The Final Practice (Sort of)

As I've mentioned on a couple of occasions on this blog, both of my children are in marching band at their school. Their season is winding down, and last night was what for my wife and myself--after just two short years involved in the marching band--has become our favorite night of the year. It's the night of the final practice before state competition (though this year that's actually a lie--the band practices again this afternoon), and the band does several things to mark the occasion. First, it's "Poster Night": the family of each band member creates a poster for that child and then all 90 or so of them are hung in the hallways outside of the band room while the students practice. The kids come back into the building after practice and here are all of these photos and words of encouragement. It's really neat to see the kids going from poster to poster and laughing about the photos and the encouraging words and the inside jokes written on the posters.

But that's not the real fun. The real fun happens just before that. Each night, at the end of practice, the band finishes the night by doing a complete run through of the entire show. On this final night, though, they actually do the run through three different times. The first time they do a standard run through. After that, though, the seniors leave the field and run up into the press box and watch the rest of the band perform without them. I'm not sure, but I THINK this was originally done for two purposes: 1) To let the seniors see the show themselves, at least one time, and 2) To reveal what a hole there will be in the band without the seniors the following year. Regardless of what the original intent was, though, the show has devolved to the point that it's now just a chance for these bandies to be the clowns that they are, and to rebel a little from the rigid formality they've been practicing for four months now. In any event, it's funny stuff.

Following that run through, the opposite happens: The underclassmen all go up into the stands, and the seniors go out on the field alone and try to do the show all by themselves. It's also funny to watch 10 kids trying to do what almost 100 were designed to do, and again, no one is taking it too seriously.

Here's video of last night's 2nd and 3rd run throughs:



(I can't see the video.)



(I can't see the video.)

Education Technology AND Poetry

As I've mentioned in a prior post, this is my 22nd year working in the field of education. For the first 14 of those years I was an English teacher, and for the last 12 years I've been working with education technology (You may notice that those numbers don't quite add up to 22; that's because for four years I was teaching English half time and teaching and working with education technology the other half of the time). And I was pretty excited today to see the two disparate parts of my work career intersect...

I was reading a book called Education Nation: Six Leading Edges of Innovation in our Schools by Milton Chen. I'd love to recommend the book, but to be honest I'm finding it a little simplistic. For instance, one of the six sections of the book is about technology (which is why I'm reading the book), but the technology section posits some pretty unsound technology educational ideas without paying any attention to real problems with the ideas. In fact, anyone who disagrees with the author is dismissed as a "naysayer," though the author never really says what's wrong with the nay that the people are saying.

But I'm not here to put down the book. I'm here to share an anonymous poem that's in the book. A poem about education technology! As George Costanza said, my world's are colliding!

I checked all over the Internet, and this truly does seem to be an anonymous work (Several blogs don't credit anyone for it, giving the impression that the blog writer himself is the poet, but there are plenty of other posts of the poem that pre-date those entries), so I feel safe sharing it here.

Competition

Let's have a little competition
     and get ready for the future.

I will you a laptop
     and you will use a paper and pencil. Are you ready?

I will access up-to-date information.
     You have a textbook that is five years old.

I will immediately know when I misspell a word.
     You will have to wait until it's graded.

I will learn how to care for technology by using it.
     You will read about it.

I will see math problems in 3-D.
     You will do the odd problems.

I will create artwork and poetry and share it with the world.
     You will share yours with the class.

I will have 24/7 access.
     You have the entire class period.

I will access the most dynamic information.
     Yours will be printed and photocopied.

I will communicate with leaders and experts using email.
     You will wait for Friday's speaker.

I will select my learning style.
     You will use the teacher's favorite learning style.

I will collaborate with my peers from around the world.
     You will collaborate with peers in your classroom.

I will take my learning as far as I want.
     You must waint for the rest of the class.

The cost of a laptop per year? $250

The cost of teacher training and student training? Expensive.

The cost of well-educated U.S Citizens and workforce? Priceless.

I have to admit--as a teacher and a lover of poetry, there's not a whole lot all that poetic in the work. And I could argue that many if not all of the stanzas would be better if they were reversed so that the paper and pen example was first. Still, the poem brings up some intriguing ideas.

A Profound Joke

A friend of mine emailed me the video below yesterday, and though I guess it's meant as a kind of joke (It's on a website called "Stupid Videos"), I think it actually says something pretty profound about the technology gap between adults and children. Watch it, and then I'll talk about it...



(I can't see the video.)

I think the point the video is making is pretty clear: Children today don't see the world with the same eyes that adults do. I'm pretty sure most people already knew that, but this video shows us that the difference is pretty profound. The children in the video understand computers and how to manipulate them BEFORE they understand how to read a book. We forget, because they've been a part of our lives since we were children, that books are a form of technology, too. Their use is not an instinctive thing, built into our DNA. They're a learned technology. And apparently, books are harder to figure out than an iPad is. If that's not the case for you, it's just because you've had a longer acclimation period to books than you've had to technology.

I used to wonder what it was like for old people who grew up without electricity. Those people, I used to think, grew up in a world without light bulbs and radio and TV, and in a world without telephone poles  and electric lines strewn all over the landscape, and they watched this new thing come into their lives and change it so profoundly. Now I know how it feels. We're being changed just as much by computer networking. It didn't exist when I was a kid, and now it's everywhere, and we look at people who don't have Internet access in their house the same way people in 1960 looked at families that didn't have electricity. And though they're not as much of an eyesore as telephone poles, how many cell phone towers have you seen spring up in your lifetime?

I'm off task a little. I want to get back to that kid above. Or more importantly to me, I want to get back to MY kids. I've seen this technology gap in my kids, too. The first time I ever got out the ole 33 1/3 RPM record albums to play my kids some Beatles and some Michael Jackson, my older daughter, who was about 3 at the time, jumped up and down and screamed, "Wow! What a big CD!" This is the same daughter who learned to use a computer mouse when she was two years, three months, and 8 days old. I know exactly how old she was because she learned to use the mouse the day before my younger daughter was born. My wife was 9 months pregnant and not feeling well (Uh, she was in labor, but we didn't know that at the time!), and she asked to be left alone for a little while, so my older daughter and I went to the nearby mall for a while. We came back with a stuffed elephant from the Disney Store (not important) and a piece of software called Jumpstart Toddler's (important).

I installed the game on our computer and sat my daughter down in front of it, and in 30 seconds (no exaggeration) she'd figured out how to use a mouse. The software had a game in it in which the cursor on the screen was a dog bone, and in the corner of the screen was a talking dog who said things like, "Ruff! Ruff! Oh, I'm sooooo hungry! Can you feed me my boooooooone?" My daughter loved animals, and she wanted to feed that dog, so she figured it out without a problem. And after that, the sky was the limit. And that same daughter who, way back in 2000 referred to an LP as a "big CD," no longer is even interested in CD's. Everything's digital now, and if I gave her a CD of a favorite artist, she'd stare at me like I would if someone gave me an 8 track cassette. She wants iTunes gift cards! This morning she asked if she could load some of MY music on her iPod, and I looked at the computer and said, "Okay. Uh, I think I can figure this out..." I don't have my own iPod--I use my Simbian cell phone as my MP3 player--so this was all new to me.

I randomly clicked a few things on the screen before I heard my daughter sigh in disgust and say, "Dad! Just move and I'll do it!" And she did. She jumped in front of the screen and deftly started clicking buttons and in about 30 seconds said, "There! It needs time to synch, but I'm good to go."

She and my other daughter have grown up in this world of technology. It's not something they had to learn about later in life. It's as natural to them as it is for us to flip a switch and expect yellow light to come out of that glass orb in the ceiling.

It's a different world when we were growing up. I didn't grow up without running water in the house, and I didn't have to walk both ways through snow to get to school, but I WILL be able to tell my great grandchildren when I'm older, "When I was a kid, we didn't have the Internet! If you needed information on something, you had to use these things called books to look up things! And if the book you wanted wasn't around, you just didn't know!"

Something I can look forward to...

Time for Timer

As a child of the 1970's, I grew up watching Saturday morning cartoons. Thanks to the Cartoon Network and a host of other cable channels which provide cartoons all day long, the idea of watching on Saturday mornings maybe seems kind of quaint now. But not for us late Baby Boomers or Early Generation X'ers or whatever you want to call it. For us, Saturday mornings were an event!

And for me, anyway, it wasn't always the actual 30 minute shows that I found most enjoyable. Rather, I couldn't wait for the cartoons to end so that I could watch the educational Public Service Announcements that played in between shows. And I must not be alone in having felt this way. Almost everyone remembers the Schoolhouse Rocks PSA's. Even my own kids, 30 years removed from the 1970's, have seen Conjunction Junction.

But the Schoolhouse Rock PSA's weren't the only ones to air on Saturday mornings. Here's one of my favorite OTHER PSA's.


(I can't see the video.)

Occupy Nonsense Street

Everyone's angry these days. I guess it's the economy. Or stress. I don't know. But people are mad, especially these "Occupy Whatever" people. I don't like them much.

I've been watching them on the news and reading about them on the Internet and watching their interviews on the Sunday morning talk shows this past weekend, and I have to say that no one involved in this movement really seems to have the slightest idea what the movement is about. People interviewed say things like, "We need to protest to let Wall Street know that we're angry, and that we know what Wall Street is really all about. And it's the government, too. We're not getting our fair share."

All of that is hogwash. What is it that these people have finally figured out? That corporations don't care about them and are out to make money? How did they not ALREADY know that? What, then? They're mad that the banks almost drove the economy into the ground, and then the government bailed them all out? I'm mad about that, too, but what can we do? The alternative was to NOT bail the banks out and have the economy grind to an absolute halt. It almost happened anyway (Remember when gas prices plummeted to $1.40 a gallon because NO ONE was buying oil?).

And these comments about the 99% not getting their fair share is also a load of nonsense. I want to grab these people and shout, "Did a terrorist kill anyone you know today? Were the borders of your country invaded? Did you drive past a highway construction project? Did your children go to school today? If your house catches on fire, will some guys in red trucks come and put it out? Dude, you ARE getting your fair share!"

These people are saying nothing new. If you want further proof that history is cyclical, go and rent the 1976 movie NETWORK. The film, which also came out a few years after an economic downturn and a major stock market "correction," could just as easily have been released in 2011. The scene below perfectly captures the attitudes of the people protesting on Wall Street. Someone should go play the scene for them and then tell them that this has already been done, and they should all either get back to work or get back to looking for work.

(I can't see the video.)

Pymgalion (and Caesar!) in the Classroom

My school district uses a computer testing program called the Measured Assessment of Progress, or MAP. It's really a pretty amazing computer application, an online test given three times a year that provides immediate feedback on student learning. The following description comes from the Parent Toolkit on the MAP website:

MAP assessments are used to measure your student's progress or growth in school....MAP assessments...measure your child's growth in mathematics, reading, language usage, and science skills. The scale used to measure your child's progress is called the RIT scale (Rash UnIT). The RIT scale is an equal-interval scale much like feet and inches on a yardstick. It is used to chart your child's academic growth from year to year.

In essence, then, MAP gives teachers very exact information about the ability levels of students and what are appropriate "next lessons" for the student. There wasn't anything like that available for me when I was a classroom teacher eight years ago. Sure, students took standardized state tests and normed national tests, but we didn't get results back for months, often (read "usually") not until the following school year when the student was no longer in that class. So I would have LOVED to have had something like the MAP test to let me know where my students were.

Or so I used to think...

I'm not so sure anymore. What changed my mind? Last week I sat in on a meeting with the current English department at my district's high school. They were meeting with some outside experts about an initiative underway in the department, and the English teachers were sharing their successes, their struggles, and their concerns. And one of the things that I heard mentioned over and over again was the tremendous difficulty it was trying to balance the skills students had coming into class with what state and federal standards say those students should be able to do when they leave a class. One of the teachers said something to the effect of, "When I get my MAP scores back and see that--of the 24 students in my sophomore English class--17 of them are reading at a 4th grade level or lower, I understand that I can't expect them to read at the level they're supposed to read at. So I have to modify my assignments."

I'm not sure what her point was, as I honestly quit listening to her for a moment and started thinking about my own experience as a teacher. And what I thought was this: For each of the 14 years that I taught, I had at least one section of sophomores, and most of the time I had several. And I taught all levels of English II, from the basic kids to the Pre-AP kids.

I actually preferred the basic kids--I felt my talents as a teacher were better suited to them. If nothing else, I was an entertaining teacher, or at least I tried to be, my philosophy always being that students would pay attention if class were fun. So in class we told jokes. We acted out plays. We made movies. We laughed EVERY day. And I was shameless in my efforts to keep student attention. I'd sing. I'd dance. I'd reference whatever pop culture icons were relevant to the kids in the class. I was even known to do the worm across the floor from time to time. And whether my students knew it or not, we learned while we were doing these things. That kind of a teacher is great for students who struggle, students who have been beaten down by our educational system and want nothing more than to be left alone to fail. A high energy teacher who occasionally--okay, often--wanders off task to talk about boogers works for them.

Not so much for the advanced kids. They needed a no nonsense teacher who was going to push, push, push them. That wasn't me, no matter how hard I tried, and at the end of the year I always felt like I had performed a disservice for those advanced kids. I'm sure they learned (The thing about advanced students is you really don't need a good teacher anyway because they will learn regardless of the quality of the teaching), but they'd learned less than they would have from a different teacher.

I'm off task, though (just as often happened in class!). What I'm getting at is that, over the years, I taught A LOT of lower level sophomores, and as much as I wished then that I'd had a test like MAP, I'm glad now that I didn't. Because I didn't know what those kids weren't capable of! I didn't know they were operating at a fourth grade reading level (Okay, I knew it was pretty low, but I don't think I would have guessed it was that low). I didn't know that they couldn't handle more advanced work like Shakespeare, that it was too much for them. And since I didn't know they couldn't do it, I assumed that they could, and so we did it. Sure, we struggled to read JULIUS CAESAR or KING LEAR or AS YOUR LIKE IT, but we read it, and I think it actually was a great teaching tool because--unlike other class novels, which I knew full well some of the students weren't reading for homework--we read these plays aloud in class, and the lower level students, I think, benefited from seeing that everyone in class, even the brightest kids in the class, struggled to understand Shakespeare. Throughout the first act everyone reading sounded like the lowest level reader ("Truly...sir...in respect of...a fine...workman...I am a...cobbler."), but by the third act more and more students were getting the hang of it ("I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. The evil men do lives after them...The good is...oft?...interred?...with their bones.") and by the final scene even the struggling reader was catching on and could read "This was the noblest Roman of them all" without much of a struggle.

I'm not writing this to criticize the teachers in the current English department. They're all doing a great job as far as I can tell. I know the demographics of the district has actually changed a tremendous amount in the last few years, that their students are not my students, and I know that I'm not in their classrooms working with their kids. I don't mean to suggest ANYTHING about THEIR classes. I'm not writing about them. I'm writing about me. I'm just writing to say that I'm second guessing the usefulness of formative assessments like MAP. If they're being used to help a teacher understand where his/her students are now so that instruction can be adjusted to correct deficits, that's fine. But I'd hate to think that I might have used them in my classroom to lower the expectations for my class.

(Confused by the blog title? Then you're probably not an educator, as I think every college student studying to be a teacher is required to learn about this piece of educational research.)

My Own Personal Vacation, part two

Yesterday I wrote a post very early in the morning saying that--for the first time since I painted the basement two years ago--I had the house to myself for an entire day, and I was going to do whatever I wanted. Below is what I decided to do: I worked on a movie.

My father passed away almost a year ago, and the day he died I posted a couple of videos on this blog. As I mentioned at the time, they were proofs of concept for a documentary about my family that I wanted to make. But until my father died, I hadn't done anything else other than make the two short videos. I'd planned to get started on it, but I kept putting it off. Soon after he died, I browsed through the files on my computer and found the raw audio files of the day I'd separately recorded him and my mother talking. The audio files were simultaneously comforting and depressing--comforting because they gave me a chance to hear my father's voice again, and depressing because very little of what was on those files was anything I wanted to hear about. I wish, instead of asking him about his childhood and his parents and his school, I'd asked him when he'd been the proudest of me, or what was his favorite story about Christmas with us kids, or something like that.

In any event, I listened to the audio and decided that I needed to take what was there and put it into a documentary format similar to the first two movies for my family, but I've kept letting the time slip by. At first I thought maybe I could get that done by my mother's birthday on January 1, but honestly the month of December last year was kind of a blur for me, so that day slipped past. Then I thought maybe I could get it done by Father's day in June, but I kept putting it off and putting it off and that day passed by, too. Then I aimed for my father's birthday, but that was last Thursday, and I didn't have it finished then. So I sat down yesterday morning and decided that I was going to stay at the computer until I got SOMETHING down in a format that I could share.

I started by recording several pieces of music in several intervals (full length, 10 seconds in length, 15 seconds in length, etc.). When I make these movies I don't want to have to worry about copyright, so I figured the easiest way to do that was to take original compositions and record them. I'm not a very skilled guitarist, and I don't even have a piano anymore, but no worries--I stuck my webcam with a USB microphone on my guitar and plucked an original tune as best I could, and then I used a program called Finale Notepad to transcribe a few other original pieces and then exported all of that into MP3's using a program called Audacity. None of it was professional grade stuff, but it was going to be pushed way into the background, mostly to cover background noise that I couldn't get out of the original audio. Took the better part of the morning to get that done.

After lunch, I started editing the audio. In the end, I found there were four basic stories I could tell in all of the raw audio: 1) My father's childhood, 2) My father's schooling, 3) His work history, and 4) some final comments he made after I'd originally turned off the microphone--he asked me to turn it back on so he could say just a couple more things. I managed to finish the voice editing for numbers 1 and 3 (which wasn't easy--I'd forgotten that when I recorded my dad I'd forgotten to turn up the gain on the microphone attached to the computer. As a result, the audio had a terrible hiss in it that I had to use Audacity to get out), even added the music to number 1. Then I went to add photos, hoping to finish at least section one yesterday, but I discovered that I had NO photos for the last 2/3 of the short video. So I'm writing today with a plea: The video is below, and if you are family and have photos of my dad or his family that my fit into this movie, let me know.

I'd really like to finish this thing before Thanksgiving. Or Christmas. Or NEXT Father's Day. Or...


(I can't see the video.)

My Own Personal Vacation

My school district is on Fall Break this week. For those of you who aren't familiar with such a thing, it's the same thing as Spring Break (a week without school), except it happens in the fall. True, there are no crops to plant in the autumn, so it's pretty unnecessary, but considering that Erlanger and Elsmere have exactly one farm in each of them (neither of which have school district children living there) Spring Break doesn't mean much around here, either.

My children are NOT off school this week. Their school district doesn't have Fall Break. Meanwhile, my wife, who also works in my school district this year, is using this week to go to Los Angeles with another advisor from the museum, supposedly for some museum-related purposes, but mostly as a vacation. I am NOT off all week. I will go into work three days this week. It's a good time to get some things done without constant phone calls, emails, and heads poking into my office. So I'll be in my office most of the week.

But not today. Today I just said goodbye to my children as they walked up to school. And, as I said, my wife is three time zones away. And me? Don't cry for me. And don't get upset with me, either, for what it is I'm about to say. I'm sure that any of you that are married will understand what I'm getting ready to say. For the rest of you, please know that I love my kids and wife very much. Don't think me a terrible person.

Okay, having prefaced with all that, I'll say it now: I am SO excited that my children are out of the house and my wife is, too. I am VERY excited! I have the entire day to myself. It's just eight hours, I know, but they're MY eight hours. And what am I going to do with them?

Whatever I feel like.

Gosh.



(I can't see the video.)

P90X diary

A lot of people on Facebook have been sharing their P90X workout progress with me via a sort of Facebook diary. I'm not sure why they think I care, but in any event, I figured turn about was fair play, so I thought I'd share my P90X workout progress with them.

Day One: Borrowed P90X DVD's and workout book from my sister. Took them home and put them on my dresser and forgot about them. 


Day Nineteen: Saw the box of DVD's and the book sitting on my dresser and wondered, "What is that again?" I opened it up and said, "Oh yeah. That!"


Day Twenty-two: Decided to get serious about this whole P90X thing. Read the back of the book and noticed it said something to the effect of "All you need are these DVD's, this book, a chin up bar, and a few resistance bands, and you can get absolutely ripped." Thought to myself, I have to go out and buy a chin up bar? And install it? Forget THAT! Put the book and DVD's in the trunk of my car to take back to my sister.

I'm going to be honest here--I just didn't feel all of the benefits that everyone else has been crowing about. Maybe I didn't do the thing right or something...

Ow

I bit the inside of my mouth today at lunch while I was chewing food.

Hard. I bit it hard! The kind of bite where you hear a crunching.

It's at times when I do things like this that I start to really wonder about my competency as a human being. I mean, come on! Chewing is something that I learned how to do when I was--what?--maybe two years old. I've been doing it multiple times a day EVERY day since then. Yet I still find myself occasionally trying to eat my own mouth! Why is that?

And this isn't the only basic human dexterity that fails me sometimes. I've also occasionally found myself tripping for no apparent reason. I'll be walking along without a care in the world and suddenly my toe catches the ground and I lurch forward. I take a quick look behind me to see what did I just trip over. Was there a hump in the sidewalk? Was there a ledge I didn't see? But no, the ground is completely flat. I just forgot how to walk for a moment! At other times, I'll just drop something, like maybe--say--the remote control. I just drop it! It's in my hands, and I'll watch my fingers just open up and the thing falls out. It's almost like I'm watching someone else do it.

Maybe there's something wrong with me...