Thanksgiving Post 2 - Mr. Freeman

This November, I am writing about teachers I am thankful to have had in my life and the impact they continue to have on my teaching.  This week, let me tell you about my 8th grade Earth Science and PE teacher, Mr. Jim Freeman.

The first day of 8th-grade is mostly listening to the policies of classes.  There might be the occasional getting-to-know-you game, but in a school where you have had the same classmates all day for years, there isn't much of that.  About halfway through the day, we had gotten to our science classroom, when a very tall, dark-haired teacher walked in, closed the door, and said, "Why should Christians study science?".  He then proceeded to talk for 30 minutes about the history of scientists who honored God with their work, the value of studying creation, and the impact Christians who study science can have on society. 

I sat, enraptured by this lecture.  Let me say that again.  I, a middle school student, hung on every word of a lecture, my eyes tracking every move of this man as he walked around the room, for thirty minutes.  I left the room that day, thinking that we were going to something important that year and that I was all in.  Throughout that year, I remained enthralled any time he broke into a lecture, which he enjoyed doing on a fairly regular basis.

There is an assumption, among people who don't know better, that a teacher or youth minister must be entertaining to engage students and hold their attention.  If that is true, educators and ministers are in real trouble.  We are simply not capable of being as entertaining as the media that floods their lives.  We can never be as engaging as their phones.  What I learned from Mr. Freeman that I carry into my classroom is that engagement comes first from instilling a belief that what we do in this room matters. 

I wish I could find my notes for that Earth Science class because they were a virtual transcript of the lectures that followed.  I couldn't get enough of this teacher and this class.  Was it because he was fun?  No (although he was a fun person).  Was it because he was entertaining?  No (even though he had that in him, often breaking into song).  Was it because he had some technique that made his lessons engaging to middle school students? No (although I am sure he learned things like that in his teacher training).  It was because he communicated the value of his class from minute one and passionately stuck to it all year.  For that, and all the books he inspired me to read, I am thankful.


Extra:  As a side note, Mr. Freeman was also my PE teacher.  It's hard to communicate how much I loathed PE.  I was tall, awkward, and afraid of the ball.  There were two positive moments that year.  The first came when we were playing softball.  I stepped up to the plate, and he said, "Just keep your eye on the ball," an instruction that is pretty terrifying if you are afraid the ball will hit you in the head.  I did it, though, and for the only time in my life, I actually hit the ball.  We'll ignore the fact that I was so surprised that I had hit it that I forgot to run to the base.  The second was the only time I was good at something in PE.  This was an all girls' class, and he decided that we needed to learn some self-defense.  We learned a few punches and kicks and how to use our keys to stab an attacker in the eyes.  One day, he lined us up, held his hand out at the level of his head, and told us to kick his hand.  I was the only one who could reach his hand.  I had been dead last at everything in PE for my entire life because of my height and awkwardness.  Now, for the first time, my height was an actual advantage. 

Thanksgiving Post 1 - Mr. Danny O. Watkins

This week at our faculty meeting, our professional development coach was doing a presentation about Growth Mindset.  She made a very sad statement that she could not think of one teacher who made a real impact on her.  I have always known I was blessed to have some great teachers, but as I was mentally making a list and coming to five without even giving it much thought, I was struck by just how many great teachers God put in my life.  Since November has started and Thanksgiving is on its way, I am going to write about one of these teachers each week.  I'll handle them in chronological order.  I would start with my sixth-grade teacher, Mr. Tom Dorrin, the person who turned my personality from fragile to one that can teach middle schoolers, but I just wrote in detail about him in January. This week's post will be about Mr. Danny O. Watkins, my history and homeroom teacher in the 7th and 8th grades.

History was not "my thing."  I didn't hate it, but if I had to list my classes in order of preference, history would always be at the bottom of that list.  Most of the history teachers I had were named Coach Something (Before you turn away, I've known many fabulous teachers who also coached athletic teams.  If, however, you introduce yourself to anyone except for you players as Coach So-and-so, you have a problem.  Your players should call you "Coach."  To everyone else, you are communicating that you teach a class because you have to in order to keep your sports job.  Okay, rant over.) Back to the gist of the story.  I was not inclined to love a history class.

In 7th grade, I was enrolled in Mr. Watkins' North Carolina history class and homeroom.  I don't quite know how to describe what made him so special, but I'll start with this: He's the most positive individual I've ever known.  He could find something good in anyone.  We loved him so much that my two friends and I weren't even bothered when he asked us to sing "How Firm a Foundation" with three-part harmony in homeroom EVERY day.  We just stepped up and did it for no other reason than he wanted us to. 

During that year, I learned a lot.  I learned about Winston Churchill, Frank Boyden of Deerfield Academy, George Washington Carver, W.E.B. DuBois, and Czar Nicholas and Alexandra.  What's that?  That doesn't sound like North Carolina history to you?  Yeah, we didn't care.  He taught what he loved.  You could study from the book for your tests, but he taught the parts of history that he was passionate about.  By the way, I learned about all those same things in American history the next year.  I get that this would not fit with the curriculum driven world in which we teach today, but in 1989, he made me fall in love with parts of history I might not have if he had stuck to the book. 

In particular, I became interested in the story of Czar Nicholas and the family and Rasputin.  In the 8th-grade, I read the book Nicholas and Alexandra for no other reason than the joy Mr. Watkins took in talking about this story.  To this day, if I am flipping through channels and see Rasputin, I stop and watch.  Ten years after this, I was in a Tulsa art museum that had an exhibit of imperial art.  They had Alexandra's crown a desk used by Nicholas.  I stood in that museum with tears running down my face.  I would not have had an emotional response to a crown and a desk if Mr. Watkins had not made me care so much about that family.

While I believe in my curriculum, what I learned from Mr. Watkins is the power of a teacher communicating the passion they have for what they are teaching.  For that and his relentless positivity, I am thankful.

Risk vs. Recklessness

We live in a safety-obsessed culture.  Playgrounds no longer have most of the features that were my childhood favorites.  I spent many happy hours spinning in circles on tire swings and roundabouts that can no longer be found on today's playgrounds.  Seesaws are a thing of the past.  Most schools have removed their swingsets, so we will see if my mom was right when she told us you can't grow right if you don't swing on swingsets.  Every time I find out a beloved piece of playground equipment is now banned, I wonder how long it will be before we wrap the kids in bubble wrap and roll them around the playground.

Don't get me wrong; I'm not against safety.  But, the point of playgrounds is to teach children how to take risks.  Why, you may ask, should kids learn to take risks?  I'm so glad you asked.  Risk is how we grow as a culture.  Risk is how the human race has progressed.  We made fire, explored the west, crossed Antarctica, invented electricity, and flew in space - all risky activities.  All of those things have been possible because human beings were willing find something more valuable than safety.

I'm concerned that the generation in front of us has been raised with such safety-conscious decisions that they have not learned the difference between risk-taking and recklessness.  Because they aren't learning it in other ways, I have this conversation with my 8th-graders when we learn about space travel and with my physics students when discussing the Manhattan Project.  When I ask my 8th-graders to evaluate the wisdom of a manned mission to Mars, about one-third of my students object to it on the basis of safety.  They say things like, "We should not go unless it can be guaranteed to be completely safe" and, "No one should risk their lives" and "We should only go when it can be 100% risk-free."  This is an unreasonable level of expectation for anything.  I remind them that sports are not 100% safe (There's a running ambulance at every game for a reason).  Driving a car isn't completely without risk, but we drive anyway.  Some of my physics students say that the scientists of the Manhattan project were not reckless because they were just doing what they had been told to do.  It seems my students have some conflicting thoughts about safety, risk, and recklessness; so I think these are important discussions to have with them.

Reckless, according to the Miriam Webster Dictionary, is "a lack of proper caution, careless of consequences, and irresponsible."  It defines risk as "a chance of loss and the possibility of loss or injury."  In short, it seems the recklessness is just risk without care or preparation for consequences.

Sports, as I mentioned before, involves risk.  That does not make those who play it reckless because they have conditioning, training, and procedures for the possible consequences.  Driving is the daily use of a 3000-pound piece of metal with combustible fluids firing up through the entire trip.  Is it reckless?  No.  You have been trained in safety techniques, and the car has been equipped with seat belts and airbags.  We, as a society, have decided that these mitigate the risk enough to make quick transportation worth handling a moving machine.  These are things we do every day that involve risk but are not necessarily reckless.

We should not be reckless, but we cannot move forward without risk.  It's important that we teach students the difference so that progress doesn't stop in the name of safety.

Defining Impact as Building a Legacy

I had planned to write about something different this week, but I saw this video a few days ago, and it will not let me go.  I'm in my car, on the way to church, and a line from this pops into my head.  I'm reading a book or watching tv, and the kind way this man is addressing the issue with millennials comes to mind.  It's 15 minutes long, but watch it, even if it means not reading the rest of this post.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hER0Qp6QJNU

I could write a ten-part series based on this video, from the neurological consequences of telling a child they are perfect and special to the fallout of giving kids what they want as soon as they want it.  I could write about the influence of technology and the trap of instant gratification or how your mom can't get you a promotion.  I could write about the trauma of being unfriended or the fact that we have age restrictions on other addictive and potentially damaging things.  I may write about those someday, but there is a small part of this video that just keeps rolling around in my mind enough that I wanted to process my thoughts about it here.

The part that keeps coming back to me is about nine minutes in, where he talks about people who want to quit their job after only a few months because they aren't "making an impact."  I teach students who use this word a lot (and in a school that has the word in our mission statement).  I truly believe they are sincere when they say they want to make an impact.  However, much like the people who want to be famous or parents who just want their kids to be happy, lack of definition makes this difficult to achieve.

In the video, Simon Sinek describes it this way, "It's as if they're standing at the foot of a mountain, and they have this abstract concept called impact that they want to have in the world, which is the summit.  What they don't see is the mountain.  I don't care if you go up the mountain quickly or slowly, but there's still a mountain."  This is such a perfect description of the issue.  Those who climb Everest certainly do it for the view at the top, but they certainly wouldn't find it as meaningful if a helicopter dropped them onto the summit.  The messy and difficult journey matters. 

In addition, what if there were no way to tell when you had reached the summit of a mountain.  You could succeed and not know or be frustrated by constantly climbing without knowing what you are climbing toward.   A word like "impact" is not a goal because there's no way to know when you have achieved it.  I was listening to a great TED talk about how unhappy kids are whose parents' goal is their happiness.  When the goal of parents was that their kids become good citizens, there was a way to know if you had been successful.  Did your child have a job, contribute to the economy, serve a neighbor, vote, and pay their taxes?  You had raised a good citizen.  The happiness goal is just too elusive to know if you have achieved it.  What is happy?  Are they happy enough?  Are they happy about the right things? (I mean, there are probably identity thieves who are happy with their work.) . This idea that a person's job should be one in which they have an impact is similar.  What kind of impact? (Because again, an identity thief is making an impact.)  In what way do you want the impact to happen?  How far do you want your impact to reach?  It's all just too mushy to be a goal.

One more problem.  "Impact" is a word that sounds like it's something that happens fast.  Earthquakes have impact.  Wars have impact.  A punch to the face has impact.  It's a sudden result.  What Simon Sinek is trying to communicate is that you cannot reach the summit without climbing the mountain.  That process may difficult, non-linear, and long.  Most people who are out there, sincerely hoping to make "an impact" are frustrated that it doesn't happen after each action.  They don't see making an impact as a lifelong activity; they see it as something they can accomplish after a week of trying.

Let me humbly suggest that we change our language a bit.  What we really mean when we say we want to have an impact is that we want to do something that matters.  We want to make a change in the world.  We want to build a legacy.  Perhaps we should change the way we speak to high school and college students to this language, the language of building.  Doesn't the image of building something communicate so much more about the process than the word impact?  A person who enters their career with building something in mind will find fare more fulfillment in the process of learning and doing their job than the person who goes in expecting to make a quick and sudden difference. 

Let's focus on building something and enjoy the messy, difficult, interesting, and growing process that is.

Teaching Students Empathy

Lack of empathy may be the world's biggest problem right now.  You might not think this if you read a lot of Twitter arguments.  Someone always says, "How would you feel if . . ." and while that sounds empathetic, the motivation is to win the argument.  That's not empathy.  It the same old selfishness disguised as compassion.  A wolf in sheep's clothing is not a sheep, and the person who pretends compassion is not compassionate.   

We are so polarized that the very idea of what someone else thinks or feels is offensive to us, so we carefully cultivate our world (friending and unfriend, following and unfollowing) to hear as little as possible from those with whom we disagree.  Whether the issue is immigration, racial injustice, the waitress serving our table more slowly than we would like, or a rival athletic team, we don't want to imagine "the other side" as human beings with their own thoughts and feelings.

Anyone who has been in education longer than a day knows that we aren't just responsible for teaching content.  We also teach life skills, study skills, thinking abilities, and engage in character development.  If we are going to fulfill our mission with students, we must find ways to teach empathy.  Here are a few ways that I've seen in my own school.  Please share what you do in yours.

Project Construction:
When GRACE teachers construct projects, we often think of ways to broaden student thinking to take others into account.  One of our English teachers partnered her class with a class from another school.  They engaged in a Twitter chat about "the American dream."  Our students heard stories and viewpoints they otherwise would not have.  Fifth-grade students learning about the Holocaust were assigned roles as Jews and wore stars of David, had restrictions on which doors and water fountains they were allowed to use in order to experience what it feels like to be isolated and limited for no reason.  Physics students are assigned a region of the world to research and asked to propose the solution to a problem that engineering could help solve.  They are required to use the available resources of the area, not swoop in with a western solution.  Our AP Statistic students collect and analyze data for local non-profits.  These are only a few examples.  If you walk through the halls of either campus, you will see projects that encourage empathy development.

Modeling Empathy in Our Interactions
For all the planned activities teachers and students engage in, the vast majority of our day involves unplanned conversation.  When a student asks a question, it means they are open to a change in thinking.  The way we answer them matters.  Do we treat the question like an interruption to our plan, or do we remember what it was like to not understand?  When a student complains about another teacher, do we let it go or do we ask them to think about why that teacher might have done that?  What might that teacher have been thinking?  When a student says something mean or insensitive, do we simply punish or does our discipline involve asking that student to put themselves in the other students' position?  All of these unplanned interactions reveal how we think, which students notice.

Community Service
My school requires students to complete a certain number of community service hours for graduation, but we want them to view service more deeply than that.  The hope is that the requirement will expose them to a variety of service organizations and opportunities ranging from local thrift stores to Habitat for Humanity to food service organizations.  In a time of slacktivism, when many believe they have made a difference by using a hashtag or putting a banner on their Instagram profile, we want our students to really engage in service by investing their time.   Many of our students find that one of those opportunities ignites a passion for service and become active because of the intrinsic motivation to help others. 

Writing Opportunities
I've often said that English teachers know their students better than anyone else because they read so much of their writing.  I know I said things in essays that I didn't talk about in other places.  It's just hard to write without putting something of yourself into it.  But English teachers don't need to be the only people who provide students with these opportunities.  It will look different in the different areas of discipline, but you can craft questions and writing prompts that both lead to mastery of content, use of Bloom's evaluation level thinking skill (yes, I know it's not on the new Bloom's but it still matters), and empathy.  History teachers can ask their students to write as a suffragette or a soldier in the Civil War.  Science teachers can ask their students to evaluate the application of scientific discoveries (nuclear power v. nuclear weapons) from the perspective of Neils Bohr and/or a citizen of Japan.  Foreign language teachers probably have more opportunities than anyone to introduce their students to the thinking of people different from themselves.  If you don't want it to be in the form of writing, that's fine.  They can accomplish the same in a skit, video, song, debate, or any other creative way you can think of.

The Arts 
Every study about arts education shows that whether it is theater, dance, visual art, or music, students who participate in the arts have an increased level of empathy.  While it is risky to assume reasons from statistical data, they do prompt us to ask why the numbers are what they are.  I'm not an arts educator (just an enthusiastic supporter), but as I've read about these studies, it seems most arts educators agree that the increase in empathy results from trying to portray the creative work of others (band music students are usually performing the work of another) and also trying to get others to understand their own message (visual arts and dance are often putting out original work).  Some curriculum includes both.  You can see how the development of empathy would happen even if it weren't a specific goal of the curriculum.  When it is a specific goal, the result is practically magical, as I got to see yesterday.

Yesterday, I attended our school's fall play.  While I have enjoyed and been entertained by every play we have done, I've never been more impressed by my students as much as I was with this one.  The play is called Women and War.  My students stepped into the shoes of Vietnam nurses, gold star mothers, war protestors, wives waiting for their husbands to return from Korea, WWII soldiers writing to their girl at home, and those who served in other capacities (like phone operators and USO girls).  They portrayed worry, sadness, anger, joy, and PTSD.   Their preparation involved more than memorizing lines and learning stage blocking.  They read dozens of articles, visiting the WWI immersive exhibit at our local museum, interviewed an air force reservist, and attempted to truly interpret the intent of the playwright.  The result was a theatre experience unlike any I've seen in a high school.  In the audience, you could have heard a pin drop.  There was none of the shifting around, moving to restrooms, and talking between scenes that have become relatively normal at plays (even though they shouldn't).  The only sounds were those of sniffles from people who had been moved to tears.  When the lights went it out, there was a beat before the applause began, and even then, it was quieter applause than normal.  The audience needed that moment as they moved from experiencing the characters and their stories to remembering that they were an audience.  There was empathy in the audience, but it was because there was empathy on that stage.  For the two dozen cast and crew of this play, Veteran's Day will not be the same.  Neither will their studies of history class or trips to DC.  Once empathy has been achieved, it marks their hearts.

Like anything else, there is no "one size fits all" method.  Writing will not successfully build empathy in all students; neither will community service.  Both methods will reach some.  Projects are not going to open all of their eyes, but participation in the arts might.  If each method reaches some, the cumulative effect will be powerful.  Do as many as you can wherever it fits in the context of your school.

Twitter as a PD Tool

The first time I got on Twitter, I didn't get what the fuss was about.  It seemed like Facebook for people with ADHD (This was back when it was still only 140 characters).  I also felt pressured to post every time I changed activities.  "I am teaching a class.  I am teaching another class.  I am eating lunch."  This was too much pressure for me, and I deleted my account.  I just wasn't getting anything out of it that I was already getting from Facebook, and I felt silly posting twice.

Then, I attended a teacher's conference at which an art teacher made the case for Twitter as a professional development tool.  I wasn't sure if I agreed, but I thought I should give it a fair shake.  I created another account and cultivated who I followed more carefully than I had the first time.  Instead of the same friends and family that I already had on Facebook, I chose to follow educators and scientific sources.  It still took me a while to develop an appreciation for Twitter, but it was a much different user experience than the scattershot method I was using the first time.

That was five years ago.  While I haven't been perfectly disciplined about keeping my follows purely about education and science (I follow a few things for no other reason than the joy they bring, like @dog_feelings and @nocontextpawnee), I have developed a great deal of momentum making Twitter a tool of professional learning.  Here are a few accounts I recommend to you.  The first list is for all teachers.  The second focuses on science.

Education List
@Wikipedia ‏- I've only been following them a few weeks, and I'm already glad I do
@davestuartjr ‏- He's a teacher with much wisdom to share.
@SteeleThoughts ‏- An Alabama MS principal.  If you aren't following him, you aren't as encouraged as you could be.
@TalksWTeachers ‏- Links to their podcast.
@TEDTalks ‏- If you don't know why, you don't know TED.
@pbsteachers - Some digital resources 

Science List
@NatlParkService ‏- Beautiful pictures, historical facts about America's best idea 
@SlowMotionGuys ‏- I teach a lot of science through slow motion video
@TheCrashCourse ‏ - Actually, this is for more than just science.  They have many grade channels.
@NASA_Astronauts ‏- They post photos from the space station.  Well worth following.
@scifri ‏- The twitter account of NPR's Science Friday with Ira Flatow
@NASA ‏- Always great, but especially awesome as we approach the 50th anniversary of the moon landings.
@ScienceNews ‏and @sciam ‏- Good articles on current science topics
@Fermilab ‏and @CERN ‏- While they are good for the occasional article, it's their photos that make them fun to follow.

Try some of these out, and if there are any that aren't giving you beneficial information, be vigilant about unfollowing them.  It's only a helpful tool if you are reducing the noise from the unhelpful ones.

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.