17 Jan 21 – My Daughter Likes a Book

If you know me, this won’t surprise you, but I treasure reading to my kids each night as they go to bed. There’s a connectedness in reading at bedtime I can’t seem to scrape together during the day. It’s also one-on-one time with each of them, something each of them would like to have, but not necessarily like the other one to have.

While, I love reading to them, neither one of them has shown a great interest in reading beyond the mechanical, “I guess I should learn how to do this.”

Then, Friday morning, my daughter made me cry.

“Do you want to know what we’re reading in class?” she asked as we were driving to school.

I told her yes, and words and ideas burst forth from her in ways I’ve never seen in relation to a book. She turned around mid-sentence to tell her brother he’d probably like the book too “because there’s space in it”.

She pulled it from her backpack to show me the cover. Then, started flipped through pages to find something. Once, there, she determinedly read a sentence aloud. This was the sentence she’d used in her writing about the book, she told me, pulling out her school work to show me where she’d written that same sentence.

“And, I said yard was the most important word in the chapter because, well, the whole thing is about the yards, so that’s definitely the most important.”

She talked about this book for nearly 10 minutes. I’m grateful she didn’t stop to ask questions because I was trying to drive and hold together how proud I was for those 10 minutes.

I didn’t hold it together later. Sitting at my desk, I emailed her entire teaching team, tears running down my cheeks, to let them know what happened. These are the people who have made her feel safe, capable, and smart. She knows she’s protected in the school, and that gives her brain the security it needs to start to learn. What a remarkable thing. What remarkable people.

She likes a book.

I’m not the Tech Guy

(There’s little to nothing you could trust me to do with what is pictured above.)

Let me explain.

Back in August, I started working for my district in a job with the official title “Instructional Technology Coordinator.”

If you look at each of those words independently or together, you’ll note that they can mean all sorts of nothing and even a few somethings if you squint.

What it means in practice is that I enter a school, a meeting, an email thread and I am “the tech guy.”

Now, there’s nothing wrong with being the tech guy. I know and work with many of them, and the things they do astound me on a regular basis. This is, perhaps, the biggest reason I should not be considered the tech guy. When I see actual tech guys at work, I am astounded. This isn’t the kind of thing you’d hope for from a peer, “Wow, you’re doing our job? That’s astounding.”

The trouble is, I know how to do some things with computers. Nothing very interesting. I cannot make a prezi. I cannot code outside of some basic HTML. I cannot do many of the things I’m asked to do upon entering a school.

This starts to wear on a person – really gnaws at the self confidence. I walk in to a situation with a picture in my head about what it is I do, and you ask me to fix your projector. Sure, I’ll play around with the buttons until something changes. And, then, if nothing changes, I’ll show you how to fill out a work order. A tech guy this does not make me.

I’m a teacher.

A few weeks ago, I was working with the faculty of one of our elementary schools. I was helping them to think about how they could have students create and thing using the camera on the iPads they’d be getting in their classrooms. At some point, it was revealed that I am referred to in this particular school as “the bow tie guy.”

This, I am fine with. I wear a bow tie daily. It is a distinguishing characteristic for someone who is still new to the district, and I’m happy to have something that helps folks remember who I am. “Please, please, plesae,” I begged, “call me the tech guy.”

I don’t want to be the tech guy because I am a teacher. I happen, also, to be a teacher who knows how to use more than the average amount of technology in the connecting with, challenging and forging of relationships with students. Still, I’m a teacher.

Call me that.

When I send out an email letting your building know I’m going to be around in the library for a few hours, know that I mean to help you think about whatever technology is available to you and how you can leverage it to move closer to the learning of the day. I’m a wiz at lesson plans, I can craft a unit like nobody’s business, and there are few things I love more than helping folks reflect about their learning in real ways.

This is because I am a teacher. I am a teacher who uses technology.

I make this distinction for one other reason. It is that I am not so separate as “instructional technology coordinator” implies. The more jargon that makes up my title, the less it sounds like I know what I’m doing inside a classroom. More destructively, that jargon implies that a classroom teacher cannot unlock and possess the hidden secrets of technology.

That’s pretty much the antithesis of my job and why I applied for it. If anything, my goal is to remove whatever mental block keeps a teacher for fiddling around with a program she’s trying to use in her class without fear that she’ll break something.

Too often, those blocks lead to sending an email or giving up when a few minutes on a search engine or tinkering just a bit more would have revealed the answer. “Instructional technology coordinator,” sounds like someone who can fix a problem, whereas “teacher” sadly has come to mean exactly the opposite where technology is concerned.

So, I’m changing my email signature and introducing myself differently from here on in. I’m a Teacher Technologist the next time someone asks. And, if I’m feeling a little impish, I might introduce myself as a Teacher Futurist. It’s a little step, but I think it is important, and it will help remind me of who I want to be in my work.

131/365 Trust the Start

My new job has me thinking quite a bit about the flow of systems. For the majority of my career, I’ve been at one end of the educational system – in the classroom – working directly with students and other teachers to make learning and formal education better.

Now, I find myself somewhere in the middle of the system. I’m not in charge of anything, per se, at either end of the system. I support teachers and students and I support the leadership of the district. Sometimes (not often) that support looks drastically different.

I’ve found myself realizing and hoping for a specific string of trust to be enacted and embodied by the district.

It starts like this – Trust that teachers are doing all they can to support students’ growth and learning.

From there, direct interactions should be set up in such a way to give them support they need to do what they feel they need to do to help kids. This would be at the principal level. From there, outside the schools, intermediate district personnel should move to support principals based on the assumption that they trust that teachers are doing all they can to support students’ growth and learning.

If I believe that’s what principals believe, I’m going to be better at my job.

The same assumption is what I hope for those to whom I report. As I move through schools, help teachers and administrators learn and consider new practices, I hope that those in charge of me assume that I trust that teachers are doing all they can to support students growth and learning.

I want others to assume it in the system, and I want those others to assume that I believe it as well.

If we all operate from this believe, if we all trust that teachers are doing all they can to support students’ growth and learning, a foundation is established on which we can build, improve and design pathways to even greater capacity.

Assuming teachers are doing all they can is not assuming that they are doing the absolute best, it is assuming that they are doing their absolute best in the moment, and that it can always be augmented.

If I work with a group of teachers to build capacity around some new tool or practice, approaching our time together from the assumption that they are doing all they can will result in conversations much more replete with respect, listening, and care than conversations based on the assumption they are slacking, skating, or faking their way through the school year.

I want the best for anyone who endeavors to add to the learning, understanding, and choices of students. The best way I can think of to support and work alongside these folks is to trust they are doing the best they can and move from there.

92/365 Teachers Should Probably be Readers

The same way that we must want for adults what we want for students, we must do as adults what we would like students to do.

Particularly – reading.

In the schools we need, teachers not only encourage literacy and learning, but they participate in it themselves as well.

Every school has one teacher who can point to the filing cabinet drawer when you walk into her room. “That drawer,” she will tell you, “has eighth grade in it.” Pointing to the other drawers, she will explain that the lesson plans and overheads for other years are all stocked away in the even that she be moved to teach another grade the next year.

Sadly, many schools have many versions of this teacher.

The high-tech version of this teacher can point to the flash drives with text files and powerpoints archived across grade levels.

Teachers must seek and engage in reading for the same reason we want our students to read – to find new ideas, challenge old ideas, and build on what they already know.

Admittedly, given the papers that need grading, the lessons that need planning, and the resources that need creating, picking up a book about teaching is not the sexiest of out-of-school activities. The right books, though, could mean finding new practices that alleviate the load of traditional teaching.

While toolkit books that preach this or that newest “best practice” can be helpful for a quick top-off when teachers are struggling to figure out how to make their next units of study interesting, they aren’t the best reading. These books are the paperback romance novels of the education world. They offer quick escapes from the problems of practice and don’t ask their audiences to think too much about what’s happening or why.

The education books worth the time it takes to read them, engage teachers in thinking about why and how they do what they do in their classrooms or other learning spaces. Like the best literature, they are complex, thought-provoking, and devoid of easy answers. Readers must also do the work. Dewey, Friere, Lawrence-Lightfoot, Holt, Dweck and many more present ideas about education and schools that ask us to evaluate our preconceptions and remain open to the new worlds they would have us create through out practice.

Admittedly, the time crunch mentioned above is a barrier to teacher reading in the same way the hyper-scheduled student struggles to find time to read anything other than the chapters assigned by his teachers.

Schools can help here:

  • Interested faculty can organize a reading group that meets regularly over a common planning period, after school, or during lunch.
  • In spaces where common interest cannot be mustered, teachers can turn to online spaces like goodreads.com for communities of readers, book suggestions, and conversations about what they read.
  • School leaders who understand the value of common language in building culture can ask faculties to study texts they’ve selected as speaking to the mission, values, and goals of a school in order for all concerned to build an understanding of the common vision of the space.
  • Ten minutes of every faculty meeting could be opened up to faculty members sharing pieces of something they’ve read in the interim since the last time everyone got together.

If we want schools to be temples built to the exchange of ideas, we must create the spaces necessary for those exchanges and we must be constantly working to access, synthesize, and consider new ideas. Reading, though not the only way to access these ideas, can be a strong gateway drug for learning.

Things I Know 349 of 365: ‘What Teachers Make’ is more than it first appears

The first time I heard Taylor Mali’s “What Teachers Make” performed live, it wasn’t by Mali. One of the other students in my undergrad program was a champion on our speech team, and he delivered a stunning performance.

Later, once Youtube arrived, I was able to watch Mali perform the piece as he intended. It was every bit as impassioned and dripping with personal experience as I imagined. I remember showing it to colleagues and shaking our heads knowingly.

Finally, someone was speaking out for us.

I looked the poem up online recently. Watching the performance, it occurred to me how complicated the piece is from a pedagogical perspective. I tear up when he says, “I make parents tremble in fear when I call home:/I hope I haven’t called at a bad time,/I just wanted to talk to you about something Billy said today./Billy said, “Leave the kid alone. I still cry sometimes, don’t you?”/And it was the noblest act of courage I have ever seen.”

And I cringe when I hear the recorded audience cheer after, “I make kids sit through 40 minutes of study hall/in absolute silence. No, you may not work in groups./No, you may not ask a question./Why won’t I let you get a drink of water?/Because you’re not thirsty, you’re bored, that’s why.”

For many teachers, on their first encounter with the poem, discussion turns to its encapsulation of how misunderstood the profession has become.

For me, the poem itself has become a rallying cry for the conversation we need to have about the relics of the professional past to which we cling to proudly and the changes we might be too afraid to make.

Mali has a new book due out March 29 with the same title as the poem. I’m looking forward to reading it – especially considering its subtitle – “In praise of the greatest job in the world.”

Things I Know 290 of 365: Write a teacher a thank you, and you’ll make their day

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be making some suggestions of possible sources of gifts for the teachers in your life. Some will be products for purchase. Some will be ideas of things to make. All of them will be meant to help remember teachers as worthy of thanks.

At each schools year’s finish, I gave the same assignment. Rather than asking my students to write about what they’d learned in the school year as part of some essay that would be far from cherished and not have the time for attention as our other writing projects had, I had them write a letter.

I showed them an manilla folder that travelled with me from my first classroom. “This is the good stuff,” I’d say. “These are the cards, letters, sticky notes and snapshots from kids across the years I’ve taught. On days when I get to the end and I’m pretty sure I’ve screwed all of you up, I read one or two of these. It helps.”

The folder now lives on the bottom shelf of my bookcase. I think of its position as the foundation.

Then, I told my students about Mr. Curry, and how he taught me math in high school and also how to be a caring teacher. I told them about the e-mail I sent Mr. Curry once I was a teacher and realized how much of him was in my teaching. I told them about how he replied and told me it wasn’t nice to make old men cry.

And then I told my kids to think of a teacher in their lives who was their Mr. Curry or who had inspired them or whom they’d like to make proud. “Write a letter to tell them how you’re doing and what you’ve learned.”

And they wrote. They looked up addresses to old schools, addressed envelopes, and sealed their letters inside.

If the teachers were from my school, I got to deliver them and watch as they were read. They were narrative report cards holding only the good stuff – moments of reminders that what they did mattered, and they hadn’t screwed the kids up too badly.

Do that this holiday season.

If you’re a parent, write a letter to one of your kid’s teachers letting them know just how much you appreciate and honor the work they do each day to help your kid (a complete stranger) understand a little bit more about the world and their place in it.

If you’re a teacher, write a letter to one of your colleagues letting them know you see how much they do for your students, your school and your faculty.

If you’re a student, write a letter to a teacher telling them how they helped you learn.

Maybe you’ll be the first entry in their Good Stuff folder.

Things I Know 268 of 365: I loved teacher gifts

A gift consists not in what is done or given, but in the intention of the giver or doer.

– Lucius Annaeus Seneca

One of the things I unexpectedly missed when I moved from teaching middle school to teaching high school were the little gifts from kids (read parents) around the holidays.

Something about a carefully chosen gift from the families I served meant I was doing okay.

Even when I was teaching older kids, it was special to get a card on the day before break with a few sentences letting me know I was cared for.

One family consistently included a gift card to the Trader Joe’s up the block from SLA. More than once, those cards came in handy when I was out of cash or another student needed some money for a meal after school.

For me, any gift or card from a student or parent was a sign I wasn’t in it alone, that the work I was doing meant a little bit more. It meant, when they sat down to think about who they felt compelled to appreciate, who I was in that student’s life meant enough to be remembered.

When I was in school, I remember creating holiday gifts for my teachers with my mom. One year we bought each of them a coffee mug and made homemade hot chocolate mix. I think there was a tea towel thrown into the mix as well. As I got older, I didn’t see why the gifts were important. They seemed childish or uncool. Still, my mom insisted, and I would hall a shopping bag full of small gifts in to dispense just before break.

When I was a teacher and my mom and sister Rachel prepared gifts for Rachel’s teachers, I could empathize with what it meant to be remembered as someone worth receiving a gift. I got that it wasn’t childish, but part of what we do when we want to say to others that they are worth our gratitude, worth our remembering.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be making some suggestions of possible sources of gifts for the teachers in your life. Some will be products for purchase. Some will be ideas of things to make. All of them will be meant to help remember teachers as worthy of thanks.

Things I Know 226 of 365: The way we talk about teachers matters

The long time to come when I shall not exist has more effect on me than this short present time, which nevertheless seems endless.

– Marcus Tullius Cicero

Michael Gersen had a Thursday Washington Post piece dealing with the current Rick Perry/Michele Bachmann imbroglio around Bachmann’s erroneous assertions about the HPV vaccine.

Given the amount of reading from classes that’s filling my brain these days, I’m surprised the column made its way to my browser.

It wasn’t even about education.

Except it was a bit.

In his lede, Gersen mocks Bachmann’s medical and personal health expertise, writing he’d rather hear from “a blunt, part-time football coach — or whomever they draft into teaching health classes nowadays.”

I wish he hadn’t done that.

As a comedian, I wish Gersen hadn’t gone for the easy joke.

As a teacher, I wish Gersen thought about the negative unintended consequences for his direct or indirect audiences when arguing  Bachmann’s rhetoric could have negative unintended consequences for her direct or indirect audiences.

Sure, the current national tenor in talking about teachers hasn’t exactly raised the bar of respect for those in the classroom.

The effects of words like Gersen’s can ripple in several directions. but two possible ripples (I’ll call them the ripples of greatest velocity) concern me the most.

In the first place, one liners or quips of the sort common from anyone looking to rough teachers up for their lunch money work to lower public expectations of teachers. In this instance, it was those people who choose to coach children or teach them the habits and mindsets of healthy citizens whose worth by perception was chipped away.

In a quick move, Gersen added his voice to those allotting permission and acceptance to the idea that any idiot can teach and those who do are the ones we trot out when we want to exemplify people we expect to know the least.

I have a rather low tolerance for ignorance, and some of the most thoughtful, intelligent people with whom I surround myself are teachers.

I doubt I’m alone in that.

Still, any time we orchestrate jokes featuring teachers as their butts, we work at cross purposes with making certain each teacher in the classroom is the best person we can get. Few people will be drawn to the job from which the public expects little. Few of the right people anyway.

If we are to stand behind the research showing an effective teacher as the most impactful factor in a student’s education, perhaps we should start treating teachers with the respect proportional to that impact.

The second ripple of Gersen’s remark, and those of the same ilk, that gives cause for concern is the erosion of good faith of the teachers doing the work Gersen implies is both simple and easy.

I’ve stood before an assembled class of high school students and facilitated discussions of sexual content in the texts we were examining. That alone was a mine field of possible pedagogical missteps requiring constant awareness and dedication.

I can only imagine the awkwardness, resistance, frustration and discomfort inherent in engaging a room of adolescents in a frank discussion of their sexual health.

Put to health teachers next to one another and I want the one who’s been repeatedly made aware we expect the highest standards of care and knowledge as she works to prepare the students in her charge for the increasingly complex interpersonal world they’ll come to know. Give me that any day over the teacher who reads continual negations of the importance of her knowledge and professionalism. The teacher who has come to realize America’s not expecting much from her as a practitioner and caregiver.

The thing that happens to the latter teacher – the we should all worry about as the ripple effects of remarks like Gersen’s – isn’t that the teacher will leave the profession.

No, we should worry that she’ll listen and realize we’re not expecting much.

Then, it’s no long walk to not expecting much from herself.

Things I Know 211 of 365: Unions hold two sets of truths for me

The only sound approach to collective bargaining is to work out an agreement that clarifies the rights and responsibilities of the parties, establishes principles and operates to the advantage of all concerned.

– Charles E. Wilson

Earlier today, I was reading this Daily Kos column from Marie Corfield announcing and explaining her campaign for the New Jersey State Assembly.

I’m not sure what rock I was under when Corfield started making waves last September when she confronted Gov. Chris Christie.

Perhaps I was in my classroom teaching.

To get up to speed, I watched the video of Corfield and Gov. Christie’s exchange.

While I am still no fan of Gov. Christie’s rhetorical style, I did find part of his rhetoric interesting.

In response to Corfield, Gov. Christie says, “I have not lambasted the public school system in the state of New Jersey.” He takes a break there to chastise Corfield for her body language and later picks up, “My lambasting and my rhetoric is directed very clearly at one set of people, and that is the leaders of the teachers’ union in the state of New Jersey.”

It’s an interesting distinction.

I can see how Gov. Christie sees it.

“I’m not against New Jersey schools or teachers,” he seems to be saying, “I’m only against the heads of the teachers union.”

It almost sounds as though his explanation is expected to assuage Corfield’s worries.

Strangely, had he been speaking of the leaders of some of the Philadelphia teachers’ union, it might have come close to assuaging mine.

My first union meeting in Philadelphia felt like a bit of a repetitive kick in the groin of my idealism.

The union negotiates fair wages and equitable labor practices, secures health benefits and paves the road for the retirement or pension fund teachers work toward in exchange for salaries that continue to remain out of step with the services they provide.

In a profession where the easiest thing to do is lose yourself in what you give to your students, the union remained an anchor ensuring teachers didn’t lose the pieces that kept them housed, fed and healthy.

This was the image in my head.

The picture that unfolded in the meeting of thousands of teachers was one unmindful of the best possibilities of what it meant to be part of the union. The tone was adversarial and the words were devoid of the passion for teaching.

My feelings at the end of it all existed somewhere between the cliché about never wanting to see how sausage is made and Grocho Marx’s never wanting to join a club that would have him as a member.

I didn’t turn away from the union after that, though it likely sounds as though I would have. I didn’t even want to.

The truth of what I witnessed in the meeting was no greater than the truth behind the union securing a wage and pay scale long before I arrived in Philadelphia that made it economically feasible to move to and stay in the city. It was a truth no greater than the fact that the union worked to negotiate a sick bank so that district employees could invest their unused sick leave so that they or their colleagues were more secure should they be stricken with a chronic illness. It was a truth that couldn’t overshadow our ability as a site union chapter to govern ourselves in a way that allowed for the structure and schedule necessary for SLA to work best for students and teachers.

Both truths existed and still do.

And this is the piece that makes the specificity of Gov. Christie’s response mute in the ears of many teachers. While I’m certain many, if not all, teachers would denounce one local union head’s urging of member to pray for the governor’s death, when Gov. Christie lambasts the heads of the New Jersey teachers’ union, that’s not what members hear.

They hear the governor attacking those whom the teachers have elected to protect their salaries, the medical coverage of their families and the guarantee of fair working practices.

What’s more, rhetorically speaking, when Gov. Christie allows those with whom he disagrees to dictate his tone, he chooses a road that makes it all but impossible to hear him as a statesman.

Things I Know 187 of 365: Be nice and we’ll work hard

Never look down on anybody unless you’re helping him up.

– Jesse Jackson

A friend recently planted himself firmly behind the idea that effective teachers are the most important factors in student success. In the same breath he said he wasn’t one of those guys to praise teachers and call them the salt of the earth. He works to support kids, he said, not teachers.

It doesn’t work like that.

The two aren’t separate.

If we want healthy schools, places of learning enlivened by vibrant and curious people dedicated to being the best versions of themselves, the systems must support and value all members of those systems.

My morning cup of coffee is better when my barista and the coffee bean farmers in the fields are treated with decency and respect.

I cannot be surprised by a reticence to praise and support teachers when the rhetoric of education paints them so largely as deficient, lazy, undereducated hacks.

Who would dare praise teachers?

Sure, you praise the teacher you know, the cousin or friend of the family who is going into the classroom. They are great. But teachers, in the general sense? No thank you.

Tell teachers the majority are performing poorly and you can’t be surprised when students are performing poorly. I wonder sometimes how many teachers are doing worse right now because they’ve read or heard the rhetoric of education leaders bemoaning the poor quality of teachers.

My friend told me he’d visited a number of classrooms on a single day, to check up on good teaching. Of the 50+ classrooms he visited, not a one held good teaching. Not a one held a teacher at the time. His evaluation was based on whether standards were posted and other measures of the classroom walkthrough. Choosing not to challenge the evaluation, I asked a question I’ve asked here before.

“So, you can name at least 50 bad teachers. Can you name 20 good ones?”

He liked the question and thought I was making his point for him.

I was not.

My point was something else. Too many people are doing well for there to be fewer than 20 effective teachers for every 50 or 60 ineffective teachers.

“All students can learn,” is a popular bumper sticker of regressive education reformers. Pronounced as though a new idea that, once realized, solves so much.

I don’t disagree with it. I question the next ten words.

So long as we’re putting out truisms and bumper stickers to rally behind, let me try one. Let me try one that, coupled with the idea that all students can learn, would mean a sadly revolutionary way of thinking in education.

All teachers can teach.

And, yes, I’ve got my next ten words.