Author: Mr. Chase

Things I Know 62 of 365: I have some questions for Michelle Rhee

Seek first to understand, and then to be understood.

– Stephen Covey

The conversation about how to improve our schools is loud.

I’m working to understand where I agree and disagree with some of the most privileged voices in that conversation.

In December, former D.C. Schools Chief Michelle Rhee wrote a piece for Newsweek explaining what she learned in her time in the job.

Rather than take a quote out of context or write a rebuttal, I decided to try to build my understanding the same way I work to build my understanding of the ideas my students present. The end result is here.

Things I Know 61 of 365: I am 30

Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter, and those who matter don’t mind.

– Dr. Seuss

Thirty years and a day ago, I wasn’t.

Then, the next day, I was.

For the last couple months, my sister Rachel has been teasing me about this birthday.

“You know,” she’s said with that tone where the “o” in “know” lasts a bit longer, “you are going to be old soon.”

She’s teasing, trying to elicit a defensive, fear-of-death response.

“I know,” I reply, “I can’t wait.”

It’s true.

I’m not exactly rushing toward death, but certainly rushing toward whatever’s next.

Truth be told, I’ve put quite a bit into those 30 years.

I’ve:

  • been born.
  • learned to walk and talk.
  • had stitches a bunch of times.
  • built many forts and clubhouses.
  • had four dogs.
  • fallen in love.
  • become a vegetarian.
  • lived in four states.
  • gotten a college degree.
  • run 8 marathons.
  • become a big brother three times over.
  • started my master’s degree – three times over.
  • taught over 1,000 kids.
  • seen the divorces and marriages of my parents.
  • served as editor in chief of a newspaper.
  • rafted down the Colorado River.
  • officiated three weddings of friends.
  • seen the sun rise over the Atlantic Ocean.
  • watched the sun set over the Pacific Ocean.
  • run along the coast of the Indian Ocean.
  • visited Kenya.
  • visited South Africa (twice).
  • co-authored and edited a book.
  • skydived.
  • lost my bookbag to a baboon.
  • recovered my bookbag from a baboon.
  • died my hair blue, green, read, orange, purple, and blond.
  • smoked a few cigars.
  • learned how to cook.
  • performed improv.
  • told my family and friends I love them (but probably not enough).
  • been diagnosed with and recovered from osteomyelitis.
  • developed an allergy to cats.
  • visited 40 of the states in the Union.
  • read.
  • transitioned from being a PC to being a Mac.
  • accidentally shot a bluejay with a BB gun.
  • watched every episode of The West Wing and Arrested Development like it was my job.
  • caught snowflakes on my tongue.
  • written.
  • failed.
  • changed the world by doing way more than saving a single starfish.
  • mourned the death of Johnny Cash.
  • voted.
  • collected hats.
  • collected pins.
  • sounded my barbaric Yawp.
  • cried.
  • been a member of a live studio audience.
  • gambled in a casino.
  • decided casinos make me sad.
  • played with a wood burning kit.
  • sang.
  • left a thawing Cornish game hen in a sculpture shaped like a hand (four times).
  • learned to crochet.
  • laughed.

And those are just the things I can remember off the top of my head.

I can’t wait for the next 30 years.

Things I Know 60 of 365: Online me is better than me

There’s this large trend – I think the next trend in the Web, sort of Web 2.0 – which is to have users really express, offer, and market their own content, their own persona, their identity.

– John Doerr

I started wondering today if I would know online me if I ran into him.

My G11 kids and I were discussing this piece by Dan Schwabel at Forbes arguing the usurpation of the resumé by a person’s online presence in the next 10 years.

While I’m hesitant to venture any guesses of what my world will look like in 10 years, something Schwabel wrote got me thinking:

Employers are reviewing your profiles to see what kind of person you are outside of work, who you’re connected to, and how you present yourself. Each gives clues to how well you can fit into the corporate culture. When employees don’t fit in the culture, there is turnover, and it costs the organization thousands of dollars.

I get that this fits with the big, scary warning that whatever is posted on the Internet stays on the Internet. Today, I started thinking about it in reverse.

I pay so much attention to keeping the spaces of my life online professional, I worry the persona I’ve created might have become better than the person I am.

The person online spaces allow me to be doesn’t get cranky midday if he forgets to eat.

A friend asked me to take care of something time sensitive today. It was probably the fourth time she’s asked me to take care of it, but for about a billion subconscious reasons, I’d put it off until the last minute.

Online me would never pull that crap.

Right now, at this very moment, online me could get ahold of people I’ve never met across multiple countries, set up appointments with them and collaborate on projects that will make my classroom a better place.

I, on the other hand, can get ahold of my dog right now as I sit watching episodes of Eureka on Netflix Watch Instantly (a service online me set up).

Online me hasn’t been purposely constructed with an eye toward besting me in a side-by-side comparison. He’s just had the benefit of being more thoughtfully constructed.

My friends know that online me is constantly connected to his students, so some of the more off-color jokes or embarrassing moments from my life don’t make it onto online me’s Facebook wall. Online me shrugs at my deepest moments of anger, hurt and self-doubt. Unbothered by the possibility of a future, online me never struggles with the question of “What next?” The man is saintly contented.

He sort of makes me sick.

Born of the knowledge that whatever is posted to the Internet stays on the Internet, my online persona is more a reflection of who I want to be in the world than who I am. This is great news for employment opportunities, but more than a little disconcerting for me.

Things I Know 59 of 365: I want to be Mr. Curry

I never realized I had that much influence on anyone. I hope you enjoy your teaching career as much as I did mine.

– John Curry

My senior year of high school, I took AP Calculus. In my rural school of fewer than 400 students, 5 of us took the class.

When spring arrived, we sat in the conference room, #2 pencils in hand, and attacked the AP A/B Calculus exam.

Well, 4 of us attacked it.

I held on as long as I could. Through the bubble and grid section, I played it cool.

Arriving at the open answer section, I froze.

My mind was a blank. Not a blank as in something had been their and was erased by anxiety, but blank in the sense that I had no idea what was being asked of me.

I looked around the room and surmised I was the only one. Throughout the room, pencils were scribbling.

In that moment, I wanted to quit even more than I had wanted to quit when my third grade T-Ball team lost every game. Every. Game.

John Curry taught me math each year from eighth through twelfth grade, save one.

He wasn’t looping with my class. It was a small school with two math teachers.

If, on my best days, I am half the teacher Mr. Curry was, I have made something of myself.

He was as traditional and by-the-book a teacher as you’re likely to meet. It is entirely possible our pedagogies are somewhat divergent at this point. We are products of different eras.

Still, I remember he cared.

When a student earned a B or above on a test, Mr. Curry would place a sticker on the paper before handing it back. As we moved to higher math, got our driver’s licenses and first jobs, we continued to treasure those stickers. The covers of our TI-83s were laden with stickers like fighter pilots noting our kills.

For a score of 90% or above, students received certificates congratulating them on showing their ability to master the content of the chapter. Mine hung in my locker.

Perhaps best were the letters. At the close of each unit, after the tests and quizzes were graded, Mr. Curry would send letters to the parents of those students earning Bs or higher, congratulating them on their students’ successes.

I remember seeing the letters as I pulled the mail from the mailbox. It wasn’t the handwriting which gave it away (Mr. Curry was mail merging before it was cool). It was the stationary. Out of his own pocket, Mr. Curry purchased stationary in our school colors watermarked with our mascot. When a Kelly green envelope showed up in the mail, you knew what was inside.

The letters did more than offer congratulations to my parents, they also explained what concepts and material I had shown mastery of. Dinner on letter nights was always interesting, “So, Zachary, explain the slope-intercept formula to me.”

Mr. Curry made me care about math because he showed he cared about me.

Sitting in the conference room, my blank drawn with amazing detail, I knew I could not quit. I could not fail Mr. Curry.

Realizing any attempt at calculus would be a mockery of the mathematics he held so dear, I played to my strengths.

I remember the first lines of the essay I wrote, “If you saw my answers in the previous section of the test, you know I’ve been holding on by a thread. Rather than waste both of our time, let me tell you why I needed to take this test and how great my math teacher is. No matter what you think of my math skills, please, don’t take them as a reflection of his teaching.”

Though I’d struggle if you put a factorial in front of me today, I learned the value of more than I can ever say from Mr. Curry.

Things I Know 58 of 365: No one deserves the Academy Awards

It’s the young and hip Oscars!

– Anne Hathaway

This morning, I had a Skype meeting from my bed with folks from Philadelphia, Portland and D.C.

Later, between completing coursework for a master’s degree I’ll earn without ever seeing the faces of those teaching me or learning with me, I tweeted with Mary Worrell in The Netherlands.

Then I looked her up on Skype and we talked about curriculum while I ate a warm cinnamon roll.

After she’d gone to bed, I hit up Bryan Jackson in British Columbia to talk about the possibilities of having our student collaborate online.

The conversation with Bryan was a little stilted because I was working to help design some curricula for use in Denver at the same time.

I’m relaying all this not to sound cool (which I am not), but to explain the chortle I emitted when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences President Tom Sherak and Head of Disney/ABC Television Anne Sweeney interrupted the limping Oscar telecast to tell me they’d be doing the same thing for another 9 years.

I held my breath for a moment waiting for the tagline, “If you think our self-adulation reeks of being mercilessly out of touch with the shifting paradigm of new media, wait and see what we can do with the next decade.”

At some point, shows like the Oscars, Grammys, Emmys, and Golden Globes were events offering the viewing public a portal into the world of celebrity.

When anyone can become a celebrity tomorrow, though, folks aren’t as interested in watching celebrities as joining them.

More people have seen “Charlie bit my finger – again!” than will ever see The King’s Speech. While Randy Newman was collecting his second Oscar in 20 nominations, Justin Bieber had (as of this writing) 769,366,327 aggregate views for his three videos in the Top 20 all-time most viewed Youtube videos. And, if the 13-year-who tried to explain Bieber Fever to me is to be believed, it’s all because Justin’s mom threw some movies of her son up on Youtube in the first place.

Though Harvey Weinstein was once a kingmaker, it’s looking a lot like anyone with an Internet connection can step right into his shoes.

Boat = Missed, ABC and Academy.

Saying you’ll be televising the Oscars on ABC through 2020 is like me saying in 2001 that I’d be teaching students out of textbooks for the next decade.

While tonight’s telecast might have motivated some people to head out to theaters to see the winning and nominated films, for a growing segment of the population (many of them in the demographic targeted by the selection of James Franco and Anne Hathaway as co-hosts tonight), it prompted the setting of sails for The Pirate Bay.

I’m worried I might be more with it than Hollywood.

If a public school English teacher can spend his Sunday talking to colleagues in six cities across three countries and just as many time zones, it’s possible the Academy needs to re-think what it means to be relevant.

Things I Know 57 of 365: I have been doing some reflecting

By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.

– Confucious

My Cognitive Curricula grad course has been a refresher on the voices present in a metacognitive approach to teaching and learning. Taking the time to look closely again at Carol Ann Tomlinson’s work within the realm of differentiated instruction was an opportunity to “sharpen the saw” as Stephen Covey says. While differentiation is something I have been practicing since stepping into the classroom, sections like Tomlinson’s “Grading in a differentiated classroom” asked me to stop and contemplate the nuance necessary when working toward full differentiation.

Specifically connected to grading, I plan to think more deeply about my use of rubrics in my classroom. Teaching in a project-based school, much of what my students create is assessed using a rubric. Too truly embrace Daniel Kain’s suggestion of problem-based learning, though, I anticipate the learning will become messier than can be contained in a rubric. Throughout this module, I have started questioning the freedom or restriction of freedom inherent in rubrics. If I am attempting to differentiate assignments, I start wondering if that differentiation could happen by drawing upon a more authentic form of assessment than rubrics.

As my students create complex and dynamic texts and other projects, I wonder if I am restricting my ability to truly appreciate what they have create by asking their works to fit into four or five assessment categories.

Moving forward as a result of my thinking in the course, I will start to think about how close and how far away Kain’s ideas of problem-based learning get to real and useful experiences with the knowledge my students are collecting and creating. As I create assignments, I will more closely consider the contrivances inherent in asking students to do things that are almost real versus things that are actually real. If I must draft artificial documents when asking my students to consider a problem, am I doing them a disservice? Should I not be helping them access real problems and real documents? This is how I will apply my learning from this block.

Intermingled with my reading of Tomlinson and Kain during the block was my examination of Sam Chaltain’s American Schools as well as Nel Noddings’s Caring. In some moments, all four texts worked in concert with one another – asking me to build greater choice into my pedagogy and increase the role of democracy in my classroom. At other times, though, these four texts stood at odds. My greatest growth happened when each text was in contention with the others. Tomlinson and Chaltain advocate greater choice and freedom, an anti-patrician approach to teaching. Not long after those messages wove themselves into my thinking, I encountered Noddings’s argument that caring for our students does not mean allowing choice in all things. Sometimes, Noddings says, we are at our most caring when we restrict choice and tell the “cared for” what they must do. She indirectly argues for a limited democracy in the classroom. Wrestling with this idea was a moment of growth for me during this block. I had to come to terms with my ideal of a democratic classroom and my ideal of living as a teacher who is governed by an ethic of care.

My endpoint – well, my way station – is to move toward a fully democratic classroom as much as possible, to limit that democracy when that is how caring must manifest itself and to work toward the wisdom of knowing which situations call for which approach.

A final piece of learning from the block, or perhaps a lingering question, is the desire to better understand the place of failure and its value in the classroom. Kain seems to write from a belief in doing all we can to prevent student failure. I teach from a belief that failure can lead to greater learning and understanding. I see my role as helping to uncover new information and understandings. Sometimes the thing covering that information and those understandings is failure. If we teach and prepare as Kain appears to be advocating, I worry we are robbing our students of the opportunity to fail and then succeed.

My implementation of the block’s content comes largely in the form of considering what constitutes authentic assessment in the differentiated and problem-based classroom. The learning in the block existed as I attempted to complicate my thinking by harmonizing the syncopation of ideas that arose from incorporating ancillary texts along with the course-required readings. The thinking that pushes me forward is the want of a deeper understanding of the role of failure as I base learning in problems and differentiate as much as I can. This is where I stand as I become more cognitive of my curriculum.

PD: Let’s Meetup

After after years of reading and talking about self-guided professional development and how online spaces can make it happen, I’m going to do something else.

I shelled out a little coin and created a meetup group.

Admittedly, scheduling the first meetup for the day after the group was created turned out to be a bit overzealous.

March 9, we’ll try again.

Our first topic of discussion, “forming and asking good questions in the classroom.”

The group has no requirements and asks only that attendees bring with them a link, tool or text they turn to in consideration of the meetup’s topic.

I don’t know why I or you haven’t started a TeachUp group before. Maybe others have, and I just haven’t heard about it.

Either way, knowing I’ve got some informal PD on the horizon with folks I largely don’t know but who share an affinity for wanting to be better teachers has me all tingly in that way only learning can.

If you’re in the Philly area, come join.

If you’re not in the Philly area, start your own.

And, if you’re a bit trepidatious about paying for a meetup account, just jump in our group – think of America as the Greater Philadelphia Area.

Things I Know 56 of 365: My job is to look closely

You can observe a lot just by watching.

– Yogi Berra

In his discussion of the use of Critical Friends Group protocols with student work, Sam Chaltain explains the process as a chance to look more closely at what students have created. Rather than looking for what the teacher was hoping would come from an assignment, CFG protocols take a step back to ask what the student was doing, creating and attempting in the completion of an assignment.

It turns out you don’t need a protocol to be reminded we need to look more closely.

SLA welcomed visitors today.

Touring classrooms, they happened upon one of my senior storytelling classes.

After a few minutes, one of the visitors approached me.

“I walked in and saw kids cutting pictures out of magazines and thought, ‘This isn’t good.'”

Admittedly, as my students played with form and function as they diagrammed their six-word stories and then created art pieces to display those diagrams, it did look like an Adirondacks summer camp exploded in my room.

“But then I looked closer,” my guest continued. “There’s some deep work going on here.”

That’s the key.

“I want to take this class,” another visitor commented after spending five minutes listening to a student explain how he was attempting to understand what he was asking words to do in his story.

Admittedly, the room didn’t look like the standard English classroom today. Still, I was able to stop and have a real conversation about modifiers and direct objects with a kid who traditionally turns in 1 in 10 homework assignments. He wanted to make something that showed how his story did what it did. To accomplish this task of helping others understand his creation, he was willing to discuss prepositional phrases, understood subjects and adverbs.

“They’re doing some difficult work,” my first visitor explained.

“I know,” I said, “Don’t tell them.”

It’s not that I’m attempting to fool my students into learning. Monday, we’ll start looking more closely and talking more clinically about what they’re learning.

I didn’t want word to get out how difficult the task ahead was because they were creating. The drive to create had overcome the drive to exclaim the difficulty of creation. I didn’t want to stand in the way of that.

I didn’t want to stand in the way, but I still needed to look closely.

As my students were using yarn, construction paper, magazines, markers and colored pencils to create stories, I was looking closely at their abilities to understand language, build complex thoughts, dissect narrative and understand the relative relationships of words.

Shhhhh.

I’ll be using the CFG protocols to get my peers’ feedback on student work soon. For now, my goal is to look closely as that work is completed and understand what’s working and what isn’t.

Rather than have them pause and take a test, my goal is to have them continue to create so I can continue to learn about their learning.

Things I Know 55 of 365: It’s good to be treated like a professional

Proposition 4: Teachers think systematically about their practice and learn from experience.

– National Board for Professional Teaching Standards

Sydney’s been giving me trouble the last couple of weeks. She’s a fine enough student. Her grades are decent. She her contributions to class discussion have been average with occasional sparks of insight. She has a fine circle of friends – no one in the upper reaches of the high school hierarchy, but fine enough kids.

Still, Sydney’s been rubbing me the wrong way.

She’ll make comments in the hallways that she isn’t happy with how I run class.

Whatever.

I decided to put an end to a project a couple weeks ago. The kids were making a go of it and working on it, but I didn’t see it going anywhere. So, I shut it down.

Sydney didn’t like it. She wrote about it on her Facebook wall. That, combined with some pretty critical conversations I overheard her having with other students in the hall, really ticked me off.

Then, when I was teaching the other day, Sydney just had to raise her hand and ask why the class needed to follow a direction I’d just given. She said it didn’t make sense and questioned the reasoning behind it.

Right there, in front of all my students, she questioned my authority as the educational leader of the classroom.

I’d made the choice because, in the end it would be easier for me to keep track of things, but I’m not beholden to explain anything to this child.

I ignored her and moved on.

A few minutes later – completely separate activity – Sydney’s hand is in the air again.

She wants to know why I’ve just announced I’ll be sending a portion of my class to a tutor down the block from now on.

I want to get up in her face and yell, “Because some of you are too hard to teach, and you make me look bad when I try. Teaching’s hard, so now you’re someone else’s problem.”

But, I don’t owe her anything.

The next day, I meet Sydney at the door and tell her to take her things to the little office next to my room for class.

During class, the group of students working with Sydney on a class project ask if they can go ask her for her notes. I tell them no and encourage them to stop thinking of Sydney as part of the class.

Later, I hear they still talked to her when they saw her in the hall.

I get an e-mail, two phone calls and 10 text messages from Sydney’s parents that night.

They want to know why I’ve moved Sydney out of class.

I write them a letter explaining Sydney hasn’t been using her time in school safely, particularly her classtime.

I manage all of four sentences and stick the letter in the mail.

Of course, never satisfied, Sydney’s parents call the school, talk to my principal, e-mail me (several times), call me (several times) and text me (several times). Not only that, they must have some sort of phone tree for parents who want to make asinine complaints, because I starting getting bombarded by way too many overprotective parents who “want to know what’s going on.”

Tuesday, I sent Sydney’s parents another letter letting them know I’d be conferencing with her today about how she wasn’t making the classroom environment a safe space with all her “Why this?” and “What about that?” comments. I also let them know I wasn’t particularly pleased she’d been talking with them about what should have been an internal classroom matter.

I mean, I’m the teacher. I know what’s best. Otherwise, how could I keep victory in the classroom?

Things I Know 54 of 365: I teach kids English

– Victor Hugo

I teach kids.

First and foremost, I teach kids.

It’s always in the front of my brain.

The stupendously great thing is I get to teach kids something I love.

In the important rhetoric around the idea that I teach kids, I want to make it clear that I teach kids a subject or a discipline or a an art.

Sometimes, it’s all three.

My only real run-in with diagramming sentences was in Dr. Jerry Balls’s Traditional and Non-Traditional Grammar course in college.

For most of the other students in the room, diagramming sentences was the hellacious experience I remember it being portrayed as in some episode of The Wonder Years.

For me, though, something else was there. In diagrams, I saw something beautiful. The way Mr. Curry had seen beauty as we worked through problems in calculus or Mr. Schutzenhoffer saw beauty in the molecular models of chemistry, I was seeing tangibly represented in the subject I identified most closely.

I wanted to talk about what I saw, the way what language was doing was being played out in what we were seeing.

Dr. Balls and my classmates wanted to finish the lesson.

He was teaching a subject.

The seniors in my storytelling class started today at SixWordStories.net.

“Read until you’re moved to create,” I said, “Then let me know when you need a marker.”

They started reading.

Around the room, I heard students reading key stories aloud.

Not surprisingly, the sexy stories were a pretty big hit.

Gradually, hands went up.

I took them markers.

“What do I do?”

“Write some six-word stories.”

And they started to write stories on their desktops – all over their desktops.

Missy covered her entire table and had to move to another to keep writing.

At some point, when the tables of the room were awash with stories – beautiful, heartbreaking, hilarious stories – we watched a simple video I found as I was digging around the TALONS English wiki.

The video ended. “For the next step, you’ll be diagramming your stories. I can tell by the somewhat terrified looks on many of your faces that you haven’t the foggiest idea how to diagram a sentence. That’s ok. The Interwebs has millions of pages to help you out.”

A beat.

They began looking up the information they needed.

A few minutes later, they were taking their works of literary art and deconstructing them. We started to talk about how where the words were related to what the words were and how the story did or didn’t change when all the same words were in a space together but being asked to show how they were doing what they were doing.

Tomorrow, we’ll head to the final phase.

We’ll move our diagrammed stories (and I say our because I’m writing one as well) off of the tables and onto tangible objects and representations to be displayed around school. The subject of storytelling, the discipline of diagramming and the art of creation will be knotted together.

When students ask me why I chose English, I explain I love words. I love their power, their beauty, their arbitrary natures, their shifting meanings.

I know few, if any, of my students will major in English as they further their studies. I’m perfectly happy with that, so long as they can see English.

As much as I would not be doing my job if I didn’t work every moment to see my students, I would also be failing if I didn’t work to help them to see the transcendent beauty of my subject – to try on a new perspective.