Teaching is more than my profession. It is my passion. My joy. My calling.

Lately, though, I wonder if that calling has left me. The joy certainly has, and the passion is fading.

I’ve thought about why this is, and there are probably more reasons than I can really nail down. Some are of my own making, and I’m working on correcting those. But two other significant ones keep coming to mind: changing attitudes and what I’ll call the Linus Syndrome.

Teaching was once a respected and noble profession. No longer. Lately when I read news reports about public response to public education, there only seems to be blame and disdain, and much of it ultimately falls on teachers. I’m beginning to wonder how long it will be until “teacher jokes” are as ubiquitous as lawyer jokes.

Even more significant, though, is the Linus Syndrome. Next year marks the 50th anniversary of the first appearance of the Great Pumpkin in the comic strip Peanuts. Every year at Halloween, Linus eagerly awaits the arrival of the Great Pumpkin, which he believes will rise from the “most sincere” pumpkin patch to deliver toys to the world’s children.

Linus is of course the only one who believes this, but this fact doesn’t quell his sincere faith in the Great Pumpkin’s existence. Year after year, he sits surrounded by lesser orange squash, believing that this time his patience would be rewarded.

I’m beginning to feel like Linus. I believe, year after year, that this is the year I can make more of a difference, that as I sit among other educators who want to change the lives of the children with whom they work, we will collectively see real opportunity to make that change. But year after year my waiting is for naught, and I’m getting weary.

I’m not the only one. (I’m not sure, by the way, whether that makes me feel better or not.) Will Richardson wrote on Wednesday about his own weariness:

I am so tired of waiting for something, at this point almost anything, to meaningfully change in our collective story of education. I look at my own kids every day and grow more and more frustrated with their education, one that is not unlike millions of other kids in this country and one that is no doubt degrees better than millions more…. We generally seem to have lost our imagination when we think about education. And to me, that’s just such a huge irony right now. In the twenty-five years since I entered public schools as a teacher there has never been a time with so much reason to dream, to imagine the possibilities.

There are days I feel like I’m the last holdout in my district, that I’m the only one left who still believes in the Great Pumpkin, and that the rest of my colleagues smile and walk on, shaking their heads and wondering how I could still be so blindly idealistic to think that education could possibly have anything to do anymore with making kids’ lives better.

And with all of that, is it any wonder that we’ve stopped dreaming of what can be? Of all the teachers I’ve had the privilege of speaking and working with in the last few years, I doubt that many of them can even now really dream of a different way, one that celebrates learning and connections and independence in the ways that many of those networked classrooms we see. They might be able to visualize it, but I don’t think many see it as a potential reality in their classrooms, in their schools. There are too many reasons why it can’t happen. Too many obstacles. Too little vision.

I want to still have hope. I don’t want to succumb to the Linus Syndrome. I don’t have any illusions that I’ll be the one to find the cure, but I’d like to think that I can be part of the conversation that contributes to it.

A tweet from Vicki Davis the other day lifted my spirits and helped me see the value in perseverance:

“Many of the great achievements of the world were accomplished by tired and discouraged men who kept on working.” Don’t give up!

The problem is that nearly every day, I read something in a journal or a blog, or hear a conversation at school, or see a news report, that squashes the hope right back out, and it’s hard not to give up.

For now, I’m staying in the pumpkin patch. But I’m not holding my breath that the Great Pumpkin is going to show up.

Yesterday I wrote about feeling conflicting emotions about truly making a difference in education. This morning I read an article by Lisa Parisi which scores a point for hope against futility. If enough teachers could really get on board with this and really live differentiation instead of just talking about it, maybe we could start to turn the ship. Now how do we coordinate the effort and have more impact? One blog post at a time, I suppose.

The more I think about this idea of looking at students in terms of their future instead of our present, the more I experience two simultaneous yet conflicting emotions: hope and futility.

The hope comes when I hear other educators promoting similar ideas. Barbara Barreda wrote today about this, commenting that when she sees alumni returning to her school,

…who they were as students and who they have become often are very different. Their growth, wisdom and direction sometimes challenge the assumptions we made when they were students. We have had many pleasant surprises but what is troubling me is that I was surprised! I was chagrinned that I still held some underlying assumptions about these students.

Barreda also refers to an article by Damien Lopez which argues convincingly that we need to think about education for elementary students in terms of preparing them for college. It isn’t that we expect every child to go to college, but that we have to stop assuming that certain children won’t.

Both of these articles highlight the importance of seeing a child from her future instead of determining that future based on our present.

But while I feel hope about the possibility of seeing this kind of shift in perspective, I can’t help but feel that the whole attempt is futile. There are so many forces pushing back on educators to prevent just this kind of thinking. As just one example, consider the way we evaluate the effectiveness of schools today. The entire system is explicitly designed to take our attention and energy off of long term goals and look only at incremental improvements in a few narrowly defined categories.

I believe, like many others, that education is in the midst of a significant change. My hope is that I will live to see a better system on the other side of the change. My fear is that the change process will crush my passion for educating children and drive me out of the profession. My dream is that I would rise above the fear and make some kind of difference. There is a plaque on the wall of my house that displays a quote by Janos Arany, “In dreams and in love, there are no impossibilities.” May it be so.

Over the last couple of days, I’ve had an interesting email correspondence with Jackie Winch. It turns out she discovered the blog post in which I quoted her, and felt obligated to add more to the story. In the process, I’ve found that behind the celebrity we see on Ace of Cakes is a fascinating story that I think perfectly highlights the importance of gifted education and differentiated instruction.

What she shared struck me as very typical of the kinds of things I have seen in gifted students I have worked with:

There is a lot to say about Duff.

I do remember in McLean, VA where Duff went to the school for the gifted and talented for grades 3-6 that many of his classmates were “unique”. Many of them were socially different, “weird”, troubled misfits. I questioned my wisdom for putting him in the program because I didn’t want him to be like them. Some had an elitist sense of entitlement and some were just oddballs. Luckily Duff kept his cool and did rather well despite the rather ugly family life he was experiencing at the time with our divorce.

Often I have heard teachers describe their students as “weird” or “different” or “troubled,” and they were often right. But these same teachers, at least the best ones, still saw them as human beings and realized there was great possibility in each one of them.

In third grade, Duff wrote a paper on “The Body”. I was otherwise occupied with more serious matters and didn’t even know about the assignment, much less have time to help him with it. I received a call from his teacher to come to the school. This paper was…[a] masterpiece. It was all in his own words, and [when we read] the section entitled “Private Parts” we nearly laughed our heads off. The teacher gave him an A. I asked why the A, because of all the lack of attention to capitalization, grammar and spelling, etc. He said the school didn’t want to bog him down with “details” wanting to foster the creativity. The details would come. Later. I’m still waiting…

What is most enlightening about this to me is looking at it in reverse: knowing about the successful adult first, and then looking back at the child. It’s easy now to look at Duff, the creative chef and highly successful businessman, and see his childhood behavior as just quirky, even necessary to his development and creative expression. But it would have been easy at the time to lump him into the “troubled” category and to write him off as a lost cause. If we could look at a child and see the adult he would become, we would almost certainly treat him differently.

I believe that’s an essential part of our job as educators, and one that often gets lost in the day-to-day minutiae of teaching. We must learn to see the potential—the real potential—in every child, and figure out ways to help him realize it. We must learn to help him imagine the possibilities and, like Duff’s third grade teacher, do whatever we can to inspire him to realize those possibilities.

That’s not to say we shouldn’t have standards or expectations or that we ignore the “details.” But the relative importance of those details will not be the same for every child:

There’s another thing which comes to mind: Duff’s older brother made very nice grades in school and worked for them. All Duff had to do was show up and he’d make similar grades. When he asked me why I didn’t get as excited over his grades I said that he was given a gift of “easy learning” and that I was only going to be impressed with what he did with it—it was up to him. I didn’t push for grades as much as his father did, but I know he understood exactly what I was telling him. What kept him balanced as opposed to some of his classmates, is that he never lost sight of the importance he felt by pleasing others. I think that’s the lesson sometimes not addressed in the schools—the balance of pleasing oneself coupled with the importance of social acceptance.

Step back and look at the big picture. Let’s see the children our classrooms from the perspective of their futures, not our present, and design their learning experiences accordingly.

According to Tom Greenspon, a family therapist and expert on perfectionism, teachers and parents need to understand four key things about perfectionism:

1. Perfectionism is emotional. It can be a vicious cycle for the perfectionist: making a mistake causes fear, which makes the student want to be even more perfect, leading to anxiety which causes more mistakes.
2. Perfectionism is social. Perfectionists may feel that they won’t be accepted unless they are perfect.
3. Perfectionism doesn’t make people more successful. It is not the same things as striving for excellence.
4. The environment influences perfectionism. Perfectionist behavior may be learned from the behavior of others around them. A chaotic environment also contributes to feelings of needing to be perfect.

Here are a few thoughts, then, on how teachers can deal with perfectionists in their classrooms:

• Create an environment of acceptance. Avoid “zero-tolerance” policies in your classroom. Provide second chances whenever appropriate. Set high, reasonable expectations, but show understanding and acceptance when students inevitably don’t meet them. Focus on positive character qualities in each child rather than on shortfalls.
• Celebrate imperfection. Let students know that not only are mistakes are normal, they are expected and even essential to the learning process. When a student makes a mistake, celebrate the effort, or point out any good thinking that went into it. Tell stories about learning that happened because of a mistake, and point out that school is a place for learning, not for performing. Give each student a “mistake pass” to allow them to make an error any time without penalty. Or maybe give them two. Give students full credit for a mistake if they can tell what they learned from it.
• Allow play time. Gifted children are still children, and letting students play without a specific goal allows them to explore thoughts and ideas without the pressure to perform. As any Kindergarten teacher will tell you, a great deal of learning takes place during unstructured play, and it is just as true for older students. The form of the play will look different: gifted students in upper elementary and beyond will play with ideas, words, and images, and numbers. Let it be what it is; don’t try to force it into an academic box.
• Show your own flaws. We’re not talking about airing dirty laundry, here. Just let students see that you aren’t perfect yourself, and give yourself the same second chances that you give students. Make mistakes in class (deliberately if necessary) and allow students to correct you without penalty.

What else do you do to help your perfectionists loosen up a little?

Caught in the Fence, by Neal Sanche

In conversations with several teachers this week I have observed the same scene repeated. They have highly verbal gifted students in their classrooms who, when asked to write, produce minimal output. Their first draft is often their only draft, and the process seems excruciating.

We speculate (admittedly without any direct evidence or research) that for these students, the mechanics of writing get in the way, slowing down the process to the point that the student’s thoughts race ahead of the pencil. In fear of losing the ideas that flow so readily, the students give up rather than try to keep up.

With some experimentation, we have created an approach which seems to be working well to get these students putting out written work which matches their verbal abilities. We have installed Audacity, a free open-source sound recording and editing program, onto several classroom computers. The students have the option for each assignment to begin the writing process verbally instead of on paper. They simply record what they want to say, save the file, then later can go back and transcribe their words onto paper or into a word processor.

The results have been wonderful. Even some students who didn’t seem to have particularly strong verbal skills have asked to use the program and are producing some of their best work this way. Teachers have caught me in the hallway or pulled me aside in the classroom to tell me excitedly that they are seeing great results already, and that students who were formerly reluctant to write are now eager to get to their next writing project.

The experiment is still in fairly early stages, and I’m sure we will run into glitches along the way, but so far, it seems to be a win-win!

There is a tug-of-war going on in education. Let me say at the outset that I’m fully aware the debate isn’t as clear cut, nor are the debaters as cleanly divided, as I present things here. The debate does exist, though.

At one end of the rope we have a team decrying the collapse of rigor and discipline in schools, asking for more accountability and a return to focused instruction on the essential skills of reading and math. Michelle Rhee is one of the outspoken anchors for this approach. She bluntly disparages any approach to education that, in her words, is too “touchy-feely.” If it doesn’t result in improved student performance, it doesn’t belong in her schools. And she isn’t afraid to ruthlessly remove anyone or anything that she feels will slow down progress towards her goal of making Washington, DC, schools the best in the country.

At the other end we have those who believe that the basics have changed, and that students now need less emphasis on routine skills and more on creativity, problem solving, and interpersonal relationships. Karl Fisch gives just one example of the change here. (As an aside, if you haven’t seen his “Shift Happens” video, stop reading now and go watch it. Really.) Daniel Pink argues in his book A Whole New Mind that this shift will require an entirely different kind of education: one that indeed focuses on the right-brain skills of social collaboration and creativity. See this post of his for one example.

But isn’t this the whole point of differentiation? Dean Shareski clearly explains why we can’t have just one approach to education for all students. We need to stop looking at which system of education is going to be more effective for all students, but what each individual student needs to thrive and learn.

Consider this statement by Jackie Winch, speaking about her son, Jeffrey Goldman. Goldman has a gifted IQ, and in high school spent a good portion of his spare time doing his artwork in public—as graffiti.

I could have been a little tougher, maybe? But when he was down there graffiti-ing with the most fabulous graffiti you’ve ever seen—it was really creative—how can you get mad at that? I’m out there taking pictures of it! I’m aiding and abetting! That’s what a mom does, I think. I mean, that’s what this mom did.

I could see what was happening. You can’t give children lines like a coloring book. You can’t say, “You can’t go beyond this line.” That is the opposite of what you’re trying to get people to do. You’re trying to get them to think without limits. Without lines, without borders, without anybody saying stop. You can’t force creativity. You have to give it room to happen.

Goldman was not a good fit for his school system and got in trouble with mall security regularly enough that they knew him by name. Chances are that you do too. He is now known as Chef “Duff” Goldman, and is the owner of Charm City Cakes and star of the Food Network show, Ace of Cakes.

Despite his poor performance in school, he is a success. It is his creativity and charisma that have brought him to where he is.

What do we do with this? Duff found a way to thrive despite his schooling. How many students don’t rise up like he did and achieve their potential?

I’m not arguing here that we need to throw out rigor and discipline in school. Quite the contrary. There are many students who need it and thrive on it and for whom the structured environment provides them security and a safe place to grow. Indeed, kids like Duff could not succeed without discipline.

For just as many students, rigor imposed from outside stifles them, cramps them, and cuts off the shoots that they try to send out into the world. For them, the discipline comes from within, and grows out of the relentless pursuit of their passions. They don’t need more boundaries, they need freedom to explore.

If public schools had the luxury of hand-picking the students who would best fit into their modes of instruction and the design of their curricula, then we could allow each team in the tug-of-war to develop its own schools and cater to the students who would fit best. But since we don’t, I don’t see any option other than to diversify, differentiate, and provide a menu of options for both curriculum and instruction which will address all the needs of all the students who find their way through our doors.