Month: February 2011

Things I Know 39 of 365: Leave it to Dana

You’re only as good as your last haircut.

– Fran Lebowitz

Dana usually cuts my hair.

She’s a smoker. She’s from Jersey. She was married once. She realized she didn’t love him as much as she needed to and it ended early. Now, she’s got a serious long-term boyfriend. She swears they’ll never get married, but they’ll never break up either.

She told me all of this whilst cutting my hair.

That’s no small task.

It’s a mess up there.

Childhood scars and cowlicks. Not pretty.

Dana, though, navigates it each time with perfect aplomb while telling stories.

I soak it up.

She makes it look so easy.

From shampoo to dusting the strays off my collar, not a break in conversation, save for the odd “Look down.”

Let me tell you, it’s not as easy as she makes it look.

The first time I tried to cut my hair myself was a little over a year ago.

I was officiating the wedding of some friends that afternoon and decided I needed a little trim.

Yes, the fact I chose that particular moment to try my hand at hair cuttery probably speak volumes as to whether or not loved ones should trust me with their nuptials, but we’ll move on.

It did not go well.

An hour later, I was sitting in Dana’s chair recounting a boldfaced lie about how my roommate had sworn she could cut hair, but had freaked out after the first pass with the clippers. Dana believed not a word. For he briefest of seconds, I’d considered fessing up, but realized the slap in the face it would be to tell her I was so pompous as to think I could perform her job without any training.

Dana patched me up as best she could and sent me on my way. She warned me it would take time for the mistakes “my roommate” had made to be corrected, but she’d plotted the course. For my part, I made certain all wedding pictures featured my left side.

It was silly to think all I needed were the tools and I’d be able to use them with the same finesse as someone trained and experienced in a profession in which I had no experience.

The idea I could try my hand at a profession in which someone was certified was a foolish one.

That it never occurred to me I might need to learn from those who had come before me or value the expertise of those currently practicing was almost unthinkable.

I’m glad I don’t have to worry about that in education.

Things I Know 38 of 365: I don’t know my neighbors

Come and knock on our door.

– Don Nicholl

I tripped into a twitter “conversation” tonight on “21st Century Literacy Skills.” I probably sounded like a jerk, but I didn’t mean to.

No, let me start somewhere else.

The individual is helpless socially, if left to himself…If he comes into contact with his neighbor, and they with other neighbors, there will be an accumulation of social capital, which may immediately satisfy his social needs and which may bear a social potentiality sufficient to the substantial improvement of living conditions in the whole community.

Thus wrote L. Judson Hanifan as quoted by Robert Putnam in Democracies in Flux.

The thing is, Hanifan, who coined the term “social capital” was writing in 1916.

Almost a century later, we’ve repackaged and digitized the problems Hanifan was seeking to address in his writings.

We have invented and populated countless online communities, and we continue struggling to come into contact with our neighbors.

We have been an intensely socially connected people for hundreds of years. To think otherwise is to conflate the problem.

The skills we need more than ever are the skills Hanifan championed – the ability to meet your neighbor, work toward an understanding of one another and build a reciprocal relationship with one another. This work is difficult.

It always has been.

If I were to knock on my neighbor’s door tomorrow in an attempt to build some sort of mutually beneficial relationship, I’d be hard-pressed to know where to start. By many measures, he and I should have easiest go of building common cause. The politics, infrastucture, weather, sidewalk upkeep, general neighborhood happenings all make us the most likely of allies. I know his name is Robert. Most times we pass, he can’t remember mine. I know there are other people in his house, but I don’t know their names or how their connected.

If you and I are friends on Facebook, think of how much more I can know about you in 5 minutes than I know about Robert after almost two years of being neighbors.

In reverse, think of how much I won’t know about you after 5 minutes of Facebook creeping.

I have access to more of the almost 7 billion souls on the planet than ever before, and I’m still connecting with those I most easily understand.

Online spaces give me the easier access to those of similar minds but different circumstances. Our causes are common, but our realities remarkably different.

I am linked to you, but we do not belong to the same club.

We’ve been here before. We have struggled with these problems. We like to pretend they’re new.

Writing of the popular rhetoric concerning the decline of social capital in the United States, Putnam writes, “Public perceptions of decline may be deeply influenced by such rhetoric and, as in decline of religion, we must exercise caution in assuming that there was actually a golden age when things were better.”

If nothing else, Hanidan’s writings point to this idea: Helping people learn to connect to those within their reach and leverage those connections is not a 21st Century Skill, but a human one.

Things I Know 37 of 365: I am uncool

Popular is the one insult I have never suffered.

– Oscar Wilde

It was an off-the-cuff remark a few months ago. One student was giving me a hard time about something and I was giving it right back.

“Chase,” said he, “you think you’re so cool.”

“Oh, no,” said I, “I definitely know I’m not cool.”

The class laughed.

I wasn’t joking. I’m not cool.

That’s a thought that’ll stick with ya.

For a while in middle school, I thought I was cool.

I remember the day in eighth grade when I learned the truth.

We were still given recess right after lunch. As the heads of middle school, this usually meant the eighth graders milled about the track aimlessly – training for when we went to the mall.

It was a fall day. The kind of fall day when you could see your breath.

I got outside and found my group of friends huddled in a circle at the far end of the track. Reaching them, I realized they were smoking. About 9 kids, sharing one cigarette. I walked away.

Something big had happened. They’d powered up to the next level while I kept an eye out for a pick-up game of tag.

I’ve held my uncoolness since then.

This comes not from a place of shame or inferiority, but one of self-awareness.

I’m totally uncool, and it’s one of my greatest assets.

In class as a teacher, I can dance or use an accent or give a kid a hug without fear of losing cool points.

In class as a student, I get to be a student because I don’t have to worry about the balance of cool and nerd. A question pops into my mind and my hand hits the air – at times, yes, waving like I just don’t care. (See, that was even more uncool.)

And I know there are those out there who will argue learning is cool and nerds are cool and how dare I suggest you can’t have a healthy appetite for learning and be cool at the same time. But, there it is. That nerds are cool is a myth propogated by the uncool in an attempt to subvert the language. See, nerds got game like that.

I’m probably not supposed to leak that one, but I’ve been in the same room as Bill Gates. He’s not cool. Super smart. Wicked savvy. Not cool.

Gates is a welcome reminder the eighth grade smoking ring has its own incarnation in the adult world. He’s also an excellent example of the primary benefit of avoiding that ring.

While the cool people like Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama must worry about staying cool, the uncool like Norman Borlaug, Amy Sedaris, Tina Fey, Joseph Priestley and Dorris Kearns Goodwin get to do cool stuff.

And that’s the virtue of being uncool in the classroom. I can try new ideas, new projects and lessons never raising any suspicions or risking losing and non-existent cred. Being uncool affords me the opportunity to have some pretty cool ideas.

Things I Know 36 of 365: We’re really good at not teaching kids to sing

I celebrate myself, and sing myself.

– Walt Whitman

Each day in fifth grade, as the bus arrived at school, I hoped everyone would break out in song. I didn’t have a particular tune in mind – at least not one that I recall now.

I just thought we should start singing the way the people did on stage when my grandparents took me to the symphony. Mayber “Carmina Burana” or the “Ode to Joy.” Something simple.

“Let’s sing,” I’d sometimes say to whichever friend was sitting next to me as we stood to de-bus. No one ever did.

Last summer, working with educators in South Africa, as we closed our week of workshops, the teachers would sing in celebration. Everyone, to a person, would sing. We’re talking harmonizing and vocal percussion.

These same teachers who at lunch were bemoaning contract negotiations and class sizes and access to technology, they sang. They transformed from teachers I could drop in to any faculty lounge across the country, to the cast of Glee.

I’ve never felt as foreign as in those moments.

This was what I’d hoped for every bus ride to school. It was happening around me.

But years of education had taught me I didn’t know how to sing.

So I stood sort of clapping arhythmically waiting for what I’d hoped for all those years to be over.

I mean, what would you do if everyone on staff broke into song at your next staff meeting?

When Jabiz Raisdana said he’d be taking my students’ writings and cobbling them together into a song, I thought, “Oh, I could do that.”

When he said, he’d be recording it, I thought, “Oh, no never, hu-uh.”

Worse still was the look on many of my students’ faces when I read them Jabiz’s suggestion that they might contribute a recording of a chorus of the song – fear and panic.

I’m not entirely certain when we teach students they can’t sing. I haven’t found where that particular standard resides in the curriculum. Whatever best practices we’re using to teach students not to sing (or play instruments for that matter) we should really start to employ them in the teaching of math and reading. We’re really good at it.

Classy: What we mean when we talk about creativity and collaboration (get in on this)

I didn’t plan any of the below. All I was doing was looking for some creativity-inspiring journal prompts. What resulted has no lesson or unit plans. I’m not sure where it’s going or what it will become. I am certain, however, that something beautiful started in my classroom Wednesday.

January 31: Jabiz Raisdana posts the results of his first month participating in The Daily Shoot.

February 2: I see the post and comment on how impressed I am with the act of creation Jabiz is embarking on each day. I ask if it’s ok to use some of the photos as journal prompts in my class. Later, he comments back welcoming the use of the photos as inspiration. I create an assignment on moodle that says:

The students file in and log in.

The result of a 2-hour delay due to weather, our abbreviated class is spent mostly trawling the photos and creating.

I enjoy answering the question of “What are we supposed to write?” with “Whatever you want.”

February 3: Jabiz posts a letter to my students, explaining the process up to this point and what their comments mean to him. He poses some important questions about collaboration, creation and connection. Most importantly, he challenges them:

So what of it now? What happens next? Well that is up to you. I hope that this introduction can be a way that we continue to explore the power of art and words and connections. I was a born teacher and student, I would love to continue to teach and learn from you. Are you up for it?

Before sharing the post, I pull up Google Earth to add perspective to the distance between Philadelphia, PA and Jakarta, Indonesia (half the world).

Additionally, Jabiz comments he’s culling their creations to create a song, and promises to share it soon.

I share the link to the post on moodle and invite the students to share their answers to Jabiz’s questions.

Students begin to comment.

February 4: Students continue to comment in answer to Jabiz’s creative challenge. The comments build off of the thinking of the other students. Later, Jabiz responds to each idea, asking questions and offering commentary. At the end, he posts the lyrics of the song composed of my students’ lines of poetry.

I start a google doc and share it with Jabiz, trying to give form to the students’ suggestions.

Jabiz posts an initial recording of the song to his blog, raising the ante:

Here you go SLA, my song to you. What will you do with it? Download it. Remix it. Add your voice to it. Set it to images. Create a video. Rap it. This version is only a draft and is not even close to being “done.” Tear it up!

SoundCloud is blocked within the school’s filter wall. All I’m able to do is show the students what Jabiz has written.

It is enough.

We begin a new brainstorming session in both sections of the participating classes as to where we can take this from here. The students build off of their original ideas. My writers want to write more, my documentarians want to document the creative, collaborative process, my musicians want to rework the song or create something new. My linguists want to ask Jabiz’s ESL students to post comments to photos we take in their first languages so that my students can learn these other languages. The ideas are bubbling over.

Later, Canadian teacher Bryan Jackson records his own version of the song, which Jabiz posts to his blog.

By the end of class, one of my students, Luna, has taken it upon herself to copy the lyrics of the song and create a wordle. She then visits each picture and copies all of the students’ comments to create a collective wordle of the initial words Jabiz’s photos inspired.

Today: You jump in and create something.

Things I Know 35 of 365: Toupées gross me out

Give me a head with hair, long beautiful hair
Shining, gleaming, streaming, flaxen, waxen.

– Hair

I’ll likely be bald in the next decade or so.

Already, my hairline has begun the retreat from the front of my scalp to safer ground.

If the common mythology of genetics is to be believed, it’s my mother’s father that best evidences my follicle future. Unfortunately, I only met him once when I was very young and have a swiftly evaporating memory of those moments.

So my hair memories are connected to my father’s family.

Running along this reasoning, things are not looking good.

From time to time, I’ll shave my head because stopping for a haircut seems more troublesome than it’s worth.

On the rare occasion those photos make it to Facebook, my sister Kirstie invariably comments, “You look just like dad.”

And, as much as I love our bald father, I’ve been mocking his baldness since my adolescent boldness made it seem appropriate.

So, I’ll be bald.

That’s my future.

I own that.

I only bring this up because, tonight at dinner, I was reminded of the alternatives.

A dinner party of six took their seats near the window. As they raised their glasses and sang the first verse of “That’s Amoré”, I noted something askew about the hair of one of their party.

Namely, it wasn’t his own.

A kidney transplant, I can defend. A blood transfusion, I’m on board. Want a heart transplant? Sure. I like to grab things.

But, hair?

C’mon.

It’s hair.

I get the importance of identity. I get the cultural implications. I get all that.

Still.

Taping another person’s hair to my head strikes me as gross.

Not only that, I can’t come to terms with such an obvious denial of who I am.

That man sat at his table, ordered a bottle of wine and an appetizer in a disguise I have to believe was fooling no one.

I must give credit to the others in there party.

Sometimes, I imagine the first day of fake hair. Do people bring it up? Do you? Are we supposed to treat it as though nothing has happened?

“Hey, Larry, that a new suit?”

And Larry soaked it up. He purchased a game of make believe and asked everyone with whom he came into contact to play along.

And they did.

And I looked on.

As much as I love the rat’s nest atop my head, when it’s gone, it’s gone.

I contemplated my future tonight.

It’s not devoid of choices.

It is devoid of attractive choices.

I’ll be faced with a choice in the next 20 years.

Barring tremendous scientific advances, I’ll choose nature.

I’ve chosen it in all other aspects of my life. Why should my head be different?

Things I Know 34 of 365: The importance of asking ‘What can I do?’

We must aim above the mark to hit the mark.

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

People have been asking me for money while I shower.

All week.

Over and over again, they’ve been begging. It carries on while I’m brushing my teeth and tying my shoes.

And as much as I listen to public radio, I’ll admit I’ve never donated money to them.

This week, I’ve been considering it.

A sucker, right?

More this week than any other, I’ve found myself answering aloud as the pledge drivers spout their rhetorical questions.

“Do you listen to public radio on a regular basis?”

“Yes.”

“Do you value the programming of public radio?”

“Yes.”

“Would you miss the programming of public radio if it were to disappear?”

“Yes, yes I would.”

“Can we count on you to become a member to support the programming you value on this station.”

“Ummm…”

And that’s it, isn’t it? I run face-first into inertia.

“…I mean I could, but it seems like you guys are doing fine without me.”

Or, as Ebeneezer Scrooge put it, “Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?”

Last night I watched a film about a school in Kenya that selected 40 boys per year from the Baltimore public school system to live and study at a boarding school in Kenya or the final two years of their middle school experience. The school’s goal was to prepare the boys to gain admission to any Baltimore high school to which they applied once they’d completed the program.

I watched the documentary with an admitted air of, “I could do that. In fact, I could probably do it better.”

Today, the angel or the demon who was asleep on the opposite shoulder last night woke up to say, “Yeah, but you aren’t, and they did.”

Last Friday, ethicist Neeru Paharia explained the effects of distance on our sense of involvement, connection and need to act. A sense of immediacy is elicited the greater our proximity to the source of need.

The key to answering “What can I do?” is ignoring the proximity.

As Karl Fisch said Sunday, “All our students are local. All our students are global.”

It’s tough stuff, this global citizenship. More difficult still is possessing even a glimmer of understanding of the connectedness of it all.

That kind of glimmer led to the first and second Red Scares. It is the impetus behind the Global Millenium Development Goals. It is the terror that keeps the Minutemen patrolling the U.S.-Mexico border and it lays at the nexus of the argument in favor of the DREAM Act. Fathoming that connectedness led to the creation of the Peace Corps, City Year, AmeriCorps and a litany of other organizations in which thousands invest themselves each year to create or repair the systems necessary for sustaining and building.

To understand connectedness is to beg the question.

What can I do?

Answering the question has its own evolutionary path.

From “nothing” we move to “not much.”

Gradually, this becomes “something.”

As we learn and experience, we say, “I can do this.”

For many, the evolution ends here.

For the brave few, the answer becomes, “A little more.”

And, in the best of people, “Anything.”

Tomorrow, I’ll shower with cell phone in hand.

Things I Know 33 of 365: These are not my secret thoughts

Whatever you think, be sure it is what you think, whatever you want, be sure that it is what you want, whatever you feel, be sure that it is what you feel.

– T.S. Eliot

February 4, 1994 I started keeping a journal.

In between moves a few years ago, it was uncovered. I pulled it from a box in my basement thinking I’d include an entry as part of this writing.

I can’t.

I can’t betray my own trust.

Twelve-year-old me wrote those pages for the posterity of us. They serve as an anchor to memories of past love, broken friendships, broken families, personal successes.

Most of all, those entries were where I was trying to figure out new ideas I’d stumbled upon or had thrust upon my brain.

Reading the entries, I can see the genesis of some of the ideas I consider at the core of who I am today. Those nascent ideas are between me and myself. Some of their more recent iterations, though, have found their way to publication. Some are still in the thought lab.

While I was keeping that journal, I was also a contributor to the student section of my local paper. Before media became social, the State Journal-Register created a space for young writers to document the world as it appeared to them and share it with our community. I wrote about ideas about which I was more confident – school lunches, music, that time a mouse got into my bedroom.

I started to find my public voice in those pages.

I still keep a journal.

This is not it.

It is worn, has been dumped in the Colorado River and stolen by a baboon. My journal holds the lint of my days and the figments of stray thoughts. I note the world and my questions about it. My opinions start there. Like the first journal 15 years ago, it holds my secret thoughts.

This is a different space.

Here, I place the thoughts I’ve played with. I’ve pushed and pulled them and shared them with those I trust to do the same.

By the time I’ve written them here, I’ve already argued against the thoughts I publish. They’re the fourth or fifth or seventeenth drafts.

Online writing should be that. It should never be the space my brain vomits with hopes the Internet custodians will clean it up.

My worry over digital footprints extends beyond avoiding embarrassing pictures of myself online. It covers embarrassing or incomplete thinking online as well.

As I write myself into existence, I work to make it the better version of myself.

PD: Ask teachers to teach their passions

Pete Rodrigues’s recent post on building capacity inspired me to comment. As is often the case, my thinking didn’t cease with the posting of the comment.

Here’s the comment:

I’ve started wondering about the different approaches to determining the topics of PD.

I get that the current model runs on the idea of either running sessions on the newest fad or those areas of need identified within the educational setting.

What about this? What if you went to your teachers and said, “I’ll give you an hour to develop a PD session around something about which you’re passionate.”

Of course, they’d have to keep in mind the need for differentiation.

Still, think of the untapped energy that could come from such a question.

I haven’t stopped thinking about that energy.

What if, for an hour, your school’s art teacher led a lesson on painting, your choir teacher took an hour to teach the importance of harmony, your anatomy teacher helped the faculty through a dissection.

This wouldn’t be teaching about teaching, but actually teaching. Literally teachers as students.

This need not be limited to classroom passions. If an algebra teacher wants to teach on the beauties of pop music or social activism or Chopin, so be it.

Pete’s reply raises the important factors of culture shift and compensation. I see them as difficulties, but not impossible ones.

Start small with lunch groups. PD leaders can model by switching up and teaching a session on what they’re passionate about. Ask students to model and their passions around video games or texting or reading or music or sports or whatever those crazy kids are doing these days.

More than requiring a culture shift, I’m thinking passion-based PD would act as a catalyst for a culture shift.

Things I Know 32 of 365: You’d beat me in a fight

A wise man can learn more from a foolish question than a fool can learn from a wise answer.

– Bruce Lee

I was in fourth grade the first time I got hit by a girl.

We were lining up to go back inside from recess when Monika, a girl who I knew of but didn’t know punched me in the face.

I only point out that she was a girl because I’d been told there were rules about hitting and there were rules about hitting girls and there were rules about hitting back. I’d never been hit before, so the shock of the experience greatly impaired my ability to follow the appropriate line of the retaliatory flowchart.

I didn’t do anything.

This is not to say I ran.

I didn’t do anything.

I stood there and wondered why this person had hit me. We’d had little interaction inside or outside of the classroom, so all I could do was guess she was angry and thought I had something to do with it.

I wasn’t angry. Just surprised. A little sad that she was so angry. I’d never been that angry, and imagined it must have taken a lot to make her do that.

That’s been my M.O. since then.

When Matt, the kid who lived up the street and had parents who I thought were inexplicably mean, road his bike to the end of my sidewalk and yelled at me to come off my porch and fight him, I yelled back, “Why?”

When some intoxicated dudes cornered some friends and I on the Quad one night in college and punched my friend Andy in the face while yelling some pretty hateful words, I had questions.

So, I turned, stared at them and yelled, “That was stupid! Why would you do something like that?” Clearly, not suspecting this might be our reaction, they cursed.

“What kind of answer is that?”

They ran away.

I’ve seen a few fights as a teacher.

Once the parties are separated, my questioning always starts the same, “Why were you fighting?”

“He said such and such.”

“Ok, but why were you fighting?”

“It made me feel this and that.”

“Ok, but why were you fighting?”

I’ll rephrase and redirect my questioning as long as it takes. Infallibly, the students don’t know.

I don’t get fighting. So, I keep asking.

Self defense, yes.

Making a point, sure.

Fighting, though, just feels like something we should be done with.

Newton gave us all the reason we should need with his third law. Fear of equal and opposite reaction kept the Cold War oh so chilly.

Socrates is my Burgess Meredith. The dude knew how to battle without fighting his enemies. When they were throwing punches, Soc was landing blows of logic they never saw coming or knew landed until it was too late and they were in agreement.

If I must be a warrior, let me be a warrior of the Socratic tradition.