Middle School: The Perfect Storm

When we middle school teachers alert other teachers that we are middle school teachers, we inevitably receive one of the following comments:  You must be crazy. Or God bless you.  Or You are a special person.   Other teachers know what happens after the students leave their cozy pods of elementary classrooms and what happens before they enter the liberation of high school.  And it is a bit crazy.  It is a time of intense change both socially and developmentally.  In fact, consider a newborn baby.  And then examine a three year old who can speak, control her bowels, feed herself, walk, etc.  Between the ages of 10-14, children experience the same kind of intense growth and change as they do between 0-3

These changes impact family structures greatly. The child who used to come home and tell parents everything is much more selective about what he or she shares.  He or she might even be surly.  Removed.  Irritable.  Erratic. Looking in his or her backpack creates arguments—because it feels like an invasion to the child’s desperately desired autonomy.  A focus on social issues overcomes the household so that the bathroom is never empty, the phone is never available, the computer is always taken.  Parents often complain that their children never come out of their bedrooms; that they don’t tell them if homework is done; that they don’t tell them about things that are happening at school. 

At the same time that all of this is happening, students change educational structures.  In our school they move from class sizes of 9-15 with one teacher to a team of 5 teachers who see 85-100 students a day for 40 minute periods.  In many schools in larger districts, students move from classrooms of 15-20 to large middle schools where teachers see 100-125 students a day.  It is impossible for a teacher to contact 85-125 parents every week. Parents who were once accustomed to getting frequent communication, positive and negative, from their elementary teachers, find that communication drops off as teacher load increases, during a time when their children are also communicating less.  To top it all off, parents were once accustomed to having one teacher to communicate with and now have up to 5 content area teachers, so aren’t always sure where to begin themselves when they have concerns.

It is no wonder so many teachers opt not to teach this level.  And it is no wonder that so many parents are unhappy with middle schools across the nation. It is a perfect storm of physical, hormonal, mental, and educational change.  And the children that parents once sent off to school are not the same ones that come home. 

During this time, students start experimenting at school.  What happens when they don’t do their homework?  What happens when they talk back to a teacher?  They try on different personas, looking for their identity, hanging out with different groups of kids.  They make mistakes.  But they are most often surrounded by teachers who both love and understand this age group and are willing to provide them with a clean slate the following day.  And so we know it’s okay for them to make mistakes.  It’s okay for them to try something new and abandon it the next week.  This is the time to learn from these errors.  And we’re there to catch them.  We also know that it is their responsibility  not to make excuses for themselves.  That it is their job to relay communication accurately to their parents.  That it is their job to take responsibility for their actions.  And so discipline, communication, classroom management, homework policies…none of those things are the same as they were in the younger grades.  Because we are dealing with a different kind of kid.

I frame this blog post in this context: The other day we sat as a faculty and read over comments that were made on our recent school survey completed by parents, students, and faculty as part of our self-evaluation process.   One major theme stuck out:  dissatisfaction with the middle school.  At first it stung.  But if we looked at numbers—out of the 61 parents who took the survey, only 4 of them were consistently negative—the parents were overwhelmingly happy with us.  More importantly, when we read the students comments, my heart felt like it would burst.  Over and over again, the majority of our students wrote that the greatest thing about their school was the teachers—that they felt challenged, understood, and cared for.  And that is our audience:  those 10-14 year olds who show up every day during some of the hardest years of their lives, trusting us, including us, and taking risks for us.  They are magnificent creatures, these middle schoolers—and maybe that makes us crazy.  Maybe that exposes us to criticism.  But I can’t imagine a more rewarding job.     

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How Curiosity Led Me To Game Theory

 “We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we're curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.” ~Walt Disney

“In terms of the game theory, we might say the universe is so constituted as to maximize play. The best games are not those in which all goes smoothly and steadily toward a certain conclusion, but those in which the outcome is always in doubt.” ~George B. Leonard (1923)

 When a teacher is no longer curious, he or she has brought stagnancy and complacency into the classroom, and I find the idea of those entities being present in our children’s lives unacceptable.  And so every once in a while I do a quick self-check.  Am I still curious?  Do I still have wonder at how the human brain learns?  Do I still want to know more about my subject? Do I still want to know more about my students?  I feel like as soon as I fail that assessment, it is time to leave the classroom.

This year, however, the answer remains yes.  And my curiosity has led me down an unexpected path:  one that involves technology, game theory, and a flipped classroom approach.  Anybody who knows me well and has spent time in my classroom knows that those kinds of things make me extremely uncomfortable and certainly don’t define my teaching style.  But I’ve been watching other teachers make an incredible impact on their students and deliver difficult material in a way that caters to a variety of learners—both in ability and style—and I’ve started rethinking some of my practices.

Start small.

In rethinking my approaches to subject matter, I decided to do a trial run of game theory in my typical 8^th grade grammar unit.  When teaching grammar, I often feel as though I am leaving behind a group of students who don’t get it—yet I have to move on.  I feel as though there’s another group of students whose needs I am directly meeting, and then there is another group who is bored because they got it the first time, and now they are waiting while everybody else catches up. 
The Great Grammar God Game will be an 8 week unit.  Each student has created an avatar and username and as they earn points during the unit they climb the board.  This past week I would have simply covered nouns, but “Koogle” and “Yolanda” have each mastered nouns and pronouns, and are well on their way to covering the adjective material.  Meanwhile, most of the class is undertaking pronouns, and then a couple of students are still working through the noun material with me, getting some reinforcement.  I am running the program through Edmodo—kind of a cross between Moodle and Facebook—and on this program, kids access all of my video podcasts (also on Vimeo), all of their written practices, and all of the directions for other activities they must do.  They work with one another and help each other master the practice work; they meet with me about questions or struggles they might have; and when ready, they sit down and take a quiz independently.  They get four lives—and so if a student does not get an 80 or higher, he or she must retake the quiz.  It is my job, after all, to teach for mastery.  Today, a boy who failed his first and second quiz sat with me and we found a different approach for him to show me his knowledge.  Granted the time to sit with him because of the independent learning taking place in the rest of the classroom, I was able to find out that he does in fact have mastery over nouns.  He got a 95.
For each part of speech, the practice work is worth 50 points and the quiz is worth 200.  As the kids gain points they climb the board—they start out as a Nothing, move to a Mere Mortal, on to a Monster, Satyr, Centaur, Sprite, Hero, Demi-God, and finally a Grammar God.  It is also possible to become a Titan with extra points earned throughout the game.  One student came to see me after taking his quiz.  I told him he got a 96.  He didn’t blink.  “But how many points do I have?”
The idea of a student-centered classroom where students are working independently and all of their needs are being met is not a new idea—but some days it feels like an elusive one.  And I’m not sure how I could apply this kind of classroom to my subject matter entirely, but I’m working on melding my reading workshop philosophy with game theory; I think it will work. 

My nightstand is stacked with a new collection of books about educational gaming, 21^st century learning, and technology for the sake of advancing learning.  It’s a place I never thought I’d find myself—but when you’re curious, you never know where you’ll end up.

TEDx NewEngland: An Abstract

“We need to stop in the course of our busy lives and look at what we already have done and ask, ‘What else is possible?’”

“To deny the chaos of reality is a disservice to our students.”

“I am what I share.”

Generation Y “will be the one that needs to tackle global and economic issues” and they are a group of “strategic optimists” with “more dreams than memories.”

“There is $50 billion in 4^th graders’ pocket change. Imagine what they could do with that.”

“We need to empower kids to become social entrepreneurs who make a difference for themselves and the world.”

"When you create value, you can claim value.”

“Character is not a trait. It is as malleable as anything else.”

“You and I are as infallible as anyone else and there are moral circumstances that will test this.”

“How do you cultivate your moral humility?”

The above quotes came from the scribbles I hurriedly made in my program yesterday as I sat in the audience at WGBH studios in Boston (and so I cannot claim complete accuracy…apologies to anybody whose words I butchered or accidently re-invented), watching the first ever TEDx NewEngland. I believe they repres ent the level of thoughtfulness and exploration that then guided conversations well into the evening and the wee hours of morning. Artists, scientists, researchers, sociologists, PhD candidates, and educators took the stage in what proved to be a highly successful event, leading us down paths of thought that filled us with admiration for a new generation, questions about our own fallacies, intrigue for the future, and hope that once-thought impossibilities could be seemingly possible. I don’t think my words can or should compete with theirs, and so I’ll leave my commentary brief. But I do want to congratulate the coordinators of TEDx NewEngland on their brilliant inaugural event and thank them for their support of the New England teachers of the year. Your generosity and new friendship is greatly appreciated and adored. Thank you.

Everyone Has a Story

I was standing in the kitchen washing potatoes several years ago--it was a winter night, dark had come already, and there was a steady hum of kids playing, NPR reporting, and my husband working around the house.  I reached for a knife to cut off a green portion of a potato when suddenly a childhood story about a homeless man who was in my grandparent's basement eating their raw potatoes came pouring back to me.  I quickly cut up the potatoes and raced through my living room yelling over my shoulder to my unsuspecting husband, "I need to go write something..."

I had a story.  I am reminded of this every year when I embark on our memoir writing unit in 7th grade.  I start the unit by telling my students the green potato story, and later read what I had eventually written down--words that wove together my childhood memories and my adult realizations of justice and prejudice to show how we find meaning in our memories.  On this first day, we sit in a circle in my classroom on the floor and just spend 40 minutes telling stories.  The only person who can speak is the one with the bouncy ball.

Writing memoir is one of my favorite units to teach, but this particular day is one of my favorite lessons.  Without any sense of hindrance from getting language fine tuned on their paper, my students begin to pour forth their stories.  And so I hear about getting lost in the grocery store; near death experiences, traveling, washing a cat off in a mall parking lot mud puddle, buying a new puppy, getting stranded in the snow, mistaking another adult as a parent...

Every child has a story.  That's one reason why I think teaching English Language Arts is nothing short of an honor; my job allows this intimate glimpse into what my students think about, believe in, and question.  But even then, I wonder if I take the time to really know everybody's story.  Do we, as teachers, know the stories that are guarded behind a child who is a behavior problem?  Do we know the stories behind the quiet student in the back of the room?  Because when we know those stories, we are suddenly much more efficient in the classroom.

Last week on an 8th grade trip to Boston, I stood on a cement wall a couple of feet above my students, in front of the Holocaust Memorial, explaining to them what the towers and numbers represent.  An elderly man and his wife wandered over to our group and stood among the students listening.  I wondered why they were standing there, and I have to admit, my first reaction was one of annoyance.  As the kids left me and began to stroll through the memorial, I saw some of them give the old man a quick lookover and then promptly move away from the stranger.  I walked over and reached out my hand.  "May I help you?"  I asked.

The man was a WWII Navy pilot who flew over the concentration camps, never knowing what they were--he was never told until his service was up.  He was shot down over Yugoslavia and it took him 10 days to get to safety.  He asked me why my students were so interested in the Holocaust--he didn't think they would care.

And there you have it--I almost missed his amazing story because of an initial response to a stranger "infiltrating" our group.  And he almost missed the story of how 14 year olds are passionate about justice, find meaning in history, and are fascinated by the Holocaust.

Think of all the stories we miss in a day because we are too busy, overwhelmed, annoyed, overbooked, scared, shy.  We must not only remember to take the time to hear each others' stories, but to teach our children to take the time to hear one anothers' stories as well.  And we need to, above all, make sure that our school environments are safe and comfortable enough for our children to share their stories.

One Week at Home: Final Reflections

"She was beginning to understand that evil is not absolute, and that good is often an occasion more than a condition." ~Gilbert  Parker


I had hoped to come to some solid conclusions about life in Cuba after my brief visit.  I had hoped to sit down in the airport terminal in Miami and let it all pour onto the paper.  But draft after draft filled pages of messy, unorganized writing and unclear thoughts.

If I learned anything on this trip, it is that things are not black and white.  And while we often give lip service to this cliched adage,  nothing more so as my experiences last week has made it more clear.

When faced with different ideologies, we Americans, revolutionists and patriots at heart, tend to lean toward polarization--we feel that there must be a right way and a wrong way. We crave justice and justification. But I came away from Cuba with the new understanding that humanity is a leveling factor that simply defies ideology.  We are so quick to judge another country's downfalls without examining our own, and we are afraid of embracing and learning from successes that our enemies may have encountered along the way.

I recently received an angry three and half page typed letter from a Cuban exile who personally attacked me for my views posted on this blog, requesting that I "withdraw that fantasy drivel" that I have written.  At first, I began to compile research so I could write a rebuttal.  But then I went back through to reread my "drivel" and realized that we are reading through two different sets of eyes. We  are of different generations, different nationalities, and have different historical perspectives.  What I write as inquiry and wonder about a process and its results, he misperceives as awe and admiration for a gang of bloodthirsty thugs.  What he has determined as black and white for so many years now, I am now viewing as gray.

This is the very problem with policy and polarization.  Cuba has a bloody revolutionary past.  At the end, many left, frightened and having lost everything. Loved ones went missing.  Others saw their families settle into better situations,  experiencing greater equality.  Anything historical can be seen through two sets of eyes.  As Americans, we can admire our innovation and Western expansion of this great land and nation, while Native Americans may recall a time when 30,000 of their people were lost to combat and 80-90% of their population fell victim to smallpox.  It's all about perspective.

Cuba is fresh though.  Those who prospered and those who suffered are still alive, trying to make sense of a living history as Fidel Castro lay sick, and his 80 year old brother leads the country.  And the changes that are positive, like health care and education, feel outweighed at times by the documented human rights atrocities and limitations on freedom of speech.

Nothing is black and white.  Some situations elicit inconclusiveness.  But no situation eludes the necessity of inquiry and exploration.

Examining Cuban Literacy: aka The Reason for my Travels to Cuba

In 1961, the rural illiteracy rate in Cuba was 42% (illliteracy in urban areas was closer to 11%) .  During that year, nearly 270,000 teachers traveled into the countryside to live alongside families to teach functional literacy.  Of those 270,000 "brigadistas," over 100,000 were between the ages of 10 and 19 and more than half were female.  Within one year, the illiteracy rate was lowered to 4%, and today, 50 years later, Cuba has the second highest literacy rate in the world and is called upon by numerous nations to assist with raising their literacy rates.

I find this fascinating.  There are pictures of hundreds of thousands of teachers returning to Havana, marching into Revolution Square, carrying large, wooden pencils where their leader greeted them.  Teenagers were willing to leave their families to go and teach others--it was a political initiative and it embraced the youth.

"Yo Si Peudo" is the name of the Cuban Literacy Program that is now implemented across the world. The program works with coutnries such as New Zealand, Mexico, Canada, and Boliva. In 2006 UNESCO recognized Cuba's innovative methods and recognized its work with over 15 countries to improve social conditions through literacy.

At the Cuban Literacy Museum we were given a presentation and shown the materials used in "Yo Si Puedo."  And while we only had the time to quickly peruse the English materials, I didn't see anything remarkable.  What was remarkable were the initiatives that embrace such materials, the cultural sensitivity when applying them in different countries, and the developmental pedagogy involved when educating adult learners.  Each country who has enlisted Cuba's help in literacy training has made it a priority.  And while putting youth in uniforms and marching them into the fields is a bit extreme and unlikely to occur in any other country than post-Castro Cuba, the sentiment remains the same:  literacy is a priority.  When Cuba collaborates with another nation, it does not just make adjustments in language; it calls for developing materials that align with the intended audience's culture.  Actors from those countries are brought in to create the video clips used and written materials address local customs and culture.  Adult learners are given adult topics; it is recognized that making connections is a critical element to reading comprehension.

The United States has a 99% literacy rate--only .9% behind Cuba.  But the largest difference is the value placed on education and literacy.  Detroit has a 47% functional illiteracy rate.  Imagine, with our force of powerhouse teachers and youth, what could occur if we gathered our own sorts of reading troops and made adult education a priority.  That would be unheard of..

 Like the history of Cuba and Castro or not, the country's commitment to adult literacy is impressive.

Day 4 In Cuba: Just the Facts

On the first day here, Sarah Daisy, our guide, asked us to hold off until the end of the week before we drew any conclusions about her country.  I will.  For the time being, here are some of the facts that have come to light for me, which I will use to form my opinion:

1.       Every single person in this country is given a ration of food.  Today I was able to sneak a look at a ration book.  Among other things, each person in a household receives 2 pounds of chicken and 7 pounds of rice per person. Other foods include cooking oil, flour, eggs, pasta, juice, beans, etc.  If they want to trade their ration at the store for something else, the grocer will generally allow it.  If they want other foods, it comes from their paychecks.

2.       Everybody is guaranteed housing, and they pay 10% of their paycheck for their homes.  Just recently the government passed a law that residents are allowed to sell their houses.  However, there is a major housing shortage, and so if somebody wishes to move, they need to find somebody else who is willing to swap homes with them at the right price.  This makes moving into a nicer home or a bigger home difficult, because it is rare to find somebody in a nice, large home who is willing to trade for a smaller, dilapidated home.  And there are many of those, because the government decides when you can refurbish or repaint homes.  In the 90s, during the Special Period, the economy was particularly bad for Cuba, and then in 2005 the island was hit by numerous hurricanes.  This has left many buildings uninhabitable and in disrepair.

3.       Cuba has the second highest literacy rate in the world.  They have some of the best doctors in the world, and their infant mortality rates and average lifespan rival first world countries.  This is because when Castro came into power, he focused on healthcare and education.  I find this fascinating, because for any country to rise from poverty and become empowered, those basic needs must be met.  In countries like Sudan, you see efforts focusing on healthcare and education.  Because of this, when you walk around Havana, you see healthy people, and most of the people we have encountered here are well educated.  These are priorities.

4.       Because the government pays for all jobs, people who work in the tourist industry and receive tips sometimes make more money than doctors or teachers.  One of our cab drivers was a teacher, but decided to become a driver because he makes more money that way.

5.       The embargo makes getting simple supplies expensive and this creates great hardships.  With a bit of digging and talking to people who were finally willing to share, we heard that hospitals don’t have enough supplies.  They have amazing doctors, but no supplies.  People don’t have enough food.  They are guaranteed a certain amount, but it is not enough, and their salary is so low (one man told one of us he didn’t even make $200 last year) that they have a hard time paying for food.  While we have been shown beautiful schools, we have passed other schools that are in shambles.  We have heard that there are not enough books for children.  They are allotted 2 pencils per month per child.  One man in the streets begged me for pens for his nephews. 

6.       The government subsidizes the publishing houses, and because so many book publishers are tied with American publishers, it is difficult to get outside authors published in Cuba. Four hundred copies of every book that is published are placed in libraries around the country.  According to the director of the Cuban Book Institute, they are not interested in publishing the likes of Dan Brown, because he is not literature.  Any kind of writing that would encourage violence will not be published.  The government has the final say in what kinds of literature the people will read.

7.       For a Cuban to travel, he or she must receive a written invitation from the person he or she would be visiting.  Even if this occurs, it is difficult to save enough money to visit other countries.  The United States is supposed to give 20,000 Visas a year for Cubans to visit, but last year only allowed 400.  Sarah Daisy saves Euros and American dollars in the hopes that someday she will have enough money to save to travel.  If she could go anywhere in the world, she would choose Canada.

8.       Under Batista, there was legalized segregation.  Fidel Castro integrated buses, schools, and workplaces.  With slavery as their backdrop of history, Cubans are highly aware of race relations.  And while racism still occurs, interracial marriages are more common, and the general public, especially in Havana, is fairly tolerant.

Tomorrow:  opinions.