Category: Uncategorized

It’s Monday night. Here I sit in my PJs with my gradebook up-to-date. I decide to reward myself.
I open the student contact file on my computer along-side my gradebook and pic a student who’s doing well in class. I look up the number, dial and wait.
The voice on the other end clearly does not recognize my Floridian number on caller ID.
“This is Mr. Chase,” says I, “Milana’s English teacher.”
“Yes…” a clearly uncertain pause.
“I was just calling to let you know how great it is to have your daughter as part of our class. She’s one I can count on for insightful comments, and I’m impressed by how hard she’s working on the Quarter 3 benchmark project.”
The conversation goes on for a few minutes more. We talk about how I joined SLA after the year started – that’s why she doesn’t remember meeting me. We joke about keeping the call between the two of us so as not to inspire false confidence in her daughter.
Before we hang up, though, she says, “I don’t know if this something you do personally as a teacher or what, but keep it up. This is one of the best phone calls I’ve gotten in a long time.”
It’s the best way to end a Monday I know.
When I was in Florida, I tried to make two positive phone calls home before I went home each day. I developed the habit after Hal Urban spoke at my first school.
Much can be said about setting the tone with parents, building relationships, etc.
That’s part of why I do it, but it’s not the bigger why.
I make those phone calls home because it makes me feel better. I make those phone calls because it pushes me, everyday, to look at the best of my students. In the hectic frenzy of any given school day, the least I can do is make certain I catch the best of my students.
No matter what happened before, the words, “This is one of the best phone calls I’ve gotten in a long time,” made this a good Monday.

While all the talk of teaching and students at Educon2.0 was enjoyable, it felt good to be back in the classroom Monday. Normally, that would be enough. This Monday was special.
Konrad Glogowski and I have been following each other’s writings and thoughts for about two years. Though he tends to be immensely smarter than I, we share many ideas.
As we were leaving Educon2.0, on a whim, I asked Konrad what time he flew out Monday. Turned out he wasn’t leaving until 7 pm.
Now, I’ll say this plainly, my idea was to invite him to sit in one some classes. “Can I teach your class?” he asked jokingly – I’m fairly certain it was jokingly.
I’m not one to pass up a good idea.
Monday, Konrad rocked the house.
From sharing his own experience with poetry as a student to calling a student up to create an improvised poem where she opened up in what many would consider a vulnerable way, Konrad rocked the house.
After having the class walk within one block in any direction of SLA and “zoom in on what’s important,” we all returned to SLA’s cafe and engaged in a discussion of poetry, revision, authorial choice, etc.
The thing that hit me was the fact it didn’t matter to Konrad that the students spread out to write whilst the rest of the class discussed. Those same students dropped into and out of the conversation as they heard something worth their attention.
Over lunch, with several members of the SLA faculty, we debriefed. One thread of the discussion was on the use of space within SLA. Our classrooms extend beyond their 4 conventional walls. On any given day, my students can be found in cubbies, nooks, offices, hallway tables and floors outside my room learning.
I know this isn’t unique. I’m glad it’s not. The thing that struck me about the goings on during Konrad’s lesson and the thoughts batted about during lunch, were the commonalities in our styles, our approaches and beliefs.
This speaks to my and Chris‘ contention that SLA is not unique. Chris said at Sunday’s panel discussion that we sadly rare, but I’m not certain that is true either. We know how to connect, how to tell our story, how to engage with other like-minded individuals, and we’re learning how to do each of those things more effecitvely. Our drive to tell our story may be the rarity. I have to believe that great things are happening in many classrooms and schools around the world; they just don’t know how to talk about it yet.
What happened Monday was a first for me. Try it. Find a teacher in your network and invite them to teach your class. This could be via skype, via chat, via ustream, whatever method you choose. And, if I am part of your network, I offer this open invitation – come teach my class.

Dr. Spencer Wells, Explorer in Residence at NG, heads Human Genographic Project

Goal is to answer the simple question of where people come from. Polled immigrant students on where their parents came from. How different are we, really?
Population geneticist – field trying to figure out the answer to that question.
How do you explain the patterns of human diversity?
Broken into sub-questions:
Are we, in fact, all related to each other?
how did we come to populate every corner of the globe and generate the diversity we see?

Darwin’s second book, the Descent of man. In each great region of the world the living…
Darwin answered the question over a century ago, “We came from Africa.” But Darwin was talking about ancient ancestry. Didn’t address the issue of humans. He was talking about things that happened a long time ago.

Apes appear in Africa 23 million years ago.
Fist African exodus 15 million years ago.
We want to know about the origins of the human species, not apes.
Paleoanthropology – digging things up out of the ground and determining ancestry based on shape. Actually relies on very little data. Completely changes the interpretations of where we came from. Three species of hominids found in the same place. Were living in the same place in the same time. Don’t know which we actually descended from.
Usually use shape as the only data. Linneas first gave us binomial nomenclature.
The question of origin is really a genealogical question.
3 billion units of DNA in each human cell.
Nice job of comparing copying a book by hand to copying of genetic material.
When they get passed down through the generations, they become markers of descent.
People are 99.9% the same. comparing genographic information from five people to search for variation.
Imagine the DNA sequences are like real words. We’re looking at the variable information.
“FIX” and “CAT”
We count the number of changes to get us back to the common ancestor “DOG.”
Africans have been accumulating these mutational changes longer than any other group of people. This means Darwin was correct and humans started in Africa. Left Africa 60,000 years ago.
Showing a map of believed migratory paths.
Book, The Journey of Man and PBS film of the same title.
Genographic Project:

• Global DNA sampling
• Public participation
• A Legacy Fund

Regional offices with the goal of sampling indigenous people.
Between 100 and 300 million indigenous people in the world.
Can go on website and get yourself tested.
Net proceeds to legacy fund to help the indigenous tribes maintain educational and cultural programs.
Migrating from homelands to dominant cultures means a sacrifice of culture. About 6,000 languages spoken in the world today. Maybe only 500-600 languages spoken by the end of the century.
Indigenous cultures tell us about natural sources for treatment medicines. Losing cultural knowledge means losing links to important information.
Participants get deeper knowledge.
Showing information from Miss Hull. Showing a map of the migration of Hull’s ancestors. Amazing. Her ancestors killed off the Neanderthals. Traced back to a single female ancestor, most successful female group.
Q&A:
Evolved more in the last 10,000 years than we did in the prev. 100,000.
We will be giving up hunter gatherers because of globalization.
Science and Religion: As a scientist, you have to stay away from religion and be as objective as you can. Average Brazilian has no idea what their ancestry is.
Are we turning back into monkeys? No  evidence we are devolving.
Interesting question to end on.

Image Credit: http://einside.kent.edu/files/Feb192007/spencerwellscrop.jpg

Our 9th Graders are working on fractured fairy tales for their benchmark. Last night’s homework was to complete their rough drafts. Because these will be incorporated into children’s picture books, there’s a word limit of 500. It does an English teacher’s heart good to have students complaining they absolutely cannot write anything under 596 words.
In an effort to stem the onset of AEP (Adolescent Editing Phobia), I’m turning back to my roots – my college roots.
There were a few things I garnered from my formal college education, truly a few. One of them was comparative adverbial forms such as, “He slowed down more slowly than she did.” The other was from Professor Bob Broad – The Writer’s Memo.
I remember writing my first memo in Broad’s class. I remember thinking it was a complete waste of time. I remember getting my draft back with memo and comments and realizing I had just learned something about editing.
Today, my 9th graders will be turning in their rough drafts, writing their memos and trading papers. I’m hoping for goodness. I realize not every student is going to get as much out of the writers memo as I did. Still, I’m hoping it will be a start to a larger conversation over what it takes to truly get worthwhile peer review happening on a draft.
If not, I’ll move on to comparative adverbial phrases.
More later.

Image credit: http://flickr.com/photos/skylover/455669442/

Blogged with Flock

My 2.0 tools are running into Beta problems.
Currently, my tenth graders are working on creating podcasts in the vein of “This American Life” by interviewing and recounting the stories of people they may or may not know around the theme of sacrifice. This all ties back to the plight of Janie from Zora Neal Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God.
We spent days listening to stories and watching some superb material from Current posted on Youtube where Ira Glass explains storytelling. We deconstructed, timelines were created, and now…
A handful of students are creating some superb content. The majority look at me in class as though I’m completely unreasonable not lower my expectations.
The thing is, my frustration comes from my inability to take them any further in the process. At some point, I have to say, “That’s all the scaffolding I can provide.” My frustration comes from giving them all the tools I can to help them succeed and then having to step back. My frustration comes from realizing I can’t actually do the work for them and achieve the ultimate goal.
Many of my students have decided their success depends on an external locus of control. Mainly, this happens when they come to the portion where they must edit the material they’ve collected. As much as I warned, (and it often included much failing about whilst speaking) many of the students approached editing as though it were an afterthought. This is not at all unlike their approach to editing in the writing process. Unfortunately they come to the rather stark realization that this whole process takes supreme amounts of focus. At that point, any number of reasons are batted about as to why they cannot complete the project.
One class’ audio is due tomorrow. I’m not sure what to expect.
The question that circles in my head is what can be done? This is not a new problem – for me or any educator. And so, here’s the point of reflection, what’s to be done?
If nothing else, the situation is a lovely example of the fact it’s not the tools that get kids to succeed.
And then…
As I finished typing the last sentence a student walked in to ask where he needed to return the Snowball mic he had been using. The student had been working for two-and-a-half hours to translate an interview he’d done with his father about the decision to move his family from Bangladesh 5 years ago and the effect it had on the student.
Mind you, this is a student I’ve seen limited academic work from thus far, mainly because the academic vocabulary develops so much more slowly than the conversational vocabulary. He’s here, two-and-a-half hours after school ended. That’s never happened with a traditional writing assignment.
Maybe I’m not doing everything right, but maybe I’m doing something right.
More later.

Image from http://flickr.com/photos/perikita/141716937/

My inbox held this message last night:

I’d forgotten I’d signed up for an invite to Pownce a little over a month ago. In fact, I’d forgotten what it was. Given the pace at which tools hit the web, I’m hesitant to try many things out. Pownce wins.

Think of it as “Twitter on steroids” as Marcie said. The setup is similar, but it’s also ready with a desktop app that runs on Adobe AIR.

The big draw for me is the range of tools Pownce brings to the table:

• No 140-character limit which was cute in the beginning, but frustrating when I need to say something more intricate.
• 10 MB file transfer capabilities (100 MB if you pony up the $20/yr. for a pro account)
• Link posting capabilities (I know this is easy in twitter, but it’s still nice.)
• Event posting capabilities.

Now, I’m also a fan of the little things. A person’s Pownce profile page will also hold contact info. from pretty much any social networking, IM or web-based presence you can think of. It’s a one-stop shop to look at a person’s online footprint and has already proved itself helpful in tracking down a friend’s info.

So, I’ve a few invites left for Pownce for those who are interested (It’s still in Beta, so admission is invite-only). As soon as the network’s big enough, I’ll be deleting my twitter account. Yeah, that’s how much I believe in it.

It will be interesting to see if/how soon this app gets snatched up by the likes of Google, Myspace,  Facebook or the like.

Back in the classroom after a week in Long Beach working with the Freedom Writers Foundation to engage, enlighten and empower a group of 30 educators from across the country. It was my first extended absence from SLA, and I wasn’t sure how things would play out with my sub.
Moodle was helpful in automating my class, but the substitute was, shall we say, “colorful.”
While that could be seen as working for me in that my students heralded my return, the loss of face time, of structure, of concrete learning in my absence was worrisome.
While I’m uncertain of the degree to which I should accept the truthfulness of their statements, my students reported the substitute teacher said that iPods were outlawed in the city of Philadelphia, that working in groups was not allowed (I left a group assignment and outlined it as such in my lesson plans) and that moodle was off limits.
I hate leaving my kids with anyone else. It comes with the vibe of teaching the “Classroom of Love.” Still, I should be able to. The tools exist. In many lessons, I approach the goal of facilitating self-directed learning over simply teaching.
Why, then, does leaving the room to a substitute create the havoc it does? The substitute teacher was a former full-time educator, she has had her own classroom. As such, the execution of the lesson plan should have been simple and effective. Though across the country, I was still facilitating. And yet.
The system was broken somewhere. That’s my initial response. Further consideration pushes me to think that perhaps the teacher, the actual person, is of more importance than thought. The tools, the collaboration, the self-direction – all tied up with the presence of the teacher.
Is this true? Poke holes.
More later.

A classroom pushes upon a teacher a daily, sometimes hourly, choice – say what my big boy brain knows is right or hand control over to 5-year-old me.
One of what I hope are a multitude of reasons I am entrusted with the growth and development of young minds is my proclivity to listening to my big boy brain. Mocking a student’s ideas would undermine what we’re (teachers and students) all in the classroom to do – build, challenge and support. It would also invalidate whatever community or trust has been created in the classroom.
The same is to be said of a faculty meeting. We’re in the room to improve how we put our axioms into practice. Again, the big boy brain is the tool of choice. Tearing down a colleague’s idea in a way that also calls into question the integrity or ability of that colleague would open the door to me teaching in isolation – and not by choice.
I preface with these statements because it gets to the meat of what’s been troubling me about James Farmer’s post “A Con-Job?” Farmer takes issue with the axioms on which EduCon 2.0 is built. More specifically, he seems to take issue with the semantics of those axioms.
Though EduCon is to take place at my school, I’ve little interest in arguing for or against Farmer’s thinking (others are involved in that discussion). My interest is really in the tone of the post.
It’s a cat post. It’s talking about someone and then pretending you weren’t when they walk up. Most importantly, it’s not helpful. That’s what gets stuck in my craw. Farmer’s tone is one of degradation. It does not strike the reader as a post interested in discourse, but of one interested in disarming. Were a colleague to “poke holes” in an argument of mine or of a peer using words and phrases like “codswaddle” and “No shit, Sherlock” the conversation would be over. Though it could be argued an axiom should make one respond with such an Arthur Conan Doylian invocation of the vernacular.
It could be argued the post was not meant for discussion, but then why choose a global forum?
It could be argued that Farmer was unaware of the tone of the post. This is unlikely from someone whose own axiom states:

“Too often we hold back users through unnecessary constraints when we could be encouraging expression, exploration and achieving far greater success through incorporating subversion.”

An “unnecessary constraint” exists in Farmer’s tone. Rather than welcoming forthright debate, he chooses language that operates more on a level of mockery. Any hopes of an elevated argument are lost in his eliciting of ire and emotion. This is bad design. To be sure, Farmer has incorporated subversion, so long as there’s such a thing as self-subversion.

So, a bit’s happened since last I posted. If you permit, a bit on my personal life. I’ll get back to the professional hobnobbery soon.

Three weeks ago, I received an e-mail, now I live in Philadelphia and start tomorrow with the gang at the Science Leadership Academy. The last few weeks have been some of the most trying and growth forcing of my life. Tonight, I sit in the living room of a new colleague who is giving me shelter after my initial hopes of an apartment fell through waiting for the first home-cooked meal in over three weeks.
Tomorrow, I visit the wonderful people of the central office of the Philadelphia public schools and work out exactly how I’ll be securing my emergency certification.
After the day is done, I’ll be signing a lease and moving in to a new apartment.
The process of packing up my life, bidding farewell to my Floridian friends, telling my students, working out out-of-state certification, has been trying.
With even the little perspective that one day in Philly has offered, it is a grand and exciting adventure that I’ve embarked upon.
New students, new peers, new tools, a new city (I’m all about listing at the moment) – they await me on this new horizon.
One of the aspects that interests me is the continued communication that will happen between my students in Florida and I. Through this blog, my teacher myspace page, e-mail and ANGEL, we will be able to participate and educate one another from afar. I don’t have a clear picture of what that will entail, but I know I look forward to the new lexicon to be formed by all parties.
For now, I prepare for the coming day and credit my arrival for the good fortune of the Phillies this afternoon. I wonder if I can take them all the way to the World Series.

After a week and a half of engaging kenesthetic activities. I changed directions with my students today. We talked. That was it. We talked. They wrote, they thought and we talked.
The opening question – their bellwork, what got the ball rolling – was a simple query, “Is diversity a good thing?”
Underneath, on the board, read the parenthetical note, “If you do not know the definition of ‘diversity,’ look in your dictionary.”
Let me say this before moving on – they actually looked in the dictionary. Even better, at tables where both students were stymied as to the denotative meaning of the word, I watched as one table partner waited patiently (not getting off task) for the other person to finish with their Webster’s work so they could have a full understanding. It really is an amazing thing to see such dedication to getting it right.
As is oft my role, when they had written their initial thoughts, I played devil’s advocate depending on the majority’s opinion. It really was some fantastic discussion.
At the end of 7th period, Jamie announced to the class, “This class made me think some things that I didn’t think before.” Any educator knows it’s not often that you get a child to realize, let alone pronounce, a paradigm shift.
One of the places a few of the discussions wound around to was shoes. I polled the class on an acceptable maximum amount for an 8th grader to spend on a pair of shoes. We had been talking footwear as an example of following the crowd rather than one’s one drum. Jordan’s were the favorite though none of my students was alive to see MJ play live. The mean acceptable price was around $110.
We talked about why brand names were “important” and whether or not acquiring one’s clothing from Wal-Mart was a mark of shame. The whole thing set me to thinking about where to take the discussion next. Not with every class, just the ones who showed interest. After a little reflection, here’s what I’ve got:

1. Each student picks a country (most likely a Third World counry).
2. They use the CIA World Factbook to find: children per capita, average annual income per capita, possibly mortality rate per capita
3. Each student then finds the retail price for each item it took to prepare him/her for school that day. (This would include hygeine products, et al.)
4. The student finds the total cost of being him/her and multiplies it x7 to get the cost per week.
5. The student then compares the findings.

The question is – what do they do with this info.? I’m sure it will be eye-opening, but what real purpose can they put it to? Where do they go after they realize “what it takes to be them?”
Anxious for thoughts and suggestions. Anyone have a class they’d like to have compare themselves to mine?
More later.