For more than a decade, my mother cut my hair. I give her credit for looking at the heads of other children at school and at church and in Look and Life. She wanted me to look like other children. I sat on a tall youth chair in the basement with an old bed sheet around my shoulders and she went at my hair with an electric trimmer and scissors. At the end, she always said with a smile, “That doesn’t look too bad.”
When I was thirteen and earning steady seasonal money with lawn mowing, leaf raking and snow shoveling jobs, I went to a barber shop and learned a life lesson that carried through my career is education. John, my first and usual barber until I went to college, was an artist with his trimmers and scissors. Interestingly, there was the same amount of cut hair on the floor around my mother’s youth chair as there was around John’s barber chair. But, there was a difference in the cuts. From where I sat watching my mother and John, the big difference was that my mother held her lips tightly together as she worked and looked at my head straight on with both eyes. However, she squinted a lot. John was not so tightly wound. As he cut and trimmed, the tip of his tongue appeared in the right corner of his mouth and he began to tilt his head to the right so that he was looking at me as if he was looking around a corner.
It took several years before I had the courage to ask John why he finished cutting my hair with his tongue tip out and head slightly cocked. He said, “I start looking at your head from the front seeing both sides and the top. The closer I get to being finished, the more I need to change the way I look at you. When I can see you in at least two different ways and like the way your hair has been cut, I know I have done a good job.” His answer was more satisfying than my mother’s double negative – “not too bad.”
As a teacher, it was important to look at children and their school work in at least two different ways. When I could do this, I knew that I would be able to cause them to become better learners and to learn better.
First, I needed to look at the child. From straight on, each child is as he or she presents herself or himself. Age appropriate for this classroom and grade appropriate in school promotion. Relatively healthy and alert. Seemingly ready to learn. It is easy to stop looking, because everything looks good or “not too bad.”
With a little twist of perspective, it surprising what one can see. Is this a first child in the family in your class or second or third – it can make a difference in how they feel about you as a teacher. Even though the child is on grade level in reading, was she an early reader or has she been improving each year? Is the child introverted or extroverted? Knowing a child’s proclivity for volunteering with a first answer or preference to hold back, listen and revise an answer based upon more information is an important thing to know. In general, how does the child see herself – does she smile a lot or frown?
Like John, I wanted to look at children as if I was looking around the corner and try to see them differently. Unlike John who was done as soon as I left his chair, my work just began and I needed to keep look differently. Children change over the course of a school year and how they look to you in September can be very different than how they look in January and April. And, every look demands that you form a renewed perception.
Second, and John taught me this, if he didn’t like what he saw in the cut of my hair, he kept on working until he liked what he saw. I learned to listen and look more carefully at what children said when asked a question or what they wrote when given an assignment or their thinking as they talked through a problem. With a generalized and pedestrian look, much of the student work I was presented was fair to good. Almost all of it was passing, for sure. But, was it good enough. How often is a child asked to refine an answer, revise a paragraph, correct mistakes no matter how many or few, or rethink the manner in which they reached a solution? Not often enough. Too often, first draft is a final draft. A good enough answer is a last answer. And, just a few mistakes is close enough. With a different look at student work and my responsibility for causing each child to improve in both their learning and as a learner, I needed to ask for more. “Not too bad” was not good enough.
This is not always easy to do. There are many social norms that make just good enough good enough. You will hear children say that “other teachers don’t make kids do rewrites.” You will hear “I don’t have time tonight to do this over.” Students will say, “I’ll take the B grade; that’s good enough.” And, certainly some will say, “I passed, didn’t I?” Staying the course of “we’re not done just yet” can be difficult. But, I always remembered, whether I was in my mother’s or John’s chair that, “I cannot see my head and I have no idea what they are seeing.” Knowing that children as students do not see the end of the job of learning is essential if you want to push children past good enough. That is how I responded to children who were more than willing to jump out of their desk with my first response to their work. “At this time, you are not able to see what I want to see in your school work.” After a while, they sat a bit longer to see if I was satisfied or if I needed to take second look.
Actually, the way John looked at my head created a very good lesson for life. Do a good job, then look at it differently to see if your first perception remains an accurate appraisal. If not, keep working until it is better than good.