by Todd Rose
So, in a big departure from what by then was my normal homework MO (that is, to ignore it), I labored at the kitchen table for several evenings straight. By the end, I’d come up with a full-page, lyrical ode to ski jumping.
Here’s how it began, complete with my primitive spelling:
My eyes are courageous
But my heart fears fate
My legs are like steal [sic]
As I approached [sic] the gate …
To this day, I remember the look my parents gave me as they watched their oldest son finally taking school seriously. Dared they hope for a turning point?
I turned the poem in on time, and even bragged to other kids in the class that I was sure I was going to win. But when the teacher handed back the poems a few days later, not only had I not won the chocolate bar, but he’d given me an F.
It took me a few seconds to register the meaning of the big red letter scrawled on my poem, but as soon as I did, I jumped out of my chair and stalked up to Mr. Meany, who was by then back at his desk.
“Hey, why’d I get an F?” I demanded, not even trying to use my indoor voice.
Mr. Meany looked at me as if he were disappointed that I hadn’t figured it out.
“You couldn’t have written this,” he said.
I felt like my head was about to explode. “Of course I wrote this. I worked on this for three nights,” I said. “You can ask my mom!”
Mr. Meany just shook his head and ordered me back to my seat. The next day, my mother came to school to argue on my behalf, confirming that she had watched me write the poem and offering to bring in other poems that I had written. Yet my teacher still refused to change my grade. As I walked out of the school with my furious mother, I remember thinking, “I quit. I really, really quit.” Until then, I’d been told so often that my failures were caused by my lack of trying. But now I had tried—and I’d been robbed.
Like all of the subsequent events I’ll be relating, this story isn’t as simple as it may at first sound. On his good days, Mr. Meany was not mean at all. Still, he was managing a crowded class with several difficult characters aside from myself, and he already had good reason to doubt my sincerity. After all, this was the first sign he’d seen that I might care about school in any way, and maybe what I cared most about was the chocolate.
I want to be clear: I’m not arguing that my loss of the Snickers bar justified my throwing those stink bombs. It obviously did not. Still, I’ve often wondered how my middle school career might have progressed if Mr. Meany had believed I’d written that poem. Maybe he would have encouraged me to show him more of the work I’d been hiding until then. Maybe I would have started to think of myself as a writer, instead of a screw-up. The flap of a butterfly’s wings in my English class might in this way have led to a completely different kind of tornado than those stink bombs in the art class.
Instead, however, the incident tipped the scales that were already loaded with hundreds of less dramatic mishaps shaping how I saw the world and myself. From that point on, I made good on my silent vow to stop trying. My parents, struggling to raise five kids while my dad worked all day and went to school at night, cajoled, bribed, and threatened me, mostly in vain, for four more years, as I determinedly wasted everyone’s time right up until the middle of my senior year in high school. That’s when my principal informed them that, given my GPA—an appalling 0.9—there was no way I’d graduate. And so, at eighteen, I dropped out of high school.
The Million-Dropout March
* * *
In flunking out, I not only dashed my poor parents’ hopes, but joined a modern American trend that retired General Colin Powell has dubbed a “moral catastrophe.”
At this writing, more than a quarter of U.S. high school students—1.2 million at last count—drop out every year. That’s roughly seven thousand students a day—a day!—making our shameful rate one of the highest in the industrialized world.
The cost to these students (and their families) is enormous, as dropping out of high school is one of the surest predictors of lifelong failure.
To be sure, we’ve all heard legends about the smart, quirky dropouts who went on to professional glory, among them the beloved author Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens), the famed photographer Ansel Adams, the billionaire businessman Richard Branson, and the former British prime minister John Major. Yet I look at this phenomenon as a glass that is tragically half-empty. When I consider the tremendous contributions that these hardy survivors made to society, I can’t help but calculate that for every George Gershwin (the famed composer) there are in all probability thousands, if not millions of other bright young dropouts who simply have lacked the resilience or resources or lucky breaks needed to turn their lives around. Their talents are forever lost to us.
America’s dropout crisis, in other words, is not only a problem for individuals and families—it’s a drag on all of us. The cost amounts not only from the value of all that lost potential but also from the expense of taking care of lives ruined in the process. Most students who quit school early end up in dead-end jobs, earning much less than their peers, or land in prison. One study found that more than 80 percent of U.S. prison inmates were dropouts. Another pegged the cost of America’s yearly dropouts, mostly in terms of crime and unemployment programs, at more than $240 billion a year.
My own story varies from the standard dropout tale. The vast majority of American youth who quit school are chronic low-achievers, and many come from low-income families. In contrast, I belonged to the relative minority of dropouts from hardworking, emerging middle-class families with a fervent belief in the value of education and with high expectations for their children. Moreover, as I’ve mentioned, when I started out in school, tests showed that I had the smarts to succeed. But along the way, things started going wrong, with a momentum that built until it seemed there was no going back.
While, again, my story isn’t average, its broad outlines are more common than you might suppose. For one thing, as many as one-third of America’s dropouts have learning differences that in the context of traditional schools are serious enough to result in medical diagnoses (an issue I’ll return to later in these pages), while as many as 5 percent of all high school dropouts are intellectually gifted. What this means is that tens of thousands of bright students a year end up giving up and failing out of a system that failed them first.
Granted, students like I used to be aren’t the easiest to teach. Yet I’d argue this says more about the state of modern classrooms than it does about us. Did I say modern? The conventions prevailing today in most schools throughout the world, in which rote memorization is still, anachronistically, prized originated in early-nineteenth-century Prussia, where the compulsory school system was designed to churn out loyal and obedient soldiers and factory workers. The model was never meant to nurture individual potential or creativity, but rather to instill uniformity and compliance. This view of education is directly at odds with the foundational ideas of the United States of America, and it is woefully obsolete in an era where more jobs demand a high level of autonomy and the skill to manage a never-ending flood of information.
Moreover, our current educational system is in fact all but unequipped to cope with what neuroscience has revealed as the extraordinary variability in the way children learn, and the powerful role that context plays in shaping outcomes. Kurt Fischer, my mentor and colleague at Harvard, where he is the director of Harvard University’s Mind, Brain, and Education program, goes so far as to say that today’s schools essentially fail about 80 percent of students. Sure, kids get through. Yet simply surviving is not a high enough bar for our educational system—not by a long shot. Worse still, our schools are often downright damaging in the long term for children who by temperament are prone to question authority—the kinds of kids who can’t help but think differently, who like to take risks, and who represent America’s best hope to innovate its way to a better future.
Unfortunately, instead of focusing
on changing an obviously broken educational context, we have to date largely put the blame on our hardworking teachers—and perhaps even more so on our children, millions of whom are themselves treated as broken because our system cannot deal with natural learning variability. At last count, more than 5.4 million U.S. children had been diagnosed with ADHD, while millions more are coping with one or more of a variety of other diagnoses, from dyslexia to dyscalculia (trouble with math), to dysgraphia (difficulty writing), and so on. Most of these kids slog through years of school, during which they’re disengaged at best, and disruptive or delinquent at worst. Researchers report that up to 60 percent of children with ADHD will be suspended in high school, and as many as 36 percent will drop out. Nor is it any secret that U.S. prisons are crowded with grown-up versions of youth who don’t fit in. By some estimates as many as half of all U.S. prison inmates meet the criteria for a learning disability.
The good news is that it doesn’t have to be this way—and I’m convinced that it won’t be for much longer. In fact, as I’ll show you, we’re now at the start of what I see as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to transform the educational environment through a careful integration of technologies and advances from the modern learning sciences. At this writing, pioneering schools throughout the United States are already starting to adopt new approaches to teaching based on cutting-edge scientific advances in learning. They’re rejecting rigid, tried-and-failed approaches, such as memorization and standardized tests, in favor of dynamic, flexible, personalized, and adaptive solutions that actually support the natural differences children bring to school with them. Many of these efforts are inspired by the struggles of kids like I used to be, who’ve long been on the margins of our teach-to-the-middle traditions. Yet what’s particularly exciting about these new approaches is that their promise extends well beyond square pegs to include all students—making learning more engaging, and igniting creativity.
Of course all the technology in the world will never be enough, by itself, to solve the problem. There is much that you can do, as I intend to show you, to make the most of this historic opportunity. That’s why this book is both a memoir and a manifesto. I’m sharing my story in the hopes of helping parents and teachers help kids at home and at school. Yet more broadly, it’s high time to demand that our schools finally catch up to what scientists (and good teachers) have known for years about the most effective ways to learn and teach. We need nothing less than a learning revolution to stop that next stink bomb in midair—and save the troublemaking square peg with the glass vials in his hand for more creative and healthy pursuits.
As you read along, I hope you’ll see what I mean. And please don’t worry about taking notes. At the end of each chapter, I’ll offer a summary of the “big ideas” from complex systems, plus related action items you can use to support the square pegs in your own lives.
It works like this:
BIG IDEAS
You can make a really cool stink bomb by mixing hydrogen sulfide and ammonium.
Parents can do much more to influence your children’s future than you may now believe; just not in the way you might believe.
Four concepts from neuroscience and complex systems can help you better understand and support your child:
Human brains are surprisingly variable.
Emotion is a much more powerful influence on behavior—and particularly on learning—than we have previously thought.
Behavior can’t be understood independent of its context.
Feedback loops are a powerful mechanism through which biology and context interact and reinforce each other. You can’t control them, but with some understanding, you may influence them.
America has one of the industrialized world’s highest annual rates of high school dropouts, thousands of whom are intellectually gifted.
A fledgling revolution in the learning sciences, based on the same complex-systems ideas presented in this book, promises to transform education and (in the process) rechart the life course of many a smart square peg, and to make school more effective for millions of other children.
ACTION ITEMS
Keep reading.
Hug your kid.
Start today to look at your world, and particularly your child’s behavior, through the lens of complex systems, keeping in mind the four key concepts of variability, emotion, context, and feedback loops.
1
My Bright Future
“Context is the key—from that comes the understanding of everything.”
—Kenneth Noland
“He’s Yours Now!”
* * *
On my first morning of kindergarten, my mother, a trim blond woman with bright blue eyes that rarely conceal her emotions, looked around at all the other moms dropping off their kids at the school door and was struck by the fact that she alone was smiling.
“He’s yours now!” were her first words to my new teacher.
Can I blame her? At five years old, I was the eldest of her three children—there would be five in all, eventually—and, as she had soon realized, this wasn’t what most kids were like.
I had begun making trouble from my first night home from the hospital. Not once throughout my first two years had I slept through the night, a torturous habit, for my parents, that I compounded as soon as I outgrew my crib, by sleepwalking, crashing into things in the dark, and occasionally peeing in my bedroom closet. My folks became familiar figures at the local hospital’s emergency room. If they weren’t bringing me in suffering from mysterious high fevers (three of which led to small seizures before I was three), it was because I’d smashed into a wall, headfirst. There are few pictures of me from that time that don’t show my face with some self-inflicted bruise or scratch.
I grew into a scrawny child with an unusually big head (my father has described me as “all forehead and gums”) and an equally extraordinary amount of energy. No crib or playpen could contain me, and from the time I got my first pair of shoes, I wore them out at a dizzying rate. Without unflinching supervision, I was at constant risk of running out into the street, or worse—and by worse, I’m thinking primarily of the “childproof” bottle of phenobarbital, a barbiturate used to treat seizures, which I pried open and drank at age two.
My world, which at the time meant a small wooden home on a quiet, flat street in a corner of northern Utah, seemed to offer me a limitless supply of targets for mischief, beginning with my siblings, who complain to this day that I rarely managed to walk past any one of them without giving them a poke or a pinch. So of course it wasn’t any wonder that by the time I reached the age of five, my mom, who had been parenting the three of us all but round-the-clock, sorely needed a break.
Son of a Square Peg
* * *
Now, the last thing I’d want you to assume is that my mother is the type who is easily worn down. She’s a fast walker and talker who routinely awakes before dawn, and has never once refrained from speaking her mind to my teachers or church authorities alike—a trait I gratefully acknowledge has made a big difference in my own life’s trajectory. She’s the worthy heir of a line of unusually strong women, although it’s also true that a moment of weakness changed her life, when she was just seventeen, and got pregnant with me. She had fallen in love with my dad, Larry Rose, who was studying diesel mechanics on a pole-vaulting scholarship as a freshman at Weber State University. The two of them had talked about marrying someday, but I guess it’s fair to say I pushed their plans forward.
Lyda never seriously considered any other option but to drop out of school, putting on hold what had been her vague dreams of following her older sisters into nursing school or finding work as a forest ranger, to become a full-time wife and mother. She waited for a couple of weeks before telling her own mother, my future grandma Ruth Burton, but even then couldn’t summon the nerve to do it in person. Instead she left a note on the kitchen table one morning before heading to school. As she recalls, Grandma Burton picked her up at school th
at afternoon, wearing sunglasses to hide her red eyes. “Lyda, never look back,” she told her daughter. “Always look forward.” In time, this became my mother’s motto, too.
Lyda dropped out of high school while my dad continued in college. He took pride in being the first in his family to graduate from high school and wasn’t about to quit now. He began working nights and weekends at a grocery store to support us, meaning that we rarely saw him at home through most of those early years. After getting his diploma, he got a job working with his dad in a truck-repair shop, saving enough money to move us to a two-story home built with a farm loan in a rural town called Hooper. Nor was this the end of his ambition: just a few years later, he reenrolled in school, at night, to pursue a second bachelor’s degree, in mechanical engineering.
My dad’s father had dropped out in grade school, just after his twelfth birthday, when his folks divorced, and essentially abandoned him. By lying about his age, he got a job in a junkyard, where he slept in an old boxcar at night. Later he worked at a meat-processing plant, and then as a truck driver, while he learned to repair cars on the side. In his own way, he was bright, resilient, and ambitious—traits he passed down to his son.
So in short, I’d describe the Rose family, as of that day I started kindergarten, as flat broke yet determinedly upwardly mobile. Given my parents’ shared conviction, still common among American families of that time, that our obstacles would be short-lived, and our lives would eventually be more prosperous than those of previous generations, my mother was therefore cheered to think that not only would she have me off her hands for several hours of the day, during the week, but that my time in the classroom would be well spent. Sure, I was mischievous. Yet based on that preschool test I’d taken, which suggested I was intellectually gifted, the school psychologist assured my mother that there was every reason to expect that I would have a bright future.