Last November I wrote On Teaching, a detailed breakdown of what I think were the essential qualities of a brilliant teacher—the kind you’ll remember when your kids (or even your grand kids) are going to school. This is somewhat of a follow-up to that original article, and is the first of a series of articles on this topic.
Previous concerns
I’ll begin by addressing some concerns that were emailed to me about that post. By far, the largest criticism that I received was that I missed out some fundamental social or communication skill that every teacher should have. The criteria people gave were usually in the form of “excellent speaking skills”, “be a good listener” or “have legible handwriting”. I’m going to address the handwriting issue separately, but for almost every other case, it’s a given. I didn’t explicitly state that a great teacher needs to not only be a good teacher but a good orator, listener, etc. because it’s so obvious I took it as assumed. Clearly, I was mistaken in thinking others would do the same, but now that I’ve handled the issue, I’ll take it as cleared.
With regards to handwriting, I am a firm believer that as long as your handwriting is legible at the most basic level, that is all you need to worry about. When I was in year seven, my parents, concerned at my admittedly horrific handwriting—it was legible—asked one of my teachers at a parent-teacher meeting what the ramifications were and whether they needed to focus on ensuring it wasn’t going to be a continuing problem. His response was that (and I’m obviously paraphrasing, I wasn’t there) as long as he could understand what I was writing, he didn’t care about how neatly I wrote. He went on to say that he was much more interested in cultivating an environment for me where I could write my mental discourse without the added hindrance of having to concentrate on writing better.
This isn’t to say that I don’t value penmanship. Nowadays I can write at what I am sure is very well above the average writing speed of a college student with about average legibility. If I slow down, I can write fairly neatly, but I don’t have a flowing script, the kind you see in older letters or calligraphers write, so I try to make the words count more to make up for it.
So you might be inclined to then think that I believe that computers ushered in an era where people were able to be more expressive and creative in their writing because there is zero barrier to writing directly in your mind. I actually disagree with this. It is unfortunately hard for me to pin down exactly what I find so much more mentally stimulating about writing things down as compared to typing them, but I know for a fact that, at least personally, memory retention for me is far higher if I write with a pen on paper. That’s the reason why I will never keep a calendar on my computer (the lack of a good calendaring app aside), why I will never use an online to-do app (unlike calendaring applications, I have seen many, many good to-do applications) and why I do all of that on a piece of paper. Aside from that, I also happen to love the tactile sensation of writing with a good, smooth pen on high-quality paper.
On the schools themselves
That little tangent finished with, I’d like to present the main focus of this piece: the schools themselves. More specifically, the way in which I feel they should be administered, the kind of curriculum they should look at devising, and the environment that I feel would best cultivate young minds. I’m looking to design the ideal high school, a four year curriculum. I’m going to attempt to make these rules agnostic to at least education systems and curricula, and hopefully the rules themselves are easy enough to extrapolate downwards through the schooling system. I can’t imagine these criteria would apply well to a higher education setting.
I was fortunate enough to have parents who sent me to the best possible school where I lived, so a lot of what I am about to say stems from the fact that my school had a big budget, a lot of open space and a lot of clout to be able to hire who they wanted. I will, to within reason and for the most part, assume that this school we’re designing is fairly similar, but I won’t assume anything is unlimited.
Teachers
We’ve already highlighted what makes a great teacher, so with that set of criteria in hand, we need to hire teachers. If you haven’t already read the original teaching article, I suggest you do so now. Pragmatically, I would assume schools don’t begin by doing this, but for the purposes of this we’ll get this out of the way.
I think that the kind of people we need to hire are those that have worked with students of this level before, but more importantly, we need a way to gauge the quality of the teachers as judged by their previous students. Here’s something that surprises me: as far as I can tell, there is no real push to have teacher evaluations in schools. By contrast, in college, I get bombarded with emails when evaluations are in season. I think that, if not by the start of high school, the most definitely by the end of it, you will appreciate what is a good teacher and what is not. If you do not, then, as I have explained, you are probably not going to do so in college.
So, short of instituting a universal successful push for high school teacher evaluations, what can we do? Sadly, I don’t have a good answer for this. I’m not entirely sure what the current hiring model most schools use is, but I guess that would be the same but with a more stringent review process that looks at recommendations with more scrutiny.
But I’d guess, without going too far out on a limb, that if word gets out that we’re looking for the best, the best would apply. This is going to be a school where the curriculum isn’t the forced drudgery that plagues most others, where the faculty will be surrounded by excellent facilities and minds, and the students want to learn.
One aspect of college education that I think would greatly benefit high school is visiting professors. Can you imagine learning introductory economics from Greg Mankiw, physics from Alan Guth, or philosophy from Timothy Williamson? This is actually contradictory to what I’ve said in On Teaching, because chances are, despite their intellect these guys are probably terrible teachers. But to have been taught a class on M-theory by Guth, despite the fact that knowledge retention wouldn’t been 100%, would have been unimaginably awesome. Assuming this school has the clout to be able to ask for this, the hit to the overall level of teaching would be far outweighed by the boost to the students’ passions.
Students
Obviously the best school should have the best students, so there’s a few things we need to tackle. In judging the kind of student we want, I feel the criteria to look at are (1) the academic prowess of the student, (2) the extra-curricular interests of the student, (3) the scholarship potential of the student and (4) what others think of them.
It’s clear that we want the smartest and most academically forward-thinking students possible for this school. If you’re taking math at this school, you’re going to learn Calc II before you graduate, if you learn physics, expect to have done a reasonable amount of mechanics, thermodynamics and basic particle physics before you graduate. And so on for other subjects. The problem with this is that I would imagine it is difficult to judge a middle-school student applying to our school for this kind of academic prowess based purely on grades, which is why I think looking at the other three criteria helps.
Extra-curricular activities, while clichéd and college-prep sounding, are important. Despite how many times colleges tell applicants this, it is true: a well-rounded student is better than a recluse genius. That’s not to say I’m interested in developing a state championship football team, but rather, a school where music, basic athleticism (likely track and field as a focus) and artistic ability are nurtured and encouraged if the student is interested in doing so. If we do get what will be the next Ramanujan, then we’ll be his G. H. Hardy.
With regards to scholarships, we need to assess the potential for each student. Scholarships are (generally) handed out for merit and need. So we can have three types of student: smart, poor, smart and poor. Essentially, a smart and poor student would attend for what would essentially be free (much like some of the bigger and richer colleges are doing now), and the smart and poor students would be judged based on their respective merit and ability to pay. Obviously, we are going to need a substantial endowment. While this is something that happens over time, I’m going to assume our first few years are covered by that pot of gold we started off with, but as time goes on, alumni would contribute, corporations would contribute etc.
What others think of our potential students is extremely important—we want students who can work great as leaders or as part of a group, students who take initiative and students who aren’t the kind that their peers hated for being obnoxious. We’re unlikely to find too many students who match all of those criteria but we’re looking for the largest possible subset. I imagine recommendations are really going to help here—the student’s teachers from their older school, counselors, principal etc.—because it’s essentially the best way we are going to find out about the student without physically interviewing everyone (obviously), but recommendations more importantly shine light on aspects of a student’s academic life that grades just don’t show. How do they engage in class? How is their demeanor towards other students? Do they actively go beyond what is required by the syllabus? Are they extremely interested in a particular subject but don’t perform as well in it? Conversely, are they naturally talented in a subject that doesn’t interest them at all? Questions like these are going to tell us how to create an environment for each student that is going to maximize their learning and potential.
While this seems like a lot (colleges attempt this but it usual has poor results), I think this is something that can be pulled off. Unlike a big university, we’re going to have a few hundred students at most, meaning that we can have this kind of focus on a student-by-student basis.
Next time
There’s a lot left to talk about, but I want to focus mainly on curriculum and facilities. On the material I’ve already written about, I’m more than open to suggestions, so please email me with what you think, any changes you’d make or if you think I’m completely wrong.
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