A Tribute to our Technology Coach

I have mentioned Laura Warmke, our technology coach many times in previous posts.  Since this is the last month that she will be employed by our school, I'd like to take this chance to make a post solely in tribute to her.

Laura Warmke came to GRACE as the media specialist.  If you are over forty, this is the person you would have called the librarian; but the job has grown significantly enough to change the title.  She was fantastic at the "library" part of the job.  I don't think I've ever mentioned a book she hadn't already read.  She could converse as easily about young adult literature as she could about historical fiction or books or medical history.  She encouraged reading for pleasure in our students.

Laura also noticed a need in our school.  The year she joined us was the second year in our one-to-one program, and we had hit a bit of a plateau.  It was clear to Laura that we needed cultivation if we were going to continue to grow.  While at a conference, she heard about a professional development program that another school had used with their teachers.  Along with other members of our IT department (Shout Out to Diane Scro), Laura developed a program for us called Level Up.

Level Up was about learning and adopting new tools for people at different levels.  When adopting a new tech program, it's important to realize that some of your people are savvy and others are less so.  We are also a K-12 school, so how each teacher implemented technology in their classroom was going to be pedagogically different.  Recognizing this, Diane and Laura developed missions for different grade levels and different tools.  Each teacher could choose which mission they wanted to accomplish.  Some were as simple as watching a TED talk by Sir Ken Robinson; others were as ambitious as flipping your classroom.  There was a wide range in between of just trying a new tool (Animoto, Canva, Storybird, etc.) with your students.  When you completed the mission, you went into a discussion board on our school's LMS and posted.  I really enjoyed looking at the posts of other teachers as well because I work with creative people.  For every tool, someone had used it in a way I had not thought of, and I was able to enhance my use of it as a result.  After completing the discussion board post, the teacher was given a badge on a poster board in the teacher's lounge.  I know that sounds a little elementary school, but I found it motivating.

When Laura moved to the midwest because she wanted to be with her husband or something, we didn't have to lose her awesome influence.  She continued to be our technology coach, meeting with each teacher once per quarter to discuss the integration of technology, talk through project ideas, help us look for a management tool or website platform, or help us process what we learned at a technology conference.  Level Up was difficult to maintain at a distance (and because she was raising two kids or whatever), so Laura changed things up.  She set up a schedule for teachers to present short presentations on tech tools during faculty meetings.  Each week, we got a 2-3 minute presentation from a peer on some tool that either had used or planned to use in their classroom.  Through these presentations, I've learned some new mind mapping tools, a digital museum tool, and Quizzes (a great replacement for Kahoot if you are no longer find that a valuable review tool).

After two years of distance coaching, Laura has decided it is time to invest in her local community and have some local here at GRACE.  While we understand that logic, we will miss her influence greatly.  I have said it before, and I'll say it again.  She made us better teachers, and I have no higher compliment to give.

The Value of Yearbook Dedication

I am sitting here with a brain so full that I'm not sure I can make coherent sentences.  This is one of the reasons why I blog.  It helps me sort out my own thoughts.  That said, if this seems a little rambling, there might be a good reason for that.

When I became the yearbook advisor for my school twelve years ago, a different teacher had been doing it every year.  That gave me a lot of freedom because there were no long held traditions that I couldn't break from.  I decided that if I was going to do this for multiple years, I wanted to establish some because traditions unite people.  One of the traditions I decided to start was to dedicate the yearbook to someone who had made a difference in our school and the lives of our students.  It had only been done once before, and I believed it was a great way for our students to see us honor each other for dedication and hard work.

That year, we dedicated it to our head of maintenance, Mr. Dale.  The book was presented to him and dedication read at a faculty meeting.  After that, I asked if we could dedicate them in front of the whole school so that our students could not only see us honoring hard work, but they could celebrate it as well.  Since then, our students have cheered for office staff, an art teacher, janitors, a high school science teacher, a fourth-grade teacher, an administrator, members of our IT department, a PE teacher, and a special needs teacher.

Why is this important?  There are probably many reasons, but I'll speak to the ones that matter most to me.

1.  We Honor Work
Our culture spends a lot of time honoring people for beauty, musical talent, and athletic talent.  We have people who are famous for being famous without actually doing anything and people who are famous because their parents are famous.  We have an unhealthy obsession with people who "speak their minds" whether or not they have anything to say.  This yearbook dedication shows that we honor people who work hard at the thing God has called them to do.

2.  We Unite in Honor
One of my favorite parts of the day is the reading of the first paragraph of the dedication.  Students try to figure out who we are reading about before the last sentence when we say the name.  Then, there is a roar into the room when that person makes their way to the front, we let their family into the room, and the entire school cheers and stomps the bleachers and celebrates.  It is a moment when our school is unified.  This year, our school has outgrown the space we have traditionally used to have our dedication.  We would violate fire code if we tried to put our student body all in that place, so we are having to split into two events.  I'm a little bummed about it, but I can't insist that we break the law.  I'll just miss hearing everyone all together in this moment.

3.  We Shower A Person With Love
Every year, the staff chooses the person we do because we love them.  That love is obviously already there, but it is not often expressed on a daily basis.  As James Taylor advised us, you should "Shower the people you love with love.  Show them the way that you feel.  Things are gonna be much better if you only will."  We do.  We usually make them cry.  We invite their families.  We explain why we love them in detail.

4.  We Show A Real Person
I don't know if you ever thought about the life of your teachers outside of the classroom, but I know I didn't when I was a kid.  They were a teacher, not a person.  In the process of our dedication research, we find out who this person was before they came to our school.  Some of our people have had really interesting jobs.  We tell the story of how they met their spouse if we can find it.  We share funny or touching stories.  I want our students to know that their teachers are human beings with childhoods and adolescent embarassments, and love stories, and hobbies, and all those things other humans have.

As long as I am the yearbook advisor, this will be an important part of our yearbook.  That's why it's right up front, just after the title page.

Fidget Fads

Fads come and go at a faster pace than they used to.  Social media and youtube have increased the rate of communication about everything, including the latest greatest thing since the pet rock (just in case your generation thinks your fads weren't ridiculous).  Social media and youtube have also given parents and teachers an increased opportunity to fight about the new gadgets, peer pressuring and bullying each other about whether or not the new thing is something their child REALLY needs or the downfall of education as we know it.

Take a deep breath.  Remind yourself that you are a grown up.  Let's have some perspective.

First, fads are not new.  I mentioned pet rocks above, but it goes back farther than that.  For fun, go to this site or this one and have some nostalgia.  We have an astounding lack of memory about the obsessions we had as kids.  That doesn't mean we should mindlessly accept all our students' obsessions, but perhaps it will help you empathize with them.  By definition, they come and go.  Remember rainbow looms and the distraction they were in the classroom?  Now, they aren't there.  Try to remember that.  This year alone, I have seen the rise and fall of bottle flipping, Rubic's cubes, and slime.  Spinners are just the latest one, hardly the worst.

Second, every new fad is a distraction in the classroom.  If a student wants to be distracted, they will be.  We must stop blaming the object as though they wouldn't be distracted if "fill in the blank" didn't exist.  When I was a kid, note passing was a big deal.  Absolutely no one blamed the pencil.  I have watched students read their pencil or stare at their own hands in order to be distracted.  (That student then raised his hand to ask me questions about his fingerprints.)  If you are at your wit's end with spinners, it is because you haven't created parameters for their use.  Tell kids they can have them the first five minutes or the last five minutes.  Tell them they can use them while doing independent work but not while you are lecturing (or vice versa - It really doesn't matter what your boundaries are as long they know you have some and will stick to them).  I say yes until there is a reason to say no, so slime was allowed in my classroom until the day I had to scrape it out of the carpet.  My students learned that the proper use of something yields positive consequences while the improper use of it yields negative ones.  Be the teacher, not the curmudgeon.

Third, every new fad brings an opportunity for engagement and learning.  Personally, I love the spinners.  I teach physics, and there's not much better way to get a kid excited about rotational inertia and the friction-lowering power of ball bearings than these little guys.  They don't make as much noise as the bottles and Rubic's cubes, so I let them experiment with them and ask questions.  I saw a blog post yesterday that bemoaned the fact that if you get one spinning fast enough it will lift off your finger.  I say that was a teachable moment about aerodynamics.  Someone in another article was complaining that her students were trying to spin them on their nose.  There's a teachable moment about the center of gravity and balance that was lost in that classroom.    You may not teach science, but what if you created a writing prompt for English or created a math problem around rotation rate?  The kids are showing us what will engage them, so take advantage of it.

Finally, let's get real about the word "need."  I have read a thousand social media comments from parents who claim their child needs one of these.  You can't need something that was invented yesterday.  As human beings, our physical needs are nutrients, water, oxygen, and the ability to expel waste.  Recent brain research is showing what teachers have known for decades.  Some kids benefit from movement and sensory input during their learning.  Teachers have kept things in their rooms for students to use for as long as I can remember because it helps.  That's not the same thing as a need.  Again, I say take a breath.  Your child will not have their graduation delayed if their teacher makes them put away their spinner for half an hour so that she can concentrate while she is teaching.

Everybody say it with me, "I'm a grown-up."  Now, go be one.

Do The Next Thing

Elisabeth Elliott is known for being the wife of Jim Elliott and for her authorship of Through Gates of Splendour, Passion and Purity, and many other books about living the Christian life through the most difficult of circumstances.  My strongest memory of her, however, will always be the time I heard her speak in person.  A group of friends and I took a road trip from Tulsa, OK to Little Rock, AR to see her speak at a church.  During the speech, she spoke little of the grand moves we make in life and much of the mundane - feeding your children, doing laundry, etc.  This was interesting for me as a college freshman, even though she was discussing things I had not experienced.  It is rare to hear a speaker talk about regular, everyday worship acts rather than the big stuff, especially someone who has experienced as much big stuff as she as.  At the end of the night, there was a question and answers time, in which someone asked what to do when they felt overwhelmed by how much they had to do.  Every college student in the audience perked up their ears, expecting profound advice on how to give your worries over to God.  Her advice was this, "Do the next thing.  Since it isn't possible to do everything at once and sitting there thinking about it just makes even less time, do the next thing."  I went back to my dorm room that night and printed, "Do the Next Thing" on a sheet of paper.  It hung above my desk for four years, and it is still in my mind today.

This is a time of year when I have a lot on my plate.  Our school does a lot of activities at the end of the year because everyone wants to do their thing for the last time.  There are senior night games, final concerts for band and chorus, and that one last time a club will get to meet.  There are NHS inductions, senior dinners, and of course, graduation.  As the yearbook teacher, I am involved in most of these to varying degrees.  Whether I am there to take pictures at the senior game or enjoy a strings concert, I am there.  In preparation for the senior dinner, my staff and I make posters with each senior's photo and the logo of their college/military/job choice.  This takes a fair amount of time, and some of the students don't make their choices until the day before the dinner.  I also speak at this dinner, so it is important to write the speech.  The yearbook staff also constructs the senior slide show for graduation, which incorporates music, photos, and quotes from each teacher.  Pulling all of that together takes time and must be copied onto a jump drive for each student so it can be included with the gift they will receive at graduation, a Bible which all of the teachers have written in.  Oh yeah, add to the list that I need to go sign the Bibles.  We hold a fine arts pep rally for the day of yearbook distribution, and that is a big day.  Every year, I forget something, like filling out the event request so that the IT department will know what I need (note to self:  do that today). We are changing the way we do that event this year due to the explosive growth of our student body, so I'm still trying to figure out how to deliver all the books between rallies.  This is all in addition to the regular teacher duties and exam writing and blog posting and faculty meetings and lunch duties.

Please understand that I am not complaining about ANY of this.  They are some of my favorite parts of the job and a big part of what makes GRACE so special.  It's just a lot of stuff in a short amount of time, and it can get overwhelming.  You have times like that too.  It may not be the same stuff, but it we all experience times when we have too much to do and not enough time to do it (or at least, it feels that way).    Let me expand a just a little on the advice of Elisabeth Elliott.

1.  Do the next thing.  I'm going to start with that because it is so powerful in its practicality.  As long as you aren't doing anything, you have the same amount of stuff to do.  Let this be the time when the urgent rules and do whatever is due next.
2.  Start whatever you can as early as you can.  I cannot start working on the senior slide show in August, but I can start it in March.  Doing a few students a day throughout the month of April is much less daunting than doing it all in May.
3.  Do whatever you can whenever you can.  This seems like the same advice as #2, but it isn't.  There are times when I am sitting in the car, waiting to meet my parents for dinner.  This is a good time to work on the slide show.  If I have ten minutes before my next class, I can cut out a few college logos for the posters.  During achievement tests, I stole the Bible pages (don't tell anybody because I wasn't supposed to do that) and signed them during the Language Mechanics test.  I am writing this blog post while subbing for another teacher who is on a field trip.  Making use of any time you have to do small things helps them not add up to big things.
4.  Remind yourself that you won't die.  This time period happened last year and the year before that (and for me, the ten years before that), and I'm not dead yet.  Exactly zero death certificates have read, "Cause of death: too much to do and not enough time to do it in."  Keep doing it, and you will eventually get a weekend to sleep in an extra hour.
5.  Decide what is important.  This can be tough because we often convince ourselves that it is all critical.  Maybe it all is, and maybe it isn't.  For each thing, decide not only if it is important but at what level.  It is very important to me that I speak at the senior dinner, but do I need to speak about five students and give each of them a personalized gift - probably not.  This year, I have chosen to speak about two.  It is important for me to write in every student's Bible, but they don't all need to be a long and drawn out message.  The fine arts pep rally matters, but the power point may not need to be as cute and "on-theme" as I usually make it.  We do some of this to ourselves, and it isn't always necessary.

Judge For Yourself

There are two professions in which fads are most prevalent, fashion and education.  It is obvious in fashion as there are visible and recognizable from season to season.  It is even necessary to the survival of the industry.  

In education, the fads are a bit more subtle as they take longer to implement and stick around for several years.  They are not, however, necessary to the survival of education and may even be harmful to the students on which they are tried.  Not all fads are bad, of course, but it is important to recognize one when you see it and then (and this is important, people) use your professional judgment.  

When I began teaching eighteen years ago, I wondered why my freshmen couldn't spell the simplest words.  For two years, I taught fourteen and fifteen-year-olds who could not spell words like definite or intelligent.  When I asked them what the problem was, they informed me that they had been instructed using the inventive spelling method.    For those blessedly unfamiliar with this "pedagogy," inventive spelling is "the practice of spelling unfamiliar words by making an educated guess as to the correct spelling based on the writer's existing phonetic knowledge." (grammar.yourdictionary.com) The hope is that the student will eventually learn to spell the words correctly by absorption.  It doesn't work, and I can't imagine why anyone thought it would, but my students were subjected to it for three years of elementary school.  These students are now in their early thirties and, based on their facebook pages, they still struggle to spell words correctly.  

My first two semesters of college, I took Calculus I and II - sort of.  I was part of an experimental curriculum, called Discovering Calculus.  The book, which was an anorexic 90 pages long, did not have formulas in it.  We, as college students, were supposed to figure out the formulas by intuition.  The logic behind this approach came from years of students knowing how to perform calculus equations without really understanding them.  While I understand that issue, I do know that students who passed those class could do the calculus they learned while I still cannot.  There's a reason it took from the beginning of time until Isaac Newton for mankind to have calculus.  Every student in my class went to a used bookstore and bought a real calculus book so that we could survive this class.  

Now that I have taught for nearly two decades, I am left to ask myself where the professional judgment was in these teachers.  Was there really an elementary school teacher who truly thought second graders would eventually figure out the spelling of words when the English language is fraught with exceptions to phonics?  My calculus professors were not first-year teachers.  They knew how to teach calculus to physics and engineering majors because they had done it for many years (one of them for decades).  What made them think this would work?  My guess is that in both cases, the people in the classroom didn't have a choice.  They probably had it handed down to them by their administration because someone convinced those people to adopt the latest educational fad.  

Those schools no longer teach inventive spelling or discovering calculus because it proved to be ineffective.  If this were the fashion industry, that might not be a big deal.  We all get to look back at our bow blouses and banana clips with nothing more than a blushing head shake.  This is not true, however, in education.  These fads are experiments, and the guinea pigs are our students.  It is dangerous to try every fad in education without serious thought.

Lest you think that I want our classrooms to stay stuck in the model of two hundred years ago, let me quickly dispel that notion.  I teach enthusiastically in a one-to-one school, and my students learn through the use of internet research, show their learning through video construction, and reflect on their learning through blogging.  They collaborate on projects and review using every online tool I can find.  I have digital textbooks, have flipped lessons, and use youtube so much that I don't know how I taught without it.  There is nothing about me that resists the use of technology.  HOWEVER, (and it is a big however), if a teacher is using technology for the sake of using technology, they are using technology wrong.  

You owe it to your students to analyze your own pedagogy.  The educational value of teachers lies in our judgment as trained professionals.  Anyone can deliver information, but it takes an educator to decide on what to teach (and what not to teach) as well as the best way to teach, reinforce, and assess learning.  When a new fad comes along in education, it may actually be a great new way to teach something, but keep in mind that it may not be.  Ask yourself the following questions:

- Does the new way offer brain engagement in a way that the old way does not?
- Does the new way take away from brain development that the old way offers?
- Is there value to the new tool for more than one curriculum point?
- If the new way doesn't work, what long-term effect will it have on students?
- Does the new way teach a skill or thinking process that students will need in the future?

Sometimes, the new way is the best way, and sometimes it is not.  My students blog because I decided that they would benefit from weekly reflection, that I could expose them to content there wasn't time for in class, and that I could ask them to empathize by using appropriate prompts.  My professional judgment was that these were important enough goals to make grading seventy blogs a week worth it.  My students make videos because script-writing forces them to put learning in their own words, but they do not make stop-action videos (unless they choose it) because I find little educational value to justify the time it takes.  My students have collaborative projects because it is my professional judgment that much non-academic learning happens when people work together.  My students also have solo projects because I believe that there must be times when students create on their own.  The common element in each of these situations is that I do not just passively adopt the newest fad method or technological tool.  I don't just ride the educational pendulum.  Rather, I employ all my training and experience to make the right decision for my classroom.  

Just as importantly, I am fortunate enough to have an administration that allows me to do so.  

My Co-Conspirator

Last summer, I wrote about the importance of your relationship with "the teacher next door."  This time, I want to talk about a different teacher in your school that it is also important for you to cultivate a relationship with - your co-conspirator.

Your co-conspirator is the person who teaches the same kids you do.  It is possible that your co-conspirator is the teacher next door, but in my experience, most schools are not necessarily set up that way.  Mine is in the room that is literally the farthest away you can get from mine and still be in the school building (Was this on purpose?  Hmm.)  She's our 8th grade English teacher.

This is Kellie's first year teaching at our school, but she has been at the school as a parent for three years.  I taught her oldest daughter last year, so I knew she would be a fun person to conspire with when they hired her.  At the beginning of the year, we had a self-imposed meeting to see how we could work together for the good of our eighth graders.  While I also teach physics to juniors and seniors and she teaches some 9th grade English, we both have every eighth-grade student.  They also have the same history teacher, so we occasionally loop him in into our ideas.  We started with a fairly short list of activities which kids could experience using both of our classes, but the more we talk, the more ideas we have.

Our first activity was at a very low level of collaboration.  We asked the students to record a Story Corp interview with someone over fifty.  She followed up on the interview with activities in her classroom, as did the history teacher.  I followed up with blog posts about inventions, comparing their answer on the most important invention to that of the person they interviewed.  It was interesting to see where they lined up and where they did not.  While the students had follow-up activities with each of us, we didn't connect those activities at all.  If you are nervous about collaboration, you should consider something like this because there is little pressure.

We have also had some mid-level collaboration on the 8th-grade blogs.  I will sometimes require that students use a magazine article, video, or image in their post.  When I do that, I require that it be properly cited in MLA format, which is what she teaches them.  Using skills from two separate classes in the same assignment creates an awareness in our students that their lives don't exist in separate unrelated blocks.

Our biggest collaboration so far has been the infamous Mars paper.  I've blogged about this paper before, but this year it provided a great opportunity for cross-curricular collaboration.  She was already going to teach them about persuasive writing and constructing intelligent arguments, so this provided an opportunity to use my topic for that purpose.  They learned argumentative style using They Say . . . I Say technique.  They had debates on the pros and cons of putting a man on Mars, in which more nuances could be brought out (like how it is different if private funding is available through companies like Space X than if we are talking about all taxpayer funding).  They wrote their thesis paragraphs as blog posts and turned in their best paragraph in English so that peer editing could take place.  The final products I got were far better than they would have been without the time spent doing that, and a lot of thinking and reasoning skills were developed.

We are already working on ideas for next year to increase our level of collaboration.  For obvious reasons, this has academic benefits for our students.  However, I think there are benefits beyond the material to this level of collaboration.  First, our students see us enjoying each other while we work together.  We met together to discuss rubrics and schedules, and students saw us laughing together.  I remember thinking that all adults hated their jobs when I was a kid, and I think it is great for them to see that we can enjoy each other.  Also, we are a small enough school that a student can't tell one teacher one story and a different teacher another without getting caught.  That is good for our students.  Finally, I think it is important for students to know that their lives will not exist in class periods.  Good writing matters across all areas of communication.  Math will be part of your life no matter what.  Every day is the history of the future.  Science is everywhere.  Working together in these ways allows students to make connections they might not otherwise make.

If there is a teacher in your school whose student list overlaps with yours, consider making them your co-conspirator on whatever level your school situation allows.  You will enjoy it, and it will benefit your kids.

STEM Majors - Stop This Now

As I scroll through my Twitter feed, I've noticed a disturbing trend.  I've actually noticed more than one disturbing trend, but there is one I feel qualified to speak to.  It is the trend of STEM majors tweeting to everyone else that only STEM majors are tired or have degrees of value.  As a person with a STEM degree, I need to tell you to stop this.  Stop it now.  Stop it immediately.  It doesn't make you sound like a hardworking student (who is apparently not too busy to tweet, by the way).  It makes you sound arrogant and ignorant.

I get it.  I really do.  I was a science education major, which meant that I took pre-med biology, anatomy, and ecology as well as all their labs.  I took chemistry 111 and 112 as well as physical chemistry and their labs.  I took engineering level physics, quantum mechanics, classical thermodynamics and applied thermodynamics and their labs.  I took Earth science and its lab.  I took Calculus 1 and 2 in an experimental course where I was supposed to "discover" it for myself.  I haven't even mentioned the education courses and general ed courses that were filling out the rest of my schedule.  I remember feeling like the busiest girl in the world.  If I had Twitter back then, it's entirely possible that I would have been tempted to post the same things you are.  Here's the thing, though.  I've come to learn that everyone I went to school with felt pretty much the same way.  We were all tired, and we are all tired.  Here's a little perspective.

Let's just start with the obvious.  You think English majors have it easy.  After all, everything they do is graded subjectively.  Let's assume that's true for a minute, even though it isn't.  As a person who likes to arrive at the end of a ten-page calculus problem with the answer of zero, you would be horrified if anything you did was graded subjectively.  You would not think it was easy; you would be paralyzed by not having a black and white idea of what to do.   Have you looked at the reading list English majors have?  If you had to face that stack of books, I'm pretty sure you wouldn't think it was easy.  Now, imagine you had to read those books so thoroughly and carefully that you could write papers with detailed analysis about them.  You really think you wouldn't be tired at the end of that?  You would curl up in a corner and calculate square roots.

While we are talking about writing, let's talk journalism majors.  I know you have been told they have it easy because everything they write is on a fifth-grade reading level.  Have you ever tried to write something specifically to a fifth-grade reading level?  If that is not your normal writing level, trying to get it down to that is actually rather difficult.  Also, everything they write or record as news is different as soon as they send it.  Physics may change some over decades, but it isn't different now than it was when I began this blog post.  Having to keep up with every piece of news in our "fast-paced, gotta have it now" society would be exhausting, and you know it.

I hear you saying, "At the very least, we should be able to make fun of art majors, right?  They can't possibly be tired after just putting down splattered paint on a canvas.  I could do that."  If you could, you probably would have.  Since you haven't, let's assume you can't.  It's okay if abstract art isn't your thing, but let's not pretend that the man who created with the method shown here wasn't tired when he got done.  Have you stood in front of this?  The scale and controlled chaos are overwhelming.  Also, if you'll stop tweeting for a second and go to an art museum, you might find out that about 90 percent of what's there isn't abstract.  It's incredible representations of the things you should be learning to appreciate in your STEM degree.  Every art teacher I've ever worked with knows a ton of science because stuff explodes in the kiln if they don't know the thermodynamics, and many kinds of paint don't work with other kinds of paint because of their chemistry.  Artists are people who create something out of nothing.  God rested after six days of creation, and you think art majors aren't tired?  

What about music majors?  Can STEM people assume they aren't tired?  I can't tell you how tired the ones I went to college with were because I never saw them.  They were always in a practice room in the music building learning to turn air into music, so I'm going to assume they were exhausted.

You might be thinking, "At least let me have the elementary education majors.  Their homework is ridiculous.  They have to practice clear handwriting on the board, make hand puppets out of paper bags, and read children's books."  I will say that I felt that way about them WHILE we were in college.  Here's what you aren't taking into account.  Your STEM degree will likely land you in an office.  You'll be able to go to the restroom whenever you feel the need, have lunch away from your office with other adults, and go home at the end of the day without being concerned about whether one of your clients will have enough food that night.  Elementary teachers may have had it easy DURING college, but they're going to be tired for the rest of their lives; so shut up for now.  

I could go on about people who study political science or anthropology or history, but you are smart enough to get the idea.  On behalf of those of us with STEM degrees, you are making us look bad.  You're making it look like people who appreciate how the world works on a literal level look down on those who appreciate how it works on a symbolic level.  Given the scientific fact that thinking on a symbolic level requires more energy from the brain, it burns more glucose, drops the blood sugar more, and makes the thinker tired.  Everybody's tired, man.  Everyone works hard to get their degree.  Stop thinking you're the only one.