In response to a journal topic that asked, in part, “Is it possible to create opportunities for deep learning in your own high school career?”, a student wrote the following:

I could definitely create those opportunities. I could go home every day, dive into articles, and essays, and youtube videos about what we’re going over in class. I could create connections and make these wonderful infographics to study with, but it wouldn’t be what’s on the test. And that’s what matters at the end of the day, even if nobody likes it.

And that is completely heartbreaking to me, for two reasons.

First, this student has had the desire to learn new, exciting things (and learn them deeply) kind of beaten out of her by waves of busy work.

And second, the student is right that the tests at the end are really what matter to most teachers in most classrooms in most schools around the country.

This is a problem.

It’s a problem that she (and most of the other writers, her classmates) all said basically the same thing: Yeah, that sounds great and all, but not as great when you’re trying to polish off your sixth hour of homework at 2 AM.

And it’s a personal problem for me. Deep learning is the pulse of my classes. I insist on students struggling and discovering things for themselves. I insist that they push each other and teach each other and support each other. I insist that they find connections and patterns where they thought there just were piles of words or cute stories.

Everything in my class is connected. I want students to read more deeply, to write more powerfully, and see the threads trailing out the windows and doors, drawing in history and chemistry and cognitive psych and calculus and physics. I want to say Here is a web. Now go make your own.

So we do things that are non-Englishy, on the surface. We draw pictures and make puppets with needles and thread and hot glue guns. We highlight documents in five different shades. We watch YouTube videos without words, and YouTube videos with too many words. We talk about how we learn, at the beginning, almost as much as what we actually need to learn.

And I model, hopefully, what voracious learning looks like. I pretend not to know answers to student questions. I steal from Ramsey, who says that introducing complexity and confusion and inquiry before giving any “answers” away is the path to true student learning.

This is true. 

I decided to become a teacher one winter day while tutoring 9th and 10th graders in the AVID program at Asheville High School, mostly in basic algebra, sitting across long-rowed cafeteria tables. There was a girl named Cece, and a boy named Darius, and as I watched them start to subtract, divide, and isolate their own variables, the lights came on for all three of us. 

I have told this story as brief and epiphanal for years, as a sudden burst of knowledge handed down from the sky, but the truth is that the decision to become a teacher came much more gradually, over the course of months and even years. It's much more fun to have a story that doubles as a Road To Damascus moment, but I barely believe my own story. 

I know the truth is actually much more complex.

I decided I wanted to be a teacher in a drama teacher's classroom at Asheville High. I was a senior in college, knower-of-all-things, trying to remember how to balance chemical equations on the board, feeling the chalk between my fingers, feeling the adrenaline spike as I realized that I was working with CNO3 on one side and splitting it off into two molecules of carbon dioxide on the other, and that holy crap, there's too much nitrogen and this wasn’t going to work and these kids are thinking I actually know how to do Chemistry and WHAT AM I GOING TO DO WITH MY LIFE?!?

Or: I decided I wanted to be a teacher after getting turned down by the MFA-In-Poetry programs at UVa, Warren Wilson, and Iowa--three of the most elite in the country. 

Or: I decided I wanted to be a teacher after a terrible series of experiences with teachers in high school history classes, after which I determined that I never wanted other students to suffer through the kind of Historical Hopelessness I had felt. 

Or: I decided to become a teacher when my grandfather, a 25-year teaching veteran himself, told me that it would be a good idea to get my teaching credential alongside my Creative Writing degree. 

Or: I decided to become a teacher when I realized that I didn’t want to live that far from where I grew up, and that there weren’t really any pockets of literary study/criticism that I thought were interesting enough to study as a grad student, and when I decided that it was all a bunch of arcane, disconnected-from-the-real-world, ivory-tower nonsense anyway. 

There seem to be two versions of I Want To Teach stories: either the "I wanted to be a teacher since I knew that was a thing, and I taught my dolls/GI Joes/baby brothers/dogs/anything else I could compel to be a captive audience" story; and the "I came to the idea of teaching late(r) in life/I wanted to do anything else but teach" story. 

But here’s the thing: teaching is something that you can't really decide to do as an avocation just once. Just like anything else you want to master, it has to be a constant, repeated choice over the course of many days and years. It’s a craft, like gardening, or painting, or joining two pieces of crown molding perfectly in the corner of a 150-year-old Victorian living room. It takes study and patience, hard work and moments of respite, fear and joy and magic pixie dust. 

The truth of the matter is that I decided I wanted to be a teacher on Friday, just a couple days ago, after we'd just missed almost a whole week of class because of a bit of ice and a lot of frigid temperatures. We went into school on a three-hour delay. I had a meeting before classes started that I got to take my kindergarten-aged daughter to, since her school didn't open for another hour. I was freezing, I was anxious, and I hadn't been to school in almost a week. I always get nervous before class starts, especially after a long break, and this particular time was compounded by the cold and the fact I realized we had lost a week of learning in an AP class that only had thirteen weeks of pre-exam instruction to begin with.

I walked back up the hall after saying hi to a couple department members, just as the first bell rang. The kids trundled in, cold, grumpy, laughing cynically (as only teenagers can) at having a four-hour school week. I told several students good morning as I walked, many of whom I have taught multiple times. I watched the fog lift momentarily as each looked up and said good morning as well. Then I walked back into B109 and sat down around a big table with fifteen students, with twenty more seated around four other satellite tables.

The room got warmer, despite the single-digit temperatures outside. 

The opposite of an ivory tower. 

I leaned back in my chair and began to talk. 

Prompt: Why do you do what you do?

First, I thought, I was born to be a teacher. And that's true, in part-- when I told friends and family that I was planning on teaching, they all said Duh, Andrew. I do, in fact, compulsively explain things to people. But growing up, I wanted to be a paleontologist-broadcaster-newswriter-poet. I didn't decide that I was going to teach until I was a senior in college when I tutored in the AVID program at Asheville High. I believe that if I was "born this way," then I'd have known it from an early age. 

Then I thought, This is the only thing I know how to do. Also not true. I play music; I garden; I write; I have plenty of experience cleaning office buildings. 

I don't teach because I have no other options: I do it because I love it. 

To be honest, no, I don't like teaching every day. Sometimes it's a grind; sometimes my stomach hurts, or it's a high-anxiety day for whatever reason, or the kids just aren't feeling it. Teaching is equal parts gratifying and terrifying, at least for me. It's a constant battle to stay present in the moment, to stay with the kids mentally, to keep after it. 

But I do love it. Every day. Teaching challenges me to give my best, even when situations outside the classroom threaten to steal my focus. It has brought me friendships, with colleagues and compadres and cheesebuckets and even former students who are now much older.  Though it doesn't define me, or give me my sense of self-worth (it's not really a good life plan to put your emotional state in the hands of around 100 different 16-year-olds), it does give me a sense of purpose, a mission, and an outlet for a tremendous amount of creative energy.

It brings me joy. That's not the same thing as Always Makes Me Happy. But when the lights start going on in kids' minds and in their work, or even when they decide to keep grinding away, even when they aren't getting it yet, when they forget that there's a grade attached to the end of what they are doing: that's love. That's joy. That's why I do what I do. 

Prompt: What is connected learning, and what's in it for me?
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I have struggled for a week to figure out how I want to respond to this prompt. It combines one of my most favorite things in the history of the universe, connected learning, and one of my absolute least favorite. It's perfect, really, that most of my closest friends as teachers started their posts this week with some form of "I had to Google 'WIIFM.'" 

I understand that part of the job of teachers/teacher-leaders is to be a salesperson, and "what's in it for me?" is one of the most common questions other adults ask about a new method, a new strategy, or new idea. But honestly? It's the worst possible question, and even worse, it counteracts the ethos of "connected learning."

Connected learning is about sharing. It's about giving freely of yourself and your work and your time and your ideas. I have learned this from a national group of teachers (links in the sidebar), all of whom are relentless about giving their work away in order to help other teachers reach more students, and who are just as relentless about sharing and deflecting credit for their great ideas. 

And it's the "giving freely" part, the part that I hold most dear, that makes "what's in it for me?" stick in my throat. I guess it's also the answer to that awful question: what's in it for us is that we get to be part of an incredible community, one where ideas are shared willingly and freely, and a community in which people care about each other, even over the many #TwitterMiles. Our students benefit from both the affirmations and the critiques, and it is SO fundamentally important to teach them to connect, especially in a world where face to face interactions are becoming more rare. 

I just hope to teach them the folly in asking things like WIIFM. 

My class is heavily weighted towards skills, rather than content. This tends to frustrate students who are:

• good at multiple choice assessments
• good at guessing right
• good at memorizing random facts and vocabulary
• not so good at connecting those random facts in any kind of meaningful order

Admittedly, students in my classes aren't going to get a super-thorough grounding in the tropes of Victorian Literature--they'll probably miss out on the history and context and the dresses that covered ladies three times over from chin to toe. Also the whale-bone corsets. They will miss those as well. To be honest, though, while that stuff's pretty cool to me, it's really just Lit Major Brain Crack, not terribly useful in the context of the modern world outside of academia. You know what skills are universally useful, though? 

• making a good argument
• writing clearly and concisely
• understanding how other people manipulate them with rhetoric
• building a professional web presence
• learning to do good research
• being able to find cross-curricular connections
• learning to work with other, and what ACTUAL collaboration looks like
• building good presentations and beautiful slide decks.

Everyone needs to know this stuff. And a focus on those skills stops me from getting bogged down in the COVERING ALL OF THE THINGS monster that attacks every other day or so. 

Because despite how adamantly I am skills-based in my class, and how proud I generally am of what we do in class, there's always the sense that I'm not covering enough, that kids are going to miss out on something important, and that we should spend a few hours of our lives memorizing the definition of epistrophe and zeugma, just in case it shows up on a test they're going to take in a few months. 

That sense is ever-present for me, and it's only in conversation with my partner and the other people in our close-knit community that I can stare down that Content Monster and tell it to (bleep) off. They remind me that the content isn't nearly as important as the skills. I just have to keep telling myself that. 
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(A caveat: Yes, I know I'm an English teacher, and yes, I know that skills-based curriculum is much easier to accomplish in this class than, say, Biology or US History.)

I have battled the procrastination demon for years now, since I first became aware of things like "schoolwork" and "deadlines." I remember not telling my parents that I had to do a science fair project in first grade until the night before it was due. I spent the afternoon/evening in a panic, trying to soak a wishbone in vinegar to make it bend (didn't work out too well) and trying to put my findings on a "tri-fold board" made of construction paper. I still remember how mortified I was to bring the project into school that day. I remember hiding it in my desk, and the teacher, who kindly and generously tried to help me stick my pitiful little wishbone on a piece of posterboard so at least it would stand up by itself. 

I didn't win any awards for that one. 

So yeah. I have a long history with Procrastination and The Suck. "The Suck" is defined by Jon Corippo as the lull between "project gets assigned and I'm sort of excited/adrenalized" and "oh crap, this is due in a few hours--what am I going to do?" 

Not surprisingly, I am of two minds about procrastination. First, in my own professional life, I need help (i.e. deadlines) to jar me into motion. That's why I love the flash blogging challenge-- it spurs me into action, and I don't have much time to think or polish. I just have to write, and let whatever flies off the top of my brain be whatever I say. Sometimes this works out well, and sometimes it blows up in my face. 

I also think, conversely, that there is a time and place to let ideas marinate, to step back and let the metaphorical sawdust settle after the chainsaw finishes its buzzing. I learned this from my grandfather, who was a craftsman of wooden stools that he made by whittling pegs by hand and wedging them perfectly into the legs with no glue to hold them. My uncle told me a story recently of my grandfather often half-putting a stool together and then saying, "Need to let it sit and look at it for awhile." My uncle said "awhile" was often days, maybe weeks, of rumination. This is the same man who was a gardener, another pursuit that required a lot of patience and a lot of time in subtle action and thought, not intense, heavy work. 

So, in my classroom, I try for the best of both worlds. I try to tease a project a couple weeks in advance without giving super-specific specifications, to give students a chance to kind of turn the ideas over in their mind. Then, when it comes to Work Time, I try to compress the timeline as much as is possible, giving students the pressure of an imminent deadline after they've had a while to think. 

This is also what Cheryl and I do when we plan presentations -- we kick around ideas a few weeks or months ahead of time, coming back to them periodically over that time. But it's not until a couple days before the presentation (or even the morning of) where the ideas tend to coalesce into something magical. Or that's the hope. It works for us. 

I am, however, interested in other people's experiences with Procrastination and The Suck. How has it manifested in your own lives, and in your classrooms? What have you done about it? 

Prompt: Define "learning" in 100 words or less. 


Learning is going, "Oh." 

Then, "OH, I GET IT." 

Then, "Hmm."

Then, "But what about...?"