I have a stack of stuff to do on my desk… but no matter how much stuff I do, it seems as though the stack remains at the same height.

And I swear, I do a lot.

I mean it’s just a wee bit before X-mas and New Year’s and I am still cranking at full speed, as if it were mid-May or something.

Question: If I stop actually doing work, does the stack of work for me to do stop growing? I mean it’s clear that doing work doesn’t reduce the stack so maybe not doing work will not increase the stack.

It’s Alice in Wonderland logic, for sure… but perhaps we’ve all got it wrong. I mean slackers never really have much to do and highly productive people (who do a lot) always seem to have a lot to do.

There’s gotta be a law here, somewhere, Murphy style.Here’s my first stab at it – I call it Sitomer’s Preposterous Law of Work. (Why not, right?)

To not do work will result in there being less work for you to do, but to do a lot of work will result in there being a lot more work for you to do.

In other words, “Work or Work not, that is the question.”

Have you ever noticed that some teachers think the work of being an educator would be absolutely awesome if it wasn’t for the damn kids?

Or those stinkin’ parents?

Or those silly administrators?

Or those reprehensible peers?

Or those annoying blogger types? (Okay, I made this last one up as I really couldn’t find any examples of folks who fit this profile. And yes, I searched and searched and searched. Matter of fact, I looked everywhere except in the mirror. LOL!)

All of us have an opinion on what is wrong with education, but how much time do we spend in our conversations speaking about that which is right?

I like the damn kids.

I seek to break bread with the stinkin’ parents.

Okay, screw the administrators. I mean even they feel that way about one another, right? (JOKING!! Admins are so often placed in untenable positions that I don’t know why more people do not recognize that we are often seeing in our schools is a crisis of administration. Too much work for too few people with too many skill sets required to sensibly prosper in the position. I’ll leave that for another blog.)
As for the annoying bloggers, if you come across any, please let me know. Truly, they ought to be tarred and feathered.

Not many students of mine can afford an iPad. Matter of fact, I know only one. Her name is B and she just left my class after showing me how she is using it.

Her final words before she left… “I don’t really need notebook paper or pen ever again.”

B, mind you, is a top student. To wit, she built her own flash cards for her AP History class using a free flash card app she downloaded.

Her cards were so stupendous, I think she should think about selling the set online. (She’d made more than 240 of them based on her handwritten class notes – class notes that are, in her estimation, “oh so yesterday” because of how she can manage, arrange, organize, share evolve and connect the content all in one simple device.)

And watching her flip through these cards – they flip the same way the iPad turns pictures (i.e. the note cards have a front and a back and can be organized into sets, colors and so on) it was just mind-blowing to see what the modern-day AP student is already doing with an iPad.

She did her end-of-year report for science class (typed, with graphics, charts and pictures that, of course, the teacher required to be printed meaning that there would be no color and her aspiration to create hyperlinked references was pointless), she had her school organizer, she had things I didn’t even know existed on her tablet-top and she was using them like a kid who had been handling this type of computer technology her whole life.

Assignments, schedules, phone numbers, bookmarked websites, on and on and on and on.

I was just amazed how all-encompassing the iPad was for B already. I mean, she’s only owned the thing for 3 weeks and yet she trusts her entire academic life to the thing.

And mind you, as I said, this is not a run-of-the-mill student. B is an A student. To her, the iPad could be a toy – and it is at times. She readily admits she likes to play some of the games. (NOTE: She kicked my butt in Finger Air Hockey but I wouldda smoked her in checkers if we had time to finish the game.)

The device is not a fad and it’s not a fraud. Matter of fact, I am not sure why we are not already hearing more cries from those of us in academia to “get our students iPads”.

Simply put, they can do more than even I was ready to give them credit for.

B was a more efficient and more capable student with the iPad than she was without it. And she proved that to me.

School, and it’s inability to keep up with B, was the impediment to extended meaningful thinking and not vice versa.

For those of you who are still skeptical, I say find your way to touching an iPad this summer and contemplate the possibilities because it is people like us who are going to bring about the change we need in our schools.

From vanquishing the inane bubble tests to ridding ourselves of sanitized, one-size-fits-all textbooks to liberating our classrooms so that we can genuinely connect kids to one another, connect kids to best practices, and connect kids in a more meaningful way to their own education (and on and on and on) the iPad is genuinely an amazing device.

Skeptical? I was too. But the more I see, the more I believe this is a great classroom tool that, if wielded properly, will work wonders for kids across the nation.

Yes, I am Back on the iPad Bandwagon… and my feeling is that You Should Be, Too!

A few days ago, a major league umpire blew a call and cost a pitcher a perfect game. Being that the “perfect game” is such a rare feat in baseball, this was a big deal to many in the sports world.

But what struck me about the whole incident was how quickly and completely the ump owned up to his error.

He blew it. He said he blew it. He felt terrible about blowing it and if there was a way to make amends for screwing up the call beyond apologizing, he made no bones about saying he would have done it.

“It was the biggest call of my career, and I kicked the (stuff) out of it,” Joyce said, looking and sounding distraught as he paced in the umpires’ locker room. “I just cost that kid a perfect game.”

This, to me, is a great reminder as to why I often try to bring in “pieces” I find from my random readings into English class. The language arts standards are easy to teach. Aspects of being a high quality human being, much tougher. (And being that the bubble tests don’t even bother to pay lip service to this aspect of a student’s education – beyond the threat of DON’T CHEAT ON THE BUBBLE TESTS, that is – we are sledding up an even tougher hill on this front!)

An article like this is a great way to end the year. Why? Because at the end of the day, kids need to know that no matter what they do, no matter how hard they try, no matter where they work, how much they make or who they partner up with, they are going to one day “screw up big time”.

And how they respond to their errors will determine much more about their lives than most kids really ever give any thought to.

I know I’ve screwed up a lot this year. (School ends next Friday, June 11 for me.) I am sure there are students to whom I have seemed insensitive, peers to whom I’ve seemed self-righteous, admins to whom I have seemed intractable and readers who think I am a bleepity-bleep.

Heck, sometimes when I read what I have written I think I am a bleepity-bleep so how can folks not?

What can I say but, “Hey, I am human… I screw up.” And just like this baseball ump, when we do foul up – and admit it – I find that most people are pretty quick to forgive us and think we are better people for admitting that we have shortcomings. Matter of fact, the people who own up to their mistakes are the type of people with whom most of us would prefer to be associated with.

Do you know anyone who always thinks they are right?
Do you know anyone that perpetually refuses to apologize?
Do you know anyone who feels that they are entitled to behave the way that they do because of… gulp… who they are?

Drive ya crazy, won’t they?

Umpire Joyce, you can call my ball game anytime because I am much more wary of the folks who claim they are not at fault than I am of the folks who own up to matters and say they are when they are.

In life, as in baseball, no one bats 1.000

The past few days I have been riding the “Schools must go high tech!” horse as if I am some kind of tech geek.

I am not. Yes, I own an iPad and I blog and I have a cool website for all of my books, free stuff, and so on, but really, I don’t view myself as cutting edge.

I view myself as just doing the bare minimum of what I need to do in order to keep pace so that I can continue to professionally evolve and remain critically responsive to the aims I hold for my career.

Matter of fact, I still don’t know how to work all the functions on my phone, my camera or even my laptop.

I’ve been using Microsoft Word for what, 20 years now? I still don’t really know how to do about a million things in that program.

Truly, the capacities of these machines boggle me. I just kind of know what I know and seek to stay comfy in that realm.

Essentially, I don’t prosper; I survive.

However, I am perpetually feeling forced to either evolve or be left behind. Trust me, a big part of me is WAY more conformable working at a whiteboard with novels using oration and paper and pen to navigate my school year. (Bubble tests and scantrons… forget it!)

Yet, I also know that literacy has become so diverse and there are so many genuinely legit projects to bring into my classroom which just rock the house and demonstrate aptitudes which allow me to meet my goals in so many ways that I believe in my heart that if I do not better embrace technology in the classroom I am doing a disservice to my students. (The degree of this slight is up for debate… but to simply not use any tech at all feels to me as if the kids are being short-changed – especially because the only real reason I would not bring some tech at some point into my classroom projects is my own inability to work in this realm. It’s never the students that inhibit me from bringing tech in the classroom… it’s me! My own inability prevents kids from using their abilities. That’s a thought worth taking note of for, does it not, ring true, for many, may teachers? Why are we so afraid to admit our shortcomings and also say, “Hey, I need help!”?)

Matter of fact, I think a driving force in me buying an iPad was a feeling of being left behind which is ironic because, when I look at public education on the whole, people must think I am at the far end of the technological competency curve.

That is scary because in many ways I am an outright oaf with tech tools!

It just goes to show how far behind our schools are. I guess the old saying is true: In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king.

Tech has a definite place in the 2010 classroom. It’s not the end-all, be-all and it isn’t the panacean answer that people would want you to believe (probably because they are trying to sell you something when they say it)… but technology can help us evolve.

A lot.

And when you look at how much room for improvement there is in public education today, it’d be great to see the common core standards tethered to the idea of project-based learning as opposed to it being tethered to, what we all fear will be, standardized bubble tests.

No, I am not a tech geek. And I’d be laughed out of one of those tech conferences if ever I was forced to show how little I actually do know.

But I understand the idea that when we preach “you must be a lifelong learner” in our schools, the first person that must embody this idea is me, the classroom educator.