by Samuel Levin
He read it cover to cover. He told us on Friday, a little embarrassed but also I think happy, that he had had to read every day before and after soccer practice to get it done. But he said he identified with Darl. And, in fact, he had written an alternate ending from Darl’s perspective in jail. He still wouldn’t read it aloud to us. But he said it was okay if Mirabelle read it for him.
I can easily imagine Dominic’s experience in first grade. I’ve seen so many kids, especially boys, hang their heads lower and lower as the rest of the group learns to read. They’re mortified that they can’t do what comes so easily to the others. They begin to dread reading time. The more they dread it, the more they hold books, and reading, at arm’s length. But it’s not just the reading itself that becomes such a source of gloominess. It’s the sense that they’re not part of the group. If that’s tough when you’re six or seven, imagine how excruciating it is when you’re fifteen or sixteen. In our culture, if you can’t read easily, you might as well wear a dunce cap around school. No wonder Dominic didn’t want to read. And the more he didn’t want to read, the less reading experience he got. By high school he still hadn’t become a skilled reader. He had missed out on all the stories, characters, plot twists, and ideas that other kids had access to. His inner landscape was constrained by what he hadn’t read, and his social landscape was therefore limited too. Dominic’s intellectual experience had been defined by his limitations. Now, for the first time, it could be defined by his interests.
The question educators ask themselves all the time is, “How late is too late?” Can a sixteen-year-old become interested in books if he doesn’t read easily? No teenage boy is going to willingly work on reading skills. It’s dreary and humiliating and feels pointless. But, given a chance to be part of a book discussion, a boy like Dominic might tackle it from the opposite direction. He might begin with the ideas and stories, and with the chance to share those experiences with friends, he might also get better at reading.
When I was in high school and college, I could tell you, on any given day, what the other people in my family were reading. If I didn’t know, I felt strange—like not knowing whether they had a pet or not, or whether they had been sick. When I met a new friend, or dated someone, the acid test was finding out what books they liked. For me, this was as important a step in becoming close as telling someone about my childhood.
The most important thing people get out of college is not preparation for a particular kind of job. Instead, at its best, college gives students a sense of intellectual community. Eating together in the dining halls and talking after class gives students the feeling that they share a frame of reference—one rooted, at least partially, in the world of books, research, and ideas. But it’s not only that. College gives students the habit of backing up opinions with evidence, offering reasons, asking questions in order to learn more, and using written material to learn about things beyond one’s immediate experience. In other words, far beyond specific technical skills, the value of college comes from the intellectual habits it instills.
By choosing books for one another, revealing to their classmates their favorite stories, becoming closer friends through reading, the kids in the Independent Project had created their own reading club. What teenager wouldn’t find a book club of his peers more engaging than a class in which a teacher assigned a book and decided what aspects of the book to discuss? Turning reading into a social experience in high school is a great way to get lots more students interested in books. But it may also pave the way for a lifelong interest in sharing ideas with others—in creating an intellectual community. When a kid chooses a book for her peers to read, she puts herself on the line. She wants the others to see what she saw in it. When a kid reads a book his classmate loves, he learns something new about her, and because of her, he can see something important and new in the book. It’s true that the most avid readers can happily read book after book all by themselves, without ever talking to anyone about it. One of the glories of reading is that it can be so solitary. But few adolescents are that solitary, and the ones who already read that way don’t need to do it in school. Kids like Dominic need to read and think with others. And here I don’t mean in a room with others, or simply reading the same book as others. I mean communing over books.
Here we come to another barrier the group in the Independent Project happily crashed their way through: the barrier of ability groups. The most literary kid in the group, Dakota, assigned one of the great works of American fiction. The least literary kid in the group, Dominic, was perhaps the most profoundly affected by it. The idea that you should talk only to those who are just like you is such a bad idea it’s strange we ever think it has a place in school. Quite the opposite. Dakota learned something new about a favorite book. Dominic learned something new about fiction. And neither could have learned what they did without the other.
When Dominic sunk his teeth into As I Lay Dying, he finally knew what it felt like to be a reader, to have a book really speak to him. And that, of all things, is the most potent and enduring accomplishment of high school.
“Intellectual” is one of those words, like “curiosity” or “creativity,” that is easy to embrace in name only. Nearly all teachers and school administrators, and most parents, too, agree that it’s great to be curious, that kids should love learning, that creativity is valuable. If you ask principals whether they think it’s important for students to learn how to think, not one of them will scoff and answer, “Don’t be silly. They’re not here to think, just to follow rules.” Most educators believe they fully endorse the value of creative, rigorous thinking, and many educators believe that’s what they’re helping their students reach for (though there are still some who are convinced the purpose of school is to memorize facts).
But if you go into a school and look for signs that all the teenagers, not just the ones headed to good colleges, are tangling with complex, interesting problems, you’ll be hard-pressed to find what you’re looking for.
It’s not enough to say that you’re going to assume everyone is an intellectual. Paying lip service to a certain attitude or point of view is a long way from putting it into action. So how do you make your school a place where everyone is treated as a thinker?
Make sure there is a wide range of students with a wide range of interests. Find a way to make them responsible for sharing their interests, areas of expertise, and thinking methods with one another. Hitch them to one another’s ideas by having them assign books, critique one another’s research, explain why they each love what they love. Ensure that they become intellectually close to one another by designing the day in such a way that students depend on one another for the material they use, the questions they ask, the responses they construct, and the reasons they give. Make their ideas interdependent.
Make sure at least one person in the group really feels comfortable asking questions, modeling ignorance, and improvising in the pursuit of knowledge. Keep intellectual topics at the center of the day and don’t confuse intellectual with academic. Make time for serious discussion, and hold everyone to that, until it becomes a habit.
Encourage a wide variety of materials—Charlotte’s Web, Many Moons, As I Lay Dying. It ensures that there are ways for every single student to stretch in a new direction, and it creates a plurality of perspectives—the key to deep thinking.
And finally, don’t confuse “student run” with “nonacademic,” or “creativity and engagement” with “unintellectual.” There is no dichotomy between self-directed learning and intellectual rigor. At their best, they are one and the same.
6
REQUIRE MASTERY
So far, we have identified certain kinds of intellectual work that we think are essential: asking and improving questions, reading novels, sharing knowledge with others. We have also stressed how important it is for every student to figure out some questions that they really care about delving into. But none of these will amount to much unless the students attain de
pth of knowledge and advanced skill in a domain. One of the most potent things a student can experience in high school is the chance to get better and better at something, know more and more about it, until he is something of an expert in that field. Everyone should master at least one discipline: a complex and significant body of knowledge that entails a specific set of skills and results in work (artistic, intellectual, or practical) that is useful and meaningful to others. Step six is the simplest one to take, the most difficult one to take fully, and the most important one to execute well. But we hope that this chapter will make it easier to do just that.
When I was thirteen, in eighth grade, I had a problem. I had completed all the math and Spanish classes at the middle school, so I needed to take some courses up at the high school. There were various complications. The walk from the middle school to the high school took about ten minutes and required crossing a main road, walking through the grounds of the elementary school, and climbing a small hill. The schedules of the two schools were not aligned, so I couldn’t just go up to the high school during middle school math and languages time. And the periods at the two schools were different lengths, meaning that when I came back down to the middle school after my high school classes, I’d have to wait around for an hour and a half for my next class to start. Fortunately, everyone seemed fine with me making the long journey on my own, unmonitored. It turned out that despite the misalignment between the schedules, I’d only be missing my electives, like music and art, and everyone at the school was happy with that too.
It was the last issue—the hour and a half of unstructured time at the middle school—that threw everyone into a tizzy. “An hour and a half?! What the hell’s the boy going to do all that time? Do we even have a procedure for dealing with something like this? Is it even feasible?” At least, that’s what I imagined the middle school administration saying. I don’t really remember the details. There was a lot of hand-wringing about how I might spend that time, and everyone was worried. Except me. I thought it was great. I could do whatever I wanted! Sky’s the limit. I asked them if I could spend the time working on a project, and they said sure, skeptically.
I decided I wanted to spend the year studying a pond.
Every Monday after school I walked through the woods to a large pond near my house that had been split in two by a beaver dam. The pond wasn’t on my parents’ land, and the very first Monday I was there, I heard crunching in the leaves behind me. I turned around to find the man who owned the property. He didn’t live there, but he had a hunting cabin in the woods. He had a golden retriever at his side and a shotgun in his hand. He told me I was lucky I didn’t get shot (though perhaps what he meant was, he was lucky I didn’t get shot). He said if I planned to be wandering around in his woods, I better get permission first.
So every Sunday night, I rang his house and asked him if I could visit the pond the following day between 3 and 5 p.m. That first Monday in September I spent forty minutes down at the pond. I didn’t see much. By June, I was spending several hours there and could fill pages of my journal with everything I saw.
During the week, in my free time at the middle school, I researched any new plants or animals I had seen and wrote up what I learned along with any relevant observations I had made. By the end of the year, I had a two-hundred-page manuscript—a natural history of the pond. But more important, it was the first time I had a taste of what it was like to master something. I knew that pond better than anyone else in the world. I had become an expert on the comings and goings of its flora and fauna. I knew more about the species found there than I knew about anything else. And above all, I had fallen deeply, truly in love with something that wasn’t a person.
When I had finished the manuscript, I sent it to my hero, an evolutionary biologist and entomologist named E.O. Wilson. I never expected a reply. But I got one. He sent a note and said he enjoyed my book. And then he said, “First your magic pond, then the world.”
“My magic pond,” I remember thinking. “My pond.”
What I got a taste of with the pond, I feasted on with Project Sprout. As the garden grew, so did my attachment to and investment in it. My freshman year I was captain of the JV basketball team and played shortstop for the baseball team. By junior year, I had quit both for the garden. I missed family trips, science fairs, and parties. In four years of high school, I never slept past seven on a Saturday morning in the fall or spring, because that was when we had community volunteer days. And every year, the spring started earlier and the fall ran later. Of all the thousands of photos that were taken at Project Sprout, my very favorite one is a photo of seven of us Sprouters, thigh deep in two feet of snow, pruning raspberries.
I learned what it was like to become completely devoted to something. To learn everything I could possibly learn about it. To give every minute of my free time to it. Once again I had fallen in love with something that wasn’t a person or an animal, but an endeavor.
Along the way, I learned how to plan an event for hundreds of people, lead a team, organize a workforce, and inspire people for a cause. I learned how to build a greenhouse, deliver a speech to ten thousand people, roast a pig, and grow vegetables by the ton. I learned about working with my peers, working with my non-peers, teaching little kids, having my colleagues turn on me, building something from the ground up, and learning to give away something that was my life for four years; and, most important, I experienced failure after failure after failure.
I became aware of all these benefits only much later, when I was in college. I never thought at the time, “Wow, I gained a lot from the pond study and Project Sprout; other people should learn those skills as well.” I just thought, “Wow, this feels good.” And I wanted all of my friends to experience that feeling too.
That’s why mastery, in the form of the Individual Endeavor, was a central part of the Independent Project day. I had seen people in school flitting about from subject to subject, always skimming the surface, never learning what it was like to really take hold of something and make it their own. And that didn’t seem fair. It seemed to me that everyone in school should have the opportunity to master something. Everyone should find their magic pond.
From the time I was twelve until I was nineteen, I spent my summers running a camp for little kids. At first it was your garden-variety summer camp—I took the children swimming and they painted and made collages, acted out plays, sang songs, and ate lots of snacks. I didn’t even drive, so my mom had to help when I wanted to take my little campers on a field trip.
I loved everything about my summer camp—preparing for the kids’ arrival, figuring out how to talk to the parents, making the kids’ snacks, and coming up with cool activities. But after the first few years, it seemed a little flat, just a string of nice pastimes. Even then, I had some inchoate intuition that my little campers were being only half tapped. And it bothered me. I thought about it during the summer, and I thought about it in the long months that followed.
Sometime during the winter before the third year of the camp, I had a mini-revelation. I realized that the best part of my own school year was the plays we performed. I loved acting, but I also loved the long rehearsals, the intense pressure of having to get the costumes and set ready, the eleventh-hour crises when one of the actors got sick and the understudy had to take over. It seemed to me, even as a fifteen-year-old, that working together on those plays brought out the best in all of us. It dawned on me that my little campers might love the same thing, which was why the very next summer, my camp became a children’s theater.
Even now, in my late fifties, that funny little children’s theater stands out as one of the best things I’ve ever done. During those teenage summers my camp completely absorbed me. In early spring I’d begin planning for the coming season—designing a mailing, finding ways to advertise, and looking for space I could rent. Once summer began, I’d get up at 6 a.m. and begin preparing, so that everything would be ready when the children arrived. Long after they
had gone home each afternoon, I would think of new activities, arrange field trips, prepare projects, and buy supplies. I loved it, I was good at it, I wanted it to succeed, and I would do anything to make it better.
Years later, when my first son, Jake, was miserable in middle school, I began to think back to those thrillingly arduous and absorbing summers. They saved my adolescence. And it dawned on me that Jake, too, needed something that would soak up all of the simmering frustrations, yearnings, and mental unrest of adolescence. In his case, it was sculpture. He began working with an artist who lived nearby, helping in her studio once a week. For his brother Will, on the other hand, 85 percent of his teenage years was spent spilling his blood and guts onto a basketball court or baseball diamond. And in Sam’s case, the garden was his life.
More and more research shows that teenagers who spend time each week completely consumed in some challenging activity are the ones most likely to thrive over the long haul. And though some of the subjects described in these studies match the iconic image of the talented teen devoted to cello or the school newspaper, some are, instead, completely obsessed with car repair or orienteering.
Teenagers crave mastery. And why wouldn’t they? Mastery feels good, and so do the steps required to attain mastery. Standing on the cusp of adulthood, what would lure a teenager forward? Autonomy, sure, but just as compelling, a sense of competence and self-assurance. In other words, expertise. What does it take to become a young adult eager to gain expertise?
Fifteen years ago, if you’d walked into any faculty lounge, you’d hear the most devoted and compassionate teachers talking about their students’ self-esteem. Parents and educators had been convinced (primarily by psychologists) that children could do well only if they felt good about themselves. A struggling child was a child with low self-esteem, and a thriving child, so the conventional wisdom went, was one who probably had a robust sense of her own self-worth. It’s no exaggeration to say that during those years teachers talked about self-esteem as if it were a bodily substance that could be measured, like a person’s temperature or BMI. I heard teachers say things like, “Well, his self-esteem is way down. We’ve got to get it higher,” and, “She has good self-esteem. She got that in fourth grade.” I always imagined the mercury rising and falling on the esteem-o-meter.