Editor’s note: This commentary is by Peter Berger, an English teacher at Weathersfield School, who writes “Poor Elijah’s Almanack.” The column appears in several publications, including the Times Argus, the Rutland Herald and the Stowe Reporter.
Mr. Wear was my high school gym teacher. I met him when he painted our house. I was 11, so he wasn’t my teacher yet, but he seemed to take an interest in me. This surprised me since I was the kind of kid who played second base because I couldn’t make the throw to first from anywhere else, and he was, well, a gym teacher.
If he hadn’t been a Marine sergeant in the South Pacific, as the story went, he should’ve been. He was weathered, strong and straightforward. Eventually I made it to high school, and whenever he’d see me in the hall, he’d wrap me in a headlock and pretend to punch me in the stomach. “How tough are you, son?” he’d inquire.
Mr. Wear believed in daily calisthenics, entire class periods of calisthenics. One particularly agonizing morning, 30 minutes into the drill, it was time for yet another set of leg lifts. I was lying there in torment, flat on my back, stomach cramping and legs trembling six inches off “the deck,” when Mr. Wear hustled by, clapping and counting. He stopped long enough to prod me just under my ribs with his track shoe. “How tough are you, son?”
I don’t think 60 boys ever hated anybody as much as we hated him that morning.
Except I left class that day with a sense of accomplishment I haven’t forgotten 50 years later, all because Mr. Wear wouldn’t let me off the hook. He taught me what stamina meant. He taught me daily lessons in perseverance. He taught me what it felt like to work hard.
So did my parents and my community. That’s how I learned to push myself, however imperfectly.
Where would Mr. Wear be today? The headlock would probably land him in court. As for his drill sergeant manner, the prisoner is sentenced to 30 days of self-esteem workshops.
Or maybe not. It seems to have finally dawned on some of education’s great minds that self-esteem might not be such a blessing. Maybe it’s not so good that American students score high internationally in math self-esteem, even as their actual math scores show they don’t know much math. Maybe there’s a connection between the decades we spent outlawing failure and American students’ widespread complacency. I’m not suggesting we set out to bruise children’s spirits, but maybe we’ve been overusing “Awesome” and “Good job” when the effort was unexceptional and the job wasn’t that good.
Naturally, we can’t acknowledge we’re readopting traditional virtues like diligence that for decades we’ve tried to eradicate. We also can’t simply practice a little more honesty about students’ effort and the quality of their work. No, instead we need to launch yet another initiative.
Welcome to “noncognitive skills,” the latest addition to schools’ exhaustive and exhausting list of responsibilities that used to belong to somebody else. Based on “evidence” that’s “been building for years,” experts have startlingly determined that students’ attitudes, values, goals and “motivation” affect how well they learn. These purportedly groundbreaking traits include “grit.”
If growth mindset’s guaranteed success doesn’t sound like “grit” to you, other advocates condemn noncognitive “personality traits” like grit as a “racist construct” because they teach “children in poverty” that the “only way they’re going to succeed is by working harder than their peers who are middle class.” Instead, these students need more “slack” and “abundance.”
Of course, to measure these allegedly new qualities, we’ll need some new “instrumentation,” otherwise known as more tests. Fortunately, the Educational Testing Service and the National Assessment of Educational Progress are already on the case. Unfortunately, they’ve run into difficulty designing their questionnaires. Believe it or not, most fourth-graders couldn’t state how proficient they were at “thinking abstractly” because they “didn’t know what ‘thinking abstractly’ meant.”
Don’t worry, though. Once officials get the questions right, they’ll be judging schools based not only on academic skills, but also on criteria like whether students exhibit “social awareness” and a “growth mindset.”
In case you’re nostalgic for self-esteem, growth mindset’s founder bills her trademarked method – the school kit retails for $6,000 per school – as the “new science of success.” She reassuringly preaches that “you can be as smart as you want to be.” Students who fail to master a unit or skill receive a grade of “Not Yet.” That way they’re “not ashamed” because they know they’ll succeed “the next time, or the next.”
If growth mindset’s guaranteed success doesn’t sound like “grit” to you, other advocates condemn noncognitive “personality traits” like grit as a “racist construct” because they teach “children in poverty” that the “only way they’re going to succeed is by working harder than their peers who are middle class.” Instead, these students need more “slack” and “abundance.” Like-minded experts complain when grit is equated with “completing homework assignments, paying attention in class, and taking standardized tests seriously.” They’re against mandating attendance because “if a child feels he can’t be in class, it’s probably for a reason.”
Sometimes children do need a breather to deal with burdens they shouldn’t have to bear, and I’ve got little use for standardized testing. But on the whole, yes we should expect students to show up in class and complete their homework. We should expect them to pay attention and make their best effort on all their work, including tests.
Regardless of color or household income, we each need to push ourselves beyond what’s comfortable. If you labor under disadvantages, you might need to work even harder. That’s the unfortunate nature of a disadvantage.
That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t also offer extra help to go with your extra effort. But “voice dictation” and “text to speech” software won’t cure illiteracy. Nurturing “creativity” won’t produce a nation of citizens who can read, write, work with numbers, and lead informed, productive economic and civic lives.
Slack and extra help aren’t what’s missing from public schools.
Public education has strayed so far from reality that when presented the simple truth that hard work and perseverance contribute to achievement, some experts think they just discovered it, while others want to squander more time and money testing it. Students and teachers are stuck in the looking glass land between one corps of experts who preach that “you can be as smart as you want to be” and another who consider “working hard in pursuit of [your] goals” and “paying attention in class” racist expectations.
Things certainly weren’t perfect in Mr. Wear’s day. Even then some of us didn’t work hard.
But at least when he asked us how tough we needed to be and how hard we needed to work, most of us, including our parents and teachers, knew what the right answer was supposed to be.
Today we can’t even agree about that. Until we can, all the Common Cores, standardized tests, and brave, new initiatives won’t cure our disease.
The post Poor Elijah’s Almanack: Grit and other virtues appeared first on VTDigger.