Month: June 2011

Things I Know 155 of 365: I’m tinkering toward tinkering

My best friend Katy is studying to be a doula. If you had to click to look it up, so did I.

She’s been blogging about the process, the workshops and assisting at her first birth. I’ve known Katy for almost 12 years, and I’ve never known her to be as enamored with what she’s doing with her life as she is right now.

I know she and I are of a generation destined for many careers before retirement. In this moment, though, Katy has found a challenge to grow that brings her happiness. Writing to her last week, I went so far as to claim she’d found her bliss.

Though one of the less dominant health care fields, Katy has found contentment in a field acceptable to modern society. If you were unfamiliar with the role and function of a doula, you likely looked it up and thought to yourself some version of “Oh, ok.” In some ways, it’s a profession more traditional than becoming a doctor.

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I watched a new television show tonight. I’ve been meaning to watch it since seeing its preview announcement a month or two ago. I’m a bit of a foodie. Many vegetarians are. I’m not going to go all Julie and Julia and cook my way through the Moosewood Cookbook in a year, but I like to cook, and talk about food and eat at a level that can safely be counted as above the norm.

Time permitting, I’ve been known to sink my teeth into Bravo’s marathon scheduling of Top Chef. No such marathon viewing gave me more joy than the run up to the Season 2 finale where we watched Marcel come in second to Ilan.

As much as it saddened me, it didn’t surprise me. Marcel looked at food as a playground, pushing the limits of what the judges would accept (and often what I would consider appetizing).

What made watching Marcel so enjoyable, though, was the possibility he saw as he approached the creation of a new dish.

Tonight’s new show was Marcel’s Quantum Kitchen on Syfy. (I don’t know why they spelled it that way either.) If Top Chef highlighted food as a playground, this new reality series provides Marcel with a gastronomic Disneyland. He made a 30” noodle out of jellied wine, and had me wanting to do the same.

And that’s why I love it. It’s one of those beautifully absurd first world possibilities. I sat watching tonight and thought to myself, “I love that I live in a world where someone like Marcel can make a living playing with his food in fantastic ways of which I’d never dream.”

I wonder how much I encourage this in my classroom, how much I allow for words and ideas to be the toys of my students’ intellectual playgrounds. I’ve certainly shed the subconscious urge to shape all students of English as though they’re to become professors, but I don’t know how far I’ve moved to making words the crayons their linguist inner children want to doodle with.

It’s something to work play toward.

Things I Know 154 of 365: I found the hidden game

In other words, hidden games are hidden in ways that invite neglect.

– David Perkins

When I was young, my grandparents would watch the St. Louis Cardinals.

That doesn’t quite explain the ritual.

First, they would turn on the television and select the proper channel. When the pre-game banter flickered to the screen, my grandfather would turn down the volume to nothing.

Silence.

He would then make his way to his recliner and turn on the radio on the side table between my grandfather’s chair and my grandmother’s seat on the couch. Carefully, he would turn the radio dial to KMOX out of St. Louis, and the room would fill with Jack Buck’s earnest, gravelly announcing.

This was how you watched a baseball game.

It took me years before I realized a person did not require both a working television and radio when watching a baseball game.

For my grandparents, though, these two sources revealed the secret hidden game of baseball. Buck’s play-by-play allowed access to something the television announcers kept hidden.

The pictures on the screen added a degree of detail Buck could never create.

David Perkins’ idea of helping students understand the hidden games inherent in their learning has been rattling around in my head since I read his Making Learning Whole last summer.

The concept itself was some sort of hidden game, suspended just beyond my comprehensive reach by some gossamer intellectual thread.

“A great deal of learning proceeds as if there were no hidden games,” Perkins writes, “But there always are. They need attention or the learners will always just be skating on the surface.”

Even the metaphoric understanding provided by my grandparents’ baseball viewing habits wasn’t made whole until Friday night.

After a day of travel, I settled in to watch the recorded women’s semi-final match of the French Open between Li Na and Maria Sharapova.

I forget how enthralled I become with tennis until I realize a Grand Slam title is being decided.

Remote in hand, I attempted to power up the various pieces of my father’s entertainment system without waking everyone in the house.

I’m not sure of the key exact key combination, but for a few minutes, I could hear the match, but the screen was blank.

Tennis and baseball are different.

One can visualize the strategy and battle of a baseball game given only an announcer’s play-by-play.

Such is not the case with tennis. Hanging on every word from the announcers as well as the barbaric, womanly grunts from the players, I attempted to understand the game I was supposed to be watching.

I failed.

While it was clear that what I was hearing was a game of tennis, the game itself with all of its nuance and tension was hidden from me.

In that moment, Perkins’ argument slipped into place in my brain.

I understood the idea of the hidden game and the detriment at which we put our students without taking time to reveal the hidden game in our teaching.

“Only a small percentage of teaching-learning experiences include explicit attention to the strategic dimension,” Perkins writes of the negligence of most teachers in teaching the hidden game. “The strategic game is hidden by neglect. It’s hidden by the preoccupation of the teaching-learning process with the surface game, with getting the facts and routines right, with getting through the problem sets and other assignments.”

The tennis match’s announcers were relaying the facts of the game perfectly. The sounds from the court gave notice of the routines being followed. The strategy, though, as Li and Sharapova battled it out, remained hidden. I knew a game was being played, but could not appreciate its detail.

Such is the case when I forget to help my students understand the hidden games in the learning we’re doing in class and instead get tied up in due dates and formatting. The strategic game of learning gets left by the wayside.

Things I Know 153 of 365: We have different nows

A graduation ceremony is an event where the commencement speaker tells thousands of students dressed in identical caps and gowns that “individuality” is the key to success.

– Robert Orben

Saturday evening, I listened to the salutatorian, valedictorian and student-selected faculty addresses at my sister Kirstie’s graduation.

The final speech from retiring physical education teacher, Mr. Butcher, made me want to get into an argument.

Though it wasn’t all particularly moving, the rhetoric of each of the preceding speakers hadn’t made me want to argue with any of them.

“Don’t ever fool yourself into thinking that life is not a competition,” Mr. Butcher told my sister and her class.

He went on to explain their competitors would always be waiting for them to make excuses for why they failed. Their employers, though, wouldn’t care how or why the failed.

I got the feeling that Mr. Butcher took a hard-line approach in his teaching. I’ve known and been taught by several iterations of Mr. Butcher. Maybe you have as well.

I don’t dislike Mr. Butcher.

I disagree with him.

I don’t want to call him names.

I want to ask him questions.

I don’t want to compete with him.

I want to engage him.

I don’t see life as a competition. Further, I’m not preparing my students to compete. Perhaps I am, but without the goal of competition.

Either way, Mr. Butcher and I differ in our pedagogies.

That’s ok.

Though highly unlikely, if Mr. Butcher and I were to meet someday, there’d be many conversations worth having.

Retiring this year after 30+ years of teaching, he has more first person historical knowledge of teaching than most people I know. I’d enjoy learning with him.

Mr. Butcher’s speech and my disagreement with it also led me to think of the 140 Characters Conference next week in New York.

The tagline for the conference, “the state of now” excites me in the same way my mind starts churning when Chris writes about building modern schools. I like the idea of knowing where we are now.

We spend so much time talking forward and backward about then, that now gets little attention.

I wish I could be in the room at the conference next week.

Mr. Butcher’s speech highlighted the difference of my now and his now. My now is wrapped in learning with students toward the possibilities or interdependence and collaboration. Mr. Butcher’s now is one of competition and winners and losers. Both really, both felt passionately, both at odds with one another.

In the same way I wish I could sit for an hour and record a conversation with Mr. Butcher, I wish I could track the differences and similarities of the perceptions of nows that take the stage at the 140 Characters Conference.

I wonder if they would be so similarly different.

Things I Know 152 of 365: Kirstie graduates today

The race is long, and in the end, it’s only with yourself.

– Mary Schmich

At 8 pm tonight, my sister Kirstie graduates from high school. I’m back home in Illinois at my dad’s house for the occasion.

Kirstie is 12 years younger than I am.

She will forever be the same age as the last class of my students I will see graduate. I realized this on the plane ride last night and almost turned to the stranger next to me to share the news.

My other sister, Rachel, is another keystone of my teaching career. The first time I stepped into my own classroom in Florida, my eighth graders were starting the same year of instruction as Rachel was back up in Illinois.

Though the ages of my students have fluctuated as I’ve taught different grades, I know that those from that first class who went to college just finished their third year.

Next year, as Kirstie begins her first year at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, I’ll think of this graduating class of SLA students who will be starting their full-time college careers all over the country.

My students will be taking all sorts of paths once they leave our halls and classrooms. My connections to past students on Facebook have taught me this. Still, Kirstie will be my bellwether of where they are in their lives. For every milestone in Kirstie’s life over the next few years, I’ll wonder about the same milestone in the lives of any number of students.

This is a change.

For the past 8 years, my students have unknowingly filled in for my siblings.

For each teen drama, every end-of-quarter stress out, all the proms and formals – I watched my students feel their way through the chasm of adolescence, thinking of my siblings stumbling along their own paths hundreds of miles away.

My students have helped me come to terms with choosing to move away from my family after college. The pieces of their lives they brought with them to school and allowed me to counsel them on helped me to be at peace with not helping my siblings work through those same experiences back home.

While always my students, in moments, they let me care for them as a big brother.

In the same way I hope Rachel, Kirstie and my brother Taylor will choose their own paths in life and go where their passions take them, I have done the same.

At mile 10 of my first marathon, my friend Julie, with whom I had run almost all of my long training runs, turned to me.

“Ok, Zac, go.”

“What?”

Julie had a slower pace than I did. She was telling me to leave her behind.

My gut resisted the idea.

“No. I’m fine running with you.”

“Zac,” she said with a sternness that was impressive 10 miles into a marathon, “run your own race.”

I did.

We both finished the race. Had I stayed with Julie, I would have felt the frustration and pain of running someone else’s race. Had she run at my pace, Julie would have felt the same pain and frustration.

We each needed to run our own races.

This is what I want for Kirstie. It is the same thing my students have afforded me as a long-distance big brother. It will be the thing my sisters and brother afford me as I leave the classroom.

At 8 pm tonight, my sister Kirstie graduates from high school and passes another mile marker.

Run your own race, Kirstie.

Things I Know 151 of 365: Should and could are different

Shoulda, coulda, woulda.

– Anonymous (though I first heard it from my high school principal)

A difference exists between the things we can do and the things we should do.

Mostly, I think about the things we should do.

The things we can do are infinite. It just seems more beneficial to focus on those things.

Today, though, I did one of the things we can do, and it struck me that, perhaps, we should be doing it more.

Tomorrow is the end of the term for SLA seniors. For my class, this means their final projects are due tonight by midnight.

Those final projects consist of a close reading of a text of their choice through a literary lens of their choice.

We’ve been working all quarter on close reading and literary lenses, so one would hope these will be strong essays.

The first act of the semester was to have them write the kids write their rough drafts of their essays and turn them in on google docs. They thought of it as an assignment while I thought of it as the collection of baseline data.

I learned where we needed to focus and what pieces of the puzzle were missing.

The closing act of the semester was to revise and finalize that same essay – to fill in the gaps of the rough draft with what they learned in the quarter.

If English teachers are constantly telling their students to take time between drafts to let them breath, these drafts were the equivalent of a fine wine in a decanter.

The problem today in class was my inability to read every document while students were synchronously reading them in google docs. While I did a fair amount of commenting and conferencing, many of the docs missed out.

I had to take my work home with me.

At the same time, my students needed to be working.

When I checked my e-mail this afternoon, I had a message from a student asking for an edit.

She was one of the students I’d missed during class, so I felt even worse.

I logged in to the google doc ready to edit.

I suppose I could have typed my comments and suggestions to this student. I could have.

But they were complex comments about global revision that required some pretty intense explanation.

I decided to take advantage of what I could do.

I e-mailed the student asking for her phone number.

She sent it in her reply.

I called through google voice.

We talked for just under 10 minutes.

“Here is where I think you could really sharpen your analysis,” I said as I moved my cursor to particular place in the document, “Do you see where I’m talking about?”

“I do,” she said.

We went on like that.

“Now, look at the evidence you bring in here,” I said, “Is that necessary to the thesis?”

It wasn’t, and she knew it.

By the end of our conversation, my student had a clear understanding of what was necessary for the strengthening of the argument and for the completion of the project. She got it.

I ended it knowing I was going to get a produce submitted that was much stronger than I would have otherwise.

Those ten minutes improved the learning of my class, though they had no connection to the classroom.

I realize I broke several unspoken rules of teaching.

I talked with a student outside of school.

I talked with a student on the phone – well, google phone.

I gave up free time for teaching.

I brought my work home with me.

I did more than other teachers would have done.

Somewhere along the way, I worked outside of contract or expectation. In the middle of it, I thought to myself, “This is something my English teachers never could have done – even if they wanted to.”

And that’s the key. That’s the thing that must transform our craft and practice as teachers. It’s the thing traditional teaching contracts and pedagogy haven’t caught up to. If I can teacher anytime and anywhere, I should be.

If I can be positively impacting a student’s learning outside of the school day, I should be.

If I can be thinking about the school day in completely different terms, I should be.

Tonight I used about four different technologies to teach a lesson more completely and impactfully than I could have in my classroom during the regular day.

After that, I ran smack into the fact that our thinking about education hasn’t caught up with the opening gambit of what’s possible.

We should work on that.

Things I Know 150 of 365: There’s comedy in truth

It is easy to become deluded by the audience, because they laugh. Don’t let them make you buy the lie that what you’re doing is for the laughter. Is what we’re doing comedy? Probably not. Is it funny? Probably yes. Where do the really best laughs come from? Terrific connections made intellectually, or terrific revelations made emotionally.

– Del Close

The school year’s winding down at SLA. Courses are drawing to a close.

For my senior Storytelling class, Friday marked the final class story slam of the year.

Amid all the stress and work of closing out the school year, the slam reminded me of something I’ve known since I was a little kid – it’s important to laugh.

Four of the stories Friday reminded me of the humor possible in the mundane.

Christine told the story of how a childhood affliction frequently led to quarantine.

Then Talib recounted how a trip to the bathroom when a bit off course.

Andrew gave us the choice between a story of a trigger happy 7 year old and stealing from his father.

Finally, Narcissa copped to her paranoia brought about by marathoning television.

The theme for the day was “Prohibit,” and each of the kids presented their own unique take on it.

I laughed harder than I’ve laughed in a long time.

There is truth in comedy.

The story each kid told wasn’t necessarily anything supernatural. Each was a moment that could have happened in anyone’s life. The key to the stories and to the class was to find a way to explode the moment so that its sharing seems at once interesting and personal for the audience.

Each student exploded the moment, and we were better for it.

If we built community within the classroom and had a good time along the way, well, then so be it.

Enjoy.

Four stories inspired by “prohibit” by MrChase

Things I Know 149 of 365: I am an authority

I did something arguably pompous and decidedly cheeky yesterday.

In the fever dream that was the completion of my last annotated bibliography for a good long time, I decided to use a book in which I had been cited. Not only that, I made reference to something I’d said in the book in order to back up a point I was making in my annotation.

The whole thing struck me as rather odd, and I did what I usually do when faced with the oddity of my life – I tweeted it.

I tweeted what I had done and admitted to waiting for the universe to fold in on itself.

It was a strange feeling using me to back myself up.

Within a few minutes, a few folks replied on twitter – each equally cheeky.

One reply stood out. I’m not certain of its exact level of cheekiness, but it certainly got me thinking.

Durff asked, “What makes you an authority?”

That’s the kind of question that’ll get a guy pondering.

My initial reaction, whether genuine humility or my midwestern roots, was to say to myself, “Oh, no, I’m not. Not me. No authority here.”

Then I started pondering a bit more.

Turns out, I am an authority.

Not only am I familiar with the topic about which I was speaking, but I work to refine my practice daily. I try to push the envelope of what can be done and am constantly reflecting when I fall short so that I can improve on each try. Others recognize my experience and consult me on the topic regularly and by all accounts take what I say to heart as useful and wise.

I am an authority.

Am I the authority? No.

But the more I think about it, the more denying my authority in any given subject feels akin to calling myself a facilitator instead of a teacher.

I’m not an expert, genius or guru.

Someday, maybe, but not today.

I’m not always right.

Someday, maybe, no, never ever ever.

I might not always be an authority. I might fall behind, lose interest or be proven interminably wrong.

For now, though, I am an authority. I have earned that right.

For the same reason I wouldn’t accept a student’s claim of stupidity, I will own my authority.