When the hurly-burly’s done

I’m done with being an education blogger (exclusively, that is).  Come on down to the new spot for non-school stuff.

This site is closed until further notice.

So my all-time favorite thing about Practical Theory isn’t that Chris Lehmann is a damn good writer or a person whose view of humanity seems very close to my own. It’s that he’s a high school principal who constantly explodes the notion of what high school principals are supposed to be like.

Chris’s latest post just came across my Google Reader–I guess he posted it last night, but I was in a turkey haze from which I’ve just emerged. In it, he addresses one of the things that makes me most embarrassed to be a teacher: the notion of “high expectations” of student behavior.

I know you know these teachers. There’s the one who posts a three-page list of rules (NO HATS! NO GUM!). The one for whom every deadline is treated as a sacred event. The one whose first response to any rustling is to tell students to be quiet.

I don’t work like that. If it weren’t for the bugs I’ve seen in my classroom, I’d bring my own breakfast every day and invite my students to join me. But really? Hats? Gum? Spending all your time chasing down malefactors? Not why I’m in the classroom, buddies. I don’t know how else to put it.

A couple of weeks ago I got into a conversation about homework with a couple of my colleagues. They’re young, they’re hip, and they shocked the hell out of me when I shocked the hell out of them by telling them I just didn’t do homework for about three years, from 7th through 10th grade. I refused, I said, to do homework that seemed like a waste of time. Why would I do 20 math problems when I could go read a book? Why read a book that was assigned when I could read something I’d just gotten from the library? Why bother?

But, one of my colleagues said, what about trusting your teachers to know what’s best for you?

I said nothing, thinking about a lot of the people I’ve worked with for eight years at two real teaching jobs and two student teaching assignments.

What I did say was that every day was a struggle for me to come up with homework assignments that were crucial and built up to some sort of classroom-based epiphany experience for the young human beings in my care.

And don’t, I said, even get me started on not accepting late homework, etc.

But what, said the other of my colleagues, looking very concerned indeed, about holding these kids to some sort of standard? In the real world, in real jobs, there are deadlines, and you get fired if you miss them.

Well, sometimes, yes. But certainly not the first time deadlines are missed. I thought about back when I worked for one of those dotcoms that were ubiquitous at the turn of the century, and how we had a product that was supposed to ship on a certain date. This wasn’t just any product–it was the latest version of our flagship software package, and it represented massive change from the last version, and it was what was going to either make our company a viable force in the asynchronous collaboration game or completely sink us. We had clients (municipal governments of major foreign cities, oil companies, etc) with a little bit of clout. I was writing custom manuals. It was huge.

And we missed our ship deadline. Twice. And there were meetings, and a couple of the clients were annoyed, but in the long run, you know what happened? The final product was way better. The company’s now huge, and though I no longer work there (they tried to claim that it was me who missed the deadline, when in fact no product existed at the time for me to write manuals about, and they finally admitted that they were pretty much full of it), I check in on them from time to time to see how they’re doing.

Maybe not the best example. But I’m sure you can think of one, too–in the corporate world, deadlines are missed, budgets are exceeded, and you know what? The show goes on. The people regroup, and good managers help the employees who are behind to catch up and learn what’s going on.

Also, in offices, you’re allowed to chew gum.

I’m all for high standards–academic high standards. But I’m also for not knocking a kid’s grade down from a B to a C- because he didn’t hand in his homework in time. Are we teaching our students how to read and produce a variety of texts, or are we teaching them that nothing is more important than timeliness?

The best decision I made last year in terms of accepting work was that for my Essay and Creative Writing classes, I’d make everything due in the last week of the quarter. Giving the students weeks and weeks to really polish their pieces made the end results fantastic, in many cases. It made the mid-quarter progress reports an exercise in creative writing themselves, but I’d say it was totally worth it. I’m still experimenting with ways to apply that kind of thinking to my other classes, to treat classes more like workshops with students working at their own paces, but I really have no idea how to do that. It seems, however, more worthwhile than anything else I can think of relating to education. It’s certainly better than complaining.

Will Richardson’s got a new post about Isaac Mao’s principle of “Sharism” (which, seriously?  there’s got to be a better name for this) and its implications for teachers.  Unfortunately, freesouls.cc isn’t accessible at the moment, so I can’t read Mao’s full piece (which Will points to), but here’s what’s on my mind right now.

Will’s issue is that even though we’re in an age when we can recognize the value of having our students collaborate on and publish their work–those great 21st century skills we hear so much about at staff development events–teachers are still reluctant to actually share their work:

When I ask teachers to talk even in general terms about the experiences their students have had previous to arriving in their classes, most sit quietly and scrunch their shoulders. I know, I know…there is a time factor involved in doing this, or least a perception of one. But it just seems amazing to me that at this point there is no realy shift towards publishing more of what we do, more of what our kids do, not only to expand our own knowledge base but to model for our students that potentials of sharing.

And he’s right, kind of.  I see, in my office, a lot of collaboration and resource sharing.  Just this morning, Mary Beth passed me two pieces about The Great Gatsby that I might give out to my Am Lit I students tomorrow (get psyched, guys!).  And Dave and I had an awesome conversation about the teaching of mythology a couple of weeks ago that led to the creation of my new unit on The Hero’s Journey.

So I’m not sure that I entirely buy Will’s assertion of non-sharing among teachers, but I see what he’s getting at.  We should be doing more sharing.  There’s a file-sharing system set up already for the Social Studies department, and we in English will be getting our own in the next few months, or so they say.  Assuming people use it, I imagine it’ll be really nice to have a space on our school network where I can go to, say, see what my colleagues have developed for The Odyssey or whatever.  Definitely a cool thing.

But sharing can’t only be about handouts and lesson plans.  There needs to be a lot more communication between teachers about their actual thoughts and ideas in the development stages of planning.  Far more useful to me than a pre-made worksheet would be a blog entry about where that worksheet came from–what was the thought process behind it, what were the teacher’s goals, etc.  And no, union people, I’m not pushing for a written rationale for every lesson plan you decide to share with others.  But wouldn’t it be cool (again, union people, I’m not actually suggesting we do this) if teachers had blogs where they actually recorded some of their thoughts and what they were dealing with?

My students do this already.  I’m currently trying to get a student, who is out on an extended medical absence, back into the fold by having her read her classmates’ blogs, and to have her classmates leave her feedback on her own entries.  I want my students to use their blogs as an extension of class discussion sessions.  You should hear some of what goes on in our Am Lit I class about Gatsby.

Anyway, sharing is caring, I guess, but we need to be smarter about what and how we share.  Final products are great–who doesn’t want to be able to print out a ready-made worksheet for those mornings when nothing seems to be working out right?–but to share the thought process, the drafts, the mistakes, that’s where the power lies.

Power Moby-Dick, the Online Annotation.

That is all.

So it’s come to this:

I want to do more personal and political blogging, but I don’t think my edublogs.org account is the most appropriate place for it.  Therefore, anything along those lines that I write will now be at rhinosplode.wordpress.com.  This will hopefully, in time, become a group blog; even if that never happens, expect it to be updated fairly regularly (say, every few days or so).

In the meantime, When the hurly-burly’s done (this site) will continue to host my thoughts on matters educational and literary (ie, things that are appropriate for the school blog of an English teacher).

Thanks for your patience as I figure this all out.