Month: October 2020

Everything Ends

“You don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here…”

The associate pastor at my parish is a former newspaperman. He’s got a very cool vocation story. And as you might have guessed about a guy who used to tell compelling stories for a living, his homilies alone are worth the price of admission. It’s nice to have a professional wordsmith breaking open the Word on Sunday.

He’s young enough to connect with our parish school kids and our EDGE and Life Teen groups, and yet still drop some pop-culture references for the Gen X crowd at a noon Mass. Sometimes I think priests are a little like teachers in that they’ll slip something into a presentation/homily just to entertain themselves or to see who is paying attention.

A couple years ago (probably on the last Sunday of the Church calendar, a week before Advent) Fr. Jeff quoted the great philosophers Semisonic (following the actual Roman philosopher Seneca):

“Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end“.

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We smirked a little. But we got his point.

On Friday night my high school played its last football game. Ever. The school is closing after 60 years as part of a consolidation that will shrink our district from four high schools to two.

There have been plenty of retrospectives in the local media. Older guys reminisced about rivalry games and their own playing days. Younger guys, well, kids are kids, man. Perceptive and resilient:

“We’re the last Gavit football team and Friday could be our last game,” Vargas said. “It’s definitely not the way we thought it would end, and this season hasn’t gone the way we had hoped, only playing three games and all, but that just motivates us to close out the school with a bang and make this season memorable.”

Vargas has been playing football since he was six years old, thanks to his father who encouraged him to play the game. To this day, while he loves the game and hopes to continue his football career, his dad remains his inspiration and main motivation.

“I definitely play for myself,” Vargas said, “but my main motivation is the people who have always supported me: my family, especially my father. He is the one who got me into the sport, and he has always pushed me and cheered me on. I play for him, and I play for others who have always motivated me.”

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So last time in this space we talked kids counting the days. Grownups in the district are doing that too. The first quarter of the final year is in the books. Looking ahead to next year, there’ll be two high schools, one brand-new. Everybody has to pick. Retire, change districts, or which of the two schools they want. And for my middle-school teacher friends, there’s a shuffle as well with 6th grade going into the elementary buildings.

Teachers are going to work with new colleagues. A lot of us know each other from district planning sessions & PDs in years gone by, which helps. There will be new admin teams. Both principals are veterans of the district, which is a plus. Kids from different neighborhoods and, uh, groups, are going to have to learn how to get along. Athletes will go from being rivals to being teammates, as football player from one of the two remaining schools pointed out a couple of weeks ago, following the last regular-season game:

“We’re going to be teammates with a lot of those guys,” James said. “I wanted to come out and show them what Morton football was all about. We’re about winning. We’re excited for the future.”

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“Excited for the future”. Yeah.

I wished out loud last spring for one of my writer friends to do a book on the last year of Gavit, Clark, and Hammond High, give it the treatment that the late Matthew Tully gave Manual High in Indianapolis, in his book Searching For Hope: Life At A Failing School In The Heart of America. Not that the schools are failing. But there’s human stories to be told, and the story of the Region’s last 60 years or more, and the story of urban education in 2020 and beyond.

And there’s still time to write it. But I bet the first year of the new schools might be a more interesting story.

New beginnings. From an old beginning’s end.

  • Sometimes in the winter I leave school late on purpose just to catch the sunset over the football field. Feeds my soul.
  • “You are a wonderful human being and this world could use a few more of you.”

400 Days

A play in three acts:

It’s probably 20 years ago now, there was a documentary I saw on minor league baseball. It followed some kids who were in their first year of pro ball, playing in the low-low minors, and the manager had to wear a bunch of hats, in particular massaging the egos of kids who were used to being the best after they went 0-for-4 or had a terrible night in the field. Not everybody makes it to The Show. And even 20 years later I vividly remember this line from this Twins minor league manager to a bunch of 20-year-olds getting (poorly) paid to do the thing they loved most in the entire world- “one day they take the uniform away from you and then that’s it. It’s over.”

Saturday morning, too early to be up when you had a game the night before, and have another game to play today (or as my son likes to say “I have a game to not play in today”) and 16 hours of work before Monday. Last week of the regular season. Last JV game of the year. He’s putting in his seat time to get his driver’s license, so he drives down to school. I’ve got my “We Survived the Winter Of 2014” Gavit travel mug full of Chock Full O’ Nuts. And as he opened the driver’s side door he looks across the car and says, “You know Dad, this is the last time we have to do this on Saturday morning.”

That’s a pretty perceptive 16-year-old. I’m still not sure if that line was for my benefit or for his.

But it definitely provided an opening for a conversation.

That’s Memento Mori, applied, right? When you know you are gonna die, you know how to live. And when you know football isn’t forever, those October practices in the cold and rain feel like Christmas morning.

It’s roughly 40 days until the football state finals. A year plus 40 – that’s about 400 days. Over in the blink of an eye, really. We talked about soaking it all up, cherishing the relationship with his teammates, the linemen especially.

He’s not a star. He’ll never have his picture in the paper or see his name in a sportwriter’s tweet. But he shows up and plays his role. Football at his school is a no-cut sport. There’s 110 guys on the sideline every Friday. About 35 of them actually play. It’s not flag football or a CYO league. The best players play. Playing time is earned, not given. But we have a conversation every now and then. Twenty years from now no one is gonna give a shit that you played football in high school. What’s gonna matter is what kind of human being are you? And maybe some of the lessons learned from being part of a team might form who you will be someday.

I’ve got an acquaintance who played on a state championship team a million years ago. Those guys still get together to talk about the old times. Some of the guys barely played a snap. But they were – and are- part of the team. And the relationships they built endure, half a century later. They get welcomed back to the reunions with open arms and broad smiles. That’s kinda cool. And that’s what I want for my son.

It’s a pretty diverse locker room, down to musical preferences. The country-boy wing of the team has my youngest listening to Luke Combs sometimes, in between Drake and Biggie. One of Combs’ tunes found his way onto a playlist around here.

“A third-string dreamer on a second-place team”…

Yep. Soak it up. All of it. That one play, that one Friday night, they’ll still talk about it years from now. No regrets. What I want most for him is to be able to look back and know he got the most out of his talent. That he won’t look back and wished he’d done more.

We are on different ends of the journey of life, obviously. When I was 16 my dad was like 68. I knew he was “old”. Does my son look at me like that? Probably. I wasn’t exactly born yesterday.

We had a quick chat on the way to work the other day. Bucket List. I don’t really have one. There’s a not a “thing” that I think about, that would make my life, what’s left of it.

What I told Sam is that what drives me right now is making sure my family is covered. That I might be able to help him out with a car, or tuition, or to get in to seminary (hope hope). That I can help make sure my (future) grandchildren are taken care of. That I can keep going to work, and keep getting paid to do it. There’s gonna be bills to pay for a while.

Mostly I want that a modest retirement can happen. I don’t have delusions of ocean cruises and Caribbean vacations. A little house in a Lake Michigan beach town will do it.

Maybe Mrs. Dull and I walk down to the lake a couple times a week, sit in the sand, listen to the waves, watch the sunset. I’m good.

Does that mean my dreams are gone? Or maybe it’s just that my dreams are just a little more focused right now. I was never a star either. Maybe that’s why I’m a hard hat & lunch bucket guy now. Just want to help the ballclub.

For the next 400 days, give or take.

For as many times as I’ve watched the movie, I never really noticed the sun setting behind Memorial Stadium as Mike starts his soliloquy. But it’s perfect. Steve Tesich, who wrote Breaking Away, is a Region guy. Went to my mom’s high school. Growing up around the steel mills, he would get that sometimes it feels dark in the middle of the afternoon.

My son’s steelworker grandfather would be pretty proud of Sammy’s work ethic, how he balances football and school and work. Weekends are pretty much a rumor, as far as free time. But he shows up, every day.

Because you only get so many of them.

The countdown is on .

Four Hundred days.

Building Blocks

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When it comes to teaching I don’t know everything, or maybe anything, but I have a decent idea of what works for me and for my kids.

When it came time to start planning fully remote teaching for this first semester, I had a lot of ideas floating around unformed in my head. But I also knew that sometimes it’s best to stick to the basics. The 10 weeks of e-learning in the spring was a good training ground in that regard.

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My district is fully remote for the first semester, using a 4 x 4 block schedule, 80 minutes per class except Friday when all 7 classes meet for 40 minutes each. So I have some time to play with every day. I envisioned three or four tasks spread out across the 80 minutes so I wouldn’t fall into the trap of talking for like an hour straight every day.

Next I needed to get that nebulous plan out of my head and onto paper, or pixels at least. So I laid it out in a Google Classroom assignment, just like they teach you in teacher school (or in your regional professional development):

  • Warm-up
  • New Notes (often patterned after Kate Nowak’s You Do-Y’All Do-We Do)
  • Practice
  • Check For Understanding
  • Summary

So, what do each of those components look like? Depends on what I want them to do that day, and what resources I have on hand, but:

And: rotating the tools I’m using to fight off burnout. Even the good stuff gets old if you doo it too often.

A big piece of my planning is: Figuring out how to plug in each of the boxes with the right tool. Use the things that serve teaching and learning. Once I saw the pattern develop, things kind of fell into place. A little like a cook (if not a chef) being familiar enough at the grocer and in the kitchen to put together a menu week after week after week.

(An aside: Picked up a couple new things that might make their way into the dinner rotation from last week’s Wednesday digest from the great Amy Welborn. Tortilla soup, and panko-crusted chicken breasts with a ricotta-spinach pasta bake. Because October.)

The shift to fully remote firmed up the need to up my Desmos Assessments game. It’s like anything else – with reps comes improvement. My Desmos Collection is here. The Desmos webinar on creating assessments is a go-to. And I gave my students the heads-up right from the jump that our assessments would focus much more on process and procedure than “answer-getting”, and we’ve been building in similar types of items to the daily work so they don’t feel blindsided on quiz day. That’s been a win on the year, for real.

Planning has evolved a little bit too : Used to be Saturdays off, dating back to Emergency Remote Teaching following The Shutdown in the spring. When I closed my laptop lid on Friday I didn’t look at it again until Sunday. Saturday I set aside for my son’s football games, and family stuff, and house stuff, and Jumping In The Car And Getting Out Of Town stuff. Sundays were Mass and school prep. But this weekend I took a couple hours Saturday morning to lighten the load for Sunday. It helped. I think that might be in the plans going forward. Motivating myself to get started was a challenge but I was less stressed Sunday night.

“Less stressed” is of course a relative term, by definition. There was still like 13 things on the list I made for last weekend, but it was also 9:30 at night and time to hang it up. If I could have knocked out all 13 that would have been a different story. But no chance. Among its other milestones, 2020 has beaten the perfectionist out of me.

I’m not alone there tho. My twitter feed indicates I’m far from the only one who is prioritizing a list and working from the top down. Urgent gets done. Everything else… well, you know.

The other thing that has received a bit of a makeover is sub plans. At first glance those feel a bit unnecessary when teaching from home, but I’ve got a district PD this week, and rather than video lessons for two classes and let the other four groups see me in living color, I wanted to level the playing field. I’ve got some kids panicking over grades as we enter the home stretch of the quarter, so it seemed like a good day for review & makeup work. I made a “playlist” for both Algebra II and Algebra II Honors, three topics each from the most recent unit. Students can do 1, 2, or all 3, treat them as review or makeup or extra credit (I’m not above bribery on a sub day). Each group got a Desmos activity, a Quizizz “homework” game, and a Google Form with a video embedded followed by questions. We’ll see. If it goes as planned I could see building in an independent work day a couple times a quarter. Because sometimes “Work Day” is a lesson plan.

My students’ Work Day playlist from a couple of years ago. Credit some of my IED kids for the title.

So that’s one teacher’s take on planning during Covidtide. Everything’s a work in progress, what works for me might not work for you. I’m thankful to all my teacher connects who have been so generous in sharing their wins and losses and daily discoveries.

It’s been a minute since I wrote about actual teaching. And I’ll be honest, this year I dug back into the archives on this site more than a few times to remind myself of things I used to do. Maybe this will end up inspiring me a few years down the line too.

I may even find that I grew as a teacher.