Teacherscribe's Teaching Thoughts
Week 25 - Spring Conferences - 24-27
Empathy
Work hard
Be nice people
The World is a Fine Place and Worth Fighting For
Book of the Week - The Call
This book, which is what The Hunger Games would have been like had Stephen King written it, plays upon Irish mythology, mainly fairies. Only these aren't the ones from Frozen. These fairies even make Maleficent seem like Mary Poppins.
Here's the situation - Ireland has been sealed off by an immense bank of fog. Anyone traveling into it disappears and is transported to The Gray, the world of the fairies. And it's not nice. The fairies, known as The Sidhe, are not happy with us for banishing them thousands of years ago from our world, The Land of Many Colours.
As if that isn't bad enough, there is something referred to as "The Call." This happens to every child between the ages of 10-17. They are 'called' from this world and teleported into the fairy world. In our world, the will be gone exactly three minutes and four seconds, but in the Sidhe world, they will spend 24 hours. During that 24 hours they will be hunted. If they avoid capture, they will return shaken but whole. If they are caught, they will go through unimaginable torture and return dead or . . . worse. When those three minutes and four seconds are up, the person reappears in the same spot.
Schools have now be transformed into training grounds for children 10-17. They teach them fighting and survival skills . . . all in the name of lasting 24 hours in the world of the Sidhe. Initially when calls began happening only 1 out of 100 survived; however, thanks to all their training, now 1 out of 10 survive.
Our main character, Nessa, is old enough to be called at any moment. So her parents send her to a training school. The only problem is that since Ireland was sealed off by the mist, no one can get in and no one can get out. So when their factories began to fail, no one was there to fix them. This also means any medical advances have ceased too. As a result, Nessa had polio as a young child and now has one nearly useless leg.
How could she possibly survive the call? She would be caught in a few seconds. Think about all the hours the Sidhe would have to torture and mutilate her.
Nessa, though, is bound and determined to survive her call.
I'll leave it at that.
But here is what the poor kid is facing, for as she gets on the bus to go to her fourth year of school (kind of like if Stephen King was the headmaster of Hogwarts!), a boy on the bus is called.
The boy's body reappears and thumps down hard onto the floor. Nessa is relieved to see that it's not one of the really awful ones. There's nothing to churn the stomach here, other than a little blood and a set of tiny antlers growing from the back of his head. The Sidhe can be a lot more imaginative than that, and they even have what experts refer to as a "sense of fun." Nessa shivers.
Wow. I read this in 12 hours. It's just one of those books, and that's why I'm talking about it now here.
Teaching Thoughts
Week #25 February 24-27
Teaching Thought #108 - This might not be for you
This is a bit of advice I garnered from Seth Godin by way of Zig Ziglar.
Godin was delivering a keynote at a business leadership seminar. As he was talking, he noticed a man sitting in the front row to his right. The man was disengaged and totally absorbed in his laptop.
As Godin continued with his keynote, he found himself drawn to this guy. Instead of focusing on the other hundred other people in the crowd, he kept trying to win this guy over, trying to get him to stop staring at his laptop and look up.
He delivered the rest of his keynote trying, unsuccessfully, to engage the man. After his session Godin was voicing his frustration to his good friend Ziglar. And that is when Ziglar dropped some genius wisdom on Godin. It was a lesson Godin would never forget, and it would change Godin’s presentation strategy forever.
I would submit to you that it will save your teaching strategy forever too.
Ziglar’s wisdom was this, “your presentation wasn’t for him. Focus on the rest of the people in the crowd that are there for you.”
Once I heard this, I knew it would change how I taught, for I was once like Godin too during his keynote. If I was teaching a class and one student was tuned out or not connecting, I would spend the rest of my class time trying to draw her or him back in. And it rarely worked.
Now, if a student is tuned out, I attempt once to draw them back in, but after that, I focus on everyone else in the room that is there to learn.
Is that a bit brutal? Perhaps, but it has saved me so much angst and frustration that I would never go back.
Teaching Thought #107 - Lawnmowers
I thought helicopter parents were a struggle. Then I saw this on Twitter and realized they have evolved into an even more nefarious creature: lawnmower parents.
See, the helicopter parents would just kind of hover right over their kids to ensure that they didn’t struggle too much or that we weren’t being too harsh on them. I believe the helicopter parents, like all good parents, still wanted to prepare their kids for the path to success.
But the lawnmower parent takes a much different approach. Instead of preparing their kids for the path to success, you see lawnmower parents want to prepare the path to success for their kids. That is a huge difference. Whatever obstacles are in the way of success, the parents just drop in and mow them down.
When the ‘real’ world their children will be entering is the most competitive ever, where grit, teamwork, resilience, and ownership are a must, I’m terrified for the prospects of children raised by lawnmower parents will face after school.
Teaching Thought #109 The happy fail
This is one of my favorite TED Talks. It comes from Adam Kreek and is entitled, “I Seek Failure.” In this short talk, Kreek outlines several of his major failures: coming in second at the Olympics and failing to row his way across the Atlantic Ocean and nearly drowning.
But in doing so, he learned something amazing: how to handle failure. He learned this from one of his biggest competitors on his Olympic rowing team. His competitor simply told him that the key to his routinely beating him in practice is that he seeks failure. This man when on to tell Kreek that during his workouts, he knows the point where his body will literally fail. He then pushes himself to that point but stops just before and hovers there, knowing this will make him better.
Kreek took this and added it to his own experience with failure to come up with what he calls “the happy fail.” What he means by that is when you’re improving and stepping outside of your comfort zone, you will inevitably fail. But the key point is to train yourself to be happy about it. When you’re happy with your progress - even if it includes failure - you will keep trying. In other words, and I’m stealing this from Carol Dweck here, you are adopting the growth mindset. And that is a key for all of us to improve.
Teaching Thought #110 - When did you “become” a teacher?
When did you “become” a teacher?
Here is Frank McCourt’s breakthrough moment when he really became a teacher. This is taken from his excellent book ’Tis.
From 'Tis: A Memoir -
I followed the teacher’s guides. I launched the prefabricated questions at my classes. I hit them with surprise quizzes and tests and destroyed them with the ponderous detailed examinations concocted by college professors who assemble high school text books.
Everyday I’d teach with my guts in a knot, lurking behind my desk at the front of the room playing the teacher game with the chalk, the eraser, the red pen, the teacher guides, the power of the quiz, the test, the exam. I’ll call your father, I’ll call your mother. I’ll report you to the governor, I’ll damage your average so badly kid you’ll be lucky to get into a community college in Mississippi. Weapons of menace and control.
A senior, Jonathan, bangs his forehead on his desk and wales, Why? Why? Why do we have to suffer with this shit? We’ve been in school since kindergarten, thirteen years, and why do we have to know what color shoes Mrs. Dalloway was wearing at her goddam party and what are we supposed to make of Shakespeare troubling deaf heaven with his bootless cries and what the hell is a bootless cry anyway and when did heaven turn deaf?
Around the room rumbles of rebellion and I’m paralyzed. They’re saying Yeah, yeah to Jonathan, who halts his head banging to ask, Mr. McCourt, did you have this stuff in high school? and there’s another chorus of yeah yeah and I don’t know what to say. Should I tell them the truth, that I never set foot in a high school till I began teaching in one or should I feed them a lie about a rigorous secondary school education with the Christian Brothers in Limerick?
I’m saved, or doomed, by another student who calls out, Mr. McCourt, my cousin went to McKee on Staten Island and she said you told them you never went to high school and they said you were an okay teacher anyway because you told stories and talked and never bothered them with these tests.
Smiles around the room. Teacher unmasked. Teacher never even went to high school and look what he’s doing to us, driving us crazy with tests and quizzes. I’m branded forever with the label, teacher who never went to high school.
So, Mr. McCourt, I thought you had to get a license to teach in the city.
You do.
Don’t you have to get a college degree?
You do.
Don’t you have to graduate high school?
You mean graduate from high school, from high school, from from from.
Yeah, yeah. Okay. Don’t you have to graduate from high school to get into college?
I suppose you do.
Tyro lawyer grills teacher, carries the day, and word spreads to my other classes. Wow, Mr. McCourt, you never went to high school and you’re teaching at Stuyvesant? Cool, man.
And into the trash basket I drop my teaching guides, my quizzes, tests, examinations, my teacher-knows-all mask.
I’m naked and starting over and I hardly know where to begin.
There is so much I love about this passage. First, I love how McCourt finally listens to his students. Better than that, he learns from them and adjust his methods. Talk about getting buy in from the students!
Second, he begins to let his freak flag fly (see teaching thought #7) about teaching high school though he never went to one! Notice how the students relate to him when he lowers his guard and is honest with them.
Third, he realizes something very important: we teach students first THEN the curriculum.
Finally, he begins to confront the all-important question - why do we have to learn this? Once a teacher can begin to honestly answer that (and McCourt doesn’t here, but this sets him on the course to answer it), the closer they are to winning over their students.
When was the moment you ‘became’ a teacher? Or are you still waiting for it?
Why I Teach
It's nice to know you've made an impact
Podcast of the Week -
This one totally rocked my world (I'm a child of the '80s and '90s, sorry about that out-dated phrase), but it's true: The Generosity of Scars from Entreleadership. This is an interview with a former Green Beret, Scott Mann, who works with others to inspire them.
Last week I focued on his 'rooftop' leadership. This week I want to focus on something else he said, "We are meaning-seeking, emotional, and social creatures." Think about that for a second in the context of teaching or work.
As a teacher or boss how do you appeal to those three things? As an English teacher, that's all I do is give meaning. The trick is to look for that which my students are seeking to understand. I think one of my most effective units is on finding their passions (The Element), finding a career path (Outliers and So Good They Can't Ignore You), and reflecting on their own lives (most of College Comp 1).
My kids are emotional. How can I bring them joy? Make them curious? Anger them? Once you get their emotions into it, everything else falls into place.
Of course kids are social. I strive hard to make them feel a part of something, whether it's just the class or being a junior or being a student of Lincoln High School. We all strive to be part of something larger than us.
And the last point that I found both intriguing and scary as hell is how Mann notes that Americans are unique in that they have bridging trust. Most of the world he saw as a Green Beret wasn't like that. Most people have bonding trust.
You see bonding trust is what allows for clans to stick together. It's how most cultures have survived, and it's certainly how many animals survive. You don't see the deer working in conjunction with the wolves.
Bridging trust, though, is what he finds unique about Americans. We - our at least we have in the past - been able to put our specific differences aside as sacrifice or work for the greater good.
I fear, though, that this is coming to an end. I see more division and strife and 'clannish' natures in our modern society than ever before. Just watch a political debate or sit in McDonald's one morning and listen to the old men who gather there for coffee.
I think social media has fueled this division; I think it's up to leaders today to solve that. I'm just not sure how. But it's something we need to tackle.
Video of the week - I wish we could give halftime interviews
Thoughts from Twitter
Tech Tool of the Week - PechFlickr
How is use this website is as a warm up before my students begin either their mock TEDx Talks or their book talks.
All I do is type in a word ("Cat," "space," or "basketball") and then the website randomly displays pictures related to the word in 20 second intervals. Then students must present on whatever comes up on the screen.
Talk about having to think and speak on one's feet!
Where are they Now?
Meghan Jones
When did you graduate from LHS?
I graduated from Lincoln in 2011.
Where did you go to college and when did you graduate?
I went to college at MSUM – Moorhead, I majored in Elementary Education, and graduated in the Spring of 2016.
Where have you taught?
I have taught for 4 years and all have been at Challenger. Once a prowler, always a prowler. My first year I taught 4th grade and then moved to Kindergarten.
Are you doing any coaching or advising?
I am not. Right now I’m focused on my sweet Kinders and being a mom
What do you enjoy most about teaching?
My favorite part of teaching is the kids I get to spend every day with and the transformation they make both academically and socially throughout the year. The eagerness and excitement about learning in Kindergarten is amazing.
What made you want to be a teacher?
I have wanted to be a teacher for as long as. I can remember. I think I was drawn to wanting to help kids feel successful, to achieve goals, and to know they have someone who truly wants the best for them.
What advice do you have for teachers?
To build relationships first and to love each kid who enters your room for exactly who they are because remember “Every kid, is someone’s kid”.
Bonus content of the week -
Last week's Teaching Thoughts newsletter is below if you're interested
Chief Inspiration Officer of Room 205
I am married to the most amazing person in the world, Kristie. It was love at first sight. At least for me. And it still is.
We have four wonderful children, Casey, Koko, Kenzie, and Cash. I also happen to have the greatest job in the world: teaching English to high school students.
I am in my 22nd year of teaching at Lincoln High School. I graduated from Lafayette High School in 1992. I decided to enter the field of education because of two amazing teachers, Mr. Mueller, my fourth and sixth grade elementary school teacher and assistant baseball coach, and Mrs. Christianson, my 9th grade English teacher.
I attended Northland Community College, and had my life changed by the amazing Dr. Diane Drake. Then I transferred to Bemidji State University in 1995. There I had amazing professors who further inspired me to teach English (Dr. Helen Bonner, Dr. Mark Christensen, Susan Hauser, and Gerry Schnabel). I graduated with my BS in English Education in 1997.
I student taught with the wonderful Lisa Semanko and then began teaching full-time at LHS in 1998.
I took a year's leave of absence in 2001-02 to return to BSU for my MA in English. There I had the privilege to teach and work closely with my greatest mentor, Dr. Mark Chirstensen. I earned my MA in English in 2006 and was honored with "Thesis of the Year" for my creative non-fiction, braided, multi-genre memoir, "Meeting Myrtle: A Biography."
In 2013, thanks to my dear friend and mentor, Dr. Jodi Holen, I was offered an adjunct teaching position fall semester at the University of North Dakota. Tuesday nights I teach Intro to Education: Teaching and Learning 250 from 5-8. Those three hours fly by in about ten minutes.
Then in 2016 I was blessed to win a WEM award (thanks to a nomination from a former student (and now an elementary school teacher), Ciera Mooney.
In 2017 I became part of the #pineconepd podcast club along with Brian Loe, Jeff Mumm, Kelsey Johnson, Kelly Weets, Josh Watne, Tevia Strand, Megan Vigen, Mariah Hruby, and Laura Brickson. This has been one of the best forms of PD I've ever been a part of. They make me a better teacher every time we meet. Please think about joining us in the summer at the Pine Cone Pub from 6:30 - until we've solved all the world's problems. For that evening anyway.
Thanks to the inspiration of Shane Zutz (our former principal) I devised this as a way to distribute my Teaching Thoughts and add more content to, hopefully, help out and inspire others.
Email: kurt.reynolds@myprowler.org
Website: http://teacherscribe.blogspot.com
Location: 101 South Knight Aver Thief River Falls MN 56701
Phone: 218-686-7395
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