In Support of Quirky

Slice of Life Challenge, Day 14

I am that mom. Walking out the door with my two little boys in tow on our way to preschool this morning, I realize that I am the quirky mom. The one who wears big black combat boots with a Goodwill vintage crushed velvet coat to drop her boys off at school. The one who hesitates only a minute when her five-year-old asks if he can bring his Zed the Zombie in for "Z" week.  He brought zucchini seeds in yesterday, tame enough. I am that quirky mom...and I am proud of that.

I suppose that I have always been quirky. I'm pretty sure that I was the only kid in my grade who was wearing clothing she had sewed herself.  And ever since doning my first pair of glasses as a freshman in college, I've been on the hunt for the perfect pair of cat's eye frames long before they were ever considered a hipster trend (I finally found them a few years ago at a flea market in Philly). My parents supported my quirkiness, as did my teachers. I have been fortunate in that I am surrounded by people who have not just tolerated my bit of weirdness, but encourage it.

And I want to be an encouraging force for quirkiness.  Being quirky is a conversation starter.  The number and diversity of people that I have met as a result of my glasses is proof alone. On a fairly regular basis, someone will tap my shoulder to ask where I found my glasses or tell me a story about a loved one who wore the exact same pair in the 60s.  Being quirky has opened up a host of opportunities and connections. Because I'm a bit of an oddball, a vintage-wearing, baby-clothes-sewing, creative-writing, geeky-tech, DIY-type, people don't hesitate to ask me for help on projects. And so I've had opportunities to collaborate and connect with all sorts of people from all walks of life.

So working with high school students, who are in the throes of figuring out who they are, who they want to be, I want to be an encouraging force for quirkiness.  I will randomly break out in song. I will dress up for Halloween every year. I will talk like a pirate on September 19th.  I will show students how to create web pages and write ovillejos. I will debate the ending of Allegiant and celebrate Holi with students.  My quirkiness is a reflection of my diverse interests and passions, my willingness to try new things.  To be a risk-taker.  As Walt Whitman once wrote, "I am large, I contain multitudes." And so I will be an encouraging force for quirkiness.

Don't Quote Me Poetry

Slice of Life Challenge, Day 13

It's time for the recycling to be placed on the curb.  Another week of newspapers gathered up with cans and cardboard.  But before I take the bundle outside, I pull open the "Sunday Review" section of the New York Times, and I stumble upon an op-ed article titled "Don't Quote Me On This" in which the writer laments the ease with which we are distracted while reading online. In our rush for efficiency while researching online, we decontextualize ideas by ripping the most quotable moments from their context.  So, I decided to spend a great deal of time with the op-ed article...decontextualizing it.

I love black-out poems.  Using the words of someone else to create a new piece, to craft meaning, is liberating.  It is a moment to get outside of my writing habits, my default topics and manners for crafting meaning, to find inspiration in another's way of making meaning. And so here it is, my black out poem from today:


"Don't Quote Me on This"

We reach for the easy
perspective,
millions plus one
decontextualized,
disappear.

Steppingstone for thought,
        for my sanity.
Fragment to fragment.
Limitless content.
Precious and
rationed truisms
strip away.

Approach
best intentions
vowing
speed,
brevity and immediacy.
Who shares nuance?

Carry your context
with you
so thoughtfully.

Local PD

Slice of Life Challenge, Day 12

Frustrated does not begin to cover how I am feeling.  I had to make a call last night, actually several calls, as the weather reports for the ironically named storm Vulcan (seriously, who names a blizzard after the Roman god of fire?!) projected me driving through somewhere between eight inches to a foot of snow in what many news sources are anticipating as the worst driving conditions of the winter. And I was already a little anxious at making the 14 hour drive with my two little boys without a second driver to help.  So I made the calls.  I will not be presenting at the Michigan Association for Computer Users in Learning (#MACUL14) conference in Grand Rapids tomorrow.

I was slated to do a short presentation on connecting young writers with authentic audiences using 2.0 tools.  My presentation weaves in some of my own action research on using elements of Connected Learning in my high school English classroom. I articulate a model I came up with for creating connected writing assignments, and then share an example from my classroom of students completing a 20% time research project.  In fact, my presentation for MACUL was based on the same one I was asked to do for the Pennsylvania GAFE Summit a few weeks ago but which also was cancelled as they restructured the session offerings for a smaller audience.  So, my last two presentations, two that I was very much looking forward to, didn't happen.

So I'm frustrated.  And not with the weather or with conference organizers.  I am frustrated with myself.  This is the first time in quite a few years that I have put myself out there by applying to present at conferences.  I love conferences.  I am energized attending sessions, madly scribbling down ideas and jotting down links. And what I have learned at NCTE, PCTELA, EduCon, and EDCamp conferences has not just inspired me but has changed my work in significant ways. However, I'm not sure why I am waiting for an invitation or a conference to share my work. I love presenting (seriously, ask me to present for absolutely anything, and I'll jump on that opportunity) because it is an opportunity to meet other connected educators.  But I have a whole community to teachers in my own school also eager to learn from one another.  Instead of wishing for more opportunities to learn and share with my fellow district teachers, I need to find more ways to make that happen.  How can we create local professional development that is as energizing as the conferences we volunteer to attend and present at?

Asking For It

Slice of Life Challenge, Day 9

I love this photo from today.  We decided to ditch our "catching up" day, the day we set aside to catch up on missed work and emails, phone calls and bills, on all that daily grind stuff that there just never seems to be enough time to get done, in order to take our boys out for a game of minature golf.  Sun shining and snow melting, it was a perfect day to get out and goof off.

My boys have never really spent time on a minature golf course. I qualify this statement a bit because there was the time that we took them to a local science museum which had a similar sort of special exhibit at the time, but it was crowded and both my boys expressed more interest in looking at dinosaur bones than playing golf. So today, my little shark-hoodie wearin' five-year-old got a quick tutorial from dad and was hooked.  Once he sank a putt, he would run to the next hole, but he was not trying to place his ball and swing a quick hit before we could catch up to him. Nope. He would run to the next green, and then keep running to see where the hole was. He would talk through how he was going to try to hit the ball, lining up his shot.  On the sixth hole, we had a wait a few moments while a dad with his pre-teen son finished the shot.  My little guy watched intently. It took the dad and his son both three shots.  Not bad.  It was a difficult incline shot with hockey pucks set up like Plinko along the green to make the shot nearly impossible. My son moved his golf ball toward the edge of the putting mat and hit it gently.  The ball moved slowly toward the first obstacle and banked toward the edge, skimming off the edge all the way down the incline and into the hole. A hole in one! He was so proud of setting up that shot and having it work.  You know what's coming next, don't you?  My connection to teaching, as if it weren't obvious.

My husband took time to help my son line up his shots on the first few holes, showing him how to hold the putter and hit the ball.  And to be honest, at first, my son wanted none of it.  So on the third green, he hit the ball without help and was frustrated when he couldn't get it to go through the hole in the big plastic tree like the shot required. After a number of attempts, he asked his dad for some help, and with a couple of pointers, my husband helped him line up the shot and take a slow swing.  Viola!  And that success lead to another and another.  We all need those supportive models to show us the ropes when we are trying new things, but we also need to be encouraged to try new things on our own, to figure it out on our own terms, and to learn when we need to ask for help. This has been a lesson that not only has my little guy has struggled to learn but one that I still struggle with - learning when and how to ask for help.

We all want to be successful and have things come easily, whether you are five or thirty-five. Learning to recognize when you need support and learning to ask for that help is critical. It is a lesson that not all of our students (or even some teachers) have yet learned. We need to help our students understand that they are part of a learning community, one that grows when we depend on one another and support one another's learning. We are stronger when we learn from one another, when we can seek out the experts in our community to mentor us. We need to teach out students to recognize when they need help and how to ask for it, to be better advocates for their own learning.

Playing with Poetry

Slice of Life Challenge, Day 8

Every class begins with Writer's Notebook. Even before the bell rings, my students and I grab our notebooks, leave them open on our desks, anticipating writing moments. I spent some time looking through a handful of old notebook this morning. It turns out there are many, in all sizes and states. I ran across an idea scribbled in red, sideways on the page...when I grow up. So here is this morning's Slice of Life: an idea taken from my notebook.

When I Grow Up

Photo of Elk Lake from ERSchools

When I grow up
     (I told anyone who'd listen)
I want to be a mermaid
     or an astronaut
and swim the stars
     to be lifted,
carried away by the current
     to far off places.
I'd dip and dive
     open-eyed
under water
     wishing I could hold my
          breath long enough to make it
               to mid-lake
     where feet couldn't touch bottom.
But I'd get two breaths out
     on tippy-toes
          nose poking above the wake
     and turn toward shore
          toward home
too scared to venture much
     further than my
          breath could
               carry me.            

Grandma's Cookies

Slice of Life Challenge, Day 7

On the wall that divides kitchen from dining room, hanging next to the stove is my grandmother's springerle rolling pin. It has always hung here.  I don't remember a time walking into my grandparent's home, whether I was six or thirty-six, that the wooden rolling pin wasn't hanging from the hook by a red ribbon. In that exact spot, untouched.

Springerle cookies are a German holiday tradition.  Doughy pillows of perfection begging to be dunked in your mid-afternoon coffee to release their hint of black licorice flavor. But my grandma has never made them.  She's never made any cookie to my knowledge. We used to joke as kids - my sister and cousins, aunts and uncles, and grandma would join in - that Sara Lee was the only baker in my grandparents' house.  This is not to say that my grandmother never cooked.  Every Sunday afternoon, we would trapse over to the little black shuttered ranch-style home that sits overlooking Elk Lake for pot roast in the fall and winter, burgers and brats in the spring and summer.

Their home was always filled with people, especially the kitchen. You could stop by unannounced in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon and someone would be there visiting with Grams, drinking coffee and chatting. And despite not being a baker, my grandma always had cookies. When my sister, cousins, and I got old enough to reach the counter, she had to move them from the green metal bread box to an overhead cupboard so we wouldn't stuff our pockets full of Soft Batch chocolate chip cookies before running outside to play.

It wasn't until I was much older, living states away from my grandparents' home, that I asked her about the rolling pin hanging in her kitchen.  It was my great-grandmother's, my grandpa's mom. She used to make springerle cookies for my grandpa as a kid growing up in Detroit.  The rolling pins hangs in her kitchen as a reminder - of my great-grandmother, of my grandpa, of the little house in Detroit where they lived when my grandparents were first married - of their shared history.

I was reminded of this shared history when one of my springerle rolling pins fell from the baker's rack in my kitchen this morning.  My rolling pins do not have the same history, bought on eBay a few years ago.  We use them regularly from Thanksgiving through Christmas to make our own springerle cookies.  My boys take turns to carefully roll out the designs on the dough. The owl is a favorite. They don't want to wait for the cookies to dry overnight in our garage before they can be popped into the oven to bake. The next day, they will sit impatiently by the oven door, watching through the warm glass as the cookies plump while they bake.  This is how we are building our history.  Later, they will help me package the springerle cookies to send out to my grandmother, their great-grandma.  She will call a few days later to say this is how I remember them.  

Sometimes You Don't Get What You Pay For

Slice of Life Challenge, Day 6

I can't help it. This Slice of Life writing logo has me thinking about orange juice.

Doesn't look appealing, does it? Unless it's in a Martha Stewart recipe.

The adage is true, sometimes you get what you pay for.  Orange juice.  A friend staying with us a few years back woke to find my husband mixing frozen orange juice in our kitchen.  "What are you doing?" he asked looking incredulously at the pitcher filling with tap water.  This is how both my husband and I were raised.  Orange juice from concentrate.  So, it is what we have always done without thinking too much about it.  It took an outsider, our friend, to point out that we were two professionals with stable incomes (at the time we didn't have kids) who could afford to buy fresh orange juice.  And it turns out, fresh orange juice is much better than a frozen gob of goo mixed with tap water.  And same goes for shoes.  A pair of well-made leather shoes will not only last a heck of a lot long that the plastic department store shoes, but feel a lot more comfortable after you've been standing in them for six hours straight talking with students all day.  Well worth the extra cost initially. And this is true for many things: hair products, hand-knit sweaters, socks...sometimes there are things worth spending the extra money on.

And sometimes not.

I hear frustration from educators who have been handed fantastic opportunties - a class set of iPads, new 1 to 1 initiatives, Chromebooks for every students - but unless districts first invest in the infrastructure and professional development, this is wasted money. A lot of wasted money.  What good is a building full of Chromebooks if your bandwidth can't support more than a fifty students utilizing online tools at a time? Before spending money on the newest hardware and software, schools need to be building an infrastructure that will support their future goals.

Photo by Kevin Jarrett

Michigan teachers have recently become painfully aware of this fact.  In 2014-2015 school year, Michigan schools have a state mandate to move all their state standarized tests over to online testing.  The problem with this is not one of schools having older technology or lacking devices.  Although 86 percent of Michigan schools have the technology in the buildings to meet the minimum requirement for taking these tests online, the Detroit News reported in January that "Only 62 percent have the recommended bandwith specifications - 50 kilobits - for online testing, which is expected to replace the paper-and-pencil Michigan Educational Assessment Program." The bandwidth, the infrastructure needed to support this move to online testing, is no where near ready for this change.

We need to stop spending our money on the newest, flashiest, fastest devices because unless we've built up the support for these devices, they are simply window dressing.  When you pay for the devices to fill a school without first building the bandwidth to support a building filled with devices, you are not getting what you paid for.  Just like many of use Understanding by Design to craft our teaching lessons beginning with our end in mind, we need our districts to do the same.  Start with the end in mind.  If you want more students utilizing online tools, you need to spend your money on supporting the infrastructure first.