Category: Uncategorized

Teacher Voice

When I applied for the Indiana Teach Plus Policy Fellowship last spring I really had no belief that I would actually be selected for the position. And then, upon my selection, I had no idea what I was really getting into.

I knew I would be be reading and researching and writing and meeting with policymakers/legislators and advocating for positions in the education space, but what did that really mean?

Our state legislature is in the second half of its session, when the 1500 or so bills in the two chambers have been whittled down to a more manageable number for debate and consideration and all the groups that advocate at the Statehouse can start to narrow their focus.

It’s the time when my executive director is gently nudging us to write op-ed pieces on the topics we’ve been researching. And if not writing 800-word thinkpieces, at least crafting testimony before the House or Senate Education Committees. I’m a good 2.5 hour drive from the state capital and I’m not sure I can sneak away this week for an in-person testimony, so the written word will have to suffice.

So here I am. Following a virtual meeting of my Equitable Funding Advocacy work group tonight, I crafted a first draft of written testimony on the biennial budget bill, in particular focusing on the proposed expansion of my state’s voucher program (known as the “Choice Scholarship Program”) to families making 400% of the threshhold for free/reduced price lunch.

Here we go:

Steve Dull

Senate Education Committee

Written Testimony

HB 1001

Voucher Expansion

My name is Steve Dull and I am a math teacher at Oliver P. Morton High School in Hammond, and an Indiana Teach Plus Policy Fellow. I am the parent of two graduates of Indiana public high schools, one of whom followed my path of attending a Catholic grade school until eighth grade. 

I have taught students in urban and suburban districts, in Las Vegas as well as in Indiana. I have served as a member of my Parish Pastoral Council. I appreciate the opportunity to submit testimony in regards to the Choice Scholarship Program. 

Catholic schools have a long history in our country of serving the most marginalized students: European immigrants in the 19th century to children of color experiencing poverty in the late 20th century. And within the last two decades leaders in the state of Indiana have seen fit to make public funds available to families who wish to offer their children a Catholic education but struggle to pay the tuition required to attend parish schools.

I can relate: for a few years while my wife and a partner were attempting to launch a non-profit matching middle school girls with STEM industry mentors, we provided for our family of four on a public school teacher’s salary. And yes, we made use of our diocesan tuition support program (funded by collections in parishes across Lake, Porter, LaPorte, and Starke counties) in those years. My oldest son, now a United States Army MP, qualified for reduced price lunch and the 21st Century Scholars program.

If we agree the Choice Scholarship Program is an appropriate use of public funds, can we also agree that a means test is appropriate to determine who should be eligible to use public funds to attend private schools? 

The Indiana Constitution requires that the state provide, “by law, for a general and uniform system of Common Schools, wherein tuition shall be without charge, and equally open to all”.

So we have a conflict. The desire to provide school choice, especially to our most marginalized families, with our constitutional mandate to provide a uniform system of schooling, free and open to all.

Opening the Choice Scholarship to families making up to 400% of the federal poverty level is a move we cannot afford to make. That is an annual income of $200,000 per year, or more than three times the median household income in our state.

Only 4.5% of Indiana families exceed this income threshold yet we are willing to take dollars away from the schools serving 19 of every 20 Hoosier children to provide scholarship money to the top 5 percent of earning families in our state. My school serves a population that is 85% historically marginalized and 74% economically disadvantaged. Our teachers and staff are rock stars and bring their A Game every day but serving a population in economic need requires support, and that requires funding.

The Indiana Capital Chronicle notes that “After the expansion, the program would cost the state an estimated $500 million in fiscal year 2024, and another $600 million in the following fiscal year.” This is more than double the current outlay for the Choice Scholarship program.

There is no magic pile of money in Crown Point, or Indianapolis, or Washington. This expansion of the Choice Scholarship is excessive. We can provide school choice to our families in need, especially our families of color, without taking funds away from the schools that serve our families in need who opt for a public education.

I’m hopeful my senior policy fellow and my executive director will provide gentle yet incisive suggestions for edits.

And since the written testimony should be around 450 words or two spoken minutes and an op-ed is targeted at 750-800 words, I may have a publishable piece when my colleagues are done with it. I’d love to do more than just shout into the wind.

More importantly, I hope I am able to contribute to the conversation around how public education is funded (and valued) in my state.

Wish me luck. Wish us all luck.

Honor Your Mother and Father

I’ve said for years that teaching in Hammond is kind of the family business. Here’s the OG SCH employee in the family:

Thirty years serving the kids of Gary, East Chicago, and Hammond. She was a school nurse but she had the “teacher look” which I later learned is kind of indistinguishable from the “mom look”.

I was the age my oldest son is right now when my mom passed. And after all that time her lessons are still pretty fresh. Some things she said out loud. A lot of this I learned by watching. If you’ll indulge my reverie, I’ll share them with you:

  • From the moment we are born we begin to die. (In case you wondered how I got all #MementoMori).
  • Don’t ever walk around without health insurance.
  • When you are thinking about making a purchase, don’t just think about the price tag. Think about how many hours you needed to work to earn the money to buy that thing. Now, is it still worth it?
  • Do your homework. Get the knowledge (and credential) to do the thing you want to do.
  • Things you don’t know how to cook, you can learn. In a cookbook on a shelf I have my mom’s handwritten copies of my dad’s recipes that he gave her on his deathbed. I’ve tweaked most of them a little but I still know where they came from and why I have them.
  • If your kids are away at college (or living on their own), yes, send the care package full of cookies and taco meat and chop suey. (She also sent a manual can opener labeled in black ink on white tape “M. Dull”, which is how she became known to my college roomies as “Ma Dull”).
  • Serve others. Her service didn’t come from a position of privilege. I didn’t get this until I was older and I knew more of her story, but as an orphan, an adoptee, a widow, and a single mom, she knew what it felt like to get knocked down over and over, and to have people willing to lend a hand up.
  • The Catholic faith is real and true. But you can’t just claim it, you have to live it.
  • Pray the Rosary.
  • Tell your kids the things they need to hear. Especially the hard things.
  • Be there for them when they make bad decisions.
  • Be willing help them out when they face hard times.
  • Your kids’ spouses need your love.
  • It’s OK to splurge on important occasions.
  • If you pay for things on time, be sure to make the payments on time. Even after we moved I vividly remember driving to Schoenberg’s Furniture in East Chicago to make a cash payment on some piece we had bought.
  • Travel. Especially outside the US.
  • Go see your siblings. (In her biological family she was one of 12, then she was adopted into a family where she was the older sister to two boys. There were plenty of aunts and uncles to visit in Cincinnati, LA, DC, Denver, elsewhere).
  • It’s good to come home.

I recall once when I was little hearing about Mothers Day and Fathers Day, and asking “when is Kids’ Day?” with all the innocent curiousity of youth. My mom, in all her wisdom, said, “Every day is kids’ day”.

True. Which is why I rely on her as an intercessor often for my own kids. She was buried on the Feast of the Assumption from Our Lady of Grace Church, at rest in St. Mary’s Cemetery so I’m quite sure she is close to the Blessed Mother.

She’ll pray for you too. I guarantee it.

Happy Mothers’ Day.

Mom and the future Mrs. Dull, way back when. Two of my favorite saints.

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.

Power

(NB: Not really school-related. Take it for what it’s worth.)

Current Mood

Kids steal things at school. Stuff that has no value to them, that they have no possible use for.

Why? Because they can. Because it inconveniences other people. Because it’s a way to strike back at people and institutions they don’t feel valued by.

I get it.

This past school year anyone with any kind of authority (in school or out) exercised it over me, often in the most petty way possible. By the time I left the building on May 31 I was sick and damn tired of being everybody’s punching bag.

I felt a little like Ken in A Fish Called Wanda:

Nobody likes feeling bullied. The imbalance of power generates a lot of feelings, most of them socially unacceptable. But I’m mature, and a professional, and a Catholic. Revenge is not an idea we promote on my planet.

So mostly this summer, I’ve been walking a lot, and reading in the sun, and praying, and doing a lot of not-school-related stuff as a cure.

  1. Daily Mass is Awesome.
  2. Rosary ladies are an avenue of grace into the world.
  3. There should be more of that, for real. As K-Lo says, they carry the world’s load as they wield their rosaries.

A person who has worked at my youngest son’s grade school pretty much the entire time he went to school there is in the cancer fight right now. It’s not my story to tell, so no details. My parish has rallied around the family, as church groups do, providing meals and keeping company. But then, one of the family’s friends organized a Rosary for her tonight. And, wow.

There were like 100 people in the chapel at our church. The outgoing school principal, who retired at the end of the just-completed year, and just about every teacher at the school, past and present, and dozens of families who have been connected in one way or another all came out.

The power of group prayer, baby. It was intense, and beautiful. The spouse addressed us tonight before we started. Tough guy, blue-collar guy. He could barely keep from choking up. Meals are awesome. But when you see a community that has your back, all in one place, that is strong stuff.

So, it turns out I have power after all. Just not the “revenge” kind. And I get to decide: do I want to use it for good, or for evil.

All I know is, on the drive home, as Mrs. Dull & I waited for a freight train to pass, we looked at each other and could not get over how awesome an evening this was. And that we should do it again, soon. Like, “who else can we pray for now? Let’s Go!”.

Use that power, people. Go lift somebody up. It’s literally good for the soul.

Cord Rosary
A handmade cord rosary I packed in Number One Son’s bag before he shipped out to basic training last summer. Photo cred: me.

Learning Together

Electric.

I know just enough to be dangerous. I can change out a ceiling fan or a car battery. Replace a plug on an extension cord. A few other things. I know enough to shut off the breaker or otherwise disconnect power before beginning a project. But how it all works?

Magic

I mean, I could give you a dictionary definition if you want. But I think you want a little bit more than that.

 

We blew past the circuits module in POE this year. We are smack in the middle of a major renovation right now, and my classroom is ground zero. There are decades of projects, binders, materials, tools, everywhere, across three classrooms. Despite receiving a literal truckload of brand-new PLTW supplies, I couldn’t track down the breadboards and wires for my students to work with. Fortunately there is an online sim for circuit building, which is what we used at my former school, but I need for my students to get hands-on with all of this. It’s one of the major selling points of PLTW – learning by doing.

Thanks to that turn of events, I’m a little ahead of schedule. Too early to start the next unit. But: amongst a recent shipment was a half-dozen boxes of the VEX building kits, including a hydrogen fuel cell and small solar panels for an energy activity.

Nothing says we can’t skip back and do that project now, right?

Turns out we didn’t have quite everything we needed. But in the spirit of American ingenuity and the can-do spirit (and the Porter County Career Center’s Alternative Energy program), we improvised. And learned. Every day I’d dig through stacks and storage of old equipment, find something that looked useful, give it to my students and said, “here, see what you can do with this.”

 

And because they are pretty slick, they’d go to work, think, try things out, look stuff up on Youtube when they needed to, and make some magic happen.

I told them up front that I had not done this project beginning to end before: “I’ll be real honest with you – we’re going to learn together”. I’m not sure I could get away with that just anywhere. I mean it as an opportunity for students to take control of their own learning. They get it.

Good thing, too.

My strategy: Ask a lot of probing questions, help when asked, get out of the way otherwise, check for understanding later. Plus, we eventually found the breadboards and some alligator clips.

And the next thing you know: Solar/Hydrogen Cell Car. Yeah.

Chassis for the solar/hydrogen car
Running a small motor off a hydrogen cell
Using solar power to run a motor

 

There are places where this kind of “go forth and play, and oh, by the way, learn something” might not be met with great enthusiasm. “You’re the teacher. Teach us.”

I believe I have.

But wait. There’s more: Wait ’til we start coding in the next unit…

hello-cortex

Robots are coming.

Will I Ever Make A PowerPoint After High School?

Every math teacher dreads the question. Like they dread teaching (Trigger Warning) synthetic division. “When are we ever gonna use this stuff?” We end up having to justify the thing we love so much we chose it as a career, to a bunch of disinterested 15-year-olds.

Other teachers get the “cool” subjects with relevant topics and awesome class discussions for days, and we get to make our kids graph lines with pencil and paper. As if anyone does that for real on the job. If only they could make PowerPoints for us, like they do for their US History teacher. Life would be so sweet.

a172848031b92b954b284660d9d724f9.jpg (700×900)

But you know what? Secretly… they hate making PowerPoints.

Seriously.

Or rather, they hate making an effort to make a good PowerPoint. It’s one more thing they can robotically churn out in a half-hour, read the slides off the screen when it’s time to make the presentation, then sit back and say “Gimme My Points!” I know it’s true, because I’ve heard those exact words.

What if making a PowerPoint is one more thing they’ll never do again after high school?

There is a stat floating around out there, of somewhat suspicious origin, that 30 million Power Point presentations are made every day.

Thirty. Million.

If this number is true, one in every 250 or so people on the planet is clicking through a slide deck today. I’m a math teacher (and a PLTW teacher), so I get that that number is not evenly distributed. But still. If my students feel like they won’t have to do this on the job… they’re probably right. Or maybe not. Depends on the job, right?

But….

What if it’s not about slapping together 10 slides (ctrl-c, ctrl-v, rinse, repeat), and it’s really about telling a story?

conspiracy-keanu.jpg (551×549)
Woah.

My Intro To Engineering Design students are in the midst of a project requiring them to select an invention, to research all the innovations that have been made to that product since it was invented, and to present what they have learned. I’ll be pretty honest with you. I don’t want to watch 40 horrible slide show presentation with my students standing with their back to their classmates, reading from bullet points while clicking through unreadable slides.

hqdefault.jpg (480×360)

 

Call me selfish. But last time I checked my business card, it says “Teacher”. Guess that means if I want them to make an awesome presentation, I’m gonna have to teach them how to make an awesome presentation. OK, fine. Somebody’s got to. So, after they research their invention and innovations, and before they start building a slide deck, I hit them with a combo platter: Carmine Gallo and Steve Jobs. Gallo literally wrote the book on making insanely great presentations, and Jobs…. well, c’mon. You know.

So we start with Gallo’s slide deck on the Presentation Secrets Of Steve Jobs. Yes, read the book. You’re probably already using at least a couple of these tactics in your class. Then once we’ve identified best practices, we watch the master at work.

Then I give them a slide from a previous year student’s presentation and ask them to use what they’ve learned to improve the slide.

Truth be told, it’s a lot more work than ctrl-c, ctrl-v. But holy crap, have they bought in. I say: tell a story with your slides, don’t read them, tell your audience the things you learned that you think are cool. And they give me this:

The-Evolution-of-the-Playstation-Controller.gif (750×526)

I swear, it was like a contest to see who could put the coolest gif in their slides. They’re having fun. In school. On an assignment. For my class. Pinch me.

But, are they ever going to have to make a PowerPoint again after high school? Ask me again in 40 years. But I know for sure they’ll need digital communication skills. I know for sure they’ll have to tell a story, and make that story kind of interesting. Maybe they’ll be pitching a product or a business idea. Maybe they’ll be witnessing to a youth group. Maybe they’ll be podcasting about writing a novel or launching a youtube channel of  DIY household repair tutorials. Maybe they’ll be telling the life story of a loved one at a wedding or a wake.

Go tell your story, people.

 

Ups And Downs. And Ups.

I’m training to run a marathon.

Let me repeat that: I’m. Training. To. Run. A. Marathon.

OK, so that last sentence is a bit overdramatic. It’s my fifth marathon since 2007. And although training to run 26.2 miles (in the same day, at once) is quite a bit of work, it’s not all that unusual. In 2013, 541,000 people in the US finished a marathon. Put it this way: that’s just a little less than the population of Las Vegas. Put all the 2013 marathon finishers together in one city and you’d have the 33rd largest city in the US, a little larger than Fresno, CA, not quite the size of Tucson. But bigger than Kansas City, Miami, Oakland, Minneapolis, Cleveland or New Orleans.

On Sunday, my marathon training team gathered at 7 am for a 20-mile run. Well, depending on level of previous training, some of us went 16, those with a little more experience did 18, and two of us planned for 20. This particular route is the toughest 20-mile route we use, criss-crossing the highest point in Porter County. Most of the middle 10 or so miles are spent climbing hills and racing down the other side.

"This is a 20.41 mi route in Valparaiso, IN, United States. The route has a total ascent of 564.0 ft and has a maximum elevation of 891.47 ft."
“This is a 20.41 mi route in Valparaiso, IN, United States. The route has a total ascent of 564.0 ft and has a maximum elevation of 891.47 ft.”

At one point, as we stopped for water and carb gels (“Gu“) after one of these climbs, I turned to my training partner and said “Man, the mental part of the game is so huge. The climb takes a lot out of you, but knowing it’s coming makes it a little easier to deal with from the neck up.” She looked at me and went, “Thanks for reminding me. I had forgotten about the big hill coming up.”

So had I. Yikes.

Most of my teacher friends have seen the following graph at some point, either in their pre-service program, or at an in-service somewhere. It’s a visual representation of the emotional phases of first-year teaching. I’d say 1) it’s pretty accurate, and 2) the graph for more veteran teachers probably isn’t all that different.

You can't quit. It's Christmas. Image via newteachercenter.org
“You can’t quit. It’s Christmas”. Image via newteachercenter.org

That’s us right now, barreling towards Survival, with Disillusionment waiting right around the corner. I remember thinking when I started in this business that Christmas Break (Politically incorrect, I know. Sue me. “Winter Break” if you prefer) was perfectly timed for a first-year teacher badly in need of a couple weeks away from kids, an injection of family support, and an obscenely large, multi-course meal, prepared by someone else (if possible).

But it’s not just first-year teachers who take the roller-coaster ride. Last year was without a doubt my worst year teaching. If I had to sign a paper in October committing to come back for 2015-2016, I’d have said “Hell. No.”

My twitter bio says I’m a stubborn jackass. Whoever wrote that knows me so well. I kept showing up. Kept planning. Kept smiling. Kept praying the Rosary on the way in every day. Kept blowing off steam on weekends. Kept my dark sense of humor. Kept writing DARs when the situation called for it. Kept leaning on my teacher friends in the building for support. Read a lot of Justin Aion at Re-Learning To Teach. Tried to not be a jerk to my family. Got through the trimester, and the world kept spinning.

But you know what I wonder? I wonder what 15-year-olds who don’t have responsibilities and mortgages and kids and bills and the work ethic of a millrat do when school sucks daily. Not just one class, but every class. Every. Damn. Day.

I wonder if there is a graph of student emotions thru the year? I wonder what it looks like?

I wonder: Is it important for teachers to be in phase with that?

 

 

The Digital Citizenship Divide

I teach at a high school in a diverse urban district. And by “diverse,” I mean in every sense of the word. My students are diverse in their race and ethnicity, but also in diversity of background, diversity of experience, diversity of interest, of skill, of need. And that extends to their readiness to use the tools of modern learning.

Look at the way we paint our students with the term “digital native”. We assume because our students have grown up around devices, grown up online, that they are inborn with computer/tablet skills.

Then this happens:

Student (looking at computer, calling to me): “What’s this mean, ‘keyboard error’?”

Me: “Oh, just do a Ctrl-Alt-Del on it, you’ll be good to go.”

Student: “What’s that?”

 

Robert Downey Jr Wut

A seatmate set her straight before I could get back over there and help her out, but still. Ctrl-Alt-Del should be like breathing air. Until it isn’t. Instant reminder to me: Don’t Assume. Ever.

So we are doing a soft rollout of GAFE tools in my building. There was a rumor last spring we would be the second school in our district to go 1:1, but that didn’t happen. However, we do have Google accounts set up for all our students, and since I teach in a computer lab, I’ve been itching to give my students the chance to use the GAFE tools in their learning. Saw an opening today when they were studying disciplines of engineering and the engineering challenges of the 21st century. The assignment calls for students to create a power point slide of what they have learned about the specific challenge. I decided to create a Slides presentation, give all my students editing privileges, and have all my students contribute a slide summarizing what they had learned about the contributions of specific engineering disciplines to a major challenge facing us in the 21st century. OK, it’s not true collaboration, but it gave them an opportunity to work in the same document, and to practice the skills that requires. I want to give them an authentic audience and plan to run the presentation at our Open House this week.  My words: “create something you can be proud of when someone else sees it.”

I expected the day to be messy, like having too many cooks in the kitchen. What I got was kindergarten crap. As soon as students found out they had editing privileges, they started playing around with or deleting other students’ slides. As soon as they found the chat box, they started flaming each other in the chat box.

Pretty much NSFW, even blacked out. Nice.
Pretty much NSFW, even blacked out. Nice.

I let them know that I could see all the edits they made. I let them know I could revert to previous versions. I let them know I could screenshot their chat and send it to the deans.

I reminded myself I Am A Teacher. My job is to teach them. That’s content-area skills, and digital citizenship skills.

Being a teacher is a lot like being a major league baseball player. Went 0-for-4 today? Too bad. We got another game tomorrow. Get your head straight. While I was still shaking my head over infantile knuckleheads being little boys, in setting up an assignment for my class in Edmodo, I ran across this:

In my house, no question goes unanswered. You wanna know the answer? Look it up.
In my house, no question goes unanswered. You wanna know the answer? Look it up.

So here’s a freshman, interested enough in a company she heard about in a video we watched as part of a design process lesson to Google the company, find their web site, read the job descriptions, and to compare that to what we do in class.

The Digital Citizenship Divide. One group saw the tools we have as another way to cut on each other, to be childish. Another student saw the tools as an avenue of learning, and pursued her own interests and questions without my guidance.

So. It’s looks like I’ve got some more teaching to do. I’ll be back at it tomorrow.

 

There’s Always Something More To Do

About 10 years ago, my wife was approached by a member of her college circle who had a vision. She saw the need for young ladies, before they reached high school, to be exposed to opportunities in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). By this time, my wife’s friend was a technology professional, well respected in her field with a good, stable job.

The vision was for a non-profit organization that would pair middle school-age girls with professionals in the STEM fields for a mentoring relationship. They dreamed big dreams, benchmarked Teach For America, imagined starting in two communities then expanding the program statewide and eventually across the nation, helping to close the gender gap in the STEM world.

Along with a third professional, the ladies outlined their vision, made a business plan, assembled a team, wrote grants, located mentors, obtained the support of the local school district, and launched their program, known as Discoveries Unlimited.

DU survived for four years, putting it squarely within the 57 percent of all new small businesses that fail within the first five years. I’ve written the postmortem in my mind many times, playing the “what-if” game. But that’s another post for another day, and maybe another blog.

Let’s fast-forward to Thursday.

That’s my IED classroom. The guest, Erika Healy, was a member of Gavit’s very first Freshman Academy. She kept in touch with many of her Gavit teachers during her years at Purdue, and visited the school to meet with classes of current students. This year, for the first time, I had an opportunity to have her visit my classroom. She connected with my students instantly, sharing her stories of growing up in Hammond, going to Gavit, college life, and being hired as an engineer by a firm in Atlanta.

Guest speakers are nothing new. In the age of Skype, they don’t even have to physically come to Gavit to meet with a class. Although, to be honest, there would not have been near the connection with my kids if she had been a face on a screen rather than a person who took time to come to be with us in person. But (Blog Of Shame coming in 3, 2, 1…) that’s the first time I’ve had a former student come to my classroom. Ever.

Bad.

And here’s the thing. When asked what’s one thing she wishes were different about her high school days, you know what she said? Not better pizza in the cafeteria, or new desks, or air conditioning, or more technology. This stellar student wishes that Gavit graduates from previous years would have come back to the school during her day to share their stories with her classes. And it’s not that she didn’t know what to do and how to do it. Some of my students are just sick of hearing the same adults telling them the same thing.

"Curtis, I don't wanna go listen to some jive-ass preacher talking to me about heaven and hell."
“Curtis, I don’t wanna go listen to some jive-ass preacher talking to me about heaven and hell.”  (Image via Blues Brothers Central)

And some of my students just need a mentor. Whether its somebody who meets with them once a month to expose them to STEM, or as Rudy Ruettiger talks about, that guy who just says “Hey, good job. You can do it. Keep it up.” Of course, Rudy had Fortune to keep him focused on the big picture.

I’m finding it pretty tempting when my students tell me (sarcastically) “preach!”, or tell me “I don’t need another lecture”, to write them off. Fine. You don’t want to know? Don’t know. But maybe there’s something more I can do. Maybe I can find the person who can crack through the hard heads.

Worth a shot, right?

Hatching a plot.