Why this is the year I become an American

For a little over thirty years, I’ve been a Washingtonian. But I haven’t been an American. At least, not yet.

There’s a difference. It took me a cross-country drive, a visit to Mount Vernon, and a meeting at the U.S. Capitol to see it. Driving through the rolling fields and prairies of the great plains, walking the path of George Washington along the Potomac River, and speaking with teachers from every corner of the nation, my experiences over the past several weeks have me thinking about my identity and what it means to be a citizen of this country.

Until I left for the nation’s capital, I had always considered myself an American. Now, I’m not so sure. There’s overlap, of course: the values of the nation radiate across the states, and my upbringing and my experiences have been similar to those of millions of others throughout the country. But there’s more to being part of this nation than merely living within it.

So who am I? A Washingtonian? An American? I’m not sure anymore. Here at the seat of our nation’s government, I’ve found myself thinking about my country in a way I never have before. It’s not just the marble buildings and the monuments and the museums. It’s something more.

We call it the United States, but I’ve never understood the concept until now. Here in the capital, I’m starting to recognize how the nation fits together. And I’m starting to learn how I fit in to it all.

On my journey East, I pass through Nebraska and Iowa. I’ve always imagined flat fields with endless rows of corn. That’s not what I find. Instead, small family homesteads with charming barns and silos dot the hills, groves of trees separating fields from each other. This was once the frontier, a land of opportunity and dreams.

I walk to work in Virginia, and many of the license plates on the cars that pass me note the state’s 400th anniversary. This is where the idea of America began, the home of our nation’s earliest European settlement. I pass by George Washington’s tomb at Mount Vernon and recognize I’m in the presence of one of the world’s most extraordinary men.

I board the subway and cross underneath the Potomac into the District of Columbia, and I enter a city with laws and government unlike anywhere else in the nation, where residents couldn’t even vote for President until 1964, and where they still don’t have the right to elect a voting representative in Congress. At its heart sit the centers of the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches of government. The decisions made here define our national experience.

I drive north into Maryland, home of soft shell crab and the Chesapeake Bay, to a place where a Civil War battle bloodied the earth and the nation’s history was forever changed. This land has been part of two American revolutions.

The other Einstein fellows come from Hawaii and New Jersey and Florida and Illinois, from California and Connecticut and Texas. Each brings a different perspective on education, but not just because we all work in different types of schools or with different types of students. It’s because we’re each literally bringing our State’s values and ideals with us to Washington. We, collectively, are America.

I’m starting to see the United States as it literally is: states, united. Until I moved to Washington, DC, I thought I was an American. But I know now that I didn’t start becoming an American until I sat in a room with thirty other teachers from throughout the country and spoke about education. When people come together, that is America.

This year, I’m becoming an American, but I’m starting from scratch. In a way, it’s my turn to be an adolescent again. I thought I knew who I was…a Washingtonian, a teacher, a husband. Those labels are still true, but now I’m becoming something else, too. I’m forming a new identity. Just like the students I teach, I’m trying to figure out who I am, and, indeed, who I want to be. I’ve lived here in the capital for just a few weeks, but I’m starting to recognize that my experiences this year won’t be much different from those of the students I left behind in Spokane.

I’ve begun work in a brand new setting, far from the world of school and science education. The National Science Foundation is not a classroom. But it might as well be. I’m in a new environment, with new responsibilities, and little expertise. At its heart, the experience I have here will be much like that of my middle school students. I need to learn a new vocabulary. I need to develop new relationships. I need to create products that show my knowledge and understanding. I need to figure out what it means to be an effective worker in the NSF environment. And, here in the nation’s capital, I need to figure out what it means to be an American.

I haven’t thought this way about my own identity for many years. Not since high school, in fact. But the path I’ll take this year mirrors that of countless American students. In schools across the country, kids will spend much of their day figuring out who they want to be and how they’ll fit in. For many students, forming an identity trumps everything else. Kids decide every day to try on new personalities. They change their clothing, they change their hairstyles, they change their friend groups. This focus on identify formation has big implications for the way we approach education.

The most important thing we can do in middle school and high school, far beyond teaching any scientific principle or language arts skill, is to give students an opportunity to learn what type of person they want to become. Adolescence is about identity development, pure and simple, and we teachers need to key in on that if we want to make a difference. Effective schools and effective educators are deliberate about giving kids opportunities to see what it means to be an actor, or a politician, or an engineer, or a businessperson.

And the best educators don’t stop there. We give our students opportunities for social interaction, where kids can try out different personalities and learn, in real life, what it means to be a responsible citizen. We teach students how to communicate, how to solve arguments, how to contribute to teams, and how to relate to others. We focus on social development just as much as career or college preparation. We give kids a chance to find out not just what they want to be, but who they want to be.

When schools teach about character development, it’s usually done almost exclusively at the elementary level. We teach kids about diligence and respect and integrity, and we do a good job of it, but then we suddenly stop once kids enter secondary school. We transition to social studies and science and music, and we hope that the principles students have learned in their elementary years stay with them for the second half of their schooling.

But this is exactly opposite the way we should be approach our curriculum. The critical period for identity development is not the elementary years…it’s when kids are in middle and high school. It’s important to set a good foundation, and I would never argue that we should remove character education from our elementary schools. But the true emphasis on character education should be during the middle and high school years.

Parents and politicians would likely say we’re dumbing down our schools, that character education has no place next to AP Physics or English Literature. And maybe they’re right…school should be challenging, and since most character education programs were created for elementary schools, they don’t have the level of rigor our communities expect for middle or high school. Yet, most students would probably benefit more, later in life, from an intensive focus on character education than on geometry.

Whether we focus on incorporating character development into our existing classes (discussing concepts like integrity as students analyze literature, or teaching cooperation techniques when students work collaboratively on a biology project), or whether we incorporate stand-alone character education classes into our course catalogs, it’s important that our middle school and high school students have an opportunity to learn not just what they want to be, but who they want to be. It’s important that we offer some direction as students make those decisions. Teaching students to be responsible, contributing citizens should be the paramount duty of every school in the nation.

So, students, you thought I’d left you this year. But I’m starting to realize that even though we’re 2500 miles away, our experiences will be similar. I wish you the best of luck as you begin your new classes. For maybe the first time ever, I know what you’re going through.