AUSSIE

Blog entry posted April 15th, 2010 by Dale Worsley

Here is the story of the wolf boy, who I will call TS for the purposes of this blog, continued from last week:

Having resolved that he wanted to go to college, earn money, buy a house on Long Island and work with wolves, he needed an action plan. His goals were shimmering in the far distance like a desert mirage. He needed to work on something short term, something smarter. (We all know about “SMART” goals, don’t we? Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Timely.) So I conjured up from the magic lantern of my computer a blank action plan template, which we filled out as follows:

I felt hopeful about the use of this action plan with TS because another teacher in the school had been using similar ones with some success in her classroom. She taped them to students’ desks and reminded errant scholars of their goals whenever their behavior got off track, not a rare occurrence, given the school’s mission to educate students with emotional disabilities.

When my teacher friend at the High School for Arts and Business, Bea Roman, explicitly teaches her students about the phenomenon of what she calls “teen think,” her lessons are borne out by research. The nerve fibers that connect the reasoning frontal cortex to the parts of the brain that generate emotional impulses aren’t coated with enough myelin yet, and the signals are slow. This in the average teen brain. The kids at this school had challenges on top of the average teen struggle to reconcile sudden urges with thoughtful reflection. “Think before you act,” was emphatically not their usual m.o. (For more information on “teen think” and the issue of connecting reason with emotion, visit http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/teenbrain/work/, where an interview with neuroscientist Deborah Yurgelin-Todd tells it all.)

Alas, when I returned to the school with a National Geographic article about wolves for my lupus-loving protégé, he was absent. His limbic system had missed a few signals from his frontal cortex, and he had gotten in a fight on the street. He was having to stay away from school because of a black eye. At a recent grade team meeting at the school, a teacher had pointed out that, “For many of our students, our classrooms might be the most hopeful point in their lives.” I reckon so. Indeed, looking closer at his action plan, the boy had mentioned his teacher, but no other adults who might help him.
My take? You have to be philosophical about these things if you are going to maintain a joyous attitude toward your work. You might have to recite the Serenity Prayer a few extra times on some days. Who knows, maybe my having written down the Education Pays chart (see my last blog post) in Rebekah Dillahunt’s room in Amityville and shared it in the New York City public school classroom will yet make a difference, somewhere down the line, once the myelin forms on TS’s nerve fibers.

The lack of immediate success with TS doesn’t bother me too much. I’m down with Zora Neale Hurston when she writes, "I am not tragically colored.  There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul or lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all....I do not weep at the world -- I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife." My version of sharpening my oyster knife is to marvel at the golden thread that led me, TS, and countless others to Roberto Allen’s chart.

For him it started at his church when he noticed the teens there didn’t seem to have a clear concept of the future. He discussed the issue with them, but also carried his concerns into his math classroom, where he created the chart with his students, based on their best estimates of the earning power associated with different levels of education. (Someone correct us if you have better research.) The “clown” referred to in the chart – which I had pictured at first as an evil grease-paint-smeared horror movie clown – was meant by him to refer to class cut-ups who waste your valuable learning time, thereby stealing dollars from your future income.

This is the way the golden thread works in this instance: Roberto is alert enough to get concerned at church, bring his concerns to class, engage his students in creating a document which gets picked up in Rebekah’s class because she, too, is also paying attention. Waking up to it myself, I write it down, share it with TS, and publish it in this blog. Who knows which next vigilant person will carry it forward. For my part, I intend to enjoy following it as long I can see its traces and imagine further effects as it vanishes from my all-too-limited view.