Category: TIK365

Things I Know 74 of 365: Story is currency

On the day when man told the story of his life to man, history was born.

– Alfred de Vigny

Stories have always fascinated me. My family trades stories like currency. From the garbled message from my cousin Milo explaining why the book I sent him was so important to my great-grandparents’ and now grandparents’ recollections of where we come from, stories matter in my family.

When I interviewed to teach at SLA, I was asked to describe my dream class. I was nervous and unprepared. I have no idea what I described. Now, though, I am teaching it. Second semester, for two years now, I teach a class called Storytelling to SLA seniors.

As I’ve explained before, Tuesday afternoons, I set up the class like a performance space, heat a percolator of coffee and one of hot water for tea. I set out cream and sugar and cookies. Beside them, I have a tip jar.

At the front of the room is a microphone. Beside it is a table with a small sound board and a laptop.

For two hours at the end of my Tuesday, I sit at that table and listen as my students share and explode moments of their lives in our weekly class story slams. Built around the rules of Philadelphia’s First Person Arts Story Slams, the rules are simple.

Three random audience judges scoring on content and presentation.

Five random storytellers.

No more than 5 minutes.

No notes.

True stories.

Tuesday, I woke up with a Daylight Saving Time hangover. I couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to leave their bed. I dragged through much of the day. Then, during lunch, I remembered – slams.

I set up the room, bought the supplies and greeted the students as they filed in.

Describing the stories would fall short. There’s something at once vulnerable and empowered as my students stand behind the mic and share parts of their lives the people in the room have usually never been privy to.

I’ll stop here and let you listen to two selections from this week’s slam around Malice.

No matter the discipline, story should be the currency of our classrooms.
Ralen and Freda by MrChase

Things I Know 73 of 365: It’s time to write our declarations

We hold these truths to be self-evident…

– Declaration of Independence

Students, teachers, community members across the country taking a day to stop, think about great moments of learning, pull from those moments the pieces that made them valuable and then declare what they need from learning.

This the is the idea behind the Great American Teach In.

It doesn’t stop there.

What if we took those ideas – in classrooms, schools, coffee shops – and asked what our places of learning are doing to support and hinder those moments? When we figured that out, what if we as learners drew up the steps we – and I’m talking the totality of the “we” – drafted the steps we would take to make more perfect places to work and learn?

Tuesday, we announced the launch of the Teach In.

For some it will be a first step. For others, a next step.

It will be a step away from political parties or ideology. Asking our students and ourselves to share powerful positive moments of learning should never be political.

It should and must be pedagogical. It must be informed by pedagogy and it must inform our pedagogy.

The discourse about education in America has lost its course. What should be rooted in the curiosity of the people and should work to build a more democratic citizenry rarely asks students what they would like to learn and how they would like to learn it. Much too infrequently do we stop and ask our students and ourselves to reflect on those real and true and pure moments of learning and then cobble together the best parts to build tomorrow’s learning.

Let’s do that.

In the week leading up to the Great American Teach In, let’s schedule Teach In Talks in restaurants, bars, coffee houses and living rooms where we ask our family, our friends and strangers to share their stories of learning. Let’s ask everyone to the table of discourse and really and truly think about what we want and need to make our places of learning more perfect.

Let’s share those stories at elev8ed and Faces of Learning. Let’s upload them to Youtube and Facebook. Let’s write them on our blogs and tweet them, tagging each and every one with #teachin11 so they can live and be archived together and we can learn from how each other learns.

Knowing, though, and doing are different things.

Once we have learned, let’s make choices about teaching and learning that respect what students need. Let’s build places of learning that don’t ask students to conform, but conform themselves to the needs of those students.

If you have ever asked what you can do to help children learn, first ask them how they have learned and then ask how you can help them do it again.

We will learn more if we begin from a place of questions rather than answers.

Things I Know 72 of 365: Dichotomies can go more than two ways

Inquiry is fatal to certainty.

– Will Durant

Jon Becker asked what I took to be a serious question today on twitter, “All of you fired up about Kahn Academy and TED ED, how do you reconcile that with your belief in learner-centered, inquiry-driven learning?”

The question implies Kahn and TED ED stand diametrically opposed to learner-centered, inquiry-driven learning.

It sets up a dichotomous relationship where one need not exist. The thing about dichotomous relationships is they present hard choices in easy packages.

Reconciling the learning of someone walking away from a TED Ed or any TED talk with the learning of one in an inquiry-driven environment is important, thoughtful work.

We need not, as Samuel Johnson said in his “Rasselas” make our choice and be content. Building a learning environment need not mean choosing one path and forsaking all others.

It’s easier to treat the matter as such, but learning and teaching should be more complex than that. Acknowledging the value in something that appears contrary to one’s belief could put one on the precipice of doubting those beliefs.

Again, it need not.

If inquiry and learner-centered learning are keystones to my educational approach. Building classrooms or other places of learning around the curiosity and interests of the learners in those spaces is the best way for them to learn. It is not, by any means, the only way for them to learn. In fact, a monoculture spoils the soil of learning.

I played with LEGOS, spent hours by the creek that ran along our property line and tied sheets around my neck pretending I was any number of make-believe super heroes when I was young. I also sat listening on the laps of any family member who would take the time as they read me stories. I watched Sesame Street. I sat at my grandparents’ kitchen table as my grandfather explained who Casmir Polaski was and why we got the day off school because of him.

I learned in many ways.

My friend and colleague Matt has his G9 students complete a learning style inventory at the beginning of the school year. Students answer familiar questions of how they prefer to handle information. In the end, their scores show them the spectrum of learning styles with which they approach life. It’s a tremendous exercise with great value so long as its followed, as Matt makes certain it is, by the conversation explaining the results as a snapshot of where the students’ learning preferences stand in that moment.

Dichotomies over simplify the issues they attempt to settle. Perhaps dangerously, they sidestep the conversation and careful consideration of how new or different information can shift the paradigms through which we shape our understanding of the world.

I see value in Kahn and TED.

I see greater value in inquiry and student-centeredness.

I’ll privilege the latter more than the former in my classroom, but I won’t deny both can help students learn.

Things I Know 71 of 365: Writing can be so much more

For a while now, I’ve been following @IAM_SHAKESPEARE on twitter. The idea behind the account appealed to me – tweeting every work of Shakespeare, line-by-line.

I’m fairly certain I was teaching my Shakespeare class at the time and all juiced up on The Bard.

Initially, Shakespeare was following me too. Not anymore. The realization that my writing had lost his attention, faux or otherwise, was a bit of a blow to the ego.

Then again, I’m struggling to remain interested in what cyber-Bill has to say. Every now and again, I’ll catch a key line from a work I’ve read and feel the self satisfaction of recognition. Most of the time, though, I’ll see something like the recent, “Farewell. Our countrymen are gone and fled.” I’m not sure what to do with that.

The narrative wasn’t built for Twitter.

This is not to say Twitter wasn’t built for narrative.

Most recently, the exploits of the fictitious Rahm Emanuel, @MayorEmanuel, have shown the medium can do more than answer its initial question of “What are you doing?”

As revealed in a recent story from The Atlantic, Chicago writer/professor/punk zine publisher Dan Sinker used the account to build an entire world for what could be described as his Nega Emanuel.

In his analysis of Sinker’s work, Atlantic Senior Editor Alexis Madrigal writes:

When you try to turn his adventures into traditional short stories or poems, they lose the crucial element of time. The episode where the mayor gets stuck in the sewer pipes of City Hall just does not work when the 15 tweets aren’t spaced out over 7 hours. It’s all over too fast to be satisfying. There’s no suspense.

This is 4-D storytelling, and I’m fascinated.

@MayorEmanuel existed as a stand-alone narrative with no tie-in or marketing behind it.

In the lead up to the 2000 release of the film adaptation of Brett Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, fans could receive e-mails from the film’s main character Patrick Bateman. It was 2000 and e-mail was still super cool. I was working at my university’s student paper at the time and remember the daily discussions as the e-mails arrived in our movie columnist’s inbox.

I’d read epistolic fiction before, but this was something new. It was sent out at the author’s pace, not the readers’. As Madrigal pointed out, suspense was built as a function of how the story was told.

The seniors in my Storytelling class are writing short stories now influenced by one of the human emotions as described by Aristotle. They’re crafting stories the way generations before them have composed texts. Though they’ve moved from paper to the screen, the process and the format are largely the same. I see and understand the value of the exercise. There’s a holding on to the roots and the tradition of writing stories (and I love Fiddler on the Roof as much as the next guy).

At the same time, Singer won’t be the last person to bend Twitter or any other social network to his will. I’ll be remiss in my duties if I don’t offer up these online spaces as playgrounds for the telling of the stories my students are writing.

It’s incredibly simple to ask them to write stories and post them to class blogs. They’re already doing it here and here.

Only doing that, though, would be tantamount to art teachers forbidding their students to use perspective in their painting. Story can have a depth and breadth to it online far beyond the linear nature of the page – be it paper or web.

The future of writing and literature has too many possibilities for me to force them to write in the past.

I’ve begun thinking of ways to encourage my students to start playing with new media as mechanisms for delivering their stories. One of the essential questions for the class asks, “How is a story affected by how it’s told?” The answer to that appears to be shifting before our eyes.

Things I Know 70 of 365: It’s okay to go off script

The difference between life and the movies is that a script has to make sense, and life doesn’t.

– Joseph L. Mankiewicz

My friend Rachel acts in a children’s theater company. This afternoon, they performed for an audience of 2-4 year olds and the kids’ parents.

When I caught up with the company afterward, they were discussing the unexpected moments they experienced onstage.

“It was interactive theater,” Rachel said.

As they have been trained by Blue, Dora and the like, the kids were talking to the characters during the scenes. Warning them to look out for the statues moving behind them, calling out the rabbit from a few scenes before who was now a rat, helping the man who could not, for the life of him, count to three – the kids were participating.

I have nothing but the deepest respect for elementary and pre-K teachers. Whatever sentiments were floating in the minds of people who repeatedly replied, “God bless you,” when I told them I taught eighth grade – those are the sentiments I feel toward the teachers of our youngest students.

Though there were characters and props and a stage, Rachel and her fellow cast members were teaching today.

And, they taught well.

“What did you do when they talked to you,” I asked.

“We improvised.”

They responded to the kids, asked them questions and played along.

Each scene ended where it needed to with the kids and parents getting what they needed. The means to those ends were wonderfully skewed from what was planned in rehearsal.

This is the best teaching – knowing what we want our students to learn and drafting a plan for getting them there, but realizing the process must be organic if it is to also be meaningful.

Every question asked or answer proffered by a kid in the audience was paid credence, showing a level of care and validation I hope I can someday replicate even more consistently in my classroom. A key to showing students I care who they are lies in showing I care what they say.

Things I Know 69 of 365: Parents count

Parents are the bones on which children cut their teeth.

– Peter Ustinov

SLA’s Home and School Association hosted their second annual auction tonight. I missed last year’s because of an improv show.

Though dead tired from the week, I made it this year.

I’m glad I did.

Even if every faculty member at SLA had shown up tonight, we would have been in the minority. We were swimming in a sea of parents. It was a great thing.

As much as they carry the genetic and social makeup of their parents with them when they enter the classroom, it’s almost too easy to forget the students I teach are tied to the history of where and whom the come from.

Even with our above-average parent involvement this is true. I’m left to imagine the mindfulness of teachers toward the parents and guardians who raised the students they get to teach in schools around the district.

I think of this, and I worry.

A few weeks ago, I went to a rally focused on calling on Philly’s district office to stop intimidating teachers, make transparent its process for changing school structures and welcoming all stakeholders to the table when thinking about improving education.

Participation was a no-brainer.

Still, when a parent was welcomed to the microphone, I wondered how many parents were in attendance. When the rally concluded and all parents were called on to cheer in support, the noise was less than deafening.

We could be doing more.

Last year, when working with a group of second-year teachers, I suggested the idea of committing to making one positive phone call home before each of them left their schools at the end of the day.

Though one of the teachers thought the idea might have merit, everyone else in the room thought it was too much work.

I was sad.

“I’m not going to look for things just to call home and say a kid did something good,” one teacher said.

I was dumbfounded.

The core of my belief in the classroom is that I should be looking for the good in every student each period of the day. Because of life, this isn’t always possible. Still, it remains a goal. If you look for it, you’ll begin to note the contribution each student makes to every class. If you commit to calling home each night for one student, you’ll look for it.

Looking for the good is what led to me calling Eric’s mom when Eric was in eighth grade.

“He said something in class today that made many of the other students think and ask questions,” I said, “It really shows what kind of thoughtful student he is.”

Eric’s mom began to cry.

After nine years of public education, she was receiving her first positive phone call from a teacher. It made me proud. It made me sad.

I’m certified 6-12; I should never be the first phone positive phone call home for a kid. I shouldn’t be the second or third either.

Though it’s incredibly easy to see my students as separate from their parents, the best educations come from the connecting of parents and teachers in the efforts to help students be more.

The parents see all of who the kids were; the teachers work to see who the kids could be. Together, we form a more solid understanding of who the kids are.

Tonight was excellent. We met as people. This will prove ever-important as we help our students decide on the people they will become.

Things I Know 68 of 365: I got in to Harvard

The school is the last expenditure upon which America should be willing to economize.

– Franklin D. Roosevelt

Two days ago, I got an e-mail telling me my decision was available online.

Forty-five slow-motion seconds later, I was congratulated that I’d been accepted into Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education to study for a Master of Education in Education Policy and Management.

I went for a run.

Three miles later, I’d set a new personal best for the mile and my head was still swimming.

I called my mom and told her the news while my sister Rachel who’s in town for her spring break was standing in front of me.

They yelled in unison. Rachel hugged me.

In the past 48 hours, I’ve completed my taxes, my first FAFSA (I worked through undergrad), and sent my financial aid application.

Today, I told our advisory the news and stressed that nothing was sure.

It’s not.

Money will decide.

I want this – intensely.

Money will decide.

Still, for now, I got in to Harvard.

Things I Know 67 of 365: Hope’s waiting for Lefty

The labor movement was the principal force that transformed misery and despair into [Hope] and progress.

– Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

I’m having a difficult time reconciling some rhetoric.

Unions are big. They are bad. They stand in the way of progress.

They add to the burgeoning bureaucracy of America.

We will save the banks, but break the unions.

Workers, it seems, are not too big to fail.

In education, one of the most oft relied upon arguments against unions centers around teacher quality.

It is the unions, we are told, that stand in the way of removing ineffective teachers from the classroom.

The paperwork, the proof of corrective action, the negotiations, the documentation. We’re told it’s hardly worth it to go through the process to divest bad teachers from the classroom. I mean, all that work just to make sure students are receiving the highest quality education possible. Yeesh.

And yet.

In the course of 21 days, the district has removed from the classroom, held hearings on and recommended the termination of a teacher who gave transit tokens to her students.

I don’t understand.

A teacher loved and respected by her students and colleagues, with no failing test scores that can be traced to her, has been stripped of her classroom in under a month, and I’m led to believe it’s the union that stands in the way of clearing “bad” teachers from the classroom?

Sure, Union President Jerry Jordan promised to fight the termination every step of the way, but I hardly see this as the flexing of political muscle we’ve heard so much about.

Teachers unions are ridiculously powerful, right? I mean, they’re spooky, angry, unthinking powerhouses of collective might.

That’s what I read, hear and see on the news.

Unless.

Unless the teacher hands out transit tokens.

Ignore students, stay in the classroom. Yell at students, stay in the classroom. Insult students, stay in the classroom. Fail to show up to school, stay in the classroom (if you ever get there).

In these things, the union can and will protect you.

Provide students with the means to participate in an authentic act of civil disobedience and a moment in which to use their still broken democratic voices and your voice and your will will be broken.

Give them tokens, and you will become one.

In the teachable moments, the union’s hands are tied.

So, don’t teach the students. Don’t teach the students, and you really give the union something to stand behind and fight.

I’m told the unions are the reason “bad” teachers aren’t fired. I’m told my union will protect me.

Someone’s lying.

Things I Know 66 of 365: English is hard

Viewed freely, the English language is the accretion and growth of every dialect, race, and range of time, and is both the free and compacted composition of all.

– Walt Whitman

“Mr. Chase, am I getting an interim for your class?”

Interims are notifications the district requires we send home if a student is earning a “D” or “F” at midterm.

“No.”

“Ok, good. I didn’t think so, but I wanted to be sure. I’m getting one in math, and I told them, but they understood because math’s hard. If I were getting an interim in English, they’d go crazy.”

And he’s gone and done it.

English is difficult. Really. I swear.

I don’t just mean remembering how to spell “recommend,” “accomplish,” and “necessary” (though that takes a definite level of skill).

English is difficult on a user level.

I struggle with communicating the intricacies of the language to my students. For the vast majority, it’s the language they’ve been learning since birth. Economics, biochemistry, pre-calculus – these all came online later in their development. They are foreign languages.

Not only are they foreign, but communicating in them requires a specificity of detail my students often fail to see in their consumption and production of language.

Though Mark Twain may have said, “The difference between the right word and almost the right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug,” students are often not interested in such precision of language. Moreover, they don’t consider the construction of meaning difficult.

But language is tough. To take an idea from the ephemeral and frame it in with words, send those words out into the world and then process the reaction – that is linguistic chemistry.

I’m not talking what my student could be doing with language; I’m talking about what they are doing with language.

I wish they could see it.

They look at a page with arbitrarily connected ticks and curves, they translate those ticks and curves to individual pieces of meaning, they string those individual pieces of meaning together, they connect those strings to their own experiences and then they store them away to connect to later strings or experiences.

I’m not just saying this is what they do with Kafka or Joyce or Woolf. This is what they do when they read a cereal box.

It’s what they do with one another. They take the laxidasically imprecise language of the colloquial, put it up against more formal internal language charts, find meaning and respond with the properly coded answer. To complicate things further colloquialism are shifting at lightning speeds.

Incredible.

Still, it’s math that has the street cred for being the T-Birds in our educational production of Grease. English is as easy as Cha Cha DiGregorio.

Even there, in the last sentence, I created an intertextual comparison that required the understanding of multiple meanings of “easy.” Admittedly, the joke loses something in its explanation.

This is the idea Taylor Mali is playing with when he says, “I make them show all of their work in math and hide it in English.”

Perhaps that’s the answer.

The next time I have a student write a summary of what they read, I’ll have them start at the morphemic and phonemic levels.

“Well, first, I realized I was looking at the letter I. Then I noticed there was a space after the letter, so I took that to imply the letter was representative of a singular idea…”

“I’m going to stop you there for a moment. When you say, ‘I realized I was looking at the letter I,’ what gave it away?”

This could be fun.

Things I Know 65 of 365: It’s ok to be nice

As much as we need a prosperous economy, we also need prosperity of kindness and decency.

– Caroline Kennedy

I wanted to be mean today.

It was a little moment.

Instead of completing her work in class, one of my students was working on her math homework.

I asked her to stop.

She asked for two minutes more.

In that moment, I wanted to be mean.

I wanted to say, “No,” take away her notebook and use my teacher voice to tell her to get back on track.

I would have been well within my rights, but I wouldn’t have actually been right.

Compliance could have been achieved by the application of force, but that wouldn’t have been teaching – at least not the right kind of teaching.

If later, she had come to ask me why I had done what I wanted to do, I would have been ashamed of my answer.

Meanness is worst when it slips in to these small moments and erodes the times we choose to be nice.

When New Jersey Governor Chris Christie had the message passed along that Firefighter Union President Bill Lavin should “Go f@#! yourself,” he chose meanness. Like my student and I, Lavin and Christie were at odds. Like my student and I, Lavin and Christie are motivated by different interpretations of what they think should happen.

Christie, though, chose to be mean.

I freely admit I wanted to do the same thing. For a moment, I wanted to use language and tone that asserted my power and showed my student I was in power.

But, I’m a teacher.

I gave my student her two minutes.

Two minutes later, I came back.

She looked at me, “Ok?”

“Ok,” I said.

She put her math aside.

I realize the Christie/Lavin comparison falls apart a bit here, but the principal remains the same. Nothing keeps us from being nice other than us.