About a month ago I was contacted by the publisher of the book Educating Esme. She asked simply if I would mind reading the book by Esme Raji Codell and mention it a blog post. My first thought was that sounds great–a free book and I don’t even have to do a “book review.” What I was most excited about however, was that the book is based on the author’s first year experiences in a very difficult inner city school right around the time I was experiencing my first year teaching at a very difficult inner city school. It was an experience which I had never fully reflected on and I thought that I could write a post about my decade in the “‘ville” and throw in the title of the book to meet my obligation. Last Saturday I sat down to read the book and four hours later I was done. The book was the blog post I have always wanted to write about my experiences. I read words that I have written and spoken, relieved the experiences that made first ten years of teaching a living nightmare, and and at the same time a dream come true. Codell somehow magically wrote a book that did not depress me by making me relieve the experiences, but her words served as motivation to continue doing what I do. Codell reminds us that “You can’t test what sort of teacher someone will be, because testing what someone knows isn’t the same as what someone is able to share.” What she shares is motivation, inspiration, and love of students. No where does she say “do this,” but somehow this became one of only two books in my twenty years of teaching that truly inspired me to keep doing what I do.
I thought that after teaching in my first school for ten years that I was burned out and finished. My wife had given me a copy of Parker Palmer’s The Courage to Teach three years earlier and after attempting to read it several times, after my tenth year I read it cover to cover one weekend–for some reason something just clicked. That book kept me alive in the classroom, and gave me the courage to change schools and continue teaching. Flash forward ten more years. I have entered another phase of questioning why I do what I do. Recently I have felt as though I am losing the “battle.” I have become very discouraged. Educating Esme is helping me snap out of my funk. When I was reading about her classroom experiences, it made clear that the reason I teach is because of the twenty-five kids infront of me, not to change the system. The “battle” is won when I realize I am “teaching” the right way, not when the entire system shifts to use new methods and tools. Somehow my scope had moved beyond the class, and I needed her book to bring my focus back to my classroom.
So in lieu of a post on my experiences, and instead of an official book review, I would like to go back through the book and leave you with a few of my thoughts and several of the lines that I have notes scribbled next to or have highlighted.
How many of you feel as though every time you have a great idea you should keep it to yourself because the rest of the staff just to destroy it?
“If you give people an idea these days, they just think you are sharing it with them so they can critique it, play devils advocate, and so on. It doesn’t occur to them that they might help or get enthused or at least have the courtesy to get out of your way.”
Most new teachers look at me with shock when I tell them that they don’t have to hear everything, and that you can be loudest when you whisper. Some lessons she gathered from her mentor:
“Ignoring bad behavior as long as you can stand it…How a soft voice can be more effective than a loud voice. Starting out with positive comments to parents before lowering the boom. Waiting patiently for children to answer questions.”
I am trying this tomorrow. What a great symbolic gesture to make at the beginning of class.
“…I collect “troubles in a “trouble basket,” a big green basket into which the children pantomime unburdening their home worries so they can concentrate on school.”
I often fall victim to believing that I am making a difference by pointing out problems and because I am passionate about “change.” I have to remember that unless I have a plan to move forward, I don’t really have a plan.
“In reference to other colleagues: As long as they are freaking out, they feel busy, like they must be doing work. Getting upset is force, but no motion. Unless we are moving the children forward, we aren’t doing any work.”
How can you give kids confidence? Do they know this about you?
“They know I would never let them fail.”
Too often teachers get angry at the kids who say “I don’t care,” or the kids who get angry in class. Negative emotions are met with negative emotions. When I read what I nearly say word-for-word in Cordell’s book it reminded me that love is always going to be more powerful than punishment.
“You can hate me all you want. That’s your prerogative, your choice. But no matter how you feel about me, I will always love you.”
“I am sorry you are angry, but I still love you, and I won’t allow you to fail.”
After ten years in my first school I moved on out to the ‘burbs. The meanest nastiest kid in my new school would have been the valedictorian in my old one. No one could even imagine the difference between the two. I could carry a wallet in my new school. Leave a pen on my desk. Walk out and use the bathroom. And could drive to school with my doors unlocked. My new school was…dare I say…easy. After receiving praise from a principal in a new school she reflected:
“…but I didn’t break up any fights…I didn’t take any children home to hide…I didn’t fear for my life…”
When I left my first school after ten years I felt incredible guilt, and I still have pangs of guilt today ten years later. I want to blame the kids and school for taking away ten years of my life. Every day was painful. Every day brought anguish and sadness. Unless you have taught at one of those hardcore urban schools you cannot even begin to relate to the violence, the bureaucratic mess, crumbling buildings and supplies, rotating administration, no parental involvement, and having to referee fights each week . Looking back, I can now say those kids made me who I am today. While they are responsible my gray hair, they are also responsible for forcing a unique perspective on how kids learn, and the importance of second chances.
“Wrongly I have thought teaching lessened me at times, but now I experience a teacher’s great euphoria, the knowledge like a drug that will keep me: Thirty-one children. Thirty-one chances. Thirty-one futures, our futures. It’s almost psychotic feeling, believing that part of their lives belongs to me. Everything they become, I also become. And everything about me, they helped to create.”
Many teachers reccomend a package of The World is Flat and A Whole New Mind to show teachers how the world is changing and how teachers need to change with it. While the world is changing, the spirit of great teachers remains the same. If you know anyone who needs to have their teacher spirit fed, buy A Courage to Teach, and place on top of it Educating Esme. To repeat a quote Cordell included from Neila Conners, “If you don’t feed the teachers, they will eat the kids.”
A poem by Marianne Williamson (with religious references removed) that I plan on reading to my students next week.
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are
powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness
that most frightens us.
We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant,
gorgeous, talented, fabulous?
Actually, who are you not to be?
Your playing small does not serve the world.
There is nothing enlightened about shrinking
so that other people won’t feel insecure around you.
We are all meant to shine, as children do.
We were born to make manifest
the spirit that is within us.
It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone.
And as we let our own light shine,
we unconsciously give other people
permission to do the same.
As we are liberated from our own fear,
our presence automatically liberates others.”
My wife says I am crabby…so I apologize ahead of time…I know that many of you teach at progressive schools, send your kids to progressive schools, or don’t send your kids to school at all…
Yesterday I had a meeting after school. It was the type of meeting that I suppose is taking place at schools across the country. We need to improve on three sections of our state testing so we are going to do more test prep on those three sections. First we have to improve on our writing prompts. The answer is to not have kids do more authentic writing or have them do more writing that they might enjoy, but to standardize the prompts across the district so that every kid gets accessed on the same prompt. Then we have to improve self to text connections. The answer is not to create units that connect to students’ live and reading material that connects with their lives, but to give them standardized reading assignments and force them to make a connection with whatever is read. Finally we have to improve reading comprehension. We are not going to help them by letting them read material they might enjoy, or making sure the have the proper background to understand and make connections to what they read, we are simply going to give them standardized sections of text to read and…well, frankly I don’t know what we are going to do. Maybe that was the one in which we were suppose to take sections of the history text and blank out words and have them guess what word we removed.
I got a little upset about how I and everyone above me just let all this cheap teaching run into our classrooms. Everyone just says yes to the person above them. For the most part, I find that teachers don’t have a problem with the test prep, their problem is wanting more time to complete the required extra testing.
After a while of feeling pathetic and powerless, I decided to shift the blame. I decide to start blaming businesses who sit idle on the sidelines as their future workers are dumbed down. Why wouldn’t businesses want the very best employees? Why don’t the CEOs complain lobby Congress about schools schools doing more test prep and killing kids motivation, curiosity, creativity, and communication and collaboration skills. Why not….
Thoughts then shifted to who benefits from having independent, empowered, critical thinking kids? Or better yet, ask the question that is asked before every action the government takes from deciding to write the Declaration of Independence to Social Security–What current part of the population will make more money? Schools would have all sorts of people questioning what they do, choosing to not participate in waste of time homework or test prep lessons that clearly have no link to their future. Why would schools want to lose control and all sorts of specialists that design all of our wonderful testing programs and staff members hired to convince us that the current path is the right one. Businesses need a dumbed down population so that they can convince them to buy clothes based on a logo, spend hours watching TV, eat their family dinners at fast food joints, and go to the movies and put down $10 to watch Jackass.
The fact is that school does not totally dumb down everyone. There are enough kids who graduate and can fill the cogs of the machines at the highest level. That leaves a whole lot of people left to buy all the stuff we are convinced we need.
I was speaking to a couple of doctors who immigrated from Europe. They have a very unique take on the whole health care debate going on. Basically they said that any type of reform will fail. It is not the system that is put in place that will help people, it will have to be a change in our cultural beliefs. No matter what system we create, it will be based on our cultural biases and ideals, most of which are at odds with creating a health care system that works. Maybe that is why schools have not changed in 10os of years, because they are the mirror of our culture, our belief systems, reinforcing our cultural memes. Yes the tools we use have changed, occupations have changed, and our cities have changed, but at the core is still the same cultural values driving those superficial changes.
As I wander through life the last couple of years, I do wonder how possible “school change” really is. There are scattered people who support a changes, but in a system as big as mine I don’t even know if I can count as many people as fingers on one hand missing three fingers who would support a system wide paradigm change. What is happening in schools matches our cultural expectations and ideals. Technology based social networks do connect folks across the world that are interested in changing education, but I think it has given many the false sense of a movement. There is no movement where I live. I live in one of the richest states, up the road from one of the worlds greatest universities, and plenty of high tech businesses driving the economy. There is no movement here for change.
So yea, pretty depressing post right? But the bright spot is it has me thinking about how to change schools without focusing on the schools. What part of our culture can be worked on so that school change becomes an automatic? What would have to change so that people would just simply no longer put up with the current system? Would we be more effective putting our energy somewhere else?
We are always getting ready to live but never living. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
Sometimes I wonder if we spend to much time getting kids ready for the future, and never let them experience today. I feel like my focus on creating lifelong learners results in kids who might never stop to experience life, never realize that action in the moment that they are in is just as important as preparing oneself for the future.
I used to lead nature walks in which we would hug trees, find salamanders, lay down and watch the branches above sway in the breeze, and listen to the leaves crunch under our feet. Today I would feel the pull to bring our cameras into the woods and record everything, document it, blog it, research and write a wiki page, and then record a podcast. It doesn’t result in being in “the moment” because one’s thoughts are not open to absorbing and experiencing the new things, but how will they use the things they find be used at a later time and date.
When I am depressed it is because I am living in the past. When I am anxious it is because I am
living in the future.
~unknown
I hate that it takes a flop of a lesson in which I was looking for answers about the future, and the kids gave me answers about today, to make me realize that I have to slow done and enter their “moment” to better prepare them for our future.
Children have neither past nor future; they enjoy the present, which very few of us do.
~Jean de la Bruyere
Too often teachers try to teach kids to write creatively or make their writing more interesting but it borders on the impossible. Always, the kids who have lived the least write the least. Kids who think the least write the least. Kids who can’t have a conversation, can’t write anything worth talking about. I never succeeded in making my students better writers until I made had them think deeply in class. I wasn’t able to have them write about things worth reading until we started to do activities worth doing. And they didn’t start to write in a way that was interesting, until we started to have interesting dialogs in class. Their language wasn’t “learned,” it was experienced. They first have to ponder, think, laugh, cry, and live…then write. Language grows out of life.
The very first thing the kids hear come out of my mouth each year is a little song that I wrote to welcome them to class. I finally remembered to record it, but I forgot to get the good mic out. A little rough but I hope you enjoy it.
Today one of the questions posed to my class was “What does the perfect class look like to you?” They were not nervous at all about having to speak out loud on the second day of school (right kids?). Not nervous at all about having their voices recorded(right kids?). When I played the recording back everyone loved to hear their voices (right kids?). And there was no pressure in Water group to hurry up and finish before the fire drill (right kids?). The recordings from both classes are below:
At the end of the book we talk about finding that cricket in all of us, listening to it, and letting it drive the creative spirit in each of them–even in school. At the end of class I give the students a “Million Word Assignment” that is due the next day. This year I got a little surprise. I didn’t receive an assignment on paper or through email, but a video instead. The video is below–I recommend watching it on youtube and clicking on “more info” and following along with the script he provided.
I asked the student if I could share the video, and as I left I asked a simple question…”Why did you do it as a video?” He answered, “Because I just wanted to be creative.”
How many other kids “just want to be creative?” Have you given your kids permission to “just be creative?”
but I hope you enjoy it.
