The Best Fever Story Ever.

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.

 

Just make it up.

A major mental alarm just went off in my head and I am scared beyond belief right now. We are creating a generation of liars. Okay, that might be too strong – but not too far from the truth.

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.

e-portfolios and skaters (or, X-folios)

This week’s grad class reflection asked us to think about what should be included in e-portfolios. Naturally, I arrived at that destination in a roundabout way. Please note: this is NOT supposed to be a polished post (breaking the rules, I know) but at least it is published. My goal is to publish more, for myself, instead of getting caught up in writing the elusive perfect post. Here goes:

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.

Witty Title Escapes Me . . .

I have never really reflected on how I actually learned some of the things I know how to do. It took a required post for one of my grad school classes to make me stop and think about what should be common knowledge (for myself). Please note, before you go judging the quality of this program based on what I am about to share, that this was simply an initial thought question meant to frame our learning for the next week. So, in the name on openness . . . here is what I wrote:

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.

The importance of @ (or how Twitter kills social norms)

(Note: The tone of this post is not meant to be negative or antagonistic. I am not singling any individual out. I have been thinking about this concept since my reintroduction and subsequent borderline obsession with Twitter in September of 2009. And I am still around because several key individuals were supportive enough to do the very thing I am writing about below.)

Photo by: cbcparklane

Here is a thought. If Twitter were a giant cocktail party, as I have heard it compared to in the past, in which we are all attendees; then what role would the @ play? To the best of my knowledge, the @ is a device intended to let an individual know you are addressing them directly in conversation, amid all the other banter and general chaos of the stream. It is the closest thing we have to turning and looking directly at someone, or otherwise gaining his or her attention, before speaking. In real life, if someone goes out of his or her way to gain your attention prior to speaking to you, how do you react? I suppose it depends on who is attempting to gain your attention and your relationship to them.  But let’s just say that we are, in fact, at a giant cocktail party. That analogy would perhaps serve to indicate that we intend on being social. Twitter is billed as social media, right? Sure, there are wallflowers at most events and I’ve been guilty of such in the past (come to think of it, maybe that is subconsciously why I became a DJ). People can choose to not engage. I am interested here in exploring what happens when they do choose to engage.

People arrive to parties at different times and with different levels of comfort with their surroundings. I joined Twitter in September of 2008. My account lay dormant for over a year, and once I came back to it I had no one to “introduce me” to the attendees of the already raging party. I played the wall for a while, listening, learning the dialect, trying to get comfortable enough to engage in a conversation. Admittedly my first few attempts to engage were socially awkward. Not having any followers made it more difficult. That is the underlying paradox of this medium. Tweeting with no followers seems pointless, but you won’t gain followers without tweeting. At the party, you won’t be invited into the conversation unless you speak up. No one is going to be like, “Hey silent dude over there in the corner, tells us what you think about . . .” So what happens when a new arrival tries to engage? Usually it comes as a response to a question posed by someone (“Anyone know of an app that does such and such?”). So, being brave, you @ the inquirer. If at a party you were do you this, if you were to gain someone’s attention to answer their query, what might their response look like? Would they look directly at you, listen, and then turn back to their ongoing conversation without uttering even a simple acknowledgement of their receipt of your advice? No way. Our social norms would suggest that a cursory acknowledgement is in order. Further, continuing with the party analogy, if you were to then attempt to engage this person again, say with a question of your own or perhaps an anecdotal reply to an offering of their daily minutia in an attempt to be conversational, and your @ appeared to have fallen on deaf ears (or blind eyes may be more appropriate), what then? How would that go over in real life? I’d be willing to bet that if in real life someone were to ask you a question or attempt to engage in conversation, however inconsequential, you are all polite enough, or at least schooled in the acceptable norms of our society, that you would never think of offering the cold shoulder. So why is it different on Twitter?

I know that Twitter isn’t real life. I also know that one of the benefits of using asynchronous media is that you are allowed to pick and choose who you correspond with. I get that. But I also question it. I question it on our level, on the level of educators. We are all here, essentially, because we want to learn. We want to interact with others who are involved in the same profession as us. We want to learn from them. Since “they” are here too, it implies that they are searching for the same thing.  So if someone makes it clear in their bio that they are an educator and they’re here for primarily the same reasons as you, why not invite them into the fold? I understand that a limit on people you follow might be needed to either, a) maintain stream sanity, and/or b) keep things relevant, as too much connection means you’re more likely to be disconnected. But seriously, if you’re not @The_Real_Shaq or @aplusk you could at least respond to @’s. Give some confidence to those brave enough to engage. Give them reason to stick around. While the outward appearance may not be that of a face-to-face encounter (at the cocktail party), I contend that the social piece, the human connection, is the same despite the vessel.

89 Opportunities

I’m ready.

I am prepared to scrap my “lessons” from now until the end of the year, the “lessons” that I have meticulously crafted over the past five years. I am ready to toss them aside because I have been remade. Better. Stronger. Faster. Well, maybe not so much. I am feeling the after effects of the revitalization that was TEDxNYED. Drawing heavily from Mike Wesch, Jeff Jarvis, and Chris Lehmann’s talks – I have arrived at the intersection of “school is real life” and “how do I make that work, exactly?” This is a busy intersection with a lot traffic (ideas) and I’m playing the role of traffic cop. I’ve never been a traffic cop before. I know what I am supposed to be doing, and I know how certain aspects of the job should look, but I also know that at any moment I could cause a major collision. Thankfully metaphorical collisions are not fatal, so I will continue without reservation.

Mike Wesch, in his TEDxNYED talk, said something that has become my mantra of the moment. In talking about his students, particularly large “lecture” classes, he said that he looks at the people in the seats not as burdens, but opportunities. I want to create a project that involves the collective efforts of my entire 8th grade class. I have, in my charge, eighty nine opportunities. We are just finishing up a rather lengthy unit that, according to the curriculum (Which, by the way, was last updated in 1999. Really.) is on The Holocaust. In actuality, it is about the concepts of dehumanization and compliance and how those are essential factors in all genocides throughout history. In years past, the trajectory has gone something like:

• Holocaust unit –> U.S. lack of response –>Rwanda –> World’s lack of response –> Darfur –> World’s lack of response
• Ultimately this raised numerous philosophical and moral questions about human nature and why we never intervene.
• The students were obviously outraged and wanted to do something
• A few years back we made documentaries in groups and posted them to our district-hosted edublog site (admittedly not the best design or most user friendly – and it was before I had a creative commons conscious, apologies). This was great in that the kids were engaged and created work for the World to view, which it did. We had something like 700 visits from all over the World. Small numbers for certain, but we didn’t really promote the site. Nonetheless, the kids were engaged in meaningful authentic education.

This brings me to the present. I scrapped that assignment last year because of some personal reasons and additionally, the more I hammered home the Darfur thing in light of other news coming out of the region, the more I became one of those opportunistic blowhards that was content swimming in the echo chamber of “never again.”

I want to take a new path. It occurred to me that it was easy for my students to want to do projects about people in far away lands suffering in a way that they (my students) could never imagine. The reality of the people in Darfur was so removed from my students that it gave them an easy way out. What I mean is that my students were clearly not the perpetrators in the situation and neither could they claim to be compliant. We were making videos to educate the World, after all. That is too easy. The major theme in my Holocaust/genocide unit is that the essential factor is dehumanization. If there is no single group of people on the Earth that are born killers, and if you need many killers for genocide to happen, then killers need to be made. Scholars have studied a long time about what makes otherwise good people commit acts of evil. I don’t expect my 8th graders to solve that. What I do want to do is focus on the one thing that connects their world with that of the perpetrators: dehumanization, compliance and a sense of removal from responsibility. This lends itself to what I want to do with the rest of the year. I want the kids to create a site that deals with the concepts listed above. Most of us have dehumanized someone at some point in our lives, we have stood by compliant as others did the dehumanizing, and at age 14 we were right in the thick of it. Add “cyber bullying” to the mix and we have ourselves one heck of a relevant topic that hits close to home. None of my students have ever razed a village, but they all have participated in dehumanizing someone or stood by silent as they witnessed it happening. This will cause discomfort in place of the self-righteousness that frequently surfaced when making videos about dangerous situations in developing countries from the comfort of our suburban school.

Here is my problem, I am struggling with how to hold my students accountable in a non-traditional manner. The videos we made two years ago were still kind of cookie cutter-ish. I made them fit my arbitrary criteria for grading purposes. I don’t want to do that this time around. I want to be as organic as possible, yet I know that not everyone will step up to the plate. What do I do about them? How do I please parents and administrators that expect grades? How can I have it both ways? I would really appreciate feedback/ideas.

Shifting Priorities

When I was an undergrad at Keene State College I vividly remember sitting in my ESEC320 (social studies methods) class doing an assignment that included something to the effect of projecting where you wanted to be professionally within five years. The professor in this class was one of the select few teachers in my life who inspired me by simply “doing it right.” It seems, upon reflection, that most of my inspiration to do what I do came from teachers who, I felt, were doing it wrong. I wanted to become a teacher to balance out the cosmos – being good at what I do because I had learned what not to do from them. That is a different post for another time. The more I try to recall this assignment that I was doing way back in the fall semester of 2000, the more I realize that I don’t vividly recall it so much as I remember one certain aspect of it. I remember thinking a reasonable goal for myself was to be named Time Magazine’s Teacher of The Year within five years of getting my first job teaching. I cringe at the cockiness of my younger, more ignorant self. However, I must admit that my narcissistic goal never really went away.

I started at Pawcatuck Middle School in 2004 as the 8th grade social studies teacher. It was my second year as a professional, but in my eyes it was a fresh start. The year before (03-04) I taught high school special education in a neighboring town. It was one of the worst experiences of my life for numerous reasons (the least of which were the students, for what its worth . . . I still am in contact with several of them). Pawcatuck was a new start. With this new start I renewed my Teacher of The Year goal in my head. It became an added extrinsic motivation. I was always intrinsically motivated to be a good teacher, and for whatever selfish flaw in human nature, I thought being Teacher of The Year would be my validation. To be clear, I did not wake up each day and think “I want that title, so I will put the extra work into my lessons and I will artificially create bonds with students simply to obtain this title.” But I would be lying if I said it wasn’t sometimes the extra push to keep going. Then things began to change. A sense of professionalism began to grow inside me. The desire for trophies and titles subsided. Soon after things really began to change. I discovered Twitter.

Twitter has helped me to find people who have pushed me into a whole new realm of thinking. I still have a hard time using the term PLN in reference to my network, because to me that implies a collaborative effort and, to date, I have consumed from the trough of knowledge much more than I have contributed, all banal things aside. It is hard not to see Twitter as a modern-day/grown up/professional card shop. When I was a kid I half heartedly collected baseball and basketball cards. I would save money from my paper route and go down to the local card shop and buy packs of cards (usually “skybox”, which in hindsight were the ugliest things imaginable. Picture the artificial laser background option for school photos in the early 90′s and add a superimposed poorly photoshopped player on top, devoid of any context).

so ugly

Obviously the great players of the moment were highly sought after and then placed either in the sleeves of protective binders or in the individual hard plastic cases, either way to be shown off. My friends and I would then gather to discuss who “we had.” There are some connections to Twitter here, in that for a while it was all about “who I followed.” I would look at my sidebar at the avatars and feel like I was cool because I “had” some important educational technology guru. It was my modern-day card binder. Like I said, an online grown-up card shop. Thankfully this thinking has also begun to shift. Sorry for the digression of the real topic, but this is a live-stream-of-consciousness post (that I am mostly writing for myself, anyways).

Returning to my point . . . the individuals I have been learning from online have done more to reboot my professionalism and my philosophy on education than any book I have read in the last several years. Probably because I was not that interested in educational theory and, instead, read content related political science/philosophy type books. Thankfully you all have been keeping up with the pedagogical theory and are able to reduce it to a concise 140 with helpful links. The bottom line is that I have awoken from my slumber and have been recharged and energized and inspired to change. Through you all I have seen where it is I want to be and what I really need to be doing in my classroom. I am constantly measuring myself against your tweets. I feel that I have a lot of room to grow. I call my own practices into question much more. I have always been a self-doubter, which in my opinion can be a very good attribute, and connecting with other educators who are doing amazing things has only served to enhance that doubt in myself. Finding the “doubting balance” is key, though. Too much doubt is paralyzing and counterproductive.

At this exact moment in my career, to use a poor sailing regatta analogy, I have rounded the first bouy and feel as if I am moving downwind with a healthy dose of doubt in my sails. I can see where I want to be and where I need to be and I know the route I will use to get there. But I am not yet there. And then the winds shift. Yesterday I was nominated for Teacher of The Year in my district. I was called into the lunchroom during 8th grade lunch and the committee made the announcement in front of all of my students. I was thoroughly embarrassed because, I frankly feel that I do not deserve it. The goal I had set for myself upon the start of my career became attainable (it is my 6th year) after I made up my mind that I no longer wanted it. I feel that I may have potential for the title a few years from now, when I am putting into practice the pedagogical beliefs I hold now. But to receive the nomination now, based on potential alone, is very much like Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize so early in his term. I voted for him and generally support him, but still question the wisdom of that decision. I don’t want to be considered for Teacher of The Year based on potential and theory. I have two weeks to turn in my paperwork to be considered for candidacy. I am unsure if I will. Life sure is funny that way, huh?

Exactly What I Needed to Hear . . .

I am still unsure how I got to TEDxNYED. I am so miniscule on the ed/tech scene that I am practically nonexistent. I joined Twitter several months ago and prior to this event was following a mere 40 or so people, with about 25 following me in return. I’m still learning the rules. It was only a few weeks ago (after the confirmation email) that I decided to start blogging. The grand total of posts on my blog, including this post, is two.  Indeed, I did not even make the first round of invites. I will proudly acknowledge my 2^nd round draft pick status. It is no wonder that I was asked at one point (in a genuinely curious and amiable manner) how I came to hear of this event? I don’t really recall. I think George Siemens tweeted something about the event way back in November. I was, at that moment, infatuated with TED talks in general (trying to watch one on my iPod touch each night before bed. Who needs books, right?). I had been attempting to embed technology and social media in my 8^th grade social studies classes for a few years now, and in addition, I had just mailed off my application to Uconn’s graduate program in educational technology. The event seemed like a perfect opportunity. I made it my mission to get there. This event was the one thing in my six years of teaching that I really and truly wanted to go to. I bled over my application essay. I felt as if acceptance into this conference would also mean acceptance into the “club”. As much as I try to be a beacon of reason for my 8^th grade students in their battles for acceptance with their peers, in their desire to place themselves where they want to be on the social scale; as much as I play the wise sage that tells them seeking acceptance should not be their true aim, I suppose that they have rubbed off on me. Or perhaps I am still an 8^th grader under the surface. Either way, when all was said and done, I think I took more away from this conference than I had intended.

I could write about the virtues of each of the speakers and throw their now oft-quoted sound bites in the “echo chamber-ber-ber-ber” and place that mixture in the oven, which, just for kicks, might end up looking something like this:

We can donate our skills as we try to use the media, which ends up using us in this participatory culture, where overcoming our inner two year old allow conservatives to teach liberals a thing or two about remixing. Meanwhile, the falling cost of finding each other allows us to do what we do best, and link to the rest. If this method is used to connect optimists then we are one step ahead in our preparation for the vital combat for lucidity, where perfect order battles imprecise chaos over the critical mass content we must come to grips with in order to be less helpful as we allow ourselves to be transformed and thereby letting us transform our students.

Amazingly a few parts of that linked together quite nicely. Well, they at least sounded like they did. Thankfully this is not what I took away from the conference.

My biggest takeaway was not a sound bite or a moment of illumination, although there were plenty of those to go around. I actually took away no content that I did not already believe prior to my arrival. Ultimately, I was able to build a framework in which to better understand or articulate my pre-existing beliefs. Even that, however, was minor in comparison with my ultimate discovery.

People are people. Presenters, curators, organizers, prolific bloggers, and attendees with astronomical twitter followers are all people just like me*. They are all people who are concerned primarily with the human beings we are in charge of preparing for the exponentially changing world. Having first hand access to such people, to rub shoulders with them, has given me the confidence to return to my school with a brand new sense of purpose, not only for my own classroom, but also for my school’s (and dare I say, district’s?) direction. Idealistic? Sure. But it has been two weeks now and I am still feeling the same way. I suppose that it is only idealistic if I ever get jaded or lose interest in the battle. Therein lies another shift in my thinking that occurred as a result of TEDxNYED.

If words matter as much as David Jakes claims, then even the word “battle” implies animosity and actions that bring about casualties. Who are these casualties? Are they fellow faculty in opposition to our shift in educational vision? More often than not, the casualties of this battle end up being the very people we intend to “save”, be it fellow educators or, more perilously, students (The irony of the parallels here between theoretical pedagogical battles and actual gun firing battles is not insignificant). I will no longer frame reform as a battle in which I am trying to be a crusader for the cause. That simply puts unwanted emphasis on reform as a struggle. If this is truly a movement to “win the hearts and minds” of peers less inclined to embrace technology and the new media as the relevant mediums that they are, then putting on the war paint will not be the most effective method. It suddenly seems clear to me that one of the talks from TEDxNYED that I considered a throwaway at the time, might instead have had one of the biggest impacts on me. Gina Bianchini’s discussion of connecting optimists has apparently had more of an impact on me than I initially thought. Sitting there, I was unimpressed with the content of the talk. Only now (as I write this) am I understanding that deep down it is optimism that is driving my new direction; and collective optimism, at that. We can do this is so much better as a mantra than I will fight you until you give in and do this.

Pretty much all of the talks that day were thought provoking. Some more than others, but that is what is to be expected. I tried very hard to comprehend both Dan Cohen and George Siemens, but simply felt that their intellectual prowess dwarfed my own. I tried, but ultimately failed. Lessig and Jarvis were entertaining, and I was so spellbound that I took zero notes during their presentations. In fact, I recall reading a few things that dubbed them the unofficial headliners. I disagree. When all was said and done, I am not sure if I took anything practical away from their talks.  Mike Wesch’s cautionary tale of how emerging technologies ultimately change us was the most riveting philosophically. His talk was probably the one that gave me the most challenging tidbits to roll around in my brain. It was cognitive dissonance to the max. I loved the “brain hurt” feeling. However, in terms of practical application for me, the headliners were Dan Meyer and Chris Lehmann (coincidence that they were the last two speakers?).

I hate math. Always have. Maybe it was bad teaching. Maybe it was my diagnosed learning disability. I wish I loved it. I am envious of mathematical minds. As much as Dan Meyer is a math teacher, and his talk was about math . . . it wasn’t. I saw Dan’s talk as proof that anything in the classroom can be made applicable to life. If, in 18 minutes, he was able to convince me that my most hated subject was applicable to real life, then I can make sure that my subject, which I a passionate about can be made applicable to my students. Interestingly enough, when I approached him at the post-event and had a 30 second conversation in which I expressed how much I enjoyed his talk, he asked if I was a math teacher and seemed perplexed when I said that I teach social studies. I never did figure out why.

Chris Lehmann was both passionate and inspiring. He was able to articulate much of what I intrinsically believe about the role of education. While some people might criticize this as preaching to the choir, perhaps sometimes that is needed. Not to get all hokey in the analogy department, but I found this similar to the Oracle telling Neo exactly what he needed to hear. I am in no way saying I am akin to Neo. Really. I am not. The fact that the Oracle also told neo that he was not what everyone thought him to be is not really my connection with this analogy, either. It is more about the fact that he heard whatever it was he needed to hear in order to do “his job” better. So . . . if I returned to my job with a bit more confidence in myself because I heard someone say the things I have believed but never articulated, and that person was standing in a spotlight on a stage talking to a packed house and thousands more via livestream, and even though the format in which he spoke has been dragged over the coals (by fellow presenters earlier in the day and in the twitterverse/blogsphere), the fact that I experienced it live alongside fellow members of the choir, made it exactly what I needed to hear. Sure, Jarvis had the sound bites that were both shocking and witty and therefore memorable (F%#K the SAT’s, life is beta) but Chris Lehmann’s were applicable. I love the idea of aiming for good citizens first and getting good workers as a result, instead of simply aiming for good workers and having hollow citizens as a result. I am going to live the idea of making my classroom the real world and doing away with the dangerous mindset that is all too prevalent in educational systems that the “real world” is some tangible thing that students will enter sometime in the month of June after 13 years of preparation (K-12). The real world is now. It is here. It lives in room 213 of Pawcatuck Middle School just as much as it lives everywhere outside of that room.

If we as teachers can’t unlearn the ways of education built for the industrial age, and relearn our roles for the post-industrial era, then we will repeatedly fail the students (humans) in our charge. Failure is only good when you learn from it and use it as a springboard to success. Are we doing that in education? A reoccurring theme that I have heard many times before TEDxNYED, and it was echoed here as well, is the question of the educator’s role in the era of Google, etc., and now the rise of mobile Google, etc. as well. Lehman answered this beautifully. We might not be the conduits of information as teachers had been in the past. We are not the monopolies of knowledge. In the era of on demand learning and fact gathering, we can still impart one thing. Wisdom. The question I have is: how much wisdom can we truly impart if we continue to, as Marshall McLuhan said, view the present in a rearview mirror, marching backwards into the future?

*Qualifying my “people are people” statement: I arrived in NYC knowing no one in person and only a handful of people (2) that I had conversed with via twitter enough times for me to feel strangely comfortable speaking to them in person, Ben Wildeboer and Meredith Stewart. However, I walked into the Friday night pre-event totally alone and unsure of what to expect. Upon entering the Dublin House and making my way to the back, I encountered a group of people having a conversation right in the entrance. I asked if this was the TEDxNYED pre-event, they said yes, so I jumped right in and introduced myself (something I do not do very well). I recall shaking hands with them and asking what they did, because that is what your supposed to do to make small talk with strangers. The responses I got did not register with me until the next morning. “I’m at USC”, replied an older looking man with a rather long white beard. “I’m a Historian at George Mason”, replied a younger looking gentleman whose name was also Dan (same as me, as I remarked to him the way we all do when meeting a fellow name).They asked what I do and why I am at TEDxNYED. I launched into my well rehearsed answer to my application question, but the bottom line is that I teach 8th grade social studies at a rather small public school in southeastern CT. The group seemed fine with that. We kept talking for a bit until I excused my self to go mingle. Uh-huh. I was so embarrassed when I looked at the flickr photostream the next morning and saw . . . the same people I was chatting with the previous evening on stage practicing for the day’s event. I didn’t even know I was speaking with presenters and it didn’t matter to them that I am such a small fish. Throughout the night I met and talked to several of the coordinators of TEDxNYED (Dave Bill, Basil Kolani, and Karen Blumberg) who were all exceedingly down-to-earth genuine people. They helped shatter my country boy perception of city folk. Throughout the day on Saturday I met and spoke with such twitter superstars as Shelley Krause, Sylvia Martinez, and Will Rich ( I think Meredith Stewart probably belongs in this company as well). All with followers in the thousands, and all genuine people. During the trek to 86th street for the post-event I looked up to notice that I was walking with Mike Wesch and George Siemans among others. Although I stayed out of their conversation I stil found it to be an important discovery for me. I was made aware that, as I stated earlier, all of these ed/tech superstar philosophers are people just like me. They know more (or have read more) about certain things, but our hearts are in the same spot. They do not exist on a plane above. This was the most empowering and important thing I took away from TEDxNYED.

Dusting off the “Thinking Cap”

I used to like to think. In my early twenties I filled up pages and pages of a pretentious looking “journal” with my ideas about the things that twenty-something undergrads taking classes on Modernism think about.

Pretentious Journal

You know: Nietzsche, Freud, Baudelaire, T.S. Eliot, all the fun stuff. I have found that I no longer think as much. I have become lazy. Sure, I am still in love with the concept of thinking but when it comes to the act . . .

Ramblings

It occurred to me recently, amid a fury of self-doubt cast upon me by comparing myself to my newfound peers in the twitterverse, that while I am a decent educator, I am far from where I want to be. In the last six years I have become complacent. I have rested upon the fact that I know that I am trying to be a teacher who makes his students think. Early on in my career thinking felt natural because I was doing it on a daily basis. Crafting lessons, synthesizing ideas, and weighing out the pros and cons of an activity were my routine. It was extraordinarily time-consuming. Seven days a week. Naturally, as I got more comfortable with the topics and concepts I was covering, the amount of time I put in to thinking about things began to wane. Additionally, in the past six years I bought a house (5 years), got married (3.5 years), buried my younger brother (2 years), and became a father (5 months). “Thinking” gave way to everyday affairs. I have decided to reintegrate “thinking” into my life.

Which bring me to this blog. The title is a work in progress. It is really hard to figure out how you want to “brand” yourself online. The concept is still new to me, but I recognize the importance. I am going to try to use this blog as a means of forcing myself to reflect upon all aspects of my life. I am going to use it to think. Herein lies my new pretentious journal. This one is a bit less aesthetic, you know, no dried banana leaves as a cover and whatnot, but hopefully the outcome will be the same. The writings in my tactile journal of yore helped me to sort the uncertainty of my early to mid twenties. Perhaps this blog will help me make sense of my thirty-something struggles. The big difference is that no one else has read the writings in my twenty-something journal. I used to re-read them and think they were pretty good, but I suppose I was a bit biased there. This is open to the world for criticism, praise, support, and indifference. To quote my favorite author, “And so it goes . . .”