Like most people I know, I loved playing games when I was a child: in my case these included board games, indoor and outdoor sports, word games, card games, puns, and puzzles. And as someone who enjoyed the thrill of winning no less than the satisfaction of competing, I learned early on the importance of following the rules. The lesson here was simple: If you followed the rules, you stood a better chance of winning.

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In my last blog I attempted to describe one of the great paradoxes of living in a more global community, the appeal of enjoying multiculturalism while wanting simultaneously to preserve distinct indigenous cultures. More specifically, I noted that “the strongest local communities are those that are comprised of families of difference.” In today’s entry I will make the parallel claim that the strongest school communities are those that are comprised of faculty of difference.

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As our nation of 312 million citizens sets aside special family time during the Thanksgiving holiday, I am reminded of our many blessings. Like our neighbors in the Americas, we boast enviable natural resources and a proud pre-Columbian heritage. Like more distant lands in the Old World (Africa, Asia and Europe), we enjoy tremendous biodiversity and an ever-growing multiculturalism. With more than 1,000,000 persons now obtaining permanent resident status on an annual basis, immigration has long been one of our greatest assets.

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I had the good fortune recently to attend a conference for elementary school heads from all over the country. During one of the sessions we were asked to think about what was most important to us in our work. Although this is a perfectly straightforward question, my head started to spin just in imagining the range of potential responses: maintaining stable enrollment in difficult economic times, managing limited resources to their fullest advantage, attracting talented students and faculty, or keeping multiple constituencies focused on a common mission. These are all worthy endeavors, but none quite meeting the “what is most important” standard that had been posed to us by Rob Evans, our keynote speaker. Rob is Executive Director of the Human Relations Service in Wellesley, Massachusetts.

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I am not a particularly experienced world traveler, but thanks to some limited travel and also to a well-developed education I have come to learn that almost all great global cities are built on waterways: rivers, lakes, bays, estuaries or coastlines. Certainly this is true of our home city of Boston. I marvel not just at the physical beauty provided by our abundant water features, but also at the ingenious feats of engineering that allow us to get from one place to another. For the purpose of this blog entry I will refer to such endeavors as bridging and tunneling.

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Living and working at an elementary school in New York City on September 11, 2001, I spent the next few months experiencing the same range of emotions as most adults in my immediate surroundings: confusion, tears, lack of focus, and sleeplessness. Six months later, as the smoke began to clear, we began to trust that the debris could actually be cleared away, that the ground zero site might actually be rebuilt, that the children in our charge would grow up and receive a meaningful education, and that life would eventually resume something of a familiar pattern. It did not occur to us quite yet that something dramatically different had already taken place in the relationships between children and adults.

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A thriving learning environment depends both on trust between teachers and students and also on a genuine respect for individual differences. Although it is tempting to imagine that young people in modern society tend to accept each other’s differences as natural, if not inconsequential, students at schools such as CHS learn early on that they cannot learn effectively in the absence of true multiculturalism. Every time students face something unfamiliar, they become stretched and therefore more educated. This is an optimal paradigm for cognitive growth: to experience one’s early years with the safety/security of an known identity, to maintain that identity during a series of developmental stages, and to encounter numerous social and cultural influences along the way. It is in this particular regard that intellect and imagination can most harmoniously coexist.

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Several colleagues and I attended a seminar a few weeks ago on the subject of robotics and lego engineering for young children. This might sound like an overly technical approach to childhood learning, but the ramifications of “purposefully designed technologically-rich interventions” are both intuitive and developmentally compelling.

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I purchased a new bicycle last weekend. A recumbent. Most people don’t know exactly what that means, and I didn’t either until I went out this morning to try to learn how to ride the darned thing. It is completely different from a regular bicycle, both in appearance and in function. The first challenge is simply getting started. If you think it’s easy, you’re wrong. It’s not even a little bit like riding a bike.

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In the wake of IBM’s Watson’s crushing victory last week on Jeopardy, newspapers and magazines are abuzz with commentary about the anthropomorphizing of this spectacular supercomputer. No less significant than the fact that Watson “clobbered his two human opponents,” writes Joanna Weiss in the Sunday Globe, “the amazing thing was the nonchalant way the humans around him behaved -- as if Watson were any other “Jeopardy” contestant who happened to have a plasma screen for a head.” For anyone interested in human or artificial intelligence, this is pretty heady stuff, no pun intended.

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In the January 3 issue of The New Yorker magazine, Adam Gopnik writes a beautiful piece about snowflakes: All Alike. Even then the winter weather had already taken a dramatic turn, and even then every school-age child in the Northeast was beginning to wonder about snow days. It turns out, contrary to most conventional wisdom, that snowflakes are really not so different as they are commonly believed to be. Gopnik writes as follows:

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One hears lots of talk about the deficiencies of today’s young people: too coddled, too self-centered, too distractible, not focused enough for the challenges of an increasingly complex world. I strongly object! To my observation the young people of today are more aesthetically versatile, more technically savvy, more multi-culturally flexible, and more capable of filtering out unnecessary diversions than their counterparts from previous generations.

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In my last blog entry I wrote about the need for schools to align themselves to the changing paradigms of the 21st century. Fully mindful of the perception that America’s stature has diminished on the world stage and also of the nationwide debate about how best to promote higher standards, I attempted to point emphasis on educational purposes rather than educational content. In today’s entry I will focus on the difference between skills and attitudes, a potentially confusing distinction hidden underneath the rhetoric of 21st century learning.

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I recently participated in a conference attended by over 100 school heads and board chairs from all over the country. In general the focus of the conference was on governance issues, but at one break-out session we were asked what skills we thought would be most important for students as they leave our schools and move on to their adult lives in the 21st century. I have to confess that I am generally skeptical about such questions. I recognize that learning has to be relevant to real life, but I hesitate to envision our educational system as nothing but a source of training. More to the point, I would not want for my school to be pressured to rewrite its curriculum for fear of not being sufficiently au courant.

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At a recent faculty meeting when we were beginning to discuss the ramifications of the new Massachusetts Anti-Bullying Law, everyone acknowledged that online bullying now presents a peculiar new threat to the safety of children and adults alike. As the discussion evolved and as we shared perspectives both from real-life and from the national media, it became clear that the dangers of bullying are restricted neither to the playground nor to the locker room. This seems to shed interesting light on the Fallacy of Childhood Invisibility: i.e., when no one is looking--or indeed when no one is perceived to be looking, the temptation to bully becomes both more likely and more problematic. As we know, children often imagine themselves to be invisible when they are engaged in online behavior.

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Ever since I decided to become a teacher, this is the question that has most consumed my passions. In the early years of my career, I imagined that the most fully educated person was a well-rounded one, someone both broadly exposed to the humanities and knowledgeable about the sciences. Such a person was as apt to understand the aesthetics of music as the mechanics of sound, as attuned to the biodiversity of life as to the meaning of life.

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