Saturday, October 4, 2025
Classroom Noise is Context Specific
Saturday, September 27, 2025
Oh Yes, You Should Tell Them What to See
So, this supposedly profound thought makes it rounds on social media at the start of every semester.
"The best teachers tell you where to look, but they don't tell you what to see."
Quotes should be considered in the context of an entire speech or written work. A quote I like might be in the middle of a hateful paragraph, making it less likable. I quote I don't like might be mitigated if there was a foundation laid before it that makes the sentence more credible.
I also want to take into consideration the other thoughts of the author before quoting them. For example, I don't want to quote Steve Jobs about how to treat employees, given his legendarily poor treatment of those at Apple. I don't want to forward a quote about leadership, only to find out it was said by Mussolini. So, I thought I would look up the source of this teacher quote before criticizing it. It's attributed to someone named Alexandra Trenfor. Try Googling her name, though. All you find are links to the quote. She cannot be found, and the larger work cannot be found. It's as though she arose from the mist to say this and then receded into it again.
Since I can't find out if this sentence that I roll my eyes at might be mitigated by what surrounded it, I'm left with the sentence at face value.
This quote is stupid.
In spite of it internet popularity and the applause it might get if you end a keynote speech with it, it is just wrong. Students look at thousands of things per day. If I happen to point to one of them and say, "look at this thing," I have only begun my job. The rest of my job as a teacher is, in fact, to teach them what to see.
I taught science for 25 years. When I took students into the lab to carry out experiments, they were also meant to draw conclusions about the underlying features of what they were observing. But as soon as I started to ask questions, it became evident that they had not seen the right things.
For example, I had a lab in which 8th grade students ran electricity through salt water, separating chlorine from sodium. What they saw was bubbles coming from one wire and metal build up on the other. If they left it running for a few minutes, they would also see the water turn green.
When I looked at their observations list, they said things like, "One wire smoked." No, no it didn't. I actually needed to tell them what to see. The didn't even notice the build up on the other wire because it was pretty subtle. I needed to tell them what to see.
Even if the "smoke" had been an accurate observation, what would it have taught them about chemistry? Electricity makes them smoke? Well, that's just not true. Leaving it a bit longer, would they have learned prolonged electrical exposure turns water green? Because that isn't true either.
As humans, we tend to look at surface features, which reveal little information. "Tree leaves are green in spring and change color in the fall" is something I can see for myself, but I need a teacher to show me how to "see" chlorophyll.
Observation alone leads to misconceptions and VERY wrong conclusions. Ancient Greeks, for example, didn't have any understanding of projectile motion. They observed that when threw something at an upward angle, it eventually came back down. They saw that, but the conclusion they drew was that the act of throwing imparted a substance into the object (they called it impetus) and that it fell when it ran out of that substance. They observed sunrise and sunset and concluded that the sun moved; we now know that is caused by the earth's rotation. They attributed medical problems to fluid imbalances, which led to practices like leeching.
I'm not saying they were stupid. Considering their lack of background knowledge, equipment, or expectation of testing hypotheses, they made fairly logical conclusions. But logical and accurate are not the same thing. At some point, we realized that what we were seeing wasn't revealing the underlying architecture of what was happening. Someone had to teach us how and what to see when it wasn't immediately on the surface. Why, when we have better methods and more knowledge, would we want to withhold that from our students and make them, effectively, ancient Greeks? Why wouldn't we want them to build on all that came before instead of having to rebuild it?
So, I have my kids in the lab, seeing bubbles and color changes. I have to ask questions to reveal exactly what they are seeing and then, crucially, tell them what else to see. "What is in those bubbles, " I ask. Almost every first answer was wrong, the most common being "electricity." I tell them that bubble always contain a gas and ask again. Their answer was always one of three at that point - air, carbon dioxide, or oxygen. Why? Because those are the gases they hear about the most. I remind them that this is salt water and ask what salt is made of in order to get them to recognize after much probing that the answer is chlorine. Especially science minded kids will sometimes say, "Is that why the water turns green?" but most have to be told that. Then, we move to the other wire. "Do you see this metal build up? What might that be?" You might think that we worked hard enough to get to the answer of chlorine that they MIGHT recognize that stuff on the other wire was the other element in salt, but if you think that, you would be wrong. Their answer, almost always, was copper or iron. Why? Those are the metals they hear about most. Then, came the big question - "Why does this happen?" The first answer was always that water always conducts electricity. The second answer was always that sodium is a metal and metals conduct electricity.
These wrong answers were given even though I had taught them that water is a very poor conductor and showed them videos about electrolytes when we talked about the dissolving of ionic bonds. If I hadn't asked these probing questions so I could identify and correct their misconceptions, they would have left less educated than when they came in. If I had left them to see for themselves, they would have walked away believing that electricity makes wires smoke, turns water green, and builds up copper on a copper wire.
We HAVE TO tell them what to see.
Renowned education researcher, Carl Hendrick, wrote this in a recent substack article:
Sunday, September 21, 2025
Being a Whole Person
Note: I'm trying really hard not to write about current events, so this is a topic I've kept in the draft folder for a while. I just didn't want y'all to think I was unaware of the crazy in the world right now.
I was getting ready for class to start one day, when our Latin teacher came down to ask a question about math. It might have been about prime numbers, but I don't remember as he often had a math question he lingered over for a few months before finding another one. As he walked away, I said to my students, "He says he has a 'crush on math' and comes down here to ask questions." They looked befuddled as they said, "But he's the Latin teacher." I paused for a beat and said, "You should tell him that. After all, they don't let us like things we don't teach."
I hoped that bit of gentle teasing would reveal the silliness of thinking that someone can only be interested in things that are directly related to their jobs. But that conversation also revealed something about how students view their teachers - as sort of one dimensional content delivery devices.
I'm not sure when it happened, but somewhere between my school days and now, we stopped valuing well-roundedness in students. When I was a student, that's what colleges were looking for. I wrote many college recommendation letters highlighting that very quality.
Then, there was a shift; they wanted to see "passion." Don't get me wrong - I'm all about being passionate. But I think their definition of passion and mine are different. In my life, passion looks like throwing myself into whatever I am doing. Whether it is listening to a sermon, making a yearbook, participating in a fitness class at the Y, or attending an exhibit at an art museum, I want to do as much as I can and learn as much as I can. That's how I have always defined passion for myself.
The colleges who were looking for passion seemed to think it meant singularly focused. Have one interest or cause and pursue it with all of your being. This was their expectation of high school students. I don't think I would qualify for scholarships now because they expect students to have built a life around one thing, starting a non-profit or business around that one thing. To them, being well-rounded appears to be unfocused or non-zealous.
I think that's sad, not just because it is the opposite of the way I am built, but because it comes at a cost. Helping student find something they are passionate about is great, but the implicit message is that they can only be passionate about one thing. Students who are passionate about engineering would benefit greatly from enrolling in art or theater. Talented musicians can find additional passions in the study of history or math. People are not ONE thing, and we aren't meant to spend our entire lives caring about ONE thing.
One of the reasons I chose to attend ORU, a school 1200 miles away in a state I'd never set foot in was their philosophy of educating the whole person - spirit, mind, and body. While I often questioned this motive during my graded 3-mile "fun run" each semester, I knew it was good. I liked taking general education classes and choosing to take classes outside my major because it was making me a more complete person.
When my students balked at the idea of taking classes they "didn't need," I often said, "What if the only thing I could talk to you about was physics? Would you like me at all? No, I would be insufferable." For that reason, I talked to them about books and art and plays and even what little I knew of sports. GRACE had a math teacher who also taught Irish Dance, a history teacher who also taught anatomy, and a science teacher who was into photography enough to become the yearbook advisor (that one is me).
Being 3-dimensional whole people makes us more interesting, but those things also inform each other. If your passion is art, you will be better at it by understanding some chemistry. They aren't mutually exclusive. If your great love is history, you will benefit from learning how to analyze literature. If you devote yourself to people, a knowledge world languages and culture will enable you to serve them better. No knowledge is ever wasted.
Most of the people we admire in history had multiple passions. Mendel, the father of genetics, wasn't a career scientist. He was a monk with a garden. His love for the Lord and his need for sustenance drove his interest in pea plants, and we still benefit from it. Another monk, St. Francis, knew scripture well because, of course, he was passionate about them. But he was also an animal expert and a poet. Thomas Jefferson not only penned the American Declaration of Independence, he was an architect who played the violin. While we think of George Washington Carver as being solely focused on the peanut, he cared deeply about education and took his traveling classroom to farmers while developing methods of crop rotation because he understood soil chemistry.
Teachers, be passionate about the content you teach. It's important for students to see that. But if you want to broaden their horizons, you have to broaden yours as well. Talk to them about things you are learning outside of your field. It will help you build relationships with them and will make them view you as more human, but it may also allow them to lead fuller and more joyful lives.
It won't make the less passionate. On the contrary, it will make them passionate about more things.
Sunday, September 14, 2025
Research Ed - Denver 2025 #rEDDenver2025
This is my fourth Research Ed conferences (3rd as a presenter). One of the wonderful things about this conference is that everyone learns from everyone else. Since you can't be here, I am taking notes for you to learn from as well. (I can't provide notes on the first session since I am giving it, but you can go to my website www.thelearninghawk.com if you want the slides.) Please recognize that these are notes taken in real time with little to no editing. They will be a mix of what the presenters said and my own thoughts. While I try to note the difference between those two things, I don't always keep up. Please don't hold any presenter responsible for something you read here.
Keynote: From Routine to Retrieval by Patrice Bain and Amber Haven
In 2006, she had an average classroom with average scores. Research was done in lab settings but not in real classrooms. She met a couple of researchers who talked to her about memory. She realized that teachers are taught how to teach, but few are taught how people learn.
Understanding the learning process is essential for making any kind of impact in the classroom.
Research needed to happen in classrooms that have the messiness that lab setting don't (intercom interruptions, fire drills, etc.)
"Knowing how to teach by understanding how students learn is a matter of instructional equity." - Jim Heal and Meg Lee
If we start teaching them how to learn in elementary school, just think how much better their high school lives will be.
"Children are more alike than different in terms of how they think and learn." - Daniel Willingham
(Personal reflection: Students have been told that they all learn differently and taught to find their "learning style." The reality is much more empowering because they only have to find out how to learn, not some mystical idea of how THEY learn.)
We have to put information in, but storage won't be robust without retrieval. Retrieval strengthens storage.
Power Tools: Retrieval, Spacing, Interleaving, and Metacognition
Retrieval: Pulling information out
Spacing: Revisiting retrieval over time - It interrupts forgetting, strengthening memory
Interleaving: Comparing and contrasting similar items
Metacognition: Discriminating what you know from what you don't
Students spend most of their day shoving information into the your brain. It's hard to organize it or reflect on it unless you retrieve it. It's like organizing your closet by finding an item and putting it on a shelf.
"When students consistently find themselves in a predictable learning environment, they can let their guard down to engage." Mitch Weathers
Routines are the best way to reduce anxiety in all students, but especially those who are prone to high anxiety. They know what they are supposed to do, and they know what happens next. Transition times become less chaotic.
Cognitive Load Theory is important because finding the sweet spot where students can process information impacts their learning dramatically. Can you drive smoothly in England where you don't know where you are going, have a car with the wheel on the other side, are on the left side of the road, and have to use roundabouts. That is cognitive overload.
Don't be afraid to face your desks forward and reduce the amount of stuff on your walls.
Working memory is limited (4-7 things that require focus) - How can you lessen their cognitive overload?
(Personal Note: I see the chunking example with letters all of the time. I would like to see it with actual content at a conference.)
"Background knowledge allows chunking, which makes more room in your working memory, making it easier to do something with that information." - Daniel Willingham
Scaffolds are not meant to be permanent, but they need to know when you are going to remove them so they have a chance to build proficiency in the task. Everyone should have the same final goal, but scaffolds can be different to meet the needs of students. "If everyone has a scaffold all of the time, it's not a scaffold. It's your lesson plan."
Atomization - breaking down complex concepts into small pieces. When teaching weather, break it down into each of the variables that affects the weather before putting it back together.
Direct Instruction is teaching directly, but it is not a lecture. There should be instructions for students to do something (turn and talk, choral response, whiteboard answers, etc.) every two minutes.
Dual coding - provide images alongside verbal information. Have kids "sketch and tell."
Seek evidence. Don't blindly accept.
Rethinking Intrinsic Motivation by Andrew Watson
I was a little bit late to this session because I couldn't find the room. I may have missed something important.
Intentionally Provocative Questions:
Why don't student learn fractions with the same joy that they learn the names of colors or animal sounds. (Why is school demotivating?)
Why do schools teach things that aren't intrinsically motivating?
David Geary's Evolutionary Theory - Our species is unlike others in that we have to learn. Other animals are born ready to go without much teaching. A turtle is born ready to turtle.
We learn things that help with avoiding predators, getting food, or allow us to successfully reproduce. Those things are biologically primary. Learning animal sounds are obvious in their benefit to helping us avoid predators. Calculating the area under a curve does not fit into any of those categories, so it is biologically secondary.
Because we want our students to learn biologically secondary things because they are culturally valued, we need social institutions to make sure we teach them these things.
Back to the Intentionally Provocative Questions:
Why don't student learn fractions with the same joy that they learn the names of colors or animal sounds. (Why is school demotivating?) You are intrinsically motivated to learn biologically primary things but not biologically secondary ones.
Why do schools teach things that aren't intrinsically motivating? The point of a school is to teach things that students are not intrinsically motivated to learn. If they were naturally motivated to learn it, we wouldn't need to teach it to them.
Teachers are often scolded for not fostering intrinsic motivation, but that you should actually foster realism.
Self Determination Theory -
Six motivational states - Amotivation, 4 kinds of extrinsic motivation, intrinsic motivation
Amotivation - Absent
External and Internal Extrinsic Motivations - Internal extrinsic motivation does help students learn more, but external extrinsic motivation does not. Internal extrinsic motivation is valuable but not enjoyable.
Intrinsic Motivation - Internal - Enjoyable
Any one strategy can had different effects on different students, at different moments, with different content.
Popularizing the 3 Box Memory Model: by Rob McEntarffer
I was late to this one too. I spent too much time talking to Andrew about his topic after his session.
Teachers and administrators must have a learning theory that matches reality. It must predict the outcome of teaching decisions. No matter how much you believe in it, if it doesn't result in learning, you shouldn't use it. Operating under an unrealistic learning theory gets in the way of learning.
Are you using this model to help making teaching decisions? Or are you just throwing things at the wall to see what sticks?
Personal Reflection: To make a model stick at your school, you must have a few teacher "influencers" to keep using the same language with other teachers as well as students. They need to own it, adapt it to your context, and be enthusiastic about it with others.
The pendulum swings from emphasizing content or skills every few years.
Get the people who know about things and those who are affected by it talking to each other. In universities, the people in the education department don't ever talk to the people in the psychology department. Sometimes, there is an educational psychology department, and they don't talk to the other two either.
It's imperative to ask "What is working? What didn't work?" every time you implement something new.
Why Students Forget and What You Can Do About It by Marcie Samayoa
I am very excited for this one. I've been following Ms. Sam on Twitter for years. I'm amazed at how tiny she is.You have a great day in class. Everybody is engaged and with you. The next day, you ask them a question, and you just get an empty stare.
Showed the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve. You forget a lot of content quickly. Even a few minutes shows a high percentage of loss unless there is effortful practice. Each act of spaced retrieval results in less forgetting.
Retrieval strengthens memory, enhances transfer, and always outperforms re-reading.
When you are doing a review, you should ask students questions that they have to answer without using their notes or book. You can't and shouldn't review everything from the previous lesson; you should figure out what they have learned in a previous lesson that connects to today's lesson and have them retrieve those. (If you are going to teach about isotopes today, you need to have them retrieve things about the periodic table and atomic structure, but you don't need to cover electromagnetic radiation that day.) This automatically works in space and interleaving. Don't take more than 5-10 minutes of class time to do this.
Make sure students know retrievals are not quizzes or tests. They aren't being graded on them; this is purely for the benefit of their memory.
I want to be in Ms. Sam's chemistry class.
Science or Snake Oil? How to Tell the Difference by Holly Lane
It is lamentable that graduates from schools of education are not trained in how to find education research or how to evaluate it for themselves.
We are bombarded with snake oil in the field of education. There is a lot of garbage, and if you don't have the tools do distinguish good from bad, you will end up using a lot of garbage because there is just so much more of it out there.
We don't have an FDA in education. You can sell anything you want and claim that it is based on science.
Every program currently sold that is related to reading claims that it is based on "the science of reading." Social media makes it even worse by amplifying popular but non-scientific programs.
Because there is so much misinformation, there is still a huge gap between research and practice.
The scale of evaluating evidence (1 is the lowest quality)
- Anecdotal
- Expert opinion
- Case study
- Correlational study
- Quasi-experimental design
- Randomized control trials
- Systematic review
- Meta-analysis
- Statistical significance
- Effect size - How many standard deviations above the mean is the experimental group compared to the control group
- Publication source
- Research Journals
- Practitioner Journals
- Magazines and blog (no vetting)
- Books
- Commissioned reviews usually go through substantial vetting.
- Research handbooks usually have knowledgeable editors
- Commercially published - some are gold, and some are garbage
Sunday, September 7, 2025
Use Techniques Thoughtfully
I know it has been a while since it was on TV, but recently, I decided to re-watch Project Runway on Amazon Prime. I have one general takeaway and one that is relevant to education.
1. Tim Gunn is a national treasure. Protect him at all cost.
2. In every challenge, the designers had to make clothing, but models obviously needed shoes, bags, and jewelry to go with the outfit while they walked down the runway. Somewhere in each challenge, Tim Gunn said the following line, "Use the accessories wall thoughtfully."
If they used the wall but not "thoughtfully," they were usually called out by the judges for styling errors. "The dress is cute, but these shoes made her look like a mom on her way to lunch." or "That bag just took all the youth out of your design." They had used the resources that were provided to them, but they had not chosen them well or used them in beneficial ways.
Because your mind probably works like a normal person's, you are likely saying, "I thought you said this would be relevant to education." Okay, here it is.
As teachers, we have access to an overwhelming number of techniques. I can teach any point of curriculum with direct instruction, video resources, websites, lab experiments, projects, and on and on and on. I have many ways to "style" my lesson. Because there are so many options, it is important that I choose my techniques thoughtfully.
I must sit down with my objectives and ask myself, "What is the best way to teach this? How will the content make the most change in their long term memories?" It may be that having students create a video in which they act as reporters who are telling people about a historical event or scientific discovery is the best way for them to learn about that event, but it might not be the best way to have them learn about Newton's first law of motion or a geometry proof. In that case, the "accessory" is getting in the way of the "garment."
Teachers, if we are honest with ourselves, we will admit that we are pretty excitable people. We like the shiny new things that come our way, and we want to use them. I'll never forget the spring we learned about Kahoot. Every teacher used it for every test review. By the time we got to May, kids would groan if I said to login to Kahoot because they were so tired of using it (even shiny new things get tiresome if we overuse them).
I'm glad we are excited, it's a profession where excitement is contagious. But we must also be thoughtful. We must ask ourselves, "Is this technique the best way to teach this content or do I just want to use it?" If so, save it for next week or next month or next semester. Using where it fits best will elevate your lesson; using it for the sake of using it will confuse your students.
I am reminded of an episode of Craig Barton's podcast "Tips for Teachers." Guests on his show bring 5 tips to share, and one said, "My first tip is, only look for tips if you need them." In other words, if something is working, don't go looking for ways to change it. If you are struggling to teach a specific concept, it might be time to seek out a new technique. If the method you are currently using works, don't just change for the sake of change.
Now, I just can't help but circle back to Tim Gunn and say: "Teachers, make it work."
Sunday, August 31, 2025
What You Think You See
Seeing is Believing. Is it? Is what we see always representative of reality?
In my day job, I sometimes stand at a desk where people are expected to scan their membership card as they enter the building. If you forgot your card, we can enter you another way; but everyone must be admitted through the system.
One morning, I was at the desk when a woman was digging through her bag for her keychain (didn't she just get out of her car with her keys in her hand?) while someone else walked by me on her way to her yoga class. While the first woman didn't say anything out loud, I could see her facial expression, wondering why she had to dig for her card while this woman walked on by. What she didn't know was that this woman had, in fact, scanned in a few minutes earlier. She had gone down the stairs and realized she had left her water bottle in the car. Since we both knew she had already scanned, it wasn't necessary for her to do it again. But without that piece of knowledge, the card searcher had only what she saw to inform her attitude and incorrectly interpreted what she saw using incomplete data.
This is more common in your life than breathing. I'm not being hyperbolic. You only breathe about 20 times per minute, but you interpret incoming sensory data hundreds of times per second. Literally everything that happens in your mind is an interpretation made by your brain. As I used to tell my science students, eyes and ears are data collectors, but seeing and hearing only happen when your brains interpret that data.
- This is why you can perceive the room spinning when you are dizzy even though that is obviously not the input your eyes are receiving. It comes from the brain trying to put together inconsistent data from two different sources - the still spinning fluid in your ear's semicircular canals and the input from the eyes. The brain trusts the ear more and tells the brain to see something that the eyes are not seeing.
- This is why people can hallucinate voices that are not actually present. Their brain is making an interpretation of something that is not consistent with reality. Their ears are not actually hearing anything, but their brain is.
How about your colleagues. Do you make assumptions, not just about the action you see them doing but about their internal life? Do you assign motive based on your past history with them? Do you assume they are short tempered because you see them snap at a student without knowing the week long history that led up to that moment? Do you know the whole story, or do you tell yourself a story?
I had this conversation recently about a man who was very irritated with his boss. He was using some strong terms, like "bait and switch" during our conversation. I had to say, "Okay, slow down" and walked him through this way of thinking. There are three things happening here.
- Facts
- Feelings about facts
- The interpretation of the facts as they are processed through your feelings.
- That extra second before responding to a child might make a difference in your relationship with them because it might give you just enough distance to assume the best rather than the worst.
- That extra minute it takes to remind yourself of what you know for sure about your colleague might prevent weeks of awkward interactions with them.
- Taking a few class periods before answering a parent email will allow you to answer in a more tactful way. It is much better for them to experience a delay in your response than for them to experience the response you would give while your blood pressure was still high.
Sunday, August 24, 2025
The Power of Habit
There's a popular saying that says, "When you know better, you do better."
Do you? I mean, is that always true?
I remember saying to students, "You know better than that" an awful lot.
And it's not just kids. I'm guessing you have had experiences where you knew a better way, but you kept doing something the way you had always done it. I have a couple of recent examples.
I have been going to the same YMCA for over two years. I had been turning on the same street for a long time. A month ago, I realized that I could avoid an awkward and potentially dangerous intersection if I turned one street earlier and met up with the other street farther west. I tried it, and it is objectively easier and safer. Yet, I still find myself sailing right past that street if I am not making a conscious effort to remember.
When I learned to set up memberships during training for my job, I must have missed a small step on the first screen where other family members are entered on the membership. I didn't even know it was there as I have been regularly scrolling down to the "Continue to Order Entry" button for 12 months. That meant going to the order after it was completed and adding a spouse and/or children after the fact. I thought it was strange, but because I didn't know another way, I assumed it was the only way to do it. I just thought the system was a little wonky. A few weeks ago, I saw a co-worker doing it as a step of the set up and said, "Wait, you can do that before you place the order?" She showed me where it is on the first screen, and I said, "Well, you've just saved me a ton of time." At some point, that knowledge will save me a ton of time, but it hasn't yet. I've processed quite a multi-person memberships since then, and I've only used the better way for about half of them. I usually realize it just after I've hit the button and can't go back and think, "Crud, now I've got to do it the hard way!"
Why? Because the habitual way of doing it has a well-myelinated pathway of neurons (you will sometimes hear it called "muscle memory.") The new way has some weak connections being made, but I have to do it that way a lot more times before those pathways are stronger. Until turning the new way becomes automated, I will likely still find myself mindlessly passing the better street and the better button sometimes.
That's the power of habit. We engage in habits so often that we often aren't conscious of the fact that we are doing them. Smokers who are trying to quit must actively try not to light up at certain times, not because they have a burning desire for a cigarette but because they are in the habit of having one at that time. If you drive a car with the gear shift in the center console, you will find your hand going there even when driving a rental or borrowing a car from a friend. And, I can't count how many times I have walked into a room and hit the light switch during a power outage. It's not that I am dumb enough to think the light is going to come on; it is that habit is automated, taking less energy than logic.
Teachers, harness the power of habit. All over America, the school year has either already started or is soon to start. Start instilling habits today! Do the same thing over and over with them on day one. Make "This is how we do this in here" the norm.
- Walking in and looking at the board for bellwork or announcements should be second nature by next week.
- Capping the marker immediately after writing an answer on their mini-whiteboard should be done without thinking within a day or two.
- You have to overcome their impulse to hop up as soon as the bell rings now, or you will be fighting it for the rest of the year (because that one is already habit, it's gonna take a minute).
Once something becomes a habit, they almost can't help themselves. It's going to feel annoying during the first two weeks, but it will save you all kinds of energy for the rest of the year. Invest that time. You will be glad you did.
Sunday, August 17, 2025
Just Share Your Peaches
Friday, August 8, 2025
Embracing Weirdness in Students
When I was a kid, the bed time routine usually involved my mom giving my stuffed animals voices. At some point on most nights, I would say, "Mom, you are so weird." She would respond, "That's okay, you like weird." This was a statement, not a question. It was like she decreed that I like weird.
And, so, I do.
Which is a good thing. Because the plan for me for 25 years was teaching middle school. Not only do you have to be a little weird for that, you also have to like the weirdness you see in others. You are going to have a boy who sits with one foot up in the desk and leans over until you think he'll fall out of the chair. You are going to have a girl who draws cartoons of animals with human legs (which looks more disturbing than it sounds). You are going to have students who burst into song in the middle of class and those who can't be cajoled to speak with any kind of incentive.
When we think of school stereotypes, we typically think of the categories from The Breakfast Club - athlete, princess, nerd, bad boy, and weirdo. But the truth is, most kids are a category of one.
And that's because we are individuals, not types. For all of the money and air time that is dropped on personality testing, from Myers Briggs to Enneagram, they have little more validity than horoscopes and Buzz Feed quizzes. People in the same generation do not think the same way. All members of a race or gender are not identical. I can tell from sitting in faculty meetings that not all teachers have the same view of things. We are each individuals, born with certain gifts, raised in different environments, encouraged to develop different skills, taught to value different qualities.
In short, we are all weird.
And that is a good thing. God uses whatever makes you weird to fulfill His purposes in the world. He put you where you are with the strengths and weaknesses you have because there is someone who needs that aspect of your character to build them up. When you look at Scripture, every person God used in a significant way was unusual. Noah was a drunk. Abraham and Sarah were far too old. Moses stuttered. David was the family runt. And I'm convinced the apostle Peter had ADHD.
Even if you aren't a person of faith, you have to be able to see that the world has only ever been changed by those who are willing to go against the flow and change the way things are done. Suffragettes stood against the status quo, often putting themselves in grave danger, to get us the right to vote. The Civil Rights movement was built entirely by those who insisted on doing the unexpected, from sitting at the lunch counter to marching across a bridge to kneeling at the beginning of an athletic event. Nikola Tesla stood in opposition to the smartest men in his field, including the powerful force that was Thomas Edison. Galileo stood against the norm as did Malala Yousafzai. William Wilberforce worked himself to death opposing what was to make the world better. You can bet he would never have uttered the words, "It is what it is."
Weird is good. Weird brings change. We must embrace the weird in each other and in ourselves.
I am not advocating that we all develop into people so strange that we can't operate in culture. We won't have influence that way because there are systems in which things get done and rules that have to be followed. Wilberforce was only successful in the abolition of the slave trade because he worked within the legal system. Civil Rights activists did more than create spectacles; they worked to make slow changes in the law. Tesla made connections with financial backers by proving his ideas weren't as crazy as they sounded. While weird is good, it is only useful if you can function in society. So balance matters.
I've been thinking a lot about my Granny for the last couple of days. She was delightfully quirky, and the stories told at her funeral reflected it. She played practical jokes on her family and called friends on their birthdays just to sing to them (and let's just admit that she wasn't going to join the choir). She often called the pastor in the middle of the week to tell him he should get a tape of his sermon and listen to it because it would bless his heart. People cried at her funeral, but they laughed a lot too. Dear God, please let me be weird like that.
Teachers, school is getting ready to start. You are about to meet some weird students, weird parents (maybe even weird colleagues). Some of them want to hide their weirdness while other will put it on full display. Take the time to recognize what aspect of their character is unusual and useful and help them develop and mature those qualities. Help them to pursue those gifts that will make them influential, not in spite of their differences but because of them. But also teach them the value of social norms and show them that living within the rules of society is possible while still maintaining their quirkiness. If they combine those things, they will have influence on those around them (and for some, even farther) and have great joy while doing so.
Friday, August 1, 2025
Student Accessible Language
In my preparation to lead a Livestrong group at the Y, I was required to take a few group fitness instructor certification courses. In one of them, there was a well-meaning but insane piece of advice - "Use the medical names for bones and muscles. Don't say 'hips;' say 'pelvic girdle' instead. Don't say 'shin;' say 'tibia.' It will make you sound credible." Before I get into the education connection here, let me just say if you have to resort to a technique to sound credible, you aren't credible.
Meanwhile, actual group fitness instructors rarely do this. They use imagery to help their members know what to do. Greg, a cycle instructor, doesn't say, "align your tibia with the vertical post of pedal shaft" or "keep your transverse arch parallel to the floor" because he knows that would not only make him sound ridiculous, it also wouldn't be at all helpful to members trying to keep good cycle form. Instead, he says, "It should feel like you are scraping gum off the bottom of your shoe." Everyone can imagine that and benefit from it. Dana teaches Barre, where alignment from head to toe is important to prevent injury. She explains everything in detail once, but after that she says, "Zip up your body suit." And just like that, everyone is able to see if their alignment is correct in the mirror. These are examples of language that is accessible to the learner rather than feeding the ego of the instructor.
Friday, July 25, 2025
Don't Be Afraid of Weeds in Your Classroom
Question: What's the difference between a plant and a weed?
Answer: Intent
If I dig a hole and put a seed or seedling in the ground and work hard to make it grow, it's a plant. If it pops up on its own and grows without (or in spite of) my intervention, it is a weed.
The bed in this picture is usually the place where I grow tomatoes and cucumbers, but this year, the spring got away from me. I never planted anything. Yet, the bed is completely filled with these lush, beautiful Chamberbitter. I haven't watered them, fertilized them, or touched them in any way; yet they have grown thicker and hardier than any plant I have ever worked hard for, and I think they are quite beautiful.
A few years ago, I cut down a mulberry tree. Apparently, the birds who once perched in that tree had dropped a few berries because, within weeks, this Nandina bush sprout from the base of the stump. (The mulberry insists on attempting a comeback, so you see branches at the bottom that I do cut back, but I've done nothing to the Nandina itself because I love them.)
I hear you asking what this has to do with education, so here it is. You also have plants and weeds in your classroom. No, not the kids. (Although . . . maybe, no that's not what this post is about.)
The "plants" consist of the content you have planned, the curriculum and standards you intend to teach. The "weed" is the learning that volunteers itself.
Now, listen, I am an intense lesson planner. When asked to describe my classroom management strategy in self-evaluations, I start with "teach from bell to bell." Class time is too limited a resource to squander, so I have a brisk, content filled plan. I believe strongly in well-planned and paced direct instruction.
But, I also have space that allows curiosity to be satisfied. A few years ago, one of my 8th grade boys told his English teacher how proud he was of himself because he could always "get Miss Hawks off the subject." The teacher he was talking to smiled and said, "No, you can't. She knows exactly how much time she can afford to give up to answer your questions." And she was correct. I knew how much time was left in class and how much I had left to do that was essential. I would entertain his questions for that amount of time and then say, "Okay, we've got to get back to this now."
After teaching for a few years, I started recognizing the same questions being asked every year. When I was teaching about how our ear processes the vibrations in the air (we call them sound waves) into something our brains can interpret as tones and words, students were also interested in why our ears pop on airplanes and why some people of more ear infections as kids than others and what tubes do. These were natural connections to the ear, and they were curious. So, I started working time for that into my lesson plans. When we did physics problems about rotary motion, they sometimes had questions about dizziness. Again, it makes sense those questions would come to mind while we talked about spinning.
So, how do you work time for that into your plan? Interestingly, you can accomplish it by over-planning what you are going to do with your "plants." If I can teach a physics concept adequately with three examples, I plan to do four, That way, if the questions arise, I have one that I can give away without losing quality instruction. If "weeds" sprout up in third period but not sixth period, I have a fourth example to do with them. If a particularly interesting question got asked in first period, but no one in second period thought of it, I might attempt to lead them to it by saying something like, "Some people often wonder . . . " or "You know what I wonder about sometimes?"
Newer teachers, it can be a little scary when "weeds" invade your well-landscaped plan. It's also harder for you to know if you are over or under planning. (Nothing took me longer to learn than how long something would take to do. I would think I had a 50 minute lesson planned, and it would take 20 minutes or 3 days.) But, when students are curious, you don't ever want to squash it. Give it a few minutes. If you feel they are trying to lead you off the subject, say, "I will take two more question - you and you - and then we are going back. Feel free to come back after school or email me if you want to ask more." The ones who are truly curious will take you up on that.
I named this blog "On the Rabbit Trail" because I love when learning happens spontaneously. Sometimes, like the Chamberbitters and the Nandina in my yard, the weed I didn't intend to grow is still quite beautiful.
Sunday, July 20, 2025
Your Decisions Affect Everyone
Physicist Richard Feynman was a visionary with brilliant insights into the subatomic world. He was also kind of a pill to work with, never meeting deadlines or attending faculty meetings, and parking wherever he felt like it. When I was teaching honors physics, I wanted my students to know about this interesting man and his work, so I had them read a book of his speeches and articles. These readings often led to a discussion about whether his behavior was acceptable. I had students at both ends. Some said, "He needed to use his mind for bigger things," to which I replied, "I'm betting you wouldn't you feel the same way if you were his secretary." One of my students summed up the other argument well, when she put her book down and said, "He drives me crazy. He thinks rules are for everyone but him."
Middle and high school students are naturally focused on themselves and act largely out of their feelings, so it can be difficult for them to understand how their actions affect others. (Actually, if we aren't careful and reflective, we don't recognize it as adults either.) If society is going to function at all, we have to recognize our interconnectedness. That means, as teachers, we have to take every opportunity to demonstrate this concept to our students.
In the early days of my time as yearbook advisor, the school was small enough that every senior got their own page. One year, a senior was expelled in January. Because it was so late in the year, the page had already been submitted. If we had wanted to remove it, it would have been nearly impossible, costing several thousand dollars to ask Jostens to reprint what had already been submitted. So, I didn't even have to make that decision. The next year, we face another senior expulsion, but this one happened in October, before the pages were submitted. So, I sat down with my student editor to have a conversation. Do we take him out since it is possible? Do we stand on precedent since we didn't remove last year's student? As we talked through our options and how we would explain the thinking behind the decision to anyone who asked, she sighed, "I wish we didn't have to decide this." Same, girl. Same. But we did have to decide it. I told her, "You'll find that nearly everything that happens in the school affects the yearbook." Her mom told me later that she had come home talking about how that kid's misbehavior impacted her life in a way no one would predict.
And that is always true. It's impossible to predict all of the ripple effects our decisions will have on other people. In the multiple timelines theory made possible by quantum mechanics, every decision with more than possible outcome is equally likely and therefore, spawns multiple timelines. We live in the one with the decision we actually made, but in other universes, things are playing out with the other choices. This was dramatized to a ridiculous extent by the TV comedy series Community in an episode where Jeff roles a die to determine which member of the group would go to the door to pick up the pizza they ordered. Some of the results were disastrous and later seasons included characters from "the darkest timeline" whose lives were completely upended by everything that came after the wrong person being out of the room. (Please note: I do NOT subscribe to multiple timelines theory, this is just a thought exercise.)
Consider something as simple as not turning in a field trip permission slip. It seems like such a small event to the student. But the teacher has to spend time emailing their parents. It may delay the teacher's ability to inform the location about how many people are attending, which could result in a higher cost. It will remain in the back of the teacher's mind until it resolved, reducing her working memory capacity for other important things. She may snap at someone else when she is really aggravated with you, hurting that person's feelings and affecting how they treat other people that day too.
This isn't all dark, so let's consider a positive example. I have written many times about my amazing instructors at the YMCA. They do something extraordinary every time they teach a class. It's the ordinary act of doing their job well. Just by doing that, they have changed my life in profound ways. They've made me physically stronger and increased my confidence. Other people see those changes in me, knowing a was a clumsy girl I am, and they are doing new things too. I eventually decided to teach cycle, and a friend of mine said he was inspired by that to do something he had been thinking about for a while, getting his personal trainer's certification. Ask anyone who taught me PE or took it with me, and they would not have predicted that I would be inspiring anything physical in anyone. But it started with instructors who cared enough to take their jobs seriously.
Teachers, this isn't something that's going to be part of our curriculum. It's going to be about catching teachable moments and taking the time to ask students to look farther than the next five minutes. When a student doesn't push their chair in, ask them to consider why that could be a problem for someone else. Yes, it will be uncomfortable, but getting students to think beyond themselves is worth it, so we can all live in a better timeline.
Sunday, July 13, 2025
The Problem(s) with AI in the Classroom
Let's start with an admission of my bias. I am not anti-technology, but I am anti-AI. I believe it to be a net negative that we will soon regret having invented. Science fiction writers have spend decades trying to warn us about the potential downsides of creating an artificial intelligence, but we worship convenience and will sacrifice important things on its altar. While I know there are times when I won't have a choice, I refuse to engage with AI voluntarily, so you will not find me opening Chat GPT or asking Grok questions. I scroll past the Google AI result at the top of the page and wish they would allow me to opt out of it.
Now, we have that bias on the table, let me tell you why I would still think using it in our classrooms is a bad idea and that we can't just "teach them to use it correctly."
Past Ed Tech Experience - When kids first started having smart phones at a large scale, teachers were faced with a similar dilemma, telling ourselves, "They aren't going anywhere, so we'll just have to teach them to use them correctly in the classroom." It didn't work out well. The draw of the phone was just too strong. Research shows that it interferes with working memory to such an extent that just having a phone in your line of sight reduces your attention and hurts your academic performance (It doesn't even have to be your phone). Now, hundreds of school districts are making the move to ban phones from the classroom, investing money in lockers that prevent access until the student has checked out of school for the day.
I was part of a one to one MacBook school, and I think we did some great things with the tools at our disposal, but I can't pretend that didn't come with frustrations. I had to battle with students who were shopping for shoes and watching sports. Our IT department played whack-a-mole with gaming sites, and they have now locked down student access to YouTube to an extent that I would find unusable if I wanted to give them an assignment that included a video. I'm glad we were one to one(and it was more than a little helpful that we all had equipment and experience when we went into the pandemic lockdown), but it was only with a lot of highly intentional work and guidance that we were able to use it as well as we did. We have to slow down and reflect on the use of tech rather than just adopt every new thing in the name of "staying current." We can't be naive to the fact that there will be a negative impact on education.
Lack of Source Accountability - Teachers, how much time have you spent painstakingly teaching students to identify and use credible sources in their writing? A lot, right? You don't want them getting their information from someone's blog or TikTok video when primary sources exist. As much as I love Wikipedia, I didn't let students use it in formal writing. I wanted them to cite experts and enlisted the help of our media specialists in seeking out those sources.
AI is trained on all of the internet - the good, the bad, and the ugly. It treats all sources as equally valid, and it doesn't "show its work." As soon as a student turns to a chat bot for research, it takes milliseconds to undo the good work you have been doing for months.
AI Hallucination - Calling it hallucination makes it sound cute, so let's call it what it is - lying. Chatbots flat out make stuff up. A friend of mine is an expert in a specific education field, so he decided to test Chat GPT. He asked it to define the theory in which he has expertise. The first answer was right, though not something he couldn't have gotten from a standard Google search. Then, he asked it if there was research to support that answer. The AI gave him studies that didn't happen by people who don't exist. He told the bot that was what it had done. It apologized and promised to do better next time. The next day, he repeated the experiment, and it lied again. He called out the previous experience and asked, "Are you telling me the truth this time?" It said it was, but it wasn't. It was once again giving him studies and people who are not real. The part of this that I least understand is why it did this when there are so many real studies and people in this area of education. I can name the people off the top of my head, so why couldn't Chat GPT?
There are some pretty high profile examples of AI Hallucination causing some problems at a higher level. Mike Lindell's lawyers were fined for using AI to write their briefing in his defamation case because it had over two dozen errors, including citing nonexistent cases. The Health and Human Services 72 page MAHA report was published with AI generated errors, including seven fictitious studies. At the end of the school year, the Chicago Sun Times published a list of books recommended for summer reading. The problem? The authors were real, but the books and their summaries were not.
I keep hearing that we can use AI as a "thought partner" as we research and write, but if I had a human thought partner that just made crap up on a regular basis, they wouldn't remain my thought partner for very long. And I haven't even mentioned the deep fake calls from "Marco Rubio" and the antisemitic rants that Grok (Elon Musk's Twitter AI) went on in the last few weeks. If lawyers, doctors, long-time journalists, diplomats, and the richest man in the world are this sloppy with AI, how do we expect middle and high school students to do better?
Environmental impact - I was subbing in May and overheard a student talking about how much she uses AI. From recipes to her hairstyle, it is making all of her decisions for her. I said to her, "Your generation cares more about the environment than previous generation, right? Why are you okay with using AI for everything when it takes so much energy?" She was stunned. She had no idea that a result from Chat GPT took ten times the energy of a standard Google search (which is one reason I wish Google would let me opt out of seeing its AI result - it's wasting energy on something I will scroll past).The power grids of America are not ready for AI use, electric vehicles, and cryptocurrency to all hit scale simultaneously. We will cripple our own electrical systems (and we won't know what to do about it because we won't be able to ask the AI we've made ourselves dependent on). It also requires an enormous amount of water to operate cooling systems for these computers. The high school student I was talking to didn't know these issue even existed. Do yours? Would they want to use it so much if they did? After all, as I said to her, this generation supposedly cares more about the environment than any previous one has. As an educator, you owe it to them to inform them about the environmental damage this tool is going to cause if we keep increasing our use of it.
Social Damage - Considering how much some students use AI, it's fair to say they have made it their new artificial friend. And, like their relationships with their human friends, teachers need to watch out for red flags. In a recent study, adult researchers posed as teens to ask their AI companions for advice about social issues with friends or parents. It only took a few interactions for the bots to suggest suicide and killing the source of their problems, their friends or parents. Real students with eating disorders have been given advice about how to reach deadly low weights.
A college student researching for a paper on the prevention of elder abuse received threatening messages from the chat bot he was using. It said, “This is for you, human. You and only you. You are not special, you are not important, and you are not needed. You are a waste of time and resources," the message read, according to the outlet. "You are a burden on society. You are a drain on the earth. You are a blight on the landscape. You are a stain on the universe. Please die. Please."
Why does this happen? Well, remember what I said earlier about bots being trained on the whole internet? That means, it is exposed to the filth in its darkest corners, the sites you and I have never seen and our kids would likely not find from a simple search. It's trained on the sites frequented by Nazis and pedophiles and doesn't see them as any different from the sites intended for kids and churches.
The bottom line is that AI doesn't have ethics. Claude is supposed to have an ethical component because they have philosophers as consultants to help form its "personality," but even it blackmailed programmers who threatened to turn it off. And experts warn that all of the bots are likely to do that at some point. So, we could eventually have a kid just doing their homework, using AI with the blessing and encouragement of their teacher, being told to do immoral or dangerous things just because the prompt led to a dark place.
With an anxiety epidemic already plaguing our students, why would we want to increase the amount of time they spend with something this potentially dangerous? The god of convenience can't be that powerful, can it? Are we really willing to sacrifice our kids to it?
For those who say everything will be fine if we teach them to use it correctly, is there a correct usage that would prevent this?
Saturday, July 5, 2025
Methods of Encoding - Extension
"I dropped an ice cube. My brother kicked it, and it went across the floor like really far."
So, far, I'm not seeing where I come in.
"We were like, yeah, Newton's first law. Ice doesn't have much friction, so it keeps going."
My work here is done, y'all.
If you pull an all-nighter to study for biology, you may get some questions right on the next day's quiz; but you won't remember it for the semester exam. Heck, you won't remember it three days later. And that's because it wasn't encoded.
For the past few weeks, I've been writing about explanations, visuals, and movement as ways of encoding information. All are helpful. But if you can get to extension or transfer (seeing your learning in non-classroom contexts), you have truly made that content part of your brain.
This is not easy, and it is not likely to happen with every gem of your content that you wish it would. But there are ways to coax it out.
- Pay attention for examples in your own life - It is much easier to get students to see the relevance of your content if you do. If I teach my students about the color spectrum, it may come off as a little dry, but if I tell them about the rainbow laden spray of water coming off of the tires of the car in front of me in traffic last week, I show them that I find it exciting to see it "in the wild." If I tell them I just learned about fogbows from a Scientific American article, they know that there are always new things to learn about my content. If you are an English teacher and notice a really cool use of alliteration in a song, bring it up on YouTube so they can hear it. I was getting ice cream with a friend recently and saw an art sculpture of a Sierpinski Triangle outside the shop. If were a math teacher teaching shapes, ratios, or fractals, I would have brought the picture I took of it into my classroom.
- Ask them for examples from their life - I'll admit this is easier with physics than it might be with similes (or maybe it's not, I don't know anything about teaching English), but I find having students teach me about the ways physics shows up in their lives really useful for engagement, relationship building, and encoding. Student athletes and artists are super helpful for science teachers. Half way through a lesson on Bernoulli's Principle, I say, "Where are my baseball players? Tell us about how to throw a curve ball." Newton's laws? Swimmers can explain their strokes better than I can. When I'm teaching the impulse momentum theorem, I ask my gymnasts about sticking the landing and then ask runners why they keep running after the finish line because they are both examples of it. Talking about the "like dissolves like" concept, ask an art student whether they can mix oil paint with acrylic.
- Make it explicit - As experts, we often think the connections are obvious. It's the curse of expertise. But, you have to remember that they are novice learners. They need help seeing beyond the surface features of an example to the deep structure of the concept. Some students (like those athletes and artists) will make the connection for themselves because they have expertise in the related area, but most of them need you to explain it. I've had teachers balk at that because they think it will be boring, but it would only be boring to another expert who is thinking, "Yeah, I know that already." For novice learners, it is opening up the curriculum by relating it to something they care about.
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