Every so often

Every so often, it occurs to me to think about how most of my teaching career is based around teaching kids to do something that I do poorly.

Oh, it’s not to say that I’m a bad history teacher, or a bad Latin teacher, or that I’m G0d-awful at any of the things that I teach officially.  But I teach so many more things than my official subject matter.  Yesterday I taught someone how to use a sewing machine.  Thursday I taught someone how to keep a to-do list.  Wednesday I taught someone how tie a couple of knots.  Tuesday I taught someone how to plan backwards.  Last month I taught someone to find the constellation of Gemini.

But really, a lot of teaching work is

1. meeting kids where they are;
2. meeting kids with anything at all that you can do, at the level you can do it;
3. providing them with basic instruction;
4. encouragement to learn more;
5. directions to more information.

I KNOW there’s a lot more nuance to that, and I KNOW that we expect more of our teachers than that they do things poorly, particularly in the lower grades where even a child’s small gains can magnify over the long haul in astonishing ways.

But I’m sometimes amazed at how much of our work is about connecting young people to new ideas, new skills, and new abilities, which we may not even do very well. When the moment comes, though, we’re it. We’re the ones who are there, and so we are the ones who get asked.

That manse we have to have an answer. We have to be willing to try. It’s ok for that answer to be “no…” as long as the next sentence is, “but let’s figure it out.”

And that’s maybe what it means to say, “Let’s do it for the kids.”

Christmas in October

Right now it’s snowing heavily outside my living room windows, and I’m grading papers while wearing a heavy sweater and extra pairs (pairs, not just an extra pair) of socks. Winter, not to put too fine a point on it, has arrived.

Last winter, my school has something like eleven snow days and five or six early dismissals or late arrivals. This early sign of a bad winter — snow before Halloween, and quite a lot of it — suggests that I should be thinking how to deliver teachingg, learning, and training without necessarily having kids in class to do it.

That means returning to my video presentations, or developing more slideshows on slideshare.net, and designing more lessons to be delivered by other means an face-to-face. If today’s snowstorm turns out to be an indicator, we might well lose three weeks of school to winter weather, and not just two.

But at that point, one has to ask — should we be rethinking the school calendar anyway? If our school year is going to be this heavily disrupted, maybe we should just plan to take part of January and February off, and load up weeks somewhere else.

Thisis just me speculating out loud — my school isn’t thinking about making changes to accommodate Momma Nature’s renewed ill humor, and neither is yours. After how many years of disruptive weather, though, should a revision of e school calendar be on the agenda?

If you had a sewing machine…

If you had a sewing machine…

Originally uploaded by anselm23

Via Flickr:
… You could have printed those worksheets on 11×17 paper, sewn them into workbooks, and given those out instead of single sheets.

… You could teach kids to make their own Halloween costumes.

… You could assemble books of student poetry yourself.

… You could bind student work together into small portfolios.

…You could teach bookbinding.

… You could help your colleagues rethink their programs.

… You could engage new parents who are hobbyists.

… You could…

The thing is, technology isn’t just computers. It is about using tools to affect the world.

Isaac Singer, inventor of the Singer sewing machine, was born October 27, 1811. He was born 200 years ago yesterday He’s been dead since 1875… for 136 years, yet his invention, which is one of the most useful tools ever invented, isn’t part of the regular curriculum any more. Why is that? Why isn’t there a sewing machine in every classroom in America?

Front of Card

Front of Card

Originally uploaded by anselm23

I had my portrait taken on Thursday by a professional photographer who’s working on beefing up his skills and his portfolio. He took the pictures in my school’s new design lab, and I took the opportunity to make a card for him using some paper from the lab’s stash of card stock and construction paper, and the new (60-year-old) sewing machine a generous family refurbished for us.

When kids stop in the hall to see you sewing, when a sports-obsessed seventh grader says that sewing using a sewing machine makes him feel “powerful”, when the drama teacher stops you in the hall to suggest a new class in costume design… you know it’s important to have a sewing machine in the building.

Does your school have a sewing machine? Does anyone know how to use it? Did you know it works on other things besides cloth?

Kid-designed, kid built

Kid-designed, kid built

Originally uploaded by anselm23

My school’s new design lab has a sound problem. The lack of ceiling tiles makes the room have a very hard, echoing sound. This is problematic when we’re having design classes in there, but it was going to be a real problem for the school dance tonight.

So one of the eighth grade girls proposed that it was time to address a real-world problem… how to muffle and dampen the sound in the Design Studio.

So they did. Those awkward squares of brown velour — mounted on poles of PVC pipe and strung with nylon cord — are hardly the elegant solutions of a trained acoustical engineer. But they absorb and muffle sound from the massive DJ station one of the eighth graders is planning to set up.

Thanks to the 60-year-old sewing machine I picked up at a yard sale, and that a parent refurbished; thanks to a quick trip to a hardware store; thanks to the assistance of our school’s drama program director; and thanks to the willingness of a sports-obsessed, basketball-crazy boy who was willing to learn to work a sewing machine; and thanks to a confident, no-nonsense, take-no-prisoners seventh grade girl — we got these crazy fabric sound baffles designed, built and hung in an hour.

They’re not perfect. But they’re kid-designed, and kid-built. Tonight, a student will DJ the dance under these banners of student design. And the kids will KNOW, without exception, that they can make any decoration or tool for this room that they need.

Because they made these.

Dangerous Contemplation

Near the end of one of my classes in American History today, a group of my students were clearly not getting the idea of Revolution.

I was having a hard time explaining that American colonists in 1773 weren’t really sure if they liked British governance or not.  A lot of the colonists didn’t, a lot of them did, and a lot were just unsure.  But British treatment of Boston — calling out the Army and Navy to punish Boston for the losses of a private corporation — deeply rattled and unsettled New Yorkers and Georgians alike, and nearly everyone in between.

So, I went with my gut instinct.  I asked them, “OK… what would cause you to decide that the existing government, in Washington DC, was no longer the legitimate government of America?  Discuss this question… I want an answer from your tables in two minutes.” And I started the countdown timer.

In two minutes, the four tables of kids had come up with the following reasons:

1. Frivolous laws with harsh penalties that make everyone into criminals.
2. Atrocity — conscious murder of large numbers of citizens
3. Conspiracy with foreign governments to run the country the way the foreigners want.
4. Conspiracy with domestic persons or organizations to run the country for private benefit.
5. Failure to respond to invasion — foreign army inside the borders of the country, no response from government.
6. Unresponsiveness to crisis — major catastrophe, no real effort to relieve people’s concerns or injuries, or to reduce harm.
7. Responds only to faction — the government only answers to one small part of the country’s needs.
8. Re-introduction of slavery = “required work for no wages”
9. Deliberate discrimination:  conscious, obvious official persecution and violence against a large subset of the population.

There you go: Nine generic reasons why people might decide their government is not the legitimate government, and why they might turn away from the existing government to follow some other leadership.

It was only after the class had left that I realized that I’d invited them to consider and create a list of reasons that allowed them to justifiably contemplate treason.  And it was only AFTER that, that I realized that one girl said she thought that the Presidency had already gone that far, and was conspiring to respond only to faction.

I hope that the ‘leadership’ in Washington and the ‘leadership’ of the parties, and the ‘leadership’ of the Tea Party, and the ‘leadership’ of Occupy Wall Street understand just how ghastly this can become.

New Blog: CAIS CPD

My friend and private school colleague Bill Sullivan is the new chair of the statewide Commission that organizes professional development opportunities for teachers in independent schools.  He has gotten the Connecticut Association of Independent Schools’ Commission on Professional Development to start a blog. It’s just getting started; I’m a contributor, and a lot of folks from around the state’s private and independent schools are also getting involved.  At the moment, it’s a place for us to post and talk about some things that are happening in the world of education, and what we might use as a conference topic to structure the Commission’s offerings around them.

Feel free to go take a look, make some comments, and give us on the Commission some feedback.

Anti-Spam message

I recently had the opportunity to send the following e-mail, in response to a request (the ninth this week!) from a freelance writer asking if they could write some guest content for my blog, and link back to their blog about online colleges.

Dear xxxxxxx,

I have decided not to permit guest posts from freelance writers.  I occasionally invite guest posts from active teachers and school administrators, but not from people whose principal career is writing.

I think it’s worth mentioning that yours is the ninth e-mail I’ve received asking for guest-posting rights on my blog from a online-college-oriented website, and you may want to consider branching out to other subjects for blogging — unless, of course, your primary business is not blogging but selling online college services.  In which case, good luck — the bubble in student loans is very close to bursting in the United States, and you may soon be jobless.  My sympathies.

Sincerely,

Andrew Watt

I reiterate: if you’re a school administrator or a schoolteacher, and you’d like a chance to blog here as a guest, please let me know (Bill Sullivan, and Ben Gott, and Martha F, and Bryan Jackson, this especially means you).  I think you have important things to say to the world, and if you want the chance to say it here, you can have it.

Teaching American Revolutions

The last few days I’ve been teaching students about the lead-up to the American Revolution (1763 to 1775 AD) from the perspective of the following rough outline of the basic structure of a revolution:

1. Popular sense of oppression — ordinary people under the existing form of government feel that they are oppressed or repressed or controlled in some way, and there are genuine reasons to believe their feelings.
2. Popular discontent — public sources of opinion such as music or writing reflect this feeling of discontent and amplify it.
3. Grievance — the populace, the people, use the regular and normative means of communicating with their government to request relief from hardship and/or an end to the repression.
4. Double-Seizure — (This is a two-parter): the regular government demonstrates its complete inability to provide relief from hardship or oppression, OR demonstrates that it serves private interest rather than the public interest; and (not or) the movement of popular discontent finds itself the beneficiary of sponsorship of some kind: sometimes commercial, sometimes political, and sometimes military.
5. Conflict — The people (with their newfound sponsorship) organize active resistance to government, and the government (fearing the new force behind the people) organizes deliberate efforts to frighten or terrify the people to their former level of inactivity or relative passivity.
6. Violence — As a result of deliberate or accidental provocation, one side commits an ‘unforgivable’ act of violence against the other.  Existing popular discontent, and the fact of Double-Seizure, make it impossible to back down from the fight.
7. Revolt — The Sponsors of The People organize an alternate government to replace the existing governmental structures, and design it to counteract the real or perceived failures of the existing government, while the People and the Government duke it out for the right to control sovereign power. Even greater hardship becomes common.
8. Victory — one side (usually the Sponsors of the People rather than the People themselves) achieve victory, often by the government being unable to carry on the conflict.  The hardships of before are somewhat alleviated.
9. Equilibrium — in order to maintain power, the new government must forswear some of the powers of the old government, or redistribute them to reassure the People that the conflict was fought on their behalf, or otherwise demonstrate the good faith and credit of the new government.

Our textbook does not lay things out this clearly.  However, in a particularly subtle passage, the textbook makes clear that in 1773, after literally YEARS of messages and petitions from the colonies demanding changes to laws that grossly restricted the legal rights of colonists under English rule in America, the British Parliament passed the Tea Act of 1773 — effectively, a bailout of the bankrupted and broke BEIC, or British East India Company, using tax moneys obtained from the American Colonies.  The BEIC had been actively involved in inflating several nasty economic bubbles and crashes, and had been allowed to borrow the British Army and Navy for military operations in Indonesia, India, eastern Africa and a couple of other Islamic countries… and now it was getting massive cash from the British Treasury because it was “too big to fail.”

 The Colonies of New York and Virginia and Georgia refused to let the BEIC ships land quite sensibly — but the royal governor of Massachusetts was (likely) a BEIC investor, and refused to let the ships depart.   And it was at that point that the Boston mercantile community used the general unhappiness with the British to unite and strike a blow against their greatest competitor, and destroy a three-hull shipment of their competitor’s products.

The British closed the port of Boston with their navy, and stationed troops in Bostonians’ houses, and made clear their intention to starve the city into submission.  Hardship, on hardship, on hardship, combined with Double-Seizure: the Boston mercantile community and the Virginia planter society making common cause with each other on behalf of “the American people”, while the British Parliament used the tax money of their American colonists to enrich the executives and investors of the then-largest corporation in the world… and then stationed regular troops in major American cities to enforce that tax policy and cow the People back into letter writing and complaining in tea-houses.

Oh, right. The tea houses were closed, because they refused to serve BEIC-certified tea.

I think we have to wonder, as we watch the Occupy Wall Street crowd hanging around in Lower Manhattan and other cities all around the country and all around the world, just how far down this particular road we’re willing to travel.  We’re well on our way through the first part of Double-Seizure, and all the real unpleasantness may not be that much farther ahead.

Found a New Blog Today

Drill and Kill looks promising….