Author: Mr. Chase

Things I Know 167 of 365: ‘I don’t know, but…’ is sexy

It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open one’s mouth and remove all doubt.

– President Abraham Lincoln

Pay attention, because you won’t hear this next sentence from me again. Abe was wrong.

Peter Senge writes, “School trains us never to admit that we do not know the answer, and most corporations reinforce that lesson by rewarding the people who excel in advocating their views, not inquiring into complex issues.”

If this is the case, Senge’s other supposition that business leaders are trained to ignore systems thinking or see issues more deeply because of similar school training, an amazing opportunity exists for teachers.

I struggled with this all through the school year. On vocabulary quizzes, I asked students to use each word in a meaningful sentence to demonstrate their ability to use a word in context.

“Even if you don’t know,” I would tell them, “write something down.”

My mom always said, “If you don’t ask, then the answer is always ‘no,’” and I was attempting to apply the same logic to the quiz.

No matter how emphatically, personally and repeatedly I urged, students left blanks on their papers.

Later, I’d inquire as to why.

“I didn’t know it.”

“You realize, writing anything down gave you more of a chance than leaving it blank?”

“Uh-huh.”

I went out of my mind.

Senge sums up the problem nicely.

My students weren’t showing me they didn’t know the answer. They would have to write something down to do that. Instead, they were showing me they could choose not to write an answer.

Setting aside all I could have done to improve their learning of the vocabulary, let’s focus on what I could have done – what all teachers can do – to improve the rate of response when students feel they are in the dark.

The best answer for my money is giving classroom credence to some variation of “I don’t know, but here’s my best guess.”

“Even if we feel uncertain or ignorant, we learn to protect ourselves from the pain of appearing uncertain of ignorant,” Senge writes.

Certainly, by the time I met them in high school, my students have learned the survival techniques.

Creating a classroom culture that honors “I don’t know” is a difficult proposition. It works against the majority of what students have been taught and what led most teachers to the classroom. We are there because we knew and kept right on knowing until we were charged helping others know.

If our students sense even a fragment of that path on us as we walk in the door, imagine the intimidation they could feel.

A student once admitted to me the reason she hadn’t turned in a single assignment for the first month of class was that she worried nothing would be good enough.

I failed.

Yes, some of this rests in the foibles of the students, but a chunk of it belongs to me. My job was to make “I don’t know,” cool and to set a tone that helped students see value in whatever they created.

Eventually, the student began submitting work, but it pains me to think of what I missed in that month.

The four most powerful words in any classroom should be, “I don’t know, but…”

Things I Know 166 of 365: Packing the unofficial portfolio

God gave us memory so that we might have roses in December.

– J.M. Barrie

I began the packing process today. It’s got me wondering who will carry the memories. If you’d ask me before I would have pointed you in the direction of a hanging folder that’s moved with me through three schools now.

In it are the notes and cards, the projects and essays from students over the last 8 years. I would have told you this was the vault of sorts in which I keep the good stuff.

Packing has proven me wrong.

Every folder or drawer at school revealed some speck of awesomeness from a former student.

Home has the same issues. In the fire box that holds my tax information from years past and documents like the title to my car I found a folder of essays and poems that struck me as such seminal works when they came across my desk that I packed them in a box and moved them with me from Florida.

One note in telltale eighth grader scrawl professed, “You taught me language arts can be cool. And now I want to be a teacher.”

You can imagine the difficulty each of these stowaway memories is posing for the packing. When I leave next week, I’ll be taking with me only what can fit in my car.

Birthday cards from my great-uncle, thank you notes from friends in whose weddings I stood up, my own school pictures – these were tossed out with ease.

The poem from the classically preppy kid who had a witty retort for everything in class but poured verse from his pencil like a stopper had been removed from a bottle? That, and its ilk, sit on my bedroom floor in a pile with fate uncertain.

I realize most of these students have forgotten what they wrote. For some years have gone by without a remembrance that I once taught them.

Still, part of me wants to hold on to all of these artifacts of former personhood as historical markers of the people they have and will become.

“You made such things of beauty and kindness,” I want to say, “And in those moments, you gave what I did with my life more richness than I could have given it on my own.”

These are the most meaningful pieces of my teaching portfolio.

In the end, I’ll pare the collection down. Some night soon, in the delirium of late-night packing, I’ll hold two equally lovely pieces in my hand and make the Confusion decision of what gets kept and what gets dumped.

I’ll have to trust that the story of who each of those former students is now tells the story  of who they were.

And who I was.

Things I Know 165 of 365: The system requires the poverty gap

The combined efforts of millions of concerned citizens could do wonders to help the impoverished. The American people are ready for action!

– Barbara Boxer

Writing on the Ed Week blogs, Massachusetts Secretary of Education Paul Reville recently posted about his state’s commonwealth’s move to close the poverty gap for its students.

Of all the gaps, the poverty gap takes up the most intellectual space in my head. Perhaps this is because it feels as though it takes up the least amount of space in the national ed dialogue.

Reville touted the progress being made in Mass. building bridges between social services and schools, working to get students the mental and physical health supports they need in the lowest achieving schools. He specifically cited the Mass. Achievement Gap Act of 2010 that “requires the state’s lowest performing schools to explicitly address, in their school turnaround plans, the health and social-emotional well-being of all students.”

This is a thoughtful and well-meaning requirement. The ends to which the Act attempts to make means have my full support.

I wonder if they have everyone’s.

I wonder if measures like “making provision for counselors or community engagement specialists to be employed full time to connect needy students and their families with supportive services designed to address out-of-school issues that threaten and disrupt student learning” are set to be the norm.

In my last school, when designing a community that could support some of the lowest achieving students from around the district, the planning committee attached one guidance counselor and one social worker per 100 students.

If a student didn’t show up to school, suffered a death in the family or any other event that pushed learning lower on the list of priorities, the school was able to act almost immediately to meet that student’s needs.

I’ve rarely seen anything so dialed in to supporting students’ socio-emotional needs.

These counselors and social workers did more than lighten the students’ loads. They lightened the workloads of teachers as well. Anyone who’s worked in a classroom knows the profession requires more than a mastery of content and its delivery. As the adults many of our students have the most frequent and prolonged content with each day, we are bond to become confidants. Having a guidance counselor literally just outside my door meant I could listen to a student’s problems, provide them with the support they needed in the moment and then connect them with an adult trained specifically to give them the long-term help they needed to come to terms with whatever challenges they were facing.

What frustrated me then is what frustrates me still, my students needed access to those services and supports long before they became low-achieving. At some point in their time in education, they were in schools much larger than ours with many fewer support personnel.

These students, like the students in the schools about which Reville writes, needed to fail so mightily, so loudly and in such high concentrations that the adults in their lives worked to build supports for them only when they had fallen as low as the system would allow.

Failing or underachieving or striving schools aren’t any of those things at all. They are students. Students who we require to fail before we give them the help they need.

It strikes me as wildly disingenuous to suggest any type of test scores were necessary before any district, state or federal office could surmise which students needed these support structures.

All anyone needed to do was ask the teachers.

Thing I Know 164 of 365: Learning is good

I am learning all the time. The tombstone will be my diploma.

– Eartha Kitt

A few weeks ago, I received an e-mail with what was described as a very, very, very unofficial suggested reading list for my program. The books contained therein were those most frequently appearing on course syllabi. Though sleep was the most emphatically suggested way to prepare for our forthcoming studies, I’m a sucker for a good reading list.

I’ve decided to integrate some of the books into the already extensive reading list I’ve built up for myself over the last year. My list is comprised of those books that sound fantastic, but that teaching crowds out.

I plan on alternating books from the suggested reading list and the reading list of suggestions.

Friday I started Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline. I understand all the lauding the initial publication of the book received. Senge writes some things about organizational learning that are both intuitive and sadly underpracticed.

Most notable thus far has been the connection he’s drawn between practices of the standard classroom and practices within the modern board room or office. If we want employees to seek out possible problems rather than working for the praise of their employers, we need to stop stop training students to find the right answer kept in seclusion by the teacher.

I’ll have more to write as I continue deeper into Senge’s work. The passage that follow’s though, struck a chord and is worth reading for anyone whose ever learned anything:

The problem with talking about “learning organizations” is that the “learning” has lost its central meaning in contemporary usage. Most people’s eyes glaze over if you talk to them about “learning or “learning organizations.” The words tend to immediately evoke images of sitting passively in schoolrooms, listening, following directions, and pleasing the teacher by avoiding making mistakes. In effect, in everyday use, learning has come to be synonymous with “taking information in.” Yes, I learned all about that at the training yesterday.” Yet, taking in information is only distantly related to real learning. It would be nonsensical to say, “I just read a great book about bicycle riding – I’ve now learning that.”

Real learning gets to the heart of what it means to be human. Through learning, we re-create ourselves. Through learning we become able to do something we never were able to do. Through learning we reperceive the world and our relationship to it. Through learning we extend our capacity to create, to be part of the generative process of life. There is within each of us a deep hunger for this type of learning.

– Peter M. Senge, The Fifth Discipline

Things I Know 163 of 365: It matters whom you live with

I don’t need to pay a therapist to give me crap. I have a roommate who does it for free.

– Ally McBeal

I used to not think you needed to meet the person with whom you would be living before you actually started, you know, living with them.

That was the capricious attitude with which I threw myself into the process of finding a place to live in Cambridge next fall.

I told those who asked what I was looking for that I didn’t mind. I’d take a room in someone’s attic with a naked mattress on the floor so long as the price was good.

As I began sending out CraigsList inquiries, I was frustrated with their replies.

People were charmed by my e-mails, thought I sounded great, and wanted to know when I would be able to come by and see the place.

A hiccup.

I replied that I was still teaching in Philadelphia and wouldn’t be able to get away to meet people. I assured my possible roommates that it wouldn’t matter. I threw “easygoing” and “laid back” around like product placement.

Still, no one relented.

More interested in securing a place to live than proving the point that one need not know me to love me, I boarded a bus to Boston Friday to see some houses and meet some potential roommates.

I’d three potentials on my list and scheduled times for each of the three.

The first was a 5-bedroom home rented by the owner who would also be one of my roommates.

As luck would have it, Meredith Stewart also arrived in Boston Friday. When we met for brunch Saturday morning, I asked if she’d come along to see one or more of the places with me.

We made our way to the first possibility together, showing up a record 10 minutes early as the owner was pulling into the driveway.

To say that the man was taciturn would be understating the matter.

A robotic engineer and craft brew buff, he gave me more than enough information to work with to build a bond.

His affect never changed.

We sat in the living room to get to know one another and I continued working my damnedest to get the man to smile.

Nothing.

We reached a break in the conversation and I started gathering myself to rise and leave when he said, “Well, I can tell you’d fit in well in the house.”

Excuse me?

I’d been working my not inconsequentially gregarious skills for about 15 minutes without so much as a rise in the corner of his mouth, and now he was greenlighting my move-in.

“There’s one problem I can see, though,” he said, “I need to find two other roommates after you, and you said you’d be out of the state until mid-August, right?”

Right.

“It’s extremely important to me that all current housemates agree on bringing someone new into the house, so you not being here just isn’t going to work.”

Oh.

And that’s where we stood.

He threw out the idea that I should look him up once I moved to town to see if there was still a room available, reiterating the idea that I was a good fit.

I accepted the offer with the appropriate amount of graciousness.

A block away, I turned to Meredith, “That was weird, right?”

“It was like watching a horrible first date,” she said.

And it was.

Sitting there, grasping for conversation, attempting to ingratiate myself to this guy, felt just like every bad date I’d ever been on – only I didn’t get a meal.

The awkwardness of the entire experience was brought into starker relief when I sat down with the roommates of my second house. A graduate from the program I’ll be entering and a Ph.D. student in South American literature, both were wonderful. We talked for nearly an hour and a half, wrapping our way through conversations on ed policy, the relative merits of True Blood and what kind of cooking lessons I might be able to provide.

Then and there, these two said they’d be willing to live with me and I accepted.

The rent for the second place is a bit higher than the rent of the first. On paper alone, I would likely have gone with the first.

My next year would have been one of being holed up in my room having awkward conversations in the shared spaces and killing myself to get that guy to laugh.

Instead, I’ll pay a little more, be a ton closer and live with people whose company I seem to genuinely enjoy.

I’ll run the risk of giving Malcolm Gladwell a big head and admit to knowing the outcome of both meetings within the first few seconds.

I’ll also admit to learning the value of meeting those potential roommates face-to-face.

More evidence that I really like learning. (Even when it feels like a bad first date.)

Keeping Tabs: 5 Sites Taking Up Space in my Browser this Week

Some sites get written about. Some sites get looked at and then forgotten. The five sites below have been open on my browser for at least a week. I’ll be bookmarking them and closing their tabs in my browser as soon as I post this.

http://freze.it/

I know I’ve probably asked for a service like Freese.It before, but I cannot remember why. They allow users to archive any webpage they want. More than a PDF, Freeze.It archives a webpage’s code, takes a screenshot and then creates a tinyurl for easy reference. At the moment, I definitely don’t need it. I’m bookmarking it in the belief that someday soon, I’ll think it a lifesaver.

Top Web Annotation Tools: Annotate+Bookmark+Collaborate from MakeUseOf.com

Throughout the last school year, I’ve asked my students to use reframeit.com when reading an article for class to prepare for discussion. The site has helped me see where the preponderance of students found meaty material in what they were reading and where I could focus some questions to help them read more deeply. I stumbled upon this article when doing some research to help a friend who wanted something akin to a sticky note function when annotating a webpage. Of the services mentioned I’ve actually used, it’s certainly proven a respectable list.

Classical Music: A History According to YouTube from OpenCulture.com

I love this. The article highlight’s Limelight’s curation of a collection of Youtube videos as a tour or primer on the history of western classical music. While I certainly remember my grandparents taking me to the symphony when I was younger, this collection helped me understand where Vivaldi stood in relation to Bach.

“Critical Pessimism” Revisted: An Open Letter to Adam Fish from henryjenkins.org

How, how, how in the world did I go this long without finding Henry Jenkins’ blog. This was the first entry I read. From there, I opened each successive entry in a new tab as though to click away would be to lose the careful, reflective thinking Jenkins offers readers. He’s safely in my feed reader now, but this post stands as a wonderful conversation point on the democracy of the web.

http://cac.ophony.org/

I’d never heard of Baruch College, CUNY until I ran into the writing of its Fellows of the Bernard L. Scwartz Communication Institute. These folks have game. And it’s not just heady, academia babbling. Each post gives me more practical thoughtfulness on the mix of media, message and culture. I’ve not made my way completely through their archives, but I’m working on it.

Things I Know 162 of 365: Philly’s thrown a lot at me

I love Philadelphia. I was shocked at what a great city this is. For me, it is the cat’s pajamas. I love everything about it. I love where I live. I love the people. I have been met with such kindness and affection here.

– George Dzundza

The night of our housewarming party for my current home, someone broke in and stole my Wii.

A few months later, my roommate and I were walking our dogs and someone rolled by in an SUV and shot us with paintballs.

Not long after that, I was on a first date, waiting to cross a street and someone in a turning car threw and hit me with a half-eaten cheesesteak.

Today, sitting on the steps of City Hall, waiting for groups of students on a scavenger hunt, I was spat on by a half-naked homeless man whose indiscernible ramblings led me to believe he was also mentally unstable. (He wasn’t the first homeless person in Philadelphia to spit on me.)

Philadelphia has literally and figuratively thrown quite a bit at me.

Aside from the time a homeless man punched me in the face in Denver, when I refused his request for $20, I’ve never actually felt assaulted by a city.

While none of these incidents has defined my time in Philadelphia, they’ve collectively shaped my perception of the city.

I’ve made friends here I will keep for the rest of my life. They have supported me, helped me grow and welcomed me into their lives.

I’ve taught at a school like no other I could hope for. It’s asked me to experiment, learn, grow and reconsider what I believe.

Still, someone threw food at me – food they’d eaten part of.

The thing that makes me wonder and that I can’t explain logically or understand about these moments is my role in them.

For the positives, those things I’ll treasure and count as the best pieces of Philadelphia, I was an active participant. In my teaching and my friendships, I sought out experiences and people with whom I could connect and learn.

When I was robbed or paintballed, I was a passive participant. These were things done to me. I posted no sign daring people to enter our house and take my stuff. I wasn’t yelling obscenities at the SUV as it rolled by. I was just there.

This is what’s made it difficult for me to fall in love with Philadelphia, to let down my guard the way I did in Sarasota or Normal.

Something is angry or unhappy about Philadelphia. Were it a friend seeking advice, I’d recommend Philadelphia get itself into therapy before starting a relationship.

“You’ve a lot of great qualities,” I’d say, “There are a million reasons people could fall in love with you. I’m just worried you’re angry about something and haven’t come to terms with it.”

I realize this is my experience. I fully own that these events are not representative of the entire city.

My time here has been a net good by far. Not one of these events warranted its own post in this space. I don’t dwell on them daily. In fact, I don’t remember them until another something awful occurs. I’ll probably never write about these events again.

Still, these things happened.

More than one person spat on me without my ever having said a word to them.

That’s not ok.

Things I Know 161 of 365: There’s a whole lot of awesome out there

No shame in saying that I felt a loneliness drifting through me. Funny how it was, everyone perched in their own little world with the deep need to talk, each person with their own tale, beginning in some strange middle point, then trying so hard to tell it all, to have it all make sense, logical and final.

– Colum McCann

Tim and Tanya like to have a reason to have a party. Last Saturday was a great example.

The invitation was open.

The event was named – The Day of Awesomeness.

The rules were simple – come join the fun, be ready to share some part of your awesomeness with the rest of the guests. Anything was fair game.

Seriously, that’s what we invited people to.

Thinly veiled by Tim’s birthday and my approaching departure, the day was really about awesomeness.

It lived up to its name.

Emily and I led the guests in about 10 minutes of improv warm-ups which had everyone moving and laughing.

Roz taught us the proper way to make frosting and frost a cake.

Tim taught us both the timeline of life on Earth as well as the difference between oaken and unbaked Chardonnays.

Marcie taught us how to draw a portrait that looked like a person more than it looks like a Peanuts character.

Steven taught us about industrial exhibit design.

Tim’s sister Meg hosted a round of trivia built around Tim’s life.

Most of the people in attendance were my colleagues at SLA. We do a tremendous job of speaking the same language of SLA every day. Our thinking on benchmarks, core values, backwards design, ethic of care and the many other components of the school is largely in sync.

For the day of awesomeness, we got to see and share the other passions that drive our lives. Much to the boredom of everyone else, we could have sat around and talked curriculum or policy. We could have tweaked classes or completed cross-curricular planning.

We didn’t, and we were better for it.

I wrote a while ago about the idea of passion-based PD. This was as close as I’ve been able to get to seeing it in action.

It was a concrete example of the best kind of learning I can imagine. “Here, I think this is fun and interesting,” everyone was saying, “Can I help you try it out?”

And we all agreed to give it a try.

We cross-pollinated our passions.

The next time I sit down to consider my perspective on an issue, I’ll remember Marcie explaining that most people draw the eyes of a face too close to the top when our eyes are really about halfway from the top of our heads to the middle of our faces. I’ll let that inform my understanding of the fact that how I am perceiving something and the actuality of what is in front of me are often wholly different.

The same is true of the people in front of me. Understanding Roz’s love of baking connected to her passion for physics helps me see her more completely. Frequently I worry about regressing to the same myopic view of others in my life that I had as a student in middle school. It was this view that made it so jarring when I saw one of my teachers at a Schnucks or Applebees.

How did they exist outside of school? Were those jeans they were wearing? Did I still need to raise my hand to talk to them?

The Day of Awesomeness reminded me that we teach children, and we do so much more. We have passion for our profession, and we have passion for our lives. One need not supersede the other. In fact, the more our passions intermingle, the more enriching it can all become.

I definitely see more days of awesomeness in my future. Consider this a standing invitation to attend.

Things I Know 160 of 365: This is what it’s all about

I’ve got sunshine on a cloudy day.

– Smokey Robinson and Ronald White

Watch this.

It was how the last class I’ll be teaching for the foreseeable future began.

I cannot think of any better way to wrap up my teaching career at SLA.

I knew I wanted to write about it. In fact, as I started to plan this writing in my head, I began with something like, “I know this isn’t what it’s all about, but…”

I mulled and I mulled and I mulled. There are ciders and wines that have seen less mulling.

My conclusion – this is what it’s all about.

If it weren’t me who walked into that classroom and the video depicted some other unsuspecting teacher being serenaded by his class, I would venture to guess that that teacher had done well. I would watch that poor sot get surprised by his students, turn to you, and tell you he’d done something right. Because all I want in this world is for anyone who hears about them or meets them to realize how wonderful my students are, my instinct was to downplay any role I may have had in inspiring the song.

I frequently reprimand other teachers who denigrate or allow others to denigrate the impact and importance they hold in the classroom. I suppose this means I need to own these things myself as well.

So, I say proudly, moments like these are exactly what public education is all about.

If it’s about creating community, done.

If it’s about being a positive force in the lives of my students, check.

If it’s about building a safe space for children to be silly, yes.

If it’s about nurturing creativity, sure.

If it’s about developing strength and confidence of student voice, roger.

If it’s about helping students see the value of creating authentic moments of support and compassion in the lives of other, alright.

If it’s about staking out a claim within the teaching profession that means seeing every student as completely as possible every day, got it.

If it’s about establishing caring relations with each person in my charge in a way that inspires reciprocity, mission accomplished.

In the last class of my last day, my students gave me something I will always cherish – a reminder that I am loved.

Things I Know 159 of 365: I was surprised

We wasted the good surprise on you!

– Big Daddy

I’m not an easy person to surprise.

No matter how diligently they tried to conceal it, by the time Christmas rolled around, I’d usually surmised what my parents had bought me.

It’s what comes from being naturally curious and observant, I suppose.

So, today, when advisory began and the advisees I saw graduate last year, after three years with me, showed up, I was impressed that I knew nothing of their plans.

Having received word that I’ll be leaving SLA, my alumni advisees organized a party in conjunction with my current crop of advisees.

They sat down with Matt, my co-advisor.

They got Diana to find out my favorite foods (mashed potatoes and sugar cookies – not usually together).

They organized themselves and threw a party today.

From all the paths they’ve taken after graduation, they returned to celebrate.

Today, I felt special. I felt loved.

I told them what is true – I’ve hundreds of former students out there in the world. I’ll never know what becomes of the vast majority of them. These 40, though, they have my heart. I was not only their teacher, I was their advisor, and that lives somewhere special in my mind. I will always count myself as their advisor.

In Cambridge or Illinois or anywhere else in the world, I will always care for and support these students.

Today, they supported me.

When talking to Bud about my day, I commented I got to experience what it means to be part of a caring community. It was a further reminder that every student and every teacher deserves to learn in such a place.