Quarters in St. Philip’s Hands
March 23rd, 2010
Each year our family spends an extended period of time in Tucson, Arizona. One of our favorite activities each Sunday is to go to the farmer’s market held at St. Philip’s Plaza. During our most recent visit I noticed in the folded hands of the statue of St. Philip a stack of quarters. My six-year-old was standing next to me at the time. She noticed the stack of quarters too. We both began to consider: Where did the quarters come from? Why are they in St. Philip’s hands, and not in the fountain? If this is an offering of some sort, why are there only quarters? There are a couple dollars worth of quarters here. Why hasn’t anyone taken them? While we never did resolve the riddle, we got to practice the art of divergent thinking, a valuable exercise for us both.
Most educational approaches with youth today are convergent. People who care about and work with teens tend to reiterate the maxims: Avoid drugs and alcohol and sex; set life goals; keep on living. But we will strengthen the effect of our message by utilizing divergent learning methods that encourage teens to consider multiple options before arriving at an answer. Too often we employ convergent methods that force youth toward predetermined answers.
Our message is like the stack of quarters in St. Philip’s hands. Others’ understanding and relationship to the message will be markedly stronger if we introduce divergent questions and encourage them to do the same. This will help them examine multiple possibilities. Those answers that best fit their experience will surface. These possibilities may be in direct contrast to their previous assumptions and perceptions. When teens adopt a new idea and shift their perceptions we say that they’ve learned something. In order for this to happen we have to be skilled at asking questions that encourage a divergent encounter with the material.
For example, if we want teens to avoid using alcohol, we should explore why they would want to use alcohol and other related issues. When we ask convergent questions we not only forfeit the opportunity to equip students with learning skills, we suppress the reality that other possible answers exist. The good news is that the vast majority of us know, or knew at one point in our lives, how to ask divergent questions.
In their book Break Point and Beyond George Land and Beth Jarman mention a longitudinal study that surveyed sixteen hundred three-to-five-year-old children in the early days of the national Head Start program. Researchers used eight tests to gauge the levels of divergent thinking. Ninety-eight percent of the children surveyed scored genius level. Five years later they tested the same children and found the proportion of students considered genius dropped to thirty-two percent. When tested after another five years, when the sample was in their teen years, the proportion dropped to ten percent. It’s notable that a mere two percent of two hundred thousand adults who have taken the test score genius level. Should we wonder, given that ninety-eight percent of us adults are not gifted at divergent thinking, that we struggle to encourage it in teens?
In Teaching as a Subversive Activity Postman and Weingartner pose what they call a “What’s-Worth-Knowing Questions Curriculum.” It’s composed of two parts that I will outline here:
- The art and science of asking questions.
- The focus on asking questions that deal with problems perceived as useful and realistic by the learners—as opposed to useful and realistic by the teachers.
Here are some questions they pose as a standard for asking good questions:
- Will your questions increase the learner’s will as well as his capacity to learn?
- Will they help to give her a sense of joy in learning?
- Will they help to provide the learner with confidence in his ability to learn?
- In order to get answers, will the learner be required to make inquiries? (Ask further questions, clarify terms, make observations, classify data, etc.?)
- Does each question allow for alternative answers (implying alternative modes of inquiry)?
- Will the process of answering the questions tend to stress the uniqueness of the learner?
- Would the questions produce different answers if asked at different stages of the learner’s development?
- Will the answers help the learner sense and understand the universals in the human condition and so enhance her ability to draw closer to other people?
We should ask good questions to help teens consider multiple options and ideas. Only after we’ve pursued divergent questions should we transition to a convergence phase in which youth can begin to narrow the options to those that best answer the questions.
Forbidden Fruit
March 9th, 2010
There is much talk today about the negative, destructive messages that target youth. A recent study revealed that one out of every three rap songs references drug and alcohol use. The study did not say, but I wonder if the other two songs are about sex.
These messages abound through media such as music, ads, magazines, billboards and the Internet. Suggestions that drug use and sex are activities youth can and should participate in are ubiquitous—presented as sure-fire ways for youth to answer those questions that haunt their changing minds throughout adolescence: Who am I? What is life about? How should I relate to other people and the world we live in?
As adults our burning question ought to be: How can we best help teens sort through these messages and not fall victim to lies? Unfortunately, a common response is to simply be dismissive of the media. Many of us are inclined to deride it for its perverse presentation of reality; its seductive antics, propaganda and lies. “That’s ridiculous!” we may say in response to a music video that has captured the interest of a teen in our life. My concern is that such derision makes the object of our wrath forbidden fruit. That which we adults label ridiculous or stupid becomes enticing to youth precisely because we disparage it.
Perhaps I’m being too generous in thinking the majority of adults are attuned to the reality that the media are feeding feverishly on our youth. I suspect many adults, paralyzed by what they recognize on some level as an inevitable swell of propaganda beneath their feet, acquiesce to the surge of the media’s force. Such folks are inclined to underestimate not only the power of the media and its role in shaping young minds, but also the calculated, premeditated nature of these manipulations.
I want to offer a more helpful option to either dismissing the media as ridiculous, or denying its power. To begin I’d like to introduce the concept of “live ideas.” Live ideas exist within us as viable possibilities for how things really are. Since these ideas are alive and active, they help inform what we believe and do.
Imagine a teen coming to a crossroads at which he will need to make a decision. How does he go about doing this? What factors influence the decision he will make, and how might the media influence his decision? The media will guide a teen’s decision-making process insomuch as the media can introduce and sustain live ideas in teens. A music video, for example, may deliver the not-so-subtle message that if I have sex often and with many different women, I bolster my manhood and become a more substantive person. If I’m a teen I may believe sex will improve my social standing. Imagine these beliefs entering, living, growing, and thriving within the mind of a teen, like their own little Oz hiding behind the curtain calling the shots. The idea is now alive and will influence that teen’s decisions, worldview and self-perception.
Teens absorb dozens, even hundreds of these ideas. Live ideas produce live options. If a teen crafts his identity as a jock, the options put forth to him through the media may include: be arrogant, dismissive, cruel, and humiliating. He may not experience as a live option ballet, opera, chess, or volunteering at his local convalescent home. These are dead options because he has no live ideas that might furnish these options. Ideas are the seed. Options are the plant with all its branches.
So long as unhealthy, deceptive live ideas remain hidden they will grow. When we dismiss or deride the ideas they grow even more. To kill these ideas and cultivate true ideas that bear good fruit we need to bring the false ideas into the open. Live, lying ideas fully exposed will die. What happens when these ideas die? Teens enter the marketplace for new, better ideas to replace the old.
Crisis and conflict are central to this process. Where there is no crisis there is no conflict and no change. I believe our task is to bring teens into relationship with live ideas that are eating their soul. This creates the kind of conflict we’re looking for. If the teen is willing to let the idea die, and work through the ensuing crisis, a new idea will inevitably ripen and give true sustenance.
Beautiful Drudgery
March 2nd, 2010
Drudgery, as we often think of the term, is something to trudge through to get to the other side. Drudgery is unexciting, monotonous work whose end is always welcomed. We must bear its oppressive weight for a time in order to get to the good stuff, or so we’re inclined to think. The Russian author Leo Tolstoy had a perspective that challenges our modern sensibilities around drudgery. He wrote a short story of a peasant farmer whose neighbors stop working their fields in protest of their low wages. As the sun sets, rather than protest, the peasant lines his plow with lit candles and resumes his labor in the fields. The beauty of the lone farmer and his horse working the fields as the sun fades exemplifies the potential richness of drudgery.
One need not be a 19th century Russian peasant to relate to Tolstoy’s story. Our families, relationships, and vocations are demanding, often monotonous hard work. We are inclined to forget that such routine holds gobs of good stuff. Like the peasant, we possess the means of creating beauty in the midst of the mundane. We can commit ourselves fully to this work and recognize the art that emerges through our diligence and good faith. We can line our plow with candles, set out in the night, and note each star as it appears.
Like master artists we do well to immerse ourselves in the unfolding progression of work within our relationships. Pieces of art are at this moment evolving between us and everyone we know. But in relationships, unlike in art-making, the work is never done. We never create a final product from which we can step back and say, “it is complete.” The best, richest relationships are also inconvenient and challenging. But the fact that relationships are inconvenient and challenging is a gift to us. I would be half the person I am today if my relationships were a breeze.
My relationship with my wife is the most valuable and rewarding I will ever know. That we enjoy what I would call a “good marriage” is more indicative of the process than a place we’ve arrived. Hard work in relationships, rather than connoting a negative reality, is indicative that something good is afoot. This is true in personal as well as professional relationships. Like the farmer and his plow, relationships offer an unparallelled opportunity to create something beautiful.
Nonetheless, I am a big fan of the glaring, wonderful exceptions to drudgery: the birth of a child, a stroll through an art museum, camping with other families, and the blooming of fruit trees. I love that life orchestrates these kinds of “mundanity busters.” I feel within me the wish that all of life be a break from the familiar and mundane. I suppose similar desires birthed Las Vegas. But what I know to be true is that, while these blessed interruptions are welcomed refreshments, they do not and should not characterize the balance of our lives. Accepting this reality is freeing. I no longer want to just get through the day; I want to bob along in its current and take in the scenery. Though today may be familiar, a near carbon copy of yesterday, it is a gift. It is where real life happens.