Hit the Doorframe

How do you know that you’re growing? You jump up and hit the doorframe.

There is this thing that happens in middle school usually in 6/7th grade, usually among boys, where every *single* time a student passes beneath a doorframe they feel compelled to jump up and hit the header. I used to wonder why I didn’t see more of this kind of thing among adults.  It seems that once you hit about 25 the allure fades and you mostly go back to walking through doorframes without smacking the top of them with a satisfying glee. 

Why do kids feel compelled to attack the doorframe?  I think it might be because they are trying to understand themselves.

They live in a world where their own bodies are changing and unfamiliar. They’re using their environments to assess their own growth, to learn their own bodies new capabilities and signal to their peers where they stand in the hierarchy of “i can touch that”

Adults mostly know how tall they are and when they're reaching something its not to assess their height or reach, often its because they know their own height as a rough unit of measure and they are assessing the world in terms of themselves as a know quantity not defining themselves and their bodies against the world.

Adults feel constant and consistent- use themselves to measure the world. 

Children feel plastic and unguided - use the world to measure themselves. 

So, how do you know you’re growing? You hit the doorframe and assess.  When a person is a child the process of growing and becoming something new is at the forefront of your experiences, thoughts and interactions with the physical world, culture, and their peers. Children do not know who they are going to be and spend a lot of time and energy trying to assess who they might become, what their gifts might be, what they can be the best at, what they want to avoid.

How can you tell? What are you measuring against? How do you know what you’ll become? What can they change? what can they control?.

Everything is an opportunity to be ranked: am I the fastest? The tallest? The Smartest? The most creative? The good “ draw-er”? The funny one? The stupid one? The failure?

What does my every action, failure and success mean in terms of Who I Am? Just as every doorframe becomes a new way to measure yourself and reassess your body, every part of your day becomes a marker against which you reassess yourself.  

 This creates some high stakes for your actions, if everything I do is a measure of my worth as a person or viewed as some kind of clue to my purpose in life then I might start perceiving things as being very important or risky that other, more grown up, folks might think don’t matter at all.

If I am not the best at something and I know it, I might avoid trying to reach that marker because the public failure to do so will have internal and external effects. Internally it may create a stronger aversion to whatever the activity is and externally it may cause my social standing or ranking to fall.

If I am trying to understand myself in the context of a world and social hierarchy then what does it mean if I am never number one? What does it mean if you’re not someone who tops the list, but sit somewhere in the middle? How does that effect your developing identity? What happens if you are the best? What happens if you’re always on top? What happens if you’re always on top but the competition isn’t very hard? 

I think adults take a big part of the blame for creating some of these perceptions among kids. While it is natural to want to understand your place and abilities as a unique human being in the world the way we talk to children about the process of self discovery is not helping a lot of the time. 

Adults like to ask children “what do you want to be when you grow up?” Often framed like what one thing will you choose?  Do you want to be a mechanic or a doctor or a diver or a systems analyst or a reporter? It’s always a binary choice. Choose one thing and live it, forever. We pass on this idea of a calling as essential to personhood. What happens if you, as a child, don’t know what you want to do?  What does it mean if you aren’t in love with any profession? What if the thing you want to be isn’t realistic?

What happens if the thing you LOVE isn’t the thing you’re good at? Is it worth doing?

Adults also create frames and narratives where “ everyone has their thing” that thing that you are best at, the gift you bring, the talent that flows naturally eventually the ugly duckling becomes the swan, the kid no one picked throws the winning free throw, the kid with that one weird skill is able to use it to defeat the guy who wants to bulldoze the community center, etc..  These are the stories we tell about childhood. The main character is ALWAYS fated to save the day with their uniqueness. Its inevitable that one day you too will wake up and realize the thing you are, figure out how YOU can save the day. 
For children there is a constant hum of: What are you going to be? What’s your thing? Is today the day you discover your gift? Is today the day you learn who you are? What role you play? What kind of story are you the hero of?  These are the things I think students are assessing inside themselves everyday, every action, and its exhausting. 

How do I as a teacher create spaces where these expectations are mitigated to allow for exploration and expression? 

Often I do this by de-centering the student’s output inside a lesson. The product is predetermined to be one thing. They are just helping ME to uncover it. I make the success of the product reflect on me, rather than them. I prioritize failure first. This eliminates the potential for failure to impact a student’s self assessment since failure is the first goal. You can’t get it wrong. Therefore you can’t be bad at it and if you fail at failure then you’ve succeeded!

Changing context is important. Working to create atmospheres where we’re all creating as iterative processes and reinforcing that 95% of art is left in the trash. Not every thing you produce is important as a final assessment of skill or value. Sometimes you just draw a bird to work on drawing a bird, then you toss the paper and draw the bird again.

  I also address cognitive load and negative self talk as a a contributor to potential failure. The physiology of doing something and how folks can be overloaded by their own internal monologue.  You can only do so many things at once and performing new skills demands a LOT of brainpower. The brainpower you use to heckle yourself sucks the energy and focus you need to be successful. Learning to turn that voice off or to use strategies that minimize its effects can be very freeing and allow students to be successful where they may not have been before. Creating explicit structures around repetition, time or process goals that are smaller than “MASTERY” also allow for a deflation of the stress of doing the thing.

How do I address students as people when they don’t know who they are yet? Offer them the space to imagine themselves as the people you are talking to. 

All my students are musicians, even if they don’t know it yet.

The exploratory spaces and addressing of students as peers on a creative journey allows them to develop a sense of “self-as”
Self as- Musician
Self as- Leader
Self as- Supporter
Self as- Performer
Self as - Composer
Engaging students in making meaningful choices and approaching those choices as valuable even when they aren’t the “correct” choices means that you can minimize the fear of doing the “wrong” thing and maximize their identity as decision makers and creative problem solvers. 

Being a child is stressful, there are lots of expectations, you body is changing like David Cronenberg is directing your version of the wonder years and the life that lays out ahead of you is one big blank page waiting for you to fill it.

How do you know who to be? 
How do you know you’re growing?
You reach up and slap the doorframe.

Continuing Questions

What kinds of “self-as” identities do you carry? How did you develop them?
What are some ways to create spaces for exploration that mitigate social factors that might provide a negative association to effort and failure?
How do you manage confronting your own place in the social/professional hierarchy of life? How does that inform your own affect and efforts?