TeacherScribe: Today's Reads, Views, and Links

So much has been stockpiling in my email that I have about 60 messages to read. So here it goes:

5 Questions You Should Ask Yourself Every Monday Morning

I am blessed to have a job I absolutely love. So here are my answers to those questions -

1. Am I excited to dive into the challenges that I have lined up for the week?

Of course! And every week brings more challenges. I'm working with teenagers, after all. How many more challenges could I expect? Actually, the students really don't offer the challenges. My biggest challenge is trying to challenge them and to keep them engaged.

2. Am I looking forward to engaging with the people I am meeting or working with?

Of course! I work with an amazing department. We bring out the best in each other and we aren't afraid to ask for help when we need it. Just now, I'm listening in to one of my colleagues teaching sonnets to her class. She is using modern songs that have their lyrics turned into sonnets. This is brilliant. Why have I never thought of this?

3. Am I going to my dream job?

This isn't my job. It's who I am.

4. Am I being compensated fairly for the value I bring to my job?

Yes. I'm not one to complain about my paycheck. In fact, since we married, Kristie handles all the bills and I don't even look at my pay stubs. I actually do not know what my exact monthly check is. That's wonderful.

5. Do I feel energized, rested, and confident?

Great question. Yes. Usually. I admit now that I have fourth block prep, when fourth block rolls around, I'm exhausted. But I am also eager to get to work.

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Mr. Zutz sent this one around to us via a link in our staff weekly: A veteran teachers turned coach shadows 2 students for 2 days.

As soon as I began reading this, I thought, I have to use this in my classes.

How cold would it be to actually do something like this? Plus, we could have students shadow teachers to see what our world looks like too. It's always been a pipe dream of mine to have this type of thing for parents and teachers. A parent could come in and take a day worth of their kid's class while the kid goes to work in place of the parent. Don't tell me that wouldn't be an eye opener!

As far as the article about the teaching shadowing two students for two days goes, here were the big take aways:

1. Students sit all day; sitting is exhausting.

I love how the former teacher reflects on what they would change about this

If I could go back and change my classes now, I would immediately change the following three things:

mandatory stretch halfway through the class
put a Nerf basketball hoop on the back of my door and encourage kids to play in the first and final minutes of class
build in a hands-on, move-around activity into every single class day. Yes, we would sacrifice some content to do this – that’s fine. I was so tired by the end of the day, I wasn’t absorbing most of the content, so I am not sure my previous method of making kids sit through hour-long, sit-down discussions of the texts was all that effective.

2. High school students are sitting and listening quietly during approximately 90% of their classes.

Again, here is what they would change

If I could go back and change my classes now, I would immediately:

Offer brief, blitzkrieg-like mini-lessons with engaging, assessment-for-learning-type activities following directly on their heels (e.g. a ten-minute lecture on Whitman’s life and poetry, followed by small-group work in which teams scour new poems of his for the very themes and notions expressed in the lecture, and then share out or perform some of them to the whole group while everyone takes notes on the findings.)
set an egg timer every time I get up to talk and all eyes are on me. When the timer goes off, I am done. End of story. I can go on and on. I love to hear myself talk. I often cannot shut up. This is not really conducive to my students’ learning, however much I might enjoy it.
Ask every class to start with students’ Essential Questions or just general questions born of confusion from the previous night’s reading or the previous class’s discussion. I would ask them to come in to class and write them all on the board, and then, as a group, ask them to choose which one we start with and which ones need to be addressed. This is my biggest regret right now – not starting every class this way. I am imagining all the misunderstandings, the engagement, the enthusiasm, the collaborative skills, and the autonomy we missed out on because I didn’t begin every class with fifteen or twenty minutes of this.

3. You feel a little bit like a nuisance all day long.

If I could go back and change my classes now, I would immediately:

Dig deep into my personal experience as a parent where I found wells of patience and love I never knew I have, and call upon them more often when dealing with students who have questions. Questions are an invitation to know a student better and create a bond with that student. We can open the door wider or shut if forever, and we may not even realize we have shut it.
I would make my personal goal of “no sarcasm” public and ask the students to hold me accountable for it. I could drop money into a jar for each slip and use it to treat the kids to pizza at the end of the year. In this way, I have both helped create a closer bond with them and shared a very real and personal example of goal-setting for them to use a model in their own thinking about goals.
I would structure every test or formal activity like the IB exams do – a five-minute reading period in which students can ask all their questions but no one can write until the reading period is finished. This is a simple solution I probably should have tried years ago that would head off a lot (thought, admittedly, not all) of the frustration I felt with constant, repetitive questions.

Now doesn't that make me think differently about how I approach teaching?

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When I saw this on yahoo news, I was totally geeking out. I love real stories like this: The First Spacewalk.

The Soviet space program has fascinated me. Maybe it's because for so long it was shrouded in total secrecy. Maybe it's because they were so ambitious to beat the US into space that safety wasn't always the #1 factor, as we like to believe it is in the US.

This story perfectly illustrates that. I mean the first man to walk in space almost didn't make it back! It also illustrates the power of human ingenuity in the "good old days."

Part of me wonders how these rugged and ingenious individuals would handle the Ebola debacle that we are mired in today.

BTW, the internet article on the first spacewalk is beautifully done. Let's hope this is what all web pages and stories will look like in the next decade.

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Here is a TED Talk on one of my all time favorite subjects - following your passion. Eunice Hill has a unique take on it, Don't Just Follow Your Passion: A Talk for Generation Y.

She even alludes to one of the books we read in College Comp 2, Be So Good They Can't Ignore You.

Here is another TED Talk along those same lines. I could listen to these all day long. In fact, whenever I have to do work around the house, I listen to these on my iPhone.

This one is again on one of my very favorite topics - How to find and do Work you Love.

His story about swimming from Alcatraz to the California Coast is worth the watch alone.

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Speaking of favorite topics (and one I blogged about last week), here is another interesting read: Where Millennials Went Wrong and How They're Paying the Price.

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Mr. Zutz spoke to my Teaching and Learning 250 class at UND last week. He did a fabulous job! What a great resource to share with my students.

He was so great that when we packed up to leave, two students lingered to thank him. Why thank him? Her words were: "I just want to thank you for giving me hope. As a future teacher all I ever hear about is how little it pays, how little we are respected, how bad students are, and how there is no hope. Thank you for proving that wrong."

Today he sent me this video to share with them. We all should have a teacher like this.

Every Student Deserves a Truly Great Teacher

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This title is sure to entice some debate: Why I Now Friend My Students on Social Media.

I can feel the panic in every teacher over 30 right now.

But hold on. There's a madness to her method, and some pretty damn good reasons for her claim. Here is one example.

I’m convinced that we’ve isolated students in a world without teachers on social media and every day we are reaping the consequences. We need to rethink this now so we can move forward to a better tomorrow.

Sometimes unpopular, uncomfortable things need to be said and positions should be reversed in order to do the right thing. Ultimately, my students said that I needed to give this one. I had at least eight kids who came up to me afterwards who said it was what educators needed to hear.

A teary eyed young man moved me most:

“My Mom died this year, I had a teacher who helped me get through it. I couldn’t have lived without my teacher. Literally. We students need our teachers and sometimes we need to talk to them on social media. We need a way to do that sometimes.”

Yep. These kids are worth fighting for and if the only casualty is my own ego in the process, that is indeed a very small price to pay.

This is truly an issue where both sides are right. We have to face the truth of the consequences of what we’ve done. We have to come out with some sort of workable answer in the middle.

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Another one of my favorite topics is creativity. Here is an interesting read on why experts tend to reject it.

You have to love the opening line: "Science advances one funeral at a time."

The same could be said for educators.

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I'm totally geeking out over Steven Johnson's new series on PBS (as well as the accompanying book) called How We Got to Now.

Now PBS has release a website that coincides with the show, How We Got to Next.

If you know me, you know how passionate I am about the Bengals (unfortunately). Well, if Johnson ever teamed up with one of my other favorite writers, James Burke, I think I would take that book over the Bengals actually winning a Super Bowl.

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An interesting read on the differences between Eastern and Western Cultures.

This reinforces what Diane Ravitch noted years ago. Ravitch told John Merrow on the Merrow Report that in America, parents tend to believe that talent is really all that counts. They push their kids into things they are already gifted at.

Chinese parents, though, realize that we all start at zero. We might have a little more natural talent here and there, but the bottom line is work. As Amy Chua, the infamous Tiger Mother, observed: "nothing is fun until you're really good at it." The bottom line for the eastern cultures is that their kids are willing to put in the struggle and hard work (or grit) that it takes to be really good.

In America? Parents are likely to complain to teachers or coaches instead of making sure their kids works. It's all about natural talent, not work. This is just what Carol Dweck talks about with her concept of "The Growth Mindset" vs. "The Fixed Mindset."

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Finally, these are hilarious. Some are more true than others, and some are totally false but still funny.