Waiting to Exhale

Friday night, my school had graduation!  The real thing.  Were there fewer of us than usual?  Yes.  Were we masked?  Yes.  Was my seat spaced from the person next to me?  Yes.  But it was real and in person.  As the ceremony ended and teachers followed the graduates up the aisle, we heard cheering and clapping.  It took me a moment to realize what was happening.  They were cheering for us, the teachers and staff.  I got what my kids from a few years ago would have called "all the feels."  I teared up, laughed, had goosebumps, got a little catch in my throat, all of it.

After the reception, in which I spoke to alumni (some of the first I've seen all year) and parents (many of whom I have only seen online this year), I got into my car and heard myself let out an audible sigh.  It wasn't a sigh of sadness or exasperation.  It served more as punctuation than anything else.  It was a sigh of finality.  I realized after I heard it that I have, in a sense, been holding my breath since March of 2020.  

Going into virtual learning involved a lot of uncertainty about the strength of our wifi, our ability to teach from a screen, and the anticipation of return.   The summer involved a lot of tentative planning.  Upon returning to campus, every decision about seating, communication with parents, how to administer tests with equity, whether to and how to hold events, whether or not to bubble our athletic teams, and even how and where to eat lunch, came with uncertainty about whether it was the right thing.  We prayed, used our best wisdom, held our breath, and hoped for good results.  

In pre-pandemic years, I spend most of my days operating at 90-95% of my energy capacity.  Occasionally, there were days requiring 100%, and I would go home exhausted and needing rest but happy to have accomplished whatever it was that required all that energy.  This year, every day required operating at 100%, and those days that required more meant operating in an energy debt.  This caused my muscles to be perpetually tightened with my shoulders climbing up toward my ears, elevated blood pressure, and tears that have been chronically just below the surface.  I have talked little about the difficulties and exhaustion of this year with anyone who hasn't done it because the most empathetic would still not be able to understand.  

My school administration has been great about listening, caring, and working rest days into the schedule, yet I still worried each time I saw an email with the subject line "Update from GRACE . . ."  Parents have been supportive, and kids have been great, but I still held my breath when an email came in from a parent with the subject line "Quick question" or "Just a concern."  My co-workers are the best ralliers in the world.  When anyone had a need, they jumped in to make sure things were covered, even though their plates were already full.  I can't imagine enduring this year with any other administration, colleagues, or group of parents and students.

GRACE friends, now that we have the chance to exhale, I wish you all good books, delicious tea, entertaining movies, and long walks this summer.  I'd also like you to add, "hug Beth" to your school checkout list.  We could call use the oxytocin.  

Ten Years Older Than I Was a Year Ago

This isn't my usual blogging day, but there are kids taking a Spanish exam in my classroom, and I have a lot of thoughts and feelings to process.  This may come out as verbal salad because everything is a jumble in my head.

A year ago today, I check out of school in a virtual meeting with my principal.  We talked about how hard virtual learning had been but how good we felt about having been successful at it.  We brainstormed a couple of the procedures we might implement this year (about 1% of what we actually did).  

Summer wasn't really summer in the normal sense.  With so much shut down, I couldn't really accomplish the goals I normally would.  I usually read a lot, but I found virtual instruction had taken a toll on my eyes, and the lack of oxytocin my brain experienced from lack of physical touch had caused some cognitive slowness and shortened attention span.  We had several virtual meetings related to the start of the school year and a few around responding to racial reconciliation in a Godly way.

On August 3, teachers returned to the school building.  Every start of a new school year is exhausting, but this was, as you can imagine, very different.  Instead of the entire staff meeting together, I spent several days seeing only my own department.  Each department was on a Google call with the rest of the departments.  We heard from our counselor, our nurse, and our IT team about Covid specific things in addition to all of the regular start of school stuff.  We found out just how many duties were added to our regular slate.  To space students properly, we had to double the number of teachers on lunch duty.  Initially, we posted adults by the thermal scanners (a duty we were able to eliminate once it became a habit).  We relearned some of the tools we had been using in virtual learning because it is different when you also need the kids in the room with you to see it.  We brainstormed how to keep virtual students informed without overwhelming them.  We glued hundreds of sheets of plexiglass down to tables and rearranged our classrooms six or seven times to maximize spacing without making it impossible for kids to see.  We made orientation videos for parents because we couldn't have the normal meet and greet night.  This was all in the week before the kids showed up on campus.  I've spent the last few years learning a lot about the brain, and that week, I learned that cognitive load is real, but it was higher than I had previously thought because we absorbed more in that week than I sometimes have to absorb in a year.  

During that week, I overheard a number of conversations about how long we might be able to stay in person.  I heard some estimate that we would be back home in a couple of weeks and one person said to me, "You think we'll get at least a day with them, right?"  Some thought we would have to toggle back and forth, doing two-week quarantines here and there.  While I was more optimistic that the protocols would work if we just followed them, even I wouldn't have predicted that I would be sitting here on May 27th, having only had 8 class days fully virtual (which was planned to give people a chance to quarantine from Christmas traveling).  If you don't count December, we had remarkably low numbers.  While we have had to quarantine individuals, groups, or classes, the school was only forced into a fully virtual situation once.  We had our midterm exams in a fully virtual setting.

For all the generational talk about entitlement and selfishness, what I have observed this year is kids who adapted well, mostly complied with regulations, cared about each other and their teachers.  The adults who have complained most about teenage entitlement in the last few years were the ones stomping their feet about their rights.  The ones who have called the generation after them snowflakes were the primary ones claiming a mask would kill them.  Kids understood, for the most part, when I had to change something because the original plan wasn't working.  When tech sometimes failed, they were the ones figuring out the workaround that would make things possible.  I don't know how this year will shape this generation's future, but I do know they learned adaptability in a big way.

I'm not saying the kids did everything perfectly.  About halfway through the year, some of them definitely started playing games, deciding they just wouldn't attend school on Tuesdays or they would stay home on test days or they would join a class from the car while they were driving to the beach.  Second semester's chaos was definitely less manageable than first semester precisely because of their adaptability.  This way of life had become normal for them, so they figured out how to work within it.  

As hard as this year was, I really had great students that I could enjoy.  I told them all this week that I couldn't imagine how much harder this year would have been if I had had classes full of trouble makers or mean kid cliques or those who just want to fight getting educated.  Instead, I had kids who enjoyed learning or made it enjoyable for themselves and each other.  I have class mascots, Gertrude the carrot and Gus the lemur, who are entirely student creations.  I have videos of kids being silly while personifying chemical elements.  I have laughed with them a lot and gotten notes of encouragement from them.  Don't tell me you can't see people smile behind masks; the yearbook has photographic evidence to the contrary.

The yearbook was an interesting experience this year.  Without Grandparents' Day, a Homecoming dance, Hoops for Hope, and other normal events, we had to come up with ideas for replacement pages.  We had to focus on covering people, not events.  While our goal is always to cover people, it has always been through events, so that was a shift.  Chorus and band couldn't have concerts, so those photographs were out.  Athletic seasons were delayed.  Photo tagging is a challenge when people are wearing masks (and facial recognition software surely doesn't work well).  I am thrilled with the results of this year's yearbook.  I think it would be one of our best in a normal year, but it was an exhausting feat to get done.

As I say all of this, I am aware of how I blessed I was to be in the position I was in.  I am in a school with great technology, supportive administration and parents, and the money to implement everything that needed to be implemented to return to school safely.  I know that if I had been in a fully virtual situation for this school year, I might not have survived with my sanity (living alone during lockdown was no joke).  I know there are teachers who had to deal with administrators who did not care how hard this was for them while mine were praying for me on a daily basis.  I know my students won't be struggling with the amount of learning loss others have had to experience.  

Here I sit on the day that felt like it would never come.  I feel a decade older today than I did when I checked out a year ago.  Perhaps, it is because, from an experience standpoint, my brain absorbed the equivalent of another nine years of information, events,  conversations, and experiences than it would in a normal year.  (I haven't even mentioned all of the non-school-related things that happened this year - like a contested election and invasion of the US Capitol).  I hope that when things return to some level of normal, there might be nine extra years of wisdom as well, but it is going to take time this summer for my brain to mush all of this around and make meaning of it in order to turn it to wisdom.

The Point Is - That's One of the Points

When three astronauts died during the plugs-out test of the Apollo 1 capsule, an investigation was held to determine the cause.  If you look this up today, you will find the official cause stated as an arc from a frayed wire.  When I teach my 8th-graders about this event, I ask them, "If the wire in the outlet next to you arced right now, would it kill you?"  This answer is, of course not.  The kid closest to the spark would scream, and we would smell burning wire, and that would likely be it.  While the spark from the wire initiated the Apollo 1 fire, there were many complicating factors that resulted in the death of the astronauts.  There was 100% oxygen in the spacecraft under 19 psi of pressure.  There was far more velcro (highly flammable in high oxygen) in the cabin than regulations called for, and they couldn't escape because the manual hatch could not be pushed outward once the fire had dropped the air pressure inside the ship.  It was a complex interaction of causes that made this simple wire arc into a fatal event.

We like for life to be simple.  You see it after every tragic event.  What was the cause?  Who was the one at fault?  We see it in disease analysis, blaming vaccines for autism and deodorant for cancer and aluminum pans for Alzheimer's disease.  Obviously, all of these maladies are more complicated than that as we have been studying them for years without knowing their cause.  We like to simplify things because we fool ourselves into believing they will be easy to fix.  Fire the right person or remove the offending ingredient, and you have solved the problem.  We know, however, that life is more interesting than that.  Almost everything in life results from a complicated mix of cascading causes and effects.

Spend a minute on educational Twitter or sitting in a faculty meeting, and you will observe the same phenomenon.  You will hear people say, "Well, the point is . . ." about a lot of things as though things have only one point.  You can trade in a lot of your goals by pretending there is only one point in education.  If you believe the point is that your students get into college, then you will be fine with writing off the last semester of your class to senioritis because you forget that your curriculum has intrinsic value and that the skills students learn in your class are worth more than college entrance.  If you believe the point is job training, you will be fine with tracking kids from a young age and not care if they miss out on something that could have enriched their lives outside of their future career.  Those who don't want to deduct points for late work will say, "The point is that they learn the material, not when they learn it."  

Maybe, I'm just old or maybe it is because I teach the Apollo 1 fire, but I sit in these meetings thinking, "No, that's not THE point.  It's only one of the points."  Every school bag, cup, coaster, and note pad I have says "Equipping Students for Life" on it, and I take that motto seriously.  Teaching students that due dates don't matter is not properly equipping them because they will not be able to call the electric company and say, "I don't know why you charged me a late fee.  The point is that I paid it, not when I paid it."  When I make choices about projects, I know life would be easier for everyone if they did the project alone.  Group projects, by their nature, ensure that no one person learns all of the material or engages all of the skills.  If, however, I am going to equip students for life, I have to give them the opportunity to navigate the messy world of collaboration because they will most surely be doing it in the business world.  If the point is simply learning the material, the most efficient way to learn the most material would be reading the book and testing them on it, but we all know that isn't how school should work because it isn't the only point.  We want them to be inspired by the material, so we ask them to interact with it, play with it, reflect on it, and synthesize it.  

We all, in practice, do school differently than we would if THE point was just that they learn the material.  So, stop saying out loud (or typing into Twitter) that the point is simply learning the material.  You know that life is more complicated than that.  You know that you want so much more for your students than that.  If you want to make a point, acknowledge the complexity and be willing to recognize the effect of any change you make.  It may be a good consequence.  It may not.  You may decide the benefit is worth the cost.  You may conclude the opposite.  What you should not do is sacrifice your common sense for the sake of simplicity.  If this work were simple, anyone could do it.  The next time you are tempted to say, "The point is," ask yourself if it is truly the only point.  Chances are, the answer is no.

Surviving is Not the Same as Thriving

Two weeks ago, I planted a few tomato plants, a couple of peppers, and a cucumber.  For the first week, I came home each day, filled two pitchers with water from the kitchen sink, and doused my little plants.  They lived, but they didn't grow.  Then, a few nights ago, it rained.  When I came out the next morning, my plants were greener, straighter, and just a little bit taller.  Tap water kept them alive, but rainwater made them thrive.

All water is not created equal.  Rainwater and tap water are different in a couple of ways.  Tap water has been treated with a few chemicals that kill bacteria, an important public health measure that stopped the spread of cholera and other water-borne diseases.  The soil in which plants grow is filled with beneficial bacterias, so what makes tap water healthy for us makes it unhealthy for soil.  As rainwater falls through the air, oxygen and nitrogen are dissolved into it, making it slightly acidic.  The slightly lowered pH unlocks micronutrients, like zinc and magnesium, from the soil.  Water delivers more than just water.

In the same way, teachers deliver more than just instruction.  Online instruction delivery methods, like Khan Academy and Crash Course, have value in the context of a real course curriculum and can be used to supplement the work of a teacher.  But, like tap water, they differ from the real thing.  They include monetization features, like ads and comments, that may be fine in small doses but do not ultimately benefit students.  They do not include interaction, physical contact, working through confusing topics, guided practice of skills, or care for the student.  Alone, they may help a student pass a test, but they will not cause a student to flourish.  As much as I love using these resources, I do not believe there are adults out there who are telling their kids how they remember "that one video" in the same way they talk about their teachers.  

I'm not a "relationships are everything" teacher, but I do know that they matter.  We are designed for human interaction, whether that is with a parent in a home school or a variety of teachers in a school building.  The objectives we don't write in our lesson plans are met through private mentoring conversations, a hand on the shoulder, shared laughter, and even working through shared confusion.  These moments are the dissolved oxygen that makes the difference between content delivery and teaching.

During a drought, we keep plants alive with tap water, but we are grateful when the rains finally return.  This year of virtual instruction has been necessary for the physical health and safety of both students and teachers across America.  It has, in a very real way, kept us alive.  But we will all be grateful when the real thing returns for everyone.  Then, we can grow in new ways and thrive.  

Feedback - Part 2 - Harder Than Ever

This week, I was walking from lunch duty to my classroom behind two 8th grade girls.  I didn't mean to eavesdrop, but I was only a couple of feet behind them while they talked about a test they had just gotten.  "I got a 94," one of them said.  "I wish I knew what I missed.  We never get things back anymore, so I don't know what I got wrong."  

Last week, I talked about the importance of feedback in helping students learn.  This week, let's address how much more difficult it is to do digitally for some things.  

If the assignment is very short, you can make a comment on your LMS or reply to an email relatively quickly.  If it is answers to a multiple choice test, it is likely the online system you are using has the option of showing them what they got wrong and what the right answer was (That's not really the same as feedback, but it gives them something).  

The problem comes from trying to give feedback on complex or partially subjective things.  Where I used to be able to write in the margin of a NASA essay, that is hard to manage if the student is joining virtually.  At the time of that essay, I only had three 8th grade students that were fully virtual, so I still did it that way, then scanned their essays, and emailed them.  That wouldn't have been feasible with more virtual students because it was rather time consuming, but it worked for those three at that time.  Where I have had the most trouble has been on the free response questions of tests.  For the multiple choice part, GoFormative has done it for me by giving me the right answer and allowing me to comment on each individual question.  For more complex free response questions, I have asked kids to make FlipGrid videos for their answers.  While I can give feedback directly in there as well, it is awkward for mathematical processes in a way that writing directly next to the problem area was not.  I also know that, while students need feedback, they don't like reading it.  Having it in two separate places means they have to work to find it, which the girl in the hallways is likely to do, but those with less motivation are not.  

I haven't solved this problem.  I've tried it in a few ways (email, grade explanation sheet sent to them, LMS comments) during this crazy year, but I feel like I haven't given truly high quality feedback all year.  It's important enough to keep looking for a good way, but I haven't found it yet.  

Feedback- Part 1 - "I've Got You"

In all of John Almarode's presentations, he talks about feedback.  No matter what else he has talked about, he says, "All of this is meaningless without feedback."  He also makes the points that feedback is about helping a student to improve.  In his Almarodian way (I'm coining that right now), he says, "Feedback should not be, 'I've Gotcha.'  It should be 'I've got you.'"

Each year, I spend a ton of time giving feedback to my 8th-grade students, and I try hard to keep this idea in mind (not that I ever had a gotcha mentality before, but I am trying harder to be really intentional about keeping feedback focused on making the product better).  The opportunity to practice this most comes from the NASA paper that I've written about before. (Actually, when I wrote about it before, it was the Mars Paper.  Sometime, I should write about that change.  Keep an eye out.)

Here's the gist of the assignment.  Students are told to inhabit the role of a NASA administrator and determine the top three priorities that NASA should invest in.  They are given time to explore the NASA website to see what they are already doing, and our media specialist comes into the classroom twice, to talk about good research and to talk about proper citations. 

The first thing that was due was their thesis.  Now, remember, they are in 8th grade, so I am not expecting super-sophisticated and nuanced writing.  I'm fine with it if they want to fill in a sort of formulaic "NASA should invest in ________, ___________, and __________."  I had them send them to me in email so that feedback could be returned as quickly as possible. 

The majority of the feedback fell into three categories:
- not reading the instructions
- choosing a priority that is impossible to support (using black holes as garbage dumps)
- missing the point of the assignment

How I give feedback is determined by the error itself.  A student who has not read the instructions is going to get different feedback than the student who is just misunderstanding them.  

- Quote the instructions - Those who have not followed the instructions will get a reply that quotes the rubric and refers them back to it.  I word it politely, but it usually says something like, "Remember, you were asked to . . . "

- Ask them to think closer to the box - Don't get me wrong; I like creative thinking.  There are, however, ideas that are too out there to find support.  Their feedback usually sounds something like, "Points one and three are fine.  Do you think you will find an expert who says the same thing you are saying to support point two?  If not, you might want to choose something more doable."  

- Giving my own example - I struggle with this one because I have found that students just put what I said, and I don't want to do their thinking for them.  

Feedback takes time, but it is time well invested.  This year, I got better papers on the whole than I have gotten in most years.  I wish it were possible to give thorough feedback on every assignment.  It isn't.  The complexities of the pandemic have made strong feedback more difficult (more on that next week).  It requires a lot of work in a time when we are exhausted.  But it matters.  It matters more than the grade because it builds your relationship with the students.  Start increasing it on the big things as you can, and keep in mind that you are communicated "I've got you."

The Pandemic and the Arts

Yesterday, I got to do something I haven't done since February 2020.  I got to sit in an auditorium and watch a live production.  While the audience was masked and the actors were wearing face shields, it was the closest thing to normal I have seen in quite some time.  

Like all sectors of business, the fine-arts world has been hit hard by the pandemic.  With singing and wind instruments being high-spread risks, choirs have been forced into zoom boxes or stopped altogether; symphonies have been moved online.  Museums have operated with limited capacity, and the lights on Broadway have been darkened for over a year.  

My school had, fortunately, already had its spring play last February.  It was heartbreaking to watch as other schools had to cancel their March and April performances.  It was hard for all involved.  While the focus was on seniors, there were also those who were going to participate in their first play and teachers who had worked hard to train their students, only to have the culmination of that training called off.  When the school year began in the fall, every school was in a different situation.  Some were fully virtual, and plans were made for virtual plays.  Some were in hybrid situations.  Our fall play involved some kids on stage and a few projected on a screen as they participated from home.  There was no live audience; it was streamed online (which involved jumping through legal hoops with the distribution companies).  

During this time, I have watched four virtual productions from Fellowship for the Performing Arts.  This is a great organization that deserves your support, but some of them were better virtually than others.  The Easter Passion was harder for me to watch because I found being sung at by people who are used to singing in a theater is a little overwhelming when it was happening inches from my face.  Virtual musicals may not be for me.  They used greenscreen to produce The Great Divorce, but that's a complicated story that was made confusing because five actors played nine parts.  While I appreciated what they were trying to do, it just didn't work as well on screen as it would on stage.  I truly enjoyed Martin Luther on Trial and Shadowlands because the performances of those actors were stunning, but I can't wait to see them live in the future.  Those incredible performances will only be enhanced by the immersive experience of the darkened room and the set and the shared feelings you only have with an audience.

What I experienced in our school chapel yesterday was something that cannot be experienced virtually - shared emotional response.  When something was funny, we laughed together; and the actors responded to that laughter.  That only happens in a live show.  While you might laugh at your laptop while watching a virtual performance alone in your living room, you won't laugh as hard or as long (and the actors won't know you are laughing and react to it) because laughter is social.  I might cry listening to a sad song on my iPod, but it is not the same experience as an audience being moved to tears by a powerful concert performance.  The feeling that comes from a large group of people being silenced by awe is unlike any feeling I may experience on my own.  

In ancient times, the arts were created for the purpose of social bonding in the village, sharing culture, passing down oral history, and expressing and receiving emotion.  It is still meant for all of those things.  If you can, donate to your local theater, visit a museum in a socially distanced way, support your school's arts programs in some way to keep them going during these times.  Do that for them.  When the pandemic is over, go to a choral performance, a ballet, a musical, a play, or a concert.  Do that for yourself and your sense of community.