Classrooms for brilliant innovation

How can we create a generation of brilliantly innovative kids?    And let's be clear: this is the purpose of our school. We're going to spend a lot of time learning about the past, and recapitulating its greatest accomplishments, but this is all toward the goal of doing new things in the future.

As the Renaissance reader, writer, and thinker Salutati wrote:

I have always believed that I must imitate antiquity not simply to reproduce it, but in order to produce something new.

So how do we create this generation of brilliantly innovative kids?

First, we have to understand the nature of creativity. Then, we need to build it into every piece of our school.

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It's a professional nuisance, I suppose, that I end up hearing so much nonsense about creativity. Most educational innovators drivel on about "creativity", rarely defining the word (often it seems to mean anything to do with art) and trusting that creativity is natural.

The assumption seems to be that if you just "let out" the native forces of a child, creativity will result.

Well, sometimes. But not frequently.

At least, new, good ideas don't just spill out all by themselves. (Unless the kid is some kind of creative genius, in which case, why do we have them in a school at all?)

That's not to say that you force creativity. Typically, you don't — forcing doesn't get you innovation. Rather, new, good ideas take cultivation — they pop up in certain contexts, and not others. Get the environment right, and you'll get innovation.

What environment is that? 

Steven Johnson wrote the book on this: Where Good Ideas Come From: A Natural History of Innovation. His major idea:

Don't think of creativity as forging new ideas by yourself. Think of creativity, rather, as piecing together others' ideas to make something new.

Johnson:

We have a natural tendency to romanticize breakthrough innovations, imagining momentous ideas transcending their surroundings, a gifted mind somehow seeing over the detritus of old ideas and ossified tradition. 

But ideas are works of bricolage; they're built out of that detritus. We take the ideas we've inherited or that we've stumbled across, and we jigger them together into some new shape. (pp. 28–28, emphasis mine)

(Ooh — there's an RSA Animates for the book! Enjoy the next four minutes and six seconds of your life.) Johnson continues:

The trick to having good ideas is not to sit around in glorious isolation and try to think big thoughts. The trick is to get more parts on the table…. A good idea is a network. (p. 42 & 45)

Creative students are network-builders. They take scads of other data, and combine them together in new ways. A limiting factor, then, is how many ideas they can stumble across! We need our school to be as idea-thick as possible. 

I hope it's apparent that we're planning to do just that — crowd our school with stories and thoughts and questions and images and facts and plenty of other abstract nouns I'm forgetting.

And those from as many disciplines as possible — chemistry and religion and art and math and music and biology and everything. Narrow disciplinary boundaries are the death of innovation (at least in K-12 classrooms).

Immerse our kids with wonderful and diverse content — one of the keys to prompting creativity.

But — if only ensuring creativity were so simple! Because here we run smack into a big problem; in fact, a fundamental cognitive limit.

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Creativity is connecting, and the easiest place to connect ideas is inside your own head. We pull information — ideas, stories, facts, questions, images, whatever — out of our long-term memory, and connect it with whatever new thing we're looking at.

The trouble is that it's easy — scandalously easy! — to misplace the memories in your long-term memory.

We all know this, of course. You've learned far, far more about (say) the Civil War than you're aware of right now. Much of that knowledge is still inside your skull, somewhere. If you heard it again, you'd recall that, yes, you'd heard it before. But you couldn't have said what it was. The knowledge was more or less useless to you.

This is the Tragedy of Long-Term Memory. (Well, it's one of the tragedies. The other is that you just plum forget things. More on that, and how to overcome it, in a later post.)

And some people fall prey to this tragedy more than others. Some people are simply worse at making these connections — they can't access their long-term memories as quickly, can't hold as much data in their working memories (more on this later) to juggle the ideas around.

So we're in danger of privileging some of our students over others. To some extent, this is unavoidable — but we should look for tools that will equalize the playing field.

Delightfully, there's a fix! And this fix revolutionized human society: write ideas down. 

Paper is the original creativity-extender. (Well, clay tablets, but nuts to the Sumerians!) Writing things down offloads the memory. We can think just by leafing through a notebook. Of course, there is the occasional glitch:

Professor Henry Jones: Well, he who finds the Grail must face the final challenge. Indiana Jones: What final challenge? Professor Henry Jones: Three devices of such lethal cunning. Indiana Jones: Booby traps? Professor Henry Jones: Oh, yes. But I found the clues that will safely take us through them in the Chronicles of St. Anselm. Indiana Jones: [pleased] Well, what are they? Indiana Jones: [annoyed] Can't you remember? Professor Henry Jones: I wrote them down in my diary so that I wouldn't have to remember.

But that trouble seems more limited to international adventurers than to K-12 students.

Except maybe it's not. 

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I want to point out that I'm not just blasting conventional schools, here. I'm rather tickled that schools make use of one of humanity's most time-tested cognitive tools! But why don't school notebooks, as they're popularly used, increase creativity?

Three reasons, I think.

First, creativity isn't part of the curriculum. Many classes don't ask students to think new thoughts — and when they do (English essays, for example), they don't train students in how to cobble together old ideas to make new ones.

Second, the notebooks aren't used for creativity. Notebooks are seen as places to dump data, and maybe review it before a test — not places to access again and again to get new insight.

Third, when was the last time you looked through your school notebooks? You can cheat for this one, and include your college notebook. Did you leaf through them in the last month? Less than a year ago? I didn't think so. (And neither did I — and I kept mine!) We dump data in, and then let it moulder there.

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There's a solution to this. Well, actually there are a number of solutions to this — but I want to outline just one today:

Externalize knowledge. Splay it on the walls.

One major purpose of classroom walls is to store information. Interesting information. Beautiful information. Information that students value, and which can help them think new thoughts in the future.

The walls can take on some of the role of long-term memory.

Information on the walls can be casually referenced in class. Students can browse the walls when they're stuck for an idea.

Of course, we can't fit all of the information students learn on the walls — only the most meager sliver of it. But that's all we need: we can fill the walls with triggers for what the class has already learned.

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Triggers for what they've already learned: that seems a crucial piece. It's not that we'll put new information on the walls. That'd be stupid. New knowledge is best learned through other people (and experience, and books, and any number of other things). It's not best learned through truncated bits of information hung on a wall.

But the walls can display bits of information that students have already learned — bits that trigger complex recollections.

At the beginning of the year, much of the wall-space of a classroom, therefore, will be empty. As the classes move on, we'll gradually fill the walls until the room becomes an index of what's their heads.

I say "index" — but it can be thought of as a sort of machine, with students the moving parts. They'll walk around, connecting an idea here (next to the wind0w) with a question there (above the sink), comparing it all to a story there (behind the plants).

Students must play a hand in construction of this — they can deliberate as to what to put on the wall. It's an externalization of their knowledge, after all.

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But I have to apologize: this probably seems entirely abstract. Next, I'll hope to give an example of one type of information we can put up — a "wall of talking dead people" — and what we can do with it — practice moral creativity.

Classrooms that help you feel

There's a debate — a stupid one! — about what should be on the walls of a classroom. If you'll permit me to simplify for the sake of mockery:

Side #1: Crap! Trash! Smother the walls with garbage! Garish colors! COMIC SANS! Side #2: Sparse! Austere! Think monastic cells! Think SUPERMAX chic!

This is over-simplification, but as educational über-psychologist Daniel Willingham points out, some actual research on the effects of classroom decoration is stuck on stupid (my words, not his). A recent study compared more-or-less the above extremes. (Supermax chic won.)

Sigh. Maybe someday our society will actually have some useful debates on educational matters. For now, we'll just shake our heads (and the dust off our feet) and strike out in a sensible direction.

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Built environment matters.

As Churchill told the House of Commons in 1943, addressing the rebuilding of the debate chamber which had been destroyed by German bombs two years earlier:

We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.

What our school physically looks like matters, because it will affect how we feel, and how we think. 

Today: feeling.

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Feeling, & Beauty

Beauty matters. Aesthetics make us feel by tapping into the most primal modules of our psychology. A sense of beauty isn't some recent cultural add-on — it's deeply evolved into our minds. It's something we share with other animals.

As Steven Pinker writes, in How the Mind Works:

The expression "a fish out of water" reminds us that every animal is adapted to a habitat. Humans are no exception. We tend to think that animals just go where they belong, like heat-seeking missiles, but the animals must experience these drives as emotions not unlike ours. Some places are inviting, calming, or beautiful; others are depressing or scary. The topic in biology called "habitat selection" is, in the case of Homo sapiens, the same as the topic in geography and architecture called "environmental aesthetics": what kinds of places we enjoy being in.

A feeling of beauty is evolution's carrot to get us to move toward a certain place. A feeling of ugliness is evolution's stick to get us out of a place.

Beauty pulls us; ugliness pushes us. Aesthetics move us. It was true on the savannah, and it's true today.

Pinker again:

Environmental aesthetics is a major factor in our lives. Mood depends on surroundings: think of being in a bus terminal waiting room or a lakeside cottage.

Ugly classrooms are bus terminals; beautiful classrooms are lakeside cottages. Beauty can be Zoloft.

For all the romantic things we can say about our school — a place of love! and wonder! and flourishing! — it will, by necessity, also sometimes be a place of discomfort. We need all the mood-enhancers we can get.

But what do we mean by "beauty"? In what ways should our classes be beautiful? I'll explore the specifics in later posts, but today I'll suggest two attributes: we should seek to make our classrooms calming, and interesting.

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Calming

The Reggio Emilia people are really onto something:

And, come to think of it, so are the Montessori people:

And those Waldorf people? Nailed it!

Compare any of those to this photo of a more typical classroom:

Not especially heinous — I found much more egregious photos online! — but (for our purposes) "helpfully unbeautiful". We've got harsh florescent lights, white walls, cheap surfaces and floors, and stuff (pedagogical stuff) cluttering the walls.

This is not a place that makes it easy to fall in love. This is, if anything, a place that makes it easy to fall in hate.

Or maybe that's too strong — maybe I react to aesthetics more strongly than do most people. (Well: I do.) At the very least this isn't a place that invites a student to feel safe and comfortable and cared for.

Some points for us to take: 

Our school won't have harsh, florescent lights, uniformly white walls, cheap surfaces, linoleum floors, or stuff cluttering the walls.

We'll attempt, instead, to achieve some degree of serenity. We'll be riling the kids up with everything we teach them — it'll be nice to have a calm, restful baseline to bring them down to between lessons.

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Interesting

Calm doesn't mean boring: our classrooms (and the other rooms in our school) will be filled with things that are worthy of students' attention during their free time. (Again, we'll be starting the early grades with a Montessori-esque model: there will be large swaths of the day when students will choose among various educational activities to do themselves.)

Again, the Reggio Emilia schools do this quite well —

Note the mirror-tripod, the aloe plant, the photos on the back wall.

The Montessori people excel at making interesting classrooms —

Note the books, the plants, and the planets. And the easel. And the playsets!

And it's not unheard of for Waldorf classrooms to have tree houses. Tree houses!

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We can borrow from all of these — and many more beside.

We have to: making a school for humans means making classrooms that fit our deeply evolved needs. 

Coming soon — classrooms that help us think better.

"One cannot read a book: one can only re-read it."

What's the book you've re-read most? Vladimir Nabokov, one of the 20th century's most controversial authors, wrote:

Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader.

Oh goodness is he right.

One of the best things about being a teacher is that I'm forced to re-read my favorite books. And I rarely re-read a book without understanding it better. I'll see how the ideas connect together more broadly; I'll see why certain examples are used.

Sometimes I'll realize that the book has a neat, simple thesis that I entirely missed before. Sometimes I'll realize that the thesis I thought I had discovered was really the wrong thesis.

Maybe I just suck at reading? Well, I doubt it. (And if I do, at least I have Nabokov for company!)

Re-reading is one of the secrets of good reading. Re-reading leads to a more extensive understanding of the text. Re-reading leads to a more precise understanding of the text.

And re-reading leads to a deeper love of the text. We're designed to love things we've encountered before: the much-studied familiarity principle: the more you see it, the more you like it. Advertisers, of course, understand this: that's why you've seen Flo the Progressive Insurance Girl a hundred times. (She grows on you, Flo.)

And yet — obviously! — there's another side to this: forced repetition is alien, unpleasurable, hateful. Forced re-reading would ruin reading.

So: how can we encourage students to experience the joys of re-reading without telling them to re-read?

Well: I'm still working on this. But here are some of my current thoughts:

1. We keep the books that students love. If a student attends our first grade, she can be sure that if she loved a book, it'll be there for her to read again in twelfth grade.
2. We encourage students to pick up a book they've read before: maybe one they've especially enjoyed — or especially hated. (I find it useful to return to books I despise. Sometimes — sometimes — it turns out the problem wasn't them, but me.) We can do this occasionally, during our individualized reading periods (our S.S.R. or D.E.A.R. periods when the whole school will be rapt silent with readers). We might even let the older students re-visit the younger rooms to find those books, and enjoy them the way they did before — say, splayed out on the rug.
3. We revisit some of the same topics over the years, and encourage students to briefly rehash some of the books they had loved. This, of course, is what we're doing with our Big Spiral History curriculum — posts here, here, here, here [deep breath!] and here — going through all human (and cosmic) history in three cycles, each of four years. So there's a reason to re-read first grade books in fifth grade, and a reason to re-read fifth grade books freshman year.

But I imagine this is just a start. How else can we use re-reading to increase love, mastery, and wisdom in our school?

Philosophy? For Children?

How can our school bring in the big questions — down into the very earliest grades?

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I had an interesting experience yesterday. I had volunteered to teach Unitarian Sunday School for middle schoolers — all boys. When I walked into the room, the kids were running wild, and the assistant leader and I had an impossible time corralling them (though maybe you already knew that when I said "middle schoolers — all boys"!). There was rocking in chairs, there was loud talking, there was perambulating throughout the room...

And then I asked them when (if ever) it was okay to kill.

It was as if the boys' attentions were iron filings, and I had just held up a neodymium magnet. Everyone's eyes were on me. The side conversations continued — increased? — but now on the topic of murder.

I fake-apologized to them (again) for my ADHD, and told them that I simply couldn't make sense of out-of-turns talking. The side conversation snuffed out; hands were raised. Clay Shirky's wonderful line, discussed in an earlier post, rang more true than ever:

Regarding teaching as a shared struggle changes the nature of the classroom. It’s not me demanding that they focus — it’s me and them working together to help defend their precious focus against outside distractions.

And then, for the next hour or so, we carefully discussed when, if ever, it's okay to kill.

We didn't reach any conclusions (though I would have been happy to acknowledge if we did). But everyone's thinking was nudged along — often into uncomfortable places!

One student initially said it was okay to kill if you were part of the military.

What, I asked, made killing in the military right, but killing outside the military wrong?

Well (the student confabulated) it was because it's legal in the military. You're killing for a country.

If the dozen of us started our own country, right here, right now, I asked, and christened ourselves the military — would that make it okay for us to kill Canadians?

Um, he said. No.

Someone else chimed in: because we wouldn't be killing for a reason! And it can't just be your own reason: it has to be a reason that someone else gives you.

Another student pointed out that that would legalize all hit men everywhere.

Crap, the student responded.

And on and on we went. There's a name for this, of course — Socratic dialogue.

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Teaching Socratic dialogue to kids — doing Socratic dialogue with kids — is, delightfully, a grassroots movement throughout the country. (Search for "Philosophy for Children" on Amazon if you're interested.) And everywhere it's performed, it seems to be performed differently.

A common way — one I learned from the good people at the University of Washington Center for Philosophy for Children — is to have kids read a book, and then ask their own questions.  They told the story of coming to a classroom (the group both trains teachers and does drop-in dialogues themselves) where the students had just finished reading Frog and Toad. They had been prepared for the kids to ask about friendship (a major theme in the book), but were surprised when the kids wanted to talk about, instead, courage.

Very well! they decided. Let's talk about courage!

And then they embarked on a short-but-thick conversation about what real courage is. Is courage necessarily good? Do we want to be courageous? 

Beautiful. Just wonderful.

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A lot of the fun in making a new sort of schooling is the stealing. We steal ideas/practices from other schools, and we improve 'em.

I don't think we can do that here. Socratic dialogue was done pretty darn well by Socrates and Plato. Any kinks in it, I suspect, were worked out over the last twenty four centuries of its use. So we're not looking to improve Socratic dialogue.

What we can do, though, is give it a more central role than it usually gets in schools. One way to say that: you'll never see "Philosophy for Children" (or "Socratic Dialogue") on our daily schedule: it will just be how we deal with questions of all sorts, and history and literature and art of all kinds.

Oh, we'll do other things with books, too! We'll re-enact them, visualize them in detail… we'll feel them. But we'll also, regularly, use them as fodder for our own puzzling out about life.

It may seem… unmannerly?... to use classic books (like Frog and Toad!) as mere "fodder" for discussion. But that's precisely why people write books: to explore ideas like these. What is the good life? What is wrong, and how do we decide what's wrong? What kind of society do we want to live in? What kind of people do we want to become?

People sometimes go to college and major in philosophy to discuss questions like these. (I did! Well: religious studies. Not all that different.) But it's a stupid educational system that puts those questions off until college. (Stupid and anti-human, I'll suggest!)

We can lead kids into these conversations — starting when they're in grade school.

(For more on how we want to make this not just a school of hippy free-spiriting and test-prep, check out our post on wisdom — number three of our big three goals.)

A school for touching

I'm not particularly sentimental. I wouldn't — say — describe myself as "touchy-feely, warm-and-fuzzy" so much as "non-touchy, anti-feely, cold-and-clammy".

But: people need to be touched. Kids, especially.

Obviously you knew that — everyone does! But in most schools touching is dangerous. Encouraging, say, hugging seems to increase the danger of sexual abuse, and the chance of lawsuits.

And so schools discourage (and sometimes ban) touching: both the teacher–kid and kid–kid varieties.

And yet: kids need to be touched! We're evolved for it. Removing touch makes a community less human.

A team of fantastic evolutionary thinkers, led by David Sloan Wilson, David Geary, and Peter Gray, has written a brief and profound essay on how evolution can inform anyone looking to improve schools — "Learning from Mother Nature about Teaching Our Children: Ten Simple Truths about Childhood Education from an Evolutionary Perspective."

Simple truth #9 reads:

Departure from ancestral environments can create unanticipated problems.

Species are adapted to their long-term past environments, not necessarily to their present environments... examples include physical activity and touching. Schoolchildren are commonly required to sit still for extended periods, and touching is sometimes prohibited as a guard against sexual harassment.

These practices have a surface logic in today’s society, but they ignore the fact that physical movement and touching among trusted associates were always part of the human ancestral environment.

(The entire essay is so entirely worth your time I recommend you to pencil it in for the next time you need to jolt of exciting ideas into your life.)

Our bodies are hard-wired to experience touch — touch from someone we trust — as comforting. Touch lowers stress hormones. Touch strengthens social bonds.

More: touch fortifies love.

I think I've made a mistake on this blog. I've gone awry, I think, when I explain what we mean by love as the first of our three big principles. When I've talked about love, I've emphasized the love of content.

But as Rebecca Goldstein pointed out (in an excerpt from Plato at the Googleplex in yesterday's post), teachers are the conduits for love of content. Students learn to love content by loving (and being loved by) the teachers.

Interpersonal love is at the core of our school. And this isn't separate from loving the subjects: they support each other.

They even blur into each another. I'm reminded of how a charter school director described the most incredible math teacher he had met: "He loves students through math."

We need to make a bigger deal of this. We need to talk about how students will be loved at our school.

When Kristin and I married, we banned the word "love" from our ceremony. (Remember when I said I wasn't touchy-feely?) We wanted to make the focus the commitment we were making, rather than our ephemeral feelings. We could do that because, obviously, everyone knew we loved each other. It was a wedding, for crying out loud, held in modern West. Love could be safely assumed!

We don't have that luxury in starting a school. Love — of teachers, of students, of content — is not typically understood to be the core of education. The educational thinkers who do talk about love (of people, of content) tend to be the starry-eyed idealists. The serious thinkers, meanwhile, talk about things like subject-matter mastery.

We don't need to choose between these. In fact, we can't: to pick one is to guarantee you won't achieve either.

So we need to trumpet interpersonal love when we explain the school to interested parties. And we need to build interpersonal into the culture of our school. And so we come back to:

People need to be touched!

Our school of mastery, of thick content knowledge, of intellectual superpowers, will rest (in part) upon hugging.

I don't know how we do this, legally — but we won't adopt policies that work against human nature.

We can't afford to.

On fires (metaphorical)

Novelist, playwright, philosopher, and MacArthur genius Rebecca Goldstein has just written one of the most insightful books on education you'll ever read — and almost no one in education is talking about it.

Probably that's because it's not "about" education — it's about Platonic philosophy.

Except that means it is about education.

Goldstein's Plato spends much of the book talking about the essence of learning, and teaching. His major metaphor: fire.

The fire for the subject and the fire for the teacher are intermingled in the receptive student. 

It’s only by proximity to the beloved teacher,

himself or herself on fire with love for the subject,

that the fire can leap over and be kindled in the student

in a self-generating blaze of understanding.

I love this. Goldstein hurls the twenty-four-hundred-year-old Plato into our modern educational wars, which idiotically insist we pick one: teacher-centered (Reformists) or student-centered (Constructivists) or subject-centered (Traditionalists).

Education, Goldstein's Plato tells us, is precisely the intermingling of all three: teacher and student and content.

And the thing that binds them together? Love.

Plato, in Goldstein's telling, puts love at the center of education.

The subject? Worthy of love. The teacher? In love with the subject — and with the students. The students? In love with the teacher — and hence with the subject.

The love is fire: it blazes, it leaps.

Can you imagine this — schools where more-or-less everyone is on fire for what they're studying? Can you imagine anything more likely to nurture the students who can mend the world? Can you imagine anything further from the schools we currently have?

I can't. But it's what I'm excited to devote the rest of my life toward cultivating.

Oh: the book is Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away, and it can be found at most Barnes and Noble's. Read it — especially the fourth chapter. Happy holiday shopping!

(For an earlier post on love, check out "Our Trinity #1: Love".)

A school for ADHD

Cure ADHD? We want to harness it. An emerging view of ADHD has been slowly gaining traction — that ADHD, for all its real troubles, is a superpower. Yesterday the Times ran an opinion piece by Richard A. Friedman, "A Natural Fix for A.D.H.D." The gist:

Recent neuroscience research shows that people with A.D.H.D. are actually hard-wired for novelty-seeking — a trait that had, until relatively recently, a distinct evolutionary advantage. Compared with the rest of us, they have sluggish and underfed brain reward circuits, so much of everyday life feels routine and understimulating.

To compensate, they are drawn to new and exciting experiences and get famously impatient and restless with the regimented structure that characterizes our modern world. In short, people with A.D.H.D. may not have a disease, so much as a set of behavioral traits that don’t match the expectations of our contemporary culture.

Research psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman put it even better. He's the author of the quite-good book Ungifted, and was on NPR's The Takeaway a few days ago to talk about the innovative and creative powers of ADHD. Quoth Kaufman:

You could conceptualize people with the ADHD label as explorers—imagine being an explorer trapped in an educational classroom where the teacher is saying, ‘Pay attention to me and don’t explore.’ It drives them nuts.

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A crucial twist: let's grant that being an explorer is a superpower. It also kind of sucks.

The need to keep moving? The disposition of experiencing the ordinary world as dull dull dull? Drah! Most gifts, of course, have their underside, and ADHD is no exception.

So I spoke a little too glibly when I suggested that we want to harness ADHD rather than fix it: what we want to do is make use of some traits of ADHD while reducing its destructive by-products.

How?

A number of ways, actually — I'll be posting more on them by and by. Among our strategies:

• Our curriculum will be wonder-filled, crammed with interesting stories and questions that pull students in. (This, for those keeping score at home, is the Imaginative Education component part of our school.)
• Our school day will be scattered with physical activity. (Movement — certain sorts in particular — eases concentration.)
• Our classrooms will give students choice and agency. (This is the Montessori component of our school.)
• Our community will practice mindfulness meditation, sometimes in unusual ways.
• Finally, our classes will (probably) offer targeted training of executive functioning, more as these activities are conclusively demonstrated to reduce some of the negative impacts of ADHD at the roots.

One final thing: we're not making this a school only for kids with ADHD. Goodness, that would be a terrible thing — we want a school of neurodiversity.

There are many ways to be human. ADHD is one of them.

And understanding that might be a good way for a "school of humans" to move forward.

A question: Should our school adopt the Common Core?

Sheepish admission: I've entirely ignored the whole Common Core debate.  I know, I know — now I need to hand back my Bona Fide Educational Puzzler certificate!

Once upon a time, I supported the Common Core because I'm pro-innovation: the nation needs a single marketplace for curriculum. I'm in favor of a level playing field for people who create curriculum — I'm especially thinking here of the JUMP Math people. It doesn't help them to have to recraft their product to the billions of zillions of state and local curriculum requirements.

And those billions of zillions of requirements aren't tremendously different, anyhow — so it didn't seem like there was much of an argument for keeping them separate.

But then my support dwindled when Diane Ravitch — long a hero of mine — turned against the Common Core. I kept meaning to get into the debate, but was turned off when the conversation was hijacked by the crazy wing of the Republican party.

[After typing that last sentence, I surfed online for good examples of anti-Common-Core whack-a-goguery to link to. After 10 depressing minutes, I decided that you could do that for yourself, if you wanted to, but that I wouldn't pollute this blog with any samplings. YOU'RE WELCOME.]

So now I'm a man without an opinion. Which can be a very helpful state.

Should our school adopt the Common Core?

What are the advantages? (Will some parents demand it? Will it make our curriculum easier to transfer elsewhere? Will it help the kids who transfer into our school, and transfer out?)

What are the disadvantages? (Would it meaningfully restrict our curricular choices?)

And, maybe most importantly — what's the simplest way to find out more? (I'll admit that reading any document written in "educational officialese" is almost impossible for me, doubly so if it's on the computer. So popular guides are much preferred!)

(Note that this is an utterly different question than should everyone adopt the Common Core.)

On word geekery (& vocab acquisition)

Can we make all kids into word geeks? And if can, should we? I'm a card-carrying word geek. Or I would be if we had cards for such things — as it is, the ten or so vocabulary books on my shelf probably suffice.

I'm the sort of person who exults to learn obscure terms (your acnestis, for example, is the part of your back that, when it itches, you can't reach!) and oddball word origins (to disembowel and eviscerate literally mean the same thing — bowels and viscera are both words for 'intestines', and dis- and e- both mean 'out'!).

Never trust a geek. We'll swear up and down that our particular corner of geekdom-ery is crucial — pivotal! — for every man, woman, and child. So you hear music geeks declaring that music is the core of an education, engineering geeks declaring that, no, it's engineering, and so on. Somewhere a My Little Pony geek is probably saying that American kids need to close the Twilight Sparkle gap with the Koreans.

And let me emphasize: Never trust a geek.

But: vocabulary knowledge is reading skill.

There's a hard-to-squelch belief that kids don't need to learn vocabulary — that they can just learn to use "contextual clues." The trouble with this is that it oftentimes doesn't work. Take the following sentence, from yesterday's New York Times:

In New York, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, a Democrat, who last week called for obligatorisk karantæne for health care workers returning from West Africa, sounded a more forsonende note, joining Mayor Bill de Blasio to announce financial incitamenter to encourage health professionals to go to West Africa to treat Ebola patients.

Above, I've taken a real world sentence, and translated into Danish the words that many of my high school students wouldn't know. (Thanks, Google translate!)

Can you figure out what obligatorisk, karantæne, forsonende, and incitamenter mean?

Very possibly you might be able to: my students, however, would not. (To figure it out, you might draw on your knowledge of the world — specifically, your knowledge of "the sorts of things governors are demanding of health care workers when they return from areas rife in scary, infectious diseases." Many high school students lack this knowledge. That's why they're reading this article, actually: to gain it.)

Here, by the way, is the sentence in all its Technicolor glory:

In New York, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, a Democrat, who last week called for mandatory quarantines for health care workers returning from West Africa, sounded a more conciliatory note, joining Mayor Bill de Blasio to announce financial incentives to encourage health professionals to go to West Africa to treat Ebola patients.

If the kids don't know enough words, they won't be able to understand the text. 

Foreign language learners, of course, know this. Polyglot Anthony Lauder asks what percentage of a text's words do you need to comprehend it, and cites the following:

• 98% pleasant, free reading
• 95% comprehensible
• 90% serious study
• 85% heroes only
• 80% gibberish

(This is from his wonderful speech PolyNot. The actual quote is about 5 minutes in.)

English professor extraordinaire E.D. Hirsch suggests there's a troubling Matthew Effect at play here: a young student who knows most of the words in a text will understand the text better, and that understanding will help her make sense of the few words she doesn't know. She'll then be able to take on books with more unfamiliar vocabulary, and so on, and so on, edging upwards and forwards in linguistic complexity.

A student who doesn't start by knowing most of the words, won't. He'll be stuck.

The (verbally) rich get richer, and the (verbally) poor get poorer.

Ack.

So it will benefit our students a great deal to make sure that they start with understanding a great deal of vocabulary. Much of that, of course, is in the parents court. But how can our school help students acquire vocabulary? How can we make it relatively painless — and even enjoyable?

This I'll take up in Monday's post!

We are surrounded by mystery

Kieran Egan — our greatest living educational philosopher — reflects on his schooling, and all schooling:

I suppose, being a university professor dripping with awards and prizes, that I have played the schooling game well. But I was never sure what sense it all made. Why did I have to learn to decline those Latin irregular nouns, or be able to prove that opposite interior angles of a parallelogram are congruent, or recall the provisions of the treaty of Ghent?  Much of the time I and everyone I knew was bored with schooling, and had difficulty relating what was happening in class with human life and its enhancement.

My book is an attempt to show that, indeed, everything in the world is wonderful, but that schools are designed almost to disguise this slightly shameful fact.  We represent the world to children as mostly known and rather dull.  The opposite is the case: we are surrounded by mystery, and what we know is fascinating.

My book is an attempt to show how we can reconceive the school and the process of education to engage students’ emotions and imaginations with knowledge.

(The book in question, incidentally, is The Future of Education: Reimagining Schools from the Ground Up, which may be the best introduction to his wide-ranging body of thought.)

In our (future) school, we don't want to cover knowledge — we want to uncover it. We want to help kids see that the world around them is a mystery — where do clouds come from? how does a microwave work? — and to excite them with the chance of unravelling it.

If we succeed at that, we'll succeed at nearly all our goals.

Reading for Joy

When did you begin to love reading? Was it a specific book? A specific person? What's behind your book lust? Now: how can we create that same love in every student? To repeat what I wrote yesterday: if we bring up kids who can read but choose not to, we'll have wasted our (and their) time.

To succeed at this — bringing kids to experience daily the joy of reading — we'll want to compile a long list of strategies, and pursue them all.

Some of the ideas on this blog are wacky, or at least sit on a WACKY—BUTTONED-DOWN spectrum. I like being wacky. Most of these ideas, though, are securely in the 'buttoned down' region: they're practices being done at good schools around the world.

These ideas are also crazy-incomplete. We're in need of more — please post your suggestions in the comments!

1. Fill the school with good books!

A surprising number of children's books are garbage. That sounds unfair, but: it's true. Such, at least, is my experience these five years (my son will be five in November) rustling through libraries and book stores. And kids aren't fooled: they won't pay attention to the dull ones.

Good books make kids rapt; bad ones make kids bored. Bizarrely, adults seem sometimes to be incapable of recognizing which are which. I've watched librarians and teachers read aloud truly insufferable books — stories where nothing much happens and no one much cares — and then be shocked (shocked!) that the kids are acting so squirrelly.

Good books grab listeners. 

And there are so, so many of these: stories and poems and picture books and reference books and novels. A college professor of mine pointed out that this is one of the under-appreciated joys of adult life: that there are more excellent children's books than anyone could read while still children.

Obviously, people will disagree about which books are good, and which are bad. No surprises there! We shouldn't frivol away our time looking for unanimity. Our rule, instead, should be this: We won't let any books stay in our school that aren't actively loved.

That way, our school will be stuffed full of books that teachers and students love. Reading can be about sharing loves.

2. Share beloved books!

I envision our faculty and students sharing their favorites — giving (very short) presentations on why they love certain books, and helping entice others to try them out. The presentations could be in the format of "You might love this book if…"

Everyone would participate — the secretaries and janitors included!

Then we could set the month's recommended books on a special bookshelf, along with a note of who recommended it, and why. This way, reading could sometimes be less a solitary act than a shared one. Books can be a way of connecting to the people around you.

3. Read aloud!

We need to show that people love to read, and the easiest way to do that is to actually show people loving reading.

We'll want to read aloud selections from wonderful books daily. Sometimes the goal can be to focus an entire class around an entire story — the teacher could read the whole of Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel (in one day) or Where the Red Fern Grows (over many days).

Other times, the goal can be to entice students to read different books — the teacher could read aloud the first quarter of Dr. Seuss's Horton Hatches the Egg or the first chapter of Lemon Snicket's The Bad Beginning.

Obviously, reading aloud isn't some revolutionary new tactic. People have been hearing stories for hundreds of thousands of years longer than they've been reading them! As a school that takes human nature seriously, we might capitalize on that. Loving to hear stories (and love to tell them) is natural, deeply embedded in the human brain. We can build from that, inculcating a love of books and reading, long before students are actually able to decode the (evolutionarily novel) squiggles in front of them.

(Note: this point is made to great excellence by Jim Trelease in his classic The Read-Aloud Handbook, which our school will be making good use of!)

4. Give kids time for personal reading.

Many schools have periods of individualized reading — variously dubbed SSR (silent, sustained reading), DEAR (drop everything and read!), and so on. This is a wonderful thing. We'll do it, too.

I wonder — and this might be a silly idea — if it'd be worth the effort to have the entire school coordinate its DEAR time. Would it proclaim our community's book lust if, for 15 minutes, our entire school was silent, with everyone (students, teachers, janitors, administrators…) reading to themselves?

Let me know your thoughts on this.

Additionally, we're planning to have very, very minimal homework each night in the grade school years — with an exception made for an hour of daily reading. More on this in a later post!

5. Make physically comfortable reading spaces.

Human bodies weren't designed to sit in desks. Any school that aims to be "a school for humans" needs to mull over this pretty deeply, and we will be — more on that later.

For the present: sometimes, straight-back chairs are perfect for reading, and sometimes they're terrible. Our classrooms should have many options for reading: sofas and soft rugs and exercise balls and stand-up tables and lofted beds.

Similarly, our classrooms should have options for lighting: bright light and soft light. And perhaps for sound: silence, and white noise, and soft instrumental music.

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Those, anyhow, are the ideas I can come up with. I know I'm only shaving the top of the proverbial iceberg.

Fellow teachers, parents, and educational geeks — what ideas have you seen work? 

A school for books

How can we bring up readers? Reading will be at the existential heart of our school. If we succeed at raising readers, we'll have succeeded overall — and if we fail here, we'll have failed everywhere.

What do we mean by "readers"? Let's (as always!) look to our three goals —

Love

We'll bring up people who are *hungry* to read — who pick up fiction and nonfiction, who relish both its escapism and its realism, who like to read alone and with others.

Mastery

We'll bring up people who *excel* at reading — who have vast vocabularies, strong focus, and variable speeds. For them, reading will be easier — they'll have top-notch skills in decoding, and deep reservoirs of content knowledge to ease comprehension.

Wisdom

We'll bring up people who *use* reading to build themselves — who browse broadly, who ask questions, and who stockpile personally meaningful quotes and quips.

I'll be exploring the nuances of these over the next few days. But first, a confession:

I'm a reader. (Of the "problematic" sort — I got in trouble as a kid for hauling multiple books into every situation, socially appropriate or not.) And I teach high-level reading. (A course on the campus of the University of Washington.)

But I'm out of my depth when I talk about how to teach reading to children. I've read a lot of books, but it's not my expertise. There are lots of people whose entire academic training is on this one subject. So: please forgive me in advance, and correct me in the comments section. I'll be thankful for any feedback I receive!

A movie a week

We'll be enacting a lot of oddball ideas at our school. One of the simpler ones — and yet one I'm most excited about! — is to watch a movie together each week. What, you ask? With droves of subjects to be explored, with scads of skills to be mastered, why would we frivol away precious class time passively staring at a (gulp) screen? Can't kids do that at home? Isn't this too easy? Doesn't this go against the whole idea of the school?!

Nope! Let's explore this.

When I was in school, I often saw teachers use movies foolishly: as "treats" (they rarely were), as history lessons (they're typically terrible history!), and as (it seemed) excuses for the teachers to take breaks.

We'll use 'em much better.

Movies provoke moral questions.

Should we root against King Kong, or for him? Are the Greeks adventurers in the 1963 Jason and the Argonauts actually heroes, or are they villains? What's up with the weird xenophobia of the sheep in 1995's Babe? Should Charlie really have refused to give the Everlasting Gobstopper to Mr. Slugworth? (I mean, come on! Wonka was being a jerk!) When Indiana Jones shoots that amazing swordsman in Raiders of the Lost Ark, and you laughed, were you being a horrible human being?

Movies make it natural to probe the questions that matter.

Not that we can't do the same thing for books: we will! (Later I'll post on our reading curriculum.) But movies are wonderful fodder for this, too.

Movies allow for intergenerational conversations.

Modern media profits from splitting up the generations: making new movies and new games for each age cohort. This can make it hard to find common cultural touchstones. By bringing classic movies into the school, we can make it easier for kids to have meaningful discussions with their parents and grandparents — who have seen Mary Poppins, and Snow White, and so on.

Maybe we could even invite parents and grandparents in to join us!

Movies saturate us in foreign cultures.

French films aren't American films. Japanese films aren't French films. And Indian films are different still!

Without actually living in another country, it's hard to get a taste of a different national culture. We'll be trying to do just that in a few ways: books, food, music, art…

But film might be the most useful of these. No other media combines stories with visuals with sounds so well — no other media offers up such quantities of sheer information in such a short time.

Movies support reading comprehension.

As Daniel Willingham — the greatest educational psychologist on the scene today — writes:

You need to know more than vocabulary to read with understanding: you need knowledge of the world.

(That comes from a YouTube video he posted about reading comprehension. It's good — if you want more, check out his wondrous book, Why Don't Students Like School?)

Well: movies give knowledge of the world!

Good movies (like good books) are revelatory: they give us a peek inside the heads of other people. They show us what other lives are like — around the world, or in the past, or in our own towns.

Willingham, again from the video:

So who are "good readers"? People who know a little bit of everything, so they know something about whatever comes up on a reading test! General cultural knowledge correlates about .50 with reading comprehension test scores!!!!

(Those excessive exclamation points, incidentally, are from the distinguished professor himself. I only would've used three.)

Films give general cultural knowledge.

Movies beg for criticism.

Was a movie enjoyable, or not? Believable, or not? Biased, or not?

How did it depict men? Women? Rich people? The poor? Blacks, and Whites, and Asians, and so on? Urbanites, and country life? Religiosity? Traditional values?

What's the tacit worldview of the movie? What sort of person does the filmmaker want you to become?

We don't want our students to be mere consumers of culture: we want to help cultivate wise users. They need to get smart about the values (explicit and implicit) that they're being fed.

Finally:

Movies are terribly enjoyable.

I've been sneaking around this point so far. I've talked about how movie-watching can help develop wisdom (they can communicate other cultures, and be fodder for critical reflection). And I've talked about how movie-watching can help develop mastery (in reading).

But at their heart good movies bring love. Movies — and I say this as a person who reads more books than he watches films — are some of our civilization's best story-telling. They tap into our emotions so perfectly to communicate a different vision of reality. They can help students (and faculty) fall more deeply in love with the world.

It's a crying shame that schools don't make greater use of film.

Well: ours will!

No Einsteins need apply?

I'm not sure about something I wrote yesterday — in the post Blessed are the sense makers. Specifically, I'm a little unnerved by this sentence:

Students should feel (dare I use the word?) entitled to full explanations — we owe it to them, because that's what we're there for.

Two aspects of that line worry me.

Kristin — who is slated to be our school's first teacher when we open up with a kindergarten through first grade in 2016 — pointed out the first. I read her the post, and the following conversation ensued:

Kristin: Goodness, that sounds scary!

Me: Really? Whyever so?

Kristin: Well, I certainly don't know everything there is to know about everything! I can't give a full explanation to every one of my students' questions.

She was worried that this idea that students are entitled to full explanations makes it sound as if, in order to teach at our school, one would have to be some sort of nuclear-enhanced super-genius. (Now, for the record, she is. She's the sort of person who graduated summa cum laude in English and tutors high-level math. And she's conversant in science and philosophy, and cooks and bakes, for heaven's sake.)

Second, I worry that the "we owe it to them" phrase makes it sound as if teachers should be 'data butlers' — sensible-shoe-wearing incarnations of AskJeeves.com who hectically buttle (a real word!) information to passive students.

Both of these are bad.

But there's a danger in going too far in this direction — toward emphasizing that teachers need not be Einsteins or data butlers. Because: maybe they do?

We do need our teachers to be smart — very smart.

This job will regularly require a lot of independent research — so much so, normal classes will take Fridays off, so teachers can study and prepare lessons. Teachers will become mini-experts on a whole range of topics; it's only by delving so deep that they'll be able to draw students into authentic love of the subject. (This, if you're wondering, stems from the Imaginative Education angle of our school. They've just revamped their website — check it out!)

And we do need our teachers to do a little data-buttling!

Some educational environments put the onus on students to discover their "passions" on their own: the teachers in these schools aren't leaders, but merely facilitators. We'll be going in a different direction. In our school, both teachers and students will be expected to do the puzzling out together: it takes a village to make sense of the world. So the students will be serving the students — doing some extra work to help answer questions. But the students will be serving the teachers, too. The relationship won't be obsequious.

So, in sum:

1. No Einsteins need apply. (Though I've no beef if they do! Particularly if they can pull off the "I look seemply amazeen und I haven't vashed my hair all veek!" aesthetic.)

By that, I mean prospective teachers don't need to fret that they don't already perfectly understand human history, the physical sciences, math, and literature (and are also able to write elegantly, draw beautifully, and cook deliciously). Because we'll help them move toward that.

2. Teachers aren't mere data-butlers — it's not their job to fill passive minds.

Rather, they're job is to engage in a back-and-forth relationship with students, bringing them into a similar love of the subject matter.

What matters, then,  is that prospective teachers be thrilled at the idea of constructing expertise, and thrilled at spreading that skill to others.

Blessed are the sense makers

Yesterday found me in the classroom of one of the greatest math teachers I've ever met, and was surprised to find a hand-made poster she had put on the wall:

Be a sense maker.

Yes — yes! I love this. I love how levelheaded it sounds (who wouldn't want to make sense of what they're studying?) — and how revolutionary it actually is. It reminded me, actually, of a rather more famous snippet of levelheaded/revolutionary rhetoric:

Blessed are the poor… for theirs is the kingdom of God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.

On Tuesday, I railed against what I dubbed "faith-based learning." I'm still a little spooked that someone in the tubes will misunderstand me as speaking against, y'know, religious faith, so let me switch metaphors for a minute:

Blessed are the sense makers.

Making sense of what you're learning — probing it, fitting it into everything else you know, challenging it — isn't typically easy. Less work, perhaps, to just swallow the thing the teacher (or the book) is spouting, and move on.

This is an ever-present danger.

Learning isn't just storing data (though it is that, in part). Students aren't mere receptacles for information. Learning is probing and fitting and challenging. Students are sense-making agents.

But it's not enough to just offer this to students in theory: "IF anyone, by chance, wants to challenge me or the book, please feel free to do so after class!"

No: we need to position students as co-puzzlers, unravelling the world along with their teachers. They should feel (dare I use the word?) entitled to full explanations — we owe it to them, because that's what we're there for.

This demands a whole new ethos of learning. This can't be achieved quickly. It needs to be cultivated over the long-term.

To cultivate this curiosity — this relentless curiosity! — we'll be employing specific tools to help the kids judge how well they understand things, note questions, and mull over those questions long-term. More on these later.

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This will take work, but, ho, is the outcome ever worth it!

A friend of mine who holds a PhD in economics told me once that she wasn't necessarily smarter than her classmates who dropped out after their master's. She did, however, have one skill they lacked: she understood when she didn't understand things.

The habit of sense-making is, indeed, a useful one. (I wonder how many IQ points it corresponds to, in measures of student success.)

But it's not just pragmatically useful — it's also deeply soul-satisfying.

The universe makes sense. 

When you ask a question, you find an answer.

This is easier to see in the analytical subjects than in the human ones. Easier to see in math, say...

7 + 3 = 10, because

7 = 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1, and

3 = 1 + 1 + 1, so

1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 = 10, because

THAT'S WHAT '10' MEANS.

…and harder to see in history. Things in math need to be the way they are. Once you understand what 3 means, and what 7 means, and what 10 means, you can see that 7 + 3 must equal 10.

In history, there's a lot of room for human muddling.

What would have happened if Zheng He — the 7-foot-tall Chinese Muslim eunuch who navigated a three-hundred ship fleet on a shock-and-awe trip around the Indian Ocean in the early 1400s — hadn't been called back to China? What if he had continued around the tip of Africa, docking his armada in, say, Venice?

What if Zheng He had made it to America?

Could he have kicked-off a half-century period of Chinese (rather than European) global supremacy?

Well, maybe. Or maybe not. History isn't like math; it's not amenable to neat proofs.

But, that said, there are deep reasons in history. There are reasons that it's Europe who conquered the world, rather than Greenland. And the longer students study history, the more they'll want to move from the small stories to the big riddles — one impetus behind our big spiral history approach.

Again, more or less everything turns out to be reasonable. The universe makes sense!

Growing into that conviction isn't just pragmatically useful; it's personally enriching. It is the heart and soul of philosophy.

Learning is a wonder. And it's our joy to help students enter it.

A school for sleep

BOY, did I get a lot of sleep last night! I'll admit it: I'm boasting. Also: lying.

But isn't it odd to hear someone boast about how much sleep they got?

Alaina (who's making plans to be one of our teachers) pointed out to me last night that hardly anyone — at least in the high school and college years — boasts about getting healthy amounts of sleep. Instead, they boast of the exact opposite:

Student 1: "Jeez, I was up 'til 2 a.m. studying for my Psych final." Student 2: "Yeah? Well, I only got four hours of sleep, writing my English term paper." Student 3: "You think that's bad? I haven't slept for 72 hours, have virtually murdered my working memory, and am experiencing numerous visual and auditory hallucinations! In fact, I doubt I'm actually having this conversation right now."

All right: I'm exaggerating. But only a little.

A high school student of mine, who gets good grades at a prestigious public school, told me:

High schoolers are in a constant state of sleep deprivation — like, intense sleep deprivation. I’ve had minor hallucianations in class before. I have a major headache right now.

From talking to others who attend his school, I'd wager that he's toward the extreme end of the spectrum. But that end of the spectrum shouldn't exist.

Our school will make it easier for students to sleep well.

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I'm new to this thinking, and don't have an excess of ideas. I welcome yours! Some possibilities that I've been playing with:

We'll begin at a reasonable time.

Our middle and high school, particularly, should begin later — perhaps at 9 a.m. Teens are biologically wired to stay up (and wake up) later. (No, really. I thought this was hippie-dippie psuedo-science until I saw intercultural research on circadian rhythms.)

Our school is pro-human nature. That means not actively working against a student's biology.

We'll explore naps.

A number of other cultures — I'm looking at you, Spain! — do mid-day naps. Sometimes I'm able to take a rest (though not an actual nap) during my post-lunch crash time. It's wonderful. I'm reloaded for the day.

So we'll try out rest periods, and see what works well for our students (and faculty). Of a piece with this:

We'll schedule well.

We won't plunk nuanced analytic classes (math, chemistry) into the tired periods: e.g. the late afternoon. Typically, the hardest intellectual work will be done in the morning classes.

(Or, at least, that's my hunch on this. If you have experience about what times of day work best for what types of learning, please share in the comments!)

We'll make kids tired.

Some kids are wired when they come home from school: not our school's!

We'll make them think hard, yes. But we'll also make them physically tired — we'll be running, jumping, climbing, and so on throughout the day.

During the day, this'll wake them up. At the end of the day, this'll put them to sleep. Ah, the paradoxical pleasures of exercise. (More on this in a later post!)

We'll teach sleep.

How to sleep well isn't at all obvious when one lives in a culture that celebrates caffeine, bright lights, and long hours. I struggled with insomnia for a few years, spending maybe about a thousand dollars on doctor visits and various medications, before realizing that it was a caffeine problem, pure and simple. I just had to cut coffee past noon, and 90% of the insomnia disappeared.

I didn't know anyone could be that sensitive to it, but, I was pretty dumb then!

Now I'm not. I was taught sleep.

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This may seem, well, nosy: like we're venturing outside our proper realm of Reading, Writing, 'Rithmetic. A little too paternalistic, maybe?

Maybe. I agree that there needs to be a balance. But it's clear to me that, at present, most schools sit at the opposite extreme. Students are under-rested, and it's having bad effects across the board: in learning, health, and psychological well-being.

We care about all those things.

But even if we just concerned ourselves with intellectual pursuit, we'd still need to take sleep seriously. As John Medina summarizes in Brain Rules:

Sleep well, think well.

We're going to be asking a lot of our students: to focus, to remember, to control themselves, to think carefully and expansively, to expand their picture of the world.

Sleeping well undergirds all of these things. If we can help our community get sleep right, we can move further toward all our goals.

Faith-based math

Our school shall have no faith-based math. Before I set off an Internet flame war (or is it too late already?!): I'm not talking about religion right now. Except maybe I am?

The Calvin & Hobbes strip above really nails the experience of many students in math class. Doing well in math amounts to taking things (formulas, for instance) on the authority of the textbook. Students who do well in math class are those who can best memorize these bits of dogma.

Obviously, this has nothing to do with actual mathematical understanding.

I know that this idea sounds incontestable — and, well, it is. Of course students should understand what they're doing in math!

Yet this principle is broken in nearly every textbook, in nearly every class.

I'm reminded of this today as I prepare my economics lesson for the afternoon. We're reading a popular book on economics — I won't mention the title — and are trying to understand how supply and demand curves shift when products are taxed.

The students are struggling to understand it. They're model students: reading carefully, testing their comprehension. But they're frustrated. I should be able to help them, because I should have a full understanding of the topic at hand.

The thing is: I don't. And the book is no help.

The book — at least this portion of the book — is, in effect, faith-based. It doesn't explain taxation the way it claims to. It doesn't matter how hard the reader works: they're stuck in faith-based math (or, in this case, faith-based economics). They're forced to kowtow to the author, and simply assume the theory makes sense.

Ack. Uck.

I'll see what I can do for the class — I may need to bring in an outside economist to help us make sense of this. I'll certainly own up to my own non-understanding, and help the students explicate the gaps in their understanding.

That is, I'll help them see what they don't see.

And that's useful, in the short-term. But here's a long-term promise we can make for our school:

When studying any analytical, reasoning-based subject, students will never be expected to take anything on faith. We'll inculcate them in the truth that, if some idea (a math formula, an economic concept, a chemistry… chemically-thing!) has been understood by someone else's mind, it can be understood by their mind.

And we'll rear them in the conviction that achieving this understanding — capturing its complexity in their own head — is one of the most beautiful experiences available to us humans.

Ban Tech? Embrace Tech? Thoughts toward technological sanity in our school

1. What we want, and how we'll get it.

What do we want in our school? Well, we want love — of learning, and of community. We want mastery — of skills, and of self. And we want wisdom — a understanding of big-picture complexity.

Computers can't bring us to these goals: only loving, skillful, and wise humans can. But they can help.

Our school needs to position itself between two extreme camps in educational reform: call them the "hi-tech" and "Waldorf" camps.

The "hi-tech" people talk as if computers in classrooms will bring the messianic age. In my estimation, this is sheer silliness. (Actually, I wonder if these people even believe their own rhetoric.) In fact, technology in classrooms poses real, often-ignored dangers: computers employed poorly can distract students.

On the other side, the Waldorf people talk as if banning computers is the only smart course. I'll admit that my basic prejudices are with this side, but it seems clear to me that computers (and screens more generally) can play a big role in helping us achieve the schools we dream of.

We need to synthesize the best insights of the pro-tech and Waldorf positions.

Alas: I have no idea what that brilliant synthesis is. Consider this post as my way to move, haltingly, toward it.

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2. Age of Distractions

So, the question is: What place should screens have in our school? ("Screens" here means desktops, laptops, tablets, e-readers, smart phones, TVs, and projectors.)

Any attempt to answer this needs to start with a diagnosis of our modern situation:

We're surrounded by machines which can help us do things that were never before possible — and which are very distracting.

To put that in economic terms: we live in the middle of an arms race for our (and our students') attention. This battle is well-funded, and its major combatants don't hesitate to exploit our base instincts —

Bright, glowing things grab our attention. Bite-sized nuggets of information grab our attention. All things instant grab our attention.

The modern glowing rectangles that we surround ourselves with — now combined with social media — are brilliantly constructed to grab our (and our students'!) attention.

Distraction isn't necessarily bad. I'm no kill-joy. In fact, I hope that I'm the opposite of a kill-joy: the problem with schools is that they're too lifeless, too pointless, to unpleasurable.

It's no wonder that people turn to screens to bring happiness into their lives: distractions, obviously, can be wonderful! (Sci-fi novels are a personal favorite distraction. They're my self-medication for chasing away the occasional blues.)

Distractions are good when they whisk us away from situations that are both unpleasant and unhealthy.

Distractions become dangerous, though, when they take us out of situations that are healthy and hard.

If we succeed in our goals for this school, it will be healthy and hard: we'll be leading kids to train their minds and bodies, to explore the world that existed before them and imagine the world that will exist after them, to ask the big questions of human life.

These things will be pleasurable: we're striving to make a school for human flourishing. But that doesn't mean that every one of the things kids do will be pleasant in the short-term. Deep learning can be frustrating, even painful. And when it is, students (and faculty) will be prey to distractions — specifically, to other tasks that are more gratifying in the moment, but less wonderful long-term.

Call it the algebra / Angry Birds divide. Algebra: pleasant long-term (say, from the ability to grok abstract patterns, and be accepted to college), sometimes not so pleasant in the short-term (say, after running my head against multinomial division for the fourth time, and failed).

Angry Birds: pleasant in the short-term, but of less pleasure in the long-term.

In the short term, Angry Birds will win out every time. And we only live in the short term.

Pause for a brain science moment! This tendency to obey present whims more than future rewards, dubbed "temporal discounting" in the classy argot of researchers, is one of the better-attested facts of human psychology, and also (as Gary Marcus argues in his wonderful book Kluge) of vertebrate psychology more generally. It's a weakness built deep into the human brain. If ours is a school that takes human nature seriously, we need to take this seriously, and plan accordingly.

Which is all to say: we're surrounded by technology that takes advantage of some of our inbuilt weaknesses. We should be cautious about this.

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 3. Personal Screens in the Upper Grades

Clay Shirky, bald celebrity theorist of social media (and professor at NYU), recently caused a stir in schooling circles by reporting that he's banned screens in his course on the Internet.

This is the sort of prattle you'd expect from an anti-tech curmudgeon. That it's coming from one of the Internet's major cheerleaders is the surprising bit.

Shirky reports that his decision came gradually, and grudgingly. (If you haven't already read his essay at medium.com — "Why I Just Asked My Students To Put Their Laptops Away" — you'll very much want to!)

He noted that the distraction seemed to be building, as more personal technology entered the classroom:

the practical effects of my decision to allow technology use in class grew worse over time. [all emphases mine] The level of distraction in my classes seemed to grow, even though it was the same professor and largely the same set of topics, taught to a group of students selected using roughly the same criteria every year. The change seemed to correlate more with the rising ubiquity and utility of the devices themselves, rather than any change in me, the students, or the rest of the classroom encounter.

He found, too, that his occasional requests to put the technology away for a time seemed to bring more relief than disgruntlement:

I’ve noticed that when I do have a specific reason to ask everyone to set aside their devices (‘Lids down’, in the parlance of my department), it’s as if someone has let fresh air into the room.  The conversation brightens, and more recently, there is a sense of relief from many of the students.

His decision to switch from a policy of "allowed unless by request" to one of "banned unless required" had two reasons.

First, he realized that the basic conflict isn't between students and teachers, but between students and themselves. His students typically want to pay attention, typically want to learn, but find doing that hard to do. Shirky explains:

Jonathan Haidt’s metaphor of the elephant and the rider is useful here. In Haidt’s telling, the mind is like an elephant (the emotions) with a rider (the intellect) on top. The rider can see and plan ahead, but the elephant is far more powerful. Sometimes the rider and the elephant work together (the ideal in classroom settings), but if they conflict, the elephant usually wins.

Haidt's metaphor, recall, is central to our conception of good schools. We want to be a school for elephants and for riders. Shirky continues:

After reading Haidt, I’ve stopped thinking of students as people who simply make choices about whether to pay attention, and started thinking of them as people trying to pay attention but having to compete with various influences, the largest of which is their own propensity towards involuntary and emotional reaction. (This is even harder for young people, the elephant so strong, the rider still a novice.)

Shirky's calling his college students young — and he's right. But we'll be working with six-year-olds! What's true for his students may be even more true for ours.

Regarding teaching as a shared struggle changes the nature of the classroom. It’s not me demanding that they focus — it’s me and them working together to help defend their precious focus against outside distractions.

That line might be one I commit to memory. We can't afford a romantic view of students — we need to be realistic about their cognitive limitations. We need to be willing to be somewhat paternalistic in order to help them live up to their ideals.

And while I [teach], who is whispering to the elephants? Facebook, Wechat, Twitter, Instagram, Weibo, Snapchat, Tumblr, Pinterest, the list goes on, abetted by the designers of the Mac, iOS, Windows, and Android. In the classroom, it’s me against a brilliant and well-funded army…. The industry has committed itself to an arms race for my students’ attention, and if it’s me against Facebook and Apple, I lose.

If it's our faculty versus an army of app designers, we'll lose. And the students can't help it — it's their basic psychology working against them. We need to help students help themselves.

This was the first insight Shirky had that made him adopt a less libertarian policy of in-class technology use. The second was that when one student uses a distracting technology, many other students may be distracted.

He cites a study with the alarming title "Laptop Multitasking Hinders Classroom Learning for Both Users and Nearby Peers":

We found that participants who multitasked on a laptop during a lecture scored lower on a test compared to those who did not multitask, and participants who were in direct view of a multitasking peer scored lower on a test compared to those who were not. The results demonstrate that multitasking on a laptop poses a significant distraction to both users and fellow students and can be detrimental to comprehension of lecture content.

Shirky summarizes:

There is no laissez-faire attitude to take when the degradation of focus is social. Allowing laptop use in class is like allowing boombox use in class  —  it lets each person choose whether to degrade the experience of those around them.

There's one thing that Shirky conspicuously doesn't mention in his essay: the effect of students' personal tech on their teachers. I assume he leaves this out because he's striving to come off as a likable guy. Or, I don't know, maybe it's because he's just crazy-unflappable.

I don't have either limitation, so I'll state this plainly: student tech can be horribly distracting for us teachers.

Maybe this is because I'm ADHD? (If so, that doesn't excuse the problem: we'll have other teachers who live on the ADHD side of humanity.) Maybe this is because I hate rudeness? (Well, ditto.)

Either way, if we want to hang onto our wonderful teachers, we need to be as kind to them as possible.

Teaching is a damned hard job.

And when a teacher has poured hours into researching a topic, has put their soul into making the topic clear and compelling, it's not kind to them to allow students to interrupt everything by getting pinged by Facebook.

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4. Computers in the classroom.

Our school needs to, once again, position itself between the extremes of the pro-technology and anti-technology camps in education. But so far, I probably sound like some crazy person, rattling on (as I am) about the dangers of personal screen use among the kids these days.

Fair enough!

I sound, in other words, like a Waldorf teacher.

Waldorf schools, for those who don't know, grew out of the ideas of Austrian educator and philosopher Rudolf Steiner. They were launched in Europe after the close of the First World War as an attempt to create a wiser, more caring society that wouldn't destroy itself in an orgy of violence. (Would that they would have succeeded more fully in that…)

My love of Waldorf schools is qualified — I think they get some important things wrong — but I am zealous for some of their ideals: developing empathy, cultivating artistic skills, and promoting play — all without shucking aside the vision of an intellectual curriculum.

(For more on Waldorf schooling, positive and questionable, check out its Wikipedia page.)

And Waldorf schools shun technology. No computers, or screens of any kind, in the school.

Well, maybe that's not surprising: hippie schools, and all that. What might be surprising is that this anti-technological stand is popular in Silicon Valley, or at least so the New York Times reports.

In Matt Richtel's "A Silicon Valley School That Doesn't Compute" (clever pun there, Mr. Richtel), we learn:

The chief technology officer of eBay sends his children to a nine-classroom school here. So do employees of Silicon Valley giants like Google, Apple, Yahoo and Hewlett-Packard.

But the school’s chief teaching tools are anything but high-tech: pens and paper, knitting needles and, occasionally, mud. Not a computer to be found. No screens at all.

The counterintuitive shock of this is similar to the "tech prof bans tech" example above. If a school in, say, Gambia lacks computers, it's not news. If a school in Silicon Valley lacks computers, it's news.

More:

While other schools in the region brag about their wired classrooms, the Waldorf school embraces a simple, retro look — blackboards with colorful chalk, bookshelves with encyclopedias, wooden desks filled with workbooks and No. 2 pencils.

Here's where the word I've been using — "technology" — becomes problematic: blackboards are technology. So are encyclopedias, desks, and pencils. (At one point, each of these was the leading, bleeding edge of technology — the innovation that was ballyhooed to transform the world!)

A school can't ban technology, because schooling itself (along with all the parts that make it up) is a technology.

But unlike glowing screens that transport a single individual away from the substance of learning, these technologies are the substance of learning.

Waldorf parents argue that real engagement comes from great teachers with interesting lesson plans.

'Engagement is about human contact, the contact with the teacher, the contact with their peers,' said Pierre Laurent, 50, who works at a high-tech start-up and formerly worked at Intel and Microsoft. He has three children in Waldorf schools, which so impressed the family that his wife, Monica, joined one as a teacher in 2006.

Education is a human-thing: obviously, an idea that's in harmony with our nascent school!

And yet, and yet: I suspect the Waldorf schools are going too far. Or let me reel that back, and only speak to our school: I think that we can achieve even better results by bringing in some modern technology with care.

Computers (and modern media more generally) let us do things that would be impossible otherwise. We'll use screens to accomplish what would otherwise be miraculous.

• We'll watch the subtle flapping of a great white shark as it launches itself out the water to pursue a seal — in slow motion.
• We'll hear the hooting, howling, and whooping of the central African Wodaabe tribe as they perform their competitive courtship dances.
• We'll savor old films, entering the imaginations of some of humanity's greatest storytellers.
• We'll luxuriate in beautiful music.
• We'll immerse ourselves in paintings and photography.
• And we'll Google questions, and learn coding, and create databases of our favorite ideas and quotes.

These are miracles. These go beyond anything schools could have done a century ago — or even a decade ago.

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5. So:

We can create the best schools that the world has seen. We can have classrooms that bring students into delight, meaning, and long-term, collective flow states.

On the one hand, this will require being careful of what distractions that we let students bring in.

And on the other, this will be helped by using technology to disport us to places that we couldn't otherwise reach.

A new metaphor: plant knowledge

One of the things I struggle to explain to people — particularly to other educators — is the utter centrality of knowledge in thinking.

We think about things, but we also think with things. Brilliance, wisdom, creativity — all these come from having learned about the external world. When we learn, we internalize — we take what's outside us, and re-create them inside us. 

This is knowledge.

Knowledge is the re-creation of the external world inside our own cranial jelly.

This seems straightforward — and yet. The troublesome thing is that, for a hundred years or more, a crucial contingent of educational thinking has stood against teaching information.

As an unfortunate-but-typical example, take Maria Montessori. Montessori truly was an educational visionary; I'm still playing catch-up to her insights. And yet she displayed her own brand of anti-knowledge:

Education should no longer be mostly imparting knowledge, but must take a new path, seeking the release of human potentials.

Note that there's something true, beautiful, and good about this quote: education should be (must be!) about the development of human potential. 

The error comes when developing potential is seen as opposing imparting knowledge.

Gaining knowledge is the quintessential way of developing potential — at least, it is for humans. (Bears, maybe, would develop potential in other ways — eating more salmon and blackberries.)

If we move away from imparting knowledge, we'll move away from a more human education.

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And yet — when educators speak against "knowledge acquisition" as the goal for an education, they really are saying something true and beautiful and good.

What they're worried about is a method of schooling that sees children as nothing more than computer hard disks to be filled up with data. This truly is an anti-human education. But moving toward the opposite extreme is little better.

Our idea for a new type of schooling is about knowledge — deep knowledge. That's implicit in our trinity of goals: love, mastery, and wisdom.

As St. Augustine noted, "You cannot love what you do not know; you cannot know what you do not love." As cognitive psychologists have demonstrated, expertise is a type of knowledge. And as philosophic traditions the world over have long understood, living rightly derives from a knowledge of what the world is like — the word "wisdom" even comes from the Proto-Indo European root meaning "to know."

There's long been an educational battle between the pro-knowledge and knowledge-skeptical camps. It's not going away. We don't need to identify with the pro-knowledge camp: it's been misunderstood by the other side for too long.

Rather, what we need to do is open up a third way between them. We need to work out how to talk about the glories of knowledge acquisition done rightly, and the evils of knowledge acquisition done wrongly. We need to figure out which metaphors and verbiage and stories show people how wonderful knowledge can be, and how essential it is to developing love, mastery, and wisdom.

This is an important task for our movement: schooling won't be able to lead kids toward genius, toward wisdom, toward creativity until someone figures out how to make knowledge attractive again.

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I'm working on this, but here's my conception for now: use an organic metaphor. 

Instead of memorizing material, or acquiring information, we might talk about planting ideas. 

Planting stories. 

Planting knowledge.

This can take us into a nuanced understanding of the plusses and minuses of storing information internally, rather than externally. The splendid educational writer Annie Murphy Paul (whom everyone should be reading) writes about a recent division made by philosophers on the differences between "O-memory" (organic memory: your brain) and "E-memory" (electronic memory: your smart phone). 

Her brief article brilliantly takes us beyond the well-worn education turf battle. She writes:

With our computers, we can search, store, and check. With our minds, we can browse, elaborate and reflect.

Each memory system, that is, has its advantages. We should use both:

If we make note of an upcoming appointment in our smartphone, its digital calendar won’t misremember the date or time, as our all-too-fallible brains are apt to do. On the other hand, if we enter the germ of an idea in our phone’s note-taking app, we won’t return after a busy weekend or a good night’s sleep to find that the idea has grown new connections and layers of meaning, as an idea planted in our organic memory is likely to do.

(Thanks for the metaphor, Annie!) 

A Taste of Big Spiral History: Grade School

Enough theorizing: let's explore what we could actually do with "Big Spiral History"!

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Big Spiral History in Grade School

Our first graders might start puzzling over the idea of a beginning. They'd hear (and maybe illustrate, re-tell, and act out!) a number of creation myths: that of the Ojibwe, the Sumerians, the Koreans, and so on.

We'd follow that up with our scientific origin myth, the Big Bang, and then progress onto a miscellany of wonderful, kid-friendly stuff from the past: fierce-looking armored fish, dinosaurs, pterosaurs, mammoths, saber-toothed tigers, cave paintings, mummies, Aesop's fables, Arabian and Indian myths, and Alexander the Great.

(I'm embarrassed, once again, at how compact I'm making this. There are whole worlds to explore in the pre-300 BCE slice o' pie — more than enough for a wonder-filled first grade experience. If you're noticing gaping holes — why isn't he mentioning THIS! — please forgive me.)

Second graders, picking up the story at around 300 BCE, might continue with the tales of China and Rome, Scheherazade and the Arabian Nights, knights and castles, Marco Polo, and Norse myths. There is enough of delight in these 1,800 years for us to craft a vibrantly intellectual curriculum.

Third graders, continuing at around 1500 CE, could listen to and re-tell the stories of ninjas (ninjas!), the Indian invention of the number ‘0,’ Montezuma and Cortes, Marie Antoinette, the abolitionist movement, and World Wars 1 and 2.

Fourth graders, continuing at 1945 CE, could hear and reflect on the stories of Mohandas Gandhi, Rachel Carson, and Nelson Mandela. They could relive the first scaling of Everest, the exploration of the Marianas Trench, and the Moon landing.

Fourth-graders might also go on to imagine what the future will bring. Even if they don't get particularly thoughtful at this stage — if they, say, imagine nothing more realistic than robot butlers and flying cars! —  I think that this might still be a useful experience. Just broaching the question is important. What will life be like when they’re older? What will life be like for their children and grandchildren? A Big Spiral History curriculum puts these on students' radar.

In general, then, in this introductory cycle we should teach only history’s “greatest hits” — the brightest bits of human (and cosmic) experience. Our goal is to create the historical anchors we'll return to later, and most importantly, to get the students wanting more — wanting to return to these topics to expand their understanding.

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But how can we teach the past to grade schoolers?

As we've mentioned before, the now-dominant model of social studies has snipped genuine history out of the early grades. It's done this because of a pernicious idea suggested in the mid-20th century: that young children simply were not able to conceive of the long-ago and far-away.

That this is not only false but ridiculous has been demonstrated repeatedly by scholars of education. It's also demonstrated every time a child picks up a book about dinosaurs or gleefully describes how Egyptians removed the Pharaoh's brain through his nose (ick!). It's a dead idea. 

But it seems good to describe how we can help students learn about the world of long-ago and far away — particularly since the answer to this question is "the Cognitive Tools of Imaginative Education!" These will play a large role in every part of our school — and, bizarrely, I haven't written about yet.

The basic idea of these tools, once again, is that the basic problem of education is getting students to connect their full minds — their thinking, their feeling, their perceiving — to something in the environment (a math problem, say, or the Declaration of the Rights of Man).

And the genius move of Imaginative Education is that this is precisely the same problem as every culture has had to solve in order to pass itself along to the next generation. The basic problem of education has already been solved. It's been solved by every successful culture over the last ten thousand years (or more).

And it's been solved by employing specific cultural–cognitive tools. Certain of these tools are perfectly suited for our youngest children. Kieran Egan calls these tools, taken together, the "Mythic Toolkit." Among them are stories, abstract binary opposites, metaphors, rhymes, jokes, puzzles, and mysteries. Let's take these one at a time.

We can teach through stories.  Stories enchant; stories captivate. We can tell real stories, of course, using information that we have access to: the tale of Tutankhamen, the tale of the Roman Empress Theodora.

We can also tell hypothetical stories about events we lack direct information about: How was the cat domesticated? How was the alphabet invented?

We can also tell silly make-believe stories that allow us to get into the daily life of the past: we can invent a team of time-traveling grade schoolers who zip back and forth through the ages on wonderful adventures. How did the explorers who first crossed the Bering Strait survive? What was life like in the time of the Buddha?

We can also teach through (get ready for a wordy phrase) abstract binary opposites. Psychologists have long noted that young children bring order to their world by dividing their experiences into opposites: hot and cold, big and little, crooked and straight. This simplifies — it makes manageable what is otherwise impossibly complex.

Ironically, if we're on the lookout for abstract binary opposites to simplify reality, we can structure our lessons to be far more complex than any textbook-driven lesson can be. Kieran Egan writes that even a single opposition like "freedom/oppression" opens up a wealth of real historical material:

"Whether at home, in their neighborhood, in the classroom, or in the school yard, children already deal with matters of freedom and oppression. To use and elaborate those concepts while learning that their world has gone through great struggles and problems analogous to their own makes simple educational sense….

[Using this, students can learn about] Greeks and the Persian Empire, or West Africans and the slave trade, or the ancient dynasties of China, or the struggles, triumphs, and disasters of men and women and communities down the ages." (The Educated Mind, p. 42-3)

We can teach through metaphors. How can students understand how long it's been since the dinosaurs died? Well, by stretching out their arms: if the Big Bang started on the tippy-tip of their left middle finger, and if time ticks on as they move to the right, then the dinosaurs died out only one third of an inch from their right-most tip.

Whoa. The world is freakin' old. 

Metaphors can do that.

We can teach through rhymes. 

The Spanish Armada met its fate In fifteen hundred eighty eight.

Or the macabre —

In sixteen hundred sixty six London burnt like rotten sticks.

Or the provocative —

In fourteen hundred ninety two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.

In fourteen hundred ninety three, Columbus stole all he could see. 

Rhymes hijack the brain: they stick with you. We can make good use of them.

We can teach through jokes. Granted: to our adult ears, many kid jokes sound truly terrible, provoking groans, if not outright pain. (Q: Why were the Dark Ages so dark? A: Because there were so many knights!) But kids often find them zany and thrilling.

We can teach through puzzles. How many parts of a buffalo could you use? How could the Inuit survive in Greenland, while the "technologically advanced" Vikings could not? How did the Egyptians build the pyramid? Similarly, we can teach through mysteries. Mysteries are puzzles whose answer is still unknown. We don't need to be obsessed with steam-rolling the world with our own understandings: we can teach an appreciation of mystery.

Egan writes:

"Too often we represent the world to students as known, and we represent their task as to accumulate the knowledge that we already have.

This is, of course, a part of education, but when we forget that our small circle of secure knowledge is bounded by a vast ocean of mystery, we make the educational task rather dull.

When we make it clear that we are engaged in a journey of discovery, surrounded by mystery, we better represent what the educational task is really like, and open up possibilities and wonder." (Learning in Depth, p. 132)

History abounds in mystery. And we can use mystery to make kids hungry for the next Big Spiral History cycle to come.

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In Sum:

As a systematic treatment of the world, this first cycle certainly leaves much to be desired — but full coverage isn't what we're trying for.

The goal in these beginning grades isn’t, again, to “cover” everything, but rather to “uncover” some of the most exciting parts of the story. Our hope is to instill in students’ minds an appreciation of the epic arc of cosmic and human history and a sense of the profusion of vibrant stories that are stuffed inside them. If students in the early grades miss or forget even some large parts of the story — Sumer, perhaps, or the advent of multicellular life — all will still be well.

Kieran Egan's Mythic toolkit affords us rich historical learning filled with emotions and meaning in even the earliest grades. Filled with a developing interest in history, our students, entering fifth grade, would now begin the tale anew.

Next: Big Spiral History in Middle School