Category: TIK365

Things I Know 84: I like to listen in

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

– Bill Moyers quotes

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

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

I couldn’t.

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

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

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

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

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

I couldn’t help myself.

The conversation was too uncanny.

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

Bingo!

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

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

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

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

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

This is a recurring problem, this eavesdropping.

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

In reality, I like to collect stories.

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

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

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

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

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

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

– Brigitte Bardot

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

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

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

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

He read it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I put on my teacher hat and offered guidance.

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

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

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

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

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

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

They’re tearing it down – dismantling it really.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They’re valuable, but not necessarily delicious.

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

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

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

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

Things I Know 81 of 365: Teachers need to play too

Play is the only way the highest intelligence of humankind can unfold.

– Joseph Chilton Pearce

We’ve arrived at that part of the school year where The Man can get you down. Usually, The Man is time – time together, time between breaks, time in the house during the bleaker months. This year, The Man has incarnations in the form of budget cuts, layoffs, the neutering of organized labor, and, yes, time.

Between sections of standardized testing today, I sent Chris a message.

“Can Pia lead us in a game at the staff meeting today?”

“Dunno,” was his reply.

I didn’t think about it again until I walked into the library a few minutes before the meeting.

There stood Pia, our health and P.E. teacher and one of my dearest friends, blowing up a beach ball.

“You’ve never looked sexier,” I said as the limp orb hung from her mouth.

We both cracked up.

Chris started the meeting.

There we sat, 30 professionals battling to get kids into college, through testing, to counseling, beyond adolescence. Somewhere in there, we teach and learn. If we have the time and energy after, we cobble together lives with friends and family.

“Before we get started,” Chris said, “Pia has a game for us.”

She broke the library in half with a clear dividing line.

“We’re playing chair volleyball,” she said. “This is the line. If it hits the floor after you touch it, the opposing team gets a point. Beyond the pole is out of bounds. You have to stay in your chair to hit the ball. All body parts are fair game.”

A couple teachers straggled in.

Both sides of the room erupted, “You’re on our team! You’re on our team!”

In our shirts and ties and our skirts and heels, we were 12.

Pia sent the new arrivals to my team.

After the other side protested, she said, “I cheat how I wanna cheat.”

I walked to her and palmed her a dollar.

“Okay, so it’s 1—0 to start,” she said indicating my team was up a point.

And then it began. It was tremendous.

The ball bounced off of people and bookshelves and the ceiling and tables and chairs. We were screaming and yelling and laughing.

Somehow, Pia’s scoring bounced around as often as the ball, and I got the definite feeling, no matter who scored the most points, the game was headed for a tie.

After about 10 minutes, Pia called the game and we clapped and laughed and sounded our barbaric yawps.

Sometimes, in the middle of a class just after lunch, when heads are bobbing and eyes are heavy, I’ll have my class stand and compete to see who can stand on their tiptoes or one foot the longest.

That’s what we did as a faculty today. March is the class after lunch of the school year. Later in the meeting, we talked about differentiation, multiculturalism and school partnerships – the business of school.

For 10 minutes, we took time to play and be people together.

Try it.

Things I Know 80 of 365: Building online courses is scary

In my experience, it takes about twice as long — prep time, putting materials together — to actually deliver the online course than it does to deliver the on-campus course.

– Denise Keele, professor of environmental policy, quoted on npr.com

For about an hour this afternoon, I felt as though I’d written myself into a corner. I’m doing some work with a school district’s professional development office to build a course on inquiry and project-based learning in the literacy classroom.

The thing should be a piece of cake.

I’ve spent the better part of a year in an online grad program that gets it wrong in so many ways that I am acutely aware of the pitfalls and pratfalls of online learning.

Building the course is about more than distilling the core beliefs and approaches of how I think about teaching and passing on those ideals.

It is also about building a space where the discussion board isn’t a place where discussions go to die and feedback consists of copying and pasting from a rubric.

After eight months of knowing what it feels like when done wrong, I sat scheming today, dedicated to constructing an online learning space and process that felt real.

The worry we have about K-12 teachers ignoring the needs of their students and teaching in mentally tortuous ways because their education is compulsory, is too often exacerbated in adult learning spaces.

Sometimes, I let my mind wander and imagine what the planning sessions must be like.

“Okay, we want our faculty to be trained in how to take an inquiry-based approach in the classroom. Let’s sit them all in a cafegymnatorium and tell them about inquiry.”

“That’s a great idea. I’ll build a PowerPoint with all the information from the book we’ll buy them and see how many words I can fit on each slide.”

“Great! While you two are doing that, I’ll build the online follow-up that will vacillate between assignments giving them directions to follow that are so specific that the implementation can’t possibly fit their students’ needs and assignments so vague they’ll never be certain they completed them correctly until they receive the final e-mail.”

You can see what I was working against this afternoon.

I don’t want to build what I hate.

Turned out the answer was the same as it ever was. I need to do what I say I believe. I started drafting questions to help focus on the ends toward which participants will work. I imagined how a participant would ideally shape his classroom upon completion and worked backward to design modules that help participants raise relevant questions and work toward their answers through inquiry, implementation and reflection.

The course is still in its most nascent stages, but I’m building somewhere I’d like to learn. That can’t be all bad.

It turned out the best way to avoid becoming the practitioners I resent wasn’t to work against becoming them, but to work to be more myself.

I wonder how many times I’m going to have to learn that lesson.

Things I Know 79 of 365: My students are readers

Books let us into their souls and lay open to us the secrets of our own.

-William Hazlitt

As my students amassed this afternoon, I met them outside my classroom with the door closed and waited for the last stragglers to, well, straggle.

“Partner up with the person in class who you think is the best researcher,” I said, “When you have a partner, you may enter the room.”

As they partnered and entered, I told each partnership that one of them should open a blank Word doc.

“I’m going to ask you a series of questions,” I said.

For each question, the partners needed to sniff out the answer, document their source and, if the source was a PDF, document the number. Answers needed to be in complete sentences, preferably restating the question as a statement.

Before I began with the questions, I told the class about running into a friend this weekend at the coffee shop near my house.

A fellow educator who knows the belief structure of SLA, with a smile in her voice she asked, “So, have you guys just been drilling and killing?”

We both laughed.

“Not so much,” I said, “I did bring it up last week. I figured, if they’re going to take the test, we should probably talk about it.”

It’s true.

That’s what I said to her and how I brought it up with my students.

Tomorrow, my G11 students will take the first two sections of this year’s standardized tests.

Today, we prepared.

Rather than prepare a slidedeck explaining the inane nuances of the test, those same inanities became the questions for our research today.

“How many sections of reading are their on the G11 Reading PSSA?”

“How many of each type of question is in each section?”

“What are the possible genres of reading passages on the test?”

And they searched and found and filled in the holes. Some were frustrated, others downright competitive.

The moment that struck me and the moment that let me know we were doing the right thing was when one of my students offered up, “It feels like we’re searching for classified information.”

I flashed to David Perkins and Making Learning Whole and everything he had to say about learning the hidden game.

I know Perkins was talking about the hidden game in real, worthwhile learning and not standardized tests. In the eyes of the state, sadly, the next few weeks represent the realest of real learning my students will be doing this year.

The grant project and the building history project will mean nothing, nor will the multiple books the kids have blazed through and the conversations they’ve had as readers.

Perkins talks about the hidden game as the pieces of learning that are unspoken and unknown except to those who know how to play well. They might not even been understood by those who play well – they just are.

I suppose, aside from some practice in researching, that was the other goal of today’s exercise. I wanted them to know they will find 22 multiple-choice and 2 open-ended questions tomorrow before they sat down so they don’t need to worry about the rules. All they’ll need to worry about tomorrow is reading.

They can do that.

They can read, question and converse better than many undergrads and grads I’ve known. They know what they look for in a book and can tell you. They can tell you why a book is boring and why it’s exciting. And, they’re working on learning to read more closely than most people I know.

They are readers.

I told them that.

I told them that, and I told them to slow the frak down tomorrow.

It’s the best way to play the game.

Things I Know 78 of 365: I Blog4NWP

As of write now, the country will shut down April 8.

Unless Congress can write the ship of the federal budget to the degree that both bickering parties can stand back and say, “That’s alwrite,” then write at the stroke of midnight the federal government will be write back where it was in 1995.

Though some clearly partisan issues lurk in the spending of the federal government, some issues belong neither to the left nor the write.

Some issues transcend.

As I’ve said before, the National Writing Project is one of those issues. Never, ever before has the country benefited from such a grassroots network of professional development that has consistently been proven to improve student learning and teacher performance.

In an educational climate where we are to be racing to the top, I’m certain of one thing, the National Writing Project has already been to the top and circled back to help the rest of us get there.

Name a metric of programatic success and the NWP will impress you. Worried about fiduciary inefficiency? Don’t look at the NWP, almost 100 percent of its federal funding is matched at its more than 200 sites by local dollars.

Or, it was.

March 2, President Obama signed a bill eliminating direct federal funding for the National Writing Project.

According to a statement by NWP Executive Director Sharon J. Washington:

National Writing Project teachers provide more than 7,000 professional development activities annually, reaching 130,000 educators, and through them, 1.4 million students. These programs are designed locally to meet the specific needs of the students, teachers, and communities served. The loss of the National Writing Project will have an immediate impact on teachers and students across the country.

I am ashamed of a congress and president that would tout the importance of education and the need for preparing our students for the future and then eliminate funding to a program that has done nothing but good for over three decades.

We will enact laws to accommodate the wills of billionaire philanthropists as they try this and then that approach to education as though all it takes to inspire learning is pushing the write button in the Wonkavator, but we will not support the work of a network of teachers across the country to continue on with what is a golden ticket of an approach to improving teaching and learning.

I am saddened and ashamed.

And, tomorrow, I’ll be calling my congressmen – again.

Things I Know 77 of 365: What we read makes who we are and what we do

You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view – until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.

– Atticus Finch, To Kill a Mockingbird

To mark AOL’s consumption of The Huffington Post, Arianna Huffington announced Monday that “AOLers and HuffPosters (who are now AOLers!) will be volunteering in their local communities” as part of a 30-Day Service Challenge.

Aside from being a good public relations move, it’s also good work. No matter one’s political leanings, jumping in and helping the rest of humanity is a good idea.

I used to teach with a science teacher who had completed a fellowship during which she attempted a different job each week for 52 weeks. At the end of the year, she’d done it all – including her personal favorite, learning to drive an 18-wheeler.

She walked through life with a different and deeper understanding of the people with whom she interacted.

She had taken Atticus Finch’s advice and walked in the skin of others.

This gets toward the heart of why I want so badly for my students to connect with books and be more thoughtful about what they view. These stories, mostly fictitious, provide moments of connection and portrayed experiences that wouldn’t otherwise be possible. I want my students digging deeply into texts because the more they read, the more they will archive. Their brains will become rife with archives of the “what ifs” of all the plots and characters they encounter. And this, this will prepare them for those moments when they are up against odds unknown or come face-to-face with someone diametrically contrary to who they are.

I grew up in a small town of 250 people. My school was in the next town over and educated just under 400 students. While each of us was an individual, the world our interactions created was nothing compared to the complexity of life for my students in Philadelphia or Sarasota.

While I can’t deny thoughtful parenting was the largest preparation I received for the world beyond Cantrall, IL, it was the books, television shows and movies I read that picked up where my family’s experiences left off.

Nothing can replace the actual experience of mucking in as the “AOLers and HuffPosters” are and my former colleague did. Reading, though, can serve as the primer in the absence of the physical experience – the original virtual reality.

Starting next week, my students will be spending dedicated class time on change.org. Launched in 2007, the site both raises awareness of acts of injustice and calls on readers to take action as well by signing petitions or contacting government leaders. I cannot provide my students with exactly what they will need for every possible eventuality they might face. Absent that ability, I can help them build connections with texts, read those texts closely and then ask questions about how what they can do in relation to what they’ve just read.

My mom likes to tell the story of the first time she read me a children’s biography of Martin Luther King, Jr. I’m not sure of my age, but know I was still in the realm of footy pajamas. As my mother tells it, we’d finished reading the section explaining racism and it affected me deeply.

“You were pacing back and forth yelling, ‘That’s wrong, mommy! That’s just wrong!’”

Though the texts my students or I encounter may not always draw on themes as clearly unjust as racism, both they and I are missing the story if we’re not looking at how the characters are treating one another and how we see ourselves in the pages or scenes of what we’re reading.

Things I Know 76 of 365: Good conversation can be self-sustaining

Conversation would be vastly improved by the constant use of four simple words: I do not know.

– Andre Maurois

Thursday’s advisory began with a question. Actually it was a statement first, “Now, I don’t mean to sound racist.”

I turned to Matt, my co-advisor, and said, “We’re about to hear something racist.”

“Why is it that caucasian people can’t handle spicy foods?”

I was wrong.

The next 45 minutes ended up being one of the best advisory periods I’ve ever had.

We wound through racism and stereotypes and what separates the two. We talked about possible sources of those beliefs. We talked about some of the roots of American cultures and asked questions of the kids as to what they understood.

I explained my family had no discernible roots in the Caucasian Mountains and that it was okay to call me white.

When one student said, “Let’s say someone calls someone else the ’n-word’ for no good reason, what do we do?” we worked toward an answer to the question and dealt with the idea that “for no good reason” implied there could be a good reason.

From a bean bag chair, one advisee added, “The ’n-word’ was just a way the slave owners oppressed black men.”

I’ve had this conversation or some off-shoot of it many times. This was the best version.

“What about when you hear someone say something and you think it is racist? What’s the best way to deal with that?” I asked the advisory.

I called on a student who didn’t have her hand up, but whom I could tell was working through her answer by the look on her face.

“Tell us what you’re thinking,” I said, “Even if you’re not sure, tell us what’s playing through your mind.”

A little shocked at first, she said, “Well, I guess I’d ask them questions. When she asked her question,” she said motioning to the student who had asked the initial question, “you didn’t jump on her or anything. You just asked her questions. That seems like the best thing to do.”

I challenged a little bit, suggesting it was one thing to offer that answer now, but another to remember it in the heat of the moment when one feels offended. The advisee agreed and we continued thinking and talking.

We continued, as luck would have it well past the dismissal time for advisory.

No one made a move toward their book bag.

No one asked if they could leave.

No one departed from the conversation.

Because the conversation started from a place of curiosity and the topic we were discussing was rich with no clear answers, no one seemed to notice we’d tripped over the end of our mandated togetherness.

Things I Know 75 of 365: Today I ran nowhere in particular – for an hour

We must go beyond textbooks, go out into the bypaths and untrodden depths of the wilderness and travel and explore and tell the world the glories of our journey.

– John Hope Franklin

Today, for my run, I put 60 minutes on the clock and ran wherever for an hour. I did the same thing yesterday.

Pace and distance didn’t matter; I was worried about the run. Both days, I ran routes I’d hesitate to call straightforward. Yesterday’s, in particular, included more staircases than I’d ever knowingly include in a route were I planning for distance.

Yesterday, though, I came to some staircases and understood they would be part of the run.

I wasn’t trying to solve the problem of how far or how fast. I knew I would be running and let that happen.

This is the same reason I like Star Trek. No matter what problems they faced episodically, the missions of the crew from any iteration of the Enterprise was to boldly go where no one had gone before.

I wasn’t exactly hitting warp 9 on my runs, but I felt kindred.

This is the same reason I asked the instructor of my newest grad school module if I could forgo coming up with a problem statement for my course project and focus on trying new stuff. My instructor told me to message him separately after explaining we needed measurable goal lest my work appear to be innovation for innovation’s sake.

It was all I could do in that moment not to reply, “I’m a fan of that.” Instead, I told him I was worried about getting lost in a deficit ideology about education. I wanted to try something new.

When I was younger, I called it play.

I didn’t sit with my toys in front of me and think, “Now, what’s the problem I’m trying to solve here?”

Sure, kid life must have been full of its fair share of dilemmas, but I didn’t play for the purpose of solving them. I played to play.

I’ve no doubt I was able to solve many of those problems because of play – because of the time away from my problems that playing involved and because playing in a non-problematized world let me develop skills without worrying about transference or application.

In one of my favorite episodes of The West Wing, Rob Lowe’s character Sam Seaborn is explaining to Chief of Staff’s daughter why it was important for the government to send a probe to Mars.

“Why?” she asks.

His answer is why I decided to run nowhere in particular and what I’d like to guide my course work:

‘Cause it’s next. ‘Cause we came out of the cave, and we looked over the hill and we saw fire; and we crossed the ocean and we pioneered the west, and we took to the sky. The history of man is hung on a timeline of exploration and this is what’s next.

I want to solve the problems in my classroom. I want to improve my teaching. I also want to remain passionate about ideas and where they can lead. I want always and forever to have the freedom to ask, “What’s next?”