Goods and Games

A brief history lesson…

In the 19th century, the British were desperate to even their trade imbalance with China. China had silk, spices, porcelain and tea, while the Europeans had only rough wool and silver. Silver was flowing out of Europe and damaging the British pound. This seemed destined to give China a massive economic advantage, until the British began exporting opium into China. As opium addiction ravaged the populace, the silver flow reversed and soon China was desperately trying to ban the drug. Britain wouldn’t allow its lucrative trade to disappear and the Opium Wars ensued. This led to massive indemnities against China, the opening of its ports, the surrender of its lands, and the start of modern Chinese history.

But the real question: How do you make this history meaningful to a ten year-old? Trade imbalance? Currency valuations? Drug addiction? How do you make these concepts resonate with the Pokemon, Harry Potter crew?

My answer: A game. A card game, to be precise, customized to our learning objectives.

I’ve always made games for facts practice and a few for reading. I don’t know why it didn’t dawn on me, having grown up with Oregon Trail and Carmen Sandiego, to make one for social studies. Until now. InDesign plus Google Images plus Wikipedia, multiplied by a two-sided color copier, all over a paper cutter equals “Trade!” the new game by Mr. AB.

Students trade and draw cards, in a Yahtzee-like pursuit of a full complement of goods. I make the learning explicit; they are trading for the very same resources we’re studying. Porcelain is worth 30 while wool is worth 10. Pictures and descriptions on each card. Round 1, learn the game in an even-handed round, then switch to uneven hands that replicate the experience of the game. Round 2, China has all the luxury goods, Britain and America have only silver, wool, and guns. Draw enough to forestall total stalemate, but not so much to prevent the salutary suffering. How much is China willing to trade? Not much. How does that make you feel? Frustrated, like we’re always going to lose. Check. Round 3, introduce the opium to the Western hands. The rules recapitulate the history. Opium must be exchanged for silver, the "trade" cannot be denied. China sees their advantage disappear instantly. They’re angry as Britain and America laughingly force them to trade away their precious goods. What would you do to get rid of the opium? Anything. War? Sure. Check.

Debriefing afterwards is a walk in the park. The learning is already there, we’re just putting labels on it. The labels stick because the experience, the game, makes the ideas so vivid. It’s not abstract and distant. It didn’t just happen to the Qing Dynasty, it happened to them. They were there. They were China, they were Britain.

It’s uncannily effective. It feels a little wrong. Like teaching by trickery. Teaching should not be this easy, learning should not be this fun.

What We Have Here...

What we have here is a failure to appreciate. Are there some things we cannot teach?

Two of my lessons struggled a bit lately, and while they were very dissimilar in terms of relative gravity, they failed for the same reason: a failure to appreciate.

The first lesson was on slavery in the United States. Our project is to create dual-perspective slideshows, where each historical picture is narrated from the perspective of slave and slaveowner. I hunted around for an array of images, some gripping and some mundane, to give them a chance to reflect on many different aspects of slavery. The classroom teacher has done several lessons about the details and stories of slavery. We thought that we had conveyed the degree of sensitivity and sincerity required in this area, but yet found our kids goofing off and producing slideshows that seemed to be striving for comedic.

The latter lesson was on a brilliantly simple computer program, BallDropping. In this class, the kids are learning to use Scratch and create their own games. I was very excited to find this program as a demonstration to the kids of how simple and yet entertaining a game can be, even verging on the point of being performance art. The program uses only circles and lines, two colors, and yet incorporates a tremendous array of ideas in music, art and physics. Yet many of the kids were obnoxiously vocal in finding it boring and too simple.

Is the failure to appreciate mine or theirs? Did I forget my students' development, and expect too much? Or did they not bring their best attitudes and efforts, and produce too little?

On one hand, I am almost always willing to accept the blame. I am the leader in the classroom; I'm steering the ship, it's my fault if we don't wind up where I want to be. On the other hand, these lessons were well planned, carefully prepared and presented with enthusiasm. I very rarely find that I miss on the lessons I'm very ready and excited to share.

If the kids simply didn't give it their best, then that's that, but I'm stuck with another question: How, exactly, do we teach "appreciation?" If we make it explicit, if we say, "This is sad, be serious. This is beautiful, enjoy it." are we really teaching anything, or are we just asking them to regurgitate the reactions we've made it clear we expect? Or, is that just part of our job, showing the youngsters all things terrible and terrific, and teaching them how to respond appropriately?

Further, we cannot control what will resonate with a child and when. Are we, as adults, always in the mood to watch a stirring Holocaust documentary, or go to an art exhibit? Hardly. Why expect that the kids will be ready to feel sad or enjoy art because that's what's on our calendar? Yet, I am not asking for emotional reaction, I am asking for appropriate response. We do not laugh at slavery, and we do not discount art because it is simple. Surely, those are reasonable lines to draw in the sand. Aren't they?

Professional Development through Struggle

In an effort to find some way to bring exercise back into my life, I’ve been swimming a few mornings a week at our school pool. Going into the experience, I had fond memories of swimming as a kid on hot Southern California summer days. About five minutes into the water, however, I remembered something about swimming that nostalgia had glossed over in my mind ---I’m just not very good at it.

Each morning I swim, I struggle to find a steady rhythm and stroke, so I splash and gasp my across the pool. Having never learned to flip-turn, after each length, I have to stop and turn myself around. Meanwhile, in the lanes next to me, are co-workers and eleven year-old kids transformed into dolphins, sliding through the water effortlessly, flipping themselves around and passing me twice. They never have to stop, they never seem to gasp, they just cruise along, their hands and feet creating gentle ripples of excellence.

I was complaining to my wife about this, about my embarrassingly public inability and dishearteningly slow improvement. She immediately replied, “It’s good for you. Think about what you make kids do everyday.”

It’s true. Every day, I ask kids who can’t read, can’t do math or struggle with computers to just dive in and get to work. Without thinking twice, I ask them to follow, use, and produce, in pace with their neighbors, regardless of their ability. It’s a part of teaching, especially teaching as a specialist. I usually have 45 minutes with a class and several big ideas to get across, hardly time for elaborate differentiation and remediation.

As adults, especially adults with the time and means to read this blog, we are privileged to focus ourselves on activities where we are competent. Few employers would keep us inefficiently struggling on their dime, and few adults select a hobby they don’t enjoy and can’t do well. Kids have no such luck. They are still building foundational skills and knowledge, which is necessarily diverse and challenging. Rare is the child who won’t encounter at least one area of deficit a day and many will deal with several. The least we can do is remember what it feels like.

Teacher, ask yourself, “When was the last time you struggled?”

Empathy with Apathy

Upon hearing that he was going to be working under an extremely unpleasant leader after several years with a strong one, a wise friend of mine once said, “I am going to grow so much as a professional.”

In that spirit, I am currently making leaps and bounds, professionally. However, what I’m learning now is not the sort of work I’d ever list on my resume and I occasionally refer to it as the doldrums, purgatory, or working on the dark side of the moon. I’m learning, first hand, how good employees go bad, how dedication becomes discouragement and urgency disintegrates into apathy.

For the last ten years, I’ve worked hard, with focus, discipline, and little understanding for those who didn’t share my ethic. I was a purposeful student before that for as long as I can remember, the sort of kid whose notion of misbehavior was surreptitiously reading a novel. In college, the only time I missed a class was when I was on the operating table having an appendectomy. As a classroom teacher, I settled on working 7 to 6 as a “reasonable” day. I would routinely teach an extra hour before and after school and, after my first year, I never had a teacher desk in my room. Now, I’m sitting here on company time, writing this blog.

Yet, I think this was precisely the lesson I needed.

Some of my greatest learnings about how to be a good teacher came from an awful two semesters of reading methods classes. Not by the negative example of the instructor, but by experiencing life as a “bad” student and understanding how they see the classroom. What, specifically, would push me to disengage? What did I hope for or wait for to reinvest? How did attitude influence the quality of my reading and writing for this class? How did I behave to signal my discontent? What did I do to cope? Certainly, I will never truly appreciate the deep sense of failure and hopelessness that befalls some of my students after years of struggle, but knowing how it feels to be on the margin, to lean and teeter off the edge of focus and effort, was a valuable experience.

Now, I’ve found myself similarly pushed to the margin and past, into the realm of being an apathetic and nonproductive worker. First, my time and place in the school was devalued. Without any explanation, my yard duty times were quadrupled, in a land where labor costs are almost insignificant. Then I was moved from a desk in the library, a hub of our school, to the basement. The rationale was solely and admittedly one of aesthetics, despite its damage to my routines and effectiveness. Requests for administrative help in encouraging teachers to try the new, potent tools I had developed were rejected. I was instructed to help the teachers do worthless projects, if that’s what they wanted. Soon after, my workload was doubled and my time halved, as my partner teacher was moved back to the classroom and I received new and contradictory mandates. Coaching relationships with struggling teachers, built carefully across the first quarter of the year were instantly destroyed. My time to team-teach and innovate, the most enjoyable and effective part of my job, disappeared. Soon, most of the curriculum I had produced last year was shelved, as teachers' confidence in and enthusiasm for technology inevitably waned to the bone. I tired of asking for support and saw that, among the many issues of our school, mine were just never going to be addressed.

Like a child not turning in his homework for the first time, I slowly stopped working so hard. There was no encouragement nor reprimand, no comments from teachers nor administrators, no one has even seemed to notice. In short: it became clear that my work and place had been marginalized in everyone else’s eyes, and then it inevitably did the same in my own. Now, I satisfy the requirements of my job, I meet only with the teachers who want to work with me and I offer only the resources they want to use. The creativity, the urgency and the joy of my work are largely gone, yet everyone except me seems quite satisfied.

I’m trying to take as much “professional growth” as possible away from this experience, to employ if I become a leader of teachers. I understand, much more deeply, the importance of offering all teachers an environment of transparency and consistency, honest and explicit communication, support and validation in pursuit of their goals, and, most of all, the confidence that their work is urgent and important. While working for the Man helped me appreciate many of these lessons, I only understood them as aspirations. Now, having worked without them, I realize that they are absolute requirements.

More importantly, I have come to realize that hiding among the ranks of the apathetic and discouraged there may be great workers, innovators, and leaders, anxious for a new job, another opportunity to stride, to lift themselves out. I don't think I ever could have believed this until it happened to me.

A New Wow from Google

I’m generally not a “new literacies” sort of teacher, even when my job title prominently features the word “technology.” For the most part, I think the written word has served us pretty well, and kids should learn it. But every now again, a presentation or film will make me think, isn't this expressing something that would just be lost on paper? Then I think, what might kids hear or say better, or worse yet, hear or say only through another medium? This new tool from Google, and more importantly the idea of student-easy, audience-powerful data analysis and visualization behind it, is one of those moments.

If nothing else, just look at the embedded graph, comparing fertility rate, life-expectancy, and population, in motion across the last 50 years. It is Willy Wonka rich. My first viewing flooded me with information, a review of large chunks of my undergraduate career in history, in about 15 seconds. Ensuing reviews brought on the torrent of teaching questions, for the part of me that still longs to teach high school social studies. What does it mean to see a nation ping-pong horizontally across the screen? What trends are evident across all 50 years? What can you tell me about Chinese history based exclusively on what is evident on this page? What do the colors tell us? And that’s just reading the graphs.

I want my students to know how to use this tool, and the better one that inevitably follows it, to analyze the data and make their case. Which is more convincing, this graph or the three pages of statistic-laden paragraphs it would take to replace it? I wouldn’t drop essay writing in favor of graph making, but I might require that some pieces utilize visual evidence to enhance their point. With this graph as only the start of the conversation, how much further the students’ essays can go!

Now, how do I apply this to a crowd where the datasets that currently resonate most tend to be about “favorite color…”

Lemov's Taxonomy, Teacher Specialization

A New York Times magazine article, with a small tantalizing set of specifics, about the “form” of great teaching and how to instill it in novices. Don’t worry, we can all buy the book, “Teach like a Champion,” from here. I will, once Amazon shipping costs less than seven times the price of the book.

The work represents an interesting bit of moderation, a point in between the notions that great teaching is innate and that it can be performed entirely from a script. Instead, Lemov (the guru featured in the article) advises that we teach a limited series of practical principles, 49 “bite-sized moves,” that can be applied across curricula and context. This resonates with me in a way that the blue “Teacher Talk” paragraphs in the margin of my Open Court reader never did. It is also a hopeful notion, as my courses and professional development on classroom management have always been simply desperate for a common vocabulary of excellence. The few specifics that are listed in the article and on the website, “strong voice,” “cold call,” “positive framing,” “injecting joy” and “precise praise” are hardly novel ideas, but there are 43 more to read about.

However, my current placement has pushed me to question whether “championship teaching” can ever be truly context-free. Here in an environment of small classes, few tests and extremely easy-going kids, I’ve been pushed to change my “form” significantly. Here, I’ve found a whole new set of challenges in running a classroom and lesson. They center on the facilitating, though I don't like that word, and questioning that is done when the basics are thoroughly achieved and there is time to delve deeper. How, when and to what extent do you offer help to a group of kids struggling with a project? What are the best ways to help kids explore new tools? How do you maximize the massive learning that can come out of really good games? Admittedly, these challenges are a bit more fun than wrestling with how to keep four extremely angry boys in a class of 36 from derailing my instruction completely, but they are challenges nonetheless.

I feel much more at home in the serious, urgent, objective-focused world of Lemov's "championship teaching," but the bar remains that all kids deserve teachers who thrive in the context of their classroom. Pick your analogy - lawyers, doctors, athletes, artists, engineers - all specialize to a degree, often very early on in their training (rather than their practice.) Perhaps we should consider this for educators? I think new teachers enter the profession with very different visions of where they'll work. Few are likely to switch, from the extremes of impoverished, crowded, test-driven public schools to low-accountability, high-resource private schools. And those that do will probably immediately or never want to switch back. I've even found that many lower and upper elementary teachers specialize, though certainly some of the best I know have experience in both of these domains. Further specialization might also enable better compensation schemes and remove some of the infamous irrelevancy of education school.

Our current reality is that I have a K-8 Multiple Subjects credential, meaning that the same set of ten-odd courses prepared me to teach phonics and middle school algebra. As I teach the kids...I don't know for sure what the answer is, but I can eliminate the one that's obviously wrong.

Their chance, our need.

“Our kids get only one chance at an education and we need to get it right.” - President Obama

This needs to be said louder and more. Particularly to administrators who think five to eight years is an acceptable time-frame in which to improve a failing school and teachers who think next year is a great time to improve their practice.

Mathews - Teachers as Olympians

There's great merit in this notion, from Michael Goldstein and MATCH through Jay Mathews. Don't train teachers like doctors, theory first and then practice, train them like craftsmen and athletes, practice first and then theory, if they make the cut. Ice skaters don't read about physics and kinesiology before ever putting on their blades, maybe teachers should get to know kids before trying to incorporate Piaget and Vygotsky into their practice.

I was originally drawn to teaching from the experiences I had working at academic summer camps and tutoring in the Chicago schools during college. Not only did it help me build a sense of how kids learn and why they fail to "get it," as they discuss in the article, but it let me taste the nectar of having made a difference. Kid comes in confused and leaves with the concept down. I made that happen. TFA's "Institute" boot camp is great for developing a sense of lesson design, but there just isn't time in six weeks to get to know kids.

I also love the idea of specific, direct feedback on "teacher talk," our language and style of presentation and instruction, our "form." The norm seems to be to let teachers develop that on their own, but that only works when it works, there seem to be few alternatives or systems for remediation. In my master's program I've been forced to videotape myself and then analyze it ad nauseam. It's an absolutely merciless form of professional development but more powerful than anything else I've read, observed or done. It forced me to get down and consider the absolute minutia of language, pacing, tone, eye contact, body language, and physical movement around the classroom, ---vital issues of my practice that I'd never really even thought about.

Interestingly, the comments on this article, even from teachers, seem to focus incessantly on the MATCH teacher's hours. Shouldn't our first year, in a new profession chock-full of challenging and urgent work, be grueling and exhausting? What would it say about the job if your first year trying you only needed fifteen minutes before and after school to get ready? The problem with teaching isn't that the first year is so hard, the problem is that the third, fourth and fifth are often just as bad.