I saw Jim Burke at CATE the other day and he mentioned how nicely blogging works within the scope of all the other writing he does.

And he particularly likes the groove he’s fallen into with it as of late.

Funny how I greatly enjoy blogging as well. Truth is, many people told me I should “blog” (whatever the heck that meant) as far back as 2007… but I wasn’t really into it. Wasn’t sure if I’d have anything to say or be able to stick with it or find any joy in it or what not.

Truth is, now that I have been at it for well over a year, I am a bit amazed at my ability to be prolific without really sacrificing any other meaningful part of my life.

Heck, I don’t know what I was doing before I was blogging – probably sleeping (LOL!) – but nowadays I find blogging to be a tool which keeps me sharp as a writer. After all, I must crank out almost 2,000 words a week just for blogs alone — and they can be about anything I want them to be about.

I’ve blogged about politicians, farts, assessment, writing, violence, books, dysfunction, friends, and on and on and on.

Heck, I’ve now even blogged about blogging.

If I do the math of it all, I see this: 2,000 words per week for at least 45 weeks this year is 90,000 words — that’s a 500 page novel I’ve written, easy! (A 500 page novel that I am, btw, not publishing. I mean who’s gonna want to read a book about farting politicians as they dysfunctionally craft policy for school assessment? I know, I know, I’d be surprised.)

The point is, more people should try it. Blogging keeps me sharp as a writer. Muscles that are used stay in better shape than muscles which are too well-rested.

I should know. I just finished yet another new children’s book which my agent read last night and loved… another notch coming in the belt, it looks like.

Blogging doesn’t come at the expense of other writing… blogging, ironically enough, seems to liberate writing.

Whoudda thunk-it?

I am at CATE today, at the The California Association of Teachers of English Annual conference. I love this event. Why?

1) Awesome authors.
-Nikki Grimes
-T.A. Barron
-Michelle Serros
-Joy Harjo
-Sonia Nazario
-Junot Diaz

2) Tons of folks sharing best practices
-Writing workshops
-Reading workshops
-New Media workshops
-Assessment workshops
-Workshops on how to do a Workshop, they have it all!

3) The Exhibit Hall
-Call me a dork but cruising the Exhibit Hall is one of my favorite things to do at conferences. From the t-shirts I buy (how many people here own an ERACISM t-shirt… that guy’s gotta be a millionaire by now) to checking out the latest and greatest that publishers have to offer — and seeing how badly some of the stuff stinks. I mean some materials that people today are peddling just look so old and tired and “been there, done that” don’t they, to the books I inevitably purchase (I always leave carrying more stuff out than I brought with me in), I just LOVE the Exhibit Hall!

4) The friends, old and new
-CATE is really such a warm place. It’s the people that make this conference rock! Getting to see folks I haven’t seen in a year (since last year’s CATE conference usually) is always fun. But the truth is, I just love chillin’ with English teachers. They make the wittiest of references, too. Gotta stay sharp to run with this crowd.

Much love to CATE.

And a great many thanks to all the hard-working people who toil so fabulously to put it on year after year.

Since ya’ll know how much I love data-driven assessment, I decided to uncork a wee bit of Super Bowl data and show you why I deserve one of those high-fallutin’ ETS jobs, the kind that pays over six-figures if you are selected to work in the hallowed halls of this “non-profit” institution.

Stand back and watch I sew the seeds of Bubble Test Brilliance while using nothing but our Holy Day of pizza, chicken wings and potato chips to make our schoolchildren squeal.

(Cause if they don’t squeal, it’s not a good test question, is it?)

–4,000 tons of popcorn were estimated to have been eaten yesterday. If one would have stringed/strung/strunged all that popcorn together, the ring would circle the earth 5 1/2 times. According to this information, what is the earth’s radius? (Ya feelin’ me, ETS? Ya feelin’ me?)

–15,000 tons of chips were eaten. If an elephant weighs 2 3/4 tons and a textbook weighs 1/62,476 of a ton, how many textbooks would you need to stack up in order to equal the amount of potato chips our nation ate yesterday?

Please express you answer in terms of elephants.

–8 millions pounds of guacamole were consumed on Super Bowl Sunday which ranks second to Cinco de Mayo. How many English Language Learners does a school need to demonize in order to create enough guacamole to sustain us through 3 Cinco de Mayos in a Leap Year?

Helpful ETS hint we’ll offer to make sure all test questions are not culturally biased: Cinco de Mayo occurs on May 5th — except during a Leap Year when it occurs on, well… May 5th.

–Each year we, in America, eat 3 billion pizzas as a nation. During the Super Bowl 350 slices of pizza are being consumed each second over the course of a 12 hour day. If 1/11 of those pizzas are pepperoni and 1/14 are veggie, who was driving the pizza delivery car when it took them a freakin’ hour and a half to deliver Paulie and his drunk friends a cold pie?

Come on ETS, I am lofting softballs to ya right here. Think of the bubble tests that could be created from this American phenomenon!

Am I hired? Am I hired?

One last FYI… Did you know that Indianapolis public schools took Super Bowl Monday off? Yep, they shut down. Burned a snow day. And why? Cause last time the Colts went to the Super Bowl on the Monday which followed the game, 64% of the kids came down with what was affectionately named the “Blue Flu”… but their parents miraculously healed them all by Tuesday when attendance returned to normal.

So this year, IPS took no chances and called off school before the game even kicked off.

Last week I was part of an amazing banquet where we honored the 2010 California Teachers of the Year in Sacramento. Big kahunas were all over the place. State senators. Educational policy makers from the Department of Ed. And of course, the inimitable State Superintendent of Public Education in California, Jack O’Connell. (Being a part of this crowd is like being a part of my only real Skulls and Bones Society — aside from this ning, that is… LOL!)

The point is, okay, I admit — I am not objective. I was a 2007 TOY (Teacher of the Year) for the state of California and when it comes to “pimpin’ for my homies” I call it much like Chick Hearn used to call Los Angeles Laker games… with an eye towards the hometown fans.

So yep, I adore Kelly Kovacic. But the thing is, when it comes to Kelly, she completely deserves the admiration. From all of us.

First off, she’s a teacher’s teacher. At school late. At school early. Taking on all kinds of extra duties. (I’d say without fanfare but hey, just she stepped into a world of fanfare so it’s no longer true — but toiling in obscurity with her shirt sleeves rolled up is how she got where she is.)

So what is all the hoopla? Well, the press release says that Kelly provides “a rigorous college-preparatory education for motivated low-income students who all live below the poverty level”.

It’s a well turned phrase to read on paper but what’s that really mean in the real world to me and you? Well, in real world terms, it means Kelly is on the front line of education changing lives. Breaking the patterns of generational poverty as bequeathed from one to the next due to a lack of education. She provides resources. She provides tools. She provides belief.

Kelly makes a difference — an immense one. And she works her ass off doing it.

There are well over 300,000 educators in the state of California. Many, many, many of them do Herculean, fantastic work. Kelly was chosen as the 2010 representative for us all.

There are millions of teachers in our nation. Many, many, many of them do Herculean, fantastic work. Kelly is now one of four teachers that might represent us all as the National Teacher of the Year. (Wow, huh?)

Many, many educators don’t even realize that their states have a Teacher of the Year program. Well, we do. We all do. And why?

As it turns out, one of the core missions of this program is to shine a positive light on the great work being done by teachers across this country. It’s that simple. There are scores and scores and scores of people doing TREMENDOUS work out there — and our parents, our students, our peers and our politicians need to know about it.

It’s not that Kelly is the “best” teacher. That would be preposterous to even try to to determine. It’s that Kelly is a GREAT teacher. And now she represents all the teachers in my state.

Do you know your state teacher of the year? Do you know someone that deserves consideration for state teacher of the year? (Hit your state’s dept. of ed website — you’ll find more info there.)

After all, if we don’t celebrate our own, who will?

Congrats Kelly! You do California proud!

I greatly distrust the data I hear. Why? Because the way one presents the data all too often determines the message that the data conveys to the audience. And the less insightful the audience (i.e the more laypersons in the group) the easier it is to spin, spin, spin away.

For example…

Scenario 1: Headline
Local school doubles their test scores over last year! YAY!

Scenario 2: Headline
80% of students at local school flunk the test. BOO!

Now, in scenario 1, if you only had 1 out of 10 kids pass last year’s test and this year 2 out of 10 passed the test, you did indeed DOUBLE YOUR TEST scores.

YAY!

Yet, if only 2 out of 10 kids passed the test, that means 80% of the kids still came up short.

BOO!

And, as I hope you can see, this “data” has been taken from the same school.

There’s too much wiggle room in the world of data interpretation — because ultimately, in so, so, so many cases, it’s all in how one presents/spins the numbers.

And people who rise to the top in organizations know this very, very well. After all, as many a big kahuna CEO has said in reference to numbers they have been presented, “I don’t want these numbers. Now go out and get me the good data!”

Look behind the numbers at what is being presented at your next staff meeting and I am quite confident your first impression (the one the data presenter intended for you to take) will offer another way entirely to view the numbers if you so choose to take a different route.

And which is correct? Data, like beauty, seems to be in the eye of the beholder.

To many students, the holiday break of 2009 is long gone. But I have a student who will never forget it. That’s because his uncle strangled his aunt to death — and then shot himself in the head in a murder suicide — with his nephew, my ninth grader, in the next room.

And yes, my student heard the whole thing.

Of course I am setting my goal to do all the humanistic work I can to make sure this kid, well… doesn’t go off the deep end. But how his story will play out is a great unknown right now.

And yet, how will my work with him be measured this year? By the standardized test scores he delivers on the bubble tests we administer to probe his aptitudes and capacities.

Really, that’s it. What are his test scores?

Fair to him? Naw.
Fair to judge me as a teacher by his scores? Naw. And yet, that’s how the district, the county and the state are going to measure my professionalism this year.

Next time you see low test scores and think stinky teachers are to blame for low performance, well… perhaps there’s a human being behind each of those data-driven numbers we offer to the bean counters.

Jobs are gonna be slashed next year as a result of our NCLB probation status. But are the measurements really apples to apples?

A student witness to murder-suicide in the age of NCLB… no excuses, just results.

As I mentioned the other day, I am a big believer in goals. So much so that I always write them down.

Yet often, when I think of goals, I think in terms of career and professional aspirations. In a way it seems as if this is the way I am wired. (As is the rest of America. We are all about “productivity”. Buncha A-type personalities in the new land, that’s for sure.)

So today I am going to begin with “personal” goals, the non-professional elements that make for a life and not simply a career.

“Be a GREAT father, husband, friend, teacher and business associate.” That’s HUGE to me. And being a writer, I choose my words carefully. It’s not an accident that I use the word “great”. Why? Cause I want to be better than merely good. Now of course, I don’t always rise to the occasion (not hardly!) but I do find that having set my intention to aspire to this level helps me a great deal over the course of a year — especially as opposed to the way I used to live, simply meandering from experience to experience, never having a core set of inner principles to guide me. (BTW, can you hear the Covey influence on my life? That stuff works I tell ya!)

Also on my personal goal list is, “Take care of my physical health.” It’s why I am working to make a greater commitment to yoga. Truth be told, yoga has changed my life (and I am so the “level 1″ student that I am not sure if I’ll ever see level 2 — and yet still, yoga treats my body, mind and spirit exceptionally well. I am just a better human being when I do it with regularity.)

Then there’s “take care of my intellectual well-being.” For me this means I must make sure I carve out time to read and write.

Uhm, hello — don’t forget my emotional sanity. I need to make sure I laugh and participate in things that I find to be joyful while recognizing the potholes — the people and things — that make me feel tense, angry, frustrated, hopeless and so on… so that I can swerve away from them at every possible juncture. Look, I ain’t no effin saint and there’s a part of me that is more than willing to lay down with dogs so that I can mix it up and good — but I always wake up with fleas when I do so.

Goal setting helps me to remember this before I ever even encounter these people. (And you know who you are!)

And finally there’s the spiritual side of matters. The key this year for me — I mean it’s a really big goal — is to be more grateful. Gratitude often feels like the antidote for much of the stuff that gets to me and it makes me feel much more deeply connected to God.

That’s right, I said it. I believe (deeply) in God and gratitude really make me feel like I have a connection to this universal spirit more so than so many other things that purport to provide that for me.

No, it’s not the biggest list in the world. (Plus, I do have some specifics to which I will not speak in such a public forum.) Yet I feel that if I aspire to these goals and earn the grade of an A for effort in seeking to reach them this year, the actual results will all take care of themselves.

Focus on the process, know your larger personal aims and put in the hard work — these are my personal goals for 2010… and I think that it’s pretty clear to see that when I attain them (it’s always good to speak in the affirmative when goal setting; nothing wrong with assuming the accomplishment of any of these aims) the tackling of my “professional” goals will not only be much easier but more rewarding as well… because they will not come at the expense of what ought to be the most meaningful to me in my actual life.

Goals: The Personal Before the Professional

it’s been shown that people who actually write down their goals — the more specific the better — have a significantly higher likelihood of attaining their goals.

People who don’t write down their goals often come up short.

And people with no stated goals… they often drift.

Check this out — it’s from the book What they don’t teach you at Harvard Business School by Mark McCormack:

“McCormack tells of a study conducted on students in the 1979 Harvard MBA program. In that year, the students were asked, “Have you set clear, written goals for your future and made plans to accomplish them?” Only three percent of the graduates had written goals and plans; 13 percent had goals, but they were not in writing; and a whopping 84 percent had no specific goals at all.

Ten years later, the members of the class were interviewed again, and the findings, while somewhat predictable, were nonetheless astonishing. The 13 percent of the class who had goals were earning, on average, twice as much as the 84 percent who had no goals at all. And what about the three percent who had clear, written goals? They were earning, on average, ten times as much as the other 97 percent put together.”

(Note: the source of the above is from this site.)

Obviously, the new year is a time when people talk and talk and talk of goals. So lesson number one on this Monday, January 4, 2010 for my students is Goal Setting.

I always set them for myself as a writer. (And I write them down — though I do this at the start of every school year cause my life operates in harmony with academic calendars more so than with traditional calendars — as per last week’s blog post.)

I always set goals for myself as a teacher.

I always introduce the techniques of Goal Setting to my kids. I truly believe there is almost a science like quality to this aspect of life.

1) dream it up (being practical yet far-reaching)
2) reflect deeply on what you want (not whims or wishes — but personally meaningful stuff)
3) write it down (be specific, the more specific the better. Not “I will lose weight” but rather “I will lose 10 pounds by May 15.)
4) refer back to your written goals now and then in order to self-assess, remind yourself of the forrest for the trees and make adjustments in case you have either gotten off-track or already surpassed a written goal and need to enhance and enlarge your objectives.

I will be speaking more to the idea of “goals” in the next few weeks. Goals for my students, goals for my classes, goals for my own writing and for my school at large.

And by declaring them so publicly, there’s a fear, I must admit. I mean, what if I don’t attain them? Well, maybe that’s the power of having written them down in the first place, it’s reflective of real commitment.

Goals — writing ‘em down is the key to attaining them. I do… and I will.

Happy 2010!!

New Year’s has never really meant that much to me… because, I suspect, New Year’s for me always hits in September.

This January stuff is nice for a few days off and a change of weather (btw, in Los Angeles, the temp dropped to a frigid 62 this week inspiring all of us in Southern California to declare WTF?), but my life is synced to an academic calendar more than it is to anything else. I guess that’s why when the ball drops in Times Square, I am not one of those people with poppers and funny hats ready to dance in the streets of New York.

The rest of the world may be thinking WELCOME 2010 but for me, I am usually more concerned with finishing what is already in motion. I need to get my students back into the saddle and up to speed as quickly as I can. And then I need to make hay because January is a good month for teaching.

February, of course is gonna blaze by — especially since there are holidays that will take away time from an already short month — and before I know it March, the biggest, most beefy teaching month of the year, will be here.

March, btw, is where we make our money. Have a good March and you will have made some real inroads. Have a poor March and you will look back on the year with “Oh, what coulda been.”

See, this is how I think. The year ends in June, begins in September and only muggles really dance in the streets in January — cause they do not understand the true nature of the universe’s actual schedule.

With school on break for a couple of weeks I get a chance to wear but one hat and be a writer for a wee bit. I love it!

And with three books coming out for me in the next 18 months (2 of them already written, one due by the end of next summer to be released a year later) this is really the time to “get ahead while the gettin’s good”.

However, part of being an author is understanding that so much of the work you do will not see the light of day til well over a year after you actually write it. In some cases it’s closer to two years.

That’s just the way the world of book publishing works.

Between manufacturing, marketing, copy-editing, cover design, and so forth, there are scores of people that work for extremely long periods of time to get a book from my computer to the nation’s bookshelves… and the process ain’t a quick one.

This is one reason why I adore blogging: the immediacy. I write. People read. People respond. I respond back. Tomorrow is a new day and the blogging process begins anew. Just as actors talk about how much they love live theater performance over film and television because of the immediacy of the audience, so too do I find blogging to share the same benefit for me as a writer.

And funny enough, I was going to take a blogging break for the holidays. Just sort of shut it down and resume again in January once school is back in session.

But then I realized that I blog for the same reason I write books — I just love it. It’s not a chore to me. It’s not “work”. I don’t wake up and think, “Ah jeez, and today I have to blog.”

I mean my holiday should be spent doing the things I enjoy doing — the things that recharge my batteries and make me feel good about the world.

Family
Friends
Sleep
Exercise
Read
See movies
Laugh
… and write.

Yep, write. See, writing — both books and blogs — they “do it” for me. They fill my inner well. And as a teacher, I know that if I do not actively seek to fill my own inner well – especially during my breaks from class – my school will suck it dry… for no matter what I do as a teacher, it’s never enough. By that I mean there’s always more. Always more kids to help, parents to contact, fellow teachers to support and on and on and on.

We must be our own well-fillers. Thus I write — with great excitement that I get to do it while only wearing my favorite pair of neon green speedo undies, nipple tassles and pilot goggles.

What, you think I don’t have peccadilloes?

LOL!!

What do you do to fill your inner well? And whatever it is, make sure to do it these next few weeks. January will be here soon enough.