The Future of the Teaching Profession

A couple weeks ago I was at my kids' high school for a concert, and afterward, I ran into the principal in the courtyard of the building. We visited a bit about how the school year was wrapping up, and he mentioned just how hectic the end of the year is with so many things going on besides the normal academic parts of school. He was mentioning how many teachers were out as well, with coaching responsibilities or family responsibilities, and he suddenly said, "Hey...since classes are out for you...do you have a little time that you could substitute for us?"

As a matter of fact, the timing was very good for me to do that, as I was in my lovely in-between-time: I had wrapped up my grading for the spring semester, and I was just getting started with my preparations for the summer term. And so, I spent a couple of days subbing at my kids' high school. (Which they were fine with, since I didn't end up teaching any of the classes they were taking.) :-)

This was a fantastic experience for me! Honestly, there is a part of me that sometimes wonders if I could still do it--if I could still teach full time in K-12. Certainly subbing is certainly not the same thing as full time teaching. Someone else did the planning, and someone else would do the assessing--and these are the two biggest, mostly-invisible parts of teaching that most non-teachers sort of forget about. But spending a few days in K-12 was a good affirmation for me that I still love connecting with kids, and I still have enough management skills and pedagogical skills to make content come to life for kids.

It was interesting for me to sit with members of the faculty at lunch too. We had a lot of laughs, and I was glad that they just included me in the conversation. But one thing stood out to me: one teacher said something to me along the lines of, "I think this is really great that you are taking the time to do this. I think more Education professors should spend time subbing." I agreed with this teacher whole-heartedly. And actually, this is something our department has already put into place: we are expected to spend time working with "real kids" in "real schools," either as co-teachers or substitutes just like this. Most of the time when I work in K-12 these days, it's been co-teaching with classroom teachers. I come in as the "outside expert" in some curriculum topic; most often it's been teaching a middle school or elementary science lesson. And this certainly has been great for me as well, but being "in charge" of the classroom the way substitute teachers are is a little different thing, and I was so glad to have this experience.

There was one more thing I caught from my colleagues-for-a-few-days while I was with them during lunch: they are tired. This year has been really, really tough on teachers. This wasn't shocking for me, of course. I feel that, even in my work as a teacher educator at the university level--I wrote a while back about how I have felt so exhausted by all the extra emotional labor of this COVID year. But it had me thinking about just how many educators I've seen on Twitter suggesting that they might not continue teaching. For some of them, COVID-stuff seems to be the reason. But for others, COVID-stuff was just the straw that broke the camel's back, because it revealed so many things about Education that feel so, so broken. And there seems to be a growing number of educators who are just going to be opting out of what they see as a broken system.

All of this had me feeling very curious, so put a poll out on Twitter a week or so ago. My tweet was thus: "I feel like I'm seeing a ton of teachers either not planning to come back to teach again in the fall, or seriously considering leaving the profession. Unscientific poll here to satisfy my curiosity: If you are a teacher...where are you at on this?"

I included a follow-up tweet encouraging teachers to share more about their decision-making: what was keeping them teaching, or what was nudging them out?

Here were the results of the poll. I was so encouraged to see that out of the 128 folks who chimed in on this very unscientific survey, almost 80% said they are planning to keep teaching. Of the other 20+%, 8% said leaning towards staying, 9% said leaning towards leaving, and only 4% said definitely leaving. So maybe things aren't so dire for the future of my profession?

But that said...it was interesting to see the comments teachers made in their tweets in response about their decision-making. A few of the comments included these insights:

• "I'm staying in teaching because it's where my passions and hopes are, and I've got a vocational calling, but man, this year I am TIRED at the finish line. I blame insufficient rest last summer as we had to plan and strategize though the pandemic."
• "Leaving for now. May get back in it for the right school fit. Tired of being taken for granted, school not doing it's part to fix curriculum & update learning experience for Ss. 1 size/way of doing things won't work for all, so it was clear the company was all about the $$$$"
• "I can’t imagine doing anything else, but I also can’t imagine being able to do years like the last 3 for very much longer. It’s been...a lot."
• "I've had a number of conversations where I've talked teachers off the ledge this year. Also more and more I'm hearing teachers say that they'll teach for the next while but that they'll leave eventually. I don't know if that is a millennial thing or COVID or..."
• "I hear younger teachers say their reason for leaving is the lack of flexibility and input.
• "Definitely coming back next year! It’s the pay cut this year, the over-abundance of work teaching hybrid, and lack of communication and providing of good curriculum that make it hard, though..."

This wasn't every comment I heard tweeted back in response...but notice any trends here? The biggest thing I note is that it's mostly the non-teaching things that are driving people towards considering leaving the profession. Several folks here seem to be saying, "Yeah, I love teaching...but all the other stuff that comes alongside the teaching that makes me consider not sticking with the teaching."

Ooof.

This is my big wondering then: how do we keep the main thing for teachers the main thing? If teachers get into the profession because they love kids, and love subjects that they get to teach, and love the actual teaching...how can we make sure that this is the stuff they do? Yeah, I know...COVID stretched everyone. But as I say that...was it COVID that was the problem? Or was it shifts that have happened societally in the past few years that have made teachers feel differently-burdened...and COVID was just the lens that really brought it all into the light in a different way?

I don't have any easy answer, or any quick prescription for what would make Education a more appealing profession for more people again. But I'm thinking about that 20ish% of respondents to my poll: what would be the implications if 20% of the teachers in the United States quit teaching in short order? 

I think the future of the teaching profession is unclear at this point. Everyone wants excellent teachers for their own kids, right? No one wants a mediocre teacher, right? So how do we equip excellent educators...and how do we keep them in the field?

On Being Seriously Silly

 I saw this one on Twitter today from the eminent Sir John Cleese:

Always be the silliest in any group. 😃 #tbt pic.twitter.com/oMJu876Wsz

— John Cleese (@JohnCleese) April 22, 2021

(Just in case you aren't familiar...John Cleese is one of the members of the ground-breaking British comedy troupe, Monty Python. This photo is of the group as they looked in the early days--maybe late 1960s or early 70s?--and Cleese is the one grinning like a fool. They may have had their heyday in the 70s and 80s, but this group has had a huge impact on media and culture far beyond the British Isles.)

I love it! I think this is a rule that I live by, and I didn't even realize it until I saw it written this way.

I revel in silliness. 

I play the ukulele.

I yo-yo as I walk across campus.

I get my Intro to Ed students to try juggling in class.

I exhibit a manic energy in teaching my Elementary Science Methods course.

At one of the summer camps I serve (shout-out to Royal Family Kids!) I dress up in a banana costume and sing ridiculous songs...and somehow get the whole group of campers and staff to play along and sing and dance with me.

Not atypical for me to look like this (at camp, at least...)

Something I've tried to embody--and to pass along to my students, future teachers that they are--is that I should take my WORK very seriously...but I try to not take MYSELF too seriously. 

Not that I want to be the butt of every joke, or anything like that. And I'm not just trying to be self-deprecating all the time. After all, I do want my students to have confidence in me as their teacher, and I want my colleagues to have confidence in me as someone who is reliable, and trustworthy, and an active contributor to important work.

But...I also want to be able to bring levity, positivity, and joy to my work! And I think I (generally) embody this quite well.

My big wondering right now: do people take me seriously even when I am silly?

I guess I'm thinking about this from a John Cleese sort of frame. He is one of the best in the world at what he does--he takes his comedy seriously, and has honed his craft over decades of work. Maybe my teaching practice isn't all that different?

Can I be seriously silly?

Teaching is Not for the Faint of Heart...and HyFlex Teaching in Particular

I saw this tweet this morning, and boy did this resonate... 

I don't think non-teachers understand what teaching remote and in-person simultaneously really entails.

How would you describe it, teacher friends? pic.twitter.com/yFRSAUTJxg

— Julie Jee 🇰🇷🇺🇲 (@mrsjjee) December 30, 2020

I've said to a few people that this past fall semester was the most demanding for me since my first year of teaching. Most of the challenge was that I have such high expectations for myself and my teaching practice...and I fell short of those expectations. 

A lot.

Here's the thing: the HyFlex model of teaching sounds great in theory. But it's really, really hard to do it well in practice. HyFlex is "hybrid flexible," and the basic idea is that students should be able to fully participate in class whether they attend in person or via distance learning. Early in my doctoral studies, we considered HyFlex as a pedagogical approach in a case study in one of my courses. One of the biggest problems we identified is the huge cognitive demand for instructors using this approach. You have to be able to teach students in the room and students joining via videoconference simultaneously, and either of these modes of teaching is already plenty demanding...let alone simultaneously! 

To do HyFlex teaching well, you basically have two demanding tasks--teaching face-to-face, and teaching via live videoconference. These require similar skillsets...but not identical skillsets. And the difficulty is that you have to do them both at the same time. It's a problem! And, I think that's why I felt like I was failing almost all of the time this fall: I couldn't focus on my normal face-to-face pedagogy, because I was constantly distracted by trying to keep my Zooming students involved in what was happening in class. But the Zoomers were always the minority (just my students who were in quarantine, most of the time) and if I focused on good distance pedagogy, everything felt lifeless in the room, where the majority of my students were. And here was the most-likely-to-fail point for me: I couldn't do either of these things well (or at least, not well enough to meet my own high expectations for my teaching), so I felt a constant sense of frustration that I wasn't doing enough to support at least one group of students' learning. But what made it most difficult for me was that I was also recording each lesson, because some students were not able to join the live class meeting via videoconference, particularly if they were sick. And while teaching is always a public endeavor (you're always doing it in front of someone, right?) having a video record of my work makes me much more self-conscious!

So, to answer the question prompted by the tweet I shared above, here's my best analogy... 

I can yo-yo pretty well. I was a pretty big nerd in middle school, and I yo-yoed a lot. I can do some fun tricks: walk the dog, loop the loop, around the world, and rock the cradle. Not the most impressive repertoire, but a variety of entertaining tools in my yo-yoing toolbox. 

I can also juggle fairly well--with three beanbags, if I have both hands available, or two beanbags, if I have just one hand available. I was still a pretty big nerd in high school, and taught myself to juggle one afternoon, just because I decided I wanted to learn how.

I also can balance a meter stick vertically on my foot for quite a long time. I was able to balance a meter stick on my hand for years and years...and early in my middle school teaching career, I realized I could also balance it on my foot, much to the delight of my students. (Middle school teachers, am I right?) :-)

Now, here's the thing: I think HyFlex teaching is sort of like yo-yoing with my right hand, while juggling two beanbags with my left hand, and balancing a meter stick on my right foot, all at the same time. It's keeping the face-to-face teaching going, while also getting the online teaching going, and then an awareness of the camera, and how this all looks to the students who are watching it after the fact. I might get the yo-yo going (in class students), and keep the beanbags flipping and flopping (Zooming students), but then I'm suddenly derailed by the meter stick dipping--maybe a tech problem with the camera--which has me dropping beanbags, or tangling my yo-yo string.

Ugh. It was an exhausting semester. 

But there were bright spots for me. My students were GREAT throughout--they were very encouraging, despite my feeling that I was failing. My colleagues were amazingly supportive in a "we're all in this together" sort of way. My fully online courses (the ones that were planned to be offered online) went really, really well, which was a buoy for sure.

I think the biggest lesson for me was that I have to be okay with letting "good enough" be "good enough" sometimes when it comes to my teaching practice. (This is HARD for me...) I will do what I can to support and encourage my students' learning, obviously, but I have to check my own expectations for teaching during a pandemic, I think. Sometimes I'm going to drop a beanbag, or get a knot in my yo-yo string, or trip over the meter stick I'm balancing. Who wouldn't flop sometimes, with all of that going on? 

Maybe it's more amazing how often it all worked than the 10% of the time that things went sideways? I guess the real take-away for me is what I always tell my students, future teachers that they are: if you ever stop learning, perhaps it's time to stop teaching?

Image by Gerd Altmann via Pixabay

Writing, Teaching, Thinking, Working

Thanks to the many of you, dear readers, who commented (via Twitter, Facebook, text, email, hallway conversation, or carrier pigeon) in response to my writing project here on the blog last month. (If you weren't reading along, no worries! I'm glad you're here now. If you want to take a look at that project, it was a series of posts offering tips for teaching at a distance. You can read the whole series here if you like: Distance Teaching Tips Series.) This is my 33rd post on the blog for 2020. 18 of those came last month, trying to get myself disciplined to write again. 

It's amazing to think about how this year has unfolded. 2020 has just been a tough year in so many ways. I thought that with the time at home on quarantine in the spring, I would have written a lot. I just didn't have it in me. It was hard work just to keep up with the teaching.

Then I thought I might do some more writing this summer. Nope--I was busy with teaching online in our Master of Ed program and doing some consulting work offering PD sessions to help K-12 teachers prepare for teaching at a distance this year.

And then came the end of summer, with the scramble to prepare for hy-flex teaching this fall. Oof. It's been demanding, friends, to say the least. Don't get me wrong...my students are amazing. My courses are going well. My colleagues are incredibly supportive. But I'm tired. all. the. time.

Teaching is hard work under the best of circumstances. I know none of my fellow educators are surprised to hear me say that. But I am often amazed at how non-educators think that our profession is some sort of walk in the park. And this year? The emotional work of teaching is all the more demanding. All the extra demands for...everything...just feels like a burden. I'm SO grateful for what I get to do, so I don't want this to sound like complaining. I'm not. But I'm acknowledging that this has been hard--really hard. And I know my students are feeling that way too; several have said as much. They are grateful to be here, they are glad to be on campus, making the efforts to do all the things that have to be different this year to make it happen. But several have named it: it's hard, and they are pining for the "normal."

I am too.

One of the joys in my work as a professor is that I am expected to think, and research, and write, in addition to my teaching. I love this stuff. But this year, the thinking, and researching, and writing feels sort of superfluous. Or at least, maybe it's less important than the teaching? I'm thinking a lot, of course. But so much of my thinking ends up circling back to thinking about my courses, about my students, about how to help them, and support them, and encourage them, and how to not get buried in the work.

Ah, the work. Working in academia is kind of weird. The work is almost all cognitive, and emotional. Teaching is such public work, but intensely personal as well. And as I'm thinking about what has just blurred out of my keyboard in the past 15 minutes here, maybe this is a great example of what I'm doing. I just had to get this feeling out of my head and heart in some way, and so the words spilled out into pixels here on the blog.

I guess I'll title this post something about writing, and teaching, and thinking, and working. This semester they all feel so interrelated--even more than normal.

I don't know if I'll even push this one on social media now that it's written. This one might actually just be for me.

How to Manage Teaching Online

In this season of isolation and shelter-in-place, many teachers have suddenly found themselves teaching at a distance. There are all kinds of technological and pedagogical challenges for this, obviously. But working from home provides another whole challenge of its own.

I had an email from one of my grad students that named this challenge pretty squarely. He reached out, knowing that I teach online a lot, and wondered how I manage teaching online. I was glad he asked! He asked several questions, which I've included below, along with some of my thinking to respond to each of them. 

I should note that while some of these are aligned to research-based best practices, a lot of this is anecdotal examples of things that I have found that work for me. Consider this a case study in managing the work of teaching online, as developed through practice, experimentation, (some) research, and a bit of the school of hard knocks too.

Image by Thomas Lefebvre via Unsplash

Teaching at a Distance: Keeping it Human

I'm thinking a lot about my students right now. I miss them. I've done distance office hours both yesterday and today, and it was so, so good to be able to hear them, see them, and communicate live for a little while, even if at a distance.

I'm grateful for technologies that allows so many different avenues of communication. One of my research interests is social presence. There are multiple different definitions for what "social presence" is all about, but one that I really like is, "the degree to which a person is perceived as a 'real person' in mediated communication" (Gunawardena, 1995).

How can I do this? How can I share a sense of myself as a "real person" in my communication with students? How can they share a sense of themselves as "real" with me and their classmates? There are lots of different ways. Videoconferences are a great way to connect. But lower tech tools--even good ol' email--can also be great ways to connect. How can students perceive me as a real person? The affordances of a particular technology matter, I think. But even more important? My tone, and the way I use the tool to communicate. Basically, I'm working with the belief in mind that my students are real people, whole people, and the way I communicate with them matters.

Teaching at a Distance: Human Connections

Today is day one of our emergency distance learning adventure.* As I'm writing this, it's about 2:30 in the afternoon. So far, so good.

I've had about half a dozen emails from students so far today, mostly just checking in to make sure they understand what is expected of them for the work this week. One shared a concern for a grandparent who is ill--not COVID-19, but a broken hip and related complications. I've had a couple of colleagues check in to see how I'm doing, which was really nice and thoughtful of them. (Last week was a crazy busy week for me, helping many folks figure out new skills and strategies for engaging with their students from a distance. Don't get me wrong; it was a good week...but I crashed on Friday night and rested well over the weekend.)

As much as I'm working on helping my students keep learning--and my colleagues too--I recognize that am learning things throughout this process as well. Here are three things I've learned already:

The Emergency Pivot to Online Teaching and Learning

So.

Here we are.

This is a fascinating time.

It seems to me, based on what I'm reading online, that most colleges and universities in the US, and many (most?) K-12 schools have either already made the decision to suspend face-to-face meetings, or will very soon.

You might think, given my field (Educational Technology) and my particular interests in that field (Online Teaching and Learning, Social Presence Theory, Technology Integration, and Social Media for Learning) that I would be cheering for this whole scenario.

Honest answer: I'm a little worried about how this is going to go.

I say this because I know how much work it takes to teach online. It's not less work in any way than teaching face-to-face. And especially at the beginning, when you're first learning how to teach online, it might very well be more work--perhaps substantially more work.

And I also recognize that I'm biased in all of this, because I actually really like teaching online, and for folks who aren't already on-board, it's going to be even more challenging.

So.

How are we going to do this, folks?

Well, this post is just a place where I figured I'd share a few initial thoughts and resources. This is just my take on things, and a few ideas I've gleaned from other places and Twitterfriends. But if you're suddenly thrust into teaching online, and find any of this helpful, please feel free to run with it, okay?

When Should We Go Digital?

I'm teaching a course this semester ambitiously entitled "Teaching and Learning with Technology." It'a actually the...eighth time I've taught it, and I have it almost dialed in where I want it at this point. (But it's always a process of refinement, you know? Always becoming, and never arriving...)

A perennial question that comes up at some point each time I teach the course is along the lines of, "When should we use technology, and when should we avoid it?"

I love it when students start asking that question. All too often, I think we assume that technology is somehow going automatically improve teaching and learning. But I think that "when should we use technology" might be the wrong question, honestly. Probably this has to do with the fact that I tend to take a very broad view of technology; sure, computers and tablets and projectors are technologies. But so are books, and pencils, and crayons, and paper, and white boards, and scented markers, and play-doh, and protractors, and juggling balls, and...well, you get the idea? We use an awful lot of different kinds of tools to support and encourage students to learn. Some are digital. Some are not.

So the way I'd like to reframe this question is, "When should we go digital?" Here too, there are probably a variety of answers, and it's not always clear.

But tonight I was in on a Twitter chat with one of my all-time favorite groups of Ttweeting teachers, #iaedchat (Iowa Educators Chat--but there's a lot of folks from beyond Iowa who join in.) Tonight's chat centered around this idea of leadership and learning in digitally-enhanced learning environments. As part of the chat, one of my long-time Twitterfriends, Devin Schoening, shared this wisdom:

I've always had 3 Qs I use when working w/teachers re dig tools. 1. Does it make something more efficient? 2. Does it enhance something you are already doing? 3. Does it making something possible that otherwise wouldn't be? Have to be able to answer at least one "yes". #iaedchat

— Devin Schoening (@dschoening) February 24, 2020

I love this! Great advice, Devin. I'm going to pass this along to my students, and hopefully we'll continue to spread this wisdom into lots more schools as well.

Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash

Geographic Literacy

I don't usually post a lot of political stuff on the blog. But today I'm going to get a little political, in the interest of promoting geographic literacy.

Today our President tweeted the following map:

Screenshot from Twitter.com

Boy oh boy, there is a lot of conversation on Twitter about this. And it's spilled over to other platforms as well--I saw at least two of my Facebook friends share a post that included an image of this tweet, and one of my favorite Instagram accounts, TerribleMaps shared it with a caption that I found pretty funny.

There has been a lot of commentary on Twitter about just what this map illustrates, both by supporters and detractors of the President. I find it interesting because this map is potentially misleading, particularly with the "Try to impeach this" text overlaid. This map is assumed to be an election results map from the 2016 Presidential election. (Though even that seems to be in dispute, if you do the slightest digging on Twitter.) The idea here being that the red on the map represents counties that voted for Trump, and the blue the counties that voted for Clinton.

The implication is that far more of the country voted for Trump than for Clinton. The further implication being that impeachment flies in the face of the voters' wishes. And, if one doesn't pause to think about what is actually being communicated in this map, that might be the quick take away. Cynically, I wonder if that is what Trump expects from his supporters: to not pause and think about what is actually being communicated in this map.

The problem with this map as a proxy for voters' wishes is, as someone said on Twitter (and I wish I could find the tweet now, but it's lost to me, unfortunately)...

dirt can't vote.

The point being, in an election results map, the number of counties in a particular color does not matter...the population of those counties matters. An awful lot of those counties in red have relatively small populations. And an awful lot of those counties in blue have relatively humongous populations. (Seriously...basically every large city in the U.S. is in one of the blue areas on the map.) "Dirt can't vote" means just because there is a large geographic area that happens to be "for" a particular candidate doesn't mean that there is a larger number of people there (or even an equivalent number of people there) who would support a particular candidate.

So what I'm really thinking about is how people don't often slow down enough and think about maps. As a geography teacher, of course I'm concerned about this. I would love it if people were more geographically literate in general.

Beginning Again

Man, you guys...I just love to teach!

I mean, it's terrifying, you know? Stepping into the classroom at the beginning of the year, ready to meet new students, and sort of hoping that everything doesn't come crashing apart in the first 10 minutes, but then you meet the students and find out how great they really are, and find your groove, and launch in to the new school year...

I love this work so much.

It's the first day of the new semester, the new academic year. This is my 22nd year as a professional educator, and my 8th year teaching in higher edu. That's crazy to me! It went so fast.

Right before Intro to Ed this morning, I tweeted...

First day of my 22nd year of teaching. Let’s see if I remember how to do this...bring on the learning! 😃 pic.twitter.com/QmsJDfclbz

— Dave Mulder (@d_mulder) August 27, 2019

I remembered how to do this. It was a good first day of class.

I love beginnings. I love the rhythm of the school year. I love that we get to start fresh every year. I love the newness of it all: new students, new schedules, new takes on the things I've done before.

Here's to beginning again!

Image via Pixabay [used with permission]

Making Connections: Thinking and Learning

This morning, when I was about to get into the shower, I was taking off my watch and I noticed that I'm starting to get get my typical biking-glove-tan-lines. That gave me a bit of joy, actually, because it means the weather has warmed up enough for me to be biking regularly again, and it's sunny enough that my arms are starting to brown (slightly) compared to my hands, which stay covered up by my palm-padded biking gloves.

Noticing this, reminded me of an Encyclopedia Brown story I read (probably around age 10? I was obsessed!) that revolved around the culprit being left-handed, and one of the clues was that a suspect had different colored hands--because he was a golfer, and only wore a glove on one hand.

The concept of only wearing one glove made me think of Michael Jackson, who used to famously wear only one glove, and I briefly wondered if his hands were different colors in the 1980s too.

And that idea of only wearing one glove in the 80s reminded me of a memory from when I was in the third grade, and a friend had gone to a Dodgers game on "batting glove night," and she gave me the glove she got--not because either of us were big baseball fans, but because we were friends, and she thought I would like it. She was right, I did. Because it was the 80s, and people could wear just one glove and be cool. (If we were pretending to be Michael Jackson, I guess.)

And that reminded me of an episode of 99% Invisible I just listened to on a bike ride this week that was all about the history of how the Dodgers moved from Brooklyn to Los Angeles, and how the city displaced a Mexican-American community from the area that would become Dodger Stadium. Listening to this podcast has helped me to make all sorts of interesting and strange connections between so many aspects of contemporary life and good design (that's where the title comes from: if it's good design, it is "99% invisible"--you only notice it if the design is bad.)

I suddenly realized this weird cognitive loop, and it made me smile

And all of this happened in about 30 seconds, as I got into the shower, closed the curtain, and turned the water on.

Reading for Pleasure and Reading with Purpose

True confession: after finishing my doctorate in 2017, I had a hard time reading anything. (Not unrelated: I also had a hard time writing anything. But that's not really the point of this post...)

Honestly, I have had a hard time getting into reading anything for about 18 months. I'm closing in on two years since my dissertation defense now, and I'm finally getting back into reading.

Oh, it's not that I never read anything, of course. I get four different professional journals, and I always skim through each of them when they arrive, and read an article or two that really catches my attention. I get WIRED magazine, and I eventually always read through each issue--though I still have the December, January, and February issues on my nightstand...and I'm not yet finished with the December issue. I read a few novels in my hammock in the summer. And I still read quite a bit online, usually profession-related things from EdWeek, or things I find on Twitter. And I do read and re-read articles and chapters for writing projects I have ongoing.

But truth be told, until very recently, I haven't found as much joy in reading. I haven't been really reading for pleasure very often since I started my doctoral work in 2013.  Of course, while I was in grad school, so much of my reading time was taken up with reading for class or for my own research. But in the almost two years since defending my dissertation, I haven't gravitated back to reading for pleasure.

Today I'm thinking about why this might be the case.

I Just Love Being a Teacher!

You know what? I love being a teacher. Seriously, I love it!

My bio on our institution's website even starts off this way: "I love to teach! ..." I figure I might as well let people know right from the get-go. I believe I'm called to this work, and that I've been equipped for it, and as a vocation teaching gives me deep joy.

Don't get me wrong...there are definitely joys and concerns. There are very real challenges in this profession. And the demands and expectations always seem to be growing, year-by-year. But overall, the joys outweigh the concerns, for me at least.

Sometimes I need a reminder about this though. I have my moments when the work starts to pile up, and the meetings start adding up, and the stack of things to read starts towering...and the distraction of this gets to me.

And then, somehow, I always seem to get a moment of encouragement, a word from a student, an affirmation from a colleague, something that reminds me, "I get to do this!"

I had one of those moments recently. I was up to my eyebrows in the thick of planning and grading and keeping up with email, and--honestly--losing some of the joy that I typically feel in my work.

I took a Twitter break.

Your Favorite Class? Your Best Class? Both?

Saw this gem on Twitter this morning...

A3. I start every year with a simple statement:

“They say your favorite class is the one that you like the most, and your best class is the one where you learn the most. If we both do our jobs, this class will be both.”

We don’t teach content. We teach people. #satchat pic.twitter.com/5hQ3kDEU53

— John Meehan (@MeehanEDU) August 25, 2018

I love, love, love the idea of your favorite class (the one you like) and your best class (where you learn the most) being one and the same. I know that in my own experience in school this was not always the case, and I'm sure it hasn't always been the case for the students I've taught over the past 20 years.

But, what if...?

Facebook Update

About 5 months ago, I wrote this rambling post about my complicated relationship with Facebook, which included a mention that I was removing the Facebook app from my phone.

A weird thing happened right after that. As I often do, I shared the link to that post on Facebook...

What's Your Brand?

Let's do a little free-association.

What pops to mind when you hear the word "brand?"

Are you picturing a cowboy, marking a cow as belonging to a certain ranch?

Or maybe you have in mind the logo for a specific company?

Or perhaps you're thinking of a celebrity who endorses a particular product?

Or...maybe you are picturing a person, and the way s/he portrays her/himself on social media?

I've been thinking about that last definition for "brand" lately. I recently have seen quite a few people on Twitter responding to this tweet, sharing their own stories of foolishness...

What's the most On Brand™️ story you have from your early childhood.

Mine is when my mom told me not to touch the electric stove when it was red, because that meant it was hot, so I made direct eye contact with her and slapped my hand down on the stove top.

— mu✨ (@prinxeMu) July 8, 2018

Calling Final Exams into Question

Oh. Snap.

A tweet from one of the people I've been following on Twitter since almost the beginning, Dan Meyer:

For real, tho: what are we gaining from final exams?

❌New insights into student learning.
✅Crazy amounts of student stress.

— Dan Meyer (@ddmeyer) May 22, 2018

Calling the grand tradition of final exams into question seems...almost heretical.

But does he have a point?

I guess I'm now thinking about what the real point of final exams might actually be. Are they intended to provide new insights into student learning? Or are they a way to help students summarize and synthesize everything they had the opportunity to learn over the term? Or...maybe...they are a mechanism for compliance, a way to keep the kids (fearfully, stressfully) "engaged" (not sure that this is the right word for it...) until the end?

Is there value in in continuing the practice of final examinations?

Or is this an outdated vestige of educational practice from days of yore?

What do you think?

Image by Shannan Muskopf [CC BY-NC 2.0]

So I Was On a Podcast...

My friend and colleague in education, Erik Ellefsen, recently started a podcast, and he asked if I would be a guest. It took a little time for us to get our schedules in sync so we could actually have a chat, but we finally did, and the episode was just released this week.

Erik and I first met up on Twitter several years ago, mostly as a result of my original #nomorecrappyhomework blog post, which I posted back in 2015, and has had over 3500 views as of this writing. We've kept in touch regularly via Twitter since then, and when he gets to NW Iowa we've been been able to hang out. I always appreciate his thoughtfulness about the role of innovation in education, and the way he challenges other educators to be the best that they can possibly be. If you're on Twitter, give Erik a follow. You won't be sorry!

In this episode, he shares a bit of the story of how we met up, and then we visited about the impetus for my research into homework--including my own dissatisfaction with the crappy homework I used to assign as a middle school teacher. If you're interested, you can listen in here...

Teachers Defending Schools?

It's been a bit since my last post, but I have continued thinking a lot about school shootings, and gun control, and all of the craziness in the media from the left and the right on the topic.

In particular, I've been thinking about everything that teachers are expected to do. It's pretty amazing, really. When I was trained as a teacher...I was trained, well, to teach. I was trained to write lesson plans. I was trained to understand different pedagogical approaches, and how to choose appropriate methods for the content I was to teach. I was trained to assess my students' learning. In my student teaching experience, I had the opportunity to practice these skills, and to learn firsthand about connecting with students, about managing a classroom, and about all sorts of pragmatic requirements of being a teacher...like navigating the line at the copier in the morning, and how to ensure that the custodian remains your friend.

But the profession has definitely changed in the 20 years since I began teaching. And teachers today are expected to perform many, many more tasks than "just teaching." One of these tasks? Apparently, teachers are now also expected to be prepared to lay down their lives defending their schools. No, seriously.