Summer!!! Summer??? Summer...
This is my desk, on the last day of school.
This is the moment after I handed in my end-of-year checklist. Note how clean it is. See that stack of blank paper? That's where the to-be-graded stack lived for the past ten months. The floors are vacuumed. The grades are complete. The lab is mopped.
If you're a teacher, it's an image you're used to seeing, year after year. If you're a student, your version is probably an empty locker. If you're a parent, your version is probably putting the empty backpacks away for the last time this year. Each of us has that one image that reliably tells us "I'm done now."
So what happens next?
We do a weird thing with school in this country; every ten months, we take a two-month break. I'm certainly not going to argue; I enjoy spending my two low-stress months each summer. I'm not a proponent of year-round school, and never will be. If anything, I think we do school too much in America. However, there is one very unfortunate message we unconsciously send our students and children by the way we schedule school:
Without meaning to, we're telling them that it's okay to take a two-month break from the pursuit of wisdom.
And we do it, like clockwork, every year for twelve to sixteen years. Is it any wonder, then, that we have created students who don't think learning can happen until they go to an official classroom and an official teacher tells them it's time to get started? We celebrate summer, and we should--but in the way we celebrate summer, I think we sometimes give tacit permission to students to think negatively of learning and positively of mental inactivity.
How do we combat this?
Not with required summer reading. Not with summer "skill retention" workbooks. Those are strategies.
And, as I learned from the great Kevin Templeton:
Culture eats strategy for breakfast. Every time.
To create a school or classroom or family of learners, you have to create a culture that celebrates learning simply because wisdom is a good thing, and the most fully human people engage in its pursuit.
How do you do this as a teacher? (We'll get to parents in a minute.) I'm not a complicated guy, and I think it's pretty simple:
Read constantly about your subject, your craft, and the world in general.
Tweet / Instagram / Snapchat relentlessly about the things you're learning.
When a student / parent / fellow teacher engages with one of those posts, have a conversation with them.
It routinely baffles my students that I spend the summer trying to make myself a wiser person and a better teacher. (For more on what students think about school and wisdom, click here.) My students learn two things from my summer reading posts: (1) they learn that I value their education enough to spend my summer improving my craft, and (2) they learn that, even when I'm not "doing my job," I'm still doing something in the pursuit of wisdom.
It's not complicated. Teachers who spend their summers vegetating have no right to demand students work hard during the year. Because you've already sent the message "It's okay to only get smarter when you see an immediate payoff in terms of paychecks or grades."
What does this have to do with parents? It's simple: if your kids don't see you reading books, they don't think reading is important. If your kids don't hear you talking about Big Ideas, they don't think Big Ideas really matter. If your kids only see you expend effort when there's a paycheck involved, they think the only reason to do anything is when there's a financial payoff.
Whether it's a classroom, a school, or a family: creating a culture of people that pursue wisdom requires leaders who are visibly engaged in the pursuit of wisdom. That's how you spend your summer.
Here's a list of books I recommend, drawn quickly from my classroom bookshelf:
- Turning Learning Right Side Up
- Linchpin
- Stop Stealing Dreams
- Imagine
- An Almanac of Liberty
- Teaching With Love and Logic
- Parenting With Love and Logic
- The Disappearance of Childhood
- Creativity, Inc
- Free Range Kids
- The End of Homework
- The Idea of a University
- Cognitive Surplus
- Switch
- What Connected Educators Do Differently
- The Homework Myth
- The Passion-Driven Classroom
- Start With Why
- Real Education
- The Shape of Reason
- How Children Fail
- The Book of Learning and Forgetting
- Deschooling Society