It Takes a School

by Jonathan Starr

  To Fahima, born after the civil war, habits such as littering without considering damage to the community are all she has ever known. She is the norm, as the majority of the population hasn’t reached eighteen years of age yet. The aid industry isn’t helping this mentality, either, with its handouts and quick-fix programs, none of which seem to provide much in the way of lasting solutions. Even if they do a great job, it isn’t possible for a few dozen foreigners to rehabilitate a country left in ruins. The whole country’s mentality needs to change away from mere survival. Millions have to join Fahima, deciding to invest their effort in making their world a little better.

  I couldn’t reach millions, but I could reach our students, and perhaps their perspectives could eventually go viral. This afternoon’s effort already does more than teach only Fahima, which becomes clear within minutes.

  Three boys walk by us on their way across campus. They stop at the spectacle of their headmaster and a frail girl spending their afternoon doing hard manual labor. One makes a motion for Fahima to hand him her sabrat. He starts working on a small boulder, the kind that isn’t going to come out with just a few stabs. Even the least competitive among us doesn’t like to lose to a rock, so this boy is certainly not done until it is out. Now one of his friends also wants to take his whacks, so he grabs the sabrat for a minute, making the first boy hungry to get back in. The third boy relieves me of my sabrat and now we have three boys doing this work. They are so focused on this particular boulder that they haven’t noticed Fahima going in for more tools. Soon, all five of us are at work, “making our world a little bit better.”

  Some afternoons it could look like a chain gang: twenty students and teachers sharing sabrats, shovels, sledgehammers, even dirt-filled wheelbarrows to fill in the holes left by the removed stones. Soldiers, the guards on duty at the campus’s gate, temporarily put down their guns and pick up a tool, not wanting to be left out of the action. Staff who live in the village, having finished their day’s employment on campus, might put in fifteen minutes of hard work on the grounds before starting their walk home. This rock-clearing project isn’t a punishment or even a plan, at least not by anyone other than Fahima and me. It may not have been traditional fun, but it is satisfying and it is a team effort. And the rocks you removed didn’t go back. The students, teachers, soldiers, villagers, and I are working together, transforming our own campus.

  Fahima got to Abaarso in the way that a lot of the students arrived, having not gotten into SOS. Like most of the others, she has realized her luck even in this very first year. But Fahima is an extreme child, and this fate is not one that in my view she takes lightly. For her good fortune, she seems to feel obligated to repay Abaarso by working tirelessly. We first started this rock removal when I realized that every afternoon she was voluntarily mopping the floors around the school. “Someone could come visit,” she’d say, “and I need to make sure that the school looks great.”

  I believe Fahima feels that way, but I also think there’s more to it. In time she would tell me about her childhood, the type of youth that no child should ever experience, the kind that can make you cry thinking about it. She is now in a new place, one that makes her hopeful, and maybe Fahima believes that if she shows all the love she can to Abaarso, then it will love her back.

  Other teachers respond to her passion by telling her that she has to be less intense and try to have some fun. This only makes Fahima angry. To her, these teachers don’t understand. Which brings us to another reason why we are outside cracking rocks in the midst of a small group. Fahima will be intense and extreme regardless, so at least I can involve her in a more public and social activity. Another clause in this implicit agreement is she would eat the food I bring her and work on some mental math problems. “It is now five thirty p.m., and we are eight hours ahead of New York. What time is it in New York?”—this kind of question.

  Students and staff fixing up the campus started during the first days at Abaarso. Before the buildings went up, Abaarso was an empty hill riddled with rocks. It was treacherous to even walk around the land. The construction labor had cleared the rocks from each building’s footprint, but you could sprain your ankle going between them. I probably could have hired a bulldozer to clear it all out, but the campus problem was less urgent than developing the “investment” culture, having the kids believe that their input makes a difference.

  When Abaarso started, it was a microcosm of the problems throughout Somaliland’s society—for example, the idea that littering is tolerable. Our students always threw their trash wherever, and I needed them to stop it. I used shame if I had to, letting the culprit know that his action damaged our whole community. Why should we come all the way across the world to help students who don’t care enough about the school to take care of it? Heavy-handed? Probably. But also true, and these students need to hear it. Abaarso School isn’t a handout. Again, Abaarso’s love comes with conditions.

  In the beginning, I made sure that every student came to an area of campus and started clearing it. Most hated it and didn’t work hard. Those who put in the effort were referred to as “Jonathan’s slaves.” Some even hummed slave songs they’d heard in Glory, an American Civil War–themed film we showed on “movie night.” Fahima’s example of volunteering is the pinnacle, but it isn’t the first. That credit goes to Tom, the excellent early math teacher, who gained a loyal following among the boys.

  With Tom’s guidance, Haibe and Zakariye, two other students, tied string to two stakes that they hammered into the ground, to make sure the path was straight. Other boys looked for large rocks that could line the path right under the string, as Zakariye, pencil hoisted behind his ear, was going to test the width at different points to make sure the two sides of each path run parallel. Tom had them measuring, calculating, and being precise. They felt like engineers. Character-wise Fahima, Haibe, and Zakariye are on their way, having already developed a love for seeing their world improve.

  15

  CRITICAL THINKING

  From a very early age, I lived in my head and was always thinking. I never noticed what people were wearing or what they had. I lost things constantly and had an awful time finding them because my hand had placed them somewhere without my brain showing any interest in the matter. I couldn’t think back to where I had been because my mind had not saved that information in the first place. My thoughts were solely focused on whatever idea had completely taken me over.

  Starting when I was six, I obsessed mostly about sports. I watched the Redskins beat the Dolphins in Super Bowl XVII and fell in love with all the technical details of the plays. By the next year, I knew more about the game than most adults and was thrilled watching the Raiders’ cornerbacks shut down the Redskins’ receivers. I didn’t leave the house on weekends because I wanted and needed to analyze every game. My loyal stuffed animals lent a hand by filling the various positions on the field and working through plays. After watching some early ESPN show about the Vince Lombardi Green Bay Packers, I had my “stuffies” all practice his famed “power sweep,” making sure the correct offensive lineman pulled. My sister, Beth, three years my senior, still has a picture of Big Teddy’s team lining up against Big Monkey’s.

  On weekends, when our family got together with my parents’ friends and their kids, I often sat with the adults talking about sports. By the time I was eight, they were actually asking my opinion on strategic situations or calls.

  When I was in junior high, my mother dragged me to a movie that would always stick with me. Normally I would have been happy to go, but this was something about “standing in a liver,” and that just didn’t sound fun. It turned out that it was Stand and Deliver, the true story of a math teacher named Jaime Escalante who goes into a poor high school in East Los Angeles, a place where the immigrant students don’t take advanced classes, and together the teacher and students work all the way up to the Advanced Placement Calculus exam.

  In the movie, Jaime Escalante introduces fraction
s using fruit slices, an illustrative method that promotes hands-on learning for critical thinking. But it was the change in the students that really impressed me. They came in without expectations for their futures, already feeling hopeless. Their lives were hard—that was beyond question. They had little money, gangs around them, and sick family members who didn’t speak English well enough to access the health care system. At one point, a girl was studying late at night when her mother, who had worked all day, asked her to turn out the light. My mother, an educator herself, gasped in pain, telling the movie screen, “Then she can’t study!”

  At movie’s end, eighteen of the students passed the AP exam. My mother was clapping so hard that she—not the movie—had my attention. Right before the credits, the film announced that thirty students passed the exam the next year, and seventy-three students passed a few years later. My mom burst into tears. So much about watching that movie with my mother impacted me—my mother’s love for education; the great teacher, Jaime Escalante; and that, with a change in attitude, these students could overcome such obstacles to achieve something beautiful.

  People have commented that it took a tremendous confidence, bordering on arrogance, to think that I could take students from Somaliland and get them to the point where they could compete in the world’s best universities. I have Jaime Escalante to thank for showing me what could be done and how I could do it. I also have to thank my mother. Her reaction to Stand and Deliver was a lesson to her son that took on multiple levels, especially the value of education.

  Nonetheless, I was a B student in high school, and by that I mean I never got an A or a C, only Bs. My high school adviser was dumbfounded how my best and worst subjects could all be the same. She didn’t understand that my best and worst didn’t matter; I was just trying to avoid grief at home. I spent all my energy on whatever was my latest obsession. For instance, when I was in high school, a friend of my uncle Eli started a magazine about University of Connecticut sports. It was called Husky Blue & White. He asked me to join him at the basketball training camps where media and coaches went to evaluate up-and-coming college players. It was several days, and at each break I’d go through all my notes and compare them to those of my uncle’s friend. They were long days and late nights, but my mind was so happily at work that I didn’t care at all. At the end of each evening, I could barely wait to wake up and start again. Eventually, we had a thoughtful enough analysis that a few Division I coaches actually paid for our report.

  Despite my lackluster academic record, I got into Emory University anyway, probably because no other applicant in the country had sold a scouting report to NCAA coaches.

  At Emory, I could select my courses, and I knew real ambition for the first time. I wasn’t as boxed in, and with my courses challenging me, my performance changed completely. Now, I was an A student. In class, I’d generally ask more questions than anyone else, and I’d go see my professors at their office hours to argue theories. After class, my friends and I would engage in endless debates analyzing everything.

  Classes in Somaliland, from the earliest grades through university, are generally run without any interaction between student and teacher, no chance for students to ask questions, no time when teachers solicit ideas or thoughts. Nothing is done to encourage critical thinking—the skill I’d learned as a child. The first time I sat in on a class in a Somaliland school, I was shocked. For the first fifteen minutes, the classroom was completely silent other than for the sound of chalk on the board as the teacher wrote down notes. This was followed by another fifteen-minute period when the students copied what was on the board into their notebooks. Periodically, the teacher would erase one set of notes and write some more, concluding the lesson by reading what was on the board aloud. Generally, these classes had sixty or more students squeezed onto wooden benches, with boys on one side and girls on the other. Other than the chalk or students acting up, they were eerily silent. When I later talked to our students, I realized that what I had seen was standard.

  There was so much academic content to cover, but, with our students’ background, endowing these children with critical thinking had to take priority. We would build it into the way the whole school was run, including giving a “Critical Thinking Award” each term, and it was my primary academic focus from the start. I would begin by teaching logic the very first term of the very first year.

  The logic class is my chance to get my hands dirty by actually teaching. To a small extent I am improvising a logic course I had taken at Emory, but mostly I use the way I learned to think as a kid. I have no content goals, as nothing the kids will be learning to do is in itself important, just as a crossword puzzle challenges your brain but there’s no value in remembering the puzzle from last Saturday’s paper. All that matters is getting our students thinking.

  To begin with, I show the students the rules to tic-tac-toe. Sure, our second-highest scorer on the entrance exam managed to lose in three moves. He was never able to transition from rote memorization to critical thinking, and sadly he dropped out of school after only a few months. But putting him aside, the students quickly figure out how to play each other to a draw. They make mistakes, as would kids anywhere, but they pick up the strategy quickly, moving in response to their opponents’ moves.

  Every couple of weeks, I introduce a different type of challenge, with the students particularly liking ones we call “dragon problems.” I got these from a book called Tricky Logic Puzzles, and the premise is that all dragons are either red or gray and either rational or predators. Red Rational and Gray Predator dragons always tell the truth, and Red Predator and Gray Rational always lie. If you are a knight, you only want to kill the predator dragons so you must make this distinction. You walk up to some number of dragons and they start talking to you. You have to figure out what they are, based on their statements. What’s more, you are color-blind, so to you, all dragons look gray.

  The simplest of these puzzles would be a dragon who says, “I am a Gray Rational.” From there, you can deduce that the dragon is not a Gray Rational because a Gray Rational always lies, so it never says the truth that he is a “Gray Rational.” Further, it can’t be a Red Rational or a Gray Predator, because those dragons always tell the truth, and for them this would be a lie. The dragon is therefore a Red Predator, because that’s the only one who would lie and say he is a Gray Rational. The knight should slay the predator.

  When I first wrote this problem on the board, explaining the different type of dragons, I had a room full of students looking shocked. They were waiting for me to tell them how to solve it. And how tempting that was. I’d keep reminding myself to “do less, do less,” because the goal was for them to be thinking. We didn’t actually need to slay any of these dragons.

  It only took a few days for the whole room to be busy, with students intensely working at their desks and then forming a small line to show me their answers. I’d look, point out a mistake, and send them back. Or, I’d say, “Nice work,” and give them the next puzzle. They were all engaged, their brains turning, each working at his or her own pace.

  Mubarik loves my logic class, and he is a natural. His struggles with English linger, but he has come a long way. In the beginning, when somebody would ask him his name, he didn’t understand what they wanted to know. On his first quiz, he didn’t realize he was being tested until the following day.

  In my logic class, he sees that he can construct a solution without prior instruction, which is intellectually fulfilling. He solves one so easily that at first I assume he has already seen it. The problem before him goes like this: You have a faucet and a drain and two jugs, one that holds five liters and another that holds three liters. You want to measure exactly two liters and there are no markings on the jugs.

  I illustrate it on the whiteboard, though my handwriting is often so bad that the students can’t read it. Mubarik comes up and, with gestures and diagrams, solves the problem. His answer is to fill up the five-liter jug, then pour fro
m the five-liter jug into the three-liter jug until the three-liter jug is full. What is left in the five-liter jug is exactly two liters.

  One girl in my logic class is even better than Mubarik. A teacher is not supposed to have favorites, and of course a better one wouldn’t have, but how can I not appreciate this tall, narrow-faced girl who is solving every puzzle in half the time of anyone else? She is Nimo Ismail. Her English is better than that of most of the other kids, which is certainly an advantage, but she is also extremely clever and can block out all other distractions when she is focusing on my logic problems.

  Nimo is one of the rare students who had chosen Abaarso over SOS on the entrance exam, and she had scored high enough to get into SOS. As I already thought the world of her, I was surprised to learn that she was one of the walk-ins, not having scored well enough on the national exam to qualify for the SOS test. Of course, that was also a test of dishonesty, and I believed Nimo when she admitted to giving answers to others but not actually taking them herself. As more data came in, it appeared that the national exam was a very inconsistent predictor of student quality.

  Nimo reported to the testing site on the day of the exam, hoping for the chance of being allowed entry as a walk-in. Indeed, luck went her way. A number of the high-scoring girls hadn’t shown up, and the empty seats meant Nimo had her invitation. Many families in this conservative Muslim country would not send a girl to a boarding school, an unfortunate change from before the war when it was more common. While Nimo had come to the test that day intending to try for admission to SOS, she ended up circling “Abaarso” as her school of choice. It turned out that my presentation to the test takers that day had swayed her, in part because she liked the idea of being taught by native English speakers and in part because we were offering unique classes like computers and robotics. Mostly, though, Nimo is a contrarian thinker not shackled by what everyone else does. She trusts her judgment, and she’s not afraid to take a chance. That’s one reason she could dive into my puzzles while others hold back, fearing the unknown.