Tag Archives: Teaching

December 3, 2025 · 11:35 am

Push Button Make Go

My 6-year-old knows how our Subaru works – push the button to make it go. My 9-year-old knows how to get anywhere – open the app and do what it says. I’m ok with this because they’re not responsible for shepherding a 3600 pound vehicle through city streets lined with people. My kids may not ever even need to drive – they may be shuttled around by cars that are summoned by a tap and exited with a swipe. 

But they will learn.

Last March the College Board changed the SAT to reflect a changing world. On the new digital test, students are allowed to use a built-in graphing calculator called Desmos, a phenomenal tool. Punch in an equation and it will solve it; type in a function and you get a graphical representation. I still teach the underlying math because being able to correctly use tools requires understanding the context in which the tool is meant to operate. It’s a decent idea to know at least a little of what you’re doing. 

School is supposed to teach kids about the world and how it works. Kids want to do this anyway – it’s literally what they’re evolved to do. When they spend a few minutes crushing a cardboard box they’re learning material science, gravitational physics, geometric thinking in two and three dimensions, structural engineering. They then get to answer the creative question of what can you do with a bunch of mostly flat cardboard? Minute for minute this has got to be one of the best returns on time from an educational perspective ever. Plus, it’s fun.

So often school focuses on deeply abstract concepts that feel removed from the systems in which the kid operates. Graphing a systems of linear equations without experiential relevance is basically meaningless, no matter how many word problems they read about buying x blackberries and y mangoes from two different stores. Without experiencing the reality of systems they’re working within, kids end up learning disparate pieces of random information without understanding the connections that create their world. They may not even learn what plants really crave. 

Over the past couple of years I’ve been building a middle school for boys that focuses on a systems approach to learning. How does water get in and out of the house? Where did it come from and where does it go? How are clothes made? How does photography work? Every unit must tie into state standards, but more importantly everything we teach must: 

  • Be a skill they can improve on
  • Be regularly observed in the real world 
  • Be useful 
  • Behave according to some underlying principle 
  • Exist within a broader systemic context

Despite driving as soon as I was able, I didn’t learn how an engine works until I pursued my pilot’s license. The FAA, and common sense, won’t let anyone fly who doesn’t have a strong understanding of the systems in an airplane and how they interconnect. Aside from being required, it’s also fun to learn about this stuff. Understanding the connections between alternator, battery, and engine in a Cessna helped me in my Subaru as well. Last month my car wouldn’t start, so I popped the hood and my son and I took a quick look. After a few minutes of cleaning the battery terminal I hopped back in, pushed the button, and made it go.

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May 26, 2012 · 2:10 pm

Keys Wallet Cell Phone

When I was 24 I ran an after-school program for elementary kids in the East Bay. My co-director Jen and I would close up every night around seven, the September sun still burning through the smog and the Concord heat still clinging to the empty asphalt. Every night around 7:30 I’d return to pick up either my wallet or my cell phone, which I’d forgotten in the drawer of my desk. If it was my keys that I’d left, and Jen had already roared off for home, I would track down the night janitor and beg him to break protocol and open the office door for me. When he wasn’t around or was feeling unhelpful, Jen got a phone call.

For the first month my co-director took mild amusement at my forgetfulness; by October, she’d crafted a plan. “Keys-wallet-cell phone, keys-wallet-cell phone” became her new mantra as we turned off the final lights and prepared to lock the office. I’d pat down my pockets: front right – keys. Back left – wallet. Back right – cell phone. “Check!”

I didn’t forget them again.

These three simple pats have stuck. The days of me forgetting almost everything are over, but I still pat down my pockets every time I walk out of my house, or leave a tutoring session, or head home from the gym. Sometimes I can hear Jen’s voice, friendly but tinged with mocking. Keys. Wallet. Cell phone.

A decent number of my students are forgetful, but only one gives younger me a run for my money. I ask to see his assignment planner, but he’s forgotten it. He couldn’t do his math homework last night because he left his book at school. He’s got reading to do, but….where is that book?

So I crafted a plan. Every day as he leaves school, his mom will ask him this question: Do you have your M-BRAN? It’s going to change his life.

M – math book?
B – binder?
R – reading book?
A – assignment planner?
N – notebooks for reading and writing?

This was a simple system to create. I asked him what materials he needs to do his homework, and then I arranged the letters as best I could. Sometimes he doesn’t have math homework, or need his reading notebook. Doesn’t matter – it stays in the acronym. In the beginning I’ll have him bring home everything, every day. As he gets more self-aware and stops forgetting materials, he can scale back and only bring what he actually needs that night.

This sounds like more work for the kid, right? Nope. When I explained the new system, a look of deep relief spread over his face. We practiced the acronym several times until he knew it by rote. M-BRAN, M-BRAN, M-BRAN.

At the end of our session he happily walked me to the door. He usually does this, but there was extra spring in his step. He now had a system, a way of doing something every time that would create consistently excellent results and didn’t require him to remember anything other than a word. A simple acronym for all that he needs to bring home frees him from the frantic, chaotic searching of his mind and organizes his approach into a clean, methodical checklist. If all checks out, he’s good to go – and he knows it.

He opened the door and held up his hand for our usual high-five.

I slapped it. “M-BRAN!”

He giggled. “M-BRAN.”

I walked out into the cool San Francisco night, but not before checking my pockets. Keys. Wallet. Cell phone.

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May 26, 2012 · 4:47 am

The Catching Machine

I’m not all tutor. I’m part big brother, part friend, part cheerleader, part teammate.

One of my students needed to imagine a machine and write about how it would serve a need. The kid’s a great kid – smart, hard-working, courteous, but beyond all that, good. The kind of kid you’d want your kid to be. He’s got great parents, but like most fathers his works a lot. His younger siblings are too young to play ball with, and his mom’s….well, his mom. So Dan invented a catching machine.

It’s big and broad and has eight arms. It catches fastballs, curves, sliders. It’s got legs and brings in long, arcing spirals down the sidelines. I suppose it can dribble and shoot, but it can definitely pass. It doesn’t tire and is available every afternoon after school.

I was raised by a single mom; I had a catching machine too. Mine was the garage door, and in the center of the chipped baby blue paint I had crafted a 2’x2’ square – a tattered, masking tape strike zone. The pitching mound was the edge of the speed bump that slowed our apartment complex traffic. I served as the entire pitching staff. I opened, relieved, and – my specialty – closed high-pressure games with down-to-the-wire, clutch performance. I was Brian Wilson before Brian Wilson was Brian Wilson.

I handled the infield, too. At third I’d backhand one-hoppers down the line and hurl them across the diamond with major league accuracy – to myself, waiting with outstretched legs and a glove that never failed. If a mean grounder threatened to break through with a man on first, somehow I’d glove it, give a sweet underhand toss to second for the force, and wing it to first for the double.

Sometimes Dan and I play catch. We’ll toss a football as I quiz him on whatever it is that needs quizzing. Memorizing poems is aided by catch. Discussing debate topics for humanities is aided by catch. We throw the football across the classroom as we shout out multiplication tables.

“Eight times seven.” A hard, tight spiral to Dan’s right.
He snags it and wings it back. “Fifty-six!”

And this, too, is high-pressure: one errant toss or missed catch and something gets broken. We silently acknowledge this and respect the pressure.

Most days I like my job. I help boys grow into competent, confident, intellectually curious young men. Some days I’m a math tutor, some days a giver of advice. Some days I’m an editor going over the finer points of our English language, and some days I correct poorly drawn Chinese characters. When it’s needed I’ll share my own history of struggles in school, or lend the needed energy and encouragement in the final throes of a brutal assignment. But some days I love my job. Some days I’m a catching machine.

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May 26, 2012 · 4:36 am

Fail Better

Ever tried.
Ever failed.
No matter.
Try again.
Fail again.
Fail better.

– Samuel Beckett

I have two rules: bring your A-game, and fail. Fail better, fail harder, and fail more frequently. The first rule is easy. Few adolescents lack heart when properly motivated; they almost always give me their all. It’s the failure that’s so hard.

Recently 60 minutes aired a fascinating episode on face blindness, which is an inability in certain people to recognize faces. The reasons why some people lack the ability to distinguish faces is still unknown. Nancy Kanwisher, a Professor of Neuroscience at MIT, gave brain scans to a group of face blind people to test her hypothesis that the problem lay with the Fusiform Face Area.

She sat across from Leslie Stahl and explained her results.
“I really did not expect to see a Fusiform Face Area.”
“So you thought there’d just be nothing there.”
“That’s right. And we looked at the data, and the face area was beautiful – it’s textbook.” Professor Kanwisher smiled, broadly. “But see, that’s the fun of science. It’s fun to be told you’re just completely and totally wrong. Because now you have to go back and think anew.”

This is not a perspective most students enjoy. Our current culture discourages failure. We’re expected to be perfect right out of the gate, free of mistakes, blemishes, and missteps. Society views failure as an unwelcome destination, rather than a temporary state, and I see that message clearest in one of my 6th grade students.

Richard hates math, or rather, he hates failing at math. When I started working with him a year ago he was frustrated, disorganized, and pretty awful at math. Now he’s frustrated, organized, and much better at math. Last semester he pulled a 98%, which surprised even me. His math teacher hugs me when I see her and, though Richard still struggles with concepts, we work through them and he ends up understanding. But his frustration remains.

So where do we go from here?

My goal for Richard is not a 98%, or a solid understanding of linear equations, or even a love for math. It’s for him to discover concepts on his own – to attempt and fail and attempt again until he’s failed so many times that he gets it right. Once he’s got that he won’t need me anymore and I can move on to some other kid with a disorganized binder and a misorganized mind.

But how do I get him there? How do I teach him that failure is not a permanent state?

I’ve tried working the lessons into hacky sack, one of our break-time activities. Like everything else that he does, his threshold for hacky sack frustration is limbo-low, and despite never practicing he expects to be expert at what is a difficult activity. I prodded him on the challenges of the game while our uncoordinated feet flailed, asking him how he might improve. That bit of life coaching didn’t work; all it did was kill the feel of break and give him even more pressure to excel.

I’ve tried helping him connect the dots through meta-cognition – talking about how his failures have added up to successes in a repeating, reliable pattern. That, too, has been unsuccessful.

This is not a column about my success teaching Richard how to fail. What I’ve done so far hasn’t worked. He’s getting much better grades, so that part is going well, but in terms of my goal to help him embrace temporary setbacks on the path to greater understanding, I have failed. He’s told me that he still hates math and that he doesn’t really understand.

But see, that’s the fun of teaching. It’s fun to be told that what I’m doing isn’t working, because now I have to go back and think anew. And I’ll probably fail again. But eventually, I’ll succeed – and he’ll get the hang of failing.

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May 26, 2012 · 4:34 am

The Gift of a D

One spring morning in 1991, my mom marched down to my middle school, a recently graded essay of mine in hand. She smoothed out the essay before the teacher, commented on the lack of red marks, and demanded to know why it was given a “B”. It should have earned, in my mother’s expert opinion, no more than a “D”. The teacher was shocked, confused, and then won over. The following week, at my mother’s request, I got my D.

This is not a contemporary problem.

Marin in the early 90s was one of the breeding grounds of helicopter parenting, following on the heels of the soccer mom phenomenon. I’d been given a good grade on a bad paper because the teachers had lowered standards to accommodate the increasing barrage of complaints from parents whose brilliant children were not receiving straight As. This was 20 years ago. It’s now worse.

In her informative and cautioning book A Nation of Wimps, Hara Estroff Marano describes the new generation of helicopter parents. The hovering is done; they now bulldoze. “Lawn mower” or “snow plow” parents attempt to smooth over obstacles for their children on the almighty quest to attain Ivy League acceptance. Marano argues that this smoothing over, rather than aiding, is actually preventing the development of emotionally stable, competent, intrinsically motivated young adults. The elimination of obstacles instead produces fragile, risk-averse adult children incapable of solving real-world problems.

Dr. Leonard Sax makes a related argument in Boys Adrift, attributing some of the modern young man’s apathy to a lack of concrete challenges – and failures – due to overprotective parenting. Lack of failure negatively insulates boys (and girls) from life and its many vicissitudes, but it also robs them of life’s greatest joys. As Aldo Leopold wrote, “Of what avail are 40 freedoms without a blank spot on the map?” Parents who eliminate obstacles also eliminate possibilities. They pave over the crevices of life where inspiration and serendipity dwell, and much is lost in that paving.

When I begin work with a new family, I make it clear that grades are not a top priority. In fact, they’re not even in my top three. My priorities when working with a student are work ethic, organization, and passion for learning. When these three are in place, good grades follow.

I’m ill-suited to give parenting advice, as I’m not a parent. However, I do know that strength is inherent in humankind, and that like anything, it grows with use and atrophies without. We’re a hardy lot; we can handle failure. But more than that, we deserve the very thing that makes this life worth living: surprise.

My middle school life has irretrievably faded into an increasingly jumbled past. The 90s, for better or worse, are gone, replaced by a time of excitement, confusion, and a future unknown. And now, as an adult navigating the real world and its real problems, I’ve never been more thankful for that D. Surprise and all.

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May 26, 2012 · 4:30 am

Peel and Remove

I transferred schools my sophomore year and, when I received my first report card at the new Catholic high school after a semester of decently hard work, I was shocked: straight Bs. I had no idea that bad students could get such good grades.

Zora Neale Hurston once wrote, “The game of keeping what one has is never so exciting as the game of getting.” In the conquests of life that’s right, but as a student, the inverse holds true: staying on top is better than rising to the top. Remaining an A student is infinitely easier than becoming an A student – a lesson that I would figure out during the remainder of my high school and college years.

As a kid, I routinely tested in the top percentiles. While I was busy failing out of my freshman year of high school, I was acing Algebra tests, despite truancy and an inability to find and turn in any homework. Many of my guys are similar. For the most part, they’re amazing thinkers. One draws schematics of machines he’s invented when he should be taking notes. Another knows more about European military history than me – and I majored in history. But middle and high schools don’t award excellent grades for excellent thinking – they award them for organization and consistency. And that’s where my guys fall down.

I know the dread of not having your homework, or not knowing if you have your homework, or not even knowing if there was homework. It sucks. Much of my job is helping guys realize that all it takes to be a good student is breaking the habits of poor organization. If you’ve never been a bad student, it’s probably hard to understand how daunting of a hurdle this can be.

We’re all adept at assigning labels to people, including ourselves, but middle school boys are especially gifted. “I’m not good at math”, “I’m not a good writer”, and “I’m a ‘C’ student” are common labels that kids stick on themselves, and those labels have lasting power. Worse than not having his homework is his lack of surprise that he doesn’t have his homework; resignation is more toxic than mediocrity. My job – our job – is to remove those labels, to peel them off and discard, and replace them with ones that are positively self-reinforcing.

A couple of years ago I tutored Zack on SSAT prep. He’d been dredging the bottom percentiles in quantitative reasoning (math), but after talking to him for a few minutes it was clear that a kid this smart should be banging his head on the ceiling of these scores. We spent all summer before 8th grade, twice a week, on SSAT prep, with a special emphasis on math. It became easier. Then fun. Then so easy it was no longer fun. His percentile score on the SSAT was in the high 90s, and for the first time he saw how amazing he was at math and, more importantly, at learning. After a successful 8th grade year, Zack vaulted into high school with high self-expectations, and he hasn’t disappointed.

Long before Zora, Aristotle said, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” While I’d rather hang with Zora, I’d take Aristotle as a study partner. Consistent routines that help with school organization are key for misorganized guys. As habits (and grades) improve, conversations around how it feels to be a good student, an organized student, an ‘A’ student will help reinforce this new self-concept. Helping a mislabeled kid relabel himself is neither easy nor quick; it requires consistency and positivity. In my work, the most fulfilling moment is when one of my mislabeled guys finally realizes how academically capable he is and starts getting the results he’s always thought were out of his reach. Zora was right, after all.

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May 21, 2012 · 4:29 am

King Khan

Deck of cards first, Khan close second.

There are plethora reasons to love Khan Academy: thousands of amazing videos; its clean, intuitive design; Sal Khan’s goal of providing a “free world-class education to anyone anywhere.” Parents love that it reinforces intrinsic motivation. Points and badges are awarded, but unlike some of the for-profit education sites, these points aren’t redeemable for pizza parties or iPods. Students love that Khan treats them like thinkers and mathematicians, not child idiots; there are no dancing bears or algebra alligators. Teachers love that they (and I) can monitor student progress and activity, down to individual problems missed and how many seconds were spent on each.

I love the whetstone of Khan’s ruthlessness.

Recently I was helping Brian with his first semester of high school math. He needed a bunch of algebra review, so we spent some time on Khan. There is a “universe” of mathematical concepts that students can achieve proficiency in, from simple adding to recognizing fractions to advanced calculus. In order to attain proficiency, students have to master a concept, and that involves making a lot of mistakes. Correct answers are rewarded with points, a chunk of color on the progress bar, and a smiley face. Incorrect answers cost progress and garner a frown.

Brian did not start off well. His actual thinking was fine, but simple errors and sloppy work kept negating his progress. Khan awards no points for answers that are almost right. Forgot to simplify? Bummer. Made a carrying error? That’s a shame.

“Are you kidding me?!” Brian became more and more frustrated as his rushed work and inattention to detail continued to set him back. And that’s of course the point: Khan beats out carelessness.

After a while he finally slowed down and started making real progress. Smiley faces became common, the progress bar was filling. He was honing his skills and achieving mastery. Then a screen popped up that informed him he’d just earned a “Moon Badge.” In a hasty effort to get rid of the window, he accidentally clicked “share”.

Khan Academy doesn’t have its own log in. Rather, users log in via their Facebook or Google accounts. This had never been an issue before.

Brian’s face dropped. “Uh-oh.” He turned to me. “How bad is this?”

He was watching his high school social life flash before his eyes:

– An English teacher asks if there are any further questions, and someone in the back raises his hand and wonders if there might be moon badges awarded for quality work.
– A trip down the hallway is accompanied by chants of “Moon-badge! Moon-badge! Moon-badge!”
– A senior jock in the locker room recounts his latest sexual achievement, and then looks over Brian’s way and says, “Hey, kid, another couple of moon badges and you’ll understand.”

I snapped Brian back from his imagination. “Did you log in with Facebook or Google?”

He thought for a moment. “Google.”

“I think you’re all right.”

He let out a deep gust of air. We returned to the math, and his success continued. Later on, when a pop-up informed him that he’d earned another badge, he carefully moved the cursor to the upper right and clicked “close”. Khan works.

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