Has coddling destroyed a generation?

One of the most common conversations among educators these days is the rising tide of anxiety and depression among young people. This disturbing trend comes at a time when schools are already being asked to do more and more academically, and these two factors are creating a perfect storm that we are having difficulty navigating. And so we are seeing ideas like grit, resilience, social-emotional learning, and trauma-sensitivity being offered up as possible solutions, and this new book by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind.

The basic premise of the book is that by protecting our children and students from everything from peanuts to opposing viewpoints, we have crippled our college campuses and created a mental health crisis among teens and young adults. The book is definitely worth a read. The increasing prevalence of anxiety and depression among young people is something I deal with every day, and it's clear that something has gone wrong on college campuses when speakers are being "disinvited" simply for holding opposing political viewpoints.

I also see overparenting as a major issue. It's a constant struggle as a parent to keep from overprotecting your kids from failures and consequences, and the same goes for running a school. What is needed is an authoritative approach, with clear rules and consequences and a focus on support, rather than a permissive or authoritarian approach. Coddling is a good reminder that we do damage by not allowing our kids to experience difficulty. I always viewed parenting as repeatedly casting my kids out and reeling them back in. 

But while I think the book makes important contributions to the discussion, I also think it muddies the waters a bit. The authors are huge fans of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), and they noticed that some of the cognitive errors targeted by CBT are similar to logical errors being made, in their opinions, by parents, schools, students and universities that are overprotecting kids. From there, they built their case that overzealous censorship at universities and the mental health crisis were symptoms of the same cause--what they call the "3 Great Untruths."

1. What doesn't kill me makes me weaker
2. Always trust your feelings
3. Us vs. them

While I agree that these are dangerous errors, I think this greatly oversimplifies the problem. From my perspective as an administrator, overzealous protectionism at schools has little to do with ideology or philosophy and everything to to with protecting ourselves from litigation. But that is a minor issue compared to the question of what is causing the mental health crisis.

The authors themselves mention some other possible causes of rising anxiety and depression, such as screen time (citing Jean Twenge's book, iGen). Sarah Rose Cavanagh has questioned the role of screen time, but suggested several other possible causes, including the decline of "face-to-face social communities" and economic inequality, just to name a few.

Human psychology is complex, and the changes taking place in our society are profound. Take, for example, the massive cultural shift that has been under way in our whole worldview as a society. I just finished listening to The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker. This classic lays out Becker's theory of what happens when you strip the dominant religious worldview from a culture. Who knows but that we are also seeing those types of effects today among young people?

We live in a world that has become a whitewater rapid of change--technologically, culturally, economically, you name it. Anyone growing up in such a world as this would be understandably prone to anxiety, just as much as they would if they were born in the midst of a river rafting trip.

I think our best bet in supporting them is to do just that--support them with research based practices and provide high expectations backed up by high levels of relational and academic supports. Allowing them to experience consequences is part of this, but my concern with this book is that is reflects a movement to discount the massive changes taking place today and their impact on kids. Kids today have to be tougher, in my opinion, than I had to be growing up. It means we have to be there for them even more than ever, casting them out into the whitewater and reeling them back in again, again and again.

What would real community look like?

What would it look like if our school were a real community--the kind humans are built for?

In his recent book, Tribe, Sebastian Junger argues that humans are built for a closeness of community that we rarely experience today. Early American colonists, for example, often ran away to live with native Americans, while the opposite almost never happened. Apparently, they craved the kind of intimacy and unity the natives had so much they were willing to give up the comforts of civilization to get it.

These days, this kind of community is very hard to come by. In fact, according to Junger, it only happens in times of disaster and war, when people draw together in a common cause of survival, and boundaries of race and class temporarily break down. But do we really need a war or disaster to get back to our roots?

I'd love to see this kind of community at our school, but how could we create it? Is there something we could rally around--a "crisis," or "survival situation"  that would give us all a common purpose? I was doubtful, but then this week, something happened that made me hopeful we can do it.

There was an incident. Some students messed up, publicly, and in such a way that I called everyone together for two restorative circles over two days. each time, we all sat around and passed the talking stick, answering questions ranging from "What happened?" and "Who was harmed, and how?" to "What can we do to make it good?"

There was embarrassment, avoidance, denial, apology, remorse, thoughtfulness, irritation and even anger as difficult topics were brought up, personalities and ideas clashed, and we tried to work this thing out together.

It was uncomfortable at times, difficult and tiring, but I think it was worth it, because as I reflected on this yesterday, I realized something: This is how it could happen. The community, I mean.

If our community is so valuable that we refuse to sweep issues under the rug, if we force ourselves to draw out conflicts like poison from a wound, if we wrestle with our mistakes and differences, instead of hiding them or turning them into walls between us, maybe we can achieve just a little bit of what those early colonists were looking for.

Maybe it doesn't take a war, or maybe the wars that are always between us and within us are enough. Maybe the disasters in our own lives and relationships, and the conflicts in our own minds and midst can be enough to unite us into the kind of community that's in our DNA.

It's worth a shot, isn't it?

We need a new narrative

Tristan showing off the urn he made at his internship.

What is the Depot? According to one of our students, it's "a place where you go and come back with blue hair and piercings."

That's an interesting description, and it has a grain of truth to it. At least 25% of our students have had colored hair at some point this year. But it is also false. Many of them already had it when they came, and 75% of them never color their hair or pierce their lips.

The problem is that stories like these change the way people see us, and more importantly, the way we see ourselves.

Not that colored hair is a bad thing, and though facial piercings may not help you get a job, that description of the Depot doesn't really bother me. The more common description of the Depot is much more damaging. It goes something like this: "The Depot is a place where you go when you fail."

This is the story we hear over and over again from our own students. It's the story they tell themselves about the Depot and about themselves. It's a story that shapes their beliefs and even their behaviour. And it's not true. And we need a new one.

Just like all cultures, nations, organizations, families and people, the Depot has a story that we tell about ourselves--a story that defines who we are. As Yuval Harari writes it in Sapiens, these stories are part of what makes human societies possible. According to Harari, the ability to make up such stories is what made homo sapiens so much more successful than the other homo species, like the Neanderthals. The stories that make up our religions and national histories bind us together in groups much larger than genes ever could. These stories are powerful, because they provide us with identities, guidance and justification for our actions.

For example, if you believe that humans are descended from peaceful, egalitarian, bonobo-like creatures that had sex freely with any and all members of their group, as suggested by Chris Ryan in Sex at Dawn, this will affect the way you view yourself as a human. It will provide an identity (humans are inherently peaceful, sharing and loving), and it will provide an explanation of why humans have a tendency to cheat on their spouses and why the divorce rate is so high. It will also suggest an answer to the problem.

But it will also fail to fit the data. Lynn Saxon, in her rebuttal of Sex at Dawn, called Sex at Dusk, shreds Ryan's analysis and makes a strong case that humans are naturally monogamous with a natural tendency to cheat on the side when they can. This is what is called the "standard narrative" of human sexual evolution, and it paints a very different picture of who we are and how we should live. Which story you believe will affect the way you view yourself and your world, and could affect your behavior.

The standard narrative of the Depot, that it's a place for students who "don't fit" the traditional model--a place for kids who fail, also has powerful implications. It suggests that there's something wrong with them, which suggests that they behave accordingly.

But what if it's not true? What if the Depot is just a different path to success, one where students can learn from mentors in real-world settings? What if it's a place where all students could thrive? Then we're not the Island of Misfit Toys, and they're not misfits. They're here, not because they are failures, but because we offer something that can help every student succeed, and they made an active choice to help themselves by taking advantage of it.

Just like societies and schools, we all have little stories about ourselves that we tell ourselves. As fantasy author Patrick Rothfuss put it, “It's like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story.”

If your story is that you're a failure, victim, or misfit, that's going to shape you, and not in a good way. You may have baggage and challenges you've inherited from your history, but that doesn't have to be your story. Instead, your story can focus on the overcoming and the strengths and positives.

My own negative stories about inadequacy and fear and failure and rejection have hindered me at times throughout my life, and I know I'm not alone. I see my students struggle every day with the stories they tell themselves. Like the stories I tell myself, the standard narrative of the Depot gets propagated because it has elements of truth. Many of our students have failed at the main campus. Many feel they don't fit in. But the story is false. That's not who we are, and it's not what we're about. We need to change our narrative.

The truth is, we are all humans with tremendous potential and resilience, and that's much more encouraging than the fiction. The truth is, we can be what we want to be. We can write our own story.

Moments like these are too rare

During my son's second year at college, he started working with a professor  who really took him under his wing. My son, Luke, worked for his business, even did yard work, and his family became like a second family for Luke.

After Luke's graduation this past week, this man had us all over for dinner at his beautiful house on Long Island. This highly distinguished man, who has helped my son so much over the past few years, was going on about how much he appreciates Luke and how proud he is of him.

I turned to look out the huge window overlooking Long Island sound, fighting back tears. I know it's not over--Luke has a lifetime of challenges before him, but at that moment, there was no worry about what was next, about how he would overcome his next hurdle or make it in the world. At that moment I was overwhelmed with pride and gratitude for what he had achieved, for who he is, the support he'd received, and just the simple fact that he'd made it safely and successfully this far.

Right then, that moment was enough.

Moments like these are too rare. The fact that it was as if a huge weight had been rolled off of me speaks to my tendency to see dangers around every corner and flaws everywhere I look. The fact that the approval being heaped on my son overwhelmed me speaks of my own "trance of unworthiness" and life of never being good enough.

But it all points to a different way. That moment on the Sound was profound, but moments like it should be much more common. There's no doubt that some landmarks of life have particular emotional significance, but every moment should be full of gratitude for those around me, who we are, and that we've made it this far. Every moment is an opportunity to awaken from the trance and shower our loved ones, those around us, and even ourselves with acceptance, encouragement, and approval.

"All my life, I was never good enough"

Probably the most peaceful moment of my life was lying flat on my back in my family's old gravel bank, my hand applying pressure to where the chain saw had cut into my shoulder, watching the clouds pass by in a clear blue sky.

I didn't know the extent of the damage, and it seems like I should have panicked instead of soaking in the feeling of the stones beneath my back and feeling at one everything.

It was as if, with nothing I could do but wait for help, I could finally just relax and not worry about striving for whatever it is I'm always striving for.

For just a little while that day, I was free from what Tara Brach, in her book, Radical Acceptance, calls the "trance of unworthiness." Like many people, all my life I've been walking around believing there's something wrong with me--that I am never good enough, that I have to prove something to the world, and always fall short somehow. And I find myself pushing my wife, kids, and students in the same way I push myself, always seeing deficiencies and room for improvement, sending the message that I don't accept them for who they are right now.

Improvement is good, but judgement and lack of acceptance is not. It keeps us from enjoying our moments, trapped in anxiety, resentment, and discouragement. It causes us to hide, pretend, and react to things in unhealthy ways, and keeps us from seeing clearly enough to bring about the change we need.

Radical acceptance, on the other hand, means facing and embracing everything about ourselves just as we are right now: weakness, anger, mistakes, envy, flaws, lust, frustration, fear, and failure. It means opening up to everything about our circumstances as they really are right now, denying nothing, hiding from nothing, feeling everything. It means seeing these self-imposed requirements and judgements and the suffering they cause to us and others. It means accepting ourselves without judgement.

In other words, there's nothing wrong with me. I have nothing to prove. What I am and what I have, right now, is enough.

Wait, is that true?

If not, then enough will be impossible for me. I know myself well enough. It's either enough now, or it never will be. I don't know if I'll have another minute on this planet, and I don't want to be like the woman in Brach's story who woke only long enough to say to her daughter, "All my life, I was never good enough," and then slipped back into her coma.

Accepting allows us to experience "enough" even in the midst of pain. Like the Buddha of legend, we can say to shame, fear and anger, "I see you Mara," and invite him to tea. Instead of being swept away in cascades of negative thoughts, we can defuse the chain reaction and experience the good around and within us, even in the bad.

But accepting doesn't mean being content with staying where you are. Like Tim Ferriss, whose interview with Tara Brach introduced me to her, I worry that accepting myself will mean I stop improving. I've struggled in the past on this blog about the balance between contentment and improvement. Tara Brach's answer is that honest and non-judgemental awareness of where you are (radical acceptance) is the only first step to real change.

My trance of unworthiness manifests itself in high achieving, never satisfied obsession, but I have students who are not high achievers, yet struggle more than I with self-condemnation and the trance of unworthiness. The outcomes may look different: me, enslaved to stressful striving, they, paralyzed in fear of failure. In both cases, we suffer.

For all of us, radical acceptance means being free: free to be enough, just as you are, to just lay there, feeling the grit through your shirt, maybe even bleeding, and just watch all those self-imposed requirements float by in a blue sky.

And then it means being free to act mindfully, and change.

So this is what I'm working on these days: practicing radical acceptance. 

Breaking out of to-do list tunnel vision

I love my Moleskine notebook, even though people make fun of me for the stack of black, dated volumes on my desk in an age where it seems like there should be an app for this. My favorite part of the Bullet Journal system is the check-lists. I absolutely love checking off those little boxes, but sometimes I get caught up in the to-do-list and lose sight of what it's for.

I guess you could say I'm goal oriented. I even like SMART goals, which many educators have come to dread. Under the new state Teacher Evaluation Plan, we have to set goals for our students that must be:

Specific,
Measureable,
Achievable,
Relevant and
Time-bound.

That's why I started listening really closely when Charles Duhigg started talking about the problems with SMART goals. For one thing, people often just start focusing on whatever quantifiable goal they can get done and lose sight of the big picture. Their job becomes all about checking off boxes.


I can relate. I often find myself focussing on making phone calls, submitting P.O.s, filing paperwork with the State, entering data, making more check-lists, and other tasks that need to be done, because they are easy to measure and complete. Or I start a bunch of new initiatives: new rubrics, progress tracking and reporting systems, a kitchen crew, a fitness challenge, a Quiet Study and Support Center, tracking more and more data, without stopping to ask if all of this getting me closer to my real goal.

Wait, what's my real goal again?


The answer to the SMART goal dilemma, Duhigg says, is stretch goals: big audacious goals that will make sure our SMART goals are actually getting us where we want to go. Start with the big goal, says Duhigg, and write it at the top of the page, and then break it down into SMART goals. Our stretch goals don't need to be SMART. We use them as a guide to build a list of appropriate SMART goals.

So how's this for a stretch goal: To make every one of my students really ready for the college and/or career of their choice. A whole list of SMART goals could explode out of that one stretch goal: assess current college and career readiness of each student, determine areas of weakness, identify strategies to support each student, etc.

But hang on. Is that really an audacious goal? Isn't that what school is supposed to do?

That's the other problem with the SMART goal habit--the "A" makes us aim too low. High expectations is one of the key ingredients to student success, and we need to aim higher than we really expect people to attain.

So let's take it up a notch: We'll bring in at-risk students, and every one of them will exceed State benchmarks for college and career readiness. And taking it even further, they'll be like arrows shot from a bow, already on their way to making the world a better place.


I've had something like this in mind since the beginning, so I'm hoping that all of the initiatives we've started this year are moving us in the right direction, but I also know I need more focus in my day-to-day activities. I need a compass needle that will keep drawing me back to this goal when I get bogged down in the little stuff, something to re-calibrate me every day as I make my check-lists.


And this is just one strand of my life that needs this. I need stretch goals for my family life, relationships, and physical and mental health. I need to remember that I started Crossfit for stress management and not to make fitness the focus of my life. I need to remember that as important as my job is to me, I'm really working, first and foremost, to support my family, so they can't take a back seat.

Getting bogged down in the minutiae can get us off track in life, plodding along with our eyes on the ground, only to finally turn our heads up and realize we've walked in a circle, tired, bored and burned out.

Every day, we need to start by asking ourselves: "Where am I headed, again? And why?" We need to break out of the tunnel vision, look around at the landscape, refocus on the goal in the distance, and ask, "Now, what do I need to do today to get closer?"

Can you tip a school culture?

“Character, then, isn't what we think it is or, rather, what we want it to be. It isn't a stable, easily identifiable set of closely related traits... Character is... dependent, at certain times, on circumstance and context.” 


-Malcolm Gladwell


How is the context of our school influencing what we would call the character of our students?

How many of the negative behaviors we see are the natural, predictable result of the social environment and structure of the school?

Listening to Gladwell's Tipping Point got me thinking about these questions again. He calls it "the power of context," and it reminds me of one of Chip and Dan Heath's powerful principles: "What looks like a people problem is often a situation problem."

Peers, for example, have such a powerful influence on human behavior that Gladwell writes, "A child is better off... living in a troubled family in a good neighborhood than living in a good family in a troubled neighborhood." That's why Geoffrey Canada, founder of the Harlem Children's Zone, figured he had to reach at least 60% of a neighborhood in order for his efforts to have a lasting  impact on kids.

So what happens if you put a bunch of struggling students from tough family backgrounds, with motivation problems, negative experiences with school, and  social/emotional challenges, all together in one class or school?

It's obvious.

And what's the solution? That's also obvious. You make sure you integrate the struggling kids with good peer role models, as many of them as possible.

At the Depot, we're working on this, but I'm also interested in finding other tipping point triggers we could use.

Gladwell argues that the 1980s NYC crime epidemic was actually curbed by scrubbing graffiti from the subway trains and stopping fare-beaters from jumping the turnstiles. These small changes sent "signals" that had a cascading effect throughout the city.

I'm wondering if there are signals we're sending that could be changed or new ones we could send that might help us "tip" the Depot into the higher-expectations, self-motivated environment we're shooting for.

We don't have any graffiti on the walls--we have a beautiful building, but is there disorder, are there little things we could address. Are there ways we could change the structure so the culture would shift? Are there keystone habits, key changes that would have a cascading impact?

Some of our efforts so far this year include:

• Pushing more kids to take college entrance exams, talking more about college, and taking them on college tours
• Encouraging fitness and healthy eating with our new "kitchen crew," free smoothie ingredients, and our "fitness challenge"
• Increased accountability and tracking of student progress with a new competency rubric and Google Drive-based data tracking
• Clarified expectations and forms for students
• Increased academic support through our new "Quiet Study and Support Center"
• Pointing students we can't serve to other environments that can hopefully serve them better

School culture and climate are so key, but they seem to have so much inertia. Gladwell's hypothesis gives me hope that they might be changed more easily than I expect. "Look at the world around you," he writes, "It may seem like an immovable, implacable place. It is not. With the slightest push--in just the right place--it can be tipped."

Easy diplomas, high expectations, and equity

Too many of these kids are struggling, and it's not their fault. They are the victims of systems and histories that make it all but impossible for them to stay above the waves. But knowing this, what can an educator do?

This question's been swirling around in my head since reading Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, but finally an answer to these questions is starting to coalesce in my mind--a solution that I think is truly equitable.

If you've been following this blog, you know we've been working on raising the bar for our students while, at the same time, increasing supports. But you also know that we've been realizing our limitations, and that, to some of our students, support has meant helping them find a school environment that works better for them. And for some, raising the bar could mean they don't make it in time for a diploma in June.

And then there's Between the World and Me, challenging me to take a hard look at what I am doing and whether I really am a support or just another hound at the heels of these kids, just more wind in their face, as Coates' put it.

Am I wrong in not wanting to just give the kids a diploma--in wanting to hold them accountable, push them to improve, and have them leave here ready for what's next?

Which is more just or fair: to deny a student a diploma because you have high expectations, or to give him a diploma no matter what, so he is not further disadvantaged by lacking that piece of paper?

According to Paul Gorski, author of Reaching and teaching Students in Poverty, high expectations is one of the things these kids need most, but they also need that slip of paper, don't they?

How do I balance their need for a diploma with their need for high expectations, solid skills, and college/career readiness?


So I turned to a mentor for advice, one with experience working with disadvantaged kids and teaching administrators how to work with them. He encouraged me to take a two-pronged approach: One in the short term "here and now," and another for "the long game."

In the short term, he said, I need to try to support the students in my care as much as possible, including advocating for their removal to a program that works better for them, if necessary. At the same time, I need to continue to work on building a program that will work better for more kids in the long term. (And that's a huge undertaking, so take it a step at a time, and be patient.)

And as far as diplomas and justice, here's my take-away from our conversation:

No. I'm not wrong for not wanting to just hand out diplomas. This is one of the inequities of the American educational system: it "launders" diplomas instead of providing kids with the support and preparation they need. But at the same time, it's better to graduate a student despite a lack of readiness than to kick him out, as long as it's an ability issue and not an attitude issue. If the problem is their attitude--if they're not trying, then granting them a diploma they haven't earned is just going to reinforce their central problem. But if they're trying, and their lack of ability is keeping them from meeting the standards, then the equitable thing to do is to personalize the standards. You can have high standards without them all being the same.

And I think that's the key. High standards for all, increased support for all, but equity doesn't mean uniformity.

The goal is that every student will leave ready for what's next, but if we can't do this, at least we can keep from harming them further. In some cases, that may mean granting a diploma, in others, withholding it.

And hopefully soon, when we all, as a society, awaken from the dream that we are an equitable one, we'll really start doing whatever it takes to reach them all.

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?

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.

College, the PSAT, and the Depot

This week at the Depot, seven of our 28 students took the PSAT test. Here are ten reasons why I made it a priority to have such a large percentage of our students take the test:

1) When asked about their goals and dreams, 76% of our current students mentioned some form of college.

2) Roughly half of the students who have graduated from the Depot since its opening in 2008 have gone on to some form of post-secondary education. I'd love to see these numbers increase.

3) I'm excited about alternatives to college, but on average, workers with a bachelor's degree make 1.6 times as much as those with only a high school diploma.

4) The so-called "soft," non-cognitive skills and the 4 Cs are the skills that are most essential for success in life, but these won't get you into most colleges without the math and language skills that standardized tests measure.

5) While some educators believe many students are simply not "college material," I don't. I see learning as exponential, not linear. And even if IQ is 50% genetic, it's only 50%. While disadvantaged students may be way behind their more advantaged peers, in many cases it's only because they are lower on the exponential learning curve.

6) During my morning commute, I've been listening to Whatever It Takes, which tells the story of Geoffrey Canada and the Harlem Children's Zone, and I've been inspired by their goal: that every single one of their inner-city students will go to college.

7) And this is the key. The key is believing in the tremendous potential within every one of our students. If we send a strong message that we want to prepare them for college, they will know we believe in them and have high expectations for them, whether they choose college or not.

8) I was so proud of them as they took that test on Wednesday. It's not easy to sit for a 3 hour test that includes algebra, geometry, and many challenging reading passages, but they attacked it with a growth mindset and perseverance.

9) Practice makes perfect. The average student's SAT score goes up 40 points every time he or she takes the test. These students will be taking the real thing in the spring, and this experience will prepare them.

10) Lots of people are all up-in-arms against standardized testing these days, but we need to measure students' abilities in order to know if what we're doing is working. We can't work towards improvement without evaluating ourselves.

So here we go. I'm hoping the message to my students is clear:

This place is about your success.

We believe in you.

And we expect great things from every one of you.