Personifying the Elements

There are a lot of ways to teach the elements.  If you type chemical elements into youtube, there are over 641 thousand results.  Google shows 102 thousand news stories, almost 1.5 million books, and countless images.  As I have mentioned in this blog before, I did the same element project for years.  Each student built a model of the atom for a certain element and then wrote a paper (or podcast or webpage, depending on the year) about that element.  Last year, I tried replacing it with a nuclear energy project, but it didn't have the effect I had hoped for.  I was ready to do it again with some tweaks, but my co-conspirator, Kellie, had a better idea.

I was skeptical at first.  She came to me after last year's collaboration on the Mars paper and said, "I have an idea for another paper your kids can write."  My half-joking response was that I only grade one paper per year.  Then she said, "What if they have to make a case for an element as "the best element?"  Oh, that's interesting.  I may have to grade a second paper.  When talking about it with our tech coach, she said, "How is anyone going to make a case for anything besides carbon or oxygen?"  Hmm, that's a thought.  How were we going to do that?  Kellie said, "What if it is running for President, and they have to talk about the strengths that would make it a good candidate?  There are a lot of qualities that might make a good candidate."  Now, we were really onto something.  There's a lot of talk in education right now about doing things that cannot be googled, and both we and our principal agreed this was a way to do that.

I don't teach English, but I assume there are a lot of ways to teach personification.  If I remember correctly, I learned it in a poetry unit.  I think a tree was talking or something.  I never thought about it existing outside a poetic context, but this collaboration allowed kids to apply personification to science, especially when we decided it should be a speech instead of a paper.  Students actually spoke AS the element (or a spokesperson for the element).  The described its strengths (noble gasses have stability, bonding means working well with others, etc.) and accomplishments (hydrogen being the fuel of stars, sodium keeping you hydrated).  I even had someone make a case that radon could be a means of population control.  We gave our students the option of doing their speech on video if doing it live was too intimidating.  If you would like to see the results of that work, here's the playlist of their work.

I have enjoyed a lot of collaborations, but this one may be my favorite.  Kids learned the properties of elements in an interesting way.  They learned personification.  They overcame their fear of public speaking.  We have management tweaks to make for future years, but this was a great project.

Next week, I start a new collaboration, this time with history, a video project about inventions and their impact on culture.

Humility - The Lost Virtue - Part 2

After last week's post, it occurred to me that I really only scratched the surface.  I stopped at the 80's, and that was only the beginning of the end when it comes to teaching humility.  I never thought I would look back on the "everybody gets a trophy days" as only the first step, but that is only because I didn't have enough imagination to know what smartphones would do to our view of the world and our view of how the world views us.

I'm not anti-technology.  As you know, I have a blog.  I work in a school that has a one-to-one program, and I am fully invested in the benefits of that.  I have often said that there is no way I could go back to teaching without every student having a computer in front of them.  I can do low or no tech days, but I could never go back to a year of teaching in which I am the only person in the room with a computer.

I am not anti-technology.  I am, however, anti-dependence.  It makes me crazy that everywhere I go, I see kids and adults alike staring at rectangles.  Kids are actually better at interacting with each other while using their rectangles than adults are, but I still have concerns that we have subjected them to a massive sociological experiment.  Ask a teenager if you can look at the pictures on their phone, and you will find a thousand selfies.  Go to their social media, and you will find out where all those selfies went.  An event hasn't actually happened, it seems, if we don't document that we were there for it and post it for all the world to see.  A picture of fireworks isn't enough.  We must be standing in front of the fireworks.  When we stand in front of the majesty that is the Grand Canyon, we are still thinking about ourselves.  I know that even back in the film days, people took photos of themselves in front of tourist attractions, but it was one or two photos, usually of the whole family, not a hundred photos of a duck-faced, good-side, downward-angled, Snapchat-filtered, posed, etc. . .  I'm pretty sure Narcissus would find us vain.  He only looked at his own reflection; he didn't insist that others look at him as well.

Smartphones have also distorted our sense of time.  It never takes longer than two seconds to get the answer to a question, watch a video we want to watch, or text a friend.  And when we do text, if it takes long than three seconds for the three dots to turn into an answer, we get angry that the person hasn't responded immediately.  We say things like, "Why does she even have a phone if she isn't going to answer?"  This infects other parts of our lives as we impatiently tap our foot next to the microwave, forgetting that it used to take hours to make a meal.  This impatience with time is about our pride, revealing our belief that we should get what we want instantly.

The day of my last post, I had an interaction that reinforced the weird relationship even our most humble students have with their social media.  Our art teacher is having our students participate in the global Kindness Rocks Project.  Because social media can be a place for good, people all over the world are decorating rocks with uplifting images or messages and hiding them with a hashtag so that you can let the world know you have found it and are either keeping it or hiding it again with a clue to where you have hidden it.  This should be a fun and low-stress school project.   As our art teacher was explaining it to a small group of students, one of them said, "This will ruin my Instagram, so I don't want to put it there."  To be fair, I am not on Instagram, so maybe the problem is with my ignorance, but I can't help wondering how a person's Instagram can be ruined by one picture.  Other students understood her concern about messing up the design and colors.  Another teacher, who is friends with this student on Instagram looked at her feed and said that it was all artsy selfies in front of sunsets.  She talked about making a separate account just for this project, but she decided to use her mom's twitter account instead.  I've never imagined this kind of conversation.  Basically, what she was saying was that this picture would be off-brand, and we can't have that.  The idea that her design would be ruined and that she would be embarrassed if she posted one photo that doesn't fit with her image is surely a sign of the pride social media has embedded in us.

Our overinflation of our online image also magnifies our sense of our own influence online.  The rise of "slactivism," from ice buckets to hashtags to the "me too" fad, reveals our belief that we are making a difference by doing nothing.  When a disaster happens, we change our profile picture to a certain color to show our solidarity.  That's it.  The people of Puerto Rico can eat or drink our red, white, and blue profile picture; but we feel good about ourselves because we "raised awareness," as though that is an end.  While our ancestors, only a generation ago, marched on Washington to show their support for Civil Rights, we plop down a hashtag and feel proud of how "woke" we are.  This is pride, and we should take a good hard look at how little we do that has actual value.

This can be fixed, but like everything else, we must do it intentionally.  We must stop and reflect on our actions.  We must model humility for our kids instead of complaining that they don't have any.  We must recognize our place before God, as bearers of the Imago Dei who have been damaged by sin, and place our sins, including our pride, at the Cross.

Humility - The Lost Virtue

Yes, you heard that correctly.  That was a man bragging about how humble he is - "More humble," in fact, "than you could understand."  If you needed further proof that our understanding of humility has been lost, this had to be it.

Humility is an important virtue.  Jesus had it, and he was the one person with the right not to have it.  Scripture advises humility from beginning to end.  Moses and Aaron admonished Pharaoh for his lack of humility before God in the book of Exodus, and I Peter 5:6 commands to humble ourselves under the mighty hand of God.  In early America, Ben Franklin listed humility among the thirteen most important virtues (We'll ignore, for now, the fact that he didn't practice it himself).  Humility was taught both in school and at home.  Children who were braggarts were admonished by teachers and parents alike.  

This is not to say that no one recognized their own value.  David Hume, who died in 1776 encouraged us to recognize those qualities that did indeed deserve recognition.  He said, "Though an overweening conceit of our own merit be vicious and disagreeable, nothing can be more laudable than to have a value for ourselves, where we really have qualities that are valuable.... it is certain that nothing is more useful to us, in the conduct of life, than a due degree of pride, which makes us sensible of our own merit, and gives us a confidence and assurance in all our projects and enterprises." While I disagree with him on the degree of importance he places on it, I do agree that a recognition of one's own skills is the first step to exercising them.  There is a reasonable ground to be found between thinking we are absolutely worthless and believing ourselves to be great simply for existing.  That ground comes in recognizing the gifts that were given to us by God for just that, gifts of God.  William James, a psychologist of the 1890's seems to have struck a secular version of balance by defining self-esteem as the ratio of success to pretension.  More on this later.

(But, for a hilarious look at how this goes wrong, click here.)

The 1960's caused the swing of many pendulums, and this was one of them.  Breaking away from parents and their rules comes with a necessary belief in the ruling of ourselves.  The "psychology for normals" movement meant even well-adjusted people were being marinated in the ideas of Maslow, Coopersmith, and Braden.  Then, those people became parents.  We truly saw the death of humility in the 1980's.  These people who had been soaked in the psychology of self-esteem were now told to instill that in their children.  California lawmakers decided that the cause of crime and most social ills would be solved if children were taught they were amazing.  There was even a taxpayer-funded self-esteem task force.  

Despite the fact that no research study (and there were many) ever showed self-esteem to be helpful in reducing social ills, and no research study ever showed low self-esteem to be a risk factor, we went on acting as though the opposite were true.  There is even one study that indicates those with high self-esteem are a greater risk to society than those with low self-esteem, but we carry on with telling our kids that they are perfect for no other reason than they were born.  

Here's a great breakdown on the history and the studies.  

Somewhere along this path, we deemed our kids worthy of worship.  If you think I am overstating this, go online and make a statement about your child that is anything short of pure, unadulterated praise; and watch what happens.  You will be vilified instantly because you aren't bowing down to the idol of parenthood.  There will be a religious fervor to the response of people for a reason; they don't worship God and therefore see themselves, their children, or you in the proper light.  Rather than seeing human beings who carry the Imago Dei (image of God) but who are fallen and in need of redemption, our culture views children as god themselves.  I have seen many mothers on facebook call their firstborn children "the one who made me a mother."  He isn't the one who made you a mother; God did that.  The child is the object of the action, not the actor.  

You may have a great kid, but he is a lousy god.  He isn't equipped to handle the pressure of your worship, which is one of the reasons we have so many kids with anxiety issues.  They know they can't be the god you want them to be, and it makes them crazy trying to live up to that.  This brings me back to William James.  In calling self-esteem a ratio of success to pretension, he gave us two ways to affect it, increase your success or decrease your view of your own potential.  This is going to seem to many like I am saying to lower your expectations to make yourself feel better.  I guess I am in a way, but not as a cop out.  Rather, recognizing our lack of diety will balance the ratio.  It will, perhaps, makes us recognize the need for a savior.  It will, perhaps, make us stop trying to save ourselves.  President Trump obviously needs this, but he isn't the only one who does.

For Love Not For Money

This isn't the post you think.  It's not about how teachers don't do our jobs for money.  Although true, it's not what I want to address here.  Keep reading.

If you are a science teacher, you probably responded with excitement when you heard that the seventh row of the periodic table was finally filled with the confirmation of the synthesis of Nihonium, Moscovium, Tennessine, and Oganesson.  You may have then been psyched to go order an up to date periodic table for your wall.  A year and a half later, you still cannot find that table.  It took almost a year before the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) officially voted on the names, and for some reason, the scientific supply companies still have not produced up to date tables.  I wanted my students to have fully up to date table for two reasons.  1. They should see current science because we are able to communicate quickly in the 21st century.  2.  I wouldn't have to address the holding places anymore. (No, Jimmy, Uuq is not an element symbol.  It's a holding place for one they haven't made yet.)  They have driven me crazy for years.  

In the absence of ones I could buy, I went looking for ones I could print (following fair use guidelines, of course).  There are few up to date table that have the information I want them to have.   There are periodic tables with way too much, and there are periodic tables with way too little.  When you teach 8th-grade, you want that goldilocks table, where the amount of information is just right.  I did what any good teacher with at least some computer skills would do.  I took a free use periodic table that didn't have enough information on it, and I modified it.  You will find it at the bottom of this post.  Tada!  My students now have an up to date table with atomic symbol, name, atomic number, atomic mass, and oxidation numbers.  That's all they need in 8th-grade because I'm not teaching them quantum mechanics.  

As I sat in a faculty meeting with my freshly printed periodic tables, a colleague uttered words that make me recoil - "You should sell that."  There are a lot of reasons why it is nutty to think that I would sell the periodic table, having only combined the research of others; but that isn't the reason it makes me crazy.  I've been hearing this about everything I make for my classroom.  I wrote a textbook for my own use and to benefit my students, and the first question anyone asks is, "Are you going to sell it?"  Again, there are a lot of reasons why I couldn't even if I wanted to, but that's not what makes me crazy.  

What makes me crazy is the assumption that everything we do must be done for monetary gain.  I modified a periodic table because I love my students and want them to have the right information (and because I love that I don't have to address the doggone holding places).  I wrote a book because I love my students and want them to have a usable book.  I designed a review game because I love the way my students respond when they get to do something they aren't used to.  Teachers bring our passion and love and talent to our classrooms out of love.  Please stop trying to turn it into monetary gain.

If you teach middle school (or even high school) science and want this periodic table, here it is the screen shot.

Here's the full-size version.

Six Things to STOP Saying to Students Today

I will never forget this parent conference.  A student was failing my class and others.  She was in danger of not progressing to the next level.  The parent called a meeting of all her daughter's teachers to figure out a plan.  During the meeting, she said, "Well, she has an older brother, so she knows that 8th-grade doesn't matter."  I sat there hoping that the look on my face didn't reflect the horror in my heart.  This woman just told a room full of 8th-grade teachers whose time she had demanded that their jobs didn't matter.  I assume she has communicated the same sentiments to her son and daughter.  It was all I could do not stand up and say, "Whenever she passes this grade that doesn't matter, I guess we should meet again."  Of course, I didn't.  As professionals, we rarely get to say the thing we wish we could.  I wouldn't even mention it here if the student hadn't left our school a long time ago, and I'm certain neither she nor her mother reads this blog about education.

When you teach 8th-grade, one thing you constantly keep in your mind is that you are training your students for what they will encounter in high school.  I assume 5th-grade teachers have this in mind for middle school, and kindergarten teachers have it in mind for 1st grade.  There is no time at which a teacher is not preparing students for the next level.  We expect this to come with resistance from students, but it should not come with resistance from parents.  Yet, adults often communicate resistance to kids, both consciously and unconsciously.

Schooling is one of the few things everyone has in common.  Whether public, home, or private, all of us have been to school.  We have all progressed from basic reading and arithmetic to complex novel analysis and geometry.  We have all gone from the idea that science is a set of terms to the idea that science is an examination of how and why things work.  We have all moved from the idea that history is a study of the events in the past to a recognition of how those events affect our present.  We all know that we are better and more interesting people because of the things we learned outside of our career path, but we do not communicate that to students.

Here's a short list of things I wish adults would stop saying to students:

1.  I never use algebra anyway.
Yes, you do use algebra.  You use it every single day of your life.  You don't sit down with a pencil and call an unknown x because you have internalized algebra to the point where you don't need to do that anymore.  It's no longer algebra as much as it is algebraic thinking.  When you figure out if you have enough money in the bank to pay a bill, you are using algebraic thinking.  When you figure out which coupon is the better deal for buying a box of cereal, you are using algebraic thinking.  When you decide how hard you need to hit the brakes to keep from hitting the car in front of you, you are using algebraic thinking.  The part of your brain that was strengthened by taking algebra is essential for modern living, so stop devaluing it with teenagers.

2.  When you get to high school is when it matters because it will go on your transcript.
I was guilty of this one when I taught 9th-grade.  The idea that your transcript mattered seemed to be a good motivational tool for incoming freshman to take their classes seriously.  What I didn't realize was that I undermined my own value by implying their education up to that point had no value.  When you underestimate the value of ANY part of a student's education, you teach them to undervalue all of it.  Yes, the transcript is an important piece of one possible path in their lives, but so was learning to share in kindergarten.  The transcript will be looked at by colleges, but a student's work ethic is what shows up in teacher recommendation letters, regardless of grades.  The transcript reflects your performance in classes; it doesn't say what kind of person you are.

3.  Yeah, I hated (fill in the subject here) when I was your age, too.
We all had subjects we liked less in school than others.  There's nothing wrong with communicating that you are a human being.  That is not, however, the context in which this is usually said.  This usually comes about when a student doesn't want to do their math homework or doesn't want to read their history book.  Someone, then affirms their lack of motivation with this statement.  If you, as an adult, take a moment to look back on it, I imagine you can now find value in something you didn't see at the time.  I wish I had paid better attention in history because I can now see the patterns that got us to where we are today; I couldn't see that as a high school freshman.  I spent all of my time in Human Anatomy and Physiology Lab in tears.  I was emotionally overwhelmed by the cadaver on the table, but I never learned more in a class than that one (in spite of the C I earned in it).  I hated, hated, hated, reading Lord of the Flies, but I can appreciate it now that I see it being played out in culture.  When you tell a student you hated a subject and let it rest, you teach them there is only value to things they like.  Perhaps, you could augment your statement with what you learned from it even though you didn't like it at the time.

4.  If a lot of you missed that question, the teacher must not have taught it correctly.
If you are a parent, you know that you can say something, say it clearly, and say it repeatedly and still have your child look you in the eye and say, "You never told me that."  Multiply that by 25, and you might stop suggesting that if students don't know something, it is on the teacher.  We do our best to actively engage students, but we cannot learn it for them.  I have had tests in which student scores ranged between 3% and 97%.  During a review for my last test, every student got a question wrong, which was a great opportunity to talk about how a lot of people being wrong doesn't make it right.  Teachers examine our tests after students take them.  When a large number of people miss a question, we do go to that question to make sure it is fairly worded, has been taught, and has been properly marked on the key.  Then, we go over that question with them in the next class to explain why they were wrong and how they could approach it differently the next time to get it right.  We do not automatically throw it out because that teaches our students that it is okay to be wrong if a lot of people are wrong.

5.  You shouldn't take that class if it doesn't line up with what job you want.
Every teacher has at least one student who tells us why they shouldn't have to take our class, no matter what that class is.  One student, in particular, stands out in my mind.  He wanted to be a musician (although I've also heard this statement from future baseball players, politicians, and writers) and just didn't believe he should have to learn chemistry.  Most of the time, we approach this from a standpoint of needing a backup plan in case the whole musician thing doesn't pan out, but I don't think that is wise.  It is just feeding the idea that education is only valuable if it relates to your job.  I said to this student, who I had a good relationship with, "What if the only thing I could talk to you about was chemistry?  Would we have the relationship we have?"  He replied, "Well, no, I guess  we wouldn't."  The reason I could have a conversation with this student, or any of my less scientifically inclined students, is because I am a human being with diverse interests.  I've learned enough about art and music to hold a reasonable conversation and to be able to learn from someone who knows more than I do on the subject (usually, my students).  I read enough to be able to talk about favorite books with students.  I loved my general ed classes because, while they weren't applicable to my future career, they were making me a more interesting person.  Let's teach our kids to be curious, not to be jaded about anything that isn't in their chosen field.

6.  It's only (fill in the grade here).  It doesn't matter anyway.
This was the one that started it all - this mom who was communicating to her daughter that it was okay to fail because this year didn't matter.  Every day of your life matters.  What you do that day matters because you are trading a day of your life for it.  Every day, you are in training to become the person you will be tomorrow.  I don't believe in preparing for college in kindergarten, but I do believe that kindergartners are capable of preparing for next week during this week.  I do believe a third grader is in training for fourth grade.  I do believe I am teaching my 8th-graders to become high school freshmen and my seniors to become lifelong learners, whether that is in college or a job or just as people.  I am teaching all of them the work ethic that is needed for their current level and preparing them for the work ethic that will be needed at the next level.  That student did not suddenly become a motivated, hardworking learner when it "started to count" her freshman year.   Because she had been taught that she only had to work if she thought it was necessary, she carried poor work habits and study skills into high school.  Even if you think a year doesn't matter, DO NOT let your student hear you say it.