Month: March 2018

Every Damn Day

Detrained

That tweet up at the top is from a former Illinois Teacher of The Year, presenter, and all-around good guy who has an active six-year run streak. The image below is my running log for this year. He ran almost as far today as I have all year.

I’ve got six marathons under my belt, 9 half marathons, which I guess would have qualified me as a semi-serious runner at some point. The kind of guy who was up at 4:00 am on school days to train. Not no more tho.

To say my fitness and nutrition have taken a nosedive would be an understatement. Too much of the good things in life. Looking at you, Greenbush and Home Run Inn.

It’s so easy to fall out of a good habit. Not that there’s necessarily anything wrong with that. There is a season for everything, and moderation is a key in life. Plus I’m older, and slower. Circle of life, and all. But standing on the scale these days, the Steve-O-Meter is heading in the wrong direction. Maybe just a salad tonight…

Speaking of seasons, this is the Season Of Checking Things Off The List. Not big things, just tedious, day-by-day things. Things that have deadlines.

  • Submitting evidence for my teacher evaluation ( I actually provide links to this blog for some of the domains, so that part is relatively easy)
  • Gathing proof of residence and shot records and such  for my youngest son’s enrollment in high school
  • Some documentation I haven’t needed in a while for my 1099 work so I can file taxes
  • Submitting proposals to present at two Summer of e-Learning conferences this summer

Trying to do those things all at once = bad times.

 

Multitasking
Via giphy

 

It’s got to be a daily commitment. In truth, I should go to school on myself. Every quarter I make two copies of my gradebook printout, one for my records, and one that is part of the required paperwork to turn in at end-of-year checkout. It beats trying to remotely print a million pages on a day everyone is trying to get their stuff done and get out.

I wonder if there are other things that I could be doing “as I go”?

(Narrator voice: Yes, there are.)

Everyone has their “tell” for stress. I’m reading Relentless Pursuit again, if you are curious about how things have been going in my little world as of late. In the book, part of the evaluation process for the freshly-minted teachers in Watts is summed up in a Teach For America document: Teaching As Leadership Framework (One Pager)

It outlines the day-to-day actions, and long-term planning that TFA research has indicated leads to “meaningful impact on a student’s academic trajectory”. Nothing in there is proprietary. I think most teachers in examining their own district’s evaluation tool would recognize most of the same tactics. So, even though I’m not a TFA teacher, I’ve had that printout behind my desk for years.

fa9b1-19jom76ujmczmxtq3mzsnmw

Bad habits don’t develop overnight, and good habits need reps to take hold as well. We tell our students that on the daily, right? So maybe the thing to do is to make one positive action toward rebuilding those good habits daily. I’ve committed to getting out to run three times over spring break. And I planned out my entire 4th quarter before I left teh building on the Friday before Spring Break. (Doc here: Term Planning Grid). That’s a good start.

So it’s Holy Week and Dyngus Day and then most of a quarter left to go, including all our snow make-up days. Only days off for the rest of the year are Election Day and Memorial Day.

It’s a marathon, not a sprint. I gotta train like it. Lace up the Supernovas and get out there. Every Damn Day.

547878_10200638431656105_1843551518_n

Time To Buzz The Tower

Changing culture is hard. It’s difficult to do it with one class of kids. It’s a major undertaking to overhaul “the way we do things here”.  Last spring someone asked how things were going. I said I felt like I was being assimilated into the collective.

Locutus
“I am Locutus of Borg”. Via startrek.com.

When grades are king and the college pipeline is pretty well established, Doing Things Different™ can be…wearying.

I’d much rather be the guy who creates learning opportunities for my kids. I mean, I can stand and deliver with the best of them, but Photomath and Google and good old copying makes me feel like traditional worksheets and quizzes are a waste of everyone’s time. And after all of that, if I still can’t tell who knows their stuff and who just knows someone who’ll lend them their homework for five minutes, well, let’s not, OK?

giphy (12).gif
Image via Giphy

I’m sorry. There’s just better ways to do it.

“Students are under the impression that when they are stuck and confused, they are doing something wrong. Think of it this way. What if you went to the gym to work out but you didn’t get sweaty and you weren’t sore or tired? You would probably feel like you really didn’t get any exercise. The same is true for learning. Confusion is the sweat of learning.

If I just tell them the answer, that would end the struggle. What if a person was having trouble doing a pull up for exercise. Instead of giving them some other exercise, I could help them by doing the pull up for that person. Right? No, that wouldn’t actually be useful. However, if I push on the person’s feet a little bit they can still struggle and still exercise. This is what I try to do in these discussions. Instead of flat out answering the question, I often ask other questions for them to consider.”

–Rhett Allain, “Telling You The Answer Isn’t The Answer“, wired.com, October 18, 2013.

 

My guy Matt Miller of Ditch That Textbook fame keynoted at CUE last week. I was able to follow along from a distance via my PLN. He definitely got people’s attention:

Maverick, huh?. For guys of a certain age….

 

I stumbled across my teaching portfolio the other day, filled with evidence of my progression as a teacher, tools and tactics gleaned from the #MTBoS,  lessons that had migrated from pencil & paper to Desmos activities. There’s a question that stands out to me from the interview process, coming from one of my assistant superintendents. He asked me: “Do you teach math like you teach PLTW?” He meant, do you give students a chance to get hands on, to discover, do you use unorthodox methods to create learning opportunities? Yes. Yes I do. As often as I can. But sometimes I feel like I’m trying to undo 10 years of student habits. Jump through hoops, give the teacher what they want, put the right squiggles on a piece of paper (even if they don’t know what those squiggles mean), get the grade.

Doing it their way has to be easier, right? Less pushback for sure.

This is the best way. I know it in my bones. But it’s a total square peg/round hole situation. Kids want a worksheet they can Photomath and call it a day. Gimme my points.

I want them to think and struggle and learn.

A lot of them are in for a rude awakening next year. We’re in the process of de-tracking our math classes. Everything next year is gonna be faster and more in-depth. If they don’t have a decent math foundation and the ability to think their way through a problem, it’s gonna be a long year next year. I’m a little scared for them.

It is my job to help them build that foundation and learn those skills. But they’re not gonna get either one by mindlessly copying symbols off a phone screen or someone else’s paper. I think they know by now I’m gonna stand my ground. My Twitter bio doesn’t say “stubborn jackass” for nothing. I’m priming them for Desmos Conic Section Art right now. Nothing mindless there. At all.

On the positive, the kids coming up through grade school and middle school are being trained up to think. They will have been 1:1 for half their school careers by the time they get to me, creating and collaborating and knocking down walls. I see what my fellow district teachers are sharing on social. By the time we do algebra together, the kids will have been pushing the envelope for a while. And then, let’s ride.

 

 

One Day Doesn’t Define You

Alford Misses Part I

Alford Misses Part II
Alford once made 25 straight FTs in a semistate tournament game. But you know what? The NCAA’s ninth-leading free-throw shooter in history had a bad day every now and then. (Hoosiers: The Fabuous Basketball LIfe Of Indiana by Phillip M. Hoose) 

I teach at a school where we definitely keep score. In pretty much everything. Our kids, the ones that care, they already beat themselves up over their self-perceived shortcomings. They probably don’t need us riding them too.

If you’ve stopped by this space before, you know I am a sports guy. At this time of the year my heartbeat probably sounds a lot like the staccato dribble of a basketball and the squeak of Nikes on hardwood.

This past weekend was the regional round of the IHSAA Boys Basketball Tournament. Since 1911 kids across this state have advanced through four weeks of increasingly difficult challenges (sectional, regional, semistate, state). For the last 20 years the tourney has been split into classes based on enrollment. Thus Da Region had 8 teams competing in regional play on Saturday.

Thud.

The high school where I teach was one of those eight. A school famous for its methodical approach to shooting free throws, our team missed double-digit free throws in a game it lost in overtime to a team it had already beaten during the regular season. Afterwards, I imagine our kids were pretty down, beating themselves up, thinking about this play or that play they could have made better.

This morning, our coach tweeted a link to a newspaper story about the season-long improvement of one of our top players. It was one of our best shooters, but a player who had struggled shooting free throws in that regional loss. Who was probably feeling at least a little bit responsible, like he let his teammates down. But his coach was there to lift him up.

My man.

For folks who follow him on Twitter, it was pretty easy to crack the code. In a state that probably takes games played by 16-year-olds a little too seriously, here’s a guy publicly saying, “hey, you’re good. A few minutes of one game on one Saturday morning doesn’t define you.”

The walls of the gym at my school are ringed with the dates of all 52 sectional championships in school history. That’s tied for 10th-most all time in a state known for basketball. This year’s sectional was our first since 2011… when our current seniors were in 6th grade. But I don’t care if we win another one as long as I teach here. The boys basketball coach is the kind of teacher I want to be. I want him to coach our kids here until the day after forever.

I can’t add much. Except to say that I could do a better job of not harping on people’s worst moments or days. I think I’m pretty chill, but it seems like a reminder I needed. Maybe tomorrow I make a point of thinking about everything that is positive about the people around me. And maybe for my students, letting them know that one bad day or poor test score doesn’t define them.

Carry on, my son.