Grit Doesn't Always Look the Same

For the past couple of days, I've been reading Fantastic Failures by Luke Reynolds.  The title is a bit of an oversimplification because in very few of these stories did the person actually fail first; they just overcame challenges and obstacles.  I guess a title like Stories of People Who Overcame Obstacles doesn't have the same zip. 

Sorry for the aside.  To be fair, you are reading a blog called "On the Rabbit Trail," so you can't be shocked. 

As I read each of these stories, I realized that we've only been viewing grit from one perspective, in educational circles anyway.  We have been focused on persevering at the same thing over and over until we succeed at it or die trying.  Popular examples include Michael Jordan having been cut from his high school basketball team, the oversimplified belief that Einstein was bad at math (which he was not; he was bad at school and lousy with people, especially authority figures), and J.K. Rowling being turned down by twelve publishers before getting someone to take a chance on Harry.

That is certainly one side, but there are other stories that could make us view grit in a different way. 

Did you know that before she became the most well-known wedding dress designer in history, Vera Wang was a figure skater?  She was good, but she came one place shy of making the Olympic team.  She enjoyed fashion, so she went to work at Vogue and then Ralph Lauren.  She had grit, but rather than applying it toward continuing to skate, she took it in another direction.  (By the way, she is in the figure skating hall of fame for designing the costumes of many Olympic skaters.)

Play-Doh was originally developed as a wall cleaning product.  It works pretty well, actually.  Try it the next time you have pencil marks on a painted or wallpapered wall.  In spite of it working well, it didn't sell well.  Just as the company was about to dissolve, a newspaper article was published that said pre-school teachers were giving it to kids to build craft projects.  Imagine if they had insisted that it remain what they originally wanted it to be rather than seeing the potential of rebranding it as Play-Doh.  They didn't give up, but they didn't dig in their heels either.

Alexi Leoniv is not referenced in this book, but I read Two Sides of the Moon a few years ago, and he has an interesting grit story as well.  Alexi's passion was art, and he had skill.  The problem was that he couldn't afford to go to art school.  Instead, he joined the military and became a pilot and a cosmonaut.  He was the first person to perform a spacewalk.  Art didn't stop being part of his life; in fact, he took crayons with him into space, knowing he would not be able to express what he saw in words.  Because he was willing to apply his grit differently, he got one of the greatest artistic inspiration vistas in history. 

As educators, we encourage our students to persevere.  We want them to keep trying.  If there is something that a student is truly passionate about, we want to see them achieve it.  But we've all seen enough American Idol auditions to know that not everyone who is passionate about singing should pursue it as a career.  We, as teachers, do not know when the right time is for a student to change directions, and we shouldn't pretend that we do.  We can, however, present them with the idea that changing directions isn't the same thing as giving up.  Grit can be applied in another direction.

Taking Your Education for Granted? Read Educated.

I tend to be a little behind in reading best-selling books.  If there's a hot, new book that everyone is reading, you can bet that I haven't read it yet.  I'm usually a good year behind.  My friend, Meagan Stone, recommended this one to me, and I am so glad I didn't wait to read it.

Educated is the memoir of Tara Westover of Buck's Peak, Idaho.  Raised by a father whose Mormonism was so extreme that even members of his own church thought he was crazy (and, he likely did suffer from undiagnosed bipolar disorder).  Tara had never seen a doctor because her father believed they were in league with the Illuminati or gone to school because, according to her dad, that was the government's way of brainwashing their kids.  They largely supported themselves through shed construction and scrapping from a junkyard, and some of the injuries she describes are astounding, especially when you consider they were treated with herbs and oils.  She didn't even have a birth certificate for the first nine years of her life, and no one can say with certainty when her birthday actually is.

As she described her childhood, I kept imagining a sort of 19th-century scene.  Then, she describes her family's preparation for Y2K and their response to 9/11.  I realized she is younger than I am.  How is it possible that this was happening in the 21st century?

While the story is gripping in every way, from her brother's abuse to her fear of a boy touching her hand for the fear she would get pregnant, the part that sticks with me is how quickly she learned to learn once she had the opportunity.

One of her brothers left home and, while attending BYU, encouraged her to do the same.  While she had been taught to read nd write, she had no education in math or in conveying ideas through writing.  In order to apply to BYU, she had to get at least a 27 on the ACT, so she got books and taught herself.  It took two only two attempts.  I know people who have been in school with excellent teachers their entire childhoods that required two attempts. 

It's not like once she was enrolled, she was prepared to do well in classes.  A friend had to tell her that she could actually read the art history textbook, and when she didn't know the word "holocaust," she upset her classmates by asking about it.  Nevertheless, this 32-year-old learned how to learn very quickly, found some people who believed in her abilities, and she now holds a Master's degree and a doctorate from Cambridge and was a visiting fellow at Harvard. 

There are two things that strike me most when reflecting on this book.

1.  Resilience is deeply embedded in children.  Tara witnessed and was subjected to manipulation, abuse, injury, and a myriad of traumatic events.  Had they been a bit more on the grid, she would likely have been removed from her family at a young age.  Yet, she overcame these challenges with teaching and encouragement from a few important people.  We talk about this in camp training every year.  We are working with foster children, but when they receive unconditional love for a week, we see remarkable growth because God has placed resilience in the human heart.  No one has suffered so much that they cannot thrive when finally placed in the right conditions with the right encouragement.

2.  Don't take your education for granted.  As I said earlier, as I read this book, I kept feeling like it was from another era or a less developed country.  You may have a had a bad teacher now and then, but you had teachers.  You may not have gotten the study skills training you should have gotten at your school, but you probably knew you could read the textbook before you got to college.  You may not know as much math as your peers, but you didn't start from scratch at the age of 16 by teaching yourself.  Whether you attended public school, private school, or had real homeschooling, be grateful for it rather than complaining that someone made you work more than you wanted to.

Productive Summer Days

If you ask ten different teachers what they are going to do with their summer, you will likely get ten different answers.  We all approach it differently, based on our life circumstances and our philosophies.  Some want to supplement their income, so they take on summer jobs or tutoring.  Those with children will approach it differently than those without.  Some believe it is a time for professional development and preparing for the next school year while others believe they should do nothing but rest.  The following is how I approach summer days, but, as I tell my students, it is "a way" not "the way" to do it.

By nature, I'm a planner and a goal setter.  This looks different during the summer than it does during the school year, but I have to make some plans in order to keep one day from blurring into the next.  I don't want to wake up on the first of August and realize I didn't do anything.  I divide my goals into four categories, reading, exercising, school-prep, and home projects.  Then, I devote some time each day to each category.

Reading - I love to read, but the school year provides very little time for pleasure reading.  I do well to get two books read during the school year, and usually at least one of those is for school.  During early May, I make a list of books I want to read during the summer.  Some of those are professional development books.  This year, those are The Power of Moments, Fantastic Failures, and Powerful Teaching.  There are a few others on my list (The Left Brain Speaks, the Right Brain Laughs and Faking It come to mind), but I don't want ALL of my summer reading to be professional, so I also read some things just for fun.  On that list are a couple of Dean Koontz novels, some Sherlock Holmes stories, and Captured by the Labyrinth, a book about Sarah Winchester and the house she built out of her guilt over the people killed by the Winchester Rifle and her fear of their ghosts.  What I'm reading today is not even on my list.  I heard so many people talk about Educated that I let it jump in line.  I'm a planner, but I'm not rigid about it.

Exercise - One of the other things I rarely have time to accomplish during the school year is exercise.  I start the school year with good intentions about doing a little every day, but it rarely happens.  During summer, however, my car remains parked, and I walk everywhere.  As soon as I hit publish on this blog, I'm heading for the bank.  I walk to the grocery store, church, lunch with my parents, WalMart.  I walk everywhere.  That takes care of cardio and legs, but this year, I've been bothered by the way my arms look, so I'm also aiming at 10000 lifts (bicep curls to wall pushups, which could become real pushups by the end of the summer) by the time school starts.

School Prep - While I do believe in taking time to rest from school, I also know that I cannot improve my teaching while teaching.  Some time in April, I start thinking about next year and the changes I would like to make, so I make a list of activities that can be done during the summer.  This includes changes to rubrics, edits to the textbook, and seeking out some new demonstrations. Next year, I'll be teaching an elective I have not taught before, so I'm spending some time this summer preparing for that class.  Today is supposed to be rainy, which I find to be a good time to write recommendation letters, so I'll spend about two hours today working on that.  Depending on the goals I have, I spend anywhere from 1 to 3 hours a day working on school-related stuff during the summer.  When I was writing my textbooks, it was more.  This year, it is less.  I let the goal guide. 

Home Projects - Most teachers will tell you that if anything gets neglected during the school year, it is home maintenance.  Clutter builds, light bulbs go unchanged, and entropy just generally takes over.  I have a list of home projects that I take care of during the summer.  Some are large goals (paint the kitchen), and others are pretty small but need to be done (organize the closet and vacuum the stairs). 

I sort of treat these goals like a job, scheduling 8 hours of each day toward meeting them.  They aren't necessarily 8 continuous hours or evenly divided.  I may walk really far one day and devote less time that day to school projects.  I may spend a lot of time on a school project one day, leaving only doing a load of laundry or dishes for home activity.  Again, I let the goals guide rather than a rigid schedule. 

For those who think summer should be nothing but rest for teachers, don't worry.  I still play plenty of video games and watch a lot of television.  You can get rest without being completely unproductive.

Kids are More Complicated than . . .

I keep seeing this statement on Twitter - "We have to Maslow before they can Bloom."  While I understand the hearts of people who are posting this, I find it bothersome for a number of reasons.

For those who weren't education majors, let me explain what these two men's names mean.  Abraham Maslow was a psychological researcher, best known for his proposal of the human hierarchy of needs.  Because book publishers just can't help themselves, it was published as a pyramid (Maslow never portrayed it that way), implying that you had to work your way up the scale.  This has been taught to every education major since the '70s, without regard or even thought to whether it lines up with your worldview.  It's just accepted as a given, like gravity.


The second name in the platitude is Bloom.  Benjamin Bloom was also a psychologist, and he's also known for a pyramid.  His was changed for the digital age, but some version of it has also been taught to education majors for several decades.  Many teachers write exams based on this model, using the assumption that the ideal test will have as much from the top levels of the pyramid as possible.


While there is much good to be gleaned from the work of both men, you might want to ask yourself first if their conclusions align with your worldview before adopting them.  If you are a Christian, you might take issue with the idea of self-actualization.  Maslow was a secular humanist, which is at odds with your world view.  Near the end of his life, even he wrote (never published) that "self-actualization is not enough" and discussed why it was important to seek the good of others.  He also asked, "Why do we leave mystery and awe to the churches?" when he realized that his work never took into account anything outside of the individual.  A more in-depth look at his work will also show that he cared about a balance of the needs.  He never implied that the ones on the bottom had to be met before the ones above them could be, which is what most of us were taught.  His late work included words like transcendence and reverence, but what we accept as his teachings from the pyramid ignores those things.  Bloom is less problematic because it is merely about thought processes and not about your life as a whole (You wouldn't be recommended for therapy for not reaching high levels of Bloom's taxonomy like you might for not reaching high levels on the Maslow pyramid).  It's handy for lesson planning, but I have to ask again about whether it aligns with your philosophy.  Are these the thought process you look for in your students, or do you want something above the "create" level (again, the words awe and reverence come to mind)?  Do you want them to then be able to connect these thoughts to their creator?  If so, there need to be a few more steps on the pyramid.

What is most upsetting to me that their years of intensive research have been boiled down to two oversimplified pyramids and then ranked in comparison to each other.  Human beings are complex.  They are far more interesting than can be summed up by any theory.  They are individuals who resist generalization, whether that is "learning styles" or personality types or enneagram scores.  God has created each child to respond to the world individually,  given each of them a different relationship with each of their teachers, and made them care differently about each of their needs.  Boiling down your educational philosophy to a tweetable phrase ("They don't care how much you know until they know how much you care." or "They don't give you what you expect, only what you inspect." or "Our learning is blended, personalized, student-centered, individualized, competency-based, data-driven (pick your favorite buzzword)."  I left public education because I didn't like the expectation to fit in a box, no matter how good the teacher in that box was.  Your students don't fit in a box either.

Just because we can tweet a catchy phrase doesn't mean we should.