My son, Jonah, is four and a half and learning to write his name.
We sit and eat breakfast and we look at the fridge.
Two dinosaur magnets hold up his masterpiece:
a piece of paper on which he has twice
drawn his first and last names.
I say drawn intentionally, because he made shapes,
he formed lines and curves and connections between.
He did not write because he is still learning how.
There is nothing simple about the ways he had to
focus, the way he willed his fingers to grip the pencil
and push it in the way he knew he should.
I feel his pride in the kitchen. I see it in his eyes.
What he's done is hard, but he never doubted he could do it.
He exhausted himself, but never did he hesitate.
He was hopeful because he believed.
He was resilient because he knows, deep down,
"I will get this. I will learn to write my name.
And as I do, it will get easier."
Hope only exists when we believe things can change,
when we adopt that mindset of growth and resilience
that begins in a whisper,
"I can't do this yet.."
then screams in crescendo,
"But I will not stop...I will not stop...because
I believe."
My son believes and, at four and a half,
why should he not?
For he has not yet learned the word
impossible. He has not learned to fail.
He has only learned to press on regardless
in hopeful pursuit of what he hasn't mastered
yet.
When Will McDonough was a little boy, he loved to learn. In fact, he still does. Will is a teacher now, and every Thursday he writes about something he's learning in the classroom. He's pretty busy, so he takes just 30 minutes to free write; then, regardless of how polished the ideas or mechanics might be, he publishes it. It's incomplete. It's a start. And it feels good.
Thursday, February 16, 2017
Thursday, February 2, 2017
Storytelling
"You guys are all made up of stories." - Laconia Therrio
Yesterday, the 8th grade began working on our storytelling unit which meant a visit from Laconia. Laconia visits my school every February to work with students on practicing stories and fables they'll rehearse and perform to younger students. He's been doing it for almost 20 years, coming into classes, modeling stories, workshopping students' development...all in an effort to help them own their stories.
Laconia will often ask, "Do you love your story?" When a student answers, "No," he often replies: "I can tell. I think you should consider choosing a new one."
He oozes wisdom, humor, warmth, and helps the students become confident in their own skin, both as storytellers and as humans. He puts them at ease
The first thing he has them do is write their names on the board.
"Write it however you want," he coaches.
Then, he introduces himself to each student, observing how they've scrawled their names upon the board and suggesting what we might learn about each student based upon the way their names are written. Who wrote in huge block letters? Who added stars or dotted the "i"s with hearts? Who wrote small? Who was rushed and who took their time? Who used cursive?
He also asks students where their families are from. If they say "India," he asks them which state their family came from. If they say "China," he asks whether they speak any Mandarin or Cantonese? If they say no, he teaches them how to greet each other in that language.
Laconia is breaking ground, treading in the grey water between himself and each of them. He makes jokes about having a Greek first name, an Irish middle name, a French last name, and being black...
He tells Jewish folktales, personal stories from his childhood in Louisiana, and African legends.
He scares students with "jump tales" and inspires them with proverbs.
But, through it all he models humility and grace...he shows them that they are now a part of his story, and he is a part of theirs.
I learn from Laconia every year, and I love having him in my classroom because he teaches us that our stories are about so much more than ourselves. Last night my students' English homework was to ask their parents to tell them a story about their grandparents. We are the children of stories and the experience of oral tradition matters in an era of technology, too.
Brene Brown writes,"If we own the story, then we can write the ending." We must do that. We must be courageous with our own stories, and we must listen to the stories of the people around us.
Yesterday, the 8th grade began working on our storytelling unit which meant a visit from Laconia. Laconia visits my school every February to work with students on practicing stories and fables they'll rehearse and perform to younger students. He's been doing it for almost 20 years, coming into classes, modeling stories, workshopping students' development...all in an effort to help them own their stories.
Laconia will often ask, "Do you love your story?" When a student answers, "No," he often replies: "I can tell. I think you should consider choosing a new one."
He oozes wisdom, humor, warmth, and helps the students become confident in their own skin, both as storytellers and as humans. He puts them at ease
The first thing he has them do is write their names on the board.
"Write it however you want," he coaches.
Then, he introduces himself to each student, observing how they've scrawled their names upon the board and suggesting what we might learn about each student based upon the way their names are written. Who wrote in huge block letters? Who added stars or dotted the "i"s with hearts? Who wrote small? Who was rushed and who took their time? Who used cursive?
He also asks students where their families are from. If they say "India," he asks them which state their family came from. If they say "China," he asks whether they speak any Mandarin or Cantonese? If they say no, he teaches them how to greet each other in that language.
Laconia is breaking ground, treading in the grey water between himself and each of them. He makes jokes about having a Greek first name, an Irish middle name, a French last name, and being black...
He tells Jewish folktales, personal stories from his childhood in Louisiana, and African legends.
He scares students with "jump tales" and inspires them with proverbs.
But, through it all he models humility and grace...he shows them that they are now a part of his story, and he is a part of theirs.
I learn from Laconia every year, and I love having him in my classroom because he teaches us that our stories are about so much more than ourselves. Last night my students' English homework was to ask their parents to tell them a story about their grandparents. We are the children of stories and the experience of oral tradition matters in an era of technology, too.
Brene Brown writes,"If we own the story, then we can write the ending." We must do that. We must be courageous with our own stories, and we must listen to the stories of the people around us.
Thursday, January 26, 2017
Winning streaks
As a fan of professional sports, I'm well aware of streaks. There are winning streaks, losing streaks, and hitting streaks. There are hot streaks and cold streaks. Pretty much, as long as someone can do something with consistency, they can go on a streak.On paper, they're just patterns, but streaks change attitudes, they change culture...they're contagious.
The above is a list of current streaks for all 30 teams in the National Basketball Association. They are listed in order of the team's overall record. But you know what's cool about that? Four of the top seven teams are on current losing streaks, while three of the worst six teams are on winning streaks. That's the thing about streaks....they gain momentum and can change the course of a team's season. They can bust ballplayers out of slumps and renew their confidence.
This week I've discussed streaks with my students in an effort to help them understand the importance of noticing patterns in their behavior. I've shared my belief that we have streaks, too. You know, it's that feeling when you say to yourself, "I feel like I'm a passive participant in my own life...like I'm letting life happen to me...like, if I were to be cast in my own life I'd be listed in the credits as brown-haired 8th grade teacher. When we're in slumps like that, we often know what we want to do differently. I wrote about this in last week's post. Recently, when I've wanted to do something new and commit to it--to start a new pattern in my behavior--I start a list of numbers. Let me explain.
Imagine you want to do a better job of consistently flossing your teeth before bed. Just start a list and after you floss, write the number one. Track your flossing "streak" by writing the number two the next day. Maybe you miss a day, or run out of floss, or just can't find the time. That's okay, but your streak is over. The next day, you start over again by writing the number one. Once you get a nice, long streak, though, going back to one feels awful.
The University of Connecticut women's basketball team has had three winning streaks of over 70 games since the 2000-2001 season. Their current streak has reached 94 games. The team has also won four straight national championships. You know why? Because they hate going back to zero. But I guarantee that the morning they do, they just figure, "time to start another streak."
My students have patterns they want to change, but changing a pattern can be tough. For some students it's a lack of class participation ("Just start a streak of making one comment in class each day and write it down," I suggest), while for others it is staying organized or printing off their homework before class begins. For me, I've decided to start sharing an "I've noticed..." moment with at least one student each day. As a result, I spend all morning trying to notice things about my students, seeking out opportunities to send the message that "I see you." This heightened awareness has made me more responsive and has raised my emotional intelligence. I'm noticing more changes in my students' emotions because I need to acknowledge someone...at first, I needed to notice them because I didn't want my little notebook to start again with the number 1, but now the streak is simply growing because it's become a part of me, a part of my rhythm, my routine, my identity.
I've also started organizing something in my life for five minutes each day. One day it's the medicine cabinet in my bathroom, the next it's my desk at school, or a bookshelf, or the trunk of my car. Just five minutes, but it's a pattern. A streak. A way of keeping myself accountable for being the protagonist of my own life.
Thursday, January 19, 2017
What Lefty Layups Can Teach Us About Learning (And Teaching!)
Whenever I encounter a student who doesn't want to fail, who allows perfectionism to reign over their very existence, I think about left-handed layups.
I can vividly recall, as a young basketball player, watching my teammates (myself included) continuously dismiss the opportunity to take an open layup with their left hand simply because they weren't adept at hitting the shot. One might think that practice would be the opportunity to hone the skill, but most of my teammates didn't want to mess it up...they didn't want to fail on a stage.
I see lefty layup moments in my students all the time. Opportunities to fail, to struggle, to improve and develop being side-stepped in favor of an opportunity to guarantee success.
Earlier this week I asked my students to respond to the following prompt:
If you could wake up tomorrow having gained any (human) quality or ability, what would it be?
I wanted to get them thinking about our foibles and blemishes as humans, about our flaws, about our character. As English teachers, we discuss these things as they pertain to literary characters all the time. We look at strengths and, by dissecting them, we begin to see that a perceived strength can often reveal a weakness as well (courage or fearlessness can often reveal a lack of mindfulness or patience, for example).
In this exercise, though, I wanted my students to hold up a mirror. I wanted them to think about the areas they see as opportunities to improve. I wanted them to think about abilities that aren't superhuman, but that can be honed and practiced. That fit into the growth mindset of their learning.
The reality is that we can't wake up tomorrow being more resilient students, more confident speakers, or having better organization skills. We can't become better listeners, or develop sincere compassion overnight. What we can do, though, is begin to grow our awareness.
My students had many things they wish they could change about themselves. They were thoughtful in the exercise, and most of them were willing to share.
One student admitted that she wished she could be more brave...that she owns her identity as a fraidy cat.
The ironic thing about it, though, is that she was being brave in that moment...by digging into the uncomfortable work of being vulnerable in front of others, she was displaying remarkable fortitude. Now, though, I have the incredible opportunity to connect with this student each day and ask her how she's been brave today, or encourage her: "You're so brave!"
For my student who wants to be better organized (this was my goal as well!) I can sit beside him during study hall and ask, "Hey, how's the organization going? Can I help you think about putting all the pieces in place?"
Many of my students wanted to be more confident speakers and contributors in class. With these students in mind, I orchestrated a "silent conversation" in the hallway outside my classroom so they could feel "heard," without having to actually speak. I was able to hold them accountable by providing a baby step toward feeling like their views matter. Next, I might affirm them and suggest that they write a few comments they'd like to share in class each evening as part of their homework. Then, the improvisation of speaking "off the cuff" can be eliminated.
The coolest thing about this exercise, though, was less about what I can do to support and uplift my students, and more about their own areas of self-awareness and their support of each other. When teachers ask students, "what are your goals?" they often respond with quantitative, measurable outcomes: I'd like to make honor roll, do better in math, make the varsity baseball team, for example.
By asking them the skills and qualities they wish they could possess, however, the students are able to unconsciously back into the processes they might go through in developing the very outcomes they crave.
Today I am going to model for my students my first step in becoming more organized. Each of my students will have a folder with their name on it in the back of the room where their graded essays, rough drafts, and revisions will live. I will let my students be my accountability partners in my pursuit of being better organized. I'll let them remind me, just as I will remind them. I will try to model vulnerability and lean into my imperfections in the hope that their perfectionist selves will do the same. One of my greatest strengths in the classroom is my ability to improvise...but improvisers are not always great planners and organizers. I don't procrastinate, but I often sort the details out as I go.
I will let them watch me miss lefty layups, and I will ask them to gauge the impact of my development. I will stumble, jumping off the wrong foot, or feebly attempting to eliminate the number of piles that clutter my classroom...but I will let them in and I will allow myself to fail on the stage. And I will let them help me grow.
I can vividly recall, as a young basketball player, watching my teammates (myself included) continuously dismiss the opportunity to take an open layup with their left hand simply because they weren't adept at hitting the shot. One might think that practice would be the opportunity to hone the skill, but most of my teammates didn't want to mess it up...they didn't want to fail on a stage.
I see lefty layup moments in my students all the time. Opportunities to fail, to struggle, to improve and develop being side-stepped in favor of an opportunity to guarantee success.
Earlier this week I asked my students to respond to the following prompt:
If you could wake up tomorrow having gained any (human) quality or ability, what would it be?
I wanted to get them thinking about our foibles and blemishes as humans, about our flaws, about our character. As English teachers, we discuss these things as they pertain to literary characters all the time. We look at strengths and, by dissecting them, we begin to see that a perceived strength can often reveal a weakness as well (courage or fearlessness can often reveal a lack of mindfulness or patience, for example).
In this exercise, though, I wanted my students to hold up a mirror. I wanted them to think about the areas they see as opportunities to improve. I wanted them to think about abilities that aren't superhuman, but that can be honed and practiced. That fit into the growth mindset of their learning.
The reality is that we can't wake up tomorrow being more resilient students, more confident speakers, or having better organization skills. We can't become better listeners, or develop sincere compassion overnight. What we can do, though, is begin to grow our awareness.
My students had many things they wish they could change about themselves. They were thoughtful in the exercise, and most of them were willing to share.
One student admitted that she wished she could be more brave...that she owns her identity as a fraidy cat.
The ironic thing about it, though, is that she was being brave in that moment...by digging into the uncomfortable work of being vulnerable in front of others, she was displaying remarkable fortitude. Now, though, I have the incredible opportunity to connect with this student each day and ask her how she's been brave today, or encourage her: "You're so brave!"
For my student who wants to be better organized (this was my goal as well!) I can sit beside him during study hall and ask, "Hey, how's the organization going? Can I help you think about putting all the pieces in place?"
Many of my students wanted to be more confident speakers and contributors in class. With these students in mind, I orchestrated a "silent conversation" in the hallway outside my classroom so they could feel "heard," without having to actually speak. I was able to hold them accountable by providing a baby step toward feeling like their views matter. Next, I might affirm them and suggest that they write a few comments they'd like to share in class each evening as part of their homework. Then, the improvisation of speaking "off the cuff" can be eliminated.
The coolest thing about this exercise, though, was less about what I can do to support and uplift my students, and more about their own areas of self-awareness and their support of each other. When teachers ask students, "what are your goals?" they often respond with quantitative, measurable outcomes: I'd like to make honor roll, do better in math, make the varsity baseball team, for example.
By asking them the skills and qualities they wish they could possess, however, the students are able to unconsciously back into the processes they might go through in developing the very outcomes they crave.
Today I am going to model for my students my first step in becoming more organized. Each of my students will have a folder with their name on it in the back of the room where their graded essays, rough drafts, and revisions will live. I will let my students be my accountability partners in my pursuit of being better organized. I'll let them remind me, just as I will remind them. I will try to model vulnerability and lean into my imperfections in the hope that their perfectionist selves will do the same. One of my greatest strengths in the classroom is my ability to improvise...but improvisers are not always great planners and organizers. I don't procrastinate, but I often sort the details out as I go.
I will let them watch me miss lefty layups, and I will ask them to gauge the impact of my development. I will stumble, jumping off the wrong foot, or feebly attempting to eliminate the number of piles that clutter my classroom...but I will let them in and I will allow myself to fail on the stage. And I will let them help me grow.
Thursday, January 12, 2017
Life in the pocket
In the first post I ever wrote on this blog, I noted that I felt there just wasn't enough time to do everything I wanted to do.
I admitted, in that post, that the time existed, it was just a matter of using the time well. A recent article in the Harvard Business Review reiterates this idea (but with research!) that we should be managing our energy, rather than our time.
I looked closely at my energy and time management last month. I thought about my purpose, my ambition, my direction. I talked to trusted friends and shared my observations...of myself. It's a weird thing for me--being introspective. I'm bad at it, notoriously out-of-touch with what I'm feeling and how and why. I'd much rather be an emotional packesel (German for burro, or colloquially, the person who carries everyone else's stuff). But when I got in touch with my emotions, I realized I was spreading myself thin, trying to do everything and do it well.
I was the quarterback in the pocket. I was scrambling. I was being the hero. The human highlight film. I was threading the needle, selling jerseys, accumulating sponsorships. I was doing it all. I was awesome.
Then it struck me. Much of my ambition was thinly disguised narcissism. Now don't get me wrong, I didn't like this realization. But I realized something. I realized that--in this football analogy--I wasn't trusting the pocket. I was ignoring my offensive line. I wasn't exhibiting the patience and poise of a veteran quarterback; the one who wants to have a lengthy career. Instead, I was careening headfirst into the end zone, relishing the roar of the crowd at every flashy play...but I wasn't preserving myself, I was too risky, I was doing it all alone. And it just wasn't sustainable.
I realized that the people in my life who meant the most--the ones I wanted to cheer for me and applaud me--were my metaphorical offensive line. They were the ones who were capable of creating the pocket in which I could thrive. The thing is, though, they also include my colleagues, my students. Sometimes I need to hand off responsibility to my colleagues and friends (running backs), whereas other times my job is to collaborate and set others up for success (wide receivers).
Regardless of how I respond, the important thing is that I remain calm in the pocket. When I can do this, I enable my students to stay calm as well. My family functions more effectively when I take time for myself. And often, this means stepping out of responsibility, setting boundaries, turning people down, saying "no"...disappointing people.
Right now I am focusing on trusting my offensive line and waiting for plays to develop. I am listening to my students more intuitively; I am thinking creatively about what inspires me; and I have taken a step back from some of my own pursuits that have a tendency to become self-absorbed and self-fulfilling (while I don't believe I'm narcissistic or selfish, some of my habits, patterns, and hobbies were simply garnering too much of my energy without benefitting others).
So, how are my students helping me in this endeavor? Well they're my offensive line, my wide receivers. I am remaining present and calm in the pocket and trusting our united experience, alongside each other, as an exercise in teamwork, not in my display as a human highlight reel.
I admitted, in that post, that the time existed, it was just a matter of using the time well. A recent article in the Harvard Business Review reiterates this idea (but with research!) that we should be managing our energy, rather than our time.
I looked closely at my energy and time management last month. I thought about my purpose, my ambition, my direction. I talked to trusted friends and shared my observations...of myself. It's a weird thing for me--being introspective. I'm bad at it, notoriously out-of-touch with what I'm feeling and how and why. I'd much rather be an emotional packesel (German for burro, or colloquially, the person who carries everyone else's stuff). But when I got in touch with my emotions, I realized I was spreading myself thin, trying to do everything and do it well.
I was the quarterback in the pocket. I was scrambling. I was being the hero. The human highlight film. I was threading the needle, selling jerseys, accumulating sponsorships. I was doing it all. I was awesome.
Then it struck me. Much of my ambition was thinly disguised narcissism. Now don't get me wrong, I didn't like this realization. But I realized something. I realized that--in this football analogy--I wasn't trusting the pocket. I was ignoring my offensive line. I wasn't exhibiting the patience and poise of a veteran quarterback; the one who wants to have a lengthy career. Instead, I was careening headfirst into the end zone, relishing the roar of the crowd at every flashy play...but I wasn't preserving myself, I was too risky, I was doing it all alone. And it just wasn't sustainable.
I realized that the people in my life who meant the most--the ones I wanted to cheer for me and applaud me--were my metaphorical offensive line. They were the ones who were capable of creating the pocket in which I could thrive. The thing is, though, they also include my colleagues, my students. Sometimes I need to hand off responsibility to my colleagues and friends (running backs), whereas other times my job is to collaborate and set others up for success (wide receivers).
Regardless of how I respond, the important thing is that I remain calm in the pocket. When I can do this, I enable my students to stay calm as well. My family functions more effectively when I take time for myself. And often, this means stepping out of responsibility, setting boundaries, turning people down, saying "no"...disappointing people.
Right now I am focusing on trusting my offensive line and waiting for plays to develop. I am listening to my students more intuitively; I am thinking creatively about what inspires me; and I have taken a step back from some of my own pursuits that have a tendency to become self-absorbed and self-fulfilling (while I don't believe I'm narcissistic or selfish, some of my habits, patterns, and hobbies were simply garnering too much of my energy without benefitting others).
So, how are my students helping me in this endeavor? Well they're my offensive line, my wide receivers. I am remaining present and calm in the pocket and trusting our united experience, alongside each other, as an exercise in teamwork, not in my display as a human highlight reel.
Thursday, January 5, 2017
The Hack PhD.
I am a pretty ambitious person when it comes to both motivation and pursuit. I like doing things and my brain is always at work. I struggle to rest, and stillness makes me antsy. I am trying to get better at this, to give myself time to think, to step back, consider, mull, marinate.
Nevertheless, with all the ideas I generate it wasn't until recently that I felt confident sharing them with others, collecting feedback, risking failure.
What is an ambitious person if they are unwilling to fail?
In high school I had a quote pinned to my desk:
"A ship in the harbor is safe, but that's not what ships were made for."
Another read,
"Ideas are useless if they stay ideas."
So here's an idea I had this week as I returned to the classroom with my students.
-----------------
We all have things we're passionate about and our thought lives are uniquely our own. If we were to graph, however, every direction of our mind's wandering, and plot the correlations and relationships between seemingly divergent ideas, would there be some common ground on which to stand?
I've come to the conclusion that the answer is yes. And it is on the foundation of this assumption that I introduce to you an idea.
The idea is inspired, I'm sure, by Logan LaPlante's TED talk about hackschooling, Austin Kleon's Steal Like an Artist, as well as Elizabeth Gilbert's book, Big Magic. But here's the thing: it's also inspired by everything that's ever inspired me, because, well, that's the point.
The Hack PhD.
So, the idea behind the Hack PhD. is that you can push yourself toward becoming an expert in some fascinating field that deeply interests and inspires you. Your inspiration just needs a little organization.
Imagine your brain goes absolutely bananas for the following:
Children's books
Maps
Spoken word poetry
Coffee
Anything having to do with Albrecht Durer
Well, perhaps your PhD would be in the field of
Prepubescent Canonical Cartographic Studies with a concentration in caffeinated oration and Germanic Renaissance motif.
Of course this sounds ridiculous, but how cool would the syllabus be?
Who would the authors be that would inspire this student? What films or TED talks or interviews would they unearth? What would the dissertation be, and how could they seek out connections and relationships between their ideas and those of the people who preceded them in this work? Would their "professors" be living or deceased, and would that even matter?
What would the final essay be? Where would it lead them? What would they learn? What would they share?
Where could these dissertations be housed and collected?
Who would read them?
And what would you learn about someone by merely reading the title of their PhD?
This suggestion does beg the question, but isn't this just what interesting people do? Well, yes, but the idea here is to go beyond self-indulgence and to share ideas with others; it's allowing other people into your sphere of influences. It's about finding other people who love horses and comic books and politics and jellyfish as much as you do and seeking out their "research." It's about getting past the stale nature of academia and hijacking it in a novel way that embraces humor, irony, and a significant measure of levity.
Finland just elected to abolish academic subjects in schools. For anyone aged 16 or older, the purpose will be lateral thinking, learning to learn, and escaping from the silos that incarcerate us. It is more fluid.
We need fluidity.
We need art.
And we need to be inspired in 2017.
It's just an idea, but it's a start...
Nevertheless, with all the ideas I generate it wasn't until recently that I felt confident sharing them with others, collecting feedback, risking failure.
What is an ambitious person if they are unwilling to fail?
In high school I had a quote pinned to my desk:
"A ship in the harbor is safe, but that's not what ships were made for."
Another read,
"Ideas are useless if they stay ideas."
So here's an idea I had this week as I returned to the classroom with my students.
-----------------
We all have things we're passionate about and our thought lives are uniquely our own. If we were to graph, however, every direction of our mind's wandering, and plot the correlations and relationships between seemingly divergent ideas, would there be some common ground on which to stand?
I've come to the conclusion that the answer is yes. And it is on the foundation of this assumption that I introduce to you an idea.
The idea is inspired, I'm sure, by Logan LaPlante's TED talk about hackschooling, Austin Kleon's Steal Like an Artist, as well as Elizabeth Gilbert's book, Big Magic. But here's the thing: it's also inspired by everything that's ever inspired me, because, well, that's the point.
The Hack PhD.
So, the idea behind the Hack PhD. is that you can push yourself toward becoming an expert in some fascinating field that deeply interests and inspires you. Your inspiration just needs a little organization.
Imagine your brain goes absolutely bananas for the following:
Children's books
Maps
Spoken word poetry
Coffee
Anything having to do with Albrecht Durer
Well, perhaps your PhD would be in the field of
Prepubescent Canonical Cartographic Studies with a concentration in caffeinated oration and Germanic Renaissance motif.
Of course this sounds ridiculous, but how cool would the syllabus be?
Who would the authors be that would inspire this student? What films or TED talks or interviews would they unearth? What would the dissertation be, and how could they seek out connections and relationships between their ideas and those of the people who preceded them in this work? Would their "professors" be living or deceased, and would that even matter?
What would the final essay be? Where would it lead them? What would they learn? What would they share?
Where could these dissertations be housed and collected?
Who would read them?
And what would you learn about someone by merely reading the title of their PhD?
This suggestion does beg the question, but isn't this just what interesting people do? Well, yes, but the idea here is to go beyond self-indulgence and to share ideas with others; it's allowing other people into your sphere of influences. It's about finding other people who love horses and comic books and politics and jellyfish as much as you do and seeking out their "research." It's about getting past the stale nature of academia and hijacking it in a novel way that embraces humor, irony, and a significant measure of levity.
Finland just elected to abolish academic subjects in schools. For anyone aged 16 or older, the purpose will be lateral thinking, learning to learn, and escaping from the silos that incarcerate us. It is more fluid.
We need fluidity.
We need art.
And we need to be inspired in 2017.
It's just an idea, but it's a start...
Friday, December 16, 2016
Thursday, December 8, 2016
The limits of being happy
Last Friday we began our winter clubs session. Since the installment of clubs in our upper school division a handful of years ago I've cast a wide net in the clubs I've offered.
Right Brain Boot Camp
Freestyle Rapping Club
Sign Language Club
Arabic Club
Infographic Club
Ultimate Frisbee Club
This year, though, I am trying something different in establishing the UPWORTHY club.
Our first session began with a discussion of why we'd chosen to join the club. My hope was to come to an agreement of our purpose over the course of the next 10 weeks.
"I want to make people happy," one girl said.
"There's too much sad, frustrating news," another boy remarked, "and I want to be reminded that there are uplifting things, too."
Finally, another student added, "Everyone just seems so anxious...I want to help spread the idea that there is good in the world."
Each of these reasons made me grateful for the students and for the group's existence. I found it encouraging that these students truly wanted to find ways to uplift and inspire those around them. It was the first comment, though, that caused us the greatest discourse.
We talked about what it means to be happy.
Bobby McFerrin sang, "Don't worry, be happy."
Joy, in Pixar's Inside Out, blindly pursues a world devoid of problems and negativity.
Yet both of these examples present happiness as a binary measurement. You are either happy or you are unhappy.
How many other things could you be, though? With a hearty dose of inspiration from the online comic, The Oatmeal, I have thought lots about what it means to be happy in the past week. Parents often remark that their hope for their children is "that they will be happy." Yet there is something missed there. People who are engaged and passionate in the most meaningful ways tend to not be happy. But they're not unhappy, either. Instead, they are energized, joyous, exhausted, depleted...they are in pain, they are frustrated, they are driven and absorbed, ecstatic, euphoric, and on the verge of combustion.
Criss Jami, in his book (well, two books) Killosophy, writes that
"...excellence is made constant through the feeling that comes right after one has completed a work which he himself finds undeniably awe-inspiring. He only wants to relax until he's ready to renew such a feeling all over again because to him, all else has become absolutely trivial."
Is the artist, the poet, the performer, the educator, the politician happy during these moments caught in the presence of true awesomeness?
Perhaps not, but they are certainly driven. They feel a sense of purpose. They are whole.
There are so many things to feel in the world, but--as my students in the Upworthy Club began to teach me--happy cannot be made the endgame of adolescence. If it is, then people who are not happy begin to feel as though there is something wrong with them, that they carry an emotional burden, the weight of which is too great for their network, their community,
There is so much passion, so much energy, so much simultaneous hope and despair and exploration in the life of a teenager. It's unreasonable to expect them to be a single thing all the time. I often share this image with parents and students as a means of illustrating all of the ways an adolescent student is prepared to engage with the world.
In our first meeting of the Upworthy Club we weren't happy. We were a little sad, a little realistic, but we were each wholly present and honest with each other. Most importantly, we were in a room where we felt known and heard, and where we saw the future history of the difference we want to make in the hallways and classrooms of our school beginning to take shape. We were grieving for the present, and we were hopeful for the future.
It reminds me of a favorite Faulkner quote: "Given the choice between grief and nothing, I'd choose grief." I used to think this quote was grim, but as I consider it now, I wonder...what other choice is there, really?
Right Brain Boot Camp
Freestyle Rapping Club
Sign Language Club
Arabic Club
Infographic Club
Ultimate Frisbee Club
This year, though, I am trying something different in establishing the UPWORTHY club.
Our first session began with a discussion of why we'd chosen to join the club. My hope was to come to an agreement of our purpose over the course of the next 10 weeks.
"I want to make people happy," one girl said.
"There's too much sad, frustrating news," another boy remarked, "and I want to be reminded that there are uplifting things, too."
Finally, another student added, "Everyone just seems so anxious...I want to help spread the idea that there is good in the world."
Each of these reasons made me grateful for the students and for the group's existence. I found it encouraging that these students truly wanted to find ways to uplift and inspire those around them. It was the first comment, though, that caused us the greatest discourse.
We talked about what it means to be happy.
Bobby McFerrin sang, "Don't worry, be happy."
Joy, in Pixar's Inside Out, blindly pursues a world devoid of problems and negativity.
Yet both of these examples present happiness as a binary measurement. You are either happy or you are unhappy.
How many other things could you be, though? With a hearty dose of inspiration from the online comic, The Oatmeal, I have thought lots about what it means to be happy in the past week. Parents often remark that their hope for their children is "that they will be happy." Yet there is something missed there. People who are engaged and passionate in the most meaningful ways tend to not be happy. But they're not unhappy, either. Instead, they are energized, joyous, exhausted, depleted...they are in pain, they are frustrated, they are driven and absorbed, ecstatic, euphoric, and on the verge of combustion.
Criss Jami, in his book (well, two books) Killosophy, writes that
"...excellence is made constant through the feeling that comes right after one has completed a work which he himself finds undeniably awe-inspiring. He only wants to relax until he's ready to renew such a feeling all over again because to him, all else has become absolutely trivial."
Is the artist, the poet, the performer, the educator, the politician happy during these moments caught in the presence of true awesomeness?
Perhaps not, but they are certainly driven. They feel a sense of purpose. They are whole.
There are so many things to feel in the world, but--as my students in the Upworthy Club began to teach me--happy cannot be made the endgame of adolescence. If it is, then people who are not happy begin to feel as though there is something wrong with them, that they carry an emotional burden, the weight of which is too great for their network, their community,
There is so much passion, so much energy, so much simultaneous hope and despair and exploration in the life of a teenager. It's unreasonable to expect them to be a single thing all the time. I often share this image with parents and students as a means of illustrating all of the ways an adolescent student is prepared to engage with the world.
Is the student above happy? Probably not. But what if they stand for justice, seek freedom, look within themselves, question authority, and tether themselves to a cause for which they care? They're smiling, yes, but they're probably a little frantic, a little romantic, and very overwhelmed.
But, then again, are people who change the world usually happy?
I don't think so. Instead, they are the kind of people who grieve for what they know is possible, for what they believe we--as a collective humanity--are capable of becoming. In short, they are engaged. And they are struggling to explore their capabilities...they are expanding their ceilings.
In our first meeting of the Upworthy Club we weren't happy. We were a little sad, a little realistic, but we were each wholly present and honest with each other. Most importantly, we were in a room where we felt known and heard, and where we saw the future history of the difference we want to make in the hallways and classrooms of our school beginning to take shape. We were grieving for the present, and we were hopeful for the future.
It reminds me of a favorite Faulkner quote: "Given the choice between grief and nothing, I'd choose grief." I used to think this quote was grim, but as I consider it now, I wonder...what other choice is there, really?
Thursday, December 1, 2016
Poetry
A few weeks ago I found myself in New Haven, Connecticut standing before a stack of books at my favorite used book store in the city, Book Trader Cafe. I always gravitate toward poetry when I'm in a bookstore like Book Trader. Always. There's something I just find so mesmerizing about selecting a thin volume from the shelf, leafing gently through the pages and finding a poem to read. By the time I'm done working my way through a number of volumes I almost always purchase an author's poetry.
My process, however, is a little unorthodox. It goes like this:
1. Pick a collection of selected poems by an author with whom I'm unfamiliar.
2. Read two poems.
3. If they both resonate with me, I buy the book.
4. If one of the two resonates with me, I read a third. If that one stirs something within me, I buy the book.
5. If the the first two, or two of the first three, poems fails to churn my heart or mind awake, I begin again with step number 1.
I remember buying Vice by Ai and the selected poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge at the Stamford Library bookstore. I discovered Hettie Jones's Drive in Salt Lake City. Winter Sky by Coleman Barks and The Complete Works of Hart Crane fell into my lap somewhere in Vermont. Hayden Carruth's Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey was at a garage sale in New Hampshire.
Of course, some poems came my way by other means. I have my father's copy of e.e. cummings' poetry, and my wife introduced me to Tony Hoagland one winter. Jay Parini took me to the far fields with Ted Roethke and Ezra Pound, and Robert Tisdale bought me Trout Fishing in America by Richard Brautigan. Matt Cheney encouraged me to read Joel Brouwer's The Way It Happened and bought me The Poems of Paul Celan.
Still, the first poems that won me over were the ones Karen Budde made me memorize in sixth grade: the Shakespearean sonnets ("...thou art more lovely and more temperate..."), the Emily Dickinson ("the pedigree of honey, does not concern the bee..."), the John Donne ("and in this flea, our two bloods mingled be..."), the Edgar Allen Poe ("'twas many and many a year ago, in a kingdom by the sea...").
As a high school student I created an elective with an English teacher and an art teacher called "poetry and painting." Half the class would paint, half the class would write. When we had a product, we'd trade with someone and the second group would write a poem inspired by the painting while the first group would create a painting inspired by the poem. We did this a third time and presented the three-piece set to the community. I think there were six of us in the class and I remember one of my poems was entitled, "Hey Mister Green Faced Man, Why You So Ugly?" and one of my paintings was about burning flags and was inspired by my friend Allamary's poem, "Shadows."
It was awesome.
My English teacher, Matt Cheney, once read us a poem he wrote about the way we ruin poems when we try to decipher them. I think it was called "To the English Teacher Weilding A Scalpel."
My heart exploded for poems. And it still does. Poems are the way I make sense of the world. Sometimes, if I'm stuck in the doldrums, or I'm particularly inspired, but I don't know what to do next, I'll stop what I'm doing and find a poem.
"Sometimes you just need a poem," was a phrase my wife quickly learned in our early weeks of marriage as we struggled to learn how to live alongside each other as one.
Julia Alvarez, one of my inspirations in college, referred to the art of poetry as "putting to words what can't be said."
I've always hung on to that.
I've always hung on to that.
And I've written literal thousands. I still have every journal of poetry I've ever filled (except for one that tragically slid off the roof of my car somewhere between Salt Lake City and Mount Pleasant, Utah...but there's a poem waiting to be written in there somewhere). Sometimes they rhyme, other times they don't. They cover a litany of emotions. They help me put words to the things I feel that can't be said. To loss. To gain. To struggle. To sacrifice. To soaring. To failing. To growing.
Between running and poetry, I find my way to navigate, to cope.
Yesterday was parents' day at my school. Many parents were there. We've been studying the Middle East, and specifically we've been looking at the geopolitics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Yesterday, though, I wanted to put a face to it...to get past the "us" and "them" of it all...to help my students see that when you have humans who feel things as deeply as they do, you get things that can't be said in words...and you get poets who are brave and beautiful enough to try anyway. So from deep within the pain of war and heartache, we explored poems together.
I would live in that classroom forever. Hearing my students with poems on their lips, their parents watching proudly, their hearts pressing firmly against the subtle wrinkle of human existence as tomorrow's history begins to rouse.
I asked the parents if they had favorite poems. Many did. It was neat to watch the parents struggle to explain what it was about the words that drew them in, and awoke something inside.
Later I watched two boys--9th graders--reciting lines from Romeo and Juliet in an empty room. The weight of the words was beautiful as I watched them. The boys took turns reciting, correcting, watching, and listening. They found joy in the lines and in their ability to express them loudly, deeply. I snapped a photo and told them I was inspired by their energy.
I wonder when each of my students will read that poem that changes them, that inspires them to look deeply within themselves...hopefully it will coax them toward the effort required to struggle some emotion of their own from the tip of their pen.
I hope, above all else, they'll realize that sometimes you just need a poem.
I asked the parents if they had favorite poems. Many did. It was neat to watch the parents struggle to explain what it was about the words that drew them in, and awoke something inside.
Later I watched two boys--9th graders--reciting lines from Romeo and Juliet in an empty room. The weight of the words was beautiful as I watched them. The boys took turns reciting, correcting, watching, and listening. They found joy in the lines and in their ability to express them loudly, deeply. I snapped a photo and told them I was inspired by their energy.
I wonder when each of my students will read that poem that changes them, that inspires them to look deeply within themselves...hopefully it will coax them toward the effort required to struggle some emotion of their own from the tip of their pen.
I hope, above all else, they'll realize that sometimes you just need a poem.
Thursday, November 17, 2016
Sweet Laughter
I've been thinking about Aristotle lately.
He was born in the 4th century in Greece, but the perspectives and philosophical beliefs he proffered resonate in today's world as much as ever. He was one of the world's most impressive lateral thinkers, finding inspiration in all that he did and thought, and seeking to better understand his world--the world--at every step, turn, and conversation. His life was ripe with OPPORTUNITY (as all of our lives are), and he plucked chances as though they were exotic fruits to be tasted and devoured, seeds and all.
Whether it was epistemology, geology, physics, psychology, biology, ethics, or any other variation of conceptual consideration, Aristotle wanted to feel everything and to understand more. He was insatiably curious in the ways we hope our students become. He valued thinking (and questioning) in ways we need our world's leaders (and "followers") to be. He operated in a world devoid of silos and safety, dwelling instead in conversations with those who disagreed with him and pushed him to better understand truth.
I've discussed Aristotle's theories of human nature with my 8th graders this week as we continue to navigate William Golding's Lord of the Flies. Aristotle believed that humans were naturally-inclined to be conjugal, political, and mimetic. He felt this was our human destiny and that it separated us from most other species in the animal kingdom.
Still, he recognized that there were animals that partnered for life and developed clan-like relationships, gathering in flocks, or herds, or packs. There are also animals that form elaborate hierarchies and systems of self-governing organization. There are even animals that can be creative and innovative in moments of necessity. While survival tends to limit opportunities for creativity and imaginative thinking, it still happens.
But here's the thing: After all of his work, observation, research, conversation, meditation, and pontificating, Aristotle ended up ascribing human's unique nature to their propensity to laugh.
A baby, Aristotle claimed, does not have a soul, until the moment it laughs for the first time.
This week, in the midst of floundering alongside my students in a punchbowl of emotions, my students reminded me to laugh. They produced videos and presentations about the Five Pillars of Islam that were highly informative; that showcased both their creativity and their intellectual depth, and that pushed their understandings deeper toward the realm of being culturally competent.
Yet they also relished in the bloopers. They highlighted the moments where they'd cut each other off, where they'd dabbed, tripped, spilled, squealed, shrieked, heard their voices crack, seen their wardrobes malfunction. They'd had their computer stepped on by an excited fifth grader, their filming had ben interrupted, their lines had been forgotten. And it was the best. It was the moment their souls were revealed, and it brought lightness to the room.
We talked about how good it felt to laugh--to lose control of our ability to look cool. But it was so much better when we did it together. Of course, we talked about memes and gifs and YouTube, about the danger of resorting to humor when real action is required....but we also recognized that laughter might, in fact, be the best medicine.
Yes, we laugh when we're nervous.
Yes, we laugh at people when we're insecure.
And yes, we laugh when we've contrived a sinister masterplan.
But those are different types of laughter. I know, because we laugh the sweetest laughter when we forget--for just an instant--about who we are and how we're supposed to act, and we return to the gleeful moment when, as Aristotle remarked, we first squealed in delight at the nonsensical folly of a world filled with joy.
Here's to laughing that sweet brand of laughter, and finding those people with whom we can do it well.
He was born in the 4th century in Greece, but the perspectives and philosophical beliefs he proffered resonate in today's world as much as ever. He was one of the world's most impressive lateral thinkers, finding inspiration in all that he did and thought, and seeking to better understand his world--the world--at every step, turn, and conversation. His life was ripe with OPPORTUNITY (as all of our lives are), and he plucked chances as though they were exotic fruits to be tasted and devoured, seeds and all.
Whether it was epistemology, geology, physics, psychology, biology, ethics, or any other variation of conceptual consideration, Aristotle wanted to feel everything and to understand more. He was insatiably curious in the ways we hope our students become. He valued thinking (and questioning) in ways we need our world's leaders (and "followers") to be. He operated in a world devoid of silos and safety, dwelling instead in conversations with those who disagreed with him and pushed him to better understand truth.
I've discussed Aristotle's theories of human nature with my 8th graders this week as we continue to navigate William Golding's Lord of the Flies. Aristotle believed that humans were naturally-inclined to be conjugal, political, and mimetic. He felt this was our human destiny and that it separated us from most other species in the animal kingdom.
Still, he recognized that there were animals that partnered for life and developed clan-like relationships, gathering in flocks, or herds, or packs. There are also animals that form elaborate hierarchies and systems of self-governing organization. There are even animals that can be creative and innovative in moments of necessity. While survival tends to limit opportunities for creativity and imaginative thinking, it still happens.
But here's the thing: After all of his work, observation, research, conversation, meditation, and pontificating, Aristotle ended up ascribing human's unique nature to their propensity to laugh.
A baby, Aristotle claimed, does not have a soul, until the moment it laughs for the first time.
This week, in the midst of floundering alongside my students in a punchbowl of emotions, my students reminded me to laugh. They produced videos and presentations about the Five Pillars of Islam that were highly informative; that showcased both their creativity and their intellectual depth, and that pushed their understandings deeper toward the realm of being culturally competent.
Yet they also relished in the bloopers. They highlighted the moments where they'd cut each other off, where they'd dabbed, tripped, spilled, squealed, shrieked, heard their voices crack, seen their wardrobes malfunction. They'd had their computer stepped on by an excited fifth grader, their filming had ben interrupted, their lines had been forgotten. And it was the best. It was the moment their souls were revealed, and it brought lightness to the room.
We talked about how good it felt to laugh--to lose control of our ability to look cool. But it was so much better when we did it together. Of course, we talked about memes and gifs and YouTube, about the danger of resorting to humor when real action is required....but we also recognized that laughter might, in fact, be the best medicine.
Yes, we laugh when we're nervous.
Yes, we laugh at people when we're insecure.
And yes, we laugh when we've contrived a sinister masterplan.
But those are different types of laughter. I know, because we laugh the sweetest laughter when we forget--for just an instant--about who we are and how we're supposed to act, and we return to the gleeful moment when, as Aristotle remarked, we first squealed in delight at the nonsensical folly of a world filled with joy.
Here's to laughing that sweet brand of laughter, and finding those people with whom we can do it well.
Thursday, November 10, 2016
Lifting our hearts from the dirt
It is a Wednesday and my students are beginning a new book.
It is a Wednesday and my students are beginning Lord of the Flies.
It is a Wednesday and I will teach them about allegory, and about the origins of human conflict.
It is a Wednesday and my students are beginning the day with the knowledge that the freshly-minted president-elect of their country--the person who will be president when they turn 18 and earn their own right to vote--has uttered phrases that fill them with horror. They are phrases the singe them, choke them, drown them, and single many of them out as being worthless, dispensable, filthy, unattractive, undignified...and worse.
It is a Wednesday and I talk to them. I try to hold space. To allow for openings, for connection, for confusion, and for pain. But I'm grasping for something hopeful...where is the light?
I decide, halfway through class, that I want to scrap my lesson. It's the one where we discuss William Golding and how "writer's write what they know." Instead, I want to show them an allegory. I want to share with them Plato's Allegory of the Cave.
I tell the story.
I draw for them.
(They smile at my fumbling whiteboard failures)
I ask them what it all means.
I don't tell them what to feel.
I don't tell them what I feel.
I let them teach me.
I embrace silence.
They tell me that we're the ones chained in the cave.
That we owe it to the world to explore,
to reject passivity,
to question authority.
They impress me and they inspire me.
I am hopeful that this experience of being alive, of existing, in 2016 is one that shapes my students into something greater than the status quo. I hope they will heed the mission of my school which ends, by stating that we aspire to equip our students"...to have the courage and confidence to make a positive contribution to the world."
I found an old poem I wrote once. I wanted to find it because I knew I'd had these thoughts before...these thoughts about being human.
I wonder now, as I reread it, how I can revise it. How I can rewrite it in such a way that begins, "How we unite tells us lots about ourselves..." I don't know how that poem begins, or middles, or ends because I haven't seen it yet. I don't yet know how we unite, or what it will tell us about ourselves. Poetry puts words to what can't be said, but in moving on, I don't even know where to begin. I've lifted my heart from the dirt, yes. But now, alongside my students, comes the noble venture of joining hearts in such a way as to ensure that their collective, resonating thunder will drown out the cries of fear, mistrust, and hatred.
Humans
How we fight tells us lots about ourselves;
about the ways we crumble,
spill, and fall apart.
And when we fight in groups
where unity and cohesion are paramount
and predicated on the drawing of our souls
like water into that vast shared bucket we call consensus,
we fail.
We fail to hear,
to coat ourselves in sufficient enough a lacquer
as to protect our gentle selves from being dented.
We fume. We pace. We eat.
Because, in our fury,
we know not what to do.
Or be.
Or how to do or be it.
We fail ourselves again.
And again. And again.
Overcome with tremors, we clamor to understand
whether we want to put something into ourselves
or get something out.
And so, instead, we lift our hearts from the dirt,
ground to pulp and left in pulsing piles
and mash them back inside our chests
where their burger shapes beat our blood thick
just for the sake of being boiled again.Friday, November 4, 2016
Pitchers or batters?
As I watched the World Series last night, I got to thinking...baseball is intense. It's beautiful, with it's moments of glory and celebration, and awful in its moments of defeat and error. Someone comes up short while someone else rises to the occasion. It's never both.
It reminds me of a conversation I had out in Texas with another teacher as we watched the Cubs play in their first game of the playoffs last month.
As teachers, do we treat our students more like pitchers or like hitters?
Let's start by looking at the differences.
Pitchers
In baseball, the pitcher begins with an Earned Run Average (ERA) of 0.00. This is perfection. Every batter the pitcher faces, however, poses an opportunity to make a mistake. For a pitcher, perfection is expected and once they make enough mistakes, they get pulled from the game.
Batters
In baseball, the batter begins with a batting average of .000. This is the opposite of perfection. It is a number representing an inability to effectively do that thing that the game asks you to do: hit the ball. Every time the batter steps to the plate (and they get a turn once every nine times) there is an opportunity for success. The hope of glory. For a batter, batting below .200 represents futility and nobody has hit .400 since Ted Williams did so in 1941. Everybody else is somewhere in between. Success is getting three hits for every ten at bats.
So there it is. Both pitchers and batters are called upon to play defense, of course, and sometimes to run bases. And they also need to high five one another and add to the clubhouse chemistry. But my question is this: When we work with students, they come to our classes with an opportunity. Is each assessment, however, a chance to succeed and praise, or a chance to drop them down from perfection?
In my class this week my students are beginning to write essays about Prajwal Parajuly's collection of short stories, The Gurkha's Daughter. I am working with each of them to learn from the recommendations I made on their last essay (in response to Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men) and to set some goals for themselves. For some students this means working on developing their narrative voice; for others it means using stronger verbs and avoiding the verb "to be"; still other students are working on comma usage, or transitions, or a crafting a more universally-relevant conclusion.
This is kind of like a pitcher honing his/her craft. Can a student throw a perfect academic game? Yeah, sure they can. A+ grades happen and so do perfect scores on assignments. Students thrive and sometimes the pressure gets to them and they struggle mightily...just like a pitcher giving up a home run at the worst possible time.
Pitchers can close the gap toward perfection, lowering their ERA with each pitch. It can never get back to 0.00, but what is a teacher if they tell their students that they expect perfection?
Are there times, though, when batters are the apt comparison? Those same English students in my 8th grade class are required to choose three vocabulary words (from anything they read) that they want to learn each night. Of those three words, they then set one singular goal for themselves (e.g. "I want to understand the meaning of the word aesthetically" or "I want to use the word wrought in my essays." In essence, by asking them to choose one of their three words and add it to their accessible vocabulary I'm trying to dissuade them from the rote memorization of 100 vocabulary words that they'll forget moments after the test.
It reminds me of a conversation I had out in Texas with another teacher as we watched the Cubs play in their first game of the playoffs last month.
As teachers, do we treat our students more like pitchers or like hitters?
Let's start by looking at the differences.
Pitchers
In baseball, the pitcher begins with an Earned Run Average (ERA) of 0.00. This is perfection. Every batter the pitcher faces, however, poses an opportunity to make a mistake. For a pitcher, perfection is expected and once they make enough mistakes, they get pulled from the game.
Batters
In baseball, the batter begins with a batting average of .000. This is the opposite of perfection. It is a number representing an inability to effectively do that thing that the game asks you to do: hit the ball. Every time the batter steps to the plate (and they get a turn once every nine times) there is an opportunity for success. The hope of glory. For a batter, batting below .200 represents futility and nobody has hit .400 since Ted Williams did so in 1941. Everybody else is somewhere in between. Success is getting three hits for every ten at bats.
So there it is. Both pitchers and batters are called upon to play defense, of course, and sometimes to run bases. And they also need to high five one another and add to the clubhouse chemistry. But my question is this: When we work with students, they come to our classes with an opportunity. Is each assessment, however, a chance to succeed and praise, or a chance to drop them down from perfection?
In my class this week my students are beginning to write essays about Prajwal Parajuly's collection of short stories, The Gurkha's Daughter. I am working with each of them to learn from the recommendations I made on their last essay (in response to Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men) and to set some goals for themselves. For some students this means working on developing their narrative voice; for others it means using stronger verbs and avoiding the verb "to be"; still other students are working on comma usage, or transitions, or a crafting a more universally-relevant conclusion.
This is kind of like a pitcher honing his/her craft. Can a student throw a perfect academic game? Yeah, sure they can. A+ grades happen and so do perfect scores on assignments. Students thrive and sometimes the pressure gets to them and they struggle mightily...just like a pitcher giving up a home run at the worst possible time.
Pitchers can close the gap toward perfection, lowering their ERA with each pitch. It can never get back to 0.00, but what is a teacher if they tell their students that they expect perfection?
Are there times, though, when batters are the apt comparison? Those same English students in my 8th grade class are required to choose three vocabulary words (from anything they read) that they want to learn each night. Of those three words, they then set one singular goal for themselves (e.g. "I want to understand the meaning of the word aesthetically" or "I want to use the word wrought in my essays." In essence, by asking them to choose one of their three words and add it to their accessible vocabulary I'm trying to dissuade them from the rote memorization of 100 vocabulary words that they'll forget moments after the test.
Instead, I want to send the message that batting .333 is good enough, and if you can actually embed one word each night in your "useable" vocabulary, that would be awesome, it would be Hall of Fame worthy, and it would be so much more valuable than earning a 97% on a vocab quiz.
So maybe this metaphor is broken. Maybe I ask my students to be both pitchers and batters. At the end of each game, though, ballplayers leave the ballpark at the end of the day and go back to being human. And that's the same for my students, too. My hope, as a teacher, is that their performance in the classroom does not define them, no matter their batting average or ERA. My hope is that they feel whole and that their understanding of themselves stretches beyond the statistics and sabermetrics. I hope my students don't dwell on the numbers on the back of their baseball card, but instead that they each get to feel like the little kid who takes their first swing and feels the satisfaction of connecting bat with ball and says, I love this game because it's fun.
So maybe this metaphor is broken. Maybe I ask my students to be both pitchers and batters. At the end of each game, though, ballplayers leave the ballpark at the end of the day and go back to being human. And that's the same for my students, too. My hope, as a teacher, is that their performance in the classroom does not define them, no matter their batting average or ERA. My hope is that they feel whole and that their understanding of themselves stretches beyond the statistics and sabermetrics. I hope my students don't dwell on the numbers on the back of their baseball card, but instead that they each get to feel like the little kid who takes their first swing and feels the satisfaction of connecting bat with ball and says, I love this game because it's fun.
Thursday, October 27, 2016
Doorways and Barriers
A few weeks ago I wrote a post about how every encounter you have with someone results in the two of you moving toward good, or away from good. Now I didn't mean to sound overly Zoroastrian in my suggestion, but I did want to make a point about the impact we have on others.
The choices we make, the words we use, the ways we make people feel, matter. Yet at the same time, we are not just producers of emotion, we are also recipients of positive and negative messages and stimuli as well.
After being inspired by a fellow educator named Marlena Gross-Taylor's use of the terms "barriers and doorways," I decided to encourage my students to think beyond their own impact by also noticing the messages their worlds were sending them through this idea of metaphorical "barriers" and "doorways" in their day.
Was this true? Were their days full of stumbles, or did they just remember it that way? Did barriers require more of their attention, whereas doorways merely asked them to sprint through, catch their breath, and frantically search for the next trial demanding their attention?
Well I'm certainly not a trained professional in conducting psychological studies, but it awakened my mind to buzzing.
There has been plenty of press in the past five years emphasizing grit and resilience as necessary components of long-term success. Accordingly, I wonder if, perhaps, my students see barriers not because they are pessimistic or perfectionist, but because they recognize these as opportunities to better themselves, and to learn. Just as we learn little from those with whom we agree, perhaps we grow most from the barriers.
What I wonder, though, is how we--as teachers and parents--can rebrand barriers to think of them as doorways through which we simply can't figure out how to maneuver.
I once read a story about a Scotsman who lived in the 19th century and dreamt of becoming a discus thrower. At the forge by his home he created an iron discus after having read a description of one in a book. He had never been trained, nor had he seen anyone compete in the event...he simply loved the idea of the competition. So there it was, in empty fields of the Highlands that this young man began to throw his disc into the air until he felt he was reaching the distances outlined in his book as being world-class. When he ventured to the city for a competition, however, he learned that the discs had a core of wood, and only the outer shell was made of iron.
He threw the discs as though they were tea saucers, winning every competition in which he took part for the remainder of his life.
Perhaps my students are like this young Scotsman...they are maneuvering barriers now to prepare them for challenges later in life. Maybe they know that life will be hard and so they're piling pressure on themselves because of that.
But what are we teachers to do? How can we convince them that they don't need to hurl discs of iron for the horizon? How can we convince them to see the wildflowers in that very field? How can we help them look for shapes in the clouds, and learn to be still in the peaceful presence of nothing? Is there a place for this? Doorways don't always need to open toward winning or success. What if they just open toward being comfortable in our own skin and knowing that how we are is enough, and worthy of celebration?
Yesterday, one of my students volunteered to share her religion with the class. She prepared a presentation, brought props, and she spoke from the heart. We learned of her beliefs, her alphabet, her traditions, her values. We held artifacts that matter deeply to her. We struggled to pronounce words in her language, and she calmly smiled and urged us to try again, but with our lips like this.
It was beautiful, and it was hard for her to stand up there. For her entire time as a classmate, perhaps her faith has been a barrier, but by sharing it, by trusting us, she created a doorway.
Here's to turning barriers into doors and celebrating them--and ourselves--as we cross each threshold.
Thursday, October 20, 2016
The Art of Going There
7/14/2008
Those were the words that got me. There stood the woman I had only just met--my future bride--speaking words rich with eloquence and glowing with truth. All those in attendance at the writing conference were audibly moved as a hush fell over the hall. While she'd answered a question about why we write, she'd done so much more: she'd revealed to us a granule of that which makes us human. The desire for connection, for a wholeness we cannot accomplish by ourselves.
Of course I'd be lying if I suggested that, at that very moment, I knew...but the honest answer is that I was too overwhelmed by the power of words to even know what I was feeling. When she and I departed four days--days spent writing, confronting, exploring, and savoring one other's words--later, we exchanged addresses and began an old-fashioned chain of correspondence. Writing hand-written letters to one another.
4/4/1984
Truth be told, my love affair with letter-writing, though, began much earlier. My parents used to refer to mail as either "anybody mail" or "whobody mail." We lived in a tiny schoolhouse in northern New Hampshire and the postal workers' lonely sojourn by our house on Lost Nation Road represented one of the highlights of each day. The 90 degree turn on which our mailbox made its home was often overshot by a late night driver and my father got in the practice of repairing the rusty old mailbox's scrap wood post every couple of months. My mother would eventually paint the words "Good News In Here" on the front.
We loved mail. I loved letters.
4/22/2001
At 17, the testosterone-laden mosaic of my adolescent ethos centered on my passions for sports and writing. So it was no surprise that Sports Illustrated found its way into my lap each week at the local library. I loved the work of Rick Reilly and wrote him a letter.
To my shock, Rick wrote back.
Nothing compared to receiving this letter as an aspiring writer.
10/19/2016
When I shared this letter, these stories, with my students yesterday, I was revealing a part of myself...I was sharing with them more than a letter, or a passion. I was telling them that I trusted them. I was pushing past the awkwardness of emotions and going there.
I'd gotten the idea to focus on letter-writing for 10 minutes a day in English class because I read the four thank-you notes to Michelle Obama published in the New York Times earlier this week. I was moved by the unconventional nature of their wisdom, their gratitude, their beauty. Each reflection (because that's really what they were) brought such enigmatically beautiful poetry to our First Lady's existence. My students and I then embarked together on a detailed scouring of the website Letters of Note, looking for letters, for wisdom, for emotions, for words and phrases, that inspired us.
My students recognized that when people are writing to those they love and admire, they become better writers, their vocabularies swell, they avoid the commonplace cliches and ordinary verbiage of their colloquial vernacular, and seek to put words to what can't be said.
And so it was that we began considering the people to whom we might compose a note of gratitude.
Here are some excerpts.
"...I want to tell you about the first time I went fishing..."
"You probably don't remember the advice you gave me one Thanksgiving, but I do. They're words I'll never forget."
"I don't know how to say thank you."
"There is something about your smile."
"Thank you. Thank you. THANK YOOOOOU."
"I love doing nothing with you."
"We learned a lot more than we realized in second grade, didn't we?"
"There is nobody in the world like you."
“A week later, you died. Cancer stole you away”
“You taught me how to be brave, how to be happy, and how to let go.”
“Hearing stories about your childhood, and everything you’ve been through, made me realize how lucky I am.”
“I’ve always been nervous about doing things.”
“Your smile and laughter is something that people everywhere will never forget.”
“That’s when I found out exactly what you were: an inspiration.”
“The moment I heard the first song, I immediately realized my passion for music.”
“You increased my love for it so much.”
“It’s more than fair to say that this trip really opened up my eyes.”
“When I think about how you risk your life every day, for people you don’t even know, I know you are a real hero.”
“You are a genius!”
“You were a frequent visitor, even though I didn’t see you much.”
“I didn’t notice how much I would miss you until now.”
“Even though we only spent 55 minutes together each day, we always shared a connection.”
“There are so many things that I take for granted that you do.”
“The only way that you can achieve your goal is through hard work, just like anything else.”
“I’d never sought their wisdom or wanted to know what they thought...they’d never given me a reason to.”
“When you first came to my door many years ago, I slammed it in your face and ran away.”
Watching my students shed the bravado of adolescence and embrace an attitude of appreciation was pretty remarkable.
"When you leave the classroom," I added. "Try to look for other moments of admiration in your day. Who do you notice? To whom could you write your next thank-you note?"
I said these words, but I didn't have to. The tone had been set, and it was contagious.
I think I owe them a thank-you note for their tenderness, their courage, and for pushing past the awkwardness of emotions and going there.
Friday, October 14, 2016
the it-ness of each of us
Here's the way this usually works:
I think all week about my own growth, my reflections, my beliefs, my students, my children, my life.
My life.
I remember being little and looking in the mirror and looking into my own eyes until I looked like a stranger; I recall saying my name aloud until it sounded foreign, weird, inaudibly bizarre as the syllable (for there was only one in my case) fled from my lips, disappearing moments later into the ether of silence. I wondered if what I saw as purple matched the version that other's had, and questioned whether apples tasted the same to everybody, and--if not--how would we ever know?
And then I would consider my life. I would question myself, my existence, and the indistinguishable it-ness (the essence of just being it) of what it meant to be me.
My life.
So somewhere in the midst of my week (in all its itness, because, like, what else could it possibly be?) I find something to blog about. But this week was different. So many things stimulated and inspired me. Flooded, inundated by ideas and visions and possibility, yesterday came and went without me knowing what to write. Truth be told, yesterday was also one of the busiest spans of 24 hours I've experienced, but nevertheless I spent the day feeling as though the vessel holding that gorgeously impossible broth of ideas in which my brain floats was brimming with a meniscus that was sure to overflow.
But it didn't, and here I am. At a desk. Writing. And because I can't write everything, I'll have to just embrace the spirit of this blog and write something and spend 30 minutes doing it.
It doesn't usually work this way, but today I just need to answer a question, posed to me via Twitter during my time in Austin, Texas at the AMLE (Association of Middle Level Education) conference:
While I was a student in the course, and assuredly not the teacher, here is my memory of 6-8 grade Latin.
Above the huge marble fireplace in my middle school Latin classroom there was an oversized chart made of graph paper. Each student's name was written along the left side of the chart. Every time a student finished a chapter in our Latin textbook we would fill in a box on the grid. Now, normally, students would progress through the textbook en masse, with teachers delivering lessons and students achieving various degrees of mastery along the way. Karen, my Latin teacher, however, was different. She felt that one-on-one Latin instruction was preferable and that each student should teach themselves the text, leaning on her for support when it was needed. Everything had to be completed, and corrected if necessary, until it earned a grade of 100%. Once a student earned 100%, they could move on.
If a student finished four chapters in a marking period, they earned an A.
Three chapters earned a B.
Two chapters resulted in a mark of C.
And one chapter earned a D.
Oh, and if you had a perfect score on your end of chapter translation you earned a cake. Like a real cake. Like a whole, big Pepperidge Farm personal cake. To eat. During Latin class.
One quick look at the chart, though, in--say--the spring of 1997 would have quickly alerted a classroom visitor to two clear realities:
1. Will McDonough had four colored boxes filled in next to his name.
2. Two girls in the class were closing in on chapter 30 and would be starting the Latin II textbook by the end of the year.
Yes, that's right. I earned a B during my first trimester of 6th grade and a D during my second trimester.
Now here's the thing: I was a bright kid. I was earning mostly Bs and As in all my other classes. But I didn't care about getting 100% on anything. I would often finish the chapter, but never correct anything to 100%. I was so excited to see what the fortis legatus was going to be doing in the next translation.
Furthermore, we were tessellating the walls with original tessellations in math class; we were building hot air balloons out of Ty-Vek in Science class; we were memorizing lines for Bye Bye Birdie; we were memorizing Emily Dickinson and reading Hamlet in English; and we had just returned from a trip to Quebec City where we'd practiced our French; I'd just mastered a between the legs dribble on the basketball court!
School was so fascinating. So inspiring. So Alive!
And then there was Latin class. Latin class where a perfect translation could earn me a cake?
Where the entirety of class was spent reading a textbook?
Alone?!?!
I was a raging extrovert. I loved my friends. I was curious beyond measure.
For anyone who was self-motivated and felt deep wells of satisfaction at constructing the perfect translation, this was great. I'm sure those two girls loved their cakes and their perfect notes and their achievement. But those carrots didn't work for me.
So, with two minutes left in this blog, why was I so quick to praise this practice on Twitter if I didn't like it?
Well, I think self-pacing is great when it works. I think students should be able to progress at their own pace, and to master material. What I don't like, though, is the public nature of the graph; the awarding of baked goods; and the one-dimensional teaching model. If a curriculum can be self-paced and dynamic, I'm all for it. But I am a firm believer that middle school needs to be an experience. That it can't just be a student and a textbook and the pursuit of perfection. As Chip Wood remarked, middle school should be a little like summer camp and a little like the Civilian Conservation Corps of the Great Depression: active, project-oriented, and always with a unifying goal of the entire group.
We've got to meet students where they are as both thinkers and learners: as thinkers, they are students who are developing toward adolescence, but as learners they are each unique by that very same ubiquitous it-ness that makes their lives their own.
Thursday, October 6, 2016
Movement
My daughter and I share many similarities. We are both the oldest children in our families; we both love adventure; we're both extroverts who thrive off of human connections; we both love morning and autumn and the hopeful anticipation of a letter in the mailbox.
We also both have an insatiable curiosity, a thirst for learning. And along with that desire for new discourse and information comes a penchant for learning something and immediately applying it to our lives. Like, right-at-that-very-second that our synapses fire like pistons and the cerebral cortex starts to chuff up the great mountain of fascination and opportunity, we are ready to teach our new insight to anyone within earshot.
We were born for soapboxes, yes, and I know it can cause some nightmarish tremors with the introverts in our family that feel like some sort of dystopian, endlessly-energized TED talk; yet this gift (or curse) also means that we don't have to plan as much as other people. We can improvise and wing it without a detailed course laid out before us.
Oh, and my daughter is five.*
In any case, I had one of these lightning quick learning experiences last week when I read skimmed something that caught my attention.
The excerpt that caught my interest was by Dr. Larry Crabb, and my understanding of it went like this:
Any interaction you have of more than a few seconds either moves you in a direction that is toward GOODNESS, or away from it.
Now, most certainly, in the 21st Century any notion of goodness as defined by a universal morality has become shockingly ambiguous. One need not look any further than one of America's recent presidential debates to understand that we are dwelling in a world of opaque subjectivity on the matter.
Still, this notion of movement caused me to think deeply about the words our Head of Upper School posed to our community at the beginning of the school year. He encouraged us to ask ourselves,
"What would my best self do?"
Well, we all have varied views of each other's best selves, but it's likely, at our core, that we know ourselves. We know what it feels like to wake up each morning and simply FEEL GOOD about ourselves.
This morning, in fact, my daughter--that one who loves teaching stuff immediately after learning it--dragged me from bed and into the kitchen: "Dad, look the sun isn't even up yet, but the sky is getting pink...this is the perfect time of day to do the cumbia."
"The what?" I ask, half asleep and putting on a pot of coffee?
"This dance I learned in music class! It is from Latin America. Here, let me show you!"
And there was my daughter in all her glory, teaching me something. Her brain was awake, her heart was awake, and...most importantly, she felt so good about herself.
And this is the heart of it. Our best selves know what it feels like to be humming on all cylinders. We know when we're making good decisions, feeling proud, feeling connected; we know when we're being challenged and being brave, taking risks and surpassing new milestones.
Our brains all wake up in different ways, but having a grasp on ourselves and what wakes us up is important. I loved starting my day with my daughter, being guided toward a deepened understanding of her, and of myself. Her love of dancing in the predawn light of our kitchen was contagious, and in that interaction--one that lasted no more than two minutes--she moved me in the direction of real, tangible goodness.
I know because it made my heart glad. Glad to know her. Glad to be alive. Glad to have today with the movement of the cumbia in my every step and action, and the movement of GOOD in the rhythm of my heart.
*In her words, last week she tipped the scales from being "five and three-quarters" to being "basically six."
Thursday, September 29, 2016
Dear Student,
Sometimes words fail, and you just need a poem to put words to what can't be said.
With gratitude to these two students, and all of the others, from whom I learned so much this week.
Dear Student,
There you are
to my left,
and you are crying.
Fat, round tears slipping down your cheek
from beneath your glasses
and you can't hide it
and you won't hide it.
And you shouldn't.
You are brave.
And we hear you now
in your hurting.
"I'm sorry,"
you whimper.
"I've never cried
about a book before."
And we are all crying,
but none of us have tears
like yours.
Your neighbor rubs your shoulder.
Everyone is with you,
together in your tears.
Dear Student,
You and I had never met,
and yet
there we sat,
in your kitchen,
that deadly blinking cursor
on a white screen
beckoning you to write what was on your heart.
"A college essay?" you ask.
And this is how they'll judge me?"
"Just make them feel something."
It doesn't have to be everything.
Just a glimpse. Don't tell them who you are...
show them."
And you do.
You take a tomb full of broken ideas
and biographical pain
and gnarled genealogy
and you make magic of the cracked mirrors.
Hours later, your mother tells me
that you knelt,
empowered by the truth of those mirrors,
alongside a teammate
before a game,
shuddering under the weight
of a world of eyes,
a cracked mirror in a sea of lies.
And in that kneeling,
you are winning:
winning a game
where no one loses.
With gratitude to these two students, and all of the others, from whom I learned so much this week.
Dear Student,
There you are
to my left,
and you are crying.
Fat, round tears slipping down your cheek
from beneath your glasses
and you can't hide it
and you won't hide it.
And you shouldn't.
You are brave.
And we hear you now
in your hurting.
"I'm sorry,"
you whimper.
"I've never cried
about a book before."
And we are all crying,
but none of us have tears
like yours.
Your neighbor rubs your shoulder.
Everyone is with you,
together in your tears.
Dear Student,
You and I had never met,
and yet
there we sat,
in your kitchen,
that deadly blinking cursor
on a white screen
beckoning you to write what was on your heart.
"A college essay?" you ask.
And this is how they'll judge me?"
"Just make them feel something."
It doesn't have to be everything.
Just a glimpse. Don't tell them who you are...
show them."
And you do.
You take a tomb full of broken ideas
and biographical pain
and gnarled genealogy
and you make magic of the cracked mirrors.
Hours later, your mother tells me
that you knelt,
empowered by the truth of those mirrors,
alongside a teammate
before a game,
shuddering under the weight
of a world of eyes,
a cracked mirror in a sea of lies.
And in that kneeling,
you are winning:
winning a game
where no one loses.
Thursday, September 22, 2016
Unknown Unknowns (what I told my students today)
I started class today with this clip.
There was nothing political about the topic. Nor was the lesson today about weapons of mass destruction, or Baghdad, or the Middle East, or diplomacy.
And it wasn't about Donald Rumsfeld.
It was about the most foundational component of my 8th grade world cultures course...it was about recognizing that our own experiences are an aberration from the norms of human experience.
This classroom needs to have a culture of its own. It's already starting to take shape, but it needs each of us to have a sense of heightened awareness...heightened sensitivity.
There are things we know.
We know lots of things.
And there are things we think we know.
We think we know lots of things.
And there are things we know we don't know.
And there are things we don't even know we don't know.
We are naive, oblivious, and completely in-the-dark about most things in the world.
And I include myself in that statement.
And all of those things matter.
You see, my hope for this class is that you will grow to trust that each of us comes into this classroom with the best of intentions. That we are here to learn, here to share, and here to listen. Nobody wants to offend, alienate, or provoke. Nobody wants to make anybody else hurt.
I believe this.
But in order for us to do that effectively, we have to trust each other and recognize that if someone doesn't know something--if they have literally never learned it before--that's not their fault. If somebody has a stereotype about a group of people, or thinks they know something, but your experience differs, it is your responsibility to help them understand it better; to illustrate the oppositional perspective.
In this course, we need to aspire to be more culturally competent, more aware, and more curious versions of ourselves. We can never learn it all. There will always be unknown unknowns...but this course is about raising our awareness so they can be known unknowns...so we can begin to recognize that the things we know--the lenses through which we experience the world--are such a smidgen of a much bigger human story.
Most of the world is an unknown unknown. If we can recognize that simple fact, perhaps the mere shifting of awareness can orient the world toward grasping that our planet can be a known unknown, meaning that our own ethnocentric perspectives are but one version of reality; "other cultures are not failed attempts at being you" (Wade Davis).
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