First off, I was never really a reader, especially not poetry or prose, so I am not going to try to pretend that I can speak with any degree of expertise on the writing acumen of Maya Angelou.  I am bringing up Maya Angelou largely because of what she means about teaching and working with students in general.  She obviously has meant a great deal to the teachers and professors of the English language, but I can’t really speak to that.  Her passing led me to think  a number of specific thoughts, and I wanted to get them out here.

What if Maya Angelou was a K-12 teacher?

Maya Angelou lived a life of various roles, but the more recent role that she played was as a teacher.  In fact, she was scheduled to teach a class this fall at Wake Forest University, where Angelou has been a professor for over 20 years, all during a part of her life where most people could have been retired.  In a district where myself and other teachers are currently counting pennies and percentages surrounding their next contract it is interesting to think that someone with such talent and ability would spend her final years working to teach others.
Here’s an interesting thought, what if this quote had taken place, and if Maya Angelou lived her entire life as a teacher.

If I had taught before I started writing books, I might have never written a book. – Maya Angelou

She may not have provided the world with her books, but she would still have an impact.  Angelou would have touched a great many number of people, and those people would have taken her lessons forward, and so on.  Could Angleou the full-time teacher have had the same impact on the world throughout her 86 years, as the poet/writer Angelou?  That’s a good question.  And I think she might have.  If she had, would our current K-12 school system be able to support her in making the most impact?  I worry that our schools are too tied to bureaucracy and regulations to help an insanely talented person like Angelou do their best work, but I think it’s possible for there to be one school somewhere that she could have made a tremendous difference.

 How would Maya Angelou work with students?

Reading the news of Angelou’s passing led me to episode of the show Iconoclast where she was featured.  This show takes two people who are a famous and lets them converse with each other while the cameras merely record their interaction.  This episode pairs Maya Angelou, the award-winning poet, with Dave Chappelle, the “Rick James” guy.

There is also a part two, part three, and part four of this episode.

The whole show is interesting, though it mostly centers around Chappelle, but interaction between the pair in the show gave me some insight into what she must have been like as a teacher.  When you watch the show, you can imagine Chappelle coming into talk with Mrs. Angelou at lunch time.  Chappelle needed to talk.  At this point in his life, he just turned away from a 50 million dollar deal and disappeared from the entertainment circuit, and was looking for general guidance.  Some kids in my class now are in a similar state mentally (if not financially) to where he was at that time, and they need guidance just as badly.

Maybe I am reading too much into this video, but I think this whole episode showcases Angelou building a relationship with Chappelle, listening to his concerns, and trying to give him very good guidance despite having only limited information.  As a teacher, I look at the discussion segments in this session as an ideal scenario of how my interactions with students could be someday.  Yes, I understand that she is insanely wise, and speaks so eloquently that everyone listening to her walks away changed, and she is really good with words, so it won’t be easy.  However, as a teacher watching the final 3 minutes of part three, you have to aspire to have the ability to help kids have such profound insights. But if you watch the final sequence of Dave Chappelle travelling away deep in thought, you can see there are so many wheels turning so deeply in his head that he doesn’t even care that a camera is pointed at his face.  I wish I could have that effect with students, even if it is largely unattainable.  She tells one story about how she made an angry swearing Tupac Shakur and talked to him until he started crying and had to call his mom.  Who wouldn’t want to be able to do that?

What if all our students are future Nobel laureates?

During the first part of part three, Maya Angelou recalled a story harrowing story about here life.  The story began when she was a seven year old visiting her family in St. Louis:

I was there a couple of months when my mother’s boyfriend raped me.  The man was put in jail for one day, and night, and released.  When police came to my grandmothers house, they came and they told her that the man had beeen found dead and it seemed he was kicked to death.

They said that within my hearing.

I decided that my voice had killed a man, so I wouldn’t speak.  I spent six years of my life as a mute, and words became very important to me.

This story of Maya Angelou’s rape sounds like a horrible thing, let alone to then grapple with the knowledge that someone was essentially murdered on your behalf.  With such a terrible event, it makes plenty of sense why she would become mute.  It took her six years to gain the courage to speak again, but learning that courage helped her develop her appreciation for the english language.  It must have been very difficult for her teachers to work with a kid who couldn’t speak.  What about the kids in your class who aren’t sharing, aren’t trying, or aren’t coming to class at all, and thinking about all of the things that they must be going through.  Are those students going to be given the space and the support they need to work through whatever is going on with them?  It seems like our job is to treat those students not as wayward sheep, but as the next Maya Angelou.

These are just a couple of thoughts I had immediately after hearing the news of her passing, but I would be intersted to hear what other people thought.  If you want to hear more, there are some videos on the Wake Foreset Maya Angelou Rememberance page, including an interview with MSNBC anchor and a former student Mellisa Harris-Perry

Well, I guess I can’t hide any more. I gave it a good shot. Heck, I’m actually still proud of myself. But it seems at this point that I failed at the 30 day blog post challenge. Failure may be a bit of a strong word, but I am a bigger fan of trying than I am of staying safe, so I’m comfortable saying I failed.   If you can look back at what you learned in the process, then failure isn’t really failure, just a stepping stone to move you forward.  What I was hoping to learn from the 30 day challenge was how to overcome the inner critic and discover my voice as a reflective teacher, and I certainly took some strong steps toward that goal. These steps will continue as I hope to go at least 5-days a week until the end of the school year in my own little “March to June 27th” campaign. Here’s to more steps forward!

What I’m teaching this week:

I’m getting kids ready for their portfolio presentations coming up in mid June, which means things are about to GET REAL. I’m going to start getting into performance coach mode as kids are starting to self-sabotage in a bunch of ways. While standardized tests don’t plague the students until the end of the cycle, the lower stress of our performance based assessments hits students earlier, and sustains itself longer. It’s my job to help my advisees and my students manage the stress (kind of like the dams from the Paul Tough book.

In addition to emotional support, I’ll be helping students with their final project in Banking and Investment, and Equations and Patterns.

What I’m blogging this week:

After I launch the project, I’m going to post up some of the ideas here. I also want to put up a post detailing some of the interesting things I’ve read around the the blogosphere, which I’ve been meaning to do since last week.  I think part of me feels like I can’t write anything because I haven’t yet read all of the blogs (my brain is weird). I will also do a post about my evolving productivity system, as I am probably going to need to make some changes to my evernote system.

What I’m thinking this week:

The end of the year can be depressing for teachers. As the end of another year approaches, all the half-finished initiatives and un-met goals become heavy burdens. These burdens can fuel last minute feats of fury, where you teach your kids that STEM unit you’ve been shelving, hammer through a lesson study with your department, and and finally get those papers back to the kids with time for them act on it! All these can wear you out.  You can also wear yourself out by simply coming to terms with the fact that you didn’t meet your expectations.  You’re human, and thus you have dreams and ambition.  Your dreams can can lift you up, but also pull you down when they go unrealized.

If this year has left you in a dark place, take a second and list out all the things that you are proud of that happened during the year. Include big and little things, completed things as well as things that only got halfway started. You’ll probably find that a lot more stuff happened this year than you previously thought about, and that the next step forward might not be to manically shove more things in during the final weeks, or to feel bad about yourself, but to reflect back with others about how to build on the successes of the year that passed.

This week’s department meeting I was asked to bring one of the things I am doing in my classes, and after some deliberation I decided to bring the thing I was debating about scrapping only a week earlier.  I brought the game I tried with my students to help them understand the development of a modern economy. I’ve called the game Dunshire Abbey, and so far it has required a lot of pushing.  To finish this class with an exploration of a firms supply curve, and talk about the math and the economics around the concept, I was worried I was going to scrap my ideas for the project.  After talking about the game with my co-workers I have a much clearer idea of how I can get students to understand the concepts and experiment with them in the game as part of the final project.

What is the game about?

The basic gist of the game in my head was as follows.  Students begin as villagers in a town where the people are just slightly more advanced than hunter-gatherer.  The different phases of the games would compound on each other, so early stages of the game would use “commodity money” and bartering, later stages of the game would depend on “fiat money” and market-based pricing.  The final project would involve students working individually to run a modern company as they decide how to produce goods and make a profit.  This is, of course, in my head.  What actually was happening was that we were not iterating through the earlier stages of the economy and now there might not be time to get to modern times.

Boiling it down to what’s important

After laying all of my ideas out for the department, and ignoring the initial feelings of embarrassment, I felt immediately better about the project. My co-workers asked questions which reflected back my assumptions, pointed me towards what the major goal was, and helped give me directions on how to get there.  In my head I was really focused on having this large connected game with a complex narrative full of historical significance.  What really matters was if the students were learning the information they needed to finish the project at the end.  Once my colleague’s helped me realize this, my thinking about the project kind of “unlocked”.

During my next class I jumped straight into the terminology of modern perfectly competitive markets with a lesson that was a little less interactive than I would have liked.  Students were briefed about the knowledge that we would have developed in the game over the next few weeks so we essentially skipped those concepts.  Each student individually, and not in groups, is the owner of a modern firm and has to make a profit.  We then spent a day looking at the relationships between costs, price, revenue and profits and the context of the market in regards to the game.  Next week we can add variability to the game when students have to respond to a “Chance” card that has different economic realities, including some of the ideas that we couldn’t fit in earlier.  Finally they will have to show with graphs and in writing how the reality will affect their companies ability to make a profit.

Making the shift

After the conversation about the project I had a mental shift where it felt like my thinking was “unlocked,” and I didn’t even know it was locked!  The best part the whole my mental shift was that the Math department really didn’t have to know anything special about my topic in order to help.  I am the only person in the department who took considerable economics in college, (although one guy was a stock broker), but the familiarity with the content area really isn’t what was helpful.  They were able to listen to what I was saying and repeat it back to me with questions that prompted me to push my thinking.  In that regard just about any thoughtful person could have helped me.  Just about any teacher may have been able to help me.  The sad part is, were I not required to present something to department I wouldn’t have asked.  The minutes before the presentation I almost brought up a more “polished’ product in an attempt to impress my colleagues rather than open up my process to them.  It is hard to open up, even if it is good for you.

When was the last time you opened up you teaching to people in your school for ideas?  Did you have similar results?

22/34 #MTBoS30

I’ve used Evernote for the past 3 years as a way to get organized.  After I had a large pile of notes things got hard to read and confusing.  To deal with it I have developed a huge set of notebooks that basically serve as a filing cabinet for my idle thoughts.  Since I saw a few people in the #MTBoS talking about Evernote (and I needed to get a post up) I figured I would detail my approach.

Mind Like Water

My original interest in Evernote came after I listened to an audio version of the book Getting Things Done by David Allen.  This book was once insanely popular and is certainly a must read for anyone tired of swimming in half-finished tasks.  I am certainly not an expert in GTD, but I would say you first capture your ideas, then review your ideas them regularly, then set up a sequence of next steps, and then carry those steps out.  If done well, you’ll achieve this “Mind Like Water” state, where you don’t have to worry about what’s next.  It’s sounds pretty cool, or at least it sounds cool if you hear it from the author, David Allen.

GTD has probably crested in popularity, so there is not a lot of new information out there, but there are still plenty of podcasts, blogposts, and online guides that can teach you more about it.

Wait, what does this have to do with Evernote?

Right! So back to Evernote.  I came across Evernote as I was looking for a tool to implement GTD.  One of the cool things about GTD is that it doesn’t have a whole suite of products, refillable binders, and subscription-based apps that you need to use to get it to work.  Naurally, one of the downsides of GTD is that it is completely up to you to piece together apps in order to get it to work.  After I read the book I went through a whole bunch of different on line to-do lists and productivity suites, even some paid ones, but didn’t see anything that felt comfortable.  The strategy that I came across was inspired by THE SECRET WEAPON, a quick, free guide to using Evernote as the central app for GTD.  With it, I am able to to quickly catch any stray thought I may have and put it in a place that I can act on it later.

Craploads Of Notebook

Here is my strategy in a nutshell.

1. Create an “!N” box notebook – In my Evernote I made a new notebook and called it !N.  I started it with a “!” because the exclamation point will make it rise to the top of the all the other notebooks when sorted alphabetically.  Also, go in to the ‘Properties’ and make this your default notebook so everything goes there.
2. Create notebooks for all of your projects – All the things that holding real estate in your brain, make a notebook.  If you need to keep track of next steps, make a notebook.  If it’s a goal you want to reach, make a notebook.
3. Group similar notebooks into stacks – To make your Evernote easy to navigate I’ve had a lot of success with putting things in stacks.  I put the each stack in all caps so they are easy to distinguish.  I also highly recommend making an “Archive” stack so that it can hold projects that are ‘Closed.’
4. Use it!  – Now you have it all set up start jotting things down. This could be future blog posts, songs you want to download later, names of people who you need to send thank you notes, a detailed plan of your new million dollar venture, whatever!
   On a weekly basis, go through your !N box and make a decision on the items you put in your box.  You’ll usually decide one of 3 things.  a) It’s important and I can act on it right now b) It’s important and I will act on it at a time and place (then you put it in your calendar) c)It’s important for reference and I can store it the appropriate notebook. For things that have next steps, you can tag the note to remind yourself, I use the tag “@NA.” A simple search for the “@NA” tag brings up a to do list from across each of the different project notebooks.

That’s what I do, or at least what I try to do.  What do you guys do with Evernote? How do you stay organized?

21/33 #MTBoS30