“Staying Found” – a middle school field study where we roam cross-country and the kids then have to lead us back to the beginning.
Occasionally, the social energy of a class needs some adjustment so I bring in a lesson derived from the insight Zephyr, as a toddler, showed me with the blocks. I have the class sit in a circle around a small pile of blocks. I ask a volunteer to stack them as fast as they can to make a high tower. It usually takes around 45 seconds. Then I tell another volunteer, “When I say go, knock the tower down.” It takes about half a second.
It’s easier to knock down than build up. It is possible to build up but it takes work and it is slower than knocking things down. It’s part of the challenge of this universe. Knocking things down is seductive; because it is easier, it makes you feel big and powerful. Building up is harder, takes more steps, more concentration, is slower, doesn’t attract attention like knocking things down does.
This happens in conversations. If you want to say something to make your friends laugh, it’s probably going to come out as a put-down because put-downs are easier to create. This tiny, quick “up” of laughter drags the whole class down in an effect that lasts and affects the well-being of everyone. Trust and safety is lost. It is so much easier to break trust than to build it up. We need to consciously monitor ourselves: are we building up or knocking down. If we work together, we can create a class capable of amazing possibilities.
I give a variety of essay topics to my eighth graders. Once, I gave a saying that Gary Snyder mentioned in an interview: “You can count the number of seeds in an apple but you can’t count the number of apples in a seed.” I had my students write about what they thought that meant. I was surprised that no one understood what I saw as its core meaning. Reflecting on that led me to share the following story.
In third or fourth grade, a friend and I were walking home from school across the Whitman College campus. We came upon eight or ten college men playing an informal game of touch football. We sat on the side and watched for several minutes. Much to our amazement and delight, one of them asked if we wanted to play. Wow, play football alongside big, tall college men? Yeah! So I played on one side, my friend on the other. We were probably mostly running around amidst the men as they continued playing their game. But then, at one point, my team’s quarterback lobbed the ball to me. Time slowed down and as the ball came towards me I hoped, oh I hoped I would be worthy of his confidence. The ball drew closer and my hands were up and I caught it!
Years later, I still remember how that made me feel. Not the catching the ball (though that was nice) but the being invited in, the being treated as an equal by older, bigger people. That memory is definitely present when I play Frisbee with kids at recess or when I bring out my kite on windy days and give the little kids a chance to fly it. The goodness those men exhibited to two boys watching them play was a seed and my thousands of Frisbee tosses and kite flights with kids are apples growing on the tree that seed became. Who knows how many of those apples will, in their time, produce seeds of kindness in the next generation? Telling that story helped the eighth-graders understand that saying.
Reflecting on the teaching success of that story dredged up another story that I shared with my class the following day. In second grade, Craig Gibbons and I were playing by Lakum Duckum, also on the Whitman College campus. Lanny Mansfield came up and asked us what we were doing. As we were telling him, he pushed us into the pond and ran away laughing. We felt embarrassed and hurt. Later, I was playing with another friend, Billy Rhodes, on the campus and, in an impulse, I pushed him in. The moment I saw the look on his face, I regretted what I had just done.
Why did I do it? I had no idea at the time. Now, I think I was trying to figure out why Lanny had pushed us in. There must be something neat about pushing somebody else into a pond so I tried it out to find out what it was. It created only regret and damaged a friendship so I didn’t do it again. But I had done it — and maybe Billy Rhodes did it to someone else for a similar reason, and maybe Lanny’s push is still sprouting seeds out in the world.
Seventh-Grade Alpha Male Story – by Alysia
Awards were being given out at Tree Assembly to students who had, over the school year, run a hundred miles. One boy, the unchallenged alpha male of the upper grades, had completed the hundred miles and received his certificate several weeks earlier. His best friend finally had made it too. He had a grin on his face as he came up to receive his award. His friend (the Alpha Male) reproached his friend, loud enough to be heard twenty feet away, “Took ya long enough.” The boy receiving the award, instantly slumped down and shuffled up to the stage, his body language clearly saying ‘this award is no big deal.'” His light went out immediately. I called out, “That was unkind.” and made eye contact with the boy who had called out.
I thought about this interaction all summer. I decided that on the first day of school of his 8th grade year, to speak to the boy who had put-down his friend. I called him over and reminded him of the interaction that had occurred the previous spring.
I said, “You are the best athlete in the school and everyone knows it. You have the most status. Ask any younger boy who is the leader of the boys on the playground and they all will name you. You have a great deal of power with them. I just wondered about what you said when your friend got the running award, and I wondered how hard would it have been for you to say,” Good job”?
He thought for a moment and replied, “Not that hard.”
I pointed out that since the uplifting comment would cost him nothing, he could have supported and let his friend’s light shine instead of having to act like it didn’t matter when it did. It dimmed his light immediately.
“You are the unchallenged leader of the older boys; you do not need to put them down to secure your place in the social group. What if you encouraged them instead of putting them down? That is leadership. What would change?”
He thought about that as he walked away. This idea that uplifting others did not cost him more than putting them down must have resonated within his spirit because, within a few weeks, the staff noticed a marked change in his attitude. He stood up straighter, softened his voice and became a positive force in the 8th grade class. He saw his better self as easily available and began using it more often.
The Hand Game
Finally time to talk about the Hand Game. I created this game by adapting some psychology experiments described in Prisoner’s Dilemma by William Poundstone. I’ve played it with several eighth-grade classes. (You can see one of these times at <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JA4eXoc4I2o>).
Quick recap: There are only two plays: Open Hand and Closed Hand. Both players look at the same chart to determine how many points they get.
| . | I play Closed Hand | I play Open Hand |
| Other player plays Closed Hand | I score 1 point | I score 0 points |
| Other player plays Open Hand | I score 5 points | I score 3 points |
It takes awhile for the kids to understand how their partner, looking at the same chart, figures out their points. So I let them play for a while until they figure it out. They are free to talk during this time. Each time, some individuals come up to me excited because they have figured out “how they can win every time.”
They explain that:
– if the other player plays Closed Hand, then my playing Closed Hand is a tie while a play of Open Hand would be a loss.
– if the other player plays Open Hand, then my playing Closed Hand is a win while a play of Open Hand would be a tie.
Therefore, if I always play Closed Hand, I will either win or tie, whereas if I play Open Hand, I will always either tie or lose. So the winning strategy is to always play Closed Hand. You can never lose.
After this discussion, I reveal the first lesson of the Hand Game. The first lesson is that I never told them how to win the game. I explained the rules and the scoring but I never said what constitutes winning. They had made an assumption. We discuss that. Why did you assume what you assumed? Kids are perceptive about this; all the games they have played result in a winner and a loser. (Zero sum games.) It’s what they’ve practiced.
Some of them say that they had assumed that the goal was to get the most points and that was what they were going by. I tell them that, actually, getting the most points was not the assumption they had used, but I would prove that to them later.
Then I tell them that the way you win the Hand Game is to score the most points between the two of you. They re-examine the chart. Then we play another round. Sometimes one of them always plays Closed Hand while the other always plays Open Hand for a score of 50 and 0. Sometimes they alternate who gets to play Closed Hand; they score 25 and 25. But most of them discover that the highest score is obtained by both playing Open Hand, 30 and 30.
That’s when I am able to point out that this strategy led to three times as many points as when they were trying “to get the most points.” Why was this possibility invisible to them? It’s then they realize that their assumption had not been “getting the most points.” It had been “not letting the other person get more points than you.”
The lesson concludes with pointing out that the 30/30 solution was always there within the chart, but invisible to them when they were delighting in the seemingly smart 10/10 strategy. How many 30/30 opportunities exist around us that are invisible when we see the world with the “never lose” 10/10 assumption?
Playing this game with several classes leads to deeper lessons. The 10/10 strategy seems logical when you can’t trust others. However, once you start down that path, playing Closed Hand confirms to the other player that you can’t be trusted. Both of you come to trust that the other person cannot be trusted. The thirty-point path is only available for people who can trust that the other person can be trusted.
The difference between when you trust that others will not be trustworthy and when you can trust others to be trustworthy made me realize that much of the culture of the “free market” (caveat emptor, externalize costs and internalize profits) leads one to assume others are not trustworthy. This view can lead you, in turn, to be untrustworthy to others, thus helping create this reality with one another. The karmic price is that all you can see in the world are the 10/10 possibilities. The 30/30 possibilities all become invisible. (In college, I met the father of a friend. He was the CEO of a large insurance company. Every line in our conversation felt like a negotiation he had to win. Though highly successful financially, to me he felt trapped always playing Closed Hand, cut off from the spontaneous delight of the 30/30 world.)
My experience with Chrysalis is that it is possible to trust that the world is filled with 30/30 opportunities. Steven Covey in his book, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People,calls this “Go for Win-Win or No Play.” He means that your intent in all interactions is to create a 30/30 working relationship where both parties benefit. If this can’t be worked out, if the only arrangement available is a zero-sum game where one party wins at the expense of the other, then you don’t play. The refusal to sink to a zero-sum game relationship is part of creating the trust that makes the 30/30 possibility visible.
In Doughnut Economics (Chelsea Green, 2017), Kate Raworth re-visions what our economic goals should be. She cites several psychology experiments where the only variable that changed was whether the subject was called a “consumer” or a “citizen.” When people were called “consumers,” they were more likely to make 10/10 type decisions, while when they were called “citizens,” they were more likely to make 30/30 type decisions. One of the slow but steady changes I’ve noticed in my life is the shift in the media from calling us “citizens” to “consumers.” Time to reclaim our title of citizens!
Last year for the first time, I had a pair of students play 30/30 on the first round. Since that had never happened before, I asked them how they had managed that. Owen and Rachel hadn’t understood “How do you win?” (since I hadn’t told them). So they asked each other this question in an attempt to understand what they were supposed to be doing, which led them to decide it must be to get the most points. Once they shared that intention, they discovered that the Open Hand/Open Hand strategy would produce the most points—for each of them. No competition was needed. As far as I know, they were the first pair of players to actually ask this question out loud to each other. Asking the question creates a discussion.
Once you talk about it, you both can see that the Open Hand is better no matter whether you are playing for the most points on your own or the most points together. If you play for the most points together, you end up with the most points on your own. You don’t end up with more than the other player – but neither do you when you both play Closed Hand. Once you talk about it together, you can realize that what really motivates the Closed Hand/Closed Hand strategy is fear of ending up with fewer points than the other, fear of the other person getting more points than you.
Responsiveness
As part of studying the Constitution, I split my eighth graders into the Senate and the House of Representatives and challenge them to pass a bill to make the school better. A few years ago, I had to miss the class where they had their first chance to work on the challenge. My substitute left a note that they had gotten badly stuck.
When I checked in with them, they said they wanted to create a student council but they were stuck on how officers should be elected. Deciding to be heavy-handed, I confided to them that several times students have wanted to have student councils at Chrysalis, and each time we tried it, the elections were, frankly, just an opportunity to have a popularity contest, after which the student government didn’t do much. But my students replied that they wanted the council to do things. “Like what?” I asked. “Like wash the outside lunch tables,” they said. I replied, “You don’t need a council in order to wash the tables. Let’s just go clean them.” I asked the PE teacher if they could wash the tables during PE, which they did with gusto, creating a good sense of accomplishment afterwards.
American kids are brought up within organizations with designated leaders. Does this teach them that before any larger-than-individual action is undertaken, leaders must be chosen? I wanted to experiment with having the kids self-organize without an election first. So I described self-organization and chaords and we started using talking circles to discuss other projects they might want to do.
One thing they wanted to do was raise money and go on an 8th grade trip. I told them, as I’ve told other classes, that Chrysalis doesn’t do an 8th grade trip. I explained that attempts in the past had always run into problems – usually involving parents. In fact, the previous year, some parents had wanted to create a fancy trip for the kids after graduation. They had made a big fundraising push, but not all the kids had wanted to participate in their fundraising, so some parents wanted the funds to go only to certain kids and the whole thing fractionated and fell apart. That was one of the reasons the school does not do a class trip.
But what, they asked, if we organized it on our own? I said they could try but it would not set a precedent for Chrysalis doing an eighth-grade trip. So they started brainstorming places they would like to go and the amusement park that parents have always wanted the class to go to for their trip was one of the choices. But the kids, instead, chose the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. That caught my attention – the fact that they had chosen a museum over the traditional amusement park. I put a constraint on any possible trip: it was essential that every student who wanted to go would be able to go; that cost would not prevent anyone from going. They all absolutely agreed, with an of-courseness that again caught my attention. But I also knew that they were too young to realize the actual cost of an overnight trip to San Francisco, so I insisted that they work out a budget. That was hard for them, but gradually we found the realistic prices of everything, and of course the cost was too high, especially lodging. (We are too far from the museum to pull it off as a day trip.)
But then one of the students arranged with her relatives, who lived about an hour from the city, to stay the night in their church for free. Suddenly the price for the trip dropped. I wrote to all the families describing what the kids wanted to try doing and explaining the condition that all students would be able to go, and asking each family if they would need a scholarship to participate. There was a need for a couple of hundred dollars.
Then another student had grandparents who lived in the same town as the church who offered to host us for dinner and breakfast. That dropped our budget further. The students tried a bake sale. They came running back at the end of it with eyes so wide and excited because they had raised $125 and they could’ve raised more if they had more food. Now there was a strong sense that this trip was going to happen, that they were going to make it a reality. The trip was planned for the Monday and Tuesday following school graduation.
And then in late April, three of the students found out that they had been accepted into a high school program that would require them to start practicing the Monday after graduation. Another student learned that she had dress rehearsals for a dance performance the entire week after graduation. Suddenly, the whole trip had run into a wall.
For a week we were frustrated and stymied. And then on Friday, the dancer came running up excitedly saying that she would have permission to miss her dance rehearsals the next Thursday and Friday and could we go now, during the school year?
The other middle school teachers were all right with the eighth graders missing classes the next Friday. Three parents offered to drive. We organized a last-minute bake sale for that Wednesday. The kids brought an amazing amount of baked goods Wednesday morning. We spent the morning on Wednesday talking about how to organize the bake sale so that they could generate the “most dollars per minute” (a new concept for them). This time, supply exceeded demand. They still had many plates of unsold cookies. But they had also made another $175. There was an absolutely wonderful sense of accomplishment and pride and ethical satisfaction that we were going to pull this off.
The next day, the entire eighth grade class drove down to the town where we had dinner and stayed at the church. The kids played hide and seek outside in the dusk. I calmed them down afterwards with a talking circle. They talked about how much closer they felt to one another. At the end of the talking circle, one of the students asked me what I thought of all of this. Certain questions, asked with a certain tone, create an opportunity for an answer to go deep, so I arranged my words mindfully. I found myself talking about how love is being aware of the light in one another and seeing it as beautiful and wanting to help it grow and feeling that the other person also wants the same thing for you. Love helps us explore together what is truly possible with the miracle of our lives that we are given.
In a serendipitous coincidence, a few weeks before the trip, from out of the blue, I received an email from a professor I did not know inviting me to be a panelist at the 2015 Tenth International Whitehead Conference, titled Seizing an Alternative: Toward an Ecological Civilization. The list of keynote speakers was very impressive but I was confused by the fact that Whitehead, a dead mathematician, was somehow presented as a seminal foundation for an ecological civilization. So I went to Wikipedia to learn that Alfred North Whitehead began as a mathematician but then shifted focus to educational pedagogy and then to metaphysics, and that his writing on metaphysics was incomprehensible to most of his contemporaries but highly influential. However, in the section on educational pedagogy, the Wikipedia article says:
“[H]e cautioned against the teaching of what he called ‘inert ideas’ – ideas that are disconnected scraps of information, with no application to real life or culture. He opined that ‘education with inert ideas is not only useless: it is, above all things, harmful.’
“Rather than teach small parts of a large number of subjects, Whitehead advocated teaching a relatively few important concepts that the student could organically link to many different areas of knowledge, discovering their application in actual life. For Whitehead, education should be the exact opposite of the multidisciplinary, value-free school model – it should be transdisciplinary, and laden with values and general principles that provide students with a bedrock of wisdom and help them to make connections between areas of knowledge that are usually regarded as separate.
“In order to make this sort of teaching a reality, however, Whitehead pointed to the need to minimize the importance of (or radically alter) standard examinations for school entrance. Whitehead writes:
” ‘Every school is bound on pain of extinction to train its boys [sic] for a small set of definite examinations. No headmaster has a free hand to develop his general education or his specialist studies in accordance with the opportunities of his school, which are created by its staff, its environment, its class of boys, and its endowments. I suggest that no system of external tests which aims primarily at examining individual scholars can result in anything but educational waste.’
“Whitehead argued that curriculum should be developed specifically for its own students by its own staff, (my italics added) or else risk total stagnation, interrupted only by occasional movements from one group of inert ideas to another.”
Our San Francisco trip was an example of “curriculum” developed specifically for and by my students. This interesting resonance with Whitehead led me to ask the kids afterwards to list some of the things they had learned. The responses that follow are some of the “laden with values and general principles” learnings that can emerge within a responsive school.
Working as a semi-functioning team: We all had to put our differences aside to create a plan that would be doable.
I also think from a person who watched her classmates scream over each other with excitement, that when people are given the opportunity to speak, that thirteen and fourteen year olds are capable of being some type of organized. Most people see us as either babies or demons. By creating the trip, I think we showed people that we are mature enough to handle situations that would be easier with the help of an adult.
Don’t create a bottleneck. If we didn’t split the lines at the bake sale, it would have been very hard to get everyone fed. Because we had two lines the second time, it went a lot better.
Work as hard as you can. If you do your best, it will be better than if you didn’t.
Be grateful for what your parents do for you because what they do isn’t easy.
Sometimes things don’t always go as you planned but that doesn’t mean you should give up because if you give up then you definitely won’t be able to accomplish your goal. You can accomplish whatever you set your mind to even if it may seem too hard or too big; just keep trying.
Time management – We had a short amount of time to get what we needed to get, yet we still managed!
Teamwork – Everyone pitched in and helped! We all did work, not just one or two people.
Money management – We learned how to properly earn money – “run a business”.
Confidence – I think that we all gained confidence from this experience. We didn’t think we could do it but we DID! That is huge!
Self-organization – We did have the help of many people, but I think we truly learned how to self-organize.
I feel like I learned a lot about friendship on the trip. I learned that friendships can come out of simply being in the same class, or sitting next to them on a 3 hour car trip.
I learned that you can be legally an adult with adult responsibilities, but you don’t, under any circumstances, have to grow up. Not one bit, not ever. Society may try to make you, but you don’t have to.
I learned that independence is difficult, wonderful and a very big responsibility. I like being independent so when we are able to just do things how we want to do them, I learned sometimes they almost get done better than if we had help from an adult. When we decided on the trip, it was all our choice, not a given by the teachers. Then we had to work for it and we did it.
I learned how dependent people can be and how there are two groups, independent and dependent. In other words, leaders and followers. There were those of us who took charge and made things happen; then there were others who agreed with what we said and just went along with it.
This last entry is expressing that leaders don’t have to be chosen. Leaders emerge chaordically from the people who care enough about something to start doing the work. Starting the work precedes the emergence of leaders, not the other way around. This leads back to the initial question that resulted in this trip. As children, are we taught that a required step in any government (class, school, nation) is electing a president, a leader? Do we learn a dependence on leaders because the governance structures modeled to us depend on leaders – and “selection of leaders” is modeled as a necessary step before people can accomplish anything? Do we learn to abdicate some of our power to a chain of command rather than learning to absorb our own power?
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