Sometimes, in life, when you stick your neck out to try and really DO something, you are gonna get blasted for it. Really, kicked in the teeth.
And it hurts.
But just remember, in life, if you don’t stick your neck out and try to really DO something, it’s going to hurt much worse.
There’s a part of me that is just tremendously old fashioned.
I believe in the value of hard work.
I believe in the potential of kids.
I believe in saying please and thank you.
Therefore, when it comes to the end of the school year, I really feel as if the professional effort we give to them boils down to one simple question: don’t our students deserve it?
Don’t our kids deserve the right to be challenged these last few weeks of school?
I mean really, aren’t our kids being short-changed enough in these tough times? After all, none of this is really about us anyway; it’s about serving them. (At least, it’s supposed to be.)
Now sure, it’s exhausting. And most of us are exhausted. But as much as we need new tools, expanded resources, more money and heightened brain-power in education, these last few weeks really only require one thing to be successful.
A dedicated teacher who holds the intention of ending the school year with a BANG!
If you want to get something done, you will get it done. And if you don’t, you won’t. At this point, I am not sure how much “teacher effectiveness” can be legislated. Or student participation. This time of year is about looking into your own heart and deciding what type of teacher you want to be.
Sure, you can coast. At this point of the school year, shortcuts seem more obvious and tempting than ever. My advice is to reach down deep and GO FOR IT one more time.
Assign a passion project. Something meaningful. Something meaningful to you (because you feel strongly that kids need to learn “this”). Something meaningful to them (so that the students feel empowered with a sense of self-directed choice).
Indeed, we are on summer’s doorstep. My advice: don’t just survive the school year, finish it!
Finish strong.
(FYI, I am going to host a free webinar on Finishing Strong tonight from 6:30 – 7:30 EST. If interested, you can sign up here.)
I love using Project-Based Learning (PBL) in the classroom. There are about a zillion reasons why and a host of research exists on why using PBL is simply, well… good teaching. No need for me to really explain the sound theory behind it all right here. It would take too long.
PBL rocks! Let’s leave it at that.
On a practical level I find that using PBL as the cornerstone for ending the school year is especially effective in allowing me to achieve many of my objectives for this time of year.
Why? Because I want my students, in no particular order to…
Of course, I want most of these things during the course of the year as well. However, having to bow at the altar of NCLB, ETS and their bubble tests while making sure to cover a host of “other things” that are not as PBL friendly for ELA teachers (like punctuating appositive phrases and teaching parallelism within sentences) well… as Mick Jagger once said, “You can’t always get what you want.”
So essentially, before my classes break for the summer, I ask my students to “step up” bigger than they ever have before through the creation of a “project”.
I preface my assignment with a little speech about how, at this very moment, my kids are most probably at the height of their aptitudes. They have never had more schooling, they’ve never been more worldly, they’ve never had more experiences, they’ve never been more ready to deliver something truly great. (Obviously, when dealing with 14-17 year olds, this can almost always be said; they are perpetually at their “height” in a way. Once you get old like me, however, you can’t always say you are “better” now than you ever were before because in 1986 I was a much better basketball player than I am today. However, as English students, they are often “better” than they were two, three or even five years ago. Thus this little warm-up speech.)
All in all it boils down to Envision, Plot, Refine, Build, Tinker, Reflect, Re-Tinker, Finalize, Present.
Ending the year with my students having created “SOMETHING” is my plan.
What is that SOMETHING? It’s really up to the teacher. From expository projects to poetry units to biographical studies and on and on and on, a host of truly great ideas are available.
PBL can be high tech… or not.
PBL can be assigned to both individuals or groups.
PBL can take the form of old school oratory or new wave multi-media.
PBL can be so, so, so many things.
All in all, when it comes to the end of the year, I want my students to have to climbed a final mountain, ascended to a new plateau, and really pushed it one last time before our moments together in my room have passed.
PBL offers me that opportunity. Showing fluffy movies, merely biding your time til the year is over, counting down the days is a freakin’ waste.
Use the time. It’s life’s true currency.
(FYI, I am going to host a free webinar on Finishing Strong next week (May 19th from 6:30 – 7:30 EST. If interested, you can sign up here.)
Great news today!! I was just notified that my most biggest writing project ever, was named a Finalist for the 2010 Association of Educational Publishers Distinguished Achievement Awards in the category of Reading and Language Arts.
I really only started writing educational curriculum for one reason: I hated the fact that I was a perpetual complainer about all the junk that was out there being peddled to my school and my students.
And living in a world where I saw my school – and so many others – get, pardon my French, “fleeced” by educational publishers that weren’t providing what I felt needed to be provided in order to 1) effectively reach our modern students and 2) smartly empower today’s teachers with the tools they really needed to be effective professionals was driving me bonkers.
And the prices that these folks were charging? Jeez, it made my head spin. (Thus the French term above). I always felt it could be done better.
But then I had to face the facts. If I really thought it could be done better, I would have to prove it. It’s easy to talk and complain. It’s harder to actually do something about it.
And so I decided to take a run at educational publishing myself.
When publishers found out that I was going to put together a curriculum of best practices from my own classroom that pretty much used all the strategies, methodologies, insights and tools I had developed over the years and years I’d spent as a classroom educator (and as avid student of schooling itself) it landed me a bunch of meetings. Everyone was interested in working with me on this endeavor.
My literary agent, however, thought I was a bit nuts.
“Why take a detour off of a great – and growing – career as a YA novelist to go write material for teachers? The work is going to be three times as hard and the money a lot less?”
Now my agent is great. Best professional partner I have in many, many respects. However, when he heard my reasoning (i.e. I wanted to “give back”, I thought I could make a real difference, people asked me all the time for materials as to how I do what I do to reap the results I get with my kids) he said, “Ya know what, you won me over. I can see you feel passionate and think this is going to be something meaningful and special. Let’s do it! Let’s see if we can’t change, or at least try to change a world that has become fossilized.”
And so, of all the publishers available to me, I struck a deal with a young and hungry group over at Haights Cross and Recorded Books. What they lacked in tremendous size, they made up for in desire, smarts and talent. They let me captain the ship, they worked hard to provide all the resources I’d need to produce something smashing, and they put the pedal to the metal from the boardroom on down. Essentially, they gave me their full support. (And who doesn’t want/need that?)
What I was able to publish with them is, what I feel, the best teaching I have ever done. The BookJam is my response to my own complaining.
And though it’s still less than a year old – and there are more phases planned in the project (I just finished the Poetry Jam and The Classics Jam meaning 7 BookJams are already out while 4 more BookJams are being written by me this summer for release in the next 6-8 months) well… how cool is it that the Association of American Publishers just gave me a little love for my efforts.
So what’s the lesson? (I am always looking for lessons.) As teachers, we are not as disempowered as we think we are to bring about change. I rolled up my shirts sleeves and got to work.
Our schools are starving for more of us to take the lead. Science teachers, math teachers, history, PE, art, music, Special Ed and on and on and on.
We can do better.
Or kids deserve better.
The status quo is not working.
Being named a finalist for such a prestigious award, what’s it really mean? It means I now have the credibility to encourage other educators to quit looking to politicians and administrators with political agendas for the classroom answers you need.
Take the reins and have at it folks… you have no idea where it will lead.
I didn’t.
You have heard of Stephanie Meyer, right? She’s a mom who doesn’t live on either coast that grew up reading Jane Austen but likes Orson Scott Card, too.
Oh yeah, she wrote this small little book called Twilight, as well. Anyway, I wonder if there is something she can teach us about what it means to be a writer? After all, anybody who can get teens to line up in front of bookstores waiting for the stroke of midnight to hit so that they can get their hands on their latest 700 page release (no pictures, either) might have something valuable to say about the act of writing for young adults, no?
Here’s what she said about what’s next for her?
Is it the purchase of a private island? A yachting trip around the globe? Perhaps she wants to buy an NFL football team? (Okay, I am projecting here.) So, what’s next for someone with the immense success of Stephanie Meyer in their back pocket?
Well, more writing, of course. She says…
I plan to then write Midnight Sun, which is Twilight told from Edward’s perspective. After that, I may write some sequels for The Host, or a may pull another outline from my files to play with. I won’t stop writing; there are too many stories I want to tell.
For writers, the joy is in the work. There is almost no real end goal, no one book that ever gets completed so that, “Well, that’s enough… I’ve done all there is I want to do.”
If there’s still ink the pen, writers want to write. Teachers are kind of like that as well. I mean we never say, “Well, Jimmy now knows how to align his subjects with his verbs so my work in this profession is done.”
We look for more ways to work with Jimmy. Or Janet or Cindy or Michael or Todd.
Cause there is always more to do when the work you are doing is meaningful.
Make your work meaningful and your job won’t really feel like a job at all… but rather it will feel like an aspect of your personhood that resonates with purpose.
That’s may sound all new age and flakey but it’s not. It’s what makes getting up in the morning – at least, for me – feel rewarding instead of dreadful.
Are we hiding something? Really, are we?
Because let me be the first to call it like it is — when it comes to the conversation about teacher effectiveness, I think I am secretly harboring an inferiority complex about my own deficiencies to do this job of being a teacher… at least to do it in a manner that is beyond reproach.
And I don’t want other people to know about it.
And I certainly do not want this information revealed to my bosses. Why? Because I don’t sense that they are sympathetic to all the challenges, hurdles and generally unreasonable demands that are being placed on me.
Come on, I can’t turn water into wine. And yet, in a way, that’s what I am being asked to do when you take all the mitigating factors into consideration. Amazingly, I do pretty well at it — at times, that is. Let’s just say that some days are way better than others.
However, I certainly don’t feel that “measuring my effectiveness” is going to take all of the “peripheral issues” and “extenuating circumstances” into account and ultimately, I think that politicians are just going to use whatever information they glean from “measuring my effectiveness” to shame me and try to make me worker harder, work longer, and do it all for less money with less resources.
So am I hiding something when it comes to being transparent about measuring my effectiveness as a teacher?
I tell you this, my natural reflex is to want to hide. To want to cover up. To want to close my door and only seek the solace and company and empathy that someone else in like circumstances can understand.
Other teachers get me. Politicians, I feel, do not. Therefore, when they say they want to measure me, I recoil and think, “Up yours, Dude… you are the one who captained this ship to the rocks and now you want to blame the people rowing.”
So, is measuring teacher effectiveness even possible? Well first, for me to really play ball with this whole idea, I am going to have to trust the process.
That is the one of the first “hows” when it comes to measuring teacher effectiveness. The teachers must feel as if we are going to be given a fair shake, we must feel that our evaluations are going to be taken in proper context as opposed to being viewed through myopic, unfair prisms, and we must feel that we have been properly and fairly represented at the table when the rules of what constitutes this measurement is made.
And with NCLB being your latest foray into education policy, you are already starting behind the eight ball buddy. I have emotional baggage right now and let’s be honest, as an educator I am a tarnished, not a clean, slate.
And you are the one who tarnished me. I want to believe — really I do. But fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice…
Last night after putting my daughter to sleep, I spent a long time writing a blog for today. Actually, it was too long. I’d spent over 45 minutes on it and knew it needed to be trimmed down or converted into a two-part piece, something like that.
See, I want to start adding in a little more about how I, as an author, write. The process of authoring a book, the ins-n-outs, the behind the scenes, from idea to page to literary agent to sale to publisher to bookstores. Looking behind the curtain at this process feels like it might have relevance to teaching ELA and I suspect there might be much to be mined in terms of making connections from the toils of a professional author to those of the student author — as they are really more closely related than most kids probably imagine.
It was a goodie, too. Really meaty.
Then my wife zapped it.
45 minutes worth of work gone-zo. I went to go score some jellybeans from the kitchen cabinet (the ones she’s been hiding from me cause I’ve been eating too many as of late… in her opinion) and she wanted to take a look at something on Web MD since everyone in our house right now has a bit of a tickle in their throat. So she opened a new tab and read a few pieces of info while I covertly munched some orange little droplets of love in the other room. Then, when she was done, she closed out ALL tabs on the computer.
Not just Web MD but all the tabs… and a heck of a lot of thoughtful work of mine went bye-bye.
So for today, it’s kinda like the dog ate my digital homework. I am frustrated that I have to do it again — and it will almost assuredly be different — but the thing is, stuff happens, right? At first I was steamed, aggravated and so on but the fact is, it was my fault, not hers. I could have “saved it as a draft”. I could have backed it up somehow. I could have taken steps to make sure I didn’t lose the material before I got up from my seat to go satisfy my sweet tooth.
But I didn’t. But what I did do right after that was make sure I backed up every file on my computer to an external hard drive because losing 45 minutes worth of work is one thing — but losing an entire computer’s worth of work is something else entirely.
After all, who doesn’t have scores of irreplaceable pictures, lesson plans, writing and so forth on their computer? So in my small pain let their be a great lesson to all who have read this today: BACK YOUR STUFF UP!
Remember, the time to fix your roof is when the sun is shining.
And now, if you’ll forgive me, I have to go apologize to my wife for my outburst. There are two reasons for this. 1) I flew off the handle a bit and 2) cause if I don’t she’s gonna hide the damn jellybeans where I’ll never, ever find them again.
Why do I so deeply enjoy helping kids who are no longer my students? I mean, it’s more work for me, right? And it’s not like I already don’t have enough to do. But still, when former kids come in and ask me for stuff, I always try and help them out — and I do it happily.
I guess it’s because I like to see them. I mean we build such close relationships over the course of a year and then, once summer hits, we all disperse into a thousand different directions. That feels normal. But when the school year starts back up again, I miss those relationships. I miss those kids. And they grow so much — and change and get taller, and lose their braces and so on, it’s just nice to see. My students, well, in a way it’s like each of them is a story in progress and I always want to know more about how things are unfolding in their lives. And of course, when things are going well for them, I am glad to see it.
Yet often I don’t see former students when things are going well for them. More often I see former kids when they need something.
Some need a schedule change. Some need to chat about something personal. Some need advice, a smile or someone to talk college football with. (GO USC TROJANS!) And some just need to feel a real connection with a real adult on campus.
I guess I live in perpetual empty nest syndrome. “How come you don’t call? You don’t write?” I become like a nagging mother with kids that have gone off to college and only touch base when needs arise.
And the thing is, I’ll take it… cause it’s better than nothing.
I’ve read scores and scores of books on the art and science of teaching. Many of the big names, lots of small ones, folks who have had some genuinely brilliant stuff to say and others who struck me as flat out nincompoops. But I think that one of the most important things I have taken away from all my “studies” is something about which everyone in our profession needs to be frequently reminded.
We flub. We mess up. We make mistakes… on almost a daily basis.
Sure, there are days when their is magic at the whiteboard, as if our dry erase markers were an alchemist’s wand turning neurological water into cranial fine wine. But most days, balls are dropped. Opportunities come up but they are not seized. Something exceptional is planned and it falls flat on its face. I come off as salty when in fact I am in a great mood but merely pressed for time. Yes, I always want to be attuned to the individual needs of all my kids –especially the ones that merely need a friendly, encouraging voice that day — but when I am in the midst of navigating 186 other kids over the course of 7 hours and the fire alarm has just been pulled for the fourth time in a row during third period by a buncha comedians in the halls, I sometimes miss the cues.
I aim to do great and then I find myself just barely hanging on. The last bell of the day rings and I realize that I did not get done nearly the amount of things I needed to do in order for tomorrow to function the way it ought to. Friday hits and I realize that I really need to work both Saturday and Sunday in order to make sure Monday is gonna work the way it needs to — and in the ways my kids deserve it to.
But I’ve got plans with the family, errands long left undone, a stack of paperwork from my own life to navigate (like the very pedestrian necessity of paying bills) and my pillow is taunting me with the idea of actually getting more than 5 1/2 hours of sleep every night.
And do I manage it all in some sort of suave, filled-with-European panache fashion? Hell no. I stumble forward, bang my foot into the dresser and screw up.
I bumble and stumble forward. And this is after 10 years at Lynwood High and even longer than that in the profession.
Yet, the difference now is that I understand this about teaching. I get that this is the nature of our career beast. Early in my career I used to get down on myself, really beat the crap out of myself. Think to myself, “Ya know, you really stink at this — and you are working at almost maximum life capacity to be this bad. It’s hard, I am no good, and the kids deserve better. Shouldn’t you pack up and go find a cubicle somewhere that offers bathroom breaks any time you need to pee?”
However, with experience, that negative-loop tape recording no longer plays in my head. Why? Because I’ve come to realize no one ever masters the art of teaching. No one is immune to falling short, fouling up, getting caught in a situation for which you were completely unprepared and acting in ways that, “Oh, if I could only turn back the clock 45 minutes and get a do-over, the world would be so much better.”
It just doesn’t happen.
And so here I am, so frequently with my tail between my legs. But if I set my intention to do as well as I can do, continue to try and improve my craft, make sure that I learn from my mistakes and remain optimistic about the future, I think I am gonna be alright.
And if I can remain alright, I do believe I have something of great value to offer my kids. Even if sometimes I am going to trip and fall and bang my head on a desk in front of a room full of teenagers who are gonna make no bones about laughing at me and telling all their friends at lunch what a dork Mr. Alan is.
Cause at the end of the day, this is a job that can only be highlighted in a “And warts and all” type of fashion. There is just no way to ever avoid the, as Homer Simpson would say, “D’Oh!” of being a teacher.
When an A student plummets to an F student, when their attendance drops off a cliff, when their demeanor changes from one of youthful, sunny, brightness to quiet, somber stoicism you just know something is wrong.
Jennie (not her real name) just hit that nail on the head. So, as I always do, I pressed her to find out, “What’s up?”
Turns out she was walking around our school about 2 months ago long after the day had ended, iPod in her ear looking for a private corner to read one of the books for my class (the irony of that it was the book Speak is just too thick) when 3 boys — she is not even sure if they went to this school — tried to rape her.
“Tried” she said. (Yep, it happened on campus — we have a really large facility, lots and lots of nook and crannies.) But she also mentioned she had “surgery” a few minutes later in her disjointed description so a part of me fears that they were successful. Details were convoluted to say the least and I am not going to go deeply into them because really, what the F*&% difference does it make? A young girl, a student of mine, was violated.
Stories like this used to break my back. And they still do but I have matured enough to realize that the pain resides with the student before it does with me and so I recognize that my role is to best serve the needs of Jennie as they stand now and not wallow in the moral implications that events like this have for me, personally, or society at large. And so I did my best to say some very encouraging things, offer all a bunch of resources (counseling, therapists, police, etc…) and so on.
Let me tell you, this girl Jennie would make any parent or teacher proud — and the fact that sexual assault is so prevalent in American society is something that just rips me up. I mean when she told me the story, she did it from a perspective of blaming herself. About how she shouldn’t have been walking around alone long after most folks were off campus, about how she should have known better and so on.
Makes me ashamed. Of my school. Of my city. Of my state. Of my nation. And the thing is, today was a day whereby I started with a ton of pep in my step, a day I was ready to really teach from the rooftops. And now… well how am I supposed to feel?
In so many ways, this incident is not about me and I feel selfish for feeling so hurt. Then again, when something like this happens to any kid, a part of our collective hearts simply sinks.
Some people are already on summer vacation. Some of us are still in the salt mines. Yet no matter where we are, this stuff stings… and when-oh-when will this nuttiness stop.
In Karma I trust. That’s where I take solace. At some point, in some way, at some time, karma… it gets us all. I think this belief is at the core of where I find the strength to go on and not leave the teaching profession. I mean I love teaching, but this stuff kills me.
