More Complex Than a Tweet

I have refrained, until now, from commenting in any way on the #metoo fad, largely because it is just that, an internet fad.  Like any other internet fad, the desire to participate in a fad clouds the real purpose and dilutes any effect it could have.  People who didn't care before it became a fad are unlikely to care about it later.  Case and point: I know a lot of people who poured buckets of ice water over their head, and not one of them can tell you the current state of ALS research.  This issue requires a depth of thought, endurance, compassion, legal action, and honest reflection.  These are not qualities we find in a fad.

Sexual harassment is a thorny and complex issue that cannot be addressed in a tweet, and it deserves more than a two-word hashtag.  In my attempt to process it, I have had many thoughts.  What you see below is my attempt to deal with those thoughts.  Many of them are incomplete, some may be contradictory as I attempt to sort them out in my own mind, and they are listed in no particular order.

1.  This is clearly a widespread problem.  When you look at the diversity of people who have been accused and their accusers, the case cannot be made that this is a one-sided, agenda-driven issue.  Roy Moore and John Conyers fall into this bucket with Harvey Weinstein and Al Franken (and let's not forget, this list started with Bill Cosby a few years ago and now includes Charlie Rose).  Some people are excusing everyone on their side of the political spectrum while vilifying those on the other side.  This is the worst kind of moral relativism.  It's wrong no matter who is doing it.

2.  Everyone has a right to due process. The reflex to invoke innocent until proven guilty is tricky.  It is an important legal concept when we are talking about convicting someone of a crime, but it is being applied in a non-legal context.  The accused has a right to due process, but so does the accuser.  Those who are touting "innocent until proven guilty" on Twitter don't have a problem assuming the victims are guilty until proven innocent.  If you are going to be intellectually honest, you can't default to believing the accused or the accuser.  Credibility needs to be assessed.

3.  All accusations are not created equal.  I am not a fan of Al Franken (well, okay, I liked him on SNL), but it is concerning when his actions are put in the same category with child molestation.  They are not the same.  They are both wrong, but they would be treated quite differently in a court of law.  Part of the problem with the hashtag is that it made all stories equal.  Some women have suffered greatly while others have felt uncomfortable that someone they didn't like flirted with them.  In the hashtag world, these women have the same story and get the same number of hearts and comments.  The hashtag may show how widespread the problem is, but it only shows how wide. If women told the actual stories, we would see how deep this problem is for some. 

4.  All forms of sexual harassment are wrong - physical, visual, and verbal.  One of the reasons I am finally blogging about this was a conversation that happened at Thanksgiving.  A man at the table said he couldn't believe there was a man who was being accused of only gestures.  "I mean this is just too far," he said.  "He didn't even touch anyone."  I just sort of stared at him because I couldn't figure out how to respond.  Would he really be okay with it if his wife went to work, and a co-worker made lewd gestures at her?  I don't think so; I think he would want that man killed.  This applies to words as well.  I punish students for making "69" jokes, and I wouldn't want a co-worker making them either.  If we don't draw a line until there is physical contact, you are looking to create a very hostile work environment (and not just for women).

5.  Sexual harassment training is a stupid solution.  No one who is doing this would stop if they sat through a seminar.  They aren't ignorant; they are immoral.

6.  It's not all men.  It's not all women.  Not all men are guilty of harassment.  Some men are clumsy flirters; some are socially awkward.  Many men are professional and supportive of their female colleagues.  Most are just trying to live their lives.  It's not all men.  It's also not all women.  One of the problems I have had from the beginning of this discussion is the implication (and at times outright statement) that ALL women have experienced harassment.  It's simply not true.  There is no hashtag for #notme, and there won't be one, but maybe there should be.  Maybe some women should start sharing their stories of supportive men in their lives and show what right treatment looks like.  Too many women have experienced horrific treatment, but lumping all stories together is wrong.  Advancing the belief that all women have been victims of all men creates a predator v. prey environment.  I don't think anyone wants that. 

I don't know that I have put all of my thoughts into words very well, but I do think we can see that they won't fit into 280 characters.  If you are going to reflect well, yours won't either.

The Ministry of Normal

If your student has an emotional problem, relationship problem, or drug problem, I am probably not the teacher they talk to about it.  There's usually another teacher for that, the teacher who has students in their room during lunch or for hours after school.  It's not that I can't or won't listen.  I am open to discussing these issues with any student.  I am not, however, the teacher that they come to.  Instead, I have the ministry of normal.

When I have had difficulties, I often found solace in going to work, grading papers, and planning lessons.  Days off were often the hardest times because that was when I had too much time to think.  Doing normal things was the most comfortable (and, therefore, comforting) activity.  When you are having a difficult time in your personal life, one of the best things for you can be to have some part of your life where you don't think about that problem.  It reminds you that the issue does not encompass your entire life.

In my nineteen years of teaching, I have taught through gun threats, September 11, the death of former students, the heartbreak of unrequited love, the diagnoses of colleagues, and many other traumas for both students and myself.  During these times, I have, of course, acknowledged the problem and told my students that I am available to them for whatever they needed; but then I taught them the same lesson I would have on any other day.  I assigned homework (although I probably accepted it late from those who needed time to deal).  When I had a student who was crying so hard she couldn't breathe, I asked her to tell me about her pet snake.  Years after a shooter threat (during my second year teaching), several former students told me that they felt safest while they were in my class that day.  Many of their other teachers had cried through the day or talked to them about it the whole time.  I had gone in and said, "There is a plan.  I will tell you what it is if we need it." and then kept my eye on the windows and doors while I taught.  My students told me that they felt confident that I had a plan and that I was keeping an eye out but were glad they didn't have to be the ones to think about it.  (This is a little comical when I think about the fact that I was 23, and my 16-year-old students were putting their confidence in me.)

Helping a student through a moment of need doesn't always have to look like a counseling session.  Sometimes, it can just look like a regular day.

Communication - My Favorite Paradox

Teachers spend much of their time these days talking about innovation.  We attend workshops and conference that are specifically geared toward teaching kids to innovate.  We spend a lot of time talking about the jobs our students will face.  More specifically, we talk about how we don't know what kind of jobs our students will face, so we need to teach them to innovate in an ever-changing world.  We construct projects now that are less about content than they are about the process of engineering or research. 


We talk about these things so much that we forget most of the rest of the world is not having this conversation.  They don't sit down every Monday at work and discuss how their kids should engage in innovation-based learning.  We forget that when they see the new and amazing project assignment Johnny comes home with, they don't know what objectives we have in mind.  We forget that they weren't sitting at our desks with us when we created it.  They see something that doesn't look like anything they did when they were in school, and that is frightening because they don't know how to help with it.  Because this is 2017, they pick up their phone or laptop and send an e-mail to the teacher to question the project.

As teachers, we complain a lot about this type of parent communication.  It feels like a lack of trust, so we take it personally.  We feel like our professional judgment is being questioned,  but it is really only because we have forgotten to communicate our thinking to them.  We could eliminate MOST (not all) parent e-mails of this type if we remembered this simple paradox:

"The more e-mails I send, the fewer e-mails I get."


It sounds crazy, I know, but I promise that it works.  I've been doing this my entire career because I began teaching just as e-mail was becoming a tool for this type of communication.  I don't send home communication about every worksheet or lab we do, but I absolutely send emails about assignments that aren't like the ones we saw in school (or even like the ones we did just ten years ago).  When our juniors started using Twitter to have book chats about the literature they were reading, the teacher sent home a detailed description of how Twitter was chosen for this activity.  When our history teacher, English teacher, and I collaborated on Story Corp last year,  I sent an e-mail to our 8th-grade parents, explaining what Story Corp was and why were assigning it as a group and what each of us planned to do as a follow-up.  I got exactly three e-mails in response to this.  Two were questions about who their student could interview; one was concern that the person they were interviewing wouldn't want to be on the internet.  If I had not sent that e-mail and the student had come home, saying, "Mom, I have to interview Grandpa over Thanksgiving for English, History, and Science," I think all three of us would have gotten a lot of questions.

This goes beyond projects.  It is common for my 8th-grade students to tank their second test with me.  It is when the questions start requiring more analysis and less memorization.  Students who are accustomed to getting As in science often earn a C+ on that one.  Students who have typically gotten Cs without a lot of studying will find their grade below failing.  As you can imagine, this creates a stir at home that would flood my inbox if I weren't proactive about it.  After I have graded this test but before I enter the grades in RenWeb, I send an e-mail to all the parents of that grade.  I tell them that this is normal and why it happens.  I tell them not to panic yet because it takes time to adjust to this new skill.  I tell them that I do not give extra credit because that covers up the problem without solving it.  I have saved the text of this e-mail in a document so that all I have to do is copy, paste, and edit it.  The responses I get to this e-mail are usually thankful for the heads-up.  It is amazing how the number of e-mails changes as well as their tone. 

I know it seems like a paradox that putting some time into your e-mails will save you time on your e-mails, but if you try it, it will quickly become your favorite paradox.

Personifying the Elements

There are a lot of ways to teach the elements.  If you type chemical elements into youtube, there are over 641 thousand results.  Google shows 102 thousand news stories, almost 1.5 million books, and countless images.  As I have mentioned in this blog before, I did the same element project for years.  Each student built a model of the atom for a certain element and then wrote a paper (or podcast or webpage, depending on the year) about that element.  Last year, I tried replacing it with a nuclear energy project, but it didn't have the effect I had hoped for.  I was ready to do it again with some tweaks, but my co-conspirator, Kellie, had a better idea.

I was skeptical at first.  She came to me after last year's collaboration on the Mars paper and said, "I have an idea for another paper your kids can write."  My half-joking response was that I only grade one paper per year.  Then she said, "What if they have to make a case for an element as "the best element?"  Oh, that's interesting.  I may have to grade a second paper.  When talking about it with our tech coach, she said, "How is anyone going to make a case for anything besides carbon or oxygen?"  Hmm, that's a thought.  How were we going to do that?  Kellie said, "What if it is running for President, and they have to talk about the strengths that would make it a good candidate?  There are a lot of qualities that might make a good candidate."  Now, we were really onto something.  There's a lot of talk in education right now about doing things that cannot be googled, and both we and our principal agreed this was a way to do that.

I don't teach English, but I assume there are a lot of ways to teach personification.  If I remember correctly, I learned it in a poetry unit.  I think a tree was talking or something.  I never thought about it existing outside a poetic context, but this collaboration allowed kids to apply personification to science, especially when we decided it should be a speech instead of a paper.  Students actually spoke AS the element (or a spokesperson for the element).  The described its strengths (noble gasses have stability, bonding means working well with others, etc.) and accomplishments (hydrogen being the fuel of stars, sodium keeping you hydrated).  I even had someone make a case that radon could be a means of population control.  We gave our students the option of doing their speech on video if doing it live was too intimidating.  If you would like to see the results of that work, here's the playlist of their work.

I have enjoyed a lot of collaborations, but this one may be my favorite.  Kids learned the properties of elements in an interesting way.  They learned personification.  They overcame their fear of public speaking.  We have management tweaks to make for future years, but this was a great project.

Next week, I start a new collaboration, this time with history, a video project about inventions and their impact on culture.

Humility - The Lost Virtue - Part 2

After last week's post, it occurred to me that I really only scratched the surface.  I stopped at the 80's, and that was only the beginning of the end when it comes to teaching humility.  I never thought I would look back on the "everybody gets a trophy days" as only the first step, but that is only because I didn't have enough imagination to know what smartphones would do to our view of the world and our view of how the world views us.

I'm not anti-technology.  As you know, I have a blog.  I work in a school that has a one-to-one program, and I am fully invested in the benefits of that.  I have often said that there is no way I could go back to teaching without every student having a computer in front of them.  I can do low or no tech days, but I could never go back to a year of teaching in which I am the only person in the room with a computer.

I am not anti-technology.  I am, however, anti-dependence.  It makes me crazy that everywhere I go, I see kids and adults alike staring at rectangles.  Kids are actually better at interacting with each other while using their rectangles than adults are, but I still have concerns that we have subjected them to a massive sociological experiment.  Ask a teenager if you can look at the pictures on their phone, and you will find a thousand selfies.  Go to their social media, and you will find out where all those selfies went.  An event hasn't actually happened, it seems, if we don't document that we were there for it and post it for all the world to see.  A picture of fireworks isn't enough.  We must be standing in front of the fireworks.  When we stand in front of the majesty that is the Grand Canyon, we are still thinking about ourselves.  I know that even back in the film days, people took photos of themselves in front of tourist attractions, but it was one or two photos, usually of the whole family, not a hundred photos of a duck-faced, good-side, downward-angled, Snapchat-filtered, posed, etc. . .  I'm pretty sure Narcissus would find us vain.  He only looked at his own reflection; he didn't insist that others look at him as well.

Smartphones have also distorted our sense of time.  It never takes longer than two seconds to get the answer to a question, watch a video we want to watch, or text a friend.  And when we do text, if it takes long than three seconds for the three dots to turn into an answer, we get angry that the person hasn't responded immediately.  We say things like, "Why does she even have a phone if she isn't going to answer?"  This infects other parts of our lives as we impatiently tap our foot next to the microwave, forgetting that it used to take hours to make a meal.  This impatience with time is about our pride, revealing our belief that we should get what we want instantly.

The day of my last post, I had an interaction that reinforced the weird relationship even our most humble students have with their social media.  Our art teacher is having our students participate in the global Kindness Rocks Project.  Because social media can be a place for good, people all over the world are decorating rocks with uplifting images or messages and hiding them with a hashtag so that you can let the world know you have found it and are either keeping it or hiding it again with a clue to where you have hidden it.  This should be a fun and low-stress school project.   As our art teacher was explaining it to a small group of students, one of them said, "This will ruin my Instagram, so I don't want to put it there."  To be fair, I am not on Instagram, so maybe the problem is with my ignorance, but I can't help wondering how a person's Instagram can be ruined by one picture.  Other students understood her concern about messing up the design and colors.  Another teacher, who is friends with this student on Instagram looked at her feed and said that it was all artsy selfies in front of sunsets.  She talked about making a separate account just for this project, but she decided to use her mom's twitter account instead.  I've never imagined this kind of conversation.  Basically, what she was saying was that this picture would be off-brand, and we can't have that.  The idea that her design would be ruined and that she would be embarrassed if she posted one photo that doesn't fit with her image is surely a sign of the pride social media has embedded in us.

Our overinflation of our online image also magnifies our sense of our own influence online.  The rise of "slactivism," from ice buckets to hashtags to the "me too" fad, reveals our belief that we are making a difference by doing nothing.  When a disaster happens, we change our profile picture to a certain color to show our solidarity.  That's it.  The people of Puerto Rico can eat or drink our red, white, and blue profile picture; but we feel good about ourselves because we "raised awareness," as though that is an end.  While our ancestors, only a generation ago, marched on Washington to show their support for Civil Rights, we plop down a hashtag and feel proud of how "woke" we are.  This is pride, and we should take a good hard look at how little we do that has actual value.

This can be fixed, but like everything else, we must do it intentionally.  We must stop and reflect on our actions.  We must model humility for our kids instead of complaining that they don't have any.  We must recognize our place before God, as bearers of the Imago Dei who have been damaged by sin, and place our sins, including our pride, at the Cross.

Humility - The Lost Virtue

Yes, you heard that correctly.  That was a man bragging about how humble he is - "More humble," in fact, "than you could understand."  If you needed further proof that our understanding of humility has been lost, this had to be it.

Humility is an important virtue.  Jesus had it, and he was the one person with the right not to have it.  Scripture advises humility from beginning to end.  Moses and Aaron admonished Pharaoh for his lack of humility before God in the book of Exodus, and I Peter 5:6 commands to humble ourselves under the mighty hand of God.  In early America, Ben Franklin listed humility among the thirteen most important virtues (We'll ignore, for now, the fact that he didn't practice it himself).  Humility was taught both in school and at home.  Children who were braggarts were admonished by teachers and parents alike.  

This is not to say that no one recognized their own value.  David Hume, who died in 1776 encouraged us to recognize those qualities that did indeed deserve recognition.  He said, "Though an overweening conceit of our own merit be vicious and disagreeable, nothing can be more laudable than to have a value for ourselves, where we really have qualities that are valuable.... it is certain that nothing is more useful to us, in the conduct of life, than a due degree of pride, which makes us sensible of our own merit, and gives us a confidence and assurance in all our projects and enterprises." While I disagree with him on the degree of importance he places on it, I do agree that a recognition of one's own skills is the first step to exercising them.  There is a reasonable ground to be found between thinking we are absolutely worthless and believing ourselves to be great simply for existing.  That ground comes in recognizing the gifts that were given to us by God for just that, gifts of God.  William James, a psychologist of the 1890's seems to have struck a secular version of balance by defining self-esteem as the ratio of success to pretension.  More on this later.

(But, for a hilarious look at how this goes wrong, click here.)

The 1960's caused the swing of many pendulums, and this was one of them.  Breaking away from parents and their rules comes with a necessary belief in the ruling of ourselves.  The "psychology for normals" movement meant even well-adjusted people were being marinated in the ideas of Maslow, Coopersmith, and Braden.  Then, those people became parents.  We truly saw the death of humility in the 1980's.  These people who had been soaked in the psychology of self-esteem were now told to instill that in their children.  California lawmakers decided that the cause of crime and most social ills would be solved if children were taught they were amazing.  There was even a taxpayer-funded self-esteem task force.  

Despite the fact that no research study (and there were many) ever showed self-esteem to be helpful in reducing social ills, and no research study ever showed low self-esteem to be a risk factor, we went on acting as though the opposite were true.  There is even one study that indicates those with high self-esteem are a greater risk to society than those with low self-esteem, but we carry on with telling our kids that they are perfect for no other reason than they were born.  

Here's a great breakdown on the history and the studies.  

Somewhere along this path, we deemed our kids worthy of worship.  If you think I am overstating this, go online and make a statement about your child that is anything short of pure, unadulterated praise; and watch what happens.  You will be vilified instantly because you aren't bowing down to the idol of parenthood.  There will be a religious fervor to the response of people for a reason; they don't worship God and therefore see themselves, their children, or you in the proper light.  Rather than seeing human beings who carry the Imago Dei (image of God) but who are fallen and in need of redemption, our culture views children as god themselves.  I have seen many mothers on facebook call their firstborn children "the one who made me a mother."  He isn't the one who made you a mother; God did that.  The child is the object of the action, not the actor.  

You may have a great kid, but he is a lousy god.  He isn't equipped to handle the pressure of your worship, which is one of the reasons we have so many kids with anxiety issues.  They know they can't be the god you want them to be, and it makes them crazy trying to live up to that.  This brings me back to William James.  In calling self-esteem a ratio of success to pretension, he gave us two ways to affect it, increase your success or decrease your view of your own potential.  This is going to seem to many like I am saying to lower your expectations to make yourself feel better.  I guess I am in a way, but not as a cop out.  Rather, recognizing our lack of diety will balance the ratio.  It will, perhaps, makes us recognize the need for a savior.  It will, perhaps, make us stop trying to save ourselves.  President Trump obviously needs this, but he isn't the only one who does.

For Love Not For Money

This isn't the post you think.  It's not about how teachers don't do our jobs for money.  Although true, it's not what I want to address here.  Keep reading.

If you are a science teacher, you probably responded with excitement when you heard that the seventh row of the periodic table was finally filled with the confirmation of the synthesis of Nihonium, Moscovium, Tennessine, and Oganesson.  You may have then been psyched to go order an up to date periodic table for your wall.  A year and a half later, you still cannot find that table.  It took almost a year before the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) officially voted on the names, and for some reason, the scientific supply companies still have not produced up to date tables.  I wanted my students to have fully up to date table for two reasons.  1. They should see current science because we are able to communicate quickly in the 21st century.  2.  I wouldn't have to address the holding places anymore. (No, Jimmy, Uuq is not an element symbol.  It's a holding place for one they haven't made yet.)  They have driven me crazy for years.  

In the absence of ones I could buy, I went looking for ones I could print (following fair use guidelines, of course).  There are few up to date table that have the information I want them to have.   There are periodic tables with way too much, and there are periodic tables with way too little.  When you teach 8th-grade, you want that goldilocks table, where the amount of information is just right.  I did what any good teacher with at least some computer skills would do.  I took a free use periodic table that didn't have enough information on it, and I modified it.  You will find it at the bottom of this post.  Tada!  My students now have an up to date table with atomic symbol, name, atomic number, atomic mass, and oxidation numbers.  That's all they need in 8th-grade because I'm not teaching them quantum mechanics.  

As I sat in a faculty meeting with my freshly printed periodic tables, a colleague uttered words that make me recoil - "You should sell that."  There are a lot of reasons why it is nutty to think that I would sell the periodic table, having only combined the research of others; but that isn't the reason it makes me crazy.  I've been hearing this about everything I make for my classroom.  I wrote a textbook for my own use and to benefit my students, and the first question anyone asks is, "Are you going to sell it?"  Again, there are a lot of reasons why I couldn't even if I wanted to, but that's not what makes me crazy.  

What makes me crazy is the assumption that everything we do must be done for monetary gain.  I modified a periodic table because I love my students and want them to have the right information (and because I love that I don't have to address the doggone holding places).  I wrote a book because I love my students and want them to have a usable book.  I designed a review game because I love the way my students respond when they get to do something they aren't used to.  Teachers bring our passion and love and talent to our classrooms out of love.  Please stop trying to turn it into monetary gain.

If you teach middle school (or even high school) science and want this periodic table, here it is the screen shot.

Here's the full-size version.