Author: Mr. Chase

Toto Got It Right

Sunset behind Table Mountain in Cape Town, South AfricaAfter nearly 24 hours of travel, the Teachers Without Borders-Canada ICT team has arrived in Cape Town, South Africa. Mind you, my brain is tired (not sure if it’s 7:30 PM or 1:30 PM), but the drive to our accommodations was enough to set the contrast here in sharp relief. Along the highway, the airport stood on one side being renovated for SA hosting of the FIFA World Cup next year and the poverty of Cape Town’s townships sat directly across the street.

Tomorrow, we’ll review our scope and sequence for the first couple of days of next week’s workshops. Then, we’re off to one of the schools that’ll be hosting us to check out their lab and set up.

The last order of business = we’ll be going on a tour of one of the townships. I can’t wait to learn more.

Right now, I’m too tired to process properly.

Learn out loud

A while back, Jabiz Raisdana tweeted,”I hate that teachers always tell students to write but very few teachers actually do it themselves. For pleasure that is.”

While I would and did argue against the idea it happens as infrequently as he contended, I do enjoy doing the work I ask my students to complete.

A few weeks ago, somewhere in my network, someone mentioned DailyLit.com. A nifty little site, DailyLit will send contiguous passages of a selected book to your e-mail account or RSS feed on a schedule you set. While some of the books require a minimal fee, many of them can be read for free.

After nosing around for a bit, I told my students to browse the “Classics” section and subscribe to books that piqued their fancies.

The assignment was simple – for each passage that popped up in a student’s inbox or feed reader, that student would then take about 5 minutes to write their thoughts on what they’d read. The responses lived as a journal on Moodle which allowed me to keep track of their thinking and comment along the way.

Now, I don’t know if anyone else has this problem, but I sometimes run into assignments I feel as though I’ve explained perfectly and come to find out it might not necessarily be the case.

Such was it with the journals. Students were copying and pasting key quotations, writing summaries of the passages, responding with one-sentence posts such as, “Boring.” Not the literary exploration I had planned.

This brings us back to Jabiz, that intrepid teacher.

When I first started looking around DailyLit, I’d tested out the site and signed up to receive Henry David Thoreau’s Walden.

May I get real for a second?

Not to malign my qualifications as one who teaches words and letters to younger generations, but I’ve tried to read that friggin’ book 4 times and failed miserably each time. Horribly, really. I mean, these guys had a better go of it than I did when wrestling with H.D.

I created a forum in each class’s Moodle course entitled “Mr. Chase’s DailyLit.” Each day, I do what I ask my kids to do as I muddle through this classic of American literature.

Somedays, it’s not pretty:

021/114

Thoreau continues to go on and on about how he got his food. This section concerns itself mostly with bread and how he made it. One particularly grating passage reads:

Yet I find it not to be an essential ingredient, and after going without it for a year am still in the land of the living; and I am glad to escape the trivialness of carrying a bottleful in my pocket, which would sometimes pop and discharge its contents to my discomfiture. It is simpler and more respectable to omit it.

Yup, that’s all about yeast. I’ll not lie, I had to force myself to stay focused whilst reading this. It’s far from the philosophical tone Thoreau first used when beginning the book. Still, every once in a while, he’ll throw out a sentence like, “Man is an animal who more than any other can adapt himself to all climates and circumstances,” and I’ll think, “You needed to go on about making bread for paragraph after paragraph to figure that one out?”

I still marvel at Thoreau’s use of words, but I’m increasingly frustrated by the content he’s wasting them on. If I had to guess, I’d say this is about the spot I stopped reading this book the last time I tried.

Then, though, there are days like today, when I get so excited by what I read that I have to run next door and find someone else who’s read Walden so I can have a discussion – days when my journal looks like this:

026/114

I’ve got to hand it to H.D. He’s certainly not afraid to throw down some truth. From today’s passage: Often the poor man is not so cold and hungry as he is dirty and ragged and gross. It is partly his taste, and not merely his misfortune. If you give him money, he will perhaps buy more rags with it.

I feel as though he wrote that and then stood from his desk and yelled, “There, I’ve said it, consequences be damned.”

Thoreau is arguing that by being charitable toward the poor, we are truly harming them by furthering poverty. “There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve.”

Damn.

Lest his readers think he’s only interested in condemnation, he follows it up with this:

I do not value chiefly a man’s uprightness and benevolence, which are, as it were, his stem and leaves. Those plants of whose greenness withered we make herb tea for the sick serve but a humble use, and are most employed by quacks. I want the flower and fruit of a man; that some fragrance be wafted over from him to me, and some ripeness flavor our intercourse.

I love that imagery, “I want the flower and fruit of a man; that some fragrance be wafted over from him to me, and some ripeness flavor our intercourse.” It takes me back to any great lecture I’ve ever attended or any conversation with people who were my intellectual superiors. There is something to be said for being in the presence of those who completely grasp the richness of their lives, who see nothing but potential and then work to achieve it. I understand what Thoreau’s saying here, though I don’t know how it fits with my own belief structure. Does this mean I don’t continue the habit of giving the money in my pocket to the guy on the street on the off chance he will use it for good? Arrrgh, damn you H.D. for making me think.

The more I read of this book, the more I think I would like to have known him.

I do enjoy learning out loud with my kids.

Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pablosanchez/3143055944/

Educational Taylorism

One of the favored arguments for the the increase in testing, standards and the like is the need to prepare our students to be workers. While I’m quick to make the citizens-over-workers argument, I’ll play your little worker game.

I’ve been reading The Future Arrived Yesterday by Michael Malone as of late. I pushed through the overly ironic title to find some good suff.

Malone’s overall thesis is that today’s corporations are on their way to becoming what he terms “Protean Corporations” or dying. (Hello, GM?) While that’s all well and good and likely to lead to its own post, I want to point to Malone’s outlining of the evolutionary stages modern corporations have gone through to get to the precipice on which they now teater.

Notably stuck in my craw is Taylorism.

Malone writes:

At its most obsessive, Taylor’s time-motion studies broke tasks down to less than a second per step, to the point twhere he and his adherents could determine how a worker should best place his feet, how far his arm should move on a task and how much he should turn to pick up the next component. And it worked: at progressive companies like Ford, workers achieve unprecedented levels of efficiency and productiviy.

Awesome, right? Familiar too?

In most Philadelphia schools, teachers follow a core curriculum dictating when, say, a 9th grade English teacher teaches a certain standard/material. As of this year, those same Philadelphia high schools have been giving their students weekly, 10-question multiple-choice tests in math and English to check up on students’ progress.

Again, awesome, right?

Malone also points out:

…[I]n almost every lace – from Bethlehem Steel to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers – where Taylor personally implemented his theory, the result was usually internal dissension followed by Taylor being fired. And while other companies did successfully implement the Taylor Plan, often to great competitive advantage [KIPP?], these new systems not only didn’t quell labor strife, they actually seemed to exacerbate it.

I know, I was shocked at that last point too. Seems our Educational Taylorism might not be the best direction in which to head.

Not to fear, Malone explains:

Taylor had made the most common error of scientists and technologist: he had treated human beings as just one more component in the production process.

It seems, we’re not only attempting to prepare our students for an approach to work that is in its last throes, but we’re using a management approach that has led to strikes, congressional hearings and general unrest.

If only the corporate world could do more than show the folly of our ways and supply us with a better way of doing things at the same time. Oh, wait:

During those long war years, [HP co-founder Dave] Packard, running the company almost alone, had discovered the incrediblepower of letting the cmployees themselves make decisions, to assume control over their own careers, and to take it upon themselves to keep the company healthy and successful…Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard seemed to understand, almost intuitively, and years before anyone else, that in a world of constant change, the old rules had been turned inside out.

More than anything else, I want our schools to start looking to the HPs of education for direction. SLA understands these tenets. My last school, Phoenix Academy in Sarasota, FL, understood them as well. I was amazed each time I went to then-principal Steve Cantees with some unorthodox idea on how to get the school’s recruited population of our district’s lowest achieving students to improve their writing. Each time, Cantees would listen, ask questions and then sign off on the idea.

At some point, I commented on how surprised I was each time he agreed. “Zac, these kids have had school the usual way, and we know it didn’t work. It’s time to try something new.”

Chris Lehmann is the same way. My fear is we have fewer and fewer examples of the kind of progressive pedagogical practice to which we can point and say, “See that, that’s what the world needs.”

The ‘why nots’ are easy: It’s messy. It requires a comfort with failure.

There is no silver bullet. We have to be comfortable with failure, and trust, like Hewlitt and Packard, that teachers will “take it upon themselves to keep the ‘company’ healthy and successful.”

image credit: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3149/2588347668_a1006846fa.jpg?v=0

Joe’s Non-Netbook

I was subbing a class today and some kids started playing around and had the discussion above. I grabbed my camera and recorded it. For all of it’s humor (and Joe’s pretty funny), I’d also argue Joe raises some important points.

More later.

Re-Kindling Our Teaching of Reading

Amazon’s Kindle is on the scene in its latest iteration, and I might like it.

Citizen Zac thinks he likes it.

Mr. Chase thinks he might like it too. (How Jungian, right?)

Here’s what I’m thinking:

  • I want a class set to try with kids.
  • Could this be how textbooks stay valid?
  • How about a site license on these books or drastically reduced rates for bulk downloads?
  • When are we going to start changing how we teach reading – not “E-Literacies,” but actual reading – to reflect the changing shape of the book?
  • Think what this could mean for an impoverished district or school.
  • Reading lists just got more malleable.

If not the Kindle, something like it should be the future of how we play school. It might burn to read that, and believe me, it burns a bit to type it. This doesn’t change the reality of things. Over Presidents’ Day, I was discussing the teaching of handwriting with a middle school teacher who was lamenting some of her students’ ability to put their words on a line.

More later.

Progress? All right, I’m curious.

You may remember I had some choice words for the School District of Philadelphia’s Induction program (see here and here).

What I didn’t write about was my trip to the Office of Instruction and Leadership Support last quarter to voice my concerns over the entire process and offer up some possible solutions.

Evidently, I violated some protocol by stopping by unannounced and asking for some time. Once we moved past the idea that I was there because I had questions about the program and, instead, there because I had some ideas (this took several attempts on my part), many notes were taken. In the end, I was told the district would be forming a task force or committee or council or something to examine the program and make it work for the teachers and not against them.

That was months ago.

Friday, I got an e-mail with the following:

[T]he Office of Instruction and Leadership Support invites you to join our District’s Induction Council [turns out it was a council]. It is our intent to create a dynamic, professional and productive Induction Council who is committed to providing new teachers with the highest level of support.

We’ve three 2-hour meetings scheduled. That should be plenty of time to reshape the way the entire district welcomes new teacher into its ranks, right?

I’m actually excited about this.

More later.

A Movie Worth Teaching

I’m one of those people who like watching movie trailers. Just finished watching the trailer for Explicit Ills which tells the story of one Philly neighborhood and its residents’ refusal to live in poverty. I hope it’s as good as it looks:

Running, Running

Before, I jump in the shower, I must congratulate the 5 SLA students who showed up this morning for the first long run of our Students Run Philly Style training. It feels like 24 degrees out there with wind gusts of up to 23 mph and they showed up at 8 AM.
Today, we learned that saying, “Good Morning!” to everyone you pass helps keep your mind off everything else.
Thanks to Ros Echols for organizing all of this. I can’t wait to watch them all cross the finish line in November!

It’s Game Time

If anyone follows me on twitter and was paying attention last night, they’ll know I schlepped my way to NYC last night for the opening event of the New York Public Library’s Live series. I’ll write more about what Lawrence Lessig and Shepard Fairey had to say as they were moderated by Steven Johnson later. This post is about something else.

As I watch Lessig’s opposition to Prop 8 or read about his newest effort to end corruption, something strikes me. He’s got a system. It’s what’s lacking in the discussion of what people are looking for, as far as I can see.

In wanting to change Congress, Lessig calls on candidates to do three things:

  • Abolish earmarks
  • Refuse lobbyist/PAC contributions
  • Promote publicly financed campaigns

Many get close. But let’s get closer. Will writes of the use of stimulus money in education:

But if you really want to use that money to improve learning, use it to help the teachers in the schools understand how to help the kids in the classrooms become the readers and writers and mathematicians and scientists that will flourish in a networked world.

Yes, agreed. All for it. Now, let’s talk about how. Not standards or targets or the like. Ideas. Steps. We don’t need a report or a study. We know what we’re unhappy about. Let’s move on.

Here’s the charge, blog or comment with the three shifts, changes, movements we should demand at the national level to move education somewhere. These should be basic, actionable, transparent steps that are taken or not taken. Don’t just blog it, though, talk about it. Bring it up in department meetings, faculty meetings, podcasts, dinner table discussions, the dog park. Take the conversation outside of the echo chamber. Talk about it with people inside and outside of education (we’re all inside, btw). If you put it online, tag it 3steps4ed. If you like, re-post this to your online space, do that.

Follow the tag, write about what feeds your reader. From there, we’ll move forward. If you’ve already written your three down, go back and re-tag it.

Recap:

  • Think of the three actionable steps that need to be taken at the national level to move education.
  • Talk about them with others. Ask for others’ thoughts first.
  • Post, tweet – heck – even photograph you thoughts and tag them 3steps4ed.

More later.

Lucky Number Seven

As of this week, I’m participating in and somehow ended up organizing a f2f/online book group reading Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Full disclosure here, my mom has worked in human resources since I can remember, and 7 Habits was one of the founding doctrines of my childhood. At 12 or 13 I remember sitting at the kitchen table trying to write my mission statement.
Perhaps I’ve shared too much.
I’ve decided to blog as I read to keep track of my thinking for when the group gets together and to expand the conversation.

Forward:
I’m reading the 2004 edition of the book with a revised Forward. The first piece that struck me was Covey’s acknowledgment, “We have transitioned from the Industrial Age into the Information / Knowledge Worker Age – with all of its profound consequences.” This tip of the hat in the first paragraph helps give the text greater credence in my eyes. I was curious when I picked it up if he would turn a conveniently blind eye to the changes we’ve seen in the last 15 years or so or if he would use the habits to frame the impact of those changes.

Covey’s assertion when asked if the text, now 20 years old, is still relevant:

[T]he greater the change and more difficult our challenges, the more relevant the habits become. The reason: our problems and pain are universal and increasing, and the solutions to the problems are and always will be based upon universal, timeless, self-evident principles common to ever enduring, prospering society throughout history.

It’s an interestingly strong claim that I’ll keep in mind when I start reading Jared Diamond’s Collapse.

He then moves to list what he sees as our most common human challenges:

  • Fear and insecurity
  • “I want it now.”
  • Blame and victimism
  • Hopelessness
  • Lack of life balance
  • “What’s in it for me?”
  • The hunger to be understood
  • Conflict and Differences
  • Personal Stagnation

Those in bold are the challenges that struck me as particularly relevant in education.

Covey writes, “the children of blame are cynicism and hopelessness,” and it takes me back to every conference I’ve ever attended where broken teachers ask for answers and ideas and help for bringing life back to their practice, then promptly shoot down any answers, ideas or help that are offered.

As to balance, Covey wonders why we find ourselves, “in the ‘thick of thin things'”. It’s something I struggle with frequently, but much less at SLA as Chris works quite hard to keep the minutia off our plates.

Perhaps the most impactful statement for me in the first few pages deals with the hunger to be understood: …[T]he principal of influence is governed by mutual understanding born of the commitment of at least one person to deep listening first.

During on of the EduCon conversations, I listened as one frustrated educator exasperatedly exclaimed that he couldn’t get parents to the table because they didn’t want to have the important conversations about data.

It struck me then, and continues to resonate, that our students’ parents’ ideas of what conversations and, indeed, what data are important contrast sharply with the data he was talking about. Imagine, though, if the first time any teacher interacted with a parent or guardian, it wasn’t to relay information, but to listen deeply. Why don’t we do that?

Photo credit: http://flickr.com/photos/sr14700/1749833542/