Point of Inflection

It has come to our attention that our students are spending huge amounts of time in the forest nearby the school. In the forest, there are many dangerous adults and our students are sometimes dangerous to each other when they are in the forest.

New school policy regarding the nearby forest #1:

It is now against school policy to be anywhere near our students when they are in the forest because, if any teachers are dangerous adults and harm our students in the forest that would look bad for the school because we allowed them to be in the forest together.

Or

New school policy regarding the nearby forest #2:

While we encourage staff to be in the forest with our students, it is very important be mindful that when you are in the forest there are always students around and that even when you are in the forest on your own time and taking steps to avoid them, students are around and will likely see what you do there. Assume that everything you do in the forest will be seen by students, parents, administrators, and school board members and conduct yourselves accordingly.

Please get to know the forest very well. Our students are spending a large percentage of their time there. Sometimes adults can find it kind of scary, but it actually has a lot to offer. The more good adults there are in the forest, the safer it will be for everyone. Much of the fear will go away once you get to know the place.

It can actually be a useful resource for your classes. We will offer staff development to help you learn ways you can use the forest.

If there are many teachers and other positive adults in the forest, it will be much more difficult for teachers who are actually dangerous adults to get away with being bad.

Please help to make the forest safer for everyone.

My friend Irving wrote this. He works at Scattergood Friends School.

Pro-Tip to Add Interaction to a Presentation

Pro-tip: Get some green index cards and some red index cards and pass them out to your class.  Tell them that throughout the period they can hold up either card – green for “I get it,” red for “I don’t get it.”  If you have time, draw symbols on the cards for color-blind students. Now you can see immediately when people in your class are getting lost, and use that information to adapt your lecture in real time.  It’s much easier to see the cards than to analyze the body language of 30 people. Omg, lecture 2.0.

Some people will be hesitant, because this is kind of dorky and kind of risky if you don’t know it.  Prompt everyone to hold up one card or the other occasionally.  The field of color is easier to register than individual cards, plus you’ll get some more participation from shy people.

Pro-tip: at the beginning, say, “Does everyone understand how to use the cards?” and wiggle your eyebrows suggestively.  And by suggestively I of course mean, “suggesting that they should hold up the green card.”  They won’t get it at first, but then they’ll laugh and reluctantly hold up their cards.  Throw out a few more silly ones like “so everyone read the chapter on thermodynamics, right?” to prompt for the red cards.  This’ll give everyone practice with the cards and break the ice.

Pro-wrestling tips: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_wrestling_attacks

Quid-Pro-Quo tip: it means “an exchange that’s pretty much fair.”  Who knew?

I use all of these tips in my presentations (e.g. lectures about trigonometry), and they work well in ActiveGrade too.  Caution: only use the Boom Drop  in advanced classes.

As some of you know, I’m a computer nerd. I recently gave my first talk at a computer nerd conference, to maybe 40 other aficionados, and it was awesome.  I was funny.  I was charming.  I used feedback techniques from my teaching toolset (red/green index-card hold-up, anyone?).  It felt great to be teaching again.

Afterwards, my friend said that at times during my presentation he thought I was just an awesome presenter.  ”Yeah,” I thought, “I know.  Go on.”

“But at other times,” he continued, “it would just get awkward, like you had forgotten what was going on. It was just dead silence.”

After I finished reeling, I was like, “uhm, you mean the times I stopped to let a point sink in, or are you talking about the times I left room for people to ask questions, even if they were uncomfortable?”

He paused for a second, and then said, “You just changed my entire idea of what a conference is for.”  Turns out, he always thought of presentations as entertaining and informative, but never as interactive learning experiences.  I guess that’s why we call students at a presentation the “audience.”  Instead of, you know, “students.”

All this is to say that we, teachers, are thebomb.com at teaching.  I forget that teaching has a lot of skills, but, attn: everyone, teachers have a lot of skills.  Three hundred people were at this conference, and all of them made eight times my teaching salary (literally)… but I was the only one who brought red and green index cards for the students.

I read ideas for using QR codes in class like

QR codes can be a great voting tool allowing students to vote by simply scanning the code as they enter or exit the classroom. This can save time, and it gets your students up and moving.

Is there some secret QR code app I don’t know about? The best one I’ve seen is Google Goggles, which requires me to take my phone out, unlock it, open up Google Goggles, take a picture, and wait a second or two for it to scan the code. Then I have to click the link or whatever was in the QR code, and wait for whatever page to load in the phone’s browser.  I can’t get thirty kids to open freaking GMAIL right, you know?

If I wanted students to vote as they entered or exited the classroom, for example, I’d consider a piece of paper or the whiteboard with a few markers laid out.  The process for voting is “pick up this marker and scrape it across the board in a check mark shape.”

So what am I missing here? I see QR codes everywhere but I’m embarrassed to scan them.  The idea of hidden messages is awesome, but QR codes can’t hold any serious amount of text.  Just use a bit.ly address, right?

Codes attached to a skeleton model or dissected pig can take students to important directions or content.

Now this starts to sound useful.  I’m imagining a sort of google-maps-like layer over the textbook or over a big wall map that shows you what’s underground there or what the nervous system looks like at a particular point.  Imagine if your school had a huge mural of dinosaurs and students could take their iPhone up to the wall and see the bones, or a big mural of a car and students could go see how the different parts of the engine worked.  Is there some way I can make this happen in my own class?  I guess I could hand out an indexed list of hints and the QR code could just refer kids to the list, with no internet connection necessary. As long as they all had the app installed.  And all had devices with cameras and apps.  And were allowed to use them in class.  And wouldn’t find their facebook status more engaging than my  QR-code worksheet.

I don’t know.  They’re neat. But if I have an extra 30 minutes to enhance my lesson materials, I don’t think it’s going to be spent on a QR code.   Is there anyone out there with a good workflow that uses them to good effect?

In my famous Circle Of Power post, I described a strategy I used to teach some trigonometry that involved students doing a lot of measuring by hand. They had a ruler, a protractor, and a circle physically printed on some physical paper.

What if they had used a Geogebra applet instead?  I could have whipped up a “drag the angle and measure the x- and y-coordinates” applet in 5 minutes, and saved the students 20 minutes each.  The data in class would have been accurate to three decimal places instead of (generously) one.  By a lot of objective measures, the computer would have been better.

And yet…

When do you have students do work by hand?

I also have a (tank-based) water heater in the basement.  This morning I washed some dishes (using the hot water) and then I wanted to make some coffee.

I have an electric caraffe that boils water.  It’s awesome.  You just put in some water, flip a switch, and soon your water is boiling.  I assume it heats up some element inside it, which heats up the water.

Should I fill the caraffe with hot water or cold water from my tap?

If I fill it with hot water, it takes some hot water out of my hot-water tank, which means that cold water goes into my hot-water tank (bad).  On the other hand, the electric caraffe doesn’t have to work as much to boil the water (good)!

If I fill it with cold water, the hot-water tank is left alone to be hot (good).  But my little caraffe has to work an extra 50 degrees! Also, the hotter my hot-water tank is, the faster it leaks heat into the cold basement air! Aiee!

I hope students coming out of my classes could

• Understand the dilemma
• Notice these dilemmas around them for themselves
• Figure out what they’d need to know to answer the questions they have
• Make an intentional decision about whether the work required to answer the question is worth having the correct answer to the question (instead of just shrugging it off because they don’t want to think about it).

Guess who just erased the board and got homework exemption for the rest of the semester #winning

This is a tweet that showed up at random in a presentation I went to.  The presentation was about databases, but I was distracted for the rest of the hour by this quote.

1. The quality of homework in this class was such that the teacher considered it equal to erasing the board.
2. The student in question apparently sat down and started tweeting.

As I get further into the business community, I realize more and more how important networks of personal connections are. Knowing a principal gets us a meeting with a superintendent, and having lunch with a former legislator gets my email a second look from a current legislator.  At ActiveGrade we have degrees in design, computer science, education, and math, a collective 20 years of experience working with kids in education, and still our biggest breakthroughs come from our networking skills.

Being an excellent programmer is a helpful attribute.  Having a good idea and working hard on it: important, sure.  But it’s indispensable to have friends in high places – we couldn’t succeed without the connections we’re building.

Teachers are paid to help students learn, giving them an important resource to draw from after school, but sometimes schools’ social responsibilities are overlooked.  Schools are our society’s way of starting everyone off in a network – every kid comes out of school knowing some adults that are more powerful than themselves.  Every kid comes out of school having learned rules of networking from the social norms set forth in school.  And yet some kids start networks, and some don’t.

I think we should shift focus away from “just try hard and you can make success for yourself.”  It’s not fair to play down the fact that you have to meet the right people, too.  Kids with wealthy and/or powerful parents learn networking skills outside of schools, and start out with bigger networks, and know from early on that it takes help to establish yourself.  We should be teaching this to our students in school.  It’s way more important to their future than, say, finding prime factors.  Even if you know calculus, there’s very little success to be had by yourself.

I’d like to see professional programs in schools, like apprenticeships, in which professionals from various trades take kids through not only the hard skills they need (math, writing, welding, wiring) but also the social skills (networking, bargaining, advertising).  I’d like to see a national fervor about our childrens’ social education alongside the fervor about their test scores.  I’d like to see post-secondary institutions dedicated to finding apprenticeships, helping young people find their networks, supporting people in learning the skills they need to succeed in a professional community.

A lot of our education reform is about helping kids be stronger and more creative problem solvers. Hands-on inquiry project-based lessons, standards-based specific formative feedback, product-driven assessment, etc.  But everything I read is about academic subjects. There’s a lot more to financial success than individual creativity in this country, and there’s a lot more to happiness.  I say, if we’re going to provide education to every kid, we ought to do an all-around job of it.  We can’t just teach them seven technical subjects and call it a day.

My first direct interactions with businesses were mostly with Amazon.  I ordered books on the website, and they showed up on my door.  Sometimes I went to the mall, which were always stocked with whatever.  I’d go in, looking for some new shoes or a new video game, find them in a store, hand the cashier some money, and walk out.

A pristine view of business formed in my head.  In school and in my neighborhood were people like me, who joked and accidentally insulted and decided to mow the lawn (or not), but in businesses were robots who knew what went where and maintained perfect organization.  It really never occurred to me that businesses were run by people.

I won the position of “Camp Director,” one day, and was suddenly the employer and supervisor of 25 staff members, and was responsible to several hundred clients.  With ActiveGrade, Dan, Michal and I are responsible for a lot of people – today someone recorded assessment number 130,000!  In both positions I work really hard to make my businesses seem professional and, more importantly, to deliver on the implicit and explicit promises I make.  As a teacher I took part in the education of hundreds of people – talk about responsibility!

The pristine image of business I formed when I was a kid is gone. I realized that all businesses make mistakes and have inefficiencies.  What’s replaced it is a more impressive picture: people that are not only working hard but constantly evaluating themselves, asking themselves where they want to get better, and relating to customers, colleagues, and friends the whole time.

This is what being human is about to me.  It’s up to us! We’re in it together!

Thanks for working and playing with me.  I’m excited to include the kids.

I play ultimate frisbee with a bunch of people every week.  Most of the people are between the ages of 20 and 65, and we play pretty hard: sprinting, leaping, and diving for two to three hours, three times a week.

Recently, an eight-year-old boy named Q started playing with us.  He’s like four feet tall and maybe 70 pounds.  We’ve decided it’s ok for him to play with us; we just try not to run over him.  We have not agreed, however, on how to treat him on the field.  Do we go easy on him? How easy?

Maybe make it SEEM like we're trying? - Photo by Nic McPhee

This is exactly the problem I faced in my classes every day.  One person has lower skills, or less experience, than the others – where do we set our expectations?  Some players in my game say Q should not get a defender, and if he drops the frisbee we should let him pick it up as if he didn’t. I say that if he’s in the game, he’s in the game! Rules apply!  If he’s not ready to play, practice with him on the side of the field until he is!

It’s hard to say what’s best for Q.  If you were in our game, you’d know the specific details that he’s actually a pretty good thrower, and doesn’t crack under pressure, and can really catch a disc, and that we should probably turn up the heat on him at least a little.  Still, you wouldn’t really expect him to be able to do everything the other players can do.  I think a moderate course is the best for Q’s skill level.  If we let him keep playing, when he’s 14 he’s going to be better than all of us. If we make him stop, or practice on the sidelines, he’ll lose interest.  For the rest of us, when he’s in the game, we can’t really play as hard, and we stop improving as quickly.

In my math classes, the kids with low skill levels had the same effects, and the dilemma was the same.  I’d love to say, “if you’re in, you’re in!” but where does that leave the kids that aren’t in?