Tinkerings

Since I started on a new diet plan to lose 50 pounds, it seems that all my mind focuses on for this blog are things like food, eating, hunger, starvation… so please indulge me for a bit as I work through the beginnings of a new way of living (again).

Last night was a bit of a rough night.  It was the end of the third day of low calorie eating.  I was watching TV and found myself looking longingly at the refrigerator.  I thought about how many nights I have felt the freedom to walk over there and get whatever I wanted to eat.  It didn’t matter if I was hungry or not.  Sometimes flavors get stuck in my head, and no matter how much I eat, I’m not satisfied until that flavor is the one I find.  And to make it even more frustrating, many times I don’t know what the flavor is I’m looking for until I find it.  The refrigerator could be empty by then!

I sat there thinking about my motivation.  Our new school insurance plan had me do a health screening as part of keeping the less expensive of the two policies.  I’m about 50 pounds overweight.  My blood pressure is through the roof. I have no idea what the blood tests have shown yet.  I decided that morning it was time to get my life back in order.  Take a stand.  Hold firm.

For those of you who don’t have a weight problem (either because you burn every single calorie you take in or you simply have the will power to do what’s right), you may not understand what it is like to stand in line at WalMart and look longingly at an Almond Joy bar.  Or how easy it is to cave in to that longing.  Day after day.  Until at some point, you are making excuses to go buy something at WalMart so you can get a candy bar.

So, today I am motivated.  Today.  As Richard Dreyfuss’ character says in What About Bill?, “Baby steps.”

In times past I’ve been motivated because I spent a lot of money on a plan.  I wasn’t going to let that money go to waste.  (OK, the plan I’m on now is not inexpensive, so I’m sure that is part of my dedication at the moment).  Other times it was because I had an appointment with a trainer, and if I hadn’t lost any weight I was going to be in trouble (my Biggest Loser moments).  But every once in a while, like now, my motivation comes from something deep inside that says this is the right thing to do and if I don’t do it my kids and my grandkids are going to miss me long before they should.

Just because I am planning my own funeral doesn’t mean I want it to happen anytime soon.

Motivation is a complicated thing.  Kids have to be motivated to learn.  Here are just some of the different ways kids are motivated to participate in their own education:

• Their teachers guilt them into doing the work
• They don’t want to look stupid to their classmates
• Their parents reward them with money
• Their teachers reward them with parties and recognitions
• They desire to score the highest on every test, or be the first to finish every assignment
• They are task oriented, and school work is the task at hand
• They have a genuine love of learning, and nothing can stop them (not teachers, not parents, not peers)

Out of those motivations, which do you think will develop life-long learning in that student?  Which one will create within them the kernel of character that will make them a great employee?

I would take issue with those who have told me that it is my job to motivate students. That is short-term thinking and it is killing the education of our children.  It is much more important for teachers to take the time to find out what motivates the student, and guide instruction toward that motivation.

I remember an 8th grader I had a few years ago.  He was constantly in trouble.  He spent about as much time in ISS as he did in the classroom.  And when I gave him an assignment about searching for and writing about a career, he was not interested.  He sat and did nothing.  Well, almost nothing.  He loved to do graffiti drawings.  So I gave him the option of using the Glogster website to present his findings rather than the research style paper I was asking everyone else to do.  Suddenly his light came on.  He found that he actually enjoyed the assignment.

I didn’t motivate him.  I allowed him to use what motivates him.

How are you dealing with this problem of motivation?  I would love to read your comments.

Yesterday I got to put a check in the box of my to-do list that said, “Go see The King’s Speech.”  I knew it would be good.  I just didn’t know it would be that good.  Finally, once again we have a film that earned the Best Picture nod from Oscar night.

In case you don’t know, The King’s Speech is about King George VI coming to the throne of England after his brother abdicated in favor of marrying a divorcee, Wallace Simpson.  I had read numerous stories about this love affair, but never anything about his younger brother, Bertie (the family nickname), who suffered so terribly from a stuttering problem.

There is a certain jarring effect to a conversation when a person stutters badly.  That effect was both heard and seen in the movie.  Colin Firth did an outstanding job in this role.  It was painful to watch him struggle so valiantly.  You could see the jarring effect in the way his family lost patience with him (all but his wife and children, of course).

But the director had a different way of showing the jarring effect.  He created it visually in some shots.  And he did this by totally destroying one of the basic rules of photography.

One of the rules of photography is that people need a space in which to move.  In the picture on the left, there is a larger space on the side of the picture into which Colin Firth is looking.  Watch closely the next time you are watching marathon reruns of NCIS or attending the next big movie release.  There is a “pleasing-ness” to this view that makes us feel comfortable with the image.

However, there are many, many scenes in The King’s Speech where this rule is broken.  You can see an example of the way I have edited the picture below.  The open space is on the wrong side of the screen.

As I sat in the theater admiring the work of the director for choosing to illustrate this point, I had to wonder how many people felt uncomfortable watching these scenes, but had no idea why.  I could appreciate the effort of the director to make me feel what the King’s stuttering was causing others around him to feel.  But how many were confronted with this jarring effect with no idea why they were struggling.

Sensing this uneasiness also made me wonder about using the jarring effect in the classroom.  No, not the one where the teacher throws the eraser at a student to get his attention.  But the one where things in the classroom change and the kids are thrown slightly off kilter.

Kids become familiar with our classrooms all too quickly.  They don’t even notice the bulletin boards or the beautiful posters or even the layout of our PowerPoint slides anymore.

We need the WalMart scheme.  I cannot tell you how many times I’ve gone blindly into WalMart, walked to the aisle where what I wanted was supposed to be, and then suddenly jarred alert by the fact that gremlins had been at work in the night re-arranging the entire store.  That is the jarring effect at work.

As a shopper, the jarring effect serves to help us notice products to which we had become blind before.  As a movie goer, the jarring effect helped me  experience the pain and suffering of the character who was in such a deep personal struggle that his speech was impaired.

As a student, it might just open my eyes to the new thing my teacher to which my teacher is trying to get me to notice.

This week I was privileged to teach an English class for a friend of mine who has been ill.  I haven’t been in front of middle school students in a classroom for several months, so I was bit apprehensive.  It would either be fun, or it would be an immediate reminder of why I left the classroom in the first place.  It turned out to be fun. (Whew!)

I decided to spend some time tying the concept of context clues that students learn in English to looking for context clues on our state’s standardized tests.  When students encounter a new word, we teach them to look for context clues to see if they can figure out what it means.  They are taught to look at the root form of the word, decipher the prefixes and suffixes attached, and then look at other words in the sentence or paragraph that might give them some hints as to how the word is used.

For the test, we look at the same things.  When students run across a question to which they simply do not know the answer, we teach them to look for clues in the context of the sentence to help them out.  Approximately 50% of the standardized test is made up of “moderately difficult” questions.  This simply means that students should be able to eliminate two answers without much difficulty.  Looking at the clues helps them do this.

As I taught my way through five classes that day, I began to see those students with new eyes.  They weren’t “my students” after all.  I hadn’t grown so accustomed to their behavior that I just expected certain things from them every day.  And while I had my moments of frustration when my lesson plan got a little out of control with students talking and not paying attention, it was much easier to see that the problem was in how I was approaching the lesson and not because these were “bad” kids.

Sometimes we lose perspective in the classroom.  We expect kids to act in certain ways because we are familiar with them.  And yet, often expecting something different leads to something different.  This expectation of change is part of what separates good teachers from great teachers.

It is often the difference between “I teach English,” and “I teach students.”

May you be blessed with new eyes today.

As I was driving into the parking lot at Starbucks this morning I was met, as I am on many mornings, with the scene of the Flav-O-Rich milk truck taking up 1/3 of the parking lot.  For some reason, the stacks of milk crates dotting the space at the back of the truck struck a new chord in me.

I don’t often think about the milk at Starbucks.  I buy a Tall Pike Place.  I want coffee.  But I want a small cup of coffee because I drink it slowly, and I want don’t want cold coffee.  Those that have been around me long have probably heard me go through the main points of my “Coffee Sermon.”  So, with great apologies to those I used to blast for adding cream and sugar to their coffee, I must admit that at Starbucks I cut the coffee just a little with some half-n-half to take some of the bitter bite out of this dark blend of caffeine and water.

Today, it dawned on me that the vast majority of coffee drinks sold by Starbucks are probably made up of much more milk than coffee.  And that, dear friends, is why they are so expensive.  Milk costs much more per gallon than does any bag of coffee beans.  In addition, it adds greatly to the square footage needed for raw materials.

Starbucks bills itself as a coffee house.  But in reality, it sells hot milk to most of its patrons.  Coffee is a mere flavoring as a shot of espresso (pronounced with an “s” and not an “x” by the way…sorry, I’m an English teacher).

Starbucks advertises itself as a place to get coffee.  And, a few of us actually do.  But in reality, coffee is just window dressing to what is really going on.

In education, we call this the “hidden curriculum,” and I have written about it before.  But I’ve never really thought about it in this way.

For those not in education, the hidden curriculum is what is really taught even though it is not what you set out to teach.  For instance, my first year in the classroom I put a little note above the pencil sharpener that read “Please Sharpen Your Pencil Before Class Begins.”  I was trying to teach responsibility and planning ahead.  But, nearly every day within the first five minutes of class hands would begin to go up asking if they could sharpen their pencil. And, since they needed their pencil, I always said yes.  So what I really taught was, “Hey kids! I have this rule that I think is really cool, but it isn’t important for you to follow it, so just ignore it.”

And I had a hard time with classroom management.  The hidden curriculum had taught them that no rule was really important, not just that one.

And this is the lesson from Starbucks.  The hidden curriculum (in this case selling milk rather than coffee) is much more expensive and is so bloated that it impacts every square inch of your classroom.

What are you teaching?  I mean really?  When you look behind the curtain to find the man talking into the microphone (as in the Wizard of Oz’s statement, “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!”), what is really going on in your classroom?  And how much real estate is eating up?  How many minutes of true instruction are you losing every hour?

If you could pare it down (we never really eliminate hidden curriculum, folks), what would that do to your TCAP scores?  Your effectiveness score? Your student relationships? Your parent meetings? The amount of planning you do from 6 PM to 11:59 PM?

Ask just about any teacher, in any school, in any system, in any state and they will tell you they feel overwhelmed.  Never have so few done so much with so little.  Isn’t that how the quote goes?

It is especially true in the area of technology integration.  The best way to learn a new technology is to receive a little training (sort of an introduction to how the software or website works) and then go play.  That’s right.  Play.

In a perfect world, teachers would be able to use their planning period to play with one new piece of technology until they have a pretty good mastery of it for classroom use.  But this world hasn’t been perfect since God put a “Closed” sign on the Garden of Eden.

Instead, our teachers are faced with countless new technologies (SMART/Promethean Boards, document cameras, flipcams, websites, PLATO, Success Maker, RTI, blah, blah, blah) alongside new standards, new assessments, and a very different kind of kid.

Teachers often come to technology training with their eyes glassy.  They are dizzy.  Lightheaded.  About to throw up….  OK, I’m kidding.  But a common question that comes up is this, “How important is it that I learn this right now?”  Well, as a technology coach I think its pretty important.  But what would I say as a principal? A parent? A student? Or just a plain old fellow teacher?

And these are adults.  Adults are supposed to handle the stress of new things.  They are supposed to be able to multi-task.  They are supposed to have coping mechanisms in place to de-stress.

How do you think our students feel?  We want people to sympathize with us for all the new stuff we have to learn and make useful.  But, what about our kids?  Do we sympathize with them?

And so new memberships at the local gym go up.  More pills are prescribed. Energy drinks are flying off the shelves (even if they kill us).  And we are retreating into our own private world as much as possible, often eluding the need for community connections…and not just the ones on Facebook.

Teachers, I feel your pain.  I really do.  But today, I challenge you at the beginning of each class, while your kids are getting settled into their chairs and putting their overstuffed, filled-with-everything-but-a-pencil bookbags on the floor (in your way), take a deep breath and look at them.  I mean really take them in.  Do you see their feelings of being overwhelmed?

How will you help them cope…so they can learn?

No, this isn’t how much sleep I’ve lost since becoming a father…or a teacher.  I recently read this blog highlighting some findings from Malcolm Gladwell regarding talent.  It takes approximately 10,000 of practice on a thing to be able to develop professional talent in a thing.  10,000 hours.

So I did some math.  On average, teachers have 5 to 6 hours of class time each day.  Let’s just agree to call it 6.  10,000 divided by 6 is 1,667 days of teaching to really become a professionally talented teacher (rounded up to the nearest day).

We have 180 student contact days in our calendar, but with professional development teachers in Tennessee work 200 days a year.  1,667 divided by 200 is 8.3 years of teaching to become a truly talented professional teacher.

This is my 8th year of teaching.  I feel like I am finally starting to really “get it” in some ways.  I’m understanding kids’ behavior better.  I’m more reflective of my own practice.

Interestingly, it only takes 5,000 hours to be trained enough to teach someone how to be truly talented in a profession.  Maybe that’s where the misnomer comes from that “those who can do, and those who can’t teach.” (I would refer those who believe this concept to watch Taylor Mali’s video on YouTube one more time).

So, I suppose that it is no accident that we tenure teachers after about 5,000 hours of teaching.  They have proven they are on the right track.  The mistake comes when teachers are satisfied at being a “good teacher.” Another 4 years of practice and they could be a truly talented teacher.

It is kind of like the difference between a pastor who stays at a church for 30 years and another who changes churches every two years for 30 years.  One has 30 years of experience.  The other has 2 years repeated over and over and over. Which one do you want to lead your church?

Are you new to teaching?  Don’t be one of those statistics that says most teachers quit after 2 years in the classroom.  Change your paradigm.  Your college degree and Praxis scores didn’t make a you a good teacher.  They just got you in the door.  Put your head down.  Firm up your stance.  Get ready to attack that line again.  Did you get knocked on your backside yesterday?  Learn from it.  Don’t change grade levels just because someone told you 3rd grade was easier than 7th.  Keep working.  Practice. Practice. Practice.

Talent doesn’t come cheap.  Or quickly.

One of my favorite stories about the ministry involves a young minister who was assigned to a church where the former pastor had been there for over 30 years.  It was a daunting task to follow in the footsteps of a man so loved and revered by the small country congregation.

After a couple of months in his new pastorate, he noticed that the congregation was not really engaged when he would offer communion at the end of the Sunday morning services.  They did not look happy.  In fact, they would rarely look at him at all.  A few would walk to the front of the church, accept the wafer, and then quickly throw a disapproving glance his way.

Finally, in desperation, he went to the head of his deacon committee and asked if he knew what the problem could be.  “Well,” said the older gentleman, “I think the congregation is just used to having communion served a certain way after so many years.  You see, our former pastor had a ritual where he would walk over to the side of the church to serve communion instead of standing in the middle as you are.  When he prayed, he would reach down and touch the radiator.  I guess we just kind of got used to a certain ritual for our communion.”

Bewildered, the young man went to see the retired pastor the next day to ask about this “touching the radiator” thing.  After explaining how the congregation was not enjoying communion because he wasn’t touching the radiator when he prayed, the elder pastor threw his head back and let out a loud belly laugh.  “I’m so sorry,” he said after finally catching his breath.  “There is nothing spiritual about manner in which I served communion.  I went over to the side of the church and touched the radiator so I wouldn’t give anyone an electrical shock from my shoes running across the church carpeting!”

This congregation had seen something happen the same way for so long they began to feel there was something mysterious, magical, even spiritual about it.  They would not be satisfied unless they saw the same thing from their new pastor.

I wonder sometimes if teacher evaluations are like this.  Principals come into classrooms and “judge” the effectiveness of a new teacher on a regular basis.  But what happens when the principal doesn’t see what he or she “expects” to see?  What happens when the rituals they think work aren’t present?

Recently, Dr. Riggins of Lee University spoke to a group of aspiring administrators about a study he and his colleagues did a few years ago.  In the study, he asked principals to rate various teachers on a group of items the literature says make for effective teachers.  The principals completed a Likert scale for each of the teachers in question, ranking them from not very effective to very effective.  They were not told why they were doing the rankings.

When the data was collected, a correlation was made between the principals’ evaluations and the “effectiveness scores” (value added) of each of the teachers.  And the result?

There was a fairly strong negative correlation between what the principals perceived as effective and the actual effectiveness of teachers.

In other words, the more effective a principal rated a teacher, the less effective that teacher actually was.  And vice versa.

So my question is this: Were they looking for the radiator thing?

Last night I went to dinner with some friends in downtown Nashville.  We enjoyed a quiet dinner in a nearly empty Joe’s Crab Shack, and finished up with a quick, cool walk down 2nd Avenue and Broadway.  As I waited for the hotel shuttle with them outside Legends we had five police cars and two police motorcycles converge on a location about 50 yards from us.

Just a little unsettling.

It turned out they were all there to put one man in the back of a squad car.  Hardly anyone stood around looking on the sidewalk.

After everyone else went back to the hotel, I walked back down to B.B. Kings for some blues by the Stacy Mitchhart band.  It was a great single set, and then I decided to go back to the hotel myself.  On the way back down 2nd Ave, 3 police cars were outside a venue on the other side of the road.  Again, they were apprehending one guy.

This was just a Monday, but I had never seen anything like it during the several times I’ve been downtown.

As I stood outside Legends again waiting on the shuttle, I turned and saw what appeared to be a homeless gentlemen in his 60s arguing with the doorman (ok, bouncer) outside of Legends.  He was noticeably drunk.  He stood about 5’6″ and was trying to pick a fight with the bouncer who stood well over 6′ tall.  This lasted about 10 or 15 minutes before the homeless man wandered down the street to harangue someone outside another door.

In all that time the bouncer never said a word. He did not engage the gentleman at all.  Not once.  Nada.  And eventually everything returned to normal.  A few tourists like myself stood around in awe watching something better than a movie on the hotel television.  I wondered fleetingly where the cameras were for this new reality show about downtown Nashville.

But I was mostly struck by the composure of the man standing guard outside Legends.

I stood there thinking about my own time with in the classroom with kids who tried to engage me in a verbal altercation.  How many times did I let them suck me in?  How  many times did I feel somewhat superior because my own verbal skills were so much better than theirs?

And how many times did that really turn out to be a win in the student column?

Every time.

I’m a teacher.  I’m used to kids being kids.  Some days I play along.  Some days I try to get them to act more like adults.  Its the dance we do every day.  Sometimes when I’ve had enough, my calming….er….planning period helps me focus back to some of the reasons why some children act like…well…children.

Some of these kids get absolutely no attention at home.  They act out in school because it feeds a deep seated longing for connection.  I have to remind myself that loving these children is far better than scolding them, even when scolding is easier.

Some kids are simply immature.  We get a lot of 6th and 7th grade students that have trouble in middle school simply because they started really early in kindergarten.  It wasn’t much of a problem in elementary school, but in middle school we are expecting a slightly higher maturity level.  Some kids struggle with this.  In fact, a new study out says we may have misdiagnosed over 1 million kids as ADHD who are really just immature for their age group.

Some kids act like their parents.  Their behavior just doesn’t fall far from the tree.  Like yesterday.  Another teacher and I were dealing with a student after school who refused to follow our instructions. She had a smirk on her face and just kept walking in the direction she wanted.  When I saw her mom pull up to get her, I decided to talk to her and see if she would help us get her daughter to be less antagonistic and sarcastic toward her teachers.  Yep.  You guessed it.  The apple didn’t fall far from the tree.

Teachers can usually help the first two types if students.  The third is much more difficult.  More difficult.  Not impossible.

But it sure feels that way sometimes.

Teachers get a bum rap in a lot of ways.  Low pay.  Blamed for all low performance results on standardized tests.  Caught between parents and students.  The list is long.  But, we do get summers off.  Believe me, that’s huge.

But there’s one other way teachers get a bum rap.  We get to make two sets of resolutions each year: One on January 1st and another sometime in August or September depending on what state in which one teaches.

Of course, not wanting to be an underachiever, I also set myself up for resolutions at the end of the last school year.

Like all good resolutions, we mean well.  We honestly intent to do things differently.  Sometimes we even succeed.  Other times we learn to tweak the resolutions so they are easy to complete.  Like this one from last New Year’s for me:

I will begin the process of losing 40 pounds.

And I did.  Several times.  In fact, I’m beginning that process again next week.  (Hey, we’re teachers.  We’re smart).

Here are just a few of the resolutions I’ve set for myself this school year.

1. Delegate more of my work among my team members.  I am one of those people that like to do my work and the work of thirteen other people.  It is time to give it up.
2. Learn all of my students’ names in the first three weeks of school.  I am horrible with names.  I think the only way I learned mine was from my mom writing it on the inside labels of my clothes when I went to church camp.
3. Find a working phone number for every student before the semester is over.  I’m giving myself a little more time here, but those of you who don’t teach would be surprised at the number of kids who don’t know a phone number for their parents.  Or a street address for their house.  Or what a pencil looks like.
4. Only grade what matters.  No more extra credit for bringing hand sanitizer.  Or getting a form signed.  Or staying awake in class.  (You can’t make this stuff up).
5. Refuse to allow a single student to leave my class without learning the things I intended for them to learn.

OK, I really only wrote all those to get to that last one.  It is this dogged determination to see kids learn that keeps us coming back to the classroom every year.

I will let the teachers, admins, school board members, and other members of PLN that read this blog hold me accountable to these resolutions.  Feel free to ask anytime how I’m doing.  If my answer starts with, “Ummmmm….” just shake your head and walk away.  Ask again on a good day.

What resolutions have you made this year?