Michael Jordan Says It's OK To Fail

I am currently reading Mindset by Carol Dweck. I'll save my overall thoughts on the book for a later post, but a train of thought that started while reading her book fits into this week's theme of sports and school. The basic thesis of Dweck's book is that there are two kinds of people out there, those who believe that our abilities are malleable and therefore work to improve themselves, and those who believe that we're basically stuck with what God gave us and therefore whine and complain a whole lot. I am seriously oversimplifying here, but you get the basic idea.

In her chapter on sports, Dweck runs through a series of athletes who display the "growth mindset," the belief that ability comes as the result of a lot of hard work. She mentions the following Nike commercial featuring Michael Jordan (I love YouTube; you can find anything there).



Her point is that successful people take each failure as a chance to improve, something they know they have to work harder at. For me, this is one of the lessons of sports that is most valuable in the classroom. In sports, you practice. You play a game or a match. You either win or lose, but even when you win, you make mistakes; so you come back to practice, and you work on improving those skills so that next time you do better.

The classroom should function on a similar cycle. You learn new material. You take a test on that material. The vast majority of students will make some mistakes on that test, so you come back in and you work on learning from those mistakes and further expanding your skills.

As a Spanish teacher, one of the biggest impediments to learning in my classroom is the fear of making mistakes, and therefore the fear of speaking at all. I try to get my students to see that it's just like practice, and that if they don't give themselves a chance to fail, they will never learn. If it worked for Michael Jordan, it will work for them.

What Can You Do With Math?

What do you use math for in your everyday life?

As a teacher, my answer is: "to calculate percentages, lots and lots of percentages." I grade stuff, the student gets x out of a possible y, I write the resulting percentage at the top of the page, I take all those percentages and average them. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. Eventually I add weight to some of those percentages with other percentages (20% homework, 25% tests, etc.), and calculate yet another percentage that gets (abracadabra) turned into a letter. That's about the extent of my math life, and I could have done that kind of math back in middle school. So what were all my advanced math studies good for? (I got as far as Statistics and Multi-variable Calculus in college before I hit my math wall.)

I have stated before that in putting together a school, we should be questioning the value of everything in the curriculum. Math strikes me as being in the unusual position of being both of unquestioned value (of course math provides the tools that our students need to succeed in the modern world) and of above average forgetableness (second only to foreign language in the "I haven't used that since high school" rankings).

For people who end up using math in their careers, it is an invaluable skill, highly in demand in the widest variety of fields, from science to engineering to business and beyond. My friends who studied math in college left school with the world at their fingertips, and have gone on to wildly successful careers. For those of us who use only a much simpler set of mathematical skills, the rest of what we learned has often atrophied and begun to fall away. So what does this mean for math education in high school? How do we balance the students who will need a strong math background with those who may never do anything more complicated than basic arithmetic? For me, the answer lies in the larger philosophy of what a high school education should accomplish.

When I was filling out my college applications, checking the boxes about what I might choose to study when I got there, I said I was going to major in economics (math would have been real useful there). By the time I had to declare a major at the end of my Sophomore year, I chose psychology (I hear they use statistics for that) without ever having stepped inside an econ classroom. Six months later, I was adding Spanish as a second major, and headed down the path that would lead me to teaching. I loved my Spanish classes in high school, but never would have guessed that my career would involve Spanish, and certainly not teaching it. My wife, who is currently pursuing a PhD in biology, only took honors biology in high school because her mom made her.

My point is that very few of us have any idea at sixteen or seventeen what our futures have in store for us. In this age of many career changes, this strikes me as even more true. The job of high school should be to prepare us for the widest variety of possibilities and to provide us with as many skills as possible. Later in life we can decide which ones to allow to fade away with disuse. So, kids, go out and practice those derivatives. You never know when you may need them.

Have you used math today?

What Can You Do With English?

In an earlier post I talked about my former student, Adam, who liked to make the argument that English was a useless class. When we really got to the heart of it, what Adam believed was that reading fiction did not belong in school. He often equated it to having a class about watching movies (not remembering in the moment that he was sitting in a Spanish Culture Through Film class). Books and movies were for entertainment, if you liked that sort of thing (Adam didn't--at least not in the case of books), and didn't belong in an academic classroom. Adam was a pragmatic guy. He wanted to grow up, get a good paying job, and settle down to the task of making lots of money. Reading books just didn't fit into that scheme, although he was willing to admit that the writing skills aspect of English class was probably worth his time.

I had this discussion with Adam more times than I care to admit, hoping in vain that someday I would find just the right argument to convince him of the validity of reading fiction in school, but I never made the breakthrough. As is often the case when we get into a discussion like this, my failure was due to the fact that I didn't have a great answer to the question. I had never questioned the value of reading books. I loved reading in school. English and Spanish were always my favorite classes, and I studied Spanish in college mostly to keep reading all of the wonderful books there were to discover in my second language. Reading the great works of literature was a part of education that I always took for granted.

The goal behind this blog, though, is to not take anything for granted. Everything in our someday school should have a reason, and we should know exactly what it is. I've already argued that there is value to knowing about literature. Today's topic relates to the skills we get from English class.

I'll leave writing aside for the moment. If Adam was willing to admit the usefulness of learning to write well, I will assume for now that most of the readers of this blog are on the same page. What I want to present is an argument to convince my friend Adam, if he ever stumbles across this blog, that all those books he was forced to read were worth the time he may or may not have spent reading them.

Adam and I ended up leaving that school the same year, he to graduate, and me to join my future wife on Long Island, where she was starting graduate school the following fall. My new school on Long Island had a summer reading list for teachers. We were supposed to pick one book from the list and be prepared to discuss it during the before-school faculty meetings. I chose to read Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, and in its pages found the argument I had been looking for. I haven't seen Adam since then, so I haven't had a chance to test it out, but I like to think it would have at least made him think for a second that reading books was good for him.

For those of you who are not familiar with the book, it is a memoir of Nafisi's experiences leading a clandestine course in Western literature for women during the early days of the Islamic Republic. In addition to Lolita, they read a wide variety of books including The Great Gatsby, Pride and Prejudice , and Daisy Miller . The book is both a fascinating view of what it was like to be a woman in Iran during that huge cultural transition, as well as a love letter to great literature. Here is what she says about what we learn from these books:

Imagination in these works is equated with empathy; we can't experience all that
others have gone through, but we can understand even the most monstrous
individuals in works of fiction. A good novel is one that shows the complexity
of individuals, and creates enough space for all these characters to have a
voice; in this way a novel is called democratic--not that it advocates democracy
but that by nature it is so. (p. 132)

By reading about the experiences of other people, even (or maybe especially) fictional people, we learn to imagine what it would be like to be someone else. We learn empathy.

Empathy can be a rare skill during our school-age years. Teenagers have enough of their own stuff going on that it is often hard to step outside themselves and think about what it is like to be someone else. Reading fiction gives them a comparatively safe environment to explore that process. When the class discusses why a character behaved in a certain way at a critical moment in the story, or what might have motivated the antagonist to commit a heinous act, they are learning to empathize, to use their imaginations to connect with other people. That is a skill worth developing.

So, Adam, if you're out there, are you convinced?

As always, the names of any students mentioned in this blog are changed to protect their privacy.

Build a Curriculum: Some Structure to Start

I think it's time to give some structure to this whole discussion of creating a new school. So far we have established the general approach of thinking of student development in three categories: knowledge, skills, and character. So let's make a table with those as our three column headings:

Our row headings, then, will be the learning areas where we hope to be teaching the students these things. As a starting point, let's use the traditional departments in a typical school and add them into our table:

As the ideas on this blog develop, I'm sure I will be making many additions and changes to this structure; but for the time being, it gives us a good jumping off point to describe on the most basic level what our school hopes to teach. Once complete, it should paint a picture of our ideal graduate, a student who has acquired all the knowledge, skills and character traits that we decide are desirable and necessary for someone with a high school education.

The majority of the posts that follow will take the boxes of this table one at a time and start filling them up. It will always be a living document; but eventually, we should have the table filled in completely enough to have a good picture of what our new school is trying to do.

What do you think? Anything important missing from the table before we start?

What Can You Do?

Back in New Jersey, I taught a level 5 Spanish class that we called Spanish Contemporary Culture. It was basically Spanish and Latin American culture and history through film. We would watch a Spanish language movie with some redeeming educational value, learn as much as we could about the country where the movie took place, and usually finish off each segment with the students writing and filming their own movie based on what we had been studying. It was always a small group of students, and we had a lot of fun with it, especially during the periods when we were filming our own movies.

The last time I taught the class, I had a student in it named Adam. (N.B. I expect that I will find myself telling many stories about people I know and students I have taught. It is my intention to protect their privacy by changing their names, especially in the case of my students. In the great tradition of Mathnet: "the names are made up, but the problems are real"). Adam was a bright kid, a junior in high school at the time I taught him, and he had strong opinions about what was and what was not worth his time. My class was worthwhile because speaking Spanish was a skill that he could imagine being useful at some point in his career. English class, on the other hand, struck him as a complete waste of time. Learning to write well was fine; writing was a professional skill that he would need. But why, Adam argued, did they have to read all these novels that had no relevance to his own life?

I'll come back to my arguments in favor of reading fiction in school in a later post. At the moment, I want to connect this story to the question of what skills students should have when they graduate from school. My main point is that while I may disagree with Adam's conclusions when it came to English class (mostly because I disagree with the purely economic model he was using to judge value), the fundamental question he was asking was an important one: why do I need to do this?

As a teacher, I feel that it is my responsibility to always have an answer to this question. Whatever I am teaching, I should have a clear and well thought out reason why I am teaching it. In the world of independent high schools, our answers are often related to skills that are necessary for getting into, and being successful at, a good college. While that fits the goals of many students, it is certainly does not offer a complete list--or even an appropriate list--for all students. Just off the top of my head, I would mention the ability to work well with a group as a skill that does not necessarily have much value for getting into college, but which will be hugely useful to students in most of the rest of their lives.

So, this time I'll finish with a two part question--as always, my own answers to follow. What skills should students have when they graduate from high school, and why should they have them?

Great Minds Think Alike

I will come right back to my ideas about what should go in the three categories for an educated student (knowledge, skills, and character). But first, check out this commentary by Howard Gardner at Education Week. He starts his discussion from a very similar premise: imagine what your students will be like when they finish school. He also suggests three categories that we should be looking at when we answer that question, which he calls the three E's: excellence, engagement, ethics. Gardner's thoughts on how the nation's different school systems--the inner city, the working class heartland, and the suburban elite--all fall short in one of these categories is an interesting way to frame the problem. As a teacher in the third kind of school, I will be coming back to the question of teaching ethical behavior frequently in this blog.

An Ideal Student

A number of years ago, as part of the end of summer faculty meetings at my former school in New Jersey, we had a guest speaker. I have since forgotten not only his name, but most of what he talked about that day; but one activity we did has stuck in my mind ever since. We broke up into groups and were given a sheet of paper. We divided the paper into three columns labeled knowledge, skills, and character. He then asked us to picture our students as they were graduating from our school and heading off to college, and then to fill the columns with the things we hoped they had learned from their time in our school.

As the presenter had planned, most of our entries were pretty evenly divided in the last two columns. His message was clear. We are much more interested in who our students are, and what they know how to do when they graduate, than any specific things that they know.

Whether or not you agree with that overall message, the exercise itself seems like a good place to start when going about the project of building a new school. If our goal is the education of a student, starting from an image of what that student looks like when he is fully educated seems logical. So, over the next several posts, I will be presenting my own thoughts on what should go into those three columns, and I'm sure I will be constantly coming back to them as this project grows.

In the meantime, it is my hope that this blog will become not only a place for me to refine my own thoughts on what a school should do, but also a place of conversation between interested people. So please, contribute your own answers to the question. What does the ideal high school graduate look like?