“It All Started When He Hit Me Back:” Getting Sent to Mr. Steele’s Office
by Kyle Steele
The other day, Miss VanDamme shared a story that had me in stitches. It’s a story her family still repeats generations later. Her two uncles got into a fight that her grandfather had to break up. When he asked what happened, one brother said with complete credulity, “It all started when he hit me back!”
I had to laugh at the story because it reminded me of what it’s like to sort out disputes and misdeeds at VDA. It was not the element of fighting that felt familiar—we have vanishingly little physical aggression at VDA—but rather her brother’s accidental admission, which reminded me just how hard it is to get a straight story from a child when things go wrong.
The students at VDA are great kids, but they are not angels. Feelings get hurt, and students often learn the hard way what behaviors are rude or disrespectful. When a child misbehaves enough, they are sent to the office to see me.
It’s not easy to judge what happened and what the consequences should be from behind my desk. I have no recordings or forensic evidence to consult. And unless it is a particularly serious matter, taking the time to consult a lot of eyewitnesses would be a poor use of everyone’s time. I have to go on what might be the worst evidence imaginable: emotional, eyewitness testimony from children. We like to say around the office that what children tell us is emotionally true, but not always journalistically true.
There are plenty of bad ways a principal can cope with this problem of poor information. The most common way all people deal with this is with prejudice and assumptions. I could fill in what I don’t know for certain with what I assume based on a child’s reputation, but this is far from fair and often wrong. I could also try to split the difference between competing stories, leaving everyone feeling unsatisfied, unbelieved, and unheard. In generations past, school principals might be severe with kids until they confessed. But whether you consult true crime podcasts or Anne of Green Gables, you know that false confessions and testimony are easy to come by, especially in children.
Happily, I’ve found better solutions over the years than prejudice, coercion, and splitting the difference. Let me tell you my tactics and paint a picture of what a trip to the office to see Mr. Steele might be like.
Lower the Stakes – Often, the first thing I do when talking to students about some social or behavioral trouble they’ve had is reassure them that the stakes are not that high. I let them know that suspension or some formal punishment isn’t on the table. I’m not going to scold them or shame them. I often use the phrase, “It sounds like there is a mess, and I want to help you clean it up.” By lowering the stakes, I make it easier for students to open up, to admit to misbehavior, and to work with me to get back to the point where they are getting along with everyone.
I Don’t Punish the Past, I Fix the Future – It’s normal for students who think they are in trouble to lie, bend the truth, or omit their own misdeeds from a story. This happens because they are still living in the past of their misdeed. They wish they could take back their actions, and they want to hide them. So, I tell the students that I’m not interested in delivering some kind of retribution for something they did wrong. I’m instead interested in the next class and the next day at recess. I want to help them make the future go well since we cannot change the past. By moving kids to this orientation, they can stop thinking defensively and instead think of how to make amends for how they might have hurt someone.
Gather Context – When I first hear about student misbehavior, it is usually from the victim of the misbehavior: another student. And the initial account of the event tends to follow what Roy Baumeister called “The Myth of Pure Evil.” This initial account usually fits into the template of, “I was minding my own business innocently when someone else hurt me for no reason because they like hurting people.” This is often how children experience things, but it is rarely, if ever, the whole truth.
So, when talking to the child accused of misbehavior, I try hard to gather the context missing from the first account. I want to know what happened before the event in question. I want to know whether the conflict started today or in the past. I want to know what they were feeling and what motivated them. Asking these questions builds trust quickly and it gives me a fuller picture within which to make a decision. And if you think back to Miss VanDamme’s anecdote, you’ll see that this larger context can often reveal how both parties might have made mistakes.
The overall impact of this approach is to make it easier for children to take responsibility for their mistakes. It makes it easier for all parties to repair the damage they’ve done and forgive each other. It keeps students focused on the values they can build in the future rather than the guilt they may feel for the past. It makes a trip to the principal’s office an experience the child might actually appreciate.
Literary Catchphrases
by Grace Steele
In a recent 5th grade literature class period, the students and I were writing notes together about the various catchphrases of our favorite characters in Anne of Green Gables. When I first introduced the topic for discussion, nearly every student in the class shot their hand into the air—with a chuckle—eagerly hoping to volunteer a favorite catchphrase.
We started with the strict and serious Marilla Cuthbert, and her most common catchphrase: “fiddlesticks.” Marilla throws this word around freely when faced with Anne’s “romantic stuff and nonsense.” When Anne objects to Marilla’s suggestion on the basis that it is “unromantic,” “Unromantic, fiddlesticks,” that good lady responds. When Anne objects to dresses Marilla makes for her on the grounds that they are “unbecoming,” Marilla’s rejoinder is, “Unbecoming, fiddlesticks!” And so on. We organized our thoughts about this topic, took down each character’s catchphrases in writing, and began to discuss what each catchphrase said about each character.
Mrs. Rachel Lynde’s “That’s what” after every assertion she makes lets us know that she is assertive and eager to express her own opinion. In stark contrast, shy Matthew Cuthbert’s catchphrase is, “Well, now, I dunno…” which lets us know that he is, in the words of a fifth grader, “Mrs. Rachel Lynde’s total opposite.”
An ordinary observer in the 5th grade that day might justly wonder what in the world we were doing in class talking about such a thing, and why we had to laugh so much about it. They might wonder why I bother to grade assignments that appear to be steeped in such frivolity. (Especially if that observer’s name was Marilla Cuthbert!)
So far, the ordinary observer. An extraordinary observer might have seen the way the students were learning to organize conclusions based on concrete evidence, that they were learning to capture the most essential aspects of these characters, and most importantly, that they were finding immense joy in beautiful literature.
On a practical level, the students gain a lot from note-taking and from discussion of literature. Our ordinary observer would be the first to point that out. They get practice with penmanship, grammar, vocabulary, public speaking, and much more.
But, what goes unnoticed at many other schools, and in a lot of discussions about education, is the boundless value children gain on a spiritual level when they read great literature. You cannot quantify this value—but you can see it in their eyes when they light up over a book they're reading, when they quote a line from poetry in an everyday conversation, and when they feel as though they have had a new, personal experience after finishing a great novel.
The way to cultivate that spiritual engagement with literature? It’s through joy.
That’s what.
Squids and Card Houses
by Tom Jones
I vividly remember learning “The Scientific Method” in elementary school. It was taught to me as a sequence of words that I was to memorize, in much the same way as I had memorized the parts of a cell. Just as I could recite “endoplasmic reticulum” on command, I could tell an adult the steps of the scientific method.
They were taught to me as: observe, research, hypothesize, test, analyze, and conclude. This became a set of abstract commandments we were supposed to then impose on our lessons artificially.
For example, one day we did a squid dissection. The process was gross, but fun. Most kids found that the most interesting part was the squid’s ink sac, and part of the experiment was to try writing something using our squid’s ink on a piece of paper. The scientific method was laid out as labels on blank spaces on a paper that we were supposed to be filling out as we dissected, but most of us got lost in the process of dissection and ended up filling the paper out after the fact as a perfunctory obligation, in the hectic five minutes of class transition.
Instead of having my students perfunctorily force this memorized set of steps on their lessons, I endeavor to help my student induce some of these principles of from meaningful experiences in my science classes.
For example, this year we are studying physical science, and my first unit is on architecture, or how we get buildings to stay up. A few days before the year started, I had a flash of inspiration. I bought a 24-pack of playing card decks from Amazon and handed out one to each student in my science class. I told them to build a house out of cards.
The result was a delightfully frustrating mess for the students: building up their houses and watching them tumble down. Over time, a few students started to figure out that putting the cards in certain configurations makes them stand up better. Eventually, the class had discovered two structures that stand up well.
While building, my students were forming hypotheses, “Maybe if I try it this way!”; they were testing endlessly; they were observing (and shouting emotionally about) the results; they were analyzing the failures and trying new methods; they would research what other students had done and what was successful for them, and then implement what they learned. This way, when it came time to write notes in the following lessons, the students were really and finally recording the results of the experiment they had done with the cards.
The card houses were a fun hands-on experience, but they were also groping for the scientific method without knowing what it was. It wasn’t an artificial set of steps that happened in a strict order, the way it is often taught. (If I type “Steps of the scientific method” into google, the top two results for autocomplete follow that phrase with “in order” and “in the correct order.”) While order and neatly recording your results are very important steps to being rigorously scientific, the actual process often doesn’t conform to that order.
When I asked my fifth graders about the card houses the next day, I had a few conclusions that I was hoping they would draw from their time, but I was confident that I would have to lead them down the road a bit to get them there. However, to my surprise, all I had to ask was, “What did you notice when we were making the card houses?” and my students could hardly restrain themselves from shouting out the conclusions I had hoped they would find. It’s frustrating to make card houses; they are not very stable. Certain shapes were able to stand up on their own better than others. And when I asked them what specific shapes, they named them for me, “A triangle with two cards leaning on each other, and resting one card horizontally on two others.”
This led nicely into my lesson the following day on arches. They had discovered both the triangular arch and post-and-lintel construction by playing around with some cards. I was pleased with the lesson (even if the shouting cries of students got a bit loud when their card houses inevitably fell over).
I will have more lessons to solidify the scientific method down to a precise and rigorous set of steps for the students. And I have more to say about how the collection of facts that are taught as “science” relates to this method. For now, I will simply enjoy watching my 5th grade students create ever more complicated card houses during arrival.
Looking Back
VanDamme Academy: Idealism and Benevolence
by Marek Michulka, VDA Alumnus 2015
I graduated from VanDamme Academy in 2015. After high school, I was recruited by the University of Chicago for tennis, where I am now about to graduate with a degree in physics. I want to say a little bit about my educational journey, and the inflection point that VanDamme Academy was for me, despite only attending for two years in 7th and 8th grade.
As long as I can remember, I've been someone who cares about things—I had overriding obsessions from my earliest childhood, from dinosaurs to Thomas the Tank Engine. My very early education didn't do much to help me hone or develop these, but it didn't really cripple me either. I had parents and teachers who cared about me, and since I was one of the "smart kids," I got along just fine. I learned a little, but even then, I knew I was coasting by.
Things took a turn for the worse in 6th grade. This was my first extended experience with educators who did not care about me. Psychologically, it was crippling. I was a capable student, but I was so terrified and overwhelmed by the seemingly heartless world I was thrust into that I couldn't find it in myself to succeed. It felt like I was suffocating. Luckily, I had loving, observant parents who could see that something needed to change, so they enrolled my brother and me in VanDamme Academy.
My too-brief time at VDA changed my life. There has never been a period in my life, before or since, where I underwent such a drastic, sustained period of intellectual and characterological growth as those two years.
I came into VDA as someone who was smart and prone to obsessions; I left as a thinker and a valuer. I felt for the first time that it was ok for me to get in the driver’s seat of my intelligence—I wasn't going to be shot down for being passionate. So, I did more than was ever asked of me. Miss VanDamme wanted us to memorize a few lines of a poem, and I'd memorize the whole darn thing. Mr. Lewis would make a few jokes in history class, and I'd turn The Sea Peoples into a running joke that only I could never get enough of. I developed a love of reality—it was at VDA that reason and science became the objects of holy worship that they are with me now. I developed heroes, both in my teachers and in the literature and history they were exposing me to—VDA was the only place in my education where I found people and stories of people that made me think "I want to be like that." I left fundamentally different—not yet a complete person, but someone with ideas and with ideals.
“I came into VDA as someone who was smart and prone to obsessions; I left as a thinker and a valuer.”
VanDamme Academy righted my path because it has two indispensable virtues: idealism and benevolence. At VanDamme Academy, a student knows that deep, personal passion will never be threatened by the sarcastic cynicism that he sees everywhere else around him. This environment creates a safe haven for his soul to form, for him to develop and express his values. He knows it because his teachers are passionate valuers themselves, and because when he's a little bit crazy (as all passionate people are in their early stages), there's a bright twinkle in Mr. Lewis's eye—not the eyeroll that he's come to expect. He also knows that his teachers care about him immensely and personally. He can see that they are always working to understand what he and his classmates need from them.
Everywhere else around him, people fall into a stale routine, and if you don't fit in their mold, tough luck. At VDA the individual student is so precious that VDA characteristically challenges its preconceptions and rethinks its curricula when it’s necessary to help growing minds. For me, these qualities added up to a sense of a universe of unlimited opportunity and ever-increasing joy. I could shoot for the stars and love the voyage there. It was this outlook on the world that gave me the ambition necessary to attend one of the top schools in the country, take on the hardest major at that school, and keep my love of life and love of learning burning brightly the whole way through.
From the VDA Archives:
When Did I Learn How to Read?
by Lisa VanDamme
When prospective families tour my school, they are often surprised to learn the following: With only a handful of exceptions over her 15-year career, our Montessori teacher has had every kindergartener reading fluently by Christmas. To me, what is even more surprising is that for those kindergarteners, the process of learning to read has been effortless.
I was reminded of the rapidity and ease with which children in her class learn to read when my own kindergarten son asked me a question in the car the other day.
Realizing that he could now read the subtitles in his favorite surfing picture book, he asked, “Mom, when did I learn how to read?”
This is something I tell parents all the time, and yet it came as a delightful reminder from the lips of my own child. Over the first several months of school, the kindergarteners do a sequence of activities, each satisfying and enjoyable in its own right, each building seamlessly on the one that came before, and then – one magical day – they can read.
For so many children, the process of learning to read is labored and unnatural. Why? Here are a few of the many reasons:
The “sensitive period” for reading is missed, either because parents and teachers naively underestimate the child’s capacity for learning, or worse, because they see academics as somehow at odds with childhood joy.
The proper order of learning is violated, because many educators have embraced the delusion that it is more efficient to bypass phonetic components and instead teach the “whole word,” depriving students of the decoding skills that make the whole world of words their oyster.
The necessity of individualized instruction is evaded, because ever-larger classes, universalized standards, and rote practices encourage teachers to treat the class like a homogenous group. The result is that the students are homogenously bored, but for different reasons – some are under-stimulated, and others overwhelmed.
The Montessori method by contrast – with its child-friendly materials, its logically sequenced steps, and its individualized approach – works like seeming magic.
Here is a glimpse of the process by which a kindergartener learns to read, with no awareness that “learning to read” is what he is doing.
The “sound boxes,” which contain a handful of letters and tiny objects that start with those letters, are like a little academic fairy garden. The child learns the sounds of each of the letters in the box, and then pulls out delightful, miniaturized objects. He identifies the initial letter sound of the object (“B – b – banana”) and then places it beneath the corresponding letter. Doesn’t your inner child long to use this material?
Once all the letter sounds have been mastered, the child is ready for the moveable alphabet. Simple, short-vowel, three-letter-words are pictured, and the child sounds each one out slowly, finding the letter that corresponds with the sound, and spelling the word. (Note: The child is able to spell words long before he can write – and the moveable alphabet is a brilliant material that recognizes and facilitates that ability.)
As the child masters particular phonetic components, he is ready for readers that center around that skill. These readers are carefully ordered and incremental, with each new skill added to and building upon the last.
These are just a few of the many steps in this ingenious sequence, steps that are utterly enjoyable on their own terms, and that – taken together – lead to the day when your child asks in wonderment: “When did I learn how to read?”
