For the past couple of years, I’ve been a regular at a “Cross Fit” gym in my town. My experience there has me thinking about teaching and learning. (To a hammer, the world looks like a nail; to a teacher, the world looks like a lesson?) Here are some of the areas in which I believe work at the gym informs work in a school:
1. Our gym is not full of testosterone and abs; I don’t know the exact split, but it seems that at least half the members are women. Ages range from high school students to retirees in their 70s. Abilities range from outstanding college athletes to some for whom “working out” is their first experience of exercise since high school gym class. Regardless, everyone does the same workout. Each does not do it with the same weights or expectations—workouts are scaled or modified to suit the individual.
Can we teach, say, math classes this way? Every teacher knows that every class has a range of abilities and a range of prior experiences and a range of learning speeds and learning styles. Everyone is learning the same material, but some master it easily and do more, while others move more slowly and focus on the basics. In the gym, one coach works with the whole group, regardless of age or ability. Can teachers handle such a range, or is it necessary to track students by (perceived) ability, teach them one curriculum, expect them to perform on one set of expectations and problems, and then censure them in some way when they don’t measure up? (Really, despite political or administrative expectations, no real teacher does this anyway; we’re all human beings.)
2. We can all deadlift—lift weight from the ground to hang at arm’s length. We can learn proper technique to maximize efficiency and minimize the risk of injury. If we are inflexible, we can work on flexibility and, in the meanwhile, start a lift with the weights raised on blocks. Regardless of where we start, we can learn, practice, and develop technique, flexibility, and strength to improve.
This begs a question about educational standards. I’m very strong, but I can hardly jump at all. I would do very well on a standard that asked me to pick up a heavy weight, and very poorly on any standard that asked me to jump over a bar. To the extent that physical gifts mirror gifts of intelligence or memory—the sorts of things we pretend to write academic standards about—the same criticism clearly applies. The important thing is not that I jump over some arbitrary high jump bar, but that I work hard with good coaching to improve my jumping. And, needless to say, I simply cannot improve every year. I will reach my limit, I will plateau several times in approaching this limit, and, with time, I will decline.
Clearly, we could write a standard that says that everyone—or nearly everyone—must be able to jump, let’s say, four feet. We could study ourselves to learn what percentage of us can already do this, and then set a goal that a higher percentage will be able to do this next year. We can train everyone in the high jump. This is all very reasonable on a macro scale. It’s unreasonable on a micro scale. All the training in the world may not enable me to meet the standard, and no training at all may be necessary for someone else to exceed the standard.
3. This raises another point, one made well in Baumeister and Tierney’s recent book Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength. We suffer too often from two (additional) fallacies in our approach to education. The first is the prejudice that intelligence is innate—I’m born “able” to do math, or not, to draw pictures, or not. Other cultures—Baumeister focuses on Japan—take a different approach (one that is closer to Thomas Jefferson’s understanding of talent than to our own, by the way; something that we can improve with effort, not something somehow genetically programmed into us): intelligence is malleable. With willpower, and help, you can learn stuff. Yes, there are prodigies, but the vast majority of us simply need to apply ourselves to learn something. Once we are old enough that we have to think for ourselves, spoon feeding won’t work. As I’ve said to algebra students for years, tongue in cheek, “Millions of students dumber than you have learned this stuff.” No one in the gym says, “I can’t.” The point is to start where you are and learn.
4. The second fallacy is the belief that we can learn without error, that we can learn by stepping only from success to success. We won’t try a math problem until we know how to do it and know that we’ll get the right answer. It’s embarrassing to the point of being unacceptable to struggle or fail, or to be seen to struggle or fail.
In the gym we fail all the time—often (not always), the point is to work to the point of failure. That’s where real learning and real progress are made. (I’ve taught skiing and swimming in the past, and this is true for these, as well. Do drills with your students until their technique begins to fall apart, and you pinpoint what needs working on—balance, weight distribution, head position, you name it. If it was easy, everyone would do it. And they wouldn’t call it work.) Trying to learn math? If you’ll only attempt a problem you know already that you can do, your progress will be slow. If the expectations of your school and your teachers and your classmates and you of yourself are that there’s something wrong with getting the wrong answer, you’re simply not in a situation that can maximize learning.
Imagine that, as an infant, you said to yourself, “learning to walk and to talk are too difficult. I’m not good at them. I give up.” You’d crawl through life, babbling gibberish. Well, it may come to that. In the meanwhile, we can recognize—as the gym does—that learning and improving include hard work and lots of failure.
5. At the gym, we write our names on a white board and post our results for the day—times, rounds, weights, whatever measure is appropriate. We acknowledge publicly our achievements. Some are successes—including personal records, “PRs,” which friends post with exclamation marks—and some are less-than-stellar. We all have bad days and bad weeks; we all need to take it easy once in a while. The posts are objective statements—there’s no particular shame or triumph in them; they are what they are.
Imagine if we had the same approach to school work. Instead of glancing at a test grade, then hiding the test in your book bag, the teacher posted all grades, all achievements, daily, next to your name. You could see how you did and how everyone else did. You might have to develop a more realistic view of your own achievements, and you might develop the resolve to do better next time. You and your classmates could see each other striving and support each other, while recognizing that some are better at some things and others have to work harder for small gains.
6. Work at the gym is not boring or repetitive. It is, by design, “constantly varied.” Imagine a classroom that was constantly varied. You know walking in, within limits, what will happen, but you have no idea what. At a Cross Fit gym, you don’t know what you’ll face each day. A long run? Power lifting practice? Gymnastics? A combination of all three? Your body and mind can’t grow too complacent or settle into a deadening routine that will drive you to skip a workout and routinize your body so that it’s actually more prone to injury, not less. Work at the gym involves learning—learning new techniques, honing new neurological pathways. Practice is necessary, but routine is a killer.
There are no fancy machines, no gimmicks or fads. Weights, pull-up bars, gymnastic rings, lots of open floor space, some rowing machines. That’s about it. There’s a parallel with education here, too. Just as we are not more physically fit than our ancestors, despite elliptical weight machines, programmable stationary bicycles, and fad diets, our education is not better for computerized learning, expensive textbooks, and faddish trends. At a certain point, close to the source, education is about the relationship of a knowledgeable teacher and a willing pupil, and not much more.
7. Work at the gym is holistic, at least physically. Good diet and sleep demonstrably improve strength, endurance, and fitness. When a coach talks about diet and sleep, we listen. We participated in a 40 day “clean eating” challenge that might better have been described as a “clean living” challenge—we earned points for sleeping eight hours or more, eating right, and drinking enough water. Yet, when teachers try to talk to parents or students about the same issues—sleep deprivation is equivalent to a reduction in IQ; low blood glucose is directly connected to a loss of impulse control—their pleas often fall on deaf ears. Why are you trying to control my life, or my child’s life?
Good teachers know lots of this already, and lots of teaching is not like a gym at all. Work in a gym may be quantified—weight lifted, time run. Important aspects of our work with our students are not quantifiable—how do you measure initiative, creativity, character, diligence, open-mindedness? Even aspects of teaching that we treat as quantifiable—learning algebra, for instance, are not as clear-cut as we might wish. A good student with a high grade is not necessarily the most insightful. Getting all the problems right may not demonstrate conceptual understanding. It’s possible to win a spelling bee without knowing the definition of any words.
On the other hand, it’s good to remind ourselves, especially in the bleak days of February, of what we can learn at the gym:
• We’re not all the same but we can still share a classroom, a curriculum, the enterprise of education. We don’t need to segregate students based on ability in order to teach them.
• External standards can be idiotic.
• It’s good to be objective. It’s okay to quantify what is quantifiable.
• Failure, in the right context, demonstrates limits, not shame.
• At a certain point, routine is the enemy of growth.
• We are wholes. What is good for the body is good for the mind.
• If we put our minds to it, we can improve.
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