Category: life

Faced with problems as opportunities, students can make amazing things

This came through my Facebook feed from a friend who teaches in Mission, SD.

It speaks for itself.

The story via NPR:

Unhappy with portrayals of Native Americans in mainstream media, a group of students from South Dakota’s Rosebud Sioux Reservation created a video to show that their community is about more than alcoholism, broken homes and crime.

The students are visiting Washington, D.C., on Monday to lobby Congress for increased funding for schools on reservations.

Filmed in black and white, the student-produced video More Than That takes viewers through the hallways, classrooms and gymnasium of the Rosebud Sioux Reservation’s county high school.

Using their bodies as signposts, the students explain that they’re more than stock images of poverty, alcoholism and violence. With words drawn on their hands, arms and faces, they share the traits that describe who they really are: humor, intelligence, creativity — and the list goes on.

The point the students are trying to make, says English teacher Heather Hanson, is that they’re not victims.

The nonprofit National Association of Federally Impacted Schools invited the Lakota students to attend its winter conference Monday in Washington, D.C. While in town, the students will also lobby South Dakota’s congressional representatives.

Here’s the ABC News special the movie references.

They weren’t content to be exoticized and knew how to tell the story of how they see themselves.

More Than That has 49,750 views right now. ABC’s clip can claim only 17,391.

I take hope in those numbers.

What I’m Doing This Year: The Resolutions

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At the end of May, I’ll be doing something different with my life than I was doing in October and different still from what I was doing 365 days before that. This promises to be a year of change to rival the changes of years past.
As I was working on my resolutions for the year, I kept this in mind. I want to document the year with the same spirit as last year, and I know another daily writing project will run the risk of draining me and distracting me from experiencing what’s going on as the changes take place.
As such, I’ve arrived at the following resolutions:
1. Run every day for at least 10 minutes. This one was clearing inspired by last year’s project. I understood the why better through explaining it to someone else. I came to know myself as a writer last year by putting myself in writing each day. In the same way, when I get to know people, I think of myself as a writer and a runner. So, I’ll be running. It’s a new approach. I’ll be running for 10 minutes some days, though my mind will want to go farther. I like that. I like actively working to shift my paradigm and experience as a runner. I’m also knowledgeable enough as a runner, at this point, to know to listen to my body and be mindful of the injuries possible in such an undertaking. If this year is to include the geographic changes I anticipate it to, experiencing where I am and who I am in those places through running will be interesting.
2. Make one photo each week that represents that week of the year. I thought briefly about a photo-a-day project, but my sister, Kirstie, helped me make up my mind. Kirstie is, as I have said, a brilliant photographer with a keen eye. She completed a 365 project last year to tremendous results. When I asked her if she would be continuing it this year, she said no. The goal of a photo each day meant she wasn’t creating shots of the quality she wanted. I can appreciate that. This year, she’s surveyed 52 friends and family members for inspirations quotations and ideas. Each week, she’ll be creating a photo each week around one of those guiding ideas. My project will be less global and much more self-centered, but I hope it to be a catalog of life this year that pushes me to think more visually. The photo above was my first week’s attempt.
3. Go vegan. I’m still a little sketchy of the details on this one. I wrote last year of my month-long go at eating vegan and the cultural and personal quandaries it inspired. Since then, I’ve continued to consider my role as a citizen, the effects of what I eat on who and what I am, and the footprint of all of this. I’m starting to think of this as a biological retirement plan. More on this later.
4. Journal each day (even if it’s only a line). My mom journals every day. Leading up to the new year, she spent her mornings on the couch reading through her life in years past and remembering the connective tissue of who she is now. For a long time, I journaled alongside my students in class. It’s different than blogging, and I want to remember why.
5. Read 52 books. That’s it. Similar to running, I count myself as a reader. As much as I could easily remain among the choir who chant solemnly they “don’t have time” to read, I know I can make time for this. To be sure, grad school will continue to help push me toward this goal. The other piece is one of genuine living. In the classroom, I told students over and over of the connection between reading, writing, and thinking. I insisted they would be better writers for reading and vice versa. If I am to stand by that and improve as a writer, I must read. Fifty-two is an arbitrary goal furnished by the calendar. Still, it’s as good a number as any.
I didn’t intend 5 resolutions this year. It just shook out that way. As much as I’m excited to work at each of them, I’m excited to find how my internal understanding and logic of the rules surrounding each resolutions shifts during the year.
I’m most curious to see how they shape me.

Things I Know 314 of 365: You can find your thank you package here

Why you're great...
It’s important to let people know you see them. It’s best to do this when you see them at their best.

One of the things I loved doing in the classroom was sending positive notes home to parents and students. It didn’t matter. At the end of the day, or on my planning period, I’d sit down and write out a couple of cards explaining all the goodness I saw in a student, and then I’d drop them in the mail.

It was a practice I learned from Hal Urban, and it was a wonderful way to end the day.

Any time I get to talk to a group of teachers, I encourage them to adopt the practice as their own. A few sentences each day to remind your students and yourself why you love the people in your classroom.

I realize getting the supplies together might seem like the biggest obstacle to sending these notes, so I’ve decided to do the leg work.

The PDF of the document I used to make the cards is here.

You can find Staples’s selection of card stock here.

My go-to invitation envelopes are here.

And, if you wanna go crazy, custom design postage from zazzle with your school logo, favorite quote or whatever here.

Having stamps on the envelopes and the cards printed and ready in my desk made all the difference.

Even last semester, as a student, I dropped a few cards in the mail to former students and to people in classes with me when I could tell the going was tough.

We find a million ways to tell people we see the things they’re doing just the wrong side of right. Maybe we could focus on the other side a bit more.

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 39 of 365: Leave it to Dana

You’re only as good as your last haircut.

– Fran Lebowitz

Dana usually cuts my hair.

She’s a smoker. She’s from Jersey. She was married once. She realized she didn’t love him as much as she needed to and it ended early. Now, she’s got a serious long-term boyfriend. She swears they’ll never get married, but they’ll never break up either.

She told me all of this whilst cutting my hair.

That’s no small task.

It’s a mess up there.

Childhood scars and cowlicks. Not pretty.

Dana, though, navigates it each time with perfect aplomb while telling stories.

I soak it up.

She makes it look so easy.

From shampoo to dusting the strays off my collar, not a break in conversation, save for the odd “Look down.”

Let me tell you, it’s not as easy as she makes it look.

The first time I tried to cut my hair myself was a little over a year ago.

I was officiating the wedding of some friends that afternoon and decided I needed a little trim.

Yes, the fact I chose that particular moment to try my hand at hair cuttery probably speak volumes as to whether or not loved ones should trust me with their nuptials, but we’ll move on.

It did not go well.

An hour later, I was sitting in Dana’s chair recounting a boldfaced lie about how my roommate had sworn she could cut hair, but had freaked out after the first pass with the clippers. Dana believed not a word. For he briefest of seconds, I’d considered fessing up, but realized the slap in the face it would be to tell her I was so pompous as to think I could perform her job without any training.

Dana patched me up as best she could and sent me on my way. She warned me it would take time for the mistakes “my roommate” had made to be corrected, but she’d plotted the course. For my part, I made certain all wedding pictures featured my left side.

It was silly to think all I needed were the tools and I’d be able to use them with the same finesse as someone trained and experienced in a profession in which I had no experience.

The idea I could try my hand at a profession in which someone was certified was a foolish one.

That it never occurred to me I might need to learn from those who had come before me or value the expertise of those currently practicing was almost unthinkable.

I’m glad I don’t have to worry about that in education.

Things I Know 38 of 365: I don’t know my neighbors

Come and knock on our door.

– Don Nicholl

I tripped into a twitter “conversation” tonight on “21st Century Literacy Skills.” I probably sounded like a jerk, but I didn’t mean to.

No, let me start somewhere else.

The individual is helpless socially, if left to himself…If he comes into contact with his neighbor, and they with other neighbors, there will be an accumulation of social capital, which may immediately satisfy his social needs and which may bear a social potentiality sufficient to the substantial improvement of living conditions in the whole community.

Thus wrote L. Judson Hanifan as quoted by Robert Putnam in Democracies in Flux.

The thing is, Hanifan, who coined the term “social capital” was writing in 1916.

Almost a century later, we’ve repackaged and digitized the problems Hanifan was seeking to address in his writings.

We have invented and populated countless online communities, and we continue struggling to come into contact with our neighbors.

We have been an intensely socially connected people for hundreds of years. To think otherwise is to conflate the problem.

The skills we need more than ever are the skills Hanifan championed – the ability to meet your neighbor, work toward an understanding of one another and build a reciprocal relationship with one another. This work is difficult.

It always has been.

If I were to knock on my neighbor’s door tomorrow in an attempt to build some sort of mutually beneficial relationship, I’d be hard-pressed to know where to start. By many measures, he and I should have easiest go of building common cause. The politics, infrastucture, weather, sidewalk upkeep, general neighborhood happenings all make us the most likely of allies. I know his name is Robert. Most times we pass, he can’t remember mine. I know there are other people in his house, but I don’t know their names or how their connected.

If you and I are friends on Facebook, think of how much more I can know about you in 5 minutes than I know about Robert after almost two years of being neighbors.

In reverse, think of how much I won’t know about you after 5 minutes of Facebook creeping.

I have access to more of the almost 7 billion souls on the planet than ever before, and I’m still connecting with those I most easily understand.

Online spaces give me the easier access to those of similar minds but different circumstances. Our causes are common, but our realities remarkably different.

I am linked to you, but we do not belong to the same club.

We’ve been here before. We have struggled with these problems. We like to pretend they’re new.

Writing of the popular rhetoric concerning the decline of social capital in the United States, Putnam writes, “Public perceptions of decline may be deeply influenced by such rhetoric and, as in decline of religion, we must exercise caution in assuming that there was actually a golden age when things were better.”

If nothing else, Hanidan’s writings point to this idea: Helping people learn to connect to those within their reach and leverage those connections is not a 21st Century Skill, but a human one.

Things I Know 37 of 365: I am uncool

Popular is the one insult I have never suffered.

– Oscar Wilde

It was an off-the-cuff remark a few months ago. One student was giving me a hard time about something and I was giving it right back.

“Chase,” said he, “you think you’re so cool.”

“Oh, no,” said I, “I definitely know I’m not cool.”

The class laughed.

I wasn’t joking. I’m not cool.

That’s a thought that’ll stick with ya.

For a while in middle school, I thought I was cool.

I remember the day in eighth grade when I learned the truth.

We were still given recess right after lunch. As the heads of middle school, this usually meant the eighth graders milled about the track aimlessly – training for when we went to the mall.

It was a fall day. The kind of fall day when you could see your breath.

I got outside and found my group of friends huddled in a circle at the far end of the track. Reaching them, I realized they were smoking. About 9 kids, sharing one cigarette. I walked away.

Something big had happened. They’d powered up to the next level while I kept an eye out for a pick-up game of tag.

I’ve held my uncoolness since then.

This comes not from a place of shame or inferiority, but one of self-awareness.

I’m totally uncool, and it’s one of my greatest assets.

In class as a teacher, I can dance or use an accent or give a kid a hug without fear of losing cool points.

In class as a student, I get to be a student because I don’t have to worry about the balance of cool and nerd. A question pops into my mind and my hand hits the air – at times, yes, waving like I just don’t care. (See, that was even more uncool.)

And I know there are those out there who will argue learning is cool and nerds are cool and how dare I suggest you can’t have a healthy appetite for learning and be cool at the same time. But, there it is. That nerds are cool is a myth propogated by the uncool in an attempt to subvert the language. See, nerds got game like that.

I’m probably not supposed to leak that one, but I’ve been in the same room as Bill Gates. He’s not cool. Super smart. Wicked savvy. Not cool.

Gates is a welcome reminder the eighth grade smoking ring has its own incarnation in the adult world. He’s also an excellent example of the primary benefit of avoiding that ring.

While the cool people like Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama must worry about staying cool, the uncool like Norman Borlaug, Amy Sedaris, Tina Fey, Joseph Priestley and Dorris Kearns Goodwin get to do cool stuff.

And that’s the virtue of being uncool in the classroom. I can try new ideas, new projects and lessons never raising any suspicions or risking losing and non-existent cred. Being uncool affords me the opportunity to have some pretty cool ideas.

Classy: What we mean when we talk about creativity and collaboration (get in on this)

I didn’t plan any of the below. All I was doing was looking for some creativity-inspiring journal prompts. What resulted has no lesson or unit plans. I’m not sure where it’s going or what it will become. I am certain, however, that something beautiful started in my classroom Wednesday.

January 31: Jabiz Raisdana posts the results of his first month participating in The Daily Shoot.

February 2: I see the post and comment on how impressed I am with the act of creation Jabiz is embarking on each day. I ask if it’s ok to use some of the photos as journal prompts in my class. Later, he comments back welcoming the use of the photos as inspiration. I create an assignment on moodle that says:

The students file in and log in.

The result of a 2-hour delay due to weather, our abbreviated class is spent mostly trawling the photos and creating.

I enjoy answering the question of “What are we supposed to write?” with “Whatever you want.”

February 3: Jabiz posts a letter to my students, explaining the process up to this point and what their comments mean to him. He poses some important questions about collaboration, creation and connection. Most importantly, he challenges them:

So what of it now? What happens next? Well that is up to you. I hope that this introduction can be a way that we continue to explore the power of art and words and connections. I was a born teacher and student, I would love to continue to teach and learn from you. Are you up for it?

Before sharing the post, I pull up Google Earth to add perspective to the distance between Philadelphia, PA and Jakarta, Indonesia (half the world).

Additionally, Jabiz comments he’s culling their creations to create a song, and promises to share it soon.

I share the link to the post on moodle and invite the students to share their answers to Jabiz’s questions.

Students begin to comment.

February 4: Students continue to comment in answer to Jabiz’s creative challenge. The comments build off of the thinking of the other students. Later, Jabiz responds to each idea, asking questions and offering commentary. At the end, he posts the lyrics of the song composed of my students’ lines of poetry.

I start a google doc and share it with Jabiz, trying to give form to the students’ suggestions.

Jabiz posts an initial recording of the song to his blog, raising the ante:

Here you go SLA, my song to you. What will you do with it? Download it. Remix it. Add your voice to it. Set it to images. Create a video. Rap it. This version is only a draft and is not even close to being “done.” Tear it up!

SoundCloud is blocked within the school’s filter wall. All I’m able to do is show the students what Jabiz has written.

It is enough.

We begin a new brainstorming session in both sections of the participating classes as to where we can take this from here. The students build off of their original ideas. My writers want to write more, my documentarians want to document the creative, collaborative process, my musicians want to rework the song or create something new. My linguists want to ask Jabiz’s ESL students to post comments to photos we take in their first languages so that my students can learn these other languages. The ideas are bubbling over.

Later, Canadian teacher Bryan Jackson records his own version of the song, which Jabiz posts to his blog.

By the end of class, one of my students, Luna, has taken it upon herself to copy the lyrics of the song and create a wordle. She then visits each picture and copies all of the students’ comments to create a collective wordle of the initial words Jabiz’s photos inspired.

Today: You jump in and create something.

Things I Know 34 of 365: The importance of asking ‘What can I do?’

We must aim above the mark to hit the mark.

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

People have been asking me for money while I shower.

All week.

Over and over again, they’ve been begging. It carries on while I’m brushing my teeth and tying my shoes.

And as much as I listen to public radio, I’ll admit I’ve never donated money to them.

This week, I’ve been considering it.

A sucker, right?

More this week than any other, I’ve found myself answering aloud as the pledge drivers spout their rhetorical questions.

“Do you listen to public radio on a regular basis?”

“Yes.”

“Do you value the programming of public radio?”

“Yes.”

“Would you miss the programming of public radio if it were to disappear?”

“Yes, yes I would.”

“Can we count on you to become a member to support the programming you value on this station.”

“Ummm…”

And that’s it, isn’t it? I run face-first into inertia.

“…I mean I could, but it seems like you guys are doing fine without me.”

Or, as Ebeneezer Scrooge put it, “Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?”

Last night I watched a film about a school in Kenya that selected 40 boys per year from the Baltimore public school system to live and study at a boarding school in Kenya or the final two years of their middle school experience. The school’s goal was to prepare the boys to gain admission to any Baltimore high school to which they applied once they’d completed the program.

I watched the documentary with an admitted air of, “I could do that. In fact, I could probably do it better.”

Today, the angel or the demon who was asleep on the opposite shoulder last night woke up to say, “Yeah, but you aren’t, and they did.”

Last Friday, ethicist Neeru Paharia explained the effects of distance on our sense of involvement, connection and need to act. A sense of immediacy is elicited the greater our proximity to the source of need.

The key to answering “What can I do?” is ignoring the proximity.

As Karl Fisch said Sunday, “All our students are local. All our students are global.”

It’s tough stuff, this global citizenship. More difficult still is possessing even a glimmer of understanding of the connectedness of it all.

That kind of glimmer led to the first and second Red Scares. It is the impetus behind the Global Millenium Development Goals. It is the terror that keeps the Minutemen patrolling the U.S.-Mexico border and it lays at the nexus of the argument in favor of the DREAM Act. Fathoming that connectedness led to the creation of the Peace Corps, City Year, AmeriCorps and a litany of other organizations in which thousands invest themselves each year to create or repair the systems necessary for sustaining and building.

To understand connectedness is to beg the question.

What can I do?

Answering the question has its own evolutionary path.

From “nothing” we move to “not much.”

Gradually, this becomes “something.”

As we learn and experience, we say, “I can do this.”

For many, the evolution ends here.

For the brave few, the answer becomes, “A little more.”

And, in the best of people, “Anything.”

Tomorrow, I’ll shower with cell phone in hand.

Things I Know 32 of 365: You’d beat me in a fight

A wise man can learn more from a foolish question than a fool can learn from a wise answer.

– Bruce Lee

I was in fourth grade the first time I got hit by a girl.

We were lining up to go back inside from recess when Monika, a girl who I knew of but didn’t know punched me in the face.

I only point out that she was a girl because I’d been told there were rules about hitting and there were rules about hitting girls and there were rules about hitting back. I’d never been hit before, so the shock of the experience greatly impaired my ability to follow the appropriate line of the retaliatory flowchart.

I didn’t do anything.

This is not to say I ran.

I didn’t do anything.

I stood there and wondered why this person had hit me. We’d had little interaction inside or outside of the classroom, so all I could do was guess she was angry and thought I had something to do with it.

I wasn’t angry. Just surprised. A little sad that she was so angry. I’d never been that angry, and imagined it must have taken a lot to make her do that.

That’s been my M.O. since then.

When Matt, the kid who lived up the street and had parents who I thought were inexplicably mean, road his bike to the end of my sidewalk and yelled at me to come off my porch and fight him, I yelled back, “Why?”

When some intoxicated dudes cornered some friends and I on the Quad one night in college and punched my friend Andy in the face while yelling some pretty hateful words, I had questions.

So, I turned, stared at them and yelled, “That was stupid! Why would you do something like that?” Clearly, not suspecting this might be our reaction, they cursed.

“What kind of answer is that?”

They ran away.

I’ve seen a few fights as a teacher.

Once the parties are separated, my questioning always starts the same, “Why were you fighting?”

“He said such and such.”

“Ok, but why were you fighting?”

“It made me feel this and that.”

“Ok, but why were you fighting?”

I’ll rephrase and redirect my questioning as long as it takes. Infallibly, the students don’t know.

I don’t get fighting. So, I keep asking.

Self defense, yes.

Making a point, sure.

Fighting, though, just feels like something we should be done with.

Newton gave us all the reason we should need with his third law. Fear of equal and opposite reaction kept the Cold War oh so chilly.

Socrates is my Burgess Meredith. The dude knew how to battle without fighting his enemies. When they were throwing punches, Soc was landing blows of logic they never saw coming or knew landed until it was too late and they were in agreement.

If I must be a warrior, let me be a warrior of the Socratic tradition.