Experience = Perspective

In the course of getting my education degree, I took exactly one class in educating kids with special needs.  I hope teacher preparation programs are now requiring more than one because it is a large part of the job.  If I was only going to have one, though, I had the best.  For the life of me, I cannot remember the professor's name, but she was fantastic.  She did therapy work with horses, told us stories of kids who came to school with feeding tubes, and introduced me to the F.A.T. city workshop, which make be the best thing ever for understanding kids with ADHD. 

And, oh yeah, she only had one arm.  This is going to sound strange, but I think about her every time I use a gas station restroom.  She once told us a story about a bathroom door lock that required pulling a lever with one hand while turning the doorknob with the other.  If she had not had a traveling companion and been able to slide the key under the door, she would have been trapped.  The person who designed this lock obviously did not have the perspective that there might be people without two functioning hands, and there is no chance I would ever think about it if it had not been for this professor.  Not having her experiences would not give us the perspective needed to think about appropriate lock design.

I was scrolling through Twitter this weekend, and this story came to mind as I watched the reaction to the President's tweets about West Baltimore.  President Trump tweets while sitting in the White House, which is a downgrade from his pre-inaugural lifestyle.  How can this man who has spent his life sitting at a gold-leafed table in the two-story penthouse of the building bearing his family name understand what it means to love a hometown that has poverty and rats in addition their other culture?  When Victor Blackwell got emotional on the air, there were people who thought he was overreacting.  My guess is that they think that because no one has said that "no human being would ever want to live" in the place they love and call home.  His level of emotion reflects his experience and perspective. 

We teach students who are going to say things we don't understand.  Some of them will be wrong or legitimately strange, but some can only be understood in relation to their life experiences.  When a student says they hate Christmas, it may be because they have an abusive parent.  When a student reacts badly to Columbus Day, consider whether they have Native American background and don't find manifest destiny something to celebrate.  A student who reacts badly to reading aloud may have been mortified by their mispronunciation of an unfamiliar word in an elementary school class.  A student who overreacts to a balloon popping may be having a sense memory of an experience we don't even know about.  We don't always have to give in to the preferences of every student, but we will be able to avoid a lot of pain and class disruption if we get to know them, listen to their experiences, and try to understand the perspective that gives them.

Royal Family Kids 2019

"What kind of camp is it?" people ask.   The simple answer is what I usually give.  "It's a camp for foster children."  While true, it is a gross oversimplification of Royal Family Kids.  When I get home, they say, "How did it go?"  Again, the simple answer of "great" is not fully accurate.  It takes a while to recover from camp enough to really reflect on it, so now that I have had three nights' sleep, I might be ready.

What is Royal Family Kids Camp?  In 1985, Wayne and Diane Tesch started a week-long camp in the California mountains to give kids who had been abused or neglected a week away to enjoy what all kids should have the chance to enjoy, just being kids.  The goal was to create "moments that matter" and to give kids positive childhood memories.  In 1990, they decided to take the camp they had developed and make it a nationwide ministry.  As of this summer, RFK camps exist in forty-three states in America and seven countries.

To a casual observer, I don't think Royal Family would look much different than most Christian camps.  Other than noticing that there are a lot of adults, they would see kids playing games, shooting arrows, swimming, riding horses, learning Bible stories, having tea parties, building things from wood, and a myriad of other camp things. 

Even if the observer were to get a little closer, they might not know that this camp was designed specifically around the needs of abused kids.  They would hear counselors encouraging their campers to keep trying and praising their efforts at everything they do.  They would see lots of food and hear mealtime conversations in which kids are asked, "What's your favorite things we do at camp?"  They might note that the Bible stories are about unlikely heroes (David, Esther, Joseph), but they probably wouldn't put together why those stories were chosen. 

The truth is a person has to be part of Royal Family Kids camp to really get it.  When we attend training, we learn why we play games in which there is a goal to be reached but not ones in which one camper wins over another.  We want these kids to experience the joy of achieving a goal without feeling that another must experience a loss for that to be meaningful.  Mealtimes are times in which campers are served and allowed to have all they want to eat.  If a kid wants a salad that consists of nothing but croutons and bacon, the staff will happily make that salad.  There is no shortage of food for any camper.  The Bible stories are, in fact, stories of unlikely heroes.  Joseph's story, in particular, is one our campers can relate to as he came from a dysfunctional family and was abused and neglected by his brothers.  These stories are chosen with great purpose.  RFK wants their campers to see that God uses the small and the broken to accomplish His plans.  During our training times, we are taught how to view misbehavior as an expression of unmet needs and how to address and correct that behavior in a positive and relationship-building way rather than striving for simple compliance.  Because we know that some of our kids have a negative history with photographs, they are told up front who will be allowed to take their picture.  We make sure to get shots of siblings together because some of them only see each other during this one week of the year.  Every moment is thought about carefully with the core values of RFK in mind.  It is the intentionality of planning around the specific needs of kids from hard places and difficult pasts that make Royal Family different from other camps. 

This year was my 12th with Royal Family.  I have served in both of the North Carolina camps.  I have been a counselor and an assistant to the photographer.  Now, I am a co-photographer and video maker.  I have seen kids experience one week have an impact on their lives, and I have had the honor of seeing kids go through all seven years and leave us different people at the age of 12 than they were when they started with us at 6 years old.  You can see why "It's a camp for foster children" just isn't enough of an explanation.

I can't imagine July without this experience.  I'm not saying it is easy.  Counselors are emotionally present 23 hours a day, and some of the kids are prone to resist that investment.  That can leave you wrecked by Friday afternoon.  Activity assistants are constantly on the move.  They are either setting up an activity or putting it away or helping at the pool or rescuing a weary counselor or cleaning the cafeteria or trying to remember who wants half of a carrot on their salad (I cannot overstate the strangeness of the salad situation).  They must be physically spent by the night time, but for an hour each night, they cover at bedtime so the counselor can have one hour with adults.  The photographers are constantly on the move, trying to capture each camper's experience in a book of photos they receive on Friday.  I'm not certain the directors ever sleep at all.  When I say, "The week went great," I am telling the truth.  It's just that great also means difficult, meaningful, exhausting, fun, emotional, and a lot of other things that the word "great" just doesn't encapsulate - unless you were there.

Each year, after I post my camp blog, someone on social media asks how they can participate.  The truth is everyone can participate in some way.  You may not be physically able to attend, but we have people who make blankets, people who pray for each camper by name, people who donate items for birthday bags, and people who donate money.  Since I don't know where you might be when you read this, I am posting the link to the national site.  It is https://rfk.org/

However, if you live in or near Raleigh, NC and want to be a part of our camp specifically, let me know.  I'll connect you with our directors. 

Celebrating Apollo - Teamwork and Transparency

If you read this blog or know me at all, you know that I have a great love of NASA.  My favorite thing to teach about is the history of human space flight.  My favorite part of that is the Apollo program.  On this, the 50th anniversary of "one giant leap for mankind," I would like to celebrate two things, teamwork and learning from our mistakes transparently and publically.

Teamwork
While I was not yet alive when Neil Armstrong first set foot on the moon, I am inspired by it and by the 400,000 people who made it and the missions that followed it possible.  Those are the people we often forget.  We know the names of the astronauts and some of the flight directors, but there were so many others.  We don't know the names of the mission control guys, the people who wrote computer code, the team that ran the simulators, the engineers from Northrop Grumman who designed and built the Lunar Module, the ladies who hand-sewed the EVA suits, or the people who printed the books explaining what each error meant when an alarm went off; but we would not have won the space race without them.

In his last transmission before returning to Earth, Neil Armstrong paused to credit all of those who got him and his crewmates to the moon.  He said, "We would like to give special thanks to all those Americans who built the spacecraft; who did the construction, design, the tests, and put their hearts and all their abilities into those crafts.  To those people tonight, we give a special thank you, and to all the other people that are listening and watching tonight, God bless you. Goodnight from Apollo 11.”

Last Friday, I watched Apollo 13 to begin my celebration of this anniversary.  If that movie shows anything, it is the value of the team in the Apollo missions.  Ken Mattingly, who had been scrubbed from the flight, worked tirelessly with John Aaron to come up with a power-up procedure that would fit within their remaining power supply.  Before a move could be made, each member of mission control had to give the "Go" based on their own area of responsibility because no one person could interpret that much data on their own.  When the three astronauts have to complete an engine burn without their guidance computer, each member was needed to do it successfully.  Fred Haise was in charge of the pitch while Jim Lovell handled the other two rotation directions, and Jack Swigert made sure they burned the engines for the precise amount of time needed.  One person could not have completed that burn.  My favorite scene in the movie is when the carbon dioxide scrubbers on the LM have become saturated and the ones from the other ship are a different shape.  The backroom guys dump all of the stuff they have on the ship onto a table and say, "We need to make this fit into the hole for this using only that."  And, then, guess what?  They do.  Not only do they build one at mission control, but they also write the procedures to communicate via radio so that the guys onboard can build one as well.  Do you feel the teamwork it took to get those men home alive?  Every mission required the work of thousands of men and women, not just the three who got ticker-tape parades at the end.

Transparently Learning From Failure
As we look back on Apollo from decades away, it can be easy to think it was all smooth sailing.  After all, we landed on the moon within the decade and on our first try.  That belief, however, would do a disservice to the people who sacrificed in order to fulfill Kennedy's wish.  

In the earliest days, when rockets were unused missiles from the war, things didn't always go as planned.  Consider "the four-inch flight" of the Mercury Redstone rocket.  Aside from the hit to morale it certainly caused, it provided an opportunity for learning no successful launch would have.  Gene Krantz had only just begun work at NASA when it happened.  In his book, Failure is Not an Option, he said, "I had gained something precious.  I now knew how much I didn't know."  They regrouped, analyzed what went wrong, corrected it, and never made that mistake again.  Not only was the failure visible to anyone who had been around, but it was also filmed and can be found on youtube today.  We didn't hide our failures; we learned from them.

The most well-known failure of the era is the Apollo 1 fire.  While performing the routine "plugs out" test, a spark from a frayed wire ignited the high-pressure oxygen in the capsule, killing Ed White, Roger Chaffee, and Gus Grissom.  The reason this is so well-known is that it was on the news that night, and transcripts of the Congressional hearing were published in the papers.  Each day, as Frank Borman led the investigation, NASA updated the public on their findings.  Because of that transparency and answering press inquiries, the causes were ultimately found and dealt with.  After the explosion of the Challenger in 1986, President Regan addressed the nation.  Of all the great moments in that four-minute speech, one of my favorites is the line, "I've always had great faith in and respect for our space program, and what happened today does nothing to diminish it. We don't hide our space program. We don't keep secrets and cover things up. We do it all up front and in public. That's the way freedom is, and we wouldn't change it for a minute."  He recognized that the public nature of our space program was never more important than during a disaster.

You may not know that the Soviets had similar failures to ours.  They made announcements of their successes, but they kept their failures tightly held secrets.  Some of them we only learned of in the late '80s.  Even within their space program, failures were no to be openly spoken of.  How can failures be learned from and addressed if they are not discussed?  They can't be.  The difference in reaction to setbacks is ultimately how we beat the Russians to the moon.  They remained ahead of us until they experienced a failure because secrecy will never beat the attitude that we "gain something precious" when we learn from our failures.  

As we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the moon landing, we should celebrate Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin.  We should not forget Michael Collins, the unsung member of the trio.  We should watch the documentaries on CNN and PBS.  I will be watching The Right Stuff.  Let's take a moment, during all of that, to celebrate those whose names we do not know and be grateful that they made us, the American people, part of that One Giant Leap for Mankind.

Teacher Oath

The Hippocratic Oath is a widely known set of standards that nearly all medical students recite at some point in their process of becoming a doctor, usually when graduating from medical school.  While they are not legally bound by it (you can't sue your doctor for violating it) and it has changed over the years (the original specifically prohibits abortion), it is generally upheld as the standard for medical ethics.

Here it is in its modern form.

I swear to fulfill, to the best of my ability and judgment, this covenant:

I will respect the hard-won scientific gains of those physicians in whose steps I walk, and gladly share such knowledge as is mine with those who are to follow.

I will apply, for the benefit of the sick, all measures [that] are required, avoiding those twin traps of overtreatment and therapeutic nihilism.

I will remember that there is art to medicine as well as science, and that warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh the surgeon's knife or the chemist's drug.

I will not be ashamed to say "I know not," nor will I fail to call in my colleagues when the skills of another are needed for a patient's recovery.

I will respect the privacy of my patients, for their problems are not disclosed to me that the world may know. Most especially must I tread with care in matters of life and death. If it is given me to save a life, all thanks. But it may also be within my power to take a life; this awesome responsibility must be faced with great humbleness and awareness of my own frailty. Above all, I must not play at God.

I will remember that I do not treat a fever chart, a cancerous growth, but a sick human being, whose illness may affect the person's family and economic stability. My responsibility includes these related problems if I am to care adequately for the sick.

I will prevent disease whenever I can, for prevention is preferable to cure.

I will remember that I remain a member of society, with special obligations to all my fellow human beings, those sound of mind and body as well as the infirm.

If I do not violate this oath, may I enjoy life and art, respected while I live and remembered with affection thereafter. May I always act so as to preserve the finest traditions of my calling and may I long experience the joy of healing those who seek my help.

Side note:  I think it is interesting that the words, "First, do no harm" do not appear in it as TV shows make it seems like it starts with that line.

It seems to me that in a job as important as teaching, we should also have a guiding set of principles.  There should be a shared set of promises we make to ourselves, our students, and their parents.  As I have thought about this, I have to ask myself, what qualities are so important and so universal that we could all agree to abide by them.  Here's what I'm certain is only a partial list.  It surprises me how easy it is to make parallels to the Hippocratic Oath.

- I will seek out research about the best practices of my profession, share them with other educators, and strive to implement them for the good of all students.
- I will use as many teaching strategies as are required to provide an understanding of content but will not fall into the trap of confusing kids with too many strategies where one is sufficient.
- I will remember that the best classroom management is a positive classroom environment, which is established by building relationships which outweigh any negative consequence.
- I will not be ashamed to say, "I do not know" when a student's question exceeds my knowledge, nor will I fail to help that student seek an answer.
- I will remember that I do not teach a report card or test score, recognizing that my student is a whole person and not just a receptacle for my content.
- I will do what is, in my professional judgment, best for my student - even when it is not comfortable or their preference.

I am sure there is much to be added to this list.  These are just the things I could think of while sitting here.

Hey, Everybody!

No matter the school, my lunch table was always strange.  I attract odd folk, so this shouldn't be a surprise.  Band geeks, nerds, theater kids, and me.  We were all kind of misfits, so we fit together.  One girl never even talked to us.  She sat at our table, reading a book to herself, and laughing out loud as though the characters were telling jokes to the whole table.

In the eighth grade, I sat next to this boy.  I thought he was cool, but looking back on it, I have no idea if he actually was (there's a lesson in there somewhere).  He was tall and stocky; he had curly blonde hair.  He was a couple of years older than I was, and I was slightly confused why this "cool" guy was ever spending time with me.  I really don't know if he was cool at all.  Maybe he wasn't cool in his class, but he knew he was cool to some kids a couple of grades down.  I don't know; it's been a long time since I even thought about this time.  To be honest, I can't even remember his name, but I want to say it was Adam.

The point of this journey down memory lane is that I had a flash of memory about those lunches yesterday.  Every day, for at least a year, Adam stood up in the middle of lunch and shouted, "Hey, everybody!"  The room would get quiet, and he would announce something meaningless like, "Ricky's got a ham and cheese sandwich."  People laughed and went back to their regular conversations.  This happened every day.  Every day, knowing that he was not going to say anything of remote consequence, every person in the room (including teachers and actual cool kids) stopped talking to hear what Adam (was that his name?) was going to say.  There was anticipation about what it was going to be, even though we all knew it was likely to be about food or the color of someone's shirt.

What made me think about the odd-ball middle school memory?  I was scrolling through Twitter.  What is Twitter, after all, but a giant, worldwide lunchroom of people having a lot of parallel conversations?  It's even kind of cliquey, just like a school lunchroom.  Every once in a while, a voice rises above everyone else's and gets our attention.  Whether it is a viral video of a cat or a story that we find outrageous or the news that Disney has cast a woman of color to play Ariel in the live action version of The Little Mermaid, we stop scrolling and pay attention in some way.  Perhaps we add meaningfully to the discussion; perhaps we add something without meaning.  Perhaps we just read everyone else's comments.  Regardless, we have allowed our lives to be interrupted and spent some of the finite number of minutes we have on earth paying attention to it.

Twitter has the power to grab our attention and time, and that can be a good thing.  It is what kept us informed about the Arab Spring.  It allows for up to the minute information on developing stories in the news.  I have a great community of educators to share information with.  It has the power to bring our attention to really good things if that is what we choose to stop scrolling for.

What we allow to have our attention reveals something about us.  The people in the cafeteria stopped what they were doing every single day, knowing that what Adam was going to say (the more I think about it, I don't know if that was his name - could it have been Alex?) wasn't going to be important.  It was usually funny, but it was never important.  It was a harmless and entertaining 10 seconds a day.

Think about this as you scroll through Twitter.  What are you stopping for and for how long?  A few seconds a day being entertained by a cat video is the harmless digital equivalent of "Hey, everybody!"  If you are spending time arguing with a stranger about the race of a fictional character, you should probably reflect on whether or not that is how you want to spend your life.

The Periodic Table's Sesquicentennial

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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