A School of Our Own

by Samuel Levin

  But then there was a backlash. Psychologists began to discover that praising kids all the time is not the best way to improve a kid’s sense of self (and often has unintended negative consequences). Don’t misunderstand. Having confidence and liking oneself are undoubtedly important. We know from decades of research that uncertainty, timidity, and tentativeness often prevent learning and lead to failure. But children don’t become confident or determined by hearing a lot of praise. They get those qualities by doing well at difficult tasks, accomplishing goals they’ve set for themselves, mastering skills, and seeing meaningful fruits of their labor. Teenagers, bullshit detectors that they are, know the difference between being told they’ve done a good job and actually doing a good job.

  Angela Duckworth has shown that grit—the ability to persevere, stay focused, and delay gratification—rather than praise is essential to academic success. Her studies show that in fact grit is a better predictor of high school grades than intellectual capacity. Teachers (and parents) have taken this and run with it. Kids need to focus; they need to try hard and then harder; they need to settle in for the long grind.

  But this love affair with self-control, effort, and hard work begs the question: grit for what? As psychologist Marlene Sandstrom says, grit without passion becomes grout. And yet the opposite is just as problematic. A general sense of excitement about learning and a “feel” for various topics will get a student nowhere if he or she doesn’t know how to dive in and toil.

  The experience of a student of mine at Williams College, named Manuel, captured this perfectly. He told me that his parents, who were born in Mexico, left school in the sixth grade and immigrated to the United States when they were young adults. His mother had been paralyzed from the waist down as a young woman. Manuel grew up in a trailer park in Texas, along with his two brothers. His father did maintenance at the high school he attended. His life, in other words, had been extremely tough, and his family had faced one kind of obstacle after another. When Manuel described his life story to me, sitting there in the bucolic and privileged campus coffee shop in Williamstown, a student at one of the most demanding and elite colleges in the country, I was stupefied. How, I asked him, had he found his way to Williams from that background? He said, “I had a lot of determination. My parents worked hard, and I knew I’d have to work hard, too, to achieve anything.” I told him that I, too, thought effort mattered, but I was worried that the national preoccupation with grit was steering everyone toward an even grimmer (and futile) approach to education. He smiled. “Of course,” he said. “I was hell-bent on becoming an immigration lawyer. For me, all the difficulty I faced getting here was worth it because of where I was headed. It’s not enough to be determined, to sweat. You have to have something in mind.”

  When I think back to my summer theater program, Small Potatoes, what made it such a pivotal experience was not simply that I found it absorbing—movies, dancing, and boys were also absorbing. It was that Small Potatoes offered me a really engrossing set of complex challenges—something I could become a master of by working hard, by throwing myself into it, and by thinking about it all the time.

  Students in the IP were supposed to develop an initial idea for their Individual Endeavor over the summer. We then spent the week of de-orientation talking to others, getting feedback, investigating possibilities, and finally helping each student to settle on an endeavor. For some people, this came easily and naturally. These were the kids who already knew what they cared about and perhaps had experience pursuing hobbies and interests in a serious way outside of school.

  Tim had always loved making short skateboarding and music videos. He had also always loved making beats on his computer. So he said he was going to write, direct, and produce a short film, and write and produce a score for it as well. It seemed perfect. It was ambitious, required a diversity of work, and could easily take a semester to complete. Mirabelle, who was passionate about fighting domestic abuse and rape, decided to write, produce, and air a podcast series on rape, with the goal of raising awareness and helping victims find support. Again, it seemed ideal. She’d have to write, interview people, do research, learn how to get radio time, learn how to edit a podcast, and all of it related to something that was really meaningful. From jump street I could see how endeavors like these could be extremely successful and transformative.

  But that wasn’t the case for everyone. Dominic couldn’t think of anything. He was a curious guy, easily taken with odd and kooky momentary interests—a day of worshiping Tesla, a day of learning how to cobble shoes, a day of collecting artifacts on the railroad tracks—but he had never experienced pursuing a single thing for an extended period of time. During de-orientation week, every hour he seemed to flip-flop between different ideas for an endeavor. “I’m gonna build a boat,” he’d say at lunch. And then at 2 p.m. he’d say, “Nah, I could never do that in a semester. I’m gonna hike all the trails around my house.” And at the end of most days, he’d say, “Forget it, there’s just nothing I’m that interested in.”

  I remember every time he said that, because each time I’d get this niggling fear that the teachers in the CSC meetings had been right. “What about the kids who just don’t have any interests?” they had said, and I had countered ferociously that every kid could become interested in something, if given the chance. But each time Dominic said, “I dunno, man, there’s just nothin’ I wanna do for a whole semester,” I’d think, “Maybe I was wrong.”

  On Friday afternoon of de-orientation week, he said, “I’m gonna learn how to play the piano. I’ve always wanted to learn an instrument, so now’s the time.” Well, at least he had settled on something. Playing the piano fit the requirements for an Individual Endeavor. Dominic wanted to do it, and it could take a whole semester.

  But every day after lunch he’d disappear. At a certain point, I started to worry. This was someone who had been seriously considering dropping out before joining the Independent Project. Maybe he was just going home every day and smoking a joint and playing video games. So I would occasionally ask him, as casually as I could, if I could hear him play. “Nah, man,” he’d say, avoiding my eyes, “not good enough yet.” And so my worries grew. A couple of times I went to the band room to see if he was playing the piano there, and he wasn’t. Eventually, thinking that this might have become a serious issue, I brought it up with Tim. Tim knew Dominic better than I did, and I thought he might have an idea what Dominic was up to.

  “Well, I’ll say this,” said Tim. “If he is fucking around, it’s not in any obvious place. I’m all over the school getting footage for the film, and I’ve never seen him in the afternoons either.”

  So one day I set out to look for him properly. I wandered the whole school, checking empty classrooms, the auditorium, the band room (again), and the cafeteria—all with no luck. I was just starting to think that he really was going home in the afternoons, which I’d have to address with him, when I heard a very faint noise that sounded like it might be a piano. I followed it and came upon the long-forgotten music storage room, the one that had once been suggested as a home for the IP.

  I crept up to the door and poked my head in. There, in the corner of the room, his back to me, sitting at an old wooden piano, was Dominic. It would be a stretch to say he was playing the piano. He was hammering out the same chord progression, over and over again, and every time he messed up, he’d start over. Occasionally I’d hear him grunt, “Fuck,” and once or twice he hit the keys.

  I stood there, feeling a little guilty for what amounted to spying on him, but also completely transfixed, for maybe fifteen minutes. He must have played the same sounds a thousand times. He never wavered, turned from the keyboard, or checked his phone. This was someone whose teachers thought he had ADHD, and yet here he was, with a degree of focus and persistence I’ve seen on only a few occasions, in anyone.

  For the next few weeks, I would swing by the music storage room and watch Dominic. I never told him that I had found hi
s hiding spot, and at times I felt guilty. But it was so amazing to watch him I couldn’t help myself. He was in there every afternoon, banging away at the keys, learning to read music, trying over and over and over again. And bit by bit, he got better.

  Eventually I stopped watching. After all, Dominic deserved better than to be checked up on. Occasionally, after that, I would ask him if I could hear him play, and he’d always have the same answer. “Not good enough.” I suspected that maybe he would never be particularly good at piano. But that didn’t matter. He was learning what it was like to devote himself to something day in and day out, to try to master it.

  At the end of the semester, everyone had to do a presentation of some kind (it could take any format) to demonstrate what they had achieved with their Individual Endeavor. The presentations would be public; one during the day, with the whole school invited, and one at night, with parents and members of the community invited. Dominic was going to do a jazz performance.

  I hadn’t heard him play since I stopped standing by the doorway to the music storage room. Now I sat in the audience, surrounded by people, with Dominic sitting at a piano onstage, wearing his usual baggy clothes and flat-peak cap. I found myself growing more and more nervous. What if he couldn’t do it, and he felt like his endeavor was a failure?

  But then he started, and for the next twenty minutes the auditorium was filled with beautiful jazz piano. He read the sheets; he played; he improvised. No one moved an inch, except for the occasionally irresistible applause at a particularly impressive set. At the end, there was a standing ovation, and Dominic’s face lit up in a big smile. “Give a bow!” yelled Tim, clapping ferociously, and Dominic did, looking embarrassed and proud.

  I remembered something Dominic had said a few weeks before. We had all been talking about whether the Independent Project would survive; whether the School Committee would approve the pilot and give it permanent status. Dominic had suddenly piped up and said, “This isn’t a pilot for me. This is real school. This is actual learning.” I found myself thinking, “You’re right, Dominic. And this is real jazz. This is actual music.” And I found myself hoping that this wasn’t the last time I heard Dominic play the piano.

  Dominic went on to start a jazz band.

  Sam comes from a long line of school lovers. When I was little, my mother helped start a K–12 school in eastern Long Island. Having left New York City and her job as a social worker to live with my stepfather on his farm in Sagaponack, New York, my mother found herself looking for a new vocation. She had come across two books that set her on a new path: How Children Fail, by John Holt, and 36 Children, by Herb Kohl. Both books brought to life the excitement and possibility of progressive education—taking fear out of the classroom, replacing dull tasks with interesting work, and giving children a lot more freedom. My mother and her new friends in Long Island set out to build a school based on the ideas she found in those books. So, at age seven, I left the one-room schoolhouse I had been attending to come to this exciting new school. It opened its doors in September 1968, with thirty-five children and seven teachers. It was bursting with life. I have vivid memories of that year: fourteen-year-old Tina Cato getting sent home for wearing a miniskirt with an American flag sewn across her butt; reading D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths and coming to our festival as Aphrodite, for which I wore my mother’s white satin nightgown and a blond hairpiece; learning what the word “observation” meant in science; and planning a fair to raise money for the next year.

  In the years that followed, the school embodied the core tenets of progressive education: learning how to learn was more important than mastering particular content, not all students had to learn the same thing at the same time, and teachers should teach what they loved most. This last came in part from an idea that Jerome Bruner vividly put forth in his classic book The Process of Education, written in 1960. He argued that any child could learn any subject at any age, so long as it was taught in a way that fit the child’s developmental level. And here is where progressive schools, like the one I attended, went astray. In their admirable attempt to make good on the ideas of thinkers like Bruner, Kohl, and Holt, teachers came to think that any topic was as good as any other, as long as the teacher and students were really excited about it. If learning how to learn mattered more than memorizing specific subject matter, the implicit logic went, students could learn critical thinking, how to apply what they knew well to new situations, and how to put information together across disciplines within any number of topics. Instead of a set list of essential books, specified facts in history, or particular topics in mathematics, kids could learn how to think while studying things they loved.

  It was a great idea. However, for reasons that are somewhat mysterious, perhaps having to do with other aspects of the 1960s, the idea played out in a slightly strange way. For instance, I took a course one year in witchcraft. Another year I did all my social studies reports on costumes around the world. Somehow, unwittingly, schools like the one I attended had made an unfortunate trade—enthusiasm and liveliness replaced breadth and significance. Often what kids studied was quirky at best, and irrelevant at worst. In one renowned progressive school in Manhattan, it seemed that several cohorts of students studied monarch butterflies for six years in a row because so many teachers had decided that butterflies were the passion they wanted to share with their class.

  During the weeks that Sam skulked worriedly outside the room, eavesdropping on Dominic practicing the piano, I secretly wondered whether jazz counted as a worthwhile pursuit. Would Dominic learn things that extended beyond the piano? Should the kids in the Independent Project be free to take on any kind of Individual Endeavor?

  When Ted Sizer published his groundbreaking trilogy about public education (beginning with Horace’s Compromise), in the 1990s, he suggested that before graduating, every student should have to demonstrate expertise in something. Those performances, as they came to be known, embodied the same principle we are talking about here—that depth is more important than breadth, and that genuine rigor comes from knowing something well, rather than knowing lots of things superficially.

  But just as learning how to learn took a misstep in the 1960s, so, too, Sizer’s demonstrations got watered down. In many schools that joined Sizer’s Coalition of Essential Schools, kids ended up choosing strangely narrow and often superficial topics for their demonstrations: how to ride an ATV in the snow, how to build a bluebird house, the science of taste buds. Basically the original concept, which was to push kids toward mastery of something they cared about, became just another project—in many schools it became one more item to check off the list of requirements. Often students set themselves tasks or chose topics that were neither complex nor challenging, but instead merely seemed manageable in a busy schedule. Having embraced the nine principles of the coalition, schools nevertheless allotted far too little time for the students to tackle their projects in any real depth or to achieve true expertise. Then, because students ended up tacking on these projects as an afterthought in senior year, squishing them in with all the other “serious” requirements, it wasn’t fair to evaluate them in the rigorous way Sizer had in mind. So it was not surprising that schools ended up providing somewhat perfunctory and meaningless feedback. It became just another rite of passage to tick off as long as the student didn’t bungle it completely.

  But the failures of those efforts did not undermine Sizer’s concept, as some skeptics claimed. Expecting students to master something and demonstrate their mastery was a great idea. It just was harder than you might think to export into schools mired in a very different set of traditions and educational customs. I once heard someone say to Sizer, “But so many of the coalition schools have struggled and failed to make your ideas work. Doesn’t that discourage you?” He smiled and said, “That’s okay. We have to keep trying. We haven’t found a cure to cancer yet either. But that doesn’t mean we give up.”

  I viewed the Individual Endeavors as a fresh ne
w take on Sizer’s powerful idea. Just as Sizer had envisioned, each of the IP students would identify something interesting to work on, unconstrained by conventional academic topics. This was their moment to pick their own mountain to scale. And at the end, they wouldn’t tell teachers what they had learned; they’d show friends and family, as well as teachers, what they had become good at. But where coalition schools had often, unwittingly, shrunk the projects down to hillocks, IP students would go all in and choose, if not mountains, then steep hills. They’d be ambitious. Instead of tacking their project onto an already fragmented day, picking something doable rather than worthy, or rushing to do it in the last three weeks of their senior year, they’d devote lots of time and energy to it. It would become the centerpiece of their school experience.

  However, Dominic’s study of the piano stirred up old questions: Were all endeavors of equal educational value? Were there any constraints on what a student might choose to pursue? Some of the other kids had taken on more obvious choices for endeavors: book writing, a review of scientific research, and filmmaking. They involved traditional academic skills, covered large bodies of knowledge, and each rested within a recognizable discipline. But jazz piano?

  For me, Dominic’s endeavor represented the perfect test case. It was clear that mastering jazz presented a huge challenge to him, and that was essential. Certainly Dominic was taking a risk. What if he didn’t get good enough to play in public by the end of the term? His endeavor was difficult—he’d have to sweat to accomplish it. The piano required hours of focused practice. But hard work and challenge weren’t enough. Lots of things are difficult and offer the chance of success or failure: tightrope walking, learning the complete chronology of wars in the Western Hemisphere, or memorizing long passages of poetry. Such efforts require hours of study or a great deal of practice, but not necessarily anything else. Yet I had a hunch that jazz was more like book writing or studying science than it was like tightrope walking. What made the difference? When I finally heard Dominic talk about his work and listened to him play, I realized what the difference was. Jazz was complex.