The Most Important Lesson

Nov 11 What is the most important ‘lesson’ you want to teach your students?

You are lovable and capable.

The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Pep Assembly

Nov 10 Being grateful for humor - share a story about a time in career where humor played a part.

I like to say "bad travel makes good stories." When I find myself in Beijing, whispering "I'm going to die" while riding on the back of a motorcycle as the driver jumps the curb to scoot around slow traffic, or while watching 4-inch centipedes scurry across the ceiling as I try to fall asleep on my cardboard mat on Wotje Atoll, I remind myself I'll have stories to tell.

I practice the same mindset on bad teaching days. Reframing the experience as a story helps me process disaster into...less than disaster.

From late August:

I am the one-woman engine behind #AHSfuel, a de-feminized pep club of sorts. I get paid a whopping $900 a year, which comes to about $25 a week for hosting a Monday-morning meeting and helping kids organize the pep bus (which was cancelled this week when only 14 kids signed up), distribute Trojan tattoos (during A lunch; the assigned kids forgot during B lunch), and dream up the student-participation games for pep rallies. 

Yesterday was our first rally of the year. I spent the day praising M for her great organization of our game, which involved four kids from each grade (who then each chose four partners) for a total of 8 people per grade. This meant we had 32 participants out on the gym floor. 

Unfortunately, when L grabbed the mic, she called for "everyone we asked to be in the game" to come down. Many confused freshmen (whom I'd invited to be part of a different ball-tossing game that opened the assembly) came onto the floor and huddled around me like...confused freshmen. 

Meanwhile a dozen bossy seniors (mix of AHSfuel members and my journalism editors, who think they deserve to be front and center of everything--a mindset I've too often foolishly encouraged) started the cat-herding process of directing half the freshmen/sophomores/juniors/seniors to the north side of the gym, and the other half to the south side. 

A major argument ensued over whether we could roll up the cheerleaders' mats in the middle of where we needed to push the scooters for the game (answer, no). Students began randomly tying blindfolds on each other (blindfolds were part of the game; the random part wasn't). For some reason the scooters were in the far corner of the gym and only Ryan (WHERE'S RYAN?!) knew where they were. 

I think we only ran around like this for about five minutes, but I might be airbrushing the memory so I can forgive myself. It was a disaster. I almost grabbed the mic and said "FORGET IT. WE'LL TRY AGAIN NEXT WEEK" (read: NEVER). 

What I did was grab the mic and said "On your marks, get set..." to which the sophomores and juniors screamed "NOT YET!" I paused, reminded everyone that the winners had the honor of dousing the principal and vice principal in the ALS icebucket challenge...and tried (again) to start the race.

The scooter race itself took about 2 minutes, which gave the band exactly 30 seconds to play our 45-second fight song before the kids' dismissal. I really felt bad. Bad. As in I went to my room and sat in the dark for about 20 minutes. I didn't cry; I just tried to think about other things. I then bumped softly against the pep rally thought, then circled around it, and bumped it gently again, trying to let myself think about it and manage the churning chagrin in my belly. 

The deal is this: disorganization is the biggest gorilla on my back. I work hard to keep it from peering over my shoulder and grinning maniacally at everyone who looks at me. The pep assembly was a very public demonstration of me at my disorganized, bumbling worst. But writing about it helps me remember these things:

1) No one NO ONE cares about pep assemblies.

2) Haters gonna hate. I'm a forceful (and for the most part quite competent) presence in the school. I gave my critics something to gnaw on for a time. That's okay. 

3) "Happy are they that hear their detractions and can put them to mending." --William Shakespeare

4) I'm okay.

Teaching Humor in Pictures:

Fabulous Liz Huggins and me as Prom emcees 2014. 

Senior paint fight 2013

Maria Oltmans, Yours Truly, Liz Huggins
Shakespeare on the Green 2013

Wotje Atoll 2012

#AHSpositive

Nov 9 What is one way you could develop the Attitude of Gratitude in your classroom or school? Try it out and let us know how it went in a couple of weeks.

A dear colleague introduced the hashtag #AHSpositive a couple of years ago. Teachers and students both use it to highlight events ranging from a good test score to a state-placing athletic performance. A couple of weeks ago my journalists decided to spiff up the hall by updating the bulletin board. They printed off dozens of screen-shots of #AHSpositive tweets. 

I have seen many students pause to read the tweets. For the next two weeks, I will make it a point to contribute an #AHSpositive from my classroom. I'll report out on the 23rd.

Moments I Teach For

Nov 8 Write about a memorable moment in the classroom and how it reminded you about why you love what you do.

From Wikipedia:

In its most simple and basic form, a moment is the product of the distance to some point, raised to some power, multiplied by some physical quantity such as the force, charge, etc. at that point:

,

where  is the physical quantity such as a force applied at a point, or a point charge, or a point mass, etc.

In the classroom a Moment might look like this:

The distance from ignorance to understanding,

raised to the power of the collective, 

multiplied by some electrical charge.

In other words:

The flash of a new idea, 

experienced exponentially,

zapped with Ah-ha!  

And that's practically Haiku:

Her small voice quivered

Bud of nebulous insight.

In unison: YES!

Those are the Moments I teach for.

Teaching 2.0

Nov 7 What new learning has inspired you in your career?

In 1989, after five years of teaching, I took a 14-year break, during which I lived out my Wendy fantasy:  

"Oh, really next I think I'll have
     Gay windows all about,
     With roses peeping in, you know,
     And babies peeping out."  --J.M. Barrie

In truth, I spent untold mothering hours at the computer, writing, while my benignly neglected babies smeared the windows with their sticky faces, and weeds choked out any rose bushes.  

But at that computer I learned word-processing, and it transformed my writing process. When I 

returned to the classroom in 2003 (the year MySpace, Skype, and the iTunes store came to be), I could not imagine asking students to compose without the capabilities to move text around, cut and paste, delete and un-do.  

Tech was happening, and as a new (again) teacher, I was poised to become a scout on the frontier. With the support of a generous, visionary IT, I embraced the role with stunning naïveté. I do believe my greatest assets in learning tech have been my tolerance for unprecedented levels of confusion and the speed at which I forgive and forget my mistakes.

The experimenting mindset required to trailblaze tech filters into other aspects teaching as well. My classroom is increasingly student-centered and student-directed, which inspires a new verse to my song: 

"Oh, really next I think I'll have
     Computers all about,
     With students owning what they learn,
     And me just hanging out."

My sweet babies, ages 3-12, 1997.

Right Words

Nov 6 Share a quote or verse that has inspired you and tell us why.

From The Paris Review, Spring 1958
Ernest Hemingway, The Art of Fiction No. 21

Interviewed by George Plimpton

The above Plimpton-Hemingway exchange is one of my favorites. It captures the essence of the writer's struggle.

I come back to this core of purpose time and again. The goal is always to get the words as close to "right" as we can.


And this reminds me of a line from "Wrist Wrestling Father," a poem by Orval Lund:

In distilling my purpose as a writing teacher, I come down to this: I want students to push toward the satisfaction of finding right words, yet to live in peace with that goal's elusiveness. 

Good Reading

Nov 5 What are your strengths? Which are you most grateful for?

As soon as I'm done with this blog post, I get to finish the last 40 pages of Falling Into Place, by Amy Zhang. After that, my bedtime book is Philip Roth's American Pastoral. On Sunday I will spend the evening at the Des Moines Public Library, attending my version of a rock concert: a Billy Collins poetry reading.

I'm a good reader. I'm not especially fast, but I read with my antennae out, feeling the vibrations of a well-crafted phrase, the tingle of an allusion, the tremor of a recurring motif. My developed ability to read richly makes me envious of those who have similarly developed appreciations for music or art or sports or finance....

And that keeps me humble. I'm not a good reader because I am brilliant, any more than I'm stupid because I can only appreciate classical music superficially.

My strengths were not--like dimples or good hair--bestowed by the fickle pot-bellied gods; rather, they are developed, nurtured skills. I was lucky to have parents who read voraciously--to themselves, to their children, to each other. My earliest memories are of stories.

I then spent years reading Seventeen Magazine and steamy fiction, and filling spiral notebooks with such poetic lines as "I hate my mother" and "Joe Ruge is so cool." I had no idea I was building the foundation of literary appreciation, but I was.

At some point I discovered that while it felt good to pour out my thoughts onto a page, it felt even better to find word combinations and rhythms to make those thoughts ripple and swirl. And the more I read, the more I sensed how writers were tugging (or failing to tug) me into their thoughts.

I can't calculate the hours I've spent at a keyboard or reading. I'm pretty sure if I'd put that time into tightrope walking, I'd be living out my circus fantasy by now. If I'd spent those hours playing the piano, I'd be past the Level 4 books I've been stuck at since eighth grade.

The upshot is this: what we do becomes who we are. The things I'm best at are things I've invested my time doing. And now, friends, I have some books waiting....