Tomorrow, four years of being a Philadelphian come to a close.
It has been an amazing journey. I have learned much. I have much to learn.
Tonight, I sat with friends on the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and watched Rocky.
It was beautiful.
Thanks, Philly.
Month: June 2011
Things I Know: 173 of 365: What books I would make me read
Laura asked last night at dinner, “What’s is a book that has impacted you?” She was looking for a book that shaped who we are. She was looking for a book that we needed to read for us to have continued on the course to who we are.
I loved the question.
I loved it even more when Christian re-imagined it.
“If you met you, what book would you make sure you read?”
The discussion deck was stacked as three of those around the table were English teachers.
The list, as much of it as I was able to copy down, is below. It’s given me much to add to the Kindle for the summer. And I will be adding as many of these books as I can.
I’m not adding them because the plots sounded interesting (though they did). I’m certainly not at a loss for additions to my reading list. I’m adding these books to the to-read list because they were the answer to a question of what thoughts and ideas people I find interesting and thoughtful consider to be formative and critical to their foundations of self.
I like understanding (or at least working toward understanding) how people come to their ideas and beliefs.
Packing to move, I’ve been sorting through the books on my shelves, the books others bought for me because they thought they were the right fit. Many of them have been a good fit. Many of them have brought me good stories. Still, I am mindful as I read these books that I want to like them because I want those who know me to be right.
The question of what you would make sure you read works better for me. Another person’s assumption of what I’ll like is not nearly as interesting to me as learning what they’ve liked. I read those books with a different eye. I read those books to get to know the person and to get to know the book.
So, here’s the list. Maybe some of these titles will make their way onto your summer reading list. If you’ve got the time, share the book that you would make sure you read.
(I’ve been expanding the list as I collect titles from those I run into at ISTE. I should probably stop before the list becomes too unwieldy. Then again, I’m still curious.)
The Gangster We’re All Looking For by Thi Diem Thuy Le (from John Spencer)
The Third Wave by Alvin Toffler (from Chris Alfano)
Losing My Virginity: How I’ve Survived, Had Fun, and Made a Fortune Doing Business My Way by Richard Branson (from Chris Alfano
Final Rounds: A Father, A Son, The Golf Journey of a Lifetime by James Dodson (from Dean Shareski)
A Conspiracy of Paper by David Liss (from Bud Hunt)
The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde (read all four books) (from Bud Hunt)
A New Culture of Learning – by Douglas Thomas (from Vinnie Vrotny)
Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century – by G. Pascal Zachary (from Vinnie Vrotny)
Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman (from Christian Long)
Griffith and Sabine: An Extraordinary Correspondence by Nick Bantock (from Christian Long)
Trinity by Leon Uris (from Laura Deisley)
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (from Laura Deisley)
The History of Rasselas Prince of Abissinia by Samuel Johnson (from me)
Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie (from me)
Still Life with Woodpecker by Tom Robbins (from me)
I’ll say it again. What book would you make sure you read?
Things I Know 172 of 365: The container matters little if at all
Your essay should be typed, double-spaced on standard-sized paper (8.5″ x 11″) with 1″ margins on all sides.
– Purdue Online Writing Lab
In freshman English, Mrs. Miller would not accept any papers with “the fringies on them.” If we were turning in an essay from a spiral-bound notebook and hadn’t torn along the perforations, we were required to remove the “fringes” before submitting our work.
Not removing said “fringes” would result in the loss of a letter grade for our overall score.
Far beyond writing in a spiral-bound notebook, I find my current classwork governed by the exacting standards of the American Psychological Association. Margins, I have learned, are to be 1” at all times.
The quality of my writing will, of course, begin to degenerate were my margins to shrink or expand beyond the 1” mark.
A few months ago, unthinkingly, irresponsibly, stupidly, I submitted a multi-page document without changing the default margins from their 1.25” measurements.
Luckily, my stalwart instructor was paying attention to what mattered most and dutifully docked three points from 20 for my final score.
Each of these examples serves as a reminder of the standard training at the K-12 and collegiate levels meant to bring about an understanding of the importance of the container.
Sunday, I witnessed another example.
Following the demonstration of the systems and structures his state had worked to put in place to facilitate discussions of professional learning for otherwise isolated or siloed teachers, a presenter opened the floor to questions from the assembled masses.
“Who moderates the discussions?”
“Who hosts all this?”
“What’s the name of the program you’re using?”
“Who’s paying for the installation?”
One after another, the masses queried the fringes.
They wanted to understand the container, not the contents.
They were consumed by the tool, not its purpose.
For nearly half an our, we’d been privy to an explanation of how teachers were working together to share knowledge, build practices and deepen learning for their students. Where a road of conversation had been paved before us, we admired the curb rather than asking where it could lead.
I understand the fascination with the containers of our learning. We’ve been trained from the early years of our educations to believe there was a correct way and an incorrect way to store our learning – be it double spacing or indenting.
What few of us ever heard or were encouraged to learn was that knowledge and skills are not solids with corresponding intellectual tupperware in which we should store them for the correct moments. Instead, these things are the soup of learning. They are fluid and malleable – shifting to fit the shapes and structures of the situations to which we apply them.
While container certainly matters for audience. As it is important when considering the end goals, no situation has a set container. Some fit better than others.
A document margin of 4.5 on all sides would interrupt the transmission of message.
But no iteration of the communication of learning should preclude the next iteration of learning.
Containers, should fit our purposes, allowing thinking we pour into those containers should shift according to need.
Things I Know 171 of 365: Teaching is no slap in the face
I touch the future. I teach.
– Christa McAuliffe
A lady sat across from me today and told me the story of how she came to be in the classroom this year.
She began the year in a role that had her coaching other teachers in her school. Out of the classroom, her goal was to help her colleagues improve their practice.
Not unlike many school districts across the country, this teacher’s school experienced a workforce reduction due to budget constraints.
In October, she was asked to enter the classroom again.
I listened sympathetically as she explained her growth as a teacher had been put on hold this year as she attempted to create order and structure in a classroom that had already seen two other teachers in as many months of school.
As she explained the difficulties of grappling with unexpectedly teaching two separate disciplines, I understood her frustration.
What I could not abide and what has me seething long after our conversation was the way she described the call to return to the classroom.
“It was like a slap in the face.”
No. It wasn’t.
It was a call to return to the classroom. It was the entrusting of the children of others into your care. It was continued employment in the face of layoffs of colleagues.
It was a chance to make an impossible world possible for a child. It was the call to teach.
And, yes, it was difficult and a divergence from the plan at the beginning of the year. Yes, it required growth and stress and sacrifice.
I have and will continue to spend time and energy working against systems so broken that they produce schools and teachers like this.
Today, though, those systems were not sitting across from me.
It is far too difficult to criticize teachers today and receive the title of champion in return for your efforts.
In a moment in time when so very little is expected of teachers, when a teacher is simultaneously the most important factor in the classroom and the least trusted, the profession could do without maligning from within.
Teachers across the country who want nothing more than to build classrooms of caring, learning and inquiry next year are searching desperately for places to teach.
Meanwhile, children are being packed into larger and larger classes, receiving less and less personal attention.
That is the slap in the face.
The fact that this woman has a place to teach, that is a gift.
Things I Know 170 of 365: There are places we haven’t been
As the right of each sentient species to live in accordance with its normal cultural evolution is considered sacred, no Star Fleet personnel may interfere with the normal and healthy development of alien life and culture. Such interference includes introducing superior knowledge, strength, or technology to a world whose society is incapable of handling such advantages wisely. Star Fleet personnel may not violate this Prime Directive, even to save their lives and/or their ship, unless they are acting to right an earlier violation or an accidental contamination of said culture. This directive takes precedence over any and all other considerations, and carries with it the highest moral obligation.
No contact. No twitter. No Hulu. They wouldn’t even appreciate Netflix’s transition from discs to instant streaming.
Earlier this week, the Brazilian government confirmed the existence of a newly-discovered uncontacted Indian tribe.
The announcement’s been taking up space in my brain since I read the story.
There are still places we haven’t been. Right here, on Earth, there are places we haven’t been.
Deep in the Amazon, the tribe is estimated to consist of approximately 200 people who “live in four large, straw-roofed buildings and grow corn, bananas, peanuts and other crops.” They would have no idea how to select a toothbrush or whether to buy the roll of paper towels that comes in regular sheets or the roll that rips off in smaller pieces.
I envy them.
I’m not saying I want to give up my life for theirs in some sort of Freaky Friday scenario.
What I want is to know the tribe is there, to know we are waiting for them to make contact with us and to know they will remain protected.
Even that sentence seems strange – “to make contact with us.” Us? I don’t at all expect this tribe will someday call me up. I completely realize their first contact won’t be with Americans at all. Still, their existence creates a “them” in my head different than that of the “them” of Canadians or Portuguese.
The people of this tribe are foreign in a way I can think of few people in the world as foreign. They are completely unknown.
Uncontacted.
As much as I enjoy living in a global community, I sometimes think of the possibility of being uncontacted.
Last year, after an intense month working alongside educators in South Africa and directly on the heels of a busy school year, I attempted to go uncontacted. I went camping for a week.
It was only a week and even then I was documenting my trip so that I could have stored up contacts to share once I was able.
My life is continuously defined and refined by the contacts I’ve made. My friends and colleagues are the result of the hard and soft contacts I’ve made over the last decade. What I like is the idea of the ability to pause those contacts from time to time.
It’s the feeling a friend of mine was hoping for when she deactivated her Facebook account to study for an upcoming exam.
Contacts are difficult to break.
My friend learned that when her boyfriend called her the day after her deactivation wondering why Facebook had told him they were no longer dating.
I think that’s what I envy most about this tribe. Being contacted, being in contact means being accountable to those to whom you are connected. Sometimes, that contact can be taxing.
As curious as I am about this uncontacted tribe, I’m perfectly willing to wait for them to pick up the phone (or whatever we’re using when the time comes).
Things I Know 169 of 365: Pages doesn’t auto-save
Dear Mr. Jobs,
I recently learned your company’s Pages software does not include an auto-save feature that one might find in Microsoft Word, Google Docs, Open Office and most other word processing programs.
That sucks.
In the future, if you decide to continue to exclude this feature from your products, might I suggest applying a sticker to the product proclaiming:
Attention, while you will most likely enjoy your user experience, know that we’ve decided to buck the trend established by the rest of the industry and failed to install an auto-save function.
We apologize to any of you who might, oh, say type 15 pages of your master’s thesis and then mistakenly click “Don’t Save Changes” thinking it applies only to the top document open and not to both open documents. Or, you know, anything similar to that.
Thank you, Mr. Jobs, for your timely consideration.
Also, I apologize for taking your name in vain and any comments I might have made about you being a smarmy, turtleneck-wearing SOB. Those were hurtful words uttered in the excitement of learning of your product’s features or lack thereof.
Kindly,
Zac Chase
Things I Know 168 of 365: It was a good year
It is not so much the example of others we imitate as the reflection of ourselves in their eyes and the echo of ourselves in their words.
– Eric Hoffer
I listened more this year. I built structures into the classroom that led to better listening. Putting a point on it, I’d say the theme of my classroom this year was definitely choice. In ways I wasn’t ready for, comfortable with or even cognizant of when I started teaching, I opened up each unit plan and class activity to choice. Not hippie, “Do what makes you happy” choice, but choice of activities and ways of showing work that spoke to what I needed to know as a practitioner and also let our students speak to what they wanted as learners.
Reading in my G11 classes this year was opened up to texts of choice. Students were free to choose the books they wanted to read throughout the year. The first semester was successful in that more students were actually reading than any other class I’ve taught. But, because I couldn’t hand out the same assignment or ask the same text-based questions of all 32 students, I needed to create new structures to capture the information I needed to make better choices about instruction.
This is where collaboration really set in. Mid-way through the year I got to sit down with Larissa and our two interns from the Penn Literacy program. They helped me come up with a plan for information gathering that led to the collection of student information in one-on-one, small group and self-reflective spaces. I knew more about my students as readers than I ever have before.
The challenge of the year was grading. I’m not talking grading from a perspective of getting it all done (though that remained an omnipresent challenge). Because of the structures and approaches that shifted in the classroom, my feedback to student work was more voluminous than ever before. The spaces that had been created were spaces for conversations about learning. Still, students wanted a grade. We could have the best conversation about a piece of writing, but a B as the final grade seemed to negate all of that.
In talking to Meredith about it, she suggested no grades until the end of the quarter. I think that’s an interesting idea. I wonder too, if asking the students to grade their own work and then something akin to an artist’s statement explaining the work and their assessment might be an interesting way to go. My role could be that of Agree/Disagree. It still puts the ultimate authority in my hands, but it makes the students part of the process in a deeper, more meaningful way.
Next year, I hope to find dynamic ways to be a part of my advisory.
I hope to still be a part of the conversation about pedagogy and caring at SLA.
I hope to get to experience the capstone process as an outside mentor.
I hope to learn with everyone at SLA from afar.
I hope I get all A’s.
To everyone who was a part of my teaching career over the last 4 years, thank you for making this school a home for me.
Things I Know 167 of 365: ‘I don’t know, but…’ is sexy
It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open one’s mouth and remove all doubt.
– President Abraham Lincoln
Pay attention, because you won’t hear this next sentence from me again. Abe was wrong.
Peter Senge writes, “School trains us never to admit that we do not know the answer, and most corporations reinforce that lesson by rewarding the people who excel in advocating their views, not inquiring into complex issues.”
If this is the case, Senge’s other supposition that business leaders are trained to ignore systems thinking or see issues more deeply because of similar school training, an amazing opportunity exists for teachers.
I struggled with this all through the school year. On vocabulary quizzes, I asked students to use each word in a meaningful sentence to demonstrate their ability to use a word in context.
“Even if you don’t know,” I would tell them, “write something down.”
My mom always said, “If you don’t ask, then the answer is always ‘no,’” and I was attempting to apply the same logic to the quiz.
No matter how emphatically, personally and repeatedly I urged, students left blanks on their papers.
Later, I’d inquire as to why.
“I didn’t know it.”
“You realize, writing anything down gave you more of a chance than leaving it blank?”
“Uh-huh.”
I went out of my mind.
Senge sums up the problem nicely.
My students weren’t showing me they didn’t know the answer. They would have to write something down to do that. Instead, they were showing me they could choose not to write an answer.
Setting aside all I could have done to improve their learning of the vocabulary, let’s focus on what I could have done – what all teachers can do – to improve the rate of response when students feel they are in the dark.
The best answer for my money is giving classroom credence to some variation of “I don’t know, but here’s my best guess.”
“Even if we feel uncertain or ignorant, we learn to protect ourselves from the pain of appearing uncertain of ignorant,” Senge writes.
Certainly, by the time I met them in high school, my students have learned the survival techniques.
Creating a classroom culture that honors “I don’t know” is a difficult proposition. It works against the majority of what students have been taught and what led most teachers to the classroom. We are there because we knew and kept right on knowing until we were charged helping others know.
If our students sense even a fragment of that path on us as we walk in the door, imagine the intimidation they could feel.
A student once admitted to me the reason she hadn’t turned in a single assignment for the first month of class was that she worried nothing would be good enough.
I failed.
Yes, some of this rests in the foibles of the students, but a chunk of it belongs to me. My job was to make “I don’t know,” cool and to set a tone that helped students see value in whatever they created.
Eventually, the student began submitting work, but it pains me to think of what I missed in that month.
The four most powerful words in any classroom should be, “I don’t know, but…”
Things I Know 166 of 365: Packing the unofficial portfolio
God gave us memory so that we might have roses in December.
– J.M. Barrie
I began the packing process today. It’s got me wondering who will carry the memories. If you’d ask me before I would have pointed you in the direction of a hanging folder that’s moved with me through three schools now.
In it are the notes and cards, the projects and essays from students over the last 8 years. I would have told you this was the vault of sorts in which I keep the good stuff.
Packing has proven me wrong.
Every folder or drawer at school revealed some speck of awesomeness from a former student.
Home has the same issues. In the fire box that holds my tax information from years past and documents like the title to my car I found a folder of essays and poems that struck me as such seminal works when they came across my desk that I packed them in a box and moved them with me from Florida.
One note in telltale eighth grader scrawl professed, “You taught me language arts can be cool. And now I want to be a teacher.”
You can imagine the difficulty each of these stowaway memories is posing for the packing. When I leave next week, I’ll be taking with me only what can fit in my car.
Birthday cards from my great-uncle, thank you notes from friends in whose weddings I stood up, my own school pictures – these were tossed out with ease.
The poem from the classically preppy kid who had a witty retort for everything in class but poured verse from his pencil like a stopper had been removed from a bottle? That, and its ilk, sit on my bedroom floor in a pile with fate uncertain.
I realize most of these students have forgotten what they wrote. For some years have gone by without a remembrance that I once taught them.
Still, part of me wants to hold on to all of these artifacts of former personhood as historical markers of the people they have and will become.
“You made such things of beauty and kindness,” I want to say, “And in those moments, you gave what I did with my life more richness than I could have given it on my own.”
These are the most meaningful pieces of my teaching portfolio.
In the end, I’ll pare the collection down. Some night soon, in the delirium of late-night packing, I’ll hold two equally lovely pieces in my hand and make the Confusion decision of what gets kept and what gets dumped.
I’ll have to trust that the story of who each of those former students is now tells the story of who they were.
And who I was.
Things I Know 165 of 365: The system requires the poverty gap
The combined efforts of millions of concerned citizens could do wonders to help the impoverished. The American people are ready for action!
– Barbara Boxer
Writing on the Ed Week blogs, Massachusetts Secretary of Education Paul Reville recently posted about his state’s commonwealth’s move to close the poverty gap for its students.
Of all the gaps, the poverty gap takes up the most intellectual space in my head. Perhaps this is because it feels as though it takes up the least amount of space in the national ed dialogue.
Reville touted the progress being made in Mass. building bridges between social services and schools, working to get students the mental and physical health supports they need in the lowest achieving schools. He specifically cited the Mass. Achievement Gap Act of 2010 that “requires the state’s lowest performing schools to explicitly address, in their school turnaround plans, the health and social-emotional well-being of all students.”
This is a thoughtful and well-meaning requirement. The ends to which the Act attempts to make means have my full support.
I wonder if they have everyone’s.
I wonder if measures like “making provision for counselors or community engagement specialists to be employed full time to connect needy students and their families with supportive services designed to address out-of-school issues that threaten and disrupt student learning” are set to be the norm.
In my last school, when designing a community that could support some of the lowest achieving students from around the district, the planning committee attached one guidance counselor and one social worker per 100 students.
If a student didn’t show up to school, suffered a death in the family or any other event that pushed learning lower on the list of priorities, the school was able to act almost immediately to meet that student’s needs.
I’ve rarely seen anything so dialed in to supporting students’ socio-emotional needs.
These counselors and social workers did more than lighten the students’ loads. They lightened the workloads of teachers as well. Anyone who’s worked in a classroom knows the profession requires more than a mastery of content and its delivery. As the adults many of our students have the most frequent and prolonged content with each day, we are bond to become confidants. Having a guidance counselor literally just outside my door meant I could listen to a student’s problems, provide them with the support they needed in the moment and then connect them with an adult trained specifically to give them the long-term help they needed to come to terms with whatever challenges they were facing.
What frustrated me then is what frustrates me still, my students needed access to those services and supports long before they became low-achieving. At some point in their time in education, they were in schools much larger than ours with many fewer support personnel.
These students, like the students in the schools about which Reville writes, needed to fail so mightily, so loudly and in such high concentrations that the adults in their lives worked to build supports for them only when they had fallen as low as the system would allow.
Failing or underachieving or striving schools aren’t any of those things at all. They are students. Students who we require to fail before we give them the help they need.
It strikes me as wildly disingenuous to suggest any type of test scores were necessary before any district, state or federal office could surmise which students needed these support structures.
All anyone needed to do was ask the teachers.