Yesterday our schools were on a two-hour delay, which is difficult enough when you are on an alternating day schedule with 90 minute periods and you have the same prep on both A day and B day. But at least I had almost an hour. Being closed today is the equivalent of the one section of AP government that I have on B day losing 2 days of instruction. I have a required assessment that must be given next week and cannot be postponed (unless we lose those days to snow).
So temporarily I have my three sections of AP Government in slightly different places.
For the two STEM classes that would meet today, one is against a deadline for finishing presentations to be made to outside evaluators next Monday and Wednesday - they will now have only Thursday to complete and practice their presentations.
And I am reminded once again of the foolishness of rigid pacing guides which do not allow the flexibility of meeting the needs of things like weather interrruptions, school closing because of earthquakes (yes, I have experienced that).
Here I am only talking about having classes in the same subjects being forced to be in different places. For me, that is not a problem, because that happens often by my choice, to meet the needs of those particularly students who collectively make up each class.
But that is the least of the problems.
My students are not standardized.
They read at different rates. Some write quickly, others need more time to form their thoughts. Some who write quickly have trouble speaking, others speak quickly and fluently but freeze a bit when asked to put their thoughts down in writing.
They arrive in my room with different backgrounds, varying amounts of relevant prior knowledge, and a wide variety in things outside school that will inevitably impact how they "perform" in the 90 minutes they spend with me every other day.
One reason when I am asked what I teach I always answer students is because in a sense it almost does not matter what the assigned curriculum is - oh to be sure I take seriously my responsibility to help them learn the relevant content and acquire the relevant skills. But since I cannot claim "I taught it but they didn't learn it" - and not because I am concerned about how I will be evaluated by others - rather, I I must find a way to help them learn, no matter how much I must change or vary my teaching to meet the needs of EACH student.
Please keep reading.
We need to ask ourselves whether our goal in education is to reshape everyone in similar fashion. Even if we believe that their is a common set of knowledge we want our students to have and that there are skills we believe each educated person should be able to apply, that does not mean that each student will achieve either the knowledge or the skill in the same way. It is equally unfair to ask students to "perform" at a level that is too much beyond where they start lest they shut down and give up as it is to hold back a student to keep them with the class when her knowledge, skill and comprehension are such that what is occurring in class is boring, a waste of time. On the latter I speak from experience - I became so bored in elementary school by about fourth grade that I started zoning out. In my case that meant I often missed things to which I needed to pay attention, and thus my learning was for many years inconsistent.
Children are natural scientists - they try things, evaluate what worked and what didn't.
Children are natural artists - let them play with blocks, or with clay, or with miscellaneous objects.
Children are natural musicians, even if they have no sense of rhythm and cannot hold a note - they play with sound, pitch, and rhythms.
Too often what we have done in education is to take these natural inquisitions and instead providing a context where they develop as passions squeeze them into rigid patterns that squeeze out the natural inclination and turn off the natural inclinations.
We create a culture where students become afraid of exploring for fear of being wrong - after all, is not that one result of turning all activities into numeric or letter grades? What if instead we gave credit for being wrong, recognizing why one is wrong? Is not that a key part of developing the ability to learn on one's own?
I recently was on of a handful of classroom teachers who attended a conference sponsored in large part by the National Academy of Engineering. People came from all over the country. There were university administrators, engineers, entrepreneurs, artists . . . One purpose was to rethink education in engineering and related fields, to see how the the acquisition of new technical understanding could also be developed and exploied (hence entrepreneurs) - one person there had multiple inventions he had been able to develop into commercially viable enterprises.
One key point that came up again and again from a variety of perspectives was this - we need to help our students learn how to fail. Read that again - how to fail, not how to succeed. If we focus too much on success we discourage the kinds of exploration that lead to real innovation, that create new understanding. One can not wildly try anything, but instead needs to learn what are appropriate risks to take, what kind of failures can be productive because (a) we have some concept of what it is we are trying, and (b) we have developed the ability to reflect on what we have done and why the results we have obtained are as they are - or perhaps, to recognize where we need to understand something we had not considered in order to understand the (often very unexpected).
results.
After all, if we fail to prove our hypothesis does not make the effort wasted, especially if in the process we develop a broader or deeper understanding of what was wrong with how we shaped that hypothesis.
As one supervising senior Capstone projects among some of our STEM students, this is a point that has been hard for some of them to grasp. I require they document their thinking and their explorations, however fragmentary, to go back and evaluate obstacles and failures (false paths) as well as successes. I am trying to help them learn how to learn, how to fail, how to learn from that failure.
Because there are only about a dozen students in that class, I am able in a 90 minute period to give each the kind of personal attention that should be part of the learning experience of all our children, and yet to combine that with the social experience of having them share what they are doing with their classmates, including having to answer questions that they would otherwise not consider.
That social process with classmates? Two of the brightest and most dedicate students in that class, young ladies, had each started a project during the summer about which they thought they were passionate. When challenged in their thinking by their classmates, they both realized that their projects were not workable, and why. Fortunately, this class is a full year, which allows for false paths (I think at this point only students are still working on their first ideas). One of the young ladies tried a second idea, found reasons it was unworkable, and now they two of them are working on a project which is related to passion they both share - yoga.
Similarly, my students in STEM Policy have to prepare policy briefs and do presentations on them. They start with an idea, explore what literature there is. They are learning how to put together a brief, with an executive summary or the equivalent. We have analuyzed a variety of briefs - in educational policy (which of course is my area of expertise), in environmental issues, in food issues, etc. The quality of final deliverables will vary greatly, but all of the students, working in self-organized groups of 2 to 4 students, will have developed skills and understanding that can help them not only produce similar products in the future, but properly evaluate the policy presentations of others. In other words, all of them will have accomplished real-world and useful education.
Education.
I have three STEM classes. None of those students will in their time with me see a single multiple choice question.
All will be expected to learn to express themselves in writing and verbally.
Each has been allowed to select the topic of their work because of personal interest, so that in STEM Policy, so long as we could keep it in the general arena of STEM, either of their own STEM education (the policies of the school and the program) or of STEM subjects in the larger world they were working on something that personally engaged them.
I try very hard to understand my students. I try to let them know in an unthreatening way that I understand them, that I accept and like them.
At the start of the year I told all my students that I would accept what they told me (perhaps why work was not done on time) unless (note - not until) they demonstratedd that I could not trust them. I have no trouble walking out of a room during a test, because by my trusting them they have learned to trust me.
Over the week off around Thanksgiving I wrote each student a personal thank you note. In one case all I could thank a young man for was the one homework he had done - ti was recent, and I could afffirm that. In several cases I could at best thank them for what I hope I would be seeing from them. In same cases I made some detailed comments, including urging some of my brightest students to get outside their comfort zones, to take risks.
None of the notes was long. Each was personal - I would sit and think about that student for a couple of minutes and then let that reflection guide what I wrote.
I was not always completely on target. In a few cases I had to tell students it was hard for me to know how to help/teach them unless they would trust me and lower the barriers they had put between us.
When I distributed them, I told each class that they should have no doubt regardless of what had happened between us that I liked each of them and believed each of them could succeed. IF I did not, it would not be fair to them and I would ask to have them transferred to another teacher - in more than 17 years of teaching I have done that only once.
I don't know if these ramblings will make sense to those who read them. I suspect that many who teach will understand what I am trying to say, and their frustration is that they have too many students and not enough time and they are being required to follow rigid curriculum, spend too much time practicing for meaningless tests.
I acknowledge I have been far more fortunate than most teachers. I only have 123 students on my roles now - too many, but not the 198 I had one year. My STEM classes do not require lots of formal lesson planning, since they are all project based, and I place on the students (all juniors and seniors) some of the responsibility for organizing and directing how we spend our time.
I have also been lucky in that I have a reputation and have worked for principals willing to give me a lot of flexibility to meet the needs of my students.
I teach with my heart and my soul.
I try to be vulnerable to my students, letting them know when I don't know.
I admit my mistakes - and I make them, because I take risks, and thus sometimes fail.
In this I am modeling for my students what I want them to do.
All of my students know about my wife and her cancer. If I go a week without updating them they will ask.
The invite me to their games, and their plays.
No, I do not reach all. I cannot make a student learn. I can prod, invite, entice, provoke, provide a context, but ultimately that student has to decide to open up enough to be willing to learn.
As I have aged, I have wrestled with whether I should continue. Teaching takes time and energy that is then not available for other purposes.
I have been able to teach as I have because my wife understands that this is my life, my passion. And despite the idiocy of what is happening in educational policy - and believe me, I am subject to much of that even as I am somewhat creative in not allowing it to overly restrict what I need to do for my students - so long as I feel I can make a difference I do not know how I can do otherwise.
That's what I feel and think today - a day when I miss being with my students because the schools are closed because of snow.
Thanks for reading.