Because my school does not have a virtual school platform like Moodle or Blackboard, we have opted to simply asked the teachers to post pages, links, .pdfs and .doc to our school’s CSM run website. While this presentation of worksheets and online activities is limited in scope, it is still better than nothing.

The American School, where my wife works, is fairing a bit better and has even received some press for their use of Blackboard. For years they have been encouraging teachers to use Blackboard for such an emergency, and while teachers have begrudgingly posted a few assignments here and there the tool has largely been unused till now. Now that the emergency is upon them, however, teachers are scrambling to quickly learn how to become “virtual” teachers, and in doing so are finding the limitations, not only of Blackboard as a tool, but they are also realizing that teaching using online tools is more than simply posting assignments on a web storage space.

Teaching online, or being a virtual teacher, is more than a skill set; it is a mindset and a philosophy. Teachers who are well versed in a variety of tools, not just Blackboard will fair much better in times of crisis and will be better prepared for finding ways to reach their students than say teachers who rarely use technology at all. Teachers who themselves are connect and use many tools for their own learning will barely miss a step. While I understand the unease these teachers are experiencing, I think their apprehension speaks more to the limitations offered not only by blackboard, but of school philosophies when it comes to technology use and pedagogy.

This crisis has clearly illustrated that creating a valuable web-friendly ethos/community of teachers well versed with technology, is the first step in creating a sustainable system to deal with not only emergencies, but in helping to maintain strong ties between teachers and students beyond the classroom. Communicating with students outside the classroom whether through Blackboard or other free online tools must be an ongoing activity for the entire school. If students are used to checking a blog for assignments or working on a Google Doc with a peer, then not being in school will not impact their schooling as much as say a student who has no way to contact their teacher beyond email.

I am not writing this post to make teachers feel bad about their or to discredit any schools. We are all doing the best we can. I just want to point out that using technology is not something that schools can force their teachers to do only in times of emergency. Teachers who are not familiar with a variety of tools that will help them connect with their students will stumble and become anxious when forced to change the way they teach. Schools must imagine different possibilities:

We need to imagine a school where everyone blogs- teachers, students, parents, and administration. Imagine a school that has its own youtube channel and podcast space. Imagine a school that uses chatzy as a back channel even when school is in session. Imagine a school where students are constantly working together using Google Docs and wikis. Imagine a school where almost every knows how to use several tools to connect, communicate, and collaborate. Imagine a school where the school day never ends, and the work can be done anywhere any time. Imagine a school where the teacher uses class time to coach and guide and not lecture or “teach.”

This is the type of school I am trying to build. You can use Blackboard, but the beauty of the Web is that it is all free and available to us all. We simply must be able to take some risks and trust our students to learn from their mistakes.

Here are some examples of what is possible:

I had planned to use this week to get my students started on our online 2.0 journey. I already have two classrooms, one in Canada and one in Thailand, waiting to meet us. We have sketched out some rough ideas of how our three classes will interact, but I needed to start showing my students the tools and skills they will need to make the kinds of connections I want them to make throughout the year. I was going to walk them through each step in class, but due to Swine Flu we were forced to “just do it.”

I was actually a bit excited when I heard we would not be in school. Rather than fumble around with how I would deliver my traditional material, I began instead to think about how I would help my students quickly learn about and use a variety of tools that would help them connect and stay tuned with our class community. I was not interested in posting worksheets for them to complete. I wanted to recreate our classroom online, so we could have conversations. It is this sense of community that I feel is missing from Blackboard.

The first thing I did was launch our class blog. I had planned to start blogging soon anyway, so it was perfect timing. I used the blog as the central place to communicate with the kids. Unlike Blackboard where individual classes are closed and hard to access, a simple blog allows me to share information, media, and much more in an environment that inspires commenting, conversations, and community. The hope was to quickly create an area where we could meet and move onto completing a variety of tasks.

Once the blog was published, I had to find a way to direct the kids to it. Out of 50 students I had the emails of about 29; I started there. I posted a link on our school website under the page for English work, and on the first day I had 81 visits to the blog. Because my students are not yet familiar with RSS, I had to find a way to let them know when there was going to be new posts.

I decided to create a Facebook Fan Page, (I have asked that adults not become a fan of the page yet. I want my students to feel safe and really understand what we are doing, before I introduce our network to the bigger global network.) In three days already has 23 fans. I embedded a Facebook feed in the sidebar to allow students who do not have Facebook a chance to stay tuned with announcements. I can now also send the group updates straight from Facebook. I now have an easy way to share class announcements with the kids in the place where they spend their time online. Instead of hoping that they would check Blackboard, I know that they can simply get an status update telling them to take a survey on the blog as they chat with their friends.

For the first task, I asked students to create Gmail accounts. Later in the year I want to use Google Docs and Google Reader, so I felt that this was a crucial first step. With little help from me, I now have 23 students created Gmail accounts. A few students had problems so I set up a chatzy chat room to answer questions. I experimented with various video conferencing sites and dodged a major bullet and didn’t use Tiny Chat due to some inappropriate material on their site, but found TokBox to be very useful and I hope to use it in the future.

I’ve used Youtube as a way to create videos for my students who are not native English speakers and may not be able to read all of the text on the site. As the students perform each task, I give them a little more to do. They have in three days: created Gmail accounts, commented on a blog, signed up to be a Facebook Fan, responded to some quotes and images, and finally answered a survey I posted from a Google Form.

Not only have I not fallen behind this week, I have actually helped my kids learn real life skills by doing and not just talking about it. By quickly building our online community, I think the kids will better understand the power of these tools and how they can use them to help their learning.

I hope you will stay tuned to what we are doing throughout the year. I have big plans for the year and this is a great group of kids. We will create individual blogs next week, as well as set up RSS on Google Reader, begin to think about tagging bookmarks with Delicious, and we will set up a class wiki and Flickr page. Why have I chosen these tools? I see them as the most vital for my own learning. I use them often, feel comfortable using them, and I really understand their value in creating a network.

Empowering teachers to use these tools is a huge first step in creating a school that can function on or offline without missing a step. Swine Flu or no Swine Flu, I know my class will be connected and ready to learn, share, and teach others. The question now is how do we get other teachers on board and feeling comfortable using these tools?

If you are interested and want ideas on how to be a more effective virtual teacher join us on our journey. We are learning as we go, but would love the company. What do you think? How has Swine Flu affected your teaching? What has worked for you? What has been hard? Do you find Blackboard useful? Do you use any other tools to connect with your students? Let the conversation begin!

While updating my resume, highlighting my innovative skills, or writing cover letters stressing my ability to be adaptive, collaborative, and visionary, I noticed how little I was talking about my love of the subject I teach- Language Arts.

It seems there is very little room in modern job recruitment for simply talking about why one chose to teach the subject of their expertise. Perhaps, I have gone about selling my career all wrong. Perhaps, administrators are not looking to see that their teachers are able to work in dynamic collaborative environments for the purpose of improving student learning. Maybe they just want to read why a certain teacher loves literature or science, or whatever the case may be. Perhaps, the only thing they would like to hear us discuss is how we can transfer our love of Steinbeck or Fitzgerald to students who are, more and more rapidly, becoming disengaged from the written word.

It is conceivable that after all the talk about our philosophies, skills, and technological know how, we as teachers should sit back and reflect upon what it is that we love about the subjects we teach everyday.

There is something indescribable about the feeling of sitting in a comfortable place, highlighter in hand, reading a great book. That feeling of kinship, understanding and bonding that is formed between author and reader is the epitome of social networking. We spend so much time and energy discovering new tools to help connect our students to information and to each other, that we sometimes forget that truly understanding a great piece of literature, having the ability to deconstruct, analyze, and synthesis text, and finally being able to produce a carefully crafted critique of a work can be just as effective of a skill to have as say blogging.

The poster children for how not to teach a class in the new age of technological pedagogy is the old chalk and talk, lecture from the podium, teacher as expert, been teaching Macbeth the same way for twenty years, thinks he or she is a professor, English teacher.

While I have spent much of my career, arguing that this style of top-down, teacher centered teaching is ineffective, lately I have been thinking that maybe simply teaching students how to read effectively is the most important thing we can do as Language Arts teachers. If our job is to teach literature then perhaps we need nothing more that the text. Everything else sometimes seems to be nothing more than a dog-and-pony show designed to keep students entertained, but not actually focused on the work.

I entered teaching because I wanted to help young people understand the world around them, in hopes that they would feel obliged to contribute to its fate. I chose to teach English because I see art in general, and literature in particular, as the greatest tool humankind has produced to help us connect and communicate with each other.

Photo by nozomiiqel

Students may need to use blogs and other web based tools to share what they find, and connect with other students, but ultimately all they need is a good book and an inspirational teacher to guide them through it. Collaboration is great, but reading is often a very solitary act. Connection with a great piece of fiction needs only three things: author, reader, text. Everything else is secondary.

Reading over my resume and various cover letters, I am afraid that perhaps my devotion to technology is perhaps overshadowing my love of Language Arts. I am first and foremost a lover of books. My goal is to arouse this level of worship onto my students. I want students, parents, and administrators to know that I am not an IT teacher. I am a Language Arts teacher who realizes that the new web is a fantastic place for learning. I have chosen to use as many tools as I can to accomplish this task, but I am in no way convinced that technology is the only way.

I am not sure anyone feels this way. It feels like teachers are being forced into these dialectical relationships, where either you are an integrated teacher, or you are a dinosaur. I refuse to buy into this. As I try to show prospective employers why I am the best fit for the English teacher position, perhaps I need to find space in my CV to highlight these factors as well.

What do you think? Is your teaching sometimes overshadowed by the tools you use? Do you find yourself more excited by a new web application then say a Nabokov novel?

Don’t get me wrong; I immensely respect these men along with all of the presenters at Learning 2.008. An hour before I was listening to Ewan McIntosh talk about how tech tools are not transformative. Pedagogy is transformative. I have skimmed Ewan’s blog for months, but not until I saw him speak did I truly understand where he is coming from. Later, I would listen to Alan Levine discuss the Horizon project, and later still take notes on a back channel as Julie Lindsay extolled the virtue of mobile devices.

If Learning 2.008 taught me anything it is that digital networks are nothing more than real human beings trying to figure it all out. I am not sure I can define what “it” is exactly, but that is part of what we are trying to do. We can read each others blogs, talk on Skype, or follow Tweets, but these tools will only paint an abstract picture of who we really are. No matter how easy the new web makes it for people to communicate and build networks, we still need that authentic human interaction. We still need to watch body language, pay attention to tone of voice, and make people laugh to really connect with other human beings. Thank goodness for that.

It was refreshing to see that we are more than blog posts, avatars, and @names. The participants of this conference, by their presence alone proved that we are a group of diverse educators determined to find better ways to learn. No one truly knows the secret answer, because there is no secret answer. We, and I say we with pride because I learned that I too have ideas to offer, are simply trying to find ways to educate children as best we can. Technology is not the answer. It really doesn’t have much to do with technology at all. It has to do with community and the sharing of knowledge and ideas! Technology is simply a way for sharing ideas.  The questions that kept resurfacing at every session I attended was- how can we convince teachers to use technology? I think we need to help teachers learn how they can become members of vibrant communities, so that they can teach their students to expand their social networks as well. This can be completely outside the scope of technology. Jennifer Jones says it best,

“Before we connect globally, we need to connect locally, whether we use technology, or just step outside.  I feel this is critical to change in our systems.”

Technology is just a tool that at this time in our evolution is the most appropriate for creating wide, far-reaching, cooperative communities that foster, promote, and encourage learning. This conference taught me that communities take time to build and that they must be unique for each member. Session after session, time spent out at dinner with twitter friends, and time spent chatting over food with fellow tech enthusiasts, taught me that my network is like a garden, in that it constantly needs to be tended.

When I first started blogging I wanted nothing more than a robust interactive audience. I wanted the largest number of people to read by posts. Like my students, I wanted to watch the little red globs infect my cluster map like a cancer. I constantly examined by statistics to see how many people had read what I wrote. I wished that the “big” names would read my work, realize my genius, and catapult me into the upper echelon of the educational blogosphere. In short, I felt that the quantity of readers would directly reflect the quality of my network. To return to the garden analogy, I wanted to transplant myself into a pre-made heirloom garden of specialized thriving plants. I was reading the names I had been told to read. I was following the people I was told to follow on Twitter. I had been sold a perfect network, and I thought that all I had to do was sit back and let the learning community sweep me away.

The conference taught me that, I can read well-known bloggers, I can even sit with them in a room and discuss the echo-chamber, but to truly feel the power of the network I have to plant my own garden and tend it religiously. It is not enough to simply use twitter to get to know someone, you need to meet them, and laugh over Chinese food, take a walk in Golden Gate park, share a cab. This conference proved that I don’t need to be connected to the network, or a network, but that it is more important that I build my own functioning network of like-minded teachers and students.

“Audiences drive by while communities drop in.”

As Clarence’s quote elucidates, I learned that it is not enough to simply copy and paste the nodes of a generic network and expect it to be fruitful. We must build communities. This takes time. This takes honesty and passion. This takes effort and patience. This takes dedication and hard work.

“You write where people care! Small passionate communities matter.”

I am sure hundreds of blog posts have already been written about what Learning 2.008 meant to the various participants. What do I have to say that is any different? What do I have to say that is relevant or meaningful in anyway? These are questions I often find myself asking myself as I blog. The longer I swim around educational blogs, the more I realize that I am not as intelligent as I like to think. People articulate their thoughts more effectively than me; people write better than me, people comment more insightfully than me. In short, I often feel that the network would be fine without my little musings in this tiny corner of the Internet, which I have etched out for myself.

So why do I bother? I may not have the credentials or the talent, but after talking with teachers from around the world at this conference, I realized that I do have some things to say that others want to hear. This is the beauty of the network. Day in and day out I am threading my own narrative and trying to somehow tie it to others. I am carefully and deliberately tending my garden.  Leaving Tweets about music and politics, never afraid to stand behind my ideas, using a raw and honest voice with an infectious enthusiasm, posting videos to youtube and photos to Flickr, I will keep sowing my seeds in my corner of the Web. Sometimes in a whisper, sometimes through a roar, I will wait patiently hoping that my tribe will find their way to my doorstep and together we will move forward.

Since our first online, meeting Lindsea and I have kept tabs on each other’s comings and goings through Twitter, our blogs, and Skype. We have had Skype chats about music; we exchanged Tweets about film quotes and song lyrics and coming events. In short Lindsea and I have become good friends. I feel I have more in common with her than most of the teachers I deal with on and off the Internet. I am not sure what that says about my maturity level or Lindsea’s for that matter, but I am certain that the future of education relies on crossing our generational boundaries and speaking about our future with young people as often as we can. We need to speak to them, not about them!

One day in May, I think it was, we both realized that we would both be in San Francisco in July. I am not sure about Lindsea, but for me, there was no question that we should meet. I have never officially taught Lindsea in a classroom, but after all the contact we have had online I feel as if I know her as well if not better than any “real-body” students in my charge.

After a few Tweets and phone calls, we arranged to meet at a coffee shop on Chestnut Street on July 11th. A nagging paranoia and fear of what could happen when a grown man meets a teenage girl he has “met” on the internet face-to-face. I could see the headlines now, “Straight A student and star of the Web 2.0 world accuses radical teacher of…”you fill in the blanks. Teenage girls have done stranger things.

How did I know this girl wouldn’t just mess with me and ruin my already precarious career with some bogus allegations? The Internet fear-mongerers work full-time to keep us weary.

I was driving over the golden Gate Gate Bridge on a perfect Northern California day blasting Sun Kil Moon when it hit me- I believe in human beings! I trust them, and because I trust them, I believe in the relationships I build with them, whether in person or online. If I truly have faith in 21st century learning and the new web, then I must trust that these tools, when used responsibly, will help maintain valuable and trustworthy networks. Any mistrust of this philosophy will only diminish the integrity of everything we are doing here. A network becomes a community when you have faith in its members and trust that they have communal goals in mind. You cannot achieve this level of confidence without a creation level of faith.

I will not get into the play-by-play of what we did and how it all felt. I will leave that for a future post or maybe Lindsea can pick-up on that. Instead I will paint a very abstract sketch of how it all went down: the two of us met, drove around the city, watched a drum circle near Hippy Hill in Golden Gate park, went shoe shopping, went to an herb store in The Mission, took in the view at Twin Peaks. We blasted music by local Hawaiian bands and Modest Mouse in the car driving through The Castro. We talked about- Adolescence, sustainability, education, music, Hunter S. Thompson, responsibility, hypocrisy, politics, capitalism, apathy and revolutions. I thought about how- I wish my daughter would grow up to be as wise as the young woman by my side, who hours before was reading Kurt Vonnegut. I wondered whether or not I could ever meet her mother and thank her for raising such an amazing young woman. I relished the thought that I have a group of young people who I am cultivating worldwide to aid in the revolution and how that is all I have ever wanted from teaching. I wondered why I didn’t have teachers like me when I was Lindsea’s age. I probably would have avoided a lot of confusion, but then again maybe it is in that confusion that I learned the most important lessons.

It was a good day.

After our meeting, we promised to write blog posts detailing every facet of our meeting, but as it so often happens, we both let life steer us towards other priorities, other projects. That is until last week, when we re-connected and had a chat on Skype. We recorded the hour-long talk and below you will find my first Podcast. Lindsea is also on a Monday deadline to post her Podcast. I am very curious to see what she found important to highlight and how she will view our talk.

This is my first Podcast, but I am sure it will not be my last. I thoroughly enjoyed the entire process. I hope that after listening to it, when people ask you to explain what you mean when you say 21st century learning, or web 2.0, you can guide them to this post. Tell them that Web 2.0 is about trust and community and collaboration and understanding the spaces between people and finding ways to close those spaces. The jargon may change, Web 2.0 just the latest buzzword, it is nothing more than a tool that help us learn to become more human and organic.

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Good to see you again Ken. I find your posts and subsequent conversations very thought provoking. They linger in my head for days as I try and work out my arguments. Perhaps it is because I think we differ on so many fundamental levels, that I find our correspondences so valuable. But this time around, I do not want to come with an attack or break down your argument point-by-point. I have read all the other comments, but still do not feel the need nor have the energy to address each one individually.

I just want to express my thoughts on the concept of teaching as a subversive act. But before I begin, I think it is important to define the word subversive:

a radical supporter of political or social revolution
intended to overthrow or undermine an established government

Yes and yes. I am guilty on both counts. As an artist, a father, and a member of the human race I am a radical supporter of political or social revolution, because the world I see in front of me is not the place I want my daughter to live. I am well read enough in history to see patterns leading to the state the world is in, and I feel it is important to alter those patterns. I advocate the overthrowing not only of most current governments, but the very fundamental principles on which they are based. I advocate a new world vision, not of radical violent Marxist revolution, but a more synergistic, organic vision. I feel the revolution of which I speak is still be concocted by the very youth we are discussing. I feel it is my job to show my students that another world is possible, that they have the power to shape it.

So where does the subversion come into play? I agree with you that preaching, sermonizing and converting students to any ideology has no place in a classroom. Students should be allowed to weigh ideas for themselves and make informed decisions. The problem, however, is that we are not playing on a level playing field. Much of what young people ingest these days, from their text books, media saturation, advertising, and even moral values and life priorities are dictated by an uber-aggressive money making machine known as the new privatizing global economy.

The winners make the rules, and so they begin to market our children from the day they are born and create a race of apathetic consumers. Is it subversive to teach children to love and share and create outside the box created by a global economic system that teaches them to compete and one that measures success and happiness only through wealth?

As teachers we are told to ignore this elephant in all of our classrooms. I am not advocating teaching students that the current system is all bad, or that I have all the answers. I am simply saying that the system is not perfect, far from it, as it is sold to us. We must consider alternatives. The system itself does not like being criticized. See the tear gas and riot gear in all the anti-globalization demonstrations since Seattle 1999, but don’t students have a right to see alternatives to the history the system prescribes? Where is our history? Why are subversives forced to teaching under the dark of night? Why can’t we parade our heroes in our classrooms along with the Lincolns and Washingtons? Abbie Hoffman, Ken Kesey, Allen Gingsberg, and Hunter S. Thompson have every right to be heard in an objective classroom. Why aren’t Chomsky or Zinn on any major curriculums?

I entered teaching because as a teenager I realized that I couldn’t change the world alone. I needed help. As an adult, I am learning that this help is not coming from adults. So I look to the students in my classroom to look at the world objectively and make choices to help make it better. I am not subversive. I simply show them what I have learned. I share with them my life experience working in the third-world and inner city schools. I am a connector of worlds. I am a painter of pictures. I understand that the term make the world better is ambiguous and can be construed as neo-hippy blather, so let me put it in more simple terms. I believe in people who work to ease suffering. On all levels. In all places. At all times. That is why I teach. It is beyond politics, ideology, or subversion. It is my nature and I cannot teach any other way.

I sit armed with a play list swarming with Fugazi, a chip on my shoulder, and a need to vent. Like many of you, I saw the term EduPunk for the first time on Twitter yesterday and took the bait. I followed a few links, googled some names, and by the end of the night I had added about ten new people to my network that seem to be more on my level than anyone in my pre-Edupunk network.

I am not here to out punk anyone or defend terms I had no hand in creating. I am also not here to cheerlead a group of people who could articulate their ideas much better than myself. This post is already one of many, probably too many, posts trying to attach meaning to a label. The creators of the term are probably sitting back and laughing at the direction their idea has taken. Some students are already angry that adults without their input are once again hijacking their movement.

But what I hope students like Lindsea will understand is that teaching is a political act. Whether you like it or not, every time you speak with, engage, instruct, interact with young people in an effort to promote their learning you are either consciously or subconsciously steering them toward the status quo or away from it. As our society becomes more and more global, at least for those of us lucky enough to be living on the comfortable side of the digital divide known as the first world, citizens are either becoming aware of their role as consumers in a resources depleting, imperialistic, war-mongering, poor exploiting, global economy or they are waking up to the idea that there are alternatives.

As educators we have a duty to either promote this brave new world, ignore it and stick to our curriculum, or to awaken young people to alternatives to the way things “just” are. With the birth of colonial expansion in Europe, then the industrial revolution, and ending with the rise of global capitalism “defeating” communism, we are constantly being told that since capitalism won the cold war, it is the best and only option. Never mind the constant state of war necessary to maintain it, or the depletion of unrenewable resources, or the unsustainably built into a system that exploits a large percentage of the global population for the benefit and profits of a tiny sub-group of ultra rich. We are constantly told that this state of globalization is the only game in town.

Teaching is a political act. So if we truly want change we must use any means necessary to break free of the chains being imposed on education. Enter EduPunk? Sure why not. Enter anything you can think of that will help us. The terms and labels are secondary to our primary concern, which is rethinking our educational institutions to reflect our revolutionary spirit, for both students and teachers.

Wikipedia tells us that punks sometimes participate in direct action such as protests and boycotts. These acts are committed in an effort to create social change when it is felt that the normal channels for change have been proven ineffective.

Let me repeat that: These acts are committed in an effort to create social change when it is felt that the normal channels for change have been proven ineffective. I am here to say that normal channels for change have been proven ineffective.

I leave you with a few questions:

What actions are you taking to help foster change in your classroom?
Are the normal channels proving difficult to overcome?
What new (call them whatever you want) techniques do you use?
Are you willing to not lead but listen and follow your students into the unknown

Listen and follow your students into the unknown? That is where you may find the meaning of Edupunk!

Salutations, memorials, bromides: let us commence.

I want to talk about love — not romance, not love l-u-v.
I want to talk about a particular kind of love, this love: classroom teaching.

I have my posse of gaily clad classroom teachers behind me.

They like to be called college professors.
And we can’t all work for the government.

We gather together because of classroom teaching.
We have shown you our love in our work in the classroom.

Classroom teaching is a physical, breath-based, eye-to-eye event.
It is not built on equipment or the past.
It is not concerned about the future.
It is in existence to go out of existence.
It happens and then it vanishes.
Classroom teaching is our gift.
It’s us; it’s this.

We bring nothing into the classroom — perhaps a text or a specimen. We carry ourselves, and whatever we have to offer you is stored within our bodies. You bring nothing into the classroom — some gum, maybe a piece of paper and a pencil: nothing but yourselves, your breath, your bodies.

Classroom teaching produces nothing. At the end of a class, we all get up and walk out. It’s as if we were never there. There’s nothing to point to, no monument, no document of our existence together.

Classroom teaching expects nothing. There is no pecuniary relationship between teachers and students. Money changes hands, and people work very hard to keep it in circulation, but we have all agreed that it should not happen in the classroom. And there is no financial incentive structure built into classroom teaching because we get paid the same whether you learn anything or not.

Classroom teaching withholds nothing. I say to my young students every year, “I know how to add two numbers, but I’m not going to tell you.” And they laugh and shout, “No!” That’s so absurd, so unthinkable. What do I have that I would not give to you?

Bringing nothing, producing nothing, expecting nothing, withholding nothing –
what does that remind you of?
Is this a bizarre occurrence that will go into The Journal of Irreproducible Results?
Or is it something that happens every day, all the time, all over the world,
and is based not on gain and fame, but on love.

There are those who say that classroom teaching is doomed and that by the time one of you addresses the class of 2033, there will be a museum of classroom teaching.

Ever since the invention of wedge-shaped writing on a clay tablet, classroom teaching has been obsolete. It’s been comical. Why don’t we just write the assignments and algorithms on a clay tablet, hang it up on the wall, and let the students come who will to teach themselves from our documents?

Why, since the creation of writing with a pen on a piece of paper, do we still bother to have schools?

Why, since the invention of movable metal type, don’t we all just go to the library?

Why do we have to have class? Why do we need teachers?

Why, since the advent of the microchip, don’t we all stay home in our pajamas and hit send?

Technology is nipping at the heels of classroom teaching, but I perceive no threat.
How could something false replace something true?
How could a substitute, a proxy, step in for something real and alive?
How could the virtual nudge out the actual?

The other great threat to classroom teaching is the rush to data — data-driven education.
We must measure everything — percentages, charts, tables.

I’m not entirely opposed to this.
If data-driven education were a pie graph, I would have a piece.

But I was not educated and did not become a teacher to produce data.

I love the classroom.
I loved it as a student, and I love it as a teacher.
I can name every teacher I ever had:
Mrs. Mulshanok, Miss Williams, Mrs. Clark, Miss Bogan, Mrs. Johnson, Mrs. Muys, Mrs. Parker, Mr. Eldridge, Miss Bush — and that’s just through sixth grade.
I could go on, I promise.

I loved coming to class: the chairs, the windows, unzipping my book bag.
And I loved my teachers.
There was content, I suppose, but that’s not what I remember.
I remember my teachers.
I remember being in the room,
and no data and no bar graph will be assembled to replace that, or even to capture it.

This week my students worked on dividing a pizza between two people, and they realized that if you make the line down the center of the pizza the two sides will be equal. After much trial and error, they came to this conclusion on their own, and I welcome you to try it. I think it’s really going to take off, and let this be where it begins.

When they take a standardized test, they will be able to fill in the bubble next to the pizza that is cut exactly in half. Do they know that will be the correct answer? Yes. But I don’t care that much. What I care about is how they got there, how they figured it out for themselves.

This skinny little high school senior got herself into Smith College by writing an essay about Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s theme, “The journey, not the arrival, matters.” It worked for me.

Standardized tests measure the arrival, but they have nothing to say about the journey, about having wonderful ideas. Do you know it/do you not know it is second, and how do you know it, and who are you, is first.

The only way this knowledge grows inside a student is with a teacher, a classroom teacher. Of course, my students will insist they did it themselves, and I don’t try to disabuse them of that.

But the work you graduates have done was in the classroom with your teachers.
That’s the miracle of today.
Why don’t we talk about it?
Because it doesn’t show up.
There’s not a bar graph for classroom teaching. There’s no data for classroom teaching, and yet it persists this year and the next year and the year after that.

Telling tens of thousands of people what to do is not teaching, it’s shouting, and there’s a lot of that going around.

Showing somebody how to do something exactly the way you’ve always done it is not teaching, it’s training. And there’s plenty of that, too.

But the reality that is neither shouting nor training is classroom teaching.
Nobody can touch it because nobody can point to it.
You have it forever.
When it grows inside you, it’s doing its work.

We can disappear.
We’ll never see you again, probably.
The chairs will be folded.
It will be as if we were never here.
There will be nothing we can count after today.
But not everything that counts can be counted.
Not everything that matters can be put into a pie chart.

The Board of Trustees has set a very great challenge for itself:
to educate us all for lives of distinction.
You are never going to be able to make a bar graph out of that.
That is immeasurable, and that’s what makes it so real.
I admonish you — because that’s my job — to think about the things that float away:
your love for your friends,
the smell of the lilacs,
the feeling your families have on this day.
You will have nothing to take with you.
The diploma you receive will be someone else’s.

Everything meaningful about this moment, and these four years,
will be meaningful inside you, not outside you.

I’ve been a classroom teacher for sixteen years–as long as you have been in the classroom. We started the same year. And I hope to go on for fourteen more years.
That will make thirty, and I’ll be done.

At the end of that time, someone will bring me a box, and I will put in it a ceramic apple somebody gave me thinking it would be symbolic somehow. I will have nothing, and that will be proof of the meaning of my work.

If you can point to something, you might lose it, or you might break it, or someone might take it from you. As long as you store it inside yourself, it’s not going anywhere — or it’s going everywhere with you.

This day is a day of love.
It’s a day of your family’s love for you,
your love for each other and your teachers,
and your teachers’ love for you.

In time, the bar graphs may tumble,
the clay tablets may crumble.
They’re only made of clay.
But our love
is here to stay.

Thank you.

Please pass it on to wherever it needs to go.

Teachers are fighting to exclude their private lives – such as personal postings on Internet sites Bebo and Facebook – from falling foul of new serious misconduct rules. The Teachers Council wants to change criteria by which officials decide whether to refer complaints against the country’s 90,000 teachers to its disciplinary tribunal. The tribunal can censure or deregister teachers for serious misbehaviour. The council says the new clause – covering “any conduct
that brings, or is likely to bring, discredit to the profession” – would plug gaps in current rules. But teacher unions fear the “all encompassing” clause would put teachers’ personal lives under unfair scrutiny, even when it had no bearing on their ability to be good teachers.

As readers of this blog are aware, I have had my own troubles dealing with this issue of being asked to resign for my online behavior. For the last few weeks, I have often found myself saying, “This is a very grey area. Incidents like mine will occur more and more often as teachers and society at large start spending more time online.”

This problem is more than just a case of inappropriate applications on Facebook, the issue at hand is that as we enter a more open and global society with more and more people allowed to express themselves publicly on the internet, professionals especially those who work with children must decide how to best express themselves in a multi-cultural world.

Teachers already have to prove they are of fit character.

What does that mean? What is fit character is probably very different in New Zealand, or New York City, or the Middle East.

Post Primary Teachers Association president Robin Duff said current misconduct criteria were “perfectly adequate”. The new rule was too vague. “What’s creditable and discreditable these days? That sort of judgment is often based on your own social background.”

To what rubric are teachers being judged on appropriate online behavior. I think we can all agree that…

allegations of physical, sexual or psychological abuse of children; inappropriate pupil relationships; viewing pornography at school; using, making or supplying drugs; neglect or illtreatment of a child or animal in their care; or crimes punishable by at least three months’ jail.

…are unacceptable anywhere, but what about teachers who promote the theory of evolution over intelligent design, or teachers who have strong feelings about the war in Iraq? Suddenly, a teacher who is pro-active in politics can be deemed unfit by a school board, a principal, or a particular group of parents.Teachers are held to a higher standard for social behavior in nearly all cases. Which is fine to an extent. I understand the level of trust that is put in my hands on a daily basis. I will expect nothing less when my daughter goes to school, but as the 21st century really gets underway, we must move forward cautiously and not allow fear of unknown technologies dictate the level of freedoms we allow the men and women teaching our children.

The reality is that teachers are not robots. We function in the same social and intellectual spheres that govern the rest of the world. It is difficult enough to be everything to everyone else: the polite and professional coworker, the qualified and hardworking employee, the fair and kind role model for students, and the polished and respectful saint for parents.

I cannot think of another job, where a person is expected to always be on their “best” behavior. We are expected to remain blank slates that will somehow shape and build the future, without offering our own ideas so as not to improperly influence young minds, lest their parents’ opinions, or that of the school board or administration should differ from our own.

We live in an age where opinions and strong beliefs can be threatening to people in power. We are told from a young age not to discuss politics or religion in public. It is unprofessional we are led to believe. But as a language arts and social studies teacher how can I not? How are we meant to teach children that they can change the existing power structures and work towards a better world, if we are no allowed to discuss the flaws in the system?

Teachers are not meant to criticize a certain president or his policies, or question the global consumer culture, or suggest that perhaps capitalism is not the best system around. Some say this type of political criticism makes a teacher of unfit character. Don’t get me wrong. I whole-heartedly agree that this type of bias has no place in a classroom, especially at the middle school level. Teachers should not be sermonizing their religious or political beliefs in the classroom, but they shouldn’t be punished for expressing them on the Internet.

If we allow schools to start firing teachers for vague indications of inappropriateness, we are opening the door to weakened teacher’s unions and a generation of teachers afraid to take risks and be themselves.

There seems to be no place left for us teacher/activists to express our ideas. It doesn’t seem fair that we cannot feel comfortable expressing ourselves on the internet, the very space we are painstakingly teaching our students to use.

It feels very hypocritical to teach students to use the tools that we ourselves are afraid to use. I believe in education more than anything else in the world. I believe that objective presentation of facts, logical thought, honesty, love, and communication are the keys to a more peaceful world. A peaceful world is my only goal. If this attitude makes me of unfit character than I suppose I have to search the earth until I find a school that agrees with my ideals. Which is what I am doing now. I have no hidden agendas. No matter what political or religious obstacles we may face, I want nothing more than to find a path toward peace. This is why I teach. This is why I write. This is why I exist. My blogs are nothing more than maps of my journey. There may have been times I have taken wrong turns, said things I shouldn’t have said, but they are meant to be read as a whole. I do not believe in sermonizing or preaching in the classroom. While my opinions may appear to take a one-sided stand at times, I work very hard to create and maintain an objective environment to teach kids to ask questions and search out the truth. That is all.

So remember that not only are…

there’s lots of other things that happen in people’s lives that have no direct bearing on people’s ability to be good teachers. Certainly not the private life of a teacher unless it impacted on the profession itself.

Personal factors in a teacher’s life often enhance their ability to better relate to and teach students. We cannot allow these freedoms to be taken away.

Although I am not getting paid and my future is still unclear,  I feel the need to be involved with my teaching network and trying to rustle up people who are interested in exchanging ideas and learning. Those are the reasons I teach anyway, not for a paycheck.

As I sat day after day, thinking about how the educational institutions of the world are mistreating me, I started to re-think what it means to teach in an institutional environment run at best by bureaucrats and at worst by corporate interests. I also began to brainstorm “perfect” classroom ideas. I have been forced to really sell myself to potential employers, and these negotiations have got me thinking about courses I would like to teach that don’t exist in most schools.

It appears that more and more people are starting to realize the fundamental flaw of teaching in a system that is based on profit. Teachers like Clay Burel and Bill Farren are asking us to rethink the very nature of how a school should function in society. As the global consumer cultures attains more and more influnce over all of our lives, should it not be the role of schools to offer young people alternatives to current systems.

Our schools should play a role in encouraging and teaching students the basic principles of activist culture. As the authority, teachers are nervous to tell an already rebellious group of adolescents to question authority, but we owe it to them to demand more of their educators.

I hope to play with some of these ideas further at the Intrepid Classroom, but I want to use this space to reflect on the reasons behind why these themes should be taught in traditional schools. I hope to create a sort of activist training school. A place where students can question the very systems they are told to worship. I would like to create a source of resources from art, to music, to web culture that helps students understand that although the mass media may try to make them believe they are powerless, there have always been people fighting for a better world, and most importantly they too can participate. Although perhaps not for much longer!
I have written in the past about my Utopian classroom, but now I want to focus on my perfect curriculum. The reoccurring themes for most of my ideas are the incorporation of Social Justice and Peace Activism into traditional curriculums. I see a series of specialized courses that deal with political, class-based issues, and artistic and philosophical themes. One such course would be an elective, probably a semester long on music as an agent of change. I hope to outline each course in depth, but for now I want to start drawing the rough sketches:

The music curriculum would study everything from sixties protest music, to the blues, to modern day singer/activists working for change. Students would not only listen to the music and examine and reflect on the lyrics, but they would also be asked to research and learn about the social problems that were the impetus of the music. As you can see there is already a Social Studies and Language Arts element to the material. They would also be asked to collaborate and create socially conscious music themselves. Using networking tools like Youtube, they would than try to promote their music to as wide an audience as possible.

I have taught a mini-music unit every year of my career, but it always seems forced, and it takes time away from the curriculum I “should” be teaching. Now that I am out of a real classroom, I hope to teach students about the power of music in a less constricting and confined environment We owe it to our students to not only study history, but learn to be a part of it.

How do you incorporate socially conscious material into your curriculum? What obstacle to you face?

I am reading a book called Three Cups of Tea, by David Oliver Relin about a man named Greg Mortenson, who after failing to summit K2 stumbles into a small village in Northern Pakistan called Korphe and promises to build the people of the village a school. Reading this book coupled with my friend Jason’s work with his school the Daraja Academy has got me thinking. What am I doing? What is my purpose?

The last few days have been a series of intensive soul searching journeys for me to find out the answers to these questions. While it may appear that I am being a bit melodramatic about the whole affair, I do take my life goals and plans very seriously. I have never wanted to simply live your average middle class life. Even as a kid, I imagined that I would do bigger things. I imagined that someday, someone would write books about things that I had done, or better yet I would write them myself.

While I am not shy about admitting that I have had my share of self aggrandizing feats, I still feel like my life is building. I haven’t done enough.

That is when it hit me; tonight, here in bed, as my wife lay sleeping reading about how this guy Mortenson had a huge set back in his plan, and his girl friend dumped him, I realized just how alone and miserable he must have felt in the Richmond district of San Francisco. I felt sorry for him. He was not some hero out changing the world. He was a mortal who was broken. I felt connected to him.

I guess what I am trying to say is that we needn’t change the world all at once and all alone. We can allow it to change us, back and forth, until we become something we can recognize and live with. I have been racked with guilt that I came to Doha to make money, and that being fired was the price I paid for turning my back on my true nature, but my true nature is to simply be the peace that I want to spread. The kids I interacted with here needed education and guidance just as much as the kids in Kenya or Korphe, and I was, until the plug was pulled, getting through to them.

I am a teacher. That is what I was born to do. I was put on this earth to interact with people and try to better understand each other. I prefer working with young adults, because that is the age I felt I needed someone most, eighth grade to be specific. I am realizing that I do not need a classroom to teach. I simply need to be the peace I seek here and now. Where ever I am, interacting with whomever I meet. I am not angry at myself or others for how they perceive my actions. Perhaps there is a hint of hostility in the way I see the world, and that is where I need to start the change.

I may not be building schools in Pakistan or Kenya, but I am on a path that will lead me some place worth being. Actually this very path, my journey is in itself the most amazing thing I will ever experience. And if there is no one there to write the book about it when it is done, you could say you were reading it here all along.

End note: For all the edubloggers out there, here is my question. This was originally written for my personal blog, as a way for me to sort out my thoughts and share my thoughts with the small community of people that I have built there, but I also see the value of posting it here. This is where I am having a hard time separating private from professional. Wouldn’t other teachers or perhaps parents who would read a blog post like this not benefit, from seeing this side of a teacher? I guess I will just double post till I figure it out.