Author: Mr. Chase

…The Story of Who I Am

In the photograph is a young man with short light brown hair, blue eyes, and a tan. Around his neck he wears a ceramic medallion with his first name printed on it hanging from a length of twine. Aside from tan, his skin is smooth. Across his forehead are no squiggly creases drawn out by the smile he wears in the photograph. Along the outer edges of his upper lip and running to his nose, there are no smile lines. No crows feet appear at the corners of his eyes along with the smile, and beneath his eyes exist no hints that he might be getting much less sleep than is medically recommended.

I found the photo on the hard drive of a 10-year-old laptop I was resuscitating. Flipping through other pictures, there I was, smiling forward more than a decade.

For a second, I missed being him. He had fewer responsibilities, he’d seen less loss. It was only a flicker as I realized the lines and scars of time I wear now were made by the memories he didn’t know were coming. His best years of teaching were still ahead of him. The friends he held closest represented only a fraction of those whom he would call on when he found the loss in his future.

While the dimples were still on either side of his smile, he hadn’t yet smiled enough that those lines were deep enough to show his smile was his default in life.

My face carries the grief of loss – some uncontrollable, some by my own actions. I wear the age that comes from finding humor in as many moments as I can. The dark circles under my eyes remember to myself that I’m not yet halfway to the end of all this, and a few more naps would be appropriate.

I don’t quite know the man in the photograph. I envy him. He’s still on the way to meeting me.

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.

The Conversations I Want to Have

All to All

As of June 15, my contract on my day gig will be up, and I’ll need to find some other way to keep my dog fed. As much as I’ve been thinking about geography when grappling with what this change means, I’ve been thinking about what kinds of conversations I want to be in and which ones I want to leave behind. With five and a half months left on the calendar, I’m gaining clarity.

The conversations I most want to sustain and move forward are those around equity and purpose. The first means all equities. I want to talk about the kid in middle school who realizes he’s gay and can’t access educational and social experiences like teachers’ use of heteronormative language and not feeling comfortable asking his crush to the school dance. I want to talk about the fact that if most school leaders say they invited their honors or gifted and talented-labeled students to participate in a program then I can be almost certain they didn’t invite students of color. I want to talk about how students in rural schools don’t have the access to arts, cultural institutions, and educational opportunities their urban- and suburban-dwelling peers have every day. As many flavors of equity as we can bring to the table, that’s what I want.

In all of my grad school experiences, I have asked and searched for an answer to the same question to no avail, “What is the pedagogy and practice that drives this institution of learning?” Silence each time. I ask a similar question of principals and superintendents, “What are the three things we are working toward this year?” Silence (usually uncomfortable), and then a garbled answer.

Thus, I want to improve conversations of purpose. For any action, program, or scheme; I want to help make sure there’s an answer to “Why are we doing this?” Similarly, for all askings of “What are we going to do?” I want to help organizations and people look to their agreed upon purpose for helpful guidance. If you don’t know your mission statement, then it’s probably not your mission.

The conversations I’m willing to step away from are simple. Anything that starts with, “How can technology…” Technology should not drive the question. It should be considered as an answer to a possible problem, and it becomes boring to be in room after room and seen as a person who is there to bring up technology before he brings up people and relationships. In the conversations I’m seeking, I hope to enter fewer rooms with that presumed persona in the same way a master carpenter probably doesn’t want to be “that lady who loves talking about saws.”

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 Prescription for Truly Alternative Medicines

Modern Medicine

Medicines and their Respective Ills (barring the availability of laughter)

  • Music – Best for soothing of soul in response to sadness, surplus energy, procrastination, lack of focus
  • Hugs – Best daily as preventative. Otherwise, good for lonesomeness, sadness, when untethered from humanity
  • Puppies – unconditional love deficiency
  • Cleaning – depletion of sense of control
  • Running – foggy brains, frustration with humanity, amnesia of place in world
  • Eating – imminent feelings of shortness of life
  • Binge Watching – lapse of interest
  • Diversion via Friend – world weariness, feelings of immense personal loss, breakups, grief

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.

Engaging in a Movement of Giving

Molnija 3601 watch movement macro

I’m active on Kiva, DonorsChoose, and HandUp. For the uninitiated, these are three micro-lending and micro-giving sites. Dedicated to people in the developing world, educators, and those experiencing homelessness and poverty, respectively, these sites and their cousins represent one of the most important and dramatic developments in technology in the last century.

Kiva LogoWe can give move our money to a specific impact immediately. That simple. When a borrower has repaid a Kiva loan, I immediately re-invest with another project based on my specific set of search criteria. When I see a teacher ask for a DonorsChoose grant and outline a pedagogical use that aligns with my practice, I move to support it and share across social media. When I see a recipient on HandUp on a path that could have been mine, I do what I can to make the difference they’re asking for.

And that’s the difference of these kinds of giving platforms, my money is doing specific work. In a better way than we usually mean it, my money equals speech. If I am going to give, I want to do it in a way that runs parallel to my values and these sites give me a much more direct route to ensuring that.

donorschoose logoI realize the drawbacks. For one, recipients of these loans, grants, and gifts need access and knowledge of the existence of these tools. Without someone to connect them with the platforms, they may never have the chance of getting the tools and resources that would make the difference.

Expanding the reach of these organizations is why tacking on that extra dollar or two to a donation to support administrative costs can be key. In the meantime, this is also why I don’t solely give through these three tools. General purpose charities and service remain important, and I make sure to do what I can to support them as well.HandUp logo

This isn’t perfect. It’s not going to move millions of people out of poverty, put other countries on more stable footing, or remove the barriers to teachers having the tools they need. Hopefully, though, while we continue to work against inequity and systemic poverty, these efforts can make an impact for those they touch.

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.

Is Youtube Recommending Me to Me?

Screenshot of My Youtube Homepage

Let’s start in that top row. Youtube’s algorithms are moving in the right direction. I started this year with a yoga binge, and it’s not showing any signs of stopping. My musical tastes tend to follow the weather patterns. So, deep in the heart of winter, I’m likely to ask Sufjan to keep me company while I’m reading or writing. In those moments of sunshine (internally or climactically), watching the Tricia Miranda-choreographed video to Missy Elliot’s “WTF” is a definite bright spot. Youtube knows I’m going to watch this again because I’ve already watched it so many times.

In the recommended row, we jump all over the place. Yoga, sure. Stephen Colbert, Ze Frank, Lip Sync Battle, and Lianna LaHavas all make sense as well. I can only guess the Kimmel recommendation was inspired by Colbert. Similarly, the Tina Fey suggestions likely came from my searching for her cold open appearance on last week’s SNL. “Stop searching for your passion,” though? No real idea.

But that wasn’t the question. What do they say about me as a person? I appreciate talented, funny, thoughtful women who make unexpected choices. And, to a lesser extent, men who talk into cameras. They point to the idea that I like to laugh, and I enjoy music. When the two of them can happen together, all the better.

Interestingly, when you asked, I started to worry a bit. I’v enever thought about whether the person I am when I drop into a Youtube hole is the same person I am on Twitter, Instagram, or here. Those places are all productive. Even when I’m liking or retweeting, I’m they are making public acts of expression. They don’t let you know what tweets made me smile or think, but that I decided I didn’t want to share.

Youtube, on the other hand, is still a place of consumption for me. While I’ve a few videos posted there and on other sites, I’m more often searching than uploading. I was worried the questioner and the talker might not be the same person. They were.

What Kind of Man am I.

Smash Binary Gender

Sometimes, in my day job, I have meetings with a lot of men in suits.

Yesterday afternoon was one such time. Seated around a rectangular configuration of tables were about 25 people, mostly men. Each of those men was in a suit. I was as well. While their suits were almost uniformly black, with a few charcoal greys thrown in for good measure, mine was just a shade lighter than navy blue.

My shirt was pink. My socks were lime green. My tie was a bow and had little British bulldogs on it. My hair was more unkempt than kempt, and mine was the only eyebrow ring in the room. All of this was a departure from the other men in the room.

When it was my turn to present to the group, I started with a warm hello and smiled quickly at everyone around the rectangle. I smiled more in that meeting than any other room. When I had something to say, I raised my hand and asked if it was okay if I added a few points. As I added a few points, I connected them to the things the other people in the room had already shared.

The other men in the room didn’t greet one another beyond initial 1-on-1 greetings before we’d taken our seats, and smiles were infrequent occurrences. When the other men wanted to speak, they did. No one else raised their hands, and none of them asked if it was okay to add on.

Being a professional man is boring, and it’s serious work, and it’s uncomfortable clothes. I express my gender by playing and pushing at the ends of that tedious monologue of manhood. When it comes to speaking in a group, I don’t assume people want to hear what I have to say, and I try to make sure my words honor those ideas that have been expressed before me.

I get that this doesn’t pin down my gender expression. I don’t know that I can (or that I’m interested in pinning such a thing). I do hope it points out that in putting on my clothes and interacting with other people, I am aware of the otherness I’m feeling in a room. I’m similar, but not the same.

While I don’t identify as genderqueer, I recognize that smiling more than most, asking how people are feeling, and other small acts might have the impact of queering my gender role. That’s fine by me. Looking around the table yesterday and so many others I’ve sat at, I couldn’t help but think it looked like a lot of work to be that kind of man.

The Extent to Which I Don’t Want to Talk about ‘Scaling’

Scales of Justice - Frankfurt Version

I hate it when people ask how we can start doing something “at scale.” There’s a physical, visceral, almost-dry heaving reaction that ripples through my body. I hear questions of scale and begin to think about Ford’s assembly line, Old Navy commercials, and genetically-engineered corn.

Solving hunger in Pittsburgh is different than solving hunger in Puerto Rico. Both of those are different than solving hunger in Peoria.

I don’t want scale, I want equity, and I want fairness. While scale can make both of those possible, we often conflate taking something to scale as establishing equity.

For instance, a district that claims has taken its 1:1 student-to-device ratio to scale has ensured depth of scale. They have scale at the surface. Everyone has a device, and I can point to the places where the usage of those devices is almost assuredly maintaining inequity if not exacerbating it.

If we must talk of scale, though, and I sense that we must, let’s at least add some nuance to our thinking and our conversations.

For me, this comes in one of the best lessons I ever learned in a classroom when Professor Archon Fung explained the following six sizes of social change. Here are his six ways of thinking about scale:

  • number of people affected
  • geographic spread across jurisdictions
  • critical mass in population segment
  • size of impact on individuals affected
  • scope and durability of individual impact
  • sustainability of effort over time
  • total individuals and assets engaged

This is a 3-D model for thinking about scale, and hopefully, you start to see how the best efforts are able to move to scale along each of these factors. Teach a person to fish, and you’ve fed them for life. Teach all people to fish, and you’ve fed all of them for as long as the fish hold out. Teach a population to responsibly manage aquacultures while identifying other sources of food, and you’ve built a world that can eat and has something to live for.

Scale is more complicated than, “Did we get everyone?” It should be, because everyone is complicated.

The Easiest Thing We Learn from the Classroom May Be the Thing We Teach Worst

This is funny on so many levels.

Whatever your training was or has been in a classroom space, that’s the easiest skill to transfer to other spaces. If we are doing it decently, our classrooms offer spaces for the free exchange of ideas. If we’re doing it a little better, those ideas are new to many of the people in the room. If we’re operating in the top percentiles, those ideas are being pushed, pulled, and resisted in ways that leave everyone thinking, feeling heard, and knowing they were cared for.

Executing that last one is difficult. What’s easy is the transference of whatever habits of conversation are the mode for a learning space into other spaces as well.

You’ve maybe in meetings with folks who answer every suggestion with why it won’t work, why you’re wrong, and why the whole effort is doomed from the start. Rome is burning, they’ll tell you. This is Rome, the’ll claim. While there’s surely a mode of conversation these people experienced within their homes that could align with what you’re experiencing, we’ve seen enough of the power of school to know that it is a path that could have shifted long before they became professional buzzkills.

Teaching in FL, this was one of the key components of setting the best expectations of what we would collectively establish as our classroom culture. We’d talk to each other in ways that recognized the human foibles of the other people and took the stance that all ideas were worth our examination. (When working with 8th graders, I may have phrased it differently, but that was the underlying concept.)

At SLA, it was built into two of the school’s three rules – respect others & respect that this is a place of learning. If those are the guidelines and you begin to build practices around it, buzz kills in training can start to explore social career paths. Over the years, many students walked through the door suspect of the kinds of things we were asking them to do at SLA. They were suspect of working with other students, and for many, it was the first time they were asked to interact in interdependent ways with people from backgrounds different from their own.

And that was the work. That’s what it means to focus on citizenship. We’re in an election year, so it bears repeating. The little things we do like helping students think about how they talk to and about one another and how they discuss new and different ideas matter in ways that can corrode or build up a community or a republic more deeply than an economic policy that runs afoul.

How we talk to one another, now, as adults, was the easiest thing of our classroom experiences to pull forward into adulthood, and it can be one of the most difficult things to change once we’re here.

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’m Exhaling Answers

Nancy Dwyer

I’m not one for answers. Giving them, anyway. I dig the search for answers, and I’m happy to help you on your way to whatever answers you’ve deemed worthy of your time. I’m not the person to whom you should turn if you’re expecting answers to questions that aren’t in my unique locus of control.

But I sure do inhale the loose ends, the un-networked nodes, the ideas in the ether that aren’t tremendously useful to me in the moment, but represent the potential of usefulness down the road.

I breath these ideas in and let them fire the respiratory flow of possibilities.

Then, in front of a classroom – in a conference presentation, on an email chain, or a chance meeting – I exhale these loose ends in hopes of creating a more complete atmosphere of answers to your questions. It turns out I’ve been carrying these loose ends to help you tie and tidy up your questions.

I’m the fellow who’s spent hours reading research reports, opening tab after tab on his browser window, shaking every hand at the party and cataloging them all in my head for that one question you ask when I’m on a panel. Often, far too often, the other folks will dodge your question. They’ll give you philosophical answers that start with, “That’s a good question,” with the subtext of, “And I’m going to answer a completely different one right now.”

That’s when I’m ready to exhale and say, “I don’t know if this will be helpful, but here are four specific places you should look to help you down your path.” I can’t promise they’ll get you everywhere you want to be, but they will get you closer than you are now.” It’s also my way of acknowledging I don’t know the answer, but I can hopefully connect you with someone who does.

In the classroom or working with a group of educators in professional development, my exhale may seem foul. Not because of me, but because of what’s come before. People are often conditioned for the yes or the no. They’re expecting the, “That’s wrong, and here’s what’s right.”

That’s not how I breath. My telling you doesn’t teach you. It might give you something new to tell others, but I’m dubious of someone who answers any question with, “Because Zac told me.” You’re ideas need something stronger than hearsay as their foundation.

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 #LifeWideLearning

So – Get to Work

Institutional Elephants

Starting down the rabbit hole.

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.