Blogush

I have this class.

They are a puzzle to me.

They have been since the first day.

They are so hard to “read”—I get very few non-verbal cues to know if something is working, failing, or somewhere in the middle.

Things aren’t going bad, but I want to bump up to the spectacular zone. It’s where we should be and I can’t quite figure out how to get there.

I have been wondering all year what I have to offer them. They are incredible writers. I think each one is writing the best they can. They just wrote inaugural speeches last week that Obama SHOULD have read. What will improve their writing is time, experiences, and wisdom. My teacher edition worksheet on how to support a topic sentence will not make them better writers. They can all follow directions to complete multi-step abstract problems. They can all take any directions I give them and complete the assignment perfectly. They don’t need a lesson on comparing and contrasting. They don’t need a lesson on cause and effect, or how to graph the number of immigrants in 19^th Century America. So I have been searching for something I can give them that will change them, something that they need, something that they could use right now. I keep coming up with only one answer.

Freedom.

That is what I can give them. Freedom from their self-imposed rules. Freedom to live outside of their protective “box.” Freedom to imagine, dream, create, experiment, make mistakes, and to take a chance on doing something that might possibly fail. I feel like doing the same thing a college professor once did to me. He simply said turn in your final exam. No topic, questions, ideas, or guidelines. I was forced to think “outside my box.” I was forced to free myself from rules that I did not even know I was following to be able to imagine, dream, and create something using my own guidelines and steps that I discovered on my own. That was in my 14^th year of school. I don’t want them to wait that long.

John Holt, wrote in his 1983 edition of ‘How Children Learn’. He said: “Fish swim, birds fly; man thinks and learns. Therefore, we do not need to ‘motivate’ children into learning, by wheedling, bribing, or bullying. We do not need to keep picking away at their minds to make sure they are learning. What we need to do, and all we need to do, is bring as much of the world as we can into the school and the classroom; give children as much help and guidance as they need and ask for; listen respectfully when they feel like talking; and then get out of the way. We can trust them to do the rest.” http://steveshann.wordpress.com

I believe John Holt. I also believe that school tends to take kids who think and learn naturally and make them dependent on teachers for what to think and how to learn. This year I am really struggling to un-school them, or maybe I am just a bit more anxious for them to break out of their safety zone earlier than students normally do. Each time this year I have given them some freedom and space to run, for the most part they have run right back into their “boxes.”

I don’t want to change the world…just one little school.

Here’s the scenario. You have a fifth grader and a first grader. You live in a small town. One K-6 elementary school. Two principals. One superintendent. One board of education. You want to change the way things are going in the school, not just one class. Things such as the amount of homework, integrating technology and more progressive methods of teaching.  You can’t have a five year plan.  By that time you youngest will be out of school. You are doing this as a parent, not a teacher.

Do you aim your energy at the kid’s teacher each year, the principal, the superintendent, or the board of education?

Do I even bother with the elementary school or aim higher–middle school, or high school?

I think next year might be the year I get off my butt and actually open my mouth and I am trying to figure out where to start.

My last post was a re-post.  I hope it’s ok if I re-comment.  I keep coming back to this comment left by Brad Ovenell-Carter on a post a couple weeks ago and I think it is worth standing alone as a post.

Thank you for bringing us to what I think is the fundamental purpose of an education: the teaching of morality, which as you point out is necessary to citizenship. My friend, Ian Benson, writes in the UBC Law Review:

A deeper ground for moral education is both necessary to citizenship and largely missing from contemporary education of all sorts [...Unfortunately,] what now stands for moral education is a series of disconnected concepts (e.g. “tolerance,” “equality,” “self-esteem” and “rights”) that are themselves obscured by a loss of historic understanding of such concepts as “virtue” and the rise of a superficial language of “values.”…If citizens (religious and non) continue to attempt to speak to surrounding cultures in confused language (such as…by using the pseudo-moral language of “values” when they mean an objective category of truth and meaning), they will never succeed in communicating those matters that are deepest and most essential to citizenship and culture.

I think he’s right. And he helps me illustrate a problem you will run into if you try to teach the values of tolerance, curiosity and so forth.

The problem is that tolerance and curiosity and the other qualities you mention are not values. They are virtues. Values, by definition, are elective. In fact, they are not really things at all. If I say I value this blog of yours, what I am really saying is that it is important to me, that it has some worth–as far as I am concerned. Likewise, if I say I value hard work, I mean the same thing. True, most healthy-minded people will agree on valuing the latter. But they have no more reason to take it as a thing of value than your blog. In other words, we can’t say hard work is valuable simply because most people say they value it. The laws of supply and demand don’t apply to ideas or concepts because they are always in infinite supply.

We need to teach virtues, not values. We can think of virtues as distinctive or essential, positive qualities of things: human beings are by nature tolerant, curious, loyal and so on. Now, if that’s the case, then it follows that we all ought to–I mean that in a moral sense–cultivate those qualities. Of course, we may choose not to cultivate them, but that is not the same thing as saying they are elective, like values.

Now we will soon run into another problem, namely that we derive virtues from our beliefs about the fundamental nature of things–our metaphysical claims. That is another, long discussion, and I’d be flattered if you’d have a look at a paper I presented on that subject at conference on the humanities at Columbia University to years ago. Send me an email and I’ll pass the paper on to you.

Cheers & thanks for resurrecting a topic that is near and dear.

Brad O-C

This comment has sent me on another wave of deep reflection.  And by the way Brad, my email is PBogush@wallingford.k12.ct.us  I would love to read that paper.

Many times the things we do in a classroom at the start of the year to establish our classroom environment should be repeated at intervals throughout year.  All those “get-to-know-you” activities and classroom spirit activities usually are done and gone by the second week of school. By the end of the first week we assume that everyone knows everyone, each kid is comfortable in the space we have provided, and why would we need one more “get to know your neighbor” activity.

Several years ago I had a student teacher start in the middle of the year.  I told her to treat her first week at the end of January just like it would be her first week in September.   Wow…doing a “get-to-know-you” activity in the middle of the year had so much more power than forcing one upon the kids the first couple days of school.  It was fabulous, and resulted in a much tighter knit community in my room.  I have tried to keep up the tradition ever since.  Some things are worth repeating.

Way back in August Terry Shay wrote a post with some inspirational quotes to read to get his readers motivated for the start of a new school year. I just happened to bump into the post again.  After reading it, I thought not only is this applicable to the beginning of the year, but the quotes in the post are also worth remembering at the half-way point.  Some posts are worth repeating.

Quotes to start the year…

I love a good motivational quote…. I thought it would be good to start the school year with some I have stumbled on that made me think!

This is the time of year when school begins. . . and my thoughts turn to some very special people. The teachers who were such an important part of my life. I think of the way their special attention helped open the gates of learning. They gave so much of themselves. . . with patience and tenderness. And not all the knowledge was of the textbook variety. I also learned about life. Those caring teachers helped me blossom as an individual. . . and gave me a sense of self-worth that. . . even today. . . sees me through trying times. I can’t imagine a more precious gift that one individual can give to another.”
— Unknown

“[Kids] don’t remember what you try to teach them. They remember what you are.”
— Jim Henson (It’s Not Easy Being Green: And Other Things to Consider)
http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/show_tag?name=teaching

“A teacher’s constant task is to take a roomful of live wires and see to it that they’re grounded.” E.C. Mckenzie
http://www.brownielocks.com/teachingquotes.html

“A college degree and a teaching certificate define a person as a teacher, but it takes hard work and dedication to be one.” Paul McClure

“I was at a meeting recently when a colleague told a story of being in India, where an educator there asked her, somewhat skeptically, “In America, you test your students a lot, don’t you?” She replied, “Well, indeed, the United States has a national policy that requires testing of all students in certain grades.” The Indian educator said, “Here, when we want the elephant to grow, we feed the elephant. We don’t weigh the elephant.”
Source: www.edutopia.org/1814

Four years ago on one of the last days of 8th Grade I pulled a girl out into the hallway and told her she “You should be a teacher.”  It was the first and last time I have ever given career advice.  There was just something special about her.  She had that “thing” that “spirit” that “soul” that “mojo” that “spark” that just made her stand out.  She taught me so much about how to teach, what is important in a classroom, and how to look inside of each kid.  She is the kid that teachers wish they had a whole classrooms of, the kid that any parent should be proud of.   She has stayed in contact with me ever since, visiting a couple of times each year.  After each visit I reflect more deeply upon who I am as a teacher.  She leaves me with hope, and a little more courage to continue doing what I doing in the classroom.   It is one of my greatest joys as a teacher to have a student return to share with me what has been going on in their life.  When she came back to visit this week I could not help thinking through the entire conversation that I hope one day my daughters grow up to be just like her. She is a magical young lady.  I am so proud of her.

And…she’s going to become a teacher

My students and I were amongst the millions of Americans that watched President Obama’s Inaugural speech today.  This part caught my attention:

Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends – hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism – these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history. What is demanded then is a return to these truths.

There is a huge focus in the blogosphere and 2.0 world on teaching 21st Century skills.  This blog was started to document my path in teaching my kids “21st Century Skills.”  Early on I pulled back on making that the focus.  From the beginning of my research into how to integrate technology into class I noticed that something was missing–values.  We could have teachers fully integrating technology into classrooms that lack values and we will successfully graduate a generation of students who lack the moral compasses to create a future worth living in.

Hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism.

We spend an awful lot of time focused on teaching 21st Century Skills.  Should we also be focused on teaching 21st Century values?

If you drive down the highways in Connecticut you’ll come across signs in each college town stating what sport championships have been won by the local college team. When I see them all I can think about is each one is probably worth about 5 laptops.

Every morning in school we have announcements. There is the smattering of random school stuff, and then the listing of every kid that played in the basketball games and how many points they scored. Apparently it is more important to tell us about someone who scored 4 points in a basketball game than describing a student’s feats in the classroom. There is no mention of anything celebrating the actual reason why we haul the kid’s butts into school each morning.

Why not? Well first of all the re-cap of most classes would probably be pretty boring.

(Please use your best sports announcer voice)

Today Mr. Smith handed out 30 worksheets and watched the students read their textbooks as they answered the questions. 26 out of the 30 were handed in at the end of class. He also collected and reviewed the questions from chapter 3, and reminded the students to make sure you study for tomorrow’s test.

So I decided to write one up to be read this week.

Yesterday Mr. Bogush’s class played DJs presenting the story of Lewis and Clark to a live audience around the world. Ashley scored 97 points, Cameron scored 94, and Kristen was the MVP with 100 points. Joe made an incredible rebound after slacking off the first two days of the project to score 90 points. Anna started off strong, but missed nearly the entire 2^nd half because she had to get her braces taken off. Rachel saved the day with an assist in the final minute stepping in to help a group that had a member absent. Bogush’s class will advance to work with the Raiders of Arkansas in a collaborative project next week.

Hmmmmm….I’ll have to work on it a bit more

For now I am working on better opening to each class.  I am thinking of getting a really big spot light and doing something like what is in the video below.  Now this would be a great way to start class!

Last summer I found a video based on a book by Brad Engel that helped motivate me to get ready for the new school year.  As I was busy planning units and trying to stuff as much technology as I could into the year it made me pause and remember to say “welcome” to each kid that enters my room…and really mean it.  No matter who they were, or what type of reputation or label they had.

I just returned from a wake for a student that graduated a few years ago. So many kids there were hurting. So many kids had no idea what was going on and what tomorrow would bring. Wednesday they will all go back to school. They will all sit back in their chairs and stuff their thoughts so they can take notes, tests, and have discussions on the merits of Andrew Jackson’s Presidency. Those that don’t do that will see their grades drop. I hope for all of them, that at least one adult in their life up at the high school will throw away the damn books for at least a day and help guide them through this. I hope that at least one adult will put a hand on someone’s shoulder and support them. Someone standing in line mentioned that his sister was staying strong through this. She was not being emotional or letting it affect her. I hope my students’ teachers are not as strong. I hope that at least for the next few days they are “weak” and talk to the students as they go through their own healing process, or if they were not affected, help talk the students through theirs. Just as students need role models for writing and behavior, they also need role models to learn how to deal with tragedies. So many kids are hurting. I just hope their tears are not ignored. Andrew Jackson is not gong anywhere. He can wait until next week.

Ines Pinto recently wrote a great post on her blog entitled The Bloggers of the Future.  She reminds us that it is important to just not follow and support adult bloggers, but also the bloggers of the future.

I believe that young bloggers are already playing an active part in the renewal of our era; that the fragile web they are weaving with their written words conceal the power to multiply and deepen friendly connections as the foundations of a different society: the one that will find its joy in sharing and thus will be healthier, more happy, more free.

When was the last time you left a comment on a kid’s blog?  After blogging with my kids I can tell you that a comment from an adult, goes just a bit farther than a comment from a kid.  It means that they have the respect of the blogging community.  It means that they impressed an adult just long enough to make them pause to become apart of their conversation.  I recently told my kids to stop saying “Hello, I am from Mr. Bogush’s class” whenever they leave a comment on an adult blog.  That they can consider themselves an equal contributor to the blogosphere and do not have to feel intimidated or anxious about entering a conversation on a blog.  Their words are taken from a perspective that adult bloggers no longer can see.  I think that they can bring a unique point-of-view to the blogosphere and should be supported by the community that they don’t hope to be apart of someday, but are a part of right now.  So please, take the time this week to visit at least one kid’s blog, whether it’s an individual blog, or a classroom blog, and encourage them to continue taking an “active part in the renewal of our era.”

If you have a class that blogs, please leave your URL in the comments.

And don’t forget to vote!   Polls close Tuesday afternoon.