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. 

The Role of Optimism in The Classroom

I read a lot of education books, and some of them are better than others.  But, even a bad book usually has something good to take away from it.  That is the case with the book I've been reading recently.  It is called Quit Point.  I don't recommend this book as it is largely a touchy-feely 
"kids-will-be-motivated-if-you-let-them-do-what-they-want" message.  If you read this blog, you know that I did not respond well to that.  However, they nailed one thing.  Optimism is necessary for learning.

So I thought I would take this week to explore what optimism is and why it is a critical component of your classroom.

When we think of optimists, we usually think of glass half-full people.  That's not a terrible way to look at it, but it isn't really the definition.  The prefix "opt" has to do with vision (hence your eye doctor having a degree in optometry).  So, an optimist is really a person with a positive vision of the future.  They believe that, even if things are bad now, they will be better.  More importantly, they believe their actions can play a role in bringing about that better future.  

Now take this thought into your classroom.  If a student who is struggling believes it will not get better, no matter what, you will have difficulty moving them forward.  If, however, they believe their actions can have a direct impact on their improvement, it will take only a little encouragement to get them to apply effective techniques for doing so.  

This is the basis of the popular Growth Mindset book by Carol Dweck.  She doesn't refer to it as optimism, but she devotes a lot of time to the idea that students who believe they can improve will improve more than those who believe their state is fixed.  

I'd like to offer an additional perspective.  Optimists and curiosity correlate.  I've never met a pessimist who asks a lot of questions.  Some of them think they know everything already; some just don't care to learn something new because they don't seen how it will benefit them.  Pay attention to the kids who ask the most interesting questions in class; and you will find they are the ones who find joy in learning and tend to have a positive view.  I don't know if one causes the other, but they are typically found together.  A person without curiosity can learn, but it is a burdensome process.  

If you want students to take joy in learning, foster their optimism and increase their curiosity.  How do you do that?  By showing yours.

Teaching Awe - Why Do You Love It?

Last week, I talked about joyful learning.  This week, I would like to address something our curriculum-driven, standards-obsessed educational culture has forgotten.  We learn best those things about which we are curious.  I'm not advocating for student-driven, personalized learning.  I'm suggesting that part of our pedagogy needs to be stoking curiosity by revealing those parts of our disciplines that are awe-inspiring.

When I took physics, I spent every day in awe.  Was it because my physics teacher did something dramatic?  Sometimes.  But often, it was the physics itself.  Knowing how the world worked made me happy in ways I didn't yet understand.  It was the first time math had made sense to me as expressions of relationships between real things.  I didn't love history, but the best history teachers I have told amazing stories of people from the past and then showed the themes that keep repeating about how we treat each other and those we consider unlike ourselves.  Trigonometry was the first math class I took that I actually looked forward to.  There was something about the relationships shown in the unit circle that thrilled me.  I'm sure there were people who enjoyed different parts of different classes; the same things don't appeal to all of us.

I want my students to understand that physics is a way of knowing something real about the world and that we have used it, not just to advance society by inventing new things, but also to understand without need to turn that knowledge into a commodity.  

My advice to teachers is this.  When lesson planning, of course, you have to think about curriculum and standards, but take a moment to look at what you are teaching and remember what made you love it.  You chose to teach math or literature or band or computer science for a reason.  Give students a glimpse of that by telling a story or showing your own amazement.  My physics classes are currently in a chapter on sound waves.  While talking about wavelength and frequency and amplitude, I find it important to take a day and talk about how our ears process it.  This is not in the curriculum.  No physics standards says, "students will understand how the human ear processes sound waves," but I think it is amazing that we have structures in our ears that turn patterns of pressure differences into electrical signals.  Even more amazing is the fact that we do not yet have a full understanding of how these structures function.  Perhaps one of my students will be the person who figures that out, but even if that doesn't happen, I want them all to want to know.  I want them all to be curious about things we have not figured out.  

It's easy in science because it is almost all revealing of some underlying principle that is neat to know.  But perhaps there is something about how poetry is structured that you find amazing.  Perhaps there is a historical figure who inspires you.  Perhaps the way colors blend in a painting takes you to your happy place.  Show students that.

If you want students to score well on standardized tests, stick to the book standards.  If you want kids to be lifelong learners, show them the awe of your discipline.  By the way, they'll do better on tests too because they'll be more likely to follow you down a rabbit hole and learn things they hadn't planned to.

Learning Should Be Joyful

I have been teaching for 25 years, long enough to see pendulum swings in a thousand ways.  From a focus on science to a resurgence of the arts back to STEM obsession.  From all phonics to whole language and back to phonics.  

Right now, we are in an upsetting trend of people who only value education as career training.  I am not against the idea that we can use what we learn in school for our jobs, but I am against the notion that everything learned in school should be focused on how you plan to use it after school, leading to people who complain that we don't teach kids to file their taxes or sew on buttons (yes, there is a weird contingent of internet people who won't let this go) or that students should only learn those things that they will use in a job 

This notion is disturbingly utilitarian.  If something is only valuable if it is useful, we will stop being learners and become consumers, judges, and grouches.  Education will become a commodity, so we will learn less as we cull the curriculum.  Content will be prejudged for usefulness, leading us to look at everything through a utilitarian lens.  All of this is bad, but the worst part is that there will no longer be joy in learning anything we don't immediately judge to be useful.  If we allow curiosity to be a defining feature of our lives, we will find joy in learning new things without insisting that it be something we will use later.

I have written on this blog before about my chemistry teacher insisting that I take honors physics.  Had I possessed the view that I should only learn those things that would be part of my future job, I would not have taken honors physics, would not have had Mr. Barbara, and would not have found that I adored physics.  I mean, I loved it so much that I came home every day and did my homework immediately just so I could do more physics.  While I ultimately did make my love of physics into a career, it was because I found so much joy in it that I wanted to give that to others.  When my students leave me, I don't try to turn them all into engineers, but I do try to make it so they see physics in their everyday lives and feel joy in knowing how things work.

I want students to be lifelong learners because there is joy in learning.  That won't happen if we view it merely as job training.  It has been 11 months since I joined the YMCA, and I have spent the last year learning new things.  I've learned about weights and kickboxing and Zumba.  I've learned about indoor cycling, and yesterday I took a certification course to learn how to teach indoor cycling.  At the age of 47, I have found new sources of joy in my life because I was open to learning new things.  My granny had a sister named Grace, who took Greek at her local university when she was in her late 70s.  Her career was long behind her.  She took it because she wanted to.  She took it because learning gave her joy.  I want to be like Grace when I grow up.  I'm not talking about making things easy to make them joyful; Grace was learning Greek, for heaven's sake.  In fact, it is sometimes more joyful to learn something hard because it is more of an accomplishment.

Keep learning.  Teach your kids to keep learning.  Model a love of learning for your students.  Show them that there is joy in learning, no matter how old you are.  

Curriculum Isn't Everything

For the past two weeks, I have been teaching my middle students about the Apollo era, the causes of NASA's fatal missions, and discussing what it would take to put people on Mars.  It is my favorite thing to teach, and I have been doing so for 25 years.  However, if you open any published physical science textbook, you will not find this chapter.  It is not part of any physical science curriculum.  I added it during my first year because I had students who didn't know anything about the space program, and I wanted them to.  I asked the history teachers if they covered the space race, and they said that, because the '60s were covered so late in the school year, they were doing well to cover the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War.  Knowing I wouldn't be stepping on anyone's toes, I developed a short unit so I could share my passion for space exploration with physical science students.  It has become everyone's favorite unit, including mine.

This takes me back to my own middle school years and a history teacher I have written about before on this blog, Mr. Danny Watkins.  History was not my subject.  I didn't perform badly in it; I just didn't care that much about what I was learning.  There are excellent history teachers out there, but I had precious few of them.  My experience with history was mostly men with the first name "coach" assigning reading and questions and then sitting down at their desk to create plays for their teams.  Mr. Watkins was the opposite of that.  He absolutely loved sharing the stories of history and the people who made it.  There were specific people he was particularly inspired by, like Winston Churchill, Booker T. Washington, George Washington Carver, and Frank Boyden.  One story he particularly loved sharing was that of Tsar Nicholas I and his family.  I read the book Nicholas and Alexandra during my 8th-grade year, a book far above my level, for no other reason than Mr. Watkins loves it so much.  Nine years later, I was in an art museum in Tulsa, where a traveling exhibit of imperial art was being shown.  I had seen portraits of Catherine the Great, Faberge eggs, and cloisonne pieces.  It was all beautiful, but I hadn't really responded to much until we reached the last room of the exhibit.  There was a desk that had belonged to Tsar Nicholas on one wall.  On the other, was a large painting of the coronation of Alexandra and her crown.  I stood in that room, thinking about the letters Nicholas wrote from that desk and the grief Alexandra felt because of her only son's hemophilia and how desperate she had to be to allow Rasputin into her home.  Before long, I found that I had tears running down my face.  This was not a response to a piece of furniture and a jeweled hat; it was a response to the story that Mr. Watkins had shared and the depth with which it had stuck in my heart.  By the way, the name of the class I had Mr. Watkins for was North Carolina History.  Other than the reason we are called Tarheels and the fact that the governor's mansion used to be in New Bern, I really cannot tell you much about the history of NC.  The tests I took in Mr. Watkins' class were about NC History, but I studied the book for those and quickly forgot them.  The stories that stuck with me were those that Mr.Watkins told in class, and he didn't much care if they were part of the curriculum or not.

I'm not sure a teacher these days can be a Mr. Watkins.  If an administrator observed his class, I'm sure he would be dinged for not having an objective posted and not remaining focused on the standard for the day, ignoring the enraptured faces of students like me.  We have become so committed to covering curriculum and meeting standards that we have forgotten that one of our most important jobs as teachers is to inspire.  

Listen, curriculum matters.  Of course, it does, but it is not the only thing that matters.  It is entirely possible my students could solve Doppler Effect problems but not recognize it when an ambulance passes them on a street.  It is possible for them to state the definition of refraction but not notice its effects on a straw in glass.  I want my students to meet the standards and objectives I have for the course, or I wouldn't have chosen them.  But more than that, I want my students to see science in the world.  I want them to ride a roller coaster and know why they feel lifted from their seat at the top of the hill.  I want them to watch curling during the Winter Olympics and remember things like momentum and friction.  Even more importantly, I want them to ask questions for their entire lives.  Why can we see through glass windows and not wooden doors?  Why is it so hard for a gymnast to stick the landing?  How do we feel so light in a swimming pool?  That won't happen if I focus ONLY on curriculum.  

While you are making lesson plans, think about standards and curriculum, but also think about how you are going to make something matter.  Think about what made you love the thing you teach and how you might show them that.  It's easy in science because we can blow things up, but most of the inspirational teacher movies are about English, History, and Music teachers.  Stand and Deliver is about an AP Calculus teacher and the difference that was made in the lives of students because of a passionate teacher.  No matter what you teach, you can bring the awe and wonder of your subject to your students.  I hope my students will be excited by a rocket launch or marvel at the oxidation of pottery glaze in a kiln.  To do that, they have to see my excitement in those things too.

Keep the Questions Coming

I go to church downtown, so I park my car in a deck and then walk a block to the church.  Between the parking deck and the church building is a Marbles Children's Museum, and Sunday is a big day for them.  As a result, I see a lot of families with young children.  

This week, a family was slowly making its way down the stairs because their son (who appeared to be three or four) had short legs, and stairs are made for taller people.  He looked up at his dad and said, "Why are stairs hard?"  In the half block I walked behind them, I saw him point to a tree and say, "What kind of tree is that?"  He put his hand on a public scooter and said, "Is this the motor?"  He looked down at the gutter as he stepped off the cure and said, "Where did all the leaves come from?" and "What's that thing?" (There was a piece of metal in the pile of leaves, and I don't know what it was either.)  He pointed to a parked bike and said, "What kind of bike is that?"  He pointed at a helium tank and said, "How is there a gas station on the sidewalk?"  

This kid is my people.  

He's clearly part of a family that values his questions because his dad answered them all, even explaining the difference between the helium tank and "a gas station."  His older sister wasn't asking a million questions, but she didn't seem to think it was odd.  She just happily skipped in front of them.  Little kids want to understand the world, and they ask a ton of questions because they have no self-consciousness about not knowing.  

Most people as fewer questions as they get older (those of us that don't become science teachers), and there are a few reasons for that.

• We have answers to the most common questions, so we don't have to point to things on the street and ask about them.
• We have some prior knowledge about more things, so we can do a lot of asking and speculating inside our own minds, leading to asking fewer questions out loud.
• We stop caring about things that don't impact our wallets.  This one makes me the saddest, and you know it has happened when students start asking about when they will use something in real life.  We didn't care about that when we were young, and it only changed because an adult told us it should.
• We start to feel insecure about what we don't know.  This four-year-old didn't think he should already know the answers to the questions he was asking, so he had no fear in asking them.  As we get older, we're afraid we'll look dumb if we ask a question because we assume our peers already know the answer.
• We stop thinking of pure curiosity as a virtue.

Teachers, we can't control all of these factors, but we do have some level of control over our classroom environment.  

• The first and most important thing we can do is model our own curiosity.  When you wonder about something, wonder aloud.  Ask your students; they will love it if they know the answer to something you don't.  When they see adults being curious about something just out of interest, not because it makes them better at their job or makes them more money, it can keep them engaged in asking questions.  
• Help them to recognize that there are deeper questions to be asked about everything.  Just because a student has the answer to a surface-level question doesn't mean there is nothing more to be asked.  When I ask a question, so students like to give them the most basic and accessible answer possible.  My most frequent follow-up is, "So then how does that happen?"  They need to know that saying "A plant makes energy through photosynthesis" isn't the end of the story.  There are between 3 and 300 more questions to be explored beyond that level.
• Make it okay to "ask a stupid question."  Please don't tell them there is no such thing as a stupid question; it's just untrue.  However, there is nothing wrong with asking about something you do not know.  When other students react badly, point out that we all have things we don't know and that the only way to find out is to ask.  (Again, if you have modeled this in your own life, the atmosphere of your classroom will be different.  My middle school history teacher, Mr. Watkins, used to talk about things from the Mini-Page, a weekly insert in our local newspaper aimed at children.  When someone in our class asked why he would read the Mini-Page, he said, "because there are things in it that I didn't know before.")
• Explicitly state that curiosity matters.  I've always been curious, but perhaps the most important thing my 9th-grade science teacher, Mr. Sandberg ever said to me was, "This curiosity you have is an important part of you."  He made it clear that it wasn't just a good thing or a fun thing, but it was an important thing.  The fact that he said to me in the 9th grade mattered a lot because that is the time when the utilitarian shift tends to happen.

Ask questions.  Answer questions.  Respect questions.  Love questions.  Do whatever you can to keep the questions coming.

How We Learn - The Role of Curiosity

My 9th-grade science teacher was one of those people who could see a quality in you and make sure you understood that it was there for a reason. "This curiosity you have - it's an important part of you," is likely something he doesn't remember saying to me because it was such a casual statement on his end.  But for the awkward, nerdy, 14-year-old girl who looked up to him, it meant a lot.  Curiosity is a defining feature in my life, but to be told it was important really mattered.  What we now know from education research is that curiosity also matters for learning.

Last week, I wrote about one of my takeaways from the book How We Learn by Stanislas Dehaene, but I never put my highlighter down while reading the section on curiosity.  I may have highlighted more sentences than I didn't.  It can sometimes be difficult in educational research to know how to conduct scientifically valid experiments to confirm things that we intuitively understand to be true.  Does a teacher's enthusiasm make a difference in student learning?  Of course, we know it does, but how do we design an experiment for that?  What helps maintain student attention?  There's a lot that we know from experience, but how do you measure attention (or even decide on what markers mean a student is paying attention)?  Studies on curiosity are similar.  Because curiosity is an internal desire, it can be hard to measure it.  That said, where studies have been conducted, they have been universal in their conclusion.  A curious student learns more.  According to Dr. Dehaene, "Piquing children’s curiosity is half the battle. Once their attention is mobilized and their mind is in search of an explanation, all that is left to do is guide them."

I know of zero teachers (even the weirdest ones on Twitter) who wouldn't be on board with this thought; of course, if we want to know something, we will pay better attention and be more likely to remember the answer we were looking for.  The neurology is fairly simple, including the reward-feedback loop.  In the book, Dr. Dehaene puts it this way, “Memory and curiosity are linked - the more curious you are about something, the more likely you are to remember it . . . Through the dopamine circuit, the satisfaction of our appetite to learn - or even the mere anticipation of that satisfaction - is deeply rewarding. Learning possesses intrinsic value for the nervous system. What we call curiosity is nothing more than the exploitation of this value . . . Whereas other animals visit space around them, we explore conceptual worlds. We rejoice in the symmetry and pure beauty of mathematical patterns.”  He even refers to mirth as the result of learning something new that we wanted to learn.  

So, the question becomes how do we pique student curiosity?  That part is tricky because it is going to be different for different students, but there are a few aspects that are universal.  For example, students will not be made curious about things that are too simple, easy, or that they have done many times before.  As an 8th-grade teacher, I do not teach "the scientific method" for a lot of reasons, but the primary reason is that they have learned it so many years in a row that I would be starting the year implying that they won't learn new things in this class.  Equally, students are bored by things that are too difficult.  If it is so beyond their understanding that they can't even form a question, they will totally check out of the lesson (we've all been there, if we're honest).  Again, Dr. Dehaene addresses this sweet spot for curiosity.  “Between the boredom of the ‘too simple' and the repulsion of the ‘too complex,’ our curiosity naturally directs us toward new and accessible fields."  

This involves a bit of metacognition as we have to figure out what we know, what we don't know, and what we might wish to know.  Teacher questioning helps with this process as we ask questions that help them to realize they do know some things about a topic.  I start almost every chapter by having students share what they already know about the thing we are about to study (which is pretty easy in physics because we have all had interaction with electricity, sound, light, force, motion, etc.).  When we ask a question they don't know the answer to, they have found their knowledge gap.  It doesn't automatically make them curious, but they can't be curious without finding that gap.  The research shows we can shut down their curiosity by telling them too much too soon as we introduce a topic, so questions are likely more helpful than statements.  There is even an interesting study that concludes we should frame our lesson objective as a question rather than a statement (so, instead of posting "Today, we will describe the role of potassium and sodium in the nervous system," we would post "What is the role of potassium and sodium in the nervous system?"  While the research shows that it makes a huge difference in the outcome of learning, it isn't clear about why it makes so much difference.  I suspect it is because a question activates curiosity in a way a statement might not.

There is a move in education to teach students only about the things they want to learn (I alluded to the failures of that model in last week's post).  I understand the value of connecting our curriculum to student interests, and I do that as often as possible (again, easy to do in physics because the sports they play, the cars they love, the photos they post, and the electronics they play with are all based on physics).  What I object to is tailoring our curriculum to their interests because, when well-implemented, our curriculum can produce an interest they didn't know they had.  I have experienced this in my own life, not knowing that I loved physics when I signed up for the class and knowing by day 4 that it was what I wanted to do as a career.  I have also seen it in others a thousand times, the kid who didn't think he was good at math until one teacher showed him that he was, the student who grudgingly took their required art class and discovered a talent and passion for watercolors, and the student who rolls their eyes at the English teacher who says they are beginning their poetry unit only to discover that there are some poets that inspire them.  I didn't know I was interested in cognitive science until about 9 years ago when a friend gave me the book The Brain That Changes Itself; now I consider myself a brain-enthusiast.  There's a whole world to be curious about, and that can't happen if we aren't pushed beyond that which we already know we like.  

I don't have any research to back this up (if you know of a study, please share it with me), but I have a lot of anecdotal evidence that curiosity can be contagious.  If someone you like is really interested in something, you usually find yourself interested in it as well.  It's why we read books and see movies that our friends recommend.  It can be used in the classroom by teachers sharing their own questions with students.  I do this a lot.  When I teach light dispersion, one of the things we address is why the sky is red/orange in the morning and evening and why it is blue during the day.  When I finish teaching that, I pose the nagging question, "Why isn't it ever green?"  It seems like it should be green twice a day (especially because our eyes process green better than any other color), and I can't figure out why it isn't.  When I first pose the question, students assume I know the answer and am trying to get it out of them.  But I don't know the answer.  I also tell students about interesting things I have recently learned, books I am reading, and questions I want to explore whose answers aren't readily available on Google, even ethical questions about AI or recklessness.  I believe my curiosity will spark curiosity in them, at least in some of them (perhaps another teacher's curiosity will spark it in students that don't respond to mine).  

If this all feels a little overwhelming as a teacher at the start of the school year, let me give you this quote from the final pages of Dr. Dehaene's book.   “I hope that teachers will agree that their pedagogical freedom should in no way be restricted by the growing science of the learning brain. On the contrary, one goal of this book is to allow them to better exercise this freedom. Genuine pedagogical creativity can only come from full awareness of the range of available strategies and ability to choose carefully from them, with full knowledge of their impact on students."  There's not one way you HAVE to teach in order to take advantage of the results of these experiments.  They give you a menu of ways you CAN teach and the ability to analyze what fits best with your curriculum in your classroom with your students this year.  

Be curious; share your curiosity, encourage your students' curiosity.  Enjoy.

Well Meaning But Ineffective - Inquiry

I have spent much of the summer reading books on the science of learning.  This week, I finished How We Learn by Stanislas Dehaene, and I recommend it highly.  I always post quotes from these books on Facebook and Twitter, but this one had so many good thoughts, I think the most important ones got lost amongst the others.  For that reason, I decided I should reflect on some of them more thoroughly here.  I may do a few posts as there are parts of this book where I highlighted more lines than not.

First, let me tell you a bit about Stanislas Dehaene.  I first heard of him at a Learning and the Brain conference back in 2019, but I didn't get to hear him speak because he suddenly became ill and had to be replaced.  I had already downloaded his book Consciousness and the Human Brain, so I knew missing him was a loss (although the replacement speaker Dr. David Rose was awesome, so shout out to the person whose idea it was to sub him in).  Dr. Dehanene is a cognitive neuroscientist, specializing in numeracy, but he has also authored books on consciousness generally, learning as a whole, and learning reading specifically.

When I started reading this book, I was intrigued but also a bit intimidated because he uses the first quarter of the book to compare human learning to artificial learning, which was fascinating but also technical and difficult.  But once I got to Part 2, I couldn't get enough of this book.  Dr. Dehaene's passion for learning how we learn is evident, and he uses stories to illuminate what would otherwise be dry research.  He finally arrives at "the four pillars of learning" in the final section.  They are: Attention, Active Engagement, Error Feedback, and Consolidation.  At this point, I am fully on board and reading without pause.  

Then, I hit this sentence, and it made me sit up straighter, grip my highlighter and tear up a bit.  “The fundamentally correct view that children must be attentively and actively engaged in their own learning must not be confused with classical constructivism or discovery learning method-which are seductive ideas whose ineffectiveness has, unfortunately, been repeatedly demonstrated.”  

If that sentence didn't grab your heart like it did mine, it could be that you are not a science teacher who constantly fights the idea that as long as you have enough labs, kids will love and learn science while knowing that your students have never learned anything from a lab without your very explicit teaching preparation AND reflective follow up.  You don't constantly feel guilty about not doing enough labs because it is what other people think you should be doing even though you know it is rarely an efficient or deep way to get to deep scientific concepts.  Perhaps, you were a victim of constructivist theory as a student (did you get subjected to inventive spelling, inquiry-based science, or discovery math?) and still don't know how to do the things you were meant to figure out.  I was in a class that used Discovering Calculus, and I remember saying, "There's a reason it took from the beginning of time until Isaac Newton to discover calculus; how am I supposed to do it in a semester as a college freshman?  

Please don't misunderstand.  I believe in the elaborate encoding that comes from hands-on activity and demonstrations of scientific principles, but given the amount of time they take, I choose my lab experiments very carefully.  I choose ones that I can carefully and explicitly prepare students for (so it's not inquiry learning because I have told them what they are going to learn), that can be carried out without much technical difficulty, that I can meaningfully follow up on to ensure they have learned what I want them to, and that I can refer back to in multiple chapters (for retrieval and because they address more than one topic).  Otherwise, it is just activity for the sake of appearing active.  There just aren't that many that rise to the level of all those criteria (and if they don't, they don't deserve the class period it takes to carry them out plus the time it takes to prepare for and reflect on).  You are much more likely to be assigned a project in my class than a lab because there is more time for processing and guidance.

Back to Dr. Dehaene.  A paragraph or so after the sentence that stopped me in my tracks, he said, “When children are left to themselves, they have great difficulty discovering the abstract rules that govern a domain, and they learn much less, if anything at all. Should we be surprised by this? How could we imagine that children would rediscover, in a few hours and without any guidance, what humanity took centuries to discern?"  I took a moment to congratulate my college freshman self and then mulled over the phrase "abstract rules."  That is exactly why constructivism doesn't work.  They can observe the experiment (which has value), but they have no idea of why the experiment works because the concepts (especially in chemistry) are too abstract.  So, in a science class, where our job is to teach why things happen, we are seduced by the idea that they will figure it out if we merely show them what happens.  It doesn't teach them to "think scientifically," which is the well-meaning theory behind inquiry-based learning.  We are naturally curious, but we are not naturally scientists (which, again, is why it took from the beginning of time until Galileo to think of experimentation in spite of really smart philosophers observing and hypothesizing about the natural world).  We need to build on the past and "stand on the shoulders of giants," not hope they will develop scientific thought processes anew.  

I don't know how to address this in the teaching of other disciplines, but I know there is a lot of push for student-driven learning in all of them as though they know enough to know what they don't know and how to explore it for themselves.  This brings me to the final Dehaene quote of this post. “Perhaps the worst effect of discovery learning is that it leaves students under the illusion that they have mastered a certain topic, without ever giving them the means to access the deeper concepts of a discipline."  

• Should we make learning as relevant as possible to students?   Yes.
• Should we pique their curiosity?  Yes (and I'll write more about that next week).
• Should we work in choices where it makes sense to do so?  Yes.
• Should we help them to understand just how much more there is to learn than what there is time to fit into a school day? vYes
• Should we ask them what they want to learn and how they want to learn it and neglect our own professional judgment?  No.  That is educational malpractice.  And all the research says so.

Student Insight

I need to write about something that is NOT the Coronavirus.  Take a breather, and let me tell you a story about my physics students.

In my honors physics class, we read the book The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, a collection of speeches and essays by renowned physicist (and somewhat cult-figure) Richard Feynman.  When we started doing this, I decided on two things.

1. I didn't want to ask them factual questions about the book.  Rather, I wanted them to reflect on how some of the book's themes play out in the 21st century. 
2. I wanted these conversations to be public, so we use Twitter chats to hold our discussions.  With Feynman being such a well-known figure, I hoped that people would stumble upon the discussion and join in.  That's only happened once so far.  Because the questions aren't just about science, some of my colleagues have joined in, responding sporadically to insights about ethics or learning.

Some of the discoveries I have made as a result of doing this were planned.  Others were accidental.  I knew that if I asked the right questions, I could get deep reflection and insight from my juniors and seniors.  Some examples

• I gave them the Oppenheimer quote ""I am become death, the destroyer of worlds." Then, I asked, "Do you think he was overly dramatic, or was this the correct response?" There were some who interpreted it from a very 2020 perspective, feeling like he was fishing for people to tell him he was wrong. Others said they would have felt the same way, knowing they had invented something so destructive. Others pointed out that Feynman and many of his colleagues entered deep depression after the bomb was used.
• There is a story in the book where Richard Feynman is sent to Chicago to gather information but is not allowed to talk about his Top Secret work and was instructed to lie. I asked, "When he was sent to Chicago, he was instructed to lie in order to get information from people. This atheist said his conscience bothered him. What do you think of that?" While I expected their answers to discuss the ethics of lying and whether it is every okay. (Rahab lied to protect the spies and is praised in Scripture.  Christians lied to Nazis about the Jews they were hiding in their basements.)  I didn't expect an answer that led to the philosophical question of whether we, as humans, have a universal sense of right and wrong.
• Our discussion on the pros and cons of nanotechnology is too long to write about here, but it was quite interesting.
• Last week, I asked "Feynman says, “The imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man.” He gives a gravity example. What is something in nature that you find astounding because you could not have imagined it?"  I got answers ranging from Yosemite's cliffs to Auroras to snow hanging from tree branches to sunrises. One said that he couldn't wrap his mind around the massive nature of outer space.  One student even said golf courses and clarified that while they were man-made, they "derive their richness from what is already there on the land."
• I also posted, "Feynman observes that a roaring ocean is made of tiny particles all following patterns. How has God made it so that individuals (whether atoms or people) cause a massive outcome no one of them could on their own?"  Answers ranged from blood cells to armies to the wind.  

I didn't expect these exact answers, but I did expect that, if I posed the right questions, I could get deep thought.  What I stumbled upon was that it is a way to make connections on a non-academic level.

• The boy who provided the answer about Yosemite talks about Yosemite a lot.  He's a rock climber, and once he visited Yosemite, it became his dream to climb El Capitan.  I've learned a lot about climbing from him, and, while I'll never climb a rock, I love national parks so we have a basis to share.
• In the first chat we have, I post, "When Feynman describes how molecules make a catastrophe called fire, he is so joyful. Is there any learning that makes you feel joyful like that?"  My intent was that they connect the rest of what Feynman has to say to something they like (because, let's face it, they don't all have a consuming passion for physics).  What I realized the first year while grading these was that I now had a list of my students' passions.  Since physics relates to absolutely everything, I make a list and try to connect practice problems or concept illustrations to the things they love.  This is, of course, easier if they are passionate about cars, golf, or exotic animals than it is if they are interested in politics or economics.

In the past few years, I have found much joy in asking my students open-ended questions, in which the point is less about getting a "right" answer than an interesting train of thought.  What I most love asking is "What's your favorite . . .?  Explain why."  It could be about their favorite thing they have learned in this chapter or what they think is the most interesting thing about the human ear or who their favorite scientist is.  The answers they give to those questions are longer, more interesting, more amusing, and filled with far more information than the answers they give to the standard "explain how this works" questions (I do still ask those when needed because it doesn't make sense to ask them what their favorite thing is about how boats float or what's the most important part of the breathing process).  I find it even more valuable to do this with middle school students because it stretches them past memorizing in a way that doesn't seem scary.  (What 8th grader doesn't want to talk about their favorite things?)

Teachers, I know it can't be every question on every assignment, but try to find ways to allow your students to show their insight, not just their learning.  Even if it is only one question per chapter test, you will find great joy in grading them. 

(And, if I can make just one Coronavirus reference, during these next few weeks when we are all teaching online, these are ways to assess learning at a distance in a way that isn't possible to cheat.)

More Girls in STEM?

I am a woman who has loved science for as long as I can remember.  I wanted to be, at various times, an astronaut, a vet, a pharmacist, a science textbook writer, and a physical therapist.  I am a middle and high school science teacher.  I want you to understand that I am a person who cares about the future of science before I say what will most surely be inflammatory.

As a woman in STEM, I am tired of hearing how we "need more girls in STEM."  Keep reading because I'm going to make an important point that you are likely to miss if you make an assumption that I'm a sexist, self-hating, pig from that one sentence.

When we want to make a point, we tend to cite statistics.  "After all, numbers don't lie," we tell ourselves, even though we know that numbers can be interpreted in a variety of ways to confirm our biases. (I learned that in a math class, by the way.)  So, on days like International Women's Day, we read how horrible it is that only 28% of the jobs in STEM fields are held by women or that only 20% of engineering students are girls.  I was one of three girls in my graduating class in the department of physics and engineering, so we've come a long way since 1998. 

We use these numbers to represent that girls are being discriminated against, but we are inconsistent.  No one seems to mind how we treat boys who want to go into fields traditionally held by women.  Only 9% of nurses are men, and no one bats an eye over it.  Only 23% of teachers are men, and if you narrow the scope to elementary school, that number drops to 11%.  I've seen men discouraged from pursuing those fields, even treated like they were unsavory for doing so.  When I worked in child care, there was exactly one male who worked there, and he didn't stay long because the parents looked at him like a pervert.  We don't bemoan their discrimination.  We don't care.  (I can tell that there are a lot of boys who would benefit from having a great male teacher in the fourth grade.) 

I'm not against helping a girl who wants a STEM career.  I'm against the idea that we have to push that because of the statistics. We have to be for a different criteria than filling a certain number of positions being filled by a certain kind of person. 

I'm for everyone being encouraged to follow their curiosity and pursue their interests.  EVERYONE.  If you are a girl who is into science, I will encourage you to go for it and help you find resources to aid that exploration.  But guess what?  I'll do the same thing for you if you are a boy.  If you are a boy who expresses interest in education, I'm going to connect you with role models and recommend programs that will help you, but I would also do that if you were a girl.  Here's the thing.  What you do as a career should be entirely about your aptitude and your interest and should have nothing to do with your gender.  God has gifted you and prepared you for what He wants you to do

When we push gender-related programs, like those that push "more girls in STEM," we automatically set up an attitude of discrimination.  We should be fostering the passions of EVERY student by knowing who they are and what they care about.  It is our job as teachers to help them find and develop the gifts God gave them, not fill some slot we think they should have.  Listen to your students.  If you have students who love art, help them connect with the best art colleges and careers.   If you have students who love math, help them connect with the best math colleges and careers.   If you have students who show an interest in cosmetology, connect them with the best school you can find. 

If you have a girl with a passion for STEM, of course, you should encourage her, but it should be about her passion, not her gender.  If we make it about their passions and their skills, we will get the right people in the right jobs, which will benefit society.  If we make it about reaching some gender-based quota, we will have miserable people in jobs they don't care about.  If you push a girl into STEM when what she wants to go into something else, you haven't helped her; you've pushed your agenda.

More Girls in STEM?  No.  The Right Girls in STEM.

Try Something New

This weekend, I had the pleasure of watching my students perform in The Secret Garden.  While they all did a fantastic job, the amazing revelation was the 8th-grade girl playing Mary.  She embodied this character, projected, and engaged with the other actors like she had been on stage her whole life.  Here's the thing.  She just started doing theater last year.

What makes this remarkable is how rare it is to see kids pursue something brand new.  Most of the time, I see kids who have already decided they don't like things that they don't already do.  I'm not sure of the cause.  It would be easy to blame social media for increasing the chance of public embarrassment on a large scale, thus deterring them from wanting to do something they aren't already good at.  It would be easy to blame video games for the number of hours it sucks out of our lives.

While those are easy culprits to throw under the bus, I think it may have more to do with adults.  We tend to tell kids what to like and not like by what we do.  I have heard many parents tell kids that they don't like math easier and it's okay because they don't use algebra.  (STOP SAYING THAT!  YES, YOU DO!)  My school has had more than one chapel speaker who tries to get the kids on their side by telling the kids that they hate reading or history.  (Please, if you are ever invited to speak somewhere, don't go in and disrespect what they do there.)  We put kids into soccer when they are four and then tell them that they love soccer, even if they don't.  If a kid expresses an interest in art, we tell them that people don't make any money with it and discourage them from pursuing it in favor of STEM fields.  Don't get me wrong, as a science teacher, I'm thrilled that some of my students want to pursue science careers, but I would never try to dissuade them from pursuing an interest of any kind.

We have fallen into an interesting habit of telling kids they should follow their passion while simultaneously telling them what their passion should be or outright choosing it for them.  In doing so, we implicit;y send them the message that other things aren't worth their time, and they don't allow themselves to recognize that there may be passions they have not yet discovered.  Yet, there are many examples of people who accidentally find something they love just because they tried something new. 

A few years ago, I wrote about our Girls Varsity Basketball Team that was made up almost entirely of seniors who had excelled at other sports but never been basketball players.  Each one of them ended the season saying they would have done earlier if they had known they would love it so much.  I had no idea when I was a junior in high school that I would fall in love with physics during my senior year and want to make that my life's work.  If someone had allowed me to stay locked into only things I already knew about, I would not have found that.  Andrea Bocelli was a lawyer until he was 34 and then decided to pursue music.  Mary Kay was 45 when she decided to try her hand at business, and Vera Wang didn't open a bridal boutique until she was 41.  You don't know what you will like or hate until if you have given it an honest effort.

When you find yourself interested in something, don't talk yourself out of it.  Try it.  Take a class, learn from a youtube video, anything.  If you don't like it, you have wasted a bit of time and money, but you have still been enriched by having the experience.  If, as adults, we still have the potential to find new interests and develop new abilities, why would we ever discourage kids from trying something new?  Kids do not yet know whether they would like something if they tried it, so encourage them to try things.  Let them know that experiences are important, even if they don't end up making it their job or even taking it into their adult life.  I don't play the piano today, but I know I benefitted from the five years of lessons that I took (not to mention the clarinet I played in the school band for three years or the blast I had playing handbells at church).  There's more to the experience than the outcome.

Take a lesson today from my bright, happy 8th-grade student.  She decided to try something new, and she is very happy that she did.

Do Your Methods Match Your Mission?

Last year, I did a whole series of posts on my school's mission statement.  All schools have a mission statement.  All churches have a mission statement.  All businesses have a mission statement.  At this point in America, I think it is possible that all individuals have a mission statement.  As a reminder, the mission statement of GRACE Christian is

"GRACE Christian School is a loving community that spiritually and academically equips, challenges, and inspires students to impact their world for Christ."

Mission statements are good to have and to put on t-shirts and coffee mugs, but what is more important is to use your mission statement as a filter.  Do you take the time to ask yourself whether your goals, objectives, or even methods align with your mission statement?  I think most of us are good at making goals from it, but I'm not sure that most people filter our methods through it.

I confess that it took me until last year to ask myself that question.  I knew our school's mission statement and I was fully committed to it, but I don't know that I intentionally constructed my classes around it.  So last year, after deciding to be almost obnoxious about it, I set out some student goals based on the specific mission of my school.

Equip:  Make you the informed thinker you need to be to make good decisions.  Ultimately, I want my students to make good decisions.  Whether that is choosing the right classes to take or exercising integrity in difficult moments, students must be informed. 

I teach them science, but I also tell them as many things as I can about as many ways as God gives me.  I show them that I love art and literature because it shouldn't just be an English teacher thing.  If they are interested in something, I learn what I can about it.  From baseball to theology to music, if you are going to make wise choices, you must be informed.  I can't teach them everything, but I teach them as much as possible and model for them that I am always learning. 

Challenge:  Ask you to perform better than you think you can at things you don't think you are good at.  If there is anything that two decades of teaching have taught me, it's that kids are capable of more than they think they are.  I teach eighth grade, so they enter my class with seventh-grade skills.  They have to leave my class with high school skills so they will be ready to learn more deeply.  For that reason, I use a lot of class time training.  I don't give them a study guide.  I teach them three ways to make their own.  I don't provide a "word bank" for tests.  I advise them on how to create good flashcards for themselves.  I spend a lot of review time showing them how to eliminate wrong answers in multiple-choice questions, a skill they will need for at least the next four years and possibly longer. 

Many of my good students perform lower in the first quarter than they are accustomed to.  It frightens them, and they want me to go back to their comfort level.  Sometimes, their parents want that too.  It would certainly be easier to do so, but I know that isn't right.  We would never take a toddler who falls down after their first few steps to go back to crawling, and we should tell kids who fall at their first few self-improvement attempts to go back to their old ways either.  We should comfort, encourage, and support; but we should not allow them to revert to their old ways.

Inspire:  Ask you to look beyond the grade, the curriculum, and the tests to see what you can do with your education.  This is the part of the mission statement I know I cannot accomplish.  God inspires, and he uses the many teachers a child has (including academic teachers, parents, culture, coaches, and even friends) in their lives as tools. 

So many of us are focused on grades and how learning applies to a job that we forget the purpose of education.  It's nice that we can get jobs related to our education, but it isn't the point.  The point is that they become more human.  A robot can be programmed to perform a job task or given the knowledge (data) needed to complete a calculation.  Part of being human is interacting with other humans who are different than we are, people with different skills, values, and interests.  The multidisciplinary approach to education helps them become better at those interactions.  When I have
this conversation with students, I say, "What if the ONLY thing I could talk about was physics.  Would you want to spend time with me?"  Of course, the answer is always no.  What if scientists only married other scientists?  What a boring life that family would lead.  Being interested in things makes you more interesting.  It allows you to interact with more people.  It allows you to serve more people.  Don't lock yourself into one thing.

The Periodic Table's Sesquicentennial

Before you read any farther, just say sesquicentennial out loud.  It's a pretty fun word.  It can't quite top antepenultimate as my favorite, but it's up there.

Okay, moving on.  Sesquicentennial means 150th anniversary, and this year is the 150th anniversary of the Periodic Table of the Elements.  If you went to high school, you've seen one, but that isn't quite the same as appreciating it in all its glory.  I'm not sure I fully appreciated it until I had been teaching it for a few years.  Ready to nerd out with me a little.  Here we go.

Dmitri Mendeleev knew of only about sixty-seven elements and their masses.  The proton had not yet been discovered, so the number we now arrange the table by (thanks to Henry Mosley) did not yet exist.  Mendeleev wasn't the first to attempt to develop an organizational method for the elements.  He was just the first to be successful.  Your chemistry teacher may have told you that he dreamed the periodic table, and that's true.  People really like to focus on that part.  What you may not know was that he been working for three days with insomnia before a snowstorm forced him to stay home, which was when he finally fell asleep his unconscious brain was able to put the pieces together.

If you had a mean chemistry teacher that made you memorize the numbers on the periodic table (I'm sorry they didn't understand the stupidity of that), you may think the two numbers are the only information the table gives you.  While the atomic number (number of protons) and the atomic mass (items in the nucleus for individual atoms, the weight of a mole for samples) are important, they still don't tell you how amazing the arrangement of the table is.  Let's talk about families and periods.

Families are the vertical columns on the periodic table.  Everyone in the same family has similar characteristics.  Sodium, lithium, and potassium, all strip hydrogen from water molecules and then ignite the hydrogen.  They all bond with chlorine in a dramatic reaction.  All members of a representative family give away or take the same number of electrons when making an ionic bond, so you can know what charge it will have just be looking at the family it is in.  Helium, neon, and argon don't bond at all.  So if you know about one element in a family, you know a little something about all the elements in the family.  Periods are the horizontal rows of elements.  Every element in a row has the same number of energy levels for the electrons it holds.  As you go across a period, certain properties increase or decrease predictably.  Then, that property starts over again when you get to the next row.  So just by looking at whether an element is on the left or the right of a row, you know something about its size, its attraction for electrons, its metallic quality, even how much energy it would take to take an electron away from it.

If you have ever thought the shape of the periodic table was a bit strange, you might not have learned about the orbital arrangement of electrons.  See if this gives you any flashbacks:

The first two columns on the table represent the s orbital in each energy level, which can only hold two electrons.  The six columns on the far right represent the p orbitals in each energy level, which can hold six electrons.  Those ten short columns in the middle represent d orbitals, which you may have guessed, hold ten electrons.  Even those two weird rows on the bottom that we pulled out of position to save space.  Have you ever noticed there are fourteen elements in each of those rows?  Well, that's because f-orbitals hold 14 electrons.  Neither Mendeleev nor Moseley knew about energy levels, and yet it lines up perfectly.  Even alternative shapes to the table would reflect this because the periodic nature is what matters, not the specific shape.  Imagine these on the wall of your science classroom.

There are a lot more things that I won't bore you with, so let me put it this way.  If you had to write out the information you get about an element from the periodic table, you would need a book.  You couldn't write it all in one book.  You would need several books just to hold it all.  As my colleague, Jenny Bomgardner once said, "It's like all the world's knowledge on a sheet of paper."  We both know it's not ALL the world's knowledge, but it is an awful lot about every single element.

Mendeleev's greatest contribution was letting us know that we didn't know everything.  As I said earlier, the world only had knowledge of about 67 elements.  There are 92 elements in nature, so he was playing with only about two-thirds of the cards.  And, it wasn't like he knew about numbers 1 through 67.   The world had known gold (72) and mercury (80) for a long time, but they had not yet discovered silicon (14).  As Mendeleev was arranging the table, he left blanks where things didn't fit the pattern they should in a family.  He then predicted that an element would be discovered to fill that blank and predicted what's properties would be.  Most of his predictions were spot on.  Before you start thinking too highly of him, he was wrong about a lot of things.  He also predicted an element lighter than hydrogen (although to be fair that's because he didn't know about protons.  His story ends tragically; he lost his mind near the end and stopped believing in atoms altogether.  That doesn't change, however, the contribution he made.  We are still adding to the table today as we synthesize new elements, and the pattern he established means we know exactly where to place them.  The fact that the pattern still works even with elements that don't exist in nature shows just how well designed the table is.

The Interesting, Quirky Kid

When you teach, you meet a wide variety of people.  The Breakfast Club divided high school students into the criminal, the athlete, the princess, the basketcase, and the brain.  Anyone who has been in a real high school knows that list is just the beginning.  It doesn't include the theater kid, the artist, the computer kid, the cheerleader, the marching band kid, the car enthusiast, the mimic (that's the kid who takes on the interest of the people around him).  I even went to school with a girl who red books and openly laughed out loud at them while sitting with other people at the lunch table. 

Of all the types, my favorite is the quirky kid.  She's the one who defies category.  He's the guy with an abnormal hobby.  When you ask them what they want to be when they grow up, their answer is likely a career that you didn't even know existed.  These are the most interesting kids in your class, and it will benefit you to get to know them.

My first year, I taught a young man who rode bulls on the weekends.  I obviously know that there are people who do this, but I had never thought about how they got started.  It was a dangerous hobby for a freshman, but I never got tired of hearing him talk about it because it was just so interesting.  Ten years ago, I asked a parent what interest her son had, and she said he wanted to be a naval architect.  I had to ask what that meant.  It's a person who designs ships.  After that, I noticed that he was drawing boats in my class all of the time.  I tried to work boats into whatever problem I could. 

There's a seventh-grade student in my school, who passes me every day at the door, making some kind of strange sound and/or walking in some unusual way.  She wants me to guess what kind of animal she is.  I don't know if this is just for me or if she does this with others, but it's a pretty fun game.  Thursday, she was a bird, and by Friday, she had become a horse.  It'll be strange if she continues doing this as an adult, but for right now, it's how she feels she can connect with the world.

By the way, if you can, allow them to incorporate their interest into your class, you should.  If you are a math or science teacher, perhaps you can include their quirky interests into problems you are working on in class.  For example, a problem could read, "A naval architect wants to find the volume of a boat . . ."  This not only signals the quirky student that you care about his interests, but it has the added benefit of opening up the world to the other students.  They probably don't know that job exists, and it may help them to know how many career options there are.  If you have projects that allow students to choose their own topics, encourage your quirky kids to choose something interesting.  You are going to have three presentations on the physics of sports, so how great is it when someone decides to talk about flying fish? 

The quirky kids make the most interesting adults.  Don't miss the opportunity to know them while you can. 

Let Your Students Teach You

Fifteen years ago, I had an idea.  Fortunately, I had a chemistry class that year that was game for me trying things out with them.  Together, we formulated what became the "Free Choice Project," so named because students could make a number of choices.  They can decide if they want to work alone or in a group.  If they wish to work in a group, they can choose their partners.  They can choose their topic, and they can choose just how deeply to delve into that topic (i.e. go deeply into a small aspect or cover a lot of the surface).   With the exception of the end date, they set their own timeline based on their own schedule and work preferences.  During the three months, they update me once per week on the progress of their work and whether or not they are keeping to their own timeline.  They are required to have a demonstration, but that it is mostly up to them how they do it (within the bounds of reason, legality, and safety). 

As a result of this project, I was asked questions that year that I had never been asked before.  One group, whose topic was fireworks, came to me and said, "Would it be alright if we brought a small amount of gasoline and a blowtorch?"  Questions like these took some mental navigation, but they showed that the kids were going to try some big things.  I'm on board with finding ways to make that happen whenever possible.

This project went well, so the following year, I implemented it in my physics class (mostly the same students, so I knew they could handle it).  This project is now done by three different teachers in my school across all of the levels of chemistry and physics.  The ones for my class have been presented for the last two weeks, and they are two of my favorite weeks of the year.  There are at least three reasons these are my favorite weeks.

1.  The variety of projects is staggering:  In the past two weeks, as 42 students have presented their projects, I have seen presentations ranging from the buoyancy boats and flight of airplanes (both real and paper) to knife throwing and the physics behind musical instruments.  One day included dog agility (with demonstrations from their actual dog) and flying fish, complete with a scale model of one to illustrate their fine construction.  I even watched a presentation on the physics of feces.  (You did, in fact, read that correctly; I had a project that explained why there are different sizes, colors, and consistencies to our daily bowel movements and how they are influenced by environmental conditions.)

2. They go big:  I already mentioned that in the first year, my students asked me things I had never been asked before.  That's never stopped.  When I introduce this project to my students, I always include the line, "Don't assume something can't happen until you ask."  There have been a few things over the years that were simply too dangerous to do (and I had to put some rules around the demonstration on the feces project), but most of what students want to do can be done with the proper planning.  The first presentation this year was from a pair of students who built a boat from PVC, plywood, and a tarp.  It was 24 feet long, requiring a boat trailer to put it in the lake and drone footage of their maiden voyage.  On Tuesday (or the next day it isn't raining in Raleigh), one of my students will actually fly a plane over our parking lot.

3.  I get to learn:  If you are a regular reader of this blog, you know that I believe strongly in modeling curiosity for students.  One of the main reasons I went into education is that I want to instill a love of learning in students for more than just the chapter or semester.  I want them to love knowledge and the act of acquiring it.  I want them to look at the world and say, "How does that work?" and then set about finding out.  This project allows them to see me as a learner while they teach the class.  I ask questions while they present, not for the purpose of evaluation, but for curiosity.  One of my favorite things about the presentation on flying fish is that it is a topic no one has ever chosen before, so I got to learn many things I didn't know before.

I'm sure this would look different in non-science classes and at different age levels, but if you have an opportunity to work topic choices, reading choices, writing choice, etc. into your classes, I highly recommend it.  While I am not a believer in purely personalized education, I am thoroughly on board with working appropriate levels of choice into your structure.  You'll be pleasantly surprised at what most students do when given the opportunity.

Thanksgiving Post 4 - Mr. Barbara

When you teach, you often get asked who was "the one."  People want to know who the teacher was that inspired you to be a teacher.  You may be able to tell from the series of posts this month that I didn't just have one.  I had many teachers in my life that pushed me along the way and inspired me in different ways.  (I haven't even touched on the English teachers who made me love literature and taught me to organize my thoughts in writing.  I haven't mentioned a favorite math teacher who showed me the magic of fractals.)  God definitely blessed me with "the several."  However, there is one teacher who beyond doubt is the reason I teach physics today.  My physics teacher, Mr. Jim Barbara, is the physics teacher everyone should have had.

Let's start with this astounding fact.  My brother liked him.  My brother is not a fan of teachers.  He tolerated their presence in his life at best.  When I got my schedule for my senior year and saw Mr. Barbara's name on it, my brother said, "You'll like him.  He's crazy."  That may not sound like a high praise, but from my brother, it is a glowing recommendation.  From the first day of school, it was clear that Mr. Barbara loved physics.  I mean, he loved it, and he obviously loved teaching it.  I'm not sure I ever had a teacher who seemed to be having more fun than Mr. Barbara.  I'm sure you already know this, but when the teacher is having fun, the kids learn more (A thought I keep in mind while I'm teaching as well).

Mr. Barbara had more energy than a person can handle while standing still, so he was always bouncing around the room.  He would be in the middle of a sentence and run into the storage room to get something to illustrate his point, emerging from the storage room still talking.  He just had more to say and show us than he could contain.  I couldn't get enough, and since I had him the last period of the day, I would often stay for a few more minutes to ask him more questions (I didn't stop being a demanding learner after Mr. Sandberg, you know).

Although Mr. Barbara and I had different worldviews, I felt that he respected mine (or at least my devotion to it).  When he discovered the internet (This was 1994, and he was the first person I ever heard use the word internet.), he actually took the time to tell me about "religious things" he had seen on it.

Because of Mr. Barbara's energy and response to my innate curiosity, I devoured physics.  I went home at the end of each day and did my homework in reverse class order so that I could do my physics first.  I would be sitting at a concert and be really excited that I knew how the microphones worked.  I would watch a play and wonder about the physics behind getting the sets to move.  This was possibly also the first time I understood that math described the function and relationship of things.  I had been able to do math, but I had not understood its purpose until Mr. Barbara connected it to physics.

I was a college freshman when I found out that Mr. Barbara was leaving the teaching profession for the world of computer networking.  I wrote him a letter, telling him that while I knew he didn't owe me an explanation, I wanted one anyway.  I'm sure he enjoyed his career in computers, but the world of education suffered a great loss that day.

When people tell me they don't like physics, I tell them they didn't have the right teacher.  The teacher is important in every discipline, but in a subject like physics, it is essential that you have someone who can show you the bigger picture and reveal "the awesome" that lies behind the work.  Mr. Jim Barbara did that for me, and for that and all his energy and love, I am thankful.

Learning and the Brain Conference - Reaching for Greatness - Sunday

Keynote 6 - Sir Ken Robinson - You, Your Child, and School:  Teaching to Their Talents, Passions, and Potential
(Disclaimer of bias:  I adore Sir Ken Robinson.  I have zero ability to be objective.  I will gush.)

There are groups all over the world having this conversation - about how we develop systems of education that are faithful to the talents of our children.  Around the world, this is happening in the face of a political headwind.

We all have some deep talents, and there is a need for education to develop them and provide access to them.

Politicians of all parties seem to take the view that education is a form of preparation for something that happens later on.  It's like a holding camp for the jobs market.  This is how they became so focused on the need to raise academic standards and lead to the downgrading of vocational programs.  Society depends on people pulling on the rope together, but our education systems have come focused on competition for political reasons.

"I'd rather have an electrician rewire my house than a man with a PhD in electrical engineering."  The unemployment rate would be lower if we didn't tell kids they had to reach a level above of what they want to do to contribute to the world.

"If you design a system to promote certain abilities and downgrade others, don't be surprised when that happens."

All grandparents think that their grandchild is the smartest, most beautiful, wonderful child that ever was born.  However, like every other child, each is a human being, who grows and depends on resources to live.  As humans, we have curiosity and have desires to create culture and change the world rather than adapt to it.

Speaking multiple languages doesn't mean you are linguistically gifted.  It has to do with your background and environment.  There is a natural capacity that the environment develops.  Nobody teaches you to speak.  You couldn't teach it if you wanted to because you don't know how you do it either.  They learn to speak because they want to and because they can.  Learning is natural.

Learning is the natural process of acquiring new skills and understanding, and it is a gift of nature (God).

We have education systems because
- there are things that are important to us culturally and want to make sure kids don't miss them.
- there are some things we want kids to learn that are to difficult to learn left to their own devices.

A school is a community of learners, where people come together to learn with and from each other.

Video showing extreme enthusiasm - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzry8ATXvX0&disable_polymer=true

All kids love to learn, but many have a problem with education and school because of the pressures inherent in the system that have been caused for political reasons.  Humans have a sense of enthusiasm and enchantment in discovery and learning.  That joy of learning should impel learning.

We fall for the lie that if you do well on tests you will get better jobs and live happier lives.  It used to be true, but it is not anymore.  We need forms of education that fit the way the world really is.

Technology has utterly transformed every aspect of childhood, from work to play.  Kids are rarely outside.  By the time a child is 7, he has spent two years in front of a screen and one year of that time alone with the screen.

After contracting polio, he was sent to a special needs school for the physically disabled.  He was at school with people who had cerebral palsy, partial blindness, heart problems, etc.  None of the children thought anything about it.  They didn't see each other in terms of disability.  A boy with CP sat next to him who had very clear thinking, but the lack of muscle control kept him from speaking well.  He wrote with his feet and had excellent penmanship.

Reflecting on his childhood as he was writing recently, he had this thought.  "If you have a narrow view of ability, you have a broad view of disability.  Our education systems are structured around a narrow view of ability."  People probably have abilities that you don't notice just because you aren't looking for them.  We have to broaden our view of ability, intelligence, and creativity rather than compliance and linear skill development.

Capacity is different from ability.  You may have the capacity to play the cello, speak multiple languages, or be a master of calligraphy but not have the ability to do it because no one ever taught you.  If you don't find the thing you love and are good at, you will get through the day; but you won't really enjoy it.

There is a difference between physical energy and spiritual energy.  You can be exhilarated in your spirit while being physically exhausted when you are doing something you love.  You get energy from doing the things you love.  People are like that too. There are people whose energy you sync with, and you fall in love with them.  You just love being with them.  There are people drain the energy from you.

Paul McCartney and George Harrison's music teacher didn't think either of them had any particular musical ability.  He had half the Beatles in his class and missed it.  Elvis wasn't allowed in the glee club because they said he would ruin their sound.

"The aim of education is to enable students to understand the world around them and the talents within them so that they can become fulfilled individuals and active, compassionate citizens."
(Personal note:  This is a secularized statement that perfectly aligns with the GRACE Vision Statement:  Students at GRACE Christian School will be grounded in God’s Word and challenged to achieve academic excellence as they prepare to use their gifts and abilities effectively to follow God’s plan for their lives.)

Human talent is highly diverse.  Life is organic, not linear.  Every life is unique and unrepeatable.  We need a broad enough curriculum to let them find their talents.  (I have never met anyone who doesn't have special needs.  There are just some that are more obvious.  It's in the nature of human beings to have special needs.)


"To be born at all is a miracle, so what are you going to do with your life?" - Dahli Lama

Every one of us bears the imprint of humanity, but we all bear it differently.  People settle for too little.  At a time when we are better off than any other time in history, the most prevalent condition among people is depression.  We must create conditions for human growth.

You can raise the value of education without raising the status of teachers.  Politicians are focused on the curriculum rather than the teachers.

Wikipedia shows us that knowledge is a shared fabric and shows what people can do when they collaborate.  There's never been anything like it.

"I don't know.  I've never thought about that.  What do you think?" - Dahli Lama  (Great teachers are great learners, and they ask others to teach them.)

Concurrent Sessions C
Part 1 - 10,000-Hour Myth: Lessons From Child Prodigies (Young Children) - Ellen Winner, PhD

The Anti-Talent View 
- "Every child is born with the capcity for becoming richly musical so long as he or she is brought up properly.  There is no inborn talent for music ability." - Sinichi Suzuki
- Ericsson believes that deliberate practice can lead to high achievement in any domain.  It must be designed to improve performance, structured, effortful, and motivate by improvement, not enjoyment.
- Ericsson's study was based on 40 people divided into 4 groups.  Because the highest two groups practiced more than the bottom two groups, it was concluded that there was a direct correlation between practice and expertise.  Correlation is not causation, and the method is flawed scientifically.  Perhaps innate proclivity (talent) motivates more practice.

Evidence for Drawing Talent: Early Skill and Rage to Master
- Practice is necessary, but it is not sufficient for greatness.  There are individual differences innate to the human being. 
- Prodigies are precocious and learn rapidly.  The come to you already with greater skill.  You can't tear them away from their domain.  They have an intense desire to master that skill.  They tend to make discoveries on their own with little scaffolding from adults.
- Realistic drawing studies of young children show early skill is shown prior to practice in some kids.

These were drawn by two different 3-year-olds.

These are drawn by the same child as he aged.  The first one was at 4 years, 7 months.  The others were drawn at 6.

These were drawn by the same child at 3, 4, and 6.





Experimental Evidence for Talent
- To sight-read music, while playing the piano, you must look at the notes ahead while playing the current notes.  This involves working memory.  Experiments measured working memory in children using span tests.  It was found that deliberate practice led to better sight-reading skill but that working memory predicted sight-reading skills regardless of the amount of deliberate practice.  Therefore, working memory can limit ultimate attainment.
- Gobet and Campitelli studied 104 chess players.  Assessed the deliberate practice hours and whether they had reached Grand Master level.  They found that deliberate practice accounted for 34% variance in national rating.  In the 34 that had achieved Grand Master level, the average practice time was about 11000 hours, but the range was from 3016 to 23608 hours.  Some in the study spent 25000 hours without reaching Grand Master level.
- Deliberate practice is harder to measure in some fields than others.  
- One of the problems with the deliberate practice studies is that they are looking at people who are already elite.  You need a random sample to get an accurate view.

Is Talent in Drawing a Splinter Skill?
- Prodigy study: Drake and Winner - 12 drawing prodigies who achieved realism 2 years ahead of their peers were compared to a control group of typical drawers.  They were given IQ tests and visual-spatial tests.  IQ was not correlated to artistic skill.  There were two areas in which the artists visual-spacial skills were better or faster, but not all.  They did not find the underlying core capacity that might lead to realistic drawing talent.


Potential Dangers of the Anti-Talent View
- Drive and talent are associated, not learned.  
- Parental pressure cannot replace or overcome rage to master.
- If the child doesn't achieve, the implication is that the child just didn't work hard enough.

An argument among attendees about whether gifted kids could be gifted in domain-specific or domain-general areas.  Suggestions that parents might not be able to influence because of kids resistance, so a parent could enlist a peer as a stealth strategy.


Part 2 - Fantastic Failures: How Learning from Great Minds Can Help Students Reach Their Potential - Luke Reynolds, PhD

- We are so deeply interested in our students' success that we might be failing them.
- When a student fails, how do you respond?  You should help them figure out how to go deeper and examine the causes.
-  Told a story about a movie making him believe that people who drove vans were killers.  Kids can get wrong ideas in our head without even knowing it.  It is sometimes necessary to unlearn things that we have deeply ingrained in our minds.
- "I want you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand.  It's when you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through, no matter what." - Atticus Finch
- Start with your passion and what causes a creative burst, and you will walk right into any standard a state can devise.  If you start with the standards, you might not ever get through to the passion.
- For the kid who feels like they don't belong, the goal of education is telling them that they do belong.

- Christopher Reeve's wife gave him the will to live after his accident when she said, "You're still you, and I love you."
- Charles Dutton took a book of African American plays into solitary confinement with him while he was in prison.  He said "I found my humanity in that cell and I was a changed man when I got out."  He asked the guards if he could start a theater group in prison and kept asking until they let him do it.  Upon release, he went to Yale and then Broadway, movies, and television.  Perhaps, if he had read these plays and gotten him involved in acting in school, he might not have ended up in that cell.
- JK Rowling was rejected by 12 publishers.  They thought Harry Potter was too weird a concept and didn't know how they would market it.  The agent who took her on told her children's books don't make a lot of money.  Bloomsbury's editor brought it home planned to reject it as well, but her daughter started reading it.  She told her mom, "If you don't publish that book, I'll never speak to you again."  

- You should have high standards for all kids, but you have to walk through it with them through the context of their life.  Join them where they are to get them to the standard.
- How do you want to be measured?  When kids talk about you ten years from now, what do you want them to say?  Measure others in that way, too.  
- Don't get so distracted by data that you forget the authenticity of learning.  It's not always measurable.

- If you can find a way to make a paper or speech on something a kid likes, you can accomplish the same skills without making them hate or fear it.  Find ways to reduce pressure on kids.  
- When you ask kids to tell you a story, they don't get scared about public speaking.  They are achieving all the elements you would have on your rubric, but there's no fear and loathing because they don't see it as a big deal. (Personal Note to Kellie: I will change my rubric a bit for next year's element speeches.  On the delivery part, I will change PVLEGS to how natural the delivery is to encourage them to be themselves or personify the element naturally.)
- You can reach any standard with creative methods.  If you are with your kids in the store, and you need 11 things (standard), you can say to your kids, "Aliens are coming to destroy the earth.  These are the 11 items we need." (method)  The more creative the method, the less pressur the kids will feel. 

Concurrent Sessions D

Part 1 - The Science of Innovation: Overcoming Obstacles to Creativity in Your Classroom - Anthony J. McCaffrey, PhD

All his students have been diagnosed with some sort of learning impairment.  

uPuzzles (Universal puzzles) can be adapted to any subject matter.

Show a doodle and ask what they see.

When asking people to solve a puzzle, it is difficult to get people to break out of the common use of an object to see how else it could be used.  Asking students to break those objects down into descriptions of their parts might help them see it in a different way.  

When asking people to design something new, they often get fixed on making variations to already established things.  If you are asked to design a new candle, you will probably only change color, size, scent, or shape.  You should focus on what other people have overlooked.

Design puzzles in such a way that the solution includes a feature that is commonly overlooked.

The brain hates nonsense.  It wants to make sense of what it sees and hears.  Nonsense makes the brain work hard.  Sometimes it needs clues, which is why it often becomes clear when someone else says what it is.  

Three degrees of separation among concepts.
Example: Brick and Banana - A brick can be used to make a building.  A supermarket is a kind of building.  Supermarkets sell bananas.  You can do this with vocabulary words in any subject (e.g. Mitosis and Basketball)

Noun-Sense (leads to metaphorical meaning)
Take any two nouns and have students tell what they could mean. (e.g. Diamond messages, Stake puddle, Dictionary treatment, Jello marriage, Drama mitosis)

Memes and Themes
Show a common meme and have kids write the words based on the material.

Strange Line
Give students a strange sentence (He met himself just yesterday.) and ask them to come up with the scenario.  When you present a text, before reading it, give students an interesting line.  Ask them what they think it means with no background or context. (To be or not to be.  That is the question.)  Then, when they are reading, they can find out what it really means.  

Complete the Famous Saying
Ask not what your country can do for you . . .
One small step for man . . .
Then, compare their answers to the real answer.

How did that happen?
Give two unrelated sentences. (The king is dead.  The evergreen trees are flourishing.)  Ask students to give a narrative chain of events to get from one to the other.  If you do it in history, you can use something like "Chauffer takes a wrong turn.  Sixteen million people died."  They fill in the details of how WWI started.  In Biology, you could use "The sun is shining.  People can breathe."

Making Headlines
Give a news story or historical event.  Have kids write the headline.  You could then look at real headlines from the time.

Group Creativity - Brainstorming in groups is not very effective.  Extroverts dominate, and they speak differently depending on who is in the room that they want to impress or don't want to be embarrassed in front of.  Brainstorm alone first.  Come together to share ideas.  Don't brainstorm together.

Shoevolution
Give students a collection of pictures of shoes.  Ask them to design a new shoe with aspects of two others.  Show the new shoes as a new collection of pictures.  Then, have them do it again with the second set of shoes.  Discuss adaptations.  

Brainswarming
Put goal at the top and resources at the bottom.  Figure out where the things can come together to find the solution.

Automaticity is the enemy of creativity.  It is an important neural process for everyday living, like why you can sit in a chair without fear, but it stops you from having new ideas of what to do with that chair.  To overcome automaticity,