Growth

It’s May.

Already.

We had our “graduation” on Saturday; although it felt more like a commencement/start of Phase II than a valediction. For me, that means leaving the classroom and returning to school, full-time, in the fall to pursue my PhD. This decision grew directly from my Kenan experience, in which I realized that I am stronger than I think and I can do more than I know.

Phase II for me also involves me taking on a more public role as an advocate for students, teachers, and families. I come from the theatre world, where I worked decidedly behind the scenes. I had no interest in the publicity of an actor’s life; I preferred to create with my hands deep into the early morning hours. And while I have since left the physical backstage behind in a past life, ghosts of the theatre still tug at me. For example, I dressed in all black for our school’s recent Math and Science Night: ready to go behind the scenes and stage manage. I am the woman behind the curtain; pay no attention to me.

Except that, for all of the ritual of education, teaching and theatre diverge. At some point, it isn’t enough to bear down, nose to the grindstone, in search of a beautifully, effortlessly elegant seam. Kids don’t work that way. And neither do communities in which they live.

And so, I need to step forward and realize that I *am* “that teacher,” the one who pushes boundaries, who gives voice to ideas, who connects resource with resource at a level beyond just my school or district. It is time for me to take on a new role, one I never saw for myself.

So maybe, instead of “Phase II,” I am really about to enter “Act II.” Either way, the curtain is rising…

Popcorn Chicken

This month is a hodgepodge of catching up and random musings. Right now, I’m writing from the back porch, enjoying the sunshine and (finally) warm temperatures as the kids play in the back yard. Today was a makeup teacher workday to account for all of the snow we’ve experienced this year, so we hosted a Spring Break Camp for kids who needed a little extra and didn’t already have plans for the week. It was a day of math and science for kids who don’t like either, and who, in the end, found themselves having fun anyway.

So, on to the task at hand: reflecting on lesson implementation/dissemination. As a specialist, I don’t have my own class. In the past, I’ve had the luxury of a small amount of time each week dedicated just to the students on my roster, but that disappeared this year. So, I needed to take over a different class in order to teach my lessons. After months of (re)organization, I finally opted to teach the lessons as an after-school club. I was set to go when suddenly, my plans once again went into the deep freeze as a blanket of ice coated our area. So, while my intention had been to complete the unit before Spring Break, the reality is that I’m just 2/3 of the way through it.

Teaching the unit has been eye-opening. I quickly became aware of the amount of supporting materials I need to include. There were times when, as a trained teacher, I wasn’t clear what the lesson was asking; I can’t imagine being a community volunteer with no experience trying to teach the same lesson. As I revise, I will need to keep this in mind. Furthermore, my kids have been brutally frank with me, telling me in no uncertain terms what works for them and what doesn’t.

Quote: “Um, Ms. Bedell, we’re fifth graders. We don’t do [that]. Maybe if we were third graders we’d think it’s cool, but, yeah.” /student rolls eyes

I appreciate the honesty and openness, not only because it will make the lessons stronger, but because it reminds me that my students ultimately trust me enough to speak their mind. They say things they “aren’t supposed to” because they believe that they will be heard. As I revise, my first and foremost duty will be to respect their voices.

This post feels unfinished right now, because it is. I’ll know more in April, once the kids have gone through the final lessons and we start preparing more seriously for the statewide pilot in July/August. Until then, I’m keeping my fingers crossed that winter really has moved on.

Lenovo

The tablet was integral to our fellowship. I would video our mentor and play it back for myself at night as I was trying to learn. Many of the snippets wound up in a longer video that I put together over the summer.

I still often video my students and revisit their work in the evenings. My students also enjoy using the tablet to take videos and photos of their work.

My favorite part of the tablet is its portability. It is my tool of choice for conference note taking because

  • it fits easily in my backpack.
  • I can access the camera if I need to snap a shot of someone’s slides.
  • Word works, even if WiFi doesn’t.
  • I don’t worry about the battery dying in the middle of a session (although this could be due, in part, to the keyboard that never really worked).

I think the best use of the tablet came on the trip to NASA-JPL. I was able to interview and post, in real time, videos of NASA employees talking about their jobs. My students were able to follow along through Twitter and a blog. Without the tablet, I would have been able to Tweet, but not add the videos. The addition of the videos made the entire event more real for my kids.

The tablet won’t replace my phone or “real” laptop, but it does provide me with another tool.

Birds of a Feather

As a “Salmonella Fellow,” I was lucky enough to have a flock of mentors, all working in different capacities and bringing different types of expertise to our project. I am excited to be able to bring the knowledge and expertise they shared to bear in the work we are developing.

I am particularly thankful for the opportunity to have worked this summer in a lab with two Latina women. Recently, Dr. Belen Cadenas, our teacher for the summer, was able to visit our school district as the keynote speaker for a Math and Science Night for Spanish-speaking families. Because of the mentor relationship, we were able to offer an opportunity for our families who are often literally left out of the conversation about supporting children in science.

I know I’m supposed to write about professional development and the impact of the institutes. I am sorry I missed the third, as I would have liked to have heard from the people who develop the policies that drive education in our state and country. But otherwise, I’m empty tonight. And have been for the past couple of weeks. Each time I sit down to write, nothing.

My father in law is dying. He has been battling cancer for the past year, and the war is nearly over. His liver is failing. His kidneys are failing. He is a tiny sliver of his former self, frail, unable to eat, drifting in and out of consciousness. It is a matter of weeks at most. Days are not out of the question.

Yesterday, we drove to DC so the children could see him one final time. So my husband could stay with his mother and help with whatever remains to try. So I could say goodbye to the man who made me feel welcomed into the family nearly 20 years ago when Mark and I were in college.

My children didn’t know that goodbye would be their last. But I do. And he knew, too.

I write this, not as a way of an excuse for having nothing to say about pd, nor as a way of explanation, nor as a plea for attention/sympathy/whatever, but simply because I need to. When you are the wife-and-mother, you are the comforter, the shoulder to cry on, the rock. You absorb others’ tears. You do not have your own.

So, my takeaway right now, if I have one, is that I am human, ultimately as frail as the man I am honored to call my family. I am not a rock, though I might pretend to be one for the ones I love. I will cry words. And that is all I can say right now.

Chickens, Monkeys, and Money

This is therapeutic writing tonight.

My school is doing a fundraiser. They are asking students to sell trash bags. Part of the money goes to the company. Part goes to the school. Part goes to fund chickens in Africa. By selling at least $20 worth of trash bags, the students get plastic monkeys, so part goes to pay for junk that will likely wind up in the very trash bags (or more reasonably priced ones) that the kids are selling.

As a teacher, and, even more, as a parent, I am angry. My students, my children, are being turned into unpaid salespeople for an organization that makes money off their labor. Even more, they are being told that selling is a “service learning project” that helps “poor people in Africa” so they are being emotionally manipulated. I watched my eldest daughter during the assembly today. I could tell she wasn’t interested in the toys, but her heart strings were tugged by the idea that she could help someone in need. The cacophony of excited children who would get “something” for “selling as much as [they] can” also was too much for a 10-year-old to bear, and she finally was caught up in the wave. My middle child came home, telling me of all the items she planned to sell so she could get every one of the “prizes” being offered. The man from the company successfully manipulated both of my children, and I am furious with the school for allowing that to happen.

I understand that money is tight, but there has to be a better way than manipulating young children, using them as an unpaid sales force, and misappropriating the term “service learning project.” I would be happy to forgo my Teacher Appreciation Week whatever; I certainly do not need another coffee mug or school T-shirt. I would gladly skip out on professionally-lettered “inspirational quotes” to line the walls of the hallway, no matter how pretty or inspirational the stickers might be. I can live another year with broken student computers (given that I’ve had any student computers at all for only one year out of the past six anyway). There have to be things that we take for granted as “needs” that really are just “wants” and without which we could spare our children the nonsense that they endured today.

In the mean time, I now have to defend, to my children, our family’s values against the school’s decision, made even more complicated by my role within the school. My eldest was pleased to learn that there are charities that also help feed hungry people around the world as their main mission. (I didn’t get into the concerns I have with using monkeys as stand-ins for the people in Africa that they are supposedly helping and the racist implications thereof; that conversation may need to wait a little longer until she is more emotionally mature.) My middle child is weighing how badly she wants a plastic monkey versus how much she doesn’t want to spend her own money on trash bags. And I am trying to calm myself enough to help them weather the storm of peer pressure brewing on the horizon.

How do you handle school fundraisers? What is the role of fundraising in schools?

For the birds

I have had a Twitter account for several years, mainly because I wanted to use Paper.li as a way to connect my families with news articles that might be of interest. I pulled together a feed culled mainly from respected news organizations in math, science, and art, signed up for Twitter…and ran into school board policy.

Until this year, we were not allowed to use social media in any form to communicate with families. (The current policy is available here.) Skype was even blocked in our district for a time. On one hand, this protects teachers’ privacy, and the school board’s legal pockets. [Full disclosure: I’m not on Facebook. My husband has an account that I use on occasion, but the account is mainly his. As a teacher who lives in the community I serve, staying off Facebook represented a small way to buffer my family from my work. So I get the arguments about privacy and data control.] On the other hand, blanket blackouts represent a missed professional opportunity to teach students about the world using the tools that they have available to them.

I look at the work done by Matt Gomez with kindergarten students where digital tools are explicitly incorporated into the classroom so that students understand both the permanence and the human impact that digital learning can have. I recognize that there will always be “mean girls,” but perhaps there might be fewer if we start earlier in helping students to understand “their” world is both bigger and smaller than it has ever been. Kids are on social media, whether we choose to acknowledge it in schools or not.

Later this fall, I am going to try an experiment with my students, born purely of Twitter-fueled happenstance. Among the organizations I followed on Twitter for my Paper.li feed was NASA. In September, NASA-JPL held a contest, randomly selecting followers for a backstage tour. In November, I will be heading behind the scenes at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory–and they are going to let me livetweet the event for my students to follow along. The school is going to create an account for me to use so students and families can follow me on my adventure and ask questions along the way. I’m hoping that this will turn into a teachable moment about the power of social media to extend the world, person by person, as well as the responsibility one has when using social media.

How do you teach kids to use digital tools?

Hero worship?

Just watched TEACH, and I find myself torn. On one hand, almost anything that helps the public better understand the contexts in which teaching and learning occur is an important addition to the national conversation about education. The four courageous teachers profiled deserved every bit of acclaim they received. On the other hand, documentaries like this one, like Stand and Deliver, like Freedom Writers, like [fill in the blank] so often run the risk of perpetuating the teacher-as-an-island (either Superman or “fire the bad teachers”) misconception that permeates our state and national discussions. I appreciated that each teacher was shown as having one mentor, but wondered who else worked in their buildings.

There ARE amazing teachers who do amazing things for children, who sacrifice themselves daily for the sake of their charges. But rarely do they do so alone. And allowing that misconception to persist, either for the sake of the pedestal or for tear-down ammo, effectively abrogates our nation’s responsibilities to consider the socio-political systems within which education occurs.

So, I’m torn. I can agree that teaching is a calling. It certainly isn’t about the money or the convenient hours or even the “summers off.” But “being a calling” can’t become an excuse to avoid talking about the very real conditions faced by teachers and students, any more than highlighting the individual accomplishments of a few teachers can’t be used to obscure the complicated teamwork needed to change lives.

Who else watched TEACH tonight? What were your thoughts?