Dear younger Self, young Woman, “Babygirl,” these four things remember always:
Pray.
You are from women who prayed: Louvenia who blessed you before you were you. Bessie Mae who sang music into your bones. Eddie Carol who wove her work ethic into your heart. Prayer kept them. It will keep you, Babygirl. Solid. Whole. Unshakeable.
Practice.
You are from women of the pen: Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, Gloria Naylor, Lorraine Hansberry, and Virginia Hamilton who kept you reading – who breathed life into your warrior pen that kept you writing. Keep practicing, Babygirl. It will keep you. Focused. Honest. Strong.
Persevere.
You are from women of greens and cornbread: aunts, a mother-in-law, and Sunday school teachers who fed you from the wisdom of their scars, who carved steadfastness into your palate, who showed you how to rise. Keep keeping, Babygirl. It will keep you. Tall. Fierce. Wise.
Play.
You are from girls with pigtails: dancing barefoot in the rain on a sunny day. Hopscotch and Double Dutch and Simon Says and checkers-not-chess gave you charisma. Shootin’ marbles atop the Louisiana soil with girls who were emeralds. They made you. Witty. Spicy. Royal.
Remember always, the women who raised you… to pray, to practice, to persevere, to play.
“I remember when I was in 7th grade, getting ready for my first school dance…” Even if your students were nodding off, sneakily texting a friend, or daydreaming about whatever kids daydream about, the second you interrupt your lesson to tell a story, you will capture their full attention.
Everyone loves stories – and students are always curious about their teachers’ private lives and experiences. Why not write a carefully crafted narrative that aligns with your most challenging lesson concept? Print it out or share it with them in an online journal. Let students read a little about your life, while at the same time, understand how your tough content connects to your real-world experiences.
You teach welding? Tell them about the time when you almost burned your…You teach 3rd grade? Share with them that when you were in 3rd grade you struggled with…You teach math? Tell them how trigonometry ended up being…
Why write when you can just say it verbally? Writing will help your students understand the content in substantial and compelling ways.
Consider these three points:
Your writing will help students learn your content – mostly because YOU are the writer, and you’ll capture their attention. They’ll want to read what you wrote – especially if you give them your personal experience and examples about the content. You will be the expert you want them to read. You will be your own mentor text.
Your students will be more encouraged to write if you write, and writing will help them in the following ways: They will 1) think more about what they’ve read or what you’ve said 2) focus their attention and concentrate to greater degrees 3) improve their communication skills 4) ask good questions and anticipate what a reader wants to know 5) be grounded to the data, research, facts, details, and information 6) review and remember what they’ve learned 7) see issues from multiple perspectives and try to describe and explain them 8) choose what is important and organize it in a way that is clear 9) clarify and condense their thoughts so that they are more apt to remember content 10) understand themselves better because writing unpacks their thinking
Your writing will last forever. Students can reread and ask questions about the content, and embroil themselves in the essential understandings that you want to impart. The wisest teachers taught using stories: Jesus of Nazareth, Socrates, Khalil Gibran, Aesop, Lao Tzu, the Griots, etc. Thankfully, they were written down.
Writing is hard and scary for most people. It’s right up there with public speaking, snakes, and spiders! But as the leaders of your classrooms, your students will respect your courage to be vulnerable with them. Yep.
Writing makes us vulnerable because writing makes us real. Our writing doesn’t have to be beautiful; it just has to authentic…and you know your kids will see right through you if you’re not being real with them. Even if you make up the whole story so that it magically connects to your content (don’t tell me you haven’t verbally done this already) – just tell them that your narrative is a gift of fiction, wrapped with nonfiction intent. 🙂 They’ll love your honesty and respect you even more because you cared enough to write your experience with the content down – so they could know your personal connection to it, remember it, and learn from it.
If you already write for or with your students, share your techniques, strategies, or habits of mind. Let’s continue to build our writing community.
Kamala Markandaya: A novelist
and journalist, who gave us the beautiful novel about a family in rural India, Nectar
in a Sieve, reminded us that words have a life that they breathe into
us – but for some words, we should hold our breath until they pass.
Richard Rodriquez, John Steinbeck,
James Baldwin, Author Miller, and Frank McCourt lived on the wall of my THS classroom
in L-9 alongside a few women, a few of my greatest teachers. Marti Knapp, a THS art teacher who retired a
bit ago, gave her AP art students a summer assignment a few years ago: paint the spirit of these writers so that
they live in plain sight of students who will be learning from their words. They did.
In honor and celebration of Women’s History Month, here are the voices
of the women on that wall that our students should know, a few who taught hundreds
of my students to think and live and be.
“That
is all you can think of: what people will say! One goes from one end of the
world to the other to hear the same story. Does it matter what people
say?” ― Kamala Markandaya, Nectar in a
Sieve
Toni Morrison – A Pulitzer Prize winning author of the novel,
turned movie, Beloved, reminded us that the blank page already contained
everything; we just needed to pick up the pen or press our fingers to the keys.
“Writing is
really a way of thinking – not just feeling but thinking about things that are
disparate, unresolved, mysterious, problematic or just sweet.” – Toni Morrison
Amy Tan
– A proud alumna of San Jose State, musician in a band with Stephen King, and
writer who introduced us to four mothers and daughters that told all of our
stories, reminded us to balance our being.
“Each
person is made of five different elements, she told me. Too much fire and
you had a bad temper…Too little wood and you bent too quickly to listen to
other people’s ideas, unable to stand on your own…Too much water and you flowed
in too many different directions….” ― Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club
Sandra Cisneros – A former teacher at an alternative
high school, MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Grant winner for The
House on Mango Street, and woman who painted her historic house purple
because it was the language of her people, reminded us to be true to ourselves.
“I
always tell my writing students that they need to write as if they were wearing
their pajamas. To write as if they were talking to the one person they wouldn’t
have to get dressed for. That’s their writing voice, and they should write from
that place first.” – Sandra Cisneros
Maxine Hong
Kingston – A
writer who told her family secrets that were our family secrets in The Woman
Warrior, a native of Stockton who taught English and wrote a book
because she had to speak with the voice of her aunt who had no name and speak
with the voice of the immigrant women who spoke with silence, reminded us that if
we lifted our pens to raise our voices and think, it must be because we looked
first so that we could see.
“I
learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room
for paradoxes.”
― Maxine Hong
Kingston, The Woman Warrior
During
Women’s History Month and always, remember to introduce your students to some
of the women who have fed you your food for thought, those who have birthed in
you great ideas, those who have helped you think and live and be.
I usually introduce Black History Month to my students in
August. Then, we research as many other
cultural and ethnic history and heritage months as we can throughout the
year.
I celebrate Black History Month with my kids and for my kids
because I want them use this month to learn about others and about
themselves. Black History Month helps
students think and learn about differentness so that sameness, and ultimately,
oneness becomes more of a probability than possibility.
Brain researcher, Zaretta Hammond’s book, Culturally
Responsive Teaching and the Brain explains the neuroscience behind the
fact that the brain seeks to make connections to what is personally relevant
and meaningful when it processes information for learning. And she argues that what is relevant and
meaningful to individuals is based on their cultural frame of reference. From it, she says they gain perspective that
engages attention, and assists in interpreting and inferring meaning.
Her research posits that we learn from surface culture –
holidays and music and food, the way we dress, etc., and from shallow culture –
unspoken rules that govern the ways we see everyday norms – etiquette for
sneezing in public, personal space, types of language we use in public v.
private, etc. We also learn from deep
culture – what guides our values, ethics, spirituality, and how we view safety
vs. threats. She gives an example that
in one culture, the color red could mean good luck – but in another, it could
mean danger. Hammond says we see and
process information based on our own cultures, so if we are learning through
our deep culture lens, we are only seeing the world with our value system. So, I ask this question, “If what we know about
another group’s culture is limited or just plain wrong, to what extent does
this affect how we learn from and about each other and the world?”
Differentness.
When I began teaching in the Central Valley over 20 years
ago, I quickly realized that I didn’t know my kids and they didn’t know me. We knew each other’s most generic cultural and
ethnic stereotypes, but we didn’t have an academic understanding of culture and
ethnicity that moved too much beyond stereotypes.
In the Bay Area, I taught ELD/SDAIE and Comp. and Lit., (grades
10-12 in the same classroom). My kids
were primarily Hispanic, White, Vietnamese, Black, Chinese, Samoan, and Ethiopian
– and all with similar socioeconomic backgrounds. But unfortunately, I only saw the White kids
as White. I didn’t have a mindset to see
their individual cultures and ethnicities, to see beyond the stereotypes.
And whenever I’d ask the White students what their culture
and ethnicity was, they’d usually say one of three things: “American.”
“…a mixture of __ and __ .” or “I
don’t know.” Black History Month helped
me change this.
The kids were curious about me – and I them. They had made it through 11 or 12 years of
school and had never had an African American teacher. I learned quickly that if I were to garner
the respect of my students and gain their trust and interest, I had to figure
out who they were – and they needed to do the same.
Black history month was how I introduced the spirit of my
culture and ethnicity to them. Their
natural curiosity took over. From there
the real work began: making studying
culture and ethnicity normal rather than monthly.
Sameness.
As educators, in addition to having knowledge about our
content, I believe we would give our students this advice:
Be good citizens of the world.
Know yourself. Love and approve of yourselves. Don’t apologize or have any trepidation for
and about your culture and ethnicity.
Don’t judge or criticize
yourselves. The world’s already got that
covered.
Don’t fear being trapped by cultural
and ethnic stereotypes. Know your
history. Understand the shoulders on
which you stand and the responsibility you owe.
Know your strength.
Helping students heed these pieces of advice as they saw
them take form when studying Black history, helped them take pride in
discovering their authenticity through discovering their own cultures and
ethnicities.
In the twenty one years that my students and I studied the literary
coursework, cultural history and social justice movements within the cultures
and ethnicities always included meaningful texts. Students began, for example, to see that the
immigrant experience through the eyes of Portuguese American author Alfred
Lewis in Los Banos looked much the same as it did through the eyes of Mexican
American author Gary Soto in Fresno, or Chinese American author Maxine Hong
Kingston in Stockton.
They discovered that many other groups had history or
heritage months and that many of the field-trip worthy places to visit were
local. In the course of twenty years, my
BSU (Black Student Union) students, and students who were in my class took the
field-trips below, which I highly recommend.
Museum of the African Diaspora (MOAD)
– San Francisco
The African American Historical and
Cultural Museum of San Joaquin Valley – Fresno
African American Museum and Library –
Oakland
California African American Museum –
Los Angeles
Museum of African American Art – Los
Angeles
Marcus Books – San Francisco
Underground Books – Sacramento
African American Shakespeare Company
– San Francisco
Dance Theater of Harlem – travels to
UC Berkeley annually
Alvin Ailey Dance Theater – travels
to UC Berkeley annually
Allensworth State Park – Earlimart
Various speakers at MJC, CSU
Stanislaus, Merced College, and UC Merced
Among all the usual reasons to celebrate and teach Black
History Month topics, consider that it is also a great way to get students’
brains into the habits of making deep connections that engender learning about
the world, and most important, about themselves.
A Reflection of America in Metaphors and Fragments
Once upon a time in America, I discovered a Japanese philosophy that made me believe Isaiah’s 54th chapter, over and over, when he said that “no weapon formed against [us] would prosper.” Even the weapons we formed against ourselves.
The philosophy was Kintsugi: it proudly, transparently, boldly, illuminated our scars. Kintsugi. It is the beautiful broken porcelain bowl that carries our American Dream. Kintsugi. It is the broken bowl whose tiny pieces are swept up, mixed with melted gold, and poured between the cracks of the large broken spaces. Kintsugi. It is the new, but old bowl with the gold scars shining through it.
Once upon a time in America, I discovered an American philosopher that made me believe in Jehovah-Rapha, the God who heals. Even the people who don’t want to heal and don’t want us to heal. The philosopher was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: he proudly, transparently, boldly, illuminated our scars. King. He is the Dreamer in the eye of my student Dreamers who know that they have a right to the Dream that is America, the Dream that has not been broken, only bent, the Dream that kept all of us believing that we should be judged the way Dr. King said we should be: by the “content of our character” not the color of our skin or the accents of our words. King. He is the old, but new Dreamer with the heart of gold that still brings light to America’s dark places.
Once upon a time in America, I discovered that we were a tossed salad, not a melting pot. That we live in the fractured, but not broken, Kintsugi bowl, dreaming the Dream of Dr. King, and healing the warrior within each of us. And that on Dr. King’s day, we pause long enough to see our salad selves. Our multiple ingredients. Our multiple flavors. Each salad fixin’ living independently, uniquely, individually, and distinctly in the Kintsugi bowl. We are together, adding our own talents to create a beautiful explosion of flavor in the mouths of all who see us from foreign soils and partake – and all who see us from foreign soils and long to partake.
Once upon a time in America, I discovered a beautiful song that is America. Dr. King added his notes to the melody. We, too, add ours. Sometimes we make music. Sometimes we make noise. But at all times, all of us add our notes: whether sound or silence, we all play the song. America the beautiful – always beautiful because we have Kintsugi. America the beautiful – always beautiful because we have Rapha. America the beautiful – always beautiful because we still have Dr. King, on his day, reminding us that the notes we play, along with the moments of silence we strategically place on the scale, determine whether we make music or whether we make noise. Dr. King, Rapha, and Kintsugi all remind us that the amount of work in creating the song, carving the Dream, living together in the salad bowl, whether we accept it or not, is always the same.
Teacher: “Write a paragraph that describes what you did this summer.”
Student: “How many sentences do I need?”
Teacher: “You need as many as it takes to give me a full idea of what you did this summer.”
Student: “Okay. One sentence will do. I didn’t do anything this summer.”
I’m sure you’ve heard this or something similar to it a zillion times. Part of what makes writing hard is that the blank page has an evil stare. It will stare back at us for however long it takes to activate our thinking or intimidate us into not thinking. Teaching writing is teaching thinking…and because there are multiple types of thinking (critical thinking, creative thinking, analytical thinking, etc.) and multiple purposes for thinking (thinking to solve a problem, explore an idea, make a decision, etc.), writing is hard. Of the myriad ways we teach students to think in each of our disciplines, one of the best thinking tools we can teach is the art of questioning. Tapping into students’ natural curiosity will help them write in deep and compelling ways – or at least find a way out of their writers’ block.
Two Very Helpful Resources for Getting Something on the Page – and Making it Substantial
#1 Essential Questions: Opening Doors to Student Understanding – Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins
Essential Question:Is there ever a “just” war? Not Essential Question: What key event sparked World War I? Essential Question: How strong is the scientific evidence? Not Essential Question: What is a variable in scientific investigations? Essential Question:What is the impact of rest and inactivity on the human mind, body, and spirit? Not Essential Question: What did you do this summer? This book helps teachers design questions that speak to the crux of important issues in each discipline. It’s definitely a book you want on your shelf.
#2 Make Just Once Change: Teach Students to Ask their Own Questions – Dan Rothstein and Susana Luz
This book provides a step-by-step strategy for helping students design good questions based on a teacher-generated question focus (QF). The question focus should NOT be a question. The purpose is to have students ask questions based on the QF. Design the QF based on your lesson objective or essential question. The QF can be a visual or audio snippet or just a short statement.
Question Focus (never a question): A boring, inactive summer.Possible Student-Generated Questions: What makes summers boring? What does it mean to be inactive? What does boring mean? What does it look like when I’m bored? If my summer was boring, how did I contribute to it? Why didn’t I do anything this summer? Whose responsibility is it to entertain me? What does it mean to be entertained? Is it even possible to do nothing during an entire summer? How do I know? What does doing nothing look like? What didn’t I do?
I’m sure you see where this is going. If we ask good questions and teach students to ask their own good questions, we have a fighting chance at helping students fend off the blank page’s evil stare.
Last week was my dad’s birthday…and you probably enthusiastically do not care, right? And why should you? What does this have to do with you? How can you use this information? What in the world was my purpose for telling you this?
The question of purpose for writing is the most important question a writer must ask before putting pen to pad, fingers to keys. My purpose here is to discuss one aspect of explanatory writing – and to give a few easy formative assessment tips that will gauge your students’ progress without making your grading life crazy.
You gave your pithy World War II mini-lecture: give students 3-5 minutes to summarize the lecture and explain the main points. Walk the room as they write to ensure pens are moving or keyboards are clacking…(in the case of keyboards, you might tell them that you’ll ask random writers to post their summaries to the class’s electronic journal). Ask them to highlight the main ideas – then, share with two seat mates to compare and clarify notes. Finally, go whole class. Get volunteers and non-volunteers to share what they learned. Clear up misunderstandings as you go.
You showed the 20 min. video excerpt: give students a Give One/Get One graphic organizer(pick one of the zillion templates online, or shoot me an email me if you want one of mine). Give students 3-5 minutes to write (on the left side of the organizer) what they learned from the video. Then ask them to walk the room and speak to students they rarely, if ever, talk to – to discuss the points they wrote. If they learned something new, they should write what they learned on the right side of the organizer, giving credit to the student they learned from. Then, move on to (maybe two different students). Walk the room to ensure that students are discussing the material, rather than merely exchanging papers and copying notes. Listen to their clarifying conversations. Then, go whole class to ensure they got it.
You read to them or assign the reading: give students 3-5 minutes to write one question and one comment. The question can be a higher order thinking question that could have multiple answers, or it could be a clarifying question where the answer is right there on the page, but wasn’t understood. Depending on your purpose, ask students to comment by agreeing, disagreeing, explaining, analyzing, evaluating, observing, synthesizing their ideas with the writer’s ideas, or connecting the reading to personal experiences, to another text, or to current events in the world. Give them time to partner share. Then, take the discussion whole class.
These writing-to-learn activities are interchangeable, can be used in any content-area, and can be modified to support younger students by asking them to write down the key words or phrases they remember from a mini-lecture, video, or reading. They can serve as a quick check for understanding – or can take the whole period, depending on your purpose. Either way, they are a good way to engender frequent, but short bouts with writing that will garner deeper understandings for your students – especially when your content or topic might be dense and complex.
If you have other writing-to-learn strategies, please share – so that we build our writing community.
…oh, and my dad, a laborer, and my first writing teacher, who wrote letters for his Navy buddies, thank-you notes to his friends, and poetry in the bathroom of our one-bathroom house, would have been 91.
Link
On Music vs. Noise:
Before we can fully embrace sameness, and ultimately oneness, we must choose a sensory experience with differentness. With both hands, we must touch the walls of the unfamiliar space, walk in the tightness of the new shoes, and hear the heartbeat of another…and the music of the “other.” If we look hard enough at differentness, if we let it seep into our collective consciousness, if we identify, analyze, and understand differentness, we eventually see sameness – even if we dislike the sameness we see. Your blues don’t sound like mine — except when it does. And…sameness (and ultimately oneness) can only happen if differentness stands tall – as its authentic self – with its authentic sound. Diversity is R&B and classical and gospel and metal and hip hop and jazz and rock and country and pop and blues and punk and funk in motion, isn’t it? A beautiful improvisation that, if we are mature enough, pushes us toward critical thinking so that we can hold divergent views in our minds and still navigate the same space in harmony, possibly agreeing to disagree, but living peacefully within the paradox, nonetheless.
Isn’t this how beautiful music works? You play a note; I play a different note; somebody plays loudly; someone else plays softly; and another is at rest, counting beats until it’s time to add more sound. At rest. Silent. Without silence, music cannot exist.
Beautiful music is harmonious. Harmony is challenging. It takes differentness and sameness operating in the same space, working together, creating beauty out of chaos. Different notes. Different timings and speeds – allegro and andante. Different levels of sounds – loud and soft. And those rests. Those silent pauses that tell Differentness when to breathe, when to slow down, when to stop so that Sameness can play its notes.
Sameness is one sound. Differentness is another. The notes come together in balance. In the key of C or another. The same key on the staff. Then otherness comes. Harmony. Different notes and different chords in the same key to birth a whole new sound. Each note, being its authentic self – each note working together to find its way within the grand design to find its way to harmony, to oneness. We can make harmonious music or cacophonous noise; it’s all in the mindset; it’s all in how hard we’re willing to work for it.
On Working for Harmony in the Classroom
I teach diversity daily. Every good teacher does. We help the diverse students in our classrooms own and hone their authentic voices and help them carve out, figure out, the value in the content of their voices. We help them speak their truths, treating everyone with kindness, dignity, and respect. They learn to speak their beliefs, attitudes, thoughts, feelings, emotions, and values without devaluing, marginalizing, and erasing other voices.
This is hard. Striving for harmony is hard. A zillion components go into the mix, enter the conversation about how to do it. Of the many methods, here are mine:
My Lesson Plan Food for Thought
Give students provocative texts to “read” (include video excerpts, visuals, and audios) regarding the diversity concept you want to engage. Whatever topic is current in the news is a good choice – whatever they want to discuss is another good choice – or whatever topic needs a light shed on it because it’s invisible. I chose to focus on Racism. The Black Lives Matter Movement held up a light to the young voices in our classrooms and pointed out what was already in the news: a barrage of unarmed black men getting killed by police officers in American cities large and small. Our nation had some challenges. Our school had some challenges. Our classroom had some challenges.
Add different voices to our Western Literary Canon. Of course Shakespeare and Steinbeck are still in the orchestra, but I added black voices, especially those of black men. We read Ta-Neshisi Coates’s Between the World and Meand Brent Staples’s Black Men in Public Space. We went to TED Talks for Stu’s ” Black Men Ski,”Tony Porter’s, “The Man Box” , James Baldwin, Dick Gregory, James Weldon Johnson, my father, brother, sons, uncles, and many, many others. It was important to hear black men play their authentic notes, speak with their authentic voices as they entered this conversation on racism.
Teach them to discuss – not debate. In the latter, there are winners and losers. The former posits the idea that understanding the issue from multiple perspectives is the single most important purpose for the discussion. Sometimes students agree to disagree. Sometimes they see the other person’s truth as part of their own. They first recognize and understand difference – then they get to sameness – and ultimately to oneness.
Teach them five types of listening: listening to paraphrase and summarize information; listening to learn and comprehend information, listening to analyze and evaluate information, listening to empathize and feel others’ thoughts and emotions, and listening to appreciate the truth and beauty of what someone is saying is what REAL listening is about.
Give them discussion resources: supply them with great discussion handouts that delineate the “rules” of student-run discussions; have them develop their own discussion norms; show them videos on how to have discussions; have them make their own videos; teach them to create their own discussion questions; let them listen to audios of student-run discussions; be sure they have their discussion journals and reading logs during the discussion (for resources, see maryasgill.org)
Give them writing situations throughout the unit: my students have “DAILY WRITE” notebooks on their computers or in composition notebooks. When they enter the room, they see a quote or question or prompt to which they respond before the discussion begins. They write before and after group discussions and whole-class discussions. They research information generated from their questions. They write reflections after the discussions. It is through the writing that they internalize their thoughts enough to have a verbal conversation – enough to add their authentic notes to the song that is America, the song that is the world.
Know ELLs – Ning for Teaching English as a Second Language
The song that is America and the world is being created daily with many instruments that play different notes. Sameness, balance, means that if you play a B-flat and I play a B-flat, we are the same, we found balance. Understanding that we are all human beings and that there is only ONE race – the human race – is a laudable notion. Yes, we are all the same. Yes, all lives matter. Yes, we all bleed red blood.
The problem with only looking at sameness, though, is that we are too quick to get there. We are too quick to erase, or marginalize differentness. When we do this, we get to sameness, and we find balance, but we do not have harmony. If everyone in the orchestra that is America and the world plays only B-flats, we are the same, but we do not have music. We only have the warm-up for what the real music promises to be.
We must each play our authentic notes if we are to continue to create a new song. Balance lets us all know that we all matter. Harmony helps us understand why – that some notes matter more than others at certain times in the song, and that every song requires silence. Without it, there is just noise.
The goal, then, is not to emphasize only Sameness – but Differentness – and ultimately, Oneness. One song, many different notes. One world in harmony.
Drop me a line if you know of other great resources for teaching Diversity in the classroom.
As a child, among the best times I’ve had in my life were my summer visits to rural Louisiana to sit on the front porch with my great grandmother to think through her paradoxical questions and watch the sunrise. She would rise from bed, put one foot on the ground, ask me a question no eight-year-old could possibly answer, put the other foot on the ground, breathe deeply, then start her day: pick lemon grass from the garden, brew tea for us, get her bible, and walk outside to the front porch to have communion with God, Stella (her canary), Jacko (her dog), and me, her tiny visitor from New Orleans, a place she said “moved like it was on fire.” She would spend an hour or so reading the bible to me and asking me questions about life, love, and all things that required me to slow down and think before I attempted an answer.
I didn’t know it at the time, but as I would reflect on those visits through a series of writings done in myriad teacher seminars via the Great Valley Writing Project in California, I began to develop a philosophy that has shaped my life as a mother, wife, teacher, and former child of a frenzied life: slow is good. I move slowly. I think slowly. I learned to wake up early so that I could wrap myself in the stillness of the morning, so that I could harness the peace to carry me through my day, so that I could slow my pace if I forgot to breathe. I learned to slow my thinking so that I could think well.
Because I intend to continue my focus on thinking well, I take (free) online courses – one my sister-in-law, Dr. Claudette Asgill, introduced me to called Coursera, where I discovered the class Social Psychology – designed to introduce students “to classic and contemporary social psychology, covering topics such as decision making, persuasion, group behavior, personal attraction, and factors that promote health and well-being,” as the course’s professor, Dr. Scott Plous, writes.
My purpose in taking the course and joining Social Psychology Network (SPN) is to continue to stay focused on thinking well. Good thinking requires slow, deliberate movement: learning and unlearning, making mistakes, relearning. It requires the know-how to find peace in the middle of storms. It requires that I understand current realities and create new realities to help me solve problems and work through tough situations. Thinking well requires that I continue to grow at my own pace – so that through and with my students, I change the world one idea at a time.
So, I am part of SPN because I cherish good thinking. I am a teacher from a small town who wants to give the gift of slow moving and good thinking to my students, as my great grandmother, in her small town, gave to me. Though she is no longer on this earth, she is with me, drinking lemon grass tea on the porch, asking mind-blowing questions that enhance my thinking, watching new sunrises every day. SPN is one of those new sunrises.
Have you discovered any (free) online courses that have enhanced your thinking in some way? If so, how has connecting with people from around the world honed your thinking skills?
Jot me a line…and remember that life is always good – no matter what.
“I’m like a recovering perfectionist. For me it’s one day at a time.” – Brene Brown
I inherited a gene that makes me always want to get it right. My father was a fantastic cook, so he did the majority of the cooking in our house, but whenever my mom would cook, he’d quietly get up from the table with his plate – take it to the kitchen and remix, reshuffle, re-season everything and come out with an entirely different-looking (and smelling) meal, which left us lusting after his plate. Or when I’d get a B+ on a paper, my dad would ask why it wasn’t an A. And in my senior year when I took three AP classes, had daily after school band practices and a 25-hour a week job, I cried when I didn’t quite finish the year with a 3.85 GPA. It was a 3.84. Good enough was not enough for me. To this day, I’m one of those people who has to work hard to resist walking past a crooked picture on a wall without straightening it – no matter whose wall.
So, a few years ago when I reflected on my teaching practice, I realized that I was doing a good job. This was evidenced by the good feedback I received from students, parents, and administrators who knew and understood my practice. But I continued to strive for perfection. On the surface, there’s nothing wrong with working hard to improve and exceed my prior accomplishments, but there is something wrong when striving for perfection is the goal. It causes burnout. What I realized was that striving for perfection should not have been my goal. Striving for excellence should have been. With excellence comes the confidence that I have done a good job, and that the job is always good enough when I put forth my very best effort. Perfection yields just the opposite. The difference? Excellence is connected to my own growth and my own internal drive to be my very best. Perfection is connected to an effort to be someone else’s idea of the very best. In this case, growth comes at a high cost since perfection is not attainable. The cost is usually burnout.
I was falling out of love with teaching. The job was becoming a stressful, angst-ridden chore that left me exhausted. It would be easy to attribute some of the stress to the myriad changes in educational philosophies teachers endure with each federal or state mandate, but it was not that. I had rolled with each tide and weathered each storm with the confidence that as long as I maintained tried and true, research (and result) driven teaching practices, I would continue to do what worked for my students no matter the next wave of change.
I was burning out because I tried to do too much and still expected to do it all perfectly. Part of me carried my father’s voice with me in everything that I attempted.
I used to believe that striving for perfection was a good thing. I used to believe that I could have it all – maybe not all at once, but that I could meet every goal I aspired to reach and perfect each endeavor. Given this, I used to worry that my students, their parents, the administration, and other teachers would think that I was not a good enough teacher if I didn’t do it all. I put an insane amount of pressure on myself to be the best at teaching all aspects of English: reading fiction, nonfiction, academic vocabulary, writing, grammar, critical thinking, academic listening and speaking and so on. As English teachers, we have our specialties. I, however, was determined to perfect all aspect of English curriculum. Insane!
Suffice it to say, I’ve taken a second glance at this idea of perfection. I’ve come to realize that I cannot teach it all perfectly not just because it’s impossible, but because I no longer want to do it all. I’ve become selective about what I can effectively teach in 182 days in a particular class period. And I’m especially selective about what I allow to consume my thoughts about teaching. Momma used to say that if I showed her my feelings, she could show me my thinking. She was right. When I felt my worst about what I was teaching my students, it was because I chose to emphasize the worst thoughts. I would feel like a failure when I did not teach them everything I had in my lesson plan by the end of the week – and especially when I failed to meet my goal of returning student essays in a timely manner.
I felt shame each time my students would ask (every day during each class period and via email) whether I had finished grading their essays. Shame – the lowest negative emotion. To stave off the shame, I would repeat the mantra of my friend and mentor Susan Davis: “If I gave you two weeks to write the paper, you should give me two weeks to grade it.” Huge mistake! After two weeks, their questions and emails would begin again. I did not have Sue’s tenacity or strength (or one child…I had three). It would take me a month (or more) to get the papers finished – and even then, the perfectionist in me caused me to grade every single item on their pages. From content to conventions, I pored over their papers with precision and depth, believing fully that I was helping my students become better writers, better thinkers. All I succeeded in doing was sharpening my own ability to grade papers and work myself down to a pulp. Students rarely revised their writing based on my comments. Suffice it to say, they were more interested in the grade than my thoughts on the page. Who knew that striving to move from good to great was a bad idea all around? Who knew that what I was really doing was striving to move from good to perfect. Were my students going to think less of me if I did not crank out their papers within the two weeks I promised? I had to learn to reach but not overreach, to do my best without pushing myself beyond my natural (and physical) limit, to strive for excellence over perfection. I had to learn to pace myself not kill myself.
Ten Ways I Changed My Grading Life, and Moved from Good to Good Enough
I only grade for certain components: ideas/claims, organization/detail, word choice/tone, sentence fluency/syntax, voice/imagery/figurative language, conventions/rhetorical grammar/rhetorical devices, presentation/MLA format, etc. I also teach writing this way – in small bites. In the first quarter, we only write paragraphs, and include a sentence-level focus. Master certain skills – then layer on the next.
I ask strategic questions in the margins of their essays so that students have to use their notes or handbooks to find answers before our writing conferences. They now join me in doing the work of revision and proofreading.
I teach students to use my very detailed rubrics – one for each writing type.
I strategically group students into 3:00 a.m. groups – groups of three who remain together for the entire year, learning to trust each other and support each other as they follow the rubrics and discuss and comment on each other’s work. By the time I received the essays, the students will have revised and proofread most of what needed to have been done.
I shorten the length of papers. A goodly quantity of writing does not translate to good quality writing. With limited space, students now have to do more thinking than writing. They are forced to write with purpose and precision.
I have them write daily. As they enter class, a quote or question or sentence stem on the board greets them. They write for 5-7 minutes a day. They then discuss their thoughts with a partner or 3:00 a.m. group for a few minutes. By the time the upcoming paper is due, students would have engaged in short timed “daily writes” where they would have written short pieces about the readings that they might incorporate into their papers.
I use creative alternative summative assessments in lieu of written essays: verbal essays, PhotoStory essays, speeches, and the like.
I design “writing to learn” assignments in lieu of long papers when I want to assess their specific knowledge.
I ask them to write “sections” of a paper in lieu of an entire paper. They write one-claim papers, where they argue their ideas in one paragraph – no more. Or perhaps they might only write an introduction.
I grade their four-quadrant reading logs in lieu of an essay.
Three Books that Helped Me Work Smarter
Carol Jago’s Papers, Papers, Papers: An English Teacher’s Survival Guide
John C. Bean’sEngaging Ideas: The Professor’s Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom
Brene Brown’sThe Gift of Imperfectionism: Let Go of Who You Think You’re Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are
I still have not mastered the paper load, nor do I want to anymore. My goal is to go to work every day and do the best I can. I want to strive to reach my version of excellence – not anyone else’s. I want to be okay with myself when on certain days my 100% is really only 30%. I want to work hard enough to give my students the best that I have without killing myself. I no longer want to be a great (perfectionist) English teacher. Great had me in my classroom until midnight on more days than I want to admit. Now I leave my classroom at a reasonable hour each day, knowing that I got some good things accomplished, knowing that my good may not have been great, but it was certainly good enough.
I welcome your ideas and comments – especially on how you manage your paper loads.
