Read the full transcript of Episode 42 of the NAIS New View EDU podcast, which features a conversation with Jason Patera, head of The Chicago Academy for the Arts (IL). Jason joins host Tim Fish to talk about his journey from an aimless 16-year-old to the influential head of one of the nation’s most prestigious arts-based high schools.
Tim Fish: Looking back over the past four seasons of New View EDU, one of my favorite parts of the journey has been the conversations we’ve had with leaders from schools that are doing education in their own way. Schools who really know who they are, who they serve, what they are really good at, and frankly—to quote our friend and past guest, Michael Horn—what they suck at on purpose.
Well, today, I am thrilled to spend some time with a leader from another one of those schools. Jason Patera is the head of school at The Chicago Academy for the Arts, one of only a few arts-oriented independent high schools in the United States. He’s spent the entirety of his career there — three decades. He started as an intern, then a music teacher, then the department head, then the assistant head, and since 2016 has served as head of school.
Personally, I’ve gotten to know Jason through his work on the faculty at the NAIS Institute for New Heads, and he delivered the keynote at the NAIS conference in Las Vegas last year. I have always been impressed and inspired by Jason’s work. And at the conference this year, I said, we have got to get him on New View EDU! So my friends, buckle in. This is going to be a fun ride.
Jason, thank you so much for joining us. I cannot tell you how excited I am for this conversation.
Jason Patera: Man, Tim, just it, it is such an honor to be here and get to hang out with you, and I am so, I've been so looking forward to this for a long time.
Tim Fish: So let's kick it off with the Jason Patera story. How did you end up becoming the head of school at the Chicago Academy for the Arts?
Jason Patera: Man, this is my, this is my best story. So I worked at this music store, a family owned music store, guitars, drums, all that kind of thing, right outside of Chicago. The day I turned 16 years old, I, I did what every kid in my neighborhood with, with a cool mom did the day they turned 16 years old. I got my driver's license and I strutted into work, brandishing my driver's license.
I'm an adult now. Take me serious. And, the, the brothers that owned the store, I found myself telling these three really bold lies right off the bat. I lied to them and told them I had car insurance. I lied to them and told 'em I knew my way around downtown. I lied to them and said I could drive a delivery van.
And so the very first place I ever drove was this place, 1010 West Chicago Avenue. I drove there. I was delivering a bunch of gear that Oprah Winfrey had bought for the school.
Tim Fish: Wow.
Jason Patera: And I arrived there. I walked through the door and I couldn't believe that this was a high school. My high school? Surrounded by barbed wire, police cars. And I mean, honestly, it was never entirely clear if the barbed wire and the police cars were there to, to keep people out or to keep all of us in. It was like a prison. But this place, there were dancers and tutus and there was a jazz jam session right there in the lobby and everything had been turned into a gallery.
And I thought, I am never leaving. This is, this place is amazing. One of the people who appeared to be in charge —and, and there were, there were a lot of really fascinating people—but there was this woman, Pamela Jordan, she was magnetic. And, and I was immediately drawn to her and she let me become something of an intern.
Now, and I should say, I would never let 16-year-old version of me hang out here now. If, if that kid showed up at our doors, I'd be like, get lost. And it never occurred to me to enroll, either. I mean, my dad, my dad was a meat salesman. We, I'm not even entirely sure we would've known what an independent school was, much less enroll in one.
But Pam just started giving me stuff to do and I pretty much stopped going to my own high school and, and hung out at the academy every day. I was playing in shows, I was making copies, I was setting up the sound system. I substitute taught for a class. This went on, Tim, for years, and one day Pam sat me down and she said, what, what are you doing with your life?
And to me, I was like, well, this is easy. I'm going to be a rockstar.
Tim Fish: You were a drummer at the time, weren’t you?
Jason Patera: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hair down to my waist, you know, ripped jeans, all these ear piercings, iron maiden t-shirt, the whole thing. And Pam says, no, no, no. You are a teacher and everyone in this building apparently, except you, knows it.
She made me go to college. She made me apply. And she said, when you graduate, you're going to come back here and teach. So I finished my degree and I certainly didn't want to move back home. So I started teaching at the Chicago Academy for the Arts. This is, this is the late nineties, and I was a, I was a music teacher, then a department head.
She convinced me to cross over into the administration. That must be about 15 years ago now. And since 2016, I've been the head of school. It's the only job I've ever had. This is the only place I've ever worked. Except for that music store in Berwyn when I was, when I was 15, 16 years old.
Tim Fish: Man, that is such an incredible story to think about. You know, I'm just, I'm so inspired by thinking about that trip and that if you hadn't told those lies, and if you hadn't lived out there on the edge and you hadn't had that opportunity to deliver that gear, you know, how might it have been different?
But also what I'm inspired by, Jason, in that story, is the power of people. Right. People who literally opened doors for you, and probably, if you will, pushed you through at some point when maybe you weren't fully ready to take that on. I'm curious about how you did have those people in your life and how does the school today continue, even though they wouldn't let little 16 year old Jason Patera in in the same way.
I'm sure every day the school does actually open doors for young people. And how do, how do you do that? How's that a key part?
Jason Patera: Well, you know what, I'm, I'm glad you said that because I'm, I'm exaggerating for dramatic effect a little bit by saying I would, I would put out 16-year-old me. And maybe that's just because I know 16-year-old me a little bit too well, but here's something I believe to my core, and Pam Jordan taught me that, and other mentors I had around that time in my life and since taught me that. That pretty much all you need to do at any time to change someone's life is decide to do it.
That's it, right? It's not the facilities that changes someone's life. It's not the mission statement that changes someone's life. It's not the curriculum, it's the people. Right. And most of the time, all we have to do, especially with young people, you meet them where they're at, and, and you have this power to, to help transform their entire life. And I think that is such a central thing to our school here. We call it human relationships first. If you focus on the human relationship first, meet, meet a student where they're at, and enroll, enroll the right kids, let them be who they are, and then just walk into work every day knowing that what you do matters and what the kids do matters.
Transformation. I, I don't want to say it's easy, but, but it's often.
Tim Fish: Yeah, that's such a great thing. You know, the person who hired me at McDonogh School way back when, brought me into the independent school world was a guy named Bo Dixon, who's a mythical, long serving head of school. And Bo used to always say to me his philosophy of education was, look, you find amazing adults, amazing people, and you find amazing kids, and then you just smash 'em together and just see what happens. It's that simple.
And you know, one of the things that's so inspiring to me is you do, you take those amazing people, the teachers, you take those amazing kids and you smash 'em together, but you also do it in the context of an academy that's focused on the arts. And you've developed, like what I have found on the website and in our conversations, this thing called the academy method.
Jason Patera: Mm-hmm.
Tim Fish: And so that's the sort of thing that sits on top of these relationships that allows you then to do this, this kind of other part of the transformational equation. Amazing people, amazing students, amazing adults, and this academy method. Tell me more, tell us more about that academy method.
Jason Patera: Yeah. I'd love to. This, this is, we talk about this all the time. We have visitors from all over the world all the time. And because our alums are all over the world doing awesome things and very visible things all the time. So people want to visit this school and they ask us, how do you do what they do?
And they show up. And our, our building is 130 years old and, and it is, it's not stainless steel and concrete and everything's old and, and our budget is strained to the max. But we transform these lives at the school. Around that time, we found ourselves feeling a lot of pressure to develop a values statement.
People would say, you need to, you need to write down your, your, your values. You need to write down your philosophical goals. And we bristled with that partly because it's a building filled with iconoclasts who bristle at anything that is typical or conventional anywhere else. But the other thing that we're frustrated by is that so many values statements, they're just identical from school to school to school. You could switch up the names of the school and never tell what school is what.
And I mean this as no criticism to people doing the hard work of laying out the values, of laying out the philosophy. But sometimes these values statements are so obvious that they might as well be like, well, here at such and such school, we don't hit the kids. Right. And yes, of course, of course you don't hit the children. So we decided though, in this project, we wanted to try to write down what we knew mattered to us. So I stole a page from Google, and it was develop a document of 10 things that we know to be true. And we revisit this every year.
We get into arguments about this, the feelings get hurt about the language around this. We struggle with, is this really true? Is this an aspiration? Is this, is this actually what we do? And so this list is about, oh, maybe it's seven or eight things that, that is the academy method, things that we do that result in this awesome stuff happening.
Tim Fish: Give me some examples of what's on, what's currently on the list.
Jason Patera: Yeah. So, so I could talk all day. This is my favorite thing in the world. So the first one is academic study and arts training are co-curricular. That means that neither one is more important or less important than the other one. Yes, you have a huge calculus project due. Yes, Shakespeare opens on Friday night.
Both are important. No one gets to say, well, Johnny's getting a D in math, so we're going to pull him out of the play. And, and no one gets to say, look, I'm not going to go to college for the arts. I've decided I want to go into engineering. So can I, can I back off on ballet this semester?
Well, no, the answer is no. Both of those things are equally important, but we call the relationship reciprocal. So what we don't do, much to the, to the frustration of visitors who come inside. We don't use, for example, geometry to teach dance. And we don't use dance to teach geometry. We take the stance that geometry is beautiful and important all by itself. And so is ballet, and we don't need one or the other to justify the existence of the other one.
And so treating both areas that way, students come in there already in love with the arts, but our hope is that they'll bring that passion to their academic study. And at the same time, what they're learning in the academic study, well, when they're engaged in this incredibly creative process, we want them to have something to talk about.
The more you know about the world, the, the better your art's going to be. So that's number one. Academic study and arts training are co-curricular. I'll, I'll give you a handful of others.
Number two is environment matters. We really believe that a student shouldn't have to leave any part of themselves at the front door. And the arts community is already a very accepting place. It's already a very inclusive place. A lot of our kids come from places where it's just not safe to be. It's not emotionally safe. Honestly, for many of them it's not physically safe. And here no one cares. No one cares. You got blue hair and no one cares. Last week you were Mitch and now you're Marsha. Seriously, no one cares. How invested are you in this work? That's the thing that everyone cares about.
So at a place like this, somebody who may well have been a target at the school they came from, well, here they're, they're the superstar of the community. And that environment, when you can walk into school every day and know that you belong, know that this place is for you, well then a lot of the junk that's typical of high school just falls away.
Tim Fish: Is it true that no one actually cares, or is it in fact that we do care? We care about you. What we don't care about is those external markers.
Take me down more into the idea that no one cares, because I don't know that no one actually cares. I imagine that people care a whole lot.
Jason Patera: OK. That's a really fair point, and I'm going to qualify this by saying I, I'm a middle-aged white guy. I've never experienced any kind of exclusion in my life. And so I'm well aware of the privileges that I have in the world that other people might not, and the things that I might not see that other people experience every day.
But the stories that people tell me when they come here, here's an example. A student will, I'll get a call from a parent, graduation is coming, and I'll get a call from a parent very concerned about the name on the transcript. Because where they were coming from, there's a whole big deal about the legality of the name and what could be printed and what couldn't be printed and, and what photo would be in the yearbook, and that.
And my response is, well, yeah, we'll just, we've got extras. We'll just print a couple diplomas for you if you need, if you need this one for legal purposes. And that one, because you want to put it on the mantle, whatever. And they're, they're, I have this conversation once a year and they're shocked and it, I feel terrible that they've come from a place where the bureaucracy is such, or the rules are such, that nobody's able to maneuver around these, these ironclad, but also really upsetting or exclusionary practices. That for me, it's like, well, does anybody actually care what name is on your diploma? We'll print two.
We'll print three. We've got the extra paper.
Tim Fish: So that's so interesting because there it's like, we don't care about what name's on because we care so deeply about you and what you're really trying to accomplish. And that, for me, that's just a really powerful piece because I think, what I've known from the school is that you do care very, very deeply.
You know, one of the other things for me is this idea of when, when the school, sort of, one of the things is that the school, you know who you are, and through your academy method and through arguing over those 10 things and through prioritizing certain things, you also have come to a place where you're like, there's just some stuff we're just not going to do well.
Right. And Michael Horn, a previous guest, said to us, like, what do you suck at on purpose? Right. And I'm curious about, you are, you are a school where you cannot be all things to all the people. There are people who come and tour, I'm sure, and then leave going, I do not want to have anything to do with that school. I do not want to, we will never send our child to that school. And there are other people who arrive, who tour, who look at the school, who apply, who get accepted, who say, finally, like you did when you walked through the door. I can't believe this place exists. I never want to leave.
Jason Patera: Yeah.
Tim Fish: How important is it, in the design of the school, to know who you are and who you're not?
Jason Patera: Well, it, it's critical because, because there's only so much time, right? There's only so much time in the day. There's only so much money, and we need to be very focused on, on who we are. So I said recently in a talk that I gave at NAIS, one of the things that's important to me is this idea of relentlessly making space for the things that matter most. Now in the act of making space for the things that matter most, there's all kinds of stuff that we just can't do, and one we've been laughing about for three days. Our semester is ending right now. So the, the music department all went to the park because they're going to play what we call sports ball. And, and sports ball is like the catchall of, of any kind of sporting thing.
Maybe there's a ball, maybe there's a stick. But you know a few things for certain. One is that 90% of the kids don't know how to play it. And, you know, two, they're going to be very bad at it, save for a couple kids who are aware of it. But there's no gym here, there's no, there's no football team, there's no cheerleaders, there's, there's, there's none of that kind of stuff. Because you're in ballet for 15 hours a week or something like that, right?
So we're, we're very bad at things that aren't this reciprocal relationship between deep academic study and the process and the product of making art. So to that, to that point, another thing that we're very bad at is we don't have the endless list of, of what I'll call perfunctory resume builders. There's not 9,000 clubs that you only care about because you want to be the president of it, so you can put it on your resume. We, we, we don't have that. We don't have 72 different AP classes, so that your transcript can only say AP, AP, AP, AP, and you can be this certain type of student.
If that's what you're looking for, well, you're not going to get it. But if you want to be on the opera team, we're here for you.
Tim Fish: Yeah. And that's, I think a powerful experience. And so people find you. You know, in, in your keynote address, you talked about this notion of these sort of seven lessons. And I know these are your personal lessons that you've learned on your own journey and these lessons change all the time.
But Jason, can you share some of those lessons from your journey with our listeners?
Jason Patera: I'll give you two, and the first one goes back to that caring versus not caring. We have an idea here. We call it human relationships first. We're a small community. We're, we're, right now we're 120, 130 students.
And by human relationships first, I mean that everybody knows everybody. I know every student in this school. I know their parents. I of course know all the teachers. I know all the employees. Every kid's got my cell phone number. It's not like my work phone that I shut off at 5:30. It's, this is my actual phone number.
And what I promise to them is that I'm never going to be some random jerk in a suit who you, you've only met the day you've done something bad. And you're a teenager, so you're going to do something dumb. When that happens and we have to have a conversation about it, I endeavor for that to be our 40th conversation. So as we have to navigate this thing, we're doing it based on a human relationship and not one of the title that I have or the role that you play in the school.
Human relationships first, and that's what I learned from Pam all those years ago, that Pam didn't size me up by, by my hair or my attitude, but let me get to know you as a human being first, and how can I respond to you as a human being? So that's a big deal to me, and it's not easy to do. Other principals will always say to me, well, how do you have the time to, you know, learn who everyone is, and how do you have the time to communicate like that?
Well, the answer is, I don't. But the other answer is, to that, I don't have time to do anything else, because that's the number one thing, to cultivate those relationships. And I'll add, it's not just me and everyone else, it's everyone interacting with everybody else on this human relationship. So that's a huge priority to me.
The other one that, that I say often, and this gets me into trouble sometimes, so maybe we can talk about this for a minute, but this idea that compliance is not the same thing as magic. And we can't get to magic—you can't legislate magic. You can't legislate community. You can't, you can't set up a bunch of check boxes and, and that magically becomes something transformative.
So, I've had the experience of, for example, a, a teacher doesn't get their grades in on time or, or something like that. And I've had this experience of administrators calling for blood, three strikes and you're out. Right. You've gotta get rid of this guy because, and, and I think, this person's the greatest teacher I've ever known. This person has personally, personally been the reason that 15 students in the last 10 years have gone to Juilliard. No one cares if they turn in their grades on Tuesday versus Monday. It's a, it's a false rule.
And, and so those kinds of, I'm always on the lookout for things that are like rules for the sake of rules. Rules for the sake of control, or with students, what we'll call prove your love work. The, there's no real value to this thing, except you're going to do it because I told you to. And that erodes so much of what I think is special about this place.
So, here's where I get into trouble. When I say compliance is not the same thing as magic, I am not saying we shouldn't be aware of mandated reporter laws. I'm not saying that we should ignore gap accounting practice. No, of course we have to do all those things, but I'm also saying that you can't make it a rule to have a great community. You can't make it a rule to be magical in the classroom. It, it doesn't happen like that.
And if you try to wield too much control, you might get compliance. In fact, you probably will, to the heads of school out there, I mean, you're the head of school. If you wanted compliance, you ought to be able to get it. You're the boss. But oftentimes that level of compliance happens at the expense of magic. And that’s what I want.
Tim Fish: Yes, yes. It's so powerful, and I think you're right on. You know, we, we've talked in other past episodes of this podcast about this idea that, how do we design a classroom experience to unlock the magic that is resident in young people? What does it look like to create that space? Right? And what we've often found is that it's about the magic of the design.That the educator has to design really well, right?
It's interesting for me because content comes into that as well, right? So I had this opportunity when I was at McDonogh to teach pretty much every year in one way or another, to teach middle school kids something. Whatever we needed, I ended up teaching it. And what I found, one year I taught history and I didn't know, I mean, I know U.S. history, we don't know, like, not like a specialist in U.S. history, right?
And so I went in really apprehensive about lecturing on U.S. history because I felt like I was weak in that area. So what did I do? I designed a whole bunch of super engaging stuff for kids. They ended up loving the class. And so what I would say is, do we want history teachers who don't know history? Well, no, of course not.
But I would also say the more history you know, the harder it is to design to get out of the way. Right? And I don't know if that's true. I wonder what your thoughts are on that, but my gut is that's when I go, I just know so much, I just want to tell you. And in the telling, that's where I lose that magic.
Jason Patera: You know what, that, that makes me think of, of something I talk a lot about. So I went to, I went to a very famous music school in my late teens and early twenties and had at the time what I thought was the, the ultimate privilege of studying with some very famous people. And I talk a lot about what I call famous teacher syndrome, where you go into your piano lesson, you go into your arranging lesson, you go into your composition lesson, and your teacher is somebody that you've seen on the cover of magazines and you think, this is amazing.
This is incredible. I'm about to get a lesson from a famous person, and what ends up happening is that famous person, who is operating at the pinnacle of ability in that craft, has no idea what it feels like to be me, and they have no idea what it feels like to not be able to do something.
Tim Fish: Yeah.
Jason Patera: And, and oftentimes those people turn into terrible teachers because either they never had to get from step A to step Z, or they don't remember getting from step A to Z because it was 30 or 40 or 50 years ago.
So they, they tend to say, well, here's how I, I, you know, I do some things. I move my hands and this music comes out. And I thought, wow, tuition is like, at that time it's like 50 grand a year for like, so I, you know, I don't want to say that hypocrites make the, the best teachers, but, but certainly if you know what it feels like to not know something, if you can remember that and you have the expertise on connecting with people. If you have that expertise on connecting with people, well, the content, the, the content falls into place.
That's the least important thing. Right? So it's the design and the connection. OK. And what are the facts that I need to get across? OK, well, you know, we're going to get those across. In the arts, maybe this is self-evident in the arts, but it's the only environment I've ever known. But this idea of magic in the classroom, there's no art that is just the sum of we hit these 15 things on the rubric, so now it's great art. It, it would never work that way. So the fun thing has been seeing how this can expand things outside of the arts, and it often translates very, very well.
Tim Fish: You've been so kind to send me videos of the work you all are doing, examples of a show that the students did, and when I see it, I mean, I'm blown away. Like the quality of what is coming out of the academy is striking. There are times when I watch it and I'm like, this is high school students doing this? Right? So in order to get there, one of the things that you've talked about that you're obsessed with is relationships first.
Jason Patera: Yeah. Yeah.
Tim Fish: What other things are present at the academy that allow you and the students and the, and the staff to get to the quality that I see on those videos? Because it, it's, it's crazy what is, what is happening at the school.
So what do you have to be obsessed with as a school to unlock that potential in students?
Jason Patera: I'll give you a couple of things that, out of our academy method that we think about every single day that I think leads to this. The first thing is this credo, hire experts and then give them the authority and the autonomy to be the experts. And I don't just mean content expert, but oftentimes you, you're an expert in ballet, and you're an expert in, in creativity, and you're an expert in, in developing and forging relationships with kids. Great. OK. You are hired. Now I'm going to get out of your way. I'm not going to micromanage your curriculum. I'm not going to micromanage your department. You know more about film than I do. You know more about sculpture than I do. You know more about ballet. Here's the keys. Go make magical things happen. So giving our teachers a tremendous amount of authority, hire the right people and then give them the keys, is critical to that.
A next thing that's really important to us, we say this a lot, expose young people to challenging material, high expectations, and critical feedback. We meet more and more, more and more young people and we're, we're grades nine through 12. We, we meet so many more ninth graders these days where nobody has ever told them, eh, this is OK, this is OK. And many of our kids, they were the best at whatever in this school that they came from.
And now here, well there's, there's 20 people just like them. And so we believe that, that young people are capable of so much more than society often gives them credit for. So we don't do watered down plays. We don't do the teen version of whatever. We don't read sanitized novels. There's, there's a lot of artwork that requires real, real struggle, real grappling with this work. And that's important. That's what art is for. And part of that process is critical feedback. That when it's not good, somebody's going to tell you it's not good. And, here's how to make it better. And then the, the next thing that I want to add, the last thing I'll say about this is, here's a thing I'm obsessed with.
We say: process matters and so does the product. We see a lot of people who have a lot of experience of one or the one or the other. Here's a great example. Somebody enrolls, they come on their first day and they're, they're a child prodigy. They have always been the best since they're four years old. They've been incredible at this thing that they do, but they've never known, they've never learned how to learn. So they have no process. All they have is product, but their process is, is oftentimes really bad and, and that can be very dangerous because one day you're not going to be a child prodigy, and one day you're going to have to learn, how do I get 5% better?
The other thing we hear a lot is somebody saying, well, we see this at a lot of schools that might have a huge production budget, so they're going to do a big show. They've got a production budget of $50,000 or whatever it is, and the entire process is compromised so that they can have a great show on Friday night. Maybe no one really learns anything in the process. All eyes just be like, let's make it to opening and make it great. And so, so you've got a great product, but not necessarily a great process.
And then finally, it can go the other way. You can, you can spend a whole bunch of time on something. You can spend two months developing something, working super hard, staying up all night. And it's still, it's still not good. Well, you probably learned something in the process, but we want to prize both. So we're looking for results in that process and we're looking for results in the product.
Tim Fish: I think so often when we, in our schools, we have found ourselves generally on this, fixated on this idea of rigor and excellence and what rigor looks like and what excellence looks like. And then we've, we've kind of put it around lots of homework. Lots of exams, lots of, you know, particular kinds of academic products. What I want us to do, though, is create an environment when the student has ownership, when the student cares deeply about the work, when the student wants nothing more than to have a place to show the evidence of their deep learning and true potential, and they know that the community believes in them. The work is rigorous to get there. And boy, you talk about joy when you have the event or you show your work or you publish your findings. It's unbelievable.
Jason Patera: I believe that all growth requires some level of discomfort. And there's such a, there's such momentum around the idea of people not being used to discomfort, or there might be parents trying their best to remove anything that's uncomfortable for their kids in life, and that's not productive.
But on the other side of it, just assigning 42 pages of homework, well, just because it's uncomfortable doesn't mean it leads to growth.
Tim Fish: Yes. Yes. That's it.
Jason Patera: And you know, like there, there's a beauty in the arts. If, if you've gotta get on stage on Friday night and play some Beethoven or some John Coltrane, you either know it or you don't. And, and there's a certain, there's something present in that demonstration of knowledge that students in the arts, they learn how to learn things. They learn how to learn things really deeply. And you use the word joy. There is a true joy in that. It's not easy. It's not easy to spend 20 hours a week alone in a practice room, shedding the same passage over and over and over again, or you're at the barre for three hours a day, not the bar down the street, the barre in the ballet studio. You're at the barre for three hours a day really working on the, on this movement. It's not easy. It's, it's hard and it's often really lonely, but the joy that is present in the product leads to so much joy in that process.
And so that's what leads to a, a really fun phenomenon at our school. One, one of the hardest parts of my job, it sounds like a sales pitch, but it's really not. One of the hardest things for us to do is to get the students to leave. So the end of the day comes and we lie to them, Tim, we lie to the children and we say, we say the school closes at six o'clock. It shuts down. Everyone goes home, like, we're locking up, you, six o'clock. You gotta be out. We pay the staff, security in the front desk. We pay them to seven, until seven o'clock. Because it takes that long to get the students to leave.
And it's not like they're just hanging out playing video games or doing bad things. They're, they're holed up in, in the, in the recording studio, laying down some tracks. They're in the practice room. They've fallen asleep at the piano because they've been working for four and a half hours and they're exhausted. And it's that kind of thing where, I mean, I dunno what your experience was, but when I was 16, I was happy to say, I'm not even going there today. I, I might not even go there this week, you know?
Tim Fish: That's such a great point. You know, we talked with Saeed Arida on the podcast. He's a founder of something called NuVu Studio and school in Cambridge, Mass. He was an architecture person and now he's running a school. And his approach, similar to your academy model, is what he calls the studio model.
Jason Patera: OK.
Tim Fish: He based it around an architecture school. He found that architecture school was a place where people slept under their desks, because they were so engaged with the work they were doing, and so passionate about it, that they were like, I'm, I'm just going to stay right here.
Jason Patera: Yeah, yeah.
Tim Fish: And if you didn't close it, you likely would have students sleeping under their desks.
Jason Patera: A thing that I said in my, in my seven lessons talk, this idea of relentlessly prioritizing the work that matters most. Here's the thing where we fail as schools, that thing that keeps the kids in the school, you know, they, they're quote unquote sleeping under their desk because, you know, not because they're bored, but because they've been doing something they're so engaged—
Tim Fish: They're not sleeping with their head on their desk. That's a whole different problem.
Jason Patera: Right. You know, they, we have to kick him out at the end of the day. That special stuff is almost never what we actually measure. It's almost never what's on the transcript. It's almost never what's on the report card. The report card says something like, you know, math B, ballet A, but the things that matter—and to us it's, it's that movie that that kid made last week, that premiered last week, that's an absolute stellar story. Or these dances that the seniors choreographed and premiered in front of a huge audience at a professional studio. We don't grade any of that. It doesn't show up on the transcript.
The transcript says something like dance department, three credits. And that kind of thing, that's a failure of our school, but I think that's a failure of schools everywhere, is that we can fall into this trap of not prioritizing and not reporting, and maybe that means not measuring, the work that matters most, the experiences that matter most.
Tim Fish: And that's where I think the mastery movement is really trying to go. That's where I think the mastery transcript is trying to go, which is to create the way that we show that high quality work, that that becomes part of the archive. You know, to click back on this idea of productive struggle and the, the necessity of struggle for growth.
One of my favorite articles, off topic completely, was one that you wrote for Chicago Athlete magazine, titled I Can Do Hard Things. Tell me Jason, in your hundred-mile run in 20, 30 hours, under 30 hours, if I'm not mistaken, a hundred miles in under 30 hours. Man. What did you learn about yourself? What did you learn about doing hard things on that journey?
Jason Patera: About a decade ago, maybe, maybe 12 years ago, I decided I'm going to start setting crazy goals. We ask our students to do it all the time, make a movie, right? So, so I got really into distance running as a way to explore this idea that I had, which was this.
Most of what we think are our limits are illusions. Most of what we think are our limits, as soon as you test it, as soon as you get right up to it and, and poke at it, you realize, oh, that's actually not a limit at all. And so, so signing up for this ultra marathon. I'm not an athlete and anyone who's seen me run is going to wonder out loud like, OK, how are you not just hurt all the time? My form is terrible, I'm slow. But to me, that was the perfect laboratory to really think about what actually are my limits? And so on that run, that's a great place to really test, to really test, you know, what I think I can do.
And I got, I got 85 miles into it with, you know, some problems, but not catastrophic problems. But the last 15 miles, I learned a lot about myself and I learned a lot about the limits of willpower. I learned a lot about how your soul is probably more important for what you're getting done than your legs, and, and also the power of friends and collaborators in helping you get across the finish line.
Tim Fish: That's right. That's the part also of the article that I love, is, and we'll put a link to it in the show notes, is this idea of how your team, how different members of the team were there and provided different sort of levels of support. And, you're right. Your soul, out there alone the last 15 miles, you know, I mean, I've not done a hundred mile. I've done some marathons, and I'll tell you that, that last six miles, you kind of come up. People call it the wall. You come up against it. And so what is that wall for each of us? How do you approach it?
You know, this has been just an incredible conversation, Jason. I'm just so thankful for it. I'm curious, as a closing, your hopes. Your hopes for Chicago Academy over the next few years, or your hopes for education in general? You know, what do you hope 10 years from now, when we get back on and do another episode, what do you hope for the world of education?
Jason Patera: Well on this theme that we talked about, I'll, I'll close with this, that most of what we think are our limits are, are illusions, for ourselves personally, and for our communities. And a habit we can get into as school leaders is to fall into the trap that school is somehow already defined, and learning is somehow already defined, and procedures are somehow already defined. And we need to figure those out and do them, when in fact we have tremendous power to just decide what it's going to be.
We have the power to decide to change someone's life. We have the power to decide to change education for the better and step outside of these boxes. You referred to these boxes earlier. We can step outside of the, of whatever boxes constrain us. The, the schedule or the curriculum or grade levels or core curricular areas. We're so much less bounded by those things than we think. And oftentimes when we just test that limit a little bit, it dissolves, and then we discover, oh wow. Oh, we can build something really cool here.
So my wish, certainly for my own school and my own community, but for every school anywhere, is to not feel constrained by the bounds of these conventions, 50 years, 100 years, 150 years old. And instead, focus on our kids. Focus on the humans in the classroom, in the building, and then step outside these boxes and do really magical things.
Tim Fish: What an awesome conversation. Jason. Thank you, thank you, thank you for your time. Thank you for your commitment to the community at Chicago Academy. You know, for me, that's one of the things I'm also really impressed by and inspired by, by you and by the community, is your commitment to that community. It is literally the only place you have ever worked, and that is just, that is so striking to me and so exciting.
Jason Patera: My wish for everybody is that they can get to feel what this feels like, being able to do this kind of work that you believe in so strongly.
Tim Fish: Oh, fantastic. Thank you so much.
Jason Patera: Thank you, Tim.