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Things I Know 91 of 365: I should be simpler

We have spent too much money we don’t have on stuff we don’t truly value and it has left us a huge mess. Call it the three-legged stool of American-style consumerism: debt, dissatisfaction, and debris.

– Dave Bruno

I’ve been thinking a lot about less lately.

Three weeks ago, I was in Barnes & Noble waiting for a friend when I saw Dave Bruno’s book The 100 Things Challenge. Briefly scanning the book, it struck me as interesting. Thinking that buying the physical object felt contrary to the spirit of the Challenge as I understood it from the book cover, I pulled my Kindle out of my bag and ordered the book on Amazon.

The short version is that Bruno spent the better part of a year pairing down his possessions to under 100 things and then spent a full year never owning more than 100 things.

I struggled as I read the book. Over and over I sneaked into the back room of my brain to ask myself if buying the book meant I too needed to undertake such a challenge. That felt like the case. Why spend the time a reflective how-to manual on minimalist living if I had no intent of living minimally myself?

It started to feel like literary voyeurism.

Because I have a basement that houses a portion of my possessions, I know I own more than I should.

While I consider myself globally aware of what Bruno calls American-style consumerism, that awareness doesn’t always stop me from consuming, only feeling guilty later.

A quick scan of my latest bank statement shows the purchase of only two tangible non-food items in the last month – a pack of ink pens and a new set of headphones for running. So, while I might not be down for the buying of stuff lately, I need only look around my house to realize the too much of the stuff I have.

I love the T-Shirts of threadless.com. When the good folks a the Chicago-based company send me an e-mail alerting me to their latest sale, I often find myself browsing their inventory and confirming my purchase unthinkingly. No one should own as many T-Shirts as I.

That gets me to the other idea with which I wrestled whilst reading.

This is all an intensely First World Problem.

I’m angry and ashamed that I live a life that prompted me to buy a book (even electronically) about how to own less stuff.

I’m out of town this weekend. Throughout the next few weeks, via donations, eBay and craigslist, I’ll be minimizing.

I’ll be asking myself what I need, what I don’t and what I didn’t remember I had.

I’ll also be reading more about minimalism. It’s an idea that makes sense to me. I’m not sure whether this makes sense, but having less stuff makes me think I’ll have more to give.

Who wants a T-Shirt?

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.

Enter #EduConText

Teachers should create. Coversations can lead to tremendous bursts of creation and excitement. Capturing creation through writing and returning to it later is how innovative ideas are refined.

Enter #EduConText.

Each day leading up to EduCon, Bud Hunt and I will write about some of our thinking surrounding selected EduCon sessions.  We’ll also share some questions to prompt your own thinking and inquiry around the ideas we see that might arise in the session.  There are plenty of fine sessions at the conference.  We’ll pick a few of them.  You choose some others.

#EduConText is about moving into EduCon conversations with the same critical lenses we help our students refine each day. Because a rah rah chorus of excitement and enthusiasm isn’t really going to do much to make our schools better places.

And, of course, the Internet is a free place. For now.  So you should feel free to write along with us.  Prompt us.  Share your thinking.  Preflect on the conversations you’re planning on joining. Dig in.

During EduCon, we’ll be supplying some writing prompts to help attendees, both virtual and face to face, archive their written thinking around the conversations in which they take part.  Because your learning is worth remembering.

After EduCon, we’ll encourage folks to set writing goals for themselves that will allow them to reflect on how they incorporate new ideas into their practice and around documenting what they want to be sure to keep.

How can you participate?

Simply add the tag “#EduConText” to your blog, wiki, and twitter posts (or any other kind of post). From there, we’ll archive the tag and see what we build.  Mostly, we hope that #EduConText is a gentle reminder to write and write often about what you’re seeing, hearing and thinking.

Worth doing, right?

Let’s get to it.

Classy: Communal notes in gDocs

As I’ve written, Google Apps for Education is truly changing my practice this year.

We’re studying Jung’s idea of archetypes as they pertain to literature in my Sexuality & Society in Literature class. For an introduction, today, we read a simple introduction.

While the students were reading, I took my notes on key information and put them in a new gDoc.

On the side, I included comments on the ideas found in the notes. (We’ve been working on summarizing before offering up commentary.)

When the class was done reading, I had them close their computers and share their initial thinking on the ideas from the write-up. It was slow going. One of those moments where I can see the bigger picture and am thereby inherently more excited about the ideas we’re investigating.

When it felt like the conversation had reached critical mass, I moved to the screen and pulled up my gDoc of notes.

I pointed out that I’d included the title of the article (linked to the original text), author information, my name and notes on the key ideas, and notes containing my thinking and questions.

From there, I set them free to find more information with the directive of “build notes about archetypes in literature that work to answer our questions.”

The link to the editable gDoc was posted on the class moodle page. They logged in and started building notes.

As they built, I asked questions via the commenting tool to prod their individual investigation.

In the doc’s chat sidebar, I asked questions of the entire class to make sure our notes took on greater breadth.

Soon, the class will be writing essays with the help of their notes. Because of what they’re building, they’ll have the benefit of many minds as points of reference.

Next semester, when I’m teaching Storytelling, I’ll be able to produce the gDoc to introduce archetypes in conjunction with The Hero’s Journey.

Here’s what I didn’t do:

  • I didn’t build a wiki. I’m not interested in worrying about architecture, and a wiki would have required more click-throughs than seemed logical.
  • I didn’t have them blog. Though I’m making the work public here, the notes were meant for in-class use. Additionally, I wanted everything to live in the same place. While a common tag would have allowed the gathering of the posts, it wouldn’t serve the purpose of notes.
  • I didn’t use a discussion forum. The goal was putting the information in one place and allowing for the common culling of ideas. A discussion forum would have, again, required clicks. As the ideas within the students’ courses found connections at different points, threading discussion would have limited the intertextual connectivity of the reading.
  • I didn’t use guided notes. With the goal of exploration and investigation of dynamic concepts, guided notes would have put the onus on me and prevented one student’s uncovering of the periodic table of archetypes.

Though not perfected, this approach will be one I take again.

Things I Know 9 of 365: Words have power

Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can kill my soul.

Leaving the locker room after P.E. in the ninth grade, Brian and Travis would call me faggot under their breaths.  I wasn’t sure how they could tell, but I learned to be ashamed of what they saw. Though I made sure to avoid P.E. for the rest of high school, I carried remnants of their words and the shame it caused for many years.

When my sister Rachel was in middle school, she came home in tears one day because her teacher refused to acknowledge that I was Rachel’s brother. “Half-brother,” the teacher insisted to my sister who could not understand why this woman would be so cruel.

December 18, the United States Senate debated the DREAM Act. Those opposed to its passage spoke in angry and fearful voices of the threat those affected would pose to our country. Casting about blanket statements, they maligned my friends and my students. They put politics ahead of the future of children.

In 1884 Mark Twain published a book. Originally intended as a sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, this new book changed course around “Chapter 7” and became an imperfect navigation of Twain’s attempt to reconcile the slavery he witnessed as a child and the abolitionist views of his childhood.

As it is as imperfect as anything a person can create, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been the cause of much controversy as of late because it also carries within it one of the great imperfections of America’s past. Some would remove the remembrance of that past rather than see it as a signpost denoting the road ahead.

That road was lit by the terrible light of tragedy Saturday as a gunman opened fire at a Tucson supermarket causing a grief the extent of which we will not know for some time.

If reports are to be believed, the gunman was heeding the words of those seeking power. And, while I need to believe their intent was not to incite violence, I cannot yet forgive their ignorance that their words carried power.

It was the terrible power with which Brian and Travis were experimenting in ninth grade.

It was the extraordinary power my sister’s teacher unknowingly wielded in her determination to be right.

It was the backwardly fearful power with which the Senate cut short the dreams of those striving to make a life in a country of their fate if not their choice.

It was the hateful power Twain chronicled when he invoked one of America’s most poisonous words.

This was the violent power wielded by those who would have power without recognizing the catastrophic effect potential in that which they already command.

In the intervening hours, much has been written about the harmful political rhetoric. We are fooling ourselves if we do not concede government’s representation of its citizens ends with the casting of votes. This rhetoric lives in our schools, our businesses, our friendships and anywhere else words hold sway.

Tomorrow, I will return to my classroom and attempt to further fortify a green zone of words with hopes that I am preparing those in my care to act as ambassadors of speech, using words to build while ever-mindful of their ability to destroy.

Classy: Long-form journalism, writing in digital margins and class discussion

A few months ago, my friend Max and another friend of his launched a site called longform.org.

A week ago, Ben tweeted out a link to reframeit.com.

I noted each site in the cache of my mind as something that could be useful in class.

I like the cache because it’s a place where ideas can marinate. (Pardon the mixed metaphor.)

My G11 students are completing a benchmark project right now. It’s one of those pieces where they have a bunch to work on, and we hand over class time to that collaboration. Doing only that can be monotonous.

To break the monotony this week, we’re playing with longform.org and reframeit.com.

Last week, I ask each team of kids (they sit in tables of four) to head to longform an find a piece of journalism they thought would hold the class’ attention and produce thoughtful conversation.

The directions were simple:

  1. Work with your team to come to unanimous approval of the article you’d like to lead discussion on.
  2. Tell me.
  3. Using reframeit.com, read the article and draft discussion points and questions.
  4. Prepare to lead discussion for 35 minutes of one class period.

That’s it.

The discussions and debates about which articles to select were as interesting as the comments that started showing up in the digital margins. One team of all girls made it halfway through an article they agreed was highly interesting, but too mature for some of their classmates. I’d made the same judgment when they told me what they’d selected, but they needed to come to that conclusion on their own. Choice means realizing when you’ve made a bad one. They shifted and all is well.

Over the next two weeks, we’ll have a shared reading experience of some amazingly diverse and high-quality long-form journalism. The students will collaborate on how they interpret and question what they’re reading. The class will build their abilities to converse about a given text and build comprehension, analysis and intertextual reading.

My role will be that of a reader and thinker.

When I showed the class reframeit.com the first time, all I did was give them time to play and told them we’d be sharing our first impressions at the end of play time. Several times, their evaluation danced around the idea that they could see it as possibly useful if they had a clear purpose for using it. Its existence wasn’t inherently useful.

That’s what cache marinading is for.

Sec. Duncan: Brandon and Devon have some lingering questions.

We had the opportunity to take about 40 students to a Town Hall Meeting on education hosted by A&E, Comcast, The School District of Philadelphia and Temple University today.

Rather than posting my thoughts, I was curious what the experience brought out in our students. Here’s what Brandon had to say –

Brandon’s thoughts on the town hall

When he publishes the blog he mentions at the end of the interview, I’ll be certain to push it here.

UPDATE: One of the other students, Devon, who attended today published this to her tumblr. It’s reposted here with permission:

So I went to this thing with school today.. It was about education and how we can teach better. The only people who actually were able to talk were the students.

I thought it was going to be a whole bunch of high school students asking some very important people questions.. but instead there were college students asking some very silly questions towards one specific person. My schools really different from other schools, and even though we can be intimidating, we ask really good questions about things.

Two people from our school were able to ask questions, and really interesting questions that could have been turned into a conversation if they wanted it to.. but the people who were on the panel decided to completely avoid those and talk about something else. Needless to say it was REALLLLLY aggravating.

Honestly I think they just didn’t want to think about an answer, and even though they think we’re doing things right with education.. they don’t want our opinions on things.. What the heck is up with that!?

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Talk TO me

To the “superintendents, chief executives and chancellors responsible for educating nearly 2 1/2 million students in America”:

Hi.

I’m a teacher.

Please talk to me and not about me.

I understand we’ve been talking about each other for a while, and I’d like to work on ending this game of phone tag.

We keep leaving messages for one another in public places and, I don’t know about you, but I’m getting a little embarrassed. It seems people are starting to look down on my profession.

Weird, right? Especially since you keep talking about how important my profession is.

I hate to say it, but I think some of the things you’ve been saying may have played a role in that.

You’ll pardon me for saying it doesn’t feel as though you care very much for teachers. If I’m wrong, I’ll happily await the data showing facts to the contrary. Just leave a comment with a link, and I’ll check it out.

I wanted to thank you, though, for drawing attention to the importance of teacher quality. I’ve been working on mine since I entered the classroom in 2003.

From in-services at the end of school days to sometimes weeks-long trainings in the summer to attending professional conferences, I’ve really attempted to learn as much as possible.

That’s just the formal stuff. Since right around the time it launched, I’ve been connecting with teachers across the world through twitter and other social media tools to help me workshop ideas for helping my kids learn. Are you on twitter? If you are, follow me.

Plus, I’ve been using my blog as a space to play with ideas before implementing them in the classroom as well as a place to share the things that work so others can take them an build off of them.

Oh, also, I’ve connected with a couple of non-profit groups nationally and internationally that work to help teachers be better, well, teachers.

This summer, I even started work on my Master’s degree. It’s not required or anything, but I thought it would help me teach better.

Anyway, that’s what I’ve been up to.

What about you?

What kind of learning opportunities have you been taking advantage of? I’ve seen a lot of stuff in the news about what I should be doing in my classroom and what we should be doing in my school to improve learning, so I was just wondering where you’ve been learning.

If you’re looking to start an advisory board, I’d love to join.

I haven’t seen you in my school lately, but you’re welcome to stop by. I haven’t cleared it with my principal, but I’m sure he’d be fine with it.

We’re used to visitors from all over the world, so you don’t have to worry.

I don’t want to make it sound like we’re the only ones who would welcome you.

In fact, I’ve been writing a bit recently about some other teachers across the country who have taught me quite a bit.

You might be surprised to hear about it, but quite a few teachers are doing some great things in their classrooms. If you’ve got a feed reader, go ahead and subscribe. I’ll be writing about more teachers soon.

In fact, I know at least one teacher in every state personally. You should too; they’re doing some amazing work.

Hey, I wanted to tell you not to be that upset. I know several studies have come out talking about how important my job is and how important my principal’s job is, and I know it’s got to be difficult that not much has been written about how important your job is or the great changes you’ve made in students’ lives.

Again, if you want to get that message out there, leave a comment. I’ll tweet it out.

Oh, something else. And, I’m midwestern, so I’ll have to admit to being a little uncomfortable broaching this topic so publicly, but I’ve got some questions about money.

First of all, I know the government has allocated quite a bit of money to helping schools and districts improve teaching and learning.

I was just wondering why nobody checked in with me or my colleagues about how we could use that money to shape lives and help our kids. Now, if you e-mailed me about this, I’ll have to admit I didn’t get it. I even checked my spam folder.

One other thing about money.

Quite a bit of talk has been batted around lately about the idea of merit pay.

I’d like to decline.

It’s just that I don’t want my kids thinking I’m teaching them stuff so I can get more money. I’ve got this thing going where I help them come up with questions about their lives and their worlds and then help them to work to find answers to those questions.

I worry that, if they found out about merit pay, they’d start to wonder if I was just teaching them stuff so I could get paid more rather than because I wanted them to be thoughtful and caring citizens. I’m sure it’s not what you meant, but I’d rather not have my kids stop trusting me.

Plus, added bonus, they’re already doing well on the tests you’d probably use to help determine how much I’d be paid, so that’s taken care of.

Right, enough talk about money.

If I could just make one more point before signing off. Actually, I made it before. Please talk to me and not about me. You see, in all this talk about how important my job is, I’m starting to get the feeling you don’t think I’m that important.

Reduction in Force (and Spirit)

When I ask her how much of her information I can share, Megan says, “There’s a part of me that says put it out there, but there’s a part of me that is a little more concerned than I’d admit about losing a job.”

The thing is, Megan’s already lost her job – 3 times.

A teacher in a district in the Southwest, Megan has been RIF’d (reduction in force) three times in her 7 years as a teacher.

Megan explains the process to me.

In March or April, principals deliver form letters to teachers’ classrooms letting them know RIF will be announced.

“People have been pretty understanding,” she says, “Still, it’s a form letter.”

Each time Megan has been RIF’d, she’s been hired back, learning in June or July where she’ll be teaching and signing a contract near the end of August.

“When I got the last one,” she tells me, “I put a piece of red duct tape on it and wrote something like, ‘This is like a spring day. In just a minute it will change.'”

It did.

Megan is teaching at the same school she started at – sort of. It was combined with one of the other schools in the city this year, so it’s not quite the same.

Luckily, Megan got laid off from the now-defunct school as well, so she’s in the unique position of knowing and having worked with both faculties.

While she’s talking, there’s a hopefulness you wouldn’t expect from someone who’s had this experience.

“One thing that’s good is that I’ve been able to work with a variety of different teachers,” Megan says.

At the same time, the reality of the situation is difficult to ignore. She describes the faculty as existing in two separate campes. “It’s not very connected. There’s all these fractures in something that could be built with a very strong foundation.”

Adding to the tectonic stress is the budget freeze in Megan’s district.

“We actually took a hit if you look at the numbers and not how they phrase everything.”

“I think it’s difficult for teachers to continually build rapport with admin too. It’s hard for people to start new programs if they don’t feel like they’ll be supported financially or professionally. If they don’t feel like it’s going to last more than a year, people don’t want to put energy in.”

She talks of running into two former students at the grocery store. She’d thought, before getting RIF’d, that she would be teaching them again this year. The students have been forced  to build new connections with their new teacher, and Megan say’s it’s not going particularly well.

“We spent a lot of time building that classroom community,” she pauses, ” If I’d been able to work with them for two years, the strides we could have made with them as learners would be different than if we have to start over every year.”

Megan’s starting to feel the stress of the seemingly constant reshuffling as well.

I ask her, if the three notices haven’t put her off teaching, where she sees her breaking point. What would push her out of what she describes as her dream job?

“As they try to streamline things and make things more efficient and less costly, I feel like I have less freedom. When I feel like I don’t have the freedom or trust of my administrators to facilitate learning, then I’m going to have to go.”

She admits to having it easier than some, “My feelings would be very different if I had kids or a mortgage or giant amounts of debt to pay off.”

Though Megan says she stays in the community because, “I feel most at home and I feel as though my voice is most valid,” I have to worry that no one is stopping to listen to that voice or the voices of thousands of teachers like her.

Not broken.

Get in your seats.

Take out your books.

Get in your pods.

Matt hollers to his class of 9th grade English students.

They’re studying Homer’s Odyssey. Once in their pods, the students pull out permabound copies of the text littered with fluorescent sticky notes. The notes are covered in the scrawl of ninth-graders. Each one unique, but all of them somewhat crude and uncertain.

The pods are charged with discussing “Book III.”

“This book was awesome,” one student says when I ask what he thought of the chapter.

“It was boring,” said another.

“No it wasn’t!” shouts the first, “I don’t know why he doesn’t just say things more simply.”

Matt interrupts.

“What do all the characters have in common?”

A girl with a feathery voice raises her hand to answer.

Matt asks why King Nestor tells a long-winded story only to say that he does not know anything.

Hands shoot up.

“No, no, no. This is a question for your pods.”

The room is again engulfed in noise.

“Just so you know, Dawn is a god,” one student tells his group.

“This was a lot easier to understand than ‘Book II,'” another student says to hers.

Matt and the senior assigned to this class roam opposite sides of the room, checking in with the pods.

The senior is part of the school’s Student Assistant Teaching program. Now in it’s second year, the program matches seniors with the sections of lower-classmen to help with the class. More than 30 of the school’s grade 9-11 classes have SATs.

At the back of the room, an observer from one of the local universities discusses the reading with a pod seated in dirty, over-stuffed chairs Matt has pulled in to his room over his five years at the school. It’s the kind of furniture you wouldn’t want in your room, but would expect to find in an ad hoc dorm room.

Traveling around the room, Matt overhears a pod discussing the Spanish alphabet.

“We’re good, we’re good,” he yells, “First question in 45 seconds.”

The students hurry to their original seats.

“Only a pencil or pen and a piece of paper. Everything else, including your Odyssey book and your old quiz, away.”

In a little over a minute, the kids are ready.

“Forty-five seconds,” is one of those teacher time warps that’s been around for ages.

“Ladies and gentlemen, no talking,” Matt says as he connects his laptop to the digital projector in his room.

“This is from class,” he says of the question on the board.

The students use their “off” or non-writing hands to protect their answers.

Aside from the shuffling inherent in ninth-graders at the end of a school day, the room is silent.

On the second question, the student beside me is stumped. “Just keep putting words down there until you’ve got it,” Matt advises. To the rest of the class, he encourages, “Folks, leave no doubt. Just keep writing.” It’s the first lesson some of them are getting in the importance of trying above all else.

“Hands up for more time,” Matt says. A third of the room’s hands go up. “Ok.”

Each of the questions pulls from the content of the previous night’s reading. They’re comprehension questions.

Matt is checking to make certain his students are understanding the reading before they move to student-generated higher-level questions later in the class.

Interested more in activating the students’ knowledge than trapping them in the details, Matt offers hints and rephrases the questions for those with stunned surprise registering on their faces.

Five questions in, during the last academic class of the day, the students remain silent and focused ’til the end.

“Quiet. Quiet.” Matt says after the quizzes have been turned in. He polls their feelings:

  • Hands up, I’m totally a rock star and got them all right.
  • Hands up, I’m getting there.
  • Hands up, I’m halfway there.
  • Hands up – listen to all of this – I sat down with no distractions with my Odyssey book, with my pencil or pen and my stickie notes, spent at least 20 minutes or a half hour and focused on the book, wrote down questions I didn’t know, came to class, sat down with my pod and asked questions of every member of my pod and still didn’t get anything right.

With snickers, a few hands go up.

Matt asks the students if they notice they’re understanding the book more because he is reading it to them in class. Many say yes.

“That may be because you’re what kind of learner?”

“Audio,” they respond in chorus.

Matt clarifies, “Even when you get your laptops with the audio, that doesn’t mean you’ll automatically get it.”

“No matter what, every lunch period, the lit lab is open. Take your book and everything else and an English teacher and several other students are there to help you.”

He explains the school’s Lit Lab, run mainly by upper-classmen, is another on the long list of ways the school helps its students.

“It’s one more reason I don’t accept what?”

“Excuses,” the class responds in the weary voice that denotes they know he’s not kidding.

Matt refers to higher-order questions as “HOT questions” and tells the class it’s time to discuss them now.

Matt takes the students’ attention to a flashback within the book and walks them through some of the complexities of the text.

Pens and pencils scribble new notes on stickies.

A confused student raises her hand.

“Can you say that one more time, but in baby language, so I can understand it.”

“Sure,” Matt says, “But not in baby language. I’ll fix what I said.”

He grabs a marker too draw a map of events while the students help direct him.

Back in the book, Matt begins reading again. “You with me?” he asks.

The students are silent.

“Talk back to me. You with me?”

“Yes,” they respond.

With the basic plot outlined, Matt turns class over to the students and his SAT. “If you have any high-order thinking or HOT questions, ask them and then ask your classmates.”

Hands shoot up around the room.

As the students answer their classmates, they turn not to Matt, but to the student who owns each question to make eye contact in their attempts to answer.

If an answer doesn’t seem quite right, hands shoot up for course corrections.

In this classroom of students with IEPs and 504s and home lives their classmates might never understand, everyone is participating.

When the last student is called on to offer her question, a few side conversations have broken out.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Matt says, “Demand to be respected when you’re speaking.”

The student waits. The conversations stop. The question is asked.

By the clock, the class is over, but this last question has incited some disagreement in the class and the students make no movement to gather their things to leave.

“Take this sudden curiosity,” Matt says, “and read ‘Book IV.’ If, when you come in next week, and people are seeming like they read it, I will not give you a quiz.”

The deal made, Matt dismisses the students, “You’re beautiful. I’ll see you next class.”

And he did it all despite being in a public school, part of a union and having tenure.

I know. I didn’t think it could happen either.