the kind of fun that you can have while actually making the world a better place for other people, too. There’s an integrity to it in the sense of oneness, of a unity.”

On a daily basis, we read of the stresses present in the lives of our students and adolescents. From the pressure to get into “the right school” to building the perfect college application, we hear of over-programmed young men and young women whose lives lack balance and perspective. They rush from one activity to another while eating in the car, they spend their time planning for the next step rather than living in the moment, and they feel little actual joy or purpose other than preparing for what’s next.

This is especially true as our high school seniors look at colleges and decide whether to apply early somewhere. They see the numbers of students who are hoping to be accepted to the same colleges they wish to attend, they know that universities are cutting back on financial aid, and they worry that either their scores should be higher or their grade point average needs that extra numerical advantage over their peers. One can see the physical manifestations of their stress in the annual outbreak of acne at this time of year, the bags under the eyes, the bitten off fingernails, and the jeans that hang off waists that are narrower than just a few months ago.

While we want our students to be goal-oriented and to pursue their dreams, we also want them to enjoy life and to take pride in their accomplishments. We desire that they participate in work that is valuable to them and to others. At Crossroads College Prep, we are using the language of Dr. Howard Gardner from Harvard University when he describes what he calls “good work-that is work that is excellent in quality, socially responsible, and meaningful to its practitioners.” We hope they can see that work is not only worthwhile, but it can also be joyful.

On top of that, we want them to realize that doing well and doing good can form two parts of a life filled with integrity. What a gift we will give our students and our world if they can graduate with the notion that good work is enriching and it’s enjoyable.

Knowledge and Will

2010-10-12T09:14:00.000-07:00

A student’s comment after class recently reminded me of both the joy and the importance of our teaching what we do. Following our reading of a chapter from Sandy Tollan’s book The Lemon Tree: An Arab, A Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East, the students and I discussed the actions of the people of Bulgaria during The Holocaust. Bulgaria and Denmark were the only countries that refused to deport their Jewish population to the Nazi death camps, and it was due to the actions of many righteous Gentiles that forty-nine thousand Bulgarian Jews survived World War II. As opposed to the people in other Eastern European countries who all too readily collaborated with the Nazis in the actions of genocide, the Bulgarians committed to acting humanely, and in the process lives were saved.

Later that day, one of the students thanked me for showing what to her was a different side of the Holocaust. She said that she had learned how awful the concentration camps were, but she had not known nearly enough about the people who had stood up and refused to cooperate. She said that while our class discussion in no way minimized the horrors of the Holocaust, it did give her some hope in knowing that not everyone acquiesced.

As educators, it is imperative that we teach our students the good and the bad that has happened in the past. We dis-serve them if we only teach the great things that occurred and do not help them understand the mistakes that have happened or the crimes that have been perpetrated. However, if we neglect to teach them that even in our darkest times, there have been people who have been willing to stand against evil, we also serve them poorly in more than one way.

First of all, it is historically inaccurate. We must help students see the courage of those who have rebelled when wrong prevailed. Maybe we should require every child to read Adam Hochschild’s book Bury The Chains on the early abolitionist movement or study Mark Twain’s pamphlet against King Leopold’s actions in the Congo. To sanitize the past is wrong, but to omit actions of bravery can be equally damaging.

Second of all, it deprives students of a sense of hope as had happened with my
student. To show adolescents that others have stood against tyrants enables them to believe that it can occur again. I remember many years ago when many students complained to me that a class on prejudice, oppression, and genocide depressed them and made them want to stop living. They figured “why bother.” The truth can and may be depressing, but their ignorance of those brave souls only worsened their sense of helplessness and made them tune out.

Perhaps most dangerously, when students lack hope, they eventually lose their will and their sense of purpose. The precursor to will is hope, and without the faith that things can improve, one feels like she is tilting at windmills and that her actions will bear no fruit. In this situation, one ultimately surrenders and our students become participants rather than actors on the stage of life.

We want our students to know their past, but we want them to know all of it. We want them to internalize that they stand on the shoulders of giants who have struggled to realize what is true and good in their world. When we teach them both of these lessons, we give them the information they need and the power to be the change we all hope that they become.

Technology, Talent, and Tolerance

2010-09-27T03:13:00.000-07:00

In a speech at the Ideas Festival in Aspen, Professor and urban theorist Richard Florida, author of many books including most recently The Great Reset, spoke on the effects of the 2008 economic crash on American society and America’s cities. In his talk, Florida discussed how urban areas in the United States are changing in this new age, and he calls for people to plan accordingly. As in previous books and talks, Florida stresses that the successful cities of the future will place a premium on the three T’s-technology, talent, and tolerance, as a way to attract creative people who will help certain urban areas thrive while other cities will fall further behind.

As an educator and as a resident of a city, I found Florida’s observations fascinating. However, they should also force those of us concerned about these changes to consider how we prepare our students to be not only people who will benefit from these new directions, but also people who will lead them. In a different age when cities were based on certain types of industries, the role of education was to prepare young men and young women to work in factories, either as laborers or as managers. In an era where creativity will rule, we must consider how we educate young men and young women to take risks of innovation, realize that making mistakes is a part of the process, and that every endeavor is a creative act.

People have been discussing the need for education and schooling, which are not necessarily synonymous, to change in our post-industrial society, so what I am saying is not necessarily anything new. Many institutions are making monumental changes in the use of technology in instruction. Whether it’s schools where every student has a laptop, online schooling, or schools that teach through video games, there are a multiplicity of institutions engaged in the application of technology to education and the research therein. It feels like there’s a gold rush on and educators are scrambling to find the next educational El Dorado through the application of technology.

However, how much better are schools at seeking out and nurturing the latent talents in young men and young women than they were in the past? The inability or unwillingness to bring forth the inherent creativity in every child may be lacking even more today than in the past as we live in an era characterized by a constant focus on standardized testing and the strains imposed by economic distress. As more and more schools concentrate on high stakes testing and eliminate funding for the arts, there is less time and energy to engage students in developing their creativity in all areas. There is only so much time available, and resources feel finite.

In addition, schools continue to grapple with how to educate students for a globally interconnected world where openness to diversity will play a major role. Students must be able to work with different types of people in a variety of settings. Not to do so fails our students and stunts our work force. Unfortunately, here again an emphasis on standardized testing and a limited amount of time will relegate teaching students about diversity to either a superficial add-on or take it out completely.

Florida’s three T’s-technological, talent, and tolerance-are each necessary, but none is sufficient. My fear is that we have jumped on the technology bandwagon because that is the most tangible solution and consequently the easiest problem to address. However, if we stop there and we don’t work on stimulating creativity and teaching tolerance, we will continue to shortchange our students and our cities, and consequently our entire country and society, will suffer.

Absolutes and Relativism

2010-09-11T14:31:00.000-07:00

A recent episode of CBC’s Ideas featured an interview with Canadian writer William Gairdner and a discussion of his recent book called The Book of Absolutes. Gairdner argues that a misinterpretation of Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, along with the politicization of the academy, led to the concept of moral relativism. As a result, according to Gairdner, societies have lost their moral moorings and people are confused as to whether there is such a thing as right or wrong.

Whether one agrees with Gairdner or not, and there is plenty in his thinking with which to disagree, the greater question of whether there are universal truths that transcend cultures provides for a fascinating and important discussion for all of us as parents and educators. While we want our students to be culturally sensitive and understand that people in different places and different times may think differently, we also wish for our teenagers to develop a sense of what is right and good that they can have with them at all times.

Many times, I have had the pleasure of engaging high school students in these types of discussions. A young woman believes with all of her heart in the equality of both genders but finds herself morally repulsed by the customs of another culture; a young man argues passionately for the sovereignty of every country but feels that we cannot sit by idly while genocide occurs. These adolescents are fierce in their convictions but they can be equally confused by the complexities of the issues.

Isn’t this what good teaching is all about? Isn’t our job to provoke them so they can wrestle with the moral dilemmas of their day and help them formulate their own code. We’re not here necessarily to teach our students what to think, but we do have a responsibility to teach them how to think so they can make an informed opinion. We must teach them how to look at a conflict in all of its facets and from every angle. We should help them see the issue from three hundred and sixty degrees and have a sense of empathy for every party involved. (Note I say empathy, not sympathy since they may not agree with one side or another.) After they have analyzed the arguments and understood the viewpoints of all sides, they are equipped to make a judgement and feel relatively secure. This does not mean they will not experience doubt, but it does mean they have done their intellectual due diligence.

Teaching students in this way is mighty hard work, and it eludes easy recipes. However, it is rewarding in its own right and it is imperative that we do so if we are to prepare our students to be citizens in a democratic society and an interconnected world. We cannot prepare them for every situation they will face; nevertheless, we can and we must help them develop a sensitivity toward others that is combined with a knowledge of what is just and right and how to act when they see things that they know are wrong. We want our students to understand the wisdom behind the lyrics of the John Cougar Mellencamp song, “you’ve gotta stand right up for something, or you’ll fall for anything.”

Identity

2010-08-22T11:11:00.000-07:00

Later this week, I will begin a class on identity in the Middle East by asking the students to respond to a question which on the surface may seem simple but can also be very complicated. I will ask the students to list all of the ways they identify themselves. Go ahead-take a minute, pull out a piece of paper and a writing utensil and jot down all of your identifiers. I have done this activity before, and it's always been interesting to hear how teenagers in today's world choose to be identified.

I thought of this activity recently while reading Amartya Sen's Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny. I came across the following passages, 'The sense of identity can make an important contribution to the strength and warmth of our relations with others, such as neighbors, or members of the same community, or fellow citizens, of followers of the same religion.Our focus on particular identities can enrich our bonds and make us do many things for each other and can help to take us beyond our self-centered lives...That understanding is important, but it has to be supplemented by a further recognition that a sense of identity can firmly exclude many people even as it warmly embraces others...The adversity of exclusion can be made to go hand in hand with the gifts of inclusion."

In an insightful and compelling argument, Sen focuses on the dangers of identifying oneself and others by only one element of our being. Sen shows how this reductionist approach can lead to conflict among and within a variety of groups, and he provides many examples of how doing so has led to warfare between countries. I recommend this book highly to anyone interested in political science, history, current events, or sociology, and I am looking forward to using it in my classes.

However, the book can also be applied to the lives of adolescents as they navigate the process of identity formation. Beyond learning how to do well in their academic classes and how to perform in their many activities, including athletics and the arts, teenagers are consumed by the developmental appropriate process of learning who they are and figuring out what kind of people they want to be. They are literally discovering their person-hood. I think of the way that Michaelangelo described sculpture: he once explained that the statue was inside the block, and his job was to chop away at the extraneous stone that was weighing the body down and preventing it from showing its true self. Like that famous Renaissance artist, our students are constantly engaged in the process of trying to eliminate their superfluous exterior so they can get to the core of who they are.

However, they often demonstrate that they're going through this struggle by what they're wearing. I have often thought that this may be one of the reasons that dress can be so crucial for some adolescents, and as a result, why dress codes may carry such weight in their lives. What may look to us adults as students merely dressing differently from day to day may in fact be students trying on a variety of identities as represented by their outfits. If clothes make the man or woman, then an adolescent's sartorial selection announces to all of her peers who she is that day.

In order for students to be free to develop their identity, they must go to schools that allow this process to occur safely and without risk of ridicule or persecution. All too often, students feel imprisoned by the identity others have chosen for them, and they desperately wish to try something new or be someone else, but the conditions of their school will not allow them to do so. For all of the talk that schools are liberal places, the adults and students in them can be extremely conservative and not allow others to change. Perhaps this is also why it is so crucial that children be in diverse settings like Crossroads College Prep; children should find people like themselves in school, but they also must be exposed to people who differ from them so they can make as well-informed decisions as is possible.

Every autumn, we watch students return to school after a summer off desirous to change. The student who had a rough year academically wishes to do well; the student who never caused any trouble decides she wishes to be a little rebellious. While not allowing students to do anything that is either dangerous to themselves or harmful to others, the adults in schools must realize that these changes are not only appropriate but may be necessary for the student to find out who s/he truly is. It is up to us to create the conditions that will allow this to occur.

Many years ago, a student at Crossroads College Prep came to me as excited as I had ever seen her. She told me that she had discovered a quotation that she thought applied perfectly to the School; since then, we have printed that quote on the T-shirts we distribute to students we have admitted. It not only proclaims what we believe, but it also reinforces the kind of place we want to be. That quotation goes, "The best way to find out who you are is to go to the place where you don't have to be anyone else."

Imagine how much easier the lives of all adolescents could be if all of us in every school took that line to heart. As we begin another year of school, and our students are coming back, let's re-dedicate ourselves to empowering young men and young women to travel the path of finding out who they are and becoming the people they want to be. What greater gift could we give them?

Wandering Minds

2010-07-07T05:23:00.000-07:00

In a scene from the futuristic science fiction thriller movie Minority Report (based on a Phillip K. Dick story), the main character, who is a detective, assembles the clues for a crime that has yet to happen by moving pictures that are floating around in space on a virtual board. He rapidly pulls together what appear to be unrelated visual images of events that have happened, are happening, or will happen and places them in chronological order so can he ascertain what will occur and stop the crime before it takes place. This stunning scene resonated with me then, and I return to it often as I think about the ways in which we process information. Like the character played by Tom Cruise in this Steven Spielberg movie, we are constantly prioritizing what we know, trying to put facts together so we can figure out their greater meaning, and maybe even discard what we may not need to know. We do this intentionally and consciously; however, we also do this when we're asleep, when we're daydreaming, or when we're staring into space and seemingly doing nothing.

I was reminded of this recently when I read an article in the New York Times called "Discovering the Virtues of A Wandering Mind" (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/29/science/29tier.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&sq=wandering%20minds&st=cse&scp=1) that discussed the ways in which we think when our minds appear to be unfocused. In fact, our brains may be like Tom Cruise's detective moving images around in a more innovative manner than if we were solely concentrating on the task at hand. As the article states, "Another school of psychologists, which includes the Santa Barbara researchers, theorizes that both networks are working on agendas beyond the immediate task. That theory could help explain why studies have found that people prone to mind wandering also score higher on tests of creativity, like the word-association puzzle mentioned earlier." Not all mind wandering is beneficial, and sometimes, and as we know, it can be counter-productive. Nevertheless, there are times when we are "somewhere else" and sub-consciously putting things together in a way that advances our thinking and learning.

I remember an experience when I was a relatively new teacher that made this clear to me. In the summer of 1992, I attended the Klingenstein Summer Institute for Teachers in their first five years of teaching in an independent school. One stormy afternoon at Columbia University, I found myself staring out the window during a lecture on assessment. All of a sudden, I had a moment of understanding that transcended anything I had experienced up to that point. Many thoughts about assessment with which I had been grappling came together, and what had seemed inchoate suddenly became very clear. Although I was fully aware of what the professor was saying, I was also integrating his remarks into what I had been studying earlier in the three week long institute and my "spacing out" actually allowed me to bring what seemed to be unrelated concepts together into a greater whole. At this moment, I also realized that we need to provide students with high level material in our courses, but we also need to give them time to process what they are learning so they can give it context.

For students to place information in a context and see the interrelated nature of facts, we need to allow their minds to roam. They need to have their eureka moments when they suddenly figure things out. There are few events in teaching, or in life in general, that are more gratifying than when one sees a student "get" it. But those moments can only come if there is time to go down paths that may not lead to the right place or to try and fit puzzle pieces together that may not click. Eventually, things do fall in place, but they rarely do so in a linear fashion or on our timeline.

That is why the most important element in teaching may be time which is unfortunately the one resource we seem to lack the most. I recently heard about a student who was reading Homer's The Odyssey during his summer vacation after he had read it earlier in the year. He told his mother that he wanted to read it again when he had more time. Maybe his re-reading during the summer would enable him to see things he could not see before. Fortunately in the world of schools, we have summer to reflect, analyze, and yes, process what we have learned. Although summer is nice, we need to find a way to build in time for daydreaming into our school year so students can make these leaps more often and move to higher planes when they are around their teachers and their peers. As fun as these epiphanies can be, we need to be able to bounce our discoveries off other people and hear what they think.

As Dr. Jonathan Schooler of the University of California-Santa Barbara says, "For creativity you need your mind to wander, but you also need to be able to notice that you’re mind wandering and catch the idea when you have it. If Archimedes had come up with a solution in the bathtub but didn’t notice he’d had the idea, what good would it have done him?"

Serendipity

2010-05-26T09:46:00.000-07:00

Reading a fascinating article called Serendipity is No Accident by Robert Friedel recently reminded me of the importance of teaching students how to think as much as teaching them what to think. Friedel points to the role of serendipity in science as crucial to many of the discoveries made over time. He discusses serendipity as "the insightful use of deduction-the sort of thing that any reader of the detective stories of Arthur Conan Doyle would recognize of Sherlock Holmes, "It's elementary, my dear Watson." He also says, "Insight is every bit as important as the accident. Simply to stumble upon something of value is not serendipity; that requires a mental capacity that goes beyond the obvious." Friedel goes on to categorize different types of serendipity and to explain how it has figured into the history of chemistry.

In an age of rapidly increasing amounts of information, and even more ways to access that information, we know that it's just not possible to know everything. (Not that it ever was for that matter.) For a humorous riff on this, check out A. J. Jacobs' book, The Know It-All: One Man's Humble Quest To Become The Smartest Man in the World. Nevertheless, with all of the talk of teaching students skills rather than content, we all too often fall into the trap of teaching students as if there's a body of knowledge out there that if they can just learn, they will be set. Our education continues to be set up in this way, and we remain fixed in this mode. Make no mistake, we are improving, and the meter that measures content versus skills has moved from where it was, but we still have a way to go.

Don't get me wrong. Students must have the foundational knowledge and the skills to be able to spot a surprise when it occurs. There are some facts that they need to know, and they need to understand that these facts are immutable and crucial. However, they also must learn that these facts are nothing more than the initial set of conditions. As the historian Barbara Tuchman once discussed, the facts of history are like the wood with which a carpenter builds. They are important, but they are nothing without the carpenter shaping them into something. Or as Friedel says, "But the true combination to science....is in making the surprise fit some larger scheme of meaning."

In addition to teaching students how to solve problems and think, we must help them develop what Art Costa refers to as habits of mind. Students must learn to not only be critical and analytical. We must help them be open to insightful deduction. Like the scientists in Friedel's article, they need to prepare for finding one thing when they are looking for something else and they need to be open to finding something by an alternative route than they originally designed. While this may be unsettling and even frightening, we need to challenge students that this is how science has progressed and assure them that not only is this permissible, but it is imperative.

Perhaps one of the most important traits we can teach students is knowledge based humility. One cannot find something if one is not looking, so we must begin by helping them learn what are the possibilities that are out there for them. After they have learned the first principles, they need to be prepared to move on to the next level, and they must be ready to expend energy and to work long hours to get there. Nevertheless, if they don't realize that there are possibilities that they have never envisioned, they will remain closed to the discoveries that their peers will make. To close with one more quotation from Friedel, "The quintessential joy of serendipitous science lies in its capacity to remind us that, as much as we know, we know only a fraction of what is to be known. As the accidents tell us and the sagacity to use them confirms, we do not even truly know what it is we do not know."

An Empathic On Line Community

2010-05-10T03:32:00.000-07:00

On Wednesday, May 5th, the New York Times ran an article on a new social networking site called Formspring. (There is a link to the article below.) This site, which can be linked to one's Facebook page and Twitter account, allows one to make comments regarding his/her peers for all to read. As the article highlights, this site allows even greater potential for cyber bullying than sites where people are identified since anyone, including adolescents, can make snide and damaging remarks about other people anonymously and consequently with no repercussions. We know that students have been writing and making biting remarks about others for a long time, and at times, they have scribbled these comments anonymously on sidewalks and bathroom walls. So one might ask if this site is simply another way of doing what they have already done.

In addition, the article notes the temptation for students to read things about themselves even when they wish not to. Much as we find ourselves peering at accidents when we try to look away, these students cannot prevent themselves from reading disparaging comments about themselves when they fully realize that they may be hurt in the process. Here again, we know that students in high school can badger others to "tell me, tell me" what someone said about them when they know full well that they do not want to hear it.

So, what's the difference between what students are experiencing in cyber space and actual space, outside of the medium of the communication. First of all, to quote Marshall McCluhan, the medium is the message. The fact that students are sitting in their bedrooms by themselves or on their Smartphones allows their messages to be nastier and even more degrading; we all know that furiously typing and hitting the send button is much easier than saying something to someone's face. The absence of an immediate and physical recipient enables one to be on the one hand more brazen and on the other hand less responsible. We know this rationally, but we are reminded of it daily as we sit alone disconnected from the content of the messages we write and the people on the other end of them.

Perhaps even more disturbing is the anonymity of sites like Formspring. I remember many years when for the first and only time, I joined in a YouTube thread conversation;in this case, it was regarding a song by Elton John. I made what I thought was a rather innocuous statement about Bernie Taupin's composing the lyrics of a well-known tune only to see the next comment in the thread toward me characterized by profanity and mean-spiritedness. I sat there stunned and wondering if this person, who I did not know, would have said those things to me if we had been in the same room. I realize that this could have been an anomaly, but I have to believe that there are probably many other examples like this.

On the same day that I read the article on Formspring, I spoke with some 8th graders at Crossroads College Prep about this site and the anonymity it offers. As is typical, our students reaffirmed my faith in the good judgement of many adolescents; they were appalled that people would take advantage of this site to trash others. However, for those who use sites like Formspring, the mass audience it offers makes it qualitatively and quantitatively different than merely scrawling something on the bathroom wall. With a snicker and push of a button that will send a message to many more people than merely who will read a comment written someplace, one person can destroy the life of another; this has been seen all too often in the attempted and successful suicides by teenagers across the country, including Missouri.

Both the medium and the message are different, and as educators and as parents, we owe our children lessons in how to live in a cyber world that has a code of ethics and personal responsibility. To allow them free rein in the virtual world is to invite them pain in the physical world. The philosopher and writer Jeremy Rifkin in his new book called The Empathic Civilization points out that with vehicles like Skype, we may be able to create a greater sense of empathy in our children as they learn to relate to others in far off places in ways that they could not before. How wonderful it would be if instead of our new forms of technology causing even more rancor and division they actually brought people together. Wouldn't it be great if our cyber world allowed us, to paraphrase Atticus Finch in To Kill A Mockingbird, to put on another man's shoes on and walk around in them for a while.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/06/us/06formspring.html?scp=1&sq=formspring&st=cse

Breaking the Math/Science Barrier

2010-04-28T05:08:00.000-07:00

Blog on Women in the Business World

A recent article in the New York Times Sunday Business section described the dearth of women in executive positions in high tech start up companies. As the article points out, "women own 40 percent of the private businesses in the United States, according to the Center for Women's Business Research. But they create only 8 percent of the venture-backed tech start up, according to Astia, a non-profit group that advises female entrepreneurs." This statistic is all the more surprising and disturbing since women outnumber men on college campuses, law schools, medical schools, and in the work force. The article gives a variety of reasons for why this trend is occurring, including long-lasting sexism, the unwillingness of women to stay enrolled in engineering programs, and the availability of venture capital funds for firms run by women.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/18/technology/18women.html?scp=2&sq=out%20of%20the%20loop%20in%20silicon%20valley&st=cse

Perhaps one of the major reasons, though, for the lack of women in high tech executive positions may be the absence of girls in high level math and science courses in high school. I can remember visiting a public high school in 2009, looking in on a senior/junior physics class, and seeing only two girls in a class of twenty students. As Failing at Fairness by David and Myra Sakder noted over a decade ago, girls who have very often outperformed their male peers in elementary school math classes began to fall behind in middle high school. (I know that there are plenty of issues plaguing boys in American schools and these require discussion; however, the fact that boys are having difficulties does not mitigate the fact that women still face what seems to be an impenetrable ceiling in certain businesses, and the roots of these inequities may start in middle and high school.)

According to a recent National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded study, "new research by a team that includes vocational psychologists at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) indicates that the self-confidence instilled by parents and teachers is more important for young girls learning math and science than their initial interest." While people have thought for years that girls were just less interested in math and science than boys, recent studies have found that this may be a result of their feeling inadequate rather than their under-performing. After twenty years of encouraging girls to pursue education in math and science, the stereotypes regarding boys being better than girls in these fields remain, and when young women struggle, their confidence fades quickly. It may be that girls have the ability to do just as well as the boys in their classes, but when they suffer setbacks they give up more quickly because their problems reaffirm the stereotypes that boys are better in science and math. In an article on the study, the authors pointed out that high expectations and teachers demonstrating that they believe in girls doing well in math and science may be some of the most important means for helping young women overcome their hesitancy. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/09/080905153807.htm

While some of this may sound obvious, or just as relevant to boys, the long term repercussions are different. As young women begin to tune out in their math classes, they inadvertently deny themselves future opportunities in STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) fields. On one level, this is an issue of social justice as women are prevented from fulfilling their potential, and society loses out in the end. From a pragmatic perspective, this is all the more disconcerting for at least two reasons. As the gender disparity on college campuses increases, we will need more women to go into these fields if the United States is to compete in a globally interrelated and cutthroat marketplace. The numbers alone will dictate the necessity for women to become engineers. However, as the NYTimes article also discusses, "For those with a bottom-line approach, analysts say it makes a difference when women are in the garages where tech start-ups are founded or the boardrooms where they are funded. Studies have found that teams with both women and men are more profitable and innovative. Mixed-gender teams have produced information technology patents that are cited 26 percent to 42 percent more often than the norm, according to the National Center for Women and Information Technology. In a study analyzing the relationship between the composition of corporate boards and financial performance, Catalyst, a research organization on women and business, found a greater return on investment, equity and sales in I.T. companies that have directors who are women." As with the benefits from other forms of diversity, when teams have men and women, the results are more creative and more able to address potential obstacles.

At Crossroads College Prep, we are dedicated to providing opportunities for all of our students regardless of gender, ethnicity, or socio-economic status. We are proud of the performance of our young women in science and math related classes. On nationally standardized tests, our girls outperform their female and male peers in math by far, and there is little difference in their scores and those of their male counterparts at Crossroads College Prep. Girls make up 66% of the school's AP Calculus Class, and 58% percent of the students in the Senior Level Advanced Physics Class are girls. One of the reasons that we altered our science sequence many years ago and required all 9th graders to take a non-math based Physics class is so all girls would take Physics, and would feel confident about their abilities in science. Over the years, this hope has been realized. Just recently at our final assembly for seniors, we were heartened to hear that two thirds of the female members of the Class of 2010 wish to major in STEM related fields in college.

For many reasons, we take pride in the performance of our girls, and we look for them to continue do well in their science and math related courses in college and in their careers, whatever field they choose. Nothing could be more heartwarming than to hear one of our students say to another in admiration, "man, you do math like a girl!"

Play Another Octave

2010-03-26T14:50:00.000-07:00

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?

2010-03-07T08:14:00.000-08:00

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?"

The Arts and Evolution

2010-02-16T12:04:00.000-08:00

In a recent Canadian Broadcasting radio show called Ideas, host Paul Kennedy interviewed Denis Dutton, professor of philosophy at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, and author of The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution. In his book, Dutton argues that as humans we adapted during the Pleistocene Era to appreciate art and we continue to evolve as a species in our love of various forms of art; in addition, Dutton counters the notion that art is culturally determined. Dutton looks at commonalities among cultures over time and among different places and proposes the notion that we have evolved in our love of art in the same way that we have evolved physically. Whether one agrees with Dutton's argument that a love of art is culturally determined or innate in us as a species, his concept that people go through evolutionary leaps in their appreciation of art is thought provoking. If you're interested in listening to this show, or other episodes of this weekly radio program, check out this link. http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/ CBC's show Ideas can also be podcasted and found on iTunes.

As I listened to the conversation with Dutton, I recalled a recent article in the New York Times Education Life Magazine on how elderly adults can continue to learn and keep their brains sharp. According to this article, called How To Train The Aging Brain, we tend to become more distracted as we get older, and as a result, we forget what we have read or the movies we have seen. (Shocking, I know.) "Indeed, aging brains, even in the middle years, fall into what’s called the default mode, during which the mind wanders off and begin daydreaming." However, all is not lost; on the contrary, as we age, we become more proficient at seeing the big picture and tying things together than we did when we were younger. For this article, go to http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/education/edlife/03adult

Kathleen Taylor, a professor at St. Mary’s College of California, believes that one way for us older adults to learn more and be more mentally agile is to study ideas that question our pre-conceived notions or concepts that we have always believed true. We need to confront notions we always thought of as givens or learn new material that call on us to see the world differently or make our brains get out of a rut and plow new ground. For example, we should begin to study a foreign language. (I realized this on a personal level recently as I prepared to read Torah for the first time in thirty years for my son's Bar Mitzvah, and noticed that my brain felt amazingly energized and alive.) As individuals continue to grow and develop by making leaps and bounds between the old and familiar to the new and unknown, they act out on a microcosmic level the evolutionary path as a species that Dutton describes.

As educators and as parents, shouldn't this be the way we teach our students and children? Isn't a part of good teaching asking our children to confront what they have always believed and help them find out what is true on their own? We should expose them to multiple and even contradictory viewpoints in history and literature; we should have them grapple with concepts in science and math that make them question what they previously thought; learning a foreign language can be a fun experience but it should cause students to move out of their comfort zone. In essence, our role is to create those moments when students can have an epiphany, not in the religious sense but in the ancient Greek notion of a "sudden realization or comprehension of the (larger) essence or meaning of something...." (Wikipedia) For these moments to be authentic and meaningful, they must include some struggle and temporary discomfort for that is when the growth can truly occur and students can move to an entirely new level.

Much of the joy in teaching and parenting comes when we witness our students having an "a-ha" experience and knowing right then and there that they, and their world, will never be the same. As parents, we take great joy when our children discover something that may confuse but also excite them. It is in the rare and powerful moments when the world seems to stop and they make their own evolutionary leaps that we can smile and take pride in their development; as a result, we can feel optimistic for the young men and women in front of us and sanguine for our species as a whole.

How Much Do Our Children Consume?

2010-01-24T07:01:00.000-08:00

So, there they were-two headlines in the same day's New York Times, Children Awake? Then They're Probably Online and Snack Time Never Ends. The first article discussed the unforeseen and surprising increase in the amount of time, nearly seven and a half hours a day not including texting and talking on phones, that children ages 8-18 spend on their electronic devices. Much of the analysis was contradictory pointing out on the one hand that many students still spend a significant amount of time exercising while other studies attempted to correlate a link between time on electronics and our nation's growing epidemic of obesity. Similarly mixed results reflected the ambiguous impact of time on screens on students' academic performance with some students doing well in school and others receiving low grades. At the end of the day, it seemed like the jury was still out on the effect of students averaging more time on line. However, the fact that this is a new reality was unequivocal. As Dr. Michael Rich, a pediatrician at Children's Hospital Boston and director of the Center of Media and Children's Health said, "it was time to stop arguing over whether it was good or bad and accept it as part of children's environment, 'like the air they breathe, the water they drink and the food they eat.'"

Turning to the Dining section on the same day, the above the fold headline and article discussed the proliferation of snacks in our children's lives starting in kindergarten. While some of the article focused on the role of snacks following young children's sporting activities, the point was very clear. More children are eating eating smaller amounts more frequently and consequently eating fewer traditional meals. (A good friend once explained to me that in youth soccer, "it's really all about the snacks.") Statistics cited in the article pointed out that "Between 1977 and 2002, the percent of the American population eating three or more snacks increased to 42 percent form 11 percent." Parents in the article bemoaned the omnipresence of food in their children's lives, and felt that their only recourse was to at least make sure that the snacks were healthy.

Reading these two articles from the same day brought on for me a variety of reactions. First of all, I wondered if in both cases it's the phenomenon of our children spending more time on line and snacking (one can in fact envision them typing on a lap top while eating a ho-ho--does anyone still eat ho-hos or ding dongs?) or is it what they're actually doing and eating. If Johnny is playing World of Warcraft at 2:00 AM while shoving Doritoes in his mouth, our antenna go up; if Susie is researching disaster relief efforts in third world countries at 5:00 PM while munching on carrot sticks, we're not quite so concerned.

Or does our concern arise because it's the decrease in the amount of face to face time that children are experiencing? Anthony's noshing all day means that he's not hungry for dinner when the whole family wants to sit down together, and research for years has shown the importance of families eating together for the physical and psychological well-being of adolescents. Melissa's running to her computer after school prevents her from being outside playing kickball or catching up with her buddies.

Is our concern stemming from both of these articles the fact that our children's lives are becoming more and more atomized? Is their actual thinking becoming more fragmented by their ingesting many, many more pieces of information, so, they have less time to digest what they have taken in? As they eat more and more snacks, do they lose the opportunity to appreciate a good and slow meal and the companionship that accompanies a conversation around the dinner table? Are these in fact two sides of the same coin?

Maybe the answer exists somewhere between on the one hand throwing up our hands in resignation and saying, "well, that's just the way it is," and on the other hand trying to deny our children all technology and food between meals. Possibly, the lesson here is to teach our children how to manage the ubiquitous technology and food in their lives and return to one of the first lessons we taught them, to always take things in right sized bytes.

A Great Good Place

2010-01-06T13:51:00.000-08:00

A recent article in the Style section of the Sunday New York Times discussed a day in the life of the Hot Chocolate Sparrow in Orleans, Massachusetts. From 6:30 in the morning until 9:00 at night, this small coffee shop serves as a place to grab a cup of coffee to go, visit over a "cuppa joe" with friends, or work from a virtual office with a laptop. Like the bar called Cheers from the sitcom of the same name, the Hot Chocolate Sparrow is a place "where everyone knows your name." Over the course of the day, the shop will be visited by contractors, mothers of young children with toddlers in tow, teenagers, web designers, and accountants. The shop serves as a hub of activity and interaction for the small Cape Cod town in which it is located, and as such plays a vital role in the life of the people there.

The Sparrow, and many other coffee shops like it, or neighborhood bars, or barber shops epitomize the concept of a third place pioneered in the book The Great Good Place by Ray Oldenburg, an urban sociologist in Florida. According to Oldenburg's book, published in 1989, a "first place" is home and a "second place" is work. A third place is a location where people can convene, be themselves, and relax. Third places, "host the regular, voluntary, informal, and happily anticipated gatherings of individuals beyond the realms of home and work." As stated on the website for Project for Public Spaces, third places "promote social equality by leveling the status of guests, provide a setting for grassroots politics, create habits of public association, and offer psychological support to individuals and communities." In the process, these places facilitate the creation of what Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam calls social capital in his seminal book Bowling Alone.

I was struck as I read the article about the concept of third places in the lives of adolescents. The article on the Sparrow said, "At 3 p.m., the middle school and high school students storm the candy counter for the homemade caramel turtles and penny delights. Macky O’Hara, 12, gets a kids’ hot chocolate for $1.75; not too hot (140 degrees versus 155 for grown-up hot chocolate), and whipped cream is free for children only. Melissa Rivers, 16, a high school junior, and her friend Drew Green, 19, sit at a table sharing a small bag of Fritos, then leave after 20 minutes, without having bought a thing. “Normally, I get an éclair, but I didn’t have money today,” Melissa said. “It’s just nice to be out of the cold.” While we can wish that these students bought something in the store, we can feel assured that they're hanging out with other teenagers on a weekday afternoon, they're enjoying each other's company, and we can hope that they're growing up.

In 21st Century society America, what are the third places for young men and young women? Where do they go when they want to be out of the house after school or on the weekends? Where are the places that they can see friends, be recognized for who they are, and be involved in the development of social capital for teenagers?

When I asked a group of 8th grade students where they like to hang out on weekends, they named places like the mall, coffee shops, bowling alleys, parks or the gym. They also complained about a local mall whose policy stated that people under the age of 18 cannot walk around unaccompanied by an adult in the evenings or on weekends. They may only go back and forth to a movie where they can share in the activity of watching a film but hopefully, they're not speaking with each other in the theater (sorry, but I'm still a purist about etiquette in the cinema.) On the one hand, I was heartened that they have a variety of places to go; on the other hand, I become concerned when we begin to take away places for young men and young women to visit with one another. One could argue that like water, teens will find a place to go, and if we don't give them the space they need, they may create it in places less desirable. I know the issues that led to this temporally based ban at the mall, and I understand the frustration that places have dealing with rowdy, and yes sometimes even violent, teenagers. The problems are real, and they require solutions.

However, we need to make sure that the way in which we resolve the problem does not exacerbate the issue or even worse, create more issues down the road when these teenagers become adults. We must offer them a space to engage in dialogue on their own, see their peers, and learn to enjoy each other's company if we want them to learn how to be civil toward one another, how to view themselves as social beings interacting with different people, and invest in their society. If one of our concerns as a democracy is a decreasing level of commitment to the democratic process on the part of our citizens, then we need to seek out ways for adolescents to feel connected to their society and their government. Home and school can provide some of this formal education, but we must give young men and young women informal places where they can grow into civic minded people by discussing issues, great and small, with their fellow budding citizens..

As the Head of Crossroads College Preparatory School, I have the opportunity to watch our students engage in meaningful discussion on important topics, and I feel hopeful for our society. I hope that we continue to provide them with the third places they need so they can become the people we wish them to be and the citizens our country will need.

Our Future is Our Choice Not Our Fate

2009-12-22T13:17:00.000-08:00

Listening to an interview with New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman recently, I heard him quote the writer/scientist Donella Meadows who titled an article, "Is Our Future Our Choice or Our Fate?" While on the surface the response to this question may be obvious, how we answer it actually tells a great deal about who we are and where we are headed. In addition, as educators the way in which we address this query has profound implications for the lessons we teach our children.

When Meadows wrote this essay in 1972, the "green" movement was in its early phases. Rachel Carson's seminal book Silent Spring was a decade old, Earth Day had been celebrated for the first time two years previously, and Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog was only four years old. We're in a different century now, and an entirely new generation of environmental activists has joined the struggle, but the motivation for those fighting to save the planet from destruction is just as strong as it was in the early 70's. Bill Mckibben, who wrote The End of Nature in 1989, said recently in an article, "We used to think that climate change was going to take a while. Twenty years ago...we thought it would be mid-century before we saw really big shifts. We underestimated how finely balanced the planet is, an illusion that finally had to crumble in the summer of 2007 when Arctic ice suddenly melted, decades ahead of schedule. Since then, we've seen the rapid spread of drought across Australia and the Southwest, the sudden destruction of western Canada's pine forests, the acidification of the oceans and worse. We've learned that climate change is not a future problem, not something for our kids to solve. It's a current crisis, one that our parents should have foreseen." The threats facing us are no longer hypothetical nor are they something so ethereal that we cannot imagine how they will affect us.

As adults and as educators, we have a responsibility to teach our children about the issues facing our world, and theirs, from ethnic warfare in Africa to the threats facing our environment. There are a variety of methods we can use to educate young men and young women, and there are many valuable educational programs ranging from Facing History and Ourselves to The Alliance for Corporate Sustainability at the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia. For students to understand the true nature of these problems, they must learn that the causes are varied, complex, and seemingly intractable. Students need to see that the world is a system and that what is happening in one area that may appear isolated is in fact integral to what is occurring somewhere else: the flapping of a butterfly's wing may in fact play a role in events across the globe. To teach adolescents otherwise is to insult their intelligence and stunt their intellectual development.

However, if all we do is show them that these problems and conflicts are inter-related and apparently insoluble, we consign them to a lifetime of being passive spectators rather than active participants. We have a responsibility to teach them the depth of the causes underlying the issues; just as importantly, though, we have a duty to help them see that there are ways to resolve the problems. At Crossroads College Prep, students learn about the variety of issues facing our world in many classes ranging from the interdisciplinary World Cultures/Earth and Environmental Science Curriculum in 7th grade to designing a sustainability project in 8th grade to Advanced Placement Environmental Science (APES) in their junior year; they also learn, though, that they can work on these issues now and maybe they can help solve them one day. For example, when the students in 7th grade learn about geology, they study mining and the problems associated with it, but they also create solutions to address run-off or pollution; the 11th graders in APES not only study the facets of water pollution but they are also part of the Missouri Stream Team program where they analyze and reclaim two streams, one in Wellston and one in a rural part of the state. The students learn about the problem, but they also realize that they can be agents of change. Teaching this way offers our students and ourselves a sense of hope, restores their faith that life can be better, and helps them comprehend that their futures are a matter of choice rather than a fate determined by someone else.

Students, the Web, and the Enlightenment

2009-12-13T05:16:00.000-08:00

Checking out two recent websites reminded me again of the power of the web to excite and inform high school students as a critical component of their formal and informal education. While discussing the benefits of information on line may be tantamount to stating the obvious, I believe that it bears remembering how amazing our world is today with what is out there. Some of this information may be new and some may have been available for a long time; the important thing is how we expose our students to the available information and how they use it for their own purposes.

Just recently the British Royal Society unveiled a new website that gives a historical overview to scientific discoveries. In the format of a time line, the Royal Society offers information on seminal moments in scientific history that also correspond to what was occurring in the world in general at that time. By studying the time line a student can learn that the invention of a new measuring tool for angles in 1731 followed the publication of Gulliver's Travels in 1726. In the process, students may begin to see that what happens in one area or discipline may be connected to what is transpiring in another and that what may seem as coincidence may be the product of "great minds thinking alike." Such an approach also allows students to see that the lines between seemingly disparate disciplines may be our artificially imposed distinctions rather than barriers that exist in the "real world."

Beyond that, the Society is publishing the original scientific papers in PDF format that the British Royal Society produced when these discoveries were made. Students can read the thinking of the members of the Society as they grappled with these revolutionary moments in science and see how philosophers approached seemingly insoluble problems. The website is http://trailblazing.royalsociety.org/.

Also new this year is a class from Harvard University that is being televised by WBUR. Law Professor Michael Sandel's class on justice comes in weekly installments and shows students grappling with philosophical questions and the law. By looking at the morality and the legal aspects of lying or stealing and relating the teachings of different philosophers to these ever-present issues, viewers can experience for themselves being in a class that discusses the relevance of the teachings of Jeremy Bentham or Immanuel Kant to their own lives. Watching these classes makes for exciting television but it also returns one to school where professors challenged us with difficult questions without easy answers and made us see that these questions were not just fodder for late night bull sessions; they hold importance for us on a daily basis.

I thought of both of these websites as I recently watched the sophomores at Crossroads College Prep engage in an annual rite of passage known as the Enlightenment Salon. This project requires each tenth grader to research and analyze the teachings of an Enlightenment philosopher. After compiling their research, each student must write a persuasive essay arguing the view of his/her philosopher and write a Facebook profile of the philosopher. The truly amazing component of this interdisciplinary assignment arrives on the day of the Salon when students come to class dressed as their philosopher (complete with white wigs and pantaloons), and as their character give an introductory speech outlining their teachings and writings and then engage in an hour long debate on issues like natural law, the rights of man, and the existence of a deity. Students are assessed partially on how well they remain in character and how well they know the teachings of their philosopher as well as the view of others in the room. Such an assignment requires students to know the background of the philosopher but also the fundamental issues of the Enlightenment and the questions asked by these thinkers. Hopefully, they leave this major project with a better understanding of the Enlightenment, the intellectual dynamism of this time in history, and the way that this period has affected their world today.

Probably very few if any of our students used the Royal Society or the Sandel websites as they're very new. However, the information from the British Royal Society might have given our students even more insight into their philosophers and allowed them to read some of their actual writings. Michael Sandel's series on justice might have provided our students with an even greater feel for how pertinent these age old questions of justice are. As a result, they can see that while much has changed over history, many fundamental questions remain and their wrestling with these issues places them in good company with their predecessors. Whether the information comes from the web or a book, we hope that students take the opportunity to engage in analytical research, relate philosophical questions to their own lives, and realize that the joy of reading and studying comes less in finding answers but in finding even more exciting questions to ask.

Why We Read What We Do

2009-11-23T13:45:00.000-08:00

I recently came across a wonderful quotation while listening to a podcasted episode of National Public Radio's To The Best of Our Knowledge on the future of science fiction that made me think about why we read and teach the literature that what we do. This show discussed whether science fiction is the only "literature of ideas" in today's world, where the genre is headed, the new field of "steam punk" literature, and the works of writers like H.P. Lovecraft. Like many people, I have read some sci-fi in my past (I remember reading Frank Herbert's Dune as I traversed the Gobi Desert on a bus) and I have read some fantasy as an adult (mostly works that my children recommended like the Harry Potter series or The Lord of The Rings trilogy), but I would never consider myself an avid reader of the genre.

As an educator and as a parent, I have also been amazed by the popularization of fantasy literature and how many young people are reading either classic science fiction or the works of horror by the newest authors in the field. It seems like every day there is another new young adult novel like Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games that is all the rage or students are consumed by the books and the movies in the Twilight Series. The same student who cannot stand what she is reading for her 8th grade literature class will stay up until all hours of the night to finish the latest installment of the saga of Bella and Edward. Why do certain stories captivate all of us, and teenagers in particular? Is it the pacing of young adult literature or is it that the protagonists are typically adolescents? The other night when my twelve year old son was absorbed in reading a new futuristic combat novel with a very martial looking cover while in synagogue (why he was reading it there is another topic), an adult looked at the cover and sneered. I had to assume that she would not have been as offended if he had been reading Moby Dick or To Kill a Mockingbird.

Many years ago, Judith Renyi, Dean of the Schools of Graduate and Professional Studies Rosemont College put a different spin on the debate about teaching the literary canon. In an insightful essay, Renyi said that arguing over what students are required to read in high school and college acknowledges what we all think but we're afraid to admit; people will only read what is required of them in school, so if we do not demand that young men and young women read certain works, they will never read them later in life. Instead of arguing over why people don't read at all, we've thrown in the towel, and we're fighting who gets to choose what they read.

However, at some level, we know that people will still read books. While the number of people reading books for pleasure may be decreasing, there still seems to be a place for the latest Dan Brown blockbuster or Malcolm Gladwell bestseller. Some people may be reading on a Kindle or some may be doing it the old fashioned way with an actual book, some may be going to the library or the bookstore or some may be reading off of GoogleBooks, but people still seem to enjoy a good read.

At Crossroads College Prep, the literature we teach is very much in the "Great Books" curriculum. Over a decade ago, we approached many colleges and universities and asked them what they expected incoming students to be able to do and to have read. As a result of those discussions and with some modifications, we traded in books by Orson Scott Card for those by Sophocles, and we eliminated books by Phillip K. Dick for works by Mark Twain. While students seem to enjoy those works, one has to wonder if they are as passionate about Raisin in the Sun as they would be about the latest in the Maximum Ride series, and should that matter.

We should always have students read the classics and see the timeliness of those books, but we should also create a place for students to discover and read those books about which they are truly excited and that they have chosen. The seventh grade students at Crossroads College Prep are assigned several "classic" pieces like S. E. Hinton's The Outsiders or Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, but they also participate in a program called Reading At Home (RAH) where they read and discuss what they have chosen. In this way, they learn to like and maybe even love some books that are regarded as classic, but they also develop an appreciation for popular literature. If we want our students to be future readers, we need to expose them to great works of literature, but we may also need to show them how the beauty of reading for pleasure can make their lives more whole and take them to places they have never seen nor even imagined.

Now for that quotation-I hope you enjoy it below.

From On Fantasy by George R. R. Martin

The best fantasy is written in the language of dreams. It is alive as dreams are alive, more real than real ... for a moment at least ... that long magic moment before we wake.

Fantasy is silver and scarlet, indigo and azure, obsidian veined with gold and lapis lazuli. Reality is plywood and plastic, done up in mud brown and olive drab. Fantasy tastes of habaneros and honey, cinnamon and cloves, rare red meat and wines as sweet as summer. Reality is beans and tofu, and ashes at the end. Reality is the strip malls of Burbank, the smokestacks of Cleveland, a parking garage in Newark. Fantasy is the towers of Minas Tirith, the ancient stones of Gormenghast, the halls of Camelot. Fantasy flies on the wings of Icarus, reality on Southwest Airlines. Why do our dreams become so much smaller when they finally come true?

We read fantasy to find the colors again, I think. To taste strong spices and hear the songs the sirens sang. There is something old and true in fantasy that speaks to something deep within us, to the child who dreamt that one day he would hunt the forests of the night, and feast beneath the hollow hills, and find a love to last forever somewhere south of Oz and north of Shangri-La.

They can keep their heaven. When I die, I'd sooner go to Middle Earth.

Teaching Responsibility

2009-11-03T14:57:00.000-08:00

On Tuesday, October 27th, New York Times writer Bob Herbert began his latest column with the following paragraphs.

“One of the most cherished items in my possession is a postcard that was sent from Mississippi to the Upper West Side of Manhattan in June, 1964.

“‘Dear Mom and Dad,’ it says, ‘I have arrived safely in Meridian, Mississippi. This is a wonderful town and the weather is fine. I wish you were here. The people in this city are wonderful and our reception was very good. All my love, Andy.’”

As Herbert goes on to explain, that note was from Andrew Goodman, one of the three men along with Michael Schwerner and James Goodman, who were murdered by the Klan in the Freedom Summer of 1964. Many people know the story through the exciting but historically inaccurate movie Mississippi Burning. Herbert uses this poignant anecdote as a jumping off point to bemoan the apathy and listlessness of people in today’s world and the need for men and women of good will to get out there and work for change.

At a time when we’re engaged in two wars, one of which is unpopular and the other of which is becoming increasingly so, an economic scene that is as bad as any of us can remember in our lifetimes, and daily news of astronomically high compensation packages for executives whose banks were bailed out by taxpayer dollars, many people seem too numb to be angry.

There was a bumper sticker during the early years of this century that said, “If you’re not outraged, then you’re not paying attention.” Is it that we’re inattentive or that we’re too frazzled to know how to respond?

Waiting tables for many years taught me a phrase called “being in the weeds,” which means that a server is so busy that s/he cannot even slow down to figure out what s/he needs. Many were the times when I was waiting on so many people that I knew I needed help, but I did not know who to ask for what. Maybe in today's world we’re so frantically running in place to hold on to our jobs or trying to prevent things from worsening that collectively we’re “in the weeds.”

One could argue that it’s precisely in times like these, though, that we parents and educators need to educate our children to be engaged citizens and fight for the principles in which they believe. This is not about political partisanship; this is about looking at our world critically and taking a stand for what is right and wrong.

At Crossroads College Prep, we stress responsibility as one of our core values, along with scholarship and imagination. I hope that we’re teaching our students that it’s not enough to know a great deal of material nor is it sufficient to be incredibly creative. If our students and our graduates do not use what they have learned to make their world a better place, then we have failed them and our society at large.

Learning for the sake of learning can be a wonderful experience but it may be an unaffordable luxury in a time of unprecedented economic hardship and warfare. While it may not be our job to tell our children what to think or what to believe, we should teach them to question and to fight for what they feel is right and against what they know is wrong.

The Digital Community

2009-10-15T08:05:00.000-07:00

Like many people, I had thought for years that a community of people required individuals to be in some form of physical proximity to one another. We could have acquaintances and we could know other people, but my limited definition rested on a quaint and antiquated notion that being friends with someone or being a member of a community meant that we actually saw other people physically and we spoke either face to face or on the phone with other members of our community. However, like others, I have had to redefine my concept of community in our digital age.

As I have grappled with the notion of what defines a community in today's digitally connected world, I have found the term to be more and more difficult to define. I remember years ago when a friend shared the story of his 12 year old son who considered one of his closest friends to be a child in Sweden with whom he played on line games but who he had never "seen" and with whom he had never "spoken." This didn't sound like a close friend to me, but his son thought of this child from another country as one of his closest companions.

In a fascinating lecture at the Library of Congress, Michael Wesch, professor at Kansas State, offers An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube that has made me question even more the definition of community in today's world. At one point in his talk, Wesch quotes Harvard Professor Robert Putnam's influential book Bowling Alone from 1995 where Putnam bemoans the loss of community in America and says that an electronic community will be unable to replace what we are missing in our lives.

However, in this extremely thought-provoking speech replete with many You Tube videos, Wesch argues that there is a rapidly emerging community on YouTube that has different mores and customs than the type of community to which we might be accustomed but it is no less valid. Wesch argues that the user-generated nature of the content on YouTube enables all of us to be individuals within a community where we are known and included. In fact, it is the ability of people to share their unmediated selves that enables this community to be so honest and so "real."

This community is not without its own drama, as Wesch shows, and there is an anonymity that allows people to say things that they would never say to another human being. Nevertheless, as Wesch argues, it is this kind of honesty that characterizes the YouTube community as people share their true feelings in ways they could not do so were they physically in front of other people.

Whether we buy into the development of this YouTube community is to some extent irrelevant. Just as Thomas Friedman argues that the world is flat whether we like it or not, Wesch proposes that this community is here and it is serving a purpose. As educators and as parents, we must wrestle with the ramifications of this new type of community, and we ignore it at our own peril.

I remember several years ago when we proposed to Crossroads College Prep students the idea of having a school wide blog and their response was one of incredulity. I was heartened to hear them say that we should never be a place where students would say things to each other on line that they would not say to people in school. I was proud of their response, and I hope our students always feel this way. However, we must realize that students now live in a variety of communities and they may not see them as either disconnected or mutually exclusive. As a matter of fact, our job may be to help them navigate the different communities in which they live and understand the ever changing customs of each of their communities, the virtual as well as the real.

The Value of the Humanities

2009-10-02T12:24:00.000-07:00

Reading a recent article called "The Burden of the Humanities" by Wilfred McClay reaffirmed why in an age that is increasingly characterized by the forms of technology we use to improve our lives, the humanities still hold an important place for us. As we awake to the alarm on our cell phones and begin texting immediately, perform our morning workout while listening to our iPods, and jump on our laptops to respond to the emails that came in overnight, we may rarely stop to think how we as human beings are changing in response to our technology. In addition, as the sciences play more and more of a role in our lives, whether it's by altering the food we eat or the manner in which we transport ourselves to and fro, we may give short shrift to the daily ethical dilemmas we confront that result from the opportunities that technology provides us.

We may engage in debates about cloning or stem cell research, but all too often, these discussions can be grounded in the immediately emotional or the visceral reactions that impassioned opinions without a strong foundation engender. We can know many facts or we can be privy to the technicalities of the particular issue, but do we actually grapple with the human, and humane, side of these issues? We may have a great deal of information and even knowledge, but we may find ourselves without the wisdom that comes from the study of the way that other societies have grappled with similar issues or the manner we have dealt with similar, but not necessarily the same, dilemmas in the past.

We must know the science to inform ourselves on the topic. but we must also avail ourselves of the thinking from previous times. As McClay says about the humanities, "the knowledge they (the humanities) convey is not a rough, preliminary substitute for what psychology, chemistry, molecular biology, and physics will eventually resolve with greater finality. They are an accurate reflection of the subject they treat, the most accurate possible."

Integrating a study of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex or Mary Shelly's Frankenstein into a discussion of genetic modification may allow us to wrestle with the role of science in our lives with a more informed sense of fate or the terrors of science run amok. Similarly, it is helpful to place our current caustic debates over health care in the context of history. South Carolina Congressman Joe Wilson's shouting "you lie" to President Obama may have been offensive but one could argue that it pales in comparison to1856 when his South Carolinian predecessor Preston Brooks used his cane to beat Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner senseless on the floor of the Senate during a debate over slavery.

I recently said in a speech that we want our students to see the music of math and the art of science. A fully formed human being has the knowledge of the sciences combined with the wisdom of the humanities. To quote McClay again, "The humanities, rightly pursued and rightly ordered, can do things, and teach things, and preserve things, and illuminate things, which can be accomplished in no other way. It is the humanities that instruct us in the range and depth of human possibility, including our immense capacity for both goodness and depravity. It is the humanities that nourish and sustain our shared memories, and connect us with our civilization's past and with those who have come before us. It is the humanities that teach us how to ask what the good life is for us humans, and guide us in the search for civic ideals and institutions that will make the good life possible."

All good schools, including Crossroads College Prep, attempt to provide students with an education that balances the sciences and the humanities, and shows students how they are in fact interconnected. In this way, students can feel well-equipped to grapple with the conflicts facing them and their world and make decisions based not only on what is effective but also what is right.

City Living

2009-09-18T13:26:00.000-07:00

In a recent issue of The New Republic, Edward Glaser reviews the latest book by Anthony Flint called Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took on New York's Master Builder and Transformed the American City. While reading Robert Caro's monumental biography of Moses called The Power Broker and Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities certainly helps in understanding this article, it is not required. In the process of reviewing Flint's book, Glaser takes the opportunity to discuss the seminal role that Jacobs' book played in redefining how we view our cities and the influence of Caro's biography of Moses. The link to the article is
http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/what-city-needs?page=0,1.

Weighing in at 1,336 pages, The Power Broker is substantial enough to stop any door in any storm, but it is also offers an outstanding portrayal of a masterful politician and urban planner. While one may not approve of the manner in which Moses used massive infrastructural projects to shape New York, one cannot deny his lasting imprint on the American City. Caro describes the manner in which Moses built NYC movingly, and when one finishes this tome, s/he is bound to look at any city differently than before.

Similarly, The Death and Life of Great American Cities forces the reader to see his/her urban neighborhood with new eyes. Jacobs' emphasizes that for city neighborhoods and streets to feel safe and vibrant they must contain a variety of people working, strolling, and playing at all times of the day. In turn, this makes one consider the wisdom of certain districts being devoted to one function, i.e. an arts district. Perhaps what makes Jacobs' book feel so prescient is the fact that it was published in 1961, yet so many of the problems she identified still remain.

While Moses focused on the integration of the various parts of a city through transportation networks or the creation of public works projects to enliven areas, Jacobs concentrated on the ways that cities allow individuals to come into contact with one another and ensure that urban streets remain humane places.

Glaser's review of Flint's book attempts to reconcile what are considered two diametrically opposing views on American cities by showing that while both approaches are necessary neither concept is sufficient. The titanic struggle between Moses and Jacobs makes for fascinating and exciting reading, but a nuanced approach to urban planning would argue for a combination of Moses and Jacobs (as biblical as that may sound.)

Glaser says, "Successful cities need both the human interactions of Jane Jacobs and the enabling infrastructure of Robert Moses. Anthony Flint has done a fine job describing the battles between these two great figures, but unlike the Louis-Schmeling fight, their conflict should not be resolved. An absolute victory for Moses leads to heartless cities, built to accommodate cars but not pedestrians, with high-rise buildings that are disconnected from their streets. An absolute victory for Jacobs means a city frozen in concrete with prices that are too high and buildings that are too low. New building is needed to welcome the diversity that makes urban magic. No city can survive without the personal engagements beloved by Jacobs, but no city can thrive without master builders such as Moses. Mumbai and Shanghai had better take note."

As the Head of the only independent secondary school in the City of St. Louis, I think often of the role we play in the independent school world in the metropolitan region and the benefits we can provide for the City. We often say that Crossroads College Prep has more in common with urban independent schools in other cities than we do with our competing schools in the suburbs of St. Louis. As a school committed to diversity, sustainability, and social justice, we must consider how we fulfill our core values in an urban area. Would we be a different school if we were located in the suburbs? Absolutely. Our population would most likely be less diverse, our students might be less committed to the cosmopolitan vision that characterizes cities, and the climate of the school would feel very different.

Nevertheless, we must continue to study how we can meet our mission of being an academically challenging college preparatory school with a wide array of strong extracurricular activities that is not only "in the city" but is also "of the city." Like great cities that attract a diverse population engaged in different ventures, Crossroads College Prep should be an academic marketplace where a mixture of people come into contact with and learn from each other.

2009-09-08T11:30:00.000-07:00

Friends,

For a couple of years now, people have asked me to blog, and I have shied away from it for a variety of reasons. However, I have decided to take the plunge and give it a shot. On this blog, I hope to share thoughts on things that I am reading or podcasts to which I am listening or watching, and send you the accompanying links in the hope that you may enjoy them also.

I hope you find it meaningful and worth your while.

Recently, I read an article in the New York Times Sunday Magazine on Memorial Hospital after Katrina and how the staff there handled the care and evacuation of those they thought were terminally ill. Here's the link. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/magazine/30doctors.html? You may have to sign up for the free NYTimes On-Line Subscription.

In addition to the article being incredibly sad, it raises powerful and difficult questions about the decisions people have to make in times of crisis. All of us face choices at times, and sometimes those choices are between two equally bad alternatives; rarely, though, are we confronted with the dilemmas that faced the staff at Memorial Hospital. While it may seem easy to sit in judgment of those who had to make these difficult decisions, it would be simplistic and wrong to do so.

This article can also be extrapolated to other situations where people have to choose between two outcomes, neither of which may be desirable. In the case of Memorial Hospital, the administrators were literally choosing who would live and who would die . This type of dilemma is called A Morton's Fork. As Wikipedia says, "A Morton's Fork is a choice between two equally unpleasant alternatives (in other words, a dilemma), or two lines of reasoning that lead to the same unpleasant conclusion. It is analogous to the expressions "between the devil and the deep blue sea" or "between a rock and a hard place." The expression originates from a policy of tax collection devised by John Morton, Lord Chancellor of England in 1487, under the rule of Henry VII."

"His approach was that if the subject lived in luxury and had clearly spent a lot of money on himself, he obviously had sufficient income to spare for the king. Alternatively, if the subject lived frugally, and showed no sign of being wealthy, he must have substantial savings and could therefore afford to give it to the king. These arguments were the two prongs of the fork and regardless of whether the subject was rich or poor, he did not have a favorable choice."

I hope that as you read the article and consider the difficult and life-determining decisions that faced administrators at Memorial Hospital, you are able to apply it in some way to the choices that you face in your life. While the consequences for the situations facing us may not be as dire, we all find ourselves between a rock and a hard place sometimes and it may help to read how others have handled it.

In addition, as parents and as educators, we often discuss with our children/students how they make difficult choices. Reading this article may provide food for thought on how to advise them as they grapple with seemingly irreconcilable conflicts and choices between competing alternatives, neither of which look palatable.