Off the Clock

Courtesy of back-to-back field trip days and the upcoming short week, I was able to actually leave school at my contract time today. My plan was to run a few Thanksgiving errands, and as I pushed open the glass doors and stepped into the crisp 3 PM November sunshine there was a purposeful bounce in my step. "Have a good weekend!" I waved to the small group of students outside.

"Wait! What?" answered one. "Where are you going? Don't you have to work until, like, at least 5?"

Nope!

Get Out

Just yesterday I was talking to two colleagues about the prospects of administering yet one more universal test for yet one more data point. "Fortunately the pendulum seems to be swinging away from this insanity," I said.

"You know how education is," another teacher said. "This has been going on for, what, about ten years? It's going to be something new, soon."

"What do you think that will be?" asked the third of us.

There were shrugs all around, but at some point in the conversation we came up with what we thought was the exact opposite of the now in schools across our country. "Experiential education?" someone suggested. "Where the kids actually get to do things?"

We laughed, but it was definitely rueful. Back when this testing trend started, I never believed I'd be at a school or in a system where field trips were considered, at best, unnecessary, and at worst, detrimental, but that's definitely the climate I'm teaching in now. While every sixth grader is soon to have an iPad, our bus budget has been slashed so that if we want to take more than one trip a year, we will have to charge the students for transportation.

Today happened to be the day of our only field trip this year. We took the students to a local nature center where they participated in a program about energy. The visit involved walking through a community garden that had been winterized, and seeing the rescued raptors (a red-tailed hawk, great horned owl, and two barred owls). As we ate our lunch, chickadees, nuthatches, woodpeckers, and titmice flocked to the feeders just outside the window, and two deer grazed at the edge of the woods below us.

All the students showed some interest in what they were seeing and hearing about, but one girl in particular sought me out and sat next to me at lunch. She is a very nice kid, but often distracted and silly in my class. Her grades are mediocre and below, mostly because she doesn't get her work done. When you talk to her about it, she agrees good-naturedly to try to do better, but academic success seems like a low priority.

Today she was animated and engaged. She loved the raptors, was fascinated by the deer and the other birds, and had something relevant to say about every exhibit. As she chattered excitedly at lunch about everything we'd seen so far, I hardly recognized her as the child who usually sits so passively in my room.

Her test scores are low compared to those of her peers, and it's a cliche to point out that they don't tell the whole story. But that part of the story that data leaves untold may be best discovered away from the traditional classroom, and we'll never know what it is if we don't get out there.

In Reply to a Former Student

Dear Ethan,

Sorry it’s taken so long to get back to you-- your letter has been sitting by my laptop for several weeks, but I have been waiting for a time when I had the time to compose (and revise!) a thoughtful reply.

First, I’m really pleased to hear that you are writing in your spare time, and it’s even better news that you feel passionate about it. You were reluctant to write much last year, but when you did, it was always interesting and creative. I’m curious about what made you start writing more in your spare time. What kind of things are you writing? I hope you’ll elaborate more on that in future letters.

You asked me about my thoughts on improvement, and so I decided to apply the question to something we have in common-- school. Our roles here are different, but to me, teaching and learning can never be mutually exclusive. No matter what I may be doing in my classroom, if my students are not learning, can I call my actions "teaching"? Even if I'm trying really, really, really hard to teach, without that learning thing, I'm not quite hitting the target, am I?

There’s an old joke that kind of explains what I mean:

Two guys are walking their dogs down the street and one guy says to the other, “Hey, did I tell you I taught my dog to whistle?”

“That’s amazing!” says his friend. “Let’s hear him do it!”

“I said I taught him,” the first man replied. “I didn’t say he learned.”

So what is teaching then? Where's the metaphor that best describes it? A proverb that is often mentioned is Teaching is not the filling of a bucket, but the lighting of a fire. I kind of like the image of igniting that passion for learning in the hope that it will continue burning after you’re gone. It seems to put all the responsibility on the teacher, though. What’s the student’s role?

After some serious thought, the adage that I currently favor to explain my philosophy of teaching is this one: When the student is ready, the master will appear.

Public school teachers, though, can’t choose our students, and we can’t change them, either, so what do we do if they are not ready? With apologies to Batman, how can we be both the master they need and the master they deserve?

One way is to recognize that a master takes many forms. It may be a book or a poem, another student, a project, or an after-school activity. Even if we are not personally the masters they are ready for, we can help our students to find the masters they need by giving them lots of opportunities to think.

So, what about you, Ethan? Where do you fit in? You asked me how I thought you could improve, and here’s what I think: Start by being aware of all those opportunities; don’t dismiss anything as boring or irrelevant before you’ve given it a chance.

My advice to you is to be ready for the master in as many situations as you can.
                                                                                   
Take Care,

Ms. S.

How 'bout That?

Each Monday my students take a skills quiz to assess the nuts and bolts of their writing, and to, well, practice test-taking in a formative, low stakes kind of a way. (But let's not get into that right now.)

This week they were asked to edit a short piece of writing for misused homonyms. The errors were underlined and students were supposed to substitute the write, er, right word. Most kids did fine, but there were some creative replies. For example, one part of the passage read, "Lets plant beans since they sprout quickly," and the little test-takers were tasked with replacing that lets with the correct contraction.

One student crossed out the lets all together and replaced it with How about we all grow beans...

Tails You Lose

"How was Philadelphia?" a co-worker asked me today while she was picking up her copies from the printer in my room, and before I could open my mouth to gush, she continued, "Because I HATE that city!"

My eyebrows were at attention, and I'm sure my surprise was evident.

"Oh, I know," she waved her hand, "there's gentrification, but I Market Street is sooo depressing! All those boarded up department stores? And, a homeless man actually whipped it out and peed on me... in. front. of. INDEPENDENCE HALL!"

I nodded and tried to say something. "We have friends who live over by Penn," she shrugged, "and, sure, it's nice..." she looked at me skeptically, "but not nice enough!"

"What about Reading Market?" I asked, thinking that no one could possibly complain about all that wonderful food.

"Oh my God, no!" she spat, "I hate the way it smells!" Then she laughed and walked toward the door with her printing. "I just don't like Philly," she finished.

Fall in Philadelphia

It was fun walking around Philadelphia today.  We went by several places I remember from my childhood-- the department stores we visited at Christmastime for their holiday windows, my dad's office building, and Independence Hall. As a city Philly is very agreeable: historic, compact, and flat, and it's narrow streets and old buildings gave it a welcoming warmth even in the November chill. 

City of Brotherly Love

And in the perfect ending to my stroll down memory lane, I find myself in Philadelphia for the weekend. I haven't visited this city for almost 40 years, but when I was a kid, we lived just across the Delaware River. Philly was a top field trip destination for all my school years from first to eighth grade, when we moved away.

When we put this trip on the calendar last spring, Heidi wanted to go to the highly rated vegan restaurant, Vedge, and I had one desire, to walk through the giant heart at The Franklin Institute. Today we did both, and neither one of us was disappointed.

Tomorrow? Reading Market, Independence Hall, Blackbird Pizza, Cesar Millan, and maybe even Jack's Bar are on the itinerary.

It's good to be back!