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?
It was 1970 or 80 something and like many weekend afternoon's I would be sitting in the family room with my friend's Jim and Dave and we would be playing a version of Dungeons and Dragons. It probably wasn't D & D, more likely Robotech, Living Steel, or Car Wars, but we loved living in the role playing game world. We would create characters, take on different situations, act through challenges, and problem solve our way through the game. It was definitely what young nerds of the 80's did, but we loved it.
Part of the fun was make characters. You role dice to identify the level of your hero's strength, dexterity, intelligence, and charisma. These were attributes. Things the character was born with. Resources to help guide them through their mythical dungeon wandering lives. Then you selected skills. Things your character could do. Capacities that they could increase their level of proficiency during the game. Skills increased frequently during the game. Attributes adjusted slowly. Simply attributes where who the character was and skills were what they could do.
As you wandered the mazes and played through situation after situation, you grew in experience. Your earned skill points and occasionally you would get the rewards of "leveling up." Identifying new skills you had learned, new proficiencies achieved, and slow changes to your attributes.
While I may not have realized while I was rolling dice at Jim's kitchen table, role playing games were more like life than I could ever imagine. In a role playing game, characters develop at different rates. They get skills at different times. Each character has different skills, accomplishes different achievements, and grows in different rates. They leveled up at different times. School and life aren't any different. When we create learning experiences for kids, they don't enter with the same attributes, they aren't ready for the same challenges, and they don't walk away with the same skills at the same proficiency level. Simply bundling students by their date of manufacture and reporting a letter grade on their skills doesn't help us understand their character sheet or program for their next opportunity to level up.
Schools need to become a little more like role playing games. Teachers and administrators more like the dungeon masters. Our records a little more like character sheets. We need to recognize the character profiles of our students and put in front of them the challenges that they can master in order to level up. We can't start our students beating the "big boss" when they are not ready for they would be crushed nor can we start them slashing through fields of gnomes that they are much more capable then. We need to set appropriate challenges in front of each of them, because we don't simply level up because it's the end of the year, but rather when we have accomplished meaningful challenges before us.
All of those geeks of the 80's sitting in their basements rolling 20-sided-dice are grown up now. Many of them with families and children of their own. It's our turn to help the most important characters in their lives develop their personal skills and attributes and level up!
I remember senior year of high school fairly well. Probably most of us do. It is a capstone year. Thirteen years in the making. For me, it was 24 years ago. Bush Senior was president. We had gone to Kuwait and Iraq for the first time. I had applied and been accepted to Kalamazoo College, bringing my lovely 3.0 gpa and looking forward to swimming, foreign study, and becoming a diplomat. Nearly a quarter-century ago, that was the plan. I was prepared for it, having taken Spanish, French, and German in high school. At the time my Hebrew was somewhat decent as I had learned it through camp, Hebrew School, and Sunday School. I had some basics civics classes and a pretty decent background in world politics. That was the plan. Like Laverne and Shirley, I was ready to take on the world.
I remember senior year of college fairly well also. This may be even easier for many of us. It was the capstone year in which we have trained, learned, and explored. Now it was time to take on the world. For me, it was 20 years ago. I was graduating from Kalamazoo College with a double-major in Chemistry and Political Science. Got my teaching certificate on the side as it was only 3 extra classes at the time. I had spent 3 months in Spain a couple of years earlier for foreign study but was planning to use that at all. I had a great job lined up to go teach Chemistry and coach swimming at Lee M. Thurston High School. And I did... for 4 years.
Since then, I've had a fair number of jobs. All that made sense at the time. All that created new opportunities. All that were fun. Few that "college and career readiness" prepared me for. I went from a High School to an elementary school. At the stop after that I was principal and Dual Language coordinator, which required me to dust off my Spanish that I hadn't used in over a decade. Stop after stop, the only thing consistent about them is that the titles made sense in vertical order. What I discovered is we can have the greatest plan in the world, the greatest skill set in the world, but each stop in the journey is unique. Each place, each role, each situation requires us to work with awesome, special, invigorating people. Each task requires unique solutions that quite frankly will work only for that situation. Each job requires us to create, communicate, innovate, accept others, and grow.
I'm pretty sure many of the classes I took in high school and college have very little application to what I do today. The most relevant classes maybe the Spanish classes as I do need to communicate in the language more than I ever imagined. Somewhere along the line, I learned to think. I learned to become a situational engineer and solve problems. I learned to accept that nothing was going to be the same from day to day or from job to job.
As we talk about college and career readiness. As we prepare students to enter the world. Maybe we need to have a different thought process. Maybe it's not the content and coursework but rather the thinking, problem-solving and communication skills. Could our work with students be more valuable if we were placing thinking challenges in front of them, encouraging them to collaborate, and having them share their solutions? Rather than covering a course, would solving real problems in the field result in a deeper level of skill development.
Many of us make a plan for our lives but life seems to happen while we are making plans. The journey is a winding road with many starts, many stops, successes, and failures. It's not the skills we have developed but rather our willingness to think, change, adapt, and restart that determines our ability to succeed. The journey is not over until we decide it is. Each day a step forward towards some unknown horizon. We can have a plan all we want, but it's the journey that matters. As we discovered in Bull Durham, "Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, and sometimes it rains."
In order to prepare children for the future, one needs to think about the future. No, I'm not thinking about warp drive and teleportation. Although, I hope my eldest son can solve the teleportation challenge, it would make walking home through the rain much easier on him. I'm thinking about the challenges and opportunities before him. For many of us, we were in elementary school and high school prior to the Fall of the Berlin Wall. Life was simple. There was us and there was them. Red countries and blue countries. Schools raced to prepare children for math and science. We needed people to out think, out prepare, and be ready to counter the Red Empire. Army and Navy recruiters waited for the next round to churn through their doors. It was a easily polarized world. And then the wall fell. Germans raced together. Families separated for a generation found each other. A wall that separated the world for nearly 28 years crumbled.
In the 26 years since, the world has changed in remarkable ways. A world once physically divided has become remarkably interconnected. A child in Illinois can video chat a child in Jaipur, India with only a momentary delay. No longer do we prepare children to blindly serve their army or nation but rather to prepare our world to become a better place.
It's interesting that the foundations of education and those who would reform education from the outside still see the structures and products within the frame of the Industrial Revolution and the Cold War. They see the factory model: curriculum as a deliverable, math and science learning widgets mastering content, and children as outcome measures comparable by a standardized metric. They see teachers, principals, and superintendents as cogs in a machine. A system that is either too expensive that it has become burdensome for the society or too ineffective in producing the math and science widgets that it needs to be outsourced to another less expensive vendor.
It is interesting that those who lead and those who would reform aren't observing our world and thinking about our future as many of those within the system. Our greatest strength as a society is our ability to innovate. We are no longer able to move thousands of workers from Kansas to Texas in a moment's notice. We aren't going to have enormous growth of inexpensive factory workers working two shifts at the steel mills in Gary, Indiana. Our success is our ability to innovate. Whether it is the internet boom of the 90's, the growth of Intel, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, or Google. Our leadership in the world is our ability to create, innovate, to solve problems in unique ways and think of new challenges that no one even considers. "Designed in California" means something more than simply an Apple product. It means that while products can be built anywhere the ideas and engineering begin here.
In order to prepare children for a future that makes our world a better place. A future in which they are asked to create, innovate, and design answers for problems we haven't considered. In order to be ready for this world, we need to stop treating them as deliverable widgets and cultivate opportunities in which they create innovative solutions. The curriculum can't be the deliverable of the 60's, 70's, 80's, 90's, and 00's. It can't come out of a book in which we say all teachers must teach this and all students must learn this. Rather it needs to look like the experiences of an engineering class. A set of problems, challenges, and objectives that the students need to figure out. The teachers can no longer be widgets providing the same inputs to each child and expecting the same outputs. Rather they are sensei & Jedi masters: providing challenges for their pupils and expecting unique products that overcome the challenge. The teachers can no longer be factory workers putting together the same batch of 25 products a year to standardized specifications. Instead they must be doctors, diagnosing each child's strength and growth areas and providing regimens to help their patient improve their quality of life.
Our future is not fantasy land. It's not a world of teaching widgets producing learning widgets. The future doesn't need more of the same. It needs people who will consider ways to heal it, innovate within it, and make it a better place for all of that. In order to prepare our children for this world, we need to allow them to grow up in that world. So maybe this year, instead of every child writing the same five-page persuasive paper, maybe this year we hand them the challenge and say, "make a product that convinces me." The students aren't widgets and neither are we.
In his book, Good to Great, Jim Collins identifies that there are many good corporations out there. Companies that do a job well. They reach a moderate level of achievement or achieve at a high level for a brief period of time. In his analysis of a range of companies, Collins reaches a similar conclusion as Voltaire, "good is the enemy of great." Good companies frequently reach contentment in their products, their ideas, and their vision. They loose the drive to move forward, to discover uncharted products, ruthlessly self-analyze while maintaining deep faith in their ability to make the next leap.
I think of the new teacher. One who is preparing to interview now. Fresh with ideas, with vision, with promise. I think of what is inside them and how do we nurture it. How do we prepare them to be successful initially? How do we prepare them to reach the status of accomplishment so they feel successful each day? And in doing so, as we get them to good, how do we feed that internal desire to drive them to achieve greatness?
What is greatness in teaching and learning? Is it mastering the content? Is it having well developed lessons? Is it covering the material of the course? Or is it more? We all have memories of great teachers. For many of us, it's not that they really understood the Revolutionary War or the Pythagorean Theorem, but rather how they empowered us to have ownership, voice, input, and engage with whatever content we were learning with them. Greatness didn't come because the teacher had funny jokes or led with incredible demonstrations, but rather greatness came because we were partners in the experience. It wasn't what he or she did, but what we did.
I think of the teacher who is finishing his/her second year. They have figured out the topics, come to understand how to engage kids and how to facilitate a class. They are good and they are at a crossroads. Do I continue to hone my processes as they are or do I take a powerful risk and ask, "what could be?" Do I ask what learning would look like if I am no longer the center of daily life, but the students are? Now that I know the topics, do I ask what it would look like if I handed the children the topic and said go discover? What would it look like if the children were researching the information and sharing it in small groups, assessing each others' progress and working to ensure that their classmates understood it. What could it be if I shared the reigns of each lesson? I know what it is that the children need to learn. I understand the outcomes. What would it look like if I handed the children the chance to make the process theirs?
Good is the enemy of great. So often we ask these questions and in the end, it is so much easier to stay the course of good. Leave leadership and empowerment in the hands of the teacher. Allow a little token empowerment and ownership on an assignment here and there. Occasionally there is a teacher who takes the step. The one who makes the jump. And the class leaps forward. It's not his class or her class, but rather their class. The students and teacher as one, learning, growing, and discovering. What could be? What can be? What will it be?
