What You Think You See

Seeing is Believing.  Is it?  Is what we see always representative of reality?

In my day job, I sometimes stand at a desk where people are expected to scan their membership card as they enter the building. If you forgot your card, we can enter you another way; but everyone must be admitted through the system.  

One morning, I was at the desk when a woman was digging through her bag for her keychain (didn't she just get out of her car with her keys in her hand?) while someone else walked by me on her way to her yoga class.  While the first woman didn't say anything out loud, I could see her facial expression, wondering why she had to dig for her card while this woman walked on by.  What she didn't know was that this woman had, in fact, scanned in a few minutes earlier. She had gone down the stairs and realized she had left her water bottle in the car. Since we both knew she had already scanned, it wasn't necessary for her to do it again.  But without that piece of knowledge, the card searcher had only what she saw to inform her attitude and incorrectly interpreted what she saw using incomplete data.

This is more common in your life than breathing.  I'm not being hyperbolic.  You only breathe about 20 times per minute, but you interpret incoming sensory data hundreds of times per second. Literally everything that happens in your mind is an interpretation made by your brain.  As I used to tell my science students, eyes and ears are data collectors, but seeing and hearing only happen when your brains interpret that data. 

• This is why you can perceive the room spinning when you are dizzy even though that is obviously not the input your eyes are receiving. It comes from the brain trying to put together inconsistent data from two different sources - the still spinning fluid in your ear's semicircular canals and the input from the eyes.  The brain trusts the ear more and tells the brain to see something that the eyes are not seeing.
• This is why people can hallucinate voices that are not actually present. Their brain is making an interpretation of something that is not consistent with reality. Their ears are not actually hearing anything, but their brain is.

Yet, we all put great faith in our own interpretation of things. That's a feature, not a bug.  We have to do it. If we doubted everything we were seeing and hearing every minute of the day, we would crack up.  For the brain to perfectly process everything would take more time and energy than makes sense for it to use.  So, it takes short cuts.  It fills in gaps in data through interpolation and extends interpretation beyond the data through extrapolation.  

So, we can't stop to question ALL interpretations.  But we should question some of them.

This is an education blog, so let's take it to the classroom.  Is it possible that we sometimes misinterpret student behavior?  When that student who is always out of his seat without permission, do we take the mental shortcut of assuming that EVERY shift he makes in his chair is about to be a rule violation? Do we hear the first half a question and assume we know what the student is asking?  Do we see a kid in the hallway and assume she is skipping class because she has done so in the past? Kids who have been trouble makers in the past have often complained that they don't feel like teachers will let them grow and change because of their past behavior.  Do they have a point?  Do we over-interpret their actions because our brains are taking a totally normal mental shortcut?

How about your colleagues.  Do you make assumptions, not just about the action you see them doing but about their internal life?  Do you assign motive based on your past history with them?  Do you assume they are short tempered because you see them snap at a student without knowing the week long history that led up to that moment?  Do you know the whole story, or do you tell yourself a story?

I had this conversation recently about a man who was very irritated with his boss.  He was using some strong terms, like "bait and switch" during our conversation.  I had to say, "Okay, slow down" and walked him through this way of thinking.  There are three things happening here.

1. Facts
2. Feelings about facts
3. The interpretation of the facts as they are processed through your feelings.

The facts were real. He was accurately relaying the story of WHAT had happened.  His feelings were real.  He was rightly irritated by WHAT his boss had done. It's that third part where things get fictional. His brain was going beyond what he knew to be true in order to construct a story. It was filling in the gaps of what happened with WHY they happened, leading him to assign motive that was almost certainly not accurate. His boss is not a manipulator or a liar, so the term bait and switch was unfair. If he were processing the facts through a different set of feelings, the story he was telling himself would be far different.

Part of what makes teaching difficult is how many pieces of data we have to interpret and how little time we have to reflect properly.  We often react quickly to our rapid interoperation simply because there isn't time to slow down.  My encouragement to you would be to slow down as much as you are able to, knowing it might not be much.  

• That extra second before responding to a child might make a difference in your relationship with them because it might give you just enough distance to assume the best rather than the worst.
• That extra minute it takes to remind yourself of what you know for sure about your colleague might prevent weeks of awkward interactions with them.
• Taking a few class periods before answering a parent email will allow you to answer in a more tactful way. It is much better for them to experience a delay in your response than for them to experience the response you would give while your blood pressure was still high.

I've strayed a bit from the point here, so let me close the circle.  What you think you see isn't always representative of reality.  It's worth asking if you know the whole story. If not, hold your own certainty in check, and be open to changing your story after you know more.

The Power of Habit

There's a popular saying that says, "When you know better, you do better." 

Do you?  I mean, is that always true?

I remember saying to students, "You know better than that" an awful lot.

And it's not just kids.  I'm guessing you have had experiences where you knew a better way, but you kept doing something the way you had always done it.  I have a couple of recent examples.

I have been going to the same YMCA for over two years.  I had been turning on the same street for a long time.  A month ago, I realized that I could avoid an awkward and potentially dangerous intersection if I turned one street earlier and met up with the other street farther west.  I tried it, and it is objectively easier and safer.  Yet, I still find myself sailing right past that street if I am not making a conscious effort to remember. 

When I learned to set up memberships during training for my job, I must have missed a small step on the first screen where other family members are entered on the membership.  I didn't even know it was there as I have been regularly scrolling down to the "Continue to Order Entry" button for 12 months.  That meant going to the order after it was completed and adding a spouse and/or children after the fact.  I thought it was strange, but because I didn't know another way, I assumed it was the only way to do it.  I just thought the system was a little wonky.  A few weeks ago, I saw a co-worker doing it as a step of the set up and said, "Wait, you can do that before you place the order?"  She showed me where it is on the first screen, and I said, "Well, you've just saved me a ton of time."  At some point, that knowledge will save me a ton of time, but it hasn't yet.  I've processed quite a multi-person memberships since then, and I've only used the better way for about half of them.  I usually realize it just after I've hit the button and can't go back and think, "Crud, now I've got to do it the hard way!"

Why? Because the habitual way of doing it has a well-myelinated pathway of neurons (you will sometimes hear it called "muscle memory.")  The new way has some weak connections being made, but I have to do it that way a lot more times before those pathways are stronger.  Until turning the new way becomes automated, I will likely still find myself mindlessly passing the better street and the better button sometimes.

That's the power of habit. We engage in habits so often that we often aren't conscious of the fact that we are doing them.  Smokers who are trying to quit must actively try not to light up at certain times, not because they have a burning desire for a cigarette but because they are in the habit of having one at that time.  If you drive a car with the gear shift in the center console, you will find your hand going there even when driving a rental or borrowing a car from a friend. And, I can't count how many times I have walked into a room and hit the light switch during a power outage.  It's not that I am dumb enough to think the light is going to come on; it is that habit is automated, taking less energy than logic.

Teachers, harness the power of habit.  All over America, the school year has either already started or is soon to start.  Start instilling habits today!  Do the same thing over and over with them on day one. Make "This is how we do this in here" the norm. 

• Walking in and looking at the board for bellwork or announcements should be second nature by next week.
• Capping the marker immediately after writing an answer on their mini-whiteboard should be done without thinking within a day or two.
• You have to overcome their impulse to hop up as soon as the bell rings now, or you will be fighting it for the rest of the year (because that one is already habit, it's gonna take a minute).

Once something becomes a habit, they almost can't help themselves. It's going to feel annoying during the first two weeks, but it will save you all kinds of energy for the rest of the year.  Invest that time. You will be glad you did.

Just Share Your Peaches

This time of year, Matt, my weightlifting instructor at the Y, comes into every class for several weeks with a bucket full of small peaches and offers them to everyone who will stand still.  He and Steven have quite a garden, yielding not only peaches, but okra, blackberries, peppers, and a variety of other produce.  They eat and freeze and preserve, but they have more than they can use, so they give what they have to friends, spreading joy and nutrition to those around them.

As usual, I hear you saying to your screen, "What in the world does this have to do with education?"  

Legitimate question. Peaches are being used here as a metaphor for the things you have "grown" in your career.  If you are an experienced teacher (at least in the U.S. - I'm not sure what the lesson planning is like elsewhere), you have created a ton of things during your career.  From a simple but well-crafted physics problem to a complex project, you have produce, and you likely have more than you can use.

In the school where I taught for 21 years, sharing was the norm.  If someone was going to teach the same thing you were, you did some planning together and shared some resources in common.  When Jenny, our chemistry and AP physics teacher went part-time after having a baby, and we hired another chemistry teacher, Jenny handed over a flash drive with her entire folder and invited her to use it at will. 

Because it was the norm at GRACE, I thought it was standard practice everywhere.

Like all naive takes, a little time on Twitter disabused me of that notion. There are teachers all over that platform who are proudly selfish about how they won't share the resources they created unless they are paid for them. They are the same teachers who talk about "quiet quitting" and never doing anything out of contract hours, so it isn't super surprising that they would hoard their resources too.  What is surprising is the number of "You go, girl. Stand your ground." responses they get from others. We've turned selfishness into a virtue, apparently.

Listen, I'm not saying you have to give away absolutely everything.  You can be on Teachers Pay Teachers.  I am too. 

There are sometimes good reasons not to share.  I once asked a seventh grade teacher to please not do the same demonstration I was going to do with them in 8th grade. There were two reasons for that: 1. She was only doing it because it was fun; it didn't actually demonstrate any of her content.  2. The value it had in my content was the mystery because it was counterintuitive, and it would lose that if they had already seen it.  If the demonstration had fit her content better than mine, I would have let her have it, and I would have come up with something else.  You may have a truly good reason not to share some things.  But, if your reason is just, "I made it, so you can't have it unless you buy it," you might be in the wrong profession.

Experienced teachers, there are new people in your building this year.  They need what you have.  Remember what that was like?  They need peaches.  They need okra.  They need blackberries.  They need resources, and you have more than you can use.  

Remember that the goal is student learning.

And share your dang peaches.

Embracing Weirdness in Students

When I was a kid, the bed time routine usually involved my mom giving my stuffed animals voices.  At some point on most nights, I would say, "Mom, you are so weird." She would respond, "That's okay, you like weird."  This was a statement, not a question.  It was like she decreed that I like weird.

And, so, I do.

Which is a good thing.  Because the plan for me for 25 years was teaching middle school.  Not only do you have to be a little weird for that, you also have to like the weirdness you see in others.  You are going to have a boy who sits with one foot up in the desk and leans over until you think he'll fall out of the chair. You are going to have a girl who draws cartoons of animals with human legs (which looks more disturbing than it sounds). You are going to have students who burst into song in the middle of class and those who can't be cajoled to speak with any kind of incentive.  

When we think of school stereotypes, we typically think of the categories from The Breakfast Club - athlete, princess, nerd, bad boy, and weirdo. But the truth is, most kids are a category of one.  

And that's because we are individuals, not types.  For all of the money and air time that is dropped on personality testing, from Myers Briggs to Enneagram, they have little more validity than horoscopes and Buzz Feed quizzes. People in the same generation do not think the same way.  All members of a race or gender are not identical. I can tell from sitting in faculty meetings that not all teachers have the same view of things.  We are each individuals, born with certain gifts, raised in different environments, encouraged to develop different skills, taught to value different qualities.

In short, we are all weird.

And that is a good thing. God uses whatever makes you weird to fulfill His purposes in the world. He put you where you are with the strengths and weaknesses you have because there is someone who needs that aspect of your character to build them up. When you look at Scripture, every person God used in a significant way was unusual. Noah was a drunk. Abraham and Sarah were far too old. Moses stuttered. David was the family runt. And I'm convinced the apostle Peter had ADHD. 

Even if you aren't a person of faith, you have to be able to see that the world has only ever been changed by those who are willing to go against the flow and change the way things are done.  Suffragettes stood against the status quo, often putting themselves in grave danger, to get us the right to vote. The Civil Rights movement was built entirely by those who insisted on doing the unexpected, from sitting at the lunch counter to marching across a bridge to kneeling at the beginning of an athletic event. Nikola Tesla stood in opposition to the smartest men in his field, including the powerful force that was Thomas Edison. Galileo stood against the norm as did Malala Yousafzai. William Wilberforce worked himself to death opposing what was to make the world better. You can bet he would never have uttered the words, "It is what it is." 

Weird is good.  Weird brings change. We must embrace the weird in each other and in ourselves.  

I am not advocating that we all develop into people so strange that we can't operate in culture. We won't have influence that way because there are systems in which things get done and rules that have to be followed. Wilberforce was only successful in the abolition of the slave trade because he worked within the legal system. Civil Rights activists did more than create spectacles; they worked to make slow changes in the law. Tesla made connections with financial backers by proving his ideas weren't as crazy as they sounded. While weird is good, it is only useful if you can function in society.  So balance matters.

I've been thinking a lot about my Granny for the last couple of days.  She was delightfully quirky, and the stories told at her funeral reflected it. She played practical jokes on her family and called friends on their birthdays just to sing to them (and let's just admit that she wasn't going to join the choir). She often called the pastor in the middle of the week to tell him he should get a tape of his sermon and listen to it because it would bless his heart. People cried at her funeral, but they laughed a lot too. Dear God, please let me be weird like that.

Teachers, school is getting ready to start. You are about to meet some weird students, weird parents (maybe even weird colleagues).  Some of them want to hide their weirdness while other will put it on full display. Take the time to recognize what aspect of their character is unusual and useful and help them develop and mature those qualities. Help them to pursue those gifts that will make them influential, not in spite of their differences but  because of them. But also teach them the value of social norms and show them that living within the rules of society is possible while still maintaining their quirkiness. If they combine those things, they will have influence on those around them (and for some, even farther) and have great joy while doing so.

Student Accessible Language

In my preparation to lead a Livestrong group at the Y, I was required to take a few group fitness instructor certification courses.  In one of them, there was a well-meaning but insane piece of advice - "Use the medical names for bones and muscles. Don't say 'hips;' say 'pelvic girdle' instead. Don't say 'shin;' say 'tibia.' It will make you sound credible." Before I get into the education connection here, let me just say if you have to resort to a technique to sound credible, you aren't credible. 

Meanwhile, actual group fitness instructors rarely do this.  They use imagery to help their members know what to do. Greg, a cycle instructor, doesn't say, "align your tibia with the vertical post of pedal shaft" or "keep your transverse arch parallel to the floor" because he knows that would not only make him sound ridiculous, it also wouldn't be at all helpful to members trying to keep good cycle form.  Instead, he says, "It should feel like you are scraping gum off the bottom of your shoe." Everyone can imagine that and benefit from it.  Dana teaches Barre, where alignment from head to toe is important to prevent injury. She explains everything in detail once, but after that she says, "Zip up your body suit." And just like that, everyone is able to see if their alignment is correct in the mirror.  These are examples of language that is accessible to the learner rather than feeding the ego of the instructor.

Teachers, have you taken a look at your state objectives?  If you have, you know they can be more difficult to interpret than contract legalese. Here's one from the NC Chemistry curriculum.  "PS.Chm.4.3 Use mathematics and computational thinking to analyze quantitatively the composition of a substance (empirical formula, molecular formula, percent composition, and mole conversions)."  Y'all, I taught chemistry for ten years, and this is a crazy sentence. For one thing, computational thinking is mathematics, and you can't analyze something quantitatively without those, so there are few redundancies here whose purpose seems to be only to make the sentence longer.  Also the examples cover several chapters of material, so you can't possibly use this for one lesson.  Given that many school require the objective to be written on the board, you are going to have some confused and frightened students if you just throw this up at the beginning of your lesson.  If were teaching chemistry now, I would write, "Write chemical formulas for ionic compounds" because that is the level students can comprehend and explains what we will be doing TODAY.  

The same is true of unnecessarily complex vocabulary.  Do you need to use the word hydrodynamic? You might; it depends on what you are teaching and how old your students are.  But you might be better served by the words "fluid motion" (or with really young students, the world liquid will probably do).  I stopped reading a book once because the author was more interested in showing off her vocabulary than she was in readers learning from her work. 

Is there a time when it is appropriate to use more complex language.  Absolutely.  It is when doing so serves a purpose. Going back to the group fitness examples, it would absolutely make sense to teach class members the term pelvic girdle if the movement you want them to do involves 360º of motion.  Then, you are prompting the imagery of a girdle, something that surrounds the entire area, not just the left and right motion of the hips. When doing back focused exercises while weight lifting, we sometimes work a few different muscles during the same song, Matt will sometimes bring focus to whichever muscle we happen to be working with that exercise as an act of clarity.  When we are working the latissimus dorsi, he uses the name and says, "you know, like a shark's dorsal fin."  In that case, knowing the name is helpful for remembering its location.  That's a thoughtful use of the scientific name, not a pretentious act of "gaining credibility." 

As a physics teacher, the difference between velocity and speed matters.  In regular life, it doesn't.  When I taught 8th graders that there is no such thing as cold, only the movement of heat in our out of a substance, I told them, "This matters a lot in science, but please don't be the person who responds to someone saying it is cold with, 'Actually, it is less hot' because you will sound like a nutcase."  

If you have ever been on an IT help call with someone who uses all the jargon and treats you like you are dumb for not understanding it, you might have some empathy with your students. When teaching students, use the technical language that matters (and explicitly teach them what it means), but use your speech to make your content more accessible, not less. It doesn't matter how great your lesson was if you used so much lofty language that they can't understand it.

Don't Be Afraid of Weeds in Your Classroom

Question:  What's the difference between a plant and a weed?

Answer: Intent

If I dig a hole and put a seed or seedling in the ground and work hard to make it grow, it's a plant.  If it pops up on its own and grows without (or in spite of) my intervention, it is a weed.  

The bed in this picture is usually the place where I grow tomatoes and cucumbers, but this year, the spring got away from me. I never planted anything. Yet, the bed is completely filled with these lush, beautiful Chamberbitter.  I haven't watered them, fertilized them, or touched them in any way; yet they have grown thicker and hardier than any plant I have ever worked hard for, and I think they are quite beautiful.

A few years ago, I cut down a mulberry tree.  Apparently, the birds who once perched in that tree had dropped a few berries because, within weeks, this Nandina bush sprout from the base of the stump.  (The mulberry insists on attempting a comeback, so you see branches at the bottom that I do cut back, but I've done nothing to the Nandina itself because I love them.)

I hear you asking what this has to do with education, so here it is.  You also have plants and weeds in your classroom.  No, not the kids. (Although . . . maybe, no that's not what this post is about.)

The "plants" consist of the content you have planned, the curriculum and standards you intend to teach.  The "weed" is the learning that volunteers itself.  

Now, listen, I am an intense lesson planner. When asked to describe my classroom management strategy in self-evaluations, I start with "teach from bell to bell."  Class time is too limited a resource to squander, so I have a brisk, content filled plan.  I believe strongly in well-planned and paced direct instruction.

But, I also have space that allows curiosity to be satisfied.  A few years ago, one of my 8th grade boys told his English teacher how proud he was of himself because he could always "get Miss Hawks off the subject." The teacher he was talking to smiled and said, "No, you can't. She knows exactly how much time she can afford to give up to answer your questions." And she was correct. I knew how much time was left in class and how much I had left to do that was essential.  I would entertain his questions for that amount of time and then say, "Okay, we've got to get back to this now."

After teaching for a few years, I started recognizing the same questions being asked every year.  When I was teaching about how our ear processes the vibrations in the air (we call them sound waves) into something our brains can interpret as tones and words, students were also interested in why our ears pop on airplanes and why some people of more ear infections as kids than others and what tubes do.  These were natural connections to the ear, and they were curious. So, I started working time for that into my lesson plans.  When we did physics problems about rotary motion, they sometimes had questions about dizziness. Again, it makes sense those questions would come to mind while we talked about spinning.

So, how do you work time for that into your plan?  Interestingly, you can accomplish it by over-planning what you are going to do with your "plants."  If I can teach a physics concept adequately with three examples, I plan to do four,  That way, if the questions arise, I have one that I can give away without losing quality instruction.  If "weeds" sprout up in third period but not sixth period, I have a fourth example to do with them.  If a particularly interesting question got asked in first period, but no one in second period thought of it, I might attempt to lead them to it by saying something like, "Some people often wonder . . . " or "You know what I wonder about sometimes?" 

Newer teachers, it can be a little scary when "weeds" invade your well-landscaped plan. It's also harder for you to know if you are over or under planning. (Nothing took me longer to learn than how long something would take to do.  I would think I had a 50 minute lesson planned, and it would take 20 minutes or 3 days.) But, when students are curious, you don't ever want to squash it. Give it a few minutes.  If you feel they are trying to lead you off the subject, say, "I will take two more question - you and you - and then we are going back.  Feel free to come back after school or email me if you want to ask more."  The ones who are truly curious will take you up on that.  

I named this blog "On the Rabbit Trail" because I love when learning happens spontaneously.  Sometimes, like the Chamberbitters and the Nandina in my yard, the weed I didn't intend to grow is still quite beautiful. 

Your Decisions Affect Everyone

Physicist Richard Feynman was a visionary with brilliant insights into the subatomic world.  He was also kind of a pill to work with, never meeting deadlines or attending faculty meetings, and parking wherever he felt like it. When I was teaching honors physics, I wanted my students to know about this interesting man and his work, so I had them read a book of his speeches and articles.  These readings often led to a discussion about whether his behavior was acceptable.  I had students at both ends.  Some said, "He needed to use his mind for bigger things," to which I replied, "I'm betting you wouldn't you feel the same way if you were his secretary."  One of my students summed up the other argument well,  when she put her book down and said, "He drives me crazy. He thinks rules are for everyone but him."

Middle and high school students are naturally focused on themselves and act largely out of their feelings, so it can be difficult for them to understand how their actions affect others.  (Actually, if we aren't careful and reflective, we don't recognize it as adults either.)  If society is going to function at all, we have to recognize our interconnectedness.  That means, as teachers, we have to take every opportunity to demonstrate this concept to our students.  

In the early days of my time as yearbook advisor, the school was small enough that every senior got their own page. One year, a senior was expelled in January.  Because it was so late in the year, the page had already been submitted.  If we had wanted to remove it, it would have been nearly impossible, costing several thousand dollars to ask Jostens to reprint what had already been submitted.  So, I didn't even have to make that decision.  The next year, we face another senior expulsion, but this one happened in October, before the pages were submitted.  So, I sat down with my student editor to have a conversation.  Do we take him out since it is possible?  Do we stand on precedent since we didn't remove last year's student?  As we talked through our options and how we would explain the thinking behind the decision to anyone who asked, she sighed, "I wish we didn't have to decide this."  Same, girl. Same.  But we did have to decide it.  I told her, "You'll find that nearly everything that happens in the school affects the yearbook." Her mom told me later that she had come home talking about how that kid's misbehavior impacted her life in a way no one would predict.  

And that is always true. It's impossible to predict all of the ripple effects our decisions will have on other people.  In the multiple timelines theory made possible by quantum mechanics, every decision with more than possible outcome is equally likely and therefore, spawns multiple timelines. We live in the one with the decision we actually made, but in other universes, things are playing out with the other choices. This was dramatized to a ridiculous extent by the TV comedy series Community in an episode where Jeff roles a die to determine which member of the group would go to the door to pick up the pizza they ordered. Some of the results were disastrous and later seasons included characters from "the darkest timeline" whose lives were completely upended by everything that came after the wrong person being out of the room.  (Please note:  I do NOT subscribe to multiple timelines theory, this is just a thought exercise.)

Consider something as simple as not turning in a field trip permission slip.  It seems like such a small event to the student.  But the teacher has to spend time emailing their parents. It may delay the teacher's ability to inform the location about how many people are attending, which could result in a higher cost.  It will remain in the back of the teacher's mind until it resolved, reducing her working memory capacity for other important things. She may snap at someone else when she is really aggravated with you, hurting that person's feelings and affecting how they treat other people that day too.  

This isn't all dark, so let's consider a positive example. I have written many times about my amazing instructors at the YMCA.  They do something extraordinary every time they teach a class.  It's the ordinary act of doing their job well.  Just by doing that, they have changed my life in profound ways.  They've made me physically stronger and increased my confidence. Other people see those changes in me, knowing a was a clumsy girl I am, and they are doing new things too.  I eventually decided to teach cycle, and a friend of mine said he was inspired by that to do something he had been thinking about for a while, getting his personal trainer's certification.  Ask anyone who taught me PE or took it with me, and they would not have predicted that I would be inspiring anything physical in anyone.  But it started with instructors who cared enough to take their jobs seriously.

Teachers, this isn't something that's going to be part of our curriculum.  It's going to be about catching teachable moments and taking the time to ask students to look farther than the next five minutes.  When a student doesn't push their chair in, ask them to consider why that could be a problem for someone else.  Yes, it will be uncomfortable, but getting students to think beyond themselves is worth it, so we can all live in a better timeline.