Teach 24/7 mother, teacher and school board member 

In keeping with the goal of fostering a student-centered culture, I decided that this would be the year I had a FedEx Day with my students. The idea originated in the business world with an Australian software company that periodically gives employees a day to work on whatever they want to work on, during company time, with company resources. They call it FedEx Day because the only requirement is that something has to “be delivered” and shared with the whole group by the  next day. I’d been reading about schools that have applied the concept, though I can’t remember the exact articles that taught me “the rules” of FedEx Day, they were all referred back to suggestions in Dan Pink‘s book Drive.

This year we had a full week of school before Christmas break. Knowing this would be a tough week for the kids, I decided it would make a great time to test out the FedEx concept. On Wednesday, we wrapped a series of lessons with a quick quiz, and I used the rest of the class period to explain the concept and the rules. Students would have all day Thursday in the library to explore a “personal passion project” on any topic they wished as long as it related to the 1800s. They could explore science, sports, art, theater, fashion, anything, with the one stipulation that there was an 1800s connection. Friday was a half day and students were to present what they learned during the 24 minute class we had scheduled. To make this truly motivated by their own interests and not “carrots and sticks” I told the class it would only be worth 1 point. Since I grade on a total points system, this would allow me to note in my gradebook which students completed the assignment, but would have virtually no impact on their averages. To reward, however, truly outstanding work, I told the students in each class they would vote for a classmate that deserved special recognition, and there would be a prize. I reminded them that the purpose of the assignment was to learn something and share what you learned, not because you had to or because there would be a reward, but just because you find it interesting.

So, how did it go? First of all, all students embraced the idea. They were unanimously excited when I presented the concept and told them they would have a truly free period on Thursday.  Did that translate to every student using the time in the most productive way, and/or learning and sharing something of value? Not exactly. But in terms of building trust, in terms of learning more about my students’ work ethics, mindsets, and interests, and in terms of moving the student-centered class culture forward, the experience was wildly successful.

Here are some highlights of our FedEx Day:

Using the library instead of just the computer lab or classroom, promoted a sense of seriousness and limitless possibilities. It was also very special since the library can only be reserved by one class out of about 100 that meet each period. The library also provided spaces for students to work with art materials, and have a quiet space to think or read.

While not every student ultimately produced a project to share, they all spent some time that day considering what they were interested in. And, furthermore, no matter what they tried to throw at me, there was a connection to the 1800s–even the invention of basketball makes it in there at 1891. One of the biggest challenges in teaching history, especially world history to 14- and 15-year-olds, is getting them see how important it is to their lives. Even the students who had started to research the history of basketball, but got distracted by a website that sold basketball sneakers, felt more connected to people of the past. They were engaged, if only for a few minutes, in learning something about history not because they had to, but because they wanted to. For a few minutes, history really mattered to them. The next time they see me getting excited over some history event, they will understand the feeling, and hopefully trust me enough to study what I am telling them is important to know.

Most students, however, did have a project to present the next day. I rearranged the desks into a giant circle. Students set up their projects at their desks. We divided the period into two sessions. In session 1 half of the class stayed seated and presented to the other half who walked around the room viewing projects. In session 2 they switched. Results were often stereotypical in that many girls focused on fashion, art and literature and many boys on sports, guns and wars. We sampled an 1800s recipe, heard 1800s music, and viewed pictures of inventions. Several students made banners of famous quotes that are now decorating my room. Some wrote papers, timelines, or biographies. A few in each class made PowerPoints or Glogster posters, and we squeezed these in as soon as the student had their presentation up and running.

On the surface the projects weren’t that impressive. But I learned so much about my students. I know their level of creativity, their preferred learning-style, their willingness to take chances. As they were working in the library and I was helping them, they often asked me to explain the meaning of something they were reading, and I got a better sense of their reading comprehension and experiential background. And the students learned more about each other, and were interested in seeing what everyone came up with for their FedEx Day project. A small thing, like a hand-drawn portrait attracted much attention.

At the very end of the period the students voted for someone who deserved special recognition. I was a bit fearful that this would wind up a “popularity contest” but in each case the “winner” was legitimate. As a prize I gave each winner a $5 gift certificate to the school store.

Like most project based learning experiences, FedEx Day was more about the process than the product. In addition, the atmosphere was similar to that of a party, only it was a learning party. A perfect, happy note to end a term or in this case leave for a vacation.

Eric Sheninger’s blog post about the BYOT initiative his high school is implementing, got me thinking about my own BYOD policy. I started this primarily so that students could access material that I had prepared for them on my blog and youtube channel. It’s led to interesting discoveries:

• My students love QR codes and are more engaged in a reading if they are looking at it on their device. I will have question pages with QR codes to readings at the top, and students will have to choose 1 of 3-4 to complete. Students who scan the articles usually volunteer to complete extra pages, while students looking at hard copies never do more than the one required.
• I often have students work in groups to look up information on a topic, usually just using different sets of old history texts. Now, that they can use the internet to look up information, I get much more variety in the responses—as well as pretty wild ideas from some no doubt sketchy sources—and it leads to a much deeper, more meaningful discussions.
• I’ve learned a lot about how students are using the tech during school hours. Because it’s not something students sneak in my class, I know how often they are checking facebook or playing games. I know that their mothers are texting them all day long. These are habits that they are probably doing less in my class, because their devices are required to be in full view at all times. When I catch them they don’t go into denial mode, and there’s no big confrontation/stand-off—they actually, readily hand-over their devices, listen to my admonition, and after a certain length of time get their device back.

My BYOD experience is still a work in progress. I have had administrators come into my classroom and scold students, then scold me when I tell them the students have permission, denying that there is any valid educational use for phones and iPods. Somehow my district actually has a policy that states teachers have the right to allow students to use personal devices, so I’m not violating a district rule, just the “common law” in my building. Colleagues who restrict personal device use in their classrooms often point out the number of times I’ve caught students off-task, which is a more well-known number than the times students use devices surreptitiously. And I must admit that one student in particular had his “best day ever” in terms of participation, articulation of ideas and leadership—all on the day he left his iPod at home.

So, like anything, there are pros and cons, and it’s going to take awhile to determine which side of the scale is heavier. I am proud to say that in my 15 year career I’ve tried many strategies, often with unexpected results, and I’ve learned from each one, even the ones I’ve abandoned. Despite the challenges with BYOD, the students wouldn’t want it any other way…and that should count for something.

The last time I wrote I was feeling pretty good about things. I was still baby-stepping my way along this flipped classroom road, and my confidence was shaky. Probably not the best time to be evaluated. However, I’m taking risks, going outside my confort level, trying out a new technique, breaking the mold of the typical “set-in-her-ways” 15 year veteran = bonus points, right? Wrong!!!

My evaluating administrator informed me of the week he would be visiting, and we had a brief meeting to nail down the exact day, and discuss my goals, etc. Last June I had sent this admin an email in which I quoted extensively from an interview with David McCullough, who was reacting to a DOE study reporting nationally only 12% of HS seniors have firm understanding of US history. At one point in the interview McCullough said, “We’re too concentrated on having our children learn the answers, I would teach them how to ask questions—because that’s how you learn.”  In the email I told the admin that I would be keeping these words in mind as I prepared lessons for the 2011-2012 school year. In early September 2011, I forwarded my goals which informed of my intention to move toward a student-centered pedagogy through the use project based learning as well as the flipped classroom model. I stressed these points again when I had the first meeting this year.

In that meeting I explained that my class had started the topic of nationalism in Europe in the 1800s…which was largely influenced by Napoleon. However, The French Revolution and Napoleon are topics that have no spot in our district’s social studies curriculum. The 8th grade course stops in 1500 or 1600 and we pick up in 9th grade with 1815.  So, I did a mini-unit on the French Revolution and Napoleon…then gave a test on the Monday of the week the admin wanted to do the classroom evaluation. Tuesday we were going to start video projects, and I was excited to show the admin how well the students work, creatively and largely independently on this project—a similar project students worked on for me last year, which is using video to break down and explain a difficult subject a la CommonCraft. I should have known I was in for it when the admin told me he didn’t want to see the students working he wanted to see me doing something.

We agreed he would come the day I was introducing the project. Here’s how it went:

1. Put challenging question on the board as my QOTD, about nationalism, and asked students to explain it in words on paper. As expected, students were at a loss for words, I hammed it up with “Why am I seeing blank pieces of paper?” After they were unable to come up with any answers, I suggested that maybe there was a better way to explain a complicated subject.

2. Showed the class the CommonCraft video Electing a US President in Plain English, and then some student samples from last year, and from Greg Kulowiec’s class from a nearby town. They could see the professional production vs. what the typical student can produce.

While the videos were running, I took the opportunity to check the notes my students had taken on the most recent on-line lecture, and noticed a key piece of info missing from their notes.

3. After the videos finished, I presented a sign-up sheet with topics and roles to be divvied up between 7 groups. Students were told to choose a their topic and role within the topic (researcher, artist, writer, director) thus forming groups of their own choosing. They were then to spend 5 minutes discussing a plan of attack and were to assign each group member a homework task so that they could get straight to work the next day.

4. I ended by explaining what I had noticed was missing from their notes…and asked them to make the addition,

HW= Complete the task assigned by your group AND 3 new videos being posted to YouTube…watch all by end of week, but watch the one that relates to your group’s country first.

How did it go? It went ok. There were some rough spots…it was 7 weeks into the school year, the kids were hesitant to choose a group, they were unsure of what to assign themselves for the homework task. But this was their first attempt at anything resembling PBL, so it all went pretty much as I expected. And I was expecting a decent evaluation.

I have always received stellar evaluations…always. Even when I was 7 months pregnant, on modified bedrest, and was having students watch a film while I sat in the back of the room the whole time. Even when a lesson on I don’t remember what turned into a discussion on polygamy. Even when an overly dramatic and attention seeking student had a meltdown when I said that the Spanish Civil War was considered a “dress rehearsal for World War II” because he was Spanish and was insulted because he probably had relatives who fought and died, even though he didn’t know of any off-hand. A few kids being shy about signing up for a project group wouldn’t be a deal breaker.

Two months later (not sure why the delay), I was shocked to read the extremely disparaging account of my lesson. First, it was written that my “activator” was ineffective. Students did not know the answer to the QOTD . It was recommended that I collect the QOTD and grade it. Huh??? This was the entry event to the project…the purpose of which was to attempt to explain a difficult topic that wasn’t easily explained in words, so that the need for another way to answer the question became imperative. The admin completely missed the point. Second, the admin didn’t understand why I was going around the room checking students’ notes. This was labeled a “rough transition” and then I “jumped back to the project.” No mention was made of the video samples I showed to engage the students in the project. Then, it was incorrectly written that I assigned groups and asked the students to start working, but students were confused and kept asking each other what they were supposed to be doing. (That was the task at hand, actually, to assign each other something to have prepared for the next day.) I also, allowed them to keep meeting with their group for 9 minutes when I had said they were only going to have 5 minutes. The last minute random addition to the students’ notes was disjointed, and it was recommended that I lecture to the students, then give them some questions to answer to see if they understood the lecture. Lastly, it was advised that my homework should only be 1 clear assignment to be completed by the next class. If we were a 1:1 school maybe this would work with a flipped classroom, but my students’ internet access is inconsistent, both at home and at school. Giving them a few days to watch the lecture video is how I account for the disparities.

The projects actually came out better than expected, in most cases better than the student samples I showed. The admin didn’t see them. Because the students could not answer the paper and pencil question I posed as a driving question, I was a failure. The admin did not view the students finished products after they were posted to YouTube, nor did the admin come back to class when invited to watch the process.

After an hour meeting, a 3 page letter and a short face to face conversation, the admin still refuses to admit his perception of my lesson is flawed. He is planning on coming in for the unannounced observation after next week’s exams are over. Of course I’m planning another round of PBL, even more student-centered, self-directed and choice laden than the first one the admin witnessed. The students have come a long way since October, and I am confident that they will embrace this opportunity with much more confidence and enthusiasm. I am also more confident in general about the flipped model and providing project based learning opportunities during class time. But do I dare? This admin wants to see evidence of learning–but with the emphasis on the product and not the process of learning. Again, do I dare?

In an earlier post I made the case for the flipped classroom model being a way to improve the quality of time spent in class. Now that I’m about 6 weeks into this experimental year I have a little perspective on how things are going.

I did have concerns going in:

• Would my students have enough internet access on their own?
• Would parents support this model?
• Would I be able to manage the technology?
• Would I be able to keep up with the demands of curriculum redesign?
• Would school continue to allow internet access to YouTube and twitter so my students could access links?
• Would technology at school work?
• Would students rebel or comply with the model?

Six weeks later, most of my fears have been realized–with the exception of push back from parents–and a few new issues are cropping up that are honestly putting some doubts in my head.

On the first day of school none of the students were concerned about internet access. While a few commented that they didn’t have computers at home when I asked them how they accessed facebook and YouTube they confirmed that they did indeed have a way to regularly get to these sites. However, upon assigning the first YouTube video lecture to watch and take notes on, a mere handful of students had the work completed the next day. Those students moved on to the next activity–which I tried to make as fun as possible (they knitted teddy bears in solidarity with pre-industrial textile work)–and the rest of the class made up the homework in class using my personal laptop computer.

This kept happening with the next few homework lectures, so I was able to get a small netbook for the students to use through Donor’s Choose to take the pressure off my own laptop. Within a short time, however, most students were watching the lectures and completing the accompanying handout or taking their own notes. If students didn’t complete the work the first day it was assigned they almost always would the very next day. On any given day there are a handful of students who are having computer trouble at home, or who planned on watching on their iTouch during a study, but the wireless failed in that classroom, or their phone broke and they’re getting a new one, etc. A nice thing I’m noticing is students sharing technology with each other, usually viewing and taking notes in pairs.

In terms of my managing the technology: the biggest challenge is keeping the videos at 5 minutes. I knew this would be tough when I signed up for TechSmith’s Jing screencasting which imposes this limit. FYI, I began with a free account, then upgraded to screencast.com pro–because I was running into storage limits. I pay $10 per month. I am currently working with two student teachers who are also screencasting and posting lectures and they are using just the Jing Pro for $15 per year which enables easy posting to YouTube. Anyway, the 5 minutes usually amounts to only part of a lecture I would normally give…so I usually post a lecture part 1, part 2 and part 3.  And often my last sentence gets cut off, despite multiple attempts (sometimes as many as 15 tries) to fit it all in. Still, I think 5 minutes is the perfect length for these lectures, especially since I intend for students to pause to write down information and/or watch the video a few times. I also fear that if a student went to the video and saw that it was longer than 5 minutes, they wouldn’t watch it. Initially, when feedback from students was that I “talked too fast” on the videos, I told them of the 5 minute limit and my concern that they wouldn’t watch it if if was longer….they all agreed. A few times I assigned the homework before the video was posted…and with multiple tries to get it right, combined with a busy home-life, the video homework didn’t go up until 7pm! The beauty of using twitter as my class “website” is that I can post a “having technical difficulties” message from my phone while at dancing school with my daughter.

However, twitter is often blocked on the school’s network…an issue that was corrected, but every time the firewall gets reset (without warning) becomes a problem again. [Funny story: when I asked IT to unblock twitter after it had been working at the beginning of the year, I was told that having twitter unblocked in the first place was an error left over from having college classes in our building over the summer. Enough said. Twitter unblocked again.] And YouTube requires having an updated version of flash on the computer being used…and not all of the computers have this. An easy fix, but the student needs to report it to the library media specialist who needs to send a ticket to IT. For some reason my students just give up when a problem arises.

I feared going in that it might be challenging to come up with quality skill-based lessons in place of all the lecturing I used to do, but this has been my favorite part of this year so far. I love the lessons I’m having the students complete…plus I’m having them do “homeworky” things in class too. For example we’ve read a play in class, which was a much better experience than having students read it at home and answer questions. Why? Because students cheat on homework. And yes, they are cheating with the on-line lecture note-taking too. But what is worse for their understanding of an historical topic? Cheating by copying the lecture notes (which are really basic 5 W kind of things…I do still lecture a bit in class and will lead discussion to explain a complex topic) or cheating by not doing the reading and copying a classmates’ answers? Sad that part of this experimental year is devoted to taking a “lesser of two evils” approach, but cheating on homework has been a growing problem over the past decade and at this point is an epidemic at all student performance levels.

There are still students who have watched none of the videos at this point…and they do complain in class that they have no idea what is going on since lessons have no context for them. Yet, each day I reach one more student, so I am confident that by the end of the term 1 the class will be humming.

{Of note: this particular ninth grade class had an unusual 8th grade experience with a school reshuffle that left them quite disrupted. Several of my students technically did not actually pass 8th grade, but were allowed to matriculate at the high school for other extenuating reasons. In general I am having a lot of trouble with them just jumping into activities without reading or listening to directions, then getting easily frustrated. Given these circumstances I am additionally pleased with the “flip” since I can focus more of my time on the basic skills like reading and writing.}

In the past few years I’ve become increasingly more frustrated with lecture and note-taking as the primary mode of learning in my classroom. I had been an early adopter of PowerPoint…back in the day I would print out the slides on transparency film and use them with an overhead projector. I still see this presentation style as being helpful and user-friendly, and an efficient way to communicate content to students. However, in today’s classroom–where the students are more deficient than ever in basic skills like reading and writing (thanks to a decade of emphasis on standardized testing)–content was taking up too much class time.

The course I teach covers about 250 years of world history. When I started teaching in 1998 my primary job as educator was to teach the content. My students always wrote essays and a research paper, they read historical fiction and partook in skits and oral presentations. Students joined an email group and were required to send response essays to the entire class and respond to classmates’ response essays. It was sort of an early form of blogging. I’ve never been a huge proponent of homework, but 2 or 3 times each week my students would have assignments that rarely went uncompleted. The hardest part of my job was breaking down complex historical events in a way that was easy for my students to understand and make it somehow relevant to their lives. The course at first wasn’t required of all 10th graders, and was only offered at the honors and college prep levels. Students could earn social studies credit by taking electives that had a more focused scope.

Later, when a world history MCAS was instituted the modern world history course became a requirement of all 10th grade students. When MCAS switched to U.S. history the world course was moved to 9th grade. It became a bit more challenging teaching to a slightly younger audience, but by now the LCD projector was hung from the ceiling and connected to my computer, so I could animate my PowerPoints and show more pictures, graphics and video.

By now, 2011, I’m having a “be careful what you wish for” moment. I have my computer projector instead of transparencies, blogs instead of email groups and technology that enables easy access to information….and I have students that are incapable of an original thought let alone an opinion. Think I’m exaggerating? A decade ago when a student wasn’t feeling well they would ask me to see the nurse. Today that student texts his mother. It’s bizarre. Any difficult assignment gets procrastinated at best and often simply ignored. Today’s students are mostly kind to each other, accepting of those whose dress and actions do not adhere to teenage norms and are friendly with adults. They will diligently copy whatever words appear on a screen, but they are much more interested in the screens they keep in their pockets.

Due an obvious lack of reading, writing, researching and presenting skills, my school district has asked that each subject teacher also teach these…not merely give students experiences in these areas as I had always done, but actually teach these fundamental skills. These skills which used to be the focus of elementary education are taking a back seat to prepping for MCAS in order to make AYP. In addition to these basics, it is important for 21st century students to be able to use technology to make school assignments more productive and of higher quality, to collaborate with peers on projects and to be effective problem solvers. So addition to teaching 250 years of world history, I also must teach and assess these 7 skills.

If this was not overwhelming enough, I’m also dealing with school budget cuts that have forced increases in class size so that I’m now responsible for an average of 30 more students each year than I was a decade ago. And these students have become more of a challenge, with each class now including a dozen students on IEPs or 504s and many more students with substantial challenges due to ASD. More alarming than any of this, however, is the number of students suffering from depression. It is important to check in with all of the students on a personal level and get to know them better in order to pick up on any serious issues that may be brewing.

All could be accomplished…in theory…if only there was more time. Now, I must confess, that I decided to become a teacher two years after college while visiting a teacher-friend in the Hamptons one summer. Now that I am a mother of four, I appreciate having the quality time with my children when none of us has schoolwork to worry about. So, I like the 180 day school year, but I needed to find a way to make time in class more productive and beneficial to students’ learning needs.

Last year I had heard about the concept of flipping instruction so that lectures could be viewed at home on the internet and class time spent on reading and writing activities typically reserved for homework. I was intrigued, but had no understanding of how this technically was accomplished until I went to Edcamp Boston last May. I experimented a bit in the spring and the students really took to it. So, this year I am going forward with a fully flipped model for instruction in modern world history.

It will be hard to completely redesign my lessons this year, instead of merely making the usual tweaks. But, it is a different kind of student sitting in my classroom today–for better or for worse–and my job is to reach them and teach them at their level. Wish me luck, and I’ll keep you posted.

As a history teacher the events of September 11, 2001 are part of the curriculum…the whos, whats, whens, wheres, whys have long been something taught toward the end of the Modern World History course. In the first few years after 9/11, I would initiate discussions with my classes surrounding questions like how has life changed or what would like your children to know about that day? In recent years, however, with my students being too young to have any accurate memory of the day, I stopped having these discussions and, while I always mentioned it in class, it wasn’t something I did a lesson on.

With the 10th anniversary coming up, and with my students having been only 4 years old in 2001, I came up with a plan to use the events of 9/11 as a way to introduce the study of world history in general. Friday was the 3rd day of class and they had already been introduced to the concept of primary vs. secondary sources. So, drawing inspiration and resources from a Smithsonian Institution lesson I saw on-line, I decided to create a lesson that asked the students to determine what primary sources should be preserved to help future generations understand the events of 9/11.

Before we could delve into this work though, I needed to help the students themselves understand what happened that day. They had this wonderful article from the NY Times in their group assignment folders along with other information about the events of September 11th, about the work museum curators do and descriptions of “artifacts” that were recovered from ground zero, the Pentagon and Shanksville.  But, they still had no real understanding of how the day went down. So I had them imagine they were parents 10 years ago and they had just dropped their children off at school. Since it was the beginning of the school year, they finally had a quiet house all to themselves, poured a large cup of coffee, and sat down to watch The Today Show. Recently an archive was created of around-the-clock television coverage from dozens of TV stations across the globe that had aired starting at 8 a.m. on September 11th and continuing that entire week. I showed the class about 30 minutes of what aired on NBC over the course of 3 hours that morning. Even though I was showing select clips, the clips were un-edited and extremely powerful.

As often happens when working with teenagers…the results of the lessons I plan are often surprising. In this case, I had hoped the students would have some appreciation for how people experienced 9/11 in a way that simulated “real time.” I was trying to help them learn the difference between primary and secondary sources by connecting it to a very specific event, and also to honor the Americans who lost their lives that day, and remember the pain of the victims’ families, and the country. What is clear to me when watching the television clips is how in shock we were. We were taken completely by surprise and it took awhile for us to figure out what was really happening. To my students, watching these events as “history,” we were foolish.

We watched the initial reports of a “small commuter plane” accidentally hitting the World Trade Center. When the second plane hit…even though the plane was visible on screen, no one saw it. In the several minutes it took to rewind the tape from a different cameral angle, Matt Lauer and an NBC producer, who was on the phone from her apartment, were debating the size of the second plane with Lauer “begging to differ” that it was a large jet and insisting it was a small plane. When the tape was rewound and aired, clearly showing a large airplane, the NBC producer exclaimed “I wonder if there are air-traffic control problems.” At 9:30, President Bush confirmed it was a terrorist attack. Eight minutes later, when the Pentagon was struck, reporter Jim Miklaszewski, who was in the building at the time, stated the blast he felt and heard could have been a gas explosion accidentally caused by construction workers. But the most unbelievable example of people in denial was when the South Tower crumbled before our eyes. Tom Brokaw joined Katie Couric and Matt Lauer in reporting that a “small portion” of the building had fallen away.

I tried to explain to class after class that we were in shock, we had no frame of reference for this type of thing, we didn’t understand what we were looking at, and that our brains just weren’t capable of processing what we were seeing. My students were incredulous. Their reactions continued to haunt me later that night. Don’t I view with incredulousness Europeans who lived next door to concentration camps during WWII and claimed to not know what was really going on? And during the great “scramble” for colonies in Africa in the 1800s, don’t I question why there wasn’t more resistance to the European takeover? While I do teach that the people in both these situations, and others like it, were taken by surprise didn’t understand what was really happening because they had no frame of reference for it. But until I watched my generation reacting to 9/11, not in the edited way that is seen in commemorative specials, but in our actual initial responses to seeing the events unfold, did I have a real empathy for others’ past mistakes.

It’s a valuable lesson for my students and me as we learn together this year. In upcoming weeks when we learn about Imperialism and later the Holocaust I will remind them of America’s first reaction to September 11th. They will have a better understanding of how these horrific acts of the past were allowed to happen. It is also noteworthy how quickly Americans did realize the truth of the situation, thanks to live television and internet making the communication of ideas instantaneous.

Tomorrow, we’ll wrap the archive lesson and my students will all know forever and always the difference between primary and secondary sources…but unexpectedly, they’ve learned something else. It’s this new understanding of humanity, and how we react to unfathomable situations, that will guide us through our studies of all world history for the remainder of the year.

Today Weymouth High School has a half day so that teachers can spend the afternoon reviewing the common core state standards and begin the work of aligning our curriculum to them.  At first the 99 page document can seem daunting…so I performed a “trick” that I often use with students when we are at the beginning of a new world history theme: I put the text in Wordle to see if that would help us get to the core of the common core.

These are the anchor standards for grades 6-12 in reading and writing:

Thank you in advance!  I’m sure many of you are starting the process of aligning your curriculum and standards to the CCSS. At Weymouth High School we are also trying to better align our courses to each other’s and define our power standards.  We sent our thoughts to our lead teacher who compiled these surveys–problem is only 4-5 teachers teach each course so the sample size isn’t really giving us the feedback we need in order to make solid curriculum decisions. 

Also, any comments or feedback or other suggestions are definitely welcome…please comment below.

Again, many thanks! 

Moden World History Teachers (1815-present)
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/5LMY7GD

This past week I’ve been enjoying the Massachusetts February vacation break.  Instead of joining the rat race every morning I’ve had the time to just be a stay-home Mom while my children got to be stay-home kids.  We’d sleep late, I’d prepare a hearty breakfast and have the kitchen spotless, laundry done all while catching up with those morning talk radio shows I’m never around to listen to.  Unfortunately, this week coincided with the standoff in Wisconsin and my talk radio shows were dominated by people outraged at this supposedly cushy lifestyle I  am currently leading. 

The Wisconsin debate is clearly political payback and elections do have consequences.  The teachers’ unions that I belong to do use a significant portion of my dues to fund Democratic political candidates and rarely, if ever, support a Republican one.  The Wisconsin Republicans are striking back in a way that has the potential to cripple future Democratic candidates and it’s actually a brilliant move on their part.  So why lie?  Believe it or not there are Republican union members and they have had to listen to Governor Walker’s explanation that police and firefighters have more important jobs than teachers. 

As someone in the trenches I fear this will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.  And it’s not the job that killing me—I love my job!  I love my students.  Despite a workload that has gotten tougher and tougher each year (eloquently stated in this heartbreaking blog post by a 35-year veteran teacher) I am still excited to go to work each day.   I’m passionate about engaging youth in civic responsibility—but how can I keep it up when there are so many lies?!  And the misrepresentations are taking its toll on me.

I have heard so many falsehoods this past week, but the most egregious are the following:

1.  Taxpayers and teachers unions are enemies.  Yes, we’re on opposite sides of the collective bargaining table, but that’s because taxpayers are the “employers” and teachers are the “employees.”  Taxpayers, or to be more specific their elected representatives on the school committee, exert their employer status in ways like dictating our school budgets, policies and hiring our direct supervisor, the superintendent.  Some school committees, like the one I work for not the one I serve on, go so far as to dictate school rules.  I spend time each day monitoring dress code violations including what footwear the students have on since flip flops are banned.  One of the secrets to successful management of teenagers is to avoid power struggles….yet my employer puts me in these very situations every day.  I also have students with ADHD who are easily distracted in a 30 student classroom.  I have heard from teachers in other districts who have had success allowing these students to listen to iPods while completing certain assignments since it helps them focus on the task at hand while classroom noises are drowned out.  I’m not necessarily convinced this tactic works, but I would be willing to give it try especially during differentiated learning activities which often create more distractions than whole group instruction.  Nevertheless the school committee has banned all use of iPods in the classroom and as the employee I must enforce this restriction.  My employer has also prohibited any social networking contact between myself and my students, insisted upon common assessments and grading rubrics and a host of other practices that I personally disagree with.  However, it is the taxpayers’ prerogative, in their district, with their children, to decide such things.  I respect their decisions and yet when it comes time to back me up I’m suddenly a money grubbing incompetent leech.  Is this a recipe for successful employee/employer relations?

2.  Unions protect bad teachers.  Collective bargaining agreements protect teachers from being fired simply for being “too expensive.”  Ask your school committee members to honestly tell you what they would do to save your district money if union protections weren’t in place and they’ll tell  you they would ”fire anyone above step 6.”  Teachers with 6 years experience are just starting to get good at this craft.  The protection of tenure is absolutely necessary to keep the best teachers employed.  Senior teachers bring a wisdom that comes from experiencing hundreds of children in many situations.  For some reason it is hard for people to grasp that teachers get better with experience.  But think of your own children.  What was it like when your first baby was born vs. your second or third?  And just because there were new techniques discovered between the births of your 1st and 3rd you didn’t still do things the old way.  Sleep positions, vaccination schedules and diet recommendations all changed and you adapted.  Teachers do the same.  And if they don’t, if they refuse to comply with new techniques and practices then they open themselves up to discipline and if necessary termination by their school administration.  If a school has “bad teachers” it is not because of the union it’s due to weak administrators or worse: school leaders who are unable to articulate their expectations and/or recognize when they are not being met. 

3.  Unions are to blame for unfunded pensions and escalating healthcare costs.  Again the relationship between taxpayers and teachers is that of employer/employee and health insurance, dental insurance and retirement funding is traditionally (and in most cases by law)  the shared responsibility of both parties.  It is a huge stretch to blame collective bargaining for astronomical health insurance premiums–and time would surely be better spent investigating the reason why healthcare costs are so high and how our current system works, for better and worse than blaming teachers unions.  However, there are ways to negotiate more reasonable cost solutions as the district I work for has done.  This is not a perfect solution and my out-of-pocket expenses have more than quadrupled under a convoluted system of co-pays and deductibles.  However, the district also began offering flexible spending accounts to employees to offset our increased expenses. 

The crux of it all is our pensions.  And while everyone knows the “defined benefit” is a good deal for teachers when they retire, for some reason there is little to no understanding of how it helps the taxpayer.  First the term unfunded pension liability is a misnomer.  I, most of my colleagues, and everyone hired in this century contribute 11%of our salaries to the pension fund.  And those of us hired after 1996 will have fully funded pensions.  What happens to our contributions?  They get invested.  Each year between $25 million and $50 million of our contributions are used to provide small business loans in Massachusetts.  And why is the Massachusetts pension system underfunded?  The stock market crashed in 2008 and the fund has not yet recovered.  Instead of placing blame on the retired teachers who worked for years in good faith or the current employees diligently offering 11% shouldn’t people’s anger be directed at those who mismanaged our money?  Like Inside Job director Charles Ferguson said when receiving the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, “I must start by pointing out that three years after our horrific financial crisis caused by financial fraud, not a single financial executive has gone to jail, and that’s wrong.”  What does it say about our society when it is easier to blame a 75 year old retired teacher for tough economic times? 

Of course there is room to improve the system and studies have been done and suggestions reported.  There are reasonable solutions, but eliminating the pension benefit altogether is not one of them.  As a Massachusetts teacher I am not part of the social security system.  My private sector colleagues contribute a mere 6.2% of their incomes toward their social security retirement benefit which their employers match.  Are school districts prepared to match the contributions of nearly 90,000 active teachers?  If the state mandated a switch to a “defined contribution” plan–meaning I got back whatever I put in like a 401K–would my employer match my contribution?  And if not, then why should I participate?  I’ll take my 11% and invest it how I like–and what would the implications be for the taxpayers then?  When the economy is failing isn’t the stability of the teachers’ investments that pull us through? 

Lastly, why do I feel compelled to fight this fight?  Obviously in my role as school committee member I have the responsibility to articulate the truth as it relates to budgetary matters.  However, why is so much of my “teacher time” devoted to blogging about this and commenting on others’ opinions and comments? I would like my union to spend more time and energy spreading the message of truth–not just about economic issues but about other popular errors regarding standardized assessments and teacher evaluations.  If only they had focused on the message and not played party politics, the teachers in Wisconsin and elsewhere would not be distracted by these red herrings and could be free to focus 100% of their efforts on the children.

The other night, about 10 minutes after she went to bed, my 9-year-old daughter came back out hysterically crying saying she had done something really bad and now she was scared.  Upon further discussion she confessed that earlier in the week she had posted her name and picture to a website and that now she was getting dozens of emails from strangers wanting to be her “friend.”  She was terrified that one of these people would be coming to our house to kidnap her.

Aside from the obvious realization that this daughter of mine–the same one who rang up a $40 deficit in ice cream in 1st grade and then swore the cafeteria bill was an error,  the same one who started a fire in our kitchen as a 2-year-old and had two trips to the ER for things she swallowed before that—is once again testing the limits of our parental capabilities, came the realization that we are not being honest with our children about the importance of digital citizenship.  This fairy tale that we spin about bad people coming to harm you is an urban legend and when confronted with a daughter frightened that “bad guys” are coming to get her I can’t help but calm her fears with the truth.

Email is my daughter’s and her peer’s first foray into the digital world.  Most of us agree that 4th grade is too young for cell phones and texting, too young for facebook…but we allow our children to have email accounts and practice their social networking skills this way.  They send chain mail jokes around, and short messages and most use iPod Touches rather than computers.  They have email friends who they only know casually–the same way the middle and high school students have 900 friends on facebook.  We all have virus protections and I have instructed my daughter never to use her address when signing up for websites like Poptropica, Girls Go Games, and Club Penguin, but to use the family public email account instead.  I had explained what spam was to her, but she didn’t quite grasp the concept.  Being a teacher who uses digital media extensively with my students, I have learned as much as I can about the ways kids are exploited on-line.

The scam my daughter fell for revealed naiveté on both our parts: me thinking email was safer than traditional social networking and her thinking she could make a mistake without leaving a permanent digital footprint. She received an email from a friend telling her he had a personal message for her on a certain website that shall remain nameless.  She was then prompted to sign up for this website to see the message.  Once signed up she was prompted to create a profile like facebook and to take a picture of herself with the computer’s webcam.  She noticed the names of several people she knew or thought she knew supposedly already using the site.  She thought this was going to be a fun new way to socialize with her friends…and maybe meet new people, but this part she’s not exactly admitting to.  Next thing she knew her inbox was inundated with friend requests from strangers. Her email account then started sending out messages to all of her contacts that they had a private message waiting for them on this website.  I had received such a message from her, but assumed her account had been hacked or something.  I often get these weird messages and just automatically hit delete without giving it a second thought.  (Got a message the other day from a very thin priest friend of mine that promoted a weight loss drink.)  I was planning on asking her about it, but when I got home that night it had slipped my mind.

When confronted by her tears and fears the first step was to take a look at the website, google it, check out the emails.  Fortunately it seemed harmless enough….just an avenue to send out a lot of spam and probably has some deal with some advertiser.  Nothing vulgar or pornographic.  It was easy to cancel the account she set up and I had any further emails from them filtered to go straight to trash, but so far there haven’t been any, nor has there been any other spam.  So, she dodged a bullet…this time.  Now it’s my job to make sure she is not tempted again to stray from the rules I have imposed.  What do I say?  I go with the truth….it is unlikely even if you post your real full name and picture of yourself that some evil stalker would track you down and kidnap you.  I ask her if she had ever heard of such a thing happening on the news?  She hadn’t.  This made her feel better.  I reminded her that we have big strong Daddy and big strong older brother in the house to protect us, and that we keep our doors locked at night.  But I told her that she did a really dumb thing and now because she did it on-line there’s a record of it.  For the rest of her life that dumb thing could be public knowledge.  I explained that the reason we don’t want her using these websites is because any mistakes will be permanent and could harm her reputation forever.  And, of course, she is punished because if my high school students don’t understand the concept of the digital footprint I know I can’t expect my 9-year-old to understand it.

But I am sad.  Sad that kids today can so easily have their reputations ruined, either by their own mistakes or by another’s slander.  When I was in 4th grade I did the same, albeit low-tech, thing my daughter did.  My friends and I had read an article about the bachelor princes of Europe.  We got ourselves all dolled up with makeup and fancy hair and took Polaroid pictures of ourselves and sent them to the princes.  Our parents would have been horrified.  The other children in our class would likely have ridiculed us.  If anyone found out when we were older it would have been traumatically embarrassing.  But no one ever knew but us–and there was no record, no proof, if one of the group decided to turn on the others.

In my childhood there was no thing as the digital footprint to worry about.  But do kids today understand the ramifications of their impulsive on-line acts?  It is difficult for children to see the big picture and to act today so that they will have more opportunities in the years ahead.  The lucky ones, like my daughter, make mistakes, get away with them, but learn in the process.  I am hoping she learns from this and acts more responsibly in the future…but will she?  Perhaps those who promote scare tactics have good reason.