Awakening from the dream of race

"I would not have you descend into your own dream. I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world."

-Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

I feel like my eyes have been slowly opening over a period of years.

But it's like they're opening in stages, like big shifts of the landscape that open to wider and clearer vistas, and reading Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me is the latest instalment in this series of shifts.

This particular shift started a couple of years ago when I first read The Children in Rm. E4, and was blown away by the damage that has been done (and continues to be done) here in my home state of Connecticut by subtly racist laws, rules, policies, and social norms.

The Children in Rm. E4 was a tipping point in my increasing awareness of the true nature of our society and economy. It shattered my belief that the injustices ended in the sixties and shattered my faith in the ability of freer markets to fix the problem. The problem is clearly so deep, so ingrained, so systemic, that it can only be solved at the system level. Collective action is required, because the system is just a reflection of the will of the masses. We created a system of plunder, and as Coates puts it, "Plunder has matured into habit and addiction."

The Children made that clear. Coates drives it home with a vengeance, and to me, his book is a call to action, a call to awaken from what he calls "the dream."

Between the World and Me is his memoir, a heartfelt letter to his son about being black in a world that is living in a dream. It's a letter to his son about growing up in a world where "You have been cast into a race in which the wind is always at your face and the hounds are always at your heels..." while the people "who believe that they are white" are caught up in a dream.

The dream is the delusion that our green lawns, memorial day barbecues, double-wide strollers and suburbs are legitimate--that they are not resting on the backs of human beings. It's the delusion that we live in a meritocracy, where I have earned what I enjoy, when in reality, we "have forgotten the scale of theft that enriched [us] in slavery, the terror that allowed [us] for a century to pilfer the votes, the segregationist policy that gave [us] [our] suburbs."

Throughout the book, Coates paints a poetically painful picture of life in inner city Baltimore in the 80s, where every day, his life was literally on the line, his body threatened, either by rival gangs or the police. He contrasts this life of fear with the secure world of "the dreamers:"

"Some days I would take the train into Manhattan. There was so much money everywhere. Money, flowing out of bistros and cafés... Money, out on West Broadway, where white people spilled out of wine bars with sloshing glasses, and without police. I would see these people at the club, drunken, laughing... They were utterly fearless. I did not understand that until I looked out on the street. That was where I saw white parents pushing double-wide strollers down gentrifying Harlem boulevards in t-shirts and jogging shorts, or I saw them lost in conversations with each other, mother and father, while their sons commanded entire side-walks with their tricycles. The galaxy belonged to them, and as terror was communicated to our children, I saw mastery communicated to theirs."

Mastery. "In the dream," writes Coates, we dreamers are "Buck Rogers, Prince Aragorn, an entire race of Skywalkers." But in reality, we are plunderers: "To awaken them is to reveal that they are an empire of humans, and like all empires of humans, are built on the destruction of the body. It is to stain their nobility, to make them vulnerable, fallible, breakable humans."

According to Oppenheimer's classic account of the rise of governments, The State, the "noble" class is always made up of the descendants of a conquering tribe or nation, and they always create some religious or moral justification of their superiority and right to rule. But there is no such right. We're all just humans. So why is there still empire?

It didn't end with the civil war, and it's not just in the South. Ta-Nehisi tells the story of an incident in the subway, when a white woman pushed his son, a white man came to her aid, he sensed their sense of superiority, and all of the hurt and history of a childhood of northern oppression welled up inside him and exploded like a volcano. I won't quote it here, because it's worth the price of the book--it's such a lucid and emotionally raw demonstration of the continuing existence of empire.

That anyone would feel as he did is an indictment of us all, yet the dream is powerfully seductive. It seduces us to to turn away from the injustice of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, from the moral disaster of the projects, and the Children of Room E4, in what Coates calls "silent acquiescence." Waking up would force us to admit our guilt and would threaten our own security. If we stop denying that this is empire, if we acknowledge the continuing injustices of the system that keep us privileged in our picnics and suburbs, if we disassemble the apparatus that maintains it, what will happen? Will history turn on us as it did them? Will we lose our security and prosperity?

So what?


The dream is an intoxication. It protects us from the rawness and pain, but also from the justice and authenticity of reality. As Carl Sagan put it, "For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring." If my security comes at others' expense, I'd rather have uncertainty.

It is high time the world came face to face with the oppressive modus operandi of the modern human race. I'm convinced its not in our DNA. Violence and oppression is not a gene, just a meme, and if we want security, there are far better sources than conquest and empire.

There's cooperation and community.

There's recognizing our intertwined lives--we are all connected.

Instead of clinging to boundaries of family, place, and nation, we can embrace the reality that we are all family, one human race, and one world community. Instead of believing in race--whiteness and blackness, we can believe in humanness.

Instead of building walls, we can tear them down.

Instead of turning away, denying and pretending, we can wake up.


But what will that look like? What would it look like if I did that?

I can admit that I am the recipient of privilege and benefits that have come down to me from empire, but what can one man do against an empire? As Coates wrote to his son:

"I do not believe that we can stop them, Samari, because they must ultimately stop themselves, and still I urge you to struggle. Struggle for the memory of your ancestors, struggle for wisdom.. but do not struggle for the dreamers. Hope for them, pray for them if you are so moved, but do not pin your struggle on their conversion. The dreamers will have to learn to struggle for themselves, to understand that the field for their dream, the stage where they have painted themselves white is the deathbed for us all."

But I can't help being an optimist. I can't help but think that I can do something--that we can do something. I can't help but think that it has to start somewhere--with me and you, with justice in our own little spheres.

For me, that means starting with education that doesn't oppress, but empowers and equalizes.

Now, the only question is, how?

Me, Gramps, Brooklyn, and the boundaries of family and place

One of the things I learned, living in Mississippi during the late 90s, was the importance of a sense of place. As humans, we need to belong. But to what do we belong--a family, tribe, nationality, race, or something bigger?

When a native Mississippian asked, "Where are you from?," he didn't mean "Where have you most recently lived?" He didn't even mean, "Where were you born?" He meant, "What town are your ancestors from?"

Their sense of place blew me away, but it also resonated with me. I grew up in the woods and hills of a small town called Brooklyn, Connecticut, tucked into the northeast corner of the tiny state, right in the heart of "Swamp Yankee" country. As far as I knew, that was my nationality--Swamp Yankee, because that's what my grandpa Green always said when we asked him what nationality we were.

He had grown up in Canterbury, a town just south of us, and moved to Brooklyn as a young newly-wed. He cleared the pines on this hill in big valley of the Quinebaug River, and started raising dairy cows on its sandy glacial soil. His love of the land was so much a part of him that he spent most of his free time, after he retired from a career in politics, working it, clearing it, and tending it. He dug a big pond out back, the one that Long Brook runs through and locals fish in.

But back then it was a rough start for he and my grandmother. Stories tell of the two of them driving a car without a wind shield and sawing wood in their living room in order to make ends meet in the early days. I have often imagined grandma in her kitchen, after her morning milking duties, serving up what she called "flap jacks" to a crew of a dozen or more children, farm hands, and foster kids. It's easy to imagine, because she did the same for us, my dozen or so cousins, brother, sisters and me, later on.

Grandma and Grandpa came from a very different time. A great aunt on Grandpa's side, who hunted and cut wood well into her 70s, told me stories of growing up on that Canterbury farm. She told me how my ancestors made  apple liquor called "rot gut," in their still, steam billowing out the door of the shed. They hid the bottles behind the seat of the car in order to deliver it to a local funeral home, where it was sold in secret during the days of the Prohibition.

This is where I'm from, and it became a part of me as I grew up and worked weekends and afternoons for the family business. The dairy had morphed into a construction business that thrived for decades, and I spent my childhood digging trenches, sweeping floors, spreading loam, planting grass, and washing trucks. I can still here my grandfather saying, "If you're gonna do something, do it right," and I can still see him inspecting his car after I washed it, in his old, worn shoes and work shirt. I have him and my dad and uncles to thank for the work ethic that is rooted so deeply into my bones.

This place and these people became a part of me as I spent holidays with so many aunts, uncles, and cousins I have trouble counting them, shooting dart guns at each other, playing tag, sledding, riding snowmobiles, Big Wheels and bikes.

It became ingrained in my soul as I walked in the woods every day, setting crude animal traps, building shelters, making pine tea, camping, dipping my hands into sand springs and soaking up the earth and life around me.

It all became such a part of me that I could never separate myself from it for long. I identified so strongly with it that it always pulled me back. After spending 5 years away in graduate school, I felt that magnetism again and returned for good in 1998, dragging my patient wife back here with me. I'm glad she hasn't felt as strong a pull as I have toward her place in central Illinois and her memories of walking beans, raising sheep, and helping with the corn harvest.

Our kids were young when I was at college in Illinois and Mississippi, and my daughter's cute little southern accent didn't last long after we returned north. Now, I think, this place is almost as much a part of them as it is of me. It's been such a privilege to be able to raise them with this kind of stability.

I wonder what it would be like not to have this sense of place--this physical identity with the land and people. It seems very primal and natural--a close-knit people tied to a place with it's plants, soils and geology. I'm grateful for it, and that I could raise my kids with it.

But I know I'm lucky. I know there are millions born into millions of little Hells-on-earth, and I was lucky enough to be born into a little Eden. I just started listening to Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me. My childhood was far from perfect and painless, but it was heaven compared with his, and there are millions who make his look like a paradise. For them, their sense of place, the culture of their childhood is more a source of pain and poison than security and strength.

And then I wonder what will happen as more and more people are displaced, living increasingly mobile lives, increasingly removed from family and homeland. Can we replace physical places with digital ones and biological families with virtual ones?

Or will it just mean adjusting to the reality that we are all family, and that the whole earth is our home? Because, after all, that's the truth. Being human means belonging to something bigger than yourself--the whole human race and the whole earth. I love what Neil deGrasse Tyson said in an interview a little while ago:

"We are all genetically related, every human being. Any two humans on Earth have a common ancestor if you go back far enough in the family tree. So the fact that you draw a circle this big around family and say 'That's my family and outside the circle it's not'--that's an arbitrary circle. That's biologically arbitrary. You've decided for yourself that inside the circle's my family, outside it's not, when we have genetic links among all human beings."

I wonder what the world would be like if we could all draw our circles larger? What if I could develop the same attachment, the same sense of identity with the whole Earth and human race that I have with my family and place here in Brooklyn?

I may have been born into a family of Swamp Yankees in the Quinebaug Valley, but I could just as easily have been born in the ghetto or worse. And more than that, this circle of family really is arbitrary, as are these boundaries of town and state and country. I really am related to everyone, and I really don't belong to this piece of land any more than any other.


I picked up pieces of Illinois and Mississipi along the way, and 15 years as a teacher in Mansfield has changed me more than I could have imagined. I am a work in progress, an amalgam of every person and place I've spent significant time with, worked with, related to. Our lives are intertwined.

It's exciting to think of the potential for absorbing pieces of other places and peoples, broadening our "circles." That's what I liked so much about Ramez Naam's awesome book, Nexus, in which he envisioned a drug that could connect people's minds, breaking down the ultimate barrier between people.

As important as family and village and tribe are, we need to somehow move those boundaries and circles out until they encompass it all. Though I am thankful for all my ancestors and homeland instilled in me, I am a citizen of Earth and a member of the human family.

That's also where I'm from.

Bees, rubrics and teacher evaluation

My hives this morning

The new teacher evaluation (TEVAL) system is the source of tons of anxiety, conflict, and even anger among teachers here in CT. I've seen excellent veteran teachers crying at staff meetings when discussing the new system of formal observations, rubrics and ratings. Obviously, something's wrong with the system, or is it? What if it's all in the way we look at it?

I've been through the new TEVAL process twice as a teacher, but as a new administrator this year, I've been experiencing the system for the first time from the other side. As I've been conducting formal observations of my teachers and writing them up, I watched myself go through a shift in thinking.

I can be a bit overly critical, and in my own life I am always trying to push myself harder to improve (though I know I've got plenty of blind spots), and I'm afraid this was coming through in my write-ups and conversations with my staff about the process. In fact, I was worried about tensions and conflicts developing.

Then I realized the problem: I've been looking at this all wrong. I am not the driver of this process--I am just part of a structure.

I firmly believe that with the right structure in place, everything else falls into place. That's why we're working on building a structure at the Depot that will allow every student to thrive. That's why last year, I spent tons of time building a framework that would allow my biology students to thrive. As humans, we need the right structure of societal rules, relationships, health, and other systems if we are going to flourish. But the right structure is not about authority and hierarchies. That's not how humans work. That's not how anything works.

Bees are a great example. A lot of people think bees are ruled by the queen--that she somehow directs the activities of the hive, but that's not true at all. The whole colony is guided by a complex system of hormones and rules built into their tiny brains that determine how they interact with each other and the environment. The seemingly intelligent behaviour of the hive just emerges naturally from this set of rules.

Nature uses structures like that, not hierarchies. Humans don't function best in authority structures, but in collaborative communities.

That's how I'm seeing my new role within the TEVAL system. I'm not at the top at all. I'm just part of the structure--a structure designed to improve our schools. We're all interacting with it--its rules, rubrics and reviews of practice. We're also interacting with the rules that govern human behavior in general--rules about relationships and what makes humans thrive.

It's not about, "Here's how you need to improve." It's about, "How can we use this structure to improve together?"

The real work is the conversations

They were trying to come to an agreement about how their teams would play their next moves in our simulation of the "prisoner's dilemma." His reply was put to music, and they agreed to abandon their selfish, cut-throat strategies and start cooperating. It was a fun example of what Kerry Patterson and his colleagues call a "crucial conversation."

According to Patterson and his team, "Any time you find yourself stuck in some area of performance or improvement that's important to you, what is keeping you stuck is very often one or two crucial conversations that you're not holding or not holding well."


Lately, I feel like my life has become one big string of crucial, and difficult,  conversations. It's been like CrossFit for my relationship skills. And that's OK. In fact, maybe that's how it should be.

If my job as an educator is to do whatever it takes to see every one of my students succeed, then it's going to take lots of intentional, intensive one-on-one conversations.

It's going to take difficult conversations with a student about her depression, another about her difficult home life, another about behaviors that need to change. It's going to mean conversations about a student's need to improve his social skills or manage his anger, or another's failure to progress and need for extra support, or whether this school is the right place for him.

It's going to mean uncomfortable conversations about teacher evaluations, fundamental beliefs, and facing facts about ourselves and our relationships--conversations that create what the authors of Crucial Conversations call "a common pool of meaning." They are conversations about compromise. They are relational negotiations.

If my job as a human is to maximize every one of my relationships, it's going to take the same kind of effort, at home and at work. It's going to be messy, but good, and this is a big part of my philosophy of life: I want to immerse myself in it, pain and all, difficulty and all.

In our game, both teams had been using a destructive and selfish strategy. Their negotiation was an effort to change that, but in the next round, his team betrayed her trust, and maintained their destructive strategy in order to win the game. I guess his team had realized how difficult their side of the bargain would be and wasn't willing to follow through.

Of course, I'm hoping for better results from my crucial conversations, but I'm also realistic. They're not all going to fix all the problems. When I do a poor job of getting all the meaning on the table, when difficulties arise, conflicts are still unresolved, conditions still haven't improved, or one of us does something else to hurt the other, all is not lost. We begin a new conversation.

What we don't want to do is avoid these conversations. They are the real work of life. Shying away may save us some difficulty now, but we'll also miss out on the benefits later: improvement and the kind of relationships humans are built for.

Mushrooms, microscopes, and building a structure that works for kids

One of our guiding principles at The Depot is "learning through interests," and one of our seniors exemplifies this. Last year, his internship mentor helped him learn to grow edible mushrooms. This year, this senior decided he'd like to teach other students to do the same.

He isn't getting any special credit for it. He won't receive a grade. He's just doing it.

With his fish tank full of fungi on the table, his Google Slides presentation, and some cool time lapse videos from YouTube, he had the whole crowd engaged as he explained the need for the right growing environment. Even some who rarely speak out were asking questions, and when he passed around the sign up sheet for the workshops he's going to offer, twelve students signed up. At least one was clearly excited about it. Who knows what the long term impact of this senior's leadership will be?

We see lots of instances of interest-driven learning, like the student who spontaneously set up one of the microscopes on Thursday and just started putting tiny pieces of whatever he could find under it--spit, blood, fingernail, chips, cheek cells.

The new "kitchen crew" we started this year has been a huge source of learning for these kids as they cook breakfast every Friday for the whole school, and many of our students are thriving in awesome internships, from law firms and vet clinics to computer and automobile repair shops.

But not all of our students are ready for self-directed learning. Even with freedom and ample opportunity to discover and pursue interests, many students have trouble with motivation and struggle to progress.

So we're extending our new tiered support system to include a "Tier 2 internship," which is a combination of Depot-based projects (cooking, designing bulletin boards, cleaning, etc.), volunteering, and explicit instruction in career skills and life skills from the Competency Rubric. Let's establish some small wins, build some confidence through basic competence.

I'm convinced that if we build the right structure--the right environment, these students will naturally thrive. To me, this is a big part of leadership--finding those rules, that structure that will allow that natural growth.

Like mushrooms (and every other living thing), humans are built to thrive within a certain type of structure. My goal is to find that structure--to find a better fit for human nature when it comes to school. And that's why I love being at the Depot--because I think we're on the right track.

Hugs like light through stormclouds

Let's just say the Depot is not without its crises and conflicts. Hardly a day goes by without some drama unfolding. Many of these young people are being  battered by life, and many lack the resiliency or the skills to cope. Sometimes the strife ripples out into our little community like a gathering thunderstorm, or else it hangs in the air like black magic.

But just as frequently, light breaks through the clouds.

Like the excitement of one struggling young person who landed his first internship last week, and another young lady whose internship just turned into a job at a law firm.

There's the growing confidence of a young man whose challenging technology project is finally getting off the ground, and the excitement and pride of a young man who came to tell me about his new, higher SAT scores.

There's the excitement among the staff as we plan new supports for students.

There's the generosity of a young lady who baked twelve dozen cookies for everyone, and the seven students who worked all morning yesterday cooking a delicious ham dinner for the whole school.

There are the smiles on faces that haven't seen many smiles lately, as they picked out an unwrapped gift during the Yankee swap.

And there are the courageous young women who sang impromptu songs for our open mic.

But the brightest light this week came from one powerful young man whose courage and compassion just blew me away. The past month has been just one painful blow after another for him, and on top of all that, a friend at the school has been seething with anger towards him for a week. So he decided to do something about it.

First, he approached his angry friend and tried to initiate a conversation: "Hey, man, we have to talk about this.." he began, and then explained his side of the story.

There was no response to this initial effort: the other student just turned away. But that wasn't the end of it. Later that day, as the angry student was sitting for the Yankee swap, this powerful young man approached him again. He came up behind him, and I heard him say something like, "I may get punched in the face for this hug, but I'm doing it anyway."

Then he wrapped his arms around this angry student, and that frown that had been there all week just... broke. It broke into a smile, though this angry kid tried to fight it. That bear hug broke through that anger like a the sun through storm clouds.

Thank you, young man, for reminding me what it's all about--what being human is all about.

Changing school from a filter to a foothold

When students are failing, we can blame it on a family issue, some supposed character flaw, or other factor out of our control, but what good will that do? We can let them fail, pass them off to someone else, or just graduate them even though they're not ready. But what good would that do?

What if, instead, we responded by increasing support?

At the Depot, we value personalized education. Our advisors (teachers) meet at least twice per year with parents and students to design individualized learning plans that outline projects the students will do, competency goals, advisory work, online math work, etc.

But the independent learning environment that lies at the heart of the Depot requires a lot of soft skills (conscientiousness, self-control, organization, etc.) and basic hard skills (reading, writing, math) that many students lack.

It dawned on me that we really need a tiered SRBI-style support system. Tier I is the current advisory/self-directed learning model. Students not being successful there can be moved to a second tier: group workshops, like our successful Senior Project Boot Camp and focused 1:1 sessions to help students complete projects, writing assignments, etc.

Just last week, a student who had been struggling to get started on his independent project since the beginning of the school year started and finished the first step in one focused, 2 hour session.

Students needing more support would move to a third tier. This highest level of support could include moving to a special support "advisory" for part or all of each day.

This is just a rough sketch, but I was excited when this resonated with some colleagues this week.

And of course, it needs to apply to behavioral issues as well. This week I did my second real restorative circle, and these are a powerful Tier II behavioral support, one that could lead to other supports such as weekly check-ins and counselling.

Success! The Rasperry Pi computer is up and running!

As I've told a couple of students this week, this is really about making sure they get the skills they need succeed, whether those are academic skills, social skills, or self-control.

I know that we won't be able to help everyone. I know there will be some who simply refuse our help, or whose needs exceed our capacity, but until that becomes clear, our job is to keeping ramping up support.

School should not be a filter, to filter out those who don't meet the standard. It's not a service for the elite--for those who can already teach themselves, or whose home lives have already ensured their success. It needs to be for everyone.

It can't be a filter. It's got to be a foothold, a foundation, a fulcrum.

We humans aren't built to thrive in a weed-out-the-weak, social Darwinist world. We're much too interconnected for that. We're built to support each other.

Three things I'm psyched about this week at the Depot

Three things I'm psyched about this week at the Depot.

1) It was awesome to see our seniors working on their senior projects for a solid three hours on Wednesday. I see it as an example of the importance of clarity, explicit instruction, and focused support. I gave them step-by-step instructions, an outline template, and a sample research paper (McDonalds vs. KFC as a model for making decisions). And they were on fire. They even came back for two more sessions, getting a ton done in this short, focussed  time. I'm a big fan of autonomy, but it doesn't mean a lack of structure--it's autonomy within a carefully structured framework. Lack of clarity equals lack of progress, and the opposite is just as true: clarity equals progress. (And focused, dedicated time probably helps, too.)

2) Along those same lines, I'm super psyched about the progress we're making on assessing and tracking our six competencies at the Depot. We now have a full, four-level rubric for all six competencies, and have started using it during the students' 1st Trimester Exhibitions. We'll track progress through the year by measuring competencies as demonstrated during their Exhibitions every trimester. I'm not big on grades, but I do think measurement is essential so that students can see their progress and we can see what's working.

3) On Friday, we capped off the week with another opportunity to practice restorative discipline. I was off campus when I got the call about the incident, which invoked a knee-jerk desire to punish the students involved. But as I drove back, I remembered my vision of restorative justice at the Depot, and after talking with staff, we came up with some exciting possible solutions. Of course the students will need to apologize to the offended parties and maybe do some work to make up for any damages, but why not have them all try it again--do the same activity the right way, without the undesirable behaviours. This would help them learn how to behave and also help restore the damaged relationships. In other words, we say to them, "Let's try that again and do it right." And why not have them score themselves on the rubric?

Whether we're working on research skills or social skills, continuous improvement is within our grasp when we are intentional and scientific about it. And this fires me up. Science fires me up because it works. "Hacking" education fires me up, because it's possible. Working towards a better fit between people and education fires me up, because it would be so powerful.

Sweet potato soup and velociraptors: Reflections on my first full week

Students walking around with mugs of this delicious sweet potato soup, getting ready for our celebratory, end-of-the-week outing. Four of them had made the soup, under Ellen's direction, part of what I hope will become a regular occurrence. Earlier in the week, they made fruit smoothies, hummus, and avocado-based chocolate pudding.

Learning to plan and cook nutritious food could be the foundation for so much growth and improvement in their lives, not to mention the community-building power of sharing food together.

It was a hearty meal after a week of hard work at the E. O. Smith Depot campus, where school doesn't look much like school, and learning looks like a cup of soup. It looks like a student-led pick-me-up meeting in the morning and students brainstorming projects with their advisors, peers, and me. It looks like parent-student-advisor-director Learning Plan meetings meetings. It looks like students researching potential internship sites, making phone calls and sending emails to potential mentors, planning projects that will meet their learning goals, including math and science. It looks like students designing monarch butterfly habitats. It looks like students walking town trails, painting blazes on trees and pruning back branches. It looks like Gabe and Max.
 

When Gabe and Max started working on the Lynch Landing trails, they seemed kind of bored, working on one section of the trail for what seemed like a bit too long with their loppers and swatting at weeds with sticks. Then I went back and showed them the safe way to use a machete and brush hook (and told them a couple of horror stories I'd heard about surveyors who were injured with similar tools). Soon, Max was attacking a multiflora rose with the brush hook (which looks more than a little like a medieval weapon). He hacked at it steadily until the invasive plant was completely gone and disposed of, roots and all. Only an empty space of soil by the trail was left.

Then we moved to the lower meadow. The weeds down there are as tall as me and cover several acres. It is prime velociraptor habitat (I was glad it was daytime), and we needed to cut paths to the patches of milkweed for the monarch butterfly project.

Gabe started cutting a new trail through the velociraptor habitat in the lower meadow while Max cut a path from the meadow to the river bank through a hedge of brush with the brush hook. Before long, they had put in a solid hour of strenuous labor, were soaked with sweat, and used the word “adventurous” to describe the experience.

 

All the while, Izzie had been working like a machine, cutting another path through the meadow with a simple pair of loppers until she had 30 feet of trail right down to the dirt. And she cut carefully around the milkweed plants, which she had learned to identify.

 

All of this in 90 degree heat. 

 

And without pay.

And by their choice.

 

It’s so cool to see students learning the satisfaction of productive work, work that adds value and helps out the community. And on top of that, they learned the proper way to use tools, identified some plants, learned about the priority of safety, and built their team.

The next morning, I gave a revised version of my "Potential" talk, which tells the story of Ben Franklin and other awesome people who started working on their goals as young people. Then I gave them each a pad of paper and asked them to write a goal on each of four pieces labelled Dream, Long shot, Maybe, and Probably: their Dream for their life, a life goal that was a long shot, but could happen, a goal that might happen, and what would probably happen. Reading some of their responses almost brought tears to my eyes--some of them have such obstacles in their lives, but they also have real goals.

 

And that's what this place is about, and why I'm here--to help them reach their goals, develop their potential, and find their purpose. And that's how it works--by tapping into their natural motivation and providing a learning environment that's a better fit for human nature, one with close-knit community, real food, real work, real conversations and real adventure.

Why study when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?

When we have to resort to external motivators, that means there's something wrong. Often, it means something we're doing is not fitting with human nature. That's why we have to force it.


And I have to wonder how much of our modern system of education and even civilization really is not a good fit for humanity at all.


Christopher Ryan tells the story of three natives of Tierra del Fuego, who were brought to England by Captain Fitzroy of the HMS Beagle to learn the ways civilization, in hopes they would serve as missionaries to their own people.

But when they were returned to their homeland, they just reverted to their old way of life--a primitive, hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

The good Captain offered to bring one of them back to England, but the man declined, saying he hadn't "the least wish to return to England," because he was "happy and contented" with "plenty fruits," "plenty fish," and "plenty birdies."

His response was similar to that of the Kalahari bushman who was asked why his tribe hadn't switched from their hunter-gatherer lifestyle to agriculture. He replied, "Why should we, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?"

This may apply to school in at least two ways.

First, who can blame young people who are enjoying their social lives, sports, hobbies, and freedom from responsibility, and whose parents are taking care of all their needs, if they choose not to work their butts off in school? Why bust their tails when there are so many mongongo nuts around and they haven't yet learned the "skill" of worrying about the future like we adults have?

Or maybe they feel a need to improve their lives, but their experience has told them that the educational system doesn't work for them. I imagine it doesn't take many suspensions or Fs on your report card to get that message loud and clear. No wonder these students "revert" to lifestyles they feel work better for them.




And I wonder how many young people, when presented with the modern education-career-retirement pipeline are simply not interested. And I wonder if that's a bad thing. After all, what's the point of all that education and career if it doesn't bring fulfilment, if it doesn't make us "happy and contented"?

Darwin and Captain Fitzroy didn't take the hint.  They were saddened by the inability of these "savages" to see the wisdom of the "civilized" way of life. But what if they were missing the point? What if they were the ones not seeing?

I wonder if we too easily assume that our modern systems are best without looking for how well they actually fit humans.

What's your one job?

What's your one job?

What's the one thing you want to make sure happens in your life--in your work?

What's the one thing you can focus on, as everything else is uncertain and changing around you?

Mine, at work, is to make education work for more kids.

Whatever else happens with my career, that will remain: I'll be working towards closing gaps and helping every single student succeed and push the boundaries of their abilities.

What my students liked about my mastery-based class

I asked the students of my differentiated, mastery-based biology for some feedback at the end of the year, and I don't know why I was surprised by their answers. They pretty much summed up exactly what I'd hoped to achieve.

Here's how they answered the question, "What was the best thing about this class?"

"I liked how we got to work on computers and also how many different projects we could have done."

"Having you give us freedom to see how responsible we are, and the due dates so we can take our time learning about the topic."

"How we had to learn on our own."

"We had fun and learned at the same time. Very unique and creative class."

"The freedom of the curriculum."

"That we controlled it by doing things on our own."

"The best thing about this class were the assignments/projects and Dr. Green."

"Everything. All students got along,  fun learning, non-stressful, interesting material, good options/alternatives to tests."

"How we could do assignments at our own pace."

"The freedom of [sic] we can do what we want."

"Take things at your own pace."

"We go at our own pace on the assignments."

"The best thing was not having actual due dates and working in groups on projects for every unit."

"The best thing was having an option of how we got to learn."
 
"The vibes this class brought"

And two students blew me away with their answers to "What was the most important or interesting thing you learned in this class?"

"School/grades don't define you, but you should try because education is important."

"The most important/interesting thing I learned in this class was to always do your best and keep trying and never give up."

And that is what it's all about, isn't it?

When the end is in sight

Boom! That's what happens to engagement as the end of the year approaches in my mastery-based biology class.

Well, not exactly. Last week it was plummeting. But this week it went through the roof. At one point today, every student was working on a quiz or project. And for the past two days, I was unable to get all of the engagement measurements I wanted because I was too busy answering students' questions.

So what happened?

Yesterday I started class by reminding them that they had little time left to complete all of their projects, and that this class could run into the summer for some of them. (They have to complete everything to get credit. That's part of the master-based deal, I tell them.)

I hate doing this--using negative ways of motivating them, and part of me really doesn't like the fact that the imposing end of the course has motivated them better than autonomy, mastery, and purpose could.

But the other part of me understands. My efforts at making meaningful objectives, giving them plenty of choice, and unlimited opportunity for mastery have not been perfect. Especially the objectives part. I feel like the projects and objectives have a long way to go before they are really meaningful to students.

But I also understand how our brains work. We drastically discount the importance of events the further they are into the future. It's called present bias or hyperbolic discounting. This is why we procrastinate. And it's especially true for some teens who haven't yet learned how to worry about the future as much as grown-ups like me. (Sometimes I wish I were a bit less concerned about the future.)

So it makes sense that my students kick it in gear as the end comes into focus.

So my goals for next year:

1) Teach them how to see the future more clearly and not discount it quite so much.
2) Make my projects and objectives so meaningful that that's not even necessary.

Why are we so stuck on extrinsic motivation?

Reading through Pink's Drive a second time, I came across the passage where he mentions a huge literature review that confirmed his hypothesis, and I wondered again:

Why are we still so wedded to extrinsic motivators when the research overwhelmingly points to intrinsic motivators?

And then I came across this critique of Pink, "Memo to Dan Pink and Friends: Incentives Do Not Undermine Employee Motivation," and I realized, it's not just that people haven't heard Pink's ideas: not everyone agrees with him.

This threw me into the following sequence of thoughts:

1) Wow. I'm all wrong about this intrinsic motivation thing. Ouch. I've been blogging for a year about and running my classes based on it.

2) But that's OK. At least I'm trying to improve--pushing the envelope. Failure is fuel.

3) Wait a minute. Why aren't there any links to the studies this guy mentions that refute Pink?

4) Hmm.. and why does he pull an ad hominem, mentioning that Kohn was a school teacher and Pink a political speech writer. Why does that matter?

5) Hmm... let's see what the Harvard Business Review has to say about it. After reviewing the results of several major studies and reviews, Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic concludes, "The fact that there is little evidence to show that money motivates us, and a great deal of evidence to suggest that it actually demotivates us, supports the idea that that there may be hidden costs associated with rewards."

6) I understand it's a nuanced thing. Extrinsic rewards do motivate people to do better at mundane, routine tasks that they don't like doing, and some people do seem more motivated by money and other external rewards. But there seems no question that intrinsic rewards, like autonomy, mastery, and purpose are more powerful: "employees who are intrinsically motivated are three times more engaged than employees who are extrinsically motivated (such as by money)."

A month of motivation in my biology class

So I think I'll stick with the plan for now. Though my student's engagement levels are up and down, and not perfect (see chart), I'd rather focus on teaching them habits of intrinsic motivation than extrinsic.


The potential is there for really revolutionary change. And even though changing the educational system sometimes seems like trying to moving the pyramids of Giza, it's worth it. The data is there. They need to move.

Making a habit of autonomy, mastery and purpose

My differentiated biology class is based on the concept that humans are most powerfully motivated by autonomy, mastery, and purpose--a concept I got from Daniel Pink's powerful book, Drive.

But another powerful book has gotten me wondering lately whether I'm missing something: The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg.

Duhigg breaks down habits like this: Habits consist of a cue (a trigger, like stress), a routine (like biting your nails or drinking), and a reward (dopamine).

But Duhigg emphasizes that it's really not a habit until you start craving it--until your brain starts expecting the reward every time it sees the cue.

I'd like to help my students form new habits, but at first the idea of habit seemed contradictory to Pink's trinity of intrinsic motivators.

Then I realized how the two ideas fit together:

1. Motivation is a craving. 
2. Autonomy, mastery, and purpose are routines that can produce rewards for your brain (dopamine). 

Some students crave good grades. Others don't.

Some develop the habit of doing their homework. Others don't.

We could focus on teaching them to crave grades and fear penalties, do their homework, and turn stuff in on time.

But I want to aim higher. I want to help my students develop habits of autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

I want to help them crave the reward that comes from those things.

Because that's the essence of intrinsic motivation. 

Quality vs. success

In her book, The Rise, Sarah Lewis contrasts the "momentary nature of success and the unending process required for mastery."

That process, she says, is what's important--not the goal of success, which forever retreats into the distance.

It got me thinking about whether I'm more focused on "success" than mastery, perfection than the process, and recognition than relationships.

It made me wonder if slow is better than fast, cultivation, than harvest, learning, than winning, growth, than achievement, creativity, than conquest.

And I forced myself to sit in the yard under a tree for an hour on Sunday and watch my bees.

And today as I hiked to Wolf Den again, I wondered if it's really more about the quality of each step than about how fast I make the round trip.

The school with the "no rules" playground

What happens when you take away all the rules?

This principal has found out.


Caught this vid shared by Michelle Boyce (@boycem3) this morning on the #BFC530 (Breakfast Club, 5:30) chat on Twitter. And it's amazing and encouraging.

And it's backed by science. Kids need risk to learn to manage risk, says one researcher.

I'd add, they also need adventure. I love the part about them not having time for video games. That's what happens when real life actually becomes fun.

And then they return to school calm and "ready to learn." Though I'd add they were doing a whole lot of that outside.

I'd love to visit and find out what else is happening. I like how the bigger kids breaking up fights, and I'd love to see what other sorts of social rules are naturally showing up out there. 

But I'd also add some modelling by adults. Need a few teachers walking slacklines and climbing trees, socializing, playing, etc.


Has a lot to say about parenting, as well.

What do you think?

Make it personal. Make it purposeful.

If you really want to motivate humans, you need to do these two things: make it personal and make it purposeful.

Personal: When radiologists were shown a picture of the patient along side every CT scan they interpreted, they were much more likely to notice things that were wrong with the patient.

Purposeful: When hand-washing stations in hospitals had signs reading "Washing your hands keeps patients from getting sick," they were more likely to wash their hands than if the signs read, "Washing your hands keeps you from getting sick."

The more I read, and the more I compare it to reality, the more I'm beginning to see the centrality of relationships to humanness.

I used to see life as competition, and that the most powerful motivator was self-interest. And I thought this was good--that it made us stronger, more creative, harder working.

But as Daniel Pink Pointed out in Drive, and as he pointed out in different ways in To Sell Is Human,the opposite is true.

If you really want to optimize human motivation and performance, you need to tap our pro-social instincts.

Less competition, more improvisation

I was talking with a classmate last week about how easy it is to start feeling like our administrator prep program is a competition, with all of us competing for a limited number of positions as we start our job searches.

So this principle from Pink (To Sell Is Human) hit home today:

Always make the other guy look good.

The principle comes form improvisational acting. When you're an improvisational actor, the strategy is to listen carefully to what your counterpart says, and then build on it in such a way as to make your partner look as good as possible. Rather than making you look worse, you'll both look better, and the whole thing looks like it was planned, like a dance.

And that's how life should be, right? Not a competitive, zero-sum, win-lose struggle for supremacy, but a cooperative dance of mutual benefit.

One practical strategy Pink suggests is called "Yes, and.." Too often we get caught in battles of "Yes, but.." Contradicting and questioning each other in an endless competitive circle. What if, instead, we always said, "Yes, and..." and then built on each other's suggestions instead of tearing them down.

I'm anxious to try this out in the classroom. When a student answers a question inaccurately during a class discussion, I usually try to emphasize what he or she got right. But Pink's strategy is more powerful. You listen carefully, say "Yes," and and then build on what the student says. The result is that instead of the usual competitive game of right and wrong, the whole thing becomes a dance.

I've posted before about Chris Ryan and Cacilda Jetha's awesome book, Sex at Dawn. One of the coolest things about their book is the picture they paint of a human nature that is basically cooperative and hypersocial, rather than competitive and aggressive. Being human is all about this kind of dance of mutual benefit. And this isn't some kind of pie-in-the-sky mystical idealism. It's what makes us tick. It's how we work.

If we want workplaces, classes and classrooms that fit better with human nature, we need less competition and more cooperation, less contradiction, and more collaboration.

Why we're so distracted by our phones

I just saw this wild photo on Instagram today (which my daughter says I'm too old to be on, by the way), and the first thing I thought was:

"Wow. That explains a lot."

A lot about why I personally find high-tech gadgets, the internet, and social media  so distracting.

It lets me know I'm not alone. My primate cousins are the same way.

We're curious. We're social. We're... something.

Whatever it is, we all have it. So there's no need to bemoan our constant distractibility and fascination with this stuff--the pull that draws into whatever it is. It's basic human... err primate tendency.

Not that we just give in to it all the time, but it's a mistake to deny it or look at it it as a flaw of some sort.

Just watched the wordless but visually striking movie, Baraka, last night, and it opens with one of these macaques relaxing in one of these hot springs. Amazing how "human" he/she looked, eyes closing slightly, then looking off into the distance, up to his/her neck in the hot spring.

Then they switched to a night sky scene, as if the monkey was thinking about it--meditating, even.

Probably not the same monkey that played with the phone, but it could have been. We're complex, we higher primates--hypersocial, hyperintelligent, hypercreative, hypercurious animals.

My goal is to better understand what it means to be human, partly so I can better understand myself, like why I'm so distracted by the computer, and partly so I can forge a better fit between my classroom, my life, and human nature.

Understanding is always better. It's not always more comfortable at first. Sometimes it shatters cherished illusions. But if we use the understanding--adjust our live based on it, we end up better off.

But I think the power of that image of the macaque engrossed in the iPhone went deeper than this. It meant a connection--a connection with something that extends beyond time and body and place and connects us all together. And that kind of empathy...

Wow.

That kind of empathy is probably one of the key facets of what it means to be "human."