Slowing Down Instruction

If you're a teacher, do you ever feel that, in order to hit your CORE objectives for the week, your daily lesson plan looks like Mulligan Stew? I do. Today, I wanted to read, interpret, and analyze an Emily Dickinson poem, introduce the proper function of the pronouns "who" and "whom," allow kids to get new books, renew, and check out books.. all while adding a tech component for "Tech Tuesday!" Ack! to quote Doonsberry comics from my youth.

If there was no library/Tech Tuesday component, I probably would have flown through my curricular objectives today, but I would have been "covering," not teaching. Even reflective, thoughtful teachers can fall into the trap of succumbing to jamming their lessons with too much. Tech slowed me down, and that is a good thing.

It took a while for kids to login to the network. Students still struggle with finding websites because they pay very little attention to detail. After a marking period and a half, some students still think my last name is a computer command and therefore mispelled the name of my room. Others received restriction notices on their screens because they mispelled todaysmeet... <sigh> the more eighth graders change, the more they stay the same. The ten -fifteen minute visit to the library turned into 20 minutes.

When everyone arrived back to the classroom, there was only time for reviewing the differences between nominative case and objective case pronouns. We slowed down--- we talked about how questions are often composed in the reverse order of statements in English and therefore it is possible that a direct object may be one of the first words in a sentence rather than one of the last words in that sentence. We also had time to learn the trick for who or whom:

1. Find the verb
2. Is "who" acting the verb?
3. If yes, then use "who"
4. If no, then use "whom"
5. If there is a preposition in front of the word use "whom" because it would be the object of the preposition.
6. If there is a linking verb and who is linked to the subject then use "who" (predicate pronoun)

So no Emily D. today but we did explore a different way to study nominitive case pronouns and students left with more ownership of case through the exploration of when to you "who" or "whom." The good news? I taught today, I didn't just cover some material and plow through more poetry exposure. That's a bonus for my students.

"Who is rich? He that rejoices in his portion." - Benjamin Franklin

Not me. Sometimes I feel like I'm the only one who doesn't want a networth with 9 zeroes behind the first numeral, especially this week, with the lottery jackpot eclipsing 550 million dollars. People dreamed aloud this week about what they could gain from that much money even after the hefty tax bite Uncle Sam would give the jackpot. I considered more what I would lose: privacy, peace, the ability to live life on my own terms.

I never want to live my life hounded by press and paparazzi bullying me about how the public has the "right to know" how my life had changed since I won the big prize. I empathize all too well with Emily Dickenson, when she declares: "I'm nobody, who are you?" I don't want long-lost relatives coming out of the woodwork with tear-jerking stories of woe designed to empty my wallet into their hands.

On the other hand, I learned, about a decade ago, that public school teachers are public figures too, and that meant I did not have as much of a right to privacy as I would already prefer. Once, I was slandered, along with some other teachers, guidance counselors, and administrators, that he railed against in a website of his own creation. The rants were truly those of a thirteen year old, and actually, I was flattered to be villified in the company of colleagues whom I repected and admired. Our building rep for the union requested that we seek legal consul.

When the union lawyer explained to us our vulnerability in such a case, we chose to go no further. It did not matter that someone was publishing a rant, railing against the rigor of my class or the strictness of an administrator. I could live with that, but the idea that, as a public figure, the burden of proof in a civil suit was upon me to prove the statements false, shook me.

Even with the drama of being a teacher, and the tyranny of being shackled to education reforms implemented by politicians with minimal input from educators in the field, I  rejoice in my portion. There is love in my life, support from family, friends, and colleagues, and I come to work every day to students who are genuinely happy to see me and who are waiting to see what they can learn from me.

Luck

Responding to Langston Hughes' "Luck"

I have no use for
rabbits' feet,
lucky charms,
or
pots of gold.
How lucky was
that foot
for the rabbit, anyway?
Lucky charms
lost,
now found-- where's
the luck
in that?
You know who's lucky?
You are.
You woke up
this morning.
Whether you had
a bad day
or
a good day
you had a day.
Every year
every month
every day
hour
minute
we roam the earth
we are lucky.
We can be
someone else's luck
to live,
to love,

to battle this journey of life,

it's luck.

Today is the second day of our poetry unit. We read two Langston Hughes poems to exercise active reading strategies on troublesome texts.
Today, students talked back to the text. The strategy is called, Talking To the Text in reading apprenticeship but I called it marginalia way before someone told me what I had been doing was new. (You know you're getting old when some new PhD is touting something you have been doing for years as a "new strategy.") Anyway, I didn't just want students to mark up the text with their own metacognitive inquiry, I also wanted them to respond to the ideas of his poem.

We brainstormed what we individually thought luck was: symbols, animals, events and phrases and then we contemplated what Langston seemed to think luck was. I don't agree with Langston's stanza that:

To some people
Love is given,
To others
Only heaven
(Daybook 11)

I shared my dissent with my classes and, as they brainstormed, I composed my reaction to the idea that luck is merely scraps from the table of joy that we like the family dog wait mournfully to retrieve, hoping all along a bone of luck will be flung instead.

I sat here earlier today trying to think what to write about this week. It has been nearly seven days since my last post. Showing students by example how to brainstorm, free-associate, and letting them see how you compose is pretty powerful. I didn't have the whining of "I don't know what to write." or "This is hard." They took the challenge and did the best they could.

It doesn't take much to make a happy teacher.

Bring Your Own Device Day One

I refrained from titling today's post "We Survived BYOD Day One" largely because there was nothing to survive. The servers did not crash, kids did not "test the waters" beyond having to be told once to put away their devices during an assembly-- no grumbling, back-talking or rolled eyes... every student appeared to understand that they were being given a unique privilege. The global issues of this experiment seemed to be a success.

Locally, my classroom delivery of instruction with the inclusion of devices sharpened over the day. If you ran into me after first or second period class today, I would have seemed harried and hagard. I was completely out of my comfort zone. Fortunately, I have third period planning and that "down time" gave me an opportunity to revisit my lesson, and figure out why I was uncomfortable. I usually enjoy workshop mode but it felt disjointed and the flow was "off."

We were in the library, which meant that everyone had the opportunity to use technology, whether they BYOD or not. I set up students with online exercises and resources on three web sources and suggested a fourth. What was "off" about periods one and two were more my issue than the students. The students seemed to react to the whole situation as if it was just a normal day.

My delivery felt out of balance because I am used to using print sources: textbooks and worksheets. Normally. I could monitor the progress of students copying notes off the board, then direct them to their textbook, then direct them to a handout, then direct them to applying the print resource to a draft. With students on smartphones, laptops, and tablets, they were all over the map in terms of directions. I could not as easily guide students through their activities for the day.

My solution? I borrowed the librarian, Mrs. Herring's, whiteboard. I proceeded to write out everything we were doing for the day. When students arrived, I walked them through the twelve things they had to do for the day, showed them where to find the sites on the overhead screen and fielded questions before we begin. Then I let them go. Suddenly the chaos was managed chaos again, and I was able to relax and observe, assess, respond, and clarify. Maybe it won't be that hard to be a 21st Century teacher after all?

What did we do today? I posted my crazy word of the day, root word of the day, word of the day, and thought for today on my school web page. (http://www.sesdweb.net/Page/3841) Just like in class, students had to write these things in their notebooks. Those who had tablets and laptops of their own were encouraged to rip the information from my page and save it in an English 8 folder. I posted a list of homophones I did not want students to continue to confuse anymore on edmodo.com. Students opened the posting and saved it on their device, or they printed it out, their choice.

For formative assessment, students were asked to tell me: what a subject and a verb were, what the difference was between singular and plural was, and what compound meant on http://wallwisher.com/wall/byod11062012. I posted their grammar work directions on edmodo, and created a drop box for them to send their answers to me paperlessly on edmodo. We were talking about how to make subjects and verbs to agree with compound subjects.

Lastly, I posted writing pitfalls for students to avoid on their final drafts that are due on Thursday. When I relaxed, I saw what I had read in Dina Spangenberger's master thesis about teaching 21st century learners. They were relaxed and seemed to feel truly at home, for the first time. I asked a few how they felt about today's crazy class and their answers were a variation of the same theme: finally.

BYOD Day One. We didn't survive. We succeeded.

Halloween 1971

            To understand the depth of my embarrassment, you would have to know Geraldine.

            In 1971, I was four years old, my two brothers, my two sisters, my parents and I spent many a weekend evening gathered in the living room transfixed to the television, laughing full-heartedly to The Flip Wilson Show. Flip Wilson was a hugely successful African American comedian and the first with his own television variety show. If you have watched re-runs of The Carol Burnett Show or Saturday Night Live, you know what a variety show is--- a series of skits, special guest stars, and recurring characters in familiar skits. Flip Wilson became famous for his recurring character on the show: Geraldine, a sassy red-haired nurse who always tried to weasel out of her bad behavior with her catch phrase: “The Devil made me do it!”

            Remember when I said it was 1971? Back then, nurses wore uniforms: white shoes, white stockings, a military-looking cap, a white skirt and a short sleeved white blouse. So every weekend we watched this grown man transform himself into a mouthy, hair flipping, neck rolling nurse-with-attitude complete with white stockings and a raspy alto-toned big mouth. This was the year my sisters and my parents had a horrible Halloween idea with me as their victim.

            In 1971, they made me Geraldine.

            Halloween preparation did not consist of frantic trips to the store to buy the latest Teen Aged Mutant Ninja Turtle, or Power Rangers or Spiderman costumes. My mom would not buy those cheap plastic costumes with the hazardous masks you couldn’t really breathe in or see out of. Our costume preparation was a frenetic push through medicine cabinets, and each other's wardrobes to create something out of what we already had.

            From what I could tell, the 60’s were the decade of the wig. Mom had white Styrofoam faceless heads with hair in the top of her closet. Unluckily for me, there was a red one, just the right length to give it the “That Girl” flip. For some reason, there were white stockings still laying around from when my sisters were my age, and someone must have been a nurse for Halloween at some point because they found a uniform that fit for me too.

            To this day, I still wonder “Where were my brothers and my father?” When the Logan women were done, the third son and been transformed into the icon of family weekend laughter: Geraldine, in all his/her scratchy red wig, leg-strangled, greasy, make-up wearing glory.

            The worse part was there were pictures! Someone actually saved the visual for future laughs--- at my expense. I remember Halloween, Geraldine, Flip Wilson and the attack of the Logan women.

Value-Free Education Is A Myth

I am a public school educator. This was not a random, "take life as it happens," choice. I chose to answer the call to education in the public sector. I am the product of public, parochial, and private education. I was taught by public school educators, Franciscan order nuns, and military tactical officers in my pre-baccelaureate educational career.

In the nineties, as a private citizen working in various industries that left me unfulfilled and vocationally adrift, I was bombarded by radio and tv messages. "Reach for the power, teach." was one slogan I remember. I also remember in college when an African American visiting professor at Kenyon College had the audacity (I felt at the time) to suggest to me that I had a responsibility to teach because I made it into to one of the top colleges in the nation, was successful there, and I needed to show others the way--- because I was African American. That one bugged me. First, I had zero interest in education as a career at the time-- we all knew that our teachers were overworked, undervalued, and underpaid. I also had been raised by parents who remembered the Jim Crow Era bad old days when the only things academically gifted black males were encouraged to do were to teach or preach.

She also was the first person to inform me I wasn't black, but that I was African American. Honestly, that was news to me. My elementary, middle, and high school transcripts all identified me as black. As a college sophomore, finding out someone changed the rules and decided for me how to claim my heritage was unsettling. It was the mid eighties and academia was encouraging all Americans to become hyphenated.

I did and still do have Countee Cullen's response to Africa in "Heritage" :

What is Africa to me:   

Copper sun or scarlet sea,   

Jungle star or jungle track,

Strong bronzed men, or regal black   

Women from whose loins I sprang   

When the birds of Eden sang?

One three centuries removed

From the scenes his fathers loved,

Spicy grove, cinnamon tree,   

What is Africa to me?

I was miffed, but I did not forget what she said to me. Nearly ten years later, I decided to go back to college to earn my masters and teaching credentials. I intended to teach urban education and I student-taught at West Philadelphia High School. My experiences there could fill a book and they shaped many of my ideas about adolescents and teaching them, but ultimately I ended up teaching in suburban and rural districts.

If teaching is a mission, (and I believe that it is) then we should teach where we can make the biggest impact. For me, I had to listen to my own inner voice. Was that impact going to be greatest in the inner city world that was so different from the life I had known and from the roots that gave me my values? Was I going to do the most good teaching the sons and daughters of captains of industry, finance, higher education, medicine, and manufacturing, or would I do the most good returning to my rural roots?

Having met with success in all three environments, I am (to date) still not sure of the answer. If success is receiving praise for your efforts by your peers, bosses, and clients (students and parents,) then I have made an impact everywhere. One concern I never had was whether I would teach public or private.

All students deserve highly qualified, well-rounded educators, regardless of the sequence of their zip code, their net worth, or their access to the 1%.  Are there schools that offer higher salaries? Yes. For the first time in my career, I teach in the community where I live and worship. I had always been leary of doing that, but it has been a powerfully positive experience. The community knows me not only as an educator but they know the rest of me too. It actually helps to recognize parents on back to school night because they sit in the congregation with you on Sunday mornings, checked out your groceries in the supermarket, inspected your vehicle, or helped you build an addition to the house. I have sung in the choir for years with grandparents of current students, live on the neighboring farm to an aunt. I have gone to national tournaments with neighbors of students and competed with them in leagues. They tease me about grading all the time. My commitment to my profession and to my students is known before many of them see my name on their child's schedule. All these connections actually help build trust in the teacher-parent relationship that is pivotal to a child's success.

Why not private? It's not the same. I lived in a military school environment for eigth and ninth grade. There was a sense of community but it was more regimented and less organic. Parochial education had a strong influence upon my values as a student an as an educator but there is a problem with access. In private schools, children are weeded out and preselected. I think someone who is a teacher at his core can teach any child anywhere. It also still shocks me that a private school in the Philadelphia suburbs offered me a teaching position even though I (at the time) had only a BA in English from Kenyon College and had never learned anything about pedagogy or about best practices. They didn't require that I had a teaching license or that I had gone through the vetting process public school teachers are subject to. I would only have been able to rely on my instincts as an educator without the background in the research to inform my instincts. I would have relied only on my limited life experiences and innate empathy to "read" my students-- no knowledge of adolescent psychology to have a sense of what was normal and what was unusual adolescent behavior. I didn't think I was ready to be a "dorm dad" and educator at 25 without that background.

I didn't believe that I would be giving these millionaires and movie star parents their $30,000/year tuition's worth in 1992. In 2012, I know that what my clients get for their modest investment of property taxes, from all of us, is an unbelievable bargain. They get better educated, better prepared teachers for a fraction of the price and they still get the advantage of small class sizes for optimum teacher accessibility.

I guess that is why I am protective of the influences I allow into my classroom. The values of our school are espoused in our district's mission statement: "Providing progressive education to strengthen the global community." That value is exemplified in our commitment to integrating technology into our pedagogy so that students may truly be global learners-- skyping with other classrooms around the nation and world, collaborating on shared projects. I plan to skype with my students from the USBC Master's tournament this winter in February. Our community food drives and community closet drives for those in need also show our  commitment to an enduring understanding that we are a global community and that we take care of each other. We are teaching values.

Last week, I received an offer to receive a free class set of Ayn Rand novels and I was horrorified at the suggestion that I indoctrinate my students with text whose theme runs against what we strive for. Ayn Rand emigrated to the US from the USSR. Her militant dogma of self-interest and individualism was in reaction to the tyranny of the collective she grew up with in communism. Her writings were embraced by some during the McCarthy era and red scare. It seemed insidious that I, a teacher in a cash-strapped district, would be approached to teach these novels, complete with teaching aids--without an appropriate counterpoint for students to engage in a discourse about the conflicting messages so that they might be able to form their own conclusions.

The head of my education program at UPENN told us something that seemed  somewhat revolutionary at the time. I did not understand it fully until I became an established teacher. He said to us "Teaching is a political act, there is no such thing as value-free education. Know what your values are when you teach. Your students already know what they are." I believe that every member of a community has value and that we have a responsibility to respect each other because only then can we uncover our roles. Can you believe this whole entry was sparked by a piece of junk mail?

“The environment you fashion out of your thoughts, your beliefs, your ideals, your philosophy, is the only climate you will ever live in.” John Maxwell

If you have been following this blog and wondering where these quotes come from that I sometimes use as my blog title, the origin is simple. Every day my students follow a routine. The come to class, sit at their seats, write the Crazy Word of the Day, The Word of the Day and the Thought of the Day. Before I check homework, teach a lesson, show a video, or even take attendance, I review these items with them. Today's crazy word? Gravitas.

The word was published on my blackboard with definition, part of speech, and a sample sentence. To connect to what I was telling them last week about why I want them to be on a weekly word quest, rather than to simply rely on my random words to improve their vocabulary, I repeated the thinking point I introduced to them Friday. "Use what you already know to help you learn new stuff." To educators, that's simply encouraging students to use their own schema. I obviously don't talk in teacherspeak to my students but I am trying to reinforce the notion in their heads that they are not blank slates. They come to me already knowing a great deal more than I expect, but often have gaps in their knowledge where I would assume they have none.

So with gravitas, to help them wrap their minds around the word, I asked students to look at the word and seek a Halloween-appropriate word that they see in the word. Immediately kids were calling out "GRAVE!" and not without some level of ghoulish delight. I pushed further. "What do you think when you think about the word "grave?" More ghoulish replies "Death!" "Dead people!" Then I asked: "How many of you think of funeral when you think of grave?" Still a large portion of the class were raising their hands but the solemnity I knew I would engender crept across some students' faces. "Most funerals are sad and the people there are serious, right? There has to be an equally serious behavior shown by everyone at a funeral, right? Thumbs up if you're with me." Sad eyes made eye contact with me and thumbs slowly went up, barely chin high. I had hit a nerve. "Would it surprise you that if we attempted the etymology of grave and gravitas, we would find the same origin?" Many nodded indicating that would not surprise them. "It means heavy--- so, when we visit a grave we come with a heavy heart."

I am constantly checking for understanding on a base level. Just beause I shared it with them, doesn't mean they "got it." They don't have to get it on the first time through. How many of us learned how to make our bluetooth connections talk to each other on the first try without reminders, refreshers or having someone more tech savvy than us show us all over again a few times? Why do some teachers expect that just because they concocted a brilliant lesson full of bells and whistles, that kids will learn the first try through when even they don't?

I remember boldly stating my teaching philosophy to my future employer, "You can't teach them if you don't love them." That was Spring 1994. I was aware that I might be misinterpreted but I meant what I said and I couldn't put it any more directly or simply. Students know when you are just punching a timeclock and you're in it for the paycheck only. They know when they are being tolerated because you only have a couple more years to hang in there before you retire. I still believe that crazy statement nearly 20 years later.

It is the reason I subject myself to pop music, hip-hop, and rock. I need to know what music is in their heads and what messages are rolling around in there. It is the reason I spend the first two weeks of each school year working on "getting to know you" activities. To establish the message with my students--- "You matter to me." My classroom and my enjoyment of my profession are fashioned by my thoughts.

Thought one - there is no such thing as a "bad" kid, although many kids have a tendency to make a slew of lousy decisions. Thought two - if you want to reach that kid, you have to figure out why those decisions are the choice that kid finds most attractive. Thought three - when you can't reach the kid, it is more of reflection of either your failure to connect or their inability to connect because of issues outside of your classroom than it is a reflection of their quality as a person. These thoughts establish a belief system as an educator, these belief systems bolster ideals that are the foundation of a philosophy. You know mine.

At UPENN, the Graduate School of Education had a philosophy: "Each one teach one." I flipped it. "Each one lose one." To be honest, I'm still not satisfied with losing one, and when I do, that climate of my own making is angst. I just have to hope that someone else was able to help those students that would not connect with me. Defeat is a tough pill to swallow when you care about them all.

“Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.” Arthur Schopenhauer

Sometimes it just doesn't feel like there is much to write about, but it has been six days since my last post so here goes.

We are two weeks from Tech Tuesday. It's the day the middle school will pilot our first BYOD Day (Bring Your Own Device) for the entire school district. Many teachers are apprehensive about how to incorporate BYOD into their lessons. I am choosing to live in a pleasant world of denial about it. I guess I do have a bit of a "been there, done that" attitude about it because I have been encouraging my college students to use their devices in class every summer for years now.

How does a literacy educator incorporate technology into an every day lesson? Take the box, turn it inside/out and step out of it. Huh? Well, students are always grumbling about dictionaries, thesuari, and other reference tools they have to use in class. Let them put their money where their whine is. If they believe that they can find the same quality information from a website that they can find in their textbook, dictionary, and thesaurus, let them.

When you think about it, the same discriminatory thinking required to find contextual definitions, true synonyms and discreet information is also going to come into play when students use the internet to find information. Students know how to cut and paste information from sites but they often don't take the time to read through the information to make certain it is the correct fit. The frustration that comes along the adventure to discovery learning teaches the same lessons as the books do.

On BYOD Day, my students will be well into their writing process for their first formal essay of the year. Students who did BYOD will be able to look up misspelled words online, find better word choice suggestions online, post questions to my wallwisher.com site, draft their first draft online and upload their work to me through edmodo.com

My thought about BYOD is simple: how can students use their own technology to enhance their educational process in my class. I  see no value in making this day a Dog and Pony show. For me, the only change has been a paradigm shift from seeing technology as cheating to seeing the use of technology as an enhancment.

To enhance this blog, I used Shopenhauer's quote. It was an advantage to grow up the son of a multipatented electrical engineer, a television designer. I learned quite a bit about degrees of improbability. Dad said that reason it took so long to go from picture tube based units to flat screen tvs was that the computers were not strong enough to calculate the math needed to get LEDs to work like pixels. He went on to say that some even thought it was impossible to get a flat screen to work because of the computer limitations. 20 years later, most households have some sort of flat screen devise, whether it's their child's PS2 gaming device, a smart phone, a flat screen tv, or a tablet. Flat screen technology is a ubiquitous fact of our lives now. Dad used to say that nothing is impossible but there are varying degrees of improbability. That is to say nothing is impossible but somethings are inplausible-- at this point in time. We need to inspire our students to seek out the next best thing and lead the way to it.

Evolution

In the 1980's, Lee Iacoca would voice-over the slogan: "Lead, follow, or get out of the way." touting Chrysler Corporation's design innovations: the K-car and the minivan. Our district has a new mission statement, tailored to address the needs of twenty-first century learners: "Providing progressive education to strengthen the global community," and Monday's in-service was developed to roll out what that will mean for teachers in our district. As I listened to the concerns of my colleagues, I was reminded of that slogan.

If something is progressive, it is forward thinking. It means change. It is the antithesis of conservative. The year is 2012. We are not on the cusp of the new millenia, we are in the thick of it. We can no more conduct the business of education in this country as we always did anymore than we could teach 20th century learners the same way students were taught in the 19th century. I get that, yet I'm still struggling to make the transition. It amazes me that others don't see the bigger picture sometimes.

The new core standards that all teachers throughout the nation will be charged with teaching in 2014, require new literacy standards that include technology. For those resistant to this change and yet were taught how to use the internet as scholars in school and college, consider this: The internet was new, unfamiliar, rife with potentilally devastating pitfalls and the teachers charged to teach with it were unfamiliar with it. How do I know? I was one of them.

I earned my masters in 1994. I was a student-teacher during the 1993-94 school year, and I acquired my first teaching assignment the following year. Articles were available on the web in grad school but there was no formatting to them. They were not pdf files the way they are now. Most people chose to forgo on-line articles and found the hard copies in the stacks of the library. People used aol or some other internet service to navigate web pages and the material was woefully lacking.

In less than five years, the net morphed from the wild west into an information superhouse that resembled what we have now. We were asked to teach students to research, using it. There were and are pitfalls and we learned the hard way that the suffixes at the end of websites mattered. Whitehouse-dot-com is completely different from whitehouse-dot-gov... remember those days? We adjusted and are approaching mastery.

Our new challenge? Teach students to use their personal webtools in the classroom as scholars;  not just for tweeting, texting, facebooking, videogaming, and killing time. Are there pitfalls to avoid? --some we don't even know about and will get blindsided with in the process-- probably. So what? Aren't we encouraging our students to try new things all the time? When we grumble about change, are we reflecting in our own behavior what we expect out of students when they are introduced to alien concepts like the future pluperfect tense?

Have any of the administrator's threatened us with negative teacher ratings or observations because our best efforts failed? Why fear failure-- how many flights did the Wright brothers attempt before success? How many of Thomas Alva Edison's lightbulbs exploded before he and Louis Lattimer figured out how to make a long lasting filament?

I think having been a transient student, professional and educator helps me accept change more readily than some. The old joke about the only thing you can count on is death and taxes rings true to me. We are charged with laying a foundation for success for the millenial generation. Right now, kids are learning how to accesss information on their own, without our guidance, and we are not teaching them how to evaluate the quality, veracity, and authenticity of that information.

Students are creating online identities without guidance from elders about protecting the only thing they truly own--- their reputation. Students can find information but they don't always know how to ask the question that gets the information they truly need. There are some who say that "That's not my job." as educators. Isn't it? How different are these 21st century challenges from evaluating traditional non-fiction texts? How different is teaching civics from teaching digital citizenship? As a writing teacher, am I ok with standard English's bastardization by the "newspeak" of the internet? John Maxwell said that "The greatest mistake a person can make is doing nothing." If we do nothing, how are we serving the unique new challenges that the 21st century learners will face?

We don't know what the future holds, but if your memory goes beyond 1993 and you think how much our world has changed since then,  imagine how much more the technological revolution will alter our daily reality in another twelve years. Educators are supposed to prepare the next generation for the challenges they will encounter as adults. How else will we help students get there from here without acknowledging these future challenges?

Moreover, public education is under attack and many of the reforms, like vouchers programs seem to be designed specifically to destroy school as we know it. When we don't evolve or when we resist change, aren't we setting ourselves up for extinction? In military school, tactical officers said that "the view never changes if you're always following." I like to see the road ahead, not the posterior of the traffic in front of me.

Growing pains--- they let us know we're alive.

From the Lanes to the Chalkboard and Beyond

Warning - The following message will contain information that is not strictly pedagogical.

When I started this blog a month ago, I gave myself permission to write about whatever was on my mind. In grad school, we investigated student's multiple worlds by turning the lens on our own multiple worlds. I am more than a teacher, yet I teach everywhere I go, and in all that I do. Teaching isn't just a profession, it's part of who I am-- even when I'm bowling.

You read it correctly, and I'm not just a league bowler; I have been a member of the Professional Bowler's Association since 2000 and I have competed in regional events since 1996. On April Fool's Day 2011, I had an unfriendly reminder of my vulnerability, age, and mortality.

It had already been a bad beginning to the new year when I contracted a flesh infection that caused me to lose nearly three weeks of school. The treatment was nearly worse than the ailment. I missed days of work due to my body's poor reaction to the medicine I was told to ingest. Then I recovered, and things seemed to be going well.

A month later, my team and I flew out to Reno, NV for the USBC National Open Tournament and I performed well enough to earn a modest paycheck for my efforts out there. I flew back on Thursday, March 31 and was back to work the following day. I had been coaching the high school junior varsity softball team for 3 years and was just beginning my fourth year. I learned that the two games I missed that week had been dreadful performances. The players lost their games on unforced errors with fielding.

It was raining that Friday. We had indoor practice and the solution seemed fairly clear to all the coaches. We would practice fielding. Triple plays, double plays, passing-- all the things that went wrong that week. All the players were on the "field," a rubber-surfaced gym floor with corrugated grooves that reminded me of a giant basketball cover. All the coaches were going to be runners.

That's when it happened. I used to be a pretty fast runner. Not as fast as my elder brothers and definitely not as fast as my cousin, Ryan Bailey, who just won a silver medal at the olympics this summer in London, but still faster than most. I set out to take advantage of my long strides and speed. I wanted to see if I could rattle my players with worry that I would make it to base before they managed to pass the ball. First base, no problem. Stealing from first to second, I applied my brakes so that I could round the base. Then I felt my knee cork-screw counter-clockwise as my heel transferred power to my other leg.

There was no snap and no extreme pain-- just the sudden feeling that something came loose inside my knee, it felt very unstable and wobbly to the point I called time and hobbled off the diamond. I had no idea how serious the injury was. I knew I had tweaked my knee, and I had enough sense to ask a player to run and get me ice for my knee. I sat out the rest of practice nursing my knee and watching my players.

Three weeks later, I was entering OSS for surgery. In that instant, I tore the left and right meniscus and shredded my ACL. Going into surgery I had hope that the surgeon would only have to repair the meniscus and that the ACL would still be viable. A meniscus surgery has a three month recovery time, ACL-- 12 months. The injury was to my left knee, my sliding knee in bowling--- one of the worst possible injuries for a bowler.

When I woke up in the recovery room, my surgeon was there to bear me the news. He had to take the ACL. He replaced it with a cadaver ACL. My heart sank. I don't really like summer vacation. It's too long and I start missing my job within a couple weeks, but at least I have the time and the funds to practice and compete in pro tournaments. Twelve months? No tournaments? No bowling? Nightmare.

After six months of physical therapy three nights a week, I was released. I had to ice and stretch my knee nightly for twelve months. Nearly a year and a half later, I am finally getting my mojo back on the lanes. Last night on a sport pattern at Leisure Lanes in Lancaster, PA, I shot a 3 game set of 675. I won two out of three matches 258-198, 212-232, and 177-245. This was the third consecutive week I felt like me, and the first week where I had complete confidence in my physical game.

Slow delivery, free backswing, even tempo-- I forgot what this felt like. The muscle memory had faded and only my brain remembered that I used to make strikes look easy. I had never had a serious injury before that. I had broken my big toe but that was minor--- all the doctor did was bandage my bum toe to the good one. I had never been incapacitated to the point where I wondered if I would fully recover.

The brutal experience gave me empathy for my student athletes on crutches and those who underwent surgery. I wore crutches for three weeks. I'm a high energy teacher. It was no fun being hindered by my own body from working the room. I had to slow down because I could not be fast. I couldn't drive my car for two weeks after surgery because my knee would not bend enough to work the pedals. I was in hell.

Last night, bowling with finesse, precision, and power felt awesome. Remembering that feeling has me thinking about my students who face similar uncertainties when they are informed that they need surgery, are going to need extended rehab, and should be  able to play next season. I have been a bowler since I was 7 and joined my first league. The prospect of never bowling again or never achieving at the level I was performing before my injury was devastating, but being a bowler is not my full identity. I have my writing, my music, my family, and my teaching that still help define me. Middle schoolers are very sensitive to a sense of drama; how must they feel when it happens to them, when they may not know that they have other things going for them that matter just as much or even more?

Last night also made me think about the enduring messages we give children as teachers, parrents, coaches, mentors, and other role models. I watched a league mate self-destruct with negative self-talk, calling himself an idiot or stupid for poor executions or failure to make appropriate adjustments at the right moments. They were so focused upon their failures that they could not look upon what these failures were telling them. Who told them they were dumb, idiots, or less than. Problem-solvers may become frustrated with negative results but they are also inspired by failures. Instead of self-doubtm they ask themselves "What went wrong?" and "How do I fix it?" The answers to those questions lead to greatness.

I am thankful I listened to my father about how failures in engineering led him to 5 patents in design. I try and I hope I am succeeding in carrying that message forward to my students. Sometimes disappointments lead to greater things. 

Patience, Epic Fails, and Student Motivation

Not only is it true that not every lesson resolves itself in a single class period, but sometimes a lesson that leaves kids bewildered can be a good thing. Sounds like pedagogical blasphemy, doesn't it? It isn't and I come prepared with ethnological proof to support that assertion.  Our classes are preparing to write their first formal essay of the year, now that we have finished reading the first novel of the year, That Was Then, This Is Now.

Class began with a review of the basic parts of a five paragraph essay. Typical for a Monday, the students were mostly lethargic, listless, and alarmingly apathetic. They had the glazed over "Been there. Done that. Bought the t-shirt" expression on their faces. The problem? They had never been asked to formally use text in a written argument before now, so when I introduced the basic rules for in-text citation, they did not change their affect because they had tuned out, assuming it was more of the same.

I reminded kids to listen and participate but the will and inclination were not present yesterday. When I handed out the guided practice prompts for them to practice two of the rules for in-text citation (MLA Format,) all the sudden students jumped into crisis mode. They had dutifully written down key concepts from the board that they were going to need: "signal phrase, dynamic character, static character." and they were somewhat quiet during the explanation but I could tell they were not really with me. The rythm of the class was "off" and I was uncomfortable.

Their exit pass was to demonstrate what they learned:

Directions: Take a quote from pages 157-158 and another quote from page 42 in That Was Then, This Is Now to show how Mark is a static character using the “Citation for Textual Support” sheet (page 2) in your “Anatomy of a 5 Paragraph Essay” packet.

1.      Prove the point using a signal phrase involving SE Hinton and the character.

2.      Prove the point without a signal phrase.

Many did not finish in my first 2 classes. They forgot what a signal phrase was. Even though we had talked about how Mark was a static character earlier that period and even though we had read the quotes on pages 42 and 157 through 158, students were acting like I was looking for new undiscovered territory. Sounds like a nightmare epic fail doesn't it?

Or was it? By fourth period, word had made its way around the student population that Logan was teaching something difficult and confusing. I found this out because the kids from fourth period told me. When I recounted the behaviors from first and second period while suggesting that their inattention may have had an impact on their depth of understanding, students in the latter classes seemed more motivated to be active learners.

The later students were actively participating by asking questions and were eager to attempt the work publicly. This was one case where the rumor mill helped fuel student achivement. The later students were motivated to see what was so difficult and did not understand their peer's confusion.

Today, the early classes came in wearing their Patti LaBelle new attitudes. We reviewed the first two rules again, this time with better focus from my students. Together, we created a signal phrase incorporating SE Hinton's name, the fact was that Mark was a static character and a quote from page 42.

The sounds of "lightbulbs" turning on in class was audible. The answers to the probing for understanding poll were genuine thumbs up. In short, the shock of not understanding something in class, because they were only half-way paying attention, actually transformed passive learners into motivated learners the following day. Sometimes we learn while we are failing only to succeed on another day. So the next time class seems like an epic fail, consider how my Maudlin Monday turned  into a Terrific Tuesday.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Schema Theory

Today, as a formative assessment, I started class with the request that students draw Bryon's big decision from Chapter 10. In the chapter, Bryon discovered that his best friend was currently a drug dealer. This happens at the heels of rescuing another friend from a drug den of a hippie house who was on a bad LSD trip. The friend happened to be the younger brother of Bryon's new girlfriend. The results of the activity were interesting.

In college we learned that everyone has schema, prior knowledge and history, and that schema colors the way we interpret information. The novel, That Was Then, This Is Now, is set in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Even after students conducted webquests about these eras and reported back to me about trends of that era in technology, many students still drew Bryon using a cell phone to call the police or a pushutton wall unit phone. I was tickled to see that on so many students' papers.

The message I gleaned from that is that students still see the world, past or present, as it is today. This means that we educators have to work harder to help students understand the time period we are teaching and what anachronisms are.The "how" is the big question.

Once, many years ago, when they were in their late 50s, I invited my parents to visit my class as guest speakers about life as an African American in the 1960s. The experience was powerful for my students, my parents and even for me. The power of having visitors speak to students about an era they were studying as witnesses to history was very strong. I cannot put my parents through that each year, but it does give me an idea--- skype? Video interviews. Live show n tell? I am getting an idea for a very cool lesson and project... stay tuned.

Why Are We Here?

Today's post title sounds like a metaphysical question of deep import, or a sarcastic rhetorical rant. I don't mean it to be either. It's a straight question. Why do we teach? Why do we teach where we do? Is it because there were no jobs any where else? Is it because there was nothing else to do with our lives or is it because we were called to it? Were you called to your profession? To your school district? To your grade?

I've been getting that message quite a bit lately indirectly. I am reminded that when I was a teen, my dad used to tell me: "Boy, if you never want to work a day in your life, do something you love. You won't believe people are paying you to do it." Yesterday I was listening to TD Jakes who said that if you are doing what you have been called to do, you will not be chasing money to do it, money will be chasing you. That resonated with me.

Not only do I do what I love, but opportunities to do more and get paid for it chase after me to the point where I now have to think about whether I have the time or the inclination to make more money as a coach, professor, tutor, or teacher. Naively (yeah, at 45, one can still be naive) I expect everyone to approach their job as their life's work. I think the responsibility to lay a strong academic foundation for a student's success to be an enormous responsibility. So when our adminstration encouraged us to embrace the idea of rigor in our classrooms, I smiled inside. Finally. I had not heard this message that clearly from administrators since I left NJ in 2004.

Dr. Downs put it this way: "Joel, the taxpayers of this district pay you a hefty salary to teach their students well. Make sure you give them their money's worth." At the time, while understanding the intent of the message, there was a part of me internally refuting the money part since I had a friend who was a high school dropout with a  GED who was working as head mechanic of a medium sized Ford dealership for 25K more salary than I earned with an ivy league master's degree. But when he pointed out to me that teachers that create a rigorous learning environment for their students will often receive friction from parents who do not want their kids to struggle, he warned me: "Don't you dare give in." I got the message. High expectations, partnered with proper scaffolding is my job. That is how we help students grow from one grade to another.

It has taken me many years to find the balance between strong expectations, proper scaffolding, and manageable work load. I have found it through raising the bar for the product but lowering the workload to obtain the bar through more time on task in class with teacher guidance and less homework. Homework is not the great Satan that some parents have made it to be, but the instructional value is reflective. Homework should be practice of what you taught in class, not a place to attempt to learn new information independently. The instruction and exercises are not the final product, but the enduring understanding that the student gains from the endeavor is.

I had to shake the chains of time limits, grade grubbing, and close-ended lessons to get to the point where what is learned is more important than how long it took to complete the assignment.  I first heard about curriculum that is a mile long and an inch deep at the beginning of the new millenia. That concept made sense, but I did not see the connection between that and trying to make a lesson always fit with closure when the bell rings or with writing projects being completed with in a fixed amount of time. Even the state writing tests are no longer timed because they got the message: quality takes time.

I was approached to become an adjunct professor after only 8 years of teaching because an elder teacher noticed that I already embraced rigor. I didn't really understand what the fuss was about how I operated. My directions were clear, and my expectations were that if a child earned an "A," it was because they had produced quality work. I took pains to spell out what quality looked like for each assignment by creating rubrics, distributing them in advance, and explaining them well in advance of deadlines. I didn't think that marked much notice, it was just what I learned to be best practices in pedagogy classes as a student teacher.

Unfortunately many did give into parent demands that a student receive the highest grade without earning it. That was as much of a revelation to me as learning that completing a project assigned by my upline at DuPont, a day ahead of schedule, was worthy of earning a plaque, a food processor, a reception in my honor, and a parking space just steps from the entry door. Is this the culture we live in as Americans in 2012?

I remember the re-runs of Star Trek I watched in the 1970s as a kid where Scottie, the engineer, would always overstate how long it would take to fix the starship so that he would come out a hero when he beat his own manufactured deadline. When did the bar of expectations get lowered so low that simply doing what was asked was outstanding work?

My attitude about state minimum proficiency exams was that I should expect more than what was necessary to pass from my students and that my student's goal should be excellence. On the PSSA's, that means advanced proficient. Passing should be a given, if I have taught my students well, because they should understand where the bar is for excellence. Legibility and quantity do not equal quality but the quality of that quantity can be measured.

When I write a rubric I look at my assignment and chunk my expectations into content, GUMS (Grammar, Usage, Mechanics, and Spelling) and whatever parameters were spelled out in the directions. For an essay, that could mean I was looking for a quality thesis, quality organization, quality supporting evidence, a quality introduction and a quality conclusion. I would ask myself what does an "A" look like and what does an "F" look like. Fleshing out the "B," the "C," and the "D" were always the tough part. Fs and As are easy to recognize.

I used to think everybody did this, but I find that there are still teachers who simply slap a grade on a paper with empty praise or commendation like "good job" or "please see me..." I thought the days of counting misspelled words died with the Gerri curl, parachute pants, and Wham UK. Some say rubrics are time-consuming. They can be, but after a while they become second nature-- like brushing your teeth before you go to bed. The practice keeps the dentist away and the rubric practice makes grade inquiries with parents easier to deal with. Ususally when an irate parent is face to face with the grading requirements that were distributed to their child at the beginning of an assignment, and shown where the student failed to measure up, the conversation changes its color.

There are generations of educators and adults who were students before rubrics. Grading was either arbitrary or a mystery. I remember having to guess with my classmates what the difference between a B+ and an A- was. Often it was the difference between whether your teacher liked you and took pity on you. I didn't want to be that teacher.

My bottom line is that I want to bring my students further, push them to achieving excellence, and empower them to achieve more than they believed was possible.

Drum Roll Please

Bless me blogger, it has been five days since my last post.  These past five days have been busy ones. The weekend was packed with coaching, training, lifting, cleaning, shopping, and cooking-- typical weekend for me. The week has been equally challenging but finally I have an unexpected moment to write, so I'm taking it.

Last week I talked about some pretty cool stuff and grades. I am happy to report that focusing upon novelty and formative assessment has had the desired affect upon my students' performance on summative assessments. Grades are due this week and Tuesday was the first summative assessment I gave my students. The results were very encouraging.

Before focussing upon formative assessment and incorporating novelty in the classroom, students would routinely crash and burn on Monday morning 10-point quizzes. The class averages would at best be 6/10 and at worst 5/10. This isn't even a bell curve. Tuesday's quiz was however a 25 point quiz that asked students to demonstrate vocabulary recall of  ten Greek roots, to demonstrate comprehension and recall of specific events in their novel by answering fifteen multiple choice questions about the plot of the first half of the novel, and to identify 5 prepositions from an excerpted paragraph in the novel.

The results are in. When I announced the class average for each class, after returning the graded quizzes, I encouraged my students to act like eigth graders. They gave me a drum-roll on their desks. Most of them did. First period averaged 85.7%, Second period 88.6%, Fourth period 87.7%, Fifth period 97.9% and Sixth period 84%. The average grade for all five sections, 88.78%. As anyone who works with averages knows, this does not mean that all my students performed well, but obvioiusly most of them did.

The best comment I received from a student, "That was an easy test, I knew all the answers." I smiled, thinking to myself: "All my tests are easy when you are prepared." I prepared them. Everything I had them do was calculated to make sure they had the recall and ownership of the material to perform well. The pictures reinforced the plot, the articles we read in the computer lab looking for root words reinforced the root words. Scouring a chapter for examples of prepositions reinfoced their ability to recognize prepositions.

Last week, I wrote that if this stuff was working, the kids grades should not sllip once we began formative assessments. I guess its working but my new goal is to see my classes average over 90 percent on the next assessment, the quiz about the second half of the novel next week.

Just like my dog Juggernaut, this old dog is learning new tricks.

Fun?

Last year in our district formative assessment committee,  we examined, experimented with, and critically analyzed a variety of new tricks of the trade to gauge student readiness to learn, student acquisition of knowledge, student schema, and generally some cool stuff (LOVE using illegal words!) The most enduring revelation I received from all of it effective feedback. I have always commented on papers--- sometimes I have more comments about my students writing than the actual writing they produced. I learned that some of what I was doing for years may not be that helpful to learning after all.

The hardest thing I had to learn (and now continue) was asking questions rather than pointing out mistakes. I did what every English teacher has been trained to do. I took out my marking pin and made editing suggestions to their work. Bad idea. Why? I was doing all the work, thus making my students dependent upon my editing and not responsible for their own.

The new strategy was to ask questions rather than point out grammar errors, misspellings, fragments and gaffes in fluency. So I'm taking a break after plowing through half of last class's Write Your Think. We just finished chapter 5 of That Was Then, This Is Now with five minutes left of the class period. Rather than talk about our reactions to Charlie's murder, I asked the question: "Whose fault is it that Charlie is dead?" Students wrote paragraph-long responses to the prompt.

It is getting easier to ask rather than direct. Everytime I saw a proper noun that needed capitalization, I underlined it and drew a line from the word to the margin where I wrote "What must we always do with the first letter in a specific name?" Where students neglected apostrophe "s" I asked: "How do we show possession when we write a person's name?" For incomplete sentences I asked: "How could you make this a complete thought?" For misspelled words or misused homonyms I would ask : "Is this the correct spelling of the word for this sentence?" There is a pragmatic benefit to this paradigm shift.

After writing the same questions over and over again, I received a direct message from my students. "Mr. Logan, we need to be reminded how to capitalize proper nouns. We need a refresher about how to show possessive in our writing. We need to keep a log of the words we misspell frequently so we know to pay attention to them. We need to look at how to writing complete sentences." See? Now I know what writing issues to focus upon next week to complement their reading assignments.

Novelty is a message I latched onto from an in-service last year. I have a tendency to be a goof or overly dramatic in class. I have fun in class, nearly every day. How-- try being a goof with 8th graders and watch their faces. Priceless. From that point, you have their cooperation and attention-- they want to know what other crazy stuff you're going to do. I once told a friend that what I like about teaching is that it takes everything I have and asks for more. In elementary school, junior high, high school, and college, I was a singer and actor. I now use those skills when I teach.

Sorry Justin Timberlake, you might be bringing "Sexy Back," but I'm bringing "Grammar Back." Smiles, eye rolls, rib jabbing, perplexed stares and mild amusements that crawl across their faces. Priceless. Some parents come to parent teacher conferences singing my versions of pop songs that thair kids sing to them on the way to soccer practice or whatever. You never know what lingers with kids or what they are taking home. Do you know: "Two types of nouns/Only Capitalize One/Proper, proper, proper nouns please?" I'd probably be in trouble with Lady Gaga if she knew my students know my lyrics better than hers.... Fun with grammar. What a concept.

Not really. Sister Eleanor Grace Spirodozzi, at Saint Mary's School in Baldwinsville, NY, used to host spelling relays every Friday. She would divide the class into two groups. We would get in line at one end of the room. The middle of the room was cleared so we could do the relay. Someone would keep score while we played. Sister would call the spelling word from our list and we would try to beat our opposing runner to the chalk board on the other side of the room and spell the word correctly. The person who spelled it correctly first earned her team a point but then she had to run back to the end of the line so the next word could be called and the teams were literally off and running again. How fun is it for kids? I still remember it 34 years later... and I can spell.

Borrowed Cars and Discovery Learning

It maybe because I was trained to think about research qualitatively as an ethnographer instead of quantitatively as a statistician, but I think when talking about students, letting their words do the talking is more powerful than insightful commentary. And that is how I want to begin this blog, with the kids speaking:

Dear Mr. Terch,

We are reading That Was Then, This Is Now in English class with Mr. Logan. Have you read it? Well there is a part in the book where Mark takes the principal's car somewhere but brings it back. The principal wasn't mad. He actually thought it was funny. How wouild you feel if I stole your car sometime? I debated with the class that you would be fine with it. Well anyway. I'm gonna go.
                                                     Bye
                                                           McKenzie R

Dear Mr. terch
         Could I borrow your car to run to the York County prison to go sing to the inmates. LOL
                                From: Julie M.


Dear Mr. Church terch -

I think i could hotwire your car is ok i would give it back ok

Dear, love

Charles

OK editing mistakes should be ignored. I typed the notes to our principal exactly as they wrote them to maintain their integrity. There is a lot to learn here from my students in this 3 quick notes. I learned how they view the world, what writing issues we need to conquer this year, and some insight to their personalities.

Where'd all this come from? Like McKenzie wrote to our principal, we were discussing chapter 4 of That Was Then, This Is Now and I was attempting to connect the story to their own lives by asking the question: how do you think Mr. Terch would react if he discovered one of you driving his car into his parking space after frantically looking for it. Several students wanted to argue that our principal would have been "fine with it." I encouraged them to write to him. The above were their responses.

Finally, I was able to incorporate the text from the novel for my grammar mini-lesson today. I called it a Preposition Quest. The students were supposed to work in their groups to find a sentence from chapter 4 that features a preposition and another sentence featuring a compound preposition. I reminded them that, since I had already instructed them to put the definitions of each into their notebooks, they should be able to find the definition in their notebook.

Do you remember I told you I was a Murphy's Law kind of guy? I left a copy of our writing and grammar text on each desk, just in case. You see, just because they wrote the definitions in their notebook is no guarantee they remembered to bring the notebook to class. Sometimes they bring the wrong notebook, come with no notebook, or were absent the day of the lesson. No problem. I encouraged them to use the texts if they neeed to and also reminded them how to find discreet information in a textbook. Use the index. We also discussed that if there was a chapter about prepositions, whether the index would list the chapter by a single page or a range of pages. Some kids still went to the single page reference that only obliquely referenced a prepositional phrase without defining it.

I remember having a new teacher I was charged with mentoring a few years back. He'd be irritated about something a middle schooler did and demand I explain the unexplainable: "Why'd he do that?" The answer was simple: "He's 13." My answer to everything. The mantra achieves calm for middle school teachers and it works for both sexes and all middle school ages. Repeat after me. "She's twelve." "He's fourteen" "They're eigth graders." After years of fighting the natural behaviors of early adolescents, somewhere around year 8 I figured out that instead of fighting it, I should accept it and redirect it. That's the year I traded rows for pods and silence for an unquiet pedagogy (yes, I read that book in grad school too.)

A chattering class focused on a task and slipping in references to last night's game or the latest middle school gossip is a healthy one. It was fun to bounce around the room eavesdropping on kids arguing whether the sentences fit the bill of a compound preposition while trying to slip in some off-topic conversation. You know what's funny about teachers who are obsessed with off-task dialogue? They are the exact same people who irritate me when I'm trying to listen to directions from our administrators in faculty meetings and in-service meetings. If they can do it what makes them think their kids can't? I trust my students to meet or at least attempt to meet my expectations. Ironically, I cannot carry on a conversation and listen to instructions simultaneously, so I appear to be a model audience member in those situations. Unlike their teachers, students have a tendency to police themselves when they're focused on the task. Often before I have a chance to redirect, the kids themselves remind each other "We gotta get this done!"

I can't decide which I enjoyed more today-- the letters to Mr. Terch or the 4 panel comic depicting Mark's car story. Supposedly, there is a way to embed photos onto the blog articles themselves. I am going to see Mr. Terch and Mrs. Spangenberger to investigate how to do it. Some of the cartoons were pretty cool. The lingering future assignment kept students motivated to finish the grammar assignment. My kids like drawing this year. I heard many "We gotta get this done so we can draw!" numerous times today."

That's my story. Lesson learned today--- don't let the kids know which car is yours-- they might borrow it. <grin>

Floppy-eared Children

When the alarm went off this morning I worried. How am I going to teach with no sleep? I'm not a parent of a human but I do have two floppy-eared children. I never noticed how much like kids, dogs can be.

Yesterday was a hectic afternoon, Hannah, my adorable four and a half month old yellow labrador retriever, had her second vet visit at 4:15pm after school. School dismissal for teachers was at 2:50pm and I live about 15 to 20 minutes away from school. Plenty of time right? You'd think that if you also believe that all things are equal and plans always turn out the way you expect.

That's not my experience at all. I'm kinda a Murphy's Law guy. The vet wanted a stool sample. Hannah wouldn't produce one for me yesterday morning which meant I had to hope she didn't make when she was let out that afternoon before I came home--- I used to think dog poop was gross, now neither the smell, shape or consistency bothers me-- it's just part of being a doggy's daddy. Skewering a fresh poop pile with a discreet little green plastic device didn't bother me at all. How did that happen?

Did Hannah give me the stool sample I needed? Eventually. My mother warned me that Hannah was her own person and had her own head before I even met her this summer. Hannah wanted to play. The clock was ticking. She had been in her crate all morning and a few hours that afternoon, so I gave in and let her play. All the while, I was nervously watching the time slip away on my flip phone--- yeah I don't do the smart phone yet. I didn't even have a cellphone until 2004. But I digress.

While Hannah played fetch and keep away with Daddy, Daddy almost wiped out discovering her afternoon stool sample had been hidden between the ivy covered volleyball court bowl and the court border. "Great, she already went this afternoon and I'll have to go to the docs without her stool sample again--- they're going to think I'm an idiot.." The bottoms of my shoes were fragrant with my doggy daughter's deposit but there wasn't enough there for me to scrape off for a sample.

It was 3:45 now and I was getting worried. I really didn't want to show up empty-handed again, but Hannah normally doesn't need to go number 2 in the middle of the day. Resigned to "daddy-epic-fail," I brought my happy panting puppy back inside the house. We walked by her food bowl and her crate and I noticed something. Fortunately, Hannah hadn't finished her breakfast and there were still a few handfuls of it in her bowl.  I discovered the hard way that my little girl will leave presents if she eats after a vigorous exercise when I forget to let her out again.

We practiced "sit-ups" using her leftover breakfast. I took the feed by the handful and we practiced sitting, sitting down (like a sphinx,) and  sitting up again. Each time she completed the exercise I fed her feed from my hand. When she finished the rest of her breakfast, I changed shoes, put on her car harness and took her for a lap around the house. Bingo! It was 4:10 and the vet's office was 15 minutes away.

Laugh if you want to at my not-so-smartphone, but it has bluetooth and so does my car so I called them from the road letting them know that we were running late. "It's Hannah's daddy's fault, but at least we have a stool sample."

All that and the visit lasted 10 minutes--- She's 35 pounds now-- 5 pound gain from her visit 2 weeks previous. She had another round of shots-- she didn't bark or growl but she didn't like them. The vet said "bee sting" Hannah shot me a look like "Evil trick, Daddy!" Like I said, 10 minutes and it was over.

I'm always exhausted after work. Before Hannah, I could crawl in my bed or lounge on the couch and fall asleep for 30 minutes when I got home. Hannah will sit at the foot of the couch and watch tv with me, but if I fall asleep, she will use her "big girl" voice and bark me awake. The tone is unmistakably insistent like "Hey! You left me home alone all day, you can't fall asleep now. Pay attention to me. Hey!" If I taped her barking rant, you could insert the words for the syllables of her barks. I know-- dog parents are nuts, right?

After dinner, I was awake enough to play with my pup some more. She loves to squirm on her back with her favorite toy in her mouth and playfully push my hands away with her paws as I try to play "Rubdabelly" with her.

It used to be "Rub the belly." If you saw us play--- you would see a grown man on all fours talking baby talk, nuzzling his puppy's neck and rubbing her belly. Hannah eats it up. She just grins and rolls on her back playfully.

When we were finished. Juggernaut, my ten year old English Springer Spaniel, squeezed between Hannah and I, plopped on my foot ,and leaned his head back against my shin-- his not so sublte way of letting me know he wants his neck petted. So I pet him and told him what a good boy he was and he was in doggie nirvanna,

Unfortunately, Hannah is jealous of anyone else getting my attention. She walked back up to us and started kissing Juggernaut's face. He went ballistic. First, he growled and, of course, Hannah paid him no attention and kept trying to get in on the lovefest. He then barked, chased after her, and even when she fell to the ground in supplication, he nipped at her side. She squealed that mournful, heartbreaking yelp that makes puppy-daddies die a little inside.

I was horrorified that he was hurting her. So this voice I did not recognized erupted from me. "No! No!No!No!Nonononono!" Juggernaut got off her and the baby scurried between my legs, shielding herself from her brother-turned-Cujo.

I spent the next 30 minutes cradling my puppy in my arms, petting her, assuring her she was safe, and that Daddy would not let anything happen to her. I noticed she avoided Juggernaut when we walked back in the room. I could not put her to bed yet.

We have a flea issue with Juggernaut, so all the linens and towels were being washed. This included the Hannah's bed linens. MamaDear made Hannah a mattress out of batting and boat cover material. She made a mattress linen for her with leftover material from curtains for the living room. I was not going to put the puppy in the crate to rest on a metal floor after she had become accostomed to more luxurious accomodations.

TV night was spent watchfully monitoring Hannah's interaction with Juggernaut. When the load was finally dry, I made my little girl's bed, placed her chew toys inside, and set her down. When I finally retired to bed at 11, I thought I would sleep til 5:00am as always. Wishful thinking.

At 12am Hannah started her whinebark. For those of you without dogs, its the whine that starts like a yawn and drawls until the pup is nearly out of breath and ends in an insistent bark. I remembered my mother warning me not to jump out of bed everytime Hannah called me and that I had to remain in control. I also had to get to sleep. After an hour and a half of attempting to ignore her intermittent pleading, I roused myself out of bed and went into the great room to see about her.

I took her out. She had to urinate but nothing else. She obediently got back into her crate and I went back to bed after saying good night. This time it was straight out barking from about 1:20 to 2am. I couldn't take anymore, so I went to see about her again. Did she urgently need to pass a stool sample? I took her out again and all she wanted to do was play "keep away." Heck no. Not at 2am! I squashed her keep-away fun, tackled her, wrestled her back into her crate, and told her: "Good night, Hannah Chase. Daddy needs his sleep!"

Again with the barking. What the heck? Finally I took her out of her crate at 4am, lay clean blankets and a couple of her chew toys on the floor in my room beside my bed. Peace. One hour of sleep. Awesome.

Funny thing about all that. The day turned out to be ok. We were in the library. Mrs. H. booktalked some new books and let the kids know about some free kindle downloads available that they may want to investigate. We used today's meet to post answers to my grammar question: "What is the difference between a preposition and a compound preposition?"

I received the feedback I needed about last week's lesson. I know. There was no qualitative or quantitative grade to put in my gradebook, but I got the information I needed. Isn't that what counts? Grades have to be uploaded on the 20th of September for mid-marking period reports. To satisfy the grade grubbing, I am giving a quiz on prepositions and the first three chapters of our novel on Tuesday.

If all this formative assessment and progressive feedback I have been working with works. The kids grades should remain relatively unchanged. Most kids have As at this point. They are doing their homework, they are productive in class and they seem to have a grasp on what is happening so far. Does every class always have to generate a bell-curve to be challenging and rigorous? I used to think that, but not anymore. Isn't the goal to see everyone successful?

Or is that the lack of sleep talking?

Now That Was Some Cool Stuff!

The title is not my own, it's a canned message that our librarian, Mrs. H., used with the video production team for daily announcements a few years back. The announcer reminded me of Max Headroom (am I the only one who remembers that virtual reporter?) Anyway, it sums up the morning I'm having. Gotta love a morning that starts well.

At the end of the 2011-2012 school year, I lost a close friend and mentor to another building assignment. You see, I spent ten years teaching Reading/Literature. I was still an English teacher, but my focus was on comprehension, extending literature to student's lives, literary terms, and decoding words. The LA teacher focused on grammar and writing. I never considered myself too much of a grammarian. There were stellar people in my building who fit that bill much better than me. Then, the curriculum changed and I was teaching writing and reading (yikes!)

As a student, grammar was never a focus of instruction except in 6th and seventh grade. In high school, I found myself in classes with other students who "wrote naturally." They also grew up in households where both parents owned degrees and experienced at least some post baccalaureate studies. In teacher-speak, we all came from literature rich environments, so its probably not true that we wrote naturally or just understood grammar by osmosis. We grew up in homes where mispeaking  grammatically, and making writing errors were instantly corrected. --any wonder we were in honors and accelerated English classes?

When I came to South Eastern, I was hired as "Communication Arts" teacher. That meant teaching writing, reading, speaking and listening skills. Fortunately I had Mr. H. as my friend and unofficial mentor to run to with questions about gerunds, participles, infinitives, and other technical bumps in the road. I used to tease him with the dictate that he wasn't allowed to retire until I learned all I could from him. I was kidding, but a far greater part of myself meant that than I would let on.

Well, today I was greeted with an email from a former students who is now at the high school:

Dear Mr. Logan,

Today in English class, we came across a sentence that my teacher and I did not agree on so I was wondering if you could help. In the sentence, "Without any hesitation, Frank stepped to the microphone.", what is "Without any hesitation" modifying? Is it an adjective clause or an adverb clause, and why? 

Thanks,

H.H. (identity protected)

I wrote her back:

Good morning,

The clause in question is an adverb clause because it is describing how Frank stepped to the microphone. You made my morning. It is nice to know former students still think of me when they have a grammar conundrum. I hope you are having a great beginning of the school year. Are you a sophomore this year? Am I keeping the years straight in my head?

Have a great day!

Sincerely,

Mr. Logan

Robert Burns wrote a poem I fell in love with in Mrs. Dixon's Junior Honors English class, "To A Louse." Funny title, right? Even better was this line from it:

       O wad some Power the giftie gie us
       To see oursels as ithers see us!

(http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/robertburns/works/to_a_louse/)

Rough translation: I would like the power as a gift he'd give us [God] to see ourselves as others see us!

The message has become even more poignant to me the further I get in my career and the older I become. My former student did not know that, in order for me to teach grammar to her at such an explicit and discreet level, I had to take the books home and teach myself what I was never taught in school. She did not know that I ran to my mentoring friends for help with understanding enough the future pluperfect tense well enough to explain it to a group of 13 and 14 year olds who, only the year before, were vaguely understanding the difference between nouns and verbs. She saw me as an authority whose learned opinion she trusted. What a powerful responsibility to uphold. That was the first gem of cool stuff to start off my day.

The second piece of cool stuff was today's formative assessment. After writing the journal entries yesterday about Connie and the video, I asked my teams (the class is set up in 6 tables of students consisting of 4-6 students) to brainstorm a skit showing how they believe Mike should have dealt with his friends in drug store. As impromptu skits have the tendency, the results were comical, informative, and insight-provoking. One group had Mike sock his buddy who would not stop harassing Connie. Another group chose to have Mike stop his friends just when they announced their intent to bother her. Still another group had Mike pontificate like a hip-hop Messiah about not being a gang and "That's not who we are!"

The kids had fun with the activity and gave some feedback to the groups that performed. This is the teacher I want to be, one with kids engaged, having fun and while learning in unconventional lesson. It's fun to come back to my roots. We concluded the exercise with talking about how hard it is to go against your friends sometimes. I offered my own thought to linger in their minds--- "If your friends don't repect you enough to listen to you when you disagree, are they really your friends? Adults say friends are the family you choose. Why would you spend time with friends who would bully you into silence?" I didn't script it, the words just came to me. Teaching is awesome.

The third piece of cool stuff? Students learned in an article written shortly after Rosa Parks death in 2005, "Kids on The Bus: The Overlooked Role of Teenagers in the Civil-Rights Era," by Jeffrey Zaslow, that she was not the first black woman to refuse to give up her seat in Birmingham. The kids learned a new name, Claudette Colvin. She was 15 and she "refused to give up her seat and was arrested" (http://www.sites.si.edu/press/Montgomery%20Bus%20Boycott_Wall%20Street%20Journal.pdf) nine months before Mrs. Rosa Parks. Zaslow told my students that the movement did not rally around Colvin because she was a teen and because she became pregnant. The leaders feared that those who opposed them would attack her moral character and make that the focus, taking away exposure to the injustice of Jim Crow. We talked about the fairness of all of that.

We also talked about the revolutionary nature of being an a young person. The article talked about the civil rights movement being a "story of teenage revolt." When we recounted the video clips of the protestors and others in the Civil Rights Movement, I reminded them how many of those faces belonged to young. We remembered the college students who gave their lives for the cause as martyrs.

The technology boom is this generation's teen revolt. I'm a liberal arts geek and math stopped being a strength academically when I ran into Algebra I, but even though I'm the son of an electrical engineer, the digital clocks on the stove, VCR, and microwave blinked until I came home from college. My parents marvelled at how quickly I could reset the clocks and navigate the layered functions. It just made sense to me and it baffled me that they found something so simple so complex.

Now its my turn. Texting, blogging, social networking, tweeting--- all were Greek to me only about 5 years ago. I asked if students ever had to teach their parents how to upload a video or post a picture online. Many grinning heads nodded at me. I pointed out to them that just like the youth of the 1950s and 1960s changed the racial landscape of the US, they (as a generation) are changing how the world interacts with itself. They loved that message of empowerment--- think I'm overstating?

Could you have read my teachers' daily professional  diary entries online in 1981 when I was an 8th grader? As a matter of fact, could you have read my online blog in 1993 when I was a student-teacher, and keeping a diary was a requirement for my ethnological research at UPENN? Who made that possible, ladies and gentleman? The revolution continues and that is some cool stuff.