Blog-o-sphere

This last semester, I used blogs for reports/writing projects for the first time in classes. That doesn't put me on the avant-garde, edgy, techno-wave of education, since many teachers have been using blogs for some time now. Others are already using RSS feeds, wikis, collaborative software, podcasts, screencasts, and a dozen other new ways to distribute and understand information. In the technology change realm, I'm rather behind the curve.

It's difficult to tease out exactly what you want from the blog technology. I didn't find the overall quality of work changed much, even though I was impressed at the level of creativity that using the internet seemed to inspire. I definitely wasn't expecting students to be experts at blogging or even understanding it. Once again, students showed that, in general, we *way* overestimate their skill and knowledge about computers, software, and internet use. Of course, there are some who are very knowledgeable, but for the majority, teaching the technology is an integral part of the lesson.

One of my most important lessons taken away from this assignment was that I need to give more time over to the project. For quality work, other students need time to look at their classmates' work, and everyone needs time for multiple revisions. For about 3/4s of the students, using a blog in a serious academic way was a completely new concept. A handful begged to be able to do the assignment traditionally, on paper, mostly because, "I hate computers."

The first step is usually the hardest. We'll see how it goes this semester!

Spaces In-between

Here's an "essential question" for us all. Is childhood--unrestrained playing,fighting, crying, jumping, sticking-your-hand-on-the-hot-stove, laughing, running, falling out of trees, building friendships, losing games, winning games, making up the rules--the raw material for formal education? Or, are we wasting time that would be better spent improving knowledge, skills, and "education"? Maybe both.

Fundamentally, for me, I don't give a Rhett Butler about any research. This really isn't a research question; it is a question that touches on the philosophical questions of the "good life". Do we really, as a society, want to return to child labor, but in the factory of the school, in place of the textile mill? Having liberated childhood from a natural labor supply for the family, do we want to hand over childhood as a labor supply for the state?

In reality, it is probably both the raw material for formal education and wasting time. Not everything related to learning how to ice skate on a frozen creek, for example, has practical, utilitarian application in the classroom. But it really doesn't matter. A humane view of life requires the time to simply be, without reason and without excuse. A time to jump around and do cartwheels simply because it's fun.

So, ok, I get that the summer break has a traditional purpose in the farming cycle; Christmas break gives time for traveling and being together as a family. And, I'm sure there is a lot of living during these times away from formal school that provides lessons and raw material for the classroom. But really, it is just space to be. I don't give assignments over breaks or vacations [unless it is inescapable] for the simple reason that I don't believe that breaks/vacation times are simply education by another means. It really is just space and time.

I need it too.

How to build a Humane Student

Another touted report. Another misfire.

Although, unlike the 1983 report and NCLB, which missed the target entirely, at least this one hits some of the outer rings. Some of the recommendations, like teaching students how to think beyond rote learning is important. The critique of the so called "back to basics" readin' and writin' is also on target, and how the NCLB has driven schools toward the minimum requirements. But where it goes all wrong, as we often do in the US, is equating education with job readiness. Sure, no question that we need, and will need, certain skills to be successful in the marketplace and in the economy. But education is not the servant of the economy.

In fact, vice versa. We need to stop asking how to build a better employee, and really focus on how to build a more educated and humane individual and community. The rest will follow. Without that essential enlightenment question, we are missing the catastrophes and profound human dilemmas that the next few generations will be forced to struggle with. Overpopulation and starvation (we are already in the midst of this one). The legacy of the most violent century in history, just past. The increasing capability of destruction. The meaning and place of patriotism and citizenship. Immigration. Biological and Chemical Weapons. The dilemma of nuclear power. Global Warming. Ad nauseum.

The needs are untold degrees beyond mere global competitiveness. Yet, seemingly, that is the only "reform" conversation within the latest short-sighted report.

We need more. Desperately. And now is not too late.

Emoting

Classrooms are cauldrons of emotion. The emotional content and context of every student every day is different and redefined. And, of course, with teenagers can change almost instantaneously. That's the environment we teach in every day.

Not to mention the emotions of adults and colleagues surrounding us, or the stress of being "on stage" 24/7, or the emoting parent on the other end of the phone. Keeping emotions in check is often the only way to survive a day without complete mental exhaustion.

It is always a shock to start a class and suddenly realize that a student is sobbing. It could be as simple as hormones, or as devestating as the loss of a parent or best friend in a car accident. You have to be prepared for anything.

Most days I'm immune from emotional assaults, but often a bad emotional state will click with the whole class and it begins waking like one enormous emotional monster. A class like that can drive me to despair. But there are days, tired and unmotivated that a class' mood coalesces around positive energy, and what an uplift that can be.

The tragedies and comedies of life are played out daily on the classroom stage. It is dirty, messy, unplannable, a very specialized micro-society. Embrace the uncertainty, you are on a rollercoaster. Might as well enjoy the ride.

To add your stories and insights to the blog, please submit your posts and stories about the daily goings on and battles that we face daily in the classroom. The goal is to help us, and the public at large, understand the reality of the classroom and move beyond the simplistic view of public education as a "broken" problem. The reality most often counters well the inaccurate and error-ridden public media reports about education and education policy.

Please send your ideas, or a fully written post, focusing on events, personalities, issues, etc., that you deal with in the classroom. I will moderate the forum, and post whatever I can.

Thank you in advance for participating. Send to ceablogger@inbox.com

Seeing Through Time

I recall one of the Simpson's episodes where the family sits to eat a dinner that Abu, the Indian convenience store owner, has prepared for them. As the camera follows the discussion, the focus moves to Lisa who has eaten some of the spicy food. With enlarged eyes she says, "I think I can see through time."

Every day, teachers spend time exercising their ability to see through time. It isn't exercising the eyes, as much as the imagination. Here are sets of people sitting in front of us with no remote past, an all too imposing present, and a mysterious future. We try to see that future in each of them.

Like farmers, we plant seeds that will not mature, perhaps not even sprout, for a considerable time to come. It affords us no solace to make judgments. We really don't know what these students will develop in to, nor what influences and knowledge will finally make a difference in their lives. It can be an intimidating environment to consider how many things every day could impact a student. But we can't live there, or we would become immobile and of little value to anyone.

Of course, looking into the future doesn't mean prediction. Rather it is an attitude of uncertainty, and a hope and belief that human beings as imaginative creatures always have the capacity to grow and change and understand.

I have had students leave and become heroine addicts. Student who have left and are not around anymore. Students who were so socially awkward it was painful to watch, who have gone to college to become student body president, debaters, and social butterflies. Troubled students who leave their troubles behind, and stable students who spiral into a troubled abyss.

It is each person's responsibility to decide the things that will matter to them and the choices that they will make. But everyday we are helping to provide those "things" that will matter, and that decisions will be based upon. If we can't see through time to the potential of the future, we risk misunderstanding how profound each teaching day can, and will, be.

To add your stories and insights to the blog, please submit your posts and stories about the daily goings on and battles that we face daily in the classroom. The goal is to help us, and the public at large, understand the reality of the classroom and move beyond the simplistic view of public education as a "broken" problem. The reality most often counters well the inaccurate and error-ridden public media reports about education and education policy.

Please send your ideas, or a fully written post, focusing on events, personalities, issues, etc., that you deal with in the classroom. I will moderate the forum, and post whatever I can.

Thank you in advance for participating. Send to ceablogger@inbox.com

BLOG 2.0

The Journal of the Colorado Education Association carried an article about this blog in the last issue. The article mentions that discussion has focused on moving the blog one step further forward by offering a community platform for members to help tell their stories about the daily classroom reality that we face as teachers and support staff from day to day. I also encourage members to comment on daily posts and make that a forum for discussion about particular topics.

Here is the original mission statement of the blog:

Our national dialog on education, and especially public education has taken a decidedly political turn over the last two decades. It also, for the most part, lacks the depth, complexity, and frankly reality, required for productive discussion. That reality of life and living inside the classroom, in concert with the larger issues, brings real meaning to the table. And there are immense stakes in the outcome of that discussion. What kind of culture are we? What are our political values? How is knowledge accountable to society? What is a citizen? What kind of people are we going to be? Is education a commodity? Do we believe in equal access, or what people can buy? Do we value teachers? We still struggle with segregation. We still deny the hard questions and grasp for simplistic answers.

I would like to thank the Colorado Education Association, which has kindly provided a forum for this kind of communication and dialog. To boldly blog and, well, see what happens. It is risky, innovative, and exciting. (It is worth repeating that the content here is solely my responsibility and does not necessarily reflect the views or policies of CEA.) This is the story and reflection of that surreal classroom where reality blends and jumbles with outside pressures, fads, ideology and power struggles. It is where I live almost every day. It's why I teach. The cast of characters includes students, teachers, staff, parents, guardians, professional associations, unions, politicians, school boards, corporations, huckters, and many, many surprises. I invite you to join me in that surreal class and, maybe, come to some answers for the hard questions. Nobody gets voted off the island, and there is no final exam; the final exam is what kind of public education--what kinds of schools--we choose to have.

In that spirit, I would like to invite the almost 40,000 members of the Colorado Education Association, and any other reader/teachers or support staff to submit your posts about the daily goings on and battles that we face daily in the classroom. The goal is to help us, and the public at large, understand the reality of the classroom and move beyond the simplistic view of public education as a "broken" problem. The reality most often counters well the inaccurate and error-ridden public media reports about education and education policy.

Please send your ideas, or a fully written post, focusing on events, personalities, issues, etc., that you deal with in the classroom. I will moderate the forum, and post whatever I can.

Thank you in advance for participating. Send to ceablogger@inbox.com

Film at Eleven

"I would say, with all due respect, you have some teachers in your schools that have children spending more time watching movies than taking tests," the governor [Bill Owens] said in his first-ever speech to the group. Many of the 800-plus administrators in the audience responded with a gasp.*

This is some of the worst of the worst assumptions about what teachers are doing in the classroom. But it is a complex issue underneath the simple surface of "showing movies". After all, where do most adult Americans get their history? From television or film?! If Oliver Stone's version of JFK is the only one someone has experienced, how do they know what is historical and what is fiction?

Like readers of good literature, adults should have the literacy skills to analyze, criticize, and be skeptical of history as presented in the media. And if we don't practice that in the classroom, with of course, relevant film, where and when do we practice it? The movie theatre is too late. And for more than half of all Americans still believing the fiction that Sadaam Hussein was directly involved in 9/11, we have a problem. I haven't heard complaints about all the time spent in English class with all that "literature" that students are spending time with, instead of taking tests. How many adults get their history from David McCullough's 1776, versus Mel Gibson in The Patriot?

The image of teachers showing Snow White and Shrek in class to entertain kids and avoid teaching is a damaging stereotype similar to the all cops eat donuts, and ambulance chasing lawyers. But that stereotype has an unfortunate impact.

I now have paperwork to fill out before showing a film in class and have to justify its educational value. Ok. I can do that. But does that mean a supervisor decides whether or not I show the film? Bottom line: distrust of my (teacher's) professional judgment; cya for parent complaints and lawsuits; responding to public pressure to a problem that isn't actually there.

And for me, instead of spending time coming up with good questions for discussion, analysis, and evaluation about the film, I'm filling out paperwork. Or? Just forget it.

ZeroTolerance gets an F

Luckily, we're well over the peak of the zero-tolerance solution to school misbehavior and violence. The problem, as often seems to be with flawed human rationality, is taking the concept far beyond its logical limits. So, the second grade girl with plastic knife gets suspended. That "news" story makes the whole world of education look mightily out of touch. That a principal could forgo good judgment to a "zero-tolerance" dogma is beyond me. But it happens. Often. The latest that I have run across is a recent news story that follows:

October 25, 2006
Texas: Art Teacher and District Reach Settlement

By RALPH BLUMENTHAL

A veteran art teacher has reached a settlement with the North Texas school district that had suspended her after a student caught a glimpse of nude artwork on field trip. Under the settlement, approved Monday by the school board, the teacher, Sydney McGee, gave up her job but will be paid the balance of her $57,600 annual salary through next May. Ms. McGee, above, and the Frisco Independent School District agreed not to “disparage” each other, and the district agreed to add to her personnel file a 2004 letter of recommendation from a previous principal. The agreement ended a dispute that broke out after Ms. McGee led 89 fifth graders from Wilma Fisher Elementary School on a visit last April to the Dallas Museum of Art. Ms. McGee was berated the next day by the principal, Nancy Lawson, who later complained in a memorandum that “students were exposed to nude statues and other nude art representations, and time was not used wisely for learning during the trip.”

Holy hand grenade batman. Kids saw a nude work of art in a museum. So are parents who take children to museums now subjecting their kids to abuse? Pornography? Ok. I'm just going to stop here because the whole thing so flies in the face of any sense of . . . well, just any sense at all.

The whole zero-tolerance mentality needs to be thrown out with the rest of the educational trash that is a result of a lack of a good dose of solid judgment, panic, and lawsuit paranoia. It's been so stained by stories like this that we need a very new, and very rational new model.

Moving on.

Boredom

This is SOOOO boring. School is boring. Life is boring. It is the motto of adolescence.

I learned quite some time ago not to take the "this class is boring" comments overly seriously. After reflecting the first few times a teacher gets those comments, it is worth digging deeper with those students.

Teacher: So which of your classes are not boring.
Student: Actually, all of them are.
Teacher: So, you play soccer. That's not boring.
Student: Well, practice is boring, and I don't get to play often, so actually it is boring.
Teacher: What about video games, music?
Student: Yeah, that can be fun for a while. But that gets boring fast too.
(Photo is from "Eric Conveys an Emotion" at http://www.emotioneric.com)

OK, are we getting a clear picture here? One of my questions to students at the beginning of a new class is what is their favorite thing in life so far? I have yet to have a class where at least one person, perplexed, simply answers: nothing. Nothing interesting!

I'm certainly not justifying everything that happens in a classroom. Some things are boring. Some are boring out of necessity--that is, it is important knowledge and information, but not "fun". That's the first lesson for many adolescents--everything important isn't necessarily fun and interesting. There are some things in the classroom that can be presented in a boring way, or in a more interesting way. But don't expect hazzahs from all the students for being engaging. Regardless of approach, some will be bored.

There are a lot of factors in late adolescent boredom. Certainly, we (as educators) must take some responsibility. In many cases we have taught boredom in schooling. Or, on the contrary, have created the expectation that everything in education should be fun. If it isn't, then students won't engage. Some responsibility lies with teaching students a high level of dependence. Few take much personal responsibility for their own learning. They are used to spoon feeding and hand holding, and weaning them from that can be traumatic. Few students see any personal responsibility in being interested. And, of course, some adolescents would rather be tortured than admit to an adult that something was interesting.

Engaged students aren't always learning well either. I've had many successful classroom activities and projects where students were highly engaged, yet a later assessment demonstrated clear as sunshine that the activity or project had become more important than the content of the activity, because, frankly, they hadn't learned much.

So, we struggle everyday to engage curiosity while keeping expectations for new learning high. We try to create interest, or find relevant connections for knowledge. We try to emulate Comedy Central and do a stand up routine. But, unfortunately, we can't always trust the student "audience" to react honestly. Boredom can be cool. Sometimes, after class, you get a peak at the truth when a student comments, "I didn't say anything in class today, but that was really interesting."

Finally, I have arrived at the truth: Student boredom is just, well, boring.

Why isn't our Society Safe?

In the wake of the shooting and hostage situation in Bailey, Colorado this week, and the subsequent murder of a principal in Wisconsin, media stories have been flooding networks and newspapers with the basic question: Why aren't our schools safe? and What can we do to improve school safety? Unfortunately, they miss the target.

Schools, we need constant reminding, are embedded in society. They are a social institution connected in complicated and numerous ways to other organizations, social institutions, and people. Schools are not some lucky isolated Pacific island where we can fix all the world's problems with a little more homework and another lockdown drill.

Until we can face and discuss the violence in our society, and then how that violence seeps into the schools, we won't get much traction on making schools safe. Many students are angry and disfunctional, and that, combined with easy access to weapons springing from at late 18th century mentality, and a misreading of the Constitution, turns those students into impulsive revenge killers.

We have them, and will continue to have them, until we are willing to secure our right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness through aggressive social control of dangerous weapons.

We have them, and will continue to have them until we are willing to confront our how our culture has broken communities from unhappiness and anomie generated by gross materialism.

"Alienation as we find it in modern society is almost total... Man (sic) has created a world of man-made things as it never existed before. He has constructed a complicated social machine to administer the technical machine he built. The more powerful and gigantic the forces are which he unleashes, the more powerless he feels himself as a human being. He is owned by his own creations, and has lost ownership of himself."
--Erich Fromm

We will have them and continue to have them until schools can shed their misguided attempts to keep the world and its problems barricaded outside of the main doors and begin to advocate in the community for social change beyond the schoolyard. Any less is attempting to do the impossible while simultaneously shirking responsibility.