No, You Don't Know How to Keep This From Happening Again

I didn't want to write this post.  I tried hard not to write this post.  After all, there have been several hundred thousand blog posts, articles, and social media rants since the shooting in Parkland this week.  What more can I add to this discussion than what has already been said?

Today, as I scrolled through my Twitter and Facebook feeds, however, I realized that this may be precisely the reason why I should write this post.  A lot of people are spouting off a lot of manufactured outrage and phony heartbreak.  Before you get mad at me for that statement, recognize that no heartbroken person is posting to facebook while they are heartbroken, and any person who is truly outraged puts their phone down and does something.  People are spouting off a lot of opinions from both sides of the political spectrum, and most of them are ill-informed.  Everyone seems to think they have a "solution," everything from arming teachers to hiring veterans as security to new laws that restrict access to guns.  Most of these "solutions" are coming from people who haven't set foot in a school in several decades.  WARNING:  This will be long, probably have some conflicting thoughts as I work out my own feelings, and will likely come off as a little rant-y.

I have been teaching for 19 years, starting the year after the Columbine shootings.  I was a substitute when Columbine happened; and, while it wasn't the first school shooting, it was the one that changed the way we looked at them.  As a sub, I walked into a different classroom every day.  After Columbine, the first thing I did every day was to look for the second exit and the place we might hide if there were a gunman in the building.  (I was 22 years old, by the way.)  Columbine tore my heart to pieces.  It happened on a Tuesday, and I remember sitting in church the next night, sobbing so loudly that I disrupted the service, and my congregation spent the rest of the time gathered around me as a representative of schools and praying.  During my second year as a  high school teacher, my school found a shooting threat letter with a hit list and a map one Friday afternoon.  I spent a lot of time in prayer that weekend, and when my students entered my classroom that Monday, after having their backpacks searched at the door, I told them, "They won't get to you without going through me."  I assured them that there was a plan (this was before we did drills, so they didn't know what the plan was) and that if we needed it, they should just do what I told them.  Then, I taught as though we weren't under threat, with the exception that my eyes darted from the window to the kids to the door about 150 thousand times per class period.  In the years since that day, some of my students told me that they felt safest in my room.  This never fails to amuse me, given that I was the youngest teacher in the building at the time.

Now that you know I am not someone who only thinks about this when it is on the news, let me say a few things.

1.  There is NOT a simple solution.
Given how many shooters there have been in schools, movie theaters, nightclubs, military bases, etc. in the past two decades, if the solution were as simple as something you could post to Facebook, it would have been done by now.  Here's the thing; there isn't a simple solution because this isn't a simple problem.  Anytime something goes wrong, whether it is a disease or the explosion of a space shuttle, people want there to be ONE cause that they can blame because that makes fixing it easy.  Almost nothing has one cause.  When I teach my students about the Apollo 1 fire, we discuss the fact that, while the official cause was an electrical arc from a wire with worn insulation, that arc alone would not have caused three fatalities.  It was a combination of the arc with the high pressure, 100% oxygen environment, and manual opening hatch all interacting with each other that killed three astronauts that day.  The problem of mass shootings doesn't come from one source.  Each shooter has a different past, different levels of access to weapons, different mental states, and different motivations.  The combination of home, school, and work lives is unique to each individual as is their constitution for a response.  Don't go online and pretend you have the solution; you do not.

2.  This is NOT about Gun Control.
Most of the phony outrage I see online surrounds firearms, saying things like, "You cannot cause this many casualties without a gun."  These people were remarkably silent when a truck drove into a crowd of people in France, killing over 70 people.  None were advocating truck control.  When there are terror attacks that involve stabbing people, I don't see knife control advocates coming out of the woodwork.  Guns don't shoot themselves.  Criminals, by definition, don't follow laws.  Adding new laws will not solve this problem.  Apparently, our founding fathers felt pretty strongly about the right to keep and bear arms because they made it the second amendment, right after the one about free speech, press, and religion.  That said, most people who lay claim to the second amendment haven't read it.  It does not say that you have a right to own any weapon you want.  It specifically references "a well-regulated militia."  Thomas Jefferson had no concept of bump stocks, high round magazines, or anything that could cause more than a few casualties in a few minutes, and I don't believe he would be happy for us to use his name to claim a right to own whatever weapon gets invented, no matter what.  I'm not going to claim to know where the line is, but can we agree that there is one?  

3.  Arming Teachers is NOT the Answer.
Possibly the most infuriating posts I read online surround arming school personnel.  If you look at these posts, you will find that they are rarely posted by educators.  I find it interesting that the same people who advocate for this in the days following a shooting are the same people that criticize teachers online on other days.  They don't trust their child's teacher to teach them math or reading properly; they question every disciplinary tactic the teacher tries; they talk about teachers as though they are too stupid to have chosen a better paying career.  Then, in the days following a shooting, they want that same teacher to be in command of a weapon.  

I'm not saying I would mind having someone in the school armed; when I taught in public school, there was an armed police officer, and I was fine with that.  Please don't arm me.  I do not wish to have a weapon strapped to my body while I am leaning over a desk to help a student with a math problem.  If you think about it, you don't want that either.

4.  Take Mental Illness Seriously (or Don't) - Stop Just Pretending You Care.
In order to divert the conversation away from guns, some have decided that the real problem is mental illness.  It is easy to assume all mass shooters are mentally ill.  After all, if you don't believe in sin, what other reason could you give for a person's decision to kill others?  That seems logical, but the research doesn't support it.  According to the American Psychiatric Association, "the overall contribution of people with serious mental illness to violent crimes is only about 3%." (See full study here.) 

Mental illness is a serious problem in our society, and we have not taken it seriously.  We have used the mentally ill for our amusement since the freak shows of the 19th century, and probably before that.  Reality TV has normalized the public's use of mental illness for entertainment.  We cannot spend nine seasons watching Hoarders and six watching My Strange Addiction, entertaining ourselves with their struggle, and then pretend to have compassion for those who suffer from mental illness.  

5.  These Events Reflect Our Culture's Worldview
I was at dinner Friday night with some older people, all of whom had thoughts about the shooting.  They talked about guns, mental illness, and school and parental discipline (which I am not even going to address here).  I said, "Well, we taught this generation that human life doesn't have value.  Are we surprised they act like it doesn't?"  

For the past forty years or so, we have taught kids that humans are just another kind of animal.  In practice, we actually teach them that animals are more important (Think about how many more ads you have seen about rescuing abused animals than you have helping abused children).  We have taught them that there are good reasons to kill human beings, from the inconvenient unborn child to lack of life quality in the elderly or disabled to the right of the chronically ill to plan their own death.  We have two living generations who believe that there is some standard which, if a person's life falls below, their life is not worth living.  This has led to a slow but steady rise in the suicide rate.   We can't be too surprised when it also translates into killing others.

The secularized culture in which we live teaches us that humans aren't special or particularly valuable.  Noted atheist, Stephen J. Gould tells us, "We are here because one odd group of fishes had a peculiar fin anatomy that could transform into legs for terrestrial creatures; because the earth never froze entirely during the ice age; because a small and tenacious species, arising in Africa a quarter of a million years ago, has managed, so far, to survive by hook and crook. We may yearn for a higher answer, but none exists."  Richard Dawkins tells us we come from living mud but without design.  He has gone so far as to say that there is no objective reason to believe murder is immoral, that it is only wrong by "my reason says it is wrong."  I guess as long as a mass shooter's reason tells him it is not wrong, Dawkins and the culture that listens to him will be okay with events like Parkland.  

Conclusion:
I know I have talked more about what won't work than what will.  See point 1.  There are no easy solutions to this problem.  I have no magic spell, practice, or policy that will ensure this never happens again.  When Jesus returns, this will never happen again.  Until then, we have to deal with the effects of the Fall.  Man's depravity is only going to be dealt with by the blood of Christ. 

Are You Pro Life?

Disclaimer:  Usually, this is a blog about education.  Occasionally, I veer off into a little political meddling.  This post will be me working out some feelings, which gets messy and could include thoughts that contradict each other.  While my blog never officially represents my school, it's probably important to state that on this one because I may say some inflammatory things, and you should know that I have not run this by anyone.  The thoughts are ONLY my own.

I have been pro-life for as long as I can remember.  When I was twelve, I was the database keeper for the NC chapter of Right-to-Life.  The chair would call me for a list, which I would print on tractor feed label paper using a dot matrix printer, and he would come over to pick up the print outs because I couldn't drive.  At age 13-16, I worked the NC Right-to-Life booth at the State Fair.  I have voted for the most pro-life candidates in every election since I registered at eighteen.  I have observed Sanctity of Human Life Sunday in multiple churches and stood by many roadsides with pro-life signs while praying for this national tragedy to end.  

I write all of this because I want to be perfectly clear that I believe abortion is abhorrent before I say what I am about to say.  It has become very plain to me in the past few years that there is a difference between being pro-life and merely anti-abortion.  I started noticing this a few years ago, but, like a lot of things, 2020 has brought this into sharp relief.

When horrifying images of what was happening at the border started coming out in 2017, many people that I had respected as pro-life made it clear that they did not care about kids in cages or the people being sent back to places where they would be killed.  They cared a lot about finger-pointing, making sure that people knew this was happening prior to the Trump administration, but they did not care about the lives of the image-bearers of the Creator.  They may be anti-abortion, but they are not pro-life.

When the caravan of refugees was making its way from Guatemala to America in 2018, our President (who many people that I know and love voted for only because he promised anti-abortion policies) threatened military action, and those same people in my circle agreed.  These are people who label themselves pro-life, and they said out loud in my presence that we should just start randomly shooting refugees, people fleeing conditions we cannot imagine.  Some of them have posted angry words at those who go to Mexico to feed those in camps, waiting for their asylum hearings.  Imagine being angry that people are feeding the hungry.  These people in my life are anti-abortion, but they should really stop calling themselves pro-life.  

Please know that I understand that the situation at the border is complex, and there are no easy answers.  I believe in the rule of law, and I want people to do things the right way.  But I also know that those who care about life can't casually talk about randomly shooting human beings.

When the coronavirus was spreading through China in December, we observed from afar, thinking, "Oh, the poor Chinese.  They've got another one."  We'd seen them in masks before, and it really didn't seem to bother us.  Besides, we had koala bears in Australia to worry about.  When the US got its first identified cases, however, we jumped to blame the Chinese.  People I love insisted on calling it everything but its medical name.  When I question that, I get a history lesson (almost always showing their ignorance by using the Spanish flu (which started in Kansas) as their example).  Can you say it?  Of course.  Is it helpful to do so?  Of course not.  Did we care when Chinese people were dying of this virus?  Do we care if our Asian American citizens get attacked?  If not, I'm not sure pro-life is an appropriate label.

In March, the shutdowns began.  For about a week, we were all in this together, separately.  That must be our attention span because as soon as people got done watching Tiger King, they started demanding the lockdowns be over.  I have nothing but sympathy for those who have lost their jobs and worried about feeding their families (and those of us who are able should be doing everything we can to support food security), but the people holding signs like this one are showing their lack of respect for life over convenience and vanity.  

I know we have to re-open eventually, but it has been disheartening to see how many people who call themselves pro-life saying things like, "Only 2% will die from it."  I truly get the point they are making, but it's hardly a pro-life kind of statement.  Some have been even more blatant, like conservative author Bethany Mandel, who tweeted, "Call me a grandma killer. I'm not sacrificing my home, food on the table, all our docs and dentists, every form of pleasure (museums, zoos, restaurants), all my kids' teachers in order to make other people comfortable. If you want to stay locked down, do. I am not."  Where her Twitter bio used to say "pro-life," it now says "grandma killer."  At least she's honest about not being pro-life anymore.  

And now, we have the tragedy of the George Floyd murder.  Don't kid yourself.  It wasn't an arrest.  It wasn't an accident.  It wasn't a complication.  It wasn't a difficult decision that had to be made in a split-second.  It was a murder.  For 526 seconds, that cop listened as a human being suffocated beneath his body weight.  In broad daylight, in front of three other police officers, bystanders begging him to stop, and a firefighter asking to be allowed to check Floyd's pulse, a man charged with the duty to "protect and serve" ignored those pleas, ignored his training, and ignored every human instinct to preserve life.  I keep wondering what was going through his mind for 526 seconds.  In the video, he appears unphased, even a little haughty.  He put his hand in his pocket, which at best shows casual apathy (at worst, he's apply more pressure to his leg with his hand).  I can't read his mind, but surely someone who cared about life would have stopped.  He didn't.  Those of us who identify ourselves as pro-life must respond to this.  So far, the only way I have found is to donate to the NAACP Defense Fund, but I am seeking out other ways.

When the rage over this incident turned to riots, the divisions returned.  I'm not in favor of riots, but I also know many of those who are posting about the riots just found a way to care less about the murder.  It gives them a way to divert their attention and not ask themselves the hard questions.  How did we react to the incredibly peaceful protest of "taking a knee"?  We screamed that disrespecting the flag was protesting wrongly.  When they blocked traffic, we said they were protesting wrongly.  Perhaps if we had paid positive attention to non-violent protests, there wouldn't have been violent ones.  Listen, I'm not condoning it.  I'm truly not.  I'm just saying if we wish to prevent it, we consider its cause.  If you care more about property damage than you do about the death of George Floyd, you are not pro-life.

When I was in the 8th grade, my school showed a video series in chapel, called "Whatever Happened to the Human Race?" in which Chuck Colson and Francis Schaeffer examine the history, practice, and effects of abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia.  It's gruesome, and I'm pretty sure no one would advocate showing it to middle school students today.  But, it stuck with me.  What stayed with me the most was that our culture seemed to divide life that was worthy of value from not based on convenience.  If you want the baby, it's a life.  If not, it's a clump of cells.  If a person is born healthy, they are valuable.  If they are born deformed or diseased, not so much.  If a person becomes ill or damaged or in any way inconveniences society at large, we devalue them.  The pro-life world has been preaching how wrong this is for at least the four and a half decades I've been alive.  What is different now?  Is it really about the rule of law and resisting arrest or is it that we are inconvenienced by immigrants and those who are different than we are?  Do we believe human life is sacred or don't we?  These are questions we MUST ask.

I know I am offending at least half of those reading this.  That's fine.  Be offended.  But then be self-reflective.  Are your actions, words, and social media posts part of the problem or part of the solution? Do you care deeply about the unborn but not so much about the post born?  Are you anti-abortion, or are you truly pro-life?  If you are pro-life, how will that change the way you live, speak, and act? 

 

What Your Education Degree Didn't Teach You

My degree is in secondary science education with an emphasis in physics.  To earn that degree, I took many courses in educational psychology, theory, and methods.  I had standard general education classes, which I loved.  I took every science class I could fit into every minute of the day.  I even had a zero credit seminar in physics and engineering, which I also loved.  (I think I just really just loved classes, so it is probably good that I made that my life.)

In seventeen years of teaching, every one of those classes has been valuable.  I have never taught an Anatomy class, but I have shared much of what I learned in anatomy with my students, and the understanding it gave me of how light and sound and electricity interact with the human body certainly make me teach the physics differently than I would have otherwise done.  I have never taught English, but writing skills have been important in my life nonetheless.  I enjoy talking about the novels my students are reading and believe it is important for them to see a well rounded life.  I am grateful for everything I did learn in college; but after seventeen years in the classroom, I've come to realize how much I didn't learn while earning my degree.  I'd like to make a few proposals.

Drama - Teachers spend much of their day pretending.  That doesn't mean we aren't genuine with our students, but it is sometimes important to pretend that something is less funny than it is just to maintain classroom management.  Some days, you might not be enthusiastic about the necessary but not thrilling topic of the day (e.g. required steps for showing your work); but it would be detrimental to your students' motivation if you show that.  You might be a single person who has just had your heart broken; it would be unprofessional to bring that into your classroom.  Some days you have to pretend to be in a better mood than you are really in because, while being real is good, being completely transparent is not.  You have to pretend at least a little.  A theater class in improv might prove useful in the development of those skills.

Lab Storage Safety
This one is, of course, meant for science teachers.  My first teaching job was in a brand new building.  We were putting all of our equipment and chemicals on the shelves for the very first time.  While all six science teachers had an understanding of chemistry on a level they could teach, none of us knew the safest arrangement of chemicals on shelves.  We knew that alphabetical was a recipe for disaster, but no one had been trained in proper storage.  I'm guessing that most colleges believe that we will glean this information from our understanding of chemistry, but that is like hoping that we could write a novel in Arabic just be learning their alphabet and a few passages.  There are simply too many combinations chemicals and their compounds.   A semester of lab safety would make us all safer.

Group Crisis Management
In the years I have been teaching, I have taught through a variety of difficult circumstances.  My second year in the classroom, my school received a shooting threat.  I was teaching on 9/11.  Ten years ago, a student in our school died.  During a homecoming pep rally, one of our teachers experienced a serious injury, which we believed at the time to be life threatening.  Recently, one of our teachers has battled cancer.  When we were told on Friday that the cancer had returned, you can imagine what it was like to step into a  classroom of hurting kids while dealing with our own shock and sadness.  When I tell you that I taught through those circumstances, I mean it.  It was not healthy on 9/11 for students to travel from room to room, watching television footage of terror; so I taught science.  When our school was threatened with a shooting even, I couldn't just decide to make the day a wash.  I taught differently, with my eyes alternating from window to door and back again all day, but I did continue to teach.

When we gathered in chapel to be together and ask questions after the death of a student, my friend came by my room with boxes of tissues for us to take with us and said, "Here's something they didn't teach us in teacher school."  She was right, and that should not be.  I know they couldn't have addressed every potential problem, but any teacher who teaches more than a couple of years will experience a class in crisis.  Some training in how to deal with groups of frightened, sad, or angry students just makes sense.

To the people who write degree plans, all the things we learn about content and methods are important, and I am grateful I had them.  The real work of teaching, however, involves much more than I ever learned in college.  Consider adding a few of those "rubber meets the road" type of courses - even a seminar with veteran teachers as guest speakers could be useful.  Please consider.

Teaching Yearbook

I never set out to teach yearbook, but it is now how most students know me.

When I was a kid I wanted to be an astronaut.  However, 3 inches over the NASA height limit, vision issues, and a complete lack of equilibrium took that off of the list of career options when I was 12.  To be honest, I would still jump on board any time someone would let me. When I took physics my senior year in high school, I discovered that I really wanted to be a physics teacher.  Five years into my career as a science teacher, my hobby of photography became one of the biggest parts of my work life.

For years, our school passed around the role of yearbook adviser from person to person.  This. is. crazy.  The learning curve in your first year of advising is steep.  To have a different person every year experiencing their first year means you never have a yearbook that reflects the lesson learned in the first year.  This was reflected in the quality of the yearbooks as well.  People did the best they could, but not having the benefit of experience definitely showed up in the product.

During the summer, I got a call from our principal, Kathie Thompson.  It began with "Keep an open mind when I tell you this."  This is hardly an encouraging start to a conversation.  She told me that they wanted me to teach yearbook that year.  I asked if it mattered that I didn't know what I was doing, and she said that no one else did either.  Since I believe you can't judge anything on its first year, I agreed to give it two years.  I thought I could re-evaluate at that point whether or not it would be a good idea to continue.

I learned more about the computer that year than I have learned in ANY other year of my life.  Second place would be the year we began our one to one laptop program.  I learned about folders and subfolders and network drives.  I learned about pop up blockers and editing tools and software.  I learned about managing a long term project in a way I had never learned before.  I was still shooting with a film camera back then (and a dinky little 2.0 Megapixel that wasn't good for much), so I would take the film to Eckard Drug and have them make a disc.  At that time, Jostens' online program was in its Beta phase, so we could only upload one photo at a time.  I also had a large number of students who didn't really want to take yearbook; they had turned in their elective forms late and were given their third or fourth choice.  You have no idea how much I cherished the few diligent workers I had that year.  I'm not sure I would have been able to continue if it hadn't been for the Clark girls, Amy Prall, and two of the three Edwards boys.

Here I sit, ten years later, a week after submitting my 10th yearbook.  Things have certainly changed.  1. First, a plug for Jostens.  I'm sure other yearbook companies are fine and dandy, but I wouldn't leave Jostens for all the tea in China.  Every year, they ask what your dream function would be for their system, and they implement most of them, often within the next year.  They are ALL about customer service.  I have gotten calls from the plant where the book is printed because they found an error and want to know how we would like to go about fixing it.  I have great relationships with both our local rep and the plant rep.  If you ever need to make a yearbook, use Jostens!

2.  I now use a digital Nikkon 3500 DSLR.  I have a 18-55mm lens, a 50-200mm lens, and a 70-330mm lens (great for soccer and baseball).  I take about 25000 pictures per year, which would have been very expensive with film.

3.  I have students (mostly) who signed up for yearbook because they want to be part of the excellence of the program.  They like the feeling of producing something.  I can usually tell who is going to be editor their senior year during their freshman year.

4.  The school has grown, grown, grown.  My first yearbook was 88 pages.  We had about 15 athletic teams.  Our middle and high school grades had only one section, and elementary grades had two.  We had fine arts programs, but we covered each of them in about half a page.  We did our best to spread out the coverage, but we had no way of knowing exactly how many times someone was in the book without physically counting them, which we did not do.  The book we just finished had 145 pages, including 24 athletic teams,  three sections of EVERY grade, and double page spreads for EACH fine art.  Due to an upgrade in Jostens system (Have I mentioned how much I love Jostens?), we are able to tag every photo and then run their coverage report.  We KNOW that every student is pictured at least three times in the yearbook.

Lots of other things have changed too, but these are the ones I can think of off the top of my head.  Yearbook has become such a central part of my life that I'm not sure what I would do without it.  What I like most is that it has kept me connected to the entire school.  I am in and out of all  classrooms across all grade levels, so I know what great things are happening in our classes.  I am at least two games/matches of every sport, so I know what is happening in our athletics.  I am at almost every theater, band, and chorus performance, so I can tell you the amazing work they are doing.  Yes, it is more work than I ever knew was possible, but it has embroidered GRACE on my heart as thoroughly as the logo is embroider on my shirts.

Thanks so much to Kathie Thompson for changing my life.  I love it and hope for ten more.

We Did What?

At our senior dinner last week, our college counselor described what our current seniors had experienced since the start of their freshman year.  This, of course, included both the lockdown spring and the hybrid year.  As she described it, I had a sort of out-of-body experience.  While I know we did those things, I can't quite connect to them.  I turned to the person next to me and said, "How did we do that?"  

While lockdown and hybrid were certainly the biggest an most unexpected things we have ever done, the truth is that my teaching career has been full of things I would not have imagined before they happened.  

I've had to deal with a student having a grand mal seizure.  I've taught during a shooting threat.  I witnessed a fight in the cafeteria. I had a student take me shopping for jeans (a different time -  I wouldn't do that now).  I sponsored multiple clubs, organizing trips and judges and events.  All of that was before I turned 25, and none of them are things I would have imagined before the age of 20.

The year I taught in Wake County is a bit of blur, but the defining moment was when the principal came in to tell me about 9/11.  Who could have imagined the country could be attacked at 9:30 in the morning, and teachers would continue to teach until 3 in the afternoon?  All day, I had to make decisions about how to deal with this unfolding story as bells rang and new groups of kids came into my room.  Should we watch the coverage because it is historic, or is it bad for their brains to soak in it all day?  These aren't decisions a teacher thinks they will have to make when they choose this profession at the age of 18.

I've been at my current school for 20 years, and occasionally I say to the teacher next door to me (we came the same year), "Man, we have seen a lot."  And, as is becoming the pattern, most of the things we have seen were things we weren't prepared for.  We've been part of new building projects, hiring new people, taught subjects we've ever taught before (algebra, health, and video editing were not in my mind ever), and growing our programs.  We've guided students through grief while dealing with our own.  We've put out fires (both metaphorical and literal).  We've learned to teach in new ways year after year, written textbooks, made videos, adapted to schedule changes, collaborated with other teachers, and dealt with three accreditation cycles.  When I imagined my teaching career as a college student, I pictured planning and teaching lessons and grading tests.  The rest of that wasn't something I had even considered.

As I distribute my 18th and final yearbook on Friday, I look back and can't quite imagine that there have been 18 of them.  Part of me still feels like I am new to the job and don't know what I'm doing.  When I took a job teaching science at GRACE 20 years ago, I could not have envisioned that one day, I'd be carting around 1280 pounds of books.  I'm getting ahead of myself because that is next week's post, so I'll stop now.

My point is this.  It's a good thing we don't know what is coming.  We would believe it wasn't possible to do things we've never done before and have trouble even imagining.  But afterward, we can look back on it and say, "We did what?" and "Yes, we did that."

They Neither Protected Nor Served - The Uvalde Report

I had not planned to write about school shootings today.  In general, I try to stay away from the topic, except for the one post following the Parkland shooting.  I would have rather written about anything else.  I would have loved to have written about something nerdy, like working memory, or something lovely, like GRACE's 16th annual Play 4 Kay event.  But earlier this week, the DOJ issued its report on the response to Uvalde, and it was worse than we already knew it was.  

I have been a teacher for 25 years, beginning with the fall after Columbine.  I have been heartbroken by the deaths of children, confused by the complicated motivations, in charge of classrooms during code red drills and code yellow events, and bothered by the lack of response from our public servants.  But no single event has outraged me more than the massacre at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.  After the report came out this week, I expressed this on Twitter, referencing the horrifying story of the girl who put her friend's blood on her own face so the gunman would believe she had already been shot.

At the time of this writing, this tweet has been "liked" over 1300 times.  I'm not telling you this because I care about online attention, but because my tweets generally don't result in more than 20 or so likes.  This story obviously strikes a nerve with a lot of people.  Considering how many school violence events there have been, why this one?  Why does this one feel different?  I won't try to speak for everyone, but for me, it is because the people we rely on to make these situations less awful made it more horrifying instead.

In Parkland, there was only one security officer who failed to do his duty.  He went out of the building instead of into it, but you could make the case that it was one man who didn't deserve to have the job and that someone else might have made the difference.  After all, Second Amendment zealots always assert that "the best way to stop a bad guy with a gun is to have a good guy with a gun on site."  The armed officer at Parkland didn't stop the incident, so maybe he wasn't a "good guy with a gun" but rather a cowardly guy with a gun.  

Uvalde is different.  There were 376 members of law enforcement in the halls of the school, about a dozen of them in less than 3 minutes from the gunman's entry.  But instead of responding to it as an active shooter scenario and entering the room to stop the shooter, they treated it as a "barricaded subject."  Although they could hear gunshots (active shooter), they approached the situation like a bank robber holding hostages.  They ignored the gunshots, the screaming of children, and the pleas of desperate parents for 77 minutes.  For forty of those minutes, they looked for a key to the adjacent classroom.  I've been in schools long enough to tell you that the classroom was almost certainly not locked and that multiple adults in the building had keys, so there was no reason for that kind of delay.  Unable to decide who was in charge, they stood in the hallway talking for over an hour.  

For the first day or two after the incident at Robb Elementary, there was a story going around that a teacher had propped open a door to the school and that this was the way the gunman gained entry to the school.  Then, they said it wasn't propped open when he entered but that it had been earlier.  Then they said it was closed but unlocked.  The report isn't clear on why these stories all conflicted.  But for me, and I speak only for me, when the bodycam footage was released, it was clear that this was an early attempt to divert attention from the inaction of the police and to blame the school for lax security measures.  Make the school look bad first, get that story on FOX News, and let those who already disrespect teachers blame them.  It may have worked for some, but the report makes it clear that this tragedy was made far worse by the inaction of the police and not the educators.

I respect those who choose careers in law enforcement precisely because they choose jobs that put their lives at risk.  They go to work every day, knowing they are armed for a reason and that there is a chance they won't come home.  When fourth graders are in danger, it is not their job to figure out how to protect themselves.  That's the job of those who chose to "protect and serve" the community.  The police in Uvalde were from all levels of enforcement, and they chose to protect themselves, not the children.  I think often of what it must have been like for the children huddled in those classrooms, hearing the police in the hall, believing they would soon come in to help.  What kind of therapy is it going to take for survivors to recognize that those who were charged with helping didn't help, for over an hour?  What was it like to know that the NRA held a convention the next week in nearby Houston?  Did they hear people say their rights are more important than the lives of kids, including their own governor and senator?

I think a lot about the girl who put her friend's blood on her face.  First of all, I respect that a fourth grader had that level of insight.  Surely, no one had told her to do this, so it was a pretty genius thought to have during such a high-stress moment.  Second, as I said in the tweet, I think about how she protected herself because the police weren't protecting her.  But mostly, I wonder about the lifelong PTSD she will certainly have and hope she is getting the help she needs.  

And that leads me to wonder whether we will have a generation of kids with PTSD.  At this point, there are very few kids in America who haven't experienced some level of threat.  Some were at a shopping center when shots rang out or sat through a lockdown of their classroom.  Others have friends or family members who experienced violence in their homes or schools.  After these incidents, we talk a lot about the dead and injured (as we should), but it may be time to expand our definition of injured beyond those whose bodies were invaded by bullets.  The long-term damage will be to mental health.  There is not one member of the Uvalde community who isn't in need of care.  (Add Parkland, Nashville, Sandy Hook, Columbine, the Aurora movie theater, the Charleston church, the Pulse nightclub, the Buffalo grocery store, and the rest of the survivors of what is rapidly becoming countless events.)  While I would rather prevent these events from occurring, we may have to face the fact that it won't happen because there isn't the political will to do so.  While I would prefer a proper response from the police when these incidents occur, Parkland and Uvalde show us there is no guarantee that will happen.  

So, at the bare minimum, can we invest in mental health responses for those who survive?  If they can't protect them, can they at least be served?

  

Adapting When the Plan is Interrupted - Focus on the Goal

Friday, I was psyched about the playlist I was going to use as I subbed for Jay's indoor cycle class.  It was as close as I would be subbing to Juneteenth, so I had constructed the class around Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, Tina Turner, Otis Redding, Della Reese, Jon Batiste, Fantasia Barrino, even Della Reese and Bobby McFerrin.  I always play some music at a low level while people are arriving, but I didn't know until a few minutes before the start of class that I couldn't make the volume go any higher.  (Coincidentally, one of the pieces of feedback I got after last week's observation was that I should make the music louder, and here I was unable to do so.). I tried a few trouble shooting ideas, but none of them worked.  I attempted to change to a portable speaker, but I didn't have the right cord to connect with my iPod (yes, I still use one).  I started class and apologized for how quiet it would be.  One of the directors came in a few minutes later to attempt to fix the system, but she couldn't make it work either.  A person entered with a cord for the portable player.  It did make it louder, but there was some kind of glitch in it that wouldn't allow it to play the vocal track.  I kept going with the class while attempting to make things better with the music.  Thankfully, the members of the class were very patient, and we all got a good workout (but I was bummed that my great playlist wasn't be heard - I'll definitely use it another time).  

Throughout the class, I remembered several of the questions Julie had asked me when she interviewed me for the job. "What experience do you have with adapting to things when they don't go according to plan?  How do you adapt?"  As with most questions, my teaching experience had a lot to inform the answer.  Things interrupt the plan all the time in the classroom.  It turns out that students don't have the prerequisite knowledge they need to understand today's lesson.  The fire alarm goes off while you are in the middle of a critical problem, or worse, mid-lab experiment.  A spider crawls across someone's desk (if you aren't an educator, trust me, this VERY much interferes with whatever plan you have for the day).  My answer to Julie when she asked was that I stayed focused on the goal, not the method for achieving it.  That's definitely what I had to do on Friday, but it was not the first time, and I'm sure it won't be the last.  

Students need to see that the goal is what matters.  It's okay to get a little flummoxed while you figure out how to shift gears when the video won't play or internet is down when you had a great digital activity planned, but you shouldn't spend the whole period on it.  You should ask yourself what the learning goal of that experience was.  Can you accomplish it through direct instruction even if you didn't plan to?  Can you teach tomorrow's lesson today and hope the internet will be back in strength tomorrow?  Can students work on a project today so you have time to try to make the video work for tomorrow?  Moving the learning forward is the main goal, not the ideal order or method you had planned.  

In addition to students seeing that the goal matters, they will see that setbacks don't have to be fatal.  In his new book, Uprise, Kevin Washburn talks about having A and B goals.  The A goal is what you want to achieve if everything goes as planned, but the B goal should be your definition of success if conditions are not ideal.  If you model this for students, they will benefit on something larger than the academic level.  They will see resilience, a characteristic they will very much need "in real life," as they say.  And people do notice.  Young or old, students notice the teacher's response to things.  On Friday, one of the senior gentlemen in the room came up to me afterward and said he liked that I maintained a good attitude and wanted to know when I would be teaching again.  Teenagers will notice too.  

Good Problem Solving Takes Time

 This week, I went through the problem-solving steps required for credit with my physics class.  They're nothing special; I'm sure math and science teachers all over the world have similar requirements.  Identify your knowns (with units).  Identify unknown.  Write the equation you will use.  Apply the equation by substituting the variables.  Do the math and box your answer.  

While this method is not earth-shattering, is certainly not the only valid approach (just the one required in my class), and is meant only for having an organization system for solving math problems, I had a realization while teaching it to them.  It's a model for solving all kinds of problems.  If we zoom out from the specifics of math, what this method actually boils down to is this.

1.  Identify the information you have that is relevant to the problem at hand.

2.  Ask "What do I need to know to solve this problem?"

3.  Examine the tools you have available and choose the one that best fits.

4.  Apply the tool to the problem and analyze the results.  

We would arrive at better solutions to problems if we approached solving problems in this manner.  The problem is, we don't have the patience for it.  We want instant solutions.  Take a look at social media after a mass shooting, a weather disaster, or any tragedy.  Within minutes of the event, there are many posts with assertions of the solution.  Setting aside that the problem they are trying to address is large and complex and has no easy solution, these people have put five full seconds of thought into it before picking up their phone; so they clearly know what they are talking about.  

Smartphones have made us less patient than any other invention.  Answers to questions are instantaneous as long as Siri knows the answer.  We can get what we need from Amazon in two days (or, in some places, two hours) without having to bother with going to the store.  I find myself getting impatient with the microwave because it is taking 3 minutes and 33 seconds (It's a quirk of mine to put in all the same numbers, don't worry about it) to cook something that would have taken an hour to cook in the oven fifty years ago or hours to cook over a fire one hundred years ago.  We don't want to wait for anything.  How much less patience do we have when we have an actual problem?  

Here's the deal, though.  The solution that immediately springs to mind is rarely the right one.  It usually leaves out some of the information we need to properly deal with the issue at hand.  It may neglect a good tool simply because we didn't take the time to think about the tools we have.  Using the wrong tool or neglecting relevant details can not only be ineffective but dangerous.  If I had a flat tire, I couldn't just grab the nearest tool, which would likely be a hammer or a screwdriver.

This tendency we have to impatiently jump to conclusions is precisely why we have grown impatient with science during the COVID-19 crisis.  We want to just grab the nearest bottle of pills and hope it works, but that's not science.  If it did work, it would be because we got lucky, not because we found a real solution.  This morning, the President tweeted that the CDC was making participating in a trial too difficult (and, as is his practice, made it about himself).  I don't expect him to understand the nuances of clinical trials and the details of how people qualify for them because non-scientists don't spend time thinking about these things, but I do expect him to know why scientific protocols exist.  Not following those protocols could lead to an ineffective vaccine, or worse, a treatment that causes more problems than it solves.  Individual human bodies are complex, and groups of humans are even more so.  This is why science takes time.  During the AIDS epidemic of the 80s and 90s, activists widely criticized Dr. Fauci for moving too slowly while their people were dying.  He knew that doing it right had to be more important than doing it fast, and he eventually won them over.  A diagnosis of HIV is no longer the death sentence it was then because scientists took the time to look for real solutions rather than jumping to conclusions.  

If you are facing a problem (or your students are), take the time to solve the problem rather than instinctively throw ideas at it.    

The Game is Not Over

Monday afternoon I went to photograph our middle school basketball teams at a home game.  I did what I often do when there are back to back games.  I got there for the second half of the girls game and stayed through the first half of the boys game.  At half time of the boys game, I often decide whether or not I will stay based on the score.  If we are really far ahead or behind, I usually make the decision to go home and eat dinner.  When I left this game, we were far enough behind that I believed I wouldn't miss any dramatic moments.

I was wrong.

The next morning, I see a video posted on Twitter from the last seconds of the game.  During the last few minutes, our boys had mounted a comeback and achieved a 42-42 tie.  In the last second, this seventh grader, figuring there was nothing to lose by shooting chucked the ball from almost half a court away.  In the video, it doesn't even look like the ball is heading in the right direction until - swish - it dropped right in the basket.  The place went nuts.  Our varsity team was there to see it.  The kid was a hero.  It was simply an amazing moment.  I missed it because I thought I knew what was going to happen.

We all experience situations in our lives in which we believe we know what is going to happen. If we envision a negative result, we sometimes give up.  It is certainly easier to quit a job that stick with one through a difficult time.  It seems easier to quit a relationship that is going through a difficult time than it would be to see it through.  The problem with that logic is that when you bail out, you never experience the comeback.

If our boys had gone into the locker room at half time and taken a vote to go home because they were losing, it certainly would have been easier.  They would have gone home, had dinner, listened to their moms tell them that they were special anyway.  It would have been easier, but it would not have been better.  There would be no video on Twitter.  There would been no crowd cheering.  There would have been no hero moment.  There isn't a hero until a situation arises that requires a hero.

Instead, those boys went into the locker room and decided to turn things around.  This wasn't easy.  They had to overcome the momentum already established by the other team.  They had to increase their defense and their offense at the same time.  They had to overcome their own psychology from being behind the first half.  The kid who made that last shot knew it might not go in, and he had to be okay with that.  None of this was easy.  

Recognizing that the game is not over is an important life skill.  Starting the year with a bad grade doesn't mean you will end the year with one.  Starting the year with a badly behaved class doesn't mean you have give up and keep it that way.  Turning it around isn't easy, but it is the only way to win.  Nothing worth having is easy.

It Seemed Like A Good Idea at the Time

I was walking down the hall when a student pulled out a piece of paper.  I wasn't trying to read over his shoulder, but I couldn't avoid seeing the paper.  I do not know what it said.  All I saw was that it was in the form of a letter and had about fifteen signatures at the bottom.  I said to him, "that looks petition-like to me."  He said that he guessed it kind of was.  I said, "Just so you know, petitions aren't usually accepted well by anyone, except maybe the government."  At that point, someone joined us, and I was never able to finish talking to him.  However, I have a similar conversation with a student about once a year. 

I used to teach in Oklahoma.  Because of that I still have a number of teacher friends there.  You may have seen on the news that their teachers' union has recommended a walkout, starting April 2.  I keep getting invited to the facebook page.  Since I don't believe in strikes and have refused to join the union in both states I taught public school in, they don't really want me to join this group. 

After the Parkland shooting a month ago, students in various districts have planned walkouts in an effort to get the attention of lawmakers concerning gun laws.  It is unlikely that this would change the vote of any lawmaker, but they make the news because students walking out of class to march in the streets is good TV.

The problem with all of these methods is that they put the recipient on the defensive.  In the conversations I have had with students about various petitions over the years, the conversation has always gone something like, "when they see how many of us agree, they have to give in."  Setting aside the language of "they have to" for the larger point, I try to get them to see why that doesn't work.  Put yourself in the position of the person receiving this letter.  No matter how respectfully it is written or presented, the moment someone opens a letter and sees multiple signatures, they feel ganged up on.  The brain perceives this as threatening and responds with the fight or flight instinct.  You have automatically turned off the rational and listening parts of their brain as it is flooded with adrenaline, undermining your ability to get what you want.  You accomplish the opposite of what you were trying to do. 

The same is true of the teacher and student walkouts and all strikes in general.  At the time, it seems like a good way to get the attention of the powers that be.  Again, I say imagine you are one of them.  When management sees you walk off your job to make a point, the danger part of their brain goes into high gear, imagining angry mobs with torches and pitchforks.  It doesn't "get their attention" in the way you hope.  The attention turns to self-protective measures, which involve digging in their heels, not meeting you even half-way.

I am not criticizing the students who make these petitions because I know that it seems like a good idea to them at the time.  I know that it is far less scary than sitting down with people above them and having a conversation one on one, and it doesn't seem disrespectful.  I am not criticizing those teachers who have been brought to this point.  I have read the posts of so many of them that feel this is the only action they have left.  I disagree with them, but I don't believe any of them are ill-intended.  That doesn't mean it is going to work.

Getting a lot of signatures seems good at the time because our signature is hidden among the others, so we feel secure in the number.  Walking out feels good in the moment.  The rush of dopamine we get makes us feel a power we do not actually possess, especially when there are others with us.  When we get tv coverage of our protest, it makes us feel like we have the world on our side until we go online and find that half of the people are not.  Those feelings of the moment are as temporary as the "love" people find on The Bachelor.  It feels real in the moment, but we must think beyond the moment.

Actual change requires people to make decisions using the rational parts of their brains.  That requires calm discourse, the ability to listen to facts and persuasive arguments, and the time to take substantive action.  Next time, something seems like a good idea, pause for a moment of empathy.  Imagine you were on the opposite side.  How would you receive the action you are about to take?  Chances are you would wish people would approach you individually, calmly, and rationally.  Try that first.

Your Viewing Angle Matters

Have you ever been in the passenger's seat of a car and looked over at the speedometer?  If so, you probably thought the driver was going a lot faster than they actually were.  This is because of something scientists call parallax error.  

You may have learned about this in your high school chemistry class because it influences how you take measurements in the lab.  Take note of the differences in the reading of this volume.  Depending on the location of your eye, you will read the measurement as higher or lower than it actually is, so students are instructed to get down at a level where their eyes will be perpendicular to the meniscus (for those who don't remember, that's the bottom of the curve).

Don't worry. I'm leading up to a point here, not just teaching you about parallax.  The point is that things look different depending on your point of view.  It's why we say things like, "The grass is always greener on the other side."  That is true both in the metaphorical way it is used (someone else's life looks easier than ours because we don't have their responsibilities) and in the literal sense (looking down at the grass under you means you can see the dirt between the blade, which you don't see when looking at your neighbor's grass).  We are rarely seeing reality exactly the way it is; we are seeing our interpretation of reality from our own perspective.

Acknowledging this in our lives would change a number of things.  I'm going to talk about a few of them here as they have come to my mind recently, but you might think of more.  

Do you have a massively different reaction to a news event than your co-worker?  It could be that the reason for your differences is the difference in your life.  Your black co-worker may have a different reaction to a story of an officer-involved shooting, having just had "the talk" with their son than you do if you have a brother on the force.  Your viewing angle matters.  When your teenage child massively overreacts (at least you think it is a massive overreaction) to your advice to study for his upcoming test, it could be that his view of how much he needs to study for this is different than yours.  In some ways, he has more information informing his view than you do because he is in class and knows how much review he has had and has heard advice from his teacher that you haven't heard.  From your point of view, however, teenagers usually underestimate their need for study, but he doesn't have the experience to know that.  Your neighbor who lost his job at the steel mill is likely to vote differently than the public school teacher across the street.  I am not saying that the truth is always somewhere in the middle; sometimes one person is actually right while the other is wrong.  What I am saying is that recognizing a difference in perspective might help you understand the other person better rather than thinking they are evil or crazy.

People have a tendency to judge the decisions made by others based only on how it affects us and using only the information available to us.  I've seen this a ton in education.  It is easy for me as a science teacher to think only from that perspective and not recognize the needs of the art department.  I have often said that my primary role in department chair meetings is to say, "It doesn't work that way in math and science."  There's a good reason that we have the input of someone from every department, or foreign language might not get what they need for their students.  The same thing applies to how we view decisions made by administrators.  It's so easy for teachers to criticize their admins (and I know that in some schools, there is good reason to), but I also know that I don't have all of the information they do.  If I did, perhaps I would make the same decision.  They have to live in the tension of parent complaints and teacher needs.  They have to deal with issues that affect the entire school while I can be hyperfocused on my own classroom.  We aren't at odds, but we do have different perspectives.  And, I will say this now and for the rest of my life.  I have zero desire to ever be in their position.  Knowing this doesn't mean I always agree with their decisions, but it does help me view the decision more kindly.

The ultimate difference in perspective is that of human beings, a limited and finite perspective, to that of God, Who is unlimited and infinite.  I saw this image on of embroidery on Twitter recently.  When people see needlework, they obviously focus on the front, the intended pattern.  In fact, if you look at embroidered clothing, the back is usually covered with a piece of backing fabric.  The purpose of that fabric is to keep the threads from unraveling, but they also prevent us from seeing the messy side of needlework.  The same is true of how God works events in our lives.  For us, they seem disjointed and messy because we are looking at it from this side of eternity, one stitch at a time.  We see the knots and the untied ends, but God knows the pattern He is weaving.  When Romans says that He "works all things together for good," it is because he can see the whole while we see individual parts.   Job didn't know what was going on when horrible events happened to him, but God knew what his life would mean.   This is why the Bible tells us "Do not lean on your own understanding."  I'm not saying this is easy; I've probably never battled a verse more than that one.  But I do often remind myself that the problem is with my perspective.

Educators, remember that your perspective is different from your students.  Don't trade in your professional judgment to twelve-year-olds, but allow yourself to understand them better.  Remember that your perspective is different from that of parents.  You have an educational goal, but that is only one of the goals in their home.  That doesn't mean you have to give up your goals; it means you understand that there is a difference of viewpoint.  Cut your administrators some slack, recognizing that you view the school from a different angle than they do, changing your interpretation of things.  Remember that changes in your life that seem bad now will become part of a larger pattern, which only God knows fully.  This will prevent you from falling victim to parallax error.

Teachers Just Keep Going

This has been a tough week.  For everyone.  

Voters on both sides have been refreshing the electoral map online over and over.  Vote counters have been doing their job round the clock with more scrutiny than ever before.  Reporters have spoken hundreds of thousands of words every night for four nights, knowing that if they misspeak even one of them, they will be raked over the coals by half of the public.  Stephen Colbert broke down for a few seconds during his monologue Thursday night because the President's assertions of fraud, which predictable, were unexpectedly heartbreaking. No matter which side you are on, this is exhausting.

You know what I did this week?  I taught 8th-grade students about the evidence for chemical reactions and how to interpret their equations.   I reviewed for and gave a physics test to juniors and seniors.  On Friday, my physics students gathered outside while my teacher friend and I threw egg drop projects from a 26-foot lift.  I reminded my yearbook staffers of the deadline we have coming and guided them through the things that needed to be done.  I took photos of elementary school students and electives.  I graded papers and helped students with homework questions and had exactly the week I would have had if it had not been election week.

This isn't the first difficult week I or any other teacher has had.  I have taught through a shooting threat.  I was teaching on 9/11.  I have taught through heartbreak.  I have taught through the illnesses and deaths of colleagues and students.  And, oh yeah, I have taught through a global pandemic.  Teachers keep going through hard weeks because the work must be done.  Education trainer Todd Whitaker says, "The best part of teaching is that it matters. The hardest part of teaching is that it matters everyday."  

Of course, teaching is not the only profession in which people must keep going no matter what.  Doctors and nurses have had a long year.  Police officers can't decide not to respond to a call when they've had a tough week.  The one thing that is different about teachers is that EVERY thing we do EVERY day is being observed by young eyes.  They look to us when there are tough weeks to see how we are dealing with it.  When they see us keep going, I hope that they become adults who persevere.  

Now, for my own sanity, I'm going to take a one week social media break.  I'll see you next Sunday.  

Teaching - Be Ready for All the Feelings

This weekend, I had a teacher high moment.  I got the privilege of attending the wedding of a former student.  It's not the first I've had the pleasure of attending, and I know it won't be the last.  I smiled, cried, laughed, and got to feel pride for her and her sister and bridesmaids (also mine).  I got to talk with several former students about what they are up to now, and it was lovely.

There are definitely teacher high moments like these, but there are also others, some good, some bad, some truly horrible, and some that defy description.  Some days bring the highest highs, like those that come from a student making you enormously proud.  Some push you into a deep hole, which you were not trained for handling.  I have experienced a range that includes the funerals of students and a shooting threat along with the joy of teaching alongside one of my students and supporting their ministries.  Every day brings with it a range of emotions, from hope to disappointment, amusement to irritation, joy to sadness.

If you are considering education as a career, here's the thing you need to know.  Be ready.  Be ready to have all of the feelings.  There are days you will love your kids like crazy.  There are days you will wish "that one" was absent.  You will be proud of the kid who fights hard to squeak by with a D and disappointed by the A student you catch cheating on a test.  No day is either purely good or purely bad.  You may hear, "I hate you" and "I love you" on the same day (and sometimes in response to the same event).  No year is either purely good or purely bad.  The events of last year were terrible, but the students were amazing.  You will laugh so hard that tears run down your face, and you will cry so hard that you finally start laughing with hysteria.  You will get angry, and you will feel pride - sometimes with the same child.  You will go home exhausted and wake up energized.  People will not understand what you do or how you feel, and that will both bother you and make you a little bit proud.

If you choose this career, I can guarantee one thing.  You will not ever be bored, so get ready.

Royal Family Kids 2019

"What kind of camp is it?" people ask.   The simple answer is what I usually give.  "It's a camp for foster children."  While true, it is a gross oversimplification of Royal Family Kids.  When I get home, they say, "How did it go?"  Again, the simple answer of "great" is not fully accurate.  It takes a while to recover from camp enough to really reflect on it, so now that I have had three nights' sleep, I might be ready.

What is Royal Family Kids Camp?  In 1985, Wayne and Diane Tesch started a week-long camp in the California mountains to give kids who had been abused or neglected a week away to enjoy what all kids should have the chance to enjoy, just being kids.  The goal was to create "moments that matter" and to give kids positive childhood memories.  In 1990, they decided to take the camp they had developed and make it a nationwide ministry.  As of this summer, RFK camps exist in forty-three states in America and seven countries.

To a casual observer, I don't think Royal Family would look much different than most Christian camps.  Other than noticing that there are a lot of adults, they would see kids playing games, shooting arrows, swimming, riding horses, learning Bible stories, having tea parties, building things from wood, and a myriad of other camp things. 

Even if the observer were to get a little closer, they might not know that this camp was designed specifically around the needs of abused kids.  They would hear counselors encouraging their campers to keep trying and praising their efforts at everything they do.  They would see lots of food and hear mealtime conversations in which kids are asked, "What's your favorite things we do at camp?"  They might note that the Bible stories are about unlikely heroes (David, Esther, Joseph), but they probably wouldn't put together why those stories were chosen. 

The truth is a person has to be part of Royal Family Kids camp to really get it.  When we attend training, we learn why we play games in which there is a goal to be reached but not ones in which one camper wins over another.  We want these kids to experience the joy of achieving a goal without feeling that another must experience a loss for that to be meaningful.  Mealtimes are times in which campers are served and allowed to have all they want to eat.  If a kid wants a salad that consists of nothing but croutons and bacon, the staff will happily make that salad.  There is no shortage of food for any camper.  The Bible stories are, in fact, stories of unlikely heroes.  Joseph's story, in particular, is one our campers can relate to as he came from a dysfunctional family and was abused and neglected by his brothers.  These stories are chosen with great purpose.  RFK wants their campers to see that God uses the small and the broken to accomplish His plans.  During our training times, we are taught how to view misbehavior as an expression of unmet needs and how to address and correct that behavior in a positive and relationship-building way rather than striving for simple compliance.  Because we know that some of our kids have a negative history with photographs, they are told up front who will be allowed to take their picture.  We make sure to get shots of siblings together because some of them only see each other during this one week of the year.  Every moment is thought about carefully with the core values of RFK in mind.  It is the intentionality of planning around the specific needs of kids from hard places and difficult pasts that make Royal Family different from other camps. 

This year was my 12th with Royal Family.  I have served in both of the North Carolina camps.  I have been a counselor and an assistant to the photographer.  Now, I am a co-photographer and video maker.  I have seen kids experience one week have an impact on their lives, and I have had the honor of seeing kids go through all seven years and leave us different people at the age of 12 than they were when they started with us at 6 years old.  You can see why "It's a camp for foster children" just isn't enough of an explanation.

I can't imagine July without this experience.  I'm not saying it is easy.  Counselors are emotionally present 23 hours a day, and some of the kids are prone to resist that investment.  That can leave you wrecked by Friday afternoon.  Activity assistants are constantly on the move.  They are either setting up an activity or putting it away or helping at the pool or rescuing a weary counselor or cleaning the cafeteria or trying to remember who wants half of a carrot on their salad (I cannot overstate the strangeness of the salad situation).  They must be physically spent by the night time, but for an hour each night, they cover at bedtime so the counselor can have one hour with adults.  The photographers are constantly on the move, trying to capture each camper's experience in a book of photos they receive on Friday.  I'm not certain the directors ever sleep at all.  When I say, "The week went great," I am telling the truth.  It's just that great also means difficult, meaningful, exhausting, fun, emotional, and a lot of other things that the word "great" just doesn't encapsulate - unless you were there.

Each year, after I post my camp blog, someone on social media asks how they can participate.  The truth is everyone can participate in some way.  You may not be physically able to attend, but we have people who make blankets, people who pray for each camper by name, people who donate items for birthday bags, and people who donate money.  Since I don't know where you might be when you read this, I am posting the link to the national site.  It is https://rfk.org/

However, if you live in or near Raleigh, NC and want to be a part of our camp specifically, let me know.  I'll connect you with our directors. 

The Beauty of Aiming High and Missing

In my physics class, we have a project called "The Free Choice Project."  I started doing this in both chemistry and physics twelve years ago in order to give students who felt constrained by rubrics a way to explore what they wanted to in as much or as little depth as they want.  I give them two months to work on it, so they know I am not looking for something basic (unless it is in chemistry, and the project on the pH scale).

Students are allowed to choose as much as possible.  They can decide to work alone or in a group of four or fewer.  They can decide what topic they want as long as it can be focused on the subject we are in.  It can be a broad survey of the entire topic (food preservation methods) or a deep examination of the one small aspect of the topic (how microwaves can be focused and fired at objects using a homemade Herff gun).  The only true requirements are that the presentation is at least 15 minutes (never a problem) and they have some type of demonstration with the project. The demonstrations should be live if possible, but a video is allowable if the topic is too dangerous (e.g. rifle recoil) or inappropriate to bring to school (e.g. an elephant pooping).  I give them weekly checkpoints in which they can keep me updated on their progress.  Given that the presentations take up two weeks of my class time, I care deeply about these projects.  The kids know that and almost always step up with great things.  I learn a lot from their presentations.

Sometimes, a group gets really ambitious.  A few years ago, I had a group make thermite (after their dads agreed to supervise all experiments).  I've had students make their own ice cream using liquid nitrogen.  One of my favorites was the chemistry of art, in which students explored painting restoration and the chemistry of the color change that happens to glaze in the kiln. 

After 12 years of assigning this project, there are some topics I know I will get, like the chemistry of fireworks and the physics of sports.  Every year, however, I get at least one topic I've never had before.  This year, there were two, and they were definitely ambitious.  One young man asked to make a rail gun, and one group asked if they could build a functioning BB8.  I believe in saying yes as often as I can so that my no will actually mean something.  I mean, I told the group that wanted to do the physics of pooping that they could as long as they were studious about it and no human beings were involved in the demonstration.  I only really say no to things that cannot be made safe with reasonable precautions.  These two sound amazing, even if they were more ambitious than all the other groups. 

BB8 - The group that tried to build BB8 worked a lot.  They kept our 3D printer running for quite some time.  They researched all of the components that make it work: momentum, motors, and magnetism.  They asked advice from science teachers, IT people, and the art teacher about what materials would hold up in the rolling section.  Eventually, they decided that they just could not find the right materials, and they backed away.  Their project was still on momentum, motors, and magnetism, but they demonstrated them differently.

Rail Gun - If you don't know what a rail gun is, click here.  It's not really a gun, except it kind of is.  It uses electromagnetic energy rather than explosives to launch projectiles.  The young man who made this apparatus spent over one hundred hours in research and building, purchased hundreds of dollars worth of supplies and equipment, reached out to unwilling electrical engineering professors, found assistance from a mechanical engineering student, and spent weeks troubleshooting.  He also communicated with me at all times about issues he was having and whether or not the demonstration was going to occur.  While he ultimately could not get it to launch, he videoed his trials and presented how it should work and also why it didn't. 

Here's the beautiful part.  Because of all the difficulties, he learned more physics than anyone in my class.  Troubleshooting forces you to analyze aspects of engineering and design that would never have come up if things worked the way they were supposed to from the start.  He will remember this experience and what he learned from it far longer than someone who likes basketball and learns how Newton's laws of motion apply to shooting.  There's nothing wrong with the level of learning they had, but they don't have the depth of learning that comes from the more ambitious project, even one that ultimately "failed."

Every time a student has ever tried a project that was this ambitious, they ask if I am okay with it.  Umm, of course, I am.  The line I use with them is, "I'd much rather you aim high and miss than aim low and hit the target."  School should be the time in which we challenge ourselves and let it be okay if we don't quite get there.  Students fear that the teacher will mark them low for failing to accomplish their goal, but they don't understand that, like a figure skater or gymnast or diver in the Olympics, you are going to start from a higher base score due to your level of difficulty.  Do big things.  You'll be glad you did.

Standards AND Compassion

For some reason, I was thinking about college today.  I was thinking about an argument I had with a woman in my Educational Psychology class.  The professor had been talking about different types of learners  and the stuff that kids had on their minds while trying to learn.  She had been talking about modifications.  She had been talking about including multicultural stuff in lessons.  I was losing my mind until I just couldn't take it anymore without raising my hand.  "When are we supposed to teach them science and math and stuff?" I asked.  "How is physics different if a student is from another country?"

Now, before you unfriend me, listen.  I was 19.  I had always been a driven student.  I had chosen education because I loved physics and wanted to help other people love physics.  In my mind, all of this focus on the "other stuff" seemed to have nothing to do with the reasons I had majored in this.   It seemed like coddling students and lowering standards.  Another student in the class, a mom of about 50, started talking to me about her child and the problems she had learning.  At that point, I couldn't hear mitigating factors because my own mind was already locked in on the point I was making.  We were supposed to teach them a certain number of things, and all this stuff was going to interfere with it.  We left class that day with me thinking she cared nothing about learning and her thinking I cared nothing about children.

We were both wrong, but we were both locked into one argument at that point.  I was an idealist, and she was a mother, and neither of use was able to see ANYTHING from the other person's point of view.  We both went home (me to the dorm and her to her child) to people who affirmed only our own point of view.  My friends completely agreed with my assessment that I could teach you standards without caring how you feel about them, and her kids completely agreed that she should drop teaching material whenever a student felt a feeling.  We both seemed to think that a teacher can care about standards OR compassion, but not both.  We were both wrong.

I have now been teaching for eighteen years, and I am a bit more realistic than I used to be.  I am also more committed to high standards than I ever was in school.  Here are some reasons why.

First, I took a class in the Education of Exceptional Individuals, taught by a teacher with only one arm.  She gave me a perspective on physical disabilities that I had never had, but she also opened my eyes to the frustration and tension that a student with learning differences could feel.  She never encouraged us to lower our expectations, only to change our methods.  I would properly credit this professor if I could remember her name.  While I can't remember her name, I definitely remember what she taught me.

Second, I student taught.  All the arguments I had in classes were based in theory.  The luxury of theory is that it is always idealistic.  I learned that when I took applied thermodynamics.  Everything I had learned in the introductory class worked perfectly.  Then, I had to start dealing with real machines that had moving parts, subject to friction and entropy.  That changed things.  ORU places their education majors in two places of 7 weeks each with the hope that they will be exposed to two different environment.  I was in two very similar schools in the Tulsa area, both mostly white, mostly middle to high socioeconomic families, and both well known for being good schools.  My advisor was concerned that I wouldn't have varied exposure.  As it turned out, her concerns were not reality.  I could not have had two more different experiences.   I started in the class of Patrick Bell, a man who believed strongly in standards but had no compassion.  He played tricks on me, like hiding tests or making sure I was in the wrong place during a fire drill, in the name of teaching me about the real world.  He wouldn't allow students to touch his desk or use a different color pen than he wanted.  They learned physics and chemistry, but they also learned to be a little less human in the pursuit of knowledge.  My second placement was with Lisa Achterkirk, a very pregnant woman who taught basic skills physical science to students with IEP's.  She did not hold many academic standards as important, but she cared very deeply about her students and knew a lot about them.  Assessing what the kids had learned was the last thing on her priority list, but she made sure they enjoyed whatever science they learned.  This is really when I learned the dangers inherent in both extremes and discovered that my course would be plotted somewhere in the middle.

I have now taught for 18 years, and I have been with students during a lot of events.  I was in class during Columbine.  I was teaching on 9/11.  I have taught during a shooting threat.  I was in class the day after a student in our school died and the day they found out their favorite teacher had cancer.  I taught kids the day after their best friend was expelled.  I was teaching when we went to war in Iraq and during four presidential elections.  My students and I experienced the nearly fatal accident of a teacher at a pep rally together.  All of these things affect their learning.

Most importantly, I have now taught over a thousand kids.  They aren't theoretical like they were when I was 19.  They are flesh, mind, emotion, hormone, and spirit.  I have watched a student have a seizure in my class and had a student I couldn't wake up because of their medication.  I've taught freshman girls who had babies and boys who spent the weekend in jail.  I have been cussed at by students as many times as I have been hugged by them.  I have taught when my own heart was broken and when theirs were.

The reason my classmate and I were both wrong was the word OR.  We thought we could be either committed to standards OR filled with compassion.  We can live in the world of AND.  We can hold to standards AND have compassion.  The word compassion means "to suffer with."  When a student fails to live up to the standards of a test or project and they are upset about it, I can feel upset with them.  That doesn't mean that I turn around and give them an A they didn't earn.  It means that I tell them how upset I would be if I were them while I pat their back.  When a student is super-stressed because they have too many things on their plate, I can let them turn one assignment in tomorrow without lowering standards.  Keep your standards high AND feel the things your students are feeling.

Inconsistent Thoughts

Have you noticed how inconsistent people's beliefs are?  Maybe it is the result of people living pragmatically rather than out of religious conviction.  Perhaps it happened when we started treating political power as the ultimate end, so whatever means it took to get there became acceptable.  Maybe we just don't think enough about whether our opinions are consistent with our other opinions (most people don't reflect as much as they should).  I don't know if it was like this before since I didn't live before, but it bugs me.  Here are a few examples I have noticed in the past few years. 

Botox v. Vaccine - During the pandemic, all the armchair epidemiologists came out of the woodwork.  People looked at graphs they were not qualified to interpret and called it "doing their own research."  They insisted that people who followed recommendations were ignorant while they were informed.  When the vaccine came out, they insisted that it was putting "poison" in their bodies.  Meanwhile, many of those same people had been injecting actual poison in the form of botulinum toxin into their facial muscles for years.  Botox for the sake of vanity was fine; vaccines for the sake of protecting immunocompromised people were not.  They'll try to tell you these situations are different; but, in reality, it is just inconsistent thinking.

Pro-Life, Baby on Board v. Death Penalty - I've been pro-life for as long as I can remember, but I have to confess I was always weirded out by "Baby on Board" signs in cars when they were ubiquitous in the 80s and 90s.  I always wondered if there was an age at which I could drive recklessly without the worry of endangering the 14-year-old on board or the middle-aged adult in the car.  The new version of this is a yard sign that says, "Drive like your children live here."  I don't have children, so I guess it is fine if I just plow through the neighborhood at 90mph.  What really confuses me, though, is that the same people who protest abortion and caution you about driving are the quickest to advocate the execution of criminals or "turning Aghganistan into a parking lot."  Again, I don't know what age you have to be before the "human life is sacred" people (of which I am one) start thinking it is okay for the government to take lives.  I'm conflicted about the death penalty because of people like Timothy McVeigh, but I'm about an inch away from believing it should be abolished completely.  It should, at the very least, be used as little as possible.  But I don't understand the inconsistency of pro-life people celebrating the destruction of a human who bears the Imago Dei.

Gender Isn't Real v. Gender Reveal - If there is anything more annoying than gender reveals, I don't know what it is.  For no reason other than social media posts, we decided we couldn't just answer the question, "Do you know what you're having?" anymore.  Instead, we had to come up with a dramatic way to announce it to hundreds of people at once.  Yet, we live in a time when some are trying to convince us that gender doesn't exist.  Even weirder, these are often the same people.  People who believe gender is literally not a thing will still make their first question, "So, is it a boy or a girl?"  I always wonder if any parent says, "I don't know.  I guess we'll find out in a few years."  These are weirdly inconsistent positions.

Eliminating Grades v. What's In It For Me? If you aren't in education, you may not know how many weirdos on Twitter want to eliminate grades.  I'm sure they mean well; they want students to learn for the sake of learning without extrinsic motivation being necessary.  Yet, they teach students who regularly compete for prizes.  These same teachers tweet a lot about their own pay, so apparently they need some extrinsic motivation in their lives.  The other day, I saw an ad for an app called Healthy Wager.  Apparently, weight loss, feeling better, and living longer are not enough internal motivations to eat well and exercise, so this app incentivizes users with money.  We can have a real discussion about the over-emphasis on grades, but if you are going to talk about eliminating them completely, I'm going to ask you to be honest about your own motivations.

Teachers Have an Agenda v. Arming them - At the beginning of the pandemic, there was a lot of love for teachers.  Parents were having to deal with their kids during the day for the first time since they were toddlers, and they didn't like it.  When they imagined multiplying it by 30, they decided teachers were saints.  It didn't last long, though, and the whiplash was strong.  As teachers and students returned to school buildings, it became popular to accuse us of having an agenda.  Teachers have been accused of everything from teaching white supremacy through math to recruiting kids to be trans.  Laws have been passed to prevent teachers from having normal conversations with students, choosing books, and deciding our own grading policies.  Parents' organizations have demanded to see lesson plans in July (not curriculum mind you - lesson plans).  We are no longer the angels we were in the spring of 2020; we are untrustworthy agents of the state.  But pay attention next time there is a mass shooting in a school.  The same people who don't trust me to do the job for which I am trained, certified, and experienced will immediately advocate that I be armed, something for which I am not remotely prepared or inclined to do.

This blog is supposed to be about education, so here's the connection.  Cognitive dissonance causes anxiety.  We talk a lot about student anxiety, but this fact is never addressed.  Helping them resolve their thoughts can only be good for them.  When students say things that reveal inconsistent thoughts, call them on it.  When they say that everyone should accept themselves just the way they are while also talking about New Year's resolutions, ask them whether they think that is consistent.  When they insist on fairness for themselves and not others, ask them what fairness looks like and guide them to recognize fairness isn't fair if it doesn't include the people they don't like.  Model consistent thinking in front of them, and own it when you have been inconsistent.  They won't recognize it for themselves.  They need us to guide them.