Bud the Teacher

At the recommendation of Gary Stager and Chris Lehmann, one of my summer reads is A Schoolmaster of the Great City by Angelo Patri.  Truly, there is nothing new under the sun. The book was written by Patri in 1917. It rings true, though, with much of what I worry about in our schools today. Patri faced the same problems and shares many of my passions. That’s both troublesome and reassuring.  I’ll be seeking out more of his work.  In the meantime, here are some of the lines that jumped out at me as I read today:

• The antagonism between the children and teachers was far stronger than I had ever seen it before. The antagonism between the school and the neighborhood was intense. Both came from mutual distrust founded on mutual misunderstanding. The children were afraid of the teachers, and the teachers feared the children. (p. 14)
• As each day went by, cautiously I put the problem of school discipline before them and they responded by taking over much of the responsibility for it themselves. (p. 15)
• In this restless, uncertain sea of motion, noise, color and goings; of constant goings upstairs and downstairs, one learned to ‘go slow’ and watch and wait for his opportunity. (p. 19)
• The rod idea was at work. Books, benches, crowded rooms, sitting still, listening; talking only when called upon to recite, teaching where the teachers did the thinking; these conditions have meant and always will mean an imposed discipline, an imposed routine, whereas real discipline is a personal thing, a part of the understanding soul. To replace discipline of teacher-responsibility by the discipline of child-responsibility is a long, slow process. (p. 27)
• It was difficult to get teachers away from subject matter, from machinery, and toward children. How could it be otherwise? (p.30)
• I wanted ideas  expressed in color, movement, fun and not lines, ideas and not perfect papers, every one alike . .  .  . I wanted nature that would make the child’s heart warm with sympathy .  .  .that would make him laugh to feel the snow and the rain and the wind beating on his face. (p. 30)
• The feeling for the things that I wanted was rather more definite than the knowledge of how to attain the desired results. (p. 30)(Karl - that quote was just for you.  We all get stuck.)
• (On teaching robins) ‘Suppose you meet the class under the big oak tree in the morning and look for robins. Watch them until you and the children know as much about them as one can learn by looking  .  .  .  . Then talk over what you’ve seen and learned. Let everybody say his say sometime or other.  .  .  . Then when you have all the facts about him select those that are most worthwhile, and present them as the robin story.  You’ll find you’ll need very little drill.’ (p. 32)
• I felt that we had to win the parents as well as the taechers if the changes we were making, our emphasis on the ‘fads and frills’ of education, were to be accepted in the homes. (p. 33)
• Many parents believe that this is education. .  .  . They fear freedom, they fear to let the child grow by himself. (p. 37)
• I wanted opportunity for the masses, the best schools for the crowds, the best teachers for the heaviest load.  I thought in terms of service, they in terms of tradition. (p. 41)

Plenty more good stuff within.  I’d encourage you to read the book.

Learning Rocks

Originally uploaded by Bud the Teacher

Had a delightful and energizing time at the Constructivist Celebration on Sunday, a day of teacher play, experimentation and, in the words of Gary Stager, time spent with folks who have “a commitment to use computers in creative ways for the benefit of children.”

I took my XO along as my note-taking machine for the day, thinking that it was poetically appropriate to do so.  Brian C. Smith did the same, and, wouldn’t you know it, there were several other XO’s in the room, too.  I ended up doing plenty of OLPC and Sugar evangelism, which was fine by me.  I also got to play and explore and create.

But more important than my play were the statements and commitments by Gary Stager and Peter H. Reynolds, the day’s speakers, about the importance of creation and exploration, both for my practice as a teacher, but also, and of far greater value, my growth as a learner. I hear a true committment from both gentlemen that there is great value in creating rich environments for children and that we, as teachers, need to model the creation that we want our students to do.

Our students need to see us struggle and reach and grow and try and explore and learn and fail and stand back up at the end and say, “Wow. What’d I learn here?”  That’s probably the best motivation for them to get their hands dirty.  And we’ve never any credibility if we ask kids to do something that we won’t do.

I thank everyone involved with the event for a special day of battery recharging play.  Special thanks to my friends from IMSA, April-Hope Wareham and Scott Swanson, who brought a whole mess of XO’s and taught me plenty about them.

Beginning today, I’m going to be co-facilitating my school district’s CyberCamp, a two-week summer institute focused on teachers building projects that help them to integrate technology into their classrooms.  You won’t see me much here, but I do hope you’ll join us over at CyberCamp’s digital HQ as we do some intense learning and thinking and questioning together.

In fact, I’m counting on it.

One of my hopes for CyberCamp is that we are able to model how transparent and connected learning doesn’t have to be limited to a specific time, place and location, that teachers in my district can learn from you, and that you can learn from them.  We’re all in this together, and that’s a good thing.

We’re putting so much of CyberCamp online in part to honor the wisdom and knowledge of our teachers, but also because we want to model the power of learning networks as professional learning communities.  But that only works if people stop by and join with us in learning and sharing and thinking and questioning and . . . well, you get the point. If you’ve read this blog for any period of time, then you know that I think we’re all better when students and teachers all share and learn and take turns leading.  Teaching and learning can be so isolating - but it doesn’t have to be that way.  CyberCamp, I hope, is an attempt to demonstrate that.

So, I’m writing this post to formally invite you, whoever you are, to come and join in the fun.  And the hard work.  I’ve nothing to offer you except a great deal of learning.  But if you do come and leave a comment or two when you can, our CyberCamp will be all the better for it.  I thank you in advance, and hope to see you at CyberCamp.

Oh, and by the way - we don’t own this model of learning.  There are plenty of folks trying this type of work - and I am grateful to them for sharing what they do as they do it.  That said, I wanted to explicitly remind you that, if you like what you see here, feel free to take it and adapt it to your communities, to your needs.  I pledge to you that I’ll happily come to your CyberCamp.  In fact, I look forward to it.

I’m writing this morning from the National Writing Project’s web presence working retreat, an event I’ve been fortunate enough to have been involved with as a facilitator since its inception last year.  This is the second time we’ve run the event, which is an attempt to provide some time and structure for teams from writing project sites who wish to think strategically about their web presence.  We’ll spend the weekend thinking through the identity of our respective organizations and what we can do online to both reflect and support that identity and the good work that all of us are trying to do in our various locations around writing and teaching and learning. That means lots of things to lots of people, but there’s plenty of intersection in the general trends.

The event is pretty intense, and, while designed for sites to think about their organizational web presences, is very helpful to me as I think about my personal and professional life online.  One of the big questions that we’re asking people to think about is how their web presences are a reflection of and a lens into their work.  My personal web presence should be like that, too.  But I’m not sure that it is.  I’ve got content spread around the web in a variety of places, everywhere from Flickr to Twitter to this blog to my wiki (which is desperately in need of an update or seven) to my work with other groups and schools and people.  There’s plenty of personal mixed in with the professional, and I think the boundaries between those two areas of my life, never truly separate in “real, offline” life, continue to blur and fade and shift from day to day, week to week, month to year.  (That’s a good thing, I think, for the most part.) How do I, as a blogger and a teacher and a learner and a father and a husband and a citizen, do my best to ensure a consistent presence across the Internet that reflects what I believe to be important?  Just as essential - how do I bring all of that content that sits all over the place into some sort of a coherent whole?  Or do I need to, so long as all that content in all of those places, and others, reflects the message(s) that I want so desperately to convey - that learning and writing and thinking and engaging and passionately working for the benefit of others are essential habits and skills for everyone, regardless of background, culture, or profession?

I think, too, about what “web presence” means.  Having a presence and creating a presence are not necessarily the same thing.  Being and doing aren’t necessarily the same, either.

These are some of my thoughts as I head into a pretty intensive planning process, where, if last year is any indication, I’ll learn as much, and probably a great deal more, than I’m hoping to facilitate.  This summer, I’ll be doing a three-hour session on presence tools, a class of software that are about making one’s presence known in some formal and informal ways, Twitter being one of the tools that I’m most curious about at the moment.  I also would like to explore more about digital identity, a conversation I sort of started here a little while back.  My work this weekend will continue to influence that work.  Lots to learn.  Luckily, I’ve got plenty of smart folks here to learn from and with.  We should all be so lucky.

I read banned books

Originally uploaded by Bud the Teacher

I wonder if there’s a button with the slogan “I surf an unfiltered Internet,” or “I read filtered blogs.” Maybe “I read blocked blogs,” is better - more alliterative.

Along another line, perhaps a button with the message “I’d trust my kids in Al Upton’s classroom,” would be a good slogan, too.
Any graphic artists out there? I’ll buy in bulk.

Last week, I received a review copy of Relentless Pursuit: A Year in the Trenches with Teach for America.  Thought it was worth taking a minute or two to say that I’m definitely a fan of the book.  I’m impressed with the way the author, Donna Foote, has captured the different teachers, students,  administrators, and classrooms and painted them as actual human beings dealing with complex issues and feelings as opposed to one-dimensional cogs in the educational machine.

While the book’s set in Los Angeles, I recognize many of the folks, or at least the types, she’s written about.  Kids who disappear.  Teachers who will do anything to see their kids do well.  Teachers who burnout.  Administrators who try too hard - and aren’t successful.  The folks who show up because they’re supposed to, but who’ve given up.  I appreciate the portrait.  It’s real and honest and captivating and certainly not pretty.  A fine example, one with which I’m more familiar than I’d like to be, is this paragraph, a stream of consciousness from one teacher struggling to figure out how to help a student he noticed was cutting herself:

Who am I kidding?  I don’t know what I’m doing.  The fact that it’s left to me to identify a girl who is on the verge of killing herself is ridiculous.  You can fake the teaching, but when it comes to this stuff, you can’t.  How can it be that I’m the one diagnosing or even realizing that this girl is in trouble?  I don’t even know who her guidance counselor is.  If something happens, I could be held liable.  I don’t know who to go to.  And if I don’t write it on my hand, I won’t remember to even report it.  It’s crazy.  Oh God, I hope she’s okay.

I’ve been there.  Ignore the TFA aspect of this book - it’s an eye-opening account of what it means to be a teacher in a dysfunctional school in the United States.  Or maybe in any school in the United States.

As for TFA - any alumni out there want to comment on the program?  While I dig their goals, it doesn’t seem to me like the program is necessarily going to result in systemic education reform.  Although, I might be getting cynical on the whole idea of education reform - small group of committed citizens, right?   And perhaps TFA, as only a 20-ish year old organization, isn’t mature enough yet.  Foote, in this interview with U.S. News & World Report, talks about the “two-pronged” approach of TFA as a reform group:

TFA has a two-pronged theory of change. In the short term, it will send smart, energetic, committed young people into these terrible schools. But the longer-term vision, and the one that is most likely to bear fruit, is the idea that, because TFA has culled so carefully for leaders and because these young teachers will be so informed by this unbelievable experience of teaching in underperforming schools, they will go out and make big changes.

Now that the early corps members are approaching their early 40s, we’re starting to see signs that these leaders that have been embedded in society are starting to rise up. If you troll the education reform movements, the big nonprofits, and philanthropies, you’ll see TFA alum[s] in their ranks. I think a real marker was laid down last spring when TFA alum Michelle Rhee was named chancellor of the D.C. schools.

I’d be curious to hear from anyone with TFA experience.  And I’m looking forward to the rest of the book.  Not because I suspect the ending’s a positive one - but because I so appreciate the humanity of the story.

    I recently finished reading Seymour Papert’s book The Children’s Machine: Rethinking school in the age of the computer, and I’ve got lots to say formally about it.  But I only have a minute at the moment and I wanted to ask a question.  In the book, Papert forwards the idea that we should have as big a body of knowledge about learning and how to learn as we do about teaching and how to teach.  (He even postulates at one point that “learning theory” is much more about teaching than it is about actually learning. And I agreed with him.  Too often, we think of education that is something that we can do to someone, rather than with someone. We certainly can’t do it for someone.)

Since I’d never actually heard of the word before I read the book, I’m guessing that it’s not a big term/idea in teaching and learning circles.  But I don’t know - perhaps I’m out of the academic loop a bit.   It seems that the term does surface in some academic arenas, and has for some time, but I can’t get a sense of its meaning in those contexts. I guess I’m writing right now to both ask about your knowledge of the term as well as to ask if you think it’s true that we spend way too much time thinking about teaching without taking the time to think about learning.  Or, rather, are we too busy teaching to bother to learn?  I’ve read plenty of posts that suggest as much, and in fact, I think I’ve said it myself.  If that’s the case, what are we going to do about it?

Papert says it, at one point, this way:

…participants thought of themselves as teachers-in-training rather than as learners. Their awareness of being teachers was preventing them from giving themselves over fully to experiencing what they were doing as intellectually exciting and joyful in its own right, for what it could bring them as private individuals. The major obstacle in the way of teachers becoming learners is inhibition about learning. (p.72 - from this page of quotes, which are worth reading) 

It’s frustrating that this isn’t a new idea, but that it’s still revolutionary.  Read the book.  I’ll give it a more formal review later. Short version: Two thumbs up.  Mindstorms is on my nightstand, now, sitting on top of my XO, which is appropriate for so many reasons.

This collection of articles, published as Threshold Magazine - New Directions Spring 2008 by Cable in the Classroom and the KnowledgeWorks Foundation is one of the finest “think bombs” related to education and coming changes that I’ve seen printed on paper. I received a copy by accident, as my predecessor was on just the right mailing list.

There’s a great think piece on open textbooks, and Stephen Downes has a piece in the issue, too, on educational choices and virtual options. Also included is a handy copy of the Future Forces Affecting Education map by KnowledgeWorks. Might be worth getting some extra hard copies to share with your favorite administrator, teacher, school board member, etc. (Here’s the reprint inquiry info. I’ll be calling on Monday.)

    Today’s podcast is a semi-rambling review of the XO.  I also manage to mention Learning 2.0 (have you registered yet? We’d love to have you.) and a couple other little things.  Enjoy and let me know - what are you doing with your XO?

Links I mentioned

The OLPC Wiki
XoChat.org
Educon
Learning 2.0

I didn’t mention this really useful walkthrough of the XO user interface.  But I should have.

    A click through Wes’s post on his son’s improvement in and excitement for reading (congratulations, Alexander!) took me back to Stephen Krashen’s website, where I rediscovered his "88 Generalizations about Free Voluntary Reading", a handy one pager of research findings on how and why we should be using SSR (that’s sustained silent reading) in school. 
    Starting this year, we begin almost every morning with SSR, followed by a building wide writing prompt — and sometimes I need to remind staff why that’s important.  It never ceases to amaze me just how hard teachers have to fight for time to simply read and write, but we do.  This’ll help.   Thanks, Dr. Krashen.
    PS — For those of you who’d like to hear more about SSR and why it’s a good thing, you might want to give a listen to this podcast, recorded by Wes, of Dr. Krashen from a while back.