Transcription of Life Lessons, #104
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Dr. Lisa: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle, and you are listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast, show number 104, “Life Lessons,” airing for the first time on Sunday, September 8, 2013.
Going back to school doesn’t necessarily mean returning to the classroom. Bates College President Clayton Spencer and Derek Pierce, founding principal of Casco Bay High School, explain how learning takes place on many levels and how understanding this contributes to a richer existence for us all.
How do we learn best? The answer to this question is different for each of us. Our genetics and upbringing have a significant impact on how we assimilate information. Some of us are visual learners, some need to hear the spoken word.
We are fortunate to live in an age where learning is being made possible by a diversity of creative individuals. Colleges are bringing innovators like Bates College President Clayton Spencer onboard. Secondary schools like Casco Bay High School in Portland are emphasizing rigor, relevance and relationships with the help of leaders such as Principal Derek Pierce.
No matter how we best understand the world, there are people who relate and help us to process life’s lessons in a way that makes sense. One size no longer fits all when it comes to learning. We all now have the opportunity to find our fit.
We hope you enjoy our conversations with Bates College President Clayton Spencer and Derek Pierce, principal of Casco Bay High School, and perhaps find some life lessons of your own. Thank you for joining us.
Dr. Lisa Today in the studio I have with me the eighth president of Bates College right here in Lewiston, Maine. This is Clayton Spencer, who came to be with us on July 1, 2013 from Harvard University where she had been for 15 years. We’re so glad to have you here in Maine.
Clayton: Thank you. I’m delighted to be here.
Dr. Lisa: I know that you have talked about this with various people, but what is it that Maine … what brought you here?
Clayton: I have a typical story in the sense that I’m a person from away who got introduced to Maine through summers. It turns out that the original rusticators in Acadia, there was a big Harvard connection there. When my then husband and I started working at Harvard, there were two alums who had donated houses on Sutton Island, which is off of Northeast Harbor, and donated them for the use of faculty and families.
We started going up to a house on Sutton Island when our kids were babies. That’s all we wanted to do and they wanted to do for any vacation for their whole lives growing up. By about 2003 we decided we’d love to own a place of our own, so we bought a place on Swan’s Island, which is off of Acadia, off of Bass Harbor. It has a ferry, which was important to me so that I could actually get stuff over there without having to drive my own little boat, which I have, but there’s bad weather and there’s other things.
For 25 years we’ve been coming up to the area. All that did was absolutely mesmerize me with Maine, which I find to be probably one of the most beautiful States in the United States from a natural beauty point of view. I love the granite, which suggests substantiality to me. I’m not a kind of sandy, beachy kind of person. I love the fact that you’re dependent on the weather, that people … that there’s a kind of gritty, no nonsense dimension to the people of Maine that just all appeals to me.
When I had the chance to actually live in a Maine zip code and have 207 on my phone and have a Maine license plate, I couldn’t resist.
Dr. Lisa: You like the grittiness of the people. I’ve spent quite a bit of time in Lewiston and my family is originally from Biddeford, which some people, it’s very similar Biddeford, Lewiston, the mill town, and there’s a grittiness to that.
Bates is this beautiful oasis in the midst of this very gritty landscape, and yet what you’re trying to do is make the boundaries more porous.
Clayton: Absolutely. We’ve made a lot of progress that predates me. Don Harward, who was the sixth president of Bates, was extremely committed to community-engaged learning. Which means not simply volunteering, which is great in the community, but actually recognizing that the community you live in can be a partner in the academic enterprise.
More than a third of our students actually take courses where there is an active dimension of working in the Lewiston schools or working with Somali refugees or whatever. You might take a sociology class. That’s a kind of living sociology class.
We have what is known as the Harward Center for Community Partnerships, a big dimension of what we offer as a college. It takes Lewiston from being the other, so you suggested Bates is an oasis and Lewiston is a sort of gritty, urban area, all of which is true, but what you want to do is weave the two of them together. We learn as much from our partners in Lewiston as they do from us. This isn’t a sense of noblesse oblige, it’s a sense of genuine partnership. It’s very enriching to the lives of our students.
The other dimension is I’m trying as a person who lives in Lewiston to just be out and get involved. A group of us went to the Franco-American Heritage Gala this fall. I go to the local restaurants, I take walks through there, I go to the farmers market just to suggest, “This is a place you want to be and want to live.” I found Lewiston both fascinating but also fun.
Dr. Lisa: It does seem to be experiencing a renaissance. It has a couple of very nice hospitals, the river has been cleaned up, there are some restaurants that have come into town which are on par with Portland restaurants. There’s something about Lewiston that just you can feel. It’s as if spring has started and things are starting to grow again.
Clayton: Right. I don’t have a frame of reference to compare. I don’t know if there have been renaissances before that have gone back down, but definitely there’s a lot of vitality now, a very actively engaged chamber of commerce, business leaders, community leaders working on the Riverfront Project, a lot of entrepreneurism, as you suggest.
I’m hoping it really will take off. There’s a sense of beauty and history in Lewiston. If you look at the mills, they are to my mind absolutely gorgeous architecture along the river. They evoke a history and a sort of key part of the building of the United States and who we are. To me it’s an inherently attractive place to try to make things happen, and I think that that’s really true.
Dr. Lisa: You’re an individual who has had multiple iterations of lives. You began with a bachelor’s in theology, and then you went into law. Along the way there were various steps. I encourage anybody who hasn’t read Sarah Bronstein’s profile, which is in the April 2013 issue of Maine Magazine, to do so.
You seem to be of multiple minds about things.
Clayton: I guess the way to say this is I live life from the inside out, so I’m always trying to figure out in any given moment what my deeper interests and passions are and how to actualize them in the world.
I think one of the greatest privileges in life is to be able to do work that has meaning to you, and hopefully has meaning as well to others. In the early period, I grew up in an academic family. I figured the only thing you do is pick which academic field you do. All of a sudden I realized that I was more action-oriented and more worldly than being a scholar in religion would have allowed me to be.
Although I still to this day find the questions there intellectually interesting, I went to law school always intending to use the law in some sort of public education-oriented domain. That’s what I ultimately did and still find myself doing, although I’m not practicing law anymore.
If you just take life as each next step, it can lead into pretty interesting places. I feel I’ve had a lot of luck being able to hop from the rock I’m on to the next rock that looks interesting.
Dr. Lisa: In an interview that you did this past spring with the Bates radio station you mentioned the notion of discernment, which is at least a theological notion if not a religious notion, and the importance of discernment when it comes to giving Bates students the tools they need to move out into the greater world.
Clayton: What is that about?
Dr. Lisa: What is that about? Tell me.
Clayton: Let me take a step back and just frame it a little. It used to be that the presidents of liberal arts colleges like me would say a liberal arts education doesn’t train you for a job; it trains you for any job.
That’s all very good and well, but this is a pretty difficult and competitive world to enter these days. I don’t think it’s enough for us to say, “You just take philosophy or economics or whatever, and good luck to you.” It used to be a sort of point of pride that the better the college, the worse the career services.
My sense is if you look at the liberal arts and what we’re doing, the key thing we’re doing is helping individuals figure out who they are and what they’re meant to do, and do that in community. They do it in a residential community while they’re on campus, and then they’re going into a variety of communities in life. They may marry, have children, and the key things in life are work and love. If you can get those right you can get anything right.
What we’re doing is taking the question of purposeful work, “What are you meant to do?” By this, I don’t mean public service work. If you’re meant to work on Wall Street, figure that out. Let’s help you get the tools, let’s help you have the experiences while you’re at college to prepare you for that work. If you’re meant to be a forest ranger, all you want to do is be outside, let’s help you figure that out, get the tools and do that.
We’re taking a very structured approach to this at Bates. From the moment kids get on our campus in orientation, we’re going to start working with them to ask the big questions. Not what color is my parachute, not how am I going to write my resume, but what matters to me in life, what unleashes my creativity? How can I spend the next four years figuring out what will give me satisfaction in life and how I can make a larger contribution?
We’re going to start that on day one and that will be a process of discernment, working with our students in very structured ways over the course of four years. Then we’ll have a series of practical experiences to make sure that they are filling their toolkits with tools they will need when they graduate, so that I hope we will be an example of a very engaged model of the liberal arts: Deeply intellectual and personal in all the ways that that education is supposed to be, but also providing connectivity to what’s important as an adult in life.
Dr. Lisa: I have my own 19-year-old son. I have the sense actually that he seems to have figured out what it is that he is passionate about, but not all 18, 19, 20, 21, 22-year-olds even do. Some people take much longer than others. How is it that you’re able to engage them to the point where they can even be aware?
Clayton: Part of being aware may be being aware that you don’t know what you want to do. Then it’s the question, take the pressure off, “What am I going to be in life if I haven’t figured that out from the inside?” Help kids to reframe the question as, “What should I do next? What might I like to try this summer?” Just work with young people where they are.
To me, any educational process is only effective if you meet the kid where he or she is. The point of being a small, engaged residential liberal arts community is that we have adults who care, whom kids respect and who are trained to help students work in these ways.
I have a son also who’s graduated from college, but on a longer trajectory of figuring out exactly what he wants to do. The point really is to work with kids in a variety of ways and different models work with different students at different stages.
Dr. Lisa: I would imagine that having you as a mother and seeing that what you have done, your son could say, “She started out in theology, she went to law school, she went into education.” That might be somewhat useful.
Clayton: Right. I hope so, but every kid has to figure out his or her own way.
Dr. Lisa: Not in that he needs to go into any of those, but just that people can change over time. That you may not know when you’re over here that you’re going to eventually end up over here, but you just keep dialing back and figuring it out, and it’s okay to do that.
Clayton: Right, and taking life or problems in pieces so that you can actually not have a concern about where you’re going to be when you’re 70 when you’re 24. That’s my big message to any human being, is take a problem where it is. Carve it into tractable pieces that you can get your arms around, and then take a step. If you bring it down to a manageable size and a manageable time horizon, it gets a lot easier to make decisions.
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Dr. Lisa: In Maine, we have an interesting … it’s an interesting landscape. Having lived here most of my life, and having been a doctor in Southern Maine and Northern Maine and various other places, the county jail, various places, it seems that sometimes it’s hard for people who are well educated to understand other people who didn’t have an opportunity to be well educated, and know that they are extremely intelligent and learned much through their lives, through the hard work, through whatever … working in a lobster boat or work in the family farm.
I never realized this myself, because I just went through and got my education. Everybody around me, we all got our educations. It wasn’t until I got to the other side and had someone very close to me who didn’t get a college education, it kind of opened my eyes as to how much I didn’t realize other people already knew.
Clayton: Absolutely.
Dr. Lisa: Do you see that that’s an issue ever with Bates kids who come in?
Clayton: Absolutely, I do. I think that’s one of the reasons that the amount of community engaged learning we do is so important. Absolutely, it’s an issue.
There’s some aspects of college life that … some of the partying and other stuff that goes on, and then our custodial staff is picking up the pieces. There are a variety of ways that we’ve actually begun thinking and talking about to say, “How do we actually get the kids in the dorms to sit down with the custodial staff and say, ‘Wait a sec. What would it be to be walking in your shoes on Monday morning?’”
It’s definitely an issue. That’s why my message of authenticity and “live from the inside out” is meant to give voice to the notion that people bring their gifts. They develop their gifts in a variety of ways, and they use them in the world in a variety of ways.
I hope that my own children and I hope Bates students gradually come to realize that anybody who is working with diligence, integrity, skill, all of those things, is deserving of respect is interesting, is someone you can learn from. I think it’s a hugely important message and I think there can be stark moments in a state like Maine, which has the kind of economic climate into us.
Dr. Lisa: I remember, as I said having lived here many years, I remember one particular tragedy that occurred with a Bates student and a non-Bates situation. The sense that I have had is that some hope was born out of that tragedy, that it certainly – this death that occurred was horrific, and it shone the spotlight on Bates in not the best way. It seems as though things have actually … there’s been some hope to come out of that.
Clayton: I think that’s right. That was a member of our lacrosse team. I think the lacrosse coach used that as a very teachable moment with the lacrosse teams over the years. We’ve been working very actively with community leaders in Lewiston, with the police in Lewiston. We make a whole lot of efforts to try to keep our relationships with the city not only peaceful, but productive and genuinely mutual. I think we’re making progress.
Dr. Lisa: Bates alums are a fiercely engaged and collegial and loyal group. I can say this, I went to Bowdoin and Bowdoin alums are similar, but I have seen … It is, there’s a fierceness to it that I don’t think I’ve seen from other college alums. Why is that? Why are they so fiercely loyal?
Clayton: This is something I’m very struck by coming from Harvard to Bates, is just how much people care about each other and care about the college community. There is something. I think what I would say, what I’ve noticed is there’s certain campus cultures where the currency of the realm is individual achievement. It’s what I do in my biology course that makes me slightly better than you are and slightly more likely to get into med school.
At Bates, that is not the currency of the realm. The currency of the realm is that there is a palpable sense that there is common good, a sense of community on campus that is certainly equal to, if not more real than the notion of individual accomplishment. It’s a product of years and years and decades and decades of the Bates culture. Culture is a slow growing mix of things. It’s hard to know what it goes back to.
I’d like to think that it goes back to the very principled egalitarian founding of Bates that is just part of our DNA, but it’s definitely strong on campus and among our alums. I’ve travelled all over the country this year meeting alumni groups. It’s an amazing experience and one I’m very proud of.
I’m very proud that the notion that you owe something to the larger good and not just to your own self-actualization is important. The most fully realized individuals are individuals who are also most in community. You know from the medical world the studies they do, the people who are happiest, healthiest, live the longest are people who have strong social connections and know how to give to others as well as receive for themselves.
Dr. Lisa: I know you’re going to continue to do good work at Bates. Is there one thing that you hope will be your legacy at some point, some day when you eventually leave?
Clayton: I have one managerial thing that needs to happen, and then I’ll talk about a broader legacy. Bates is a very strong experience and strong academically, but we have never had the financial resources that other colleges have whom we compete very successfully with. I want to make sure that when I leave Bates, years from now, that it’s in a strong position financially because the kind of highly engaged education that we and other liberal arts colleges offer is just inherently expensive to feed and house and teach students and community. That’s just something that needs to happen.
In terms of what I’d like for Bates to achieve, I would like Bates to set the standard for the engaged liberal arts in the 21st century. By that, I mean we deliver an excellent personalized education on campus in residence. With all that means knowing that we’re working on the total human project with these students. It’s not just what they’re learning in economics, it’s how are they developing as human beings. That’s doing what we do very well.
The second thing is engaging the forces that are transforming our world in education. Engaging technology, figuring out how we can take advantage of some of the amazing content that’s out there, the amazing technique, the things we’re learning about how kids learn. Then we talked before about taking on the question of preparing our students for lives of purposeful work as a core aspect of our mission, not an afterthought.
All of those things to me will create the model of the liberal arts for the next 50 years, and I want Bates to be at the front end of that.
Dr. Lisa: That is a very laudable goal. I’m privileged that I have been able to spend time with Clayton Spencer, the eighth president of Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. Thank you for all that you’re doing to educate our children and to connect with the community at large.
Clayton: Thank you so much for the opportunity to share my hopes and dreams with you.
Dr. Lisa: We on the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast hope that our listeners enjoy their own work lives to the same extent we do and fully embrace every day. As a physician and a small business owner, I rely on Marci Booth from Booth Maine to help me with my own business and to help me live my own life fully.
Here are a few thoughts from Marci.
Marci: Whenever I hear someone say, “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks,” I can’t help but shake my head and roll my eyes. That old adage just doesn’t make any sense to me. I believe none of us is ever too old to learn something new to develop or perfect a new skill.
Learning new things, how to solve problems differently never gets old to me. Whenever I’m working with a client I try to teach them something new about planning, projections, human resources, give them a fresh perspective on their business or how to be more efficient in one area so they can focus greater effort on another.
The next time you hear that old dog thing, shake your head too and remember you’re never too old to learn something new.
I’m Marci Booth. Let’s talk about the changes you need, BoothMaine.com.
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Dr. Lisa: My mother has been a teacher in the Greely school system for many years, so it has been that I have heard at the dinner table stories of what it’s like to be an educator. Stories of what it’s like to be an educator in this day and age, which I think is pretty interesting. Kind of similar to stories I’ve heard around the dinner table, me and my doctor brothers and sisters, about what it’s like to be a doctor in this day and age.
We’re in this huge time of transition when it comes to education, medicine, a lot of different fields. It’s really great to be able to spend time with people who don’t mind transition, and in fact embrace it. One of these people is Derek Pierce, who is the founding principal of Casco Bay High School for Expeditionary Learning, right here in the Portland area. Thanks for coming in.
Derek: Thank you for having me.
Dr. Lisa: Expeditionary learning? That’s something in it of itself. What is that?
Derek: Yeah. It’s a national school reform movement. There are about 160 schools. It takes that idea … actually it’s an organization that’s connected to Outward Bound originally. About 25 years ago, the folks who were involved in Outward Bound said, “What if we applied what we know about how kids learn best in the wilderness to schools?” Meaning, having kids collectively take on great challenges and doing individually things, I never thought they could do, not just in a wilderness setting but do that in an academic setting.
The movement has sprung from there. King Middle School in Portland is one of the founding schools of expeditionary learning. Because of their success, the movement was interested or the organization was interested in expanding in Portland, and Portland was interested in expanding as well.
Dr. Lisa: Why do kids learn better in this way?
Derek: There’s no one way for certain to learn, but I do think this is a means of getting kids to do their personal best that works for our full range of kids. I think it’s because the learning is integrated. The kids see that it’s relevant, that it matters that they’re doing work that’s not just for school or for their teacher, but the world and for themselves. It tends to get them excited both in heart and head, and I think we find when kids are as passionate about something as they are intellectually curious, they tend to bring forth things that surprise even themselves.
I think we spend a lot of time on community and getting to know kids well, so that they feel valued and they feel safe to be who they are. That also enables many kids to go places they didn’t think they could have intellectually or interpersonally even.
I think it’s an emphasis on what we call our three R’s, which are Relevance, Rigor and Relationships. I think a lot of schools are good at maybe one of those things or two of things, but it’s really, really difficult to hold each of those values as paramount. That’s what we strive to do anyway, over the last nine years now.
Dr. Lisa: Give me an example of a child who engaged in expeditionary learning, and what they did and what the outcome was.
Derek: Yeah. Maybe I’ll talk a little bit about our junior curriculum. One of the things I think that’s great about expeditionary learning is that it’s for the all. It isn’t for just this kind of kid or that kind of kid. The curriculum that we do is what’s called heterogeneously grouped. We don’t track students. We want to push all students to go farther than they thought they could go.
In our junior curriculum for instance, we organize … and it’s US history, English, chemistry, typically Algebra II or pre-calculus, so typical course matter but how it comes together is perhaps what’s unique. The organizing question for the year is, “How do we resolve our dependence on fossil fuel?” The kids first do a case study. This past year, they did a case study on coal mining in West Virginia. Then they each picked an aspect of the energy crisis that is of interest to them. Some kids researched thorium nuclear reactors and other kids algae fuel cells.
Then they each had to develop what we call a white paper, like a policy brief that would be given to policy leaders. Then they developed a presentation which they presented as part of an energy symposium to local city councilors, people in the energy industry, experts in the community. They had to present not just what they know but what do they propose happen. Then we had a small grant process where some people are trying to go further with those ideas.
There was for instance a student that was writing about what should be the insurance … how we should deal with insurance after natural disasters given global warming, given that people who live by the coast are more likely to get ravaged, and how do we sustainably finance that over time.
After that the kids study the literature, the music, the culture of West Virginia. We actually took the whole class to West Virginia, and they raised a lot of money for that. Then they did some service down there. They interviewed some senior citizens, many of whom have been involved in the coal industry. Then they created these multimedia oral histories of the folks that they interviewed, using photography, using film, using their own writing, and put together about a two-hour DVD telling these folks’ stories.
Over the course of the year that involved chemistry in the studying of the energy issues, that involved math in their presentation of the statistics to support their ideas, and obviously a ton of English and history to create excellent work. We want kids … they may do kind of fewer test and papers, they do those kinds of things, but what they do, we want every year our kids to do excellent work that requires tons of drafts in which has … could meet professional standards in terms of the quality.
That kind of work I think helps transforms kids’ lives. There was a kid named … I probably shouldn’t say names. There’s a kid who was very much at risk of dropping out that had come from a reform school. When she went down to West Virginia a couple of years ago as part of this junior journey, it changed the game entirely for her. She came back a new student, and she got more credits for senior year than any kid we’ve ever had in history of the school. This was a kid that good money was on that she was going to drop out.
I think when kids have experiences with other kids, first of all that they feel a part of a community that cares about them and matters, and when they feel their own greatness firsthand through work they do, that’s transformative. That’s the goal to get those two things going.
Dr. Lisa: One of the R’s that you described, you said it was rigor and relationships. I don’t remember the other R.
Derek: Relevance.
Dr. Lisa: Relevance, okay. I can see the relevance and I can see the rigor as it comes to academia. What about relationships? This really isn’t something that we focus on in traditional education.
Derek: Yeah, unfortunately. Though I think elementary schools typically do a big deal of it, but it’s sometimes a forgotten concept in high schools, as if that doesn’t matter for teenagers when I think it matters perhaps more than any of our age group.
I think we look at it in a whole bunch of ways. We look at that kids feel meaningfully connected to other kids and across the school. For instance, we have our freshmen each do kind of profiles of seniors. Seniors are paired with a freshman and they write a letter to a particular freshman saying, “Here’s my advice for how you live your high school life.”
We value relationships between students and teachers obviously. We have advisories and other structures which enable teachers to work with kids more deeply, so they’re working with fewer kids but more often and also often over multiple years.
We try also to have kids connected with the outside world with mentors in the community, through internships and other opportunities. We try to make sure we have a meaningful relationship with the parent, teacher and kid. Parents are often shunned in high school. I don’t … kids kind of give that message implicitly or explicit to parents, and schools sometimes send that message to high school parents. We want to partner, because we are all about … all parents, teachers, kids all want the best for their kid. There’s a lot of common interest there that’s typically not capitalized on.
Then I think it’s about the relationship to a community, an individual’s relationship to a community and feeling a part of something bigger than themselves, and something that you care about, and is going to bring out your, again, your best self because you want to better that community – both the school community, and then Portland, and then even bigger than that hopefully.
Dr. Lisa: The goal of the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour is to help make connections between the health of the individual and the health of the community. The goal of Ted Carter Inspired Landscapes is to deepen our appreciation for the natural world.
Here to speak with us today is Ted Carter.
Ted: I’ve been self-employed my entire life. From the time I was a young teenager, I started in the landscaping business and never stopped. As I’ve gotten older I thought, “As I get older, maybe things will get easier and maybe I won’t have to work quite as hard.” I find myself working even harder.
The human spirit is a fascinating thing. I think that the universe gives us just enough that we can bear, and just sort of throws it out there and says, “Okay, how’s my spirit going to handle this in a mature fashion or in an immature fashion? What works for me? What doesn’t work for me anymore?”
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Dr. Lisa: At the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast we believe we are helping to build a better world with the help of many. We’d like to bring to you people who are examples of those, building a better world in the areas of wellness, health and fitness.
To talk to you today about one of these, fitness, is Jim Greatorex, the president of Premier Sports Health, a division of Black Bear Medical. Here’s Jim.
Jim: Did you watch the Olympics last year and see the athletes wearing that funky tape on their shoulders and wonder, “What the heck is that deal?” It’s called kinesiology athletic tape. It works like an orthopedic brace without limiting range of motion. It provides stability for muscles, joints and tendons, and helps reduce pain while maintaining flexibility for better support and increased endurance.
If you have knee, shoulder, ankle or foot pain, or have that one muscle that just flares up after increased activity, come in and have our staff help you out. We’ll have you performing like an Olympic beach volleyballer in no time.
I’m Jim Greatorex, president of Black Bear Medical. Come on in and see our trained staff down at 275 Marginal Way and at www.blackbearmedical.com.
Dr. Lisa: When we had Billy Shore on our show, and he’s the founder of Share Our Strength, which is a national childhood hunger relief organization, he talked a lot about an individual that is all about the courage to teach. He’s actually written multiple books about having the courage to teach.
I think this is something that we forget, that you can come out of your education and be enthusiastic about teaching and love children, and love learning, and sharing this love of learning, but then over time it really can be very challenging to work within the system.
Derek: Yes. I think teachers too have a tendency to see all the work they haven’t done. They go home at the end of the day and say, “God, I didn’t reach that kid.” Or, “That kid’s still not enjoying my class.” Or, “That kid is still not doing their work that I know they can do,” and not seeing all the glory that they brought to kids’ lives and all the kids who are growing and changing.
That’s something we try to be conscious of as educators, to help one another not just focus on what we’re not getting done. Because the work is never done, and more and more teaching is social work as the social fabric of our world becomes a bit more frayed. I do a lot of social work in my job. We provide food, two meals a day to half of our kids. We’re dealing with health issues, mental health issues a lot more than reading and writing and arithmetic, and that’s wearing.
I think one of the things that we’ve had is we’ve struggled with as an organization is how to efficiently and sustainably care for kids in a way that we’re not owning all of the kids’ collective struggles and dysfunction. That we figure out ways to put a blanket of support around kids in the ways that are going to buoy them, but that we’re not all feeling the need to do that, but we’re doing it better as a team, because you have to be in it for the long haul to see results.
That, I think, there were those … the incredible good fortune and blessing of our work is that you do see lives transformed. That’s what sustains educators, when you see this kid in ninth grade who is just a mess as a human being, not just as a student but interpersonally in their ability to connect with peers and adults and their ability to produce something of quality in their lives, and then you see that kid on a graduation stage sharing wisdom. That’s what makes it all worthwhile and keeps you going.
Dr. Lisa: I can tell that there’s some parallels between education and medicine even from what you’re saying, because I know the doctors often will feel as if that they’re doing a great job with their practice in general but there’s that one patient they’re not reaching. Or you’re sitting with a patient and you’ve known them over many years, but they can’t for some reason change some pattern they really need to change, like stop smoking or get out of a bad relationship.
Then you don’t really know what happens inside of person’s mind. You don’t know when something is going to click. You have to keep showing up and bring present and doing the best that you can because at some point something might change.
Derek: That’s exactly right.
Dr. Lisa: Excuse me. You’re right that to get discouraged too early really just doesn’t achieve anything. How do you keep bolstering that energy and knowing that even though you can’t really see the outcome, there’s probably still something happening.
Derek: Right. I think it is about trying … less about kids learning discreet skills and knowledge, and more about those habits or dispositions towards life that are what going to gear somebody towards success. There’s been a lot of research recently about traits like grit and perseverance and empathy as being the dispositions that lead people towards successful fulfilling lives.
As an educator, you’re in for the long game if you’re working on those things. A quiz is not going to fix that. You have to have that long view, I think, and use your colleagues and use your own … we’ve all seen those. You have to keep reminding yourself of those stories of that kid that I mentioned. Whenever I think about this kid, “What are we going to do? We’re run out of them.” No, we got to keep at it. You have to, because you’ll never know.
You’re exactly right, Lisa, that … and it may not … that switch may not go off until the kid is 25. That doesn’t mean that what you did at 15 wasn’t worth it, because all the time I have kids come back and say to me, “I remember you told me…” I don’t remember that I told them X, Y or Z, but somehow it stuck with them. You never know.
If you keep showering kids with love and attention and, “You can do it, you can do it, you can do it,” something will stick over time for 98% of kids I think. I’ve hardly ever come across a kid that we couldn’t – that I didn’t feel like there was a real positive impact we could do in school for that kid if we just stuck with it and never gave up.
Because often the kids who are most needy are the kids who have experienced a pattern of others giving up on them. Adults have abandoned them and they have that no consistency. You just feel like, “I just want to stick with you. If you let us stick with you long enough, good things will happen.”
Dr. Lisa: What about the arts? You’ve talked a lot about science and math, and travels and all of these things that we think about when we think about schools, but I know that some of my most formative moments took place while I was singing in our school’s madrigals group, being part of the play at our high school. I went on to be a doctor, not a singer or an actress, but these really were very important to my growing years. How do you approach that?
Derek: Yes. It’s similar with sports. I think for many, many teenagers or many, many adults, when you look back to your high school years your most memorable powerful learning experiences happened outside of the classroom; happened in the play, the big game, the singing performance. Our hope is … and those are great. We want those things to happen.
We have clubs and our kids play sports at Portland actually, but we have our own … we have the biggest model UN Delegation in the state, kids write their own one-act play for the One-Act Play Festival and stuff like that. We want those experiences also, those kind of adrenaline transformative experiences to happen through your academics as well, so we try to integrate the arts into the performances.
We have a school meeting every week where the whole school gathers and kids as a big chunk of that perform. We do these courses called intensives, which was involved with the fabulous John, where for instance I worked with him and … the idea of intensives is like a January term. I think Bates for instance has a January term.
Dr. Lisa: You’re talking about our fabulous John McCain, our audio guru who came in and did one of these Intensives with your students.
Derek: Yes. He’s a professional musician among his many talents. He and some other musicians worked with a bunch of our students who had very musical experience. They did nothing but work on songwriting all day every day for a week.
We stop normal classes twice a year and we do these things called intensives. Kids pick from about 15 or 16 of them. This one happened to be songwriting. By Thursday, the kids put on a concert of original songs. We had all these great mentors from the community. These are kids 9 through 12. Again, some come in as great musicians and some can barely keep beat, but by Friday they all have something beautiful in themselves to share.
We’ve done similar things with photography, with filmmaking, with putting on theater productions, but also building solar panels and we did one on Sabermetrics, which is baseball statistics. The idea is that you go these learning expeditions in miniature, so you go from what we call immersion to culmination in a week. You built a boat in a week, you’ve made this movie in a week, you’ve written a song in a week.
Sometimes when a kid has written a great song, then that transfers to English class. They’re back to something, “Oh, back to writing. That’s…” but they have a sense of what … the drafting process, the process of creating or expressing something elegantly can have academic transfers as well, as well as just that feeling of, “Wow. I did something great. I want to have that feeling more often.” That can transfer to French class.
Dr. Lisa: Why do you, Derek Pierce, care about teaching? Why do you care about kids? What is it about these children that keeps you showing up day after day after day? Why the kids here in Maine? Why not anywhere else in the world?
Derek: I’ll start with the second first. I think Portland’s demographics are especially exciting to me, because we do have kids from all over the world. We have kids of all different kinds of socioeconomic status who are comfortable and accustomed to being in school together.
I think there’s some … the possibilities of the American dream seem pretty deadened in other parts of the country where there’s more social stratification. In Portland it feels like there’s some real opportunity for all kids to achieve something excellent. That’s really exciting to me as an educator in Portland.
Why I do this work, I feel incredibly lucky to be able to do this work because I love being around kids, I love learning every day, I love being around adults who care and love kids and want to help kids, and it’s very, very … I haven’t had even like a nanosecond of boredom in nine years. I’ve never ever like, “Oh, what should I do?” I don’t know. Like the stimuli and the challenge blows your head off most days, but I feel lucky to have that problem.
I feel like the work we’re doing does matter, and I think that feels really good no matter how hard it is. It feels well worth it because the kids matter so much.
Dr. Lisa: Derek, how can people find out about the Casco Bay High School for Expeditionary Learning?
Derek: You can go to our website, which is part of the Portland Public Schools website. I can’t do the address off on top of my head. If you go there, you’ll find the link fairly easily.
Dr. Lisa: We’ve been speaking with Derek Pierce, the founding principal of Casco Bay High School for Expeditionary Learning here in Portland, Maine. You can actually read more about Derek in the September 2012 Maine Magazine profile on him written by Sarah Bronstein.
We’re very excited to know that there are people in the world like you and like my mother, also a teacher who are out there bringing a really high quality education to the children of Maine. Thank you.
Derek: Thanks so much. Thank you. Thanks.
Dr. Lisa: You have been listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast, show number 104, “Life Lessons.” Our guests have included Clayton Spencer and Derek Pierce. For more information on our guests as well as extended interviews, please visit doctorlisa.org. The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is downloadable for free on iTunes. For a preview of each week’s show, sign up for our e-newsletter and like our Dr. Lisa Facebook page.
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Also, let our sponsors know that you have heard about them here. We are privileged that they enable us to bring the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour to you each week. This is Dr. Lisa Belisle. I hope that you’ve enjoyed our “Life Lessons” show, and that our guests have inspired you to find your own life lessons. Thank you for allowing me to be a part of your day. May you have a bountiful life.
Speaker 1: The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is made possible with the support of the following generous sponsors: Maine Magazine; Marci Booth of Booth Maine; Apothecary By Design; Premier Sports Health, a division of Black Bear Medical; Dr. John Herzog of Orthopedic Specialists; Mike LePage and Beth Franklin of RE/MAX Heritage; Ted Carter Inspired Landscapes; and Tom Shepard of Shepard Financial.
The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is recorded at the studios of Maine Magazine at 75 Market Street in Portland, Maine. Our executive producers are Kevin Thomas and Dr. Lisa Belisle. Audio production and original music by John C. McCain. Our assistant producer is Leanne Ouimet.
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