Month: March 2011

Things I Know 70 of 365: It’s okay to go off script

The difference between life and the movies is that a script has to make sense, and life doesn’t.

– Joseph L. Mankiewicz

My friend Rachel acts in a children’s theater company. This afternoon, they performed for an audience of 2-4 year olds and the kids’ parents.

When I caught up with the company afterward, they were discussing the unexpected moments they experienced onstage.

“It was interactive theater,” Rachel said.

As they have been trained by Blue, Dora and the like, the kids were talking to the characters during the scenes. Warning them to look out for the statues moving behind them, calling out the rabbit from a few scenes before who was now a rat, helping the man who could not, for the life of him, count to three – the kids were participating.

I have nothing but the deepest respect for elementary and pre-K teachers. Whatever sentiments were floating in the minds of people who repeatedly replied, “God bless you,” when I told them I taught eighth grade – those are the sentiments I feel toward the teachers of our youngest students.

Though there were characters and props and a stage, Rachel and her fellow cast members were teaching today.

And, they taught well.

“What did you do when they talked to you,” I asked.

“We improvised.”

They responded to the kids, asked them questions and played along.

Each scene ended where it needed to with the kids and parents getting what they needed. The means to those ends were wonderfully skewed from what was planned in rehearsal.

This is the best teaching – knowing what we want our students to learn and drafting a plan for getting them there, but realizing the process must be organic if it is to also be meaningful.

Every question asked or answer proffered by a kid in the audience was paid credence, showing a level of care and validation I hope I can someday replicate even more consistently in my classroom. A key to showing students I care who they are lies in showing I care what they say.

Things I Know 69 of 365: Parents count

Parents are the bones on which children cut their teeth.

– Peter Ustinov

SLA’s Home and School Association hosted their second annual auction tonight. I missed last year’s because of an improv show.

Though dead tired from the week, I made it this year.

I’m glad I did.

Even if every faculty member at SLA had shown up tonight, we would have been in the minority. We were swimming in a sea of parents. It was a great thing.

As much as they carry the genetic and social makeup of their parents with them when they enter the classroom, it’s almost too easy to forget the students I teach are tied to the history of where and whom the come from.

Even with our above-average parent involvement this is true. I’m left to imagine the mindfulness of teachers toward the parents and guardians who raised the students they get to teach in schools around the district.

I think of this, and I worry.

A few weeks ago, I went to a rally focused on calling on Philly’s district office to stop intimidating teachers, make transparent its process for changing school structures and welcoming all stakeholders to the table when thinking about improving education.

Participation was a no-brainer.

Still, when a parent was welcomed to the microphone, I wondered how many parents were in attendance. When the rally concluded and all parents were called on to cheer in support, the noise was less than deafening.

We could be doing more.

Last year, when working with a group of second-year teachers, I suggested the idea of committing to making one positive phone call home before each of them left their schools at the end of the day.

Though one of the teachers thought the idea might have merit, everyone else in the room thought it was too much work.

I was sad.

“I’m not going to look for things just to call home and say a kid did something good,” one teacher said.

I was dumbfounded.

The core of my belief in the classroom is that I should be looking for the good in every student each period of the day. Because of life, this isn’t always possible. Still, it remains a goal. If you look for it, you’ll begin to note the contribution each student makes to every class. If you commit to calling home each night for one student, you’ll look for it.

Looking for the good is what led to me calling Eric’s mom when Eric was in eighth grade.

“He said something in class today that made many of the other students think and ask questions,” I said, “It really shows what kind of thoughtful student he is.”

Eric’s mom began to cry.

After nine years of public education, she was receiving her first positive phone call from a teacher. It made me proud. It made me sad.

I’m certified 6-12; I should never be the first phone positive phone call home for a kid. I shouldn’t be the second or third either.

Though it’s incredibly easy to see my students as separate from their parents, the best educations come from the connecting of parents and teachers in the efforts to help students be more.

The parents see all of who the kids were; the teachers work to see who the kids could be. Together, we form a more solid understanding of who the kids are.

Tonight was excellent. We met as people. This will prove ever-important as we help our students decide on the people they will become.

Things I Know 68 of 365: I got in to Harvard

The school is the last expenditure upon which America should be willing to economize.

– Franklin D. Roosevelt

Two days ago, I got an e-mail telling me my decision was available online.

Forty-five slow-motion seconds later, I was congratulated that I’d been accepted into Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education to study for a Master of Education in Education Policy and Management.

I went for a run.

Three miles later, I’d set a new personal best for the mile and my head was still swimming.

I called my mom and told her the news while my sister Rachel who’s in town for her spring break was standing in front of me.

They yelled in unison. Rachel hugged me.

In the past 48 hours, I’ve completed my taxes, my first FAFSA (I worked through undergrad), and sent my financial aid application.

Today, I told our advisory the news and stressed that nothing was sure.

It’s not.

Money will decide.

I want this – intensely.

Money will decide.

Still, for now, I got in to Harvard.

Things I Know 67 of 365: Hope’s waiting for Lefty

The labor movement was the principal force that transformed misery and despair into [Hope] and progress.

– Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

I’m having a difficult time reconciling some rhetoric.

Unions are big. They are bad. They stand in the way of progress.

They add to the burgeoning bureaucracy of America.

We will save the banks, but break the unions.

Workers, it seems, are not too big to fail.

In education, one of the most oft relied upon arguments against unions centers around teacher quality.

It is the unions, we are told, that stand in the way of removing ineffective teachers from the classroom.

The paperwork, the proof of corrective action, the negotiations, the documentation. We’re told it’s hardly worth it to go through the process to divest bad teachers from the classroom. I mean, all that work just to make sure students are receiving the highest quality education possible. Yeesh.

And yet.

In the course of 21 days, the district has removed from the classroom, held hearings on and recommended the termination of a teacher who gave transit tokens to her students.

I don’t understand.

A teacher loved and respected by her students and colleagues, with no failing test scores that can be traced to her, has been stripped of her classroom in under a month, and I’m led to believe it’s the union that stands in the way of clearing “bad” teachers from the classroom?

Sure, Union President Jerry Jordan promised to fight the termination every step of the way, but I hardly see this as the flexing of political muscle we’ve heard so much about.

Teachers unions are ridiculously powerful, right? I mean, they’re spooky, angry, unthinking powerhouses of collective might.

That’s what I read, hear and see on the news.

Unless.

Unless the teacher hands out transit tokens.

Ignore students, stay in the classroom. Yell at students, stay in the classroom. Insult students, stay in the classroom. Fail to show up to school, stay in the classroom (if you ever get there).

In these things, the union can and will protect you.

Provide students with the means to participate in an authentic act of civil disobedience and a moment in which to use their still broken democratic voices and your voice and your will will be broken.

Give them tokens, and you will become one.

In the teachable moments, the union’s hands are tied.

So, don’t teach the students. Don’t teach the students, and you really give the union something to stand behind and fight.

I’m told the unions are the reason “bad” teachers aren’t fired. I’m told my union will protect me.

Someone’s lying.

Things I Know 66 of 365: English is hard

Viewed freely, the English language is the accretion and growth of every dialect, race, and range of time, and is both the free and compacted composition of all.

– Walt Whitman

“Mr. Chase, am I getting an interim for your class?”

Interims are notifications the district requires we send home if a student is earning a “D” or “F” at midterm.

“No.”

“Ok, good. I didn’t think so, but I wanted to be sure. I’m getting one in math, and I told them, but they understood because math’s hard. If I were getting an interim in English, they’d go crazy.”

And he’s gone and done it.

English is difficult. Really. I swear.

I don’t just mean remembering how to spell “recommend,” “accomplish,” and “necessary” (though that takes a definite level of skill).

English is difficult on a user level.

I struggle with communicating the intricacies of the language to my students. For the vast majority, it’s the language they’ve been learning since birth. Economics, biochemistry, pre-calculus – these all came online later in their development. They are foreign languages.

Not only are they foreign, but communicating in them requires a specificity of detail my students often fail to see in their consumption and production of language.

Though Mark Twain may have said, “The difference between the right word and almost the right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug,” students are often not interested in such precision of language. Moreover, they don’t consider the construction of meaning difficult.

But language is tough. To take an idea from the ephemeral and frame it in with words, send those words out into the world and then process the reaction – that is linguistic chemistry.

I’m not talking what my student could be doing with language; I’m talking about what they are doing with language.

I wish they could see it.

They look at a page with arbitrarily connected ticks and curves, they translate those ticks and curves to individual pieces of meaning, they string those individual pieces of meaning together, they connect those strings to their own experiences and then they store them away to connect to later strings or experiences.

I’m not just saying this is what they do with Kafka or Joyce or Woolf. This is what they do when they read a cereal box.

It’s what they do with one another. They take the laxidasically imprecise language of the colloquial, put it up against more formal internal language charts, find meaning and respond with the properly coded answer. To complicate things further colloquialism are shifting at lightning speeds.

Incredible.

Still, it’s math that has the street cred for being the T-Birds in our educational production of Grease. English is as easy as Cha Cha DiGregorio.

Even there, in the last sentence, I created an intertextual comparison that required the understanding of multiple meanings of “easy.” Admittedly, the joke loses something in its explanation.

This is the idea Taylor Mali is playing with when he says, “I make them show all of their work in math and hide it in English.”

Perhaps that’s the answer.

The next time I have a student write a summary of what they read, I’ll have them start at the morphemic and phonemic levels.

“Well, first, I realized I was looking at the letter I. Then I noticed there was a space after the letter, so I took that to imply the letter was representative of a singular idea…”

“I’m going to stop you there for a moment. When you say, ‘I realized I was looking at the letter I,’ what gave it away?”

This could be fun.

Things I Know 65 of 365: It’s ok to be nice

As much as we need a prosperous economy, we also need prosperity of kindness and decency.

– Caroline Kennedy

I wanted to be mean today.

It was a little moment.

Instead of completing her work in class, one of my students was working on her math homework.

I asked her to stop.

She asked for two minutes more.

In that moment, I wanted to be mean.

I wanted to say, “No,” take away her notebook and use my teacher voice to tell her to get back on track.

I would have been well within my rights, but I wouldn’t have actually been right.

Compliance could have been achieved by the application of force, but that wouldn’t have been teaching – at least not the right kind of teaching.

If later, she had come to ask me why I had done what I wanted to do, I would have been ashamed of my answer.

Meanness is worst when it slips in to these small moments and erodes the times we choose to be nice.

When New Jersey Governor Chris Christie had the message passed along that Firefighter Union President Bill Lavin should “Go f@#! yourself,” he chose meanness. Like my student and I, Lavin and Christie were at odds. Like my student and I, Lavin and Christie are motivated by different interpretations of what they think should happen.

Christie, though, chose to be mean.

I freely admit I wanted to do the same thing. For a moment, I wanted to use language and tone that asserted my power and showed my student I was in power.

But, I’m a teacher.

I gave my student her two minutes.

Two minutes later, I came back.

She looked at me, “Ok?”

“Ok,” I said.

She put her math aside.

I realize the Christie/Lavin comparison falls apart a bit here, but the principal remains the same. Nothing keeps us from being nice other than us.

Things I Know 64 of 365: A balanced reading diet is an important part of this complete teacher

Reading is a means of thinking with another person’s mind; it forces you to stretch your own.

– Charles Scribner, Jr.

In their book Subjects Matter, Harvey Daniels and Steven Zemelman outline the importance of helping our students construct a balanced reading diet. Speaking of the need for such a balance of text consumption across all disciplines, Daniels and Zemelman write about the importance of fiction, non-fiction, newspapers, websites, books, magazines, blogs and anything else.

By feeding our students a monoculture or near monoculture of texts, we do them a disservice. Reading is a diverse act.

I’ve been attempting to remind myself of this lately.

While re-reading Daniels and Zemelman I’m also reading Nel Noddings’ Caring. Every once in a while, I pick up Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything. I just finished Sam Chaltain’s American Schools. Next up is Kathleen Cushman’s Fires in the Mind. During reading time in class, I’ve been re-reading Volume 5 of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8 comics so I can finally read my newly purchased copies of Volumes 6 and 7.

Over the last 12 months, I read David Perkins’ Making Learning Whole because Gary said I should. I also picked up Democracies in Flux by Robert Putnam, Eating Animals by Johnathan Safran Foer, A Framework for Understanding Poverty by Ruby Payne, DIY U by Anya Kamentz and On the Road by Jack Kerouac.

This is to say nothing of the countless pieces of first-rate long-form journalism I’ve consumed thanks to longform.org, articles encountered by trolling reedit, links grazed through twitter and whatever friends send me through e-mail.

If I haven’t been lying to my students, and everything is a text, then the TED Talk, This American Life, Planet Money, Moth Theater and Dinner Party Download podcasts must also go on the list.

While my food diet is most certainly corncentric, my reading diet is not.

It shouldn’t be.

If I’m to do my job as best I know how, it can’t be a monoculture.

My grad school assignments regularly require that I use the course materials within my annotated reference list. They go so far as to allow for the use of individual chapters within the same book to be used a separate lessons so we need not stray too far from the prescribed reading.

My last reference list had 12 entires and the minimum 2 course-assigned entries.

It struck me as I was compiling the list how much of a disservice the program is doing to the students of those other members of my cohort who only referenced the two books and decade-old DVD segments.

Too many ideas are floating in the world.

My friend Jeff is working to answer the question of what kind of school he would like to lead. He pinged me tonight to ask what texts he could reference to get the pedagogical language that serves as the cognitive infrastructure for what we do at SLA.

Though he was likely hoping for one or two, I listed quite a few more than that and am still thinking of minds he should be looking into.

The best ideas I’ve ever eaten were cooked by the combination of ingredients from several sources.

It’s a type of communal individualization.

I used to know a principal who could be counted upon to have her faculty read a different book each year. They’d come back from summer break to find their copies of the text of the year waiting in their mailboxes. Each year, the processes from the previous year’s text were laid down in favor of this new book’s frame of mind.

In the same way a body will deteriorate if you feed it only one food, the teaching in the school became ideologically thin. If the principal had asked the teachers to read what they were interested in and share what they were reading, think of the culture shift.

I’ve heard the arguments why teachers don’t have room for reading. Family and friends come into play. They are so exhausted by their teaching days that they cannot fathom picking up texts that asks their minds to return to the classroom.

My answer is unapologetically simple – Don’t watch that episode of Law & Order: Akron or House Hunters Antarctica. Cut an hour or 30 minutes of vegetating and play in a text.

But, there’s one remaining rule:

If you only read one book about education this year – don’t.

My teaching is better because I move between Perkins, Whedon and Bryson or turn my back on them entirely for the humorous simplicity of Oddly Specific.

I’m pretty sure my brain is happier too.

Things I Know 63 of 365: I want to build a sanctuary

When a man finds no peace within himself it is useless to seek it elsewhere.

– L. A. Rouchefoliocauld

St. Patrick’s Cathedral made me feel small today – small and peaceful. After 2 hours of driving and then walking the crowded Saturday streets of Manhattan, walking into St. Patrick’s with my mom was like being consumed by peace.

Though I wouldn’t count myself as religious, it was a spiritual experience.

A couple hours later, in the Reading Room of the New York Public Library, I experienced the same sensation.

As we left, my mom explained she couldn’t help but contemplate the thousands, if not millions, of people who’d occupied both buildings before us. In either case, they were there looking for something.

She mentioned the disheveled man sitting on a bench in the library attempting to sew his hat back together while the outside world buzzed by. I thought of the patrons I’d watched waiting in line to have their necessary books retrieved. They sought piece of mind.

In St. Patrick’s, the scene had been similar, people seated and kneeling, queued up to ask for answers. They sought peace of mind.

Both of these cathedrals offered sanctuary. Visitors to both could seek or simply sit without their outside lives barging in.

I want my classroom to be a sanctuary.

Beyond the discussion of safety, sanctuaries offer something more. They offer a pause.

If everything in their social, familial and academic lives is clamoring for their engagement, my classroom should provide a silence that rises above the din and stresses disengagement.

Controlled chaos can be beautiful. A boisterous class discussion can amaze the mind. I attempt to orchestrate these moments in class as often as possible.

What are missing are moments of stillness. Uncomfortable as they may be, if they can experience them physically, then maybe my students will allow themselves to experience them internally as well.

That’s the larger goal – helping my students to find comfort and sanctuary in the quiet spaces of who they are.

Things I Know 63 of 365: They have to get the jobs first

Be willing to do the job passionately, even if you’re not passionate about the job.

– My mom

When I was 16, I headed out to look for my first job. A word nerd from way back, I was intent on a job selling books. I was probably not the only 16-year-old jobseeker managers had met. Others had probably warn khakis and a shirt and tie when applying as I did. What I’d imagine set me apart from other mid-adolescent applicants was my inclusion of a resumé with my application forms. Even if resumés were standard faire, I’m willing to wager my 24 lb 100% cotton watermarked paper set me apart.

It took me a few years to realize everyone else’s mom hadn’t made a fuss over the weight of their resumé paper as they applied for their first jobs. The realization that everyone else hadn’t been sat down at the kitchen table to write their personal mission statements when they were 14 took me awhile as well.

My mom has been in human resources management for almost as long as I’ve been alive.

While she’s been in Philly visiting this week, I’ve asked her to talk to my kids about jobs and applying and online privacy and the like.

It’s reminded me just how tremendously wise she is.

It’s illuminated for me just how tremendously little my kids know about applying for jobs.

As we spend billions of dollars and countless hours arguing about the best way to prepare our students for the “jobs of the future,” we’ve fallen down on the job of preparing them to get their feet in the door.

“What can’t potential employers take into consideration when considering you for a job?”

Silence and some mumbling that they didn’t know there was anything they couldn’t consider.

A small collective gasp was audible when my mom admitted she didn’t research applicants’ Facebook pages or other online profiles when considering them for employment. Her reasoning that people should be able to decide what they share of their personal lives when applying was more thoughtful, measured and reasonable than the warnings they’d seen around the Internet and heard from teachers.

They had questions too.

“How do I answer when they ask me what my weaknesses are?”

The news that explaining they “just can’t stop until something is perfect” was a bit cliché and that they should instead explain a weakness they’ve taken steps to address was scribbled into brains and notebooks alike.

“The resumé isn’t to get you the job,” my mom explained, “The resumé is to get you the interview. Use the interview to get the job. And, send a thank you note.”

None of this is earthshaking news to anyone who’s been through the job search process a few times. They are the tricks of the trade picked up along the way.

Still, I hadn’t thought to bring them up with my kids. As much as I’ve been worried about preparing them for doing the jobs they’ll have in the future, I know I’ve ignored or forgotten to have any conversations with them about how to get those jobs.

I doubt I’m alone in that.

Thank goodness for my mom.

Things I Know 62 of 365: I have some questions for Michelle Rhee

Seek first to understand, and then to be understood.

– Stephen Covey

The conversation about how to improve our schools is loud.

I’m working to understand where I agree and disagree with some of the most privileged voices in that conversation.

In December, former D.C. Schools Chief Michelle Rhee wrote a piece for Newsweek explaining what she learned in her time in the job.

Rather than take a quote out of context or write a rebuttal, I decided to try to build my understanding the same way I work to build my understanding of the ideas my students present. The end result is here.