Learning Should Be Joyful

I have been teaching for 25 years, long enough to see pendulum swings in a thousand ways.  From a focus on science to a resurgence of the arts back to STEM obsession.  From all phonics to whole language and back to phonics.  

Right now, we are in an upsetting trend of people who only value education as career training.  I am not against the idea that we can use what we learn in school for our jobs, but I am against the notion that everything learned in school should be focused on how you plan to use it after school, leading to people who complain that we don't teach kids to file their taxes or sew on buttons (yes, there is a weird contingent of internet people who won't let this go) or that students should only learn those things that they will use in a job 

This notion is disturbingly utilitarian.  If something is only valuable if it is useful, we will stop being learners and become consumers, judges, and grouches.  Education will become a commodity, so we will learn less as we cull the curriculum.  Content will be prejudged for usefulness, leading us to look at everything through a utilitarian lens.  All of this is bad, but the worst part is that there will no longer be joy in learning anything we don't immediately judge to be useful.  If we allow curiosity to be a defining feature of our lives, we will find joy in learning new things without insisting that it be something we will use later.

I have written on this blog before about my chemistry teacher insisting that I take honors physics.  Had I possessed the view that I should only learn those things that would be part of my future job, I would not have taken honors physics, would not have had Mr. Barbara, and would not have found that I adored physics.  I mean, I loved it so much that I came home every day and did my homework immediately just so I could do more physics.  While I ultimately did make my love of physics into a career, it was because I found so much joy in it that I wanted to give that to others.  When my students leave me, I don't try to turn them all into engineers, but I do try to make it so they see physics in their everyday lives and feel joy in knowing how things work.

I want students to be lifelong learners because there is joy in learning.  That won't happen if we view it merely as job training.  It has been 11 months since I joined the YMCA, and I have spent the last year learning new things.  I've learned about weights and kickboxing and Zumba.  I've learned about indoor cycling, and yesterday I took a certification course to learn how to teach indoor cycling.  At the age of 47, I have found new sources of joy in my life because I was open to learning new things.  My granny had a sister named Grace, who took Greek at her local university when she was in her late 70s.  Her career was long behind her.  She took it because she wanted to.  She took it because learning gave her joy.  I want to be like Grace when I grow up.  I'm not talking about making things easy to make them joyful; Grace was learning Greek, for heaven's sake.  In fact, it is sometimes more joyful to learn something hard because it is more of an accomplishment.

Keep learning.  Teach your kids to keep learning.  Model a love of learning for your students.  Show them that there is joy in learning, no matter how old you are.  

They Neither Protected Nor Served - The Uvalde Report

I had not planned to write about school shootings today.  In general, I try to stay away from the topic, except for the one post following the Parkland shooting.  I would have rather written about anything else.  I would have loved to have written about something nerdy, like working memory, or something lovely, like GRACE's 16th annual Play 4 Kay event.  But earlier this week, the DOJ issued its report on the response to Uvalde, and it was worse than we already knew it was.  

I have been a teacher for 25 years, beginning with the fall after Columbine.  I have been heartbroken by the deaths of children, confused by the complicated motivations, in charge of classrooms during code red drills and code yellow events, and bothered by the lack of response from our public servants.  But no single event has outraged me more than the massacre at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.  After the report came out this week, I expressed this on Twitter, referencing the horrifying story of the girl who put her friend's blood on her own face so the gunman would believe she had already been shot.

At the time of this writing, this tweet has been "liked" over 1300 times.  I'm not telling you this because I care about online attention, but because my tweets generally don't result in more than 20 or so likes.  This story obviously strikes a nerve with a lot of people.  Considering how many school violence events there have been, why this one?  Why does this one feel different?  I won't try to speak for everyone, but for me, it is because the people we rely on to make these situations less awful made it more horrifying instead.

In Parkland, there was only one security officer who failed to do his duty.  He went out of the building instead of into it, but you could make the case that it was one man who didn't deserve to have the job and that someone else might have made the difference.  After all, Second Amendment zealots always assert that "the best way to stop a bad guy with a gun is to have a good guy with a gun on site."  The armed officer at Parkland didn't stop the incident, so maybe he wasn't a "good guy with a gun" but rather a cowardly guy with a gun.  

Uvalde is different.  There were 376 members of law enforcement in the halls of the school, about a dozen of them in less than 3 minutes from the gunman's entry.  But instead of responding to it as an active shooter scenario and entering the room to stop the shooter, they treated it as a "barricaded subject."  Although they could hear gunshots (active shooter), they approached the situation like a bank robber holding hostages.  They ignored the gunshots, the screaming of children, and the pleas of desperate parents for 77 minutes.  For forty of those minutes, they looked for a key to the adjacent classroom.  I've been in schools long enough to tell you that the classroom was almost certainly not locked and that multiple adults in the building had keys, so there was no reason for that kind of delay.  Unable to decide who was in charge, they stood in the hallway talking for over an hour.  

For the first day or two after the incident at Robb Elementary, there was a story going around that a teacher had propped open a door to the school and that this was the way the gunman gained entry to the school.  Then, they said it wasn't propped open when he entered but that it had been earlier.  Then they said it was closed but unlocked.  The report isn't clear on why these stories all conflicted.  But for me, and I speak only for me, when the bodycam footage was released, it was clear that this was an early attempt to divert attention from the inaction of the police and to blame the school for lax security measures.  Make the school look bad first, get that story on FOX News, and let those who already disrespect teachers blame them.  It may have worked for some, but the report makes it clear that this tragedy was made far worse by the inaction of the police and not the educators.

I respect those who choose careers in law enforcement precisely because they choose jobs that put their lives at risk.  They go to work every day, knowing they are armed for a reason and that there is a chance they won't come home.  When fourth graders are in danger, it is not their job to figure out how to protect themselves.  That's the job of those who chose to "protect and serve" the community.  The police in Uvalde were from all levels of enforcement, and they chose to protect themselves, not the children.  I think often of what it must have been like for the children huddled in those classrooms, hearing the police in the hall, believing they would soon come in to help.  What kind of therapy is it going to take for survivors to recognize that those who were charged with helping didn't help, for over an hour?  What was it like to know that the NRA held a convention the next week in nearby Houston?  Did they hear people say their rights are more important than the lives of kids, including their own governor and senator?

I think a lot about the girl who put her friend's blood on her face.  First of all, I respect that a fourth grader had that level of insight.  Surely, no one had told her to do this, so it was a pretty genius thought to have during such a high-stress moment.  Second, as I said in the tweet, I think about how she protected herself because the police weren't protecting her.  But mostly, I wonder about the lifelong PTSD she will certainly have and hope she is getting the help she needs.  

And that leads me to wonder whether we will have a generation of kids with PTSD.  At this point, there are very few kids in America who haven't experienced some level of threat.  Some were at a shopping center when shots rang out or sat through a lockdown of their classroom.  Others have friends or family members who experienced violence in their homes or schools.  After these incidents, we talk a lot about the dead and injured (as we should), but it may be time to expand our definition of injured beyond those whose bodies were invaded by bullets.  The long-term damage will be to mental health.  There is not one member of the Uvalde community who isn't in need of care.  (Add Parkland, Nashville, Sandy Hook, Columbine, the Aurora movie theater, the Charleston church, the Pulse nightclub, the Buffalo grocery store, and the rest of the survivors of what is rapidly becoming countless events.)  While I would rather prevent these events from occurring, we may have to face the fact that it won't happen because there isn't the political will to do so.  While I would prefer a proper response from the police when these incidents occur, Parkland and Uvalde show us there is no guarantee that will happen.  

So, at the bare minimum, can we invest in mental health responses for those who survive?  If they can't protect them, can they at least be served?

  

Curriculum Isn't Everything

For the past two weeks, I have been teaching my middle students about the Apollo era, the causes of NASA's fatal missions, and discussing what it would take to put people on Mars.  It is my favorite thing to teach, and I have been doing so for 25 years.  However, if you open any published physical science textbook, you will not find this chapter.  It is not part of any physical science curriculum.  I added it during my first year because I had students who didn't know anything about the space program, and I wanted them to.  I asked the history teachers if they covered the space race, and they said that, because the '60s were covered so late in the school year, they were doing well to cover the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War.  Knowing I wouldn't be stepping on anyone's toes, I developed a short unit so I could share my passion for space exploration with physical science students.  It has become everyone's favorite unit, including mine.

This takes me back to my own middle school years and a history teacher I have written about before on this blog, Mr. Danny Watkins.  History was not my subject.  I didn't perform badly in it; I just didn't care that much about what I was learning.  There are excellent history teachers out there, but I had precious few of them.  My experience with history was mostly men with the first name "coach" assigning reading and questions and then sitting down at their desk to create plays for their teams.  Mr. Watkins was the opposite of that.  He absolutely loved sharing the stories of history and the people who made it.  There were specific people he was particularly inspired by, like Winston Churchill, Booker T. Washington, George Washington Carver, and Frank Boyden.  One story he particularly loved sharing was that of Tsar Nicholas I and his family.  I read the book Nicholas and Alexandra during my 8th-grade year, a book far above my level, for no other reason than Mr. Watkins loves it so much.  Nine years later, I was in an art museum in Tulsa, where a traveling exhibit of imperial art was being shown.  I had seen portraits of Catherine the Great, Faberge eggs, and cloisonne pieces.  It was all beautiful, but I hadn't really responded to much until we reached the last room of the exhibit.  There was a desk that had belonged to Tsar Nicholas on one wall.  On the other, was a large painting of the coronation of Alexandra and her crown.  I stood in that room, thinking about the letters Nicholas wrote from that desk and the grief Alexandra felt because of her only son's hemophilia and how desperate she had to be to allow Rasputin into her home.  Before long, I found that I had tears running down my face.  This was not a response to a piece of furniture and a jeweled hat; it was a response to the story that Mr. Watkins had shared and the depth with which it had stuck in my heart.  By the way, the name of the class I had Mr. Watkins for was North Carolina History.  Other than the reason we are called Tarheels and the fact that the governor's mansion used to be in New Bern, I really cannot tell you much about the history of NC.  The tests I took in Mr. Watkins' class were about NC History, but I studied the book for those and quickly forgot them.  The stories that stuck with me were those that Mr.Watkins told in class, and he didn't much care if they were part of the curriculum or not.

I'm not sure a teacher these days can be a Mr. Watkins.  If an administrator observed his class, I'm sure he would be dinged for not having an objective posted and not remaining focused on the standard for the day, ignoring the enraptured faces of students like me.  We have become so committed to covering curriculum and meeting standards that we have forgotten that one of our most important jobs as teachers is to inspire.  

Listen, curriculum matters.  Of course, it does, but it is not the only thing that matters.  It is entirely possible my students could solve Doppler Effect problems but not recognize it when an ambulance passes them on a street.  It is possible for them to state the definition of refraction but not notice its effects on a straw in glass.  I want my students to meet the standards and objectives I have for the course, or I wouldn't have chosen them.  But more than that, I want my students to see science in the world.  I want them to ride a roller coaster and know why they feel lifted from their seat at the top of the hill.  I want them to watch curling during the Winter Olympics and remember things like momentum and friction.  Even more importantly, I want them to ask questions for their entire lives.  Why can we see through glass windows and not wooden doors?  Why is it so hard for a gymnast to stick the landing?  How do we feel so light in a swimming pool?  That won't happen if I focus ONLY on curriculum.  

While you are making lesson plans, think about standards and curriculum, but also think about how you are going to make something matter.  Think about what made you love the thing you teach and how you might show them that.  It's easy in science because we can blow things up, but most of the inspirational teacher movies are about English, History, and Music teachers.  Stand and Deliver is about an AP Calculus teacher and the difference that was made in the lives of students because of a passionate teacher.  No matter what you teach, you can bring the awe and wonder of your subject to your students.  I hope my students will be excited by a rocket launch or marvel at the oxidation of pottery glaze in a kiln.  To do that, they have to see my excitement in those things too.

A Detailed Creation

I teach in a Christian school in which a view of God is woven into everything we teach.  Since I teach science, where we study creation, it only makes sense that this points students to more knowledge of the Creator.  To that end, on my midterm exam, I have a question in which I ask students to tell me something they have learned about God through their study of science.  Since their first semester was basic chemistry, the theme of their answers often focuses on atoms, elements, and the periodic table.

This year, like many others, there was a theme to their answers: how detailed creation is.  Now that they know that what we see externally is a result of what is happening internally, they understand that the tiniest of particles is important, which leads them to an understanding that God is involved in the small details.

While this has been a theme of the answers to this question for many years, it hit me differently this year.  I think it is because my art teacher friend and I have spent a lot of time this year talking about stone sculpture.  I love a lot of genres of art, but there is none that impresses me more than stone sculpture because there is no margin for error.  If an artist paints something that they don't like, they can paint over it.  A pencil drawing can be edited by blending and erasure.  If a sculpture makes a mistake, there is no fixing it; that sculpture just doesn't have a nose now.  My favorite artwork on planet Earth is Michaelangelo's The Pieta, a marble sculpture at the Vatican in which Mary is grieving her crucified Son.  There is much to love about it as an artwork. For one thing, it is overwhelming in size, almost seven feet tall and weighing over six thousand pounds.  

But when I talk to students about this work, I talk about the small parts of it.  Zoom in on the right knee of Jesus, and you find some astounding detail.  The little indentation just behind his knee is on your leg as well, it is the tendon, where the thigh muscle connects to the femur.  The same thing happens when you look at the ankle.  Not only can you see the Lateral Malleolus, the bone that protrudes from the side of the ankle, but you also see the veins on the top of the foot.  Others may feel differently than I do, but I find this much more impressive than a basic sculpture that is a crude outline of the human form without much attention to the details.

You may be thinking, "Okay, we get it, Beth, you are a nerd.  But what does this have to do with your students' answer to the question on their exam?"  Well, I am so glad you asked.  When I marvel at the details of The Pieta, I learn something about Michaelangelo.  That tendon isn't there by coincidence, and it is too specific to have been based only on observation.  This level of detail means Michaelangelo had an intimate knowledge of human anatomy.  According to the Getty website, he participated in dissections of human corpses and made extensive sketches of bones and muscles.  He studied how the underlying structure is affected by the movement of a limb (a tendon may be more visible when the hand is moved in a certain way), which give his sculptures authenticity.  Looking at the detail in the sculpture tells us what the sculptor cares about.  

In the same way, looking at the details of God's creation tells us what He cares about.  Electrons are so small that we don't even count their mass.  Yet, the itty bitty electron determines the behavior of the atom more than any other particle.  The outer electrons determine what type of bond an atom can make, which determines things like intermolecular force which influences things like boiling point.  Everything about water that makes it life-sustaining arises from the electron structure of hydrogen and oxygen.  So this tiny detail is critical to the world in which we live.  

What does this mean for education?  It means the details matter.  In our push to cover so much curriculum, it is tempting to remain at the surface level (and, don't get me wrong, sometimes that is appropriate).  But, at certain points, we should show our students the really important details of what we teach them.  That will reveal what matters, what we value, and be more inspiring to students to study our discipline further.  If we want to create lifelong learners, we need to show them the inspirational details.