Defending Public Education (by my principal)

My principal, Bill Collins, delivered this address to the entire faculty of our school district at our Convocation just a few weeks ago, and then it was printed in the newspaper yesterday. I asked his permission to reprint it at my blog because I think the message of the value of public education is worth sharing. Bill points out that we take on a wide range of students, and educate and nurture them. He notes that a colleague in a class he is taking is at a private school, and often scoffs at his public school colleagues. But Bill will have none of that. He stresses the role of a leader as a “mirror” to the “candles” around him, and that our task and passion is for keeping all students, whatever their background and ability, in the forefront of our teaching and caring.

He gave me permission to share this with you. Thanks, Bill.

What motivates, rewards, and challenges me to work in public education? The easy answer is that I want to make a difference.The deeper answer is I am an idealist. I deeply believe in the art of possibility. I believe that any child can grow up to be president. I believe that our nation’s founding fathers were on to something. I believe in being a part of something larger than the sum of its parts. I believe that the seeds we sow today will be reaped some day, even if we are not around at harvest time.

Back when I was first a middle school guidance counselor, a troubled boy was assigned to me. I struggled to help this student get back on track. I failed miserably and so did he. The principal gave him a social promotion to high school. Late December of the following year I was working after school finishing up at the end of the term before the holiday break, when who should appear in my office doorway but this boy. He had come to show me his report card, for he was passing his high school courses. I told him I was proud of him and do you know what he said? You were the only one who never gave up on me. So yes, I am an idealist.

I became a principal with the hope of having an even greater influence; I wanted to make a bigger difference. I came to the Norris School with the notion of influencing the culture and upon reflection I am amazed at how much the Norris culture has influenced me.

I believe in the art of possibility because I have repeatedly witnessed it at Norris. I have seen the seemingly impossible become possible. I have met some of the most generous and selfless people that I have ever encountered.

Recently, a Southampton student with special needs didn’t qualify for summer camp and his parents couldn’t afford to send him. Do you know how he attended? Two Norris staff members personally financed it.

Edith Wharton once said, “There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.” I see myself as a mirror who is surrounded by candles.

I have returned to school myself in the hopes of expanding my influence. I have the ambition to one day become a superintendent of schools. I am about half way through a doctorate program. In my group there is an administrator from a very exclusive private school. This classmate is always saying, “Come over to the light – where there are no special education issues, few behavioral or disciplinary problems and almost no fiscal constraints.”

I have given his repeated invitation much reflection because it irks the heck out of me.

I have concluded that public education is a noble profession and Massachusetts is its birthplace. It pleased me to see that Superintendent Craig Jurgensen’s back-to-school letter referenced our state constitution. It may surprise you that in Massachusetts there is not a right to education but rather a “duty to cherish.” Interesting phraseology.

There exists a bit of a debate about whether public education exists to level the playing field and provide every individual with the opportunity to succeed or if public education exists for the common good to have an educated citizenry to preserve the democracy, not leaving decisions in the hands of a privileged few.

I think it was the latter but has evolved to include the former. Whether it is one or the other, or both, it still makes those in our profession the great equalizers who do not limit access by wealth or religion or race.

Even as an idealist, I recognize that there are other countries that do a better job of educating some of their students. The operative word being “some.” No nation does a better job of educating all of its students. We recognize that parents are sending us their best students (they are not hoarding the good ones in the cellar). We educate them, all of them, no matter their economic status, whether they don’t speak a word of English, the color of their skin, their religious convictions, their level of disability.

No matter if the private schools have invited the students to unenroll, we at the Norris School say “bring ’em on!”

— Bill Collins, principal of Norris Elementary School, Southampton, Massachusetts

Peace (in the sharing),
Kevin

Sometimes, the Crowd need help

I’m all for collaboration and bringing many brains together, and I love how technology makes collaboration so much easier. But some recent developments with a project made me realize that there is a limit to “many hands on deck” that I need to keep in mind in the future.

I am part of the Massachusetts New Literacy Teacher-Leader Initiative, which began last June with a week-long institute in Cambridge, and which is set to continue through the course of the year with three professional development sessions. There area about 100 teachers, administrators and technology coordinators involved, and I am one of the ten teacher-leaders who are trying to run and organize the initiative, which is sponsored by our state. (We had help last summer from the New Literacies Collaborative folks, but they have moved onward and left the project in our hands.) The other teacher-leaders are smart, interesting and are on top of things. It’s a good group to be part of.

Since mid-summer, we have been working on coming up with a plan for an October session. Since the ten of us leaders live and work across the state, it seemed to me to make sense to do the planning virtually.

First, I created a social networking space on Grouply, which wasn’t that popular, I guess, since very few of us used it for much at all.

Then, I started up a Google Doc for us to use, but soon realized that there just too many of us to keep track of the changes and ideas floating around.  To me, it became chaos. And even then, not all ten of us were even using the document.

Someone suggested Elluminate, but none of us followed up on it.

We were then left with a wall of silence for a bit, as I think we were all bit confused about where to go now. Plus, school was starting up.

We’ve now reverted to good ol’ email, with two of our team (not me) designated as “project leaders” setting the agenda options and allowing the rest of us room to add ideas (around showing new tools, and allowing the teams time to connect and share out, etc.) in email responses. I like that approach much better, even though I have to give up an amount of control, and tracking the emails can get nutty.

This experience had me wondering: where is that Golden Limit on number of people collaborating where collaborative flexibility transforms itself into chaos and too many voices make a muddle of things?

I think the number for me is about five people trying to plan a document together. After that, the best option is to designate some leaders and resign yourself to the role of a follower-collaborator. And this seems to be one of the ongoing weaknesses of the Crowdsourcing movement, right? Chaos reigns easily. Even Wikipedia has editors or gatekeepers.

Peace (in the organization),
Kevin

Talkin’ 9/11

Last year, I took some heat from an administrator at my school for showing a Brain Pop movie explaining what 9/11 was and its impact on our lives today. The video was well-done and informative, and a perfect fit for sixth graders. Or so I thought.  I was told I should have warned parents and that the images of planes crashing into buildings was not appropriate to show (even in cartoon). I don’t know. I teach sixth grade and they need to be ready for the world.

Yesterday, I just had to talk about 9/11, even if I didn’t show a single image or movie. And we had a great series of discussions around tolerance and current events, particularly around the uproar over the Mosque/community center project near Ground Zero  (most of my kids did not know what a mosque was) and that pastor in Florida who wants to burn the Quoran. When we made the connection between the Bible and the Quoran, most of the students were very offended (and one student from Turkey was already outraged). We talked about the ongoing war in Afghanistan and its roots in 9/11 (we live near a reserve air base, so many folks in our area have been to the Middle East in recent years).

As it turns out, two of our vocabulary words this week are immigrant and persecution, both of which also gave us an entry point into the diverse nature of our country and how many people have come here to avoid their governments, and the result is that there are many different people, with many different religions, and many different cultural heritages.

And then I told them that, in my family, September 11 is a day of celebration, too. My youngest son turns six years old today and I told my students that in this world, you need to find a balance between the good and bad, and while I will be remembering those who lost their lives in the terrorist attacks, I will also be cherishing the joy that my son brings to us.

Peace (in the love, not hate),
Kevin

My Son’s Teacher’s Blog

Finally … a teacher of one of my kids has a blog. I know not every teacher needs to blog nor desires to, but I was hoping that with three kids in the public school system, eventually someone would have a blog that I could follow.

My oldest son — now in seventh grade — came back home with a slew of forms and papers from his first day, and in there, there was a nice welcome letter from his history teacher, who included the web address of a blog that she uses called A Place in the World. It seems more like a place of news than a place of student work, but it’s a start.

I posted a comment for her, wishing her a good year, and then put her RSS feed into my reader. I feel like the parents of my own students, hopeful that I will get some information to spark discussions other than “nothing” when we ask what is going in school.

🙂

Peace (in the blogging),
Kevin

And Now Some Inspirational Words from Colleagues

Today, our students arrive. Yesterday, all of the staff in our district convened for our Convocation Ceremonies as a way to getting the year off to a start on a united front (we are a regional district) and the superintendent this year invited fellow teachers and administrators to be the speakers. Hearing those voices was a great way to begin the year, I thought, so kudos to our superintendent for passing the buck to the staff to motivate, inspire and lead us into the new school year.

Here are a few highlights:

  • My own building principal talked about coming into education as an idealist (and jokingly admitted how that idealism sometimes runs smack into reality when trying to bring ideas to fruition). He noted that no other professional addresses the needs so such a diverse population, and no other profession has a more meaningful goal in our society. Every day is a challenge. Yes. But that challenge is what we relish. “I pity the cubicle dwellers,” he said, to laughter.
  • A mom, who teaches kindergarten, and her daughter, who teaches third grade, took the podium collaboratively and in a very down-to-earth way, they talked about becoming inspired to be a teacher. The daughter: “I thought she (the mom) was the best teacher ever and I wanted to be just like her.” There were more than a few “awwws” in the audience. The two also did a funny bit about teaching styles today (ie, checking out lesson plans online) versus slightly more older teaching styles (ie, pulling out the old mimeograph copies).
  • Another third grade teacher, who had a career in the environmental sciences, told his story of how he went from that career into teaching, mostly because “it’s fun.” But that’s not all, he admitted. “Doing meaningful work has always mattered to me. One thing that charges me up … is knowing what happens in my classroom matters. I know this is a cliche, but what you and I do is important.
  • A high school math teacher took the stage to admit she is a full-fledged “math geek” who was a student in our district and came back as a teacher. She noted the many ways that colleagues helped her during her first years, and how she now tries to return the favor to her younger colleagues. And she loves seeing that spark with her students, noting: “I love to see students finding success where they don’t think it is possible.”
  • Another high school teacher, who teaches social studies, winged his talk a bit, and told of teachers from his Catholic school days who made impressions on him. One teacher was brilliant, and he still draws on those memories to inspire him as a teacher. Another was brilliant but could not connect with students, and was unfair in grading and unhelpful in nurturing young minds. “He expected a lot of his students but he did not expect a lot of himself. He had the ability but not the desire.”
  • Finally, a retired superintendent who now works for our state department of education concluded the Convocation with stories of her teaching days in Texas, and noted that so much of teaching is desire and drive. She also said that building a supportive school community, for staff as well as students, is crucial. “Our job is to be there for each other — to hold each other up. And when we take that as inspiration, we hold up all of our kids up, too.

What a great way to start the year!

Peace (in the words),
Kevin

Balancing Concern and Possibilities

Like most schools in Massachusetts, where there is a new law around bullying issues, we spent much of our first day back in professional development sessions centered around bullying and cyberbulling. Under our new state law, there will be detailed reporting procedures, a trail of action taken by administrators, and introduction of a bullying curriculum. It’s an important issue and we need more discussions. But I wonder about the message that was sent yesterday to the elementary teachers by our first speaker.

Cindy Boyle, who is a community educator with the regional District Attorney’s team, was energetic, engaging, funny and clearly has talked a lot and worked a lot with kids. She cares about young people. That was evident.  She was also upfront, letting us know that her perspective on the use of technology to engage in bullying behavior (through messaging, comments, etc.) is seen through the prism of the justice system. She urged us to see the issue through the eyes of an educator, too.

She also made it clear that the fears over predators scouring the Internet for victims is so statistically rare, and happens in certain situations, that those fears are not what should be worrying us. It’s the regular kids that need to be in our field of vision. The kids with a cell phone, or a computer.

Then, she launched into a presentation about how prevalent technology is in the lives of young people, how often clueless many young people are about their “digital footprints,” how she works in small groups to help youths see what digital detritus they leave behind, and how technology can be used to decrease the social interactions of people to such a degree that bullying can take place easily enough. She also took gaming to task for its use of cheating by sharing codes, violence in first person games and anti-social behaviors of users.

A few things she presented were not quite correct. She used a recent Kaiser Family study in which young people were show on average to be consuming media about 7 hours a day. Boyle told us that the study showed that kids use the Internet for 7 hours a day. There were some gasps around me. And she told us that when you load a video to YouTube, anyone anywhere can write a comment saying whatever they want (she had a slide with some vicious comments to demonstrate her point). Another teacher questioned her on this, and she started to backtrack about privacy controls. Just to be clear: you can shut off all comments, all video responses, all ratings when you load your video, just to be clear. And the news articles she shared made their point dramatically, all right, with reports of teachers being penalized and students being reprimanded, etc.

I imagine that the majority of my colleagues probably just shut the door on the possibilities of using web-based technology with that one single presentation because even though Cindy Boyle made it clear that education is a key component to stopping bullying online, I imagine a lot of teachers thinking the easiest way is to not even bring technology into the classroom.

Although she had asked us to view the talk through our own eyes, I think the fears that she put in place may have overwhelmed any considerations of possibilities for Internet-based work, including writing for an audience, connecting with global partners, composing in multiple media, etc. Those positive learning elements seemed diminished in the shadow of worry that she cast over us.

Peace (in the balance),
Kevin

The Great August Blog Pull-Back

blogvacation
It’s the time of year when I step back from blogging for a stretch and give my mind and my blog a rest. If you are a regular reader, thank you for coming by each day and I will be writing again when September rolls around. If you are a newcomer, welcome to my blog site and I hope you find me again in a few weeks.

I’ll still be writing here and there (on Twitter, at our iAnthology, for various websites where I write reviews — although I’ll be slowing down all around there, too, in August), but not here at Kevin’s Meandering Mind. I find that stepping away from the blog makes me appreciate the act of blogging more on the return, and allows me to concentrate on other things, like my family.

Write to you soon!

Peace (in rest mode),
Kevin

Narcissistic Viewing: Teaching the New Writing

Recently, I decided to do a search on the book that I helped co-edit and write a chapter for — Teaching the New Writing: Technology, Change and Assessment in the 21st Century Classroom — just to see if anyone was writing about it. Our aim was to showcase ways in which technology might be changing the teaching of writing, particularly in the spotlight of standardized testing and assessment and state curriculum. When Charlie, Anne and I were planning the book as editors, and then working on it over the course of two years with various writers, we hoped it would be something useful for classroom teachers.

But you never know.

Happily, the book has its share of mentions at various websites. It seems like much of the responses are positive and that the information is useful. I even found an entire wiki site dedicated to the book as well as a glog, which is something quite cool.

I am collecting the tidbits in the LiveBinder show above and will add when I find new things. If you are a reader of the book, I thank you and hope you found it helpful.

Peace (in the viewing),
Kevin

What’s your Epic Fail Day story?

Yesterday, I reviewed Bill Ferriter’s new book (Teaching the iGeneration) and saw at his blog — The Tempered Radical — that he was hosting an Epic Fail Story Day for August 12. He wants to make sure that folks know it is not about the failing, but about the resilience of teachers and students to find ways to work around problems that do arise from technology.

He writes:

Designed as an effort to raise awareness about the importance of being digitally resilient in the 21st Century Classroom and to help teachers new to technology understand that even digital veterans have computer meltdowns, Epic Tech Fail Day authors should write short pieces about the struggles that they’ve had in their work with technology…and then share lessons learned from their disasters.

Bill has all the details about Epic Fail Day at his site, and he also provides some suggestions for folks for writing. And he provides his own Epic Fail Story, too about some unexpected trails he took his students on. He will be choosing a few random writers to receive a free copy of his new book, which is certainly worth the price of a blog post!

So, what’s your story?

Peace (in the sharing),
Kevin