Think Like a Teacher

I nearly cried when I read the story of a Vermont principal who was removed from her job because of a law’s (I hope) unintended results. As teachers, we often see similar situations where the best of intentions generate a classroom or school rule. Later, unforeseen circumstances ultimately bring that rule to cause unintended damage in a horrific reversal of crime and victim. The student who is “caught” is not the one we hoped to punish. Circumstance twists into gut-wrenching injustice.

In the case of this principal, the “crime” was a failing school, deemed “failing” most likely because of the misapplication of a testing protocol on immigrant, special ed, or newly-arrived children. The principal hero-turned-victim must walk away from the progress that was occurring in the school. A tragedy for sure.

The broader question is how to balance consistency with reason for any well-meaning legislator, school board, or even classroom-teacher-maker-of-rules. In a classroom situation, most teachers, when confronted with an unexpectedly inverted instance of a rule violation, will stop and adjust. There may be an informal “appeal” strategy or rewriting of the rule. The most secure teacher will even admit the mistake as he/she changes the rule on the bulletin board. Maybe there is a private conference with the student in the “odd” situation, or maybe the teacher simply “forgets” to apply the rule in this case.  Mr/Mrs Solomon knows justice when he/she sees and applies it. Maybe teachers are so accustomed to differentiating to eschew justice: the right lesson, the right rule, the right way to admonish this student, the right thing for him/her to learn from this experience.

In government, finding the right way to deal with all the exceptions is much harder. I applaud those who truly want to make schools better, but not their rigidity. I recognize that there are schools with huge problems. But maybe we should take lessons from those who design lessons every day. You have to be willing to adjust according to the needs of the learner. If the learner is an entire school, adjust for it. If the rule-writers messed up, ask them to revise and learn, too. Let’s be reasonable.

All my life, I have been aware that teachers volunteer for everything. Having grown up as the child (and grandchild) of teachers, I saw it in my family and those of  fellow faculty-brat friends. Teachers do church school, coach their kids’ teams, are choir moms, help out with scouts, run neighborhood food drives, and so much more. During summer, we may have a few moments free to fantasize about what else we would do if we weren’t working so hard all through the school year (and most of the summer). If teachers were suddenly independently wealthy and could quit our jobs, what volunteer efforts would we be likely to do? How would all those fantasy volunteers change the world?

I would start an after school program at my neighborhood community center. We have tons of kids and tons of retirees. We could have fun and have a time for kids to get homework done in a cheerful place, maybe with healthy, donated snacks. The cooler kids could use computers to edit digital pictures or show other kids how to make glogs or the like. I would hope I’d be wise enough to help steer the computers on a positive path with cool, creative tools.  (After years in middle school, I can usually sense the inappropriate giggles and actions before they happen). In a couple of hours, all the frenzied parents could come home to find kids who did more that afternoon than watch 25 year old re-runs or defeat yet another level of a video game.  Do I think parents should be responsible for their kids? Yes. Do I know it just doesn’t happen? Yes, again. Besides, the relationships of community would do more than foster parental convenience. It might make the kids less likely to smash a mailbox or defiantly skateboard across the road in front of the “old lady” who read Harry Potter with them a couple of years ago. It might decrease the number of retirees who complain about “those kids.” And it might just let us share some laughter. We might even play music or dance or play basketball together. That’s my fantasy volunteer job.

As the economy makes each of us question whether we will ever be able to retire, I worry that the world will be robbed of all the fantasy volunteers who might otherwise have moved from teaching into important roles as enthusiastic, younger retirees. In my more idealistic moments, I wonder what impact it would have on society happen if we rotated 5% of all teachers into fantasy volunteer roles (subsidized as some sort of sabbatical) once every 20 years or so. What would your community look like?

A tweet and blog post by another teacher this busy morning brought me up short. As teachers, we make job changes less often than many, and this time of year brings many reflective moments among those who are making changes. So focused on learning, no teacher can make a change asking, “What have I learned from this place I am leaving?”

Four years ago this week, I made a major change. After 27 years as a teacher, I moved into year-round mode running TeachersFirst (previously my favorite moonlighting job) and out of the immediate cocoon culture of K12Land. It is only right that I stop after 4 years to reflect on what I have learned here in Nonprofitland.And, like the teacher above, I wonder a little about whether I have sold out.

Top five things I have learned after 4 years “on the outside” (sort of):

5. Moving on should not make you feel guilty. Once you get past the guilt for being able to go to the bathroom when you please and no longer helping 150 kids each and every day, you start to notice the reach you do have from your new place. Once you stop labeling your changed constituencies: “at risk population,” “sell out,” etc., you realize that every population needs you. The immediate impact on kids is far less obvious in Nonprofitland, yes, but after a couple of years, you start to see new root systems for growth developing because of the things you have planted. In today’s world, Twitter and rss feeds help us see that extending growth.

4. Teachers trust those who still hear them. Not every teacher has the opportunity or motivation to move out of the classroom to Nonprofitland (or Profitland– yuck!).  Teachers will continue to trust those on the other side of the fence as long as we still listen and feel what classroom life is like. I don’t think I can ever forget being in the classroom. At least I hope not. (My husband says I will talk like an 8th grader for life.)

3.  Kids are the best alternative energy in the world. Outside the classroom, you have to find other sources to generate the electric moments, and they are MUCH harder to find. I find myself talking to the kids at the neighborhood pool or reading and commenting on class blogs, etc. just to connect to that power source. When my energy runs low, it is one of the few places I can recharge.

2. Teachers conduct the energy their students generate. Since I no longer have contact with the kids every day, I rely on contact with their teachers. OK2Ask, in particular, acts as conductive material passing along the electricity. But I can talk to any teacher in person, in email, on Twitter, or through blogs and feel the buzz again. Like my iPhone, I need regular charging.

1. It is much lonelier outside of school. No amount of electronic contact will ever make up for the camaraderie of bitter, stale coffee and peanut M&Ms after school in the faculty room. Don’t say, “Misery loves company,” because that’s not it. Know that you — as a teacher — are living in a place no non-teacher will ever understand. The roots you cultivate daily are hopelessly tangled with many others. Even if you move to a different school/garden, those roots are as persistent as crabgrass, and they love entwining with others. Outside of school is a manicured, landscaped, well-mulched world that is not weed-friendly. When you first find yourself the only crabgrass in a bed of azaleas, you will need to find new ways to feel that you belong. There is nobility in crabgrass.

A few days ago, we had an earthquake. At the time, I thought it was the concussion of a distant explosion or possibly  a serious malfunction in one of the systems located beneath my feet in the basement of a house I still do not entirely trust. When I talked with neighbors and others who felt it, each had a different description, but none of us knew at the time that it was an earthquake. Having lived in the San Francisco Bay area as a child, I recalled the rolling tremors that had shaken my toys and books. By comparison,  this was not an earthquake to me.

A short while later, the text messages and phone calls began to roll in. “You just had an earthquake, you idiot!”  pointed out my well-connected but distant offspring. They had the data and coordinates to prove it. The NGS confirmed it. Google Earth measured it: 2.9, centered 6.8 miles from here and 5 miles deep. Cold, hard data. There’s an app for that

Next came the questions: what should we be doing about this? What does the data tell us to do? Are there things we should check? Did it damage anything I/we are responsible for?  What about the dam that holds in the lake we live on? Is there a contingency plan to go with this data?

Shortly after that, a final question: did this earthquake even matter?  We have all sorts of accounts, impressions, and hard data. We have post-surveys, inspections, and discussions. And, when it comes down to it, it really does not matter. But at the time, it did. For a brief period, we needed the data to answer our questions and confirm/deny our worries. Without a more distant perspective, we did not even realize the truth about something potentially major. (BP certainly knows about lacking  perspective from up-close at the time of an event.)

I still wonder which experience is more real: feeling it or measuring it..or combining the feeling with the data after the fact? In a classroom, how do a teacher and a student feel  and measure the earthquakes of learning and know whether they matter?

As a teacher, I am always intrigued by what people notice first. Reading Kevin Jarrett’s and Kim Cofino’s posts (one recent, one not-so) brought up a flood of ideas about the way I do the things I do and how other people sometimes look at me funny when they see things on my computer.

Teachers are professional observers of the way kids do the things they do, but we forget to notice the same about adults. First grade teachers pride themselves on analyzing the way a kid holds that fat pencil and helping him adjust it so the letters look better and the paper doesn’t tear. Swim coaches watch the way one arm enters the water and know that is why the swimmer rolls too far. Learning support teachers know that Doug or Lisa only “sees” words set off by white space or remembers words he/she says aloud but not the ones he/she hears. Geometry teachers look at how a student starts a proof and know where he/she is headed and what he/she sees first in that maze of triangles and line segments. We constantly analyze brain paths.

Why don’t we do the same when we help adults? The UI* “experts” (hired consultants to tell you your web site is badly designed) can tell you where people go first, click first, and get lost. They are the visual merchandisers in the mall of web pages. (Did you know that Americans almost always walk to the left when they enter a store?) Teachers are experts, too, but we forget to watch when we are trying to show another adult how we managed to make that web tool to do that or how to build a template in Google Docs. We need to remember that the way we do the things we do may not be the other guy does it, and he needs to recognize his own way.

A year ago I reverted to an Mac computer after a ten year hiatus.  Two months ago, my colleague made the same switch.  She read manuals. I did not. She learns from print. I do just fine with print, but given the choice, I go for colors and images. I color code emails, folders, fonts…everything. (I would probably color code people in a room if I could figure out how. Unfortunately, I remember new people first by the colors they were wearing — a real liability since they tend to change clothes!) Color and position have greater impact than text on the way I do the things I do. My colleague wants to write thorough, sequenced explanations of any how-to. She, like most teachers, uses words as her primary means of communication. I certainly talk enough, but I figure things out visually. Then I translate them into words orally, and finally into writing. So when it is time to teach OK2Ask sessions to other teachers, my plan is visual at the start. I want to SHOW things with colorful cues. But I know there are adults who don’t notice color. They are looking for magic words like “start” or “go.” That’s the way they do the things they do. Kim’s second graders in her post had no fixed way to do the things they do because they were young and flexible. She helped them notice their ways. We need to help adults notice, especially if they are accustomed to what seems like random clicking  followed by failure.

What do you notice first in the produce section of the grocery store? Colorful fruit? Signs with prices? The words “Bonus Buy”?  When you open your email, what do you notice first? Names? Dates/Times (numbers)? Red alerts or boldface? Are you an icon person or a label person? Are you a menu person or a drag-it person? If your computer (or Google Docs) folders were color coded, would you remember better where you put things? When you explain where to click do you say “click Save” or “click on the blue button in the top right to save”? How do you do the things you do? How does the way you do the things you do affect the way you help the adults you help?  

[This post is captioned for GLL (Geek Language Learners) *UI= Geek speak for “user interface” or how-people-click-and-do-things.]

This is the final episode in a long fable, and perhaps the start of another. Unravel the previous chapters here.

The town of Forwardthink has completely changed. At the stroke of midnight  (about 1 pm Pacific Time) on May 12, the doors of the Town Hall opened, and an arm tacked one final message on the door. From inside, the sounds of music and dancing and jingling keys of gold echoed across the near-empty square. Outside, the few remaining Innovators rushed to read the message.

It was a vaguely familiar sheet of paper with a scrap pasted at the end– pasted onto the same message that had been posted for others in mid-March. The scrap bore a few new words explaining that the winners were already inside the Town Hall, apparently ushered in by a secret passageway several days before.  As the handful of remaining, bedraggled and tired Innovators huddled to read and re-read, a small voice from among them sighed,

“The Elders did not even take the time to cross out the old version of the “go away” message and start a fresh piece of paper to tell us they did not want us. They have simply pasted a scrap of a sentence at the end of an old message. I guess we were not worthy enough to see the Elders or hear their actual words.”

“But look! We can see the Winners through the windows!” cried another as he jumped up and down to see over the high sill and beyond the newly opened blinds.

They took turns for a minute or two, boosting one another by the foot so each could see the party of Winning Innovators. But their energy for jumping drained quickly. The MySciLife Innovators drew away from the window and stepped to the sidewalk together.

“I was SURE you would be among the winners,” came a voice from a passerby. Others who passed hummed in agreement.

Epilogue

Although the Elders of Forwardthink have not invited the MySciLife Innovators  to join the Winners inside the Town Hall, these Innovators did not simply pack their knapsacks. As the small gathering around the Town Hall dispersed, careful ears caught the MySciLifers words, “I heard there may be a different kind of Elders in other villages who may be willing to help. Let’s look at our maps, then set out for the unknown territories. If we stick together, we will find our own key of gold somewhere.”

Moral:

In a tug of war between the wisdom of the crowd and competition, who wins?

[In the spirit of crowdly wisdom, insert your moral here]

I can only imagine what a teacher in Colorado must have felt as she watched this senior’s “last lecture” in her classroom.  A few times a year– maybe a few dozen in a career– a student takes your breath away with such wisdom and depth that you want to open the windows and yell to the world. Watch a high school the next time you drive past and look for teacher heads popping out the windows to say, “THIS is it. THIS is the power of minds that I learn from. THIS is richness of thought. EVERYONE should hear this kid!”  It doesn’t happen often enough. Luckily for one teacher in Colorado, a blog post of a simple video opens the school windows for all of us fortunate to listen. She says nothing because she does not need to. Kyle says it.

Kyle teaches us about thought and connection and irony and waste in our classrooms. Mostly, he teaches us the poetry of learning. I do not mean simply that he has composed poetry. I mean that he helps us to feel the nuance and richness and layering of learning as a poem itself. The few who have commented on his video have requested a transcript. I want to read and re-read it, still hearing his voice and watching his hands poke through his pouch-pocket as he speaks. I also want to share what he says with everyone from President Obama to every disgruntled eighth grader who grimaces and scuffs his way through school. I want to let Kyle spread the poetry of learning as I could not possibly say it. And I want people to listen to him. Simply sending the link or clicking to “share” does not open my windows wide enough to overcome the noise of passing traffic. But they should stop and notice. This kid gets it and tells us what he gets…more than we get ourselves. He makes us want to get more —  from ourselves and from our schools.

So I hope that the small audience for this post will go beyond click-sharing Kyle’s last lecture. Open your windows and tell the world. This is the poetry of learning.

Teachers have a skewed view of motherhood. Teacher-moms know when their kids have homework, read the comments on the report cards (even memorize what the comment letters stand for), and remove red pens from their own kids’ school supply pack  so the kids won’t disguise the markings on their papers. With their first kid,  a teacher-mom even looks over EVERY sheet of paper that erupts from her child’s backpack. A teacher-mom sets aside time unloading backpacks on the evening of the first day of school to fill out all the forms, cards, and permissions to go back to school the NEXT day. Mind you, that was her first day with students, too, but she finds the time — perhaps wine in hand.

A teacher-mom dies of embarrassment and avoids the faculty room when her son is the one who at 16 organizes the speed races  in front of the high school or the drafts a team of twenty to cleverly decorate the HS front lawn with plastic forks, spelling out an inappropriate message.

As professionals, we know how important parent involvement is for our students, but we need to know that what we do is skewed from what most moms do. We need to stop and ask: What is it that we bring to our children’s lives (both good and bad) that the other moms do not? This is not to pat ourselves on the back, but to help us realize where our students are not coming from. It is not to make a list of “must-dos” for our student’s moms. It is simply to build an awareness of how their lives may differ from what we see at home each night.

Teacher-moms:

• Live and breathe school. We have talked about it every day of our child’s life. School is an exaggerated slice of the life-pie for our own kids.
• Overtly value education. ‘Nuf said.
• Talk about school taxes, budget priorities, and the importance of the kids. By the time a child is two, he/she has overheard it repeatedly from the grocery cart seat or the swimming pool deck.
• Use words for everything.
• See life in ten month blocks.
• Think New Year’s Day is the same as Labor Day.
• Plan ahead — for this week, next summer, next child, college…
• Change the channel when the show makes a teacher look stupid.

My list could continue, but I know there are many bright, busy teacher-moms who may have something to add. So I salute all of us this Mother’s Day weekend and ask you to add your thoughts. Maybe even ask your kids. It could make for an interesting conversation over burnt pancakes or a lovely dinner.

Happy Teacher-Mom’s Day to us.

Ning  shook the world of web 2.0 junkies late last week by letting everyone know that they are going to change their terms of service and no longer offer “free” social networking spaces. Many, many teachers will ask, “who cares?”  Those who have been teaching and learNing using these spaces have filled the twittersphere and a vocal Elluminate get-together to vent, discuss alternatives, and stir a web-based uprising for web 2.0 consumer rights. The conversations in Elluminate the other night included several digressions into web 2.0 business models  as seen through educators’ (idealistic?) eyes. Adam Frey of wikispaces articulately shared their philosophy for K-12 schools and was careful to underscore the fact that every tool has its own unique model. We educators would like to think that the nobility of our cause is enough to justify “free”– forever.  After all, we gave up the big bucks to serve kids, so why can’t these web 2.0 companies? Free is the noblest route. But in today’s web 2.0 world, will it last?

As a person who runs a FREE (ad- free) web site, I am often questioned about where the money comes from.  Teachers — and even my curious friends — are secretly skeptical that we at TeachersFirst must be:

a. planning to “bait and switch” to a fee-based service as so many others have done
b. quietly advocating for a frighteningly evil cause
c. vulnerable as minnows about to be eaten by the Big Fish of the web
d. secretly funded by independently wealthy philanthropist individuals (ha!)

Actually, you should have blackened the space for e. none of the above. Unlike today’s amazing web 2.0 tools, we are a simpler site.  You can’t remix, mash up, or random-generate anything except ideas and resources for learning. What you can do is FIND anything. Good stuff. Written or reviewed by Thinking Teachers. Free. No strings. No “while in beta.” No ads creeping in next to what you really want to see. No bikini-clad models selling you anything. So skeptical (thinking!) teachers ask me directly,  “What is YOUR business model?”

The answer is simple: Robin Hood.

Our non-profit parent company is fortunate enough to have something that cellphone companies want to buy–or lease: frequencies. Those same companies that make money from your teenage students’ text messages and from charging people for precious minutes are also giving us their money. Rob from the rich (cell companies),  give to the poor (teachers). What truer justice could there be?

I wonder, though, why this “business model” could not be translated into other web venues. Wikispaces has adapted the semi-Robin Hood scenario….Take (at a reasonable fee) from those who CAN pay, and give to over 300,000 “poor”  classroom teachers. Strike a blow for Robin.

Today’s web 2.0 world has far more tools than can ever possibly survive. There are so many slideshow makers and PowerPoint wannabes that our review team simply drew an arbitrary line and stopped reviewing them. Perhaps we should examine the Robin Hood legend long enough to point out that Robin Hood is himself a physically fit, thriving benefactor/thief. Those not strong enough for a few sword fights will not survive, even if they are able to snag a few bags of gold. But I sure hope the good ones will wield their web 2.0 swords a bit on their way to hand over the coins of learning to the kids  and teachers who are ready and waiting.

There is a stir  in Forwardthink.  MySciLife, our finalist entry in the Digital Media and Learning Competition, is complete, including this video.  One of these days I’ll upgrade our version of WordPress so we can simply embed it here. But for now…go take a look.

The town of Forwardthink is abuzz during these final days before the deadline for videos and proposed budgets.  Who will “win”? Who knows!?  But the process of imagining, thinking through, and visually explaining a whole new way of learning using digital media has Innovators twisting every digital knob, mashing together different types of files,  converting, combining, and clickety-clacking mice or smooth, glassy touchpads in their excitement. And we are the”old people” who are trying to give the real students a chance to learn this way. What a wonderful, nesting Matryoshka doll/box of learning: we learn how to show our ideas so real students can say it even better outside our carefully crafted box. Their box of learning is actually the larger one that envelopes our vision and grows yet another and another layer.  We “innovators” have carved a small but beautiful vision, the smallest inner seedling of a doll/box. The best thing that can happen is for students to encase it in their own, more artful ideas.

Back in Forwardthink, we Innovators are busy marveling at how pretty our starter Matryoshka doll/boxes are. We hover about the Town Hall doors. The Elders have not even told us when to expcet The Announcement. The Wise Crowds are still busy sharing their insights. And we wait to learn:

In a tug of war between the wisdom of the crowd and competition, who wins?

 I think it’s the  Matryoshka dolls of learning who ultimately win. We are just part of the process.