I was motivated to write this post after a student of mine arrived to class 45 minutes late with a note from his mother excusing it because - get this! - his teeth hurt. I’ve heard a lot of creative reasons over the years, but this was a first. This young man will be able to vote in roughly a year. He also likes to skip class. I knew what was up. I recommended that he not show his future bosses notes like this from his mother. “In fact,” I said, “you might not want to show them any notes from your mother.”

I am so grateful that Hara Estroff Marano wrote A Nation of Wimps five years ago. As an educator, it gave me the courage to stand by my expectations and principles when parents came in to negotiate marks or question my intentions. It gave me the courage to say what I knew was intuitively true: “Adversity, you know, can actually build character if we teach Johnny to view it positively instead of negatively. Why don’t we make an effort to show him how a lesson can be learned from this little setback?”

Now a new documentary produced by the CBC has come out showcasing the same ideas. It’s called Hyper Parents, Coddled Kids and it’s very enlightening. To view the trailer click the image below. To watch the whole documentary, click here.

When I went over who Wilhem Wundt was with my psychology students yesterday - “the father of psychology” - I was struck by our text’s manner of introducing him as just another brilliant mind who floundered in school:

“Like many famous people, he (Wundt) got off to a rocky start. Darwin’s father, for example, had called his son a bum and told him he was too lazy and stupid to ever amount to anything. Albert Einstein, one of the world’s greatest mathematicians, kept failing high school math and failing college entrance exams. When he finally got through school, he said it had injured his mind. So, too, with Wundt: he had spent most of his time daydreaming and failing, for his teachers kept slapping him in the face (literally).”

To be honest, I automatically agreed with this statement as I went over it. How could you not? School is no place for brilliant, deviant, field-creating thinkers, right? How could it be? The mission of schools is to teach students about fields of knowledge that already exist, right? You couldn’t have a course titled, “Create a New School of Thought 12,” offered in the course calendar, could you? What would the prerequisites be? A track record of frustrating and annoying teachers? Daydreaming? What would its standards and benchmarks be? How could you blanket what a good school of thought was versus a bad one? Now that would be tricky!

Then I looked up at my students. They were just sitting there, patiently waiting in silence (I must have been staring into my textbook for a good while), and I asked myself: Do they need to flounder in school in order to be game-changers? How many Darwins, Wundts, and Einsteins have I taught? How many of my students have had the genius beaten out of them by red x’s, teacher sighs and eye-rolls, pre-packaged content, and standards and benchmarks that challenged them to ‘get’ what has already been discovered by others? How can I, with my prescribed curriculum, challenge them to discovering things for themselves? Are schools, then, worthless? Should I just stop the lesson and tell my students the dirty little secret that the author of this text is referring to?

I wish I could have seen the look on my face when I read the next sentence from the text:

“Fortunately, a few teachers saw the promise of greater things in him (Wundt) and helped him to pull himself together.”

“Aaah,” I thought, “That’s why we’re here.” And with that bit of paradoxical irony, I continued on with the lesson.

*            *            *

End Note: (and I’m not joking)  After class a student (who a colleague of mine referred to as the boy “With a lot of stuff going on in his head,”) came to my desk and asked if I had ever read Julian Jaynes’ The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown in the Bicameral Mind. Ironically I had. I couldn’t believe it! That book was/is the most mind-blowing, field-converging book I have ever read. I was 24 when I read it and it took me a long time to get through it. This student is 16 and I got the sense that he read it over a weekend. We talked for some time and he ended by saying how one of his goals in life is to learn lots about a lot of different things so he can create his own insightful conclusions and associations … just like Julian Jaynes (and Darwin, Wundt, and Einstein if I might add). It was a perfect way to end the class.

Every so often I encounter a discussion with someone who doubts whether or not class size really matters for effective teaching and learning. I’m sure there’s evidence to support this, but I usually respond by saying that a class of 21 or less is more than manageable. I don’t know why this is, though, but every student over 21 is noticeable … up until about 28, and then it’s just a big class. Every student less than 21 isn’t nearly as noticeable. Speaking from my own experience, in a class of 21 or less it feels like it’s possible to get to work with each student.

Then I ask the inquisitor to picture spending a weekend afternoon with seven (or more) children and/or teenagers in their house. Like really … close your eyes and picture what would it look like? What would you do to prepare for their arrival?  Would it be noisy? Would it be enjoyable?  Would you want a break? Or five?

Then I explain that that is exactly the difference between 21 and 28, except that there’s already 21 children and/or teenagers in the room.

That’s why class size matters.

If you teach a course where your students need to remember and understand a lot of content, this review game may interest you. I created it a few years back when I was trying my best to prepare a lackluster class of students for their final exam. It’s called Vocab King’s Court, it’s a lot of fun, and it goes like this.

last-minute prep before King's Court

PREPARATION
The first thing you need to do is identify what key facts, terms, events, etc. you want your students to know and put them in a list. Give this list to your students at the start of each unit and tell them to begin developing their own glossary or set of flash cards, saying that they will need the list at the end of the unit (or course) to play Kings Court (and do well on the exam).

KING’S COURT OVERVIEW
The game is quite simple.  You create one court for every two students in the room, and you create courts by putting two desks together (head-to-head) or by putting two chairs at either end of a long table. A “court” is simply a seating arrangement where two students can look at each other and ask questions (see pictures).

The objective of the game is to make it to the King’s Court and stay there. The way you do that is by beating the opponents you face in all the courts leading up to the King’s Court. When you win, you move up to the next highest court. When you lose, you move down a court. The highest court is the King’s Court, and I’m sure your students will have their own names for the lowest court.

So, let’s say two students face-off in the court just below the King’s Court. The illustration below shows the winner advancing ‘up’ to the King’s Court, and the loser being demoted down a court.Each pair of students in a court are given two minutes to take turns asking one another questions from their self-made glossaries, trying to score more points than the other. It starts with one student asking the other a question. The student who’s asked a question is given roughly 15 seconds to start their explanation (if you let them use their lists, this gives them time to find it), and then 15 seconds to finish. So it works out to roughly 30 seconds for each question. If they provide an adequate answer, they score a point. If they can’t, the ‘question-asker’ scores a point.

students quizzing one another

By the end of two minutes they should have asked one another at least four terms, facts, events, etc. The student who scored the most points moves up a court and the other student moves down a court. If they tie, I have them do one rock-paper-scissors (no best of sevens).

"silent review breaks" between rounds

I often allow my students to use their self-made glossaries or flashcards when they answer questions for the first couple of rounds … until they get the hang of it.  After that, though, they cannot use them to answer questions - they have to recall the explanation on their own.

To make it a productive exercise, I insert 5 minute “Silent Review Breaks” so students can brush up on their own. Some students will look for that killer word that will help them score points and move up a few courts. Other students will review terms that they may have got burned on. The silent review breaks, though, are golden: the students do not want to be the ones in the bottom tier and most are really motivated to study in order to advance.

STARTING PLACEMENTS
It obviously wouldn’t be fair to start the bright kids at the top and the lower kids at the bottom; in fact, I do the opposite. Without being too obvious, I position the lower students in the higher courts and the brighter students in the bottom courts.  This provides the bright students with a fun challenge.

"Time's Up!" Winner move up. Losers move down.

A great friend of mine and an incredible teacher, Timothy Quinn from Westminster School in Simsbury, Connecticut, sent me a link showing how his students’ work on their Hamlet unit made the front page of his school’s website.

Student artwork inspired by Hamlet

Initially I was blown away by the quality of the student work (just read two paragraphs of one of the essays and you’ll see what I mean). The second time I read through the article I was utterly impressed by  how well his students responded to the open-ended format of the project. If any of you are looking for shining examples of differentiated instruction in action, this is as good as you’re going to get.

But after reading it a third time, and not surprisingly, Tim’s own comments struck me the most, making me wonder how I too could use public displays of student work to make my students’ education more meaningful. In Tim’s own words:

Additional benefits of the public element of these alternative assessment options were that

1. The authenticity of the task in some cases may have raised the bar in terms of student effort;
2. The display of art created a buzz for underform students who were able to view the work of the Sixth Form; and
3. The various projects made for a more memorable and potentially stronger educational experience for the entire form, who were able to learn not only from their teachers, but also from the ideas of their classmates.