Tinkerings

For those who follow me on Twitter and Facebook, you know I had quite an experience today trying to get my car to the Cadillac dealer 8 miles from our hotel.  It took me 3 hours to get there and back.  I decided then that there was not enough money in the federal repository to pay me to live in the DC area.  I know, I know, I’ve just offended a few friends who love it here, but rush hour on the highway, on the streets, and on the metro is not the way to win people over and get them to move here.

The metro ride back seemed to take forever. For about half the trip, we were packed into the train cars like so many sardines packed side by side in a tin can.  There are few smells that can turn one’s stomach faster than the smell of a metro car during rush hour with all those arms held high trying to hold onto railings and stop ourselves from falling into one another.

On an ordinary day, I would have been upset by it all.  I would have spent the day frowning, getting upset with people stepping on me and bumping into me.  I was quite put out by the whole “take the car to the dealer” thing anyway.

But today was not an ordinary day.  Today I was wearing my Discovery DEN shirt.  Today I was a brand, not a person.  Today I smiled.  I offered people more room if I could afford it.  I told them it was okay if they stepped on my foot (after all, I have another one).  I spoke politely to people.  I even hummed a little on the train (OK, I was humming the most depressing song I know, but humming is still good, right?).

Why did I act differently?  The power of a brand.  Today, I was a representative of something I love…the Discovery Educator Network.  Today, I was the only face these people might ever associate with our group.  Today I was the Network.

And it made a difference.

The question I am left with is this: What brand will I be when I step back into the classroom?  Will I care enough about my own brand to act appropriately every day?  I don’t have an answer to that question yet.  I just know that today felt good.  There really is power in a brand.

We’ve been working hard today (ok, hold down the laughter).  But seriously, we had a great general session from 9 to 10.   A lot of introductions, but I won’t bore you with over 60 names I’ve now commmitted to memory just in case someone decides to build an assessment quiz in DE Streaming Quiz Builder!

I sat through the bloggers session with Steve Dembo from 10 to 12.  Great stuff coming to the blogs, at least on the dashboard side, as we move to the newest version of WordPress.  Learned to do a few things I didn’t know I could do, so I might be blogging a bit more soon on the TN DEN blog in order to learn them all.

Lunch was awesome as usual.  Great sandwiches, salads, and chips from the Whole Foods grocery store across the street from our hotel.  I am so full I may not need dinner.  Of course, need has nothing to do with it when the food is actually put on the table.

This afternoon I am attending 2 of the 3 sessions available.  I learned a lot from Steve Dembo (again) related to Media Share.  It has sort of been on the back burner of my to-do list for a while.  I am looking forward to uploading resources for the teachers at my school.  You can also embed videos, presentations, and more so that people who look at the asset can actually see what it is before downloading it.  As we start to use Media Share more, look for updates on the TN DEN blog.

Right now I am sitting in a session on Wufoo.  Wufoo is a great site for creating online forms.  Lots of cute bells and whistles.  Discovery provides this for the LCs as a courtesy for our use.  However, I have to say I am very comfortable using Google Docs to do the same thing, so I don’t think I’ll be getting on this bandwagon anytime soon.

Since Teryl is actually helping to present the session on Google Docs (and since we use these with our LC already), I am taking my car to a local dealer to get the air conditioning fixed.  I hope to be back before the unveiling of a new sneak peek in DE Streaming.  Then, tonight it is dinner and fun times.

Learning a lot!

It is not quite 9 AM and the crowd is growing here at 1 Discovery Place.  Our sessions begin at 9.  We have a general session for about an hour, then we break out into our respective roles on the Leadership Councils.  I have a 2 hour session on using the blogs effectively.  After that, lunch!

This afternoon consists of 3 breakout sessions that we will rotate through.  After a short break, we all head out to an undisclosed location for dinner.

I turned in rather early last night since I’m just getting over the head cold that attacked me at TAMS in Sevierville.  I’ve been through the watery eyes and runny nose day, the fever is attacking me day, and am now on the coughing my head off at night day.  I won’t even try to describe what it is like to blow my nose right now.  You’ve seen the movie, “The Blob,” right?

I’ve had a couple of cups of real coffee and have gone to the decaf stuff before the shakes set in.  I’ve had my everything bagel and fruit.  I’m good to go for a little while before the chocolate chip cookies are put out for snack time.  (I will try to be good, but I can’t make any promises).

I’m really pumped to be here.  Out of all the people who are part of my Personal Learning Network (PLN), the people from the DEN are the best.  They are here because they want to make a difference in the lives of teachers (who, in turn, make a difference in the lives of students).  They are here because they love to share what they know (and some of what they think they know).  They are here because they love to laugh (we will do a lot of that this week).  And they are here because Discovery is here for them.

Relationships are a two-way street always.  In a marriage, one partner can’t do all the work to keep it together.  In parenting, the kids have to participate, too.  In teaching, it is a give and take between teacher and student, or it isn’t anything at all.

Discovery knows this rule.  They are here to build relationships.  And we are the welcome recipients of their overtures to teachers.  If we can share just a little bit of that with the teachers we work with in our schools, our districts, and our states, then the circle will be complete.

Have a great day.

Teryl Magee and I arrived in Silver Spring, Maryland, today after a less-than-eventful drive up from Tennessee.  Our apologies to all who wanted to join us via ustream on the drive.  I gave up my Verizon USB connection several months back, so we had to rely on our cell phones to stay in touch with everyone via Twitter, Plurk, and Facebook.  Since I was driving, I tried to keep my texting to a minimum.

We got a late start yesterday.  I was supposed to pick Teryl up in Maryville around 6-ish.  I didn’t leave Cleveland until then!  I kept making stops, picking up supplies, visiting with friends, and generally not really caring much about the time.  So we left Maryville around 7:30 and drove to Roanoke, Virginia.  That’s pretty much the half-way point.

The free breakfast at the Quality Inn Suites was not spectacular.  I guess that’s why it is free.  I wouldn’t have paid for it.  The 2 ounce cups for water and coffee was the last straw for me.  But we ate it, and we were on the road again this morning at 6:30.

About two hours into our drive the air conditioning in my car decided to quit.  It made a really loud clacking sound, kind of like playing cards in the spokes of my sting ray bicycle when I was 10.  Then…nothing.  It was annoying, but not extremely uncomfortable, and we made it to the Courtyard right on time around 10:40 this morning.

We dropped our suitcases off at the hotel (no rooms were ready yet), got back in the car and headed to the airport to pick up some friends at 11:00.  THAT is when the we reallyl noticed we didn’t have any air conditioning.  The directions to the airport from the hotel took us right through the heart of Washington, DC.  We must have hit every traffic light and road construction crew between here and Arlington.  The sun was fully up by then and we were melting.  The strawberries I had in the back seat started to sweat and look like strawberry shortcake topping, but not in a good way.

After arriving back at the hotel, taking about an hour for a well-deserved lunch at McGinty’s Irish Pub, and finally getting into our hotel rooms, Teryl took the car back to the airport to pick up two more friends.  Poor thing.  I just got a Skype message from one of them about thirty minutes ago.  It read, “You’re car is hot!”  I don’t think that was a compliment.

So there you have it.  Our first few hours in Silver Spring.  The DEN LC Symposium starts tomorrow morning.  We have a short meet-and-greet tonight, and then tomorrow will be back to back work sessions followed by a little fun time tomorrow night.

Ahhhhh….this is what vacations are all about.

Father’s Days are hard for me.  It has been 28 years since my dad passed away, and I still miss him every day.  We were not close when I was growing up.  He was busy working.  I was busy playing.  I never doubted that he loved my mom, my brother, and me.  That was obvious.  But I was oblivious to anything outside of a six foot circle that was my life bubble.  I was in 7th or 8th grade before I even knew what my dad did for a living.  I knew where he worked, but not what he did.

My dad was one of the lucky few of his generation.  He made it without college.  He went from factory worker to chemist to plant manager to small business owner before his untimely death when I was just 22.

My dad taught me how to play ping pong and to shoot pool.  We had both in the basement of our small, non-air conditioned home in Richmond, IN.  Our family would sit out on the back porch in the summer time and make home-made ice cream.  It was my job to sit on the ice-filled tub while my dad and my brother took turns cranking that handle until it just wouldn’t turn anymore.

My dad gave me a love for cars.  He traded cars often.  He liked playing around with them.  He even sold them for a while as a part-time job.  I would often go and hang out at the Marcum car lot in Richmond.  Tommy Marcum and I would sit in one of the sportier cars and play like we were racing.  Fun times.

I gained the most respect for my dad when we moved back to Arkansas so he could begin his own business.  He talked to me about that for a couple of years.  He explained what it was he was going to do.  It morphed from getting a press to make plastic signs to making cone-shaped seals for a continous vulcanization (CV) machine at his work.

When we got to Arkansas, dad and mom took their life savings to build a house for us.  They lived with no income for quite a while.  They used the house as collatoral to get money to begin the business.  Dad and I would work at night making these CV seals.  They were hard rubber with a piece of cloth sealed inside.  We made all kinds of sizes.  We worked hard in a borrowed space with borrowed machines.  There was only one problem.  No one wanted to buy them.  That didn’t stop my dad.

Instead of making the seals, he decided to make the materials that went into the seals.  That was the messy job.  That was the job no one really wanted.  And it was the key to my parents’ success.

That was the life lesson that stuck with me from my dad.  Volunteer to do the messy jobs no one else wants.  There isn’t any glamor there, but there is always work.  And from work comes success.

When I got a little older, my dad didn’t have a problem still telling me I was a kid.  He nearly always beat me in ping pong.  He pinned me to the ground in a wrestling match when I was around 17.  He had both arms behind his back.  I could go on and on.

So, today  I honor my dad.  Happy Father’s Day dad.  Tell Papaw I said hello.

I have spent the day at the opening pre-conference sessions for the TN Association of Middle Schools (TAMS) state conference.  I have to be honest.  These two sessions were not among the best I’ve attended.  (Sorry TAMS committee, but we all make mistakes from time to time).

I spent part of the day grumbling to myself about why I was here, and how I could have been doing something more constructive with my time.  Yes, there were one or two brief ideas I took away from the sessions, but that isn’t much to show for 7 hours.

What I did find, however, was a totally different side to some of the teachers from my school.  I haven’t laughed this much in a long, long time.  I mean, I already liked these people.  It wasn’t that.  But, for the first time in six years, we were able to get out of the “fellow teacher” mode, let our hair down, and simply have a great time.

It started at breakfast, wound its way through lunch, and carried on into dinner.  The laughter was contagious.  Others in our group (there are 30 of us here) would look at us like we had 3 heads or something.  We didn’t care.  We were in a zone.  We were connecting.

At some point, probably near lunchtime, it hit me.  This was why I was at these sessions.  I needed to learn nore about the people I work with.  I needed to see some people in a new perspective.  And most of all (for me, anyway) I needed to let go, let loose, and crack up.

So, to those who stood with me today, I thank you from the bottom of my heart.  This may just be the best day I’ve ever had at Lake Forest.  You are the best.

I love my Blackberry (Yes, I would have loved an iPhone, too, but you know…).  For the first time I am totally connected to the world wherever I am.  My two main email accounts come through this thing.  I have Internet access.  I can post to Facebook, Twitter, Ping.fm, and Plurk whenever I want.  I can send txt messages, chat in Google Talk, and carry on conversations through Facebook’s Inbox app.  I can even listen to my favorite custom radio stations at slacker.com.   Yes, I love my Blackberry.

But…

Isn’t it amazing how there are always two sides to every story?  Henri Nouwen put it this way:  There is life and death in every decision.  The key to a successful life is making decisions that bring more life than death into your experience.  Those words have haunted me for years.

Sometimes we are cognizant of the decisions we make.  We recognize the good and bad results that are possible.  And we choose life-giving responses.  Or not.  It is still, after all, a life of free will.

But sometimes we are simply NOT aware.  At those times we leave the results of decisions up to fate.  It is like we’ve flipped a coin, but walked away before we know whether is heads or tails.  When that happens, life ain’t fun.

What does this have to do with my Blackberry I hear you asking.  Last night I went out for some alone time.  My youngest daughter was cleaning the house and listening to music I didn’t think I could survive, so I went to Panera and worked / played on my laptop.  Later, I changed locations and thought I set my Blackberry to vibrate so I could more easily tell if I was getting calls.  Instead, the little trackball had a mind of its own and decided to play a mean trick on me.  The phone went to silent.  Total Connectness gone.

So my daughter tries to call me.  No answer.  She texts me.  No answer.  She calls her mother who calls me.  No answer.  She texts me.  No answer.  She tries me on Google Chat.  No answer.  All the while, I’m totally oblivious to the fact that the world is looking for me.

When I finally remembered to glance at my phone (3 hours later), I had missed 6 phone calls and as many texts, each one getting more and more frantic.  When I called my daughter she was already in the car getting ready to scour the streets looking for the mangled wreckage of my car.

After calming down overnight, I realized that while I love my Blackberry, life was much simpler when no one had a cell phone.  The expectation of instant, total connectivity has changed the way we live forever.  I love my Blackberry.

But I’m not sure I will trust it anymore.

I love reading Seth Godin’s blog.  For those of you unfamiliar, Seth is a marketing guru.  The short, to-the-point posts he provides are usually all about marketing, selling, market saturation, and the like.  And yet, reading them with a sideways glance they really speak to teaching and teachers.  A few weeks ago, I marked a post from Seth that I wanted to come back to for my own blog.  In part, it reads:

Stalling provides a hurdle that allows you to filter out requests.

If you put people on hold for six minutes, the trivial calls hang up. If you tell people that they can have something they’ve requested but will have to wait a long time, the unmotivated will go away. (I’m not proposing that this is a good way to handle customers, I’m merely saying that it does in fact triage the incoming requests.)

The question is, what do you do with the people who, from the start, are obviously not going to go away?

If a woman is in labor, you can try every demotivating tactic you can think of, she’s still gonna have a baby. Might as well accept this and get her a room in the maternity ward, right now. Anything else is just annoying and a waste of time.

As teachers we face these kinds of kids every day.  Some kids continue to “bother” us with questions or complaints because they simply don’t want to do the work.  They have a plan: Get the teacher off track and the whole class will love me.

Other kids have genuine questions, genuine concerns, genuine problems.  If we aren’t careful, we’ll put them off as just another set of pesky people that bother us and keep us from what we are here to do: teach.  Indeed, if we aren’t careful, we will do anything but teach.

It is a fine line to distinguish between those kids just filling up or wasting time with their questions and those who are genuinely needing our help, even at the expense of serving the rest of the class.  It is a gift for some teachers.  Others, like me, have to work at it.  It means being fully present in each class.  It means having a plan and not a straight jacket.  It means filling the room with compassion and understanding rather than sarcasm and criticism.

But if it is done right….wow.

I know, the title of this blog is a little pretentious.  But bear with me.  I’ve had this on my mind lately, and thought I’d better share it before it leaves forever.  I think I may have even blogged about this before, but it is back at the forefront of my thoughts again, so forgive me.

Several years ago, I finally read through Walter Brueggeman’s book, Israel’s Praise.  In it, he asserts that the praise offered up by Israel during their years of captivity was meant to change their world.  In essence, the words they used transformed their circumstance from one of slavery and degredation to one of freedom and supremacy.  In reality, their circumstance was still the same, but their words changed the inner world of themselves and created an entirely new reality for them.

The example I remember most vividly was one of King David when his son, Absalom, was trying to overthrow him and take over the kingdom.  We read that Absalom was killed and left hanging from a tree by his hair.  David doesn’t know that.  In his reality, Absalom is still alive and, thus, able to be saved.  Then, a runner approaches and tells David Absalom is dead.  In that instant, David’s reality changed.  His world changed.

I thought about that story recently when showing a DE Streaming video to one of my classes.  It was the story of Malcolm X.  We were comparing and contrasting the lives of Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  Malcolm X was in a nearly, if not all, white junior high.  He had dreams of becoming a lawyer.  And then, one day, a teacher said that he needed to give up that dream.  He was a negro.  What chance did he really have of becoming a lawyer?  In that instant, Malcolm X’s world changed.  It was, perhaps, the driving force behind him turning to drugs and winding up in jail where he later turned to Islam for answers.  How would his life, or the world for that matter, have been different if those words were never spoken?

In everyday life, we speak words that change worlds all the time.  Two people fall in love and say, “I do.”  In that instant their single worlds collide into one.  Their reality is changed.  Across town two people have fallen on hard relationship times, and the judge says, “I grant this divorce.”  Instantly their single world is shattered into two.  Their reality is changed.

How many times do we as teachers look at our students and say something that changes their world?  Do we even know?  Do we know what the words we say to our students even do to them?  Is their world changed instantly for the better?  For the worse?  Our words are powerful beyond measure.  In the New Testament, James writes that the tongue is a fire.  It is like the rudder of a ship, such a small member, yet it controls our direction.

What about you?  Has your world been changed in an instant by the words of another?  Care to share something in the comments section?

A few days ago, I watched the short TED talk below on the key to success. Simply put, an experiment was done several years back with a group of 4 and 5 year olds. They were left alone in a room with one marshmallow. Their task? Do not eat the marshmallow for 15 minutes. If they could wait, they would get a second marshmallow. Simple, huh? Well, guess what?

One third of the children waited. Two-thirds of the children could not wait. No big surprise, right?

Let’s pan forward about 15 years or so. The researchers went back to look at these kids again. The 1/3 that waited were the most successful in school. The other 2/3 of the students were mostly mediocre at best. Delayed gratification has now been realized as an extremely important element in what we define as “success.”

Great. So what?

Well, we are now in a society that does not allow room for much delayed gratification. We’ve gone from snail mail to email to instant chat. We no longer have to go to the mall to buy those new Sean Jean jeans. Just click online. Memorization is out the window. Google it.

I watched the video and thought about my 6th graders this year. The smart ones, the ones who need no external motivation to be great, would look up from their word problems in math and say something like, “Mr. Childers, this is toooo haaarrrdd! What’s the answer?” (You have to imagine that in a really whiny voice). My response was always the same, “You’ve been working on it for less than 30 seconds. Keep working.” These kids have not learned the skill of working through things, thinking, problem solving, or struggling. Everything has to be instantaneous or they are not interested.

Delayed gratification? Fuh-geta-bout-it.

So, does our instant oriented technological savvy next generation spell the obsolescence of Success? I guess we can check back in 10 or 15 years.

(NOTE: This short video is worth the watching just for the video of one little girl toward the end. You will know her when you see her.)