Monthly Archives: September 2013

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?

Week One

If this summer has left me with anything, it has left me with the command to be fearless in my teaching. The summer was hard in ways I could not have imagined in April, and yet, here we are, in August, still standing. I am stronger than I thought. I can do. 

And I need to. So many of my children bear scars from past battles lost, and they bring their demons with them each day. They fear failure. They fear success. They fear alienation from their communities. They fear alienation from themselves. They fear. So I need to be fearless for my students, to model the fearlessness they will need in their own lives in order to rail against the dehumanizing processes that threaten learning.

I have been thinking about the dehumanization of education because, on August 14, I sat for the GRE. I felt fear in the days leading up to the exam. I cringed as I heard my voice in my head reciting the familiar testing strategies that we pretend to be important. I squirmed as my name transformed in to a number, trapping me into the rigid performance of “testing.” And I cried as I recognized practices in my school and countless other well-meaning schools contained within the extreme dictates placed upon me that day. I realized that when we strip our students of their dignity, when we turn them into numbers and erase their names, when we systematize and organize to meet our own needs without counsel or consultation, we feed their fears.

Teaching and learning should be acts of joy. This year, I will be fearless in advocating for my students’ humanity, starting with my class rules. I will be fearless so they can be fearless. I will be fearless because I can. And I know I can, because I survived this summer.