Tinkerings

Today, April 30, is National Poem In Your Pocket Day.  No, I don’t know who established it.  Its after our TCAP tests in Tennessee, so I’m sure we won’t celebrate it in our classes across the state.  Yet, poetry is one of the most beautiful art forms we can embed into the minds and hearts of our nation’s children.

Poetry leads to music.  It makes rhetorical speeches eloquent.  It lifts the heart.  It expresses our inner angst in a way no other medium can.

Today’s observance is not about those poems you have to look up and read (even though you love them so much).  It is about those poems you carry with you.  The ones you have memorized.  On Facebook this morning, I posted this one I learned nearly 25 years ago:

A diamond in the rough is a diamond sure enough / For before it ever sparkled it was made of diamond stuff / But someone had to find it or it never would be found / And someone had to grind it or it never would be found / But once its found and once its ground and once its burnished bright / That diamond’s everlastingly just shining out its light.

Back about five lives ago, I worked for our denominational publishing house.  Part of my job was to travel to Christian education workshops.  Sometimes I ran the bookstore.  Sometimes I got to lead workshops.  Sometimes I did both.  It was always fun.

My boss at the time, Tony Capps, pulled this poem out of the air one day as part of his opening keynote.  I was mesmerized by its simple beauty and its telling way it describes the job of a teacher.  I committed it to memory after hearing it once.  I still use it occasionally when I lead education workshops across Tennessee.

As teachers, we sometimes gripe about the kids we have.  We wish we had more technology.  Better textbooks.  More supplies.  More time.  Fewer students.  Shorter weeks…. You know what I’m talking about.  And yet, too often we forget that we are diamond miners.  We are digging through rock and dirt.  We are getting dirty in our attempts to find the diamond buried beneath the surface of each one of the precious children placed in our care.  (Yes, I said precious).

Thanks Tony.  25 years later you are still impacting kids in ways you never dreamed possible.

Today, I was shocked to read a story about a middle school principal in New Jersey that had sent a request home to parents to close their children’s accounts on Facebook and MySpace.  In fact, he was just full of “great advice” for parents regarding technology:

• Close any social networking accounts
• Install spy software on the computer to track all kids’ activities
• Check their text messages online every week
• 90% of homework does not require a computer
• Confiscate all electronic equipment each night
• There is absolutely no reason for a child to have a social networking site account (this is repeated several times)

And yet, he insists the school is going to teach children responsible use of technology.  C’mon.

I would agree that perhaps some children should not be on social networking sites.  Some children should have their text messages monitored.  Some should have every move they make watched closely online.  Yet, the reality is that we cannot stop these children from joining and participating in social network sites unless we have them under the watchful eyes of a parent 24/7.  It is impossible.

Children are able to access accounts through their iPod Touches, through their cell phones, or through computers at their friends’ houses.  You cannot stop the wave.  You can, however, guide it.

Mr. Orsini does make one valid point.  Parents should educate themselves and their children on Internet safety.  This might include keeping computers in a central location in the house (not a child’s bedroom where doors are closed and locked), exploring Internet safety sites, or talking to kids about common sense rules for Internet use.

Recently, I took an unscientific poll of the kids in my classes.  80% of the students I have this semester (about 135) have a Facebook or MySpace account.  Nearly 20% have their own computer safely locked away in their bedroom.  70% have Internet access at home.  55% update their Facebook or MySpace account while they are at school using their cell phone.  10% have a Twitter account.  90% of those with social network site accounts have friended someone they’ve never met without checking other friends first.

There are some unsafe practices in those statistics.  Schools should take the responsibility to educate children (and possibly parents) concerning Internet safety.   But closing out one account you know about will only lead to children opening another account you don’t know about.  I would much rather work with kids on things I know about than to clamp down so hard they decide to create things I don’t know about.

Mr. Orsini, I know your heart is in the right place, but your ideas simply demonstrate your own lack of knowledge about technology.

What do you think?

As I was driving back from Chattanooga this morning I was listening to NPR (yes, all that know me know that this is no big surprise).  The lead-in music to a new story was unmistakeably Bobby McFerrin.  His music captures my imagination every time I hear it.  Fortunately for me, the news story was about McFerrin’s new album, VOCAbuLarieS (I know that isn’t Standard English, but if you notice, all the capital letters spell VOCALS….something that was lost in the radio version).

The idea of the album was very interesting.  The producer took loops from 8 or 10 years of improvisational live performances by McFerrin and his a capella group.  Every concert is improvised.  As the producer sorted through all the vocal tracks he had, he began to layer things together that he liked.  Sometimes he added lyrics.  McFerrin would go into the studio and do perhaps another 100 takes on a single theme.  I believe he estimated he had over 8,000 recordings that were used to put this album together.

What resulted is nothing short of amazing.

(Listen to Vocabularies Overture here)

Immediately, as I am prone to do, I began to think about this project in terms of how we learn.  So often I have watched my own children and my students (yes, and myself when I was young) cram for a test by reading over spelling words or definitions for ten minutes before the test.  Our goal was simple.  Learn something just long enough to get a 90 or above, then forget it.

Everything piece of information is a “loop.”  Too often in education we want these loops to be played as single tracks.  This is how we look at things when we prepare kids for standardized tests.  (Just to remind the readers of this post, I support standardized testing, I just disagree with how we prepare for it sometimes).  Math teachers teach math.  Science teachers teach science. And on and on.

When “loops” of learning stand on their own it should be no surprise when kids walk into our classrooms at the beginning of the year and proclaim loudly as we review their standards from the previous year, “I’ve never seen this!”

Learning should be layered.  Teachers try to do this all the time.  In education we call it scaffolding.  We take a layer and build on it to create a new layer.  But sometimes I’m afraid we create a new layer, or loop, that is still standing on its own out there somewhere.

Why is this bad?

New brain research (sorry, I didn’t save the URL after I read the story) suggests that sleep is a necessary component to forgetting.  Our brain is creating links across synapses all day every day.  If we couldn’t prune some of those back our brains would literally grow so big as to burst out of our skulls.  Sleep helps us shuffle those memories around.  We tie them to something important.  We are layering the loops of learning every night.  Loops out there on their own get pruned out completely.

It isn’t just a simple task of layering all the math loops, or all the language arts loops.  It is the harder task of sorting through thousands and thousands of loops and layering all those subjects together so that kids can see relationships between everything they learn.  Teachers are like producers.  Like editors.  Composers.  Conductors.  We need to give up being performers.

Listen to McFerrin’s VOCAbuLarieS.  You’ll see the beauty of being an educator in there.  I promise.

Dear Praxis:

I was intrigued by a link on Twitter from someone I follow, so I clicked the URL and I found this:

At first, I was a little shocked.  Then, disbelief started to settle in.  I am an adult.  I am a teacher.  I am over 50 years old.  I have 3 grand children.  I have two master’s degrees.  I have passed all the Praxis tests I’ve ever taken in the 98th percentile.

And you have the audacity, the gall, to tell me that if I show up at your testing center with a cell phone in my possession I am going to be dismissed and my fees forfeited?  Unbelievable.  I mean, I teach middle schoolers and we don’t expel them from school for possessing a phone.  Heck!  We don’t even expel them for using the phone against policy!  Did I mention the part where I am an adult?

I’m afraid you may have crossed a line on this one.  I am one of those teachers that embrace technology use in the classroom.  And while I understand the pitfalls that may come with it, I would encourage policy changes that would allow teachers to design lessons that actually use cell phones in the classroom.  It has always been my contention that teenagers will find a way to do almost anything that they are mandated not to do.  If we actually use cell phones responsibly, perhaps we can diminish the irresponsible use over time.  As it is now, irresponsibility is winning.

So, I understand that we are not allowed to use cell phones while we take the exams.  I understand that they should be turned off, and not just put on vibrate.  I understand that they should be put away in a pocket or purse.  But to kick me out just because I have one with me? Please Praxis, say it ain’t so!

Sincerely,

A former test taker