ArtBlog

Lucky to Have Had A "Velvet Hammer"

In the Fall of 1980, it would not have been farfetched to imagine that I am dressed in a blue oxford button-down shirt with the top button unbuttoned, green rep tie loosened a studied two inches, tan corduroy jacket, narrow cords, sockless microbe-rich top-siders, longish hair, seated at a black-topped laboratory table listening to Christine Breuker outline the terrifying curriculum of the upcoming year of AP Bio.  I probably smirked behind my hair, thinking that this was going to be easy.  I probably thought to myself, "I'm destined to go to Harvard Medical School.  I've been studying medical textbooks since I was a kid. I'm going to blow this course away."  Little did I know that of the three statements, only the second proved to be fact.

Ms. Breuker was - and is - a study in contrasts: soft voice, mild demeanor, even-keeled, but with a steely gaze that echoes the precise line of the bridge of her perfect nose, large perfectly perfect teeth, and perfectly sharp jawline.   She didn't have to raise her voice, able to finely tune a spare choice of words that would have made Hemingway proud to effect a bludgeonly full body impact or a surgical, nearly painless slice to instantly rightsize one's inflated ego.

My school graded on a one to seven scale, seven being the highest.  I specialized in fives.  AP Bio was no exception.

I seem to remember that after the midterms, Mrs. Breuker asked to see me.  "Art," she said, "I don't understand what's going on.  I'm disappointed in your performance.  You have such potential and are wasting it on this class."  I probably smirked.  "You may think you are a hot-shot in this school, but to the world who only sees your grades, you are second-rate at best.  You are better than that."

It took months for it to sink in, but with less than a month to go before the AP exam, I met Fear.  I meticulously re-outlined the entire course materials for the year, filling two spiral notebooks with single-spaced outlines and diagrams that represented the entire year's curriculum.  On the morning of the exam, having stayed up most nights for several days, I declared myself finished and played tennis with the future Dr. Dan Katz. 

The exam was not memorable.  The sleep afterwards was.

Weeks later, when I received a five out of a possible five, I felt on top of the world   I'm sure I gloated, smirked, and engaged in all the peacock behavior an 18-year-old guy could possibly muster. 
With the AP score representing 90% of my year's grade, I received a seven. 

Shortly before graduation, I ran into Mrs. Breuker on campus.  "Art," she said.  "You are really a disappointment.  Just think what possibilities lie in that mind of yours if only you apply yourself." 

For years I think I resented that ego-shrinking comment.  It probably helped provide the fuel I needed through semesters at Yale when I was working full-time to survive and on the verge of failing academically. 

I don't know if I have ever lived up to Mrs. Breuker's confidence in my ability to apply myself.  But it has given me a deep respect and admiration for those who do apply themselves.  I think of her every time I say to a young employee, "Just think of what is possible if only you apply yourself!"   And I hear those words in my mind almost every day.

Thank you Mrs. Breuker for helping to instill in me the meaning of excellence.  I'm lucky to have had my own Velvet Hammer.

Christine Breuker has taught for over three decades at my alma mater, Western Reserve Academy in Hudson, Ohio.  I wrote this in honor of her retirement.

Experts are just part of the solution

Perhaps because my mother continually received calls from teachers dismayed at my "underperformance" in school, it was not a surprise to learn that my older son was being assigned a reading specialist, since he was having trouble keeping up with the other children in his first grade class.

I was willing to carve out 90 minute slots for people I didn't know.  Why wasn't I willing to carve out slots for my children, especially when they needed me?

So Ben started coming to my office Mondays and Wednesdays after school to work on homework.  It quickly became apparent that reading was a big issue.  He didn't want to do it.  It made him feel stupid.  He felt the other kids were making fun of him.  It was hard.  He was forced to read "baby books", where he still failed. 

The last statement made me see red. But in fact his reading was awful.

One day, I held up a book in front of me so I was peering over the top.  Something told me to watch his eyes as he read.  Instead of making linear left-to-right movements to follow text, his eyes appeared to jump all over.  As I watched, the apparently random pattern began to resolve into the pattern of the illustrations. 

So I retyped the text of the book into a Word document, one sentence per page, 36 point type.

I put it in front of him.  He read, with great difficulty.  My heart sank.  But as he was dressing to go home, he said, "Dad, reading was a lot easier without the pictures.  Can we do it again?" 

Over the past few months, we've read, covering the pictures with white paper. 

And why not?  This is a boy whose visual intelligence is truly precocious.  Little kids' books are richly illustrated.  What's more interesting - the images or the text?  Clearly, for Ben, it's the images.  I can't blame him.  Covering the pictures is the only way to make the text interesting.

A technique for teaching reading is to have kids focus on the pictures for clues to the words meanings.  But for kids like Ben, the pictures are more interesting and complex in context than the words. 

Everyone missed this. 

Experts are taught to be experts in a technique or a set of techniques.  It's impossible to become deep in multiple areas, which means that experts are self-limiting in their breadth.  They're the 80 in 80-20 solutions.  For us 20s, it is imperative that we use our own wits to arrive at practical solutions. 

So I don't blame them, but it makes me worried about the kids who don't have parents who can take work hours to focus on their issues, or who don't have access to resources who can help figure out the unique needs of each child.  It's left me with an overwhelming sense of how truly lucky I and Ben are and a question about how to help the kids who don't have his advantages.

Words of Encouragement

500,000 encouragements by age 3.  That's what the average child of a professional hears...and 80,000 discouragements.  Nearly the reverse is what the average welfare child hears: 75,000 encouragements to 200,000 discouragements.  Juicy tidbits like this have led Paul Tough's What It Takes To Make a Student - New York Times to occupy an unusually prominent position on my desk since it was published on November 26, 2006. 

"Creativity is as important as literacy..."

Several months ago, an acquaintance emailed me a link that I haven't been able to forget.  Thanks, James.

Many years after Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences has become part of the educational canon, where is education today?  After all, as Sir Ken Robinson says, "Education is to take us into this future we can't imagine...this year's entering students will be retiring in 2065." 

Why hasn't the system adapted?  Because we parents haven't adapted.  In fact, we are paralyzed by fear.  On the one hand, we have enthusiastically embraced the idea that we are educational consumers, unwilling to let anyone lead us into an alternative educational future for our children.  On the other hand, we are imprisoned in a system where failure to follow increasingly stringent guidelines can preclude college - and presumably - life success.

If we want our administrators to change, we have to reward them for changing and give them the support to buck the literacy-obsessed educational bureaucracy that exists today. 

In other words, courage is going to have to come from parents.   

Link: Sir Ken Robinson on TED Talks.

Link: Howard Gardner on multiple intelligences, five minds, and more.  One of the greatest contemporary thinkers on educational theory.