Author: Mr. Chase

17 Jan 21 – My Daughter Likes a Book

If you know me, this won’t surprise you, but I treasure reading to my kids each night as they go to bed. There’s a connectedness in reading at bedtime I can’t seem to scrape together during the day. It’s also one-on-one time with each of them, something each of them would like to have, but not necessarily like the other one to have.

While, I love reading to them, neither one of them has shown a great interest in reading beyond the mechanical, “I guess I should learn how to do this.”

Then, Friday morning, my daughter made me cry.

“Do you want to know what we’re reading in class?” she asked as we were driving to school.

I told her yes, and words and ideas burst forth from her in ways I’ve never seen in relation to a book. She turned around mid-sentence to tell her brother he’d probably like the book too “because there’s space in it”.

She pulled it from her backpack to show me the cover. Then, started flipped through pages to find something. Once, there, she determinedly read a sentence aloud. This was the sentence she’d used in her writing about the book, she told me, pulling out her school work to show me where she’d written that same sentence.

“And, I said yard was the most important word in the chapter because, well, the whole thing is about the yards, so that’s definitely the most important.”

She talked about this book for nearly 10 minutes. I’m grateful she didn’t stop to ask questions because I was trying to drive and hold together how proud I was for those 10 minutes.

I didn’t hold it together later. Sitting at my desk, I emailed her entire teaching team, tears running down my cheeks, to let them know what happened. These are the people who have made her feel safe, capable, and smart. She knows she’s protected in the school, and that gives her brain the security it needs to start to learn. What a remarkable thing. What remarkable people.

She likes a book.

16 Jan 21 – Baking in Mistakes

If I know something could be better, is it always right to improve it?

The other day, I asked Chris to take a look at a document I was drafting for our district school administrators in preparation of our new curriculum resources. After reading and clicking through a couple of the embedded links, he got to the summative assessment description for one of our sixth grade modules.

The year focuses on community, and the summative asks students to compose an argument for one key component of a community. It’s all based on the interviews, analyses, and discussions they’ll have during the quarter, but those aren’t mentioned in the project description.

Chris pointed out the prompt could easily lead students to answers that are an inch deep and a mile wide. While I have confidence that the accompanying and building assignments will give students what they need to craft something narrower and deeper, the summative description leave those connections to chance.

What we have could be better.

The thing, though, is we built these resources internally. For most members of our design team, this was their first time building curriculum whole cloth. It’s some really good stuff.

So, now I wrestle with how heavy my hand should be. Do I go through each piece and put it as I would have it done? It’s certainly within my domain professionally and positionally. It’s also in my wheelhouse as someone who’s been doing this kind of design work for almost 20 years.

I could do it.

I don’t know if I feel like I should. Leaving these imperfections in the documents feels like leaving an unfinished puzzle lying around for others to add to and mess about with. When we bring teachers together in the Fall to plan their first quarter implementations, it’s these little pieces I am compelled to leave where they are so that others might realize their own agency when they suggest an edit.

To say I have the better idea and to change it feels as though it undercuts the professional learning I hope comes along with this process and working to make sure our teachers own this curriculum and these resources.

In describing this process, I’ve likened it that of a startup. What we have is well beyond a minimum viable product. It’s good stuff. Am I wrong to leave a few bugs in it for others to find and fix?

15 Jan 21 – Friday Night Rites

I didn’t have a lot of traditions and rituals in mind when I became a parent. Holidays and the lot, sure. But I don’t know that I had anything in mind apart what might come marked on calendars.

One surfaced in our first weeks as a family, though.

Every Friday, we order pizza and watch a movie. Which movie is on a choice rotation from oldest to youngest. The pizza is almost always Papa Murphy’s. (Every Friday, $5 large thin crust cheese, sausage, or pepperoni pizzas!) And, the movies can be television shows, holiday specials, or pieces of a few things until the chooser finds just the right film.

I’ve seen Season 2 Episode 2 of Netflix’s Ultimate Beastmaster more times than I can count. Same for Disney’s Zombies and Zombies 2.

Part of the fun of Friday Movie Night is its transgression against one of our other rituals – dinner together at the dinner table. Quite a little bit of research speaks to the importance of eating dinner together each night, but it just sort of happened for us.

Stealing from another movie The Story of Us, we take turns each night sharing our “high” and “low” from the day. Right now, it’s a lot of modeling from me. We also learned in our first couple goes that someone naming you in their description of their low for the day was not that person trying to make you feel bad or pick on you.

Many nights, the kids say they don’t have a low. Then I share mine, and they say, “Oh, that’s my low too.” This happens even if my low was about something that happened at work. I know what’s going on developmentally, so I never comment on it.

I know, if I let things develop organically, when we enter adolescence, this piece of ritual will give me some rare glimpses into their lives.

It’s also why the transgression of Family Movie Night is so important to us. We get to eat DOWNSTAIRS! We watch TV while we eat. We get to stay up late, though one of us tends to be zonked about 45 minutes in.

When we have visitors on Fridays (which used to be a thing), the kids are excited to welcome them into our tradition. It’s special for us, so it will clearly be special for our guests. It’s a testament to my friends that they’ve stuck out some pretty heinous choices.

In both these cases, it has struck me how easily these rituals came into being. No special forethought to get them started, no real planning. How easy these little things became big and important parts of who we are.

14 Jan 21 – I’ll Let You Know When We Get to the Opportunity

It has been suggested by several folx in education – most working outside the classroom – that we may be missing an opportunity to dramatically re-think, re-imagine, re-design, re-create learning, schools, and public education during the pandemic. We are not missing this opportunity, and hearing people say this makes me want to box their ears.

In a conversation with some teachers a couple days ago, one commented prepping for yet another return of students felt like she was in her fourth September this school year. Imagine, had I suggested in that moment that she was missing the opportunity to dramatically re-think her teaching practice.

It would not only have been tone deaf, it would have been uncaring.

We will get to the opportunity phase of all this, but we are not there yet. Right now, we are still in the survival, compassion, and empathy stage of this. We are in the place where everyone who is going to work is showing up with the knowledge they could unwittingly become infected by those in their care and pass that contagion on to those they love.

In one of the most deeply human professions, people are still required to be physically distanced and masked when interacting.

My attempt to re-imagine public education right now would start and end with me imagining it without the fear of catching a plague.

It does seem, as we settle into a very strange sense of routine, that we have gotten past the limitations of only solving those problems directly in front of us. Room is opening up for us to begin to think about the After Times. These will be the times of re-imagining.

I would posit, before we get there, we can carve out time for pausing and reflecting. Not time for planning, but time for asking as faculties and school communities, what we are learning and what’s working or not. Our schools and school systems have been in literal survival mode for nearly a year. One would hope school and district leaders are starting to hold space in meetings to return to listening to the people in the room.

Learning cannot happen unless people feel a sense of pyschosocial and physical safety. With all that has transpired this past year, we must build those senses of safety before we can hope to re-build learning and teaching.

The opportunity now is to listen. If we miss that opportunity now, when we arrive at the opportunity to re-create, we will miss it as well.

13 Jan 21 – Once a runner

This is the longest I’ve gone without running since I started running 18 years ago. I’ve taken breaks. The couple of times I did two marathons within a couple weeks of each other I was off my feet for a few months. It worked out okay because that was a stupid thing to do (twice) and my brain would have no more of that nonsense.

Not running wasn’t a thing I’d registered I’d be giving up on the road to single parenthood. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it. But, both kids are too young for me to head out for any decent distance. We all get anxious when I tell them I’m taking one of the dogs on a walk around the block. We’ve tried going on a run together – one on a bike, the other running with me. We made it a mile in about 20 minutes. I wouldn’t say it was running so much as moving quickly in short bursts with bickering in between. So, not exactly what I was looking for.

Plus, there’s a pandemic on. Combine that with my first full year of parenting and I’m always exhausted. I’m not, it turns out, too exhausted to snack. The steps and stamina required to snack are well within my much diminished capabilites.

What I also knew clearly but hadn’t registered was the break that running gives me. I’m not an athlete. I have no interest in lifting heavy things. I cannot dribble anything other than hot soup. I was on the losingest t-ball team in our league the year I played.

When I found running, something worked. It was time to myself. I couldn’t do anything else. In the last 18 years, when I had something I needed to process, I went for a run.

I’ve needed running this year, and it’s been just out of reach.

Tomorrow, at lunch time, I’m going for a run. It won’t be long. It’ll kick my ass. Two days from now, I’ll curse myself. For two miles tomorrow, though, I’ll be a runner again. I’ll let you know how it goes.

12 Jan 21 – What I’ve Been Working on the Last Few Years

In October, I wrote a bit about the Essential Questions a team of teachers got together and wrote in our district almost two years ago. They were the first step as our district started to develop our own secondary ELA curriculum resources. At the end of this year, the pilot of those resources will be concluded, and we’ll (hopefully) be gearing up for full implementation.

Screenshot of the curriculum homepage.

Piloting all-new resources in the midst of a pandemic when teachers have been asked to put into practice no fewer than four instructional models since the year began isn’t ideal. I’ve come to think of it as more of a consumer reports lab where context and reality have repeatedly beaten my plan for the pilot with a hammer to see how much the spirit of this project can withstand. Turns out, quite a bit.

If you’d like to see what we’ve been cooking up, you can find it here.

A few notes for context:

  • Our state has rolled out revised academic standards for ELA classrooms.
  • We have licensed all the materials under Creative Commons in hopes that other districts might leverage what we’ve created and share back their own work.
  • The approach is tight/loose. Tight on summative, on-demand writing, types and numbers of experiences, and themes/essential questions. Loose on how teachers use the resources to get students there.

I’ll go into more details down the road. For now, I wanted to share what we’ve done and where we are so far.

11 Jan 21 – Feedback in English Classrooms

Over on the professional twitter account, I mentioned this piece from Dan had me considering what possible corollaries exist in how we give feedback poorly in English classrooms.

Dan replied with a few questions:

and

Let’s take them in the order they rolled in. Dan contends the average ELA space as “richer” in feedback than most online math. Parsing out richer, I’d guess he’s thinking more meaningful. I would label it as more verbose. The average ELA classroom has a lot of words coming at students for feedback. Certainly, I’d argue the feedback on a short essay is full of more words than the feedback on a daily math assignment – online or in print.

But those words aren’t usually saying much, and their meaning is often more for the teacher than the student. These are the not quite sins, let’s call them sinlets I committed when grading such work.

  1. A cheat sheet. There were certain error types or weaknesses in writing that came up over and over again across multiple students’ work. So, I had a file open as I responded that allowed me to copy and paste identical feedback when I encountered a version of that error.

I don’t think ELA teachers are alone in this, but I would argue it does a greater disservice in the ELA classroom than in other disciplines. If students are working to create an artifact of their learning and thinking unique to their own minds, then copying and pasting my feedback where that thinking falls shorts fails to connect in a way that is constructive to growing those students thinking. It’s like trying to connect an off-brand LEGO to the real thing. It’ll stick, but it won’t hold together.

This particular sinlet was born out of a want to avoid repetitive grading injuries. I falsely thought I couldn’t let these “errors” slip by, so I pasted the relevant comments on everything. This brings us to…

2. Hyper commenting. There’s an principle in writing instruction that sets review and revision as a conversation between the writer and their editor. With this sinlet, my students were trying to have one conversation, and I responded so prolifically that it felt as though I was having 20. Even if the feedback was more specific than that mentioned above, where were students supposed to focus in the conversation with my hyperactive suggestions bouncing from comments on tone to grammar to evidence to structure? If they had been real conversations, I can’t imagine my students would have stuck around for long.

Again, this was often born out of a sense of needing to teach everything in each essay. The cumulative effect was that it taught nothing or very little.

3. It was already dead to begin with. When did I look at student writing? After they had written it and written it off as being done. For this sinlet, I was giving advise on pieces of work that, in the students’ minds, were now etched in stone. And, no matter how much I encouraged them to set goals for the next writing assignment based on that feedback, the bridge between the two was always too far.

With the exception of math courses where re-takes are allowed, I know feel there’s strong overlap on this one. Most non-computerized feedback comes only at the end of an assignment. Where ELA falls short is the bigger assignments cannot be graded in terms of individual pieces like math problems. We could give grading paragraph by paragraph, but there are issues there as well.

Those were my 3 annoying sinlets of teacher feedback. I have visited and worked with enough English teachers across the country to know they’re playing out right now in hundreds of classrooms and piles of grading.

As to Dan’s contention around meaning and artifacts of thinking, this is still the exception and not the rule. In some studies of practice in ELA classrooms, findings are that very little reading or writing are happening. Instead, it’s the stuff. Faux writing to prepare for constructed response items. Grammar exercises. Graphic organizers. So, when they encounter the rare soup-to-nuts writing experience, students are still shooting for the right answer in terms of a way of writing or particular content that will appease their teachers. Yes, the page may be blank, but there are unspoken expectations to fill it with the right words in the right order. And, like math, the possible combinations are infinite.

Because of this game of Guess What the Teacher is Thinking, peer feedback can also be paralyzed at best or apathetic at worst. If the teacher is going to come in at the end and render a verdict based on what they expected to be included, then no peer comments or suggests are going to make any difference. This is where we get the inspired, “I like the words you used” and their ilk as comments.

So, Dan, to answer your questions, yes, the possibility exists for these things to hold true and set ELA spaces apart. For myriad reasons, though, that is not how the average ELA space functions. Additionally, and for another post, moving these creative acts into spaces where the feedback is automated is an even bigger killer of the work.

10 Jan 21 – This is who we are, and it need not be

This is who we are.

We always have been.

It is not all of who we are.

Pretending it is not who we are means it festers underneath.

Pressure building.

Spreading.

Surfacing in rage so antithetical to the face we’ve been presenting, we can’t admit it’s a mirror.

This is who we are, and it need not be.

9 Jan 21 – Oh yeah, I’m a dad.

So, I realize I haven’t really talked about the fact I’m a dad now. I am. I have two kids – an 11yo daughter and a 9yo son. They are tremendous.

My pathway to parenthood was foster-to-adopt. I’ve known forever I want to be a dad. Forever. Figuring out the how was a little trickier. For a while, I anticipated I’d be married and we’d either adopt or go through a surrogate. At some point, though, I either got tired of waiting or didn’t like the idea of my parenting being dependent on another person. (It’s possible I’ve been single too long.)

So, I attended an informational session organized by Raise the Future, outlining the numerous pathways to adopting. While I love babies, I didn’t need the newborn experience to feel like a full parent.

From the informational meeting, I found a local adoption agency, set up a meeting and got the process going. I’ll write more about the process throughout the year. Suffice it to say, I’m a dad now. It’s part of the reason last year saw two posts on the blog. Parenting is hard. Adopting is hard. My kids moved in Dec. 4, 2019. Over the Christmas holiday, our dog was diagnosed with cancer and put down just after the new year. In March, the pandemic started. Parenting and adopting during a pandemic that requires social isolation is very hard.

This has been the hardest year of my life. I have felt more alone than ever before. I have felt unsure of every option in front of me. I have felt deep sadness grieving the life I had before. I have wondered how I will get to the other side of this.

I love it. I choose it every day, and I love it.

Last week, my daughter ran up to me when I arrived to pick her up from school. She was distraught, sad, near tears. A friend who’d said she’d play with her had decided, instead, to play with another girl. My daughter hugged me as we walked and told me how sad she was. A year ago, heck, three months ago, that wouldn’t have happened.

Now, though, more often than not, they both look for me when their worlds get heavy or scary.

They are also starting to share their joys more.

My son has reported two new best friends at school this week. This morning, he told me they were his bosses, “Like you have a boss.” His understanding of bosses and friendships not withstanding, he’s connecting at his new school, making friends, feeling safe. He’s finding his people.

When I was younger, my mom was constantly telling others about my sister and me. It always struck me as odd. Her job was an important and busy one. Why would she bring up her kids to colleagues or take time to tell stories about us?

I get it now.

I have told no fewer than 1 billion people my daughter can solve 3-digit by 3-digit multiplication problems. When my son read a story by himself for the first time, the video made its way to his entire teaching team, my moms, my sister, my brother-in-law, and several friends. Frankly, now that I’m a parent, I can’t believe my mom ever shut up about us to get any work done.

I live and breathe with their every win and every loss. I want to shield them from every hurt they could possibly feel. And, I want them to live big, bold lives feeling all things deeply.

Most of the time, I know I’m doing it wrong. Every once in a while, I have a brief moment of thinking I’m doing it right.

That, I’ve been told, is parenting.

8 Jan 21 – 10 things I have done to stop watching, reading, scrolling the news

  1. Re-subscribed to Marvel Unlimited – A couple years ago, inspired by the AMAZING Jay & Miles X-Plain the X-Men, I started a subscription in hopes of reading every X-Men comic starting at the very beginning. I have re-subscribed and begun again.
  2. Re-activated my Headspace account – While I’ve never been able to “imagine liquid sunlight pouring into” me, I am all the way back on board with Headspace. I need someone to remind me to close my eyes and breathe.
  3. Daily (at least) living room dance parties with the kids – They have no idea how on-the-nose it is that they choose Rachel Platten’s “Fight Song” as our first song every time.
  4. Coloring – I don’ have a description here.
  5. Reading Hank Green‘s second novel – I loved An Absolutely Remarkable Thing. I am hoping to equally love A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor. (Side note: Endeavor is a cruel word to have to spell.)
  6. Taking down Christmas decorations – This is, admittedly, a one off…unless I decide to put them all back up and take them down again. We live in a world without rules.
  7. Laundry – But we’re talking EVERYTHING. I even took down the shower curtain to be cleaned.
  8. Trying all the teas I’ve stockpiled over the years – I live very close to the Celestial Seasonings factory. Once I found this out, it became a go-to move for visiting family and friends. Did you know they make more than 70 types of tea? I’ve got work to do.
  9. Writing here.
  10. Watching TV – The latest seasons of Star Trek: Discovery and The Expanse both portray a pretty bleak future, and they’re still preferable to reality.

What about you?