Killing them Softly Part Deux: Confession of a Teaching Father

I apologize to my first-born every day.

My childhood was pockmarked with violence, swings from poverty to middle class and back, and an atmosphere of substance abuse within my family and the surrounding community. My oldest daughter, Jade, was eleven months old when I came home from Iraq and truly met her for the first time. It was my second deployment as an infantryman during my time in the Montana Army National Guard. With that type of past and the reality I learned from my latest year at war, I had made the decision that I would raise my daughter to be tough and independent so that she could survive when our world went to hell.

From the moment I met that beautiful girl, I worked to build her strength, her resilience, and her self-reliance. I made her toddlerhood about work and strength; every game we played was a lesson to be internalized and utilized as a tool for what I saw could only be a hard future. We rarely cuddled, hugged, talked nonsense, or played. During my first two years of teaching in one of the most diverse districts in the country, my wife would often comment that I pushed my four-year-old daughter harder than my eighth-grade students.

Jade had trouble in school; homework took hours and often led to tears. I would sit with her while she worked and wonder what I was doing wrong. Why was it so hard to complete a pile of worksheets? She rarely went outside to play and had few friends with whom she played outside of the school day. Her mother and I had both worked our way up from nothing and were both successful and somewhat intelligent people. What was going wrong?

I ignored that Jade was incredibly smart. She had figured out that if she made me mad enough, I would walk away to avoid reverting to the yelling and violence I had learned about parenting from my youth. When I stormed away, she would stop working and start drawing or daydreaming, something I saw no time for anymore, even though as a child I had often wandered in the plains and mountains of Montana while daydreaming.

I look at those moments now and have a profound respect for her ability to learn an intricate social pattern in my behavior and take complete advantage of it. In some ways, our children inherently know more about what they need than we do as teachers and parents.

I regret nearly every moment of that time.

It wasn't until her younger sister, Bella, was born that I realized how many mistakes I had made by trying to make her an emotional rock. I didn't know Jade as a baby, but I knew Bella. I knew the fragility, the fear, and the wonder. In Bella's first year of life, I learned more about teaching than I could have imagined. I truly understood learning for the first time as she would attempt and fail, only to get up and attempt again. Watching her taught me what scaffolding meant, and for the first time, allowed me to understand that pyramid graph that flashed across projectors and worksheets in college. Every perspective teacher, no matter what level, needs to work with very young children as a part of their own learning.

Jade is now ten. She and I have a tremendous relationship which is centered on a near-daily apology. I jokingly remind her that her younger sisters will have an easier time, because I have no parental training and she is my experiment. That sounds ludicrous from the perspective of many parents and teachers, but it has fostered the ability for us to discuss actions we both take and how they affect each other, the family, and others in our lives. She is happy, she plays, and she is a less anxious person who now loves going to school to learn, all because I came to the realization that the world wasn't going to hell, and I could chill out.

This confession serves two purposes. First, it is to highlight that we are not naturally born with all of the answers, and that our own experiences and backgrounds can confuse us on what is good for our own children and our students. It also serves as a reminder that as I pick apart a system we define as being for the public good, I am not left unstained by the mistakes we make on a daily basis.

Yesterday, I mentioned that we would discuss Maslow today. The above was supposed to be an introduction into an examination of Maslow's hierarchy and how it is often misused in our system as both educators and parents. I think most folks are done reading by this length and I won't delete it to make room for Maslow, because it serves a purpose as I move forward on the topic of what we do to our children both within in the system and how our understanding of that system affects us as parents. We will move on to the Maslow mistake tomorrow. If you are just joining this conversation, please feel free to comment, or send a message on Google+ to Lee Butterfield.

Killing them Softly: Expecting better-than-adult reactions from adolescents.

Last night, I had a visitor. A friend and former coworker, Thomas Gardiner, brought his young daughter over to the house to play with my two youngest criminal minds, while Thomas and I talked about work, old colleagues, and our children.

At some point, we began to rant about the problems we had with our own attempts at parenthood and how we negotiate the education system from the perspective of parents. We lamented our abilities to have patience with students in the school setting and expect our own children to not have the same brain patterns as the children we show so much empathy towards on a daily basis.  The very behaviors we take so much time to understand in a work setting are the behaviors we chastise and try to fix in the kids we are supposed to paternally love. It brought us to some interesting discussion which will be the focus of this blog for the near future. 

Thomas has escaped and now works  as the Recreation and Education Support Supervisor with AK Child and Family. Every day, he works at bringing play and learning to emotionally troubled youth. He tirelessly coordinates active and community-based experiences that help young people develop appropriate communication and social skills. As a non-profit in Alaska, his work also leads him to work with the community to secure funding for the programs to continue. Thomas finds a level of satisfaction in his work that many educators are missing, which is one of the catalysts for the conversation that ensued. 

I say Thomas escaped, because the current state of education in our nation is a draining mental and emotional prison for people who care about kids as people. That sounds nice and cheesy, but some of us actually acknowledge that kids are self-determining, conscious beings that deserve at least some level of respect, and yet, due to pressures we have no say in, we make decisions every day that completely counter that acknowledgement. The larger system and ideas about education tend to force us to view students and teens as two dimensional icons we need to push through a machine at a steady speed which will grind them into the three dimensional, logical thinkers we so nostalgically think should come out of the system. In our nostalgic blindness, we simply continue a system based on power structure and conformity rather than learning. 

This is usually the point where the blogger places blame. Some reformers blame old teachers or teacher unions. Some reactive teachers and union communications folks blame the testing culture brought on by over-zealous politicos and administrators. Some people, whose only interaction with the education system is their time as a student, make wild claims about the reality of education woes. Some on one side of the political spectrum claim that an atheistic, socialist plot is being hatched in dark rooms where educators are planning to reprogram our public education students into an army of globalist brown shirts. To find the page above, all one has to do is search "Common Core, Socialism" and find thousands of pages decrying the death of America by setting standards. On the other side of the political spectrum, we see fear that schools will become a place where science is ignored for political reasons. Again, I only place these here to see the discussions and blame that surround the act of teaching kids how to read, write, add, subtract, and reason. It is all smoke. It keeps us all distracted from the real fire which gorges itself on our children's childhoods. 

The blame game doesn't need to end, but instead must be turned into an introspective experience where we as a nation ask some simple, yet serious, questions about what we think is the point of public education and what we want from our students. 

The next post will focus on the misuse and misunderstanding of Maslow's hierarchy of needs (video explanation) in the current system and how parents, even ones who are also educators, are caught up in perpetuating a myth of human development. What should be a useful  tool to help guide discussions on learning has instead turned into a flashy graph placed on powerpoint presentations to give the illusion of understanding while being ignored in practice and in society. 

I must acknowledge that I do believe that most of the people involved in any part of this debate actually have the best of intentions. I just don't think the parts being debated on the public scene really matter. The problems with our system can only be fixed by discussions on what education means to us as a nation and what we want our youth to experience in childhood and adolescence and what they can manage as people, real people. The very problems we see with burnout in the greater American work place are the realities we put adolescents into every day and expect to handle better than top executive adults getting paid for their work.  

Out of respect for the digital audience's need for short blog entries, I will cut this discussion into smaller pieces. Please leave comments which will lead to a dialogue. I am not too worried. As I told Thomas, nobody will read what I have to say. I am only a teacher, which immediately disqualifies me from discussing education. 

Using in Good Faith: Chapters 6 and 7 of 21st Century Skills

The situational irony of writing about these chapters at this point in time hits like a ton of bricks.  I am encouraged and required to take classes such as these to make me both a better student and a better teacher.  At this very moment, the state and district I work for are slashing education funding with what seems to be an ancient stone viking axe blunted by wind, sea and bureaucracy.  At this moment in time, I am planning for the rise of my student load by 20% and an end to teaming opportunities for project-based cross-curricular learning all while developing myself professionally to be better at just that.  I laugh on an intake of breath to hide my frustration that the list on page 89 tells me that one of the fundamental tools needed to support 21st century learning is educational funding while ours is disappearing at a ludicrous rate (they passed right by ridiculous).  That irony aside, these two chapters are both enlightening and reaffirming of the ideals I have always held dear and worked hard to live up to in my professional practice.  

Problems and Questions:

The idea of asking appropriate questions at the appropriate times seems like common sense to those in the business of learning.  Inspired by the very question posed by Einstein and discussed in chapter six, my students and I have agreed that we will always ask childish questions and demand to not be answered in childish ways.  We want to find explanation and depth, not a yes, no, or because I said so.  This has led to fantastic questions posed in our energy project as starters and the work we have done with our engineer partners has pushed our students into new levels of thinking.  We have over twelve separate energy-based questions moving forward at this time including some asking how we can design a cheap and portable device that can be dropped in rural third world areas with access to small amounts of running water for the purpose of creating small amounts of electricity for multiple uses.  The prototype design looks great and using the skills shown in the figures from the next section have shaped and driven our process further than I had originally thought possible.  

Answer and Solutions:

Using the concepts and information from this sections as well as the graphic tables from pages 92 and 93, my collaborating team adjusted our original parameters for the project from the student perspective.  Allowing students to follow either the Science track or the Engineering track has led to multiple projects based on both areas.  Groups wanting to focus on experimenting with new ideas were able to follow the Science track to create plans for experiments to test questions raised by their research.  One group is currently designing a vacuum in which to test the affects of various elements on stripping pollutant molecules from coal before burning it.  Following the inquiry and new questions loop, they came up with the idea of cleaning the coal first before needing to clean the results of combustion.  Another group focused on utilizing flexible solar panels to power deer-repelling devices along sections of train track heavily traveled by the ungulates.  This idea, following the engineering cycle, has been the topic of heavy discussion with our engineer partners and the idea has evolved several times with exciting discussion and ideas.  Having these visual cues present in all of our classes has led each teacher into discussions within our own disciplines for non-related curriculum.  Not only do they help shape the projects our students work on, but they coincide with the learning taking place with the instructors as well. 

My Learning:

Chapter seven had far more benefits for me than my students.  The project bicycle model helped to de-clutter my understanding of the execution of this project.  At the point I began interacting with this chapter, I felt overwhelmed by the shear amount of work, communication, and planning that was demanded for successfully completing this project.  Having it laid out and explained in the chapter allowed for me to take a step back and look at my planning and implementation.  I will admit that my own lack of understanding the logistics of such a project had been hampering both my and my students’ experience.  After reading this chapter and thinking on it for a number of days, we actually discussed it as a class and now use the bicycle model for the project and check in with our progress at the beginning and end of each project week.  We also start most new units in other areas with Tom Kelley’s phrase, “How might we...?”  We have even revamped how we learn complex grammar units by asking questions like, “How might we explain sentence structure in algebraic formulas?”  The answer to this takes longer than I have left, but the results are amazing and the connection that both math and language are simply our brain’s recognition and use of patterns both amazes and confounds students and teachers alike. 

The rest of chapter seven sings the praises of project learning and reminds us of where it working and how it is successful.  The chapter ends in a way that brings me to my knees in shame over some of the experiences we have had with team disfunction throughout the project.  We created groups based on personally chosen interests and availability of projects.  The social ramifications of students in this age group working so closely has led to many in-group disputes and the need for mediation has arisen multiple times.  While we have been successful in making the required adjustments and communicating the need for respectful collaboration, it will save a lot of time and stress to follow the guidance for team designing on future projects.  

It is now time for me to walk stop reflecting and plan for another day in the job I love.  While working through this allowed me the momentary consolation that comes with focus on bettering myself and my students, the creeping reality that it will be much harder, if not improbable, to plan and implement projects such as the one inspired by this book.  I am told by veteran teachers that the pendulum swings and that one day we will be back to a situation in our state and nation where people who scream about the importance of education will stop trying to use politics to undermine it for their own purposes.  Moments later those same teachers suck in their breath and remark how it has just never gotten this bad.  

Fire! Me use Fire! -or- When we convince ourselves that old is new.

21st Century Skills

Chapter 5 “Career and Life Skills”

I must say that I sometimes get quite frustrated with my journey into the 21st century skill set as it applies to education.  I read these books, participate in these conversations, and embrace the future openly, desiring to be amazed at the foresight into human potential.  I have, unfortunately, often come to the conclusion that these skills are not new in a manner of speaking.  They have, I will agree, been neglected for a long time in our system, but many of the attributes of a 21st century worker are simply attributes which are innately valuable in a motivated society.  Chapter five catalyzed one of those moments.  The career and life skills discussed in this chapter are simply traits respected in a thriving community in general and while I agree they need attention in the classroom, I worry that they have been so neglected as to need their own posters and chapters.  

Professionalism, flexibility, leadership skills, and the like seem innate requirements of any successful citizenry.  We could stop with the pop culture philosophies of James Tiberius Kirk who spoke often of humanity’s desire for challenge, exploration, and an ever-changing sense of reality.  We can go deeper and further into the history of our species and realize that the hunter gatherer who changed their view of reality and threw flaming sticks at an oncoming predator passed their genes further along than those who continued the age-old tradition of peeing their loin cloth to season the main Man-Tartar course.  I must admit, nearly a decade as a combat infantryman may influence my view of what seems important knowledge and skills for students and citizens.  Much in the same way our Cro-Magnon friend beat our other humanoid species through ingenuity, teamwork, and a strong set of “21st Century” life skills, the greatest of any soldiers I had the honor of working with maintained an impressive ability to adjust to fast-changing situations without hesitation to ensure the success of any such mission.  I digress...

As I page through my notes on this chapter, I have far less to say than above.  It is startling and a bit disillusioning to me that these ideas are presented as novel.  I admit the authors address this situation when stating, “Though these skills have been around for a very long time, they take on new significance with the digital power tools now available for work and learning” (Fadel  86).  I still feel as though this statement gives too much power to those tools over these skills and that these skill sets are socially-evolved skills that shape the way we use any tools in any era and I tend to believe the need to tell educators that we must directly infuse them says little about where the system has drifted in the past few decades.  Have we so focused on what to put in the bubble that we have lost the skills to figure out what a bubble is and how to manipulate it to our advantage?  

21st Century Learning Chapter 4

Digital Literacy Skills or How to use a Hammer

Much of chapter four plays to an understanding I have about technology growth in general. When a child grows up with technology novel to their elders, they know how to use it in the manner of basic functions.  This does not change the fact that they still have the minds and impulse control of children and adolescence.  Teachers and educators must stay far more tech literate if they dream of being effective as educators in the 21st century.  It is far too easy for adults to fall into the trap of either novelty without purpose or fear without understanding the potential of new software and hardware.  

I liken this relationship with the history of that behemoth of a technological advancement called the hammer. As far as we have evidence for, the first stones used to drive or pulverize other material date back to 2,600,00 BCE.  This epic shift in reality came with either a stroke of ingenuity or a very painful bump on the head from a falling stone.  Needless to say, the first folks to utilize this tool found it useful for many tasks which would have taken much longer without this technology.  Then they complained that their grandchildren didn’t respect the technology and used it in ways it was not meant for.  You see, their grandchildren grew up watching their parents use the hammer and easily took to it at a young age.  Then at some point they threw it at a sibling or broke Grandma’s favorite bear skull.  As the millennia went by, grandchildren grew up and made the technology better.  They tied sticks to it and marveled at the physics they had discovered, only to be disgusted in the sad reality that their grandchildren cared not about the advancement and only about smashing items around the hut with such a simple and fun toy.  At some point, a parent or grandparent realized that if they gave the child a task meant for the hammer before explaining what it was, the child became a student and the student learned.  This did not make the student any less apt to break items with the hammer, but when the focused task was available, the student learned.  Mind, this was not the adult stating that the hammer was the destruction of society nor the savior of humanity, but a tool that made human time more efficient and allowed for time to be spent on other tasks.  

This is technology.  What we carry in our pockets is the digital age equivalent to the stone age hammer.  Our grandchildren will use it faster and with more ease as well as for many of the wrong tasks.  We must make the decision on wether to hand it to them without our own understandings of its potential, fear it and scare our children away from a useful tool, or know more about it than them and work to share that knowledge through meaningful activities that will also bring in community, family, and self worth.  Just as this chapter encourages us to build our students’ skills in ITC, Media, and information literacy, we must build our own and have the forward thinking to see where tomorrow’s technology will take us and how we can best introduce and teach our students how they can be used to build instead of destroy. 

Learning to the 21st Power: Taking student learning to the level needed for success in the 21st century world market.

I know I promised QR Codes for Geography, but this was the purpose of the blog and you will get your free ideas next time.  

Learning to the 21st Power: Taking student learning to the level needed for success in the 21st century world market. 

The Players: The Nebula team at Goldenview Middle School have teamed up to plan an experimental project aimed to bring students and team members into a 21st century model of thinking and learning.  Other players agreed to be involved or are currently in discussion to enter include Conoco Philips Alaska, Google Plus Education division, Consumer Energy Alliance, and the Anchorage Chamber of Commerce.  The first two groups have entered into the project with excitement and this summary acts as an introduction for others to join.  Other individuals have tentatively agreed to work with students both in person and via Skype.  This group includes App designers, physics professors, and local drill and geological teams. 

The Project: At the beginning of the school year, the Nebula gifted students will be split into groups of six.  Depending on the number of gifted sections, this will create five to ten groups of students.  By the end of the first week students will be introduced to ten different problem statements related to energy supply and demand on both a local and global level.  Each statement will have implications or challenges affecting either the mode or efficiency or production, the use and need for efficiency in the consumption of the energy, and each will also include the social implications of the challenges on the social dynamics of either developed or developing communities around the globe.  The Goldenview principal has donated space for the team to create a meeting room for research, collaboration, and engagement with field professionals wether in person or via internet communications.  

The Room: Teams will have scheduled access to the planning room during one forty-five minute period per week.  Depending on the schedule, this will take place during either their Language Arts class or their Science class.  As both teachers have designed the bulk of their curriculums to support this project, students will benefit from the collaboration time.  The room will also be available for sign up before and after school as well as lunch to accommodate professionals working with groups. 

The Rough Time Line (adjustments will appear as planning continues): 

First Quarter: Students have the first quarter to engage with a mountain of introductory information from PBS Media, Conoco Philips, British Petroleum, as well as information from the Switch Energy Project.  By the end of the first quarter, groups must chose with problem statement they wish to engage. 

Second Quarter: Students will use this time to conduct independent research via print, film, audio, web material, and live professionals. Students will also engage in full class discussions, presentations, and labs based on broader energy concepts.  The team job is to collaborate their research and focus the full class work on the narrow problem chosen by the team.  This research is based on the knowledge that they will form a hypothesis of a possible solution to the challenges presented in the problem question at the end of the quarter. 

Third Quarter: Students use this quarter to develop their proposed solution to the problem.  This solution can be original or build upon attempts currently taking place in the energy world with the intent of improving the outcomes.  The solution can address the problem in its entirety or areas of the challenge in order to help build toward a greater solution with the sum of many working parts.  Teams will not only be responsible for creating a proposal pitch for their solution, but they must create a testable model either through mathematics, digital modeling, or physical experiments to test and collect data on the effectiveness of their solution.  Students must have the model complete and tested before the end of the third quarter to simulate hard deadlines in a fast-paced world market.  

Fourth Quarter: Students must build and publish a website based on their project, research, and tested hypothesis for the purpose of communicating the information to a broad and diverse public.  Students will need original print, video, audio, games (for exposing younger audiences to the ideas), and mobile applications related to their proposed solutions.  Whether the solution proposed by the team is successful or not determines the final summary of the project.  If the solution succeeds, students will use this published presentation to explain why and formally request participation in moving the project to a larger scale.  If the solution fails to meet the requirements set by the team, they will explain what steps would push the project in the proper direction and formally request participation in moving forward with new ideas.  

What we Need from You (Not Money): We need time.  I started this project based on my vision that education needs to be more than students learning facts and skills for the sake of learning facts and skills.  This no longer applies to the motivators our students respond to.  They crave purpose and have no qualms asking what that purpose is.  Throughout my career, I have always used large ideas and projects as vehicles for teaching the standards rather than the standards themselves as the vehicles.  Lately I have heard the private sector state loudly that they want to be involved in education and I have seen many great business partnerships fall into ruts of schools asking for money and service for hanging up company logos.  My fellow media teacher and I already have media and local businesses work directly with our media classes to create advertising and creative film work.  Please see samples of our student work here. We also work together on what has been known as the Passion Project and over the last two years, we have developed it from an amazing project on paper to an even more eventful project through 21st century tools and ideas.  For examples of student work, please follow the links on this page.  This project seemed like the next logical step in integrating real world problem solving, innovation, collaboration, and creation into our forward thinking team.  If you or someone you know would be interested in participating, please email your contact information to butterfield_lee@asdk12.org or comment on this post. 

Who the hell is Edmund Wilson? QR Codes in the Library

In the library: (Who the hell is Edmund Wilson?)

The above is the reaction I would expect from a student reading Wilson’s jacket review of William Faulkner’s life-altering novel, Absalom, Absalom.  Wilson says of Faulkner, “Faulkner...belongs to the full-dressed post-Flaubert group of Conrad, Joyce, and Proust”.  I was first handed this book by a great friend and mentor by the name of Brady Harrison whose book, Agent of Empire, is available now.  (If each of you order a copy, he will notice and wonder what shift has taken place in the universe.  I have one, and he hasn’t signed it yet.)  Even as a young literature student wandering the stacks, if Brady had not suggested the title to me as a friend, Wilson’s words on the back of the book wouldn’t have swayed me into reading what is now and will forever be one of my favorite insights into the human condition.  How then, could I possibly expect it to catch the attention of a teenager who doesn’t know the name of their school principal let alone Edmund Wilson?  I was lucky enough to know one of the two best librarians in the state of Alaska who helped develop this next project and it has worked best for us as another great link between LA and the library, but I sense would be a great bridge with other core subjects as well.

-Students in my Language Arts classes are required to read a book of choice on their own time every three weeks.  The only restriction on the books is that they must be at the student’s reading level or above.  Each book requires a short written review which assesses both a specific reading standard and writing standard.  Each teacher has a collection of these prompts already or has some available, so I will not go into detail on each of them.  One of my favorites is an exercise in conflict identification and discussion as well as word economics through focused word choice.  I was introduced to this prompt by a colleague and I love it.  After reading their choice book, students write a review identifying the main conflict, identify the conflict type, and analyzing its importance in shaping the rest of the plot line while judging if it was entertaining and effective.  The catch is that the review must be exactly twenty-five words and grammatically correct.  Needless to say, revision and editing also play a major role in this review.  

-Once the written review is in final form, students use either a camera, a phone camera, or a computer with camera capabilities to record themselves speaking the review to the camera.  Most reviews last less than thirty seconds.  We have done this for a couple of years and learned some tricks to make them better.  We have a green screen set up for this year’s reviews with the added challenge of students identifying a picture or scene to lay in behind themselves on their review.  This will add the experience of higher technical skills with video editing in a relatively small dose as well as linking the book with a representative image.  Once the videos are made, the instructor will need to make a vital decision in which they will choose to trust students or use a massive amount of personal time. 

-I run a school youtube page which works great for communicating what our students can accomplish to the outside world.  Each student signs a media waiver at our school for these purposes which is extremely important if you get into the media and digital world.  The problem for us was that youtube is blocked by our district’s firewall and switching to youtube for education is a challenge to argue technically with our top education technology administrators.  We had to find a system which, like youtube, sent a temporary clip player to the device opening movie URLs through QR Codes.  If that didn’t make sense, feel free to ask what I meant by the previous sentence.  We tried TeacherTube, but found it clunky at best.  It took long amounts of time to upload films and then there was a longer-than-projected wait time for clips to be available for viewing.  While scouring the online possibilities, we also toyed with the idea of creating our own in-house server with the needed capabilities.  I then stumbled upon SchoolTube. It does what youtube does for our needs and is not blocked by our firewall.  No matter which video site you use, make sure to designate the security setting as “unlisted”.  This will limit access to the video to those people opening the link and will not allow the film to be accessed through a search.  The QR Code, of course, is just a vehicle for the link.  As the instructor, I choose to load each of the videos from the students.  I could open a station for students to load the videos, but for short videos, it takes less time for me to load them as I receive them.  I keep a running link/code spreadsheet on googledocs which is an alpha list with columns for assignment links and QR Codes.  I put the link to the loaded videos into the appropriate column from my station once the film is uploaded and students can make their codes for the links at their leisure before the due date and place them in the appropriate column for that assignment code.  The system runs quite smoothly and makes it easy for quick checks to see who is behind on turn-in.  

-Once the codes are all turned in, we print off the name and code columns, turn it in to our librarian, and she attaches them to the backs of each copy of those titles.  Now, when a student walks into her library, they can scan the codes on the backs of books for a friend or acquaintance of the same age and interests for their take on books.  These reviews are far more powerful on getting students to read than obscure names of what they view as old people from far away.

Next Post: In the Geography Class or Beam us Down Scotty