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.

Parents (It's Not What You Think)

This week I've talked a lot about parent contact and making sure that parents are informed about what is going on with their children. As high school educators, we often look to defer some of that communication under the guise that our students are young adults and should learn to start taking some responsibility for themselves. When you pause to think about that, you can quickly see how strange our culture is in regards to teenagers. Consider the following:

At 14 they can legally work (many of ours do earlier than that)
At 16 they can drive
At 18 they can vote and in some cases, hold an elected office
At 18 they can live emancipated
At 18 they can serve in the Armed Forces
At 18 they can gamble in a casino
At 18 they can establish credit, take out a loan and have credit cards
At 18 they are legally adults
Also at 18, they still need permission to go to the bathroom in school.
At 26 they can still be on their parents' insurance

Being a teenager in America comes with a strange set of rights of passage that are often contradictory. One minute, a teenager can be treated like a responsible adult and the next, they are treated like a child. No doubt, this dichotomy of expectations can create confusing situations for a student. But just take a minute to consider things outside of our culture.

This week I reconnected and had some time to talk to a 2017 graduate. He is Hispanic and we spent some time discussing what schools, communities, and families can do to help more of our Hispanic students get into college after high school. He took a minute to frame Hispanic culture, especially the culture of immigrant families whose parents did not grow up in the United States. He remembered his mother being supportive of his schooling but never involved. He was smart enough to know that other students in his classes had parents that spoke with teachers and counselors and helped advocate for their child being in the right classes. At about 14, he knew that he was considered old enough to handle those things for himself.  I asked him if we should do more to reach out to Hispanic parents. While I expected a simple "yes," his response shocked me. He told me that Hispanic parents don't know how to navigate that relationship because they didn't have it themselves and that if we wanted to help Hispanic students, we were going to have to teach their parents how.

It is easy for us to write off disengaged parents as people that do not care. However, by doing that, we assume that all parents are like us or grew up like us. That is far from the truth in most schools today. Helping students has to be an academic, social and cultural approach in diverse schools. Understanding this means that not all of our parent contact can be due to negative behaviors or bad grades. Most should be around supporting students and giving parents options and choices on how they can help, not just problems that they may not see as ones they should fix. We have to teach them how to help sometimes. Luckily, teaching is what we are good at.

Think Positive

This week I had several ideas about what I should write about in my blog. For the life of me, I can't recall them this morning because I have been wrapped up with the fact that our legislature hasn't passed a budget and that as of last night, they went home. It makes our jobs harder and literally takes money out of our pockets and it infuriates me. But I'm letting myself focus on the negative.

October is traditionally a tough time to teach. The newness of school has worn off and things got difficult. Students get too comfortable and their bad habits become irritating. If you didn't hold out on expectations or communication like you should have, October hit you hard. It happens every year. But today starts November and all of a sudden, the end of the semester seems like it is just around the corner. Teachers start talking about getting ready for exams and before you know it, you will be sitting in test training getting ready for the end of another semester.

So with the start of a new month, it's time to think positive. It's time for encouragement for students to give their best to finish better than they started. It's time to support colleagues as they push hard to be leaders in our building. It's time to check in on those beginning teachers because we all remember what they were going through. It's time to roll up our sleeves and do the hard work to finish. We have to think positive and let the negativity of October go. We owe it to our students and ourselves. Happy November everyone...let's do this!

Five Things I Learned in Peru

My trip to Peru last week as a study abroad experience with ECU was truly an experience that I will never forget. I learned so much about the culture and the people there and the struggles that people experience in trying to keep up with a modern world, especially in the field of education. So many of you have asked me about my trip, and I seem to think of something new each time I answer the question. So here's a list of five things I learned in Peru:

1. Poverty is relative to where you are. So many people in the cities of Lima and Cusco live in conditions that we could never imagine for ourselves. Homes without heat or air conditioning are the norm for middle-class families with good jobs. Sanitation is an ongoing problem everywhere except in tourist areas. Lower class families have "apartments" with tin roofs, missing windows and no running water. And this is in the cities, where it is best. Public school teachers there earn about $600 (US money) a month and that is double the minimum wage. A family of four can probably survive the month on that.

2. They have common problems with us. In regards to the advancement of education, they seem to share common problems with the southeastern United States. While we know where jobs and the future of employment are headed, we also find ourselves holding on to many outdated things in our schools as a last-ditch effort of preserving our way of life. In Cusco, schools are forced to teach the indigenous language of Quechua.  If you speak to the students, they are eager to learn English and other world languages (and most speak at least two languages) and want to study outside of Peru to experience the world around them. Meanwhile, the ones that control schools and curriculums speak one language and have a more narrow view of what students should learn. We are probably guilty of the same.

3. We could learn some things from their university systems. Peru offers free college to students after high school. (They finish high school at 16 there). While this offer is limited to a certain number of students with high enough test scores, it does provide access to thousands of students each year. There are private college offerings as well. Some families that can afford private schools prefer it because they feel that the school is superior to the public option, however in most cases, the public college is the best educational option. What I found unique was that the colleges only offer degree programs that relate to jobs that are central to the economy of Peru. There are no communications degrees or liberal arts programs that are not connected with an industry. Simply put, college education equals jobs.


4. Children can learn whatever you teach them. One of the most impactful experiences I had was visiting an after school program for young children whose families work on the streets. It provides them with a place to be and someone to feed them and help with homework. In this place, there is no running water, so when it was time to clean up from snack time, I saw children walk to a five-gallon bucket and wash their dishes and then rinse them in a second bucket. Each child did this without being prompted and then put their dishes away. Also, schools in Peru are mandated to have one psychologist for student mental health needs for every 500 students. This is dramatically more than what we provide for students and you can tell it in how students interact. While their school curriculums may be behind ours, they are beating us in this arena, and it's our own fault.

5. Experiences change people. While I saw this trip as a unique opportunity to see the world as a part of my university experience, it quickly became something that changed my outlook on the world and my profession. A person's experiences change how they view the world around them and the opinions they have about others. As educators of one of the richest and most advanced nations that has ever existed, we owe it to our students to provide them with experiences that cause them to think globally and act locally. While we may not be able to take students on foreign excursions, we can expose them to the world around us in so many ways. We need to do more of that.

World's Best Driver

On Tuesday evening I was leaving my daughter's tennis match and headed to get food before going home. I got behind a slow driver that was obviously confused about where they were going and it was annoying. I followed them all the way to the drive-through, where this must have been their first experience with a drive-through line as well. I tried to get over it and headed home, only to get behind another car that refused to go faster than 15 mph BELOW the speed limit. I was stuck behind them almost the whole way home and I was furious. Bad driving has always been a pet peeve of mine. So much, that I would work driving questions into my history tests as a teacher.

That evening I read about something called the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Put simply, it's the psychological belief that you know something that you really don't. Because of this feeling, we trick ourselves into thinking that we are above average or superior at something, when in fact we are just average, or maybe worse. When I read this, I realized that my judgment of everyone's driving is based on the fact that I believe myself to be the world's best driver. Everyone slower than me is an idiot with nowhere to be and everyone faster than me is reckless. Apparently, I'm not alone in this belief though. It's actually VERY common and can be seen in everything around us, especially our jobs.

Studies show that close to 50% of people believe that they are greatly superior in their jobs when compared to their peers. It doesn't take a math teacher to know that everyone can't be better than most. Most people have to be average. That's how statistics work. The crazy thing is that when we study this effect more deeply, we find that often the people that do the worst at a job, tend to overrank themselves the most. Inversely, the people that are actually the best, tend to under rank their abilities. This is true in assessing leadership, raising kids, constructing an argument and lots of other things, including driving. People with a little bit of knowledge tend to think that they know a lot more than they actually do.

So how good are you as a teacher? What are you really good at and what do you just think you're good at? Chances are, you don't actually know unless you're willing to look at data that shows you. And you can't pick and choose which data to accept and which to ignore. Great teachers are more likely to be humble and constantly seeking to do better and learn more. Average or below-average teachers, just proclaim that they have this teaching thing down. That's an important thing to know when we are talking about personal growth related to your strengths and weaknesses. We can all be better than we are if we are willing to accept a growth mindset and let go of the voice in our brains that fills us with confidence.

Maybe I'm not that great of a driver after all.

Trust Me

A recent report published by the Pew Research Center examined the public perception of trust in people that hold various positions of power. (You can read the Washington Post article on it here) The report found that the public has lost trust in many traditional positions of power. Despite that, one position did surprisingly well in the survey. School principals rated consistently high or highest in all parts of the survey. That's interesting, but I don't think that the story should stop there. School principals are extensions of the school. Nothing that I say would matter, if the teachers and other adults in the building did not validate those words through actions. I can say that we want the best for your child, but it is usually others in the school that perform the tasks of teaching, caring, feeding, clothing and all of the many other aspects expected of educators today for students.

In a world that seems more divided and jaded than ever, the public seems to have a renewed trust in the adults that their children spend the most time with. This is exactly why we have to continue communicating with families, no matter how hard it is to fit that into our schedules. It is easy to be anxious or nervous about calling home, with thoughts of what may happen on the other end of the line. And while every experience may not be a great one, that shouldn't stop the important work of talking to families about their child's progress in school. This has been something that I've tried to push for a few years now, and since then, I've had numerous teachers who either did or did not receive information from their own child's school tell me how important they realized communication was as a parent.

People believe what I say, because of what you do. My words without your actions would lead to distrust. This survey simply validates the work that our school and so many others are doing to include families in the education of their children, rather than it being our responsibility alone. So trust me, your efforts matter.

Teams

I recently read that basketball was the sport where teamwork and coaching mattered least, and individual talent mattered most. The argument was that while a football or soccer team of average players can overcome a team of less than average players with one star, a basketball team with one star can often do very well. I talked with Coach Edwards about this and he quickly agreed, especially in today's NBA. He talked about how NBA players often get confused when they play international teams because the international teams still utilize a more teamwork-styled play.

Despite the fact that a star can make a difference, it's still very important that the star be with the right team. Victor Oladipo is a great example. While with the Magic, he averaged between 13 to 17 points per game over three years. He then goes to the Thunder for one year and averages just under 16 points per game. But when he moves to the Pacers, he finds the right fit on the right team and the same player now averages 23 points per game. That's a huge difference. Being on the right team has been studied quite a bit in the working world as well. One study showed that surgeons perform much better at one hospital over another despite their years of experience. The same can be said of pilots. A study found that 75% of airplane crashes happen when the pilot is put with a new crew. Even sleep-deprived flight crews and pilots dramatically outperform crews that do not usually work together.

So with all that this tells us, why do we focus on individual success and improvement? Doing that seems a little counter-productive. If we take lessons from the research, we should probably be focusing on how well our teams work together. Everything shows that this leads to individual improvement of all of the team members and wins for the group as a whole. This concept in education probably isn't that strange for elementary or middle school teachers. But the higher up in grade levels you go, the more you start to see teachers focus more on what is going on in their own rooms. But when you do see high school teachers that reach beyond their rooms to build a functioning team, great things tend to happen. So the next time you are sitting at a department meeting, ask yourself what all you are doing to build your team. Chances are, it's the single most important thing that you can
do to improve your own performance.