The Bread of Life

I lifted this picture from King Arthur's website, because while I had my iPhone, 

I hardly thought taking a shot of the mom buttering the toast was appropriate. 

There I was, sitting at a table in King Arthur Flour's lovely new cafe, waiting for a meeting with a Head of School who is visiting from out of town, and I caught something going on at the table next to me. A family - mom, dad, teenage daughter - were enjoying a lovely breakfast together. That's nice, I thought.

My reverie was pierced by the rapid movement of the mom who yanked the plate away from her teenage daughter, asked for the daughter's knife, and hastily unwrapped the neat little package of Cabot butter. I watched - I'd like to say in disbelief, but my reaction was more like disgust - as the mother buttered her thirteen or fourteen year-old's toast. 

I watched for a while. I watched out of the corner of my eye to make sure the daughter did not have a cast I was missing on her arm or some other obvious disability that would have interfered with her ability to butter her toast. Nope. Not from my perspective, at least, nothing obvious to report. [As some commenters have mentioned below - at least the ones who refrained from swearing at me - have correctly pointed out that I can't assess neurotypicality from ten feet away. This is absolutely true. Her inability to butter her toast could have stemmed from any number of issues. However, I sat next to them for a full hour, and as far as I could tell from my seat, there were no waving neuro-atypical red flags. But thanks for the obscenities and one particularly vivid description regarding where to put my own head.]

The daughter watched her mother frantically buttering, buttering, with what appeared to be a little bit of impatience and maybe even irritation. Ah, yes. It was irritation. I know, because when she bit into the toast, she complained to her mother that it was "too crunchy" and to please get her another order of toast that's "less crunchy." 

I wish I was making this up. 

To her credit, the mother made her go get it, but when the daughter returned with her less crunchy toast, the mother got back down to work, buttering, buttering...

And I got back to work on my book. 

My cursor blinked at the end of a sentence in the following paragraph, in a chapter on the research behind intrinsic (internal) and extrinsic (external) motivation:

“The hallmark of successful individuals is that they love learning, they seek challenges, they value effort, and they persist in the face of obstacles” writes Dweck. She calls these successful individuals “mastery-oriented,” and

There's that "and," just waiting. I honestly did not know where to go from there. Luckily, my colleague arrived and I was able to shut down Scrivener before I finished with 

"...and therefore, it's vital that your child be allowed to butter their own toast, to experience that sense of mastery over their breakfast."

NB: I edited one sentence above after receiving comments and added the stuff in brackets.

Oh, Say Can You See?

Mark Bauerlein wrote a fantastic piece for Bloomberg.com yesterday called "What Do U.S. College Graduates Lack? Professionalism." In it, Professor Bauerlein laments the marked decline teachers are seeing in student work ethic and the impact that decline is having on the emerging workforce.

I gave an exam last week, and one student showed up 25 minutes late. When the hour ended and I collected the papers, he looked up from his seat, cast a pitiable glance and mumbled, “Please, I got here late -- may I have another 20 minutes?” 

I shook my head and said, “Can’t do that.” His request echoed in my head all the way back to my office. Where in the world did he get the idea that an exam doesn’t begin and end at a set time?

I am both relieved and worried to read that I am not the only teacher who has noticed a decline in student work ethic over the past decade. This decline has not been subtle, in my experience, and when I talk to other teachers, I hear the same complaint.

Bauerlein writes,

Even more than employers, fully 64 percent of professors observe an increase in a sense of entitlement in recent years, while only 5 percent say it has decreased. The students text-message during class, send e-mails to teachers with grammar and spelling errors, and act “unfocused.”

I posted Bauerlein's article to my Facebook page, with a question about where the decline in work ethic is coming from. My smart and observant friend, Carol Blymire, who teaches part-time, observed, "Because Mommy and Daddy will do everything for them...?" and the writer Tetman Callis agreed, in his usual poetic style, "The ills of the republic are nested in the homes of the citizens."

I don't know what's going on in the homes of other citizens, but this citizen's home will be ground zero for a cultural sea change this summer.

This will be the summer of my sons' independence, and I'm not talking the country idyll version of childhood independence; running around in the woods all day long in the summer and only coming home at the call of the dinner bell. That kind of independence is great, but we've already got that going on. My kids are decidedly free-range. I'm talking about the kind of independence that requires initiative and diligence, life skills that enable us to render abstract ideas, desires, and needs into reality.

I want to foster the sort of initiative and diligence apparent in the difference between a kid who asks his mother in a tone of accusation and annoyance where his blue t-shirt is, and a kid who knows precisely where his blue t-shirt is because he's the one who washed, dried, and folded it when it got dirty.

Yes, it's true that I am operating under the influence of the mountain of parenting and education books I'm using as research for my book, texts that outline the evolution of our increasingly anxious and overprotective style of parenting in excruciating detail. Children used to have a work ethic because they were - gasp - expected to work. It's only once we started treating them as precious commodities to be coddled and pampered that teachers started to see a decline in the life skills that comprise work ethic, or "grit."

Despite the fact that I should know better, I have allowed myself to fall victim to one of the the classic parenting cop-outs, "Nevermind, I'll do it myself." I've failed my boys because I give in to the rationale that things get done faster and better if I do them myself rather than teach my children how to do them on their own. While it is true that I'm faster and better at most household chores, every time I do them myself, I deprive my children of the opportunity to practice both skills and diligence, and that's worth a few minutes extra here and there.

Part of my responsibility as a parent is to raise children with a solid work ethic, kids without the sense of entitlement described by Professor Bauerlein. More than the livelihoods of our children are at stake; the American economy is in the hands of today's parents. American college graduates are generally acknowledged to be less educated, less intellectually flexible, and less creative than their international peers, and to add insult to that critical injury by depriving our children of a strong work ethic could prove to be the fatal blow to our country's educational and economic future. 

All In

A lot has been made this year of the value of marshmallow tests, grit, and character in building a quality education. Every time I open my laptop, someone has forwarded an article or tagged me in a post about about the value of character in schools. When I closed the lid on my laptop this weekend, and finally got around to catching up on my NPR podcast listening, there it was again. Paul Tough, talking about his book How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character with Ira Glass on This American Life." Tom Ashbrook, talking about the fact that schools are adding workouts, not for fitness, but for "Attention, Grit, and Emotional Control." I had to retreat to a Freakonomics podcast about how to maximize my kids' (read: my) Halloween candy haul (research for next year). 

Don't misunderstand - I'm not tired of the discussion; I think this focus on character in education is a fantastic turn of events. I'm thrilled. As more and more people come around to the value of character education, I sound less and less like the preachy schoolmarm on a weekend pass from the Big Woods. 

For the past five years, I have been teaching at Crossroads Academy, a school that combines the Core Knowledge curriculum with a core virtues curriculum. I have to admit, I was not totally sure what I'd gotten myself into when I signed the contract for my first year. I figured I'd smile and nod, support the character education teachers in their efforts, and reap the benefits of teaching kids who attend a weekly character education class. It's not as if this is my first brush with Aristotle's Golden Mean, on the contrary - I'm one of the A-man's biggest fans - and I can hold my own in a conversation about prudence, temperance, fortitude, and justice. 

But about six months into that first year, I noticed all that "character stuff" was leaking out of character education class and saturating every other subject. It was my students' fault; they opened the floodgates. They talked about Atticus' sense of justice in English class, Achilles' lack of temperance in Latin class, Ghandi's incredible fortitude in history class. This weekend, I was helping my third grade son study for his history test, and he told me that "the conspirators killed Caesar because he was not a good steward of Rome." 

Today, Core Knowledge drives my content, but character education and the core virtues drive my teaching, and my relationships with my students.

Well, most of the time. Like anyone who has been teaching the same classes for a while, I am apt to get lulled into a routine, particularly in November. The clocks have just changed, that certain slant of light has descended on New Hampshire, and it's tempting to coast while I put my energy into writing report cards and recovering from the middle-school super-virus my students gave me last week. After all, it would be easy; my class materials have all those helpful notes and Post-Its in the margins, accumulated over years of discussion, the teacher's manual of my Latin textbook sings its siren call...but drat. Just when I have checked out until after the holidays, my students foil my plans. 

This week, I was hacking away at the huge pile of grading I have to get through before I can actually begin to write grade reports, and I was getting sleepy. In my defense, Latin translations are a huge time suck because my students like to take full and creative advantage of Latin's  relatively flexible word order. Nouns and verbs are never where I expect them to be, and the grading is slow going. Halfway through what felt like the bajillionth Latin test, I came across an incorrect answer, with an arrow pointing to a note in the margin:

"Dear Mrs. Lahey. I know the answer to #4 is incorrect, but I accidentally saw the answer on your answer key, and I did not want to cheat. But I know the answer is "vobis" because "you" is plural, not singular."

Needless to say, I gave her the two points, and promptly checked back in.

I am not naive enough to believe that character education alone can save America's educational crisis, but I do know that this week's headlines are full of bright, well-educated people who have sold virtue to purchase wealth. If character education manages to score some column inches on the front page between Jill Kelley and Lance Armstrong, and authors such as PaulTough and Diane Ravitch are brave enough to champion the cause of character in education, I'm all in.