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...?" 

Prompt: What is the best thing you do in your classroom/school/district/job?

It's hard to brag. 

I also have dozens of assignments and structures in my own classroom that I'm proud of, as well as lots of things I've screwed up (that you could charitably call "learning experiences"). I like the student-centered infrastructure, which is not dissimilar to the one Karl writes about here. I like the work on Hour of Code and presentation skills and patterning and website building - all skills that my students need to be successful in their future lives. And the Pretty Much All Online Class I ran? Didn't work out too well.

But my two favorite assignments are these:

At the beginning of many English classes, I have my students read Jamaica Kincaid's short story "Girl." If you haven't read it, it's basically a list of things the narrator's mother lectured her about when she was a little girl. They progress from basic ("Wash the white clothes on Monday and put them on the stone heap") to much more devastatingly serious ("this is how to make a good medicine to throw away a child before it even becomes a child"). I have students write their own version of this piece, from the voice of their own parent. Believe me, it's a great way to get inside students' heads - to see what kinds of things they are being taught at home, what type of relationship they have with authority figures, what they are interested in, what they wish they could do, but can't.

These classes tend to culminate with a reading of Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried. In the middle of that book, there's a short story called "How to Tell A True War Story" that says, in part, "true war stories make the stomach believe." The whole story (and whole novel) toys with the reader's perception of truth and fiction, and how your understanding of your own past can change with age and perspective. And that stories can be true without being factually accurate. Anyway, I ask students to write the story of their own transformation. They can tell it straight, as it happened, or they can choose to completely fictionalize it. 

These stories frame the class in a beautiful way. Though the classes are ostensibly about analysis of theme or argument, these two assignments make analysis personal. And that's really my best thing- taking distant texts and making them personal, using them as a vehicle to build relationships among the students in the class, helping students see each other as people and not obstacles to be conquered on the way to becoming a Junior Marshal. 

It doesn't always work, but when it does? That's the best of things. 

Unfortunately, Weebly ate my first draft of this blog. Here's the guts of it:

I struggle a lot with the idea of a late work policy. In a purely philosophical sense, I don't believe in charging penalties for late work--because if a student does it, and the purpose is to learn, then there shouldn't be a penalty for when the info is learned. 

However, we teach in the real world, and grading 2500 assignments at the end of a grading period just isn't feasible. And we all know that assignments turned in at the end of a marking period tend to be facile and completely, well, lame. This is because the work is done out of context: if you're writing, for example, about a text you read 3 months ago, then you're not going to remember all that much about it. Your analysis is going to be cursory at best and, more likely, just flaccid and dull and a waste of space. Also, as teachers, we know that we tend to grade assignments cursorily in the end-of-semester crunch as well, so not much actual learning happens. 

What I'm toying with now is the idea of chunking the semester into 2 or 3-week blocks, letting students turn in whatever assignments they want, whenever they want within that time frame, but not afterwards. Obviously, major projects and presentations have to be done on time, but the rest will allow for students to move a little bit at their own pace, but not get super far behind. Hopefully, it will serve to make my ends-of-semesters easier as well. 

This is a thought-exercise in progress, and would love to hear what your additions + suggestions are.

As I have noted at least a million times on this blog, I teach three different preps (AP English Lang, Desktop Publishing, and garden-variety American Lit), and have 100 students on our 4x4 block schedule. So yeah. That equals a lot of grading. 

And since I don't think letter grades tell students anything useful about their essays, that means I'm giving a LOT of feedback. Like, A LOT A LOT. My fingers can't type that fast, not fast enough to give meaningful feedback on 200-ish assignments every week.  So Kaizena helps me. 

In case you don't know Kaizena, it's an app for Google Drive that allows you to leave voice comments on Google Docs. By using Kaizena to respond to student essays, I can much more realistically give feedback to that cavalcade of students. It allows me (and allows them) to feel like we're having sort of a writing conference, which I know is ideal for every student on every major writing assignment, and is also completely unrealistic. I love the fact that students can go back and replay my commentary on assignments, which in some ways improves upon a "real" writing conference: this way, little side trails and details don't get lost in the ether. My students will tell you I talk and think in tangents, some of which actually turn out to be interesting/useful. 

And Kaizena cuts off your voice comment at three minutes, which is perfect. It forces me to be concise, and let's be honest: three minutes is about the limit for anyone listening to a recording of me rambling about an essay. 

So yeah. Kaizena is just a couple dudes. They are awesome. They aren't paying me to write this, nor are they shipping me to conferences or anything. They just make a really cool little program, and it has a place in any class--particularly ones that are writing-intensive. 

Every winter, I plant seeds.

This isn't anything special, nor is it any different from millennia of humans. 

I do this for a few reasons. I like seeing plants grow. I like keeping heirloom varieties of vegetables alive in the world. It keeps me grounded, in a very literal sense-- there's something satisfying and humbling about coming to school the next day with a little bit of dirt under my fingernails. 

My ancestors came to the United States in 1640, settling in central Virginia. Over the last four hundred years, they have gradually migrated all the way from central Virginia to central North Carolina. While most of them had other avocations, almost all of them have gardened. My roots run deep here, both in this red clay country and in the sense that it's both appropriate and desirable to see green shoots breaking soil.

The other reason I plant seeds is because the practice gives my life balance. I have the growing station pictured above sitting in my kitchen, and every time I walk in the room, the earthy smells remind me that there are other things beyond cinderblock classroom walls, things that are connected to places deep in the past. When the first true leaves pop out of the tomato plants, and that distinctive tomato plant smell remains on my fingers long after I’ve scooped and divided and transplanted, it reminds me that although the winter is dark and cold and longer than I'd like, the summer is coming, and coming soon. 

Finding those reminders - that summer is coming - is the dead-of-winter task for me as a teacher, too.  It’s easy to forget that my time with students is short and precious...especially when they refuse to do work, or throw something at a classmate, or ask the same question for the tenth time that I’ve just answered each of the previous nine times.

Trying to rush plants along is a fool’s errand. No matter how much fussing I’ve done over them, how much water, how intensely I shine my grow-lamps, the seeds are pretty much going to sprout when they feel like it. 

I have to remember: teaching is a long-game.  Like planting seeds, it’s sometimes hard to predict what will happen months later. My job, with seeds and with students, is to provide the most optimal conditions, and then get out of the way--with a little extra dirt under my fingernails.