The Forgiving Teacher

Here I am, trying to be a writer.  In my feeble attempts to keep this unread blog alive, I offer some thoughts on forgiveness and teaching.

It’s almost 4pm on the last day of school before Winter Vacation.  I’m sitting alone in my classroom, almost two hours after all of the students paraded out of the building in celebration of a two week break from school.  They know that this respite will only last for a brief moment in time but the possibilities of endless freedom excite their little hearts to no end.  

Only in the presence of peace and silence of deserted hallways can one truly understand the beautifully chaotic reality of school.  So much happens throughout the day both very much within the sphere of influence of my fellow teachers and I and as well as an overwhelming amount that is not.   At this moment, now that all of the students and most of the teachers have left the building, I am thinking about forgiveness.   

The very nature of teaching requires the ability to forgive.  Forgiveness is a choice, conscious or not, that every teacher must make for themselves on a moment by moment basis.  I have experienced such frustration that forgiveness seemed impossible.  Error is, understandably, constant within the walls of a school.  Kids, just like the rest of humanity, make mistakes.  This is how we slowly discover how the world works.  In the same way that young people possess the ability to surprise and amaze, they just as easily do stupid, irrational, unexplainable things.  Often, these actions are described as disrespectful, rude, ridiculous, or approaching an evil that offers no hope for the future.  Some of these mistakes cause teachers to scratch their head with a kind of hopelessness that leaves them unmotivated and cynical about the youth.  Yet, it is because of this content error that teachers must forgive.     

To forgive someone is to understand why he or she acted in the particular manner that harmed the individual, another student or the entire community in the first place.  True forgiveness is to trust that the intent of the wrongdoer was not malicious or, if it was, then they have learned why the act was wrong in the first place.  It is the responsibility of teachers to show students a way of moral rightness; a compass that always points towards goodness towards others; and behavior that promotes the learning for both themselves and their peers.  We must always remember their youth and they likely don’t know the appropriate way to do things especially within a classroom environment.  My mentor, Sarah Durst, shares with me regularly that as a teacher, I have to teach those within my class everything that I want them to be able to do within my space regardless of how trivial it may be.  Though she refers to the daily procedures and routines of classroom, in a very real sense, she might as well be talking about acting within our community and the world at large.  Gentle reminders such as “You shouldn’t run into this classroom, it is safer and more appropriate to walk calmly and with a purpose,” might go a long way to reducing car accidents in the future or at the very least will give me less of a headache at the beginning of every class period.   

When teachers work to understand why their students act the way they do instead of growing angry with them, it makes true forgiveness possible.  For students come with a backpack of experiences so large that it sways their every move.  Some were shown how to do things the right way and others did not have the same guidance.  No matter a student's previous path, it is the responsibility of teachers to work to help them improve, whatever that might mean for the individual.  This holistic approach to human growth is the beauty of being a teacher and it is something that testing companies have yet to be able to accurately measure.          

 

There is nothing easy about forgiveness and understanding.  When experienced teachers advised me to spend as much time as possible “developing relationships” and “establishing mutual trust,” that sounded easy enough when said aloud but incredibly difficult as well as time consuming in practice.  However, knowing who your students are is the first step to forgiving their digressions. We must be responsible for knowing them first and then showing them the right way second.

Ultimately, teachers have little choice if they want to be successful and happy within their chosen career.  Those misfits and management nightmares are coming back to our classroom whether we like it or not.  We can choose to accept them for being imperfect beings with the potential for unimaginable growth or we can write them off forever.  In my second year of teaching, I am not so naive to think that every student can be saved or helped.  Some may be so far along a path of destruction that their eventual demise is only a matter of time.  It is important though that it is not teachers that make this decision.  We are not the judges of who should be given the best education available and who should not.  The forgiving teacher gives every student a chance to succeed regardless of how badly they have erred in the past for they understand that the future is unknowable.

     

A student of mine decided one afternoon that the best action to take when she was upset was to clearly communicate a melody of colorful and vindictive language not often found in school settings.  This in front of an entire class of silent young writers.  She spoke with vigour about how she “didn’t care about [me] or anyone in this school” and she certainly didn’t care what we said or thought.  As she yelled, she stormed out of the classroom with an anger that spoke louder than her words.  

And then when she returned to school, she eventually made her way to my class.  Though I cannot control whether she or students like her came back or not, I possess control over my attitude on how I am going to treat this student as all teachers do.  I welcomed her back into my space after she acted in a way that was completely against every aspect of common decency essential to the safe and supportive classroom environment that I work so hard to create on a daily basis.  

There was no “thank you.”  She showed no obvious appreciation.  Yet, here she was, back in class and I forgave her. 

--AN

Writing Club

Writing Club...writing club…Writing Club….

“Man go fuck your room Mr. Newman.” that is the sound of a once improving but now backtracking relationship. I’m not going to write this kid up.  He gets written up too much and it doesn’t do anything.  Consider this my documentation.    

“I fail at everything Mr. Newman.” That is the sound of a young person with no hope in himself.  

“Is that your version of not giving up Mr. Newman?” That is the sound of a student correctly calling me out on my bullshit.  

“Sit down!” That is the sound of me yelling at a kid who was getting a tissue out of a tissue box.

“...........” That’s the sound of me trying to gain my cool back.  Breathe in, breathe out.  In the through the nose, out through the mouth.”  

“Meeting got cancelled, the parent couldn’t make it in.”  That is the sound of putting off a gathering of a village that might have helped a student succeed.  Maybe not.  

“Sign here please and don’t forget to take your pencils.”  That is the sound of standardized testing.  

“Close those chromebooks while I’m up here talking.”  That is the sound of desperate classroom management.

“This isn’t important for us to know at all.”  This is the sound of a failed delivery of an actually crucial concept or a student that just doesn’t give a shit.  It’s hard to say which is worse.

“Every year, there are only so many students that you can help.”  That is the sound of sage truth.  

“You’re making a difference in that kids life.”  That is the sound of support, friendship, happiness.”  

“That was a great moment for me.”  This is the sound of a retiring teacher realizing the future.  

“How do I get on the soccer team?”  That is the sound of a student that maybe isn’t a lost soul like his grandma said but a soul searching for some meaning.  

Growth Seminar

On a recent post, I attached a link to a video entitled Understanding Talent.  The video is a short animation that describes how people develop talent in a variety of things.  It focused specifically on athletics.  However, the message should be applied to any and all skills that a person wants to develop.  The science shows that talent is something that is developed through hard work and is in no way intrinsic to certain individuals.  Nobody is born to play basketball.  There is no gene for basketball talent.  Those that make it to the top of the basketball world were able to hone their skills through hard work and not some magical stroke of luck that gave them that talent.  

Earlier today, I listened to an episode of This American Life, a WBEZ radio magazine style show hosted by Ira Glass, that focused on a book by Paul Tough called How Children Succeed: Grit, Personality and the Hidden Power of Character.  The theme of the episode entitled Back to School examined the age old question about what students should and should not be learning in school.  Through a series of stories and interviews directly with Tough, one theme was that schools are not focusing enough on teaching students the “noncognitive skills” also known as social skills that truly help people succeed throughout life.

At the beginning of the episode, Glass features a long term study by Nobel Prize winning economist James Heckmen which compared those that simply that dropped out of high school and those that completed high school in the traditional four year manner.  He found that those individuals that achieved high school credit through the GED were not nearly as successful in a variety of ways throughout life including job performance, money earned, college success and quality of marriage when compared with those went through the much longer route of four years of high school.  Heckmen discusses that the GED is established to show that a person who passes this test possesses the same amount of cognitive ability(traditional school skills) that everyone must have to pass high school.  He concludes that the reason for this difference in so many life outcomes is while in school for the thousands of hours over four years required to graduate from high school, students develop a wide variety of other skills that contribute to success throughout their entire life.  These are the qualities that are truly important for someone to learn in high school and not the math or reading skills that we often think are the heart of a child’s education.

After this moment in the show, I was both relieved and troubled.  I was relieved because it gave me a sense of satisfaction that school is in some way important in a person’s life, even if it has little to do with the cognitive skills that they learn.  There was a moment when I thought that Glass was going to reveal that in fact those that took the much less demanding, in terms of hours, GED would do just as well throughout life.  As a teacher, I dedicate my life to the success of children and knowing that there is clear value for students to be in school makes me want to work harder.  However, what troubled me was the fact that nowhere in the curriculum of my school district and I’m guess most others is there a focus on the social skills such as grit, self-control or optimism that are clearly crucial for a person’s ability to succeed both in school but throughout his or her entire life.

When students enter high school in my district, they take a class called “Freshmen Seminar.”  Though I must admit I’ve never seen a syllabus, I’m guessing that it focuses a lot on how incoming freshmen can achieve and gives strategies to reach graduation in four years.  One idea that I know that they talk about is the Growth Mindset.  Students learn what a Growth Mindset is and why it is so important.  They are shown that with grit and determination, they can learn almost anything that they put their mind to.  

My question as a middle school teacher is why are we waiting so long to send this message and what can we do at the younger levels to promote similar ideas?  We spend so much time focusing on traditional curriculums such as Reading, Writing, Math, Science, and Social Studies. At what point are noncognitive abilities developed for all of our students?  There is AVID, a program for students that help them to develop the academic skills necessary to go to college, but this is not something that is offered to all students.  The noncognitive skills, Paul Tough pointed out based on his analysis of current research, are the skills that people have the most potential to improve throughout their life times.  

When listening to the This American Life episode, I found myself thinking about so many of my students that struggle to control themselves, have behavior and emotional problems and cannot find success in the classroom.  Glass interviewed researchers that discussed what early childhood stress does to a person’s capacity to learn and how that impacts their actions within a traditional classroom setting.  Without knowing the details, I am sure that one too many of my students experience the type of hardship every day that would cause their brains to be unable develop naturally.  As a school system, we must do more for all of our students to learn how to learn and how to develop the personality traits that help to overcome those hardships.  What I am advocating for is more of a focus at the younger levels of a child’s education in developing social skills that will be invaluable throughout a lifetime.  Research shows that if a person understands how skill develops and that talent is in no way natural that he or she is more likely to give greater effort because they believe that those skills are indeed possible for them to learn and not some luck of the draw talent distributed at birth.  What if every 6th grader took a Growth Seminar when entering middle school?  This would be more than just a two week introduction but a class that they went to every single day.   What if instead of reading and math intervention classes established to improve scores on standardized tests, we helped students with developing the essential social skills Tough and so many others in the educational research community advocate?

Change is happening in the educational world but like all change, it is slow.  First it takes academics to share their research, followed by policy change and then finally it makes its way to down to the school districts and the schools.  The road is long and is filled with thorny obstacles much of which unfortunately comes in the form of dollars and private interests.  However, sharing this kind of information at the grassroots level is an important part of change.  Those in positions of power within school districts must begin to see the value in helping our students develop as complete human beings and not simply focus on one aspect of their development. Once they do, our curriculums will begin to reflect the type of complete education that will help young people in every aspect of their lives and not just on challenges that require academic knowledge.  Consider this post part of that grassroots change.  Now I just need to gain an audience.   

               

The Cheerleader Coach

This post answers one of the questions from the book How Would You Handle It?: Questions For Teachers to Ask Themselves by Aaron S. Podolner.  The book promotes increasing the self-awareness of teachers by answering tough questions in order to improve their educational practice.  

  

Are you meant to be a teacher?  Why do you think that you are?

The first time I taught was as a volleyball coach.  Much of who I am today as a teacher in the classroom is because of the coach that I became early on.  In my first couple of years, a lot of people would make references to me as a “cheerleader” or define my style as  “cheerleaderish.”  This comparison always bugged me.  I have nothing against cheerleaders but my definition of coaching was so much more than this simple generalization.  A coach is a role model, an advisor, a mentor, and a strategist.  A coach is a leader with the goal of transforming a group of individuals into a fully functioning and high performing team.  A coach is a key part of my identity.  It is an honorable title, yet here I was in my first couple of years compared with a group of screaming girls on the sidelines of a high school football game.  Cheerleaders don't even watch the game but rather focus their attention on the crowd.  People did not mean the comparison maliciously but were simply remarking upon a clear observation.  Who could blame them?  There were many comparisons to be made.  However, I wanted to be so much more than that and mentally rejected any sort of association with such a thing as a cheerleader.  

I’ve grown immensely since my first year as a coach.  Over time I came to acknowledge the fact that I was a cheerleader-coach early on and I still am today.  In many ways, I always knew this but it took time for me to be comfortable enough in my own skin to admit to it.  When my team finds success, I am celebrating in a stream of pure joy and unadulterated enthusiasm.  Early on, when my team would be doing well, I’d be jumping up and down and encouraging them from the sideline.  When we struggled, I would work hard to corral them or search for some way to motivate them.  I was intense.  I was full of energy.  At best, I possessed an above average understanding of the game and let my personality do the rest.  I am still all of those of those things today but with a good degree more experience to go along with it.  

The bedrock of that personality is my positive attitude.  Early on, I knew that this was my greatest strength.  It is the characteristic that not only do I think defines me most clearly but is also the one I work the hardest to protect as well as to improve.  Those that study personality psychology debate over whether people are who they are because that is the way they were born or because they chose to be a certain way.  My guess is that it is a little bit of both.  I have a positive self image when it comes to my own optimistic attitude of which I’m not exactly sure when or how it started.  In addition, I make a conscious effort to choose that perspective in almost every situation I encounter.  

 

Though I didn’t appreciate the association with cheerleaders, I did enjoy much of the other praise I received.  People would come up to me at tournaments, people that I had never met and who supported other clubs, to say how much they enjoyed watching me coach.  They appreciated my passion for the game and how I worked with young people.  I would pass these complements off modestly but I’d be lying if they didn’t make me feel some sense of success on the sidelines.  My teams, while not the most successful or the most impressive in terms of wins, always played hard and seemed to enjoy themselves.  It’s hard to say whether this was luck or because of something that I was doing.  I suspect a little bit of both.  

As I grew older though and gained experience, I calmed down on the sideline.  This was as much a purposeful change as a natural progression.  I attribute this calm to a few things.  First, I began to gain more knowledge about the game of volleyball, coaching and most importantly decision making.  It became clear to me that in order for me to start making better decisions on the court, my emotions would need to be controlled to some degree during the game.  Through observing some of the great coaches of sports, calmness under pressure seems to be a characteristic of so many of the best: Phill Jackson, Anson Dorance, Russ Rose and John Wooden.  All of these men stayed calm, communicated clearly with their teams and possessed the clarity of mind to make important decisions during moments of intensity.  This truth was supplemented by all of the reading I’ve done on coaching, leadership and psychology.  Popular psychology author’s such as Malcolm Gladwell and Jonah Lehrer write extensively about all of the research that shows human decision making ability decreases when the body is over-stressed.  There reaches a point in which the body begins to shut down sensory systems and neural pathways when stress becomes too high.  I doubt I’ve ever gotten that worked up on the sidelines but it became clear that if I was going to analyze the game on a higher level, I needed to relax.

This calm also came out of the roles that I played early on.  As an assistant coach, I was forced to take a back seat during matches.  It is actually illegal in Illinois high school volleyball for more than two coaches to stand at the same time. My role during matches was to analyze the serve receive offense of our opponents and anything else about them that could be used to our advantage from in-match observations.  I took notes on each play, charted attack routes and as we progressed through the game was able to make predictions based on the small sample size of information received in a short amount of time.  One reason why I was able to do this was the simple fact that I was sitting down.  I sat down and I watched the other side closely.  Though I did get emotional at times when the game was exciting or close, I was always able to refocus on the opponent and make better judgements than I ever felt I could make.  Assistant coaching helped to relax me as a head coach.  It was a combination of the experience gained, the knowledge learned and the realization that I could influence the game in a very positive way without jumping up and down on the sideline.  One can only sustain that type of energy for a limited time.

Finally, I began to take stats using my iPad from the sideline.  With such an expensive piece of technology in my hands(usually just one) during matches, I could not get as excited as I previously did.  I’m heading into my third season with the same iPad I started with and much of this is because of the fact that I was able to stay cool under pressure and keep both hands safely on the device.   

What became clear was that being a cheerleader coach is in some ways what all good coaches are to a certain extent(though in vastly different ways).  Cheerleaders are the ones that have the organization to get people to do what they do better and with more intensity.  They can motivate the team to play harder or the crowd to root louder in order to accomplish a goal embraced by everyone.  They are always there for a team, encouraging them even in the face of utter defeat and they never lose hope that there is some way that we can turn it around.  Do cheerleaders make tough decisions and provide strategy for the team?  No, of course they don’t.  Yet, I genuinely believe that the most crucial attribute for a coach is that they care about the success of those they are coaching and that is exactly what a cheerleader provides.

My greatest strength as a coach and a teacher, the reason why I was meant to be a teacher, is my ability to encourage and stay positive even in the face of defeat.  Great coaches and teachers have the ability to help their students grow.  They help them to gain skills in their subject but more often than not they help them to grow as individuals.  Growing and learning is tough business.  It causes people to give up what they love and to doubt themselves.  I wouldn’t trade my ability to motivate, to connect, to make kids want to work harder, to see the value in struggling to improve for all of the strategy and decision making in the world.  

My goal is always to grow as a teacher and coach in order to develop all of the aspects that are involved in such a role including my understanding of the game and by ability to make thoughtful decisions based on those understandings.  I must continually remind myself that I am still very young and inexperienced.  It’s hard to say whether I was born with a positive attitude or if the summation of my experiences brought me to this point.  At this point, does it really matter?  What I do know is that I’ve used this outlook to shape every interaction and decision that I’ve made from the beginning.  It shapes the way that I interact with kids, design practice/lessons and carry myself as a coach, as a teacher and as a leader.  The decision making will come as I gain more experience and confidence in myself.  Learning to control my emotions as a coach has helped me greatly in classroom.  Patience is a virtue of mine that is tested every day at school and something I am continuing to develop.  Ultimately, I was meant to be a teacher because I believe that people have the innate ability to grow in anything that they put their mind to.  It provides me incredible happiness to not only watch the process happen but to be a part of such a transformational experience.       

Understanding Talent

This is a video that I plan to share with the volleyball team that I coach.  In order for us to be successful, it is important that my athletes understand where exactly talent comes from.  Ability is not something that you are born with but something that you work towards and develop.  The clip stresses the importance of young athletes understanding this concept in order to experience growth.  By not challenging themselves in order to always be successful, students will never be as good as they can be.

See The Talent Code if you're interested in some of the science about talent development.

Enjoy the day,

Alan

Concentrated Fires

All I know is that I want to write a blog.

My name is Alan Newman. I want to be a writer. I teach writing in a middle school but I have never considered myself a writer. It is time that I begin to share my voice and record my thoughts for the world. If you are reading this blog, I thank you. I will try not to waste your time.

This space is going to be called “Hearts of Their Youth on Flame.” The title is inspired from a speech called, “The American Scholar,” given by Ralph Waldo Emerson to a group of Harvard freshmen in their first days of school. After awing in the power of his words, I often wonder about the young students that listened to this speech when it was first given. They were only eighteen after all and probably did not realize that what they listened to that afternoon would become one of the most famous pieces of texts of an entire movement in American writing as well as philosophy. How could they possibly have appreciated the gravity of the situation? They probably were bored, hot and wanted to go enjoy their newly found independence. The last thing that they wanted to do was sit in a crammed hall listening to some professor drone on about thinking freely and independently for over an hour. They wanted to get the party started. I can relate to Emerson, for such is the battle that every educator faces. Every teacher possesses an important message but how they communicate that message to the youth separates the good from the great.

Whether or not his audience was engaged in his oration, Emerson knew what he was talking about and his thoughts on the experience of the Scholar are as true today as they were when he first gave the speech in 1837. I feel obliged to share the passage in which the title of this blog is inspired:

Of course, there is a portion of reading quite indispensable to a wise man. History and exact science he must learn by laborious reading. Colleges, in like manner, have their indispensable office, — to teach elements. But they can only highly serve us, when they aim not to drill, but to create; when they gather from far every ray of various genius to their hospitable halls, and, by the concentrated fires, set the hearts of their youth on flame. Thought and knowledge are natures in which apparatus and pretension avail nothing. Gowns, and pecuniary foundations, though of towns of gold, can never countervail the least sentence or syllable of wit. Forget this, and our American colleges will recede in their public importance, whilst they grow richer every year.

Here, Emerson makes it clear that it is the responsibility of schools to inspire students. This belief is one that I take with me to the classroom every day. Schools must foster a life long love for learning and create an environment that fosters creativity in it’s highest form. Of course, there are endless factors that I cannot control as a teacher. But I can work hard to set the hearts of my students on flame. Though I can’t say that I know how to do that just yet, I promise that it is my number one goal and something that I think about every single day. How can I inspire my students? How can I get them to think independently and creatively? How can I get them excited to come to class and learn each day? How can I build concentrated fires?

These are some ideas that I hope to explore with you in future posts. The purpose my writing in this space is to explore the very nature of motivation and fostering creativity among the youth.

Enjoy the day,

Alan