Category: TIK365

Things I Know 135 of 365: Processing matters

Follow effective action with quiet reflection. From the quiet reflection will come even more effective action.

– Peter F. Drucker

My friend Darlene earned her master’s in counseling. Never one to do things in a small way, Darlene’s degree is in Adventure-Based Counseling.

In the two years we worked in the same school and the eight years we’ve been friends, Darlene’s made one point about ABC over and over again: The activities are only only useful if you process them with the kids.

Darlene’s processing mantra of choice was, “What? So what? Now what?” asking the kids what they noticed about the activity, the implications of what they noticed on their success during the activity and what they would do to move this new knowledge into practice in their daily lives.

At SLA, we introduce students to inquiry thinking by taking them along a similar line of questioning: “I noticed…Iwonder…What if?”

As I’ve been considering caring lately, these questions and other iterations thereof have been striking me as increasingly important from both an academic and socio-emotional point of view.

On a recent flight, I sat next to a grandmother who was flying home after watching one of her grandsons graduate. I confessed to being a teacher and we felt silent again as often happens with the edd and flow of airline conversation.

“You know, every child needs at least one good and important teacher in their life,” she said, pulling me back to the conversation.

“More than one if they’re lucky,” I said.

“Mine was in ninth grade,” she said, “He told me, ‘I’m going to transfer you out of my class because it’s not quite what you need,’ but he also took the time to explain why.”

We talked for a while about how much it meant to her that the teacher explained to her why another class would be a better fit.

Now in her 70s, it is the processing she carries with her as the memory from both of those math classes. The processing of the why of it all turned out to be the greater moment of learning for her.

I suspect it influenced how she interacted with her own children – taking the time to explain when they asked the omnipresent, “Why?”

Darlene is right, what we do is only as useful as our effort to process it with our students. The processing takes many forms such as giving a response more detailed than “Good answer” in class or providing words rather than numbers when filling out a rubric.

Not only is processing in this way helpful to my practice as a teacher, it’s helpful to my students in their acquisition of the language of learning.

I’m a little cagey on the idea of teaching students to learn. Teaching students the language of learning and how to express the ideas and progress inherent in their learning – that I can get behind.

Things I Know 134 of 365: I will maintain an “Angle of Repose”

Home is a notion that only nations of the homeless fully appreciate and only the uprooted comprehend.

– Wallace Stegner

They’re tearing down Wallace Stegner’s studio.

I’m not certain how I feel about it.

I first read Stegner’s Angle of Repose the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of undergrad. My cousin suggested it to me as we browsed the tables at a used book sale.

When I got around to reading Repose, Stegner had a difficult road ahead of him. My cousin also recommended Ann Rice’s vampire books, which had left me nonplussed.

From the first pages, Stegner had me hooked. He introduced me to a protagonist and narrative structure the likes of which I’d never before experienced. An author was presenting me with a story about an author dictating to tape a book about his fictitious grandmother’s life. Stegner bent what I took to be the rules of narrative even further by using the text of authentic primary source documents in Repose as the letters of his protagonist’s fictitious grandmother.

The pleasure I took in Repose and how it shaped my thinking about narrative structure and the blending of fact and fiction in storytelling added to the sting I felt when I read the new owners of Stegner’s home planned to demolish his studio.

Surely, some literary magic must live within those walls. This is the same magic I believed in when I visited Mark Twain’s boyhood home as a child or Ernest Hemingway’s home on Key West. Writers are connected to the places in which they write.

The budding minimalist within me argues against such sentimentality. Stegner left us his writings. While his studio grants us a superficial connection to his writings, the actual space has nothing to do with my enjoyment of his words.

I didn’t know about Stegner’s studio until I read about its demolition. This didn’t keep my brain from flashing to thoughts of “Oh, that’s so sad,” as I was reading.

Place should mean less to me in a world where much of my communication happens in a digital cloud rooted in no geography in particular.

With some of my friendships and professional collaborations existing exclusively online, I’m trying understand the hold location still has on my sense of self.

When I meet new people, it’s my time growing up in Illinois, teaching in Florida and now Philadelphia that I share before my blog URL, twitter name or slideshare page.

If you’re reading this, though, and we ever meet in person, we’ll likely talk about something I’ve posted before we ever talk about teaching eighth graders to write in Sarasota, FL.

Stegner’s studio exists in the place between. While reading Repose, I never considered the text’s place of conception. Now that I know that place is to be destroyed, I want it to remain. It’s destruction will make certain what is already true – that I’ll never read another word produced within its walls.

I suppose that’s the importance of place. I don’t want any space – physical or virtual – to be destroyed. The loss of any place I count as part of my identity would mean I could never go back nor could that place ever further shape who I am.

And yet, if those places were destroyed tomorrow, I’d still carry with me all I’ve gained from them that makes me who I am.

When Stegner’s studio is gone, the world will still possess an Angle of Repose.

Things I Know 133 of 365: Youtube won’t solve bullying

I’m starting to feel as though our plan for fighting school bullying is to have students create as many youtube videos on the topic as possible and then compliment the hell out of them.

Each time a link to a new bullying video flows through my twitter stream, I can’t help but think we’re missing the point.

We shouldn’t be surprised a student is able to cobble together an emotionally affective video about the pain and suffering of others, of children.

I worry sharing these videos masquerades in the minds of some as actually working against the deeper causes and effects of bullying.

In understand the instinct to share these videos. What I miss and wish was an equally prevalent instinct was to follow up the posting of these videos with reflections as to what we are doing and should be doing about bullying.

Instead of “This is a powerful student video about bullying,” I wish there were more, “This is a powerful student video about bullying as well as a link to my thinking about my own thinking on the topic and what I can do to prevent bullying in the classroom.”

Maybe that’s the implied conversation, and I’m just missing it.

I don’t think so. A quick search of my RSS feeds returns only 44 instances of “bully” and only two of those posts are from teachers talking about bullying prevention. Here is one you should read.

In a network of some of the most vocal proponents of social learning, two hits.

Where are the voices?

Where is the deeper discussion we’re always championing?

Where are we talking about what we’re doing to stop and prevent bullying in our classrooms?

Thinking these videos are stopping bullying strikes me as just as dangerous as hoping a young Helen Hunt on angel dust would win the war on drugs.

Anti-Bullying Resources for Teachers:

  • Anti-Bullying Network – http://www.antibullying.net/adultsinschools.htm
  • Gay, Lesbian, & Straight Education Network – http://www.glsen.org/cgi-bin/iowa/all/antibullying/index.html
  • Teaching Tolerance – http://www.tolerance.org/activities?keys=bullying&level=All&subject=All

What else?

Things I Know 132: With tech, teachers fear the unknowable

Growth means change and change involves risk, stepping from the known to the unknown.

– George Shinn

It takes quite a bit to get me visibly frustrated. I like to joke that teaching G8 for 4 years prepared me for any frustration that might come my way.

In some ways, it’ not a joke.

Deep in the throes of adolescence, eighth graders’ brains are in a constant state of flux. As such, so were my lesson plans. Outside of the classroom, I needed a score card to follow the ever-shifting line-up of friendships in the social melee that was the cafetorium.

Teaching G8 honed my interpersonal skills like nothing else. Understanding and shifting to meet the needs of my students meant I was able to do the same for most adult problems that came my way.

I’m not unflappable, but most flats are pretty securely tied down.

Until moments like yesterday.

All I wanted was to watch a movie on Netflix. For whatever reason, the Wii was not cooperating.

We reset the router, reset the modem, reset the Wii’s Internet settings, reset anything that could be reset – nada.

With no information but the icon that relays signal strength on the Wii connection screen, there was little I could do to diagnose the problem, let alone solve it.

I decided the combination of the television being on a different floor than the router combined with the thunderstorm that was rolling through must have caused the problem. I needed to believe that was correct.

I shifted my attention to the upstairs, Internet-enabled television.

Located in a part of the house that was an addition, it’s never gotten great wifi reception.

Frustration mounting, I unplugged the TV and moved it to the living room coffee table.

There, I tried over and over again to find a strong enough signal.

While I could establish a connection, nothing was strong enough to support streaming.

Thirty minutes after the process began, the decision was made to crowd around my laptop and watch the show.

I was bested by the machine.

The fact that I couldn’t get it to work was less a frustration than not knowing the why.

“This should be work,” I kept repeating aloud with varying degrees of anger in my voice.

It wasn’t, and I had no idea why.

With eighth graders, when something didn’t work, I could change my approach, gather more information and attempt to solve the problem in a new way. In even a refusal to share information, there was information to be gathered. I could adjust my tactics to fit the changing needs of my students.

Yesterday, the tech was tougher than an eighth grader.

No matter my approach, the outcome was invariably the same – across two different machines. No level of cajoling would solve the situation.

We like to think it’s change that scares resistant teachers from embedding technology into their classroom practice. We credit fear of the unknown as the greatest barrier.

I don’t think that’s it.

It’s not fear of the unknown, it’s fear of the unknowable.

With their students, teachers can question, assess and converse to solve nearly any problem. With technology, there comes a point where teachers’ ability to problem solve runs up against the wall between what they can know about how it works and what they cannot know.

This is akin to knowing from the display screen there’s a paper jam somewhere in the copy machine, but having no way of navigating to that particular innard of the beast to remove it.

I was upset yesterday because I couldn’t know why what I wanted to do wouldn’t work. With kids, that very rarely happens.

Things I Know 131 of 365: If the thinking is good, I don’t care about citation

Old teachers never die, they just grade away.

– Unknown

Saturday, my mom graduates from her Master’s program.

Tonight, as we talked on the phone, she was checking her grades as they showed up online. She reported the points she’d earned on her assignments, and I logged in to my program’s website and looked at the points I’d earned in my last course.

We exchanged point information as badges of honor.

“I earned 388 of 390 points,” I said, “But, I lost those two points because of inconsistent APA citations.”

It’s true.

The less-than-perfect score with which I finished my last course was a result of formatting.

For a few entries on a list of works I’d referenced, I capitalized all of the first letters of the books’ titles rather than the first letter of only the first word as the American Psychological Association decrees.

In my defense, the books, themselves, had each first letter of each word capitalized.

While the Modern Language Association honors such formatting choices, the APA judges this level of capitalization as showy and ostentatious.

I remember when my score for that particular assignment came back to me with the notes from my instructor.

“The APA format of some entries need improvement.”

I was devastated.

It wasn’t for the reasons you’d think. Sure, my formatting was a bit off, but he’d scored my thinking as perfect.

In the last 30 years, I’ve had many thoughts. They’ve been varied in their depth and their breadth. Some were decent. Others were not so hot. I will admit now, not one single thought I’ve ever had has been perfect.

On that assignment and every other assignment for the course, I received perfect marks on my thinking and learning.

I began to worry I’d reached Maslow’s self-actualization, and it wasn’t all it had been cracked up to be.

There is, of course, at least one other possibility.

Given the portions of the assignment that had definite objective qualifiers, my instructor was able to give a less-than-perfect grade and feel justified in his thinking. There were standards, after all.

In the squishier, more subjective areas of the assignment where the quality of thinking, not the quality of writing or citation, was at question, leeway was abundant and doubt was given more benefit that it had earned.

I’m not saying I should have failed.

I earned an A for the course, and worked diligently for it.

My thoughts, though, were imperfect and should have been assessed as such. In some of my thinking, I was lazy. For some of my wording, I was imprecise. As each assignment unfolded, I learned such lackadaisical strategies would yield the same reward as strategies that were more detailed with both my language and my thinking.

I found the bar, sat atop it and never imagined what could be higher.

I’m working with my senior classes to help them practice their skills at close reading. Almost every day they analyze a piece of text for its linguistic, semantic, structural or cultural machinations.

It’s tough work and a skill to be refined.

As I assess their attempts, I’m tempted to give the same marks to  the “almost” answers as I would to the “exactly” answers.

I resist.

They can think more deeply.

They should think more deeply.

That will remain the skill I assess, and my standards will remain high.

If they cite their work with some strange bastardization of MLA and APA, I’ll be happy. So long as it’s thoughtful.

Things I Know 130 of 365: Professional development must be warts and all

Good design begins with honesty, asks tough questions, comes from collaboration and from trusting your intuition.

– Freeman Thomas

A group of teachers cam to visit SLA Tuesday. Particularly enterprising, their school is heading to a project-based model next year, and they’ve been using this year to experiment. While not fully project-based, their classes have featured a few projects throughout the year, and they wanted to talk shop.

When I sat down, they were talking to Tim Best about rubrics and expectations.

They wanted to adopt a similar approach next year, and I had a question.

I asked if they had a plan for getting the more hesitant members of their faculty on board.

No matter who comes to visit SLA, they never bring the most recalcitrant members of their faculty with them. Those who come to visit are of like minds.

This group had no plan.

They asked if we had any suggestions.

I had one.

Be vulnerable.

Whenever I’ve been part of a faculty or heard stories of a faculty that was adopting a new approach or program, there was never a sense of vulnerability.

Every launch, unveiling or introduction has been orchestrated with the promise of perfect like some sort of Kevlar-covered pedagogy.

Nothing ever is.

No matter what these teachers say next year as they start to shift the way their school approaches teaching and learning, it will not be perfect.

My suggestion was for each of them to sit down with a group of their peers and workshop a unit plan, project description or rubric they’ve built this year.

When new initiatives are launched, all many teachers hear is “We’ve figured out the problem with our school. You’re teaching the children wrong, and we’re hear to fix you.”

Asking their peers to sit down to a curricular discussion that values the knowledge and experience of everyone involved can be a way for their school to make thoughtful change.

Even better, those conversations will bring new eyes to the process in a structured way so that this beta group can refine their practice with the help of their peers rather than burning out mid-year next year because everyone is looking to them to keep pushing things along.

Some school initiatives fail because they are either bad initiatives or bad fits for the schools adopting them. Other initiatives fail because they’re thrust upon a faculty with pomp and circumstances, but lacking dialogue and reflection.

By inviting their faculty to the table as colleagues, these teachers could have a good shot at eliminating 50 percent of the reasons they might fail.

I like those odds.

Things I Know 129 of 365: Sometimes, when we say we’re caring, we’re not

Students in a given high school say that they want their teachers to care for them, but “nobody cares.” Their teachers make a convincing case that they do care (in the virtue sense); they work hard and want their students to succeed. Here we have willing carers and willing cared-fors but no caring relations.
– Nel Noddings

Today’s faculty meeting featured an investigation of the Ethic of Care. A group of SLA teachers self-selected into a study of the EoC at the beginning of the year. Once a month since then, they’ve met to discuss selected readings and their thinking on the subject.

In the second half of the year, each group is presenting on its learning from the first semester. Today we talked about caring.

The EoC has been coming out of my mouth quite a bit lately. SLA visitors, colleagues, student teachers, no one has been immune to my verbal storm.

Such is usually the case when I’m trying to work out an idea. Today, in a small group discussion, I think I figured out what I’ve been talking about.

Much of the time when we claim to be caring, we’re really not – at least not like we think we are.

Teachers assign loads of homework or grade harshly while asserting such actions come from a place for caring for their students’ futures.

Parents punish in anger or limit students’ independence under the guise of caring.

Under the definition of the EoC, though, these don’t qualify.

Nel Noddings explains the existence of a caring relationship depends not only on the one caring, but also on the cared for recognizing the actions of the one caring as being, well, caring.

This is tough.

This is really tough.

In many educational settings, patterns are firmly developed:

  • Teacher assigns difficult homework to help push students to grow and examine complex ideas.
  • Students become frustrated with the work and blame the teacher for not paying attention to what they see as their limitations.
  • The homework goes undone or incorrectly done.
  • The teacher becomes indignant that the students have ignored or negated what he sees as his clear attempts to show his care for the students and their future.
  • The students’ frustrations grow as they continue to receive work they perceive as reinforcing their teacher’s uncaring.
  • Without reciprocation of his intended caring, the teacher’s capacity to care is diminished.
  • The negative feedback loop diminishes everyone’s capacity for caring.

Simply put, if the one caring is the only one who sees what he’s doing as caring, it’s not a caring relationship and the caring will be unsustainable.

Communicating care means taking time to check in with our students to understand how their perceiving our actions and intentions and then working from that understanding to better communicate what we mean.

Saying and believing we are acting from a place of caring means much less if those we are caring for don’t feel the care.

To me, the best piece of this is Noddings’s contention that the reciprocity of a caring relationship isn’t predicated on the cared for becoming the one caring. For a caring relationship to energize the one caring, all he needs is to have his caring acknowledged.

Last week, a few minutes after I’d dismissed class, a student returned to my room. She’s been struggling mightily this semester with some hard core procrastination and disorganization. It’s drawn a fair amount of my attention and encouragement. Things are improving, but ever-so-slowly.

She popped her head into the room.

“I want to thank you for not giving up on me when it would have made a great deal of sense to do so,” she said and walked away.

She knows I care, and that will make it easier for me to continue to do so.

Things I Know 128 of 365: Pooh is my favorite

– A.A. Milne

In second grade, toward this time of the school year, my mom came to class for the day. We were completing our “My Book About Me,” a project I remember my mom organizing.

We were each given a Duo-Tang folder with copied pages for us to fill in blanks about our interests and favorites.

We worked to write down the superlatives of our 7-year-old lives with pencils and crayons. I vividly remember a few of the pages.

One had a box in the middle of it above the words, “This is a picture of me.” I had just started drawing necks, so I’m fairly certain I looked to be part giraffe.

I also remember writing The Dick Van Dike Show as my favorite television show. It was tough call. My other favorite show was All In the Family. Not yet old enough to understand the nuance of All In The Family, I went with Dick Van Dike because his show made me laugh the most.

The last piece I remember from my book about me was what I listed as my favorite book, The Adventures of Winnie the Pooh. I did and still do love that book.

I also remember my classmates mocking me for my choice.

They alerted me to its standing as a baby book and I’m sure called it stupid.

We were 7, after all. I’m not sure what was cool at the time, but it certainly had nothing to do with A.A. Milne.

It wasn’t until a few years ago while home at my mom’s that I picked up our old copy of The Adventures of Winnie the Pooh and started reading.

I was immersed.

“Mom,” I would call from the couch, “This is smart and funny!”

“I know,” she would call back.

“Mom,” I called a few moments later, “This isn’t just a book for kids. Adults should read this book too.”

“I know.”

And, of course she did. She knew then as she had known when I told her about the kids in my second-grade class that Pooh was a beautifully intricate narrative full of semantic and linguistic acrobatics that could not help but invite its readers’ imaginations out to play.

When I talk about wanting my students to fall in love with reading, its the world I found in Milne’s creations that I’m hoping they will find in whatever texts capture their imaginations.

I want them to be intoxicated with story. When Pooh stops short in the story and starts conversing with the narrator, I cannot help by giggle. He’s breaking the rules and inviting his readers along.

I get that in a way I never get when reading Joyce or Faulkner. Both of them broke rules, but seemed to spite the reader, not to entice him.

Should Duo-Tang folders show up in my classroom tomorrow, Dick Van Dike might have to step to the side, but Winnie the Pooh would still hold a place of honor.

Things I Know 127 of 365: The real world accepts late work

I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.

– Douglas Adams

Jabiz called me out this morning.

He didn’t mean to, but I’m glad he did. Each of his assertions was incorrect. I haven’t written 124 posts. Neither have I written a post each day since January 1.

Let me explain before you give up on this experiment all together.

This is my 127th Thing I Know. I realize yesterday’s post was labeled “124 of 365,” and there’s a reason for that.

I can’t count. Well, I can’t keep count. If you were to comb the archives, you’d find two 63s and two 94s. I’m not sure how it happened, but every TIK from March 6 on has been a day or two off. I’ll be going back and correcting them, but it’s going to take some time to individually rename half of the posts I’ve written this year.

The second inaccuracy was the claim that I’ve written one post per day. There were a few days over the last couple of weeks that got away from me. From being on the river to writing narratives to entering grades to report card conferences, my days got away from me.

I’m not sure anyone would have wanted to know what I knew in those few days. At least two of the posts were begun in end-of-day exhaustion only to result in me wake finding an open laptop on my stomach after I had passed out in bed.

I counted this weekend. May 10 is the 130th day of 2011.

I owe me some posts.

They’re coming.

No matter whether anyone else cares, my brain won’t sit right until this is all back on track.

What’s interesting to me is my lack of freak out. I could be rambling on and on to myself that I’ve lost the purity of the project or that writing more than one post in a day to catch up is cheating.

I’m not doing any of that.

It will get done, and the missing posts aren’t missing because of sloth or apathy.

Life needed me to prioritize school ahead of writing and then sleep ahead of writing. I obliged.

Today, a student got to my first period class late. We were just finishing up a vocabulary quiz. At the beginning of the year, my policy was that any student missing during the quiz would not be allowed to make up that portion of the quiz.

“Get here on time if you’re think it’s an unfair policy, and you’ll never have to worry about it,” I said.

The tardy student raised his hand once he’d taken his seat.

“Can I make up the quiz tomorrow during lunch?”

“Where were you?”

“I just got to school.”

“Why were you late?”

“I woke up late and then had to catch the train.”

“You can make it up Thursday at lunch.”

Then, I walked away.

I could have lectured him on the importance of punctuality or restated the policy, but that’s not what he needed at the time. The student was visibly frazzled and stressed by getting to class late and missing the quiz. Adding to that would have accomplished nothing.

If he makes a habit of it, we’ll talk.

I’ve been late to meetings and missed deadlines outside of self-imposed blogging deadlines. I’ve felt the frustration of falling short of the expectations of others and myself.

In those moments, it wasn’t the people who lorded the hegemony over me who made me want to work harder the next time. It was those who looked closely to see what I needed and responded from a place of care.

If I ever took advantage of their empathy, they once again responded caringly and called me on my actions, helping me learn lessons I didn’t necessarily want to learn but needed to.

I once taught with a teacher who accepted no late work and allowed no make-up work, citing the real world in her reasoning.

“When these kids get into the real world, they’re going to have bosses who don’t let excuses and tardiness fly.”

I’ve been in the real world for a few years now, and it’s not nearly as cut and dry as my colleague made it out to be.

There are times when deadlines are hard and fast, not to be taken lightly. Other times, life piles up and we’re forced to make choices. Then there are those moments when we make the wrong choices and firm understanding, not berating and belittling, is what’s called for.

I am reminded of this sentiment as I catch up on my writing. I will remember it again, Thursday, as I administer the make-up quiz.

Things I Know 124 of 365: Literacy brings democracy

I read this piece aloud to one of my G11 classes this afternoon.

We all sat in a sort of oval on the floor and I read it from start to finish. The students had only one direction: Mark anything you have a question about.

In case you didn’t click the link, some things you should know: the article was about Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Russian literature, Russia’s role in the Russo-Turkish War and Tolstoy and Dostoevsky’s disagreement over whether or not Russia should have stepped in. Oh, also, it is about Libya and the possible negative economic consequences of American participation in the military humanitarian aid mission in Libya.

A little light reading.

My interest in examining the article wasn’t that my students have a deep understanding of the Russo-Turkish War, nor was I particularly worried they did or did not see its relevance to contemporary history.

I wanted my students to see the text because it was dense and difficult. In two sentences, we saw three words that had appeared on our vocabulary quizzes during the year.

In a moment of frustration, one student commented she thought the article was “the stupidest thing ever.”

I replied she should research Crystal Clear Pepsi before she made that statement, and asked her why she thought what she thought.

“He just writes it so it’s too hard and boring to understand.”

James Warner does some interesting and slippery things in his writing of the piece. These are techniques of linguistic subterfuge that disguise some of his deeper points and play off of the psychology of his readers.

In a text inspired by and commenting on US intervention in Libya, Warner mentions the country only once and never brings up President Obama. Warner does reference the Iraq War twice and directly refers to President Bush once.

“What kind of connections is he drawing by bringing up Libya, Iraq and President Bush, but leaving out President Obama?” I asked.

A few students’ faces flashed with the “hmmmmmm” moment.

I asked how many students had seen any James Bond movies. Several hands went up. “Where are Bond villains often from?” I asked.

“Russia!” they answered.

“So what’s the implication of saying the United States is acting like Russia?”

More “hmmmmmm” moments.

They might not know about the Cold War, but 007 has taught them Russia’s not to be trusted.

For those of my students who struggle the most with reading, my job is to help them read the lines on the page and to find more pages with more lines they might be interested in reading when they believe the world doesn’t have any of those.

For all of my students, my job is to help them detect semantic snake oil salesmen and read between the lines on the page. They are growing up in a world of The Magic Bullet, FOX News, challenges to collective bargaining, and Michael Moore. They need to read smarter.

One student commented the article sounded intelligent because of all the expensive vocabulary.

Exactly.

I want to help each of them build the linguistic haggling skills to determine if the price of understanding is equal to the value of what is being said.

Each time they step up to a piece of writing unprepared to read it, they’re left out of the democratic process a little more.