Blogush

Sue Wyatt tagged me with the meme  “Looking back on your life, what was the worst‘job’ you ever had, that ironically made you a better teacher?” I have to admit that I was tagged with this meme a few months ago by Anne Mirtschin and ignored it because I wasn’t comfortable giving the answer. I wasn’t sure how my answer would be taken. I was afraid to revel a little secret that I have held for so long.

When I was 12 years old I started a lawn service. It was very tough work. I worked up to about 10-15 properties. I loved that job. A few years later I started washing dishes at a mom and pop breakfast/lunch joint. Really hard work, but I loved it. A couple years later they moved me over to the bakery where I eventually moved up to opening and closing the place. Holiday weeks meant working 15 hour days, there was no such think as a break or lunchtime. I really loved that job. With those jobs going on I added in working at a BSA camp away from home during the summer. I led the Scout Craft and Nature sections. Really loved that job. Then I moved on to lead hikes to the Rocky Mountains. Really, really loved that job. Worked at a deli for a month—wouldn’t say I loved it after cutting off the tips of a couple fingers, but it was a great experience. Worked at a dairy farm for three years—loved it. I have been scoring beginner teacher portfolios for the Connecticut Department of Education for 13ish summers—love it. Worked in two different “natural food” stores for 5 years—loved those jobs. Started my own small farm—love that job. So that leaves only one other job that I have ever had…teaching.

I have had a love hate relationship with teaching.  There have been days that I could not imagine waking up and going in, and other days where I couldn’t imagine doing anything else.  But something has begun to change recently–I no longer have those days in which I hit the snooze 5 times.  This was not the case for my first 10+ years.  For my first ten I was in a school that created a lot of pain and stress.  Every single day there seemed to be a new roadblock put in place to prevent a kid from getting an education.  There were many days in which I would have preferred to wash dishes instead of going to school…actually I would have preferred to wash dishes everyday.  I remember distinctly that it took 5 years before I was able to get in bed at night and fall asleep.  That school was so challenging, depressing, and full of anxiety that it made me deeply reflect on who I was and what I “should” be doing.  Teaching was at that point the worst job I have ever had.  That “worst” teaching position forced me to examine why I had to use a one-size-fits-all curriculum, enforce rules that were senseless, do things that crushed my students spirit in the name of school policy, give grades, adhere to a schedule that stifles creativity, not able to get the supplies or tools I needed to get my kids fully prepared,  work in an environment in which I might be one of a few who believes that a kid’s spirit should come first, and an environment in which my belief in integrating technology in a project based classroom might get me burned at a stake. Everyday all of that weighed on me. Everyday I couldn’t do what I believed in my heart was the right thing to do. I had learned to constantly twist and manipulate the “rules” and “curriculum” to make my kids learning journey a positive one. When I saw some of the things that kids were made to do, and some of the things that were said to them and how they got treated it broke my heart. I agreed with John Gatto. Teaching was at that point in my life the worst job that I ever had. I questioned whether I would ever make a difference.

That laundry list of things that have made teaching my “worst” job also drove me to figure out how to make my students time in class the most valuable of any they will spend in their life, and ironically have made me a better teacher.  I spent years experimenting how to overcome the obstacles. How to over come a traditional grading system? How to make school “real?” How to treat 100 kids as individuals? How to implement a classroom management system that is not coercive and does not strip kids of their pride and dignity? How to give kids freedom in their learning and allow their curiosity to flourish while still following the curriculum? How to get them to succeed in a classroom environment that is a paradigm shift from what they are used to? How to empower them even though they have to ask me for permission and a pass to go and simply pee? How to fully integrate technology into class so that it does not distract or mimic textbook learning, but leads to growth in creativity, collaboration, and communication? How to involve myself in professional development that is innovative and not just full of ideas that I have already read online or led by someone who has never used the ideas in a classroom? How to do all of the previous things in an school environment that does not support change, risk, creativity, or mistakes, and with colleagues that think I am nuts?

Some 14% of all new teachers quit after their first year; 20% are gone within 3 years; and almost 50% are gone within five years. For science teachers it is even higher – about 50% leave after 3 years and  67% after 5 years. Why do up to 50% of teachers leave the profession within the first 5 years?  I spent some time this morning researching the reason why and found out that they quit because of many of the obstacles that I have listed.  The only difference between them and me, is that I did not quit.  I knew in my heart that teaching was my favorite job, I just needed to figure out how to overcome the obstacles.

One by one I am slowly overcoming the obstacles and finding the answers to my questions.   It has been a long uphill battle but teaching is no longer my “worst” job.  I am really looking forward to Monday and Tuesday’s classes.  I am excited about the project we are doing next week.  I can’t wait to hear what went on in my student’s lives this past weekend.

Teaching is now becoming my favorite job because in the last few years I am sure I am doing something that I was not able to do before.

Everyday I make a difference.

Only a couple of days left to vote!

King of the Hill is not a show I watch, but I will support this one episode.  It is a funny satire on Special Education and NCLB.  Even if you normally would not watch the program, give it a shot.

…and don’t forget to vote!

I have the greatest group of students ever this year.  I know that is tough to say, all kids are great and that sorta thing.  But this year I think that they are just a super group.  I have been questioning whether that has allowed me to relax, to sit back and maybe not push so hard.  I wonder if I have settled into just doing a pretty good job because the kids make it so easy.  Or is it that I have challenged them and they are just so good at dealing with a paradigm shift in classroom environments.

Those thoughts made me dig up a poem that I started messing around with to use in class at the end of the year.  It makes me remember that being pretty good, is not good enough.

Pretty Good, by Charles Osgood

There once was a pretty good student
Who sat in a pretty good class
And was taught by a pretty good teacher
Who always let pretty good pass.

He wasn’t terrific at reading,
He wasn’t a whiz-bang at math,
But for him, education was leading
Straight down a pretty good path.

He didn’t find school too exciting,
But he wanted to do pretty well,
And he did have some trouble with writing
Since nobody taught him to spell.
When doing arithmetic problems,
Pretty good was regarded as fine.

5+5 needn’t always add up to be 10;
A pretty good answer was 9.

The pretty good class that he sat in
Was part of a pretty good school,
And the student was not an exception:
On the contrary, he was the rule.

The pretty good school that he went to
Was there in a pretty good town,
And nobody there seemed to notice
He could not tell a verb from a noun.
The pretty good student in fact was
Part of a pretty good mob.

And the first time he knew what he lacked was
When he looked for a pretty good job.

It was then, when he sought a position,
He discovered that life could be tough,
And he soon had a sneaking suspicion
Pretty good might not be good enough.

The pretty good town in our story
Was part of a pretty good state
Which had pretty good aspirations
And prayed for a pretty good fate.

There once was a pretty good nation
Pretty proud of the greatness it had,
Which learned much too late,
If you want to be great,
Pretty good is, in fact, pretty bad.

I am working with the poem and changing the ending to create a video to show to my kids on the last day of school. A bit rough, would love suggestions.

Again, a big thank you to everyone that has voted for “Blogush” in the Weblog Awards. Remember you can vote once every 24 hours until Tuesday! Just click on the icon below and it will take you to the poll!

Heather Dowd brought to my attention the article How the city hurts your brain…And what you can do about it By Jonah Lehrer.  I made an instant connection between my classroom environment and this article.  Here are some highlights from the article:

Just being in an urban environment, they have found, impairs our basic mental processes. After spending a few minutes on a crowded city street, the brain is less able to hold things in memory, and suffers from reduced self-control.

A city is so overstuffed with stimuli that we need to constantly redirect our attention so that we aren’t distracted by irrelevant things, like a flashing neon sign or the cellphone conversation of a nearby passenger on the bus. This sort of controlled perception — we are telling the mind what to pay attention to — takes energy and effort. The mind is like a powerful supercomputer, but the act of paying attention consumes much of its processing power.

People who had walked through the city were in a worse mood and scored significantly lower on a test of attention and working memory, which involved repeating a series of numbers backwards.

This also helps explain why, according to several studies, children with attention-deficit disorder have fewer symptoms in natural settings. When surrounded by trees and animals, they are less likely to have behavioral problems and are better able to focus on a particular task.

A tired brain, run down by the stimuli of city life, is more likely to lose its temper.

…the very same urban features that trigger lapses in attention and memory — the crowded streets, the crushing density of people — also correlate with measures of innovation, as strangers interact with one another in unpredictable ways. It is the “concentration of social interactions” that is largely responsible for urban creativity, according to the scientists.

I used to have a city classroom.  Every inch of my walls and portions of my ceiling were filled with posters, odd objects, student work, hanging decorations and plants.  I thought I was being a good teacher by offering all of the stimulation.  I tried to make my class an exciting busy place where there was non-stop action, movement and exciting things happening to stimulate the kids.  Then one day I had a seat in one of the student desks to check out a new seating plan and had the same perspective that the students had.  Whoa…it made me stop and realize that I did not even know where to focus and my eyes went from picture to object to the board and all around and back again.  The next year the kids walked in and there was not a thing on the walls.  Everything was bare.  We slowly added student work as the year went on and I noticed that when something went up, kids actually stopped and focused on it.  As I used more technology and the kids turned in less “paper” my room was more “bare” for a greater part of the year and I like it. I think it has been especially beneficial to many students who have attention problems. Continuing the city/country analogy, I try to always make sure we spend a week in the country between projects and arrange the desks in a manner that focuses attention to one spot–a horseshoe for a single speaker or small groups for projects. 

It might just be in my head, but there is a huge difference in student performance when those changes are made.  When I run big mentally tough challenging projects back-to-back the latter one never seems to work quite right.

I now introduce our projects in the country, go to the city to plan and start work on them, and come back to the country to finish, present and reflect.

So where do you teach?

A quick thank you to everyone that has voted for “Blogush” in the Weblog Awards.  I really, really appreciate it.  Remember you can vote once every 24 hours!  Just click on the icon below and it will take you to the poll!

If you can spare 30 seconds please go over to the Weblog Award’s Page and vote for me!  Yes, you can go there and vote once per day.  If you vote at home and work that would be super.  If you are teacher send the link out to all your kids, send it out to everyone in your company, send it to everyone in your family!! There are some big sharks in that pool of finalists and I need all the help I can get.

The Weblog Awards are the world’s largest blog competition with over 545,000 votes cast in 2007 edition and nearly two million votes cast in all editions since 2003.  There were over 5,000 nominations in the 48 categories. My blog is in the “Best Education Blog” category.

So if you can spare 30 seconds, I would really appreciate it if you can visit the Weblog Award’s Page and vote for me…everyday until January 12, 2008 (that’s next Monday).

A few years ago I was very lucky to have David in my class.  David has Autism.  I have had students that have had autism before.  What made David different was that during the year he was in my class I opened my eyes to a different way of teaching kids, especially special education students.  I realized that every PPT I sat in on was all about how to get kids to conform and succeed in a traditional classroom.  It was the kid that had to change.  It was the kid that would need a IEP, drugs, or checklists.  It was all about taking a square peg and figuring out how to shove them into a round hole.  The meetings focused on fixing the peg, not changing the shape of the hole.  It was very rare to actually get any input from the kid.  We never knew what was going on in the mind of the student.  We seem to enter these meetings with an angle of what does the teacher want the kid to do and how do we make the kid do it.  We sometimes just treat the kid like a lump of clay, and everyone at the table pokes and prods it with suggestions to shape them into what a student should be…in their opinion at least.  Too often we look at the kids weaknesses and try to fix them.  We don’t look at their strengths and try to build on them.  We take a kid who is already frustrated with school, take the things they have the most trouble with, and find ways to convince the kid that sitting in a chair for 55 minutes at a time, taking notes, studying for a test, and doing homework everynight will be the key to their life long success.  We spend a lot of time and money trying to make kids conform to our sytem.  Crazy…

I would like to leave you with a letter written by David for one of his college classes that his mother has shared with me and I have received her permission to share with you.  David was much more than just a lump of clay.  I know that now.  And thanks to him, I will stop trying to mold my students, but instead create an environment in which they can shine. David will shine, as long as he is not forced to become a round peg just to fit into our society’s black hole.

I am David, an individual who possesses autism. My disability makes it difficult to for me to understand the nuances of social conduct. Instead of instinctively knowing these facts, I have to learn them from scratch. For instance, I don’t know when to interject my thoughts into a conversation or when everyone’s interest of my opinions starts to waver. While I have gotten better in many areas, I still have trouble knowing when to speak and how to interpret people’s expressions. I’m still not very good at making eye contact as it’s like getting stage fright, and I am sometimes not aware of my tone. I am also not very social. While I do enjoy talking to people with similar interests, I dislike crowds and extreme extroverts. Being in a packed stadium of exuberant people would be a nightmare for my sense of space and hearing. The situation would overwhelm my senses and make me very unhappy. I prefer a more quiet, controlled environment. I also enjoy my solitude, where I can think in peace and pursue whatever interests me. As a fan of, among other things, Japanese monster movies and anime, I find it difficult to find those who share these interests and so I turn to the Internet. I enjoy reading discussions about them and will, on occasion, join in to add my thoughts to the equation. I also read fanfiction, fan written stories based on copyrighted properties and I often get ideas for tales based around my favorite shows. However, as with with my original story ideas, I procrastinate a lot and have trouble finishing even a story’s plot outline. I hope to overcome this and be able to publish stories about action, adventure, and interesting characters. Many of my tales can get very dark and push a protagonist’s psyche past the breaking point. For instance, I have a story in mind where a very sheltered superhero fan manages to become one and his sanity gradually unwinds when he sees how low people will go. However, that same character will learn to cope with that and still find that people have the capacity to do great and wonderful things. In my own fiction, I’m too idealistic to concede to downer endings.

Confession….

I have been a little down latley.  It seemed as though every blogger out there that I read has been tagged for the “7 Things you don’t know about me” meme–except me.  Geez, it’s like not getting a invite to the party that all the cool kids are going to.  So I am happy to say I am finally one of the cool kids thanks to Bill’s tag! (and tagged again by Jess Muculloch!) So let’s see, seven things you don’t know about me are:

1- I am a heavy metal fanatic.  Love being in the front row of a concert surrounded by people with long hair and tattoos.  I used to have a heavy metal podcast that made it into the top ten in iTunes. I lead a student metal/punk band that played at the 8th Grade outings each year.  Iron Maiden is my favorite band of all time!  On the turntable right now is Dokken, Ratt, and Dio.

2- I spent my college summers leading backpacking trips out to the Rocky Mountains.  Out in the middle of no where for two weeks.  On one trip on the way back we stopped in North Dakota and were camped out on the edge of a plateou.  We were run out of our sleeping bags early in the morning by a heard of buffalo.  We went over the edge and dug into the side trying to avoid the herd.

3-I used to communte to school on my bike.  The lowest temperature I ever biked in was -2 degrees.

4-Almost all the meat I eat is produced on my farm. I have had to stick my hand inside of a goat to deliver a kid.  I kill my own chickens, and have a small herd of very rare heirloom sheep.

5-I spent ten years teaching at the worst most challenging school on the planet.  It was everything that was wrong with public education in one building.  If you think you can imagine what it is like to teach in the worst most challenging inner city school, you can’t–it is a different world.  I never for a second wish that I would have started my career anywhere else. I am still recovering from it, and  I still feel guilty about leaving.  While there I started my transition from being a traditional detention/test/homework/disciplinarian teacher to the odd-ball teacher I am today.

6-I really, really, really want to be a college professor!  My favorite time in the classroom is when I am working with student teachers.  I would love the opportunity to totally mess-up kid’s minds and give them a completly different take on how to “teach.” I can’t quite figure out the path to get there.  It seems as though all professors have a PhD or have done some great research, writing, or other projects.  I don’t see those credentials getting onto my resume until AF (after kids).

7-I am Santa Clauss.  Really I am. I am Santa for our town’s winter festival.  It is a really cool gig making kids smile all day.  Making kids smile really energizes my spirit.  My thesis for my 6th year was actually about using humor in the classroom.

So there ya go.  Now to pass it on and tag other bloggers.

The following bloggers can consider themselves tagged:

Steve Kimmi

Dan Callahan

Terry Shay

Glenn Wiebe

and the last two students that commented on my Blog!

Mallorie and Brian

Earlier this year I stopped following all of the big cheese bloggers and podcasters.  I even took the blogroll off of my blog.  You know who they are.  Look at 99% of the blogrolls out there and you will see the same names.  If you are a new blogger or podcaster they are the same ones that are in your blog roll right now.  If you are an old time blogger please update your blogroll with all of those new blogs you found after your initial plunge into the 2.0 world.  Nothing against the big guys, I was just looking for something fresh and new, and wanted to find people who were more like…well, me.  The folks who are in the 400,000s for a technorati rating, get a big smile when their counters hit more than 10 people per day, and just a single comment on a post is enough motivation to write again the next day.  During the course of my search I found many small, and many “big” blogs that I had previously never seen.  One of the first that I found was Delaine Zody’s (or did she find me?).  It is the only blog that I have continuously followed through every RSS reader change.

On Christmas Day Delaine left me a present in a comment–she gave me a Pop-tastic award.  I get excited anytime anyone stops by and reads a post of mine, but it is with great excitement and a “tear in my eye” that I come to the podium and accept a 2008 Pop-Tastic blog award from one of my favorite people I have never met, Delaine Zody!

Part of the deal is that after receiving the award you have to pass it on to six other bloggers.  Here are my six choices for blogs that I read for a wide variety of reasons and have kept me coming back regularly over the last several months:

Tech Intersect

Souly Catholic High School

Successful Teaching

eJourney with Technokids

Army of Dude

One Marine’s View

I know that some of you will think this is a bit silly and have a problem with a picture of vegetables on your site so no offense taken if it does not show up.  But I just wanted to let you know that I appreciate what you do.  Even if I have never commented on one of your posts, they still leave me thinking.  Thanks.

1. When you receive The Award, please post it on your blog, linking back to the person who gave it to you.
2. In addition, please link to This Post, which explains the origins of The Award.
3. Please visit Veggie Mom’s Post , which explains the origins of The Award, and Sign Mr. Linky, so she’ll be able to keep a record of all whose Blogs are Pop-tastic! Feel free to leave a comment, too!!
4. Pass The Award along to SIX Bloggy Friends, whose creativity merits inclusion in this circle. Link to their blogs in your Awards Post, and notify them that they’ve received The Award.