Tag: The Great Handshake

Slings, arrows and whatevs.

(They don’t think I know a b***load about the Gospels but I dooooo)

Another great post from The Great Handshake: Moral High Ground and Blowhard Bloggers.

Since someone had the brave honesty to tell me I was being condescending the other day, I will take this feedback to heart and try to change. However, from what I read and think about daily, many of us teachers only have our egos to protect us from the onslaught of negativity. It’s thin protection, and tears easily. We boost ourselves by mumbling our own mantras of worth and value in students’ lives with near immeasurable moments we continuously capture. Some, like me, use the blogging platform to do this, some social media. We promote ourselves, our moments, and we are the star of the show.

And there is not a dang thing wrong with that.

We need to be our own champions: however, I will make note of Great Handshake’s advice and do my utmost to veer away from blowhard-ery. My colleague had a point: I can be condescending at times.  It was the right thing to say, and in no way offensive. And if we don’t reflect on who agrees with us and who doesn’t, then we stay stuck, which may lead to apathy, a sour grapes rigidity. Boredom and apathy make an interesting emotional team: they mire and muck motion.

Consider, however, they are the signs of poor health: they are the signals we, teachers and students, simply need to rest. We don’t have to answer every question, or respond to every remark.

Just–rest.

When we rest, enjoy the mediocre and mundane, then we can go back to our scholarly research and curation, and share with others. Or not. When I started this blog I added a disclaimer – I just write this for myself, and if others get something out of it, bonus! Writing is a selfish act, like art, that becomes open to public interpretation.

Today I can’t rest, but I did allow myself this time to write and think. And then I can get back to ideas like these:

What’s Working In the Classroom (some ideas I want to keep):

I drew daily inspiration from the teachers I met. Many were in tears over policies with catchy names and disastrous consequences, but their dedication was a constant. Across America, teachers in ordinary circumstances are breaking the standardized mold. They cast aside worksheets, textbooks, lectures, and test preparation in favor of empowering students to collaborate, solve real-world problems, and discover their strengths and interests.

The specifics of these remarkable classrooms were all over the map: kindergartners in Fort Wayne, Ind., designing robots; elementary students in Dunbar, W.Va., running the school’s information-technology help desk; middle schoolers in Fargo, N.D., producing documentaries about local historic buildings; high school students in Albuquerque, N.M., creating social-media campaigns for the city’s soccer team.

 

 

 

Disrupting Boredom.

I’m bored.

And that’s a good thing.

Because creative folks like me (and I believe we’re all creative) shake things up when we’re bored. (We sometimes get in trouble, but if we do too much cost-benefit analysis  we will never break the cycle.)

This past week, the week after break, I gave my students space and time to work, clean up assignments, and it’s working well. But I couldn’t help feeling something was missing. It’s tough to look at curriculum I created, like a painting or sketch, and know it’s not done, it’s not good enough, and it needs more. I have little guidance, or opportunity for dialogue, and am professionally isolated this year. (More about that when I analyze Call-Out Culture, losing my tribe, and being sent to the metaphorical solo igloo.) Rest in peace, Jean Briggs. I feel you. It’s sure darn cold and lonely when you’re iced out of the group.

And very timely, the gentlemen at The Great Handshake wrote the essay I needed:

The Great Handshake, “Disrupting April” —

My co-blogger Adam always says that great teachers are really just about making moments. Those kind of moments form memories by disrupting the normal blur of the school day, and those memories connect to some kind of learning for the students in our classrooms. Unfortunately, we often forget the great gift of memorable moments. We tend to let each day pass without noticing, and we fall victims to the seduction of forgetting. It seems kind of nice not to think, but before we have taken notice we are bored and miserable.

Those words, ‘memorable moments.’ There are a hundred of them every day. The student who says, “I love coming to this class!” with no sarcasm or cynicism, the ELL student who wants to keep writing on the Digital Dogs post, the colleague who says a kind word, or the young thinker who uses the digital tools to create something new and solid, and supports my instructional efforts.

The best teachers and educators recognize this tendency that we all have to slide through our days without any meta-cognition, and they become masters of disruption. They have the ability to build fences, around huge spaces where kids can feel secure and creative, and then within that space, they disrupt, ignite and engage.

The thing is–and I am not alone–we teachers live in fear so we falter, freeze and fail. Our nature as educators is to meet and exceed standards: and if those standards are subjective and punitive, we stumble Sisypheanally up a mind-numbing hill. If we are to empower and engage our students, we must look to our own engagement and empowerment first.

What this looks like may not fit into a subjective checklist. It is now my mental challenge to get over that, get beyond it, and not allow it to stifle this process.

Thank you for the reminder, gentlemen.