I don’t like for things to be messy.
That said, almost everything in my life is messy. In fact, if I’m being honest, it seems like the more control I have over something, the messier it is.
This website is messy. I’m proud of it in many ways, but there’s no denying it’s a bit of a mess.
It’s not a design problem or anything – it’s me. I don’t post consistently in terms of either timing or content. Sometimes there are several new additions a week, while other times it can take months. I write about teaching for a bit, then get distracted with court cases that interest me, or politics, or historical figures, or books I like, or music I find motivational. I create new sections to share lesson plans or classroom strategies, then leave them ambitiously incomplete. At one point I even started a separate site – a Blue Cereal dot NET – in hopes of better organizing my ramblings.
It didn’t take.
My social media history is a mess. I was on Facebook years ago, then quit because I kept letting myself get drawn into the ugliness. After a time, I came back determined to keep things strictly “on brand,” as it were. Then 2016 happened and I was overwhelmed by the number of friends and acquaintances from “real life” who turned out to be science-denying, fear-and-hate mongering, white supremacists. Once again, I began despising who I was when I was on Facebook as well as resenting far too many others in my virtual circle. I was angry and discouraged all the time (but for some reason kept coming back).
It later turned out that was, in fact, a primary goal of the platform itself. Still, that’s no excuse. So I bailed.
My Twitter account is hit and miss. I value many of the people I follow there and enjoy my interactions. I nevertheless vanish for weeks at a time, then pop back up randomly and wonder why everyone doesn’t fawn appropriately in response. Now that the whole Elon Musk dumpster fire is fully ablaze, I may bail on Twitter altogether. {Update: I did.} I’ve recently joined Mastodon and I love it and the folks I’ve already met there – wildly and wonderfully. And yet… there are still those people I really like and who I only connect with on the bird app.
So… it’s messy.
My reading habits are messy. I have three or four different books partially read and I cycle between them as mood or opportunity dictates. I buy stuff I know I want to read but then never seem to be in the mood for. Other times, I find myself returning repeatedly to series I’ve already read over and over. I think I like the comfort of the familiarity, but I also want all these new things there’s no room for. So… it’s messy.
I don’t even want to discuss my “lists” on a dozen different streaming services. There’s the stuff I’m actually watching, then there are the endless shows I’ve bookmarked because I think I want to watch them (but clearly I’m never going to). Never before in the history of humanity has so much been so available so easily – and so much of it of such high artistic and academic quality! If I ever catch up with the 13 hours of pro wrestling grabbed by my DVR each week, I’ll get right on that.
Stop judging me. My tastes are eclectic – which is a fancy word for “messy.”
My house feels messy. Realistically, it’s not. We don’t have kids at home and we have plenty of room. “Messy” in this case is quite relative. But no matter how often we clear off the dining room table, I always seem to awake the next day to find a half-dozen random items scattered across it – most of which belong to me. No matter how thoroughly we clean and organize the office, I quickly end up with books on the floor and papers piled on my desk. This might be forgivable if I were an eccentric old college professor with several advanced degrees or a best-selling author focused on cranking out my next movie adaptation, but I’m just a guy who teaches high school, blogs a bit, and has a few self-published books which you should totally buy for all those special someones on your gift list because they make you seem so thoughtful while suggesting you find them both erudite and worthy of a little extra time and attention in your gift selections – all for about $15 a pop even after shipping.
Seriously, I’ll wait while you click the link. This post isn’t going anywhere.
My classroom is messy. I’d love to say it’s a productive, creative messy indicative of all the learning going on, but it’s really more a matter of students who don’t put stuff back and my efforts to keep everything I need within reach, whether it fits there or not. My desk is too big, which means stuff ends up piled up even worse than at home and nothing ever quite looks caught up. My lessons usually end up messy as well, no matter how well I think I’m planning them or how pure my intentions. I make careless mistakes, or schedules change, and so many students are absent every day anyway that we can never get a “flow” going. There’s rarely a day that feels like we’re building on what we’ve already done or which leads smoothly into the plan for tomorrow.
I was assigned a “pre-observation questionnaire” recently (in preparation for, as the title suggests, a formal observation). It was four pages long. In addition to listing state standards and providing a detailed explanation of how what I was doing that day supported each one, the questionnaire wanted to know how I’d been leading up to this specific skill-set and this particular knowledge, what qualitative and quantitative data I’d used to determine we were ready to move on to this point, how I’d be differentiating during and after the lesson, what sorts of formative and summative assessments I was utilizing, and of course, how the data I was supposedly collecting would drive future instruction.
Somehow, “I hope most of them finish the vocab crossword puzzle” didn’t seem likely to secure me that “highly qualified” ranking I was hoping for.
I’m getting too old and disgruntled to put on much of a show or sling golden manure the way I sometimes used to. I tried to respond to at least half of the questions with sincerity but without pretending anything I was doing was THAT sophisticated. My students are wonderful, valuable people, but doing right by them has less to do with differentiation and more to do with noticing that Ivan’s oddly quiet today or helping Monique realize the importance of reading the directions at the top of the page without being patronizing about it.
With all due respect to Marzano and Danielson, what we’re doing here isn’t that complicated. The areas in which I most need to improve have little to do with curriculum maps or backward design. I’d be more than willing to talk about growth mindset, social-emotional learning, or metacognition, but somehow the vocabulary behind all the useful stuff has become stigmatized through misappropriation or outright abuse, and in any case those things never show up on the evaluative rubrics. Also, I really would be happy if more of them would at least attempt the #@*& crossword puzzle.
You can see why no one’s going to be playing me in the inspirational movie version of my class anytime soon.
Objectively, my classes aren’t actually that disjointed, and many of the very real challenges aren’t in my direct control. The environment in which I operate isn’t particularly predictable and most of my kids have far more immediate concerns than understanding the Progressive Era. Still, I should probably be doing a better job of being all big-picture pedagogical. It probably doesn’t have to look and feel quite this messy.
Maybe none of it does.
I can do a better job putting stuff back where it goes, or at least not always choosing the dining room table. I can commit more time to just sitting and reading without distraction, knowing I usually enjoy it once I begin. And at some point, I really will seriously revamp the website – possibly from scratch.
As far as the teaching goes, though, I’m still working on that. It’s not a shortage of pedagogy or a lack of support – I’m surrounded by some amazing educators, all things considered. It’s not that my kids don’t deserve the best education possible – if I believed otherwise, I shouldn’t be here.
I don’t know about you, but at the moment there’s a grand total of “zero” people lined up desperately wanting my job. I suspect that’s true for yours as well. I’m all for getting better, and learning and growing, but in these messy times it’s easy to feel like we’re not doing enough, or that we’re not doing it right, or that someone else could be doing this better.
I’m not sure that’s true, for me or for you.
I think maybe it’s just always going to be kinda messy, trying to figure out what’s best for them and what has the best chance of helping them learn whatever seems most important that day. I don’t ever want to make excuses for carelessness or lack of focus, but maybe sometimes it’s OK to simply embrace the chaos of it all and do the best we can with it.
Even if it gets kinda messy.