More Facebook: Why are you surprised?

Something else that has caught my eye of late is the press covering the astonishing fact that students and their parents bad-mouth teachers on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.  I’m not sure when “rock-star popularity among youth” became part of the teaching job description, but the idea that this is “news” struck me as kind of amusing.

When my kids were toddlers I used to hear other parents complain about the fact that three-year-olds (and maybe even – gasp – their own three year old) tended to pee in swimming pools, and that fact diminished their enjoyment of the pool.  This phenomenon lead to my Personal Parenting Rule #47: Don’t swim where toddlers swim.

I love Facebook.  I have gobs of Friends who were high school classmates and whom I haven’t seen since, people whom I see maybe once a year if I’m lucky, and regular friends I see daily who need to coordinate a meet-up.  Also in there are a few kids who are friends of my kids, athletes my wife coaches, etc.  They exist in a group called “Kids,” and they do NOT participate in my Facebook life, though they can contact me through Facebook if they need to.

When I was first playing with Facebook, I allowed myself the ability to see former students’ status posts.  They hated and dissed some of their teachers, some of them my friends, so I changed my settings to exclude their status updates from my Facebook life.  This was their emotional space, not mine.

I remember my earliest teaching days when I thought I was a “friend” to some of my students, when I could secretly claim to belong to their generation, and when I said “we” in class, I felt like I was including them as peers at some level.  With 20/20 hindsight, what was I?  Role model & mentor?  Yes.  Trusted adviser?  Often.  Beloved teacher?  Occasionally.  Peer?  No.  Friend?  Never.

Stay out of your students’ social lives.  If they or their parents publish lies about you such that your career/reputation is being harmed, the same remedy applies: sue them.  Written defamation is libel, and teachers are not considered “public figures”; you are not a rock star.  Your principal is, however.  But know that if you share the conversation in which you are being libeled, your claim to having been damaged by their speech would likely be much weaker.

Know that just as three-year-olds pee in the pool, teenagers get unreasonably angry and verbally abusive, with parents often close behind them.  That’s why there are kiddie pools, and that’s why you don’t share your Facebook life with students.

Of Sasquatch and Schools

Pretty universally, educators find themselves kvetching about parents who believe that because they went to school they are experts on education.  You know, like how dare they?  Why, after all the years of professional preparation, graduate degrees and credentials, not to mention the years of classroom experience, are we to suffer this presumption?

Like all good myths, including mermaids, Sasquatch, leprechauns and fairies, this one also fails to die because it has deep roots in illusion and history.

In the year 1800, our culture was agrarian.  90% of the population was involved in farming, growing our food, thus 90% (and probably more) of the kids grew up on farms worked by very tired parents and older children.  Before the organization of schooling, children learned from their parents – mostly moms – and the learning goals were to serve the task of farming and furthering the solidarity of the farming community, and in cities the goal was to succeed in some delimited trade, but still based on elementary reading and calculating skills.  As schools became organized in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the role of teacher shifted to mostly young unmarried women (powerless and predictable entities) who could be counted upon to instill these values in the hearts and minds of farm children.

The illusion here was that children were being taught by surrogate parents, in loco parentis, by the “controllable” teacher in the one-room schoolhouse overseen by the “educated class,” the local (male) mayor or preacher.  The reality was these farm kids were being taught by energetic adolescent and single young women who not only taught the 3-Rs, but also imparted a vision unique to the American frontier, one of achievement, great energy, and self-determination.  By the 1870s, Susan B. Anthony was fighting to bring to 19th Amendment to the US Constitution, and young women across the country were changing the face of the nation, their 41-year struggle ending finally in 1920.

Illusions aside, the fact remains these farmer parents paid these young teachers to teach their children as they themselves would be teaching them.  School was exclusively an authorized extension of parenting.  While the reality was undoubtedly much greater than this, the core parental assumption was that education was bounded by parental life experience.  Only.  This worldview is one we share with our parents and their parents’ parents, and it is only the “educator class” by means of professional inculcation and experience, which has learned that education is much more than a simple academic cloning of our students’ parents.

Today, a parent’s life experience includes his and her own personal experience with schooling.  They are to be forgiven for thinking schooling is still exclusively an extension of parenting.  All myths are etched into our psyches by the greater culture, for better or worse.  In our case, knowing the task at hand is much more complex than that, it is most certainly for the worse.  While parents head for work in highly networked, creative, tech-infused environments, when doing their best to represent their children’s welfare they find themselves uttering words like “Pencil and paper worked great for me when I was in school, so they’re good enough for my child.”  Pencil and paper, when polls suggest 84% of American workers need to use their computers at work. These parental attitudes toward schooling reflects perception grounded solely in myth, obviously having no relationship whatsoever to their daily workaday experience.  Today’s workplace is all about change and facile evolution of skillsets, quite different from an earlier core mandate of stability and social compliance.

While teachers today still participate in the parenting function simply because they are tasked with controlling the days of increasing numbers of young people, the days of bringing children to adulthood capable of living their parents’ lives is today considered failure in most educators’ eyes.  Our task now is to prepare children for a future in which we cannot describe the professions for which they are preparing.  This is crazy talk, right?

Maybe, but it’s a form of craziness our students have fully embraced, and they are not waiting around for our school systems to catch up.  The greater culture, the modern equivalent of the adolescent school teacher with a revolutionary heart, is feeding our students a vision of the future that is quite unlike anything the traditional school system is prepared to provide.

Out of simple self-preservation we adults who run our schools (and send our children to them) need to clear the dust of years from our eyes and see the future through the eyes of our students.   It has been some years since ed technologists formulated the task before us through the ISTE NETS standards, but the response from society has been a collective yawn.  Meanwhile, the kids are rocketing past us and finding alternatives to fifty-year-old pedagogy.  If the Pew Internet & American Life Project is indicative of anything at all, it is that students are finding learning and meaning in their digital world despite the educational system’s best efforts to suppress it to keep things comfortable.

Let’s pause and think about what we really mean when we say we “educate the future.”  Are we really?

Happy Birthday, Dr. Hawking

The press is full of news of the 70th birthday of Dr. Stephen Hawking on January 8th, including Discover magazine’s coverage of how he could have lived so long with Lou Gehrig’s disease.

Not that I feel he needs me to add to his accolades, but I do have a favorite “Hawking Moment” of my own that continues to inform me professionally, and indeed how I live my life.

In an earlier post here I promoted the book, Transforming School Culture by Anthony Muhammad.  In that post I described my encounter with Dr. Hawking thusly:

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Some years ago (I think it was 2003), the UC Davis Cosmology Group invited Stephen Hawking to present a recent paper, and as luck would have it, one of my 5^th grade students that year was the son of one of the cosmology faculty who had extended the invitation to Dr. Hawking, and I was politely invited to join the physicists for lunch with him. Yes, as an amateur astronomer I was thrilled to sit at the master’s feet, and he said a great many things of great complexity and importance during his public lectures.

But to this lunchtime crowd of mostly his peers, the one thing he said I will never forget was, and I paraphrase here: Forget everything you think you know.  Be like a child and receive the new data as if you were just born.  Easy for you to say, you might think.  Well, nothing is easy for Stephen Hawking to say, and he challenged his colleagues to engage in a personal dogma dump so they might comprehend the meaning of the new astrophysical data emerging at a fantastic rate.  He encouraged them to let go of everything they thought they knew about the universe.

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So, Dr. Hawking, thank you for encouraging the dogma dump, that we might regard our world and our roles in it afresh as the data informs and change remains our ever-present companion.  We are all the better for it.

A eulogy for Steve Jobs

Please take a moment to read this eulogy from Steve’s sister, Mona Simpson.  You will be richer for the effort.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/opinion/mona-simpsons-eulogy-for-steve-jobs.html?pagewanted=all

Thank you, Steve Jobs

“The cure for Apple is not cost-cutting. The cure for Apple is to innovate its way out of its current predicament.” [Apple Confidential: The Real Story of Apple Computer Inc., May 1999]

Substitute the word “Education” for “Apple,” and I believe we have our answer.  Thank you for your life, Steve.

Egypt on the rise

Last Spring a young Egyptian woman, Mona, contacted me in her effort to visit K-12 classes while she studied at UC Berkeley for the summer, wishing to see our use of technology in our classrooms.  There were logistical difficulties owing to our now very limited summer school offerings, but we managed to set up some class visits for her at a couple of our sites including our charter New Tech Network high school, Da Vinci Academy.

Regrettably I was unable to meet Mona due to my own summer travels, but she apparently left grateful for the time she was able to spend with us.  On my desk this morning I found an envelope with a keychain, the fob pictured here.  In a subsequent email exchange, she called it a “humble gift,” though while perhaps humble, I found it moving and deeply thought-provoking.

I have referred to recent events in the “Arab Spring” in previous posts to this blog, and Mona’s visit has brought those events even closer to my professional world view.

On numerous occasions throughout my career, I have been visited by international teams of educators, mostly from Asia, intent on learning how it is we Americans do what we do.  These were nations that were building infrastructure and slowly growing their social systems, rethinking how education should be done, and reaching for ideas.  If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll notice the citizens of Singapore, Shanghai, and South Korea haven’t done so badly for themselves over the past twenty years.  Now the visits and learning are traveling from the West to the East as we grapple with our own value systems and the defunding of education.

Egypt and other Arab countries on the distant other hand, rather than slowly developing a system, are in a head-long charge to remake their societies.  In London and Philadelphia young people use Facebook and Twitter to vandalize their neighborhoods out of boredom and general adolescent disgust with authorities.  In Cairo and Alexandria, young people are using these technologies to remake their world into something meaningful, changing governments, lighting their way to the future.

I have found myself increasingly envious of Mona as an educator in Egypt.  To be an technology-oriented educator in a country that is hungry for relevance, powered by people impassioned by a vision of the future that provides a world in which they want their grandchildren to prosper would be a dream.

Perhaps if we in America can look abroad for these examples of people looking beyond their personal and immediate comfort and affluence to focus on the future they are creating, we may avoid international irrelevance.

The Power of Intention

Much is said about 1:1 computing, putting technology into classrooms and into the hands of students.  However, anyone who pays attention to technology and schooling recognizes that transformation of school culture into one in service to real 21^st century demands requires more than providing tools to students, tools they already know how to manipulate with considerable agility.

In the news these past days has been the story of how Osama bin Laden was tracked, discovered, and his time on this planet brought to a close by a team of Navy SEALS.  What has particularly struck me is the degree of reverence given to the highly focused, laser-beam stream of intentional thought and action that brought about this chain of events.  It is clear we, as a culture, value clear, intentional, fearless action.  We like it when people make definitive choices, travel risky paths despite the possibility of negative outcomes, and take decisive action based on what you know at the time as the best information you can possibly develop, vetted by the minds of good people collaborating for the right reasons.

If we value this quality in our leaders and we recognize intelligent, intentional action as being the agent of success, why is it we as educators think we can tiptoe into transformation by half measure and semi-commitment to strategies we know work?

The first two paragraphs of this post are related by the fact that while we seem willing to get devices into the hands of students, to supply them with access to the cloud, to turn them loose under the crush of random data, we appear bent on bringing transformation to the rest of the education infrastructure in half and quarter measure lest we disturb someone’s sleep.  While the world around us is propelled by information carefully and intentionally crafted, education continues to think of information technology as some sort of luxury add-on, like sequins on a dress.

Folks, the sequins are the dress, and unless we incorporate enough of them in a strategic manner, we will be left naked in all the wrong places.

How Real is YOUR Computer?

“Students have to learn what’s real!”

This was offered by a New Jersey biology teacher who had just heard my presentation at the NJEA Convention on the changing perceptions and expectations of students with respect to K-12 animal sacrifice for purposes of dissection. This teacher had every reason to be upset with me, as I had implied that students who didn’t share the thrill of dissection perhaps had a point.

Modern students need or expect some sort of technological solution to the ways they interact with the world. Case in point, frog dissection, where in many states, as in California, there are regulations that require teachers to provide an alternative to dissection of live or preserved specimens. Frequently those alternatives involve some sort of digital simulation. The objection commonly heard from teachers is that is not an authentic or valid experience in terms of science learning. If you use a computer, you’re just “playing” science rather than “doing”science, right?

From my perspective I share that feeling and perception, as in my own experience I was immersed in dissection of animal and human tissues from high school through graduate school, and my ways of relating to these phenomena were informed by that experience. I wasn’t keen on pithing the frog in high school, but my dissection skills were second to none in college, including human cadavers. I loved it no end, and I still have my box of “ghoul tools.”

Digital natives, on the other hand, have created extremely vibrant social communities in digital media, and that experience clearly, on many levels, is an enhancement of community-building and overall interaction, an experience central to personality development in adolescents. Students have, as a consequence, become more socially reflective and instantly reactive to their friends’ needs. These networks may not rise to the level of deep, mature insight, but at their level of maturity they have been central to peer community-building, so among them has grown the expectation they be provided with a digital means to explore topics of interest to enhance or even substitute traditional pedagogical practices.

Perhaps those of us who don’t consider digital experiences “authentic” need to consider the fact that many modern surgeons and interplanetary explorers are using technological interfaces to do 100% of their work. In the world of nano medicine, genetic therapies, forensics, and innumerable other professions, there is nothing but a digital interface for getting the job done.

Before we leave this idea of “real” experience, it might serve the secondary life science teachers well to consider how we’ve changed what’s “real” for modern kids. For the last couple decades, science curriculum has been creeping into younger grades, with 5-7 year-olds learning about food webs, life cycles, and the interdependence of life forms on our planet. Their media are full of stories of endangered species and their changing, threatened planet. Do we adults have the liberty to question why they feel as they do about animal sacrifice? How would we feel if we were expected to study anatomy as our predecessors? I don’t know about you, but I’m not particularly up for grave robbing of the freshly-hung for my anatomy class. This was fairly standard practice a scant hundred years ago.

The UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine has responded to their changing student body by replacing the traditional dog cadaver anatomy lab with study of plastinated specimens, and the one-way kill practice-surgery has been replaced by a guided spay/neuter procedure, an experience providing not only the animal with a post-surgical future, but also the pre-vet the satisfaction of doing what it is they came to school to learn, healing and helping skills.

Any educator over age 25 or so would do well to periodically crack open this idea of “authentic” for themselves, and do the standard “compare/contrast” of what is authentic for us versus what is authentic for our students who will never accept that our authentic experience is more valid than theirs. The teacher who gains access to their students’ world view and connects new meaning to that world will be in the position to actually do the world-changing we came into this profession to do in the first place.

For future posts it might be interesting to explore what this means for teacher professional development. Are the skills we should be nurturing in our teachers more about practicing analytic empathy than it is software expertise?

 

“Santa blows up when it’s Christmas time!”

This lovely holiday sentiment is courtesy of our network administrator’s three-year-old daughter, Olivia.

While her dad assured her that Santa wouldn’t be eating too much, her parents also wondered what kind of anti-holiday images had slipped past their media firewall to produce that comment, and Olivia couldn’t explain herself very well.  The mystery was solved a few days later as they drove down their street, when Olivia pointed at a neighbor’s inflatable Santa saying, “Look, Santa blows up!”

While I don’t want to venture too far into this metaphor (images of Monty Python’s Mr. Creosote haunt me), I can’t help but think of so many miscommunications just like Olivia’s.  How many of us have made excited declarations, proposed innovations, suggested policies changes, shared well-meant intentions – and I’m thinking of education-related activities here as well as personal – only to have them perceived as expressions of secret evil?

An example that comes to mind is our journey into assessment data analysis and district-wide benchmark testing.  What those of us managing this process saw as exciting potential for nurturing achievement in every student, some sectors of our educator-community saw as a threat to autonomy and an insult to their practice.

Keeping the community network alive with patience and careful listening, just like for Olivia’s family, is probably the key to understanding how blowing Santa up can actually be a good thing.

Drop your tools and run!

Transforming School Culture: How to Overcome Staff Division, by Anthony Muhammad, is a book brought to our attention courtesy of our district superintendent, and I suspect it will be the topic of future posts as life here goes on and its insights illuminate our experiences as educational leaders.  Dr. Muhammad recounts an event from August 5, 1949, in which 14 young smokejumpers were killed by a wild fire in western Montana because they failed to obey these orders: “Drop your tools and run!” This was counter-intuitive to these firefighters, their tools considered to be their key to survival, and they were trained to fight fire, not run from it.  Dr. Muhammad’s excellent book devotes a full chapter to describing the dynamics of educators’ unwillingness to change, to adapt to circumstances that for them feel no less aggressive and life-threatening than those faced by those young smokejumpers.  Hear him describe his book here:

Some years ago (I think it was 2003), the UC Davis Cosmology Group invited Stephen Hawking to present a recent paper, and as luck would have it, one of my 5^th grade students that year was the son of one of the cosmology faculty who had extended the invitation to Dr. Hawking, and I was politely invited to join the physicists for lunch with him. Yes, as an amateur astronomer I was thrilled to sit at the master’s feet, and he said a great many things of great complexity and importance during his public lectures.  But to the lunchtime crowd of mostly his peers, the one thing he said I will never forget was, and I paraphrase here: Forget everything you think you know.  Be like a child and receive the new data as if you were just born.  Easy for you to say, you might think.  Well, nothing is easy for Stephen Hawking to say, and he challenged his colleagues to engage in a personal dogma dump so they might comprehend the meaning of the new astrophysical data emerging at a fantastic rate.  He encouraged them to let go of everything they thought they knew about the universe.

In the world of the physicists, their ideas are changing because the data they’re receiving is overwhelming their precepts.  Their universe isn’t changing, but their insights as informed by their data are.

For educators, our universe, our region of practice, is changing while the fresh data roles in, so what’s an educator to do?  Our students are not the students on which teaching practice was built when schools were designed long ago.  Do we drop our tools and run?  If surviving as a teacher (or principal or superintendent) in this field means we die unless we find fresh solutions, maybe it’s an idea whose time has come.  And as we immerse ourselves in the data the analysis technology is making available to us, is our vision obscured by lenses smeared with what we thought we knew?  Just who are these kids, anyway, and who are we who dare teach them?