The Clam and the Butterfly: The Effect of a Little Interest

William, I’ll call him, wasn’t interested in anything.

–What do you want to be when you grow up?

–I don’t know…

–Any ideas?

–No.

–What about college. Any idea what you want to study?

–No.

–Where you want to go?

–No. 

Fascinating, huh? That’s how his teachers felt. Like trying to teach a clam.

I can’t recall a less motivated student. Bright, talented, but a C student and not interested in doing any better. No hobbies. Coordinated, but no real interest in sports. A reader, but no discernible passion. Other teachers and I shook our heads. Such possibilities going to waste. How to reach someone like this? Dismissive of most literature, dismissive of opinions different from his own, a bit of a know-it-all. A year. A year and a half.

He was on scholarship, and the chair of the board met with him to try to help him recognize the opportunity he was wasting. Not a lot of movement. The board questioned continuing his scholarship. Mom was tearing her hair out. Dad was done with him. Teachers rolled their eyes. 

And then he signed up for a photography elective. He could have taken it earlier, but, really, we gave other students priority because they were better students, they had earned it. 

He and another student spent one afternoon a week in our darkroom. At the same time, he was enrolled in a filmmaking class that we instituted this year, for the first time, because our school has grown so large that not every student can participate in the school play. William enjoyed photography. He loved filmmaking. We closed school early for a snowstorm, and William, for the first time, expressed an emotion. He was crestfallen. He would miss photography.

So far, so good. A student without apparent interest found an interest. But here’s where it gets interesting.

William started making eye contact, even smiling from time to time. He went out of his way to talk to the woman with whom he carpooled to school each morning—earlier, he sat in silence. His attitude improved, his effort improved, his work improved, his grades improved, his relationships with teachers and schoolmates improved. A tough, experienced teacher commented on his new life. He started to open, like a clam.

I remember a similar student—this one, Guy, I’ll call him, had a different personality. He wasn’t dismissive and apathetic, he was just goofy. His grades were terrible, his effort was lacking, his attitude—if he paid attention long enough to have an attitude—was, well, like the attitude of a stone skipping over a pond.

And then, who knows why, he started taking flying lessons. (Our school is a couple of miles from a rural airstrip for propeller planes.) He got a job to pay for them. He decided he wanted to be a pilot. He knew he’d have to improve his grades, to learn some math. And he did it, rapidly. It was like watching a butterfly emerge from a chrysalis in speeded-up nature documentary style. He applied to aeronautic colleges and was admitted to every one. And he’s now a commercial pilot.

It’s one thing to believe that we are whole beings. It’s another thing to see how one little movement toward interest gradually opens us like a chrysalis. Or like a clam.

Shoplifting, or, the Little Joys of Teaching Teens are Almost Without Number

“I heard the manager say he’s going to catch him tomorrow and have him arrested.”

One of our more Norman-Rockwell-looking students, I’ll call him Joe, had been shoplifting on his lunch hour from one of the Norman-Rockwell-looking shops in town, a small pharmacy that sold snack food, close to our school building. Another student overheard the manager after Joe left, and reported what she’d heard.

Now what? Stand back and let things take their course? We—the other teachers and I—talked about the pros and cons of this inaction and decided that wouldn’t be right.

We announced to the school that that shop was off-limits to our students until further notice. Eyebrows around the room made it clear that several students knew why. Was Joe alone? Probably not, but he was the one who got caught.

We met with Joe and his mom after school.

“The manager of the pharmacy knows you’ve been shoplifting. When you went in there tomorrow he was going to have you arrested. What should we do?”

I wasn’t going to pretend not to know what had happened. I’ve learned over the years not to compound trouble by asking someone, say, a thief, to become a liar. This wasn’t an inquisition. It wasn’t a court of law. It was an attempt to help a young man grow up. And, if somehow he was innocent and wrongly accused, his reaction would make that clear.

Joe, to his credit, didn’t try to lie. “I still have some of the stuff I stole. I could return it and pay for the rest.” His mom sat silent.

“And what about an apology?”

“I’ll write an apology,” he said.

“And deliver it to the manager by hand tomorrow,” we said.

He agreed, and walked into the shop alone the next afternoon with a fist full of gum and candy, some money, and his letter. We learned later that the manager was pretty gruff with him, as he had every right to be, and let Joe know he’d be keeping an eye on him if he came into the store again.

Incident concluded, we let the other students return to shopping there, but asked Joe not to—probably to his relief—for the rest of the year. We also put him on behavioral probation for the rest of the year, and, as far as we can tell, he lived up to our requirements.

You hear, sometimes, the kids are “asking” to be caught. I’m not cynical enough to doubt it. But, after our first meeting as we were leaving, before Joe wrote or delivered the apology, we shook hands. He looked each of us in the eye and what he said startled me. He said, “Thank you.”

How I Almost Got Fired Before I Had a Chance to Teach

You know you’re in trouble when the President of the Board of Trustees faxes the school to say that his son will not return to school until you’re fired.

What had I done to provoke this terse fax? That’s a longer story. I was reminded of it recently while teaching teachers. My adult students, many in their first year or two of teaching, too often assume that my colleagues and I must have it all figured out, that we have stepped from success to success in our own teaching and haven’t shared their struggles, travails, and challenges. False.

About twelve years ago, as I was finishing my dissertation and planning a career as an academic, I was offered a 7^th grade class at the Steiner School that my children attended. The 6^th grade teacher’s husband had a terminal illness, and she took a leave of absence to care for him. I took the job in early June, ready to start in September.

The teacher’s husband died a few weeks later. I offered to return the class to her. I told the committee that hired me that they could give her the class, no hard feelings. I didn’t want to take her job, I was doing the school a favor, I could easily go elsewhere and do other things. The teacher and the committee assured me that she didn’t want the class back. Her husband had just died. There may have been other reasons, too.

For her own reasons, however, she was unable to tell the parents that she wouldn’t return. I don’t understand it—somehow, she listened to the parents plead for her return, but was unable to state simply that she wouldn’t return. Before I even stepped into the class, then, a group of them saw me as a usurper, someone who took away their beloved teacher’s job just after her husband had died. I was unaware of this at the time.

I stepped into the classroom, the antithesis of this thin, sincere, quiet woman; a thick, glib, loud man.

The school year started. I spent hours before the first day of school making nameplates for the students’ desks in calligraphy, but I didn’t put a chalk drawing on the blackboard. School started, and I discovered that the 7^th graders needed lots of work on their writing. We started the year with Marco Polo, Henry the Navigator, the Age of Exploration. I decided that, rather than draw lots of pictures (as might be more customary in Waldorf schools), we would write. Summaries, essays, dialogues, poems, you name it.

The Board President and his wife had a child in my class. Within a week, mom asked for a meeting after school. She had a list of my transgressions on a small piece of colored paper. We met with her husband and a representative of the teachers’ Council and went through her list, item by item.

“You didn’t have a drawing on the blackboard to start the year.”

“No, the nameplates took so long I didn’t have time. There’s a nice picture there now.”

“There are no drawings in the students’ good books.”

“That’s true. I decided we needed to work on writing.”

“But Waldorf education is about making pictures.”

“Yes, and we’ll make ours in words. We’ll do plenty of drawings later on.”

“I can’t imagine going on a ship without drawing a picture first.”

I bit my tongue. Really? There were other items on the list. I can’t remember them all. I was polite and tried to explain myself, but I gradually became aware that no explanation was necessary or sufficient. The real source of feeling was the loss of the teacher on leave, and the real agenda was to get rid of me. I’m reporting this, years later, dispassionately, but it was a tense, difficult meeting, and I left it—as I’m sure Mr. President and his wife did—reeling and with a knot in my stomach.

We parted without resolution, and, later that afternoon or evening, the Board President faxed the school to say that his son would not return until I was gone.

I offered, again, to resign. I didn’t need fraught meetings after hours and hidden agendas. If I wasn’t fitting the culture of the school, I’d gladly go and save the school the tension and bad feeling. My colleagues reassured me that they wanted me to continue. An experienced retired teacher sat in my class and reported that all was well; he and I are now friends.

The son of the Board President returned to school after an absence of three days. He was a nice, normal, quiet, polite, diligent student, caught between his parents and me. We had a good enough year—I always felt sorry for his having to be in the middle of this—and his parents withdrew him at the end of the year.

I was lucky in several ways. Although this was a new job, I already had a dozen years of experience as a teacher. I had the support of my colleagues, and, as it turned out, most of the parents in the class, too. I was confident in what I was doing and could explain myself. I was willing to let the job go, to be fired or to resign. I didn’t require the job to support my family or for my own sense of self-worth.

Many, many colleagues, especially those just starting out in teaching, work themselves into similar situations but aren’t so lucky. They find themselves, months or years into a sincere commitment, without support and, in the end, without a job. As George Hoffecker, an educational consultant, put it: “If you want to make economic compromises, work in a private school.” Too often, tuition-paying parents hold the reins, and can force schools to remove teachers they don’t like. I escaped. Many don’t.

Organic Free-range Schooling, or, How to Start a Waldorf High School the Hard Way and Keep it Going Despite Many Obstacles

Our German teacher, a Jew whose family escaped from Germany prior to World War II, attended the Munich-Schwabing Rudolf Steiner School after the war, and remembers carrying bricks to school in the morning, as many children did, to assist in building the school.

Earlier this week, I learned that an east coast Waldorf high school will close this spring after about five brief years of operation. As I understand it, the school has only about 20 students enrolled for next year, and the powers that be can’t support it. One consultant apparently told the school that is would need to find $2 million in the next few years while it tried to grow to full strength, and advocated closing it if this amount could not be found.

I don’t know that the school made the right decision or the wrong decision, but I do know that a school of only 20 students does not necessarily need $2 million to succeed and grow, given time, creative thinking, appropriate resources, commitment, and a conservative model or business plan. I know that the high school with which I have been involved for the past ten years has graduated five classes; operated in the black for six of ten years—including the past four; paid its debts from the years it was in the red; and hasn’t spent $2 million total in that whole time.

The story of how we built our “organic, free-range” Waldorf high school is worth telling. As a farmer friend of mine, an organic vegetable grower, said toward the beginning of our enterprise, “Someone can tell me how much it costs to grow corn, but that presupposes that I’m going to grow corn according to the prevailing model of corn growing. If I do it in a different way, his assessment of the costs will simply be wrong. Growing corn is the easy part; if I want to succeed and not to pay his costs, my job is to figure out a different way of growing corn.”

It only costs millions of dollars to educate a few private school kids, Waldorf or other, if that’s the model you use to build your school.

Here are the key points that have enabled us to succeed against the odds. (And, don’t be fooled: The odds aren’t very good even if you have pots of money. A day school near us started a high school around the same time we did, poured a few million dollars into it, and, unable to attract sustainable numbers—which, given its model, were much higher than ours—closed it four years later. The only way—the only way—to try to beat the odds is to have an endowment of such size that the existence of the school is ensured regardless of enrollment. And this model, almost impossible to attain, brings a huge and different set of challenges with it.)

1. Independence:

We began as an outgrowth of the Great Barrington Rudolf Steiner School, a pre-K to grade 8 school, and, during our second year, the Board of Trustees voted to close us. We had enrolled 13 students in our pioneer class, but could enroll only 4 for the following year. Our choice was to close or to incorporate independently. We chose the latter, and, as difficult as this separation was, have been grateful for it ever since. Although we recognize the ideological value of being “one school,” this ideology rarely seems to serve practical necessity. We have been able to make our own decisions, stand on our own feet, take our own risks, write our own budget, and not contend with or worry about elementary school teachers, parents, trustees, decision-making, or governance. We incorporated, formed a small board of committed members, found a building in town in which we could rent the second floor, and set to work.

2. Community resources:

We had a building, a used school bus, some blackboards that were hand-made by a trustee’s husband, and a core faculty. What about a library, a science lab, athletic facilities, art studios, and so on? We found them. Students obtained community-use library cards at a local college for $5. The college rented us use of a chem. lab in January and May when their students were on break. All we provided was an insurance waiver and our own chemicals. We scheduled use of the elementary school playing fields for soccer, and, with the elementary school, rented a basketball court at a local athletic center. We rent a performance space and have a “real” theater for our annual play. We mined the area for local artists who could teach in their own studios—pottery, blacksmithing, glass-blowing. Without intending this, exactly, this “practical arts” program became one of the strongest in the school. Yes, there were some disasters. A wonderful weaver turned out not to have the touch with adolescent students. All escaped with their lives.

We may grow to the point at which we no longer require such involvement in the community, but we have grown to value this integration. We plan to continue it long after it is mere necessity. Our students gain immeasurably from having teachers who are professional artists, from meeting community standards of behavior when they’re out of our building, from being treated not like immature teens but like members of a community.

3. Big world:

One of our first ads, copied almost immediately by another school in the area, read “Small school, Big world.” Because we were so small, we deliberately sought to get out into the world, not just in our integration in the local community (see above), but in trips to New York, Montreal, Boston, and, in our third year, Munich and Lima. Students and families raised money, and, ever since, every student has traveled abroad at least once in high school, regardless of ability to pay. Every student at our school can take a semester abroad; what big school can say that?

4. Part-time teachers:

We currently have one full-time teacher/administrator (me), two ¾ time teachers (one in English and drama, one in math and physical science), and two 3/8 time teachers (our foreign language teachers). The rest are paid smaller salaries or work hourly—arts and physical education, mostly, although some itinerant humanities or science teachers. If we had had to wait until we could afford 3-4 full time teachers, we never would have begun. We plan to add full-time teachers as we grow, another possibly next year, and 2-3 more in the next five years. Fortunately, we have found excellent, committed, experienced teachers, many with experience in Waldorf schools, some of good will who otherwise have no prior experience in Waldorf schools, to help us.

5. Combined classes:

With the exception of math sections, we have combined grades or classes throughout our history. Sometimes, as in a foreign language class, this is a compromise—it’s difficult (difficult, but not impossible) to teach two sections simultaneously. Sometimes, as in, say, history or science seminars, it’s a compromise—students have occasionally learned courses out of sequence (modern lit. before medieval history, for example). Sometimes, students have had a course a year earlier or a year later than “the” Waldorf curriculum “says” they should. We have found that our students have thrived, regardless. Their enthusiasm for their school and their education has not been compromised.

Basically, in seminars (what other Waldorf schools call “main lessons”) and other classes, combining classes introduces an economy in that we’re generally paying two teachers where other schools might pay four. We rotate the curriculum every year, so every student graduates having completed every course.

We have found that the educational costs of combining classes are minimal and that the social benefits of combining classes are enormous. We have decided that, even when we can afford not to combine classes, we will still combine many because to do so introduces a healthy cross-class dialogue and understanding that introduces social harmony far outside the classroom. We simply do not have “class consciousness” in our school, and students are as likely to have school friends two years older or younger as they are to have them in their own class.

6. Conservative planning:

By writing a budget based on actual money received, we have crept forward, growing each year from a low of 13 to a current high of 35. When we were in the red, it was because of unforeseen circumstances. In each case, we have been able to adapt, cut our losses, carry debt for a while, and pay it off. Every teacher has deliberately made sacrifices to work here. In at least two cases, teachers worked for a year for no salary in order to support our effort. It could have been different. We came close to closing many times, but, each time, asked ourselves if we could go forward one more semester, one more year. We cannot underestimate the flexibility our small size and conservative view has given us. We have no debt, and we have run a small surplus each of the past three years.

7. Commitment:

Between our first and second year, one parent, committed to our endeavor, announced to what I call the “game of chicken” meeting, that her daughter would be in the school the following year even if she was the only student and the meeting place was someone’s living room. Fortunately, it didn’t come to that.

I call it the game of chicken because you have a room full of people each of whom would like to send a student to the school, but very few of whom are happy to be the first to commit.

The intense commitment required characterizes our early years, necessarily, because the commitment was to an idea, not yet to a school—we had yet to demonstrate that we could educate students and send them off to college and out into life. (This is the Catch-22 of any school start-up: You have nothing to sell but a vision and those committed to it.)

From the start, we saw no conflict between academic excellence and Waldorf education. We are committed to preparing those students who wish to attend highly selective colleges to do so. Teaching bright, motivated students is easy; the challenge is to teach to the top of each class and then work like heck to bring the rest along.

We also believed completely in the value of the creative, humanistic aspects of Waldorf education. We are committed to educating students to think for themselves and to think of their own lives, responsibly, as creative works-in-progress.

We are not a private school because we believe in private education; if we believed we could teach as we like in a public school, we might do so. But our experience is otherwise. Similarly, we are not a Waldorf school because we believe in Waldorf education. We have found, individually, and for as many reasons as there are teachers who teach here, that the principles of Waldorf education are healthy for adolescents. We do not see ourselves as implementing some already thought-through program, handed down by Steiner or AWSNA, but as educating students according to the best practices and best principles we can find.

8. Small is beautiful:

At first, we apologized for our small size. People believed in us anyway. After a few years, however, we began to discover the value of being small. Small schools are incredibly flexible—fiscally, educationally, you name it. Want photography class? Give us three weeks to locate some equipment and a teacher, and you have it.

Small schools are highly individualized. No one falls between the cracks because there are none. Want to come for one class? We can arrange that. We’ll take your little bit of money, give you a great course, and you’ll contribute to the social life of our school.

Small schools are inclusive. Everyone plays on the sports team or the team doesn’t exist. There’s no room for cliques. The students don’t even date each other—as one boy said to me, “it would be like dating your sister.”

Small schools, necessarily, are creative. If necessity is the mother of invention, at this point we are practically Thomas Edison, and not just the teachers and board members, the students, too. How do you have a Student Council in a school of 35? How can you raise money to go to Germany in such a small community? Many, many of the rules the govern our day—eating out, computer and cell phone policies—were written by the students and approved by the teachers.

9. Miscellaneous

This list could go on and on, and I’d be happy to answer questions for anyone who is interested. We have never had tuition remission. We can’t afford it, and we are all in the same boat. A teacher should pay whatever he or she can, just like everyone else. Fundraising happens because of volunteers and passion. Our business manager has been a volunteer; next year will be the first year we pay someone to oversee accounts. (We have had a paid bookkeeper since the beginning.)

At the graduation of our third senior class, one of our trustees reminded me that this was the first graduation—in our seventh year—that we closed up for the summer knowing that we would reopen in September. He was right; every previous June brought the uncertainty of wondering if we could get everything in place—especially including enough students—to open again in September. Since then, however, we haven’t looked back.

One of our first graduates made a short film about our first three years. She called it “The Pioneers.” By the looks of it, we were all laughing all the time. It was great fun, an adventure. We laughed all day, perhaps, and stared into the darkness at 3 in the morning, when her camera wasn’t running, wondering how long we could keep things going.

She’s now in graduate school in creative writing. Three of our first seven graduates are in graduate school, soon to be four. We’re no longer so young; our board will meet later this week to discuss accreditation and our first five year strategic plan (our strategic plan to date has been, “All hands on deck!”). We have survived, even thrived, so far. In doing so, we’ve learned a lot.

We hope our experience can encourage other small, committed schools and groups to make a go of it, a rational, hard, risky go of it. Adolescents need the best education we can give them, and we can’t rely on one model or one vision to provide this for them.

U.S. History in a Nutshell

When ranchers and rangers drove a large, closed General Motors/Chevrolet vehicle based on a truck chassis, the vehicle was called a "Suburban." As soon as actual suburban moms and dads started driving the same vehicle, its name was changed to the range-friendly "Yukon XL." Fantasy becomes reality becomes fantasy. U.S. history in a nutshell.

Please send other pithy illustrations of our great nation in fantastic action. What about us tickles you?

Today

Arrive at school a few minutes before 8. Greet teachers, students, staff. Some students have work for me—late, but better than never. One teacher is planning a field trip to the Holocaust Museum, and needs to check arrangements. We gather for a teachers’ verse at 8:15, then disperse. I don’t teach first period, so I can check weekend email, make photocopies for my two morning classes, answer the Office Manager’s questions. We have applications on which to follow up, an upcoming visit from the building inspector, a fundraising dinner, a tennis team to put together. A parent shows up, unannounced, to ask for a few minutes. I just don’t have them, so we agree to meet tomorrow morning. 9:05, precalculus class. We just finished sequences and series, so we’ll take a couple of weeks for SAT review—mostly strategy and tactics, but it will also show what topics we could fruitfully review before the end of the year. The kids are in a good mood, first day back from a week off, colds mostly healed, happy to see each other again. Then Morning Meeting at 10—students circle the room and shake each teacher’s hand; announcements for the day and the week; sign-ups for a parent-provided hot lunch two days a week; welcome a new student who joined our 11^th grade—that’s three new students for the spring semester. Our little school is growing. Then Robert Frost’s “Choose Something Like a Star,” which we’re learning as a school, students and teachers together, and Rudolf Steiner’s morning verse. Then fifteen minutes to sip coffee and review notes for a seminar (100 min. class) in cell biology. Class starts, everyone present, and we’re off. Prokaryotes, eukaryotes, bacterial diseases, oil-spill clean-up, fermentation, surface-area-to-volume ratios. An unplanned digression to discuss scale, to try to give some sense of a micrometer and then a nanometer. Then another digression into meaning—a cell is a “unit,” but only has meaning if we understand the context in which it functions. I used to stop class for misbehavior. Now I move kids around if necessary, and don’t stop the class for much. Pick up the pace and everyone has to pay attention. Then lunch time. I’m alone at the desk for a few minutes, and can catch up on phone messages and email, then 15 minutes, literally, to eat some egg salad and have another cup of coffee. Then pile the 9^th and 10^th graders into the bus to drive to a nearby athletic center for volleyball. I drop them, and head for the local community college for a meeting with the director and one of our trustees—we’re looking into renting space from them as we grow. They have an art room we could use. What’s the rent? Can we use storage in the back? Will our schedule mesh with theirs? I worked for this college ten years ago, and the director is the same. We chat—her son was a part-time policeman then, now a chief-of-police. The director will retire next year. Then a brief strategic planning meeting, and off to pick up the kids from volleyball. They spend the last fifteen minutes of the day cleaning the school, so I walk around checking their work. No paper towels in the downstairs bathroom. Who’s job is that? We need a substitute to clean the blackboards. The senior class is in charge, and they find someone to do it. Then handshakes good-bye all around, lock the school, and drive six students to the elementary school to catch buses home. I get home around 3:15 to snack and spend another hour and a half returning phone calls and answering emails. I change, drive to the gym for an hour and a half, then home to cook and eat. Janis is here to help, but she has a planning board meeting this evening, followed by a case study for grad school, which she started this spring. I have notes to write for classes tomorrow, but, because it’s the start of a new seminar, no student work to correct for a change. Hence, time to write this. The TV is on in the background—I love 30 Rock re-runs. Bed around 10:30—I’m reading Jesse Ball’s The Way Through Doors and Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror and Rudolf Steiner’s The Christian Mystery and this week’s New Yorker. Lights out before eleven. With luck, I’ll sleep most of the way through the night and do it all again tomorrow.

What I Learned at the Gym

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.