Think Like a Teacher

Parents enjoy seeing their kids grow up and then reacquainting with them as adults. What about teachers? After 27 years of teaching, I can honestly say that I still enjoy reading what former students are doing and what became of them as adults. I don’t know if this is true for all teachers, but it is an important part of me and how I view my worth on this earth.

I suspect that my interest is in proportion to the number of years I shared learning with a student. In my case, I had students for multiple years as their teacher of gifted or as a middle school media center teacher during that magical(?!) span through puberty and growing taller than my five foot three. In other words, I witnessed them as they grew up — for more than the usual nine or ten months. In some cases, I witnessed and participated for as many as seven years from grades 2-8. As many continued in high school, I had continued contact as a technology person team-teaching with their teachers.

As a child of two teachers in boarding schools, I grew up believing that students become lifelong members of a teacher’s extended family. I am sure that this assumption cements my feeling of connection to former students. My network of “siblings” came back to our house at the oddest times, and my parents welcomed them just as they did me when I arrived unannounced from college with a carload of hungry friends and laundry.

Enter Facebook into the world of former teachers, and an interesting phenomenon occurs. If  I see former students among friends of friends, do I “friend” them? Is this unprofessional on my part, an invasion of their world by someone from childhood, or a sign of respect for them as an intriguing adult? As I click “add as friend,” I worry that they will think it odd to hear from this lady who made them build inventions or peristently asked them, “what to YOU think?” I am a blur from life before high school, a name that sounds familiar, gummy with old sticker-adhesive on a “log book” they threw away years ago. I am cursed and blessed by an exceedingly good memory for their projects, panics, and even parents. Now I simply would like to meet them again as adults. Should I risk the click to “add as friend”?

I am probably taking this decision far too seriously. Facebook sticks people together with as much adhesive as old stickers. Not a big deal. Except to the former teacher who saw them grow up.

Reading has definitely changed. Trent Batson and Nicholas Carr both know it, and so do all of us who pass through places like Think Like a Teacher.  Batson’s response and the original Carr piece, ‘Is Google Making Us Stupid?’ have me ready to click “write a post” before I finish bouncing between them. As soon as one piece has my attention (I found it on a trusted RSS feed),  I mentally highlight favorite quotes a la English major  and look for juicy bits to read and re-read. Carr is right that I am “power browsing,” but Batson is also right that the “loss” of books is actually a gain for critical thinking. I would go even further and say that reading has become an invitation to DO something.

When I taught elementary gifted kids, there were two distinct groups that emerged during independent project season each year: the Tell-alls  and the Sponges. The Tell-alls wanted to tell everyone everything they read and could not enjoy learning without the telling. During quiet research time in class, they called out, narrating each new discovery as they read or browsed the web. It wasn’t new knowledge until they shared it. The Sponges worked alone, never speaking a word, often so absorbed that they lost all their notes and personal belongings as if transported to an entirely separate location, living among the subjects of their research. When called back to our world and asked to prepare their choice of presentation to “show what you know,” the Sponges were at a loss and uttered malformed bits and pieces until I squeezed the sponge of their awkwardness with many prompts. The Sponges saw no need to DO anything with what they learned. The pleasure was purely personal.

I see the new way we read– thanks to technology — as a cure to both. The Tell-alls are web 1.0. They get their pleasure from the suck-in-and-spit-out of info, but the rest of us gain little from their pleasure. The Sponges are stand-alone processors without a network. Only with the evolution of multiple-tabs (I still have Carr and Batson open right now), feeds, blogs, and doo-dads can I have the very real pleasure of reading until I feel I must DO something. I once had a prof who always asked, “Now what will you DO with it?” as he handed back a good paper. The web (and email and RSS feeds and Facebook and cell phones…) ask that every time we READ.

Now what will you DO with this?

Last week, the folks in the international space station had to duck and cover as space junk came dangerously close to their orbiting haven. It seems that debris from various objects humans once shot into orbit continues to plague any active space mission. This danger clouds each advancing endeavor while, as NPR puts it, “experts continue to debate what can be done about all the trash that’s orbiting our planet.”

I sit at a traffic light, listening to this story, wondering…

…as experts continue to debate what can be done about all the (trash?) that has been shot into the orbit of education?

Is outdated school curriculum the space junk of  learning? Sometimes we see kids excited about what they are learning as they orbit the earth at 20,000 miles per intellectual hour. They experiment, discover, communicate and enjoy learning. Add the power of sharing this experience with others at a distance, and the process becomes even richer. But the shards of old, broken curriculum are a  constant threat. Just as young writers create their own interactive online books or narrate and annotate the uploaded images they have created, an alert sounds:

Warning: Incoming Space Junk. Change course to avoid collision! The curriculum says you need to be able to diagram a sentence and identify parts of speech. Course correction requires that you immediately stop and demonstrate these skills in regulation format to avoid catastrophe. Fire one number two pencil –oops, retrorocket — with bearing 1A 2E 3C in precisely 60 seconds.

Can you think of an instance where space junk nearly took out a viable learning mission? Have you ever taken refuge in an escape module as the debris whizzed by? What can be done about all the trash that’s orbiting?

OK, so my ego bounced this week at being named a “DABA” (Deserves A Bigger Audience) blogger. As I thought about it, my mind rolled over to all the kids I taught and the ways they reacted to unexpected feedback. They were changed people. And so I muse:

Doesn’t everybody deserve a bigger audience?

I started rewinding the reactions I saw when students absorbed just one little bit of extra recognition– even just from a quiet teacher comment. But when they approached projects with a broader audience, they REALLY became porous sponges to the flowing reactions, in turn creating better products than I ever imagined. There were kids who sweated for weeks, perfecting scripts for student-made TV shows worthy of a “Televiddy Award,” our middle school’s equivalent to the Emmys. There were kids who spent hours creating bald eagle, turkey, and vulture costumes and the accompanying “National Bird Pageant” script for a Bicentennial Minute that actually DID win a local Emmy once televised. Simply seeing it aired on TV was what they cared about. There were little second graders who, when they found out their inventions would be judged by an actual patent attorney and several high school “judges,” suddenly cared about whether their gadget truly worked (not required, but it sure mattered to them).

Is it any wonder that their achievement soared? Is it surprising that I find myself carefully revising my words in this post-DABA post?

We read the research about authentic learning, but how often do we remember that every kid is a DABA in some way. And most of us still perk up and suck in feedback from respected sources as adults. We just forget to give it as often as we should.

Whom will you dub a DABA today?

This is a story through a teacher’s eyes. This teacher was a veteran of many years and many trends over more than three decades. She was the kind of teacher who embraced each new trend as an opportunity and loved trying new things. She had discovered computers and the Internet early on and had become a techno-evangelist among teachers. More recently she had crossed over to join The Suits, the people who meet in the principal’s office wearing visitor badges, catching only glimpses of “Evan” or “Jamal” being hushed and scurried along at the end of the line and into the classroom door across from the office by a woman in a colorful sweater and “teacher shoes.” She had left the trenches to travel as an “expert.” But she savored the quick glimpses she could steal on her way into the principal’s office meetings.

On this particular day she visited two schools: one an elementary school, and one an elementary school building turned into district offices. The schools were in neighboring districts. There the similarities end.

As the kindergarten line skidded into the room across the hall from school office #1, our teacher signed herself in and printed a visitor badge from a laptop just inside the office, then settled into a wooden fifth-grader-sized chair around a table in the principal’s cluttered office. The principal pushed aside a few papers and a handmade book about a principal superhero, neatly handwritten on purple construction paper.

The small group talked about the upcoming Earth Day and a chance to use a new technology from a garden lab a mile from the school so students could stream video directly to the Web and tell about their applications of environmental science in the garden. The laptops and webcams would share the event with parents, other classrooms, and anyone who wanted to watch on the Web. When our teacher asked about any district policies that might limit streaming video, student-created content on the web, or use of web-based tools that require memberships and profiles, the principal smiled knowingly and suggested that he could get a parent release for the students involved and take care of it. Our teacher saw the knowing look as he went on to tell how he deployed new technologies among his teachers by modeling them in a staff meeting and then “letting them play for a while to see what ideas they come up with for their curriculum.”

The meeting ended and emails exchanged, our teacher signed herself and the others out and brushed past the hand-made tiles of the hallway mosaic and out into the sunshine.

Later in the day and 10 miles away, the group stopped in a parking lot and rang the doorbell as the desk buzzed them into school #2, the former elementary school. They signed in on the sheet and clipped their visitor badges into their suit lapels as they were ushered through aisles of horizontal files and name plates, finally arriving at a windowless conference room. Everyone exchanged business cards across the empty laminate table and began the conversation about that same new technology. The Gatekeepers of the Network pronounced the need for streaming video to be unproven and, yes—theoretically possible, but only available if someone could show that it was needed. The Gatekeepers declared that even wifi had not been installed in their schools because no one had shown that it was needed. But perhaps this technology could be used to track the school busses or help with emergency evacuation plans. The Gatekeepers had a Robust and Secure Network and –by the way—far better tax support than their neighboring district whom they declared to be “broke.”

On the way out, walking in the single file line of Suits back toward the security entrance, our teacher composed this blog post in her head and cried as invisibly as the ghosts of children in this former school building.

Where I am today, the wind is howling in a classic nor’easter, with snow swirling into near white-outs. As always happens to me when the natural world is doing something noteworthy, I find myself drawing analogies connected to what I witness in nature. Today’s musing: Is education the response to intellectual “whiteout,” a way to prevent students from  blowing and drifting?

A recent New York Times article underscored the pragmatic trends in education during tough economic times. Specifically they cite the priority of technological, scientific, and employment needs that have pushed aside the liberal arts into pockets within “elitist” colleges. The Times further points out that the proponents of the humanities have not successfully marketed their field as essential to the future of the U.S. and the world.

Marketing the humanities?  Hmmm.

To prevent minds for blowing and drifting, do we steer students to science and technology where their efforts can be measured and their products fill practical needs in society? If we do so to the exclusion of the study of history, literature, writing, the arts, and even philosophy, will the winds abate and the snows settle into sparkling mounds of freshness?

You can tell by my questioning where I stand. I am an unabashed proponent of the liberal arts.  Without the ability to bounce new ideas off each other, to question, muse, and say the unexpected using an unexpected turn of phrase, we cannot stop the blowing and drifting of young minds and press ahead to a sparkling world. Indeed, we NEED some blowing and drifting of thought or we risk hardened, stale, brown-grey piles of crusty snow formed by plowing those once-sparkly flakes too quickly into the places where they are “supposed” to go.  I have no problem with the value of pragmatism. I believe it is in the process of questioning and making connections and oxymorons out of the scientific and measurable that we turn blowing and drifting into the striking patterns we see on the hillsides of thought. This is blowing and drifting allowed to follow and create new patterns. And I would maintain that without the liberal arts, without people seeing analogies and wondering aloud, the scientists would be stuck in crusty snow mounds that age and melt from the underside into cinder-filled storm sewers long after the rest of the winter has thawed.

I hope we can allow education to appreciate some blowing and drifting, veering entirely neither to white-out nor plow-hedges. We need everyone’s ideas — stirred by a little blowing and drifting.