It Takes a School

by Jonathan Starr

  Nimo is the oldest of her parents’ five children. She spent the first twelve years of her life in Saudi Arabia, where for a couple years her father had her studying with a Kenyan-born English tutor. Both of her parents completed high school, and her father had some college education. At age twelve, she and her siblings returned to Somaliland with their mother. The return was triggered by two things: Nimo’s allergies, which might improve with a change of environment, and the fact that non-Arab people could not attend public high school in Saudi Arabia. The following year, Nimo’s father joined the family, but after a months-long job search with no prospects, he took a position in Switzerland, sending his earnings home to support his family, like so many other fathers.

  From what I can see, he would much rather be with them. While Nimo rarely gets to see him, he calls her often, perhaps even daily, and she lights up every time. Unlike some of our girls, she never has to wonder if he has moved on or if he still loves her. He even calls me, using the English he knows, to find out how she is doing. Nimo’s motivation for a good education is that she will be able to reunite the family once she is educated and can find a good job. I want that, too. I hope her whole family will be together when Nimo becomes attorney general or chief justice of Somaliland. I honestly believe she is capable of this future.

  In my class, Nimo is a standout in every way, though I learn that she doesn’t put such effort into her other classes, perhaps another reason why she wasn’t a top scorer on the national exam. In fact, when she isn’t interested in a subject, she races to finish the exam, so that she can read a book the rest of the period. Nimo, I realize, is just like me when I was her age, only putting effort into what interests her. She saves her energy for things she likes.

  When I introduce Nimo and the rest of the kids to board games, they are an immediate hit. I like the ones that use logic more than luck and require you to react to the actions of others. Most students have never seen a board game before, so playing them is a learning experience in both strategy and social engagement. The boys are particularly drawn to Risk: The Game of Global Domination. They are quick learners and are soon adjusting their moves in reaction to those at their approach. While at first I can easily win, I will eventually need to work hard, though I can always take advantage of their Achilles’ heel, an irrational desire to control East Africa.

  The girls are more in favor of Clue, which is a bit more social. Each player sticks to the same character color. I am always Mr. Green, green being my favorite color; Amal, the girl I had promised that coming to Abaarso would be the luckiest mistake of her life, is always Mrs. White; Nimo, logic star, is Scarlet; and Deqa, perhaps the top student in the school, is Mrs. Peacock. The other positions rotate through a combination of girls, with Suleikha or Siham often playing Colonel Mustard, and Barwaqo taking on Professor Plum. For Nimo and Deqa, the character choices fit, as Nimo is the cunning Scarlet type, and shy Deqa is the perfect fit for the classy old Lady Peacock. Suleikha could certainly be militant, so why not the Colonel? And Barwaqo, who is affectionately nicknamed “Waqo” (wacko), is the crazy professor. By default, Amal is Mrs. White, the servant. Mrs. White is described with the adjectives “jealous” and “frustrated,” both of which we teased her about at the time.

  The board games not only teach critical thinking, they help the kids develop confidence. This applies across genders, although the boys need it less because they’ve always had sports in their lives. For the girls, these games are some of their first experiences in competition, winning, losing, strategic play, and learning to trust themselves. It is amazing how quickly their confidence blossoms. Once, I was in the Conservatory, one of Clue’s nine “locations.” I rolled the dice to get out, at which point Siham, a clever player herself, looked up and said, “Why did you roll? Why didn’t you take the secret passageway to the Lounge?” Without a pause she answered her own question: “You must have the Lounge.” At which point she picked up her pen to check that off on her sheet. She was right. I was looking for the murder room, and I had the Lounge. She had learned critical thinking without realizing it.

  16

  FUNDAMENTALS

  Everyone knows that you don’t build a house on a weak foundation, you don’t have a five-year-old practice shooting on a ten-foot basketball hoop, and you don’t learn to drive in Manhattan. The same “crawl before you walk before you run” approach pretty much applies to everything.

  This includes education. If a student reading at a fourth-grade level is handed The Great Gatsby, she will get next to nothing out of it. Slogging through paragraph after paragraph of indecipherable prose could also result in her hating to read. On the flip side, a student reading at an eleventh-grade level doesn’t want to read a second-grade-level book. Teaching the right level, making sure students are challenged but not drowned, is obvious and by no means brilliant. You can’t go from fractions to calculus in a year, not if you actually want to understand it. As writer Jerry Jesness pointed out in his article “Stand and Deliver Revisited,” which appeared in the July 2002 edition of Reason magazine, the Hollywood treatment of education in Stand and Deliver painted an overly optimistic portrait of what’s possible in a short amount of time. In reality, Jaime Escalante needed a system in place over several years to establish fundamentals, and only then would he build calculus on top of them. It took him a decade to make this happen. The shiny finish didn’t come until well after the foundation was solid.

  When I moved to Abaarso, I had no idea what it meant to live in a war-torn country, to be recovering from the complete collapse of all systems and all institutions. When our students got to campus, even the very best were like partially built homes for which there had been no architect. The foundations were almost nonexistent, yet there were a couple of doors and windows precariously hanging in place. The house had a few stories, but the second floor couldn’t bear any weight. One of our greatest challenges the first few years was figuring out what was and what wasn’t sturdy. Eventually, we’d conclude that none of it was; the house needed rebuilding from the base.

  In the third year, some of our top students are taking the SSAT—Secondary School Admission Test—an exam that many American boarding schools use to judge applicants. The students have been practicing with a math teacher but found out that calculators weren’t allowed on the test. I heard they were panicking, so I went to talk to them.

  “Look,” I tell them, “you don’t even need a calculator for this stuff. Any arithmetic can easily be done in your head. Let’s do #4 in the practice book. That’ll show you.”

  I open up to a geometry problem. A circle is inscribed in a square, meaning that the edge of the circle hits all four sides of the square, with the circle completely inside the square. There are four areas of the square that the circle does not also enclose. These are shaded. The problem asks to calculate the shaded areas. You are told that the circle has a radius of 1.

  The SSAT exam board no doubt viewed this as a good test of how students can apply geometry. As geometry does not require a lot of foundation before high school, our students are pretty good at it. They quickly get to the heart of the problem. The shaded areas that are inside the square but not in the circle will equal the area of the square minus the area of the circle. They know a circle’s area is Pi times the radius squared, so they square 1, which is still 1, and multiply it by 3.14. The answer is 3.14. They then do the next step, which is to see that 2 radii equal a side of the square. That means the square has sides that are 2, which means that the area of the square is 4.

  For many who have not done geometry in some time, that last paragraph may sound dizzying. You may even have skipped it when you saw that math was involved. Don’t feel bad. Solving this SSAT problem takes a reasonable understanding of geometry, and our students have that. We’ve done a nice job building the geometry floor of the house. That’s when I see the foundation below it collapse.

  “So which answer is it, a, b, c, or d?” I ask. I am able to eyeball it in a second
.

  “I don’t know. How am I supposed to do that without a calculator?” one of our top students responds.

  “What do you mean? It is 4 minus 3.14. The answer is clear.”

  It takes them twenty seconds to hand calculate that answer, one that should be automatic, and students taking exams like the SSAT are so pressed for time that losing twenty seconds means not getting to a later problem. Their mental math skills and understanding of number bonds, such as that 14 will need a 6 to get to 20, which will need 80 to get to 100, are nonexistent. This is a major issue, but even this isn’t the real problem.

  “It is .86. But the answers are in fractions.”

  This is true. The SSAT has given the answer choices in fractions, so the .86 needs to be converted. However, the SSAT has basically done it for you assuming you have any understanding of what a fraction is. The four choices are 1/6, 6/7, and then two more choices that are both greater than 1. You don’t need to calculate anything. The answer has to be 6/7. This is my whole point. No calculators are needed or even helpful in the problem.

  They can’t answer it. Instead they start one by one converting the answer choices from fractions to decimals using long division with lengthy hand calculations. They can’t rule out any, not 1/6 because it is clearly less than .50, or the two fractions that are clearly greater than 1. On the actual exam, taking three minutes on this problem would be testing suicide. Their scores would be crushed by how few problems they’d get to, and the worst part about that is that it isn’t the SSAT or some “test bias” that’s to blame. The test had picked up a legitimate gaping hole in our students’ fundamentals.

  After this session, I try the problem on Deqa, who hadn’t been there. She is arguably the top student in the school. Deqa is no better at solving it. Like the others, she cannot see how a fraction relates to a decimal other than by calculating, which means she cannot see it at all. This further means that she won’t be able to catch any mistake in calculating. What’s worse, without such understanding, none of the students can actually apply math. They are just going through mechanical operations and don’t know when to use them or why. The pretty geometry level has been built without any beams to support it.

  Fractions are an offshoot of division, which is to say that 6/7 is six units divided seven ways. Might they not even understand division?

  “Deqa,” I say, “if we have 90 kilos of rice and we use 12 kilos a day, how many days can we eat rice before we need to get more?” I know she can get 90 divided by 12, but this problem checks that she knows what division is and can apply it. She doesn’t.

  Digging through our library, I find fourth-grade math textbooks. One has an assessment in the back, which I have every student take. The ninth graders have now been at Abaarso for half a year. They score 50 percent. The tenth graders are at 66 percent and the eleventh graders, 75 percent. On a fourth-grade test, I’ll call that a disaster.

  From then on the “Orange Book” becomes famous at Abaarso. It is a Macmillan/McGraw-Hill fourth-grade textbook with an orange cover. Every student goes through it, even those already in advanced grades. You can’t understand fractions without understanding division; you can’t understand division without multiplication, and multiplication is just a series of additions. So future students will start by visualizing and applying addition.

  This lesson in starting at the foundation, one that Jaime Escalante understood and practiced, holds true across all subjects. Yes, you can learn some chemistry before you understand basic science and critical thinking, but you won’t learn it right. And, like the fourth-grade reader picking up Gatsby, it will be a frustrating and off-putting experience.

  Let’s skip ahead to a beginner English class at Abaarso, when we had a much better understanding of what we were doing. The book of choice? Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss. For those who don’t remember, Sam is asking the other character if he likes green eggs and ham. The other character says no, but Sam won’t give up. Instead, he keeps asking him if he’d like them if they were this or that, giving slight variations. “Would you like them in a house? Would you like them with a mouse?” Invariably, the character says no. “I do not like them in a house. I do not like them with a mouse. I do not like them here or there. I do not like them anywhere.” This goes on and on. Nine times Sam tries, and nine times he is rejected.

  Our teacher Natalie is patiently working with the class, challenging them to really think about the book in a way you would with something far more advanced. She’s asking them who the characters are and what the conflict is, and she even has them predict what will happen next. The students are new to Abaarso and have never been asked to read a story this way. It is understandably challenging, as is the English, which is why Natalie is starting with a simple story using simple words.

  “So what do you think will happen next?” she asks, Sam having been rejected several times already, plenty of book left to be read, and Sam now asking, “Would you eat them in a box? Would you eat them with a fox?”

  Much of the room is sure of their answer. “This time he will try them,” they say.

  Natalie, hiding her perplexity, patiently asks them to explain why. They come up with a few explanations, but the truth is that this, too, is a very new question for them. It will take lessons like these for them to hone such a skill.

  Then she turns the page.

  Not in a box.

  Not with a fox …

  I would not eat green eggs and ham.

  I do not like them, Sam-I-am.

  Shock and disappointment fill the classroom. The start of some understanding, too.

  17

  INTEGRITY

  It is the second half of the third year in Abaarso, and Harry, my assistant headmaster, and I have already been through hell. There has been trouble from the outside, my life threatened, hideous accusations, the school’s future put at risk, and Harry almost jailed, but none of that is currently on our minds. Instead we are now forty-eight hours into uncovering a massive cheating scandal in our original class of students.

  We have been interviewing student after student, slowly getting the story, occasionally getting big breaks, and calling back students to tell them we now know they were holding back. We have learned that over the last couple of years there have been several occasions when boys had broken into the staff office and stolen exams. The exams had then been passed through the grade, to boys and to girls. Seemingly every eleventh grader has been involved, even my advisees and most trusted students.

  Fahima, just a ninth grader, had begged Nimo not to go see me. “It’ll be too much for Jonathan,” she had pleaded. “It will break his heart.” But Nimo comes to me anyway, saying she wants to talk to me. We sit down on opposite sides of the cafeteria table. She is ready to tell me something, but before words come out she puts her face in her hands and cries.

  Before this scandal I wouldn’t have dreamed that some of our oldest students would cheat, especially when they knew more than anyone that integrity was the fundamental building block of the school. Some of the teachers would be upset about it for months, with Harry taking it the hardest. He could deal with the outside attacks because then he was fighting for our students’ futures and for what was right. Now, we both wonder how these same students could do this to us. It feels personal, like being stabbed in the back.

  I had seen cheating in middle school, I had seen it in college at Emory University; I had seen it on the SOS/Abaarso entrance exam, and I’d even suspended my share of students for the offense in the three years we had been operating. But these students are in their third year; they should know better. That they’d gone from cheating all the time to cheating only on occasion was not good enough.

  Emory, like many colleges, had core requirements you needed to fulfill for graduation. The requirements came in different categories, one of which consisted of cultural classes, including music. I was an upperclassman when I finally stopped stalling and accepted that I needed to fulfill this requireme
nt. History of Jazz was considered the best class at Emory, but I was unable to get a place in it. Instead I was taking History of Folk Music, and “Hey, folk can be cool, too,” or so I thought. I arrived to a big lecture hall, one of the bigger ones on campus, where approximately two hundred students waited for class to begin.

  The professor was a shell of a man. According to rumors, he used to be a good teacher, but his wife had left him at some point and he started drinking, or perhaps the order of that was in reverse. On a personal level, I liked him. But he was depressed and defeated, and the class was awful. The majority of the syllabus didn’t even cover what any of us considered folk music.

  Come the midterm exam, students didn’t know what he’d test us on. Had we really learned anything? Emory was full of ambitious premeds and pre-laws. Everyone, including me, was rightfully pissed off about taking this useless class and now taking its midterm, which we all viewed as a clear waste of our time.

  I don’t know how many people entered that exam planning to cheat, but you needed to be blind not to see that you could get away with anything. A few students went up to the front with questions, essentially shielding the rest of the room, not that they needed the cover. There was a buzz as people talked, opened their notebooks, and even stood up and moved around. It probably started with a few students, but soon it had become a complete free-for-all. I don’t believe the professor could have been that clueless, but he didn’t stand a chance. He was too weak of spirit to even protest.

  I didn’t cheat. Cheating on exams, no matter how stupid the class, wasn’t how I did things, but I did take advantage of the situation. Toward the end of the term I went to the professor’s office, told him that I was one of only a handful of students who legitimately got my grade, and said I had other classes that needed my focus and didn’t want to have to take his final. He agreed without the slightest resistance.