Category: TIK365

Things I Know 346 of 365: Gaiman had me at pg. 7

I’m on page 111 now, but it was much earlier, when I read the passage below, that I knew it was literary love.

There are four simple ways for the observant to tell Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar apart: first, Mr. Vandemar is two and a half heads taller than Mr. Croup; second, Mr. Croup has eyes of faded china blue, while Mr. Vandemar’s eyes are brown; third, while Mr. Vandemar fashioned the rings he wears on his right hang out of the skulls of four ravens, Mr. Croup has no obvious jewelry; fourth, Mr. Croup likes words, while Mr. Vandemar is always hungry. Also, they look nothing at all alike.

– Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere

Things I Know 345 of 365: ‘We Bought a Zoo’ reminded me of what Crow can do

Cameron Crow and Tom Robbins live in the same condo in my brain. Crow is the well-meaning nice neighbor while Robbins is perpetually ready for a casting call for Pineapple Express II. That said, they both put words together in ways that make my brain sit up and take notice.

My family went to see Crow’s latest concoction,, tonight. It was uneven, but not unsatisfying. Crow’s power exists in his ability to create a world and narrative arc in which he can pour wonderful lines to be spoken by capable actors.

Tonight featured Matt Damon’s character saying to his teenage son, “You know, sometimes all you need is twenty seconds of insane courage. Just literally twenty seconds of just embarrassing bravery. And I promise you, something great will come of it.”

They are words that only happen in literature and which I carry around with me in the emergency kit of my brain.

Robbins’s works are similar.

I first read Still Life With Woodpecker my junior year of high school as a way to offset the drudgery of hearing yet another book review of Red Badge of Courage.

I was amazed. I didn’t know what I had. I knew it was complex, poetic prose that used story as canvas and sentences as paint. I also knew it was a little dirty and a little beyond my understanding.

Still, there are moments in any Robbins book where I think he’s lost me and wonder if this might not be the book I decide to walk away from. Then passages like this from Still Life remind me why I keep reading:

Who knows how to make love stay?

1. Tell love you are going to Junior’s Deli on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn to pick up a cheesecake, and if loves stays, it can have half. It will stay.

2. Tell love you want a momento of it and obtain a lock of its hair. Burn the hair in a dime-store incense burner with yin/yang symbols on three sides. Face southwest. Talk fast over the burning hair in a convincingly exotic language. Remove the ashes of the burnt hair and use them to paint a moustache on your face. Find love. Tell it you are someone new. It will stay.

3. Wake love up in the middle of the night. Tell it the world is on fire. Dash to the bedroom window and pee out of it. Casually return to bed and assure love that everything is going to be all right. Fall asleep. Love will be there in the morning.

Robbins is not for everyone. He is an acquired taste. If you can acquire it, though, it is well worth the reading.

I was at a similar point when the credits rolled on Zoo tonight. Not everyone will love it (as reviews are showing), but those who love beautiful words and hang on will be happy they did.

Things I Know 344 of 365: George Watsky deserves your listening attention

I first heard George Watsky on a road trip with my cousin Trevor. It was one of those, “You’ve never heard of George Watsky?” type of moments.

I babysat Trevor and his sister Martha for a bit when we were younger, so he censored any songs that might prove awkward.

After hearing “Who’s Been Loving You?” I was hooked.

I didn’t remember any of the other music from the trip, but Watsky stuck.

He’s a spoken word artist/emcee whose ryhmes hit the everyday, the socially unjust and being facially follically challenged.

When I found his Youtube channel, whatever I’d logged on to the computer to do took a back seat. And, I started IMing and e-mailing my favorite videos to friends. You may know him from “Pale kid raps fast,” but there’s so much more. You can find him here on iTunes or check out his bandcamp page. Either way, I think you’ll appreciate his skills.

While he’s not necessarily safe for work or school, there’s something in Watsky that speaks to the kind of writer I’ll never be and the mastery of language I’ve always wanted for my students.

Things I Know 343 of 365: It’s not the flipping

Mich. school sees success with blended learning, flipped instruction

– SmartBrief on EdTech

Of course they’re seeing better results. But I guarantee it’s the teaching and not the flipping that’s making the difference. Part of me wants to point out the ridiculous inattention to logic here and perversion of the possibility of the tools. It’s being shouted down by the part of me that’s just happy something’s moving an entire school to adopt participatory and exploratory practices:

Clintondale (Mich.) Community Schools’ high school has turned the traditional school day upside-down by asking teachers to assign short video lectures as homework and have students do activities, participate in discussions and complete assignments in class, with their teacher at hand to answer questions.

Clintondale High School applied the flipped model gradually, beginning with just a couple of classes in the 2009-2010 school year. In the fall of 2010, all freshmen classes were taught using this model. After seeing an increase in student achievement and a decrease in the failure rate, administrators decided to flip the entire school this year.

The flipped class is a type of blended learning, which combines online and traditional face-to-face methods. Students can review videos at their own pace, pausing to take notes or review a point. While the number of educators using this method is tough to calculate, 2,500 have joined the Flipped Class Network, a learning community for teachers using vodcasting (video podcasting) in class.

CHS teachers use Camtasia screen-recording software that allows them to speak over a PowerPoint presentation and to create and upload videos in different formats. Videos from the Khan Academy, a nonprofit organization that offers a library of 2,600 video tutorials, are also used. Teachers can upload their videos to a school Web site, Edmodo or use learning management systems such as Blackboard or Desire2Learn. Read more…

My favorite part comes from Susan Patrick who is quoted as saying, “The key is in the implementation and the fidelity for using research-based practices such as increasing peer-to-peer interaction, focusing discussions on key learning objectives, enabling effective teaching interventions and assuring that students are demonstrating the knowledge and skills at high levels of proficiency along the way.”

Just so we’re clear, no technology necessary.

Things I Know 342 of 365: I’d assign these books to inspire thinking about philanthropy in education

My theme for philanthropy is the same approach I used with technology: to find a need and fill it.

– An Wang

A few years ago, before actually reading Paul Tough’s profile of Goeffrey Canada and the Harlem Children’s Zone, I read a blurb on the dusk jacket from Ira Glass contending that the book had taught him more about poverty than any other text.

I had a similar experience.

I recommend Tough’s Whatever It Takes. Were I designing an ED school unit around non-traditional philanthropic interventions in urban education, I’d assign it and three other texts as well.

The first is a recent series from the Washington Post profiling this history and legacy of the Dreamers, a group of Seat Pleasant, MD students adopted by two D.C.-area businessmen who pledged to pay the students’ college tuition two decades ago.

The 3-part series and it’s ancillary coverage do well to paint a picture of the program and its place within other Dreamer initiatives across the country connected to the “I Have A Dream” Foundation.

I’d also assign The Boys of Baraka, a documentary about 12 at-risk Baltimore, MD boys sent to live and attend school in Kenya as part of an experimental program. It’s as worthy of the descriptor “compelling” as anything I’ve ever watched.

The third text is Ruth Wright Hayre and Alexis Moore’s (auto)biographical book Tell Them We Are Rising. Hayre and Moore provide a historical perspective of one African American family’s experiences with schooling across 3 generations and Hayre’s legacy when she promised college tuition to 116 sixth graders from Philadelphia. For me, the book provided a portrait of the history of Philadelphia schools few people had the time or memory to bring up. I understood where I was teaching because I understood how schools changed in Philadelphia.

While these four texts don’t provide a comprehensive list, they do provide much food for thought on the roles and possibilities for third-party stakeholders in education.

Things I Know 341 of 365: We are not doctors or lawyers

Life is filigree work. What is written clearly is not worth much, it’s the transparency that counts.

– Louis-Ferdinand Celine

When people hear “teacher” two things happen, they think of the teachers they’ve had and they think of all teachers. If they are parents, these people also think of the teachers their children have or have had in class.

Teacher pulls in images of the specifically personal and the generally vague.

Often, teachers find themselves working to elevate the prestige of the profession to the level of doctors, lawyers and other similarly regarded careers. I understand the comparison and the temptation to make it.

Teachers aren’t doctors or lawyers. They do not enjoy the same social distance as those professions.

The regard given medical and legal practitioners comes from the foreign nature of what they do. Though average Americans might know and be related to a doctor or lawyer, they do not spend the first 13-17 years of their lives in courtrooms or operating rooms. They know enough to understand the role of each profession in society, but not enough to feel as though they understand the minutia. If forced, the average person would likely feel comfortable running a classroom. They wouldn’t, I’d wager, feel the same sense of comfort if forced to defend or prosecute someone on trial or perform a surgery.

Thanks to television, they would have the jargon, but not the level of comfort appropriate to the moment.

Teaching is familiar. It is accessible through our memories.

We have spent hundreds of hours watching teachers. We’ll just do what we saw them do. What we did not see, we cannot know to do.

The familiarity of teaching keeps it from aligning with other practices similarly dedicated to the furthering and preservation of society. Teaching is visible, participatory and engrained in the lives of citizens. This works against the profession as it attempted to elevate itself.

Teaching must become wholly and completely familiar rather than working away from public access.

I received this horrendous email from change.org today about a mother who arrived at her son’s school to find him tied inside a bag meant as therapy for his autism. What the teacher did was unconscionable. It is also what the public of Mercer County and anyone who hears the story will know of Mercer schools. This will be the practice of Mercer teachers when they come up in conversation. Few will know or speak of the thousands of moments of kindness, care, professionalism, and wisdom that happened the same day and every day that follows at Mercer schools.

The gross familiarity with schooling has long been the handicap in elevating the profession. Let us then reverse that. Make all of teaching and schooling public. Make transparent the pieces children and parents did not see as students. Show the complexity of practice inherent in moving a diverse classroom of students toward learning, and esteem and regard will accrue. Respect for the work of teachers lies not in the further drawing of the curtain, but in the opening of it.

Things I Know 340 of 365: We had a Blue Steel Christmas

Somewhere in the last year, my sister Kirstie took on the mantel of family photographer. To understand the implications of this, you must know that my grandfather has worked all of his life to make certain mine is the most well-documented family in America. Would he so desire, Ken Burns could make a film about our family sans narration and using only my grandfather’s photos that matched the combined length of Baseball and The Civil War.

Kirstie’s eye for photography is natural and amazing. She can find things through a lens that I would miss 99 times out of 100. She also has the special ability to convince her subjects to step outside the ordinary.

So, yesterday, in a rare event that saw all of my dad’s family assembled at once, Kirstie took the expected family portrait.

She then turned and asked if we all knew what Blue Steel was. Not surprisingly, the majority of the family said no. My cousin Chloe and I are evidently the only true celebrants of Ben Stiller’s film canon.

Kirstie demonstrated and told us we would all be sporting Blue Steel on the count of three. The result is above.

Pay particular attention to how my grandparents interpreted the instructions.

The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree (and I come from an orchard).

Things I Know 339 of 365: Putting learning in place personalizes the experience

A colleague asked me last week if I had any resources on place-based education (PBE). It rang the memory bell of an episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers I got to sit in on in February. Diana and I were asked to talk about our Building History project. Best of all, I got to connect with Woody Woodgate who’s working with the Alaska Department of Education on place-based education initiatives.

Never one to shy from tracking down resources and it being a task I’d meant to get around to since February, I was happy to oblige.

I anticipate PBE popping up more frequently in the educational conversation in the next year. It’s a natural approach for those working within the context of the breadth of the Common Core who want to anchor their teaching in something local and specific to the worlds of their students.

Boiled down, PBE encourages one central question, “How does where I am influence who I am and how I understand the world?” It’s no small question.

According to Promise of Place, a site dedicated to structuring and supporting PBE:

Place-based Education (PBE):

  • Immerses students in local heritage, cultures, landscapes, opportunities and experiences;
  • Uses these as a foundation for the study of language arts, mathematics, social studies, science and other subjects across the curriculum; and
  • Emphasizes learning through participation in service projects for the local school and/or community.

Watching our students complete the Building History project, I was moved by the attention to detail and depth of questions they asked once the learning moved into their own neighborhoods. It shouldn’t have been surprising that asking students to think about home would make the learning more personal. Still, it was.

If you’re interested in more PBE resources, here’s what I was able to offer my friend after some time searching the Interwebs:

Things I Know 338 of 365: Every organization should be collecting stories

The broader the ocean of knowledge, the vaster the shores of ignorance.

– Christopher Gilbert

The other day, I stumbled on the Harvard Stories project.

The Harvard Stories project offers all members of the Harvard community the opportunity to record, share, and preserve personal stories relating to their experience with the University…and by the end of 2012, the site will allow members of the Harvard community to upload and share their own stories.

When I return to campus, I’ll be stopping by to find out how I can help with the collection of stories from the Harvard community. It also got me thinking about the value of this Story-Corps-esque approach to harvesting institutional memory.

There’s value in any institution creating a space for the collection of stories of members and their histories with the organization.

It’s the evolution of the yearbook. Relaxing the curatorial conditions for inclusion, the space would simply ask members to tell the stories of how they came to understand the mission of the space and their part in that mission.

Perhaps one essential question guides the process. Maybe it’s a list of core values. It could even be a mission statement.

I can’t help wondering at the almanac of identity a school would have after a semester’s worth of story netting.

Think of the information available to a student’s future teachers. Think of the time capsule for future students.

Think of the stories of who we are and how those stories could shape our understanding of that identity.

Surely, there’s a broom closet somewhere that’s waiting to become a story capsule.

Things I Know 337 of 365: So, this is where flash mobs come from

My sister Rachel and I were watching Hello, Dolly! last night. You can’t tell me this…

…wasn’t the inspiration for things like this…

Mystery = Solved