But towards the middle of the decade we started to learn about the detriments of secondhand smoking. My age would correspond with the stage of schooling when students were introduced to the dangers of cigarettes and alcohol. But secondhand smoking was a new thing. Through science, the narrative around secondhand smoking wafted from arbitrary to objective. My sixth grade classroom learned how bad it was simply to be around people when they were smoking cigarettes. By the time I entered eighth grade, my parents no longer had the option of telling the hostess which section they would like to be seated in. Smoking sections in public places like restaurants had vanished.

There is no question that education has an impact on culture. Like any institution, its outturn is able to lean upon and dent society. The question that requires a deeper mediation is whether or not education can change culture and society. 

Because culture and society cyclically inform each other, Education becomes the conduit for learning about both. School, then, is the site we individual members of a culture learn, both implicitly and explicitly, about the very culture they exist in. 

We should be asking ourselves, What is the purpose of education? Is its most essential aim to promote happiness? Or ought a child’s learning be absolutely tethered to their experience and the practical applications that evolve in between the continuum of survival and thriving? Regardless of which aim we lean towards, one thing is for sure: Education, in part, is a preparation for something. 

Ultimately, educators must teach citizens to be aware. Aware of their experience, of history, of reality, of what knowledge is objective and what is subjective. One purpose of education is to foster, within its students, an awareness of the culture and society they live in. Then, when we understand the elements that are most important to education we can insist that, at its core, a vital aim of it is to foster a capacity to prepare for and seek out a just culture. That is how education was utilized to make smoking indoors taboo. Because the purpose of education is inextricably tied to freedom, education can not only change culture, it is responsible for changing culture. The question remains: Is it doing a good job? 

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The first time I drove a car I was 12 years old. My father travelled to Jamaica for his father’s funeral. My mother never owned a driver’s license. I was old enough to not have to walk across the street and then walk down another two houses to be babysat during summer break anymore. And with this I even earned my first latchkey. That summer was the first time I felt like a man.

I wasn’t a man…

For the first few days after dad got on the plane and mom went to work, my younger brother and I scrambled to figure shit out. It started with sleeping in and using more peanut butter than we were supposed to on toasted sandwiches at lunch. We had free range of our house for the first time ever. Naturally, we ended up exploring. 

By the end of the third day, with dad being away and mom at work, we found the keys to our sky blue Buick Regal. I pressed the key into the door hinge and reached over to unlock the passenger side for my brother. We sat there for half an hour, me moving the steering wheel, him telling me to press the gas because it’s some cops and robbers shit. Both of us, pretending to be driving around. Like kids.

We weren’t men yet…

We did that one time on the third day and three times on the fourth day. On that fifth day I pushed the key into the slot right beside the steering wheel. Then I twisted it. 

We drove to and ate breakfast at Aunt Marys, the local breakfast restaurant across the street from the middle school. I got fried eggs with bacon and Tiny had scrambled with sausages. We paid with a ten dollar bill mom left for us days before. And we got in that mothafuckin’ car and drove home. Like men.

I didn’t hit anything until I came around that very last corner, the one leading onto our street. When I hopped the curb my little brother looked at me with so much fear that I had to stop for a second. I didn’t know anything about gears so I drove over Mr. Tedesco’s nicely mowed boulevard, back onto the street, and parked almost a quarter foot on my own lawn. We ran inside and left the keys back where we found them. We barely went outside for the rest of that week. 

Mom was almost too tired to even notice but Pam and her talked everyday. Pam always knew what happened on our street. Mom told us we weren’t anything close to the grown fuckin’ men we thought we could act like. She also told us that this would be the first thing she told our dad when he got back. She didn’t even make us dinner that night. We had to stomach that. 

We knew, we weren’t men. 

Twenty years later they both would bring up that story at family functions. It served to embarrass us when we started talking like we knew more than we did. Ten years after these times I think I understand why. 

They, as parents, knew what upbringing and raising and lessons looked like. We thought we knew how to be them––adults––but we really had no clue. Both of them abridged the child-to-adult development by giving me a key and letting me learn on my own, without babysitting. They balanced, intrinsically––from what they experienced––how to parent in a good way and what quality parenting is. 

In being parents, like teachers, what they learned to do helped them teach us how to learn. They figured out that parenting, like driver’s ed, is some parts teaching and some parts letting the child, or the driver, learn on their own. 

But how would they know what good teaching could be without them letting us roam a little? In order for parents to grapple with what quality parenting can look like, they have to be willing to let their children explore. Same rule goes for driver’s ed instructors. Same for teachers. 

And same for the educators who teach teachers how to teach. We only arrive at quality teaching by letting teachers learn bits on their own. That’s the art.   

I never went to driver’s ed. When I finally really learned how to drive years later it was my dad who sat in the passenger seat and let me navigate. Those times were quality experiences. His teaching from the time he travelled away to the time he sat beside me in that same car served as good education. His method was a gift. A gift in so that he probably left his keys on the top of the fridge for a reason. Only known to his why. Only articulated between and through his understanding of the difference between good teaching and quality education. Because of him––and good teaching mixed with quality education––I too know how to steer.

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Every year in college basketball the NCAA holds a season’s end tournament affectionately referred to as “March Madness.” Sixty-four, now sixty-eight or seventy-two––I can’t seem to keep up with the specific changes––of the top teams in the country enter in mid-March and by early April one team is crowned national champion. The tournament is a sudden death elimination style and, hence the moniker, subject to catastrophic upsets, last second finishes, and sporting chaos. A line made famous by 1974 national champion NC State coach, the late Jim Valvanno, the goal of the grueling tournament is to survive and advance. This school year, I shoot hoops with a group of students and fellow teachers Fridays after school. This school year, I remind myself of that line––survive and advance––from Sunday evening through noon Friday. This school year feels like one long, grueling March Madness tournament.    

This school year I’ve stopped answering colleagues with the words I’m good when they ask me how I am. I’ve somehow kinda naturally melted into answering that question with the words I’m here. It’s more truthful. Truth is, I am not good. I am merely here. Right now nothing will change this. No long weekend, no sauna or steam bath, no situation with school. Am I selfish to hope that summer break will reset my spirits? I know it must. Because to survive and advance should be a mindset reserved for coaches entering relentless competition. Not for teachers entering exhausting schools.  

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I thought the first days of this new school year would be like riding my old bike after years and years of being off of it. Maybe I wouldn’t be confident enough to ride at top speeds down hills like I used to, but confident enough to go a bit fast because I knew that my back wheel brake was on the right side of my handlebars and my front wheel brake was on my left. Maybe I was no longer expert enough to ride with no hands but I could live with that because, shoot, riding with no hands is dumb and dangerous to begin with. The first days of school were nothing like dusting off that old 4-speed and taking it for an easy ride down a familiar path. The first days back to school, under Covid education, felt like someone told me and all teachers, “You know how to ride a bicycle, right? Good, here’s a fucking unicycle…it’s basically the same thing.”

The ironic thing is that if my friends and I were privy to the type of world we live in now back then, we would probably not even need Sasha’s advice if we wanted to learn how to ride a unicycle. We could spend a few hours on Youtube, watch some tips from people who did a better job explaining the process than Sasha did, and pick it up in a modest amount of time. That’s literally what people outside of the in-person and virtual classrooms think school is right now. Simple, just take what you did in the classroom and do it online, or…in the classroom. I’m fortunate enough to actually still be teaching in a physical classroom (I’ve heard and read dozens of horror stories regarding remote learning already). But what we are doing now, which we can call Covid education for the time being, is not what we did in the past. It needs to be understood and subsequently treated as such. A few naive folks hold the belief that teaching is easy, and they hold this stance simply because they went to school. First off, teaching is not easy. Secondly, what teachers are doing now, in these times, is conceptually different than teaching. 

If we want to be honest as a society, we need to admit that most students (and some teachers) lost the motivation for school sometime around April. That amounts to six months – half a year – of some demotivated students and staff and a collective paradigm shift regarding how education fits into our lives. Education, for all of its prerequisite flaws that it had maintained over time, is not the same as what it was this time one year ago. We don’t need to simply “get back on the bike again.” We need to learn how to use a completely different vehicle. And before we even begin to do that, we all (educators, politicians, medical experts, and families) need to understand the shift in schooling that has occurred due to Covid-19. Sasha was wrong – it’s not the same. When we accept that fact, we should be able to grasp this new skill we are all trying to learn. 

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The only benefit to this crisis in education created by the coronavirus pandemic is that it allows us all the opportunity to catch up on what we should have done before. The institution of education is not outside of this humbling reality. All of us were running too fast and we see the remnants of it. Ironically, it seems as though we haven’t learned our lesson as of yet. In education, we are still sprinting! While most schools began indefinitely suspending traditional school by announcing a transition to complete virtual learning, they forgot to acknowledge that while many a teacher are familiar with implementing technology into their pedagogy, virtually none have experienced doing so at 100% acumen. Instead of pausing to think deeply about the traditions we want to carry forward and the ones we ought to permanently shelf, we held meetings about the type of content we were going to deliver “Week 1” and worked together to reach mandatory study hours for kids. I am guilty of it, I know that for sure. Maybe if we correctly phrased this type of teaching and learning for what it really is, we wouldn’t have been so quick to act like we had everything under control. Maybe if we did call it Emergency Education from the jump, we would have treated week 1 of “remote learning” like an actual first week of school in the fall; making connections, establishing routines, connecting with families in a way simply to get to know them and the circumstances of things. Instead, we acted like there was no emergency and the transition would come with bumps and bruises but all in all, we’d figure it out. We can figure it out, but first we have to humble ourselves. All of us.

The thing about any systemic emergency is that it will inevitably reveal the inadequacies of that system. Unfortunately, we see that all the time – 9/11, Columbine, Donald Trump. But what is darker than that is that only survivors can consolidate their understanding. In this situation, there is something to be said about the folks who don’t “survive” this. I understand the sensitivity of such words and I am solely referring to people who will not be able to recover metaphysically. More specifically, I am referring to students that are even more burdened by this transition to a new way of supposed learning. Sensitivity to words is important. Attempting to educate children in a real state of emergency and calling it anything other than Emergency Education only amplifies the haste that our privilege as educators affords us. 

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I’m not worried about the near future: the inevitable mandate by government to shut down schools for the remainder of the year and teachers brainstorming to perhaps design or implement online learning in the coming weeks. Or high schools and universities scrambling to finalize grades. I’m worried about the long term toll that this pandemic may proffer.

Let’s say school closes indefinitely and the remainder of this year somehow gets absorbed by the gravity of “more serious” precautions society ought to take in light of the coronavirus. What will such a move imply about education? That it is non-essential? That virtual learning is equally as valuable to the growing fabric of our future generations as was sitting in a classroom around others and having to navigate that space? That teachers and teaching are two-dimensional? The coronavirus crisis is here and it is real. But before we rush to mandates that alleviate the burden that educational institutions bare in terms of rearing society forward, we really need to philosophize the implications of rushing to a haphazard answer. 

I’m conflicted under these circumstances. I want to teach. I want the children I’m teaching this year to get the rest of this food and these gems I’ve been cooking up for them. Are the students I teach prepared to move on if we abruptly ended the year? Pretty much. I mean, we go hard in my classroom. But will missing the next two or three months adversely affect them? Oh, indeed. 

They’ll be missing out because education is not simply about acquiring the knowledge that is ascribed by the curriculum in a given year. Education is not two-dimensional and people who really care about education know this. People who know this will also put together online learning if that is the way things go. Shoot, I dropped a message in my Google Classroom today asking my students if they wanted me to put some stuff together in the next few weeks. (I’ll be sure to follow up on how that evolves). But I fear we will not hit reset during this pandemic and instead continue on with “band-aid” solutions instead of really taking this opportunity to realize where we are as a society, and especially where Education, capital E, has gone. 

So instead of thinking of what will happen, I reserve thoughts of what should happen. Speaking with a longtime friend of over 20 years, who now doubles as a religious scholar in South Africa, crystallized a few particular pathways we in public education should be venturing down due to this coronavirus outbreak. Firstly, physical and health education has been a joke for as long as I can remember. “Gym” or “Phys. Ed.” was the class that you got to chill. Considering what we are all experiencing, this has to change. Habitual physical exercise and general healthy eating habits need to now succeed the skills of dribbling a basketball in our schools. Educating ourselves and then our students on an array of topics including philosophy, science, religion, and international relations must be infused into our curriculum moving forward. More precisely, math should be replaced with economics, geography should be replaced with geopolitics — and not done so through mere semantics. And lastly, this “social distancing” and “self-isolation” we have had to re-learn should be explicitly fostered through schooling (and not merely on the front page of a report card under the vague monikers of “independent work” or “self-regulation”, for example). What this coronavirus pandemic proves is that self introspection, on the micro or macro level, is important to what we all manifest as a collective. We need to re-invest in the total learning of the mind, body, and soul. That is what we should do, at least. I hope that is what we will do. 

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Yes, our students learned how to operate an iPad before they learned how to multiply. Yes, although these kids grew up on and around computers, they barely know how to type. Yes, despite all the technology that makes life easier, these kids gripe about life being so hard. But don’t we, meaning parents and educators, especially educators, claim responsibility for any of the so-called calamities that have penetrated the current fabric of our society?

Schools especially look egregiously oxymoronic when they pathologize the plight of this new generation. We have turned the trend of paying reformers hundreds of thousands of dollars to research our schools only to find that these people are either way too smart for their own good or way too stupid. We have names, norms, and acronyms for every practice, insight, and strategy about teaching; professional developments out the ass about new ways to teach math, reading strategies, and student engagement. All of it recycled, or renamed, every half-decade or so to suggest a breakthrough in pedagogy and student learning. All the while, actual teachers, the ones who implement this stuff being sent down from high up places, realize that our latest “strategy” is nothing more than a flashy new term for an outdated method that was already in place, and then abandoned, and now back en vogue. We moved away from rote learning to “experiential-based” practice only to realize that not every kid was going to be a mathematical savant and discover the principles of multiplication on their own. And now we have a generation of kids who don’t know their timetables but are expected to answer multi-faceted math problems. While we sit back, shaking our collective heads, sighing about the kids these days.

What happened to accepting the culture and generational norms of a group and straight-up good teaching?

Damn near starting at the first grade, the stakes are so high for these “pupils” it is no wonder why anxiety is the number one mental illness in North America right now. We are welcoming a new wave of parents who have more debts than degrees and have no clue what to really tell their children about the importance of schooling. Does hard work really pay off? For the lucky ones, yes. But how about the thousands of college graduates who worked unpaid internships during their entire college time only to come out with a job that pays them less than what they could have made as a construction worker or plumber – if they had only forgone higher education and gotten right into the trades after high school.

The responsibility lies on teachers to pull back the reigns of linear thinking that results in specialized subject matter and telling 10-year-olds that if they want to be an elite athlete that they have to pick one sport and stick with it. We are stifling creativity when third grade test scores result in Individual Education Plans and special education classes for particular students. Third. Grade. Test. Scores. The lives of 8-year-olds are now predetermined based on how well they added two-digit numbers together and derived meaning from a story about a wizard and a rock that talks.

The fault does not lie with the “kids these days” but more so on our inability to properly empathize with their circumstance and then correctly adjust our teaching methods. Some, but not all rote learning is important. Unstructured time, you know – like recess and playing in the park, can still go a long way in the development of self-directed youngsters. On the flip side, high-stakes, state or province wide assessments are also not the way to a productive future. There must be a blend between the past and the present. And it doesn’t take a futurist to see that.

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I had a conversation with my nephew and, in between discussing the latest Drake vs. Pusha T beef, we talked about this topic. This idea was actually on my mind as I rode my bike home from the gym and passed a bunch of geese. I had never been afraid of geese in my life until I decided to waste time on Facebook the other day and watch a mindless video of them attacking humans. Nothing too graphic but it did look like their beaks gave one hell of a pinch if they caught you. Plus, they are big as shit. There were two geese about 12 feet from the sidewalk as I peddled by. They looked at me and I looked at them. They are friggin’ geese, but I was scared. I wondered if these feeble animals could smell my fear.

To a teacher, kids are powerless. Like geese, kids know that “fully evolved” humans rule their environment. But every now and then, kids, like geese, “beak up” and run an adult off a lawn. And in the classroom I’ve seen this on many occasions.

We don’t give these kids enough credit. They are evolving into actual real adult-like people, and if you don’t come correct, expect for them to deal with you in a way.

Simply walking into a classroom as a teacher and assuming that you are going to “manage” it merely because you are the adult in the room is your first mistake. Children are around adults all day and night, thus they have, at the least, rudimentary skills in negotiation tactics. And, despite not knowing what I thought as a 12-year-old, I do know that I didn’t ever enjoy doing math and science. I did it because I had to. And just like a good majority of society, people go to work every day because they have to. Just like “the real world” there are consequences for actions; the difference is, for students those consequences are rather inconsequential. In adulthood, them things get real.

But I do think that kids understand this. They have been told by either a teacher or a family member that school is preparation for the real world. And a large majority of kids probably take this sentiment “in” on some sense of a realistic continuum of understanding. But just like the day your boss isn’t in the office – these kids always take advantage of the supply teacher. And you can ask any supply teacher; they do it from third grade on. Reason why – they smell the weakness in the air.

I usually end these blogs with a conclusion that ties things together while providing some sense of direction for folks who are immersed in the game of education. But for this one, I really have no last words of wisdom. These thoughts are just tethered theories provided by geese on my ride home, a convo with my nephew and perhaps most importantly, witnessing teachers getting chewed up and spit out by collections of 13-year-olds and then having them ask people like me why it happened. My answer in a nutshell to the latter scenario is rather simple. These young kids are more adept than you think. And the one thing you should know about them is something we, as adults, have all forgotten. They are more genius, mature, and internal than we give them credit. As teachers, we seldom notice unless we are truly reflective in our practice and actually have adult-like conversations with our kids, starting with abstract questions like, “do you think kids can smell fear?”

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In my part 1 of why geniuses suck at school, I wrote about a student who, by fifth grade, was so intelligent that she was able to pass a BAR exam prep test yet had average grades in traditional school. This second genius I encountered was not nearly as intellectually astute, at least in terms of the standardized ways in which we measure intelligence. In fact, this student was the opposite, a child who by 7^th grade, was placed in remedial classes because he was deemed not able to comprehend subject content at his grade level. Let us call this student Malik. Malik, in his own right, is a genius. But as I have contended, geniuses suck at school.

I guess by the time that Malik came to my classroom he had already developed the habit of passively resisting school, and by extension, school work. When I would sit with Malik, I could easily tell that he had the ability to grasp the concepts he was being taught; he just didn’t feel like regurgitating them in the way that school seemed to force upon him. Unlike the first true genius I taught, he would routinely “participate” in class – usually in traditionally disruptive ways. He would find any fallacy in a teacher’s wording of a question and respond with an answer that was so absurd, yet so in-line with the content, that the teacher would either brush it off or confront Malik and his comments. He ended up in the office a lot. When teachers would ask students to offer real life examples to demonstrate their understanding of elementary academic concepts, Malik would retort with real-life examples. For instance, I watched one science teacher review with her students the different ways heat was transferred through using all the different methods that heat works in a home. The teacher got through heat transfer methods such as conduction and radiation by pointing out how a stove and microwave work. She prompted her students to think back on the term convection (heat transferred through hot air circulation) with a simple question: how does your home get heated? Malik was the first to answer, and without putting his hand up said, “money!”. I sat back, observing the class, thinking, damn right, it takes money to keep that heat on.

And he got sent to the office because he defended his sentiment with the teacher who was trying to talk about convection and heat in a 7th grade science class. Adult responses out of a child’s brain. Genius to me.

I silently observed Malik’s display of other genius tendencies throughout the first months of the school year. Things like knowing the exact layout of the entire school. The exact layout – not only the classrooms he had taken subjects in, but the staffroom, staff restrooms, janitor’s office, and spaces like the guidance offices that were no longer in service. This was merely after the first two days of the school year. After the first week, he also had a grasp on the “lambs” and the “wolves”, both his peers, the older students, and the staff to whom he could toy with and the ones he could not. On the second day of school, I had his class last period of the day. It was “home time” and I put up my chairs differently than your traditional classroom; instead of placing chairs on desks, we “stack them” at the back of the room, 6 chairs per stack, because I feel like that helps the janitors out when cleaning at night. With about two minutes to go before the bell rang, I asked the students if anyone knew how we put the chairs up in my class, assuming that of course no one would know. It would be my small classroom management moment to share with the group of students how I liked things done at the end of the day in my classroom. Malik said, “you stack ‘em in groups of six at the back of the class”. It was the second day of school. Malik had never stepped foot in my classroom on the first.

Genius, in my opinion comes in all forms. As teachers, it is our obligation to look out for the genius in children, whatever shape that may take. This student is one I still keep in touch with. Unfortunately, he is still struggling with “school”. I don’t know if or how I could have helped Malik bridge his non-traditional genius with the more linear school consideration of one. Fortunately, or rather hopefully, for him, his genius-level socio-personal ability will allow him to find success in adulthood. He may have to figure that part out on his own, because the traditional school, as it stands, will not give him that opportunity.

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I never quite understood the stories of geniuses who are horrible at school until I started teaching. Two of the brightest students I ever taught did horrible in school. I had the pleasure of teaching one of these geniuses, and I use the word genius in its purest form, when I was a 5^th grade teacher a few years back. She was a quiet student who almost literally never talked. You could classify her as “strange”; a student who displayed behavior that was outside of the “norm” – she would find pleasure in routinely annoying her classmates in the most subtle ways. Having the patience to “stalk” her peers over the course of the day then simply wait for her victim to explode. Side note – I use the words “stalk” and “victim” in the least litigious and most innocent of tropes as possible; she would do things like hum or make clicking sounds every time she passed the kid she wanted to annoy for the day. Of course, she would get in trouble daily for these minuscule acts. And also consequently, she had no friends because of her behavior. Socially, she and the idea of traditional school just didn’t mix. And her social behavior seemed to outweigh any academic potential she had – at least according to her report cards.

But when I had her in my class, I noticed that this student wasn’t just an average academic and “socially low” child. Academically, she was above and beyond her years and I first noticed this during times when the class would have a math test. She wouldn’t finish her test in about 5 minutes and ask to either read or draw mazes. She would score perfect. So the next time I gave her the 5^th grade test as well as a 6^th grade test in the same math unit. This time it would take her about 7 minutes to finish both. Both perfect. Many students scrambled to finish the last few questions before the bell for the end of period would sound. I stopped this scaling test experiment after I had her complete four tests in one sitting, from 5^th to 8^th grade. All perfect again, except for the long-winded word answers in which she would simply write one or two words instead of a “math sentence” explaining her mathematical thinking. I stopped testing her on the 5^th grade curriculum and started to give her high school math. She did it effortlessly without ever asking for clarification. I revisited her 4^th grade report card and noticed that in math the year before she had earned a few Bs. I asked her previous teacher about the grades and was told that the student didn’t like answering questions in large group discussions and even questioned her at times. Her response is something for another time, and another blog.

In the other core subject I taught this student, English, I noticed that she put minimal effort into written responses. She only answered questions when she picked up on my frustration with attempting to guide my group of brilliant ten-year-olds to an answer that seemed to frazzle everyone into silence. When I pushed and was direct with my expectations relating to her grades for lack of writing, she turned out paragraphs that mimicked everything I required of my 5^th grade essayists. Instead of pushing this future left-brained savant into critically analyzing elementary short stories, I shoved a BAR exam prep test on her desk. While students were busy reading and responding to short stories about a boy who lost his hockey sweater, and was sad because he got it from his now-passed grandpa, she was using her logic to determine which conclusion was most accurate based on a case study and a set of circumstances. And then she would move onto the next question. Between the school work that I made her do (in order not to ostracize her already socially maligned position in the class) and annoying classmates, she managed to finish a section of the exam over the course of a school day. There were 25 questions and I had the answer key. She got 19 correct.

To be honest, I was fearful of graduating this student to the next grade to simply see her in detention for not writing down the homework in her agenda. I formalized the paperwork for gifted testing and this student was on her way to an alternative school the following year. I have no idea where she is now in terms of her academic career but I do know that if she stayed in the traditional school, we would have been as easily misguided and confused as her. And she probably would have gone on earning As and hypocritical Bs in classes like math and English all the way through, completely missing out on her genius potential. Hopefully I will hear about her one day.

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