Tag: beginning

148/365 Let’s Begend

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I’ve been on the road the last five days, crossed three time zones, and had innumerable conversations with educators of all stripes.

As it sit in the Minneapolis airport, waiting for my flight to board, this feels like the right time to start to reflect on the slam of excellent idea exchanges I’ve had the good fortune to experience over the last several days.

My handy dandy notebook is full of seeds of posts, so I’m expecting this space to be informed by those seeds for the next few entries. I hope you’ll join in my reflection and participate in the conversation. My understanding is always more fully formed when informed by the voices of others.

What strikes me now, though, is the difficulty I’ve had in the last few evenings trying to get my thinking out as I experience things.

More than once, I’ve sat down with the intention of capturing at least a piece of the day’s thinking, only to be confounded by the notion that I was still in the experience, still living the things about which I wanted to write.

The will was there, and the head space was lacking.

Each time, I started to wonder about how this feeling is embodied in the experiences of students across our learning spaces each day.

A math student is cold called amid a lesson to explain his thinking and freezes because his grain was busy buffering the new material and constructing the connections to what he’d learned previously.

The history student finds herself up against a deadline to write a reflective blog post about her work curating primary sources for a display to be experienced by younger students only to find that she’s more consumed with determining how best to achieve flow in the presentation than she is able to coherently spew her thoughts online for others to read.

In the same way that learning must happen in its own time and students must have the space to connect ideas and build artifacts of learning, we must remember that the artifacts of reflection (the metacognitive learning) must also come at its own space.

I will need a few days to process some of the more powerful conversations of the last week. Some require distance of time and space before they can be externalized.

This I will take with me as I help others in their learning. In the classroom, a frequent practice is to ask students to reflect on their learning immediately after a project has been completed or an assignment has been submitted.

Beginning reflection, I’m understanding, required more distance than our immediate or arbitrary classroom deadlines often allow.

Let’s begend.

90/365 Can Caring Change Classrooms #YearAtMH

I’ve been asked by Sam Chaltain to contribute to the conversation over at EdWeek around the series A Year at Mission Hill. I’ll be offering a take on each episode and interpreting some of the research that might be relevant and trying to make it practical. This piece was originally posted at EdWeek.

Beginnings are wonderful things, and Episode 2 of A Year at Mission Hill does well to capture the wonder and possibility inherent in the beginning of most school years.

Some years into my career, a veteran teacher was leading an introduction for all of the novice teachers at our school. She shared this piece by Irene McIntosh documenting the “ride” of first-year teachers. By the end of the introduction, I’d clipped the graphic timeline from the article and posted it on the bulletin board by my desk. While it claimed to be the timeline of a new teacher, I’d experienced enough first and last days to know the cycle repeats itself no matter whether it is a teacher’s first or fourteenth year in the classroom.

It was later in my career that I encountered the work of Nel Noddings and her study of the Ethic of Care in her book Caring. It seems such a simple thing, and if you’d asked me at the time, I would have told you that’s what I’d been doing each day. I taught because I cared. Throughout her book, though, Noddings frames caring in a different light, and it’s one that’s important for any teacher hoping to maintain a sense of both anticipation and rejuvenation throughout their career.

Noddings describes caring as a specific relationship between two people – one that is caring, and one that is cared for. These two engage in a caring relation when the caring listens to and attempts to understand the needs of the cared for, and moves to satisfy those needs. The bond is established when the cared for recognizes what is taking place as caring.

This is key, and it’s evident throughout our observations of the classrooms at Mission Hill. It is not enough, not completely enough, to say we are caring for another person. That person must recognize what is happening as caring for the relation to be established.

How often have we teachers known the pain of caring the hell out of a student only for that student to ignore those acts and walk away? Humility lives in caring. It is the humility of listening to students and attempting to move our actions to meet their actual needs, not necessarily what we’ve identified as their needs. This is difficult.

Noddings puts it best: “The one-caring reflects reality as she sees it to the child. She accepts him as she hopes he will accept himself — seeing what is there, considering what might be changed, speculating on what might be. But the commitment, the decision to embrace a particular possibility, must be the child’s.”

Again, this is difficult work.

It is difficult, and it is deeply fulfilling. In that fulfillment we find the passion described by Mission Hill teacher Jenerra Williams as she advocates knowing each of her students well and thereby wanting to advocate for them.

This is the incalculable payback for those of us who teach. It is a reciprocity of care, and for many years it was what carried me through from August to June. It is not a reciprocity in the sense that we should expect our students to care for us in the same way that we care for them. It is more of a deep noticing and appreciation of being cared for that can energize us and that leads us to care again in the future. As Noddings writes, “In considering education, then, we have to ask how best to cultivate the moral sentiments and how to develop communities that will support, not destroy, caring relations.”

If we can do these things, then it is possible the nadirs in energy that can follow a bright beginning will not be so low.

Things I Know 197 of 365: There are two kinds of angry in the classroom

To give anything less than your best is to sacrifice the gift.

– Steve Prefontaine

Recently, I’ve started reading Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.

I don’t know that I like Murakami, but I’m enjoying his book. I’m a social animal and he is not. He speaks highly of his comfort being away from people. While I enjoy my times of solitude, I feed on social interaction like some weird Buffy villain.

Something Murakami writes, with which I agree, is the following:

When I’m criticized unjustly (from my viewpoint at least), or when someone I’m sure will understand me doesn’t, I go running for a little longer than usual. By running longer, it’s like I can physically exhaust that portion of my discontent. It also makes me realize again how weak I am, how limited my abilities are. I become aware, physically, of these low points.

John Spencer has been writing a wonderful series of posts for new teachers – a collection of truths he wish he’d known or someone had told him before he entered the classroom.

He crowd sourced ideas online before embarking on this journey and the question of what I wish I’d known has been ruminating with me since he asked it.

My answer at the time and one of my answers now is embodied in Murakami’s words.

It was a doctrine of my classroom for years before Chris gave it words when we were in a discussion one day.

There is a difference between teacher angry and real angry. Teacher angry is what you let them see. It is the verbal kick in the butt that shows you care. It comes from a place of personal control akin to a parent telling a child they aren’t angry, they are just disappointed.

Real angry comes from the part of your brain the Vulcans work to control and repress. It is the moment when what you want to say is “For the fortieth time, stop interrupting, you little shit!”

These moments are exceedingly rare. They are born of exhaustion, confusion and periodic realizations that you are a last front between an ignorant and an informed citizenry. These are the intermittent terrors of the first through 30th years in the classroom.

The best teachers I have ever known never gave wind of their anger. I have taught alongside those for whom I would make a voracious case for canonization.

The good teachers know the line between teacher angry and real angry. They leave the room when the darker parts of their humanity well up within them in moments of great frustration.

The others see no line. Teacher angry and real angry are interchangeable in their classrooms. I’ve only seen a few of them, but they’ve tarnished the shine of what it means to be a teacher each time I’ve encountered them.

Each time I’ve encountered them, I’ve taken it as a sign that I must pick up the load they gave up carrying.

When I started running in college, I took none of this with me when I went out on the trail. I carried other injustices, other moments that showed me the world was not as beautiful as I imagine it to be. I would run, as Murakami writes, to “exhaust that portion of my discontent.”

Now that I’m entangled in the lives of the children I’ve served, I find myself carrying the injustices inflicted on them. It’s not always teachers. Mostly, though, it is one adult or another from their lives.

I will always do all I can to make up for those who have let them down. Still, when I run, I often find myself pushing myself because of what the world is not and what I would like it to be.