Stepping into Summer, II

As I sat down to think about today’s post, I found this article waiting for me, thanks to a friend who had shared it earlier in the day. The not-so-hidden messages of “good little teacher” and “be quiet, good little teacher” are powerful indeed, and they resonate with the messages of earning love by good behavior that we’d talked about last night in my weekly Book Group’s conversation about the Henri Nouwen book we’re currently reading. Like the dutiful elder son in the parable and the painting, “good little teachers” firmly believe that, if we just work hard enough and do good enough things, “They” will somehow notice and reward “Us,” or at least acknowledge what “We” have been doing. And, of course, “good little students” feel the same way when their teachers’ scarce attention is devoted to “the bad, lazy ones” and “the troublemakers” and, on occasion, those few “annoying” students who already understand the New Thing and need something different. Maybe, those “good little ones” think, just maybe, if I do the worksheet packet with extra-special care … maybe then Ms. X will notice me and appreciate me? Maybe I’ll get the gold star, the sticker, the “good little worker” label.

What about me? we “good little ones” are asking. Maybe if I’m extra good, I’ll get the attention I seek. Maybe, just maybe, if I’m really, really self-sacrificing, someone will notice and reward me. As I was writing this post, a friend called me to vent about that very issue in an organization with which she regularly works … and as the school year came to its end last week, and as my summer commitment began, I found myself struggling with those very thoughts and feelings.

I’m sure you noticed the irony of being self-sacrificing in order to receive attention and praise. But in the heat of the moment, in factories, farms, schools, and even families, it’s hard to notice the irony.

But even on the farm in the parable, it didn’t work that way. The father in the parable seems surprised by his older son’s anger and resentment: “You are always with me,” he says, “and everything I have is yours.” It’s not that the father takes his dutiful son for granted … or is it? Does he just assume his son knows how much he cares for him and values him?

The parable, the article, and the book are all helping me find a new and much-needed perspective on factory schooling, on colleagues’ reactions, and on the responses of the Powers That Be that I know best. I spent several hours Monday writing “common exams” (which my Latin colleagues may or may not actually use) and a “Latin II placement exam” (which may or may not be helpful given the small number of middle-school programs in the district) in the Curriculum Team work session I mentioned yesterday. It was a good, productive day, with lots of time to work, some excellent opportunities to talk with each other, and an amazing noodle dish that one of our Chinese colleagues had contributed. Good food, good friends, a good mixture of time alone to work and time together to share and reflect … a great way to spend the first Monday of summer.

And yet … there was more work to do than time available. Our relevant Power wasn’t there, due to a bunch of other commitments, so there wasn’t a way to ask critical, big-picture questions in real time. There was confusion about how much time we’d agreed to spend, about what to do when we finished, about whether we’d been granted an additional day to work or not.

So, even in the midst of a joyful community, there was still a lot of factory-thinking … or should we say Older Son thinking? It was easy to slip into the mindset of “good little teacher doing what we’re told” … and from there, it’s a short trip, indeed, to resentful “little teacher” complaining about how They don’t really appreciate Us, and about the “bad lazy ones” who don’t do their fair share.

It’s a short trip, indeed, from dutiful to resentful, from family working together to resentful Older Son refusing to join the party.

The parable, of course, is deliberately ambiguous, and the painting depicts a single moment in time. We don’t know how the older son responds to his father’s invitation, and we don’t know what happened before or after in narrative time. Like any excellent Story, the parable invites us to imagine, to create a back-story and a What Happened Next. And like any excellent Story, it invites us to think about implications for our own lives, our own families, the organizations within which we work.

A school, a school district, any organization or business, is an ongoing mesh and series of relationships. Sometimes things function smoothly, and sometimes we feel as though we really are striving together toward a common goal. But sometimes, just when we least expect it, someone demands his or her share of the property, or somebody leaves to seek fortune and fame elsewhere, or someone makes us feel unappreciated and disrespected. What lessons do the parable and the painting hold for Ms. X, Mr. Y, our Powers, our students, and me at times like those? What lessons do they hold for builders and sustainers of Joyful Community, and for those who wish to join in?

Stepping into Summer, I

If you’ve ever been (or even known) a teacher in a factory-model setting, you know that those first few days of freedom at the start of the summer vacation aren’t a time of great productivity. Exhausted by their long struggles, many teachers do very little for those first few precious days. Several friends of mine headed directly to the beach, to be waited on by their appreciative spouses and children. Others went home and went directly to bed. Some keep the energy going for a few days, like the participants in my online professional-development class who submitted all the work for their first Unit in a burst of energy right before – or right after – their official release. But even for them, I noticed a small drop-off in productivity as Thursday became Friday and Friday turned into the weekend.

We’ll see what happens this week, now that students have been “released” for a whole week (as of midday today).

Often the first few days of summer are “just me and the animals” time, with everyone else in the family busy with other things. But this year, with some scheduling quirks, we’ve had a few days all together. Sometimes it’s a parallel form of togetherness, with everyone engaged in work or play on a separate screen; other times, we’re fully together over meals, shared entertainment, or even conversation. We’ll have a few more days of that later in the week, though today is a busy one for me: six hours of “curriculum development team” work, which will look a bit different for the “Latin Team” (of me) from what my Spanish, French, Chinese, and German colleagues are doing. My “team” finished more of its original assignment than the others, so “we” will be working on “common assessments” and placement exams as other groups struggle to finish or revise the curriculum documents they prepared last school year.

I’m glad, though, that the whole team will be meeting together. The original plan was that everyone would check in somewhere, then go off individually to work. To a degree, that’s still the plan … but our meeting space promotes both solitude and collaboration, ad I’m grateful for that. If you’ve ever spent six hours of solitary work, you probably know that human interaction – even if only for a moment, as you and your colleague both get a snack at the same time – is vital for real productivity. And yet, though you and I know this – and though my colleagues today will talk about it a few times, I’m sure – poor Ms. X and Mr. Y are so ready to deny their students a thing that they themselves find important and essential. “Stop talking!” barks Ms. X, “and pay attention to my really important PowerPoint and study guide! Stop being bad and lazy!”

I wonder what Ms. X and Mr. Y wrote in response to the email I got last week, from a Power whose work I value and respect. The Power, responding to a request from Yet Higher Up, had asked us to answer three or four questions about academic rigor and what it means to us … and what it looks like, for students and teachers, if a classroom is “rigorous.” If you’re a long-time reader of this blog, you know I have an ambiguous relationship, at best, with that word … but leaving aside its etymological connections with stiffness and death, and trying to reclaim a meaning of “challenging but engaging,” I spent a good bit of time responding to the Power over the weekend. But what about Ms. X, who had somehow overlooked an absolutely vital piece of information all year long? “I get so many emails,” she told me, “so I just delete them unless it’s obvious that they really apply to me.” The transition, state-wide, from one student information system to another — and the required online training sessions that Ms. X must complete before mid-August — evidently had fallen into the “just delete them” category. So I wonder what, if anything, she’s written in response to the Power.

As the new week begins, what opportunities will we find for connections, for deepening relationships, for sharing understandings and building joyful communities together? How will we find a good balance between the solitude and the collaboration that we need? And what are some effective ways to get poor, overworked Ms. X – and the frantic Powers who “have to” deal with “bad, lazy teachers” like her – to come together into a deeper, more meaningful community, too?

Wrapping Things Up, V

How do you react to the first taste of freedom after a long, difficult captivity?  It’s sad that such a question would come to mind at the beginning of summer vacation – but for so many students and teachers, factory-schools do feel like captivity and vacations, temporary though they are, feel like a restoration of freedom.  That tension was apparent Wednesday afternoon, when the announcement came that no email “authorizing us to be released” had arrived.  It was more apparent as the afternoon hours passed, as colleagues half-jokingly started plotting escape attempts.  Ms. G paced restlessly; Mr. Z and Mr. N teased her about that; Ms. M and Mr. P and I looked on in amusement; a young colleague, who smokes but can’t do so on campus, twitched nervously in anticipation of his nicotine fix.

Then came the announcement of release, and in moments the parking lot emptied out.  Laden with leftover hot dogs and hamburgers from the end-of-year cookout, folks rushed to their cars and sped away … to freedom or something very much like it.

“What are your plans?” someone had asked me.  I had a definite one – to pick up that box of books I mentioned yesterday – and a tentative one of possibly doing some clothes shopping.  The definite plan did happen, but I  bought no clothes Wednesday evening, and I still haven’t used the gift cards some grateful students and families gave me.  I did manage to take the boxes – and the Chair of Power and the hand truck – out of the car on Thursday, but they’re all still sitting in the garage, waiting for a day when I have more energy and enthusiasm to tackle them.  For me, that first day of freedom involved some writing, some work with the online professional-development course I teach, conversations with friends, and – eventually – a quiet dinner out and a few brief errands.  Thursday was a brutally hot day, and then there were storms in the evening – and that combination didn’t exactly help me make or carry out ambitious plans.

And yet, as factory-school people, we want our students to have ambitious plans for the summer.  We simply must, we say, prevent summer learning loss.  And we’re sure we know how to do that: by keeping those kids learning during the lazy summer months.  And, if you’re a factory-school thinker, you just know that learning means doing worksheet packets and answering questions.  So younger students get summer math packets and summer reading questions to do, and older students get course-specific review packets.  Never mind the research on distributed practice; never mind the need to let old learning sink in deeply.  Never mind that their teachers, in many cases, won’t think about that content area for weeks.  You wouldn’t want those kids to get bad and lazy over the summer, Ms. X and her Powers think, and besides those parents “need to” be grateful because We gave Those Kids something to do. When you see yourself as the controller, the supervisor, the enforcer of the right process, it affects everything that you do.  Everything from Ms. X’s complaints about “doing the problems the Chapter Six way” to the ways we define and enforce student (and teacher) dress codes – it all flows logically from a world view where They (the “bad, lazy ones”) need Us (the “good, diligent ones”) to tell Them what to do, to enforce order on Their chaos.

Control and labeling.  Process for its own sake.  We talked about them yesterday in response to Emily’s blog post about dress codes, and the conversation continues in response to her second post in a series about “distractions” and the not-so-hidden messages we send when We try to prevent distractions for Them.

Is it really about Them?  Or is it about a side of Us that we don’t want to acknowledge?  Who actually gets “distracted,” and who really needs to be monitored for badness or laziness?

Responding to yesterday’s post on Google+, Debbie brought up four critical factors to consider:

Awareness … understanding that people have different ways of looking at the world, interacting with the world, learning about the world, contributing to the world, and interacting with others
Respecting … respecting people’s different ways of being, thinking, interacting
Self-awareness: knowing how “I” think, learn, interact, contribute, helps in so many ways: emotional management, seeking connections and knowledge, knowing when to speak up and when not to, and so on.

And of course we can’t forget the ever-present question of intention. We need to constantly be identifying our true intention and checking to see if our actions are matching it. If something is important enough to become a rule then it “should” be important enough to follow through on.

In an joyful community – the temporary one that my colleagues and I formed Wednesday afternoon, the more lasting one that I rejoined later that day, the ongoing one we’ve formed around our shared conversations here – awareness, respect, self-awareness, and intention are always important, whether we’re consciously addressing them or not.  They’re the keys to community, to friendship, to any kind of lasting relationship among people – and the more different we are from each other, the more important these factors become.  I had been thinking about replacing my rather beat-up cell phone, but decided to wait a week or so after I discovered my daughter would also be needing new glasses.  So far, so good – but then that decision triggered a host of old perspectives about worthiness and deserving – or not deserving – nice things.  And as those old perspectives took hold, I’m glad a good friend called me, called me out on them, and forced me to get to a place of self-awareness and intention.

Friends who know you well enough to do that.  A community that cares enough not to settle for the first, easy, superficial answer.  Structures that promote awareness, respect, self-awareness, and intention.  We need them, and when factory-structures fail, we need them more than ever.

What will we each do, today and every day, to make sure those structures are in place?  And how will we invite others – exhausted Ms. X , disheartened Mr. Y, terrified Powers clinging to their positional authority like shipwreck victims to a life preserver – to join the community, let go of what’s broken, and look more closely, but less judgmentally, at their own intentions and perspectives?

Wrapping Things Up, IV

Wednesday was the Very Last Day of the school year.  For my dear friend Ms. H, the school counselor, it was the Last Day of All.  She’s retiring to spend time with her family and friends, to explore some new adventures.  And we took time to celebrate her career – and all the students and teachers she touched in nearly three decades with the school district – at our annual end-of-year cookout.  There were smiles and happy tears, laughter and stories – all the hallmarks of joyful community.  It was great to meet the Famous Grandchildren, whose pictures I’ve seen and whose adventures I’ve heard so many times over the last several years.

I’d spent the morning moving those last few things around.  There were a few last books that needed to be boxed up, and the Chair of Power (as it’s been nicknamed for so many years) needed to come home for a minor repair over the summer.  But then there was time – time to read, time to think, time to reflect in a now-empty classroom.  Two signatures remained on the All-Important Checkout Sheet, and when those were completed, there came a different gift of time.

If you haven’t worked in a factory-model school, you might not know about the hurry up and wait approach to those last few days.  There’s never enough time … but then there’s too much time.  There’s too much to do … and then nothing to do.  Sometimes, if Great Powers think about it, there’s “that email” telling Lesser Powers that their staff can be “released” early if everything has been completed, and some Lesser Powers sometimes make that decision on their own.  But at a school that tries to do things right, we wait for “that email” … and on Wednesday, “that email” never came.

So, after lunch, little groups – temporary gatherings that sometimes turned into joyful communities – began forming in various locations.  I had stopped by the school office to turn in that All-Important Checklist and a Vitally Significant Item – an item we always used to turn in at the end of the year, but one which hadn’t been required in a while. Then, around lunchtime on Wednesday, it seems there was an emergency email from a Power, not requesting but requiring all schools to make sure that the Item (school-system identification badges) was collected from “all staff members” who wouldn’t be working in schools over the summer.  Poor Mr. Y, who had left his at home, will be dropping it by the school today, and I’m sure many others, in many other schools, will as well.  There was no explanation, of course, of why the Vitally Important Item needed to be collected, nor of why the decision was made so late in the school year.  At some schools, whose “required day” was Tuesday rather than Wednesday, most of the faculty and staff were probably already gone for the summer.

Hurry up … and then wait.  Too much to do … and then not enough.  After the brief emergency with the Vitally Important Item. there were still two hours till the Official Release Time.  I found myself in the school library, where an interesting group of three custodians and three teachers gathered to talk, to tease each other as longtime close acquaintances do, and to wait for any message of Official Release that might come.  It wasn’t long before we had formed something very much like a joyful community, despite our many differences in age, status, and demographics.  And eventually a message of Official Release arrived, and everyone headed home – or, in my case, to meet an old friend and pick up a gift from another old friend.  And then, all of a sudden, it was summer … which is why this post is being published a bit later than it “normally” would be.

I’m still thinking about the various lenses that Brendan suggested to gain perspective on factory-style thinking and actions.  They’re highly relevant to the Last Day of All, just as they are to the issues of dress codes and enforcement raised by this article and this one, which Emily discusses in her blog today.  For the Powers who sent the one email – and didn’t send the longed-for one – the lens was probably

 the factory model paradigm of people being “compliant or defiant” with their factory roles.  When people don’t “comply,” friction is applied to Ms. X and Mr. Y’s factory roles.  The same pattern repeats when Ms. X or Mr. Y don’t comply with directives from Powers, or expectations from students or parents that go beyond the expected factory routine.

And if you’re a Power – or anyone “just doing your job” and enforcing a policy, whether it’s about turning stuff in or release times or what kids can wear – it usually seems Just That Simple.  Here’s the rule, and you either comply (and get labeled as “good”) or defy (and get punished, or labeled “bad and lazy,” or worse).  Of course, it never is Just That Simple, as Soraya Chemaly points out in the piece that Emily refers to.  But if you point that out – if you question the motivation behind The Policy – that, in itself, is defiant and bad and lazy from some Powers’ perspectives.

What about those other lenses Brendan suggested?  The one of brain functions and personality types is intriguing, especially when you think about the personality types who are drawn to rule-based, algorithmic jobs and how they (we) perceive Those Others who see shades of gray where there “should be” only black and white. Brendan also points out another lens:

The cultural anthropology lens

Another way to think about all of this is through the lens of cultural anthropology.  Teachers and students alike have been trained to adhere to the norms of factory culture, but this is a peculiar kind of culture, and one whose traditional way of life is being disrupted.  Students receive mixed messages, not only within the context of school, like whether to attend the last day, but also about how they “should” think about themselves and the world by the broader culture.

For example, youth today, in the US and many other places, absorb messages of empowerment like never before in history.  These messages indicate one should make one’s own judgments and not listen to what others say.  Meanwhile, specific people, like parents and teachers, expect their judgments to carry weight backed by the very fabric of society itself.  This is a profoundly mixed message, and one that invariably leads to inner conflict, or some reaction to it (like apathy, acting out, and alienation.)

What insights into the Last Day – and the conflicts over student dress and turning stuff in and release times – can we gain from that lens?  And what about the other lenses, like the context collapse & multiple commenter lens or the other lenses Brendan mentioned?  When you build joyful communities – or when they form spontaneously, like the one on Wednesday afternoon – it’s a lot more complicated than it first appears!  How do we honor all the perspectives and help each other understand them?  How do we bring all the lenses and perspectives together to help us all see more clearly?

Wrapping Things Up, III

I want to return to the theme of lenses from yesterday’s post, the theme sparked by Brendan’s comment on Friday.  But, as Brendan noted this morning, it can be difficult and problematic to ask people to try on different lenses:

One consideration is the how of suggesting new lenses for people to consider.  This can be complicated, especially when confined to the flow of a typical in-person conversation (as opposed to writing a long message, or giving a speech.)

It’s easy to come off as criticizing the lens they’re using — or, stir up the common resistance to anything that sounds psychological or philosophical.

One possibility is to try a what-if approach.  What if students actually aren’t and lazy — or they are for a very good reason, and with some changes they’d have a reason to try?

The catch is if the necessary change is to give students (or teachers) more autonomy, authority, and chance for initiative.  Wouldn’t it be chaos?  It’s a difficult transition to make from dependency on the factory structure and its assumptions.  The question is asked around here a lot, but it comes up again here: what might that transition look like?

The end of the school year, with its odd bursts of frantic rush and time to wait and reflect, isn’t a bad time to think about lenses and perspectives.  And sometimes, just when you least expect it, you run into someone in the very act of trying a different lens.

Right before lunch on Tuesday, I saw my colleague Ms. H, the French teacher.  She’s a kind, caring soul, a truly sweet person, a veteran teacher who came out of retirement because she still loves working with young people.  Adjusting to a new curriculum – and to a very different generation of students – has been a struggle for her, a struggle compounded at one point by some serious health issues.  But as she’s gained health and strength, and as her old fire has returned, Ms. H has been thinking – a lot – about change.

“I realized something,” she told me, “when I looked at my French 4 students, especially the one who got the award on Awards Day.  She’s a good student and a hard worker, but she isn’t really proficient at using the language. ”  Ms. H was concerned about that – and concerned that her “old-school” approach to teaching the language wasn’t serving her students well.  So we talked about proficiency and measuring proficiency, about building proficiency and grading for proficiency.  Ms. H will be participating in at least two training sessions this summer, a face-to-face one about proficiency-based language instruction and an online one about using web-based tools in her teaching.  And, after talking with her on Tuesday, I’m eager to know about the changes she’s suddenly willing, even eager, to make.

“It sounds to me,” I told her, “like you’re where I was a few years ago.  I had the perfect system for teaching Latin, and I tweaked and improved it every year.  And then, all of a sudden, it stopped working, and I was so frustrated!”  Yes, she said, that’s exactly what had happened.  And we both had realized that we were prioritizing that system over the students, the process over the people.  For both of us, the realization had been painful; we liked the good teacher label, and even in the midst of our system-focused days, we still took time to build relationships with young people and their families.  But somehow, without anyone directly telling us or confronting us, both of us had tried on different lenses, taken a hard look at the situation, and realized we needed to make some changes.

What’s the best lens to use?  Or is it different for each person?  For me, one key was the first alternate lens Brendan pointed out:

One way to look at this black-or-white thinking is through the lens of the factory model paradigm of people being “compliant or defiant” with their factory roles.  When people don’t “comply,” friction is applied to Ms. X and Mr. Y’s factory roles.  The same pattern repeats when Ms. X or Mr. Y don’t comply with directives from Powers, or expectations from students or parents that go beyond the expected factory routine.

The Myers-Briggs temperament and brain function lense

Another lens to use is Myers-Briggs temperament and the associated brain functioning in students and teachers.  Some temperaments, for example Sensing-Judging types, function best with a lot of expected structure and predictability, and disruptions lead to a depletion of mental energy.  That’s not to say SJ types couldn’t operate in a different kind of school, but given their adaptation to the factory rules, that’s what they are going to expect and be comfortable with.

Meanwhile, Sensing-Perceiving typed students, for example, may derive more mental energy and brain activation by staring out the window than paying attention in class.  This pattern has been shown on EEG, and provides a whole different way of looking at what’s going on in schools than the comply-vs-defy, good-vs.bad-and-lazy framing.  (“Sit up Straight! Sit still! Look at me, not out the window! “ http://forums.school-survival.net/showthread.php?tid=29190&pid=491155#pid491155 )

That work was done by Dario Nardi at UCLA, who explains in Dario Nardi Neuroscience of Personality.MP4 ”Yes, there is evidence for type.  There is, in the brain, the neuroscience evidence.  And it’s not just book research, I can say, ‘it’s this and this and this,’ and all of them have coaching implications, learning implications, leadership, communication… once we look at the brain, we see type is there.”

So that’s another way to consider things, but by itself it doesn’t take into account all the factors in the factory.

As I started paying attention to thinking styles and processing styles, I had the stunning insight that different people see the world differently!  And as a language teacher, I was always attuned to the different cultural lenses that lead to differences in perspectives.  As Debbie put it,

aw, the “Fire of Truth”, not only the bigger picture where we listen to and respect the different perspectives (or lenses) but also the one within each of us – if we are willing to tend to it.
Being able to “see” different perspectives, through the different lenses is a valuable skill, especially for mentors. As we look for, listen to, and respect the different perspectives we develop our ability to best meet the needs of the moment and of the individuals we engage with. Basically, this is empathy. _”I understand where you are coming from; I hear what you are saying; I see what you mean.” _

I’m curious as to how much of our mentoring time is spent on developing this really important skill?

That was a natural beginning point for me … and possibly for Ms. H, too.  But what about folks who don’t regularly think about perspectives?  What about folks who just know there’s One Right Way, the Chapter 8 Way?  How can one invite Ms. X and Mr. Y to try on new lenses without criticizing or terrifying?  And what are the implications for joyful community if we fail or if we succeed?

Wrapping Things Up, II

The last day … and the first day.  The last for students, with “early release” for them, and then two hours for teachers and other staff members to work on all the things that must happen before a factory-model school closes down for its summer break.  There are reports to complete, classrooms to clean, stuff to pack, signatures on the all-important Checkout Form, the underlying tasks that generate those signatures.  Sometimes there’s a feeling of “hurry up and wait” when bunches of people, having all finished a given task at around the same time, are waiting – patiently or not-so-patiently – for the one and only Power who can sign off on their completion.

But amidst the hurrying and waiting, there’s also the odd gift of time.  For once, Ms. X and Mr. Y were “done with grades” on time, though they’d neglected to notify the person who needed to know about that.  So end-of-year reports and records, often a frantic nightmare of rushing, should be relatively smooth this year.  Even during the “field day” activities, you could feel the gift of time.  Our students who came – more, I think, than Ms. X and Mr. Y had expected – were able to play dodgeball or basketball if they wanted, or they could sit and chat with friends and watch the games.  Faculty members rotated into the gym to observe and participate, if they wanted to, and I was glad to see that the Three Basketball-Playing Guys on the faculty joined in to one of the games.  I was also glad they invited me to join them, but as I told them, there were “at least two problems” with me and basketball yesterday.  First, I’m old and out of shape, so I’d be more of a liability than an asset.  Second, I wasn’t wearing appropriate shoes.  And third (yes, third of two), after what I did to my foot a week or so ago, I didn’t need to be running and changing direction.

But the feeling of joyful community was there, in that old gymnasium, among the players and the spectators.  Well, most of the time – some words were exchanged between Two Problematic Boys, and  One Ms. X “had to” go running over to them to prevent a fight … or so she thought.

One Ms. X was upset about that, too, at lunch time, and she blamed the “disorganization” and the Powers That Be.  ”They should have made All Of Those Kids do something, not just sit and watch,” she complained bitterly.  I had images of her upbraiding “bad, lazy students” for not having “enough fun” on the Last Day, but I didn’t want to say anything to her.  She was also concerned about the published schedule, which indicated that students would be returning to their homeroom classes after lunch.  ”But I don’t have anything for them to do!” she insisted, “and my classroom is all torn up, and they can’t even watch a video.  What were They thinking?  Those kids need to stay in the gym all day!”

Other Ms. X was more concerned about the early dismissal for students, which specifically did not apply to school-system employees.  ”Do you think They will send an email so We can leave early, too?”  she asked.  No, I thought, for “at least two” reasons: first, non-school-based employees had things planned for the afternoon; second, schools need the time to do their end-of-year business; and third (it had been a long day by then), that’s not the sort of thing that would occur to any Powers That Be who could send such a missive.  One Ms. X suggested that, if such an email never came, it might be because “people were bad” during the school year.  ”Well, I was good,” sniffed Other Ms. X … and that’s when I left the room.  I don’t really want to know what else she had to say.

But I did think Ms. X’s notion of rewards for being good was interesting – and it stuck in my mind all day.  It was oddly connected with our Book Group conversation Monday evening, as we talked about the “Elder Son” section of the Henri Nouwen book we’re reading.  For Nouwen, the Elder Son in the parable represents that all-too-human tendency to compare our own best with others’ worst, and then to sit in judgment, to reject community and connections with those we’ve labeled as bad or less worthy.  When One Ms. X labels her students, when Other Ms. X labels nameless, faceless coworkers at Some Other School, or, for that matter, when I label One Ms. X or Other Ms. X, don’t we all step out of joyful community – the feast prepared by the loving father in celebration of his wayward son’s “return from the dead” – and into a cold, dark place?

On Google+ yesterday, Debbie was

reminded of a story from my parenting program at the correctional centre. During the program, talking about guiding self-discipline and empowerment, one gentleman said, “all this thinking- it is so much work. It was easier to not think about all this.”
Building a joyful community is indeed a lot of work as opposed to expecting and enforcing the “on task” desk work. It is so much harder to plan for the unexpected than to enforce the expected. But the outcome – the joy fullness, the empowerment, the sense of community: priceless!

And Brendan talked about many different lenses through which one can analyze Ms. X’s “black-and-white thinking:”

One way to look at this black-or-white thinking is through the lens of the factory model paradigm of people being “compliant or defiant” with their factory roles.  When people don’t “comply,” friction is applied to Ms. X and Mr. Y’s factory roles.  The same pattern repeats when Ms. X or Mr. Y don’t comply with directives from Powers, or expectations from students or parents that go beyond the expected factory routine.

I want to address all of Brendan’s lenses – those of Myers-Briggs Personality Types, Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy, Cultural Anthropology, Context Collapse, and Rod Baird’s Counterfeit Kids – but I think each lens deserves a post of its own.  Since today and tomorrow should be fairly quiet days – and since Ms. X and I will probably be too busy to interact much – I’m hoping to have time and space for the lenses in this week’s remaining posts.

Lenses, after all, are important.  They bend light, distorting it in some ways, but helping us see other things more clearly – like the lenses in my glasses or those in a telescope or magnifying glass.  With a simple lens, you get a distorted picture; with multiple lenses, or a complex one, things can come into clearer focus.  As builders and sustainers of joyful community, we need those different lenses just as we need each other’s perspectives!

Wrapping Things Up, I

If you’re reading “live,” today is the Last Day for Students.  Yes, it’s a Monday, and yes, it’s what we call an “early release” day – though even a local Power, in a pre-recorded phone message to parents, students, faculty, and staff, managed to use the more common term “half day.”  It’s a tradition here, and in many surrounding school districts, for students not to come on the last day.  There’s nothing to do, they say, and Testing is over, and grades have been turned in.  So why come?

In some schools, I’m told, that’s also the sentiment among faculty and administrators.  They’d love to have an extra day to close things down, pack things up, put things away.  So students are discouraged – overtly or covertly – from coming on the Last Day, and the few who show up are put to work as extra pairs of hands.

In my little world, we’ve returned to a very old tradition of Field Day activities today, though I’m glad, given the heavy rain that’s falling as I write, that we planned to have them indoors.  An email message from Powers That Be, sent fairly late on Friday afternoon, promises that a detailed schedule will be emailed this morning.  To be fair, it’s hard to plan when you don’t know how many people will be there … and we won’t know, not really, until students arrive.  We asked how many were planning to attend – or, at least, teachers were asked to ask, and a form with the count was to be turned in several days ago – but perhaps Ms. X overstated or guesstimated or “just put something down” because she was busy with that last bit of “coverage” or that last, all-important worksheet packet that “might just make the difference.”

It’s an odd, bittersweet time, since there’s no clear sense of ending.  A decade ago, when exams ran until the Last Possible Day, Field Day events happened after the Last Exam, and everybody was there to participate.  Seniors had graduated by then, but many of them came back for one last celebration.  It was hard on the faculty, of course, since we had to finish grading that Last Exam … but there was a real sense of closure, of celebration at the end of the year.  That changed when Lofty Powers decreed a “remediation and retesting” window for state-created exams, and then several brutally hot Last Days put the Field Day tradition on hold.

I’m curious to see what will happen today, when the tradition returns in a new and different form.  Who will come to celebrate, to play together and relax?  Ms. X and Mr. Y probably have a dark suspicion: “the bad, lazy ones” will certainly come because their parents don’t want them around the house, while “the good kids” will generally stay home.  But that’s the lens through which Ms. X and Mr. Y see everything:  students are either good or bad and lazy, parents either supportive or unbelievable, administrators and other Powers either nice or mean.

And graduations?  They’re either perfect or … I don’t know what the opposite of perfect is in this context.  But I do know that perfect graduations are very important, not just to Ms. X and Mr. Y but to various Powers That Be.  And perfect, in this context, has a specialized meaning: it means nobody “yelled out” as graduates’ names were being called.  Nobody disrupted the smooth flow of seniors across the stage at the Graduation Venue.  Nothing interrupted the perfect precision, the perfect timing of the assembly line as it processed students one final time.

We had a perfect graduation this year, and everyone was proud.  My daughter’s school had its second consecutive perfect graduation, but she thinks last year’s graduates might be upset about that.  As the the first perfect graduates in that school’s history, they got a commemorative banner, I’m told.  A friend and former colleague, still at a school where I taught many years ago, was also bragging about that school’s perfect graduation and about how “proud” she was.

I wonder who, exactly, she was proud of.  The students, for not screaming?  Their parents, for not jumping up and screaming?  The audience, for not “having to” be escorted out by waiting law-enforcement officers?  Proud and perfect, in this context, are troubling terms indeed.  The standard of perfection seems low indeed – appallingly low – and what does it say about us school people that we feel pride when our students (and their families) live up (or down) to such expectations?  What about the not-so-subtle social class assumptions built into an expectation of quiet, compliant graduates and audience members?

Responding on Google+ last week, Debbie said,

the “mixed messages” keep making me shake my head. Why do we do that? I am reminded of a parent who struggled with getting her two girls ready for school in the morning. The rule was to have the clothes picked out the night before but every morning they spent half an hour finding an alternative outfit. What was the rule? It wasn’t that they had to pick out their clothes the night before,  it was that they had to pick out clothes the night before and then, in the morning, they selected the ones they would wear. Once the mother stepped back and looked at what was happening, things changed. The rule became the rule.
We do the same thing with, “if” ….  _if_ you hit, this will happen — so the rule is “hitting is ok – you just have to take the consequence along with it”.

I guess we just don’t know what we want. We want our students to develop good learning skills but we also want “in class and on task” and so we push this way and pull that way. The poor students!
And the teachers who try to bring their skills, strengths, and personalities into the classroom, only to be pulled back by rules, change of plans, limitations placed on them by the higher-ups because of some other goal.

And Edward referred to

management-driven K-12 education which emphasizes central authority and busywork over helping form human beings–which is to say, meaning-seeking and -creating beings.

As builders of joyful learning communities, we walk a complex path – much more complex than Ms. X and Mr. Y’s simple world of perfect or terrible, good and sweet or bad and lazy.  And yet, for our communities to be complete, we need their perspective, their involvement, their participation, too.  On Last Days and on every day, how will we work to hear everyone’s voice, to welcome everyone?

Something Old, Something New, V

Around lunchtime on Thursday, the rain started – a heavy, driving rain that’s expected to continue all day today and for part of the weekend.  Blame Tropical Storm Andrea, which made landfall in Florida and is working its way up the East Coast bringing rainfall of two to four inches in a 24-hour period.  So, as I thought about this post Thursday afternoon and evening, and as I sat down to finish writing it this morning, it was unusually dark, unusually cool, unusually wet for early June.  With potential flooding in the forecast, sensible Powers decided to cancel (or maybe postpone) the end-of-school-year dance that had been scheduled for tonight.  But five area high schools have graduations today … which reminds me that I want to take a slightly different route to work this morning!  Traffic near the graduation venue will be considerable, and the wet weather will only compound people’s frustrations.

As the rain became heavier, it was time for one group of students to leave lunch and return to class as another group arrived at the school cafeteria.  The arriving group were, of course, drenched – one of the downsides of a beautiful, historic campus with multiple buildings.  They were also excited and talking loudly, much to the dismay of Ms. N and Mr. O, whose classrooms they passed on the way.  Mr. O, though, thoughtfully stepped out into the hall and offered substitute umbrellas – posters his students had made but not reclaimed – to anyone who didn’t have an umbrella.

It was a thoughtful, kind gesture … but as I looked out the exit door a few minutes later, I saw the posters lying wet and unwanted on the ground.  They seemed symbolic, somehow, of the complex journey we’re all trying to navigate as we move from 20th-century schooling to a new paradigm of learning.

Earlier in the day, a friend had shared this editorial piece from The Atlantic about the importance of developing a “real code of ethics” for newly professional teachers.  As it is, the author argues, both teachers and their Powers That Be conceive of educators’ professional ethics as “following the rules” – and Rules, as we all know, are sent down from On High and can be changed when necessary, especially when people act bad and lazy.  I thought about that a lot on Thursday, as various Powers announced Rules or Rule Changes.  ”Teachers,” said one aggrieved Power over the intercom, “please be reminded that there are no parties at the end of the school year.  If you want to do a celebration or something with your class, you have to have that approved through The Office.”  Another gave a reminder about the new, improved system for turning in printed copies of grade information – and it is a new, improved system, but it apparently caused a lot of confusion for Ms. X and Mr. Y.  A few other, very tired Powers were doing “walk-through observations” on Thursday, just to make sure “their” teachers were “keeping kids busy and on task” … and the one who visited our class, right after we’d finished the Culminating Activity, was most impressed by what the students had to say about it.  We’d stopped because, in addition to the mandate for “busy and on task,” there was also a mandate for students to report – in three different groups – to a central location for a special program.

I guess you could accomplish busy and on task and a third of the students out for a Special Thing if you had enough worksheet packets … but it’s a bit harder if the task is real and meaningful.  And for all three classes, the Culminating Activity proved to be real, meaningful, and even fun.  ”I’m no good at improv,” said K, who played the role of Mercury in the early-morning group … but that gave W, as Jupiter, the opportunity to be even more bossy and directive than he’d expected to be.  ”Go down there,” said W-as-Jupiter, “and tell them this!”  Will Lucius and Lollia end up happily together after she quarrels with her husband Vipsanius?  Will the gods grant Lucius’ not-so-secret prayers … or, in their anger at his lack of pietās, will they decide to begin the slow process that leads to the eruption of Mount Vesuvius?  The outcomes were different in the two Latin II classes, but all the active participants had a wonderful time and the spectators seemed to enjoy watching things unfold.  ”Is this the third column of the Tres Columnae System?” I asked each group.  ”Reading, writing, and becoming the characters?”  Yes, they said, and we need to do this more often, and start earlier.

I thought so, I told them, but I wanted to be sure.  We now have proof of concept; if we could do this well at the end of the year, when everyone is exhausted, just think of how well the role-plays will work when everyone isn’t exhausted, when there’s enough time to develop the characters and situations fully.

Meanwhile, down the hall, Ms. X was  fretting about what They might say or do if They happened to visit her classroom.  I saw One Ms. X around lunch time, sitting at her desk, head in her hands.  She looked as tired and frustrated as any “bad, lazy child,” and my heart ached for her.

The role-play scenario was a bit different in the afternoon class – and it took longer to start because that’s also the time when students were being called to receive their “summer packets” for Advanced Placement courses.  U and T came back with something the size of a textbook – and they were bitterly unhappy because, in fact, it’s “a complete review” (according to Ms. D) of “the whole curriculum” of the prerequisite course.  I reminded them that, if they’re interested, the equivalent Latin course is at the exact same time as Ms. D’s class next year … and they picked up that minimal “packet” just in case.

How do all these threads connect?  What are the lessons for us builders and sustainers of joyful communities?  What literal or metaphorical storms will we face as we move forward?  And how will we respond in the moment, when someone offers us literal or metaphorical discarded posters to help stay dry?

Something Old, Something New, IV

Wednesday, as everybody knew, was Graduation Day.  But apparently some of the implications were lost on one graduate’s mother.  It seems she called the school late Tuesday afternoon, wondering whether her child needed to report to school before the ceremony … and whether he needed to come back today, Friday, and Monday.  Ms. L, who took the phone call, insists this story is true.

It’s also  illuminating, I think, about the effects of factory-model thinking.  The answer (“No, no, no, and no!”) could be found, of course, in a letter that went home to seniors and their families a few weeks ago – the long one with  the logistical information about the graduation venue, and tickets, and dress, and all those things.  But if you live in a factory-school world, you just know that written directions aren’t always true.  Sometimes there’s a typo on The Test or The Directions.  Sometimes Ms. X said one thing in The Syllabus, but she was in a hurry and really meant something else.  Sometimes The Directions get changed because a Power is upset, or someone was “bad and lazy,” or an Even Higher Power reverses the original decision.  Even when you know something ought to be true, it’s still better and safer to check anyway.  That’s the factory mindset, and I’m guessing that’s why That Mom called Ms. L Tuesday afternoon.

Of course, there could also be a simpler reason.  Maybe she was secretly hoping to have her now-grown child out of the house just a few more days.  In any case, Ms. L was still laughing on Wednesday, and I needed a good laugh too.

Wednesday morning was a strange, quiet time, as graduation-day mornings tend to be for us.  The ceremony itself was in mid-afternoon, and it’s the day after the Last Final Exam.  So, if your sibling is graduating, you probably won’t come to school; if your friend is graduating, you probably won’t come to school; if you’re a musician or someone else participating in the ceremony, you might come to school just so you don’t have to deal with parking Over There at the venue; and if you can, you might just try to persuade your parents that graduation day is a good day to stay home.  Two classes did meet in the morning, with a “required meeting” for juniors that, to be fair, many of them did actually come to school to attend.  But then, around lunch time, all of us graduation participants ate first, while students staying at school were grouped in five or six classrooms, with Ms. X and Mr. Y resentfully watching them and showing movies … or something.

“I don’t get it!” said Ms. X when I dropped by to share the final version of the role-play scenario with my students who were staying.  ”I think I have more kids than I’m supposed to.  Could you check and see how many of your students are here?”

Apparently, for Ms. X, it was just too complicated to attempt any of the standard forms of checking attendance.  Call names and ask students to answer?  Send a roll sheet around for them to sign?  It was “easier,” it seems, to act helpless, to wait to be rescued by some Power or other.  And, to be fair, I “helped her out” by checking on my own students, and then I “helped her out” when, for some reason, the speakers on the computer wouldn’t produce enough volume for That Movie.

It was such a contrast with both the Ceremony and the mid-morning class!  Not many of us were there mid-morning, but we had a wonderful conversation about the role-play scenario.  They made one so good that I had to share it with their early-morning-group friends, who were “getting babysat,” as she put it, by Ms. X.  And we talked about games and favorite things to watch and read, about K’s friend in Europe who’s interested in the Tres Columnae stories, about N’s Roman outfit which she thinks is in storage somewhere.  Somehow we managed to connect the Roman army’s inability to change tactics and strategies with the ways big 20th-century companies also eventually “fell” in conflicts with more nimble, more innovative foes.  No grades, no labels, no pain-punishment cycles, no mindless entertainment to “keep them quiet” and “make the day go just a little more smoothly.”  Just a respectful conversation among community members who value each other.

And the ceremony was beautiful, dignified, and happy.  I “always” cry at graduations, but I didn’t cry on Wednesday.  It was a joyful celebration – and it was great to see a constellation of alumni, from the Sheriff’s Department color guard member I taught so many years ago to the older siblings and friends who just graduated recently.  So many rich connections … and so many rich connections on the Google+ thread where we’ve been discussing yesterday’s post!  Sometimes it’s really hard to choose what to feature, what to omit, what to summarize, what to describe.

A week from today, if you’re reading “live,” it will be the first day of “real summer” for me and my colleagues.  Students finish with a (very well-attended?) half-day on Monday, and then there are two “teacher workdays” on Tuesday and Wednesday.  Some of those colleagues – and a good number of our students – spend their lives wishing and hoping for a future state: for Friday to come, for summer to arrive, for graduation, for retirement.  And there’s nothing wrong – nothing at all – with anticipating future happiness.  But sometimes, when I hear Ms. X longing for the weekend or the summer, I want to ask her how much she enjoyed the last one.  ”It was good,” she often says, or “It was OK, I guess.  But it was too short, and now we’re stuck back here.”

I guess the factory-world is all about waiting, anticipation, and disappointment.  It’s a great way to move product, if moving product is your goal.  But it’s a terrible way to live, if living in authentic community is what you seek.  How will things change as we leave those factory-ways behind?

Something Old, Something New, III

Poor Ms. X!  When I saw her briefly Tuesday morning, she looked pale and unwell; when I saw her leaving at the end of the day, she was completely exhausted.  ”I haven’t been feeling well,” she told me, “but I haven’t really been sick.  I’m just tired, and the different schedules are tiring me out.”

Perhaps her comment on Monday was directly caused not by the deep factory paradigm it unconsciously revealed, but by her exhaustion and minor illness.  It’s hard to deal with interruptions when you aren’t feeling well … and the Other Boy’s appearance in class, combined with Ms. X’s distrust of scary “new technology” like texting, definitely constituted an interruption.

But regardless of the immediate cause, Ms. X’s statement had a profound effect on my thoughts.  And the underlying attitude – the notion that a Power ought to solve your problems for you – profoundly shapes our students’ views of the world, their school, and even themselves.

Tuesday was the Last Day of Exams, with the afternoon class moved to early morning and lengthened to a three-hour block.  We needed that time, even though most of us had finished two of the three parts of the exam. We got the Collaborative Product, a lengthy passage to read and create a timeline or Character Diagram about, over a week ago, and we all did Individual Oral Responses last Friday.  When everyone had finished the Written Response, we started working in earnest on the Culminating Activity I described yesterday.  B and B were excited to read some Tres Columnae Project stories so new that they’re not yet published on the site.  ”I feel like I’m watching a bootleg video or something,” B said, and we all laughed together.

Then came lunch and some “planning” time (I did make some plans, but many exhausted colleagues were too exhausted to do anything but stare at piles of paper and complain about “too much to do”), and the exhausted, depleted afternoon class.  That was where I really felt the “Powers must solve things for us” mindset.  The schedule called for yearbooks to be distributed then, and that happened … but in a break from previous tradition, the only students allowed to attend the yearbook distribution and signing gathering were those who had purchased books.  There had been an unpleasant conflict at the gathering last year, one involving two students who hadn’t purchased yearbooks, and Powers That Be understandably wanted to avoid conflict.

And when you’re the one who has to solve problems for others, and you’re good at that, sometimes you solve them proactively.  You solve them by preventing them, or at least trying to.

“But that’s not fair!” moaned E, who had been involved in the conflict.  ”That other girl doesn’t even go here anymore!  Why are They still punishing Us for that stupid thing?”

It’s hard for E to see that actions have lasting consequences everywhere, though she’s finally grasped that idea in the context of the Latin Family.  It’s hard to believe something that happens for 95 minutes a day when, all other times, at home and at school, you hear a totally different message – one of dependence and shouted orders, yelling and labeling, pain and punishment, packets and “just do it, don’t ask why” – from the Powers in your life.  Tuesday evening I came home to a recorded phone message from a different Power, another attempt to solve or prevent problems proactively.   With graduations impending, the Power had sent out this message to every parent – with copies to faculty and staff members – to remind them that, by school district policy, if they made noise during the calling of graduates’ names, they’d be escorted out of the auditorium.

Like the other Power, this one meant well …  meant to forestall trouble by being proactive.  But E felt angry and disrespected, not safe and protected.  And I wonder how that phone message sounded to parents who would never consider screaming at their child’s graduation.  How did it make them feel?  And what about those who had always planned to make a spectacle?  Were they deterred or inspired?

There’s such a thing, perhaps, as being too proactive.  Did Ms. X fall into that trap when she told That Boy to go to Our Principal first?  Did the Powers, when their attempts to prevent problems ended up creating a whole new set?  Do I when I’m tempted to do part of the work for exhausted, frustrated students?

Reflecting on these issues, Rachel noted on Google+,

As much as this sort of thing can scare teachers, it scares kids too.  They already know what it takes to get that number that they want in most classes.

The more creative I’ve asked kids to be, the more often I’ve had kids beg me for the simplicity of a worksheet with right and wrong answers.  However, at the end, they all end up feeling accomplished, or, the few who don’t, recognize and accept the consequences–which currently are a low grade (how cool would it be if the consequence was, say, having to do it over again, the right way? so being lazy ended up creating more work instead of a punitive grade).

And Brendan pondered,

Exactly — the factory model teaches powerlessness, and to run to an authority to resolve any problems.  And in the big picture, that leads to people handing over power, but then becoming too dependent for even the Powers to handle.

I think one effective way to change things is to help communicate a different way of thinking about choices and strategies than a lot of people are used to….

I think the questions from Friday’s post are useful to ask in the context of Ms. X’s comment.  Is it thoughtlessness that the factory brews, or is a particular kind of thinking?  Framing the question in those terms helps put Ms. X comment in perspective, but it also helps to unravel the dysfunctional consequences of running to authorities whenever there’s a problem.  Why can’t conflict resolution, perspective taking, brainstorming creative solutions, and communication skills in general be a core part of the purpose of education? ….

Ultimately, the question of how one interprets caring links right back to the discussion of the factory model.  Within the factory, people very equate often “being cared about” with some kind of problems, if not punishments.  In this view, the authorities start caring when there’s a problem, and it’s their job to solve it, using their limited repertoire of moves….

I’ve heard those plaintive cries too, Rachel and Brandon: “Please just give me a worksheet and tell me what to put on it!”  Or, as the Other B said when she got her copy of Pars Tertia of the Latin IV exam, “Oh, do you mean we just need to memorize this?”  No, B, you need to read the Latin passage and create a product about it and make the Thematic Diagram as directed on page 4 … there’s nothing to memorize here!

In a rapidly-changing world, it’s tempting to hold on to the comfort of the factory, even though we know the factory wasn’t actually comfortable and it’s not producing what we want.  Risk-takers have long since set out on their journeys; experimenters (am I one?) are tweaking results; and before too long those cautious Others will be taking tentative steps, too.  How will we risk-takers and experimenters welcome them, encourage them, and bring them into joyful community?