Newton South blues

Note: This piece now has run in the Newton Tab: 30 July 2014.   This is the version that ran in the Tab, and replaces the original version.

Anyone interested in the original can please e-mail me at:  JHuth58@gmail.com

The culture at South

The last of my three children just graduated from South.  I write this with concern, yet see hope for the school.

A culture is the sum of parts – the students, parents, teachers, coaches, counselors, and administrators.   All may be functioning under different constraints, desires, and goals, but the result can sometimes become toxic and interfere with important goals of education.  Part of this toxicity stems from pressure to get into high-ranking colleges.   The admissions process often drives parental pressure, it can skew curriculum, and administrators can be tone-deaf to the problems.

At Harvard, I often see the end-product of successful campaigns to gain admission.    The resumes of incoming freshmen are unbelievable.  They can be “pointy”, meaning that they’re the best in the United States at some obscure talent, or they founded an orphanage in Guatemala.   It seems inhuman.   Yet, when I read their essays, they feel shallow and come off as attempts to echo the political biases of the teachers.  One wonders whether they’ve experienced failure at least once in their lifetime, and that the timidity of the essays reflects a fear of failure.  This concern is reflected in a recent article by William Deresiewicz in the New Republic, which, along with recent events, motivates this essay.

A study highlighted in the New York Times shows that US colleges and Universities are well behind most European countries in math skills.   The most serious deficit, it seems is that “[US students] cannot perform math-related tasks that ‘require several steps and may involve the choice of problem-solving strategies.’” This deficit can translate into problems in the next rung up the ladder. According to the director graduate studies in the Harvard Physics Department, the one distinguishing feature of successful students is their ability to function in the face of uncertainties.

I teach a class called Primitive Navigation. The concept of the course is that the process of navigation, as practiced by most cultures, is an interaction with the environment where decisions about journeys are taken based on observations and reasoning.  Students are asked to perform navigational tasks in the real world and are sometimes bewildered when they have to make decisions in uncertain conditions. The answers aren’t in the back of the book or in the mind of the professor, they’re out in the environment. Failure can actually aid learning.  Sadly, I see some students who are locked into a mode of perfection and this inhibits their learning.  They cut corners for ‘success’.

Returning to Newton South, I saw intense pressure on many students to get into a top-tier university, often from their parents. Frankly I’ll plead guilty to creating some of this pressure myself.  On the other hand, I’m grateful my children had the wherewithal to push back and begin to chart their own courses.    

This is not to indict all of South, far from it.   I’ve seen athletics unite parents and children in a positive way.   Reading essays in the school newspaper, I see a depth of understanding of the cultural pressures and intelligent strategies for coping.  South is by no means a cookie cutter if students choose a sane path, but this may mean forsaking the formulaic and exhausting strategies for getting into a top tier university.    

Just after my daughter’s graduation from South this spring, I held a barbeque. She invited some of her friends over.   We got into a discussion of the atmosphere at South, and they echoed and even amplified my impressions that parental pressure was one of the more corrosive aspects.   The pressure for attaining the ‘success’ of an Ivy admission leaves the students with little sense of how to improvise, cope with uncertainties, or god forbid, cope with failure.

During the discussion, one of Charlotte’s friends pointed out to me the strange parallels of the graduation speech delivered by Newton School Superintendent David Fleishman with a speech given by Deval Patrick at BU’s commencement.   They were struggling with how to cope with what appeared to them as plagiarism, something that had been drilled into their heads as unethical.

Sadly, this mirrors the corner-cutting behavior that Charlotte and her friends saw in many of their classmates. I am extremely proud of Kylie and Jordie for publishing the analysis of Fleishman’s remarks.   They aren’t going to an Ivy this fall, and they’re doing more than just fine. They’ve gained an important piece of life’s wisdom by surviving the crucible of Newton South with their ethics in one piece.  There’s something very positive at South, it seems.