Tag Archives: Education

No Sense of Urgency

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Friday, June 10th, 11:30a.m. Sitting up high in the stands in the Olympia High gymnasium. Awards assembly. Surrounded by fellow parents of seniors. Make contact with fourteen on the other side of the gym and hold my iPad up and taunt her with it which she and her friends find entertaining. This early adopting stuff is kinda fun, but it would be awfully embarrassing if an administrator confiscated it.

But I digress. 11:50a.m. and we’ve gone from 165 students with a 3.5 gpa to 80 with something higher to the top 20 gpaers.

Nineteen young women.

Why aren’t parents, educators, ordinary citizens of all types more concerned with the growing gender gap in academic achievement?

Where’s the urgency?

The Negative Utility of Losses

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At present I’m privileged to be working with twenty-eight hard working people who just completed a year-long teaching internship. Beginning teachers typically fall into a common psychological trap. Hell, what am I saying, I still do it too and I’ve been at it for a quarter century. All but the most callused teachers fall into the trap of letting a few negative student encounters shade one’s thinking about an entire class or course.

For example, when I think about my sixteen writing students last semester, I know at least twelve learned a lot, improved, and had a positive experience. One to four, probably not so much. One of my current students is the mother of one of my first year spring semester writing students. She confided in me that her daughter said, “He doesn’t like the way I write.” Insert knife. Twist. I really work hard to help students develop more positive attitudes towards writing and to develop self confidence so that really bummed me out. Then my thought process becomes, “Nevermind loser that the majority of the class had a positive experience, a few didn’t.”

Why is it that you can have a neutral or positive working relationship with nine students, but the negative one with the tenth takes away from the entire teaching and learning experience?

I was wondering this while reading The Investor’s Manifesto by William Bernstein, page 108 specifically. He writes, “It makes little sense that we should care about a bad day or a bad year in the stock market if it provides us with good long-term returns. But because of the importance of our limbic systems, we care—very, very much—about short term losses. We cannot help it: That is the way we are hardwired. Behavioral studies show that, in emotional terms, a loss of $1 approximately offsets a gain of $2; in the unlovely language of economics, the negative utility of losses is twice that of the positive utility of gains.”

Or five or ten times that depending on how negative the teacher-student relationship.

Conceptual convergence. I love the phrase “the negative utility of losses” because it helps me better describe the abstract psychological (or actually biological) phenomenon that plagues most teachers.

My natural tendency would be to strategize on how to combat negative utility of loss thinking, but if it’s biological is it inevitable? Is resistance futile?

Cultivating Passion

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From The Global Achievement Gap by Tony Wagner.

“Michael Jung. . . believes that ‘there are only three reasons why people work or learn. There’s push, which is a need, threat or risk, but this is now a less plausible or credible motivating force [in the industrialized countries] than it has been, even for the disadvantaged. There’s transfer of habits—habits shaped by social norms and traditional routines. But this, too, is becoming weaker now, because of the erosion of traditional authority and social values. That leaves only pull—interest, desire, passion.’ I understand Jung to be talking about three kinds of human motivation. Physiological need is one—the need for food and shelter and so on. But he suggests that with high rates of employment and government safety nets, this is less of a motivational force in many young people’s lives than it once was. The desire to adhere to social norms is another human motivation that is weaker than it used to be, because traditional sources of authority, religion and family, have less influence on young people today. Jung believes that it is the third motivational force—interest, desire, and passion—that increasing numbers of young people are seeking and responding to in school and at the workplace.”

We tend to be products of our environments so I wouldn’t describe the transfer of habits/adherence to social norms argument quite like Jung and Wagner. The influence of significant others, for better or worse, is still there. My clearest childhood memories of my dad are of him pacing the house as he memorized his sales presentations.  Five or six at the time, the impact was indelible. Every family has momentum, whether positive or negative. Because of my parents, ours was positive which is not synonymous with perfect. If a critical mass of adults in a young person’s life aren’t working and planning for a better future, we can’t expect that young person to care much about school work, continuing their education, or making a positive difference in the world.

If we agree that young people are mostly motivated by interest, desire, and passion, as I’m inclinded to do, we need to rethink teaching, coaching, and parenting. In his book, Wagner tells Kate’s story, a senior in high school. “Kate suffered from too much of the wrong kind of adult authority,” Wagner writes. “She was overmanaged for success—success being narrowly defined as getting into a college her parents and teachers considered to be top-notch and having a high paying job.”

What good are high standardized test scores and good grades if a student lacks specific interests, desires, and passion? What if they learn to “do school” but fail to become passionate about anything?

The seventeen and eighteen year-olds that I know are striving to get into the best colleges possible. But what makes one college better than another? US News and Report offers pseudo-empirical answers based upon numbers colleges get good at manipulating, but there’s more art to educational excellence than science. Maybe the best college is the one where faculty and staff help students discover their interests and desires. They advise and teach passionately; consequently, students become more passionate about writing, or a language, a culture, an environmental challenge, a historical period, a social movement, global politics, law, or medicine. I’d like to see USN&R measure staff and faculty passion for advising and teaching.

If I did a focus group with my daughter and her twelfth grade friends, I suspect all of them could identify things they like, but only a few could explain in any detail what they are most passionate about and why. And surely those few that are ahead of the curve need guidance on how to turn their passions into purposeful vocations. My wish for my daughter and her friends is that over the next four or five years they become more passionate and begin translating their passions into meaningful, rewarding work.