Beyond School

I just stole a moment from grading the stack of research papers and semester exams to watch the first few minutes of the TED Talk embedded below on “The Art of the Interview.” The speaker discusses the importance of having interviewees  who have not only intellect,  but also “energy” (what he even called “Life Force”), and moreover, who throw “modesty” out the window in favor of the desire to acknowledge the extraordinary  and to unabashedly try to illuminate it. And all of this connected, in this teacher’s head, to an experience I had last week in my classroom.

So let me steal a couple more minutes from my gradebook deadline and share it. It’s this:

Single semester courses at my new school give Academic Excellence awards at semester’s end. One award is given per 50 students or so, and I have only 36 combined in my two Chinese history classes — a semester course.

So: given that a good six or seven students from those two classes all qualified as “academically excellent,” how choose one over the other?

Highest grade point average wasn’t the magic bullet, since the few tenths of a decimal point separating several of the students were surely as attributable to the performance of the grader — me — as to the performance of the students (that will be a revelation or a scandalous idea only to those who have never taught, read the research on, or thought for five unbroken minutes about the imprecision of grades as a measurement of student quality).

Long story short, I looked at the little canned script the school gave us teachers to read (optionally, bless their hearts) when presenting the award. It had a blank list of “five accomplishments” we were encouraged to fill out. I played along: 1) likes history; 2) good thinker; 3) good writer; 4) good speaker; 5) reliable and accountable, yadda yadda. Again, that still described at least five or six students.

Then it hit me.

Our Past is not Your Future — And Why That’s Bad News

What separated one from all the others was this: social intelligence. Call it “energy” or “life force,” if you will. It’s what the vast majority of “academically excellent” students are lacking. As  I tried to explain it  to the class when presenting the award:

The Dow topping the 10,000 mark aside, many economists are arguing that the U.S. economy may take years to recover to pre-crash levels in terms of something more important to most people than stocks — I mean jobs. Employment and production continue to decline, and many say those jobs may never come back.

High school students are so stuck in the myth that grades will lead to jobs — and so stuck in the textbooks about yesteryear — that they’re oblivious to this. The evidence for it pervades the classroom daily in the “I’ve done my work and I’ve got a high GPA, and that’s enough” attitude. I can slouch in my chair during class, use my mouth during discussions only as an oxygen-intake port, foul the collective sound- and vision-scape with complaints and sighs and sour looks, promote complacency by refusing to put any imagination or energy into improving the group experience, on and on. Again, my GPA is enough. It will get me into college, and college will get me into a job, because I have no inkling how much more difficult my future may be due to the several gathering clouds on the horizon — have no inkling, for example, that for every single vacancy in the professional job-rolls today, there are between five and six very qualified people seeking and needing that job.

The Only Thing Worse than a Suck-Up….

So in deciding how to give that award, I gave it to the person I wouldn’t only hire for being academically capable, but would promote for qualities of character: a person whose body language said “I’m awake and alert,”  whose facial language said “I’m not sour,” whose actions said “Let me help improve the class” instead of shirking that option — who was, in short, “energetic,” positive, constructive –  neither a “suck-up,” as I put it in class, nor, as importantly, a “suck-down.”

In a sense, by giving that student the award, I did “promote” her. That honor might, after all, be the tipping point in a favorable college application decision down the road.

I don’t know where I read it — and now that I think about it, I believe I saw it on a TV interview — but somewhere I saw a headhunter or executive type respond to a question about how the new economic landscape was affecting his hiring decisions, and his response should be posted above the gates of all schools for the privileged (such as mine): He didn’t care, he said, about an applicant’s academic pedigree, regardless of how ivy-covered it was; in fact, he went on, such a pedigree can even be a red flag and a demerit. Because the last thing he was looking for, he said, was people whose backgrounds led them to believe they were entitled to the best things in life. He wanted people who see  privilege as a thing to be earned.

This is something American students, especially, may need to hear, since they’re less able to compare themselves to their English-speaking peers from India and Asia — perhaps India especially, since it has two advantages over both East Asia and America: the presence of native English literacy skills equal or superior to those of American students, and the absence of the Confucian submissiveness and rote learning habits of many East Asian countries.

(The short version: watch out for India. It’s confident, it’s capable, it’s talkative; it’s hungry, it’s not spoiled, and it’s socially intelligent. This is made abundantly clear in my international school classroom every day.)

Psst…Your Code is Showing

In any case, in this age of the interwebs, this teacher once again shares with the rest of the world what he shares in his classroom, hoping it’s of value to students anywhere, whether they’re in his gradebook or not. What I hope you’ll take away:

First, your grades might get you in the door, but they won’t get you up the ladder. (And in this Age of Defining-Down “Success,” even getting in the door shouldn’t be taken for granted. Having a job at all, in other words, may be the “new” success. Just ask the 1-in-5 Americans currently unemployed or under-employed.)

And second, we don’t see you as a GPA, because we see the rest of you daily. How you walk and who you walk with, how you sit and how you compose your face, where your eyes go and don’t go, what comes (and doesn’t come) out of your mouth — all of things things are very obvious codes that we decode daily. And when you leave us, others with the power to pull you up or keep you down will take our place, and they’ll read those same codes.

I know this sounds crazy authoritarian, and that maybe one or two of you might be possessed of the type of genius that can beat the odds and conquer the world without an ounce of social intelligence or maturity of character. But — to share a dirty secret — I, like most teachers, really do want you to succeed. And I write this because I think it may help some of you.

Now here’s that TED Talk:

Oof. It’s Sunday afternoon. Since returning Friday night from a skipping-rock of a flight home from Koh Samui, Thailand – departed 6 a.m., layover and transfer in Bangkok, another layover in Hong Kong, a refueling layover in Taiwan, an arrival at Incheon (Korea) at 9 p.m., and an airport bus and taxi to enter the door at 10.30p – we gasped at the two-week-old dust bunnies bounding across our apartment, unpacked, and then I slept a few hours before driving through the brutal cold (oh Thai sun, please shine up here) to my radio job at 6.30 the following morning. Home again, write a post for Education.Change.org, sleep, more radio this morning, and finally, though sleepy, here to write a bit – *inhale* – about….

The Wonderful World of International School Hiring Fairs

It was wonderful, in a weird way. Talking for hours for four straight days to school leaders around the world about our views on teaching and learning (and most interestingly, though probably most damning for many of my job prospects, about technology in education) is an interesting way to spend the time.

Without naming names of schools or interviewers, here’s a random and sleepy-eyed report of lessons learned from the experience.

1. Bad interviews are good things

No matter the reputation of the school, the people sitting across from you in the hotel room asking you questions in that school’s name are a stronger indicator of how it would feel to work at that school. I talked to English department heads whose questions – and my answers – made it clear to both of us that we would, or would not, make a happy marriage. There was an unsurprising correlation between this marital element and the offering or non-offering of a position at each school. Schools touting themselves as “21st century schools” and banging their laptop program drums – and during interviews with which I expected flower petals to descend from on high – on an occasion or two turned out to instead voice sentiments belonging to, um, people who’d obviously never experienced the literacy magic that happens after a few months writing and conversing behind the wheel of a blog. No rose-petals there – instead, many mental leaves of wet cabbage fell, probably, in both our imaginations. Marriage for the next two years? We think not. Thank goodness for the bad interview, and for the “We’re sorry we cannot offer you a job at this time.” No apology necessary, really – good luck.

2. “Energy is eternal delight” – so its opposite is….?

(h/t to William Blake who, though dead, deserves eternal credit for the eternally delightful maxim.) If, like mine, your own heart seems to pump more espresso than blood, then it may be important to consider the energy coming from those interviewing you. I’m not saying interviewers need to be manic or anything; I’m just saying a lack of excitement, of a sort of buoyancy – of even a decorously restrained intensity – when discussing educational vision while courting for a temporary professional marriage may be, well, a screaming red flag. Granted, the interviewers are stuck in their hotel rooms interviewing candidate after candidate for many more straight hours than the candidates themselves, but still – we’re all teachers, current or past, so we should be pretty good at keeping our energy level up whenever a professional client enters the room, be it classroom or hotel room. The short version? Beware the droopy interviewer, and put a gold star by the inspired/inspiring one. You are, after all, bound to be sitting in many more meetings with them if you sign the contract to work with them. If they’re sleepy, chances are you’ll be a sleepy worker with them. But if they’re exciting – in a way that rings true (and we all have what Hemingway calls a “shock-proof sh!t-detector,” don’t we, to distinguish real from fake excitement, yes?) – then consider fishing your pocket for that ring, and dropping to your knees on the spot.

3. Interview questions make the interviewer.

By the end of the first of my four days of interviewing, it struck me how different interviews are based on the questions asked (and not asked) by the interviewer. Some of them seemed as stilted and scripted as the worst end-of-chapter questions from the worst textbooks (redundant?). They felt less like interviews than exercises in checking off the questions boxes. It wasn’t quite “schooliness,” so can we call it “interviewiness”?

The best interviews, on the other hand, were more free-flowing and responsive, characterized by give-and-take expansiveness as one party or the other heard something no script could predict.

4. Being yourself is better, come what may, than trying to be someone else.

Think about it. Not only does pretending to be what you’re not cheat your interviewer – it also cheats you. Show your true colors now, so you’ll know whether it’ll be okay to show them over the length of your contract. I love the fact that, at my second interview with the two interviewers for the school I chose, Singapore American School, I replied to a question by saying something to the effect of, “There’s no denying that people’s first impression of me is often, ‘Damn, Burell, you’re too intense!’ But after a while they see the rest of me, and realize I’m also mellow in my own way.” “Damn” is a soft enough word these days – and I certainly don’t toss out higher-level potty words like rhymes-with-fit or ends-many-limericks-about-Nantucket or leads-to-supposedly-eternal-damnation in professional company – and I wondered about the wisdom of the utterance after it escaped my mouth (and this was in like the middle of the second hour of the interview), but somehow the fact that the offer was still made left me feeling even happier than otherwise about accepting it when it came in hour three.

5. Check your ego at the door.

I got about an even mix of offers and rejections from the schools I talked to. One school in particular seemed so right after two interviews that getting the rejection note broadsided me with the force of a turbo-powered school bus. I bumped into one of the interviewers later, and he told me that choosing my competitor over me was the hardest decision they made the night before, and that it took them over an hour of group deliberation to make it. A rejection can happen for all sorts of reasons – maybe they needed yearbook experience you didn’t offer, or needed that administrator whose spouse happened to be a less-qualified candidate for the position you want. So don’t take it personally.

6. Remember to research.

I’m sure I blew one interview by expressing my desire to get experience in a program they didn’t offer, and expressing my distaste for the one they did. Oops. I’d mistakenly thought they did offer that program.

7. Benefits, preps, class sizes, and student mix.

You don’t offer a flight home after the first year? You don’t cover dependents? 70% of your student population is Korean? You laugh off the notion that four preps is too much for new (or old) teachers?

8. Courtesy is cool, good will is good stuff.

When it came down to thinking I’d be choosing between two very attractive schools, I told one of them how I hoped that saying “no” this time, if the decision went that way, wouldn’t close the door to a “yes” next time in years to come. The gentlemanly answer of the man I said this to was so winsome, I don’t know what to say, other than that it made me want to work in this man’s school even more. The answer was no less impressive for its simplicity, which was, simply, “Your saying no to us will offend us no more than we’d want to offend you if we said no to you. It’s the nature of the beast, and we understand that, so no doors will close at all.”

9. Remember to check yourself in the mirror before you leave your hotel room for the day’s interviews.

I can’t believe I forgot my belt. At least my fly wasn’t down.

That’s about it. Hope it helped, and fyi, Mr. Utecht, consider the assignment done