Upper School Curriculum Night Remarks — Fall 2019

Joy Hurd
Joy Hurd
Nov 4 · 6 min read

The following post contains my remarks (or an approximation of them) from our Upper School Curriculum Night this fall. Some parents in attendance have asked for a copy, and I decided that posting them here was an easy way to share my thoughts from that event. Enjoy!

Welcome to Upper School Curriculum Night and to the start of an already-busy and already-great year at Lake Forest Country Day School. This evening, as we start our program, I want to talk with you all about questions and about answers, and I want to start with my thoughts about answers.

By “answers” here, I mean knowledge: the “skills and stuff” that we try to commit to long-term memory as we learn. Some people argue that in an age of Google, where almost any fact can be quickly and easily searched, there’s no need for students to memorize much of anything. I disagree. There is value in retaining facts, figures, definitions, events, and all the rest in our memories. There is value in learning poems and speeches and songs by heart. Knowledge enriches our thinking and enriches our lives.

We have learned more about how we learn — how our brains acquire and retain skills and knowledge — in the past 20 years than we learned in the 200 years before that. This past summer, all of my colleagues were invited to choose a book for professional reading, and many of them chose Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning.

I recommend the book highly, and there are many important points it makes, but I want to highlight just one of those points here with you this evening: Successful long-term learning results from both effort and frustration. Often, when we see a student feeling frustrated as he learns, we assume that something is going wrong when the exact opposite is often true. It turns out that we learn best when we face what scientists call “desirable difficulties.”

Think back to your own years in school when you were studying for a test. Let’s say that you were deciding whether to just re-read your notes or to use flashcards. Re-reading notes was fairly easy and non-threatening, and you could feel fairly confident that you knew the information once you were done reviewing — perhaps more confident than you should have. Flashcards posed a different challenge because they forced you to recognize when you didn’t know something that you probably ought to know. What was the better study method? Almost certainly the flashcard route because flashcards offered a desirable difficulty.

One of the best books I’ve read recently is David Epstein’s Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. If Make It Stick is a bit academic and dense, Range is remarkably accessible and lays this idea out very well: “For a given amount of material, learning is most efficient in the long run when it is really inefficient in the short run… Frustration is not a sign you are not learning, but ease is.”

I make this point because, as your children start the new school year, we want them to learn as much as they can, and we want them to learn it for the long run. That means frustration will inevitably be part of the process, and that’s actually a good thing, not something to be prevented, nor some sign that things somehow aren’t working. So welcome your child’s frustration this year and encourage and support them as they work through it.

I said I would be talking about questions and about answers. I just shared my thoughts on the “answers” part, so I’d like to turn now to the “questions” part. Any school that promises to teach your children all the skills and knowledge that they will need for the future is making a promise that it simply can’t keep. The future is unknowable, especially in this age of accelerating change and disruption. For that reason, I’d like to propose that curiosity is the 21st-century skill we should want for all our children.

I want your children — all children, really — to lead their lives with a sincere sense of curiosity. Curiosity about the world and their studies, sure. But I also want them to be curious about themselves, how they feel, how they learn, what they value, and who they want to be. I want them to be curious about others, especially those who come from backgrounds and cultures different from their own. Only someone with a curious mind can become a lifelong learner, and the surest sign of a curious mind is a habit of asking questions.

Children are naturally curious, they’re natural question-askers, and our job at LFCDS is to nurture that innate curiosity. As kids get older, they stop asking so many questions and often stop showing a sense of curiosity about the world around them. Maybe that trend is because schools often reward students who are the quickest to arrive at the “right” answer. Maybe as students grow older, they become more self-conscious and fear that asking a question might make them look “dumb.”

Whatever the reasons, we need to work to counteract that trend. Your children will be ready for an unknowable future only if they know how to ask great questions. In the future, we have to leverage those skills that humans are especially good at, like asking questions. We’re often told to fear the rise of artificial intelligence because computers will start stealing jobs. And the rise of A.I. is indeed something to pay attention to.

In Range, the book I mentioned earlier, the author tells the story of Watson, the IBM-created supercomputer that defeated humans at Jeopardy! After that victory, many believed that Watson would revolutionize medicine, an endeavor that ended in terrible failure. Why did that happen? An oncologist quoted in the book put it this way: “The difference between winning at Jeopardy! and curing all cancer is that we know the answer to Jeopardy! questions.” Epstein, the author, adds, “With cancer, we’re still working on posing the right questions in the first place.”

So what does this commitment to great questions look like at LFCDS? I’ve challenged all my teaching colleagues to reflect on the role that questions play in their classrooms, both questions asked by the teacher and questions asked by the students. When I was a teacher, it was common for me to finish teaching a concept or lesson and then to ask, “Does anyone have any questions?” What I hoped for early in my career was for no one to raise their hand, sure proof that I had taught a perfectly clear lesson. But of course that wasn’t the case at all! It was inevitable that at least one student didn’t understand the new concept, that students had questions but were reluctant, for whatever reason, to raise their hands and ask.

Instead, when our teachers finish teaching a lesson, they have been challenged to ask, “What questions do you have?” in an attempt to normalize question-asking as part of the learning process, not a sign that you weren’t able to follow along. We also want to ask our students higher-order questions that require thought more than recall, and we want to give them the wait-time to think deeply about their answers before any student is called on. These are simple strategies, but quite powerful ones.

And tonight I want to challenge all you parents in the room as well. When your child gets home from school, instead of asking, “How was your day today?” (a question that rarely elicits an elaborate response, especially from a middle schooler), ask, “What questions did you ask today?” Now, I’m not entirely convinced that that particular question is likely to elicit an elaborate response either, but over time you will teach your kids that you see value in the questions they ask and the curiosity that they show.

Tonight is your chance also to show sincere curiosity as you visit all your children’s teachers and learn what will be going on in our classrooms in the year ahead. Take advantage of this opportunity to ask your own great questions.

Thank you, as always, for entrusting your children to us. I have the privilege of working with the best faculty I know, and we are all committed to knowing, loving, and challenging your children to be the best version of themselves that they can be.

Written by

Joy Hurd

Head of School at Lake Forest Country Day School (Lake Forest, IL)

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade