Lessons We Should Have Learned From Lockdown - But I'm Not Sure We Did

Six years ago today, I was at school, but my students weren't. 

Two days prior, we had learned that we would be transitioning to a virtual learning environment as part of the "slow the spread" phase of the Covid-19 pandemic. The IT team was entering every class into the student Google calendars to create as little friction as possible for them to join.  Teachers were learning to share our screens and brainstorming how we might still "see" students while we were doing that (turns out you can can use your projector as a second monitor). Students were at home, half nervous and half excited by the newness of all this.  

We then taught 40 days fully virtual and two years in a hybrid situation (only the first one was officially that, but let's not kid ourselves).

We learned so many things - much of which I blogged about at the time and on last year's anniversary.

There are also things that we should have learned, and based on what I am hearing and seeing in the world, I'm not sure we did.

Screens are not replacements for teachers - It's harder to learn from a screen than it is from a live person. I'm not saying there aren't some high quality videos and online courses out there. But a video can't make eye contact with you. It can't see a confused expression on your face or sense the squirminess in a room. It can't tell when your working memory is overloaded or know that you aren't absorbing well because you missed breakfast this morning. More importantly, it can't adapt to any of those things.

For all the years I have taught, administrators have told us to get away from "lecturing" and make lessons more interactive. Whether they were talking about high quality direct instruction or discovery learning, they directive was that it shouldn't just be the teacher delivering information in one direction. Video is the ultimate in one way delivery. I'm not suggesting we never use them, but they are supplements, not replacements.

Why do I say we haven't learned that lesson?  Because in spite of all of the negative consequences, I still see "implement virtual instruction" in school improvement plans. It was one thing to have that on your website before Covid, but if I were a parent, it would make me choose a different school. I have sat in meetings with people who think the solution to limited instructional time is for teachers to make video and assign them for asynchronous learning. And, of course, there are those who think AI is the solution to everything; we get naive with every new piece of tech. While I grant that AI may be able to adapt based on performance, it will not be able to diagnose the reason and address that. 

External motivators matter - For years prior to the pandemic, one of the raging debates on EduTwitter was about whether grades motivated students. As with most things, we were having a binary argument on something that doesn't have a binary answer. There are some students who are highly motivated by grades. Those of you who have seen my font like handwriting may know that my first "bad grade" was in penmanship, and I made sure that would never happen again. Others couldn't care less about their grades, but they do care about what the grades get them (getting into college, eligibility to play a sport). There's not a yes or no answer on something with a spectrum of attitudes.

However, a comparison of schools during lockdown showed one thing - not having grades was definitely demotivating. My school continued to take attendance, give assignments, give tests in whatever way we could. And we graded those assignments and tests. (We were likely a bit more lenient in the grading than we had previously been, but we were still grading.) Public schools in my county did not grade - that is to say, the grade couldn't go down. So, if a teacher graded something and it kept the student's grade the same or increased it, they put it in the gradebook.  Otherwise, they didn't count it. They told kids they should still attend class for the sake of learning, but . . . class attendance in those schools plummeted to nearly zero, and very little was turned in. One boy I know attended two of his classes because he needed to get his grade up and knew they would give easy work so he could, but he did not attend his other four because he "already had an A and it couldn't drop." (NOTE: This is NOT a criticism of those schools. It is my personal policy not to judge the decisions made by any school during the spring of 2020 since exactly no one knew what the right the thing to do was.)

Why do I say we didn't learn this lesson? People are pushing "no zeros" policies again. A kid doesn't turn something in; he gets a 50%. I objected to this the first time around, writing a letter to the editor of my local newspaper, if that tells you how long ago it was.  Their logic is that a zero is too hard to recover from; mine is that something hard to recover from should motivate you to turn something in. I don't want a generation of workers believing that doing NOTHING is the same as doing half of their job. We have people pushing feedback only assessment without grades attached. I'm not saying it can't work, but our culture would have to change dramatically for that to succeed.

I'm not saying it has to be the exact grading system we use now, but without some kind of external motivator, many, if not most, students will not work. Let's be honest; how many adults would go to work without a paycheck, no matter how much we love our jobs? External forces motivate much of what we do for most of our lives. Why would we believe students would be any different?

Attendance is critical - You can't learn things you don't attend to.  Teaching yourself is nearly impossible, even with high quality resources. You can probably get some surface stuff, but you can't see nuances if you don't have the background knowledge to notice them. There are certainly isolated examples to the contrary, but for the vast majority of students, they need to be taught. That means school attendance matters. Students who had sporadic attendance during the pandemic could make up their assignments, but they didn't learn the material; they checked the box on doing something.

Why do I say we didn't learn this lesson? We are in an attendance crisis in America. Based on some of the educators I'm connected with on Twitter, they are in the same crisis. This thing that was always a given - kids go to school on school days - became optional. SOME parents now plan trips without regard to the school calendar and leave it to the teacher to figure out how to teach their child upon his return. Kids stay home when they have a minor headache (I'm not talking about migraines, just run of the mill, pop-an-Advil headaches). They are then surprised when the student doesn't do well on their tests because "she made up her work." This isn't just a school problem. People are calling out of their jobs more now than they did in the past too.

I don't want this post to sound entirely negative. There are definitely some tools and techniques we took out of the pandemic that remained helpful. Go back to the beginning and use those links to see some of the positives. But there are things we should have learned that we just didn't. And we need to consider that so that we don't just keep sleepwalking through low attendance, meaningless grading, and people who want to replace teachers with screens.

Growing Requires the Right Conditions

I had an azalea that died in my front yard.  I don't just mean it didn't thrive.  I mean it died - doornail kind of dead.  All that was left was a stick. When I dug it up to replace it, it had some roots still attached.  For some reason, I decided that meant I should let it have a go in the back yard.  I dug a whole and plopped this dead stick into it.  That was 7 years ago, and this year, has bloomed twice - profusely, so many blooms that you almost couldn't see the green leaves anymore. 

I took this picture 3 years ago, but it doesn't do it justice. 

It turned out the front yard was not the right place for that plant, but the spot in the back yard was. I started calling that spot "the Lazarus spot" because the plant had been raised from the dead. Two years ago, I was given the most beautiful hydrangea plant I have ever seen.  It was the deepest blue and fullest potted plant I've ever had the pleasure to have in my house.  It started wilting after a few months because they aren't really meant to stay potted, and I thought, "No problem. We'll plant it right next to the azalea in the Lazarus spot." To my horror, the beautiful hydrangea did not revive there; it died and has not returned.

This photo was taken just after I put it in the ground, when it seemed it could be saved. It couldn't be.

What's the lesson here?  The spot wasn't perfect. It was just perfect for that azalea. It didn't work at all for the hydrangea.

Schools are built for the majority of children. Just as most plants have similar needs for the range of water, drainage, and sun exposure, most kids have similar needs that can be met by the regular school system.

And, just like some plants need more water or less direct sunlight to thrive, some kids need fewer choices or more individual attention to thrive. They might benefit from a different placement - an alternative school, a small Christian school, a military academy, or homeschool might be the right choice FOR THEM.

Because humans love to oversimplify, when a student finds success in an alternative placement, we credit the placement.  We decide that model must be the best one since it reached "even that kid." We assume that model would be good for everyone. Let's build all schools with that model.

But life is just more interesting than that.

If all kids went to a military academy, some of them would come out traumatized. It worked great for the kid who needed that much structure to thrive, but the average kids would collapse under the weight.  Send some kids to an alternative school with a lot of choices about what they do, and they will fall apart. They need more structure to function and freeze up with indecision when given too much choice. Some families homeschool beautifully, and their kids move through curriculum both quickly and deeply; other kids are placed in front of a math video and learn little (I know because I have taught those kids when they returned to school, and they couldn't do basic algebra as high school juniors). 

Education is not a one-size-fits-all situation.  Even within a household, you might have a son who functions well in your local public school while your daughter needs the individual attention that can only come from homeschooling. 

The mistake we make in the school system is to either try to alter the kid to fit the typical environment or alter the environment to fit the kid. That is not sustainable in a system as large as schooling.  What we need to do instead is match the kid and the environment so that azaleas can thrive in one place while hydrangeas thrive in another.

That Mr. Beast Video - I Have Thoughts

YouTube celebrity Mr. Beast dropped a video this week that has EduTwitter all . . . well atwitter. He isn't the first one to do this. I remember being required to watch and respond to a video posted by a punk in a hoodie telling us that knowledge didn't matter in the age of Google about 15 years ago.  That one fizzled quickly, but this one is different for a number of reasons. I have thoughts - lots of them, so get some tea and settle in.

First, let's address who Mr. Beast is. When I called him a YouTube celebrity, I was understating it.  At 468 million, he has the most subscribers of any channel on the site, and he has the third most followed TikTok account. He is especially popular with high school boys because much of his content consists of the stunts and challenges they enjoy; many of his challenges are philanthropic, so their parents don't mind that they watch him. He's been posting for over 20 years, which is longevity in any field, but is insanely long for the internet world. All of that only matters in this discussion because his reach is wide, and his influence is high. When he speaks, his followers listen. 

So last week, he decided to use his immense platform to criticize educators. I'm not saying there is nothing to criticize - far from it. Ask any teacher what could be better in education, and they could give you a TED talk without preparation. 

But Mr. Beast is an outsider. He graduated from a small Christian school in NC and then dropped out of college in 2018 to study virality - what makes a video spread like wildfire - on his own.  He is public about his lack of desire to have children. So, when he speaks about education, he speaks as someone who has not been inside of a classroom in almost a decade. Someone pointed out that he has built ten schools, and, to his credit that is true. But it's not the same as knowing something about education. A person who builds a church doesn't know how to be its pastor.

His basic premise is that teaching hasn't changed in over a hundred years.  "Why," he asks, "are we still being taught the way our parents were taught when everything else has moved on?" He claims that when he was in school, a teacher just read out of a textbook. He then goes on to suggest that kid would be better taught by videos because a lot of complex information can be delivered in a short period of time. 

I want to be as kind as I can to Mr. Beast because I think he was probably well intentioned, but he was wrong about so many things in such a short video. Let me unpack a few things here:

1. Your kids are not being taught the same way your parents were. They just aren't. I taught for 25 years (including ALL of the ones when Mr. Beast was in school) in three different schools, both public and private, and education changed dramatically during that time - some changes were for good and some were not. As Tom Bennett said, "Any parent who has helped their kids with their math homework recently knows that kids are not being taught the same way they were." 

Tech access alone has changed things; when I began my career, I made an appointment to take my kids to the computer lab to use Google for research. By the end of my career, AI was making its push. And, I promise you Mr. Beast's parents weren't using either of those things when they were in school. There were also multiple swings in education philosophy during the 25 years I taught. The pendulum swung from STEM focused to arts integration in every class, from explicit rubrics to free form exploration, from phonics to whole language and back to phonics again.  

Mr. Beast MAY have a had a teacher who read aloud from a textbook. He was in a tiny school in NC, which currently has an enrollment of 287 in K-12; so ten years ago, they may not have had the resources to do any more than that. Since he is using a sample size of ONE, it would be hard to say that applies to the whole field. 

2. Tech has changed. Brains have not. One of my favorite responses to the Mr. Beast video addressed a basic fact he clearly doesn't know (maybe he would if he hadn't dropped out of college). The way brains learn doesn't change with the technology of the world. 

"There is no neurological reason we should be taught differently. Our brains work exactly the same way our grandparents' brains did." While neuroplasticity is real, it creates only minor differences in our brains - strengthening some connections while weakening others. It does not change the basic architecture of our brains. We all learn basically the same way - encoding through our senses, spaced retrieval coupled with feedback, rinse and repeat as needed. The encoding may come from a variety of sources, from live teacher to video to book to podcast, none of it sticks without the retrieval and feedback process (more on that in the next point). 

Change is often good, but not ALL change is good. A change that makes the picture on your TV better is good; but it is still basically TV - we aren't going to say we need television reform and dramatically change the way we film just to say we have changed with the times. 

The truth is that we would likely be better off if we were learning more like our parents learned. The push for discovery learning turned out to work against the brain rather than with it. Some were successful, but the most disadvantaged kids just became more disadvantaged because we overwhelmed their working memories. Projects and labs are great, but they are reinforcements for explicit teaching, not replacements.  

3. No, you cannot absorb and retain the information from a video in 20 minutes.  One of the points made by Mr. Beast is that there are a lot of high quality videos that we can use for learning. He's not wrong about that part. He references Mark Rober, but there are many good sources - Kahn Academy, Veritasium, Crash Course. I have used and loved them all.

But here's where Mr. Beast got it wrong.  He said, "You can learn complex topics in 20 minutes in a way that's engaging, fun, and you retain it." Complex information can be PRESENTED in 20 minutes, and you can CONSUME information in 20 minutes, but you cannot LEARN it in 20 minutes. As I said earlier, there is a cycle of retrieval and feedback that are needed to retain information.  I consume a great deal of content.  I listen to podcasts, read books, read blog posts, and, yes, I watch videos. If I retained all of the information in the things I consume, I could rule the world. But the truth is that most of it passes through my consciousness and then back out. I might remember one very interesting point, especially if I found it interesting enough to tell someone about it the next day (retrieval) and have them find it interesting enough to engage with me in conversation about it (feedback), but I will have a temporary and superficial understanding at best if all I do is watch the video. The idea that videos are engaging is ludicrous; there is nothing more passive than watching a video. It's even more passive than a live lecture, which we have all been encouraged to eliminate. Entertainment is not the same thing as engagement. Engagement requires interaction, which videos do not provide. Engagement is a means to an end, but it is not the end. Learning requires engagement, but engagement alone is not learning.

Videos are great as supplemental tools, and I used them frequently. They were super helpful in science teaching because they animated processes. They were good review tools because students could hear an explanation that was similar to but slightly different from mine. But they are not a replacement for quality instruction from a human. Education has been, at its core, a social experience since the Garden of Eden, where God came and walked with and talked with Adam. This is why I don't believe technology is going to replace teachers (even AI).

4. Mr. Beast is the beneficiary of the very thing he is criticizing.  This is where I want to be as charitable as I can with Mr. Beast because I don't think he knows. It's so easy, once you have learned enough for learning to be easy for you, to forget what it is like to be a novice. He may well be able to watch a video on a topic that interests him and that he knows reasonably well and retain something new. A 7th grade math student who is learning a concept for the first time does not have that base. 

Mr. Beast benefits from a strong knowledge base already being in place from his years of schooling (even if he had a teacher or two who only read from a book) that allows his working memory to not be overloaded when taking in information from a video. He has a schema of knowledge from decades of school as well as professional learning to connect new learning with. A freshman year biology student who is encountering Latin roots for anatomical terms for the first time is building that schema, but she doesn't have it yet. Butterflies tend to forget that they used to be caterpillars and think that, since they can now fly, those younger than them should be able to as well. (I'm not sure if that metaphor worked, but hopefully you know what I'm saying.)

At 27, Mr. Beast is old enough to have lived in a childhood where screen time was still considered something we should limit. He would have had some video time but not the constant stream we have now. Because he wasn't engaged by video non-stop in his childhood, he had moments of boredom that trained his imagination, and it was that training that allows him the success he has today. But he doesn't know how to look back and see what got him here. 

Teachers, you are not beholden to a 27 years old YouTube influencer. Do what you know is right. Do what you know works. If you don't know what works, we live in a golden age of books on the science of learning. Start with Why Don't Students Like School by Daniel Willingham or Learning Begins by Andrew Watson. If you want to dive really deep, take a look at How We Learn by Stanislas Dehaene. Form a relationship with a teacher in your building who has been at it long enough to see the fads come and go and return to the basics of quality instruction. Don't give in to the idea that "newer is always better" as our culture seems to have. You are there to teach, not to do the latest thing.

The Post Teachers Need in February

It's February, y'all. It's hard to explain why this means teachers are exhausted more than any other time of year, but they are. So, I'm going to keep this post short and happy.

Getting through the February doldrums requires you to have something positive and future focused to think about.  

So here it is.

Look at your students. They are not the same people you met in August.

• The boy who needed his schedule to be re-printed on the first day of school because he kept losing it is now helping a new kid find his way around.
• The girl who wouldn't wear her glasses or contacts and then used "not being able to see the board" as an excuse for poor attention is now focused and listening.
• The kid who failed your first two tests is working hard and pulling a solid C.
• Someone who came in at the beginning of the year saying, "I don't like math" has found the idea of limited infinity fascinating and now realizes math is more interesting than they thought.
• A new kid who was quiet and separating from the group at the start of the year is now laughing with her friends in the lunchroom.
• The kid who couldn't stand you at the beginning of the year dislikes you less now. (Let's face it, these aren't all going to be 180º turns.)
• All of your students are working more independently than they were at the beginning of the year, and they all have acquired content knowledge. Even the one who is failing tests has learned SOME things.

Think about your room. What progress can you notice and find joy in as you get through the last week of February?

Reframing - Learning is Satisfying

"Good afternoon, Beth. Enjoy your workout." 

When I first joined the Y, getting a greeting like this was very helpful. And it wasn't because they knew my name, which pops up on the computer when a member scans in. It was the word "enjoy." It had been a long time since I had done any workouts other than walking, and while I was excited to try new things, I also knew it was likely to be uncomfortable. Framing the workout as something to enjoy changed my outlook on what I was about to do. While that was only a small part of how the Y changed my life, it was an important part.

Often, in school, we give in to a negative view of work - student work anyway. Then, we take one of two approaches at either end of the attitude spectrum.

1. Make everything super fun, even if it sacrifices the actual learning or takes longer than the curriculum pace would allow for. We hope turning everything into a game or relay race will distract kids from the fact that learning is work.  Fun is what matters because it is motivating! And, if we need to trade in some content for the time it takes to tally game points, so be it.
2. Adopt a "suck it up and do it anyway" attitude. This technique is employed most with high school students. We tell them that the "real world" is filled with things they won't want to do but still have to do, and this is good training for that. I'm here to teach you, not entertain you. Who cares if you are motivated or not.

There is truth involved in both of these extremes.  Certainly adult life does involve a lot of things that have to be done whether you are motivated to do them or not, and certainly some things are inherently fun.  But the day to day of school exists between these two extremes.  Motivation often comes from places we don't expect and find it difficult to plan for.

What if we reframed work for our students the same way the Y reframed a workout for me? 

Example:  Lifting heavy things is not inherently fun, and no peppy song will change that. It's uncomfortable on purpose. Does Matt change the "lesson plan" to make it less difficult? Does Dana say, "Let's skip around outside instead of doing triceps because you will be more motivated if it is fun"?  No. (Although that second one would be a decent aerobic workout; it would not achieve the purpose of the BodyPump class.) They do two things that are motivating:

1. They are joyful. This is not the same as making activities fun. It's an attitude they communicate. I have had instructors for this class that take it (and themselves) so seriously you cannot focus on anything but the number of reps left. That makes for an awfully long class. I have also taken it with an instructor that just makes everything silly, singing along with every song to the extent that you can't know what you are supposed to do next. Matt and Dana are neither of these. They are joyful about the workout. They make some jokes, but the class isn't about the jokes. They create a community spirit by knowing who likes certain songs or certain movements. "We're doing planks just for your today, Dan." or  "I know Kamryn is going to like the Rhi-Rhi bicep track today" or "Beth's favorite - shootouts." Planks, shootouts, and biceps are just as challenging, but they are now framed as someone's favorite, so others might find joy in them too.
2. They focus on the satisfaction of the outcome. While I have never heard the phrase "no pain, no gain" in my time at the Y, the sentiment is still there. The payoff of the discomfort you are feeling in the moment or the soreness you will have tomorrow is in the satisfaction of the outcome. So, while you are doing a sumo squat with a weighted bar on your back, Matt tells you which muscles you are strengthening. While you are clenching your upper thigh in Barre, Dana says, "It's your free butt lift, courtesy of the YMCA." 

So, school teachers, what can we learn from this? We can learn that there is a happy medium between frivolous and fatalistic. 

A teacher doesn't have to be a non-stop fun machine to approach learning with joy. You cannot out-entertain or out-engage their phones, so stop trying to. Show them your joy and watch it spread. There are not many ways, for example, to make learning the periodic table a rip-roaring good time, but my students knew how much I loooooooved the periodic table. I constantly expressed my own amazement of it and told them that I hoped they would one day learn enough about it to appreciate it as much as I did.  "Every year, I find something new to appreciate about it," I would tell them, even after teaching it for over 20 years. When we balanced chemical equations, I would say, "If you are the type of person who enjoys solving puzzles, you will probably enjoy these" because there is definitely a satisfaction that comes from the equation finally coming out right.  I took EVERY opportunity to communicate how much I loved learning new things, including my delight when they asked a question I couldn't answer because then we could find out together. I didn't limit it to science because I wanted them to see that learning is joyful outside of what you do for your job, so I talked about art and music and books and how much I liked the unit circle. If someone had Julius Caesar sitting on their desk, I made a big deal about it being my favorite Shakespeare play. Learning can be joyful for its own sake, and we don't have to gamify our classes to communicate that. (I'm not trying to dog on people who gamify, by the way. I would just ask you to think about the opportunity cost involved if you are spending a lot of time on it.)

Learning is hard work. There's no getting around that fact. If you think changing your muscles requires focus and energy, it pales in comparison to changing your neurons. But a teacher doesn't have to adopt a "Life's hard; then you die" mentality to help students learn. They can, like a good weightlifting instructor, emphasize the outcome of the work. "When you learn to write a well-crafted paragraph, you will be able to communicate your ideas in a way that is actually persuasive to others" will help a student realize that the hard work of writing well has purpose.  "You know who uses this kind of math? Video game designers" will help kids recognize purpose beyond the grade book - even if they don't intend to become a game designer themselves. Learning has multiple outcomes, so think about value and relevance outside of making money from it.  I once had a student who was clearly going to be a musician and didn't understand why he needed to learn chemistry. Was I going to convince him that he needed science as a fallback? No, that would have been stupid, but I didn't convince him that the brain training he was doing to write chemical formulas would help him ad lib when he forgot the lyrics on stage later in his life.  

By being joyful and focusing on outcomes, we can help students reframe the learning experience. It is challenging and requires work, but it is also satisfying and enjoyable. We must communicate that these are not mutually exclusive. 

Book Review - The Lockdown Artist by Jay Wamsted

One of the best things I can say about a novel is that I lost sleep over it - not because of the content, but because when it was bed time, I wanted to read one more chapter. This is absolutely the kind of experience I had with The Lockdown Artist by Jay Wamsted.

I have followed Jay on Twitter (currently X) for quite some time and know him to be a fun and engaging school teacher. When I saw that he had written a novel, I wanted to support him, and I knew that the book would be fun.  What I didn't know was what a gripping story it would be - think 1984 in a high school for a general framework, but it is more than that. There are shades of Frankenstein and Hunger Games (and sadly some hints of Project 2025 - although that might have been my addition as I was reading it just after the deaths in Minneapolis).

What I most appreciate about Jay's writing is how much he respects his young adult audience - something actually quite rare in YA literature. So many YA authors feel like they have to over-explain to avoid confusion, but what that really does is avoid excitement. Young readers like to have things revealed after they have thought about them for a while, hence the success of the Harry Potter franchise, where some payoffs came two to three books later.

In The Lockdown Artist, you arrive along with a new student, Liam, in the middle of the school year.  Rather than spoon feed you an explanation of the school, Jay knows that the reader is capable of figuring things out as the story unfolds and doesn't bore them with a ton of exposition at the beginning. You find out parts of the mystery as the characters do, so there are surprises around every corner (almost literally). There were moments where I sat up straighter and said, "No.  Oh, what are they going to do now?" out loud while I was reading.

Characters can be tricky in YA lit as well because they are often written by adults who either write their teen characters as adults in young bodies or write them as clichéd tropes of pop culture references. Jay's teaching experience means he knows adolescents, and he writes these teenagers as complex, three dimensional characters (salty language and all) rather than stereotypes. I appreciate that, and I think young adult readers will too.

The book didn't end quite the way I envisioned or perhaps even hoped, but it does end in an interesting and thought provoking way. I highly recommend this book to high school, college, and adult readers who enjoy a little dystopian fiction in their lives.

Yes, We Are Like That - And We Should Repent

When Joe Biden was President, and there were shootings or tragic crimes, he often put some variation of the sentence "This is not who we are as Americans" in his response speech. While I know what he meant, each time I thought, "If it's not, then how does it keep happening here?" It would have been more accurate to say, "This is not who we SHOULD be as Americans."

For the past two weeks, as we have witnessed the clash between ICE agents and protestors in Minnesota, there have been similar sentiments online. After Renée Good's death, one tweet read, in part, "We love our neighbors. We aspire to live by the Golden Rule. We are better than this." Another said, "Consider the outlook Jesus would have on you celebrating her death. We are not them. Stop acting like you are."

This isn't a semantic difference. To declare that our actions do not reflect who we are just doesn't make sense. What are we asking people to judge us by if not the things we say and do. If not our actions and our words, what are we?

Statements like this, even when well meaning and aspirational, are a problem. They give cover to the darkest parts of us while allowing us to delude ourselves into believing that our hearts are not dark. You've gotten this non-apology from someone, "I'm sorry I said that, but you know I didn't mean it. That's not who I am." We've seen this from celebrities like Paula Dean, Mel Gibson, and Michael Richards after their very public racist rants. Some jumped to defend them because of the circumstances under which they said it (duress, drunkenness, being pushed to their limits, etc.). 

But here's the thing. Something can't come out of you if it's not in you. No matter how hard you squeeze an orange, you won't get coffee out of it. 

If a tube is unlabeled, the only way to know if it is toothpaste or Preparation H is to put it under pressure. Pressure doesn't create; it reveals. 

We shouldn't apologize for saying something we didn't mean; we should apologize for meaning it. And, we should definitely not minimize things by claiming it to be outside of our character.

Teachers, this matters in our classrooms. If we want to help our students develop good character, we cannot let them get away with "that's not who I am" apologies. And, we can't model them. When we have lost our temper or crossed the line in our speech, true apologies are needed, not evasions of responsibility dressed up as contrition. True apologies include three things: 

1. An admission of the action (I did/said this thing.) 
2. An acceptance of the damage done (This thing I did harmed you.)
3. An attempt to make things right (I will repair what can be repaired, and I will not do this again in the future.)

This is going to take more time than "Say you're sorry," which is what we so often do with little to no regard as to whether or not it is sincere. But the discipling that happens is worth the investment. Most teachers have some kind of paraphernalia (coffee mug, wall hanging, t-shirt) that says we touch the future; well here's how we do it. Imagine a future in which people have been taught, not just to say they are sorry, not even just to express remorse, but to reconcile. What a better future that would be.