Not many students these days know my favorite old band, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young.  Fewer still know the melancholy and romantic melody of the band’s tune Helplessly Hoping.  However, this spring a student chose this song for his group to sing.  This PA tune ended up creating a really cool and unexpected connection between two Hyde students and some spirited adults in the Bath community.  I know that our Performing Arts program has an impact beyond the stage and outside the Hyde School gates, and now I have video to prove it!

As we prepared for the spring show, I had worried the tune would not appeal to a group of teenagers more accustomed to hip hop and other contemporary musical styles.  The band director worried more about how the students could pull off the harmonies.  However, these guys pulled it off under the steadfast student leadership of Scott Georgaklis and with a little help from some awesome female faculty voices.  Luckly, their haunting and successful performance wasn’t the end of it.

For me the best part was seeing the universal appeal of some cool old music come to life in this video of Warsame Mohamed and Talin Rowe singing the tune Helplessly Hoping.   One week after our show, and during a community service project at Bath’s local food bank, the boys enjoyed PA revisited.  Some older adults from the Bath community, your classic ex-hippie types, were providing some music for the food bank’s weekly event.  As they plunked out the tune, our two boys – excited to recognize the music – jumped in to join the fun.  You can see the joy on their faces and the connection between the generations.  That is why I do what I do.

“They are one person, they are two alone, they are three together, they are four for each other.”  –CSNY

Special thanks to Beverly Coleman for the video!

 Word Problems

Confronting my students’ continual aversion to word problems, I had decided to attempt a word problem ‘blind’ in class.  Having done many problems in my math career of a much more difficult nature, I was motivated in my thinking somewhat by arrogance but mostly by a desire to communicate the process involved in solving any word problem. 

I began by outlining five general steps in solving word problems.  I proceeded to read the problem aloud and verbalize the cognitive process that I was experiencing having read the problem for the first time.  I was thinking out loud.  I then proceeded to build pictures and graphs to solve the problem.  The difficulty of the problem was high for the students and forced them to sit back and watch the process rather than assist in the details of the problem. 

About a quarter of the way through, I began to feel uncomfortable with the answers I was finding and verbalized my uncertainty to the students.  I continued solving the problem while expressing my ambivalence the whole time.  When I began to near the conclusion of the problem, I noticed a large mistake I had made in the interpretation of the word problem which had led me down the wrong path.   I was wrong.

The students had watched my process, so they were able to relate to the error in thinking that had occurred.   They had been here before themselves.  They pointed out that I had been questioning my intuition and proceeding with the problem despite my reservations.  They watched my learning process and one of the students stated that he had learned more about word problems in those 20 minutes than he ever had before.

“I haven’t been honest with people,” said the senior who had been charged with a leadership position in the class.  But this was no ethical transgression or sneaky behavior.

This young man was an excellent critical editor who had volunteered to edit the English class’ anthology.  He realized, as the revision project wound to a close, that he had not offered his honest feedback on his classmates’ writing.  He had not really been clear about the effectiveness or clarity with which they met their purpose.  He had had thoughts on the success of their organization, but he’d not offered it.  He had had questions about their word choice, but he’d not voiced them.  In the end, he realized he had simply been too much of a coward to be honest.

His solution?  After speaking with the English instructor and becoming clear in his own mind about the issue, he made a commitment to the truth.  In the last twenty-four hours before the anthology deadline, he sat his peers down one by one.  Ten in all, he met with them at meals, during study halls, during class, in the dorm and under the chandelier.  For hours he sat and he spoke the truth.  He told them where he saw success and where he saw failure in the writing.  He became a Brother’s Keeper, a coach, a mentor… he became honest.

“How do you find the Beatles’ Let it Be?”  Students use iTunes of course, but they also shared a long list of options the man didn’t even know about:  YouTube, Rapcity.com, and Pandora.  Clearly the sources for gathering information are vast and growing vaster.  Sound like your classes?

“Where do you put it?  How do you store it in there?”  Mr. Romac wondered aloud to the boy with 15,000 songs, will you live long enough to listen to all of those songs?  That left him pondering.  The boy calculated that he had 52 days of music, so he was going to be OK.   I suppose that young man needs to figure out which play lists deserve more of his time and sort his favorites into those lists.  Kind of like chunking class content information and deciding where it goes – both in the binder and the mind.

“How do you find it?”  When a person has 15,000 of anything, how do they find it again?

“What can you do with it?”  Often students find a song they like at the gathering phase, and then they share it a few times before they start connecting it to other songs they like.  Then they gather more songs – back to step 1.  It turns out that the boy with 15,000 songs also has the capacity to mix songs together on his iPod.  The power to create on such a small device amazes those of us who grew up without the internet, a touch screen or the Cloud.

“How do you share what you’ve done?”  Steve Jobs made that so simple.

But if you can’t remember where you stored it, or you can’t retrieve it because it is in a different format then perhaps  you ought to have taken some time to synch it with your master computer system.   Or, what if you can’t play it because your iPod is running on an empty charge or you lost your ear buds.  All of these will keep you from communicating the song you have fallen in love with.  And if you can’t communicate “it” with others, then you really don’t have it.

Now where did you file that “song”?  Where did you even find it in the first place?  What if it was critical information for a class, or for life?

The young man seemed to struggle with his writing skills, but his greatest weakness was integrity.  Perhaps his struggles with integrity significantly limited his writing ability.  No matter where it begins in the proverbial chicken or egg story, our experience together began with writing stories; and this young man was writing about a childhood event that involved fighting and lying.

This young man’s narrative line jumped around and his draft could not tell a coherent story.  He began threads that seemed interesting (how he reacted to a brick thrown at his friend) only to skitter away and take up a different thread (how he had managed to stay home without his parents in the first place).  Through days of revision conferences and revision strategies, he never could settle in, focus on, or go deeper into the narrative thread of his story.

I used a visual to help him see the intended shape of a story and the actual shape of his story.  I drew an inverted triangle to show how a story should draw the reader in on one idea and event – to give all the details associated.  Then across the top edge of the triangle, I drew a sketch that looked like a time-lapse image of a stone skipping across the water.  I explained that, at present, his narrative presented a random and surface-level series of topics and images.  I selected a few of his stronger points in the story as entry points for more detail, more specifics.  I asked him to go deeper.

However, a young man who struggles to tell the truth often struggles with putting down the details and sharing all the specifics.  In fact, this young man had made a career of lying to his parents, his friends, and his schools. In the end, at the same time we tried to improve his paper, he was secretly holding back many truths about his actions in present time.

When the truth began to break, yet the young man continued to deny it, I saw in perfect 20/20 hindsight view how his writing struggle was not one of focus and depth, but one of truth.

Next time you find yourself stuck with a student who cannot seem to get deeper in their writing, ask them to consider their commitment to the truth.

“Heel,” I commanded again.    I looked back at her and started to slow my stride while I repeated the command.  She looked up at me with those sweet puppy dog eyes, but she plodded along at her same flagging pace.  And then awareness hit me.  I picked up my pace to a light jog, repeated the command, and she happily fell in to line – her nose to my knee – and kept up with me.  When I stopped, she stopped.  I changed my pace a few more times as we moved ahead and she kept up with me.

Then it really hit me – how much teaching is like dog training.  Sorry, but it is.  When I first went to puppy classes, the instructor reminded me that it isn’t really the dog that needs the training. It is the owner.  We call it dog training in our ignorance and arrogance, but really our dogs (and our students) train us.  To slow down, to let them sit in ways and places they ought not to, to eat with selfish abandon.  You know.  You’ve seen it from your students and your dogs.

So, I made the case in faculty meeting yesterday that teachers should keep in mind the cautionary tale of Maggie:  Beware our tendency to slow down when our students begin to flag and falter.

However, when dealing with students the cure for slowing down isn’t always speeding up.  In Maggie’s case, she is a dog and it is in her nature to run, so speed is the motivator.  In addition, I supported and reinforced Maggie’s compliance with lots of reminders (“heel”) and praise (“good dog”). 

But what is in our students’ nature?  What does “speeding up” mean?  What support structures and reinforcements make a difference?  Well, these are the big questions of teaching aren’t they?

Anatomy of an Education

• The Bones are the strategies: learning attitude, organization, reading, note taking, study/test taking
• The Fascia tissues are the teacher moves: wait time, active prior knowledge, connecting new to known, relationship with teacher, class culture
• The Muscles are the big stuff that makes the world move: Understanding, Applying, Analyzing, Evaluating, and Creating*

*Blooms Cognitive Taxonomy

What do you think? Any other body systems you might account for?

American Paradox:

A collection of short stories

Hyde School Performing Arts 2011

America embodies paradoxes:   America dreams of freedom and opportunity for all while we alienate immigrants; America imagines marvelous creations that improve life but then we become ruled by them; America strives to expand, yet sometimes we burden others with our striving.

Performing Arts also embodies paradox.    Students must say “Yes” to their inner childlike spirits on stage while saying “No” to their baser instincts as children back stage.  Students must push to sing to the rafters only to turn around and keep their mouths closed in transition.  They must boldly initiate action and humbly follow directions.  Students must learn to perform and not merely entertain. Seniors must take the spotlight and create spotlight moments for underclassmen.  

Through it all, we are tested, yet the tension both fuels and transforms us.  Like any catalyst, the pressure created by life’s paradoxes makes us stronger and we endure. 

Thank you for joining us.  Enjoy the show!

 Run of Show

“America the Beautiful”                      arrangement by Brain Thompson and Ethan Bryan

                                                   with words by Katharine Lee Bates & melody by Samuel Ward

     Immigration – L. Kidwell, Moore, Muchimuti, M. Newberg, Redstone, Smith

“Give Us the Child”      original score Hyde School ’76 from the poem by Emma Lazarus

“I Hear America Singing”                                                                                          Walt Whitman

“America”                                                                        from the film score to West Side Story

Vignettes                                                                                      student stories of immigration

          Technology – Foye, Grant, Grant, H. Newberg, Mercer, Romac

Monologues                                                                     giving voice to famous innovators

“Space Oddity”                                                                                                        David Bowie

Vignettes                                                                                 student stories of technology

“Mr. Roboto”                                                                                                                        Styx

          Expansion – Chesterton, Coleman, Eberhart, Gregory, H. Kidwell, Levesque

“Shenandoah”                                                       lyrics by Jerry Garcia and David Grisman

“Uncle Penn”                                                                                                            by Bill Monroe

Monologue                                                giving voice to the Native American experience

“You Can’t Go Home”                                                             original score Hyde School ‘76

Monologue                               giving voice to JFK’s vision of altruistic global expansion

Vignette                                                        student stories of America’s global expansion

             Finale

“Song to Woody / New Day”                         Bob Dylan and original score Hyde School ‘76

Earlier in the day, I had demanded that a student leave class because he swore aloud and spoke insolently to me during class instruction.   The student in question balked, but he left.  He did not seek me after class to apologize (a mark of immaturity), but I sought him out during lunch and asked him how he planned to hold himself accountable.

Surely he did not want to be a man who cursed and acted so childishly towards people who dedicated themselves to coaching and supporting him as a growing young man.  Did he?  He agreed he did not.  I mentioned that the Dean had suggested I “put him out to work” for his actions.  However, that course of action did not sit well with me.  This young man had been attempting to work in partnership with me and to lead his peers in the school wide performing arts program.  He seemed simply to have forgotten his better self.

In addition, this young man always receives accountability from others and rarely makes adult-like decisions.  I wanted to change the paradigm.  When I asked him how he would hold himself accountable, he answered, “Think about it.”  I stopped and stared.  Thinking was not the kind of action I had in mind.

A colleague joined us, and I asked him if he had ever held himself accountable.  Providence came through, and my colleague shared a story about the time he missed his turn to facilitate an important early morning assembly – 5:30 am to be exact – and held himself accountable by replacing all other folks for the following five days and running the morning assembly all by himself.  He has never missed his turn since.

I watched the storm cloud pass over our student’s face.  He did not want to hold himself accountable for actions – actions he said he hoped to be free of – in such an uncomfortable way.  In the end, he identified that which he did not want – in this case a few nights of dinner dish crew – and marched himself in to make a verbal commitment to the kitchen manager.  I will need to watch over and follow-up with our young man tonight.

In hindsight, I can see that my decision to steer away from the school’s central disciplinary office created an important learning opportunity.  This eighteen-year-old man had negligible experience in holding himself accountable, and in life after Hyde that is the skill he will need perhaps most of all.

In March 2011, I attended the annual national conference of ASCD (Association for Supervision and Curriculum and Development) in San Francisco.  I presented Saturday during the start of dinner hour, and it turns out that the folks who came to hear us are hungry to learn more about developing and implementing character education programs in their schools.  My colleague and I focused our presentation on sharing strategies that cause students to enact intellectual character in the classroom since public schools – the target audience at ASCD – focuses so much of their attention within the four walls of a classroom.  I have posted a PDF version of our presentation, and I would be happy to talk through any point or take your comments and questions.

In addition to presenting, my colleague and I attended hours of presentations offered by assessment coordinators curriculum designers, school principles, and educational researchers.  As classroom teachers, we felt outnumbered.  As a Hyde teacher, I kept my ears tuned for educational language and concepts that reinforce what we do well and offer insights into how we can do better.  Upon reflection, I summarized my learning into five key points:

1. Folks still would rather study character from a safe distance.  Additionally, there is a new buzzword for the concept – Social-Emotional learning.  My colleague sat through a sixty-minute presentation on the “What” of social-emotional based education.  Near the end, someone asked the presenter, “but How do we help our students learn about their social-emotional selves?”  The presenter launched into a crafted explanation of how to study courage by reading and learning about the actions of courageous people like Martin Luther King, Jr.  No wonder character education can feel like an add-on for teachers who study character in other people rather than in their students or in themselves.  Additionally, I can see that selling curriculum materials is big business for educational organizations, so why would they encourage teachers to mine the free material available every day in the life of a school.  (read my blog post “Character Education” for further thoughts on this topic)

2. Hyde’s long standing grading policy of setting a numerical ‘bottom line’ for grades at 55 is supported by educational research.  Instead of using zero as a punishment or motivator, we choose instead to get the work out of students.  Each year Hyde teachers – new and old – wrestle with the grading policy, especially around midterms when we find our grade books show columns of blanks for a handful of students.  We feel frustrated, and some teachers feel a zero would send a message.  However, educational research supports the ‘no zero’ approach.  I heard from a Minnesota public school principle who has worked with the teachers over the last year to overhaul the assessments and grading systems in their school to include a bottom line of 50.

3. Action research is the fancy term for what we call action/reflection while collaboration is key for change.  Every administrator at ASCD with a success story to share pointed to the value of teacher collaboration.  I have enjoyed my role working with teachers, and my time at ASCD reminded me that my job is one of coach and collaborator.  I must help teachers identify and validate their own questions, gather their own data, and implement the changes they hope will make their teaching and their student’s learning richer and of the highest quality.  I cannot be the answer girl – much as I would like to.  Teachers can answer their own questions, and I can support them as they do so.

4. The culture of feedback in some schools needs a revival.  During a presentation on SMART Walks, the presenter asked us to turn and talk with our neighbor about the culture of observation and feedback within our own schools.  My partner made a handful of comments that made me realize the culture of both giving and receiving feedback in many school is fraught with peril.  The presentation offered a productive example of teacher observation and coaching that reminded me of Brother’s Keeper at its best. 

5. Hyde School’s achievement and effort grades go a long way toward serving our mission, but we tend to double dip.  I am guilty of the practice myself.  Is it accurate to include homework compliance in the achievement grade?  The boarding schools especially need to revisit our assessment practices and do more to understand the value and weight of both summative and formative assessment in student learning and in grading practices.

http://www.hyde.edu/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/ASCD-2011-Character-Education-is-Foundational.pdf

Despite my own misstep, I agree.

I feel blessed that sharing my story about a public confrontation gone wrong has helped stimulate conversation and questions, but this colleague’s question makes me want to clarify the message. 

I engaged the wrong kid, at the wrong time, with the wrong feeling in my heart.  I know she is volatile.  I ended up interrupting everyone in the dining hall (including my own family).   I felt anger not concern.  In fact, I confronted the girl about surreptitious bullying, but I ended up being the aggressor.  She certainly didn’t want to hear what I had to say, but my method didn’t improve her listening level. 

The learning:  Confront out of concern, not out of anger.  Do not contribute to the youth culture’s love of drama if you can help it.  When I blow it, I can apologize, and students can still be held accountable.

Nevertheless, public confrontation has value and purpose.  If done with concern and an even temper, then it can advance whole-group learning, instill individual durability, and develop a tolerance for tension and discomfort.  In fact, students ought to learn to handle public challenge and critique, though teachers can help facilitate the learning within a scaffold of concern, brevity and purpose.

I strive to remember Romac’s maxim:  “Praise in public, reproach in private.”  I publicly lavish well earned praise on students.  I will also confront an attitude when and where I see it.  I just need to remind myself – concern, brevity and purpose. Students will not always like it.  If fact, most often they won’t.  Student will still balk and react – astounded that a person would dare challenge them in public.  However, with concern, brevity and purpose, the confrontation can push them to a place of transformation and self-knowledge.   As Paul Hurd used to say, make it “win-win.”

 What do you think about confrontation in public?  Please share your comments.

“What has made the difference?”  I asked.  We had brainstormed ways to improve the learning: changes in seating, a mix of instruction methods, a firmer hand.

“I realize that I am most comfortable teaching in a lecture style, but that they do not learn best that way,” came her response.  She adds more interactive instruction such as, worksheets they fill out in stages then share and Jigsaw methods to move through the textbook material.  She still uses lecture sometimes.

Some teachers might think this teacher is dumbing-down her expectations.  “Don’t’ these kids need to learn how to sit through a lecture and take notes?”  “As a teacher, I need to get them ready for college and those dull lectures in a hall of 300 students.”  “The professor isn’t going to change his style.”

I have heard these arguments, and I respect the concerns.  My colleague continues to incorporate lecture components into her class, because she knows the students need note taking and attention maintenance skills.  However, she also sees that a teacher whose main concern is students can decide to meet students part way.

Besides, those mean lecture halls and unyielding professors are changing and becoming part of the fabric of high school teacher myth – the boogiemen we use to scare students.  In fact, we scare ourselves into persisting in instructional methods that may not serve our students because we fear some college professor will ask, “What lousy teacher didn’t get this kid ready for my class?”

My graduate school professor, a PhD in education, assures me that teachers do not prepare students for college by making high school look just like college.  Instead, teachers engage students, cultivate their love of learning, and kick them in the pants some times.  I am proud to say my colleague is soul searching in order to accomplish all of these goals and more.  Her humility and courage – to ask for help from a peer, to try something new, and to both invite and respond to her students’ feedback – inspire me.

I defined the content skills of Performing Art as “body, voice, stage.”  Translated, that means that students needed to learn how to make best use of their bodies, their voices, and the stage to transmit a concept, an emotion, or a message.

I could have defined the character skills using the Five Words and Principles, however, during a hectic practice one day I recalled a most instructive and simple phrase.  “Character is the ability to say ‘no’ to yourself.”

A master teacher of mythological proportion had passed on the idea of saying ‘no’ to yourself, and we certainly associate delayed gratification as a mark of character.  However, standing in front of all those wiggly teenagers with their expressive faces and raw energy, I realized that saying ‘no’ could never be enough.  These students certainly needed a bit of ‘no” (and I often needed some earplugs), but they also needed to say ‘YES’ to the creative and expressive spirit occasionally caught within.

As the year progressed, I learned to demonstrate this concept.  I would remind them they needed to learn how to say ‘no’ to their lesser selves – the fear, the boredom, the negativity – by pulling my hands together and down while steadying my gaze.  Conversely, I would invite them to say ‘YES!’ to their best selves – the child-like spirit, the volume, the courage – by flinging my arms wide-open and throwing back my head.

Character is sometimes defined as the ability to say ‘no’ to ourselves while we simultaneously say ‘YES’ to ourselves.  Therefore, we must say both ‘Yes’ and ‘no’ at once.  Go figure… another paradox.

*PS: reading Parker Palmer’s The Courage to Teach has me thinking about paradox a great deal lately.