the first time I saw Ann Coulter, I thought she was a really bad SNL character

1. Teachers are over-worked. For all the vacation time we are supposed to have, many teachers work additional jobs to make ends meet.  They don't necessarily have the time to fight the political and economic systems that are at work against the profession.
2. Teachers will take as many left hooks as you can offer.  After all, schools are dens of indoctrination and the only solution is educational anarchy.
3. Teachers will also take punches from the right. After all, teachers ask students to think critically about American history, explain descent with modification, teach sex ed and encourage tolerance.
4. It's easy to confuse the system with the people who work hard to change it.  For example, on The Innovative Educator, guest writers have called teachers slave-drivers, prison guards, child-abusers and thieves.  Teachers make a great punching bag here, because the system is made of concrete and steel and who wants to punch industrialization anyway?
5. Teachers are notoriously nice and typically don't punch back.  While this panders to stereotypes, there are many within early childhood education that are kind and gentle spirits.  I've watched my son's teachers have more patience with him (and with all the students) than I do.  There's nothing wrong with being nice, but I'm beginning to see even the gentlest kindergarten teachers put on their gloves and punch back.
6. Teachers aren't part of the top one percent who control the vast majority of the wealth in our country.    If Bill Gates makes it a priority to use teachers as punching bags and promote Kahn-style Light-Bright solutions in math, the media will report it as a solution.  If Punch-a-Teacher is a carnival game, Gates can not only buy as many tickets as he wants; he can buy the entire carnival.
7. Like most punching bags, we're resilient.  Teachers tend to love their jobs and continue to serve out of social rather than economic norms.  Punch them and they come right back and serve, tirelessly and with a sense of gratitude.  There is a cost, though, in being so beat-down.  Teachers are worn-out and a collective cultural thank you would go a long way.
8.  Most people have a former teacher they would love to punch.  Therefore, it's way too easy to normalize the few bad cases by reframe social perceptions.  Unlike other heroic professions (fire fighters, for example), most people in society have experience with teachers.  As students, they saw the imperfect humanity and experienced a few really bad teachers.  By reframing the debate into anecdotal stories, people can focus on the bad teachers they have and conclude that teachers suck.
9. The union sucks.  There, I said it.  The NEA offers their endorsement like an over-eager suitor who is seeking an abusive relationship.  Instead of protecting teachers from the punches, they've paid politicians to take a shot at everything teachers hold sacred.  "Hey Arne, here's some cash.  Go ahead and support the full-scale firing of all teachers in one school.  Oh and blame us.  Complain about how hard it is to hire teachers.  We'll just give you more money."  I dropped my union membership the minute that they supported Obama.  Were they choosing the lesser of two evils?  Perhaps.  But why are we choosing evil in the first place?
10. People are hurting and they need to punch back.  It feels like the teachers didn't take as huge a hit in the bad economy.  The truth is that many lost their jobs and faced salary freezes.  But, ah, they have pensions.  Those bastards! It doesn't matter that we pay ten percent of our check into state pension.  It doesn't matter that when the economy was booming, no one complained that we weren't "bearing the economic burden" of a bull economy.  It doesn't matter that we are still one of the lowest paying professions for the level of education we earn.  None of that matters, because we have a pension.  And when boomers have lost so much of their own 401k's, a teacher is a far less threatening punching bag than a transnational bank.

 

I've seen some horrible video footage of police brutality in the Occupy Wall Street march.  The truth is that I don't blame the cops entirely.  They are not there to maintain safety (they would have stormed Wall Street themselves before the bubble burst) but to maintain order (and the real question is "Whose order?")  The cops exist for "crowd control."

Control.

The situation is out of control.  Yet, the truth is that neither side "lost control," because neither side ever had any control.   Both groups are victims, trying to do what's right, trying to make a difference, fighting for what they believe to be justice.  Both sides grow angry and scared with the loss of control regarding the picture that they had in their minds.

*     *     *

Joel is telling me about his day in school.  I try and listen intently, pretending that I am learning, for the first time ever, the intricate details of first grade.

Micah interrupts and I remind him that he'll have a chance to talk next.  As Joel continues to share stories from the playground, Micah stands on the dishwasher.

"Get off that!" I yell.  It's not a scream.  It's not a red-in-the-face moment, but Micah puts his head down and says, "I wasn't breaking it. If a four year old can't stand on a dishwasher, it's not well-constructed."

The night continues this way.  Brenna dumps clean laundry on the ground.  Micah and Brenna knock down all the toys.  Joel draws pictures with permanent marker and it leaks onto the kitchen table.  All the while, I'm attempting a stir fry.

It's out of control.  I had this picture in my mind of a clean house and a nice meal and a relaxing evening for Christy.  She's an amazing woman and I want to give her something tangible and I feel powerless.

I walk into the bedroom later and hand her the stir fry.

"They're out of control," I tell her.

"They're little humans, John.  You can't control them.  If you try, the best you can get is compliance.  If you want them to trust you, they need humble leadership."

My tone changes.  I drop my plans.  I drop the mental picture I had held in my mind.  We read books and tell stories and clean up leisurely.  I lose control in all the right ways.

*     *     *

My worst moments in the classroom occur when I feel the need to control.  I power up and hide behind my title.  I have this perfect image in my head of what a class should look like (sometimes I even tell myself that these are "high expectations").  I'm afraid of an administrator seeing a disorderly class or kids not passing the test or a whole class discovering that I lack the ability to get them to behave.

So, I power up in those moments.  I micromanage.  I get sarcastic.  I shame.  I fail to distinguish between order and safety.  I'm not all that different from the cops on Wall Street.  I lose control in the worst way possible at the precise moment that I am trying to maintain control.

But counterintuitively, when I can be humble and honest and relational; when I can lose the perfect picture of the ultimate classroom; it's then that I am able to build the positive community that surpasses anything my mind could have conjured up.

 

thanks mom and dad for teaching me how to build a home

Awhile back, I heard a man describing the need for "quality design" in education.  He compared it to building a home. I nodded my head when he described the need for a floor plan and he made sense when he talked about the need to have experts paying close attention to the construction of the home.  However, he began to advocate standardized common assessments and talked about the need to isolate various skills for testing and re-testing.  He said that you don't build a whole house at once, but you build in stages.  "The connections don't come together until the end."

After awhile, he began defending the use of Galileo tests and the need to have everyone on the same page.  I was lost.  I tried to track with him, but it was hard.  It no longer seemed to fit the home-building metaphor.

I thought about how I would build a home.  I would probably hire a team of architects, engineers, contractors and sub-contractors.  I'm thinking they would spend hours planning ahead.  They would take time on the foundation and constantly assess the reliability of the frame, the drywall and the plumbing.  But they wouldn't tear it down every three weeks, just to measure it and then start from scratch again.

Then I remembered that I've never built anything with my own two hands.  I haven't the slightest clue how a home is built.

*     *     *

So, I'm hanging out in the garden, ripping apart the soil and preparing it for the next season.  I tell Micah that he's "tough as nails," but he tells me that I'm wrong.  Nails are always being pushed around by the hammer.  Maybe I could be "tough as a hammer" or better yet "tough as ants."  Joel tells me a story from school and Brenna randomly names all the items that she can think of in an ocean.

Although I love this garden and the back yard and the physical location that we dwell within, I'm struck by the distinction between house and home.  If education is anything like building a home, then it has to be a mystery.  It has to exist within paradox.  All the talk of design and construct and plans and what not make little sense when I'm hanging around in the garden.

The truth is that I don't know a thing about building a house, but if I know anything about building a home, I know that it's a mystery of love and humility. If education is like building a home, then there aren't easy metrics and the plans are messy at best and the learning happens through relationship rather than construction.  

 

If it doesn't make sense at first, look harder. 




If it's seems like there's nothing written, it's no accident. There are no free apps.  I know, I know.  Some of them don't cost a penny.  I get that.  But they aren't free.  Not really.  Corporations use "free" in order to sell something.  Apple sells more products.  Google sells more advertising.  App-developers offer "free" with the goal of selling a nicer version.  Often, freeware developers have a goal of selling customized consulting and IT development. 

Even open source comes with layers of cultural, social and political systemic thinking.  Regardless of geography, every medium develops in a context and that context comes loaded with socio-cultural layers. There is a cost to every application.  Sometimes it's environmental.  Other times, it's social.  But it always costs something.

Perhaps we shouldn't be looking for "free" apps at all. Maybe we need to switch to a paradigm that says, "What is the cost?" and "What is the trade-off?"  Perhaps instead of saying, "Is this free?" we need to ask, "Is this worth it?" Or better yet, "What does this mean for our shared humanity?

 

A Sample from a Documentary on Globalization

I will be co-leading a documentary project with an ELL fifth grade classroom.  One thing I'm realizing is that my process is a bit of a mystery to people.  This post might be a no-brainer waste of time or it might be helpful.  But I thought I would take some of the common questions I get about student documentaries and answer them all in one post.

Why should teachers consider having students create a documentary?

In my experience, documentaries are an engaging, creative way for the class to do authentic research, writing and speaking.  It's a truly multimedia framework, but it doesn't require a one-to-one student to device ratio.  However, it goes deeper than that.  When students create a documentary, it becomes a chance to express their individual and collective voice and becoming creators rather than consumers of information. 

What criteria do you use for the topic?

I explain to the class that the topic must be specific enough that we can present it in ninety minutes, but broad enough that we can find enough relevant information.  From there, the class negotiates the topic ideas and we eventually decide upon it through a democratic process. 

What if the topic doesn't fit the standards?

I approach it as a chance to teach language arts standards.  Other skills include: 

• Questioning strategies: critical thinking, inference, clarifying questions
• Research: inquiry questions, primary and secondary sources, source construction, validity, data analysis using multiple methods (online text, newspaper articles, magazines, books, live interviews) 
• Oral fluency: accuracy, expression, pace when they recorded their scripts
• Reading skills: compare and contrast, cause and effect, etc.
• Analyzing persuasive text: bias, loaded language, propaganda 
• Analyzing expository text: facts, opinions, main ideas
• Analyzing narrative text: elements of literature, sequencing, 
• Analyzing functional text: following directions in trouble-shooting, analyzing environmental text connected to the topic
• Technology criticism: questions about editing (such as "How do people change on camera?" or "What are the dangers in collecting and constructing truth?"), visuals, amusement ("How does this medium shape the message?") and intellectual property (such as Creative Commons images)

But what if the topic seems shallow?

I had a group that wanted to do Coca-Cola.  What began as a fairly dull "history of Coke," became an analysis on childhood obesity, cultural imperialism, mass media in globalization and several other subtopics.  

What type of a framework do you do to keep it organized?

After developing a topic, students join groups based upon sub-topics.  They conduct research and complete their "product" in an ongoing cycle of research-creation.  Each group has to complete interviews, create a video and compose a picture-with-audio video (think annotated slideshow like Ken Burns). I ask the groups to monitor their own progress and then I check up on the progress throughout the process as well. 

Do you have an overall timeframe?

I tend to spend a full semester on it, blending parts both in-class and out-of-class.  Here is the way I organize it:

• Phase One: Planning
• Students negotiate a topic
• Students research sources
• Students brainstorm people to interview
• Students practice using quality questioning strategies
• Small groups form and develop sub-topics
• Small groups develop essential questions
• Phase Two: Research and Creation Cycle - this phase can be really chaotic and messy, but it almost needs to be this way to let it work organically
• Students conduct research using multiple methods (the research chart works well for this)
• Students reflect on the process (tech criticism, summarizing, etc.) on individual blogs and on a class-wide blog
• The whole class engages in discussion, dialogue and debate regarding both the content and the methods of presenting
• Groups begin completing interviews, developing skits, creating smaller videos and writing / recording a script
• Phase Three: Editing
• Students edit smaller videos to post on the blog and then edit their small group portions (typically about ten minutes a piece)
• A small group of students stay after school to create a unified "look" for transitions, titles and music.  

What do students typically include in the final product?

We stretch the boundaries of documentary, I suppose.  Students do interviews, picture-with-audio, sketch comedy / satire, puppet shows, neighborhood videos, stop-animation and short videos.  Some of the videos have shocked me in their creativity.  These are pieced together into a larger narrative that the class organizes together.

Does it require extra work of the teacher?
Honestly, it does.  It requires some good organizational / systems thinking, which can be difficult for me.  However, after learning the ropes on the first few, it's getting easier. 

 

Joel and I kick a soccer ball back and forth. I promised him that we would play after Micah and I finished building our castles.

I kick the ball toward him and he shouts out to me, "I have two kids in my neighborhood who are in first grade, but I don't get to see them."

"Are they in a different class?" I yell back.  He moves closer and lobs a short kick my direction.

"They're in the brown class," he says without any filter.

"What's the brown class?"

"It's the class with the brown kids and the brown teacher.  I thought it was Spanish, but one of the kids speaks Muslim.  There are some kids who are really dark brown.  You should see it," he informs me.

"Muslim isn't a language.  Islam is a religion," I begin to correct him, but I notice that he's completely lost.  How do I explain the definitions of Islam and Muslim, religion and culture and language?  I don't. Instead, I say, "Never mind."

He kicks the ball back to me again.

"What do you think about the brown class?" I'm tempted to teach him the correct terminology: Latino, Persian, African.

"It feels wrong.  I'm kind-of brown.  Look," he points to his tanned skin.  "It's a light brown.  Kind of orange."

"That class is the ELD block," I tell him.

He stares back at me in confusion and steps away from the soccer ball.

"It's because they're still learning English," I explain.

"But Muhammed speaks English," he tells me.

"I know, but the state thinks they need to focus on learning new words," he says.

"I'm still learning new words," he says.

"Me, too," I answer.

"It doesn't seem right to have dark brown and light brown classes," he tells me.

"You're right, Joel.  It's not right at all. That's called injustice and as you get older you'll have more opportunities to fight it."

Someone once said that kids are not color-blind so much as color-kind, but it doesn't stay this way forever.  Kids learn to internalize what is homogeneous as being better and over time they will begin to see what is normal as what is right.  I can teach him polite terms for dark and light brown and soon racial injustice becomes an issue of manners rather than ethics.  Or I can let him stumble around in uncomfortable terminology and develop his own moral reasoning of racial and cultural injustice.

 

Can't we repurpose the factory?

Lately, it seems that teachers have been compared to slave-drivers, prison wardens, thieves and child abusers.  Yes, I've read about the industrial nature of schooling.  Honestly, I agree that there are some real issues with compulsory schooling.  But prison? Really?  How many people who make that comparison have ever known a loved one who spent time in both?

People can slam schools all they want. They can slam the system and complain about industrialization.  They can make charts comparing the similarities (walls, cafeterias, lack of free movement, design, etc,) But just as I don’t oppose home learning (as opposed to homework), I don’t oppose an alternative method of education within the confines of the school.

The social and cultural realities are that my students have parents who work two or three jobs and they simply cannot un-school or homeschool. I don’t get to choose my students nor do they get to choose me. We don’t get to chose standards, either.

But . . .

I can do documentaries, independent projects, murals, blogs and all kinds of learning that they find interesting.
I can advocate a humane, meaningful relationship to replace traditional discipline.
I can shift my pedagogy to problem-based and project-based.
I can do away with grades and homework.
I can encourage free movement.
I can have honest dialogue that leads to small acts of liberation.

Some would point to me and say that it’s simply a “minimum security prison.” And at that point, it’s not worth it. When we disagree on metaphors, it’s pointless to have a conversation. Maybe it is a prison. Maybe. But if it is, I would hope that a seed can grow under the industrial pavement and something organic is happening inside a place that is designed to be artificial. I would hope (and perhaps I am naive) that authentic learning can happen anywhere – even within the prison walls. I would hope that if we are stuck in a box, we can repurpose that box.

If it is a prison, don't we need compassionate people working quietly to subvert it?  Don't we need a few more Andy Dufresne bringing art and voice and beauty to a place that is so often at war against such things? 

Photo Credit: Stephen Davis

 

I don’t assign homework and I haven’t for the last four years.  It’s been a slow journey, because it runs against a very powerful ideology within the United States.  Here are ten reasons to abolish homework:

1. Young Children Are Busy: If a child cannot learn what needs to be learned in a six hour day, we are expecting too much of a child. We are creating a jam-packed hurried day without a chance to play, reflect and interact. Adding hours to an already busy day is absurd.

2. Older Children Are Even More Busy: So if younger students need a chance to play, the reality is that many older students are busy with extracurricular activities,

3. Inequitable Situation: I have some students who go home to parents that can provide additional support. I have others who go home and babysit younger siblings while their single parent works a second shift. I have some who don’t have adequate lighting, who constantly move and who lose electricity on a regular basis. Call those excuses if you want. I’ll call it systemic injustice instead.

4. Kids Need to Play: My son loves school. He loves the chance to learn to read, write and think in a way that is different from how I engage him. However, when he comes home, he needs to ride a bike, throw a ball or climb a tree.

5. Homework Creates Adversarial Roles: It is possible for homework (or rather home learning) to be a positive force. However, when a parent is stuck as a practitioner of someone else’s pre-planned learning situation, it becomes an issue of management.

6. Homework De-Motivates: It is possible to provides students with meaningful learning experiences after school. However, if that’s the case, why make it mandatory? Why not say, “I offer tutoring if you need help” or “here’s an idea of something you might want to pursue on your own?” When I was in high school, I wrote pages upon pages of poetry, a novel (never even told an adult) and countless short stories. It was, on some level, self-directed homework. And honestly, I would have allowed a teacher that I trusted to provide feedback. However, if the process had been formalized, I would have kept all of that even more underground.

7. Homework Doesn’t Raise Achievement: I know Marzano looked at one study and concluded that homework works. However, Duke University’s study (by Harris Cooper) concluded that homework does not increase achievement and it often decreases it instead. I spent some time looking at the “studies” regarding homework and they all point to a correlation rather than a causal relationship between homework and achievement. The bottom line is that the research is sketchy at best.

8. Most Homework Is Bad: Most homework recreates school within the confines of a home. So, instead of having children do interviews, analyze a neighborhood or engage in culinary math, the traditional approach involves packets.

9. Homework Teaches Bad Work Habits: I know this sounds crazy, because it’s precisely the reason that so many people give for offering homework. However, homework doesn’t teach good study habits. It teaches kids to study, because they have to rather than need to. Similarly, homework doesn’t help children become hard workers, because the work is not self-directed. Want to watch a child work hard and take ownership of learning? Watch a child build a bridge for fun. Let a child read a book for fun (without the bribery of fried dough) and see just how hard a kid will work when there is a meaningful goal. Hard work is a product of motivation. It is an internal drive. When we a parent steps in an makes a child work hard, the work ethic diminishes.

10.The Wrong Focus: Homework is precisely that: work at home. The goal is often increased achievement. The bigger question is whether we want achievement or learning. If the goal is learning, homework kills the desire to learn.

What I Advocate Instead:

1. Emphasize the idea that learning can and will happen naturally at home or elsewhere in a child’s world.  Visit a skate park and watch the learning that happens.  Spend some time watching kids develop new games in the neighborhood.
2. If parents really want homework, let teachers give workshops (might be a great time to bridge the gap with homeschoolers / unschoolers by doing a co-teaching workshop) on how to engage children at home in authentic learning.
3. Provide ideas and support for students who are interested in doing more.  If a teacher had said, “Hey, I’d like to meet with you on that novel you’re writing,” I would have met one-on-one or in a small writing circle.
4. Treat homework as an extracurricular activity: Students in my class voluntarily do homework when we create documentaries.   They take pictures, film interviews, complete community surveys, work on neighborhood ethnographic studies and volunteer with local charities.  The key here is that it is not graded and is treated as an extracurricular activity.
5. Ultimately, we need to tackle injustice.  If parents can’t be home with kids after school, there is a systemic flaw that needs to be addressed socially, culturally and politically.

Photo Credit: yet another very cool picture from Stephen Davis

 

Instead of pejorative language, we should try building bridges.

The following is a satirical interview with an un-father. I am not against home-schooling and alternative schooling, but I'm writing this post to point out the absurdity of some of the metaphors and points being brought up on a very popular "innovative" blog.  I have some good friends who un-school and home-school and the crazy thing is that they've never told me I was a thief or a slave-driver.  The cool thing about real dialogue (the kind that doesn't resort to finger-pointing) is that we have both changed one another's practices.   So this isn't an attack on alternative schooling. It is, however, an attack on the crazy rhetoric and twisted logic used to attack teachers.


Can you describe your journey?
I started out with un-schooling but quickly realized that it wasn't enough.  The home itself is a cancerous social institution meant to reinforce power structures and dehumanize children.  So, I was reading Ayn Rand's Anthem and thought, "that's the only solution.  I dropped my children off in the middle of the city, where they wouldn't have to worry about the paternalistic mother-father unit spying on them and stripping them from freedom.

Why didn't you just become a more open dad?
Look, I was abused as a child.

I'm sorry to hear that, but it seems possible that others were not abused?  Some adults have fond memories of their moms and dads. 
That's because they were indoctrinated into a false belief that their parents loved them.  I've come to realize that all fathers were abusive.  Ever met a dad who never once raised his voice at his child?  It's the nature of the relationship.  It invites abuse.  And that's the problem.  Look at our society.  Parents are so bad that we have created government agencies to deal with the problem.  Why can't we see the solution is to get rid of families altogether.

Why not improve families?  Why not get rid of spanking and time-outs instead?
The problem is the home itself.  It's a prison.  What is a kitchen, if not a mini-prison cafeteria?  What is a bedroom if not a cell?  Think about it.  Both have walls.  Both have rules.  Both strip away the right to roam free-range.  Just yesterday, I saw a parent pull a child from the road in the name of "keeping him from the cars."  How will a child learn to avoid getting hit unless we let that child run into the street?

So, why not work within a family to change things?
Parents are, by nature, paternalistic.  They feel they need to protect their kids.  Indeed, the language of "my" kid demonstrates the flawed thinking.  They are slave owners.  They are prison wardens.  They are thieves, stealing a child's freedom in the name of "what's best for the child." It's a broken institution.  The family itself is dying.  I say, let it die.  No, let's beat the snot out of it so that it dies faster!

Is it possible the nuclear family has something to offer a child?
Look, man, there is no middle ground.  There is no chance for dialogue.  We are hurt.  Family equals cancer and the only way to deal with it is to cut it out entirely. Did you know that the nuclear family as we know it developed during the industrial revolution?  It was patterned after a factory?  Parents used to hit their children.

How are your children doing?
They're not mine.  Remember, I disowned them.  Which is the only solution.  It's fight or flight and the battle cannot be fought.  When it's soul genocide, the only solution is to liberate and run.   But to answer your question, my son is being mentored by a very cool, edgy street pharmacist and a cool social club, where they all wear matching blue outfits and paint street art initials on the walls of restaurants.  It's science and art.  It's Banksy meets a naturopathic healer.  I'm excited for him.


Photo Credit: Stephen Davis

 

I realize that this isn't a new idea, but I thought I would share it anyway.  I enjoy giving non-verbal, non-linguistic writing prompts.  It's simple.  I show a picture and ask students to write.  Students choose the genre, the topic, the type of writing, the pre-writing (or lack thereof) and post it to their own blogs. 

I typically give students forty-five minutes for the activity.   Sometimes students write poetry, others dialogue or a story.   Some choose a traditional article or a persuasive piece.  Occasionally students delve into functional text.  A few brave souls will create a graphic novel or write out the outline of what becomes a podcast (there is often far more writing there than they originally expect).  

For me, the benefits have been:

• It's Personal: I get a chance to learn which styles of writing my students prefer along with which types of pre-writing they choose if they are not forced to follow school protocol. 
• Motivation: Students typically start the year hating writing.  I'm not sure why.  However, in the midst of this activity, almost every child is engaged and interested.   
• A practice in writing fluency:  In other words, students aren't stuck with tons of editing, revision or pre-writing.  They simply write - often longer than they had originally expected they would.  
• Creativity: They learn to be creative within limitations.  
• An increased level of autonomy:  Instead of giving more choices, I limit the choice (one picture) and offer more freedom.  

A Sample

I wrote the following after looking at a picture that my friend Quinn the Business Bohemian chose. It's a work of fiction. (I promise I haven't abandoned my faith) 

"You still keep the chairs out there?" she asks me with a tinge of hope.

"It's a memorial."

"I see," she says. But she doesn't. She doesn't see it at all.

"People use the term 'lost' to describe it. He was my closest friend. It was a slow and painful death. I mourned. Lost is a word for car keys and smart phones. I didn't lose anything."

"But I thought you said it wasn't real?"

 "Reality is perception," I hide behind Wittgenstein. Now there's a man who hasn't let me down.

"The relationship seemed so real at one time."

"Tell me about the ritual again," she says. I can tell she wants to save me. Not to earn Jesus points or to feel better about herself. To her, this is all real. She can't fathom the finality of death. She hasn't held onto her son, watching the morphine drip, listening to the beeps and buzzes and machines telling you "he's still alive" when he's already slipping into the oblivion.

"I used to sit at the chair and imagine God was sitting with me. Not behind me or far from me or above me or whatever. Just there. Sitting in that chair. I couldn't pray with my eyes closed. I'd think of the Cubs or my to-do list or shards of porn. I couldn't keep a prayer journal, either, because it felt like I was writing to myself. But I'd sit there in that pre-twilight phase, where the whole world seems magical and the rays of light would fall through the trees and my God, it all seemed so real at that moment. Always. I'd point it out to him, 'Hey Jesus, check out that view. I think it's beautiful.' Then I'd imagine him saying, 'Me, too.' And that would be it. I could never sing praise songs. Sappy love songs before a really bad PowerPoint slide and untuned clashing guitars. But here it felt real. Always. And then, it just disappeared. It had been an illusion.  A trick of light.  Lost. Yeah, maybe that's the right term after all. Lost."

"Can we maybe both sit there?" she awkwardly gestures.

I nod my head.

"Sometimes when God feels like a fairy tale, I find that he's hiding inside the people around me," she continues.

"Tell him it's a pretty sick game of hide and seek," I snarl back.

 We sit alone on the chairs, sharing stories of childhood. Brother and sister again.  The light moves into the magical phase and then fades so slowly that I can't pinpoint the moment it's gone. God, I wish the light would last. 

"Jess, I didn't step away from the light.  You know that, right?  I just looked up one day and it was gone."

 

"This can't be right," Joel tells me.

"Why?" I ask.

"The answer is just there.  You don't have to think about it," he tells me.

"That's because it's McGraw-Hill, Joel.  You don't know them and they don't know you.  So, you know what they do?  They make easy work like this."

"Oh," he tells me.

"Dad, they did this wrong," Joel points out.

"Why's that?" I ask.

"Look at the picture," he tells me.

"I am."

"See, it can't be a nap," he points out.

"Why's that?"

"There's a moon.  You don't take a nap at night."

"Is it possible to see the moon during the day?" I ask.

"Yeah, but I think they meant for this to be the nighttime."

I can't control if my son gets worksheets.  I can, however, encourage him to think critically about the worksheets.  I'm guessing McGraw-Hill has fact-checkers to double-check their spelling.  I'm also guessing they don't spend enough time reality-checking their work.

 

What did I do during my week away from Twitter? 
Pretty much everything I do without Twitter, just with a little extra mind-wandering, more doodling and maybe a little less distraction. I didn't write more, run more or watch a foreign movie.

What did I miss out on? 
Not much. I had the same types of conversations I have on Twitter, but I was limited by time and place. I didn't miss Twitter as a medium, but I did miss the people I've met on Twitter.

What does this tell me? 
This proves to me that Twitter is an everyday part of life. It's a place I like to be, but it isn't home. It's a method of communicating, but it's nothing as vital to me as blogging.

What does this have to do with teaching? 
Sometimes techies gush about social media as a transformative tool. This week reminded me that it hasn't transformed much of my life, much less my approach to teaching. It has, however, become normal -- and maybe the normalcy is precisely why it's powerful. When the novelty fades and I find myself drawn toward it again, I am reminded that the place/tool of Twitter has a place in my world.

So what about the whole transformative thing?
I'm realizing that it's the relationships, not the medium, that make Twitter powerful.  I have met people who have completely changed my thinking on various subjects.  Some are loud advocates for a particular issue (thanks Joe Bower) while some argue with subtly and nuance (thanks Stephen Davis) and yet both men have changed my approach to teaching.

 

I rarely promote specific blogs and blog posts here.  However, this one is too good to pass up.  It's Michael Doyle's post about being a doctor versus being a teacher: Pediatrics vs. Teaching.

 

When I was a kid, I hated the stories of our Founding Fathers.  They were like the stories of Greek gods, except without the imperfections inherent in the inhabitants of Mt. Olympus.  Not too different from watching singing vegetables try and explain a violent, imperfect story like David and Goliath.  Things changed in college.  Enticed by the promising counter-narrative of Howard Zinn, I soon realized all he could offer was a smear campaign telling my how unheroic the Founding Fathers had been.

Neither narrative fit the words penned by Jefferson, Hamilton or Adams.  It felt as if both the patriotic propagandists and the critical revisionists both had daddy issues with the Founding Fathers and as a result I could never get a nuanced, human picture.  Instead, the men had become cartoons - one suggesting T.J. was a He-Man, the other demanding we Posterity place him in a vault within the Castle of Gray Skull.  Meanwhile, the letters themselves were often emotional, nuanced and fluid, revealing both beautiful ideas and the dark side of cognitive dissonance.

So, on an impulse, I pick up Founding Brothers, assuming I'll sift through another propaganda piece, leaving the Founding Fathers as proper nouns, enshrined in ideological monuments, inaccessible to a postmodern man.  Two chapters into it, I get a sense of nuance, of paradox, of the humanity in the men who stomped around an emerging nation wearing whigs and tight pants.

I find myself identifying with both the pros and cons of Madison's pragmatism or Jefferson's idealism.  I find myself connecting with the loneliness of Adams along with the tenderness between him and his wife. Moreover, I'm making sense out of my world and my identity, recognizing that the Founding Fathers both shaped the American psyche while also reflecting both the positive and negative aspects of a shared national identity.

*     *     *

I'm in a staff lounge when a teacher says, "Are we supposed to have them make personal connections?"

"I don't know.  I don't even think that's a reading strategy. It's nice.  It's a great byproduct of reading, but it's not a strategy."

"I'm not sure it will be tested.  How do you test that?  I'm not going to spend my time teaching personal connections when they can't read as it is."

"I know.  I need kids increasing in fluency.  I think all this mumbo jumbo about personal connections is why they're not reading more."

"It's like circle time."

"Exactly."

She's right.  Making personal connections is not a reading strategy.  It doesn't belong on the laminated bookmarks next to clarifying questions, visualizing or summarizing.  The truth is that personal connections go far beyond the how and into the why.  They cut to the issues of identity and belonging, beliefs and motivations.  Whether it's a narrative, an article, a story, a poem, a functional text or a persuasive piece, the text is useless if I'm not making a personal connection.

We do a disservice to students when we treat personal connections as a strategy to use so that they can eventually do well on the test.  The real test is whether any text relates to a student's life.  Ultimately, that's the only reason someone will ever read and internalize anything.

 

Few Updates:
I've added a ton of resources and sketches to this blog.  So, if you're reading this in a reader, you might want to check those out.

August 28, 2011
Cooperative Catalyst: Nine Reasons I Quit Listening
Education Rethink: It's Time to Privatize Our Families

August 29, 2011
Education Rethink: Kids Already Own Their Own Learning

August 31, 2011
Education Rethink: The Paradox of Parenting

September 2, 2011
Cooperative Catalyst: Fiction As an Act of Healing
Education Rethink: A Note From Your Dad

September 3, 2011
Education Rethink: Interview with a Teacher: Jeff Russell

 

The following is an interview with Jeff Russell (@jrussellteacher).  It's the second in a series where I ask teachers about their first year of teaching.

1. What is one thing you wish you had known going into your first year of teaching? 

It's hard to limit it to one. There's a big part of me that wishes that I could have known that I could make mistakes, but I really wish that I had known that my master teacher could make mistakes. Second semester, under the advice of another teacher working at my school, I requested a transfer to another teacher. My original one was leading into a dead end and was trying to paint the picture that I was the root of the problem (sounds like bad teaching, right?). Considering it was my credential program experience I wish I had known that I could do more than grin and bare it. I wish that I had known that I should have come in with expectations that should have been met.

 2. How has your philosophy of education changed throughout your career? 

 That is HUGE. Reading your books has honestly been helpful. Education, when I began, was about feeding unwilling, ungrateful kids knowledge that they likely did not want. Now my philosophy has shifted - dramatically - to guiding my students in their exploration of learning and developing a love for the process. We often say that we teach the way that we learn best and not the way our students learn, but that wasn't even true for me. I taught the way I learned in college and, to be honest, I almost hated college. You won't find many people more cynical about the experience. I need to do better than that for my students by allowing them to do better for themselves.

3. What advice would you offer in terms of classroom leadership / management? 

 Classroom leadership is far more important than classroom management. Management is there when a correction needs to be made. Leadership guides students to make the right choices along the way, that way they need far less management. If you make students feel comfortable and respected they will feel more at ease to open themselves to their learning. Manage less. Even lead less. Let students take the lead. You'll be there to guide them to their path if they get lost (their path, not your path).

 4. Why did you become a teacher? In what ways did the system either confirm these reasons or fight against these reasons? 

I became a teacher because of experiences that I had in high school. I worked in my school's theatre department as an actor, lighting designer, set builder, you name it. Along the way I began teaching what I had learned to other students. It made me feel really good about myself and I couldn't get enough of it. I gave up lunch and after school time to do it. What is interesting is that 5 years of under grad and 1 year of college made me forget all of the brilliance of teaching - trusting students to make decisions, to understand through trial and error, to figure things out on their own. It took me 3 years of teaching and my PLN to figure it out again. 

5. What were some of your fears going into your first year of teaching? Were these fears valid? 

Fear of failure - it's always reassuring to hear that 50% of your profession burns out or gives up in the first 5 years. Invalid. I may not make it to year 5 at this point, but it's a job market issue. If I could afford it I would continue to teach for free.

Fear of disappointment - if I needed too much help, would it seem as I though I was ineffective? Would I get to keep my job if my humanity showed through? Invalid - I'm human, and EVERYONE knew it, regardless of my best efforts to hide the fact.

Fear of administrators - I didn't understand their purpose - and to be honest, many of them don't. Administrators should not be working punitively, they should be evaluating in order to identify areas for growth. Then, they should find ways to facilitate that growth. I just thought they were there to judge me. Therefore, whenever they were around I put on the dog and pony show. An illegitimate assessment at the time. Now when they come in I ignore their presence because what I'm doing with/for my students is generally too important to interrupt. Valid and invalid - depends on the administrator. Just like teachers, some are better than others.

*     *     *

If you're interested, I just released A Sustainable Start: A Realistic Look at the First Year of Teaching.

 

Dear Joel, Micah and Brenna,

Thank you for reminding me that learning involves the senses.  Thank you for reminding me to feel the grass beneath my feet and look into the sky above my head.  Thank you for teaching me that I'm never too old for wonder and that life is never too busy to slow down and look and listen and smell and hear. Most of all, thanks for reminding me of the power of touch.  Your high-fives and hugs in the morning are more powerful than you can ever imagine.

Love,

Dad

*     *     *

If you're interested, I just released A Sustainable Start: A Realistic Look at the First Year of Teaching.