Sometimes The Answer's Right in Front of You - Ask Someone to Show You

I've been painting this week. The front door and the mailbox post were easy, but the shutters required more out of me, both physical and (as it turned out) mentally. Climbing the ladder over and over again with paint and a brush in my hands was only possible because of the good people at the YMCA, but the bigger challenge was figuring out how to paint the shutters without painting the windows.

The fronts of the shutters were simple, as long as I could balance myself on the ladder while using my hands to both hold the paint and do the painting. I had a plan for the outer edge, slide a piece of cardboard behind the shutter and then move it down as I descended the ladder and continued painting the edge. That worked perfectly. 

But what about the edge that meets the window? I can put the cardboard under the shutter there. And even if I could, I can't reach the far shutter from the ladder or see the inner edge of the near shutter. Given that it is less than half an inch wide, there's not a lot of room for error, especially if I can't get cardboard or tape there to protect the window. 

I had thought about it a fair amount. My mom and dad had both suggested things. Nothing was the right answer.

Then, I was walking with my friend, Meagan, to our class at the Y. I was in the middle of this story when she simply said, "Do your windows not open?" 

Of course, that's the answer. Of course it is. Stand on the floor inside my house and lean out the window. I can see and reach the inner edges of both shutters. Of course that makes the most sense.

Yet, it would have never occurred to me. I was too close to see it - literally.

This sometimes happens in your classroom. You have a part of your curriculum that seems to be a sticking point every year, but you can't figure out how to explain it differently. You have a project that isn't quite what you want it to be, but you don't have a solution for making it better. You have a nagging behavioral issue that tends to be a problem for you repeatedly.

Teachers, especially middle and high school teachers, often have an independent streak built by the fact that we stand alone in front of students all day long. We usually believe we can solve most any issue ourselves. But just as I was too close while standing on a ladder to view the shutters from a different perspective, you may be too close to the issues in your classroom to see obvious solutions.

So here's my advice. Spend some time during the summer talking to someone. It could be another teacher or an administrator, but it doesn't have to be. You may have a friend who can give you the teaching equivalent of "Do your windows not open?" and make a solution immediately clear. 

School leaders, you can help your staff with this as well. GRACE did this one year as part of our orientation meetings. Rather than an "icebreaker" (which, by the way, no one likes - ever), we were assigned to groups and told to bring an issue we were having. I brought a project that just wasn't producing the results I had hoped for.  In just a few minutes, I was given two fresh ideas that would help me to improve that project.

One thing that I feel was critical to the success of this group was that it was not a department meeting. Don't get me wrong; I adored my department, but the success of this came from the different perspectives each person in the group had. Other science teachers would have been locked into the same ideas I was; we would have all been too close to see the solution. The ideas I ultimately adopted from that meeting came from an English teacher and the Spanish department chair. They were able to see it in a way I couldn't. So I recommend mixing these groups.

If you want to improve some part of your process and feel stuck, ask someone to point out what is right in front of you.

Thanksgiving 2025 - Holy Trinity Anglican Church

Each year at Thanksgiving, I write a post about an educator who inspires me. I've written about the teachers of my childhood, my colleagues, the GRACE administration and parents, my group fitness instructors at the Y, and Learning and the Brain. 

This year, I am particularly grateful for my church, Holy Trinity Anglican Church in Raleigh, and most especially for its rector. His fancy name is Rev. Dr. John W. Yates III, but he's my pastor, John, and I could not adore him more.

Fair Warning:  This post is going to be longer than normal. There is some background information, and I want to tell the story in detail. Get some coffee and settle in.

A little background on me. I grew up in church.  I don't mean I went every now and then. I mean I grew up in the church building. My family was there, at minimum, 3 times per week - more if there were youth activities, drama practice, handbell or choir performances, etc. I also attended a Christian school from kindergarten through 9th grade and went to a Christian university. So, I've been hearing sermons since my ears were forming in utero. And, Roland Harrell, the pastor I had during the most formative of those years, was intelligent, thoughtful, organized, and prepared.  We used to joke that he could pull a sermon out of a comma in the middle of a sentence. He kind of ruined me for all other preachers. It took me a while in college to settle on a church for that reason. In Tulsa, a city FULL of churches, there was no preacher that lived up to Mr. Harrell.

Fast forward to my adult life. I had been attending a well known church downtown Raleigh for quite some time. I never really got plugged into it, though. I was briefly in a community group, but it didn't stick. It's a big church where it is easy to be pretty unknown. Maybe I needed that for a while, but in late 2022, I started feeling that it was time to move on. I don't have anything bad to say about that church; there's no dramatic story. I just had allowed myself to become stale. I was mostly anonymous, showing up on Sunday morning to listen to the sermon and that was about it. Because it was non-denominational, doctrine was very much de-emphasized. If asked about specific doctrines, they would say, "We hold some things in a closed hand because they are essentials. We hold everything else in an open hand because Christians can respectfully disagree on those."  I am on board with that philosophy. I grew up in a Pentecostal church and a Baptist school and went to college at ORU. I taught in a Christian school with a multi-denominational population. So, I am accustomed with respectful disagreement amongst faithful people, but at this church, we didn't get a chance to respectfully disagree; I couldn't tell you if I disagreed with them or not because they never talked about them. (I'm not even 100% sure I know which issues they might put in each hand.) So, I wasn't growing at church. I went to church for those last few years because I am a person who goes to church, not because I was contributing to or taking anything from it. I got my doctrinal development from podcasts. I knew this wasn't right, but inertia is powerful; so it took God moving in my heart to get me to think about looking elsewhere.

But in November 2022, I didn't feel like I could leave yet. I had committed to a two-year giving initiative, and we were only near the end of year one. I didn't want to break my commitment, and I still believed that what I was giving to was a good thing. I didn't want to make my home somewhere else only to say, "I'm sorry, I can't give here for a year because I'm still giving over there."  So, I decided to wait until after Christmas of 2023 and then start looking for a church home, where I could grow, serve, give up any sense of anonymity, and stay until I died. 

Okay, here's where God has a sense of humor because He knows what is coming and we don't. During the fall of 2023, He started nudging me out of the classroom, something I had never remotely considered.  You can read that story here. Everything in my life was about to change as I went from very stable income and a predictable school calendar to the unknown of hourly work, writing a book, and the attempt to build a consulting business. When I made my last payment to the giving initiative, I thought, "Really, God? I know I said this was when I would leave, but . . . NOW?  Do I just not have enough change coming in my life?" But I knew there was a reason this needed to happen, so I made a list of local churches and began visiting.

The first church I visited was definitely not it. I posted about it on Facebook, prompting one of my friends to send me a "What were you thinking?" message. I was thinking I needed to go to church this week, and there was one on this corner; but don't worry because I'm not going back. On a walk to a kickboxing class with my friend Meagan, I said, "I will visit however many it takes; I want to find the place I can stay forever, and it may take time to find that place." She suggested that I visit Holy Trinity Anglican Church, saying, "I think they have the things you are looking for."  This was, word for word, the same thing she said when she suggested I take a tour at the Y, so she's wise about knowing what I am looking for.  

My first visit was interesting. I sat about halfway back in an aisle seat. After a song and prayer, when I sat back down, I was blinded by sunlight coming in through a very large window. I got up and moved, feeling very conspicuous (although, that's just the Spotlight Effect - no one actually noticed). Having attended very few liturgical services in my life, I felt a little awkward about kneeling and responsive readings, but I also  liked the sense of ceremony and connection to everyone else in the room that came from it.

Then, John got up and preached the sermon (start at 22:00). It wasn't long, but it didn't need to be. It was powerful. It was about loving your enemies and blessing those who curse you, which feels countercultural in our current climate. After putting it in the historical context of Jesus' audience, John shared a story about a time his dad, who he clearly loves, was betrayed by a friend and told how he responded. I was impressed by the vulnerability it took to share this obviously painful story, so later that week, I found his email address on line and thanked him. I ended the email with, "I don't know much about Anglican practices. Is there a resource you could point me to?" I thought that, if he answered at all, he would send a link to a website. He wrote back a lovely response and said if I would send my mailing address, he would mail me a book called Anglican Essentials (for which he had been a contributor). There's so much about this gesture that appealed to me:

1. If it is possible for books to be a love language, they are mine. This, friends, is the way to my heart.
2. It is unusually kind. Copying and pasting a link would have gotten the job done. It took time and care to put the book in an envelope, put the appropriate postage on it, and mail it to me.
3. It shows that he cares about scholarship - both his and mine. I didn't know it yet, but he is a Brainy Smurf. I've since heard him talk about pursuing his degree as "thinking I could scratch an itch only to find out it was poison ivy; everything I learned just made me want to learn more." This is basically my life as well (minus the advanced degree). 

The next week, as I approached him, he said, "You're Beth?" I wondered if I just looked like someone with questions, but he had gone to the school website in my email signature, so he would recognize me. Again, a kind act that took some time. He suggested another author that morning. I was talking to my friend Elizabeth, who had been on a similar journey with moving from a large non-denominational church to small, Methodist church recently. As I told her the story, she said "Wow, you found your people."  This was made more evident a few weeks later when he expressed, in passing, an interest in theoretical physics and specifically string theory. It was my turn to give him a book. When I gave it to him, I told him it was my favorite book about string theory, and he told me that made me a special kind of nerd. 

Done. Sold. This is my church. If, after only 5 weeks of knowing me, you knew that I would consider it a compliment to be called a nerd (and a special kind of nerd at that), you get me.

Every other member of staff has been wonderful. Claudia sought me out after seeing me for a couple of weeks in a row and told me she could help if I had any questions. I've learned well from the sermons of Tripp, Caleb, and Jason. The vestry is full of friendly people who are intentional about connecting. I am not anonymous as I sit around the same people each week and chat with them before the service. There are opportunities to serve, so I am now on the altar guild and have recently been added to the reader list.

What God knew when he started prompting me to move churches was something I didn't know.  I was about to lose something I had taken for granted, the intense Christian community I had experienced at my job in a Christian school for 21 years. Even though it wasn't right, I had "gotten away with" treating church the way I did because I attended chapel, teacher devotions, and a prayer meeting weekly at school.  That's not happening in my current role, and God knew I was going to need a pastor who I wanted to listen to, often going onto YouTube later in the week to listen again. He knew I was going to need a pastor who was patient with my constant communication. (Because he became so important to me so quickly, I send him way more emails than a reasonable person should, and he is gracious in answering them.) God knew that I would come to love liturgy, finding the repetition of the creed and certain prayers each week more meaningful than I imagined. He knew I was going to need sermons that sometimes feel like they are just for me.  God knew I was going to need Holy Trinity Anglican Church in Raleigh.

This may not seem like the most "education-y" of posts, but John is a gifted teacher. I have learned more in the past 22 months than I had in most of my adult church life. Teaching matters here, and I could not be more thankful for that because that teaching has been a gift to me - and one that I really needed more than I even knew. In a meeting with Claudia, I mentioned something about one of John's responses to me, and she said, "Yes, we really like to think here, and he leads that."

So this year, I'm giving thanks to God for Holy Trinity Anglican Church, generally, and the gift of John Yates, specifically. I sometimes wish I had found you sooner, but God blessed me with you at exactly the time I needed you. Thank you for everything.

And thank you to Meagan for being the kind of friend who knows what I need.

Classroom Noise is Context Specific

Warning: This post is a little more rambling than intended. As often happens, I was working out some thoughts through my fingers. But I also wrote it at noon on a Thursday, when I had gotten up at 3:15 to go to work. If any of it seems really weird, please blame it on that.

Last Sunday, I showed up to church, as I do every week and 8:45 for the 9AM service. Instead of the usual off duty police officer directing traffic as I crossed Peace Street, there were two fire trucks.  Instead of people walking toward the building, there were people gathered in the parking lot. Instead of chirping birds, there was the unmistakable sound of a fire alarm.  

No worries. Everything is fine. There was a technical issue in the system that tripped the alarm, but it couldn't turned off by the firefighters, and the alarm system people were 40 minutes away.  My sweet pastor stayed calm as he attempted to develop a Plan B, but he finally recognized that there wasn't going to be one. Even if we attempted to have church in the parking lot, he said, "I can't compete with the fire alarm." He didn't want people focused on the sound, not the sermon (which was excellent, they live streamed the 11:00 service).

Later in the week, Carl Hendrick started a little bit of a hubbub on Twitter by posting a link to his blog post "Is a Noisy Classroom a Thinking Classroom?" As is always the case with Carl's blog, this post is a nuanced and thoughtful exploration of the idea that noise is more productive than silence when it comes to teaching and learning. 

As is always the case on Twitter, the response was anything but nuanced and thoughtful. The teachers who hate compliance ironically insisted that other teachers comply with their opinion that student voice is THE MOST IMPORTANT THING in education. And don't let this shock you, but many commenters had not read the article and responded only to the title (I'm sure that's the first time anyone has done that one Twitter). 

Anyway, as I was reading all of these posts about noise, I couldn't help but think about the cancelled church service.  When John said he couldn't compete with the alarm, it was because he knew people wouldn't be able to think about his words while something else filled, not just their ears, but their working memory. I also thought about my own classroom as both a full time teacher and as a substitute and how there are times when I need students to hush and concentrate on what I am saying and other times when they should be talking through the assignment. I also came into the profession at the time the idea of a the noisy classroom was being push hard, principals saying they wanted to hear kids voices as they walked by your classroom because "whoever was doing the talking was doing the learning." This is a sentence I could easily believe if I didn't know better since I have talked out loud to myself since I was a toddler, and I sometimes don't think something is real until I have heard myself say it out loud. 

So, I was thinking a lot this week about the question of whether a noisy classroom is a thinking classroom.

If you have met, me you will not be surprised by my conclusion - the answer to the question "Is a Noisy Classroom a Thinking Classroom?" is . . . "It depends."  It depends on the type of thinking expected and on the quality (and quantity) of the noise.

Type of Thinking Expected

I once had a group of 9 students who were sitting stone cold silent in my classroom.  I don't mean it was kind of quiet. I mean it was a graveyard level of quiet. I said to them, "Y'all are creeping me out.  Why is it so quiet in here?"  They acted like I was crazy for suggesting that they should be talking . . . in class.  But there was a reason their silences was surprising - they were supposed to be working on a group project together.  Since they had not yet settled on a solution to the problem they were attempting to solve, I expected to hear suggestions and discussions of whether or not those suggestions would work.  Instead all of them were claiming to be "researching the problem."  I could see their computer screens, so I knew they weren't actually researching.  This was a case in which silence was not golden and was not a sign of internal thinking.  It was a sign of students who didn't want to work at that moment.  In this case, a noisier classroom would have shown more thought than a silent one.

However, there are times when this is not the case. I was recently substituting in a math classroom.  Students had been given math problems to solve as retrieval practice, and it could only be retrieval if they did it on their own, using their own brains. About a third of the class started talking about fantasy football.  About a third started talking to each other about how to do the problems. The final third was attempting to work on the problems on their own, but it was difficult for them to tune out the other conversations.  If one of those principals from the 90s who expected to hear student voices as they walked by bothered to enter the room, they would have known that this was not productive noise. It was noise that was preventing the objective from being achieved by most of the students in the room.  In this case, the sound of silence would have resulted in more thinking.

Zero teachers have ever said, "Let's have a noisy exam because that will show more thinking," but there is an equal number of zero teachers who have said, "Silence in the lab!" unless there was an emergency where instructions needed to be heard. A quiet foreign language classroom might indicate lack of learning as you would expect speech, but it might also indicate that they are reading in that language and need quiet to process the syntax. Context matters in many education discussions, and this is certainly one of them.

Quality of Sound

Most experienced teachers can quickly discern the difference between productive and unproductive sound, but it is hard to describe.  When it shifts in the middle of class, they know.  It isn't a super power; the two just sound different.  And it ins't necessarily about the decibel level.  It's about what the sound . . . sounds like.  Sorry, I know that isn't the most helpful sentence, but I can't think of another way to put it.  

There are sounds that happen during dissection labs that are good, like  "Hey, hand me that scalpel" and "Do I cut this way?" There are sounds that are bad, like "Ouch." and "Oh, no, I shouldn't have cut there." Those are pretty obvious, but you can also tell without hearing words when the conversation has shifted to evening plans and tv shows and sports. I don't know how to explain it, but it has a different tone.   Teachers can tell the difference between those tones in the same way moms can differentiate a baby's hungry cry from his full diaper cry.

Quantity of Sound

Even productive noise can become unproductive when it reaches a threshold level. I'm not sure I have research to back this claim up, but I think loud noises or noises that occur closer to ones head take up more space in working memory. My purely anecdotal example of this occurs regularly during my job at the Y.  There is music playing in the lobby all of the time.  Which is fine until I need to concentrate. If I answer the phone and someone with a thick accent asks me a question, I have to turn the music down to process what they are asking. When swim team practice ends and a gaggle of loud, wet kids enter the lobby all at once, I have a hard time carrying out even relatively routine tasks. You might think this is just because I am middle aged, but I experienced it when I was younger as well.  In my junior and senior year of college, I was a janitor in an arena. None of my maintenance tasks during an event required high levels of concentration, but some of them became very difficult when a loud band was performing. A few times, despite my youth, I opted to wear earplugs, just so I could perform relatively simple tasks.  If the fire alarm at the church had been half the volume, John might have been able to hold our attention.  

Education isn't simple:

Okay, I know I've wandered around a bit here (I did warn you up front). My point is this.  A noisy classroom is sometimes a thinking classroom, provided that the quality and quantity of noise match the expected type of thinking for the assigned task.  A quiet classroom is sometimes a thinking classroom if the silence is needed for concentrating on complex or individual work.  Trying to cover something as complicated as education with a blanket statement that should apply at all times is a fool's errand.

Education isn't simple enough to have one answer to most questions.  Most questions are context specific. There isn't an answer that covers all situations, so decide at the lesson planning stage whether or not this is a quiet day or a productive noise day. Then communicate to your students what that means and what you expect to hear or not hear. 

Being a Whole Person

Note: I'm trying really hard not to write about current events, so this is a topic I've kept in the draft folder for a while. I just didn't want y'all to think I was unaware of the crazy in the world right now.

I was getting ready for class to start one day, when our Latin teacher came down to ask a question about math. It might have been about prime numbers, but I don't remember as he often had a math question he lingered over for a few months before finding another one.  As he walked away, I said to my students, "He says he has a 'crush on math' and comes down here to ask questions."  They looked befuddled as they said, "But he's the Latin teacher." I paused for a beat and said, "You should tell him that. After all, they don't let us like things we don't teach." 

I hoped that bit of gentle teasing would reveal the silliness of thinking that someone can only be interested in things that are directly related to their jobs. But that conversation also revealed something about how students view their teachers - as sort of one dimensional content delivery devices.

I'm not sure when it happened, but somewhere between my school days and now, we stopped valuing well-roundedness in students.  When I was a student, that's what colleges were looking for. I wrote many college recommendation letters highlighting that very quality. 

Then, there was a shift; they wanted to see "passion." Don't get me wrong - I'm all about being passionate. But I think their definition of passion and mine are different. In my life, passion looks like throwing myself into whatever I am doing. Whether it is listening to a sermon, making a yearbook, participating in a fitness class at the Y, or attending an exhibit at an art museum, I want to do as much as I can and learn as much as I can. That's how I have always defined passion for myself.

The colleges who were looking for passion seemed to think it meant singularly focused. Have one interest or cause and pursue it with all of your being. This was their expectation of high school students. I don't think I would qualify for scholarships now because they expect students to have built a life around one thing, starting a non-profit or business around that one thing. To them, being well-rounded appears to be unfocused or non-zealous.

I think that's sad, not just because it is the opposite of the way I am built, but because it comes at a cost. Helping student find something they are passionate about is great, but the implicit message is that they can only be passionate about one thing. Students who are passionate about engineering would benefit greatly from enrolling in art or theater. Talented musicians can find additional passions in the study of history or math. People are not ONE thing, and we aren't meant to spend our entire lives caring about ONE thing.

One of the reasons I chose to attend ORU, a school 1200 miles away in a state I'd never set foot in was their philosophy of educating the whole person - spirit, mind, and body. While I often questioned this motive during my graded 3-mile "fun run" each semester, I knew it was good. I liked taking general education classes and choosing to take classes outside my major because it was making me a more complete person. 

When my students balked at the idea of taking classes they "didn't need," I often said, "What if the only thing I could talk to you about was physics?  Would you like me at all? No, I would be insufferable." For that reason, I talked to them about books and art and plays and even what little I knew of sports. GRACE had a math teacher who also taught Irish Dance, a history teacher who also taught anatomy, and a science teacher who was into photography enough to become the yearbook advisor (that one is me). 

Being 3-dimensional whole people makes us more interesting, but those things also inform each other. If your passion is art, you will be better at it by understanding some chemistry. They aren't mutually exclusive. If your great love is history, you will benefit from learning how to analyze literature. If you devote yourself to people, a knowledge world languages and culture will enable you to serve them better. No knowledge is ever wasted. 

Most of the people we admire in history had multiple passions. Mendel, the father of genetics, wasn't a career scientist. He was a monk with a garden. His love for the Lord and his need for sustenance drove his interest in pea plants, and we still benefit from it.  Another monk, St. Francis, knew scripture well because, of course, he was passionate about them. But he was also an animal expert and a poet. Thomas Jefferson not only penned the American Declaration of Independence, he was an architect who played the violin. While we think of George Washington Carver as being solely focused on the peanut, he cared deeply about education and took his traveling classroom to farmers while developing methods of crop rotation because he understood soil chemistry.

Teachers, be passionate about the content you teach. It's important for students to see that.  But if you want to broaden their horizons, you have to broaden yours as well. Talk to them about things you are learning outside of your field. It will help you build relationships with them and will make them view you as more human, but it may also allow them to lead fuller and more joyful lives. 

It won't make the less passionate. On the contrary, it will make them passionate about more things.

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.

Enlist Help

For the past month, I have been working the front desk at my local branch of the YMCA.  There is a lot to learn - and I mean a lot.  From the basic functions of the computer system in making scan cards, charging people for personal training, and selling guest passes, there are rules about who is allowed to receive a seven day pass and when people can leave their children at the drop in child care.  There is simply no way to train in all of it at once, so I spend a fair amount of time doing things incorrectly.  One of my co-workers, Helena, is often the one left to tell me, and she always feels bad about it.  I keep telling her that she shouldn't feel bad and that I would much rather have a kind and well-meaning person tell me I'm doing something wrong than to keep doing it wrong.  Obviously, what I would much rather were happening is that I would be doing things right, but there is too much to learn for that to be happening yet.

We are around a month away from teachers returning to school for the inservice days before school starts.  New teachers, it is an exciting time for you, but it is also daunting.  Don't let that scare you.  There is a lot to learn. There are going to be many things you weren't taught in teacher school that will become part of your daily life.  For a while, you are going to stumble into scenarios you don't know how to handle, requests from parents that you aren't sure are reasonable, and student situations you won't know how to navigate.  My best advice is not to try to do it on your own.  Enlist help from the wisest person you can find.  That might be the mentor teacher your school assigns you, but that also might not be your most natural relationship.  If you organically develop a relationship with teacher next door or across the hall, it might be them.  It might be the principal or the librarian.  Admit your vulnerability, and seek wisdom.  It is simply not possible for you to know all the nuances of student, parent, colleague interactions in addition to your content and your pedagogy.

I've had a number of those people over the years.  In my first school, it was, in fact my assigned mentor, but that doesn't always happen.  I also had a great principal who had a story for everything, teaching me that mistakes weren't fatal.  At GRACE, I had a few over the years.  My art teacher friend, Elizabeth, was a great listening ear and wise when it came to student interactions.  The teachers surrounding my room (Zane, Melanie, Meagan, Alyssa) were often the ones I asked to look at email replies before I hit send.  My English teacher friend, Kellie, was the person I went to if I needed someone to disagree with me in order to evaluate my own position.  My history teacher friend, Amy, provided good perspective on spiritual issues.  Our librarian/media specialist, Marcia, was the person I bounced new ideas off of.  

Whether you a new teacher or an experienced one, teaching is a complex endeavor, and you never stop needing help.  In my 25th year, I was giving advice some days while still asking for advice on other days.  Keep learning.  Keep asking questions.  Keep enlisting help.  

Great Teachers Aren't Born

"I'm going to tell you everything you need to know about being a great teacher - steal. STEAL.  STEAL!"  Then, he left the stage.  That's how the great Harry Wong opened the day of professional development for this first-year teacher.  When he returned to the stage, he said, "Well, I told you I was going to tell you everything you needed to know.  I figured you could go home after that."  We spent the day laughing and learning from this tiny man who, at nearly 70 years of age, had more energy than anyone in the room.

Before there were Edu-celebrities, Harry Wong was one.  He didn't try to be. It didn't come from a fine-tuned marketing machine with social media support.  It came from being the real deal rather than a crafted persona, a truly influential person rather than "an influencer."  I know very few teachers who haven't had his seminal work The First Days of School somewhere in their education, whether in a college course on classroom management or required reading for their first-year training in a school or a gift from an administrator.  It is a practical book of techniques that have been tested "in the wild" and it has influenced me from year one.  From procedures for entering and exiting the classroom to attention-getting hand signals, Harry and Rosemary Wong have helped teachers create efficient classrooms and reduced stress for both teachers and students more than just about anyone in the last four decades.  But what makes that book so effective is that much of the writing was not done by the Wongs.  They collected and collated techniques teachers were already using to give younger teachers the wisdom of their experience.

Which brings me back to the day of professional development.  What he meant when he said, "Steal. Steal. Steal." was that teaching is improved by experience, but it doesn't always have to be your experience.  You can learn from the wisdom of others.  While I cannot find it attributed to him, I am 99% certain that I heard Harry Wong say that day, "Great teachers aren't born; they are made by the teacher next door."  (If I am wrong and someone else said it, please don't hold it against me.  It was 1998, and he may have attributed it to someone else that I just don't remember 26 years later.)  

It is true.  Teaching involves a thousand big and small activities every day.  They have to manage their classroom, plan lessons, do lunch duty, deliver lessons, grade homework, give feedback, write tests, create project rubrics, deal with emotional students (or parents), choose curriculum, etc.  Anyone who tries to do that alone with only the knowledge they acquired in college courses will quickly burn out.  Befriending the teacher next door and finding a co-conspirator is as important as preparing your learning activities.  Despite being with 30 to 130 people all day long, teaching can be a lonely job, and the only remedy for that is to spend time with other teachers.  No matter how good you are at this job, you need a mentor.  If the school assigns you one, that's great; but they may not be the person you naturally gravitate toward.  Find that person.  Go in their room, sit down, and start developing a relationship.  You need them. They need you.

Harry Wong passed last week, but his legacy did not.  His book will still be valuable to young teachers everywhere.  His videoed speeches will still engage and entertain while educating educators.  But if anything, his lesson to learn from the experienced teachers around you will continue to do good far beyond the 92 years of his life.  Rest in peace, Harry Wong.  We'll miss you.  

Teaching Awe - Why Do You Love It?

Last week, I talked about joyful learning.  This week, I would like to address something our curriculum-driven, standards-obsessed educational culture has forgotten.  We learn best those things about which we are curious.  I'm not advocating for student-driven, personalized learning.  I'm suggesting that part of our pedagogy needs to be stoking curiosity by revealing those parts of our disciplines that are awe-inspiring.

When I took physics, I spent every day in awe.  Was it because my physics teacher did something dramatic?  Sometimes.  But often, it was the physics itself.  Knowing how the world worked made me happy in ways I didn't yet understand.  It was the first time math had made sense to me as expressions of relationships between real things.  I didn't love history, but the best history teachers I have told amazing stories of people from the past and then showed the themes that keep repeating about how we treat each other and those we consider unlike ourselves.  Trigonometry was the first math class I took that I actually looked forward to.  There was something about the relationships shown in the unit circle that thrilled me.  I'm sure there were people who enjoyed different parts of different classes; the same things don't appeal to all of us.

I want my students to understand that physics is a way of knowing something real about the world and that we have used it, not just to advance society by inventing new things, but also to understand without need to turn that knowledge into a commodity.  

My advice to teachers is this.  When lesson planning, of course, you have to think about curriculum and standards, but take a moment to look at what you are teaching and remember what made you love it.  You chose to teach math or literature or band or computer science for a reason.  Give students a glimpse of that by telling a story or showing your own amazement.  My physics classes are currently in a chapter on sound waves.  While talking about wavelength and frequency and amplitude, I find it important to take a day and talk about how our ears process it.  This is not in the curriculum.  No physics standards says, "students will understand how the human ear processes sound waves," but I think it is amazing that we have structures in our ears that turn patterns of pressure differences into electrical signals.  Even more amazing is the fact that we do not yet have a full understanding of how these structures function.  Perhaps one of my students will be the person who figures that out, but even if that doesn't happen, I want them all to want to know.  I want them all to be curious about things we have not figured out.  

It's easy in science because it is almost all revealing of some underlying principle that is neat to know.  But perhaps there is something about how poetry is structured that you find amazing.  Perhaps there is a historical figure who inspires you.  Perhaps the way colors blend in a painting takes you to your happy place.  Show students that.

If you want students to score well on standardized tests, stick to the book standards.  If you want kids to be lifelong learners, show them the awe of your discipline.  By the way, they'll do better on tests too because they'll be more likely to follow you down a rabbit hole and learn things they hadn't planned to.

Learning Should Be Joyful

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

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

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

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

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

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

They Neither Protected Nor Served - The Uvalde Report

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  

A Detailed Creation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What You Can (and Can't) Control

According to Blogger, this is my 500th post.  I debated about whether to try something special and decided just to keep it a regular post.

Yesterday, I saw the movie Oppenheimer.  I'll save you the review, but it is dark and difficult in ways I was not expecting.  Brace yourself if you decide to go see it.  One of the more interesting takeaways for me came from a moment after the successful test at Trinity.  The military is driving away with crates containing the bombs that would be dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Oppenheimer is conflicted about its use, but it is clear he has lost control of his own creation as it drives away.  He had been in charge of this project, but he was not in charge of the result.

Earlier this summer, I blogged about my summer goals.  While I have met goals related to reading, school work, and home projects, the goals I have been most invested in this summer have been related to working out at the YMCA.  This is the sticky note on my computer where I listed my goals to hold myself accountable.  I have completed the first four goals, and I will continue doing three of them from now on (not the 12 miles - that would be unrealistic to make a regular thing, but I wanted to see if I could do it once).  In kickboxing last week, I came very close to completing the last goal on the list, but there is a weird jumping jack that I didn't try.  I will do it this week.  While my pushups are getting a little better, I'm not sure I will be able to call that goal completed because I saw myself in the mirror today while I was trying them.  My elbows are bending more than they were in May, but they aren't bending far enough to call them pushups. 

Anyway, the point of this post isn't to congratulate myself on meeting my goals.  It is to point something out.  None of the items on that list are about weight loss.  I don't own a scale because women have such an unhealthy relationship with that number, so I wouldn't know anyway.  There is nothing about inches or a clothing size I want to fit into, although surely I hoped to fit comfortably into my Tuesday pants again because that's their job.  All of the goals are things I wanted to be able to do, not changes I wanted to see in my body.  Why?  Because I have control over what I do, but I do not have control over how my body will respond.  I'm not going to lie; I'm pretty happy with how it has responded, but if I had chased those numbers, I might have done the exact same things I'm doing now and not achieved them, resulting in feelings of failure rather than accomplishment.  I wanted to set goals that were related to things I could control.

Teachers, as the school year starts, you are going to be setting a lot of goals.  Keep the lesson of Oppenheimer and my workouts (a combination I never imagined typing).  Recognize what you can and cannot control.  Don't set goals like, "Half my children will make As" or "Every student will love me." Those things are not in your control.  In their book, Clarity for Learning, John Almarode and Kara Vandas say that students and teachers should know three things when going into a learning activity - What they are doing, why they are doing it, and how they will know when they have achieved success.  This should guide your goal-setting as well.  Figure out what is important to you to do or to have your students do.  Then, you will know what you are hoping to accomplish and why.  If you say you will "engage each class in retrieval practice at least five times per month" or "upload lesson plans on time every week," you will know what you are doing.  If you chose them for a reason, you will know why you are doing it.  And it is easy to identify success in a goal like that.  Put it on a list and cross it off when you have done it.  Tracking your progress is motivating, not being able to tell if you are successful because your goal was too nebulous is de-motivating.

There is much in the world of education we cannot control.  We cannot control the home lives of our students, no matter how much we might like to.  We cannot control the attitude or motivations of our students, although there are many evidence-based techniques we can use to challenge motivation.  You cannot control the broken nature of the system, no matter how many red shirts you wear.  You cannot control another teacher's policies that frustrate you because your philosophy is opposed to theirs.  Instead of wringing your hands over those things, focus on your actions in your sphere of influence.  Set your goals based on what you can control, and stop fretting over the things you cannot.