Square Peg Read online

  “This important book shows how people learn and develop differently, with diverse values, goals, and commitments. We naturally learn in different ways for various reasons. There is no single pathway to learning that everyone follows, but instead variable ways of learning based on diverse goals and values. This analysis of education should be the starting point of teaching and learning, the groundwork of pedagogy from top to bottom. The book lays out the framework for a new kind of education, grounded in the individual, not the fiction of one common learning pathway. Only with this new framework will schools recognize and celebrate the differences that make students unique. Only then will teaching and learning help all children to reach their potential. This must be the starting point of the new framework for education.”

  —KURT W. FISCHER

  Director of the Mind, Brain, and Education Institute

  Harvard Graduate School of Education

  Dedication

  For Lyda, Ruth, and Bernice.

  Heroines.

  Contents

  Dedication

  Prologue: Surrendering the Rain Sticks

  1. My Bright Future

  2. Smart Criminal

  3. Why Context Matters

  4. Ostracized

  5. Fitting In—and Dropping Out

  6. Social Justice

  7. Turnaround

  8. Failing Well

  Epilogue: Creating New Contexts for Learning

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  About the Authors

  Other Works

  Copyright

  PROLOGUE

  Surrendering the Rain Sticks

  “The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones....”

  —John Maynard Keynes

  Seventh-Grade Satan

  * * *

  It’s said that you can tell when the Devil is near by the smell of burning sulfur. And while my seventh-grade art teacher, Mr. Peabody, may not have believed this, literally, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear the thought crossed his mind on the afternoon I threw a makeshift stink bomb—well, actually six stink bombs—at his blackboard.

  In the twenty-two years that have passed since that time, I’ve sometimes thought back on my diabolical naughtiness as a justified protest against the way he taught us—always talking about art, but never having us do anything. A rail-thin man with sunken eyes, he mumbled a lot and seemed to be counting down the days to his retirement. Perhaps my defiance should be considered as a noble act of civil disobedience: my eloquent rebellion against a broken system.

  Or maybe not. A few minutes earlier, my friend Ryan had dared me to do it—and I’ve always been a sucker for dares.

  The bomb was made of six small vials of ammonium sulfide, a mixture beloved by generations of pranksters for its powerful stench of rotten eggs. Ryan had handed the vials to me moments earlier, suggesting I walk to the back of the room as if to sharpen my pencil, and throw them while Mr. Peabody stood at the blackboard with his back turned to the class.

  Looking back, I suppose it’s no surprise that things turned out so much worse than I’d expected. First, I really should have taken a few seconds to think before I acted, during which I might have realized that there was no way I could have avoided getting caught—and punished. Second, Ryan no doubt should have told me he’d meant for me to throw just one vial, not all six.

  Oh well!

  The funny thing is that at the moment I hurled those vials at the blackboard, I was just as surprised as the other students by the loud noise of the shattering glass, and by how thoroughly the air filled with the stink. The smoke brought tears to our eyes and obliged Mr. Peabody to usher us all out of the classroom. Once he had us lined up against the wall outside, it didn’t take a great detective to zero in on the culprit; while every other student was crying and choking on the synthetic fart fumes, I was the only one laughing.

  My teacher grabbed me by the back of my neck, like a dog, and marched me to the principal’s office—by then familiar territory—where I was “detained” for an hour until my mother, fuming quite a bit herself, arrived to pick me up. I was suspended from school—yet again—for the rest of the week.

  My Two Futures

  * * *

  The stink bomb was my worst offense that year, and one more black mark on a growing record that vexed both my teachers and my bewildered parents. By the age of thirteen, I was already (and seemingly permanently) labeled as a troublemaker. I was the kid who makes other students laugh during class, but whom no one sits next to at lunch; the kid who’d failed so many times by then that he’d rather get an F on an assignment than admit he didn’t understand the lesson; the kid who attracted detentions and demerits more often than praise and rewards. In short, I was the square peg in the round hole of our local school system.

  It wouldn’t have surprised anyone who knew me back then if I’d landed in jail by my twenties. It did surprise just about everyone that I wound up on the faculty of Harvard University.

  Looking back, I know there was no single intervention that turned my life around. No heart-to-heart talk with a great teacher. No perfectly tailored drug that helped me sit still and concentrate. I wasn’t “scared straight” by a probation officer. My parents never found a magic guide to raising me right. I didn’t wake up one morning and suddenly turn over a new leaf.

  Instead, my future emerged from a series of at first seemingly random, yet always interrelated, circumstances and events. These include, but weren’t limited to: my father’s professional promotion, which allowed us to move to a new town just when I needed a second chance; the patience of a socially skilled football player whom I decided to emulate; and a spring afternoon when I impulsively stole a textbook from a lovely high school senior. I can’t say for certain how my life would have played out in the absence of any of these or several other experiences. I simply know that I always had within me the raw materials for what anyone might suppose are two mirror-opposite paths: leading either to prison or to Harvard.

  I eventually found my way to the more prestigious destination, and today I have the honor of collaborating with some of the nation’s brightest scientists and entrepreneurs on delightfully challenging problems. Through it all, I can’t help but marvel at how little I, myself, have changed, even as the way I’m perceived has been transformed by this new set of circumstances. In my Ivy League enclave, my high school impertinence is seen as wit. What used to be my lack of respect for authority is now viewed as iconoclastic insight. My lack of inhibition is now interpreted as creativity.

  Twenty-two years ago, however, as the noxious fumes filled that art class, most people who knew me weren’t so much admiring as perplexed or even appalled. Why on earth, after an intelligence test I’d taken before starting kindergarten showed that I was unusually smart, was I doing so many stupid things? Why was I so intent on sabotaging myself? Why did I seem destined for a life of self-inflicted failure while others, seemingly less gifted, succeeded?

  These questions have weighed on my mind continually ever since the joyful day (for both me and my hapless teachers) that I left Sand Ridge Junior High School. And I’m not alone in asking them.

  Over the past several decades, researchers and policy makers have dedicated careers to trying to understand what makes kids like me tick—and how on earth to make us tick more quietly.

  The trouble isn’t a lack of opinions. I’ve heard my behavior ascribed to everything from sheer diabolical nature, to laziness, to a cry for help, to an excess of TV, to having a brain deficiency—a reference to the fact that the same year I threw the stink bombs, I was diagnosed with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD.

  None of these all-over-the-map hypotheses caused
me near the frustration, however, as I felt on one particular afternoon in Utah, in the year 2000, roughly twelve years after the stink-bomb affair. An anguished mother, having read a newspaper story about my unlikely comeback and recent acceptance to graduate school at Harvard, visited me at my in-laws’ house. She figured I’d have insights in how to deal with her own struggling son. He, too, had been diagnosed with ADHD and was failing academically and rebelling in school.

  As I listened to her tale, I could see that she’d done everything she could think of to help her son. She’d escorted him to medical experts, secured a diagnosis and prescription for stimulant drugs, and fought for accommodations for him at school. Yet he was still on the skids: feeling miserable, and causing misery to everyone who cared about him.

  By then, this mother had come to the sad realization that doctors could only do so much for her child, and that something more was needed. She was looking to me for the answers, and at that point I’m pretty sure she would have signed up her son for round-the-clock tap-dancing lessons, or a diet of pure wheatgrass, if I had told her such methods had worked for me. As much as I wanted to help, however, I had nothing useful to say. The truth was that I really didn’t understand how I’d turned my life around. I’ll never forget the look in her eyes when I told her as much, or how she left the house in tears.

  The encounter so humbled me that I vowed I would wait to talk about my story in public only when I felt sure I could offer something useful for parents in similar predicaments.

  A decade has passed, and today, at last, I have something to say.

  It’s Complex …

  * * *

  At eighteen years old, I was a failure: a high school dropout stocking shelves at a department store for $4.25 an hour. Sixteen years later, I was a success: a young faculty member at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. As I’ve mentioned, there’s no easy explanation for my turnaround, and, frankly, I’ve yet to find much enlightenment from either conventional psychology or mainstream theories of education. Instead, I’m convinced that the most valuable insights derive from a new scientific field known as complex systems.

  To put it simply, the study of complex systems looks at how different parts of a system influence each other collectively to produce various outcomes. Nowadays, scientists have been holding up this lens to a range of traditional disciplines, from physics to biology—and, most recently, in centers like the one in which I work: Harvard’s Mind, Brain, and Education program—to the study of human learning. As this effort matures, it is offering a radically new and useful way for parents and teachers to understand the often bewildering behavior of children in their charge.

  No matter whether your subject is an A student or a stink-bomb-throwing rebel, the perspective of complex systems will help you see that an individual’s behavior at any given time will depend on much more than that person’s genetic code or even his or her best efforts. Instead, all behavior emerges from the constant interaction between a person’s biology, past experiences, and the immediate environment, or context. These interactions happen through what scientists call feedback loops—powerful mechanisms that, if left unchecked, can kick-start a cascade of actions and reactions, in which small differences end up having an enormous impact on the outcomes.

  Feedback loops are what explains the famous “butterfly effect”—the idea, first proposed by the mathematician and climatologist Edward Lorenz in the 1960s (and, incidentally, the title of a so-so movie starring Ashton Kutcher), that a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can set off a tornado in Texas.

  … But You Don’t Need Any Math

  * * *

  Through the rest of this book, I’ll elaborate on four ideas derived both from the study of complex systems and recent neuroscience findings, which I believe can help make you a much more understanding and effective parent and teacher. Here they are, in brief:

  1. Variability is the rule: As humans, our ways of perceiving the world and reacting to what we perceive are much more diverse and dynamic than we might ever have imagined.

  2. Emotions are serious stuff: Contrary to what we’ve long believed, modern neuroscience has shown that there is no such thing as purely rational thought or behavior. Parents and teachers need to learn to tune in to children’s emotional states to help them make the most of their education.

  3. Context is key: People often behave in dramatically different ways, depending on the circumstances. Among other things, this suggests that we unfairly prejudice children by labeling them with a disorder, when they’d be perfectly fine in a different environment.

  4. Feedback loops determine long-term success or failure: Remember those flapping butterfly wings, and keep in mind that small changes in your child’s life today can make an enormous difference tomorrow.

  Once you start reflecting on how behavior can be shaped, moment to moment, by interactions between your child and his or her context, complex systems may seem like a no-brainer. Little Johnny, a bitter pill at home with his kid brother, is a sweetheart at his friend’s house. Alternatively, your moody teenager calls you an “idiot” and your explosive reaction has less to do with that choice of words than your memory of a fight you had with your own dad in 1973 and the fact that you slept less than six hours the night before.

  In fact, if you’ve ever watched a baseball game, you already intuitively understand how complex systems work. Why is it that a big-league pitcher can’t throw the same curveball every time? Despite his exceptional skill, and thousands of hours of practice, his performance with any given pitch will depend on a variety of contextual factors that mostly are beyond his control: the wind velocity, the cheering or booing from the stands, whether or not there is a runner on base, and even his perception of his competitors’ skill, all play their parts.

  So do feedback loops. Imagine the same pitcher in the middle of a meltdown. He’s been doing just fine for six innings until, out of the blue, he throws a bad pitch, and then another, and another. Suddenly the bases are loaded; the crowd is jeering, and while the pitcher is trying to keep his mind on the next pitch, he also has an eye on the dugout—will the manager pull him out soon? Adrenaline surges through his bloodstream. His heart beats faster; he’s sweating, and his hands are starting to shake. Not surprisingly, the next pitch is way off the mark, and he is yanked from the game.

  With curveballs, as with stink bombs, the same rule applies. Behavior isn’t something someone “has.” Rather, it emerges from the interaction of a person’s biology, past experiences, and immediate context.

  Surrendering the Rain Sticks

  * * *

  If all this is starting to seem pretty obvious, let me offer a suggestion as to why so many of us—unfortunately including so many school administrators—continue to resist the wisdom of complex systems. It boils down to one of the most basic human needs, which is to believe that we have total control over our fates. The history of philosophy, on top of every individual’s life experience, tells us otherwise, and still we poignantly persist.

  It’s a lot like the way societies have clung to the belief, since ancient times, that we can make it rain. Mexico’s Mayans resorted to fearsome human sacrifices, while Native Americans used chants and rain sticks. Today we trust in meteorologists, who use powerful computers and sophisticated mathematical algorithms yet, even so, are often as surprised as the rest of us by sudden storms and heat waves.

  The difficulty is that the weather will always depend on an assortment of constantly fluctuating influences. And to be sure, we’ve made progress in accepting this rule—when it comes to the weather. We’ve surrendered the sacrifices and chants and sticks as tools to make it rain. Yet when it comes to our kids, we’re still seeking that magic bullet. Today, a multibillion-dollar industry of pharmaceuticals, dietary supplements, computerized training programs, and other interventions sustains the illusion that as parents and teachers we can “fix” a child’s behavior and save him or her from failure. The reality is that we can’t,
for the simple reason that behavior, like the weather, is staggeringly complex.

  That’s why our first step must be, finally, to put down those rain sticks when it comes to our kids, and shift over to the complex-systems view of behavior. We must do this in our homes, but more importantly also in our schools, where our children, after all, spend most of their waking hours.

  My hope with this book is to give you several more insights into how this can happen, based on what I’ve learned both from my own fall-and-rise journey and the gradual and quite hopeful transformations I’ve been witnessing at many schools throughout this country. Before I leave the story of those stink bombs aside, however, I want to offer you one more clue to the context of my rebellion. It was an incident that took place in another class, several months earlier, and is unfortunately the kind of small but potentially devastating event that clouds all too many a square peg’s future.

  No Chocolate for Me

  * * *

  Here’s how it went down: My English teacher, whom I’ll call Mr. Meany (since I’m being completely objective here), had offered a giant Snickers bar to the student who wrote the best poem. Unlike Mr. Peabody, Mr. Meany was one of the more popular teachers at Sand Ridge Junior High. He coached a recreational basketball team and even occasionally took some of us kids on ski trips. I wanted him to like me and felt this was my big chance. I’d been writing poetry for years, filling up notebooks I occasionally showed to my mother and grandmother. The two of them had encouraged me so much that I was sure I’d have an easy chance to win that Snickers bar.