Quarter Century`

Tomorrow is my 25th birthday, and the number 25 feels significant to me for some reason.  I haven't thought much about my last few birthdays because who really cares about turning 23 or 24 anyway? Turning 23 and 24 was just marking the passage of time, and those birthdays felt somewhat arbitrary.  While 25 is no less arbitrary, it feels a little more significant this time around because of the other events that have occurred recently.

When I was growing up, I had no idea what it was like to be someone in your mid 20's.  I felt like I understood what my youth was for, and I felt like I could understand what adulthood would be like, but there was this huge blank space where I simply couldn't imagine life as a mid 20-something. 

Elementary school was for exploring and having fun.  Nobody had expectations for you in elementary school.  Everyone just expected you to play and grow.  Middle school was that weird time when everything became awkward and everyone was obsessed with "being cool."  Middle school was when I started to care about girls, popular kids, and having my own "cool" personality.  I knew that high school was a time for being involved in a bunch of activities, doing stupid stuff with your friends, playing sports, meeting girls, and getting into college.  High school was preparation for living on your own and for going to college.

When I got to college I understood it as the best chance to learn as much as I could from some really brilliant people.  I tried to take as much advantage of college as I could.  I volunteered, I played sports, I took random classes, I studied abroad, and I learned a ton.  I read some really interesting stuff, and I read some of the most dull pages I have ever laid eyes on.  I found that I really do have a passion for teaching people, and I found that I never want to live at home again.  I could barely stand being home for the summer after my freshman year, and I really do love my parents.  After that first taste of freedom, I just can't stand to be under someone else's roof anymore.

My first confrontation with the unknown came after undergrad, before I made the decision to get my teaching degree.  I graduated with only a small amount of loan debt, and I realized that I really could make any decision I wanted.  I was, in a sense, free.  However, I always knew that I would not stop with just a bachelor's degree.  I knew that I would pursue some career that would require further training or education.  My first confrontation with the unknown was not the same as now.  I always had the comforting feeling of having a next step.  I would go back to school, or I would pursue a professional career, and I would continue my ascent up the ladder to adulthood. 

I still didn't have a clue what people actually did in their mid twenties.  I understood that you simply got older, but I didn't feel like people in their mid twenties had a set place in the world - a role to play, or a specific job to do.  I couldn't envision myself as a twenty-something, I didn't know what it would be like, and I didn't really have expectations for how it would be.  After some soul searching I realized that teaching really was my passion and that going back to school for my teaching degree was really the one option that was perfect for me.

A year and a half later I am a teacher, and I am learning how to be a good teacher.  What feels very weird to me is that I am now a teacher, and that I am not preparing to be a teacher.  In some sense I am becoming a teacher while people all around me expect me to already be a teacher.  I now have a responsibility and an obligation to these young people to be an adult and a role model.  I have a purpose: to teach these young people to learn.

That shift in responsibility, obligation, and purpose is made all the more poignant by another huge life event this year: my marriage.  I have told Cyd this before, but I was afraid to start dating her because I could never see our relationship ending.  I knew that falling in love with her would be the last time I fell in love.  That's a scary thought at 19 years old.  Its a profound thought on the eve of being 25, but it isn't as scary anymore. I have a responsibility and an obligation to her which goes beyond the strength of our relationship when we were dating, or engaged.

My whole life has been preparation: college, graduate school, dating and engagement.  Now I have become someone, and I feel this growing urge to be someone, or to do something.  It doesn't feel like it is enough to simply be that guy who will be good in the future, I need to be that guy who is good in the present.  What I feel, as I am about to turn 25, is the immediacy of the present.

And the weird thing is that I love that feeling.  I am truly prepared, and I have had the greatest first quarter century that anyone could ask for.  I welcome the responsibility to shape these young minds that I have been charged with, and I enjoy the challenge of building an adult life. (Fake it till you make it, right?)  I just want to end by saying thank you to the hundreds of people who have had an impact on my young life.  You have all made it such a wonderful ride so far.

Here's to the next 25 years!

Homework

There is an article going around by Alfie Kohn about assigning homework and how it is a myth that homework completion leads to student success.  It's something I think about a lot.  Do students really learn from doing homework?  Is it really necessary practice, or is it just something that we teachers assign our students because we had to do homework when we were in school?  So much of modern education just repeats the practices of the past, even when those practices don't hold up under scrutiny. 

I don't claim to have the answer about homework, I just think it is an interesting question.  When I was student teaching at the high school, homework did not count for a grade, therefore students did not complete the homework.  I could count on 1 or maybe 2 students completing the homework assignment for the night, so I could not refer to the homework during the lesson.  It got to the point that writing the homework assignment on the whiteboard was practically a useless exercise.  It was something I did just because it's something that teachers do.  All good teachers assign homework, right?

Because I did not have the incentive of graded homework, I tried to appeal to students' intrinsic motivations to learn.  "Homework is valuable practice," I said.  I tried relating it to sports: "If you never practice dribbling, how can you play basketball? If the only time you pick up a basketball is during the game, you won't win the game."  I did not have success with this line of argument.  Granted, I could have done better at motivating my students in the classroom, so it's no wonder they had little motivation outside of the classroom.  At the end of the day, I felt like some sort of disservice was being done when I didn't give my students something to work on at home.  Homework has to matter, doesn't it?

I can remember times in my life when homework assignments have been meaningful and have been learning experiences, and I can remember times when homework was just a waste of time.  The majority of the time homework was just a waste of time, to be honest.  If I already understood how to do the work in class, why did I need to repeat it when I got home?  On the other hand, if someone doesn't understand the work in class and can't complete it at home, why waste time on a task that can't be completed? 

I think the answer has to be that homework only increases learning when it matters to students.  When I really cared about an essay, I researched, pre-wrote, drafted, edited, revised, and proof-read.  When I didn't care about an essay, I wrote 5 paragraphs, clicked spell check, and turned it in (maybe with some creative fonts and margins to meet the minimum length requirement).  Rote memorization and routine practice doesn't really transfer to meaningful and lasting learning, so a lot of homework assignments are just a waste of everyone's time.

Again, I don't claim to know the answer to homework's (lack of) efficacy.  I just want to know what other people think.  Is there merit to Alfie Kohn's claim that homework is a waste of time?  Or is there truth in the adage that practice makes perfect?  Or is it a mix of the two?

Management: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

I was in a great mood today, and I really needed it to make it through Monday.  Because of the inservice day on Friday, the kids had a 3 day weekend, which always makes for an interesting return to school on Monday.  It is amazing what that one extra day of freedom will do to middle schoolers - they forget things amazingly quickly.  The great lesson you taught on Thursday is merely a distant memory to the students who enter your classroom on Monday.  You need to reteach material, revisit expectations, and remind students of upcoming tests and due dates.  I haven't found a good way to lesson plan for Mondays yet.  I seem to either plan too much by trying to move forward too quickly, or I plan too little by expecting a review activity to take longer than it does.  Either way, Monday's are just plain tough.

To make matters worse, we are 1/6 of the way through the school year, and the honeymoon period is definitely over.  I'm not that new, fun (charming, handsome, talented, etc.) teacher anymore; I'm just another one of their teachers who expects them to come to class prepared and ready to work.  I cannot just use the force of my personality to make these students behave anymore.  I need the structures and classroom procedures I have in place to work better so I don't have to.

My philosophy around classroom management is that students should always be treated as if they are intrinsically motivated and that extrinsic motivators should only be used as a last resort.  I really do believe that every student wants to feel successful, and that most misbehavior is just an attempt to gain attention from me or from the student's peers.  I've seen so many students completely turn around in class once they start understanding the material and participating with their group.  Nobody likes feeling stupid, so it is easier to slack off and be off task than it is to honestly confront your confusion.

The trouble I am having is with other students.  I'm making (slow, painfully slow) progress with a few tough students who never contribute in class.  I know that they can be a part of the classroom, and that success is an addictive feeling.  I have elicited some (short, semi-articulate) responses from these kids, which feels like a huge success to me.  The next step is trying to help them integrate into their groups, which is extremely challenging.

If there are 4 kids in a group where 3 understand the assignment while the last kid is barely holding onto the material, then the 3 kids who understand will want to just complete the assignment themselves.  It's natural to want to finish the work at a higher quality and quicker pace, and it's natural to resent the student who is slowing everything down and making it look bad.  This makes the 4th kid feel bad, resent his or her group member, and not want to participate.  All the gains I made with a student can be erased in a second by a harsh word or look from a peer.  Middle schoolers care much more about peer approval than adult approval, so peer-to-peer relationships are incredibly difficult to manage in the classroom.

Here's my quandary: how do I respond to behavior from students who are on task but are being rude to the kid who is slowing up the whole group?  It is especially hard when one of my on-task students points a finger at a kid who is off task, because I can relate with the student who resents being slowed down and I can understand the response of the kid who is struggling with the assignment.  I can't allow students to be mean to each other, but I can't baby the students who are consistently off task.

How do other teachers handle this sort of issue?

Fool's Gold, Rotten Eggs, and Engaged Kids

Thursday and Friday were probably my best teaching days of the year so far, and I felt really comfortable with the class. On Thursday, I was telling the class about a geology field trip I took over the summer where I broke off a piece of fool's gold with a hammer at an outcropping on the side of the McKenzie River highway near the town of Nimrod. Back in the Oregon gold rush, miners would search for precious metals by blowing a big hole in a rock outcropping with dynamite and just seeing what pops up.  If they got fool's gold, there was little chance that anything valuable would be nearby, so they would move on. Right on the side of the highway near Nimrod there's a outcropping that had been blasted, which was one of our first stops on the field trip.

We have been studying characteristic properties of matter, and we were talking about how miners used characteristic properties to tell the difference between fool's gold and real gold.  The miners used the density of gold to separate it from all the other lighter materials by swirling it around in water in a pan.  The denser gold sinks to the bottom while the lighter dirt, sand, and other material is suspended near the top.  When the miner pours the water out of the pan, the lighter junk falls out and the gold remains in the pan. 

I have been trying to get the idea of characteristic properties to stick in their heads for weeks now, and I thought that this was a great example.  A characteristic property is always true for a substance, regardless of the size of your sample.  It is something that helps you identify what the substance is, thus it must always be true for the substance.  What is cool about the panning and density is that even little bits of gold dust will sink to the bottom because they are denser.  It's not just the big nuggets that sink, its all of the gold.

The great thing about fool's gold and middle school science is that fool's gold is made of iron and sulfur.  Almost every kid has heard about fool's gold, and a lot of students had heard of sulfur.  When I asked them how they can identify sulfur, a few kids started to giggle.  Those who had heard about sulfur knew that it stinks like rotten eggs.  There is no better way to get a room of middle schoolers to pay attention than to say that something smells like stinky farts.  Now there's a characteristic property for you.


I'm excitedly explaining this to the class when a girl in the front raises her hand. 
 "You're pretty into all this stuff.  You should have been a... like..  science person or something."
"A scientist?"
"Yeah, totally.  That's it."

She was right, I am pretty into all this stuff, but not enough to be a professional scientist.  I'm nerdy enough to want to learn about everything, but I don't have it in me to study a topic for hours, weeks, and months on end.  I get interested in the next topic too easily and I can't stay focused on one problem for too long.  What was great about this little exchange was that she was actually paying attention, and the rest of the class was engaged, too.  When I'm nerding out about a topic, it is more engaging to the students because it is more engaging to me.

One of the biggest lessons I'm learning this year is how much of teaching is like show business.  You need to constantly be moving around the classroom, telling stories, showing videos and pictures, writing things on the board, varying the mode of presentation, and entertaining.  In a way, I have a full time job keeping twelve and thirteen year olds entertained, and I have to try to teach them some content along the way.  Sometimes I wish that I could just present all the ideas up on the board in a logical order and have the kids learn but it just doesn't work that way.

It's an incredibly simple concept: your lessons are engaging only when you are engaged teaching them.  Students feed off of your energy, and half-assing a lesson only leads to students half-assing their work.  On the other hand, it's incredibly difficult to be fired up about ratios 5 times a day, every day.  It's a balance I'm still trying to strike, but I feel like I'm getting closer.

Sick Day

Today I'm taking my first real sick day, and it does feel nice to lay around the house rather than working at school all day.  I've got this congestion and head cold and fever that is just generally uncomfortable, but not debilitating by any means.  I feel bad enough to know I shouldn't be at work, but not bad enough to feel like I can spend the whole day in bed watching Netflix.  (On a related note, Law and Order is no longer streaming on Netflix as of today, so I'm not even sure what I would binge watch).

So there I was, trying to take a nap, while all these thoughts kept swirling through my head.  I wondered if I left good enough sub plans, then rationalized that it probably didn't make that much of a difference, and that I should try to sleep.  I worried about the lessons I have to plan, the tests I need to grade, and the paperwork I need to complete, but I really wanted to get some rest.  My philosophy is usually that being a healthy and happy teacher is the most important part of teaching, but it is so hard to stay healthy and happy when you can't keep your mind off of the hundreds of things that seem so important and pressing.

I settled for 45 minutes of half-sleep, dozing in intervals just long enough to let my sinuses drain from one side to the other before flipping over and starting the whole process again.  I didn't feel that sick, and I kept thinking of all the wonderful and productive things I could be doing, now that I had the time for it.  On the other hand, I don't want to push myself and prolong my sickness by working too hard too soon.  Sometimes it is really more productive to rest now and take care of business when you are completely well.  However, sometimes you can rest easier when you take care of some tasks that have been looming over you for a while.  I kept going back and forth between the desire to feel productive and the desire to rest.

I settled for a middle ground: blogging!  It's not exactly productive, but not unproductive either.  And it makes me feel better to get my thoughts out on the page.  Writing what I'm thinking makes it seem less complicated.  Once it's laid out there on the page, it really doesn't seem like that big of a problem at all.  When it's swirling around in my head, it seems like some huge conundrum.

I'm sure I'll end up grading some tests, planning some lessons, and dealing with some chores around the house.  When do I have a whole weekday just to spend around the house with nothing to do other than relax?  I wonder what other people (teachers or otherwise) do on their sick days.  Anybody have a hint for a relaxing and ameliorative day?