Above the line

I have been reading Urban Meyer's book Above the Line.  In this book he talks about the culture of Ohio State and what he expects from everyone of his athletes when they step onto the playing field.  It triggered a thought what I should expect from everyone of my students when they enter the classroom.  Here are my thoughts which I am going to share and hopefully get some feedback before implementing this above the line approach in the class.

1.  All students should be engaged with the class material.  They should be focused on the discussion that is occurring in the classroom.  In this respect they should have their cell phones off and out of sight.

2.  Be the best you can be.  When I say that I want you to be the best that you can be on that day.  I understand that sometimes people are sick, did not get a good nights sleep but you still can put your best foot forward.  It might not be your best effort but it is the best effort you can muster that day.

3.  Do not complain.  When I look around our school their is a culture of complaining that starts from the administration through the teachers and down to the students.  I do not want complaining in our class room from either the students or the teacher.

4.  Integrity-No cheating, do not take the easy way out of things.  Work hard on each problem without asking for help before you gave it your best. (see number 2).  Remember when you think you gave it your best you still have much more in the tank.  Learning is a struggle and we need to push ourselves to struggle before giving in.

5-  Caring for others-Trying your hardest to take care of the person to your left or your right.  Worrying about did they understand the concepts.  Helping them become better students.  Making them feel comfortable asking questions.

No matter what we decide on we are going to need to be critical coaches of each other.  If you see a student with a phone out you need to tell them to put it away.  If a student is cheating you need to tell them we do not do that in this class.  If the teacher is not following the above behaviors you need to call him out on it.  As a team we can make the last couple of months one where we all push each other to be the best we can be.

So is there anything on this that you disagree with?  Anything I need to add?  Pushback as hard as you want.  Let us make this something we can all live with.

learning through golf

The other day I mentioned that my golf swing was not very good.  One of my students reminded me that it was not good yet.  Thanks to this reminder of Carol Dweck, I went to the driving range with a growth mindset.

While I was on the range warming up I noticed that I was hitting the ball better than usual.  I was warming up with my eight iron which is my favorite club to hit.  It occurred to me that I needed some deliberate practice, which is to work at a specific skill, that needs improvement.  After, thanking Anders Erickson for this concept, I took my driver out of my bag.

Here is where the frustration came into play.  I was hitting my drivers 20 yards longer than my eight iron.  For those of you who do not golf your driver should go about 80 yards longer than your eight iron.  Every once in a while I would take out my eight iron to see how my swing was with that club.  Each time my eight iron shot went about the same distance with good accuracy.  As I continued to hit my driver my frustration grew but I remembered GRIT.  So I continued.

As luck would have it, a person walked by me, and gave me some feedback  on my swing.  Once I put this feedback into play I noticed that my driver was now going 80 yards longer than my eight iron which also improved with this tip.  Practice is great but one of the most important parts of deliberate practice is feedback.  Too often we continue to practice the wrong way which only brings about bad habits.

Now that I felt confident in my swing with the driver I started changing clubs every swing.  This change in swings is called interleaving.  When I wore a younger man's clothes, a golfer or anyone would just practice the same thing over and over again until they perfected it.  While this is good for short term results it is not good for the long term.  Now research has shown that when you switch tasks you need to think about the change, which forces your brain to work harder and therefore your remember it better in the future.

Think about math for an example, how many times do you do problems that all have the same skill to which point you are not even thinking about how to solve the problem.  Interleaving forces you to switch for example from adding to subtraction to multiplying to division.   When you change the skills it that forces your brain to think about each action which allows you to remember it better in the long run.

When I was done with this hour and a half golf session I was excited about having another session to reinforce my learning.  I will give myself a couple of days (spacing effect) to try to rehearse the same swings that I did on the range. 

The last thought I had when driving home was that learning is fun.  Did I have some frustration? Yes.  Is this part of learning?  Absolutely.  Is their a time when you are just hitting shots at the range that it becomes boring? Yes.  Does practicing have anything to do with real life application?  No.  I am never going to be a professional golfer.

What is really fun is the act of learning?  How does this get lost in the educational process?  Love to hear your thoughts?

Myths about learning

There are a lot of myths about learning that I would like to talk about it in this blog.  The first one that really has spread like wildfire is that people have different learning styles.  This year when I was learning about a new curriculum one of the writers of the curriculum stated that this is written for students with different learning styles.  There was a reading passage, youtube video and audio version of the information that the students could choose.

There is plenty of research out there to show that students do not learn better if it is auditory, visual, kinesthetic etc.  What really happens is that different material is learned better with different styles.  It is more effective to teach geography with the visual aid of a map but that does not make a person a visual learner.  Also if I am teaching the impact of high interest rates on Aggregate demand, it is good for me to discuss it while also showing a visual with a graph.  Using both of these often improves the learning of the student.

There is also a lot of discussion about how to study for tests.  Research has shown that highlighting your text, is one of the least effective methods of studying.  The research also shows that re-reading the text leads to overconfidence and does not help prepare you for the exam.  The tendency is for students to read the text for the second time , while saying I know that already.  So they skim the text and it is not an effective method.

The best way to study for an exam is to take a test.  I give all my students a practice assessment to prepare themselves for the real assessment.  To maximize the use of the practice assessment, students should not only look at getting the answers correct, but making sure that they know what each distractor in a multiple choice test means.  This allows the student to review not only the correct answers but other concepts as well.

When you are done reading a text it is a great exercise to write down everything you remembered from the text you read.  Forcing your memory to recall information gives you a better chance to remember that information at a later date.  So I would recommend making a list of concepts that you remember, then checking your notes to see what you left out.  This is also a good method prior to taking a test is to list all the concepts that you know, then check out what concepts you are missing.

Talking about notes, your notes should be personal to you.  They should have examples that you can relate to and if possible requires you to give personal meaning to the concept you are trying to learn.  Anytime you can connect personal meaning and emotion to the concept you have a better chance of remembering it and applying it. 

The last myth it that of have you should feel prior to taking a test.  Many teachers will tell you to calm down as you are about to take the test which is not helpful.  The truth is if you are feeling some stress/anxiety that is good for you.  You should take that as a signal from your body telling you that you are getting ready for the exam.  Your body is sending more oxygen to your brain so that you can be most effective.  Research has shown the students who feel that stress will help them be successful on exams outscore participants who are told to calm down.

As always comments are always appreciated.

four agreement

I finished reading a book Four Agreements which I totally recommend.  It is a great book about bringing happiness into your life.  Here is my interpretation of those agreements.

1.  Do your best.  It is funny when I ask people do they do their best each day they often start off with an excuse.  When I think about doing my best,  it is my best under the circumstances.  So if I am sick,  I will probably not perform to my optimal level but I can still do my best under those circumstances.  At the end of the day I ask myself,  Did I do my best today?  I try to phrase the question so that doing my best is up to me.  I have been struggling with this one but am improving each day.

2.  Do not assume.  Whenever I mention this you get the assume joke.  What I have realized however since I have taken the agreement not to assume is how often I did assume.  That someone sends you an e-mail I wonder how can they think that.  Or if someone does not return an e-mail are they mad at me?   Now instead of assuming I will seek the person out or just not make any judgement at all.  One of my friends is deciding on taking a position and they were being influenced by what their friends would think about it.  My advice was do not assume what they will think just do what you think is best for you and your company.  While I will sometimes assume things I am getting good at catching myself and then stopping.

3.  Do not take things personally.  This is something that has really helped me.  When I catch myself taking something personally and I let it go, I feel the tension leaving my body.  It is an awesome feeling and also make me realize how many things I have taken personally in the past.  I see criticism now as trying to be helpful, their are no such things as personal attacks because I just do not see them that way.  I will not let someone who does not really know me or care about me decide how I feel. 

4.  Impeccable with your word.  This is about not spreading gossip about people.  It amazes me how fast bad things get around and how often that leads into problems of people assuming or taking things personally.  I know recently I was very upset with what I viewed as wasted paperwork.  I probably told twenty people about it twenty times.  How did that help?  All it does is spread bad will.  Now I just mumble to myself to be impeccable with my word.  If someone or something bothers me go right to the source and straighten it out.

So far these four agreements have worked for me.  If you get a chance pick up the book and as always would love to hear your thoughts.

I can hear you

In education both students and teachers often feel that they have no voice.  That no matter what they say or how they feel that nobody will listen seriously to their concerns.  In the past five years I have felt that while people will hear what I have to say that they do not really listen.

This past week we had a young man write a poem, with the theme "Black Lives Matter"  When he presented the poem to his administration they told him that it was offensive and that he could not present this poem at the schools talent show.

While this person does not go to my school I was able to find his performance online, which I played for a couple of my classes.  I was interested to see if any of my students were offended by his words.  Most of the students were fine, one student thought it might be offensive, and almost all agreed that if you agreed with his stance or not he should have the freedom to express himself.

The poet however, did not take no for an answer.  Instead of getting frustrated with the Principal, he decided to write our Superintendent, County Executive, and area representative.  One of his friends took to face book to post the poet reading his poem, and started a petition to allow him to read it.  The fact is that denying him originally to perform allowed more people to see his work.

When I asked my students what they thought would happen, many of them said nothing.  They did not think anyone would listen to a student's petition or student grievance.  But they were wrong.

The next day the poet was told that if he changed two words (which he was fine with) he would be able to read his poem at the talent show.  While nobody should have to work that hard to perform at his school's show it does prove that if we organize ourselves correctly we all have a voice.

The student used social media, the direct access we all have to our superintendent, and the alumni of his school to rally  support.  Instead of complaining about his situation he worked hard to fix it and therefore stand up for students freedom to express themselves in an appropriate manner.

I think this is a great lesson for all of us.  If something is important we should think about how we can solve the problem instead of how we can complain about it.  This young man has totally inspired me to take action when I feel that I am not being heard.  WE HAVE A VOICE, WE JUST NEED TO USE IT.  People will listen.

As always your thoughts are appreciated.

Powerball

I have never played the lottery before the other day when Eugene talked my wife into buying a power ball ticket.  It reminded me of a professional development session I attended 15 years ago when the speaker asked a group of 100 teachers how many would stay on the job if they hit the lottery.  My hand and one other person's went up.  I was truly amazed.

So as I went to purchase the power ball tickets I thought to myself what would happen if I won.  The first thing I thought about is that I would go to work the next day and continue to finish out the year.  My obligation to my students would not change, but would I continue to teach after this year?

It took me a second to come to the answer of yes!!!!!!!!!!!!!  I would continue to definitely teach.  My first move would be to ask our former AP Calc teacher how much would it cost to get her back in our school.  After that was done I wondered would I stay at my school or open an alternative school where I can embrace my educational philosophies. 

While the alternative school would be interesting, the truth is that we as a country need to find a way to make public education work.  So I continue to think the best way for me to give back is to embrace public education.  So besides having fun giving money to the charities of my choice I do not think Power Ball would change my life at all.

So I have to ask, how would your life change if you won Power Ball?  Have some fun answering this question.