Students in my second hour are working a documentary project about rethinking schools.  I begin with the assumption that the research portion will be rocky, but instead I find that students are enagaged.  Many of the lower readers (and the class has a high number of special ed and ELL students who struggle with grade level text) find the graphic organizer helpful and begin picking more challenging sites for information.

As we talk about reform, one boy pulls me aside.  "Why don't we bring back recess?"

"We can't shorten the school day.  We have laws about how long school has to last."

"No, I'm not saying that at all.  Here's what I'm thinking.  Teachers have to be here from eight until four, right?  So, why not take the forty minutes before school when you have to be here and create two twenty minute recesses?  Kids could have two hours of work, a twenty minute break and then two more hours until lunch and then another twenty-minute break in the afternoon.  Then rotate the schedule so that we only change classes after two hours."

"I see, like a block schedule."

He stares at me blankly.  "No, like recess."

Perhaps he's right.   After all, middle school students are energetic and need time to run and play and be social.  Maybe they don't need swing sets, but they need to jump and dance and throw around a basketball and talk about meaningless fluff (which it often turns out isn't as meaningless or fluffy as I had once assumed).  Kids need to run after a soccer ball and play a game of cards and talk about their little crushes that feel, in the moment, completely earth-shattering.

Adding a recess might actually be a good thing.  For those who argue that school should match the reality at work, last time I checked an eight hour shift requires two ten minute breaks - we just don't use the term "recess."

photo credit

Sometimes I wish that I could hang a "Do Not Disturb" sign around my neck and wear it at places where it is socially acceptable to be intrusive. I'd wear it at church, during the "shake hands with each other," time. I'm not so great at sharing the peace. I'd prefer to keep my peace to myself.

I'd also wear it on train rides, where it is openly acceptable to talk politics or religion or anything else one considers personal.

Tonight, I want to hold the sign up at a diner.

"Is that homework?" a man asks.

"Yes, it's part of my Pencils in Society class."

"Oh, I see. Is that part of your master's degree?" the guy asks.

"Yes, it is," I add avoiding eye contact.

"Seems like a silly degree to me," he continues.

"I beg your pardon," I finally look up.

"Well, it's just that pencil advocates always complain about not being included in the conversations about education. Yet, they have their own pencil conferences and pencil degrees and pencil plogs. I mean, last time I checked, there was an entire category on the 1896 Eduplogger Awards dedicated to pencil plogs. Don't get me wrong, I use pencils. I should state that outright. I use pencils everyday in my job. Love them. I carry one around with me in my pocket. On a bad day, I worry that it might puncture my scrotum, but on most days, they become a part of daily life."

"I'm not sure where you're going with this," I add.

"Well, we don't have a separate world in the workforce that's all about pencils. If I go to a leadership conference, we use pencils. If I go to a workplace productivity conference, we use pencils. But I would never feel the need to get a whole degree in Pencil Business or attend a Business Pencils Conference."

"I see your point. But these venues are necessary as long as we are shut out of the dialogue on curriculum and instruction."

"As long as educational technology and education remain separate entities, both will exist in a fantasy world of tech-denial or technophilia. See, we'll have all these people gushing about new gadgets in our Brave New Industrial World. We'll hear about connectivity of the telegraph and the global community and all of that and if we're not careful, we'll miss the reality that there are some dark sides to industrialization. Meanwhile, we'll have a separate faction advocating a 'back-to-basics' approach that plays on fear and nostalgia. I'm guessing you're of the technophilia camp, right?"

"I love technology, but I'm no technocrat. My students use paper and pencil, but they also criticize the role of industrialization, the loss of community with technology and the dangers of developing a vapor-self when moving toward a text-based personna."

"I'm glad. We need people who use technology to be focussed on the human element first. But here's the thing: wouldn't you be better off introducing technology to people involved in leadership and curriculum and policy?"

I'm wishing for my Do Not Disturbed sign. Right now I am definitely disturbed.

"Hey John, can you describe your approach to parenting?"

"I guess I would say that I want to have a few firm boundaries, a considerable amount of freedom and unconditional love."

"Oh, that's not at all how I run a family," my friend explains.  The term "run" jars me, but I'm intrigued.  

"Yeah, I have my kids compete with one another.  It makes them work harder. Unconditional love is just another term for low expectations.  I want accountability.  If my kids are someday going to compete in a global economy, they need to first compete for my affection."  

"Describe what you mean."  

"For example, take dinner time.  Each week, I have my children take a test.  Those who have reached the top get more food.  Those who fail it . . . well, I don't exactly starve them.  But I give them just enough food to stay alive. It's a motivational tool."  

"Wow, that seems a little cruel."  

"Oh no, my kids work really, really hard."

"What about the child you just adopted from China?"

"Yeah, he's having a hard time.  But I want my ELL child to know that he has to compete on the same playing field as the rest of my family.  And you know what?  My guess is he'll learn English faster this way."  

"Don't you have a child with special needs?"

"Yeah, but he competes with the other kids, too.  Don't get me wrong, he won't ever have as much on his plates as others, but God knows he'll try.  Where else will he get competition?  The Special Olympics lies to them and tells them that they're all winners.  That's simply not how corporate America works."  

"Are your kids afraid of making mistakes?"  

"Perhaps, but in the process they learn that mistakes have consequences.  We've settled for mediocre for too long.  Indeed, I want to set up a neighborhood competition that will pit my house against the others.  Maybe we can shut down some of the lower performing homes and sell them to a company who will run a more competitive household. The family as a social institution is broken.  Data demonstrates that the divorce rate continues to increase.  We need, competitive families with smart children."  

"I'm not sure I agree with your approach."  

"Oh, I see.  You just don't believe that all kids can learn.  You don't believe in competition.  You probably won't even push your kids into joining football or winning the academic pissing contest.  But don't complain later when Joel and Micah and Brenna aren't competitive global leaders." 

I rarely get choked up when a celebrity dies and yet I felt something deep within at the death of Salinger.  I know he was a recluse and anti-social and all of that, yet I wonder if that's a part of why I liked him.  He was human and he had no desire to lead the masses.  In this sense, he was the anti-Tolstoy.

I think the media misunderstood his scowl as being one of arrogance.  Few reporters have ever experienced what it's like to be a wallflower. Salinger ended life quietly, not on a crazy adventure binge or with a blasting gun. I could be wrong, but I have a hunch that Salinger had a thirst for authenticity and he knew the world of fame would transform him into an icon.  On some level I admire his hermit lifestyle, because in his solitude he was able to be himself.

I fell in love with literature after reading Nine Stories. I fell in love with character-driven narrative and thus I would imagine myself as a surrogate member of the Glass family.  Catcher in the Rye is one of a handful of books my brother and I both read and discussed together. I had no idea at the time that reading Salinger is a rite of passage that allows high school kids to point out the phonies they see in life and, if they're brave enough, in themselves. I was far from brave at the time, but I've had days since then when I experienced the power of that narrative to expose my own phoniness.

I used to sneak his work into school and pretend to read it during Math class. For what it's worth, I still think "A Perfect Day for Banana Fish" is more real than an imaginary number.

I'll be releasing a free eBook called Remotely Controlled Chaos: A TV's Guide to Teaching Middle School. It's an expansion on my summer blog series looking at the practical side of teaching through the small screen lens.  Essentially, the book will be 45-50 short chapters that are each roughly three pages.  It should be available on February 14th, in honor of my favorite holiday, Arizona's Birthday!

So, I'm thinking back to a post from awhile ago about what type of book I want to write next and I'm throwing around three ideas right now.  Here they are:

1. Tutored by Toddlers: How Parenting Changed My Approach to Teaching - A book where I process what I've learned about teaching through my experiences with young kids.  Things like simplicity, humility, learning to be concrete, finding the value in fun, etc.  
2. Unmasked: A Journey Toward Authentic Education - This will use many of my former blog posts, but they will be expanded, with more story-telling.  What I want to tell is the human side and to take a bit more of a humble approach to describing teaching (a little less cynical than Sages and Lunatics)
3. The Impact Paradox: Why Less Is More - I wrote a blog post awhile back and I'm considering expanding this concept into a book that blends concepts with story-telling. 

It's not exactly what I had considered before, but it blends some of the ideas.  Please leave your comments and also vote on these options (on the side of my blog).

I used to spend hours hunched over a computer grading papers.  I'd pass them back only to have students ignore the final grade.  I would print a progress report out each week only to realize that the hard workers who were doing well were the only ones who took the reports home.  I gradually began to take a more realistic look at the meaning of assessment:

Paradigm Shifts

• From grades to assessments.  I now view all feedback as "assessment," meaning I check student work often but I don't record a grade until the end.  
• From assignments to projects and portfolios.  Instead of individual assignments, students do projects with a reflection piece and a portfolio. 
• From anti-test to someone who sees tests as occasionally necessary for measuring discreet skills.  The DRA helps me know reading level.  AIMSWeb is decent for testing fluency.  I now see these as diagnostic rather than judgmental tools. 
• From isolation to holistic assessment.  In other words, I see all work that a student does as a part of the learning process.  Assessment is relational and by getting to know a student, I can better tailor lessons to fit that student's needs.  
• From a management to a leadership perspective - For example, I won't walk around to "manage" a class and see what they are doing.  I'll spend that time having one on one student conferences. The result is that I know students better and I trust students to get work done without me nagging them. 
• From either product (behavioral) or cognitive process to a combination of both.  I want to see what a student knows by what they think and how they can demonstrate it (though I do cringe at the word "product," because it assumes a certain business-like element to it). 
• From testing knowledge to drawing out wisdom.  I want to see how students use knowledge to make decisions.  I want them to think about what they know, but also understand what they don't know.

"Hey, Techno-Tommy, are you going to buy a tablet?" asks Mr. Brown.

"No. Not anytime soon," I respond.

"It's supposed to revolutionize the paper world. I thought you were a paper-geek."

"It just seems like hype. They might as well say, 'This is hand-crafted from the finest paper of the magical forests and consecrated by the holiest of of all woodland creatures. Every page is guaranteed to save the life of a sprite in danger.' Or 'Use this to turn water into wine and cure leprosy.' I just don't buy it."

Mr. Brown stares at me for a moment. "Really? Medieval mythology and thinly veiled Bible references? I'm talking technology, here, Tommy. It's supposed to revolutionize the paper world."

"Don't get me wrong. A tablet is cool. But it is not revolutionary. The Guttenberg Press was revolutionary. The horseless carriage just might prove to be revolutionary. The American Revolution - now that's revolutionary."

"Far from it," Mr. Brown begins. "As a Canadian, let me offer a critique. You stole democracy from the Greeks, your republican system from the Romans, the Bill of Rights from your states who stole it from the British. When will you understand that you simply aren't that special?"

"Okay, but you would agree that the tablet is mostly hype."

"Maybe. But you can flip through pages and touch it and take notes on books."

"It's a pad of yellow paper made from the over-expensive iCompany. I've been taking notes in books for years. I just don't think it's that special, that's all."

"But it's so much thinner than a notebook.  You'll grant me that, won't you."

"Yes, but I never thought my notebooks were too bulky or heavy or cumbersome.  I've never thrown out my back trying to care a composition book."

"Consider this, though. Often small changes are what make a huge difference. The shift from scrolls to pages revolutionized reading. The double-entry inventory forms helped the Spanish dominate the world. That and their boats. Oh, and their suave accents. See, it's little things. Yes, railroads are great, but a hundred years from now everyone will drive cars and trains will simply be an annoying, if quaint, relic of the past. But everyone will be carrying around tablets to take notes."

"Perhaps. I just don't see what makes a tablet so incredibly different from a stack of paper or a notebook. And for what it's worth, I'll refrain from the hype until I see the results. After awhile, all the slick marketing starts to feel like the junk mail promising to increase one's manhood or the letters saying I've won a UK lottery."

My thoughts on a coffee mug, my district and my own identity. You can also visit it at Internet Archive

Our plog hosting site is across the street. It's a bit like a library, but a little different. People can peruse the plogs, but also subscribe to them and have it sent directly to their home. Some plogs require registration to view or comment and others simply require a word verification code (It's a great device that may some day ward off robots. For now, though, it works great at keeping Phil the Town Drunk from writing obscene comments)

As we cross the road, we face a barricade sponsored by SiteSense, the same folks who keep us away from "unnecessary field trips."

He kindly tells us that the district has restricted us from this site and that we can go elsewhere, but he will not permit us to take any steps forward. I stare at his baton and assume he means business. The Paper World is full of such posturing and though I never test it out, I assume it is correct. Years ago, I would hand-write addresses incorrectly and the postal worker would send it back with a stern "You have performed an illegal operation." I kept expecting the Paper and Parcel Police to pound on my door and take me to prison.

On the way back, a student tells me that it's what she expected.

"Our district slogan is 'Learning for Life,' but life is the very thing they try to avoid."

"One of our values is community, yet we have huge walls that keep us in and the community out."

* * *

After school, I stop by the district office. The Assistant Superintendent of Paper-related Learning explains the issue to me.

"Oh yeah, you're supposed to publish all student work to the iSites. We paid good money and we're going to use it."

"Yes, but the Plogger site is free and easier to customize and kids can visit it when they aren't at school."

"But the iSites works with the iParchment and it flows seamlessly in a system. We know the company and we trust them. Besides, I heard that there might be pornographic plogs across the street. Gertrude was tell me a story about . . . "

"Look, I highly doubt it. But if there is, you can always fill out a Report Abuse card for the curator and she will throw the plog in the trash."

"Quite honestly, we are worried about your approach to safety. Your students never even signed the Fair Use policy."

"What do you mean?"

"We have a distinct code explaining how paper and pencil must be used."

"No one told me that."

"Well, you never asked."

"So, do they have a Fair Use Policy in the wood shop? I mean, it seems that they are much more likely to lose a hand in woodshop than, say, gouge out an eye using pencils."

"No, shop class doesn't have the same rules."

"Do we block the choir from singing at the town square? I mean, I heard there is drinking and gambling that goes on over there."

"But that is supervised, Mr. Johnson. Your students could be meandering through a site that SiteSense considers potentially dangerous. They have a scientific process . . ."

"Science is about reason and skepticism. It's about inquiry and exploration. This is hysteria. It's not science. Technology, perhaps, but not science."

I leave with a stack of Fair Use forms for students to hand out to their parents. I am struck by the notion that our community is afraid of all the wrong aspects of pencil and paper. No one questions the proper age and development of a child using a pencil. No one asks whether it is a good thing for a child to have a community audience. No one looks at the death of an oral culture when we embrace all things print-related.

I'm not opposed to having some guidelines or even some paperwork.  What scares me is that we get so hung up in creating structures of security that no one seems interested in protecting paper freedom.

(note: I was influenced on this post by a comment made by Josie)

Our school mascot is the Cougar.  While it's a decent animal, the students love making jokes about a mascot that relates to attractive older ladies.  It got me thinking about sports teams, both professional and collegiate, and their respective mascots.  Here are my thoughts on mascots.

• Bad: Naming a mascot after an indigenous people group, especially when we are stuck saying, "The Cowboys are killing the Chiefs right now." If I was a Navajo, I'd cringe every time I hear that.
• Good: Naming a mascot after a people group who are no longer around. I can't imagine a real-life Viking getting angry at having a violent sports team named after them.  

• Bad: Names that no one understands.  What the Hell is a Laker and what does that have to do with Los Angeles. 
• Good: Names that even a child can understand.  My son can understand what a Tiger is. 

• Bad: Animals that are pansies. Ooh, a Dolphin.  Now that's a tough animal. Almost as tough as an Oriole. 
• Good: Violent animals, especially when you can relate it to the sport (i.e. Diamondbacks) 

• Bad: Naming a team after an object.  How lame is a Jet? What exactly is a National? 
• Good: A name that involves an item of clothing.  I like Red Sox and White Sox. I'm not entirely sure why.  

• Bad: Names that don't fit a city.  Last time I checked, Utah wasn't exactly well-known for its budding jazz scene. 
• Good: Names that represent the ethos of a place.  Texas Rangers, for example. The 49ers and the Packers fit this category, too.

• Bad: Naming a city after a natural disaster. 
• Good: Naming a city after a natural wonder.  (Rockies, for example) 

A few more bad ones:

• Bad: Religious names.  Padres? Really? Priests who play baseball? Saints? I can't picture Francis of Assisi demonstrating much gridiron skill and throwing a quarterback to the ground. 
• Bad: Teams named after intellectual ideas, geek culture or fantasy.  Ravens would fit this category and so would the Washington Wizards. The exception would be those that are so over-the-top that they mock sports, in general (The SCC Artichokes or the UC Santa Cruz Banana Slugs) 
• Bad: Multiple city names - "Hey, we're the Los Angeles - Anaheim Angels of the Southern Region of California" 
• Bad: Naming a team after a color.  What exactly is meant by "the Orange?" (or for that matter, the Reds)
  

Students walk into class edgy and hyper. A few shove one another in the halls or deliberately squeak their shoes. Rain is a sedative to adults and an upper for most children. So, while I yearn for a cup of coffee and a book, my students can't sit still. While they eventually calm down, classroom leadership doesn't flow seamlessly. The dance is off by a few beats and I fight off my desire to use words as daggers.

I move outside for lunch duty feeling edgy and restless. The blast of cold air jars me and seems to travel through my bones. I tense up even worse, ears burning and muscles tightening. I love a hot July day. I love the heat and its ability to make me feel that I am melting. I know the issues are low-pressure systems and the Earth's wobbly axis. However, I curse the sun for being so incredibly hot and so unwilling to offer it's outstretched rays to our playground.

I look over and three boys are laying on the ground, bundled up in their sweatshirts.

"What are you doing?" I ask.

No response.

"Guys, you need to tell me what's going on."

"We're being Kenny from South Park. We died from the cold."

A few feet away kids dance in the middle of a basketball court where a game is in progress. Three boys prance around with umbrellas and pretend to be Marry Poppins as they twirl their umbrellas. On most afternoons they might wear a hardass expression, but the wind has transformed their reality into a musical.

A group of students make paper boats and float them on "Castro Lake" (the flooded football field.) I ask them about it and a girl says that the goal is to get from "the grip of Castro to the other side, America." She then says, "You don't even need papers when you're from Cuba." A few feet away, students are racing paper airplanes.

I walk toward another zone where a small crowd huddles together. Assuming it's a fight, I begin to break it up. However, it turns out that they are huddling together and slowly moving people out of the middle and toward the back. A boy explains, "We learned this from March of the Penguins. See, those penguins are pretty smart."

I am struck by playfullness of the lunchtime crowd. No one texts. No one fights. No one plays games on a PSP.   Instead, they are playing games that one would expect from a second grader. The cold air and the wet ground and the wind seem to awaken them from the trance that is seventh grade and move them toward play.

Okay, so the last post was a bit gloomy.  But here are a few opposite trends that I can easily see happening within that framework:

1. Districts becoming better at communicating with the public and therefore regaining public trust.  With this there is great potential for legitimate local partnership.  Indeed, I see "local" becoming popular in everything from anti-fast food and local food to local parks becoming more popular to the strong emphasis on community.  Oddly enough, it might just be nostalgia that leads neighborhoods toward becoming more progressive. 
2. A higher value placed on knowledge and expertise, meaning the teaching profession shifts toward teachers being viewed as . . . well, professionals.  In other words, we'll wake up from standardization and say "Man, what did we just do to ourselves?" and teachers will lead with their expertise. 
3. Schools empowering teachers to do independent research.  Yes, teaching might get harder and the data craze won't entirely die down.  However, I can see teachers working collaboratively on curriculum in a more horizontal, common and democratic approach.  
4. The hybrid approach might very well mean more creative ideas like small group tutoring, local apprenticeships and other programs that move learning beyond the school walls.  
5. Failing charter schools will close and top-notch ones will eventually have to pay teachers more to keep quality teachers.  Meanwhile, you'll increasingly see charter schools fitting a niche and in many cases this niche will be dropouts / alternative education.  
6. The continuation of education that I mentioned before might very well mean that universities work closely with schools and the student teaching experience will become a more integral part of the university.  I can easily see schools offering their buildings as a location for education classes in return for partnerships.  This could potentially mean some authentic mentoring happens.  
7. Districts will abandon textbook curriculum companies and realize the money is better spent on resources and professional training.  With businesses currently emphasizing creativity and innovation, districts might move toward less prescribed curriculum and more resources. 

For over a decade now people have told me that computers will replace teachers.  The idea is that online learning will become so popular that schools will have to change paradigms.  We'll also have flying cars and hover crafts and computers will mean that our work day will decrease to five hours a week.

None of this will happen, because it doesn't make economic sense.  Flying cars will explode in the air, causing shrapnel to follow on people below, increasing accidents and raising insurance rates.  It's an issue of property damage and liablility control.  No company will take the risk of hover crafts in an era will kids wear knee pads to ride a bike.  No corporation will ask a worker to spend five hours a week to finish a job. Instead, they'll reduce it to thirty-five so they don't have to offer benefits and then they'll increase the work load.  If technology means less work (and this is doubtful) it means fewer jobs.  Sure, our jobs went overseas but they were also replaced with robots.

Teaching is no different.  We need teachers, because parents want their children to have a free education and they want free babysitting.  I know that sounds harsh, but in most households the parents or guardians have to work and few parents will opt for an online education when they can't be at home to watch a child.

I admit that I am skeptical any time that someone tries to predict trends.  However, here are some trends I see in the future of the teaching profession.  I don't see all of this happening the next few years.  However, I see this as the future in the next few decades:

1. A movement toward low-skilled labor.  With a lack of tenure and a movement toward standardization, schools will increasingly move toward part-time teaching positions and additional "specialists" who create the curriculum that the part-timers use.  This system is already in place at the university level, where professors are being replaced with adjuncts.  I can easily imagine a school marketing part-time slots for stay-at-home moms, for example. 
2. An increase in charter schools that do not have to follow the same Highly Qualified recommendations, which will in turn accelerate the first concept. 
3. Teachers finding their careers to be more fluid.  We'll see more teachers moving to different districts, doing research, working for curriculum companies and doing other part time work to make a living wage.  I already know many teachers who work at the community college and coach sports.  I think we'll see more of teaching as a piecemeal profession.
4. An increase in programs that essentially allow uneducated people to get a "degree" real quickly.  Teach for America is a great example.  People can enter it, have no true foundational knowledge of pedagogy and enter a classroom with the myth that they have received better training. 
5. A hybrid approach where schools are both online and off-line.  It makes sense from a transportation and facilities standpoint that districts will want to save money by offering online options.  With this you'll see a push toward longer school years.  Right now the biggest drawback is budgetary.  However, if schools begin offering a hybrid approach, I wouldn't be surprised to see districts move toward year round with two separate two-week vacations.
6. A constant continuing of education, not to increase in salary, but to stay certified.  Teachers will complain, but this is how most of corporate America works.  The master's degree will be the new bachelor's degree. 
7. An increase in corporate control over public education all in the name of free choice.  Companies like McGraw Hill and Pearson will market their products as interventions and solutions and schools will adopt this, especially given the fact that teachers will be less trained, less qualified, part-time, low-skilled labor and those who are currently teaching will become managers who make sure low-skilled teachers follow the rules. 

I know this sounds depressing and on some level it is.  However, I also see the potential for quality teachers to create their own schools based on a more constructivist framework.  Oddly enough, I can envision charter schools, which helped create this problem being a potential solution for teachers who decide to cut out the red tape and focus on what really matters. True we'll see insane ideas resulting from those seven trends, but we'll also see some public schools sticking with what really works - emphasizing quality teachers who are respected for their professionalism.  However, this will have to occur within a system where the definition of a teacher is increasingly muddled.

Six graders snicker at the word plog. It sounds dirty, not in our Victorian sense, but in that innocent sense that you expect twelve year olds to have. Kids like turning it into phrases like "Don't plog the toilet," or into a makeshift cursed word like "Son of a plog!" Still, despite the strange terminology, students take pride in their plogs.

When I pass back their final projects, a student asks me what we should do with them.

"Save them, I guess."

"Can we make them public?"

"What do you mean?"

"Well, there is this site I go to and it's like a library, but you can publish your plog and anyone can browse it."

"Wouldn't that be dangerous? I mean, wouldn't you worry about creepy people?"

"Maybe," another student interjects, "but I wonder if that's mostly hype. I mean, we let kids sing solos and do concerts for the public, right? And our school already has a baseball team. What's the difference?"

Another student adds, "Actually, a plog seems a little more anonymous. At a baseball game, they see you in person, learn your entire name and have physical access to you. A plog just means they have access to your public thoughts."

"Anyone in the world could visit this site," I point out.

"Do you really think anyone in the world is just going to randomly find out plogs?" a student asks.  "No,  they have to be searching for it. And if someone across the globe wants to take a boat to our great city and read the work of a bunch of sixth-graders, I say go for it!"

"What if you accidentally said something personal?" another student asks.

"Am I going to quit going to a diner because someone might eavesdrop?"

Another student points out, "I'd like to know what people think of my writing. If someone leaves a bad comment on the margins, I can always erase it."

"I don't know," another boy says. "I get random mail from strange people. I'm not going to divulge my secret, but apparently I have a large some of money in an account in Africa."

Finally, Ruth, a typically shy child, raises her hand and says, "I don't want my posts to be public. I think they belong to the classroom. They should be read by us. These walls aren't all bad. They define our community. I wrote with my classmates in mind. If I knew the public wanted to read my plog, I would have written it a little differently."

A boy adds to her comment, "If we knew that these would go to a public site, we would have been too careful in our approach. We would have tried to sound more important or more humble or more grown-up. I'm with Ruth. I like the barrier we have of a classroom wall."

I quickly develop a compromise, "What if we took this route? What if we played it safe at first and created a three-tiered approach? We could copy and paste the best parts of our personal plogs and made that a public magazine. We could then share our personal plog with the class and then have a separate private journal."

The class agreed with this solution, but then a boy pulled me aside and said, "Mr. Johnson, I think we should get to choose if we make our personal plog private or public. I think every student should have ownership of his or her voice."

I'm talking to a friend and I share some ideas of what I want to do next year.  After awhile, I cut myself off and say, "I feel like I'm starting to slip into that dangerous place where I say 'It will be better when . . .' and then I miss out on what's going on right now."

"What do you mean?" he asks.

"I'll sometimes go into a escape mode where I tell myself that life will be easier when Brenna's a little older, but I don't want to miss her as a baby.  If I can remember that then I end up smiling with her and paying attention to her little baby sounds.  I'll imagine how great it would be to have a book published and forget how much I love to write regardless."

"It's all about being present, right?"

"Not exactly.  It's more like being content.  When I am content, I don't need that escape.  I can be present.  But if I say to myself, 'You need to be present today,' it just starts to sound like a pop psychology gimmick."

"What if lack of contentment is what drives creativity?  What if you need to have those moments when you get bored or you escape or whatever, because when the time comes you've already thought through certain things?  You hit this situation in life and you realize that you've been thinking through this idea mentally for years. We all need to dream , right?  So maybe it's not an escape, but a dream."

It's hard to deny that pain, confusion and a lack of contentment often drive the creative impulse.  At the same time, I find that it's easier to create when I feel safe. It's easier to plan when I have the freedom to screw up and it seems like the ideal world doesn't grant me that permission. Besides, the imaginary "it-will-be-great-win" fails to engage me in a deeper, more authentic dream.  If I'm not careful, the better-when route will make me resentful toward those around me. I'll start developing a sense of entitlement and go through life with a lingering resentment toward the present-tense reality that never quite fits what I had originally planned.

Moreover, that escape dream takes my attention off the reality that I am living a dream life right now.  I have an amazing, beautiful wife and three great kids and a job that is meaningful and a hobby that I enjoy.

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Every so often this guy named Ted likes to gather around the world's movers and shakers to offer short lectures on the future of the twentieth century.  I know it sounds a little cultish, but these aren't magical mind readers.  They don't sacrifice animals to the industrial gods or anything. Most of them are geeks like me, just smarter and with more money and influence and power.

Over this past weekend, they invited my class to visit the latest Ted Talk (I give him points for alliteration).  A student pointed out to me, "Isn't that Andrew Carnegie?"

"It looks like it is."

"I can't believe he is lecturing us on what it means to be a philanthropic citizen.  I enjoy our library, but I have an uncle who worked in one of his steel mills.  When the machine chopped off his arm the company did nothing."

I sat uncomfortably through the talk.  Apparently acquiring a massive amount of wealth through the use of monopolistic endeavors gives a man moral authority over others. I whisper to the boy, "Having free books isn't that great of a privilege when you have lost your eyesight in the steel mill."

Next was a man named Phil Bates.  He seemed like a nice guy, slightly fidgety and a little shaky, but the kind of man who I would probably enjoy having a pint with.  Bates first talked about the need to fix all of the poverty in Africa.  It had a slight tone of "white man's burden" to it, especially considering the fact that he failed to address the larger issues of poverty, such as colonialism and imperialism.  (Who knows, perhaps he was influenced by Kipling's poetry) Still, I respect a guy who will use wealth to help others. I can't picture Rockefeller or JP Morgan following his example.

However, I couldn't handle his next points.  He spoke eloquently about the need to create a new pencil-integrated curriculum prepared to meet the demands of a New Industrial Economy.  "Schools should move from one-room schoolhouses to factories producing workers that are knowledgable about our new global economy. Teachers need to be held accountable.  Raise their salaries based upon their performance.  We need better creative thinkers and our lack of creative teachers is a part of this creative crisis." he implored.

I took offense to his speech for the following reasons:

1. Phil Bates never finished college.  He wasn't a great student, either.  The man has no formal knowledge about the educational system, no registered research to back up his claims and no peer-reviewed articles under his name.
2. Phil Bates earned his income by stealing the intellectual property of another company, marketing it as his own and creating a monopoly in the paper and pencil industry. So it's a little hypocritical when he talks about the need to develop a "creative mind" for future entrepreneurs. Unless, of course, by creativity one means, "find a creative way to take somebody else's ideas."  
3. It is not charity to offer your paper products at a discount.  It is product dumping.  Telling kids they "need it" because "that's what businesses use" only stifles future pencil innovations and ensures that your company has a greater market share in the future.  
4. The assumption that schools only exist to serve private industry goes against the very notion of public education and the original intent of developing critical thinking citizens.  
5. If you are really worried about training better factory workers for a "global economy," then you need to create vocational programs that do this very thing.  But don't tell me that my only goal in teaching sixth graders is to create compliant workers. 
6. I'm a good teacher and I teach because I care.  I teach because I believe it is meaningful.  No gold star reward system will ever motivate me to improve.  
7. Having money doesn't mean you should have a stronger voice in educational reform.  Even if this were true, Phil Bates has never once donated to my school.  It is funded locally by hardworking citizens.  It belongs to us, not him.

Okay, so my last post was a bit dark.  I admit that I can get that way sometimes about issues of poverty and imperialism and media.  I seriously considered un-posting it.

Tonight Joel asked if we could do an experiment.  His latest favorite phrase is "let's test a hypothesis."  It can be anything, really.  "Will the remote work without batteries, Micah? My hypothesis is no it won't."

I asked him what we should test and he explained that we should test what floats.  "This lemon will not float, daddy, it's too heavy."  When it floats, he looks at it funny.  "It's heavy and it doesn't have air in it.  Most things that float have air in them."

I drop in a paper clip.  "How come the paper clip sinks and the lemon floats?"

How do you explain buoyancy forces to a four year old?

"I'm not really sure how to explain it."

"That's okay, daddy, neither do I," he answers.  

He pauses for a second and asks, "Will more things float if it's salt water?"

"I don't know."

"How about chocolate syrup?"

"I'm not sure."

"What about Jello?"

So, it has me thinking about my job as a teacher. I can't think of the last question that I answered with, "I'm not sure how to teach this to you" or even "I don't know."  One of my favorite aspects of parenting is that it forces me to admit how little I actually know.

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Someone sent me a link to this article about how Anderson Cooper saved a kid. The imagery is powerful and I don't deny the heroism of Cooper. I'm supposed to feel inspired, but instead I am jarred by the racial overtones. White guy saves black kid. More like white guy from the wealthy Vanderbilt family goes into a Haitian ghetto to fulfill his mission and help CNN increase advertising revenues. It could be a teacher movie. Maybe replace him with Hillary Swank next time.

Emotions mean ratings. After all, television is an emotional medium and kids are easier to portray as victims because they are smaller and cuter on camera. I imagine that the "looters" and "robbers" he describes are going home to . . . okay, to nothing, not even home and when this adventure vacation is over, he'll have a hot meal and a mansion and he'll be able to read his eloquent version of the story on the 360 Blog and even on his worst day he won't worry about whether he'll be eating.

I quickly get over it and feel guilty about being so judgmental. After all, what have I done to help quake victims? Nothing. I realize how arrogant my thinking is. I don't know Anderson Cooper's heart. I don't know anything about Haiti. I don't know poverty. Yes, I've seen it in homes, but I've never woken to an empty stomach and cursed the summer for failing to bring a free lunch and breakfast. I've known students who faced this, but it has never been my story and I have a hunch, as I huddle over a laptop and write a blog, that I have more in common with Anderson Cooper than with the poor he writes about.

I know that I can get real self-righteous about issues as insane as jay-walking.  I can ignore a homeless guy with the assumption that he's an addict before I ever get a chance to know him.  On my worst days, I  can play the white-guy-saves-the-world role with my mostly Latino classroom.  Perhaps that is why the story jarred me so much.  I saw too much of myself in it.

Still . . .

What I do know is this: people get crazy when they are scared. What were they stealing? Oh, candles? Food? How dare they piece together a few items in the midst of a broken nation! Some of them have turned violent.  I'll take note of that and try to be more polite if I'm ever in the midst of a disaster, having nothing to lose and having lost my family.  I'll politely ask Wal-Mart for candles and I'm sure they'll pass them my way. I'll even smile to the greeter on my way out.

Newscasters, please quit calling it "looting" when a family in Haiti scavenges a shop for food. The correct term is "survival."  You'd do the same thing and so would I. (Incidentally, a better example of "looting" is what AIG did to the American taxpayer.)

Sure, a few of them turn violent. But last time I checked America has an enormous plank in our eye and we're making a huge deal out of a speck of dust and a box of candles and a bag of rice.

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After visiting the second school, I told other teachers about the amazing Utopia I had seen.  My glossy-eyed edu-crush was shattered when I met with the principal the next day after school.

"I'm amazed with what you have here.  How did you pull it off?" 

"Tom, this place got real political when we began to change.  Twelve teachers quit.  People want autonomy and we were asking people to reject practices that weren't working. One teacher told me that she relished in being the Worksheet Warrior.  This place works because the teachers agree upon this model."

"I'm impressed by the way it runs."

"Sometimes I worry that we simply attracted great teachers and then some of them have had their hands tied in collaboration and might be more effective if left alone."

"It seems like it's working, though."

"Maybe so, but change doesn't happen in a vacuum.  The social and political and economic forces are hard. You know for a fact that both parties have been involved in handing out administrative jobs, right?  And the large textbook companies essentially bribed our Governing Board.  I almost lost my job in the first year."

I give him a puzzled look for his short lecture on Gilded Age politics. Yes, I know that corruption is the norm.  Some of the best teachers had to pay for a teaching position.  Yet, that has little to do with pencils and paper. 

"What I'm saying is to avoid the thoughts about reform. If you want to be effective, teach well.  Focus on your group of thirty students. If you are using pencils and paper effectively, it will catch on.  The change will happen organically."

"But your school created structures for change.  Your teachers do research and plan curriculum together and . . . "

"I know, but sometimes I wonder if they would have been better off without so much rigid structure. What's important is that they're talking about instruction instead of arguing about discipline or complaining about parents. Besides, things didn't improve for us until I backed down a bit and gave them the reins."
 
He pauses for a moment and then tells me, "Look, I hope you saw some good strategies, took a few notes on that fancy iParchment you have there and go back to your classroom with ideas. If you learn anything from this place it's to let your theory drive your instruction and then think of the pencils afterward. It's not the pencils, it's the people."

"What about implementing pencil integration school-wide?"

"Let it happen organically, Tom.  You have some great teachers at your school.  Let them ask you about pencils and move at their own pace.  If it's imposed from the top, they'll resent the change.  Didn't some guru in the first century say that change begins with something as small as a mustard seed?"

I visited two schools in our district that had a different approach to their philosophy of pencil integration. The first was touted as a state-of-the-art facility (it's more state-of-the-science, with hardly anything artistic about it) based upon a new Pencil Pedagogy.  The second was a school that worked toward meaningful learning with pencils playing a secondary role.

The Pencil Palace

In the first school, I saw the teacher talking a great deal.  She stood in front of the class with her Smart Chart and lectured students on vocabulary.  Students were supposed to take notes and use their "expression" notepad.  However, most of them simply drew pictures while she created sentence diagrams.  They were creating expressions alright. Afterward, I watched the students use the self-paced Pencil Island program, where they completed a series of worksheets. Yet, none of them ever picked up a book and read anything.

I once worked with her.  She had been a phenomenal language arts teacher.  Students read individually, in small groups and in partners.  She would model what they needed in quick, interactive lessons.  Yet, it seemed that, with the new Pencil Pedagogy, she completely abandoned everything that had once worked for her.

Indeed, in most classrooms I listened to hardware hype, but few teachers discussed actual teaching practice.  "Look Techno-Tommy, these binders I'm using are amazing.  You can drop it and it won't break. You can add tabs.  They're amazing."  So is student learning.  Most students in his class spent more time figuring out the binder than figuring out the math problems.

In another class, the teacher spent most of his time checking his mail pile while students sent short-hand messages or abandoned the school altogether to go catch a baseball game.  When I pointed this out, he responded, "Look, they're safe.  Besides, there's a lot of math in baseball.  So I figure, let them go on their own field trip.  When they come back they can add it to their pencil log."

A Place with Pencils

In the next school I visited, the teachers had similar lessons.  Students used concept maps to plan out writing and they created their own documents for five paragraph essays.  Those who struggled could check out a tutorial binder.  Teachers utilized the larger shared documents for brainstorming activities and students passed papers only during the editing phase.

In math class, they varied from slates to pencils and one teacher even allowed students to use their own personal, miniature notebooks to take short-hand notes.  Students in the reading class actually read from physical books and used a graphic organizer with paper and pencil only to shift back to reading and then quickly wrote their response on a plog.

When I asked teachers about their lessons, none of them focused on the pencils and paper.  Instead, they discussed which strategies worked best with which students. A teacher explained it this way,  "Look, we like pencils.  We just get more excited about learning.  Some schools focus on pencil literacy.  We focus on literacy."

Another teacher pointed out, "Our school begins behind, because many of our students are still learning English. We differentiate between innovation and novelty.  In most cases, novelty is a new toy.  Innovation is a new way of thinking."

"What about the standardization of your school.  It seems like you guys are doing the exact same, rigid curriculum."

"It seems that way, but it's horizontal, Tom.  Our school lets us plan together and we have discussions about what strategies work best.  Once we define the strategies then we talk about what tools to use.  Sometimes it's slates and sometimes it's pencils. We have similar lessons, but we customize them to meet the needs of our students."

"Don't you feel less autonomous?"

"Not at all.  We're co-researchers.  The teachers document what is working in both qualitative and quantitative terms.  Instead of fighting against an imposed curriculum, we're working toward shaping it."

"So, it's not the pencils?" I asked.

"I don't deny that the pencils have helped.  We use the same tools in our planning that the students use in their learning.  But the power is in the way we think and not in the tools we use."

Another teacher stepped in, "Michelangelo wasn't a genius because he had the world's best chisel.  It was his creative mind that made him a genius."

So, we're listening to NPR on the way to church one morning.  Christy is back with Brenna and so I have free rein of the radio.  I'm in no mood to listen to chick rock or the DeLovely soundtrack (which, admittedly, I do enjoy most times) so it's NPR.

Joel picks up on one line about the Ba'ath Party and the danger of allowing Hussein's old cronies work their way back into the political system.

"Why would they fight if they're having a bath party?"  Joel asks.

"I want a bath party," Micah answers.

"It's not really a party guys.  When someone runs for office they . . . "

"People have a party when they are running to the doctor?" Joel interrupts me.

"Okay, uh, when someone decides to become a president they have to choose a party.  But it's not a real party. It's a political party."

"Does it have a pinata?" Joel asks.

"No."

"Then it's not a real party," he answers.

Our school is state-of-the art.  Okay, it's more state-of-the-science in its layout and design.  In order to run effeciently, the architects included a series of automated eco-friendly devices.  While I am sure each device has helped reduce carbon emmisions, there is a downside to an automated ecology.

Often times the toilet will flush multiple times assuming that my lack of movement means I am finished.  On many occasions, I find myself personifying the toilet and telling it, "I'm not done."  When I grade papers, the lights suddenly shut off and onlookers can view my hand-waving, jumping "Let There Be Light" dance.

While the automated solution might save resources, it is less effective than the more human, albeit imperfect solution.  I might not hold a doctorate in engineering, but I can flip a switch or pull a lever. Perhaps, overall, it is more effective.  Maybe we are a nation populated by compulsive toilet flushers and light-addicts.  However, on an individual level, I think I might have mastered those skills more effectively than my mechanical alternative.

Furthermore, the automated alternative fails in its promise of making life more convenient. Sure, I have to do less, but I have never before felt such an intense anger toward lights and toilets.  In other words, the  paradox of automation is that the more it tries to simplify life, the more life becomes complicated.  Twitter is efficient, but it won't simplify my life.  Cell phones might offer more options, but they do not save me time in the long run.

I mention all of this because I am helping with a reading intervention class.  We have to use the Jonestown . . . er, Jamestown Reading Navigation System.  Any unskilled teacher with semi-decent classroom management can walk around and make sure students click buttons correctly.  Like the automated lights and the automatic flushers, the system is human-proof; and if you begin with the ideology that most teachers are lousy then the system is extremely effective.  

My co-teacher subverts the system subtly by offering novels and informational text pieces that peak the students' individual interests as an "enrichment."  She conferences with students and tutors them individually when necessary.  One day she confesses to me, "I know Jamestown is convenient, but it's really not.  What students really need is more time reading and a teacher who knows their individual needs. I can't prove this, but I've noticed from experience that no one has ever fallen in love with reading because of a program."

It has me thinking about the love of learning and the power of automated teaching.  In many cases, worksheets are automatic flushers with student motivation swirling down the drain and scripted curriculum is the automated dimmer shutting out enlightenment and leading students toward darkness.

Before beginning our second week of a one-to-one pencil to student unit, I explain to them that they will need to create some documents. I assume the skills will transfer over from the students' use of Pen Pal networks and plogs.

"Here's how it works.  When you are done with your document, write your name at the top and then save it inside of your folder."

Pretty simple, right?  Students of the Pencil Native generation should understand this without my explicit directions.

So, I am surprised the next day when students can't find their documents.

One girls says, "I set it in a folder and wrote the name on the folder."

"Did it already have a name on the folder?"

"Yeah, but I thought it was like a slate, where we change names when we change slates."

Not a problem. I pull papers out and pass them out, but I quickly run into a stack of nine papers that are untitled.  I have a hunch that this is simply adolescent immaturity. Some day when students have papers beginning in kindergarten, they will still forget to write their names at the top.

Two students have no papers at all.

"Where did you put yours?" I ask one girl.

"I left it on the desk top."

"Then it was probably put in the trash," I explain.

"Uh oh," a boy interrupts.  "So that metal bin is a trash can."

"Why?"

"I put my document in there."

"Didn't you read the word 'trash can' on the side?"

He shakes his head sheepishly. "Can I go get it back?"

"The custodian emptied the trash yesterday."

The boy next to him explains, "I erased it.  I forgot that it wasn't like a slate."

Mrs. Jackson enters the room in the midst of the chaos and I say, "I'm done.  I'm done with papers and pencils and folders and kids setting papers in the trash.  I'm done with pencil sharpeners that leave dust on the ground and . . . "

"I'm not a fan of pencils.  You know that.  However, where else are they going to learn some of these basics?  Yes, students are advanced, but they miss some of these small skills about organizing their papers or writing their names or setting them in folders.  I don't recommend wasting class time teaching this, but if they learn some of these pencils skills, then isn't that just a bonus of a great education?"

"I guess that's true."

"Besides, when they used slates, didn't they erase the boards before you had read them? Didn't they bang erasers together sometimes?  It's a part of being a kid."

I think back to the PIE (Pencil Integrated Education) Conference I attended last year.  The presenters spoke eloquently about each medium and how students would use it for amazing projects.  While I do not deny the power of pencils, there was an element missing from the discussion.  No one seemed to recognize the developmental level of sixth graders.  What I mean is that no one reminded me that kids will do some illogical, confusing things simply because they are kids.

Mrs. Jackson leaves the room with this reminder, "If pencil literacy is like true literacy, you need to give your students permission to make big mistakes.  My son is four and barely recognizes letters.  A few times he's even torn a page or two out of a book.  But my hope is he'll grow into it and eventually love reading."

The principal pulls me aside and says, "So, your request to go to the university has been approved.  It looks like you'll be able to go on a field trip after all, Techno-Tommy."

"What happened?"

"Well, the district decided that the solution is not so much an issue of all sites being bad, but rather some of them needing to be restricted.  So, they outsourced it to a company called SiteSense. It searches out keywords and prevents teachers from allowing kids to wander to dangerous sites."

After investigating the SiteSense program, I'm a little skeptical.  I mailed out five searches and each were denied.  Apparently we can't visit with a lawyer, because of the use of the word "bar" in American Bar Association.  We can't listen to any music.  We cannot be present where anyone might access a Pen Pal network.

A student of mine decided to write a letter to the district:

To Whom It May Concern:

I am a sixth grader who is concerned about your current field trip policy.  You are scared that I might use a Pen Pal network incorrectly.  However, instead of teaching me boundaries, you cut me off from any letters entirely.  You are worried about me listening to ragtime so you cut off music (and thus a major aspect of education) completely.

Can I go to a hospital and interview a doctor about breast cancer?  Nope, SiteSense says that any field trip that includes the word "breast" is banned.  Can I go to the botanical garden for botany research? Apparently, merely hearing the word pussy willow will turn me into a binge-drinking, amoral hedonist.

What if we tried this instead?  Teachers could use their own judgment and monitor field trips.  If a student wastes time passing a note on a Pen Pal network, perhaps the field trip wasn't as valuable of a learning experience as one had assumed.  If a child wanders over to a baseball game instead of going to the museum, perhaps the child individually needs to be reprimanded.

We are a nation built on the notion of civil liberties.  Your district vision includes "model citizens" and "lifelong learning."  Why not treat field trips as a chance to model critical thinking and citizenship?  Instead of punishing everyone, what if you trust us to navigate field trips with the guidance of our teacher instead of a SiteSense that rarely makes any sense at all.

Sincerely:

Sarah

I start to type the following:

Eleven men were found missing in action yesterday.  They were last seen here in Glendale and apparently they failed to show up to New Orleans. So, if you see a random man dressed in tights wearing massive shoulder pads and a red and white mesh shirt with a number on the back, he's probably not in drag.  He's a member of the Cardinals defense.

Until it hits me that none of this matters.  I'm not even much of a Cardinals fan.  I grab the remote, click off the television and remind myself that I won't live vicariously through a quasi-violent sport in the name of city-wide tribalism (which isn't always a bad thing) where we will base our success on the athletic prowess of multimillion dollar athletes who very well might have thrown me into lockers had we attended high school together.

So, I walk outside and Joel is making dust while Micah pushes around his big metal tractor.  Minutes later, the boys gather up oranges and I start preparing the counter space.  I fuss over our new juicer (which is actually an older, higher-quality one) until I realize that for all my desire for social change, I grow overly conservative about things like kitchen appliances.

When I slice the first orange and demonstrate the juicer to Micah, he says, "Wow, it's magic."  For the next half hour, he delicately places each orange-half on the juicer and watches the liquid pour out.  Joel loses interest quickly and grabs a Dr. Seuss  book attempting to prophetically tell my son all the places that he'll go.

Joel asks when we'll do "learning time," and I want to say, "Now.  Always.  You were learning when you played in the dirt and you were learning when you started trying to find every letter-Q in the house and you were learning when you made orange juice." What he wants to know is when we'll practice our shapes or drawing our letters.

I'm struck by the notion that "learning" will gradually grow less holistic.  (It's for this reason that I am careful not to slam home school parents.  While it is not the route we will choose for our children, I understand the desire for one on one attention and for a more holistic model of learning).  Right now, learning is tactile and abstract; creative and analytical; skills-based and concept-based. Science and social studies and math and language arts connect constantly.

It's hard to imagine the day when not just school, but learning as well, becomes uncool; when he is just a kid in a row and when he fills out a packet of worksheet to get a rubber stamp grade or a colorful sticker.  It makes me sad to think that gradually learning will move to the waste up and then eventually it will go all the way up to his head and even then he will be asked only to use the most analytical parts of his mind.

I refuse to define "parental involvement" to mean simply spending more time helping an institution.  I'll show up to conferences and perhaps even volunteer for an event or two.  I'll begrudgingly help with homework while silently criticizing any teacher who demands work that would require tutoring help from a parent.

However, where I want to be the most involved is in helping them to retain what they already experience, which is the joy or learning and the notion that it is not confined to any subject or any location or any timeframe.

Mr. Brown walks into the supply room with a candle in his hand,"How does a school expect its teachers to use the Edison Projectors if the electricity keeps going out?"

"I know.  I not only don't have electricity, they forgot the paper shipment system updates, so my entire system of operating has crashed."

"Crashed? That's a bit extreme. Besides, operating system?  Really?  It's paper, Tom. It doesn't have to be a system."

"Good point, Brown." (If they insist on changing the name colleague with the word "teammate" then I'm going to call him by just his last name and drop the "mister" entirely.  Brown, for his part, has started bringing sunflower seeds and scratching himself.  If we're going to use a sports metaphor, might as well go all out.) "But it's impossible for the paper and pencil system to work when they won't do a few purchase order updates. What's the point of one-to-one pencil to student ratio if I can't keep things updated?"

"People ask me why I'm not switching over to pencils and paper and Edison Projectors and phonographs.  You know how often slates break?  Never.  You know how often I run out of chalk?  Never.  I keep a huge stash of it under my desk.  Chalk doesn't get old, so I don't do any updates.  It's cheap.  It's portable.  It's durable. Tom, it's an issue of taking care of hardware.  That's why schools don't have meaningful pencil integration."

"Perhaps.  Some day, I imagine there will be machines that make copies for you and I won't have to worry about whether kids have paper, because they won't have to copy information from the board. We won't see the human errors, because it will come down to pushing a button."

"Yeah, but think about this, Tom.  A hundred years from now, they'll have telegraphs in each school and people will be able to access information from around the globe.  Yet, the telegraph connection will break constantly.  They'll have copy machines, but the machine will jam daily and they'll forget to order paper for it."

For all the talk about teachers being motivated to use pencils, no one seems to address this issue.  A teacher isn't going to create phenomenal PowerSlides, if the Edison Projector might not have electricity.  A teacher won't create a true pencil-based lesson if the access to paper is unpredictable.  Teachers want to have some certainty that the hardware they use will work.  Few of them relish in the unspoken role of improvisational speaker meets babysitter meets handy man while a group of restless kids sit on their hands and wait to learn.

No one does this explicitly, but on a subconscious level, we become timid about integrating new tools, because we are never sure if the tool will work properly.  We plan a lesson but then plan a back up lesson or a backup of the backup and it makes us a little skittish. Like a carpenter with a wobbly-handled hammer, we know that tools in schools are often unpredictable in their failure and in becoming overly careful, our students miss out on a full education.

A note ahead of time: I'm not against data.  It can be qualitative and quantitative.  It can be a great way to analyze skills and concepts.  What I'm against is those who twist it to fit their own financial goals -- people who refuse to check it out from different angles it and look at it honestly. I'm against those who turn out pretty charts for the executives of textbook companies and for politicians.

You don't need a reason or a three piece suit to argue the truth. (Brett Dennen)

The Office didn't jump the shark -- it brought us too close to the shark-infested waters of Wall Street.

The Office has been my favorite show on television for quite some time (since the first season, probably) but this season, it has failed to engage my interest.  At first, I thought it was an issue with the writers or with stale plot lines.  However, after some reflection, I'm convinced that the issue has nothing to do with the humor.

The problem is more about escape.  In all times, but down times especially, we don't want stories of that remind us how tumultuous our own lives are. We don't want a context of an office that might be downsizing or shutting down entirely.  When I hear about potential furloughs and I'm angry as hell, I don't want to be told to laugh about it.  I know that there is humor in most situations, but it's better to laugh about corporate fraud when people aren't scare of losing our 401K's.  It's hard to smile at Jim and playing a trick on Dwight when we don't know whether Dwight and Jim will be back next week.

I could be wrong on this one.  However, I have a hunch that people enjoy the snarky satire of Glee, because it's real without being too frightening.  They enjoy American Idol (which I hate, because it picks on the mentally challenged and socially awkward) because it tells us that there is still hope in the midst of turmoil.  Even gritty shows about intervention or hoarding both make sense because they aren't about our problems. We can handle a show about crime scenes as long as the crime isn't white-collar with those committing the crimes jumping out with golden parachutes.

Maybe I'm reading into it too much.  Perhaps I'm projecting my own feelings on all of America.  I just think that the economy (and the fat bonuses of crooked executives) makes us angry and it's hard to laugh when you're really pissed off.

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I meet with Paul the Pre-industrial Poet after my fourth day of our one-to-one unit.  I always feel conspicuously white when we hang out at this diner. I believe in Progress and so I imagine that, a century from now, we won't have a China Town or a Little Havana or an all-black Harlem.  I can't fathom that, over a hundred years after Reconstruction, we would still have segregated churches or neighborhoods or media.

"What do you think of the whole pencil citizenship idea?" he asks me.

"I guess it has its place in using pencils.  I mean, I suppose we need to educate kids on the dangers of pen pal predators and the problems with pencil sharpeners, but it seems a little overinflated right now."

"I'm not against the term," he adds, "but it just seems like the focus should be on citizenship first and pencils second."

"What do you mean?" I ask.

"I mean this.  If I thought about regular citizenship and all I taught students about was safety, we'd be living in an authoritarian regime.  I'd be scaring kids into following rules instead of developing a mentality of democracy, right?"

"I see what you mean.  So, pencil citizenship should include things like teaching kids to use a pencil to combat injustice and using paper to develop a social voice."

"Exactly.  I want students to know that pencil citizenship, if we're going to use that word, means analyzing how pencils are shaping humanity and how the written word shapes culture and community.  I want them to see how people like Frederick Douglass used pencils and paper to tell narratives that led to social change.  If all I do is teach kids how to avoid pen pal perverts, then I've failed."

"I wonder what it would look like to drop the word pencil from it.  I mean, what if we just said 'citizenship' and then focussed on what that means with pencils, images, photography, the printing press, music, poetry, whatever.  What if we added pencils as yet another tool that we analyze and use and apply to this concept of being a critical thinking, democratic citizen."

"I think it's a dangerous concept, because it goes beyond simply avoiding pedophiles and learning to write without using all capital letters.  Teaching citizenship from a critical perspective might mean they challenge the authority . . . "

"Which I don't seem to mind, unless they challenge me," I add.

I look out the foggy diner window and gaze at the gray pillar of smoke.

I point to it and say, "It seems eternal, unstoppable, unshakable.   The factory is a metaphor of our warehouse school system and slowly we are relegated to robotic machinery spouting out scripted curriculum. I keep thinking about when you mentioned an authoritarian regime. I'm thinking about the desks in a row and the difficulty of serving out of humility instead of being a dictator in the classroom.  I think about the hysteria over pencils and paper and the fear of low kill-and-drill test scores and our obsession with this Caravan to the Top."

"It's like we're all ruled by fear," he says.  "And those of us in the pencil world seem just as scared of not being innovative. For all the talk of a grand new pedagogy of paper and pencils, we have to define what it means to be well educated.  We need to explore a better metaphor than factories. Otherwise we end up simply creating a newer, shinier, Edison-projector-enhanced pencil factory that merely mimics what's already out there."

I wonder if one day we'll wake up in a daze, shake our heads and see with a little clarity that public education is meant to educate citizens on what it means to be free. I wonder if we'll walk out of the factory and ask ourselves, not just, "What new system do we need to create?" but "What did we lose?  What is buried under the industrial pavement?"

They send me to my annual PIS meeting. (Originally, the district representative called us the Pencil People, but when an edu-crat told him that PP could be offensive to some, he changed our names to Pencil Integration Specialists, which is just close enough to PISS to annoy the higher-ups, but just normal enough to be a coincidence).

One would assume that a meeting with all of the pencil enthusiasts would involve collaboration.  Instead, each meeting involves sitting down and listening to an overly enthusiastic consultant display diagrams about how amazing a new product can be. I'm sure that it's great, but it's a tool.  I've never been over-awed by a hammer or a screwdriver, either.

For what it's worth, I'm beginning to hate Edison Projectors and the whole PowerSlide program that most professionals use. PowerSlides lost their power a few years ago and the culprit was college professors in lecture halls and staff development meetings where they read slides that could have easily been handed to us on paper.

So the man is pitching a SmartChart, which is essentially flip chart paper in front of an Edison Projector.  He pulls out scissors and glue and cuts and pastes pictures of dolphins.

"Pretty dynamic, eh?"

"You can cut and paste.  You can save your charts and show them to another class."

He pulls out a pencil, draws a happy face and erases it. "Show me a chalkboard that does that." To my surprise, the teachers actually begin clapping, despite the fact that we've all been erasing information from chalkboards for years. Are they really this impressed or are they simply being courteous to our over-enthusiastic salesman.

"It will revolutionize your teaching experience."  Revolutions are bloody ordeals.  I just want learning tools.

Finally, when he asks for questions, I take the bait.  "Isn't this a little teacher-centered?  I mean, we've all been to boring meetings where someone just reads a slide presentation and the audience checks out after five minutes. I fear that teachers will get really excited about it, because many of them are like raccoons attracted to shiny new objects, at least when they are first exposed to technology.  It's not bad.  I was there at one time."

"I'm not seeing your point.  You are concerned about teachers being excited?"

"I'm concerned that there will be a disconnect between theory and practice.  Teachers will use this as a cool toy for lectures and thus students won't become any smarter by using a SmartChart."

"I see your concern.  First, I want to point out that this is not your average Edison Projector.  This includes paper and pencil integration and a cool stylus that allows you to draw."  Stylus? It's a pen.

"Second, you can use this in groups.  Have other kids reading in centers and let kids play games like hang man or a trivia game or let them view pictures and add comments. Why do you have to be the one using it?"

"With all due respect," (I hate that phrase and find myself using it precisely when I've lost any due respect) "this is a teacher-centered tool.  Many teachers aren't going to trust kids to use this by themselves. However, it's also unrealistic to keep giving us tools that are designed for lecture and then saying that we can just add them to learning centers. This product is designed for a lecture format.  Otherwise, you would have put us into learning centers and allowed us to use this."

"I'm modelling one simple way.  But really, try the learning center approach."

"Teachers need prep time and there are classroom management issues to work out," another teacher points out.

"The prep time is not an issue.  We have many great programs and trainings that our highly qualified staff offer . . ." I disconnect at this point, smile and grin and realize that any true dialog won't occur.

It's not that I hate SmartCharts.  It's just that it seems superfluous to add them to classrooms when students don't have paper or pencils.  Yes, we can use SmarCharts in learning centers.  However, if students cannot create their own PowerSlides and have no access to their own paper and pencil for previous planning, then the SmartChart will remain teacher-driven.

What's worse is that, because of the cost of buying SmartCharts, teachers will feel the pressure to use these often.  The technology will drive the instruction rather than the theory driving the implementation of technology and while the SmartChart people seem nice (if a little over-enthusiastic) their bottom line is sales and my bottom line is student learning.