Traditions Communicate Values

I am writing this on Easter Sunday, and this year, I am in a liturgical church for the first time.  Tradition and ceremony are the bread and butter of the liturgical church all year, but during Holy Week, from Palm Sunday to Maudy Thursday to Good Friday to Easter, Anglicans are at steroid levels of tradition in which every moment, color, and piece of fabric are symbolic and meaningful.  I have loved every minute of it, and it reminds me that traditions communicate values.

Some families have holiday traditions, like reading from Luke or attending church services on Christmas Eve, communicating that they care deeply about keeping the birth of Jesus at the center of Christmas.  Non-religious families may read "Twas the Night Before Christmas," showing that they value time with family sharing a story they have loved.

Even on this blog, I have a tradition.  Every Thanksgiving, I post about educators who have formed my life as an educator, from my own middle and high school teachers to my current administrators to my group fitness instructors at the Y.  This yearly practice reflects my penchant for reflection and gratitude.  

If there is any industry in the world that participates in tradition, it is education.  Schools have dozens of traditions.  There are the obvious, holiday concerts, spring musicals, and graduations.  There are traditions for the first day of school and the last day of school.  Some go back for generations.  

At my school, we have some special ones.  For example, the night before the first day of school, parents of seniors come and decorate their parking space with chalk.  We have a Grandparents' Day celebration, which, even though it has changed somewhat over the years, has been consistently happening for over 30 years.  These communicate that we value the families our students come from and their participation in our community.  We have a high school spiritual retreat, called Ignite, every year and weekly chapel services, communicating to our students that we care about their spiritual formation.  We have an annual basketball game in support of the Kay Yow Fund and a number of yearly service projects, communicating our value of service outside the walls of our school.  And my favorite meeting of the entire year is the last one teachers have before we check out for the summer.  It's called "The Shout Out Meeting," and I consider it sacrosanct.  There is nothing like that meeting to communicate our care for each other as human beings, and it is a lovely way to end the year.

We are heading into the part of the year with more traditions than any other.  What traditions does your school have?  Why do you do them, and what values do they communicate?  Are they values you want to communicate?  If not, is it worth doing or should you replace this tradition with something new?  It matters and should be thought about carefully because, as writer Will Durant said, "We are what we repeatedly do."

It Should Keep Getting Better

Projects - Love them or hate them, but you will have them.  This is especially true in science.  There are some concepts that simply must be learned by doing, not to mention all the non-academic learning that comes from projects (which I should write a post on in the future because it is so important).  Because projects matter so much, it is important that we use reflective professional judgment to decide how students can best use their time rather than throwing every good idea we have at them, overwhelming them with work.

When deciding on whether to do a new project, tweak an old one, or keep it exactly as it was this year, there are some questions you need to ask yourself.
1.  What is the academic objective?
2.  What is the "other" objective?  (This could be social, behavioral, or even spiritual)
3.  What are they learning from this project that they cannot learn by doing it some other way?
4.  If retooling a previous project, what can I do to reduce confusion or increase efficiency?  What did someone do last year that I can incorporate this year?

After asking those questions, you may reach one of three conclusions about your project.

1. It should be dropped altogether as it has become a Grecian Urn.  If you don't have time or inclination to read the excellent Cult of Pedagogy post about Grecian Urn projects, here's the summary.  A Grecian Urn is any activity whose time and effort are disproportionate to the learning outcomes.  Something might be fun, but if it is taking days of class time, it should also be rather meaningful.  If it is not, drop it or give it to kids as an optional at home (extra credit if you believe in that sort of thing) activity.  If it is that fun, they'll want to.  If they don't, it probably wasn't as fun as you thought.

2.  The project should stay exactly as it is.  I'm going to suggest that this particular conclusion is rare.  It is difficult for me to believe your project is perfect exactly as is and that making changes could only do damage to the result.  Some projects are classic traditions that everyone should do (e.g physics egg drop project) because it unites us as learners across generations, but that doesn't mean those projects shouldn't change with technology or renewed priorities.  Before you settle into this conclusion, give it some serious thought.

3.  Tweak the project.  I submit to you that this is going to be the answer about 75% of the time.  If you are a creative and interesting teacher who cares enough about your skills to be reading education blogs, you probably had a good idea.  The process of reflection should allow you to identify what was really good about that idea and what needs to be changed.  This may happen only a couple of times, or it may happen every year of your time teaching a course. 

An example will likely help, so let me tell you about a project in my physics class that used to be called "The Electricity Project."  Warning: It plays out over multipl years, so it is long.

I have a healthy respect (that sometimes rises to the level of fear) for electricity.  It's one of the few things in my home I won't tackle on my own.  I don't know what caused this in me, but I don't want to pass it on to my students; so fifteen years ago, I started assigning a project in which they simply had to do some electrical circuit building (series, parallel, and combination circuits were my only requirements).  Many of them built a model of a house and lit each room.  Some built models of car lots or airports and lit each car or plane in series but the runway or lot lights in parallel.  These were all fine and accomplished the instructional objective "recognize the three types of circuits" and my personal behavioral objective "don't be afraid of 9V batteries."  This was fine for a time, and the kids enjoyed it.  They were also nice to have at student showcase nights.

Seven years ago, two students asked if they could do something that was electrical but didn't fit the project instructions.  If you teach high school, you know why I heard this with a skeptical ear at first.  Then, they proposed their idea.  They wanted to build an electric guitar from scratch.  "Umm, that's the coolest thing I've heard.  Yes, of course, you can do that."  I changed the rubric, not just for that year but for the future.  Instead of "build a model with circuits," the requirement became "build a functioning electrical device."  It still fulfilled the objectives the previous version had, but you wouldn't believe the difference in creative projects I got.  I had students who built games that would allow a bell to ring or light to come on when you got a correct answer.  I had some fun electrical versions of tic-tac-toe.  A student attempted to build a theremin.  I even got a Jacob's Ladder and a tiny rail gun that fired paper clips one year and a Tesla coil that had to be operated outside the next.  Because they were so interactive, we had a day of electrical fun, setting them out all over the room and inviting people to come and play with them. 

Four years ago, our school started really pressing in on the idea of Challenge Based Learning.  What would kids do if we took the constraints off and gave them a real-world kind of problem?  Knowing that the addition of another project would be burdensome to all involved, I brainstormed with our technology coach about how I might adjust an already existing project to become challenge based.  I decided on the electricity project.  Given how many people around the world have limited access to electricity, that seemed an ideal problem to solve with their knowledge of physics.  Also, at that time, our IT director was a former missionary to Haiti, where he had his own challenges with keeping electricity consistent in his home.  "Out with electrical device building . . . In with electrical problem solving," I thought.  I don't have time to tell you about the epic failure we had in the first year of this project, and I've already written about it, so read that here.

The next year, as I reflected on the project, I decided that clearer instruction was needed.  Perhaps I had taken the challenge based learning tenant that the teacher shouldn't have an end in mind a little too seriously.  I assigned groups and adjusted directions but had essentially the same project (check here for those adjustments).  Things were better but still not what I was hoping for (I've blogged about this a lot, apparently - see here for that year's result).  I wanted some real ideas, not just windmills.  The next year, we began our year with brainstorming groups in teacher meetings.  If you had an idea but needed input, you presented it to other teachers (mostly outside your own area).  Two teachers said, "It sounds like your idea is a little too hypothetical.  What if you gave them a real place?"  When we began brainstorming sessions last year, I was astounded by the difference that made.  Suddenly, I heard them taking weather into account because "you can't have solar panels in a place with sandstorms all year."  They were discussions about how difficult it would be to find diesel fuel in their particular part of the world or whether it was even windy there.  The fact that they were researching the resources of the area brought this project so much closer to what I envisioned.

Then, the biggest change happened quietly and almost accidentally.  The group that was assigned to Yemen came to me and said that the biggest problem with their lack of electricity was that they had so little clean water.  "Can we build a solar-powered water pump?"  As with the electric guitar, I didn't want to say no to a good idea just because it didn't fit what I had in mind.  Of course they could build a solar-powered water pump.  Aside from the atrocious spelling in their video, this was the best project of all the groups and the one people talked about the most.  They were compelling and knowledgeable and, most of all, invested in their solution.  This challenged me to change this project once again.

I consulted with our current tech coach about broadening the project.  Instead of focusing on electricity, I would assign the area.  Then, they had to decide what was the most critical challenge before them that could be addressed by physics/engineering.  Not knowing what they would decide, I wasn't sure building something was practical, so he suggested grant-style presentations with PSA videos.  Yes, this was coming together.  Of the 8 groups, six said lack of access to potable water was the biggest need in their area, one said flooding led to disease and water problems, and one said sanitation was an issue (because they had garbage and raw sewage in their streets).  In the six groups that addressed water access, there were six different solutions.  This showed me that they did, in fact, research what made the most sense for that country.  I was so proud of their results, and we got great feedback from those who attended the forum.  This was finally the challenge based learning project I wanted it to be.

You may have noticed that the objectives had changed.  No one built anything that had to do with circuits.  I accomplished that objective in one day of handing out 9V batteries, wire, and Christmas tree light bulbs with the instructions to "play and tell me what you learned" after a day of teaching about the different circuits.  That was a memorable day as one group pretty much tased themselves for twenty minutes by linking 32 batteries together and touching wires, showing that they weren't afraid of it.  This project is so much more meaningful that I can't imagine going back to building a simple model to show you can make circuits.  They can learn that another way.  This project now gives them things they couldn't have learned in another way.

If you teach for several years, your project should be getting better.  You may not have one that changes as much as this one did, but don't be afraid if you do.  Share the progression with the students.  They need to see that we continue learning.  They need to know that you have deep thought about the reasons for what you assign them.  They need to know that we haven't arrived at perfect ideas yet but that we are always reaching for them.  If you want them to keep getting better, you should be too.

Resolution Schmesolution

From the title of the post, it should be obvious that I don't believe in making New Year's Resolutions.  I'm certain I've mentioned it in previous years, but I've never really explained why.  It isn't because I don't believe in self-improvement.  Quite the opposite.  It's because I do.

Reason 1:  New Year's Isn't Real
I know it bothers some people when I say this, but New Year's isn't real.  There is no religious or culturally significant event that we mark on December 31st.  It astounds me that once a year, we throw huge parties that celebrate nothing happening.  The people that are offended by this statement usually tell me how it is the only holiday that everyone on earth celebrates.  That makes it sillier.  The entire world has agreed that there is something to celebrate when there is not.  Yes, the earth has successfully made a lap around the sun, but that is no more true on December 31 than it is on February 3 or September 9.  The fact that the calendar used to begin on April 1 proves that this is a completely arbitrary date.  Therefore, making resolutions in celebration of this non-event is silly.

Reason 2:  You are Knowingly Lying to Yourself
Starting on December 26th, all the morning shows start talking about resolutions and give tips on how to keep them for a little longer than you have before.  Articles start popping up on social media about why resolutions are so hard to keep.  Go the gym January 3, and you will find triple the number of people as if you visit on February 20.  I actually heard someone on the radio two days ago say, "Resolutions are meant to be broken."  While finding that statement bothersome, I also recognized that she's right.  People who make resolutions aren't actually operating with a belief that they will keep them.  They know that the average resolution is broken by the third week of January, so they congratulate themselves if they actually make until the beginning of February.

Reason 3:  Self-Improvement Should Happen All Year
When you identify a problem in yourself, start taking steps to fix that day.  Whether the recognition comes June 4 or October 12, immediately is the time to stop doing that bad habit or start doing a new one.  Putting it off until the new year is proof that you don't really want to address it.  If you actually wanted to lose weight, stop smoking, curse less, or save money, you would.  You would do it at the time you identified that there was a problem.

Self-improvement matters, and it matters too much to wait until the "new year" and make resolutions you have no intention of keeping.

Trading in Tradition

One of the funniest things I have learned from teaching at a school long term (14th year at GRACE) is that kids are intolerant of new ideas.  Sound crazy?  Aren't millennials early adopters of technology?  Aren't they seeking novelty?  Aren't they progressive?  The answer to all those questions is, "Yes, unless it is about education."

When students come to visit, they remember everything I did with them.  They ask if I have talked about twinkies yet.  Sadly, the twinkiesproject website no longer exists, or I would have used it forever.  They ask if we have done the egg drop project yet.  They even ask about certain jokes I tell.  They remember everything and will not hear of my changing any of those things.  They are traditions, set in stone.  No one is allowed to say they graduated from GRACE without hearing the story of Max (my first cat) getting stuck in a tree.

This year, there is a big change happening in my classroom, and I am already hearing negative feedback from older siblings of my students.  As of this year, I am dropping "The Atom Project."  For seventeen years, I have assigned each student an element, had them build a Bohr model of the atom of that element, and do research on the history and uses of said element.  This year, I am dropping this project in favor of one in which my students will research various topics related to the nucleus of an atom (radiation cancer treatment, nuclear power, nuclear weapons, fusion, irradiation of foods).  Former students have told me I can't make this change.  I don't know what kind of power they think they have, but they keep telling me that their brother should have to make an atom model.  They can't believe I would not have this project.

Don't get me wrong, this was a good project.  I would not have assigned it for seventeen years if it hadn't been.  However, there are reasons to change a project, even a good project.  I modified it over the years.  The model never really changed, but the presentation of research went from a written essay to a podcast to a newsletter to a website.  These were modifications in presentation, not content. They were reactions to technological changes, not scientific ones.

You may be asking yourself (as my former students ask me), "Why change it?"  There are two reasons.  One is personal - the other pedagogical.

Personal Reason:  I'm tired.  I'm tired of grading this project.  I'm tired of counting beads, cotton balls, puff balls, styrofoam balls, thumb tacks, pennies, and the gazillion other materials used to represent protons, neutrons, and electrons.  In a quick calculation, I estimate that I assigned this model to 945 students.  They have built models from carbon (36 particles) to plutonium (327 particles), I believe that I have counted over 185,000 subatomic particles in my career.  Then there is the paper.  I haven't learned anything new about an element in a long time.  When I am a senile old lady, pushing a shopping cart down the street, people are going to be confused why I keep muttering, "Aluminum is the most abundant element in the earth's crust."  It is because I have read at least 30 papers that started with that sentence.  I'm tired.

Pedagogical Reason:  Personal reasons aside, there are real reasons to change projects.  The old way is at a fairly low thinking level.  It is very concrete and doesn't incorporate 21st Century Learning.  Students do come away with an understanding of the atom and certainly some of the applications of elements they might not have known before, but I don't think they come away with much understanding of why that is relevant to their lives.  It consumes from the internet (which has value), but it does not contribute to the internet.  The new project will still require them to understand the nucleus of the atom because they will have to learn in it in order to explain the technology.   However, they will also have to apply this understanding to busting myths about nuclear activity.  They will get to see the relevance of how knowledge of the atom led to improved cancer treatment, or how their food could be preserved if we allowed it to be irradiated with gamma rays.  These are things that apply to the lives they live in the 21st century.   They will get to decide as a class how they want to present the research (make a website, put videos on a youtube channel, hold a summit).  In this way, they will be contributors, not just consumers.

If you are a former student of mine, you should know that some of the things I did with you are different from the class before you (unless I taught you in 1998).  You want teachers to have new ideas.  You want us to improve.  Teachers who have the same year over and over for their entire career are not teachers you want to have.

PS - Big Shout Out to our technology coach, Laura Warmke, for her encouragement and willingness to brainstorm ideas with me.

The Hour Before Graduation

This will be a short post and mostly photos.  The graduation ceremony is always lovely, but it's not my favorite part.  My favorite parts are the hour before and the few minutes after the ceremony.  Our teachers robe up in the same room with the graduates.  There are happy conversations happening between teachers and their (almost former) students.

There are teachers taking selfies with students and each other.  It is a joyous time with just us.

My best friends and I take photos together, just like kids do.  This is the last year that our "Blue Pod + One" photo will look like this because Cheryl is leaving us for other employment.  It is also the last photo of all the Beths that will look like this one.

Even after all these years, teachers have some difficulty with their caps and gowns.  That hood is always impossible, and no one seems to know the right way to arrange it.

Just before the ceremony, we gather together and pray with them one last time.

Fine Arts Pep Rally

If you read last year's Yearbook Dedication Day posts (Anticipation and Dedication), you know that a big part of our tradition is a Fine Arts Pep Rally.  Your school doesn't have one of those?  You are missing out.  We just had our fifth one.  In a time when many schools are slashing their arts programs to ribbons, this pep rally shows GRACE's fine arts to be growing, diverse, and dynamic.

As soon as the yearbook is finished in early March, I start doing two things - the graduation slide show and organizing for this pep rally.  Our visual arts teachers send me photos of much of the year's artwork.  The theater teacher sends me cast lists.  Our music teachers tell me what groups they want to perform and what songs they will be doing.  I put together a slide show, and we do some planning in a shared document (thanks, Google).  This all culminates in a big event that involves every one of our students and teachers.

Our school is one K-12 school, but it is on two campuses.  While they are only a quarter of a mile apart, the other campus sometimes feels very far away.  We don't get to see the elementary students as often as we would like, and this is one of only two times that were are all together in one place each year.  The first is the homecoming parade.  I love that the thing bringing us all together is a celebration of the fine arts.

As students enter the gym, a slideshow containing photographs of visual art made by our students is playing.  High school students get to feel nostalgia about art project from their childhood when they see elementary projects, and kindergarten students get to see the kind of work they can one day aspire to make.  Our middle and high school combined chorus sings the national anthem, and our sixth grade chaplain opens us in prayer.  Our visual arts teachers then recognize those who have won awards in art competitions this year (several dozen students have excelled in some competition).  Some of those kids are also athletes, and some are scholars.  Some will also be performing during the rally.  I love how well rounded our kids are.

Our performance arts are well represented.  The elementary chorus sings, and 6th-12th grade bands play.  This year, they played a Star Wars medley, so a couple of drama students had a light saber battle.  The crowd loved it.  Our dance team performs, and our strings group plays a jazz number.  The sixth grade theater class performs a short number.  This year was "Step in Time" from Mary Poppins.

The rally leads up to the unveiling of the yearbook dedication.  This year, it was for our middle and high school visual arts teacher and my friend, Elizabeth Walters.  She is an amazing woman, capable of pulling talent out of students that they don't know they have.  Her students' work covers our hallways.  Without that artwork, our school is just a building.  She is a friend, mentor, and inspiration.  It was the perfect way to end this celebration of the arts.

Look, I know academic, fact-based disciplines are important.  I teach science, for heaven's sake.  I believe, however, the God created us in His image.  Part of that image is creative, and we should all reflect that.  As a Christian school, GRACE knows that students are created with diverse talents - from math to music, from science to dance, from writing to sculpting, from Latin to theater.  We strive to help students to discover them.  The list of names on each of our fine arts rosters makes me happy.  Our students are finding their God-given talents, and we get to be part of that.  Today's pep rally was a great reminder of that.

Thank you to our band, chorus, theater, strings, dance, and art teachers.  Your work is inspiring.

Senior Dinner

I know I already wrote a little about senior dinner in my Reflecting on Students post, but tonight is the dinner, and I feel the need to talk a little more about how this fits into the culture of our school.

This year, GRACE will graduate its 13th senior class.  I have been at GRACE for 13 years, so I have been at every dinner we have ever had.  It has changed a bit over the years.  Its original purpose was to honor the parents.  Teachers did speak about every student, but that was a relatively small portion of the program.  The larger portion was students making a speech.  They wrote a letter ahead of time to thank their parents for everything they had done.  At the dinner, they stood and read the speech aloud.  This was a festival of tears from the student, their parents, the teachers, and the principals.

Our school has grown since then.  Our first graduating class had 7 students.  This year's class has 43.  The dinner has grown as well.  We now use it as an awards night for students, announcing valedictorian and salutatorian, bestowing graduation cords, and presenting ACSI awards.  Every student also receives a framed printout with three character traits the teachers have said they see in that student.  As the focus of the dinner shifted from parents to graduates, the program changed.  Students still write letters to their parents, but they read them privately at their table rather than out loud at the podium.  As a teacher/speaker, I no longer speak about every student.  I speak about the 2-3 that I have signed up for.  

While we only speak for about two minutes, it is the culmination of our mission and vision statements at GRACE.  It shows that every student is well known by at least one teacher, not just on an academic level, but at the character level.  These speeches rarely mention their classroom abilities; they are about character.  We bring the student to the front and share what we see in them and what we hope for their future.

A few years ago, I spoke about a student that isn't a super-positive person.  The next morning, during my first-period class, she interrupted me and asked if she could say something.  She told the sophomores in my chemistry class that they didn't know how lucky they were and how much they were loved.  She spoke to my class for over five minutes about how glad they should be that they have teachers who know and love them.  She didn't graduate as cynical as she might have, and that is what this dinner does for many students.

Next year, GRACE will have over 60 seniors, and there has been much discussion this week about how this dinner might change again.  It would, after all, take 2 hours to talk about each student for 2 minutes each.  Tuesday, we had a one and a half hour meeting to discuss it.  You might be surprised to find a group of teachers and principals weeping over possible changes in this tradition, basically begging to be allowed to stay longer on a Friday and do more work.  If a student walked past the library and saw us through the window, I'm sure he would have been confused by the scene.  We ultimately decided to limit ourselves to 200 words, written ahead of time to keep us accountable.  As I drove home from that meeting, I thought again about our mission and vision as a school and thanked God for the amazing group of people with whom I am blessed to work.  Their passion for this dinner isn't about the dinner; it is about making sure our students graduate knowing that God has gifted them for His purpose.  Our wonderful principal actually cares what we think and accepts our level of intensity.  She didn't just say, "This is the way it will be now, so get to it."  She wanted to help us keep the heart of what we do while making it logistically feasible.

This night is special.  It was special before, and now it is special in a different way.  As the next wave of changes come, it will continue to be special - possibly in a different way.  Whatever changes we make, we know that it will come from an administration who cares about our students and about us.  We know that it will still proclaim to our students, "You are loved by your teachers and by the God who gave you these gifts.  Go accomplish the mission He has given you."

Make a Memory

School, like a lot of long-term experiences, can become a monotonous series of similar days.  To some extent, that is good and necessary.  Routines are important to safety, security, and proper function.  If, when you went to work each day, you had zero idea of what to expect, your job would be difficult to master.  It might seem fun for a few days; but after a while, it would result in a lack of security.  Get ready for a big however.

HOWEVER, the days you remember from school are probably not the everyday ins and outs of grammar and math and foreign language.  They are the days where something different happened.  My most memorable experience of elementary school is the day we read the story of the Gingerbread man.  We went as a class to the school kitchen and made a giant Gingerbread man.  When we returned at the end of the baking time, he was gone.  We went from room to room, seeking out our gingerbread man.  We learned directions.  We learned to talk to older kids and their teachers.  We learned the joy of finding something lost (which was the point, if I remember correctly).  Each year after that, I would enjoy reliving the experience as small people came into my classroom in search of their lost gingerbread man.

My most memorable experience from high school came at the end of our reading of The Great Gatsby.  It was school tradition that when all of the English classes had finished Fitzgerald's masterpiece, there would be a party worthy of the time.  As students, we were assigned to committees (decorating our English classroom or the hallway, food, music, etc.), and our work on that committee comprised half of our grade.  We were required to dress in period costume (the other half of the grade) and were given extra credit for dressing as a character from the novel.  We could attend this party during our English period and our lunch time, but since party crashing is a frequent occurrence in the novel, we felt obliged to try it and didn't get into too much trouble if we did.  The school has stopped this tradition for a variety of reasons, and it makes me sad.  The memory of that day is still connected to my enjoyment of the novel.

It is important to help our students create memories of their school experiences.  At my school, the elementary campus really excels at this.  When the kindergarten learns about Antarctica, they come dressed as different types of penguins for a day.  They march around the building, squawking and having a great time.  If they remain at the school, they will experience it again each year, much as I did with the gingerbread man.  When fourth grade learns about planets, they come dressed on different days with some item that is meaningful about that planet.  One day, they wear sunglasses and surgical masks to represent Mercury and Venus.  When they learn about the civil war, they set up tents on the school lawn and come dressed as either union or confederate soldiers.  They spend the day eating as soldiers, learning to darn socks, and hearing from experts on the war.  Years later, I still hear them reference this experience, especially if it was particularly cold or raining their fourth-grade year.

By necessity, this looks a little different in middle and high school.  Because they travel from class to class, it would be logistically rather difficult to have an all day experience (although that can and does happen from time to time).  Rather, we tend to work our memorable experiences into projects.  The two physics teachers do climb to the top of the school building every year to throw egg drop projects down to the parking lot, and I like to think they will look back fondly on that experience.  Our math teachers give students all kinds of mathematical memories, like flying kites they make themselves.  Our foreign language departments take advantage of holidays specific to French and Spanish speaking countries.  The Latin club even marked Saturnalia just before Christmas break.  This week, my physics students are presenting projects that I call Free Choice Projects (I think I'll do a post on that project at some point because it is a great project).  They decide what the memorable experience will be.  I've had years in which students analyzed blood spatter by smashing balloons of colored corn syrup.  I had a student build a hovercraft, which we all enjoyed riding.  One of my groups this week is presenting the physics of swimming.  They asked if they could do a live demonstration rather than a video, so we will be heading to the area aquatic center for one class period.  As students gather around the pool, I believe they will create a better connection of memory to Newton's laws than they would if they were watching a video, not to mention they will think of more interesting questions, which the experts can address on the spot.

It isn't always possible to break from the day to day experience of class time.  When it is possible, make every effort to do it.  After all, we want them to learn the curriculum; but what we really want is for them to love learning.  It is that love that will make them want to learn as much as possible for the rest of their lives.

Do you have a favorite memory of school?  Feel free to comment.

Community Service Day

"GRACE Christian School is a loving community . . . " is the beginning of our mission statement.  Because of that, we have our students reach out to the community in a variety of ways.

Within the school, we take care of each other.  If someone gets sick, we make meals for them (like proper Southerners do).  Teachers meet twice a week for prayer and once a week for a faculty meeting and multiple times if there are special needs.  Teachers have donated their sick days to staff members with long term illnesses.  We have held charity walks for members of our community to help them with finances, collected baby items for one of our teacher's nephews who was born just after hurricane Katrina and then arranged for the students to attend a funeral after that baby died a few months later.  When my cat died, I got sympathy cards from several members of our staff and one alumna.  GRACE is a loving community, and you experience it quickly and overpoweringly if you have a need.

We do not, however, want our students to believe that we only take care of our own.  We want the to recognize that, having been blessed by God, we have a responsibility to share our blessings and the  love of Christ with those around our community and around the world.  For that reason, we set aside two days each school year in which we empty out our upper school building for the entire day so that middle school students, high school students, and teachers can go out into our community for a day of service.

Let me first give a big shout out to the receptionists who have taken charge of this over the years.  Michele, Dana, and now Lisa have taken the enormous task of sending hundreds of kids to multiple places with multiple adults.  If you are a teacher reading this, you know what a hassle it is to plan a field trip for you class of 30 kids.  Imagine doing it with 330 kids (and not all to the same location).  This involves permission slip, money for the bus drivers, parent drivers and chaperones, grouping kids, figuring out which ones need to bring their lunches and which done, emergency information packets, medicine for the right kids to the correct adult.  It's crazy.  The work of this person is just as much a community service as the kids going out to do the work.  The students do a variety of things.

Middle School - Gleaning -  Our middle school students were taken to a sweet potato field, where they spent all day gleaning.  For those who may not know, gleaning is a practice established in Old Testament law.  Farmers were instructed by God to leave some of their harvest in the fields for the poor to harvest and eat.  The modern version of this the farmer harvested only one round of sweet potatoes and then has allowed ministries to come out and dig up more.  They are then bagged and taken to the food bank.  We had 122 7th and 8th grade students digging in soil!



Freshmen - Thrift Shops - We always send our freshmen to thrift shops.  We want them to see that other people live on less than they do and that new is not always better.  We want them to understand
that they can help in a variety of ways.  We divide them between With Love From Jesus, the Mabopane Foundation, and two Thrift 2 Gift Stores.  They do a variety of things, from sorting clothes to cleaning to decorating Christmas trees to organizing food to checking out customers.  Basically, they do whatever the store owners ask them to do.  I like visiting these sites because kids have usually found some strange, interesting, vintage item that they would want to buy themselves.  This shows they are gaining a perspective on the materialistic world they are soaked in.  In past years, many students have returned from these stores and organized their own food drive because they saw a greater need than they knew.




Sophomores - Service Homes - We want at least one year of their experience to include interacting with the people they are serving.  There are several homes or day centers in the area that deal with the mentally disabled, the elderly, or those transitioning back into normal life.  Since sophomores are at an age where they can interact appropriately, we send them to those homes.  They are able to have meals with the people, play games, have Bible studies, and generally get to interact.  Because of the personal interaction with people so unlike themselves, I believe it gives them a perspective on the world they might not otherwise get.  These can be some of the more difficult sites because they are sometimes seeing very difficult circumstances.

Juniors - Habitat for Humanity - We love helping Habitat.  Students often report this as their favorite year because they get to build something.  They get to see the end result.  Sometimes, we have been lucky enough to have the construction professionals tell us about the family who will live in the house.  Kids don't generally get to build things in their childhood the way they used to because we have safety-ed kids to death.  Putting them in a hard hat on a construction site, swinging a hammer (or using power tools) let them see the possibilities of being makers.

Seniors - Wherever We Can - This year, our seniors were split into two groups.  One group spent the day at the Salvation Army and another at Meals on Wheels.  I was unable to get to the Meals on Wheels crew, but I did get to visit the Salvation Army.  They put our boys to work in the warehouse and girls in their store.  It was great for them to get to see the variety of ways one ministry can help so many.  I hope when they hear the bucket bell ringers this year, they will want to stop and give.  One of my homeroom students was at Meals on Wheels, and while she reported some sadness at some of the circumstances she encountered, she also said, "I'm definitely more grateful for the life I have."  That awareness is the beginning.  We want them to take that awareness and gratitude for their blessings and pass them on to others.

As a teacher, I love our community service days.  I like seeing my students step out of their normal routine, move out in courage and faith, and serve others.  Thank you to all the ministries who allow us to invade your routine in order to open the eyes of our kids.

One other thought - Our elementary kids participate in a lot of service as well.  They just don't leave school for the day to do it.  They collect coats every year for the WRAL Coats for Kids campaign.  They make pillowcases for military members.  Their teachers organize activities for their classes to do.  I didn't want to ignore them just because this post was about the day we just had.

ACSI Nexus

I know I already posted this week, but since we are at the ACSI teacher convention, I thought I would discuss some of what I learned here.  This is really an act of public note taking more than anything, but it could potentially help you as well.  Who knows.  ACSI has invited us to tweet our thoughts and download their app, so I thought adding a little blogging to the technological mix couldn't hurt.  Also, it is helping me pay attention because two days in an uncomfortable chair in a darkened room can be taxing on the attention span.  We are also participating in a school scavenger hunt while we participate.  One of the challenges was to take a selfie of your scavenger team at the sign in table.  Here's my group Bluevengers  as well our librarian and English teacher husband wife team.  They appear to be psyched about Nexus Live.





Dr. Dan Egeler - A Pilgrimage to Servanthood:  Wearing the Mantle of Humility
Told story in which a monkey "rescues" a fish from the water and thought he had done a good thing.  What was right for the monkey wasn't right for the fish.  Servanthood is as important to leadership as any other quality, and it requires humility.  Humility is considered a virtue.  (Personal reaction:  That's supposed to be true, but I'm not sure it is in our culture.  We seem to think pride is a virtue and anything that humbles you is "shaming.")

Characteristics of a Christian Community
- hospitality
- gratitude
- truth telling
- promise keeping

Students need to connect to who the teacher is.  We must teach their head, their hands, and their hearts.  We do so with our hearts.  The heart provides the catalyst for the head and the hands to be effective.

Five Elements for a Pilgrimage to Servanthood
1.  Openness - the ability to welcome people into your presence and make them feel safe.  Don't form an opinion about an important matter until you have heard all the facts.

2.  Acceptance - the ability to communicate value, worth, and esteem to another person.  Who a person is now is different from who they will be.  The person you may be tempted to ignore or treat badly now may one day be a person you would be tempted to worship.  People are not mortals; they are eternal.  There are no neutral contacts.  We are either nudging people toward eternal horror or eternal splendor.

3.  Trust - the ability to build confidence in a relationship.  Both parties must believe that the other will not intentionally hurt them and that the other will act in their best interest.

4.  Learning - the ability to glean relevant information about, from, and with other people.  This does not come naturally to most people.  It requires trust and humility.  (Personal reflection:  You must learn from those who you want to teach.)  Those you think you have nothing to learn from, you may learn everything from if you have humility

5.  Understanding - the ability to see through others eyes. It requires the other four because there must be openness, acceptance, trust for people to open up to us.  Only when we learn from them will we have the ability to see through their eyes.

Cynthia Tobias - Motivating Students to Take Charge of Their Own Success
This is one of my favorites of the day.  Book:  The Way They Learn

"My first year of teaching, I was so excited that all my students would want to learn and think like me.  After all, I was a living example of how the way I think works."

I can help students figure out for themselves how they work, how they think, and how to be successful.

How to get the most of what you are learning:
1.  Know Your Strengths - Once you know them, you can make a plan for how to use them.

2.  Figure Out What You Need to Succeed - Come up with a plan.

3.  Prove That it Works - If you try your plan and it works, keep doing it.  If it doesn't work, don't do it again.

How Do You concentrate?  If you are physically uncomfortable, it is impossible to pay attention.  Whoever makes school furniture needs to know this.  The brain can only absorb what the seat can endure.  Sometimes it is as easy as changing the temperature of your classroom.  It's not always neurological.  Try some simple things just to make kids more comfortable.

"There are two kinds of people - morning people and those would like to shoot morning people."

How Do You Remember?
Auditory kids remember what they hear, but not necessarily what they hear from others but themselves.  Auditory kids need time to talk.  They will talk about what they are learning, but it will be mixed in with other things.  It doesn't count if you don't say it even if it has been on the board all week.

Visual learners look for minor flaws because they are easily distracted by visual cues.  Visual learners are more literal than most.  They will be focused by the stain on your tie or where you got your shoes.  They have a picture in their mind of everything.  Pause to give them time to picture your instructions.

Kinesthetic learners are born to move.  You need to allow them opportunities to move.  Put in a swivel chair or something they can bounce their feet on.  If you get them to sit still they will not be paying attention.  Adults have learned more subtle ways to move.  It not practical to expect someone to be still (unless they are in an MRI).

If you can do three things in every class, you will increase exponentially their ability to remember.
1.  Give them something to talk about.
2.  Give them something to visualize in their minds.
3.  Give them something to do.

How Do You Process Information?
Analytical thinkers will get their work the second they get back if they didn't call from their sick bed. They pay attention to every detail but miss the big picture.

Global thinkers will ask if you missed them the second they get back.  They pay attention to big picture, plot, and story.  They learn intuitively and are very creative, but they think they are dumb because school are not really designed for them.

School doesn't always bring out the best in us, but you are not at an ordinary school if you are a Christian educator.  You know how important it is to reach out to help every student learn.  Communicating ways they can be successful and confident is not as hard as it sounds.  Nobody likes to be analyzed, but everyone likes to be understood.  You do not have any students in your classroom by accident; God put them their for a purpose.

Jon Bergmann - Taking the Flipped Classroom to the Next Level
Book:  Flipped Learning

We have way too much "sit and give" and not enough active, engaged learning.  Flipping your classroom changes what happens IN the class.  Instead of sending them home to do the difficult cognitive tasks, they can do the lower parts of Bloom's taxonomy at home and do the harder parts while we are there to support them.  This puts the point of need with the right resource.

Turning the Bloom's pyramid upside down is what you do to get a pHD.  If we make the pyramid a diamond, we will spend the majority of our class time on analysis and application.  The students will think the homework is easier, and then they will be excited that they don't have to listen to the teacher at school when they can interact with their friends.

Next steps:
1.  Rethink Classtime - Flipping is NOT about the videos.  It is about what you do in class.  There is a lot more time for guided practice, walking around checking in on your students, peer tutoring, lab time, small group work, debates, small projects.  It gives you class time back.  Trying to have them do something active every day is a mistake.  Use the class time for the best use, not just the fun use.  Don't feel guilty about using it the best way.

2.  Interactive Notebooks - Questions to answer about the video to keep them engaged while they are watching.  Include a link to the video, so they can use them at the same time.  Using a tracking tool (like EduCannon) will hold them accountable and give the teacher formative data.

3.  Flipping Leads to Mastery - It makes for a bit of chaos because everyone is on different pages at different times, but they are all progressing at their own rate.

4.  Flip Your Instructions - Put your instructions on video.  You won't have to use class time, and they will always have access to it.

5.  Time for student created content in the room.

6.  It gives kids choices.  If they prefer to read the textbook than to watch the video, let them (if the content is the same).  Be careful about giving them TOO many choices, but if they have the power to choose based on their method of learning, they will learn it better.

7.  The station model is like centers for elementary school.  The class is divided into three areas in the room.  It could be writing, research, and project work or whatever fits the lesson your are teaching.   It makes your class kind of a workshop.  Another version of this is the station rotation or In-Flip Model.  If your students can't watch videos at home, one of your stations could be the video.

8.  Choice boards - Give 2-3 choices using activities that cover Bloom's taxonomy in each of a few levels.  Giving them choice, even if it is just the order you do it in, is empowering.  Student Choice boards allow them to choose the input and the output while everyone has the same objective.  Choice days are days the students can choose.  Activity days are the days when everyone does the same thing together.

9.  Explore-Flip-Apply - They start with inquiry until they need help.  Then they get the video when they are ready for it or need it.

Challenging Thought:  The world has changed.  They have access to information like we can't even imagine.  Most of what we teach is on youtube.  We can be doing so much more than content delivery.  "If you could be replaced by a youtube video, you should be."


Kristin Barbour - Walk a Mile in Students’ Shoes: Differentiating Between Low Motivation, Curriculum Casualties, and Learning Disabilities
Science has been studying learning with brain in mind for 20 years.  We understand that learning disabilities are neurological, so they don't get better in a short period of time.  

Phases of the Learning Process
1.  Input:  perception  
2.  Elaboration:  processing, attaching meaning to the input, attaching a priority to it
3.  Output

Give students time and tools to help with identification.

Lots of kindergarten level examples that I am not taking notes on because if my physics students need a letter of the week, there are bigger problems than I have.

This workshop is a reproduction of the FAT City Workshop done decades ago, but she is not giving credit to Rick Lavoie, so I am going to.  I watched this video in 1997 in a college class.



Alan November - The Top Survival Skill for Teachers:  Critical Thinking Using the Web
If you ask kids, "do you know how to use Google," they will say yes.  However, they may not be using it effectively.  They don't know how to get the best quality of information.  

We should be balanced in our discussion of technology and acknowledge what can go wrong as well as what goes right.  Google's algorithm assigns the most points when the search term is in the web address.  It is not because it is the best information.  It is also geographically biased.  It places priority on sources closest to you.  This will keep you from getting information from sources near the source of the topic.  If you google Iran Hostage Crisis and use no sources from Iran, you are getting biased information.

When we teach kids about books. we teach them to understand the design of print; but we don't really do that with the internet.  If you are preparing students for universities, you must prepare them to find content on the web.  We should teach them to compare and contrast information.   They might be manipulated if they don't understand the structure.

If you want to know how Google works, Google the word google and operator.  You can get the google guide.  Not teaching kids to use the google operators is the equivalent of not teaching them the Dewey decimal system in the library.

Ways to understand information.  Use the site operators for searching.  Use easywhois to find out who owns the site.  Use the way back machine to find the original website when it was launched.  Use country codes to limit your search to those countries.  The internet gives the reader more tools to understand information, once you know how.  If you don't know how, it is phenomenally dangerous.  

The most powerful knowledge tool is Wolfram Alpha.  It is only vetted scholarly information.  "It is not like Google, where a twelve year old can give you constitutional law advice."

We should redesign our assignments so they can't look up the answers.  Watch the TED talk from the Wolframs as they discuss what Wolfram Alpha and like tools are going to do to education.  The problems we give kids need to catch up with the power of the information.  Instead of asking kids to compare the nutritional content of two foods, ask them to design a food plan for the space station.  Show kids a picture of a baseball field and ask them to design the perfect bundt because only a human can do that.

A lot of questions in life are not well organized.  They are messy.  Teachers should write messy problems.  Give them more information than they actually need to solve the problem.  Change the word solve to involve.  Solve means every student gets the same answer.  Involve means the student has to design the problem.  

Follow Jessica Caviness on twitter to see how you can make kids design problems.


Dr. Bill Brown - Effective or Defective?  Equipping Students for Lifelong Vision
All of the things we are learning converge when we think about the context of what we do.

The Bible opens and closes with humanity in close fellowship with God.  In between is the fall and God restoring what was lost.  

If your mission statement doesn't line up with God is doing, let God get in the way of your mission statement.  You are where you are for a reason.  What part is God giving you to play in His movement in whatever area you are in?  You are part of the big plan of God.  Bigger is not better; better is better.  

How can we measure our effectiveness?  You measure it 5, 10, 15 years after they leave.  Are they still walking with Christ?  Ask them if they were prepared for the world they are now facing?  They need to know that you will never become in the future what you are not becoming today.  We must educate for the world as it is becoming.  

Agendas are short sighted activities to accomplish near sighted goals.  Visions are expansive plans to achieve ambitious aspirations.  We should be vision driven, not agenda driven.  The only true vision is the one that God has, and we are part of that.  How are you communicating vision to your students, your community, your faculty, and your staff?  You don't necessarily have a Biblical worldview just because you know the Bible.  You have to learn to think worldviewishly.  Don't fill a bucket; light a fire.  There is no safe place in the world where you aren't going to be bombarded with alternate views.  We must prepare our kids to hold on to their faith in the face of opposition.  

Know God
Know God's Word
Know God's World

Don't let them think being a Christian is knowing how to follow the rules.  We need to equip and mentor them with God's word.

Action Steps:  Be More Intentional
1.  Develop or affirm your mission statement
2.  Make sure everyone knows your vision.
3.  Survey your parent and alumni to see if you are accomplishing your mission and vision.
4.  Your own walk is crucial.  You can't give away what you do not have (It's like measles).

Times are tough.  There is every reason in the world to give up - but no reason in heaven.


A tweet from another conference attender: 
Monica Remer ‏@MonicaRemer  3m

3 minutes ago

#NEXUS15 if you are different in ways that do not matter then you are just weird.

Dr. Venard Gant - Head, Hands, Heart:  Three Dimensional Education
Let's view Christian education in an expanded light.  If we as Christians are the light of the world, shouldn't our education also be light?  Can we take Christian education and expand it from a defensive posture to an offensive posture?  Rather than protect them from the darkness, we should prepare them to make a difference in the darkness.

I always ask the question "why you?" when I go into a classroom.  I always know the answer is I Peter 2:9 - because you are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a peculiar people.  He called you out so you may show his marvelous light.  Is our posture causing us to underperform.

The buzz word is to provide students with a "world class education."  That's the best they can come up with.  Their best line should be our baseline.  We want to give them a "Kingdom class education."  

Education should be in three dimensions, not just the two that the world focuses on.  The world focuses on the head and the hand, but they don't get a return on their investment if they leave out the heart dimension.

The facts of God's world should be integrated with the truth from God's word.  If you have worldly content devoid of God's context, it will inevitably lead to wrong conclusions.  For that reason, we must be students of the Word because His Word is truth.  We are also empowered by God's Spirit.  What do we do with this power?  Without his power, the best we can be is influential.  With the Spirit of God on your credentials and pedagogy, you can be impactful.  

God isn't limited to working in only favorable circumstances.  He can work with all children.  We don't want to communicate that the best God can do is teaching children who are highly educable.  It would be nice if we had kids who don't need grace and kids who don't sin.  They are not beyond God's ability.

We are equipped with God's love.  The words on the page are powerless to transmit life.  When we take the stuff of the curriculum and make it a living curriculum through your love, you can impart life.  

There are no children or families that are beyond the scope of God's power.  We take the cards no one else wants and give them a kingdom class education so that they will walk out saying, "The Lord - He is God."


Dr. Kevin Washburn - Fueling Learning:  Sparking Curiosity in the 21st Century Classroom
This is the speaker I have most been looking forward to hearing.

You don't start from a place of know-how.  You start from a place of curiosity.  Intelligence gets an awful lot of press, but even Albert Einstein put more importance on curiosity than intelligence.

Learning is movement, and movement requires energy.  The same neural network that is active when you take a physical step toward a goal is active when you learn something.  The brain interprets learning a movement.  

Curiosity drives interest, excitement, and exploration.  It is a hunger to know.  It is sad to realize that all children are curious, but most students are not.  What are schools doing to take away their curiosity?  One of the things technology provides us is the opportunity for self directed learning, but they won't do it if they aren't curious.  

Engagement does not equal curiosity.  Looking at cat videos online is engaging, but it isn't sparking the curiosity we are looking for.  How do we make them curious?

Atmosphere - Curiosity thrives in atmospheres of freedom where adults respond positively to student questions.  If your students have a fear of asking questions, they aren't free.  Curiosity is caught through conversation.  Respond to children with questions. This requires attentiveness to every situation to see where you can take advantage of moments.  How adults respond to children influences how curious they become.  Think about what you are communicating to the child by the way you respond to a question.

Model Curiosity - Show them that you are trying to figure out things.  Tell them what you are wondering about.  Show them the process of seeking information for personal interest.  When students are in the midst of learning, model questions with them.  What new questions can we ask now that we have information.

Encourage Curiosity Even When it Goes Off Track - Curiosity is more critical to their development than the material.  Coverage can be the enemy of learning.  Work in time for the questions they may have.  Question and support rather than directing and explaining.  When you start explaining, the child stops thinking.  Be cautious with cautions because we need more freedom to their questions.

Don't Try to Make Your Classroom Foolproof - You can't learn resilience through easy success.  You learn it by regrouping after a setback.  If you are trying to overcome an intelligence deficit, realize that that is only half of the formula.  The other half is a combination of curiosity and resilience.

Question, Guide, Allow the Student to FIND the Answers because it produces more robust learning than explaining things to them.  Prompt and provide opportunities to spark curiosity.  Study how Rod Sterling got you to want to know things.  He raised questions in your minds before going to commercial.  Bring in an element of mystery to your class.  "Why do you think you have a radish?"

Allow students to generate and record questions.  As soon as you've got them asking questions, you've got them.  The quality of the question matters, so help them refine the questions.  It makes a difference in the brain's response if it is too challenging or too easy.  The right level of questions releases dopamine, which makes the brain happy and also makes better connections between brain cells.

Curiosity makes learning and recall stronger.  If the question is too simple, the brain doesn't care.  Keep encouraging the student to ask why questions until you get to an appropriate level.  Keep asking why - just like 4 year olds do.  Why and how questions produce more mystery than where, who, and what questions.
- If it is too simple, ask why.
- If it is too general, open or close it until you get to a good question.
- If it seems like the wrong question, contextualize it.

Curiosity doesn't deserve the bad reputation it gets.  It didn't kill the cat.  Curiosity drove Moses to an encounter with God.  He wondered about the burning bush.  

Eric Metaxas - Miracles
Author of Bonhoeffer -

What you are doing makes a huge difference.  You are probably not half as aware of it as I am.  You probably forget that all the curriculum stuff is periphery to the big questions.  Who am I?  Where do we come from?  Where are we going?  What is the meaning of life?  Only Christian education deals with those types of questions.  Others avoid the questions because the believe life doesn't have meaning, which is bleak.  The difference you are making is beyond belief.

At the heart of our teaching is the understanding that we are made in the image of God.  Others must look at their worldview, which is that we are here completely by accident.  If they really believed that, they would kill themselves or go insane.  The idea of meaning wouldn't even exist.  All your feelings would be meaningless.

Making it explicit is great, but even if you aren't making it explicit, the assumptions that you have impart things to them they won't get anywhere else.

The heroic is a concept missing from secular education but is central to Christian education.  God gives us examples throughout scripture.  Faith is not about principles or rules, even though those things are important.  It's about Jesus, who was a person who came to live among us.  We transmit what we believe through life with the people around us.  You draw people to Jesus by being like Jesus.  We are potentially a hero to those around us, whether we know it or not, which is why we should know it.

When we read biographies of inspiring people, we realize the power of what they did.  Those things are forgotten in our culture because we aren't being taught them any more.  

Without a Christian worldview, you have no basis for believing that racism is wrong or any other moral standard.  With a Christian worldview, the answer is the Imago Dei.  We've got to be able to call evil evil rather than letting things go, calling it culture.  Slavery was wrong even though it was culturally accepted.  Boys being raped in Afghanistan is evil whether or not it is their culture.  This is why moral relativism cannot work.  Truth is not relative; it is not a cultural construct.  WE HAVE TO COMMUNICATE THIS TO OUR STUDENTS.  

William Wilberforce is a hero we must know.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer is another one.  He said, "Silence in the face of evil is evil."  He stood up to the Nazi's.  The fact that his story ended badly doesn't mean he isn't a hero.  We must tell the stories of these people for others to be inspired by them. n't

Who are you affecting today?  What you do matters.  When you give young people stories of heroes and heroines, you are giving them something others do not have because we are so scared in our culture to say someone is better than others.  We are so afraid of offending people that we are afraid to give them heroes.  

God doesn't give you blessings for yourself.  He gives them to you so that you can bless others.  Greatness doesn't belong to a gender or a race.  IT ONLY BELONGS TO GOD.  

God calls us into all kinds of things because we need them all.


David Kinnaman - Why Our Students are Leaving the Church and What You Can Do About It as a Teacher
We want to understand through the lens of research what we can do about the trend of young people leaving the church.  

The top reasons of young people leaving the church is that the church is overprotective, sexually repressive, anti-science, exclusive, appeared to be doubtless, and provided shallow experiences.  

The world young people live in today is more complicated and complex than ever before.  Are we meeting the challenge of helping students deal with that complexity?  We have to be honest with ourselves about the students we have that are taking a journey away from faith.  Christians are viewed as irrelevant and extremist today.  

The way young people leave the faith fall into three categories
- Nomads - These are individuals who say they are still Christian, but they are not involved in any way with a church or Christian activities.  They got to church on Christmas and Easter only.
- Exiles - Faith doesn't fit with the place where they are in culture.
- Prodigals - These are individuals who say they are NO LONGER Christians.

We live in a complicated, accelerated culture.
The best human inventions in history are in our pockets.  Students spend 7 hours a day on some kind of media.  We have become hyperlinked, multi-careered.  Pop culture is our religion, but we crave meaning.  We are lonely participants who are addicted to media and grazing information.  

When Daniel lived in Babylon, he had be faithful in a different context.  We are living in digital Babylon.  Our students are living in a culture in which people are skeptical of scripture.  We must teach them that the Bible has a countercultural narrative.  Teach Ecclesiastes to a fame obsessed culture because it shows that the end of all their ambition is vanity.  The idol of our time is fitting in and being up to speed.  

Christian school students struggle with doubt more than public school students.  They are more likely to remain active in the church.  They seem to want more from their churches and to have a more integrated experience.  Within this context, effective Christian education will provide meaningful relationships, cultural discernment, leadership development, vocational discipleship, and a firsthand experience of Jesus.  

Millennials have been marketed to so much that they are skeptical.  They think of our outreach as something we are paid to do in order to get them on our side, not as a genuine effort at relationship.  

Be a learner.  Emphasize purity within culture while having proximity to culture.  Educate with young people.  Teach a right theology of sexuality, work, and influence.  Show how the Bible intersections with vocation and changes us as people.  Model discipleship in our lives.  Pray like we are exiles.

As much as we try not to be, we are part of the spirit of the age; so we have to work hard to examine our own hearts for the ways we are absorbing the culture of the age.  What traditions are we keeping that need to be rethought?  

First Week Fun

The first week of school is an interesting and wonderful and crazy time.

If you read Harry Wong (and if you don't, you should), his excellent book The First Days of School will tell you that the first few days are critical for establishing procedures and routines.  Teachers want to do this, but the first week almost never allows for it.

Our school starts on a Tuesday, so the first week is four days long.  This year, none of those four days followed the same schedule.  On the first day of school, we begin with a whole school assembly, so that alters the schedule a bit.  Our second day was Wednesday.  In my school this means the chapel schedule (or what I call "the flippy do").  This means that instead of going to third period, middle school students go to chapel while high school students go to 8th period; and instead of going to fourth period, high school students go to chapel while middle school students go to 9th period.  Then, when 8th and 9th happen, our students go to 3rd and 4th.  If that sounds confusing to you, it is because it is confusing.  We have been doing this for five years now, and I am still surprised when my third period class doesn't show up.  Thursday does follow a "normal" schedule, but since they haven't had that yet, it does seem normal.  Also, it is the day our high school students get their computers, which pulls them out of a class or two.  Friday, we have a homeroom schedule.  While this is only a few minutes difference in a few periods, it is a fourth schedule in four days.  It is also the day middle school students receive their computers, so I will have one of my 8th grade classes but not the other two.  Harry Wong, how do I go about establishing procedures this week?

Lest you think of the previous paragraph as a list of complaints, let me tell you that I love all of these things.  The first day assembly is awesome.  You get to hear all the happy sounds of students reconnecting, who are happy to see each other, and excited about a new year.  Chapel is awesome.  I can't wait to see the chapel news videos each week, and yesterday's promo was epic.  Getting the computers is so great I wish we did it earlier in the week.  We haven't done homeroom yet, but I am optimistic that it will be a good thing.  I'm not complaining about any of this, but it does make it difficult to establish procedures and routines.

I suppose that will come next week.

My Annual Life Changing Moment - Part 2

Warning:  Long Post
In my last post, I gave a rundown of what happens during the week at RFKC, but it would have been a really long post if I had also told you why these activities add up to life changing moments for both the campers and the adult volunteers.  In fact, it isn't really possible to convey all of its meaning; you just have to experience it.  I will describe some of the things that stand out most in my mind.

Meal Times
I'm starting with meal times because it recently hit me that it was particularly special at this camp.  First of all, kids can choose whatever they want.  If they want to eat a plate with nothing but bread, that's fine.  If they want to eat yogurt at every meal, we take along enough for that to happen (and also make Wal-Mart runs if needed).  I once had a camper who wanted a "salad."  When asked what she wanted, she said bacon bits and cheese.  Mind you, this wasn't a salad topped with bacon bits and cheese.  It was just a bowl of bacon bits and cheese.  This may sound insane to you; but for these kids, it may be the only choice they get to make about their food.

At this branch of RFKC, we have the best cooks ever - I mean ever.  At the last camp I was at, the food was fine.  It was camp food, made by state park staff.  At this particular camp, however, it is some of the best homemade food I have ever eaten.  It didn't strike me how spectacular that was until this summer.  These kids are getting a home cooked meal, made with great love, three meals a day, for a week.  Our kitchen staff doesn't get to interact with the kids as much as the rest of us, but they may be responsible for what the kids will remember the most.

One more thing that is important about meal times.  We talk while we eat.  We talk a lot.  It is the most important relationship building time we have at camp.  Counselors and staff ask the campers questions about their favorite food, favorite camp activity, favorite story of the day.  At breakfast, we ask what they are most looking forward to.  At dinner, we ask them what was the most fun.  We ask questions, and we listen to their answers.  Kids in general feel like they aren't listened to, and I would imagine that is even more true of kids in the foster care system.  These meal time conversations are truly important.

Overcoming Obstacles
I mentioned briefly in the last post that we have activities designed to help the kids overcome obstacles.  In my regular life, I recognize the value of competition and kids learning lessons from losing a game.  At camp, we turn this totally on its head.  These kids have already learned a lot of those lessons.  They already know that life isn't fair.  They don't need even more of that at camp.  We want them to realize that they are capable of overcoming challenges and doing great things.  For that reason, activities are planned that allow for this.  Almost every year, we have a rock climbing wall at carnival, and you wouldn't believe what a great opportunity this is for courage building.  We usually have one event with a large inflatable slide.  Some of the younger kids might be a little scared or need their counselor to do it with them; but by the end of the evening, most of them are doing it on their own.  We have archery and darts, which provide opportunities for improvement with each shot.  We have horses, which also provide the opportunity overcome fear.  Two of the horses are capable of carrying two riders; so if a kid needs their counselor to ride with them in order to overcome their fear, that is doable.  This year, one girl had a hard time mounting, even with their counselor on the first day.  She had to have a long talk with the horse to make sure he liked her before she would get one.  The next day, she rode it by herself.  The pool (to which they go every day) is another great time for this.  Two years ago, I had a six year old girl who couldn't swim when she got to camp.  Our coach patiently taught her what to do.  As she practiced, I held my arm under waist or legs.  She got a little less scared each day.  The next year, she showed up ready for the pool and was in the 9 foot deep end by the end of the week.

Woodworking is getting its own paragraph because it is my favorite.  The first year I went to camp, I had a much different image in my mind.  I pictured the little snap together kits you get at Lowe's with maybe some tiny nails and girl hammers.  Was I ever wrong.  Woodworking takes more supplies and electricity than any other camp activity.  You wouldn't want to walk near it with a headache because you hear dozens of hammers, drills, and power screwdrivers.  Kids build bird houses, bug boxes, treasure boxes, and chairs.  You read that right; they build their own chairs that they can actually sit in.  Why is woodworking so valuable?  Because it is so tangible.  When a kid goes home with a chair they built themselves, they have evidence that they can do something bigger than they thought.  When they take home a treasure box, they have a place for THEIR stuff.  That's big for kids who sometimes have to take their stuff from place to place (some of these guys might live in three or four places within a year).  The other reason this is important is that building things is therapeutic.  Do you know how good it feels to hammer a nail?  You can feed all your frustrations into that hammer.  A few years ago, I had a girl who was not feeling camp yet.  She was sitting at woodworking, but she didn't want to build anything.  Our wise woodworking instructor gave her a block of wood, a hammer, and a handful of nails.  She started pounding them randomly into the wood.  After four or five nails, she was smiling.  After a few more, she practiced getting them in straight.  After a few more, she was ready to build something.  The following year, she came with a list of things she wanted to build.  Talk about a moment that changed everything.  That woodworking instructor met her exactly where she was.

Scripture Teaching
While this is a compassionate ministry and not an evangelistic one (an important legal difference), we are able to teach as much scripture as we want.  If you grew up in church, think of our program times as VBS on steroids.  We have object lessons, drama productions, scripture verse break down, teaching time, and lots and lots of singing.  The importance of this is pretty obvious, but there is one story I want to share from this year.  It actually goes back to last year.  One of our teachers told the kids that the best way to learn a scripture was to read it every day.  Our theme that year was the Good Shepherd, so we had spent quite a lot of time in the 23rd Psalm.  This year, a seven year old boy approached the teacher and said, I can say the whole thing.  I've read it every day since last year.  He stood up in front of everyone and quoted the entire thing without stumbling or stopping to think at all.  There was no one at home to tell him to do it; he just did it.  God is doing work through His word.

Pictures
As you know, I spend most of year taking pictures.  Because our kids are wards of the state, I was never allowed to take any at camp.  There is a camp photographer, and that is the only person allowed to take pictures.  As a counselor, I had to be content with taking "mental pictures."  The kids go home with a book of photos, but adults do not.  This year, I began my transition into the role of camp photographer.  This not only gave me a broader view of all the parts of camp, but it cemented the importance of the kids having the pictures.  We have some campers who are siblings, but their circumstances prevent them from living together.  We take a picture of them together and give each of them a copy.  During the year, they have at least that picture of each other when they can't see each other.  They also get a picture of themselves.  We all took for granted that we had school pictures (you know, the ones your parents ordered and sent to grandparents or hung on the wall), but the instability of our campers lives means they may have few or none of those.  If they come from age 7 to 12, that means they get six years of pictures for themselves.  They also get photos taken with grandma and grandpa, their counselor, and their cabin mates.  These are important relationships, so it is valuable to take home reminders of those people.  They also get ten or twelve pictures of themselves doing the things I have talked about already - riding horses, climbing rock walls, swimming in the pool, etc.  Like woodworking projects, these pictures provide them with tangible reminders of all the experiences they have had.  For a camp whose goal is to create life changing moments and positive memories, these pictures provide permanence to those memories.  Former campers who are now adults have said that they still have all their camp photo albums.

I know this post has been crazy long (to be fair, I did warn you).  It doesn't scratch the surface of all things that keep people coming back to camp year after year.  Once it is in your blood, you can't imagine a summer without it.  If you want to know more or donate, visit the RFKC website.