These pictures represent one of my fondest teenage memories.  Every year when they pop up in my Facebook memories, I have some pretty happy nostalgic moments.  But it may not be for the reason you think when looking at them.

These are a few members of my church youth group.  I doubt you are having trouble identifying me, but if you are, thank you for that.  I'm the one in the jeans and blue shirt.  These two pictures were taken on a 100-degree day in a parking lot in Atlanta, GA.  My youth group drama team had traveled down during the Olympic Games to perform street drama and pray with people.  This was our first day. 

We arrived in the notorious church van and after sitting there for a while, our youth minister came out and said, "This is going to take some time. Settle in."  He did not inform us that the building we had been assigned to sleep in had been condemned by the city and that they were trying to find us somewhere to stay for the week. We spent nine hours in that parking lot. After a while, the van became too hot to stay in, so we pulled out a sleeping bag and put it in the parking lot. We played games and told stories and laughed our heads off.  Other groups were having similar problems, so they were also in the parking lot and we got to meet them and play games with people we otherwise wouldn't have met.  (I think I threw horseshoes for the first time that day because someone in another group brought a set.)  When it began raining, we found that the back door of that school bus was unlocked and commandeered it.  I have no idea who that bus belonged to, but it was much easier getting into it than it was to squeeze back into the church van.  When we finally made our way to our home for the week, a church's gym floor with cold water hose showers on the roof, we were a giddy group of teenagers who had just had the best day ever all because everything had gone wrong.

The thing about life is that things go wrong a lot.  The thing about teaching is that things go wrong a lot.  Whether you have a great day or a terrible day very often is determined by how you react when things go wrong.  If we had sat sulking in the hot van all day, we would have missed out on a day of happy memories.  Instead, these pictures represent a great deal of joy.  

The same thing can happen when things go wrong in your classroom.  If you teach longer than a week, that's going to happen.  You are going to plan something that takes dramatically more or less time than you planned.  You are going to have a student who insists on interfering with your plans.  You are going to solve a problem incorrectly in front of 24 teenagers.  If you react with embarrassment or anger, you will likely make the situation worse (by the way, I'm talking to myself here as I have more than one story of responding poorly).  If you recognize that showing kids how to adapt is just as important a lesson as the one in your plans, you can turn it into a good experience.  

I frequently make mistakes while solving physics problems.  It's not because I'm sloppy; there are just a lot of ways to mess up.  You can forget a negative, punch something wrong in the calculator, or accidentally draw an arrow pointing down when it should have been up.  Usually, a student catches it and corrects me.  I thank them and fix it because I want them to see that these mistakes are easy to make and that they are not irredeemable.  I want them to see that you don't have to be upset about it because you can learn from it.  There are so many things a teenager thinks are needs when they are really wants.  There are so many things they think are critical when they are really just convenient.  They have so much anxiety about things going wrong that we must teach them how to embrace those times.  It will make a difference in their future.

And, of course, I cannot title this post "When Things Go Wrong" without including this poem.

When Things Go Wrong

by Anonymous

When things go wrong, as they sometimes will,
When the road you're trudging seems all uphill,
When the funds are low and the debts are high,
And you want to smile, but you have to sigh,
When care is pressing you down a bit-
Rest if you must, but don't you quit.

Life is strange with its twists and turns,
As every one of us sometimes learns,
And many a fellow turns about
When he might have won had he stuck it out.
Don't give up though the pace seems slow -
You may succeed with another blow.

Often the goal is nearer than
It seems to a faint and faltering man;
Often the struggler has given up
When he might have captured the victor's cup;
And he learned too late when the night came down,
How close he was to the golden crown.

Success is failure turned inside out -
The silver tint in the clouds of doubt,
And you never can tell how close you are,
It might be near when it seems afar;
So stick to the fight when you're hardest hit -
It's when things seem worst that you must not quit

Losing Our Mental Stamina

Last week, I wrote about how we don't use our minds as much as we should because it is so much easier to rely on emotion, instinct, and memory.  I referenced the kerfuffle about Karen Swallow Prior on Russell Moore's podcast.  This week, I'd like to address how hard it is to sustain prolonged use of our minds, a thought that started in my mind while listening to that same episode.  Russell talked about how difficult it is for us to focus on Bible reading because it has become difficult to sustain focus on anything.  It's easy to blame this on the pandemic (and I'll return to that soon), but I think we have to back up several years before Covid to really diagnose this issue.

When I was in college, professors sometimes referred to "the Sesame Street effect," suggesting that our attention spans were shortening due to the way children's television shows were filmed, including rapidly changing angles and scenes, bright colors, and lots of sound stimulation.  While I don't think any scientific research had been done on this thought, the logic seemed pretty sound.  And, man, did they have no idea what was coming.  

The early internet was slow to load images and mostly screens of text.  But as transmission speed increased, our patience decreased.  We started expecting things to load instantaneously, correct our errors for us, and show us what we wanted to see when we wanted to see it.  We began consuming news in video clips, reading blogs and articles rather than books, and scrolled past anything we didn't care to see.  Twitter's character limitations took away all sense of context or nuance because there just wasn't space for it.  It bled outside of the online world; I have impatiently tapped my fingers waiting for the microwave to cook something in four minutes.  Mind you, this is something that would have taken an hour just a few decades ago and would have required the building of a fire in prior centuries.  

Enter the smartphone.  Any reliance we had on others evaporated in a matter of months.  Take the wrong exit while driving?  No need to stop and ask for directions anymore.  Can't remember a fact, you don't need to be near a book, a knowledgeable person, or a computer because the computer is in your pocket.  Want to listen to a song while watching a video and reading a news article simultaneously, no problem.  At least with Sesame Street, you were limited to what the directors/editors had produced; now you could change scenes at your own control.  While adults fretted over what this would do to their children's attention span, they ignored what it was doing to their own.  And in short order, they handed them to their children and let them take them to school.  Let it be the teachers' problem to out-engage this extremely consuming technology.  

Some parents did have limits on "screen time," but they implicitly sent their kids the message that screen time was valuable by making it a reward for everything from chores to grades to good behavior.  The pandemic didn't help; screen time limitations went out the window.  I'm not judging parents here, by the way, because I cannot imagine what trying to work from home while having kids would have been like.  My own screen time was enormous as I taught virtually.  When it first started, I thought I would do a lot of reading since I was at home all of the time, but I found that my eyes didn't want to focus at that distance after a day online.  When we started back to school, I just didn't have the mental bandwidth for anything other than getting through the day.  Then I came home and watched Stephen Colbert and an episode of Would I Lie to You while playing online poker.  The human brain isn't capable of multitasking, so I was just training my brain to consume things in shorter and shorter chunks.  We all did.  Consequently, traffic is more upsetting than it used to be, and waiting in line for anything annoys us more than ever.  I haven't even addressed that we were being politically stoked at every turn during this time, but our patience for other people's opinions is down to zero.  

Okay, we know we have a problem.  What do we do?  It has to start with wanting to do something.  It's not enough to complain about it or think of it as someone else's problem.  Older generations like to talk about it as a Millenial or Gen Z problem, but there were a number of people texting DURING the Tony Bennett concert I attended in February of 2020 (a concert in which I was the youngest person by quite some margin).  At a family event, one of the grandparents showed me a meme on his phone bemoaning the fact that kids don't play stickball or something.  I don't remember because I was distracted by the fact that he was showing me a meme. . . on his phone.  With no sense of irony whatsoever, he used tech to complain about tech.  They used to say recognizing that we have a problem was half the battle, but I'm not sure if that's true because we recognize it as a societal problem rather than one in ourselves.  

The second thing we need to do is make a plan.  Choose a challenging book and plan to work your way up to it.  I'm not saying jump into Steinbeck or Dickens right away, but make it something worth your time and move your way up from your current reading length from now to some goal date.  Treat it like training for a marathon or weight lifting; increasing your mental effort each day or week.  Watch an entire television show with your phone in another room.  Do you really want to challenge yourself?  Leave your phone at home for a day.  I promise you won't die, and neither will your children; you will just have to remember to pick them up from soccer practice without a reminder alarm.  Do the work to memorize something - a scripture passage, the Hamlet soliloquy, or the Gettysburg Address.  It doesn't matter, just exercise those parts of your brain to help you sustain mental effort for the future.  

Do something.  Do anything.  Work out your brain.  

Losing Our Minds

This post is going to start out with the appearance of political meddling or cultural observation, but if you will stick with me, I'll bring it around to education at the end.

This week, I was teaching my 8th graders about kinetic theory, which states that all matter is made of small, indivisible particles that are in constant motion.  It is an important concept in understanding the physical properties of each state of matter and explains why a golf ball keeps its shape as you move it from one location to another while water takes on the shape of its container.  What is interesting is that it was first proposed by an ancient Greek philosopher, and no one asked him to prove it.  Why?  Because proving things simply didn't exist yet.  Imagine going your whole life and never hearing anyone say, "Can you prove that?"  It wasn't an expectation.  If you followed Aristotle, you were Aristotelian and, I presume, agreed with his musings.  Maybe if you disagreed, you become Pythagorean.  I don't know.  

My students always find this strange (rightly so), but they usually indicate that we would never do that today.  Since they are in the 8th grade, they still get to possess this level of naivete, but soon they will find that we absolutely still do this.  People pick their party, their candidate, their guy - and that's the end of their thinking.  Whatever he says, it's totally fine.  I'm not just picking on one side here.  I've seen people defend Trump for things they would have been horrified if Obama had done.  I've seen people bend over backward to excuse Biden for things that they would set their hair on fire to criticize Trump for.  They've picked their side, and then they didn't need their minds anymore.  I am trying desperately to fight this trend, but it can be hard.  I used to describe myself as conservative, but now you'd have to ask me about a specific issue for me to know.  I am still mostly conservative on many issues (life, taxes, small and local government - although I'm not sure most people who call themselves conservative still believe in small government), but there are issues on which I am a raging liberal (voting right and immigration should both be as easy to do as possible).  I have also come to realize that there are some issues on which I will never be qualified to have an opinion (large-scale economic issues, most of foreign policy) because it is just too complex.  While I never cast a straight-party ballot, I did think voting was relatively simple until a few years ago.  I now find it to be a complex mix of economic issues, social issues, support for different causes and people, and all of the other things that might reveal a candidate's moral character.  This requires more research than I have ever done before and more thought than I think most people wish to engage in.

There's something I have learned from all of the reading I do into cognitive science research.  Thinking is hard, and our brains try to avoid it.  Daniel Willingham discusses this both in Why Don't Students Like School and Outsmart Your Brain.  Thinking is both slow and energy-intensive, so we rely on memory, shortcuts, and a variety of tricks to save time and blood sugar.  That doesn't mean we can't think, but that it isn't our first instinct.  In politics, it is easy to rely on emotional responses rather than thought, but we can be adults if we decide to be (after all, isn't that the rationale for having a voting age of 18?).  In an attempt to think things through more carefully than I used to, I listen to a few different podcasts that try to either present both sides of an issue or forge a middle ground.  One of those podcasts is Truth over Tribe.  Another is the Bulwark.  In a recent episode of the latter, Charlie Sykes said, "We are losing our minds."  He did mean we had literally gone insane, just that we had given ourselves over to not using our minds.  We had given ourselves permission not to use our minds by choosing a party, reacting purely out of emotion, and turning off our brains.

Recently, Pilgrim's Progress was trending on Twitter.  I've seen some strange things trending on that site, but Puritan literature is by far the oddest.  It turns out that the reason it was trending was because people were hassling Karen Swallow Prior.  This is hardly new as women like her and Beth Moore are lightning rods for the obnoxious TheoBros online.  Karen had appeared on an episode of the Russell Moore podcast, and Russell said he found John Bunyun morose and difficult to read.  Karen responded that Pilgrim's Progress was kind of a drag, that her students loved to hate it, and she loved to show them that there is value in things they initially hate.  This is a teacher's answer if ever there was one, but the people attacking her on Twitter left out the context and simply attacked her for saying it was a drag, which it objectively is.  Lots of great things are difficult to enjoy.  Even if Pilgrim's Progress is your favorite book, you would have to admit that it is a slog because Puritans wrote differently than we do.  I would describe Casablanca as slow, in spite of it being one of my favorite movies.  Some really great music is challenging to listen to.  But, in the world we are currently occupying, people don't want to think these thoughts.  They want to spew their emotions into their keyboard without thinking.    

I promised I would bring this back around to education, so here it is.  Teachers, we are the front line of turning this tide.  We MUST teach our students to think.  We can overcome this by modeling thought for our students, asking them for their thoughts, correcting them when they speak emotionally rather than logically, pointing out areas of context they may be missing, and allowing them to hold us accountable for the same.  Teachers are so often accused of having agendas, whether we do or not.  This is one we absolutely must have.  Cultural shifts start in our classrooms, and teaching kids to keep their minds rather than losing them is our most important job.

Retrieval Notes - An Experiment

Ever since the 2019 Learning and the Brain conference and reading Pooja Agarwal and Patrice Bain's book Powerful Teaching, I have been all in on the idea of retrieval practice.  I recognize the benefits that come from retrieving information from your mind rather than putting it in again, myelinating the neuron and making it more efficient.  As I tell my students, if you are in a play, you don't learn the lines by reading the script again.  You learn them by trying to remember them.

But there was one thing I was afraid to try until this year.  It's a concept known as Retrieval Taking.  Rather than taking notes during class, students summarize the class at the end.  The research on this is compelling.  Students who summarized after learning performed 12 % better on a post-lecture exam than those who took notes during class.  But I was hesitant.  What if it doesn't work?  How do I tell parents that I told their students not to take notes in class?

For the past two years, I have had a lot of individual meetings with students.  If they don't do well on a test, I send them a note to come see me during lunch or study hall.  We talk about their study methods, and I give them advice on how they might revise them to be more effective.  Then, I looked at their notes.  What I found was that the students who were the very best at note-taking were still really bad at note-taking.  They either had what I had projected on the wall and nothing else or they had attempted to take down every word verbatim.  Neither of those methods is helpful, so I thought I would teach them to take better notes.  That didn't work because change is uncomfortable, so, if I wasn't going to collect their notes and grade them (and I wasn't), they would just go back to what they were comfortable with after about a week.  Their computers were also an issue.  While I am totally supportive of our one-to-one program, students do an awful lot of shopping and game-playing that is difficult to manage as a teacher.  One of the purposes of note-taking is to maintain student engagement in class, and that was kind of a wash if they were taking them on their computers.

At last year's Learning and the Brain conference, I was in a session with John Almarode.  He gets you to stand up and walk away from your table and find a partner; as a result, I am nowhere near my computer for over 20 minutes.  He is intentionally trying to keep us from taking notes.  After the session, I was joking with him and said, "Well, I am going back to the hotel room and writing up these notes, and you can't stop me."  He laughed and said, "Yeah, that's what you should do.  That's what students should do; it's just that they won't."

So, I found myself at a tipping point where I thought it was time to attempt this method of note-taking.  Also, between the textbook that perfectly matches my class and the many videos I have made, the students have plenty to study if this doesn't work.  At parent orientation, I introduced this idea to parents, a little worried about what their response would be.  It was overwhelmingly positive and hopeful.  The only concern one parent had was "What if my daughter wants to take notes."  I replied that if she was taking them on paper, I would not take the pen from her hand, but she would not be allowed to do it on her computer, and I would not wait for her to write.  He seemed satisfied with that.  So, here is what I have been doing.

First, I needed something to keep student attention and engagement in class.  There are mini-whiteboards and markers on every desk (thank you Craig Barton for so much advice for their use on your podcast and Zane Smitley for spending two years doing this so well while I observed you).  I ask frequent questions in class anyway, so rather than calling on a student with their hand raised, I now get an answer from every student on their whiteboards (I may need to buy stock in the Expo company).  I am realizing that I need to ask a lot more questions because when there is a large gap between them, students are starting to drift; but I'm working on that.  Second, I stop whenever the part of the class that is primarily me speaking and say "Go back to GoFormative for the notes summary."  They begin almost every class on that platform for their bellwork, so it made sense to use it for the summaries as well.  When they go there, I have put in several questions that I would hope notes would have answered if they had been taking them.  I based that on the advice from this blog post by my friend Andrew Watson from the Learning and Brain website.

It's a little too soon to know how this going.  As far as classroom practices go, it seems to be going very well.  But, is it helping them learn?  It's too soon to tell.  They did perform exceptionally well on their first test, but the material on the first test isn't very hard.  I may not be able to make meaningful comparisons between this year and other years until tests two and three, when I traditionally see a drop in performance.  (Yes, I know performance and learning are not the same thing, but for the moment, it's the only metric I have.)  At this point, I can say for certain that it has not harmed their performance on the first test, but I'll keep you updated as the year goes on.

Don't Cause Your Own Stress

This week, we had our first community-building group of the school year.  My group is 8th graders, and the deans had given us a little activity.  Students were given the outline of a t-shirt that was divided into squares that were meant to be filled in with favorites - favorite color, fruit, song, movie, etc.  For most students, this was what it was meant to be, a fun activity.  

One student stressed over it the whole time. 

• "Do I have to do it?"  Well, yes, this is what we are doing today.  
• "Can I just write words in the square?"  Some of them could be that, but maybe make the words fun.  The example shows how you can do that.
• "I can't draw."  No one is looking for great artwork.  Just have fun with it.

She finally gave it a half-hearted effort and did a pretty good job, but what I noticed was how she turned something that was meant to be relaxing into a stressful experience because she couldn't see how she could enjoy something even if she wasn't awesome at it.  She created her own stress because of her performative way of thinking.

This experience brought to mind a student that I had a few years ago who created her own stress in a different way.  Every day in middle school contains good moments and bad moments, events that make you smile and events you find mildly irritating.  Most students ride the waves of these small ups and downs pretty smoothly because they react to minor things in minor ways (and with some exceptions - they are hormonal after all - save the major reactions for major upsets).  This student, however, turned the little waves of the day into tidal events.  The slightest annoyance, like a student behind her putting their feet on her chair legs, was met with a dramatic response.  One day, I said to her, "I'm going to need you to learn how to level your responses.  You react to everything at a level 9 or 10, and that was a 2 at best."  

When I joined the Y in March, or every new class I took, I approached the instructor and said, "I've never done this before.  What do I need to know?"  Most instructors answered me with information - how to set my bike, what size weights I would need, etc.  These were all important, but the best answer came when I took cardio kickboxing for the first time and approached Matt with that question.  He said, "Well, first of all, don't take yourself too seriously."  This was good advice for someone who was about to execute every move incorrectly.  If I thought I had to be good at everything to enjoy it, I would never have found this source of joy in my life.

Life is stressful in a lot of ways, but we don't have to make it more stressful for ourselves.  Stop thinking everything is bigger than it is, more important than it is.  Enjoy things for the sake of doing them rather than the outcome.  Let the stress you experience come from external sources.  Don't make rules for yourself that cause your more stress.

Stop with the Pyramid - Remembering is Sometimes "Higher" Than Understanding

As a teacher of 8th graders, I operate as a preparer - a trainer of students for high school.  They come to me as middle schoolers with middle school mindsets, but it is my job to morph them into high school students by the end of the year - mostly as it relates to study skills.  

They are used to pretty weak studying, and the techniques they have used in the past have brought them some degree of success due to the nature of the tests they have taken.  This is not a criticism of their K-7th grade teachers.  The tests they have been taking were age-appropriate, but they need to add tools to their toolbox.  While I devote some class time to giving study advice and test-taking advice, I also end up having a couple of dozen meetings with students after their first and second tests (and a few after the third when the ones who had thought it would go away if they ignored it realize that strategy isn't working).

During these meetings, I always start with the same question.  "What does studying look like for you?"  Ninety percent of the answers are, "I look over my notes" and "I re-read the chapter."  We talk about the ineffectiveness of that strategy and how their time would be better spent on retrieval practice.  I recommend flashcards as though I had stock in the index card companies.  Flashcards, however, are only good for what they are good for - information in which the answer is rather short.  So, this year, I added another question to this conversation.  "How do you prepare for the questions that are likely to be (or that your teacher has explicitly told you are) short answer or essay questions?"

Wow, did this question ever get me a lot of blank stares.  Most of the conversations sounded like this:

Me:  "Do you remember when I told you that this question about explaining inhaling and exhaling using Boyle's law would be on the test?"

Student:  "Kind of"

Me:  "Do you remember that I showed you the page number where it is explained and where the link to the video animation is?"

Student:  I guess

So, of course, we talk about the reason teachers tell you things and how, if I have gone to this much effort to make sure you have the resources to prepare for the question, you should take that seriously.  The most interesting conversation I had on this topic, though, came from a very conscientious student who did take the time to use her resources.  It sounded like this:

Me:  How did you prepare for the Boyle's Law/Breathing question?

Student:  I read the section and I watched the video you gave us.

Me:  Good start.  Did you do anything to make sure you remembered it?

Student:  I read it and I understood it.  I figured that would be enough.

That was a revealing answer, which I had never gotten before.  I asked a few more questions and advised her that next time, she should try writing out the answer like she would if it were on a test BEFORE she went and checked the video and the book page.  In other words, she should use the resources for feedback after retrieval.  Her answer then benefitted every student I met with afterward because I gave the same advice to them.

Later that week, I was relating this story to a colleague, and she said "That's interesting.  Understanding is considered a higher level thinking skill than remembering, but it didn't do her any good to understand it because she couldn't remember it."

If you aren't a teacher, you might not know the phrase "higher level thinking skill," but it comes from the misapplication of Benjamin Bloom's work.  He set out to identify different types of thinking.  His publishers put it into a pyramid diagram.  Teacher prep programs started using the diagram to press teachers into racing their way up to the top levels of the pyramid without recognizing that the lower levels are just as important and perhaps foundational.  (I like the wheel diagram to the left better because it doesn't imply a hierarchy.). You cannot engage in "higher level thinking" with things that are not in your brain.  If you can't remember it, it doesn't matter that you understood it.  If you can't remember it, you can't apply it, analyze it, or evaluate it.

Doug Lamov, author of Teach Like A Champion is a great Twitter follow.  Several weeks ago, he posted this.  "Retrieval Practice is the act of recalling previously encountered information into working memory, or conscious thinking. Brief spurts of Retrieval Practice help students solidify information in their long-term memories, and, importantly, understanding is not learning until it is encoded in long-term memory." 

Debates about pedagogy are everywhere - traditional v. progressive, explicit v. project-based, worked examples provided v. student-generated examples (a lot of ink has been spilled on these topics), but we would be wise to keep in mind Lamov's point.  It isn't learning until it is encoded in long-term memory.  So stop with the pyramid, and figure out what you want students to do with the knowledge they have.  It will guide your thinking about what is important to have memorized rather than make you look down on all memorization.

Viewing Angle Revisited

I have had a fun experience every day this week.  Our new earth science teacher is across the hall from me.  As we have prepared for the start of the year, she has naturally had a number of questions.  

• Is it okay if I hang this in my room?  
• Yes, of course.  
• Am I allowed to put this in my policies?  
• Sure, if that'll work for your classroom.
• I went to IT to ask if they had any iPads left from the hybrid year.  
• They said they didn't have extras, but they would order me one.  They wanted me to have what I needed.
• How do I go about requesting more . . .?
• They are in the supply cabinet in the teachers' lounge.  You can just pick them up the next time you are there.

It would be difficult to describe the look on her face with the answers to each of these questions.  There is a disbelief that her professional judgment would be trusted in most cases.  I have loved watching her react to this because it reminds me that this is not normal.

I have been at GRACE for 20 years, and it is easy to lose sight of the limitations other teachers have to deal with, even slip into a sense of entitlement.  Having someone whose viewing angle is different allows me to see it differently.  It reminds me to have gratitude.  

I'm not saying GRACE is perfect.  Frustrations will come throughout the year because we are a building full of sinners, like everyone else.  But in those times, it will be helpful to revisit these experiences and remember that I also have it pretty great.