Wednesday, March 2, 2005. "The Hidden Logic of Students in Everyday Life." Mike Riera.

 

MS. BRIZENDINE: Good morning, everybody. We're all sort of scattered out. I know some of you have flights, but why don't you move forward just a little. We understand what today is like, but coming a little closer might be better. I see you all are not listening to me at all.

 

I want to remind you that there are evaluation feedback forms in the back. They're no longer yellow, but white. If you haven't filled one out, please take the time to do so and put it in the box in the back. Again, Council thanks you for your time on that. We take it quite seriously.

 

Cell phones off, in case you have them on, making sure your flights are all in order.

 

Council members, we're going to move our meeting to 10:30. Please duly note that.

 

Of course I have a closing poem for you, I'm going to shake it up a little bit. This is from a collection called "The Book of Luminous Things," an anthology of international poetry. Recognizing my arrested development in Western tradition, I tried to reach out a little bit. So this one is from Rumi, 13th century, so you can see we're really shaking it up here, and it has to do with the energy we're feeling right now about going back.

 

No title.

 

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,

There is a field. I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in the grass,

The world is too full to talk about.

Ideas, language, even the phrase "each other"

Doesn't make any sense.

 

So I wish for you many, many fields as you go back to your schools.

 

Mary Lou.

 

MS. LEIPHEIMER: This is not a test, but it is a question. What do schools, Heads of schools, Oprah-like progress, CBS, Saturday Early Morning Show, and bestseller list have in common? I see the Heads going down. So perhaps I should say that what we have in common is that all of us have read Mike Riera's books. Mike Riera, Ph.D., is a renowned authority on children and teenagers.

 

It should come as no surprise that someone who has had that kind of exposure has two degrees, a master's degree and a Ph.D. in counseling and psychology, and so that should be credit enough. But probably the real training ground is that for 19 years, he was a teacher, counselor, and dean of students in one of our schools. Dean of students is the one job I was never going to touch, and so that's a real training ground.

 

To make him even more authentic, he has become the Head of school at Redwood School in Oakland, California. I'm looking forward to seeing how he does as a Head of school and whether students think, when they go to see him, that he's going to shrink them.

 

And I know you'll join me in welcoming Mike Riera.

 

MR. RIERA: Thank you. Just to be clear, I'm really getting my comeuppance now as a Head of school, first year. I'm a neophyte Head in learning as I go, and it's exciting.

 

Today I want to talk about a few different things. I want to look at development of kids and how they develop, for our purposes, from five years old to about 18 years old, some of the similarities and some of the differences.

 

I focus a little more on adolescents, but I want to connect it also to the younger years so you can see these things. I was getting caught up in some of the things you have covered already, and a lot of people have talked about developing a language if you really want to mentor someone, whether in the arts or athletics.

 

The same is true for a concept like integrity. Integrity is a concept I'm going to talk about. A large part of that is developing a language and teaching it to our students and sharing it with our faculty, as well as the language of development.

 

So we're going to talk about development also, but before I start, I actually want to acknowledge Joan Twaddle, who's in the audience, whose official title is aunt-in-law. So I'm actually very nervous, because I know she's a meticulous listener, and she's going to point out -- as her brother, my father-in-law, would -- six or seven points that I could improve on just a bit. He was always right. When I rewrote "Uncommon Sense," I included in the book all seven points he gave me, because he gave one of the best readings ever. I know Joan will do the same today, and will tell all my relatives about it.

 

But on the other side, I know she's grabbed some of the evaluation forms that are lying around and by my name wrote "Outstanding."

 

To start with, as we look at development, it's curious how kids change over the years, the way they think and see the world. A quick example. At our school, we have kindergarteners through eighth graders. When you go into the girls' room, you walk in and go right. There's a wall here. Turn right, and there used to be a door here that was on hinges. But we removed the door this summer while we were doing some work. So you walk through where the door used to be, and there are the sinks, and then there are the toilets up against the back wall there. Pretty straightforward.

 

Well, in November we finally put that door back up. Imagine women walking in, seeing the door, pausing for a second, opening the door, going in and going to the bathroom.

 

I'm standing out in the hall talking to someone one day when a kindergarten girl walks in. She goes in, then comes right out, looks up at the room again, looks at me, goes back in, and right away she comes out. She says, "Mr. Mike! Mr. Mike! Someone stole our bathroom."

 

And I said, "What?"

 

She says, "It's not there anymore. Come look."

 

So I went in, and of course, it's just the door. So I push the door. "How's this?"

 

She goes, "Oh," and she went in.

 

Now, this is the part of me that's a little demented, I'll warn you. I staged an experiment of asking kindergarten girls, "Could you get me a paper towel from the girls' room? There's none in the boys' room."

 

And almost every kindergarten girl would walk in and have the same experience. The bathroom was lost.

 

But then I did with it a first-grader, and about two-thirds of the first-graders got stuck, but then they pushed the door and went through. A third of them came back out and said the bathroom was lost.

 

So clearly it's a developmental period of kindergarteners. They don't have this object constancy, can't remember it's there. They're so literal. And kindergarten and lower-school teachers know this. People who are attracted to elementary school like the literalists, like the concreteness, are good at making use of this, having the kids get in a nice, straight line, being quiet, coming up with whatever signs they do, singing a song to get people organized. It works really well, because these kids are literal and concrete.

 

Then we move up to middle-school kids, and they're a whole other group. We know our kids are going through all sorts of cognitive changes in the way they approach the world, and we know that middle school, that world of sixth and seventh grade, is when kids begin to make the shift from that concrete, literal thinking to abstract thinking. The shift is not a shift that happens overnight, that they go from the world of concrete thoughts, what's in front of them, to the world of possibilities, of themes, of connections. Instead, they go back and forth through all of middle school, and actually part of ninth grade. They go back and forth, and you never know where they are.

 

And this is why some teachers who are drawn to middle school in some ways are drawn to the chaos of the middle-schooler, and they like the fact that the kids are a little all over the place because they themselves are a little all over the place, and they work with us really well and take flow and take it to the next step, whereas elementary school teachers who go to middle school pull their hair out after a month. "What am I doing here? It's too crazy," because the kids are making the jump: Abstract, concrete. And they make this jump like that.

 

So if I'm teaching the seventh grade English class and I have 20 students in my class, when I'm talking, I know that probably ten or eleven of them are thinking abstractly. The other eight or nine are thinking concretely. I turn around, write something on the board, turn back, and they have all switched. I don't know who's who anymore, because they switch that fast.

 

Have you ever been to the circus and seen the person spinning the plates on the poles? I always think of a great middle-school language arts teacher as someone who has plates for the concrete things and plates for the abstract things. So they start out spinning the plates for the concrete thinkers, and they do it by asking concrete questions. "When this happened in the story, what did the main character say? Where did she go? What did she do? What was she thinking?"

 

Then the big question: "What do you think she'll do next?"

 

And with the concrete thinkers, hands are up, this, this, they're in the book, they've got things, "Call on me." The abstract thinkers are over here going, "Boring. This is so lame. What are we doing?" They're looking out the window, talking to their friends, because their plates are wobbling like this, while the concrete plates are flying.

 

So the great teachers just seamlessly walk over and say, "So if this main character were a best friend of yours and you went out to lunch, what kind of music would she be listening to? What do you think she'd be into? What kind of person would she be?"

 

And the abstract thinker's hands are flying, plates are spinning. And the poor concrete thinkers are grabbing their books, saying, "That's not in here," because their plates aren't spinning. And the teacher just goes back and forth, back and forth, because this is the nature of middle schoolers. They're in that betwixt-and-between world.

 

Then we go to the world of the high-schooler, and they're really focusing on independence, on autonomy, on becoming the people they are. They're stretching out from the adults around them, but they don't want to be abandoned by the adults, so it takes a different kind of person in high school who knows more, is comfortable having this distance, of having influence, of understanding that these kids go through a cycle where they will become independent, independent, independent.

 

And then second semester, senior year, it will all fall apart, because they do just what all of us do. Stanford did a great research project on what happens when you give notice that you're leaving a job. Instantly, whether it's two-week notice or a year's notice, the focus goes from productivity to relationships. It happens across the board.

 

Think, when you gave notice as a teacher sometime in your life, after you gave notice, you probably found yourself spending more time in the faculty lounge, hanging out with some different people, perhaps going to a happy hour that you'd never gone to, maybe going to dinner with people. You're reconnecting with people before you leave.

 

For second-semester seniors and, to a degree, second-semester eighth-graders, the same phenomenon is happening. They find out where they're going college, because that's what they're aiming at. They get into college. Now it becomes the world of relationships. They revisit all the bad and the good that happened in school, as well as start new relationships. And they're shocked, they're just shocked, when the adults don't support them in this 100 percent and say, "Let's just cancel classes this week and let's just hang out and have fun with one another. We're so proud of you." They're really shocked when we say, "You still need to do your math homework, get that history paper in," because we're still focused on productivity, while they're focused on relationships.

 

A hint for faculty: When they're focused on relationships, if you focus too much on productivity, there's a complete disconnect. One of the simplest things a faculty member can do is reach out to your kids, show them how they have connected, how they have touched you.

 

So if Mary Lou were one of my students and she's a second-semester senior and I'm teaching her in math class, at some point she's focused on the relationships, and I might say, "You know, Mary Lou, I'm going to miss you next year. You ask the best questions, I just love your questions." And that's it.

 

What I'm showing her is how she's marked me, and how she's made a difference, and how I'm going to remember her. For most kids, that's enough to get them back into the world of productivity, that the relationship touches them.

 

So developmentally, there are all sorts of things happening with kids, and I'm just fascinated by how it plays out in all the relationships.

 

I was going to save this until the end, but I know some people are leaving to catch flights. Last night David was here, reading us. A lot of us here are parents, and a lot seem to be parents of kids going off to college and high school kids, former high school kids, so I thought I'd do this earlier rather than later.

 

To put the whole relationship into perspective, as Heads of school, principals, we need to understand, to communicate. Think of the different constituencies we have: The kids and the parents. One way to get instant credibility with parents is talk about their relationships with their kids, and to sketch out what's normal and what's abnormal. Because half the time, when parents come in to talk to us about some crisis, the underlying question is: Is my kid normal? Is this typical of what's going on, or is there something I really should be worried about?

 

So developmentally, you ask, what's the relationship parents have with their kids? What's the relationship parents have with their five-year-olds and picking out a school? The relationship is essentially that you're the manager. You organize their lives. Kids love it when their parents are managers, especially young kids. When you're looking for schools for your four-year old, I wouldn't sit down with Mary Lou and say, "Okay, we're looking at schools for you. You're four and a half, and as we pick out the school, it would help me to know, what kind of career do you see yourself in? Where do you see yourself going to college?"

 

She would look at me and go, "I don't know." And we wouldn't expect that. Instead, we visit a few schools and I say, "Which one did you like?"

 

She says, "Oh, I like that one."

 

"Why?"

 

"Because they had the best playground."

 

Now, I might say, "That was a good school, but actually I think we're going to go to this one because," and you come up with some reasons. And she might say, "Oh, I really like the playground."

 

"Well, I'll take you to the playground down the street." Or, "They're going to get a new slide. The Head of school told me that."

 

Whatever it is, it takes about ten minutes, and for the most part, they go along with the program. Parents eat this up. They love it when they're the manager of their kids' live. Their kids listen to them, take their advice. This is in your kindergarten and first grades. You see the kids, when their parents are getting ready to leave, "No, no, no. Come read me a story. Come read me a story," because you're a trophy when you walk into the classroom.

 

And you sit down and you start to read a story. Before long, four or five kids are on your lap, and you see your daughter or your son looking up at you like, "So great to have you here because I'm getting all the credit here with all the other kids." They love you in the classroom. This is when parents are hesitant to leave, because they're invited in all the time, they're invited on the field trips. Kids come home and say, "Dad, you haven't gone on a field trip in a long time. Come on. Jenny's dad has gone the last three times. You need to go with us."

 

They really want us involved. And for parents, it feels great. This is when you drive down the street with your daughter, she's eight years old. She sees her friend coming down the street, and what does she say to Dad or Mom who's driving the car? She'll say, "Beep the horn. Beep the horn." And you'll see her doing this extra-exuberant wave, like "Hi, hi, hi, hi, hi," and you realize it's not only they're excited to see a friend, but they're also proud to be with Mom or Dad. And this is the moment that really gets dads, because dads are driving. You know, ten o'clock, two o'clock, hands on the wheel. You realize what's going on. This is when dads get a little teary-eyed. "Smart kid. She's proud of me. This is great." You reach over and pat her on the back.

 

And there's a little part in every dad's brain that goes, "We'll just sail right through adolescence. We've got a great relationship. It will be great." It's wonderful. And this is when you hear the elementary school parents giving the middle school and high school parents advice on how to get closer to their kids, because it works for them so well, to sit home and ask Happy every day after school how her day was, and meet and have a snack. And parents of a 15-year-old are just going, "Never mind," because it's a different world.

 

Because somewhere along the way, eighth grade, ninth grade, tenth grade -- every parent knows the moment; it's etched in your brain -- you have been the manager. It's a role you have liked. You see the horizon of adolescence, of drugs, alcohol, mental health, of sex, sexuality, academics and pressure, peer pressure, all those things on the horizon. And most parents are saying, "It's a good thing I'm the manager because I have really got some good things to say. I'm really going to help my daughter get through this. And that's the role that we're ready to play."

 

So we're not quite ready when, driving down that same street with your 13-year-old daughter, you see the same friend, and you say, "Hey, honey, isn't that" -- and you expect to see her waving. And instead of the big exuberant wave, you see her crouch down in the seat going like this, "Shhh. Don't beep, Dad. Don't beep the horn."

 

What she's done in that moment, very unceremoniously and not very kindly, either, is she's fired you as the manager of her life. And that's what kids are going to do if they're healthy. They're going to fire Mom and Dad as the managers of their life.

 

This is going to lead to a conundrum for parents. Some of your parents are going to say, "No. Can't fire me. Absolutely not." And they're essentially going to litigate for the next three to five years about wrongful termination. "Can't let me go. I'm Dad. I'm Mom. I'm going to be here." And they'll micromanage and run the details of their kids' lives. And they will then justify this by saying, "Maybe she hates me now. Maybe she doesn't want to talk to me. Maybe she rolls her eyes every time she walks in the room. But at least when she's 20, 22, she'll be alive, she'll be healthy, then she can go to therapy, we'll take care of it, we'll it out. But right now I'm running the show." And these kids act out all over the place.

 

Then on the other side, there's a group of parents that go, "This adolescence thing ended earlier than I thought. Fired as the manager. This is great. There's an evening class I want to take." And they'll go up to their daughters and say, "So you fired me as the manager. Okay. That's great. Last one in at night, lock up. First one up in the morning, let the dog out. Let me know if you need anything."

 

And they have essentially abandoned their kids, and their kids don't want this. These kids act out all over the place because the moms and dads aren't part of their life.

 

So there's a big developmental switch, and it's one I talk about all the time with elementary-school parents, to get them ready for this, and I talk about it a lot with the middle-school parents it's happened to already. Because the big developmental switch that happens is, as they fire us, we can either fight with them or we can abandon them, but there's a third alternative, which is: When you get fired, accept it. There's nothing you can do about it. Grieve. It's very, very sad. At the same time, be appreciative. She's doing what she's supposed to be doing.

 

Now you have a different job. Your job is to get rehired as the consultant to their life, because that's what they want. They don't want the old paradigm of top-down management. They want much more of a side-by-side -- actually, they would prefer you about two steps back. They always want you in their peripheral vision. They want to be able to see that you're there. I'll talk a little bit later about why that's so, because it's very important that you're there.

 

It doesn't mean laissez faire parenting. It doesn't mean you let what happens happen. It means it's a different role, that you're listening more than you're talking. The reality is, most of us, whether we're talking to faculty, spouses, to our students, don't listen as much as we wait for our turn to talk. With our kids, it's really important to learn just to listen, to take in the information.

 

Every kid will put a teacher, an administrator, their parents through a test. And the test will go something like this. I'll be telling Happy and Peter, my parents, everything that's going on in my life. They're listening. And for a 15-year-old, it's a strange experience. Mom and Dad are listening. You know, they're not giving me all the advice. That seems good. They handle everything I say.

 

Then I'll amp it up and say something that's going to make them a little anxious, like, this girl I have got a crush on, or the party I went to where someone was drunk, and I wasn't even supposed to be at the party. And it's the test to see how they're going to respond. Because most of us, when that happens, stop listening. We click into lecture mode because we feel like we're supposed to say something, to make something different, when, in fact, if we really listen to them, what most kids do is, they raise our anxiety. If we can get through it, hold onto the bottom of our chairs, hang in there a little while longer, they'll come around and begin to show their responsibility. But they first need to test that we're going to continue in that listening mode.

 

This is the beauty of high-school teachers, because they're not in charge of the kids. They're not the moms and dads. It allows them to listen in a different way. So it's very important to encourage your teachers to really listen to the kids, because it may be a place where they get to talk in a way they can't talk at home.

 

And kids use teachers in all sorts of interesting ways. I remember, in a middle school, a teacher told me a story. This is why in every school we have to have a diversity in our teachers. And it's not only a diversity of gender, of age, of ethnicity. It's a diversity of learning styles and a diversity of quirkiness that people have. It's a diversity of emotional availability that people have. We all need to have an emotional availability department, some teachers who are right there, so that when Mary says something, I say, "Yeah, but what do you really feel, Mary? What's really going on with you?"

 

And we need those teachers. We need those teachers who love the juice of emotions to get in there. We also need the teachers who don't want to go near an emotion, and when it starts to get touchy-feely, they get nervous and they walk away from it. And we all have those teachers, because kids use them at different times.

 

A middle-school teacher told me a story where, in the middle of the year, an eighth-grader he had had the year before showed up in his classroom at 7:30 in the morning. School began at 8:00. She would show up every morning at 7:30. The teacher would be reading the newspaper, eating a muffin, having an orange juice. This was his routine. Everyone knew it. He got there at 7:30, had his orange juice, coffee, and a muffin, and read the newspaper. The kids would open the door at 8:00 and come in.

 

She knocked on the door at 7:30 and she said, "Can I come in?" And he said, "Okay," hoping that she's not going to talk to him about something, hope there's not a problem she wants to talk about.

 

She came in and just sort of sat there. He said, "You want to read part of the paper?"

 

She said, "Sure." She took part of the paper.

 

And from then on, for the next two or three months, she showed up every morning. 7:30 she'd knock on the door, come in. After a while, he started to bring an extra muffin, an extra orange juice. She'd come in, they'd read the paper. They'd never talk. They would never talk about anyone. Every once in a while, they'd touch on something in the headlines or, "Read this article. This is a good one." And that was it. She would leave. And this went on for two and a half months.

 

Then she graduated. He didn't know what to make of it. He had no idea. What was she doing? They barely talked to each other during the school day.

 

A year later she was visiting campus, a ninth-grader, coming back to see her favorite teachers. For him it was a little sad because he wasn't one of her favorite teachers, didn't show up in his class. But she was walking around, big smile on her face after visiting. She sees him and she goes up and says, "Oh, hi." She pauses, that awkward pause. Then she says, "I never really thanked you. I really want to thank you so much for helping me through my parents' divorce."

 

And he said, "What?"

 

And she said, "Well, that second semester when my parents were going through that ugly divorce, it was just great to come hang out with you in the morning. Thanks a lot."

 

And she gave him a big hug, which made him feel even more awkward, and then she went away. And he found out that, lo and behold, her parents had been going through a really nasty divorce.

 

When you go through a divorce, some of the most difficult times are in the morning. That's when a lot of fights happen, and home was not a safe place for her. But she was also in a place where she didn't want to talk about it. It was too early. And we know this with kids. They operate on their own time frame. Sometimes they're ready to talk about it, sometimes they're not. She needed a safe place to go where she knew this person would not ask any emotional questions that would get into it, and that's why she chose him. Later, she went to high school, got on her feet, a little more stable, she was ready to talk about it. She went to a counselor and had those conversations. But it all came out of the relationship.

 

A lot of what we think about kids developmentally is how to have the appropriate relationships with them, how to connect with them. So when I look at kids developmentally -- and I try get our faculty to do this -- I look at five different areas. Look at what's going on physically with their bodies, how their thinking is changing. How they are social, where they are socially and emotionally. Where they are in terms of integrity and independence, and where they are with their family.

 

For the most part, when you know this about kids, when you just play with this, I would have our advisees take each student and think about them in these five terms. What's going on with them physically, thinking, social, emotional, integrity, independence, and family? You start to get a different snapshot, because kids reveal certain parts of themselves in school, and what we want to get really good at is being curious about the parts we aren't seeing, because often there are little gems hidden there.

 

So we talk a little bit about thinking. Physically what's going on with kids, all kids, elementary through high school? What's going on with their bodies? They're growing. They're going through these growth spurts, changing in radical ways.

 

Every parent remembers what it's like when you realize that your two-year old's crankiness had nothing to do with you, but it was all about growth. They were going through a growth spurt. She gets clumsy. She knocks things down. She's angry. She's moody. She eats a lot, then she doesn't eat anything. She can't sleep at night. When you realize it's a growth spurt, as the managerial parent it's really powerful, because you realize, if I rub her legs, if I rub her spine a little bit, she goes to sleep. If I put a little Tylenol in her juice, she drinks it, she's fine, she goes to sleep. You know what to do. You know how to handle it.

 

We see it at school all the time with elementary school kids. They're coming into their bodies and sometimes they're fluid; a week later they're not fluid. We know from the research that growth spurts are particularly tricky thing. We don't remember growth spurts, you know, we're far removed from growth spurts, where their bodies implode. For three or four days, they just implode, and then in a growth spurt, they can grow an eighth of an inch in one night. Boom. They grow. And they grow during their sleep. That's when the growth hormone is secreted.

 

So this is why sometimes you walk in and you see a kindergartener or a third-grader and you just think, Wow. You really grew, didn't you? You're different. Because their face changes, they get longer, they stretch out. This is part of the deal.

 

We recognize it in elementary school kids so easily. We see it all the time. We recognize that sometimes the first-grader will be sitting in her chair, just sitting there -- and this is a common phenomenon in first grade. The kid is sitting in the chair, then all of a sudden, boom, she's on the floor, and she has no idea how she got there. And everyone sort of looks at her, "Oh, get up." And they don't laugh at one another because they know their bodies are out of control.

 

This is when you see them running in the playground and realize, Oh, my goodness, if I don't get there to catch them, they're not going to stop before they get to the wall. And you reach out and catch them just before they get to the wall because they don't realize how fast they're doing. They're clumsy, sometimes they're graceful, but they're going back and forth all the time. And we recognize this.

 

The beauty of elementary school kids is, they're not really self-conscious. So they fall, they just get up and go about their business. In middle school, as they're making the shift to abstract thinking, one of the things that comes from abstract thinking is full-blown self-consciousness. So now they become aware of themselves and they become aware of how they think other people are watching them. This is why when they bring a friend to middle school or high school, and they will feel the self-consciousness in the air as they walk.

 

I'm looking at Peter and Happy. We used to work together at University High School, and we had this beautiful courtyard. I remember a friend coming across the courtyard during lunch one day. Everyone's out there, lying around, all the teenagers are lying around. My friend came across the courtyard. I watched her come through the courtyard, and her body starts to get a little tight. She got to my office and she said, "Oh, my goodness, was that awful."

 

And I said, "Why?"

 

And she said, "I just began to feel like a teenager again. Self-conscious. I thought my zipper was undone. I thought I had the wrong shoes on. That's exhausting."

 

That's where our kids live all the time in this world of self-consciousness. As a smart administrator, a smart teacher, we think about how this affects kids. I remember being at a middle school dance. It was a girls' school and they had three other schools with them. Kids are dancing, doing their thing, doing their natural dancing thing. You could see one girl starting to move, trying to get up in the social group. It's a seventh-grade phenomenon. Which group is she in? Wanting to move up, but not wanting to abandon her other friends. But she's moved into the cool group she wants to get in, and they've created a space for her. She's dancing and really excited, but she's a little too exuberant, going up and down like this. And I don't quite hear the beat that she's dancing to, but she's really going on. I'm standing there with the Head. And she goes up, comes down, and her cuff gets underneath her foot. They're all dancing in their socks on the gym floor. She hits it and she goes, boom, down right on her back. Slam. And the music is still pumping, but you know that feeling when it's really loud, but you can hear a pin drop, because there's a vulnerable moment? And what's going to happen now? Are the kids going to turn and laugh and make fun?

 

This Head didn't miss a beat. She handed me her juice, sprinted across, and went, "Safe!" like that, at which point everyone started laughing. The girl got up and continued dancing. She rescued her in that moment of vulnerability.

 

She came back to me, I handed her the juice and I said, "Do you realize you just saved that girl two, three years of therapy?"

 

And she said, "Yeah. Do you think I can charge the family for it?"

 

I said, "I don't think so, but I'd go for a big capital campaign gift."

 

So their thinking is changing and showing up in different ways. Let me come back to the body for a second. Their bodies cause them to do this. When they get into high school, their bodies are still changing. And sometimes their moods are affected only by their bodies.

 

Can you imagine a math teacher having a conversation with a student, and she has some tough news to give her. All of a sudden, the girl loses it, upset, screams at her, and walks away. The math teacher is going to be really upset. Why is she treating me this way? What's this all about? And we begin to think about the worst possibility. That's what we do. We go to the worst-case scenario. Is she on drugs? Is there an awful crisis in the family? Is she challenging me for authority? Is she depressed? All these things go through our minds. And it's worth it, going through that exercise.

 

But imagine -- and this is the case sometimes -- that ten minutes later she came back to the math teacher and said, "You know, Ms. Carmichael, I'm really sorry. I lost it. I'm just in the middle of a growth spurt. I'm really moody. I can't help it."

 

What would the teacher say? "I can understand. I understand. I remember what that's like."

 

And that's part of what we can do with kids. Normalize what feels to them as abnormal behavior. This stems from their bodies. When they're getting used to their bodies, when they're tripping into things, when you walk by that eleventh-grader and she closes her locker too hard and the books fall down, and you realize her body is out of her awareness. You just say, "Oh, don't worry. You'll get used to your body. You'll grow into it."

 

Because when they go through the growth spurts, the two places most outside of their awareness are their feet and their hands. This is when they start knocking things down. The more we can normalize it, the better off they're going to be. If we can't normalize it, then they feel like something is wrong with them. So we want to give them that chance.

 

The other piece that throws everyone is their sleep patterns. We've got it all wrong with middle school kids and high school kids. Their sleep patterns are very different than ours. With us, 7:00 at night, melatonin is released in the brain, it makes us tired. This is why at 8:00 many of us fall asleep under the newspaper on the sofa. The guys are getting caught up in the news. Then we do a few things, go off to bed.

 

With teenagers, at 7:00, it's not melatonin. It's a different chemical. It amps them up, gives them lots of energy, so they're wired. Their melatonin doesn't kick in until about 10:30 at night. That's when they start to get tired.

 

When do we start high schools? What time? 8:00 in the morning. This is the worst time for kids. They're not awake. You have been in the classes. They wake up about 8:45.

 

I remember doing a talk at the American School in London. I did this talk with the faculty, and then the parents, and I was going to do some work with the kids the next day. A psychology teacher came up to me -- she had that funny smile on her face -- and she said, "Would you come and talk to my psychology students? They'd love to hear what you're doing."

 

I felt like it was a set-up, but I didn't know what the set-up was. I said, "Sounds great. I'm happy to do it. I'm happy to come in and do it."

 

And she said, "Just come on by the class. The kids will love it."

 

Okay. Why not? Flattery gets people a long way. I said, "What time is the class?"

 

She said, "7:45."

 

I thought, Oh, no. So I walked in. It's an-hour-and-15-minute class. At 7:45 I start. The kids are there, they've got the hoods over their heads like this. They're slumped over. I'm working my tail off. We've all been there. You're working, you're the guest speaker, you're trying to make something happen. Nothing is happening.

 

At 8:45, it was like this collective yawn rippled through the whole class and the kids went, "Hey, who's this guy? Where did he come from?" Because that's when they're ready to learn. But we set it up in the opposite way.

 

What we also miss is that for every hour of sleep debt that kids carry, they lose roughly one point off their functional IQ. One point. And when kids sleep all day Saturday and Sunday, they wipe out the sleep debt, but then they begin accruing it, at about three hours a night, Monday through Thursday. The average teenager needs 9.1 hours of sleep a night. The average teenager gets 6.3 hours of sleep a night. So it's about a three-hour sleep debt accruing every night. This means by Friday, most teenagers are down anywhere from 12 to 15 points in their functional IQ.

 

What do we do in schools on Fridays? We give kids tests. It's the worst day of the week to give kids tests. When I talk to faculty, I'm always saying, "Let's try to schedule more tests for Tuesday and Wednesday."

 

That puts us in the unenviable position of being poor role models. If I give a test on Tuesday, I'm probably not getting it back to the kids until Monday, because I have got lesson plans and coaching. Ideally, I give it on Friday, I can correct it over the weekend, and the next class period I can give it back to them.

 

But I also find that when you tell kids why you're doing this, they're more than happy to give you those three or four days. It's actually taking into consideration what's going on with their bodies.

 

I was on a local radio show in San Francisco called "The Ron Owens Show," talking about this. And talk about getting set up. I do this show every three or four months. I look in the control room, and all of a sudden I see the president of the company, the general manager, all the engineers, with noses pressed against the glass. What's going on with this?

 

I pick up the phone, and it's a teenager. Sometimes kids call the show. And we're talking, and she says, "So, Mr. Riera, you know, I go to your school, and I'm in eighth grade, and how come we start at 8:00 in the morning?"

 

She had me busted completely, because she's right. We need to really look at that. And of course, you know, I give her the fast answer about sports and things like this. But the bottom line is, it really affects kids. In Medina, Minnesota, the public schools took this on in earnest, and they moved the start time of school. At the end of three years the research shows two things that were very powerful. One, in three years they had 50 percent fewer incidents reported to the vice principal in terms of behavior, in terms of acting out. which says very clearly -- we know this -- when we're tired, our tempers snap more quickly, we lose it more quickly, don't have the patience to absorb things. Fifty percent fewer incidents to the vice principal.

 

The second piece is even more shocking. The average SAT score went up 100 points. Wouldn't it be great to be able to go back to your parents and say, "Skip all the SAT prep courses. Give your kids an extra hour of sleep every day. Let them have that nap. That's probably going to make a bigger difference than taking all these courses."

 

Our kids are tired. They're exhausted. You know what it's like. If you read a chapter when you're tired, you read it six, seven times, you don't absorb it. Then when you get a good night's rest, you read the chapter once and you get it.

 

I'm always teaching kids the acronym, HALT. They love this. And I teach it especially to lower-school kids and up. This comes from all the 12 step groups. If you are fighting with an addiction, this becomes a mantra for you. And it simply means you never let yourself get too hungry, too angry, too lonely, or too tired. Because if you're fighting an addiction, if you get too hungry, angry, lonely, or tired you're much more susceptible to a relapse, much more inclined to reach for the bottle, to call your bookie, or whatever it is that you're fighting.

 

With adults, it's kind of interesting, because we get stuck the most in anger and loneliness. But think about kids. They're in a school of community. They have a lot of friends around. They're usually not lonely. And if they're angry, it's usually a burst on the playground, and then it's gone and it's okay. With them mostly it's the hunger and the fatigue.

 

I give to kids what I call a stress-buster. When you're stressed out, just run through this: Hungry, angry, lonely, tired. And usually if they're out of balance with one of them and if they attend to it, then much of their stress goes away. They have something to eat. They catch a nap. They call up a friend. They take a break from studying. It gives them a balance. Most of all, it makes them the masters of themselves. That's what kids are really looking for all along, is how to be the master of their own world, master of themselves.

 

We also have relationships of teachers with kids. I talked a little bit about the shift we make in concrete to abstract thinking. That was Piaget. He came up with all this, how people individually learn and grow, the steps. He had a contemporary in the Soviet Union named Vygotsky, who never got the same amount of credit, partly because his writing is incredibly complicated, as is Piaget's, but his was unknown for a long time and translated so many times that it changed along the way.

 

Vygotsky looked at learning in the social context. This is the real juice of teachers. He came up with some remarkable things. One that I want to share with you is how, when kids learn, the relationship with a teacher affects learning. Let's say this is units of knowledge, if there were such a thing. Let's say it's in math. These are discrete units of knowledge. Time is on this axis. Maybe the teacher has 10,000 units of math knowledge. That's why she's teaching it. This is an introduction to prealgebra class in sixth or seventh grade.

 

When the kids come in, they have only 1,000 units of math. The teacher has 10,000. The goal, of course, is that by the end of the course, maybe the students will have 2,000 to 2,500 units of knowledge, if you can measure these discrete units. So the teacher walks in with this amount of information, and they have their first class. If the class goes well, if the students are engaged -- and some students are engaged by raising their hands, some are engaged by just sitting quietly, some are a little fidgety. Every student looks a little different, but they're engaged. And it's important that all faculty know what each student looks like when engaged, because it's a little different.

 

If the students are engaged, they learn. And let's say they learn 20 units of math. It's a really good day. They have learned 20 units of math. Class ends. As soon as they walk out of the classroom, as soon as the teacher leaves, the number of units they learned in that class that day drops. It drops to probably 16 units, and that's where it stays. They really only learned 16 units.

 

But here's the part that's amazing. The next day, when class starts again and they're here at 16, within the first four minutes of class, they get back all four units that they lost, and then they continue to grow. So maybe they go to 30 units by the end of the class.

 

So learning is not a nice curve like this. It's up a little, drop, up a little more, drop. So it's ten steps forward, three steps backward, ten steps forward, three steps backward.

 

Where it really plays out is with new teachers, teachers in their first couple of years. How many of you have heard or experienced the frustration of ending at a certain place in class, where the kids were getting it, giving the homework from there, the. Kids go home, they come back in, and a fair number of them say, "I tried but I couldn't do the homework." And first-year teachers want to be accommodating and say, "Really? You were doing so well yesterday in class."

 

"Yeah, I really tried. I tried for about 20 minutes, but I couldn't figure it out. I really tried." Then what teachers do -- because we're all kind -- we reach out to the kids, we say, "Here. Pull your book out. Take a look. Try now."

 

The student tries, and here's the thing, that shocking moment. All of a sudden, the student can do the problem. And the teacher looks at him and says, "What do you mean? You said you couldn't do the problem."

 

And the student says, "Honestly. Last night I couldn't do it. I really tried."

 

And now you're beginning to wonder, is the student been honest? Did they really work hard? Here's what happened. And it's simple. You're next to them. When the teacher is there, they know more. It's really that simple. This is why pragmatically, when a teacher is going to be gone, what do they have a substitute teacher do? Give them a test. Don't cover new material. Just give them a test. That way, we're not losing a teaching day.

 

The next time one of your teachers gives a test, go in and watch. Here's what you'll see. It's a short-answer test. Say they're sixth-graders writing their answers down. A girl comes to a question where she's stuck. She's not sure where to go. This is what she'll do. She'll look up, frown, look back at it, look up. She'll look right at her teacher, look away for a second, pick up her pencil and starting writing and have the answer.

 

If you have been that teacher, you know what it's like when they look at you, because it's as if -- I can say this in California -- they're taking in your aura in some way. And if you respond to that, if you say, "What?" they'll look at you like -- they weren't really looking at you. They just needed to take something in, and they get the answer.

 

This is why coaches and drama teachers are masters at this. Before that child goes to the foul line to take the big foul shot to win the game or lose the game, every coach puts herself in visual contact with the player, to make sure, Okay, you can do it now, you can do it, and makes that contact.

 

Parents, if you're in the audience when your kid goes up for one of those shots or gets ready to go up for the big solo, kids will make quick eye contact with you and they'll make quick eye contact with the director of the play. Then they'll do their solo. It's their way of gathering themselves, not only from the people that support them, but the people they learn these skills from and that gives them the best chance to do their best.

 

SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR: How does that all play out with the concept of distance learning?

 

MR. RIERA: Ah. Interesting question. Distance learning. I hope no one here is in a distance-learning school, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that's one of the primary problems. There's no relationship. And as a result, much of the information is much more abstract. That's why, if you're doing distance learning, I think it's important you have a group of other people you're getting together with and talking about the concepts. Otherwise, it doesn't go in the same way.

 

You do this all the time. You all have had mentors in your life. If you are back at your school and you have a really difficult decision to make, how many of you, in your own heads, start consulting your mentor? Whether he or she is there or not doesn't matter. Whether he or she is alive or not doesn't even matter. You consult that person. What would she say about this? And very often, that's enough.

 

This happened more often than once. But the first time it happened, I was the counselor at a school. Kids were graduating. They were all leaving. And at this school, the kids came through a line of all the faculty and hugged the faculty as they left, and we gave them off to their families. A beautiful tradition. I had worked with the kids as the counselor, but I also did retreats for the kids, and activities like this.

 

As one girl came through, she threw her arms around me. She said, "Thanks so much. You really helped me through high school. You're really great."

 

And I said, "You're welcome," et cetera.

 

There's an awkward pause. And she said, "I know, I know, I never came and talked to you, but I almost did four or five times, and each time I would start to go, and I would think, 'What's Mike going to say?' And I usually could figure it out on my own, what you were going to say, so I didn't need to talk to you. But you really helped me, because I knew you and knew what you would say to me."

 

Kids are doing this all the time. This is where Vygotsky is really important, that our presence matters to our kids. So one of the things to remind your high school parents who have been fired as manager is that maybe your kids aren't talking to you so much, but your presence matters every bit as much. It's very important. They will solve problems they can't solve on their own, as long as you're in the house, as long as you're around them.

 

I think moms have this experience more often than dads. They'll be doing some work, and their daughter will come home really confused and upset, but doesn't want to talk about it. She goes to her room. At some point you're doing your checkbook, you're vacuuming, you're cooking, doing something, and you feel, like only a parent can feel, your daughter is staring at the back of your head. You look up and you say, "What, honey? Can I help you?"

 

And it's like breaking out of a reverie. "Oh, what time is dinner?"

 

And you'll say, "6:30." And under your breath, "Like it's been for the last 17 years."

 

"Oh, okay." And she walks up to her room.

 

I'll guarantee you, from the time she turns around until the time she gets to her room, she makes some significant strides in solving that problem she's having, because she just needs to put herself in your presence, to be around you in some way.

 

Integrity. This topic goes to development, and is the one topic that cuts across the board, and it's one of the richest topics we can bring to schools. My definition of integrity is a little different than most, because if I were to look at values and things like this, there's a continuum. On one end of the continuum are values, principles, character, all things that we teach kids abstractly, we teach them through experiments, through our advising groups. You know, if you're in a rowboat and only seven people are there, who are you going to get rid of one at a time? Interesting conversation that forces kids to make decisions. It's very important. I don't want to minimize this.

 

But way on the other end of the continuum is integrity. Integrity is what you do moment to moment. It's really personal. Some social psychologists did this experiment. I don't have it quite right, but I have got the gist of it. They said to a group of people, "Here's the scenario. What would you do?" I'm sure you have heard this. A train is coming down the tracks. There are five people on the tracks. There's a big lever in front of you. If you don't pull this lever, the train is going to kill all five people. You can't shout. You can't scream. There's nothing you can do. Your choice is to pull the lever or not pull the lever. If you pull the lever, the train will divert and go down this track and there are two people on the tracks, and it will kill those two people. So what are you going to do? Are you going to pull the lever and save a net savings of three lives, or let the train go and hit the five people? Are you part of fate? Should you be there? Should you act?

 

It gets into very interesting conversations. Who am I to judge the value of one life over another? Really interesting. But social psychologists are cruel, in a sense. They make you make a decision. Yes, you're going to pull it. No, you're not. In this experiment, a fair number of people will actually pull it.

 

Then they change the experiment. Very subtly. Not so subtly, actually. They say that now the train is coming down the tracks. It's not a lever, but these two people are right in front of you, and five people are further down on the tracks. If you push these two people, one at a time, in front of the train, they'll die, but it will save these five people. It's not a different question, essentially. It's whether you're going to intervene. The difference is, you're going to intervene much more personally.

 

That's the world of integrity. That's where we roll our shirtsleeves up and it gets messy. The other part about integrity -- and this one is frustrating for teachers, administrators, and especially parents to hear -- the only way kids learn to value integrity is by being out of it. There's no shortcut. You have to be out of it. It's the only way you can value it.

 

It's just like your health. When you have your health, you take it for granted. When you're ill, think of all the things you say. "I'll sleep better from now on. I'll eat better. I'll get more exercise. I'll take care of myself. Nothing is more important than my health." And it is the most important thing, after you're healthy, for the next two days, and then you begin to take it for granted again.

 

It's the same with integrity. Think of the number of phone messages or e-mails you left between 1:00 and 4:00 in the morning because your integrity was keeping you awake, wouldn't let you sleep until you sent that e-mail to set up the meeting for tomorrow, or to apologize, or to try to clean something up, or wrote it out on a note so the first thing you did in the morning when you go to the office is clean it up. Once you take care of that integrity, then you can go back to sleep.

 

And integrity happens so fast and in the moment, you don't get to think it through a lot. So imagine in the morning you go to your local cafe and you order a latte. The latte costs $3.25. Instead of the $1.75 change, the person gives you back $16.75. They made a mistake. They thought you gave them a 20 instead of a five-dollar bill. And as you're walking out the door, you notice the mistake.

 

Now, here's the big moment for you. There's a part of you that thinks, Cool. I get the latte and $16. What a great day.

 

But you take another step, and now it's not a thought process. It's a gut process that goes, Uh. Uh. I can't do this.

 

Then we do this very interesting thing. Our integrity is saying, "Huh-uh," and now we rationalize. We think, Well, it was her mistake. It's no big deal. This is a big company. They make a lot of money. $16 isn't going to affect them. You take another step towards the door and your integrity twitches a little bit more, makes it more uncomfortable.

 

Then you think, Well, maybe it will have to come out of her salary, but she'll learn not to do it again. We all have to learn from our failures.

 

You take another step towards the door, and integrity ramps it up a little bit more and it gets uncomfortable. Finally you think, What's the rest of my day going to be like? And you think, I'm not going to be able to forget this moment. I'm not going to be able to walk into this cafe again and get another latte without feeling bad about myself.

 

So you begrudgingly go back to the clerk and say, "Here. You gave me too much money."

 

And two things happen. Instantly, her face lights up, and she goes, "Oh, thank you. That would have come out of the tip jar. We all share the tips, and I would have been in a bad way with all my colleagues."

 

But the most important thing that happens is that the tension that was building in your integrity, in your gut, releases itself. And it's like this energy goes right through your whole body and you say, "Ah," and you walk out and you think, it's a great day. It's going to be a great day, no matter what happens, because your integrity was tested and you withstood it. You passed it.

 

Now, our jobs are to help our kids learn to value that integrity, to value that part of them that says, "Huh-uh, bad thing to do."

 

In order to get there, I'm going to cover a couple of different things here. I want to compare integrity to a concept that might surprise you: Self-esteem and integrity. They're not the same thing. You know, we have grown up in this age of self-esteem. Many teachers are trying to support the self-esteem of their students. Many parents are trying to make sure their kids have high self-esteem, because we're not quite sure how to get to integrity, and we think if they have high self-esteem, they'll have integrity.

 

It's not really true. One of the groups of teenagers that has the highest self-esteem is kids in gangs. They feel really good about themselves. I don't know that they have a lot of integrity, but they have got high self-esteem, in part because if the world gets vague, it's really clear in a gang. The hierarchy is really clear in what you need to do to grow up and be successful in that gang.

 

You're a parent, or many of you have parents in your student body, who want to support the self-esteem in their kids. What do they do to support the self-esteem in their kids? What behavior does it elicit in them? Constant praise. And they only praise for things that are completely praiseworthy; right?

 

We find parents who are praise junkies. They praise left and right. I praise Happy because she did something halfway, but I feel like if I praise her, it will motivate her to do it better the next time.

 

I praise Peter. He's a 14-year-old. He's not looking at me, but if I say something to him, at least he'll look at me before he rolls his eyes. I can have a connection.

 

Sometimes I praise kids because, as a parent, I feel guilty. I'm working too much. I'm not there enough, so I want to make the moment as rich as possible. So I say things that are out of proportion. You know, "Great job today. That was terrific." And we feel as if we're doing no harm. No big deal. If we praise them, they'll feel good about themselves, take more risks. They'll be more resilient, et cetera.

 

Completely wrong. Completely wrong. In our faculty meeting the other day we had a discussion about praise. That may be the most interesting faculty meeting I have ever been a part of. A couple of people had gone to hear Alfie Kohn do a talk, and he talked about praise and the problems with it. And we as a faculty began to talk about not theoretically how should we, but how do we actually use praise in the classroom?

 

It was difficult, because a lot of us realized we use it in the wrong way. We use it to motivate. We use it to change behavior. But it's not an authentic way. And I want to be real clear. The authentic, genuine praise that comes out of you is terrific. I would never want to take that away.

 

SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR: The same thing is true of those random multiple, "I love you. Love you, sweetie. Love you." And I was thinking about my own childhood, and realizing, I don't think I ever was told by either of my parents, "I love you," but it was the abundantly clear to me. And I think that's true of praise as well.

 

MR. RIERA: "I love you" is an interesting one. I think it's great, and I love the parents to tell their kids that they love them. But make sure it matches with the behavior. We have a lot of parents who say, "Love you, honey, love you," because they're not there. They're not there enough, and they're just saying, "I love you," to sort of fill the space.

 

But here's where praises leads to. This is a word that's going to make most people in here cringe, but you know it, you recognize it in your students. It leads to a sense of entitlement. That's what happens with praise junkies. They think the world will take care of them as soon as they're ready, know what they want to do.

 

Time Magazine had an article three or four weeks ago talking about what's happening with the 18-to-twixters. They come up with these crazy names. 18-to-28-year-olds who try something for six months, then go try something else, move to another city, move to a different relationship. It's a quiet sense of entitlement, that the world will take care of them.

 

This is really frustrating to work with, but it's even more damaging than that. I used to have a radio show, and I had T. Berry Brazelton, the great pediatrician, on it a couple of times. We talked about this. He pointed out one thing that really cuts at integrity. He said it's a number one problem in his office: Parents over-praising their kids, from two years old on.

 

He says that if somebody praises me for doing something and I know I did a good job, it's great for her to praise me. It just supports what I know already. Now imagine she praises me and I know I didn't do a good job. And every kid knows. They know when they have done something well or when they haven't. And if she's my mom and she constantly praises me, here's what happens. Either I turn off that voice inside me that's saying, "Good job, bad job, such-and-such could have done better," and I turn that off and listen to her, and go along with her all the time, in which case I'm losing my own moral compass, so to speak, and I'm counting on the praise of other people.

 

I can do that. There's a huge cost. I'm not going to have any integrity. And I tell this to parents and that will get their attention. When they overpraise when kids are younger, when they get to middle school and high school, it makes them much more susceptible to peer pressure. Because if I'm not used to listening to my own voice, I'm used to listening to praise, the kid who says, "Oh, that's great, you're a blast, a great friend, let's go drive this car and see how fast we can get it going," your behavior goes to where the praise is, and you don't ever have a sense of self.

 

The other option is maybe worse. When a parent or a teacher is constantly praising you, the kid knows they really don't deserve this praise, they shut that person off. They shut their parent off. They shut the teacher off. Essentially, they remove themselves from a person who really loves and cares for them. So there are significant costs here.

 

One other thing about entitlement. It's something to think about in your schools. Our generation is different because of communication. Anytime something awful happens to kids, you see it over and over and over again, to the point that many of our parents, most of our parents, are very fearful about their kids' safety.

 

As a result, we don't let our kids go to the playground just to hang out and play. Instead, we take them to soccer practice, we take them to violin practice, take them to chorus practice, to community service project. It's not bad, to do this enrichment, but what we're doing with our kids is taking them to activities that are ready-made. You know, get your soccer uniform and go play soccer. Get your violin and go to violin lessons. So they start in the middle of the activity and go to the end of the activity.

 

What do they miss? Think about when you grew up, on the playground, having to negotiate with your two girlfriends, trying to figure out what to do today. Play catch? Play dolls? Read a story? Negotiating that. Learning how to read the subtle signs. "She doesn't want to do this today, but I really want to be with her, so I'll compromise, do what she wants. But maybe tomorrow I'll do what I want to do. I really want to do this and my three best friends don't. These do, so I'll play with them."

 

Kids aren't doing all those negotiations as much anymore. We have a really robust after-school program. We worked hard to make sure there aren't too many structured activities. We have a great playground. The kids go out and play. They just play. What do they do? We have nice slides and nice swings and everything. Their favorite thing to do, when it rains -- we've got a lot of sand -- is to dig holes it in and make dams and get down on the ground and get dirty.

 

We have these old truck tires. That's the favorite thing for the kids to play with. They jump in and out. We have this tree. They stack tires up against the tree. They create little houses, little communities. They knock it down every recess and come back and rebuild it. It's different kids all the time. I just watch how they negotiate what they're going to do. It's not planned, structured activity.

 

It starts with your parents and their play dates. Take a poll in your community. How many parents feel like they have to do something special on the play date, so it's really a wonderful time to come to our house? The most special thing you can do on a play date is get the kids together and then get the heck out of there, and deal with the phenomenon that happens between ten and twenty minutes of the play date, which is when the kids come to you and say -- what do they say? "We're bored. Can we watch a movie?"

 

And many parents say, "No, but let me help you. I have this great activity we can do together," and you come again right into the middle.

 

Instead -- and this is where our parents were infinitely wise -- "Well, figure out something to do. You have a lot of stuff there."

 

"Well, no. Can we watch TV?"

 

"No, you can't watch TV, but figure out something to do."

 

"Well, we can't."

 

Then the one we all wait for. "Oh, if you can't figure out something to do, I can find something for you to do. The floors need to be waxed. The car needs to be washed."

 

Zoom. They'll be off. And once they get through this period, they'll usually find something to do. You would never predict what they're going to do. This helps them get through this sense of entitlement.

 

Coming back to integrity, the way we get there is through questions. I call them the questions that linger. This is the ones the kids can't quite answer in a moment, and these lead to a sense of responsibility.

 

Let me give you an example of two areas where this shows up. I think they're very important areas. One is discipline, and the other is academics.

 

Imagine you're doing a talk at your school and you put a note out that says, "All parents will have an evening meeting at the school to talk about academics." The room will be full. Lots of parents are going to show up.

 

Then imagine that evening you say, "Actually, there was an error on the flyer. We have two talks tonight, and I only have about 30 seconds to describe them. You need to go to one or the other. All parents to who want their kids to get all As in school, go to auditorium A. All parents who want their kids to learn to love learning by the end of school, go to auditorium B."

 

Where are most parents going? Most parents are going to auditorium B, but they will act as they went to auditorium A. How do they talk to their kids about academics? "What grade did you get?" They extend it to sports. "How many goals did you score? How much playing time did you get?" They extend it to drama. "Did you get the lead? How many songs? How many lines do you have?" It's very quantifiable.

 

We do same thing with our students. They come into class and we say, "How did you do on the math test?" Or as an advisor, "Did you get the history paper done?" We ask them end questions, result-oriented questions.

 

That's not what education is. That's not what learning is. One of the things we don't talk about with kids, maybe the thing that really gets left out of the conversation, is confusion. What's the role of confusion in learning? This one is huge. If you look at your kids, you can separate them simply by their relationship to confusion. Some kids feel that as soon as you get confused, it's a sign that you're not smart, you're not intelligent, and then they get depressed about themselves, they act out, they distract, anything to avoid the confusion.

 

Whereas other kids have a healthy relationship with confusion, which is, I think, a more realistic one, which is: You get confused. This is good. It's uncomfortable now, but I'm going to get through this, and when I get through it, there's going to be a payoff. I'm going to learn something new.

 

This is why kids learning a musical instrument is an incredible lesson in a relationship to confusion. Say they're taking the piano. They practice all week. They come in, they play something, they do it fairly well. The teacher points out a couple of places where they can improve. She introduces a new piece of music that's more difficult than the one they had. They get confused. They feel they can't do it. But every week, from practicing, they learn how to get through that confusion, how to sit and get through it. That helps them develop a sense of integrity. They know they can get through things.

 

Think about your jobs. How many times do you get a phone call or have a faculty member come up to you with a really important burning question and you're confident enough to say, "This is really complicated. I don't know. I don't have an answer for you now. Let's talk again tomorrow." Because you know you need to sit with it. Maybe you need to go for a run. Maybe you need to call a colleague. Maybe you need to cook a meal and get away from it completely. But you trust that it will begin to settle in, because you can tolerate the confusion.

 

So the most successful and happy people in the world are the ones who have the healthiest relationship to confusion. And we need to be really explicit about this with our kids. They need to understand this. You know, the girl in seventh grade is making relationships but is confused about where she stands with kids, and wants absolute clarity. We need to come down on the side of supporting that confusion, that it's okay not to know for a while. In fact, that's normal.

 

It also means we need to be transparent with our students, say to them, "I'm confused. I'm starting the assembly in a little while. I don't know whether to read a story or tell a joke or just introduce. What do you think?" And we get their opinions, but we show our confusion. We're the leaders of the school. We need to show a little confusion. We don't need to show too much confusion, because it will rock their confidence, but a little confusion can go a long way. Model this for our kids.

 

We take the world of integrity to the world of academics. There's a whole other set of questions we can ask. Actually, let's do this example. I know there was an art teacher here earlier in the week. She probably touched on this. I'll going to come at it from a different angle.

 

I wrote a book called "Right from Wrong," with a friend of mine, Joe DiPrisco. In writing that book, we spent a lot of time going around and observing classes. And I saw this phenomenon more than once, in an art class, particularly, where kids had made some sort of drawing, some crazy drawing. Parents of kindergarteners and first-graders are in there volunteering, helping with the art projects.

 

The parents would come in, falling on the side of self-esteem. Let's say that Happy had done this drawing. The parent would come in and do this. "Wow. Happy, that is beautiful. That is really gorgeous. You're going to be an artist. Your parents should frame this. Do they hang this up?"

 

"Yeah, my parents hang it."

 

And it goes on for a minute like this. Then the parent says, "Great job," and goes on to the next person.

 

You watch the students after the parents have gone by. It's like helium has filled their body of self-esteem. They sort of look at this and float away, go do something else. They just move on, but they feel great about themselves. But it's temporary. The parent will go down the line saying variations of the same thing to each student, and you see them sort of peel away like the helium balloons, and float away.

 

Then you watch the teachers. Completely different interaction. The teacher comes in and says, "Okay, Happy. Are you done?" Big question. The kid can't answer it. "I don't know."

 

Now we give her the language. She says, "Well, I ask because it's all blank on the outside. Do you want to keep it that way, or do you want to add lines to it?"

 

Now for the first time, she sees that. "Oh. I didn't notice that before."

 

"Well, yeah. Just something to think about. What's your favorite line?"

 

She might say, "What do you mean, favorite line?"

 

"Well, I really like this one because it's strong and wiggly and goes into that powerful curve, but then gets a little weak there, and I like that."

 

"Oh."

 

"What's your favorite line?"

 

"I like this one because it looks like a teardrop just sort of hanging on there."

 

"Oh, okay. I'll be back in a little while."

 

The teacher walks out. Never once praises the child. Implicit, though. Like you were saying, Cathy, the love is implicit there. Here's what the student does. Looks at it. Goes away. Comes back. Starts working on it. Never had to tell her it was good, bad, done, wasn't done. Gave her the language, engaged her with it, and let her work through it on her own.

 

We can do this with our kids all the time. Great coaches do this all the time. It's about, you know, "How did you do in the game today? Where did you do your best? Where do you think you could have done better? What does that mean for what you need to practice on this week? As a team, what does it mean we need practice on this week?"

 

So it's always about the process. That's where the richness is in education. It's the questions we ask. "During the game today, I went to the game and, yeah, Mary Lou, we won the game and it was great, and you had a good game. But what I noticed was, when the referee made that bad call, I watched you start to well up with anger, and then somehow you stopped it, just stopped it, and then you played harder. How did you do that?"

 

A couple of things. I'm observing this. She may not have even recognized this in herself. This also may be something she's been struggling with for a while and she'll say, "Oh, yeah" -- because now she's in the know about herself -- "Oh, yeah. I don't really know how I did that."

 

Now I walk away. She's going to be thinking about that question for the next week or so. She's going to think, How did I do that?

 

So I might come back the next day and say, "Hey, did you think anymore about how you actually contained that anger?"

 

And she might have an answer. It might be, "Well, I remember the coach saying I could really use all that energy in a positive way," or, "I remembered what my mom said about when she was an athlete."

 

It will be something. The conversation will never have a nice, clean, solid period at the end of it, but it's the question that lingers that turns her on to herself and her experience. And that is the essential part. We're trying to be more like anthropologists. If you have ever spent time with a cultural anthropologist, they ask you questions about all the things you do, and before long, you feel like the most interesting person in the world because they're asking you all these questions.

 

We can do this with our kids. When we're talking to them about relationships, when we're talking to them about academics, focus on the process. A big concern of middle school and high school especially is sex and sexuality with the kids. Particularly sex. Particularly parents of girls. When are they going to have sex the first time? Many parents feel like, okay, I really need to have the sex talk. When should I have it? When they're 11? 13?

 

You should have it when they're two. Two years old. But you don't talk about sex. It's giving them a language. It's the language of intimacy. We want our girls to know the world of intimacy before they hit puberty, so that when they hit puberty, and think about the next logical step, which is having sex with somebody, it happens out of intimacy. It doesn't happen as a way to achieve intimacy. And you know that. We see kids who try to get to intimacy by having sex, and others for whom it wouldn't even enter their minds to have sex until intimacy is there first.

 

We do that with the questions we ask, with our two-or-three-year-old. "How come that person is a better friend than this person?"

 

"Well, you know, he doesn't hit me."

 

"How are you different with this person than that person? How are you different with Mom than you are with someone outside the family?"

 

We ask them questions that help them articulate, describe the experience of intimacy and know how they're different when they're with people having intimacy. And this naturally grows and leads to the sex conversation, the drugs conversation, the alcohol conversation, but it's all coming out of intimacy, laying the seeds for it very early on.

 

This is academics. This is sports. This is drama. There's the whole world of discipline, and how we discipline kids. And this is one that is really tough on us. Most of us know that discipline requires consequences and it requires support. Many of us live in the world of consequences. Many of our parents are really there thinking, There's got to be the perfect consequence. And they obsess over having the right consequence, the right number of nights grounded, the number of cars that have to be washed, the leaves that have to be raked. They obsess, as if there's a magic formula: Get the consequence right, they'll never do the behavior again.

 

There's nothing like that. We know from the research if there's no consequence, they don't learn anything. If the consequence is too much, they just get resentful and they don't learn anything. So there needs to be a consequence.

 

I'm a firm believer that the consequence involves a physical activity. I'll say why in a moment.

 

Then we go to the support. How do we support kids? Sometimes we appeal to their self-esteem. "You're a great kid. You're a wonderful kid. You're smarter than that. You don't need to do that."

 

Does that help the kids? No. Truthfully, they feel like it's part of the consequence. It's the lecture they have to get. This is when dads go into lecture mode. It reminds me of when I was a kid. Kids roll their eyes, and some kids I know actually number their parents' lectures. Dad's going to do a 2, go to a 7, he always ends with a 9.

 

Moms aren't much better. They use the lecture form of rapid questions. "What were you thinking? Did you think about how I'd feel? Why did you do that?"

 

Twenty-seven questions within one minute. The kid is sort of knocked over because of all these questions coming at them. We're not sure how to support them. Here's what I suggest. Think about this. This is where the juice is. This is where the payoff is.

 

The best times I have had in my first year of being a Head are when kids have gotten in major trouble. It's the best time for me. The kids have been reprimanded, they have had their consequences, they have been suspended or whatever. Before they come back to school, they have to come meet with me. They have had all the lessons. They come in and I say to them, "So tell me what happened."

 

They tell me what happened. I say, "So what do you think about it now?"

 

I hear all the words, the parents' words, their teachers' words, their own words coming out. It's really wonderful. It's great to hear this. But that's nothing for me.

 

The next question is -- and this is what I say to them, and this is the leap I'm going to ask you to make that I don't think is a leap. And the leap is this. Every kid, for their age, knows the right thing to do. They know the right thing to do. The four-year-old knows what's right for the four-year-old. The 14-year-old knows what's right for the 14-year-old. And I really believe this. In which case it makes zero sense to lecture somebody about something they already know.

 

So Mary Lou comes into my office. She's going through this whole thing. She thinks, Okay, I got through to the Head. He's okay. I'm going to be safe. He's not going to yell at me or anything.

 

And then I'll say, "Mary Lou, when this happened, when you hit this child, when you cheated on the test, whatever it is, as you were doing this, or before you were doing this, was there a small voice or a feeling that you had that said, 'Bad idea, don't do this'?"

 

Every kid I have ever talked with, after the consequence is in place, would go, "Yeah. Yeah. There's a little part of me that said not to do this."

 

Now the whole game changes because metaphorically, I'll come around the side of the table and I say, "Mary, that's what concerns me the most. There's a part of you that knows the right thing to do, and you're not listening to that part of yourself. What got in the way of you listening to that?"

 

Every kid I have ever said this to does a -- "What? Could you say that again?"

 

"There's a part of you that said, 'Don't hit them. Don't cheat on this test.' But you didn't listen to it. What stopped you from listening to yourself?"

 

Every kid I have done this with immediately starts crying. Why do they cry? Because they realize they disappointed themselves. Nothing to do with me, nothing to do with the teacher, nothing do with Mom and Dad, but they realized, "I'm not listening to myself." That's really sad and it's tragic.

 

And then the conversation soon is about what got in the way. And sometimes they'll say, things like, "Well, I was just angry."

 

"So your temper got in the way. What else?"

 

"My friends really wanted me to do this."

 

"So you didn't listen to yourself because your friends would like you more if you did it."

 

And they'll say things like, "It really sounds lame when you say it back to me that way."

 

But they get it. Also remember, if you're working with adolescents, the nature of adolescence is a very narcissistic time of life. Naturally narcissistic. They have to go through the narcissism. That's where empathy and compassion come from. If you're asking these kinds of questions to a narcissist, you're making them much more interesting to themselves, and a good narcissist wants around lots of people to make them more interesting to themselves. So they invite you in.

 

So I'll have this conversation with kids and at the end of it I'll say, "Look. All I ask for is that from now on, you listen to that part of you that knows what's right for you to do, in which case you'll never be back in this office except for good things. Now go on."

 

And they go. And every kid at some point checks back into my office, a day later, a month later, two months later, and says, "You know, Mr. Mike, I listened to that voice yesterday. I was going to hit somebody but I didn't. I listened to that voice."

 

That's all. Then they walk away. But it's about them reclaiming their integrity and it's about making them whole. And that's what integrity is. And as educators, that to me is the highest language we want our kids to have. How do they learn to trust themselves? How can we help them in this process?

 

Implicit in this is where I started with integrity, that all our schools need to be safe places where kids can fail. And kids need to fail regularly. And we need to remind our faculty over and over again that when the kid cheats, when they hit somebody on the playground, it's not the end of the world. It's an opportunity to really teach them about their integrity.

 

It also means when you take the ideas of Vygotsky, how it shows up in the classroom, and it also shows up in the playground. When our kids have a fight with one another, they come to you and say, "Mrs. Johnson, I can't believe it. They pushed me. They won't let me play in their game."

 

Then instead of saying, "I'll walk right over there and solve the problem for you," we say to them, "Okay. They shouldn't do that. What can you say to them? How can you work it out?"

 

"Well, I can't work it out. I don't know that I can work it out."

 

"I think you can. Practice with me."

 

They practice with you and they say, "Would you come with me?"

 

"Okay, I'll walk over with you, but I'm not going to say anything."

 

And you walk over and you let the kids do it on their own. We let our kids have their struggles. And it means an incredible PR job we need to do with our families to say, "If we're doing our job, your kids are going to struggle here in some places. They're going to have some failures."

 

But that's part of how integrity becomes important to them. This is how they learn to value it. Bodie and Reveta led a workshop this summer at the Institute for New Heads. Many of you have been through it. Many of you have been faculty in it.

 

The greatest value I got out of that workshop was watching how our faculty were so different from one another. They all did it in a very different way. Some get up in the morning. Some do it late at night. Some make sure you get your exercise. Some take care of yourselves later. Some were out there greeting people. Different ways people did it.

 

The thing that rang true was that they were all authentic and genuine, who they are as people. I heard Carol Gilligan speak at NAIS. I'm sure many of you heard that. She said that around age 11 is when they start to lose their voices. The way they can continue to hear their voices is when the adults around them stay authentic. It starts with the principal. It starts with the Head of school. If you figure out a way you can be your authentic and genuine self at the school, you're way ahead of the game.

 

Think about what it was like for the first-year teacher. Any person in the classroom, the first year teaching, you feel like a divided personality. You're one person with your friends. You go in front of the classroom and you're a completely different person. And you spend the next five years figuring out how to be the same person in both places. You're not telling the same rowdy jokes to your first- and second-graders, but you're that same presence, same central figure.

 

As Heads, when we establish that authenticity that rings true, that we are morally supporting faculty, the more they're supportive of the kids, and the more the parents can go with this, that's the thing that really rings true. That sense of authenticity is what allows us to make use of the integrity, and understand the development that's going on with them.

 

If people have some questions, I'm happy to answer them.

 

Thank you for having me here. As a last piece, I urge you to embrace the idea of confusion, especially if you're confused a little bit. What I said about integrity -- it's a big piece to wrestle with. I think what we're doing with kids now is the most important wrestling match we have, to figure out how we can bring more integrity. Because in the information age, with kids exploding all over the place, the thing that really matters most is that kids have integrity and leave our schools trusting themselves, knowing what's right or wrong, and most of the time being able to listen to that part of them that knows what's right. If we do that for our kids graduating from our schools, it's a terrific thing that they probably won't get elsewhere. So thank you. (Applause.)

 

MS. BRIZENDINE: We want to thank Mike. The good news is that he's a Head of school. The bad news is he doesn't have any time to come to our schools anymore.

 

But thanks so much, Mike.

 

Safe journey home, everybody.