Radical Excellence

Radical Excellence Works

 

Radical Excellence
Radical Excellence Works

This book took me at least two years to write, then another year to work up the courage and energy to get it published. The courage, or lack thereof, wasn’t because of what I said, but I was still dealing with worrying about what my friends and family would think about some of my ideas and comments.

I finally realized such fear had never been a factor in the person-to-person part of my life, so it shouldn’t bother me by putting my views into print.

At first glance, the tenor of the book might appear mostly negative, but the reality of progress is that it often blooms from recognizing what is wrong or missing in the status quo of any situation. From corporate philosophies and actions to personal failures and successes it is totally appropriate to recognize how things are… then take assertive steps to make the situation better.

Table of Contents

  • Acknowledgements. xi
  • Living Free.. xiii
  • Challenge to the Public Sector.. xv
  • Foreword.. 1
  • Introduction.. 3

  • 1 THE PROBLEM GROWS. 7

  • Kids are Killing Kids. 7
  • Kids are Failing Chemistry.. 8
  • So What’s the Point?. 9

  • 2 How We Got to this Awful Place.. 13

  • The Sins of the Fathers. 13
  • The Subtle Symptoms of a Quiet Chaos. 14
  • The Flat Screen Generation.. 16
  • Having Learned the “Not”. 18

  • 3 The “Ooops” Syndrome.. 21

  • Approval by Acquiescence. 21
  • Law of Unintended Consequences. 22
  • Internet Information Ignorance. 25
  • Avoiding Institutional Inertia.. 27

  • 4 System Absurdities. 31

  • It’s Time to Get Off Your Buts. 32
  • We Are Committed… 33
  • Perception Versus Truth.. 37
  • God Told Me…… 37
  • I Have the Gift. 39
  • Pursuing Progressive Dissent. 40

  • 5 Never, Ever Give Up.. 43

  • Redefining Professionalism.. 45
  • Why We Teach the Way We Do.. 50
  • Transcendent Teaching as an Art Form.. 53
  • 6 The Road to Radical Excellence.. 59
  • The Critical Nature of Leadership. 63
  • Hope Amidst the Absurd.. 67
  • The Structure Lateral Leadership. 69

  • 7 The Head Guy Rules. 71

  • The Changing Nature of Administrative Leadership. 71
  • Free Advice to the Head Guy.. 72
  • Evaluating Excellence. 74
  • Risking Radical Excellence. 79

  • 8 The Excellence of Service.. 83

  • Schools as Servants. 83
  • Take Care of Creation.. 86
  • Creating A Mission-Focused School. 88

  • 9 Planning for Excellence.. 91

  • Workshops That Work.. 95
  • Christian Colleges Might Hold the Ultimate Key.. 98

  • 10 It’s All About the Kids. 105

  • Blake – 1984. 106
  • Autobiographical – 1953. 107
  • Stan – 1974. 107
  • Kevin – 1997. 108
  • One More Autobiographical – 1984. 109
  • Unknown Students – 2006. 109

  • But in the end…… 110

 

Feel Free to Read Chapter Three Below.

3  The “Ooops” Syndrome

The time is always right to do what is right.

               Martin Luther King, Jr

 

CRITICAL THINKING can be learned. That is a fact, and one that all teachers ascribe to. Considerable energy and effort is expended in classrooms trying to impart that skill into students. Trouble is, all those negative attributes described in Chapter 2 contribute to a lessening ability of students being able to learn how to think critically. Unfortunately, there are also some subtle characteristics that can exist in teachers, administrators and the entire system that compound the difficulty of teaching critical thinking even further.

Approval by Acquiescence

Sometimes my neurological synapses operate slower than I would hope, so it’s taken me a while to verbalize some of my thoughts about trash.

It all started with another of my many days on the ever-present lunch duty. I was on one side of the outdoor lunch area and observing the other teacher on duty as he was telling a table of ninth grade boys that their table trash was unacceptable. Having given the appropriate reprimand, the teacher turned and walked towards the gate. From my vantage point, I watched one of the boys deliberately and flauntingly flick a piece of garbage from the table to the cement floor. Old bones moved faster than I’d prefer, and momentarily the gentlemen and I were discussing the matter in a rather adversarial mode. The boys soon realized that they were, in fact, going to police the entire area, and as they worked, my thoughts slowly started crystallizing.

My next class after lunch was normally rather talkative before class began, and this day was no exception. Three or four mini-conversations were occurring, and just as I began telling them to focus in on the thought for the day my mind went into Far Side cartoon mode. Suddenly it seemed to me that their words in this time of chatting became like pieces of trash emanating from their mouths and falling randomly to the floor. For some reason the following thought flashed through my mind.

By acquiescing to that which is unacceptable, we give tacit approval to that action. We give approval not only to those doing the unacceptable action, but an implied approval to those who only sit and watch. Approval is granted to their “sitting and watching” as much as it is to the unacceptable act.

By ignoring a problem we are actually proactive in teaching a message, and that message is that corporate responsibility is not in the domain of individual activity. Thus, that which is individually unacceptable suddenly becomes acceptable in the greater, corporate sense. In the lunch area event, I’m confident that each individual would agree that it’s wrong to throw their trash on the ground, yet by acquiescing to letting it happen, we have approved and taught that as an acceptable action.

Law of Unintended Consequences

One of the standard safety practices when hiking or backpacking with a group is that the weakest hiker, the one who will lag behind, is always accompanied by a stronger, more experienced hiker. The weaker hiker is never left to fend alone at the back of the group. In accompanying the weaker hiker, however, the more experienced person must operate at a diminished level of skill in order to accompany the novice. In this case, the stronger hiker willingly stays at the back as a protective measure.

In most things we do there is an obvious distribution of skill and ability level, and the obvious observation in the backpacking world is that at some prior time the stronger hiker had been given the opportunity to risk… to venture ahead… unfettered by acquiescing to the norm. Someone, somehow had enthused the stronger to become just that, to learn the techniques and acquire the stamina to lead the pack. And now the stronger can actually help the weaker to become better.

In an ideal world, no one would ever be left behind. Life isn’t ideal, however, and a normal distribution of skills and abilities naturally occurs. Someone is always the fastest, another the slowest. Some do calculus, others are hard-pressed to multiply double digit numbers.

The national intent to leave no child behind is well-intended, but statistically impossible to attain. We attempt that Herculean task by establishing curricular “STANDARDS” that can hopefully be achieved by everyone. Then we attempt to measure the successful attaining of those standards by using the oft worshiped and frequently cursed Standardized Test. (notice… said with appropriate awe)

For the sake of economy and speed, those standardized tests are almost totally multiple-choice questions. The Number 2 pencil and the Bubble Sheet have become the implements of war in the fight to achieve an acceptable level of academic performance. Not only are individuals measured by these exams, but also the performance levels of individual schools and teachers is directly tied to how well the students perform on these semi-sacred tests.

The commendable emphasis on establishing academic standards and measuring performance by standardized tests may have resulted in an unfortunate and insidious unintended consequence. Just as our students think at the flat-screen level, they analyze in the multiple-choice mode.

Kids are not stupid. They might not pass math or be able to write an interesting paragraph, but they sure do know how to take multiple-choice exams. The trouble is, their idea of “taking” a multiple-choice isn’t what the testers envisioned. Students have learned how to do a cursory reading of the question, quickly eliminate two answers because they “look wrong,” and then make a supposedly reasonable guess at the right answer.

For the past several years I have conducted an interesting exercise which substantiates that hypothesis. I select several questions that would normally be multiple choice questions on standardized tests. These selected questions all have answers that are definitive or can be calculated precisely using the proper formulas. I then blacken in all the choices, but leave them on the test so it’s obvious that they are of the multiple choice variety. Sadly, the majority of the students react with, “We can’t do these! The answers are all blocked out!” And unfortunately, they’re right! Most of them are literally unable to perform at a passing rate on this type of doctored exam, even though the basic knowledge to do the questions is within their framework of learned material.

The importance of doing well on these exams can’t be ignored. Graduation, acceptance into college, school evaluation and teacher performance are all evaluated based on often ill-prepared students taking curricular exams using faulty methods.

Life is decidedly not ideal.

Teachers are apt to fall into the mode of testing almost exclusively in a multiple-choice fashion. The extensive practice on weekly tests is thought to produce a comfort level for the students when they take the standardized exams.  Another compelling factor that encourages  multiple-choice testing is the efficiency of grading when class sizes approach the imponderable and unworkable in many schools.

Having lived with and experienced this syndrome as it developed through teaching in five different decades, I am led to the conclusion that an ironic result of creating artificial standards and testing incessantly with multiple-choice questions has inadvertently resulted in an overall lessening of critical thinking and analytical abilities. Ironically, emphasizing a multiple-choice style of testing ultimately results in a lessening of the very thinking and learning processes the system was intended to improve.

 

Internet Information Ignorance

 

Several years ago some studies indicated that the amount of knowledge was doubling about every ten years. I suspect it might take less time that that in our present age of research and discovery. In fact, Peter Large of Information Anxiety says, “More information has been produced in the last 30 years than in the previous 5,000. About 1,000 books are published internationally every day, and the total of all printed knowledge doubles every eight years.”

I do know that the amount of knowledge immediately available is vastly greater than the nostalgic era when many homes had at least one shelf of the living room bookcase filled with a neat arrangement of the encyclopedia just purchased from the door-to-door salesman.

For instance, a few years ago, I gave a physics assignment in which the students were to choose a common technological device, investigate the primary physics principles on which the device depended, then write an analysis of how that device had influenced societal behavior, either positively or negatively. One student selected the flush toilet as her technological focus. After finishing her Internet research, she cited six separate sites devoted entirely to the operation of the flush toilet.

I’m going to suggest that you won’t find six pages of information about toilets in any of the shelved encyclopedias.

This girl was a unique student, however. She actually read and analyzed the downloaded pages.

The norm of student Internet research is a bit different, as illustrated in the extreme by another student who wrote a social studies paper on the city of London, England.

His paper consisted of a Title Page and then twenty-six pages of downloaded and printed Internet information stapled together. When the teacher confronted him about this rather simplistic method of writing a research paper, the student defended his work by saying, “But I did the research. Look at that. I’ve got twenty-six pages of stuff. What more do you want?”

Obviously that’s the extreme, but it’s more representative of the kind of research and analysis many students perform. They Google a topic, take a perfunctory glance at the first few hits, then copy and paste some marginally relevant paragraphs. Of course the paper isn’t complete until they paste in a few totally plagiarized and un-cited pictures or diagrams from the website.

Partly as a result of Approval by Acquiescence, Students have learned the not of a click-and-copy mode of research at the same shallow level of learning they use to take multiple choice examinations.

 

Avoiding Institutional Inertia

 

At some point in time, kids started going to a place called school. These places of learning strongly reflected the societal wishes of the historically traditional family. Times were simpler, and learning consisted of the mastery of a closely defined body of knowledge generally considered intrinsic in educated people.

Knowledge entwined with education often promotes activism in thinking. Certain aspects of this educated society then began to create a technologically based culture, the primary result of which was a rapid growth in leisure time. This richness of leisure time suffered the inevitable perversion into a selfish, radical individualism as described by Charles Colson in his book, The Body.

The decades continued and are summarized as follows.

 

1940 – 1959                       “Yes, Sir. I understand, Sir.”

1960 – 1970                        “Peace, Man, peace.”

1971 – 1982                        “Listen, who really cares?”

1983 – 1989                        “Hey, Dude, chill out”

1990 – 1999                        “It’s mine, Baby, it’s mine!”

2000 –    ?                           “I’ll text  you when I get there.”

 

Somewhere in this chronology, radical visionaries (actually, reactionaries brave enough to be vocal) began what we now call the Christian School Movement. Back to the academic basics, something called integration, short hair, classes started with prayer, and dress codes all became identifiable attributes of this exciting phenomenon.

First perceived as a non-Darwinian joke, the Christian School Movement slowly began forcing the public sector to consider change, at least publicly and politically. If you can’t change the heart, at least you can put a cop in the corridor.

And finally, with the slow terror of a Poe-like pendulum, the Christian school movement is quietly acquiescing to the historical viruses of mediocrity that have dulled the public sector. The safety of a dormant Christian status quo threatens to send this movement into the oblivion society reserves for the harmlessly eccentric.

No longer new enough to be interesting nor radical enough to be exciting, many Christian schools are illustrating what I believe to be a foundational law that governs many societal institutions. I call this phenomenon the Law of Institutional Inertia.

 

Radical Ideas acted on with enthusiastic energy give rise to visionary institutions. Those institutions then tend to produce rules and structure designed to protect their own existence, thus stifling the production of further creative thought and radical ideas which created them in the first place.

 

There is a corollary law that applies to individuals.

 

Creative individuals who dare act on their creativity reach levels of success which become comfortable and secure, thus lessening the likelihood of further creative action.

 

The First Law of Motion as described by Isaac Newton discusses both the static and dynamic law of inertia. Both Institutional and Individual Inertia are static in nature. Creative ideas and enthusiastic energy allow an institution or person to reach a comfortable level of operation, but staying at that level eventually and inevitably turns a groove into the proverbial rut. That rutism can be avoided by choosing to live by the third law of Dynamic Institutional or Individual Inertia.

 

The willingness to risk failure…or the perception of failure… by fostering and acting on creative ideas is the only way to produce dynamic inertia and to develop a continuing and expanding acquisition of Radical Excellence.

 

To say it simply, be willing and anxious to enjoy the risk of becoming radically excellent.