Truth

Every now and then I get to read a book for fun. My favorite author is Malcolm Gladwell (I'm a dork, I don't read fiction) and he recently released a new book, Talking to Strangers. If you're familiar with Gladwell, you probably recognize some of his ideas in my blog posts. The new book takes a look at several current events and why we have misinterpreted the people within them. The premise of this is that while our brains want to believe that everyone is telling the truth, that doesn't always happen, at least in our interpretation of what truth is. Truth from my perspective may be quite different than someone else's truth based on our background and experiences. When we encounter events where truths are mismatched, bad things can sometimes happen. The book uses examples where this has happened time and time again in major events covered in the media. The point that Gladwell is trying to make in these examples is that while we blame individuals when our truths mismatch, we probably should be looking at the backgrounds and systems that cause that mismatch instead.

I enjoyed the book and finished it last weekend. Since then I have been hit with examples all week where I saw this to be the case. In a principal's meeting, we discussed behaviors that lead to suspensions and how those suspensions can be disproportionally assigned based on race and gender. In the cases of the suspensions for things like disrespect insubordination and language, my gut told me to look at the individuals. Who are these kids getting suspended and who are the teachers and administrators dealing with them? Instead, if I want to fix it, I should have been looking at the systems. Systems of code-switching at-home behaviors that are unacceptable to the cultural expectations of the school. These are mismatched.

While that was validation enough for me to start thinking differently, the school shooting at Santa Clarita, California yesterday hit me with the mismatch again. Each time this happens, we look to the individuals. What motivated a 16-year-old to kill others and himself on his birthday? What failure in school safety protocols allowed this to happen? These questions soon migrate back to the gun questions that Americans grapple with. Rights to own guns versus access to guns by those that should not have them for malicious reasons. We want to blame individuals and we should be looking at systems. Each side has a truth in their own right and it is nearly impossible for someone to argue you out of your truth. But if we want to be better, if we want to keep kids from dying from gun violence and we want to make schools safe, we are going to have to take a hard look at our systems that mismatch. Neither side can get all of their truth. We are going to have to consider each other, our backgrounds and experiences and decide what we can give up to make things better. Otherwise, no one wins.

While we may not be able to tackle the problem of school shootings here at our school, we can create an environment that works best for teachers and students. We have to consider how our experiences and expectations mismatch from those around us, and we have to teach kids to do the same. We need to see how our expectations impact our rules, consequences, and systems in classrooms, ball fields, and hallways and understand where that goes awry for some so that we can help them. The goal of schools is to educate people to make them better and hopefully, that's one truth we can all accept.