Three Dimensional Teachers

A few years ago, my friend Ben came to my room to ask a question about prime numbers.  We talked for a moment, and then the bell rang for my class to start.  The student nearest to me asked what had just happened.  I said, "Every year, he gets fascinated by one math thing.  Last year was Mobius strips; this year is prime numbers."  The student replied, "But he teaches Latin."  Since I have a good relationship with this student, I replied sarcastically, "Yeah, when we start teaching, they make us pick one thing.  We're not allowed to like anything else."  The student realized how silly that was and, I hope, came to view his teachers as actual human beings.

I am interested in . . . almost everything.  Seriously, I'm hard-pressed to come up with an example of something I don't find at least a little interesting.  I don't like sports, but I appreciate their physics.  There are genres of books I don't read, but that doesn't mean I don't find my students' interest in them worth talking about.  I'm sure if I knew anything about it, I could find something in the Punic Wars to be fascinated by.  There's a way to find almost everything interesting.  I want my students to know that.  I want them to understand that choosing a career does not mean being that thing.  To that end, I try to communicate with them about many things.

My classroom is decorated with a variety of things.  Of course, much of it is science, but not all of it science that I teach.  One section of a wall is covered with materials about blood donation.  One day, a student said, "When do we learn about blood in this class."  I said, "We don't.  You'll learn about it in Biology next year."  He asked why I had so much stuff about blood on the wall, and I told him about blood donation and why it was important to me.  I have an entire wall of National Parks, not because I will ever teach earth science, but because I love National Parks.  I have bobbleheads, not only of Newton, Einstein, and Fauci but also of Michael and Dwight, Sheldon and Lenoard, and various other pop culture characters.  I have artwork of former students as well as some professional artists that I admire.  I want my room to tell my students that it is okay to love more than one thing.  Fortunately, my school has a high percentage of students who read for pleasure.  I love that and want to encourage it in all of them.  When one of them is reading something I loved, I make sure to comment on it.  

Why does it matter that students view their teachers as three dimensional people with a variety of interests?  For one thing, it would be difficult to form relationships with all students if the only thing I was capable of talking about was physics.  It shows them that being excited about learning, all learning, is an enjoyable part of life.  It shows them that they can be people with a variety of interests as well.  Part of education is becoming a fuller person, so they shouldn't see the educated people in their lives as less full.  

John and Hank Green of Crash Course are good examples of passionate learners in many areas.  Hank is known more for science and John for history, but if you follow them at all, you know they are also just generally nerds for knowledge.  In one of their Vlogbrothers videos, John describes how much he loved sitting in the theater during the lead up to one of the Harry Potter movies and watching excited people enter the theater.  He said, "Nerds like us are allowed to be unironically enthusiastic about stuff. Nerds are allowed to love stuff, like jump-up-and-down-in-the-chair-can't-control-yourself-love it. Hank, when people call people nerds, mostly what they are saying is, 'You like stuff', which is just not a good insult at all, like 'You are too enthusiastic about the miracle of human consciousness'."  

Let's teach our students to be nerds, not because we think academia is the only thing there is, but because we want them to be enthusiastic about the miracle of human consciousness.

Humans - Capable of More Than We Think

 My 8th-grade students have academic blogs.  This week, I asked them to look at the inventions of the time period since 1899 and explain which one they thought was the most important.  Of course, most students wrote about the internet and the smartphone.  A few got clever with things like chicken nuggets and chocolate chip cookies.  Several wrote about air conditioning.  One of the boys who wrote about air conditioning made this statement.   "If we didn't have air conditioning then I don't think that mankind would still be alive."  Now, he's in the 8th grade, and they are prone to exaggeration, but it got me wondering if he realized how recently the invention of the air conditioner is in relation to human history.  It was invented less than 120 years ago and wasn't used in the majority of homes until the late 1960s.  The human race had survived since Adam and Eve without it until about 55 years ago.  

Don't misunderstand, I am also very grateful for Willis Carrier's invention, but this middle school blog post got me thinking about how limited our perspective is on what we can endure.  It also reminded me of what I've been seeing on social media in the past six months from people who don't believe themselves capable of doing the things we need to do to get through the current pandemic.  I've seen so many words like "unsustainable" and "incapable" and "cannot possibly endure until May."  Repeating these words to ourselves and reading them over and over has a deleterious impact on our brains because they fail to put human capabilities in perspective.  Let's do that.

My grandparents grew up in the Great Depression and fought World War II.  Depending on the criteria used, the Great Depression is calculated to have lasted between nine and eleven years.  The average deployment length for an army soldier in World War II was around ten months, but many served more than one deployment.  They endured 24 hours per day without a break (and, I might remind you, no air conditioning) away from family under the constant threat of death.  We are being asked to work longer hours with more duties, but we go home at the end of the day in our cars to climate-controlled homes.  

Their grandparents, by the way, fought World War I and endured the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, which killed from 2.7% to 5% of the world's population.  Those fighting in the trenches experienced or observed multiple diseases, from cholera to typhoid.  They slept in dirt, sometimes surrounded by their fallen brothers.  When supply lines were blocked, they survived on food rations that we wouldn't think enough food to survive, much less do an important job with. We were asked to sit on our sofas, watching Netflix and eating food that was delivered to our house two hours after we ordered it.

Perhaps it isn't fair that I've focused on the conditions of war since they aren't representative of everyday life.  Let's continue this historical tour of human endurance.  Those born in the 1850s came of age during the time of the Civil War, but thanks to The Homestead Act, many took on the challenge of settling the West.  Traveling in covered wagons, they endured bitterly cold winters and risk of diseases in frequency we cannot imagine today (in spite of kids rediscovering the video game Oregon Trail).  When they finally arrived in the West, they had to clear land for farming and ranching, build their homes, and sew clothes.  Should I remind you that they didn't have air conditioning or running water for that matter?  Their version of self-care was . . . nope, I can't finish that sentence because self-care was a concept not yet invented.

We could keep going.  There's the generation that literally formed America by writing a constitution after fighting a revolution.  There are those who spent months on boats, traveling the oceans.  Before that, there were those who got on boats, not knowing their destination or even if there was a destination because they believed it was possible they would fall off the edge of the earth.  We can go all the way back to those who literally lived in caves.  People who did not know where their next meal was coming from established civilization for the generations that followed, and we have staged protests over the closing of restaurants while eating food that was put in our car at the curb.  

I'm not saying this year hasn't been difficult.  Of course, it has been.  But it is not unsustainable.  Our responsibilities have increased, but they are not beyond human capability.  People have endured conditions far worse than these for far longer than a school year.  Repeat after me.  WE CAN DO THIS!

Variety is the Spice of Education

When I was a student teacher, I was placed in two different schools during the semester.  Because both schools I was placed in were largely upper-middle-class, majority-white student schools, there were some in my university program who were concerned that I wouldn't get varied experience.  They needed not worry.  My experiences could not have been more different.  I know the differences they had in mind were cultural and socio-economic, and in those ways, the schools were similar; but the classrooms bore no resemblance.  

The first teacher I was placed with taught juniors and seniors physics, astronomy, and AP Chemistry.  He ruled that class like a judge rules a courtroom, and the students did exactly what he wanted them to do exactly when he wanted them to do it.  He could leave the room, and nothing would be different when he returned because they wouldn't dream of stepping out of line.  My second placement was in a basic skills level freshman science class with a very pregnant (our last days were the same day), very relational, very casual teacher who would come in some mornings and say, "Okay, what are we doing today?"  She would not ever leave the room because she might return to a pile of rubble if she did.

In the defense of my experience, a panel member asked me, "If he is on one end of the spectrum, and she is on the other, where do you see yourself?"  It was a good question.  I knew I absolutely could not have been either one of them.  She was so casual that her room was chaos most of the time, but her kids loved her and wanted to be with her.  I'm not sure how much science they learned, but they knew she loved them.  That level of daily chaos and uncertainty would make me insecure.  His room ran like a Swiss watch, but when the bell rang, the kids left like they were being fired from a cannon.  They learned a lot of science, but I doubt he knew their names outside the classroom.   

During my first couple of years, I found my own style.  I was fortunate enough to have a principal who recognized that talent came in different forms.  In case you are wondering, I am extremely planned but open to changing on the fly if the plan isn't working.  I enjoy bantering with students, but I don't let them just all shout out whatever comes to mind.  You won't walk by my room and find me playing hacky sack with a bunch of kids, but I have been known on occasion to lip-sync the entire run of Toto's "Africa" and cannot control myself when it comes to dancing along with Kahoot music.  I have planned exactly what I want to accomplish during the day, but some classes require a lot of focused examples while others take me down a few rabbit trails along the way.  I have expressed deadlines, but I also know that students have different challenges outside of class and that misbehavior is often an expression of unmet needs, so when a student communicates with me, I am open to extending said deadline for individual students.  I do not allow eating in my class (because bugs), but fidgets are fine unless they become distracting.  I find as many reasons to say yes as I can, so that when I have to say no, it is actually meaningful.

The one year I taught in the North Carolina Public School System, I was miserable (like gain 30 pounds in a school year miserable).  There were a lot of reasons for that, but one of the primary ones was that my supervising administrator seemed to feel that there was only one way to be a great teacher (which was, conveniently, the way she taught when she was in the classroom with no acknowledgment that she taught a high-level elective while I was teaching a course that was required for all freshmen (a third of whom were on IEPs).  We were supposed to accept all of the differences of our students, but teachers were expected to fit in a box.  I grant you that the teacher in the box was an excellent teacher, but it just wasn't me.  Thankfully, it was not my first experience, or it might have been my last.  

We, in education, have sometimes sacrificed common sense on the altar of consistency.  Yes, it can be challenging for kids to remember the policies of several teachers, but that is training for life.  Kids need different kinds of teachers.  For one thing, they are going to encounter different kinds of bosses.  In their adult lives, they will encounter all kinds of personalities and have to adapt.  If we don't teach them to adapt, we are not equipping them for life.  

More importantly, kids need different kinds of teachers because there are different kinds of kids.  Some kids need the teacher who shows them how to not take themselves so seriously (Thanks, Mr. Dorrin).  Some need the teacher that challenges their thinking and believes they are capable of meeting that challenge (You're the best, Mr. Sandberg).  Believe it or not, some respond well to a well-crafted lecture (I was mesmerized by yours, Mr. Freeman).  Some students respond to the passion of the teacher and find a love they didn't know they had (I cried in an art museum because of you, Mr. Watkins).  Students that connect well with some teachers don't connect at all with others.  If all teachers were the teacher in the box, we might only reach a small percentage of our students.  We need different teachers to connect with the nerds than the theater geeks.  We need the inspirational English teacher that inspires a love of poetic imagery AND the one that teaches them to craft a proper grammatical sentence (That might be the same teacher, but it might be different teachers over the course of several years).  

Experienced teachers, you probably have a good idea of who you are in your classroom.  Yet, you may sometimes feel guilty that you aren't like the teacher who gives each kid their own personalized greeting at the door.  Or, you may be the cool teacher and exhaust yourself with the effort to be more like the serious teacher down the hall.  Don't.  If your classroom environment is working and your kids are learning, you don't need to be like the teacher down the hall.  Young teachers, it may take you a while to figure out what works for you.  There's much to be learned from your colleagues and mentors, but don't try to be them.  Take from them what works for you, but adapt it for yourself.  You'll find your style, and it will be exactly what some student needs.

Poet William Cowper wrote that "variety is the spice of life."  It's also what keeps school interesting.  Don't fear it.  Embrace it.

Teachers - Stop Beating Each Other Up

This is going to be a short post because there is not much nuance to what I want to say.  It is sad and disheartening to see what teachers are doing to each other online during the return to school.

In March, when the shutdowns began, EduTwitter was kind of a lovely place to be.  They were sharing best practices, showing tech hacks, and encouraging each other that we could do this.  Of course, we were also getting a lot of love from the public as parents realized that teaching their child was kind of a hard job.  About two weeks in, I had to make conscious efforts to limit my time reading teacher posts because they had turned dark.  They were frustrated with their admins and district leaders, feeling that expectations were changing weekly or daily; and while I was sad for them (because my administrators were super supportive and helpful), I was disappointed at the lack of professionalism and often wondered how they were keeping their jobs.

August is very much NOT March.  The whiplash caused by the change in public support is unnerving.  We went from heroes to villains during the summer.  The very same people who were praising teachers in March for their adaptability now have expectations of their kids' teachers that simply cannot be met by human beings as though June and July was enough time to reinvent their practice even while not knowing if they would need to.  Even my beloved Ken Jennings took a soft jab in a joke where he said it was called remote learning because of the remote chance his kids would learn anything.  I wasn't offended by Ken's joke, but it is illustrative of the changing attitude about what teachers are doing.

But, this post is not about the public.  It's not about parents.  It's not even about the teachers who criticize their administrations.  It's about those teachers who insist on beating up other teachers on Twitter.  

- A teacher had posted her rules for her online students, and a swarm of teachers descended on her because she didn't want them to eat while she was teaching them.  This isn't a choice I would have made, but they don't know why she made it a rule.  Perhaps, she has, like others, developed misophonia during the pandemic and the sound of chewing will be distracting.  Perhaps seeing the kids eat will be distracting to her in-person students who cannot eat in the classroom.  
- Some teachers are assigning homework during this time, and they are being responded to with all caps, hand-clap-emoji-filled tweets, telling them that they don't care about their students.  

- While absolutely no one knows what the best way to do hybrid learning is, there are many who will attack the way you have decided to navigate it in your classroom.  Worse, when someone tries to explain their choice, they are accused of toxic positivity and told they are buck-passing cowards for not standing up to their admins and districts.  (I saw this happen yesterday to a poor woman who is just doing the best she can.)

What bothers me about all of this is that none of these attacking teachers seem to care about context.  What's right in an elementary school reading class is not even close to what is right in a high school math class.  What's wrong to expect of a special needs 5th-grader may be perfectly fine to expect of a junior in an AP class.  What is feasible for a private one to one school in the Research Triangle is not even possible for a rural public school in West Virginia.  Context has always mattered, but this situation makes it matter more than ever.  

Teachers are all doing the best we can right now.  Some may appear more confident than others, but we all know that we are not delivering the ideal that we would like to be.  While you are doing the best you can, it is fundamentally cruel to be mean to someone else who is also doing the best they can.  Would you allow your students to do that?  Twitter shouldn't turn us into Heathers.  We're teachers, and everything we publically do sends a message to our students.  Tearing other teachers apart because they carry out their practice differently than you do models intolerant, hateful, bullying behavior to your students.  

You have to stop.  You just have to.  

Strength for Today

I am a planner.  I've always been a planner, but when I took on the role of yearbook adviser, it was only enhanced and strengthened.  I have to-do lists for the day and the week, and those lists are sometimes cross-referenced.  I am not inflexible, but it is only by having a plan that I can adjust my plans.  Yet, here we are.  Planning during the pandemic requires a pencil with a strong eraser and a shorter view.

I realized a few days ago that I've been saying the same prayer in the car each day on my way to school.  It is, "Lord, give us enough strength for today."  I don't ask to get through to Friday or make the semester work.  I ask for enough energy to make it through what I need to do for that day.    

When the Israelites were wandering in the wilderness for 40 years after their liberation from Egypt, they were not able to plan for their needs either.  I'm pretty sure they were planners because their society was agrarian.  If you think I'm a planner, I've got nothing on farmers.  They had herded sheep and grown food for generations, and then they were in the desert.  God taught them to rely on Him for their daily needs by making it so their clothes would not wear out and by dropping food from Heaven each day.  Knowing they would doubt His provision could continue and that they would want to hoard the manna, He made it spoil at the end of each day with the exception of the night before the Sabbath.  I assume that this is also the source of the request in the Lord's prayer to "give us this day our daily bread."

As I contemplated my prayer and the Israelites, I realized that this is one way God using the pandemic. He wants to give us more faith in Him and less in ourselves.  Teachers, make your plans, but know that the strength you need to carry them out comes from the Lord, and He has given you the energy you need for today.  Trust that He will give it to you tomorrow as well.

(I grew up singing hymns in church, so they are sometimes in my head.  As soon as the words "strength for today" came to my mind, my mind began playing "Great is Thy Faithfulness" on a loop.  Enjoy this lovely performance of it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErwiBz1QA4o)

Unexpected Benefits - Connection at a Distance

This is a short post.  Teachers are tired right now.

I am currently in a hybrid teaching situation.  For those who think it isn't possible, it is.  I'm not saying it is easy, but with each passing day, the tech takes up less space in my working memory, and the ability to address those in my room as well as those on my screen gets a little more natural.

Because we are now two weeks in, it was time to give the first test.  Figuring out how to do this fairly has perhaps been the most difficult thing to wrap my mind around.  Giving a regular paper test makes cheating far too tempting for those at home.  Giving something different to those at home than those in the room was just going to create perception problems.  So, I decided to do what I did when everyone was at home, using a combination of Go Formative with monitoring (for multiple-choice questions) and Flip Grid (for short answer questions or skill-based questions).

While no method is perfect or without the potential for cheating, and the videos take a long time to grade, this combination is what works for me in this moment.  

Yesterday, I discovered a benefit I had not anticipated.  While watching the videos on Flip Grid, I got to know my students better.  From the hams who practically performed their answers to the introverts whose voices I rarely get to hear in the room to the creativity of a student who cut out a picture of a fire hydrant to use in her video as though it were real, I got to see the personalities of my students in a way that I would not have if they had written the answers to the questions on paper.  

The quarantine of the spring and the hybrid classes of the fall have forced us to examine our practices to figure out how to make them work in this situation.  Doing so has been difficult, and we are all tired.  It has, however, had the upside of finding benefits to methods we might not have otherwise used.  As you innovate, keep your eyes open for the unexpected benefits.

Good Problem Solving Takes Time

 This week, I went through the problem-solving steps required for credit with my physics class.  They're nothing special; I'm sure math and science teachers all over the world have similar requirements.  Identify your knowns (with units).  Identify unknown.  Write the equation you will use.  Apply the equation by substituting the variables.  Do the math and box your answer.  

While this method is not earth-shattering, is certainly not the only valid approach (just the one required in my class), and is meant only for having an organization system for solving math problems, I had a realization while teaching it to them.  It's a model for solving all kinds of problems.  If we zoom out from the specifics of math, what this method actually boils down to is this.

1.  Identify the information you have that is relevant to the problem at hand.

2.  Ask "What do I need to know to solve this problem?"

3.  Examine the tools you have available and choose the one that best fits.

4.  Apply the tool to the problem and analyze the results.  

We would arrive at better solutions to problems if we approached solving problems in this manner.  The problem is, we don't have the patience for it.  We want instant solutions.  Take a look at social media after a mass shooting, a weather disaster, or any tragedy.  Within minutes of the event, there are many posts with assertions of the solution.  Setting aside that the problem they are trying to address is large and complex and has no easy solution, these people have put five full seconds of thought into it before picking up their phone; so they clearly know what they are talking about.  

Smartphones have made us less patient than any other invention.  Answers to questions are instantaneous as long as Siri knows the answer.  We can get what we need from Amazon in two days (or, in some places, two hours) without having to bother with going to the store.  I find myself getting impatient with the microwave because it is taking 3 minutes and 33 seconds (It's a quirk of mine to put in all the same numbers, don't worry about it) to cook something that would have taken an hour to cook in the oven fifty years ago or hours to cook over a fire one hundred years ago.  We don't want to wait for anything.  How much less patience do we have when we have an actual problem?  

Here's the deal, though.  The solution that immediately springs to mind is rarely the right one.  It usually leaves out some of the information we need to properly deal with the issue at hand.  It may neglect a good tool simply because we didn't take the time to think about the tools we have.  Using the wrong tool or neglecting relevant details can not only be ineffective but dangerous.  If I had a flat tire, I couldn't just grab the nearest tool, which would likely be a hammer or a screwdriver.

This tendency we have to impatiently jump to conclusions is precisely why we have grown impatient with science during the COVID-19 crisis.  We want to just grab the nearest bottle of pills and hope it works, but that's not science.  If it did work, it would be because we got lucky, not because we found a real solution.  This morning, the President tweeted that the CDC was making participating in a trial too difficult (and, as is his practice, made it about himself).  I don't expect him to understand the nuances of clinical trials and the details of how people qualify for them because non-scientists don't spend time thinking about these things, but I do expect him to know why scientific protocols exist.  Not following those protocols could lead to an ineffective vaccine, or worse, a treatment that causes more problems than it solves.  Individual human bodies are complex, and groups of humans are even more so.  This is why science takes time.  During the AIDS epidemic of the 80s and 90s, activists widely criticized Dr. Fauci for moving too slowly while their people were dying.  He knew that doing it right had to be more important than doing it fast, and he eventually won them over.  A diagnosis of HIV is no longer the death sentence it was then because scientists took the time to look for real solutions rather than jumping to conclusions.  

If you are facing a problem (or your students are), take the time to solve the problem rather than instinctively throw ideas at it.