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.

Stress - Don't Avoid It (Teach Students to Embrace It)

This time of year is often one of the most stressful in schools.  

It's usually a time with projects because you have learned enough to do something with your knowledge and far enough from the end of the school year to have time to grade them.  It's a time with yearbook deadlines, tech weeks, post-season games, and college acceptance/rejection letters.  For some reason, there is a week during this time of year when it seems kids are having a test in every one of their classes.  

Our impulse as adults is to alleviate all this stress in the name of mental health, but I would suggest instead that it is a time to teach coping mechanisms.  Removing stress may seems like it is good for them, but removing stress does not build strength. Coping with stress does.  It's focused on their future mental health.

In biology, we have learned that organism that don't experience stress die. Appropriate amounts of stress stimulate growth.  

Consider weight training.  You intentionally subject your muscles to a higher than normal load. The muscle fibers break down. But that causes them to rebuild with more dense connections. That increase in muscle density makes it less stressful the next time it experiences the same load, reducing future stress through response to current stress.  

Temporary life stress also causes us to respond. We develop coping mechanisms that we can employ in the future. We gain strength, knowledge, and skills that keep the same load in the future from being quite as stressful.

It's important to recognize the difference between stress and trauma.  Stress is an increase in load over your normal state.  Trauma is a load increase that is either high enough or comes on fast enough to break the dams of your coping mechanisms. 

Returning to the weight training metaphor - If you are at point where you normally bench press 50 pounds, and you put 60 pounds on the bar, you will likely struggle a bit, lift it with poor form for a while, and be rather sore at the end of your session. That's a stress that leads to growth and may eventually lead to ability to lift 100 pounds if you add to it incrementally as you adapt over time.  If, however, you put 100 pounds on your bar today, you will likely drop the bar on your chest and break your sternum or crush your lungs.  That's trauma - It's not possible for you to handle it with normal responses.

I'm not suggesting we subject kids to chronic stress all year in order to build strength. I'm suggesting that a week here and there of higher than normal stress need not be avoided.  They may look back at the end of it and recognize they are stronger than they thought.  They'll definitely learn to deal with future stress better.

The Motivation Success Cycle

Everywhere you look, there are resources for improving motivation.  Books, news articles, research studies.  You can have a whole career in motivational speaking.  Why, because we know that without motivation, there can be no success.  That doesn't necessarily mean all motivated people are successful because some are delusional about their abilities (think of those people in the first few episodes of American Idol who truly believe that the judges will regret their decision to not send them to Hollywood). But success and opportunity knock; they don't break into your house.  So, there is a lot of money to be made in helping people become more motivated.

But here's the thing . . .

Success breeds motivation.

We all know that motivated students are more successful.  But we often fail to appreciate that successful students are more motivated.  It's a happy little circle.  

It's probably not going to surprise you that I am about to use an example from the Y.  I have been having some motivation issues since October.  Not with going; I am always motivated to go.  I have struggled to push myself harder in my classes.  For over a year, I had been setting goals and improving, and then I hit a bit of a wall.  I just couldn't get any better.  When I went home and wrote my numbers in the tracking grid I had on the refrigerator, I was far from motivated.  In fact, I was demotivated.  

I didn't go out an buy a self help book or look up exercise motivational speeches on YouTube.  That may work for some, but I felt it was unlikely to help me get past this wall.  

I decided to take some time to appreciate exactly where I was.  I stopped tracking numbers for a while, knowing that just going and doing the workout was good for me.  I gave myself until Thanksgiving to just let things be what they were and not worry about it.  

This week, I started in my efforts to improve again.  I haven't yet sat down with a goal sheet or a grid, but in each class, I have said, "I want to increase my squat weight today" or "I want to average at least 16mph on the bike."  Is this back up where I was in the spring and summer - no.  Setting an unrealistic goal will no motivate because it will not lead to success.  These numbers are above where I was two weeks ago.  It may take a little time to get back up to where I was at my peak, but achieving these small successes will motivate me to get there.

How does this connect to education.  When students who have traditionally made good grades slip a little, they feel a sense of failure at a more profound level than your students who fail regularly.  They aren't used to it, and their instinct (as well as that of their parents) is to get them back up to where they were quickly.  Depending on the cause of the slip, that may or may not be possible.  If it resulted from night when they didn't sleep well or they had a cold on the day they took a test, then quick recovery is possible.  But, if they have slipped due to chronic illness, a long term absence, or an unidentifiable sense of demotivation, it will likely take time.  

That were the teacher comes in.  Give them a realistic sense of what is possible and help them set a goal.  "I'd like to make an A on my next test" will be demotivating if that isn't doable for them right now.  However, "I'd like to aim for 5 points higher on this test than I got on my last test" might be.  Perhaps they can get one excellent paragraph of an essay written or do four projectile problems in physics.  

Don't set the goal so easy that it results in meaningless success because that's not motivating either.  No one says, "Yeah for me because I walked to the mailbox today" (unless that was something they hadn't been able to do for a while).  But there is a sweet spot where it is motivating.  Just before an endurance song, I tell my cycle classes to set a goal that is "challenging but doable."  Succeeding at that kind of challenge improves what we view as "doable" and allows us to set bigger goals.

To sum up, if you want your students motivated in your class (especially those who don't think they "are good at it," you gotta get a few wins under their belts early on.  During the first week of class, set a challenge that they have to reach for but isn't out of their reach.  Then (and this is important from a growth mindset standpoint), don't just say, "Hey, look, it turns out you are good at this."  Instead, ask them what they did that enabled their success.  Encourage those actions for the future.  Point out each time they have a success, no matter how small it is, that it was the result of the work they did.

It's also helpful to remind them that growth is not a linear process.  There are twists and turns and ups and downs on your way to a long term goal.  While it may feel unpleasant, it is perfectly normal and part of what makes life so interesting.

What I Learned by NOT Achieving my Summer Goals

"If you never fail, you aren't setting big enough goals." 

- Jillian Michaels on The Biggest Loser

When I first started taking fitness classes at the Y, I had two goals:  Don't hurt yourself, and don't leave a class early.  After a couple of months, my planner personality kicked in, and I started setting real goals and tracking them on a spreadsheet that hangs on the side of my refrigerator.  For the first four seasons, I pretty much killed them.  This summer, I did not.  I met a few.  I fell just short on others.  And a few aren't even close.  So, this post will be a slightly self indulgent reflection on what I learned from the summer of not meeting all my goals.  Since it is an educator's blog, I'll make connections to setting and meeting (or not meeting) academic goals in the second half.

Setting the Goal Too Far Out Messes With Motivation

In the prior seasons, my goals were no more than 90 days out.  This one started the day after my birthday, and since I wasn't going back to school, I decided to make it end on the last day of August rather than when I reported back to school.  That made the time I was giving myself to reach the goals 105 days.  That sounded good because it gave me plenty of time to get stronger and increase weight and bike speed.  But in reality, it made me less motivated to increase weight because I'd have time to do that later.  And some of my goals are averages.  It turns out that it is really difficult to move an average up after day 70 or so.  Even if I spent all of the final month moving really fast on the bike, it wasn't going to move the average up by more than a minute amount.  Hence, I didn't have a ton of motivation to kill it in the latter parts of the summer.  Long term goals are fine, but the yearbook advisor in me should have known to put some  intermediate milestones in place as I pursued the larger aims.  

For the fall, I am going to set goals two weeks at a time.  I'll track a bunch of numbers.  At the end of two weeks, I'll choose a couple to improve on for the next two weeks.  It could be 5 more miles on the bike or a higher average speed.  It could be adding 5 pounds to my chest weight.  But, instead of a far away end goal, I'll be focusing on improvement in some area.

Failing in Part is Not Complete Failure

It is easy when looking at performance to focus on where we fell short.  That's natural, and may even be healthy as we set our next objective.  But, we should also take time to celebrate the good.  I didn't fail every aspect.  And even on those where I did fail, I made progress, got stronger, became healthier, and spent time with people I love while doing them.  That all has enormous value whether or not I hit my target numbers.  

Keep Moving Forward

Many of my goals are based on averages.  These were the ones that became really difficult to meet if I wasn't already there in August.  Budging an average up is just hard after a high number of days in the same way baseball players with long careers won't see as much movement in their batting average after each game like a rookie will.  But a few of my aims weren't averages.  I aim for a total distance on the bike, so even on my off days when my legs just wouldn't cooperate, I was adding miles to that total.  It may have been 9 miles when I wanted 12, but it was 9 more miles than it would have been if I hadn't come to class that day.

I have a cycle classmate named Wallace.  He is 80 years old.  A few days ago, he said, "Now, you are going to see that I am slack in all classes, not just yours." Oh, no, Wallace.  The last thing you are is slack.  Do you know how many people aren't even here?  That man is strong and healthy at 80 because he keeps going.  He may be a little slower than the person next to him (although, not always, I've seen him outperform people much younger than he is), but he is continuously moving forward.  Wallace is an inspiration, and I hope that I am still on the bike 32 years from now.

When Circumstances Change, It's Okay for the Goal to Change Too

Goals are tricky because they require us to project into the future.  And the truth is that we don't know what the future holds.  We have a decent grip a few days out, but we can't know whether we will get sick or experience an emotional upheaval or injury during the next month.  As a result, we often set unrealistic goals.  It didn't scare me to have a few off days.  That can happen from not eating enough calories before the workout or not getting enough sleep the night before.  But then, I got a summer cold followed by a particularly heavy cycle (perimenopause was the opposite of what I expected, y'all) that turned a couple off days into a couple of off weeks.  Rather than change my goals, I thought I could ramp back up and make up for the off weeks.  To make up for the losses in averages, I would have had to perform farther above average than I am actually capable of.  I would have been much better off resetting the goals instead of insisting on the delusion that I could reach them.  Then, once I got to the place where reaching them was mathematically impossible, I had no motivation to do toe-pushups in the morning or an extra set of crunches in the evening.  

In his book Uprise, Kevin Washburn advises having an A goal (the one you can reach if all circumstances are ideal), a B goal (the one you will be happy with if the weather messes with your run), and a C goal (the one you can find satisfactory even if everything goes wrong).  I sometimes have those for individual classes, but I've never thought to have them for the entire season.  I'm hoping my two week interval system will allow for this as I will only be focused on improvement, and the C goal can be improving by a small amount while still being improvement.

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As promised, there are connections to education.

Setting the Goal Too Far Out Messes With Motivation

At the beginning of the school year, I often asked student what their academic goals were, and I learned that students are very broad in their thinking.  They say they want to make an A for the semester.  The semester that starts in August ends in December.  The young brain is simply not equipped to motivate itself for a goal that far out.  Meanwhile, I have found their practice to be remarkably short sighted, only willing to study for a test if it is less than three days away or work on that which is due tomorrow.  I ran into this with my study skills class when I tried to get them to devote some time to studying for the test they had that Friday while also putting some time into making flashcards for their finals.  They didn't want to do it because it wasn't "next."

Teachers should encourage students to set some intermediate goals for the sake of continuous motivation. It's up to you and them what that looks like. Perhaps, like my workout schedule, they should have something to improve on every week or two.  Perhaps, they should focus on the next thing out and one more thing.  Perhaps there should be a reading or study time schedule that they can mark off to show their progress visually.  But don't rely on willpower to get them to the end of the semester.

Failing in Part is Not Complete Failure

I remember the only time I failed a physics quiz in high school.  I remember the three Cs I made in college classes (Chemistry 201,  Human Anatomy and Physiology, and Ecology).  I can tell you about projects I have tried at school that went very wrong - In fact, I'll be speaking about one of those failures at a conference in October.  The reason I can tell you about those times is that they were rare.  Overall, I was a very successful student.  

When good students fail, it is traumatic.  Unlike students who regularly perform at low levels, they simply don't have the coping skills to deal with failing a quiz or performing worse than usual on a test.  But it is going to happen, and teachers are going to have to support them through it.  It is important to remind them of a few things.  

1. A bump in the road is just that, and they should keep their eyes on the prize and stay on track.  
2. They have a strong record of success and will continue to have one.  This one quiz is the story they'll tell later because it was so rare. 
3. Grades are not their identity. 

Keep Moving Forward

When I tried to get back on track after my few "off weeks," I made the mistake of thinking I could make up for it by really over performing in a way I wasn't actually capable of.  I would have been much better off just getting back to normal, allowing the average to be slightly less.  Students are sometimes like this too.  If they did poorly on one test, they try to aim at 100 on the next one or even ask for extra credit work. A student who has consistently made Bs is not likely to find a 100 realistic, and they set themselves up for disappointment.  They would be better off acknowledging what they have learned from the situation and getting back into a normal routine of studying than they would be trying to make a "New Year's resolution" type effort just after their setback.  I often told students that it was called an average for a reason.

When Circumstances Change, It's Okay for the Goal to Change Too

I have taught many excellent students who had difficulty recovering from concussions, grief, or mono.  While we as teachers work with them the best we can, we also cannot just give a student an A.  We can extend deadlines and reduce load, but to require nothing of them and give a grade for that nothing is not something a person with integrity can do.  The circumstances have changed, and it is okay for the goal to change with it.  

Several years ago, I had a student who had traditionally been a straight A student fall dramatically after being diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome.  This messed with her head.  She said to me, "If I don't make As, who am I."  We had a discussion about making your identity something more permanent and important than a letter at the top of a paper, and I prayed for her to find her worth as an image bearer of her Creator. But I also understood that she was used to a life where it was fairly easy to reach her grade goals, so this felt like academic whiplash.  If I had this to do over, I would follow up the spiritual conversation with a practical plan, asking what might be a realistic grade for her to aim at in her current circumstances now that the ideal was unattainable.  

I have always said that I would rather my students aim high and miss than to aim low and hit their targets, but when that happens, it still feels like failure.  Reacting to our students with empathy gives them a safe place to land, recover from the wounds of failure, and launch again.  That kind of resilience does not get built in those who always achieve success.  It is only built by failing and learning from that failure.

Transitions are Exhausting

Warning:  I'm in a very emotional place as I'm working through some personal stuff, so expect this to be a self-indulgent post with a lot of rambling.

If you are a parent of school-aged kids, you have probably had the experience of your child falling asleep in the car on the way home from school during the first week.  You probably assume it is because they are getting up earlier than they did in the summer, and that is partly true.  But there is another reason.  Learning new things takes a lot of energy.  

I used to notice that I was especially hungry on days when I taught something difficult.  People laughed at me when I said that.  Then, I found data to vindicate me.  While some processes in the body burn fat or protein in addition to carbohydrates, the brain burns only glucose, and when it is especially active, it burns a lot of it).  So a hard exam or learning activity can drop blood sugar, making the learner tired and hungry.

I've spent this week learning - all day, every day, everything I did.  I've started a new job at the YMCA, and learning the computer system is as overwhelming as trying to get a drink of water from an open fire hydrant.  In addition to the energy drain of all this brain work, I have also had the emotional impact of leaving my 25 year teaching career, where I was supremely confident in my abilities, to doing nearly everything wrong for a week because I was doing it for the first time.  I think I have clocked in and out correctly exactly one time.  Once, I even answered the phone with the name of the wrong branch.  Even though everyone has been very kind and understanding (can I keep using "It's my first week" as an excuse for the next five years?), it has been . . . a lot.  At the end of a shift, even if it was only five hours, I was exhausted and hungry.  

There's also changing email addresses, phone numbers, and passwords on literally everything I do online.  I didn't realize how many things my email address was attached to.  The refurbished laptop I bought online has about 400 kernel panics a day, requiring a reboot every time, sometimes four times in one paragraph of writing (although that has helped me get used to my new password, for sure).  I now understand why my middle and high school students wanted to eat all day long.

I knew this transition would be emotionally difficult, but I'm not sure I was prepared for just how difficult.  Do you know the Neil Diamond song, "I Am I Said"?  It's about his move from New York to Los Angeles at the start of his music career.  There's a line in it that resonates with me right now.  It goes, "LA's fine, but it ain't home.  New York's home, but it ain't mine no more."  I am really looking forward to making the Y my home, but it isn't just yet.  GRACE is home, but when I got on GroupMe this morning to report a problem to the Cycle Instructors group and saw that I had been removed from the GRACE groups, it hit me hard that it really means I don't work there anymore.

I wanted to work at the Y because I want to be part of their mission and to help people.  I don't yet have the feeling that I am doing that.  And, of course I don't; it has only been a week.  Even though my role is problem solving, I don't yet know how what problems there are, much less how to solve them.  In my brain, I know that I will have that sense eventually and that this is just my entry into this mission and that every job is necessary for the place to function, but after several weeks of students and colleagues telling me how meaningful my work as a teacher was, I am experiencing emotional whiplash as I understand that I will have to rebuild that in my journey at the Y.  When I broke my iPod this morning on the way out of the house, I sat in the car and cried for a few minutes before ordering a replacement I wasn't expecting to spend money on.

But God is good y'all.  He gives me little reassurances when I need them.  This week, there have been a couple.  On Friday, I was subbing for a cycle class and saw that my boss was on the roster to observe.  That made me pretty nervous because I've only taught five classes.  She's a super positive person that says things like, "You're gonna crush it," but there is never way to not be nervous when you are being evaluated.  As I arrived and changed into my cycle shoes, I noticed that someone had put one of the scripture slips from the bowl on top of the sound system.  I unfolded it and found this.

You probably cannot read it, but it says, "Isaiah 41:10 - So do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God.  I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand."  I stuck it in my pocket next to the microphone pack and reminded myself of it throughout the class.

My friend, Kevin Washburn, recently published a book on resilience, called Uprise: Building Resilience in Ourselves and Others.  I bought it because I love Kevin and wanted to support him, but I honestly didn't expect to find things that spoke to me because I already considered myself a fairly resilient person.  I had started it a couple of weeks ago and then had to pause to read a different book because of a study we are doing at church this Monday night.  Today was the first time I had a chance to pick Uprise up again.  And even the pause in reading this was God-ordained.  He wanted to me to read pages 49-51 after this week of training.  On page 49, I found these words - "Mastery, where we can perform a skill without thinking, takes time to develop.  First, we establish accuracy; then we build efficiency.  That's why patience is a critical component of the learning mindset. First attempts require feedback and adjustment before additional tries increase accuracy.  This is true especially when trying something new."  It's not like I didn't know this.  I have even taught about it to others when presenting on retrieval practice and formative assessment.  But somehow, seeing it on a page in black and white made it feel more real.  While neither of these moments have prevented me from feeling all of the feelings I described above, they reminded me of how much difference it makes to trust God and how he designed learning as I move forward.  

This blog is supposed to be about education, so let me give this piece of advice to teachers.  If you want to empathize with your students who are learning and making mistakes, try something new and difficult this summer.  Pick something you are likely to be really bad at in the beginning.  Analyze your own frustration in learning needlepoint or basketball or poetry, whatever pushes you out of your comfort zone.  When school starts back in the fall, you will better understand students, model the learning process for them, and be able to tell them how you overcame obstacles.

Now, I need to post this quickly before my computer reboots again.

Want to Grow? Do the Harder Thing Now

In his excellent book, Why Don't Students Like School, Daniel Willingham discusses the difference between performance and growth.  A lot of students use study techniques that are ineffective for learning because they seem good at the moment.  As teachers, we all know that cramming is not good for keeping things in long-term memory, but students feel that it is effective because they do well in the short term (even though they know they have forgotten that information a few days later if you press them on it).  Parents have sometimes told me they didn't understand how their student performed poorly on a test because they went over their flashcards many times the night before, and they knew them by the end of the study session.  They don't realize that the student has recognized the material from seeing it a few minutes ago, and that they suffer from the "Illusion of Knowing." 

You can learn more about recognition/familiarity vs. knowing in Willingham's book Outsmart Your Brain.  In it, he uses an analogy from the world of fitness.  He asks the reader to consider a situation where your goal is to do as many pushups as possible.  He suggests that most people would be inclined to do the easiest pushups possible.  After all, you can do them relatively quickly, so it seems like you are reaching your goal, at least from a short-term performance standpoint.  What is not happening, however, is growth.  If you want to get stronger, you have to do the hardest pushups you can accomplish and then slowly make them even harder.  It will feel ineffective because you will end the session with jello arms, but it will help you accomplish your long-term goals in a way the easy thing won't.  You should do the harder thing.

I am in a class called Group Power at the YMCA.  It is a choreographed group weightlifting class, and I love it.  The first night I took it, I was afraid of injury, so I used the lightest weights I could, but for some of the moves, I realized I could do a lot more.  Over the next few weeks, I added more and now have "a normal weight factor" for each muscle group.  The instructor changes up the routine every six weeks or so, giving me the opportunity to experiment.  Right now, we are using an inclined bench.  During the core portion of the routine, we have the option to fight gravity or let it help us.  I thought of Daniel Willingham and chose to do situps and crunches against gravity, knowing it would help in the long run.  That long-run mindset is important because the first week, I looked like a dying cockroach, legs flailing everywhere.  Another member of the class showed me how to grip the bench risers with my feet, which helped a lot.  I still run out of core and leg strength a few reps before the end, but I feel stronger and can feel that I have improved.  Next week, I will talk about ways in which an understanding of cognitive science has helped me in group fitness classes, but the idea of doing the harder thing despite the feeling of ineffectiveness is definitely one of them.  I wouldn't be pushing myself as hard if not for Willingham's analogy.

Two weeks ago, in a parent-teacher conference, a mom came in and said, "My daughter has changed how she studies because of your advice."  I have spent a lot of time explaining effective study methods to my 8th graders.  Some of them neglect the advice, believing that they know what works for them in the face of contrary evidence.  ("No, listening to music doesn't affect my working memory," said one young lady as though she was qualified to know that.)  I want students to understand the reason for the advice we give them, so I have explained the difference between performance and learning.  Some continue with the ineffective strategies that make them comfortable, and some only care about performance (which is hard to change in our current culture).  But those who care about learning adapt, and I know they will find it satisfying at some point if they stick with it through the times when it feels ineffective.  

As teachers, it is easy to send mixed messages.  I know have been guilty of talking to them about keeping a long-term perspective on learning while also communicating with them more about their performance when grading them.  It's a tension I don't know we will ever fully reconcile, but we should be aware of it and try to keep them focused on growth over grades, learning over performance, and the important over the immediate.

Losing Our Mental Stamina

Last week, I wrote about how we don't use our minds as much as we should because it is so much easier to rely on emotion, instinct, and memory.  I referenced the kerfuffle about Karen Swallow Prior on Russell Moore's podcast.  This week, I'd like to address how hard it is to sustain prolonged use of our minds, a thought that started in my mind while listening to that same episode.  Russell talked about how difficult it is for us to focus on Bible reading because it has become difficult to sustain focus on anything.  It's easy to blame this on the pandemic (and I'll return to that soon), but I think we have to back up several years before Covid to really diagnose this issue.

When I was in college, professors sometimes referred to "the Sesame Street effect," suggesting that our attention spans were shortening due to the way children's television shows were filmed, including rapidly changing angles and scenes, bright colors, and lots of sound stimulation.  While I don't think any scientific research had been done on this thought, the logic seemed pretty sound.  And, man, did they have no idea what was coming.  

The early internet was slow to load images and mostly screens of text.  But as transmission speed increased, our patience decreased.  We started expecting things to load instantaneously, correct our errors for us, and show us what we wanted to see when we wanted to see it.  We began consuming news in video clips, reading blogs and articles rather than books, and scrolled past anything we didn't care to see.  Twitter's character limitations took away all sense of context or nuance because there just wasn't space for it.  It bled outside of the online world; I have impatiently tapped my fingers waiting for the microwave to cook something in four minutes.  Mind you, this is something that would have taken an hour just a few decades ago and would have required the building of a fire in prior centuries.  

Enter the smartphone.  Any reliance we had on others evaporated in a matter of months.  Take the wrong exit while driving?  No need to stop and ask for directions anymore.  Can't remember a fact, you don't need to be near a book, a knowledgeable person, or a computer because the computer is in your pocket.  Want to listen to a song while watching a video and reading a news article simultaneously, no problem.  At least with Sesame Street, you were limited to what the directors/editors had produced; now you could change scenes at your own control.  While adults fretted over what this would do to their children's attention span, they ignored what it was doing to their own.  And in short order, they handed them to their children and let them take them to school.  Let it be the teachers' problem to out-engage this extremely consuming technology.  

Some parents did have limits on "screen time," but they implicitly sent their kids the message that screen time was valuable by making it a reward for everything from chores to grades to good behavior.  The pandemic didn't help; screen time limitations went out the window.  I'm not judging parents here, by the way, because I cannot imagine what trying to work from home while having kids would have been like.  My own screen time was enormous as I taught virtually.  When it first started, I thought I would do a lot of reading since I was at home all of the time, but I found that my eyes didn't want to focus at that distance after a day online.  When we started back to school, I just didn't have the mental bandwidth for anything other than getting through the day.  Then I came home and watched Stephen Colbert and an episode of Would I Lie to You while playing online poker.  The human brain isn't capable of multitasking, so I was just training my brain to consume things in shorter and shorter chunks.  We all did.  Consequently, traffic is more upsetting than it used to be, and waiting in line for anything annoys us more than ever.  I haven't even addressed that we were being politically stoked at every turn during this time, but our patience for other people's opinions is down to zero.  

Okay, we know we have a problem.  What do we do?  It has to start with wanting to do something.  It's not enough to complain about it or think of it as someone else's problem.  Older generations like to talk about it as a Millenial or Gen Z problem, but there were a number of people texting DURING the Tony Bennett concert I attended in February of 2020 (a concert in which I was the youngest person by quite some margin).  At a family event, one of the grandparents showed me a meme on his phone bemoaning the fact that kids don't play stickball or something.  I don't remember because I was distracted by the fact that he was showing me a meme. . . on his phone.  With no sense of irony whatsoever, he used tech to complain about tech.  They used to say recognizing that we have a problem was half the battle, but I'm not sure if that's true because we recognize it as a societal problem rather than one in ourselves.  

The second thing we need to do is make a plan.  Choose a challenging book and plan to work your way up to it.  I'm not saying jump into Steinbeck or Dickens right away, but make it something worth your time and move your way up from your current reading length from now to some goal date.  Treat it like training for a marathon or weight lifting; increasing your mental effort each day or week.  Watch an entire television show with your phone in another room.  Do you really want to challenge yourself?  Leave your phone at home for a day.  I promise you won't die, and neither will your children; you will just have to remember to pick them up from soccer practice without a reminder alarm.  Do the work to memorize something - a scripture passage, the Hamlet soliloquy, or the Gettysburg Address.  It doesn't matter, just exercise those parts of your brain to help you sustain mental effort for the future.  

Do something.  Do anything.  Work out your brain.  

I Tried it Once. It Didn't Work.

Recently, I tweeted that I was creating a Study Skills elective and asked people to tell me what they thought was the most essential to include.  In case you were wondering, this was not, for the most part, a helpful exercise.  Some people suggested the two books I was already using.  Some gave me really weak things that I wouldn't likely spend time on (I'm not telling a high school student to organize a notebook in a specific way).  By far, the weirdest piece of advice I got was this (She meant well, so I've blotted out her name).

First of all, are any of these study skills?  You might be able to make a case for note-taking (and I will be spending a little time showing them Daniel Willingham's advice about figuring out the thematic hierarchy in a lecture in order to make connections in your notes), but again with organizing?  Have you ever tried to impose someone else's organizational method on yourself?  It doesn't work.

But here is my real beef with this advice.  "I'd teach different ways to do each thing and then have them try each way for a week or so."  This feels like the least effective strategy I can possibly imagine.  There is no world in which a week is enough time to know if something will work.  That's not even enough time to cover one chapter in a class and see the results of your method on a test.  

I spent a lot of time trying to figure out why an educator would give me this advice, so I finally went to look at her profile.  She isn't an educator.  She works in machine learning, a field in which "fail early" and "multiple iterations" are prized.  That helped it make some sense.  The tweet has a bit of a learning styles vibe to it with "so they can see what works and doesn't for them."  People who are up on education research know that the idea that we all learn differently and must find our personally preferred method or it won't work for us is not true.  While it is true that every brain is different, most of them function in similar ways to the rest, so we need to find what works, not what works for us.

But mostly, I think it rubbed me the wrong way because it reflects the short attention span, multi-task-attempting, commitment-dropping culture in which we live.  If I don't see results in the short term, they must not yield results in the long term either.  Instant gratification or nothing.  I'll try this for a week and the judge it inadequate.

When I was a yearbook teacher, students were required to sell two ads to offset the cost of book production.  While I admit this is a daunting task and difficult to do (which is why I only required two), students often had little endurance for it.  One year, a delightful young lady said to me, "I don't know what to do.  I've tried a lot and haven't been able to sell one."  I said, "How many people have you asked?" and she replied, "Like two!"  I laughed so hard I almost fell out of my seat, not because she wasn't adorable but because she had described her efforts as having "tried a lot" only to answer with the number two.  It's a good thing sales is not her future career.  I said, "You are likely to get several no answers before you get a yes.  Keep trying."  

Whether you are attempting to drop an old bad habit or develop a new good habit, one week is not enough to judge if it works.  It is possible one month will not be enough.  Often, there is actually a temporary drop in performance while making the switch.  The illustration below comes from Peps McCrae's weekly newsletter Evidence Snacks.  In this one, he discussed our misconceptions about trying something new.  He said most people believe that if something works, our growth in it will be linear.  It will start working right away, and we will keep getting better at it as we practice.  Yet, this is not the case.  When first implementing a new policy or technique, you may see a drop as you adjust from the way you used to do things to the new way.  For example, my brother took Bowling as a PE class during his freshman year in college.  They taught him a different method than the one he had grown up using.  For a short time, he was a terrible bowler because he hadn't learned the new way very well yet, but he could no longer do it the old way.  It isn't until the new way becomes a well-myelinated pathway that automation allows us to judge the effectiveness of a new method.

Because we expect progress to be linear, we misjudge any drop in performance, but we don't see benefits until the new way of doing things becomes automated.  We often don't like something in the beginning for no other reason than we resist change.  Sometimes, we know something isn't the best way to do it, but it is the way we are accustomed to, so the new way feels like it isn't working.  Daniel Willingham's book Outsmart Your Brain discusses the reasons why you often misjudge something as not working when it really is because the difficult way is yielding long-term benefits rather than short-term feelings of improvement (Google his brilliant pushup analogy).  If I were to follow the advice in this tweet, my students would end the year believing no method worked for them, and I would have failed them as a person who knows how to dig into studies and provide research-based advice.

So, I'm clear on that not being the way to go.  What will I do instead?  Well, first, let's not look at a bunch of ways that might work for us.  Let's look at what the research says works generally (spaced interleaved retrieval practice with feedback).  While individual students may have to adapt methods to fit their schedules and context, the advice we give them should start with research-backed practices.  For that, I am using Barabara Oakley's classic book, Learning How to Learn, and the new book by Daniel Willingham, titled Outsmart Your Brain as well as the amazing website retrievalpractice.org with advice from the lovely researcher Pooja Agarwal.  These sources will allow me to deliver advice with confidence and explanations about why techniques work.  They will practice them for the entire year.  I will add techniques for different thinking levels, but I will not give multiple techniques for the same thing in the hopes that one might land.  

This is not just an important concept in education, so let's look at it in everyday life.  If you have a goal to achieve, it is going to take time.  Let's say you want to lose 15 pounds.  You can't go to one spin class and 

say, "Well, I am not 15 pounds lighter, so exercise clearly doesn't work."  If you want to improve an artistic skill, you can't spend an hour watching YouTube tutorials and say, "Well, I am not any better at this now than I was an hour ago, so these tutorials are garbage."  We need to recognize that nothing in your brain changes instantly.  Trying something one time will not allow you to adapt or even to accurately judge whether you are good at (or like) what you are doing.  

Don't just say, "I tried it once.  It didn't work."  Keep doing it until it becomes an automatic routine in your life.

Mental Recovery

I didn't blog this weekend.  I posted that I didn't have any wisdom to share.  And I didn't.  Between the kidney stone I was battling and the atrocious week I had had, there was nothing in my head that I would have wanted in a public space.  It was dark in there, y'all.  

Here's what a long career does for you, though.  It gives you perspective.  Bad days end.  Bad weeks come and go.  Bad years feel crippling, but they don't have to be if you take steps to recover.  Recovery is important for our students to see because they have to do it too.

I'm not for living your life out loud with students.  There are professional boundaries to be set.  I do believe in being genuine and authentic with students.  Finding the line is tricky, and I have sometimes found myself on the wrong side of it; but my ultimate feeling is this.  If they go home worried about me, I've crossed the professional line.  They might say at the dinner table. "It was weird how upset Miss Hawks was in class today."  That's fine.  That's noticing something human.  They should not be losing sleep over it.  They should not be coming in the next day worried that I'll be that upset again.  Then I've shared too much.  

Recovery probably looks different for different people.  For everyone, I assume it involves sleep.  There's some kind of magical power in sleep that I've never really understood.  The Bible says, "His mercies are new every morning."  That may be Jeremiah's poetic way of recognizing that sometimes things seem better after a night's sleep.  (I'm sure there are Biblical scholars who know what it really means, but I do know that I have often been really upset about something one afternoon and wake up with a different perspective.)  Sleep well after a rough day.  It helps.  

Gratitude is helpful as well.  Recognizing that there are many things for which you are thankful can put those few things that are upsetting you in perspective.  It doesn't make them okay; it doesn't make them go away.  It helps you recognize balance in your life.  (On Twitter, where people have a very unbalanced view of my thoughts, I have been accused of toxic positivity.  I'm not talking about pretending everything is fine when it isn't.  I'm talking about recognizing life is not one day/issue/problem.  Life is more interesting than that.)  

The last thing is this.  Keep going.  The easiest thing in the world is to give in to the dark stuff and hide, but it doesn't work.  Darkness reinforces darkness.  Feelings of worthlessness are only made deeper by shirking responsibilities and not accomplishing goals.  You might adjust the goals or give yourself more time, but accomplishing something gives us a sense of . . . well, accomplishment.  One of the lessons I've learned from unfortunate grief is that the rest of the world keeps moving.  Bills are still due, and some stuff has to get done.  Will you do it more slowly?  Yes, it may feel like you are walking through water.  Keep walking.  Move slowly, but keep moving.  One of the reasons I am writing this now is that doing the thing I didn't do on Sunday will be better than not doing it at all.

Our students have been raised to either numb their feelings (medication) or soak in them (self-care).  Neither extreme is healthy.  We must model feeling them and recovering from them.

Ode to the Last Place Runner

In my role as yearbook advisor, I photograph a lot of sports and many other kinds of events.  One of my favorite things to photograph is track and field.  Part of that is because people look interesting when jumping hurdles or doing the Fosberry Flop; part of it is that they make unintentionally hilarious faces when hurling a shot put or discus.  But what I find most inspirational is watching distance runners.  The endurance it takes to run lap after lap on a track is unreal, even for the person in first place; but I am the most impressed by the kid who is running behind the pack, far behind the pack, the kid who knows he is dead last and keeps running anyway.  The winners may win the ribbons and get the praise, but the last place runner builds character and grit that will transfer to other areas of his life as well.  He will be the one pushing down brick walls for the rest of his life because he has built those muscles through perseverance.  Here's my best effort at honoring you as you should be honored.

Ode the Last Place Runner

To the runner who knows you are last
Half a lap behind the rest 

I see you.

I see you continuing 

To put yourself through pain

Both physical and emotional

Just to finish.

Thank you.

To the student who is barely passing

Knowing you'll never receive an award

I see you. 

I see you continuing 

To ask questions and study hard

Coming to help classes

Just to make a D.

Thank you.

To the team who is up against your most difficult rival

Entering the game wondering whether you will even score

I see you.

I see you training and watching game tape

Listening to your coach and doing your best

To put your heart and soul on the field

Just to lose by a lot of points

Thank you.

To the actor who auditions for the lead

Always getting a role in the chorus.

I see you.

I see you learning your lines

And everyone else's, so you'll know your cue

Putting your all on the stage

Just to keep getting non-speaking parts.

Thank you.

You don't know it now,

But what you are doing matters.

It won't win you today's trophy,

But it will make you strong 

For the challenges of the future.

You don't know it now,

But you will tell the stories of your losses to your children.

When they suffer their own.

When they need you to understand,

You will.

Keep running.

Keep studying.

Keep playing your best on the field and the stage.

The people in the stands see you

And they are inspired by you. 

Teachers Just Keep Going

This has been a tough week.  For everyone.  

Voters on both sides have been refreshing the electoral map online over and over.  Vote counters have been doing their job round the clock with more scrutiny than ever before.  Reporters have spoken hundreds of thousands of words every night for four nights, knowing that if they misspeak even one of them, they will be raked over the coals by half of the public.  Stephen Colbert broke down for a few seconds during his monologue Thursday night because the President's assertions of fraud, which predictable, were unexpectedly heartbreaking. No matter which side you are on, this is exhausting.

You know what I did this week?  I taught 8th-grade students about the evidence for chemical reactions and how to interpret their equations.   I reviewed for and gave a physics test to juniors and seniors.  On Friday, my physics students gathered outside while my teacher friend and I threw egg drop projects from a 26-foot lift.  I reminded my yearbook staffers of the deadline we have coming and guided them through the things that needed to be done.  I took photos of elementary school students and electives.  I graded papers and helped students with homework questions and had exactly the week I would have had if it had not been election week.

This isn't the first difficult week I or any other teacher has had.  I have taught through a shooting threat.  I was teaching on 9/11.  I have taught through heartbreak.  I have taught through the illnesses and deaths of colleagues and students.  And, oh yeah, I have taught through a global pandemic.  Teachers keep going through hard weeks because the work must be done.  Education trainer Todd Whitaker says, "The best part of teaching is that it matters. The hardest part of teaching is that it matters everyday."  

Of course, teaching is not the only profession in which people must keep going no matter what.  Doctors and nurses have had a long year.  Police officers can't decide not to respond to a call when they've had a tough week.  The one thing that is different about teachers is that EVERY thing we do EVERY day is being observed by young eyes.  They look to us when there are tough weeks to see how we are dealing with it.  When they see us keep going, I hope that they become adults who persevere.  

Now, for my own sanity, I'm going to take a one week social media break.  I'll see you next Sunday.