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How To Listen So Kids Will Talk (Part 1)

11/15/2017

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Yesterday, I felt like everyone in class was just DONE with school. They were frustrated and exhausted and didn’t really know what to do with themselves. So I asked them to write a quick venting-style response which discussed their views of school in general, and which narrated a little bit about their current experiences over the last week or so. 

This is one of the responses:
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 It is my guess that other teachers would have one of two reactions to this passage: 
  1. Rabble rabble rabble grammar
  2. Wow. This kid is really struggling with both the structure of school, which they compare to a prison, and the academic content in a class that “gives a lot of work, even after tests.” 

As I realized this, I felt I needed to write and share this moment-- which clarified the “missing the forest for the trees” theories of education I hear from so many teachers. If you have this kid in your class, or one like them, please take a moment to just listen to them. 

Listen to what they are saying. Please don’t get so caught up in grammar and MLA guidebooks and double spacings and Times New Romans that you don’t hear what they are saying: 
  • School feels like a prison to me.
  • Trying to learn something that is way beyond my skill level is (boring, frustrating, annoying). Please listen to me.
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Writing (and Teaching) As Weightlifting

2/13/2017

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The metaphor I use for why I teach the way I do is most often, “It’s like weightlifting.” On the surface, this seems like kind of a silly, inept metaphor for an English teacher who spends most of his days teaching Creative Writing and a smattering of online publishing.  

However, it works, despite how disparate the two disciplines appear to be.

In my class, we do lots of small, targeted assignments, usually two or three per class period, every day. I focus these assignments on a specific skill, much like weightlifters spend different days targeting different muscle groups. But we’re not talking “arm day” and “leg day” -levels of focus. This is much more “right tricep day” and “left calf day.” Very specific. We move around to different skills so no one “muscle group” gets tired.

I have to admit, for much of my career, I gave very few assignments. They were almost all major assignments, and they caused my students and me a lot of stress.  Most of the rest of the days in class, I talked at my students, or had text-based conversations with the 6-8 students who would participate. I think those kids, the 6-8, got a lot out of my class, but there were too many who slipped through the cracks.

My class was like a weightlifting class in which the teacher spent ten days talking about weight room safety and proper form and that cool dude from Game of Thrones that sets world records for the distance he can throw a washing machine… and then tries to get kids to max out on one day at the very end.
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That’s not only a really terrible way to get stronger, it’s a really great way to get someone hurt.

When we do many cycles of targeted reps, we’re actually building the skills (muscles) that students need to be successful. And that’s the goal-- for everyone to be successful, for everyone to at least be able to lift a good bit more than they could when we started.
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Increasing Cultural Literacy with Film + Classic Literature

10/13/2016

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This semester, I’m teaching a Film and Literature class for the second time. The first time through, in the Fall of 2015, I taught it as more of a filmmaking class, and while we still have some of those elements this semester, I have incorporated more purely literary content. 

This is how I’ve done it. 

And full disclosure: as with everything I do in class, this idea was stolen entirely from Cheryl, and then modified for my own class context, in which we are explicitly supposed to be comparing the film versions of stories to the novel/play versions. She does a Pokemon Go-style search for literary references with her 7th graders that is incredible and engaging and massively fruitful for kids’ education and cultural literacy. 

I have picked a tentative, ever-expanding and changing list of cultural reference texts that kids (who were almost all born after 2000!) probably wouldn’t encounter, or choose to engage with even if they did. The criteria: there has to be some sort of written (non-script, novel-style or play/short story-style) version and a film version in existence. And for NC high schools’ sake, the film version has to be rated PG-13 or lower. These criteria eliminate cultural touchstones like Catcher in the Rye (Salinger won’t sell the rights to make a movie version) and rated-R movie classics like Beloved or The Godfather.  

This semester, kids will be encountering classics like Hound of the Baskervilles, Pride and Prejudice, War and Peace, The Scarlet Letter, Dracula, Moby Dick, The Count of Monte Cristo, and Gone With the Wind, along with probably a half-dozen others that have yet to be decided. 

[As an aside, I do realize that this list skews both old and white, and that’s something I’m struggling with rectifying. I selected texts that probably wouldn’t get read even if they were assigned--ones that would come off as both oppressively long and complex. But as I said before, this list is in constant flux, and I welcome suggestions to both improve it and make it more culturally diverse.]

The goal here is not to give kids a deep understanding of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s diction or whatever. The goal is to do one or two of these a week, so kids will understand common cultural references, like Greg House = Sherlock, or what a “scarlet A” is, or what it means for someone to be chasing their own great white whale, or that Nicholas Sparks stole every idea he ever had from Jane Austen. 

So: here’s what we do. 

The first day, I have students fill out a slideshow that asks them to summarize the plot of the story in 2 sentences and make a slide each for 10 characters, describing them and their significance to the story, and inserting an image of each. They are encouraged to use sites like Shmoop and SparkNotes for this process -- the only goal is that they get some context for the excerpts they are about to encounter…

Which generally happens on Day 2. I pick an important scene from the text/movie (often, but not always, the opening scene), and link up the assignment on Google Classroom to a 5-8 minute video clip from the movie and the corresponding scene from the novel. (This is one of the other reasons I have gone for older texts - they are easy to find full-texts versions of online, often from Project Gutenberg.) Students read/view the two, and write some comparisons, look for patterns that repeat, consider what the movie adds/leaves out, etc.  For some of the texts, I’ll give them two video versions; for example, for Pride and Prejudice, I gave them a clip of the 1995 BBC miniseries and the first two episodes of the Lizzie Bennet Diaries. 

The next assignment is to look for pop culture references and make a slide deck of 20 that they find (Bride and Prejudice, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, etc.). I want them to understand that these stories don’t exist in isolation; rather, many of them are referenced in many ways in modern media. Then, I ask them to do a second comparison between a scene of their choosing in the book and the same in the movie. 

Hopefully, this series of assignments gives students a collection of cultural checkpoints that they would otherwise miss in their educations. As we move forward in the semester, the assignments will likely get more complex; I will start to add things like “compare the way the author chooses to establish setting to the way the director does the same in this scene” and “how would you film this scene in this book, if you were directing, and then compare that to how it was done” and “shoot this scene from the book yourself.”  

What I have noticed already, though, is that students are continuing to engage with the stories beyond the required assignments. They are watching the rest of the BBC Sherlock episodes; they are checking out Sherlock Holmes anthologies from the library; they are watching all 100 episodes of the Lizzie Bennet Diaries. And that is definitely a success in my book. 
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Why We Iterate

12/15/2015

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I had a former student come by and tell me today that she wished she could come back and take my class again, because it seemed so much cooler now than it did when she took it. 

And she's right. It is a way better class than when she took it. My first year at this school, I taught Desktop Publishing with a little "How to Make a Good Powerpoint" and a little "Advertising 101."  This semester, Desktop Publishing includes sections on coding (block and html, if the kids want to get into that), graphic design/layout, Photoshop, making good slideshows across several platforms, manipulating all of the Google Drive suite of apps, movie making, website building, and creating a huge portfolio of their work. Then, they leverage these skills in bids for real-world projects, like an online literary magazine or a newsletter template for another school. 

It's important to iterate our classes, and it's important to learn to teach in more varied and effective ways. Sometimes, though, we lose sight of the real-world application of that idea. Iteration isn't just another one of those buzzwords we should hear and let float through on the ether. 

Real iteration is taking a class that was about how to make a calendar in MS Publisher when I was hired here and turning it into a Real-World Digital Skills Wonderland. It's about making the class more useful for everyone, and giving students skills they can use across the curriculum and after they leave my class. And it's about modeling the hidden curriculum in my class for my students; it's about always looking for ways to improve. 
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Jenga For High Schoolers - #flipclass Flash Blog

12/14/2015

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It’s a constant push and pull for most teachers between content and so-called “soft skills” - things like How To Study and How To Collaborate. I’d argue that the two types of learning create a positive feedback loop. Good study skills, for example, make learning the Hard Content easier--and they make the facts stick more. As with everything else, it’s all connected.

One of the most important “soft skills” we learn in my classes is “How To Figure Things Out For Ourselves.” As you can probably guess, this process drives students nuts to start with. Often, we’ll institute a “everyone gets an extra 100 if EVERYONE completes the assignment and NO ONE asks me how to do ANY part of it” rule. That tends to focus everyone and gets everyone to put on their collaborative hats really, really quickly.
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Also, in my class, I have no worksheets, no real “tests” to speak of--just a series of assignments that swirl and meld into each other. Students realize pretty quickly that they can’t ignore one piece of the Assignment Tower, or the whole things falls down. They can’t just pick and choose to leave out certain assignments, because they need them all to be able to complete the Mastery Tasks. It’s Jenga For High Schoolers. Everything holds everything up.
So, when I combine those two principles - How To Figure Out Things Out For Ourselves and Everything Holds Everything Up, I end up with a class that can be frustrating for students, but ultimately works with cognitive science to help information stick even better that it would if I just explained all of the things to them.


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6 Specific Ways To Create Respectful Relationships With Teens

11/4/2015

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This has to be said again. It's kind of important. 

If you want to have respectful relationships with the teenagers in your classroom, here are some ways to achieve optimal success:

1. Treat them like people. 

That's the whole list. High school students are people-- sometimes more impulsive, sometimes more raw, hopefully far less jaded, but people nonetheless. 

Talk to them like human beings, ones who can have good days and bad days, ones who can say inappropriate things sometimes, and ones who are just trying to figure everything out, just like everyone else. 

Let's not complicate things. 
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Uplift With A Pen & Paper: #flashblog on Classroom Community

10/26/2015

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I have lots of little tricks about how to build classroom community, but my favorite doesn't involve any technology at all (which probably surprises people).

I find that writing little notes to students on scraps of paper is one of the best ways to create an inviting, caring atmosphere in a classroom. None of them are super, super serious in content. Most, in fact, just say something like, "Hey, that logo you designed yesterday was pretty sweet." And then I add suggestions for revision if I want--but that usually doesn't happen. 

Other times, when a student isn't acting/responding normally, I'll give them a short note that says something to the effect of, "Hey, you seem a little off today. Hope whatever it is improves soon." 

These two types of notes, generally sorted into "You're awesome" types and "Are you ok?" types, make a huge difference in classroom community. I see them stuck into binder covers, and former students tell me they keep them for years. 

It just goes back to my bedrock thesis of education: treat students like they are people, because, you know, they are people.  Notes that just say, "Dude, I see you, your humanity, and your value" carry huge, huge amounts of weight in building the kind of environment we enjoy and can learn in.  
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What Community Means Has Changed

8/31/2015

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When I first started teaching, I was super proud of my classroom community. I had conversations pinging back and forth, I was guiding students along the path that led to knowledge, and everyone was happy.

But really, everyone wasn’t happy. “Everyone” being happy really consisted of the 5-10 kids that were super engaged, and everyone ELSE was just twiddling their thumbs and glad they didn’t have to engage with anything.

I was also the center of the classroom universe. All the conversation filtered through me and my Academic Lens, which made me feel like I was magical. That way worked for a few kids, but it didn’t really make a community for everyone, where all of the kids (or at least the vast majority of them) felt engaged.

As I’ve done more and more tech-based lessons over the past few years, I have struggled with building classroom community-- which has been more personally difficult for me because I used to think I was SO GOOD at it. My students have largely not talked to each other in awhile, other than in small friend-group-enclaves.

My thoughts for now are that the kids need to be doing more presentations, which serve to get them out of their bubbles and let everyone’s eyes be on everyone’s projects. Eventually, the students will have to make design projects, create proposals in groups, present them, and let actual clients select winners.

My desire, though, is that my class engages all students, not just a handful of future Lit majors. It’s hard to make that transition from “I Am The Magical Center Of These Kids’ Education Universes” to something more along the lines of “I’m creating an atmosphere where you all can be successful and still have space to ad-lib and fit these parameters in a way that makes YOU happy.”

The hope, anyway, is that Engaged Students = Happy Students = Better Classroom Community.
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Blank Space (But Not T.Swift): #flipclass flashblog

8/18/2015

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Today, I found out that I was moving classrooms from a regular-style space to a computer lab space. This is mostly fine - I do a digital publishing class for half the day anyway, and the school needed the space for another teacher.

But the move (which is all of about 3 feet, between adjoining rooms) has caused me to realize how much stuff I have- files, posters, three shelves worth of books, a full cabinet of miscellany, art from former students, etc.- and how little of it I actually use.

Spoiler alert: the answer is “almost none of it.”

I have lots of sentimental items I’ll keep and hang up - particularly drawings by my own child and other students that have been dear to me over the last dozen years. But there is a whole file cabinet, plus two crates full of papers that I moved from my previous school and haven’t touched once in four years at my current one.

I don’t really know how my room will eventually look, or how I’ll arrange the space while I navigate the very narrow confines of Furniture Moving that are possible in a desktop computer lab. However, the move is making me start to think about what I actually need, what I actually want for reasons of convenience and sentiment, and what can just be passed on to other people.
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All of the Emotional Labor: #flipclass Flashblog

7/27/2015

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Emotional labor is hard.

I love being That Teacher, the one that students tell Life Stories to (even when they’ve only been in my class 3 days, I’ve had students pull up a chair and tell me some horrifically personal/familial stories).

As much as I love it, that adds a lot of extra to a job that already includes managing expectations re: grades and class content, remaining cognizant of class dynamics and tensions, dealing with administrative expectations and district expectations and state and federal expectations, and keeping kids safe.

And it doesn’t stop when they graduate, either - in the last month, I talked a former student through breaking up with her boyfriend, and this young woman is 24, just finished her first year of teaching, and I hadn’t talked to her in a couple years. It’s true that once a kid becomes “yours,” they never really stop, no matter how old they are.

That circles back around to the original point, though - this level of relationship-building and emotional labor is hard, and it does leave me exhausted in the evenings, much more so than I thought I should be from the amount of work I had done. When I read about emotional labor, though, and realized how much of my day was about massaging egos and listening to stories and those kinds of things, it made a lot more sense what was going on.

Unfortunately, I don’t have any good ideas about how to reduce it at work. I can’t be that teacher who just tells kids who are hurting/angry Sucks For You, Dude, Now Let’s Get Back To Learning ENGLISH! Can’t do it.

What I am going to have to work on this year is the “taking care of myself after work” part. More time turning off Work Brain and less time sculpting the Most Perfect Lesson Evah. More sleeping. More eating. More dancing with a first grader. More grading assignments in class, so there’s nothing to do at home.

But if y’all have any ideas about how to create better work/life boundaries in this profession, I’d love to hear them.
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    The Writer

    I'm Andrew. I write about learning. I like to learn. 

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