Personal Update, Flag Day, and Rushmore

The months of my blogging at Education Week go on; yesterday I posted my 52nd entry, which has me two-thirds of the way through the current plan. But I miss spending time here.

One thing about blogging at someone else's place is that there is a certain matter of figuring out what I am supposed to say, and who is listening. I had half expected that EdWeek would introduce me to eager audiences beyond the independent school world, but I think my origins and my interests have largely confined my readership to independent school folks, even when my posts have been pretty much sector-agnostic.

This has been fine, because it's meant that I can be myself and write from the stance and in the voice to which I am accustomed and with which I am most familiar. I get to continue the explorations I have begun here, speculating and exhorting and examining issues through my own lens, whose convexities and scratches and likely distortions are all rooted in my independent school experience.

I've also been busy sorting out my future plans, which now include a half-time of involvement at my school doing something pretty exciting: I'm gonna be looking at data and trying to help us build a dashboard to measure some effects of our programs. It should be really interesting, and I'm planning on learning a whole lot (starting with something about statistics, about which I'm enrolled in a (so-far) very congenial Udacity MOOC taught by Sebastian Thrun himself). In the next week or so I will have more to say--shamelessly self-promoting, I don't doubt--about the other half of my life.

Rushmore: Friday night has been family pizza and movie night at our house since forever, and last night we had a rare summer Friday when both of the younger boys were around; one came home for the weekend from his summer as a student tech at his university and the other has been up to his eyeballs working for a Massachusetts senate candidate for the special election in a couple of weeks before he goes off to Poland for a summer studying Polish (don't ask; we don't quite understand ourselves). We went to the

Nothing says Flag Day like kids, a cigar store, and a tank. It's pretty fun in Our Town.

Flag Day parade, an extravaganza as always, then came home with a couple of the local House of Pizza's very best. Somehow Rushmore was the chosen flick.

I've been hearing for years about Rushmore but manage to have missed it. I was expecting more juicy prep school stuff (corruption, hypocrisy) but pleasantly surprised when these had little to do with the plot. The film is solidly and weirdly Wes Anderson, and Bill Murray is corrupt and noble all at once (just mostly confused, I'd say), but the school head is a pretty genial and likable man and even the teachers surprisingly rational and human. The film's kids are also human, and the two teachers and and teachers' children watching all agreed that the school's mistakes were, if not minimal, at least benign.

My young politico was particularly impressed that the school--both schools, actually, the prep and the public--seem to recognize the importance of extracurricular activities as learning experiences. He also found himself marveling that the Murray character is able to admit that his kids were less than stellar human beings. I don't think either of my kids (who were both, as it happens, theater kids and fencing captains like the protagonist) regretted not having started a bee-keeping club in school.

It's not a "prep school movie," despite the name, but it's another Andersonian exploration of the world of strangeness that separates childhood and adulthood; if you liked Moonrise Kingdom, you get the idea. Definitely worth watching.

FY, Pump Up the Volume! A Movie Reflection

I’m pretty consumed by my Education Week blogging these days, but I wanted to come back here to reflect on a film my kids, home from college on spring break, had us watch last Friday, our traditional pizza and movie night. It was good to be all together again, with cheese dripping off slices of the local House of Pizza’s very best. And the film forced me think about school, and about technology, in ways I hadn’t bargained on.

The movie was the 1990 Pump Up the Volume, written and directed by Allan Moyle and starring Christian Slater. Brief plot summary (spoiler alert): disaffected teenager (Slater) uses his pirate FM radio station to broadcast anonymous angsty, angry soliloquies that excite his schoolmates and infuriate school officials (and in time the FCC). Things move to a crisis, not surprisingly, but not before the high school principal (who uses wholesale expulsions to rid the school of “low performers” and maintain its record of the “highest SAT scores in the state”) flips out to the point that she herself is fired—it’s a sort of happy ending.

Pump Up the Volume is about kids and voices, with the illegal radio station offering the student and some of his listeners (he does call-ins) the chance to express their frustrations, their boredom, and their adolescent rage. The contrast with the school officials, bullies all, is stark and striking, and the principal herself is especially horrible—Dolores Umbridge thirteen years before she shows up to nearly ruin Hogwarts with a similarly ruthless regime.

The filmmakers stack the deck in favor of the Slater protagonist, and you root for him to fully grasp the liberating power his show offers to the town’s victimized teenagers. But all I could think of—along with having bad Umbridge flashes; remember how creeped out you were the first time you read Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix?—was that ten years later the low-power FM technology that is at least the co-star of Pump Up the Volume would be forgotten, a technological dead end except to retro hobbyists.

What Slater and the kids in Pump Up the Volume need is blogspace. I think the best analog would be Tumblr, which does for connected global youth nowadays what Allan Moyle hoped that low-power FM might do. I follow one of my kids and a few friends on a multiplicity of Tumblrs (the Tumblr “fy”form—which may not mean what you think it means—pretty much conveys the affirming message of Pump Up the Volume), and I can safely say that I’ve encountered enough angst, anger, piercing insight, and anonymous soliloquies on Tumblr to script a hundred sequels to this movie.

It’s a better world for a technology that gives kids a voice—not just Tumblr, but every platform: Twitter, Instragram, YouTube, Facebook, and who knows how many more. Kids may hide behind pseudo identities, and they will still feel, will always feel, the full measure of pain and joy and confusion that comes with confronting life, but at least there are platforms—and multiple media—where they can channel their thoughts and words. The portrayal of adults in Pump Up the Volume may be appalling (and even more chilling in its prefiguring of our current testing mania), but the movie had me cheering for a world in which kids can save themselves through authentic self-expression.

EXCITING CHANGES IN MY BLOGGING WORLD

It's apparent that the pace of my blogging here has slowed down considerably in 2013. But there's a reason for this, a reason that has me pretty excited.

Starting tomorrow (February 15), I will be blogging at Education Week thrice weekly under the title, Independent Schools, Common Perspectives. I'll be writing in search of finding some common ground between the world of independent schools and the public sector. I suspect that many of you have read my August 2012 Commentary essay in Ed Week, which they titled "Independent Schools Should Share What They Know." I seem to be doing some of that sharing. 

I shall be looking for examples of work being done in independent schools that ought to be shared, work with real potential as a crossover hit in public, charter, or other kinds of schools. I am hoping to hear from readers here who have suggestions. I'll also be looking for examples of successful and substantive partnerships between independent and public schools--I know that these exist, and I am looking forward to hearing about the new National Network of Schools in Partnership at the upcoming National Association of Independent Schools annual conference (better known as #NAISAC13).

I've been a big proponent of the idea that independent schools need to become more involved in the national and even global conversation about education, and now I have a chance to participate myself. I look forward to having readers of Not Your Father's School stop by the new place for a look, but above all I promise to keep this blog moving, as well. But I might be part of the "slow blogging movement" (is there such a thing?) for a while.

BANTER AND SCHOOL CULTURE

A friend, knowing I’m an old maritime fiction (Patrick O’Brian, Richard Woodman, and Alexander Fullerton are among my favorite authors) as well as an admirer for the leadership of Captain Picard in the Star Trek: The Next Generation series, recently pointed me to a really interesting post in the McKinsey Quarterly titled “Leadership Lessons from the Royal Navy.” 

Now, I’d not really want to serve in Nelson’s navy or occupy a gun turret on a World War I dreadnought, but the Royal Navy has had a certain luster for a long, long time, and its greatest leaders—Nelson and Jellicoe, for example—have something to teach us. The McKinsey piece, by Andrew St. George, explores a few aspects of the culture that has made the British navy a formidable and storied fighting force since the sixteenth century.

One factor in creating the Royal Navy’s positive culture with strong values around authentic communication is the encouragement of banter—easy conversational give-and-take, often humorous or teasing, a game of verbal badminton that often weaves together the superficial and the essential. The British style of banter has long crossed frontiers of class and rank, not transgressively but rather in a way that creates a path for the transmission of important information when needed. Writes St. George, in the Royal Navy “the practice of “banter”… is … openly encouraged as an upbeat and informal way to regulate relationships and break down hierarchy. Banter occurs at all ranks and quite often between them. A Royal Navy driver will talk more readily to a second sea lord than the average corporate employee will engage his or her CEO in an elevator.”

Banter of one sort or another tends to characterize life in schools. As adults we probably don’t hear about 90 percent of student banter, and of course we know that student banter can escalate into or sometimes mask—in an ugly and perniciously subtle way—teasing that is truly unkind, and even outright bullying.

But we can model and encourage “good” banter—the kind that eases the strains in relationships and helps students learn the critical skill of talking to adults—by practicing and nurturing it in our classrooms, lunch tables, hallways, and dormitories and indeed making it the hallmark of our most effective relationships with students. Banter can be used to gently redirect or focus a student whose actions have taken a wrong turn, and it can be used to reinforce and praise without quite awkwardly laying on laurels. Banter can be used to jolly students toward new understandings and insight—and students bantering with us can push us in all these same directions.

In the summers of my younger days I worked on the food service and buildings and grounds crews of a number of different institutions—schools, colleges, and youth service agencies. A somewhat shy kid, I had grown up around adults who were by and large intellectual and awfully serious, but in these less academic environments I learned about banter, the joshing and cajoling and occasional flashes of purposeful sarcasm used by the grown-ups on these crews to process and occasionally defuse aspects of their workday lives. Often enough, the endless and often clever banter just made more interesting, bearable, and even fun the repetitive and not always super-stimulating work of, say, preparing two hundred servings of baked chicken, building a new sidewalk, or edging eighteen holes’ worth of sand traps. The banter made work enjoyable, lightening tasks and building relationships among the crewmembers that really did cross boundaries of age, race, and social class.

I remember one young and stern boss, whose seriousness and idiosyncrasies quickly became fodder for a great deal of banter among us behind his back. At some point one of the veterans ventured to direct right at him a gentle tease; we all froze, waiting for a harsh response. Instead, the boss teased back, acknowledging his own quirkiness on this particular subject, and from that point forward the whole crew became more relaxed and productive—and the boss, having acknowledged a certain vulnerability but now engaging with the crew as peers on a shared mission (just in different roles), became much more confident and even easy-going.

As I play back the mental tapes of impressions and memory from my years in schools, I can attest to the fact that many of the most effective teachers I have ever had or worked with were inveterate banterers, whose easy and yet gently and positively provocative conversations with students were the locus of much of their best work. 

These teachers also made great colleagues, whose humor and generally upbeat approach to life invited colleagues into a positive space, sometimes working subtexts that nudged the rest of us toward exploring new perspectives and approaches to our practice or helped build consensus around particular points of view on school policy.

School culture, then, is every bit as subject to and in need of the effects of vigorous, openhearted banter as the British Navy. As small communities striving to knit themselves into a cohesive unit, except in purpose not so unlike a naval vessel, schools need to foster just the kinds of easy, open, and positive cultures that St. George claims banter helps create in the Royal Navy.

If any of Admiral Horatio Nelson’s cadre of young captains—the Band of Brothers whose victory at Trafalgar the Royal Navy views as its finest hour—would happily have taken the bullet that killed their commander in that battle, the record suggests that their open and easy relationships with one another—at meals, off duty, and sometimes on deck—were a part of the reason. The love they bore for Nelson was greatly inspired by his own willingness to be himself among them, not unlike the good attitude that made my own young boss so successful in the end. One suspects that this openness was paradoxically not a small source of the confidence that made Nelson such a decisive, clear-headed leader; he knew he didn’t have to impress anyone, just organize and inspire them.

This also makes me reflect on how the benefits of banter may be transferred to digital environments, where the nuances of tone and pitch that so often characterize face-to-face banter may be lost, or reduced to the paltry explanatory power of emoticons. In my experience banter moves faster than my fingers can type. But I guess I do engage in banter-esque discourse via text and even email, and I can imagine that for digital natives e-banter is probably as easy and common as it was at the dinner table in Nelson’s cabin aboard HMS Victory.

So, as you wander the halls of your school and poke your head into its classrooms, be alert for banter, and consider its power. If you’re a leader, consider how your own willingness to engage in banter—with everyone in your school—might support not just your relationships but the strategic work you must organize and inspire. It might not be Trafalgar, but it is about improving the lives of the children in your care.

CHOPPING WOOD AND INTELLECTUAL CHARACTER

Lucky me!

In a week I start a half-year sabbatical, my first since 1996 and a real privilege for which I will be eternally grateful to my school.

On the other side, I’ll be coming back to a new position—as yet to be fully defined—that will allow me even more flexibility to do the out-of-school work and writing that I have so enjoyed in the moonlight of recent years.

The downside is that I have been cleaning out my office of the last seven years—thirtysome years’ worth of tchotchkes and shelves full of books that overflowed whatever bricks and boards I could stack in small apartments past and migrated to school. I’m at 17 boxes and counting, and my spouse is already cranky about where they will fit in our house. Ah, well.

One object I ran across was a faded and slightly rumpled reproduction I made many years ago of a roadside readerboard sign that once graced the headquarters of some small business in New Hampshire. The message both intrigued me and offended me when I spotted it sometime in the 90s (as I recall), and I even made my own crude and eminently discardable version of the whole sign, purging the name and location of the original in an attempt at humor.

KIDS TODAY, the sign reads, WOULD BE BETTER IF THEY HAD TO CHOP WOOD TO KEEP THE TELEVISION GOING. Probably not an original sentiment; likely something from some talk radio rabble rouser.

But there is something oddly compelling in the message, and in an age of helicopter parents and increasingly easy access to astonishingly powerful technologies, one does wonder whether we’re making things so easy for kids that there is some detrimental consequence to what we think of as character. It often seems that for many students there isn’t a lot of quid required before they receive their pro quo. Maybe it would be better if they had to chop wood to power the devices that enrich and increasingly enable their lives.

It all kind of sounds like the “In my day we had to walk five miles to school in two feet of snow, uphill both ways” tales that our elders (this may actually include me; my children would have to chime in on this) are alleged to have been telling for generations; justificatory evidence of one’s superior moral character, hardened by experience.

If hardship automatically makes better people, the less affluent of our world have always been better people than those who haven’t had wintry treks to school. Intuitively, I think we’re all inclined to think that a certain amount of struggle yields up benefits in terms of commitment and engagement, possibly with a good dose of confidence and optimism thrown in.

Hence my fascination with the sign. Would a little more sweat equity be good for kids? Or is this slogan simply a facile swipe at a generation whose struggles and stresses are a little harder to see than long snowy roads? While it may contain a ring of homely truth, is the message just a way of putting down a whole generation whose lives and interests seem remote and self-centered to those who don’t spend their lives among youth?

My own answer hedges the bet. I think there is a certain self-satisfied contempt in the message, a good measure of holier-than-thou. But I also think it contains an even larger measure of confusion and even a soupçon of good intention—a wish that kids had more opportunities to contribute to their own well being.

We’ve managed to overschedule kids to the point that few children of our most ambitious middle and upper-middle class families would even have time for chopping wood. The exceptions, of course, would be if the chopping were the subject of an enrichment course in Colonial Problem-Solving at a local college, or perhaps part of a community service program at a shelter for the widows of Civil War re-enactors—something, perhaps, a kid could write a college essay about.

We’ve also been able, for better or for worse, to empower our kids with technology that makes mere television seem as outmoded as a Franklin stove. The world is at their fingertips, and even a few hours of babysitting a week can cover the cost of a smartphone and data plan. What used to make up the bulk of academic “content”—facts, figures, and formulas—is so readily at hand that schools have the luxury (is it, though?) of being able to focus on skills and understandings and habits of mind—the “21st-century” or “soft” skills that we believe will empower a generation who know not the feel of blisters from an afternoon with an axe or a splitting maul.

In the end I believe it’s a good thing that kids don’t have to chop wood to keep their televisions or iPads or Lumias going, and I’m glad that these tools are available and only wish that their availability and affordability were more universal. I don’t think we’ve lost much of substantive value by installing central heating or broadband; we have given ourselves the space to construct for our kids—and ourselves—a world in which intellectual character matters above all else—character of mind and spirit evidenced by curiosity, perseverance, generosity, and the general disposition to use one’s mind fully. I’d exalt this over the well-defined forearms of the woodchopper any day.

All the same, the occasional blister from a hard day’s labor isn’t a bad thing—for kids today or for old fogies like me.

HOLIDAY WISHES

It’s been a long slog through autumn, but the solstice is past and the days are indeed growing longer again. Light is vanquishing darkness in our hemisphere.

There’s still a lot of darkness around, but I feel quite certain that regular readers of this blog are determined to be sources of light and joy as we pass through this holiday season and make the turn into 2013.

I have three things that I wish for, really three emerging themes here and in my life. The first of these is that educators will continue to cherish and sustain the deep mysteries and precious values in the cultures of schools even as we embrace the opportunities and challenges of a new era. I hope that Not Your Father’s School will continue to be a place of worthy questions and ideas as we move forward together.

My great personal desire is that schools will strive, consciously, to deliver on 100% of what they say they do and what they claim to value. All my life I’ve been fascinated, in a horror-stricken kind of way, by the ways in which popular fiction—and too often, reality—skewers independent schools for hypocrisy. Hypocrisy may sell novels—who doesn’t like a juicy example?*—but it’s bad for kids and adults. Hypocrisy in schools is a poison. Thus, my second wish/theme is that schools—independent schools in particular, because I know them best—will continue to strive to “keep it real.”

Schools exist in and of the world, and we school folk are, too, and so my third wish is that we stay open to this essential part of who we are and what we do. Sometimes our stories are funny, personal, irrelevant—but in the world of a school nothing human is irrelevant.

As a teacher, an administrator, and lately a college counselor, I have often found myself thinking and sometimes saying to those around me—anxious students, stressed colleagues—“Hey, relax! It’s only school!” There’s a too-clever-by-half irony there, I know, but at the same time I am trying to say something true: school is a place where it’s okay to strive, to contend, to dream—and to fall on our faces; it’s how we learn, often enough. School doesn’t require endless perfection, only intention and openness and our best efforts in the moment and, when we can, in the long term. Let’s work harder to accept our own humanity and fallibility—and aspirations.

Okay, there’s a fourth wish, as the sun goes down on this 24th of December: May every reader have a wonderful holiday season and a glorious 2013!

*Just such a juicy example can be found in Amber Dermont’s 2012 novel, The Starboard Sea, reviewed by your author in the Winter 2013 Independent School magazine, just arrived. Riveting story, disturbing read.