To a New Teacher

This week, a graduating senior of mine wrote with a lot of vulnerability, asking for any final advice before he began his first year as a new teacher. Here is how I replied:

Dear [...],

I'm so glad you reached out! I hear you, and it's a crazy and surreal feeling to start your first year of teaching. The biggest thing I can share is to know that everything you are feeling--the nervousness, the worry, the doubt, and sense of uncertainty--is all very normal! This is what every new teacher feels, and on the first day, even most veteran teachers feel it. 

Once the students arrive, and you get a few weeks under your belt, a rhythm starts. But during your first year, it will still feel hard. You'll make mistakes, and you'll feel uncertain often. This is okay. This is part of the process of learning to teach. 

As far as preparing curriculum and strategies for the classroom, I would say to try to plan activities that don't make you the center for the whole duration of class. If you plan a lot where you have to be constantly talking and leading, you will get exhausted, and also the kids will start to struggle with behavior. They won't be able to sit and focus on you for long periods on and on, so be sure to plan in ways for them to connect with each other and to move around the room. Remember things like CHALK TALK from Assessment class, where students can get up, record ideas and responses on large posters or white boards around the room. Use that! Use activities that help students get in small groups and think through problems. I would suggest picking groups, so that students don't always just go right to friends, and so that the same kids aren't always left out. 

Come up with some fun challenges for students to work on. Things like: "If you were a group of senators in the US Senate, which 10 laws would you add to our country right now? And why? In the groups of four that I give you, talk about your ideas, then come up with your list and with one solid reason why for each law you create." You can then give students 45 minutes to talk, create their laws, maybe a second 45 minutes the next day, and then they can hang their posters with their laws around the room. Students can then do a GALLERY WALK to explore each other's posters, and then you can lead a discussion afterwards about what everyone noticed--prompting deep analysis and reflection. 

You might do an activity like this after you briefly explore some real laws--or a discussion of unjust laws in our country's past, and how to create new laws that ARE just. 

A strategy like this allows students to learn, but also doesn't put you in the spotlight for long, long periods of time, allowing you to connect with kids in small groups, and also allowing kids to do the thinking and learning!

The more you can utilize strategies like this, the more fun you and the kids will have, and the more energized you will feel!

Also remember that the words you say to students matter, and you have the power to encourage them, inspire them, and let them know that you SEE them and you CARE about them. You'll show them this by all the little things you do every day--making eye contact, responding to their joy about a movie they saw, a soccer practice they had, or a picture they drew. 

What students remember--long after they will have had you as a teacher--are these things. They'll remember whether your eyes opened wide when they told you a story. They'll remember whether you delighted in them, and whether you allowed yourself to be childlike enough to be amazed at what they'll say and do. 

Be delighted. 

Be amazed. 

This matters far more than anything else you'll ever do in the classroom. 

And one last thing: remember that they are going to try their best. On the surface, it might not look like that, but they'll also be hiding a lot of fears, a lot of worries about not being cool enough, smart enough, loved enough. Don't always take their surface-level reactions as core-level judgments of you or what you do. See deeper. Explore farther. 

Keep reaching out, and know that I'm here for you, and others are too. Never hesitate to ask away--you are not alone!

Peace, and rock on,

Professor R

Facing History with Courage and Hope

When I first started teaching high school students in Connecticut, back in 2003, I remember discussing the realities of racism in America with my students, and the horrific--and lasting--legacy of slavery and the Jim Crow era. My students were shocked to learn that the KKK was still active in 2003, and I recall many of them saying that they had thought racism was long gone.

No.

Today, I doubt any high school student in America would dare to believe that there is no such thing as the KKK. Because of the repulsive acts of cowardice among white supremacist groups in Charlottesville, students today are realizing a harrowing truth: racism was never defeated nor dead--it was merely in hiding.

I grew up in the town of Windsor, CT--a town just north of Hartford, where there is still a beautiful diversity of people. In all of my public school years, I had friends of many races, and I recall listening to the speeches of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. on my Sony Walkman as I did my paper route. The speeches riveted me--their clarion calls for justice and equality, their evocation of America's ugly past towards African-Americans, and their hope for a more just future.

Listening to those speeches, though, and going to school every day where my classes always seemed to be 50% white and 50% black, I thought America had come a long way.

But when my best friend in high school, an African-American, and I created a dream to hike the Appalachian Trail together, I was somewhat shocked when he confided in me that he wasn't sure it was the smartest idea anymore. "Why not?" I recall asking--noting that we had trained with great discipline already. "Because there have been some racist attacks on the Trail lately," he said.

He was worried for his safety. As a young black man, he had to deal with a reality that I never did.

In more recent years, in my teaching in the 7th grade classroom, I saw a glaring ignorance. On the walls of my classroom were such notable figures as Martin Luther King, Jr., Langston Hughes, and Toni Morrison. Students could only recognize King, and even then, many of them inquired, "Didn't he end slavery?"

However, I think my own initial ignorance, and that displayed by so many students, is evidence of America's hiding of its past. So many want to pretend that racism is over and done with--dealt with by passing a few laws and some slip-shod apology for slavery.

It is not.

So, my 7th grade students read Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry. In conjunction with these books, my students explored the racist voting literacy test Louisiana gave in the 1960's after the Voting Rights Act was passed. We read and discussed Ta-Nehisi Coates' "The Case for Reparations" and we watched footage from Eyes on the Prize.

Just last week, my wife and I welcomed out third child into the world: Joshua William Reynolds. We have both long believed in raising our sons to be kind, compassionate, gentle, and loving. Ever since we watched Jackson Katz's powerful documentary about the horror of male bravado and cowardice that masquerades as courage, Tough Guise, we have tried to create a family that aims for honesty, emotional-openness, and facing our hopes and our fears.

We grow as a family when we talk openly and vulnerably. We grow as a society when we reveal our wrongs, not when we hide and disguise them, pretending that they were not really all that bad. We heal when we make amends, not when we make false moral equivalencies.

The high schoolers and the 7th graders I taught evidenced something beautiful as they learned more fully about America's past: action. They wanted to know what they could do, how they could help change our country for the better. They didn't become America-haters, as so many seem to fear. Instead, my students became America-changers. They wanted to try to work to fulfill America's promises to all people--to the many, not just the few.

I am a highly imperfect man: imperfect as a father, as a teacher, and as a writer. But I long to try my hardest to live compassionately, to love deeply, and to stand witness to injustice and do whatever small part I can to try and stop it.

The middle school kid who heard powerful words on his Sony Walkman is now a Daddy. I want to make those words real to my sons. I want to help them see that courage is about making amends for wrongs, about facing history honestly and trying hard to do whatever we can to create a more just society.

The Most Important Skill

Before the new school year starts, I try to think through a theme for the year--something that I want my students to carry with them long after the work of reading and writing essays and stories has finished for 7th grade. After reading article after article about the lack of empathy--and seeing such proof displayed, tragically, on the national stage all through the summer--I decided that this year we would try and work on what I believe is the most essential skill of all.

Growing up, I was very close with my oldest brother, Christopher, who is deaf. He lost his hearing at age two due to meningitis. Once I got to high school, Chris began to open up to me and vulnerably share what school had been like for him--the ways in which others did not view him or treat him with kindness and dignity, but rather with disdain and disregard.

His is not my story to tell: his journey belongs to him, and I do not want to speak on his behalf. Chris has a powerful, beautiful, and dignified voice all his own.

But I do want to share that after teaching for 13 years in a variety of contexts--at the high school, college, middle school, and Adult Ed levels--I am convinced that the most important skill we can help our students learn is empathy. It is more important than every single test score, every college essay, every other result or attribute.

And empathy is severely lacking.

The recent news out of Omaha, Nebraska, about Alex Hernandez is deeply disheartening. Watching Alex talk about his experiences of ongoing bullying (particularly the most recent instance when two male students stole his backpack and threw it into the toilet), and showing the clip to my current 7th graders, I cannot keep from crying.

But in the CNN article about Alex, in light of the wave of support and solidarity from people who heard about the disturbing incident and then connected with Alex, he shares a profoundly moving statement: "It made me very happy. It made me feel like I am not alone." This is the power of empathy. For a student who has traveled years feeling like he is alone, that his battles are his alone, and the cruelty of others is his alone to face (with little support, it would seem, from the school community in which he spent years), Alex finally feels like others see him for who he is. They are seeing the injustice that has been done to him repeatedly--not just in a single instance--and they are voicing their support of Alex and their righteous anger at those who attack.

One of the questions my 7th graders and I are exploring is why students who attack feel like they have the license to do so. In other words, why did those two male students who stole Alex's backpack think it was okay to do so? Why did they have a sense they would get away with it (as, by all accounts, they have. A mere mention that they didn't know Alex seems to have convinced the school that it was all a big misunderstanding--something that is often told to people who are systematically and consistently oppressed)?

One of the most insightful responses from my students is that students who bully and demean others do so because they do not have a deep, experiential, and intimate understanding of others who look, act, or think differently than they do. In other words: the segregation which plagues our school systems across this country is a massive culprit in the absence of empathy.

Our schools are woefully segregated according to race, class, gender, abilities, and many other attributes, aptitudes, and attitudes.

Instead of remedying this injustice, many of us seem to accept that this is the way schooling has been done, or that it would be too hard to change, or that it would impose upon principles of freedom. But when we allow segregation and misunderstanding to fester, anything else we teach or learn is meaningless.

What could have been done to prevent the tragic act of Alex's backpack being thrown in the toilet (and the thousand other cruelties Alex endured along his years as a student)?

Giving students experiences connecting with others who look, think, and act in ways that may be new to them. We need to invite speakers into our schools to talk about deafness, race relations, gender inequality, and more. We need to create experiential activities whereby our students journey outside the walls of their own schools and into others. We need to create new ways of fostering communities in our schools, and building schools that depend not only on zip codes but on justice codes: commitments to equalize housing costs and access to our public schools.

We can continue to pretend that standardized test scores are what matter, and that fighting for better scores for all is the work of justice. But that would be to deceive ourselves. What matters most is creating schools that model the kind of what in which we want to live: diverse, understanding, connected, and full of that most important skill of all: empathy.

Get Your Looney On!

The Gant Family (Paul, Diana, Micah, Emma)

Mr. Looney, the 77-year old zany English teacher in The Looney Experiment, is all about depth, connection, and courage. The friendship he forges with 8th-grader Atticus Hobart is a testimony to what's possible when we are willing to get beyond the status quo for school, for ourselves, and for society.

To help spread the word about going beyond the status quo and into the realm of LOONEY, here are a few friends...

Ben Reynolds

Kathryn Erskine

Megan Devlin

Matt Devlin

Tamara Ellis Smith

Katie Benson

Susan Anderson

Jake Dustin

Deborah Underwood

Laurie Ann Thompson

Luke Someone or Other

Suka

Trixie

What does your looney look like?

#GetYourLooneyOn

Of Soup and Synthesis

A few nights ago, Tyler announced that he wanted to make dinner for Jen, Ben, and I.

"What are you going to make?" We wondered aloud.

"You'll see!" came the excited retort.

And so, we saw.

Tyler asked Jen to purchase a number of items from the store--red peppers, onions, garlic, avocado, grape tomatoes, tomato sauce...and a few hours later Tyler was at the stove adding ingredients into one pan and getting ready to chop up others and fry them in another pan. The entire time, as he progressed in his yet-unannounced recipe preparation--he voiced aloud exactly what he was doing as he was working off the set of his own veritable cooking show.

Hearing our seven old utter sentences like,  "So what I'm doing here is I am cutting these peppers into very tiny pieces to get them all to be just the right size for the mix" filled us with a synthesis of wonder and delight.

We relished it. (Even if we were just a bit mystified and fearful of how the eventual result would taste.)

Fast forwarding an hour later, we all sat down do a kind of soup. The onions had been fried and we browned just towards the heavy side of soft, the peppers were (as predicted) just the right size, and the other ingredients seemed to elbow out their space in the mixture to announce themselves subtly yet powerfully enough to get noticed--"Hey man! I may be small and have strange ties to varies but I AM HERE TOO" said the garlic.

In the days that have followed, I've thought a lot about soup.

Soup.

It's a synthesis really, and I have thought a lot about synthesis lately, too, since my 7th graders just finished writing their synthesis essays and since my school backpack is burdened with the 100 essays labeled TO BE GRADED.

The theme my thoughts have taken with all of this soup and synthesis has coalesced into one curiosity today: I wonder how many students in our schools feel like they can make their own soup?

In other words, I am wondering how often we ask our students--and our children--to work with the ingredients they know and come up with new possibilities. Instead of handing them recipes to be followed meticulously, how often do we let their minds wander around the educational grocery store and say, come up with something new!

RUBRIC is a buzzword we hear everywhere these days, and if I ever assign some kind of writing and don't provide a rubric (which is becoming more and more frequent!) I certainly hear the fear that arches back: "But how will we KNOW what to produce?!"

And the answer that rises up--the YAWP if we can invoke a little Whitman here--is simply, "You won't!"

And maybe that's okay. Maybe that's even a good thing.

In one of his poems, the great rule-breaker e.e. cummings wrote, "I would rather learn from one bird how to sing /  than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance." Maybe part of what he meant here relates to soup and synthesis. Maybe part of what he meant was about learning a new song rather than teaching what NOT to do because it's not on the rubric.

I have a lot to learn. And watching my seven year old son make soup, I felt a kind of challenge from the young to the old: watch this, Dad. It doesn't have to be all planned out. I don't even have to know what I am doing! And it will be okay!

It may not always taste great. But then again, isn't that, too, what real learning is all about?

What it Comes Down To

I've just gotten off the phone with Dr. Noam Chomsky. For an upcoming book on education tentatively entitled IMAGINE: Visions of What School Might Be, I had the chance to interview Dr. Chomsky, and it was a powerful experience--made even more powerful by the fact that I was calling on a tiny little Magic Jack device that helped me place the call from York, England to Cambridge, Massachusetts and only once during the 25-minutes did the device go haywire and almost hang the call up. Crisis averted, and our discussion was inspiring.

After recently finishing Diane Ravitch's utterly compelling and deeply important book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System, I have become more and more excited about the revival of the American Public School system.

Sure, it looks bleak right now, with market-based principles and privatization rampantly encroaching on a basic human right of children. Billions have been spent pressuring teachers to narrow their curriculum so that high-stakes testing becomes the sole focus on schools. What is lost is love of learning, authentic growth, development as citizens, the values of compassion, and the ethic of collaboration.

And yet, we're still standing as a crossroads. Even with the heavy financing of powerful foundations to pressure both the federal government and state governments to work towards competition and market-based principals in schools, somehow, the public school system remains undaunted. Even with vociferous attacks on teachers and teacher unions--media and Hollywood providing the microphones--the public schools system holds as its steadfast mission to reach and teach all children: not just those who can provide better test scores. But the children in special ed programs, the English Language Learners, those with severe behavorial issues--all children.

As a young high school student, I remember watching Morgan Freeman in the film Lean on Me. Originally, I was riveted by Freeman's portrayal of real-life principal Joe Clark. After all, he was tough. He did the dirty work of getting rid of all the "bad" kids. Gathered them on stage and kicked them out so that he could inspire, motivate, and teach the kids who really wanted to learn.

Right on! And, obviously, the media loved the figure of Joe Clark enough to make a movie about him.

These many years later, however, I see the film in a new light. For the first time, I am asking, What happened to all those 'bad' kids? Where did they go? If they were kicked out of public school, then what?

And when I think of similar get-tough figures from our current era--like Michelle Rhee and Joel Klein--an interesting trend asserts itself. We glorify those leaders who talk tough and place blame. Whether it's the bad kids in Joe Clark's Eastside High or the underperforming teachers in Michelle Rhee's District of Columbia, we find outlets to praise those who talk tough and point fingers.

And yet: a stubbornly troubling fact asserts itself. If we blame the bad kids and get rid of them, and if we blame the bad teachers and get rid of them--but the system still doesn't improve, what are we left with?

We find ourselves, then, where we should be beginning anyway: by examining the system itself. How can we truly expect public schools to thrive when funding is based on unequal measures--so that students in poor areas consistently receive vastly lower funding and vastly larger class sizes than students in affluent areas? (This was documented in great detail by Jonathan Kozol in his heartbreaking book Savage Inequalities two decades ago. The book was promptly praised by the press, then promptly ignored by policy-makers and today, that system of unequal funding is largely unchanged.)

How can we truly expect public schools to thrive when teachers are being pressured constantly to raise test scores, thereby spending vast amounts of class time teaching students test-taking skills that will become wholly meaningless skills after they leave high school. Where in the workforce or larger world community do people ask us to take multiple choice tests to prove our worth, abilities, or work ethic? Nowhere. We reveal and demonstrate these qualities via our social interactions, experiences, collaborations, and projects.

How can we truly expect public schools to thrive when we underfund them, overload teachers, pressure leaders to get test results, do nothing to change the status quo of the plight of those in poverty, and then hand 30 students to a teacher and say, get results?

Instead of brow-beating and pointing fingers, this is a time to support students and teachers alike: smaller class sizes for all teachers, increased autonomy and ability to be creative and interactive in classrooms, instead of narrowing the curriculum to focus on standardized test-scores, open it up to possibilities for authentic learning motivated intrinsically. Create ways to help those students with behavioral issues to change and learn new skills rather than kicking them out to the streets. Welcome all students--not just those privatization would encourage us to welcome because they represent possible rises in test scores.

Tonight, one of the things that most moved me about what Dr. Chomsky shared was his response to a question about switching the current trend in education, and some of his answer is a fitting way to close:

The public school system is based on the idea that we do care about other people. That’s what it comes down to. Charter schools undermine the public schools, and the other problem is that schools are very much underfunded, and if you want to destroy a system, underfund it and then people will say we’ve got to privatize it. As an example, when Margaret Thatcher wanted to destroy the public transportation system in Britain, she underfunded it, then she privatized it. That’s what is happening with the schools now.

Perfectionism's Lies

The thing about Perfectionism is that it often walks and talks like Hard Work. It's adept at dressing up in the clothes that pass it off for a well-meaning, diligent character who only wants what's best for our lives. But the lie of Perfectionism is that it's never fulfilled--like a bucket with a hole in the bottom, so that we pour endless amounts of water into the thing, only to find that the level never rises above a certain point.

Here are five ways I've seen Perfectionism masquerade as a variety of other things--five lies that identify Perfectionism for what it is, along with some ideas on how we can call out these lies with a very loud, silver-ish whistle and a bag of carmelized popcorn (used for throwing, hard, at Perfectionism when he appears, of course):

1. RESULTS: Perfectionism's entire livelihood is built on the result of some project, dream, vision, or endeavor. Where Hard Work is concerned with the actual doing of something, Perfectionism only considers the action-part as a useless requirement in order to get to the result, the outcome. Perfectionism therefore holds the vision of a prize, an achievement, an award as real success and accomplishment, and leaves the fallible, day-to-day work undone. Perfectionism is concerned with glory, where Hard Work is concerned with journey.

2. GROWTH: Perfectionism will often try to convince us that it's only concerned with growth. Improvement is all we're talking about, after all, right!? I remember a student I had once who earned a 94 on her essay. I was so proud of her. I wrote loads of encouraging and congratulatory comments on her paper, as a 94 was a strong showing on a challenging essay assignment. But her reaction was only, "How can I get a 100 next time?" Perfectionism never allows us to enjoy what we have done because it's always screaming at us that we need to do better the next time. It pretends that it's about growth, but really it's an insatiable inability to rest or to be proud of the work we do.

3. PROOF: Perfectionism often tries to convince us that if we can manage to follow it obediently, we'll finally know that we are enough. Finally, you'll be able to feel peaceful inside and understand that you're okay! Because you'll have proof--you'll have evidence! But the lie of this costume of Perfectionism is that there will never be enough evidence. The proof that Perfectionism requires lasts for a few fleeting moments, and then we're forced to gather up new proof. What you accomplished yesterday won't stand in court today. And with Perfectionism, we're always on the stand, daily enlisting a trial lawyer to try and prove that we should be free. The tragedy of this is, of course, that there is no actual court case, no judge, no jury. We harbor the critical voices of others and put these messages on replay to construct a courtroom for ourselves, where we can battle over and over a case that has already been won on our behalf. Perfectionism's need for proof can never be fulfilled.

4. ENERGY: Perfectionism tries hard to convince us that it's a source of energy--a way in which we can find motivation to keep on going. In a way, it is, but it's energy is self-sapping and unsustainable. For a while, Perfectionism may feed a drive to accomplish and achieve, but continued despair over its impossibility eventually yields a feeling of claustrophobia. Perfectionism-as-energy puts us into a room and gives us a bag of balloons. Under its guise, we keep blowing up balloons, believing that we're accomplishing something. Finally, we look around ourselves and feel totally overwhelmed. Stuck. We can't even move. The reality is that the forty balloons that keep us locked in place only feel formidable; but they're just air, zero substance. The obstacles that Perfectionism throws in our path can fill a room with what could be held in the palms of our hands--once the hot air is removed.

5. LOVE: This is Perfectionism's most insidious disguise: to masquerade as a form of love. Sometimes parents send this message to children--it's the conditional claim of love: I do love, you, I just want you to be the best you can be... Essentially, such a claim really says, I don't love you, unless, you can achieve... Conditional love isn't, in fact, love. Vocationally, we start to believe that if we achieve enough (and achieve it in the right manner) we'll earn love or somehow possess an ability to love others better. Neither occurs.

In light of Perfectionism's incredible capacity for shape-shifting, what are we to do? I think one response lies in the remarkable power of Grace. Essentially, Grace responds with You don't have to. But the thing about Grace is that it frees us to want to. Some people claim that Grace is cliched because it tells us that we don;t have to work hard or have big dreams or entertain visions for the future. But the reality is that Grace gives us all these, but it allows us to work from a place of desire rather than a place of need. When we're parenting, writing, working, relating to others from a place of freedom, we can actually feel the joy of desire: we can want to grow, love, create beautiful results, forge proof, and sustain energy. If we need these things to happen, they don't. If we try to live from a place of must, then what happens isn't really ever organic--instead, it's always manipulated.

The power of Grace is that, in a world of people who are desperately trying to shove proof of our worth and lovability in front of the eyes of others, God doesn't need it. He doesn't ask for it. God's radical love instead utters a compelling, constant refrain: work from joy, not from shame.

You are no longer on trial. You have nothing to prove--to yourself or anyone else. In freedom, you can choose the work because you love it, not because you need to do it to earn status, belonging, or love. The lies of Perfectionism will relentlessly try to convince you that these can be obtained via its rigorous program. But Grace offers another avenue--still involving hard work, great sacrifice at times--but a way in which the work you do is liberating, not suffocating. Now is the time to pop the balloons that have been filled with the empty words of others and of yourself. Now is the time to embrace the gospel of Grace over the punishment of Perfectionism. There's a whole room--rooms!--in which you'll find you can move, live, and work.