Monday Morning Read: Make Them Move

This is the last week of school for me, and probably many of you. I hope it's been a happy year full of lots of learning and laughing.

My 7th year has definitely been my best. Half of teachers drop out of the profession before five years, but if you make it far enough, there comes a point where you stop surviving the very demanding requirements of the job and start thriving. Classroom management becomes easier, lessons plans go through multiple refinements, and you actually know what to say to parents once in a while. If you're been teaching long enough, you know what I'm talking about. If you're new and still struggling, stick with it. You're almost there!

For me, the turning point was year four. I had always worked hard to make good lessons plans and provide timely feedback (read: grade stuff quickly), but in year four I felt a certain sway and control over my content and class I never had before. Sometimes I felt like an artist painting a canvas.

One of the best things I picked up that year was from a Marcia Tate workshop titled "Worksheets Don't Grow Dendrites." Her's was the best professional development I'd ever been to. It provided the science behind a lot of stuff I already knew intuitively.

Doing worksheets are boring, and they don't retain anything.

Talking for too long is boring, and they don't retain anything.

Answering questions out of the book every day is boring, and they don't retain anything.

For whatever reason, they older kids get, the more lame stuff we make them do. Think about kindergarten. It's full of songs, movement and hands on activity. The wiring in our brain eats that stuff up! I'll prove it. Can you remember the first song you ever learned? No? Say the alphabet. We all say it in that same sing-song we learned in our earliest days.

After that PD I set out to add lots more motion to my lessons. We all want to be fun teachers, and we all want kids to like our class. So make it fun! Here's some of the ways I use motion in my classroom:

In 5th grade we use hand gestures and sayings to remember a key characteristic of two of each of the 5 regions of the United States. For the Midwest we rub our bellies and say "Mmmm Bread Basket."

In 6th grade we play a medieval West African trading simulation where in order to cross the Sahara you must hire a Berber caravan and say "Berber, Berber, Berber" as you cross.

In 7th grade we play a Feudalism Simulation you must kneel when taking a fief from your lord and shake saying "Land for Protection," emphasizing the basic feudal contract.

In 8th grade we use a series of hand motions to help remember key parts of the Declaration of Independence. When talking about our three unalienable rights we say "life" and put a hand over our heart. "Liberty" while spreading our hands wide. And "Pursuit of Happiness" while reaching to the sky.

The results are amazing. Movement really makes learning sticky. Those points aren't forgotten. Kids remember those key points throughout the year, usually with giggles. Try it this week. Find one key idea you really want to reinforce and make some sort of movement to hammer it home. I'll bet they remember it in the fall.

Let me know how it goes.

Monday Morning Read: Wikipedia, Friend or Foe?

Note: Starting this week, I'm going to begin a blog segment called the Monday Morning Read. It will be some short tidbit for teachers that gives you something to think about to start your week, or something you can use in the classroom.  

Most social studies teachers have a love-hate relationship with Wikipedia. On one hand it is an exhaustive resource with up-to-date information on nearly every subject imaginable. On the other hand, it's cloud-sourced knowledge, meaning anyone can write anything. As I blogged just last week, a few years back I encountered a Wikipedia article that swapped out King Leonidas of Sparta for the fear-inspiring King Poopypants.

Single handedly stopped the Persian invasion and saved Western Civilization

This dichotomy makes Wikipedia a dicey source at best. But I do tell my students it can be a good one with a caveat: you must check the citations! To their credit, Wikipedia does a great job of requiring citations in their articles. I've even used Wikipedia to help teach students about citations.

But what happens when some miscreant writes errors on a Wikipedia entry, which is then read by an undiscerning journalist, who writes an article that is then used as a citation to prove the original mistruth? A raccoon turns into an aardvark, that's what.

"Call me whatever you want, just give me some bugs to eat."

This excellent piece in the New Yorker lays it all out. Above is a coati, but a while back some snot-nosed New Yorker edited its Wikipedia page to say "also known as the Brazilian Aardvark." Which it was not. Yet, if you google "Brazilian Aardvark" now dozens of entries come up.

Disturbingly, it appears newspaper reporters do exactly what my students want to do when told to research something: 

1. Get on a computer, 
2. Type whatever it is into Google
3. Click on the Wikipedia link
4. Write down whatever comes up 

Once that reporter wrote an article calling the Coati a Brazilian Aardvark, someone on Wikipedia linked that article back to the original error on Wikipedia, making it seem credible. The Wikipedia lie became a truth.

The article makes a great point. With any crowd-sourced knowledge platform, if enough people believe a lie, it becomes a truth. Think about all the funny, fascinating, or sad beliefs that people have held throughout history:

• The Romans and Greeks believed a giant river named Oceanus surrounded the world.
• Medieval Europeans though urine could help cure the Black Death.
• Around the time of Lewis and Clark, many Americans thought Wooly Mammoths lived beyond the Rocky Mountains.

So, if Wikipedia were available at that time, we can imagine that the articles on Oceanus, Black Death cures and zoology of the West would have been authoritative and error filled.

While ignorance is one thing, in the coati's case the author willfully entered an error, that became cited so much it made its own truth. It's an invaluable case study for students to understand the limits of Wikipedia, and the potential of any source to be inaccurate purposefully or not.

Unbelievable! Healthy Skepticism

I always try to teach my students to never believe something because someone tells you to. Skepticism is healthy, especially in a republic. All citizens need to have an instinct to seek out, inquire, and question to find the truth.

More practically, a certain level of discernment is particularly desirable while researching information on the internet. I'll never forget the Wikipedia article on Sparta I read a few years back that replaced all mentions of Leonidas with "King Poopypants."

To drive the point home, I recently threw together a quick lesson for my students, disguised as a refresher on the difference between primary and secondary sources.

I explained primary sources, documents or physical objects from the time we are studying. Things like letters, journals, etc. Then I gave them an example:

The dead numbered in the hundreds.  As we dug a trench for their bodies, Mangini hit a stone.  In the process of removing it, we discovered that it was not a stone, but a large bone.  Assuming it belonged to some ancient and large elephant, we carried on.  The smell of the bodies left us no time to delay….

 …when we found the skull , all dropped to their knees and crossed themselves.  Immediately Luigi ran for a priest, who when seeing the monstrosity, ran back to his abbey.”

-Lucardo del Finco, Italy, 1345

We had just finished studying the Black Death, so the students caught the connection between mass graves, decaying bodies, and Italy pretty quickly.

Then I showed them another primary document. A drawing I said came from the same place and time period

I added a strategically placed Spongebob over that weird leafy thing.

I asked the students to speculate what kind of skeleton they found. Common answers: giants and Sasquatch.

Next we went over secondary sources, books, articles, etc that use primary sources to summarize what we know or guess about a time period. I showed them this excerpt from an article called "The Giants of Florence"

Legends of giants living in the Apennines Mountains date back to the early Roman Republic.  When the Black Plague struck Italy, however, over a dozen enormously large skeletons were found as citizens hurriedly dug mass graves. Tales of the giant skeletons  spread like wildfire.  Fearing that the peasantry would begin to worship the bones and resurrect the religion of the Ancient Greeks and Romans, the Pope ordered all bones destroyed….

The tale of giants faded back into myth, until a peasant farmer in Tuscany, near Florence, uncovered a skeleton measuring nearly 15 feet tall.  Scientists speculate that these remains are of early Greek setters.

I then showed them this picture:

Clearly not a hoax.

The students gasped. They ooh-ed and ahh-ed. "Is that real?!" they asked. I just nodded and gave them a quick quiz on the difference between primary and secondary sources, and the readings. Two questions were.

1. How many feet long was the skeleton recently found?
2. What do scientists speculate is the origin of the skeleton?

The answers:

1. There was no skeleton
2. It's all a joke. Don't believe everything you read or hear, even from your teacher.

My students were surprised and relieved that no creepy giant skeletons existed. While I hate to sow any seeds of distrust, I think the bigger message is more important. This nation needs skeptics. We need people to question authority, doubt the message. The alternative looks a lot like Orwell's 1984. The NBC interview with Edward Snowden (which I showed to my 8th graders today), drove the point home.

Here's a picture of James Clapper, our Director of National Intelligence. Here's a man we can trust, right?

A true American hero.

Well, no. He lied, under oath, before a Senate Committee about the extent of our government's surveillance on American citizens. And surprise, surprise, he's not the first government official to lie. The good news is, as long as we do have people like Edward Snowden who aren't afraid to bring the truth to light, our Republic is going to be in good shape. 

Like Orwell said, "In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." So while my government wants to arrest Snowden for telling us the truth about how much our government is watching us, I'd like to thank him for standing up as an example of courage to our nation. 


PS. If you want, I'll be happy to email the Powerpoint of the lesson to you. It only takes about 10 minutes!

Anger: The Least Effective Tool for Teachers (and all of us)

Anger is least effective tool in a teacher's tool box.  And I think that extrapolates out to almost every relationship we have.

Like all emotions, anger can feel so good, and that's the problem.  Righteous anger in particular imparts a satisfaction we rarely get elsewhere.  "I'm angry, and I should be!  You deserve this!"  While it might feel good, anger often does more harm than good.  Ben Franklin said it best, "Anger is never without reason, but seldom a good one."

A few ideas I've learned from teaching

Apply consequences to actions without emotion, kids notice when you get rattled. 
Kids will do stupid stuff.  Constantly.  Like the kid I saw doodling on a desk today.  Or the kid who paper glued paper towels to the paper towel dispenser.  "WHY!?" , you want to ask (or scream), but there's no answer.  They're kids.  And at my age, middle school, they are learning their value system and figuring out who they want to be.  Part of that is making mistakes and knowing you never want to do that again.  More often than not, there is no need to blow up at them because their guilty conscience is probably already doing that.

You can get angry at this constant parade of idiocy, and if you do you'll be angry a lot.  That's a tough way to spend your days.  Plus, you'll teach your class that you're easily rattled.  Provide discipline.  Be firm.  Deal with issues calmly.  Let your word be final.  A teacher in control of his/her class has no need to raise their voice.

Anger may stop the symptom, but rarely the cause.
Sometimes students do something they know is wrong.  Like the kid my first year who wrote F*** in big letters on my whiteboard while we were lining up for lunch.  While anger is the natural response, 99% of the time anger works against you.  It throws up barriers and you become an enemy, where you should be a mentor and a guide.  Students that act out, never do so without reason.

While your anger might shut them up, it sure won't help you why your student is acting up.  As teachers we get so busy planning lessons, grading papers, and going to meetings we can forget some of our students' lives are terrible.  Hunger.  Abuse.  Abandonment.  Neglect.  It's no surprise that those students are the ones that cause the majority of the issues.

As their teacher, you need to be their ally.  Apply discipline, always.  But take the time to talk to the student and understand them a little better.  See where they're coming from.  Ask them about their day, their night before.  Sometimes the answers will horrify you, but it will provide you a crucial window into their life, and potentially a chance to make a difference.

If your whole class is acting out all the time...
Don't get angry.  It's you.  Your lesson plans suck.  Don't take it personal, just learn from it and move on.  I've taught some really awful lessons before, and I always have the most issues when my students aren't engaged.  Good lessons=good students (most of the time).

If you use anger, do so rarely and only when you choose to.  And make that anger positive.
The longer I teach, the more I check the impulse to act in anger.  If I do get angry, I choose to.  And it's usually to tell a student that I know they are better than what they've been doing.  I direct that anger in a positive way, so they have to nod their head when I'm yelling at them because I'm actually complimenting them.  "I know you're a good kid!  I've seen you do (good thing) and (another good thing), so why on earth would you (bad thing)!"

They'll always agree with you.

Above all else, kids need to know you like them, and care about them.
If they know that, than they'll listen to your words however you say it, because they believe it's in their best interest.  And if they're listening to you, there's no need to be angry.