Don't you love a good project?

Take some time to develop the thing,

but once you roll it out to the students,

the students are engaged, and you get
to stand back and watch them work.

You get to advise them as they dig

deeply into this thing on their own,
whatever the subject is that you've

assigned to them in this project.
Instead of being the sage on the stage,

you get to be the guide
by the side for a change.

And the students, they're working extra

hours trying to fill in whatever
gaps they might have.

They find sources you hadn't thought of.

They learn things you didn't know.

And when they get to obstacles,

they just bound right over those obstacles
as if they don't exist...It's not connecting?

That's not your experience of projects?

Sometimes it is, and those are great.

I have only ever had students outright

tell me they don't care about what I'm
offering in words,

maybe a handful of times in the 14
years that I've been teaching.

But they tell me they don't care
in other ways. What's actually going on

when a student is not engaging

with the material I have to offer?
A student saying "I don't care"—

a student really not engaging

with the material may actually
be afraid of failing.

They might be saying "I don't care"

as a means of covering up
their fear of failure.

We talked about that yesterday as
a misapplication of carefulness.

Carefulness is a good thing.

If you misapply it and go

to perfectionism, then carefulness
is damaging and debilitating.

Today I'm going to take a little bit
of a different approach to the fear

of failure and say that the thing
to develop in students who are afraid

to fail and therefore
feigning a lack of care—

the thing to develop in these
students is intellectual courage.

Courageous thinking is a willingness

to take risks for the truth,
for something important.

And in this case, intellectual courage is
a willingness to take risks for the truth.

So they may be saying they are afraid

of failure and feigning
that they don't care.

And in that case,
the thing to develop is courage.

It may be
that the student is saying that their

outside life is more important than
what is happening here. In math class

oftentimes we talk about making math real

for the student, and that means you're
connecting it to their daily life.

And actually, in every
class we try to do this.

We try to connect the class to what

students are experiencing
outside of school.

And that's a good pedagogical technique;

that's a good thing for us to do as
teachers, is to tie what students are

learning today with what they know
from their life outside of school.

However,
if the student is relying on me always

to do that, I'm going to fail,
and I'm going to lose them along the way

because I can't always make those
connections for all of my students.

I have 14 students coming in this year.

They have widely varied interests.

I'm not going to hit them every single

time
with things that interest their personal

life, with every single
lesson that I teach.

And so it is the student's responsibility
sometimes to make those connections.

It may be that the student is saying

of learning, that learning is
a transactional relationship.

Think about a transactional relationship
that you have with a clerk at Walmart.

I will give you this money,
you will give me the goods I desire.

Think of the transactional relationship
that people have with their boss.

I will do the things you ask of me.

I will allow you to boss me around for 8
hours a day and in return you will give me

a paycheck. That translates very,
very easily into school.

I will do the tasks you ask of me

and in return you will give me a grade
and you will let me go to the next grade.

And at the end you will give me a diploma.

Transactional relationship of education
means that as long as the student is

fulfilling the commands of the teacher,
the demands of the teacher,

then they have earned their diploma,
their grade, their advancement.

Is that really what education is?

Is that really what we're all about?

I would say no.

No, no, no, no.

You see, education is about far more
than this transaction.

Another way the student might be saying
this,

might be communicating this transactional
relationship is that he might be saying or

she might be saying, "I love something
else more than I love school."

Well, that's fine, actually.

Does a student really need
to love school itself?

No.
But there are things going on at school

that ought to be shaping
the loves of our students,

and students ought to be finding
themselves loving certain things more

and other things less because
of what's happening at school.

So far this week I've been focusing
on intellectual character traits, things

that exist in the mind,
the way students think about things.

Today I want to highlight
something very different.

It is a character trait.

Remember, I called character

how a student behaves within the range
of possible behaviors that they have.

So how do they behave within a range

of possible behaviors,
within that range of possibility

when it comes to love?

Love is a transitive verb
that means it needs an object.

There is something—you don't just love,
you love something or someone.

So while we are thinking beings,

I would argue that we are
much more than our minds.

What we love is a deeper part
of who we are than what we think.

Now the two are closely connected.

I like to say that the mind
defends what the heart chooses.

Education is not a process of information;

it is a process of reformation.

Think of it almost like

a hammer and an anvil and the student
is this piece of metal.

I almost said a piece of work,
but that has a different connotation.

Sometimes they are a real piece of work.

We shape our students.

But it's not in a single act,
it's not in a single statement.

We don't have these brilliant moments
where we change the life of a student.

I wish for us that we all could have
that experience, but it's rare.

What happens over time is that the student
gets shaped by what happens repeatedly.

Loving God, loving our
neighbors through practices,

these daily habits,
will hopefully move the needle.

Now, I recognize, I recognize we have our

students for a very short amount of time
in the overall scheme of things.

We have them for a few hours a day.

Then they spend a lot of time elsewhere.

And a lot of their loves are shaped by
their friends, by what they do elsewhere.

As teachers, we have limited capacity,

but we do have some capacity
to shape their loves.

And I'm saying that we ought to be using
that capacity to the fullest of our abilities.

If you wish to build a ship,

don't drum up people to collect wood
and don't assign them tasks and work,

but rather teach them to long
for the endless immensity of the sea.

Perhaps

the problems that I face with getting
students to really engage

with the projects that I give to them,
to really engage with the lessons

of the day, perhaps those problems are

not so much problems of disconnection.

Rather, they're problems of students
not longing for the immensity of the sea

and not seeing how these
things that they're doing day by day

connect to that big term,
that long-term picture.

I have a vision for schools

where each classroom is
a community of lovers.

Lovers together of truth,

lovers of knowledge, but more importantly,
lovers of each other,

lovers of God, and lovers
of neighbors outside the classroom.

And we can do that through practices
that build that community.