A Gift For Los Alamos

In times marked by trials, tribulation, and discouragement, it is always refreshing to learn of an effort that offers a resurgence of hope for the helpless and a selfless initiative for the benefit of people in need. Bad news sells, unfortunately, but we are now in that one season of the year when editors seem to try just a little harder to find room for a story that just plain feels good. This blog will be no exception.
I first learned of the Children's Project shortly after arriving in Los Alamos on the Central Coast of California. A new friend, who involved himself on occasions in service to the town, wondered if I had heard about the project. It seemed that a group had formed around an idea to benefit the foster children of Santa Barbara county. The idea was to seek a charter and then to build a public charter boarding school for foster children. It would be a unique concept in public education. And it was to be built right here in Los Alamos.
I learned that the active force behind the idea and the driver of the project is a former television series actress  currently practicing law in Santa Barbara named Wendy Kilbourne Read. I fired off an e-mail to Wendy and she graciously agreed to meet me in a little coffee shop in Santa Ynez. I was eager to share my character and leadership education  practices that I had developed at my former position in an eastern boarding school and so set aside a folder full of lessons, frameworks, and scholarly dissertations that illustrated my work. Fortunately for both of us, in my haste I brought the wrong file. Because what followed instead was a free flowing exchange of ideas about children and character education and opportunities.
I learned that Wendy had taken on responsibility for volunteering time with a six year old foster child. She quickly became discouraged by the quality of his passage from childhood to his eventual emancipation from the court system, a journey which included 26 dis-placements. She questioned the need for a life of continual turmoil. She realized the cyclic nature that such instability initiates: the consequent lack of academic focus and achievement, the inevitable narrowing of opportunity, the resignation to a poorer life and prospects. Wendy's association with a local private boarding school might have suggested the 'Ah hah!' moment that sent her along her current road toward the creation of a foster child boarding school. But like any good student, she did her own homework. She traveled around the country and even to Israel visiting similar schools instituted for similar reasons. Each visit added fuel to her enthusiasm. At the time of our meeting, The Children's Project had taken large strides toward influencing potential stakeholders and  raising private funds and had already acquired land. A great deal of the time consuming work was then being focused on acquiring a charter. I was later privileged to witness the fruit of this labor when I attended the meeting at the County Board of Education in Santa Barbara at which the charter was granted.
As The Children's Project brochure and web site (www.childrensprojectsb.org) can tell you, The Children’s Project Academy is a residential charter school that will enable 120 7th-12th grade foster youth to live with passionate, dedicated foster parents and alongside their teachers, foster grandparents and staff, in this way creating permanent relationships with caring adults. And a permanent place to reside, work, and play among children like themselves, a place to call home.
I find myself uniquely positioned to foresee the potential benefits to both the Gown and the Town. Around me in my little community within a community in Los Alamos live refugees from a nearby town of similar size now advanced in the shaping of its character beyond reclamation. At one time, that town would have stood poised to make decisions that must determine the quality of its future. In a land of tourism and a successful wine industry a choice that favored wine tasting rooms and boutique stores supporting that industry is not surprising and probably necessary. But the occasional outcome for the residents, the dark underside of inebriated tourism with its noise, fumes, and filth, is what sent my neighbors packing to Los Alamos.
I grew up in a community that supported a private boarding school and my career subsequently took me to another community enveloping not one but two private boarding schools. In each case the net effect was the same: the economy of the community gradually lifted by the tangential benefits of a residential school in its midst while the quality of life and attractiveness of the town was maintained.  Today both communities are surrounded by overpopulated and noisily gridlocked towns yet themselves remain an oasis of calm, dignity, and space. This is not magic; it is the fact that every town decision is made in some consideration of the young people who live in its heart and the perspective of other young people and adults who will come from other schools and towns to visit them.
The Children's Project Academy is a wonderful and worthy project that appears to have no down side. But as always with initiatives of such size and scope, there remain substantial hurdles to overcome before completion. There will be those who would oppose it and those who wish to diminish it. Now, however, at this particular time of year is the right time to celebrate not perhaps  the realization of this vision so much as the spirit of caring that brought the vision to light. 

Some Say Tomato, Some Say Tomahto

What if you could design a school from the ground up? How would it be different from schools that exist? How would it be the same? What would be the aims of the school? Its mission? How large would it be? What would be the size of the classes? What would be your expectations for the quality of education? For the success of its students?

I ask the last two questions facetiously because, of course, no one would set out to build a school of low quality or one with a poor rate of success.  When one sets out to build a school one does so with a vision. But it may not be your vision. And one does so with an expectation of success. But it may not be your understanding of success.

Businesses differ from schools a very fundamental way. The product of a business must be a fit for an economically viable portion of the brains out there in order to succeed. Schools (and government) try to be a fit for all of the brains out there in order to succeed. But they can't. And so they then decide what all of the brains should be out there. That's why large national educational reform movements don't work. There are many different types of brains out there but the reform usually assumes just one. And there are many different needs out there but the reform assumes just one. That is why when I hear concerns expressed that the United States is lagging behind other nations in science and math I wonder if I can infer that to mean that the United States is surging ahead in other capabilities, such as literature, and history, and the arts? Or even better, in compassion and empathy and caring?

When we as a nation set about condemning the progress of our education systems we must first be certain we agree about the aims of education. And to understand that, we need to understand that every school is unique just as every child is unique and every teacher is unique. What is the fundamental teaching aim of PS 149 in Chicago, or Walnut Creek Charter School, or The Sisters of Grace School in Texas, or The La De Da Private School in Boston? Yes, each will tell you that the school's mission is to Educate the Whole Child For a Successful Life, or words to that effect. But are their aims truly the same? What is the actual underlying vision of those unique individuals who have come together to form a unique faculty to teach unique children in that unique environment? What are the particular driving needs of these students? of that particular community? Should we ask those teachers to stop teaching toward those needs so that they can all pass the standardized mathematics test? I think not.

Lets consider for a moment what federal education reform means. An emphasis on competitive success in math and science suggests a continuing emphasis on left brain capabilities; educating engineers and scientists to retain dominance over other countries in technology and manufacturing and, yes, warfare is assumed. But isn't that yesterday's news? Don't we now need communicators and autonomous thinkers and linguists for a globally connected tomorrow?

In my career as an educator, I have sat on multiple building committees working with architects for building and grounds  development. An issue that always arises is the design of pathways. First, the architect will propose a path design that is pleasing to the eye. Then an astute teacher on the committee will suggest that the children probably won't follow that path, because it doesn't lead where they wish to go. Next, a reluctant architect asks the teachers to propose a path that they believe the children will follow. That is when I suggest that we not design a pathway at all, but wait to see what path the children wear into the grass and then pave that over.  My suggestion was never followed. But it should be followed in a larger sense for education today. Because educational pathways are even now being worn in the grass for future pavement by many charter schools and public school districts and private schools, who can see the direction of education for the future in the needs of their students today. The process of educating is not static or final. Just as brains grow and develop and adapt so must schools. Just as there are millions of unique brains out there, so must there be different approaches to education. And with new technologies and global connections it is happening - on its own - by itself. Children are not waiting for state and federal agencies to decide how they should learn - they are learning and connecting. We need to watch how they learn, where they learn, and when they learn, and then give them what they need and pave it over.

The natural direction of education in the United States reflects this process. The growth of charter schools around the nation is indicative of the varied needs from community to community. A desire for smaller teacher student ratios and safer learning environments and increased use of technology and instruction in inter personal skills and the inclusion of the arts is leading the way. Private schools have continued to thrive, despite the recession, because they respond to this wish list. Charter schools are increasing for the same reason. Here lies the pathway to be paved.

Sorry, Parents - There Still Is No Free Lunch!

The word is out! The verdict is in! The true cause for lagging education in the U.S. has been identified. It is simply, and solely, the teacher!

As education reforms run their course, as political initiatives founder, as watchwords fail to galvanize, and as frustration has increased, finger pointing has begun.

The recent attempt by the Los Angeles Times to evaluate that city's teachers by the level of improvement of their students on certain standardized tests and then (apparently) to shame them into action by publishing the results takes missing the point to a whole new level. Never mind the fact that these tests are antiquated and incredibly narrow in scope, or that success in taking these or other similar tests requires consistent levels of emotional wellness and stability that may not be available to many of these children, or that these tests do not reflect creative "right-brained" learning experiences that may be of even greater value to the child, or ….I could go on, but first, let's consider just one aspect of this attitude: responsibility.

As a teacher of 35 years experience, I find myself asking the same question I have asked myself at some point during every one of those years: "Who is ultimately responsible for the education of the child?" This question is usually followed by another: "Why am I doing this by myself?"

There has been a general abdication of responsibility for educating children over the years by the communities to which the children belong. What used to take a village now takes only an individual, it seems. And now the village is blaming the individuals whom they have abandoned on the front line with the responsibility to teach what that community wants taught, how they want it taught,  where they want it taught, and (worse) when they want it taught. Because even the most effective teacher can not overcome a poorly constructed or archaic curriculum or respond to outdated teaching aims. Teaching is best done as a team effort, in concert with fellow teachers and administrators and parents, taking advantage of the latest gains in technology and neuroscience. The single autocratic teacher in a classroom with the responsibility to shape the lives of 35 or 40 students for good or ill is a dinosaur. It does, indeed, take a village.

It is time to look beyond traditional teaching methods to discover the real reasons that education in the United States is beginning to lag behind other nations. First, consider teaching aims. It is no longer sufficient to attempt to motivate students or teachers with economic goals. The narrow and competitive mission to crank out doctors and lawyers and engineers who can then collect a big paycheck and experience the American Dream doesn't work anymore. Americans recognize that there is more to life than that. Nell Nodding has put forward the aim of teaching toward happiness. That seems closer to the mark. I would respectfully suggest the aim of fulfillment, to learn to become and to experience all that you can, to expand your individual horizons in particularly their most difficult directions, to find unsuspected talents and abilities within yourself. Perhaps happiness would follow.

Second, examine the school wide curriculum to determine its compatibility with neuroscience. It is the brain that learns, after all, and our effectiveness at teaching is dependent upon understanding its growth and development. We are discovering more about the brain on an almost daily basis. The stages of development of the brain dictate the readiness of the brain to learn. Any experienced teacher can tell you that learning happens only when the child is ready to learn, not before. And neuroscientists are discovering that some stages come earlier than thought and some later and that in some cases specific windows of opportunity are presented and in other cases opportunity continues indefinitely.

Third, allow the teacher to truly teach, which means to have a part in the creation of that which is to be taught and how and when it is to be taught. This is the area of the teachers' training. It is not the area of the parents' training, in most cases. Give the teacher a larger part in determining the curriculum and syllabus.

Fourth, supply community support for teachers and schools. Be a part in determining teaching aims and mission and objectives. Attend meetings and conferences. Learn from the professionals what is effective in education today and help schools to effect positive change.

Finally, consider an attitude change. Education should be viewed in the same way we do our businesses. We should be hiring the professionals who supply the best abilities and are the best fit for the job and the school and then paying them accordingly. We should be always looking forward to new paths, rather than backward to old 'proven' traditional methods. The way in which the world communicates, collaborates, and connects has changed and continues to change and schools should be on the leading edge of that change, not protected from it. The way in which we were taught may have been good enough for us, but it is not now good enough for our children.

Were I still teaching those classes...

    In my final year teaching Leadership classes before retiring from teaching in 2009, I emphasized climate change. My premise was that leadership requires the awareness and courage to face reality, no matter how distant or uncertain. There is comfort in residing in the camp of denial, but leadership demands that one arrive there through personal research and conviction rather than by the path of least resistance. My students at the school represented the various views of their parents and while most felt an obligation to consider energy saving practices at a certain level, there was no real sense of immediacy from them. Even the best global warming evidence at hand - the current rise in sea levels, global record high temperatures in the last decade, increasing snow and ice melt - was insufficient to stir thoughts beyond typical 8th and 9th grader momentary earnestness.

    Were I still teaching those classes, I would now be revisiting the topic with the much more dramatic evidence from the current year. Few of my former students are likely to have missed the climate harbingers of this past spring and summer; the floods, the heat waves, and the intense storms. The brain is wired to prioritize threats that are most immediate and logic must be supported by limbic to raise the red flags that cause us to elevate such concerns in our memory centers. I believe I would now have their full attention.

    Were I still teaching those classes, I would describe in detail the disasters and catastrophes from around the world since 2010 began. I would begin at home. I would ask, "How many of you experienced extreme heat on the East Coast this summer?" For those many who habitually escape to the relative coolness of Cape Cod, I would remind them of July 7 when at 5 pm the temperature remained at 95 ℉ in Hyannis, Massachusetts. According to NASA and NOAA this spring was easily the hottest January through May in the temperature record (NASA & NOAA). In Mark Lynas' book "Six Degrees" he discusses the ramifications of a 2℉ global temperature increase in the context of the summer of 2003, when averaged across the continent of Europe the temperature increased 2.3 ℃ above the norm. At that time, Great Britain experience triple digit (℉) temperatures for the first time and even Switzerland reached 104 ℉ by August. In 2003, this was the worst of the past but a harbinger of things to come. Inexperience with such temperatures, poor preparation for the possibility, and denial all played a part in the 10,000 heat stroke victims in Paris, up to 35,000 deaths in Europe all together, crop losses estimated at 12 billion dollars, and forest fires in Portugal causing another 1.5 billion dollars of damage. And according to NASA and NOAA, this current year is hotter! And not just here at home. I would ask my students if they were aware of the current conditions in Russia, where they are experiencing the longest heat wave in 1000 years.  I would quote from the blog of the young actor Emile Hirsch, in Moscow to film a movie, who describes the heat and the effect of smoke from the 500 plus wild fires burning unchecked on 420,000 acres of forest. I would talk about the drownings of over 1000 Russians trying to cool off in rivers after consuming vodka. And the lack of air conditioning and other means to find relief in the normally cool but now hot and polluted city. Traveling briefly around the globe, I would point out that in Pakistan, a temperature of 129℉ was reached, the highest recorded in Asia, and in Sudan, 121℉ was reached, the highest ever in that country, and in Iraq, 125.6℉ was reached, the highest ever in that  country. And coming home again, I would mention that the month of July in the U.S. was one of the hottest ever, eclipsing the July 1936 Dust Bowl record temperature.

    Were I still teaching those classes, we would talk about water. While the more dramatic water related crisis portent of a warming globe is sea level rise, an underplayed symptom is the increased intensity of precipitation during storms. A study by the British government prior to 2005 found that once a century floods in that country are by 2080 expected to increase to one in three years, in part due to rain volume and increasing runoff. Too much water at once can be as devastating as too little. I would direct my class once again toward home, remembering the Midwest floods of this summer. But we would quickly travel to Pakistan to review the worst flooding that country has experienced in 80 years, effecting 20 million people from an unusually heavy monsoon that brought 12 inches of rain in 36 hours. Then to Poland, where floods caused the evacuation of 25,000 people, and on to Romania and the Ukraine where 9500 people had to be evacuated. And then, while the heat and wet of the summer still surrounds us, we would remember the devastating snow events of the winter of 2010: the blizzards of the United States east coast, mud slides in South America, and unprecedented winter weather around the world .

    Were I still teaching those classes, I would teach that climate change is real and inevitable, and while it may seem to stabilize in some years, or happen there but not here, change - difficult and uncomfortable change - will inevitably occur. And as leaders, we must stop thinking 'if' and begin planning for 'when'.

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Not On A School Night!

"Not on a school night!"
How often have children heard that phrase over the years? Every parent knows that the surest way to compromise success for young people in school is to limit their sleep. Yet this is precisely what parents and educators are doing, albeit unwittingly.

The problem is biology…aided and abetted by unyielding tradition and seductive technology. While there often may be sound underlying reasons for many of the customary child raising methods and  education traditions we currently employ, just as often the original purpose for our choices may no longer exist; take for instance summer vacations, or non college preparatory courses of study (subjects for future blog articles!). And sometimes new data may indicate that long accepted practices are in reality counter-productive. The case in point: clear evidence suggests that early school start times for students in grades 8 to 12 actually diminish academic performance, a result that is probably not part of the original intention. Research has found that melatonin secretion, a marker for sleep onset, is later by almost an hour for most post puberty children. In essence, a biological change takes place at puberty causing these children to resist sleep longer. It is why adolescents struggle to wake up in the morning and don't want to fall asleep at night.

This is not recent knowledge. It is simply undersubscribed. In November 2006, Mary Carskadon, PhD., a researcher at the E.P.Bradley Hospital Sleep Research Laboratory of the Brown Medical School, presented her findings to an audience of educators and scientists at the 15th Learning & the Brain Conference in Boston. Her accompanying paper had actually been submitted to the New York Academy of Sciences two years earlier in 2004. Dr. Carskadon's findings support the evidence of sleep pattern changes during pubertal development. In fact, she concluded that "many adolescents have too little sleep at the wrong circadian phase. This pattern is associated with increased risks for excessive sleepiness, difficulty with mood regulation, impaired academic performance, learning difficulties, school tardiness and absenteeism, and accidents and injuries."! Work by Robert Stickgold of Harvard University and a host of other researchers around the country is supportive of the science. Yet with the exception of one or two west coast schools which have instituted dual start times an hour apart (students may select their start dependent upon their desire to participate in competitive sports) and high schools in Minneapolis and West Des Moines which have adopted later start times, this information appears minimally disseminated and even more minimally acted upon.

Which is why I was heartened to read a recent Associated Press article describing a study undertaken by St. Georges School, an exclusive private boarding high school in Middletown, R.I. The study was guided by Dr. Judith Owens, a sleep researcher and pediatrician at Hasbro Children's Hospital in Providence, R.I. The results appeared in the July edition of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine and "add to a growing body of evidence" supporting the findings from sleep researchers that biological changes take place in adolescent children that dramatically alter their sleep times. The St. Georges School starting time was shifted from 8 to 8:30 am. The findings for 201 students participating:

    •    55% (increased from 16%) reported a full 8 hours sleep
    •    20% (decreased from 49%) reported daytime sleepiness
    •    50% decrease in first period tardiness
    •    50 % increase in hot breakfasts served

These results are not surprising to me. Students really do want to feel well and be alert and perform well. Young people at this age are characterized by their confusion and lack of understanding about their own physical development. They require our help to establish safe and healthy practices (St. Georges School, by the way, intends to keep the later start time).


Among the practices contributing to late sleep onset may be, yes kids, homework…and TV watching. Not just for all of the commonly rehashed reasons, but because of blue light, that is 460 nanometer light, the light that is perceived by the retinal cells, those photo receptors in the eye. Our circadian rhythms are established largely by this level of light which occurs naturally in the morning and at night (the blue hour…). As Carskadon (et al) report, "Light occurring in the early part of the circadian night (evening and early nighttime) produces a delay resetting response in the (body) clock, whereas light signals in the late night/early morning result in an advanced resetting response". In other words, when my retinal photo receptors perceive blue light for a period of time in the evening, my internal sleep clock will reset itself for a later hour and in subsequent evenings I will feel wakeful longer. And here is the really interesting news…computers and televisions (and video games) emit this same blue light. The inference is clear. The use of these electronic devices after natural blue light occurrence will readjust the user's circadian rhythm to sleep later.

And so the irony is revealed. Because of a natural biological change at puberty causing sleep onset to occur an hour later, and augmented by homework assigned by teachers which must be completed on computers emitting blue light that resets the circadian rhythm to later sleep times, students from puberty onward are now struggling to meet early school start times and increasingly find themselves in a growing sleep deficit which is effecting their performance…and they have been placed in this situation unknowingly by educators and parents! 

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• Teenagers biologically programmed to wake-up later (healthfinder.gov)
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A Different View of Illegal Immigration

Perhaps its time to look at the U.S. illegal immigration woes in a global way and begin to realize that any mechanisms the United States may implement to secure its border with Mexico can only be momentary, finger-in-the-dike solutions in the grand scheme of population migrations in the near future. As climate change marches relentlessly forward and sea levels rise, ice caps and glaciers melt, rivers dry up, and wild fires and devastating storms affect more people, the immigration problems that this country is now experiencing will seem like child's play. Instead, we need to consider the problem on a new philosophical basis, thinking in terms of how to accommodate populations rather than how to exclude them. Once we free our thoughts from a mindset of resistance to one of acceptance we can begin to utilize the combined resources that become available on all sides of the issue. We can begin planning, enlisting the aid of climatologists who are already charting the migration directions likely to result from increasing drought here and flooding there. We can project agricultural changes, such as the drying up of the vast grain production areas of the great plains and the warming up of more northern locations such as Bismarck, North Dakota (89℉ today) or Fargo (87℉) and begin now to plan an agricultural shift. We can take another look at the vast still uninhabited areas of the United States to find ways to make them more habitable for immigrants willing to adopt a pioneer spirit of hard work and creativity in order to establish a home. We can work closely and positively with the countries sharing our borders to formulate a cooperative and inclusive plan that includes all the people using combined technologies and utilizing that greater pool of physical and intellectual resources. 

When viewed through this lens, the growing dispute around the new immigration law of Arizona can be seen as useless and wasteful of both time and money. The miles of fences, hordes of patrol guards, and untold spending in detection technologies to keep our neighbors out is not the answer. Students of history can aver that since its inception the United States has learned and relearned the fact that an isolationist policy is ultimately an untenable policy. So it is now.

Instead, the United States must continue to do what it has always done: welcome the world's poor and needy. And it must do what it does best: lead the world by example. Let's address illegal immigration with planned migration strategies. Let's begin negotiations with Canada to work together to expand the future northern breadbaskets of Saskatchewan and Alberta into combined agricultural centers with Montana and North Dakota, sharing technologies for production and shipping to benefit the entire hemisphere. Let's tear down the walls and fences on our border with Mexico and in their place together construct an array of solar panels and lines of windmills to power future industry for both countries and to pump water inland from desalination plants on the Baja Peninsula. Let's prepare for the future and at the same time create industry, increase employment, and improve the shared economy of the this hemisphere.

And maybe, once we have accomplished this, once we have led the way, the rest of the world will follow.

This is too easy...

It would seem that the Senate has moved on to other issues that do not include unemployment legislation and the expiring benefits for jobless Americans. Nor has a realistic means of support been suggested for the projected 1.6 million people who will suddenly be without the means to purchase essentials. What issue could be of such importance to senators that the very survival of large numbers of the people that they represent is not their top priority? Apparently, politics.

I had not intended to target Congress yet again in this blog about leadership but this is too easy…and too necessary. Who should the Senate be representing if not the most needy residents of their states? In my home state of California unemployment hovers near 12.2%, which out of a population of about 43,310,433 people means well over five million of them are jobless and dependent upon unemployment benefits. Five million people! What could be the economics of ignoring their plight? Will it hasten recovery? It seems doubtful to me.

We all belong to gradually increasing and overlapping concentric circles of community: family, neighborhood, town, friends, colleagues, state, country, business and so on. Often these communities come into conflict and we find it necessary to prioritize one over another. Often such conflicts give rise to an ethical dilemma. In the case of Congress, the conflicting communities appear on the surface to be political party vs. constituents in need. It can be rationalized (and I'm sure it is!) that the greater good can be achieved by success at the polls leading to the institution of newer, better policies. But in so doing, by thwarting legislation of the current administration, these Congressmen are ignoring a greater need and responsibility as leaders, that of the huge numbers of unemployed. Fix the hole in the dam and then talk about whether it is in the right place on the river!

While the need for effective leadership in our country and the world grows, a void in leadership skills and tools is becoming increasingly apparent. As a leader, how do you make the right decisions for yourself? for the world? When looking at the ethical question, should it be about the greatest good, or about the greatest need? The Jones/Covrig decision making model suggests six questions when facing such dilemmas, including: "How important is the immediacy of this decision to other stakeholders?" and "How concentrated will the effects of this decision be on any one stakeholder?". While bias must necessarily effect the leader's consideration, particularly with so many powerful stakeholders involved, the totality of the responses to the six questions must identify the areas of greatest ethical intensity. Once established, it is time for the leader to look internally for personal honor and courage, and act.

Addressing an ethical dilemma can be difficult. But not recognizing that you face one is a travesty.

A Roadside Field

The following piece was published recently in the Santa Ynez Valley News and is therefore copyrighted. As a consequence I must rescind my usual policy of open permission to use it. RLG
Have you chanced to drive to Los Alamos this spring? If you had, and if you had come in from the southern exit off the 101, you would have braked at the stop sign. And there as you paused you would have noticed a tree just across Bell Street and behind it a small field glorious beyond all joy with brilliant color. Late last fall, as the days grew shorter and darker , the tree was unremarkable and the field, a vacant lot really, was barren and colorless and scruffy with stubbly grasses. When night fell it was very dark there and on one of those dark nights a young man walking home near that tree and that field was struck by a carelessly driven car  and then left to die. I learned of the tragedy pausing at that stop sign during my mundane to-ing and fro-ing. My eye was drawn across the way to a gathering of  sad silent mourners beside the tree. Although I did not  personally know the young man who died there I saw that he was well loved and much missed. In the following days when I passed by, the nondescript tree was attended by various sized gatherings and sometimes songs and music sounded and sometimes eloquent silence prevailed and gradually the tree sprouted flowers and pictures and mementos at its base and as it slowly became surrounded by bright memories and illuminations of past joys of a life so suddenly vanished even the tree  seemed to slowly transform into a younger and greener and more promising memory of itself. But time wins out, and after many more days the visits became fewer and the flowers around the tree began to wither and the lone pumpkin shriveled and the mementos disappeared and the tree seemed to return once again to its unremarkable former self and the field to just a barren memory, no longer worthy of lingering glances or sad smiles from pausing motorists. To  the casual passersby like me the wintry cold of reality had set in and the beauty of those moments past had slipped from our grasp, as so often happens in life. But where humankind must finally let go and trod on, nature was waiting in infinite patience to celebrate the newest star in its firmament. Very early this spring, when the green hillsides first began to flaunt their ornaments of bright yellow and purple flowers, so too, suddenly, did that dusky featureless field flower abruptly, not in patches or in a half-hearted way but as an entire vast carpet of the most strikingly brilliant gold, interwoven delicately with taller deep purple spears, filling the entire field as if preparing an exquisite cloth for the coronation robe of a king. So spectacular were the colors and so extensively did it blanket the small corner lot behind the tree that once again motorists found it impossible to stop at the stop sign without pausing to pay homage to a ground now so obviously hallowed. And as the spring wore on and the  jeweled hillsides with their gold hued pendants faded as they must and when the glorious yellow and purple blanket beyond the tree seemed destined to diminish as well, suddenly more flowers burst forth in a whole new joyous celebration of reds and blues and all colors of the rainbow like the reprise of a grand aria. And that aria continues even  as I write. This is my first spring in Los alamos and you may try to convince me that this rare display is the result of  seeds  and thoughtful planting and that flowers grow in that field every year, but I will tell you that even had a human agent supplied the canvas and the oils used to paint such a picture those masterful brush strokes could  only have come  from nature, and her inspiration must have been the celebration of a newly arrived soul.

If you chance to drive to Los Alamos this spring, you can see for yourself.

The Crisis in Education Revisited

I read with interest Stephen R. Covey's recent piece in Huffington Post (Our Children and the Crisis in Education 4/20/10) and frankly, I could not agree more. The world is certainly moving toward profound change and, indeed, our children are not being prepared for that reality. Nor, in fact, are we. Unfortunately, as I have written in the past in this blog, the adult communities tend to begin to prepare themselves for change first, and our children last. It appears to be an old fashioned, even gallant, attempt to protect our children from harsher realities, but in effect it is an archaic approach to education which stultifies attempts to condition our children to facie the radically changing world in which they must live. Yes, traditional education is archaic.
As Covey writes, "Parents see the chaos, the economic uncertainty, the stress and complexity in the world, and know deep down that the traditional three "R's" …reading, writing, and arithmetic…are necessary, but not enough. Society's present and future needs and opportunities demand increased capacity for responsibility, creativity, and tolerance of differences." Covey further suggests that society needs people who are autonomous, trustworthy, socially competent, and will take initiative - in other words, leaders, and that our current educational system is not designed to produce these attributes. Again, I agree. I agree with Covey's proposed solutions as well. Education today does need to directly inculcate the attitudes and social competencies that Covey outlines and that are currently being taught in the leadership magnet school that he describes. The A.B. Combs school in Raleigh, N.C. has gone about it correctly with full immersion in the ideals, staff accepting themselves as role models, and a whole school positive mindset. The school uses an "inside out" methodology, as Covey describes it, teaching the teachers Covey's seven principles first so that they may live, model, and integrate the teaching into their classes every day. As Covey states, there is no new curriculum. While I agree wholeheartedly with this mission, I must disagree with the procedure. And here is why.
Those skills and capabilities that are necessary for the development of strong character, autonomy, and intra/inter personal competencies are not be taught by promotions, sayings, quotes, and role modeling alone (although such an approach is way better than no approach at all). Yes, the application of these principles in context in classrooms is valuable. A picture is worth a thousand words, and a teacher with the awareness to present such pictures within the framework of history, or science, or other disciplines is a huge asset. And certainly an entire community dedicated to the promotion of these principals is going to experience success. All of these reminders are needed. But the skills and competencies composing autonomy and trustworthiness and caring need to be nurtured and taught.
Character education is all about the brain. The integral traits need to be developed and the skills learned over time, the neural paths established and traveled repeatedly. And to do so requires a curriculum, a curriculum that is carefully crafted to reflect the needs and capabilities of children at each developmental stage. Leadership skills, social competencies, ethical decision making…all are centered in brain growth and processing (after all, what isn't?)…and how and what to teach at each level of growth must reflect an understanding of the brain's maturity and capabilities. All of this knowledge is available. A huge amount of neuroscience research has been done in the last decades, so much that there has not been time to disseminate it. While I believe that every primary and middle school teacher should be responsible for seeking out this research, to better understand what a child brain can be expected to assimilate at each developmental stage and to understand the importance of relevance and the power of peer influence, I understand that time is our constraint. But a prepared leadership curriculum, even a simple generic framework designed to be taught easily by any and all teachers, can insure consistency, accuracy, and sensitivity. In teaching such skills, the empowering of self is critical, and therefore the manner of teaching is as critical as the subject being taught. A designed curriculum can outline specific presentation techniques for creating such an environment.
While much more may (and probably should) be said to advocate the use of a designed curriculum for teaching those self leadership skills that Mr. Covey so correctly declares are critically needed in education today, I will resist in the interests of preserving the central point of the issue, which is that a sea change toward such thinking is necessary immediately, and that the strength of mind and character to preserve our world in the future can only come from the demand that our children be sufficiently prepared with these qualities.

The Debt Will Be Collected

Today I received a letter from a collection agency informing me that they had assumed a debt from my timeshare resort for an overdue maintenance fee. A hefty collection fee was now due as well.
This past summer I moved across the continent from Massachusetts to California. I had done my best to assure that monthly and annual service providers had my new address, but I was not surprised that I had overlooked the fee for the timeshare, payable every other year. I was surprised, however, not to have received any notice prior to the letter from the collection agency. I called the timeshare office, and the accountant to whom I was referred insisted that a total of five earlier notices had been sent to me before the collection agency was utilized, responding to my plea for leniency by saying that it was my responsibility to have made certain that they had my new address. I was bewildered as I hung up. With just such a circumstance in mind I had arranged for all of my first class mail to be forwarded by a reliable associate. Then, suddenly, I understood. The mailed notices from the resort were not first class mailings - they were post cards. No one would think to forward postcards with images of beach sands and hotels which must have appeared to be advertisements. Then I realized that the time share resort must have known this - I could not have been the first - yet they never sent a single (more expensive) first class notice letter that could have a chance of being received. The institution took no responsibility beyond what it perceived to be its immediate best interests.

The resort demonstrated a lack of leadership with its own most important constituents, its owners.

This year, the United States Congress has acted in a similar way to my time share resort. The divisions that have stalled or disfigured the passage of legislature critical to the health and welfare of the American people did not arise from the interests of the people, but from lobbies, the corporate world, and pressures of partisanship. In short, from self interest. And the global collection agency is on its way.

When considering leadership skills, the capability to resolve ethical dilemmas in a constructive, ends-based manner is essential, particularly for anyone who accepts responsibility for a constituency. That is, the leader must be capable of processing decisions to the benefit of the greatest number. The consequences of such decision making determine its moral rightness. There is a tendency among public officials to rationalize their processing in terms of rule-based thinking, that is, selecting and utilizing a rule that can be applied anywhere. The consequences do not matter in that case - it is the rule itself, and its underlying precept, that is paramount. Where right vs. right decision making is concerned, many leaders satisfy themselves with having arrived at this juncture and are then unable or not courageous enough to rise beyond that point and to assume this next dimension of ethical decision making, ends-based thinking. When too few leaders manifest this capability, the affairs of an entire nation must be subjugated to the short-comings of individuals.

Technology Angst

One week ago, I was attending the Learning & the Brain conference in San Francisco, eagerly consuming every new nugget of neuroscience data applicable to education in general and teaching leadership and life skills in particular. This was my fifth year attending the conference, but there were two significant differences: it was my first time attending the west coast edition of the conference and I was to present my leadership curriculum development process in the poster session. My poster, entitled "The Development of a Brain Compatible, Scientifically Attuned Leadership/Life Skills curriculum", straddled a table shared by seven other posters entered by college professors, learning specialists, and educational business leaders from across the U.S., Canada, and Israel. The mission of the Leadership & the Brain conference is to bring educators together (in this case, all across the U.S. and from 14 countries) with brain scientists and researchers to share the often startling and always rapidly evolving data stream from new knowledge about brain development and processing, with a goal of enhancing educational practices and providing a practical synthesis and utility for the research. But the unstated theme might well be "technology in action", as we witnessed the utilization of state of the art technology for the research, the presentations, and even for teaching. Multiple projectors driven by multiple computers displayed digital movies, animated charts, and screens from second and even third party computers on distant university networks and the web. One session I attended was presented by a grade school teacher who showed how she contacts her students with advertisements in the form of digital, home-edited films before each upcoming upcoming class, piquing their curiosity and establishing a constructive mindset, a technique she shared with us by utilizing several web sites and many ethernet software locations. It was all wonderful, accessible, and useful.
One day ago, my wife's computer suddenly displayed a note saying that it wasn't well and asked to be excused. It then shut down for good.
One hour ago, my computer, the only other household computer, decided to create a vertical band on the display which obscured the exact area where instructions and choices are offered, not to speak of a quarter of the useful screen, rendering it unusable. And so I write this piece by hand.
My personal crisis, relevant in the moment only to me yet so very critical to me in terms of my daily ritual, livelihood, and state of mind, has caused me to reflect upon the vulnerability of a society so completely dependent upon technology for, well, virtually everything: business, pleasure, communication, progress, and personal and community welfare. We have seen the effects of total trust in the 'house of cards' constructs during the recent fall of the financial establishment. Is it then so preposterous to feel angst in regard to a system that relies upon decaying satellites in orbit around the earth and thin strands of cable stretched along the earth's surface and ocean floor, and towers standing atop the high hills, to be our senses and intelligence? When my computer stopped, so did my brain. I had gone paperless some time ago, and now I found myself unable to devise strategies to continue to function. All of my financial reports and bills, telephone and address books, shopping lists, writing projects, client contacts, even my amusements, were now locked away in an inaccessible computer. It required some time for me to locate a pen and a pad of paper to begin writing this article, by so doing demonstrating pure faith that I would have my computers up and running soon to publish it.
According to scientists who study these matters, we have been most fortunate that the past 120,000 years has been a time of relative climatic calm, a period conducive to gradually building our current infrastructure, launching our satellites, and stringing our wires, but a period that, in the scheme of things, is actually comparatively short. That this very habitable period might well come to an end should not surprise us, given that in earthly climate history such a period is quite unusual.
And so I consider that it is very possible that in the not too distant future we may find ourselves, as I do now, trying to remember where we left our pencils and our paper as we rediscover how we managed to do things "back when". At that future time, I will modestly stake the life skills and leadership qualities illustrated on my poster against all of the advanced technology on display around me. Because if you can't plug it in, it doesn't exist.

The Politics of Care

As an institution designed to represent the people (all of the people), the Congress of the United States appears dangerously close to forgetting the sanctity and, in fact, the simplicity of this original purpose. As insurance lobbies, private health networks, and pure power politics delay and threaten to reverse an embarrassingly tardy health care program meant for the people, our Congress, secure in their own health care provisions supplied by we the people, choose to backpedal, allowing the momentum of this historic effort to fizzle and die, all the while claiming (incredibly) that we the people don't really want it after all. Once again, the poor and the jobless must wonder how to care for their families and the Medicare short-fallers (those retired due to unemployment, but not eligible yet for Medicare) must resume their desperate thoughts of moving to neighboring countries where, although poorer than the good old U.S. of A. in most respects, they somehow manage to take care of the health of their populations.
The Nike slogan "Just do it!" encapsulates the actual simplicity of the issue. How often do we make a task more difficult than it really is by layering it with complexities? When the Good Samaritan, that man of contemptible origins, stopped along a dangerous road to assist a robbery victim of higher caste when no one else would, it was a different time and place. But the circumstances remain familiar. There were many layers of reasons for the Samaritan not to lend care to the man; risks beyond the physical dangers - risks that were political, legal, and social. And there would ultimately be no personal gain. But he did it because he chose to do it, because he chose not to worry himself into indecisiveness by weighing all possible consequences, because he wanted to do the right thing. The United States Congress, regardless of political party or personal interests or consequences, needs to do the right thing for the people. In other words, our leaders need to demonstrate true leadership.
True leadership requires empathy, that quality which compels us to visit those feelings that others must be experiencing. Those that lack it must develop it. I recall a conversation with a brilliant medical doctor whose son was my student. When the discussion turned to role modeling, she resisted the notion that everybody could experience, let alone demonstrate, empathy. "My husband", she said, "has no capability to empathize!" Yet the science of the brain suggests otherwise. Except for psychotic conditions usually due to injury or defect, everyone with a normal frontal lobe structure has the capacity for the "sense of other" that is so necessary for social integration. The genes are there, but the neurological pathways must be traveled frequently enough to maintain the awareness. If we don't prioritize this function, as with every brain function, we will lose it.
True leadership requires courage. It takes courage to turn away from powerful interests, to disagree with the party gurus, to perhaps even endanger the life style to which your family has grown accustomed. But I expect my congressmen to be courageous.
True leadership requires foresight. This comes from global thinking, from extricating one's mind from the daily "trees" to contemplate the social "forest". It means projecting forward the consequences for the population of not having health care and grasping what it could mean to the legions of homeless, of jobless, and aged.
Finally, true leadership requires insight, that capability to know ourselves and know our weaknesses and deficits. It is this insight into ourselves which helps to engender empathy for others. I want a congressional leader with insight.
The Good Samaritan's action seemed selfless, yet it was self serving because it was a small step taken by one individual to role model the kind of community in which he would like to exist. If each individual congressman in this historic instance and for this momentous cause would think and act like a leader, he could lead us all toward a community in which we would all like to exist, a community for the people.

Right Brain Ascending

As I said goodbye to 2009, I realized that it was in fact the year of ascendancy for the right side of the brain and farewell to the left side of the brain, after decades of living in that domain. Daniel Pink predicted this in A Whole New Mind when he prophesied that the right-brainers will rule the future. It is a move from analysis to synthesis, from detail to the big picture.

How did I come to realize that the right brain is in the ascendancy? I realized that we no longer worship the scientists.

I grew up in the era of the left brain, when science challenged God. The household of my youth was that of a scientist, an engineer, where every idea, every emotion, was subjected to a form of scientific proof to authenticate its validity. Our world then was a world powered by scientists, held in awe for their triumphs that ended the second world war, relied upon for our country's safety and security in the decades of cold war, and worshiped for the technologies that revolutionized our lives. The left brain ruled. But no more.

Science is now declaring something we do not wish to believe, something that makes us uncomfortable, something that frightens us. With the same processes and proofs science now points to a future that is not hopeful and bright but dire and dangerous. And the only paths scientists can propose to avoid it are too confusing, too uncertain, too uncomfortable, and too late for us to accept.

The left brain, which is literal, sequential, logical, and analytical recognizes the danger that global warming (climate change) presents to humanity. The left brain is, so to speak, "in our face". It will not let us ignore the obvious conclusions presented by the facts. But the right brain is contextual, emotional, and global. The right brain presents an overview, a more distant perspective. It is here that we are finding comfort and taking refuge. The global position is a safer position; it allows us to view crisis from afar and to see an unchanging blue planet in the foreverness of space. The right brain allows us to believe the spin doctors, the lobbyists, and the false prophets. The right brain supplies hope but it does not stir us to action.

What is called for now is not only the hard unvarnished facts perceived by the left brain or just the distancing perspective of the right brain but a combination of the two. What is called for now is a literal understanding and acceptance of the current global situation from the left brain and the empathetic connectivity and a world-wide commonality of purpose driven by the right brain. It is in the balance of our spheres that our best future lies.