The past year was easily the most challenging year I have lived to date. It wasn’t a bad year, it was simply filled with much craziness. From grad school, to house construction, to the birth of my second daughter – there was non-stop action. Looking back over the year in pictures has revealed to me just how quickly time moves. Looking back has also, hopefully, put me in a better spot to move forward. I have gained a new perspective about time and family and self. In the coming year I will make no resolution other than this: think and act for the future. For far too long I have lived only for the present, and this past year marked the rapid change into full-on adulthood. Perhaps “rapid change” is not exactly correct. This change has been coming over the past several years: buying a house (25), getting married (27), burying my younger brother (29), having a child (30), selling a house (in this market) (31), going back to school, building a new house and having a second child (32). And now here I am, at an age I had always marveled at growing up (33), and I don’t know why – although I suspect that attending Catholic school from 2nd grade until 10th grade maybe has something to do with it. All I know is that, while my daily photos do not document the change that has occurred - it has happened none the less. I am ready for what the future holds…

On Friday July 15th I finished up with the last of the face to face meetings of my graduate program at Uconn. In the time since, I have been thinking a lot about the program I was a part of and about myself as a student. I have come to two realizations.

1) While proud of my accomplishments and growth over the duration of my program, I couldn’t help feeling that it should have been harder. At least, in the romanticized notion of “grad school” it should have been harder. Writing those words produces an odd sensation within me. I definitely worked harder than I thought myself capable of over this past year, and I hardly wish to take away from my accomplishments. However – as the capstone week drew to a close and I assembled my portfolio, I found myself wondering if my work was worthy of the degree I was pursuing. I recall a brief conversation I had with someone who scoffed at my “one year” program as diluting higher education. I was quite offended at the time, but his words stuck with me, and as I hit send on the email containing the link to my finished portfolio to my professor I found myself back in that conversation that occurred several months prior. Looking around the room at the rest of my cohort, I also knew that of the twenty of us, at least half only pursued this program to satisfy the Connecticut requirement needed to obtain a professional certificate. Were they passionate about educational technology, or simply finding the quickest route to satisfy their needs? Alas, who am I to judge? Does it matter what their intent was, as long as they came away with something that makes them a better teacher?

2) I like to learn, but I hate the discomfort of the artificial structures imposed on me during this process – yet that accountability forces me to actually do something. To produce. The problem with production is that it creates something that I can critique, which I will do to no end. If I get caught in a web of endless self-criticism I won’t produce anything of value, so it is easier to semi-produce things and label everything I do “beta.” It seems this fear of production runs along many lines in my life. For example, I hardly ever publish posts I have written and I never seem to be able to complete a recorded DJ mix. This doesn’t stop me from writing down thoughts, or playing around with my turntables for hours. It seems the minute I set out to do these actions with the intent of coming away with a finished product, I freeze up. Perhaps this is why I enjoy teaching so much. Each year is new and changes are made. Nothing I do in my classroom is set in stone. In fact, on-the-fly alterations to lessons are a necessity. Regardless of how I justify my phobia of production, I realize that this is something I must address if I wish to move forward professionally. So, with that being said – I am hitting “publish” on this post and including a small bonus

I had quite a bit going on in my life this year, all positive but stressful. My wife and I were living with her parents as we built a house, we were raising a toddler and expecting a new baby in early May. I was enrolled in a graduate program at the University of Connecticut full time in addition to my full time job teaching 8^th graders social studies. I was also committed to making major changes in my teaching this year, because I knew that I had to. I couldn’t simply say, “I’ll do it next year.” It had to be now. So, to say I had a lot on my plate is an understatement. At times I thought I couldn’t handle it. One can only put one’s head down and grind away for so long without breaking. I found my first anthem for the year sometime in mid October. The song, “This Year” by The Mountain Goats became the first song I played upon entering my car each morning for my drive to school, and again each afternoon for my drive home. While the verse lyrics did not connect with my situation, as they are about teen angst and not thirty-something issues, the refrain absolutely hit the nail on the head. I would sing these lyrics (in my head, mostly) over and over and over, as if to promise myself that I would make it.

I made it. Well, I mostly made it. I have one more week of face-to-face time at Uconn in the coming weeks, and then I will have made it (although the house is not yet done…)

Not only did I make it, I actually am proud of myself for the first time in my life. I made the changes I wanted to make in my classroom. I moved towards being the teacher I want to be – putting much of what I was learning in my grad program into practice. It would have been much easier to chalk this year up as a loss in my classroom. It would have been easier to say, “I’ll make those changes eventually, because I have enough on my plate right now.” But I wouldn’t have been able to live with myself if I did that. Am I done changing? No. The way I see it is that phase one is complete. I am already thinking about phase two. I am confident that I will continue to make the changes I need to make as I move forward. This is where the second song comes into play. There is an obscure underground hip-hop artist named Edan, and I’ve been a fan of his for over ten years. In his song, “One Man Arsenal,” he recites a line that has been forever etched into my brain, but really took on a sense of meaning this year. In the song, Edan raps, “Limitations strictly defined by motivation…”

Perhaps no truer words have ever been said (to a beat).

It was inevitable, I suppose. Today I had to inform my students that I would not be able to participate in an 8th grade tradition I created six years ago. It was painful for me. If you’ve ever had to scrap a favorite unit, one near and dear to you, take that pain and multiply it by the death of your first pet (hamsters and fish, not cats and dogs). That is what I am feeling right now.

For the past six years I have helped my 8th grade students put on a performance that we call “the ‘it’ show.” Essentially, the show is sketch comedy from the adolescent mind. Certainly a terrifying prospect for many, but then again, so is teaching middle school. Those of us that do teach middle school (especially 8th grade) will tell you that it is a magical place that teeters between the youthful innocence of primary grades and the complexity and maturity of high school. When the stars align, and you can find the perfect balance between the two – it is, in my opinion, the best experience in the world. It is a multi-layered never-ending pool of ZPD. The “it” show was the pinnacle of such feats. Imagine taking a large group of 8th grade students (last year we had 70 kids involved in some aspect of the show) and creating a production from the ground up. On day one, usually in the first or second week of March, we have nothing. We are a blank slate. We have no script, no skit ideas, nothing. By the second week of June, we have an hour long show (sometimes longer) written and performed by the students – complete with sets, lights, sound technicians and the works. We also have a shoe string budget, and can only practice on the stage the week of the show, as the stage is also the band room. Essentially the “it” show is DIY culture at its best. The show allows students the opportunity to be creators of content instead of consumers.

The general ethos of the show is one of originality. Themes change every year. No skits can be similar to any from previous years. Simply recreating a popular YouTube video is out of the question. Kids are pushed out of their comfort zones as they perform on stage for an audience of 400 people. Each year I go into a tailspin of panic as the shows draws close, and each year they pull it off – making me exceedingly proud of them. And they are so proud of their accomplishment. Kids who would never sit at the same lunch table are high fiving each other and hugging on stage. It then becomes part of their social curriculum vitae, and it also gets a dose of peer review. The previous 8th grade (current freshmen) come to the show in droves, and there are “it” cast alumni from grades 10, 11, 12, and even a few college kids who were part of the very first show. How is that for community building? The laughter that gets shared in the meetings and the bonds that get built in this setting are addictive to say the least. It allows kids to be awesome. It allows them to take a chance at performing. It allows them to create and solve problems authentically. In short, it is the most meaningful thing I do as their teacher.

And I can’t do it this year.

The show requires hundreds of hours of my time outside of the school day. We meet every weekday in the month of May, until 5pm sometimes. We work on it online on the weekends. I become nonexistent to my wife for about a month. She is begrudgingly cool with it. Last year we had a baby, and my time commitment to “it” shrunk. We are having another baby at the end of April, right when the meetings take off. I am also finishing up a master’s degree. We are also building a house. There is nothing I can do, except turn the show over to the kids. I will not deprive them of the experience. Just because I can’t do it, doesn’t mean that they can’t. I have found colleagues willing to help out (two have daughters in 8th grade, so their commitment to the show is personal). If there ever were a class that would be capable of doing this on their own, this is the class. What kills me is that I won’t be able to do it with them.

(here is a sampling of the 5th “it” show – the theme was time travel, and it was blended video with live on stage action)

It was last period of the day and I had my highly talkative, yet high achieving section. It is March and they are in 8th grade. We begin a week of state testing on Monday, and they begin their transition to the high school the week after. If the stars were ever aligned for off-task difficult to focus behavior, this is it. Yesterday I launched a lesson on propaganda, specifically focusing on WWI propaganda posters. It is a topic I love to explore with kids. It is actually one of my favorites as it combines abstract thinking with visual literacy and introduces a healthy dose of skepticism that can be applied throughout all media. Today I had hoped to get them started by explaining a few things that didn’t get uncovered yesterday, and then having groups explore a series of WWI posters to determine the propaganda techniques being used. Three cheers for some structured social negotiation of meaning!

It didn’t turn out as I intended, but it did turn out as I had hoped. Confused? Me too.

I could not get the kids focused to start the class. Side conversations about typical 8th grade topics were gushing from their mouths at full force. I am not one to yell, never have been. I can’t do it, even if I tried. My management style does not need that tool in my teacher utility belt. However, nothing worked today. Nothing. I could not get through the five minutes I needed to set them up before sending them on their way. I became visibly flustered. And then I stopped teaching. I walked out of the room. I felt as if I should not have done this. This was the mistake in character and I should have handled it differently. My classroom fell silent. Kids rushed to the door, peeking into the hallway. Audible murmurs of confusion could be heard. “Is he mad?” “What should we do?” “Is he coming back in?”

When I reentered the room a few moments later, a student had begun teaching the class. He was up at my laptop/projector, scrolling through the example posters I had lined up for them. It was initially meant as a joke, except I still wasn’t laughing. I sat at my desk and did some work. The student continued to teach. The rest of the class was engaging in on-topic conversation dealing with the techniques being used in the posters. I continued to do work. They continued to engage in meaningful and high quality discussion. I listened to them while I worked (by this point I was pretending to do work and listening to their conversation instead, just to see where it went). Here’s the thing that shook me . . . the absolutely killed it. They were on fire. They were coming up with the things I felt that I had needed to explain to them all on their own. They were being respectful to one another by letting the quiet kids speak and engaging in meaningful dialogue. Even the side conversations were on topic. I continued to sit and do busy work until the bell rang. They continued to have the conversation I had hoped for, but I struggled to come to terms with the fact that it was not done as I had intended. I wonder how much of their actions were based on my reaction? Then I wonder if that ultimately matters. In the end, they took away what I had hoped for. How much of what I am feeling is simply crushed ego that they didn’t need me to do it?

I haven’t had a fever in a really long time. A few years at least. When I was a kid I used to have the most intense fever dreams, you know, the hallucination type pseudo-night terrors? Yep. Had one earlier tonight, and it got me thinking about my favorite fever induced “dream.” Since I’m already a bit delirious, I figured I’d share it with you now . . .

Christmas Eve nineteen eighty-something. I don’t recall the exact year but it was when shows like He-Man and Thundercats ruled the after school airwaves. I was running a mildly high fever, or so my Mom tells me, somewhere in the 101 range. Per tradition in our house growing up, my siblings and I were allowed to open one gift on Christmas Eve (in retrospect an extraordinarily calculated move to occupy us for a few hours before bedtime). I opened some anime ninja VHS tape (I wish I still had it, or even had the name of it) and watched it with my younger brother. Mistake number one: 1980’s anime ninja movies with a fever don’t go well (which probably inspired this tweet earlier tonight).  As bedtime approached, I recall feeling worse – shaky, jittery, whiny, typical fever attributes of an 8 year old kid (and, I suppose a 32 year old man). I was shipped off to bed anyways. Asleep in minutes. I remember waking with a start – eyes exploding open with the realization that I had been asleep for hours and it must be Christmas morning, who cares that it was still dark out? Even at that age I knew that technically “a.m.” meant morning and morning was fair game. I got up out of bed and approached the door, choosing not to wake my brother for whatever reason. My bedroom door opened into the living room in our apartment, the Christmas tree was in direct line of sight, the stockings hung off to the right on the armoire. I opened the door a crack to make sure the coast was clear. What I (thought) I saw shook me to the bone with both delight and fear. There he was bent over underneath the tree arranging presents. It was Santa.

I’m sure that my eyes grew wider than they ever have and my heart started pounding, sending the fever drenched blood pulsing through my veins. I was so excited I could hardly stand it. There he was. He was in my living room. I quickly scanned about for the tray of cookies to see if he had eaten them. As I was scanning the room I vividly recall the feeling of my stomach sinking. I knew I wasn’t supposed to be awake. I was going to ruin everything. The guilt was overwhelming (My Dad is Jewish and my Mom is Irish Catholic so I’ve got the self-guilt thing pretty much covered). I shut the door as quietly as I could and stood there frozen with fear. If Santa knew I was awake it would jeopardize my entire household’s Christmas. So I stood at the door unable to move. Suddenly it dawned on me that if Santa were in my house that would mean he would have to leave at some point, and when he did leave, I would be able to see the reindeer fly! With that realization, I totally forgot about why I was standing as still as a statue. My ninja moves from earlier in the evening kicked in, and a few strategic jumps and gratuitous 360s later I was at my window, face firmly planted on the cold glass, looking up. I waited, never losing faith that I would be the only kid to lay eyes on the most magical of  (commercial) Christmas mysteries. Still I waited, eyes focused like a hawk for the slightest movement in the night sky. I waited some more with supreme confidence that at any moment I would see the sleigh overhead. I waited for what seemed like hours (and in reality was probably 10 minutes). I finally blinked, and with that blink came a creeping realization. The first doubt, not in Santa, but in seeing the reindeer fly. The doubt came faster now, like a rolling boulder, when suddenly it hit me. How did I know that Santa didn’t come from this direction? I didn’t know his route. He could have flown in any direction. Maybe he was zigzagging to avoid enemy aircraft (I had recently seen Top Gun, too and was quite certain that the Russian Mig pilots did not celebrate Christmas)? With that, I crawled back into bed feeling dejected. I awoke a few hours later with the best fever induced story of my life.

I am in the middle of grading some position papers from my 8th graders as our wrap up to my unit on the paradox of modernization. Admittedly this “paper” is more artificial in nature than I would like, as it is part of a lesson I had to design for my practicum class in my masters program (a lesson which I am seeing now, was designed rather poorly). Despite the heightened artificiality of it, I am seeing some stomach churning, rib stinging, cold-sweat-inducing issues that are totally removed from my specific lesson. These issues I am having such a hard time dealing with are directly related to the nature of “teaching to the test.” The test I am referring to is our state writing prompts. These prompts require students to take a stance on an issue presented, one in which they have very limited background information aside from the paragraph introducing the prompt. The students have 45 minutes to complete this persuasive piece, usually framed as a letter to the editor of a local newspaper or something along those lines. These prompts are then scored holistically based upon how well the student elaborates and uses persuasive techniques like, you know, statistics and such in their writing. Okay fine. Makes sense, right? We cite sources to add to the strength of our arguments. It seems like an important skill for them to have. Here is the problem – the prompts the students are asked to write for the state tests are out-of-the-blue topics. As I stated earlier, the only real background information given is in the paragraph introducing the prompt. So where do the kids get the statistics for their prompts? They make them up. That’s right. They imagine experts and statistics that will support their stance and include them. They lie. The more they lie and the more creative their lies are, the better their score will be. Viewing this with a behaviorist lens (Skinner, Thorndyke, etc) leads down a scary path indeed. Rewards in the form of acceptance (teacher, parent, societal) for high prompt scores derived from making things up to support your claims will not yield long term favorable results.

So what about reality? What about when they are asked to write a position paper where they have, say, an entire units worth of information at their disposal? It seems that they fall back to the tired and true (and continually reinforced) method of making things up that suit their needs. I dread the type of “informed” 21st century citizen this kind of education produces. I feel paralyzed and helpless in my attempts to change it.

Whenever I have thought of portfolios in the past, I have always thought of showcases for exemplary work. Shine time, so to speak. The problem with shine time is that, well, it is bogus. We don’t shine all the time. Not everything we do is exemplary. Portfolios shouldn’t be cherry picked examples of what you are able to do on certain days when the stars align. Portfolios should showcase failures along side the successes. Think of it as a skate video (any skaters?). For those not in the know, skate videos are similar to portfolios in many ways. Skaters use these highly polished videos to showcase themselves in hopes of acquiring and retaining sponsors (much like we have spoken of portfolios as a means of acquiring a job). Frequently the more polished the video, the better received it is. These videos not only showcase the skater’s ability to do a variety of tricks, but the music selection, the editing, and even the banter in between sets give the audience a sense of who this skater really is (or who they want us to believe they are, and perception is reality, right??) The same holds true for our portfolios. We select items that essentially put out the brand we are looking to create for ourselves. What we include tells the story we want to tell. Here is the difference: skaters often include the not so pretty bail clips. They show the mess ups. Do we show ours? Why not? What are we afraid of? Let’s continue this line of thinking for a moment. I believe that the mess-ups in skate videos, while perhaps serving to increase the “wow” factor in a visceral sense, also highlight how hard it is to do what they do. It takes practice and fortitude and a whole heap of other inspirational character traits typically seen on posters in your vice-principal’s office. Perhaps they want us to see how hard it is? Perhaps the kid who sees his favorite skater mess up over and over and then finally nail the trickwill be encouraged in his own attempts to improve. Why don’t we do this for our students professionally? Why are we stuck on the “teacher must be infallible” mode? Wouldn’t it be more empowering to our students if they saw some vulnerability in us? Wouldn’t perspective employers want to know how we plan on fixing mess-ups? No matter how well you interview, no employer is naive enough to believe they are hiring Superman (← a joke in light of today’s Oprah fiasco. If you don’t know, Google it). You are human, and therefore imperfect, and you will be imperfect on the job. How you deal with the imperfections says more about you as a professional than how well you cherry pick your best clips.

Me+time+solitude+interest=learning

I think I’ve pretty much said all I need to say in my title.

Considering that Mike (<– the professor) might be looking for a more “meta” explanation, I’ll pander to his desires in this instance.

Outside of the typical multiple intelligence babble we revisit in PD every few years, I’ve never really given thought to how I have learned what I know, in non-academic instances. It is also scary to think about how little I actually know outside of a few things. So, here are the only three things I know how to do:

• DJ/scratching (<– the hip hop sounds created from moving a record back & forth in a rhythmic fashion) has been a hobby/passion since 1995. I consider the artistic side of it akin to playing a percussion instrument. I never took lessons. I just did it. I tinkered around. I listened to music that had scratching in it. I tried to emulate that. It was a long road to get to where I am today (which is far from good, by my standards) but I did it all myself. No manual. No assistance. Just drive and passion and time. (p.s. the link is NOT me . . . not even close)
• Editing video: Same as above. I always had a drive to do it (wanted the Fisher Price PXL2000 so badly . . . still do) and once editing became more accessible, I jumped on board and dove in head first. I spent HOURS doing it and wasn’t afraid to mess up. This, however, resulted from another nonacademic learning endeavor . . .
• Technology/Computers: While I don’t know code or the stuff under the hood, I have managed to teach myself quite a bit about using computers (both personally and professionally) since 2005. I was a technophobe prior to 2005. Email and word were my limits. Then I had “the awakening” and got the drive to learn and lost the fear and jumped in and started pressing buttons. The more time I spent, and the more buttons I pressed, the easier it got. I am now the “go-to tech guy” at my school.

Essentially, I’ve just wasted a bunch of your time I guess, because in retrospect, my title really did sum things up.  If I may briefly speak to academic learning, I think that there were only two classes in my life that I ever truly felt like my brain was growing . . . dendrites being birthed and whatnot. Both were late in my undergrad career and both, now that I have the vocabulary to understand, were quite constructivist in nature. The classes (History in the Topics of Ideas, and, Modernism) required a ton of reading (mostly Literature, some Philosophy, etc) but with little guidelines. We created our own sense of importance concerning what we read and wrote lengthy papers to thematic, minimalist questions. The book I read about WWI and Modern Memory has had a lasting influence on my teaching. I can quote Baudelaire and Kafka nine years after reading them. These, among other things, have had a profound impact on how I view the World. I learned it because I had the freedom to make it my own.