In schools, we talk about needing to prepare children for a changing world. We have conversations about the number of careers an individual will have in their lifetime. We discuss the ever changing workforce and preparing students for jobs that don't exist. We engineer imaginary objects and dialogue about what technologies the future will bring. And then their is social studies. We discuss our past and our present but rarely our future.
I remember Social Studies pretty well, which seems odd because going through elementary school, junior high, and high school I remember that we'd constantly talk about how boring it was. Social Studies in the early years was all about our community. The neighborhood, policeman, fireman, the mayor, the library. We learned to read a map before Google and Apple put us on the map. Then we studied cities, regions, US History (never getting to Vietnam) and World History. We learned the Constitution and why it was written. In the end, it was about a bunch of mostly dead people that set up rules so we could live in one place. Social Studies was the past and the present. It wasn't our future. Maybe that's why my generation, Generation X, had so many movie about feeling disconnected from society (Breakfast Club, Reality Bites, etc.) Our learning about society was about a world we had no control of yet in everything else we were learning skills to observe and build in our world. It was a great disconnect.
Apparently, whether we learned it in school or not, we found our voice. As I read my Facebook feed this weekend, the normally white background with blue trimming has turned the rainbow colors of a cereal bowl with a half-eaten collection of Lucky Charms. There are two themes that go through my timeline, individuals on "both sides of the aisle" sharing #lovewins and my staunchest Republican friends complaining about leaders who advocate about getting rid of the courts. I have lived and worked in "liberal" and "conservative" communities. The thing is, both titles are fueled by ideas of the past not visions of possible futures. Versions of Reagan and Bush's healthcare plan has become the "Obamacare" or "Affordable Care Act" of the present. The Brady Handgun Violence Protection Act was named after Reagan's White House press secretary, James Brady. Ideas that political parties want to capitalize on as being "liberal" or "conservative" are truly encapsulations of our past not visions of our future.
While we didn't learn social action as part of Social Studies, it was being taught somewhere because it is evident in my timeline. Perhaps we learned it from Sesame Street and Raffi. Social Studies is more than our past and our present. It needs to also be about our future. We need to understand the frameworks of our society and discuss what it could mean. Encourage children to question structures that deny individuals liberties and rights. We need to prepare them and ourselves for an active future which may not be the same as our present. If we are preparing students for an ever-changing society, one in which job markets and careers constantly evolve, perhaps we also need to prepare them for a society in which prejudices and generalizations of generations past are not those of our future. Perhaps we can encourage them to envision a world not trapped in the judgements of their parents and grandparents generations. Raising children for the future means preparing them to be more than workers. It is our job to help them become leaders and difference makers. In the words of Google, "Don't be Evil" and of Apple "To Leave the World a Better Place Than We Found It."
This week my youngest child discovered Phineas and Ferb, which means every afternoon for the past few days I have had to hear that there are "104 days of summer vacation." They must have a really great summer vacation that begins on May 26th and ends on September 7th. That's a long time. While summer breaks aren't that long, my children will be off from June 13th to August 25th or 74 days without a class. It's still a long time. A time in which they can still learn, change, and grow or the can drift, lose, and fall back.
Summer is filled with choices. For some families, the choice is to take a break from everything. They say they want their children to be children, run, play, socialize. For some it's classes, they want their child to learn new things they are interested in such as photography, coding, tennis, and cooking. For us, it's camps with swimming, community, skills, classes, and some religious living. The trick is while summer vacation can and should be all of these things and more.
Summer shouldn't be the intensity of 35 hour student work weeks with 90 - 120 minutes of nightly practice. However, it can't be learning free either. Reading and mathematics are skills that if you don't practice them they do go away. Just like my high school French classes. If I don't speak and read a little French now and then, I don't have the vocabulary or sentence structure to use them. The same applies in math. We need to practice some math skills each week or we will forget our trigonometric ratios and how to combine fractions. Skills learned during the year need a little love, care, and maintenance during the summer in order to be ready for next school year.
Summer can be a great time for reading. It's our chance to work with our children to find their "home run book." Selecting novels, comic books, or magazines that may interest them or make them laugh. You know, the ones we find them reading with a flashlight under the blanket. For my eldest, it means MAD magazines, Justice League comic books with "The Flash", and some Terry Prachett novels. For my youngest, well that's our job this summer. We haven't found his home run book yet. The one he wants to read all night and can't put down. Maybe will start with a Phineas and Ferb novelization. After all, they are always building things and he likes to build. There may not be 104 days in our summer vacation, but we can make the most of the days we have.
I couldn't have been more than five or six at the time. It was raining outside and we were at my mom's office in Lisle one evening. Mom was seeing patients, dad was serving as the night receptionist, and I can't even remember what Roy and I were doing. I'm sure that we must have been trying to help out in some way and reflecting on it, I'm sure it was probably more work for others than actual help. It was the family business, the seventies version of a "start-up." Dad was the greeter. Mom, the primary "bread-winner," was a physician in a time when there really weren't women physicians. And two little boys were welcoming anyone who would say hi.
Twenty years later, I remember walking into a diner two miles from my first assistant principal's job. It was between school and a night activity. In a booth sat two boys from school, a second grader and a fourth grader, doing their homework. The older one looked up, scurried to the counter and grabbed a menu. He invited me to take a seat at a nearby table and coyly said check out the menu, I designed it. As I sat, his mom appeared from out back, thanked the young man and invited him back to complete his homework. I learned later, every night the boys "helped out" at their diner. It was their "start-up." A tough business, fifteen years later I wonder if it's still their's and still there.
Powerful lessons are learned when we share our work. As we have children take part in our work and we take part in their's, bonds are formed. Understanding and context developed. Real life application helps our children understand why the skills they are learning are necessary and important. They also learn not to go it alone, but to work together with us to help achieve. My wife shares stories of helping her mom out at school. Going as a teenager to organize supplies, help students find things, and listen to them read. For us, our children help us with our work in innumerable ways. They have made sample videos such as our first 1:1 video to the Board of Education about what a child could do with an iPad came from my eldest, 9 years-old at the time as he screen shot how he used it to write and organize his work. When we had 2000 iPads to organize for school in a month, there were my children and their friends. They unboxed iPads and created set up shortcuts that we had never imagined.
When worlds collide, positive connections can be made. The realization within the family that both our work and their's are important. As such, there are many nights when I wander home from a meeting to be greeted by a young man who needs (wants) help completing an assignment. One who wants a section re-read to him or an essay reviewed. It's their work and my time to help them out at the shop. Through these opportunities we discover that our worlds are not separate, but intertwined experiences, home-school-work coming together to make a powerful tapestry of life. One in which we can choose to share and through sharing we become more connected.
I remember taking a graduate school class at Eastern Michigan University with olympic medalist Eric Namesnik. Nice guy. Added a few thoughts here and there in my Educational Leadership class. He didn't walk around and introduce himself as "Olympic Medalist" or "Olympian." I think the only reason we new his last name was that first day going around the circle he said, "Hi my name's Eric Namesnik and I work over at the University of Michigan." For most people he was just this guy in the class, a relatively quiet gentleman at that. For me, I knew who he was as he finished uttering the syllable "snik." That was two-time 400 Individual Medley silver medalist, Erik Namesnik. He was barely a breath behind Tom Dolan in '96. He was an impressive swimmer. Didn't make him a great educational leader, didn't make him a wonderful pianist, didn't make him an astro-physicist. I simply recognized him internally for the honor that was his, one amazing swimmer.
O'Neill Middle School held it's graduation ceremony for the first time since anyone can remember in the Downers Grove High School gymnasium. As a graduate of O'Neill and South, it was an interesting experience. I walked into the gymnasium for the first time Kitty Dukakis had done a speech on the campaign trail recommending that we students avoid the perils of drugs. A while later she was hospitalized for drinking rubbing alcohol. The gymnasium was a place I generally avoided as a student. I was a swimmer, so I did PE down by the pool after freshman year, either as a lifeguard/swim teacher or through swim competition. With 3000+ students, the gym was this loud place to be avoided during pep rallies. So naturally, I wandered to a place I was more comfortable, going down towards the pool.
Outside the Downers Grove South High School pool is a blue board with white letters. It's a top performances board. Listed there are the best performances of South students in Swimming and Diving. I wandered to see the board. At the top of the 100 and 500 still sat Steve Fetyko, I remember the 44 he swam at State in February of 1991. I remember him coming home and quietly sharing the 4:44 he had gotten at State in February of 1989. At the top they still remained. Doc Antonoff's 507.38 in diving in 1973 had just recently fallen to second place on the board. The board was filled with other names I remembered: Aaron Johnson's 1:02 and Keith Johnson's 1:05 in the 100 Breast, Nick's 52 in the Fly, other names I swam with: Mike Orseno, Eric Mateja, Dan Brady, Mark Hacker, and others. The board was a roll of honors, those that had achieved something remarkable. And 24 years after I had left, the honors were still rememberable to me. They were specific times, specific incidents, specific moments where something special had happened. To an outside person, one could look at the times and say honestly how special or not special it was. They were comparable points of data and in my mind moments of personal energy that culminated from months of hard work.
I walked back in the gym and looked up against the wall. There was a large blue cut out of the State of Illinois. Listed on it maybe 15 names. State Champions that had gone to Downers Grove South. Listed their were some of my classmates. I remember Mindy bouncing for hours on the the diving board warming up. I remember my neighbor Tina running each day as soon as the weather broke. I remember meeting Stephanie in the halls one day between classes. State Champions in diving, track, and gymnastics respectively. Names honored on the wall for specific achievements.
See, as we move to vertical learning, where students are challenged to push the boundaries of what they can learn and do hard things. The old system of honor roll may no longer make sense, if it ever did. See when high achieving students get material at their level, they may no longer get perfect scores. They could be learning trigonometry as an 8th grader and Calculus 3 as a Sophomore or Junior. If we give them the opportunity to learn at their instructional level, it may take them time to learn and achieve. So what do we do about Honor Roll? Do we honor the aggregate achievement of performance as we do now, regardless of the class taken? Do we make some mythical scale for adjusting the worth of Enriched Classes, Honors Classes, AP classes to calculate "GPA?" Does being an Honor Roll student at Downers Grove South, Deerfield High School, Lee M. Thurston High School, and Richland Center High School mean the same thing? Does it mean any more or any less depending on my high school? Does it mean equalized performance or are these honor rolls inherently unequal? Does it actually mean anything? I'm not even sure that a first semester A in Mrs. Lindahl's Chemistry class that I took is the same as an A in a first semester Chemistry class that I taught.
We do need to honor students for their achievements. We need to bring meaning to the accomplishments and recognize outstanding insight and performance. In talking through this with one of our bright Middle School principals, the idea came out of a role of honors. Recognizing students for outstanding performance, not in aggregate as a GPA does but in specific. Just as we do now, publishing a list of students who achieve at high levels, not in terms of general grades, but in terms of itemized specific performances. A student's name and the performance/standard that is being recognized, for example:
Jamie Doe - Life Sciences- Cell Structures, Musical Composition
Jo Winner - Engineering - Simple Machines
Tommy Marvelous - Musical Performance - Vocal, Spanish Preterite Tense
...
A simple list. Easy to reconcile based on accomplished standards and teacher identification. Student's performances identifiable by specific achievements on rubrics developed by student's and staff. Meaningful in terms of why a student is being recognized. A roll of honors that recognizes that we don't need to be great in everything to be outstanding in any one important thing.
I look at the board at South and there are achievements that have never gone away. Special moments outside the classroom. We can generate this within the classroom by simply creating the same power, honoring not a summation of the work, but rather specificity within the work. There could be boards outside the Math Department, Science Department, Music Department that honor similar specific achievements. What could generate more powerful learning, the honor roll or a roll of honors?
