There Are No Quick Marshmallows Here

9.11.10 By Neema Avashia

Picture a roomful of new 8th graders watching Joachim de Posada explain the Marshmallow Experiment, complete with clips of adorable Colombian 4-year olds struggling to resist eating the marshmallow placed in front of them for 15 minutes, so as to earn a 2nd marshmallow at the end of the session. It’s day 3, and I’m teaching my students about delayed gratification. The 6-minute video has kids laughing hard, but when I stop the video and ask, “Why am I showing you this in Civics class? What connection does this experiment have to do with school?”, they get serious immediately. We talk about the marshmallows they confront each day as BPS students—playing on facebook instead of doing homework; hitting the snooze button one more time when your alarm goes off at 5:00 because your high school starts at 7:10 and you have and hour and a half commute to school; hanging out at downtown crossing instead of going straight home when the school day ends—and the impact that eating those marshmallows can have on their future success. We talk about how annoying teachers can be, how frustrating school can be, how much easier it is to just stay home sometimes than enter the school building, then connect attendance to academic success, academic success to financial success. One student summarizes perfectly, saying, “Eating the marshmallows now keeps you from getting bigger, better marshmallows later.” Point made and taken, we move on to a baseline assessment, and leave the marshmallow experiment behind.

A 15-minute mini-lesson and discussion on day 3, cribbed straight from a KIPP school concept discussed in the New York Times, is just the first step in a year-long process of helping kids develop stronger self-discipline, and a greater capacity for delaying gratification. But it’s also worth considering the marshmallow experiment in relation to teaching. Because the thing about teaching is, there are no marshmallows to eat in the shorter term. There are moments of joy in every day, to be sure, but there is also such an intense amount of work and struggle that those moments are often over before we can fully appreciate them.

For teachers, the marshmallows are often much-delayed. But, as I enter this 8th year of working in the Boston public schools, I know for certain that they are so, so sweet when they come. They take the form of incredible young artists coming to decorate my classroom so it is welcoming for new students. Of rising high school seniors asking their old 6th grade teacher to read their college essays and write their ‘mentor’ letters of recommendation. Of high school students who don’t feel too cool to have breakfast with their old teacher at McKenna’s, or eat ice cream from Coldstone at the Christian Science reflecting pool, during the last days of summer. Of text messages from high school juniors that say, “Hi, mommy #3, I miss you. When can we meet up?” Of Spanish 2 tutoring over Skype with a former student now in prep school in Connecticut. Of emails that say, “Thank you for making me do the pilot school application last year. I’m so grateful to be at the school that I’m at. I love it here.” Of 9th graders coming back to their 8th grade teacher and saying, “I wish I had a pocket Ms. Avashia to take to history class,” or “My English teacher reminds me so much of you. She pushes us so hard!”, and then realizing that the English teacher is a BTR grad as well. Truth be told, I’m swimming in 6-years-in-the-making-marshmallows these days, and loving it.

So as we begin another school year, and with it, 6-day work weeks, 14-hour days, and hemorrhaging bank accounts at the hands of Staples and Office Max, take a minute to reflect on the marshmallows you’ve accumulated doing this work, and remember that there are many, many more to come in the days ahead.