#EduWin for the Day

Just got an email from a former student who is now a sophomore in college. Among other things, the email said this:

Also just for fun I sent you this tiny first day assignment I did for a class I have: History 363: American Social Reform from Revolution to Reconstruction. The assignment was to write 200 words on "utopia," whether that be a place I've actually been, a place that doesn't exist, or an abstract idea. I'm sending it not just because it's for a history class (and therefore makes statements about history that I definitely began learning with you), but also because it was a really cool thing to sit down and do. I ended up coming up with a bit of a personal philosophy and wanted to show you!

This is why we teach.

Also, it totally didn't matter if the assignment that this student shared with me was good - it was completely the thought that counted. However, the assignment was freaking brilliant: thoughtful, eloquent, measured - all of the things. 

Absolutely made my day.

The Wire and Education

Yes, I’m finally getting around to watching The Wire. Yes, I’m a little behind on that. And I’ve only watched the first three seasons, so what I’m about to say may be less relevant after I watch season four, which is about education. With all the caveats done now…

I was struck by the backwardness of the higher-ups in the police department and mayor’s office and Boston. I know that this portrayal was intentional, but it was interesting to me nonetheless. What the higher-ups want - consistently, across the three seasons I watched - was arrests. Drugs seized. Low level players taken off the street.

All of these desires went against the work that McNulty and everyone else was doing. Busting these low-level criminals always put the ‘on the street’ police in a bad spot: wires would be revealed, larger cases against bigger offenders would be comprised, etc. Essentially, the desires of the higher-ups would ruin weeks of work against bigger drug targets that McNulty was working on.

And this sounds so much like education. I got an email from my superintendent this past week congratulating the district on our API score going up. No mention of anything else - just an ‘atta boy, scores up’ email. We’ve got the higher-ups in education pushing test scores while classroom teachers know better: teaching to the test dumbs down school and is bad for students.

But no one asked us. At least in The Wire, McNulty and Daniels can go in and talk to the powers that be - Burrell and Rawls - and explain why it’s a bad idea to make arrests. I’m not sure I have that power.

But I do have an advantage that McNulty and Daniels don’t have: I can do what is best for my students in my classroom, standardized test scores be damned.

School Redesign Project

I spent a good chunk of the summer planning an introductory Humanities group project that students would be working on in both their English and history classes with my Humanities partner. It was a cool project - it required internet research, original research (interviews, surveys, class observations, etc), and a presentation. Plus, getting students to think about how to make an aspect of school better works on the ‘I’d like my classroom to be a little subversive’ meter.

Several cool things came out of the project. In no particular order…

Major growth in creating presentations. Did some kids still have whole sentences (and even paragraphs in some cases) on slides? Yes. Were there groups that presented only with images? Yup. That growth was cool to see.

Instead of saying school sucks, kids were starting to say that we start school too early (7:45am) and that the start time should be moved back because cognitive research shows that kids don’t learn well that early in the morning.

I saw students present about alternative assessments, the miracles of Finnish education, and a new way to do teacher evaluations to name just a few cool things that came up. Super cool!

There were more, I know. I am hopeful that this has started some real thinking about school and what it could be for my kids. As one said Friday as we wrapped up presentations in one class, “Was the point of this project for us to go out and like try to change school? And the world?” YES. #EduWin.

I want to leave with one last awesome piece of this project. Every year at Back To School Night the members of the smaller learning community I am a part of at Hillsdale gather before BTSN and have a potluck with the parents and students that we have that year. These are always fun, and the food is always spectacular. This year, we had two groups of students volunteer to present their projects to the 150 or so students and parents there.

These kids showed a ton of courage, both groups that presented really rocked it. Step back for a second. Think about those teachers that aren’t interested in using technology in their classrooms to push student learning. They have lots of reasons. One of them, though, is the what if it doesn’t work when I’m trying to use it reason. Well, when Charlotte and Eli were presenting, the internet was really slow. And when they tried to advance their Google presentation, it didn’t respond. So they hit the arrow a second time. And the preso skipped forward two slides. Then they hit back to get to the correct slide. Nothing happened. Back got hit again. And promptly, the preso hopped back two slides.

What’d they do? Made jokes. Acted like it was no big deal. Made the audience laugh. And continued on. Didn’t freak out. Didn’t act like anything abnormal was happening.

It was later in the evening that I got to talk to Charlotte and thank her for presenting. She mentioned how she was freaking out during the preso when the internet decided to hate her. And then it hit me: I had just had two of my kids present in front of parents, have tech difficulties, and handle it so calmly that it didn’t strike me until two hours later WHAT AN AWESOME JOB THEY DID handling those tech difficulties.

Those tech difficulties that would send some teachers running. Or cause them to not integrate tech at all. Yeah, my 10th graders crushed it.

Victoria, Daniel, and Claire presenting about tracking