Blogush

Technicolor wrote in a blog post:

“What are we as educators doing to ensure that the students that sit before us during the school day are going to ready for what they are to face when we are no longer there for them.”

My comment:

Make sure that you teach a hidden curriculum. Take a look at the school curriculum for your class and create a curriculum that stands up behind it. Never start off with I am going to teach about Harriet Tubman. Start off with I am going to teach about courage. Never start off with I am going to teach them how to write a letter to the President. Start off with I will empower them to make change. Most importantly, stop calling your class by its name-Soc Stud, Math, Sci, Eng, whatever-call it life. I teach life. I use social studies to do it. Kids will remember life skills, they won’t remember social studies skills.

Every year I teach, I come to believe that more and more. Especially this year after reading my students evaluations at the end of the year. I hesitate to place this video here, something I have been fooling around with for next year, but I offer it as proof that if you will change lives, if you teach life.

I used to raise goats. Had quite a few, 40+ at one point. Which in urban New Haven County Connecticut probably made me the biggest goat farmer in the county. I grew up in East Haven, CT. I am pretty sure they have laws banning the preservation of open space and farms. So basically I went from only having a fish, to the biggest goat farmer in the county overnight.

What happens to teachers who all of a sudden want to make the change from a traditional teacher driven traditional classroom to a more progressive project based technology integrated classroom?

When I first received my first set of twenty goats I can honestly say I did not have a clue. Sure I had read every book and internet article on raising goats but soon found that they did not prepare me for the real thing and all of the exceptions to the rules. As someone who was new there was great intimidation in directly contacting a more experienced farmer and admitting that I did had a problem, did not know what I was doing, and please help me out of a mess I had gotten myself into. For all of you out there brimming with confidence—well, maybe you don’t know what I am talking about. But how many people reading this have spent hours trying to figure something out with great frustration instead of contacting someone who would be able to help you with your problem and probably give you some great extra advice that you did not even know that you needed.

What helped me with the goats is I found goats911.com. It was a site that listed goat breeders, their specialty, and when they could be contacted for help. They invited people with problems to ask them questions. When I started with 2.0 stuff I found a lot of sites full of teachers looking for partners, or sites that offered places for people to ask questions, but these were usually sites set up for folks who were already a bit 2.0 savvy, or for folks who had edibility to go from 1.0 to 2.0 in 5 seconds. What exists for the people who are driving Pintos, who might need their hand held for their transition, for folks looking for or in need of a mentor…folks who are too intimidated to get into a 2.0 discussion on a race track full of Ferraris. I know that I had goats die, because I was struggling through things on my own just reading internet articles, and only dabbling in forums with the goat Ferraris. I know that for many teachers starting a PBL 2.0 classroom will result in death because of the lack of guidance. If you think otherwise, than either you are just smarter than the average teacher (which I will assume all of my readers are or you have forgotten what it was like to make a jump to something brand new.

So I wish there was a teacher911.org(teacher911.com is already taken!). A place that had a list of teachers, their fortes, their email, Skype, twitter, something along those lines, that invited teachers who had zero experience to come and ask questions of an individual and could get close to an immediate response–a place to establish a relationship where mentors could be found. A place where newbies would not be embarrassed to ask the must simple questions of a person, and then come back and ask 10 more questions to the same person. I think newbies would be more likely to make a shift to 2.0 when they could ask questions and form a relationship with an individual rather than a ning, wikispace, or other type of forum. To get more teachers to make the shift to 2.0 we need to make a shift to 1:1 support.

Traditional professional development doesn’t work. I am talking about district supported, not when a person chooses to attend a conference. District PD is based on “we have something to give to you”, when a teacher chooses a conference to attend they go to that PD to “take something.” If you didn’t ask the question, you won’t remember the answer. One PD is full of people just getting info to questions they did not ask, the other is people seeking answers to their questions.

It bugs me when teachers say during parent conferences “S/he never asks questions in class, they need to ask more questions to catch up and do better.” It’s hard to ask a question when you don’t have the words, it’s hard to ask a question in a group that exposes a lack of knowledge, especially when it is in a group of people who have all the knowledge you are seeking. But maybe they would call teacher911 in the privacy of their home when they know the person on the other end is offering a safe helping outstretched hand.

Today I spent the day in the great town of Newton, MA at the edubloggercon before the Alan November Conference. In many ways (and I say this with lots of love) it was an edtech therapy session. I think I was one of two(?) classroom teachers present. Alot of the conversation revolved around and came back to how to get other teachers aboard the 2.0 train. The day gave me a few ideas for posts which will come in the next few days. On my drive home I was trying to come up with an analogy for a question that no one asked–maybe because it would cross some kind of “line.” So I leave you with this analogy and look forward to posting some thoughts from the conference in the next couple of weeks–and maybe I will ask the question instead of hiding it in a cryptic analogy…

Doctor=tech ed staff
Patient=teachers

If a doctor is called in to to help a patient who is ailing and the patient dies after treatment there are two possible reasons.
1-Doctor gives the wrong treatment and the patient dies — Doctor’s fault
2-Doctor gives the right treatment and the patient dies — not doctor’s fault

Why did the patient die despite being given the right treatment?

Gordon Wells in his book “The meaning makers” (1986):
1. At school, utterances by a child to an adult were 63% less than at home
2. Different types of meaning expressed by children dropped 50% (home to school)3. Conversations initiated by children dropped 64% (home to school)
3. The number of questions raised by children dropped by 70% (home to school)

I often hear teachers complaining about the problems they have with children coming to school from dysfunctional families. I have never heard a teacher talk about the problems families have to deal with from their children coming home from dysfunctional schools. Once again the question of ownership of the learning is central.

This post was inspired by an interview that my Lunch Time Leader Podcast team did with Sharen McKay, a scientist from Yale University.  One thing that she has researched is brain plasticity.  Basically making all our neurons in our brain connect instead of becoming dead-ends.  See the prior link for a more accurate explanation!

By now most people have heard about how we shouldn’t focus on teaching facts because google will be just a few steps away. “Why bother learning _____ when you could just get in a few clicks from google?” Yes, if you are wondering about something google will give you the answer. I worry about getting my questions answered so easily. I worry that I will not be able to wonder about as many things. I am a big outdoorsy type. What I love about exploring in the great outdoors is not that I can identify almost every plant and tree, but that there are some that I can’t. There are things that I still wonder about when I take a hike – and google has the ability to make me stop wondering about them. An example–there is this bird that sings in the woods every night in the summer. It’s a beautiful song. I have no idea what the name of it is, or what it looks like. Every night I wonder. If I looked it up on google my amazement and wonderment would be replaced by knowledge. I really don’t believe I would ever enjoy dusk the same way again.

Do I destroy my students “wonder?” When we are deep in thought about something in class thinking about all the possible answers someone usually says “look it up on google.” When we look it up and find the answer do I end the thought process, do I destroy the wonder, do I end the curiosity? When we are in the middle of baking home made bread do I just end up buying them some Wonder Bread?

This year when some says “just look it up on google” I am going to make sure that we don’t stop our search with an answer, but that our search leads to another question. Too often google is being used as an end, I want to figure out how to make it a tool that leads students to make more connections, a tool that is used to create questions, a tool that leads to more wonder.

Maybe it shouldn’t be “google plasticity.”  I think my issue goes beyond google and can apply to almost any 2.0 tool. Maybe it should be 2.0 plasticity, maybe some other term.

2.0 plasticity – using technology to answer questions students wonder about in order to make connections that lead to the development of more questions, that nurtures their curiosity, and leaves them wondering.

Ok…I have had zero time to deal with this blog and I really, really want to comment on some of the comments on my previous post. So until I find myself with more time, I am just going to use a video from Dan Meyer’s blog that he made and posted this week. I am so happy to have found a new blog that I had never come across. So thanks Dan for supplying me with some content for this weeks post.

dy/av : 002 : the next-gen lecturer from Dan Meyer on Vimeo.

I received an email from an ex-student who moved to a large city in another state for his freshman year of high school. A brilliant kid who was an absolute joy to have in class. I will always remember the presentation he did comparing and contrasting the different eras of music, playing samples of each on his flute. I have been thinking for a while about what kind of introduction or conclusion I could add to his letter below, but I think any of my words would just detract from the power of his. Full disclosure here—the letter is heavily edited. I did not change any of his words, but I did omit any sentence about me and parts about his band experience. I did get his permission to re-print the letter on Blogush.

Here is what we are doing to the cream of the “creative class:”

…education is very different here, and I felt something wrong in the classroom when I got here. It’s is seriously, and I am not exagerating, like CMT(CT Mastery Tests) day everyday here…the teachers, I don’t know how to explain it. They are not human, nothing is human. The tests, I do not even want to get into. They are Scantron, in other words, ALL bubble in because, and I quote a teacher, the teachers simply do not feel like grading papers. I have yet to write an essay here, or really write anything. Everything is multiple choice which just takes out the human in teachers I think. Well, I think that’s enough of bashing teachers…I am doing so much reading as I don’t read enough in school hahaha. I just finished Animal Farm which I loved. Such a great book. I also re-read 1984 and I found a lot of new stuff in it I hadn’t seen before. Last week I bought Fahrenheit 451 which was grand. See, the way novel reading goes at this school is they give us the book, they play a tape which reads us the book and that’s all. The teacher simply watches us. I don’t know, maybe I am just a complaining teenager which is fine…

I want to write back something that gives him hope. This is a great mind that should not be wasting away in a classroom coloring in bubbles on a test. What do I say? Would you give him advice on how to keep his mind active by doing things outside of the school? or direct him to take action and attempt to change the current academic environment? What would you do?

Came upon an interesting comment on dkzody’s blog that she left in response to another reader’s comment:

“Education is the one career where you have a clean stop and start each year. You can always see the end of the tunnel.”

That is so true. Every year I teach I start off as a totally different person. Each year I grow and change so much and look forward to reinventing myself for the next year. Extending Moore’s Law to me as a classroom teacher, I think that every two years my classroom changes so much that it bears no resemblance to the previous years. Hmmm…I just went through my seventeen years and it does hold true. I can say with certainty that the kids that graduated three years ago would not recognize my current classroom(of course not talking about aesthetics). I plan on talking about some of the changes in my end-of-school fiesta post.

So…click on that little word “comment” and tell me what is the biggest way in which you have changed in the last two years? And what sparked that change. (Note that the question is not — What is the biggest change you have made? Subtle difference)

My students are doing projects on 19^th Century American Heroes. Yesterday a student found a quote from Clara Barton that she asked me to help her interpret. After reading it I realized that it was a quote that describes my feelings towards education.

“I have an almost complete disregard of precedent, and a faith in the possibility of something better. It irritates me to be told how things have always been done. I defy the tyranny of precedent. I go for anything new that might improve the past.” - Clara Barton

I really want a quote. You know, a quote that when people hear it they say “hey, didn’t Paul Bogush say that.” A quote that will last longer than my presence here on Earth. One that is googlable. I thought I had a pretty good one awhile back. Years ago I started saying that “I don’t teach kids so that they will be ready for the future, I teach them to create the future.” Well a couple months ago I heard Wesley Fryer use it in a podcast and have seen it pop up in a couple of other places. Seems like I lost that one. Dang it.

Maybe someday I will blog the quote or post that gets sent around the internet. I really think that is the reason why I am blogging. For the hope that one day I will hit gold with some words and get my 15 Seconds of Fame. Do you have a post or quote you want to be known for?

For now I live on watching my little counter go up by a few each day, and for those of you that leave comments—I can’t even tell you how much it means to me. I can almost say with certainty that if my counter did not take a few ticks up each day, and I did not get the occasional comments I would stop blogging. That’s not a good thing, but the truth. So for everyone who visits Blogush and leaves a comment—Thank you. Thank you so much. You really do make me feel so important.

Seventeen years ago a few months into my first teaching job, I was standing in an assembly when I realized something.  I was the only white dude in the room.

I was looking around Twitter today at who other people follow and I had the same feeling come back.  There are only white dudes in the “Twitter room.”  I could not find anyone who was not.  Out of every class that I have collaborated with this year only one person was an African American. Then I thought about the blogs I read, the wikis I check out, and the podcasts I listen to.  Same deal as the Twitter room.  What’s up with that?