Lessons from a world record
Consider this: We can assuage our own our own inadequacies in comparison to a man such as Eliud Kipchoge by saying: “Well, we’re all built a little differently aren’t we?”
In certain circles, Kipchoge is justifiably famous for being more than a little different from the rest of us armchair athletes. His fame hit the headlines again a week or so ago when he won the Berlin Marathon in 2:01:39, smashing the existing marathon record by a previously unimaginable 1.84 minutes.
Last year, on an auto track in Italy, Kipchoge nearly succeeded in his attempt to run a marathon in less than two hours.
It was a project organized by Nike called “Breaking 2.” Kipchoge ran with a rotating cast of Olympic-level pacesetters, finishing in 2:00:25, and covering the marathon distance faster than any human in history.
Kipchoge averaged 4:36 per mile. The world record for a single mile is 3:43:13.
Expectations change over time, and the first recorded mile record in 1865 was a sluggardly 4:36:5, a pace Kipchoge matches and sustains for 26 miles, 385 yards.
A good friend who is a successful marathon and ultra-marathon runner tells me: “I likely wouldn’t be able to hold that pace for more than 300 to 400 metres.”
It’s clear that Kipchoge has a gift for this, but that’s not the point. I have often quoted Joseph Renzulli’s definition that “giftedness” is a matter of equal parts intelligence, creativity and perseverance.
Two of these attributes out of the three isn’t enough, and when we examine who Eliud Kipchoge is, it is the full range and applicability of Renzulli’s definition that becomes clear.
To begin with, Kipchoge is a man of unusual self-discipline. He rolls out of bed at 5 a.m. for his morning 20- to 30-mile runs. He splits his time between his home in Eldoret, Kenya, where he lives with his wife and three children, and a training camp up in the hills, 8,000 feet above sea level.
Kipchoge is also a reader and a thinker. His literary tastes range from Aristotle to sports biographies to self-help manuals. The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey, is, he says, one of his favourites.
When asked about his success, Kipchoge says things such as: “Only the disciplined ones in life are free. If you are undisciplined, you are a slave to your moods and your passions” and “The best time to plant a tree was 25 years ago. The second-best time to plant a tree is today.”
As an educator, I think that last one should be the motto of every teacher-training college on the planet.
The point of all this and how it relates to the teaching-learning situation in every classroom is that truly successful education should be about an acceptance of the fact that, while individual kids share common characteristics, most, if not all kids, possess some additional and unique characteristics that, like Kipchoge’s, set them apart physically, intellectually and emotionally.
These individual differences are readily observable, which is why many educators continue to wonder why public education is organized the way that it is, with 20 to 30 kids in a classroom in a program based on the assumption that they will all learn in the same way, at the same time and at the same rate as they move toward the same desired level of success.
We celebrate excellence in most human endeavours: the arts, team and individual athletics, and the sciences.
These celebrations are evidence of the fact that we accept the value and importance of individual differences.
The evidence is also clear that the degree to which each individual possesses different physiological, intellectual or emotional traits is the reason that there are daily joggers and then there’s Eliud Kipchoge.
But when it comes to the organization of education, we still struggle to create a system that designs programs, schedules and buildings that recognize individual differences, even extreme differences, among learners.
So where do we go from here? While we accept the way schools are because “that’s the way it is,” and we organize kids basically into grade by age groupings because that simplifies things organizationally, we also know that individuals cannot/should not be so readily classified as academic or non-academic or age-appropriate for teaching/learning purposes.
So while we know for sure that there exists this wide range of learning capacities, abilities, needs and interests in any single classroom, it is those considerations that should, in the best of all possible educational worlds, be what is dictating a differentiated approach to instruction in all areas of learning — not organizational convenience.