Month: April 2011

Things I Know 105 of 365: I marvel at every takeoff and landing

If you want to find yourself by travelling out west
or if you want to find somebody else that’s better
go ahead
go ahead

– Rilo Kiley

Five of our 10 students on this year’s river trip are first-time flyers.

I am sitting near three of them as I type this.

Takeoff was awesome.

Everyone held hands and tensed up. I leaned across the aisle when anxiety levels were peaking and told a story about how the kids would have free reign to paint my toenails if we got rained in on the river. This diffused tension a bit.

As the flight leveled off, I told everyone to look out the window. From there, they were glued to the view.

We’re thirty minutes in and every student is reading, playing Angry Birds or wondering at the oddities available from Sky Mall. By the time we touch down for our layover in Chicago, this will all be old hat to them.

I marvel at every takeoff and landing.

I get drag and lift along with all the other forces Mr. Matthews explained in my physical science class. Still, it shouldn’t work. Some element of magic must also be at play to keep us suspended in a metal cylinder with wings miles above the earth.

I’m planning on starting a round of applause when we touch down. We all put our faith in forces I’m sure few, if any, of my fellow passengers completely understand, and it worked out.

Well, if you’re reading this, it worked out.

If you’re reading this, another piece of magic worked out as well – a piece my students and I often overlook the same way most passengers overlook the magic of flight.

I’m making meaning here. I’m writing something, putting together symbols in a specific order to communicate thought. Not only that, you’re taking in those symbols and assigning meaning to them that aligns with the meaning I intend as I write them.

Plus, these symbols and their interpretation aren’t limited to the two of us. Millions of people around the world can make meaning with the exact same set of symbols and with minor assistance can translate those symbols to have meaning with other whole sets of symbols.

And it all started in kindergarten when I learned how to write my name.

Teaching eleventh and twelfth graders, the magic and acts of faith in reading and writing are often take for granted the same way we take for granted takeoff and landing.

Writing assignments are submitted with worry that commas might be misplaced or sentences might run on.

I see the need for polish and revision. I relish that I get to build on the work of those teachers who have come before me and help my students become better readers and writers.

Still, I should do a better job of celebrating the takeoffs and landings of their interactions with language and not take for granted they’ll get where they’re going.

Each sentence a student writes is an act of creation and faith.

I’m tempted to cite literacy statistics from Philadelphia, America or the world, but I won’t.

They don’t matter here.

At some point each student couldn’t read and write. Now they can. That’s tremendous. I will remember that more specifically in the moments before I start assessing my next batch of essays.

For now, I’m supposed to turn off and stow all electronic devices.

The magic’s about to happen.

Things I Know 104 of 365: I learned outside

I went into the woods to live deliberately.

– Henry Davi Thoreau, Walden

I grew up surrounded by nature.

When I was younger, I’d go visit my grandparents and explore the farm that has been in my family since my ancestors settled in Illinois over 150 years ago.

When I entered fifth grade, we moved outside of Springfield and my postage stamp yard was suddenly 5 acres.

Many a shoe or shirt or pair of shorts was sacrificed to the mud I inexplicably fell into while playing in the creek that ran along our property line.

When I got back from South Africa last summer and was emotionally drained, I set out to the woods of New Hampshire and then Acadia National Park to remember who I was.

Tomorrow, two teachers, ten SLA juniors and I will make our way to Arizona and then Utah for camping and rafting down the San Juan River.

I cannot wait.

Last year, when the students saw the Grand Canyon for the first time, one commented, “I looks like a screen saver.”

I know I’m biased, but there’s immeasurable value in outdoor education.

Encouraging kids to recycle is much easier when they’ve experienced an environment beyond sidewalks and streetscapes.

Students will exist sans cell or iPod for a week. They’ll breathe air cleaner than they’ve ever experienced and they’ll get to know the planet.

Mr. Trueblood required all of his advanced biology students to curate leaf collections of at least 40 species of trees when I was in high school. Later in the year, we took a quiz requiring us to identify species of local birds. Walking through a park is a different experience for me still.

And, while I don’t imagine our students will return able to tell an oak from a maple or a starling from a sparrow, they will come back knowing they’re connected to a larger system.

They’ll experience beauty beyond any painting they could ever find in a museum. They’ll hike and raft and explore.

When they get back, what they’ve learned about themselves and the world will be akin to what I learned on the farm and in the creek. They’ll know mess and the beauty of nature.

It should be a part of every child’s education.

Things I Know 103 of 365: Students should teach one another

The secret is to gang up on the problem, rather than each other.

– Thomas Stallkamp

Matt and I looked at each other halfway through the class period and asked each other why we hadn’t tried this until the end of the third quarter.

In the last class of the last day before Spring Break, our students were working together, collaborating and mentoring one another all the way to the end of the period.

My original plan had been for my G11 students to visit Matt’s G9 class and share the vignettes they’d crafted and then discuss their writing process. I saw it as a chance for the upperclassmen to mentor the freshmen in reading and writing.

Surely, the younger students would be enamored of stories from their elder peers’ lives as readers. Well, probably not, now that I type that. The point is, we’ll never know.

As in the best learning experiences, very little went as planned.

Matt’s class had been disrupted earlier in the week by a field trip that had only taken a portion of the kids our of the room. Some students were working on making up the day, others were revising their own memoir projects and still more were working on a smothering of other smaller assignments.

As shocking as it was, I came to terms with the fact that these kids weren’t clamoring to hear vignettes detailing my students’ lives as readers.

Instead, we did something much less contrived. We had the older students pair up and work with the younger students.

They sat around Matt’s room. They occupied tables in the hall. They migrated to my room for more space.

The conversations were real and earnest.

“Mr. Chase,” one student said, “I don’t know who needs help.”

“Walk around and introduce yourself. Then, ask how you can help,” I told him.

He did.

I looked to one side of Matt’s room and saw one of my students who is most frequently off-task completely focused on helping one of Matt’s students improve his writing.

I would be lying if I told you I hadn’t been struggling daily to find ways to motivate this student to engage in class. Turns out she wasn’t waiting for my help, she was waiting to help.

After I’d heard a student advise, “You’ve got the outline of a paper here; now you need to fill it with what you want to say,” another one of my students approached me asking what he should do now that he’d helped two students with their papers.

“Go back to the one you helped first,” I said, “And see if she’s made any progress. It’s something I do as a teacher all the time to help students focus.”

He looked at me as though I’d just given him secret teacher knowledge.

In reality, the whole process was a reminder of my general lack of teacher knowledge.

While I’m keen to point out teaching’s general lack of willingness to utilize the wisdom of the elders of the profession, I should also be looking to the wisdom of our older students.

My students have walked this way before. They’ve known what it is to stare confoundedly at a laptop screen trying to piece an argument together. They’ve also felt alone in the effort to be better writers.

Every one of my students, no matter their level of proficiency, was an expert today to someone who benefited from that expertise.

I can and should attempt this type of cross-pollination more frequently. Failing to do so ignores the resources of the school and reinforces the artificial boundaries adolescence creates in the presence of a difference of two years.

Things I Know 102 of 365: My classroom isn’t one place

Man’s heart away from nature becomes hard.

– Standing Bear

At the beginning of each year, SLA parents sign a permission slip which allows for the freedom of field trips without much notice. So long as we are within the Philadelphia city limits, teachers can plan experiential learning for our students.

Today was one of those days.

My last class of the day has been workshopping their vignettes chronicling their lives as readers.

Each student’s vignettes are placed in a manilla folder along with a cover letter explaining their purpose and asking questions of the reader.

Students, armed with pads of paper and sticky notes read one another’s work, comment and then trade one folder for another.

As Emily, our literacy intern, said, “It’s like a Christmas present when they get back their writing with all of the comments.”

A nerdy, nerdy Christmas present, but yes.

After two days of cold, rainy, dank weather, the sun shown in Philadelphia today and the temperature neared 70.

A golden moment.

As I walked to get my lunch, I realized there was no reason our last day of workshopping needed to be inside.

As students filed in, I told them they would need jackets.

“Are we going outside!”

“Yes.”

We walked the three blocks to the running/biking path that runs near the school and along the Schuylkill River.

The students spread out on the grass, folders in hand, and read and commented and enjoyed the weather.

Save a few complaints about some errant insects, it was a beautiful thing.

A visitor to SLA documenting project-based, inquiry-driven education tagged along with the class.

“Why go outside for an English class if all you’re going to do is read and respond to papers?”

It’s one of those questions that begs the answer, “If you have to ask, then I can’t explain it to you.”

Instead, I worked to put my reasoning into words.

School design mimics prison design too closely already. Any time I can work against that association, implied though it may be, I’m going to take the chance.

More importantly, my job is to help my students become real readers and real writers who engage in those activities authentically.

When I think about where I want to read or write, where it feels most natural, I do not picture a school.

We went outside because I don’t want my students to think the only place they can do the work we’re doing is in a classroom.

And, we went outside because there are beautiful parts of our city and sometimes it’s enough to just be in them.

Some might argue a more fitting use of the space would have been to ask the students to write about what they saw or be inspired by the nature around them or wax poetically about public green spaces.

We weren’t there to focus on the space anymore than we stay in the classroom to write about the classroom. We were there to focus. That’s it, to focus on the task and spread apart and read and comment while sitting on benches and lying on the grass and every once in a while losing track of ourselves while watching the river.

The air was better, the vitamin D was pumping and the students had space to breathe and focus. It won’t be every day, but it was today and it was good.

Things I Know 101 of 365: I teach at a wonderful school

If a job is worth doing, it’s worth doing well.

– Proverb

In advisory Monday, we talked about public displays of affection. A couple of days of the week, it’s Spring in Philadelphia, our students appear to have taken note of it.

In an effort to avert any of our 19 ninth grade advisees hanging all over one another in the hall the way so many others have been in the last few weeks, my co-advisor and I decided to meet the issue head on.

We spent a solid portion of advisory discussing how you treat and touch the people you’re attracted to as well as how you set boundaries for touching with the people who are attracted to you.

For good measure, we also talked about how to handle situations where your friends were the ones being hung on and clearly wish they weren’t.

Oh, and I talked about hickies.

In a move that had me feeling all of my 8 years of classroom experience, I brought up hickies and had an open and frank conversation about what it said about a person to want to put their mark (of ownership) on someone else and what it said about a person to let someone else mark them.

“I’ve never thought about it like that,” said one advisee who’d been eyeing me suspiciously as I made my case.

Tonight, I received an e-mail with a link to this story from the Daily News with the comment, “Fodder for advisory, or would it be too much?”

The e-mail was passed along by one of our advisory parents.

We hadn’t e-mailed the parents our lessons or anything, this mom had simply had a conversation about her student’s school day and noted the story when it crossed her path. She was being active and supportive.

In another moment of active support today, a fellow teacher engaged me in a conversation about what I would be studying at Harvard. As conversations do, this one found tangents in teachers unions, sustainability, teacher leadership and what we want for kids. After a day of teaching and a faculty meeting, this colleague invested his time in trying to know me better and to exchange ideas.

The faculty meeting our conversation followed had focused on two main issues. The second issue was the writing of narrative report cards – something I spent the better part of my afternoon crafting. Twice each school year, we get to sit with our students’ work and write thoughtfully about their progress, challenges and successes. I waded through a quarter’s worth of quantitative data to make certain I was saying things that showed each student I’d been paying attention throughout our time together and urged them to continue growing in the final quarter of the year.

Earlier in the meeting, the faculty had been urged to continue to be the amazing school we are in the face of tremendous, district-wide budget cuts. In a time where Chris could just have easily encouraged us to fall to our knees and begin wailing to the heavens, his message was that we should do all we can to continue to serve our students.

The students were not the only focus of the day.

Parents were rallied tonight in an emergency meeting of the Home and School Association to alert them to the budget crisis and begin to move them to raise the money we’ll need next year for supplies and programs while also asking them to contact state officials to let them know our school has a voice.

While the meeting was attended by those you’d expect , it was also attended by students. Not just students who were tagging along with their parents, mind you. We had students speaking out on what they wanted to do to help the school, students helping to set up for the meeting and students in the audience asking pointed questions and offering suggestions for fundraising.

They were engaging the agency they’ve known in our care to solve the problem of sustaining our community.

It was this agency I was reminded of when I continued to scroll through my e-mail on my walk home tonight. Aside from the advisory parent’s e-mail, I had a message from a student turning in homework, a message letting me know a student finished reading a book of choice and wanted to know if she should write a review, a message from a student saying she’d have class during a scheduled meeting but would e-mail me if she had any questions.

I work in a place of invested individuals who teach and learn on their worst days and lead, create, inspire and question on their best.

Everyone should have such a place.

Things I Know 100 of 365: Education’s silver bullet is in our stomachs

I spend a surprisingly large portion of my day with adolescents – by choice. Their bodies are all crazy, their brains are all crazy, and I’m supposed to teach them how to read, write, and think.

In an excellent dinner conversation tonight, we discussed the misguided belief of one of the world’s billionaires that education has a silver bullet.

“No silver bullet exists,” we said, as sure of ourselves as we could be.

I’m not so certain.

Food.

Food is the silver bullet in education.

Feed the students, and you can teach the students.

That is, feed the students beyond the scope of the federal school lunch program.

Feed them food, real food and you’ll see gains in focus, energy and thinking.

According to Michele Borboa writing for sheknows.com, the 2009 School Nutrition Dietary Assessment Study found:

  • Only 50% offered fresh fruit
  • Only 39% offered green salad
  • Only 29% offered orange or dark green vegetables
  • Only 10% offered legumes
  • More than 95% of grain products were made from refined white flour
  • The most common entrées were peanut butter sandwiches, meat sandwiches, pizza with meat, cheeseburgers, and sandwiches with breaded meat or poultry.
  • Dessert offerings mostly included cookies, cakes, brownies, and candy.

Michael Pollan must have spit his locally grown organic coffee.

We know we should be feeding out children better. We know that better food equals better brains. We know this, but we feed our students monochromatic lunches and expect them to be their best.

The schools receiving the most attention right now are those with the highest percentages of students receiving free or reduced lunch. We measure who’s getting what in the lunchroom and then move directly to the classroom as though what our students eat for breakfast and lunch doesn’t have any causal effect on what they are capable of in the classroom. We use free and reduced lunch as a measure of the implied obstacles in students’ lives and then use those same lunches to create new obstacles in their academic lives.

I made a purchase a few years ago. I bought a Presto PopLite Hot Air Corn Popper.

Every few weeks, I stock up on 5 lbs. of popcorn and serve it up whenever my students need a snack. Whenever I can, I buy a bag of apples or oranges and share them around. I try to feed them food.

A half a cup of popcorn can feed a class of 32. They complain I don’t give them butter or salt, but every kernel is eaten at the end of our 65 minutes together. I issue a challenge: Ignore teacher tenure. Ignore collective bargaining. Ignore merit pay. Ignore all of the most contentious of issues in American education. Ignore all of those things and focus on feeding our students well and teaching them what that means.

Do that and the crazy brains and bodies will be smarter, saner places.

Things I Know 99 of 365: I’ve got a cold

A cold in the head causes less suffering than an idea.

– Jules Renard

It started Saturday morning when I woke up with my throat sore and my nose clogged.

The feeling continued throughout the day as my body ramped up mucus production and it felt like pipes were bursting behind my eyes.

By Saturday night, being in a crowded spaces was more input than I could take and I sought the refuge of my bed.

Sunday morning started much the same as Saturday with the noted addition of achiness and a dramatic uptick in mucus production.

I’d made breakfast plans with friends and stayed in bed until the last possible moment before leaving to join them.

I had more planned for the day, but after breakfast spent my time alternating between sleep, blowing my nose and exhausting the offerings of Netflix Watch Instantly.

One would imagine such a day would make it difficult to find sleep when the night arrived. Not so.

I was out like a light.

My morning cup of coffee had no affect.

I added a muffin to my usual bagel, thinking we’re supposed to feed these things. Why you’d feed a cold, I don’t know. Why I thought this one would like a blueberry muffin, I’m even less clear on.

Today wasn’t my finest as a teacher. The plumbing leak behind my eyes continued, I think I pulled something when I sneezed and I probably should have packed two handkerchiefs in my back pocket when I left the house.

Still, we learned today. We examined the Hero’s Journey, discussed the implications of skin tone in subjective definitions of beauty and engaged in a writer’s workshop. I didn’t dare stop moving. Stopping would bring on that slow motion effect where you can see all of the momentum of the day slamming into a person as they become stationary.

Ideally, I’d take off tomorrow and call in sick. But, that wouldn’t be ideal.

Taking off means sub plans and sub plans mean the disruption of other plans.

My first period class is beginning its writer’s workshop tomorrow. I’m covering another teacher’s class while he chaperones a field trip. My food class is in the middle of a project. And, I’ll be damned if I’m leaving the weekly storytelling Story Slams in the hands of a substitute.

There’s a negotiation that happens in my mind when I’m ill during the school year. I liken it to the negotiations one might overhear when listening in on the nonsensical purchasing of a car.

“I’ve got a number in my head.”

“Is it-“

“Nope.”

“But I didn’t say anything.”

“Even if you had, this number is so perfect, you wouldn’t have guessed it.”

“Listen, I’d really like to sell you this car.”

“I’m sorry, but I’ve got this number in my – Nope!”

“Wait, I didn’t even have time to guess. You interrupted your own sentence.”

“I guess we’ll just have to agree to disagree.”

No matter how hard I try to sell my conscience on the idea of a sick day, short of being flat out on my back, no bargain will ever be reached.

So, I’ll suit up tomorrow and teach, because it’s a cold, and a lot of other teachers have taught through a lot worse.

Clearly, I’m a horrible patient.

Things I Know 98 of 365: The way we talk about the way we talk matters

Language shapes the way we think and determines what we can think about.

– Benjamin Lee Whorf

My sister Rachel is working toward her degree in English education and her minor in linguistics. She asked me tonight to take a look at a paper due in one of her classes later this week. It’s one of those moments that keeps me feeling useful as a big brother.

Rachel’s considering Zora Neal Hurston’s adherence to dialectical English when she was working as an anthropologist documenting early African American folktales.

I’ve not thought so much and so academically about the topic since I wrote my own term paper on African American Vernacular English (called Ebonics at the time).

This got me thinking.

Every once in a while, I’ll hear a student correct or chastise another student for saying “toof” instead of “tooth” or some other dialectically attributable difference.

Whenever I witness these moments, I take them as opportunities for discussion – the chance to show how understanding language and its connection to culture matters. They’ve been some of the richest culture-based conversations I’ve had in the classroom.

I wonder if waiting for the odd teachable moment might not be underserving in my role as an English teacher.

Colleagues in the Spanish department help their students understand dialectical variations across multiple Spanish-speaking countries and even regionally within those countries.

English teachers, though, remains tremendously staid in our approach to helping our students explore language. We not only ignore the international variations across English-speaking countries, we teach as though intense variations do not exist across America as well.

There is what is right and there is everything else.

Much of the time, the everything else is what our students are speaking in their homes, and intentionally or not, we make it seem wrong or less than.

I’m not advocating the abandonment of formal academic language or the prestige dialect as many of my undergraduate professors referred to it.

Instead, I’m suggesting room exists at the linguistic table to help our students understand the variation and complexity inherent in language.

To do so would be a radically complicated shift in approach. For one, classroom teachers would need to better show the cultural sensitivity we so often pride ourselves on when selecting texts.

Teaching Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God for its authentic dialectical style is far from building lessons and discussions around the dialects students walk into our classrooms practicing and then building bridges from those dialects to the academic English we’ve been preaching for generations.

If we want our students to interact with the world – to be global citizens – we might need to help them become better national citizens first. To do that, we might need to help ourselves do the same.

Language is complex and intensely tied to culture. America is complex and intensely cultural. Perhaps we could be better diplomats.

Things I Know 97 of 365: We’re really warry

All wars are crimes.

– Gerald McCraney as USAF Gen. Allen Adamle in The West Wing

In the lead-up to the almost shutdown of the federal government, I read headlines declaring a war on women, culture wars and a war on the middle class.

A quick google search also reveals a war on poverty, drugs, the working class, crime, cancer, kids, science, democracy, Christmas and greed.

Then there are the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, not to mention (depending who you ask) Libya.

Turns out we’re also still at war with terror.

As if this wasn’t enough, wars have been declared on both ideas and ignorance as well. Complicating matters, those involved on both the ideas and ignorance camps make no mention of one another suggesting that neither campaign is meeting with much success.

This irony is matched only by the apparent alliance between FOX News and President Obama in the battles against education and schools according to News Hounds and Newsweek respectively. The Ayn Rand Institute reports FOX and President Obama have an ally against education in the form of multiculturalism.

I’m uncertain how the corporation, elected leader and intangible idea will be teaming up, but education better watch its back.

When looked at in the traditional sense, it’s easy to tell the hawks from the doves. Move the battlefield from the physical to the realm of ideas and everyone appears to be gunning for someone or something.

The American Psychological Association acknowledges the stress of war and includes an article aimed at helping teens build their resilience in times of war.

I wonder if our kids will be able to muster constant resilience when the literal wars are done and the wars against the figurative are still being waged 24/7.

At some point, not one I ever remember, disagreeing with an idea or pushing against something necessitated not a war, but something more akin to work instead.

“We are working against the rise of crime.”

“We are working to stem the tide of greed.”

I’ve heard we worked on problems in the hopes of finding solutions. Declaring war abandons those hopes. Wars deny solutions and aim instead at annihilation.

Working against something is a time-consuming process – one fraught with setbacks and missteps. Work, it turns out, is work.

Annihilation, on the other hand, abandons not only hope, but thought as well. Move to annihilate and no discernment is necessary. War implies the black and white of being with us or against us.

I get the draw of declaring war.

I’ve worked on several problems where I’d rather have destroyed than solved. Still, if we’re constantly working to make war on our problems, we’ll never have the resilience necessary to declare peace.

Things I Know 96 of 365: We need organization, not organizations

Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.

– Peter Drucker

When I was teaching in Florida, we handed out a little booklet to students every year. The cover was light blue and covered with print. Slightly larger than a billfold, the booklets listed all of the social services available to students and their families within the county. Pages and pages of organizations in almost-illegible print.

Every once in a while, I saw the school’s guidance counselors or social workers pull out these little guys to look up a contact for a student.

Never, not ever, did I see a student using the book. By the end of the year, I’m certain few of them knew where their copies were.

For many government and non-profit organizations, this was their only way into the schools.

I was thinking about those booklets last week when someone asked me what I wanted to do with my a degree in ed policy and management.

“I don’t want to work at a non-profit,” I said, “And I definitely don’t want to start a non-profit.”

Everywhere I turn, someone is starting an organization to solve one educational dilemma or another. More often than not, I meet someone who’s starting or going to work for an organization that sounds remarkably similar to another organization someone else has started or gone to work for.

I’ve seen the booklets. We’ve got the organizations.

We don’t need more organizations or government offices. We need to do things better, not more things.

Working at that same school, we partnered with the local Big Brothers, Big Sisters office, recruited community members and set up a “Bigs Training” at the school. Adults interested in mentoring our students came in one night and were trained on mentoring, our school’s culture and filled out paperwork for the required background checks. They were even fingerprinted on site.

We didn’t need to create a new program within the school. We connected with the extant programs and brought them to the school. The school community, the local community and the non-profit community came together within a school.

This is what school should be.

Much of what I admire of Jeffrey Canada’s Harlem Children’s Zone has to do with the braiding of resources to better serve the community.

That type of braiding need not take a multi-million dollar influx of cash. We can do this better. We can do this more intelligently.

The odd school intrepid enough to connect these dots should not be the exception. State and local offices should move to simplify the process.

I’m not suggesting they should prescribe what services schools or districts provide. We’ve had quite enough prescription.

Creating pathways, though, that more efficiently connect educators and the children and families they serve to the organizations established to make life better will pay tremendous learning dividends.

In the vast network of public services, each school should function as a hub – connecting families with the assistance they require.

Ninety percent of the children of this country make their way through our public schools. While non-profit offices often struggle to find points of contact with the populations they’re designed to serve, those same populations are compelled to be in school each day.

We don’t need more organizations to serve those in need. We need more organization in how we serve those in need.