By Tom

I once watched an interview on 60 Minutes with Derek Jeter, one of my favorite baseball players. He was asked what he thought about when he stepped into the batters' box. "I know I'm going to get a base hit," he said. "I don't hope for it, I don't think I'll do it, and I don't know I can. I know I will." When it was pointed out that he only succeeded thirty percent of the time - a remarkable achievement – he said he didn't think about that. All he thought about was knowing that this time he was going to get a hit. And when it doesn't happen? "I'm always surprised."

That's how we need to think about our students. Every time we teach a lesson, we need to know that every child will learn what it is we're teaching. We can't hope they can, think they will or know they can. We need to know they will.

Obviously there's some disconnect going on. If a ballplayer has to know that he will get a hit every time he gets up, he also knows that he'll only succeed some of the time. Those two facts are mutually exclusive. There's bound to be some cognitive dissonance. So what happens to the baseball players that try to resolve this dissonance?

Simple: they enter the workforce with the rest of us and play slow-pitch softball in the evenings.

There is, you see, only two ways to resolve this dissonance. One way is to lower your expectations. Instead of knowing that you'll get a hit every time you get up, you can start knowing you'll get a hit every third or fourth time. You can look at the reality of your situation and see that there are a number of very good reasons why you shouldn't get a hit. For starters, there's a tall man throwing a baseball 95 mph at you from only sixty feet away. And it doesn't always fly straight. Then there's the other guys out there, who have figured out where you're going to hit the ball before you even start your swing and are halfway there before you finish. Those aren't excuses; they're reasons. Good ones.

Same with teaching. There's a lot of reasons why a kid in your class won't "meet standard" or "read at grade level" or achieve any other goal you might set. Good reasons. Maybe she doesn't speak English. Maybe she lives in poverty. Or in a car.

But it doesn't matter. To teach, you need to know that every student will learn every lesson, while simultaneously knowing that factors beyond your control will affect what actually happens.  But just like our ballplayer, if you let those reasons lower your expectations, you're out of the game. If you try to resolve that dissonance by allowing your expectations to drop to where the data says they should be, you need to leave the classroom and pursue some lesser career. You need to be like Derek Jeter: this time, that kid, and every other kid, will learn this lesson. And the next one. Period.

But remember: there's two ways to resolve the dissonance. One was to lower your expectations. The other is to dramatically increase your results. Right now. You can misconstrue your expectations as actual, immediate mandates. In baseball, this is called "pressing." It comes from the word "pressure." You see it all the time. A guy strikes out in the first inning. He grounds out in the third. By the fifth inning, he's no longer trying to get a hit; he's trying to get two hits, which is impossible, so he pops a fly ball to shortstop. What he forgot was that you can only do so much at a time. If you try to do too much, you'll end up doing nothing. If he doesn't turn it around inside his mind, he's headed for a slump; and if he continues, he's headed for slow-pitch softball.

We see the same thing in education. We have high, rigorous expectations that every child will learn. We know they will learn. But we also see the data, which tells us that not every student meets every expectation. And then, like our fifth-inning head-case, we "press." We misconstrue high, rigorous expectations as utter mandates.

And we start doing stupid things. Like teaching to the test. Teaching writing in the form of "test-like prompts." Dropping science and social studies instruction to spend more time on "tested subjects." Or focusing on the kids just below and just above the cut score at the expense of the kids way below, hoping to increase the number of kids who "pass the test." We drop recess. Or we keep kids at school until 6:30 and send them home with another hour of homework.

And sometimes we just plain cheat.

What we forget is that it is possible to simultaneously hold two, mutually exclusive facts in our minds. We can know that every single student we teach will learn every lesson. We can also know that there are reasons, not excuses, beyond our control that will have a real impact on our success.

It's complicated, yet possible. But if baseball players can do it, so can we.