Try Something New

This weekend, I had the pleasure of watching my students perform in The Secret Garden.  While they all did a fantastic job, the amazing revelation was the 8th-grade girl playing Mary.  She embodied this character, projected, and engaged with the other actors like she had been on stage her whole life.  Here's the thing.  She just started doing theater last year.

What makes this remarkable is how rare it is to see kids pursue something brand new.  Most of the time, I see kids who have already decided they don't like things that they don't already do.  I'm not sure of the cause.  It would be easy to blame social media for increasing the chance of public embarrassment on a large scale, thus deterring them from wanting to do something they aren't already good at.  It would be easy to blame video games for the number of hours it sucks out of our lives.

While those are easy culprits to throw under the bus, I think it may have more to do with adults.  We tend to tell kids what to like and not like by what we do.  I have heard many parents tell kids that they don't like math easier and it's okay because they don't use algebra.  (STOP SAYING THAT!  YES, YOU DO!)  My school has had more than one chapel speaker who tries to get the kids on their side by telling the kids that they hate reading or history.  (Please, if you are ever invited to speak somewhere, don't go in and disrespect what they do there.)  We put kids into soccer when they are four and then tell them that they love soccer, even if they don't.  If a kid expresses an interest in art, we tell them that people don't make any money with it and discourage them from pursuing it in favor of STEM fields.  Don't get me wrong, as a science teacher, I'm thrilled that some of my students want to pursue science careers, but I would never try to dissuade them from pursuing an interest of any kind.

We have fallen into an interesting habit of telling kids they should follow their passion while simultaneously telling them what their passion should be or outright choosing it for them.  In doing so, we implicit;y send them the message that other things aren't worth their time, and they don't allow themselves to recognize that there may be passions they have not yet discovered.  Yet, there are many examples of people who accidentally find something they love just because they tried something new. 

A few years ago, I wrote about our Girls Varsity Basketball Team that was made up almost entirely of seniors who had excelled at other sports but never been basketball players.  Each one of them ended the season saying they would have done earlier if they had known they would love it so much.  I had no idea when I was a junior in high school that I would fall in love with physics during my senior year and want to make that my life's work.  If someone had allowed me to stay locked into only things I already knew about, I would not have found that.  Andrea Bocelli was a lawyer until he was 34 and then decided to pursue music.  Mary Kay was 45 when she decided to try her hand at business, and Vera Wang didn't open a bridal boutique until she was 41.  You don't know what you will like or hate until if you have given it an honest effort.

When you find yourself interested in something, don't talk yourself out of it.  Try it.  Take a class, learn from a youtube video, anything.  If you don't like it, you have wasted a bit of time and money, but you have still been enriched by having the experience.  If, as adults, we still have the potential to find new interests and develop new abilities, why would we ever discourage kids from trying something new?  Kids do not yet know whether they would like something if they tried it, so encourage them to try things.  Let them know that experiences are important, even if they don't end up making it their job or even taking it into their adult life.  I don't play the piano today, but I know I benefitted from the five years of lessons that I took (not to mention the clarinet I played in the school band for three years or the blast I had playing handbells at church).  There's more to the experience than the outcome.

Take a lesson today from my bright, happy 8th-grade student.  She decided to try something new, and she is very happy that she did.

Expectation v. Courtesy

Today, it is not uncommon for a teacher to open their inbox in the morning to find 15-20 e-mails from students, parents, or both.  Students typically write to ask a question about their work or ask about a grade.  Parents write for a wide variety of reasons, from questions about projects to complaints about something I have said to their student (that sounded pretty different by the time it got home) to requests for extra credit and tutor recommendations.

When I began my career in 1998, e-mail existed, but it wasn't really being used to communicate with teachers the way it is today.  I taught freshmen, and I knew that they weren't telling their parents what happened at school.  The best a parent is likely to get from their freshman child when asked how their day was is "fine" or the answer "nothing" when asked what they did at school that day.  I wanted my students' parents to have some idea of what they were doing at school, so I sent a weekly e-mail.  Monday mornings, I summarized my lesson plans for the week.  It wasn't detailed; it was usually just the objective of the week.  I also told them if they should expect that week in terms of homework.  It was just a little way for the parents of my students to see that their teacher was excited and had a plan for their students that week.  I got a lot of positive feedback from this weekly 5-6 sentence e-mail, so I kept doing it.

With the advent of learning management systems, like Blackboard, Haiku, and Neo, this e-mail is no longer necessary.  They are going to get most of this information from the LMS and, in fact, expect it to be there.  If a homework assignment doesn't get posted on the LMS, I'm more likely than not to get an e-mail telling me that their student should not have to do it.  What was once a courtesy is now an expectation.

I was talking with a friend one day about the pace of "time-saving" technologies and whether or not they actually saved time.  She made the point that, far from saving time, they just raised expectations.  The washing machine, for example, resulted in people wearing clothes only once before expecting it to be washed when people would previously have worn something a few times between washings. 

Educational tech is the same.  Because students and parents have access to their grades twenty-four hours a day, they will refresh a page, again and again, waiting for the teacher to input the grade.  Because the grade shows up on a screen, they often forget that a human has to grade the assignment first.  I received an email from a student this week, telling me that she had done an assignment, but it still said zero in our grading system.  Her email was sent 7 minutes after she completed the assignment.  She expected it to be input instantaneously.  I'm a yearbook advisor as well, and digital photography and social media have led to students asking, "Where will your pictures be posted so we can download them?"  Notice that they don't ask IF the pictures will be posted, but where.  I used to send a really good shot to a student as a thougtful act.  Now, it's an expectation, so they feel deprived when I tell them that I don't post them. 

As teachers, we want to do things that help our students.  We want to share information with their parents that will help the student be successful.  We have to be careful, however, not to set ourselves up to chase our tails by responding to every request.  Setting clear boundaries at the beginning of the year is very important.  If you don't answer emails on Sundays, make that clear in your class policies (I know. I know.  They don't read them, but that's not on you).  If you make an exception to your late work policy, make sure the student knows that it is a one-time act of grace, or it will happen again.  Responding yes to everything is not the act of kindness you might think it is when you consider the impact that a sense of entitlement it is having on their life in the long-term.  Clarity is kindness, and predictability leads to a feeling of security.  When kids know you mean what you say, they may not like every decision, but they will have more respect for them.

One Way (or Another)

Depending on which educators you follow online, you have either read that computers in classrooms are the greatest thing ever and that we should all go paperless or you have read that computers in classrooms are toxic distractions and sources of evil and students should do everything on paper.  As with most things, both extremes are stupid.

Paperless is stupid.
All paper in the 21st century is stupid.

My school is in our 8th year as a one to one school, and I am on board with what can be done with computers in the classroom that cannot be done without them.  From simple things like, "Hey, guys, look up the height of the Empire State Building in meters" so that we can write a physics problem about it to more complex uses like, "Our honors discussion of the Richard Feynman book will be a Twitter chat" to "Construct a solution to a problem in a developing nation," there are skills I would not have been able to ask of my students without each of them having access to the internet.  And those examples don't scratch the surface of the day to day activities of downloading instructions, dropping illustrations into their notes, and the fact that they keep track of all of their assignments on a digital calendar. 

Sometimes, however, it just makes sense to do things "the old way."  I have days in which I advise students to work on paper today.  It is easier to do math with a pencil than it is to type it, especially at higher levels.  Fractions make no sense later when you have typed them.  It takes more time to time to type subscripts and superscripts and special symbols of chemical equations than it does to write them.  In these activities, the techy way just isn't better.

Here's the thing.  You are in the classroom for a reason.  It's not because you know everything.  It's not because you can answer every question.  It's because a computer doesn't have professional judgment.  There are about ten ways to do everything.  Your job as a teacher is to decide which way or ways are best.  A blanket policy of any kind doesn't allow for you, as the educational expert in the room, to recognize the differences between your students.  It might be best for 2nd period to do something on the computer while 3rd period does the same activity on paper.  It might be best for one student to type because their handwriting is atrocious but for someone else to write on paper because they won't stop playing games online.  It might be that one student needs to put files on their computer because it is searchable while another student will do better with color-coded, tabbed folders. 

Know your students.  Know your content.  Decide what is the best way to do things.  It can't be all one way.