One Student - Many Influences

This weekend, GRACE held our annual senior dinner.  I'm pretty sure I write about it every year, and I may share the same insight each time.  That is because each year, I am grateful that students have more than one teacher in their lives.

At our senior dinner, each student is spoken about by a teacher who signed up specifically for them.  Because we are limited to 200 words, each speech must cut to the heart of the matter, reflecting the character of each student.  While I love giving my own speeches, what always impresses me are the speeches of other teachers about students that I teach as well.  I get to hear stories about them that make me smile and some that reinforce what I already know.  But, the ones that always strike me are the ones that tell me something I didn't know about that child.  A student who is driving me crazy has a teacher who sees perseverance in them.  A student that I may view as a clique leader is seen by another teacher as a loyal friend.  The same may also be true in the reverse.  I may find a student delightful that another teacher would have described as foolish.

This night always reminds me why it is so good that students have more than one teacher in their lives.  Back in the days of the one-room schoolhouse, when students had the same teacher from kindergarten through high school, they only learned one philosophy of the world, one view of education, and only had one voice recognizing who they were.  While there is much that is flawed in our current system, I maintain that it is good for students to have as many as 45 teachers in their K-12 school experience.  That's 45 voices speaking into their lives about who they are and what their potential is.  While some of those teachers will not see the promise of that student's life, others will.  While that child may not respond well to the teaching style of one teacher, another teacher will spark a love of math or reading or art or history that will last a lifetime.  

A student doesn't have to experience education in one way.  Some teachers allow students unlimited retakes, instilling a sense of grace in a student that may inspire them to do more with that second chance.  Other teachers are strict about deadlines, teaching students the importance of following through on commitments.  A student needs both of those lessons, and they cannot get them both from the same teacher.  Some teachers are focused on making learning fun; others teach students that something doesn't have to be fun to be valuable.  These are both great things for students to experience.  We sometimes sacrifice common sense on the altar of consistency, but students need to see that adults can have a variety of philosophies and still respect and love each other (because they are, for sure, not seeing that on social media).  As we approach teacher appreciation week, appreciate that teacher that challenges your student in a way others have not or makes them see things differently than other teachers have.  Honor the teacher that makes your student uncomfortable because they have to change the way they think.  

A few years ago at a Learning and the Brain conference, Dr. David Daniel delivered a keynote in which he talked about the art of applying the science of learning to our classrooms.  He said, "Don't run from complexity.  Honor it."  

Teaching students how to adapt to people with different views honors the complexity of education, the complexity of students, and the complexity of the world.

Interrelated Variables Make it Hard to Interpret Results

A student once asked me about two related things in physics.  After explaining the differences, he said, "Oh, okay, they're exactly the same except for all the ways they are different."  We laughed a lot about that, but I liked it and have used it for a number of things.  I have a friend / former colleague with whom I share a similar personality and many similar opinions, but we have a few issues on which our opinions are totally opposed.  I use that sentence to describe our friendship.  

Recently, however, I see a ton of things on Edutwitter that exemplify this in a less funny way.  The assumption is that changing one variable will only change one variable without realizing that our lives are interrelated in ways we cannot predict.

When we went into lockdown in the spring of 2020, no one thought it was the educational ideal, but we adapted as best as we possibly could to virtual learning, keeping kids learning something, even though we were not teaching or assessing in the same ways we would have.  More importantly, virtual learning enabled us to keep the kids connected to each other and to us in some small way.  The following year, most schools either remained virtual or forged ahead with a hybrid model, knowing that it wouldn't be the same as being in school face to face, but doing the best we could to protect our students during the pandemic.

A few weeks ago, some research data was released about the academic and mental health impact of the methods we used to keep education moving during the pandemic.  While these numbers should have been no surprise, some on Twitter reacted to them as though they were a bombshell.  The impact on academic achievement was clearly negative due to many kids choosing not to attend virtually at all and others choosing to cheat their way through virtual tests.  While it will take time to address the lack of gains in those years, it can be done.  

The mental health impacts are tougher to interpret and address.  Lockdown is obviously not the sole source of anxiety, but those who want to criticize lockdowns are treating it that way.  Scientifically, it is hard to parse the impact of that one variable because it was coupled with the racial reckoning following the murder of George Floyd and a difficult election cycle (understatement?), which had their own influence on the mental health of youth facing a world in which they would soon vote.  And we may have forgotten that anxiety rates were already on the rise before 2020.   

Twitter and its 280 characters is, however, no place for nuance, so what we read there is more like, "See, we should never have even gone into lockdown" and "I told you remote learning was a joke" and "If we had just left them in schools, they would not have these mental health issues."  The problem with that is that it imagines an alternate universe in which A only impacts B, which is not the universe in which we live.  To quote some Aaron Sorkin screenwriting, "The world is a more interesting place than that."  We live in a world where A influences B and C and D and where C may be influencing A and B in return.  

If we imagine a world in which there had been no lockdown, we wouldn't just have one in which everything else would be the same except for its impact on academic progress and emotional health.  We would be looking at higher transmission rates, a completely overwhelmed hospital system, greater fear of attending school (as we saw in the hybrid year with some making the choice to stay home anyway).  I can tell you from experience that the death of a classmate has massive mental health consequences.  If staying in school had caused the 1% death rate that Dr. Oz and Dr. Phil deemed acceptable, we would be talking about 7-10 deaths in many schools.  I can promise you that would have a negative impact on both academic progress and mental health.

Lockdowns weren't good.  We know that.  Hindsight is 20/20, but we also knew that when we did it.  But attending school during the height of the pandemic would also not have been good.  Even those who won't admit it know that to be true.  Some schools continued to assess and grade students, while others made a different choice.  Some were synchronous while others utilized videos and self-pacing.  We all made the best decision we could with the information we had in our context.  Monday morning quarterbacking on Twitter isn't helpful because there is no way to know what impact a different combination of decisions would have had.

We, as teachers, need to set a better example.  Rather than constantly criticizing and saying, "See, I knew it," we should be teaching our students that solutions aren't simple in a complicated system.  Knowing that could reduce the polarization we see in the world today because we might not always be so certain that we are right all of the time.  If you'll allow one more Aaron Sorkin quote, "Complexity isn't a vice."

The Point Is - That's One of the Points

When three astronauts died during the plugs-out test of the Apollo 1 capsule, an investigation was held to determine the cause.  If you look this up today, you will find the official cause stated as an arc from a frayed wire.  When I teach my 8th-graders about this event, I ask them, "If the wire in the outlet next to you arced right now, would it kill you?"  This answer is, of course not.  The kid closest to the spark would scream, and we would smell burning wire, and that would likely be it.  While the spark from the wire initiated the Apollo 1 fire, there were many complicating factors that resulted in the death of the astronauts.  There was 100% oxygen in the spacecraft under 19 psi of pressure.  There was far more velcro (highly flammable in high oxygen) in the cabin than regulations called for, and they couldn't escape because the manual hatch could not be pushed outward once the fire had dropped the air pressure inside the ship.  It was a complex interaction of causes that made this simple wire arc into a fatal event.

We like for life to be simple.  You see it after every tragic event.  What was the cause?  Who was the one at fault?  We see it in disease analysis, blaming vaccines for autism and deodorant for cancer and aluminum pans for Alzheimer's disease.  Obviously, all of these maladies are more complicated than that as we have been studying them for years without knowing their cause.  We like to simplify things because we fool ourselves into believing they will be easy to fix.  Fire the right person or remove the offending ingredient, and you have solved the problem.  We know, however, that life is more interesting than that.  Almost everything in life results from a complicated mix of cascading causes and effects.

Spend a minute on educational Twitter or sitting in a faculty meeting, and you will observe the same phenomenon.  You will hear people say, "Well, the point is . . ." about a lot of things as though things have only one point.  You can trade in a lot of your goals by pretending there is only one point in education.  If you believe the point is that your students get into college, then you will be fine with writing off the last semester of your class to senioritis because you forget that your curriculum has intrinsic value and that the skills students learn in your class are worth more than college entrance.  If you believe the point is job training, you will be fine with tracking kids from a young age and not care if they miss out on something that could have enriched their lives outside of their future career.  Those who don't want to deduct points for late work will say, "The point is that they learn the material, not when they learn it."  

Maybe, I'm just old or maybe it is because I teach the Apollo 1 fire, but I sit in these meetings thinking, "No, that's not THE point.  It's only one of the points."  Every school bag, cup, coaster, and note pad I have says "Equipping Students for Life" on it, and I take that motto seriously.  Teaching students that due dates don't matter is not properly equipping them because they will not be able to call the electric company and say, "I don't know why you charged me a late fee.  The point is that I paid it, not when I paid it."  When I make choices about projects, I know life would be easier for everyone if they did the project alone.  Group projects, by their nature, ensure that no one person learns all of the material or engages all of the skills.  If, however, I am going to equip students for life, I have to give them the opportunity to navigate the messy world of collaboration because they will most surely be doing it in the business world.  If the point is simply learning the material, the most efficient way to learn the most material would be reading the book and testing them on it, but we all know that isn't how school should work because it isn't the only point.  We want them to be inspired by the material, so we ask them to interact with it, play with it, reflect on it, and synthesize it.  

We all, in practice, do school differently than we would if THE point was just that they learn the material.  So, stop saying out loud (or typing into Twitter) that the point is simply learning the material.  You know that life is more complicated than that.  You know that you want so much more for your students than that.  If you want to make a point, acknowledge the complexity and be willing to recognize the effect of any change you make.  It may be a good consequence.  It may not.  You may decide the benefit is worth the cost.  You may conclude the opposite.  What you should not do is sacrifice your common sense for the sake of simplicity.  If this work were simple, anyone could do it.  The next time you are tempted to say, "The point is," ask yourself if it is truly the only point.  Chances are, the answer is no.

The Humanity of Heroes

When you teach, you get asked strange questions.  From how I pronounce caramel (because he wants you to agree with him in the argument he is having with a friend) to my favorite element (which I don't know how to have an answer for) to my favorite meme (do people have favorite memes), students ask a lot of opinion questions.  Occasionally, I even get asked who is my favorite President.  The answer is Thomas Jefferson, but I know that can be a difficult answer for some people to take.  After all, he was a very flawed and self-contradictory individual, both wanting to free his slaves and writing that "all men are created equal" while fathering children with one of his slaves, Sally Hemmings.  Similar contradictions are true of many of the founding fathers, so we feel we are left with the choice of ignoring their faults or ignoring their contributions. 

When the movie The Greatest Showman was released, I heard a lot of students speak very lovingly of PT Barnum because the movie had portrayed only his heroic side.  I guess his ownership of an old woman (yes, he purchased her) doesn't make for good content in a musical.  He is the person known for lines like, "A fool and his money are soon parted" and "There's a sucker born every minute."  While it is hard to know if all of the saying attributed to him are true, we can all agree that his character is more complicated than the movie portrays.

There are so many examples of this.  This summer, I decided to read Buzz Aldrin's book Magnificent Desolation to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the moon landing.  He describes the affair he had with a woman he met while on the world tour, flying back and forth to New York to "keep up his flight certification."  We all know the controversies over monuments to confederate leaders.  Henry Ford was antisemitic as was Charles Lindbergh.  Both Charlie Chaplin and Elvis seemed to be interested in girls we would call younger than appropriate.  If you want to keep admiring singers that you grew up listening to, I don't recommend seeing Ray or Walk the Line.  Since I'm writing this post on Martin Luther King Day, it might be worth noting that he regularly cheated on his wife.  Recently, A few weeks ago, I saw a tweet asking a prominent Baptist leader why he didn't call out George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards for their apparently racist views.  Of course, Twitter's character limit means it is hardly the place for a deeply meaningful discussion, so the answers to this question left much to be desired.  John Piper does a pretty good job of addressing the issue here, even referencing Peter's denials of Christ and God's forgiveness.

Speaking of Twitter, it seems that every day, someone is being "canceled."  It takes one statement or action for the mob response on Twitter to call for us to boycott various celebrities or companies.  In the past year, I have seen cancelation calls for Kanye West,  JK Rowling, the Hallmark Channel, and even YouTube.  I'm not saying some of them aren't deserved, but it is an almost daily event.  Can there really be that many?  (It's also worth noting that it doesn't seem to work.  Kevin Hart may have removed himself from hosting the Oscars after being canceled, but his shows are still as popular as they were before.  And, I don't think the use of YouTube dropped even one percent after being called out as "over" on Twitter.)

If you haven't seen the PBS documentary Hamilton's America, let me recommend that you do.  Even if you aren't into the musical, the presentation of history is compelling.  There are two scenes in it that stuck with me.  One is the scene in which Christopher Jackson, the play's original George Washington, visits Mount Vernon.  While standing in the slave quarters, this African American states that he is trying to reconcile the heroic aspects of George Washington with the fact that he owns slaves.  In the end, he decides that he has to make peace with the fact that he can't make peace with it.  He is a deeply flawed and yet heroic figure.  The other scene that returns to my mind frequently involves a conversation with Leslie Odom, Jr., the actor who portrayed Aaron Burr.  He discusses how, before the show, most of us only knew that Burr killed Hamilton in a duel.  The benefit of the show, in his estimation, is showing the events that led to that moment because we see the complexity of the man, not just his actions on his worst day.  In fact, one of the things I most appreciate about Lin Manuel Miranda is that Hamilton treats each person in our complicated history as a three-dimensional human being, not a marble statue of their best moments or a painting of their worst. 

How do we deal with this, especially when having conversations with our students (who have been immersed in cancel culture for their entire lives)?  The answer is certainly not to ignore faults in order to maintain our hero worship.  The answer is not to ignore the accomplishments of those we look up to because their flaws make them worthless.  The answer to acknowledge the complexity of human beings.  We are made in the image of God, but we are also corrupted by sin.  Even young students are capable of recognizing complexity.  In fact, these types of discussions are the perfect time for Christian school teachers to talk about sin and our need for redemption.  We can be glad that God uses people with flaws since those are the only kind of people there are.  If we want our heroes to be perfect our only option is to make Christ the hero of the story.