Category Archives: Education

November 20, 2011 · 11:00 pm

Miles Davis: So What

My oldest son is learning to play the clarinet, and seems to be doing well.  He makes sure he practices every day.  Of course he learned to play a part of the Star Wars theme, which he likes to share every day.

So, I thought I would introduce him to Miles Davis.  To expand his musical interest.  To reveal to him some of the great artists, to show him how incredible music can be.  To show him the deeper part of music.

It didn’t go well.  Not that he didn’t listen with me, but he wasn’t much interested.  I tried to get him to let the music speak to him, to feel the emotion behind it.  He just wanted to be somewhere else.

I was disappointed.  Over the last month I have been sharing movies with the boys that I watched when I was growing up.  Both boys like some of my 80s music.  I thought exposing him to Miles Davis was going to be a great moment.  Why wasn’t it?

I started to wonder about all the times I tried something like this in the classroom.  Sometimes it worked, other lessons failed.  Why?  I just assumed my son would like Miles Davis because he was learning to play an instrument.  My son has no background knowledge about Miles Davis, hasn’t even heard him before.  What did I expect?  That he would just understand how great Miles Davis was.

As an English teacher I have fallen into that same trap, especially with literature.  That my students will just get how awesome a book or poem is.  I don’t want them to miss the opportunity to be moved by the literature, just like I wanted my son to feel the beauty behind Miles Davis’ music.  Ironically, I become the barrier of that moment.  Not in sharing the music, but by being the source of the selection.  And worse, like with my son, not creating an opportunity to spark their interest, or to provide a real foundation to what they will be reading or listening to.

I want to share the great works of this life with my students, with my sons.  But more importantly, I want them to decide what is great on their terms. To search out their own deeper moments.  That is when real learning happens.  And I want to be there, as a dad and as a teacher.

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November 1, 2011 · 9:43 am

First Year, Again

The only time I totally lost my cool with a class was my first year of teaching.  I threatened them all with detention.  I even slammed my hand down on my desk.  That first year of teaching is such an eye opening experience.  All theory seems to evaporate in the controlled chaos of everyday life of school.  That year challenges you, makes you dig deep into your creativity, resolve, and meaning of it all.  Thirteen years later I am experience that again.

Instead of standing in front of a class of new students, a clean marker board behind me, walls decorated with motivational posters and first day jitters; I sit at a desk in front of a HD camera, 50 inch TV and students who are attending schools miles away.  I have taught distance-learning classes for the last nine years, but have always had a room full of my own students.  It is not the system that is challenging; it is the loss of any person-to-person contact.  I am purely a teacher on the TV to them.  All theory seems to have disappeared with that little red light on the front of the TV.

This year has challenged me in ways I wasn’t expecting.  In so many ways I am again a first year teacher.  My creativity is challenged in creating lessons that can bridge the technological divide between the students and me.  I am challenged to work through all the bumps in the road, from technology issues, to student apathy. To be honest, some days I feel like a total failure at this and wonder if I am even doing anything worthwhile for the students and my own life.

My own personal struggles got me thinking about the other aspect of my job, working with teachers on integrating technology into their curriculum.  I have had the privilege of already doing a school wide workshop, presenting at Nebraska Distance Learning Association’s conference and helping ESU 10 colleagues with their workshops.  Through all these events, I realized that sometimes when we talk about getting technology into the classrooms and getting teachers to use technology more, we forget that in a small way we are asking them to go back to being a first year teacher.  Obviously it isn’t as extreme as a true first day of school, but it has some of the same challenges.

We are asking them to stand in front of their class as a new teacher.  That is exciting, but it is scary.  Teachers take pride in their lessons, they teach to see their students grow and learn.  Nothing makes a teacher smile more then when a student’s face lights up with understanding.  Even though we know not to take it personally, it hurts when a student says a lesson is stupid, or walks into the class announcing they hate English (the class I teach).

Technology integration asks teachers to go back to that first year, but now they have tools and lessons that have worked for them.  Lessons that have brought their students to that light bulb moment.  We cannot ignore that we ask them to be a first year teacher.  We need to address their fears… but also tap back into that other feeling which all teachers had that very first day as they stood in front of that class, took a deep breath and thought, “I’m ready to make difference in these students’ lives.”

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October 11, 2011 · 9:09 am

Are You Ready?

For all the hours I’ve spent on the road, all the years living in Nebraska and Wyoming, I have never hit a deer or an antelope.  I have had a number of other car accidents, but I’ve always spotted the deer while driving before anything bad could happen. Until this morning…

Right now, it is completely dark for most of my commute.  This morning the moon accompanied me on my drive. I was in between Doniphan and the interstate (as the picture below shows).  Things were going fine, music on, cruise set, and I was checking traffic to decide when to go into the left lane so I could merge onto the interstate.  I just crossed the bridge when the deer appeared.

Image from Google Maps

I was still in the right lane when the deer appeared on the passenger side, just in the fading part of the headlights. Both of us were caught in that eternal second. Because of the light the deer looked like a ghost, faded, almost transparent.  I could see his head snap back and his black eyes widen.  I swear his expression was, “What the….”

I did nothing. Which was the best thing. The deer and I caught up with time. It seemed my car lurched forward to do it, getting ahead of the deer to miss him.  I looked into my review mirror but could not see if he crossed the road or not.

No matter how much we try, we cannot control Life.  We have control of our attitude, or work ethic, and our smile.  But Life, it is like a box of Ping-Pong balls dumped out on a concrete floor.  We will get knocked around, sometimes drastically.  This got me thinking about dictionaries…

As an English teacher I forever get the question, “How do you spell that?”  I would always respond with directions to the bookshelf where the dictionaries sat waiting to be opened.  Even when my students had computers I would get that question.  At a time when answers are sometimes just a click away, why did my students still ask that question?

I think part of the shift we are experiencing, in school and our own lives, must include the ability to react (or know when not to in my case) to Life.  That is a grand statement, but I’m not sure I have had a whole day where something didn’t go wrong.  Where a Ping-Pong ball didn’t knock something off track.  Or a deer run out in front of you.  Are you prepared to react, to adapt?  Are students prepared?

Courtesy of Flickr user Lester Public Library

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September 26, 2011 · 3:51 pm

Collaboration

collaboration |kəˌlabəˈrā sh ən|
noun
1 the action of working with someone to produce or create something

As a distance learning teacher I have had classes from different schools collaborate during a class period.  I’ve used a number of different tools, Scribblar, Today’s Meet, and others. This semester I took an opportunity to see how well students could collaborate, not just across geographical barriers, but also across time barriers.

I teach ESU 10’s TECHS course. I have four class periods for the online sections. Using digital music downloading as a support issue, I divided the whole class into two groups.  Group one’s stance was that digital music should be free.  Group two’s stance was that there should be a price for music.  Side note: whether good or bad, sometimes I throw the students in the deep end to see if they can swim.  The guidelines were simple, as a group you need to produce a Google doc and Google presentation concerning your side of the issue.  Each group had a Scribblar white board to do work on, a Google doc, and presentation that I hosted for them.  They had a total of 5 days to work on it (including the weekend).  Below are the presentations.

Some observations:

1. Group work.  Just like a regular classroom, some students did more work than others (8 out 49 students reported that they barely worked on the document or presentation).  Just like a regular classroom, I had to refocus the groups at times. The interesting point was that working this way was seen as a positive and a negative.  Some quotes from the students.

“We could chat to other people in your group and talk about the assignment.”

“Well, it was hard for everyone in the groups to get on the right page. They were kind of all over the place, but in the end we did good.”

2. Quality: I feel for the open-ended way that I handled the assignment the students did a solid job.  I understand that the class is in a unique situation, a teacher they see only on the TV.  My first year teaching only from the TV, combined with my somewhat nontraditional way of teaching, probably made the students frustrated.  A student response, “It really didn’t have anything to do with what I thought this class was about.”

3. The Power of Technology.  From a student, “It’s cool how we could all work together as a group and share our ideas and opinions with each other.”  During class I would be having discussions with the students on the whiteboard (they talk more to me in text form then verbally). I remember one discussion that centered around the cost of a song verses the cost of a bottle of pop.  When on task, the students did a great job researching and holding interesting discussions with each other and me during the class period.  But there is always the negative side of this type of communication, “While working on the website with other schools it was hard to add info because so many people tried adding something to it at once.”  And the personal differences; a response from one student to the question about what negative aspect of the assignment they noticed, “the fighting.”

Final thoughts: As in any classroom, some students jumped into the assignment, others complained, some worked through the frustration, others just gave up.  The funny thing about the assignment was how much it felt just like a regular classroom.  I had the same frustrations as a teacher.  Student apathy, “why do we have to do this” attitude, and honestly, in this case, the technology only seemed to enhance the negative for me.  But I think showing how technology can connect us to opportunities to collaborate was worth the time.  When we truly connect who knows what we can create…

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September 21, 2011 · 11:10 am

Turning 40 “The Past”

“Today is the moment when your past and future meet.”

I have been struggling with how to articulate this idea with out writing some deep philosophy book.  Simply stated, what I’ve learned is that our past is important, but we don’t handle its power well.

On the extreme edges we either ignore it or let it cripple us.  Somewhere in the middle is where we can use it to improve today and build for tomorrow.  Our past affects us, even if we don’t always recognize it.

The crazy part is it doesn’t matter if the past was 10 years or 10 minutes ago.  Over the years I’ve seen how the past affects my students.  I’ve seen how the drama of the last class took 10 minutes for them to get focused, to the way a movie we watched in class brought back the pain of the loss of a parent.

I have been guilty of not seeing my students fully. Wondering why they just did that?  Or frustrated with their work ethic.  I am guilty of not considering their past and how it might play a role in their behavior.  To use my English teacher vocabulary, we all are round dynamic characters in this life.  We all have a past, we all have dreams and goals we want to achieve. And today is the moment when our past and future meet. If we are aware of this I think we can tackle issues with a clearer objective.  If we can help our students see that, maybe we can help them build a better future.

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August 26, 2011 · 2:55 pm

Motivation

mo·ti·va·tion [moh-tuh-vey-shuhn] noun

  1. the act or an instance of motivating,  or providing with a reason to act in a certain way (dictionary.com)

During a conversation with a colleague, the idea of motivation in the classroom came about.  This discussion coincides with some ideas I have been thinking about regarding how we reach our students.  So, I am going to try to express a complicated web of ideas with the center being motivation.

As a teacher I have been frustrated.  I have stood in front of my room looking out on my students’ faces talking to myself, “How do they not see how great this book, or poem, or lesson, is?”  Sometimes, as teachers, we take for granted that everyone knows how powerful learning is.  But if we look at popular culture, it will remind you that they don’t.

Idea one: The Mountain

Let’s use a metaphor for a second. If we view education as a mountain, we understand that to see the spectacular view from the top we must climb.  And that climb is hard at times.  Even an expert mountain climber (or a well educated person) needs a hand to get to the top.

Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay

Sometimes we need to remember that our students haven’t made this climb before.  Sometimes we have to reach out to them and show them the way to the mountaintop.  The view is incredible; they just don’t know it yet.

Idea Two: Practice

What if the classroom was more like practice?  Take a second to think back to what practice was like for you. How many times did the whistle blow?  How many times did coach go off on some kind of motivational rant?  Sometimes coach got on your case, other times a “nice job” was all it took to keep you going.  You were pushed, you were challenged, sometimes you were down right dog-tired yet felt great.

What does a typical classroom look, sound, feel like?  I understand the difference in the environments, but why can’t we match the energy of practice to a classroom?  The techniques and tools are different, but not what motivates a person.  In an interview on Focus on the Family for his book, coach Joe Gibbs stated that a good coach finds what works with his athletes to motivate them, be it a challenge or a simple comment like “good job.”

Everybody needs motivation; I found it as a coach when we successfully performed on the field.  As a teacher I found it in the light-bulb moment.  We all need motivation, a helping hand.  Not because we don’t know of the importance of our jobs, but because sometimes the climb is just hard.  And we forget what the view is.

Courtesy of Flickr user rbbaird

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August 10, 2011 · 1:37 pm

Adjustments to Freedom

Student Life

Student Life

A part of change is adjustments, and in my new position I am finding the biggest adjustment comes from the freedom I have in my position.  The two biggest factors of that freedom are time and working.

Spending the last 12 years in high school, time is segmented out for you.  The calendar is set, the bells ring every 48 minutes, planning period is the same everyday.  Life in school is a tightly run routine.

The second day on the job I wanted to go to the Casey’s up the block for a pop.  I stopped at our secretary’s desk to ask if it was OK.  She was nice about the situation, but I saw in her eyes that “I can’t believe this” look just after I asked the question.

Also that week, the staff was gathered together for lunch.  Guess who was done first?  Yep, me. Finished in less than six minutes.

The freedom of my time affects the second aspect; my work.  I am responsible for producing my product.  If I have an idea, I’m responsible for it.  One example is an idea for an online only workshop covering 2.0 tools for teachers.  My boss likes the idea.  So it is up to me to produce it.  Yes, there are some guidelines and standards to meet, but if I want my idea to be a reality I am responsible for it.  Powerful way to work.

Powerful way to learn? Yes, I think so.

The first aspect of time is crucial to the second aspect of learning.  Every teacher has had the situation when the class is just clicking.  The energy is high, students are engaged, as a teacher you are flying.  No one notices, or cares, about the time… then the bell rings.  You try to finish the point you were on, kids are trying to listen and grab their book bags at the same time.  You can see the bell has intruded on them too.

There is no easy answer for the time constraints in school, without some radical change.  But, I think it is an aspect of school reform that needs real attention.  In my discussions with students, one area that time has the greatest negative impact is the industrial and art classes.  In one conversation with a student who was taking a welding class, he expressed his frustration with only getting 10 minutes of real welding done in a typical class session.  There is attendance and class issues first, then prep work, and then having enough time for cleanup.

Which brings us to what students produce.  The freedom to work on things they love, or to stay with a concept until that light bulb goes off.  Some of my best teaching has happened as I walked with students to their next class (so they wouldn’t be tardy) talking with them until the idea clicked.  That is a teacher’s gold medal: that look when a student’s eyes get big, the corner of their mouth moves into a smile, and I swear, the room becomes bright.

What would school look like with more freedom?

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July 13, 2011 · 2:25 pm

Frustrated?

What does golf, starting a new lawn, having five children, and learning have in common? Frustration.

My life right now is filled with all kinds of different frustrations:

I have five children, the youngest only months away from being two… (If you are a parent that is all I need to say)

We are trying to get a yard started for our new home. Our dirt is clay based, we don’t have underground sprinklers, and we are on our second attempt of seeding. Every 30 minutes you can hear me say, “Be back, got to change the water.”

This month I started my new position and there are so many things that are different that I get overwhelmed with the changes.

Then there is golf…

Yesterday was my day to play golf in the morning. Almost every Tuesday and Wednesday I play nine holes in the morning. This week I was especially excited to get a round in because I had a good practice session last Saturday. I thought I had my swing for my irons figured out. I played the back nine and started well for me, a 5 on the par 4 tenth hole. As any golfer knows without reason things got worse.

A quick side note, I take one of my older boys with me when I play. They like to get a Gatorade and tend the flag for me. But when frustration hits, they remind me to watch my outbursts. Which was a challenge Tuesday morning.

Hole 14 par 5… I score an 8 (never once in the fairway).

Hole 15 par 4… I score a 7 (Water ball)

Hole 16 par 4 … I score an 8 (Walk off the green feeling so frustrated that I would love to throw a club)

So, I walk to the 17th hole frustrated…
Frustration is a powerful emotion. But part of its power is an illusion. When we get flooded with frustration it feels so wide and deep. It seems to filter into every aspect of that moment. Thinking, feeling, we can even feel that fate is against us. It feels like we are treading water in the middle of the ocean. But if we would put our feet down, we would see that frustration isn’t deep, that is its illusion. We can go deeper than the frustration. When we do, then we truly learn.

My son is watching me as I pull out a 5-iron for this hole. I wonder what I look like through his eyes. Does it look like I am drowning?

As a teacher and a coach I see students fight against frustration. I see them splashing around trying to find the beach. To get away from frustration. There are the excuses of not knowing what to do. Or the quiet giving up. Each student has their own way of dealing with frustration. But if we can get them to put their feet down, or even better to dive down through the frustration, the outcome will be powerful. More powerful than frustration, any frustration they will encounter in school or life.

My son stands quietly next to my golf bag. I mentally try to put my feet down, concentrating on what I worked on during practice. I swing. Not perfect, the ball starts at the flag, but then hooks. The ball lands about 20 feet from the green on an up-slope. I have to get the chip up in the air but soft because the green rolls away. I continue to think about the chip instead of the frustration, to set my feet down. My chip comes up nicely off the grass, soft and high. The frustration starts to drain away. I do two-putt for a bogey. But I am happy with that hole.

The last hole is a par 5. My son starts to talk again as we walk to the next tee box. He can feel that my frustration is fading, but it is nagging at me as I think about my drive. I haven’t hit a good drive all day, but I mentally set my feet down, trying to get past the negative voice trying to scratch at my mental state.

I slow down my swing, focus on the fundamentals, and send the ball straight down the center. Not long, about 200 yards. Second shot lands just off the right side of the fairway, but a solid hit. My third shot lands just in front of the green. I chip and two-putt. Bogey, yes. But I walk of the course feeling that I played those last two holes like I can.

Everybody feels frustrated, in all kinds of situations, but we can learn and improve when that frustration hits. It is a powerful emotion, but part of the power is an illusion. Frustration is not that deep; just below it is the opportunity to improve.

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