“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.