Forty five years ago, some educators complained that the people at CTW were ruining children’s brains by entertaining kids as they learned. The advent of Sesame Street and soon after, Electric Company, made skeptics question whether media and fun ruined attention spans and forced classroom teachers to become entertainers simply to be able to “compete” for kids’ attention.

Any middle school teacher will tell you that the best way to grab kids attention is to make ’em laugh. That started long before Sesame Street. If you want them to remember a grammar or editing concept, give examples that are funny:

Misplaced modifier: Throw me up the stairs a pillow.

Comma error? Misplaced adverb(?): I devoured my lunch, a sandwich with my boyfriend inside.

We all struggle to get kids to listen and pay true attention. The Southwest Airline flight attendant video that recently went viral is the perfect illustration of using humor to grab attention. Make ’em laugh, and you make ’em listen — at least for a couple of minutes.

Televsision was “bad” (read “change”) enough back in the day. Today we worry about what the Internet is doing to our brains and our students’ brains. Want to spend time doing many things and accomplishing nothing? There’s an app for that! Want to laugh while “watching” sobering stories on the news? Multitask! Write clever or meaningful tweets. Watch what’s “trending.” Text or message somebody. Scrape for laughs on top of laughs by sharing YouTube videos that make fun of your friends’ antics. Comment wittily. Comment acerbically. Did you forget what you were watching or thinking about? Exactly.

I worry about what multitasking is doing to my teaching colleagues’ brains. At TeachersFirst we offer OK2Ask® free online professional development sessions. We started OK2Ask over five years ago, and our audience includes many “frequent fliers” who come back, contribute, and learn. We also have many newbies  in every session. We are now discovering an increasingly disturbing trend.  Where teachers three to five years ago were extremely attentive simply figuring out how to chat or navigate a live, online “room,”  our attendees now fall into two groups: those grateful to interact in a live session and learn from other teachers and those who are obviously multitasking their way through the session time in hopes of collecting a professional development certificate. The frustrating irony is that if this latter group would listen at the start of the session or read the information and emails when they register, they would know what it takes to earn a certificate.
Does this sound like your classroom? If they would listen when you announce the homework, copy it down off the board (in the SAME place every day!), or even check the web site, they wouldn’t look at you the next day and declare, “I didn’t know” or “I didn’t understand what I was supposed to do.”

I want to say to the teachers who miss the 5+ reminders and explanations we give both visually and verbally: If you are going to multitask, do so wisely. You need to develop better situational awareness, the fighter pilot’s term for paying attention to what is going on around you (or placing yourself in grave danger).  If you don’t know to listen when listening matters, you are risking a certificate. More important, you are risking your own learning.

If we have to make teachers laugh to make them listen,  we’ll try that. But I worry that we have given in and that poorly attentive adults are the worst possible models for our kids. Online learning is an amazing opportunity to extend your learning reach, but it does require situational awareness and self-discipline. Should we make ’em laugh to make ’em listen? We will probably try it to see if we can avoid receiving emails three weeks later asking where their certificates are. But one part of me wants to scream, “IF YOU HAD BEEN LISTENING, you would know!”

In the meantime, if there are any budding comedy writers who would like to take a crack at a comedic presentation of our OK2Ask certificate procedures, comment here. I’d love to have your help.

The best thing about working digitally is that I can occasionally slip into playing digitally. This week the TeachersFirst servers went down for much more than a hiccup, forcing me to work on other things. I have long to-do lists, but I chose to spend 15 minutes on Twitter, feeds, and the various bookmarks strewn on my desktop. I was seeking inspiration and an excuse to digress. I turned on the Spigot to feel this confluence into my creative buckethead:

Ingredient 1: This video from Eddie Wright about 29 Ways to Stay Creative. Especially ponderable: #4: Stay Away from the Computer (Ironically, I excitedly bookmarked the entire blog to be sure to come BACK to it on the computer!)

Ingredient 2: This post from George Couros, which made me ponder whether living and working digitally “humanizes” or dehumanizes ME — and what impact it has on the creativity conversation in Ingredient 1.

 So often I reach the end of my workday exhausted and devoid of any remaining creative impulse. While that is not so bad for the people I work with or for the TeachersFirst audience, it does take a personal toll. The irony is that the same screen that has filled my eyes and sucked everything from my brain throughout the day also offers the connections and inspirations to restart the drip-drip-drip of creative juices.

I am maple sap in the spring.
At night, I drip
a constant tap-tap-tap into that bucket,
ready by morning to be hauled to the sugar shack and boiled for hours.
I am grade A amber, ready to add flavor. I am never Fancy.
I am the ever-boiling pot that needs new sap.
I am the storage space where this season’s syrup rests, ready to curl the tongue in sweet surprise
months from now.

The web exhausts, collaborates, invigorates, and I am grateful.

Since when is  Social Studies a “special”?

For those unfamiliar with elementary school lingo, a “special” is the rather ironic term for a subject that kids have once a week or once in a six day cycle. “Specials” typically include Art. Music, Library, and PE. In some schools, Computer is a special. Kids love specials for the change of pace — and probably because they see a different part of the building and a different teacher face. You would think “special” would mean important, but in this case, it means “extra.”

In researching elementary schools this week for a friend who is considering a move, I was stunned to see social studies listed among the “specials” in the elementary curriculum, a class that kids have once a week. Thinking this was a fluke, I poked to find the same thing in a neighboring district. What I feared a few years ago — with the advent of No Child Left Behind — has come true. Science was saved from NCLB purgatory by the current emphasis on U.S. competitiveness in STEM and the inclusion of the NextGen Science Standards as part of Common Core, but even the gr 6-12 Social Studies Literacy aspects of Common Core have not been enough to save Social Studies from becoming “special.”

Why? ” If you test it, they will come. If you don’t, it is a “special.” (I could insert a long discussion about this, but it’s not my point here.)

Robert Frost ended a favorite poem with this oft quoted line:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

I fear that this time we have taken the wrong road, and THAT is going to make all the wrong difference. Where does this path lead us, this path where kids rarely see and hear discussion about what it means to make the tough decisions of government, to learn from our past and to plan for a society that fits our ideals? If social studies is a special, it drops to the bare facts and skills that can fit into one class per week: know the national symbols, the basics of your state’s history, the names of the three branches of government. But elementary kids need to talk about how people and governments make decisions, not just how they pass bills. They need to be aware of how varied cultures are around the world and even around their city. They need to understand why people’s opinions differ on upcoming elections or social issues. While they are young, they need to learn to be citizens of a broader world. They will not simply “pick up” a deep sense of citizenship, history,  cultural richness, and personal involvement when social studies suddenly becomes a (non-special) subject in middle school.

I am certain no policy maker has planned a study to find out whether loss of social studies experiences and discussions in elementary school has an effect on whether kids later become involved voters or savvy global citizens. I offer a strong hypothesis that these kids won’t care as much about why people are slipping through society’s cracks, why people from different cultural backgrounds may have a different approach from their own, and how to make the tough decisions about what a national budget should keep or cut. If  learning about these decisions doesn’t count before they were 11, why will it when they are 21 or 31 or 41?

Kids tell me they love “specials.”  Kids look forward to them, but their parents may not emphasize specials like art or music as anything other than an outside interest or hobby kids will enjoy during leisure time in adult life. I hope by making social studies a special, we have not made citizenship a hobby for a generation to take up in their spare time.

PS On a note to Art, Music, PE and other “special” teachers, I personally believe every one of these subjects is as important as breathing.  I was fortunate enough to attend a school that had art and music every day!  We had no “specials.” I am painfully aware, however,  of the culture of school and of our society in designating certain subjects as  “specials, ” i.e. almost expendables in elementary school. But that could be another post entirely.

In honor of Poetry Month, I offer another “poetic” post to follow up on the pocket poems.

You have seen them: blackout poems created just the way it sounds, by blacking out large portions of text on a page and leaving carefully selected words behind to form a “poem.” You can see many more and learn more about them in this great resource.

At first glance, blackout poems are a strikingly creative exercise, plucking words offered by serendipity to generate a poem entirely separate and new. Depending on the original passage, blackout poems can discover the power of even the smallest words, becoming a Hemingway of meaning or an e.e. cummings without capitals or punctuation. If you ask kids to try it, they may complain bitterly that the one word they want is not there, “Can I just add it?” By saying “no” you force a whole new level of creativity and awareness about words. There must be some other word there to suggest a thought that works. Poems suggest, allude, entice, but never tell.

At a much richer level, blackout poems can teach many things. Common Core asks us to teach close reading of informational texts, to help your students see how authors lay their evidence amid all the words, the bricks of evidence that support the structure of ideas and opinions. When you consider blackout poems, you are delving directly into those bricks, deciding which to keep and which to remove, while still trying to support a structure of your own ideas to become the message(s) of the new poem. I am not sure whether it is harder to maintain the message of  the original passage in the new poem or to create an entirely new one, but blackout poems could do either. A passage about trees can become a poem about climate change or pollution. A passage about the characteristics of great teachers (see “Passion and Awareness: What Great Teachers Have in Common” by Bill Smoot) can be distilled into a poem that suggests a similar message refracted through the poet’s lens. Here is a sample based on the great teacher article as a “test” of doing close reading via blackout poetry:

the noteworthy passion

a calling to feed their souls

chose me

for it serves humility in knowing

a purpose larger

give the ability to be better

to mind the words

seek

the passion investigates     studies   writes

that math is beautiful

expertise completes it

excellence is never far away

create an atmosphere

detached awareness

a therapist

to listen to

self-reflection

themselves      and in their students

the witness seat

the art to instill

a goal of learning

tempered by

wisdom

Now imagine sharing any article for reading, in fifth grade or twelfth, and talking just a bit about what it means, what its important ideas are, and how the author tells us what is important. Don’t answer all the questions… just start to ask. Now have kids work together with that text to first highlight JUST enough words to suggest the message. Then they simply reverse out the highlighted words so they are the ONLY ones that show, blacking out the rest. Have them try taking away as many as they can to suggest, allude, entice a message. At the same time, you are teaching poetry. (Science teachers have permission to pass out now.) Granted, it is not the kind of poetry that rhymes or has meter. It is sophisticated blank verse and lacks the conventions of writing we work so hard to instill! But in comparing the new poems with the original passages, and comparing the different poems that groups create, you have the perfect experience with close reading integrated with writing AND curriculum content:

Does the poem match the passage in meaning? How do you know? Can your group “prove” it? Do these two poems have the same meaning or does one slant it differently? How do you know? Is one a better match to the original passage than the other? But which one has a message you prefer? What words make it your favorite? Are there any “loaded”  (i.e. biased, slanted, or powerful) words in that poem?

The best thing about this activity is that it can happen in history class, reading a passage about the causes of the Civil War or the economic influence of China. It can also happen in science, reading about the importance of biodiversity. The original passages can come from the web or a textbook (bo-ring!). If they are on the web, a simple copy/paste gives students the raw material to read, subtract, and add meaning. It also gives students a new way to master required terms. Creating blackout poems is  group oriented, creative, and loaded with very high-level thinking.

Here are just a few other ideas for blackout poems during this, National Poetry Month:

1. Coming to terms: Make blackout poems from articles kids locate using Google, subtracting words to give meaning to new terms they are learning.

2. Loaded words: Make blackout poems to call out bias or opinions in letters to the editor (online or print).

3. Pass the backout: Have one student blackout a passage and pass the words to another who must create a poem from them. (This one allows reordering the words and adding a certain number of your own).  If in a content class, the message should have something to do with concepts they are learning, such as explaining weather phenomena.

4. Pass the Backout II: Pass around several different articles, challenging each student to blackout one sentence or less then pass it on. Each receiving “poet” must continue the blackout process, trying to do it so there is a logical continuation of the poem. (Very creative, but best suited for students who have some experience making blackout poems!)

4. Blackout mixup: Combine two passages into a single blackout poem, alternating words from the two articles to form a poem. This is REALLY challenging!!

5. Pluck the figures: Have students do the blackouts in small groups, treasure hunting for words that will become figures of speech. Of course the poems that include these figures of speech must make sense, too!

6. Earth Day Blackout: Find a web or print article from which you can blackout a poem titled “A requiem for the environment”  or some other Earth Day theme. (You can ADD the title so you don’t need to have those words in the original text!) Note: this is the ultimate “recycling” — of words — for Earth Day!

7. Blackout poem, the multimedia version:  BLACKOUT large portions of videos or news clips from YouTube to create a multimedia blackout poem. Try a tool like DragonTape. This is for the adventurous techie types and your gifted kiddos who always want to do something different! Make sure they give you the text transcript of the resulting  “poem” to show that they actually thought about it and did not just throw together something to be funny.