Tag: teaching

The Forever Teacher

A regulation MLB baseball sits on my desk in a plexiglass cube. It is accompanied by a ticket stub from the game of its provinence – May 12, 2001 Reds vs. Astros, Cinergy Field, Aisle 105, Row 10, Seat 2.

I wasn’t at the game. I didn’t catch the ball, nor was it tossed to me by one of the players during batting practice.

The best of us realize the value of connectedness beyond the days when these young people are in our charge.

The ball has a signature on it. I don’t know how many times I’ve looked at it – Scooter Gennett #11. The S in Scooter is fashioned to look like a lightning bolt. The rest of the text is in the cursive of a young hand.

Scooter was 11 at the time. He’s 25 now and playing pro ball for the Milwaukee Brewers. When he handed me the cube at the end of my first year of teaching, he was just finishing 8th grade. The ball means something to me because it meant something to him and he handed it to me, I’ve always believed, to fill the space between us when our year as teacher and student ended and he headed off to his last four years before being a professional baseball player.

This ball has made 5 moves across as many states, and it lives near the box of things I’ll grab on my way out of the house in the event of a fire.

Scooter, or Ryan as I insisted on calling him, gives me the tremendous gift of knowing where he is and what he’s up to by way of being in the public spotlight.

This past weekend, I got to share a couple of meals with former students while I was in Philadelphia for ISTE. A recent education grad, an employee of the city, another college grad on his way to a pottery studio to make his art, a film-turned-communication major, and a neurobiology major who might want to be an engineer or a dentist.

We sat at these meals and I shared as briefly as possible what I’ve been up to since we’d last met. Then, I got to find out who they’d become in these newest versions of themselves. They are beautiful. They are tremendous. They give me hope for the People we will become – together.

I don’t know what it was like to teach students with whom I couldn’t connect after they’d left my classroom. I find it difficult to imagine a world where I don’t get to see status updates of their growings and mistakes, their discoveries and setbacks. Simply saying goodbye at the end of 180 days is a foreign idea.

I’d be able to find Ryan, sorry – Scooter – with a google search no matter what. To be able to shoot out a message when I’m coming to town and be able to sit down and hear about their lives first-hand, though, that is an affordance of the modern world.

What’s more, it speaks to the communities I hope schools will be. More than once, I’ve said to parting students, “Let me know what you need, and I’ll do my best to help you out. It doesn’t matter how long it’s been.” I’ve meant it every time.

Perhaps that’s a part of the new contract that’s written between teachers and students rather than districts and unions. The best of us realize the value of connectedness beyond the days when these young people are in our charge.

That’s a world I want to live in, and it’s what I want to model. I want my students to know I’ll be here. I want them to see that as a way of caring for those around them.

Yes, to those who read these words and worry about boundaries, perhaps this approach invites difficult conversations about what I can’t do to help students. It’s true. When I think about those students I’ve lost or the world has lost after I’m no longer their teacher, though, I’d much rather have the difficult conversation than grieve a life that might have been.

Much is made of the importance of lifelong learners. This weekend, and this baseball sitting on my desk, make me wonder if we’re not missing a chance to think about lifelong teachers.

69/365 I am Filled with Hope by the Future of Education

My sister Kirstie is studying to be a health teacher at SIU-E. A few weeks ago, she sent me the text message below. I am already an incredibly proud big brother. My sisters and my brother are the three most amazing people I know. That said, my pride in Kirstie’s words, her learning and her commitment to helping those coming after her has its own space in my heart. In a week where cynicism and coursework have ruled most days, returning to this text has been helpful.

Today I was teaching yoga at Glenwood middle school to a few of the girls pe classes, and I had them do an activity to help with positive thinking and so I told them to write a list of 5 things they like about themselves. A good amount of the girls didn’t have too much trouble, but there were far too many of them that thought it was difficult. The saddest piece of paper I found had only the word “none” written on it. I think that the positive reinforcement needs to start at home, but why can’t our schools help children love themselves too? I believe in what you’re doing Zachary, I hope you do make a difference for every student and help make school a better place for everyone. Middle school is tough, but it shouldn’t be so hard that a 12 year old can’t name one thing they like about him or herself.

I am sad that my little sister has to feel and build her understanding of the places where the world falls down, but I feel much better knowing she’s out there helping to pull it back up.

5/365 I’ve Been Prepping My Class

As a wrote months ago, I’ve been asked to teach a course as part of Antioch University New England’s Next Generation Learning M.Ed. program. More specifically, I have the pleasure of teaching a course called Social Media (I’m not kidding). While I’ve been collecting pieces of planned implementation since I was asked to lead the course, the last few weeks have had me seriously planning for the course’s launch.

I’d forgotten the joy of planning, the thrill of sitting down and saying, “How will I organize this pathway to learning?” and then setting about outlining the thing.

Two days ago, I tweeted out this link to the modified UbD for the course asking for comments on my plans.

Today, I offered up to the social networking populous this link to the course’s syllabus – again, asking for comments.

The plans for things are to take the course beyond Antioch’s LMS and into a more public forum. Namely, we’ll be using Peer 2 Peer University’s platform for the course. This will allow for a greater plurality of voices and situate the course in the type of social environment we’ll be talking about, rather than the (high) walled garden of other course.

My hope is participants will be a mix of those students who are completing the Antioch program for their degree, those who are dropping in to take the course for credit and those P2PU users who want to join in the learning for the learning’s sake. We shall see.

What is for sure is the excitement I’ve felt these past few weeks prepping materials and trying to craft something that goes well above and beyond those online courses I once encountered. I know it’s not going to go perfectly. Everything is about iteration. Still, it will be a new adventure. So, check it out and join in.

Things I Know 362 of 365: Education bought a round of bad evaluations for the house

Nice! Compulsory feedback #fail

– Gary Stager

To register next semester, I (along with all other Harvard ED School students) were required to complete our Fall term course evaluations. One would imagine signing off on the student loan promissory note was enough to get the job done, but it turns out telling others how they did their job is one of those fine-print requirements.

I’m of a mixed mind about the process.

To not see the erosion of validity in mandatory course evaluations, I’d have to be blind.

Then again, my answers were truthful and honest, but I’d likely never have completed the evaluations if left to my own post-semester devices.

Realizing this puzzle, I’ve been trying to think of possible alternatives.

Evaluations for two of my classes were particularly frustrating because I’d been keeping a mental list all semester of comments and compliments about what worked and what didn’t. I’d been waiting for the chance to offer feedback. When the chance came, though, I couldn’t remember what I wanted to say. I remembered bits and pieces, but completing course work and getting assignments down on the page throughout the semester had taken precedence over keeping a running evaluative journal.

For another course, I wanted more than text boxes could provide. I wanted the chance to sit with the professor and say, “I know you’re brilliant. I know you understand more about this field than I can probably ever hope to understand. I’ve got a little game of my own when it comes to teaching. Maybe we could help each other out?”

I dig wordsmithing, but I just couldn’t find a way to put that sentiment judiciously in a course evaluation.

My thinking on course evaluations at any level runs parallel to my thinking on single-scoop standardized testing. The bulk of the work has been done, and the feedback is supposed to paint a picture of the learning and teaching as a whole. It just doesn’t work. Evaluations need not be mandated if they are meaningful to those on either end.

If students benefit from frequent and multi-faceted feedback, it stands to reason the same could be said of teachers.

It could be as simple as, “What would you keep, and what would you change from today’s lesson?” or “What are two things you would have done to make today’s class better?”

Not only would such thinking model a willingness for improvement, but taking the feedback seriously would likely improve the level of instruction in the class as well.

Few things are as lonely as those few moments after a class of students has walked out the door and a teacher is left in the vacuum between the lesson that has just concluded and the next lesson to be planned.

Things I Know 331 of 365: I’ve had three great loves

I was sitting in my dorm room my freshman year of undergrad when the phone rang. I could hear from the quiver in my voice that my mom had seen what happened.

“Josh!” she said.

“I know,” I said, “I saw.”

We were both pretty broken up. The call only lasted 45 seconds.

“It’s back on,” I said.

“I’ll talk to you later,” she said.

It’s a rare day that I return to “In the Shadow of Two Gunmen” parts I and II, otherwise known as the second season premiere of The West Wing. I still tear up.

—

It was a point of contention between my friends and I.

“You have to.”

“I’ve tried. I just don’t see it.”

“C’mon, it’s brilliant?”

“Really? ‘Cause I had to turn it off the last time I watched it.”

“Give it another try. It’s exactly the kind of show you’d love.”

It wouldn’t be until Arressted Development came out on DVD and my friend Rachel loaned me the first season, that I would truly see the beauty of the show that launched Michael Cera’s career, brought Jason Bateman back into the public eye, and cemented my appreciation for the mind of Mitchell Hurwitz. Though the show was cut down before its time, I am among the throngs of viewers waiting for it’s re-launch next year and subsequent movie.

—

A backyard surprise party for my best friend Luke somewhere outside of Los Angeles.

The rest of the partygoers have headed home. It’s the first birthday I’ve spent with Luke in our 17 years of friendship and I’ve no intention of moving.

“But I don’t care about football,” I say to his business partner David.

“You don’t have to care about football. It’s not really about football.”

“Really?”

“Yes. I love The West Wing too. And this show might be better than The West Wing. It’s the kind of filmmaking I want to be doing.”

“Really?”

“Yes.” Luke has jumped in. “You have to see it. I know you’re going to love it.”

“Clear eyes. Full hearts,” David says.

“Can’t lose!” Luke yells back in response.

Not until two months later, when I’m alone on the couch and they inspire goose bumps, do I understand the place of those words within the world of Friday Night Lights. One episode in, and I’m in love the way I wasn’t sure I’d ever be after Arrested Development or The West Wing.

—

I’ve said before we’re miseducating students if we don’t teach television as literature. In the same way I get lost in The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia or Lord of the Flies, I get lost in the words of Sorkin, Hurwitz and Berg.

The West Wing was the second language of SLA. We often drank from the keg of glory and called for the “finest muffins and bagels in the land.” We paused in moments of appreciation when our dialogue become “Sorkinian.”

If your impression of a chicken includes, “Chaw-chee-chaw-chee!” or you are well-versed on never-nudes, I know we can be friends.

More and more, I’m an advocate of teaching Season 1 of Friday Night Lights alongside a reading of The Odyssey. I find the dead-on portrayal of small-town life inspiring and too close to the truth at times.

I’m sure, or at least hopeful, I’ll fall in love again. Until then, these are the three great television loves of my life.

Things I Know 316 of 365: It’s best to teach two types of writing

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

– Benjamin Franklin

Yesterday, I was listening to and interview of one of my favorite television writers, Steven Moffat. He’s the head writer and executive producer of Dr. Who and Sherlock and one of the screenwriters of The Adventures of Tintin.

Moffat has been a fan of Dr. Who since he was a boy and was asked when he wrote his first script for the show.

I expected mid-20s.

Moffat answered 10 or 12. He and a friend scripted a 4-part series of the show on their own, in their free time.

My mind immediately went to how that interest could have been leveraged in school. The voice in my head sounded something like, “I’m sure they didn’t, but Moffat’s school should have had a program for script writing. He could have latched on to his passion much earlier.”

Thinking it over, I’m glad they didn’t. We might have ruined him. This was a boy so enamored and passionate about writing – this kind of writing – that he spent his free time playing with the form and structure.

While school could certainly have been the place for the development of his talent, it seems unlikely they would have given it room to breathe and time to develop.

I’m so tempted to argue that we should be teaching more forms and genres of writing in school aside from the expository and persuasive essays required by standardized tests. In the current curricular climate, though, we would teach those things in pieces with restrictions and a tone of teaching that says, “This is the way you do it.”

What I love about Moffat’s writing is how far he strays from the expected and how often he breaks the rules. It makes for interesting storytelling.

When I started my students on story slams, my guidelines were purposefully vague – tell a story, make it interesting. The judges in the audience were given two measures – content and presentation. We never stopped to define what a top score in either of those categories would look like. Rather than looking for certain characteristics, I relied on the idea they would know quality when they saw it.

If we could teach writing like this – if we could say, “Work until you think you’ve gotten to quality” – then I’d say we should carve out space in classrooms for our future-Moffat’s. Until then, their curation of their passions is safer in their free time.

Things I Know 313 of 365: I was a bit of a jerk

In cleaning out my box.net contents I found a folder containing my slidedecks from the first day of school of my fourth year of teaching. All was well and good until I found the class rules slide below.

Day 1 Per 3

Who wrote those two rules? When was I Severus Snape? The thing is, I had a decent idea what I was doing when I made this slide. I’d been in the classroom 3 years and came out of a decent teacher prep experience. The kids I’d taught the year before had taken the school from 47 to 81 percent passing the state writing exam. I had strong relationships with my colleagues, kids and their families. I’d headed up a partner student screenwriting program between our school and the local film festival.

Yet, there I was declaring war on cell phones and gum as though it somehow secured my power as teacher overlord.

Not only that, these were the first two rules I posted. Somehow gum chewing and the sight of a cell phone presented clear and present danger in relation to learning.

This list shows me what I told my students I valued on that first day of school, and it reminds me of how much what I said I believed stood in contrast with the beliefs I enacted as a teacher.

We do that, we get better at what we do, at being people with kids. If I had to guess, I’d say this authoritarian stance was a remnant of teaching students who were quite close to me in age and appearance. It was a stab at drawing a line between who I was and who they were. While I needed that line then, in the years that followed, I worked hard to erase it. I realized the way to teach was to connect, to become a person who mattered that asked students to do work that mattered.

It was a difficult lesson.

One I’m still learning. I’m grateful to younger me for sticking this slidedeck in the cloud time capsule to remind me how I’ve grown.

Things I Know 289 of 365: In teaching, the simple is complex

And so from that, I’ve always been fascinated with the idea that complexity can come out of such simplicity.

– Will Wright

In working toward completion of a final learning task in which I design a learning organization, I’m re-visiting the reading from this unit of study.

In one 2002 Teaching and Teacher Education article from Judith Warren Little, I found this description of a comment made in a meeting of teachers. One teacher, Leigh, has asked her colleagues if the will all be implementing silent sustained reading uniformly across their classrooms. It stuck me that Little’s description of the conversation captures some of the richest conversations a teaching colleagues can have:

Leigh’s questions thus becomes the occasion for revealing differences in the teachers’ instructional preferences, and for negotiating what it will mean for the teachers to work together in “piloting” a new course. These are not mere matters of technique or procedure; fundamental issues of principle and purpose figure prominently in that negotiation. Further, these are no matters that could have been fully negotiated in advance. They arise in and through the work itself. As Leigh’s question is posed and modified, engaged or deflected, individuals find occasion to state their own preferences and intentions, locating themselves in a variety of ways in relation to the collective project of the group (piloting the course, developing this week’s curriculum), past and present relationships in the classroom (student choice), and the group’s way of being (decisions).

A classmate and I were talking today about the perceived disconnect between external perceptions of teaching and the internal complexity of the work. Little is describing four teachers faced with a simple question or whether they will all be practicing the same reading method uniformly in their classrooms, and she describes the complicated nature of the attempt to answer that question quite wonderfully. This is tough work.

Things I Know 264 of 365: Some stories keep going

The process of putting your life into order with a beginning, middle, and end forces you to see cause and effect.

– Catherine Burns

Thursday, I got just about one of the best message I’ve ever received from a student. Freda was in my senior Storytelling class last year. Along with the rest of the class, she participated in our weekly story slams where students were randomly selected to tell a story in front of the rest of the class without notes. The stories had to be true and in the first person.

For one of her stories, Freda told us about the one and only time she’d bullied another student.

Here’s the story. Freda’s starts around 5:50:
Ralen and Freda by MrChase

I remember thinking at the time how amazing it was any time a student felt free to open up and share part of themselves that might not otherwise be revealed. Those were the moments where I felt like I’d stumbled on something right.

Freda’s note today gave me that feeling again and reminded me those moments in the classroom were ripples that are still moving across my kids’ lives though we aren’t with each other everyday.

Here is Freda’s note in all its informal online missive parlance:

Mr. Chase. I have to tell you something. Remember Jermy? The kid I did my story slam about? He friend requested me. I apologized. He said he had wanted to send me a request for years and was worried I’d forgotten about him. I can’t believe it, how could I forget that? I told him that I’d never forgot it and regretted it for like… my whole life, and how I did a school project thingy on it and so, he asked for my number, and he called me up and he was crying, and I was crying and like… I’m just… I’m glad we had that assignment, and I feel so… lucky that I had a chance to tell everyone in class, and even more lucky that I was given a second chance to apologize… and… I guess… I never believed in fate before… but I might now… sounds corny but whatever… So yeah, I just felt compelled to tell you, right now. Thank you for being a great teacher, I love you.

In moments like these, it’s hard not to miss the classroom terribly.

Some Useful Words from Ted Sizer on a Common Curriculum

From Horace’s Compromise:

Some today, with earnest good intentions, urge that a common core of subjects be legislated for high school students. Depending on one’s point of view, much of this certainly is nice. Laudable or not in the abstract, however, if it is mandatory, it is an abuse of state power, an excessive reach of political authority. Again, the state is fully justified in providing it at public expense, if it wishes, and prescribing it for certain certificates and diplomas that citizens may voluntarily choose to earn.

Some others say that an adolescent should have a “high school experience,” something that is inherently a Good Thing, an experience that teaches young people to “get along with others.” Proponents of this view offer no evidence for support of their argument for mandatory “residence” at school. This is prudent on their part: there isn’t any. Most real reasons for enforced attendance actually turn on the need to preserve adults’ jobs. Compulsory attendance in an educational institution should cease when a young citizen demonstrates mastery of the minima, and most young citizens should master those minima before senior high school. As a result, schooling for most adolescents would be voluntary. Few would be compelled to attend high school, though a prudent state would vigorously encourage it. High school would be an opportunity, not an obligation.