Summer Camp: Personal Learning Using Sports

My first summer camp job, back while I was still in college, was teaching swimming at a sports camp at my old high school. While the camp certainly focused on teaching athletic skills in the various sports that were offered, the main goal of the camp was to use sports as a means to teach important life skills: teamwork, sportsmanship, the value of practice and hard work, and so on.

Each class, regardless of the sport, began and ended with a warm up and cool down in which the kids were asked to set goals for the day and then evaluate their performance. In swimming these tended to be more individual goals. "I will swim a full length of the pool without stopping." "I will put my face in the water." But in the team sports there was also an emphasis on group skills. "I will congratulate an opponent on a good play." "I will pass the ball to a teammate."

Because of these warm up and cool down times, the experience of sports was much more about process than about result. I have tried to maintain that emphasis as a coach at the middle school and high school levels. I have coached an undefeated state championship volleyball team, as well as multiple teams who have not won a single game, and a little of everything in between. Hopefully what all those experiences have had in common for the players on those teams was an emphasis on having fun and on getting a little bit better every day. As in the classroom, it has been a good day at sports practice if you have improved, and maybe learned a bit about yourself in the process.

Summer Camp: Challenges

In this series of summer camp related posts, I keep coming back to the day camp back in Massachusetts where I have been a camper, counselor and administrator. Many of my ideas about what an ideal school would be like, especially in terms of building community and character, come from my experiences there. One of the big pieces of that community building experience was what we called challenges.

Anyone who has done a leadership training course or any sort of Project Adventure program will be familiar with the idea of challenges. Basically, a group is assigned a cooperative task with a set of proscribed rules to make the task more difficult. Completing the task generally requires that the group work very well together and that every member of the group be involved in getting to the finish. One of the classic examples is a challenge we called 'The Peanut Butter Pit.' The task is to get the entire group from a start point to an end point across a boiling pit of sticky peanut butter/corrosive acid/radioactive sludge. Between the start line and the end line, the campers are not allowed to touch the ground. All they have to help them across are a series of evenly spaced cinder blocks in the middle of the pit, and two or three narrow but sturdy boards. The goal is to challenge both their cooperative and problem solving skills.

Generally, we did about three challenges over the course of a four week session, each one a little longer than the one before. The last and longest was generally supposed to take about one full day of camp, although there are legends about epic challenges that took three or four days to complete. Each challenge also came with a back story, usually involving counselors in costume breaking into circle time to enlist the campers help preventing some imminent threat to the camp, the world or the universe.

At the end of the challenge (and often in the middle of more difficult ones) counselors would lead group discussions about how things had gone, what worked and didn't work, and what they could take away from the experience and apply to other areas of life. They were given a chance to give a 'hats off' to members of the group who had been especially helpful, and were guided to the idea that a successful group effort requires both leaders and followers. Finally, the all gave each other a ceremonial pat on the back to congratulate themselves on a job well done.

As a counselor and a teacher, I took a number of lessons away from working with kids on these challenges:

1) Frustration is an important part of the learning process. Personal growth comes from overcoming challenges, even artificial ones. Students need to learn how to handle themselves when things don't come easily. If they can learn that lesson in the relatively safe environment of school, it will serve them well throughout their lives.

2) We learn lessons best when we explicitly talk about them. Somewhere in the teaching process, we need to have a conversation with the students about why they are doing the things they are doing, and what it is we hope they get out of it. The more we give them a chance to talk about the goals, and assess their own progress towards them, the better off they will be.

3) Sometimes students should just be left to figure stuff out for themselves. One of the key pieces to being a counselor in the challenges was to create a safe environment and then to leave them alone to figure out the solution. They need the confidence-building experience of being the ones to solve the problem on their own.

I'm not suggesting in all this that classroom time be taken away from academic pursuits and replaced with team building activities, but I do think that some of the structure of these challenges could be carried over into the classroom. Give the students a difficult task that stretches their abilities, allow them the chance to work through it on their own, even when it is frustrating, and then come back at the end and debrief. In this way, they not only learn the material, but they learn how to work and think independently.

What do you do to really challenge your students?

There Is Nothing New Under The Sun

Starting about a month before I published my first post for this blog, I began archiving articles and blog posts that I thought might some day inspire a post. I didn't know at the beginning how much I would have to say about starting a school, and I thought it would be a good idea to have a catalog of ideas ready to go, just in case I developed a case of writer's block. Generally, when I see something that interests me and seems vaguely relevant to the topic of schools, I email it to myself, and label it for future use. At this point, I have over a hundred articles and blog posts awaiting my attention in my gmail account.

Among the articles I've been waiting to write something about is Gene Weingarten's Pulitzer Prize winning feature from The Washington Post. If you haven't read it before, you should stop reading this right now and follow the link. You should experience his article and the accompanying video clips first hand. I found it to be a fascinating and moving piece.

To sum it up briefly, Weingarten convinced world famous virtuoso violinist Joshua Bell to play the roll of a busker in Washington D.C.'s L'Enfant Plaza metro station, just to see if anyone would realize what they were experiencing. The basic answer is no. Other than one amateur violinist, a woman who had just seen Bell in concert and recognized him, and a young boy who had to be dragged away by his mother, no one stopped to listen. Bell barely made enough money for a cup of coffee.

On a couple of occasions, I have started posts relating to this article, mostly focusing on the wonder of the young boy in contrast to the hurrying adults all around him, arguing that schools should do everything in their power to preserve and encourage this sense of fascination with the world. I never quite got the post finished, or it didn't quite fit in with the other things I was writing about, so I kept leaving it for another day.

Then yesterday, my wife forwarded me this Weingarten article from this Sunday's Post. It turns out Weingarten's fascinating social experiment had been tried and written about more than 75 years earlier for the Chicago Evening Post with almost exactly the same results. In the most bizarre of coincidences, not only did both violinists play two of the same pieces for their street performances, but for a period of about ten years, Joshua Bell played the exact same Stradivarius used by Jacques Gordon 75 years before (The Red Violin anyone?).

I write about this here, because I think there is a lesson in the way Weingarten handles the discovery that his his Pulitzer Prize winning article, surely one of the proudest accomplishments of his professional life, is not quite as original as he had believed. Instead of burying the story, or writing a defensive piece all about how he still deserves credit for his great idea, he writes a very humorous and humble piece, poking fun at his own pride in his originality. He points out that the internet, not any intrinsic differences between the two pieces, is largely responsible for the enormous success of his article in comparison to the immediately forgotten 1930 version. He revels with the rest of us in the bizarre coincidences between the two stories.

There are many teachable moments out there in the world, and this is a great one. I would present the students with a hypothetical situation, maybe translated to the world of science, where publishing original ideas if of such crucial importance. They have researched and written an article. All of the work is their own, but as the article is going to press, they discover that someone else has published something very similar before. What would they do? I think it would lead to a fascinating conversation about originality and who ideas belong to. Any chance for students to really engage with an ethical dilemma is a good thing.

In Weingarten's place, what would you have done?

What Can Math Teach Us About Character?

In case you hadn't noticed, it's election time again. What do elections mean? Lots and lots of numbers. We have poll results, delegate counts, statistics of all different sizes and hues. For the next six months, the air will be unusually full of numbers. It will be left to the American voter to sort through all the numbers and come to a conclusion about what the right thing to do is. But how numbers literate is the American public?

Perhaps the defining moment for numbers in politics came in the first presidential debate in 2000. Al Gore spent much of the debate defending his positions with statistic after statistic, which Bush brushed aside with the phrase "fuzzy math," converting all that information into so many greenhouse gasses. (It turns out that "fuzzy math" and "fuzzy logic" are real things, but I don't think that's what Dubya meant.) This moment was, of course, indicative of the whole campaign in which the intellectual and analytical Gore was regularly stymied by Bush's appeal to people's common sense and values.

Personal opinions about el presidente aside, what Bush was playing on was the general impression that in the wrong hands, numbers can be made to show whatever we want them to. In this particular respect, he is not wrong. Because we expect numbers to be objective, we can be manipulated by themall the more easily, and it is not all that hard to make the numbers appear to show something. Bush's strategy for dealing with the problem (ignoring the numbers completely), is one way to handle this problem. (I leave it to the reader to decide how successful it has been.)

The opposite approach, and the one which I would advocate, is to educate ourselves to be good interpreters of numbers, to recognize when the numbers have been fudged, and when they are really telling us something. If we are going to be good citizens, we must also be good judges of information. We need to be able to figure out when someone is telling us the truth, and when they really are using "fuzzy math".

All you math teachers out there, I encourage you to spend some time with your students analyzing the numbers that are floating around out there these days. Help them decide for themselves what is real or what is not. Their decisions just might make a difference someday.

Have you seen any really bad math recently? I'm sure you have.

What English Class Should Teach Students About Character

One of my responsibilities during my last couple years working in New Jersey was as one of the teacher representatives to the school's Judiciary Board. The Judiciary Board consisted of three teachers and three students (the student body president and two specifically elected representatives, one junior and one senior). When a major school rule was broken, it was our responsibility to determine as best as possible the facts of the case, and to recommend consequences to the Head of School and the principals. We saw a little bit of everything you might imagine that teenagers do, from the unending accumulation of minor offenses to bigger things like theft and drinking. More than anything else, though, we saw cases of cheating and plagiarism.

I had a conversation recently with my current colleagues here in northern Virginia. I am the only native born American in the Language Department, and we were discussing what they saw as the peculiarly American obsession with plagiarism. In the schools where they grew up, plagiarism was, if not outright encouraged, certainly openly permitted. It was the students' job to go out and find information from people who knew better than they did, and regurgitate that information. The extent to which you rephrased or processed that information was really beside the point, as far as they were concerned.

My background is pretty much the opposite. Where I went to school for 7th-12th grades, academic dishonesty (plagiarism, cheating, lying to a teacher) was grounds for immediate expulsion, a more severe policy than the two strikes given for drug or alcohol offenses. That environment certainly shaped my sense of the severity of plagiarism, and made it difficult for me to sit on the Judiciary Board as student after student came through for the same dumb things and walked away with a minor slap on the wrist. I felt at the time that if we made it more clear to the students that academic dishonesty was impermissible, and that the penalties were severe, the less it would happen.

Whether or not a one strike policy would have been the solution to the problem, the issue itself is one that schools have to deal with more and more, and need to find appropriate solutions for. The Internet gives students access to an increasing number of ways to avoid doing their own work, as well as teachers more and more resources for catching them. At schools like McLean High School, right here in my own backyard, the resulting conflict is starting to boil over.

It is not just about the increased resources available on the Internet. The Information Age is changing the role of information itself, and we should be discussing with our students just what that means for the morals and ethics of using information. On the one hand you have sites like Wikipedia, where information is open, fluid, and without owners. In many other areas, though, information is an increasingly valuable commodity, and we need to think about it as we would think about anything else with financial worth. This is going to be a difficult situation for students to navigate, since the opportunities to break the rules are growing, even as the rules become more and more important.

In that context, teaching students to do their own work, and to give credit where it is due to the work of others, is a hugely important part of education. I include it here as I am working through my ideas about English class because it comes up so often as students resort to CliffsNotes and SparkNotes to do their reading for them, and downloaded essays to save them hours of writing. Severe and immediate consequences for breaking the rules may not be the best solution in all schools or for all students, although I certainly got the message from my school, but it needs to be an explicit part of the curriculum, so that when students go out into the world they are prepared for the moral questions that lie ahead of them.

How serious an infraction do you think plagiarism is, and what would you do to discourage it?

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?

Who Are You?

I recently finished reading The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, by Steven Pinker. I love Pinker's books. His explanations of how the human brain works are easily understandable by a layperson without being dumbed down. He doesn't shy away from saying something controversial, but his arguments are so well backed up by clear thinking and an encyclopedic knowledge of the subject that you wish there were a lot more people thinking about things the way he does. Most importantly to me, I always feel like my understanding of the world has expanded by the time I reach the last page.

In The Blank Slate, Pinker goes on the attack against the idea that human beings are born as malleable lumps of clay whose characters are entirely formed by their environment and experiences. This may seem like an unnecessary and obvious argument to make in this modern age in which individuals are getting their whole genome mapped, but Pinker points out in his introduction how much of our cultural values and public policies depend on the idea that we are all really created the same, only differentiated by the fortunate or unfortunate circumstances into which we are born. Like I said, Pinker does not shy from controversial topics.

The bad news for those of us hoping to educate young women and men of good character, is that Pinker makes a pretty good case for the fact that environmental factors have very little influence over the eventual personalities of children:

Decades of studies have shown that, all things being equal, children turn out pretty much the same way whether their mothers work or stay at home, whether they are placed in daycare or not, whether they have siblings or are only children, whether their parents have a conventional or an open marriage, whether they grow up in an Ozzie-and-Harriet home or a hippie commune, whether their conceptions were planned, were accidental, or took place in a test tube, and whether they have two parents of the same sex or one of each. (The Blank Slate, p. 386)

The one place where environment does seem to have some (although still very slight) influence is the peer group:

Even the rare finding of an effect of the shared environment, and the equally elusive finding of an interaction between genes and the environment, emerge only when we substitute peers for parents in the "environment" part of the equation. (The Blank Slate, pp. 391-2)

If Pinker is right, then it might seem that we are doomed in the effort to educate character, and can only hope to collect large enough groups of good kids and hope that they have the desired effect on the not so good ones. I prefer to be a bit more optimistic. I think teachers and schools can have a great deal of influence on how peers interact with one another, and thus on how they learn to be from one another. I've seen it in action in a number of situations that I will describe at length in future posts. I think making character and ethics a part of a schools curricular goals is hugely important. I went to a high school that did a couple of things I think were effective, and I'll touch on those, too, in future posts.

In the meantime, please weigh in: what aspects of character would you hope a school would instill in its students, or at least try to?

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?