On a very rainy day last spring, a few kids from Yesler Community Center boisterously piled into a Honda Civic on their way to see a little movie that had just come out, which you may have heard of, called The Avengers. This was our first ever field trip reward for our after school homework help program, and in pretty much every measurable way, it was a failure. Kid there without permission slip; permission slip there without kid; no kid, no permission slip; you name it. As a result, we ended up with about half of our projected attendance. Keyword here: (F)ailure.

Now, if you’ve read The Big-Brained Superheroes Club Origins: Part 1 of X, you may have a sense of where this whole thing is going. This post is essentially a prequel to that one (We’ll leave it up to you to decide whether this prequel is more Christopher Nolan or George Lucas). In short, if we were purely STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) and data-driven decision-making were our only guiding star, The Big-Brained Superheroes Club would likely not exist today.

Upon return from the failed field trip, the attendees were all quiet…for a change.  One of our 11 year-old boys didn’t have time to discuss it because he simply had to “go write a poem”. And when we asked a round-faced, supremely stoic young girl covered in Hijab who was her favorite Avenger, she smiled broadly with her eyes: “Captain America”. “Captain America?” Really? Not Black Widow who had the brass to say, “Maybe it’s not about guns,” in a superhero movie!? Not the scintillating scene-stealer Iron Man? But, rather, the conventionally wooden throwback to the 40s whose most exotic feature was his spangly outfit? That guy? We had to get to the bottom of this. And get to the bottom of it we did when we embarked on our mission to determine what made Captain America cool. It was from that mission that the basis of The Big-Brained Superheroes Club was formed.

We can argue all day about what constitutes scientific vs. artistic thinking. In truth, we see a lot of overlap ourselves. But words require meaning, and in the language of superpowers, we rely pretty heavily on Critical Thinking to be our pathway into scientific thinking. Data, math, logic…all of these tools are absolutely necessary for us to analyze, to communicate, to determine. However, for us, these tools are by no means sufficient. Without our pathways into what we currently consider artistic thinking—our Creativity and Sense of Adventure superpowers—we come up short. All of our carefully discerned patterns would never develop into themes. So, just like Albert Einstein, we big-brained superheroes need our (A)rt. STEAM is the word.

“Can I have a math problem?” is, as we mentioned on Twitter recently, probably our favorite big-brained superhero FAQ. How this tradition got started we don’t recall, but we’ve pretty much given up on making it through the halls of Yesler Community Center without being stopped by this question at least once (mostly at least thrice). And having zero interest in looking a gift horse in the math, roll with it we do. Even if it means scheduling an extra 20 minutes for a trip to the bathroom.

Why do we love this question so much? Well, we know that number talk is important in our early years, and apparently, ready access to basic math knowledge correlates with success on the PSAT. But our love of this question goes much deeper than that. This question, for us, is all about our superpowers:

1. Sense of Adventure: Anytime big-brained superheroes are eager to solve a problem, they’re exercising their Sense of Adventure. And it all begins with a Sense of Adventure.
2. Kindness, Empathy, Teamwork: Somehow some way we’ve learned to use math as a means of communication. A point of connection. Contra approaches like this one, our hallway math is a group effort. We suspect this cooperative approach may be good for all our big-brained superheroes but most especially for our girls (who, BTW, are our most frequent inquisitors by far). 
3. Critical Thinking, Creativity, Adaptability, and Persistence: Hallway math, sans pencil or paper, creates an interesting challenge for us. How difficult can we make it for our big brains and still keep it achievable? How far can we test their boundaries and even their sense of themselves? How can we, ever so briefly and subtly, blow their minds? While it may sound ridiculous, these really are the questions we ask ourselves. All in this quintessentially transitory space.

We love these indisputable reminders that thinking, learning, and connecting can and should be happening everywhere, maybe even especially on the way to the bathroom.

Little Rascals aficionados may have noticed a vaguely familiar cadence in The Big-Brained Superheroes Club nomenclature. Some may consider our name silly. We, however, take it quite seriously.

One of the raisons d’etre of The Big-Brained Superheroes Club is to provide a place for those of us who don’t necessarily have a place. We sometimes affectionately think of ourselves as “the riffraff”. Consequently, there are no major signup requirements—no parental signatures needed—for admission to the club. The only real requirement is that we adhere to The Big-Brained Superheroes Club Oath at all times. And if any of us fails to adhere to the oath, we get expelled from that evening’s meeting. Expulsion can be a harsh sentence, as one of our young big-brained superheroes discovered recently (see the above artist’s rendering of real-life events). So, we try to avoid it at all costs.

Why we’ve devoted ourselves to this particular model has to do with the opportunity gap that others have studied (and that we, ourselves, have observed):

Wealthy families can and do spend more money on music and art lessons, tutors, and summer camp for their children that help them get ahead, while low-income kids often go home after school to unsafe neighborhoods, with little supervision and fewer positive outlets for their time and energy. The extended time movement is meant to correct those inequalities by offering the same diverse array of activities and adult mentors to disadvantaged children.

And while Yesler Community Center houses fabulous art activities for kids who wish to drop in (courtesy of The Nature Consortium), we see value and interest in throwing some science and superpowers into the mix. The challenges inherent in such an endeavor are vast and varied, but one of the benefits is that it forces us to exercise our superpowers in some fairly extreme ways. In particular, our Creativity and Sense of Adventure are constantly getting a workout while we’re searching for ways to tap into the hidden strengths that all (young) humans have.

In theory, it could work, she says, but it’s often resource intensive and takes the space and time for creative outside-the-box thinking.

Indeed. As observed in the above artist’s rendering of real-life events, we’re not always successful. However, in the rare moments we have considered ourselves successful, we’ve identified a few of our, what we in the big-brained superhero biz call, “assets”. So, in the interest of anecdotal science, here are some of the things that we think have helped us tap into some of those hidden strengths:

1. We are where the young people want to be. When we were kids we probably would have rather shot our eye out than remain an extra second at school. And we consider it probable that our young big-brained superheroes feel similarly. Yesler Community Center is currently our home, and it’s a huge asset in that kids go there willingly. Because they want to.
2. We are always trying to maximize opportunities. Recently, Yesler CC provided accommodations for a holiday party where hundreds of kids lined up in the hopes of procuring some loot from a jolly old fat man in a red suit. Lined up kids (and parents) = opportunities. So, while other (real) volunteers were handing out stickers and posing in Disney costumes, we riffraff were working the insanely long line administering “The Big-Brained Superhero Test”. It’s amazing how many varieties of math problems you can do without pencil and paper: “What’s 6 x 3? What’s 6+6? What’s 12+6? What’s 18/3? What’s 1/3rd of 18? What’s 2/3rds of 18?…” It’s also amazing what kids will do voluntarily in order to avoid staring blankly around them or talking to their parents.
3. We are utterly shameless in our use of almost any motivational tool. Shop smart; shop BBSmart! And though we haven’t used food as a direct motivator (and have no immediate plans to do so), we do provide snacks.
4. We are profoundly enthusiastic about what we’re doing. We are big-brained superheroes, and a big-brained superhero’s credo is to Always Be Superpowering. If we’re not living it, we’re not teaching it.
5. We have a handbook. And handbooks are for heroes.
6. We are them; they are us. It may be obvious by now that The Big-Brained Superheroes Club truly is a group endeavor. We the experienced (aka old) big-brained superheroes are there to provide opportunity, adventure, and minimal boundaries. When young ones come to us for help, we want them to do so mostly because they value our ideas and suggestions…not necessarily because we’re authority figures. And while we do drop the hammer from time to time (have we mentioned the above artist’s rendering of real-life events?), it’s only ever in the interest of the group. Trust and goodwill are our most valuable currency—we don’t squander those on delusions of grandeur.

Now, we’re sure there’s more where these six assets came from, but those will have to come in due time.  Finally, here’s your reward for making it this far:

Utterly. Shameless.

Subtitled: A Promise Kept.

In a recent installment of The Big-Brained Superheroes’ Handbook, we briefly discussed how the Big-Brained Superheroes Club economy works.  Basically, big-brained superheroes (yes, we’re moving beyond proper noun status—Oxford English Dictionary, here we come!) get rewarded for exercising their superpowers, such as Empathy, Kindness, Persistence, Sense of Adventure, etc.  Or, as we sometimes simplistically put it: We essentially created an economy based on being a nice person.  But our goals are quite a bit loftier than that.  We don’t want to just meet expectations as far as these skills are concerned.  We want to exceed expectations.  That’s why, when choosing a name for ourselves, we eschewed The Averagely Nice Person’s Club for something a bit more in line with our expectations and abilities.

However, one thing a big-brained superhero understands is that expectations and abilities aren’t enough to achieve our goals.  Another essential is motivation.  And while we’d all love to feel that the act of becoming a big-brained superhero is its own reward, inertia ain’t just a central rudiment of Newton’s First Law of Motion, if you know what we mean.  OK, what we mean is that getting from here to there takes work—both mental and physical.  It’s the mental work that we needed to jumpstart.

If you’ve read about Who we are…, you have a very general sense of how we’ve evolved as a club thus far.  However, there’s a muddle in the middle about how our reward system evolved*.  First, we tried various combinations of stickers and raffle tickets.  Over the summer, we moved to “powerbadges” (which were also stickers).  And, finally, The Big-Brained Superheroes Club mercantile is in effect.  And while the mercantile has only been in operation for a little over a month, it’s a clear winner in terms of both motivation and capacity building.

The motivational benefits of the BBSC mercantile (BBSmart?) are similar to those of the raffle system we were previously using in that both the bank and the raffle tickets enable real-time, rapid rewarding (essential for our young BBSes, we’ve found) and even provide a springboard for negotiation (sometimes, BBSes will engage us on how much they think their work is worth; we frequently encourage these discussions).  However, there are several benefits of the mercantile over the raffle.  First, the raffle outcome would sometimes feel unfair (to all parties), and as a result, it would actually demotivate.  We have much more control over how our current market system works.   Second, BBSes like to see their bank accounts grow day after day, so it’s got longer term motivation-driving potential.  In that respect, the market can do more to exercise our Persistence and Willpower superpowers than our raffle could.  Finally, as we mentioned in the handbook appendix, the market gives us a chance to price store items at the beginning of a club meeting, providing both a quick hit of motivation early on and a chance to do some negotiation and consensus-building.

As far as capacity building goes, the underlying philosophy of the BBSC is oriented toward helping us all help ourselves.  The finding and exercising of our superpowers is one aspect of that.  However, the BBS market system enables us to learn about other fundamental aspects of our current daily lives.  Money, math, interest, savings…those are useful things for us all to understand in today’s America.  But beyond that, we want our market to provide a basic intellectual foundation for some more direct entrepreneurial activities we are working toward.  Our nice-person-based economy knows no bounds!

* We should note, emphatically, that The Big-Brained Superheroes Club also evolved from rewarding general work to rewarding specific work, as we briefly address here.

Yesterday, over half of our volunteer staff couldn’t make it to our Big-Brained Superheroes Club meeting. And being the small group that we are, we missed them severely. However, the shortage gave us a great opportunity to exercise our Adaptability superpower, and the way in which we exercised our Adaptability superpower brings us to Part 3 of X of our Big-Brained Superheroes’ Handbook…

Rule #3: Playin’ for keeps is still playin’. (Thank you, Gambit.)  As you may have noticed by now, The Big-Brained Superheroes Club has very little use for somber. Sincere surely. Subtle sporadically. But somber scarcely.  The truth is that we Big-Brained Superheroes take our responsibilities so seriously that we simply can’t afford somber. Somber carries far too many opportunity costs.

The calculation is simple: How many hours in our lives are any of us going to be able/willing to sit somberly learning?  Now, how many hours are there in our lives? If we can agree that the answer to the first question is a small subset of the answer to the second question, we can start to see the cost of somber.  We can frequently do the sitting; we can frequently do the learning; we just can’t frequently do the somber. And if we, consciously or unconsciously, start to equate the learning with the somber, then, well, we’re losing countless opportunities.

So, when we ventured forth yesterday with 3/7ths of our volunteer staff, we chose to seek our learning opportunities on the basketball court, where somber isn’t even an option. And where the generally established rules and goals of the game would kindly supplement the boundaries and sense of purpose that our volunteer crew typically brings to club meetings. But, first, homework. With the added incentive of the impending basketball game, we finished our homework in record time yesterday. Before our club meeting was scheduled to start even. (Which, once again, indicates that our usual challenges are less connected to ability than they are to motivation.) And now that that’s over with…

Because The BBSC doesn’t have its own basketball and the community center was all out of them, some kids already on the court got to exercise their own Kindness and Teamwork superpowers and invite us to play with them. In fact, it wasn’t even a question—they wanted us in their game. (Challenge: How can we make The BBSC lab more like the basketball court in this respect? Maybe our young BBSes can help with this problem.) And once we started the game, the words “Teamwork” and “Leadership” frequently flew out of our mouths. “Sense of Adventure” even made several appearances. If we Big-Brained Superheroes spend a bit more time learning this game, the opportunities for articulating and exercising our superpowers appear almost limitless. Instead of exercising our superpowers while shooting hoops, we can be shooting hoops while exercising our superpowers. Opportunities, opportunities, opportunities.

Speaking of opportunities, when one of our young Big-Brained Superheroes spent her break time reading the gym’s Maximum Occupancy sign…opportunity!  First, we divided 456 (it’s a fairly large gym) by two and then by three. Next time, we’ll discuss it in terms of halves, thirds, and maybe even halves of halves or fourths.  Maybe then, we’ll discuss it relative to the number of people in the gym at the time.  And maybe after that even more opportunities will arise.

But we digress (such is one problem with learning)…Going back to Rule #3: If we here at The Big-Brained Superheroes Club had to create a slogan, it would never be “We make learning fun!”; it would be more along the lines of “We don’t make learning not fun!”.  (Which is, of course, why we’ll never make for good slogan-makers.)  Because, like Gambit, we see our very serious work for what it is—just another opportunity for some very serious play. And so it naturally follows that we see our very serious play as just another opportunity for some very serious work.

One learns many things at The Big-Brained Superheroes Club that one might find nearly impossible to learn anywhere else.  For instance, did you know that a shiny, hot pink foil wig is worth less than $5 because it’s made out of a lowly synthetic material instead of being made out of real hair?  You just try finding that bit of information in your economic textbooks.

Big-Brained Superheroes, on the other hand, have something better than textbooks.  We have the Big-Brained Superheroes Club store.

The Big-Brained Superheroes Club store and bank combination is a mechanism we’ve adopted to help us rapidly reward Club members for using their superpowers.  Our BBSC bank includes singles, quarters (which are literally singles cut into quarter pieces), fives, and tens.  (We haven’t printed out any benjamins or base-twelve-specific bills.  Yet.)  Our store includes toys, games, books, etc that have been generously donated by various community-minded folks (and we’re always looking for more!). The evolution of the store and bank combination is something we’ll cover in an Origins post at some point, but here’s the structure of the thing so far:

At the beginning of each Club meeting, all the Big-Brained Superheroes get together and collectively price out several of the most recently donated items for the store.  Our pricing model is evolving, but as of now, it’s based on some ambiguous combination of diplomatic consensus and the very visible hand of the meeting moderator. After the pricing and other meeting opening ceremonies are complete, the Big-Brained Superheroes collect their bank accounts (pocket folders containing all the Big-Brained Superhero Bucks they’ve saved so far) and get to work earning more and more and more BBS Bucks.  Then, at the end of the day, the BBSes decide how much they’re going to spend at the store and how much they’re going to save in the bank for (currently) 10% interest (though we’re thinking of moving to a Wheel of Interest that ranges from 6-12% just to keep the math interesting).  Then, they tally their savings and spendings on the fronts of their bank accounts and put them back in the bank.

Some intriguing observations we’ve made during this process:

1. It’s been enlightening to see how guileless our young Big-Brained Superheroes have been in their approaches to pricing so far;
2. Much to our surprise, on the very first day, our young Big-Brained Superheroes saved almost all of their BBS Bucks;
3. The consensus-driven item pricing that takes place at the beginning of each meeting seems to engage both our Empowerment and our Teamwork superpowers;
4. There are early signs of a direct relationship between feelings of Empowerment during a meeting and savings at the end of a meeting.  That is, from day one, it has appeared that the better the meeting went for a young Big-Brained Superhero, the less the young BBS spent at the end of it.  Whether this seeming relationship would withstand more rigorous study or more incredibly awesome BBSC store items remains in question.

The Big-Brained Superheroes’ Handbook continues with…

Rule #2: Humans are unruly and, therefore, cannot be ruled. (courtesy of those unruly Avengers … yet again)  This rule is great for two reasons: 1. It’s a lot more powerful than it may seem at first glance (like us!). 2. Rules about unruly lack of rulability rule!

On a micro scale, unruliness can (and often does) cause great consternation and discord.  But on a macro scale, unruliness can (and often does) lead to great originality and inventiveness.  The upshot of rule #2 is fairly straightforward: Let’s focus our superpowers on trying to minimize the micro costs of unruliness while maximizing the macro benefits of unruliness.  After all, our Respect, Kindness, and Willpower superpowers wouldn’t get us very far without our Empowerment, Sense of Adventure, and Critical Thinking superpowers to go along with them.  The Big-Brained Superheroes Club has adopted some tactics to help us out in this process, and we’ll discuss those further at a later time.  But for now, let’s focus on the most important point here…

Big-Brained Superheroes actively avoid the control tactics of fear and domination. Supervillains are better at those anyway.

One thing we learn as Big-Brained Superheroes is that there are a lot of “Part _ of X“s in our lives.  That’s because knowing the value of “X” means we’re done.  We’ve solved the problem.  The end.  But when it comes to living and learning and living and learning and living and learning and…a Big-Brained Superhero’s work is never done. And that’s just the way we like it.

So, with that in mind, and with this school year’s first Club meeting coming up on October 1st, let’s prepare a bit by reviewing/revising at least some of the never ending Big-Brained Superheroes’ Handbook:

Rule #1: With great power comes great responsibility. (you may have heard that one somewhere before)  As Big-Brained Superheroes, we try to be constantly aware of our effect on the world and to expect at least as much from ourselves as we do from others.  This is never more true than when working with our younger BBSC members.

Rule #1 manifests in several ways: First, when we’re looking for a behavior from someone else, we should first check ourselves to verify that we are modeling that desired behavior.  And the corollary to this is that when we’re looking to change a behavior in someone else, we should first make sure we’re not modeling that very behavior. An example: If we don’t want our young Big-Brained Superheroes to yell at each other, we should avoid yelling at them.  Instead, let’s try to, first, use our Willpower to restrain our own impulses, and then, use our Empathy, Respect, and Creativity to find other ways to conduct ourselves and others.

Some options for managing un-Big-Brained Superhero-like behaviors:

1. Ask the question: “What would happen if you used your Adaptability/Teamwork/Kindness…superpower here instead?”
2. Have our young BBSC member restate The Big-Brained Superheroes Club oath: “I, Big-Brained Superhero, do passionately promise to try hard, be kind, and have fun!”.
3. In a tense situation, have our young BBSC member step away for a moment to go hang out in her limbic system and then have her come back and restate The Big-Brained Superheroes Club oath.

Another manifestation of Rule #1 is that we Big-Brained Superheroes must, at all times, be aware of the language we’re using.  Along those lines, The Big-Brained Superheroes Club has taken the drastic step of semi-banning certain words: smart/stupid and easy/hard. Not only have we found these words to have little meaning in the context of a BBSC meeting, they’re often used as weapons, which inevitably do more harm than good.

Some methods for avoiding these semi-banned words:

1. If a Big-Brained Superhero is reluctant to engage in a daunting task, instead of “You’re smart/this is easy; you can do this,” try, “Didn’t you bring your Sense of Adventure superpower today?”
2. If a Big-Brained Superhero has accomplished a daunting task, instead of “You’re so smart,” try instead, “Way to use your Persistence/Adaptability…superpower”.
3. If the “e” or the “h” word happens to rear its ugly head, consider responding with, ”Everything is ‘easy’ once you know how to do it. Everything is ‘hard’ until you know how to do it.”

In short, our dictionary of superpowers is intended to bring some more precision into our language and, as a result, into our Club’s value system.  A Big-Brained Superhero’s goal is to Always Be Superpowering.  Because we’re control freaks, we focus on process (which is more in our control) rather than product (which is less in our control).  And being as precise as possible in our language enables us to be as precise as possible in our actions (this point is discussed nicely here).  Or, to continue the analogy with Captain America’s shield, we should think of our superpowers as discernibly discrete tools that get stronger and stronger the more we use and refine them.

To be continued…

So, we’ve documented at least some of the story behind the “superheroes” part of The Big-Brained Superheroes Club, but what’s with all this “big-brained” stuff?  Well, the answer isn’t as obvious as you might think…

We here at The Big-Brained Superheroes Club believe in science.  And as of now, science says teach kids about their brains:

“If we gave students a growth mindset, if we taught them how to think about their intelligence, would that benefit their grades?” Dweck wondered.

So, about 100 seventh graders, all doing poorly in math, were randomly assigned to workshops on good study skills. One workshop gave lessons on how to study well. The other taught about the expanding nature of intelligence and the brain.

The students in the latter group “learned that the brain actually forms new connections every time you learn something new, and that over time, this makes you smarter.”

Basically, the students were given a mini-neuroscience course on how the brain works. By the end of the semester, the group of kids who had been taught that the brain can grow smarter, had significantly better math grades than the other group.

“When they studied, they thought about those neurons forming new connections,” Dweck says. “When they worked hard in school, they actually visualized how their brain was growing.”

Dweck says this new mindset changed the kids’ attitude toward learning and their willingness to put forth effort. Duke University psychologist, Steven Asher, agrees. Teaching children that they’re in charge of their own intellectual growth motivates a child to work hard, he says.

“If you think about a child who’s coping with an especially challenging task, I don’t think there’s anything better in the world than that child hearing from a parent or from a teacher the words, ‘You’ll get there.’ And that, I think, is the spirit of what this is about.” 

OK. Maybe the answer was obvious.  But the point is that we here at The Big-Brained Superheroes Club aren’t just using our big brains…we’re using our big brains to learn about, visualize, and embiggen our big brains.  We’re very meta that way.

If you’ve seen the recent Avengers movie, you have some idea of how The Big-Brained Superheroes Club got started.  First, recollect just a few of the challenges that Nick Fury faced when trying to get his band of brainy heroes to trade contretemps for cooperation. Now, throw in a few unconvincing lectures by a crackly voiced, brown-haired girl about how “we’re all in this together.”  Finally, add a considerable number of math worksheets, some reading exercises, and a bit of homemade play dough, and you have the essence of our weekly after school homework help sessions.

OK, maybe that’s hyperbole.  But it’s an analogy based in today’s pop culture…What did you expect? A Lord of the Flies Survivor reference?  We’re better than that.

If you’re familiar with Who we are, then you know that one of the top priorities for our after school program is “fostering a collegial atmosphere,” and you know the reason we feel that’s important is that stress has been shown to inhibit learning, and there’s a lot of stress involved in interpersonal conflict, etcetera, etcetera, whatever, just re-watch The Avengers and you’ll get the idea.  ”That’s great,” you say, “but what does all that have to do with superheroes? And superpowers—what’s with those?”.  Well, just unclench for a second, exercise your Sense of Adventure and Persistence superpowers, and we’ll get there.

Why Superheroes?
Because superheroes have superpowers.

OK, then. Why Superpowers?
Easy. Superpowers are manifestly cool.

A couple of us were sitting in the movie theater watching (SPOILER ALERT!) the recent Avengers movie wondering what made Captain America cool.  Was it his spangly outfit?  Was it his snazzy shield?  Not really.  Not to us.  What made Captain America cool to us was when, at the end of the movie, he used his Leadership and Teamwork superpowers to inspire the Avengers to make optimal use of their own individual superpowers.  To that end, he gave general suggestions rather than specific orders.  And he modeled rather than simply dictated the behaviors that he wanted to see.  That’s what made him cool. Captain America’s shield and spangly outfit were simply technologies with which he exercised his Leadership and Teamwork superpowers.  Or, at least, that’s what we saw.

But beyond the coolness factor, the superpowers metaphor serves a valuable function. Like other metaphors, It helps us see the otherwise unseen.  If we flip the standard comic book concept of superpowers upside down and abnormalize the “normal”, we can more easily become aware of, clearly define, and maybe eventually taxonomize the behaviors that we otherwise take for granted on a daily basis.  (Shout-out to all the sci-fi nerds rolling their eyes that we’re like a textbook with arms right now…yes, we know you know this, but you’re special.)  If our Leadership and Teamwork superpowers start to become as apparent to us as shields and spangly outfits, then we are more likely to pick them up and use them in our most stressful moments.  And, at the end of the day, isn’t that what education is about? Giving us the power to defeat supervillains?