Charleston Collegiate School Blog

When I read Dr. Larry Afrin’s comment in response to my previous post on homework, I was inspired to reflect on a topic that has always interested me: writing. To borrow the words of Dr. Samuel Johnson, “reading maketh a man broad; speaking maketh a man ready; but writing maketh a man exact.” Being able to write well is an invaluable skill that can carry a person through so many aspects of his or her personal and professional life.

In today’s fast-paced, digital world of Googling for answers, instant messaging, and online support, I agree with Dr. Afrin that students dislike writing today because it takes time, practice, and focus.  A writer — whether an adult or child — must use all thinking abilities to translate abstract thought into physical words, and this takes  a true dedication of faculty. Since this conversation began around the prompt of homework, I will add that perhaps homework is a good time for students to be writing, no matter what it is — a blog, poem, anything. Just getting a student to write is a great place to start inspiring his or her love of writing and desire to write well.

I find, though, that many students put this kind of effort into other ventures, such as sports, art, and socializing. Thus I am forced to consider, how do we get young people to focus on learning to write as much as they focus on learning to dribble a basketball, execute a perfect pirouette, film a documentary, sketch a superhero, or get the attention of the opposite sex? Perhaps it is by making writing more social. As Dr. Afrin says, it seems teenagers are writing today more than ever through texts, emails, Facebook, Twitter, and blogs, but these are social venues.

Thus, as Dr. Afrin avers, perhaps a public display of writing, such as a literary magazine, the blogosphere, or other such forums, would be a great way to inspire students to practice the art of writing. Publishing the best efforts of student’s writing gives them a goal by which to base their motivations to produce good written work.  Moreover, it is a way of making writing a social skill. CCS has started exploring this avenue through NCTE and its development of the National Day on Writing and the online National Writing Gallery. CCS now has its own online writing gallery called The Charleston Collegiate Collection, which can be found here.

So, what do you think? Is writing as we know it becoming a lost art?  If so, what exactly are we losing? Why are we losing it? What conditions exists (or no longer exist) that may eventually cause mankind to lose the ability to write well? How can we save the art of writing and thrill of civil discourse? How do we inspire students today to learn to write well and to put time and focus into creating well written work? And, if anything, what have we gained through this potential loss? I look forward to your insights.

What do you think about homework? Do you think that children are not working hard enough or learning enough if they are not getting enough homework? Or do you think that children today are getting too much homework?

Do you feel homework improves learning? Is its purpose to instill a sense of responsibility? Or is it merely busy work?

Using the beauty of William Butler Yeats’ words from his poem “Among School Children”, here is my take on homework:

Labor is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil,
O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

To Yeats, a person’s life, like a dance, is a succession of fluid and self-invented steps. This stanza celebrates imagination, creativity, and passion and the growth that comes from these aspects of the human condition. Wisdom and beauty are not born from hardship and sleep deprivation. Rather, they come from experiencing something one is passionate about and working hard at something that inspires the imagination. It is through the latter that true growth occurs.

Does homework spur passions or inspire creativity? Could it? Should it?

What do you think about homework?

For this blog post, I began writing a piece on a book I am reading by Tony Wagner titled The Global Achievement Gap. However, as I was writing, I had an epiphany — maybe I am approaching this blog the wrong way.

My initial intention was to create an additional venue where parents, teachers, administrators, and even students could share their ideas, interests, and concerns about education, not just at CCS, but all over America and the rest of the world. However, I have found that even though people are coming to this site and potentially reading my posts, no real dialogue has started. Those of you who know me know that I love good conversation. So let’s start talking (or typing) to each other about schools, education, young people — anything!

Therefore, my weekly posts will be much shorter, and they will be more like prompts for discussion rather than a personal commentary. Of course, I will share my thoughts and ideas, but I want to know yours as well. In addition to my own weekly posts, my colleagues at CCS will also be posting their thoughts. I invite you to comment on, contribute to, and/or question all posts and comments.

Until my next post, I would encourage you to check out a really interesting website about the documentary film 2 Million Minutes: A Global Examination, which chronicles how six high school students (two American, two Indian, and two Chinese) spend their two million minutes (equivalent to their four years of high school). While you’re on the site, you may want to check out the Third World Challenge Exam and see how you measure up! Let me know what you think about the documentary, and how you do on the exam. I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

As the school opens its doors for another academic year, I am compelled to think about the meanings and implications of the phrase ‘academic rigor.’ What is it? Is it needed? How do you know it when you see it?

When I first tried to define academic rigor for myself, I quickly realized that it was much easier to explain what academic rigor is not. Academic rigor is not more busy work, more hours of homework, and more late night tears. It is not teaching to a test. It is not strict instruction and unbending curricula. It is not long lectures and even longer note-taking. Academic rigor is not stringent teacher-driven classrooms. None of these are aspects of rigor, but rather what leads to rigor-mortis in the classroom. Academic rigor must bring life to a classroom and invigorate student brains. We need to challenge students and raise expectations… not bore them to death with tedious assignments and long lectures or scare them to death with unattainable goals and assignments that are beyond their capabilities.

There has been an increasing amount of dialogue and debate about academic rigor in the past five years, and so there is a lot of information on the subject. An article from the Oregon Small Schools Initiative explains that an institution, classroom, and/or curriculum is academically rigorous when it requires students to “actively explore, research, and solve complex problems to develop a deep understanding of core academic concepts that reflect college readiness standards. Increasing rigor… means [designating] time and opportunity for students to develop and apply habits of mind as they navigate sophisticated and reflective learning experiences. …Through an academically rigorous program students not only gain knowledge and skills to achieve at high levels, they also gain ways of thinking and doing that prepare them for college, work, and citizenship.”

This explanation of rigor certainly fits with what we are doing at Charleston Collegiate very well. We endorse student-driven work, prompting our students to become actively involved in their own learning process and motivating them to challenge themselves; we are as interested - actually, more interested - in the student’s process to reach an answer as we are in the student’s answer. We are striving to teach students to be independent thinkers interested in their own academic careers.

Rigor means placing high expectations on teachers as well. To be rigorous, a teacher’s class work must be carefully planned to challenge all of the individual students in the class. This means that all teachers and administrators in the learning community must understand that each student is an individual learner and not merely part of a class of students and teach accordingly. Each individual student must be frequently challenged, and sometimes that means different challenges for different students.

Another well-founded definition I find compelling is that academic rigor is a “consistent expectation of [student] excellence and the aspiration to significant [student] achievement. Excellence has been described as product and content, while rigor is the process” (Robert Cundiff, The Angle, and “What Rigorous Really Means”). In this article, Cundiff also maintains that rigor is not something to be feared if we approach it in this way. An academic program is best when it is rigorous and when it demands the best of the student participants. But this is not done by assigning more work. It is accomplished by assigning more thought-provoking, profound work.

To summarize, rigor means high expectations, challenging thought, teacher and student preparation, product excellence, and most of all purpose in learning that fits the needs of the students and pushes them to present and future success. The ideal form of academic rigor is when students become so engaged and passionate that they seek rigor for themselves. And this is how you can tell the difference between rigor and rigor-mortis - rigor should inspire students to become engaged and work beyond their perceived limits… not scare or bore them to death.

This is the third and final part of the address I delivered at Charleston Collegiate School’s commencement on May 30th. (Read Part I and Part II.)

Graduates, as you leave here today, I urge you to apply this attitude to your own life as an avenue to success. You too are about to step into unknown territory, and no one can tell you with any certainty where to go to find what you are looking for.

In the end, it is the survival of the fittest, and those who can carry the message to Garcia are those who will prevail. I agree with Hubbard’s claim that civilization is one long, restless search for just such individuals as Lieutenant Rowan. He is wanted in every nation, city, town, and village.  He is wanted in every office, store, hospital, factory, military unit, business, law firm, and university. The world cries out for the person who can ‘Carry a Message to Garcia’: this person is always needed — and needed badly.

Are you that person? Will you be that person?

Proverbially speaking, “You cannot get to the top by sitting on your bottom,” so keep moving, keep working hard and, to borrow words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, “be yourself, not some base imitator of another, but your best self. There is something which you can do better than another. Listen to the inward voice and bravely obey that. Do the things at which you are great,” and, believe me, you will go far.

Graduates, you are a graduating class in the 39^th year of Charleston Collegiate School or Sea Island Academy, and I applaud you for how far you have come and how far I know you will go.  Congratulations and best of luck in your future endeavors.

This is the second part of the address I delivered at Charleston Collegiate School’s commencement on May 30th. (Click here to read the first part.) Look for the third and final part tomorrow.

Elbert Hubbard of East Aurora, New York, who was a soap salesman, entrepreneur, vaudeville performer, bohemian, horseman, humorist, printer, novelist, moralist, farmer, egotist, plagiarist, avid supporter of big business, avid defender of individual rights, anti-intellectual, supporter of the arts, male chauvinist, pro-feminist, college drop-out, and self-proclaimed philosopher, knew a little something about what it meant to keep moving.  He wrote the famous short story “A Message to Garcia,” which had a circulation of 40 million copies distributed all over the world in more than twenty different languages.  Hubbard wrote this literary trifle with a huge impact one evening in a single hour on the 22nd of February, George Washington’s Birthday, in 1899, and I will summarize it for you now.

In 1898 President McKinley found himself at war with Spain in the Philippines, and he heard that the leader of the Insurgents, General Garcia, was in the jungles of Cuba fighting the Spanish as well.  It was very necessary for McKinley to communicate quickly with General Garcia, who was somewhere in the vastness of the thick mountainous forests of Cuba, but no one knew exactly where to find him. No telegraph or mail message could reach him in time. But President McKinley had to secure Garcia’s cooperation, and quickly. Colonel Arthur Wagner, head of the Bureau of Military Intelligence, informed the President, “There is a fellow by the name of Lieutenant Andrew Rowan, and he will find Garcia for you, if anybody can.” Lieutenant Rowan was sent for and given a letter to be delivered to Garcia. Rowan sealed the letter in an oilskin pouch, strapped it over his heart, in four days landed off the coast of Cuba at night from an open boat, disappeared into the jungle, and in three weeks emerged from the other side of the island, having traversed a hostile country on foot and delivered his letter to Garcia. It is not really important to know exactly how he did it. What is important is that he did deliver McKinley’s message to Garcia, thus accomplishing his mission without ever asking the president how to find a man he had never met on an island to which he had never been.

I agree with Hubbard that this is what makes Lieutenant Rowan a man whose form should be cast in bronze and placed in every college of the land because his actions show that young men and women do not merely need book-learning or instruction.  To succeed in today’s world, young men and women must have resolute self-reliance, determined ingenuity, and a steadfastness of the heart and mind, which will cause them to be loyal, to be reliable, to act promptly, to concentrate their energies to do the thing they must do — whether it be to “carry a message to Garcia” or take the next step forward into adulthood.

Lieutenant Rowan did not ask any questions about the location of Garcia.  He made no objections, requested no help, but in the end he accomplished the mission through his own initiative. In truth, no one could have told him the exact location of Garcia for certain, and so he set out and found the answers for himself.

(Part III to follow tomorrow.)

This is the first part of the address I delivered at Charleston Collegiate School’s commencement on May 30th. Look for the second part tomorrow.

Parents, grandparents, teachers, friends, and graduating seniors, good morning and welcome to the 2009 Charleston Collegiate Commencement Ceremony. I have been asked to fill in as your commencement speaker today, and I am honored to do so.

I have made comments at 39 other graduations and been the official speaker at one other commencement ceremony before today — and can you believe that I am only 45 this year! All jokes aside, I am happy to be standing before such a fine group of young people. We have worked together and played together, and we have seen many things accomplished during our time here at CCS.

As I stand here today, I am reminded of a story about a college president who runs into a former graduate back on campus for his 25^th reunion. The graduate tells the college president, “I want thank you for the inspirational advice you gave me at my commencement 25 years ago!”  The college president, who of course could neither remember the graduate nor what he had said 25 years earlier replied, “Why, thank you, but perhaps you could refresh my memory. What did I say that inspired you so much?” At that, the graduate leaned in close to the college president, looked at him earnestly, and said, “I’ve tried to live my life by these words. As I walked across the stage during graduation, you shook my hand and said, ‘Keep moving. Keep moving!’”

Though humorous, we should all heed this advice and strive to keep moving forward, but the problem with continuing to move forward is that sometimes we lose sight of the direction in which we are headed.

(Part II to follow tomorrow.)

For the past three months I have been writing blog entries that presented my educational background, and now I find myself in a school at 73 and still thinking about how to provide a proper environment for young people to use for their learning.

The way I see it, they learn whether we think we are teaching them or not. Students are, as Nancy and Ted Sizer say powerfully in The Students Are Watching, paying a lot of attention to our actions and only some attention to our words. I look through the eyes of a lot of writers who write about how people learn, what they learn, how they apply what they learn, and how their brains work, etc. It is through the wisdom of others’ experiences and thoughts that I shape my own insight into teaching and learning, and I plan to discuss these inspirations in a later blog post

I think it is time for me to speak out a little about what I think it is really all about. I think that it is time that I bring whatever I have to say about schooling, educating, whatever, and, the words of Mae West who said, “bring all you got.”

Each day for each teacher should be a triumph of the learning experience. Of course teacher’s successes will not always be on some grand scale, but each success must always be more than just an evanescent moment. I invite teachers to talk about shining moments in teaching. And I will ask some of our teachers to give us blog entries to that end.

When I was growing up in the South Carolina upcountry, there were basically two big industries — farming and textiles. In my home town, Greenville, there was a semi-circle of cotton mills around the west side of the city, and if you drove about five miles from the city you were in farming land, usually small cotton farms. My family owned three small cotton farms, and my dad had a job with the railroad. He usually had to pay the taxes on the land from his earnings because there was no profit on the farms. The people who did the work received half of the money made on the sale of cotton, and they lived a meager existence. Enter the state’s plans for education.

Rural schools and “mill” schools provided very basic and very mediocre educations for the children unfortunate enough to attend them. White students and black students were segregated. Reportedly, the Episcopal Bishop Kirkman Finlay said the state would live to regret not educating its populace. He was prophetic. The price of under-funded educational programs is ignorance. Mills now stand empty, and cotton fields are either barren, have a few cows munching grass on them, or, if close to a town, houses have been built on them.

Why do we languish in the backwash of this neglect today? My guess is that our shortsightedness relates to either or greed or our arrogance. I have been told that my ancestors moved from the fertile valleys of Virginia to South Carolina in search of land that was not “farmed up” by poor farming methods.

My home state has struggled with the cost of ignorance as long as I can remember, and we still struggle with it today. Educational programs come and go, folks argue about how to deal with the problems, and we do research to an endless degree. At the end of the day it is hard to get away from what James Coleman found many years ago. Our schools affect the learning of students to about a 20% degree. The other 80% comes from outside the school — the home. At the base of the problem then is the situation in the home, and poverty seems to create more poverty.

I am forced to say that the cost of ignorance is overwhelming. I feel that we will never overcome it until we begin to realize that we have to pay more attention to what we know and what our educators have known for a long time. Everyone does not start the race on an equal basis, and we have to make up for it somehow. That is why Head Start seems to work, and that is why our graduate schools need more money to train good teachers. Otherwise the cycle of the cost of ignorance will be with us for many more decades.

For my next few blog posts, I have decided to reflect on my own experience as a student because I feel that my life as a student has certainly shaped who I am as a man, as a teacher, and as a Head of School. To read previous blog posts in this series, click here, here, here, and here.

From the time I left the Marine Corps in 1962 until I joined the staff of Summit School in Winston-Salem to teach, I worked for Wachovia Bank in Winston-Salem. My work was based on knowledge gained in training with the bank. Once again I found myself in school to gain knowledge of a broad amount of material. Formal classes with discussions, problems, case studies came together to initiate me into the world of banking.

I learned accounting, analyzing bank statements, and was introduced to a new machine call a computer. In the case of the bank that was an IBM 1401 computer that with its associated equipment occupied a large part of one floor of the bank.

We never know what is going to happen next, not I nor Forrest Gump. One day as I was making a loan for a young man who had taught at Christ Church School in Greenville, S.C. where my mother taught, I found that he had left Christ Church to work at Summit School in Winston-Salem and that he was leaving there to go back to be head of Christ Church. I took a position at Summit School in 1965.

I did not have a job description, and I think that my duties varied widely and deeply. I taught a full load of 7^th, 8^th and 9^th grade English, acted as the school’s business manager, and drove buses 2-3 times a day.

My school head was a brilliant and patient teacher. He allowed me to learn and to develop my knowledge of independent education. At the same time I started work on a masters degree in English. I was 30 years old.

Since 1941 and the first grade I had been engaged in some form of learning, and it did not stop. I continued to learn with my students and with university professors. And I hope that I keep on learning now as I go along with my education. New vistas consistently open, and I am going to strive to always be like Chaucer’s Clerk: “and gladly would he learn and gladly teach.”