The exercise is called "The Fist."
Early in the curriculum of "Becoming a Man," a mindful mentorship program operating in certain Chicago Public Schools, a counselor will pair off the ten or so male students into groups of two.
They sit across from each other.
One student is given a golf ball, explains Harold Pollack, a University of Chicago social service administration professor who studied the program. The other is told that he has 30 seconds to take the ball away .
And promptly, the kids start beating the daylights out of each other.
Then the counselor says, "Did you try asking for it?"
The first student usually says something like "He wouldn't have given it."
And the second almost always replies, "Yeah I would have. It's just a stupid ball."
Becoming A Man (or BAM) is a weekly in-school program that gives teen boys the space to learn how to express what they're experiencing, navigate through thorny social situations, and develop a sense of virtue.
Founded in 2003 and operated by the nonprofit Youth Guidance, the program served 2,100 youth across 44 Chicago Public Schools in 2015. The target population is the 7,000 or so young men in Chicago who are at risk of dropping out of school and live in neighborhoods with twice the national average homicide rate.
It works: According to a 2015 paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, the program reduces violent-crime arrests among participants by 44%, and the program has been highlighted by The White House.
Taking the time of a single class period, a BAM session begins with a "check in." Students talk about what they have on their minds, how their weeks have been going. Then they'll do activities to break the ice and build a sense of camraderie.
In one activity called "The Chair," students sit in a circle where there's one less chair than students, leaving a student standing in the center of the circle. Then, as BAM counselor Erik Rosen explains, the student in the middle will say something true about himself, like, "I'm wearing Nikes. Whoever else is wearing Nikes, get up and switch seats with someone else." Everybody wearing Nikes has to find new seat fast as possible, leaving another student standing. That student then has to say something true about himself.
"The activities that we facilitate are designed so that we can process with the youth and teach a lesson," says BAM counselor Erik Rosen.
For "The Chair," the goal is for students to share and validate one another's experiences. In "The Fist," the goal is to think before acting and ask instead of using force.
Something profound happens in the course of BAM, if everything goes to plan — students step out of what psychologists call "automaticity." As detailed in the work of Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer (in "Mindfulness") and Nobel Prize-winning Princeton behavorial economist Daniel Kahneman (in "Thinking Fast and Slow"), we live our lives to a surprisingly automatic extent — reacting to situations in ways that we've been taught to by our personal histories.
According to Pollack and his colleagues, the way automaticity affects our lives has a lot to do with economic status.
If you grow up rich, the situations you face in and out of school have "low variability." That means the responses to various situations that help you in your neighborhood or at home are the same ones that are helpful in school. If someone asserts their authority to you in your neighborhood, they're probably to be trusted, same as in school.
If you grow up poor, situations you encounter in school and out of school are more variable. If somebody steps to you on the street and asks for your jacket, you need to defend yourself. But if a teacher tells you to stop talking, you need to defer — even if it may feel like your reputation is at stake.
The automatic responses — like confronting a teacher if you feel disrespected —that help teenagers navigate through their lives outside of class screw up their academic lives, getting them suspended or expelled.
BAM helps students escape this trap. In the weekly meetings, students find a place to express their feelings constructively, building the social-emotional skills that are increasingly associated with academic success and reduced violence. They also learn new ways to approach problems.
"One example might be a student asking a teacher for extra help after school or asking school security to open the gym during lunch," Rosen, the counselor, says. "We want the students to understand that there is power in asking for what they want/asking for help. In BAM, we teach students to approach situations in different ways – to think outside the box."
At the beginning of fall semester, Edinson, a senior at Amundsen High School on Chicago's North Side, was in discussion with his BAM fellows and made a declaration.
"A boy has problems," he said to the room. "A man finds solutions to his problems."
The group was talking about integrity, Edinson recalls. The guys in the group were talking about their grades, and the students who were struggling were blaming the teachers, saying they hated them.
"We're all blaming the teachers and the people around us," he says. "Nobody is blaming themselves — how could I help myself succeed? How could I help myself pass this class?"
Edinson started in BAM as a sophomore while he was struggling in an English class. He was getting C and D grades at the time, and his teacher told him that he needed to shape up. He thought about getting afterschool tutoring, but it wouldn't fit with his basketball and volleyball practice schedule. A counselor asked him to check out BAM, which operates during school hours, and he was hooked.
One of the things that most affected him were the discussions about integrity.
"In the beginning, I saw integrity as something just for people in business, like I have this appointment and I have to be on time," he says. "I didn't think of that as something for a student, that I have to show show up as a student. Now, I think every person has integrity. I do my work for myself."
BAM, he explains, has given him a lot of mental tools for understanding what he wants in life and how to deal with conflicts that come up. He recalls that his friends would say that school was something they they were forced to do, but it helped him change his perspective. It's an opportunity that a lot of the people around the world don't have, he reasoned. He sees that there's a path for him to succeed.
Now Edinson's getting As and Bs, and he has applications in at three universities. He'll hear if he's admitted this spring.
