Lie to Me

I like to joke to people that I feel like I am the most lied to person on Earth. Between working with teenagers that are in trouble or seeking to convince me to give them something, parents seeking to get their way and employees seeking to gain advantage or get out of something, I know that not everyone tells me the truth on a day-to-day basis. Last week's blog about truth, led me to dig a little deeper into why we lie. (For more on this, read here.)

It turns out that everyone lies and most of us tell some kind of lie on a daily basis. Most lies are harmless. We lie to gain an advantage or make ourselves seem better than we are. Sometimes we even lie to protect someone's feelings. On the other hand, social scientists believe that most people tell at least one major lie in their lifetime. They use falsifying a college application or an affair as examples. As it turns out, humans learned to lie about as soon as we learned to talk. Telling a lie to gain food or a mate was just easier than hitting a competitor over the head with a rock.


How, when and why most of us lie depends on our age and our intelligence. Adolescents tend to lie much more than younger or older adults. As we get older, our ability to lie evolves and we get much better at it. There are even studies that show dramatic increases in neural fibers in the brain among good liars as compared to those that do not lie as much. Other studies strongly tie advanced abilities to lie to advanced cognitive function and intelligence. On the other hand, tests on children with autism show a very low ability to lie.

So if we know that everyone lies to us and that they do it to deceive us to gain an advantage, why do we believe it? You would think that as humans we would have evolved to detect a lie. Instead, we have done the exact opposite. Because we are creatures that greatly depend on a social group, our need to believe and trust those in our group outweighs the harm done by most lies. Therefore, humans have continued to be gullible. The onset of social media has only multiplied our lies and our acceptance of them. As we use social media to spread lies about ourselves we have also begun to intentionally believe lies that confirm our opinions of the world around us. 

So what does all of this mean for us as educators? As we spend our days with the "Keep It 100%" generation, we probably need to keep in mind that they are doing everything but that. We need to know that even when we present them with evidence against a lie, they will likely dismiss that evidence. Teenagers lie to us and each other daily to improve their self-image, make excuses for their shortcomings or just to get what they want. If they are successful in fooling us, it's not our fault and may even show signs of intelligence. But also remember that all of us believe that we are good at lying and that when we do perceive that someone is not being truthful, we should trust that instinct because it is strong enough to defy our genetics. 

So as the guy that is lied to more than anyone in the world, I say "Lie to me!" I may or may not believe you, but I do have a pretty good formative assessment on how smart you are.

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!