It's easy to become pissed off at the establishment. Sometimes it really feels like the beauracratic monster is a virus that will inevitably devour every hard working, good intentioned person on the face of the earth.
But we must resist the urge to reduce ourselves to being mere cynics.
I've written about this topic before, and I've quoted Alfie Kohn on the subject:
...cynicism, unlike vibrant, reasoned skepticism, actually contributes to passivitiy.
It's too easy to play the blame game.
It's too easy to become disenfranchised with the system.
It's too easy to just close your door and teach on your little island.
But man is no island.
Sure you can close your door.
But if you do, you become part of the problem. Kohn explains:
Whereas the skeptic thinks and doubts and in so doing affirms a vision of the way things ought to be, the cynic affirms nothing, takes no action, and ends up perpetuating arrangements that make our lives worse.
Did you hear that?
...makes our lives worse...
Young teachers are full of shit and vinegar - but they are inexperienced and suffer from 'dear in headlights' syndrome. They're too damn busy trying to keep their heads above water. And if they're not too damn busy, they're too damn scared. They can't afford to rock the boat because they want to maintain a seat on the boat.
So who am I really challenging here?
I'm talking to the veterans...
...the battle-axes...
...the hard-asses...
...the dinosaurs...
...the fossils...
You know the teacher I'm talking about - the one who has been around so long they look like they're a part of the furniture.
Yeah. I'm talking to you.
You owe it to yourself, your students and all those young teachers who will one day become you: the veteran.
That is, unless they chose to leave like the other 50% of teachers who quit inside of the first 5 years. Unless they chose to be like the countless number of kids who grow up wanting to be a teacher but think better of it, because, well, teaching isn't really worth it...
But I guess, you really don't have to accept this challenge. I mean what's the worst that could happen?
If we simply reconcile to the status quo and spend all our time getting out children to accomodate themselves to it and play the game, then nothing will change and they will have to do the same with their children. As someone once said, realism corrupts; absolute realism corrupts absolutely. (Alfie Kohn)
Seriously, if you're not the person to stand up and fight the good fight, then who?
Standardized testing is destroying our education system. The kids are telling us by voting with their feet - drop out rates are anywhere from 30% to 50% in America. Sir Ken Robinson does a marvelous job of showing that at this point, we can no longer blame the kids. There is something inherently wrong with our education system.
Teachers encourage their students to prioritize and avoid distractions all the time. We employ all kinds of classroom management tactics to encourage a focused learning environment. However, perhaps more today than ever before, students are driven to distraction - and what's sadly ironic is that the adult's may be to blame.
In order to refocus ourselves, we need to understand what it means to properly prioritize.
In their book Made to Stick, Chip Heath and Dan Heath explain how defining and maintaining the essense of an idea can be so important:
It's hard to make ideas stick in a noisy, unpredictable, chaotic environment. If we're to succeed, the first step is this: Be simple. Not simple in terms of "dumbing down" or "sound bites." You don't have to speak in monosyllables to be simple. What we mean by "simple" is finding the core of the idea.
"Finding the core" means stripping an idea down to its most critical essence. To get to the core, we've got to weed out superfluous and tangential elements. But that's the easy part. The hard part is weeding out ideas that may be really important but just aren't the most important idea. The Army's Commander's Intent forces its officers to highlight the most important goal of an operation. The value of the Intent comes from its singularity. you can't have five North Stars, you can't have five "most important goals," and you can't have five Commander's Intents. Finding the core is analogous to writing the Commander's Intent - it's about discarding a lot of great insights in order to let the most important insight shine. The French aviator and author Antoine de Saint-Exupery once offered a definition of engineering elegance: "A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." A designer of simple ideas should aspire to the same goal: knowing how much can be wrung out of an idea before it begins to lose its essence.
Because most teachers have curriculums that are bloated with content, it can be a real challenge to maintain our focus. With the advent of today's high-stakes, standardized testing accountability, teachers may be more apt to become distracted than ever before. As if printing students' test scores in the local paper wasn't distracting enough, now policy-makers want to tie teachers' salaries to their students' test scores with merit pay. We've gone from targetting teacher's pride to targetting their wallets. All of these distractions make it hard for teachers to focus on our primary objective: learning. And if the teachers are having trouble maintaining focus, you can only imagine how distracted the kids are.
In the military, the Commander's Intent intentionally remains vaguely focused on the primary objective. This way the original plan may go up in smoke, but you still execute its intent. In the classroom this translates into: If there's only one teacher left to teach, they better be doing something to help student's to learn.
Unfortunately, top management might know what their priorites are but be completely inept at sharing and achieving them.What's worse is that there is very good reason to believe things are worse than that- for too long education reform has been driven by politicians who are incompetent at even identifying the primary goal of education.
As you prepare for your next lesson, think not about what you can add to your classroom, but how you can peal away the distractors and make it obvious to every single student in your class that, in the end, students are in school to learn.
I subscribe to Dan Pink's free newsletter. I just received his take on merit pay.
Here's Dan Pink:
Q: Dan, there's been a lot of talk lately about "merit pay" for schoolteachers - that is, tying teacher salaries to student performance, especially on standardized tests. What do you think of this approach?
A: A few years ago, I thought this was a great idea. Incentivize teachers and the pay the outstanding one more? What coud be wrong with that? It's logical, straightforward, and fair. However, after looking at 50 years of research on human motivation for DRIVE, I've changed my mind. I think that this approach, despite is surface appeal, has more flaws than strengths - and that there's a simpler, more effective alternative.
Here's my reasoning:
For starters, most proposals for "merit pay" (sorry, I can't use the term without quotation marks) tie teacher compensation to student scores on standardized tests. That's a disaster. It focuses teachers almost single-mindedly on training their students to pencil in correct answers on multiple choice tests - and turns classrooms into test prep academies. (What's more, it can encourage cheating, as Georgia's experience shows.) So let's knock out this approach to merit pay.
A second option is for school principals to decide who gets performance bonuses. Again, there's a certain theoretical appeal to this method. But I've yet to meet a teacher who considers it fair, let alone motivating. Teachers worry that principals don't have sufficient information to make such decisions and that "merit pay" would be based too heavily on who's best at playing politics and currying favor. So let's kibosh this method, too.
A third approach is to use a variety metrics to determine who gets a bonus. You could measure teacher performance using: standardized scores for that teacher's students; evaluations of the teacher's peers, students, parents, and principal; a teacher's contribution to overall school performance; time devoted to professional development; how much the teachers' students improved over the previous year; and so on. This isn't necessarily a bad idea. But it has a huge downside: It would force resource-strapped schools to spend enormous amounts of time, talent, and brainpower measuring teachers rather than educating students. Schools have enough to do already. And the costs of establishing and maintaining elaborate measurement systems would likely outweigh the benefits.
In short, I can't see a way to construct a merit pay scheme that is both simple and fair. What's more, it strikes me as slightly delusional to think that people who've intentionally chosen to pursue a career for public-spirited, rather than economic, reasons will suddenly work harder because they're offered a few hundred extra dollars. Truth be told, most teachers work pretty damn hard already.
Fortunately, I think there's an easier and more elegant solution - one that's also supported by the science of human motivation.
First, we should raise the base pay of teachers. Too many talented people opt out of this career because they're concerned about supporting their families. For prospective teachers, raising base salaries would remove an obstacle to entering the profession. For existing teachers, it's a way to recognize the importance of their jobs without resorting to behavior-distorting carrots and sticks. The science reveals a paradox about money and motivation: In most cases, the best use of money as a motivator is to pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table. Raising base salaries would help take the issue of money off the table. Instead fretting about paying their bills on an insufficient salary or scheming to get a small bonus, teachers could focus on the work they love.
At the same time, we have to make it easier to get rid of bad teachers. Teaching, like any profession, has its share of duds. Showing these folks the door, which now is quite difficult, is the right thing to do. It's better for students, of course. But it's also better for the teachers who remain. Just as it's very motivating to have great colleagues, it's incredibly de-motivating to have lazy or incompetent ones.
So . . . if I could wave a magic wand, I'd dispense with elaborate and complicated "merit pay" schemes for teachers. Instead, I'd raise teachers' base pay and make it easier to get rid of bad teachers. That solution is simpler, fairer, and much more consistent with what truly motivates high performance.
What leads to success? This is an excellent question that has no one right answer. So I'm going to take the easy way out and explain what is not the answer.
- grading does not lead to success -
Watch the TEDtalk and then read below where I show how grading is at best unhelpful and at worst harmful towards all 8 characteristics of success.
Passion
Real learning flourishes when kids learn for its own sake. There is a big difference between a kid who reads so he can win a free pizza and the kid who reads because he wants to know what happens in the next chapter. If we care why kids do the things they do... If we can admit that motivation matters, then we have to stop bribing kids with high grades and threatening them with low grades. Interestingly enough, research1 only confirms what our hearts know. When people are told, Do this and you'll get that, they are very likely to lose interest in the 'this' and care more about the 'that'. Just as true passion for your career can't be driven by the love for money, neither can the true passion for learning be driven by the love for grades.
Work
Learning can be hard work, and sometimes it is true that nothing comes easily, but learning can also be a lot of fun. However, in order for successful people to see hard work as fun, they need see how important effort truly is and how the idea of 'the natural' is largely a myth. Success comes from hard work, and hours upon hours of deliberate practice. Successful people understand that how you rationalize your success may be just as important as being successful. Or in other words, know why you are successful and being successful are both important. People who apply their success to external factors such as luck, task difficulty or lack of natural ability are likely to subscribe to a fixed mindset that sees intelligence and personality as finite qualities that are written in stone. The research2 shows that students who focus on their results - their grades - are likely to attribute their success to external factors. These students tend to rationalize their success or failure in terms of who they are rather than how hard they tried. And when they do this, they typically perform poorly and quit. Good
We want kids to get damn good at learning not grade grubbing, but this is exactly what happens when kids are given grades. When kids get their tests back from the teacher marked, what is the first question they ask of each other? When kids gets home from school after writing a test, what is the first question asked of them by their parents? Research3 shows the effects of grading and found that when students receive their work back with a comment and a grade on it, they look at two things: their grade and then their neighbors grade. If children aren't told explicitly, then they inevitably come to understand implicitly that grades are the point of school. What's wrong with this, you ask? In China, they have a saying gaofen dineng, and it translates to high score but low ability. Education in China has come to be a kind of punch line, a joke, because of their test-taking emphasis in school. The Chinese know that this kind of testing culture has come at a great cost - too many Chinese students are good at taking tests but nothing else.
Focus
Grades do encourage students to focus - but grades are narcistic - grades encourage kids to focus on grades. In China, the gaokao is like the American's SAT but on steroids and ecstasy. College admissions in China are solely and entirely dependent on performing well on the gaokao4. And if they focus enough, the top performers on the gaokao are bestowed the honor and title of zhuangyyuan, and are turned into instant celebreties. So what's the problem? the research is showing that their importance and success isn't lasting much longer than that 15 minutes. Zhuangyuans who become distinguished leaders, accomplished engineers or creative entrepeneurs are the exception and not the rule. For the most part, these zhuangyuans excel on the tests and disapear into obscurity - leading many to question why the tests were so important in the first place. In the end, grades don't help kids to focus, they are ultimately a distraction from learning.
Push
Most people will agree that motivation is an important characteristic for successful people. Most people understand that there are two flavors of motivation - intrinsic and extrinsic - and most people would agree that successful people have a healthy dose of intrinsic motivation. The problem here is that the research5 shows that when kids are given a task and told this is an opportunity to learn rather than to do well, they are more willing to challenge themselves. When the classroom is sold as a place to show off how good you are, learning simply becomes a means to an end, and too often the most rational way to achieve the desirible end (a high grade) is to avoid projects that are challenging. Grades create an emphasis on performance and results that leads predictably to less intellectual exploration - or in other words, less learning.
Serve
Narcisim corrupts. Aboslute narcisism corrupts absolutely. Grades do nothing to encourage students to think of others. In fact, grades artificially turns the classroom into a competition - and the name of the game is to collect more As and look smarter than your neighbour. If your working on a group project that will be graded, its hard to see your lazy partner as someone you need to help; rather, it is more likely that you will see him as an albatross that the teacher unfairly dumped on you. Grades encourage you to focus on the wrong inequity - there are grades to be gotten and the albatross will hold you back; however, the true inequity is that you are learning and the albatross isn't - and so you need to help him. This is how true character education is born, but this kind of perspective is not the default. Be honest, how many of you can put a face to this albatross I speak of, someone from your schoolhood past whom you still resent because they held you back from higher grades? Be honest again, how many of you were the albatross? Research6 also shows convincingly that collaboration, as opposed to competition, is a far more productive way of becoming successful If we truly care about serving others, then we need to stop using grades to artifically pit students against each other.
Ideas
Bill Gates talks about having ideas, and ideas are important. To have ideas you have to have an imagination - but to actually produce something from that imagination, you have to be creative. Students who have come to see learning as a means to an end (high grades), tend to think less deeply while reducing the quality of their thinking. Reproduce the teachers knowledge, requires a lot less imagination and creativity than producing your own understanding. If the class is grading a test during class, and a student gets the question right, but totally guessed, what are the chances the student will say, "wait a minute, giving me credit here is misleading. I may have chosen the correct response but I actually don't have an understanding for what the question was asking me. Teacher, you can chose to give me credit or not give me credit, that's up to you, but I would like to take some class time right now and learn about the content of that question"? The plausibility of this is absurd. Learning should be like this, but grades won't ever allow it to be so. Research7 confirms that students who are more interested in understanding than succeeding outperform those who are distracted by scoring good grades.
Persist
Persistance and resiliency in the face of mistakes and failures is universally accepted as a critical characteristic of successful people. We know no one succeeds all the time, and we know that there is a lot to be learned from our failures. In order to succeed, we have to push our own limits. You will never create something new and creative if you aren't prepared to be wrong. However, grades explicitly tell children that the point of school is to succeed - or even to be better than others. If the point of school is more about proving how good you are and less about learning and improving, it's pretty hard to cope with being less than good. And this is exactly what the research8 tells us - people who come to see school as an exercise in collecting high grades are likely to fall apart when they experience a set back or frustration. They see mistakes and failure as things that should never happen. In contrast, successful people see mistakes as valuable information to be used to figure out what went wrong and then fix it. Grades do not encourage students to have a healthy and relilient attitude towards failure - too often they are simply debilitating. And if you need proof, just ask a student who has historically received low grades and ask them how motivating those low grades were for them.
--------------------
What leads to success? I'm not sure. That's an intimidating question with any number of different answers, but I do know this - grading is not the answer, and the sooner we abolish grading from our classrooms the better.
What's that you say? You are made to grade by some external force such as your department, principal, superintendent, premier or governor?
Okay, but I would wager that you are probably grading more than they demand of you. I am willing to bet that you could assign and talk about grades less than you are now. I get that grades are not going to vanish over night - that's okay. I could live with a world that had kids only think of grades on report card day (at least until we could abolish report cards too - that is report cards as we typically know them: grade-spewing scripts)
Yes, many students have gone through their education with grading, and have gone on to be successful. But if you ask any of them, it is likely they're success was in spite of grades, not because of them.
If you enjoyed this TEDtalk by Richard St.John... if you find any truth in his 8 characteristics of success, then you owe it to yourself and your students to do everything in your power to make grades invisible in your classroom.
1 For more on rewards harm intrinsic motivation, read up on Edward Deci and Richard Ryan's Self-Determination Theory.
2 For more on how focusing on ability encourages a fixed mindset and how focusing on effort encourages a growth mindset, read up on Carol Dweck's book Mindset.
3 For more on how grades encourage shallow thinking and discourage creativity, see Ruth Butler's study that she conducted on elementary students in Isreal.
4 For more on the harmful effects of China's testing culture, read Yong Zhao's Catching Up or Leading the Way.
5 For more on the harmful effects of rewards, read Alfie Kohn's book Punished by Rewards. Dan Pink's book Drive is good too.
6 For more on how competition is inferior to collaboration, read Alfie Kohn's book No Contest.
7 For more on how grades discourage creativity and artificially limit thinking, read Alfie Kohn's The Schools Our Children Deserve.
8 For more on how grades discourage persistence and resiliency, read Carol Dweck's Mindset, and Alfie Kohn's Punished by Rewards, The Schools Our Children Deserve
I have had a number of people comment or e-mail me asking how I conduct and assess group work if I have no grades. I have a true story for you to read. Take a look:
When it comes to group work there is no complaining, whining or competing over grades in my classroom because their are no grades to fight over. Instead of my students seeing each other as obstacles to their own success, they see each other as collaborators. Rather than competing over grades, my students collaborate over their learning.
After reading my story, do you see how the real problem is not that Samantha gain proper credit, or that she be overly concerned about her own learning?
She was learning.
She knew it.
I knew it.
Her partner was not learning as much as her.
She knew it.
I knew it.
Hell, even her partner knew it.
This is where real character education is born. I provide Samantha with an extrinsic-free learning enviornment, so she can spend less time worrying about her own learning and competing for her own share of the grade-pie, and spend more time thinking of others. This is all very cool because while she is stressing less over her own learning and helping others, she is bettering her own learning.
Competition is a zero-sum game.
Collaboration grows learning exponentially. We all win.
Words can not properly express how mind-blowingly different this environment is compared to the school you and I experienced.
In his book The Dip, Seth Godin writes, "the problem with infinity is that there's too much of it." He ends up talking mostly about business and markets, but his point is not lost on education.
The trouble with focusing on content as the primary role of education is that there is an infinite amount of stuff to know.
If teachers are suppose to the be sage on the stage, they might never have time to get off the stage.
If teachers are suppose to be the jugs and the kids are the mugs, the teachers might never notice that their jugs are bottomless and the kids' mugs are already overflowing.
If teachers are to chalk and talk, they may only stop talking because they are waiting for their turn to talk again.
Rigorous and rigid curriculums that are bloated with content is used to rationalize all kinds of horrible pedagogy such as horrendous loads of homework to sit-and-get-regurgitate-and-forget lessons. We cover curriculum at break-neck lightning speeds so that we can say that we covered while we really have no idea whether we've uncovered anything for the kids.
I'm not saying content isn't important, but for the most part, school gets curriculum wrong. You can't demand teachers to dispense an infinite amount of material and then hold them accountable for reducing it all to a finite score.
Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson offer this perspective on planning in their book Rework:
Why don't we just call plans what they really are: guesses. Start referring to your business plans as business guesses, your financial plans as financial guesses, and your strategic plans as strategic guesses. Now y ou can stop worrying abou them as much. They just aren't worth the stress.
When you turn guesses into plans, you enter a danger zone. Plans let the past drive the future. They put blinders on you. "This is where we're going because, well, that's where we said we were going." And that's the problem: plans are inconsistent with improvization.
And you have to be able to improvise. You have to be able to pick up opportunities that come along. Sometimes you need to say, "We're going in a new direction because that's what makes sense today."
The timing of long-range plans is screwed up too. You have the most information when you're doing something, not before you've done it. Yet when do you write a plan? Usually it's before you've even begun. That's the worst time to make a big decision.
Now this isn't to say you shouldn't think about the future or contemplate how you might attack upcoming obstacles. That's a worthwhile exercise. Just don't feel you to write it down or obsess about it. If you write a big plan, you'll most likely never look at it anyway. Plans more than a few pages long just wind up as fossils in your file cabinet.
Give up on the guesswork. Decide what you're going to do this week, not this year. Figure out the next most important thing and do that. Make decisions right before you do something, not far in advance.
It's OK to wing it. Just get on the plane and go. You can pick up a nicer shirt, shaving cream, and a toothbrush once you get there.
Working without a plan may seem scary. But blindly following a plan that has no relationship with reality is even scarier.
On the record, teachers are bullied into saying that they teach every single outcome that their state or province dictates. Afterall, if they admitted otherwise, they run the risk of being tossed out on their ear. But off the record, over an ice-cold beer, teachers will likely say that they don't get to everything because they just can't. There is too much.
And yet, there are some teachers who will stand stead-fast and recite their allegiance to their curriculums. To these teachers I say, wouldn't you like a little more autonomy? To be trusted a little bit more? A little more time and opportunity to explore the things you and your students would like to explore? In the end, all I am advocating for is more trust and autonomy for teachers.
This is why the very best teachers spend everyday of their lives subverting or ignoring curriculum. And they do so because it is in the best interests of their students.
I was pleased to moderate #edchat for April 6. Our topic was:
From an educator's point of view, what should be cut from education budgets when times get tough?
I have a problem with the whole idea of cutting education. I also have a problem with even discussing it. The problem is we are making a rather gross assumption that we must accept the inevitability of budget cuts at all. Alfie Kohn would put it this way:
[We have a] cultural aversion to digging out hidden premises, pressing for justification, and opposing practices for which justification is lacking...
Too many of us, including some who work in the field of education, seem to have lost our capacity to be outraged by the outragous; when handed foolish destructive mandates, we respond by asking for guidance on how best to carry them out.
Even when we do regard something as objectionable, that doesn't mean we will object to it. Indeed, we're apt to see the situation as being like the weather - something you just learn to live with. We may not "accept" (that is, believe) everything we're told by public officials and professionals, but in the other sense of that word, we tend to accept (that is, put up with) what they do.
Indeed, there's no shortage of cynicism about authority figures and powerful institutions. But cynicism, unlike vibrant, reasoned skepticism, actually contributes to passivitiy. People who write off all politicians as "a bunch of liars" are unlikely to become politically active, just as those who say you can " prove anything with statistics" are unwilling to distinguish between better and worse research. For that matter, the statement "everything's bad for you these days" can be used to rationalize easting junk food. These are shrugs not positions. Whereas the skeptic thinks and doubts and in so doing affirms a vision of the way things ought to be, the cynic affirms nothing, takes no action, and ends up perpetuating arrangements that make our lives worse. (Those arrangements, in a neat self-fulfilling prophecy, then comfirms the cynical conclusion that no one can make a difference.)...
When we find ourselves unhappy with some practice or policy, we're encouraged to focus on incidental aspects of what's going on, to ask questions about the details of implementation - how something will get done, or by whom, or on what schedule - but not whether it should be done at all. The more we attend to secondary concerns, the more the primary issues - the overarching structures and underlying premises - are strengthened. We're led to avoid the radical questions. I use that adjective in its original sense: Radical comes from the Latin word for root. It's partly because we spend our time worrying about the tendrils that the weed continues to grow. Noam Chomsky put it this way:
"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate."
Education is a long term investment for the future that should never be cut, regardless of today's economic status. In fact, today's economic crisis should only reinforce how important education truly is. Cutting any investment in education sacrifices long term for short term gains - this is not acceptable.
However, to remain true to Kohn's definition of radical, I want to get radical. No cuts should ever be made to the root of our education system - the teaching and the learning. However, if we needed to find a place to save money, let's look at the tendrils of our system - standardized testing.
It's time to lance the leeches that take pride in their data-mongering. It's time we expunged the parasites that suck the valuable resources out of teachers, students and parents.
And yet, while teachers talk about photo-copying less, or mailing letters home to only the oldest or only children to save on postage, Deleware is hiring 35 data coaches at a rate of $104,000 ($54/hour) per coach so that they can win Race to the Top money. In other words, we hack away at the tendrils, but the weed continues to grow.
I consider the relationships I have with my students and my daughter as being the most important part of being a teacher and a father.
Teachers who believe that their primary role is to dispense the curriculum content into their students' heads regardless of whether the students like the content or like the teacher are missing the point. Good teaching and good learning are inseperable from good relationships.
When teachers and parents choose to use rewards and punishments to manipulate children, we are playing a kind of Russian roullette - meaning, at some point, we will have to make good on our promise to actually use the reward or punishment.
When we trigger the reward or the punishment, it is awfully hard for our students or our children to see us as a caring ally who is on their team - rather, it is more likely that they will start to rationalize the relationship as 'us' and 'them'. They see us as a judge in-waiting who holds the carrot in one hand and the stick in the other.
If you want to determine if you have an 'us' versus 'them' relationship with kids, take the pronoun test. Listen to your kids to find out which pronouns they use to describe your relationship. Do your students describe the classroom as a 'we' or do the students see you as a 'them'? This kind of inclusive or exclusive language indicates more than just symantics.
Those giants who hold me and rock me and feed me and kiss away my tears sometimes go out of their way to take away things I like, or make me feel unworthy, or hit me on the backside (even though they keep telling me I'm always supposed to "use my words"). They tell me they're acting this way because of something or other that I did, but all I know is now I'm not sure I can trust them or feel completely safe with them. I'd be pretty stupid to admit to them that I'm angry, or that I did something bad, because I've learned that I might be give a time-out or talked to in a voice that has all the loved drained out of it or even smacked. I'd better keep my distance.
That last sentence scares the hell out of me. I could not think of a greater indictment of a parent or teacher than if the chlild actually feels like they have to keep their distance because the parent or teacher encouraged them to do so. This is exactly what rewards and punishment do.
It would break my heart to know that I was responsible for creating a wedge between my students and me. And as bad as that may be, words couldn't even begin to describe how horrible I would feel if I did the same with my daughter.
If we really care about being a caring ally that is there for our children, that is there to work with our children, we have to purge our teaching and parenting tool-boxes of our rewards and punishments and interact with our children unconditionally.
I want to show how a scene from Bull Durham, the best baseball movie ever, and an exerpt from Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road can help us to rethink teaching. Watch the clip and then read the excerpt. Just a heads up, there are a couple F-bombs in this clip:
Ok, we'll come back to this clip.
Now take a look at an excerpt from Cormac McCarthey's Pullitzer Prize winning novel The Road:
That night they camped in a ravine and built a fire against a small stone bluff and ate their last tin of food. He'd put it by because it was the boy's favorite, pork and beans. They watched it bubble slowly in the coals and he retrieved the tin with the pliers and they ate in silence. He rinsed the empty tin with water and gave it to the child to drink and that was that. I should have been more careful, he said,
The boy didn't answer.
You have to talk to me.
Okay.
You wanted to know what the bad guys looked like. Now you know. It may happen again. My job is to take care of you. I was appointed to do that by God. I will kill anyone who touches you. Do you understand?
Yes.
He sat there cowled in the blanket. After a while he looked up. Are we still the good guys? he said.
Yes. We're still the good guys.
And we always will be.
Yes. We always will be.
Okay.
Could you understand what was going on in this excerpt?
Did you notice anything unconventional with the writing?
In case you didn't notice, there were no quotations marks to identify the dialogue. The reader is left to sort out the dialogue and the narration on his own. If you're like most people, the excerpt still made sense.
In the Bull Durham clip, Nuke LaLouche is young and naive, but despite his five cent head, he has been blessed with a million dollar arm, and so, as his mentor catcher, Crash Davis has been assigned to mold him into a big leaguer.
The point to be made here is that while Nuke is still in the minors, a nobody, the rule is he shouldn't have fungus on his shower shoes; however, as Crash points out, that little rule can go away if only Nuke can make it to the big leagues - become famous and rewrite the rules in his own image - become colourful.
Unfortunately for Nuke LaLouche, he's not in Cormac McCarthey's league.
There's a double standard here.
When Cormac McCarthy submits his story to the world, he is met with a Pulitzer Prize and a movie deal, but when my grade 6 language arts students forget to use quotation marks with their dialogue on their Provincial Achievement Test, they are docked marks. Punished.
And Nuke is a slob.
At some point in time, Cormac McCarthy was in grade 6 - the minor leagues, grinding it out with the other minor league authors. If Cormac McCarthy does as he's told and complies with the rules of writing, he continues to use quotation marks, and The Road either never gets written or drowns in mediocrity and obscurity because it is standardized. Of course the omission of quotation marks does not define The Road's greatness, but I think you get the bigger message here.
So when does Cormac McCarthy ever learn to be different. If we don't provide him with the opportunity to be wrong - to be unique and creative - we can only hope that he will defy the rules at his own peril.
When school is more about reproducing the teacher's knowledge rather than the student producing their own, we run the risk of extinguishing their creativity. We teach it out of them. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say we school it out of them.
If we can appreciate how Cormac McCarthy bends the rules to create something new and creative, then we have to provide students with a learning environment where they can grow their own creativity and find themselves.
In his book The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything, Sir Ken Robinson points out that one size does not fit all:
Some of the most brilliant, creative people I know did not do well at school. Many of them didn't really discover what they could do - and who they really were - until they'd left school and recovered from their education...
These approaches to education are also stifling some of the most important capacities that young people now need to make their way in the increasingly demanding world of the twenty-first century - the powers of creative thinking. Our systems of educaiton put a high premium on knowing the single right answer to a question. In fact, with programs like No Child Left Behind (a federal program that seeks to improve the performance of American public schools by making schools more accountable for meeting mandated performance levels) and its insistence that all children from every part of the country hew to the same standards, we're putting a greater emphasis than ever before on conformity and finding the 'right' answers.
Artistry and creativity that becomes standardized ceases to be art and loses much of its creativity. For every Cormac McCarthy out there who defies the rules and finds his own style, there are a thousand Nuke LaLouche's who are made to feel guilty for the fungus on their shower shoes.
