How to Get Rid of Bad Teachers

1. Take away the Teacher's Guides and if they claim that they are unable to teach, they are right.  They can't. As long as you're at it, take away the standards and the curriculum maps.  Any decent teacher should be able to know what is vital in his or her content area. 
2. Take away the computers.  Tell them that there's no electricity.  Even if it's a computer class, there's still a lesson to be learned.  If they can't teach without the gadgets, then they aren't teachers. They're technicians and they have no business in a classroom.  
3. Take away the School Discipline Program and have the administrators leave for a day. If they can't lead a class without the intervention of an administrator, they probably need to leave.
4. Take away the grades and get rid of the homework.  Toss out the token reward system and the points and the gold stars.  If they claim that they can't motivate a class without these things then they're missing a big part of what it means to motivate.
5. Take away the classroom for a day and have the teacher lead a group of ten kids.  Meet outside.  I don't care where.  A lake, a river, a mountain, a busy intersection of the city. If the teacher can't see how the subject connects to life and struggles to get a point across without a Word Wall or a chalkboard or a set of worksheets, then the teacher is missing the point of education.

I'm not saying you fire all of them.  I'm not even saying you go tech-free, resource-free or structure-free.  I am, however, saying that teaching is a deeply human endeavor.  If you believe that it requires a system, a resource or a gadget to ensure you succeed than you don't understand what it means to teach.

Here's my guess, though: despite all the hype about how awful our teachers are, most would pass the five criteria listed above, because an honest look at the teaching profession suggests that there are far more good teachers than bad ones.

"I remember when you were a baby," I tell Joel.

"I don't."

"Of course you don't."

"Why? Why can't I remember everything?"

"I'm not sure."

"Well I want to remember now forever. How do I make sure I remember now?"

"It's why I write. I don't want to forget."

"When you die, do you remember everything from life? Or is it like remembering when you were a baby?"

"I don't know."

"When you die, do you stay that age or do you get older in Heaven?"

"I don't know."

"I want to keep my memories when I'm in Heaven someday."

"Even the bad ones?"

"I don't know."

It's raining right now in Phoenix.  Just a few days ago, it was sunny and seventy degrees.  Joel is trying to make sense out of this.

"We don't have snow in the winter, right?"

"No."

"But we have lots of rain in the summer."

"That's true."

"And our trees don't lose their leaves in the fall.  It happens in the winter here."

"So, the only difference between fall and summer is that summer is hotter.  I think it's because the sun stays out longer."

Micah comes in from outside and asks, "Are all the raindrops the same size?"

At the beginning of this winter break, I reviewed the inquiry questions that are still unanswered:

• Why does San Diego stay nice all the time?  Like why is San Diego never too hot or cold like it is here?
• What makes a monsoon and why are people surprised each year when it happens?
• Does agriculture or urban development use up more of our water?  Is it true that concrete makes the city hotter?
• How do they predict the weather? (I know it's got to be something more advanced than a magic eight ball)
• What causes fog?
• What happens if an earthquake happens under water?

And so it goes, with almost every question dealing with physical geography.  My students want to know about volcanoes and tornadoes.  They want to know things like "If the longest day is over already then why is it still dark later in the morning?"  They are asking questions about lightening and predicting weather patterns.  

If I could re-write the science curriculum, I would make eighth grade the year of physical geography.  Start with observations.  If we want to do digital media, fine.  Let them take a picture of a location every day for a year and write about how it is changing.  Have students study continentality and pressure systems.  

I realize it might sound like fluff.  After all, I have mocked old people for having conversations about the weather.  Yet, I believe that meteorology in particular and physical geography in general are essential to life.  My students will study solvency followed by atomic particles and then boiling points and then adaptations and then they'll memorize letters on the Periodic Table of Elements. They'll ping-pong around abstract concepts without getting to know the physical geography that makes up their world.  

Perhaps physical geography is also too abstract.  I'm sure that the Inter-tropical Convergence Zone sounds about as magical as the innards of an atom.  However, at least it is in their neighborhood and they can experience the effects with their naked eye.

I'm glad the new year falls in the darkest time of year.  It's hard for me to drum up grandiose ideas of massive personal change when it's still dark at seven in the morning.  It's nearly impossible for me to write out personal goals when I've been taking naps and visiting friends and working on writing fiction.

I've tried resolutions, but they fail.  I've tried making easy resolutions as well (I won't practice genocide, for example) but that begins to feel a little cynical.  I've tried reflecting on the year or making top ten lists, but it all feels tiresome.

Balance.

That's what the new year has become for me.  It's that mid-year (by the school calendar) readjustment of priorities that shatters the overly idealistic plans I make in the summer.  I'm never sure what it will be. Maybe I'll be home earlier.  Maybe I'll commit to fewer projects.  Maybe I'll cut back on how much I eat and carve in a little more time to exercise.

I'm thinking this year it will be my bike.  I miss riding my bike to school, both for the health benefits and for the perspective.  I've grown to comfortable listening to NPR in the morning and it's making me curmudgeonly. I start to think that what's happening "out there" is more important than what happens in the community where I serve.

I yearn to breath the crisp air in the morning and to feel the blood flow.  I need my jolt of energy to come, not through a second cup of coffee, but from starting out the day with physical activity.

I realize that it sounds like a resolution and maybe it is.  But instead of taking that deep breath and saying, "Buck up, kiddo, you need to try harder," it's starting with, "Relax, kiddo, it's time to find some balance.  Do a little less and you can be a little more."

I recently read a Grant Wiggins post. It was supposed to be satirical some people (including myself) missed it. I like my satire a little more over-the-top. It's why I usually write my satire from the perspective of zombies or superheroes or fake conversations. Then I tag it "satire" just to avoid confusion. Or I just start an entire satirical blog that takes place in another era entirely.

I enjoyed Tom's response on Stop Trying to Inspire Me.  He did a great job picking apart how poorly constructed the arguments were.  I also enjoyed Dana Huff's points on Huff English. However, I thought I would add my point as well:

Part of what really angered me about that post was the gender stereotyping. Boys need stories. Often these stories involve action or fantasy or realism or characters that grow – which is essentially what girls want as well. When I teach social studies, I use narratives often. The textbook or Night? I see value in both, but the depth comes in with the narratives. If I want to teach about communism and capitalism, I'll use Animal Farm, Anthem and The Communist Manifesto. And guess what? The boys do just fine. Really, they get into it. And the girls? They do just fine, too.

The main reason being that both boys and girls love a good story.  They love the characters and the context and the conflict.  Narratives are how we make sense out of the world. Why do you think so many kids, bored to death of expository passages, yearn for video games?

The thing about fiction, at least decent fiction, is it will include persuasive, expository and occasionally functional text within it. Wiggins seemed to miss that as well.  The power in the narrative format is that it creates a context.  It humanizes the key points. I still see the need to use journal articles, primary sources and newspaper accounts.  Literature should be blended.  However, ultimately they will make sense out of history when they are able to think about it from the perspective of story.

So when I teach World War II,  I'm going to include All Quiet on the Western Front with no apologies and I'll add excerpts from The Rites of Spring. We'll even use some dry statistics on death and demographics. If I want to teach whole students, I need to use a holistic approach to literature.

Hubris.

Bill Gates and I will never see eye to eye on education. As long as it speaks of it as "an investment" or pontificates on the need of teachers to "fit into the right system," I will ignore him. He believes education is a private investment. I believe it is a public service. We will never agree. For what it's worth, a simple glimpse into the future of operating systems suggests that an incentive-based approach (Micro$oft) continues to lose market share to a collective, collaborative culture (Linux - think of Android or Chrome OS not as newly competitive alternatives, but as private offshoots of the Linux foundation)

In a recent interview, Gates said, "We need to measure what they do, and then have incentives for the other teachers to learn those things."

I have a few problems with this:
1. Good teaching often cannot be measured. Observed, yes, but not measured. I have had "experts" consider me a good teacher. They haven't seen the days when I shamed a student or ignored one asking for help. My abilities as a teacher are not easily measured.
2. Incentives will not help me become a better teacher. If anything, they'll lead me to take fewer risks, find more shortcuts and lose a part of the intrinsic motivation that drives so much of how I teach.

*     *     *

Just recently I got caught up in the desire to win an Edublog Award.  I didn't win.  It wasn't even close.  I should have known that my blog is not hugely popular.  However, the awards inflamed something within me that wanted so badly to be recognized.  At first I had a hard time pinpointing it, but now I recognize the culprit: It's shame.

I don't want to be the Strikeout King again.  I don't want to be the kid who is huddled around a teacher who says, "He's just not very mature" or "He's not working to his potential," when in fact "working" and "learning" were not the same thing.  Something about the awards stirs up this ugly sense of shame that I've never been able to shed.

Shame begins with the belief that a person is only as good as his or her actions - not motives, not desires, not thoughts, but actions.  Shame tells a lie about one's identity that says, "If you screw up, then you are a screw-up."  It looks at every person's condition and says "you put yourself in this and now you get yourself out of it."

Behaviorism begins with the same belief system.  It's the lie that we are the sum total of our actions.  It's not about motives.  It's not about thoughts.  It's not even about the context of our actions.  It's about how we acted.  It's about carrots and sticks.  Free fried dough if you read well and solitary confinement if you talk too much.

It's not that the entire theory is wrong.  We are all motivated by stimulus - some of it internal, some of it external.  There are times when rewards and punishments work well (for menial tasks, for repetitive motions and other activities).  I have sometimes had to set up a reward for myself in order to do some small task that I hate (like going to the DMV).  It's the behaviorist theory of human identity that is so dangerous.

*     *     *

Sometimes people outside the teaching profession don't understand why teachers hate pay-for-performance.  They seem baffled by the idea that we don't admire Bill Gates (himself an uncreative screwball who stole another company's idea to make billions) an we don't embrace a market-norm system in place of the current one.

The anger, the protests, the loud, vehement words from teachers are a response from being shamed.  It seems silly to sum.  Really?  Protest against the system that the rest of America uses.  However, has the market-norm, behaviorist system really worked that well?  Consider the Tech Bubble, the Mortgage Crisis, the lies of companies like Enron and the bailouts that are robbing our public resources to fund huge CEO bonuses.  Is that really what we want to emulate?

How dare you reward me for doing the thing I love.

How dare you try and buy my autonomy with an extra bonus check.

I rarely repost anything, but I re-read this one from a year ago today. If it's a repeat to you, just ignore it. If it's new to you, I hope you enjoy it.

This morning I re-read the Gospels.  Not in the old King James (though I missed the swaddling clothes), but in The Unvarnished New Testament.  The first chapter of John brings me into that poetic, metaphorical understanding of the story.  But I am jarred by the other three gospels. I'm trying to place myself within the story, trying to imagine where I'd be as a narrator.

I can see myself as the Pharisee, looking for orthodox views on religion, playing the seven-steps and eight keys formula, generally following the rules.  (I never jaywalk) I'd call myself a counter-cultural figure in a shirt and tie and I'd sip lattes with friends who convince me that the Free Market Messiah will take away my debt and lead me to financial peace.  I'd feel safe here, secure in my plain, Midwestern, common-sense approach to life.  And Glen Beck would beckon me toward anger, but not enough to go out and do anything. I'd quietly ignore the news of a Messiah, feeling slightly embaressed by yet another family claiming their son was the chosen one.

Or maybe I'd be a zealot, pissed off at the Roman "bread and circus," trying to recover some sense of authenticity lacking in both the religious and political institutions.  I'd be wearing a Che shirt (and wondering why people keep confusing him for Captain Morgan) and painting protest propaganda on the graffiti covered bathhouse walls of Jerusalem. I'd seek out the radical clerics in the desert who force me into discipline, because somewhere within I hate how easily my mind meanders. So, I'd bust out my incense and meditate and hope for the day I'd be centered. I'd hear the rumors of this Messiah and wonder if I'd be bold enough to slice through the Romans on the day of the violent revolution.

Or perhaps I'd choose the elitist view of the Sadducees.  Ever the rationalist, I'd hear rumors of a Messiah from the star-gazing crazies from Persia.  I'd laugh at the people who claim to see angels, just as I laugh at Horoscopes and Ghost Hunters and people who see the Virgin Mary on tortillas.  I'd sip wine and talk Plato and we would all laugh at claims of the working class shepherds who claim that God can be found in a newborn.

*     *     *

In my little suburban enclave, I run past an inflatable Nativity scene.  Here, an ultra-white, puffy-cheeked Mary and Joseph look into the crisp, white sheets of the manger. And the word became [inflatable] flesh and dwelt among us [next to Winnie the Pooh and Tigger, too and Garfield in Santa hat].

It's hard to think of the scene of a sweaty, teenage mom screaming in terror as Emmanuel comes into being.  God-With-Us in a place that smelled like stale urine and saturated with blood on the floor.

Joel asked me the other day if Jesus nursed "from Mary's boob."  It's hard for me to remember that she had breasts. I imagine it would have been hard for me to believe in Christ, laying defenseless on Mary's chest while she delivers the placenta. I can't imagine the vulnerability of a God who transcends all taking on the defenseless form.

*     *     *

People become cruel around Christmas.  Seriously mean.  I was at the park yesterday and everyone just seemed tense. Either that or totally disconnected. Two cars honked their horns in order to jockey for position at the parking lot nearby.  Finally a man jumped out of his car and smashed his fist onto the hood. (For the record, I think the hood won) I guess everyone was in a hurry to start relaxing.  Nothing says a calm afternoon like road rage at Sahuaro Ranch Park.

Maybe it's the solstice.  Maybe it's the dying of the light.  We're edgy.  It's in moments like this that I empathize with those whose hearts are two sizes too small. I'm not above this, either.  I've been more impatient with my boys lately.  I am using the threat of a time-out instead of the calm reassurance of reason.  I'm having a hard time being present with them.  Joel's stories are long and detailed and I have a hard time waiting it out.  I think he senses my disconnect sometimes and I don't want him to quit telling stories.  School will probably beat that out of him as it is.

My students tell me more stories of abuse and sickness and broken homes during the holidays.  Everyone coughs a little more.  I see more salt-stained puffy eyes. Even the most energetic students seem to walk with a bit of a damper in their stride. Faces are glazed over.  Quite a few kids tell me this year that they're skipping tamales and staying in town.  Hardly anyone brought cans of food this year for the food drive.  Times are tough.

*     *     *

On some level, I don't get the angels.  Not the baseball team, but the shouting and trumpets and the repetitive chorus.  After all, my religious experience is forged through conversations and books and well-delivered sermons and a praise band with guitars and drums.  Or, at it's best, it's formed by walks in the desert and barefoot evenings under the stars.

I don't fully comprehend the pagan astrologers finding God outside the box.  It sounds uncomfortably close to religious relativity and it's hard for me to recognized that those who had all the answers missed all the questions.  I used to fight like crazy to get people to remember that we have no idea how many they were, but that they were not kings and they were not at the stable.  They handed God-in-Flesh a present when he was in his Terrible Twos.

I don't fully comprehend the blood in the barn and the screaming teenage mom and the husband who probably wonders if it would have been best for him to just leave and avoid the shame of a bastard son. My most dramatic moment yesterday was finding my first few gray hairs. I live in a world of songs with hand gestures and wiffle balls in the backyard and an afternoon making fudge for the holidays.

I don't fully comprehend the shepherds gathering near, abandoning their only economic opportunity in order to see God-With-Us or the backdrop of corrupt government and infanticide and the absolute need for power. The only glimpses of genocide I see are through a nineteen inch television set that I can watch in in a home where I can change the temperature to suit my comfort.

But I believe this much: God, the Word who spoke the universe into existence, becomes human.  I don't pretend to understand the mystery.  But I understand that he came into a world as hurt and broken and pissed off and disconnected and apathetic as the present day.  And I get the fact that most people missed him.  But the humble, the rejects, the outcasts found hope. I get that sense that God gets those who strike out in the ninth inning.

Although I don't always get him, he gets me. I am a skeptic, a cynic, a man of doubt.  For all my talk of transparency and relationships, I can be distant and reclusive and I guess that's why I love this holiday. It's not a time for those who "have it all together."

So, I awkwardly stumble through this time in my very suburban way - with fudge and cookies and lights and trees and ornaments and songs about snow (despite living in a desert) or worse yet telling ghost stories and drunken tales of the glorious days that never were.  The world doesn't cease to be broken, but for a short season each year, I am surrounded with very sensual reminders (albeit sometimes very deceptive) of Emmanuel.

I have hope.

A few of my beliefs seem strange to people. Namely the fact that I don't agree with grades, that I am ardently opposed to standardized tests, that I generally downplay awards ceremonies (despite being hopeful and then crushed by the Edublog Awards) and  that I don't assign homework. Add to this my openness to interruptions, my philosophy of authentic learning and my belief in quality over quantity and I begin to sound like a heretic in the Cathedral of Data.

I get it.  I don't entirely fit into the system.  I'm fine with that.  In fact, there is a mini-anarchist inside me who delights in my rebellious streak.  What surprises me, though, is the fact that people will sometimes assume that I have low expectations. People assume that I am against standardized tests as a way to rationalize low scores.

So, here's the deal:

My students aced the last round of standardized tests.  In a test designed to ensure that half the students fail, my students scores an average of 76 and 78.  These scores are at the top of our district for self-contained eighth grade.

And yet . . .

my teardrops do not cure leprosy.  I am not a master teacher. I fumble around in lessons.  I shame kids on occasion.  I've raised my voice several times.  I've had to go back to the class and say, "What I taught you turned out to be entirely wrong."

And yet . . .

my students did really well on the test.  This isn't because they had a phenomenal teacher.  This post is not about false humility.  It's about the reality that authenticity, even imperfect, broken, confused authenticity is always better than artificiality.  My kids aced the test because they learned in the most real way I could provide.  When provided with autonomy, challenge and meaning, something as small as a standardized test felt . . . well . . . small.

Here's a little secret about passing the test.  If you want your students to pass the test, don't teach to the test.  If you want your students to be at the top of the pack, ignore the pack and de-emphasize the rat race.  Give them something real and they'll do just fine.

A teacher tries to engage me in a debate over terminology.  It's fog.  I don't care if there's another name for it.  I don't care what keeps it down.  I don't care how it is connected to our pollution.  It's fog.

I know that he understands science deeper than I do.  I realize he took a few more upper-level physical geography classes during his coursework.  I don't care.  I know fog.  I know it intimately.  I grew up in Fresno, California.  I know fog.

It's the magical haze that used to signal football season and homemade rocky road and half days at school.  And it's here in the desert on this last day of the quarter.  Teachers shuffle by, heads down, a bit defeated by the semester.  We're all tired.  It's too close to the solstice to try and pretend.  And yet . . . It's fog.  It's like we're living in a cloud.  It's like we've captured the heavens and not even the sun can melt it away for now.  Seize this moment, staff, it's fog.

My students frolic in the fog.  I know that sounds strange.  However, it's what happens.  They dance and jump and then when the frolicking is done, we move slowly into the class.

No one wants to bathe in the fluorescent lighting.  Not even given the fact that I am actually allowing them free time on the netbooks (a rarity in my class).

"Can we see the moon?" a kid asks.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that I saw the moon."

We move outside and look up.

"That's the sun," I start to say.  But then I stop.  They stop.  No frolicking now.  Just observing, watching, asking silent questions.  The class is silent.  Not for long.  Three, four minutes maybe, but that feels like eternity to a plugged-in eighth grader.

Finally, a kid asks, "Could that be the sun?"

"I think it is," another student says.

"It looks so . . . so . . . so tame, I guess."

And I don't know what is more powerful; the fact that the fog can tame the sun or that it can pull a tired teacher so quickly back to childhood or that inside there's humming machinery promising a virtual reality and none of my students (not one) is staring at a screen.

First Child:
"Gross. Joel has a Cheerio from under the couch. I'll go take it out of his hands."

Second Child:
"Well, Micah has a Cheerio from under the couch. Probably won't hurt him. I think in some countries they eat off dirt floors."

Third Child:
"Brenna's crying. Let's see. Is there at least a Cheerio under the couch she can eat while I fix her a snack?"

I was the fourth child in my family.  Now I'm beginning to understand just why I am the way I am.

I am against homework.  When I vocalize this, I typically hear the following questions:

Isn't practice necessary?
I agree that practice is necessary for skills-based (but not necessarily conceptual) knowledge.  However, if a student already masters a skill, is it necessary to practice it for hours?  Meanwhile, if a student hasn't mastered the skill, what happens when the student practices a skill incorrectly?  If a child thinks the a makes a hard "o" sound and practices that thirty times each night, this does more harm than good.

Don't you have high standards?
High standards is more about quality than quantity.  If I pack my day with meaningful, challenging learning than I don't need my students to spend hours practicing what they already know.

What about the students who don't get it?
That's why I structure intervention and enrichment into every lesson.  If a child doesn't get it now, practicing it wrong repeatedly won't help him or her.  If I truly believe a child needs hours of practice, I need to be available before and after school to tutor that student.

Isn't it better for students to spend time learning than simply watching television?
While that's partially true, I also know of students who are active in church, sports, clubs and family.  All of those have components of learning to them that cannot be attained in a classroom.  If I want whole students, I need whole people and homework hinders rather than helps this occur.

Shouldn't there be an extension of learning into the home?
That's where authentic learning truly happens.  Right now I work with my son for twenty-five to thirty minutes a day on homework.  That time used to be used reading books together, drawing or practicing our words.  Now it's spent on worksheets.  To me, that's tragic. I am watching him lose his love of learning each night.

Is there ever a time for homework?
I have students do independent projects.  I have them do surveys or song analyses or take pictures of concepts.  Home-based learning can be a great enrichment of classroom learning.  However, this is always voluntary, never graded and always integrated into in-class projects.  To me, that's a far cry from forcing students to do additional assignments after school is over.

What about China?
I remember, as a child, being in a "Nation at Risk" and hearing about how the Russians were winning the pissing contest.  Then these risky children became the creative software engineers that now lead innovation.  Meanwhile, the less-risky Russians watched their entire system fall down.  Furthermore, there are certain things China does with children that I disagree (like infanticide and child labor).  Finally, the data is skewed to compare the U.S. average to the Shanghai average (where it is essentially a magnate for the top students).  The truth is our system doesn't suck as much as most people think.

I notice the sentence, "I will talk at him," and say, "Don't you think it should be 'with' instead of 'at.

"It's not a big deal. At and with. I don't really think I need to change it." It's Friday and it's late December and the mere thought of clicking the delete button twice and typing four letters is just too much.

"What do you mean you're not going to change it?" I ask the kid. I'm tempted to play the 'I'll dock you points on this' card, but instead, I choose a conversation.

"It doesn't make that much of a difference," he tells me.

"At and with don't make much of a difference?"

"No."

"First sentence: Take a shot at Hitler. What does that mean?"

"Shoot him."

"Second sentence: Take a shot with Hitler. What does that mean?"

"Drink with him."

"Right. Do you see my point?"

"I'll fix it."

"Good."

Sometimes it pays to be a geek.

"What do you think the moon is made of?"

Joel answered, "I think it's like the earth, but it has white clouds. Sometimes the clouds cover the whole moon and sometimes it covers none of the moon and then sometimes there's big black clouds that cover the whole moon."

Micah answered, "I think it's far away. Like maybe from here to Colorado. And the people there have flashlights that they shine at the earth so that we can see better at night."

"So why does the moon change each night?"

"Some of the flashlight batteries die."

Okay. I'll accept that.

I didn't correct them. A few months back they had a different hypothesis. In a few years, I'll let them look at the moon through a telescope. On some level theoretical astronomy and cosmology are like rum - excellent in small doses, but not suitable for children.

Before I teach them about the universe, I want them to see the universe. I want them to theorize and question and watch.

During our professional development, every group draws a poster about vertical collaboration.  Most of the posters have steps or ladders and have a few phrases about the importance of sharing information from grade to grade.  One, however, seems to resemble a football field.  It turns out to be a ladder, but I mistake it for a football field and say to our curriculum, "That's it!"

"What do you mean?" 

"It's like football.  You go for a goal, you gain yardage, but the summer lull create a delay of game over and over again. You lose at least a good twenty yards.  It goes in spurts, with forward and backward movement. And all the while, you're hoping to reach the end zone successfully."  

It strikes me that every metaphor deals with steps.  Carefully calculated steps.  Tidy ladders.  Measurable growth. Road maps. Precise spirals.  

What if we have it all wrong?  What if education is filled with conflict and confusion?  What if there are eleven pissed off men who are ready to knock the crap out of every kid who tries to attain a goal (could be crazy stepdad or societal pressures or poverty or politicians) and all the while the defense believes they are defending something worthwhile (their pride, their power, their traditions, their beliefs) and in the process, they knock the kid down?  

What if, as teachers, the best we can do is help call the write creative plays so that students can find a hole in the insurmountable line?  What if we help them to work as a team, recognizing that the ultimate goal is in everybody's self-interest?  And what if we are able to recognize the moments when it just might be right to abandon the play and call an audible or maybe even move into a no-huddle offense?  

I admit that I'm not crazy about sports metaphors.  Being tossed into a locker by football players has a way of changing what a person feels about a sport.  Still, I'm thinking that when I recognize that education is filled with conflict and that the goal occurs in a finite amount of time, it changes the way I think about collaboration.

I understand that students need to master certain skills in reading.  I'm not opposed to being told to have students make inferences, develop clarifying questions, or understand the author's purpose.  I don't doubt that students should make predictions and then confirm or deny predictions.  I see value in using graphic organizers to make sense out of what they read.

However, I would lump all of the aforementioned standards in the category of reading strategies rather than reading skills.  To me, a list of skills would involve thinking critically, identifying biased language, examining elements of propaganda, analyzing the elements of literature or any other skill involved in taking the text to a deeper level.

I know my students understand the reading strategies, because they use them on a regular basis. Just today, I noticed quality clarifying questions and assessed student graphic organizers.  While a few of my students still have a hard time with the concept of bias, none of them struggle with how to craft a clarifying question or use affixes to determine the meaning of a word.

I find it strange, then, that they will be tested next week on clarifying questions, not by creating clarifying questions, but by choosing from a list of questions and finding the best clarifying question.  Similarly, they will be asked to use graphic organizers, not by filling out a graphic organizer, but by choosing which letter corresponds with what information a person would choose to place within the graphic organizer.

This is, at best:
a. asinine
b. silly
c. a swell idea
d. inaccurate

This is at it's worst:
a. dangerous
b. precarious
c. unreliable
d. a great way for transnational corporations to make money off my students' minds

My students will probably do well on the test.  They are intelligent, hard-working and used to work that is more challenging than a multiple choice test.  However, I find it sad that they will spend the week before winter break taking kill and drill tests rather than doing projects and enrichment work on the standards that they've mastered.

With no real authority, I have declared from this year forward, that December 8 will forever be Greet One Another In Old-School Country Music Lyrics Day.  While not as popular as Kwanzaa or Festivus, it is a fun holiday simply because it is cheap and doesn't require any mental effort beyond remembering the lyrics I wish I could forget.

So, how does it work?

When someone calls you on the phone, you answer, "Ever met a woman late night roamin' party till your money was gone? Smilin' Mona Lisa loaded up your visa and took the bartender home. Stand up.  Have you ever been there? Testify."

When asked, "What are you doing this weekend?" a great response would be, "We're going to hire a wino and he'll decorate our home."

"Why?"

"So, you'll feel more at ease here and you won't need to roam."

It works best to quote a line as a question to a question.  For example, in response to "Do you have your lesson plans?" a great response is "If I said you had a beautiful body, would you hold it against me?"

It might just be the last time that person asks you a question.

When someone makes an interesting comment, the best response might be, "It makes you wonder:
Who's doin' right by someone tonight, An' whose car is parked next door?" You have to say it just like that, too, without the d in the "and."

Now, this can be tricky.  For example, is it okay to use "And if we’re victims of the night, I won’t be blinded by the light?"  I always considered that country, but some would argue it was pop.  Similarly, one might be tempted to use, "I'll stick a boot in your ass, it's the American way."  However, that might not qualify as "old school."

I had great professors when I was in college, so none of this is meant as a gripe.  Instead, it's the realization that so much of what I value in teaching I learned on the job:

1. Humility is one of the most powerful traits of a quality teacher and yet I never once heard about this in my education classes.  Whether it's the ability to apologize, the open-mind to listen to new ideas or the sense that maybe students have a voice as well, I see humility as an absolute necessity.
2. Sometimes old ideas are better than new ones.  I've learned more from Nehemiah or Jesus or Aristotle than I learned from Marzano.
3. While administrators can leave some great feedback, the ones who really know how I teach are the students.  If I taught an education class, I'd have students help develop the best ways to have students evaluate a teacher.
4. Even though reflections are valuable, there is a power in telling one's stories as well.  If I taught an education class, I'd have a place for poetry and short story writing.  It's easier to be honest when writing fiction.
5. What you believe about the human condition heavily influences how you approach teaching.  The mere fact that I see everyone as deeply flawed and yet capable of acts of beauty is what has saved my teaching career and helped me to avoid giving up on certain kids.
6. No one could have ever predicted how much of a physical activity it is.  From holding in the urge to pee to making sure I drink enough to avoid dehydration (try that for balance) to the reality of being energetic when a newborn has been screaming all night, teaching remains a physical activity.
7. I often heard that the staff lounge is a dark and creepy place, filled with "lounge lizards" who were out to beat the passion out of new teachers.  Instead, I found peers who listened and who shared the common struggle of trying to teach well despite the brokenness of humanity.
8. Nearly everything in teaching is a paradox.  Whether this is skills vs. concepts, results vs. process, compassion vs. truth, every single "versus" is misguided at best.  When presented in tidy boxes in a textbook, it seems like I have to pick my team and cheer for them (hooray for Constructivists!) but it's almost never like that in a real classroom.  It's messy.  It's muddled.  It's filled with mystery and nuance.
9. It's not about results so much as it is about being faithful.  Often the results (whether it's the "aha" moments or the life-long learning or the thank you's don't happen for years).
10. Even in my "urban" classes, I never really had a chance to examine the powerful role of class, culture and micro-colonialism (not sure if I made that one up) in schooling.  So much of the misbehavior I see in schools has less to do with behavior and more to do with a clashing of values and a warring of cultural narratives.

Bonus:
Looking back, I think it was wrong to discriminate between Ed Tech and Education Theory.  We should have critiqued the medium as we discussed the theory and its application in a real classroom.

Often, I hear the distinction between formative and summative this way:  Formative assessments measure what they are learning in the moment to help plan future instruction. Summative assessments measure what they have already learned at the closing of the learning process.

What if this whole dichotomy is a false one?  What if, for example, all assessments were used both to plan future instruction and to see where they are in learning the current knowledge?  Makes sense to me.  If I give a student an authentic problem, chances are I'm seeing what he or she needs in the future (I hate the term "intervention," since it sounds more like addressing a crack addiction than helping a student with fractions)  

Furthermore, if learning is genuinely life-long, then it seems that the notion of formative and summative make little sense.  Each assessment is always at the closure of some lesson or standard or unit and yet it is also what guides teachers in planning new lessons.  

What really matters is whether or not we know our students.  It's important that we know what motivates them and whether or not they are learning what we taught them. What we do with this is even more important.  If it remains, simply a number in a gradebook, we failed.  But if we take this information and use it both to plan new lessons and to allow students the extra support and enrichment that they need, then we use assessment as a tool for learning rather than judging. 

Last night I sent out a tweet mentioning being nominated for an Edublog Award.  I then erased the tweet, but it had already become public knowledge on those crazy ether tubes that fill up our make believe world.  I had pleaded publicly and I regretted it.  Then I added a badge and mentioned it at the bottom of two blog posts.  Then I felt like an arrogant fool and so I thought about erasing all of that.

Here's the deal: I want to win.  This feels oddly foreign, since I don't tend to be all that competitive.  I chose individual sports in my youth (if running as hard as you can is considered a sport) so that I could compete against my own personal records. One of my greatest personal accomplishments involved finishing among the bottom of the pack in a marathon.

And yet . . .

I want to win in my category.  It's not as if I ever wrote a blog post thinking, "I hope this means people will vote for my blog in the Edublog Awards."  If I had gone that route, I would have used "21st Century" in the title (or even kept the title or the URL or the blog layout constant).  I would have pretended to be more cutting edge.

And yet . .

I still want to win.  So, where does this motive come from?

It's complicated.  First, I want to win because I want to be noticed.  I want to matter.  On a positive note, this is the desire to be known.  It's what begins relationships.  On a dark side, this is the desire to causes people to hide and to lie and to put on pretensions.  This is ego at its best and worst.

However, there is another reason.  I want to spread some of my ideas and values to a larger audience.  I want people to get past the Waiting for Superman mythology and recognize that it's about humility and transparency and authenticity.  (And all the while, I've got this ego thing that I can't shake) On the darker side, this is the explicitly arrogant belief that I have the answers (even if the answer is that no one has all the answers).  On the positive side, I think I have something worth saying. I think I've been sharing a philosophy that counters much of the screaming in the mainstream media echo chambers about teachers and education reform.

So, it's complicated, really complicated, and my initial reaction is to avoid tweeting about it or adding a badge or mentioning it in a blog post.  I did that last year and it worked well.  Except that last year when I did it, I realized it was a false humility.  I was playing pretend.  This year, I want to be honest my motives.

"How can splitting something that's so small no one can see it turn into an explosion that can destroy a city?" a girl asks.

I begin to explain the science as best as I can until I admit, "I don't really understand all of it.  I know why it scared people afterward and how it shaped society. But I'm not going to pretend I understand how the energy is released and how the atom splits."

"If you don't understand something, it becomes magic," she answers.  "If you're going to tell me that something so small I can't see it in a microscope can make an explosion that big, it's going to feel like magic."

"Right.  And magic is scary," I add.

"Do you think the president understood the science of it?" a boy asks.

"I'm not sure how well anyone understood it until after it happened.  And then it took years to try and figure it out."

I cancel our reading lesson entirely as we view pictures of the aftermath and then watch a video from Robert Oppenheimer.  I have to talk prep them on who he was and about the scriptures that he quotes and they seem a little baffled that a scientist would choose spirituality and poetry to express what happened.

The first time we watch it, kids can't pay attention.  It's black and white and scratchy. The next time, though, it's quiet. By the fifth time, the silence is haunting.

When I ask, "Was it right to drop the bomb?" I cancel my time limit.  Some kids stare out for five, ten minutes and wrestle with it.  A few argue it verbally.  A few more look up the numbers online.  It takes thirty-five minutes for them to try and answer it and even now I admit that we went too fast.  The girl who first asked "how" still can't get to the "why."  She throws her hands up at all the diagrams and says, "I'm still not getting it."

You can't teach Hiroshima and Nagasaki in forty-five minutes.  I'm not even sure you can teach it for two and a half hours and do a decent job.

Sometimes I feel guilty about how slow our class moves this year.  It takes them thirty minutes to read an eight page article and really question the bias. My rule of twenty minutes to blog two paragraphs isn't happening.  My prediction of five minutes to solve a word problem isn't working either. Yet, my students are thinking deeper than in years past, not despite the slower pace, but because of it.  Thinking takes time.

Teach less.

Learn more.

Hey, I've been nominated for an Edublog Award.  If you enjoy this blog, please vote here.

I once attended a conference in Las Vegas.  Surrounded by the lights and glamour and faux clouds and make believe canals, it was easy to forget the context of my classroom.  Add to this, the magic formula solutions of the peppy speakers and I had to pull out a stack of student work just to shake off the brainwashing.

The other conference took place in Seattle, which felt like a mythical utopia where one could find a Starbucks every twenty yards and people understood my love of indie folk rock.  Again, I fell into an educational intoxication and had to close my eyes just to remember what my classroom felt like.

I'm not sure that every conference is like this, but I would like to propose an alternative location.

Enter: Ed Camp Blythe.

If you've never passed through Blythe, consider yourself lucky.  Situated between the most extreme blue and red states, it is a bastion of banality that exists mostly as a stopping place for people either going to the beach or wishing they could be back at the beach.  It's a stopping point on a journey (a little metaphor for education there) that captures our most mundane American values.

It's not that Blythe is a hideous town.  It's just that it has little to offer in terms of escape.  You can go to the Dairy Queen or the Burger King or any other despotic fastfood joints. You can go bowling and go see the mountains and catch the subtle beauty that is far from breath-taking but still beautiful.

Photo Credit: marshall.mayer on Flickr Creative Commons

Hey, I've been nominated for an Edublog Award.  If you enjoy this blog, please vote here.

So, I'm writing my own version of Wookie Leaks:

"The Emperor refuses to implicate Halliburton in Death Star incident, since Vader was once its CEO."

"So it turns out that Ewoks aren't supposed to be edible." - Hans Solo

"Luke is a classic case of nepotism. Dim-witted. Dull. Often confuses 'imperial' with 'empirical.' And his sister is an insufferable control-freak."

"C3PO's gentrified speech and narcissistic ramblings make him a greater asset to the Empire than to the rebel forces."

"Someone needs to tell Obi-Wan that it's still theft even if it's taken by the force. That clepto stole my crocheting needles and claimed he owned them the whole time.  Really, have you ever known a Jedi knight who enjoyed crocheting?"

"Spend an hour with Jar Jar and you'll actually want to join the Dark Side."

"With Jabba's recent speculation efforts, it looks like we're all going to have to bail out the effin' Tashi Station. How can we have a revolution if we are dealing with skyrocketing compound interest rates?"

"No politician will admit this, but Byss got the Intergalactic Cup because the Abyssins bribed the FIFA officials."

"Yoda is so drunk his syntax is barely decipherable. Or, rather, 'Drunk he is decipherable not when speaks.'"

"Vader is a petty tyrant who can't keep a Death Star intact."

Hey, I've been nominated for an Edublog Award.  If you enjoy this blog, please vote here.

I've recently had a few people tell me that my site has been labeled as "adult" and thus blocked by a filtering program.  What makes this difficult is that there is no one I can contact to change this.  I have a hunch that it has to do with quoting a Bible verse.

The Word became flesh.

Flesh.

That will throw the robots off every time.

Now watch this.  I embrace the notion of earth and tone and human.  I embrace the notion of flesh, because I don't want my identity defined by machine.  Flesh and embrace.  Definitely set off the filters with that one. Robots cannot understand context and nuance and paradox.  They cannot understand humor.  And thus, the algorithms of blocking a site become a sophisticated game of "that's what she said" and let's be honest, I can't win against a robotic Michael Scott.

I understand the need for spam filters.  Digitized canned meat product will always be undesirable.  I understand the desire to keep robots away through the use of CAPTCHAs and Word Verifications.  It makes sense why schools use filtering programs to keep kids away from porn.  (Probably set off the robots with that one, too.)

So, the other day when I went to the grocery store with Joel, he asked why the car kept beeping its horn.

"That's the alarm."

"What's finished?"

"No, nothing is finished baking.  It's to keep people from stealing a car."

"How does it work?"

"It tells people that someone is trying to steal the car."

"Is someone trying to steal that car?"

"No."

"Then why is the alarm going off?"

Then it strikes me that it is very possible that someone could have been trying to steal the car.  However, no one is looking.  Car alarms, designed to protect people and call on the community for help, became a robotic alternative that actually led to more apathy.  Now people fail to pay attention (the alarm will catch it) but also fail to pay attention to the alarm.  The same goes with gated communities.  People feel safe, but my time in a gated apartment complex taught me that anyone could sneak in easily and that often the most unsafe elements of the apartment came from fellow residents rather than the outside.

It makes me wonder if so many of our online security devices are doing the same.  What if the CAPTCHAs and the spam filters and even at times the site blockers all fail to build the trust and transparency that are needed for safety to exist?  What if they are becoming the car alarms and apartment gates that are more of a nuisance than a support mechanism?

It's cold and it's dark and it's the time when staff lounge energy drops down and we muster up any possible passion before Winter Break.  A few teachers begin talking about the "perfect day" and imagine an afternoon at a Hawaiian beach.

It has me thinking about the perfect day, so here's a list of what it would look like:

4-6:30: Read and Write
6:30-7:00: Eat breakfast with my family
7:00-7:30: Listen to NPR, Sufjan Stevens or sit in silence
7:30-4:30: Teach.  Listen.  Ask questions.  Create works of art.
4:30-5:00: Listen to music
5:00-6:30: Play catch or "get you" or hide and seek with my kids and maybe watch a sunset and break break
6:30-7:30: Run and Pray
7:30-9:30: Talk to Christy.  Listen to Christy.  (I can't say anything more here or Christy would kill me)

Or maybe the perfect day might include hanging out with a friend instead of going to the gym or maybe it would include working out in the garden and spending the day with the kids.

Here's my point: As cheesy as this sounds, I get to live the perfect day on most days.  Whether it's the summertime or the school year, I get to have days that are meaningful, challenging, fun, creative and affirm who I am.  If that's not a perfect day, I'm not sure what is.  Don't get me wrong, I'm sure Hawaii is nice.  I'm sure the water looks pretty.  But after a game of catch, the sunset is gorgeous and after an exhausting day, no tropical paradise can compare to Christy.

Perhaps this post has too much of a Hallmark feel to it.  It's just that after going to a funeral and thinking about how I would live my last days, I'm pretty sure that I would want to live them similar to how I live each day now.

Note: On most days, the 4-6:30 time slot is also used for assessing student work, commenting on their blogs, etc.

Sometimes when I'm feeling social, but not social enough to talk to anyone, I have pretend conversations with myself.  It's a weird, childish habit that I never really outgrew and it seems to creep up only when I'm in a car and the world presented through the lens of NPR sounds too depressing for me to handle.  I'll turn the volume off entirely and play around with mock voices until I have the right sound.

This morning, it's This Suburban Life and I'm sort-of Ira Glass with a polo shirt purchased from the outlet malls.

The story begins with:

"And the Word became [inflatable] flesh and dwelt among us [next to Winnie the Pooh and a multicolored light display of cacti].  I mocked it at first.  I actually laughed aloud and had to quit running.  The whole neighborhood just had this dark, eerie resemblance of a Cartoon Network Crime Scene . . . And then, it hit me that suburbia is a part of me.  It's a part of who I am."


"Can you elaborate?"


"It just struck me as profound that in the midst of capitalism and the American Dream and decorations purchased at Target, there was this longing, this hope in Emanuel.  It was this sense that in the midst of the Winter Solstice, on the coldest day, when the sun itself had given up, there was a collective hope in a resurrection of some sort.  Yeah, it was a bit Whoville, but it was still real."


"And you found your place?"


"It's weird, I know, but the place known for being so artificial is the place where people are so real.  Yeah, they might have an inflatable Jesus, but it's no different from trendy hipsters who turn him into a folk rocker or someone who believes they see his face in a tortilla.  It's the desire, the hope, perhaps even the reality that we can see God in our lives."  

I don't deny that this mock talk show is a little strange.  But I'm comforted when I look around at my fellow drivers.  One man picks his nose and flicks it out the window.  A woman eats a pretend breakfast of pretend sausage and pretend egg.  A man engages in a pretend conversation with his Smart Phone.  Nothing profound.  Nothing enlightening.

We're all playing make believe and on some level, that's a part of what makes life worth living.

Sometimes I can be overwhelmed by what feels like a dark and broken world.  However, today, as I engage in my pretend talk show and look around at the Text Man and Egg McMuffin Lady and Gold Digger, I am struck by the sense that suburbia isn't all that bad.