Raw Notes from ResearchEd New York City

These notes are completely raw, taken in real time with no editing.  They have not yet been processed into usable form.  Please do not judge any speaker based on what I have written here.

“I started ResearchEd as an act of hope. I hoped every student would have a teacher who had been exposed to the science of learning.  I hope you’ll see someone you agree with. I hope you’ll see someone you disagree with. I hope you’ll see someone you’ve been hoping to see for weeks. I hope you’ll see someone you’ve never heard of.”  - Tom Bennett

Keynote:  Dr. Jim Heal and Meg Lee

Meg runs professional learning for a 50000 student school district.

Jim is a founder of Deans for Impact

Wherever there is darkness, there is the promise of new growth. This is what spring teaches us.  The US is at the beginning of a movement for evidence based instruction. Teachers want to know how to take the best evidence about education and turn it into great practice.  If the science of learning in the US was a person, it would be a teenager.  It is trying to figure out what it wants to be, sometimes contentiously, with pendulum swings but the promise of becoming something really great and interesting.

There’s a sweet spot between overgeneralizing and under generalizing, growth mindset v. speaking about gifts,  There are low resolution implementations of practices, but we want real fidelity.

What is the science of learning?

A set of principles representing our best understanding about how people learn, backed by evidence from the field of cognitives science and show to have positive effects on learning.  Applicable to instructional context int he form of demonstrable teacher actions.  Until it is used in a classroom, it is not an applied science, only a theoretical one

“The most important single factor influencing learning is what the learner already knows.” - D.P. Ausubel

As you become more expert at something, everything you learn comes in not only in isolation but in connection with other things you know that are related, it connects ideas and allows innovation.

Draw two circles.  Draw the rest of the owl.  Doesn’t work if you don’t know any of the steps in between.  Taking students from their current state to the desired state can’t mean putting them in an inquiry state.  That’s a game of guess and check in an area in which they have no knowledge.  Teaching foundations and architecture of your content allows them to reach the desired state more directly.  

Showed a complex paragraph about cricket and asked how much you estimate you will remember.  It’s not about whether you can interpret it. It’s about whether you have enough knowledge of the subject to bring to your interpretation of the text.  If you know about cricket you activate more of what you already know to the learning.  

Baseball, you confusion me video

Don’t expect students to bring new understanding to something they don’t understand at all.  Otherwise, you are presenting them with a redacted view of the world and expecting them to figure out the parts you redacted.  

New knowledge needs a place to live within the knowledge you already have.

The beauty of this is that the more you learn, the more you can learn and the more interesting, sticky, and rich it becomes.  Since the new learning has more ways of hooking to what you already know, you remember it longer and at more depth.  

Understanding is remembering in disguise.  It is your brain responding to new information with “I’ve seen something like this before.”

Hansel and Gretel example - solving a riddle in which a path must be marked is easier to figure out if your grow up with this fairy tale than it is if you didn’t.  

Inquiry learning is inherently inequitable because those who have advantages of prior knowledge will be able to figure things out.  Those who haven’t won’t.  It is our responsibility to give them all prior knowledge.

Every child deserves to be taught by a professional who understands how learning happens.

Teaching is very hard, but we make it harder for teachers when we prevent them from understanding what works for most student most of the time.  Every teacher deserves to understand how teaching happens in order to prioritize and focus the work.

Evidence informed Venn diagram (Scutt, 2018)

Evidence guides us, but it can’t tell us what to do because context matters and requires expertise, experience, and professional judgement to implement. This is using the teacher’s schema to place new understanding about research within their already existing practice.    

Expertise and experience are not the same thing.  Experts see problems differently because they recognize patterns and categories.

Surface prior knowledge, make schema explicit, intercept misconceptions, connect surface feature o underlying conceptual architecture, hang the new knowledge in the right place.

When schema is underdeveloped 

• use examples and analogies
• Provide scaffolds

The science of learning allows for aligned acts of improvement rather than random ones.  Aligning them will be powerful for improvement in your school.

Learning science is not an initiative. It’s a lens for improving our practice. It’s the way we accomplish our goals.

Zach Groshell - Explicit Instruction

Explicit instruction is NOT lecturing.

• A lecture is a continuous monologue.
• Explicit instruction is interactive and responsive, even though the teacher is the one delivering information.

Personal definition:  A lecture might as well have been a video.  Explicit instruction requires an alert human who can adapt.

Working memory is limited

Pairing words with visuals is better than words alone

Stories are psychologically privileged

Examples and analogies help make the material concrete

Generating a response promotes retention and transfer

Lecture is transient.  Working memory limitations prevent you from holding onto it because it passes by too quickly.  

Explicit instruction involves lots of small chunk presentations with a pause to check for understanding, prompts for short interactions, and retrieval. 

Hands up only participation privileges the confident student.  Use choral response, cold call, turn and talk, mini-whiteboards, etc. to hear from more students and make all of them think.  This type of explicit instruction uses methods that recruit all students to think and participate.  

Working memory has two complementary channels, verbal and non-verbal. Pairing them doesn’t overload working memory. It optimizes it.  Don’t make them compete by reading words to them outlaid.  That’s putting two things in the verbal system at once.  Make a diagram, pause to allow students to take it in without listening to you.  Take away extraneous information, point to words and diagram (or add the words as you teach) to orient attention.

Story arc:  Exposition, rising action, falling action, resolution

“Imagine a time when you . . . “  

“Put yourself in the shoes of . . . “

Examples and non-examples have a lot of nuances that allow students to find the boundary of definitions. This is a a covalent bond.  This is a covalent bond.  This is an ionic bond (How is it different).  This is a polar covalent bond (close, but different - we’ve encountered a boundary of the definitions of both ionic and covalent).  Ask a lot of yes and no questions about the examples and use a lot of them.  

Explicit instruction involves a lot of scaffolding.  Removing the scaffold requires them to generate answers. 

8 Generative Strategien

Summarizing

Explaining

Testing

Drawing

Concept Mapping

Imagining

Enacting

Teaching

Adina Lopatin - Examples and Non-examples

Most teacher prep programs pair you with a highly regarded teacher and say, “Do everything she does.  Now.”

Can beginning teachers have things broken down into pieces?

Brilliance is equally distributed, but quality teaching is not.

Students should think about meaning when they encounter key ideas.  How do we make that happen?

• Draw attention to meaning
• Prompt effortful thinking
• Use examples and non-examples

Examples and non-example help build student schema.

• Contrasting similar things clarifies what is included in a concept and excluded from it, helping the brain to organize concepts in long term memory.
• It frees up working memory and allows transfer across contexts.

Varied examples
- Don’t just show one.  Show several that have the defining feature in common but a lot 
              of other differences. (Three triangles of different angles and colors)
Contrasting non-examples
- Show something with defining differences while keeping everything else the same. (A 
              blue triangle and a blue square, a bat and a bird)
Prompts to elaborate
- Ask how the things are the same and how they are different, so they can bring it back 
              to the defining qualities (If bats, birds, and airplanes all have wings, are wings the 
              defining characteristics of birds?  Then, what is?)

Cult of Pedagogy video - How to t Teach a Concept Attainment Lesson

Panel Discussion

Q:  If you could design an AI tool that would actually be helpful for teachers and education, what would you want it to do?  (Personal note: Everyone knows that I refuse to participate voluntarily in AI, so take the summary of these answers with a grain of salt.)

A:  It would help with administrative tools, like lesson plans.  If it could recognize the BS in our lesson plans, we could make more effective plans.

A.  Focus on augmentation, not automation.  Make it do something that is impossible for a human today (like a crane), not replace a human (like a loom).

A. If it could help students better see and understand all of their students by facilitating communication between them.

A. Design it to norm rubric based grading.

Q. What would it look like for teachers to learn together and have that inform the practice of the entire school?

A:  Teachers volunteer to host observations after implementing something they learned through PD.

A:  Trust and camaraderie is required for transparent sharing and allowing people to watch each other.

A:  Principal programs teachers in the same room because it requires them to watch each other teach.

Q:  Is there a gap between what students and teachers need and what systems prioritize? How can research address that?

A:  Obviously, there is a gap. The people who make decisions about what go on in classrooms are not in classrooms enough. The administrator should come in curious and interested in why the teacher has made the decisions they have made.  There is currently no feedback loop about products and initiative implementation.

A:   We should explain why policy decisions are made and give time to adapt. If a teacher isn't doing it, we should care about find out the reason, not just being upset that they didn't do it.

A:  Meet with stakeholder groups regularly and frequently to ask questions about priorities before making decisions.

Q:  How do we get more teacher voice and involvement in decision making without overloading them?

A:  Build time into their schedules.

A:  Every teacher should be part of some team.  Allow them to choose which conversation they want to be a part of.  They all want to be part of at least one of them if given the opportunity.

A:  Partner teachers with researchers, so the researcher can observe the expertise and try to translate it into something explainable and transferrable to others.

Tom Sherrington - Evidence Informed Teaching -What Does it Look Like in Practice

You can't think about the research while you are in the flow of running the room, but you have to be thinking about something as you make decisions about what do.  How do we take the enormous wealth of learning and turn it into a model of teaching and learning that we can implement.

Ausubel's Meaningful Learning talks about how to connect new material to prior knowledge.  That's where meaning is made.

Ask yourself what prior knowledge they might be missing.  (If you use Rome as a synonym for the power of the Pope while teaching about Henry the 8th, do your students know that's what it means?)

Students struggle because of 

- lack of prior knowledge

- attention deficits

- poor fluency of recall

- working memory overload

- task completion as a proxy (a poor one) for learning

Is everyone thinking?  Making meaning?  Practicing?  Building schema?

Dylan Wiliam's Formative Assessment Strategies:

Rosenshine's Principles

Scaffolding:

- Map out components of the task

- Provide supports at a detailed level

- Provide supports at a generalized level

- Practice explaining with the support to check

- Remove supports as they practice.

Short feedback loops - Give a couple of examples.  Then ask students to generate one.  Once you have developed a pattern, you can play with it by making small changes to the pattern.

You don't get better at a sport by endlessly playing a sport. You break it down and drill the components before putting it back together.  

Richard Wheadon - Teaching Learning Habits - How to Develop Independent and Successful Learners

Teachers are becoming more evidence informed, but we have forgotten to tell the students.

Kids leave you. Have you instilled enough knowledge of the science of learning in them that they can learn without you?  They are sitting in a college lecture where all the things you did in middle and high school aren't present, can your former students help themselves?  Understanding cognitive science gives them the freedom to make better decisions.

Learning - Working memory is limited.  Knowing that should change how you teach.  If they know that, it should change how they study.  Explain chunking to them so they can chunk things themselves when they need to.  Teach them why retrieval and rehearsal work.

Thinking - "Memory is the residue of thought." - Daniel Willingham. If you don't spend time thinking about something, you will not remember it.  You lose your phone or your keys when you think about something else because it has left your working memory.  That's why we retrace our steps when we are looking for something.  Listening and thinking are two different things.  Do things that require them to think.  Teach them that for studying as well.  Could you draw a dollar bill accurately?  Probably not, because when you are holding it, you are thinking about what you want to buy, not what the bill looks like.

Fast and slow thinking - Daniel Kahneman - When you do things automatically (habits, frequent things), you forget them quickly.  You don't remember a normal drive home.  If you encounter a detour, you remember more of it because you had to slow down to navigate new challenges.  Fast thinking is important for saving our mental energies day to day, but it is bad in learning new material because it is loaded with bias and reinforces logical fallacies.  

Substitution Bias - Instead of answering the question they are asked, students answer a simpler question.  A bat and ball together cost $1.10. That bat costs $1 more than the ball.  How much does the ball cost?  A child will answer 10 cents, but it can't be.  The ball has to cost 5 cents, but they just look at two numbers and subtract them.

Sunk Cost Fallacy - They keep doing things that don't work because they don't want to admit that it they have been doing it wrong for a long time.

Structure things and create rules that slow down thinking.  Train in statistical thinking.  Remind people why you are doing what you are doing (Nudge theory).  "Hey, there is a trick question in here, so try to find it."

Habits - Habits are formed through self gratification, motivation, and routines.  As a teacher, you have more control over routines than the internal processes of the other two.  Our brains are wired to prioritize immediate pleasure over future rewards.  Habits can help you overcome that impulse and overcome procrastination.

The law of effect - Success breeds success.  If something leads to a desired outcome, it is reinforced.  

Atomic Habits - Cue, Craving, Response, Reward - Breaking the cycle is required to change the habit. 

Tom Bennet - Addressing the Behavior Crisis

I didn't take notes in real time because I enjoy Tom and really wanted to just listen.  I'll summarize later.

Lessons Learned - Reflecting on Covid Teaching 5 Years Later - Part 2

Last week, I spent some time remembering the events of five years ago.  I focused on how hard it was.  And it so was.  I have no perfect analogy, but this one seems to work.

For the teachers who were already in the classroom when the pandemic started, our entire careers, we have taught on a boat.  Boats aren't always smooth or stable, but you get your sea legs by managing all the ups and downs, knowing that there is something solid under your feet and that the boat is moving forward.  COVID threw all of us and the kids off the boat and into the water, so we did what you do in that situation; we tread water to survive.  In the beginning, everything looks okay because everyone's head is above water and everyone is still kicking.  Even though no one is moving forward, everyone is surviving and hoping to get back on the boat.  There's only so long people can tread water before their arms give out.  We helped each other and the students tread longer by using whatever energy we had to hold up the others.  All we really wanted was to get back on the boat, and we finally did.  The boat feels different now than it did, but at least we are back on it.  We also learned some things from the treading experience that made us stronger.  That's what this week's post is about.

1. Virtual is not a replacement for in person

Prior to Covid, there was a lot of talk about the "direction education was headed" (My Lord, how I loathe that phrase), and a lot of attention had been given to online classes, video classes, and asynchronous learning.  The pandemic taught us that the in-person stuff matters when it comes to teaching and learning.  Body language, the ability to read a room, having the teacher standing up as the person to pay attention to.  All of it matters so much more than we ever knew.  A video cannot check for understanding and respond to it (and no AI cannot either).  It is difficult on a Zoom call to tell if students are confused and impossible to help only one of them when they need it.  But at a more fundamental level, learning is a social experience.  It has been since the Garden of Eden when God came down and walked with Adam to teach him.  God could have drop knowledge directly into Adam's brain, but He did not.

I mentioned last week that I was living alone through all of this.  My wonderful friends set up virtual lunches and times for us to chat.  I'm grateful that they did, but it was still not a replacement for sitting in a room with them.  When we got back to that, it was like a weight had been lifted.

I'm not saying that we shouldn't take advantage of existing technologies to meet our academic objectives.  I'm saying that we should never undervalue the impact of a teacher who knows something explaining it to a student who doesn't in a classroom.  

2. Split attention is exhausting and poor educational strategy

Hybrid teaching was, without question, the hardest thing I've ever done for so long.  (It was not the worst year I ever had because hard is different from bad.)  My own working memory was taxed from the beginning.  Using the technology that allowed us to teach this way required multi-step setups, and we had to add masks and spacing to things we needed to look out for.

But by far, the most exhausting part was trying to make sure the kids online were just as involved as the kids in the room.  They weren't just there to watch; they were still my students. That meant a lot of pre-planning to make sure they had whatever they needed to have at home, but it also meant checking in with them just as frequently as I did with the kids in the room.  It meant stopping to ask them questions (and sometimes just to make sure they were still there - so many had left the room).  It was like trying to be in two places at once, and used every ounce of energy.  

If it were simply exhausting, we could have handled that.  Teachers are generally tired from September until May.  The bigger problem was that no matter how hard we worked, we couldn't make it better as an educational strategy.  Giving only part of your attention to the kids in front of you isn't good for them; giving part of your attention to the kids online isn't good for them.  As a science teacher, it was nearly impossible to involve the virtual students in lab experiences and hands on activities (Our AP Chemistry teacher actually ran a separate time after school when the virtual students could come in and do labs on their own).  

Please note:  I am not saying we should not have done this during the pandemic.  It was the right way to handle things in the context of our situation.  We do things in emergencies that we wouldn't do at other times.  Hybrid learning mitigated the loss that would have been so much worse if we had not done it, but it is not something we should ever do outside of an emergency situation.

3. Building in time for community matters

GRACE's mission statement begins with "GRACE Christian School is a loving community."  This is never more evident than when there is a crisis.  If there is anything we did well, it was rally around hurting people.  The pandemic required creativity to make that work.  Since there were no social events or clubs, and we couldn't even put people in the same room for chapel, we needed to have a way to keep the community strong.  Chapel was done during part of their Bible classes, leaving a space in the schedule.  We divided the kids into smaller groups, called Community Building Groups.  It was time to breathe and play. We had games and contests. Since we couldn't have fans at games, one week, our community building groups made cardboard cutout fans which were then put into the bleachers for basketball.  If I had balloons or paper airplanes from science classes, I kept them for community building time.  One of my community building students was virtual, so I mailed the paper airplanes to him and then he went outside at the same time we did (taking him with us via iPad), and when we played charades, he provided the words to me in the chat.

While they have changed the way it works several times since, there has been a continued effort to have community building groups. All victories are sweeter and all tragedies impacts are lightened when experienced with support.  That has always been true but was never more evident than it was during the hybrid year.

4. The team is truly critical

So, I knew already that I worked with best team of people in the history of the world.  But, during the lockdown, the hybrid year, and the year that was supposed to be better (but wasn't), I had more opportunities to witness this than ever before.  I'll start with my admin.  As I mentioned last week, our administration was filled with forward thinking planners.  That was true in preparing for the lockdown and for the return, but it was also true in their care for us.  They seemed to know just when we were going to need something special or a word of encouragement.  One day, we got an email that declared the next Friday would be "a snow day" just because our head of school thought we might need one. They stayed late at night, after receiving notice of a diagnosis, to measure six feet around that person's seat in each class so they could inform those people of exposure. Then, they showed up the next morning to lead devotions and help with duties.  Teachers held each other up. You would be having a very rough day, and a colleague whose plate was already overflowing would offer to take your lunch duty that day.  The math teacher across the hall from me would come to find other teachers to tell them that she heard a student say a nice thing about them.  

Without the team I had around me, I would have been a broken person at the end of the year.  Build your team in the good times so that trust base is already there in rough times.

5. Growth happens under stress

As hard as it was, I became a better teacher during Covid.  Changing circumstances required me to pay attention to details I might not have before. 

• Moving our tests from paper to online platforms (and back again the following year - I could not stand having them continue to take them on a computer) forced me to read each question and evaluate it.
• Trying to explain things virtually is very different from explaining them in person.  You don't have body language, nuanced facial expressions, and physical proximity (and weird things like jumping up on a chair to discuss the movement of electrons between energy levels) to aid your words.  That meant my words had to become better. I had to find better explanations and analogies.
• The resources I created to send to my virtual students were helpful to have after the pandemic was over.  We all know that the absenteeism has become an issue.  While that hasn't hit GRACE as hard as it did in public schools, it still hit us.  Having resources to email to a student who was about to be out for three days saved me a lot of reteaching upon their return.

I sincerely hope that we never go through anything like Covid again, but allow me to return to the boat analogy.  After a year of treading water, we may not have moved forward, but my arms were stronger than ever.  When we all got back into the classroom, the lessons we learned made us stronger and more equipped to face the normal challenges of teaching.

The Day the World Stopped - Reflecting on Covid Teaching 5 Years Later - Part 1

The first time I heard the suggestion of closing school was from a senior in my video editing class.  It was mid-February.  "Miss Hawks, do you think they'll close schools because of this virus?"  My response was remarkably short sighted - "No, we don't close schools.  How would that even happen."  

A few days later, in a faculty meeting, my head of school said, "On Wednesday, we are going to have a 'just in case' meeting. We need to figure out what we will do in the event that we have to switch to remote learning for a few weeks. So come to this meeting with thoughts about what you would need to take home and what the kids would need to have at home."  Little did I know that the administration and the IT department had been talking about this for several days, deciding whether we would use Zoom or Google Meet and how to load everyone's class schedules in the calendar so all the student had to do was click on the link.  

Two and a half weeks after that "just in case" meeting, I was in a "this is happening soon, but we don't know how soon" meeting. It turned out soon was the following day.  Our very forward thinking administration filled with aggressive planners were shown to be wise indeed.  March 13, 2020 is the day the world stopped. It was the day we got the email that we would be going into a virtual learning environment immediately.  And, of course in the next few days, everything else started shutting down as well.

As massive life transitions go, I have to say this one went pretty smoothly - for us at GRACE.  Because they had been thinking about it already, the IT department started loading in class schedules immediately.  Teachers were allowed to come to the building for planning for two days and could do their virtual teaching from their classroom if they wished for the rest of that week.  I opted for this because I wanted to be near the IT department if I ran into any issues and wasn't sure if the wifi I had at home was robust enough.  After all, I hadn't chosen it with large amounts of streaming data in mind.  More importantly,  I knew it would be the last time I would see people for a month (it turned out to be much longer than that, but at the time, we had planned for a return after Easter break, four weeks later) because I live alone. I knew that was going to be hard for me, so I stayed at the school building for as long as they allowed.

So, we only lost two instructional days before teaching our first virtual classes on March 17, 2020.  As four weeks became six and six became the remainder of the semester, we checked in with each other every day to make sure things were going as well as they could, for emotional connection, and for prayer with each other.  Students were remarkably adaptable and helpful.  Parents sent me notes and emails of support (some even invited me to their homes for dinner because their child was worried about my being alone - which kind of misunderstood the point of what we were doing but was still very kind).

Being a single person who lives alone during this time was rough.  My parents came over once a week, which was likely a violation, but I would have been useless to everyone if I had lost my marbles from isolation.  We didn't touch each other at all. They just came over on Sundays and had lunch.  I had no physical touch from another human being for 10 weeks.  I don't know all the complexities of oxytocin, but I do know that having none of it did some screwy things to my brain that took a couple of years to recover from.  One evening, about 5 weeks in, I was watching TV and looked down at my hands to find that my right hand was patting my left hand.  I don't know how long it had been happening or if it was even the first time I had done that, but my body knew it needed something it wasn't getting.

Like all schools, we our administration had to plan for end-of-year activities, like giving kids things from their lockers, collecting textbooks and athletic uniforms, and handing out yearbooks.  Our graduation was perhaps the best in America.  I wrote about it here if you would like to read about it.

The summer was hardly one of rest, although as teachers, we got more rest than our poor administrators because they had to do all of the planning for the return.  We had multiple online meetings, not only about how to deal with spacing but also about racial reconciliation in the wake of George Floyd.  We made plans for how to teach in a way that would be equitable for those who would choose to stay home and those in front of us.  It was hard to know what the correct decisions were as there was no experience on which we could rely to show us the way.  My most common sentence as we returned was, "We're going to try this.  If it works, we'll keep doing it. If not, we'll try something else."

I can't write much about the hybrid year.  I'm still a little too overwhelmed by how hard it was to properly convey it.  It's kind of a "you had to be there to understand" situation.  We were working at 100% of our capacity every single day, and then there were days that required more, so we were living in an energy deficit.  I was so grateful to be back at school because I couldn't have handled any more alone time, but it was still exhausting to face spacing, cleaning, masks, temperature scanners, plexiglass, and uncertainty every single day in addition to the normal challenges of teaching middle and high school.  (I haven't even mentioned that we had a contentious election and an attack on the Capitol during this time.)  Thank God we had each other, supportive leadership, and cooperative kids and parents.  I can't imagine what people were going through in places that didn't have all of that.  One of the top five moments of my entire life was at the end of graduation that year when faculty and staff received a standing ovation from the parents of our kids as we walked into the aisle for the recessional. It took a moment to figure out what was happening, and then I felt all the feelings there are.  It was amazing.

When we took a photo together at the end of the year in our "We Did It" t-shirts, we knew it wasn't really over, but we were proud to have gotten through the most difficult year of our careers and had hope for the recovery.

I divide Covid into three parts - the virtual spring, the horrible hybrid, and the year that was supposed to be better (but wasn't).  When the hybrid year ended, most teachers and many students were vaccinated.  We spent the summer living footloose and fancy free.  Just as school was about to start back, the Delta wave hit, so we returned masked.  We had too; the numbers were just too high for anything else, and thanks to Omicron, we remained masked until Presidents' Day weekend.  We had some protocols around who could be virtual, so it wasn't as pervasive as the previous year, but there was still a lot of it.  We were in hybrid-lite, but the kids were done with it. They had been super cooperative with them the first year; I would see parents yelling on the news about masks and say, "This is an adult problem. The kids are fine with it."  That was true during the hybrid year, but if you made a word cloud of my 2021-2022 school year, the words, "Masks up" would have been the largest by a mile.  Things were supposed to be "back to normal," but unlike the beginning, there was no hard date on the end.  

Education has suffered in the world since the pandemic.  Attendance rates are at an all time low, not just in the United States, but worldwide.  Patience is low; demands are high. No one can agree on what to do about learning loss, or even if it exists.  And, since we never properly grieved (because part of the country, including its leader, doesn't want to admit this was real), we have not mentally and emotionally recovered from the chronic stress.

I'd like to reflect on the lesson we learned and what we can take with us, but this post has gotten very long.  So, let's call this summary part 1.  Next week, I'll try to bring it all together with some good lessons.

Let Them Grow

“We want to be known but not to be memorized as though we cannot change.” 
- Beth Moore in All My Knotted Up Life: A Memoir

Once, I was making a seating chart for my physics class at the beginning of the year. One of our maintenance staff came in and saw what I was doing.  

• "Oh, it's so awful you have Seth Morris (fictional name). He's the worst!" he said.  
• I tried to ignore him, but he wasn't the kind of person who read social cues, so he kept talking, going on and on about this young man.  
• "I like him a lot," I replied. "He's bouncy, and that takes some energy to manage, but I'll take that over kids who won't participate."  

It turned out that the one experience this man had with Seth was when he trashed a bathroom during an extracurricular event when he in the 7th grade.  This kid was in my physics class his junior year, which means it had been four years since the event that this man was still holding against him.  

I think about that conversation sometimes, wishing I had handled it differently.  

• I wish I had said, "Yeah, he was a twerp in the 7th grade. We all were.  I'm glad no one holds my 7th grade twerp behavior against me now."  
• I wish I had said, "This kid is just trying to grow the heck up, and it would help if you got out of his way."  
• I wish I had confronted him in some way that might have prevented him from doing this in the future with other kids.  
• Alas, I did not do any of those things. Hindsight is always sharper.

One of the best parts of teaching in the school I was in was that I got to watch kids change as they grew. Because of my role as yearbook advisor, I often got to see kids from kindergarten through graduation.  I taught all 8th graders for 21 years.  For 11 years, I got them all again in 10th grade chemistry.  I often had 20-40 of them again in physics during their junior or senior years.  Let me tell you, the kid you know as an 8th grader is not the same young adult who graduates five years later.  Sometimes, they aren't the same at the end of the year as they were at the beginning.  Sometimes, I got the amazing experience of wondering how a kid was so different this week than he was last week.  Growth is not linear, so there are spurts and plateaus, and occasional regressions, followed by more spurts. 

In one of my favorite works by C.S. Lewis, Perelandra, the character known as The Green Lady describes learning in terms of agin. Every time Ransom explains something to her from Earth culture, she thanks him for making her older than she was before. We presume as people get older, they have experiences that teach them new things; her description was simply an alteration of that idea.  Seth, from my earlier story, had grown a lot between his 7th grade year and his junior year, and he was no longer a bathroom trasher.  In fact, he was likely the one who would have helped you clean up after an event.  

The reason this is on my mind today is that I had an interaction earlier this week.  There is a young man who comes into the Y every day.  I'll call him Kadeen. He's a handful, and he certainly hasn't been taught respectful interactions with adults, but I have seen him exhibit moments of kindness (like giving someone an extra bag of chips that came out of the vending machine).  I was mentioning something about finding an item for him in lost and found the day before, and one of the women I work with starting talking about what a horrible kid he was and how he would likely end up behind bars someday.  "I know I shouldn't think this way, but I do," she said.  I said, "I've seen him have some sweet moments, so there's some good in there somewhere.  We'll see what happens as he gets older"  She wasn't having it. Setting aside how annoying I find it when people can't agree that I have seen something if they weren't around to see it, I said, "I've known a lot of kids who seemed that way when they were young but changed a lot as they aged."  Long after we had ended this conversation, she brought it back up, saying he was one of those people who would have to hit rock bottom before anything changed.  This kid is 13 years old! Are we really writing his future off already?

If you know me, you know I am not saying some such nonsense as "There are no bad kids, only bad circumstances."  We are all sinners in need of grace and mercy.  (Even if you aren't a person of religious faith, you know that we are all more likely to do the wrong thing than the right thing if it serves us better.)  What I am saying is that people change, and kids are not yet who they will one day become.  I had a shorthand with the teacher next door to me. We used to look at each other and say, "Half baked."  It was our reminder that the kids weren't done yet. They wouldn't even be done when they graduated.  Just like no one would take a cake out of the oven half way through the baking process and toss it out because it was a mess.  Of course it's a mess; it isn't finished yet.  Of course your students are a mess; they aren't finished yet.  (Oh, man I just had the weirdest memory of a song from 80s kids' church - "Kids Under Construction")

There's a sentence that frequently pops up on social media - "When someone shows you who they are, believe them."  And I don't disagree with that statement if we are talking about an adult who has exhibited a pattern and shows no signs of remorse.  It is likely that person is acting out of his well-established character, and this is unlikely to change without a fairly large intervention involving repentance.  But when people show genuine signs of change, we should allow that, even if we are cautious in doing so.  

And when we are talking about kids, it's important to recognize that they are not just small adults; their character is being molded by every experience they have. We should be honored and humbled that we are part of that; it's an awesome responsibility.  While we hold kids accountable for their actions through discipline, we recognize that those very actions might help them to change (the root of discipline is disciple, so it should be teaching them something).  If we see a change in pattern, celebrate that as a success. Don't hold the action they've already been disciplined for against them months and years.  

One of the things I will miss this year about being in the classroom is that I won't have the opportunity to write college recommendation letters.  Writing those for kids I had known since middle school (and sometimes seen since elementary school) was an annual reminder of how God uses the process of maturing, learning, discipline, and experience to make us older, not only in the chronological sense but in the Green Lady sense.  

May we all be older at the end of the day than we were at the beginning.  

And recognizing that in ourselves, let us allow it in others too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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