tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16856375507861855672024-03-13T14:36:42.950-07:00He's the Weird TeacherThe media hub of the ever expanding empire of the Weird Teacher whose goal is total educational domination through the power of excellence. The Weird Teacherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07865409578314612808noreply@blogger.comBlogger399125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1685637550786185567.post-68381941711658366652021-07-13T00:39:00.004-07:002021-07-13T01:41:41.959-07:00Chicken Little<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-eR7S2tBn0r4/YO03Paa7pgI/AAAAAAAAIgI/6AdlSPUIwtQYiEZpICclJM1Gvl9qwlS3gCNcBGAsYHQ/s650/chickenlittle.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="650" data-original-width="500" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-eR7S2tBn0r4/YO03Paa7pgI/AAAAAAAAIgI/6AdlSPUIwtQYiEZpICclJM1Gvl9qwlS3gCNcBGAsYHQ/s320/chickenlittle.jpg" /></a></div>I have been angry for the last sixteen months. <p></p><p>Sixteen months ago, for those of you who need reminding, everything in the country stopped as a pandemic of almost unbelievable proportions exploded. I do say "also unbelievable" because there were and still are some people who claim not to believe in it. But let us put them aside for now. </p><p>Our students, my students, went home. How long would they be home? No one knew. Three weeks? Five? The rest of the school year was taught online, with myself and teachers like me struggling to find ways to reach kids and deliver instruction. While those in leadership positions did...I'm still not sure what.</p><p>But they assured us that next year they would be ready. They spent all summer making plans for the coming school year. What were those plans, exactly? No one will ever know. Unless the plans were, "Head to the Winchester. Have a pint. Wait for this to all blow over." Because we started the 2020-2021 school year with "safe return" on our lips. Every leader wanted to be ready to get kids back to school. All they would talk about his how crap a job teachers did handling the previous year and how much better teachers were going to do this year. Programs were purchased and launched without any testing, vetting, or teacher input. Schedules were made and remade. And always "safe return" was the word of the day. </p><p>Eventually kids did go back. In my district they went back quarter time. Teachers went to school and taught in the morning online. And in the afternoon A or B cohorts would come to school on Monday and Tuesday or Thursday and Friday for...stuff. Socially distanced stuff. Because they needed the contact, even though the contact should have been masked and six feet apart and not sharing anything. Nothing made sense. </p><p>I did not go back for this. I got a doctor's note for none of your business that said I wouldn't be exposed to the virus and at first my district agreed to that. Until, all at once and for no reason they wished to explain, they didn't agree with it (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGLmGu6aDiE" target="_blank">for more detail watch this video</a>). Myself and many other teachers were given a choice- Come in to school against your medical advice or take leave and hope that you've got paid leave saved up. In layman's terms, "Screw you and your doctor and your family." I was lucky and had plenty of leave saved up. So I stopped teaching three quarters of the way through the year last year. Let us not get into the guilt that comes with abandoning your class before the year is out. And let us not talk about the multiple COVID cases that spread through my school and others, causing cohorts to quarantine. Everything was fine and dandy because the kids were back.</p><p>My own children did not go back. We kept them home because we did not think it was safe. This was the correct choice for my family. We were lucky to be able to make it, I know many could not. My second grader did all of second grade on the computer and hated every second of it, which is not a reflection on his teacher who was doing her best. He's a social child. He saw that his friends got to go back. He understood us, but he won't really understand for years yet. My kindergartener did all of kinder online, doing his best. He had the best kinder teacher in the world, and she did amazing things with her class online. He wanted to go in. But he did what he could. </p><p>And I struggled. I wasn't teaching. I wasn't sleeping. I would get up with the boys so my wife and the baby could sleep in and I'd help them do school mornings. We'd fill the days somehow. </p><p>During this whole time I was reaching out to anyone who would listen to me in my district to ask to help plan. To be in meetings and on committees. To make things better for teachers and students. I am not a sit around and complain person, I had ideas. And not one person in any leadership position wanted to hear me. You know that person who complains in staff meetings? I've never been that person. Not ever. I'm not. I will get up and try and if it's bad I'll break it when I'm alone in my room and make it work. I will run my mouth to make things better. But no one wanted to hear me. My district was tired of me by the time school let out a year ago. Because why would you want teacher input when planning how teachers will deal with pandemic teaching? And once I left for the year, once I stepped away, I stopped feeling like I had any voice at all.</p><p>Now it's summer break once again. The virus is still happening, despite what you might see on social media or out your window. Not everyone is vaccinated who can be, for some reason. The Delta variant doesn't seem to care if you're vaccinated. Though if you are, at least it won't kill you. </p><p>And once again schools are getting ready to open. But this time everyone is getting ready to open full on, like everything is back to normal and safe. And I honestly feel like I'm losing my mind because I do not understand why anyone is acting like this.</p><p>Not one child who goes to my school will be vaccinated when my school year starts because the vaccine isn't ready for kids yet. Will we be social distancing? Will masks be mandated? Will class sizes be smaller? All signs point to No. When the vaccine is available for kids, will it be mandatory to come to school? If not, why not? Why should my kids get punished because you don't believe in science? </p><p>What do I do? Do I send my unvaccinated kids and hope? Because here's the other thing- I have a daughter too. <a href="https://hestheweirdteacher.blogspot.com/2019/07/nicu-edu.html" target="_blank">A daughter who was born with a heart condition</a> she still has. Her cardiologist has told us, in so many words, that getting COVID would be "very bad". So should I send my boys to school and hope they don't accidentally kill their sister? </p><p>Putting it like that sound overblown and hysterical. Except it's not. It's fact. </p><p>Friends and readers, this is all I can think about. I am burning and consumed with it- Why are we acting like schools should open as normal? Why risk it? </p><p>Because we're all tired of it? I get it. I'm tired of it. I want everything to be back to normal. I want to go to concerts and meet with friends and restaurants and go to the mall and on vacation. Things people are doing. But we're not because we can't take the risk until everyone in our family is vaccinated. </p><p>So maybe it's just us. Maybe we're now in the minority and everyone else feels rightly safe. Maybe...are we being overly-cautious? Wouldn't you rather be overly-cautious? Who am I to judge.</p><p>Here's what I know- If you ask me how I am, I am not smart or subtle enough to lie and say I'm fine. If you ask me about next year I am incapable of not going on and on about my questions and concerns and fears and anger.</p><p>And I feel like it's costing me friends.</p><p>I want to be very clear here- I <i>am 99% sure I am wrong about this feeling</i>. But that does not stop me from feeling it. It's summer break which means I'm already going to feel disconnected from my school friends. I chat with some, but when you're used to lunch every day it's not the same. I always feel disconnected from people over the summer.</p><p>I didn't even finish the year, so even when people were back in the building I wasn't. So there's that too. Will my friends judge me for taking leave when they didn't? <i>(No! Of course not, I have good friends.)</i> I mean...probably not, but maybe? </p><p>And most importantly, is everyone I know exhausted by me constantly talking about my concerns about coming back? Am I exhausting? I must be, Jesus how much can one person go on? We get it. I'm not who I was, I know that. I used to be intense, but focused and moving forward and looking for solutions and aggressive but not in a bad way. And now...I'm not. </p><p>Now I feel like every conversation with me is like having a conversation with Chicken Little, when everyone else has begun moving past the fallen sky or just straight denies that the fall was all that bad to begin with. I feel like I'm looking for validation, looking for someone to say, "Yes, exactly, I agree with you." <i>BUT THEN BE ABLE TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT.</i> And no one who can do anything about it...does.</p><p>I am so angry, friends and readers. All the time. And if you've talked to me and I haven't brought these things up, I just haven't brought them up out loud. Is the sky falling? Is everything actually better and I've just been so consumed with the problems that I haven't noticed an improvement? Does data matter, because my district says it does. But at the same time the entire state has been regularly ignoring numbers and moving benchmarks to get what they want. Is it raining or is someone still pissing down my back?</p><p>I can't tell anymore. I have no perspective. I am thankful and lucky that my wife and I are on the same page with this and we haven't once disagreed about what to do with the kids through all of this. Neither of us know what to do next year.</p><p>I want so badly to step into my classroom next year, greet my students, and start group projects. I want so badly to see my own children go to third and first grade happy and healthy and excited. I don't think anyone who isn't a teacher understands just how badly I want these things. </p><p>We also need to talk about how this whole thing has impacted our kids. Because they are going to look resilient and we're going to get a million stories about how strong the kids are and how they got right back into it and what were we worried about. Those will all ignore and brush over the trauma these kids have faced and will pretend everything is ok. Because all we want, I guess, is for everything to be status quo. Teachers will be happy to be back. Students will be happy to be back. Shut up and smile. <i>For the kids</i>.</p><p>But I'm pretty sure the sky is still falling. And until all three of my kids are vaccinated, I have no choice but to trust that I'm right about that.</p><p><br /></p><i>If you like this post and the other posts on this blog you should know I’ve written three books about teaching- <a href="http://bit.ly/hestheweirdteacher">He’s the Weird Teacher</a>, <a href="http://bit.ly/theteachingtext">THE Teaching Text (You’re Welcome)</a>, and <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Classroom-One-Doug-Robertson/dp/1975739175">A Classroom Of One</a>. I’ve also written one novel- <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Unforgiving-Road-Doug-Robertson/dp/1539932168/ref=pd_sim_14_5?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=1539932168&pd_rd_r=PFBPHZ2HMH0VV26YB83F&pd_rd_w=lYjeO&pd_rd_wg=6hZZD&psc=1&refRID=PFBPHZ2HMH0VV26YB83F">The Unforgiving Road</a>. You should check them out, I’m even better in long form. I’m also on the tweets <a href="https://twitter.com/TheWeirdTeacher">@TheWeirdTeacher</a>. And I'm on Instagram at TheWeirdTeacher too where there are a million pictures of the baby being uploaded every day.<br /></i><br />The Weird Teacherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09409036328788408352noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1685637550786185567.post-89842846062871491722020-11-09T23:00:00.002-08:002020-11-09T23:00:45.136-08:00Redefining Good Teaching<p style="text-align: center;"> <a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-hAOb7bd2N1g/X6ojbDfU8oI/AAAAAAAAIUo/9cBN2Cdq35IN99DhvOYDwnz7yUzs7F0hACNcBGAsYHQ/s259/download.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="194" data-original-width="259" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-hAOb7bd2N1g/X6ojbDfU8oI/AAAAAAAAIUo/9cBN2Cdq35IN99DhvOYDwnz7yUzs7F0hACNcBGAsYHQ/s0/download.jpg" /></a></p><p><i>I feel the need to note off the top here that this is, even more than normal, a very confessional, almost-journal-like post. Which means it's long because I'm trying to write out what I think so I'm able to see it. Which I've always felt you kind of appreciated. So head's up. And thanks for reading. I don't think I'm alone here.</i></p>I have two choices at this point in this incredibly broken school year-<p></p><p>1) Admit that I am not a good teacher this year, and allow that to leak into my feeling about myself as a teacher in general, because I think I know what it means for me to be a good teacher.</p><p>2) Admit that this year is insane, redefine what being a good teacher means for me, stay sane, and live with that tiny niggling doubt that I'm making excuses.</p><p>I've been trying my hardest to get to option two. In fact, I'm pretty sure I've been doing it for longer than I've been teaching this year. I think I started making mental excuses as soon as it dawned on everyone that we would not (and should not) be going back to school this year. That everything education would have to be done through the computer. That classrooms, mine included, would have to look very different. </p><p>A regular reader of this space will know that my class is a place of mess and creativity and cardboard and spontaneity and wheels-within-wheels of goals and foolishness. I am not much of a stand and deliver teacher, though I can lecture with them best of them because I do love the sound of my own voice. I'm not much of a worksheet teacher because I hate trying to grade them and I hate thinking that they are the best way to assess much of anything. I'm also, to be clear and honest, not the best planner. I know where we are going, but if you ask me what I'll be doing in two weeks in math I'll only be able to give the the vaguest of answers. Not because I don't know what I'm doing, but because I move with the kids as much as my school's administration and pacing plan allows me. So my answer would be something along the lines of, "Probably whatever Lesson Six is, unless they really struggle tomorrow and Friday. Then just short of Lesson Six. Probably." </p><p>Now? Man, I need to plan much better because time is shorter. But I'm kinda not because it's even harder to know how well a lesson is going to go.</p><p>Everything about how I teach has had to change. Distance teaching is trying me in ways I didn't realize when I first started worrying about it. I knew I wouldn't be able to do projects like I want to do because of the inequality in materials. "You could deliver materials to students," you might say if you were a well-meaning person on Twitter trying to solve someone else's problems before you were asked for help. Yes, I could. I could travel to 28 homes every two weeks with a supply of cardboard, tape, scissors (to replace scissors that had been lost or broken), rulers (see previous), markers and Sharpies (see previous), and whatever else the students might need for the project. If I did that they would probably make a Lifetime movie about me. I mean, they would if I were an early-in-my-career white lady "saving" a bunch of inner city (movie for "Black except for the one white boy and the Mexican girl") students. </p><p>But in the real world that's not feasible. It's not. I could maybe do it once, and I might once. But I can't make a habit out of it because it isn't a sustainable thing. </p><p>So building projects are out. Completely? No. But mostly, because I don't know what kids have at home and I'm not sending anyone to the store.</p><p>Ok, but I'm a Good Teacher. And to me that means I'm creative. I pride myself on my ability to think around corners and solve problems I'm confronted with in my class. Don't have enough laptops? I can fix that. Run out of tape? I can fix that. Reading curriculum is dry this week? No problem, easy. No one is getting this math? Google is right there to help me figure out a better way to teach it. Give me problems, yo. I'll solve them. </p><p>But this isn't a problem. </p><p>Distance teaching isn't a problem. I can't think about it like that. We can't think about it like that. Distance teaching is what I do right now. I do not like it but I like any of the alternatives even less. I've seen hybrid learning plans and they do not look better to me. The ones that <i>might</i> be safe are more restrictive than a whale bone corset being swallowed by a python, and the ones that aren't safe (most of them) are as effective as taking our shoes off at the airport and just as fragrant. They are less ideal because the world we live in right now is not safe for groups of any kind. Unless science is wrong, which I have been informed might be the case. In which case it's a good thing I've got a chewy center because I'm a big sucker. </p><p>So distance teaching is <b>Teaching</b> now. Which means my method of delivery has been determined for me. It's not the problem. Teaching can't be the problem, it's the job. The problem is how do I make it engaging? And how do I make it equitable? And how do I assess? And how is that equitable? (I have it on good authority that nothing about right now is equitable. No suggestions to work around that were made, so I guess it is what it is. Which is...you know, not great. Personally, I'd cancel report cards completely and when that failed to please The Powers The Be I'd insist on Pass/Fail only because, like I said, it's impossible to fairly assess anything right now. But that's just me thinking about solutions again. Hashtag PassFailPandemic) </p><p>Do I make class engaging? I am engaging. My kids come to my thrice daily Meets. Many of them chime in. Very few turn off their cameras and go play Among Us as far as I can tell. Not a whole lot I can do about that past what I'm doing. Moving goalpost there- I used to take nearly complete responsibility for student engagement. But now they actually <i>can</i> choose to come or not (in theory) and nearly all of them <i>do </i>come nearly every time. I have puppets and they like the puppets. Puppets are engaging. The kids act like they like the flipped videos I make with the puppets.</p><p>I know I'm not getting information across as well as I could be. Maybe. Am I communicating it as well as I could be? I think I am. But I'm not sure. It's hard to tell. Some days I'm not. But that's not always my fault. I have a second grade class and a kindergarten class happening downstairs in my house at the same time as I'm teaching fourth grade. Because of the layout of my house and the volume of my five year old I can hear those classes happen. Which means my students sometimes can too. To be fair, sometimes I can hear classes happening at the dining room table in their homes too when they unmute to answer or ask a question. Total Synchronous Learning- Distracting Or Teaching Us To Focus Better: You Be The Judge.</p><p>I don't think it's equitable and I think that is out of my hands. In class it isn't. But like this I can't control how good your internet connection is, how loud your house is, what the situation is inside your house, whether or not a parent can sit with you and help you with things like I would if I were there. And if I dig into this too much I start feeling incredibly impotent as a teacher. All I'm doing is delivering information. </p><p>We all know that Teaching is not what you see in the movies. Sure, part of it is the delivering of information. But most of it is planning and dancing. You plan what you're going to do and why, you deliver it, and then you spend the actual lesson dancing to the rhythm of the kids, responding to verbal and nonverbal cues to clarify, deepen, and modify how that information is being received. Anyone can tell someone something. Teachers dance.</p><p>I'm getting better at reading expressions over the computer. When I can see their faces. When they aren't holding up their distractingly adorable bunny to the camera, or rolling around on their carpet, or talking to someone off screen, or looking at another screen off screen, or having their cameras off. "But Doug, that solution is easy!" Ah yes, my helpful friend. Let me guess, you're going to tell me to dictate how a student should behave in their own home while forgetting that a teacher should never make a rule they can't actually enforce? "Uh," you say. "When you put it that way..." Yes, exactly. When I put it that way I would never try to police a student in their own home to the extent that I'm going to insist that they sit in a chair at a table facing forward camera on. No. I do remind students to put the bunny down and please pay attention and I can see you playing a video game I can see the controller in your hand come on, man. We set routines, we built class rules. All that is in place. But what, I'm going to punish them? There's a disciplinary protocol in place? It reminds me of an old Robin Williams routine. <a href="https://youtu.be/ugUzcoAlYCA?t=89" target="_blank">"Stop! Or I'll say stop again."</a> </p><p>Am I a good teacher this year? I don't know, man. I really don't. I'm doing everything I can. I'm being as creative as the various levels of stress and anxiety I'm under will allow. I'm also, as I mentioned, teaching from home. So am I doing everything I can? I have three children, two dogs, and only one wife. She is horribly out numbered out in the living room while I'm trying to teach in my office. She was really looking forward to a year where the seven and five year old were at school all day and she would have hours at home to bond with the one year old alone, and get some stuff done around the house that she wanted to do that is frankly impossible to do with the LOUDEST, MOST ENERGETIC HUMANS ON EARTH around 24/7. So between classes sometimes I grade or plan. Sometimes I go downstairs and parent. I don't work at school, which I could have done until the governor put a two week stay at home order back in place, because we are being as safe as possible and because I know I'm needed at home. My ability to be a good teacher and my ability to be a good parent are, for the first time, in serious conflict. But it's not a real conflict, we know what choice wins in that scenario. Doesn't mean there isn't the littlest bit of guilt about it though. I could be teaching better...I don't have to be sitting here holding my sleeping one year old and watching TV. I could get the laptop and work with her on my shoulder. Or I could enjoy holding the last tiny person I'm going to help make without working at the same time.</p><p>I'm not sure what the parents of my students want. Or what they expect. I know many of them want their kids back in school. Not in a "get out of my house" kind of way, but in an honest "I think you'll do better at school than at home" way. But their kids won't. Not this year. Social distancing at school, according to the plans I've seen and not to speak for everyone everywhere of course, is awful. It's not school, it's not better. I would rather kids be comfortable and, more importantly safe, at home than trapped at a desk in school, unable to move or work together in a meaningful, in-person way or interact with me in a way that is actually fun and useful. Again, maybe I'm stuck on a stick and wrapped in paper, but I don't think so. I've seen the numbers. I do want parents to know we know they are doing their best. I'm a teacher, my wife is a teacher, and we are frustrated with the process of teaching our own kids. I can't imagine what it's like for parents who don't have our background. I know they love their kids and I know they are trying to make everything in this crazy year work for their families as best as they can.</p><p>I do not feel like a good teacher this year. I feel angry and stressed and anxious almost all the time. I feel unheard. I'll be honest, a week ago I made the decision that to remain sane for this year I would reach for apathy when it comes to policy. I decided to try and be apathetic about things. Apathetic, by the way, is <a href="https://hestheweirdteacher.blogspot.com/2017/06/whatever-is-worse.html" target="_blank">the worst thing</a> I can be about something. It's the opposite of the way I'm built. But I thought to myself, "I don't think that Serenity Prayer thing works for me, but maybe I should try just not caring anymore and let someone else get worked up for a while. It's not working. I'm all fury and reason and questions and noise and the result is still nothing. What if I just didn't care?" </p><p>How does trying to be apathetic about the policies being made that impact my students make me a good teacher? How does driving myself crazy trying to have a voice in those policies make me a good teacher?</p><p>My kids seem happy to come to class. Even now, weeks in. They laugh, they play, they seem to enjoy me, each other, and at least some of the things we do. I don't know how much they're learning, really. I'm so far off any pacing plan it's not even funny because I indulge students following rabbit trails more than I normally do because some of them don't get to spend time with other people outside of these meetings and they need the contact more than they need to practice cause and effect. </p><p>I hate the "it doesn't matter what they learned, only how they felt" school of teacher PD that is popular right now. Because it does matter what they learned. Like, a lot. Not caring about learning, only feeling, is what got us into the mess(es) we're in now as a country. My job first are foremost is to help them learn and remember things, and learn ways to learn more things, and to learn to use all the things they learned. I want them to enjoy it because that makes it all work so much better and be so much stickier, but learning comes first. That makes me a good teacher.</p><p>But maybe not this year. This year I think, and don't tell my boss or her boss, I think I care much less about what they walk away remembering academically and more that they walk away healthy and feeling like the 2020-2021 school year wasn't great, but it didn't suck either. </p><p>I think maybe that will mean I was a good teacher.</p><i>If you like this post and the other posts on this blog you should know I’ve written three books about teaching- <a href="http://bit.ly/hestheweirdteacher">He’s the Weird Teacher</a>, <a href="http://bit.ly/theteachingtext">THE Teaching Text (You’re Welcome)</a>, and <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Classroom-One-Doug-Robertson/dp/1975739175">A Classroom Of One</a>. I’ve also written one novel- <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Unforgiving-Road-Doug-Robertson/dp/1539932168/ref=pd_sim_14_5?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=1539932168&pd_rd_r=PFBPHZ2HMH0VV26YB83F&pd_rd_w=lYjeO&pd_rd_wg=6hZZD&psc=1&refRID=PFBPHZ2HMH0VV26YB83F">The Unforgiving Road</a>. You should check them out, I’m even better in long form. I’m also on the tweets <a href="https://twitter.com/TheWeirdTeacher">@TheWeirdTeacher</a>.</i><br />The Weird Teacherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09409036328788408352noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1685637550786185567.post-43128057740865413412020-09-21T23:02:00.003-07:002020-09-21T23:02:57.150-07:00You Gotta Have Faith<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-UoFkgT8rb2U/X2mIvOysMBI/AAAAAAAAISo/sfEyffhTUQsfQXXUz7rgoihnJFacvV9ywCNcBGAsYHQ/s646/faith%2Bheader%2Breal.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="456" data-original-width="646" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-UoFkgT8rb2U/X2mIvOysMBI/AAAAAAAAISo/sfEyffhTUQsfQXXUz7rgoihnJFacvV9ywCNcBGAsYHQ/s320/faith%2Bheader%2Breal.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>Before I start I have to say that I deeply hate that forever connected to the phrase "You gotta have faith" is the band in the above picture. It was their first single and I was the exact right age to hear it over and over and over even though I hated that band. Remember nu-metal? With the two decent bands that came out of the entire genre? If you don't know what band and what song I'm talking about you were not in high school or listening to rawk radio in the mid-to-late 90s. I shall not taint your brain and your ears further. Google it if you must know, but I warned you.*<p></p><p>What does the above rant have to do with education? Nothing. I just needed to explain why I hate that header image, but it's the only header image I could have possibly used considering the title and subject of this post. </p><p>I also would like to note that I will be using <a href="https://i.pinimg.com/736x/75/8c/92/758c924ff2a55573d2ab380449f63890.jpg" target="_blank">a bad language word</a> in this post. Why? Because language exists for a reason and we're all adults here. Because I could beat around the bush and be clever with synonyms, but those don't carry the weight and impact I believe is needed to make my next statement land like it ought to. So if bad language words hurt your ear-eyes make like <b>A Christmas Story</b> and pretend it's another word. </p><p>We all good now? Cool.</p><p>Distance teaching is fucking hard, my friends. It's fuuuuucking hard. And even in a few weeks when it gets easier as everything settles into something resembling a groove, it's still gonna be fucking hard. </p><p>Teaching is never easy. Even the quote unquote best class in the world still isn't easy to teach. You could have 30 of the most wonderful "I wish I had 30 of her/him in my class" students and it would not matter. The year would be hard. There is too much going on, too much pressure, too many personalities and loads atop loads that must be carried for a teaching year to ever be easy. It's always hard. But, like Jimmy Dugan says, "The hard is what makes it great." I embrace the difficulty of the job because that challenge is what makes me better.</p><p>Distance teaching, though? That's fucking hard. Hardness, as we all know, is a scientific measure that increases exponentially (I think I'm using that word right, but I teach 4th grade math so who knows). There's "hard". And then there's "<i>hard"</i>. And then there's "pretty hard". Next is "damn hard". Followed by "pretty damn hard". Then there's "...*whew*...I mean...mmm...this hard, man." And last is "fucking hard." I have heard tell of "pretty fucking hard" and " pretty fucking damn hard" levels, but those only exist in middle school because middle schoolers, through no fault of their own, are broken on a deeply hormonal level. Also also, if you made it through the entire preceding paragraph without giggling once at the repeated use of the word "hard" you are more adult than I will ever be.**</p><p>I am exactly one day into distance teaching. The second grader and kindergartener who live in my home are exactly one day into distance learning. Yes, I'm going to use both phrases because teachers are not distance learning. Put your hand down, I know "teachers are always learning" and "the best teachers learn from their students." You can stow the cliche pamphlet. Our job is distance teaching right now. Except for the districts and states actively trying to murder their teachers. They're still teaching teaching. Until an outbreak happens at their school. Then they're climbing into our boat. Make space. Six feet in every direction, please.</p><p>Now here is the real kicker, and the thing I cannot get past- </p><p>Really fucking hard is still the best fucking option. </p><p>I do not come to you bearing bad news (which you already know anyway). I come to remind you that we have no other choice. No one does. The parents don't want this. The students don't want this. The teachers don't want this. But we have no choices. It's fucking hard or it's in-person, and that should never have been an option. What are the other choices? Homeschooling. I guess, and not to take away from the parents of our students, but teaching isn't that easy. Remember the above paragraph? One does not simply walk into teaching. The character the writers don't know what to do with suddenly deciding to become a teacher (I'm looking at you Keiko O'Brian) and BAM they're teaching is bullpucky. Horse hockey. Fiddlesticks and other nonsense. I trust my parents, I know they want what is best for their children. And I know that no matter how hard distance teaching will be, those students will be better off with me because this is my job and I'm trained for it and good at it. I'm not specifically trained for this kind of teaching, but I'm more trained than they are. </p><p>We should be working in partnership with our parents. They are the teacher in the room, while we're the teacher in the box. We should be flexible *looks hard at places requiring things that are unfeasible in the long run* and have open lines of communication so we can change things and make everyone has happy as they can be. That doesn't mean we can make them happy. Just as happy as they can be.</p><p>No one is going to enjoy this year very much. I know that sounds dire and terrible, but we have to admit that. </p><p>I hate hate hate with the fire of a thousand suns the cliche "teaching is a marathon not a sprint." I go into why in detail <a href="https://hestheweirdteacher.blogspot.com/2018/03/singles-and-doubles-keep-us-in-game.html" target="_blank">here</a>. The short version is that marathons suck. They suck the whole time. They hurt for the entire race. If you're winning you're in pain the whole time because you're pushing your body harder than it believes it can be pushed and you want to die but your will won't let you. If you in the middle or the back you're still running/walking/staggering over 26 miles. Marathons hurt the entire time. Don't call teaching a marathon because then you're saying that teaching sucks and hurts for 180 days. It doesn't. Teaching is a baseball game. Seriously, read the <a href="https://hestheweirdteacher.blogspot.com/2018/03/singles-and-doubles-keep-us-in-game.html" target="_blank">thing</a>. </p><p>Teaching is a baseball game...normally.</p><p>This year? This year teaching is going to be a marathon. It's not going to be very fun.</p><p>So how does one survive a marathon? The flip answer is training and suffering. The real answer is <i>Faith</i>.</p><p>Not faith in a higher power. Faith in thyself. Faith in thy students. Faith that is might be a fucking hard way, but it's the fucking best option. I have to believe that. I'm clinging to it. I can do this. I can teach my kids well. They will learn. We will make it through the year.</p><p>Before I had kids I did triathlons. That's the swim/bike/run thing. Sprints, Olympic distances, and once a half Ironman. That's a 1.2mi swim, 56mi bike, and 13.1mi run. I trained my tail off for that. Was in the best shape of my life. Still hurt the whole time. I loved it, because I'm broken (except for the run, I do not love the run), but man it hurt. I got through on training and faith. I believed. I can take another step. I am strong enough. I do have a water table coming. I will nom on a gummy bear for some sugar. They hurt. You survive through the hurt because you have to.</p><p>Right now all of us are having tech problems. I can't log in, why am I muted, what's the website, I forgot my password, what icon did you click on I don't see it, why can't I hear you, who left this comment in Classroom, we have to learn what program now and why? The kids <i>will</i> adapt. They will learn. Every year I spend the beginning of my year walking slowly through all of these issues in person and by October zip zap look at that everyone is doing what they need. This isn't every year. The timeline for everything is expanded this year. I'm hoping November we get there. That's a long time. I have to have faith. I have to be preaching to my students and their parents and instilling that faith in them. We can find the way. We will celebrate the small steps. We will find mind games and tricks to get us through the year as best as we can.</p><p>Now I will also grant that it's so very easy to say "have faith". It's so very reductive to bring what this year will be down to "it's a marathon." I agree. Metaphors are never perfect fits, they're meant to illustrate a point, not define it. It's going to take collaboration and self-care and support and a million other things too.</p><p>But if we don't have faith that even though distance teaching is fucking hard it's the best fucking option we have open to us, I don't know what we have.</p><p>It's what I got. I gotta have faith.</p><p><span style="font-size: x-small;">*If you do Google it, it's not the first result. It's Google's "Did you mean?" result. But still, don't google it.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: x-small;">** Honestly, I do not know why I don't get asked to write for major education publications.</span></p><i>If you like this post and the other posts on this blog you should know I’ve written three books about teaching- <a href="http://bit.ly/hestheweirdteacher">He’s the Weird Teacher</a>, <a href="http://bit.ly/theteachingtext">THE Teaching Text (You’re Welcome)</a>, and <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Classroom-One-Doug-Robertson/dp/1975739175">A Classroom Of One</a>. I’ve also written one novel- <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Unforgiving-Road-Doug-Robertson/dp/1539932168/ref=pd_sim_14_5?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=1539932168&pd_rd_r=PFBPHZ2HMH0VV26YB83F&pd_rd_w=lYjeO&pd_rd_wg=6hZZD&psc=1&refRID=PFBPHZ2HMH0VV26YB83F">The Unforgiving Road</a>. You should check them out, I’m even better in long form. I’m also on the tweets <a href="https://twitter.com/TheWeirdTeacher">@TheWeirdTeacher</a>.</i>The Weird Teacherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09409036328788408352noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1685637550786185567.post-14846010766949587622020-09-15T00:59:00.008-07:002020-09-15T01:10:02.687-07:00What's the Plan? (OR The First Week Cometh)<p> <table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-hkKnm8RCFQk/X2B2ctgvXwI/AAAAAAAAIRc/SPsqKvxLDwk2HCQpxQRJkItZ6iMeMIpaACNcBGAsYHQ/s570/il_570xN.1062193070_pjt7.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="570" data-original-width="570" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-hkKnm8RCFQk/X2B2ctgvXwI/AAAAAAAAIRc/SPsqKvxLDwk2HCQpxQRJkItZ6iMeMIpaACNcBGAsYHQ/s320/il_570xN.1062193070_pjt7.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">Credit- <a href="https://www.etsy.com/listing/471936246/plan-ahead-funny-embroidery">https://www.etsy.com/listing/471936246/plan-ahead-funny-embroidery</a></span></td></tr></tbody></table></p><p></p><p>Today was supposed to be the first day of school.</p><p>I guess technically the first day of school was supposed to be a few weeks ago. But then the pandemic happened and we had to swap to distance learning. So we were given more time to plan for that. More on that in a minute.</p><p>So why wasn't today the first day? That's easy. </p><p>Most of my state is on fire. </p><p>As I type this all the windows in my home are sealed shut and there's a wet towel wedged into the crack at the bottom of the front door to keep smoke out. It still tastes like fireplace in here. My kids haven't been outside in I don't know how many days because the air quality is so bad the air quality measure online is pegged to the right and literally says, this is not a joke, "Off The Meter." Bad does not begin to describe the air quality. Imagine being trapped in a small car with a chain-smoking Keith Richards on a cross-country road trip, and he recently switched to unfiltered.</p><p>It's bad here. Others have it worse, people have lost their homes, their places of business, their lives and the lives of those near to them. Ours is not the worst. But ours is still bad. Bad enough that "Are you going to have to evacuate?" has been part of the phone calls I've been making to parents for the last week. "Where are you compared to the Level 1 line? How is everyone's breathing?" </p><p>In other words, in the middle of a global emergency, one of the main symptoms of which is trouble breathing, major fires are making it hard to breathe. Luckily for all of us the United States government does not care at all and has no interest in making anything better. <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-warns-that-explosive-trees-are-causing-disastrous-wildfires" target="_blank">Sometimes trees just explode. Shoulda raked better</a>.</p><p>Because the fires are so bad, causing families of students and teachers to be displaced, schools have been enlisted as emergency shelters and the various scheduled material hand-outs have been postponed. So put down your hand, Karen. Just because we are teaching from home, and we're all trapped at home now by fire and COVID-19, does not mean teaching can happen. Parents haven't had a chance to pick up computers, iPads, books, supplies, and whatnot. Teachers who were planning on teaching from their classrooms, which is an option here, now can't because social distancing has been increased to "STAY INSIDE WHY ARE YOU EVEN DRIVING WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU YOU CAN <i>CHEW</i> THE AIR RIGHT NOW." </p><p>Or, in teacher parlance, an inequitable situation has now been made even more inequitable. This, though, isn't the fault of the system. Well, it's the fault of <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-warns-that-explosive-trees-are-causing-disastrous-wildfires" target="_blank">this part</a> of the system. But that part did all the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/15/opinion/coronavirus-school-reopen-devos.html" target="_blank">inequities on purpose</a>. Because white supremacy*. </p><p>All of this is a long lead in to say that the first day of school, normally a fairly stressful day even in a normal year, is <i>incredibly </i>stressful right now. I am starting my fifteenth or sixteenth year of teaching (yes, I should know and I could count, but does it really matter?) so I've done the first year a few times. I've felt confident and good at it for a while. I'm established enough at my school that, and I say this without ego, students coming up to my class know me and are excited to join me. They think they know what they're getting into even. <a href="https://hestheweirdteacher.blogspot.com/2018/08/this-is-not-what-i-expected.html" target="_blank">They don't really</a>, but that's ok. </p><p>All that to say- What the hell am I going to do for the first day of school this year? Ignore the first week, just Day One.</p><p>Here's the problem, my friends- Schedules have changed and changed and changed again over the last three weeks of planning, meetings, trainings, and questions. So many questions. We're supposed to be teaching synchronously three or four times a day. For those of you not in the know, that means all 30-some-odd of my students are supposed to go to their school-issued Chromebook at 8:30am, long-in, and join me and everyone else in a Google Meet. We will Do School for a while, then they'll log off the meeting to work independently while I Do Other School. Then at 10:30 they'll all log back in and we'll Do More School. That happens for a while then they log out of the meeting and small groups happen, independent learning happens, whatever. Then there is one more block of time where everyone gathers in a Meet to Do School. Then they do more independent work.</p><p>I did not make this schedule. I suspect none of my peers (or my union or any parents of students) were in the room or consulted when this schedule was finalized. That's a different conversation for another time. </p><p>The fact of the matter moving forward right now is on Monday at 8:30am we're supposed to have The First Day. We've been told not to try to teach content for a few weeks, but just social emotional learning lessons and tech procedures (something I'll get into in a minute). So what to do, what to do?</p><p>I'm going to be completely honest with all of you- I'm not going to follow the prescribed schedule on the first day. Or the second. I'm not. I don't think it's the best way to start the school year, I don't think it'll set the tone I want for my class, so I'm not going to do it.</p><p>Here's how the year normally starts in my class. (I should note that this has worked in third, fourth, and fifth grade. So if you teach tiny ones and you're shaking your head I get it, it might not work for you. I think it could, but I've never taught that size child.)</p><p>- My desks are in groups of four or five. There are probably six groups like this around the room.</p><p>- There is no seating chart. I greet every child at the door, shake their hand (ain't doing that anymore, foot taps all the way now), and tell them to find a seat. They ask where they're supposed to sit. Or a parent does. I say, "At a desk, please. Pick one, make a good choice." The kid is excited. The parent is not (some of the time). This has a purpose- My class is built on trust. This is the first act of trust. I will not control your body even in this. The very first act you do in this class will be your own. It might be a poor choice. That's ok. We're learning here. </p><p>- Once everyone is in we immediately move to the Spaghetti and Marshmallow Tower Challenge. Every group is given ten strands of raw spaghetti and ten tiny marshmallows. They are told that together, as a team, they must make a free-standing tower. I don't tell them it's a contest to make the tallest one. They do assume that though. The second act they undertake in our class is collaborative work they' excited about. They talk. They plan. They test and try and fail and rebuild and laugh and start to bond. Our class is built on planning and communication and testing and trying and failing and rebuilding.</p><p>- We play the Name Game. The Name Game goes like this- You must choose an adjective that starts with the same letter as your first name and that describes you. Mine would be "Dashing Doug." Yes, I tell them my first name, why wouldn't I? They know to call me Mr. Robertson. Now here is the fun part- We go around the room and the first person says their name. Dashing Doug. The second person says the first person's name and then their name. Dashing Doug. Amazing Amanda. The third person says the first person's name, the second person's name, and their name. Dashing Doug. Amazing Amanda. Cool Chris. And so on. It is a joy to watch the feat in front of them dawn across their faces. Especially the kids at the final group of desks. I will, of course help. But the goal is you must listen to every single person in the room. You must hear their names, the way they pronounce them, over and over and over. You must say it right. After the last person goes I go. Because now I know everyone's name and face and it has only been an hour. Then I open it up. There's always a kid in the first group who wants to run the table. I challenge them, do it backwards. By the time The Name Game is over no one has any excuse for calling a classmate "Him over there in the red shirt" or mispronouncing a name. </p><p>There is more to the first day, of course. But that's the start. See how much is set up in those few activities? They are <i>foundational</i> to our room. I will bring those things back over and over through the course of the year. Everything sends a message.</p><p>How in the green hell am I supposed to do this through Google Meets?</p><p>I don't know.</p><p>So here's my plan, and here's why I'm going to immediately not follow the prescribed schedule and shhh, don't tell my boss. </p><p>I have been telling my parents in calls and emails that there will be six Google Meets over Monday and Tuesday, three each day. I've told them the times. And I've told them their student <i>must</i> come to one of the six. But only one is required. They <i>can</i> come to as many as they want. I'd love it if they came to all six, because then they will for sure meet everyone in their class this year. I'm calling it the Trickle In Start until I can come up with a better name that I can slap an acronym on and write a book about. This way coming to class basically starts as a choice. Who will decide to come more than once? Will the kids who come more than once encourage their peers to come more than once? Which parents will force their kids to come every time? What tech issues are hiding that I can fix with ten kids instead of 30? </p><p>I want to know. Because I don't know how this is going to work.</p><p>What will we do during this time? Probably some variation of the Name Game, but it won't be as fun because the kids will have their names displayed. It will probably changed over the six Meets, which might provide motivation to keep coming. </p><p>I'll introduce myself and display a Google Tourbuilder I have that talks about my journey from my hometown of Palmdale, CA to here in Gresham, OR. We will talk about how their summer's were. I'll bite my tongue in half as students talk about visiting with friends and traveling and how some of their parents were for sure not being the kind of safe and responsible we all hope everyone is being. I might let other kids ask about that though. Respectfully. We're not going to get into rules too deeply, I hate starting with rules. Welcome to class, here's how you need to be controlled. Bleh. Bad messaging. We'll probably play a Kahoot.</p><p>On the first day everyone is supposed to be in a Meet, the we'll build the rules. Maybe with a Padlet. My normal rule procedure is I make the kids list every single tiny little rule they can think of and I write them all down. I fill over writing space with their rules. Then I tell them we all have to memorize everything that has been written so we know. They don't like that. So we start searching for overlaps and possible combinations. We look for positive statements instead of negative ones. It all boils down to Be Responsible, Be Respectful, Be Safe, Make Good Choices. And then, because it amuses me to quote Pulp Fiction in my class, I tell them that there is one overarching rule to remember, that even if they can't remember those four rules they can certainly remember one- Be Cool.**</p><p>I think I'm going to do this online by ignoring the district-created curriculum around setting online learning procedures. They did this last year for four months. They know. Let's make a Padlet of all the procedures and rules a class needs to be effective in distance learning. Now let's simplify simplify simplify until it's clearly understood and easy to remember and, most importantly, created by the class, not by me and not by some person in the district office that didn't think to call me when she was making these rules up in the first place. </p><p>So that's my plan for starting the school year from home during a pandemic while wild fires smolder in our backyards. </p><p>Oh! Real quick, because I promised. You can totally teach procedures, social emotional learning, and content at the same time. That's literally the message of STEAM. If you can take silos away from Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math you can take them away from "This is how we log into our online classroom" and "This is what we're going to be learning about" and "How are you feeling?" I promise you can. I do that every year too. Messages are stickier when they are wrapped in useful context.</p><p>I want to also state that all of these plans for online learning might burn down, fall over, and sink into the swamp. Always a possibility. In which case I'll build another castle. </p><p>How is your year starting? </p><p><span style="font-size: x-small;">*If you're reading this and you got to that part and rolled your eyes with a "Ugh, Doug. Must you make this political?" Yes. I must. Call it what it is, confront it, and fix it. Education destroys ignorance. And if you think white supremacy doesn't exist I'd really appreciate it if you never support anything I do or create ever. Kthxbye.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: x-small;">** Yes, I know that's Pulp Fiction quoting Happy Days, but in my head I see Jules telling Ringo to tell Honey Bunny to be cool.</span></p><i><br />If you like this post and the other posts on this blog you should know I’ve written three books about teaching- <a href="http://bit.ly/hestheweirdteacher">He’s the Weird Teacher</a>, <a href="http://bit.ly/theteachingtext">THE Teaching Text (You’re Welcome)</a>, and <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Classroom-One-Doug-Robertson/dp/1975739175">A Classroom Of One</a>. I’ve also written one novel- <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Unforgiving-Road-Doug-Robertson/dp/1539932168/ref=pd_sim_14_5?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=1539932168&pd_rd_r=PFBPHZ2HMH0VV26YB83F&pd_rd_w=lYjeO&pd_rd_wg=6hZZD&psc=1&refRID=PFBPHZ2HMH0VV26YB83F">The Unforgiving Road</a>. You should check them out, I’m even better in long form. I’m also on the tweets <a href="https://twitter.com/TheWeirdTeacher">@TheWeirdTeacher</a>.<br /></i><br />The Weird Teacherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09409036328788408352noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1685637550786185567.post-6372137914013040182020-09-07T22:58:00.000-07:002020-09-07T22:58:02.959-07:00I Never Metacognition I Didn't Like<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://i.chzbgr.com/original/2711195648/h60743CFC/spacing-out" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="502" data-original-width="492" height="322" src="https://i.chzbgr.com/original/2711195648/h60743CFC/spacing-out" width="315" /></a></div><p><br /></p>It's pretty On Brand™ for me to quote underrated musical genius "Weird Al" Yankovic, but I'm going to do it anyway. This is not an exact quote but more along the lines of what he said. I heard it on one podcast or another and it struck me as true and useful so I saved it in my little mental file cabinet is Useful Quotes To Remember. And, because it's me, of course it's not just a pithy saying but an entire short anecdote so that the pithy saying at the end has context and is actually sticky and useful. Here's the story he told, as best as I can remember it-<p></p><blockquote><p style="text-align: left;">Being a creative person can be hard sometimes especially when you have kids. I was sitting on the couch one day while I was working on this album and my child came up to me and asked me to come play with her. And I said I couldn't because I was working, and she gave me the strangest look. I realized it was because all I was doing was staring into space. But that's a lot of what creative work looks like It looks like spacing out.</p></blockquote><p>If I were to insult your intelligence by summarizing what you just read for you into an easily shareable, hopefully viral meme format, it would be "Sometimes creating looks like spacing out." But I won't do that because both Al and I have more faith in your than that. </p><p>This is on hundred percent my process. Or at least part of my process. I either sit and stare at nothing while talking to myself or I move all over while scribbling useless and illegible notes on scraps of paper while talking to myself. And sometimes my process for creativity is sitting down at my computer with no ideas and forcing myself to type until something worth exploring comes out. I call all of these "mining for ideas." One of my favorite metaphors for creating is thinking, and I know this isn't technically true but that's why it's a metaphor and not a fact, that no one delivers the block of marble to the sculptor. You, as the creator, have go to the quarry and mine the marble for yourself, you have to drag it back to your shop, and you have to beat it into a giant rectangular prism. And that's all before you can start actually working on turning it into whatever it's going to be. Now all the mining and hauling can be the homework you have to do, or the brainstorming, or the prep work. It's the gathering of mental materials. Then you can actually start going at the block of marble with your chisel. And even then that's just the rough draft. Once you release the Thing from the marble it's still not done. You go at the marble with finer and finer chisels and files and rags until you have removed the last piece of excess marble. Then you're done. </p><p>Often the going to the quarry to mine looks like sitting on the couch (or chair or whatever) staring into space. The mental gathering of energies.</p><p>From there the next thing I think about is teaching. I do <a href="http://hestheweirdteacher.blogspot.com/2019/10/solo-co-planning.html" target="_blank"><i>a lot</i> of spacing out after school</a>. That's how I lesson plan. That's how projects come to me. If you work with me (and the world isn't ending like it currently is) and you come into my classroom after the kids are gone chances are high you'll be met with me scowling at nothing while something that sounds like death metal to you<span style="font-size: x-small;">*</span> blasts out of my computer. That's what working looks like.</p><p>Unless I'm actively teaching. Then it happens very quickly because you can't space out for too long in front of 30 fourth graders. Trust me on that. I have learned to trust my instincts and listen when the little cricket that lives in my pocket goes, "WAITAMINUTE! Wait...One...Second..." My students learn it quickly. I stop talking, freeze, point up at nothing, look into the middle distance, smile slightly, and then 'Ok, no...wait...ok...put away your books- NO DON'T you'll need them. Push your books to the side. Ok!" Then we do a thing. That's spacing out at warp speed.</p><p>Which brings us all the way around to the most important part of teaching- The <strike>money and drugs</strike> Students! </p><p>If I know that creating for me looks like spacing out for who knows how long, and I'm constantly asking my kids to think creatively and push their boundaries, how can I expect thinking to look any different? So often we, and I include myself in this of course, know what "think time" means but we forget that time moves at different speeds in different places in the classroom. </p><p>It is so tricky to know when a kid is spacing out (ie "I wonder what I'll do on Minecraft after school...") versus thinking (ie "So if this math problem works like this, then this next one..."). They look the same on the outside, but <i>they look different on every person</i>. Like I said, my Resting Think Face is a scowl, probably because I'm annoyed at stupid brain come on get it together let's go. But it could just as easily be a more slack-jawed, wide-eyed look. Or have a half-lidded sleepy vibe. Or it could look like Work. Like if you asked an amateur actor to play Thinking, the face they would make. Kinda constipated, but not to a panicked level yet. Constipated but making progress.<span style="font-size: x-small;">** </span>Those kids you see and think "Ah, she's working." But she might be in Minecraft too! We don't know.</p><p>A theme of this school year is going to be Patience and Grace, but think time should always be filled with Patience and Grace and that's hard because we have places to go and things to cover. We all know 30 kids don't learn at the same rate but we do our best to make it happen because that's the system we work in and it's not perfect but it's the best we've come up with so far. What does your thinking face look like? What does your spaced out face look like? How can someone around you tell if you're mentally solving complex equations or thinking, "You know, I don't care what anyone says- I really like vanilla ice cream." </p><p>I have to remind myself of this all the time. Not just when I'm blasting "Weird Al". Because I forget. But I have gotten pretty good at it. Unless it's early in the year and I don't know the kids yet. Then I have no idea what thinking looks like to them. This, by the way, is a conversation I have with my students (minus the constipation thing, but I make the face and they get it anyway because some humor is universal). I tell them I am trying to figure out what their work style is.</p><p>BUT I'M IN CLASS WITH THEM FOR THAT! What am I going to do this year? What does thinking look like online? How do I teach cognition skills from my office when they're in their homes? How can I learn to look at a kid on Meets and know what or if they're thinking. Or did their screen freeze? Or is that really their thinking face and it looks like a frozen screen?</p><p>Patience and Grace as teachers relearn instincts we've honed over years of work. Patience and Grace with ourselves because we are going to miss so many cues we would have caught in class. It's going to be so much harder to find the kids that had a tough morning or a bad lunch or have something really exciting to share but they're too polite to chime in with it and besides they don't know how much to trust me because humans aren't really built to make close connections through a screen. </p><p>What does your thinking look like? Maybe we could ask our students if they know what their thinking looks like? I do that during my conversation and the kids all strike funny poses. Then we do it again and I ask them to try and be a little more serious the second time and they do because they got to play once. </p><p>I'll have to think on it...</p><p><br /></p><p><span style="font-size: x-small;">*It probably won't be death metal, I don't like much straight death metal. It might be melodic death metal, or maybe black metal, or maybe blackened trash, or perhaps experimental jazz black metal, or maybe Taylor Swift or "Weird Al". </span></p><p><span style="font-size: x-small;">** no idea why I'm not paid to write for bigger education publications</span></p><p><i style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, "Palatino Linotype", Palatino, serif; font-size: 15.4px;">If you like this post and the other posts on this blog you should know I’ve written three books about teaching- <a href="http://bit.ly/hestheweirdteacher" style="color: #888888; text-decoration-line: none;">He’s the Weird Teacher</a>, <a href="http://bit.ly/theteachingtext" style="color: #888888; text-decoration-line: none;">THE Teaching Text (You’re Welcome)</a>, and <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Classroom-One-Doug-Robertson/dp/1975739175" style="color: #888888; text-decoration-line: none;">A Classroom Of One</a>. I’ve also written one novel- <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Unforgiving-Road-Doug-Robertson/dp/1539932168/ref=pd_sim_14_5?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=1539932168&pd_rd_r=PFBPHZ2HMH0VV26YB83F&pd_rd_w=lYjeO&pd_rd_wg=6hZZD&psc=1&refRID=PFBPHZ2HMH0VV26YB83F" style="color: #888888; text-decoration-line: none;">The Unforgiving Road</a>. You should check them out, I’m even better in long form. I’m also on the tweets <a href="https://twitter.com/TheWeirdTeacher" style="color: #888888; text-decoration-line: none;">@TheWeirdTeacher</a>.<br /></i></p>The Weird Teacherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09409036328788408352noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1685637550786185567.post-78739456723143868222020-09-01T01:10:00.002-07:002020-09-01T01:10:23.211-07:00Mental Health Math<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-qyWsm1LP8mg/X038FskFWXI/AAAAAAAAIQc/VVrr7pEmaeMZA-xILxWo_GiqrXu5cfVtQCNcBGAsYHQ/s627/Mental%2BHealth%2BMath.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="623" data-original-width="627" height="254" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-qyWsm1LP8mg/X038FskFWXI/AAAAAAAAIQc/VVrr7pEmaeMZA-xILxWo_GiqrXu5cfVtQCNcBGAsYHQ/w256-h254/Mental%2BHealth%2BMath.jpg" width="256" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div>Welcome to the hardest year of every teacher's career. I think we can all agree on that. The most fun thing about that statement is, for many of us, the year hasn't even started yet. For the rest of us it's still as fresh as a Prince of Bel Aire. And yet, if you asked 100 random teachers what the hardest year of their teaching career was, 98% of them would say the 2020-2021 school year. Two percent would kick you in the shin and walk away in a huff.<p></p><p>I, of course, can only speak for myself. I have found, through this blog and through my books, that my experiences are often more universal that I give them credit for. So while I don't pretend to know for certain how everyone is feeling and coping, I can tell you how I'm feeling and coping (<i>read: pretending to cope</i>) in hopes that you find some common ground and at least feel less alone. Teaching is a solitary pursuit, no matter how good your grade level team, your staff, your extended community on social media, we're all in this alone. Just us and the kids. I would bet that's how most of us prefer it most of the time. Sometimes, though...sometimes all that does it make it hard to tell if we've gone right round the bend or not. When there ain't nobody in here but us chickens how do you know when you clucking eggs are scrambled?</p><p>So how am I feeling? And, by the commutative property laid out in the previous paragraph, how might you be feeling?</p><p>I am of two minds. Two minds that are actually three. Picture, if you will, a circle. Hold that image in your head. It could be a square or a rectangle if you must be <i>that</i> kid. Draw a line down the diameter of the circle, perfectly bisecting it. (You square/rectangle people- just cut it in half.) You now have two halves. Hopefully I'm not leaving anyone behind yet. Now, perpendicular to that line, draw another line, breaking one of the halves in half. You should have one full half, and two quarter sections. </p><p>Let's start with the full half section. I want you to label that section the title of this post. Yes, I see you writing "The Title Of This Post." You're very funny, everyone laughed. You know what I meant. Call it "Free Fallin'" please. And let's shade it in blue. You know, like the sky that we're falling through. </p><p>I feel overwhelmingly like I'm free falling. My district has a strong leader at the top, and many strong links in the chain of command from the top all the way down to the school level. Nearly every link is strong, competent, and capable. That is not enough for this year. This year, even with a great team at the top, excellent coaches, and principals who are doing their level best, things are not coming together like they should be. I know we are not alone in this. I do not know why every district feels the need to make the same mistakes as their cousin districts. I feel like most of us could be watching the districts that opened first while taking copious notes and asking many questions in detailed emails, then taking that information back home and not falling into some of those same pits. I also do not know why some districts have not involved teachers in the planning process from the beginning. I want to be clear again here that I like my district very much and I respect much of our leadership and I know this is an impossible position they have been put in by Cheeto Hitler and Dolores Umbridge (Hey, what's the difference between Betsy DeVos and Dolores Umbridge? At least Umbridge wasn't scared to walk into a school. And Umbridge was written to be an awful human, Betsy comes by it on her own.)</p><p>But because there hasn't been much teacher feedback and input into the process a lot of the information we're now getting feels incomplete or unfeasible. Much of it doesn't seem like it will survive that first week with students. Now, I am not a person who expects something new to work the first time. Or even the first few times. But I am the guy who will be standing in the front, along with my fellow teachers, when the fecal matter strikes the ventilator. And I'm not looking forward to clean up on aisle 14 for however long that takes. </p><p>I think things could have been done better. What things is a different post and requires a much deeper level of specificity than I'm willing to get into right now. I also acknowledge that "I could help do things better" is an amazingly egotistical thing to say and I do not in any way know what would make things easier for middle or high school. Those worlds are mysteries to me. But I would bet that there are teachers at those levels who feel like I do and with our powers combined we could create Captain FigureItOut. </p><p>Without all of that I'm in freefall. Freefall without a chute that I packed myself. Someone packed it. I saw bits and pieces of how it was packed. It's not how I would have packed it. Now I'm falling and starting to think about grasping for that ripcord and I don't know what's going to happen when I pull it.</p><p>Which leads me to the first of the two quarter sections of our circle. Let's keep getting negative so we can end on a positive note. Color this section red, please. Name it "WTF Am I Gonna Do?"</p><p>This part of my brain is overwhelmed with What Am I Gonna Do? I keep stumbling over my pre-planning because everything I do, my entire classroom environment, is built on being in the room with the kids. Giving them access to the materials and time they need to learn how I believe they will learn best. Allowing myself to drift free on the winds of whim and inspiration. Surfing atop piles of cardboard as we take the boring story in the Journey's book and turn it into a week-long build that allows for deeper learning than we would have gotten otherwise. Starting the year with spaghetti and marshmallow towers that immediately sets the tone for how groups will work collaboratively and how every activity will be tied to deeper and more complex educational ideas than they can even glimpse on that first day, but I know what's coming and how the project will echo all year. </p><p>I can't do that from home. Some well meaning person on twitter suggested I make regular packets of materials to send home to kids so I'm not burdening the parents to buy things or have things and that's great. Completely unrealistic, but great. Because yes, if they were in my room I'd be buying these supplies. I'd be supplying them (see what I did there?). But I'm not paying bi-weekly postage for thirty-something kids. I can't. Cheeto Hitler has stolen all the mailboxes anyway. </p><p>So what am I gonna do, man? How on Earth can I pivot my class to completely online and do anything like what I normally do? Be anything like the teacher I am? Build relationships, establish bonds and trust, read the body language that kids speak fluently (but each one speaks differently, and it takes time to learn to translate). How, man? I'm panicked. I'm freaking out about a lot right now. And let's not even bring up that my parent brain is also freaking out about my second grader and my kindergartner going through the same thing downstairs with my wife while I'm upstairs doing it with my class. Let's pretend that that hooey about "leave your personal life at the door" is a real thing people can do. Even though for distance learning the door is my house. So the metaphor falls apart immediately. </p><p>Let's look at that last quarter of the circle. Yes, or square or rectangle, I didn't forget about you I was just ignoring you. What do we label this possible saving section? The only part of my teaching brain that is keeping me from full blown DEFCON One hiding under my desk and rocking back and forth. Let's call it "I Thrive Under Pressure."</p><p>I've never encountered a year like this. None of us has. Anyone who says they know what they're doing is lying. *Looks back a few paragraphs when I say I could help solve this* I said "help solve", not "I know exactly what to do." Anyone telling you they know how to teach and build relationships and weather this distance learning storm, anyone who says that with full confidence while looking you in the eye, is a liar and should never be trusted to petsit a goldfish. They don't know.</p><p>What I do know, though, is that I'm a good dancer. </p><p>In my head that's how I think of what we do when we encounter a bunch of unknown problems. When the classroom is going to hell and nothing is working. We dance. I dance. I search for any beat, any flow, and I try to follow it. I stay light on my feet, I listen for the changes and watch my (thirty-something) partners for clues to when they want to lead. This year I'm gonna have to be Ginger Rogers. Yes, Ginger. Look up what Fred Astaire said about what she was doing when they danced together. This is a quote you should know. </p><p>I can, too. I'm good under pressure. When the room is going bad and the coffee isn't working and the air conditioner is broken and it's the week it rains randomly right before recess every single day and I forgot my lunch at home and the kids have had enough, I know how to teach. I can find a way. That's all I've got right now. </p><p>Faith.</p><p>I've got faith that I know what I'm doing. I know I don't, not this year. But I know I can figure it out because I have to. I know it'll be bad. I know it won't go right all the time. I know I'm gonna be banging my head against my desk and I'm going to be working myself silly to be sure my parents don't hate me and hate what their kids are being asked to do and to be sure my kids don't hate this kind of school. I don't know how yet. I have glimmers. Sparks. Embers. I haven't chased them yet because they're still formless. I'm in freefall too. Nothing on the classroom level can be planning with any detail yet because I'd be best laying plans like a mice or a man. Man plans, unpredictable wifi laughs. </p><p>But I'm pretty sure there are some rabbits in my hat. (There was one of two places I could pull an idea out of and I went with that one. You're welcome.) I don't know where the rabbits are, what they look like, or how fast they'll run off. But every year I doubt my ability to teach and every year I can.</p><p>I was telling my therapist that I have anxiety in a lot of situations. I <a href="http://hestheweirdteacher.blogspot.com/2019/12/anxiety-and-me.html" target="_blank">wrote about this too</a>, not long ago. I have helpless anxiety nearly everywhere <i>except</i> in my classroom. I do not get anxious in class. Ever. I'm clinging to that right now, my friends and readers. Holding tightly to it. Because I am anxious. I'm not sleeping. I'm snappy. I'm stressed. I'm way more negative about way more things than I'd like to be. And I know the why for all of that. I bet we're all feeling it. Yours might be manifesting differently than mine, but I bet it's there. </p><p>So I'm going to cling to the rock of Faith in Myself in the middle of these rapids. I'm going to get dunked and half drowned and rolled and bruised. But all I've got right now is that rock. </p><p>I hope you have a rock. If you don't you can borrow mine. We can do this. It's gonna be rough. It's just starting. But we're good teachers. So we can feel our feelings, but inside hold that rock tight. It's only a quarter of my brain, but it's all I've got working for me right now.</p><p><br /></p><i>If you like this post and the other posts on this blog you should know I’ve written three books about teaching- <a href="http://bit.ly/hestheweirdteacher">He’s the Weird Teacher</a>, <a href="http://bit.ly/theteachingtext">THE Teaching Text (You’re Welcome)</a>, and <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Classroom-One-Doug-Robertson/dp/1975739175">A Classroom Of One</a>. I’ve also written one novel- <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Unforgiving-Road-Doug-Robertson/dp/1539932168/ref=pd_sim_14_5?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=1539932168&pd_rd_r=PFBPHZ2HMH0VV26YB83F&pd_rd_w=lYjeO&pd_rd_wg=6hZZD&psc=1&refRID=PFBPHZ2HMH0VV26YB83F">The Unforgiving Road</a>. You should check them out, I’m even better in long form. I’m also on the tweets <a href="https://twitter.com/TheWeirdTeacher">@TheWeirdTeacher</a>.<br /></i><br />The Weird Teacherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09409036328788408352noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1685637550786185567.post-21639810917992752392020-05-12T16:03:00.000-07:002020-05-12T16:03:05.037-07:00Reflections on Distance TeachingNormally I write this stuff out. I made a video instead this time.<br />
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<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/wS-8O2pjoqc" width="560"></iframe>The Weird Teacherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09409036328788408352noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1685637550786185567.post-45460190591687214882020-02-10T22:22:00.000-08:002020-02-10T22:22:12.179-08:00Hiding Behind Bad Jokes<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Let's clear something up right now: Putting "Satire" or "Funny observations" does not absolve you of the responsibility of being coherent and responsible in your education tweets. For every anonymous education account that tweets well there are a dozen that are terrible at it.<br />
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That's right, friends and readers- this is a blog about education twitter. Strap in.<br />
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There are more anonymous education twitter accounts that I prefer to think about. Most of them hide behind handles like @LOLTeacherProblems or @MindYourMindset or @YourDumbAdmin. They have bios full of weasel words like, "meant to amuse" or "these are jokes" or "satire" or "just observations meant to be inspirational". Things that attempt to distance them from the content of their feeds or brush off tweets as "just jokes" as protection.<br />
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Here's the problem with that- "Jokes" are not the same thing as "complaining about your job and/or students with a winky face". It's just not. I get wanting to complain. I get wanting to have a space to do that freely. I don't think that is a bad thing in and of itself. Where my problem lies is when the account, framed as a source of insight or comedy, supplies neither. The funny isn't that hard. Correction- One funny isn't that hard. Three funnies, especially about teaching (an incredibly funny profession), aren't that hard. An entire account dedicated to the funny? <i>That's</i> hard. Before deciding you should create an anonymous account with all your clever education observations try to be sure you have more than a half dozen of them. Because once the well runs dry you'll still have that account sitting there and you and I both know you'll want to use it.<br />
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What happens to those accounts? Let's take two recent examples. I'm not going to call either account out by handle because that sucks, and I'm not going to link to the tweets. I won't link to the tweets because both accounts have since deleted the tweets under pressure of push back. Not bullying, push back. Response in a public forum to what they said publicly. One even wrote a (terrible) non-apology, then deleted that, then deleted an even worse poor me apology, then deleted <i>that</i>. Courage of your convictions and whatnot, I guess.<br />
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The first account example frames themselves as a funny account. "Check me out, I have clever things to say." Most of the tweets are boring at best and sucrose or cotton candy at worse. Until the account decided to post (I'm paraphrasing) "You know what I hate about my students? When they use slang." The they gave an example of a slang phrase that literally anyone would say (and did), "Wait, are you mocking the way a student of color speaks?" That's a problem, but maybe the account could have added context. That's not what happened. What happened was the tweet went mini-viral and pretty soon (white) teachers all over were adding the annoying things their students say that also sounded like they were singling out students of color. This thread got longer and longer and more and more racist. Like openly, easily racist. And when the account who started it all was called on it they got defensive, they started blocking people (not me, even though I straight out called them racist in an RT to 21.7k people, but accounts run by teachers of color did get blocked). Eventually they deleted the tweet and posted the two non-apologies I mentioned earlier.<br />
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There's a lot of problems with this. First off, if the student's quote was taken out of context it's the responsibility of the account posting it to provide the context needed and asked for. Secondly, and this is more important, if the responses to your thread get increasingly more racist it's your job to shut that down or at least try. There should be replies from you to the offenders telling them what's not welcome in no uncertain terms. An artist can absolutely cull their followers. I point to the easiest example- Nirvana post-Nevermind. Nevermind was the biggest album on the planet and Nirvana exploded into places they never wanted to be, and suddenly people who should never have been in their fandom found them and decided to like them. So on the next album, In Utero, they put this in the liner notes.<br />
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"If any of you hate homosexuals, people of different color, or women, please do this one favor for us- leave us alone! Don't come to our shows and don't buy our records."<br />
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You can't control who buys your stuff or follows you, but you can be very clear who and what is unwelcome. The second a twitter thread you start becomes toxic it's on you to at least try to stop that. "But I'm just trying to be a funny twitter account." Sorry dude, you started this, now own what you said.<br />
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The second type of account I want to talk about isn't sure what they want to be. They want to be funny, sure, but they also know that fauxspiration goes a long way towards those sweet sweet interaction metrics. So they will post what I suppose is supposed to be funny and mix in a nice helping of pablum and platitudes. The best kind of platitude? The kind teachers in February really want to hear? "Exhaustion means you're working hard. Being exhausted means you're a good teacher."<br />
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Holy crap, we're still doing this? I'm more of a martyr than you because I'm more tired? I love my kids more because I hate myself more? Pain makes teachers great? This is not a Thing! It has never been a Thing. Stop trying to make exhausted happen, Gretchen, or you can't sit with us anymore.<br />
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Again, lots of push back. Lots of tired, concerned teachers feeling the need to raise their hands and go, "Uh, this is a bad narrative and you should stop."<br />
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"Jeez, you guys are all so mean. I'm just trying to *mumble mumble argle bargle*." Hiding behind inspiration and, when that fails, hiding behind "it's supposed to be funny." If it's supposed to be funny then it ought to be. Don't be Ricky Gervais. It's possible to be shocking or edgy <i>and </i>funny, not just preachy and obnoxious.<br />
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As a bonus type of account, we have the sunshine and rainbows ones that pretend at understanding mindset but only to the depth of a splash pad in mid-winter. I saw, and I swear this is true, an account about mindsets tweet "Feeling overwhelmed? Switch to excitement! Don't think you have to do it, think you get to do it!" Oh, that's all it takes to stop feeling this tired and overwhelmed? It's just a mindset issue? "You're depressed? Have you tried not being depressed?" This reduction of depression, anxiety, anger, frustration, and exhaustion to simple "Well you just aren't trying hard enough to be happy" wouldn't fly on My Little Pony (one of the best cartoons about friendship and relationships and conflict out there today)*.<br />
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I want to make note that I'm not going to go after the anonymous part of these accounts, just their content. Honestly, I would rather everyone speak with their own face because that forces you to stand behind what you say, but I also understand the reality of some school districts and how some teachers might not feel safe speaking their truth with their face exposed. So, while I prefer to say everything with my face and voice out there in the open, I understand why some don't and I won't fault them for it.<br />
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Keep the focus on content. Education twitter accounts of the world- I cannot tell you how to tweet (the last thousand words to the contrary, I know). What I can tell you is what we see and how it makes us feel. Oversimplification, reduction, and hiding behind "It was just a joke, omg" are weak covers that do nothing to disguise a lack of content. Not to say everything everyone says on education twitter needs to have some deeper meaning. Imma tweet about Star Trek and my kids and my band and music I like as much as I tweet about education. But my bio doesn't pretend that I'm anything other than that.<br />
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Satire isn't that hard. Funny isn't that hard. Inspiration can't be that hard. Pretend I went to Target, browsed through the cards for a long time, and mailed you one that said, "Get better." Not because you're sick, but because you'r not very good at this.<br />
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*The Mane Six ranking goes 1) Pinkie Pie 2) Rainbow Dash 3) Rarity 4) Twilight Sparkle 5) Fluttershy 6) Applejack. No I will not be taking questions about this except to say Rarity sometimes jumps to number two because she's secretly the funniest pony. and The Great and Powerful Trixie is the best re-occurring pony because the idea of a stage magician in a world with actual magic is freaking hilarious and Trixie calls herself "The Great and Powerful Trixie" in the third person and I want to adopt that.<br />
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<i>If you like this post and the other posts on this blog you should know I’ve written three books about teaching- <a href="http://bit.ly/hestheweirdteacher">He’s the Weird Teacher</a>, <a href="http://bit.ly/theteachingtext">THE Teaching Text (You’re Welcome)</a>, and <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Classroom-One-Doug-Robertson/dp/1975739175">A Classroom Of One</a>. I’ve also written one novel- <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Unforgiving-Road-Doug-Robertson/dp/1539932168/ref=pd_sim_14_5?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=1539932168&pd_rd_r=PFBPHZ2HMH0VV26YB83F&pd_rd_w=lYjeO&pd_rd_wg=6hZZD&psc=1&refRID=PFBPHZ2HMH0VV26YB83F">The Unforgiving Road</a>. You should check them out, I’m even better in long form. I’m also on the tweets <a href="https://twitter.com/TheWeirdTeacher">@TheWeirdTeacher</a>.</i>The Weird Teacherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09409036328788408352noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1685637550786185567.post-51875702517023888702020-02-03T23:19:00.002-08:002020-02-03T23:19:31.971-08:00Learning to Fret Less (OR A Post About Bass, Projects, and Risk)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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If you are a regular reader of this blog or of my <a href="http://twitter.com/theweirdteacher" target="_blank">twitter feed</a> then you're probably aware I spend a lot of time talking about Making in the classroom. STEAM is one of my teaching passions and I feel very strongly that there is no learning like hands-on, get it wrong, then reflect on what you learned and generalize it to everything else learning. I do not ignore the textbooks in my classroom, I'm not an extremist who thinks ditching normal tools makes sense, but I do lean hard in the Explore And Do To Learn camp. I love telling my students that they're going to make a <a href="https://hestheweirdteacher.blogspot.com/2017/12/cardboard-arcade-game-design-is-no-game.html" target="_blank">cardboard arcade</a> and then stepping aside and letting them figure it out over four days. I love fielding student questions like, "How do I make this arcade game do this thing I want it to do?" with "I dunno, I've never made a game that does that. Draw out what you think, building it, then revise it until it works." It's the same reason I like teaching coding. Coding is all about revision and generalization of rules.<br />
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I love watching my students do this. I love the risk I feel I'm taking as a teacher by letting them do these things.<br />
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But is it a risk? I mean, I believe in this method. I have actual years of experience doing it with students. I've seen the positive results over and over. I have faith in the process even in the midst of freaking out about the process not working this time. I call it a risk because making often throws a classroom into what looks like chaos, but it's really a messy but controlled working environment. Making in the classroom isn't a real risk for me.<br />
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Especially since I'm not the one making anything. I'm supervising.<br />
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If you're not a teacher who does a lot of making you might think this is a strange way to do things. "I wouldn't have my students do anything I wouldn't do" and all that. But here's the thing- there's a <i>lot</i> to watch and be aware of when a classroom full of kids are making something. When I'm making something I need to focus. It's kinda the same reason I don't silently read when my kids silently read. I wouldn't be able to stop when the timer went off. I wouldn't be able to stop working on my thing to help a student deal with whatever their thing is. Also, students tend to follow their teacher's lead, even independent students. They are trained to assume that the way you're doing something is the "right" way. So I don't do anything, unless a specific skill needs to be modeled. I don't let them just drown. I'm the teacher, after all.<br />
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But here's a secret about me- I'm super confident about making things out of cardboard. Cardboard is easy and cheap. However, I get kinda freaked out making things that are real. I don't like changing my own oil and I'd rather pay someone. If I go to IKEA and buy a flurgenshiglet my wife will be the one to build it because she likes that kind of thing. I'm just now learning to love Lego. My "creating" creativity happens at a keyboard and, more recently, on my electric bass.<br />
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Which is why when I got the wild hair to turn my cheap starter bass into a fretless I had significant concerns. What if I screw up my bass? What if I do it wrong? I don't know how to do this, I've never done it before.<br />
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You know, excuses I wouldn't tolerate from my kids.<br />
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I prefer the direct human touch to YouTube tutorials, so after watching a dozen how-to videos that ranged from a five minute video of "I Used A Kitchen Knife To Make A Fretless Bass" to "Part Seven of Fifteen: Choosing the Proper Sand Paper" I texted a buddy of mine about it and it turned out he'd done it before. Through a longish, patient text conversation he convinced me that it wouldn't be that hard, I could do it, it's pretty cheap, and he'd be a phone call away if I needed it.<br />
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That's all it took. I'm hesitant to start projects like this, but I'm also of the personality that when I decide I'm going to do something I jump directly in and go. I decided I was going to do it on Thursday night, and Friday after school I hit the craft store for supplies and, after putting the Weirdlings to bed, got to work.<br />
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A little context for those of you who might not know what I'm talking about- guitars and basses are fretted instruments. The frets are those metal bars that go up the neck. They allow the player to know where the notes are and they cause the note to ring out in tune as the string is pressed against them. A fretless instrument has, as I'm sure you've figured out from the clever name, no frets. You can buy a fretless where the neck was built without them or, if you don't have the cash to throw around on a new-to-you instrument, you can convert a fretted instrument into a fretless by, well....pulling the frets out with pliers and filling in the gaps.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">See the silver lines? Those are frets.</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The first fret removal. It has begun.</td></tr>
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It's a pretty straightforward process. You might be able to see where my trepidation would come in though. I own two basses- this one, which was my first bass and cost, along with a tiny practice amp and a junk gig bag, just over $200, and a Geddy Lee Signature Series Jazz bass that cost a lot more. So I only have two, my good one and my old back-up. I'd rather not ruin the back-up. But if I'm going to experiment on something it ain't the nice one. And this is a way of revitalizing an old, kinda junk instrument without getting rid of it or spending a ton of money on it (I think there's an education metaphor here too).<br />
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The frets are held in with some glue, so I took our clothes iron, set it on high, and heated up each fret. Then, using needle nose pliers, I gently wiggled the fret free. Repeat 22 times. Next, I bought a sheet of 1/32" basswood, the narrowest sheet available. I still had to sand down both the fret gap and the sheet of basswood, then cut it into small slats which filled the gaps. I added a tiny bit of superglue just to be sure nothing would move, but those things were in there tighter than a [REDACTED].<br />
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Once the whole neck was filled in I had to trim the pieces shorter and then go at it with progressively finer sandpaper. I started with heavy grit to cut down the tall slats and as they got closer to the neck switched to finer and finer grit. It still took quite a bit of sanding and I know I took some width off the neck in the process, which is ok because the bass kind of had a baseball bat neck to begin with.<br />
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What's nice about this process is once you're here you can't screw it up any more. Like, you can, but it's too late to fix it or take it back, so I could relax and go to it with the sandpaper.<br />
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By the time I finished the neck was nearly perfect. It's still not perfectly smooth, which means I will occasionally get some weird buzzing, but the friend who talked me through the process to begin with is sending me a radius block that I can use to finish the sanding. I also need to file down the nut *waits for the giggling to stop* which is the metal post at the head of the neck that keeps the strings in place. When the neck had frets the nut was fine, but I was pressing the strings down onto the frets, not the neck. You wouldn't think that that tiny fraction of an inch would make that much difference, but it does. So when I get the radius block I'll also file the nut to lower the string action and make the bass more comfortable and cleaner to play.<br />
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What does all of this have to do with teaching? I constantly challenge my students to take risks. I'm always asking them to do things they don't know how to do and have faith that they'll learn from it. But I rarely do that. <a href="https://hestheweirdteacher.blogspot.com/2018/02/gimme-four-down-low-for-risk-and-failure.html" target="_blank">Learning to play the bass starting two years ago</a> was a big moment for me in my journey of continuing learning. When do I learn from making? What's STEAM in my life? When did I do something I wasn't sure I knew how to do and used my resources to figure out anyway? Yes, we can be constantly growing our practice by attending conferences and reading new books, but what concrete things are we doing that can reflect in our practice? You cannot expect to put something into the world that you do not first internalize and actualize.<br />
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I think this bass will eventually need new electronics, the knobs are rubbish and cheap, and probably new tuners, and then new pick-ups, and maybe a new bridge. Eventually it'll be the Bass of Theseus*. But the thought of dealing with wires and electronics freaks me out. I've never done that before.<br />
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Which means I probably should. For myself. And for my kids.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">*no, I won't link to it, you Google it if you want to know what I'm talking about</span><br />
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<i>If you like this post and the other posts on this blog you should know I’ve written three books about teaching- <a href="http://bit.ly/hestheweirdteacher">He’s the Weird Teacher</a>, <a href="http://bit.ly/theteachingtext">THE Teaching Text (You’re Welcome)</a>, and <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Classroom-One-Doug-Robertson/dp/1975739175">A Classroom Of One</a>. I’ve also written one novel- <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Unforgiving-Road-Doug-Robertson/dp/1539932168/ref=pd_sim_14_5?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=1539932168&pd_rd_r=PFBPHZ2HMH0VV26YB83F&pd_rd_w=lYjeO&pd_rd_wg=6hZZD&psc=1&refRID=PFBPHZ2HMH0VV26YB83F">The Unforgiving Road</a>. You should check them out, I’m even better in long form. I’m also on the tweets <a href="https://twitter.com/TheWeirdTeacher">@TheWeirdTeacher</a>.</i>The Weird Teacherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09409036328788408352noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1685637550786185567.post-79959148344912024832020-01-27T23:09:00.002-08:002020-01-27T23:16:59.921-08:00One of Those Years<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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You know what's special about teaching that I don't think translates to very many other jobs?<br />
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You can say, "It's been one of those years."And no one at work will question what you mean. Every single person gets it. Every single person at your school has had "one of those years."<br />
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Like, you don't often realize it right away. Maybe it was just a weird September, some years start weird. And October felt a little funny. November is always strange. And December doesn't count, December is always screwed up. But suddenly it's the <i>end</i> of January and things still haven't settled in? Oh...oh hell. It's <i>one of those years</i>, isn't it?<br />
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There can be a lot of reasons for <i>One Of Those Years</i>. Every once in a while you just get that certain mix of students, that specific chemical combination of personalities that makes everything harder than it needs to be. Not that they're bad kids, not that they're trying to make things harder, not that you're worse at teaching, but you just ended up with the least efficient possible combination of humans in one room and no amount of relationship building and class meetings can smooth the jagged edges.<br />
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Sometimes it's a new admin. Or a new team member. Or a new program. Or, for the lucky amongst us, a combination of the three. Yay, so much newness all at once, this will be fun to juggle.<br />
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I recently realized that this year is probably going to be <i>One Of Those Years</i>. I'm fortunate. I haven't had too many in my fifteen years. Two real bad ones. The first, which I wrote about in my <a href="http://bit.ly/hestheweirdteacher" target="_blank">first book</a>, was when I taught sixth grade in Hawaii. My third year of teaching. I had the worst team in the world. The meanest women I've ever met. Impossible to work with. I was in my principal's office in October asking to be moved out of the grade. I stopped eating lunch with them in October and spent the rest of the year eating alone in my room. I sheltered my students from them as much as possible. Example- I was teaching my kids the meaning of "suspense" one day and one girl raised her hand. "Oh, so it's that feeling when we have to go to Mrs. XXX's room. We know that someone is going to get in trouble, but we don't know who and we don't know why." That was <i>One Of Those Years.</i><br />
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The second one was because my school had just hired a brand new vice principal. It was her first year as an admin and we...did not get along. I take responsibility too, I do not handle having my chain yanked well and I know better than to go toe to toe with an administrator. But right away I was shut down by her in a staff meeting in front of everyone in a brutal, rude way, and that set the tone. She decided she didn't like the way my classroom ran and to enforce every inch of the district guidelines, which included expecting weekly lesson plans on her desk every Monday morning. She claimed she was doing it for all "new" teachers. (I wasn't new, it was my ninth year, but my second in the district, but she treated me like it was my second period.) I checked. It was just me. So I did the responsible, respectful thing of testing her, because I didn't trust that she actually cared. I wrote one master weekly lesson plan out, made a bunch of copies, changed the dates, and submitted the same thing to her over and over. She never called me on it. She did end up threatening me with a poor review when she found out I was looking for another job if someone called her. Like I would tell a job to call her. But like I said, I wasn't making it any easier on myself. I made the year harder for myself and it sucked the whole time.<br />
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The constant in both of those years was I had great kids. Amazing kids. Well, one scary kid in the sixth grade that eventually got moved out, but other than that it was amazing. I learned a ton with them in those two years.<br />
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I narrowly avoided <i>One Of Those Years</i> a few years ago with a student teacher. Rough mix of kids. We had a hard time, but we figured it out right at the end. We had to <a href="https://hestheweirdteacher.blogspot.com/2017/04/show-me-money-adventure-in-new-things.html" target="_blank">rework everything</a> but we did it. Student Teacher Ms Miller (now Ms Miller in her own classroom for a few years) helped save that year. I couldn't have asked for a better student teacher. It was <i>One Of Those Three Quarters Of A Year</i>.<br />
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This year, I think, is <i>OoTY</i>. Not because of my kids. I have a reasonably size group of nutty, weird, funny, chatty, great kids. I <i>always</i> have a bunch of nutty, chatty, weird, funny kids. Every single year. What are the odds? The kids claim I make them weird, but I doubt that very much.<br />
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But here's what has happened since the start of the year-<br />
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<ul>
<li>This summer my daughter was born and immediately spent a week in the <a href="https://hestheweirdteacher.blogspot.com/2019/07/nicu-edu.html" target="_blank">NICU</a>. She's fine now. But summer break wasn't a real break.</li>
<li>I had my first <a href="https://hestheweirdteacher.blogspot.com/2019/11/i-failedi-think.html" target="_blank">utter failure</a> of a student teacher experience.</li>
<li>My favorite principal ever, the best I've ever worked for, was <a href="https://hestheweirdteacher.blogspot.com/2019/12/losing-leader.html" target="_blank">stolen by the district office</a>, throwing our school into a spin we're doing our best to ride out but which won't actually be settled until someone permanent is hired next year.</li>
<li>My children spent basically all of winter break sick, including the littlest one, now six months old, spending Christmas and a few days afterward in the hospital with RSV.</li>
<li>Yay, <a href="https://hestheweirdteacher.blogspot.com/2019/12/anxiety-and-me.html" target="_blank">anxiety</a>!</li>
<li>Right after Christmas break, starting three weeks ago, I woke up Thursday morning knowing I was passing a kidney stone (I've done it a bunch of times over twenty years) so I didn't go in, it didn't pass on Friday so I didn't teach again, I taught through it on Monday, went to the doctor on Tuesday so no school, had surgery on Wednesday, recovered Thursday and Friday, had Monday off as a holiday, taught Tuesday, and on Weds I took the day off because they took the stent out they'd left in during the surgery and the stent was between my kidney and bladder and there's only one way to that particular tube and I got to be awake for it so I decided to take that day off too because I had earned it. Then I taught Thursday and had no students and meetings on Friday. So, to review, in three weeks I taught six days. This month might as well have been shot into the sun. My poor students. </li>
<li>Cheeto Hitler is still president and even though he's been impeached I'm terrified he's going to get away with everything anyway because the GOP are all cowards and traitors and I'd be lying if I didn't admit that's a constant level of stress lurking beneath everything else all the time.</li>
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Not to mention all the normal things I'm involved in like I'm on a STEAM leadership team and I'm part of an awesome Community Partnership thing that had my students building <a href="https://hestheweirdteacher.blogspot.com/2019/06/where-my-benches-at.html" target="_blank">benches </a>last year and is dreaming even bigger this year, and I'm heading up the <a href="https://hestheweirdteacher.blogspot.com/2019/05/the-cardboard-city.html" target="_blank">MakerFaire committee</a>. I'm not complaining, I love this stuff and it's important to me. But it's a lot. </div>
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I've noticed that I just feel <i>off</i> this year. I still don't have my feet under me and it's basically February, which probably means I'm not going to get them under me. My class is great, my kids are working hard. We've done cool things and I'm doing my job well (except the last three weeks which were a garbage fire of no one's doing). But it's just not <i>right</i>. </div>
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I'm lucky too because my grade level team is killer. I couldn't be more lucky with the two people I share fourth grade with, and the fifth grade team is awesome too. I'm close with one of the fifth grade teachers, he's been a partner in crime and kindred spirit since my first year at the school and we make each other better. These people are saving me while I also battle that wonderful teacher insecurity of I Can't Let Them Down. Because it's not enough to put pressure on yourself to not let your kids down, someone of us are lucky enough to work with teachers we feel the same way about. The jerks. Gotta be all helpful and friendly and good at their jobs. (I should note that if they sucked like the sixth grade team a few paragraphs above did I'd still be be putting pressure on myself, but it would be the much less healthy "I'll show you" kind. Because spite and anger are fuels too, kids!)</div>
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I'm going to keep trying. You can't give up on a <i>One Of Those Years</i> or it'll sweep you away completely, but it's not healthy to not see it for what it is. Teaching is a hard freaking job. No amount of sunshine and rainbows, be positive and cheerleading keynotes, books, quotes, memes, and pablum will change that or make it better. I'll find my way and laugh doing it because, like Jimmy Buffett says, "<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7JpxavO9NE" target="_blank">if we weren't all crazy we'd all go insane.</a>"*</div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">*I've seen Jimmy a few times live, he puts on a great show. Especially when you see him outdoors in Hawaii and you can smell the ocean (and a few other things) during the set. But you have never seeeeeeen so many drunk white people dancing badly. </span></div>
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<i>If you like this post and the other posts on this blog you should know I’ve written three books about teaching- <a href="http://bit.ly/hestheweirdteacher">He’s the Weird Teacher</a>, <a href="http://bit.ly/theteachingtext">THE Teaching Text (You’re Welcome)</a>, and <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Classroom-One-Doug-Robertson/dp/1975739175">A Classroom Of One</a>. I’ve also written one novel- <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Unforgiving-Road-Doug-Robertson/dp/1539932168/ref=pd_sim_14_5?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=1539932168&pd_rd_r=PFBPHZ2HMH0VV26YB83F&pd_rd_w=lYjeO&pd_rd_wg=6hZZD&psc=1&refRID=PFBPHZ2HMH0VV26YB83F">The Unforgiving Road</a>. You should check them out, I’m even better in long form. I’m also on the tweets <a href="https://twitter.com/TheWeirdTeacher">@TheWeirdTeacher</a>.</i>The Weird Teacherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09409036328788408352noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1685637550786185567.post-69384832067027811242020-01-20T22:53:00.000-08:002020-01-20T22:57:13.284-08:00Why is Your Scientist a White Man?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-fSDk0dmS9hU/XiaUsJEMvuI/AAAAAAAAIDM/eDOOHv4lZF0V8NGp5TJFtgEGZTZJnjFqgCNcBGAsYHQ/s1600/question%2Bmark.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1080" data-original-width="1000" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-fSDk0dmS9hU/XiaUsJEMvuI/AAAAAAAAIDM/eDOOHv4lZF0V8NGp5TJFtgEGZTZJnjFqgCNcBGAsYHQ/s320/question%2Bmark.jpg" width="296" /></a></div>
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"Ok, you're all doing great work but I need everyone to stop and listen for a second. Hands off your computers, please."<br />
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I try not to interrupt my students when they're in the middle of work time. Especially when they're working well. There's no better way to break the spell of a focused class like sticking your One-More-Thing-Teacher-Face in front of it. I try to avoid it at all costs but doing all the explaining and expectations and whatever before the student work part starts. But something always comes us. It's the nature of the work. So then it's a judgement call of "Should I put this fire out fifteen times between all my groups?" or "Let's just stop everyone, get it taken care of right now, and move on with the work." In this case I choose Option Latter.<br />
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The project in question was one I like because it manages to fulfill a few boxes of my Flowchart O' Good Projects- It uses technology in a creative way, it allows for student creativity but within narrow boundaries, it assesses what a less creative but more straight forward project could, and it can be expanded upon later and blown up real big.<br />
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My students are reading a story called "Invasion From Mars". It's the first few minutes of the "War of the Worlds" radio play by HG Wells in script form. We get to talk about the genre of audio plays, dissect the text for clues about what it happening, describe actions and events, look at cause and effect, all kinds of good stuff. In my class, if students see a script, they're gonna want to perform it. I call this the Give a Mouse a Cookie Principle. But just reading the script out loud is no fun, and it's not very engaging. There's only three real speaking parts in the whole thing. How to get everyone involved?<br />
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Technology! Did you know that you can use Google Slides to create a stop motion movie? It's true! Just build a character out of shapes, copy the slide, move the shapes very slightly, copy the slide, and repeat. The more slides you have the finer you can make the movements the smoother your animation will look. Students get <i>very</i> into this and you'll soon have slideshows of 200 slides. Then expand to presentation size and click through very quickly. To add audio download Screencastify (or any other screen capture extension) to Chrome, turn it on, and the kids are now the voice actors, folly artists, as well as the animators. This is not the quickest process in the world, but if your goal is to get your kids to slow down, read the text carefully, see what's happening, and summarize it in some way it's golden. They have to read with fluency and expression because they're acting. They have to pay attention to the text because their animation needs to match the story and so does their folly (sound effects).<br />
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It's great fun. Like I said, they'll beg to do this again which means you can release control and move from the students animating a pre-written script to animating one that they've written. They'll <i>beg</i> to write a script.<br />
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The three main characters in "Invasion From Mars" are The Reporter, The Farmer, and The Scientist. There's also a cop, another reporter, and a crowd but they don't count. In the text The Reporter is called Phillips, The Farmer is called Mr. Wilmuth, and The Scientist is called Pierson. Students take their time designing these characters. And it was during this that I noticed something interesting and troubling-<br />
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All three characters were being animated as white men by every single group in the room. In the illustrations of the book Phillips is a white man and he's referred to once as "Carl". Mr Wilmuth is given a gender in his name and he's illustrated as a white man. And Pierson is illustrated as a white man. So you might think, "Well, that's why the kids are animating the characters like that. They're taking their cues from the text. You know, like you want." Maybe, EXCEPT later in the story the alien climbs out of its smoking space ship and, while that's also illustrated in the story, the description in the text is pretty sparse, and every single animated alien across every group looks different. So why are all of my kids, the groups with more girls, the groups with more boys, the groups with students of color, the groups without, every group is animating the human characters the same?<br />
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I had to say something. This is a chance, an organic teaching moment, that you cannot let pass by. It's real and it'll give us a chance to talk about bias and reality and what they're presented with every day and it will, hopefully, change how they interact with the world.<br />
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I focused the conversation on Pierson, The Scientist. "Please raise your hand if you're animating Pierson to look like a man." Wait one two three. "Look around. All of you did. Ok, if your hand is in the air find me proof in the text that Pierson is a man." Wait four five six.<br />
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Someone calls out (we're allowed to call out in my class in these kinds of situations, it's a conversation), "Uh...I don't think it does."<br />
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My turn. "Huh. That's interesting.So why did you make Pierson a man?" Someone will be brave. Someone will say it without thinking about what they're saying until they've already said it, which is perfect and what this needs.<br />
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"Because Pierson is a scientist."<br />
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Then I wait. I don't need to do anything right now. I need to let that hang in the air for just a moment, watching them, waiting for what's coming. "Heyyy!" one student exclaims. "Waitaminute! Girls can be scientists too!" Let it run through the room for a minute. All it took was the spark, the kids will blow it into a flame. Now I can poke, because her Pierson was a man too. You can't believe how quickly they rush for the keyboard to start making corrections.<br />
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"But wait! There's more!" Everyone freezes again. "Raise your hand if you animated Pierson with what could be called white skin."<br />
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No matter how comfortable your class is, bringing this up will always get a moment of caught breath, a slight pause. Racial conversations can be hard and the classroom needs to correct environment to have them. Mine does, but that doesn't mean they're willing to jump right in all at once. They're fourth graders. But still, every hand goes up. "Leave your hand up if you can find in the text where it says that Pierson is white." Every hand goes down.<br />
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"I want us to all sit with this for a second. We can have a bigger conversation about this if you want, or I can let you think on it and we'll come back to it later, but isn't it interesting that every single person in hear read Scientist and though White Man? That's a problem, isn't it? Sure, Pierson absolutely could be. In fact, based on when this was written in history that's exactly what the author probably imagined when he wrote it. But that was 70 years ago. You are smarter than that. You are more open than that. No one is in trouble, and I'm not going to insist that anyone change what they've animated. <i>But</i>, I am going to insist that you think about why you did what you did. I want you to change your animations to reflect what you think."<br />
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We talk at this point in class about what implicit bias is, because that understanding will inform every single thing we do and it's important that that lives in their heads now. Someone will ask about Phillips, The Reporter and Mr Wilmuth, The Farmer. I'll tell them that the story does seem to specify their genders, but I'll ask if it matters. "Sure, at one point Phillips is called Carl, but does that mean you can't slightly alter the text to make it Carol? And the farmer too. What do you want them to look like, not what did the illustrator make them look like?"<br />
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This is at once a small thing and a Big Thing. It's a small thing because it's all about getting my students to look at text in a different way. But it's a Big Thing because they need to see the biases they carry with them all the time. This story is perfect for that conversation too because it comes up organically. I'm not forcing something to happen, I'm letting it happen and then calling it out. I believe in Education Circles we call that a Teachable Moment. I'm also not shying away from it, which is so easy to do, especially as a straight white man teacher. "You would like to center me in this story? Awesome, I should be centered in all stories! Straight White Man to the Default!" I can't let that happen. It's not good for my kids who aren't straight white men and it's not good for my kids who are. Decentering takes work. It takes specific calling out. It's these small and big things that will help bring the change we're working towards always. And, just as a CYA (Cover Your Ass) in case a parent gets grumpy for whatever reason ("Why are you having political conversations with my child?"), I'm not having the conversation, I'm pointing out something and guiding things while students come to whatever they'll come to. Also, I'm about to teach the colonization of the continent through the Oregon Trail so the No Political Conversations thing is well out the window anyway.<br />
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It's our job to help students see the world and understand it, and that includes the world inside themselves. A lot of teaching, so much of it, is a time release capsule that we put into a kid's head and then step away from, maybe never to see the result of. It's my job, it's our job, to find these chances to make the world a better place and take them. Wherever they appear.<br />
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<i>If you like this post and the other posts on this blog you should know I’ve written three books about teaching- <a href="http://bit.ly/hestheweirdteacher">He’s the Weird Teacher</a>, <a href="http://bit.ly/theteachingtext">THE Teaching Text (You’re Welcome)</a>, and <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Classroom-One-Doug-Robertson/dp/1975739175">A Classroom Of One</a>. I’ve also written one novel- <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Unforgiving-Road-Doug-Robertson/dp/1539932168/ref=pd_sim_14_5?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=1539932168&pd_rd_r=PFBPHZ2HMH0VV26YB83F&pd_rd_w=lYjeO&pd_rd_wg=6hZZD&psc=1&refRID=PFBPHZ2HMH0VV26YB83F">The Unforgiving Road</a>. You should check them out, I’m even better in long form. I’m also on the tweets <a href="https://twitter.com/TheWeirdTeacher">@TheWeirdTeacher</a>.</i>The Weird Teacherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09409036328788408352noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1685637550786185567.post-66839745726068015332020-01-13T23:25:00.002-08:002020-01-13T23:25:34.074-08:00The Professor<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-vpJFv8curAk/Xh1ZkvcpZNI/AAAAAAAAICs/MdoRbJyiNI8GtM1YS5Q5eBoGbZ3cLSmRQCNcBGAsYHQ/s1600/Neil20202.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="640" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-vpJFv8curAk/Xh1ZkvcpZNI/AAAAAAAAICs/MdoRbJyiNI8GtM1YS5Q5eBoGbZ3cLSmRQCNcBGAsYHQ/s320/Neil20202.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A friend sent this to me and I can't find who drew it to credit them. <br />If you know please let me know.</td></tr>
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<i>Author's Note- Like most of my stuff, this does not immediately come to an educational point, even though this is an education-based blog. Like most of my stuff, I do have a teacher-centric point and you just need to trust me and come on the journey.</i><br />
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Neil Peart is my favorite drummer. He is a lot of people's favorite drummer. Somebody said that Neil Peart is your favorite drummer's favorite drummer. Neil Peart was the best for a million different reasons.<br />
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Neil Peart died on Tuesday, January 7th after a three and a half year battle with brain cancer. It sucks. A lot.<br />
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First some context for those of you reading this who have not yet been initiated into the world of wonder and rock that is the greatest rock band to have ever existed- Rush. Rush was three men- Geddy Lee on bass and vocals, Alex Lifeson on guitars, and Neil Peart on drums (except the first album, which featured John Rutsy on drums). Rush is a progressive rock band from the Great White North. Even if you don't think you know Rush you've heard Rush. You probably know "<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auLBLk4ibAk" target="_blank">Tom Sawye</a><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auLBLk4ibAk" target="_blank">r</a>" or "<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZiRuj2_czzw" target="_blank">Limelight</a>" at least. Rush didn't write hits. Rush didn't write for record sales. Rush was, in the words of Geddy Lee, "The most popular cult band in the world." The easy pigeon hole for Rush is that they wrote twenty minute long prog rock odysseys with seventeen time changes, and that's true, but only for a few early albums. Eventually they moved away from that and wrote five minute long prog rock adventures with fourteen time changes.<br />
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Prog rock gets a bad wrap, a lot of it is the fault of prog rock bands. People will hear a millions notes a minute and songs so long that the listener and the band need a road map, a snack, and a power nap to get all the way through it, and say, "That must be prog!" And at one point it was. But, much like punk, by defining progressive rock with boundaries you box it and therefore take what is progressive about it away.<br />
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Rush was progressive in the most real sense of the word. They were constantly evolving and changing. Every Rush album sounds like Rush. A neophyte to the band could listen to the self-titled debut and to <i>Clockwork Angels</i>, their final full length published forty years later, and say, "Yep. Same band." And not just because, love it or hate it, Geddy Lee's voice is unmistakable and never really changed that much. But while it's still Rush, the band has changed, and if you care to listen with your ears on you can hear that. Most of my favorite bands, like jazz-rock-orchestra shapeshifter Frank Zappa and Canadian prog-extreme-atmospheric-pop-metal genius Devin Townsend (and even Metallica, who always evolved even when we weren't thrilled with the evolution at least they did it), never made the same album twice. But they always <i>always</i> made the album that was true to them in the moment. Rush mined their hearts and passions for songs and expected us, the fans, to come along...or not. Their wider popularity ebbed and flowed but after a certain point they never failed to sell out any EnormoDome in whatever town they were coming to. Because authenticity matters.<br />
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Even though he wasn't the literal voice of the band (he was fond of saying, "Singing is the worst job, but drumming is the hardest") it was his words that sprang from Geddy's throat. Neil wrote nearly all the lyrics to every Rush song. I say nearly because he was the lyricist but he'd give the words to Geddy, Geddy would decide what was too much to sing or too complicated or didn't flow right, make changes, give the words back, and Neil would edit from their. In a band of three guys you can't have factions or people ganging up on each other. It wouldn't work. Rush worked together like only three good Canadian boys could.<br />
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And what words he would write. Diving into the lyric sheet of any Rush album is a journey that is akin to diving into your favorite piece of literature. Bring a dictionary too because his vocabulary is bigger than yours. He's not showing off, it's just that, much like his giant drum set, if he's got the exact right word he's going to use it. Neil read voraciously and you could hear that in his lyrics. Whether it's a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZm1_jtY1SQ" target="_blank">massive science fiction story about government control of art and individual thought and accomplishmen</a>t, a five minute metaphor about <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYYdQB0mkEU" target="_blank">the things that separate and alienate us from each other</a>, or <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SomjthIXTI" target="_blank">processing the loss of his daughter and wife within a year of each other</a> Neil was clear and quoting his heart.<br />
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He also rode bicycles and motorcycles, taking long adventures through the back roads of countries the band was touring in instead of traveling in ease and boredom in the bus the whole time. These treks led to books about his travels. For those of you paying attention, yeah, he was a motorcycle riding author and musician who loved to read. No wonder I feel such a strong connection to him.<br />
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"Ok great!" I hear you cry, dear reader. "But what does this have to do with teaching? My recess/bathroom break is almost over and you still haven't gotten to the point."<br />
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Neil talks about building drum parts like I think about building lessons and projects. Correction- Like I aspire to thinking about lessons and projects. His drumming is famously complex and layered, with a million things happening at once. But the secret that other prog drummers sometimes miss is everything, every flourish and hit, is in service of The Song first. Like our lessons should be. So how does he write these complex drum parts? By starting simple. Play the beat. Play the beat until the heartbeat of the song is strong. Then add something. Does it work? Can he do it? Ok, now add something else. Change it slightly. Can he play it? Ok, repeat. He builds these massive palaces one beat at a time, checking and revising each time. That's why they call him The Professor. No one thought about playing drums like Neil thought about playing drums. He wasn't a drummer. He was a composer.<br />
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Now I think about how I try to build things in my classroom. You always have to start with The Point. What's the point? Ok, now what can I add to flesh it out? How can I add technology or movement or choice or making? Where are the places it can be given to students more freely? How do I grow it bigger, fancier, but always in service of The Lesson. Done right, at the end I've created something big. What makes what I do, what we do, different from what Neil did is that's only the first step. He needs to be able to play that complex behemoth every night on tour with exacting accuracy, and I need to be able to hand it over to ten year old so they can create something with it on their own. He builds something to set in stone and make perfect. I build something to be broken and re-purposed. But the process is the same.<br />
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Neil was widely considered the greatest drummer in his genre for a long time. It would be easy for someone who was The Best to be happy being The Best. But that's not who he was. Neil wasn't happy with his drumming and wanted something more. He found a teacher, Freddie Gruber, thirty years into his career and dedicated himself to relearning an instrument he'd mastered a hundred times over. He learned new styles, new techniques for playing, new ways of thinking about beat and rhythm. The best in the world went back to school to be better.<br />
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The connection to education and what we do seems pretty obvious, my friends. If he can see places to improve, and be brave enough to deconstruct his practice in order to build it back up stronger, anyone can. And should. He said when he got together with the band again after doing that the other two said he still sounded like him, and for a minute he was disappointed. "But of course it still sounded like me. The difference was the clock at work had changed, and as we played we could all feel that."<br />
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Neil gets labeled as a sourpuss sometimes, and if you watch him play you can honestly see why. It does not look like a man having a good time. But Rush songs are <i>hard</i> and no one has higher standards than Neil himself. He compared playing a three hour Rush show to running a marathon while juggling and doing complex equations. You try to smile. He was also deeply shy and never did the fan meet and greets. Leave that to Geddy and Alex, who actually enjoy it. It was never that he was above it, he just didn't like it. He'd say that, "extroverts will never understand introverts." This is a lesson I need to take to heart more often in my own classroom, and something some education speakers should probably have pinned to their shirts before they start talking about what good teaching looks like.<br />
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Shy though he was, he was also fun and funny and silly. Those sometimes get put in two different camps as though you can't be both at the same time. Watch either of the wonderful Rush documentaries- "Beyond the Lighted Stage" or "Time Stand Still"- to see that. Or just listen to "<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nIV2EIVH9o" target="_blank">Limelight</a>" and hear what he has to say about fame from the man himself.<br />
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One last education lesson than I take from Rush and Neil and then I'll let you get back to your life, especially if your life consists of investigating the decades of Rush material I'm jealous you're about to discover for the first time or rediscover or just listen to for the thousandth time.<br />
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My favorite Rush album is <i>Hemispheres</i>. It's the one with a naked guy standing on a brain on the cover. It's also their Big Long Complicated Album. It's got a side-long beast called "Cygnus X-1 Book II" (Cygnus X-1 Book I: The Voyage is on the album <i>Farewell to Kings</i> and clocks in at a mere ten minutes) that's just science fiction and virtuoso playing nirvana. That's not the song that's the lesson though. The song that's the lesson closes the album- a nine and a half minute instrumental called "<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eK1hmDpa8bo" target="_blank">La Villa Strangiato</a>". Here's what I love about that song, and why it inspires me as a teacher, an artist, and a creator- They wrote a song that was too hard for them to play when they wrote it.<br />
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They wrote the song, and then were determined to record it live, as a band, in one straight take. Nine and a half minutes of perfect playing. And they couldn't do it. They spent days trying to get it exactly right. Eventually they had to break it up into smaller chunks and record it that way. BUT that doesn't mean they can't play it all the way through. "La Villa Strangiato" was a staple of the live set. You've never been a music nerd until you've sung passionately along to an <i>instrumental</i> song.<br />
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How inspiring and empowering is that? That these master musicians could overreach themselves and fail. Would write something beyond their own abilities. If Rush can do that I take plan a project that I don't know will work. I can step beyond my technological knowledge to bring my kids closer to a greater learning goal. I have to be willing to go so big that failure is a true reality, learn from it, and then learn to do it anyway later on.<br />
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Neil has a million great quotes, but I want to leave you with him quoting someone else, because it sums up why he means so much to me and so many others and why I just wrote a Rush-length blog post about Neil Peart. He would use this line often. It's from Bob Dylan, taken from a 1978 Rolling Stone interview: "The highest purpose of art is to inspire. What else can you do for anyone but inspire them?"<br />
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Thank you, Neil.<br />
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<i>If you like this post and the other posts on this blog you should know I’ve written three books about teaching- <a href="http://bit.ly/hestheweirdteacher">He’s the Weird Teacher</a>, <a href="http://bit.ly/theteachingtext">THE Teaching Text (You’re Welcome)</a>, and <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Classroom-One-Doug-Robertson/dp/1975739175">A Classroom Of One</a>. I’ve also written one novel- <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Unforgiving-Road-Doug-Robertson/dp/1539932168/ref=pd_sim_14_5?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=1539932168&pd_rd_r=PFBPHZ2HMH0VV26YB83F&pd_rd_w=lYjeO&pd_rd_wg=6hZZD&psc=1&refRID=PFBPHZ2HMH0VV26YB83F">The Unforgiving Road</a>. You should check them out, I’m even better in long form. I’m also on the tweets <a href="https://twitter.com/TheWeirdTeacher">@TheWeirdTeacher</a>. </i>The Weird Teacherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09409036328788408352noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1685637550786185567.post-87168868366543480772020-01-06T22:35:00.002-08:002020-01-06T22:38:54.767-08:00Recess Rules<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-qKiA2dE9qdg/XhQnebYA7KI/AAAAAAAAICI/17DwzeN47mEWUAYqY_83_TuSUaCh2PYZACNcBGAsYHQ/s1600/sign.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="332" data-original-width="500" height="212" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-qKiA2dE9qdg/XhQnebYA7KI/AAAAAAAAICI/17DwzeN47mEWUAYqY_83_TuSUaCh2PYZACNcBGAsYHQ/s320/sign.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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How many rules do students really need at recess?<br />
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Let's leave the classroom aside for this post. In the classroom I feel students need no more than four rules- Be Respectful, Be Safe, Be Responsible, Make Good Choices (provided the kids build that list themselves), and that those four rules can all be boiled down to the simple, easy to remember catch-all- Be Cool. That's The Rule in my room. Do the students know I came up with the idea not because of Fonzie but because of <a href="https://i.pinimg.com/originals/60/4d/9f/604d9f80265f5ebfcac7e8caab26ab2f.jpg" target="_blank">Jules, Honey Bunny, and Ringo</a>? No, and they don't need to until they finally get to that movie and wonder, just for a moment, why "Be cool" sounds so familiar.<br />
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I can only speak for my current school and the ones I've worked at in the past when I say often there are <i>way </i>too many rules at recess. And, as so often happens when you have too many rules, they conflict and don't hold up to scrutiny or questions.<br />
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Here's the most egregious example, and it's from my current school. I have no problem admitting it's from my school because I didn't make it up, my students know I think it's ridiculous (I'll get to that), and I've brought it up a few times.<br />
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At recess, the students at my school are not allowed to play Tag. HOWEVER, they are allowed to play two-hand touch football. </div>
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Imma leave that right there for just a second. I'll let you pick your jaw up from your keyboard or the bathroom floor (ew, come on) or wherever you're sitting and reading this. I'll wait as you go back and read it again. I'll look you dead in the eye and shake my head when you silently ask me if there's a punchline coming. Nope, dear reader. There is not. This, as much as it sounds like a joke, is not one.<br />
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The kids at my school cannot play Tag at recess. This is a school rule. It's been there longer than I have. They can play two-hand touch football. "What's the difference!?!" I hear you ask. Friends, I have seen students ask that very same question. They've asked it honestly, with no trace of Gotcha or disrespect. They've asked it because their teacher, me included but not only, encourages them to question rules that are confusing. This is part of being a good citizen.<br />
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The reason? The reason that I heard today makes as little sense as the rule. "Because there's a ball." That's basically it. The recess person in question went on to try and justify it with "There's lots of things out here that we're worried students could run into." No, this does not make it better nor does it justify No Tag But Yes Football.<br />
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How many rules are there like this out there? How many don't make any sense at all?<br />
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Now, before I start really hammering on those who run recess duty I will make acknowledgements- There's a lot of freaking kids out there at any one time and not very many of them. That can be overwhelming, I'm sure. And they honestly don't want kids to get hurt. Be honest though, this is an excuse that gets used to make their jobs easier. I get it. More rules make your job easier. And we've all heard the story about the one time one kid was playing on the monkey bars unsafely and slipped and fell and broke both arms. We know that happened. But one event does not an unsafe play area make. You can't use one story that happened forever ago as justification for rules that don't actually make sense or keep anyone safer. I mean, this is recess, not the airport. (This is where I rant at you for a solid five minutes about how unbelievably stupid and insulting it is that we still or ever had to take our shoes off at airport security.)<br />
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But it's <i>recess</i>. We're literally preventing running at recess unless the kids are playing one specific game? I'll be honest, I've always been annoyed by this but right now, this moment, as I type this, it's really setting in and getting under my skin. I've not spent an extended period of time rationalizing it, I've just always heard it, been annoyed, and then moved on to more important things. But holy crap the more I think about this one rule the madder I get. They have to play two-hand touch football to play a Tag-like game? <a href="https://metvcdn.metv.com/aK3A4-1500933281-1643-blog-MASH_pottergifs_main.gif" target="_blank">Road apples</a>! I'm going in to my administrator tomorrow morning and having another word about it. And I think it'll go better than the last time because my current admin is a sub, my former one having just, sadly, been <a href="https://hestheweirdteacher.blogspot.com/2019/12/losing-leader.html" target="_blank">promoted</a>.<br />
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Back to the wider topic at hand- Does recess need specific rules or can the general school rules be applied to recess as well and leave it at that? You probably need some game/equipment-specific rules. Tetherball lasts <i>x</i> rounds and then the next person comes in. You can swing on the swings <i>y</i> times if there's a line of kids waiting. Something something handball something.<br />
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I'm inclined to proclaim loudly and overly-broadly that students should be trusted more and given less rules during their free time. They get ten minutes and then another ten or twenty after lunch. Let 'em run. Let 'em get hurt. Let 'em do the learning on their own. Let 'em build their own rules for recess. It works wonders in the classroom. I know it'll be harder with the whole school. Maybe students could elect a safety committee. Kids choose a group of kids who come up with reasonable recess rules as a group, vote on them,, run then by the adults, make adjustments as needed, and Robert is your mom's brother. I like this idea too and I'm running it by a partner in crime tomorrow morning first thing. This is part of the reason I blog about topics like this- I need to think out loud and being in the car <a href="https://hestheweirdteacher.blogspot.com/2019/12/anxiety-and-me.html" target="_blank">isn't really helping me think</a> right now.<br />
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What rules do you have at recess at your school?The Weird Teacherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09409036328788408352noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1685637550786185567.post-9352171203837969982019-12-16T23:01:00.002-08:002019-12-17T06:56:35.033-08:00Anxiety and Me<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Let's get a little personal with mental health, why don't we? This will, of course, tie into teaching, but that's not really the point either.<br />
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For a while now I've been suffering from pretty extreme bouts of anxiety. I didn't always recognize these as such, however. Let's go back- When my first child was born I found out that <a href="http://postpartummen.com/postpartum-depression/" target="_blank">Paternal Postnatal Depression</a> is a thing. I knew that women could experience something like this, and we were on the look out for that. Had no idea it could happen to me too. I'm the Dad, I didn't carry nothing. Nope, knocked me flat, and for a while. I ended up going on medication and doing talk therapy for a while to help me through it. It also made me hesitate about going for Weirdlings Two and Three because I was worried that it would come back. My wife is incredible and we got through it together and it didn't come back with either of the other two.<br />
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Looking back, I've had anxiety in some form or another for as long as I can remember. I always chalked it up to being a control freak. If you, dear reader, and I go for a drive, I will insist on driving. Even if we're friends. Even if I trust you. I'm a bad passenger. Control freak, right? Seems like it. Especially since this feeling never happens to me on my motorcycle. Then I'm <i>really</i> the only person in charge. I can't even hear you if you're riding with me.<br />
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If we're stuck in traffic I'm going to start freaking out, feeling trapped. Because I literally am. I'm trapped in this car in the middle lane surrounded by all these other cars and what if I need to get out I can't no one is moving so I can't move we're just stuck here and why won't anyone move. Driving makes this better, but not all the way because I'm not in control of the situation.<br />
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Airplanes are worse. I hate flying. No, not true. I hate boarding the plane, being stuck in the aisle, getting to my seat, not being able to get up from the time when they button up the big door until we're at cruising altitude. You <i>can't</i> get up at any point during that! You're stuck in your seat no matter what. What if your stomach gets upset (a related problem we'll get to)? Too bad. Stay there and suffer until we tell you you can stand up. And then we're in the air and I'm fine. Until..."Passengers need to return to their seats and prepare for landing." And then it's another twenty minutes/eternity until we're at the gate. The entire time I have my eyes closed and I'm mentally repeating, "I'm ok, I'm alright." over and over. No exaggeration, no joke. I hate it and I'm miserable every time.<br />
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I thought I was just a bad traveler.<br />
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On top of that I've always had stomach issues. Issues that we've mostly fixed with a change in diet, turns out I'm lactose and gluten intolerant. Good to know. That helps but didn't actually fix things because now I've trained my body that when I'm stressed my stomach hurts, but when my stomach hurts it stresses me out. So soon I'm stressed that I'll be in a situation that will stress me out and upset my stomach, which sets my stomach off.<br />
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But recently things have accelerated and gotten worse and worse. Examples, because it's important to me you, dear reader, know what I mean. To be clear, these are the most illustrative examples, certainly not the only ones-<br />
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A while ago a friend of mine and I went to see Nick Cave, one of my most favorite musicians on Earth. Because of a trick of the tickets we ended up in the second row. He was <i>right there</i>. He could see us. We could see him. We were supposed to be in the back, where the cheap seats were. Being that close was incredibly exciting, but also so very stressful. I was completely unable to fully relax and enjoy the show because the back of my mind had this flashing red light the whole time. He was great and I loved it and I still couldn't fully connect.<br />
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I went out on Black Friday, something I never ever do. But my local record store that I love was doing a Black Friday thing and they were going to have a limited number of the new Opeth album and the vinyl reissue of Geddy Lee's solo album "My Favorite Headache." Yes, I could buy these online but I love Jackpot Records and I want to support local business. I got there at nine for a ten o'clock opening because I knew there would be a line and damned if someone else would get my albums. I was fifth in line. Score. I was fine at 9:00. I was fine at 9:15. At about 9:30 I started having to talk myself into staying in line. At 9:45, after waiting forty-five minutes, needing only to wait fifteen more, I was actively pacing and eyeballing my car, which I could see from the line. I was having a detailed conversation with myself about, "I should just go home, I could get these online. It would be fine. I should just get in my car and go." Ten minutes to go, still pacing, it's getting worse. I'm miserable and my heart is pounding and I <i>know</i> all of this is stupid because I'm fifth in line. When they open I'll be right in there. I'm not worried about not getting the album. What am I worried about? I have no idea.<br />
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I've heard people who have panic attacks describe the mental spiral as "you keep thinking of worse and worse scenarios, which keeps escalating your panic." That's not what was happening to me. There was no "worse and worse scenario." There was no thinking involved. I just had to get out of there or I felt like I would be sick. Once again I'm whispering to myself, "I'm ok, I'm alright" over and over. I'm pissed that I want to leave and trying to use that anger to keep myself in line for <i>five stupid minutes more.</i> Finally they open the door. I go right in, find the two albums I wanted in about two minutes, pay, and I'm out of there. I enjoyed exactly none of the experience of being in a record store with a bunch of other music nerds who got up and waited in line to buy vinyl, something I really like.<br />
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This was the last straw. I made an appointment for the doctor. I described all of this to her and kept hedging, "I don't know if it's anxiety or of I'm a control freak or if it's just my stomach or what and I don't know." She stopped me. "Everything you are saying is textbook anxiety. That's exactly what this is."<br />
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Then she asked me a question I had already thought quite a bit about, because I am reflective and I had noticed this trend. She said, "You're a teacher. Does this happen to you at school?"<br />
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"Nope. Never." And it's true. I'm obviously at this point not trying to be a tough guy and impress you. But it doesn't happen in my room. I'm sure it happened at the beginning, but it's been years since I've felt any kind of anxiety in my classroom. I've been stressed, sure. Exhausted. But not like I wanted to crawl out of my skin. Not like I had to escape right at that minute how can I get to my car or at least outside I need to get away. Nope. Doesn't happen to me in my classroom. Doesn't happen to me when I present at conferences. Doesn't happen to me when I keynote. I get nervous before that last one, but that's more like a racehorse in the gate than actual fear.<br />
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Why? I think it's because of the control thing. What do I have to be anxious about in my classroom? This is, more than just about anywhere else, my space. I mean, it's my students' space too, but I am its architect. That has to be the reason I'm basically anxiety-free in my room. Now, if you tell me I have to be trapped in a PD all day I'm gonna have some spikes. But if I'm running it? None. But if, during that PD, you ask me to go out to lunch with you, I'm going to drive. The second I'm out of the classroom it's back.<br />
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Which explains why I hate field trips so much. It's not just that the bus makes me motion sick after all. Maybe it doesn't, but the anxiety does. Either way, field trips suck.<br />
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I'm still trying to process what all this means. I'm doing what I can to get better. The doc recommended me to a talk therapy person and we're trying out medication to see if that will help. Hey, you know what's fun? Teaching the week before Winter break, but adjusting to new anti-anxiety medication at the same time! Now why does my stomach hurt? Is it stress? Side effects? Both? Weee!<br />
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I wonder if what I notice about my anxiety in relation to my classroom rings true for other teachers. I wrote this and shared all of this because it's important that we are real people. I know how I come across, hyper-confident-to-cocky, silly, irreverent. That's all me, but I bet some of it is coping mechanisms too. When I get anxious I either talk a whole lot or cannot talk at all. Some of you have probably met me at a conference and got a weird vibe. This might be why. Though, like I said, I'm mostly ok when I'm presenting. But in the halls of ISTE, surrounded by a billion people? Yeah, I don't like that at all. I spent the evenings of my last ISTE, the last one in San Antonio, in my hotel room watching Star Trek: The Next Generation. Because TNG is great, but also because it was just easier.<br />
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And let's not even get into how I think I've turned my phone into a coping mechanism. I'm sure that's SUPER healthy.<br />
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I don't know how to end this post. I'm tired of not being able to enjoy things like concerts and amusement parks and drives with my family and movies and going to dinner and trips to the record store. I'm tired of waiting for the stress to jump out and making choices that will just let me avoid it if I can. I've become such a homebody because it's just safer and easier. Maybe you can relate. Maybe knowing this about me helps you, dear reader? Hopefully the medication does its job, and if it doesn't hopefully it's not hard to find one that will. Hopefully you're all doing as well as you can out there. We're all in this together.<br />
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<i>If you like this post and the other posts on this blog you should know I’ve written three books about teaching- <a href="http://bit.ly/hestheweirdteacher">He’s the Weird Teacher</a>, <a href="http://bit.ly/theteachingtext">THE Teaching Text (You’re Welcome)</a>, and <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Classroom-One-Doug-Robertson/dp/1975739175">A Classroom Of One</a>. I’ve also written one novel- <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Unforgiving-Road-Doug-Robertson/dp/1539932168/ref=pd_sim_14_5?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=1539932168&pd_rd_r=PFBPHZ2HMH0VV26YB83F&pd_rd_w=lYjeO&pd_rd_wg=6hZZD&psc=1&refRID=PFBPHZ2HMH0VV26YB83F">The Unforgiving Road</a>. You should check them out, I’m even better in long form. I’m also on the tweets <a href="https://twitter.com/TheWeirdTeacher">@TheWeirdTeacher</a>. </i>The Weird Teacherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09409036328788408352noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1685637550786185567.post-22818601071927968602019-12-09T23:09:00.004-08:002019-12-09T23:09:54.454-08:00A Very December Q&A<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I asked and you responded with questions that you asked so I could respond. We've got ourselves a chock-full Q&A tonight so let's get to it, shall we?<br />
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How do you maintain the blue in your hair? What is the meaning of life the universe and everything? Pineapple. Yes or no? Cookies crunchy or soft?</div>
— Jen Faulconbridge (@innejf) <a href="https://twitter.com/innejf/status/1204213864159596546?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 10, 2019</a></blockquote>
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Ok good, we're starting the education Q&A off on the right foot. I use color safe shampoo and conditioner and dye it with professional-grade dye after a really good bleach because my hair is dark and needs to be lightened a whole lot. The meaning of life, the universe, and everything is, as everyone knows, 42. Pineapple is yummy and goodness unless it's on a pizza. Cookies should have firmness to them, more on the crunchy side than the soft side.<br />
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How do you know when to stop killing yourself trying to come up with individual solutions to systemic problems?</div>
— Rebecca | Ex tenebras lux (@edutinker) <a href="https://twitter.com/edutinker/status/1204138243832369152?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 9, 2019</a></blockquote>
I stop when I feel like I've done everything I can at the moment. I think very long game a lot of the time when it comes to bigger problems because, frankly, I've got too much going on in my classroom to do any more than that most of the time. I work inside the system so I fight the fights I can and spend a lot of time teaching my kids to think and question and help bring down inequitable systems as they grow. I am doing the work too, but I can't kill myself fighting the system on a big scale. I'm doing my work well, writing when I can, marching when I can, and speaking for teachers. They want us to throw ourselves on our swords in exhaustion. Gotta outsmart them.<br />
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What advice do you give teachers who just don't think they have anything particularly weird about them?</div>
— Rebecca | Ex tenebras lux (@edutinker) <a href="https://twitter.com/edutinker/status/1204136702543122432?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 9, 2019</a></blockquote>
Redefine "weird" for yourself. Weird doesn't mean standing on desks with puppets and blue hair. Weird doesn't mean doing voices and a ton of making projects. Weird doesn't mean upending all the expected norms in big, loud ways. Weird is just unconventional, it's different. Everyone interesting does something outside the norm.<br />
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However! If you honestly don't feel like you're doing anything weird or different then I suggest starting by looking at what you consume. This is a big soapbox for me but watching Friends and The Big Bang Theory and listening to Coldplay will not invert your thinking. Buy an album that you're not sure you like, but you can't define why, and listen to it until you either like it or know why you don't. Buy something that sounds like noise. Watch a show you'd <i>never</i> watch. I deeply believe that you cannot put out what you're not taking in. What weird things do you consume? Honestly, deeply, strangely, confusing things than no one around you is watching, listening to, or talking about.<br />
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Q3) How do you feel ab Teachers Pay Teachers? Since I have been on Twitter I have seen some MAJOR drama being thrown around regarding TPT. Up until now, it has been suggested to me as a resource for internship and beginning teaching: what says you?</div>
— Morgan Durham (@MrsDurhamteach) <a href="https://twitter.com/MrsDurhamteach/status/1204136048160317440?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 9, 2019</a></blockquote>
Morgan asked a TON of good questions, especially for an education student. I'm going to get to just this one because there's a lot of questions here and the rest are in the thread which you can find by clicking on her tweet.<br />
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I don't like Teachers Pay Teachers. I have investigated this for myself because I need to know why I have visceral reactions to things and I think there are two reasons. First- I started before the internet was a thing we could use for teaching. Every single thing I did in my classroom I built or stole from someone at my school. And I think that made me a better teacher. I had to depend on myself. There was no shortcut, no massive community at my fingertips, no easy way. I grant that this also makes me sound like an Old shaking his fist and grumbling, "You darn youths with your Teachers Paying Teachers and your Facebooks getting ideas without working for it!" But I think the struggle has a lot of value. Because of my second point- Every single thing you buy on TPT has to be changed to fit your classroom. Nothing from there should be used whole cloth with no modifications. They are built to be general but your classroom is not.<br />
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Steal ideas. Here's how I use Pintrest and TPT- I'll google an idea or a subject, find the skeleton of something, close it, and built it myself. Important Note- I like this process and the time it takes, and it takes a lot of time. New teachers do not have the bandwidth I have. But I think the struggle makes my lessons more creative and deeper. You're going to be doing a million things and those lesson plans right there are going to look real good. But they're easy to get addicted to, and there's zero difference between that and just using your curriculum whole cloth and thoughtlessly. Instruction should be flexible. But don't kill yourself.<br />
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I also think teacher should share what we make with other teachers for free. BUT we don't get paid much so I don't want to stand too firmly on that particular hill. Make your money.<br />
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What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow? <br />
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— Chris Burke (@mrburkemath) <a href="https://twitter.com/mrburkemath/status/1204156399401553920?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 9, 2019</a></blockquote>
African or European?<br />
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How do you stay energized as a teacher? What advice would you give to Ts feeling burnout? How do you handle conflict between how you do things & other Ts actions/policies that don't make sense in your view? What is the most valuable thing you've learned teaching?</div>
— Jessica Hunsberger (@MissHunsberger) <a href="https://twitter.com/MissHunsberger/status/1204136505977057280?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 9, 2019</a></blockquote>
Oy, this is a whole lot!<br />
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I stay energized with a lot of coffee. Also I honestly love what I'm doing and I'm very happy where I am. I have as much freedom as I could ask for and I know that my admin (at least for the<a href="https://hestheweirdteacher.blogspot.com/2019/12/losing-leader.html" target="_blank"> next three weeks</a>) has my back. I also work with some other teachers, one in particular, who has my brand of crazy when it comes to projects and Big Ideas and he and I bounce off each other well.<br />
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I don't care if other teachers don't like how/what I'm doing. There's no conflict in that direction because I honestly couldn't care less if someone doesn't like my way. If I don't like their way I need to first evaluate if they're just different than me and I don't like what they're doing personally or professionally. If it comes up and it's a real concern I'll bring it up as tactfully as I'm able. But I do a lot of, "Watch me go, I'll model it my way as I run off doing my cool things with my happy students."<br />
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The most valuable thing I've learning in teaching is either- Have a hobby, have a reason to go home OR we live on singles and doubles and anyone who wants us to be hitting home runs all the time is selling snake oil.<br />
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Have you considered leading a twitter chat? I’d show up for that! <a href="https://t.co/C3JRNMjkAr">pic.twitter.com/C3JRNMjkAr</a></div>
— Deanna (@Hessteacherest) <a href="https://twitter.com/Hessteacherest/status/1204232721683427328?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 10, 2019</a></blockquote>
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I used to! Every Wednesday from 7-8pm PST #WeirdEd happened for over 200 chats. It was so much fun but I eventually ran out of gas because I believe twitter chats should mean something. They should be special. Most are the same mouthwash swishing to the other cheek. Same questions rephrased. Same answers. Right answers rather than a chat to actually talk and exchange ideas. Authors asking questions from their own books and then quoting themselves in their answers to their own questions. "Themed" chats that aren't- "Welcome to Star Wars chat! You have to pass certain tests to become a Jedi. How do you handle tests in your classroom?" <i>That's got nothing to do with Jedi, it's am act</i>!<br />
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How do you assign your wobbly stools versus the regular chairs in your classroom? Do your students squabble over them?</div>
— Mr B 5th Grade Teacher (@MrB5thGradeTea1) <a href="https://twitter.com/MrB5thGradeTea1/status/1204168284762980357?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 9, 2019</a></blockquote>
I don't. This starts right at the beginning of the year- first day. I don't assign seats and I don't assign desks and I don't keep track of who has sat on what when. I have more important things to deal with. This is because Trust is a Number One foundation of my class and if you don't trust your students to find a place to sit and share, you don't trust your students. They know that too. Every morning everyone is expected to trade chairs. You can't sit in the same thing twice. They self-monitor and they appreciate the responsibility. I don't have an issue with it after the first week. They don't squabble over them either. I have a ton of different chairs, there's too many to fight over.<br />
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Don't assign chairs. If your classroom is built on trust you've gotta walk the walk. Students don't have to earn our trust. They should start with it.<br />
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How to implement a semi-successful intervention block 1x/weekly without falling back on prodigy or IXL.</div>
— MrsBorges (@BorgesRobyn) <a href="https://twitter.com/BorgesRobyn/status/1204143299386388482?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 9, 2019</a></blockquote>
Oh my. Ok, so I'm not great at this but I'll share what I do and I'd love more ideas in the comments. My intervention time is M, T, Th, F from 1:00-1:40, right after lunch. Some students get pulled out for various reading groups, the rest, about 20-22, stay with me. I have a Five Station Rotation-<br />
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<ul>
<li>Read To Self- Student read out loud into Flipgrid, and then watch themselves read back and count mistakes.</li>
<li>Vocabulary- I have a bunch of those Word, Sentence, Definition, Picture, Synonym worksheets and students use the week's vocabulary words.</li>
<li>Free Write- Write whatever you want.</li>
<li>Listen to Reading- We use Storyline Online and the kids listen to a story.</li>
<li>iReady Reading- Do iReady.</li>
</ul>
<br />
Each station lasts 20 minutes, so kids get to two a day. It's not perfect, I stole it from the teacher across the hall because she's better at stations than I am, but it seems to be working pretty well so far.<br />
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How do you balance engaging curricula, very diverse needs (some well below grade level) and meeting standards with staying sane? :) I feel like I just don't understand my 5th grade well enough. 6-8 I'm good with. Sigh...</div>
— Mary Ellen Wessels (@Teacher_Wessels) <a href="https://twitter.com/Teacher_Wessels/status/1204147229478604802?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 9, 2019</a></blockquote>
This could be (and I'm sure is) a whole book. So I'm only going to answer in one way with the caveat that it's not The Way and only an option.<br />
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Making stuff. Project-based learning and finding ways to incorporate making into the classroom is a great way to reach everyone. Good making projects mean everyone will create something different, they'll iterate their learning, and they'll work to their level on their own. You need to make reflections and stuff happen, there's no learning until the kids think about it, write about it, generalize it, and talk about it. But find opportunities to make something.<br />
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I'll give an example- We were reading a story in the Journey's book about tree kangaroos two years ago when I taught fifth grade. It was drier than a consultants PD session in the fourth hour. But in part of the story the book said that the researchers caught the tree kangaroos by climbing a tree and scaring the animal out of it, then netting it on the ground. We thought that was terrible, so I challenged my kids to come up with a better way. We designed traps. Students had to justify their design, and in doing so had to read the story because it had all the information about the animal. Your cage will trap the animal's tail. Why won't the animal leap out? How do you get the animal in and out without hurting it? It got detailed and amazing and they learned a ton from it. But you didn't need to read at a 5th grade level to have ideas, build them, or explain them.<br />
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One more, I think. This is starting to run long.<br />
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Which Hogwarts house makes the best teachers? And does the answer change as students promote into middle or high school? Seriously tho, how much does personality equate to success in the classroom (not just popularity with other Ts or admin)?</div>
— Melynda Jones (@MelyndaJones) <a href="https://twitter.com/MelyndaJones/status/1204155590781607936?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 9, 2019</a></blockquote>
McGonagal was a Gryffindor, so that's probably the correct answer since she's easily the best teacher at Hogwarts. Though I bet a Hufflepuff would be good too for certain kinds of students. I worry than a Ravenclaw would get irritated with the kids who didn't catch on quickly enough and , well, Snape and Slughorn were Slytherins and one hosted dinners for his favorite students and the other literally abused a kid for seven years because his mom wouldn't date him.<br />
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I think personality goes a long way, but I also think that's a loaded statement I just made because it sounds then like there's A Personality that kids will like the best and we all know that's simply not true. I'm an extrovert who is loud and funny and unable to be serious for an entire day unless the room has REALLY screwed up. But I have quiet, calm, more serious friends who just have the mischief dancing in their eyes who's students like them just as much or more than mine like me.<br />
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I think the most important personality trait a teacher can have is the willingness to Yes and commit to it. Default to Yes in the case of new ideas. Complain when complaints need to happen, don't be a gross toxic positivity person smiling all the time like there's no war in Ba Sing Se. Push back on bad policy, but not just because it's new or sounds hard. Pick your battles. But default to Trying.<br />
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Ok, there's a ton of questions I didn't get to which you can find in <a href="https://twitter.com/TheWeirdTeacher/status/1204112066501496832" target="_blank">this thread</a>. Thank you to everyone who asked a question. I think we'll do another of these soon. It was fun.<br />
<br />
<i>If you like this post and the other posts on this blog you should know I’ve written three books about teaching- <a href="http://bit.ly/hestheweirdteacher">He’s the Weird Teacher</a>, <a href="http://bit.ly/theteachingtext">THE Teaching Text (You’re Welcome)</a>, and <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Classroom-One-Doug-Robertson/dp/1975739175">A Classroom Of One</a>. I’ve also written one novel- <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Unforgiving-Road-Doug-Robertson/dp/1539932168/ref=pd_sim_14_5?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=1539932168&pd_rd_r=PFBPHZ2HMH0VV26YB83F&pd_rd_w=lYjeO&pd_rd_wg=6hZZD&psc=1&refRID=PFBPHZ2HMH0VV26YB83F">The Unforgiving Road</a>. You should check them out, I’m even better in long form. I’m also on the tweets <a href="https://twitter.com/TheWeirdTeacher">@TheWeirdTeacher</a>.</i><br /><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>
The Weird Teacherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09409036328788408352noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1685637550786185567.post-74471881019053571112019-12-02T23:38:00.000-08:002019-12-02T23:38:31.150-08:00Losing a Leader<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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At the end of this month my principal of the past five years will move on from our school to the district office. This is what happens when there's unnamed upheaval (unnamed in that teachers can tell <i>something more</i> is happening up there but no one up there will be specific with exactly what) in the upper levels of the district, which are causing people to leave, which are causing spots to need to be filled. A spot opened up near the beginning of the school year that my principal would be perfect for, the district asked her to apply for it, and she got it. These things happen and I'm not here to complain or litigate the timing of things, even though taking our principal mid-year is a <i>real</i> annoying choice to say the least. What makes it worse is the job she's getting will be perfect for her and she's going to be extremely good at it, so I can't even complain about that.<br />
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My principal leaving has brought up a whole host of emotions in me. I've already had this conversation with her, so she knows this stuff. But reflecting out loud helps me process, and I never know if admin somewhere else will read this and learn from it. Because there are things an administrator could learn from what I'm about to write.<br />
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My principal for the past five years has been the best boss I've ever worked for. I literally could not have asked for a better administrator. I've worked in a lot of schools and under even more principals and vice principals, and they've ranged from good to middling to downright awful. I know what I'm looking for in a boss and who I'll work well under and who I'll chafe with. You get by in any situation, but I firmly believe that teachers, if able to, don't leave schools. They leave administrators. I know I did. My last VP was a nightmare on two legs.<br />
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My principal hired me the day of my interview. I rolled in straight from teaching session at a three day conference in Northern California. I'm in Gresham, as far north in Oregon as you can get without actually being in Washington. I'd gotten the call with the offer to interview the day before, and it was the last day of the conference. So I finished my last session, jumped on my motorcycle, drove the three hours home, changed, grabbed interview clothes, got in the car (it's a long way to go on a bike after a long day), and hit the road for a four and a half hour drive while my wife found a hotel. I got to town at probably one am, crashed out, and was up at six for an interview at seven. First one of the day. Got there, had to dissect some data (weeee), teach a mock lesson to the panel, and do the interview thing. I felt like I nailed it. Afterward I went to get lunch, more coffee, and get ready to drive home.<br />
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As I was getting my Baja Fresh I got a call. Not from that interview, but from a different school in the same area who I'd had a video interview with a few days before. They wanted to offer me the job. I begged off, telling them I needed to think about it for a few hours and I'd get back to them. As I was finishing by lunch I got another call, this from the school I'd just interviewed at, also offering me the job.<br />
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Holy crap. Two offers in one day? When does this happen? I was still in town too, which meant it was my turn to interview the principals. I went to the video interview school first, met the principal, got a tour of the school, and talked to her for about a half hour. She was very friendly and the school was nice. Then I headed to the school I'd been at that morning and toured the school and chatted with that principal. I asked her all the questions I wanted to know, about technology and teacher freedom and data and creativity. She gave great answers and I was feeling convinced. Then I asked her, very specifically, "How driven by data are you? Will I be tied to a curriculum?" And she said magic words, words that made my mind up right then and there. She said, "Well, we have to use data, that's part of what comes down on us from the state and the district. But I believe that teaching is an art as much as it is a science, so as long as teachers get results I want them to be creative. I think students respond to that." I'm going to put that in big bold text now so you know how important it was to me.<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-size: large;">"I believe that teaching is an art as much as it is a science, so as long as teachers get results I want them to be creative. I think students respond to that."</span></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
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Oh yeah, this is the place for me. I took the job on the spot. It's a risk. Principals say all kinds of things they don't actually mean. But she felt like she meant it. And she pretty immediately proved that she did.<br />
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I have told bits of these stories in the past in this space, but they're important to make my wider point. When I started at my school I became friends with the other guy teacher in fifth grade, a kindred spirit of creativity. It wasn't long before we were talking about making stuff in the classroom and investigating these things called MakerSpaces what what would that be like, how cool would that be? We picked out a room being used for storage, built a wishlist and a plan, and went to her office to pitch her. We fully expected to be shot down. One does not simply walk into your principal's office and ask for five thousand dollars to do something brand new. But you gotta take the swing, right? She listened carefully, asked good questions, and then said yes. Yes! Told us to come to the PTC meeting coming up and pitch them because they'll love it and they'll give us money. Told us there was technology budget we could use. Hooked us up with an amazing parent who got hyper-involved and became the third arm of the team. Did everything we could have asked for and more, all without a shrug or an "I dunno..." or a question that this would be good for kids. The MakerSpace is still there, still being supported, she still believes in its power. If she didn't it would have been converted into something else long ago.<br />
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A few months later we went back to her. Since the MakerSpace is cool, how about this thing called a MakerFaire? Could we do that? It would be a lot of work but we could get one going by the end of the year. She said yes again! She found the money and time. She backed us up in front of the staff. The MakerFaire is still going strong. She's still involved, still helping us, still encouraging the teachers who might not be as enthused as we are.<br />
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This can do, yes let's do it attitude of hers has heavily influenced my own teaching. I am and always have been a jump first, ask permission later kind of human. This does not always sit well with administrators. I know plenty of principals who need the Why and Wherefore first. I know more who look at the schedule not as a playground to work within but as a sacrosanct text to be followed to the minute. I don't work well in those scenarios. My principal never pushed those things. She understands that sometimes reading runs long, especially if we get caught up in the story and are suddenly in the midst of building tree kangaroo traps. She knows that construction is math so even though we're not exactly on where we need to be, the kids are learning what they need to learn. She trusts that if she comes into my room and sees cardboard everywhere and the room looks like a giant mess, the kids are learning. Why should she trust that? Because I tell my students, "If Mrs Cook comes in here and the room looks like this she's going to wonder what on Earth we're learning. She's going to ask me what you're learning. Do you know what I'm going to tell her? Ask the kids!" She comes into my room while we're building and knows not to ask me what's going on. She asks them not what they're <i>doing</i>, but what they're <i>learning</i>. And they know, so she's cool with it.<br />
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Our deal has always been as long as my data doesn't slip, she trusts that what I'm doing works. My data doesn't slip. My kids love coming to school. My discipline is contained. We're good, and she believes that's what learning and teaching is.<br />
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Last year she suggested me for a construction pilot that ended with my kids <a href="https://hestheweirdteacher.blogspot.com/2019/06/where-my-benches-at.html" target="_blank">building benches</a> that now exist around my school. I didn't seek that out. She brought it to me. She trusted me with it. It paid off, we did amazing things. And we're going to do amazing things again this year with a fifth grade class led by my kindred spirit co-conspirator.<br />
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I went to her when I didn't understand a bunch of what she was talking about in a data meeting and said, "I don't understand what you were just talking about in this data meeting" and she took time after school to walk me through it. She didn't say, "Why don't you know this?" or "You ought to figure this out." She was a leader, appreciated me saying I didn't get it, and showed me the way. I've <i>never</i> worked for a principal I've been comfortable saying, "This stuff that you're talking about like we all get it? I'm drowning and don't get it at all" to. That's a crazy thing to say to your boss. Unless your boss is awesome. (I think I wrote about this after it happened but if I did the blog is buried among the however many are in the archives here. You dig, there's a lot of good stuff back there.)<br />
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We had <a href="https://hestheweirdteacher.blogspot.com/2019/02/whats-leadership.html" target="_blank">this conversation</a> about leadership.<br />
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I don't know if everyone knows how good we have it. I feel like teachers have a hard time seeing outside of our bubble sometimes and there's always something to pick at. Real problems need picking, of course, and no one is perfect. But the things we are able to do right now, the freedoms we are afforded, these are more precious and rare than I think some realize.<br />
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I'm incredibly nervous about having a new principal. I feel very safe and supported right now. I can do what I do because she trusts that it's right. We're going to have an interim principal for the remainder of the year and that will be whatever. I dunno. I'm sure it will be fine, but even if it's not it's only a few months. After that, what then? I acknowledge that this statement makes me sound like I think I'm a delicate special snowflake teacher, but my way of teaching is not normal and doesn't often read as normal. Especially if the administrator is a by the book type. We will rub each other the wrong way. What if the next person doesn't get it? Doesn't trust? I'm willing to be flexible, but I'm not willing to not teach how I think is best. I will be unable to fit into a "From right now to right now you're all to be teaching reading from the book" rigid schedule. The district is saying all the right things about what they're looking for in a principal for us, but the truth is no one will replace who I've been working with for five years.<br />
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A good principal makes all the difference. So does a bad one. All I want from a leader is trust and support. I've had that in spades and it has made me a better teacher. It has made our school a great place to work and to learn. What do I want in a new principal? Faith and trust. What do I really want? My principal to not leave.<br />
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<i>If you like this post and the other posts on this blog you should know I’ve written three books about teaching- <a href="http://bit.ly/hestheweirdteacher">He’s the Weird Teacher</a>, <a href="http://bit.ly/theteachingtext">THE Teaching Text (You’re Welcome)</a>, and <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Classroom-One-Doug-Robertson/dp/1975739175">A Classroom Of One</a>. I’ve also written one novel- <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Unforgiving-Road-Doug-Robertson/dp/1539932168/ref=pd_sim_14_5?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=1539932168&pd_rd_r=PFBPHZ2HMH0VV26YB83F&pd_rd_w=lYjeO&pd_rd_wg=6hZZD&psc=1&refRID=PFBPHZ2HMH0VV26YB83F">The Unforgiving Road</a>. You should check them out, I’m even better in long form. I’m also on the tweets <a href="https://twitter.com/TheWeirdTeacher">@TheWeirdTeacher</a>.</i>The Weird Teacherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09409036328788408352noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1685637550786185567.post-82909769165690971882019-11-19T00:00:00.000-08:002019-11-19T00:00:02.420-08:00Musical Chairs of Responsibility<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Xy_O6YBoLTI/XdOYN19ZhcI/AAAAAAAAH-g/59PcORyluWgEoY5_WOJCTU3w9zFVXpzJwCNcBGAsYHQ/s1600/musical%2Bchairs.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1067" data-original-width="1600" height="213" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Xy_O6YBoLTI/XdOYN19ZhcI/AAAAAAAAH-g/59PcORyluWgEoY5_WOJCTU3w9zFVXpzJwCNcBGAsYHQ/s320/musical%2Bchairs.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Musical Chairs...get it?</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
My students want so badly to be responsible kids. They want to take responsibility for their behavior and own their choices. They want to know themselves and be proactive with that knowledge.<br />
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And now they're realizing just how complex all of that is when you try to put it together into a workable whole.<br />
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At class meeting last week a student raised his hand. I threw him our Talking Vader (some classes have a talking stick or some other bauble, I've got a little stuffed Darth Vader). He said, "I feel like I'm tempted to talk too much in the group that I'm in and I think I should be moved."<br />
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Some background before we go on- I do not create seating charts or assign seats unless absolutely necessary. From the first day of school my students choose where in the room they will sit and who they will sit near. This is because our classroom runs on choice and that can't just be lip service. If you say you do student choice, you gotta lean into it and make it a reality. Just because a student chooses a place to sit doesn't mean that's where they will always be, however. They know this, we talk about it a lot. "I'm letting you make this choice, but the most important part of my job is allowing you to be in an environment where you'll learn. Some of your seating choices might not be the best for your learning or the learning of those around you, so I will occasionally have to move you." That's my job as the teacher. Their job is to make a choice that precludes me from having to take any further action. They're nine. So some of them don't. Not at first, at least. This is to be expected and fine, it's part of learning the responsibility of having choices.<br />
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I will make one or two rules when it comes to seating- I do not want groups that are all students who identify the same way, our groups must be mixed. I do this because students in fourth grade still split up into "boys" and "girls" for one reason or another and I don't like it. Nothing in my class is split down gender lines, especially since binary gender lines don't exist. The second rule is anyone who wears glasses needs to choose to be near the front because I need you to be able to see the board even if you forget your glasses. That's it.<br />
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Back to my student who is trying to make the good choice by being reflective and asking to be moved to a group where he won't talk. He's in the front of the room because he's a student who needs that little extra proximity sometimes and because he has already been moved at least once for being distracted by and distracting those around him. Hey, he's nine. It happens. I'm here to help. He asked me for help. "I need to be moved."<br />
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Here's what I did not say- "Ok, how about you and this kid switch. Sweet, problem solved. Moving on." You, dear reader, are a teacher who is on it and I bet you know why I didn't say that. I bet you can even guess what I said instead. Let's see if you're right, shall we?<br />
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I said, "I am glad that you are asking me to do this. It shows strong reflective abilities and a willingness to be responsible. What group could I move you to that has no one you will be tempted to talk to?" You see, dear reader, this problem is not mine. It's the student's. Let us watch as he looks around the room, along with everyone else, and they all realize for the first time that the groups are divided in a very specific way, almost as though by letting them make their own choices, and then making small adjustments, we've engineered a relative balance in the room. Let's watch as he looks at one group and thinks, "I could go...no, he's there." To another, "Oh! Here. Wait no, then I'd be across from..." And so on. Yes, my child. You have friends at each of the other five groups, don't you? Whatcha gonna do?<br />
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He looks back at me with an idea in his eyes and I can say it along with him. He's about to suggest not just a two person switch, but a wholesale realignment of the classroom. He's about to set up a scenario in which I've got to pull up two diagrams, a graph, a map, and a horoscope in a futile attempt to somehow balance the room so no one ends up next to or near anyone else they will talk to. Newp, I think not.<br />
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Finally we get to the meat of the issue. Finally we get to have the conversation that we need to have about this.<br />
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"It is not up to me to keep you from talking. That is impossible. I can help, absolutely. And I will. I move you away from friends that you cannot resist talking to to the detriment of your education. However, there are too many of you to keep you away from <i>anyone</i> you're likely to talk to. I refuse to move you out of groups and into rows just to solve this problem. It won't work, for one, and for two, I despise rows with a fiery passion. And you will too once you think for a moment about how much group work we do, because if you make me put you into rows it won't be a sometimes thing. Instead, this is the point at which you need to choose what kind of a student you will be. We talk about responsibility all the time. We only have four rules in this class- Be Respectful. Be Responsible. Be Safe. Make Good Choices. And we often boil those rules down to the One Big Rule- Be Cool.<br />
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"Responsibility is easy when there's nothing pulling you in any other direction. But that's not the world you live in. You'll always be tempted. I'm tempted. I like the teachers I work with and we have to sit in some <i>long</i> meetings. You think I don't want to talk instead of listen sometimes? Of course I do. But I don't* because that's the mature, responsible choice. It's time for you to start learning that lesson for real."<br />
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We have a good talk about it. We talk about how it's hard and how they will fail. We talk about how I'll still move students who need moving for whatever reason. But it's vital that this is the point that they realize I'm not a superhero, here to swoop in and solve their problems for them. Some of them have already realized that when they asked me how to spell or define a word and I go off on, "If only there was a book...a book with all the words in it. A big red book..." or a similar riff but for Google or the glossary in the back of the book or whatever other academic problem that is not so major they can't solve it for themselves, at least partially.<br />
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Now, if you're near someone who is making you feel unsafe in some way, that's different. I'll help solve that problem right away. That's serious. Temptation to talk is not. I will not move your seat just because you're near someone you think you might talk to. I will be glad that you know you're near someone you might talk to. I expect you to take that information and use it. This lesson in a microcosm for literally everything in our class.<br />
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*mostly. Shut up, you do too.<br />
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<i>If you like this post and the other posts on this blog you should know I’ve written three books about teaching- <a href="http://bit.ly/hestheweirdteacher">He’s the Weird Teacher</a>, <a href="http://bit.ly/theteachingtext">THE Teaching Text (You’re Welcome)</a>, and <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Classroom-One-Doug-Robertson/dp/1975739175">A Classroom Of One</a>. I’ve also written one novel- <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Unforgiving-Road-Doug-Robertson/dp/1539932168/ref=pd_sim_14_5?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=1539932168&pd_rd_r=PFBPHZ2HMH0VV26YB83F&pd_rd_w=lYjeO&pd_rd_wg=6hZZD&psc=1&refRID=PFBPHZ2HMH0VV26YB83F">The Unforgiving Road</a>. You should check them out, I’m even better in long form. I’m also on the tweets <a href="https://twitter.com/TheWeirdTeacher">@TheWeirdTeacher</a>.</i>The Weird Teacherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09409036328788408352noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1685637550786185567.post-21832036029080606932019-11-11T22:56:00.001-08:002019-11-11T22:56:06.013-08:00I Failed...I Think<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://cdn3.collective-evolution.com/assets/uploads/2017/03/ego.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="392" data-original-width="580" height="216" src="https://cdn3.collective-evolution.com/assets/uploads/2017/03/ego.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div>
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I will start this blog post with a caveat and an excuse- It's going to be vague. Or at least the details of the inciting incident will be vague, and I'm doing that on purpose. Sometimes in education the stories we are a part of are <a href="https://hestheweirdteacher.blogspot.com/2016/05/what-we-cant-say.html" target="_blank">not ours to share</a>. This is not one of those. The details of this particular story will be kept vague because I'm not looking to drag the main character out here on the internet. I'll also admit that subtle is not something that I'm known for, so my attempts to make a point while keeping the details of why that point is on my mind might be clumsy.<br />
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This year I started a journey that I've taken a few times in the course of my career. It's a very important journey to me, so much so that I've spent month and months and tens of thousands of words talking about it and sharing my outlook on it. I think it's the best kind of professional development a teacher can undertake because it forces you to reflect openly and honestly on a constant basis. I took on a student teacher.<br />
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I've had many student teachers, and they've ranged from absolutely wonderful to simply very good. To this point I've worked with three university programs. I go into mentor teaching with a positive outlook and a servant mentality, ready to give of myself and my time because growing new teachers is a vital part of a veteran teacher's job in my opinion.<br />
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I am, if I may say so myself, good at being a mentor teacher. This is not my ego talking (though you'll have to trust me on that). My student teachers leave my classroom ready for their own, and many of them have stepped from my classroom straight into their own without having to go through the long process of subbing and applying and applying and applying like many, including myself, had to do at the start of our careers. Part of my identity as a teacher is closely tied to being a good mentor teacher. Yes, I'm a good classroom teacher. My kids love coming to school, they learn a lot and in creative ways. But I'm also good at translating that for another adult in the room who is watching and learning how to do it.<br />
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Teaching is a hard job. Student teaching is an exceptionally hard job, because on top of the expectations of the student's placement there are the expectations of being a college student. It's a lot. But, in my mind, our students should always take priority. Above anything else, a student teacher is responsible for the learning of the however many kids that are in that room with us. So while I'm exceedingly flexible because I understand the difficulty of the learning process, I also feel very strongly about this. I don't think I understood exactly how strongly I feel about the job until this year. I've never been pushed like this before. I've never had to grapple with the emotions that I felt this year in connection to my student teacher, so I spent a lot of time reflecting on them. I needed to understand why I was getting so worked up when I never have before. Now, I run hot a lot of the time, especially when it comes to this job. I'm always Up. But there's a difference between being passionate (buzzword bonus points) and being angry. I was <i>angry</i>. A lot.<br />
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Without going into detail, so you, my dear reader, are going to have to decide how much you trust me and how unreliable of a narrator you think I might be, a lot happened in my classroom and outside of my classroom since the start of the year that made me feel that I was not respected and my students were not respected. There was no isolated incident, there was only a near constant piling on of issues, some big, some small, but most things that on their own could have be handled.<br />
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Handling things, though, is a two-way street. While I'm sure that the other person's story would be different, it always is, my issues were never dealt with or treated with respect. I don't think they were actually heard. There is a level of maturity required in education that was not present, and this lead to a regular series of issues that snowballed at the end into a few Very Big Poor Choices that should never have happened. Feedback was never taken on-board in a meaningful way. Occasionally, and after the fact, the words were said that made it <i>sound</i> like feedback was heard, but actions never reflected this.<br />
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You see, part of being a mentor teacher is you tell me something, I give you feedback, you choose to act on it or not. I expect that you act on it because I'm rarely going to say something that won't work. I am, as I said, good at this. Been doing it for a while. Doesn't mean I know everything, I'm not perfect, but I am good. What a student teacher shouldn't do is turn that feedback back on their mentor teacher.<br />
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Here, I will be specific about one incident because I do want you, reader, to understand what I mean. Right at the end I gave a piece of feedback that went like this. "You are still too sarcastic with the kids. It doesn't work. You sound like a dick sometimes." The context for this is it's a conversation that had taken place previously and it was during a conversation initiated by the student teacher asking the very good question of how to deal with challenging students, one in particular. This is a good question, or would be if the person asking it wanted to hear an answer. So I said, "You're still too sarcastic with the kids." The immediate response, and I mean immediate, there was no moment of reflection, no thought, the immediate response was, "Well so are you."<br />
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I want to be clear- I'm not too big to take feedback from anyone. I've got a sign on my door asking for feedback. However, this wasn't feedback. This was an excuse. It was a retort jumping up to defend a fragile ego. It also wasn't the time to do that because a lot of other things had happened surrounding this moment to make that an even worse choice that it might sound like to you.<br />
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"Well so are you."<br />
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Yes, I am. Because I know my kids and I don't use it as a weapon. Because I've been doing this long enough that I know the difference between gentle pushing with certain kids and using it for control. And maybe that's how I should have responded. But I didn't because I was knocked on my butt by the gall it must have taken to respond like that. "You asked me for feedback, I gave it, and we're not talking about me. We're talking about you. The student teacher." He went on, digging deeper, trying to say I modeled the behavior and he learned it from me.<br />
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This was one of many things. It wouldn't be the first time or the last time I'd be put into the Bad Guy position that day. That day, by the way, was his last day.<br />
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I've never dismissed a student teacher before. This one had been told not to come in at least once previously and warned that is something didn't happened they wouldn't come in another time. This was the last straw. And then later that day he added three more tons of straw on top of it. That recess was a bad scene.<br />
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I'm not here to vent about him though. I needed to use at least one specific example even though I said I'd try to stay vague. I'm here to talk about how I felt leading up to that.<br />
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I felt like I failed. Like the problem was on me. I knew the problems were coming from him, but I thought there was things I wasn't doing. But I also can't do the job for a student teacher. That's not the job of a mentor teacher. I prepare, but they've got to be prepared. And up till now, they have been. This one never was. Not even when given the smallest direction. It was this moment, "Well so are you" when I fully internalized that there was nothing I could have done this year to prepare the person for teaching. Their choices were beyond me.<br />
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I understand ego protecting ego. I get that. I get being defensive. I get making excuses. I get being insecure and compensating in bad ways. But I do not get letting that happen with my kids. My responsibility to them outweighs everything else. You can't make someone mature.<br />
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I think I might have failed at being a mentor teacher. And that hurts. But I'm pretty sure I never had a chance.<br />
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Or maybe I succeeded as a mentor teacher because there are people who are not ready to be teachers, or should never be, and the unpleasant job of a mentor teacher, the part of the job I've never once had to think about before now, is preventing those people from entering their own classroom. My job is not to protect an ego.<br />
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<i>If you like this post and the other posts on this blog you should know I’ve written three books about teaching- <a href="http://bit.ly/hestheweirdteacher">He’s the Weird Teacher</a>, <a href="http://bit.ly/theteachingtext">THE Teaching Text (You’re Welcome)</a>, and <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Classroom-One-Doug-Robertson/dp/1975739175">A Classroom Of One</a>. I’ve also written one novel- <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Unforgiving-Road-Doug-Robertson/dp/1539932168/ref=pd_sim_14_5?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=1539932168&pd_rd_r=PFBPHZ2HMH0VV26YB83F&pd_rd_w=lYjeO&pd_rd_wg=6hZZD&psc=1&refRID=PFBPHZ2HMH0VV26YB83F">The Unforgiving Road</a>. You should check them out, I’m even better in long form. I’m also on the tweets <a href="https://twitter.com/TheWeirdTeacher">@TheWeirdTeacher</a>.<br /></i>The Weird Teacherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09409036328788408352noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1685637550786185567.post-84622070785335981442019-11-04T22:37:00.004-08:002019-11-04T23:33:49.397-08:00The Threat of Vanilla<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 11pt; margin-right: 11pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;">
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It's November. The month of giving thanks. But sometimes in order to give thanks for thinks you have you have to look to the flip side and see what makes you angry. Anger is often conveyed as a bad emotion, something you shouldn't feel or express. That's unhealthy, anger is human and anger is fuel. It burns hot and fast and it's not sustainable, but it works. Anger can focus you if you're mature about it. <br /><br />You know what makes me angry?<br /><br />How many teachers seem to take snake oil salesmen seriously. How many people can continue to be fed the meaningless gruel of "Be positive and ignore the negative", "Just love your kids", "In the 'Real Word'", and the like and eat it up and ask for like an orphan in Dickens. These messages are vanilla at best and dangerous at worst. They perpetuate a system that upholds the status quo while pretending at revolution where none exists. They pander to the safest, easiest impulses of ourselves rather than do any pushing at all because you can't push with cotton candy.<br /><br />There is nothing risky in saying "You know what teachers need to do? Love their kids." We are sold it like it's this revolutionary concept. Holy crap, man! Did you hear what he said? Love the kids! Like love is all you need. He should write a song. It would be a hit. It also puts an incredible amount of pressure on teachers. "You know what's wrong with you? You don't love your kids enough." Screw that, I'm working hard. Frankly, my job is to teach my kids first. I do love my job. I do love working with my kids. But putting "You gotta love your kids" on someone creates deeply unrealistic expectations. <br /><br />Loving the kids is also the language of those actively trying to hurt public education. It plays right into the hands of people who want to continue to pay us an almost living wage with one hand while calling us valued professionals with the other. Every time there's a strike or a walk-out or a protest, LOVE YOUR KIDS is the first place those who want to hurt us attack us. "Look at these teachers. They say they love their students, but if they did would they be walking out?" We're immediately back on our heels having to argue from a place of "I do love my kids! But..." This is a tactic sold to us as pedagogy. You know someone really loves something when they're forced to defend it loudly. Just like you know someone really loves students when they tell you you should be doing it all the time. Especially people who don't have students but love telling you how much you should love yours.<br /><br />It's not a risk. We should be angry that "risk" is reduced to such bland, tasteless vanilla. <br /><br />I'm angry that thought leaders won't be bothered to respond to critical responses to what they say and their fans don't care. We should be scared and angry that those who style themselves as leaders in our community call any questioning of their ideas "bullying" or "trolling" or "rude". We should wonder what they are so scared of. But when I push my mentions are filled with people asking me why I'm so mean instead of wondering why the person who presented the idea in the first place won't support or defend it. My mentions are filled with people telling me to talk to the person I disagree with in private rather than in public. Let us ignore that they're ok with disagreeing with me in public. And I'd prefer that anyway. I have the strength of my convictions, I'm not afraid of being wrong, of being challenged, of standing behind what I say. Question it and let's see if the towers I build stand up under high wind. If they don't that's good, I can build them better next time. <br /><br />A popular thought leader who gets paid a lot of money to spread his ideas and cannot handle being questioned at all ignored my pushing him on something ridiculous he said until he finally bravely said that he would only only talk to me about it I would follow him, DM him my phone number, and then he would call me, and then we could talk about what he had to say. This was his "I'm putting all my cards on the table" move. He was so brave, so unafraid of defending the ideas that he puts into public, that he was willing to defend them only in a situation of his total control and in completely privacy. And when I called him on that too he said he guessed I wasn't the one willing to have a conversation. The conversation I'd been pushing for hours. The conversation he would only have if his specific demands were met.<br /><br />Such brave. So risk. Much positive.<br /><br />I'm angry about what's hailed as leadership and good ideas. There's a dude out there who thinks he's a dynamic professional developer, an author who writes about discipline. A white dude who used the n-word is his book but thinks it's ok because he was trying to make a point. A guy who talks about "mouthy kids" (code word alert) and suggests that instead of being "mad" at the kid (the "mouthy" kid) we should be "sad" for that kid. And people are like, "Yeah! That's the way to deal with it! Pity the child. Like Mr T, except with our students." Why shouldn't I be angry that these are the ideas that gain traction? <br /><br />Books full of quotes Jack Handy would have left on the cutting room floor get published and pushed like their the Next Big Thing even though they're actually the Same Old Thing all over again. Mouthwash swishing from cheek to cheek. We should be angry that this is what passes for leadership, for risk, in some education circles. We should wonder who wants this big bowl of nothing and can't wait to order another.<br /><br />I wonder at the writers who assert that teachers should just use technology better, more effectively, to reduce student stress, or increase engagement, or solve some other ill, while ignoring the lack of technology in schools. Yes, your solution would totally work if A, B, and C were also true. I want to rally against that. Against notions like the rate of change happening inside of classrooms is not keeping pace with the rate of change outside of classrooms. According to who and what, I wonder. Where does this data come from? Is it anecdotal? There's always someone out there willing and ready to talk about how bad education is. There has to be, you can't sell a fix to something if you don't talk about how broken it is first. And there are parts of education that are broken, to be sure. But loving kids, teacher evolution, effort of students and teachers, professionals who push the boundaries and do it while doing everything else we do, that's all happening. <br /><br /><div>
There are so many great education writers out there. So many good authors writing important things. So many people in and out of the classroom who still have a realistic view of education. Who know that platitudes solve exactly zero problems and are the Möbius strip of the education world- you use them, they do nothing, and then you can suggest them again as a solution, round and round ad infinitum. We should celebrate them and every time a nothing sentiment gets thrown around like it's something, we should throw it back. "Sorry, this is too small. Bring it back when it's mature enough to catch and use." <br /><br />I'm angry at being disrespected by those who want me to do better and claim to be positive while doing it. Hiding isn't positive. Creating a bubble, an echo chamber isn't positive. Rushing to defend your favs without wondering if maybe there's a point in the pushback isn't being positive. Using "But he's nice/trying hard" isn't actually an argument in favor of any idea. It's a cult of personality. <br /><br />Why aren't I calling any of these people out specifically? I would like to do that. But I would also rather focus on the idea than the person. I don't think most of these people are bad people, though a few are hacks and thieves and frauds. I do think there's a lot of meaningless-to-dangerous ideas being put forth by good people who are just trying to help. But intention doesn't actually count for anything, result counts. <br /><br /> Please stop calling yourselves thought leaders. No one's thoughts need to be led, and most of your thoughts aren't so original that all of ours are clambering to fall in line.<br /><br />Leaders stand behind their words. Leaders do the work rather than talk about the work. Leaders act in specific ways. Leaders are brave enough to put their chins out in the air. Leaders fail in public, admit it, and move forward stronger and better.<br /><br />We should be angry at those who pretend to be leaders, and we should celebrate those who actually lead.<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
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<i>If you like this post and the other posts on this blog you should know I’ve written three books about teaching- <a href="http://bit.ly/hestheweirdteacher">He’s the Weird Teacher</a>, <a href="http://bit.ly/theteachingtext">THE Teaching Text (You’re Welcome)</a>, and <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Classroom-One-Doug-Robertson/dp/1975739175">A Classroom Of One</a>. I’ve also written one novel- <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Unforgiving-Road-Doug-Robertson/dp/1539932168/ref=pd_sim_14_5?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=1539932168&pd_rd_r=PFBPHZ2HMH0VV26YB83F&pd_rd_w=lYjeO&pd_rd_wg=6hZZD&psc=1&refRID=PFBPHZ2HMH0VV26YB83F">The Unforgiving Road</a>. You should check them out, I’m even better in long form. I’m also on the tweets <a href="https://twitter.com/TheWeirdTeacher">@TheWeirdTeacher</a>.</i></div>
The Weird Teacherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09409036328788408352noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1685637550786185567.post-49465928074985597362019-10-29T00:19:00.001-07:002019-10-29T00:19:38.412-07:00What if You Classroom Was Haunted?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-fvVVIuNEQQk/Xbfn-XKd_xI/AAAAAAAAH8I/Of1Iko0lLKg2XrkQLqYiYJlRCYNHhXaYACNcBGAsYHQ/s1600/IMG_20191029_001727079_2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-fvVVIuNEQQk/Xbfn-XKd_xI/AAAAAAAAH8I/Of1Iko0lLKg2XrkQLqYiYJlRCYNHhXaYACNcBGAsYHQ/s320/IMG_20191029_001727079_2.jpg" width="240" /></a></div>
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I wonder what it would be like if my classroom were haunted.</div>
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Would it be haunted by the ghost of a former teacher? Is that where teachers go after they die? They say your spirit can't move on if you've got unfinished business. This should scare all teachers because, really, who has all their grading done? Put your hand down, you liar. Even if your grading is done you haven't finished planning that next lesson.</div>
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My classroom being haunted by a teacher would explain why I can't find things and why student pencils always go missing. It's either that or my students and I are completely unorganized, and I <i>know</i> that can't possibly be it. So it's probably a ghost. This would explain why my projector sometimes freaks out and switches channels. Ghost teacher, trying to send me a message that I shouldn't be talking any more. Oh sure, Mrs Ghost. When you taught it was all slate boards and chalk so you can't understand why I'm casting a Chromebook to the overhead. You don't even know what those words mean. And you should, Mrs Ghost, because you've been in my room for years so you've heard me explain it. But I guess once you're a ghost you're not really looking to learn or grow anymore. </div>
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If my classroom were haunted by a former teacher it would probably be cleaner though. I don't know a whole lot of teachers who are ok with my style of "organization". Mrs Ghost teacher would probably move stuff around and I'd get back and instead of Haunted Mansion tea parties and precarious book stacks every pencil would be sharpened and in a cup, all my papers would be stacked nicely, and my coffee machine would finally be cleaned. </div>
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Maybe I do need a ghost teacher in my room.</div>
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If it were a ghost student, let's call him Kaspar for legal reasons, that would explain how so many of my students fall out of chairs and off wobble stools. It's not that they're rocking back and forth or playing around. Kaspar is a punk and he's pushing them off and laughing about it. He's also getting into their desks and stealing morning work so they can't find it even though they know they put it right back into their folder just like I said. Kaspar strikes again. </div>
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Kaspar breaks pencils, even as the student is writing with them. And Kaspar, let's call him Kas, messed with my pencil sharpener so it never actually sharpens the pencil, it just eats it. Can ghosts climb inside pencil sharpeners? Sure they can. Kas is ruining pencils. And markers! Holy cow, this is all coming together now. Kas goes around and loosens whiteboard marker caps so the pens dry up. I bet Kas has a bunch of tiny whiteboard marker ghosts following him around everywhere, doing his evil bidding. That's why he didn't cross over. There was one more prank left to pull. </div>
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I'm absolutely going to haunt my classroom after I die. I'm already lame, might as well lean into it in the afterlife. I'll whisper answers into student ears while they're testing, sometimes right, sometimes wrong depending on how I feel that day. I'll whoosh across the teacher's desk, scattering papers everywhere. Me and the ghost custodian will play with the lights and make sure the fire alarm never works during drills until after the administration have called maintenance. In that millisecond flash between when the teacher turns the projector off and the light actually goes out I'll stand (float?) in front of the screen so my afterimage is burned into everyone's subconscious. I'll short out the microwave in the teacher's lounge. </div>
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Unless they leave out dark chocolate M&Ms for me as a peace offering. Leave out the dark chocolate, show some respect to the phantom of the schoolhouse, use the lesson plans I write, and hire the young teacher I secretly trained in the broom closet, and I'll leave you be.</div>
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Or will I? *spooky ghost laugh goes here*</div>
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<i>If you like this post and the other posts on this blog you should know I’ve written three books about teaching- <a href="http://bit.ly/hestheweirdteacher">He’s the Weird Teacher</a>, <a href="http://bit.ly/theteachingtext">THE Teaching Text (You’re Welcome)</a>, and <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Classroom-One-Doug-Robertson/dp/1975739175">A Classroom Of One</a>. I’ve also written one novel- <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Unforgiving-Road-Doug-Robertson/dp/1539932168/ref=pd_sim_14_5?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=1539932168&pd_rd_r=PFBPHZ2HMH0VV26YB83F&pd_rd_w=lYjeO&pd_rd_wg=6hZZD&psc=1&refRID=PFBPHZ2HMH0VV26YB83F">The Unforgiving Road</a>. You should check them out, I’m even better in long form. I’m also on the tweets <a href="https://twitter.com/TheWeirdTeacher">@TheWeirdTeacher</a>.</i>The Weird Teacherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09409036328788408352noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1685637550786185567.post-20879073456606940322019-10-21T23:37:00.003-07:002019-10-22T00:00:48.192-07:00"Does This Make Sense?" Doesn't Make Sense.<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-partner="tweetdeck">
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Forever struggling to remove "Does that make sense?" and its cousins from my teacher vocabulary.</div>
— Doug Robertson (@TheWeirdTeacher) <a href="https://twitter.com/TheWeirdTeacher/status/1186356374025826304?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 21, 2019</a></blockquote>
Yeah...so this got a lot more traction than I expected. But I also never know what tweets will get a reaction and what won't. I just say stuff I'm thinking about, and sometimes it hits a nerve.<br />
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Because it's important (to me, but I actually like the engagement of twitter, not just the engagement numbers*) not to leave a popular tweet like this just floating contextless in the education space, I want to talk about the why of it all, and where I'm coming from. Then we'll look at what some other people in the long long thread had to say.<br />
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"Does this make sense?" is a pretty terrible check-for-understanding question to ask students. How will they answer? They'll say, "Yes." That's actually the whole line from <b>GHOSTBUSTERS</b>. "Ray, if someone asks you if you're a god, or if what they just taught makes sense, you say 'YES!'" It's in the extended edition. Don't google it, just trust me.<br />
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Students will default to Yes for a variety of reasons- They don't want to look like the one kid who doesn't know. They weren't listening and Yes is a safer answer than No. They do actually understand, at least part of it. They know Yes will probably get you to stop talking. They <i>think</i> they understand but actually don't. They are a god. None of these things help me as the teacher do my job at all. The question is too open-ended, too vague. At the least, it requires a few follow-ups questions. But those need to be done one-on-one with a student and can come off as "I'm trying to catch you not being honest" questions.<br />
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The cousins to "Does that make sense?", in case you're curious, are "Any questions?", "Everyone got it?", "Soooo...yeah?", "Can we move on?", and "Eh? *gestures at board* Eh? Right?" Holy cow, there was so much punctuation in that last sentence.<br />
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The problem is, "Does this make sense?" <i>seems</i> like it should be a good question. We assume our kids are honest, and I think they mostly are. We assume they want to learn, and I think they do. We assume they will tell us when they're confused, and...that's a learned skill coupled with everyone's favorite Education Word- relationship-dependent. My students will, for the most part, tell me if they're confused. By now, eight or nine weeks in, we've built a relationship and a trust and hopefully encourages that and has made it clear not understanding is not a bad thing. I've got a few kids I can depend on to ask for help, and a few who, at parent/teacher conferences the end of November, I know I'll be telling their parents "I would really like it is s/he would ask some more questions in class." Because it is on the kids to take their learning into their own hands. If this is a conversation then it should be two-way, but I can't expect them to do it all themselves. And asking bad questions like "Does this make sense?" is not helping.<br />
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We <i>must</i> be more specific with our questioning.<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>"What's something cool you noticed about what we just did?"</li>
<li>"If you had to explain this to my six-year old, what would you say?"</li>
<li>"Can you please give me an example based on what we just learned?"</li>
</ul>
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You know- specific questions that cannot be answered with Yes/No. And those can still have follow-up questions. I love having the kids re-explain what someone else said. You know what's really fun, and I only do it occasionally because it's not a well you can go back to a lot without it running dry? For a Think Time option, rather than Turn And Talk, I tell my kids I've hidden an invisible white mouse in each of their desks. Please open your desk, gently take the mouse out, cup it in your hands, and whisper what you think/know/learned/understood to the mouse, then hold it to your ear and listen for what the mouse says. Then tell me what the mouse says. Friends, the first time I did this was because I had, as I often do, and idea that began "Wouldn't it be funny if..." and then I decided to see what would happen. And they <i>all</i> did it. It was awesome. They ask to explain things to their mice. They name their mice.<br />
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I'm also thinking about this question, and other in-the-moment assessment questions like it because I've got a student teacher, and he's working on these same skills. As with everything I tell him, I have to run it through my personal Teacher Brain first. What am I telling him? Why am I saying it? What's the pedagogical point? Why do I do that? He's trying to find the best way to do comprehension checks too, just like we all are.<br />
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Hence, the <a href="https://twitter.com/TheWeirdTeacher/status/1186356374025826304" target="_blank">tweet</a>. Now that's I've gone on for a while, let's check out some of the responses in the thread, shall we? Learn from each other.<br />
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I try to go with "What questions do you have?"</div>
— Mr. Peck (@MrPeckHistoryWS) <a href="https://twitter.com/MrPeckHistoryWS/status/1186361691342364672?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 21, 2019</a></blockquote>
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How about instead “are there any questions” to “what questions could you ask?” I’m trying to build this habit 🤔</div>
— Ana Sanchez (@EducatorSanchez) <a href="https://twitter.com/EducatorSanchez/status/1186428504956493824?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 21, 2019</a></blockquote>
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I now require 2 questions from the class after a lengthy set of directions. We don’t move on until I get at least 2. Forces them to 🤔 of ?s they or others might have. Most times we end up with more than 2.</div>
— 𝕃𝕒𝕄𝕒𝕣𝕚𝕒𝕄𝕒𝕣𝕥𝕚𝕟𝕖𝕫 (@Lamariamartinez) <a href="https://twitter.com/Lamariamartinez/status/1186478127754530816?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 22, 2019</a></blockquote>
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-conversation="none"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">My current favorites are “What questions do you have for me?” and “Ask me 2 questions about what we just discussed.” but it’s taken a LOT of intentionality and practice.</p>— Kimberly Goff (@KGoffWV) <a href="https://twitter.com/KGoffWV/status/1186433849380802561?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 22, 2019</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
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I’ve tried to substitute, “What questions have I created?” <br />
2 purposes: 1) indicates the *expectation* that questions will occur in active learning, and 2) Keeps the onus on the learning facilitator to ensure progress checks and adjust or clarify, if needed.</div>
— michele ashton (@MicheleADugan) <a href="https://twitter.com/MicheleADugan/status/1186387755187822592?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 21, 2019</a></blockquote>
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I try to teach them other clarifying statements. Can you say that in another way? I’m confused about..I don’t know how to continue, I don’t know how to start, etc. But usually ask do you get it? Then look for questions on faces and ask “How can I help?”</div>
— Alicia Blankenship M.Ed (@MsBteacherlady) <a href="https://twitter.com/MsBteacherlady/status/1186410686081064960?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 21, 2019</a></blockquote>
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I like a lot of the ideas in this. I think that I'll be specifically trying to add the "You must ask me two questions" thing. I also completely agree with Alicia that no matter how good our questioning is, at some point you've still got to know your kids and just be on the look out for the floating question mark over their heads. That's part of being a teacher. We should have to take body language classes in university, like Tim Roth on <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1235099/" target="_blank">Lie To Me</a>, except not to be cops about it. Never to be a cop about it.<br />
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It's also worth scrolling through the responses to the original tweet because so many teachers said something along the lines of, "Oh man, me too." This is a goodness. We're all in this together, we're all struggling and making mistakes, and we're all doing things that we know aren't the best, trying to fix them, but still being honest about it happening. It's not saying "I sucked today", it's specific, detailed reflection that is actionable. You know, just like what we're trying to ask our students.<br />
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Here's one last funny thing about tweets like this- There is no request for help in this tweet. It doesn't ask for advice. But a lot of teachers just can't help themselves. And, to be honest, that can be a little off-putting, no matter how well intentioned the advice is. We need to be able to see the difference between "I have trouble with this, what should I do?" and "I have trouble with this." Those are two very different statements. In this case, after advice continued to roll in, I choose to lean into it. Why fight the tide? Truthfully though, who amongst us actually enjoys unsolicited advice? I say all of this as a guy who has responded to tweets that do not ask for advice with advice and got shot down hard for it. The women (yes, I too succumb to the mansplain and I'm doing everything I can not to, and these experiences getting shot down helped me with that) who shot me down were right to too. They didn't ask, I assumed. So even though this whole thread came out good, and there was a lot of helpful ideas shared, I think it's important to be aware of the difference between a statement and a request. Personally, I try to remember to ask, "Yeah, do you want to know what I do?" before jumping in with "Here's what I'd do." Everyone just wants to help. Not one person in this thread was being a jerk or being rude or being anything but open, honest, and helpful. But even a lifeguard doesn't jump in until the person asks for help or can no longer ask.<br />
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We want our kids to ask us for help before we help them. Then they know they need it, they feel safe enough to ask, and they know what to ask for. We need to help them by asking the right leading questions. When everyone comes together in understanding for understanding, everything is better understood.<br />
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Does all that make sense?<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">*"But Doug, I hear you cry, you barely responded to anyone in the thread. That, dear reader, is because it blew up while I was teaching, then I went straight from school to my bass lesson, then straight home and my wife went to a PTC meeting at our oldest son's school and I had the two boys. Then they went to bed and she came home and we spent some time together and now I'm up in my office writing this. Sixty-two replies (as of this moment) is a whole lot to respond to. I'll try later.</span><br />
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<i>If you like this post and the other posts on this blog you should know I’ve written three books about teaching- <a href="http://bit.ly/hestheweirdteacher">He’s the Weird Teacher</a>, <a href="http://bit.ly/theteachingtext">THE Teaching Text (You’re Welcome)</a>, and <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Classroom-One-Doug-Robertson/dp/1975739175">A Classroom Of One</a>. I’ve also written one novel- <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Unforgiving-Road-Doug-Robertson/dp/1539932168/ref=pd_sim_14_5?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=1539932168&pd_rd_r=PFBPHZ2HMH0VV26YB83F&pd_rd_w=lYjeO&pd_rd_wg=6hZZD&psc=1&refRID=PFBPHZ2HMH0VV26YB83F">The Unforgiving Road</a>. You should check them out, I’m even better in long form. I’m also on the tweets <a href="https://twitter.com/TheWeirdTeacher">@TheWeirdTeacher</a>.</i><br />
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The Weird Teacherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09409036328788408352noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1685637550786185567.post-12589396268566980022019-10-14T22:31:00.002-07:002019-10-14T22:31:40.863-07:00Real Men What? Guest post by Alexander Fishman<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Get it?</td></tr>
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<br /> I decided that I was a feminist some time in high school. Deciding to claim an identity and living it out are by no means the same thing. For a long time, I marked the beginning of my journey as the evening when I argued with my father standing outside our apartment in Brooklyn. The argument ranged and meandered, as conversations between parents and children will do, but landed on me yelling at my father to stop telling me “be a man”. For a long time, I remembered that evening as my taking a stand for something. Lately, what I remember most about that night, is that while we extended our evening walk to have this argument, my mom was upstairs in the apartment doing dishes and laundry, after having cooked us dinner. <br /><br />The distance between who we want to or perceive ourselves to be, and how we actually show up, is often vast. Change happens in the space between the two. But if I am satisfied with my “End White Supremacy” T-Shirt and use it as a way to absolve myself from rooting out racism, then change doesn’t happen at all. <br /><br />Today I was having another argument on Twitter, about being a man, and what it means to be a ‘real man’, and what the words ‘real men’ mean in the classroom. I may have convinced someone to read bell hooks, or maybe not. I definitely talked my way into writing a blog for Doug (<i>Ed. Note- Truth, but I like hosting smart writing here)</i>. I definitely said things that people who aren’t men have already said. Is it still mansplaining when it is done among men? It is.<br /><br />It might also be necessary to have men speak with one another about the harm sexism is doing and the need to examine and dismantle patriarchy. No, it is definitely necessary. But when I speak out in public, like let’s say on Twitter, it’s easy for the conversation to end at the acknowledgement. Hey look, this dude says he is a feminist and has called out a sexist thing. Applause. And after the applause, comes silence. <br /><br /> I have been having difficult conversations with a small group of activists within White People 4 Black Lives, who are working to examine their male privilege. Those conversations have been private, with less applause and more introspection. I am grateful for the leadership of men who’ve been discussing this longer than I have. The more I dig into sexism, the clearer it is that it’s not just in the culture but in me. As much as I don’t like the ‘real men’ hashtag that started this blog, I dislike that part of myself that is satisfied to clap-back and move on. The part of me that values competition and one-up-MAN-ship is what I need to change.<br /><br />So back to the argument on twitter. Yes, it bothers me if there are people who think ‘male educators’ are somehow under privileged in schools. But there is a bigger conversation we could be having. <br /><br />We could talk about the disproportionate amount of attention that men in schools get. How folks of all genders do the work, but men get the admin positions and awards. But should I be leading that conversation, when I’ve gotten those admin positions and those awards?<br /><br />We could talk about how even in classrooms and schools dominated by women, patriarchy is the driving force. People of all genders need to start dismantling patriarchy in our classroom management, in our curriculum, and in our organizational structures. But can I really lead a conversation like that, when I started teaching without any knowledge of intersectionality, and certainly ran my classroom management with a deep ignorance of class, race, and gender? <br /><br />We can talk about how our curriculum continues to put white men in the center, and how clumsy attempts at ‘diversity’ make the ‘hidden figures’ seem the exception that proves the rule. But is the conversation around meaningful inclusion in need of another white voice?<br /><br />We could talk about how patriarchy harms children of all genders, how entitled men who abuse power, start out as little boys who are denied access to their emotions and denied the tools to understand the emotions of others. But none of these are conversations that should be led by me or by any white men for that matter. In fact, those conversations are already taking place. Kimberle Crenshaw described intersectionality in the 1980’s. bell hooks elaborated on the role of feminism for men’s liberation in the 2000’s. Since then educators, often led by educators of color, have been applying these ideas to the classroom. I just need to make room, to listen, to learn, and to support.<br /><br />Meanwhile I have internal work to do. In my teaching career I have been handed amazing opportunities, and I have been constantly elevated, often when there were non-male and non-white educators who could have taken on those roles. I’ve been used to seeing myself as someone who steps up, but now I am learning to consider stepping back and getting out of the way. I used to think, “If I don’t do it, it won’t get done,” where now I am trying out, “who in my community can I support who is already doing this work:?” This is painfully obvious stuff, but white male privilege is a powerful drug, it feeds us lies like perfectionism and “There is only one right way.” I have to admit that my way may not be right, and accept that for some reason that’s super hard for my inflated ego. <br /><br /> The distance between who we want to or perceive ourselves to be, and how we actually show up, is often vast. The twitter persona I have is one of a woke activist teacher who is a great ally. I got a lot of digital high fives for calling out the problematic ‘real men’ language. To be honest, I even started writing down questions we could ask on #WeirdEd. Then I remembered #ClearTheAir and #EduColor and a quick search showed me that I was basically paraphrasing stuff that other teachers had already asked, in some cases three or more years ago. Questions about teaching with an intersectional lens, have been discussed in depth on those chats. And I should have remembered because I even participated in those conversations. Insert facepalm emoji. <br /><br />Me ‘starting’ the conversation about male privilege in the classroom would be like that time Lyft decided they invented buses. So if I am going to contribute to an original #WeirdEd let’s ask this - What patterns are you trying to change in your teaching that are difficult to shake?<br /><br /> My pattern has to do with ego. It is tied to that self righteous teenager, who knew there was something wrong with ‘masculinity’ but didn’t take the time to notice how he was benefiting from it. My pattern is about a young teacher who thought he had to fight the system, but didn’t notice that he was the system. My pattern is about a teacher who was ready to lead the fight for change, but didn’t notice that others were already in the fight. My pattern is about wanting to be the change, without fully realizing that I need to change. Maybe other white men in education experience this, or is it just me?<br /><br />Thanks to <a href="https://www.showingupforracialjustice.org/white-supremacy-culture-characteristics.html">Kenneth Jones and Tema Okun</a> I have a name for my pattern and it’s called ‘white supremacy culture’ Remember that t-shirt I mentioned? Getting the T-shirt was the easy part. Pulling out this thing that has roots in my ego is going to be hard. So that’s me being a real...person.<br /><br /><i>Alexander Fishman can be found on <a href="https://twitter.com/djsardine" target="_blank">twitter</a>. He is a teacher. His work is inspired by students who want to see real change in the places where they live. This is his 13th year in the classroom. He began teaching Regenerate Neighborhoods in Chicago and is currently the Elementary Technology Teacher at Campbell Hall in Los Angeles. </i>The Weird Teacherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09409036328788408352noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1685637550786185567.post-61348116215596149852019-10-07T22:51:00.001-07:002019-10-07T22:51:07.557-07:00Solo Co-Planning<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-z7r5R883YGc/XZwcO-7EIQI/AAAAAAAAH3s/Rt8BscwQYlcUZVzVnEbphysKwiiywWaBQCNcBGAsYHQ/s1600/Alone-Is-My-Happy-Place_800x800_SEPS-1-1000x1000.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="1000" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-z7r5R883YGc/XZwcO-7EIQI/AAAAAAAAH3s/Rt8BscwQYlcUZVzVnEbphysKwiiywWaBQCNcBGAsYHQ/s320/Alone-Is-My-Happy-Place_800x800_SEPS-1-1000x1000.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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When you do a Google image search for "<a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=all+alone&rlz=1C1CHBF_enUS833US837&sxsrf=ACYBGNTA-3SdWfa3_cXgcQ7UOWABuZiXuw:1570511516984&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjtmdeo84vlAhXjHTQIHS-FDZwQ_AUIEigB&biw=1366&bih=657" target="_blank">all alone</a>" the first hundred responses (at least, I didn't keep digging) are all depressing. "<a href="https://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1CHBF_enUS833US837&biw=1366&bih=657&tbm=isch&sxsrf=ACYBGNQeyp47M_Mp5cHZUcrJdvwuZKQjCg%3A1570511520058&sa=1&ei=oBqcXa-QA9Dt-gTGno6ADQ&q=working+alone&oq=working+alone&gs_l=img.3..0l10.90523.93000..93302...0.0..0.124.870.8j2......0....1..gws-wiz-img.......0i7i30j0i7i10i30j0i67.x6fNC0qSCcY&ved=0ahUKEwiv4JKq84vlAhXQtp4KHUaPA9AQ4dUDCAc&uact=5" target="_blank">Working alone</a>" too, including <a href="https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/54484740e4b0426d6479d1d2/1505691494781-MP6ZE7SG1BV0CFUBHAPX/ke17ZwdGBToddI8pDm48kH4pZyHlFZscNRG8AFecS7IUqsxRUqqbr1mOJYKfIPR7LoDQ9mXPOjoJoqy81S2I8N_N4V1vUb5AoIIIbLZhVYxCRW4BPu10St3TBAUQYVKcKtlpmRsEEH1HpTK7CycAqLJOr2cvLVJ-LZ4ccAtudUhc37ch-bUN9Ir5lWRjrac0/image-asset.jpeg" target="_blank">this poor guy</a> who I'm pretty sure is dead. For the header image here I even searched "<a href="https://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1CHBF_enUS833US837&biw=1366&bih=657&tbm=isch&sxsrf=ACYBGNSFo7GfNg4st_jl83v9aPW1uIp9ww%3A1570511614870&sa=1&ei=_hqcXbeZNI7T-gS9mL6ABg&q=working+alone+happily&oq=working+alone+happily&gs_l=img.3...76061.77095..77240...0.0..0.164.718.6j2......0....1..gws-wiz-img.......0j0i67j0i8i30j0i24.J70tBDQAfYg&ved=0ahUKEwi3kK3X84vlAhWOqZ4KHT2MD2AQ4dUDCAc&uact=5" target="_blank">working alone happily</a>". Look at all those people <i>who are not alone at all not even a little</i>. This is some real interesting messaging- If you're alone, you're depressed. It's like all those teacher memes where we're supposed to get the introverted quiet kid to open up because that's like playing the video game on Hard. It completely ignores the joy of working and creating alone that many students (and teachers) feel. It emphasizes The Group. Why don't you want to be part of The Group? What's wrong? You should join The Group. The Group is good.<br />
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I like working alone. I've spent most of my teaching career working alone. Not because I'm anti-social or superior or a jerk no one wants to hang out with, but because even in grade level teams teaching is often a solitary thing.<br />
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My first job was teaching third grade. The other third grade teacher was also a first year teacher. So we planned together because it's harder to drown alone. Then I moved to Hawaii. Hawaii is amazing and they really do mean all that ohana stuff that makes it into the tourist material. Locals are the coolest people and I worked with a really big, really cool team my first year there. I got a lot of help, I was a second year teacher, after all. But the next year I worked with the meanest, worst women I've ever had to be around. I stopped eating lunch with them by the third week of school, I avoided them at all costs unless we were forced to work together. After that year I bounced around from third to fourth for a bit, all great teams, but as I started to develop my own teaching voice and style and beliefs I drifted away from the group planning. This is nothing against those other teams I worked with in Hawaii, they were wonderful (except the sixth grade team, who were the meanest women on Earth, like I said). But the more established teachers had their Stuff and I was still building my Stuff and deciding that I would throw away a lot of my Stuff every year to make way for new Stuff. I'd always been different my whole life, and I was finally confident enough in my teaching for that aspect of my personality to come through.<br />
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So I planned with others as far as we all had to, but I was on my own out in my little portable too. This only got stronger as I moved back to the mainland and brought my growing sense of Weird Teacher-ness with me. Again, great team, great people, didn't really plan together, didn't really do the same stuff through the team.<br />
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It wasn't until I got to the school I'm at now where that started to swing back the other way, where I found a kindred spirit in Making. But he was also a loner as far as it was. So we'd bounce ideas off each other and then go to our rooms and create those ideas in our own students' image. Co-planning, but not at the same time. A happy balance. We do us, but I get to do me more. Perfect.<br />
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Cut to this year. My team of myself and two other teachers is wonderful. Really and truly fantastic. We get along better than I've gotten along with any other team, bar none. Planning takes place between cracking each other up. And we're very different teachers. One is a second year teacher, much more confident in himself this year, ready to take on new challenges, and one is a veteran teacher who is way more Type A than either of us, but willing to put up with our nonsense as long as she can see the whole and how it connects to the standards. A strong balance.<br />
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And I'm struggling with part of it. Not in a bad way, mind. I don't want this to come off like a complaint. But I <i>like</i> planning alone. That's the process I've built over fifteen years. So when we're having a planning session as a team and someone says, "Ok, but how can we make this more project-based learning?" I feel like I should have an answer. I'm a PBL guy. I do trainings and whatnot on it. My kids build stuff all the time. I should be able to hit them with ideas and we hash them out together and Boom, awesome happens.<br />
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Except, ideas don't really come to me like that. Ideas come to me when I'm staring at my computer, heavy metal blasting from the tiny speakers, spacing out, turning the most recent Journeys story or math lesson or whatever over and over in my head, talking to myself, waiting for something to come. Then a little light shows up, so I follow it, and eventually it becomes a Thing. But even then, most of the time I don't know if it's a Good Thing or a Bad Thing yet. It's just a Thing. The quality of the Thing won't become clear until I start saying it out loud at kids, or writing it out. And even then chances are high the Thing will change again once I'm actually working it with my students.<br />
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That's my process. It's slow and messy (unless the idea comes fast and fully formed) and it often looks like <i>nothing</i> until it suddenly looks like something. And that's really freaking hard to explain to a grade level team on Thursday afternoon trying to plan for the next week. "I dunno man. I gotta, like, talk to myself for a while." Even then, I know that when I try to explain it that first time it still looks odd. That's not because <a href="http://bit.ly/hestheweirdteacher" target="_blank">I'm The Weird Teacher</a> and I've gotta stay On Brand. It's because that's how I see things. Last year I saw a spiderweb that became a metaphor for Westward Expansion that I got really excited about and didn't fully understand until my kids finished making it. Things always get bigger than they are initially. Or get too big and they have to be pared back.<br />
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None of this is a problem when I'm planning alone, or with a student teacher. I get to go on that little journey all by my lonesome, following paths and rabbit trails, pulling strings, standing in the center of my room, hands on hips, then laying down in the center of the room, then looking intently at a tabletop for a minute (ten minutes?), then playing air guitar when Slayer comes on, then finding it.<br />
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Michelangelo said that sculpture was not creating a shape out of stone, the sculpture was already in the stone and he had only to free it by removing the excess stone around it. (This is probably apocryphal but I love the metaphor of it so google it and correct me in the comments or twitter thread if you must.) The project, the plan, the idea is there, I've just gotta have faith and get to it.<br />
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That does not really work with two (or three if my student teacher is there) people sitting and waiting for you to be a part of the meeting. I'm having to change how I create and think. This is not a bad thing, evolution is good, teamwork is good, they make my ideas better just like I make their ideas better. But at the same time I like working alone. I like being king of my island of misfit ideas and wandering through it as I wish. I'm happy alone in my classroom, working out problems. I'm also happy in a small meeting, laughing and joking and hashing things out together.<br />
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For one last example of Doug Likes To Work Alone And Pretends It's Collaborative- today we had a half day training on co-teaching because of the push-in model we're doing with our SPED and ELL teachers. Who are both excellent teachers and I like working with them a lot. But as the trainer lady was explaining one of the co-teaching methods where the two teachers play against each other and focus on different things while working the same topic, all I could think was, "Hey! I do that with my puppets! I've been co-teaching with Courson. I do like this." So, in other words, my favorite kind of co-teaching is when I'm teaching alongside myself. Yeah, nice moment of self-reflection there, Robertson.<br />
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It's a good problem to have. It is still something of a problem though, and I'll have to keep an eye on it as the year goes on to see how I grow into it. I like problems.<br />
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<i>If you like this post and the other posts on this blog you should know I’ve written three books about teaching- <a href="http://bit.ly/hestheweirdteacher">He’s the Weird Teacher</a>, <a href="http://bit.ly/theteachingtext">THE Teaching Text (You’re Welcome)</a>, and <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Classroom-One-Doug-Robertson/dp/1975739175">A Classroom Of One</a>. I’ve also written one novel- <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Unforgiving-Road-Doug-Robertson/dp/1539932168/ref=pd_sim_14_5?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=1539932168&pd_rd_r=PFBPHZ2HMH0VV26YB83F&pd_rd_w=lYjeO&pd_rd_wg=6hZZD&psc=1&refRID=PFBPHZ2HMH0VV26YB83F">The Unforgiving Road</a>. You should check them out, I’m even better in long form. I’m also on the tweets <a href="https://twitter.com/TheWeirdTeacher">@TheWeirdTeacher</a>.</i>The Weird Teacherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09409036328788408352noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1685637550786185567.post-4125316191605382312019-09-30T22:45:00.001-07:002019-09-30T22:45:52.564-07:00Students vs Tree<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-WDuNiNYCTZQ/XZLfwWucLJI/AAAAAAAAH28/xhFgxeWjppIIHx-BTR1mOGeFN0B2oXJ9QCNcBGAsYHQ/s1600/beo1125-s.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="678" data-original-width="1024" height="211" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-WDuNiNYCTZQ/XZLfwWucLJI/AAAAAAAAH28/xhFgxeWjppIIHx-BTR1mOGeFN0B2oXJ9QCNcBGAsYHQ/s320/beo1125-s.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">from <a href="https://bjornsphoto.wordpress.com/2012/10/07/fall-forrest/">https://bjornsphoto.wordpress.com/2012/10/07/fall-forrest/</a></td></tr>
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"Imagine you are running through a forest as fast as you can. Because you're so focused on running as fast as you can you've got your head down and you you're charging straight ahead, arms and legs pumping. Suddenly BAM! You run headfirst into a tree. It staggers you, knocks you down. You get back up, shake your head, take a step back, and resume running at full speed. BAM! Right into the same tree. Over and over you repeat this. BAM! Get up. Run forward. BAM! Are you ever going to knock that tree over?"<br />
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I wait and my students all shout through their laughter, "No!"<br />
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I wait, milking it, because now they're with me and waiting to find out what the point is.<br />
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"No! Of course not. What should you do?"<br />
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"Go around the tree?"<br />
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"Go around the tree!" I shout. "Look up, take a step to the side, and go. Around. The. Tree. You're never taking that tree down with brute force. You have to be smarter than the tree."<br />
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They laugh again here. "Smarter than a tree" is a laugh line. Trust me. I wait for the laughter to die down again. Then wait a moment longer.<br />
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Because drama.<br />
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"So...why are you all getting stuck on number three here? You've got six more problems after it that you need to get to. You don't know how to do number three YET (you gotta hit 'em with the YET, growth mindset and all), and you're going to let that tree stop you in your tracks? Be smarter than the problems. Look up, step around. We'll come back to it later." This, by the way, is where the metaphor could fall apart, because metaphors always fall apart. They're good for an example, a quick way to remember something, but they're nothing to build an entire style on. However, you can duct tape the metaphor together if you really want to and extend it to, "So the next time you're running through this particular forest (math or whatever), and you come to this tree, you'll know how to get by it without bashing your head in."<br />
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If you come into my classroom you will hear a student explain why they skipped a problem as a "tree". It's shorthand we have. They ran into the tree, couldn't get through it, so they went around it instead. They'll come back to the tree after the run (the assignment, you see) is over and take a closer look at it and try to figure out what it was about it that stopped them. But only after everything else is done. This is a life skill and a test taking skill and a common sense skill all rolled into one, if only I take the teachable moment to call it out. There are few problems that should stop you dead in your tracks completely.<br />
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We all know that students love to find ways to delay work. Teachers do it too. I will happily get into the weeds of planning with my team to kill five or ten minutes before moving forward. Students will use, "Well I don't know how to do number three" as an excuse for days. "I can't do it, so I have to sit on it." No. Look up, step around the tree, move on with your learning/life, and come back to it when you've got everything else cleaned up. Think of things in your life that you haven't done because there was one piece of it that you weren't clear on. Was there a way to step around that tree?<br />
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Sometimes there's not, by the way. It's a metaphor, it's not a Truth. You can't apply it to everything like a magic spell. There are plenty of times when you need to figure that tree out right then and there before you can move forward. But often even in there you can find pieces that can be stepped around. Prioritized. Seeing the Big Picture even inside the smaller picture.<br />
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I need my kids to see the trees they can't get by, it shows a level of metacognition and reflection that will make them better learners. It's ok to not get it. It ok to say you don't get it. As long as you ask for help or go back to it when you don't have quite so much pressing on you and can take the time to dissect it better.<br />
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This should never be read as an excuse to give up on something hard. Yes, I tell them about running with their heads up so they can see the trees. Yes I tell them to step around trees when they need to. But I also tell them a story the <a href="https://tardis.fandom.com/wiki/Twelfth_Doctor" target="_blank">Twelfth Doctor</a> told us in his best episode- "Heaven Sent". I'm not going to spoil the context of the story (which is <i>perfect</i>) because it would be a major spoiler for the episode.<br />
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<a href="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CVAevEhUsAAjb_4.png" target="_blank"><i>"There’s this emperor, and he asks the shepherd’s boy how many seconds in eternity. And the shepherd’s boy says, ‘There’s this mountain of pure diamond. It takes an hour to climb it and an hour to go around it, and every hundred years a little bird comes and sharpens its beak on the diamond mountain. And when the entire mountain is chiseled away, the first second of eternity will have passed.’ You may think that’s a hell of a long time. Personally, I think that’s a hell of a bird."</i></a></div>
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Personally, I think that's a hell of a bird. Because time and hard work can accomplish anything. It's not always fun. It's not always easy. It's not always fast. But it still gets done.</div>
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Sometimes my students can be smarter than a tree. Sometimes they need to be a hell of a bird.</div>
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-wtkslF5nhVU/XZLnds-LayI/AAAAAAAAH3I/Cu7de7iqVGcPYRWYBPNiOeYHm8cw_96DQCNcBGAsYHQ/s1600/bird.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="900" data-original-width="1600" height="180" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-wtkslF5nhVU/XZLnds-LayI/AAAAAAAAH3I/Cu7de7iqVGcPYRWYBPNiOeYHm8cw_96DQCNcBGAsYHQ/s320/bird.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<i>If you like this post and the other posts on this blog you should know I’ve written three books about teaching- <a href="http://bit.ly/hestheweirdteacher">He’s the Weird Teacher</a>, <a href="http://bit.ly/theteachingtext">THE Teaching Text (You’re Welcome)</a>, and <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Classroom-One-Doug-Robertson/dp/1975739175">A Classroom Of One</a>. I’ve also written one novel- <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Unforgiving-Road-Doug-Robertson/dp/1539932168/ref=pd_sim_14_5?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=1539932168&pd_rd_r=PFBPHZ2HMH0VV26YB83F&pd_rd_w=lYjeO&pd_rd_wg=6hZZD&psc=1&refRID=PFBPHZ2HMH0VV26YB83F">The Unforgiving Road</a>. You should check them out, I’m even better in long form. I’m also on the tweets <a href="https://twitter.com/TheWeirdTeacher">@TheWeirdTeacher</a>.</i>The Weird Teacherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09409036328788408352noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1685637550786185567.post-51649251975098572062019-09-23T22:26:00.000-07:002019-09-23T22:46:45.494-07:00Fearing Flash<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-hnZ5Bskp0Ak/XYmiOd6BGWI/AAAAAAAAH1g/dC0G6SIyZnY_EJqJv3SMSpX-2N_avy3gACNcBGAsYHQ/s1600/kiss%2Blive.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="331" data-original-width="500" height="211" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-hnZ5Bskp0Ak/XYmiOd6BGWI/AAAAAAAAH1g/dC0G6SIyZnY_EJqJv3SMSpX-2N_avy3gACNcBGAsYHQ/s320/kiss%2Blive.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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We're about to get real self-reflective up in here. Buckle up, grab a mirror.<br />
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Last Wednesday I got to watch a teacher I've worked with for a few years teach. Somehow in all the years we've worked together and all the things we've done together I've never gotten to watch her actually doing her job in front of students. I wasn't there to observe her. We were supposed to get a bunch of kids together, then split them in half and I take half to my room and she keeps half in her room and we both teach basic multiplication skills. But there weren't that many kids so we quickly agreed to keep them all in her room and divide the work in there. Easier, quicker.<br />
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Then she took over the lesson. And within five minutes I was sitting at a table in her room taking notes. It just kinda happened. I didn't abandon her and she didn't leave me behind. It was just immediately obvious that she did not need me. At all. Which didn't hurt my ego, I didn't think she would need me. But the kids didn't need me either. They were 100% engaged with her. Me trying to interject myself into the lesson would have served only to distract them.<br />
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I am a great believer in a variety of teaching styles. My way is not your way nor should it be. It's one of the things I constantly preach at my <a href="http://bit.ly/aclassroomofone" target="_blank">student teachers</a>. "Don't try to teach like me. Teach like you." Sure, part of that for them is copying me but that's how you learn your voice when you're new. You try on other voices until you find one that fits. Just like my teaching style is not best for all students, and it's on me to adapt myself to them rather than on them to come to me. I'm the one getting paid for this, after all. I can't teach like anything but me and they can't learn like anything but them. We meet in the middle, I hope.<br />
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Here's the thing about my style- It's real big and loud. There's not much I can do about that. I like puppets and playing music and standing on things and shouting and dramatically draping myself across desks and Using The Space. It's a lot. Which means when you watch me teach and I'm on my game it really looks like I'm doing something. I think I am too. The kids are engaged. They're laughing and on task and we're getting our learning on. We're doing The Work.<br />
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But are we doing it enough?<br />
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This teacher that I watched was just as engaging, just as interesting, the kids were just as engrossed, and she was a sliver of a fraction as Big And Dramatic as I was. In fact, the kids might have learned even more from her than they would have learned from me had we split the class like we'd originally planned. She's real good. I am stealing things from her. And I'm worried that my "way" is getting in the way.<br />
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Which is good, right? I should be reflective about my practice. I should constantly be thinking about what I'm doing to keep the learning front and center and making every other thing that happens in the room about the learning. I'm not the most organized person and doing stations frankly freaks me out because that's a whole lot of planning and organizing and balls in the air at once all the time. I do them, but I always steal those ideas and plans from other teachers because they think those things through much better than I do. (Than I do now? Growth Mindset says I should add "yet" to that statement and be striving for better self-made stations. But play to your strengths and get help with your weaknesses, right? Or be happy with your strengths and work to improve your weaknesses? What if I just don't like planning stations and would rather take good ideas and apply my energy in other places? Am I self justifying not being more organized? Gah.)<br />
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I think about this a lot when it comes to reflecting about my practice. I'm good at the Show. And I truly believe that my Show contains all the vitamins and minerals kids need to grow. But I've also had conversations with teacher who, when I explain all the thought and intention that goes into some of my big, flashy projects, say, "Oh! I thought you were building that stuff because it was fun." And it is, but there's more to that. I'm good at this.<br />
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I know where my weaknesses are. I still don't use data to its fullest potential, and I constantly struggle with the "it's just numbers" vs "yeah, but we know some of these numbers actually do have value" push and pull. I'm getting better, thanks in no small part to an incredibly patient and helpful principal. I'm getting much better at teaching math creatively thanks to a training last year, intentional session choices at conferences, and stealing from friends who are better than me.<br />
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Does being flashy distract from my lessons? Does it let me get away with less pedagogically-sound methods because they look cool and there's so much going on? The kids won't hold me accountable if they're enjoying school, we're too busy laughing to notice we missed another benchmark. Not that they don't want to learn, but it's my job to help them and guide them. I think it would slip through if I let it. If I didn't pay attention and care about objectives and layers and pushing my lessons and my kids to go as deep as I could. Anyone can look good in an observation, and anyone savvy enough to graduate college can write goals that are attainable. This scares me. I don't want to be The Fun Teacher. I want to be The Surprisingly Challenging But In a Good Way That Made Me Love School While Also Finding Learning In Unexpected Places Teacher. (I probably should have made WEIRD into an acronym right then to make my point, but that would have been gross for all of us.)<br />
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A corollary to all of this is I worry that on education social media I'm seen often as the funny teacher guy who makes jokes and throws things at the self-important, rather than as someone who does those things but is first and foremost a real good teacher with real good ideas and lessons to steal, modify, push back on, and talk about, and often the blogs (and books) I write that are more pedagogically-focused get passed over because of that. My most popular blog is still the one I wrote making fun of people who got super worked up and grumpy about fidget spinners. It's a great post and I'm proud of it, but I write a lot about the teaching I do in my room too.<br />
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I don't need to teach like the other teacher and she doesn't need to teach like me. I'm not better than her and she's not better than me. Teaching isn't a competition and comparing yourself like that, even in your fifteenth year, isn't healthy. I honestly believe that asking myself these questions, questions like, "Am I doing what's best for the kids in this lesson?", "Does this type of teaching work?", "What holes am I letting through?", and "Where are my weaknesses?" keeps me strong and keeps me growing. I've got a student teacher this year and it's important for him to see me reflecting like that even while he's looking to me for guidance in How To Be A Good Teacher. Because honestly asking yourself, "Am I a Good Teacher? Why and What Am I Doing About It?" is part of that.<br />
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<i>If you like this post and the other posts on this blog you should know I’ve written three books about teaching- <a href="http://bit.ly/hestheweirdteacher">He’s the Weird Teacher</a>, <a href="http://bit.ly/theteachingtext">THE Teaching Text (You’re Welcome)</a>, and <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Classroom-One-Doug-Robertson/dp/1975739175">A Classroom Of One</a>. I’ve also written one novel- <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Unforgiving-Road-Doug-Robertson/dp/1539932168/ref=pd_sim_14_5?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=1539932168&pd_rd_r=PFBPHZ2HMH0VV26YB83F&pd_rd_w=lYjeO&pd_rd_wg=6hZZD&psc=1&refRID=PFBPHZ2HMH0VV26YB83F">The Unforgiving Road</a>. You should check them out, I’m even better in long form. I’m also on the tweets <a href="https://twitter.com/TheWeirdTeacher">@TheWeirdTeacher</a>.</i>The Weird Teacherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09409036328788408352noreply@blogger.com0