Author: Mr. Chase

I Am Sam

I know a whole bunch of stuff, until I don’t. As the title of this space implies, I love learning as much about as many subjects as possible. Smart is good. And still, I find myself in rooms and conversations where I am outpaced by those who showed up to the party long before I did and are much better versed in the ideas and thinking around a certain subject. While I still unintentionally find myself faking a fund of knowledge I’m totally lacking, I’ve gotten better over the years at remaining quiet, reading the room, and asking good questions.

I try to see the whole board. For many reasons – some intentional and some out of my control – I’ve been able to work for people who are not only amazingly good at the work they do, but willing to take the time to help me understand how to see what we are building together in a larger context. From building schools, to serving an entire district, to writing policy for a nation, I’ve had the chance to work with leaders who pause to ask if we are seeing the whole board and have taken the time to help me see it when I’ve needed help focusing.

I sign my name. More importantly, I work as hard as I can to make sure my name is attached to messages taking up for those who don’t have the same privilege I experience on a daily basis and working to make sure that privilege isn’t unique to people who look or grew up like me.

I have unexpected friends. While I interact regularly with a fair number of people with whom I see eye to eye, my days are just as likely to be populated by conversations with people I think are wholly wrong and whom I call friends. While I’m sure I’d be happy if they one day conceded that our conversations had changed their mind on a topic of contention, I also value the argument. Connecting and conversing with people with whom I disagree helps me to remember why I might have started holding a belief in the first place while gaining an understanding of why other people might think or believe differently.

I made a promise to a widow. I’ve never loved a job as much as I loved teaching. Each year brought a new group of individuals into my care, and each day brought a new set of unexpected experiences. I was entrusted with the sustaining the greatest of public goods. I had the good fortune to teach with and at some of the best teachers and schools, respectively. And my informal education on educating was at least as important and informative as my formal one. Then, after agreeing with so many of my colleagues for so long about frustrations with the absence of teacher voice in so many decisions directly impacting our classrooms and students, I left to join that other fray. While I love what I’ve gotten to do since leaving the classroom and the experiences it has afforded me, nothing has been or will ever be as amazing as what I got to do in the classroom.

What Wakes Me Up

A friend at the day gig questioned aloud what good the work we do has in the world. In the face of the extreme tragedies and chaos occurring daily, there are few occupations and roles I could imagine feeling as though they had maximum impact on the world or individuals. Luckily, as I’ve said before, I’ve got faith that we’re all working on all the stuff that needs attention all the time.

Still, I replied to my friend with the thing that keeps me showing up at the office every day. While I’ll never know all the good we do in the world, I’ve got to believe things are a little better at the end of the day than if we’d done nothing.

Thus, waking up, getting out of bed, and facing each day.

There are forces of ignorance at work in the world, and they are much more pernicious than evil.

This post is part of a daily conversation between Ben Wilkoff and me. Each day Ben and I post a question to each other and then respond to one another. You can follow the questions and respond via Twitter at #LifeWideLearning16.

Building the Perfect Blendship

My first master’s degree took a year to complete. It was a whirlwind of activity that rarely gave me the space to pause and connect with folks on more than an academic and discursive level. And as much as I love a good classroom discussion, I can’t say the experience left me with more than a handful of people whom I call friends.

Though we were in different programs, Paul and I found ourselves in many of the same classes across both of our semesters. I liked how his brain worked. I loved how he listened, paused, and deployed questions that had just enough of his own ideas lining them while still pulling out more of the thinking of the other person.

While I don’t have it in writing anywhere, I’ve got a hunch Paul felt the same way about me.

This mutual admiration made it sting quite a little bit when, facing the end of our year, Paul and I had the conversation. While he was glad we’d become friends, Paul explained, he wasn’t the kind of guy who really talked to people on the phone or kept in contact with people who weren’t immediately present. He was breaking up with me. I told him I understood, and in fact, I operated much the same way.

I’d been worried for a few weeks that Paul would take it as a lack of care when our daily communications abruptly ceased or went down to a trickle when we weren’t living in the same city. Worse, I was concerned he, like most people, would take this infrequent communication as an indication I no longer cared for him or wasn’t interested in what might be going on in his life.

In truth, I have a difficult time remembering time. If you and I are friends and we go years between visits, I will conceptualize us as having only parted ways moments ago when we next meet. Maybe it’s extreme object permanence, but for relationships?

Either way, Paul and I agreed to a conscious unfriendliness. In the unlikely event he and I would see each other again in person, we both agreed not to take it personally that the other hadn’t reached out more to check in.

In the four years since Paul and I said goodbye, we have seen each other in various locations across the country. When each of us was considering moving to a new job or had a major life event take place, we reached out to one another for counsel. We’ve kept checking in.

I’ve tried to figure out the why of our friendship’s sticking power. I cannot understand why Paul and I have kept in contact while I struggle to be a better friend to people I’ve known much longer and even lived with. I was part of the same group of friends all four years of college. We were inseparable. Now, I know what they are doing because of social media and from infrequent updates from the few with whom I still keep close contact.

As for the why of it, here’s what I’ve got. New friends are difficult. They come with interoperability standards that live deeper in the programming that makes you you than the surface features of family, hobbies, and the like. What’s more, we’ve all got old friends. They’re folks with whom we’ve already formed connections. We’ve written the patches necessary to meet those interoperability requirements. New friends mean a willingness to go through and debug your programming with a whole new person. Much of the time, it’s difficult to imagine making that commitment.

Then again, maybe it’s chance.

This post is part of a daily conversation between Ben Wilkoff and me. Each day Ben and I post a question to each other and then respond to one another. You can follow the questions and respond via Twitter at #LifeWideLearning16.

Ten Truly Rare Things

Rare Prime Rib Baked Potato Diner Nicky's Steakhouse Estes Park Colorado Chinese Daughters reunion

Ten Things That are Truly Rare:

10. An Adam Sandler film I fee compelled to watch.

9. My reaching the upper limits of the much-touted 8-10 hours of sleep per night.

8. Meeting someone with whom I could imagine spending the rest of my life.

7. Going for a run and not seeing the world as anything but better at the end.

6. My picturing the right person on the first mention when someone says, “Have you ever heard of/met so-and-so?”

5. A Neil Diamond/Johnny Cash/Elvis/Frank Sinatra/Matchbox Twenty song playing and me not singing along.

4. Feeling as though I’m living up to being the son and grandson I think my parents and grandparents deserve.

3. Laughter not making me feel better.

2. Letting myself own and feel sadness not making me wiser and more whole.

1. People flossing as often as dentists would recommend.

This post is part of a daily conversation between Ben Wilkoff and me. Each day Ben and I post a question to each other and then respond to one another. You can follow the questions and respond via Twitter at #LifeWideLearning16.

I Work Hard to Doubt Your Research

classified research

I’ve been known to read a study or two. I can back up my point with this research or the other. Today, I was in a meeting where I easily pulled up 20 years’ worth of research to make my point. And while I’m not statistician or economist, I can evaluate a study’s worthiness of my attention better than most folks I run into. Treatment and control groups, T-tests, P levels, pseudo-experiments – thanks to more semesters of graduate level statistics courses than I’d ever intended on completing, I am functionally literate.

So, even though I appreciate a randomized-controlled trial and can revel in rejecting the null hypothesis, it may seem surprising that I work so hard on maintaining a bias of doubting even the most well-constructed study.

When it comes to what I privilege as a belief, I’ll point you to the sociologists and anthropologists who examine a phenomenon closely, take care to understand as much of everything around it as they can and present their findings by saying, “This thing happened, and here are the elements and conditions that happened when it happened.” Then, they turn around and return to watching, calling back as they leave, “We are going to keep watching to find out if it still happens when other things happen.”

Why, though, do I work so hard to maintain a bias in favor of this descriptivist approach? I think of it the other way around. I’m resisting the sexiness of numbers. An implied or inferred certainty can creep in when numbers are used to explain why something happens. Whatever quantitative study you choose to believe is basically saying, “If X, Y, and Z are equal, then we can say with this level of certainty that this thing will happen when you do that other thing.” It’s that first part of the statement that keeps me suspicious of education research. Tell me the the last time a teacher was able to control for all relevant variables when deciding which practice to employ in her classroom.

This is not to say I throw in with the sociologists’ ability to predict the future. It is only to say I take comfort in the implied humility in reporting your results by acknowledging they are the conclusions at which you arrived when trying to figure things out by watching this time.

It is also not to say I poo poo a well-constructed experimental study. I hear and read each one I encounter as, “Here’s a pretty good guess of what will happen when you do these things and know this about the population to which you’re doing it.”

All of this is how I think about dictionaries. Dictionaries are descriptivist tools. Adding a new word to an edition of a dictionary does not freeze that word in time, prescribing how it is to be used in language forevermore. Like the work of a sociologist, a dictionary’s contents are meant as a snapshot of language putting newly-deployed words alongside those already in existence. When Homer Simpson’s “d’oh” first found its way into Webster’s, few (if any) people started using it in their everyday speech or formal writing as a result.

For words with which I’m not initially familiar, the dictionary can act as our statisticians’ studies. Looking up “fat” after my early-90s self was told that’s how I looked would help me to understand what had been meant by the statement. Here too there’s a flaw. Without knowing the context inferred by the dictionary’s definition, I may walk away thinking the statement meant I was corpulent when it was meant to imply I was “phat”. The definition was the dictionary’s best guess.

I rely on dictionaries to help me navigate new terms in the same way I look to the results of well-designed studies to tell me about new ideas of practices – with a bias of believing they are providing me the best guess at the time.

This post is part of a daily conversation between Ben Wilkoff and me. Each day Ben and I post a question to each other and then respond to one another. You can follow the questions and respond via Twitter at #LifeWideLearning16.

Are You Adulting or Growing Up?

Adorable Handsome Black Boy Child in Baggy Business Suit laughing and walking over white background.

I’m glad childhood is a thing. For the longest time it wasn’t. When people aren’t expected to live very long, it seems inappropriate to demarcate a certain part of a lifespan as protected. Then, starting in the 17th century, folks in the “western” world were living longer and John Locke gave us childhood. We haven’t Locke(d) back. Sorry.

From childhood grew adolescence. (Thanks, Piaget.)

Now, setting aside for the moment the newish idea of late adolescence, we have childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. While puberty provides an (awkward) transition from childhood to adolescence that coincides with the rituals of many cultures, the transition from adolescence to adulthood lacks such an obvious physiological transition.

Enter, adulting.

My first adulting was early – filing my 1040-EZ form on my own. It was followed by setting up appointments with my academic advisor, finding a roommate to join me as we ventured out of the dorms in college, and a host of other small steps toward being the version of me who could stand on his own.

Adulting isn’t the same as growing up. Growing up carries with it the implicit sense of being a mature person. Adulting, on the other hand, gives the sense of dipping one’s toe in adulthood without taking on all the responsibilities the full transition would entail. Adulting sounds like a costume or set of clothes you can take off Mr. Rogers-style when you’re finished with whatever adult task needed tending to.

Whenever I put on a suit for my day gig, I get a serious sense of adulting. I’m putting on the costume without fully feeling I’ve become all the worst characters in movies like Baby Boom, Joe Versus the Volcano, or The Hudsucker Proxy. Those folks put on the costume and couldn’t remember who they’d been before.

Adulting is a putting on, while growing up is a shedding. It’s what I saw time and again as my students were thrust into life events that pulled away from them the childish pieces of their identity, forcing them to deal with death, divorce, poverty, and any number of the darker aspects of adulting.

I’m pretty grown now. Life has happened, and I’m a week away from another birthday that will raise expectations one more year beyond my shoe size. Still, I’ve got a beach ball and a collection of legos at work. I brought an assortment of crayons to the office from my last trip. I’m still not adulting full-time.

Teachers, Not Gods

If your ratio is golden, do different math. If your bullets are silver, put down the gun.

These terms in education should have us worrying about the medicine men who come to town hocking their wares and schemes for how improving X will make all the difference. For the longest time, you couldn’t walk into a conversation about education in America without hearing someone say teachers were the biggest classroom factor on student achievement.

Fix teachers, the argument went, and you’d have fixed learning. The research showed a persistent positive impact on a student’s achievement if that student had a highly-effective teacher three years in a row. A cottage industry sprang up and schools were required to document the “highly-effective” status of their teachers.

While I don’t argue with the findings of the research, I do argue against the assumed implications of that research or the suggestion that a highly-effective teacher is the deciding factor of student success. Focusing on a single factor and holding it above all others will always be ill-advised.

This 2013 study showed the effective of poverty on cognitive load. In essence, people in poverty are navigating being poor and that puts extra stress on their capacity to learn the facts of the Crimean War.

If we are following the belief in the highly-effective teacher, though, we set the poverty aside. We call on our teachers to teach through the poverty (and asking students to learn through it) rather than acknowledging and addressing the pervasive effects of poverty on the system.

The greater the effects of poverty, the more highly-effective the teachers need be. As we have set all of our hopes on the highly-effective teacher, it matters less and less as research shows the effects of childhood trauma, hunger, impediments to accessibility, poor infrastructure, racism, and the like. In the end, our super teachers are called upon to be so highly effective as to negate and reverse the effects of any manner of negative variables impacting student learning.

This, wasn’t where we started. It’s not what the research was suggesting. No one said, “Fix the teachers and you’ll be good to go.” Instead, the implications were more refined. Give teachers the skills, knowledge, and supports to be effective at their practice, and they’ll be good at their practice. Those skills, knowledge, and supports mean ensuring the students in a teacher’s care are well-fed, have access to the right social services, are presented with the best learning resources, and a list of other factors we know to impact learning.

More broadly, this means actively working against poverty rather than asking teachers to teach against poverty. It means ending childhood violence rather than asking teachers to teach through childhood violence. It means committing to make better communities rather than simply expecting teachers to be better teachers.

The golden ratio or silver bullet are useless once we begin to acknowledge that schools, teachers, and students exist in an of a world. Asking them to learn and teach despite that world or as though they are not a part of it is myopic and cruel.

This post is part of a daily conversation between Ben Wilkoff and me. Each day Ben and I post a question to each other and then respond to one another. You can follow the questions and respond via Twitter at #LifeWideLearning16.

Staring Because I Cannot Begin to Speak

stare down.

Otherwise not a violent person, I want to punch the three people two tables away.

They are teachers. They have been enjoying happy hour for the last 90 minutes, letting fly with all they are thinking about their schools, their classrooms, and their students.

What they think about learning and teaching is different – dramatically different – from what I think. They have mentioned “those kids”. They have talked about urban education in a way that makes my skin crawl. “A private school without private school prices,” one just said.

These are the moments I can’t turn away from. I stare in a state of vacillating anger, shock, and worry.

I’m not going to walk over and talk to these folks. It’s not that I always hold my tongue (Diana can attest to this). It’s that I don’t think I have it in me to listen as closely as I want to in this moment.

So I stare in the same way you might stare at a Dalí painting, wondering how you both saw the same world and clearly interpreted what you saw differently.

These are the things at which I stare, those that depart so sharply and swiftly from my own experiences and beliefs that I must hold my tongue as I attempt to weave what I am seeing an hearing into a useable framework.

Staring, for me, doesn’t mean I have nothing to say. It means I have more to say inspired more by emotion than thoughtfulness that I’ve got to pause and weave. It doesn’t always work. It won’t likely work today. This other table and I are going to have to agree to disagree at a distance.

Maybe the next time I stare, I’ll have the patience to speak.

This post is part of a daily conversation between Ben Wilkoff and me. Each day Ben and I post a question to each other and then respond to one another. You can follow the questions and respond via Twitter at #LifeWideLearning16.

How Not to Build the Systems You Hate

framing hammer collection 2007

Quite a bit, I get to work with schools and districts as they work to think through their strategic plans. Visions and mission statements are set. They are quickly complemented by action items and assignments of responsibility. An excitement, a fervor start to pass over those assembled. This is it! They are finally moving!

And then I stop things.

Anyone who has begun this work has done so because the status quo is no longer acceptable. They have become frustrated because so much of what is being done is justified by the way the system has operated in the past. They’ve always done it that way. Over and over again, folks are upset by the sturdiness of the system. Banging and clawing at it, they’ve gotten me in the room after a prolonged fight.

So, I ask, “Where is the timeline for review?”

Stares.

We are in the room because of frustration over a lack of reconsideration of priorities. There has been no institutional process for reflecting on whether things are going well. More often than not, the newly proposed system (no matter how forward-thinking) is equally devoid of review.

As much as they may recognize the need for student reflection, for professional pause to consider their practice, they have not thought to include it in their new plans for their schools and districts.

It’s possible they see their new mission, vision, and the lot as perfect. I don’t think that’s it. More likely, they are excited by he possibility of change. The immediate future overrides the later possible.

And that’s why I stop things.

Without planning a process for review, they have doomed themselves to repeat the past. They have cemented the status quo. Without intending to, they have built a structure against which future members of the community will hit their heads.

They have made the arbitrary.

That’s the key for anyone building something new. You are creating something of value to you with deep theoretical roots planted in the soil of today.

This is how the systems you’re fighting against were begun.

Build something better.

This doesn’t mean anticipating the future. As anyone with a platform and technological megaphone will tell you, we can’t anticipate the future. Instead, it means anticipating the future will need something else – something specific to the time.

In any system, the arbitrary is the most unfair. It is the thing to which people point and say, “Well, it’s always been that way.” It is the immovable that most needs moving.

So, we stop things and look at the system they have designed and start asking where it makes sense for future community members to be called upon to examine the status quo for cracks in the foundation.

What makes sense today will be the status quo of tomorrow. It will come replete with the seemingly arbitrary trapping of “we’ve always done it this way”, and that is reason enough to guard against it.

This post is part of a daily conversation between Ben Wilkoff and me. Each day Ben and I post a question to each other and then respond to one another. You can follow the questions and respond via Twitter at #LifeWideLearning16.

A Goodbye for Every Room

On my most frustrating days, it will be this…

For my closest friends…

To those to whom I will always owe and apology…

In the crowded rooms in which I’ve always hoped to be heard…

To my siblings…

To my parents and family…

To my students…
student sign offAnd, inveriably to myself…

This post is part of a daily conversation between Ben Wilkoff and me. Each day Ben and I post a question to each other and then respond to one another. You can follow the questions and respond via Twitter at #LifeWideLearning16.