“What is mom’s main job?”
That’s the question I asked my sons most often when they were young — when they were four or five and their play had turned intensely physical — say, testing a towering slide they had built out of cushions in our cement-floor basement or hurling themselves headfirst off of the living room couch.
“Keep boys safe!” they’d chorus back with enthusiasm, a phrase I had trained them to say and which contained the protective plea I hoped they would eventually internalize.
“Careful.”
“Watch for cars.”
“Wear your helmet.”
“Easy there.”
The list of reminders went on and on, and while the cautions have matured now that my sons are 11 and 13, they continue.
One of the central tensions for me as a parent is finding the balance between protecting my sons and letting them take the risks necessary for growth, between providing appropriate safety nets and trusting them (and the world) enough to let them try things and make mistakes, between guarding what is most sacred to me and allowing them to discover and develop what is most sacred in them.
One of the central tensions in many great schools is the same.
We all want to provide safe learning environments for kids. And as we know from our own life experiences and a decade of cutting-edge brain research, ideal learning happens when we feel physically and emotionally safe.
When Miss Hartsema, my kindergarten teacher at Sunset Lake Elementary School, got down on her knees to welcome me to school and, with patient and radiant kindness, helped me believe that I could indeed spend three-and-a-half hours away from mom and home, she not only launched my formal education, she provided me with a template for the emotionally safe classroom. She taught me that powerful learning environments (pre-school through graduate school) are infused with compassion, and are marked by guidance, scaffolding, and support.
But it was Mrs. Bjork, my no-nonsense first-grade teacher, by asking me — the shyest child in the room — to be the Gingerbread Man in the class play, who offered me the template for growth.
In February of my first year as a teacher, I accompanied seven 15-year-olds on a six-day paddling trip into the Everglades. Organized by Outward Bound, the experience was rigorous and life changing. On day three, having misread the laminated topographical maps that we were using to navigate the Ten Thousand Islands, we paddled from 8 am to nearly midnight. The charm of the trip diminished as the night wore on, as the spider webs thickened, as the student in the bow of my canoe paddled more and more infrequently. I was 22 years old, I hadn’t showered in 72 hours, and I ached from head to foot. But taking my cue from our guides, a couple of intrepid outdoorsmen in their late twenties who whistled softly and occasionally waved their flashlights into the mangroves, I kept paddling.
As we closed in on our destination, a tiny sand-flea-ridden island, a few of the students started singing. They had paddled for 15 hours — they were sunburned, dirty, disoriented, and nearly numb with exhaustion — but something school related had finally tested their endurance, and they had learned a profound and validating lesson about themselves. It has been more than two decades since that experience, and I’ve shared a lot of healthy risks with students since, but when I catalog the most memorable, that one tops the list.
My colleague, Missy Simonds, who played ice hockey in high school and at Yale, tells her seventh-grade students that they need to get “out on their edges” when they write poetry.
“If you stay vertical on the blade,” she tells them, “you aren’t really skating; you are walking with ice skates on your feet.”
“You have to lean out onto the blade,” she continues. “You have to risk falling in order to gain speed and dexterity.”
Missy’s classroom is enormously safe. Her students feel well known and protected and loved. But like Mrs. Bjork and all truly effective educators, Missy helps her young students to use that platform of safety as a springboard for taking healthy risks. She helps them recognize that powerful learning happens when they get closer to the ice, when they are out on their edges, when the adrenaline starts flowing, and the real skating begins.
When my older son, Liam, started kindergarten, my husband and I were both amazed by the quarterly fun runs his school hosted. The entire school community — faculty, staff, students, and parents — would run a one-mile loop in the neighborhood streets before the school day began.
“Aren’t they worried that some kid will get hit?” I questioned. “What about the kids that are out of shape? Do the teachers mind being sweaty all day? What kind of exposure are they risking?”
Both my sons have now graduated from that courageous K–5 school where they ran happily for eight collective years. No one was ever injured, no one ever collapsed from heat stroke, no parent ever signed a medical release form, no one ever got sued. Big kids helped little kids, moms and dads ran alongside teachers and each other, older residents of the neighborhood smiled and waved, and the whole simple enterprise taught the value of risk-taking.
When Liam was in sixth grade, my husband and I, having heard that the middle school drama teacher was phenomenal, encouraged him to try out for the school play. Cast in the tiny role of Peter in Romeo and Juliet, Liam attended so many lengthy rehearsals that we feared he wouldn’t make it through.
“He’s going to get sick!” I despaired. “What is this, the Royal Shakespeare Company?”
But when we saw the performances, and witnessed the astonishing quality of the production, I got it: in asking these middle school students to take a very steep risk, the director had given them a kind of gift. The play was so good that I could barely believe the performers were kids.
A few years ago, eager to repeat my formative experience with Outward Bound, I signed up for a weeklong backpacking course for adults in the Colorado Rockies. Beginning in Leadville where we got to know one another, acclimated to the elevation, and completed a ropes course, we hiked for six days in the Collegiate Peaks.
Before I even arrived I knew that this entire experience represented a risk: I was leaving my family and the comforts of home to bond with a dozen strangers at 13,000 feet while lugging a 50-pound pack. The night before I flew to Denver, when my husband and I checked weather.gov and realized that heavy rains were forecast in the area throughout the week, I nearly wept with anxiety.
“What have I gotten myself into?” I wondered.
But then I remembered: this was the same feeling I had experienced the year before when I had applied to be department chair, the same feeling I had experienced two years prior when I flew to Dallas to attend a leadership conference and to Connecticut to attend an aspiring female administrators’ workshop, the same feeling I had experienced three years prior when I helped my school launch an experiential mini-term, the same feeling I had experienced four years prior when I said yes to co-leading our accreditation self-study.
In other words, I was once again out on my edges. And as soon as I completed the ropes course, and hefted the pack, and figured out how to tie a slip knot, and rappelled down Turtle Mountain, and sang on the trails, and managed the solo, and summited the peak, and hiked along the ridge line, and bonded with the strangers, I knew: this gut-tangling place that requires a courageous leap to navigate is where learning happens, where real growth occurs.
This past May, I spent three days down at Drey Land, my new school’s outdoor property in the Ozarks, with 50 ninth-graders and their three biology teachers. Because I spent the year eating lunch, family-style, at a table with ninth- and tenth-graders, I had been hearing about “Bio Drey Land” for weeks. The stories about this curriculum adventure are legendary: “You have to complete a 100-page data packet with essays!” “Kids stay up all night finishing.” “You never stop working.”
I listened and nodded and reserved judgment. And then I went. If you, reader, are looking for a chance to observe genuine ecology field work in action, a chance to watch 50 ninth-grade kids undergo “intellectual and physical boot camp” and return triumphant to tell about it, you should arrange to visit this tiny property on the Sinking Creek, 30 winding miles south of Salem, Missouri, during the second week of May. The students take 10 75-minute classes in the forest and the stream; they collect and analyze data samples; they work alongside their teachers to test water quality and mark crayfish; they do, indeed, complete a 100-page packet including essays, all the while sleeping in very rustic cabins without electricity.
My colleague Rob, also a new hire to the school who has a background in fisheries, remarked that he hadn’t been exposed to anything like this kind of work until his graduate program.
Healthy risks.
A classroom teacher for 23 years, I have been an administrator for exactly one. And already I can hear myself counseling caution: “Wouldn’t a giant swing be dangerous?” “What do you mean we don’t have a universal field trip form?” “Shouldn’t those seventh- graders be in after-school study halls instead of roaming campus?”
That parenting impulse toward safety and structure is starting to trump the lifetime of experience — both observed and lived — that tells me that kids, teachers, all of us need challenges, need real risks in order to flourish.
Perhaps, as writer Nancy Willard suggests, it really is “safer to be crazy than dull,” or at least, we might amend, safer to be the kind of students, teachers, parents, and schools that are brave enough to identify and then tackle healthy risks in order to grow.