April 2018 – Notes From the North Country

Texting in the Boys Room

Posted on April 19, 2018April 19, 2018 by alden110

Image result for kid on a cell phone in class — Cell phone use has become a major problem in American schools — and it’s not going away. (http://nordic.businessinsider.com)

***

“Excuse me, do you have your cell phone out?” I asked.

“Don’t worry, it’s not what you think,” the boy responded.

I was surprised because even though I fight this battle every day in my other classes, here in my advanced writing class, I had never seen a cell phone. As I thought about it, even after nearly a year of teaching these 15 juniors and seniors, I had no way of knowing if they even owned cell phones.

In any of my other classes, the ten minutes of directions I’d just given — form groups, choose a book to read together over the next month, then check local libraries or bookstores for copies — would’ve sent at least two or three kids reaching for the welcome distraction of their phones.

“Not what I think? Sure it’s not,” I said to boy, cracking a smile.

“No, no! I just texted my mom. She works at the bookstore. She’s already ordered four copies of the book. We’ll have them in class Monday.”

“Well . . .” I stammered. “That’s . . . impressive problem solving. And — smart use of your . . . cell phone.”

His phone was already put away.

How the Other Half Lives

Skip ahead to my next class. Unlike the advanced writers, these students leave no doubt that they all own cell phones.

“Please take a moment to put away your phones,” I cheerfully remind them at the start of class. I think of myself like the announcement you hear in movie theaters right before the film begins.

“And take your headphones out, too!”

With their discrete wires emerging from sweatshirts and snaking into their ears, my students remind me sometimes of Secret Service agents. Many of them attempt to conduct their entire lives with one headphone playing music at all times. How can they concentrate?

“Remember,” I tell them, “to think about those studies we looked at.”

“Those studies” are my first lesson plan of the year — a series of articles about the dangers of distraction: how multitasking is a myth, and how a cell phone sitting on a desk can make us less cognitively astute, and appear less empathetic. It’s my attempt to kill two birds with one stone: to educate students, and to stop cell phone distraction before it starts.

It usually works for about two weeks. Then phones creep back onto desks, into laps, and into restless hands. I spot them during lectures, during writing time, even during group project work. Some kids are cagey — backpacks or books propped on desks are a telltale sign of illicit phone use. So are illuminated faces in an otherwise dark room. So is a strange interest in one’s groin area. Other kids are more brazen. Some, despite my friendly tone, are downright belligerent. Their rebellious tones belie the straight-up lameness of their excuses.

“What’s your problem? My mom’s texting me!”

But here’s the irony: most of these heavy in-class tech users are completely unable to use technology to help them learn.

Even though they spend — by their own admission — upwards of eight hours a day using media, few of them understand how to follow their progress by checking our school’s online gradebook.

Even fewer of them bother to check their school email, ensuring that they miss their teachers’ email updates about missing assignments and homework changes.

Even more alarming, they struggle to use technology for basic educational tasks: knowing where to find information, how to identify good and bad sources, even understanding what to type into a basic Google search to yield relevant results. The reasons are not hard to detect. These students lack problem-solving skills, literacy skills, and simple perseverance — ironically all of which are exacerbated by their heavy use of technology. It’s a depressing cycle.

Family Drama

And here’s another problem. Cell phones also allow family problems to creep into the classroom. There’s a sad juxtaposition between the young man whose mother ordered books for him and the young man whose mother was texting him with drama-filled invective. One was helping her son learn. The other was, as some of our students would say, “bringing the drama” — the same sort of familial turmoil that has kept learning a stated priority but in reality a low one in this boy’s life.

The irony of the student whose mother is frantically texting him, “You should be paying attention in class right now!” is all-too clear.

Meanwhile, the students in my advanced class are downright savvy tech users. They receive automatic updates from the online gradebook, check and respond promptly to their teachers’ emails, and frequently show me new ways of using media for our studies. Last week, as we discussed Cambridge Analytica in class, one young man removed a cell phone I’d never seen before and demonstrated how I myself could find the covert marketing profile Facebook had compiled on me.

(Apparently I am — like this young man — “Very Liberal.”)

What We’re Up Against

What’s troubling for me is that technology is sold to schools as a way to provide educational equality. By using online learning, blended learning, and now, “personalized” learning, tech companies promise us that we’ll be able to tailor our teaching directly to individual students in order to close the achievement gap. But as I’ve described, too often technology only seems to increase the divide between those who’ve been taught to use it wisely and those who haven’t.

Don’t get me wrong. We’re trying. Like France, which has banned cell phones in schools for students under 15, the school where I work has banned phones for middle schoolers. And in the high school classrooms, we try to teach not only research skills, but subtler ones too: the dangers of online data sharing, and the dangers of distraction, both in class and in the car. To some extent, we’re all media literacy teachers. We try.

But we’re up against a lot. The same tech companies that claim they’re on our side when they’re peddling products to school superintendents are every second fighting for our kids’ attention — and they have a lot sexier products to sell than we educators do.

We’re also up against the first generation of parents who’re on phones. A few years ago during my annual Open House presentation, I started seeing parents on cell phones. Here I was, telling a roomful of adults how I’d be educating their children, and they were on their cell phones! I wanted to quit right there.

Sometimes teachers are no better. Look around at the next faculty meeting sometime and watch the thumbs working. We’re just as bad as anyone else at practicing what we preach.

It’s hard because as forward-thinking educators, we want to encourage responsible use of technology. We know it’s going to be part of our students’ future. And yet, it often feels as if we’re introducing another impediment to learning, especially for our neediest students. It’s so hard to keep them on task. Too often during a research project, I’ll catch students visiting websites they shouldn’t be on. College professors face this dilemma everyday — to keep kids from taking notes on computers during lectures feels ridiculous in 2018, but then the professor stops talking and everyone’s still typing because they’re actually doing email or posting on social media. Technology isn’t an educational panacea — it’s a pickle that we’ve gotten ourselves into.

Believe me, I’m not trying to pin all the blame on technology. Lord knows that kids never needed technology to distract them in class. We passed notes, we stared at the beautiful girl in front of us, we sketched the rapids on the New Haven Ledges in our notebook (that was me . . . ), or we just zoned out. The writer and teacher Garret Keizer said that whereas the problem used to be smoking in the boys room, now it’s texting in the boys room. I suppose that’s a good trade. But they weren’t smoking in class. Technology makes it harder to pay attention — especially for the kids who most need to pay attention.

The Panacea?

This message is urgent right now, because of the belief that technology can fix our educational problems by differentiating instruction, or — here is the new buzzword in education — by personalizing it. The allure of hooking our weakest students up to a computer program and letting them work their way through it at their own pace is something that’s becoming more and more seductive.

But it’s naive to think that digital learning can ever replace the true personalization of an experienced teacher. What if all of our students were savvy about the dangers of the internet?

What if all of our students knew how to leverage the remarkable research and learning tools we didn’t even have just five years ago?

What if all of our students understood the dangers of digital addiction?

What if I didn’t know if any of my students owned cell phones? That’s the dream.

I don’t know how that happens, but I do know this: It won’t be computers teaching them that.

A Year Off From Teaching

Posted on April 6, 2018April 13, 2018 by alden110

A few months ago, I did something crazy. Even though it’s what I want, and even though I’ve had time to get used to it, I still find myself wondering, “What the hell am I doing?”

Or, “Who am I to try this? I’m just a teacher.”

Let me explain.

In my world, I’m realizing, things don’t change much. Public schools are remarkably consistent. Sure, kids don’t pass notes anymore — they text. Homework isn’t on the board — it’s online. And nowadays we practice active shooter drills and even talk about arming teachers. Imagine!

But look closely and you’ll find the core of American high school has stayed strikingly similar for 75 years. Every morning since who-knows-when, a bell has rung and sleepy-eyed teenagers have wandered off to the same basic classes, on the same basic schedule, for the same 180 days, to earn the same As, Bs, or Cs. It’s ritual: the droning teachers, the hand-raising, the homework, the lockers, even the detention. High school is comfortably familiar, its traditions etched into our collective conscious. It’s a rite of passage.

That doesn’t mean it makes sense. It doesn’t. For instance, if I were checking kids’ incisors or tonsils, I’d get to examine one kid at a time. Instead I’m teaching them to read and to show empathy and to participate in a democracy. I get them twenty-two at a time.

For American schools, this too is tradition: We know what works. We just can’t afford it.

Or can we?

Two years ago, a creative principal decided to do something about his students’ writing. So he lightened an English teacher’s class load from five to four — and made each class a bit bigger (but not too much) to compensate. Understand, teaching five classes is just as much a fixed reality for American teachers as the 180-day calendar. It’s tradition.

But not this time. Now the principal told the teacher to use that extra time — that fifth teaching period — to conference individually with kids outside of class. This, he thought, would improve their writing.

Improve they did.

The results were immediate. One month in, the teacher was pinching himself. Suddenly he could really dig into kids’ writing and show them what his red pen comments never could. But it was more than that. Suddenly he could know his students as individual learners, as individual human beings, more than he ever had before. This, he told himself, is what I’ve been trying for my whole career.

That teacher was me.

That experience of being freed up to work one-on-one with kids on their writing — to diagnose the individual patient rather than the group — changed my outlook on what was possible in education.

We know what works. This works. Maybe this time we can afford it?

***

A year later — this winter — I received a Rowland Fellowship — a year-long, paid sabbatical awarded to Vermont teachers — with the purpose of investigating whether this new conferencing approach to teaching is a) as good as I think it is, and b) feasible for anyone else. What does this mean? For a whole year, I won’t teach. I’ll visit other high schools and maybe even colleges to see if anyone else is doing this crazy conferencing idea. I’ll read journal articles to try to figure out if any schools way, way back in time have tried this (hint: they have). I’ll attend conferences. I’ll interview kids and teachers to see what they think of the writing conference model. I’ll research. I’ll support my coworkers, who are brave enough to try out this new plan. It’s the sort of chance you don’t often get in your professional life — the chance to step back from the day-to-day to really try to get it right.

And it’s not only generous of the Rowland family, but far-sighted. In a time when we’re used to educational policy being driven by those farthest from the classroom — professors, politicians, even billionaires — the Rowland Foundation is built on the refreshing and frankly savvy idea that, given time and thought-space, it’s teachers themselves who have some of the worthiest ideas about improving education.

After all, schools are busy. Teachers are busy. We jam twelve months of work into a 10-month school year. We rarely get to pause and reflect. Too often, we flit from shiny new initiative to band aid reform, without giving anything a chance to work before we move on. It doesn’t help that our policies are often subject to the whims of short-tenured administrators and to impatient legislators.

Paradoxically, it’s this constant blur of reforms that ensures none of it ever really sticks. Add in a lack of money, the comfort of familiarity, and the sheer scope of the job of educating the masses, and all of it helps explain why today’s basic school structure looks remarkably similar that of 50 years ago. There is an “immovable mountain” — as Rowland Executive Director Chuck Scranton calls it — in our way. No change comes to schools without a lot of time, thought, and hard work.

And yet, change does happen. The school where I work is remarkably forward-thinking and humane. Even in my eight years as a teacher, I’ve seen a number of positive changes worked into the immovable system by diligent and committed educators. I’ve seen it work — and I want to be a part of it.

As trite as it sounds, I took this fellowship because I wanted to make a difference. And I’m incredibly excited to get to work. But this does feel out of character for me. I don’t usually think of myself as a leader. The goal of the fellowship is not just classroom but school-wide reform. The question is — can I “scale up” my idea to promote change beyond my own classroom or department. That’s scary because that’s not how I usually think of myself. I’m just a teacher. When I look down the list of past Rowland recipients, I see leaders in the Vermont educational community: future principals, curriculum coordinators, even a future mayor. I don’t see myself that way. Motivating grumpy teenagers to pass in their Paper Towns essays is one thing. Trying to nudge grizzled veterans with pedagogical war stories from the year I was born to fall in line with my wacky ideas is quite another. Who am I to try to make change?

What if no one’s interested?

Then there’s the fact that what I’m selling may be impossible to spread beyond my classroom. There are a hundred reasons why it’s too hard to teach only four classes and to conference individually with kids: Teachers have always taught five classes. Teaching four will make classes too big. One-on-one meetings take up too much time. It’s impossible to conference with all of your students every semester. Better to just do what we’ve always done: chat quickly with kids during a stolen minute or two in class here and there, or even 30 seconds when everyone else is working well. Keep your classes small and try to make it work without the individual face-to-face time. Play the long game. Things are the way they are for a reason.

For months, I’ve been wrestling with these doubts.

The last time I remember feeling this way was back in 2003, when I first decided to write the book that would eventually become Let It Rain, the kayaking guidebook that was the passion project of my pre-teaching days. The questions, the self-doubt, was all the same:

Who am I to do this?

What if no one likes it?

What happens if this doesn’t go well?

But there are always a million reasons why you shouldn’t do something. Just like back in 2003, I have no idea how the next year will turn out. I cannot know if my desire to change schools to establish more flexible teacher schedules and more individual instruction will be repelled by the immovable mountain. I cannot know if the changes I’m hoping to make are at all realistic, or helpful to anyone besides me. But I do know that sixteen years ago I did not regret taking the risk that I did.

I have the sense that these feelings of doubt are again the ones that precede something important. And something tells me that even if I fail, even if in five years there’s no trace of my reform left, I won’t actually have failed.

I am a big believer in the idea that every now and then — maybe once or twice in your career — you stumble onto something amid the myriad of temporary reforms that really works. And if you don’t throw your hat into the ring, if you don’t fight for that cause to get its hearing, then you’re not playing the game for real.

Starting next fall, I’m in.