Flipping Might Help Save My Classroom

Pictured- Some of my students

I've been having trouble talking to my kids for any length of time. The second week of school has just ended and already I feel like I've had That Talk a dozen times. You know the Talk about how they're fifth graders and I promise I'm talking as little as humanly possible but I also need all of them to understand expectations and instructions. The one where you're trying really hard not to sound frustrated the first few times you give it, and then maybe you try it with an edge in your voice to see if that helps the few kids who aren't getting it. The one where sometimes you enumerate the things you really don't want to do to "help" them be quieter like rows or assigned seating? Yeah, I feel like I've given that talk a lot already. And I'm not really used to that.

Let's get the extenuating circumstances/excuses out of the way- I have 36 fifth graders this year. Yup, to prove that was not a typo I will write it again in word form- thirty-six fifth graders. That is, as the kids say, a lot. It's at least five kids past "a lot" to be honest. That said, I'm not trying to complain about the number. It's only been two weeks and I already like all my kids, even those kids who I know will be the ones to push me to be a better teacher. I wouldn't trade any away. And the other two fifth grade teachers at my school are in the same boat. One of them was a fourth grade teacher last year, so his boat has been an ark for a while now. I was dealt a hand of thirty-six this year, so that's the hand I'm going to play. 

Still, that's a ton of kids. And it creates challenges I can't ignore. I can't use the challenges as excuses not to get my job done, but it's a factor that plays into my planning much more than it used to. And I have a chatty thirty-six. I like chatty classes. I want my kids to talk. It's so much better than a bunch of silent types. (Of course, I naturally have silent types in my room too and they're trying harder than ever to melt into the background, which is easier because the background is full of kids.)

I also have a student teacher this year. This is not a complaint in any way. In the first place, I begged my principal to find me a program in need of a mentor teacher because, as I say in my first book, having student teachers is the most valuable learning experience I've ever had as a teacher. And in the second place, she freaking ROCKS. Inviting someone into your classroom is a coin flip (or a crap shoot) and I scored huge. Her name is Veronica Miller and she's a high-energy, high-positivity nerd custom built for me. If you click on the link on her name you'll see her twitter handle is Veronica 3 of 5. Which lead to me saying, "Wait, like 7 of 9 from-" and we both finish, "-Star Trek Voyager oh my god you nerd!" She's also jumping at the chance to teach as much as possible. I'm sure I'll be writing about our experiences and what I'm learning from her quite a bit. 

But having a student teacher also presents certain challenges. I've already heard, "At least you have kind of a co-teacher in the room with you." Which, while true, isn't exactly what her job is in my room. I mean it is, but I didn't ask for her to lighten my load. 

All that said, Veronica and I have a chatty bunch of kids this year. A happy, positive, willing to learn and try, chatty bunch of kids. And they are having a hard time settling down for long enough to listen to a full set of instructions. Or even chunked instructions. Trust me, I know the tricks. I got a bag and I've been reaching into it. But they aren't working like they should. Again, I'm pretty sure the class size is diluting some of their effectiveness. So, rather than complain, we went looking for solutions.

Sophie

Veronica noticed that when I use Sophie or Courson, my two monster puppets, to teach the students are riveted. This was not a surprise to me. Pretty much everyone, including my own children, likes Courson and Sophie more than they like me. But I also know that the puppets aren't a cure-all. They're great and they work like gangbusters, but I can't spend the whole year speaking through them for a whole wide range of reasons I'm sure you can put together yourself. 

Courson

So we had ourselves a challenge. How can we take advantage of the students' love of the monsters, while not burning them out? And then I thought about a lesson I was planning on running again this year which had worked great last year. The first story in our reading text (which for the most part is full of decent-to-good stories) is called A Package For Mrs Jewls. It's a chapter from the wonderful Sideways Stories From Wayside School by Louis Sachar. In the story (SPOILER ALERT) Louis, the yard teacher, carries a very heavy box up to Mrs. Jewls' class on the 30th story, only to have her open it, see it's a new computer, and toss that computer out the window. "Thank you, Louis. We were learning about gravity and the children learned about it much faster with a computer than with the pencils and paper we have been throwing out the window," Mrs Jewls says. The story is actually a fun commentary on edtech in general. But the punchline is scientifically incorrect and much like a Balrog, that shall not pass.

So I created this YouTube video

I gave out Chromebooks and iPads, gave the kids the bit.ly (if you don't use bit.ly you must install the Chrome extension and make your life better), and set them to work. It worked wonderfully. The kids got the assignment, they could watch it as many times as they needed to understand, and they were working in groups. Ready, GO!

I realized this just might be what Veronica and I needed with the more instruction-heavy lessons on our plate this year. Especially since, thanks to Donors Choose and wonderful human beings, I just added three more Chromebooks to my class set, putting me at thirteen. That's 1:3 for those of you keeping score at home. Not ideal, but a better ratio than most. Especially if we're just watching videos.

We experimented with a quick video that very day (that day being Friday). The kids went to PE first thing in the morning so we used our prep to shoot a quick math lesson/game involving place value. Veronica brought the game to me, together we massaged it, she created a worksheet-like substance for it, and we were ready. Making the video was as easy as shooting it on my phone, uploading it to my class YouTube channel*, making a few minor edits using YouTube's editing software**, and linking it to our class website along with the questions Veronica wrote on a Google Doc we set to View Only. This is why I have an Assignments page on our class website.

The kids came back from PE, did some learning, went to recess (while we double checked all the links), Veronica reviewed place value periods in two minutes (using my classroom timer to keep her honest), I told them they were going to work in the same groupings as that morning, and we wrote on the board "bit.ly/robertson1617 -> Assignments -> Place Value Yahtzee Video and Doc. WATCH VIDEO FIRST". Then we said, "Ready...Go!" (We actually said, "Ready, Hippo," because V brought using magic words into my room rather than just plain old Go and I dig it.)


It WORKED! Not 100% perfectly wonderfully, but it freaking solved the problem. Neither of us wasted time counting back from three or doing the Silent Stand And Wait While Staring At The Talker in the middle of giving directions. We had time to hand out dice while kids worked. And they learned what they needed to learn and did what we wanted.

I'm not convinced flipped is the way 100% for me. But that's because I don't believe in using anything in my classroom 100% of the time. Date teaching strategies, don't marry them. Flipping with video-based instruction seems to be working right now. There's a lot of front loading that will go into these lessons, and I'm not sure I want to spend my morning and afternoons making a ton of videos, but this is a tool I didn't use often than I think I will use more. I think we found a way to serve our large class while saving my sanity and preserving the positive attitudes of our students.

Plus, as I excitedly shouted at Veronica at lunch on Friday, "Now you get to go to your cohort and say, 'Today I planned and executed a lesson using puppets, video, manipulatives, Google Docs, a class website, and paper and pencil!' Then you drop an imaginary mic and walk out of the room because damn, that's cooler than anything they did." I'm not saying being a cooperating teacher is a contest, I'm just saying Veronica and I are winning.

*if you have a google account, you have a YouTube channel. I had to talk my school into unlocking mine last year, but they went for it.

**YT's editing is easy to use. Sign in, click Upload, click Video Editor, push buttons until it does what you want.***

***if you have follow-up questions about anything I'm talking about in this post, please tweet at me (@TheWeirdTeacher) or throw a comment on here.

#WeirdEd Week 120- Talking Too Much

dem bones

Welcome to the beginning of the school year, where I always feel like I'm talking too much!

Yes, for days and days all I do is talk. We're setting goals and expectations and defining and redefining rules. I'm creating routines that will last (with copious adaptation and evolution) through the entire school year. Yes, students, I am going to talk you through my thinking for some of the ways we're going to do vocabulary this year. I'm going to talk you through how we think about math. I'm going to talk and talk and talk and I promise this won't keep happening. But I need you to understand what we're doing right now.

I have another reason for all the verbiage- I am lucky enough to have a student teacher this year. There is zero sarcasm in that sentence, by the way. I begged for a student teacher and frankly I hit the Lotta super win with mine. Veronica Miller is a kick ass college student with great energy and a positive, willing attitude and I'm so excited to share my class with her this entire year. But that does mean I'm doing some talking because I want her to hear how we should be talking to the kids.

Talk talk talk. No one really likes it. I know the kids are getting over it, even though I am quite entertaining and funny, if I do say so myself (which I do). And I'm not going to advocate not talking to them at all, I'm not some kind of all-or-nothing zealot.

Finding balance in the talking is the key. Right now I'm setting up a lot of dominoes. I'm building these intricate designs and layers and that takes time and patience. But soon they'll all be laid out. Once that's happened, all I have to do is tip one and watch everyone fall into place. (I don't love this metaphor because it could be misconstrued as me saying I know exactly what the kids will do because I planned it out, and that's not the case. I just know what the routines they will follow are.)

But tonight I'm tired of my voice. We're handing the reins over and the students are taking control. I've been modeling how must I trust them from the word Go. Literally. The first thing that happens in my class is they pick their own seats. And then they are allowed to adjust where they're sitting as needed as decided by them.

So let's talk about talking.

#WeirdEd Week 119- Gene Wilder

Like most of my generation, Gene Wilder lied to me the first time I met him. Scrub forward to 9:30 for the quote.

"I thought the script was very good, but something was missing. I wanted to come out with a cane, come down slowly, have it stick into one of the bricks, get up, fall over, roll around, and they all laugh and applaud. The director asked, ‘what do you want to do that for?’ I said from that time on, no one will know if I’m lying or telling the truth."

For the longest time he was Willy Wonka to me. He was fun and a little scary and dangerous but in the best way, and always full of joy. Then I discovered Mel Brooks and I met an entirely different Gene Wilder. I met the Waco Kid, Leo Bloom, and Doctor Frederick Fronkenteen (phonetic). He became Richard Pryor's counterpart for a time. Suddenly he was in all my favorite movies. 

What I think made Gene Wilder work, aside from his unmistakable and perfect comic timing (see the way he says "You know- morons" in Blazing Saddles, a delivery so perfect Cleavon Little honestly breaks up), was the sadness in him. Always, just under the surface, there was a sad, soulful loneliness in his eyes. He always sounded like he was on the verge of a sigh, except for when he was arcing into a hysteria no one else could pull off. Yes, everyone loves to point out his "LIVE, DAMN YOU!" in YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN but just as perfect is his blue blanket tantrum in THE PRODUCERS. It's a minor compulsion, he could deal with it if he wanted to. 

Marilyn Manson opens his first album with the "There's no earthly way of knowing" poem from Wonka and it's a toss up who does it creepier. 

When he was sick he kept it a secret. His family's statement reads, "The decision to wait until this time to disclose his condition wasn’t vanity, but more so that the countless young children that would smile or call out to him “there’s Willy Wonka,” would not have to be then exposed to an adult referencing illness or trouble and causing delight to travel to worry, disappointment or confusion. He simply couldn’t bear the idea of one less smile in the world."

That quote, by the way, that's when I cried. I was sad, but not crushed. He was old and suffering from Alzheimer's. He lived an incredible and long life, full of love. My connections to him were through movies I love. That's enough to feel an, "Awww, man. That sucks." But reading that he couldn't bear the idea of one less smile on a child's face? That did it.

There's so much we can learn from him and his movies. God, I wish I could show BLAZING SADDLES to a class full of students. Not 5th graders, I'm not insane, but high school kids? And then we could talk about how it's 40 years old and exactly as relevant today, in Barack Obama's America, as it was then, if not more so. And you can't say that's just Mel (oh god the chat we're going to have to have when Mel Brooks dies...I don't want to think about it), because Gene was involved in his movies very deeply. He co-wrote YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN.

#WeirdEd Week 118- Make a Thing Pt. 4

This week was supposed to be about Gene Wilder. I am moving that back a week for two reasons. The second, less important reason is I will not be moderating this week and I want to be a part of the conversation about Mr Wilder. The first, and more important reason is I'm in the midst of preparing for the school year, Back to School Night is tonight, and I have a student teacher that I'm also helping. So I'm pretty slammed and, quite honestly, Make a Thing is easy to prepare while still being a high value chat.

We've done this three times before. First, Second, and Third. It's very simple. Fill the Doc with ideas. Collaborate. Share. Expand and expand and expand. This is your time to get ideas from people, to post "I need help with X" thoughts, and go wild. As it's the beginning of the year, I'm thinking we could focus on Beginning Stuff, but we do not have to. Shawna will be ring leading tonight. 

The link to the Doc is HERE.

Science Technology Engineering Art Marvel

credit WIRED and Marvel

Representation matters.

The new Iron Man is a 15- year old black woman named Riri Williams.

Teachers spend an inordinate amount of time looking for ways to connect with our students. What can we use to help them latch on to what we're teaching? What tricks can we pull? PokemonGo is huge, let's cover graphs and banners with pocket monsters!

But sometimes we're handed an opportunity on a red and gold platter, and we need to jump at it. If you've been to a edtech conference* or read an edtech blog you know one of the major challenges we're facing is getting women into STEAM (I like the A, and so do you, iPhone users). A sad but natural connected challenge is getting women of color into STEAM. The technology sector has well documented issues hiring people of color and women. We claim to be training kids for the jobs of the future, and the tech sector is where those jobs will be. So if we're not working as hard as we can to get students of color, especially our girls, trained in STEAM subjects we're perpetuating the problem. Notice I didn't say "get them interested in STEAM". They already are. The trick is keeping them interested and not shutting them out.

And if you haven't been living under a rock you know that every Marvel movie that comes out makes approximately nine bijillionty dollars.

While Marvel's movie productions haven't been as quick on diversifying their cast of heroes as we'd all like (I can't wait for BLACK PANTHER and CAPTAIN MARVEL but it's been too long and they know it), Marvel's comic side has been making strides for a few years now. Oh yeah, you realize. All those movies are based on books! Currently-

• the mantle of Captain America is being carried by Sam Wilson (formerly the Falcon, yes guy with the wings in the Captain America movies) 
• Black Panther is being written by the brilliant Ta-Nehisi Coates. 
• Roxane Gay is about to start a run filling out the world of Wakanda. 
• Thor is a woman, Jane Foster (yes, Luke Skywalker's mom from the movies). 
• Amadeus Cho is Hulk-ing it up. 
• Miles Morales is everyone's favorite wall crawler. 
• Kate Bishop is Hawkeye. 
• And, my personal favorite comic of all these, Ms Marvel is Kamala Khan, a Muslim teenager, and her book is written by G. Willow Wilson, a Muslim woman.

And now Riri Williams will be joining this illustrious group of Earth's Mightiest Heroes as Ironheart. I don't know too much about her yet. I know she's already part of Tony's stories, but I don't have as much time to read comics as I'd like. I know she's already built herself a suit. I know she's going to MIT. I know that Ironheart is a better name than Iron Maiden if only for legal reasons. And I know that I can't wait for November so I can start buying and reading her stories.

I also know that a lot of our kids are invested in these movies, if not these books**.

Marvel is gift-wrapping engagement and representation for us. Look at that list. Those are The heroes of the Marvel universe. Almost all of them are geniuses. Not because a super power made them geniuses, but because of hard work and training. You can't even pretend Captain America being black doesn't mean something. Or that the character with Marvel's name is a Muslim teen.

We want to use something the kids care about to engage them? Don't*** pander to them with a faceless Pokemon game (face it, we don't actually need them caring about Pokemon, we need them engaged with the technology and, therefor, with the lessons we're teaching). Use these characters and their stories. Hang a poster of Riri Williams on your wall and explain why she's there. She's the new Iron Man and she goes to one of the best technology schools in the country. Let them see her face. Riri might engage the ones who need it and she might be just the thing that those who feel unwelcome in the tech world can cling to. Please, if you're about to hand wave about fictional characters not motivating people, put your hands back in your lap. LeVar Burton and Nichelle Nichols have a thousand stories about young people of color telling them that it was Geordi Laforge and Lt Uhura that showed them it was ok to be who they are and go into technology. And don't tell me you'll feel silly talking about a comic book character in class if you're about to use the words "pokeball" or "Goldeen" out loud.

What if the kids don't know Marvel comics, you ask? You just introduced your students to a whole new genre of books! Way to go, teach! Time to buff up that class library.

Representation matters. We don't have any Pikachus in our classrooms, but each of us has a Miles, an Amadeus, a Kamala, a Riri.

credit- Marvel

*can we stop calling them that yet? All teacher conferences involve technology now. They're just teaching conferences.

**they are books. Don't devalue comics. Watchmen and Winter Soldier alone are stories better told than 90% of the books you read last year.

***just- balance in all things. But seriously, don't pander. It's gross and doesn't last.

tons of credit to WIRED and Birth.Movies.Death writers Scott Wampler and Siddhant Adlakha for writing articles invaluable to this one.

#WeirdEd Week 116- Analog is Warmer

Special Guest Post by Sarah Windisch

Vinyl is the best medium upon which music has ever been recorded.

There. I said it.

And I meant it.

I love records. I have hundreds. There are more turntables than people in my house. My son’s initials are LP on purpose. I celebrated my 33 ⅓ birthday.

I’m possibly a little extreme.

Records just sound better, and it’s inherent in how they’re made: they are pressed physically from stampers created from a master disc that physically has the music - as played in the studio - etched in acetate. The audio engineers think about things like groove width and velocity at the inner and outer edges, and adjust the mix to be truest to where it will appear on the album. A mastering engineer runs a lathe to actually cut the master when it is mixed to perfection - calibrated perfectly between channels and sometimes viewed with an oscilloscope - in one take. ONE. The cut has to be perfect, and the track separations are cut by hand.

That’s all before it heads to a company that will stamp the vinyl that we get as consumers.

That time and commitment to perfection at the very first step should be enough to make a person love vinyl more than a bunch of ones and zeroes algorithmically forced into a sine wave.

Vinyl has perfect imperfections created by human hands. Vinyl is a physical interpretation of an musician’s work. Digital music only has cold perfection.

Don’t get me wrong. I have an enormous CD collection and pay my monthly fee to have good Spotify. I love having access to whatever song strikes my fancy at the moment and having music in my car that will satisfy anyone who’s riding along. It’s great for someone with extremely eclectic taste to be able to examine a band before buying an album. And the pure nerdy fact that digital music even exists? That you can sample and query sound and recreate it in binary? That’s cool too.

It’s just that what’s new and better isn’t always...better. It might be more convenient. It makes life easier. It’s shiny! But the hisses and pops that make every record unique, the care put into liner notes and album artwork by artists to share their vision, the way your needle can wear the grooves down on a favorite track, the ritual of turning it over, of learning how to align the arm so your stylus is right over the start  - those things feel more substantial than being able to DJ on the fly.

There’s so many Exciting New Things in education. Every day there’s a new acronym to be responsible for and a bandwagon to jump on. A new toy or tool to meet our students where they are. Some of these are fantastic. Some, let’s be honest, are 8-tracks: popular for a short time and destined to die out because they are internally flawed. Some are fine, but push older, battle-tested ideas aside, relegating them to idea-collectors and educational hipsters who use the old thing you’ve never heard of to prove their worth as teachers.

And those “vintage” ideas? How long did someone, or a group of people committed to creating them dedicate? Were they used for so long because of their worth, rather than because “that’s the way it’s always been done”? Are we as educators too quick to judge on that point? Are we too focused on keeping up that we forget to use the past to help us change for the future?

So when we talk about vinyl this week, let’s think about educational obsolescence and make nifty analogies about records and teaching. Naturally, we have to talk about the amazingness of album art and the idea of the gatefold and which album is The Album, too. We might even actually debate if analog is really warmer.

Or not.

Because it is.

Sarah's record collecting is an honest habit - she's a music teacher. It's practically required. She lives and causes trouble in North Idaho, and wishes her students appreciated Herb Alpert as much as she does. Find her on Twitter @slwindisch .

#WeirdEd Week 115- Olympics

The Olympics are the ultimate standardized, high-stakes test. You get one chance to perform at the highest level. Everyone in your event performs under the exact same conditions. Your training and practice overtakes your life to the detriment of everything else. It's stressful, brutal, takes childhoods, and is completely overwhelming. And none of the events represent anything that would happen in real life.

I love them so much.

The Olympics are the best. It's the highest quality athletes performing on the biggest stage. Who can handle the pressure? Who rises? It's not a nationalism thing. I cheer for Team USA because I know those athletes the best, but not because I need us to crush China/Russia/France to make some Cold War point. Medal counts are outdated but it's the best way we have to keep score and the ultimate competition requires score keeping.

The Olympics are fascinating because the closest parallel to Olympians are astronauts, especially the early Apollo astronauts. Neil Armstrong was 39 when he landed on the moon. (I know, I thought he was younger too, but I checked a bunch of places, he was born in 1930, landed on the moon in 1969.) No matter what you do in your life your greatest professional accomplishment will be walking on the moon. Armstrong, Aldrin, and the rest had fantastic careers But they also struggled back home. You train your entire life, every day, everything you do dedicated to one goal. A goal basically no one on Earth will accomplish. And then you do it. You land on the moon. Then what?

We should remember one of the things that makes Michael Phelps remarkable is that he keeps coming back and succeeding. This is his fifth Olympics. That's not supposed to happen. You shouldn't be one of the greatest at anything for almost twenty years. Most Olympians, as Marshal Mathers so eloquently put it, get one shot. (You all thought I was gonna make a HAMILTON reference there. I contain multitudes.)

What do you do when the greatest thing you'll ever do happens at 16? Or 20?

I love how the Olympics pit the greatest against each other and they, because they are killers, that's what makes them great, rise. Katie Ledecky real does love swimming close races. She's not built to destroy people just to destroy them. She's built to see you on her shoulder and then crush your soul. That's much more satisfying. It's more fun. I just watched Phelps win the 200m fly. He broke Le Clous in that race. That dude won't be ok for weeks.

If you'll allow me an Al Bundy moment- The best race I ever had was in high school. It was the 100yd fly, my specialty. Another kid from a rival school had been talking trash. He and I swam on different year-round teams and knew each other. We didn't get along. Before the race my coach grabbed me. he looked me in the eye and said, "Don't let him think he has a chance." I wrecked him. He didn't get closer than my hip the whole race. It was glorious.

What does all of this have to do with teaching? It's not really fair to compare the Olympics, which you have a choice to compete in, with high stakes testing. It's not fair to compare Olympians (and astronauts) with our students. Is that where our expectations hit ridiculous levels?

I tell my students my expectations for them on a regular basis- "I expect you to be the best class in the school." This isn't a joke or hyperbole. Before every assembly, any time we're doing anything, I tell them that. I tell them that before the Music teacher picks them up. I want her to compare every other class to us, and I want us to come out on top. It's not a competition, but we're going to win.

So I guess I do make school an Olympic event. And it works for me. I'm not putting pressure on my kids. I'm not deadly serious about WINNING. But my expectations are as high as they can be. This carries over to the rest of my class. You're the best behaved in music, in assembly, and with me. And because we're dedicated to being the best I'm going to be the best teacher I can be for you. Together we're going to be the best. Are we actually? Probably not. I work with wonderful teachers who do fantastic things. Doesn't stop me from trying.

Let's talk about pressure. But let's also talk about the Olympics without talking about school. I love the Games. It's a wholly unique experience. We get to see sports we never normally see. We get to see the greatest on Earth be great.

And that's as inspirational as anything.