Tag Archives: Teaching

We Carry Ourselves

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At its most fundamental level the Internet is nothing more than a way to spread and share information. Sometimes this information is produced by the person sharing it, but more often than not the Internet is simply the passing of acquired information. We share information in hopes that it will help us better connect with each other. We cut and paste information, passing it from one node of our network to the next hoping that it will stick where it needs to stick. I have cut and pasted the following post into all the blogs I operate on the web, in hopes that all the people who follow me will get a chance to experience the following words. I found his address by Marget Edson on Doug Noon’s great blog Borderland, and he found it from Susan Ohanian’s blog, and now I send it to you all:

Salutations, memorials, bromides: let us commence.

I want to talk about love — not romance, not love l-u-v.
I want to talk about a particular kind of love, this love: classroom teaching.

I have my posse of gaily clad classroom teachers behind me.

They like to be called college professors.
And we can’t all work for the government.

We gather together because of classroom teaching.
We have shown you our love in our work in the classroom.

Classroom teaching is a physical, breath-based, eye-to-eye event.
It is not built on equipment or the past.
It is not concerned about the future.
It is in existence to go out of existence.
It happens and then it vanishes.
Classroom teaching is our gift.
It’s us; it’s this.

We bring nothing into the classroom — perhaps a text or a specimen. We carry ourselves, and whatever we have to offer you is stored within our bodies. You bring nothing into the classroom — some gum, maybe a piece of paper and a pencil: nothing but yourselves, your breath, your bodies.

Classroom teaching produces nothing. At the end of a class, we all get up and walk out. It’s as if we were never there. There’s nothing to point to, no monument, no document of our existence together.

Classroom teaching expects nothing. There is no pecuniary relationship between teachers and students. Money changes hands, and people work very hard to keep it in circulation, but we have all agreed that it should not happen in the classroom. And there is no financial incentive structure built into classroom teaching because we get paid the same whether you learn anything or not.

Classroom teaching withholds nothing. I say to my young students every year, “I know how to add two numbers, but I’m not going to tell you.” And they laugh and shout, “No!” That’s so absurd, so unthinkable. What do I have that I would not give to you?

Bringing nothing, producing nothing, expecting nothing, withholding nothing –
what does that remind you of?
Is this a bizarre occurrence that will go into The Journal of Irreproducible Results?
Or is it something that happens every day, all the time, all over the world,
and is based not on gain and fame, but on love.

There are those who say that classroom teaching is doomed and that by the time one of you addresses the class of 2033, there will be a museum of classroom teaching.

Ever since the invention of wedge-shaped writing on a clay tablet, classroom teaching has been obsolete. It’s been comical. Why don’t we just write the assignments and algorithms on a clay tablet, hang it up on the wall, and let the students come who will to teach themselves from our documents?

Why, since the creation of writing with a pen on a piece of paper, do we still bother to have schools?

Why, since the invention of movable metal type, don’t we all just go to the library?

Why do we have to have class? Why do we need teachers?

Why, since the advent of the microchip, don’t we all stay home in our pajamas and hit send?

Technology is nipping at the heels of classroom teaching, but I perceive no threat.
How could something false replace something true?
How could a substitute, a proxy, step in for something real and alive?
How could the virtual nudge out the actual?

The other great threat to classroom teaching is the rush to data — data-driven education.
We must measure everything — percentages, charts, tables.

I’m not entirely opposed to this.
If data-driven education were a pie graph, I would have a piece.

But I was not educated and did not become a teacher to produce data.

I love the classroom.
I loved it as a student, and I love it as a teacher.
I can name every teacher I ever had:
Mrs. Mulshanok, Miss Williams, Mrs. Clark, Miss Bogan, Mrs. Johnson, Mrs. Muys, Mrs. Parker, Mr. Eldridge, Miss Bush — and that’s just through sixth grade.
I could go on, I promise.

I loved coming to class: the chairs, the windows, unzipping my book bag.
And I loved my teachers.
There was content, I suppose, but that’s not what I remember.
I remember my teachers.
I remember being in the room,
and no data and no bar graph will be assembled to replace that, or even to capture it.

This week my students worked on dividing a pizza between two people, and they realized that if you make the line down the center of the pizza the two sides will be equal. After much trial and error, they came to this conclusion on their own, and I welcome you to try it. I think it’s really going to take off, and let this be where it begins.

When they take a standardized test, they will be able to fill in the bubble next to the pizza that is cut exactly in half. Do they know that will be the correct answer? Yes. But I don’t care that much. What I care about is how they got there, how they figured it out for themselves.

This skinny little high school senior got herself into Smith College by writing an essay about Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s theme, “The journey, not the arrival, matters.” It worked for me.

Standardized tests measure the arrival, but they have nothing to say about the journey, about having wonderful ideas. Do you know it/do you not know it is second, and how do you know it, and who are you, is first.

The only way this knowledge grows inside a student is with a teacher, a classroom teacher. Of course, my students will insist they did it themselves, and I don’t try to disabuse them of that.

But the work you graduates have done was in the classroom with your teachers.
That’s the miracle of today.
Why don’t we talk about it?
Because it doesn’t show up.
There’s not a bar graph for classroom teaching. There’s no data for classroom teaching, and yet it persists this year and the next year and the year after that.

Telling tens of thousands of people what to do is not teaching, it’s shouting, and there’s a lot of that going around.

Showing somebody how to do something exactly the way you’ve always done it is not teaching, it’s training. And there’s plenty of that, too.

But the reality that is neither shouting nor training is classroom teaching.
Nobody can touch it because nobody can point to it.
You have it forever.
When it grows inside you, it’s doing its work.

We can disappear.
We’ll never see you again, probably.
The chairs will be folded.
It will be as if we were never here.
There will be nothing we can count after today.
But not everything that counts can be counted.
Not everything that matters can be put into a pie chart.

The Board of Trustees has set a very great challenge for itself:
to educate us all for lives of distinction.
You are never going to be able to make a bar graph out of that.
That is immeasurable, and that’s what makes it so real.
I admonish you — because that’s my job — to think about the things that float away:
your love for your friends,
the smell of the lilacs,
the feeling your families have on this day.
You will have nothing to take with you.
The diploma you receive will be someone else’s.

Everything meaningful about this moment, and these four years,
will be meaningful inside you, not outside you.

I’ve been a classroom teacher for sixteen years–as long as you have been in the classroom. We started the same year. And I hope to go on for fourteen more years.
That will make thirty, and I’ll be done.

At the end of that time, someone will bring me a box, and I will put in it a ceramic apple somebody gave me thinking it would be symbolic somehow. I will have nothing, and that will be proof of the meaning of my work.

If you can point to something, you might lose it, or you might break it, or someone might take it from you. As long as you store it inside yourself, it’s not going anywhere — or it’s going everywhere with you.

This day is a day of love.
It’s a day of your family’s love for you,
your love for each other and your teachers,
and your teachers’ love for you.

In time, the bar graphs may tumble,
the clay tablets may crumble.
They’re only made of clay.
But our love
is here to stay.

Thank you.

Please pass it on to wherever it needs to go.

Reading Plants

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At the beginning of this year, I was asked to teach a Reading Enrichment class for students who were having trouble reading. Their Language Arts teachers had labeled these students as troubled readers who needed extra support. While I have an ESL background and have taught a few enrichment classes in the past, I am by no means a literacy teacher. I know how to teach students the elements of literature, or how to write effectively, but I wasn’t sure if I would be able to teach them how to read. To this day, I am not really sure how that is done. So I started to think about what reading actually means. I came across definitions like this:

Reading is a multifaceted process involving word recognition, comprehension, fluency, and motivation. Learn how readers integrate these facets to make meaning from print.

Reading is making meaning from print. It requires that we:

  • Identify the words in print – a process called word recognition
  • Construct an understanding from them – a process called comprehension
  • Coordinate identifying words and making meaning so that reading is automatic and accurate – an achievement called fluency

Sometimes you can make meaning from print without being able to identify all the words.

These definitions, however valuable, seemed academic; they did not seem to really answer what reading is. This research was great and I spent a lot of time looking for ways to motivate my students to become active engaged readers, but I still had to design daily lessons and activities.

I had no idea which direction we were headed. So I took the easy way out and decided to “enrich” what they were already doing in their Language Arts classes, which was reading Where the Red Fern Grows. I figured it would simply be enough to slow down the text and spend time learning how to be more active readers by: questioning the text, taking notes, visualizing imagery, connecting to personal experiences, and asking questions for comprehension.

Because of my own frustrations with adjusting to a new curriculum and a new school, I had a hard time getting into Where The Red Fern Grows. I was coming from a place where I had nearly complete control over the books I taught, and it was difficult to teach a book that I had never read. We started to examine the text looking for ways to apply basic literary criticism. I found it to be a very sexist book; that made it easy. We tried that angle. We then looked at it historically, socio-economically, but we finally chose to cling to one of the main themes- working hard and being persistent.

We decided that we would start a gardening project to try and better understand what it means to be patient and work hard for a delayed reward. The students themselves were aware of their generation’s need for immediate rewards and felt that a slow moving project like growing plants would prove to be educational.

So we started planting. We brought in pots and plants and seeds and away we went. We journaled. We read stories about plants and seeds. We talked. A lot. We took photographs. We documented growth. We shot video and answered questions. Things started to grow. We started to grow! We explored the idea of the seed as symbol. We made connections. We constructed meaning. Were we reading?

This brings me to my point-

I felt a bit guilty about this project, because I wasn’t sure if raising plants had anything to do with reading enrichment. What if someone would come in and ask me what I was doing? What would I say? So I decided to take the safe route and look at my Benchmarks. I know that proper assessments should be built backwards from benchmark to activity, but this project lent itself to work the other way. I noticed that while it seemed like we were only having a great time planting and tending and discussing, we were actually covering lot of curricular ground:

Reading

  • Generate interesting questions to be answered while reading (we generated many questions to be journaled and discussed)
  • Recognize the use of specific literature devices (we talked a lot about figurative language and symbolism)
  • Summarize and paraphrase complex concepts in informational texts (substitute informational texts with plant cycle and we definitely paraphrase complex concepts)
  • Use new information to adjust and extend personal knowledge base (seeing their own growth reflected in the plants added to their knowledge base)

The others are pretty self-explanatory.
Writing

  • Use descriptive language that clarifies and enhances ideas
  • Use a variety of pre-writing methods

Speaking

  • Ask questions to seek elaboration and clarification of ideas.
  • Listen in order to understand a speaker’s topic, purpose, and perspective.
  • Convey a clear main point when speaking to others and stay on the topic being discussed.
  • Use explicit techniques for oral presentations (e.g., modulation of voice, inflection, tempo, enunciation, physical gestures, eye contact, posture).

I also started to compare the skills that are required while one reads to the skills necessary to be a good gardener, and again there were striking similarities.

Both reading and gardening require:

  • Patience and dedication
  • Seeing it through
  • Not giving up
  • Enjoying each word like it is a tender new leaf
  • Need to make sure you have sun(proper reading area), soil(vocabulary/dictionary) , water(support or place to ask questions)
  • You have to do it everyday
  • Be aware of growth
  • Start small and read more complicated books later
  • Don’t rush the process

Obstacles

  • Takes time to learn and grow
  • Not very exciting, very little action
  • The rewards come later not immediate

Skills Strategies

  • Communicate with the text and/or plant (give them both attention)
  • Check in daily and make sure that you don’t stop taking care of the plant or your book.

In the end, I feel this was a worthwhile first draft of a project. I would like to do it again. The connection that the students made with their plants was a very organic way to engage them in something they would otherwise seldom do. The plants connected them to nature in a very real way, while at the same time giving them a rich source of material to write about, reflect on, and read. Yes, I said read. We spent the last semester reading plants looking for meaning and this is what we found:

Music by Ben Harper and Jeff Nesmith. Please be patient while video loads.

Intrepid Teacher Will Be:

18 Replies

It’s always a strange feeling to start a new blog. There is the sentiment that one need lay out a course of action, write their exposition, or explain oneself fully before getting started, and while I feel that pressure to do this, I am finally ready to simply jump right in start this blog. My friend and former co-worker Kim Cofino has been hounding me to start one since we parted ways last year, and I realize now that it is time. I have waited long enough. I will let the subsequent posts build my networks. This blog has been a long time coming. Having said all that, I cannot in good conscience start this blog like this. Let me briefly outline some goals I have for this space.

I hope Intrepid Teacher will be:

  • A place for personal reflection about teaching, Language Arts, and technology
  • A place to share websites, ideas, and Web 2.0 tools with ASD teachers
  • A place to network with other Next Gen teachers

I value personal reflection in nearly all aspects of my life. I cannot read a book, watch a movie, or participate in a discussion and not feel obligated to reflect on what I have absorbed in one way or another. I am compelled to record and document my observations. So it only seems fitting that I should have a place to share my thoughts on the most important aspect of my life- my career.

As teachers, we all understand the importance of experimenting with new ideas, reflecting on successful and failed assignments, and simply taking the time to observe our feelings about our work. I hope this blog can be a place that helps me study, document and share the aspects of my job that I feel are important, because teaching is more than a job to me; it is the tool I have chosen to do my part in changing the world. I feel that life is a dynamic and exciting experience. I don’t want my work to be the least exciting part of what I do. It is not. My days are spent in constant degrees of euphoria and anguish. I feel it valuable to better articulate these highs and lows, both on personal and professional levels.

In addition, I hope my passion for blogging and technology will inspire and encourage my peers to join the discourse I am establishing, not only to help better serve our students, but so we can help each other become better educators. And so, in addition to simply sharing my thoughts, feelings, and ideas about my classroom, I hope this can blog will become a place where we as a school community can share websites, ideas, and Web 2.0 tools to help all of us better integrate technology into our curriculum.

At the moment, I feel quite disconnected with the people I work with and I am not sure how, where, or even if technology is being used on our campus. I hope this blog will help me identify where it is or isn’t being used. I further hope that by leading by example and modeling these new tools, other teachers will begin to feel confident in using them as well. I would like Intrepid Teacher to be a place where teachers can engage in conversations about how to best use technology. I invite all teachers who are currently using these tools to please connect with me, so we can start building learning networks here at ASD.

As I mentioned earlier, at my last school I worked closely with Kim Cofino and other teachers like Clarence Fisher. By working with these groundbreaking educators, I was constantly in the loop on what was going on in the Next Gen world. Today, I feel that I am losing touch with the latest ideas, techniques for integration, and tools. I hope this blog will re-connect me with the exciting work that other educators are doing all over the globe. You will find a short list of blogs I am currently subscribed to in the sidebar. Please start to read and interact with them as well. I hope to start communicating better with these educators and promoting by blog, If you know of others, I am open to reading them as well. I hope that some of us will become members of a global teaching network soon. A network that will helps its member’s better use technology and become better educators.

In closing, I hope this blog will be a place where I can share who I am, what I think, and what I do professionally with as many people as possible. As a language arts teacher, I teach my students that reading, writing, communicating, and inquiry are valuable skills. I teach them that we are life long learners and that seeking knowledge is a valuable enterprise. So now I want to do what I teach…

I hope that you will read, comment on, and share the upcoming posts. I hope that you will become excited and inspired, and start your own blog. I hope that we can use the tools available to us to integrate technology into out daily teaching practices, so as to better learn how to integrate them into our classrooms. If you have any questions about subscribing to this blog or setting up RSS reader accounts (so you can get the latest post sent to you) Stay tuned! I will post some videos and directions soon, or you can send me an email or stop by room 3208 to chat. Please leave comments below.

The lessons and the sharing start soon. Get ready!