Author: Mr. Chase

Things I Know 89 of 365: It’s the testing holidays

Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.

– Albert Einstein

Used to be it took a proclamation from Congress to create a holiday. Though education reform initiatives over the last decade haven’t exactly been proclamations, they’ve certainly created a holiday. A month-long holiday.

For SLA, the holiday season started last week with the advent of Pennsylvania’s standardized tests, the PSSA’s.

Math and reading were last week, writing finished this week and we’re looking forward to the science test in two weeks as a break from teaching.

When I met with one of my G11 classes today, we actually took a couple of minutes to greet each other and catch up as the testing schedule has kept us apart over the last few weeks.

We took separate vacations.

And while the tests have meant a break from the meaningful and authentic learning our G11 students engage in at SLA, some schools treat the testing holidays as though they are the time of year when their students do any real work.

Phone calls are made home to remind students to show up to school. Some schools cater breakfasts for students.

Students know they will be rewarded with the educational equivalent of Christmas bonuses if they’re shown to have made top gains when the testing results come in.

And while G9, 10 and 12 students at SLA attended classes as usual (with some room switches), in other schools the testing holiday looked like a real holiday for those students not being proctored.

Oh, the proctoring.

Again, treating the holiday season as though its more important than when actual learning is taking place, proctors face rooms of testees with attitudes that are, well, testy.

Looks of scorn and dictatorial attitudes are assumed in an effort I can only assume to frighten the smarts out of the students.

I guess I missed the study showing stressed students preform better.

On the other hand, there’s a way to treat students like people – even during the testing holidays.

Talking to kids as they enter the room, providing them with peppermints, smiling, treating to them the same way you treated them before the break and the same way you will treat them when classes resume.

If we must test (and for now we must), let’s treat it like school.

I know it’s not – not the best versions of school, anyway.

Still, let’s pretend so we can avoid those humanity gaps that we know can occur over breaks in learning.

Things I Know 88 of 365: We’re about to have some great discussions

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

In the second half of the semester, I open my storytelling class to greater student choice and control. This could be intensely dangerous considering the class is populated with students with eyes fixed firmly on graduation.

I operate under the assumption greater choice and control will help make our class relevant.

The guiding questions for the assignment I rolled out today are simple:

  • What is a text you connect with strongly?
  • What causes that connection?
  • How can you help the class understand that connection?

I suppose anyone else in a class about story would collect a set of stories from the Western Literary Canon and proceed with the indoctrination.

They’ll have college for that.

My goal is more to work toward the type of deeply curious conversations about texts that will equip them with the tactics to pull apart those dusty canonical behemoths later on.

The assignment is simple:

  • Pick a text that means something to you. Prep a whole-class discussion that will help us all learn more about the text.
  • For the purposes of the assignment, I put myself in the role of Mr. Chase as English student rather than Mr. Chase as English teacher.

Students are responsible for preparing copies, online materials or video clips as necessary. They must also prepare pre- and during-reading activities to prep their peers (and me) for at least 30 minutes discussion.

Last year’s initial launch of this assignment brought some amazing moments.

For almost an entire class period we debated the appropriateness, theme, and intended audience of Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree.

In another discussion, the debate over the narrative structure of OneRepublic’s “Say (All I Need)”.

Aside from checking in with students to make certain they’re finding texts and offering suggestions for planning their discussions, I stay out of things as much as possible.

I know the texts, but I haven’t read many of them.

There’s an element of trust there, I suppose.

It’s why I ask that the texts be important to the students sharing them.

“If you bring in something you don’t care about, it’s more likely that we won’t either.”

This is likely why I have such trouble teaching The Great Gatsby.

Some early possibilities this year include an excerpt from the film version of For Colored Girls, a cross-medium analysis of a quotation from The Kite Runner, deconstruction of Hamlet’s most famous of soliloquies and a Rage Against the Machine song.

Aside from Hamlet, these will be texts with which I am largely unfamiliar. While this adds an air of novelty to the process, the greater benefit is my not having a preconceived notion of how a discussion should play out. I’m learning along with the rest of the class.

This year’s iteration of the assignment includes one major adjustment. Aside from the 30-minute minimum, the students and I are building the assessment criteria for the discussions together.

Before they’ve built anything, we work to answer the questions, “What should a great version of these discussions look like? What should we expect as help in our thinking? What is the role of the discussion leader?”

Before they graduate from high school, I want them to graduate to owning class and their thinking.

Will you invest in my education? OR Crowdfunding Harvard

I was accepted to the Harvard Graduate School of Education Master’s program in Education Policy and Management.

I found out today I didn’t receive the merit scholarships from Harvard. While I’m willing to take out student loans to make this program a reality, there’s only so much money I’m approved to borrow. With an estimated $60K price tag, this makes things difficult. I’ve come up with an idea, and I’m asking for your help.

Will you invest in me?

Rationale:

I know a couple things:

  • I believe in transparency.
    • The kind of transparency that shows not only what is happening, but also what is possible.
  • I believe in the value of education.
    • I believe the value of any education can be increased by dialogue and transparency.
  • I believe there’s value to be had in the discussion of a transparent education.
    • The connections made in the pursuit of this discussion are the value. The discussion has happened and will continue happen, but the experience of transparent education and the network of people that gather around this experience will exponentially increase the value. It is the sustained part of the discussion that will make this important. It isn’t one paper. It isn’t one blog post. It isn’t one Personal Learning Network (PLN) project. It is the ongoing experience of learning in an transparent way. Finding a way to make the value grow because there are more people learning together is worthwhile work.
The traditional view of higher education has the student leaving the community to study in an cloister of learning, only to reappear upon graduation, degree in hand, ready to move to whatever’s next. With this project, I will bring the community along with me, invest the community in the process and build an archive of a transparent, dialog-driven education.For all the discussion of higher education, no true, public archive exists of the university experience, let alone an archive built in the public as the experience happens. Not only will this project generate discussion, debate and study of the graduate process, it will serve as an artifact of that process as it currently exists.

Proposal:

I want my graduate experience to be a conversation and a text that builds itself. I will blog about my studies every single day. Every paper and project will be shared online (and built online whenever possible) and Creative Commons-licensed. As a function of the blog, the program of study will be posted publicly so that all backers will be able to view any class notes as they are drafted in Google Docs to later be posted as part of the archive.

In every possible way, the experience will be public, transparent and built around the dialogue it generates.

What you get:

Funders will receive access to the project blog as well as be guaranteed one public thank you throughout the course of the program. Starting at $40, backers for this project will receive live access to all course notes as they are drafted when available, a weekly multimedia e-mail blast documenting the social highlights of the course of study including music, films, books and television shows. From $80 and up, backers will also be invited to monthly online chats to discuss the program status, content and any issues of relevance. Should the archive be published in book form, all backers will be thanked within the text.

Funding Goal:
$40,000

What I’m asking from you:
  1. A donation of $40 or more.
  2. Blog, tweet, e-mail, text and share this project with everyone you know and tell them to do the same.
  3. Join the conversation.

Links:

Contingency:

If all of this proves impossible and I am not able to attend Harvard, any collected funds will be donated to Science Leadership Academy.

Things I Know 87 of 365: Pres. Obama, Rhee, Gates and Sec. Duncan should support the NWP

So our goal as an administration, my goal as President, has been to build on these successes across America…

…We need to put outstanding teachers in every classroom, and give those teachers the pay and the support that they deserve…

…A budget that sacrifices our commitment to education would be a budget that’s sacrificing our country’s future.  That would be a budget that sacrifices our children’s future.  And I will not let it happen…

…Let me make it plain:  We cannot cut education.  (Applause.)  We can’t cut the things that will make America more competitive…

– Pres. Obama 3/14/11 Kenmore Middle School, Arlington, VA

We’ll fight against ineffective instructional programs and bureaucracy so that public dollars go where they make the biggest difference: to effective instructional programs.

– Michelle Rhee 12/6/10 Newsweek

Great teachers are a precious natural resource. But we have to figure out how to make them a renewable, expandable resource. We have to figure out what makes the great teachers great and how we transfer those skills to others. These are vital questions for American education.

– Bill Gates 11/19/10 Council of Chief State School Officers

The plain fact is that — to lead in the new century — we have no choice in the matter but to invest in education. No other issue is more critical to our economy, to our future and our way of life.

– Sec. Arne Duncan 3/9/11 Senate Testimony

For 20 years, the National Writing Project has received federal funding to help teachers across the nation improve their practice and improve the learning of their students. The research bears this out.

The NWP is in danger. Twenty years of success and grass-roots professional development are in danger. Contact your congressperson – daily. After that, contact the offices of each of the people quoted above. If they truly believe what they say above, they will have no problem speaking out in support of the NWP.

Things I Know 86 of 365: Sometimes I need to put on the teacher hat

Friday, one of my G11 classes was having a class discussion. I gave them 7 minutes to find an interesting news story, pull out the main details, state their opinion in one sentence and draft a question to spark conversation.

If a particular topic lost steam, whoever brought that topic up called on someone else to inject a new topic into the conversation.

One student introduced the proposed fair schedule changes to SEPTA, Philadelphia’s mass transit provider.

As soon as the name left the student’s mouth, the class was awash in groans.

Philadelphians love to hate SEPTA. Cheesesteaks, Rocky Steps, booing our own sports teams, and abhorring SEPTA – in these things we find our brotherly love.

Once the topic and the proposed fair schedule were introduced, the expected flurry of slanderous complaints started up.

Each student took his turn to talk and called on the next.

“I know SEPTA’s not perfect,” someone said, “But, when you think about it, SEPTA can get you pretty much anywhere in the city of Philadelphia without much of a problem.”

A lone voice against the tumult. One brave villager against throngs of pitchforks and torches.

“Sure, sometimes they’re late, but most of the time they’re on time.”

“What bus do you take,” someone asked?

The lone voice answered.

“Those are white people buses,” the questioner scoffed his reply.

The conversation took a turn.

In the moments the class was snickering at this half joke, I had to decide how I was going to be a teacher once the laughter subsided.

“Hold on a sec,” I said, “I need to be your English teacher right now.”

“I need to unpack that statement because you said a lot more than what you said.”

It was one of those great moments where I got to use real language as the object of study. I talked about the mixture of humor and seriousness in that moment and suggested the humor might obscure the deeper point of the statement.

Then I pulled attention to the embedded implication that only black people in Philadelphia lived in poverty or that white people’s experiences in poverty were less valid. Briefly, I touched on the possibility that the statement also could have been construed as a weapon meant to make others positioned anywhere on the class spectrum feel guilt over their socioeconomic status.

Another student said she agreed the comment was inappropriate, but insisted their was a difference between bus service across neighborhoods.

We talked about the truth of that statement and started to play with the complexity of the whole idea.

I stopped to clarify that I wasn’t angry about what had been said, but that I would have been remiss in my duties if I didn’t take the time to pull it apart and start to consider the multitude of meanings.

I know there were probably a million ways I could have handled the whole conversation better, but that’s how I handled it Friday. Next time, whatever the next time is, I’ll do it a little bit better. And, it was loads better than some similar conversations from my first years in the classroom.

Then, as always, I tried for the same things:

  • talking, not yelling
  • eliciting conversation not compliance
  • respecting whatever opinions are on the table
  • challenging the untested opinions
  • speaking with authority, not as an authoritarian

Though it’s un-Philadelphian of me, I’m thankful for SEPTA for inciting the conversation.

Things I Know 85 of 365: It’s time to share the funny

A joke is a very serious thing.

– Winston Churchill

It’s difficult to be funny in China. I know, right? All those people, and you’d think it would be easier for a viral case of the giggles. Evidently not.

I’m a little worried the same may be true for the teaching profession.

A few days ago, I wrote about a faculty volleyball game at SLA. The comments I received about the post both on and offline led me to wonder and worry a little that educators aren’t bringing the funny as much as they should.

We have to laugh.

In my second year of teaching, the middle school team I taught on had lunch together once a week in our team prep room. Every once in a while, we would order Chinese food.

The kid of the team, I imparted some cultural wisdom to my colleagues as we finished our meal one day.

“You know how to read your fortune, right?” I said.

Everyone looked at me.

“You read it aloud and you add ‘in bed’ to the end.”

Everyone on the team saw me as young and impetuous. If they didn’t see me as their son, they saw me as their little brother. I was to be humored.

One teacher on our team was all business. She was there to teach and the children were there to learn. Anything else during class time was to be corrected. What’s more, the rest of the teachers and I knew very little about her. “Touchy feely” was certainly not a phrase we used to describe her.

We began to open our fortune cookies. I was trepidacious as we grew nearer and nearer her turn.

Finally, the moment arrived.

“You will be lucky in many things.”

Nothing.

Such a buzzkill.

Two second later.

“…in bed.”

And we were ruined. For 5 minutes, this stoic pillar of order and reason laughed uncontrollably, her face beet red. And we all joined in.

It was a rare moment of total levity.

We needed it.

In rest of my time on that team, every once in a while, I’d pass a colleague and have to stifle a giggle as they whispered “…in bed.”

Whether it’s the jokes section of Reader’s Digest or the Onion News Network, funny must be injected into the day if your’e going to make it in teaching and be able to relate to people in any kind of way that makes them want to relate to you.

So here’s my question – Where’s your funny? I’m serious. Where do you look for the humor during your day. Is it a book or a website?

We can and do share our daily trials. We share how our students make us proud. We share frustrations with our administrations and the newest tools we’ve found. Take a moment, today, and share the funny.

I’ll start it off.

Things I Know 84: I like to listen in

A journalist is basically a chronicler, not an interpreter of events. Where else in society do you have the license to eavesdrop on so many different conversations as you have in journalism? Where else can you delve into the life of our times? I consider myself a fortunate man to have a forum for my curiosity.

– Bill Moyers quotes

Earlier this week, I sat at my usual counter at my local coffee shop working. I had done that thing where I put my earphones in, but in a moment of ADHD, forgot to turn on the music. This failed to occur to me until I noticed any work I’d intended on doing was being subverted by the part of my brain that was paying attention to the two people sitting one stool away from me at the same counter.

Realizing I was listening to their conversation, I should have cracked up The Low Anthem and re-doubled my working efforts.

I couldn’t.

I wanted to, but one of the guys mentioned the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and the other brought up cognitive linguistics and I’ll could do was open up twitter and start sharing their conversation with the rest of the world.

As is the wont of brains, mine started filling in the unknown details of these two based on the non-verbal cues I could pick up through sideways glances. I decided they were on a first date…and tweeted it was the nerdiest first date ever.

One of the two mentioned Noam Chomsky and the other brought up “linguistic pragmatics” and I was off to Wikipedia.

You know that thing where you’re out with someone and they keep checking their phone or looking something up online when they’re supposed to be present with you?

That was me. Only, I was checking my phone and looking things up online when I wasn’t supposed to be present with these two.

I couldn’t help myself.

The conversation was too uncanny.

The one who I’d learned was a doctoral student brought up something he’d read in a book by the founder of Palm called…I couldn’t hear what he said. I knew the second word of the title was “intelligence” or “intelligent” so I went to Google, found the name of the founder of Palm and then loaded in Amazon’s search box.

Bingo!

After reading the reviews and continuing to listen to the conversation, I decided I was interested in the book. Two minutes after it had been mentioned, the book, On Intelligence was delivered to my Kindle.

I mean, if these two wildly interesting and intelligent guys thought it was worth reading, who was I to disagree?

Not only that, but the twitter conversation had ticked up and people from three other states were commenting on my play-by-play.

Just when someone suggested we all chip in to buy the couple a drink or a snack, the two packed up and headed off to their day.

I was left alone – the real kind of alone. No one else was sitting at the bar.

This is a recurring problem, this eavesdropping.

I tell myself it’s a combination of what remains from my days as a journalist and my listening training as an improviser.

In reality, I like to collect stories.

I also assume anyone sitting near me is stricken with the same malady and listening intently to my conversations in public places.

Sometimes, I catch myself using purposefully misleading or provocative language so they have a good story to tell their friends and family when I’ve gone. When I get up to use the restroom, I’ll close twitter on my web browser and pull up the homepage to The Economist so people will know how erudite and urbane I am when after I’ve asked them to watch my things while I’m away.

I get that Facebook, Tumblr and their ilk provide the same kind of eavesdropping in a virtual environment. From time to time, I’ll crawl through the profile of a friend of a friend to learn about their life. It’s just not the same.

Call me old fashioned or call me a purist. I don’t care. There’s no substitute for truly being there.

Things I Know 83 of 365: Thoughts are like fine wine and Paul Newman

It’s sad to grow old, but nice to ripen.

– Brigitte Bardot

An envelope arrived for me at school today. I’d been expecting it, but it wasn’t at the top of my brain. That made it all the better.

Val Sherman who used to write with me at The Daily Vidette when I was in college happened upon some old papers a couple of months ago and asked me if I wanted copies of my old columns.

Before I was a blogger, I was a columnist for three and a half years in university. It was one of the best jobs I’ve ever had.

I took the envelope of almost 20 columns into Chris’s office to read and eat my lunch. I passed him a clipped column to read, saying, “This is me in a past life.”

He read it.

“I don’t think I agree with you here,” he said.

“I don’t think I agree with myself,” I replied.

I’ve read several of the columns tonight. Interesting mile markers of my thinking from a decade ago, they’ve also helped me to see who I am now.

In one I said, “It’s amazing how you notice a place moving so quickly when you step out of it.”

I’m amazed at how much I notice myself having changed as I step out of being who I was.

Though I never came out and wrote it, my column was the place I tried to work through my own demons. I lamented what I saw as the weakening of the Separation Clause. I argued acceptance over tolerance. I recounted a Christmas with my father’s family and having to defend my liberal social politics.

I can’t say these aren’t views I hold now. Ten years later, though, I understand them better. I can believe them better because I’ve let myself see their imperfections and listened to differing points of view.

This summer, my grad program asked me to write my philosophy of education. I sat down to draft it. Not surprisingly, it was a distillation of many of the ideas I write here. When I was done, I searched for one of the many 3-ring binders teachers are required to keep to make themselves appear more teachery.

In the binder, I found the first philosophy of education I ever wrote as part of the portfolio I was compelled to complete before being allowed to begin my student teaching.

I looked at the pages 8 years after their drafting and then returned to my newly drafted philosophy. It turned out it wasn’t so new.

Like the ideas I found today in my columns, my philosophy then was my philosophy now without the wisdom of age.

My ideas had been untried. I was working with what I thought I saw on the horizon. I could only speak as a student then. Now, I can speak as both teacher and student.

Today in class, one of my students was arguing against the television media’s coverage of the divorce of a celebrity. His argument was reductive and simplistic. It made suppositions based on half truths and asked the other students in the room to ignore the missing halves.

I put on my teacher hat and offered guidance.

When I was done, I was fairly certain the kid would make the same mistake over and over again for the next few years.

Reading my columns, I know I’ve done a fair bit of that myself. Knowing where I am now compared to where I was then, though, assuages any worry I have over that student or any other. Time and experience are decent tutors.

Classy: Using social media to tell stories…real stories

I wrote a while ago about the stories my seniors are writing in our storytelling class. Each randomly drew one of Aristotle’s identified human emotions from a hat and was asked to let that emotion inspire a short story.

A few days later, the students partnered with one another with the goal of getting to know each other’s protagonists.

“What’s the name of one of your characters?” was the starting question. From there, the sky was the limit. They inquired about the characters’ favorite colors, their histories with their parents, what kind of students they were in middle school, their appearances – anything.

As partners questioned, they took notes on the answers. Those notes were handed over to the writers when the interviews were over as reminders of whom they were writing about. The activity proved informative.

“I’ve never really thought about who a character was before a story I was writing.”

“This makes me feel like I know the character, like she’s real.”

That’s the idea.

Then they wrote.

And wrote.

And wrote.

Last week, we read Atlantic Senior Editor Alexis Madrigal’s story outing Chicagoan Dan Singer as the man behind the twitory of @MayorEmanuel.

We discussed the idea that an entirely new genre of literature (or several) was being created in our lifetimes. Story was being transformed.

As it’s a storytelling class guided in part by the essential question, “How does the way we tell stories affect those stories,” it seemed a good idea to try our hands at these new genres.

Enter the project.

Description: Taking the story you wrote based off of one of Aristotle’s identified emotions, plot the timeline of your story, select the tool or tools you’ll want to use and tell your story in real time. Think of it as a mix of 24 and @MayorEmanuel.

I informally launched it Friday as an idea I’d been playing around with. Nothing formal. Just words in a conversation.

Monday, I handed out project descriptions and we started building. Today, we collaborated on the rubric.

Any online tool is fair game – Facebook, tumblr, twitter, youtube, anything.

In traditional arts and letters, we have fiction and nonfiction with the line blurring from time to time.

If everything can be read as a text and if the more traditional texts are moving online, is anything inherently nonfiction?

Some of what they’re writing violates user agreements. I don’t feel badly about that. If Mark Zuckerberg can play in my backyard, I can play in his.

One student has solicited his friends to also build character profiles to improvisationally interact with his protagonist and the events of the narrative. Other students have created public profiles on Facebook for their characters’ public thoughts and anonymous tumblr accounts for those same characters’ private thoughts. Anyone with both links will have the whole story, but either link will provide a different narrative.

Differing from Singer, we built blueprints and timelines for these stories. As I checked them in today, the students explained how they’d begun posting as exposition already.

Thursday I received a friend request on ‘Book from someone named Kwadwo Watcher. A few minutes later, I received the message below.

Another character started following me on twitter. A few students’ characters are following and friending one another with plans for intertextual cross-pollination.

All signs are pointing to the probability that this will be an interesting project.

Things I Know 82 of 365: Not all ideas are sacred

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

From my bedroom window, I can see a church. A simple brown stone building around four stories high, I also pass it when I walk my dog.

I should say used to. More specifically, almost used to.

They’re tearing it down – dismantling it really.

I didn’t notice until a few days after the work began. I awoke one morning, looked out my window and couldn’t figure out why my eyes were making it seem as though some monster had taken a few bites out of the roof and back wall of the church while I slept.

I’m uncertain as to why, but they’re taking the church apart stone-by-stone. Each morning, men in a cherry picker are chiseling away at these weathered bricks and dropping them to the ground. I assume the building is too close to power lines or other buildings to simply be knocked down.

Two weeks ago, I was walking with some friends past the half-eaten building and they got nostalgic, an emotion made all the more unbelievable considering they were from another state and had never seen the building before.

“I know, but it’s a church, and it’s sad,” they said when I pointed out the incongruity of their emotions.

In their minds, there was something inherently melancholy about tearing down a church.

For the more than a year I’ve lived in this neighborhood, I’ve passed the structure and thought how cool it would be as a restaurant/coffee shop or a brew and view. For me, the ground was unconsecrated long ago.

A couple days ago, PJ Higgins sent me this link to “20 Technology Skills that Every Educator Should Have.”

It’s worth a look. And though I don’t know that all 20 skills are essential, if a teacher has all 20 he could do some pretty sweet educational damage.

The tab is still open in my browser. I’ve not yet bookmarked it. I’ve almost bookmarked it a few times, but then pulled back.

They’re valuable, but not necessarily delicious.

I don’t want to consecrate the list as something I could conceivably trot out during keynote or conference presentations to welcome new teachers into the 21st century teaching fold.

They’re worthwhile today, but I don’t want to hold on to them so long that I stop questioning them the way some teachers invest total faith in overhead projectors or red pens.

Lists like that can quickly become commandments. In an uncertain educational world, commandments are alluring. They give the appearance of an easy path to success. Administrators can tick off this skill or that during and observation and bestow highly-qualified status as though simply throwing all the ingredients together gives you a satisfying meal.

Perhaps that’s why the guys in the cherry picker are taking the church together stone-by-stone. When you construct something and you call it holy and you consecrate it, it’s difficult to think of it as anything but holy. Even after it’s no longer consecrated, an idea, like a building is easy to worship and even easier to mourn.