Doug Lemov's field notes

Earlier today I posted this this on our facebook page:

My sis lives in Cambridge right near Watertown… ie at the epicenter. She sent me this email earlier today. It’s like a postcard from the edge of civilization:

A minute ago, Tao started barking her alarm bark, and we looked out the window … to see a lone man crossing Mt. Auburn St. (Belmont Ave.) wearing a hoodie and a baseball cap. … Kind of weird. Weird that anyone would wear that right now.

We decided he was bigger than the fugitive. However Tao is on alert by the window.

Our neighbor, who just graduated from Rindge, was on the wrestling team with the guy (the younger brother) and said he was really nice, everybody liked him. Madness…

After I posted I was thinking about why I shared her email.  I mean we’re far from a current events site.  But something about that last line in her email….everyone at school thought he was a good guy… left me thinking.  I am grasping to get at them but some initial thoughts:

It sounds like the older brother might have been a match for the type who does this kind of thing… isolated outsider/loner who didn’t fit in and perhaps bore deep unspoken grudges.  He posted that he had no friends, didn’t understand people.  But the younger brother apparently everybody liked.  I just listened to a former teacher of his talk about how he always thought of him as a great kid; a character kid; kind compassionate and jovial I think he said.  How does that happen?

I started thinking: We think we know who our kids are.  We often do know them very, very well…  But sometimes we don’t. Or more precisely we know them in one setting but we know only one part of them.  A lot of social science research suggests that personality and character, even the notion of a singular fixed “self,” are more fluid concepts than we often recognize.  I always feel this strongly when I take “personality tests”… they ask “What do you usually do in X situation?” Well, it depends on what’s going on around me.  I am not always the same. Usually I refuse to answer those questions.  

We all learn to code switch.  When you come to school you speak in a certain way.  Format Matters is about intentionally switching to the language that allows for social mobility and access to meritocracy.    When students come to school they are—hopefully–wrapped in a certain culture that helps them to become a positive, optimistic, compassionate, diligent, thoughtful, resilient person who values learning and knowledge.  We foster them in becoming a certain person, and that person is, at least in part, the product of an environment.  We hope part of that carries with them into their lives outside of school.  We know they are different outside of school but we hope certain traits endure.  And very often they do. When we do well, parents tell us their students are “changed” they are compassionate to younger siblings and responsible about their work… they are mature and self-manage.  In the end educators leverage the notion that changing the environment changes people. And it does.  Sometimes.  Or maybe often.  But not always.  Can’t be. 

People are often not the same in different settings.  Not just students, of course, but in the case of students we build school cultures to give them the opportunity to reinvent a most productive positive version of themselves.  There is often a side of them elsewhere in which they switch to something else.  The other environments of their lives socialize them in different ways.  Usually the difference is minimal.  In many cases they go home to situations that bring out the very best in them.  In other cases they have to do things to survive. Or thrive or achieve some desire. Maybe they fall deeply under the sway of someone else and when they are with them they are different.  Perhaps they have an older brother they love and admire and they fail to see that he has become twisted and violent.  I don’t know anything about the two men who visited such evil to the good people around them and why and how that happens.   I just think the case of the kid who everyone believes is a good kid who is, in a different setting, someone very, very different is hard not to reflect on.

In fact it made me think of a kid I taught many years ago who was a sweet kid.  He struggled with rules but was open and honest about his transgressions and always owned up afterwards.  He had an insight about people that sometimes let him connect with adults in a very mature and reflective way.  He was sometimes “trouble” but everyone liked him. Smart kid. Good, committed hard-working parents.  If you had asked me, when I left the school, I would have bet on him.  Eight or ten years later he committed a multiple murder and is in jail for life.  Pow.  He wasn’t the last kid in the world I’d have thought would get into trouble but nothing like that… and “sweet,” ironically, was a word I might have used to describe him. So was he faking it? or was he “sweet” in one setting and something totally unpredictable in another?

Anyway I’m not sure what it means other than to remind ourselves that we sometimes know people less than we think and that who people are in one setting (school) is not always who they are when the environment around them changes drastically.    Maybe you can make more sense of it than I can… but anyway that’s why I shared that post.   Forgive me if this offends anyone… I’m just like most of you in trying to make a little bit of sense out of it all.