Rigor

10.28.10 By Kellyanne Mahoney

Rigor literally means to be stiff or inflexible. Think “rigor mortis.” This is something my school (meaning—somewhat coincidentally—my alma mater as well as my current workplace, Boston Latin Academy,) is historically very good at. In fact, many of my own former high school English teachers would have already just deducted points off of this reflection because I ended my last sentence with a preposition. Despite the fact that I did not always earn stellar grades in their classes, I am forever grateful to them because I am aware of this grammatical construct. In college, while studying Art History, I also came to appreciate how geniuses like Picasso were revered not only for their demonstration of the marks of the artistic canon, but also for their seemingly contradictory ability (and proclivity) to deconstruct the canon. Lately, “rigor” is a buzzword within BPS, but it seems to lack a clear definition.

Last year I participated in a day of Instructional Rounds at my school in which a cohort of headmasters, department heads, and other miscellaneous school district bureaucrats (invited by Harvard from across the country as well as internationally) were asked to analyze whether our school, through a few hours of random classroom observations, was overly focused on memorizing and understanding content—to the detriment of “higher order” skills like analyzing, evaluating, synthesizing, and creating. Not to my surprise, the data proved the cohort-generated hypothesis that there was a sweeping overemphasis on these “lower order” skills.

After a resounding recognition of this revelation during the post-observation and data analysis share-out time, an administrator from an elementary school in England, making a point of her “artsy” theater background, chimed in with a chord of dissonance. She prefaced her comments with some context about her school: that it is highly renowned in its region for its innovative pedagogy and level of student engagement, while adding that its standardized test scores are not terribly noteworthy. Her remarks went something like this:

“One day, while we were readying the classrooms for a standardized test the children were about to take, we had the little ones rearrange the desks into rows. One of them noted that, ‘Wow. This looks like a “real school” now.’ We all laughed at the time because it seemed cute, but now that I have visited BLA, I am faced with the serious undertone of what this child might have meant. BLA indeed looks like a ‘real school’—like an idyllic academic setting you might see on TV years ago. In talking to the students at BLA, I sensed this sentiment too. I asked one senior what his thoughts were on BLA, and he replied: ‘I like this school because I know things.’ When asked to clarify, he replied: ‘I have friends at other schools, and they don’t know things.’”

When I was recently asked to reflect upon my thoughts about “rigor” as part of a class I am taking, I almost automatically reverted back to that anecdote—which I had yet to process and had struggled to compartmentalize. While I do agree that at my school there is an overemphasis placed upon memorizing and understanding, to the detriment of innovative thinking, I do think that these “lower order” skills are prerequisite to a rigorous curriculum—and that they are time-consuming (and hard!) to master. One common pedagogical misconception is that content needs to be memorized or “understood” before students are able to process and interpret it in other ways. However I do think that students must at least be integrating this new content into their schema before moving onto skills like synthesizing and innovating. In order to do work that is truly rigorous, they need material. Also, I don’t think memorizing and understanding are “lower order” at all, as is reflected in the newest, and less hierarchical, conception of Bloom’s Taxonomy—which is depicted graphically as a circle.

Meanwhile, this week in my classroom, my ongoing objective is for students to demonstrate their understanding of the “hero’s journey” plot structure through reinventing a heroic archetype in poetry, song, symbolism, and interpretive dance. I have no doubt that my students will be engaged. For example, on Friday I watched a student reinterpret the ‘80s break-dance move “The Worm” across my classroom to symbolize a US soldier in Afghanistan in the trenches—to the tune of the instrumental version of “Eye of the Tiger” from the “Rocky” films. My feedback to her was that, although I appreciated her enthusiasm, she should think seriously about what the soldier’s “Call to Adventure” might have been and what “The Return” would be like for him given that many of his friends from his neighborhood might have never left home before, or might have gone away to college instead. How would he be accepted back home after his deployment? What knowledge is he bringing back, and would his family and friends be ready (or able) to accept this knowledge?

Perhaps the most effective way to keep students engaged is to introduce complex, real-world applications at the same time that memorizing and understanding are “under construction.” Still I worry that ultimately the types of tasks I assign will not entail the “skills and drills” fine-tuning I came to expect as a seventh-grader. And I also think back to Picasso: How were his teachers able to cultivate within him a reverence for “the canon,” while at the same time the confidence to break the mold? If this is truly “genius” and the culmination of “rigorous” instruction, how can this meta-cognitive realization and mastery of convention be taught simultaneously with a nuanced appreciation for rebellion? This intellectual insurrection is likely what seems missing from BLA’s definition of “rigor”, but I wonder: Can it honestly be taught?