“Embrace your inner weirdness”

May 14, 2011 By 5 Comments

A parent recently sent along this article: Why geeks make better adults than the in-crowd.  The article draws it’s lead from Alexandra Robbins  book The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth.

While there is something of a defensive, passive-aggressive revenge fantasy to the tone, it is undoubtedly true that conforming to the conventional as a way to be popular is a dead end.

It reminded me of two things.The first was a post I wrote in 2009 that was along the same lines. The second was last January’s young alumni/ae panel.

We invited college age alums to come back and talk to current high school students about college life. They offloaded a trove of invaluable expertise and good humored advice about the transition from high school.

We learned that:

Getting grades in college is no big deal
PDS really teaches you how to write and be a learner
Joining an athletic team is a great way to make friends and have fun
Owning a frying pan for making egg sandwiches and knowing how to cook  is a really good move

There was advice on how to become a research assistant, get an internships and get into the best science classes.

And then there was this on college life in general:

When you get to college, embrace your inner weirdness. We all know that PDS kids are weird and in college they will love you for it.

So I started thinking about that because I know that PDS kids are actually not weird (apologies to those invested in trying to be different for the sake of it!)

They are themselves though. And that – maybe -  is the difference. If most schooling is inclined to promote conformity and compliance through a relentless emphasis on standardized tests and narrow measures of achievement, then it is no wonder that the most successful students are those who have jumped highest through the regulation hoops.

Success at PDS is not like that.  Sure we have plenty of excellent test takers and achievers and the scores to match. But it is not the purpose of a PDS education to raise scores. The purpose of a PDS education is to raise learners. The focus is not on tests but on learning. And, because that means thinking about learners, it means recognizing and valuing the amazingly different capacities and passions of every student. Being who you are means being part of the in-crowd.

So if a school enables, encourages and educates each child to be who they are and who they might become, then it is no wonder that PDS students are “weird”. They’ve not been obsessively tested and graded and numbered and labelled.  They’ve been spared the widget factory approach to schooling and they emerge from the process as individuals on a unique journey. That’s what we strive for. Being a teenager is hard enough without the added pressure of an education designed to create alienated and isolated outsiders along with the few winners who have raced to the top.

So “embrace your inner weirdness” is comparable to “follow your passion”. We all do better and go further and deeper when we find and follow that inner drive and purpose. And in this era of innovation that spells a competitive edge. PDS kids stand out because they are who they are. Like all kids, each one is a bundle of unique qualities and not one of them is off the assembly line.

And sometimes – being conventional is where a student wants to be.  And that is just fine too. After all – with everyone else busy being different, conventional stands out.  And how PDS is that!

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Filed Under: 21st century schools, Creativity, Diversity, Education, Identity, Many minds, PDS People

We asked…they told: 100% feel safe in school

October 20, 2010 By 5 Comments

100% of PDS high school students agreed with all of these statements on the HSSSE :

I  feel safe in this school

I am treated fairly in this school

There is at least one adult in this school who cares about me

I feel supported by the teachers in this school

Adults in this school want me to succeed

Teachers try to engage me in classroom discussion

With those things so solidly in place it is much easier to expect all student to do their best.

There’s a haunting and melancholy song that plays at the open and close of Race to Nowhere. It’s from a group aptly named “The Weepies” and it opens with these words:

“Nobody Knows Me At All”

When I was a child everybody smiled, nobody knows me at all
Very late at night and in the morning light, nobody knows me at all

Now I got lots of friends, yes, but then again, nobody knows me at all

As I watched the film again yesterday, I thought of just how important that sense of being known and valued is to students on their journey through school.

To be accepted for who you are, known and valued should be the essential ingredient and basic premise of school. Being fearful in school, or in constant anxiety of being held less worthy because of who you are, your differences or perceived difference, takes an enormous toll on learning capacity.

The energy it takes to fit in and stay under the radar drains the children of intellectual and emotional energy and robs them of their rights.   So establishing a safe haven for intellectual risk taking needs to be a top priority. Climate and context matter. We can only expect children to expand their capacity when  conditions make it possible.

With these thoughts in mind, and the impact of the film again fresh in my mind, I returned to those HSSSE results. Of the three dimensions it is the third – the Emotional Engagement – where the PDS results are the most outstanding.

Creating that culture of kindness and acceptance is a conscious act and the faculty of the high school – and indeed the whole school – are to be congratulated. This is vital bedrock of our mission that demands “mutual respect’.

There are almost 40 questions of the survey designed to elicit information about the level of emotional engagement. They range from feeling safe in school to being accepted for who you are and being respected and valued. They should be universal expectations and experiences. But they are not. And that is a crime against children.

On all of those questions PDS students report feeling very significantly higher levels of support, safety, acceptance and respect than their peers nationally.  As a PDS student was reported saying in 1941: We wish all children could be glad and safe.

And that song by The Weepies? Here it is:

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Filed Under: 21st century schools, Assessment, Data, Education, High School, Identity, Mission Vision Values, PDS People, Progressive Education

Objects of desire

November 9, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Objectified - a film about the creative process of influential product designers – those people who create the “must have” gadgets and those design upgrades to toilet brushes and other quotidian items that Daniel Pink spoke of in A Whole New Mind. The film explores our complex relationship with manufactured objects and, by extension, the people who design them. It’s a look at the creativity of the designers who create the future by re-inventing the world of made objects And it’s about the stuff we have and the stuff we desire and therefore about who we are – our personal taste, style and expression – consumerism, and sustainability. What does what we have tell us about who we are and who we want to be?

Here’s a trailer of Gary Hustwit’s documentary Objectified.

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Filed Under: Creativity, Future, Identity, Technology

Scarlet Women

October 28, 2009 By Leave a Comment

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Filed Under: Creativity, Critical thinking, Curriculum, Diversity, High School, Identity, Leadership, PDS People Tagged With: , , ,

Many minds, many voices, many stories

October 7, 2009 By 1 Comment

The history of Nigeria and African colonialism is not Chinua Achebe and Things Fall Apart; the Holocaust is not Anne Frank and The Diary;  Mumbai is not Slumdog Millionaire.

Our lives, our cultures, are composed of many overlapping stories. Novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice — and warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding.

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Filed Under: Diversity, Identity, Many minds, Uncategorized

The machine is us/ing us

March 22, 2007 By 1 Comment

Take a look at this fascinating video about web 2.0 from Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University.
The machine is us.
The machine is using us.
The machine will not stop.

According to Professor Wesch we’ll need to rethink a few things including:
copyright
authorship
identity
ethics
aesthetics
rhetorics
governance
privacy
commerce
love
family
ourselves.
What might all this mean for school 2.0?
For the University of Kansas it clearly means a new course of study: Digital Ethnography

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Filed Under: Change, Identity, Learning, Technology

Picasso, the brand

December 9, 2006 By Leave a Comment

Last weekend I visited the Guggenheim for the exhibit Spanish Painting from El Greco to Picasso: Time, Truth, and History. As the paintings were arranged thematically, rather than chronologically, is was possible to see connections and influences in a more direct way. It was in front of the juxtaposition of these two paintings by Goya and Picasso that I heard a guide, passing with a tour, tell the following story as explanation of Picasso’s darker picture.

Francisco de Goya’s Still Life With Sheep’s Head (c. 1808-1812); Pablo Picasso’s Still Life With Sheep’s Skull (1939)

It was 1939. The Spanish Civil War had ravaged his country. Europe was on the brink of disaster. His mother had died. Picasso was close to his mother and had taken her surname for his. Picasso said, “My mother told me ‘If you become a soldier you’ll be a general. If you become a monk you’ll end up as the pope.’ Instead, I became a painter and wound up as Picasso.”

Clearly, he knew himself to be a personal brand before we had heard of such things.

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Filed Under: Art, Identity