We are living and working in a time of educational opposites.

*Our class sizes are growing as our teacher ranks are shrinking.
*Our students’ needs are expanding as our professional development time is diminishing.
*The public’s confidence in our professional abilities is lessening while the public’s distaste for supporting public education is broadening.

These opposites are not good. However, there’s a bright side as well.

*Socioeconomic status still constricts but equitable access to information is ballooning.
*Skin color matters less while individual merit opens many more doors.
*Gender bias is on a downslope while women’s rights have climbed and climbed.

Nice, huh?

And finally…

*Budgets are shrinking but our viewpoint that budget determines how well we can do our job is as well.

Not really an opposite, I know, but still, it’s a good thing to be able to diminish this all-too-trite excuse we so often hear in our ranks for not doing better. (Though, it certainly has some merit. Not as much as people would have everyone believe… but some.)

These days we now, in my opinion, have much more of a mindset of, “Hey, these are the cards we’ve been dealt so there’s no use whining about them… so let’s just start playing them the best we can.” I think this perspective on our plight is good for us as it allows us to see what is possible with our resources as opposed to what is not possible due to our lack of resources.

And if some more money comes back into the picture sometime soon, we’ll take it, right?

How in the world can we expect all students to show the same amount of enthusiasm for all subject areas on their schedule? I am not sure we can.

And if you agree we can’t — read on. (If you think we can, then this post is probably not for you.)

I think about my own experience in school. For me, science class was always something I endured more than I enjoyed whereas creative writing was an after school club for me that I choose to join which had me up til late in the night working for no real academic credit other than the pure pleasure of the discipline back when I was in high school. And my grades reflected my interests. In the humanities, I smoked it, in math, I was a decent student, but certainly not exceptional, and in science, I was a “let me just do the least amount of work to get me over the hump” type of kid.

And high school for me was a long, long time ago. Before google, email, AOL, cell phones and DVD players. (I know for some people on this board, it was also before the invention of the wheel but hey, I’m just making a point here… no need to compare long-in-the-tooth tales.)

So why do we still mandate our curricular offerings as conceptualized from the perspective of pre-designed, non-differentiated, one-size-fits-all educational packages for today’s kids? (Well, for the most part, we do.)

I mean in middle and high school you’re forced to take X amount of math, Y amount of history, Z amount of science and K amount of language arts. (I ran out of algebraic characters… shucks!). Unless you show deficiency in math or the language arts, that is. Then you’ll take 2X of those (cause we know the subjects in which you do poorly are the ones where you want to spend double the amount of time, right? Geesh, reminds me of the old game show prize joke — 1rst prize is one week in the city of Detroit; 2nd prize is two weeks).

Is there not a link between choice and performance?

Is there not a link between allowing kids to be more self-directive about their learning and a connection to an improved dropout rate, higher grades, better attendance, more motivation to succeed and a sense of perceived relevance between a school’s curriculum and a person’s own life?

In an iTunes world where we no longer have to buy the whole record in order to buy the song we want to own, how come our schools are not doing more to accomodate for today’s kids by reinventing our curricular offerings as conceived through this type of ‘iTunes” philosophy?

Why? Because I guess it’s like mom always said when I got too smart-mouthed and logical about matters and she just had to get back to running the darn house and didn’t have time to discuss it any more with me.

Why? Because I said so, that’s why!

And at the end of the day, no matter how intelligent my point — or poignant or thoughtful — Mom always won when it came to aruments like this.

iTunes… when will your brilliance more speedily bleed over?

It is with great sadness that I must inform everyone that I will be retiring from the world of education. See, a few hours ago, I just learned that a dead 3rd aunt who moved to Senegal in the early 1900′s just left me 67 million Communaute Financiere Africaine franc (XOF) — this is the official note of the Central Bank of the West African States — which translates into about 32 million US dollars.

Of course, I couldn’t begin to explain how ecstatic I was to receive the email. And lucky, too. See, I found it in the junk folder of my account but, happily for me, it didn’t get dumped before it caught my eye.

I think the first thing I might do with some of the cash is build a school. (That’ll be tax-deductible, right?) It seems even the head bankers are not very well equipped to use the English language. They misspelled a bunch of words, used capital letters in many inappropriate places and had a couple of grammar issues as well. However, 32 million bucks is 32 million bucks, right, so for me to quibble right now, well, that would smack of a lack of gratitude.

And I have to say, I love the way the internet is going to make this transaction so easy. All Messier Francoise Antoine Jamblais needed was my full name, date of birth, driver’s license number, mailing address, social security number, and bank account routing number and poof! we were off. I expect, with all the international paperwork which he’s got to fill out, it might take a week or two to process this transaction but I gave him my credit card number to pay for expedited handling of the details so it really shouldn’t be too much longer now before I am yacht shopping.

And all this time, I thought having an education was valuable. Bull-puckeys! What matters is having rich relatives, the kind that go overseas, die and leave you vast fortunes.

Well, so long, suckers! My dead long lost relative ticket just got punched and I doubt you’ll be seeing me round these parts much more ever again.

School: when it comes to amassing great fortunes, it’s so overrated.

I just witnessed a group of teens and young adults who said, with a straight face and all the seriousness in their heart that they could muster, that if they did not figure out a way to improve over their performance of last year, they’d be toast. They knew they needed to grow, adapt, change, evolve and break new ground… for if they didn’t, they knew someone else, with more hunger in the belly, would come along and take from them their, well… everything. Their future, their ability to earn a prosperous living , and so on.

Work ethic, creativity, self-determination, guts, a willingness to learn and grow and experiment and push the envelope, they showed it all.

I LOVE young people such as this. And I then I realized that if public education, and all the people who were involved in it, had this same attitude, we might literally move mountains.

Yep, I am saying it: if public education were more like the X games, I think we might all be happily surprised.

Look, I am a HUGE fan of the X games. If you ain’t seen some of their highlights, you have no idea what you are missing. Check it out…

See, the thing is, the reason I believe we, in education, have much we can learn from these X gamers is because 1) They care. I mean they really care. Passion drives this sport and nobody shows up to work at the X games without bringing their A game.

Imagine if our students showed up to class with this same hunger to learn. Or if our nation’s teacher’s showed up with this same fire to teach? It’d almost be a different world. I mean how many people who work at our schools actually show up at the start of a new school year and feel, “If I don’t have the best year as a teacher that I have ever had, if I don’t give my best, reinvent parts of myself, give 110% this year, I’ll be toast?

X-gamers do.

2) They bounce back from adversity. There’s not an X-gamer out there who does not know what it means to fall flat on their face. It’s a world where falling and failing is part of the process but woven into the fabric of being a participant is the notion that YOU GET UP.

You get up. Getting knocked down is inevitable. When adversity strikes, you don’t fold your tent, you don’t weep, “Poor me”, you don’t give up.

You plan to keep going.

3) They celebrate one another’s achievements in a way that is characterized by authentic camaraderie. They are rooting for one another’s success. It’s not a back-biting, undercutting, talk trash about your kids and your colleagues in the lunchroom type of world. They are each working to be their best but they are also each a part of a bigger whole and they love to sit back and admire the excellent efforts of the people in the same game.

They know how to tip their hat.

X games: it’s more than just apparently suicidal tricks. It’s an outlook on life.

Working on my listening skills has probably been one of the best pieces of PD advice I have ever tried to take to heart.

The fact is, we teachers, we kinda come to class to talk. To impart. To flow outwardly. And in the chaos that is a teaching day, with hundreds of students coming at you from hundreds of angles at a hundred miles an hour seeking hundreds of answers (from “May I go to the bathroom?” to “Do you think Shakespeare really wrote all those plays?” to “Can I bring in the homework I didn’t do two days ago and was supposed to turn in today, tomorrow?”), it’s quite the challenge to remember that one of the best ways to ensure that you are going to be an effective educator comes through listening.

And it’s almost counterintuitive in a certain way.

I mean we lesson plan over the weekend to come rock the house on Monday morning but really, for all our concoctions, for all our data driven determinations, for all our plans and goals and aspirations, how much time do we actively plan to listen? To patiently wait? To reflect and then respond?

Really, does the VP ever storm into your room and demand that you absorb, consider, weigh, and not judge your students… but rather, see what they think, feel, care about and want to do, express, experience?

Do our kids not have much to teach us about how to teach them?

If there is one area I think I can always improve upon, both as a teacher — and a human being in a multitude of relationships (monogamous as one of them is… had to throw that in there, right Honey?) — it’s “How can I be a better listener?”

TIME magazine just published this story called Morning the Death of Handwriting. It made me realize that the more deeply I think about my job as a teacher, the more acutley aware I become that I really can’t say for sure that I am doing the right thing — or teaching the right things — in my classroom.

Sure, my state has standards — and our nation is currently developing national ones — but let’s be honest… they are a “best guess”.

No one really knows for sure what knowledge we need to impart to our kids in order to best prepare them for the demands of the future.

We can guess. We can speculate. We can use expert opinions to rationalize our reasons, but do we know? Do we really know?

We don’t. And I am not sure why we do not acknowledge this more openly. I think exposing our sense of “fallibility” would make us more compassionate towards one another as we discuss these matters and more willing to listen to people who have different opinions than the ones we ourselves currently have.

Because at the end of the day, these are all opinions — only opinions — that we are offering as to what will matter. Cause as I said, no one knows for sure.

For example, I teach Orwell. But I can’t say for sure that the impact of teaching Orwell creates a better future life for my students in a way that leaps over what I could have imparted should I have chosen to teach Jane Austen.

And while I make an effort to incorporate 21rst century digital literacy skills into my classroom, I can’t say that I’m not participating in the education of my kids in an area that’s a total waste because it will soon enough be obsolete due to somebody (probably a pimple-faced teen with a whole lotta Red Bull running through their veins) already figuring out a better means of accomplishing the same task in less time with more accuracy and insight.

I mean I teach MLA style. Is there not a point at which papers will simply be hyperlinked to their reference source so that I do not have to have my kids go through the process of typing last name, first name and so on?

Once, doctors believed in leeches and bleeding. Today we believe in slashing the arts in order to drill the “core”. Will history view us one day in the same manner?

No one knows. People may say they know, people may shout they know, people may drum up all sorts of intellectualized justifications for why they know.

But they don’t.

We’re all just doing the best we can and if we took a moment to take the bullhorns out of our mouths and tried to listen to other people’s points of view as heard through this perspective of understanding, “Hey, they really don’t know what they are talking about anyway” our educational dialogue in this country would be much more civil.

And less dogmatic. And less infuriating. Wouldn’t it? (I am only speculating — I don’t really know.)

But I do know that the folks who have PhD.’s — they don’t know. And that smart-mouthed kid in 3rd period. He just might know.

And which of those two thoughts is more disconcerting?

Education is a best guess business.