It's Not About Time

Anyone who has lived and worked in a boarding school will be familiar with this refrain: "We don't have enough time."  Some variant of this mantra animates my daily rounds at school --

"We need more time"
"If only we could devote time to [name the lapsed priority]"
"This is a waste of time"
"If you want me to do that, you'll need to create some time"

Teachers know the wonders that we can work each day, but are well aware that they are miracles in minature-- frustrating, incremental steps towards progress in our students and our systems that we will mark in years, not days.  Who better to deeply understand the longer time scales of institutional change?  Who better to reckon with the boundaries that precious few minutes can create in our work?

So why are we so bound and determined to make time our master?  Instead of waiting for someone else to create the space in which to do our best work, what if we looked within?

Let's start by accepting the proposition that there just isn't enough time.  Especially in the boarding school world, we live with the constant tension of home and work, our families and our students, our grading and our restorative intellectual (or decidedly non-intellectual) pursuits.  The challenge of living is to make peace with the fact that our time is finite -- that in devoting time to one enterprise, we ultimately end up shortchanging another.  We never have enough time.  So it goes with mortality.

I created time to sit and write this morning.  The space to sit is not an outgrowth of my mastery of the quantum bounds of the universe, but rather a conscious decision to marshal my morning pool of creative energy into reflection, rather than my email inbox.  In reality, this reflective act is not a decision of how to use my time, but rather, how to distribute my attention.  I'd argue that taking 15 minutes to write reflectively each day is actually one of the best uses of our attention on behalf of ourselves and others.  I'm not the first person to articulate the powerful difference between time and attention, but I'm struck by how often I hear time cited incorrectly as the obstacle to being our best selves. 

In a real way, adopting the lens of time leads to a kind of willing powerlessness.  "I don't have enough time" is a statement that implies that we have ceded control over the distribution of our efforts to someone else.  Sure, for those of us who have to get up each morning and go to work, this is true to some extent.   If we looked deeply at the ways in which we distributed our attention while at work, however, we might find that opportunities do exist to use it in more productive and fulfilling ways.  By focusing on our investments of attention, rather than our allocation of time, we make an empowering declaration of control in a world that seems all too out of control otherwise.  To get there, we need to take a hard look at ourselves, and keep a more careful accounting of our attention. 

School leaders (and I don't mean "administrators" when I use this term ... about this topic more later) can empower others by adopting the paradigm of attention in their decision making, asking:

How does this project I'm working on make use of my colleagues' attention?
Is there some other way to harness or consolidate attention on this project and others?
Are my behaviors unintentionally draining attention that could be better directed elsewhere?  [see: our broad misuse of email]

Creating time for someone, or for oneself, is no guarantee that it will be time spent wisely.

Choosing a different way to distribute our attention may actually be the solution we've been searching for the whole time. 

Oliver Sacks and the Stories Behind the Science

"Never forget: beneath the statistics, there are stories." 

My students and I stumbled onto this essential, but often forgotten truth yesterday in my ninth grade Global Seminar course.   It was one of those rare moments where a conversation turns and creates language for something that one has sensed but not previously had the perception, power, or capacity to express in any kind of coherent shape.

The wisdom emerged from a lesson on the European migrant crisis.  As we frame up our work in the course for the year, this topic connects us to so many important conversations that will unfold in the months to come.

• Are our traditional ideas about nationhood adequate for understanding the current geopolitical landscape? 
• How does an impact in one area of a global system produce intended and unintended consequences in another?  
• As global citizens, what responsibilities do we have to each other? 

We struggled through the conversation.  The issue is complex, frustrating the simple cause and effect thinking that schooling may have required of many in the room prior to their arrival in high school.  Along the way, we surfaced some uncomfortable opinions, including talking points culled from the debate on US immigration policy that has dominated the early portions of the current US election cycle.  

When confronted with rhetoric like this that too easily reduces complex debates to simple platitudes, I tend, by training, to turn to stories.   In this case, we were able to draw on our all school read, Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat.  In the novel, readers meet the Hatian protagonist Sophie, whose mother has immigrated to the US prior to the opening of the narrative, and sends for Sophie to join her in New York in the opening pages.   In the summary/synthesis exercise that closed the class, I prodded the students to draw the threads of the European migrant crisis together with Sophie's lived experience of arrival and integration in New York.  Slowly, the insights emerged, moving beyond the rhetoric to consider the human scale of the problem.

While reading the New Yorker later that evening, I happened upon Atul Gawande's remembrance of the late Oliver Sacks -- a meditation on Sacks' singular gifts, but also on what narrative storytelling has to offer to the field of scientific writing:

"'Studies, yes,' he wrote in the preface, but 'why stories, or cases?' Because, he explained, the understanding of disease cannot be separated from the understanding of the person. They are interwoven, and this has been forgotten in our era of scans, tests, genetics, and procedures. He compared the modern clinical practitioner to the man who mistook his wife for a hat—able to register many details yet still miss the person entirely. 'To restore the human subject at the centre—the suffering, afflicted, fighting, human subject—we must deepen a case history to a narrative or tale.;"

While the conventional wisdom in schools silos the fields of English, History and Science, there is "real-world" richness in the areas of elision between them.   In order to go about answering some of the biggest questions we can ask in our classrooms, we need to think beyond our artificial structures. We are drawn to narrative -- the arc from mystery, to conflict, and perhaps, to resolution.  How healthy and freeing to to inhabit the perspective of another, no matter how brief the stay.  The "stickiness" of narrative in the human consciousness suggests that teachers are well served to consider the following questions in the design of our course units and activities:

• How do we learn to see the texture of a human life? 
•  Which methods of inquiry and analysis allow us to best capture the complexity of a real-world situation? 
•  How to the decisions we make each day impact someone a world away?

Beneath the statistics, there are stories.  "Suffering, afflicted, fighting," but also laughing, celebrating, and healing.  The trick is learning how to hear them. 

"This is Water": David Foster Wallace on Education, Freedom, and Paying Attention

One of the ways I'm working to grow professionally is in my ability to model and support effective digital storytelling.   The combination of engaging story-craft and compelling digital media transforms a traditional mode of discourse into something even richer and multi-layered for the audience, multiplying meaning and impact.


When I roll out projects of this kind in the future, I plan to use a video remix of David Foster Wallace's 2005 Commencement Speech, "This is Water."  On its own, the speech conveys powerful and simple truths about the nature of consciousness and experience, opening out to consider the ways in which education sharpens our ability to pay attention, and thus to transform the way we think about the"boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life." Ordinarily considered interstitial filler, these humdrum slogs become powerful moments of revelation, and surprisingly apt subjects for the august occasion of the commencement speech.

"The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom."

This, Wallace submits, is the true power of an education -- the sharpening of attention and awareness.  Put another way, education-- with storytelling at its core-- is the critical equipment that allows a student to make a wise choice about the narratives unfolding in his or her environment, and,  as a matter of considered practice, to configure meaning where others may fail to grasp it.  

On Alternatives to Fractured (Fractious?) Curriculum

In his seminal, Horace's Compromise: The Dilemma of the American High School, Sizer defines a new organizing approach as an alternative to traditional departmental silos.

1. Inquiry and Expression
2. Mathematics and Science
3. Literature and the Arts
4. Philosophy and History

In essence, these quadrants are the building blocks of an education for citizenship -- each element a contributor to a student's capacity to define and express his or her own values.

Reorganizing has the ancillary benefit of helping to contextualize knowledge more authentically, moving away from what Sizer characterizes as the, "Splintered view of knowledge that usually confronts high school students."  Indeed, Sizer continues, "their world rarely uses the fine distinctions between academic disciplines" (134).  Neither does the adult world, I would argue.

In a consolidated landscape, teacher training transcends the disciplinary, opening more room to focus on techniques to foster the development of essential student skills. Sizer utilizes the paradigm of coaching to describe effective student and teacher training -- a skill we who work in residential boarding schools appreciate and apply on a daily basis.  To Sizer, "good coaching cuts across academic specialization" (134).  Instead of investing our energies in defending our departmental garrisons from incursion, teachers have the opportunity to find common ground in the ways that we think and see in our fields, and to help students better appreciate these connections.

One can imagine the forging of a transdisciplinary framework where students gain the building blocks of curricular knowledge -- or what we call "requirements" in our current parlance -- in common seminars organized around a theme, or a real-world problem.

• Communication: English, History, and Arts combine to approach essential skills of communication through writing, oral and digital storytelling both creative and historical, and other visual media.
• Inquiry and Reasoning: Arts, Math, Science and History combine to approach the quest to derive meaning from diverse sources of information and data.  Infographics and other forms of data visualization are great examples of structuring intelligible meaning from static sources. 
• Movements as Patterns of Thinking: A variety of the traditional disciplines can combine to form a chronological or thematic look at major thought movements, equipping students to study these ideas both within the world at the time of their conception, but also as critical lenses through which to evaluate the development of modern thought, and human artifacts of various descriptions.  Romantic Thought in Poetry, Art and Science could be one example. 

An idea that I have been toying with here as a bridge to more of this sort of work in our curriculum is a common essential question for school-wide, or grade-wide, consideration.  

• What is the "good life"?  
• What is the proper role of a just person in an unjust world?  
• How does the velocity of the modern world impact our relationships-- human and non-human? 
• What are the hallmarks of a robust community? 
• How do we know when "enough is enough?"  

While a more substantive reorganization of our curriculum -- and with it the comfortable, recognizable rhythms of our lives in schools -- requires far more thought and debate (justly so, I'd add) asking each class to ponder a common question initiates a dialogue between teachers about shared skills and ideas. On behalf of our students, who have been dutifully plugging away, trying to assemble coherence from the fractured menu of high school content, it is about time we searched for this common ground. 

Weekend Reboot: September 14-15

Life in any school marches to a hectic, "always on" drumbeat.  Each week, I collect articles to inform my thinking about education, to be digested when 
life slows down to a more appropriately reflective, weekend pace. 

Off we go with the start of the year.  One week of classes in the book, and I'm starting to see my students' personalities emerging from behind the masks of reticence that abound in the first days in a ninth grade classroom.  Transitions are on my mind this week.  As teachers, my colleagues and I are asked to shift gears from self-indulgent days of summer to the selfless energies of the classroom.  The ninth-graders I work with each day find themselves in another vortex entirely-- new school, new peers, new rituals and routines.  In most cases, the culture shock means that students are navigating life away from home for the first time, and coping with academic struggles that were unthinkable just months ago.

Little wonder, then, that an article on emerging work in the area of Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) tops my list this week.

• "'Growth Mindset' Gaining Traction as a School Improvement Strategy": Education Week profiles schools using the pioneering "mindset" research of Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck to drive improved student outcomes.  

• In an innovative school, what is the proper relationship between teachers, courses, and content?  Ben Olin's piece, "When Memorization Gets in the Way of Learning" urges teachers to mix memorization and meaning to build enduring understandings. 

• To take things a bit further, what is the appropriate interplay between students and content in a truly innovative school? The answer may lie in the intentional cultivation of creators, and not simply consumers, of content -- a theme I'm hoping to explore in more detail as the year evolves. The always excellent "Hybrid Pedagogy" pushes a radical extension of this ideal in "The Digital Humanities is about Breaking Stuff".  Time to move beyond simply "building stuff" and "sharing stuff," argues author Jesse Stommel,  towards an investigative mode that interrogates conventional wisdoms, and reshapes or remixes the building blocks of tradition. 

Dig in!  I hope you'll find something here that challenges you to think in new ways, and that you'll share in kind. 

Our Educational Labors: on "Artisinal Teaching"

Poetry has power to illuminate, allowing us to see the commonplace or everyday anew.  While the ninth graders I teach have varying feelings about matters poetic, they respond impressively when asked to untangle a few lines.  When presented as a mystery to be understood, a code to be unlocked -- as opposed to august and distant monuments of learning, cobbled from oblique literary terms -- poems speak to the pattern makers in all of us.  Often, I will set a poem beside one chapter from a novel, using it as a fulcrum to elicit discussion on a theme, or to cast new light on the arc of a particular character's journey.  Conversations gain additional depth as the students follow a thread into the labyrinth, emerging with wisdom otherwise obscured.

So it was with interest that I read the rather clever and unexpected explication of Robert Frost's "After Apple Picking" in Marjorie Pryce's recent essay "Artisinal Teaching".   Pryce's thesis is, in essence, that we commodify education at our peril, and that there is still a vibrant role for the small and local in informing that most crucial transaction of the enterprise -- the dialogue of student and teacher.   Using the poem, and some well placed musings on her strivings as a would-be pickle entrepreneur, Pryce unlocks the truth that in our rush towards standardization and MOOC-ification, we risk, "Becoming mere sorters and graders as the students come rumbling down the cellar bin, some inevitably falling and failing 'as of no worth.'"   

Summer Reads: Independent Schools

(Flickr/cantonpubliclibrary)

The arrival of deep summer finds many teachers truly unwinding after a long school year.
For me, that means a chance to make a dent in the pile of books that inevitably accumulates through a mix of aspiration and good intention during the months where much energy flows towards work.

We have the same aims for our students, as independent reading quickly cultivates other admirable habits of mind such as curiosity, empathy, and even grit (it requires some serious follow-through to eschew the lazy temptations of summer long enough to read something cover-to-cover).

While I am a proponent of sending our students off to the summer with a fat stack of texts that might reasonably spark some new interest, or offer a unique angle of vision on the coursework that lies ahead of them, I am aware that others would have students unburdened by long reading lists (one parent at our school woefully recounted the experience of buying four additional books -- course specific assignments -- to crown the three we require as a baseline).  Summer reading cannot be undertaken with the independent or carefree spirit which we aspire to cultivate -- the argument goes -- if it is compulsory.  Some would have students free to assemble their own stacks, or free of summer reading completely -- after nine hard months of school, time out from the intellectual enterprise keeps them balanced and sane.

I hear the counterarguments, but feel that our duty as educators to support our students' developing media and cultural literacy outweighs the impulse to simply "let them be."  When done well, summer reading galvanizes further discussion, incites new curiosities, and brings community together in conversation around a shared set of questions and ideas.    Instead of starting from scratch each September, our campuses (physical and virtual) can be vibrant centers for ideas year-round.   The rich classroom thread picked up in week one of the school year can be traced back to July or August's interaction with a text. 

I have written a companion post, arriving soon, to outline what's on this educator's book list for the summer, but I also thought it might be worth having a look around the world of local independent schools for lists of books (required and otherwise) that students will be reading.  Perhaps there is a title here that you'll want to put on the radar of your favorite high schooler, or even pick up yourself!

Teaching Through Tragedy

As are many of you who might come to read this post, I am up late and haunting the house, attempting to generate some sense of meaning in the wake of today's tragedy at the Boston Marathon. I offer these thoughts out of honor and respect for those who were impacted today, either directly or indirectly-- not as any sort of pIublic declaration, but as a way of processing the trauma in an internal way.  Those of us who write often feel impelled to set down our thoughts in various forms, but never more so in times like this, in part to make something coherent out of something so senseless.  As a teacher, I feel that urgency to respond a bit more acutely.  Our students will be looking to us for that same coherence when we arrive in classrooms tomorrow morning.  The best I will be able to offer them is this-- some evidence of my own struggle to normalize the presence of uncertainty and grief. 

Full disclosure: my second day as a fully fledged professional educator was September 11, 2001.  As the school community attempted to piece together the tragic images and reporting from our (on that day) even more acutely remote-feeling outpost in Connecticut's Housatonic Valley, I remember sensing that I had turned a corner from adolescence to adulthood.  Students were now looking to me for meaning, explanation, reassurance, and I had precious little to offer.  In the face of something so generationally significant, not many could, beyond simply open ears and a steady shoulder. 

In the years since, I have taught through tragedy in varying degrees and have arrived at the conclusion that we see the best of schools at the worst of times.  Some of these hurts are still so raw that the pain returns anew on days like this; we know that students of all backgrounds in our communities are struggling with their own grief--no matter the source-- in similar fashion.  As the news from Boston unfolds, we will grapple with deep sadness and search for ways to support those who have been impacted in some way.   Our conversations on a school campus revolve around how to best work through these traumas with our students; they are apt to be most keenly affected by an event whose roots we do not-- and may not --understand, and whose particulars have unfolded in excruciatingly graphic detail on air and online.  WBUR's CommonHealth Blog offers guidance from child psychiatrist Dr. Gene Beresin on "How to Talk to Children About Boston Marathon Bombs"; others have circulated widely Fred Rogers' famous advice to "Look for the Helpers."  All good advice, and well worth repeating.  What can we really say to make sense of tragedy on an unimaginable scale? Tragedy replayed so soon after Newtown, and Aurora?  Tragedy that unfolds against the backdrop of international tensions on the Korean peninsula, and seemingly daily bombings of equal or greater magnitude in places like Iraq and Afghanistan?  The school bell rings (or metaphorically rings, in our community) tomorrow at the usual time, just as it will at schools across the Commonwealth, and we will begin the work of speaking, again, to our students about the unfathomable.