It’s taken me many years to see the pattern, but I finally do:

A teacher comes along wanting to be part of my school. On the surface, they are going along with things. In every training meeting, they agree with my points and agree to implement my feedback.

But in reality, they are going their own way. Their underlying motivation for joining the staff at an alternative school is to push against the status quo, and they keep doing it even once they’re on the team. In other words, they are wary of me because I’m an administrator. I must be the enemy, part of the system they are pushing against. Therefore, they seek to subvert my authority and ingratiate themselves with the students — often without even realizing that they’re doing it.

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For a few years, I ran a daily drop-in sing-along for families.

Of course, it was actually mostly babies and caregivers. So we lost the whole family bonding angle that I had been hoping for. But that’s okay — we could still offer an enriching musical experience for small children.

So we did. We sang songs, danced, did finger plays, and played instruments like the tambourine and bells. And inevitably, just when the child was starting to catch on, we’d hear from the parents that they had outgrown the sing-along and would love something more structured.

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What goes into a grade?

Grades seem straightforward. The teacher gives the assignments and administers the test, and the results are up to the student. Success and failure are measurable and quantifiable.

A letter grade on a given assignment, test, or course implies that the onus is on the student to achieve a successful outcome. However, there are two problems with this: Success is defined narrowly as the attainment of a certain numerical score, and the teacher is never required to reflect on the student’s progress — only the score.

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If you want to learn something — anything — the content is out there.

There are books, videos, and courses galore to show you how to do whatever it is you want to do, from flower arranging to sailing to investing. Whether in person or online, there is no shortage of information and eager teachers out there.

Despite this, we don’t reach our goals. We don’t all learn how to do the things we want to. Although online course completion rates are not the best measure of whether someone is learning, most sources suggest that they hover between 5 and 15 percent. Presumably, some of these people got as much as they wanted to from the course or learned what the wanted to learn elsewhere, but for many of them, life happened. They wanted to follow through, but they didn’t.

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When I was in tenth grade, I suddenly developed a passion for the guitar.

My dad played, so he lent me a guitar and showed me my first chords. Late at night, I would sit on the edge of my bed and work out songs.

One afternoon, I spent about three hours going through a book of Beatles songs, painstakingly reading the tiny chord grids above the piano part.

The intense effort paid off. I started in March, and by May of that year I was jamming regularly with other musicians, performing onstage, and writing my own songs.

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It's really pretty simple. If you want to succeed at something, whether it's learning an instrument or mastering fractions or running a marathon, you've got to just not quit.

Simple, but not easy, right? Here's what I've noticed in working as a teacher and coach across subject areas: 

When we think we are pretty good at something, we'll keep going until we have completed our objective.

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