Category: teaching

Choose Your Own Adventure

Wednesday broke a lot of people in our building.

Last Tuesday my school board voted to close three elementary schools at the end of the year. It was the worst-kept secret in the Region as the closings had been long-rumored, generating a series of demonstrations by teachers and community members.

At the same meeting the board voted to approve layoffs for 173 employees with support staff, paraprofessionals, and custodial staff taking the brunt of the cuts.

Wednesday about half the teachers in the district woke up with a mysterious illness, causing the district to close for the day.

That afternoon the mayor held a virtual town hall and stated, “I don’t think they’re done cutting. If we don’t fix the funding problem, next year it may be Morton High School.” (46:40 mark of the video).

Morton High School. My school. Well. That’s a lot to process for one day. I have no desire to change schools again, but a year or two from now I may not have a choice.

Most of us just want to put this year out of its misery. Teachers are done with PD, kids want to get to the last week of May and get out of here.

It’s a delicate balancing act, reading the room.

In my district tests and quizzes account for 70% of the overall grade so the last thing I need is to offer my kids an assessment that will bomb their grade. But wait Mr. Dull, isn’t it your kids’ job to prepare for quizzes? I mean, if it’s that big a factor in their grade, shouldn’t they take it more seriously?

Yes, but. It’s also my job to determine the most appropriate way to assess my kids, to select a way for my kids to demonstrate their learning. In the first week of May in Algebra II, wrapping up the rationals unit, that looks like an activity. Choose your own adventure, it says here.

Enter DIY Row Games.

Row Games were a darling in the heyday of the #MTBoS. Students pair up and work a page of problems in two columns, one column for each student. Catch is, the answers for each pair of problems is the same. So the exercise is student-centered and self-checking. There’s a couple of folders of pre-made row games out there.

I grabbed one up (multi-step equations) to use as a bellringer, then set the hook: “Man, the answers to both problems were the same. All the way down? Hunh, that’s a weird coincidence. How’d the teacher that made this page do that?”

So we bounced some ideas around and eventually settled on working the problem backwards, starting with the answer and using inverse operations to work back to the original problem.

Then I introduced the assignment. (Doc here, template here). Students work in pairs to create a page of row games, one each of simplify, multiply, divide, add, and subtract rationals. They turn in a page of problems, a worked-out answer key, and the work they did to go backwards from the “answer” to the original problem.

They were tentative at first, then started to dig in. I made my way around the room to check for stuck students and demonstrate the process for a problem from the bellringer.

The big payoff came late. Students were working diligently on Day Two of the activity and making good progress but starting to sense they wouldn’t finish. The question developed independently from two sides of the room: “Can we keep working on this tomorrow?”

Wait. You guys want to do more math? On a Friday?

I don’t know….. well, maybe. OK. Fine. Due date is tomorrow.

And yes, I totally planned that in advance.

Because I’ve been doing this for a while and you learn to anticipate these things. So instead of all of us being frustrated with a traditional pencil/paper quiz over a really tough topic, bad grades and hurt feelings all over the place, I got kids so invested in an activity they want to keep working on it for a third day.

That’s a good Thursday in Room 130 right there.

Oh, and they’ll see Row Games again. I plan to take one or two of the student-made sets and use them as part of my semester review package coming up a few weeks from now. Because authentic audiences are awesome.

The coalition of state representatives from my Region put together a press release this week blaming the state GOP leadership for my district’s financial woes. (Indiana is super-majority Republican in the Statehouse so one party has great influence on education policy). You can make a case for their position on property tax caps and referendums and vouchers, just like you can question the decision-making at the local level. I spent all of last school year as a Teach Plus Policy Fellow studying the school funding model in Indiana. There’s aspects that need fixing.

But what I do know is that both of those things, state-and local-level policy-making, are outside of my control. I can advocate, but I don’t get to make laws. What I do get to do is make decisions about how I organize my classroom and plan my instruction to suit my students’ needs.

Choose Your Own Adventure. And I’m going to keep doing just that until they take my keys and lanyard away.

Ten Days Out

“I’m too old to get excited about spring break”.

One of the teachers I hang with during passing time dropped this knowledge on me this week. I’m sure he’s far from the only one who’s kind of numb as we enter the last big break of the school year. Students are baked, teachers have long since been over this year. Just give me ten days when I can shut off my alarm and my teacher brain and try to recover, and re-charge for the stretch run.

A couple of my activities that historically have ramped up student engagement fell kinda flat these last couple of weeks. Both of them involve connecting some dots and applying the math we’ve learned to the world outside our walls: a compound interest investigation involving comparing the price of a new and a year-old car to test the “15% depreciation” figure used in many textbook/worksheet word problems (and the Dave Ramsey recommendation to let someone else take the steep loss in the value of a new car the first couple of years).

And the March Madness investigation I use to intro the probability unit. (Doc here). Remarkably, of the two, the NCAA brackets did the best job of drawing my kids into the math. Even the students (maybe especially the students) who had to ask me what “upset” means in terms of a tournament were able to nail down theoretical vs. experimental probability and use data to make some informed guesses on their brackets.

If nothing else it kept math happening in Room 130 during the countdown to spring break. Which isn’t nothing.

Shutting down teacher thoughts is a survival mechanism for many of us this year. When we get back, instead of looking forward to summer break, we’ll face a parade of unpleasant news. Like, bad news followed by worse news followed by career crisis. My district is crumbling financially and has been asked by the state to prepare a corrective action plan. In addition, our contract negotiations have been at impasse since November and will also likely require state intervention.

The district will present a list of teacher job cuts at its next meeting April 2. Then it is expected to announce multiple elementary school closures at its April 23 meeting.

The most recent personnel report featured four resignations from my building alone. I suspect next month’s will be similar. Folks are getting out before they get let go, or looking ahead, seeing that raises are unlikely in a financially distressed district, trying to pad their high-five (average of the five highest salaries that figures into the formula for our pension). Our once-robust insurance plan has been gutted and will be prohibitively expensive. Morale is at an all-time low and will get worse – the written notification of cuts will begin May 2, just in time for Teacher Appreciation Week.

It would probably be funny if it wasn’t so sad. Source

Don’t check your mailbox, friends.

Is it any wonder folks burned rubber (metaphorically speaking) leaving the parking lot Friday?

For me, self-care looks like diving into hour after hour of televised hoops. Reveling in first-round upsets, rooting against rivals, and dealing with the cognitive dissonance that my favorite coach on the planet is likely to lead my alma mater’s top rival to the Final Four.

The dude was spitting bars after Purdue’s second round win today.

Painter’s definitely onto something here: “I just think everybody should take a test on their knowledge of what they’re doing. Like I think all coaches should take a test, so they understand refereeing. I think all referees should take a test, so they understand coaching. And I think all journalists should have to take a basketball quiz or test.”

Just show me you know what you’re talking about. OK?

But wait a week or so to do it.

Tipping Point

This tweet popped into my feed the morning after I returned from a weekend retreat with a few dozen of our juniors, and it served as a bit of a framework for some thoughts that had been floating around unformed in my head over the course of the two and a half days.

John Bacon is a prolific writer and a lecturer at Michigan and Northwestern. This tweet refers back to his tenure as hockey coach at his alma mater in Ann Arbor which was the focus of the book Let Them Lead. (I wrote about it and its relevance to my classroom here). Simply stated, Bacon’s philosophy is: set the tone early by establishing high expectations, then hand over the responsibility for leadership to the players themselves, who have bought in to the program.

A classroom isn’t a hockey team but there are definite parallels to the way we do things in Room 130.

And I think that is one of the things that has attracted me to the Natural Helpers program. This weekend was my fourth retreat with a group of juniors from our school, a group of student leaders, and a group of teacher facilitators. (Previous recaps here and here). The Natural Helpers program originated in Washington state in 1979.

School leaders were concerned about teenage suicides and other problems, and searched for a way to disseminate as much accurate information as possible to all the students. They recognized that students listened to their friends before anyone else, and fashioned a system by which students from all the different subgroups in the school could act as sources of accurate information. This was the forerunner of the Natural Helpers selection process. In 1982 the original Natural Helpers Leader’s Guide was written by Roberts, Fitzmahan & Associates, a health education consulting firm in Seattle, Washington. Between then and 1989, when the program underwent a major revision, over 900 schools throughout the United States and Canada implemented the Natural Helpers Program.

https://sites.google.com/elwood.k12.ny.us/mskarch/natural-helpers

Natural Helpers bore fruit at the four high schools in the city of Hammond, then went on hiatus during the pandemic. A couple of the instructional coaches at our school led the charge to re-establish the program in the two consolidated high schools. (Video link to NWI Times package here).

And I think we are moving the needle. Just before we boarded the busses to leave our retreat center last fall, one student asked me “could Morton be like this all the time?”

Source

Bingo. That’s exactly the point. Go back on Monday and let the awesomeness spread organically.

Since I’m a numbers guy, I started doing the math in my head. With two retreats per year, on an ongoing basis there are about 150 students in the building at any one time who have experienced the retreat, roughly 10 percent of our student body.

But, is that enough to start changing the culture? What’s the tipping point?

It sounds like an application of the Pareto Principle a/k/a The 80/20 Rule. Eighty percent of the outputs come from 20 percent of the inputs.

This “universal truth” about the imbalance of inputs and outputs is what became known as the Pareto principle, or the 80/20 rule. While it doesn’t always come to be an exact 80/20 ratio, this imbalance is often seen in various business cases:

20% of the sales reps generate 80% of total sales.

• 20% of customers account for 80% of total profits.

• 20% of the most reported software bugs cause 80% of software crashes.

• 20% of patients account for 80% of healthcare spending (and 5% of patients account for a full 50% of all expenditures!)

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kevinkruse/2016/03/07/80-20-rule/?sh=675e458e3814

I’m banking that’s enough kids who default to helping their classmates that it makes a real difference in the day-to-day experience for our students. I hope I’m right.

Part of the discussion amongst the adults during one break this weekend was “what if there was a Natural Helpers retreat for teachers?”

Hmmm. I’ve been at schools where we’ve done team-building outings to kick off the school year. I think that was valuable. So….

What is the critical mass of Natural Helper adults in a building to make real change? Twenty percent of our staff is about 16 teachers. There’s probably close to that many right now who have facilitated the retreat, or at least have been invited by students as facilitators. I think that’s a good sign. In our current atmosphere we’re never gonna get 100 percent of our teachers on board with a school-wide initiative, or even half, but maybe we don’t need that many. Maybe it’s just the core group that make this school an awesome place to be just because they are who they are, daily.

But I wouldn’t be opposed to an off-site safety meeting to discuss the possibility. I seriously think that we can create the culture our kids need to thrive and survive.

But it is an uphill battle. Morale in my building (and my district) is way down. And we’re not alone for what it’s worth. This thread from a western Canadian teacher hit my TL this morning and snapped my head back:

The unroll is here:

I think the reason a lot of teachers are struggling, myself included, has nothing to do with the actual act of teaching.

It’s emotional energy.

The days have become so demanding. Kids need so much, much more than pre-pandemic. The supports are so thin, we have to be…/🧵 

Everything to everyone. But we also have to be always on our game. Always positive, eager, constructive, professional, engaged, and more. So what happens to me, and every other teacher I know, is that you wind up with nothing left.

You spend all of your emotional energy at …. 

Work instead of on your life. Teachers wind up with no energy to play with the kids in their own life. To spend with their partners and loved ones. Weekends become a frantic sprint to recharge. You wind up just trying to hold on until holidays… 

You’re so exhausted that you defer all of the joy in your life. You tell yourself you’ll do all the things that give you life on holidays, or in the summer. But you don’t, because you’re too tired to move, and spend the whole time recovering. Every teacher I speak to feels… 

This way, and it’s why so many are looking to leave. I personally don’t know how much longer I have left. My friends, family, my wife, and I, all deserve more of me. This round of contract negotiations will decide the course of my career. If I don’t see a path for things… 

To get better, I’ll find another path. And I know a lot of other teachers feel the same way. The stakes are high. Thousands of teachers are working in a job that is hurting them and their loved ones and they’ve had enough. Because when we try to advocate for better…. 

We get told we’re lazy, entitled, and spoiled by a bunch of armchair quarterbacks who have neither the skills nor the courage to walk into a classroom and teach. People teach because of a deep sense of responsibility. It’s an act of tremendous hope and faith. An act that seeks… 

To leave a better world than we found. All we want is to be able to do our job, work with kids, and to not be hated for it. We want a job that we can sustain, and that sustains us. One where we don’t have to watch kids struggle with unmet needs that we are trying our best to… 

Meet. One where we don’t feel the constant contempt of our government and a large section of the public. There’s a lot riding on this round of negotiations for a lot of teachers. And if Scott Moe and Jeremy Cockrill don’t step up, I’d suspect they’ll find themselves in the… 

Midst of a profound teacher shortage. Because every single teacher I know who has left is glad that they did.

They never come back. Ever. And that tells you a lot.

If we want teachers, we need to make teaching a sustainable job. They are not disposable things to be used up… 

And thrown away. People aren’t signing up. People are leaving. And it’s going to get worse without serious action. So I’ll be picketing the legislature and sitting in on QP on Monday. To look the government in the eye. Hope to see you there. 

  • “This round of contract negotiations will decide the course of my career.”
  • “They never come back. Ever”

Woah. That’s a “win or die trying” if I ever heard one.

Our kids and our adults are facing a legit existential crisis.

This is it. This is the battle. It’s real. For the kids and for the adults. So do we have enough Natural Helpers in this building to win it?

Energy Crisis

I’m not sure I can remember a year when I’ve talked to so many teachers who are so tired at this time of the year. Myself included.

Part of it is physical. The school year is a grind, and I’m not as young as I used to be. A lot of it is mental. January and February are cold and dark, money is tight after the holidays, snow days and testing season wreak havoc with planning.

And in the case of my district, everyone is waiting for the other shoe to drop. We are in dire financial straits and are widely expected to close schools and lay off teachers at the end of the year. Like, hundreds of teachers. So the joy and relief of the close of the school year will be replaced with anxiety and job searches.

It’s hard to get motivated for the last three months of the school year when there is nothing but bad news on the horizon. I mean, I can do pretty much any miserable thing for 90 days if I know there is a reward (or at least relief) at the end of the journey.

We’re all professionals but the events of this current school year have me looking at a lot of things through the lens of human nature. If you found out on May 1 you were gonna be out of a job at the end of the year, at least part of you is moving on to the next thing.

I hope I’m wrong. I really do.

A few years ago I riffed off a Mary Schmich column on concrete tactics to make it through February (sanity intact) in the Chicago area. I’ve built my coping mechanisms. I’m still a sucker for puppies and sunshine on a cold day and the smell of a charcoal fire. The dogs don’t live behind me anymore but I still stop to let the sun shine on my face before going inside to teach, and grilling feeds my soul.

Today I stumbed across a listicle from the University of Nebraska on the same general topic, “10 tips to beat the winter blues”:

  1. Spend time outside each day to get fresh air, even if only for a few minutes.
  2. Open your blinds or window shades to let in more sun.
  3. Plan activities with friends or family to stay socially connected.
  4. Get good sleep at night, but try not to oversleep, which can make symptoms worse.
  5. Eat a healthy diet full of fresh produce, lean protein and complex carbohydrates.
  6. Identify a hobby or activity you enjoy and make time on your calendar each week to do it.
  7. Try a new winter activity, like skiing, ice skating or sledding.
  8. Practice mindfulness through meditation, journaling or breathing exercises.
  9. Continue or establish an exercise routine.
  10. Try light therapy with a light lamp, which can be purchased online.

We’re a dog household so combining #1 and #9 is a regular feature. My schedule change last month moved me to a classroom with windows so I get my daily dose of midday Vitamin D (along with a good look at McDonald’s, Dollar General, Zante’s, and the All-Star gas station across 169th).

Important thing about this type of list is: that doctor in Nebraska is an expert in her field, but she doesn’t know you the way you know you. You don’t have to do every last thing on this list, or even half of them. Find the couple two tree that work for you and leverage them.

I’d rather stab my introverted self in the eyeballs with raw spaghetti noodles than stay socially connected with, you know, people, but you bet your ass I make a couple of minutes every morning to sit in the dark with my coffee before anyone else wakes up and just breathe and clear the mechanism.

Source

And we’re on a nutrition journey as a family which is also paying dividends. We’re long-time “control what you can control” people and although the clouds on the horizon are real, I’ve got a job to do every day and I’m gonna do what I can to be there.

(Don’t rule out an occasional mental health day as needed as well).

The summer learning conference my district has hosted since forever is moving this year. We’re still a co-sponsor but somebody else can pick up the cost of putting the thing on. The list of keynote speakers was released this weekend and it includes Kim Strobel who speaks on the science of happiness (amongst other topics). Somewhat ironic this year, I know, but there it is. Here’s a clip of her guesting with George Couros talking about the effects of stress and goal-seeking on productivity:

Easy for her to say, I know, “just be more positive and you’ll be more productive and happier” while we watch everything crumble around us. But an investment in mental health is exactly that, an investment, and if that two minutes of darkness and coffee and breathing, or that moment in the sun before I walk in the door gets me through, it’s worth it.

Oh and did I mention that next Friday it’s March? Or that we’re like 3.5 weeks away from our first 7:00 pm sunset?

We’ll get there people. Swear.

Just Chillin’

I’ve known for a while that the day was coming when I’d be too old to battle a raging snowstorm on my drive in to work. I am a safe driver (if somewhat of a leadfoot) and have decades of experience driving in bad weather, including 15 years of commuting to work 185 days a year on the notorious Borman Expressway (the portion of I-80/94 in Lake County).

Until that day arrives I know that in winter I need to be prepared ahead of time for an e-learning day that may be called on short notice. Sometimes that is an assignment from our online math tool provided by our textbook publisher, other times a digital activity that may not necessarily involve computation.

Back in the embryonic days of e-learning in my area I created a Desmos activity for just that purpose, and it came in handy earlier this week when a snow day and a day off for bitterly cold temperatures bookended Martin Luther King weekend.

Rather than virtually teaching a topic I’d have to re-teach the folllowing day in person, on Tuesday I reached for Just Chillin’, a Desmos activity where my students investigate how temperature and wind speed affect the wind chill figure reported by forecasters.

The activity includes mathematical modeling, interpreting graphs, and using a model to make predictions, all kind of evergreen topics in algebra and beyond. After I set the scene with a couple of beach photos (one summer/one winter), students read an article outlining how Antarctic scientists tested their hypothesis that an increase in wind speed increased the rate of heat transfer.

Next I show them three points on a coordinate plane representing wind chill at three different air temperatures with a wind speed of 15 mph and ask them to determine the type of function suggested by the points:

The next screens ask them what temperature would combine with a 15 mph wind to create a minus-30 wind chill, or a minus-25 wind chill.

This is a skill I spiral back to often in activities, because it is a really good life skill in addition to being a state standard and a staple of testing. Also because it is an area where my students have historically struggled.

Then, a twist:

That point isn’t on the graph, which only contained temperature and wind chill data with a 15 mph wind. They have to take into account the relationship they saw from now five points on the graph, and determine how to estimate the conditions with a stronger wind. (Translate? Something else?)

That was a tougher challenge. They were pretty much guessing at this point. Although honestly, closer to correct than their responses to the questions where they were using a graph or equation.

I showed them the actual formula for wind chill, which involves two variables and is more complex that I needed the first part of this activity to be. So, kids, which variable (temperature or wind speed) has a greater effect on the wind chill, just from looking at the equation?

We haven’t quite reached rational exponents yet (next week) so I knew that 0.16 power was going to be about as clear as mud. So let’s look at the data a different way:

I was hoping they would zero in on rate of change given just the one row and column. The change in wind chill at 35 mph is pretty consistent per 5 degree change in temperature while the change slows rapidly as wind speed increases in the 5 degree column. Almost no one picked up on that. It may have been a factor of remote learning, it may be that they transposed the temperature and wind speed axis, but I didn’t get the traction I thought I would from this question.

So we closed with a couple questions putting the students in charge of “school”:

I appreciate that they are upfront and real with their responses. The last slide is the entire wind chill chart I excerpted earlier, with the “dangerous” level wind chills highlighted in a darker shade of blue. Those are the readings below minus-25, which not coincidentally is the traditional cutoff in many districts for calling off school.

That led to a quality conversation, which kind of rescued the day for me. In my experience, “what would you do if you were in charge?” is a winning question in a high school classroom. Probably something there about student voice and agency, if I had to guess.

All told, I was pleased with how the day went. My students stayed engaged on a Google Meet with me for pretty much an hour, which as my veterans of the remote teaching game know, is saying something. We did some math, I learned about their strengths and weaknesses with some foundational algebra skills, and the topic was obviously timely.

This class came to me at the semester from a teacher who left our building, so I also got to slowly introduce them to Desmos activities, problem-based learning, and “how we do math” in Room 130. Which is also a plus. Pretty positive e-learning day as I see it.

As an epilogue to the first graf way up there: parts of northwest Indiana got slammed with lake effect snow overnight. The band set up over communities a little bit to my east and they got literally two feet of snow today. Some roads won’t re-open for 24-36 hours according to reports I saw. I was right on the edge of the plume so right around the time I was starting the shower this morning and system snow moved out, the lake effect flakes started falling. And one by one, my local districts started calling for e-learning today. The roads were terrible. Meanwhile, my district was well outside the band and got about an inch of snow, if that.

Decision time.

A quick look at Google Maps and INDOT’s live web cams, and a swing around my socials told me the road conditions were lousy for most of my commute. What to do? My class was well set up for a sub if needed. I was in touch with a couple of my math colleagues who also drive in from a distance and we could see this was going to be a challenging drive, if not outright dangerous.

So I made the call.

Not gonna lie, the district’s attempt to cap sick days over a career factored into the decision. A sick day is basically Halloween candy under the proposed contract, like a timeout near the end of a half in football. Can’t take it with you. Might as well use it. Especially when weighing a sick day against a possible injury and car repair from an accident on snowy, slick expressways.

Easiest call I’ve made in a while. No regrets.

Just Your Garden Variety Five-Day Weekend

I live where we get winter. The kind of winter that has a tendency to wreak havoc on school schedules. As I write, I’m waiting on my district leadership to make the call and join the growing number of Region districts that are going to an e-day (or cancelling outright) due to frigid temperatures and brutal wind chills.

Sunday morning in the Region.

Five-day weekends are exceedingly rare but that’s what’s on tap after a snow day Friday and Martin Luther King Day today. And that great cheer you heard from a distance is school kids everywhere (and let’s not kid ourselves, teachers, too) rejoicing over a mid-January break. And yes, I know we just had legit two weeks off between Christmas and Epiphany. But still.

That probably tells up something about where we’re all at from the neck up when it comes to school and life in general in the coldest, darkest month of the year.

Want your own? Amazon link here and no I don’t get a commission but I just ordered one.

A favorite parlor game (in my house anyway) is watching which districts resist any kind of closure, and how districts phrase their closing announcements. One local district is kind of famous for a superiority complex (“Town X Community Schools are open in-person and on-time today” or “We live in northwest Indiana where we have winter, be sure to leave early and drive safely on your way to school today”.)

Which, fine, you’ve got a brand to maintain, do you, but sometimes it’s OK to just take the day and keep everybody safe. You can make it up next month and the kids are still gonna learn. You go all-out, 90 mph all day every day and something’s going to break.

Even marathon runners build in cut-back weeks to their schedule to avoid injury.

With that in mind, this weekend I tapped out of an online course I’ve been working on since October.

My district is backing a couple of very large shifts in practice right now, The New Tech Network for problem-based learning, and Modern Classroom Project (self-paced learning similar to an in-class flip model.)

We have an instructional coach over PBL and another of our coaches is trained in MCP. I felt strongly that in order to best support the math and science teachers I work with as an IC that I needed to be personally familiar with all the systems we’re asking them to put in place.

So the first big project in my class rolled out in December. And one of our ICs convinced me to take the plunge and do the online MCP training with her (strength in numbers, right?)

I want to walk my talk. Which is good. And hey, my dad worked 40 years in a steel mill so blue-collar work ethic is literally in my DNA.

The online course consists of five modules, each with a soft due date, then there is a hard due date for the entire course. That due date passed this weekend. I had planned everything out to wrap up the final two modules after Winter Break, but I got hung up on module 4. After a couple of rounds of revision, I was running out of time to work on the final module. Then the I got a change of class schedule which required an afternoon of work to prepare for, and the winter storm descended on us (cancelling a day of school and keeping me out of the building where some of the video tools I would need are located), and I couldn’t make the time work.

The training is not required to do my job (although I obviously see the value in it), and I already know how to run a flipped classroom. In previous rounds of training my district had offered a stipend to teachers who completed the MCP course but things being the way they are these days that was off the table, so it cost me zero dollars to decide against finishing. Self-image aside, there was not a single factor that argued strongly enough in favor of finishing the course.

There’s other aspects of my job to do though, and this seemed like a good time to take something off my plate.

There was a time not that long ago that I would have powered through and finished the course, even if cost me sleep or family time or came at the expense of other duties. But I’m a little older these days, and hopefully a little wiser. If load management is a thing in the NBA, it for sure is OK for a teacher to exercise a little self-care for a long-term benefit.

And of course, as a reflective teacher, I thought a little bit about my students in similar situations. They make decisions daily about when “good enough” is good enough, and we’ve got to respect that. Maybe they’re on to something. Following the lead of Kim Strobel and applying the Minimum Effective Dose:

And sometimes you find out that by pulling your foot off the gas just a hair, you can still get what you want. (The “try easier” philosophy). Jim Bouton in his book Ball Four addressed this concept. Paraphrasing, he said baseball players can’t try to psyche themselves up like football players do. If they did, they’d go out swinging the bat hard, and miss the pitch by a mile.

Swing and a miss. Source

In a related story, this email hit my inbox this morning:

Only thing I don’t get is the support of a dedicated mentor but other than that I can still turn in my final submissions and get the certification. I can live with that.

Oh and if you were wondering, late this afternoon my district leadership announced the e-learning day for tomorrow. A five-day weekend it is. Gonna make an instant pot full of soup, and make some e-day plans for tomorrow, and live plans for Wednesday, and watch some football, leave the faucets running a little, and sleep like a baby.

Riding The Storm Out

Source

I honestly did not anticipate the crash would come this hard, this fast.

It’s been a stressful school year, in a long string of stressful school years.

A referendum to fund teacher pay and much needed school repairs was defeated in landslide on Election Day. Not that we didn’t see it coming, but it still hurts when the people of your city are like, “Nah, you guys got enough money. Figure it out.”

Our superintendent tried to soften the blow by reassuring our teaching staff that all contracts run to the end of the school year, and that no one was in danger of losing their job on November 8.

On top of the referendum defeat our contract negotiations reached impasse and went to arbitration and are still not complete even as we approach winter break. Doesn’t matter, because there’s no money for raises, and an insurance premium increase means an effective pay cut, at least for the teachers who are left.

So you could say we have a morale problem in our district right now.

But wait, there’s more.

Friday, literally at noon, a week before Winter Break, a district-wide email.

Source

Paraphrasing here, but the basic gist was “Remember that email I sent on election night, saying things were bad? It turns out things are way, way worse.”

Total gut punch. You can guess the reaction amongst the teaching staff. Panic ensues.

I stopped by one of my math colleague’s classes during passing time just to guage where he was at. I said “If you can concentrate on teaching geometry these next two hours after that email, you’re a better man than me.”

The wider world will know the reality when the personnel report is published for this week’s school board meeting, but within the buildings the dot-connecting started immediately. The instructional coaches spent most of the afternoon counseling teachers who were concerned about getting RIFfed two weeks before Christmas.

Our superintendent was up front and apologetic in his email. He realized that his election night email may have created a false sense of security, and that the timing of this news, right before the holidays, was devestating.

I’m gutted for my colleagues who will spend the rest of the year (or at least until the state-mandated May 1 window for reduction-in-force announcements) worrying about their job status, and my heart hurts for our administrative staff at the district level. There is a lot of supremely talented people and good human beings who are going to be out of a job. We’re losing a lot of institutional knowledge.

Not to mention our district admin staff just got a lot whiter and more male, in a district that is predominantly serving students of historically marginalized populations.

Many of my colleagues are still hurting from a district downsizing just four years ago. I wrote about it as part of my reflection on the Summer Of E-Learning Conference in my district in 2019.

I spent some time with Mrs. Dull on Friday night sorting out the possibilities. I think there’s a five percent chance I get caught up in the cuts and end up a free agent. My status as a highly-effective teacher probably saves me but I switched districts for a minute and then came back so despite my 15 years in Hammond, my current years of service make me the least senior teacher in my department.

Just looking at the distribution of licensed math teachers in my district, involuntary transfers are a likely reality so there’s maybe a 35% chance I stay in Hammond but switch schools, leaving an instructional coach position to return to the classroom. Again, seniority is not my friend.

There’s about a 55% chance I am no longer an instructional coach and return to the classroom in my current school. Good thing I didn’t really unpack a lot of the stuff I packed up from my classroom last August.

And the other five percent is total pipe dream, we decide we need instructional coaches at the building level and I stay in my current position at my current school.

I love teaching and won’t be heartbroken to take a full schedule of classes next year. Honestly, I’ll be happy to still have my same job in my same building with my same department colleagues. We all will be happy just to still have jobs, if you want the truth.

But I’m really not looking forward to walking back in my building tomorrow. I don’t think the weekend away will have assuaged anyone’s fears about what’s to come the next five months. If anything folks will be more concerned about the future, not less.

Gonna put my counseling hat on as I walk in the G door.

We’re going to have to ride this one out together.

Source

There’s Money Out There. Just Not For Everything.

Went to an event this weekend. The opening weekend of a new distillery/brewery/restaurant/event space, built in a renovated 160-year-old factory.

The brand is well-established with a similar renovation in a neighboring state, where the founders have been distilling award-winning spirits for the last decade.

The founder’s story is compelling – son of a banker, stood to inherit the business, instead the family sold off the bank and the founder was left to figure out what’s next. Given the luxury of money and time, he had a minute to ponder his next move. This eventually led him to craft distilling and the conversion of a former buggy whip/corset stay factory in southwest Michigan.

Once established, the founder saw an opportunity to duplicate the concept in his hometown. He selected an abandoned factory and set about lining up investors and implementing his dream.

Forty million dollars and a pandemic later, the dream is a reality.

Forty. Million. Dollars.

A mind-bogglingly huge amount of cash. And I can see already that Journeyman’s is going to be an attraction to challenge anything else in the Region.

Meanwhile in Vegas, the ownership of the Oakland A’s baseball team has been seeking cities for relocation (you could say they are seeking cities to use as leverage in their attempt to convince the city of Oakland to commit to funding for a new modern stadium.) Forty years ago, due to Vegas’ well-earned reputation as a gambling mecca and its reputed connections to organized crime, no major pro sports league would consider a franchise there. College basketball was the city’s prime sports attraction and the Runnin’ Rebels of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas were the biggest game in town. Now gambling apps partner with major pro sports leagues and stadiums build on-site sports books. And Vegas boasts a Stanley Cup champion and one of the WNBA’s strongest franchises, along with a state-of-the-art domed stadium that houses the (formerly Oakland/formerly Los Angeles) Raiders of the NFL. Could major league baseball be the next attraction on The Strip?

Selling out 81 games a year times 35,000 seats is a big ask, even for a tourist destination like Vegas. And modern stadiums aren’t cheap. One particular organization is weighing the overall value of state support for a new ballpark versus state support for public education. Schools Over Stadiums is the name of the group. The fight is likely to end up in court before MLB can make a decision on approval for the move.

It’s an interesting thought exercise: So, where does money, especially public money, belong?

Back in the Region. I was in Michigan City last weekend and in my travels ended up at St. Stan’s, a gorgeous downtown historic church.

A huge banner in the narthex advertised a 2.5 million dollar capital campaign to renovate a 100-year-old church. Keep in mind, this is not a wealthy town, nor a particularly large community (32,000 or so residents), not a well-off parish (the folks with the lakefront McMansions or summer homes go to Notre Dame in Long Beach), at a moment when urban dioceses are consolidating.

It’s a big ask. Maybe too big. Like “in your dreams” big. But the diocese has given the green light. Sometimes it’s worth asking the question. I’ve got a thing for beautiful historic churches. And beautiful historic buildings just in general. I hope they make their goal.

So my district has a funding referendum on the ballot next month. It is a renewal of the 2017 referendum that paid for the newest high school building that allowed the district to consolidate from 4 high schools to 2.

That was a painful moment for folks in my district. But the state forced our hand, financially speaking. You close schools, or we’ll close them for you, basically.

Our superintendent presented at our last faculty meeting this month. His intent was to steer away from referendum-related topics but let’s be honest, that’s all anyone wanted to talk about. The referendum amount is the equivalent of about 250 teaching positions. (“Don’t worry, it’s not like we’re going to let people go on November 8. Everybody’s contract is to the end of the year.”) So he walked us through the history: our current schools infrastructure was built for the Baby Boom generation. In 1965, the first year that Gavit hosted a full 9-12 enrollment, we had 25,000 students in K-12. This year it is 10,500. A 60% decrease. I mean, you can see why the Distressed Unit Appeal Board was on the trail.

That’s not good. A dying district in a dying city, from an outsider’s standpoint.

And so: Literally no one expects the referendum to pass. I can’t even find out where to get a yard sign. And believe me, I’ve asked. Referenda are just not very popular around here these days. But just like the folks at St. Stan’s, you have to ask, right? It’s the right thing to do. The existing building (my building) is badly in need of repair. The board sees this as an equity issue. Half our high school kids go to a brand new building. Half of our high school kids go to a building with lockers scavenged from two closed high schools, with substandard HVAC. An accident of birth, or what neighborhood your parents can afford to live in, determines your school conditions.

Sounds like a no-brainer, right? You fix that up, for the kids. But two things: Number one, a significant portion of the residents feel like they were lied to about plans to close neighborhood schools, and two, as a city we are tapped out in terms of dollars.

Parenthetically: it doesn’t help that the state requires the ballot question to state the percent tax increase from a theoretical baseline instead of from the reality of the 2022 tax bill. Who would vote a 35% property tax increase on themselves? Not me, for real. Unless it wasn’t actually 35%.

We’ll see I guess, but I’m not holding my breath.

There was 40 million dollars available to renovate an ancient exurban factory building into a destination because the investors believe they will make a return. And I hope they do. I’m going back there, for sure. But what about St. Stan’s? Treasure in heaven aside, no one is making a profit on their donation to a capital campaign for a church building that may or not remain a parish. But that parish means something to its congregants, and it means something to downtown, and to the city of Michigan City. Perfect world, it deserves a renovation. But still….

And in Hammond? Look, I’m a teacher. I understand the value of a strong school system to a community. And, I’m a homeowner with a budget to keep. And beneath the red and black spirit wear I’m a Gladiator whose heart broke a little when the closing of my school was announced.

I still bleed purple and sweat gold. So I understand all sides of the debate.

But kids don’t get to pick.

Maybe, thinking about craft distilleries and schools, and tourist desinations and dying Rust Belt cities, and where money flows, it all comes down to what one of my online running friends commented when I posted about the Vegas stadium vs. school funding fight: “One makes money, the other doesn’t”.

And that dictates where the money goes, regardless of where it’s badly needed.

Dammit.

I wish people cared as much about fixing up a building that provides a place for education for kids who live in a place by accident of birth, as much as they did to house a genrtified factory that serves $15 cocktails.

Pride of place is worth preserving. Everywhere.

Or else it’s an empty phrase.

One-Man Book Club: Top Gun

It’s Air and Water Show weekend in Chicago. Meaning every quotable line from Top Gun is right there for the taking. (Especially if you are a highly skilled photographer). Its no help that for a lot guys my age the movie runs in a loop in our heads 24/7.

One of my mentor teachers, and also my first across the-the-hall neighbor in Vegas, were both former Air Force fighter pilots stationed at Nellis. Since they were already basically rocket scientists when it came to physics, the transition to teaching high school math was an obvious one that the district encouraged. I always noticed they had a somewhat “different” approach to teaching that I could never quite put in words.

I’ve said for years that Top Gun and Maverick were Teacher Movies. Maybe not in the Freedom Writers or Stand and Deliver sense, but there is something to be learned about teaching and learning and meeting the needs of changing times and asking for forgiveness rather than permission and the possibilities for student achievement.

I’m even more convinced after reading Dan Pedersen’s 2019 memoir Top Gun: An American Story.

Source

If you’ve seen the movie, you know the setup. “During Korea, the Navy kill ratio was 12-to-1. We shot down 12 of their jets for every one of ours. During Vietnam, that ratio fell to 3-to-1.”

And it turns out, that wasn’t because American pilots got worse at dogfighting. To the contrary, decisions made by leaders in Washington, far from the tip of the spear, hamstrung our pilots. Pedersen notes that strategists were enamored with the idea of using guided missiles from a distance to down enemy craft, rather than using onboard guns. Problem was, the navy’s rules of engagement did not allow fighters to fire on an enemy until they had visual contact. At that point the guided missiles were virtually useless and the American jets, flying without guns (a nod to keeping the weight of the craft as low as possible) were easy targets.

The lack of guns also hampered the US pilots’ ability to provide air cover for ground operations. It was a problem begging for a solution, and that solution needed to come from men who had sat in a cockpit and faced down an enemy.

(I’m an army dad and keenly aware of the stark difference between teaching and going to war for your country. But I think we can agree that I nodded a little bit thinking about people making decisions who would not have to implement those decisions, nor face the consequences of trying to function under the constraints of those decisions.)

Untold in the movie was the story of an underground dogfighting scene off the California coast. Pilots were encouraged to get as much seat time as possible so they were authorized to “check out” a jet and get in the air pretty much any time. Pilots would secretly head to restricted airspace over San Clemente Island, find a willing opponent, and with hand signal the “dogfight” was on.

Pedersen notes parenthetically,

“Here’s the thing. You learn by doing. Those of us who lived to fly learned our craft by flying a lot. We intercepted wayward airliners, and did our own troubleshooting when things went wrong with our birds. The men I most admired in the Navy were the old-school fighter pilots. I wanted to be a throwback, ready to face adversity on my own wits.”

Top Gun, pg. 42

Part of the attraction of this “fight club” was the chance to match up with different aircraft, which had varied strengths and weaknesses. But when similar aircraft engaged in a certain maneuver, Pedersen points out “the difference is pilot skill and aggressiveness. The winner is usually the one with the most guts to push his aircraft to its aerodynamic limit”.

Lunch at a long-ago South Shore Learning Conference, and a new sticker for my water bottle. Photo cred: me.

And this:

“Every pilot had his own bag of tricks. We learned by watching other guys beat us with them. Others we picked up in late-night shop talk in Coronado bars. Unusual maneuvers, little ways to extract just a bit more performance from your aircraft and other jewels, were shared and discussed. The knowledge – and the liquor – flowed with equal speed in those sessions.”

Top Gun, pg. 46

I’m far from the first person to draw the connection between Top Gun and teaching. Matt Miller built an entire keynote around it one year. (I have the sticker). But the analogies for the teacher here are clear.

  • You get better by doing. The year I made the most improvement as a broadcaster was a year I must have called 100 games between football, prep basketball, small college basketball, and baseball. Everytime I opened a mic was a chance to improve. Same with teaching. The last handful of years I’ve been single-prepped so I present the same lesson six or seven times. If I’m not way better at it by the sixth class, that’s on me. I haven’t learned anything.
  • Sometimes the difference between a so-so lesson and one that really clicks with students is: what risk am I willing to take? Can I push beyond the tried and true and make (or borrow) something that will make math pop for my kids?
  • The debrief is cruicial. Teachers need collaboration time to share successes and failures, tricks of the trade and new techniques. Ten brains are better than one. In my building we are working hard to build in time for teachers to drop by and watch other teachers teach. I can say from experience that a different persepective can open new doors in my own classroom.

The lessons gleaned from these impromptu “hassles” between pilots out over the open Pacific formed the foundational elements of Top Gun. After a lengthy tour in Vietnam, Pedersen had been assigned stateside to serve as a tactics instructor at Miramar. At about the same time, a commander of a carrier that had been deployed off Vietnam produced a 200-page report detailing the root causes of the US failures in air combat during the war. Part of that report was a recommendation to establish “an Advanced Fighter Weapons School”.

F-14 Tomcat at Fightertown, USA.
Source: Gary Danvers Collection. Used under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

And Top Gun was born. Pedersen’s chain of command offered him the opportunity to start and run the program and he took it.

Pedersen selected eight top-notch fliers to his staff of instructors, each chosen because of expertise in a specific technical area. And because they were woefully underfunded, the “Original Bros” as they called themselves, set about scraping and scrounging to obtain the needed space and tools to get started.

All of us working in underfunded schools have a wry smile right now. We might as well all get matching “beg, borrow, steal” tattoos.

And another connection to teaching that Pedersen made plain as paste:

“Topgun was best understood as a graduate school. It functioned essentially like a teachers’ college for fighter pilots. Our job was not just to teach pilots to be the hottest sticks in the sky. It was to teach pilots to teach other pilots to be the hottest sticks in the sky. Our first class of students, handpicked by their squadron commanders to join us at Miramar in sixty short days, would spend about five weeks with us and then return to their units to spread to their peers what we had taught them. In this way the Navy hoped to leverage a multiplier effect, seeding ideas in a geometric progression as a class of eight went out to teach eight times sixteen more.”

Top Gun, pg. 106

Everyone who’s ever been to a “train the trainer” workshop knows the theory. Top Gun put it into practice. Probably most important was, the training and the tactics worked. Good pilots became great. And their enthusiasm boiled over.

Pedersen explains the progression when teaching a new maneuver. Instructor is the pilot, student in the back seat. They run through the maneuver so the student could experience it and know he would survive. Then they switch seats.

“Out over the desert or the ocean, I’d coach him through the vertical maneuver. He had never dreamed a Phantom could do it, but our rugged machine performed the same way every time. Once the student decided he could trust it, he was exhilarated to fly the F-4 as it was never supposed to be flown.

Back on the ground there was always a lot of laughing and hollering from the front cockpit. The student would be ready to beat his chest. And trust me on this: once four or five twentysomethings have an experience like that, the energy level at the O club that evening is something to see. If you walk in and witness it, the buzz isn’t rowdy idiocy. It’s the sound of people believing in themselves, in their aircraft, in their leadership, in their weapons, and in their ability to win a war when it all comes together.

The day to start worrying about your military is the Friday night you go into an officers’ club and everybody’s quiet, staring into their beer.”

Top Gun, pp. 131-132

True from teacher to student, from coach or admin to teacher. If you’re lucky enough to have had that classroom moment when the bell rings and you’re ready to beat your chest, when you’ve learned a way you didn’t know existed, you felt that line deep in your gut.

Because I bet you’ve felt that silent Friday night too.

In his introduction, Pedersen states, “The eight men who joined me in a condemned trailer at Naval Air Station Miramar in late 1968 had gone into the war thinking we were the best pilots in the world flying the best aircraft armed with the best weapons. The North Vietnamese showed us otherwise. We were ready to do whatever it took to find a way to win.”

Same, sir. Same.

21 Years

My teaching career is old enough to drink. Year 21 started today.

The back to school dreams were late coming but they’ve been intense, filled with places and people from my past.

I was a psych minor at IU but you don’t need any kind of special knowledge or training to interpret the messages in those dreams. I’m older (I actually heard a person use my age and “senior citizen” in the same sentence a couple weeks ago) and there are changes afoot this year. Change is scary and it’s common to reach back for a grip on the comfortable and familiar.

We are in the third year of a consolidation and the third year of a shift to project-based learning. It feels a little like we’re far enough past the growing pains of combining student bodies and staff from multiple schools into one building to where we can focus on instruction. Which is good. “Meaningful and equitable” is our hashtag for the year. 

When I started doing this job the iPhone didn’t exist. This year, we’re implementing a “no personal devices during the school day” policy, so ora pro me?

And my role is changing as well. I’ll be the math instructional coach and one of our building’s new teacher mentors in addition to teaching a little bit of Algebra II. Our previous math IC was a unicorn, a one-of-one combination of knowledge, creativity, planning, vision, and drive. So, big shoes to fill. In year one I’m just happy to be able to continue to work on the projects where she has laid the groundwork. 

But I’m also ready to apply the lessons learned and skills gained these last couple of years from Teacher Leader Bootcamp and Teach Plus as well as a career of learning and sharing to this role. 

And the work revolving around curriculum mapping and power standards will intersect perfectly with the ongoing shift to PBL. In fact I’m convinced we can’t do one without the other.

And just in case I needed confirmation I follow the right people on social, here’s a blog post on coaching that popped up in my feed on Friday while I was at a training for our evaluation tool. I just wrote about Allyson Apsey’s recent book book over the summertime and now her thoughts have a little more relevance in my new position. 

Day One broke sunny and ended with a torrential downpour. Because Mondays (and school days) are like that. There’s some big challenges awaiting us in my building as the new school year begins. And a good team ready to face up to them.

Today was a pretty good day. We’ll take 179 more just like it.