The Sleepy Reader

"I am a reader, a flashlight-under-the-covers, carries-a-book-everywhere-I-go, don't-look-at-my-Amazon-bill reader. I choose purses based on whether I can cram a paperback into them, and my books are the first items I pack into a suitcase." ~ Donalyn Miller, "The Book Whisperer: Awakening the Inner Reader in Every Child"



I was that kid who used to almost fall asleep on the bus. I dragged myself into school in the morning and I swear I learned nothing until at least 9:30 AM. I was mopey, hypersensitive, and asked to go to the bathroom simply because I couldn't stay awake in class and needed an excuse to get up and walk around. As a teacher, I judged students like I was. I judged their parents, their nutrition, their sleep habits. I forgot, when I first got into the classroom, about the sleepy reader.

The sleepy reader is the kid who cannot put their book down. They sneak a flashlight to bed and end up with poor eyesight as an adult as a result. They read and read and read, not noticing that a day has gone by and there is no light in the room. They read in social situations where it's actually unacceptable, like at a family dinner party or (once) at the movie theater. The sleepy reader is not tired because they are neglected or their parents don't care. They're tired because they were too busy reading to sleep.

I don't see many students like that these days. I'm surprised by this because I work with strong, early readers who are identified gifted. As I've been working with a team to improve our remediation tutoring this year, I've been giving this a lot of thought. What happened to the sleepy reader?

When I stumbled upon Donalyn Miller's book in our school's professional library, I found some answers to my questions. I found this part, in Chapter 1 "There and Back Again" to be particularly inspiring:

"I transformed my classroom into a workshop, a place where apprentices hone a craft under the tutelage of a master. I learned that being the best reader and writer in the room is not about power and control. Instead, I must be a source of knowledge to my own young charges, I should guide them as they approach their own understandings. Meaning from a text should not flow from my perceptions, or God forbid, the teaching guide; it should flow from my students' own understandings, under my guidance."

I imagine Miller's classroom is full of sleepy readers. This is a classroom where I would want to be. This is a classroom where reading is taught as a craft, not as a set of isolated skills needed to pass some arbitrary test. Students in this classroom learn that reading is important for readings' sake, but also opens doors and windows to so many other things. These children learn that reading is joyful.

As the holidays approach, I have been encouraging my students and their parents to find ways to bring learning outside the four walls of our school and into their homes and communities. But when I think back on my own childhood as a sleepy reader, I realize I did this for myself simply because I got a whiff of the joy of reading. Maybe the best thing we can do for some early readers is just get out of their way.

Good Teacher Days

Ever had a "good teacher" day? I used to excitedly tell my friends and family every time I had one. It was a day when all of my students seemed happy and engaged the entire day. Things just fit together, like the pieces of a puzzle. My lessons flowed nicely and maybe some kind of unexpected "teachable moment" occurred.

I'd venture to say I had about 15 of these kinds of days my first year of teaching. I think I might average about one a week in my current position. This has something to do with my self-confidence, I know, but it also has to do with my position as a non-classroom teacher. It's easy to feel like a "good teacher" in 45 minute segments!

I used to keep an old-fashioned (meaning non-electronic) journal in my early days of teaching. This entry from my third year made me smile today as I was reading through it, which I often do... to remind myself of where I came from and how I got here, wherever here is!

2/10/08- "It was a good teacher day today. 'Test Prep' all day and the kids had no clue. It CAN be done!"

If I had known what Twitter was in those days, I might have shared this with my PLN. At the time though, it was self-affirming enough to have a day that just felt right. The entry was accompanied by one of my favorite quotes, by George Bernard Shaw:

PEOPLE WHO SAY IT CANNOT BE DONE SHOULD NOT INTERRUPT THOSE OF US WHO ARE DOING IT.

I think of this every time I hear a news story about bad teachers. Bad teachers are only bad when they choose to stay bad. Everyone can have "good teacher" days, but they only happen when we work for them.

I'm still working for them. Are you?

Be the Change You Seek

 I stumbled upon this video today from the RSA's 21st Century Enlightenment Project:

http://www.youtube.com/user/theRSAorg#p/c/39BF9545D740ECFF/20/zDZFcDGpL4U

 
After a particularly trying week (or 2 or 3) at school, this really rocked my world. I've been living in my head quite a bit lately and have had a hard time finding colleagues willing to wax philosophical with me about changing the system that we call "public education" in this country. No one wants to talk about the things they can't change.

Then, a few days ago, while driving to school, I was listening to CNN and heard a speech by President Obama on his tour of Asia. He was in India and spoke of a quote by Mahatma Gandhi that resonated with him: "Be the change you seek." I scribbled this onto a gum wrapper at the next red light and found it in my pocket later that day at a particularly low moment.

Sometimes it's a bit discouraging to work in the public school factory. In positions of leadership, it's sometimes hardest of all. You see people who lack capacity, compassion, the will to work towards the greater good... it's hard to watch! In fact, I'm sure it's why many people escape. Honestly, though, I think there's something empowering about believing that changing yourself can change the system. If we all had this attitude, imagine what we could accomplish!

Matthew Taylor of RSA said it better than I can:

"What we aim for can be as important as what we achieve." 

Now, I am a skeptic of "the power of positive thinking" (see Barbara Ehrenreich's "Smile or Die" by the same organization), but there is just something so empowering about this statement! If we aim high, even if we don't reach what we aimed for, at least we tried and at least we got higher than we were before.

As a perfectionist who wants to have done it 100% yesterday, this could be a tough pill to swallow, but I think we could do a lot of "damage" to our current educational system with this kind of thinking. I believe it was Skype co-creator Niklas Zennström who said he wanted to "...be destructive, but for the purpose of making the world a better place."

So... a premature New  Years' Resolution of mine: I will be the change I seek.

I am frustrated by teachers who won't risk new teaching strategies. I vow to try a new teaching strategy. And I'll do it clumsily in front of another person who might be inspired to take the risk as well.

It irritates me when administrators ask their insubordinate to do things they themselves have never tried. I will shatter my mental image of myself as "perfect classroom teacher". It's easy to remember yourself as perfect, but not quite as easy to actually be perfect! I will try something new before asking someone else to do it.

I can't stand the grading system we use in schools today. I will start to consider developing a new grading system and even it only lives in my brain, at least it will be better than whining and complaining about what we already have.

How will you be the change you seek?

Parents and Schools



I have to admit: When I first started teaching, nothing scared me more than parents.

When you are 21, fresh out of college, and in your first classroom, you know how little you know and you spend 90% of your time trying to hide it. I used to think to myself all the time my first year of teaching, "If my child is ever in the classroom of a first year teacher, I will do whatever it takes to get them out. Their whole year will be wasted." When I think back on that year, I can't believe every single parent didn't call the school to get their kids removed from my care.

It's not that I was abusive or mean or (completely) scattered... it's just that there were so many who were BETTER than me! I tried things and failed 3 or 4 times a week, even day. Who would want that for their child?

Recently I was speaking to a friend whose husband is in med.school. I asked her, do they tell the patients that they are not doctors, but doctors in training before they help with a diagnosis or even a surgery? Her response: The patients don't even notice or ask.

This really took me aback! They didn't notice?! How could they not? This person had very limited experience outside of a classroom, a book, or an observation. How could they not tell the difference between a seasoned veteran mentor and a young, naive intern?

Maybe it's the lab coat. Teachers don't wear lab coats, but let's face it, we can be spotted from 4 miles away when we head to the grocery store after work still wearing our "crazy socks" from Spirit Day. We have chalk dust or markers coating us. We give "the look" to innocent children in Walmart. We LOOK like teachers, so maybe parents don't notice new teachers anymore than patients notice interns.

I'm not afraid of parents anymore. Not even a little. I don't get that sick feeling when I'm paged from the office with a call and I don't have nervous dreams the night before the parent workshops I host as part of my position as a gifted resource teacher. I imagined the worst from these parents, but have been pleasantly surprised how a forging a relationship with the parents has truly improved my interactions with their children.

For example, yesterday a parent explained how useful rubrics are to her family. Her son tends to go completely overboard on projects, but having a rubric to break down criteria is helpful for him because parents and child know what the teacher expects.

Another parent shared her child's obsession with Taylor Swift. In a discussion about helping gifted children deal with failure, she decided to do some research about Taylor Swift and find out some difficulties she needed to overcome to get to where she is today. Upon sharing that, some other parents decided to do the same using athletes their children look up to as well.

A very knowledgeable and caring parent also shared how anxious she finds her child gets when asked "why" questions. She suspects he thinks the asker knows "why" and expects him to come up with the correct answer. Even if he MIGHT know, his fear of being wrong keeps him from answering the question. Instead, she tries to rephrase her "why" questions with "What do you think about..." to help him take the risk to answer a difficult question. I used this technique with him in the classroom today and was shocked by the sophistication of his response when I might previously have gotten a blank stare.

These parents KNOW their kids! They know them well, much better than I can in two 45 minute sessions a week. Their insight proves to be invaluable time and time again. Conversely, when all their children will say when asked about school is "It was fine." or "I don't know.", substantial conversations with someone from the school can be enlightening for parents as well.

In the words of Macaulay Calkin: "I'm not afraid anymore!"

Stress is a Choice

I believe that stress is a choice.

I have spent about 2/3 of my life quitting bad habits. I’ve gone from grinding my teeth to biting my nails and back again more times than I can count. I know that my bad habits crop up in times of stress and I attempt to quit them in times of relative peace.

In my second year of teaching I decided to keep a “stress calendar”. On every working day I rated my stress level from 1 (no pulse) to 10 (ready to be committed). Sometimes I forgot about it entirely and sometimes I got a bit of sick satisfaction from writing down an “8” or even a “9”. What I did not anticipate, however, was the amount of stress relief that calendar would bring me in my third year of teaching.

When I got to the end of my last staff meeting that first week of school in my third year, I checked my calendar. Last year I rated this day a “7”. Just reading that brought me down to a “5”. That day in October when I realized that my guided reading schedule, which looked so perfect in August, just simply wouldn’t work with this group of students should’ve been at least a “6”, but came down to a “4” when I realized that October never got below a “5” the year before. In December, when my family and my in-laws started competing for holiday time and my kids were bouncing off the walls, I didn’t even need to look at my calendar.

Now, in my sixth year of teaching, I never look at that calendar. I don’t need to because I realized that stress is a choice. There are ebbs and flows to the amount of stress I suffer from in my personal and professional life. I can choose to be stressed or I can choose to be calm. The things that I cannot control will not change no matter how stressed I am and the things that matter now will most likely be distant memories before I know it.

I believe that stress is a choice.

Single White Female

I have always been what I affectionately refer to as a "psuedo feminist". My fiancee calls it my "bleeding heart". I do not consider myself a liberal or a democrat, but I am certainly not conservative or a republican. I am also not apolitical. I think I simply believe in the inherent good inside myself and others and rarely, if ever, feel like particular groups or rights should be excluded.

Therefore, it always burned me a bit that I knew in my heart and soul that I would become a teacher. I knew about the critical shortage of women in math and science careers (alas, my two worst subjects). I also knew that caucasion females are not exactly in short supply in schools today. When I saw this modern-day Rosie the Rivetor magazine cover, I was still in the early stages of my career and was shamed when I looked around and saw 2 dozen faces just like mine leading the classrooms in my school, but only about 6-8 students participating in the lessons who fit the "caucasion female" bill.

Why is it that caucasion females are attracted to elementary schools? Is it because this was a happy, safe place for us in our youth? Or maybe it's because OUR teachers were caucasion females, successful and secure women we looked up to?

By those standards, there are few students in my current school who can relate to me, at least on the surface level. It is a struggle to remember that all kids do not learn they way I learned... that is, exactly as my traditional teachers taught me. This country has a major problem: a plumetting national reputation and "failing" subgroups barring us from federal funding.

Can our predominantly caucasion female workforce solve this problem? Honestly, I think so.

Rosie is the symbol I chose here because women have a history of righting the wrongs of society. In general, women are empathetic and motivated (at least those of us who chose to go into teaching tend to be). What better qualities could there be to right the current wrongs of our schools?

Our schools are designed to educate as many people as possible as similarly as possible. Is this really the best plan in this day and age? If we are truly leaving "no child behind", then we ought to start teaching as many people as possible as effectively as possible.

Top Teachers List- Part 2

Top Teacher #2: Dr. W

I began grad school in the summer of 2007, hoping simply to gain a degree that would earn me more credibility and more pay. For much of that summer and the fall semester, I felt like I was getting little else. Then, in the spring of 2008, I took a class called "Educational Assessment", which promised to be important but terribly boring. As a relatively weak math student, I dreaded the statistics and mathematical mumbo-jumbo.

The first day of class was an evening in January. Class had already been cancelled once due to inclement weather. I drove nearly an hour from my school, immediately after the day had ended. My students were rowdy that day due to several days off playing in the snow. I was tired and had a headache. There was no time for dinner. I would have to eat my smashed peanut butter and jelly during the first break from class.

Needless to say, I was in a foul mood. I was pleasantly surprised, however, by a familiar face standing in the classroom door as I approached.  Having recognized (but not being able to place) the professors name, I now made the connection: I had this teacher in undergraduate school and liked her very much. She was actually my very first education professor and taught a class the students called "Fundies" which stood for "Fundamentals of Mathematics". I remembered loving the practical tips she gave and the way she taught the class as we should be teaching... truly learning by doing.

My mood improved considerably and the class proved to be one of the most useful I have had in my educational career. I learned things about assessment that, looking back, blow my mind in their simplicity, clarity, practicality, and utter importance. How could I not have known these things, yet been allowed to teach for 3 + years?! It astounded me.

Everyday class started with an "icebreaker" which I would immediately take back and use with my students. One popular technique is what my prof called a "Snowball Fight". The students write their responses to an open-ended question on a piece of paper, then crumple them up into a ball. The next two minutes are for the snowball fight. Everyone throws the wads of paper at one another, getting out energy and acting ridiculous. When the teacher yells "Stop!" the students pick up the nearest "snowball" and read the response using the sentence starter, "I think this person said this because..." to interpret what the classmate said.

As much as I enjoyed the "icebreakers" and alternative assessments the professor provided us with, one piece of advice stuck with me. I have used this quote to describe my graduate school experience to many people over the past 2 years. She told us:

Undergraduate elementary education classes are some of the toughest classes to teach. It is like preparing a traveler for somewhere neither you nor they have ever been before. You give them a suitcase and fill it with as many things as possible. You pack warm weather clothes and cold weather clothes, rain gear and swimsuits. Chances are, they'll never have enough of what they need.. They'll have enough to get started, but will need to fill their suitcase themselves once they get to their destination.

Graduate classes are different. You are now packing a suitcase to travel back to somewhere you've already been. You know generally what the climate is like there, what you like to do, and how you will spend your time. There are always unexpectedly cold or warm days or maybe your tastes change, but you know what things to put in your suitcase and what to leave behind.

How profound! I have approached my life-long learning as an educator from this perspective. I know what needs to go in my suitcase and what can be left behind. I know the things that were most important the last time I went on this journey and what I didn't have enough of. The more times I make the trip, the better prepared I will be.

Here's to a new school year! May your suitcase be full of everything you need!

Top Teachers List

This series of posts will be dedicated to some of the most influential teachers I have had thus far in my life.

 

Top Teacher #1: J.R.

 

At this time of year, I always take a few moments to reduce the size of my bloated files by taking out all information that I will not be needing for the next school year. It's really gratifying, especially, to clear out those "Memo" files and extremely entertaining to sift through the "Personal" file. It's at this time that I get to look over the cards and pictures and other personal items that I collected throughout the year, thinking about which ones still have meaning and which will have meaning in future years. Now that I've got a few years under my belt, I also like to look through my "personal" files from past years of teaching. My 2005-2006 school year file has an entire folder stuffed into it marked with a student's name who will hereby be referred to as "JR".

 

Each school year, it seems, there is one student who gets their own file, filled with memories of what made them particulary challenging. Inevitably there are old planning documents, behavior plans, drawings or pictures, and funny writing assignments stuffed in there... "JR" was the first student who got his own file and in the past five years I have found myself unable to throw away a single scrap.

 

When I was in college, I would tell anyone who would ask that I would never teach a primary grade, no matter how much I was paid. The reality of finding a job, however, landed me as a second grade teacher in a small rural school in south central Pennsylvania. I convinced myself that second grade was not primary, put on a brave face, and smiled and said "guess" when a student would ask me age (21), rather than give myself away. Despite the challenges, the first week of school went quite well and I started to gain some confidence. And then I got a new student.

 

JR came to me from the school district I grew up in. He looked innocent enough at first. After about 10 minutes in my classroom, however, he had used at least three 4-letter words, winked and licked his lips at a particularly shy girl, and my room began to smell alarmingly like motor oil.

 

It took about four days for me to fully grasp that JR was a part of my class. He would not be leaving. He would not be absent. My hands (because I had to hold his hand not only in the hallway, but pretty much all day every day) would smell like motor oil for the entire year. The thought came crashing down on me during a brief conversation with my guidance counselor, a few minutes before picking my students up from recess. To my horror, I actually started bawling.

 

It's funny. I've always been a reflective person, a journal keeper. I set out that school year to record the ups and downs of being a new teacher. I wrote a beautiful entry just before the parents arrived on Back-To-School night before the year began. I wrote again the day that I realized the impact JR would have on my life. I did not write again until the 2006-2007 school year.

 

In the early days of that year, I couldn't stop to think for even a few moments, lest I suffer from a panic attack or nervous breakdown. Parents were calling me, telling me they had to have "the talk" with their seven year old because of a curious comment JR made to them. He got banned from the playground, the cafeteria, specials, because any time there weren't adult eyes on him he made sly comments to other kids or ate something he should not. So JR became my full-time companion. We were together, all the time, for 9 straight months.

 

I quickly became disenchanted with the "identification" process that promised to remove JR from my room. It dawned on me that only I could control the destiny of my classroom. I started to come up with ideas to not only keep JR busy, but to actually help him learn. We started simple... I created some word sorts using the "a" sound, the only vowel he could recognize. We sorted cards between long a and short a. The first time I left him alone with his word sort, he ate it. The entire thing. Swallowed it. I was shocked, but I printed another and we tried again.

 

It took almost 2 months before we moved on to "e", another month before "i" and I'm pretty sure we never got to"u" by the end of the year, but JR began to develop the habit of sitting down and doing his sort once a day. This afforded me about 8 minutes of peace a day.

 

Now that Language Arts was covered, we moved on to math. JR was intrigued by the timed math tests my students took each day. At first he only wanted to control the timer because it made him feel important and a part of things, the most important currency I could use with him, I found. Eventually, though, he wanted to try too. Again, we started simple. His first timed math test was tracing numbers, followed by filling in the next number in the sequence. By the end of the year he could do one digit numbers plus 1. I now had 10 minutes of peace a day.

 

Thinking back, I don't think I ever got more than that. JR is now bussed to another school where, I am told, he is a star student compared to some others in the class. It took him calling the school psychologist the b-word and stomping on his foot, plus a case of a library book covered in human urine to even get him through the identification process, a process that took until May of the 2005-2006 school year. JR was in my room full time for one full school year. I still cringe a little when I smell motor oil. But you know what? This child taught me one of the most powerful lessons of my teaching career.

 

You are on your own.

 

There are "services", sure. They are not miracles and they are not guarenteed. Often times, the providers of said services know even less than you do, which is a hard pill for a 21 year old to swallow. You make small strides and they never feel like enough, but they are. I was worried about my class that year, that they would be traumatized, that they would be hurt or damaged by JR. In fact, those same students as fourth graders actually said, "Who?" when I asked them if they remembered their former classmate. With hindsight to guide me, that is enough for me to know I accomplished something that year. My second graders learned and were safe, JR's time was only wasted for 5 hours and 50 minutes each day and I became an independent teacher, a problem solver, and someone who never looks to someone else to solve the mysteries of my classroom.

The Rube Goldberg-izing of Education

Public Education: Making the Simple Complex since 1852

Earlier this school year, my fourth grade gifted cluster classes were studying simple machines. As a culminating project, they created Rube Goldberg-esque machines, using levers, pulleys, etc. to make a simple task (such as bouncing a ball or unwrapping a piece of candy) more complex.

Recently I got to thinking about how our public education system routinely "Rube Goldberg-izes" curriculum, procedures, accountability measures, and just about anything they can get their hands on. Think back to the last excrutiating faculty meeting you attended, where nearly 20 minutes was spent determining the best solution for the lunch box pick up problem or the seating arrangement in the auditorium. Even more frustrating (and terrifying)- take a close look at one of your teaching manuals and read an entire page from top to bottom, left to right. Amazing how trivialized one skill can become!

Imagine the instructional time that could be saved by streamlining and de-Goldberizing our schools! Collaboration time could be spent analyzing student work, providing constructive feedback to colleagues, or (gasp!) differntiating instruction based on data. Nevermind that the putty we are using to hold up our posters keeps peeling or a colleague's birthday is coming and we have to come up with a clever gift. Forget that we ran out of post-its earlier than expected and there are typos in the curriculum guide written by a notoriously incompetent (yet frequently promoted) specialist. Who cares that our second graders keep tattling and the fifth graders can't seem to keep quiet in the restrooms?

The work of teaching is more important than all of these silly things. It should not take 13 steps to wipe our face with a napkin, or, the educational equivalent: get our students to write the proper heading on their page. Our time would be better spent making the complex more simple. Helping students understand place value is hard! There are multiple steps that can be taken to get to the final product of kids being about to compute with large numbers.

With the tight budgets we are working with today, our resources need to be used as efficiently as possible. Personally, I'd rather my tax dollars pay for a Place-Value machine rather than a Heading Writer.

The Inclination to "Teach"

When I was a kid, I taught my brother how to roller skate.

This sounds innocent enough, but if you ask him about it, he will shudder and cringe. You see, my brother already knew how to roller skate.

We had our lessons in the garage when one or both of my parents' cars were gone. The floor was smooth and flat, creating the perfect surface for skill practice. I spent hours planning the lessons, determining what precise skills he needed to work on and developing drills that would help him isolate that particular skill.

The lessons would begin, usually to music, with me demonstrating and him mimicking the drill. Most often, he was perfect the first time. This was frustrating to me. So I picked apart his performance until he had no clue what it was I was trying to get him to accomplish. Now this was something I could work with! I would create impassioned speeches about believing in oneself, practicing until there was nothing less to practice and then practicing some more.

This went on for an entire summer. 3 months of torture for my poor baby brother.

Looking back, it's not difficult to see why I felt the need to teach my brother to roller skate. I had experienced terrible failure that school year. My teacher did not like me and I knew it. I had the skills I needed before I set foot in that classroom. This frustrated her. She proceeded to pick apart my performance until I no longer knew what it was she wanted me to do. She drilled me, I failed... to music.

If You're Standing Still, You're Moving Backwards.

"Yesterday's classrooms are not coming back. Nor should they return... Getting everyone to agree on that, or anything else, can be a challenge."

~Elaine Wilmore