Tracking Down an Idol

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This is sloppy, but so is life.

In this week's #slowchated, @EricDemore is asking about rebellion. Tuesday's question was along the lines of: What rebel most impacted you? I saw great answers. Galileo. Henry Rollins. John Dewey. Beakman from Beakman's World. Howard Zinn. Beatnik Writers.

My mind went to an author. He had the single greatest impact on my education and my subsequent growth into adulthood. Former Hobart and William Smith associate professor and author Paul Cody. He has written 5 books that you can find here. (Full disclosure: I've never read any of these in their entirety, but I ordered his memoir, released last year.)

Paul is/was a great man. He read/reads to us. It seemed a silly thing at the time - a professor reading from Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried to a class full of English majors. His voice is/was incredible. Soothing and engaging. His cadence makes/made you hang on every word. 

When I was a junior, Paul shared a column he had published about his time as an undergrad. It was laced with drug use and alcohol abuse. It spoke of regret, but it impressed upon the reader the understanding that the time was not lost. It was a piece that spoke to me on a lot of levels. There were elements with which I couldn't relate - after all, here was this great man upon whom I depended to help me grow as a writer and thinker talking about his own dependence on chemicals to keep moving.

Fast forward to now. Asked for a Cody text, I began a search for that column. I found talks he gave at Colgate, dead links within Ithaca's writing department, and an Amazon link to books he's written. His voice still has the same amazing qualities. I was saddened to know that he was no longer at Ithaca. I was happy to see that he's still writing. No email, no social media that I can see, I am reaching out to his publisher for contact information. 

But still I learned more than I expected. When I looked at the Amazon preview of his latest work, a memoir called The Last Next Time, I was thrown when I realized he was writing about his wife driving him to rehab. I wasn't sad. I was thrown. I didn't expect it. He struck me as a man who had a handle on all of it. Then the writing gave setting clues. This was right after he left Hobart and William Smith. He left the year after I did. He was experiencing addiction issues while teaching us. 

It's a strange feeling, recognizing that one of my heroes, a man who inspired me to grow up, to be strong, to take measured risks was fighting demons the whole time he was making me stronger. I don't know how I feel. I know that I feel different.

3 days after my 21st birthday, I walked into his class (because I was in no condition to walk into his class 1 day after my 21st birthday), and he called me out.

"Ross," his voice boomed across the tiered hall. "Where were you on Monday?"

"Paul," I began. "Sunday was my 21st." I would never have considered lying to him.

"That's not much of an excuse."

"Were you in class after you turned 21?"

Pause.

"Touche."

We think we know the people in our lives.  Here's what I know. He's a good man, and he made me a better person, and I wish I knew him better.

Commencement

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This time of year, there are grades to be finalized, speeches to be made, and toasts to be cheered. Graduates from all across the country and grade spectrum are celebrating the culmination of work that allow them to move on to the next steps.

Classmates watch anxiously, unable to shake the idea that this may be the last time they're seeing each other, since when you move on, you don't always take everyone with you.

Speakers are reassuring these same graduates that a commencement is not an end but a beginning. When one door closes, another opens. Your future starts now. These are all commonly uttered as we celebrate the our hard work.

Moms may dab tissues into the corners of eyes to protect the makeup; they may stand and scream with pride and glee watching their babies walking across stage to collect the document affirming that, yes, this part of the process is complete.

Fathers may stand stoically with silent pride beaming from their chests seeing their children achieve; they may giggle like school children with the joy that comes from the private joke of seeing a district level administrator shaking hands with their child, who at one time needed help burping.

Younger siblings look on with adoration, knowing that one day, it will be their turn.

Teachers? Teachers watch as well. They lament the loss of the group they've come to know so well. They swell with pride at the children who have become young men and women under their tutelage. They wish for further successes, while recognizing that this is truly the end. Their time with this class is over.

It is a time of release, and it is time for reflection, because next year starts right now.

And that's what it is for the teachers. Commencement. The beginning of next year. The start of the planning process. Teachers can look at each one of the graduates walking across the stage with whom they've had interaction and know what they could have done differently or better. These thoughts are part of the process. What do I wish I knew when last year started?  I'll make that call home sooner.  I won't teach that book the same way.  I'll have more technology tools in my tool belt.  I'll use a different diagnostic.  I won't have so many rules. I'll have more rules.  I'll decorate my class differently.  I know that the kids will be different. I'll be different.

I once read (and I don't remember where) a sixth grade teacher said, "I may teach 6th grade every year, but my students get 6th grade once." So at commencement, enjoy it all, and soak it all in. Celebrate the successes of your former students. Just don't ever forget that it is a beginning.  It is the beginning to the only time that a teacher's next students get to be in the next grade.  That teacher is already working to make sure it's amazing.

Congratulations to all the graduates of 2014.

What Ronaldo's Foot and Varela's Head Can Teach Us About The A-ha Moment

94:45. In a game with 90 minutes, it's a curious point at which to have your heart broken.

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Max asked me what half they were in at about the 57 minute mark. I told him the 2nd half.  He asked how many halves there were in the game. I asked him how many halves were in a whole. He said four. Let's go through this again. It's a conversation that had started in the fall during the NFL season. Quarters and halves; total minutes; teams switch sides; 60 minutes equals 3 hours. It's not easy for a youngster still trying to understand clocks to work out how the timing of a football game works.

Soccer was supposed to be different in this regard. "If you cut something in half, how many pieces are you going have?"

"Two."

"How many halves are there in a game?"

"Two." Nice. He gets it.

In the 64th minute, Jermaine Jones absolutely destroyed a shot that the Portuguese goalie couldn't see, much less stop. Max looks at me between jumps on the couch, smiling from ear to ear, and yells, "That was a great strike!" He's adorable.

As we gathered ourselves and play resumed, he noticed I was on the edge of my seat. "What's wrong, dad?"

"There's a lot of time left. Portugal is picking up the pace."

"Wait, there's a lot of time left."

"Yeah, buddy. 25 more minutes!"

"Wait, so there ARE three halves." Whoa whoa whoa. I thought we had covered this.

I look at him.  He's bigger than I remember. He walks. He runs. He talks, he writes, he builds his own Lego sets, and he rides his bike. Each of these things happened in one amazing moment that I'm sure we have pictures of, and we've documented in the right way so as to never forget.

But at the same time, none of them happened in one moment. There was training, and there was frustration, and there were changes made to the plan so that the reason we made the plan would come to fruition.

Knowing this - understanding this - made it that much easier to stomach when - at 94:45 in a game that would be blown dead at 95:35 - Cristiano Ronaldo played a beautiful cross that was struck perfectly by a diving Varela into the back of the net, snatching a draw from the jaws of what surely looked to be a loss.  It was not lucky, and it was not all in that moment, for that moment had been practiced for hours on end. The legs, still fresh enough in the stifling heat and humidity, had trained past exhaustion on occasions too numerous to count.

That's how it is with Max's learning. He gets the credit and accolades for those moments in those moments, but it's all the building that led to it that's really responsible for the growth. All the times we fail - those are the times most responsible for the time we succeed.

Walkthroughs: The Imperial March or Walking on Sunshine?

How open are you to people coming into your classroom?

According to the December 2007 Educational Leadership on the ASCD website:
          The idea behind walk-throughs is that firsthand classroom observations can paint a picture to inform

          improvement efforts. These observations typically involve looking at how well teachers are 

          implementing a particular program or set of practices that the district or school has adopted.

The Goal

Ours is a district always looking to improve. We have 3 schools identified by the state as focus schools, so they are subjected to multiple state walkthroughs until they clear that label. To ensure uniformity within our schools, we conduct walkthroughs at all of our schools around the same time as the state walkthroughs are happening. This allows us to remain cognizant of progress through specific lenses in all of our buildings to keep them moving forward.  We focus on effective instruction practices, student engagement, and the appropriateness of grade-level instruction.  There are talented, professional people in the business of improving instruction for students looking at specific content and grade levels to ensure the most informed feedback we can offer.

The Reality

I sat down to have a bite to eat with some of my staff yesterday afternoon, and there were two responses to the coming walkthrough.

          "Excellent! We have planning during that time, so you can't come into our rooms!"

          "It's so scary when they come in. Even when they're not coming to your room, it's still scary."

More succinctly, the walkthroughs are now this:

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The teachers see us coming and hope that we decide to keep moving past their room. The anxiety is palpable, but I get it. As a former classroom teacher in the district, I get it. I didn't like the district team walking into my classroom. I saw an array of people with various levels of experience, and nearly all of their collective experiences were not teaching ELA to the high school students I had before me. What could they possibly tell from a 5 minute visit to my class?

As a member of the walkthrough team, I get it. I have conversations every day that amount to the age old, "Teachers aren't teaching." During a recent walkthrough, a team of district administrators referred to allowing teachers to conduct the walkthroughs as a chance to "see what's wrong in the building."

And you know what? Both are right, and both are wrong.

Right and Wrong

So how can they both be right and both be wrong? They're looking at the walkthroughs through the wrong lens. Yes, there are things that are wrong in our buildings, and we as educators need to recognize this and root out the causes of those situations, but we need to understand what's good in order to aspire to get there.

We all need to see the walkthrough as the best way to collaborate our way to better educational experiences for our students. It is critical to create a culture in which a teacher expects to have visitors as well as expects to be a visitor. The UCLA Walkthrough model encourages teachers to be in the classrooms of their colleagues to find things that are positive, and then the walkthrough team debriefs all the wonderful things they saw in front of the rest of the staff. When teachers move around the building in search of good things happening, they find them. They get new ideas to implement. When they have discussions about those good things in front of their colleagues, their colleagues get excited that the good they're doing is being noticed.

When teachers and admin get excited about the good that other people in their building are doing, the culture shifts from one of viewing visitors as dictatorial tyrants seeking any opportunity to force choke someone to one of celebration of teaching and learning.

You may even start to invite visitors in to share the good you're doing.

Or What If Instead of That, Teachers Had Guns,Too?

December 14, 2012 - "B" Day at Orange High School in Orange, NJ. I know it was because my last class left at 12:40, and I had the next two hours to myself. I spent that time in an empty classroom, reading and watching the news unfold. Twitter told me the wrong person had done the things I was reading about. I exchanged text messages with parents of young children as we all tried to come to grips with the event.

I was sure that the modern American would stand up and demand change. Surely, we would step up and say, "That'll do, guns. That'll do."

Since that day, there have been at least 74 school shootings in the United States. Broken out in total school days, that means that approximately every 6 days, we can expect to hear that there has been a shooting on a school campus.

If you're scoring at home, that's more frequently than you can find a Sunday edition of your local newspaper.

Nothing changed following the event in Newtown. Actually Georgia passed some pro-gun legislation since Newtown, and the state has the most school shootings of any state since Newtown (10). The gun lobby and our politicians have worked to ensure that there is no change to our perceived Constitutional right to bear arms.

But this is our world. We live in it, and we need to adjust to it or fight to see it changed.

• We need to arm our teachers to protect our students, or we can take the guns out of the hands of the general population which would reduce the access people have to guns.

• We need to post armed guards at the doors to every school building, or we can drastically reduce public access to guns.

• We need to stop declaring our schools "Gun Free School Zones" so that criminals won't see them as easy targets, or we can severely limit the possibility of a person from obtaining a gun.

• We need to dress our students and ourselves in kevlar vests, or we can take away access to guns so that we and our students don't have to worry about being shot at.

• We need to have an open dialogue with our community about what needs to happen to protect our schools from future shootings, or we can take steps previously untaken to be sure that people who don't need to have guns don't have guns.

There's a lot that we, as a society, can do to protect ourselves when this happens again. But remember that guns are designed to kill something, and every time a gun kills something, it means that the gun worked. What if - stay with me - what if we actually got rid of the guns? There wouldn't be a rifle or a shotgun lying around the house looking like the perfect solution to whatever might be ailing someone at the moment. There wouldn't be aisles of guns in Wal-Mart next to the lawn darts and toilet paper. 

What would that society look like? Would there still be bad people? I'm sure. There are bad people now in countries where the population doesn't have guns.  Would people still have mental illness? Would people still commit crimes? Probably. But I bet we wouldn't be reading about a shooting in a school every sixth day. Then we could get to the business of healing with those people with mental illness and addressing the conditions in which people still feel the need to commit crimes.

To live in fear that a king is going to come be a tyrant over us and to use that fear as justification for an amendment open to interpretation is to ignore that King George isn't posing a threat anymore. It's ignorant. And now that we're on this topic of ignorance, anyone who feels like your rifles and your state militias are going to be able to stand against the single largest armed forces in the world is delusional. If the United States military decided to turn against the people, there isn't a state in the Union that could stand against it. 

I want this to be an America that moves forward into this century. I work diligently to ensure that my staff provides classroom experiences for our students that will lead them to be the best 21st century citizens that they can be. This country should offer no less. 

Quite frankly, this country actually continues to offer less. We spend more on our military than the next 8 countries combined and more than triple the country in the 2nd spot (China).  We are leaders of the developed world in two categories when discussing children. Child poverty and school shootings.  We refuse to protect the most vulnerable of us, and if we don't take great strides in directions not previously explored in our still youthful history, our legacy will not be one of improving America. We will be remembered as the generation who tried to protect our students from guns being brought into schools by bringing guns into schools.