The 20,000 Hour Journey

By John O’Malley

*Editors note: This is Tony Holler. I’m constantly challenged by the exceptional things that come from John O’Malley. Last summer, while writing, Divergent Thinking: Inside John O’Malley, I ran every morning listening to John’s favorite U2 song, “Bad”. The guy is 20 years younger than me, but he’s a wise old sage. When John spoke at the Track Football Consortium in June, everyone was on the edge of their seats. John O’Malley owns the room. One of his topics, one PowerPoint slide, has stuck in my head ever since. 20,000 HOURS. High school graduates have spent 20,000 in school. That’s a lot of time.

Six weeks later, I wrote 20,000 HOURS. Before writing, I sent John O’Malley a text:

“Thinking about writing a back-to-school article, 20,000 HOURS. What were your thoughts when you posted that slide? Really, what are kids good at when they’ve graduated? Have we failed? Is there anything a teacher can do, or is it a lost cause?”

The following was John’s response. I will interject throughout.

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The 20,000 Hours

My boy starts his 20,000 hour journey next week. 

I continue facilitating the 20,000 hour journey this week.

First of all, I like quantifying things. I know, for instance, that there are 1,440 minutes in a day. But the real exigence for the slide was the concept of taking kids seriously. I thought about wasting their time and I thought about their schooling and did the math. My next logical question was, “What do they get out of it?” Coaches need to think about this as well. If all they get out of thousands of hours of practice is that they are good at blocking, catching or throwing, then that’s not worth the time. Likewise, if all that students are good at after 20,000 hours is taking a hyper-packed test that lacks relevancy, then that’s probably not good, even if they got into Harvard. 

*Editors note: But isn’t next-level readiness the mission statement of every grade level? Ha. Too many professional educators buy into this!

Different kids are good are different things when they graduate. So we are talking about what are they systematically good at. I’ve seen brilliant mathematicians, high level athletes, creative writers, and the list goes on, but we are talking about what, directly through the system, are most kids good at? You put in 20,000 and you should be good at something…really. Anders Ericsson (the man behind the Malcolm Gladwell research) would argue that, if you’ve had purposeful practice, you could be professional level in at least two things. Kids don’t get purposeful practice and they don’t rise to professional levels. In truth kids get good at terrible things. Kids become good at finding shortcuts because their schedule is not manageable. Many kids become professional students (sounds good, huh?) In actuality, professional students become masters at accumulating points in an archaic grading system with the most efficient means possible, including cheating. They are NOT good at innovation or risk-taking. Why should they be? The entire system is punitive. If they get something wrong, they are penalized for it.  

*Editors note: We live in a transactional world. Kids are taught to do stuff to get stuff. Kids are still taught like B.F. Skinner’s rats. Rewards and consequences are everywhere in education. We can do better.

Have We Failed?

We haven’t failed but we are failing. Here’s an experiment. Ask a room full of people (i.e. a class) to silently think about a moment they learned something meaningful. Give them a minute. Then ask for a show of hands of how many people came up with a moment that occurred inside a classroom. Any time I’ve done this, it’s been a maximum of one hand raised. Think about 20,000 hours now. 

*Editor’s note: I taught Honors Chemistry. I don’t think anything I ever taught would rise to the “meaningful” standard. Students learned solid fundamentals of chemistry and were well-prepared for tests. I would like to think that meaningful things happened in my class, but those things happened IN SPITE OF THE CURRICULUM.

Next time you are in a room of young adults, ask them to list the ten most meaningful and inspirational PEOPLE in their lives, outside of family. For some, all ten will be teachers. It was for me. Not because of the delivered subject matter, but because of THE TEACHER. The teacher displayed a charisma, enthusiasm, kindness, and sense of humor that was infectious. Great teachers are people who young people aspire to become. Curriculum, standards, and assessment are the most overrated and over-valued things in education. School is all about PEOPLE.

Is There Something We Can Do?

Yes. It’s pretty funny that you ask this question to me, a teacher. Teachers don’t get asked about education. Bill Gates recently admitted that their $575 million dollar investment in improving education didn’t make any significant impact. Of course it didn’t. Gates could have saved $575 million and spent $50 bucks buying a dozen great teachers coffee at a Seattle Starbucks and having a conversation. He would have gotten more out of it. Instead he went to Arne Duncan and “real academia,” like research consultants who don’t actually teach but make money off of education.

*Editors note: One of the most respected voices in education, Diane Ravitch, published this about Arnie Duncan in 2015. The Education Secretary Earned His F. The closing paragraph of the article:

“It will take years to recover from the damage that Arne Duncan’s policies have inflicted on public education. He exceeded the authority of his office to promote a failed agenda, one that had no evidence behind it. The next president and the next Secretary of Education will have an enormous job to do to restore our nation’s public education system from the damage done by Race to the Top. We need leadership that believes in the joy of learning and in equality of educational opportunity. We have not had either for 15 years.”

Now we have Betsy DeVos. God save us.

Teachers are not considered elite. We don’t need to hear more from people who spent two years in Teach for America before launching their “real” career and are now considered experts because they spent two years in the trenches. By the way, you can’t cure poverty by sending in a kid from an Ivy League school to be their teacher for a year. Furthermore, you aren’t a good teacher because you went to an Ivy League school. No one is a good teacher in their first two years of teaching.

If Bill Gates wants to improve education he should figure out a way to get universal health care in this country. Health care would be the number one way I’d improve education. The prenatal care alone would raise our average ACT score. Of course, we can’t wave a wand and make that happen, but the lesson is significant in that we need to remember that our students are complex humans. We need to understand them.

I was thinking about a couple of teachers in my department–Kristin Mattera, Kathryn Guelcher and Judy McAuliffe. I haven’t seen them teach much but I know they’re great because it’s remarkable how well they know their students. I don’t know my own son and daughter as well as they know their students! I’m not talking about knowing they play this sport or that instrument. I’m talking about understanding their struggles, their motivations, their anxieties, and even their nonverbal communication. They must have this intense radar scanning their classrooms registering the emotional quakes of their students.  

HERE IS WHAT I WOULD TELL MY SON’S TEACHERS FOR THE REST OF HIS LIFE

If I drop dead tomorrow, I hope his teachers do the following, and note that these are not characteristics I am declaring I have as a teacher. I am hoping my son has better teachers than I am:

1. Don’t be a daycare.

2. Take the profession seriously. I cannot stand when I hear people say stuff like, “Coaches are teachers.” No. I’m a coach and I respect the profession tremendously, but coaches are not teachers. They may teach, but they are not teachers. Teaching is a profession. If I tended to a student or an athlete with a cut and cleaned and bandaged them up, I would not call myself a doctor. Teaching is a profession. Study it, respect it and grow as a real professional. You know about learning, so learn. Teach yourself. 

3. Take your students more seriously than you take your profession. 

*Editors note: This is what makes John O’Malley special. Who else says this kind of stuff? Most teachers are more loyal to their employers than their students.

4. Value the present. Don’t talk about college. Help him make sense of his present. His present has more value beyond how it facilitates a future. Education is not simply about preparation. And preparation is not best accomplished by *talking* about the future. Engaging in the present is a good way to prepare for engaging in the future. 

5. Don’t fill time. Don’t just attempt to change the hands on the clock. Instead change the way he thinks. 

*Editors note: Filler and filling time is a disease of education. Kids are kept artificially busy to make them easier to control.

6. No worksheets. Send my son outside instead of giving him a worksheet. I don’t care if he gets a C-.

*Editors note: Word searches and crossword puzzles should be illegal.

7. Start your school year with zero homework assignments. Assign only what you deem essential and meaningful. If it’s not essential and meaningful, please don’t assign it. He’s already going to give you 20,000 hours.

8. Don’t ever give unmerited or inauthentic praise. Be generous. Be kind. But no false praise. He’ll know you don’t believe in him. He won’t ever take you seriously again. 

9. Don’t tell him what he is supposed to learn in class by posting it on the board to start class. It’s called curiosity and exploration. 

*Editors note: I used to tell my chemistry students, “This is your first science class because we are going to *do* science.” I made fun of biology. Biology students take notes every day and are told to study their notes for the test. Those notes were simply the *answers* to the test. That’s not science.

10. Don’t talk about grit. The problem isn’t whether or not your students have the skill of grit. Maybe your class isn’t worth being gritty about. Grit is never an issue if my son loves what he is doing. “Choose a job you’ll love and you’ll never have to work a day of your life.” Supposedly Confucius said that. Sounds dumb. Tell me one thing that you love that doesn’t require work. But if you love it, you’ll work for it. And grit without purpose is a waste of time. It’s slavery. 

*Editors note: John and I seldom talk without the word grind or grit coming up. We are anti-grinders. Love should replace grit.

11. Request that my son reads and write, some of it his choosing, no matter what subject you teach.

*Editors note: If I listed the best 100 books I’ve read in my lifetime, none of them were books assigned in high school or college. Zero.

12. Move. No matter what subject you teach. I was just on a team trip. We had a day where 20 teenagers never got tired of moving and being outside all day long. The sun was setting and they were still running around. They socialized the entire day, too. We take the most biochemically active and social cohort on earth and stick them in a chair and stay mostly silent, all day. 

*Editors note: I say this often… “For the first five years of a kid’s life, they are taught to talk and move. Then they go to school and are taught to sit down and shut up.”

13. Tell stories.

14. Don’t have the outspoken, professional students be the heroes of your classroom. Back to my colleague, Judy McAuliffe. She’s an amazing educator. The most reluctant learners, the most disruptive students, the most self-conscious people become heroes in her classes. Judy’s students, like all students, come to her when they are most vulnerable, disregarded, and even mocked as mindless, phone-clutching, entitled and narcissistic. Then Judy does something which they hold sacred: she takes them seriously, she cares. Most teachers don’t take these kind of kids seriously. Please do the work to understand my child. Observe like Darwin.

15. You, teacher, will not get a Mr. Holland’s Opus celebration. You will not have students stand on their desk yelling “O’ Captain, My Captain!” If you have great administration like I do right now, you’re lucky. No kidding, I have a deep suspicion that I might have the best administration in any high school in the United States. I’m a better teacher for it. I cherish it. But no matter what, you still won’t get the Hollywood moment (by the way, these movie teachers always only teach one class. Must be nice). But your work is worth it.

Our last lawfully elected president, Barack Obama, once said the following when asked, “When is the time you felt most broken?” “I first ran for Congress in 1999, and I got beat. I just got whooped. I had been in the state legislature for a long time, I was in the minority party, I wasn’t getting a lot done, and I was away from my family and putting a lot of strain on Michelle. Then for me to run and lose that bad, I was thinking maybe this isn’t what I was cut out to do. I was forty years old, and I’d invested a lot of time and effort into something that didn’t seem to be working. But the thing that got me through that moment, and any other time that I’ve felt stuck, is to remind myself that it’s about the work. Because if you’re worrying about yourself—if you’re thinking: ‘Am I succeeding? Am I in the right position? Am I being appreciated?’ – then you’re going to end up feeling frustrated and stuck. But if you can keep it about the work, you’ll always have a path. There’s always something to be done.”

So no Hollywood moment of teaching glory, but it’s good work and I encourage you to walk into my son’s classroom and remember that it’s about the work. 

*Editors note: I finished my teaching career on June 5th, 2019. John is exactly right. There was no Hollywood ending to my 38 years. John O’Malley sent me a text the previous night asking if I had an exit song. I said no (I had never considered it). He suggested Van Morrison’s “Queen of the Slipstream”. At 1:30 on June 5th, Van Morrison played from my phone as I carried out a box with the contents of my desk. The day was hot. The parking lot empty. I waited for an Uber that arrived in five minutes. It was always about the work.

By John O’Malley, *edited and annotated by Tony Holler

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Don’t forget to read the other back-to-school article, 20 HOURS, by Tony Holler, *edited and annotated by John O’Malley.