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.

Just Share Your Peaches

This time of year, Matt, my weightlifting instructor at the Y, comes into every class for several weeks with a bucket full of small peaches and offers them to everyone who will stand still.  He and Steven have quite a garden, yielding not only peaches, but okra, blackberries, peppers, and a variety of other produce.  They eat and freeze and preserve, but they have more than they can use, so they give what they have to friends, spreading joy and nutrition to those around them.

As usual, I hear you saying to your screen, "What in the world does this have to do with education?"  

Legitimate question. Peaches are being used here as a metaphor for the things you have "grown" in your career.  If you are an experienced teacher (at least in the U.S. - I'm not sure what the lesson planning is like elsewhere), you have created a ton of things during your career.  From a simple but well-crafted physics problem to a complex project, you have produce, and you likely have more than you can use.

In the school where I taught for 21 years, sharing was the norm.  If someone was going to teach the same thing you were, you did some planning together and shared some resources in common.  When Jenny, our chemistry and AP physics teacher went part-time after having a baby, and we hired another chemistry teacher, Jenny handed over a flash drive with her entire folder and invited her to use it at will. 

Because it was the norm at GRACE, I thought it was standard practice everywhere.

Like all naive takes, a little time on Twitter disabused me of that notion. There are teachers all over that platform who are proudly selfish about how they won't share the resources they created unless they are paid for them. They are the same teachers who talk about "quiet quitting" and never doing anything out of contract hours, so it isn't super surprising that they would hoard their resources too.  What is surprising is the number of "You go, girl. Stand your ground." responses they get from others. We've turned selfishness into a virtue, apparently.

Listen, I'm not saying you have to give away absolutely everything.  You can be on Teachers Pay Teachers.  I am too. 

There are sometimes good reasons not to share.  I once asked a seventh grade teacher to please not do the same demonstration I was going to do with them in 8th grade. There were two reasons for that: 1. She was only doing it because it was fun; it didn't actually demonstrate any of her content.  2. The value it had in my content was the mystery because it was counterintuitive, and it would lose that if they had already seen it.  If the demonstration had fit her content better than mine, I would have let her have it, and I would have come up with something else.  You may have a truly good reason not to share some things.  But, if your reason is just, "I made it, so you can't have it unless you buy it," you might be in the wrong profession.

Experienced teachers, there are new people in your building this year.  They need what you have.  Remember what that was like?  They need peaches.  They need okra.  They need blackberries.  They need resources, and you have more than you can use.  

Remember that the goal is student learning.

And share your dang peaches.

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.

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.

Teachers, have you taken a look at your state objectives?  If you have, you know they can be more difficult to interpret than contract legalese. Here's one from the NC Chemistry curriculum.  "PS.Chm.4.3 Use mathematics and computational thinking to analyze quantitatively the composition of a substance (empirical formula, molecular formula, percent composition, and mole conversions)."  Y'all, I taught chemistry for ten years, and this is a crazy sentence. For one thing, computational thinking is mathematics, and you can't analyze something quantitatively without those, so there are few redundancies here whose purpose seems to be only to make the sentence longer.  Also the examples cover several chapters of material, so you can't possibly use this for one lesson.  Given that many school require the objective to be written on the board, you are going to have some confused and frightened students if you just throw this up at the beginning of your lesson.  If were teaching chemistry now, I would write, "Write chemical formulas for ionic compounds" because that is the level students can comprehend and explains what we will be doing TODAY.  

The same is true of unnecessarily complex vocabulary.  Do you need to use the word hydrodynamic? You might; it depends on what you are teaching and how old your students are.  But you might be better served by the words "fluid motion" (or with really young students, the world liquid will probably do).  I stopped reading a book once because the author was more interested in showing off her vocabulary than she was in readers learning from her work. 

Is there a time when it is appropriate to use more complex language.  Absolutely.  It is when doing so serves a purpose. Going back to the group fitness examples, it would absolutely make sense to teach class members the term pelvic girdle if the movement you want them to do involves 360º of motion.  Then, you are prompting the imagery of a girdle, something that surrounds the entire area, not just the left and right motion of the hips. When doing back focused exercises while weight lifting, we sometimes work a few different muscles during the same song, Matt will sometimes bring focus to whichever muscle we happen to be working with that exercise as an act of clarity.  When we are working the latissimus dorsi, he uses the name and says, "you know, like a shark's dorsal fin."  In that case, knowing the name is helpful for remembering its location.  That's a thoughtful use of the scientific name, not a pretentious act of "gaining credibility." 

As a physics teacher, the difference between velocity and speed matters.  In regular life, it doesn't.  When I taught 8th graders that there is no such thing as cold, only the movement of heat in our out of a substance, I told them, "This matters a lot in science, but please don't be the person who responds to someone saying it is cold with, 'Actually, it is less hot' because you will sound like a nutcase."  

If you have ever been on an IT help call with someone who uses all the jargon and treats you like you are dumb for not understanding it, you might have some empathy with your students. When teaching students, use the technical language that matters (and explicitly teach them what it means), but use your speech to make your content more accessible, not less. It doesn't matter how great your lesson was if you used so much lofty language that they can't understand it.

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. 

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.

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? 

Methods of Encoding - Extension

"Miss Hawks. We talked about you over the weekend," said my excited 8th grader. 

This makes me nervous. Who knows if things I say get reported accurately at home. 
"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.  

1. 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. 
   
   
   
2. 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. 
3. 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.

I said it before, and I'll say it again. This is not easy. It requires you to have a repertoire of examples. And it takes a lot of experience to have those in your long term memory.  So, when you find one, write it down. Keep it in a spreadsheet. Add it to your lesson plan. And if a student gives you one, use it and credit them. Other students will love that you got it from one of them. 

This is worth the effort for many reasons, but I'll tell you my favorite.  I do this so frequently that it has been years since a student asked me the dreaded question, "When am I ever going to use this in life?" 

Methods of Encoding - Movement

In a college biology class, I was learning about the difference between mitosis and meiosis. If you have learned this concept yourself, you know it can be very confusing to keep the movement of the chromatids straight at each phase of the process.  As I wrote last year, images are helpful, but because it is dynamic process, they were not helping me see how things moved from on phase to another. The professor knew this, so he had us all stand up. We began in a clump at the center of the room (cell). As we moved into prophase, metaphase, anaphase, and telophase, he had us move toward partners and away from other groups until we finally had split into two classes (daughter cells). He was taking advantage of movement for encoding.

Was it because we were a room full of kinesthetic learners?  Nope.  At the time, because I didn't know learning styles were a myth, I would have called myself an auditory learner, but experiencing the motion of each phase did help me encode each one better than words alone (or even words with images) would have. I would like to point out, though, that the movement alone wouldn't have been helpful without explicit explanation coming first.  The movement helped cement the learning, but it did not teach mitosis to me.

Gesture has become all the rage, but there is still much research to be done on its effectiveness.  As with a lot of things in science, the results of experiment are very specific to content and context.  So, the conclusion seems to be that some types of gesture help some kids learn some content. Given that there is zero cost to implementing it and it will help a bit with engagement, I say it is worth trying.  It can be as complex as the "dance steps" we did for mitosis.  It can also be as simple as having students hold up a circle with their hands to indicate a zero.

Content which involves relationships in three dimensional space benefit from use of moving the body to represent those relationships.  Mitosis is one example, but as a physics student, I was taught the "right hand rules" to help with analyzing the relationship between electrical current, magnetic fields, and force.  Each pair of those has a perpendicular effect on the third one.  Unless you are already quite familiar with this topic, that explanation was probably confusing.  It will help if you see this picture, but nothing helps as much as students twisting their hands to the orientation of the set up described in the problem.  One only needs to walk into the test on this chapter and see students silently doing that exact thing to know how much it helps.

Since the research is fairly new, there are a wide variety of hypotheses about why it works and no solid conclusions.  Some have posed that it provides an offload to working memory.  If I can hold the number 3 that I'm going to need in a second in my hand, I don't have to hold it in my brain.  I've done this without meaning to while teaching cycle classes.  If I know we are going to increase tension 6 times, I'll have four fingers resting on the handlebar, so I can tell my class, "This one is number 5 of 6."  If an anatomy student is pointing at her own femur while rehearsing proximal and distal attachments, she won't have to look back at a diagram to remember which part she is dealing with.  The gesture might serve as a physical mnemonic device, reminding you of the thing it symbolizes. Like I said, the research is too new to have drawn any meaningful conclusion about the mechanisms just yet.

We all know the power of muscle memory for physical activities, like dance and sports.  Muscles are meat, so they don't actually remember, but a well myelinated pathway from repeated practice is how we make learning permanent. 

If you want to implement this is your classrooms, start slowly.  There is no need to insist that every piece of content have a motion or gesture, and the research doesn't support that anyway.  I would suggest the use of movements and gestures will only be really helpful if they are natural.  If you have to think hard to come up with a gesture and force it to fit, it will likely not be beneficial.  

Methods of Encoding - Pairing Visuals

A popular applause line at education conferences is "Nothing has changed in education for 200 years!"  It gets everybody fired up for the "new" thing that the speaker wants to promote, but it simply is not true.  I taught for 25 years and was, of course, a student for 17 years before that.  And just in that relatively short time, education has changed dramatically.  The fact that we sit in rows at desks notwithstanding, my grandparents wouldn't recognize most of what happens in classrooms today.  Have you ever picked up a textbook from a hundred years ago?  It is only a few millimeters thick, has tiny font, no pictures, and little spacing - printing was way too expensive to waste precious space.

Tech has brought about a million flashy changes.  Kids can make videos of their own, but the most profoundly effective change was probably the simplest - pairing visual images with explanations.

I know you were expecting something more fun, and I'm certainly not going to be able to sell this to people at conferences.

But it really is this simple.  

Is the impact because we are addressing the learning styles of visual learners?  

No.  That isn't a thing.  You aren't a visual learner.  Stop saying it.  Your child is not a visual learner.  Just stop.  Stop it now.

The reason pairing visuals with explanations is so powerful for encoding information is because we ALL essentially have two pathways in the brain for processing information. Verbal and images.  

Verbal information can be spoken or written - it doesn't matter because they are both words, and words are processed by the verbal pathway.  Images are, of course, pictures. Or animated video. Or even pictures we imagine in our minds.  When these two processing centers are used in conjunction, they compliment each other, and encoding is more powerful.  It's called Dual Coding, and it helps EVERY student (and is, I believe, one of the reasons the learning styles myth just won't die - people don't understand the difference).

But just as I said last week that not all explanations are created equal, the same is true of how we pair our images and explanations.  I'm not talking about clip art, here. I fell for this for a while, so I want to be clear that some images serve as nothing more than a distraction.  If I am teaching physics students to solve kinematics problems (the relationship between acceleration, distance, and time) and include a picture of a race car just for the sake of having a picture, that is NOT dual coding.  If I put in a gif of a race car going past over and over again because I think kids like gifs, that is NOT dual coding.  Those images are impeding learning, not enhancing it.

An image that helps your explanation is one in which the image provides detail, context, or anchors that words alone cannot.  A photograph of a flower in a science book is unlikely to help (unless it is just to show types of a certain varietal), but a labeled diagram of a flower with lines pointing to the structures being named can enhance a paragraph in which those structures are explained.  

The less eye movement required to take in the information, the better.  An image with direct labels is better than one with letters corresponding to words elsewhere on the page.  In very detailed pictures (like anatomical drawings), this may not be possible, but put it as close to the image as possible.  Ideally, the words and image can be processed simultaneously without splitting your attention.

What's nice about understanding the difference between the truth of dual coding and the myth of learning styles is that you don't have to pressure yourself into making three different lesson plans for the same subject.  You can design one high quality lesson with modalities that fit the content, and ALL students will benefit.

Methods of Encoding - Explanations

Despite all of the fads encouraging "guide on the side rather than sage on the stage," the most common form of instruction remains good, old fashioned explanations.  

Why?  

Because the most effective, efficient, and straightforward way of getting information from the head of someone knowledge to the head of someone without it is to tell them.  We know it works from research, but even if we didn't, we would know it works from the thousands of years of history in which oral tradition was the only option available (perhaps paired with a drawing on a cave wall, but we'll talk about that next week).

So, most of the encoding that happens in schools is done through explanation.  That means, we should invest a lot of our professional development time on getting explanations right.  Anyone who has ever helped their dad with a home repair, only to misunderstand and mess up the project, knows that explanations aren't all created equal. 

Good explanations engage listeners through hooks, brisk pacing, frequent checks for understanding, analogies, and clear sequencing.  

Hooks:

Think of the best sermon, stand up comedy routine, or TED talk you have ever heard.  Chances are, you remember how it started more than any other part of it.  And that's likely because excellent speakers start with something to get your attention.  Sometimes, it's a quote or especially interesting fact, but more often than not, it's a story.  Better yet, it is the first half of a story that they will finish later in the speech.  People who want you to keep listening are wise to pique your curiosity and make you want to know more.  Teachers, pay attention to the world around you, and you will see myriads of opportunities to connect something you have seen to your content.  "Last week, I saw a bird fly into a window, and it made me wonder, 'What makes glass transparent?'" will draw students in far more than, "Today, we will talk about what make glass transparent."  An English teacher can tell a story about an argument they overheard as the lead in to a discussion on literary conflict.  Even in math, there is a way to turn a variable into a character.  Check out this TED talk from Tyler DeWitt on using story telling in his science classes to help his kids care about what they are learning.  The point, if you don't grab their attention early, you don't stand a chance of keeping them engaged when the lesson gets harder.

Brisk Pacing:

I confess that I had not thought much about pacing (other than my own need to fit the whole lesson into a class period) before reading Zach Groshell's book Just Tell Them.  In his role as instructional coach and consultant, Zach has observed hundreds of lessons and says that one of the things he has noticed most is pacing that is too slow.  He's not advising that teachers speak at lightning speed and blow past checks for understanding (far from it if you have ever seen him present).  He is simply advising that we not dwell forever on one point if it isn't needed and eliminate things that aren't necessary for learning.  I'll add that a lot of classroom management issues could be pre-empted with faster pacing as well and free up time for retrieval practice at the end of the period.

Checks for Understanding:

No matter how good an explainer you are, there will be misconceptions in the minds of your students.  They miss an important word that changes the meaning of a sentence.  They activate some partially relevant piece of prior knowledge and make an inappropriate connection to it.  Their lack of background knowledge or vocabulary makes them have only a partial understanding.  There are lots of ways misconceptions can sneak in to your excellent lesson.  And misconceptions are like weeds; they grow out of control alongside the good information.  And, they are easier to uproot if you catch them early.  For that reason, your explanations should include frequent checks for understanding from as many of your students as possible.  Don't just call on the kid with his hand up.  He only raised his hand because he was confident, so he's almost always going to be right; and that is almost always going to mislead you into believing that everyone understands.  You can whiteboards, paper, choral response, cold calling, or digital tools, but you must ask them to answer questions that show their thinking.

Analogies, Metaphors, and Similes:

The best way to understand something is to connect it something else that you already understand.  Using analogies in your explanations help content to stick.  Chemistry teachers, make the reactants and products of a chemical reaction people at homecoming trying to find the right dance partners.  

Algebra teachers - "Think of the variable like a loner.  He just wants to be by himself.  He's trying to get everyone to go away by doing the opposite of what they want to do."  Kids understand that a lot more than "To isolate a variable, employ the opposite operation of those terms already connected to the variable."

You do have to be careful with analogies.  Because they are so powerful, they are sometimes the part of your explanation that sticks the best.  I used to describe dissociation (the process of ionic compounds dissolving in water) with the analogy, "It's like a married couple going to a party.  They wife goes one direction and the husband goes another to mingle during the party.  But, they aren't divorced (to make the point that chemical decomposition has not happened) because they come back together at the end of the party.  One the next test they had, several students gave me a detailed answer to the question, "Describe the process of dissociation" without ever mentioning ions or polar molecules.  They told me a lot about mingling at parties.  That was a good reminder for me to constantly circle back to the content to prevent only encoding the analogy.  

Sequencing:

Perhaps the most under-appreciated part of explanations is the sequencing of information.  I think that is because most of us plan it rather unconsciously.  But it is worth taking a few minutes to think about as you plan your lessons.  Will "A" make sense if I teach it before I teach "B"?  If not, re-sequence.  

There are time when this is difficult, especially as students get older and the content becomes more complex and self referencing.  I often found myself saying, "But we'll talk more about that next semester."  The key then is to explain what they NEEED to know in order to understand what you are teaching them today.  It's okay to say, "There will be more on this later" without trying to teach all of the coming concept.  In fact, I found that my especially curious students were excited to know that things would connect up later.  I also really liked making that explicit when we got there.  "Hey, remember that thing from two weeks ago?  See how it all comes together now?  Isn't it cool how everything depends on everything else?"  Once a student made the connection for me.  I was teaching Net Ionic Equations, and a student said,"Man, this one thing has stuff from like four different chapters."  I had not recognized that yet, but he was right.  If I had tried to teach those too early in the year, it would have been an absolute mess. 

Explanations may be the most straightforward way to teach, but it takes time to plan effectively.  I recommend two books to help with this process.  The first one is one I already mentioned - Zach Groshell's Just Tell Them.  Zach practices what he preaches, so it is a short book that is practical, to the point, and leaves out the fluff.  

If you have a little more time and you want to deep dive into the science behind explanations, I recommend How to Explain Absolutely Anything to Absolutely Anyone by Andy Tharby.  It is a little more dense than Zach's, but it is chock full of great connections to cognitives science research.  Together, these two books will up your explanation game in a huge ways.

Practicing What You Have Not Learned?

I discovered a delightful show on YouTube during lockdown.  I say "discovered;" it had already been on for fourteen years before I found it.  It's called Would I Lie to You?, and I'm honestly not sure I would have gotten through the hybrid year without it. I'd come home at the end of the day a puddle of exhaustion and eat dinner watching Colbert, after which I would watch a couple of episodes of WILTY and laugh until I cried.

Last week, a more recent episode featured a story in which one of the participants claimed to have made a sculpture of a girl he liked (like the girl in the Lionel Richie "Hello" video).  Spoiler alert in case you plan to watch the show:  This story turned out not to be true.  But, as he was selling his tale, one of the questions that was asked was, "Do you have experience with sculpting."  His answer was, "No, but I figured you learn by practice."

This could just be the education nerd in me or a reflection of the age of the young man telling the story, but all I could think was, "Well, there's someone who has been exposed to too much "discovery learning."  Here he was thinking that the highly specialized skill of representative sculpture (not an abstract, but the face of a girl he was trying to impress) was something he could figure out on his own by trial and error.  It's a good thing this story wasn't true because I don't think he would have won the affections of this girl with a "learn by practice" sculpture.

I think the reason this stuck with me was the word "practice."  There are two parts to learning.  Encoding and practice.  

Whether knowledge or skill, encoding must come first.  I'm not saying it has to be learned from a professional teacher, but no one is truly self-taught.  They get their initial knowledge or skill from somewhere.  Whether it is from reading, direct instruction, modeling, or TikTok video - something must first be input and encoded.  Practice, by definition, is the repetition of something already learned.  Practice is important as it myelinates the nerve cells and solidifies the skill or knowledge, but it cannot come first.

As the great Tom Sherrington put it in one of his recent blog posts, "You need to make some initial pathways in your brain (some actual physical connections) before we can worry about strengthening them through application and practice."

We have underemphasized this in recent years with the talk of retrieval practice at every conference.  I'm downplaying retrieval.  We must have both to make learning stay in long term memory.  But let's talk more about good methods of encoding.

I'm going to attempt to do my part by making the next few posts about methods of encoding.  So stay tuned this summer.

The Dignity of All Work

I once had a principal who liked to tell what he believed to be an inspiring story.  His junior high school was right across from a textile mill.  Once, when he was not performing up to expectations, his teacher made him look out the window at the mill and said, "If you don't get good grades, you'll have to spend your life working at the mill." He then, apparently, put his all into his studies so he wouldn't have to livet hat life.  Every time he told this story, I cringed (and not just because my grandmother and brother both worked in textiles) because he was taking dignity from one kind of work in order to inspire another kind.  I didn't have the kind of relationship with him where I could go to him and say, "You should be glad there are people who don't think their above working in textile mills or you would be naked right now," but I always wanted to.

Across the country, the school year is winding down.  Students are graduating from high school, and they are taking a wide variety of paths.  Some students are excitedly celebrating their acceptances to four year universities and already have plans for post-graduate degrees.  Others are nervously waitlisted or accepted on a deferred basis.  Some are going to community college while they take general ed classes and figure out what they want to major in.  Some will get vocational training in a technical school.  Some will begin entry level jobs and work their way up.  Some will wait tables. Some will design the next big video game. 

And some will work in textile mills.

Every kid's path is different.

Let me put it another way for those who need to hear it differently.

Every path is valid; yours is not superior.

The society in which we live is inanely interdependent, and we need people to do all of the jobs.  If your garbage isn't picked up one week, that's inconvenient, but if it isn't picked up for two month, that's horrifying.  Be grateful for your trash collector.  You have a coffee addiction?  It's a good thing there are people who don't see service jobs in coffee shops as something to be sneered at, or you would have to figure out how to do it for yourself.  When you need your air conditioning repaired on a 95 degree day, your son't degree in accounting or contract law won't do you much good, so you are going to shell out good money to someone with skills you don't have.

Let's not forget that college for most is a relatively new thing.  Just one hundred years ago, going to college after high school was the exception, not the rule.  Neither of the Wright brothers graduated high school.  Frederick Douglas wasn't allowed an education.  Yet, those people managed to have great influence through their work. Some of our founding fathers attended college, but not all of them did. Going back farther, Jesus was a carpenter, and Adam and Eve were farmers.  

Let me be clear.  I am not against against people pursuing degrees.  I did.  If what you want to do requires a degree or two or five, I'm all for it. I hope your school prepared you well for that choice.  After all, I don't want a doctor or lawyer or engineer who is "self taught."  I'm saying that it is not the right choice for everyone.

We need all jobs. Not everyone needs to go into debt to get one.

It's an unappreciated truth that some paths are not linear.  You may do one thing for a few years and then make a different choice.  It's always been the case that few people do the thing they majored in for their entire career, and that is becoming increasingly rare in recent years.  Sometimes, interests change.  Other times, market forces and government whims force change.  Injuries, the birth of kids, divorce, aging parents who need care, and a million other things can spark big change.  The idea that a high school senior has their whole life planned out when they graduate is fiction.  When I was in college, I worked as a janitor in an arena and in child care. I was a teacher for 25 years, but between two schools, I worked at a mortgage company.  Now, I work at the YMCA.  All of these jobs helped shape who I am, and the lessons I learned in each of those jobs were carried with me into the next one, making me a better employee and more interesting person.

In 2018, pictures of Geoffrey Owens, who had played Eldin on the Cosby Show, went viral.  Why?  He was bagging groceries at Trader Joe's.  Acting isn't always consistent income, sometimes including long time periods between gigs; so he was making ends meet by working at the grocery chain.  The same people who criticize so called "Hollywood elites" for being out of touch went online and mocked him for doing work they considered beneath themselves.  He praised Trader Joe's as a great place to work and said, "I'm not ashamed of working at the grocery store. No job is better than any other.  Every job is worthwhile and valuable."

What is important is that you do something that is honest, fulfilling for you, and contributes to society in some way. You are meant to honor God with whatever He has put in front of you to do each day, whether that is brain surgery or car repair. Whatever God has given you to do, use it to glorify him and serve others.  The reformer Martin Luther is credited as saying, "A dairy maid can milk cows to the glory of God."  He said that she is "glorifying God just as much as a preacher in a pulpit preaching a sermon."  Civil rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr. described all work as significant, saying, "All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence."

After communion each week, my congregation prays the same prayer.  It says, in part, "And now, send us out to do the work you have given us to do."  If we do that, our work has value, dignity, and importance, no matter what it is.

Congratulations to the class of 2025.  Whatever you have chosen to do next, and wherever your path may lead you, do it well.  Use it to glorify God, and serve others.

Tribute to MY class of 2025

"In life, you don't have to have all the right answers if you are asking the right questions." 
- Salutatorian Katherine McKinley May 23, 2025

The class of 2025 is here, in their regalia, ready to head out into the world.  I know some schools still have a few weeks left, but Memorial Day weekend marks the beginning of graduation season.  While they look forward, I can't help but look back.  As an 8th grade science teacher, I taught 54 of this year's graduating seniors during the hybrid year.  There is a bond that can only be created by that kind of stress.  Some were at home while others were in the room with me, although we were standing as far apart as a classroom space would allow, we were in it together. Masked and separated by plexiglass, but with a common goal and a common spirit. They had been home since March, so they were excited to see each other again and a little more nervous about what the year might look like than normal.  But my biggest memory of them was how game they were.  Because we were doing EVERYTHING in new ways, the most common words I said in the first month of the 2020-2021 school year were, "We're going to try it this way.  If it works, we'll keep doing it. If not, we'll try something else."  And they rolled with it, adapting like champs.  At the end of the year, just before they walked out the door, I said, "This year has been hard, but I want to thank you for not using the power you have to make it harder.  You guys made it fun."

While all 54 of the ones I taught are special, there are a few that stand out in my memory for different reasons that year, and I want to mention a few.

Collin - Collin is a hard worker, but he is also a goofball - a teacher's favorite combination.  Because his elderly grandmother was living with them, he spent the first six weeks of the school year joining my class from his bedroom.  At that time, he was the only one virtual in that particular period, so I could see him full screen.  Every time I looked at the screen, he was wearing a different hat.  He switched from sombrero to cowboy hat to propeller beanie as though it were totally normal.  At one point, I looked up to see that he had a yellow duck perched on top of his head.  Since I was the only one who could see him, this wasn't a show he was putting on for friends or an attempt to be disruptive.  It was purely for my entertainment and his.  He says he doesn't remember this, but I do. In a very stressful time, it was a lovely moment of joy.

Marley -  I heard so much during the pandemic about how masks prevented people from telling if you were smiling.  Marley proved this not to be true.  I'll set aside the fact that anyone who smiles only with their mouths is a psychopath (Try it; it's pretty much impossible). Being back in person outweighed any effect not seeing the lower part of the face had.  Kids communicate a lot of information in a number of subtle ways, and that had been lost during the virtual spring.  Online, I wasn't getting much nonverbal communication at all; in person, I was seeing body language and hearing sounds of confusion or affirmation.  Marley, in particular, smiled with every part of her being.  Her eyes sparkle; her voice is bright and genuine; her body language is open.  She gave this joy to everyone during the pandemic, and she has continued to do so in the four years since.  

Emily - Emily is an artist, and that's how she processes the world around her.  She draws pictures -  pictures of her pets, pictures of her thoughts, pictures of whatever she's looking at - she fills her sketchbook with lots and lots of pictures.  During the stress of the pandemic, she became a giver of  pictures.  I had a stuffed toy lemur named Gus in my classroom, and she drew a picture of him during class one day to gave to me after class.  One morning, as she was coming into the building, she asked me what my favorite animal was.  When she came to class that afternoon, she gave me a drawing of a panda sleeping on a tree branch.  It was stress relief for us both, and I still have those drawings at home.

Haolin - If you are a person who nods along during a presentation, class, or sermon, God bless you.  When presenting, it can be hard to know whether what I am saying is landing with listeners, and getting that bit of attentive feedback is useful.  Haolin is the world champion of nodding along.  He sat in the back of my classroom, in my right peripheral vision, nodding and saying, "Yeah, yeah.  Mmm hmm."  That little bit of affirmation was so encouraging, and while I have thanked him for it, I don't think he'll ever understand its true value for me.

Kate - The quote at the top of this post from Kate's salutatory address stood out because of what Kate's questions meant to me during the hybrid year.  She was in my 6th period class.  By that point in each day, teachers were exhausted - not just tired, but depleted of energy.  Yet, Kate continued to be curious.  She asked interesting questions.  She truly wanted to learn more about whatever topic we were covering and had questions about how it applied to things she saw in life. Each day, she reminded me that I was still teaching - not just surviving the year (or the day) but actually teaching students who wanted to learn.  I could never thank her enough for that, and I hope she continues to view learning that way throughout her life.

Class of 2025, I can only imagine what it would have been like if I had been teaching a different set of 8th graders during the most difficult year of all of our lives.  As hard as it was, your spirit made it worth every exhausting minute.  

Thank you.

Wait Time - The Secret Sauce of Thinking

My first observation as a teacher was done by my university advisor.  She had a lot of good thoughts and constructive criticism, but the best was about wait time.  Professor Klehm said, "You are not waiting long enough after you ask a question.  Count to three before you start looking for hands." 

Observers and feedback givers, take note.  This is the kind of effective, practical, simple, and usable advice every first year teacher needs.  And the longer I taught, the more I recognized how right she was.  In fact, she probably should have told me to count to a higher number.  

Increasing wait time would improve all of our classrooms because wait time is think time.  

Imagine. You are sitting in a class or a meeting.  The leader asks a question.  Your ears hear it, but it takes a moment for it to be really heard by your brain.  Then, unless it is a question you get asked frequently and have a memorized response for, it takes a little time to consider what the answer might be.  How long do you think that process might take?  What if the meeting leader expected an answer from you in less than a second?  Or less than half of a second?  Stressful, right!?!

Well, here's the bad news.  

In data compiled from thousands of teacher observations, the average wait time between a K-12 teacher asking a question and then expecting students to answer, has been calculated to be 0.7s.  If that's the average, that means some teachers are waiting for less than half a second before expecting kids to have an answer.  Some were as low as 0.2 seconds!  Just for context, it took 0.155s for Usain Bolt to get out of the blocks after the starting gun was fired at the Rio Olympics.  So, some teachers are expecting Olympic sprinter thinking from middle schoolers.  

Then, they call on the first student to raise their hand, and thinking stops for the rest of the class.  The gap just keeps getting wider as the fastest thinker is the only one engaging in retrieval practice and those who need it most don't get the time to do it.

Why is this happening?  

Well, for one thing, many education preparation programs don't cover this type of practical classroom technique stuff.  There is a lot of high level philosophy talk about "your why." That's important, don't get me wrong, but how much time does it take you to find it?  There's a lot of Piaget and Maslow.  I guess, if that's your thing, there's nothing wrong with learning it, but I've never thought about either of those mend during an actual teaching day.  There's a lot of talk about "the direction education is heading" even though it never is because it keeps changing direction.  The stuff you need in the daily practice of education is given short time, if any at all.  I moved into a new school building with six science teachers, and not one of us had been taught how to store chemicals safely in the stock room, so you can be certain a small but practical and impactful detail, like wait time, wasn't ever mentioned.  So, teachers don't know.  That is one reason.

Another reason is a thing your brain does, known as "action bias."  If there is activity, your brain reasons that you must be making progress.  You have fallen victim to this if you have ever been sitting at a lengthy red light and made the decision to turn and take a much longer route to your destination rather than sit there for another 30 seconds.  Activity feels more productive, so when we are calling on students quickly, it feels like our classroom is more productive.

The "curse of expertise" may play a role here as well.  Since I know the material well, I could answer this question very quickly, so I assume my students can as well.  It's easy to forget that novices think differently than experts.  It will, of course, take more time for them to even understand the question than it will for a group of experts, much less the amount of time it takes to develop an answer.  That's at play with a lot of recent graduates (you just took a physics course way harder than the one you are teaching) and experienced teachers (your content is second nature to you at this point).  

For me, personally, it was discomfort with silence.  Most of us find more than a couple of seconds of silence awkward, especially when there are people looking at us.  So teachers tend to fill the silence with chatter.  Even when I was getting better with waiting for the kids answers, I was saying more stuff and filling their working memories.  I started keeping a water bottle on the cart next to me so I could take a drink while I was waiting for them to think because it was the only way to shut myself up.  Eventually, I learned to embrace the awkwardness, even taking pride in the fact that I could endure it longer than they could until someone finally answered.

The good news

That was the bad news.  The good news is that this extraordinarily easy to fix.  You literally just wait longer.  The advice given to me to count to three inside my head was good.  I would make it five, though, because most of us count faster than we think we do.  Grab a sip of water; tap five times on your leg, scan the room, whatever you need to do.  Let your students know that you aren't going to call on someone just because they are the first person to raise their hand and that you want them all to have a chance to process their thoughts; they get it and the slower processors appreciate it. 

What time is right?

What is the right amount of wait time?  There's not a clear answer on that.  It largely depends on the complexity of the question and the exposure your students have already had with the content.  If you have been sprinkling retrieval practice questions through out the chapter, and you are asking relatively simple questions on the day before the test, you will not need to wait as long as you would if you are asking a complex question on a new topic.  

What has been observed by researchers, if you want some guidance, is that in classrooms where 3-5 seconds wait time is practiced, there are more correct responses and more variety of responses.  The variety part interests me because some of those answers will be wrong (others will be a variation of right if the question is open), but they are answer that wouldn't even have been proposed with less than three seconds of wait time.  You can't fix misconceptions you don't know they have, so getting a wrong answer from a student is useful to you as a teacher because you have insight into their thinking. 

I don't want you to misread this as an endorsement of a glacial classroom pace. Brisk pacing is a good thing.  Too much idle time is how teachers lose control of their classrooms.  I am only address the time between questions and responses here, not the rest of your lesson.

I know we are at the end of the year here. You may only have a few days or a couple of weeks left, so you might just experiment with this while reviewing for exams.  But keep it in mind when the school year starts next year.  While you are going over your classroom procedures, explain that you value their thinking time and then practice waiting.  The benefits outweigh the awekwardness.

Teacher Appreciation Week

It has been almost one year since I stepped out of full time classroom teaching.  That's a hard thought for me because there have been times in my life when I thought of teacher as my identity (thankfully, God knocked that out of me about ten years ago, or I couldn't do what I'm doing now). But I still interact with my teachers as I sub and speak at education conference, not to mention most of my friends are teachers.  

So, this week, I want to give a big shout out to the people who persevere, pouring their hearts, minds, and energy into the work of training up the next generation.  Here goes:

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Teachers, your task is difficult.  It may, in fact, be impossible.  You walk into a classroom every day, expected to equip, challenge, and inspire every student, regardless of background, home support, past educational experience, or interest level in your subject.  You may or may not have the support of your administration when it comes to classroom disruptions.  You likely don’t have the budget you need to properly carry out the things you would like to do, so you employ your creative skills to work around lack of supplies. As with all of the other issues in our society, education has become polarized along political lines, and you are in the middle, just trying to do your job. 

And you do it. You do it well. You do it because you know kids need you to do it.

Every day, you equip your students with the information they need to be good decision-makers.  This

is no small task, especially in an ever changing technological, political, and social landscape.

You fight the people who say they never use algebra because you know that they use the thought

processes of algebra daily. You overcome the fact that someone's mom didn't like the Scarlet Letter

or thinks teaching poetry is dumb because you know that the analytical skills that accompany analysis

of complex texts are important for the developing mind. You insist on the proper ending to chemical

formulas because getting it right can literally be the difference between life and death. You make them

memorize even though it isn't fun because you know the act of memorizing strengthens their brains,

no matter what some TikTok influencer says.  The mere act of equipping them is Herculean, and

it is the most basic level of your job.  

American teachers, you are also meant to challenge students at all levels of the ability spectrum (I

understand this might be different in other places).  In the same classroom, you have a child with

profound learning disabilities and those with intelligence higher than your own and the full spectrum

of academic levels in between.  You have students who may have had a bad experience with science

or math in the past and enter your classroom skittish while others suggest lab experiments to you

because they spend their free time reading about them online.  You know differentiation isn't really

possible, but you try. You ask ALL of them to perform better than they believe they are able to at things

they don’t think they are good at.  You are supposed to be fun and joyful and engaging while you

demand more from a child than the child (and sometimes their parents) think you should be asking for

because you know meeting challenges is good for the soul.

The best of you inspire, asking your students to look beyond the grade, the curriculum, and the tests to

see what they can do with their education. You have a student who “doesn’t like art” on the first day

they enter your classroom who will tell stories someday about the teacher who made them care about

the what the Dada movement was trying to accomplish or have an emotional reaction in a museum. 

Some may go into medicine because you taught them anatomy, but most will simply be enriched by

having a better understanding of their own body.  You build up students into people with a broader

view of the world than they would have if you hadn’t been their teacher. 

And that is just the academic part of your job; I have not included all of the social counseling, emotional

baggage, and safety concerns you keep in balance.  You know which students shouldn’t be put in a group

together and who needs a friend to sit with at lunch.  You are the frontline of reporting abuse and the

shoulder to cry on for many students and colleagues.  You make hundreds of decisions per day, often

without time to reflect on them thoroughly. 

Now, you know why you are so tired on Friday afternoons.

This teacher appreciation week, I hope you got some of the love an gratitude you deserve.