Author: Mr. Chase

Science Teacher Stephanie sent an e-mail out today asking for “links of educational websites the students can peruse in the before school program.” I don’t have a huge database of educational games.

So, this happened yesterday:

9/21/06
Dr. Carol Todd, President
School Board of Sarasota County Florida
1960 Landings Blvd
Sarasota, FL 34231

Dear Dr. Todd and Members of the Board of Education,

It is with sadness that I am serving you notice today that I will resign my position as Superintendent of Schools effective June 30, 2007. I appreciate the fact that with your “meets expectations” vote on my evaluation, June 21, 2006, the board automatically extended my contract another year until June 30, 2008, but unfortunately, I must decline your offer. I intend to immediately begin a search for a new position.
The past several months have been unnecessarily tumultuous and have exacted a huge toll on my family and me. I have loved every part of my 24-year career as superintendent of schools until recently. I think it best for the school board, the school district and my profession, that I not elaborate any further.
The past few weeks have cemented my realization that while the work to create a NeXt Generation education system is essential, there are unimaginable roadblocks in Sarasota County that will continue to impede the transformation.
My passion to insure a NeXt Generation Education for our children is now even stronger than it was when we first met in October, 2003. Every single day, the research becomes clearer that this type of educational reform is necessary for our students to be successful in our changing world. I intend to offer that vision to another community or institution.
I will continue to work tirelessly on your 4 goals until June. Equally important to me is that your next superintendent has a very smooth transition period. I will do everything in my power to make sure that happens.
Thanks for the opportunity to work with the fine professional educators and support staff in this school district. I truly believe in them and their abilities. My sincere thanks, to all of our outstanding community partners, that have been so supportive of our efforts. I sincerely hope that the community believes that we have made a small difference in establishing the vision and elevating the discussion about the importance of transforming our schools.
Sincerely yours,
Dr. Gary W. Norris, Superintendent

I’m still taking time to process the whole thing. I actually had a meeting at the district office toward the end of the day yesterday. Before I finished the 20-minute trip, I had two texts and an e-mail letting me know what had happened. Still, I didn’t have any concrete proof until I sat down in my meeting and everyone received a copy of the Superintendent’s resignation letter. Definitely a pallor to the spirit of all involved. ITC Wendy asked what I thought about things. My response:

You know that feeling people describe when they’re telling you the campfire story/urban legend about the guy who wakes up in a tub of ice water and his kidneys have been removed? That guy, that’s how I feel.

It’s true. All along, I’ve said Dr. Norris is a man of vision and the back-to-school meeting gave evidence he was recognizing the need to better communicate that vision. True, there is some value in the criticism that he wanted to do too much too quickly, but the responsibility for these past few years’ tumult cannot rest on his shoulders alone. Our district has proven itself to be a lumbering machine. So often do we hear cries of improvement, that we failed to act when the cries were real. Thinking critically is good. Living in a constant mode of criticism is not.
Tumult, tumult, tumult.
More later.

To say it rained in Sarasota last night would be a gross understatement. Last night brought a cataract of ark-building proportions. It does that in sub-tropical locales. As such, the power in our school flickered on and off a few times. The network went all screwy and connectivity was hit and miss all day. ITC Wendy came into my room mid-day and said, “I think if you don’t restart, you should be ok.”
I had, of course, restarted at least three times to try and solve the problem. Luckily, the student laptops were still functioning, so I didn’t need to fall back on Plan B. This deep into the school year, I wonder would I would have done were I already up and running as a blogging classroom. Generally speaking, in the traditional classroom, the textbooks aren’t given to disappearing after a storm. Still, I’d much rather have what I have than have not.
Our ESE Resource teacher Lynne helps daily in my last period class. This means she was in on my Eminem lesson yesterday. This morning, she told me last night she read my post on the lesson. She was in her daughter Crissy’s room, she’d forgotten her laptop at school, and Crissy came in. She explained what she was doing and told Crissy what she was reading about.
“They got to listen to music in English class?” she said, “I want to go to Phoenix.”
I’m a little incredulous at the idea that music in a classroom is so difficult to believe at this point in the game. It’s such a rich mix for a language classroom in the first place. Given the success of yesterday’s as shown by my students’ almost total recall of what we had done and the lesson to be learned, I’m planning on using it more and more in my classroom.
The room has also become a hub of activity during lunch. I’ve a contingent of male students who pile in to use the computers to listen to music and look up weird news. I’ve also a contingent of female students who come in to look up videos of the latest dance crazes. These same students who struggle when I give them a research topic or question are incredibly adroit at finding exactly the right video or finding their way around dead links. The knowledge is there, but the building is dead. I’ve got to bring more relevant content to the class.
My students, by-and-large, do not see themselves as writers. If I can get them writing about where they are and interacting with the online segment of experts on those various subjects, I think they will be pushed to explore their abilities.
Ideas?
More later.

Part of biulding endurance in writing in my classroom is using daily journaling in response to what I try to make high-interest prompts. We’ve been journaling for about 10 days so far and my results are encouraging.
One common frustration is the way almost all of my writers start their journal prompts. Today was a prime example. One of the prompts was, “What are three things in your life of which you are proud. What makes you proud of each?”
Any teacher who has thrown such a prompt at their kids knows most beginning writers will come back with a first sentence that starts something like, “Three things in my life I’m proud of are…”
Determined to show my students why that can make for painful reading, I played just the intro. of Eminem’s song “Lose Yourself” from the movie 8 Mile.
The song starts with a piano solo a la the introduction to a Mariah Carey song. Just as you’re getting pulled in and lulled in to thoughts of herbal tea and afternoon naps, a strong bass guitar line takes the place of the guitar.
Before I started the song, I wrote the question, “What do you notice about the beginning of this song?” on the board and told them all I wanted to do was listen and write.
When it was over, after promising we could listen to more of the song later, I asked them to share what they noticed.
The results were great.
“In the beginning, I thought it was going to be a Mariah Carey song because it sounded like one of her beats, but then it changed up,” a student recalled in last period.
It got me where I wanted to be and got them thinking about how they started their writing.
I asked them to think of what they wrote today and what they read of other people. “Raise you hand if what you wrote or read started with…” I listed the usual suspects, hands went up.
“Would you really want to read that?”
A chorus of “No, that would be boring.”
“Then I challenge you not to write it. Don’t write what you wouldn’t want to read. Easy is boring.”
Talking to other teachers after school today, it sounds like they were listening. Tomorrow’s journal prompt will be a better barometer.
More later.

Time for some soul cleansing.
Sitting at my desk this morning, I am responding to school e-mail and notice I have yet to RSVP to an invite to take part in some district training. I hit the reply button and type my missive, explaining I will be a little late due to our school’s late release time.
Two Minutes.
That’s all it took before the e-mails started rolling in from across the county letting me know that I had inadvertently “Replied All.” I’ve unsent the message now. Anyone who hasn’t already seen it, won’t. What’s interesting to me is the mood of the response I got from many teachers. The few from around the county who know me and read the message were polite with their replies. Not everyone was.
One teacher, whom I do not know, replied:

WHEN YOU WANT TO RESPOND TO THE PERSON WHO CONTACTED YOU, GO TO MESSAGE, REPLY SPECIAL, REPLY SENDER. THAT WAY THE WHOLE WORLD DOES NOT HAVE TO READ YOU MESSAGES OR BE PART OF YOUR BUSINESS. JUST AN FYI….HAVE A GREAT DAY.

You’ve got to see the irony in using all caps and the “That way the whole world does not have to read your messages or be a part of your business,” coupled with “Have a great day.”
It’s amazing how snarky we can be to each other when there’s no person attached.
So, here I sit, replies rolling in from those teachers who already opened the message. Each one telling me just how to reply to an e-mail. Nothing like starting the day with humility brought to me by EVERYONE in the district.
More later.

Life has become 50-50-50. As a marathon runner, I have a natural curiosity when it comes to Dean Karnazes‘ planned running of 50 marathons in 50 states in 50 consecutive days. As a teacher, it goes a bit farther. Tomorrow, the day of Dean’s second marathon, my students will be exploring his site, the site The North Face (the event’s major sponsor) has set up and the Runner’s World website to gain a better understanding of what exactly is underway.
Friday, I used the USA Track & Field route mapper to show my students what 26.2 miles from our school would look like using the site’s Google Maps-based technology. They were hooked.
Then, with no prior knowledge, I had them predict the times for Dean’s first 10 marathons.
As he goes, we’ll fill in the actual times and work in Excel to create formulas to track the differences. The math teacher on my team is on board to help the students with graphing of the results and tracking trends. It’s actual data. It’s something real.
Outside of that, Dean’s blog will be a big focus. As we uncover information, I’m going to show the students how to post their findings as comments to his blog. Hopefully, this will whet their appetites and usher in the use of blogs in my classroom. My difficulty thus far has been the idea that they would probably not just latch on to blogging. It needs a purpose and I think this will help them see it.
As far as how this connects to writing, it’s clear to me. They are doing authentic research, interacting with the world and making informed predictions. I’ll be asking them to think about why Dean’s doing what he’s doing and how that could be compared to their lives. They’ll be looking at what this can do to his body and explaining it to others. The hope is for this to build natural intrigue.
In other realms, I missed an opportunity Friday. My daily journal prompt asked my students to identify who was the more successful of two men pictured. The picture on the left was popular rapper Ludacris. The picture on the right was Vice President Cheney. There wasn’t one class where at least one person could identify the vice president, though it did take time. Were we farther along, I could have posted the prompt on my blog and had my students use the “Blog This” function of Flock to pull down the pictures and then write their response.
The piece that’s missing is the learning of the skills. I’m not only trying to integrate tech. literacy into my classroom, but I’m also charged with paving the way for my students to come in to their own as writers. Some days, I’d settle for capitalizing the word “I”.
I’ve been doing some interesting reading lately, but, as always…
More later.

I could throw in the ubiquitous lines about it being a long time since I’ve posted, but I don’t want to waste time with that.

With the holiday last week and then a professional day Tuesday, we had a 3-day week last week. Talk about difficult recovery. A full week out for Kagan training and a four-day weekend, getting the students back in class was difficult. It’s like starting the year all over again. This week is a bit better. We’re getting there.

Last week, we started journaling, the old-fashioned way, on paper. What incites this has provided into what is going on with my students. It also shows great formative assessment opportunities as to where their gaps are in writing. Still, it’s quite a bit of information to process.

Today, as I’m sure many teachers across the country are doing, our journal prompt has to do with the attacks of 9-11. I was on the fence as to what I was going to do. Ignoring it seemed wrong, but I know the country’s close to saturation on remembering what we must remember. The students have a choice between two prompts: Where were you 5 years ago today when you heard about the WTC? OR How has America changed in the time since 9-11? What examples can you give to prove your point?

Here’s something I hadn’t thought of that is unique to students in my county, some of them were in the room when President Bush got the news. They were there. One young man raised his hand during our post-journaling discussion and said, “I shook his hand that day.” That’s something he’ll always have. While it was clear from my follow-up questions he doesn’t quite grasp the impact yet, with time, he will. I also have students whose family members were in the Twin Towers that day. Here they are, sitting in a school on a day when the entire country is remembering and theirs are the memories that are more unique than most.

What to do with this information? It seems to me to be teeming with possibilities for using multiple literacies. I’m not sure we’re ready yet. I don’t know how to evaluate those skills. I know I’m ready. I know I have the knowledge necessary to blog and research and respond to posts, but do they? How do I know? It’s something severely lacking in my pre-service experience and professional development. How do I assess media literacy? Where’s the test?

I can’t remember what I’ve never forgotten.
More later.

We’ve one more day of Kagan Cooperative Learning Train the Trainer training. During today’s session, I began to think about cooperative learning and engagement in the modern classroom. Part of the Kagan premise is “Simultaneous Interaction” which asks the question, “What percent is overtly engaged at a given time?” It’s a fantastic time and one teachers have been asking since they stepped in to the first schoolhouses. The trouble I see is prescriptive engagement. Jackie, our trainer, made sure to point out that engagement does not equal compliance. Doesn’t it? Another piece of the Kagan premise is “Individual Accountability” which asks, “Is individual public performance required.” It’s that last word that runs up against the idea of compliance being separate from engagement. If I’m requiring my students to fulfill a certain role, am I not requiring them to engage in a compliant manner? If student A refuses to work because he wanted the role assigned to student C, then he is truly engaged, but not at all in compliance. Most teachers would give student A the choice of complying or choosing to work alone. I know many who choose the latter and even more teachers who expect the former.
This works away from 21st century literacy skills and problem-based learning. I would much rather my students were engaged due to authentic interest in content rather than contrived adherence to teacher prescription. In my doodling/notetaking today, I wrote down, “Cooperative learning does not fix bad teachers.” You can take a horrendous teacher, train them in Kagan structures, have them buy in and own the structures and use them everyday in their classroom, but I would argue you haven’t helped that teacher if the content the students are cooperating to learn has not changed. If this teacher is having students use the “Quiz-Quiz-Trade” structure to review important dates of battles of the American Civil War, then the students are still being done a disservice in their learning. Even if they were using the same structure to review the causes of the war, a disservice has been done if those causes came from the textbook or teacher. The teacher has simply found a new way to transfer old information.
Teachers must also be taught how to let students uncover and evaluate their own information. From there, quiz-quiz-trade is a great avenue of education. Kagan surely informs our practice, but not our pedagogy. Old dog, old tricks, new order.
I would be remiss if I did not clarify that I am a believer in the promise of Kagan. I’ve experienced the transfer of responsibility and increase in student accountability in my own classroom. My worry is that it is not requiring teachers look more critically at their practice, rather it is providing a more palatable (for teachers and students) method of delivery. Taking your cousin to the prom is taking your cousin to the prom whether he’s the best looking person their or not.
One piece I thoroughly enjoy about Kagan is its focus on state change and its interest in brain chemistry. While teaching does have an artistic side, educators cannot afford to ignore the science of the brain and how best to activate it. Including the elements of “Silly Sports” and “Goofy Games” is something all structured events, from classes to faculty meetings would do well to include.
Miguel Guhlin had a fantastic post recently on “Whitelisting and Transparency” that has certainly informed my thoughts on covert and unintended hypocrisies in education. It’s led to the consideration of how I can transform the way I do things in such a manner that it provides my students with authentic engagement in a safe (in many senses of the word) environment. Kagan is an undeniably useful tool, but it is the lens to examine the findings, not the hammer and pick to unearth the learning.
More later.

I’m in training all week this week to become a certified school trainer with Kagan Cooperative Learning. I’m highly excited by this prospect. This is my third Kagan training, and each time I walk away with new knowledge that had direct benefits for my students.
The difficulty comes in the visage of being out of my classroom for an entire week so early in the school year. It’s never easy for me to leave my students in the hands of a substitute, even the most capable. Amazingly, I know they’ve learned from teachers I’ll never meet and will go on to meet many more. For me, though, it’s a question of how long I have them in my classroom and I hate to waste any of that time.
For the most part, my substitute reports have been positive, with regular mentions of some frustrating mishaps. I’ve had my students working on the laptops the first two days of the week, but that met with big problems. For someone who knows what to expect, it’s an excellent environment. For someone who neither designed the lesson nor has the training/experience with technology, it’s proven a nightmare.
Tuesday, as my final attempt, I designed an automated PowerPoint presentation with embedded audio thanks to audacity. I figured the students would be able to hear my voice and that will help as a behavior regulator. Plus, it was a way for me to be in the room without being in the room. For some, it worked; for others, it did not. That’s ok. It was a trial.
Upon returning to school Tuesday afternoon and reading of further mishaps in the substitute teacher’s notes, I packed up the laptops in the cart and wrote a lesson plan that was technology free, no projector even. Not only that, for the first time in four weeks, I was sent to the copy machine. The lesson I designed was high-content, but low-tech. Traditional would be the word for it.
I didn’t go back to school when I got out of training today. After staying up until 1:30 both Sunday and Monday nights, I decided I had put in my time. I got to bed at a decent hour last night, but it hadn’t been 11 hours since I left when I stopped by the building this morning. Luckily, I have not much of a life outside of teaching.
The whole week takes me to what I’ve heard Will Richardson comment on several times in person and in podcasts – it’s about teaching the skills. I thought I had made headway with my students in showing them appropriate use of resources and the rationale behind it. Clearly, there’s more work to be done. When we get back after the holiday, I’ll start in with new class and teambuilding as well as tech. and web usage skills. One of the pieces I’m constantly reminded of is the premise that many of my students stand on the losing end of the technology divide. Though the majority of them have home computer and Internet access, it’s a slim majority. They may be natives of Prensky’s digital world, but they are not among the power class. There’s a difference between living in the Bronx and living in Manhattan. I’m not sure if the metaphor works, but it’s how I see things in my head.
Much of the time, I feel the shininess must wear off before we can get to the true potential of these tech tools.
One more note about training before I sign off. The final announcement for the day was about the follow-up to the training and making sure every participant had support in taking what we’ve learned back to our schools. The way that will happen is a follow-up day back at the district office for participants to voice concerns, questions and the like. Stephanie, friend and science teacher at Phoenix, and I agreed a blog would be the best way to house that conversation and eliminate the need for yet another day out of the classroom. We proposed the idea and were told a blog was a great idea, but as a follow-up to the follow-up. Tried to make the case for blog-as-follow-up, but met with resistance. I suppose the agreement that a blog would be a useful tool is a sign of progress. Oh, progress, you slow, lumbering behemoth. (My point was just validated by the fact the blogger.com spellcheck did not recognize the word “blog.” Too funny.)
More later.