Off the Beaten Path

From: bangalore.citizenmatters.in

When faced with choices to make or dilemmas on which way to go, or career options to follow,  or even how to proceed or achieve a particular goal in my life, Robert Frost's The Path Not Taken inevitably comes to mind (usually with a smile) as it conjures such nice memories for me - both personal and professional.

The Road Not Taken  (1916)

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

As a teacher, I LOVE teaching this poem because it embodies decision making and critical thinking, particularly because of the challenge Frost gives us in his comment about the poem:

"It's a tricky poem - very tricky."

I will leave what is tricky for you to decide (and can add it in the comments - let me know).  What I want to discuss is how to encourage occasional departures from the mainstream and the consideration of "paths less trodden"  because as Frost notes, it can make "all the difference." And, teaching our kids to take these weighted risks CAN make all the difference for them - be it in school, with friends, or later in life when faced with even more complicated choices.

The trick is raising kids to critically evaluate choices, especially the less obvious ones, and to feel comfortable taking the occasional calculated risks. Being open to options is important for many reasons:

• It helps us lose the negative effect of labels - the closer we look at other people, placed, things, and other options, the less meaning the superficial labels have.
• Considering paths 'off the beaten track' trains a more flexible mind.
• By looking for diverse options we can navigate less congested paths to similar outcomes - be they physical destinations, or professional goals.

I see so many applications here for this:

• Daily life - in clothing choices, leisure choices, choices in friends, etc.
• Travel - can be SO interesting and informative when you visit places off the beaten path.  I have found gems doing this - no lines, no wait, super food, super products, or super cool interesting people.  Try it!
• School projects - diverging from the obvious makes learning for everyone (student, teacher, classmates) more interesting and meaningful.  Sometimes that means brainstorming and creating projects, book reviews, writing assignments that are different or relate a more obscure topic. Go online and have fun researching, planning, and constructing unusual topics.
• School choices - This might mean different schooling options (i.e. changing schools or homeschooling, or attending specialty schools instead of a liberal arts college).  In one of the schools I worked at there was a really popular third grade teacher who'd been teaching there 30 years- all the parents knew of her and wanted their child to be in her class. But the thing is, her projects and curriculum were old and stale.  The newer third grade teacher had exciting options in his lessons that for many proved the better class.
• College - You may want to rethink HOW you're applying to college (i.e., essay topic selection or writing / presentation style), WHAT colleges to focus on, or IF college is even the best choice. For some of us, college means loans - loans often greater than the value of our homes.  Is it worth it?  (Go to the following website: http://www.collegedropoutshalloffame.com/h.htm for a fascinating list of famous achievers who never attended or did not finish college.)

NOTE I am NOT encouraging kids to drop out of school or not go to college.  I went to college and graduate school, got A LOT out of them, and I am happy that my kids went to college as well.  My two who finished (my last is still in school) learned a great deal in college and were lucky to find jobs in fields of their choice. I do, however, think too many of us feel an unnecessary need to go to college. In fact, research now shows that many college grads do not gain greater knowledge (although they may gain greater networking ability).  My point is to think and explore less-trodden options to achieve long and short-term goals.]

How to facilitate the discovery of options that are off the beaten track:

• Begin early. As toddlers, my kids only wanted us to read their favorite book, and one only wanted to wear green for a while, another always wanted to wear the cap of her 'Flash' pajamas because she would run around the house 'racing' time.  Encouraging different choices even in the clothes they wear or the books you read is a nice start.  [Granted rereading books is actually a good thing as kids learn to anticipate and 'read' familiar words and rhymes, but that is fodder for another post, and diversity is important as well.]
• Talk, read, listen, smell, attend to new and different things all around you.  Make it a point to do this with really new things every so often.  When shopping try a new fruit, read a new book, check out new exhibits and museums, etc. Go hunting for books with unusual covers or the word "slime" in the title, for example.  In short, explore the 'uncharted'.
• Model by doing unusual things, visiting unusual places, driving to familiar places using different routes.
• When going on vacations select one or two visits that are off the beaten path, or simply walk with no guide around a new city or neighborhood.
• Go online, go to the library - search books, magazines, and newspapers for alternative ideas. Read different genres and formats of stories.
• Talk about how fictional and real-life figures might approach an unusual topic or problem.  Be creative in the figures and topics you decide to discuss.  Have FUN with this.  Laugh, be creative, be extreme.  In the process you may uncover some pretty cool approaches. Below is YouTube video marrying Mr. Bean with hiphop. It's fun.  Come up with your own wild combinations together.
  
• Talk with people about anything/everything.  You'd be surprised what type of ideas an unexpected conversation might yield.
• Look at trends new and old.  Compare and contrast what did and didn't work.  See if one trend or part of a trend can be applied to something different (or tangential).
• Brainstorm options (for large and small decisions) and really encourage kids to take alternative approaches.

How do you do this and encourage this for yourself or with your kids?  Let us know in the comments.

Nature of Nerds and Neutralizing the Bullying

I'm a nerd, my husband is a nerd, and our kids our nerds.  We have lovingly joked about it with our kids for some time - even through middle and high school, when it was a bit painful.  The humor and love seemed to help us relieve the pain and create a more cohesive unit.

A few weeks ago our family 'nerd-hood' was relived when my daughter's friend, Daniel, gave me an essay by Paul Graham, "Why Nerds are Unpopular"  (http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html) which started me thinking.

Two weeks ago (http://departingthetext.blogspot.com/2011/10/labels.html), inspired by Graham's essay, I addressed the effects of labeling in and out of school and in adult life.  Today I return to discuss the essay more directly.  It is a powerful, provocative essay I strongly recommend you read. In it, Graham ruminates why nerds are nerds, and why they are so often persecuted by their peers.

The Nature of "NERD":

According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nerd):

The stereotypical nerd is intellectual but socially and physically awkward...Stereotypical nerd qualities have evolved in recent years, going from awkwardness and social ostracism to an allegedly more widespread acceptance and sometimes even celebration...

Why Nerds are Unpopular - Graham sites several reasons for this:

"One argument...the smart kids are unpopular because the other kids envy them for being smart...[But] in the schools I went to, being smart just didn't matter much...Intelligence counted far less than, say, physical appearance, charisma, or athletic ability."

"Nerds serve two masters. They want to be popular...but they want even more to be smart.  [But] popularity is not something you can do in your spare time... it takes work to be popular.

"The main reason nerds are unpopular is that they have other things to think about...books or the natural world, not fashions and parties... Few smart kids can spare the attention that popularity requires....

Graham then takes this issue and looks at it from a socio-anthropological lens:

"Around the age of eleven...[parents and family take a back seat] kids create a new world among themselves, and standing in this world is what matters... Kids persecute nerds to make themselves feel better...People unsure of their own positions will try to emphasize it by maltreating those they think rank below...

"But ...Popularity is only partially about individual attractiveness.  It's much more about alliances...By singling out and persecuting a nerd, a group of kids...create a bond between themselves.

From: facebook.com

What We Can Do To Help:

This is where Graham's essay becomes really interesting.  He blames schools for often turning a blind eye to abuses, and for creating vacuums of empty time and work - all of which leave kids to their own devices - in search of meaning and identity.  He notes that,

"Bullying was only part of the problem...we never had anything real to work on. Humans like to work; in most of the world, your work is your identity.  And all the work we did was pointless [his emphasis], or seemed so at the time... More often it was just an arbitrary series of hoops to jump through, words without content designed mainly for testability... And there was no way to opt out.  The adults had agreed among themselves that this was to be the route to college..."

He then continues by comparing teens today to teens in the Middle Ages.  There was no high school or college - just apprentices. They were not left relatively unsupervised to create their own societies - they were junior members to adult activities and societies.

"Teenagers seem to have respected adults more then, because the adults were the visible experts in the skills they were trying to learn...Now adults have no immediate use for teenagers...[And] the real problem is the emptiness of school life.

The truth, anger, and sadness in these words were quite moving for me and I think we need to take Graham's words further.  For many kids there's often an emptiness in family life as well.  We as adults often have so many hoops to jump through that as our kids become teenagers, we are there less for them.  We are working two jobs, we're busy networking on our electronic devices, we can't find a common time to eat dinner and talk together, and we as parents often rationalize that our tweens and teens are fine on their own.  And maybe we are, but the family unit is fragile and even though our teens need to become independent, they also need a family unity solidly with behind them, continuing to shape boundaries, rules, and identities. 

Potential Solutions: 

From: photobucket.com

• Help all kids comfortably define who they are - what their strengths, weaknesses, and passions are, and what their pursuits might be.  We have to accept their gifts and embrace their differences, and help kids think out of the box.  Maybe we have to remove the box entirely.  [That is what many are doing with homeschooling - quite successfully.]
• Set aside family time - even though they need independence, they need the structure of family time and family rules.  Eat meals together as often as possible, but at least once or twice a week with no television, no phones, and no outside distractions.  Talk, laugh, support each other.
• Create opportunities and diverse environments in and out of school with larger masses, where even the smallest minorities can achieve a critical mass.
• Help bullied kids find and create 'safer' communities in and out of school.
• Model tolerance, acceptance, and self worth. 
• Help schools become safer havens for our kids - maybe creating parent monitors walking outside the school at arrival and dismissal times; make sure there are teacher monitors during lunch and recess.
• Teachers need to make learning more fun and meaningful.  Reading texts and teacher generated lectures must be balanced with group and individual projects, and multi-sensory, multi-media presentations.  Many teachers ARE doing this already.  They are bringing graphic novels into their reading lists, generating meaningful project units that integrate leadership and social skills with learning about our past and present world.  They are relating subject matter directly to their students lives, and are even having kids act out events in tableaus or tableaus vivant ("living pictures") where kids mime events by acting in 'frozen scenes' of history. 
• Help kids, teens in particular, find meaningful things to work on - in and out of school - be it through community service or meaningful, possibly community related school projects:
• Visit sick in hospitals - create songs to sing or scripts to perform (can be school project where the songs and scripts are related to a particular subject unit)
• Volunteer in community food shelters - or have the school offer (occasional) healthy, cost effective menus (through math, social studies and science projects)
• Organize charity drives
• Create and/or clean up parks and playgrounds
• Have the school / class visit with a responsible city official - talk about critical issues facing kids in the city - brainstorm as a class and create community relief projects.

The point is to add meaning in and out of the classroom, to create large diverse communities in and out of school; help all kids find their voices, their identities, and their intrinsic value. Help kids realize that they're not losers - point to Steven Jobs,  Bill Gates, President Obama and other major players and contributors to our society who were (and still are) nerds.  And enjoy Pop Culture's answer to nerds with Revenge of the Nerds, Diary of a Wimpy Kid or Peter Parker and Spider Man.

And most of all, reassure them...It does work out.


And, for some lighter fun... check out:  How nerdy are you?  at:
http://www.nerdtests.com/ft_nq.php

As Graham puts it in his essay:

"Nerds aren't losers.  They're just playing a different game, and a game much closer to the one played in the real world.  Adults know this.  It's hard to find successful adults now who don't claim to have been nerds in high school....It's important for nerds to realize, too, that school is not life.  School is a strange, artificial thing, half sterile and half feral.  It's all-encompassing, like life, but it isn't the real thing.  It's only temporary, and if you look, you can see beyond it even while you're still in it."