School Cartoon by Andertoons

I sort of get it. Parents, right? Parents do that stuff. In some ways it would be nice if you could go to school and just download information into your brain, and come home to get your dose of culture.  It’d be like that scene in The Matrix where he learns Kung Fu, except really boring, takes a decade instead of 5 minutes, and teaches you to submit to the machine.

Obvi: it’s too simplistic.  If you send your kid to spend 40 hours a week with a group of adults that aren’t you, your kid is going to pick up some values from those adults.  It would be cool if you had total control over another person’s morals, but if you want our society to help you out by teaching your kids you’re going to have to face the fact that some of society is going to spill on them.

Trust teachers or don’t. Talk to them about what you want and see if they’ll give it to you. You can’t legislate this, ffs – don’t pretend you can abstract our service away from our humanity.

If you don’t want them to learn about differing viewpoints, keep your kids home in front of Khan Academy.  Be careful, though: even recordings of other adults can transmit infectious opinions.

Working to really SHOW respect has two purposes.

It supports a group of people (children) who are just now earning respect for themselves.  They aren’t necessarily very receptive to respect yet, so being obvious about it can help.

It also teaches THEM to show respect. Which might be even more important than teaching them trigonometry.

The thing is, I did all of these things without really thinking of them as disrespectful. Once I realized that my students were people in the prime of their health, trusting hundreds of hours of their youth to me… it was easier to get my copies done on time.

I was eager to correct my attitude, but in my eagerness I made another mistake.

6. I overreacted and put too much pressure on the students to be their own guides. I forgot that 15-year-olds do still need guidance, and left them to unguided exploration that left them feeling lost and foolish.

George Jetson commutes to work on a little air scooter to push a single button for an hour a week.  It’s hard to imagine what George might do instead of pushing the button – to find a new way to be helpful, he’s going to need skills and passion that I just don’t see in him yet.  Everything else he could do – every job he’d get such simple instructions for – has been automated.  He’s going to have to change completely, from a routine-following technophobe to a self-directed instigator – and it’s going to be COMPETITIVE.

He should start now, while button tech is still primitive!

Jobs that can be automated may simply disappear for our students and their offspring.  There may be no truck drivers, or factory workers, or cashiers. Most of our office jobs can be automated too, so watch out, middle class.  Wealth is already being concentrated by this stuff.

I’m focusing on helping kids be adaptable and incisive. They are NOT going to be hired to push a button all day.

I’ve been to a dozen conferences for PD too – sitting in on lectures about why lectures aren’t effective, and filling out worksheets about adding creativity to the classroom.  The PLC, and my blog, always stand out as the work I’m most proud of and that improved me most as a teacher.

Iowa is getting excited about competency-based education, which would let students follow their own interests and strengths around the school instead of following their age group.  We would stop wasting students’ time by giving them C after C and meet them where they a) are and b) want to be.

There’s a lot to think about. What if we end up with a bunch of expert skate boarders and none of the doctors we want? After all, my school set up this PLC to make us better teachers, and it interested me so much I quit my teaching job so I could work on it all the time. Giving up control has the downside that you have to give up control.  If we let students study their interests, do we have the faith that presenting them with smart, helpful role models and the world’s information will be good for the society we want to have?

Leaving school, grades are the only thing they give you to take with you on your way.  Your diploma is an acknowledgement that you collected a sufficient number of acceptable grades.  The big symbol they send with you, after TWELVE YEARS OF YOUR YOUTH, says “you met our expectations!”

I’m not saying we shouldn’t ask kids to meet our expectations. The thing is, when the ONLY symbol we really celebrate is about meeting expectations, we’re saying implicitly that that’s the most important thing.

And I want to celebrate compassion, creativity, problem solving, problem finding, ingenuity, leadership, stewardship, responsibility, hard work, open minds, beauty, longevity, partnership, communication, intelligence, technical skills, and self-sufficiency WAY MORE than I want to celebrate obedience.

We can teach from the front of the room, giving our students the knowledge we’ve earned over our years. But if we only give information, we’re only telling – we’re never showing how to learn.  We say learning is important, but we never do it in front of them. What conclusions do they draw from that?

In ten years, when our students are working on problems that have never occurred to us, they’ll need more than even our very best classes have given them.  They’ll need to ask their own questions, and teach themselves their own, wiser lessons.

We have to give them more than what we know!

I spent my afternoons with the ultimate frisbee club I started with my friends. I spent my evenings on the computer. Can you picture me on the computer, my notes and books open next to me?  So I could pretend I was doing my homework?

Can you picture my parents getting these teacher reports?

My GPA was 2.0 from 3rd grade to 16th, so you can infer that I know almost nothing. I lose at every trivia game. My wife will pick up crossword puzzles, and I’ll just get out a book or check my blogs.

And yet, in the last 18 months I’ve formed a company with three employees, and single-handedly written a program that handles thousands of users and over 750,000 pieces of assessment data – scores and ratings and comments. All without knowing anything!

Here’s the thing: the technology we’re using to create ActiveGrade was released in 2008. Even if I HAD studied in school… I graduated in 2005.  Knowing things isn’t enough. Maybe, knowing specifics is less important than ever – if I knew more history I might back that up more convincingly.

ActiveGrade is hiring, and what will we put in the developer job description? We can’t require experience – the tools we’re using were invented three years ago, and a tiny fraction of the population knows how to use them. You all know how I feel about tests – I’m not going to hire someone based on a test score when I care about creativity, compassion, and hard work.

I want to hire someone with the things I got out of my childhood INSTEAD of knowledge: curiosity, fun, tinkering skills, trouble-shooting skills, communication skills.

Knowledge is A LOT CHEAPER than it was when we were in school. Casual Obedience is NOT THAT IMPORTANT. I hope that the grades we give out are not based on knowledge and obedience.  I hope we’re not misleading our children to think that obedience is our biggest goal.

It has come to our attention that our students are spending huge amounts of time in the forest nearby the school. In the forest, there are many dangerous adults and our students are sometimes dangerous to each other when they are in the forest.

New school policy regarding the nearby forest #1:

It is now against school policy to be anywhere near our students when they are in the forest because, if any teachers are dangerous adults and harm our students in the forest that would look bad for the school because we allowed them to be in the forest together.

Or

New school policy regarding the nearby forest #2:

While we encourage staff to be in the forest with our students, it is very important be mindful that when you are in the forest there are always students around and that even when you are in the forest on your own time and taking steps to avoid them, students are around and will likely see what you do there. Assume that everything you do in the forest will be seen by students, parents, administrators, and school board members and conduct yourselves accordingly.

Please get to know the forest very well. Our students are spending a large percentage of their time there. Sometimes adults can find it kind of scary, but it actually has a lot to offer. The more good adults there are in the forest, the safer it will be for everyone. Much of the fear will go away once you get to know the place.

It can actually be a useful resource for your classes. We will offer staff development to help you learn ways you can use the forest.

If there are many teachers and other positive adults in the forest, it will be much more difficult for teachers who are actually dangerous adults to get away with being bad.

Please help to make the forest safer for everyone.

My friend Irving wrote this. He works at Scattergood Friends School.

Pro-tip: Get some green index cards and some red index cards and pass them out to your class.  Tell them that throughout the period they can hold up either card – green for “I get it,” red for “I don’t get it.”  If you have time, draw symbols on the cards for color-blind students. Now you can see immediately when people in your class are getting lost, and use that information to adapt your lecture in real time.  It’s much easier to see the cards than to analyze the body language of 30 people. Omg, lecture 2.0.

Some people will be hesitant, because this is kind of dorky and kind of risky if you don’t know it.  Prompt everyone to hold up one card or the other occasionally.  The field of color is easier to register than individual cards, plus you’ll get some more participation from shy people.

Pro-tip: at the beginning, say, “Does everyone understand how to use the cards?” and wiggle your eyebrows suggestively.  And by suggestively I of course mean, “suggesting that they should hold up the green card.”  They won’t get it at first, but then they’ll laugh and reluctantly hold up their cards.  Throw out a few more silly ones like “so everyone read the chapter on thermodynamics, right?” to prompt for the red cards.  This’ll give everyone practice with the cards and break the ice.

Pro-wrestling tips: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_wrestling_attacks

Quid-Pro-Quo tip: it means “an exchange that’s pretty much fair.”  Who knew?

I use all of these tips in my presentations (e.g. lectures about trigonometry), and they work well in ActiveGrade too.  Caution: only use the Boom Drop  in advanced classes.

Afterwards, my friend said that at times during my presentation he thought I was just an awesome presenter.  ”Yeah,” I thought, “I know.  Go on.”

“But at other times,” he continued, “it would just get awkward, like you had forgotten what was going on. It was just dead silence.”

After I finished reeling, I was like, “uhm, you mean the times I stopped to let a point sink in, or are you talking about the times I left room for people to ask questions, even if they were uncomfortable?”

He paused for a second, and then said, “You just changed my entire idea of what a conference is for.”  Turns out, he always thought of presentations as entertaining and informative, but never as interactive learning experiences.  I guess that’s why we call students at a presentation the “audience.”  Instead of, you know, “students.”

All this is to say that we, teachers, are thebomb.com at teaching.  I forget that teaching has a lot of skills, but, attn: everyone, teachers have a lot of skills.  Three hundred people were at this conference, and all of them made eight times my teaching salary (literally)… but I was the only one who brought red and green index cards for the students.

QR codes can be a great voting tool allowing students to vote by simply scanning the code as they enter or exit the classroom. This can save time, and it gets your students up and moving.

Is there some secret QR code app I don’t know about? The best one I’ve seen is Google Goggles, which requires me to take my phone out, unlock it, open up Google Goggles, take a picture, and wait a second or two for it to scan the code. Then I have to click the link or whatever was in the QR code, and wait for whatever page to load in the phone’s browser.  I can’t get thirty kids to open freaking GMAIL right, you know?

If I wanted students to vote as they entered or exited the classroom, for example, I’d consider a piece of paper or the whiteboard with a few markers laid out.  The process for voting is “pick up this marker and scrape it across the board in a check mark shape.”

So what am I missing here? I see QR codes everywhere but I’m embarrassed to scan them.  The idea of hidden messages is awesome, but QR codes can’t hold any serious amount of text.  Just use a bit.ly address, right?

Codes attached to a skeleton model or dissected pig can take students to important directions or content.

Now this starts to sound useful.  I’m imagining a sort of google-maps-like layer over the textbook or over a big wall map that shows you what’s underground there or what the nervous system looks like at a particular point.  Imagine if your school had a huge mural of dinosaurs and students could take their iPhone up to the wall and see the bones, or a big mural of a car and students could go see how the different parts of the engine worked.  Is there some way I can make this happen in my own class?  I guess I could hand out an indexed list of hints and the QR code could just refer kids to the list, with no internet connection necessary. As long as they all had the app installed.  And all had devices with cameras and apps.  And were allowed to use them in class.  And wouldn’t find their facebook status more engaging than my  QR-code worksheet.

I don’t know.  They’re neat. But if I have an extra 30 minutes to enhance my lesson materials, I don’t think it’s going to be spent on a QR code.   Is there anyone out there with a good workflow that uses them to good effect?

What if they had used a Geogebra applet instead?  I could have whipped up a “drag the angle and measure the x- and y-coordinates” applet in 5 minutes, and saved the students 20 minutes each.  The data in class would have been accurate to three decimal places instead of (generously) one.  By a lot of objective measures, the computer would have been better.

And yet…

When do you have students do work by hand?

I have an electric caraffe that boils water.  It’s awesome.  You just put in some water, flip a switch, and soon your water is boiling.  I assume it heats up some element inside it, which heats up the water.

Should I fill the caraffe with hot water or cold water from my tap?

If I fill it with hot water, it takes some hot water out of my hot-water tank, which means that cold water goes into my hot-water tank (bad).  On the other hand, the electric caraffe doesn’t have to work as much to boil the water (good)!

If I fill it with cold water, the hot-water tank is left alone to be hot (good).  But my little caraffe has to work an extra 50 degrees! Also, the hotter my hot-water tank is, the faster it leaks heat into the cold basement air! Aiee!

I hope students coming out of my classes could

• Understand the dilemma
• Notice these dilemmas around them for themselves
• Figure out what they’d need to know to answer the questions they have
• Make an intentional decision about whether the work required to answer the question is worth having the correct answer to the question (instead of just shrugging it off because they don’t want to think about it).

This is a tweet that showed up at random in a presentation I went to.  The presentation was about databases, but I was distracted for the rest of the hour by this quote.

1. The quality of homework in this class was such that the teacher considered it equal to erasing the board.
2. The student in question apparently sat down and started tweeting.

Being an excellent programmer is a helpful attribute.  Having a good idea and working hard on it: important, sure.  But it’s indispensable to have friends in high places – we couldn’t succeed without the connections we’re building.

Teachers are paid to help students learn, giving them an important resource to draw from after school, but sometimes schools’ social responsibilities are overlooked.  Schools are our society’s way of starting everyone off in a network – every kid comes out of school knowing some adults that are more powerful than themselves.  Every kid comes out of school having learned rules of networking from the social norms set forth in school.  And yet some kids start networks, and some don’t.

I think we should shift focus away from “just try hard and you can make success for yourself.”  It’s not fair to play down the fact that you have to meet the right people, too.  Kids with wealthy and/or powerful parents learn networking skills outside of schools, and start out with bigger networks, and know from early on that it takes help to establish yourself.  We should be teaching this to our students in school.  It’s way more important to their future than, say, finding prime factors.  Even if you know calculus, there’s very little success to be had by yourself.

I’d like to see professional programs in schools, like apprenticeships, in which professionals from various trades take kids through not only the hard skills they need (math, writing, welding, wiring) but also the social skills (networking, bargaining, advertising).  I’d like to see a national fervor about our childrens’ social education alongside the fervor about their test scores.  I’d like to see post-secondary institutions dedicated to finding apprenticeships, helping young people find their networks, supporting people in learning the skills they need to succeed in a professional community.

A lot of our education reform is about helping kids be stronger and more creative problem solvers. Hands-on inquiry project-based lessons, standards-based specific formative feedback, product-driven assessment, etc.  But everything I read is about academic subjects. There’s a lot more to financial success than individual creativity in this country, and there’s a lot more to happiness.  I say, if we’re going to provide education to every kid, we ought to do an all-around job of it.  We can’t just teach them seven technical subjects and call it a day.

A pristine view of business formed in my head.  In school and in my neighborhood were people like me, who joked and accidentally insulted and decided to mow the lawn (or not), but in businesses were robots who knew what went where and maintained perfect organization.  It really never occurred to me that businesses were run by people.

I won the position of “Camp Director,” one day, and was suddenly the employer and supervisor of 25 staff members, and was responsible to several hundred clients.  With ActiveGrade, Dan, Michal and I are responsible for a lot of people – today someone recorded assessment number 130,000!  In both positions I work really hard to make my businesses seem professional and, more importantly, to deliver on the implicit and explicit promises I make.  As a teacher I took part in the education of hundreds of people – talk about responsibility!

The pristine image of business I formed when I was a kid is gone. I realized that all businesses make mistakes and have inefficiencies.  What’s replaced it is a more impressive picture: people that are not only working hard but constantly evaluating themselves, asking themselves where they want to get better, and relating to customers, colleagues, and friends the whole time.

This is what being human is about to me.  It’s up to us! We’re in it together!

Thanks for working and playing with me.  I’m excited to include the kids.

Recently, an eight-year-old boy named Q started playing with us.  He’s like four feet tall and maybe 70 pounds.  We’ve decided it’s ok for him to play with us; we just try not to run over him.  We have not agreed, however, on how to treat him on the field.  Do we go easy on him? How easy?

Maybe make it SEEM like we're trying? - Photo by Nic McPhee

This is exactly the problem I faced in my classes every day.  One person has lower skills, or less experience, than the others – where do we set our expectations?  Some players in my game say Q should not get a defender, and if he drops the frisbee we should let him pick it up as if he didn’t. I say that if he’s in the game, he’s in the game! Rules apply!  If he’s not ready to play, practice with him on the side of the field until he is!

It’s hard to say what’s best for Q.  If you were in our game, you’d know the specific details that he’s actually a pretty good thrower, and doesn’t crack under pressure, and can really catch a disc, and that we should probably turn up the heat on him at least a little.  Still, you wouldn’t really expect him to be able to do everything the other players can do.  I think a moderate course is the best for Q’s skill level.  If we let him keep playing, when he’s 14 he’s going to be better than all of us. If we make him stop, or practice on the sidelines, he’ll lose interest.  For the rest of us, when he’s in the game, we can’t really play as hard, and we stop improving as quickly.

In my math classes, the kids with low skill levels had the same effects, and the dilemma was the same.  I’d love to say, “if you’re in, you’re in!” but where does that leave the kids that aren’t in?

Holy crap, am I glad that I thought of it before my boring science teacher told me that.  And yet, in my math classes, I often tried to blow the kids’ minds with stuff they probably hadn’t thought of yet. I made a three-dimensional grid of string in the classroom so they could stand in it, and imagine it stretching out forever.  Did I rob them of the opportunity to think of that themselves?  It’s not a particularly important concept to my class – I could have waited and let them find their own awe.

I’m so engaged. I think this is awesome… and it is! But can my student, who looks so bored, ever think it’s awesome after he’s been told so by someone so boring?

Maybe it’s better to come up with engaging questions on a smaller scale, and to help people to a proficiency with the skills they need to start asking themselves the big questions.

So, here are the questions I want help with (don’t worry, they won’t rob you of a profound thought):

• When they say, “oh my gosh, I just realized that maybe everyone sees color differently and no one could tell!” what is the best way to respond?
• Is it ok to throw out a spoiler to your whole class?
• What are the big ideas you thought of for yourself, that gave you that feeling of dawning awe?

from World History, McDougal Littell, published 2009.

There’s an implication that, since 1500, scholars have generally been challenging the scientific ideas that came before them. Think that’s true? In your classes, you’re the ancient dispenser of knowledge. What do you do to get students to practice challenging your ideas?

Could it be worth teaching untrue theorems, giving inaccurate analyses of novels, or giving kind of naive reasoning for histories… just to keep your students skeptical? At Scattergood the freshman science teacher used to teach Copernican theories about the solar system for a few weeks, so he could later say, “and then we figured out it was really this way.” I always wondered how many students got the message that “it’s really this way” is probably never really true.

The safest approach, perhaps, but not the shortest: 280 feet.

Many shorter paths exist by walking diagonally through the lot.

This route is only 250 feet.

This one's 240 feet

230 feet! Is this the optimal solution?

To decide that this is absolutely the best path, mathematically, might take quite a bit of work.  I actually never got around to figuring out how I would represent it mathematically – it’s just so much easier to plug it into Google Maps and use the measurement tool.  In the field, you can kind of just pick a direction and things work out ok.  The hours of work to represent and solve this as a math problem are not worth the effort – the penalty of guessing and being a little wrong is, what, 15 seconds?

And yet, a lot of math problems – especially the “applications” or “real world” problems – ask students to do a tremendous amount of work to get an answer that they could have guessed at in a few seconds.

When you flip to the back of the book, you see that the publisher recommends creating a formula that represents the area of the eventual box in terms of the length of the sides of the squares you’ll cut out.  Find the derivative of that equation, find the zero of that derivative, and use that zero to determine the final dimensions.  The best solution in many students’ minds, however, is to guess a length between one and three inches. You’d probably be within 10% of the perfect answer, and you’d finish ten minutes sooner.  If you suggest that a different solution is best, you’d better have a very apparent benefit analysis ready, or your students will stop trusting you, check out of your class, and start asking “how much are these problems worth in our grades?”

The benefit of learning about derivatives (or skill xyz) is not apparent when the penalty for guessing is so low.  One solution some books attempt is to making the units bigger.  A farmer is mowing his field, and wants to find the best path, given that his baler can hold 5 tons of hay.  Now we’re not talking about 15 seconds: this could save a full day of work!  This is much more interesting, except:

1. By guessing, the farmer can get pretty close to the optimal solution right away.  After a few harvests, he or she will have refined it to the best path.  Your computation forgot to factor in the turning radius of the tractor and the soggy ground in the southwest corner, so he or she would probably have to make these adjustments anyway.
2. It seems possible that none of your students will ever harvest hay in their entire lives.

My Best Solution (TL;DR)

The goal is to make the benefit of learning <skill x> apparent to students so that they will want to learn it.  The best solution I’ve ever found is in showing students how to program a computer to do all of the textbook problems for them.  Geogebra is a programming environment that students can use effectively after a few minutes of training, and in my experience people love making computers do work for them.  The math comes to the forefront because now we’re making paper boxes out of a piece of paper of any size.  Now the students aren’t learning math to figure out what size to make a box (BORING) but instead they’re learning math to figure out how to get a computer to do their homework (FUN).  They’re not doing work by hand for twenty similar problems (TEDIOUS), they’re generalizing and finding patterns that the computer can make visual for them (ILLUMINATING). They’re not talking about farmers or engineers doing some problem (IRRELEVANT AND OVERLY SIMPLIFIED) but they’re learning to identify patterns and make computers work for them (REAL-LIFE DETAIL, OVERWHELMINGLY RELEVANT).

David Cox has a lot of posts about Geogebra, and I’ve written a few other articles explaining different parts of geogebra too.  If you teach math or any kind of numerical analysis, I implore you to learn to use Geogebra or another programming environment and bring it into your classrooms.  As long as the electricity and lithium hold up (fingers crossed) programming is going to be hugely important to your students.  As an added benefit, programming will let you go farther and deeper in your classes because students will get that delicious, stone-cold, 100% accurate feedback that only a computer can give.

Normal Point of Inflection programming will now resume, and I’m already looking forward to the conference next July!

We have some great speakers lined up and you are welcome to become a speaker as well; just make a post on your own blog in answer to the prompt.  This is a time to step back from the every day tasks of teaching and look at the broader picture.

Here is the Conference Center (go here to see an explanation and links to all the “speakers”)

Here is the form by which you should submit your post.

• Jose Vilson, middle school teacher, coach, and data analyst, will be posting at The Jose Vilson
• Deborah Meier, long-time teacher, writer, and public advocate, will be posting at Bridging Differences
• Dina Strasser, seventh-grade English educator, will be posting at The Line
• Holly Graff, high school teacher and unschooling mom, will be posting at Unschool Days

Michal has been a big help in finding and coordinating communications with these presenters, and I’m excited by the lineup – especially since these four new presenters are outside my usual network.  In this conference about the core values and the basic motivations of education, I hope we are all stretched in a useful way.  Still, there are a few demographics painfully absent from the lineup of speakers, and perhaps the most painful is: students! If you are in contact with students during the summer, please think about who you know that’s still in school that would like to contribute.  Too often we forget to ask our charges what they think of what we’re doing, and what they think the point of all this is!

You can see the whole schedule at the convention center.  It starts in July! I hope you’ll participate.  On July 1, we’ll make a kickoff post with instructions for submitting your piece.

Thanks for your enthusiasm! Get those posts ready! Plus: extra credit for any presenters who use a format other than “the article.”

PS: I’m joking about the extra credit. The last time I joked about it I lost 10% of my readership.