Tent and Travel

I love traveling with a tent.  It creates a sense of freedom, trust, and independence that is absent when I walk into a motel room, lock the door, switch on the air conditioner, and flick the remote.  I have car camped, backpacked, and bike toured around Asia and the United States and all of these modes of travel bring me closer to people, closer to nature, and closer to myself than if I stayed in hotels along the way.  

I recently returned from a car camping trip out West with my family.  Most of the places that we went in West Texas, New Mexico and Southern Colorado were places that I wanted to show my boys since they had meaning to me from previous trips.  We camped under the penetrating sun of the Guadalupe Mountains, beneath cool Pinon Pines near Santa Fe, within fifty yards of a 1200-year-old Anasazi ruin at Chaco Canyon, and ten feet from the crashing waters of Bear Creek at the Telluride City Campground  -- and at each place we met and interacted with people and nature in a way that we couldn’t have if we had locked a motel door behind us.  There was the probation officer we met at Hyde State Park who had bike toured from Chattanooga, our friends the McGraths with whom we rendezvoused at Chaco, and the Catholic Cardinal and his friend from Flagstaff who were four-wheeling around Telluride.  Each morning we woke around sunrise and were in bed soon after sunset, reading either our individual books or our out-loud book, Journey to the Center of the Earth.  Our rhythms quickly matched the natural cycles of the Earth, and it became more comfortable to sleep on the ground than in a bed.  We made up games at campsites.  I loved pinecone bocci ball, but my sons preferred throwing pinecone hand grenades.  The boys whittled, chased small animals, and climbed rocks while Elizabeth and I made supper or read.  

There was some whining, complaining, and restlessness -- but it seemed to diminish as we went deeper into the trip.  The boys learned to be more patient, to manage their time, to find ways to overcome boredom, to deal with loneliness, and to be physically uncomfortable.  They saw so much -- bats swirling out of Carlsbad Caverns, lush springs in the middle of the desert, blooming agave, 700-foot-tall sand dunes, tiny Permian fossils, Anasazi petroglyphs, hot springs, pronghorn antelope, thunderstorms racing across the plains, and a sky that never seemed to end.  We were a family together every hour of every day for three weeks, rarely leaving each others’ sides.   

I sometimes forget in the rush of daily life that being together as a family is more important than anything.  As the school year progresses, and the stress of too much to do in too little time hammers away, I will be sustained by the memory of listening to the steady breathing of my family as they slept under the dome of our tent surrounded by the great Western night.

Delayed Gratification: Marshmallows, Minecraft, and Control

This morning was monumental, much better than A’s on a report card or 99th percentiles on standardized tests.  This morning my eight-year-old boy got up and said that he wanted to finish all his work first thing in the morning.  Walter Mischel, make way for Charlie Douglas who just passed the marshmallow test on a grand scale.

While I’m off for a few weeks during the summer, my two boys enjoy the pleasures of Papa Camp, which shares a few of the same attributes of their traditional “sleep-away camps,” like regular meal service, swimming at the lake, and poopy-sleepy time.  However, unlike most “sleep-away camps,” Papa Camp has some work involved. (I refer to work here in the purest Mark Twain sense as being something that you have to do rather than something that you choose to do.)  The work involved is daily reading, writing, math, exercise, piano and chores.  This summer, rather than working out an intricate schedule of these activities for the boys, I gave them a spreadsheet with the activities listed and told them that they needed to do all of them each day.  They also have a limit on screen time each day, and they must keep track of this as well.  I have refrained from nagging, and let them figure out the how and when of getting the work done, when to play MInecraft (more tempting than a marshmallow for my boys), and when to loll around trying to deal with summer boredom.  

This morning, one of the first things out of Charlie’s mouth was, “I’m going to do all my work first thing this morning.”  When I asked him why, he said that he wanted to get it done first thing because he didn’t do all his work yesterday.  When I prodded a little deeper and asked him how it made him feel not to finish his work, he said that he didn’t have the “word” to describe it.  I really could care less about the word that he might have chosen; maybe he will be able to name it later, but what is important is that he displayed a huge amount of self control, a large amount of grit that I have not seen exhibited before in his work.  The motivation to get his work done first came totally from inside, which is more important to me than almost anything.

Charlie has always had the ability to persevere to do things that he wants to do -- to play.  He can and does spend hours designing and making intricate Lego structures.  He figured out, by himself, over many, many hours how to use I Movie to make a video about his Dream Team of Lego heroes.  However, up to this point in time, he has not displayed the same stick-to-it quality in things that other people, like his parents and teachers, require him to do.  It is amazing to me to see this transference of grit from the things that he wants to do to the things that he is asked to do, and I wonder how and why this blossomed within him.  

I know that this quality, possibly more than anything else, will help Charlie to be successful and happy. The self-control to postpone gratification, in eight-year-old Charlie’s case, the power to choose to do his work before designing worlds in Minecraft, will reduce negative stress in his life and give him control over his world.

Learn to Use Math

I frequently use math.  You probably do too, so I’d like to give you a math awareness challenge.  At the end of the day today, spend ten minutes or so making a list that describes when, where, and how you used math during your day along with the math skills that you used.  If you are kind of geeky like me, you may want to put it into a table:

when	where	how	why	math skill used
5:45 AM	bedroom	looked at clock when alarm went off	oriented me into the day	telling time
5:50 AM	bedroom	counted pushups	helped me to set and reach goals of physical fitness	counting
6:10 AM	kitchen	measured ingredients for pancakes	prepared food that tasted decent	measuring
6:30 AM	kitchen	read info from yearly physical from prior day,  (specifically my body mass index and how it related to averages)	helped me to understand my physical condition and enforced beliefs about eating and exercise	reading tables and comparing data

Perhaps you will be surprised by how often you actually use math.  We frequently use math for day-to-day tasks, and we never think about it.  We use math to help us make sense of the world around us and our place in that world.  One of the other things that becomes obvious from my table is that I was not born with any of the math skills that I used in the first forty-five minutes of my day.  I learned all of them.  

I’m not sure where I learned the skills listed above, but I’m pretty sure that I learned all of them before I was six or seven-years-old.  I carry all of those math skills (and a few more) around with me every day in what I like to call my math toolbox, a toolbox that was first opened soon after I was born. I am almost always unaware when I use my math tools.  However, every time that I use something in my toolbox, I get some practice with that skill.   I remember how to do all of this math because I do it on a regular basis.

I also know that folks can lose the computational math skills that most of us take for granted.  My father has lost most of his cognitive function due to Alzheimer's.  While he may recognize a number on a clock, he has no concept of what that number means.  He doesn’t know the difference between ten dollars and a hundred, and he couldn’t count twenty paper clips on a table.  While Alzheimer's has done other terrible things to his mind, it has also taken away his ability to make sense of the world by using math.  

The ability to use math in our lives is a skill that is frequently overlooked and taken for granted, but without it we could not function successfully.  It is no wonder that we teach math in school.  However, I do wonder about the math that we teach and the way that we teach it.

If the function of math is to help us make sense of the world around us and to solve problems in that world, then shouldn’t we spend some time practicing how to recognize problems, how to get the information we need to solve them, and then how to apply the math that we carry in our tool box (or that we can access from a resource)?  Unfortunately nearly everyone who attends school in the United States gets little practice at this, which I would argue, is a more important skill than memorizing algorithms.  

We need to present our students with situations and scenarios where they actually have to determine the problem, find the information that they think they need to solve it, and then reach into their toolbox of math algorithms to find a solution.  Students who are taught to recognize problems that others may not see, who are taught to seek multiple solutions, who are taught to appreciate the possibilities of alternate perspectives, and who are taught to synthesize other’s ideas into their own -- these are the students who are going to have control over their lives.

Yes, of course students still need to know the algorithms necessary to solve problems.  However, for math to be truly useful in their lives, students must develop the capabilities to know how and when to use the appropriate tool in the box. They can't do this without practice.

Google Sees Little Value in Test Scores and GPA

It must be reassuring to the folks who believe that school shouldn’t prepare students for the workplace to read the following written by Max Niesen from Business Insider:

In an interview with The New York Times' Adam Bryant, Google's Senior Vice President of People Operations Laszlo Bock explains that some of the biggest stalwarts of the hiring and recruiting world, the interview, GPA, and test scores, aren't nearly as important as people think.

Google doesn't even ask for GPA or test scores from candidates anymore, unless someone's a year or two out of school, because they don't correlate at all with success at the company. Even for new grads, the correlation is slight, the company has found.

Bock has an excellent explanation about why those metrics don't mean much.

" Academic environments are artificial environments. People who succeed there are sort of finely trained, they’re conditioned to succeed in that environment," he says.

While in school, people are trained to give specific answers, "it's much  more interesting to solve problems where there isn’t an obvious answer," Bock says. "You want people who like figuring out stuff where there is no obvious answer."

When I started teaching in the early 1990s, I had already worked for a bank, done some oil and gas properties management, and run different divisions of an automobile dealership.  My first teaching job at Robert E. Lee High School in San Antonio was a shock on many levels, but the biggest head-spinner was that it became clear to me that school had little to do with other workplaces or real life.  Some teachers were unmotivated and would have been fired in a week if school were anything like the working world.  I’ll never forget one seasoned teacher asking me why I worked so hard.  There was little focus on the customers, e.g. , the parents who paid our wages through taxes and the students who were the passive recipients of knowledge that was of little use in their lives.  A lot of time and energy was spent in managing the students’ days, making sure that everyone was accounted for and trying to limit the opportunities for students to engage in illicit or unsupervised activities.  Even amidst this mind-deadening, controlled world, there were many dedicated faculty and students who struggled to teach and learn in a system that really wasn’t conducive to helping students learn how to be successful in their lives outside of school.

The students who were successful at Robert E. Lee High School and most other high schools around the country, the students who learned how to “do school” and be successful in what Bock calls an “artificial environment,” went on to ply their school skills at college.  Then they faced what I and nearly everyone I knew faced when I graduated from college:  they faced a world of work that was quite different from high school and college.  While a college diploma may have given them a ticket into the workforce, it did little to prepare them for what they would be doing.

The most frustrating thing to me is that we know how to help students learn to be succesful outside of school.  We know how to teach students to examine and solve open-ended problems; we know how to instill grit in our students to give them long term perseverance; we know how to help students develop character strengths; we know how to create environments and methods that hone students’ communicative and collaborative skills; we know how to help internal motivation flourish within students; we know that we should limit curriculum to what is truly “lifeworthy.”  If you don’t believe me, pay attention to the experts who have spent the better part of their lives researching and reporting on these topics:  Check out Dan Meyer’s work in implementing problem solving, look at Angela Duckworth’s work on grit, read Martin Seligman on developing character, don’t forget Daniel Pink’s and Alfie Kohn’s books on motivation; listen to what Dave Perkins has to say about lifeworthy skills.

There are many things standing in the way of making school more relevant to life, but the primary obstacle is the collective mindset of institutions, parents, teachers, administrators, and students that we all think we know what school looks like.  In our minds, even though many of us know better, school should look like what it looked like last year, or ten years ago, or fifty years ago simply because that is school.  Unfortunately, the school that we are comfortable with, the school of our memory, grows in irrelevance as the rest of the world speeds toward the future while we remain firmly planted in the past.

Modeling: Another MOOC Course

I’ve been doing a little modeling on the side the last few weeks.  No photo shoots for Esquire or GQ, but modeling -- as in creating ways to represent the world by using math or graphics to gain understanding and find solutions to problems.  I enrolled in my second MOOC (Massive Online Open Course) through Coursera a couple of weeks ago and have gone through the first three weeks of Dr. Scott E. Page’s “Model Thinking” class at the University of Michigan.  It already has me thinking that modeling, along with probability and statistics, should be required at all schools.

If you have been listening to the news lately, you are probably aware of the growing demonstrations in Sao Paulo, where Brazilians are protesting against high taxes and low living standards.  Dr. Page’s lecture that I watched yesterday demonstated a simple model that explains how difficult it is to predict these huge public demonstrations that have occurred around the world the last three years.  It all has to do with thresholds and peer effects.  I’ll let him explain it in this six-minute video:

This simple model has some pretty big implications for seventh-graders.  We know that as children grow to be teens that most look to peers for cues on what they should wear, how they should act, what music to listen to, the type of social media to use, etc.  What is a particular thirteen-year-old's threshold for "trying on a new hat" and what if that new hat is not something harmless, but something that can have lasting ramifications.  I plan to show this video to my advisory next year in hopes that  understanding thresholds and the peer effect may give my boys enough knowledge to display courage and confidence in situations that could be harmful or dangerous.  

Free Your Mind, Share a Run

They say that if you sleep on a problem that you will wake up with a solution.   I solve problems when I run.  Creativity happens because I am unencumbered by linear thought.  My mind floats and roams on a rocking sea, held afloat by the the constant rhythm of my feet, my breath, and my arms.  When running, I have true attention deficit, and my mind leaps and frolics in places that it normally doesn’t venture.  Because of this, I rarely run with others.  The conversation keeps my mind too focused to float.  However, on the last day of the faculty workweek, Andy Lammers and I hit a small portion of the Mountains to Sea Trail together, and something unusual happened -- at least for me.

After five minutes of panting up the Stuyvesant Road hill, we both fell into a comfortable rhythm of breath and legs.  The stressors of our work week started dripping off of us like the sweat that rolled down our backs.  After a few minutes, we began free associating childhood memories that were so close in spirit and emotion that our childhoods could have occurred in the same time and place instead of being separated by fifteen years and several thousand miles.  We talked about the risks that we took as boys:  throwing mudclods at our neighborhood friends, reading books soaked in the heroics of war, building forts, and pretty much being clueless to the world outside our neighborhoods.  Our memories fed off of each other, bouncing around from one thread to another.  It struck me much later that on this run, our minds worked together to do the same thing that happens to me when I run alone.  That is cool.  

Although I’ve known Andy for many years, that run brought me closer to him than any time we have spent together socially or professionally.  Long term memories have their neural grounding in deep emotion.  I’ll remember this run with Andy, and maybe in the future I’ll seek out running partners rather than shunning them.

Postive Psychology - A Summer Project

A few weeks ago, Missy Sullivan gave me an article to read about Positive Psychology written by Martin Seligman.  Missy has her headlights set on the completion of an advanced degree in School Psych, and during the summers we sometimes discuss ideas that apply to psychology and school.  I admit that I knew little to nothing about Positive Psychology, and although I found the article interesting, I was also a little skeptical.  In the meantime, I came across a large section in the book, How Children Succeed by Paul Tough, that described the theory and outcomes of Positive Psychology.  It seemed too much of a coincidence for me to be exposed to this theory twice in such a short period of time, so I’m following the serendipitous guidepost and delving into the theory, process, and outcomes.

The following is an excerpt from Martin Seligman’s Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-Being

First, a quiz:

Question one: in one or two words, what do you most want for your children?

If you are like the thousands of parents I’ve polled you responded, “Happiness,” “Confidence,” “Contentment,” “Fulfillment,” “Balance,” “Good stuff,” “Kindness,” “Health,” “Satisfaction,” “Love,” “Being civilized,” “Meaning,” and the like. In short, well-being is your topmost priority for your children.

Question two: in one or two words, what do schools teach?

If you are like other parents, you responded, “Achievement,” “Thinking skills,” “Success,” “Conformity,” “Literacy,” “Math,” “Work,” “Test taking,” “Discipline,” and the like. In short, what schools teach is how to succeed in the workplace.

Can and should schools attempt to teach well-being?  The list of adjectives that Seligman describes as what parents “most want for their children” seems pretty squishy.  Is it really our job in school to teach kids to “love each other” or to “find meaning?”  Truthfully, great teachers have always taught these skills and attitudes.  It is one of the things that promotes such strong bonds between teachers and students.  However, what if schools adopted systematic and coordinated approaches to teaching well-being?  This has been done and, according to Seligman, done with success.  

I’ve got some research to do this summer.

Revisiting Choi to the World

There are some Japanese words that just don't translate well into English, and natsukashi is one of them. To me, natsukashi is a gentle fondness of a memory that you know will never be repeated. One might feel natsukashi when remembering a perfect spring day walking next to the Matsukawa River with cherry blossoms drifting to the ground. This morning I woke up feeling a little natsukashi, remembering my family's time with Choi and his graduation from high school a year ago. So, I am reposting one of my favorite pieces, Choi to the World.

It will take me a few months to get over the absence of brilliant piano music as I prepare dinner in the evenings.  Choi is leaving us after nine months of inhabiting a room in our basement and our lives.  We are sad to see him go.  

Choi is a Korean national who graduated from Carolina Day School a few days ago.  He has attended CDS for three years, living with two other CDS families during the previous two years.  Among his many talents, Choi is a gifted linguist (fluent or proficient in five languages), an amazing pianist, an aspiring badminton player, a brilliant actor, an award-winning mathematician, a divergent thinker, and an encourager of vegetable eating for my seven-year-old.

I am sure that my sons get sick and tired of me asking them questions; it is simply a byproduct of my years as an educator, and I can’t help myself.  So this morning on the drive to school, I asked them what they learned from Choi over the last nine months.  John Kelly thought for a while (I give tons of wait time) and said simply that it was different having Choi live with us.  At first it seemed like a “duh” response, but John Kelly rarely gives simplistic reasons for anything.  After a few leading questions, what he was trying to say was that he learned a lot by being forced to live differently.  Our cozy family of four, with our routines and habits became different when Choi moved in last August.  Changing things up, making things different, is a prerequisite for growth and learning, and this was Choi’s greatest gift to our family.

My children also had first-hand experience living with someone from another country.  This will make them more accepting of others and other cultures for the rest of their lives.  Wow!   We had dinner table discussions about mandatory service in the military (following his freshman year at Dickinson College, Choi will serve in the Korean army for two years like all Korean males), we talked about gender roles and sexism in other countries, we listened to Korean pop wafting up from the basement, we learned that Korean children learn never to question their father (too bad I couldn’t get this going in my family).

Choi also provided inspiration to us all.  John Kelly composed his own piece of music for his recent piano recital because he observed Choi’s love of music.  Charlie learned some better table manners.  Elizabeth and I were reminded that the world is huge and that we can still take risks in our lives.

Last week, it hit Charlie that Choi would be leaving us for good.  He cried himself to sleep that night.  We will all miss Choi, but we send him out into the world with our love.  Choi to the World!

"The Road to Nowhere" and Finding the Right Fit

The “Nowhere” depicted in the film The Road to Nowhere does not refer to college as some may think; I believe “Nowhere” is the college application process.  The principal theme in the movie is that high school, for many students, is not about learning but about creating a resume full of exceptional grades, honors classes, AP courses, extracurricular efforts, community service, and various awards in order to gain acceptance to the highest-rated colleges possible.  Under our current system, students become experts at “doing school” rather than experts at learning skills and long-term knowledge.  This has to change, and there are many courageous schools that are fighting this battle to prepare students for life, not college acceptance.

In the Q and A session following a recent viewing of A Race to Nowhere, Warren Wilson College President, Steve Solnick, made some comments about the college selection process that rang true to me.  He said that the ranking of colleges by students and the ranking of students by colleges has created a situation where too many students end up at the wrong college.  Students should be choosing colleges by best fit, not by attempting to attend the “best” college.  Likewise, colleges should attempt to find students that best fit their college, not attempting to enroll the “best” students.

As Solnick pointed out, the strength of higher education in America comes from the great diversity of colleges.  There are colleges that train students to be athletes, that conduct research, that emphasize particular religious beliefs, that promote outdoor education, that focus on relationships between faculty and students, that require all students to spend a year abroad, etc.  Choosing a college because it outranks another on an arbitrary list inevitably ends up with students at the wrong schools.  

One indicator that students are choosing the wrong colleges is that one-third of all college students end up transferring (Chronicle of Higher Learning).   Of course there are other reasons for transferring than discovering that your “best college” choice in high school was a poor fit, but certainly the lack of fit must be a determining factor for many students who transfer.

Unfortunately buying a seat at a college is under the same marketing and status influences as purchasing other goods and services.  Many Americans drive particular cars to impress others, choose wines because of a name or rating, and wear emblems on shirts and shoes because they are brand conscious.  So, it should come as no surprise that young Americans are susceptible to marketing ploys and status seeking with regards to college.  

This makes the job of conscientious parents and faculty even more important.  We must help our children and students to understand that college is much more than a name on a list and more than a flag that can be waved in front of the world to show how well they “did school."  When any young person says, “I want to go to college at _________,” the adults who love her need to ask why and probe deeply to help her discover the right fit.