Think Like a Teacher

Do you ever think about the many mini-cultures you pass through on any given day or week?  Every culture has its common priorities, common language or dialect, behavior do’s and don’ts and events/celebrations. The mini-cultures you visit in your life are no different, Paying attention to them can be a useful warm-up to visiting or understanding other full-blown cultures in our multidimensional world.

My first day of travel has been just such a warm up as I left home in the eastern U.S. to travel to San Francisco for a morning flight to China. I passed through and noticed:

Mini-Culture 1: my early morning swimming mini-culture. This group meets in the dark around 5:30 a.m. several mornings a week at a local high school pool.

• Common priorities: a good workout and a little friendly locker room conversation on a tight schedule
• Language /dialect: polite small talk (English). No swearing. Special vocab: lane, lap, pace, guard
• Do’s : Complain about the water temp when you get in. Stay in your own lane. Move along quickly in the locker room.
• Don’ts:. Take someone else’s customary lane. Kick your neighbor. Discuss politics. Bother learning last names.
• Events/celebrations: Non-school days when we can linger longer in the locker room. Welcoming back swimmers who have been ill/injured. Opening of outdoor pools for summer.

Mini-culture 2: a middle class neighborhood in rural central Pennsylvania

• Common priorities:  getting the kids on the school bus, getting to work, making a living, enjoying outdoor recreation, conservative “family values” (in varying degrees)
• Language /dialect:  Middle American. Special vocab: see any study of American slang with a healthy dose of Pennsylvania Dutchisms
• Do’s : Wave to neighbors in passing cars, Take your kids to the bus. Ask “D’ya get your deer?” during the first two weeks after Thanksgiving. Anything you can do for a neighbor who is sick or elderly.
• Don’ts: Forget to wave. Talk about your upcoming trip to China unless you are asked (lest you be considered a snob)
• Events/celebrations: Thanksgiving and Christmas, followed closely by the first day of deer season, opening day of little league, and the first day to launch boats in the lake

Mini-culture 3 : small city airport, large city airports (2) in the U.S.

• Common priorities: packing complete strangers on and off large airborne vehicles, loaded as tightly as possible with the undercarriage filled by possessions in black (and other multicolored) wheeled cases with handles and various tags. Making said people walk endlessly looking for letters A, B, C, D, etc. along seating areas and wide corridors
• Language /dialect: TSA/English/your language of choice as long as you understand English. Special vocab: gate, check in, premier, advantage, sky cap, club, grab-and-go, board (bored), deplane, ground transportation (is that ground like hamburger?)
• Do’s : Walk briskly but change directions often. Make unannounced stops mid-concourse to answer a cell phone. Talk loudly on said phone. Carry expensive bottled water. Approach any manned desk to ask questions as if they are giving something away. If an employee, look at computer and tap on the keyboard incessantly at said desks.
• Don’ts: Leave baggage unattended. Open any door, especially ones that go outside. Be overly nice to anyone. Smile at TSA. Appear to eager to accept overbooking deals.
• Events/celebrations: On time or early flights. “The captain has turned off the seatbelt sign.” Toddler-less planes. Deplaning. Reuniting with your luggage.

But these mini-cultures are so familiar that I can only poke fun at them. At least I was able to use them to warm up my cross-cultural radar. Tomorrow is another day. Within 24 hours, I will have some real observing to do.

What minicultures do you  observe on a regular basis?

I leave for China (via the U.S. west coast) on Monday. Four days from now. One day to go west, another to fly across the Pacific. Some things I learned already, some geeky, some mundane:

Some hotels in China answer email, some do not. I contacted hotels about my Internet access there and what it will cost. The one that responded quoted me $7.50 for 24 hours, slightly cheaper than U.S. business hotels. I suspect that my English email was indecipherable to those on email duty at the other hotels.

It is hard to teach a computer calendar program (iCal) about time zones. It keeps converting China time back into U.S. EST. I guess it will get smarter when it discovers itself on China time?

Activating an iPhone in China is WAYYY too expensive: $2.30 a minute for any phone traffic, including the time while people leave me voicemails. I am leaving it in “airplane” mode and using it on wifi when I can. At least the calendar will still work, but none of the cool apps that connect to the web, unless I want to pay BIG bucks for data roaming.

According to the book I have been reading on Chinese culture, I am probably going to appear a boor at least once a day. I simply cannot memorize what to do in every situation. Two taps on the table to say thank you when someone pours your tea? And I am a klutz with chopsticks, but will persevere. I wonder what weird behaviors we have in the U.S. that others have trouble remembering? In my neighborhood, you always wave and step aside for passing cars when out for a walk — facing traffic, of course, on our quiet but narrow streets. My dog even knows where to stand in this neighborhood’s culture.

I will stand out on Chinese sidewalks, though many of my clothes were probably made there. I am a blue-eyed blonde. Oh well.

My random wondering is flowing now:

Will I have a chance to talk with any kids?

Since mandatory retirement age in China is 55 for women, would I be seen as really old (I am NOT that old!), or “revered”?

Who designs fixtures like lights and faucets? Does every culture have their own designers or do some countries lead while others mimic? When I visited Europe, some showers were fascinatingly confusing. How does one go to school to design faucets internationally? It kind of gives new meaning to company names like American Standard, eh?

I am sure many other odd thoughts will occur to me before I am immersed in China. I can’t wait. Please join me by adding comments, wonders, or your own cross cultural experiences. The faucet is on.

W: What we want to know

Here are some questions about China that I have received from U.S. and Australian teachers. Feel free to add your own in comments, whether you are a teacher or a student:

• What would they [the Chinese] like us to teach about them? What resources can they offer both on line and hard copy?
• How can we better create strong educational bonds between us?
• Are there any universities there that accept foreign post grads, like us, and yet do so in English and on line?
• What sites do Chinese teachers use to 1) provide resources to students? 2) to connect globally and interculturally on projects? and 3) for Web 2.0 learning?
• Are teachers paid on par with other professionals?
• I would want to know what resources they are using, what they are teaching, and how. I’d like to see us move beyond knowing the “Big C” of culture into the “little c” in order to change our misconceptions and create a more accurate perception.
• I teach early childhood….I would like to see what happens in a China Classroom, what they eat, read, and study.
• I would be interested in knowing more about what the school day is like..do they switch classes, have special area teachers, do they have learning centers or are the more structured? I am really thinking about the primary level.
• What do kids want to know? What’s it like at school? What are you into? How are you the same as me? How are you different? We are human beings. Whether kid, teacher, adult..in roles as parent, teacher, student, athlete, artist, administrator, teacher, specialist, counselor, what do you do? what do you like? what do you use? what works? what challenges do you face? what do you in the face of adversity (financial, administrative, etc etc) to meet the challenges? what would you never want to do without in your class?

In short, most of us want to know,

“What is it like to be YOU?”

“How are you the same as me? How are you different?”

I will try to share the experience of finding out. Stay tuned.

I have so much I want to know about China. Two weeks from now I will be over the Pacific! So I have started to organize my W list of things I Want to know. If you have any you would like to add, please feel free to comment here. Students welcome, too.

Unfortunately, I can’t embed the KWL here interactively because we need to upgrade this version of WordPress. Here is a static version:

And here is a link to the interactive visual map of my KWL. And here are my lists so far, simply in verbal form:

K -What I know:

• Chinese students learn English and like to practice it.
• Chinese history is rich and very complex, much older than the U.S.- Students must have a LOT to study about history!!
• Reportedly, teachers are treated very respectfully.
• High stakes tests determine student opportunities for higher education. The highest scoring students have a chance to study science/math/medicine. The second highest tier study business. Teachers are from the third highest  scoring tier.

W – What I want to know:

• What is a teacher’s day like? A student’s?
• What do teachers and kids wear?
• Do  students ever use computers at school?
• How do schools view technology and the web?
• Would a Chinese class ever do project-based learning?
• Can I explain what TeachersFirst is so they can understand it?
• Will I talk too much for them?
• Can we set up a way for schools in China to communicate easily with U.S. and other classes?
• Do parents help with schoolwork or leave it up to the tutors and late evening school?
• Do parents have any input into what schools do? Do they want it?
• Will I have to eat things that I can’t identify or don’t WANT to know about?
• What web-based tools that I am used to will be unavailable in China?
• Is sense of humor valued/suppressed at school?
• What happens to divergent, gifted thinkers?

L – What I have learned: Watch here and see!

According to neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky’s fascinating piece in the New York Times, “This is Your Brain on Metaphors, “ the structure and sheer size of the human brain give us certain capacities that distinguish us from other animals, most notably:

• the ability to defer reward and engage in long term planning toward long term goals
• the ability to make connections through metaphor and enjoy the experience of mental metaphors as expressed in poetry, oxymoron, and other creative combinations. As Sapolsky explains the delight:

We know, and feel pleasure triggered by … unlikely juxtapositions….Symbols, metaphors, analogies, parables, synecdoche, figures of speech: we understand them. We understand that a captain wants more than just hands when he orders all of them on deck….And we even understand that June isn’t literally busting out all over.

It is precisely this latter capacity that Sapolsky probes further, including the neurobiology of the brain’s responses to analogous  experiences, both real and imagined.  Significantly, both real and imagined sensations are experienced in the same place in the brain. If  we feel disgust at an imagined experience, it triggers the same physiology as disgust at something real, touched or smelled.

What does this mean for our students (and us)  for learning? What about as producers of multimedia experiences (“class projects”)?  Students who do a good job creating an experiential metaphor for the senses — perhaps a glog, a video or an enhanced image — can trigger brain experiences that are as real as the real deal. The better we can trigger the analogies of experience for learning, the better they will “feel” and understand concepts. If we want students to know the Civil War, we should first let them immerse themselves in as many “experiences” of it as we can find. We should also challenge them to create such experiences for others. The mental poetry of both feeling and creating analogies for vital, invisible concepts such as citizenship or atoms can make the experience of learning real. Even the very young can understand simple analogy and experience if it is personal and familiar enough in their context.

Teachers, take the time to read this one. Although Sapolsky focuses more on the international, political implications of analogous brain experience, the analogy of extending such experience in our classrooms is important. We need not make virtual experience realistic. We need to help students trigger analogies, build analogies, and notice analogies. Think like a teacher.

I began this post last week and allowed it to “sit,” thereby defying any timeliness whatsoever.

I just read a thoughtful– and occasionally heated– exchange on the role of time zones in fragmenting the world and as barriers to “flat,” global learning. The comment thread is fascinating and well worth a read, even if it is “old” in your time zone!

It makes me wonder: what is the value of  real time interaction and, consequently, of  Twitter, feeds, and blog posts for writers/artists and those who model creative process for our students? Are tweets the carefully crafted mini-poems or snippets we collect in scrapbooks for someday inspiration? Are they advertisements for audience: “I am a writer– listen to me”? Do they need immediate response? How do tweets, feeds, and blogs mesh with the creative value we put on real time interaction  and what we get out of them?

So I share an enigmatic analogy of the way I envision tweets, feeds, and blogs:

Tweets are a quick walk past the shop windows of a thriving shopping district. It may be in daylight and during store hours, or it may be at night when the lights are lower and the “SALE” signs obscured by shadow. But I walk by and stop only to look at those that intrigue me. I could go back and enter the shop another time if I retrace my steps in this vast downtown, and if I want to come during store hours. As I pass by during store hours, I may stop in and speak to a shopkeeper. I may even buy something.  There is no predicting. I send a message of my own to others on the sidewalks by adjusting my scarf or changing my pace, but my message is quick and without depth: surface statement for surface judgment among a busy crowd. If I do fashion a message during off hours, no one sees it.

Checking my feed reader is my extra cup of medium ultra bold coffee-of-the-day, a stop on my walk for a mental cup of coffee, take-out. I enjoy it for a few minutes (perhaps I walk back past more Tweet offerings at the same time). I savor the flavor, but I may not remember to finish the cup if I am too busy with other distractions. I may decide not to stop at all for that take-out cup today.

Writing a post is deliberate coffee-and-conversation with someone else at the cafe table. This is not take-out. This is sit-down. There is a friend or new acquaintance there with me. We may talk about what we saw in the shop windows or not. But the words of the conversation matter. A post is deliberate, though conversational. A blog post is not a full meal– like writing an article or something for “print,” but it is careful and responsive. I may linger. I may even lose track of time because the conversation is so good. If I sit down for coffee alone, I still imagine the other person across the table and word my ideas so he can hear me best.

This analogy of tweets, feeds, and blogs tells the value of how I experience each, rather than the place of each in real time. The enigma is that the timeliness value is the inverse of the relationship value.  If blog posts — the experiences I value most– are cafe conversations,  they should become cold, abandoned cups of coffee when another person cannot hear them at the same time. The feed reader “take out” coffee should yield stale, gray flavor when it is not fresh. And store windows should lure me most because they are there for me any time in real time.  How I  experience each determines its value to me, and “real time” matters the least. Real time does not matter as much as deliberate, lingering time. Time does not matter as much as attention and craft. Maybe real time and time zones do not matter when we take the time to factor full creative process into the exchange. Don’t you do a much better job of saying things when you give the process time?

I began this post last week and allowed it to “sit,” thereby defying any timeliness whatsoever. 

For twelve days in December, 2010, I will be traveling in China with a group of educational technology professionals. We will be meeting educators there and –I hope– seeing schools along with the usual tourist fascinations. I would LOVE to meet some kids, but am not sure if that will happen. I will be blogging the trip here. Please plan to follow the trip and ask questions or make comments at will. As a teacher, I am sure I will not be able to resist asking a few questions myself. Maybe you and your class would like to stop by once a day to learn something new about China through the eyes of an American teacher!

Humphrey Jones, a teacher-blogger from Ireland, suggests that we relabel “teachers.” What would happen if we hired a Madison Avenue firm to “rebrand” our profession? (Now that the elections are over and the economy slow, they could probably use the business!) As Jones says, we need to “relabel the term ‘teacher’ and replace it with a word that more accurately describes the multi-faceted nature of our role.” Over the years, I have read facetious job descriptions of  teachers as a combination of parent, psychologist, cheerleader, health aide, trash collector, and much more. This one was quite popular via email. But these exercises do nothing more than cheer those in the faculty room drinking cold swigs of this morning’s coffee as they grade papers at 4:30 pm. We need a real branding effort.

A brand is much deeper than a label. It is

… what your company stands for and what it is known for. “Look at yourself in the mirror

and ask yourself what you stand for. Go around the room with your leadership and ask them what the company stands for. Settle on one or two brand pillars and build your brand around them.  (A Practical Guide to Branding, Business Week, June 9, 2008)

or, as this article says in a nutshell, your brand is:

The Promise You Make to the World

Interestingly, promise is exactly what teachers bring to the world. We seek it out, nourish it, praise it, polish it, revere it, stretch it, describe it, measure it, mold it, let it grow, prune it, savor it, sing it, respect it, help it recognize itself, and turn it loose to be responsible for itself. We are promisers of promise.  That could be the start of our brand as teachers.

Oh, rats. Somebody already named a margarine after us. I guess we need to keep working on this brand thing. Any MadMen volunteers out there want to take on several million teachers as clients?

Many well-meaning and caring adults outside of Educationland want to offer the benefits of their worldwide experiences to kids unable to have such firsthand knowledge.  An adult visits an African country and bemoans how little U.S. students know of the world beyond U.S. borders  (or even beyond own town/state). The adult generously offers to share his/her pictures  with a local school or to come into as a guest speaker. He/she may even organize a way of disseminating pictures and telling the stories of the trip online. I wholeheartedly echo the desire to help kids learn beyond borders and the invisible fences of  socio-economic backyards.

I am sure you can hear the “but…” coming.

Why don’t  worldly, caring adults take the one, most important step of involving Educationland insiders who have expertise in teaching and learning to join in their efforts to share and disseminate? I don’t mean that we educators need to pablumize the experience of the person who has been to Uganda or other world location so our kids can learn about.  We don’t need to dumb it down or “can” it a la filmstrip/tape of the 1980s. We do need to assist caring Educationland visitors in communicating their global experience in a context that students can share and take part in, given the students’ location, connectivity, prior knowledge, developmental stage … and, unfortunately,  time/curriculum restraints. Ask one of us to act as a friendly but flexible tour guide to Educationland, a learning sherpa

The Sherpa’s Role

The Educationland sherpa knows the lay of the land in Educationland. She knows where the crevasses of technology limitations will trap a well-meaning visitor: the filtering, the lack of plug ins, the potential attacks of armed AUPs ready to spear a visitor and toss him off a cliff.

The sherpa guides — but does not lead — the trip. The sherpa plans together with the worldly visitor and acts as a translator with the Educationland natives, making advanced connections with student-natives so the visitor encounters students ready and eager to converse. The sherpa is brutally honest about how the Educationland natives will probably act and how to win them over. The sherpa explains why they behave as they do, how much they probably know already and how to ensure a successful encounter.  The sherpa may even ask “what if” questions aloud during the visit. Then the sherpa steps back, letting the visit happen and new bonds form.

If the visit is an open one, such as an online sharing site, a 24/7 public basecamp for learning, the sherpa can help plan that site so it has the tools  students need to survive and thrive as learners. No one should expect a novice world traveler to know how to build a learning camp inside Educationland. The worldly visitor should realize the value of the Educationland sherpas in making the Educationland basecamp– a website or blog or online community — a community that provides the right sustenance for learning. (Here is an example I serendipitously found: a blog created by a teacher-sherpa from her visit to Uganda. Note the language and support that make the experience accessible to the students.)

The sherpa carries the extra weight of logistics, the backpack full of provisions and maps for alternate routes when some Educationland natives refuse to associate with the visitor or cannot understand him/her. The sherpa brings experience.

If you are planning to visit Educationland or even to invite natives from Educationland to join in your global journey, seek out the sherpa who can make the encounter a success for the students.  And sherpas, think carefully about ways you can add to your global backpack and continue to allow the visits to play out successfully once you have provided wise guidance.

A blog post I encountered today inspired this idea for a culminating activity in a world cultures class. (Apologies for the post title’s inappropriate language in a classroom, but it could be worse, I suppose.) This idea could easily be the final assessment for the year. Or it could BE the course:  the one and only ongoing project for a world cultures class, with tastes of math, consumer science, and business/economics tossed in. A dream scenario would be for the best projects to be awarded actual funding for their round the world tickets.  Even if used as a final assessment but not as a replacement for usual classroom activities, it would be much better if students knew about it from the beginning and could collect, muse, investigate, and create throughout the semester or year concurrently with “regular” classroom activities about different cultures.

Here is what it could look like:

RTW Ticket: A study in World Cultures

Subject/Grade: middle school or high school world cultures

Rationale: Students rarely see their study of world cultures as anything except facts about far off, near-imaginary places they will never see or care about. What if they had the opportunity to plan a detailed round-the-world itinerary to hypothetically live and learn in person? The project requirements will build understanding of culture, customs, geography, history, and economics of lands and people around the world as student plan a RTW itinerary to visit and experience world cultures first hand.

Duration: full semester or full year

Objectives: (tailor these to meet your curriculum standards, but be sure to include demonstrated  understanding of at least ten different cultures: their economy, geography, etc.)

Project requirements: (adapt for the level of complexity expected in your classes)

1. Start from the inspiration blog post to learn the basics of planning a RTW ticket itinerary.
2. The itinerary should be presented using any web-based tool(s) or media platform(s) and submitted as a single URL.
3. RTW ticket itinerary must meet the specifications of your chosen airline and be accomplished within a budget of $5000 for air travel during a 365 day period. Travel may start and end at any location worldwide.
4. Itinerary must include rationale for each stop, including links and your own written explanation for this location choice.
5. At least ten different cultures must be included.
6. Experiences with all types of climates must be included.
7. Visits/experiences with at least 10 landforms or geographic features not found in the U.S. must be included.
8. At least 50% of the locations included may NOT be capital cities.
9. At least one third of the locations must not use English as a primary or readily-available language.
10. At least four different types of governments must be visited —  accompanied by explanations of how they differ from the others and how they are similar.
11. At least half the locations must include specific, detailed suggestions for local activities representative the chief economic and natural resources of that culture. You must explain HOW it is representative and how it differs from other cultures.
12. At least half the locations must include specific, detailed suggestions for local activities representative of the rich cultural heritage of that location. You must explain HOW it is representative and how it differs from other cultures.
13. At least three developing nations must be included, along with explanations of how they are developing and changing.
14. At least three countries not “U.S. friendly” must be included. along with explanations of their views of the U.S. and suggestions for activities Americans might do to build better understanding with those they meet.
15. Full credits for all sources must be included in the final product.
16. A completed self-assessment rubric must be embedded or linked in the final product.
17. A RTW ticket budget, documented using resources of the inspiration blog post and subsequent research, must be included in the final product.

Project timeline: (add more detail and intermediate benchmarks for younger students or those who need more direction)

Preliminary tool choices and “wireframe” (empty product pages/spaces/script headings/etc.) for the project due _____.

Tentative location choices (up to 25 possible) and requirement check/match list due _______.

Final location choices, location order, and requirement check/match list due ________.

Full location information for three locations completed by ________.

I could go on and on. The whole point: how well would an American adult do at planning such a RTW experience?  Where would YOU go? How much could YOU learn from doing this project? I know I would work hard to accomplish these requirements.