No Matter, There

I haven’t taken the time to blog this week. I’ve been busy exploring, having conversations with colleagues, and trying to answer a question.
Here are some highlights of what I have been doing lately.

• I was really excited by Christian Long’s manifesto, and his call for others to join him. I emailed him an idea I had and was pleased with his quick response, which challenged me to take it a bit deeper with my kids. I shared the manifesto idea with another teacher, and we puzzled about how best to use it. At the end of each school year, our Middle School Language Arts teacher asks her students to write a reflective essay about their learning during the past school year. It may be that she will add a beginning of the year manifesto piece.

• I changed my work schedule to allow for a chance to work with a teacher who is beginning two projects I want to support. (Think about the excitement she’s engendered in me to get me to propose that, and the flexibility of my school to allow the mid-year schedule change). Having successfully negotiated trades in recess duties and planning time periods, I now have a different day off (I’m 4/5 time).

• I got severely motion sick from flying too fast while exploring 2d life (I’m still on welcome island)! It lasted for quite a while, and really disappointed me.

• Partook in a most wonderful educational experience as a chaperone on a field trip to the National Liberty Museum in Philadelphia. The values and message were wonderful (the students were led to examine perspective, diversity, peace, and communication through metaphor and art and then to relate what they learned to present-day reality). The students loved the experience. My son said that he learned how powerful words were.

• Christian Long (how does he find the time?) emailed me a response to an email I sent, after he looked at our older watershed web page, and wondered whether I’d be using Google Earth to update the new data and maps. Good question! It’s been a while since I used Google Earth, and I wonder if they have more features to investigate. Last time, our area had very little focus in the images (not many satellites focus on us, I’ll bet). Another thing for my to-do list!

The question: a colleague asked “How do you deal with all of this? Aren’t you overwhelmed by all of the great stuff out there that you find out about from sharing on the web? How do you not get overwhelmed?” (As I was handing her a printout I thought she’d like to know about.)

I began answering with advice Will Richardson gave at the workshop I attended: pick one thing to start with. He was talking about the tools, and modeling their use. He also talked about the power of blogging and how he’s changed the way he reads in order to process all there is out there. Then, I thought about other discussions that I’ve read recently. About my flying too fast in Second Life. About a teacher, showing us the instructional model that she keeps pinned up on her wall, reminding her of what it looks like when it “works”–when things go well. Some big projects I’ve signed on to help with involving watershed studies, solar power, wiki and web page design. And I began getting a bit dizzy again, myself.

Sunday afternoon I got a big chunk of the answer. I attended a discussion about how my school attempts to incorporate our Quaker values. One teacher mentioned a sense of being aware that she and her students are choosing only a percentage of anything to cover (in history, science, etc.), of needing to teach both how to learn and how to get others to teach you, as our students move on from our school and seek out their own further education in high school and beyond. Example after example featured cross team collaboration, among teachers and between students of various ages. When asked how the wonderful collaboration we do as a faculty gets coordinated, the teachers talked about planning time, rearranging schedules, grabbing conversations and snatches in the hallway or bathroom, that help us all take advantage of opportunities – because we are all aware of and we have a sense of our traveling along this journey together. That our guiding mission and principles mean that when one teacher approaches another and says “You know, I forgot to tell you that we have this wonderful speaker/performer coming in to the my classroom today, and you might want to bring your students because we’ll be talking about ….” the other teacher is likely to say “okay!” and make the schedule work around it, because both teachers in that conversation have a sense of working toward some common mission together.

We’ve had a year of difficult times, personal tragedies suffered by some of our teachers and students, shared burdens that we all found heavy, and some uncomfortable conflicts in attitudes. It’s been a long, full winter. We have missed the chance to gather as a community in celebration of what we are. We have gathered to mourn, we have gathered to react, we have gathered to do good deeds within our community. What really had been missing for that teacher who asked, and for me, was the chance to stop and affirm that sense of being part of something big, the shared values and goals, and to share our success stories with each other, a chance to take stock and see that we are indeed, on a wonderful journey.

Sunday afternoon’s conversations were a chance for teachers to explain to others in the school community our shared mission, our Quaker values, and how they play out in our actions and what we attempt to do at the school. It wound up being a wonderfully affirming experience for us as teachers to be able to share what it is that we are doing, and where we think we are heading.

We need to let the Light within our school shine, and to give ourselves time to celebrate it. As a Quaker teacher, I need to “walk the talk;” I need to demonstrate my belief through my actions. And, I need to learn how to fly a little slower.

Filed under: My Middle School Tech Class, Tech Among Teachers and