Dr. Grauer's Column - The Hardest Thing I Have Ever Done

"The Hardest Thing I Have Ever Done"
(11th Grade Student)

Math and literature can be learned in a chair. However, unlike those subjects, character is developed through the experience of persevering through challenges where a chair would be limiting in the extreme. There is a whole other education out there in the wild.

This past December, the No Child Left Behind Act, also called the “standards movement,” where students and whole school systems were judged on the basis of a few standardized tests, officially became extinct and, in my opinion, this signaled the end of the age of the chair. What’s next?

Most educators around the country have felt the lure to expand our definitions of achievement and intelligence, which had been held in a cage by that Congressional Act that reduced success in school to a few assessments that ranked our kids. Almost in celebration, character, aesthetics, various forms of fitness, and the development of values are all flooding back into the educational arena like blood into an arm you slept on for too long. 

Many great teachers are leaving the age of the chair to enter more deeply into the age of the consciousness and the mind.

Once, I was in a group of San Diego teachers and the leader of our group was showing a video of a sample reading class for us to critique. The teacher in the video wandered round the classroom attending to each learner, and was doing so with care, and each student in her class appeared to attend to the reading, or to try to on prompt. Each in our group commented on what we were seeing. This was group of skilled, experienced teachers, and they weighed in: “Lovely class.” “Attentive teacher.” “Excellent control of the class.” Something was disturbing to me, but I did not know if I could articulate it. Were we teachers really observing the best possible use of the three-pound miracle we call our brain, much less our bodies? At last, it came to my turn to critique, and I was feeling a little dazed. “They look like they are dead,” I heard coming out of my own mouth, as everyone in our group picked their heads up in a pregnant silence. Those were the days I was learning that I had no choice but to start a school of my own.

In the West, most school systems and curricula avoid the natural world as a basis for teaching and learning, for the most part, as though this is evidence of conquering it, or of our advanced civilization. We rarely face the fact that we are indoors or in vehicles 93% to 95% of our hours. We attempt to mitigate our chronic disconnection from nature through enormous teaching skill, enlightened school design, cunning attention-getting techniques and, increasingly today, emerging contemplation methods: “Hold your breath in for a count of seven seconds, hold for five, release. Concentrate on your belly.” We have learned this transports our students to someplace more attuned. We put our cellphones in pouches during class so students get a break from the more than 200 times per day they (and we) check them. We can describe the perfect classroom setting, with the calm sounds and the calming wall colors, the plants, and the calming voice of the teacher who understands us and how we can be receptive. In our no-threat community of friendship that describes today’s “best practice,” we have the confidence to engage in shared and stimulating learning. 

Still, in these sheltering routines, however much good they bring, we reduce our own lives and development. Attention exists in the most natural way in the world in the natural environments our species has fled from in our race to become as urban as possible. 

I spent many years growing a faculty that wonderfully reclaims and shares the understandings of the natural world and the pedagogical mountain top of pure, undistracted attention we can attempt to recreate in the classroom. All of it shattered outside the town of Chamonix in France, where I am writing this.

I am indoors now. The cleaning substances have taken over the air, making me sneeze. We have ended up here after the hardest thing ever. It happened like this:

From art nouveau Gare de Lyon in Paris, we boarded the bullet train bound for Annecy and, for 100 miles, saw not a single human out the window, only some cows and kilometers of rolling hills with golden sunflowers and wheat. 

In Annecy, we boarded a bus bound for the Alps. There was something about nature we were winding up towards: the cortical and facial impacts of “awe,” the healing aerosols among the forests down below, and the clean cold air up above. As we gained in elevation, the French blue sky that calmed our retinas was claimed by mists. We disembarked in Chamonix and, early the next morning, approached the cog rail bahn that would take us higher still, to the lift that would take us to the gondola, at last to the Aiguille du Midi, the top of Mont Blanc massif, the highest place in Europe where the air is thin. 

We disembarked with our packs of gear and entered a long tunnel terminating in a whited-out world at 12,000 feet. We carried packs with crampons (climbing cleats), snowshoes, and harnesses. The wind was gusting, and I had to cover my eyes sometimes to protect them, and clots of clouds opened and closed the view at random. Our guide, Eddy, divided us into three groups of 5 and each group strapped the climbing rope into the harnesses so if one fell and slid the others could hold them fast.

We set out across a ridge in our groups as the wind whipped up higher, and I dared not look off to the side too much for my imagination. Could we even hold a falling member of our group from sliding down the steep slope? Some randonnée skiers made small arcs as they picked their way down the steep face, and their skis seemed to be better tools than our light snowshoes. 

I think of how trusting they looked when I studied their eyes as we were roping in. We are a rope team now, holding the dynamic rope taut for stability as we traverse the ridge, and I think of how innocent our students are but also how incredibly receptive. My imagination spins off as I imagine losing footing and sliding down after the skiers. A student in front catches the edge of a snowshoe and face plants, then struggles to stand again. We press on. I have no poles, as I have given mine to a young student who has lost hers. I hold my left hand to my ear to keep the biting wind and snow out. We tread along steady for a while. Eddy stops to check on everyone. He tugs his mountaineering gloves onto the hands of one student whose hands are too cold. Then he pulls her dainty gloves on his own hands so he’ll have something.

“Let’s keep going. A few hundred feet more till that rise,” he says, establishing a goal. He looks the kids over down the rope line and adds, “Then we will start making our way back.” The show is falling up, not down.

High arousal seeking is the thing parents and schools fear most in teens, and suddenly it occurred to me that we were delivering it now. These wild surroundings captivate every human sense, and the issue of capturing any student’s attention suddenly seemed trivial before the sounds and sights of the wind and snow, the crunch below our feet, and the vistas from the top of the world. Heightened arousal is normally considered the enemy of our children at home and school, and now, here, in a natural environment, nothing has ever made my students more challenged or engaged. Here in the high Alps was a new kind of performance standard that would either shut students down or trigger the blood pressure and pulse they needed to rise above the noise: to filter out all distraction, to be here now, to engage every physiological resource in their minds and bodies all towards a single challenge. 

Down below, this might be subject to imagination alone, and indicative only of what we must make sure our children physically avoid, but up here in the windy wild it is the opposite. Beyond fear of risk is a whole new kind of attention at a level we might rarely experience but that teens might subconsciously seek through loud music or drug use, or risk taking. Up here, we learn that anxiety, worry, and risk have another face: exhilaration, exhilaration, and intense excitement. Sensory alertness. 

Down below, afterwards, I ask Mac, grade 11, how he liked our hike. He says, “That was the hardest thing I ever did,” and I ask, “In a good way?” He gives a knowing nod. We share the best kind of knowing a teacher and student can share. I say, “It has been a while since I’ve seen any student do a really hard thing in the real world.”

School seems like a place of manufactured hard things. Here is something harder: one recent Nature Conservancy poll found that only about 10 percent of American teens spend time outside every day. [1]  

Being outdoors is a therapy and cure for many diseases with no side effects. Beyond just being outdoors, the pursuit of something like sheer exhilaration promotes levels of consciousness and learning almost completely unexplored by educators and almost nonexistent in schools. The state of excitement creates unforgettable and pristine moments of insight and discovery. These moments can be negative or positive, and this is completely up to the individual, hence they are the best times to have a great, encouraging teacher on hand. 

Down below, we are in an epidemic of fear and anxiety, distraction, obesity, and near-sightedness. We live in communities that respond to wild conditions with prescription drugs and psychologists, more drugs and more prescriptions, as though the body and mind have no antidotes or choices—and then we talk about building resilience in kids. Down below, we glorify the wild in film and song, and then use every resource to ensure that our children will not have to experience it. Down below, the wild is what teachers remove from the classroom. But up here atop Mont Blanc, on the highest place on the continent, where survival takes unforgettable skills, the antidote to our pervasive, 21st century fear is different. In the wild we know that the opposite of anxiety is not relaxation at all, and it will not be fixed in a chair. 

Looking at the data on mental illness and chronic stress of our youth, many educators conclude that they are reaching peak negative stress these days, despite all we know about how to avoid that. I subscribe to the pursuit of academic rigor and equally the peaceful alpha wave activity of “the brain on nature” and meditation, but neither pushes our envelope no matter how bad it needs pushing. Beyond the known comforts lies the chance for peak excitement, the aching muscles, the numbing body, the mind-sapping Everest moments our kids are going to push through, which are positive stress, and they are up to this. People have long pushed themselves far out of their comfort zones to feel extremely alive and absolutely focused. I’m sure that many of our kids need natural highs like these to remain healthy.

Almost all healthy teens are going to go out of bounds, they are going to need to light themselves up inside, and we might worry a whole lot more if they do not, so the real question is where that is going to take place. Up on Mont Blanc at 12,000 feet, roped together, we arrived back into the tunnel at last, unstrapped our snowshoes and slapped the high fives. It was freezing and no one was cold. They looked: alive.

I love seeing great teachers guide our students through places where I know transformation occurs, and I feel proud that several of our school’s former students have become outdoor guides. I also felt brokenhearted up on that once great glacier, the legendary Mer de Glace, now diminished, thin, and dying, and I am still seeking ways to help students develop the sensitivity and courage they will need. The love of the wild is not just found in the majesty of a mountaintop, but in the unknowable life on the other side, the future.

[1] This Is Your Brain On Nature, National Geographic, Florence Williams.

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