When Parents Meet with Teachers

Last week my school held parent-teacher conferences.  A student that I thoroughly enjoy left the room the day before, saying, "I'm nervous about what you might say to my parents."  This is a delightful young lady who daily brings joy to her teachers, and she is worried that we might report something negative to her parents.  This interaction made me think of a few things.

It took me way back to my first year.  There was a student who I had, in fact, had a major argument with.  It had been about a month since the argument, and I had forgotten about it.  We had a rather good relationship.  The day before conferences, she begged me not to tell her mom about the "fight."  It actually took me a minute to remember what he was talking about, but it was so vivid in her mind that she thought it might be the topic of my conference with her mom.  It was a good opportunity to talk about how things like that don't have to define a relationship.  There was so much water under our bridge that I wouldn't have even thought to bring it up to her mom.

Then, I had to wonder if other students were worried.  If this delightful girl was nervous, what do the actual trouble-makers think?  Is the child in your class who actually is a chronic disruption worry that you will tell his parents that?  I don't know.

One the days of the actual conferences, there was a wide variety to the conversations.  Some brought the student with them.  Some just wanted to tell the teacher about their child's history.  Some just want to meet the teacher they hear about at home.  Most are parents who are just looking for ways they can help their child study or be more socially successful. 

If you are a student, please know that these meetings are not gossip sessions.  You are welcome in them because we aren't saying anything behind your back that we wouldn't say to you.  We aren't looking for things that are wrong with you.  We are ON YOUR TEAM.

Libraries Still Matter

My students began a project last week.  I've written about it before because it has changed so much over the years.  It's an 8th-grade project in which they research an element.  While this has changed from a model and a paper to a podcast to a website to a speech, one thing has not changed.  Students have to research their assigned element.

This brings us to an important place, the library.  I know you have probably heard that the internet has killed the library.  Well, The Buggles were wrong in 1979 about video killing the radio star, and people are wrong about libraries.  Like any great organization, the library has adapted in methods, but it is far from dead.  The role of the librarian is, as it has always been, to help connect you with the information and tools you need.

When I take my students to the library, the first thing that happens is that our librarian shows the kids some tools they may not realize are available to them.  He helps them narrow down potential source material because, let's face it, trying to get information from a Google search is a little like trying to take a sip of water from a fire hydrant.  He also goes through a discussion with them about the credibility of sources.  In the age of the internet, what could possibly be more important than teaching kids how to evaluate the validity of a source?

Then, he shows them the books we have on the assigned topic.  Whether that is books about elements for this speech or books about space exploration for the NASA paper, they are always surprised by how good the information is in these sources.  Some of them even want to copy pages from the book.  At that point, they learn an entirely new skill - making copies on a copy machine.  I had to giggle this year at how amazed they were by the copier.  One of them even said, "Ooooh, look at that light going back and forth."  (Note to self:  I may want to include a video on how copiers work when we get to static electricity.)

Students don't just go to the library to research.  It is also where they get help with 3D printing, come for club meetings, and check out books to read for their own enjoyment (one of my favorite things about GRACE is the high percentage of our students who do read for pleasure). 

Any time you walk by our library, you will find groups of students in a tutoring session, reading a book, playing a game, taking a test, chatting with our librarian, or filming a video.  It is not the quiet mausoleum of books you may remember; if it were, the modern age would have killed it.  It is, instead, a lively and interesting place where people gain information and share thoughts.  Libraries still matter, and I believe that they always will.

Flexibility - Changing Plans With Short Notice

I have a friend whose favorite saying is "Blessed are the flexible, for they shall not be broken."

I live in North Carolina, and this week, all the talk has been about Hurricane Florence.  While Raleigh is far enough inland to rarely be dramatically affected, that doesn't stop everyone from preparing.  Stores were quickly out of bread and bottled water.  People who have never grilled before rushed to Home Depot for grills and propane tanks in case we were without power for a few days.  The entire shelf of charcoal at Harris Teeter was empty.

I am single and content with the peanut butter and crackers in my house.  I filled a few pitchers with water and tea.  My preparation issues were almost entirely related to school.  On Tuesday afternoon, it was announced that we should have a half-day on Thursday and no school on Friday.  We were in the midst of achievement testing, so that required some reconfiguring.  I had also planned to tape some physics students to an outside door on Wednesday, but the rain delayed that for a week.

What do you do with 1 and a half days and a long weekend you hadn't planned for?  Think about what is essential.  Is there something you have planned that would have been good but isn't really needed?  You can delete that from your plan?  Is there something that is marginally better if it takes a whole class period but can be compressed into a half period without much loss?  Do that.    Is there something you could assign them to read for homework?  That'll make your use of class time upon returning to class more effective.  Is there something you planned to teach in a time-consuming way that could be handled more efficiently with direct instruction or a video?  That'll work.

None of these is the ideal because there isn't a way to make a sudden time cut ideal.  (Your original plan probably was the best way.)  They are, however, the best way to move forward and not waste time just because you weren't expecting the change.

If you work in a school longer than a month, you will encounter unexpected schedule changes.  Even the best thought out plans get changed by weather, a guest speaker who gets scheduled or dropped at the last minute, changes to standardized testing, or a pep rally you forgot was coming.  If you don't have in your mind what is most essential, you will either end up overloading your students or wasting their time, neither of which is acceptable.

Thank You For Being Confused

Last week, I had a great experience with a student.  I had explained the concept of Archimedes' Principle (a concept I am comfortable with in terms of my ability to explain it clearly).  One of my students, however, was still confused about neutral buoyancy.  As a way of trying to clear it up, I did something I had not done before.  I picked up an aluminum pie pan, which I had used to demonstrate how much weight could float if enough water was displaced, and filled it with water.  When I lifted it, just a bit of water came out of it.  It was just enough, as it turns out, to make the combined weight of pan and water equal that of the displaced water.  When I let go of the pan, it stayed exactly in place.  The students were in awe, and I now have a demonstration to use for the rest of my career.  I thanked her for being confused because it helped me as a teacher.

Confusion isn't pleasant, but it is necessary to the learning process.  What I tell my students is that if they are never confused, we have never taught them anything.  While I generally try to avoid invoking the likes of Maslow and Piaget in this blog (and in my life, for that matter), this is one case where Piaget's theories are helpful.  It is a stage of learning he called "Equilibration."  The idea is this.  Most of the time you are walking around in a state of mental balance, or equilibrium.  When you encounter something new and challenging, it throws your brain out of balance, a state called mental disequilibrium.  This state (also known as confusion) is uncomfortable, so you either abandon the new activity or master it in order to relieve the discomfort be restoring equilibrium.  Since the new balance now contains a new skill, you have made the learning permanent. 

I know we live in a time when we try to keep everything unpleasant away from ourselves and our kids, but we should NOT object to anything that confuses them.  If we do, they will never know more than they do now.

Almost Obnoxious - Part 5 - To Impact Their World for Christ

For the past month, I have been writing about the mission statement of my school.  Just in case you need to be reminded, here it is (with links to the previous posts).

"GRACE Christian School is a loving community that spiritually and academically equips, challenges, and inspires students to impact their world for Christ."

Today, let me address the most important part of the mission - "to impact their world for Christ."

Their World:

My students will enter different worlds from each other.  That's a good thing.  They aren't all going to be business leaders or engineers, although some will (and have) become those things.  In the twenty years I've been teaching, some of my students have become musicians.  Others have become nurses.  Some have been stay-at-home moms.  Some have become teachers.  Some have become dancers.  Some have become fashion designers.  Some have gone into the military.  Others serve on the police force.  They have all entered different worlds.  The way in which one impact their world will be different from the way some else impacts theirs.  My hope and prayer, as a Christian educator, is that they have been prepared in my classroom for whatever world they have chosen, whether by the academic content or the spiritual modeling of their teachers.

For Christ:

Mark 8:36 is clear that our focus needs to be on eternal matters rather than temporary definitions of success.  "For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?"  If my students become millionaires but do nothing to glorify Christ, I have not fulfilled my mission.  If their name is on the news every night, but they don't use their platform to advance the gospel, what will their Christian education have been about?  I am far more proud of my student, Liz, who teaches her children (and the children of others) in her home about the grace of God than I would ever be of a student making a fortune from taking advantage of clients in any field.  

I love the mission of GRACE.  I believe in it, even when I find it difficult to fulfill.  I carry it around with me, not just on a laminated sheet of paper, but in my heart.  As long as God gives me a classroom, I will endeavor to carry it out, even if it means being almost obnoxious about it.

Almost Obnoxious - Part 4 - Academically Equip, Challenge, and Inspire

Last week, I talked about how our school spiritually equips, challenges, and inspires our students as part of our mission statement.  We are aware, however, that our school is not a church.  It is a school.  Thus, the other part of our mission, to academically equip, challenge, and inspire.

Equip
The academic equipping of students is the mission of all schools, and it is no small task.  Let's first address what it is not.  Academically equipping students does not mean teaching them every skill they may need in life.  We are not in the business of teaching them to cook and sew buttons (though I have nothing against a good home ec class).  We are not teaching them to repair a transmission (again, no problem with schools offering a shop class).  If you are a parent who wants your kids to know those things, please teach them to your children.  We are also not attempting to teach every piece of content they need to know for any career they may choose.  For one thing, that isn't possible.  There would just be too many things to know.  Also, they may have careers that do not currently exist. 

What does it mean to academically equip?  It means teaching them how to learn.  A few years ago, our graduation speaker said, "An educated person doesn't know everything; but in a pinch, he can learn anything."  That perfectly sums up the way I see my job.  In the same way you don't lift weights because the weight needs to be off the ground but because it trains the muscle, academic content, while important, mostly serves as a vehicle for the training of the brain.  Equipping students with the ability to learn is how they become prepared for whatever life may throw their way.

Challenge
What does it mean to academically challenge?  Again, I would start with what it is not.  Academically challenging students does not mean giving them more work or harder work to do.  While GRACE does have a rigorous curriculum, our mission to challenge them comes from asking them to raise their level of thinking.  Creating a base knowledge is important in any subject, but asking them to apply that knowledge to the problems of the world is what creates the challenge.  Our science department asks students to examine their impact on the environment, create a plan for growing crops more efficiently, and propose solutions to some of the problems in the developing world (lack of access to clean water, electricity, etc.).  Our math department challenges them to design a tiny house and decide whether it might be a feasible solution for people experiencing homelessness.  Last year, our 8th-grade English teacher allowed students to put the book they were reading "on trial" to defend whether or not it should remain a part of the curriculum.  These sorts of projects push the knowledge students have learned far beyond the surface level of understanding that a simple multiple choice test measures.

Inspire
As I mentioned last week, inspiration is not something we can accomplish.  We can't write academically inspire into a lesson plan.  It's something that happens because of the magical combination of the right student having the right teacher learning the right content.  What inspires one student won't necessarily inspire the student next to him.  Every teacher has some students who think they are the best while others in the same class can't stand them (which is why you can't base your feelings about your career on their feedback).  God brings the right teacher into a student's life at the right time to help shape that student.  It's something that only He can plan.

Next week, I'll address the ultimate goal of all of this, that our students "impact their world for Christ."

Almost Obnoxious - Part 3 - Spiritually Equip, Challenge, and Inspire

Our mission statement hangs on three walls of my classroom.  It hangs in the school lobby.  I walk past it a couple of hundred times a day.  In case you haven't been reading this series, it says,

"GRACE Christian School is a loving community that spiritually and academically equips, challenges, and inspires students to impact their world for Christ."

Read again.  There are parts of it that I am skilled to do, and there are parts of it that WE are skilled to do.  There are parts of it, however, that are, in fact impossible.  That doesn't mean we should change our mission.  Quite the contrary.  It means, we have to call in the big guns.  The portion of our mission statement that says we will "spiritually . . . equip, challenge, and inspire" is not within our power.  It is only possible if we are daily putting this part of our mission in the hands of God.

I don't know if you have ever written a mission statement with a group of people.  You wouldn't believe how long it takes to dissect each phrase and word.  The first draft of this statement only included the word "equips."  Some of the teacher in the room felt that word was too small, that it made it sound like we only did the minimum.  While I disagreed, I certainly understood how, if they thought that others might as well.  We spent several minutes brainstorming other words with the intent of replacing the word equipped.  When we were through, the three favorite words were "challenges and inspires," and there were a few people who still fought for the word "equips."  We ended up keeping all three words, not because it was easier, but because each of those words means something different that we agreed we wanted for our students.  Let's look at each of them.

Equip
 As I said earlier, there was a contingent in favor of this word because it means giving students what they need.  Imagine that you are an astronaut being sent on a mission.  You would expect NASA to equip you with training time and manuals, a suit, oxygen, biomonitors, etc.  You would expect that the ship would be equipped with fuel, safety devices and procedures, food and water that can be consumed in microgravity, waste disposal equipment, electrical systems, and guidance computers.  As you can see, equipping is hardly a small thing.

When we set out to spiritually equip students, the job is daunting.  We have chapel and Bible classes.  Our English classes teach students to analyze literature, and those skills are useful for Bible analysis as well.  We converse with our students often about spiritual issues.  Tomorrow, our high school students leave for a spiritual retreat, in which they will hear sermons but also be broken into smaller groups to discuss topics that have been specifically chosen for them by the faculty and staff.  While there may be people who thought of this word as small, you can see that God must be the one who does the equipping because it is too big a job for us.

Challenge
Challenging students comes with the job description of any teacher.  English teachers challenge students to raise their level of writing and increase their vocabulary.  Science teachers challenge students to ask big questions and draw conclusions from things they observe.  Foreign language teachers challenge students to speak when it is not comfortable to do so.  In Christian education, all of those things are still there, but we are also tasked with challenging our students to stand up to the influence of their culture, one that is increasingly secular and even militantly atheist.  Sometimes, it feels a bit like we are standing in a raging storm with the culture flashing lightning and blaring thunder, while we shout at our students to fight back.  It would be easy to give up on this if it were up to us.  Fortunately, God will challenge their hearts.  We, their teachers, are merely the tools he uses to do so.

Inspires
If there is any word in the mission statement that I know for sure I am incapable of achieving, it is this one.  I can teach.  I can talk.  I can design lessons.  I can give students opportunities.  I cannot inspire.  Only God can do that, so we as teachers should pray each day that he will.