Lesson: M. Aurelius

Well.

I wasn’t expecting it to go THAT well.

I gave them five pages of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, begun around 167 AD.  I’d selected Book 1, as translated by George Long, which deals with what Marcus Aurelius felt he’d learned from his various teachers.

Wow.  We talked about why Barak Obama can’t root too loudly for the Chicago Cubs; how Michael Vick ruined his chances for public office by fighting dogs; why generosity is a good thing; why slander is bad; why freedom of speech needs to be tolerated; why having too much passion for professional sports can be dangerous; why not to believe in charlatans who can promise health or salvation or freedom from demons; why being eager to own too much is dangerous.

Every person talked or read aloud from the text. (UPDATE: It’s worth saying that I do reading/commentary as a double-circle.  We sit in a circle.  The person to my right reads a sentence or a paragraph. The person to my left has to say something about that sentence or paragraph before anyone else talks. Then we open it up to the floor.  The next day, we alternate directions, so that the students who read but didn’t talk have to talk; and the kids that talked but didn’t read have to read aloud.)

We only read the first page and a half.  We parsed out what he was saying; checked the dictionary when we had words we didn’t know.

We argued whether he was believable.  We reminded ourselves that he was a Roman emperor — someone who’d already risen to the position of greatest power in his time.  We debated whether he had anything to teach us.  We argued whether he was right or wrong.

We expressed amazement that a human being who lived almost two thousand years ago had so much to teach us.

The proof will be in tomorrow’s homework: Pick the five most important sentences from the first page-and-a-half of Marcus Aurelius, and write out those sentences. Then write two more sentences about each of those quotations, explaining why you chose them.

I asked, “how many like Marcus Aurelius?” as they left.  Nine of eleven students raised their hands. For the first encounter with a primary source, that’s not really all that bad, is it?

Lesson Plan: Marcus Aurelius

The kids in my class liked the quotation on the board today from Marcus Aurelius, especially after I connected him with the old emperor played by Richard Harris at the beginning of the Ridley Scott/Russell Crowe movie, Gladiator.

The quotation?

Reflect often how all the life of today is a repetition of the past; and observe that it also presages what is to come.

Which, of course, they simplify to, “If you don’t study history, you have to repeat it.” Or if they’re slightly deeper, “Those who fail to grasp the lessons of history are condemned to repeat it.” Or some such nonsense.

Because that’s not what Marcus Aurelius is saying here.  As he wrote a little later in the same chapter, “the performance is the same, only the actors change.”  He’s saying something more along the lines of Battlestar Galactica‘s “All this has happened before, and all of it will happen again.”

Marcus Aurelius lived shortly after the high point of the Roman Empire.  He was considered the last of five good emperors.  Antoninus Pius was his mentor, and Antoninius was himself trained and mentored by the Emperor Hadrian. Hadrian was the disciple and adopted son of Trajan, who was the adopted son of Nerva.  And these men were Rome’s last able leaders for almost a century and a half — a century in which Rome’s government descended from a kind of enlightened dictatorship to something resembling a totalitarian police state.

Yes, I know that’s an oversimplification.

Still there are parallels.  Marcus Aurelius lived in a time of economic chaos, with wars on two fronts and a fair amount of discontent at home, and an uncertain succession with a complicated system of factions keeping the empire close to civil war.  Maybe it’s not such a bad thing for kids to read a book by a Stoic philosopher who also happened to be the ruler of the known world of his day.

What could go wrong?

Tomorrow, book one of the Meditations, and the kids’ responses to it.  Also, thanks to our tech department, I’m going to be running this reading process online on our school’s intraweb by the middle of next week at the latest, and so we’ll also be learning digitally in the near future!  W00t!

How to Plagiarize/ How to Avoid Academic Dishonesty

Here’s my lesson plan for my history classes today:

1. Go over class rules.
2. School’s official homework header
3. Grab a history book from the back shelf
4. Copy a sentence from the book.
5. Turn in the page.
6. “This is plagiarism.  You’ve turned in someone else’s writing as your own, and even if you copied it out by hand, it’s still claiming that you did original work.”
7. Discuss plagiarism and academic dishonesty.
8. “here’s how to fix it.”
9. Turn back the homework.
10. How to footnote.
11. How to create a bibliography.

Will I have to repeat this lesson? Absolutely.  Will they get it right the first time? Almost certainly not.  Is it a good way to begin? I think so… they go on from here to hoity-toity private schools and high-end public schools. They should know enough not to get thrown out for academic dishonesty.

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Chapel Program

I’m asking my readers to help me find appropriate readings for my school’s chapel program.

This year, we’re opening our chapel program for the first time to readings outside of the regular Bible program that we’ve done for decades — it’s a change mandated by our new head of school, who recognized that our families come from 15 countries, 20 states, and 6 world religions.  We needed to be more inclusive.

I have readings now from the Gospels, Native American traditions, Genesis and the Talmud, Rumi, the Tao Te Ching, Martin Luther King, Jr., Walt Whitman, and a few others. But I’m looking for more.

Would you help me?

I’m specifically looking for texts suitable for middle schoolers to read aloud, on the following themes in a spiritual life:

• Ancestors
• Sacrifice
• Holy Ones (Saints and Angels)
• Prayer
• Preparation
• Prophecy
• Thanksgiving
• Ordinary Time
• Meditation
• Mysticism
• Community
• Sacred & Profane
• Repentance
• Renewal
• Gratitude
• Mystery
• Achievement
• Light

Any help you can provide will be graciously acknowledged.

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Hey, Tech people

I want to salute the tech people at all of our schools, who make it possible for us to develop exciting new ways to teach, and give our students access to exciting new ways to learn.  They keep the equipment running, and they find new software, and (despite the filtering software) try to make it easy for us to find our way around.

I have only one small gripe.

Don’t (as you did today) promise me access to specific tech tools on the first day that all classes meet, and then e-mail me at 4 in the morning of that day to say that you can’t do it.  I’ve already made my lesson plans around the tech, and I may not have time to revise them successfully.  I understand — tech problems arise, you’ve spent 18 hours on the problem, etc., etc.,

But I hate winging it on the first day.  And if I have to wing it on the first day, my natural instinct is to blame the tech, and blame you.

Instead say to me, “I don’t think we can do that on Wednesday.  How about Monday?” Then if it’s ready by Wednesday, I think you’re terrific. 

In Star Trek terms, show me that you’re a Scotty — and that you get jobs done in a quarter of the time that you think it’s actually going to take. 

Because otherwise, I don’t trust you, and I don’t trust the tech.

Thanks.

(Oh, and by the way… I do trust the tech, and I do trust you [my specific guy, Jason].  But because it was the first day, I made alternate plans… just in case.)

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School starts Monday

I’ve kept meaning to post this week, but I’ve been working my way through teacher orientation this week.  There’s a lot of things going on.  We have a new head of school, and a new organizational chart to go with him, and a ready-made grab-bag of new policies and procedures to absorb.  It’s been mildly exhausting, but also fun and invigorating.  I’ve changed classrooms: from a room shared with six other people and programs and lots of light but no wall space to a room shared with four other people and programs and nothing but wall space. So that’s a little dismaying.

It’s also clear that my role as ghost writer of the accreditation document will likely continue this fall and winter.  It was a killer last year during our self-study, and it’s likely going to be a killer this year.  It’s too late to back out of my involvement by a long shot, and yet the thought of putting more time into it fills me with a certain degree of dismay.

As chaplain, I also put into play our new chapel format — an invocation from Isaiah 43, a poem from Jelaluddin Rumi, some Episcopalian prayers, a benediction from our school founder, and some closing sentences from the Zen tradition.  I think it reads pretty well, and there were faculty colleagues this afternoon who seemed deeply moved.  The history of religious life at Rectory is a checkered one, and a source of a fair degree of conflict; I’m eager to see how it plays out.

Finally, our dormitory-leader seniors are coming in Saturday for a half-day of training before we put them to work as residential assistants. We call them proctors, and ideally they perform some of the requisite work of helping get younger kids up in the morning, keeping the dormitories clean, and so on.  Some years they’re great, and other years they’re not.

We have a recommendation from our new head of school that we not make friends on Facebook with current students, and so I’m going to have to go through my facebook friends and look for current students.  I’m going to have to unfriend them in a polite and dignified way, and yet it still won’t be pretty. Hmmm

Learning and the Brain 2009

This conference actually wasn’t last week.  It was in mid-August.  I apparently dropped the blog entry into a “drafts” folder rather than publishing it, and then forgot about it.  As a bonus, here’s my piece on Learning and the Brain – unfinished, unedited, and forgotten for a month.

I went to the Learning and the Brain conference at Avon Old Farms School in Avon, CT this past week.  The CAIS CPD, of which I’m the chairman this year, is one of the sponsors of the event.  I think it’s one of our most successful offerings, although this year the attendance was down substantially from last year — the economy seems to be the reason.

A lot of private schools are cutting back on professional development and teachers in general these days; much like public schools. My father sent me a news item that 1,200 k-12 teaching jobs have been cut in Connecticut for the coming school year in the public schools. though I  do wish they’d also publish how many adminstrators lost their jobs — then we’d have a MUCH better idea how much it’s really about the kids).  A colleague of mine reports that at his private school, a prominent and much loved adminstrator was laid off, and when there were complaints, the head of school responded sadly, “I can have a beloved adminstrator or I can have a math department.”  Losing ten students at a school of under a hundred can have that kind of effect, I guess.

Anyway, the conference!

Every year now for several years in a row, a group of brain researchers come to talk to teachers, and every year I come away with a dozen ideas that are easy to talk about in theory and substantially more difficult to translate into practice on a daily basis.

I sat next to an administrator from a Virginia school who lauded and praised to high-heaven those clickers (multiple choice selectors for classrooms with SMARTboards or Promethean systems) I thought so awful at NECC 2009.

I learned that playing video games actually causes some parts of the brain to grow larger and more dense; pick the right video game, and you substantially increase your spatial recognition capabilities (Tetris) or your ability to pull a real rifle or pistol trigger for the Army (Doom, Quake, other FPS’s) and hit the target.  Digital word and number games like crosswords and Sudoku can decrease your risk of dementia and Alzheimer’s in later life.  The brain contains around 24 day-to-day executive functions like MONITOR, CORRECT, TIME, GENERATE, SELF-OBSERVE, and more.  These are connected to five or six long-term functions like planning and calendar-keeping, and two connected to space-time awareness and cosmic consciousness.  But there’s NO ONE EXECUTIVE FUNCTION. There’s a lot of them, and they start developing at birth, and they develop throughout life.  Some remain undeveloped, because the brain doesn’t know they’re there, or the part of the brain that controls the function is miswired, or it’s correctly wired but it’s not fully operational in this particular brain yet.

There’s no part of your brain that sits there, and rules everything else. There’s no king, no president, no tribal chief, no Indian in a headdress, no swami with a turban that rules everything.  No pilot in a jump suit, no steampunk engineer in a tophat and goggles pulling levers and getting burned by steam jets or pinched by the brain’s mental cogs.  Just a bunch of processes.  There’s no ‘there” there.

Does it change how I teach?

Well, yes. No. Maybe.  I could teach kids how to use and manipulate the 24 day-to-day functions.  I could try to connect them to the five or six long-term functions.  I could teach them “palace of memory” techniques from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, that are designed to work with and counteract the fragmentary nature of the executive functions of the brain somewhat.

I could ignore this data, and do ‘drill and kill’ exercises with them until my eyes bleed and theirs cry.

But here’s the thing.  Two things, actually.  First: if a kid has a learning disability, you can diagnose it pretty clearly with the right diagnostic test.  “oh, this is dyscalculia.  This is dyslexia.  This is non-verbal disorder… ” Whatever it is, you can find it.  But if a kid has an untrained Executive Function, like “doesn’t know how to MONITOR what his hand just wrote” or “doesn’t know how to INTERRUPT one activity and REDIRECT to another”… it looks like a character flaw: one child is too careless to go back and correct his work; the other is obstinate.  Yet both are connected with developmental processes in the forebrain, that develop at their own pace.

Second: The first time you teach a kid to use one of these frontal lobe executive function skills, it requires a MASSIVE amount of brain power in the portions of the brain where sensory information is processed — which means it’s going to use a lot of stored energy all at once.  But each time that the frontal lobe does the same task, the sensory lobes are less involved, until after about 5-6 times they become almost quiescent.  Then all the processing happens in the front of the brain.  The sensorium goes back to processing sensory data, and not running a 2-way communications channel between the forebrain trying to get something done, and the hind brain trying to watch what’s going on.

Keep in mind, this is what some neurologists and neuroscientists are thinking is happening.

Thirty fore-brain processes is a lot. Each of them is almost a separate personality — except that’s the wrong word, because personality may be something else completely.  The whole point is that we don’t know how the brain works to generate us. And getting good data is phenomenally expensive – wiring me up to get CAT scanned or MRI’ed or PET’ed could run $500 to $2500.

Mise en Place and the Nude Classroom

There’s a concept in French cooking, and even in American restaurant culture and among American foodies, called mise en place. Francophile and chef Jill Prescott describes it thus:

If there is one idea I try to drill into my students’ minds, it is mise en place, a Frenc term that translates to “put in place,” or, as I put it, “get your mess in place.”  The point is to prepare your kitchen and your ingredients ahead of time for maximum efficiency.  Stocks can be made ahead and frozen, as can fresh tomato sauce.  IF you have prepped items on hand that are used in many different recipes, you’ll always be ready to cook.  I teach students how to set up their kitchens so that good cooking is as easy as driving a car.  Once you have learned proper cooking techniques, you can make an outstanding meal in a short time.

Replace words like “kitchen” with classroom and “cooking” with learning, and you realize that maybe we don’t do a very good job of preparing our classrooms these days.  Or at least, *I* don’t do a very good job of preparing my classroom.

For one thing, I don’t know which classroom is mine this year.

I’ve been told what classes I’ll be teaching but not where.  I’ve been told what sections I’ll be teaching, but not who is in them.  This is a bit of a disadvantage, in that I don’t quite know which room to prepare this week, or what to do with it.  But let me step back a little bit further, and assume that I’ll be teaching in the same classroom I taught in last year.  It has two corkboards in the room, and a third just outside in the hallway.  These will have to be decorated, and re-decorated, several times during the year.  So I’ll need staples, a stapler, construction paper in many colors, pushpins and thumbtacks.

Each child in my classes is supposed to maintain a writing portfolio.  Since I’m apparently expected to keep doing this with paper (no one has gotten back to me about blogging) yet, I’ll need file folders.  And, apparently, a filing cabinet, preferably one that locks, since the teacher’s desk has a broken lock, and the room is used for after-school programs I don’t run; a study hall in the evenings (that I also don’t run); and in the late afternoons as a day-care playzone.

Yes.  Our school has space issues, and desperately needs more actual rooms.  But leave that point aside for a moment, and let me come back to my main point, which is this:

• What materials make a currently-naked classroom into a mise en place classroom?

Because that’s the essential question, really.  If I can’t answer that in the next six to eight days, then it will still be a naked classroom when students show up in the room for the first time on September 14.  And I may have to decide this question of what goes in that naked classroom sight-unseen.

I’m guessing that I’ll need paper, in several kinds, for various art projects.  And I’ll need scissors, for cutting up that paper (and they’ll need to be those silly little student shears instead of real scissors, even though they’re ninth graders and 15 years old!), and markers, and rulers, and glue, and… and…

It may be useful to consider the kitchen when thinking about your naked classroom.  For example,  spices should be close at hand to the cooking area, so that seasoning can be added throughout the heating process.  Table preparation is handled in a different place than food preparation, so it’s good to keep silverware separate from kitchen knives and mixing spoons.

So, a classroom should have different stations for different kinds of learning, just as a kitchen does. (and maybe it should have sou-chefs and sauciers and pastry-makers, but that’s another post).  Research here, drafting here, presentation assembly here, and presentation over here.  In other terms, we configure our classrooms differently depending on the lesson type we’re going to teach — setting up one way for a day with laptops, and another way when a classmate gives a presentation.

Likewise, some days we should do a little work that makes life easier down the road; in any classroom, there should be time for general reading, so that you have research ‘stock’ that can be added to other projects down the road.  You write and store away paragraphs and blog entries for rainy days, like making pasta with leftover flour and the last egg.  You try to waste nothing, by composting previous efforts and keeping a ‘kitchen-garden’ of fresh herbs — I mean, quick thoughts that can spice up other projects.

Some of the materials and tools a classroom needs are constant tools: the steel spatulas and cast-iron frying pans of education likely include staplers, extra pens and paper, and so on.  Some are imperishable consumables, like paper-clips or a world map. Some are perishables, like photocopy outline maps or book report forms, which get stale and need regular refurbishing.  The point is, when thinking about the mise en place classroom, is that the supplies get replenished.  When you tear the plastic off a package of construction paper, it’s time to put “buy construction paper” on the to-do list.

Maybe I’m taking the analogy too far, but maybe we should spend time each autumn thinking about our classroom’s mise en place, and select supplies and materials for the whole year.  There may not come a day immediately when you want to do a map project on ancient Greece, but it sure is nice to have the materials at hand to start right away.

It does become clear that a mise en place classroom can be expensive, unless you use a lot of found materials, as Reggio Emmila schools do.  It’s particularly expensive during a recession, when schools are budget-cutting, and there’s no sense of what teachers can really afford to put in their classrooms.

What do you think belongs in a mise en place classroom?

Welcome Back: Here are your books

Here it is, the week before teacher orientation begins.  I know many of my friends and colleagues are already back to school, but we don’t start until September 13.  “How lucky!” I hear some of you cry. “You have an extra week of vacation!”  Please remember, though, not to hate me — I don’t get days off in the middle of terms for professional development, or for American holidays like Columbus Day or such-like.  I also work weekends running a dormitory, so basically I have about eight days off (including weekends) between September 13 and Thanksgiving.

I came to school today to work on one project, and found myself considering the issue of books, particularly textbooks.

I spent part of the morning meeting with colleagues teaching ninth graders.  This was great.  It was nice to see them; one of them gave me a little cloisonné pin of an apple.  And we talked about how to co-ordinate curricula across literature and history more effectively through the whole school year.

But one of my colleagues was complaining about the translation of the Odyssey (selections from Fitzgerald) in her school-issued textbook.  And my other colleague then noted that she hadn’t read the Odyssey since high school.   I pointed out that if they didn’t like the translation, they could pick a different one from Project Gutenberg: for example Samuel Butler’s translation, or Butcher & Lang’s translation, or even William Cowper’s translation.  Or from the Perseus Project, you can use this translation with hypertexted notes.  (Also at Perseus Project is their database of art and archaeological materials from the ancient world, which I find fascinating and lovely).

They looked at me like I was from the moon.

I’m not sure what the underlying premise behind their glance was.  Maybe it was one of these:

• “Printing that would get us in copyright trouble.”
• “We don’t have the budget to print all those pages.”
• “That’s a whole lot of extra work for me.”
• “How will I know what to teach from the Odyssey without selections?”
• “You really don’t understand this business of teaching very well, do you?”

But mostly I think it was the notion that the textbooks we are given are the textbooks we must use.  They discussed a literature assignment that one of them has given to her classes for several years in a row, and with a mild giggle suggesting she was doing something naughty, the literature teacher said, “of course, it’s easier to get forgiveness than permission.”  All this for one three-day writing assignment that’s clever, inventive and edgy while also showing mastery of a writing style.

But the Odyssey?  We have to stick to the school’s official promulgated translation, and stick closely to the chosen selections (which, I might add, skip virtually all of the blood, guts, gore or racy scenes except the Cyclops…) Argh.

And since I spent at least part of my summer reading Plutarch’s Lives, part of the ancient curriculum intended to cultivate virtue in its readers by considering the good of men as well as the bad, I can only look at my present-day ancient history textbook with fear and loathing — drier and dustier than the bones of Caesar, and clearly written to suit political niceties in Sacramento or Austin or Albany.

Welcome back: here are your books.

I’m looking forward to breaking free, and reading some Plutarch, Caesar, Gilgamesh and maybe even some Egyptian Book of the Dead.  It’ll be nice to see if the kids buy into the idea that these are their books, because they explore what it means to be human, rather than merely middle school students.