The Truth Behind the Tortoise and Hare Incident

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A focus on winning and losing, comparing children with each other, or grading students’ work is a prescription for children becoming frustrated, humiliated, and ultimately choosing to avoid, rather than engage. A within-child focus promotes sustained engagement with challenges, continued growth, increased competence, and ultimately greater self-esteem.

 

The Risk of Between-Child Comparisons

 

What was he thinking?! Challenging the Hare to a race? Was he out of his mind? Did he have a special scouting report on the Hare? Or maybe a HARE Personality Profile? No, the truth is this. The Tortoise was fed up with being ignored, rejected and ridiculed by the other animals for being so slow compared to everyone else. He had been cut from the cross-country team and was actively shunned on the playground where, instead of being picked last – he simply was not picked. Out of sheer frustration and a wish for a little attention, even if it risked humiliation, he boldly challenged the Hare, in front of everyone in the school cafeteria, to a race the following day (after lunch). Did he know that the Hare would need a nap after lunch? No, this was just a desperate cry for attention.

We all know the outcome. Well ahead of the Tortoise, the Hare settled in for a short nap, only to awaken too late to catch the plodding Tortoise. Is there a lesson to be learned? Don’t believe what you have been told about “slow and steady wins the race.” What kid, what school, what parent values slow?

The following day the humiliated Hare challenged the Tortoise to another race. When he refused, the Hare began taunting the Tortoise mercilessly, making his life miserable. “You are so slow, recess is over by the time you reach the playground.” Thus the Tortoise went from being ignored to being bullied.

The Hare was popular at school because he was the fastest. He was first to be picked for sports, games of tag, and delivering notes for the teacher. His status came from how he compared to others. As the fastest at Riverside Grade School, he maintained that status easily. However, when he moved to Countryside Middle School, things changed. In fact, at CMS, he wasn’t even the fastest rabbit.

Kids will always compare themselves with others. But we do not need to take a potentially harmful process and make it worse. Tortoise was shunned for being slow. He was cut from the cross-country team for being slow. But in a school that emphasizes within-child comparisons, Tortoise could have been included on the cross-country team and he could have competed each race in an attempt to better his own personal best time. Hare arrived at middle school without having been adequately challenged. He only worked hard enough to be better than the others, which at Riverside was not that difficult. He too could have benefited from competing with himself, attempting to improve with each race.

This kind of structure puts emphasis on Mastery rather than winning or relative comparisons. Within this healthier system, Tortoise got to hang out with the CC team, dropped five hours off his CC time, and entered middle school looking really fit and happy. Hare arrived at middle school with enough internal discipline that he was not blown away by the challenges of fitting in and feeling adequate where everyone was bigger, stronger and faster, having been chased daily by the farmer’s dogs.

A within-child focus promotes self-esteem and internal discipline because it emphasizes growth as a function of effort and values Mastery instead of winning. In a system that values winning, the vast majority of us are losers. Who persists at something where they are losing in comparison with others? Am I bad at math because I cannot solve problems as fast as other kids? Or is eventual mastery of the material what counts?

Wishing for Some Magic?

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The importance of exercise and its role in cognitive functioning, mental health, and preventing obesity is presented. Two examples of school systems that successfully encourage exercise are described. “Not exercising when you feel down is like not taking an aspirin when your head aches”.¹

 

The compelling benefits of regular exercise

Ever wish someone would invent a pill that would make you happier, more alert, calmer, and better able to concentrate? While we are at it, why not make it easier to sleep and lose weight. What the heck, throw in a little added libido while you are at it. Think a drug company could make some serious money on a pill like that? No, it’s not Welbutrin. It’s EXERCISE, as in one-foot-in-front-of-the-other kind of exercise.

All of the benefits of our wished for drug are derived from exercise and the evidence is very compelling, even in the elderly. Check out Art Kramer’s work at the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois. In this You Tube video, Dr. Kramer explains how exercise, even just walking, can reverse some of the effects of aging on the brain. (He has MRI evidence of new brain growth in elderly adults who participated in regular exercise.) So can you imagine what exercise does for kids? (Don’t tell the teenagers about the added libido effect.)

The obesity rates in the United States are alarming and have climbed dramatically in the last twenty years. One third of all adults in the United States are obese. Not overweight. Obese! As recently as 1986, only seven states had an adult obesity rate above 15%. Now all states are above 20%.

(Overweight is a Body Mass Index greater than 25. Obese is a BMI > 30. Check out the CDC data on obesity or CDC resources on interventions)

BMI = (Wt. in lbs.) x (703) / (Ht. in inches)

Seventeen percent of all children (ages 2-19) in the U.S. are obese.

Yet, if you have attended graduation ceremonies for the University of Illinois Laboratory High School, you will have seen no obese teenagers. Why is that? These graduating seniors could thank (or curse) Sally Walker for this. As Director of Physical Education at Uni High, Sally initiated a fitness program that includes every student, every day, for the entirety of their five years at the school. During the week, classes alternate between aerobic workouts and weight training. To get credit for the day’s class, a student must maintain his or her heart rate within their target zone for at least twenty minutes, now recorded by the monitors they wear. First semester of their (“Subbie”) first year, there is plenty of grumbling and feeble attempts to beat the system. But soon thereafter, everyone is on board, because it is a clear expectation for everyone and it has long been an accepted part of the school culture.

Fitness at this school comes in many forms and not just by decree. Beginning the second year, during the season in which they compete, members of the school’s athletic teams are exempt from Fitness Class. With a no-cut policy for all sports teams, Uni has a high percentage of student-athletes. Sally, who still launches the fitness program with the “Subbies”, told me that a number of alums have emailed her saying, “you may find this hard to believe, but I just finished my first 1/2 or full marathon”.

Here’s how Sally described the program to me recently in an email,

We started this program in 1986, my 3rd year at Uni. It was started when we observed the declining level of fitness of our incoming Subbies, and as a lab school we felt obligated to address it. Our program has evolved over the years, adapting to the current trends and needs of our students. The one constant has been the end of year requirement for each student to complete a 5K. Amazingly, our students always impress us with their accomplishments. For some just completing the race is a huge milestone, while for others, a PR (personal record), class record or school record is their goal. Whatever the case, we remain committed to this requirement, especially when we see the smiles of satisfaction on the faces of the subbies who just months ago were sure there was no way they could ever run that far! We also see growth from year to year as some students take time to buy in, but then when they do the change is sometimes dramatic. Weight loss, gain of self-esteem, whatever, it remains the best thing about teaching!

Over the past two decades, Phil Lawler, a physical education instructor in Naperville, Illinois, has developed a fitness program that now encompasses all 19,000 students in the school district. His work is well documented in John Ratley’s book, Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise And The Brain. Naperville students rank among the best in the world in areas such as math and science. There are many who would argue that the fitness program is a major contributor to the high levels of (math and science) achievement shown by Naperville students relative to comparable socio-economic status (SES) school districts.

The Uni High and Naperville programs share several important factors. Both focus on effort (or growth), rather than meeting normative standards. In other words, their goal is for constant growth in each child; (as Sally’s words suggest) a mindset they take with them even after graduating. These programs are thus minimizing the discouraging effects of between-child comparisons and emphasizing (where kids strive to make improvements in what they have previously accomplished). An appropriate level of effort for each child is objectively established by measuring their heart rate.

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Just like Sally was able to make exercise a universally accepted part of the routine at Uni High, parents can do the same at home. The younger the child, the easier it is, because they want to be just like Mom and Dad. If you exercise regularly, they will want to join you. One of the best gifts we can give our kids, as well as ourselves, is the habit of daily exercise, beginning at a young age. Parental modeling is the most powerful form of influencing children’s behavior.

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Although apathy and low energy often characterize people suffering from mild depression, those who can find a way to begin exercising invariably find some immediate improvement in their depressive symptoms.

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See Tomporowski, Davis, Miller and Naglieri, Exercise and Children’s Intelligence, Cognition and Academic Achievement, for a thorough literature review of the research on the benefits of exercise.

For a simple but compelling summary of the cognitive benefits of exercise, see the first chapter of John Medina’s Brain Rules .

Robert Brooks’ article, Physical Exercise in School: Fitness for Both Body and Mind is just one of a series of excellent essays he has written every month over the past decade about raising healthy children. These essays can be accessed at http://www.drrobertbrooks.com/writings/index.html.

Dr. Brooks is also the author of 14 books on children, including two of my favorites: Raising Resilient Children and Raising a Self-Disciplined Child.

Grade school children who participate in daily aerobic activities have fewer disciplinary problems

¹ From American Psychologist article on exercise.