Lies We Tell Our Students

October 17, 2018June 4, 2023 ~ Blue Cereal ~ 1 Comment

I don’t like to lie to my students. I try not to, but it’s not always easy. Sometimes it’s literally required by the folks signing my paycheck, creating what we in the teaching business call “a dilemma.”

My ex-wife and I never told our kids there was a Santa, a Tooth Fairy, or an Easter Bunny, even when they were very little. We tried to make holidays fun, of course, and we played all sorts of pretend games and did traditional things – we weren’t uptight. It just seemed wrong to demonstrate to them early on that we were willing to fabricate stories about invisible beings which they were expected to later outgrow, for no better reason than our own amusement.

Euthanized animals weren’t playing on someone’s farm, pre-teens didn’t always win at games they sucked at, and not everyone is special in their own way. We tried to balance this with some grace and humility – it wasn’t their job to puncture the illusions of their young peers – but we didn’t figure familial festivities required lies and delusion.

(I’m not criticizing those of you who choose to betray your child’s trust repeatedly, by the way – that was just our personal choice. We wanted the truth – whether it be uncomfortable, encouraging, unwelcome, or warm – to mean something. We were odd that way.)

I feel the same way with my kids today – the ones I’m paid to deal with. It doesn’t automatically make me a great teacher, but at the very least I’d prefer not to contribute more than absolutely necessary to the existing cynicism and distrust of “the system” and everything for which we claim to stand.

Here are a few of the most egregious lies we tell kids repeatedly, then wonder why they don’t take us at our word when it’s really important. I’m curious what you’d add to the list – so please, comment below.

Lie #1: You can be anything you want to be if you really set your mind to it.

This may be true for a handful of them, but for most it’s balderdash. That doesn’t mean they’re all doomed – that’s a false dichotomy – but the power of personal choices and the glory of risk needn’t be yoked to self-delusion.

I’m an overweight public school teacher with a blog and a modicum of notoriety. I’d like to write a book eventually. That’s unlikely, but certainly possible with some commitment and a few sacrifices. I’ve considered going back to school for a master’s, which would be tricky in terms of logistics, but if it’s truly important to me, it’s conceivable. I could pick up the guitar again, do more with “Have To” History, or lose 30 pounds if I make good choices and refuse to give up – yay motivation and living one’s dreams.

But my NHL ambitions are simply not in the cards at this point. Disney movies aside, I’m not going to be picked up by the Stars or Blue Jackets this season. Or next. I’m not going to make a living writing. People do, but I can’t. And no matter how much I wish I’d used my twenties more ambitiously, I’m never going to be young and suave and hang with the cool kids ever, ever, ever. Even trying would be creepy and sad.

Lie #2: Appearance doesn’t matter – it’s only what’s inside that counts.

Appearance doesn’t’ matter? Seriously? Are you new?

Of course appearance matters. Maybe it shouldn’t – I suspect that’s what we usually mean, if we mean anything at all – but it absolutely does. Worse, we all know this when we say it.

Why did you choose semi-professional attire today? Why do we have dress codes for our students, however silly or loosely interpreted they may be? Why do girls wash their hair from time to time and boys don’t want to have zits?

Do you honestly believe that girl in your 3rd hour, the one who’s just… large, and homely, and objectively not that easy to look at, will throughout her education get the same attention, respect, opportunities, or breaks as those in ‘average’ range or above? It’s a sliding scale, of course, and all sorts of subjective, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

It is arguably petty – perhaps even offensive – to openly speak of such things, but claiming you can’t tell or don’t notice which young men are handsome or which young ladies are genuinely cute is like insisting you “don’t see color.” Nonsense.

It’s not just personal appearance. Good handwriting or proper formatting of a document makes student work look ‘smarter’ before we’ve actually read any of it. Projects that are turned in looking intentional and demonstrating a little aesthetic awareness grab our eye very differently from those haphazardly taped together or only recently freed from the bottom of someone’s backpack.

None of this excuses our conscious promotion of appearance over substance. God forbid we judge students based on potential professional attractiveness or grade their papers based primarily on their font and margins. But that’s a decision, based on ethics – it’s not how the world naturally works. They all know this. Denying it simply undercuts our credibility in other areas.

What we can respectfully suggest to them when the opportunity arises is that while appearance matters – sometimes greatly, and especially at first – it’s the underlying qualities and less obvious elements of people, of writing, of art, of work, that almost always matter most over time. Looking good, in other words, will only get you so far, whether we’re talking hair gel and pencil skirts or that fancy paper you used to print out your essay.

Lie #3: This {insert stupid required school thing, probably state-mandated, always done in the most annoying, time-consuming way possible} is very important for all these reasons we’re about to give.

There are times we have to do stupid stuff. The more pointless and unnecessarily contorted it is, the more likely it is to have been mandated by the state. Let’s just acknowledge that and move on, shall we?

We’re supposed to be preparing them for some sort of “real life” down the road, aren’t we? Sometimes life means jumping through hoops or enduring bureaucracy with patience and grace. Heck, sometimes it means sucking it up and doing stupid stuff to get what you want on the other side.

Can we not just own that and admit to our kids when some of the system is unnecessarily inane? Being cooperative shouldn’t require being dishonest. If there are reasons to do it anyway, let’s share the reasons.

For that matter, I prefer to admit it to my kids if an activity or lesson doesn’t pan out the way I’d hoped. Assuming I don’t recklessly waste their time on a daily basis, they don’t seem too shocked or turn on me violently when I share that, well… here was my goal for that and what I was hoping we’d end up understanding or being able to do, but I’m not sure it turned out that way. Maybe next time I’ll do it this other way, etc.

That’s not something I’d add to the teacher evaluation system or anything, just my personal style – like not lying to my children about magical invisible gluttons or pretending animals are immortal. I’m just quirky like that.

Of course, sometimes we don’t know why we’re doing the stuff we’re doing. Sometimes it’s not the state – it’s us. If I can’t easily and succinctly explain the purpose or value of something I’m asking a teenager to do, then perhaps we shouldn’t have to do it. That’s also about honesty – maybe with ourselves as much as them.

Alright – I’m sure I’m missing some biggies. What are the most egregious lies we tell our kids, in your opinion? And why do we tell them? I look forward to your comments below.

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Wick-Ed

October 6, 2018June 4, 2023 ~ Blue Cereal ~ 1 Comment

Think of something you love.

Not a person – a topic. A hobby. A personal passion.

Now pretend that it’s very important to you to share this passion with others. In fact, you’re getting PAID to spread this interest and your expertise. This is exhilarating and terrifying, because on the one hand you’re being given the opportunity to make a career out of something you deeply care about, but on the other… this passion is part of what defines you.

It’s personal. It matters to you. You care whether or not it’s done WELL.

Still – GIDDY!

Plot Twist: Most of those with whom you’ll be sharing are here against their will and care nothing about your topic, nor do they wish to. Also, they’re supposed to be learning about six other things they don’t care about all at the same time.

But nothing’s perfect, amiright? And besides, surely once they’re exposed to what you’re really talking about, they’ll start to love it a LITTLE – how could they not? Your interest wasn’t planned or forced – you can’t HELP but dive in. It’s naturally engaging! It’s just a matter of lighting the first few candles in the bucket, surely.

How will you begin?

Well, you should put together some sort of high-interest discussion-starter to get them talking about your passion. You labor for hours trying to find the right entrance point – something accessible, but relevant.

Something rich in possibilities, but which still clearly lays the groundwork for where you’ll go next. You research, you revisit, you consider various mediums – a presentation of some sort, or a reading – maybe some audio or visual stimuli. Oh! Oh! Where is that one thing you used to have, with the stuff that was so—THAT?! You need THAT! Boy howdy, we are rolling now. A few dozen hours, and Day One is going to ROCK. THEIR. WORLDS.

OK, what next? Some content – some background – some substance to build on yesterday…

Plot Twist: Tomorrow’s schedule will be entirely different to accommodate some sort of school assembly, and there’s a fire drill, despite all the construction. Oh – and don’t forget the anti-bullying video you’re required to show. That’s fine… it’s just that nothing you have planned will actually work now and you’ll have to rethink it all. It’s now nearly 1 a.m. and you’ll deal with it in the morning.

You press on bravely and creatively, full of vigor and highly qualified by any measure. You differentiate, you target different learning styles, and you make sure to effectively incorporate some of that technology the district is so excited about. Mostly, though, you woo, cajole, and inspire the $%&#@ out of that content and those skills! You leave it all on the podium all day, every hour.

Most of your kids politely go through the motions. A few overdo it, but as overachievers rather than converts. Several fall asleep or zone out watching trashy videos and eventually you give up redirecting them. Their total efforts combined don’t come anywhere close to what you poured into preparing.

Plot Twist: Your principal happened to drop by to observe for nine minutes and wonders why you’re not doing more differentiation or incorporating more technology. For the rest of the day you fight petty resentment of your students for that part.

You resent his comments from the observation as well, but you don’t fight those feelings so much.

It’s not that teaching is always complicated or demands superhuman self-sacrifice – we’re not Gandhi or Peter Parker. But if you’re not careful, it can drain you like a vampire with an eating disorder. (Not the kind where they’d drink less blood, though. One where they drink more. Lots more. So that you’re— look, it can be draining, OK?)

I hate this meme. I’m pretty sure most educators do. It comes up from time to time on social media, and consensus is that it’s dysfunctional and far too martyr-ry.

Like most irritating things, though, there’s enough truth mixed in to make it sticky – like Dr. Phil, or napalm. There’s nothing particularly noble about destroying yourself in the delusion that it “lights the way” for others (unless, I suppose, your goal is to model self-destruction). But the teacher-student relationship is in many ways one-directional, and without some self-awareness and waxy buildup outside of the school day, it will wear you away.

See, by and large, teenagers don’t give back. Many of them simply can’t – they don’t have it in their skill set, or they lack the emotional surplus. Some probably could, but they just don’t – life is complicated enough when you’re 16, and it’s not an especially self-aware time of life in terms of our impact on others.

And honestly, it’s not really their job at this point. For educators, just inculcating the awareness in some of them that there ARE other people in the world who have actual thoughts and feelings, and that part of being human is learning to accommodate such inconveniences, can be a herculean (and oddly controversial) task.

The opposite can be just as challenging, as many of our best young spawn can’t imagine that their broken universe isn’t somehow their fault, and they’re terrified the rest of us will figure it out soon and come for them.

They are consumed with inadequacies, guilts, and fears that are not their own, but inflicted on them from every direction.

That doesn’t mean they’re not fully enjoyable. Many are amusing, thoughtful, engaging, or otherwise pleasant – it’s like they’re almost people sometimes. They’ll surprise you with what they can do when you least expect it – then crush your hopes with the most bizarre cluelessness just to keep you on your toes. They’re like walking-meat versions of Alexa or Android Auto.

“OK, Google – please play more music by this artist.”
“Sure. Asking to play more music by *pause* ‘Mike Doughty’. This artist was also in *pause* ‘Soul Coughing’. Would you like to include *pause* ‘Soul Coughing’ in your playlist as well? I can shuffle the tracks for maximum emotional variety and turn up the volume when I register that you are singing along.”
“Thanks, Google! That’s very—”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand that command. Try speaking more clearly or using different words.”
“Never mind, I just—”
“You must have a subscription to Google Play to access music from *pause* ‘Nevermind’ by *pause* Nirvana.
“No, I – just play this artist.”
“I am unable to find music in your library by *pause* ‘This’.
“No. Cancel. Play music by ‘Mike Doughty’.”
“Searching for ‘No Cancel’. I will now lock into an eternal ‘thinking’ loop until you hate everything about technology…”

We can love our students and expect a great deal of them academically, but whatever we walk away with from the experience has to be built on internal foundations – constructed fulfillment based on our perceptions of their growth, their understanding, their happiness.

The hours you put in on content, on activities, on logistics, aren’t theirs to reward. Whatever time you give to their joys or terrors has to be entirely out of your professional surplus. The moment you begin needing anything back from them is the moment the relationship is out of balance.

And you don’t always see it coming.

The last time I ‘lost it’ with a class was over them… talking. Cutting up. Not knowing where the lines were for informality. I snapped and left the room rather than saying something truly ugly which I hoped I didn’t really mean, but might have.

But it wasn’t about the talking – that’s a classroom management issue. It was about how desperately I was busting my @$$ trying to figure out what would be effective with this group – how to accommodate who they were and where they were at academically and emotionally while still clinging to the expectations of the district and the course. I loved them, but I was burnt down trying to make it work – and they didn’t appreciate it AT ALL, the little $(@#&$!

I’d lost too much wax. When a 15-year old is getting under your skin, something is out-of-kilter – something not 15 years old.

You can’t fix all of it. Hell, sometimes you can’t fix ANY of it. All you can do is try one more time to bring your topic to life, and connect it to what you know of them. You try to listen, and to remain aware. From time to time you offer encouragement or resources. You’ll probably never be quite sure if you’re actually helping, or just filling space. And they’re teenagers – their reality is their reality. Doesn’t mean it’s not true – it just means it’s not always the same type of true.

Then YOU WALK AWAY AND DO THINGS UNRELATED TO SCHOOL. You talk shop with a few colleagues, but you refuse to ONLY talk shop – especially with family and other friends. You try to have a life of some sort.

Honestly, you’re better in class when you’re not always in class. That doesn’t mean be lazy, or that there aren’t weeks (or years) that are a helluva lot more work than others, but you gotta have OTHER stuff – or those kids are all you have.

And that’s not good for you. Or them. Ever.

Go add some wax.

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The Screen

September 14, 2018June 4, 2023 ~ Blue Cereal

I don’t usually mind dealing with technical quirks. If something basically works, even if it requires fiddling here and there, I’m good.

Mostly.

Other times, though, technology turns on you. Maliciously. I’ve had home printers over the years grow increasingly hostile and sarcastic towards me as they refuse to print, inexplicably change orientation, or outright insist they’re not connected, have never been connected, and wouldn’t know what to do with a connection if they found one but-whatever-because-they-can’t-so-why-are-you-bothering-me, human?

I’ll unplug and restart, FAQ and Troubleshoot, update drivers and Google myself into emotional exhaustion, all to save $2.40 and a 20-minute trip to Staples – where I often end up going anyway.

Days later, having moved on with my life and hopefully grown a bit in the process, I sit down to work on something new. As my computer comes to life, so does the printer – stirring and spinning and warming up, mocking me as it builds suspense towards the inevitable…

And here come 18 copies of the thing I gave up on a few days before. Multiple pages each. Which is why I’m always out of ink, despite rarely actually printing something on command at home.

Sure, you can fight it – hit STOP and DELETE and unplug things and throw them out the apartment window to the parking lot below like people do. A few days later, it’s off to Best Buy to purchase any-brand-but-THAT-one, hook it up to your wife’s computer (just in case it was something with your laptop, which you refuse to openly blame because why anger it along with the others?) and in mere minutes it’s asking to print a test page…

Here come 19 copies of that thing from last week – this time in whichever color you’re lowest on. The stuff you ended up destroying the previous machine over. Page after page spitting onto the floor for the rest of the evening. Clearly they’re all in this together.

My kids were testing today, and I had a rare opportunity to get ahead on planning next week. I was moving around some tables in Word, trying to decide whether they’d help my darlings better organize important themes or merely crush all hope out of their souls, when my cursor momentarily stuck.

It happens. I’m blessed with technology in my room, but I’ve learned that it’s the mixed variety. I inherited the largest classroom in the building through no merit of my own – it’s what the teacher before me had when she moved up. There’s a Smart Board of some sort, a laptop that actually runs things, and a wireless monitor, mouse, and keyboard. There are other important-looking items connected as well, but I’m not sure what all of them do. I’ve learned not to experiment.

My first month here – about this time last year – I tried rotating my desk to a better position. But there are cords. Cables. Wires and zip ties. Velcro, and tightly bound… things entering the wall in some places while different things emerge from others. Many of them go into the important-looking enigmas on and around my desk; others are wrapped and hang sadly alone behind the trash can. It all appears intentional, but not in a ‘Building Tomorrow’s Classroom Today’ sorta way; it’s more of a “I think we can get the Enterprise to leave orbit but we’ll only get once chance and might blow up” vibe.

But it all works. Well, you know… mostly.

Between you and me, I’d prefer to lose the wireless stuff. I’d rather just work off the laptop, smaller screen and all. Wireless stuff gets quirky, and it takes up desk space. But still – I’m genuinely thankful. Many educators would love to have it so good.

There are three screens – the laptop, the monitor, and the big screen up front. If I’m using PowerPoint, I need to Extend Screen One to Screen Three. After class, when I want to work on a presentation without turning on the big screen again, I have to Extend Screen One to Screen Two – except that’s not always an option in the dropdown menu. (I haven’t yet figured out why it’s there sometimes and other times not.) So we… Duplicate Display on One and Two? Ah, that does it, although there are actually two completely different things showing now. But who cares, right? It works.

The next day, the district wants us to show a video about bullying, which means I need to Duplicate Screen One to Screen Three. We’re tight on time, so that option has inexplicably vanished today. I can either, let’s see… Extend Display to Screen One? No, never – or what’s this? Duplicate on All Screens? That’s new. Sounds like something that should work – except that my screen is suddenly large and fuzzy, which is weird. The sound is playing, but the image up front is frozen, until I open Settings again at which point the laptop is tired of my incompetence and goes completely black. Also, an ad has just popped up for incontinence. Or maybe against it. I’m too distracted to catch the details.

You get the idea. And that’s without anyone touching or brushing too close to the screen at the front of the room. Touch it – even accidentally – and all bets are off what the computer and its various displays will do. The big screen itself flashes and sputters like a wounded animal in the ugly convulsions of digital death, and I have no choice but to restart before all is lost.

But as I said, it all works well enough once you get used to it. I’m grateful. And flexible. I’ve learned to be flexible.

Until I broke everything today, forever.

My cursor was stuck. Word has a mind of its own when it comes to moving tables around, so I wasn’t overly concerned – just confused. Then it happened – I did a kind of 5-finger tappity-tap-them-all on the keyboard. Not angry, not hard, just a quick finger-drumming, two runs in quick succession. Human code for “HELLO?! ARE YOU FEELING ME IN THERE?”

My display promptly flipped upside down.

Huh.

That wasn’t the plan.

No idea how I caused that, but obviously it was something in my type-itty-type fest. OK. This was fixable. There’s a setting, right? There’s always a setting.

The laptop display wasn’t affected. It’s anchored a bit far back on my desk, so I had to lean in to see what I was doing, but there, under Settings, was something about screen rotation. Here we go – rotate 180 degrees! That was ea—

Now my laptop display was upside down. Oh, but my monitor was back to normal.

Huh, again.

Like a bad sitcom, I repeated the process several times. Stuff kept changing, but never back to where I wanted it. In fact, I think it gradually got worse.

My kids are still testing and I’m trying to play this cool so no one notices. Besides, prepping for next week is overrated, amiright?

Let’s try extending Display One to Display Three. There we—WHAT THE HELL?!

The monitor display is upright, but it’s blobby-blurry. That won’t work. Duplicated Display Two on Display—

Where’d it go? The laptop is blank now. I can tell Settings is open, but I can’t get an image on the laptop and the monitor is blobby-blurry. Where did—

Ah. The big screen. I’ll just have to subtly turn it on and hope they’re so engaged in testing that they don’t notice. Here we go, it’s warming up…

Settings were open on the big screen – sort of. They were open at a 90 degree angle, filling half the screen, which distorts things more than you’d think. And I couldn’t get the cursor to move into that section.

I kept at it, though. I may not be smart, but I have grit enough to send Carol Dweck into trembling pedagogical ecstasies. It was like chasing wet soap in a straightjacket – each effort rotated images, altered resolutions, or sometimes just made things go away, but over time it was all clearly getting worse, and I began to fear I’d have to ask for help. For THIS.

I had to use my cell phone to email tech support. All this tech, and I had to Swype with my fat old fingers on that tiny little phone screen to try to explain, without sounding either enraged (I really wasn’t – just defeated) or irredeemably idiotic. I then did the smartest thing one can do in such a situation – I shut it all down, and calmly walked to another workspace in the room where I began refreshing myself on next week’s content while my kids finished their writing.

A half hour later, I quietly booted it all up again. I right-clicked and looked more closely, and there it all was – the option, in the menu, one screen at a time, back to 0 degrees and crisp resolutions, and all is again right in the universe. Maybe I panicked too quickly, or maybe I too easily perceive malice when none exists. Heck, there’s probably a kind of metaphor in it all – a lesson about education or life which would make a nice blog post…

I rushed home and began to type. Most posts take multiple drafts, but this one—

I coulda swore I’d unplugged that printer, but for some reason it’s whirring and making the most ominous clanking sounds. I wonder what dark effort from my past it will be ejecting the rest of the evening… With what new oddities will it taunt me?

I don’t care, machine – Bring. It. On. I’m ready.

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The Mesopotamians & Jumping the Classroom Shark

August 8, 2018June 23, 2023 ~ Blue Cereal

Some of you are familiar with this 2007 release from They Might Be Giants:

Pop culture connections are a blessing and a curse in the high school history classroom. On the one hand, YAY ANYTHING THAT REINFORCES CONTENT IN UNEXPECTED WAYS! – even if it’s strange, inaccurate, and fictional {I’m looking at you, Hollywood}. On the other, it’s difficult to anticipate when such things have jumped the shark in relation to teen culture. Just to keep things really frustrating, some of the most promising and engaging sources are so far from school-appropriate that no amount of editing will make them OK, no matter how much I want to use them anyway.

But I don’t. Because… employment.

{In case you’re not strong on making inferences based on close reading and context, neither of these are particularly appropriate videos, language-wise.}

So we’re left looking for clean-but-engaging – a fragile field, to be sure.

Think of those school assemblies where administrators wear their caps backwards and rap about school policy. There are elementary students who will forever find this the coolest thing in all of academia, but not enough mental bleach to redeem participating “authority figures” in the eyes of those same kids five years later. You see it happen with stuff that’s pretty impressive in its own right – like Flocabulary or those cool History Teachers songs. I know others who’ve experienced this in relation to Crash Course or Hip Hughes History, although I still find both of them valuable resources. It’s just hard to anticipate with a given group.

There was a painful video several years ago of a public school teacher doing parody math songs karaoke in class. I won’t link to it here because I appreciate the risk involved – the leap of shameless faith she decided to take in hopes she could break through the expected drudgery and have a real impact out of the proverbial gate. But it was, well… it was awful. The worst sort of painful. Better she read the syllabus to them until the room lost collective consciousness.

That’s what I worry about with stuff like The Mesopotamians. I love the band, and the track, and I don’t want it to be party to anything cringe-worthy – or even something tired. Most of my students, strangely, have heard it before. Last year when we started covering Hammurabi, a number of them asked if we could watch it. {Standard answer: of course you can. I’m sure it’s on YouTube and any number of other websites. I hope you enjoy it – just don’t do so during class.} But when I changed my mind the next hour and started with it as an introduction, there were sighs and eye-rolling.

So go figure.

Add pop songs and zany videos to the list of things that can be brilliant with one group and suddenly mean nothing to another. It’s another reason the whole teaching thing is as much art and guesswork and gut-level improv as it is a craft or a science. It’s another reason that online education or computerized learning may have a role to play in public education, but like symphonies composed by algorithms or those confession booths in THX-1138, there are limits to what they can do.

Seriously, where are they hoping to find all of these kids who will stay focused and self-motivated if only the software can adjust to their reading levels and multiple choice responses quickly enough?

But I digress.

I don’t know if I’m going to show the video again this year, but I am going to reference it as an anchor for the unit. The four individuals referenced in the song lived in different times and different civilizations united only by their geography and pre-classical status. One of them (Gilgamesh) is most likely entirely fictional. But they matter both for who they were (or were supposed to be) and what they represent in the larger story. My hope is that by using the song and video as a starting point, I’ll give my students a non-threatening frame-of-reference to help them slog through the substance.

We’ll see.

Several years ago I began a rather ambitious project I called “Have To” History, the goal being to produce 2-3 page summaries of essential people or events in history for students who don’t actually care but are expected to know stuff about them. There are, of course, already numerous reference sites online, but there are countless blogs as well and that certainly hasn’t stopped anyone from adding one more. I’m hoping the focus and format make them useful for certain sorts of students (or teachers). At my current rate, I should have at least two dozen posted and available for download by 2089 or so.

In any case, I’ve recently revised and (hopefully) improved the four H2H installments drawn from The Mesopotamians. My current plan for class is to do some sort of jigsaw activity with them, although we’ll see once I’ve actually met this year’s kids. We’ll do something with them, most likely. They’re attached to this post on the off chance anyone else teaching Ancient World History or AP World (which includes ancient civilizations for one more school year before the curriculum shifts) might find them useful. Let me know.

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Do I Really Look Like A Guy With A Plan?

August 3, 2018June 12, 2023 ~ Blue Cereal ~ 2 Comments

Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit”— yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring… Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.” As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil. (James 4:13-16, English Standard Version)

I know, right? Not that I’m in any real danger of over-planning. It’s all I can do to keep track of today, let alone regiment tomorrow.

But I’m trying. At least in regards to the upcoming school year. I’ve been reading over standards, reviewing content, organizing visuals, bookmarking relevant articles or videos. Heck, I’ve even set up a calendar week on the new district student-learning-eduganza-management system, so that I know what we’re doing in class the first three or four days.

Possibly.

It’s always been hard for me to plan very far ahead – even when I’d been teaching the same thing for a number of years. The start of a new year is especially tricky, because, well…

I haven’t met the kids yet.

“Action has meaning only in relationship, and without understanding relationship, action on any level will only breed conflict. The understanding of relationship is infinitely more important than the search for any plan of action.” (Jiddu Krishnamurti, Philosopher & Speaker)

OK, I’ve met some of them. I had a few last year. It’s been a loooong time since I’ve had kids two years in a row (for different classes, not as retreads). Some of them will be happy to see me again, and I them. Others, not so much.

But I don’t know the class dynamics yet. I don’t have a “feel” for them yet. And that’s limiting in terms of just how ambitious I can be in preparing to beat the learnin’ into them.

It doesn’t help that last year didn’t go as well as I’d hoped. I moved to a new district in a new state to teach a new subject in a whole new reality stream. I love the new district, and the kids, and even the town. If only I’d not, you know… sucked so badly.

OK, that’s not fair – I didn’t suck most days. What I did was spend far too much of the year trying to prove myself to a fictional audience (one deeply wedged in my subconscious and snacking on popcorn and emotional baggage, no doubt) before adjusting to the real kids in front of me – who weren’t ready for where I wanted to take them, and who didn’t trust me enough to go for it anyway. Once uncertainty and insecurity set in, well… it was a rocky start.

We finally reached a sort of groove, although in retrospect it, too, was distorted by dirty grace – a lenience built on guilt, like a divorced parent trying to “make up” to the 12-year old what he or she was unable to fix with their ex. I started off asking too much without figuring out where they were and finished by asking too little in an effort to offset whatever damage I thought I’d done.

All of which assumes I had much more control over the situation and the players than any of us really do.

“A deliberate plan is not always necessary for the highest art; it emerges.” (Paul Johnson, Historian & Author)

So perhaps “planning” isn’t the right word at all, so much as “preparing” – I hope to be better prepared this year. To have more options loaded and ready, to be more familiar with more content (which is essential if we’re going to be at all creative; “how” grows out of “what” and “why”), and to anticipate some of the time-intensive things I know I’d like to try, but wasn’t logistically able to construct before.

Most good teachers will tell you that it can take several years for your best lessons to evolve. Even then, that activity that totally churned the knowing and doing and growing for years in a row can suddenly just… not work anymore. Kids change. Different years are, well… different. Time to rework, rethink, re-valuate. You can’t always know ahead of time.

Still, you can prepare. We can prep ourselves, our ideas, our goals. We can prep the salads and the sauces and the skillets and the other chef-ish metaphor stuff I can’t quite pull together as I type – probably because I didn’t prepare to use them. (See what I did there?)

But you know what we can’t do – at least not consistently or effectively? We can’t plan it all, not really. Not honestly. Not effectively. Some of you can reach much further than I in your logistical outlines and have a much better idea what to expect based on your history in the district or with kids you’ve seen before. Nothing wrong with that. But the vast majority of us aren’t nailing down specifics until we’re in it – talking to the kids, watching them interact, asking them questions and otherwise pushing them as best we can.

Even when we’re in the middle of it, I’m not sure intuition and guesswork don’t play just a big of a role as knowledge and preparation. We can work mighty hard and it still seem like some of the best moments are a function of weird luck as much as anything.

Maybe that’s how it’s supposed to work – preparation creating the luck, and all that. I’d like to think we play some role in the mess. I’m positive that my kids do. Individually, and in how they react to and interact with one another. And events around them. And the weather. And the time of day. And their worlds. And their wiring. And the divine spark of random free will that keeps everything interesting and so damned difficult.

That’s not even taking into account their other teachers, other classes, and innumerable intangibles. You just never know what’s going to happen.

“In the planning stage of a book, don’t plan the ending. It has to be earned by all that will go before it.” (Rose Tremain, Author)

This, of course, drives ed-reformers and edu-financiers absolutely nuts. Folks accustomed to agenda-creation and content outlines and footnoted studies demand (but don’t really expect) better from those of us at the bottom of the pedagogical food chain. In their defense, many of them come from worlds awash in status, money, or influence (or some combination of the three). They are often accustomed to decreeing how things should go while others make it thus – or they’re at least surrounded by people good at pretending.

In my tiny little job, if things don’t go the way I’d hoped and planned, I usually know right away, and it’s immediately my problem and my scramble to adjust. As Peter Greene of Curmudgucation has pointed out, poor (or lazy) teaching brings on its own worst consequences – bored or antagonized teenagers, in your room, making you pay all day, every day.

Teachers are held accountable for innumerable things over which we have no control to begin with; we’re certainly not escaping the fallout of our own plans gone awry. It keeps you honest, I’ll tell you that.

I’m all for respecting expertise and I’m a big fan of having lots of money, but our culture too easily validates the pronouncements and preferences of power and prestige. Being rich doesn’t make you smart about everything – at best, it makes you smart about getting rich (although even that is often a function of circumstances or inheritance). And at the risk of sounding defiant or defensive, I’d even argue that being an “expert” in the field of education doesn’t mean you know anything about my kids or my content, let alone my classroom. You want authority? Tell me about your world and your experiences – your studies, your observations, your suggestions. I can adapt what’s useful for mine from there.

I have plenty to learn, even after twenty years. But any presentation, any training, any report, that opens with some variation of “stop ruining the future and behold my revelation of this season’s edicts” can pretty much kiss my aspirational posters.

If I were a nurturing, supportive type, I’d encourage you as the new school year ascends to prepare more than plan. Hold yourself to a much higher standard than is required by the paycheck or the system, absolutely – but cut yourself some slack when it comes to implementation and juggling the impossible and the unknown.

There will be real live little people in front of you soon, and they don’t need a better study or a more determined philanthropist – they need you to figure them out and to love them and to be stubbornly flexible on their behalf. Read the research and watch the TED Talks and follow the blogs, but own your gig and your obligations. We can demand far more of ourselves and of our little darlings without letting someone with a fancier title or a government study dictate exactly what that looks like in our reality with our kids.

No one knows better than you what’s best for your kids this coming year – a truth as terrifying as it is freeing. Anyone who claims otherwise is “boasting in arrogance.”

They’re coming. Let’s get prepared.

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