Before I get started, I need to make some apologies. I didn’t write a newsletter last week because I was at a wedding in Annapolis, and I didn’t send this newsletter out earlier today for reasons that I won’t share right now but that may become relevant in the future. And, since I’m writing this sort of last-minute, it’s not going to be a deeply researched or well-planned post. So I apologize to all my readers who have rightfully expected consistency from me. But since most of you know me, recent delays are no shock to you.
Anyway, today I want to write about a number of things that bother me about both my experience as a teacher (no surprise there) and my diagnosis of some of these problems. Some of this may seem disjointed, but I’ll try to pull it all together in the end.
What’s the point?
One of the things that bothers me most about my students is when they ask, “why do I have to do this? I’m never going to use this in real life.” This has been a perennial question among students at least since I was in school. I remember many students around me asking why they were learning about, say, the Renaissance, or the Pythagorean Theorem. And it’s not such a preposterous question. After all, I’ve never encountered a right triangle and been asked by a stranger to calculate the length of its hypotenuse given the length of its other two sides. I imagine that most of my readers have also successfully avoided this type of situation (and probably don’t remember what the heck a hypotenuse is, anyway (it’s the side of a right triangle (that’s a triangle with a right angle (that means 90 degrees)) that is diagonal)). Luckily, we don’t go around encountering such strange circumstances, and so the knowledge of how to even begin to attempt solving such bizarre questions from such presumptuous and persistent strangers simply dissolves from our brains over time.
But still, some people do use the things they have learned in school in their daily lives after they have left school. Engineers, for instance, wouldn’t have a problem plugging the relevant numbers into the relevant places in the relevant formulas (formulae?) and obtaining the correct answer. In fact, that’s basically all they do. Similarly, opinion journalists need to know how to write a persuasive essay—oftentimes, several of them in one week. Science teachers need to know how photosynthesis works (as do florists). Military analysts need to know the capitals of all sorts of countries, and they need to be able to find them on a map.
Of course, my students could counter by saying that they don’t want to become engineers, or journalists, or science teachers, or florists, or military analysts. They want to do…something else.
This is a fine point, except it ignores the really immutable fact about the future: You just can’t predict it. My students have no idea what they want to do with their lives, and probably won’t know until, like me, they are in a career that they decide they don’t want to have for the rest of their lives. Therefore, they are making rash decisions when they consciously choose to avoid the task given to them by their teacher under the presumption that they won’t use that skill later in their lives. They may, in fact, choose to pursue a career that involves that very skill.
For instance, I never really knew what I wanted to do with my life, but I knew that I always liked writing. I may have told this story before, but it bears repeating. When I was in first grade, I had to write a creative story. In the story, I used an ellipses (that’s the three periods in a row (see above)), and my teacher was completely floored that I knew what ellipses were and, more important, how to use them properly. She had me read it out loud because she was so impressed by my skills. Ever since then, I knew that I was a good writer. Later on in my school career, I decided that I wanted to do something with writing as a career.
Now, I don’t expect many of my students to become writers. But the point is that I had no idea in first grade that I would ever use my writing skills to earn money. But because I read a lot of books (thereby absorbing the rules of punctuation, diction, and syntax) and actually tried in school, I was able to pick up the skills that would help me start this very newsletter in my adult life.
This lesson applies to every subject in school. You never know what interests you may have when it comes time to choose a career. Even if you hate math when you are in middle school, you may find a teacher in high school or college who changes your perspective on it and encourages you to pursue a career in engineering (or as a math teacher). The same may be true of science, or art, or music, or English—but probably not gym. Anyway, the point is that you never know what “real life” will mean for you—so you may as well be prepared for anything.
The point of education
This brings me to my second point, which is that we have a warped view of what an education is for, in the first place. We tell kids from the moment that they enter elementary school that they need to pay attention so they can learn things and graduate so that they can earn lots of money after they graduate. It’s the same with college: We push high schoolers to think about college (even if it’s not really for them) and we point to charts and studies saying that college degree-holders earn x percent more money over the course of their careers than mere high school graduates.
And unless a student ends up going to a liberal arts college, we never teach them the inherent value of education. We never tell them about the Socrates quote that says “the unexamined life is not worth living,” which extolls the virtues of education and the non-pecuniary value of simply learning things.
You can debate whether Socrates was right about this. Lots of people lead unexamined lives; most of them, I would say, are worth having around. But his general idea is correct, I think. Even if you don’t pursue a traditional education, it is important and eye-opening to learn new things. Moreover, it can provide you with a sense of meaning that you may not have otherwise, and it can prepare you for your future in ways you don’t expect.
Just look at two of our most important historical figures in America: Alexander Hamilton and Abraham Lincoln. Neither of these men received a proper education. Lincoln was a country bumpkin, Hamilton an illegitimate immigrant. But both read voraciously and became some of the most impressive and important people our country has ever seen. Meanwhile, today’s kids are given a free education—not a great education, but an education nonetheless—and they couldn’t be bothered to do anything more than the bare minimum in school.
Anyway, I think we need to change the way we message about education if we want kids to take it seriously. It shouldn’t just be a 13-year training program for when they become career-havers. Rather, we should proselytize about the virtues of learning new things just for the sake of learning them.
Declining expectations
Okay, so here’s the part that I’m not sure fits in with the rest. Bear with me here.
Last week, I tasked my students with writing a two-paragraph essay. In the essay, they had to compare how two different texts portrayed the Greek character Icarus. You’ve probably heard of Icarus—he’s the kid who flew too close to the sun, which melted the wax on the wings his father made him, causing him to plummet to his death in the sea. The message of the story is to listen to your elders, and to “stay at a moderate height.” However, that’s not the only interpretation. We also read a poem by a guy who admired Icarus for taking chances, and that the only way that he could obtain wisdom is by testing his limits.
Based on these two interpretations of the classic story, students had to write a two-paragraph essay comparing how the authors depicted Icarus. They first had to fill out a couple of graphic organizers designed to help them organize their writing and find evidence to support their ideas.
You may think that this is a fairly straightforward task, and that students should have been able to do this with ease in a single class period. But if you knew my students, you would understand the folly of this thinking. I gave my students two-and-a-half class periods to complete this task, and some of them didn’t even finish after that generous amount of time. One of my students—granted, one of the more infuriating ones—asked how I could possibly expect him to complete this essay in “only” three days.
I reminded him that on the MCAS (Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System) that he will take in May, he will have to perform that same task more than once in one day, and that this would help him prepare for it. He grumbled something and continued to procrastinate. I’m not sure if he actually ever completed his essay; I guess I’ll find out when I grade the submissions.
This incident made glaringly obvious the perils of our rock-bottom expectations of our students. In some ways, this isn’t our fault: These students are years behind where they should be due to remote schooling, and their behavior often creates situations in which we can’t even teach anybody. But this dismal situation isn’t going to change if we keep our expectations at such low levels.
When I was in middle school a mere 11 years ago, neither I nor any of my classmates would have had an issue writing a two-paragraph essay in one class period. That’s not because we were any smarter than the kids I’m currently teaching. Rather, it’s because our teachers expected that level of output from us. We delivered what we expected because the bar was set at such a level where we had to push ourselves to reach it.
The situation today is totally different. We have let our students bully us into lowering the expectations for them—both in terms of academics and behavior. This is a rotten system, and it’s not going to improve the lives of our students.
Putting it all together
As a society, we seem to have dropped the ball on education. What used to be an exclusive privilege for a select class is now a frustrating and fun-killing obligation for all. We need to do better in our messaging about education—and schools and teachers need to reinforce this messaging.
Of course, that is much easier said than done. Kids are naturally rebellious and they just want to have fun; they don’t want to sit in a classroom and memorize the rules of grammar when they could be on their phones or playing basketball. But everyone knows this about kids. Nobody except the foolish expect kids to like going to school and learning. So in theory, we would expect this going in, and enforce the rules and expectations so that kids are in the proper environment in which to learn.
Instead, we let kids dictate the rules of the halls and classrooms. We tell them to pay attention because they need a good education in order to make money, which just reinforces the idea that they shouldn’t pay attention to things that they don’t think will make them money in the future. We let kids slow down the pace of learning because they are not at the level at which they need to be to go through the curriculum faster.
Lots of school reform efforts are complicated and involve switching around the school day or the method of funding schools or privatizing the whole thing (I’ve written about these things in past editions of the newsletter). But the first step to reclaiming the ability to educate kids is simple: Have higher expectations. Have higher expectations of students, but also of teachers and administrators. Have higher expectations for the pace of curriculum and content, but also of the responses to the question “why are we doing this?” Teachers can’t be afraid to tell kids that the stuff they are learning is important whether or not they will use it directly in their later life. The simple fact is that learning new things is a wonderful endeavor and will always add inherent value to your life. It’s time we started acting like we value education for its true virtues rather than as a money-making venture. And it’s time we set the bar far higher.
I don't know where or when it happened, but I see the results of it everywhere. I see it at the grocery store, I see it at the lunch restaurant, I see it when I call a company, I see it when in contract for services. Mediocrity. It's epidemic. It's everywhere. My parents weren't my friends. They were my parents. What does that mean? It means I was a little nervous around them. I didn't want to disappoint them. They weren't afraid to tell me I could do better. I never wanted to disrespect them. We were all human beings, but they occupied different, more important space than I did. Never were we equals. Never did my feelings or opinions trump theirs. They were in the business of running a family. They got to do it their way and it is the most important institution and unit that ever existed. Maybe that's where the problem is. Somewhere and at some time, the hierarchy of the family collapsed. Call it equality. Call it equity. Follow the money (taxes). I call it busted. I don't believe it's because people are busier, I don't believe it's because times are different. People are more interested in a like or a thumbs up than a guiding hand and I don't know why. Media? Politics? Power? Perhaps all three but righting the ship will not be easy and I'm afraid it will get worse before it gets better. Most things that are worth fighting for never are.