All Of the Above

Today we did a little experiential learning at Freeport Middle School. 

The essential question: Why is it not a good idea to wear T-shirts and shorts to school in December in Maine? 

What we discovered: Sometimes it's not a drill but the real thing and you have to stand outside when it's very, very cold and the fire trucks take a long, long time to come. 

Cause: A burning bread stick in a microwave oven.

Effect: I feel cold. 

Conclusion: (choose one)
a.  Do not put bread sticks in the cafeteria microwave.
b.  Dress warmly in Maine in the winter.
c.  All of the above.

Twenty-One Chairs

The material world is an entirely different reality to 13-year-olds. This beats last year's whirlygig constructed out of strips of lined paper atop the air vent.

We're Going to Have a Great Day!

This morning upon waking, I caught myself conversing inside my mind as if I was directing a class of students.  I might even have been talking out loud. A bit.

Okay. What's the date today everyone? Thursday. You're right! Almost the end of the week. We're getting there. Here we go.

Made it upright and collected the dogs.

Good morning! Everybody up and out! (This part was out loud). The "everybody" is all of two dogs, one big boxer and one small Boston terrier, who sleep on their own doggie beds on the floor next to our bed. My husband is not part of the everybody because he sleeps like a rock and wakes up after everybody else anyways.

The two dogs love the "everybody," I sense, because it makes them feel like they're in a pack, and according to Cesar Milan, all dogs need to feel part of a pack. They happily trot ahead, looking back at me for direction. I lead even from the rear, and out we go into the dawn for them to take care of dog business. 

The leading the dogs part is not so weird. They like the routine, tune into my voice, and who doesn't talk to their pets? What startled me this morning is how I oh-so-easily slid back into the narration of directing a whole group right inside my own head.

Ok. Shower done. Time? Yup, we're looking good. Let's make sure we remember the laptop charger today...


My God, when did I start doing this? I know I wasn't doing it this summer. Did it start with the new school year? When did my self-talk change to this craziness of the plural pronoun?

And then it hit me. I'm old. I am suddenly old. Just a few days before the students arrived this year, I turned 50. Half a century. It's the onset of dementia. I'm becoming daft, delusional!

The idea of retirement, for the very first time, lit up in my mind. When do people retire now-a-days? Certainly people are working longer and stronger than they ever have in history, considering technology's easing of physical labor and medicine's support of our health. But at the rate my mind is going now, with all this "we" and "everybody" business, I might slip into directing shoppers at Hannaford any day now.

Well, we'll just have to work on avoiding that, right? So for now let's just get lunched packed and start our day. We're going to have a great day, everybody!


















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It Could Have Happened in My Classroom

This little classroom moment posted to YouTube is making its rounds on the social media scene under a developing digital genre, "cringe." I could be wrong about it being a developing genre.  It's quite possible that cringe is no longer in its nascency but legit and here to stay.  I hope so. I'm all about truth-seeing and truth-telling. And here they are with the wide open truth of themselves, giving it their all -- their hearts, their souls, and what they have so far of their developing rhythm and body control. It's got to be middle school right? I am thinking late 7th grade or 8th. High school teachers, could this possibly be 9th?

Cringe is hard to explain. The sound of the word itself does a good job to begin with. When you say the word, you just can't help squinting or puckering up some part of your face. And what exactly lands something in the category of cringe? Older folks might think that little gal in the front is doing a fine job with her clogging dance but I think most of us can feel the cringe. Perhaps we need to turn to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart's famous 1964 quote on obscenity: "I know it when I see it."

Viewing this YouTube clip makes me cringe on two levels.  First, I cringe remembering myself as a middle school kid. My gawky display at cheerleading tryouts. The streaks of orange in my hair, that were supposed to be highlights, from spraying Sun-In on selected clumps. Reading aloud to the class a report on oceanography -- all of oceanography - that I had captured onto 8 pages using an IBM Selectric typewriter.

The second level of cringe is present day.  I cringe as a teacher because this scene could have happened in my classroom. Rap and dancing like this has happened more times then I can count.  There was the time the entire plot of The Cay was relived by three boys, one reading the rap, the other busting moves around the room, and the third going at it with drumsticks on an overturned plastic bucket. Another time there was a poetic-costumed-musical interpretation (not sure what to call it) of suffering and death from the bubonic plague of the Middle Ages. 

Why do we do it?  Why do we allow the foolishness, the sometimes elaborate preparation followed by awkward displays, time-consuming costumes changes and furniture rearrangement while we grin and bare it? We know full well it's a stretch, at best, to align the frolic with Common Core. And we know full well that the outcome is bad. With the exception of a very few, most of the time middle school kids just are not good at presenting. We can coach them and give them rubrics, but in the end they're just not there yet.

But still we do it. We give them the time and the space, the projects and the prompts and encourage them to walk right out there into the land of cringe. Because that's what middle school teachers do. The outcome will be bad, almost always, but we must never let them know that. The important thing is they put themselves out there, show their true colors, give it a try and hopefully laugh a little too. It's 'A' for effort. 'A' for risk-taking. If you look real hard at whatever evidence flutters down after the fallout of the display -- the tattered script or a google doc that the group used to plan -- you may even find 'A' for content. 

Years later they will cringe at themselves, but in that moment they must never know anything other than it was absolutely amazing. 

Pedagogy vs. Pack Leading

Cosmo & Elmer watching me...always watching.

It should not take me by surprise by now but it does, how the new students enter the classroom on Day 1 -- tentative, their eyes on me, watching. Ears listening. Every movement, every cue. People who study such things say that middle schoolers have three basic questions on that first day: 1. Are my teachers nice?; 2. Where is my locker?; and 3. When is lunch? These are all important, and very much on middle schoolers' minds, but I think we need to look at question number one a little more thoroughly. There's a lot more going on there.  Here's what I pick up on when students first lock eyes with me:

1a.  Is this teacher nice?

1b.  Does she know what she's doing?

1c.  Is she going to understand me?

1d.  Am I going to understand her?

1e.  Is she going to keep the classroom running well?

1f.  Is she going to take charge of the situation if something is not going well?

1g.  Is she she going to create interesting lessons?

Over the years I have read some great books and articles on classroom management, observed master teachers, and taken workshops and classes that have all taught me some effective skills. Yet last night, when my brain was frazzled with planning and over planning, I reached not for pedagogy but the soothing and simplistic words of the master dog trainer, Cesar Milan in his 

article Essential Qualities of a Pack Leader

1. Be calm

2. Be consistent

3. Be instinctual

4. Be respectful

5. Be confident

Dumb, Dumber and Smarter

Now hold on a tick here! I haven't read Mark Bauerlein's 2009 book The Dumbest Generation, which appears to be built on the claim that people under 30 have been stupefied by the digital age, but already I don't like it's brash title. I came across the title when viewing a PBS documentary Digital Nation: Life on the Digital Frontier. Viewing a clip from the documentary was one of this week's assignments in a course I am taking, Digital Writing in the Classroom.

You have to be careful about labeling generations. Tom Brokaw went the brash-titled route as well with The Greatest Generation, people born in the 1920's  and I can think of more than a few moral shortfalls that bunch had! 

The under-30 set are some of the kindest, conscientious, technologically literate people who are socially, environmentally, and fiscally responsible to boot. As I have just turned 50 this summer, I have come to realize I will depend on these people when I start to wear Depends, so never would I put them down. I wonder if Bauerlein thought of that?

In any event, the real argument seems to be, are they dumber than older folks because their brains have been altered and their attention spans shortened due to their immersion in digital technology? The studies presented in the PBS video give evidence that students are now reading fewer books and writing with less stamina, in "burst and snippets." But "Dumb" lies in the eyes of the beholder. It depends what you're looking for. The target definition of "smart" is changing -- and it's changing rapidly. 

Students coming into my classroom as young adolescents have most definitely changed over the last dozen years.  I have seen that tendency to write in snippets and to be daunted by lengthy texts. More and more I need to work on drawing them into the traditional culture of reading and writing by teaching and especially modeling it directly and then providing the time during class to practice it. Without the time to practice within the classroom and without explicitly making my own contemplative processes as a reader and writer transparent to them, their skills would lag. 

Yet, my students have also changed in new and exciting ways as they work with digital literacies more and more in their lives and for academic purposes. They come in now with a well-developed eye for visual composition, in photos that they take as well as layout and graphic design. They are able to outpace me in producing iMovie and using Garage Band. It seems like once I get them started, they take off and find something new that I did not think about or even know about! And with minimal instruction about task and parameters, students have a great deal of enthusiasm and stamina when I ask them to interact digitally within their book clubs and invent new ways within digital formats to share information and authentic reflections with one another as they read.

So I am not willing to label the younger generation dumb and am keeping an open mind on new ways they can show me smart.

Mrs. Watermelon Head Cat

No one tells you this when you first start teaching, but rule number one in "Cultivating a Positive Classroom Environment" is you don't change your hairstyle during the school year, especially in middle school. Students don't like it when you change. They are allowed to saunter in suddenly donning cat ears atop hair newly streaked in psychedelic colors, but trim a bit here or curl a bit there and you are met with near-Puritanical scrutiny -- furrowed brows, whispers behind your back. The bolds ones will state, with flat-as-a-pancake intonation, "You got a haircut." 


So a hairstyle change for a teacher must come prior to day one. With all the stick-to-your-neck heat this summer, I went shorter than usual on my back-to-school haircut and had it graduated in the back to get it up and out of the way. There! A new look. Shorter than ever!  If I like it, I can keep it up with slight trims as we go through the year. If I don't like it, I can allow it to grow out slowly. Either way, my students will be sheltered from the sudden shock of their teacher changing her appearance mid-year.

With my new look established, I thought I could turn my mind onto more important things, like how can I refine the clarity of my Student Learning Objectives? And, more importantly, do I have enough boxes of not-the-scratchy-kind-but-the-good-kind of tissues?

Then my 22-year-old son saw my new haircut and my confidence sank. 

"Mom, why did you get a Can I Speak to Your Manager haircut?"

Google it. It's a real thing. I did, and I was horrified. 

"Is it really that bad? Isn't it a little more skillfully cut? A little less extreme?"

He walked around me a few times, rubbed his chin, and changed his mind. He decided it was not a Can I Speak to Your Manager. My haircut was, in fact, a Watermelon Head Cat.

Go ahead. Google that one. It comes up too.

Here I am three days away from lift off and I am Mrs. Watermelon Head Cat! 

Well, there's nothing to be done about it now. I could don cat ears too, but that would just be weird. Nobody wants a weird teacher.

As always, my husband to the rescue. He says cheerily, "Do you know the difference between a good haircut and a bad haircut?" He smiles then delivers the punchline, "About two weeks."

Two weeks. Two weeks until I am Mrs. Cowperthwaite again.