In a Little Different Direction.

On different days over the last week or so, I was blessed by one of the most valued experiences a teacher has. Well,  one that is incredibly rewarding for me anyway. That experience is simple and "everyday", and yet, so cool. It is when a former student sticks his or her head in the door and smiles or strides across the gym toward you just to say, "Hello!" With college spring break last week and BHS still in session, I was blessed to experience just that.

That is not really what this post is about, however. Instead, it is about blogging, and to a lesser degree, Twitter. Last Friday, Lacy Pitts, yes, the one and only Lacy Pitts, stuck her head into my room and smiled, then laughed, because that is what Lacy Pitts does. I was talking about The Great Gatsby with another student at the time, and Lacy snagged a seat and jumped right in. Lacy could always talk about literature and writing. The fact that she is now at KSU and beginning her journey toward becoming a mover and shaker in Ag policy has not changed that. Over the next hour or so, we just talked. I gave her a hard time for being a sorority girl. She criticized me and the rest of the ELA department for not implementing flexible seating and our new ELA Jr/Sr curriculum while she was at BHS. She recommended Lincoln and the Bardo and Quiet: The Power of Being an Introvert and she talked about what makes each one worth reading. Lacy raved about specific singer-songwriters that I need to add to my ITunes playlist and include in our literary discussions in class. We talked about other BHS students who have made the trek to Manhattan and the frustration of GTAs instructing classes, as well as her job and studies, which take her to Topeka once a week. It was a great time, for me anyway.

Then Lacy called me out.

When Lacy was in high school, she had started blogging, and that was the trigger I needed to get myself into the practice. I had thought about it for some time at that point, but I had not actually jumped in. With this HS junior turning out thoughtful posts on a regular basis, I had no excuse not to start writing. If Lacy blogged and I had not done so for a period of time, I felt obligated to focus and put digital pen to electronic paper. I returned the favor and called her out from time to time. And maybe that is why Lacy felt she could confidently call me out last Friday.

It started with Lacy admitting that she need to blog. I told her I aimed for once a month, sometimes more. Then she hit with this:

"Coach Kohls, you need to blog more for your kids. Remember why you started blogging and who was your audience. They need to see you as that creative person, who does the things you are asking them to do."

Lacy went on to remind me that she had called me out for the same thing on Twitter a while back. "It's a way for kids to see you on a different level. It's important."

Over the last three years or so, I have shifted what I write on my blog and what I post on Twitter. Previously my blogging was pretty much all over the place, and it included creative writing, personal posts, musings about my son and daughter, and ramblings about what was happening in my classroom. I have since moved into writing nearly exclusively about education, fellow teachers, my classroom, and my students. I follow a lot more educators and learn from them through Twitter on a daily basis. I still Tweet primarily about my school kids and celebrate their awesomeness. My feed is also loaded with responses to Twitterchat questions that focus on education and conversations with fellow teachers about classroom ideas.

Both platforms have become incredibly important for me as a teacher and allow me to grow each and every day. Sometimes I blog to share what we are doing in our classroom, and sometimes I write to think through thoughts that I am struggling to wrap my head around. My Twitter life has connected me with teachers not just from #313teach and across Kansas, but also from Philadelphia, Boston, Little Rock, and Minneapolis. We have been able to connect with poets and writers from across the country and around the world. Twitter has changed how I learn and how I share the stories from within our halls and classrooms.

However, Lacy made me think. Was I missing an opportunity to connect with my kids at that level that Lacy was talking about, a connection I was making in the past and now need to establish again? I still connect with kid sn Twitter and "Are you going to Tweet that?" and "Hey, Mr. Kohls, you better like my Tweet" are common refrains in Room 202. However,  I haven't written posted anything creative on my blog in a while. How can I push my kids to post on Crusader Chronicles, the BHS creative blog, if I am not putting creative work out there?  I told Lacy that maybe I needed to start another blog that was focused just on my creative writing and less "teachery" ideas. That way I would not lose what I have with my more professional blog while putting out there what I once put into Ramblings.

So, I am going to do just that. Leave it to Lacy Pitts to make me add one more thing to my plate. Lacy reminded me that when she was at BHS, I had been working on a serial novel that I used to post on my blog, but I had not put out anything new on that in a long time. She was right. So, I am kicking off Rambling in a Little Different Direction. with an unfinished piece of goofy little fiction that is just meant to be fun. I doubt very many people will read it, which is fine, but I better get at least one hit on that page.

I'm calling you out Lacy.

Battling 'Just Tell Me What to Do'.

I was caught completely off guard this week during pre-enrollment by a student comment: "Why can't we just have Junior English? Just tell me what to take. I'm not going to like it anyway." 

The student hit me, hard. At first, I didn't understand how he could say such a thing, and my initial reaction was frustration. We had made a fairly major shift within the ELA department, eliminating on-level Junior and Senior English from the curriculum and replacing them with high interest and high relevance semester class offerings.  We had spent a great deal of time crafting the change, drawing on ideas from the past and dreaming big for the future, focusing and refocusing our purpose, and drawing on student input to help develop the curriculum. It wa a team effort, and the administration and BOE had been extremely supportive, asking the important questions and expressive the appropriate concerns which revolved around one principle: What is best for our kids? We had polled students about what courses they felt they would gain the most from, and we had drawn from research students had done regarding what should be done to improve education. Our semester courses now include Passion Pursuits, a research and writing class that allows students to research a passion they hold and then use that research to do something bigger. That had been a part of our Senior English curriculum for some time, and we did not want to lose it; in fact we want to expand it. That semester is required during the junior or senior year. We now offer War Literature, Pop Culture Literature, Media Criticism and Review, Gothic Lit and Fantasy Fiction, Creative Writing, Heroes and Mythology, and Technical Writing and Lifelong Reading. Dual credit classes are now a part of the course offerings. Our seniors are a little upset with us because they wish we had made the change earlier. Graduates have emailed or tweeted us about how much they wish they could have been a part of this change. 

And here is a student complaining that he wishes he didn't have to choose what was interesting to him and could just be told what to do. 

I lamented the comment and my frustration in the hallway. Hallway collaboration is a key part of my personal development as a teacher. Our hallway is populated with amazing people with incredible minds, and I try to tap into that wealth as much as possible. Later, one of those teachers Voxed me about the conversation we had. We do that a lot, and our collective minds usually lead to something positive.

Many of our kids, much like many of our teachers, have been trained to do what they are told. Student voice and student choice require them to take ownership of their learning. It is not that they do not care or do not want to be active in their learning; some of them just do not know how to do that because they have never been given that power.  We encourage our gifted students to "enrich their learning", but the majority of our students have been driven to, basically, just get as many answers right as possible. Pass the test and do what will earn the points to get a passing grade. That is what they have learned to do. And the truly bothers me. Here is an opportunity for  each student to decide how he or she wants to improve as a writer, a reader as a learner, to select what is most interesting and relevant to him. And he was complaining. 

After thinking about it and discussing it, I came to realize that he was not really complaining about the choices and options: he was complaining about how he had been taught to approach his education for 11 years. School was something that had been done to him.  Now the rules were changing, and it was making him uncomfortable. As we have tried more and more to involve our students in owning their learning in our individual classrooms through PBL, inquiry, and more, we have seen it before. When we have tried to guide students to initiate, extend, enrich, and demonstrate their learning, some students immediately want to be told what to do. The freedom and uncertainty can be scary. "How much do I have to do to pass/get an A?" is a common query, especially from honors students. The grade has always been the goal, the prize, and we have ingrained that into their thinking. It has been our fault, and it is our responsibility to shift the thinking back to learning, back to thinking. We need to recapture the excitement we see in our elementary kids. Some students are hungry for that, and they are feasting in our classrooms and in our building. As they do, they ask less and less often about grades, and they take more and more risks in their learning. Others are less comfortable, not because they are being obstinate or do not want to learn, but because they honestly understand their learning, their education, in such a way that makes owning their learning somehow wrong, or at least unexpected. As with every lesson, we have to demonstrate how this is relevant, how it will benefit not just all of our students, but each student as an individual. 

In other words, I need to be a teacher. I need to facilitate each kids' learning, even if it is learning about owning his own learning. If I can do that, then we all learn more. And we all win.