an exciting stew, part deux

At the beginning of the 21st century (doesn’t that just sound momentous and historical??) I was asked by a new department head colleague what my secret was in hiring good teachers for the history department. I must admit—I had done a pret-ty good job of collecting effective history educators in my few years in the post as head. I said that many people seemed to hire a resume and not look for the more important element of signs of success with adults and adolescents. Sure, the resume matters, but the first lesson I learned was how a fabulous resume did not guarantee a successful classroom. I had inherited a teacher with degrees from Harvard and Princeton, and this teacher ranks perhaps as the least successful classroom teacher I have ever seen. This teacher moved on, and I had the wonderful opportunity to fill that position with a former student of mine who is a top-drawer educator.

But I told this newly minted head that when I create a department I look for two things: people that I want to see every day, whom I think are dynamic and interesting, and people who are going to teach me something. Yes, I know, it shouldn’t be about me (Who decreed that anyway? They sound mean!) but my feeling is that if I am excited by the educator’s presence, so will our students. So that has been my guide, and I gotta say, these criteria have served me well in surrounding myself with successful educators.

Our History Department at KA has been meeting every day now, going on two weeks, as I said in yesterday’s blog entry, and this is an exciting group to manage. While their resumes are just fine, it remains those other qualities which I feel certain will yield a great year for our students. I enjoy being around our new colleagues. I look forward to seeing them, sharing an article I liked or an assignment that has worked for me, and I welcome all that they have to teach me about where they have been and how life has shaped them.

Each year, as I prepare for the opening of the school year, I love thinking about how I might motivate my department toward more expansive thinking focused on that goal of Great Teaching. Earlier this month I attended an AP Art History conference in Dallas (by the way, I still pat myself on the back for this clever move—I enjoyed an engrossing conference led by an excellent teacher and had the good fortune of spending a week with one of my favorite families in the world, the Enszers. I chose the conference in Dallas as a sure way to get to visit these friends.) On the plane back to Cincinnati I started a book that fueled my thoughts about what our job is as educators.

The book is Malcolm Gladwell’s The Outliers, and I looked forward to this newish book since I had enjoyed Gladwell’s other books, Blink and The Tipping Point so much. Gladwell begins the book touting very ambiguous definitions of the word “outlier,” and stresses that he wants us to “look out from” the individual that has succeeded and challenge our understanding of how success happens. On pg. 17 Gladwell says, “This is a book about outliers, about men and women who do things that are out of the ordinary.”

Chapter 2 is entitled, “The 10,000 Hour Rule,” and in it Gladwell concludes, “Ten thousand hours is the magic number of greatness….Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good. It’s the thing you do that makes you good.” Gladwell looks at hockey players and computer nerds and musical protégés and even the Beatles (offering a great story of their early years when they would practice and perform hours upon hours a day) and declares that it seems to be that 10,000 hours of practice vaults you into a category of greatness.

A day or so later I was back in Cincinnati for that wistful last week of the summer, “the last of” everything from visiting friends to BLT sandwiches. My last movie of the summer was with our dear friend Sylvia and we took in Julie and Julia. Besides the lively audience that clearly enjoyed the escapades of a younger Julia Child, and the performance of Meryl Streep, I have been obsessed in the last couple weeks by one scene in the movie. Forty-something Julia Child, wife of an impressive Foreign Service representative, is a tad bored with her life in post-war Paris. She loves to eat, so husband Paul encourages her to take cooking lessons to stem her ennui. Julia joins the top-of-the-line Cordon Bleu Cooking School, and everyone from the woman registrar to her cooking class colleagues mock her presence in the class. They chop onions one day, and snicker at her awkward clumsiness. The next scene in the movie witnesses Paul coming home late that night finding Julia at the butcher-block in the kitchen with a mountain of chopped onions. She had practiced all evening! The following day in class she had a take-no-prisoners-attitude as the chefs-to-be sliced onions and she, Julia Child, finished first with a decidedly gorgeous heap of onions.

It’s the practice that makes the greatness! That is hardly new to anyone who has tried to improve at something, but it hit me about our job as teachers. We need them to write mountains of essays to improve—they need the “mountain of onions” lesson.

Back to Gladwell: in another chapter he investigates the career of one of the top tech geniuses of the modern age, Bill Joy. Gladwell calmly says, before Joy “could become an expert, someone had to give him the opportunity to learn how to be an expert.”

Aha! Another great thought to savor in our role as educators, in fact, in our call to be great educators. We need to create enough opportunities—we need to create work that makes our students feel autonomous, that is complex enough to intrigue them, and rewarding enough so they continue seeking those opportunities.

Oh, Mr. Gladwell and I are so on the same page! He uncovers how success arises more out of the steady accumulation of opportunities, “but not really about ability as attitude. You master mathematics if you are willing to try. . . .Success is a function of persistence and doggedness and the willingness to work hard.” At the end Gladwell writes simply that success follows a predictable course: “Outliers are those who have been given opportunities—and who have the strength and presence of mind to seize them.”

How are we going to help facilitate these opportunities as educators? That is our challenge. We create the opportunities, and we give them the arena for practice, and we model persistence and doggedness and the willingness to work hard. That is our job.

I am remembering another interesting scene in Julie and Julia, a strangely riveting scene. It is about 10 years later and a publisher has offered to handle Julia’s cookbook she has written for the “servant-less American cook who wants to make fine French food.” In the scene Julia and her editor are poring over many possible verbs and nouns that might engage a buyer in a bookstore. There are maybe two dozen possible phrases or leads for the title of the book, and finally, the editor sees the light and says that this book is about Mastering the Art of French Cooking. A well-filmed scene in that most of the audience probably knew the title, but how they arrived at it was fascinating.

Back to my little sermonizing to my new department—I loved that scene because the editor and Julia felt confident that the goal of the book was to master something…think about it…in our 21st century world we often sell things by reducing it to the lowest common denominator. Think of the fabulously successful string of books for dummies. We want everything made easy. No, this book, this project was about mastering something and the satisfaction and reward one gleans from the steady practice to master something!

That is what I want for my students! I tackle AP courses year after year not because I love the tick-tock of the year’s calendar but I love urging and goading and cajoling my students to master a body of knowledge and the art of writing. Julia Child put a beautiful cherry on top of that sundae for me with her practice and efforts.

Of course I also enjoyed the “Julie” sections of the film. Julie is a woman who, in 2001, found herself feeling quite unfulfilled, and ended up creating a project in which she tackled every recipe in Julia Child’s seminal cookbook in one year’s time and blogged about it.

Might this be the first big movie about bloggers? Those blabbers and self-indulgent types who natter on and on and feel so self-absorbed that they should self-publish on the internet for all to read?

Again, she started out doing it to fill some time and make sense of it all.

In 2007, when I moved to Jordan, I started this blog for the very same reasons. I had left everything I knew, and writing on the blog filled some time and helped me make sense of it all. Maybe this Julie is the Bloggers first movie heroine!

So I offered my Malcolm Gladwell and Julia Child stew of ideas to my 9-member department this week, and looked at their excited faces; then I felt the goosebumps that hail the beginning of a new school year.

Tomorrow the invasion begins! Our 280 students from last year return, and then on Saturday we welcome a new crop of 125 students who will fill four grades, finally, for our first complete year of our upper school of 9th through 12th grade.

Ahhhhh…time to embrace the struggle!