Author: Mr. Chase

Things I Know 197 of 365: There are two kinds of angry in the classroom

To give anything less than your best is to sacrifice the gift.

– Steve Prefontaine

Recently, I’ve started reading Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.

I don’t know that I like Murakami, but I’m enjoying his book. I’m a social animal and he is not. He speaks highly of his comfort being away from people. While I enjoy my times of solitude, I feed on social interaction like some weird Buffy villain.

Something Murakami writes, with which I agree, is the following:

When I’m criticized unjustly (from my viewpoint at least), or when someone I’m sure will understand me doesn’t, I go running for a little longer than usual. By running longer, it’s like I can physically exhaust that portion of my discontent. It also makes me realize again how weak I am, how limited my abilities are. I become aware, physically, of these low points.

John Spencer has been writing a wonderful series of posts for new teachers – a collection of truths he wish he’d known or someone had told him before he entered the classroom.

He crowd sourced ideas online before embarking on this journey and the question of what I wish I’d known has been ruminating with me since he asked it.

My answer at the time and one of my answers now is embodied in Murakami’s words.

It was a doctrine of my classroom for years before Chris gave it words when we were in a discussion one day.

There is a difference between teacher angry and real angry. Teacher angry is what you let them see. It is the verbal kick in the butt that shows you care. It comes from a place of personal control akin to a parent telling a child they aren’t angry, they are just disappointed.

Real angry comes from the part of your brain the Vulcans work to control and repress. It is the moment when what you want to say is “For the fortieth time, stop interrupting, you little shit!”

These moments are exceedingly rare. They are born of exhaustion, confusion and periodic realizations that you are a last front between an ignorant and an informed citizenry. These are the intermittent terrors of the first through 30th years in the classroom.

The best teachers I have ever known never gave wind of their anger. I have taught alongside those for whom I would make a voracious case for canonization.

The good teachers know the line between teacher angry and real angry. They leave the room when the darker parts of their humanity well up within them in moments of great frustration.

The others see no line. Teacher angry and real angry are interchangeable in their classrooms. I’ve only seen a few of them, but they’ve tarnished the shine of what it means to be a teacher each time I’ve encountered them.

Each time I’ve encountered them, I’ve taken it as a sign that I must pick up the load they gave up carrying.

When I started running in college, I took none of this with me when I went out on the trail. I carried other injustices, other moments that showed me the world was not as beautiful as I imagine it to be. I would run, as Murakami writes, to “exhaust that portion of my discontent.”

Now that I’m entangled in the lives of the children I’ve served, I find myself carrying the injustices inflicted on them. It’s not always teachers. Mostly, though, it is one adult or another from their lives.

I will always do all I can to make up for those who have let them down. Still, when I run, I often find myself pushing myself because of what the world is not and what I would like it to be.

Things I Know 196 of 365: I made something

The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.

– Carl Jung

I didn’t figure this would make me as excited as it has. I mean, I’m the guy who goes on an on about having students do authentic things in class, ask them to create real and meaningful stuff as part as their learning.

That’s me.

That’s something I believe.

Still, when it came time for me to create something, to then connect that creation to various channels of public consumption, I didn’t figure on my excitement about the process and its results.

In projects past, I’ve worked alongside my students to experience as many of the steps as possible with them so that I might have an understanding of what I’m asking them to do and what that might entail.

Still, being the teacher has gotten in the way in those processes. Turns out, when the temptation is to say, “I can’t help you right now, I’m building my own,” I tend to favor actually putting down what I’m doing and helping students find solutions for themselves.

The closest to creating I’d done as a classroom teacher was unit, project and lesson plans. Again, those were not the ends. They were the means to helping others create.

While all creation is in some ways a means to helping others create, the creations of a teacher planning teaching take on a different tint of inspirational tone than the artist whose work is destined for the gallery, museum or mantle.

And so, I created.

Where before there was story reliant on transmission by word-of-mouth alone, I made something more readily consumable and polished.

As part of my work at The Freedom Writers Foundation this summer, part of my duties are to support and leverage the network of more than 200 teachers from every state, several Canadian provinces, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands and Taiwan.

I realize I don’t write about it much, but these are remarkable teachers with whom I am proud to be associated. They teach in private, public, and parochial schools. They work with students behind bars, after school and on any number of non-traditional paths. They range from the novice to the recently-retired.

For my money, they represent one of the richest mosaics of American education you’re likely to find.

As part of my time here, I wanted to work to find a way to help communicate the stories and identities of these teachers to one another and to the outside world.

I’ve long said one of the reasons it’s so easy and popular to beat up on the teaching profession came from the almost complete and utter failure on the part of teachers to tell their individual stories.

A few weeks ago, I set out to find a sustainable way to capture the stories from around North America and then share them with the world.

Yes, writing them out is fine, but I also wanted to something more personal, more intimate.

And so, last week, I set to work creating the Freedom Writer TeacherCast as a regular way to record and share the wonderfully diverse array of experiences of these teachers from all walks of life.

Once I’d begun, the lessons I attempted to impart to students setting out on similar projects came flooding back. Get more material than you need. Find the human story. Story, reflection, story, reflection and so on. Edit forever. When you think you’re done, edit some more.

Episode 1 launched Tuesday. We became subscribable on iTunes today.

It’s no Moth or This American Life. Still, I’m proud of it. It reminded me of what I can do and gave me a laundry list of all the things I want to do better next time.

If there’s room in your summer and you can fit it in between relaxing and family vacations, take some time to create something new that could not have existed without you. I was most fulfilled with the project in those moments toward the end when I could see what I wanted it to become, but was faced with a million tiny adjustments that stood between me and that ideal.

Go, create something. When you’re done, I’d love to see it.

Things I Know 195 of 365: Projects for projects’ sake are fine by me

For those of you playing the home game (I’m looking at you mom and Debbie), you’ve noticed my posts this month have been a bit fractured in their, well, posting.

While I’m certainly no slave to the rules, it is driving me slightly batty that I’m not able to get something up every day.

It turns out not having a wireless connection everywhere I go out here restricts my ability to post.

The whole inconsistency of access has started to frustrate me.

It’s what caused my brain to flag this tweet from @kealyd when it rolled through my feed the other day:

#eduphilosophy affirmation day 4 projects for projects’ sake are not PBL

I think they actually might be.

I’ve got no end game in mind once I document 365 TIK. The whole decision to begin this project was made in a matter of seconds and prompted by the fact that Ben would soon be finished with his 365 Questions Google Can’t Answer.

It seemed to me like someone should keep up the mantle just for the sake of doing it.

We call projects for the sake of projects play in children and hobbies in adults.

I see nothing wrong in giving students time to read in class or unguided time to write. I see many things right in it.

What I think might be a more perfect statement is that not all PBL learning should be projects for the sake of projects.

I sit and write this post for me and the sake of some self-imposed goal. Later today, I’ll be building a podcast delivery system, writing a newsletter and prepping for a conference call. Each of those projects come with ends in mind. I’ll know where I want to go before I get there and the route will be straightforward.

In this space and in this moment, I’m playing with ideas toward the end of having played with ideas.

While Lewis and Clark had an overall goal to their expedition, they didn’t wake each morning to write their learning objectives on the board or else consider themselves failures. No, they were explorers.

January 1, I didn’t write down a list that said somewhere, “Refine your thinking on project-based learning.” But here it happened. As a learner I know when I am learning with purpose and when I am learning for the joy of learning alone.

Allowing the breathing room for crazy random happenstance means I feel better equipped to move toward objectives when the time comes.

Things I Know 194 of 365: We miss something when we fail to engage

The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.

– George Bernard Shaw

Working in Long Beach this month has meant one key change in my life. I had to find a new coffee shop.

A connoisseur of both coffee and coffee shops, with two weeks left on my stay, I’ve got it down to two possibilities.

Exceedingly different spaces, one element keeps them neck and neck – people watching.

As I’m listening in on the conversations around me, I’m astounded at how few people are listening to the conversations they’re actually in.

“My brain’s not all there today,” says the barista at Contender A. She means it as an explanation as to the joke she made in conversation or the point she attempted to interject into a discussion didn’t quite land.

The thing is, she says her brain’s not all there today every day.

Based on my informal longitudinal study, this event is neither a singularity nor properly named.

As I learned in freshman speech class, communication isn’t a one-way street.

Last week, I took special care to listen to the patrons eliciting this admission of a daily lobotomy.

They weren’t listening. Or, they weren’t ready for a conversation. These people filed through the door for lattes and bagels. When the barista commented on their tattoos, their piercings and their hair; they didn’t know what to do. They weren’t ready to connect with another person.

It was, as it turned out, their brains that weren’t all there.

When I realized this, I got sad.

Here she was, attempting to connect through more than caffeine, and they weren’t gaming up to engage.

She kept offering up volleys to person after person, “Oh, that’s a great T-shirt. Where did you get it?”

“Huh? Oh, I don’t remember.”

Five minutes later, “I really like your sleeve. What does the middle part stand for?”

“Sleeve? Uh, that part’s for my mom,” then change in the tip jar and out the door.

Though it saddens me to see the barista feel failure time and again, what troubles me more in these scenarios is what the patrons are missing.

More times than I can count, I’ve listened to complaints that social networks are taking the place of genuine communication. I’m not sure if these missed communications are a result of declining social skills due to increased social networking or if people were never that attentive in the first place.

Either way, it’s moved me to be more attentive. When I’m engaged in conversation, I’m making a special effort to actually engage.

A friend trying to drum up funding for a new school remarked that she’d started a conversation with the person next to her on a recent plane flight.

Normally a flight recluse, she told me the conversation revealed her row mate was a land developer and social entrepreneur. Cards were exchanged and my friend is a step closer to her dream.

I don’t know that my barista is going to hold the keys to conversations that will help her customers realize their dreams. What she does offer and what so many of them are missing is the chance to connect to someone – even if just for a few minutes.

Things I Know 193 of 365: Everyone’s history is important

History should be honest.

– California Governor Jerry Brown

This starts someplace tangential.

I was in my room in the early evening of April 5, 1994 when the phone rang. It was my friend Adam. He was distressed.

“Can you believe it?”

“What?”

“Can you believe it?”

“No, I heard you. I mean, can I believe what?”

“Kurt Cobain is dead, man. He killed himself. Can you believe it?”

“No. Who?”

“Are you serious?”

Adam spent the next 20 minutes explaining who Kurt Cobain had been, who he was to our generation and what his death immediately meant.

I responded by attempting to feel as though I was taking on the gravity of the situation.

This is perhaps why I was so excited to go see a screening of the documentary Hit So Hard as part of L.A.’s Outfest a few weeks ago.

Every blurb I read touted the film, which tells the story of former Hole drummer Patty Schemel, as including rare home movies of Kurt.

It was a chance for me to find out what Adam was talking about all those years ago.

Something interesting happened.

By the time the film got to Cobain’s death and the home movies were long over, I didn’t care. I was invested in Schemel and her story.

It had the elements key to the cliché telling of the rise and fall of a rockstar – drugs, alcohol and partying.

What it also included – what I didn’t expect or know – was Schemel’s story of coming out as a lesbian in a small town and struggling to understand what that meant.

It included voices key to the punk and early 90s rock scene who were also gay and documented the role they played in serving as, if not role models, touchstones of hope for fans struggling to find acceptance and a sense of self apart from the shame they were carrying with them.

I wish I’d known about them when I was growing up.

While adolescence in a small town can be lonely and difficult, queer adolescence in a small town is terrifying and seemingly singular.

While I don’t think it was Schemel’s story California Governor Jerry Brown had in mind when he signed a bill that would require schools to teach students about the contributions of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Americans, I’m still glad he signed it.

I could have used a source of hope that was more significant than episodes of Will & Grace.

I understand the resistance of those opposed to the law. I get that they feel it imposes on their beliefs. While I understand all of this and respect their right to their beliefs, I’m okay with them being uncomfortable for a little while.

If it means a kid unnecessarily living in shame and fear of who they are with only caricatures and epithets to provide meaning and history has access to hope and a healthy sense of self, then I’m ok.

I’m ok with the discomfort of those whose beliefs have oppressed and degraded others so long and in such a culturally acceptable way that a person running for the highest elected office in the country can gain support after publicly likening homosexuality to part of Satan.

Children are hating and killing themselves because the ignorant have been given a stage.

Those who are troubled by the teaching of history in place of state-sanctioned silence can learn to deal.

Better yet, they can simply learn.

Things I Know 192 of 365: There’s Opportunity to Empower Teachers in the Common Core

If we use these common standards as the foundation for better schools, we can give all kids a robust curriculum taught by well-prepared, well-supported teachers who can help prepare them for success in college, life and careers.

– Randi Weingarten

A thought that gets highlighted, underlined and annotated over and over again in its many iterations in Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline is the idea that we cannot expect creative business solutions or creative people if we maintain an education system designed around student compliance.

I’d add to that the idea we cannot expect to move away from a system built around student compliance if we don’t relinquish the idea of teacher compliance.

In a THE Journal interview with Westville, IL School Superintendent Jim Owens I found some hope:

One particularly effective training tool involved flip video cameras and a directive to create a project illustrating the impact that technology was having on the respective teacher’s classroom. This simple exercise frustrated a lot of our teachers, who didn’t know what we wanted from them or what the right answer was. We told them that there was no right answer, that we just wanted them to get creative and share how they were using technology in the classroom. Once they “got it,” the teachers really surprised us by coming up with some innovative ways of integrating technology into their lesson plans.

We did something similar this last year at SLA. Teachers formed their own PLC’s based on self-identified areas of interest for professional development. The areas ranged from understanding the Ethic of Care to exploring issues of education policy.

In the spirit of asking ourselves to do what we asked of our students, These groups were asked to develop a unit/project plan for the semester based on a set number of meeting times and the end goal of presenting to/teaching the rest of the staff.

While most groups took the task and ran with it, one or two groups of teachers experienced the same frustration Owens describes. They wanted the right answer.

We’d opened professional development to pure inquiry based on personal interest, basically said, “Learn what you’re curious about and then share with the rest of us.”

I was surprised by the response at first.

As I started to overlay the experience with what happened when 9th grade students entered SLA. The first few months (sometimes the first few years) are spent helping student to stop worrying about the right answer or worksheet withdrawal.

We had no reason to think teachers wouldn’t behave the same way.

Were I to do it again, I’d look more deeply into how or if the teachers saw their practice change and what possible increases of empathy they experienced.

It’s the kind of deeper analysis we’ll miss with the publication of the “publishers’ criteria” for the ELA section of the common core.

In an Ed Week post Friday, Catherine Gewertz wrote, “The impetus behind the criteria, Ms. Pimentel and Mr. Coleman said in a joint phone interview, was to respond to teachers’ requests for support by helping them focus on the cornerstones of the standards and understand how classroom work will have to change to reflect them.”

It’s the problem Owens and the Westville leadership ran into, it’s the problem we ran into when asking teachers to plot their own professional development.

The best possible answer here is simple, “I don’t know. What ideas do you have?”

In navigating the Common Core landscape, lies the opportunity to have teachers experience the kind of high-impact learning the standards are designed to engender.

Instead of guidelines, I’m curious as to the essential questions.

If the DOE can track grantees and how they’re studying the methods and outcomes of teaching American history around the country, surely we can design a program to track, study and better understand the implementation of the Common Core.

Create a transparent, open access clearinghouse of information and ideas. Design grant opportunities that create teacher researchers around the country.

Let the teachers own the process if you want them to own the practice. I know it’s a far cry from how the CC were created and adopted, but there’s a chance to put teaching back in the hands of teachers.

One of my favorite passages in Gewertz’s piece comes from Gates Foundation Common Core Lead Jamie McKee:

[McKee] said that while the foundation “cares deeply about the quality of the [instructional] materials that come from the common core,” it hasn’t yet decided whether it favors a panel or process for validating such materials.

I don’t care.

ELA Common Core lead and Susan Pimentel said, “If we’re asking students to be able to look at text and draw evidence from it, it means they need to be given text, with good teacher support, but without a lot of excessive spoon-feeding up front.”

It’s time to want the same thing for teachers.

An amazing chance to empower teachers exists in how we begin to implement and appraise the Common Core. Handing that process and the design of those systems over to textbook companies and those with little skin in the game isn’t reform, it’s regression.

Things I Know 191 of 365: I find my friends in the pages of this book

And it is still true, no matter how old you are – when you go out into the world, it is best to hold hands and stick together.

– Robert Fulghum

Somewhere between 8 and 9 years old, I pulled a book off of my grandparents’ bookshelf. The title was almost Seussian, so I was immediately intrigued. If had been a gift, my grandmother explained. For her birthday. From a  friend or relative. From some other such individual of the grown-up class.

Could I read it?

A stern look.

May I read it?

Of course, she said, but she didn’t think I’d like it much.

I did.

I liked it so much I read and re-read Robert Fulghum’s All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten over and over again until my grandmother handed his second book to me.

I’m still uncertain whether she wanted to read Fulghum’s further writings or if my grandmother was simply following her grandmotherly motivation.

I could ask her, but I like the not knowing better.

Tonight, as I sat reading and writing in the local coffee shop-cum-used bookstore, I looked up in a moment of frustration and saw a copy of All I Really Need to Know… on far away shelf.

From there, I wrote frenetically, driven by the fear that someone might see the book before I finished and buy it from under me.

If this 1988 tome meant so much to me, surely others placed the same value on its contents.

Luckily, the book was still shelved when I finished.

I took it to the counter, waited in line, handed the barista the dirty fork from my fruit salad and said, “I’d like to buy this book” with more bravado than I think she was expecting.

I’ve been reading it ever since. I read through dinner. I read when I got back home. Were it not for drooping eyes, I’d still be reading.

It’s been some time since I returned to Fulghum’s prime work, and I noticed something I hadn’t noticed before.

I’m not sure if I wasn’t ready or hadn’t lived enough yet, but tonight, as I read, I heard the voices of those who shaped and continue to shape who I am.

In one essay, I heard the voice of the college professor who became mentor and now is friend and colleague.

In another, I heard Bud’s tone, wit and optimistic pragmatism and was reminded why I value his voice and Fulghum’s.

I heard my mom in one essay, Ben in another and Chris in another, still.

In the moments I paused and now as I write this, I’ve started to wonder.

I wonder if I would have collected, valued, cherished and pulled these people so winter-blanket close to me had I not picked up and fallen into copacetic agreement with that book when I was 8 or 9.

Logical, rational me says of course I would have. These pieces of identity were in place long before the book or any of the people happened into our life, says he.

I’m tempted to listen to him only briefly. I don’t care for what he’s selling. It doesn’t sound like me.

The whimsical version of the truth suits me much better. In this book I find not only myself. I find those who are the LEGOs of my life – no pattern or instructions, just time to play and think of what I want it to be.

Things I Know 190 of 365: At the core what’s common are people

They never really sorted out what the subject of these standards is. It’s rather remarkable.

– Tom Hoffman

I recently had to help show how the activities of a teacher training program I work with align to the Common Core (PDF) as well as the National Board (PDF) standards for English language arts.

While I respect the general depth-over breadth approach of the National Board standards, the Common Core standards leave me sad and alone like a jilted prom date.

Still, the task at hand was alignment and align we did.

And everything fit.

Every single activity aligned nicely with at least two Common Core standards without any embellishment. Should Congress hold hearings tomorrow requiring me to defend the connection of each learning activity to the standard of English education to which I claim it moves participants, I would sweat choosing a tie more than I would sweat making my case.

By that measure, the program looks beautiful. It looks perfect. It looks complete.

That’s the problem, isn’t it?

We know the program requires refinement. We know work is yet to be done. We know that we must hold ourselves to a higher standard if excellence is to be maintained.

It is a standard specific to our mission and vision in serving the specific population of teachers with whom we work.

As forty-three states raced to the top of something or other, they adopted the Common Core. Along the way, they told those they serve those adoptions would improve education for students in their states.

It won’t.

I rarely dole out definitives.

The standards for teaching English language arts are now and always have been helping students to read, write, speak, listen and think.

Such was the case the day before Utah’s August 8, 2010 adoption of the Common Core or North Dakota’s June 20, 2010 adopt. Such will be the case long after the next go round when they adopt standards that are more common and more core.

It will always be the people that matter. A great teacher August 7 in Utah was a great teacher August 9 in Utah. A horrible teacher was much the same.

A child who arrived at school hungry or abused June 19 in North Dakota was likely still hungry or abused June 21.

In the movement to adopt standards;  in the debate (where time was allotted for one); in the funding to print, promote and publish the standards; a point was missed.

The point was people.

Tomorrow, I’ll be working toward a higher standard. No state legislated it. I adopted it.

Things I Know 189 of 365: I’m not interested in pictures painted with the all the same brush

You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.

– Friedrich Nietzsche

Reading a post Monday critiquing the Andre Agassi Ventures LLC plan to join with an investment firm to secure, rent and plan to sell properties to charter schools, I stumbled over a passage.

I mean that. I was motoring along, consuming the information, filtering what jived with my previous knowledge and what needed to run down the shoot of new ideas.

Then I got to the following:

This shows the true aim of charter schools–they won’t be run in the interests of students, but to meet the needs of charter operators to be profitable, in order to pay off their lenders and landlords.

What?

Say what you will about charter schools (and I know people will rush to the microphone of public opinion on that invitation), but I have a hard time believing any one move by any one organization can or should be taken as representative of the whole.

Reading the remainder of the post held little interest for me after those few lines. I’m willing to wager the writer of the post would claim charter schools ignore the individuality and individual needs of their students in the interest of maintaining monetary solvency. If that’s the charge and an argument of seeing individuals is to be maintained then that same perspective must be the benchmark of opining.

This is difficult. It’s difficult from all perspectives.

Those speaking and spending the loudest in favor of improving teacher efficacy frequently wander off the message of building on the strengths of the most successful teachers onto what sounds like a tirade condemning the majority of educators.

Such is also the case when those railing most vociferously against the worst managed and most harmful begin to dull their arguments by fencing all charter schools into the same camp.

If Petrino DiLeo disagrees with charters, if he considers them the bane of modern education, so be it.

As soon as he or anyone else gives in to the temptation of seeing anything other through a homogenizing lens, the middle is lost. And, as was the case with me, those whose ears, eyes and minds might be open to you become quickly closed.

Things I Know 187 of 365: Be nice and we’ll work hard

Never look down on anybody unless you’re helping him up.

– Jesse Jackson

A friend recently planted himself firmly behind the idea that effective teachers are the most important factors in student success. In the same breath he said he wasn’t one of those guys to praise teachers and call them the salt of the earth. He works to support kids, he said, not teachers.

It doesn’t work like that.

The two aren’t separate.

If we want healthy schools, places of learning enlivened by vibrant and curious people dedicated to being the best versions of themselves, the systems must support and value all members of those systems.

My morning cup of coffee is better when my barista and the coffee bean farmers in the fields are treated with decency and respect.

I cannot be surprised by a reticence to praise and support teachers when the rhetoric of education paints them so largely as deficient, lazy, undereducated hacks.

Who would dare praise teachers?

Sure, you praise the teacher you know, the cousin or friend of the family who is going into the classroom. They are great. But teachers, in the general sense? No thank you.

Tell teachers the majority are performing poorly and you can’t be surprised when students are performing poorly. I wonder sometimes how many teachers are doing worse right now because they’ve read or heard the rhetoric of education leaders bemoaning the poor quality of teachers.

My friend told me he’d visited a number of classrooms on a single day, to check up on good teaching. Of the 50+ classrooms he visited, not a one held good teaching. Not a one held a teacher at the time. His evaluation was based on whether standards were posted and other measures of the classroom walkthrough. Choosing not to challenge the evaluation, I asked a question I’ve asked here before.

“So, you can name at least 50 bad teachers. Can you name 20 good ones?”

He liked the question and thought I was making his point for him.

I was not.

My point was something else. Too many people are doing well for there to be fewer than 20 effective teachers for every 50 or 60 ineffective teachers.

“All students can learn,” is a popular bumper sticker of regressive education reformers. Pronounced as though a new idea that, once realized, solves so much.

I don’t disagree with it. I question the next ten words.

So long as we’re putting out truisms and bumper stickers to rally behind, let me try one. Let me try one that, coupled with the idea that all students can learn, would mean a sadly revolutionary way of thinking in education.

All teachers can teach.

And, yes, I’ve got my next ten words.