A student pulls me aside when the assembly ends and asks, "I got the social studies student of the year award and I got a piece of paper. Other kids pull a ball through a hoop and they get a trophy. Why does it work like that?"

There's a reason she's the Social Studies Student of the Year (Aside: I hate the whole notion of awards). It's a subtle message schools send when they create pep rallies for football games and mention the debate team on the morning announcements. Or when the paper runs an article when the local soccer team becomes state champions, but a Science Fair winner isn't considered newsworthy. It's the same message when the average child can't name a Nobel Prize winner but they can memorize the starting line-up for the Diamondbacks.

Entertainment is our national religion. (Indeed, even within religion we need funny pastors and PowerPoint lyrics led by rock bands) I find it interesting, then, that teachers will question why students weren't better behaved at our awards assembly. They didn't make it fun.

A group of nine students gather in my classroom after school to glue various hues of purple on the remaining sunset of our Paper Border project.  We discuss the current controversy surrounding a child's decision not to opt for chemotherapy and the ethical quandries surrounding it.  We discuss whether a Latina Supreme Court Justice might change immigration decisions in the future.  Eventually, it shifts into a discussion about high school and the fear each of them have.

My favorite times of the day are before school, during lunch and after school - all times when I do projects with students.  It's not that I don't enjoy teaching.  Instead, the issue is the structure itself.  Students seem more motivated when they are in an extracurricular activity, whether it is a sport, a club or a fine art.  Students work harder, think better and pour more of their emotional energy into extracurriculars than into their traditional classes.  The following are some of my ideas about why this is the case:

• Students choose extracurriculars while they are forced into classes. In many respects, that is the beginning of all the bulleted points below. 
• Students often believe that an activity is relevant, engaging and meaningful if it is on "their own time" rather than in school
• Without the pressure of grades, stickers or other extrinsic motivators, students can find intrinsic motivation in what they are doing
• The skills seem to come naturally with a higher sense of differntiation in extrarricular activities.  Instead of saying, "everyone will do this whether they have mastered it or not," coach typically have different athletes attempt different roles with a different regiment based upon their needs
• Students have deeper relationships with one another. Groupwork feels coercive in a class but enjoyable in a service project or on the ball field.
• Students have a deeper relationship with a coach or a coordinator than with a teacher.  Part of this is due to the size of class.  Another aspect is that the role resembles one of mentoring rather than judging.  
• Students almost always know the deeper goal in what they are doing.  My students this afternoon knew the Paper Border Project was about raising awareness, yet I wonder how often students fail to know the objective in my classroom. 
• Students are active in using what they know rather than simply learning for the sake or learning.  A life-long learner is useless if there is no action. Paulo Freire once explained that all action with no reflection would mean mindless activism while all knowledge with no action would lead to meaningless intellectualism. 

Photo Credit

Flickr Creative Commons

http://socialvoice.blogspot.com/search/label/graphic%20novel

Every year, I get a little sad when it's about to end.  In the last week, it goes by so quickly and there are so many sheets to fill out that I have learned to find closure in the second to last week.  So, while sitting at home grading final papers, I look at a paper (or rather a blog post) marked as a draft that I had failed to post a few days back.  

A student wrote it when she went back to visit a relative who died. I've mentione before that the students have influenced me as much as I influenced them.  This blog she wrote reminds me of something my students over the years, have taught me: recovering my appreciating of the land, of the dirt, of the earthy reality below me.  I can get so caught up in the abstract, but it's almost always my students who remind me of the terrestrial reality I'm missing. 

Photo Credit

Flickr Creative Commons

http://www.flickr.com/photos/themacinator/3509410568/

poor guy just can't compete with a flat screen

The hardest part of having a blog is that I never know how public it really is.  Sometimes I feel like one of those crazy bullhorn preachers, yelling out gigantic curses at ongoing traffic.  It's been a long time since anyone commented on this blog (though I've gotten more lately on my other one).  I'm not begging for comments, but I also don't know if I've become repetitive, boring or offensive.  People don't say, "Hey, this blog sucks," but they do stay quiet - for better or worse.  

It's a small zone of cyberspace that I can call my own.  Maybe that's why I constantly change the background or the images or the icons at the top.  It's not so much an issue of self-marketing as much as it is a chance to be creative in an online format.  

I got rid of my Facebook and my Twitter accounts, because I wasn't crazy about artificial interactions.  I've kept my blog, though, mostly because I can be longwinded and reflective.  At a younger age, I wrote in journals all the time.  I still have stacks of cheap spirals with smudged up ink.  I'd often add pictures I clipped from magazines or sketches I made when I was bored in church.  I'm not sure if my switch from paper to ones and zeroes was wise . . . sometimes I miss the feel or paper beneath my inner wrist.

The more I blogged, the more I became aware of an audiene (albeit small) and began to refine my thinking.  The comments forced me to reconsider ideas.  Yet, I lost a part of the privacy and itimacy of a journal.  I still find myself second-guessing a point I'm about to make - or wondering if I'm rambling.  So, as I sit here feeling lonely, I wonder if it's a subtle gift.  Perhaps I'm rediscovering solitude.

Photo Credit

Flickr Creative Commons

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rustybasset/2438109980/

When I began teaching, I tried my best to be Teflon.  Sensitivity would mean exploding anger or tears - both of which would backfire.  If I could develop a thicker skin, students would behave and I wouldn't take it personally.  The problem with Teflon is it's synthetic and easily scratched.  The harder I tried to be Teflon the more my humanity pushed through, often in unexpected moments.  A student would do something small and I'd explode.  

Eventually, I learned to be more like a cast-iron skillet.  Here, everything stuck.  Sensitivity wasn't a liability, but a part of my idenitity.  I learned to "let it stick" and become a flavor of the classroom.  Instead of ignoring it and brushing away the pain, I began to confront students and say, "that was cruel" or "you can't treat a fellow student that way."  In the process, I allowed the students to change me as much as I changed them.  It became relational.  Skillets have personality and depth.  

I didn't become a softy by any means.  A cast-iron skillet is heavy, hearty and durable.  However, it is also more human and more humble than shiny new teflon.  I learned that by being human and humbling myself made me more effective.  It's a bizarre thing, but people like their skillets more than their Teflon.  And they like them, because the skillets are "theirs."  There's a sense that "letting it stick" is precisely why cooks won't ever trade in their skillet.

So, with the close of this school year, I'm a little sad.  However, I also realize that I am forever changed by this particular group of students. 

Photo Credit

Flickr Creative Commons

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cbertel/2775676287/

Poor Chuck Norris would have a hell of a time in this class

I think I'm going to enjoy the principal at my new school.  He mentioned to the staff, "We have had only two big fights and two examples of graffiti.  There was a consequence, but the relationship was restored."  

Teachers looked baffled when he explained his philosophy of discipline, "It's about trust and mutual respect.  If teachers trust students and students trust teachers, they are less likely to misbehave." Think about it this way, "If you have a son or daughter and they misbehave, do you pull out a discipline matrix?  Don't get me wrong, we have one, but it's about the conversation and the dialogue and the climate of unconditional love."  

Someone asked about uniforms and he explained the general guidelines.  "If a student fails to understand, we have some back-up uniforms.  We meet with them in private and if it becomes a huge issue, we'll eventually call home."  A few teachers seemed really concerned. I mentioned a difference between my current school and this new school.

"At my school right now, there are uniforms.  It's like a dare to them.  How much can I get away with?  So they wear even baggier pants or super-long t-shirts or they write all over themselves to find any loophole in the uniform policy.  At this school, students seem to dress appropriately because it's not a set of rules as much as a general expectation. It's more like a procedure of how things are done rather than a rule that requires obedience."  

Relationships rarely have rules, but they do have procedures.  If there is trust and if a person feels known, they'll follow the procedures.  I don't pull out a pyramid or write up a referral or set up a circle of shame when my sons mess up.  We have a short time-out designed for reflection and then we have a conversation.  We don't hang up a laminated list of rules on the wall and I don't set up a point system where good behavior can lead to stickers.

Even in horizontal relationships, procedures exist.  It's not a rule, but it is a procedure, that I need to be home by six and if I'm going to be late, I should call my wife.  It's a procedure that dictates our place where we sit at the table.  Christy and I have a general idea of who gets up when the boys wake-up in the middle of the night, but if it's the "late night" shift and she's really tired, I might get up with Micah when he has a nightmare.

My class rule that I post on the wall is, "Love."  I tell the students that we'll all mess up on that one and that the response to breaking the rule is that we apologize and seek reconciliation.  At the same time, I have procedures.  Students know to be silent during bell work and to only talk to their own groups during group work.  Yet, those are not rules.  If they mess up on the procedure, the group self-monitors or sometimes I'll re-explain a procedure.  I don't have a pyramid or a stack of referrals or a grid or a laminated list in bold font.  Isntead, we have procedures and dialogue. It's less confrontational and it doesn't sacrifice the relationship.

It's no secret that I hate standardized tests, but over the last year and a half, I've been wondering if they have a place. What if standardized tests are not inherently evil, but actually misused. Anything is right if done in the right context. If killing can have a place in the compass of morality, perhaps standardized testing can, too.

So, I've made a list of where standardized testing works:

• To measure skills rather than concepts (which is why social studies should never be tested with standardized tests)
• To get a general trend for what a group of students are learning. Often, they are misused to judge an entire school when they might be best used to measure a certain teaching practice.
  
• As a diagnostic tool to help determine where students need more help (i.e. using the the AIMS Web to measure fluency). Often, they are misused as evaluative measures.
  
• To remind students that occasionally tests are something we have to do in life (as bogus as they might be).
• To see what students do not know. Often people assume standardized tests measure a child's knowledge, when it's really a test of ignorance.

Standardized tests cannot measure higher-level thinking, creativity, the development of convictions, civic virtue or much of anything else that I value in my classroom. However, in limited doses, I can see the value of a standardized test.

I wrote today's What-if Wednesday on my other blog:

http://jtspencer.blogspot.com/2009/05/false-dichotomy.html

It's a subject I've thought about a lot lately.

Last night I watched a PBS documentary with Mark Oliver Everett, the lead singer of the Eels as he attempts to learn about his deceased father, Hugh Everett. His dad had been a proponent of the Parallel Worlds theory within Quantum Physics.

As I watched it, I was struck by the notion of this artist who is convinced that he's so different from his dad, coming to some understanding of his eccentricities. Everett is convinced that science is mechanical, mathematical and therefore "not his thing." So, he's on this sort-of subdued quest to learn his dad's theories and in the process he bridges a gap. He discovers science is filled with poetry and magic, art and paradox in motion.

I grew up believing that math and science were "not my thing" as long as I loved to write and read and draw and paint. It's strange how I often make simple mathematical errors, but I loved abstract math and non-linear geometry. The equation only made sense when it was conceptual. For me, the journey was to take what I knew intuitively and use the language of math to prove it with numbers. There was no room for me in a class of pure objectivity, where the teacher won't make room for paradox.

Lately, I've been thinking about science. I'm growing to love the natural sciences when I garden. I've read a little about quantum mechanics and though I am often lost, I'm delighted by physics for the first time ever. It makes me realize that school forged a false dichotomy between the "logical thinkers" and the "intuitive thinkers." They created a fairy tale barrier between logic and poetry, between math and language.

This dichotomy doesn't exist in the real world. When I hang out with artists and social scientists, they talk about systems and structures. When I hang out with philosophers they talk about logic. When I'm around science geek, they're talking about paradox and mystery and parallel universes. They use metaphor and poetry.

What if schools did a better job bridging these gaps? What if math connected more to social issues or to paradox or to life? What if social studies students analyzed data? What if science students were given a small taste of quantum physics before they reach college?

Photo Credit

http://www.bandweblogs.com/eelsbbc.jpg

I work with a science teacher who lives the organic life.  I'm guessing the vast majority of his home decor is created from canvas or hemp.  He has a slow, calm demeanor and Celtic tatoos and he rolls his own organic tobacco.  He's one of those guys who was never trendy, until the trend happened to be what he already was. 

I tell him that my wife and I have started to take up gardening and he grows passionate, as if he's talking to an eco-convert.  I tell him that it's fun, but painful, that the growth is slow but I could never have anticipated the reaction from my sons.  "I'm recovering my love of nature and science. I'm beginning to see how science and art intersect.  I mean, yeah, there is a wrong and a right way garden, but there's so much art involved.  It's creative."  

"You don't use Miracle Gro, do you?" he asks.  

"No, but I thought about it." 

"I have no data to back it up, but I don't trust it."

"To me, the real miracle is that anything grows at all," I explain, "last night's salad scraps become next month's compost and at some point I see tomatoes.  It really does feel like a miracle."  

"It's more earthy when it's not rinsed off and set inside of a plastic bag," he smiles.  

"Is Miracle Gro dangerous?"  I ask.  

"We don't know.  In the fiftees and sixtees we thought the Green Revolution would saves lives.  And it did.  But now you go to parts of India and there are these huge cancer clusters.  It's sort-of like the cancer clusters we had in Maryvale.  People say it was the water, but I think it was the chemicles from Goodyear and Motorola and the chemicles we dropped from planes."  

I left thinking about the garden metaphor and the agrarian parables of Jesus.  I thought about education as growth and the danger of looking for miracle growth at the detriment of sustainability.  Unrelenting growth, free of rest and sabbatical, was the cause of our market meltdown.  

I thought about the growth metaphor in education and the hucksters who try to sell a Green Revolution of test scores, with equally malicious euphamisms.  According to NCLB, all of my studnets will pass the test by 2014.  Just like the Miracle Gro commercial, I am doubtful of the claims.  Still, if it does work, I wonder if unsustained growth in test scores will be what kills the long-term desire to learn.

I take no credit for this video, but I'll post it here anyway.  One of my students (a member of our Legion of Pisspoor Scholars Who Nonetheless Think Well) created this in response to our reading of Fahrenheit 451. He asked to stay after school one day and make a video for his poem that he'd written.  

I spent three to four hours on Saturday morning digging a hole around concrete, in hopes that it will someday transform into a home for basil and marjarom and a bunch of spices that I know nothing about right now.  Joel and I turned the hard earth into a mud bath and I ended up knee deep in it.  A few years ago, I would have squirmed at the idea of finding enjoyment in mud and shovels and basil.  

It's not as if it were deeply symbolic either.  I could have thought, "This is the story of my life.  This is my style of teaching. I'm tearing down rigid, industrial structures and trying to grow life." I could have wallowed in metaphor and drifted away into the abstract.  Instead, I played and laughed and grunted.  I let Joel spray me with the hose without thinking about the ecological damage of wasting water.  Love is supposed to be exhorbitant and wasteful and unexpected and costly.  Maybe that's why desert poets often relate grace to water.

Instead, I thought about Joel and Micah and growing up, about how my dad had pushed me away from all handywork with his temper and about the moments I had lost my temper with them.  I felt hopeful of the notion that I would have open dialogue with them as long as I could and that, even if projects were half-assed I'll try and choose people over "stuff" and I'll apologize when I yell. I thought about what I want my life to be and what I don't want it to be.  

I've been slowing down lately.  I dropped my Twitter account and I'm preparing to leave Myspace and Facebook.  I'll never quit blogging, but I'd like it to be the extent of my digital identity.  I want my tweets to be real birds and my friends to be real friends and my photo album to be tangible, so that it smells like an old book when I'm sixty-two.  I don't want to connect over ones and zeroes, but over a pint or a venti coffee.  

The only sports games I want to follow religiously are the ones of Joel and Micah.  I'm convinced it's possible to know the entire defensive line of the Cardinals at the expensive of knowing one's sons. I've been listening less to NPR and more to the silence of my own thoughts when I drive home everyday.  I'm not sure it's really possible to have "all things considered" within an hour framework each day. 

I'm not trying to be preachy here. I don't pretend that this makes sense to everyone.  I'm just finding rest and I'm okay with that. It's been a gradual process and it will probably always ebb and flow, but I'm beginning to enjoy it.

Photo Credit

Flickr Creative Commons

http://www.flickr.com/photos/alexandra_z/3297957224/

It's a ritual that occurs in nearly every staff lounge at this time of year.  (Sorry for the pun on the title) Teachers stand around and talk about how tired they are.  

"I'm so tired.  I got only five hours of sleep last night,"  a person will ante up.  

"Yeah, I watched The Office and then, you know, I had to watch Thirty Rock and I ended up grading papers until two this morning."  

"I don't watch t.v." (people love to brag about how much t.v. they don't watch) "but I had this friend in town and we were just talking and I got like three hours of sleep."  

After awhile, it becomes a pissing contest of how little sleep each person gets.  If I admit, "I slept for eight hours," people will tell me how lucky I am.  Lucky?  That's like saying, "You ate three meals today, you're so lucky" or "You stayed hydrated, you are so fortunate."  What's strange is that I end up feeling left out of the Sleepless Game.  So, I have to tell the story about when Joel was six weeks old and we went three straight days without sleeping more than two hours in a row.

I can't think of any other area of life where people would gather around to brag about taking poor care of themselves.  Can you imagine someone walking into the staff lounge and saying, "Dude, I've been so busy that I haven't showered in days" or "Man, I went three days without deoderant."  I'm still waiting for the day that someone says, "I'm going on a chocolate binge and I'm going to quit working out.  Maybe I'll fry up a bunch of bacon. You know, becuase I'm so busy grading papers that I can't take care of myself."

Photo Credit

Flickr Creative Commons

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dhdesign/1096464615/

Many of the teachers I know seem really focussed on summer plans.  They bust out calendars and cross out big X's in red marker.  I can't blame them entirely.  Teachers are tired, kids are anxious we're in the beginning of another blazingly hot summer.  I attempt a faux stern look and then give up when kids throw water.  

Despite all of this, I always feel the need to finish hard.  I pack the end of the year with more service projects, a documentary and a major art project.  I teach my favorite, most practical unit and I don't show videos.  I realize I might sound a little self-righteouss, but it's my method of survival.  Weeks go by faster when I'm passionate about a project. I could be wrong, but it seems that students are less apathetic.  It's not that students are tired of learning at the end of the year.  It's that they're tired of school.  

Even when I attempt to finish hard, I always have a nagging sense of guilt.  It's strange, I know.  I believe in grace.  I wasn't raised around angry nuns who shamed me and hit me with rulers.  I don't think I have a Freedom Writers styled hero complex.  Still, in the middle of May, I always feel that I should have done more.  I should have given better feedback on work.  I should have gotten to know students better.  I see some students and think, "I hardly know you," and I shudder at the thought that some are slipping through unnoticed and unknown.  I wish we had done more service projects and field trips.  I wish we had started videos earlier in the year. 

Is this a common feeling for other teachers at the end of the year?

I've been posting a lot of videos lately on our class website and we've had a lot more freedom to do more multimedia things. . . which leads me to a little announcement. I'll be teaching computers next year. How cool is that to have a quasi-Luddite teaching computers?

I thought I'd embed a student-created video. Two of the kids made in my class made it. I could appreciate the contradiction of creating an anti-technology rant in a technological format, especially given that I'll be using that approach as I teach next year.

I don't know what this is, but it sounds cool

It's a secret to most people that I love Norteno music (and hate my computer for failing to understand tildes). I love the accordian and the tuba. I realize they'll never make it into the rotation of gringo radio, but I'm okay with that. So, on late afternoons, when I have a fat stack of papers to grade, I'll but out my Los Tigres del Norte on full blast. (The other day a teacher thought it was the janitors and came in to complain)

I guess I have an affinity for non-mainstream instruments. I love it when the old bald guy in church plays the mandolin or when Hayden plays the harmonica. I remember one time hearing a harpsichord and piano duet and lamenting thinking that the sound was as foreign and sadly lost as the stain glass windows that surrounded me.

So, I'm making a list of favorite instruments that I rarely hear on the radio:

1. Tuba - The musical version of a Hefeweizzen
   
2. Mandolin - Maybe the most beautiful sound in the world.
   
3. Accordian - I fell in love with this instruments because of Counting Crows and I still think it sounds amazing.
4. Banjo - I love Sufjan Steven's ability to make the banjo sound sad.
5. Harpsichord - The first few notes sounded tinny to me, but then I was hooked.
   
6. Harmonica - I can thank Hayden for changing me here. What I once relegated to camp fire solos I can now appreciate.
   
7. Steel Drums - My time in Brazil changed my perspective on this instrument. It sounds like it's singing (more so than Peter Frampton's guitar)
   
8. French Horn - Some of my favorite songs have this (Mistress Witch, Chelsea, Where and When)
   

Power structures melt in the heat; straight-up melt, like chocolate or compact disks. After twelve, when it's over one hundred outside, it turns into Lord of the Flies. Fights break out. Kids throw water. Half the students walk around with their undershirt rather than uniforms. It's why they have riots in Tent City. The Russians were onto something with the whole Siberia thing.

What makes music so powerful?

Photo Credit
Flickr Creative Commons
http://www.flickr.com/photos/zipkid/3525255061/

I'll be taking this week off from blogging and by the end of the week, I'll hopefully add some videos and podcasts (to my jtspencer blog) and maybe add some top icons to this bad boy. See you in a week. 

I remember being in my first year and feeling lost.  I wanted to have some advice, but I quickly found that there was too much advice and not enough of it fit my own personality.  People would say things like, "Wear a shirt and tie everyday."  One person told me, "Color code the post-it notes." At the same time, the good advice saved my life.  Looking back, I realize that some of the "useless" advice has probably helped tons of other teachers.  

So for Survey Saturday, I offer this question:

What advice would you offer a brand new teacher?

Rock Bottom sent me an e-mail about the Mother's Day Brunch Buffet.  I love my mom, but I'm skeptical that she would go with this.  She still has too many layers of Baptist legalism to shed and her arthritis medication won't allow her to have alcohol.  I could try and convince her.  I'd tell her that Mary not only drank, but she told Jesus to turn water into wine and who better to remember on Mother's Day than the blessed virgin?  

Somehow I can't imagine that most moms who want to begin drinking in the morning are the same ones who have a children who feel a super-close tie to them (unless the tie is called codependency) so I'm wondering if the Sunday Brunch doesn't offer beer - which I think is more of a sacrilege than my indie protestant church that doesn't serve up wine on Sunday morning and instead sticks to mini shot glasses of grape juice.

My guess is that they had a Father's Day event that went really well and so some guy in marketing was like, "We already did pinatas on May 5th and green beer on St. Patrick's Day.  We need to increase our festive holiday offerings, but we have to be careful.  Remember the angry e-mails of the '07 MLK Day fiasco, when we had a discount on all of the darker stouts? How 'bout Mother's Day?" 

I've been told before that I have low expectations for my students.  Whenever I suggest that a standardized test is culturally biased or that the wording is deliberately deceptive, someone says, "You need to have high expectations.   These kids can pass the test."  

So last year I felt a little vindicated when students went to pick up the free RIF books.  Our curriculum specialist ordered what she felt middle school students would want.  So, it was fun to have them say things like, "In all these books, I can't find a single copy of The Jungle," or "Why don't they have the Night trilogy?" Or to see them walk up to the librarian and ask for The World Is Flat or Anthem or A Communist Manifesto.  (I think it made our librarian's day and gave her hope for the future of literacy and thus the Dewey Decimal System). 

Don't get me wrong.  We had students who wanted the picture books or who went for the Harry Potter series (which I consider to be a higher level than most youth literature) but it was cool to see them want to own books that they had read in my class.  

I mention this story, because, as I gear up to teach seventh grade again, I'm trying to set up my class list of what they'll read alone, in groups and altogether as a class.  I'm struck by the fact that the same people who accuse me of not having high standards are the same ones who will tell me that I made my book list too hard and that, no, it is not possible for adolescents to grasp the ideas in Fahrenheit 451.  

Photo Credit

Flickr Creative Commons

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cobalt/409924867/

I used to sprint the finish every time, until a coach pulled me aside and said, "Don't sprint it.  Go your hardest, yeah, but if you're running well you won't be able to sprint.  You'll just finish and you'll be done and that will be it."  

Often, I sprint the finish of the school year.  I miss the people.  I miss the students.  It's an awkward way for me to reach closure - jampack it full of projects and it goes by quickly.  It's when we do documentaries and plays and everything we're not prohibited from doing during test prep time.  Most teachers I run into ease into the summer.  I guess for them it's more like reaching a slow stop before a red light.  I could call them lazy, but they could just as easily call me an overzealous workaholic.  

So, I'm not really sure how to end this year.  Don't get me wrong.  Tomorrow is a packed day, but my overall schedule hasn't changed from August to May.  Maybe it means I'm reaching balance.  Maybe I'm getting lazy.  Maybe it's my body's way of telling me to avoid burn-out.  Yet, as I pack up the boxes in my classroom and prepare myself for another three weeks, I have a lingering sense of satisfaction mixed with guilt.  I'm torn between enjoyment and feeling that I haven't done enough and that I don't know students well enough and that I took too many short cuts and that no one should ever engage in such a long run-on sentence when an English teacher might be reading this long-winded blog post.

I'm really curious to get people's ideas on this.  I'd really like a philosophical conversation:

What does it mean to end well?

Photo Credit

Flickr Creative Commons

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dr_john2005/2935470206/

In a well-intentioned gesture, someone once gave me this poem called “Pretty Good,” by Charles Osgood. The main premise was that America is falling behind as a superpower, because we let “pretty good” pass instead of striving for excellence. Ironically, the poem was pretty bad; with a plethora of slant rhymes and trite phrases. I am no poet, but I felt compelled to write a response to it. I figured that my poem couldn’t be much worse.

“Really Great”

By John Spencer

There once was a really great student

Whose class was considered the best

And taught by a “qualified” teacher

So he could ace the standardized test

His scores were the highest in reading

He won first in the state’s science fair

And played first-string varsity quarterback

though he honestly didn’t really care

Even though he wanted to be an artist

and a philosopher questioning why

He soon found that to be a success

Was to let creativity die

So he memorized all the information

Just to get an A on the exam

Though he knew his whole education

Was merely a standardized sham

Then he became a great salesperson

And married a great trophy wife

and live in a great little suburb

but he never thought well about life

He lived in a really great city

Where everything had to be best

Except when he finally messed up

and became clinically depressed

My point in writing the poem is that success for the sake of success is flimsy.  Don’t get me wrong. I’m not opposed to asking students to work hard.  I’m a strong proponent of providing a challenge for students.  However, without providing a solid motive for working, teachers are left with an empty Magic Ticket Mythology.  They have this notion that hard work will mean a free ticket to a better job and hence a life of easy enjoyment. 

The tragic irony is that focusing on achievement leads to less achievement.  Some students become risk-managers, afraid to do something that might lead to failure. Others quit before trying or resort to perfectionism, where they work as hard as possible, but they miss the qualitative side of education. Still others do the bare minimum possible to earn the highest reward.

I don't know this lady, but she just looked like an honors student

For the last year, I have taught a rotation of honors.  People often have a few false assumptions about honor's students; namely, that they act and think like Martin on The Simpsons.  People assume the honors group is smarter, better behaved and harder working than the other groups.  In reality, they earned a slot through teacher recommendation meaning they could have been chosen for the following reasons:

1. They were personable and fun
2. They were phenomenal brown-nosers who behaved well
3. They were genuinely gifted
4. They did fantastic work, despite being less intelligent than the gifted kids
5. They had "potential," meaning they were intelligent trouble-makers
6. They were great test-takers, but had little practical knowledge
7. They were smart but lazy

In other words, I have students who act and think like most of my other classes.  True, some are more talented in some areas.  Some are math whizzes and some are gifted writers and some think more intuitively or go deeper philosophically.  So, why do we bother with an honor's class at all?  If honor students are not necessarily gifted, do we need a special tracking system for them?  

What if we re-tooled honors?  Instead of using test scores or teacher recommendations, we could offer it as an enrichment program that provided more challenging, in-depth, higher-thinking work but also offered new opportunties as well.  Students could join honors as long as they felt they could rise up to the challenge.  We might end up with a special ed or ELL student who works harder and reads Plato's Republic and we might have a smart kid with "potential" who chooses to go with the regular class instead of honors.  

Yet, isn't that how the world actually works?  I may not be the smartest teacher or the best test-taker, but if I'm the most motivated, chances are I'm a better teacher than the genius down the hall who feels that scrubbing graffiti off the desk is beneath him.  There are lawn services with geniuses who never learned to apply themselves and former special ed students creating innovative solutions for companies.  

Mullet Man preaches in a paisley tie at Yankee Stadium. A cyclical loop of a low-tuned base works the crowd into a frenzy. Since I don't get Comedy Central, I flip to TBN sometimes, with the hope that the pink-haird lady will start crying about satellites. It's touching, really. Tonight, though, it just makes me sad.

I see the crowd and they look poor. I don't mean "spiritually poor," but poor, poor. Most are minorities, wearing their threadbare Sunday best, hoping for a miracle. Mullet Man wears a three-piece suit. It's not threadbare. Then again, it doesn't need to look poor when Mullet Man promises that if we are faithful and try our best, God will give us "the life you always wanted." He seems to think we have to rub God the right way, make him happy; a bit finicky and perhaps a little cantankerous, but who can blame a guy whose been around for so long?

His lips drip with white imperialism. Blame it on his accent or his lilly white skin, but I can't help but see the racial tension in a predominately black crowd taking direction from a rich white guy. "If you have a good attitude. If you put your smile on. If you have an attitude of faith, your life will work. You may say, 'I'm sad. My husbands in the hospital.' If you say, 'God, I'm gonna be good,' God will bring a harvest." I'm not sure his urban crowd will connect with the agrarian metaphor, but the bass in the background, my God, the bass in the background is powerful.

So, I switch the channel to an old episode of This Old House. "This house is overlooked," Norm explains, "but it's beautiful. The last owners covered the floor with carpet and nearly ruined it, but look at this. The original concrete is gorgeous." They start the renovation from the inside out and transform it. It's not that the house looks radically different, but that it's restored. It's more itself than ever before.

I'm banking on one spiritual conviction that becomes my hope: that God is way more like Norm Abram than the Mullet Man in Yankee Stadium.

I don't believe in living vicariously through sports.  I don't believe that when "they" do well, "we" do well.  I don't drink Miller Light and the word "fantasy" does not conjure up images of baseball in my mind.  Still, I can't help but feel a little excited that the Giants are playing above five hundred and I can't help but hate the Dodgers for no other reason than the fact that they are the LA Dodgers.  What is it about the game that draws me back year after year?

"Towns turn into motels, people into nomadic surges from place to place."
"The bigger the market, the less you handle controversy."
"It didn't come from the government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, we did it to ourselves."

Those are some of the phrases that popped out of our Fahrenheit 451 passage today. I'm haunted by it - the notion of image over substance, of soundbyte (he predicts a nation mobilized not by a phrase but by a word "change.") I'm not sure what to make of all of it. I sometimes feel that I'm rationalizing my entertainment addiction with the concept of being "relevant."

In Jonestown, the people first volunteered. They gave up their freedom for a dizzying utopian dream. It didn't start out with armed guards and poisoned Kool-Aid. It was the promise of convenience and happiness as long as someone else could think for them.

The cynic in me worries about the culture of mass media. I'm seriously considering ditching my digital identity. When I think of a tweet, I want it to be a real bird, not a one-hundred icon soundbyte on Twitter. When I think of my friends, I want it to be flesh and bones. When I want to connect, I want it to be over a pint or a Venti coffee. Yet, I also realize the need to live within the culture and participate in it - to be in a monastary without wall. I'm pulled toward the cloister of a non-digital identity but I'm also feeling the need to be relevant.

Apparently the changing one's hairstyle can be the most disruptive element to student learning. For two days now I have had no gel in my hair. It has garnered way too much attention and I'm already beginning to feel a little self-conscious. Who knew the students cared one way or another? I thought middle schoolers were supposed to be so self-absorbed to notice.

I'm surprised how few students know that they can create podcasts on their own. For example, I asked them if they wanted to do a "Social Pulse" activity, where they asked a series of questions and allowed people to offer a quick answer.  When they asked me where they could find digital recorders, I asked, "How many of you have a portable music player?"  Two students raised their hands.  

"You mean you don't have an iPod?"  A bunch of hands went up.  

"I got a ghetto iPod.  I think it's called M3P or something like that," a kid responds.  

"How many of you know that you can record with it?"  Nobody raises their hands.  

It quickly becomes an impromptu lesson on using these devices to record.  A similar incident happened awhile back when I asked a student to copy notes for another student who was absent.  She pulled out her cell phone, took a  picture of the board and sent it in a text.  Another time I asked if a student wanted to do a quick service reflection and she said, "Here, record me from the food bank.  It will be a better background."  She handed me her cell phone and I interviewed her.  I realized right then that two of the most powerful tools for learning are ones that students are prohibited to have on campus.

Schools are slow to recognize that the very "toys" they ban can often be used in creative ways for education.  I've heard the argument that students will listen to music if we don't ban iPods.  Yet, is it really so bad if a student listens to music during bell work?  Similarly, I realize students can get distracted with sending texts, but would they be paying attention if the cell phone was gone? 

Cell phones and music players can be great tools for learning. True, they can be used incorrectly.  Then again, so can paper.  How many notes do teachers confiscate? How many schools have proposed across the board bans on paper and pencils?  Perhaps a better approach would be to incorporate various gadgets into the actual learning and to focus on why students feel the need to text.  Is it that the lessons are boring?  Is it that the student is confused?  Is the child a techno-addict?  Simply banning a medium does little to teach true technology literacy.

Photo Credit

Flickr Creative Commons

http://www.flickr.com/photos/fr3d/1553224678/

Sometimes I get into a habit of offering my half-baked ideas, telling stories of my classroom an even offering advice.  I get into a habit of fashioning something new, attempting a thin veil of a new online identity. I enjoy the praise.  I like to feel helpful.  Sometimes I need to remember that I'm not the Wizard of Oz. I can sit around pushing levers and buttons and creating smoke and mirrors, but in the end I'm just a lonely guy pushing buttons.  

A little over a week ago, a student did something really mean in class.  We were in the midst of filming a short video and she held up a sign reading, "This shit isn't funny."  I watched another student shut down.  Sign Girl can be real mean.  Last year, she pantsed a girl and then took a picture and spread it around Myspace.  Often, she instigates fights and then sets up bets on them. She's a part-time socialite, part time bookie, with a hard-ass attitude.  

So, in my mind, I'm thinking, "Don't yell."  I calmly say, "Get out of my class."  She answers, "Why?" 

Then I say some of the meanest words I've ever said, "You're rude and disrespectful" and then I said something that I really regretted.  It doesn't need to be repeated online.  

I've tried to apologize, but she won't come back to my classroom.  Half of my students hated me last Monday.  Now they're beginning to come back.  When I first began, I would have justified it and demanded an apology.  I would have tried harder to be the Wizard of Oz.  Now, I end up in tears.  I apologize and I come back with a limp, but surprisingly stronger from being humbled.

So, I'm not the Wizard of Oz.  I don't offer magical formulas.  I don't deal well with the smoke and mirrors and gadgets and widgets.  And I know that, when I'm saying "sorry" (even if it's initially rejected) that to my core, a broken John Spencer is way more necessary than another false wizard promising steps to success. 

It's not exactly Kansas, either. My version of Dorothy couldn't give me courage or a new heart or any of that.  She didn't prounce around a yellow brick road.  She came in with a stare and a glare and a sign reading, "This shit isn't funny."  Still, she gave me a reality check when I needed it. 

I recently read a blog post where a teacher showed her orderly, creative, well-run classroom configuration on The Cornerstone Blog. So, I thought I'd steal her idea and post a video of my classroom, "Cribs" style.

I'm going to be taking two weeks off of this blog. I'm doing this for two major reasons. First, I want to add some videos, podcasts, lesson plans and other stuff to my "musings" blog and to the resources blog.

Photo Credit
Flickr Creative Commons
http://www.flickr.com/photos/littlebranches/168490477/

I recently read a blog where the author promises a "total teacher transformation."  While I'm a big, big fan of alliteration and I usually enjoy this particular blogger's posts, I'm not sure it ever really works like that.  Maybe I'm an anomaly, but my experiences have been full of highs and lows, with humbling experiences followed by, "Damn, I can't believe my kids just did that."  

For me, the greatest mentors have often been former teachers.  I thank the grammar gestapo Mrs. Moore and the relentlessly challenging Ms. Bedene and the teacher who mentored me in History Day, Mrs. Smoot.  Yet, the teacher who I constantly go back to mentally as I teach is my senior government teacher, Mrs. Waller.  So, for today's Survey Saturday:

Tell a quick story of a teacher who made a difference in your life.  

If you want to post it on your own blog and post the link as a comment, that would be cool.  I'm not a very trendy guy, so I can't imagine making something go viral.  You can also post it on my Twitter.

A couple of posts ago, I mentioned the story about defining love. 

So the story gets crazier. The girl who brought up the point at the end asked me (I'm paraphrasing), "Do trees feel? Can they communicate? I'm serious about this. What if their language is so slow and their life span so quick and we are so fast that we are their equivalent of a fly that pesters awhile and then dies after a few days? I mean, what if our chopping down a tree is the equivalent of someone dying from malaria? And what if the mosquito thinks he's just as smart as we think we are? Meanwhile the tree is having these really deep conversations, but we can't ever speak their language?"

A boy tells her she's crazy, but she counters with, "When I was little we used to sing a song in church about trees on the earth clapping their hands.  What if that's what they do? What if they don't need to move, because they are dancing and talking and smart enough to do that without ever having to work? Maybe they're more evolved than us.  Can you make photosynthesis?"

I'm not sure that photosynthesis is something a person "makes," but I admit that she's got me thinking. It's been a long time since I've thought this deeply about trees. 

I'm not sure if she got it from a movie or a book.  .  . She's a really low reader and hates to read, so maybe she didn't get it from a book.  Or maybe she got it from her mind or from the synthesis of books and stories and conversations and philosophical musings that happen before school while we listen to Ray LaMontagne and work on a Paper Border and she thinks about children's songs from church. 

The point is this: I'm not sure if kids are getting smarter or if they've always been this smart, but I treated them like they were dumber than they were the first few years of teaching.  

Today's Philisophical Friday is available on my other blog:

The Trouble with Defining Love

It's harder to see through someone who is being transparent.

I'm easiest to see through when I'm not transparent.