Away from my Desk

OK, now there's a LOT to write about, and it's 12:37 PM (I just got back from Rosas y Xocolate's rooftop bar, where I briefly sat in with a jazz trio, so the evening got late).

The day started at Rosas y Xocolate too, because it's just down the street from us and they did a great breakfast (I had poached eggs and fried bananas with curry sauce). 

After breakfast, we caught a cab to Habla.

Workshop 1: The Sound of Light (11:00-2:00) (led by Dario and Kurt)

You can read Arnie Aprill's write-up of this workshop (with lots of photos) here.

We started by going into the gallery space and standing in a circle. 

Everybody walked to a different spot in the circle (silently) while Kurt counted to ten, then again while he counted to seven. Between place, changing, Kurt asked us to check the circle and make sure that it was maintaining its shape and not flattening out on particular sides. 

Next (still in a circle) Kurt had us all jump "as high as you can" at the same time, without speaking to each other. He told us to be still for a little bit before we jumped. After the jump, he asked everyone to point to "who started it". Ideally, we would all be pointing in different directions. We jumped a few times - sometimes there was one clear leader (though they didn't necessarily realize they had instigate the jump), other times we really were pointing all over the place. When it worked really well, everyone was beginning to tense up to jump, and one person's tension went infinitesimally towards a crouch, which triggered several others to crouch more, and then we all went. 

Then it was "bumper cars". We counted off by twos (still in a circle). "Twos" shut their eyes and  crossed their arms in front of them, elbows jutting out protectively from the chest. Their task was to walk across the circle, eyes shut, to a different spot. Ones kept their eyes open. Their job was to gently shift the Twos so that they didn't crash into each other, and so that they ended up in the perimeter of the circle, facing the center, at a different spot. Nobody was assigned a partner, we were all expected to look after everyone. After doing this, Kurt asked people what they were feeling, and got some responses.

This led to us pairing off with someone new, again with one person shutting their eyes. The other person led them around the room by  pushing gently at the center of the back (between the shoulder blades), or touching either shoulder blade. Somewhat counterintuitively (to my mind, anyway), when Kurt and Dario modeled this, touching the left shoulder meant that the "led" person shifted their shoulder back into the hand, thereby turning left (I would've thought the hand on the left shoulder was a "push" onto that shoulder, so it would actually make you turn right). Finally, if you took your hands off the person entirely, they needed to stop. We no longer had a goal for our journey, we were just encouraged to explore the space. Once both partners had been led, we did it again - this time with the freedom to lead however we wanted, within reason - by the hand, by the elbow, by both hands, so the leading took on an element of dance. In the final variation, we led our partner for a while, then indicated in some way that we were leaving, and left them standing alone, for someone else to pick up and lead. Kurt described the loneliness of an elderly architect who had been "left" for a long time when they did the workshop at Brown ten years ago, and reminded us to make sure everyone was looked after, and no-one was left. 

In retrospect, this feels like the point when the "warm-up" ended, and the workshop-specific work began, but that wasn't clear at the time. In any case, we returned to the circle and people talked about how they felt and what they noticed, both when being led and when leading. After that, we sat wherever we wanted and Dario led what I'd call a "listening meditation", listening first to our breath, then what was near to us, then to the entire room, then to everything outside, then back to the room, to what was near us, and to our breath. My mind was crammed with thoughts (among others, wondering how I was going to keep track of all the exercises we'd done and reflect on them) and I didn't feel like I ever really started listening. 

After chatting to a partner about our listening (or lack thereof), we returned to a circle, counted off by twos again, and the twos sat in a smaller concentric circle, while the ones stayed further out. Everyone shut their eyes, and the twos created an improvised sound piece by making whatever sound we wanted when Kurt tapped us once on the head, changing the sound when he tapped us once again, and then going silent when he tapped us twice. After that "conducted" piece, we did it again - this time with no "conducting". We were told to provide some silence, then start our piece. We could make any noise we wanted, change it at will, and stop it when the time seemed right. All the pieces we improvised were magical. 

At this point, we returned to the air-conditioned but acoustically problematic room, made groups of four or five (self-selected), then went outside to listen. Kurt told us when to start and when to stop listening, and gave us time to jot down what we heard in our notebooks. This was our first "text", (Kurt's word). In our groups, we used a collection of objects to recreate the soundscape we had just heard. We performed out composition for two other groups, who also performed theirs for us. 

Before we composed our piece, Kurt reminded us of the "jumping at the same time" game, and encouraged us to seek distributed leadership in our team. When we were composing our piece, I was reminded of the painful aspect of collaboration - especially with strangers - as I would see an idea begin to flower and then die of neglect in the general tumult of ideas, variously directed enthusiasms, and the critical work of projecting goodwill to the people we'll be spending the next week working with. The withering of neglected ideas is an inevitable byproduct of collaboration, but I always find it hard. I also find that I (increasingly consciously) decide where collaborations fit on a continuum of priority, between "make something really good" and "have a positive experience in a group". This act of triage has helped me to relax a lot in collaborations, and be a less obnoxious group member, because I'm able to tell myself things like "Hey, in this context we do not need to produce the platonic ideal of a pipe-cleaner animal circus," and relax into having a good time. And the work always ends up being good, and better for me having relinquished my role as self-appointed arbiter of quality. Although I also nearly always feel a sense of "why didn't I think to do that" competitiveness when I see the work that other groups produced.

What I'm trying to say is that I have developed a relaxed attitude to group work through force of will, which I suppose means I don't have a relaxed attitude to group work. 

The other interesting thing I was reminded about, working in the group, is that groups are nearly always composed of some people who prefer to carefully map out what they want to do before they do it, and people who want to do it and then figure out what they liked and didn't like about it. I tend to want to do whatever we're planning to do (my general attitude is that it's never to early for a first draft) and then discuss what we did. Lots of people, I've noticed, really don't want to "do the thing until they have a clear sense of what they want to do. I haven't heard this difference of approach acknowledged in groups before. I'd like to bring it up.

After that, we did our first "serious" reflection, a 3-2-1

Here's what I wrote:

Three thoughts

1. I want to make sure I remember these games
2. The games were purposeless, and as such, depended on our goodwill
3. There are some very dominant voices in the group - I'm curious to see how this dynamic develops over the week.

Two questions:

1. What additional steps would Kurt and Dario have included in the warm-ups if we weren't as receptive, mutually trusting, and/or as skilled at these kinds of physical games?
2. How far will goodwill and expectations get me with teenagers, weighed against their (justifiable) fear of losing face? What if we do something like the improvised soundscapes, and the first time we do it it isn't magical? If that happens, why would students want to give it a second try?

One analogy:

1. The process that we went through - of making yourself vulnerable, disconnecting from speech (and thereby rationality), and putting blind trust into other people - is the same process that indoctrinates people into cults. 

After a short break, our next text was Gabriel Garcia Marquez's short story, "Light is Like Water", from Strange Pilgrims. I read it in Spanish. I'm going to try to read everything in Spanish. It's a novel experience to read something that takes me our entire allotted time to read, and that I then only partially understood. It had a remarkably minimal impact on my ability to take part in the conversation, which took place in a trio and followed the "building conversation" protocol in which each of us spoke for a minute, with each minute building on what was said in the previous minute, then for three minutes we spoke together (with the only direction being that we not merely rehash what was said in the first three minutes). Full disclosure: after the discussion, I skimmed the English version of the short story. 

I should mention that the 3-2-1 and “building conversations” protocols, which I described in the previous post, come from Harvard’s Project Zero.

I should also mention that Kurt uses the term “thinking routines” instead of “protocols”. I’m going to try it. 

OK, it's 1:30. I will continue this tomorrow...

I'm only writing this post in order to start off on the right foot - there isn't much to tell. After meeting at Marisol's house at 6:45 AM to cross the border to Tijuana International Airport together,  we finally arrived at our hacienda in Merida at 10:15 at night. Even accounting for the two hours we lost between time zones, it was a long trip - most of it spent in Mexico City's airport on a layover.

But we're here! As promised, it's hot and humid (even at 10:15 at night). On the taxi ride in we saw lots of people out in the streets - I guess this is the nicest time to be out and about. The bathroom sink had a bug trapped in it, with an antenna-span of well over six inches. When I tried to capture it and take it outside, it escaped down the drainpipe. 

What else to tell? We've got a small but perfectly formed pool in the back, and I just took a dip. It's refreshing. Also, whoever is next door to us was playing pretty out-there jazz on their stereo. 

Tomorrow we'll be at our first pre-institute workshop, doing vocal improvisations. I'm nervous, I'm excited, and I'm wishing I'd spent more time reconstituting my Spanish before we flew here!

Tonight, a student hosted a screening of Miss Representation.

I left my notebook in my car so I ended up taking notes on a note-card. I want to record them more permanently before I lose the note card. 

My one big frustration with the film

Continually, throughout the film, different people talked about "The media" and how we live in a world driven by "The media", as if there is a monolithic entity called "The media". 

Media is a plural noun - the plural of "medium" - we forget this way too often. It's made up of lots and lots of people with lots and lots of goals, many of them competing. When we talk about "the media" it's easy to imagine it as a disembodied demonic force, but what we see on our computers, TVs, phones, magazines, etc. is the result of created by lots of people clustered together and collaborating in lots of ways. 

Legislations

First of all, a remarkable statistic: the US is ranked 90th in the world for proportion of the legislature that is female. 

• The film made the interesting leap that a lot of the most interesting and important legislation (especially socially-focused legislation) in the past few years has been spearheaded by women. What's a bit odd about this is that if it's the case, it's presumably the case because women are relatively disempowered, and so bring a perspective on what's important that reflects the experience of the (relatively powerless) majority, rather than the limited experience of the male elite. So, in an equal society, women would not be any better at coming up with legislation than men would be. However, this scenario doesn't look to be anything but hypothetical in the immediate future. 

An idea for an essential question

This one is a bit of a tangent from the film, but I thought "What is a citizen" would be a really interesting question to explore, and you could do a history week about the rights and responsibilities (and self-conceptions) of citizens of different civilizations, which you would (of course) present as a citizen, in costume. 

Eventually, this will be about teaching: specifically, reading and discussion

On a recommendation from a friend, I was listening to an episode of Dan Carlin's Common Sense podcast in the car yesterday. From what I gathered, the show consists entirely of Carlin's commentary on current events. He began the episode with a story in Newsweek about a demand by Rabbi Menachem Margolin, director general of the Rabbinical Centre of Europe (RCE), for all European governments to alter their gun laws so that Jews could legally carry guns, in order to protect themselves from terrorist attacks.

Carlin was presenting this as a case study about why European attitudes to guns are too rigid, and he was making a case that the right to protect yourself is a "human right". 

Now, on one level I just want to write a post about how wrongheaded Carlin's premise is, but I'm not going to write that blog post. All I'll say on this subject is that based on Rabbi Margolin's reasoning (that gun laws should be relaxed for groups of people who are in danger of attack based on their religion), then the only people in Europe who need this exemption more than Jews need it are Muslims, and I doubt Margolin would be receptive to a deal in which Jews & Muslims were both exempt from European gun laws.

OK, enough of that. I don't want to write my reaction to Carlin's argument - I want to write about my reaction to Carlin's argument. First, a confession: I turned it off before he was finished. I'm not proud of this, but I became aware that I was so frustrated by the podcast that it was ruining my mood, and I was on the way to visit a student at his internship site, so I didn't want to carry my frustration to my meeting with the student. Since then, I keep thinking about the podcast - so much so so that I brought it up with two different people afterwards. This got me thinking about why I was thinking about it so much, and here's what I think it boils down to:

I get incredibly frustrated by listening to an argument in which...

1. I care about what's being discussed
2. I'm unable to contribute, and
3. I can see an obvious point that is not being articulated

"Fauxthenticity"* is faux authenticity, specifically within project-based learning.

A fauxthentic project is one that looks profoundly authentic when summarized on a presentation slide at a conference, but which students experienced as being no more authentic than a book report. 

If you are a project-based teacher, you know what I'm talking about: projects that you meticulously designed, that engaged with big questions and issues relevant to students, that expanded their horizons into hitherto-unfamiliar areas of inquiry, but that somehow lost their spark in translation to your actual classroom and turned into a series of tasks that students executed more-or-less dutifully because you were their teacher and you told them to. 

To some extent, this describes every project I've ever done: there is always a point where I think "I'm sure this seemed meaningful when I was designed it - what happened?" and temporarily losing sight of your greater purpose is a natural part of projects for everybody: I'm absolutely certain that at some point during revisions of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson turned to Benjamin Franklin looked at each other and said something along the lines of "I feel like I've totally lost track of the point of this document." In this situation, you need mechanisms to help you get back on track and reconnect with the big reasons for what you're doing.

However, there are other projects that are fauxthentic by design - they contain basic conceptual flaws that guarantee that they won't feel authentic to students. As teachers, we could come up with dozens, if not hundreds, of warning signs of impending fauxthenticity, but I want to jot down a few right now:

1. "Students are going to make and sell..."

2. "Students will make recommendations to the City Council..."

"Mentor texts" in writing are endorsed by Kelly Gallagher, Ron Berger, and, for what it's worth, me. The basic concept, as I used it most recently, is this:

1. Student decides what they want to write about.

2. Student chooses a "mentor text" with a structure and/or subject matter the student would like to emulate.

3. The student studies the mentor text, takes it apart, isolates different aspects of it, and uses what they find to inform their own writing. 

4. The student acknowledges the mentor text in some way when they publish their own piece. 

I've got a structure for Step 1 (taken straight from Kelly Gallagher) that I like a lot. I've laid it all out here. As for Step 2, I've got a collection of potential non-fiction mentor texts here and of science fiction short stories here (if you'd like access to these and you don't work at High Tech High, get in touch with me. There are lots of tricky aspects to Step 2, but I'm not going into them in this post. 

This post is about Step 3. Specifically, it's about a concept I've been working on for a while: the "reverse-engineered outline". The idea is that students look at the structure of their mentor text and make an outline out of it (hence the term "reverse-engineering"). You can see examples of past students' reverse-engineered outlines here, and an example of a variation on the "reverse-engineered outline here. You can also see an example of the most recent version of a reverse-engineered outline I've done here. 

I've never felt entirely happy with this process, but at a meeting with my Director, Lillian, yesterday, we came up with a process for "reverse-engineering" a mentor text that should help students apply to what they learned about the mentor text to their own writing. Here it is:

The next step is to test it out myself! If you give it a try, I'd love to hear how it worked for you!

This started life as an entry in my journal. Some context is necessary if you aren't me or a student in Team Run DMC. That context is here. We're currently on Step 9.

It turns out I do not yet know how to teach the art of writing descriptions in fiction. 

I planned today's lesson because I noticed a tendency for people to "tell, not show" in their stories. So I wanted students to take time to focus specifically on writing vivid descriptions of setting, character, and action in their stories. 

Well, the impetus was unimpeachable. The execution wasn't so hot.

I started out (in the second class - the first class had been even worse and I won't go into it) with students highlighting the descriptions in their drafts in three colors: "descriptions of character" in yellow, "descriptions of setting" in orange, and "descriptions of action" in pink. 

I then told students to look at what information they provided about each. This was the wrong move. I was conflating description with conveying information - which was an especially egregious mistake since the problem I'd noted in students' drafts was that they were doing too much "telling" (in other words, "conveying information") rather than "showing" (in other words, painting a picture in the reader's head).

Here's what I should  have done:

First, students identify a "golden description" from their piece (or at least their favorite description, if they don't feel like any are "golden" yet). They give it a star.

Then, students, identify a description that feels a bit bland to them, and that they want to make more vivid. They draw a piece of white bread next to this. 

Students share their "golden" and "bland" descriptions with there table, and the full group hears a few golden ones. 

Now that this is done, the students take some time to analyze where each color appears in their text, and how much of each there is. I could break this into four specific questions:

• Which color is there most of at the beginning of your piece?
• Which color is there most of in the middle of your piece?
• Which color is there most of near the end of your piece?
• Which color is there the most of overall?

This could go in "Write Club" notebooks, but also would work as a graphic organizer, either on paper or as a googledoc. 

After that, students could highlight descriptions in their "mentor text" science fiction short story the same way (which would mean they would all need to have a specific science fiction short story that they were using as a "mentor text", which would have also been a good idea!).

They then identify a "golden description" of character, one of setting, and one of action, in their mentor text, and share this with their table (it'd be good for people to write these on the whiteboard too. We haven't done enough graffiti discussion in a while). 

Then they fill in the same four questions about their mentor text (these could be side-by-side on the graphic organizer):

• Which color is there most of at the beginning of your piece?
• Which color is there most of in the middle of your piece?
• Which color is there most of near the end of your piece?
• Which color is there the most of overall?

This analysis would be less critical than the identification of the "golden descriptions", and I wouldn't want to spend too long on it, but I think it would lead to some interesting insights and conjectures. 

The key thing (and the part I often struggle with most) is to identify the characteristics of the "golden descriptions" that make them so effective. One question I've used in the past is "can the reader draw what you're describing, based on your description?" This is helpful for "showing, not telling", but less helpful for economical description using a single telling detail, and not at all helpful for metaphor and simile. It might be that what would be most helpful for this would be to start developing a taxonomy of "golden descriptions" over time. It might be that coming up with "categories" of descriptions is as helpful as coming up with "characteristics. 

So I'm not sure how best to identify the characteristics of these descriptions in such a way that students can put those characteristics in their own work and then easily check to see whether their work has them. This is something that Ron Berger makes look easy, but which I continually struggle with. 

However, students did this lesson and then just had time to work on making their descriptions more vivid based on the golden descriptions they identified in their mentor texts,  it would be a huge step forward from what happened today!

I'm writing this particular post for one simple reason: I witnessed Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea playing piano together last night, and I want a record of it. 

First, the basics: the concert was at San Diego's Copley Symphony Hall, I was sitting dead center in the highest balcony. The stage had two grand pianos with their lids removed, set up so the players would face each other, with an synthesizer set up at a right angle to each piano (both set up to the right of the musician's right as he played piano, which meant Corea was facing away from the audience when he played synthesizer). There was a sign in the lobby indicating that there would be no intermission. The program said "program to be announced from the stage". 

Here's what my view looked like, just as the house lights were going down (I turned my phone off after this naturally):

I like to think of myself as a fairly adept manager of my time. I pomodoro (Kanban Flow is my site, since you asked), I use Google Tasks, and yet I've spent the past two months (since Spring Break, specifically) feeling several days and several dollars short, constantly.

I just gained some insight into why. It is currently after school, and I am in my office. I sat down with the intention of entering some (long-overdue) scores into the grade book. Here's what I did instead:

I spent a half an hour skimming the Slice Harvester blog (in which one man tries a slice from every pizza place in Manhattan) looking for a review that didn't include harsh profanity or references to past drug use, so I could share it with a student as a model for the piece he's writing comparing chicken wings from two different chains. 

On the other hand, when I could have been checking that work is being done on our project, I was skimming blog posts about pizza. And now I'm blogging about it. 

So, not quite the time manager I like to imagine I am. 

Oh, and here's the blog post I eventually shared with the student. Yes, the comments are profane, but when are comments ever not?

Scientists at NASA reported today that the Western United states may experience decades-long "mega-droughts" in the near future because of rising carbon levels in the atmosphere. San Diego, where I live, is dry at the best of times. Right now, this makes it seem like a paradise, but you need to be living in a time of extraordinary abundance for a place where it "hardly ever rains" to sound like a paradise. For most of human history, living somewhere where it "hardly ever rains" would have been a nightmare. 

This line of thinking leads quickly to questions like "What happens if we all need to leave? Where do we go?" And, because I'm in my thirties, "Will I seriously regret it if I buy property?" More generally, it gets me thinking about how when I look around at the planet, the places where basic natural resources in short supply tend to be pretty violent. Which is all a roundabout way of saying that I am exceptionally pessimistic about the likelihood of the world forty or fifty years from now being a place I want to live in. For one thing, my country's strides in social justice, equality, tolerance, and just plain safety for its citizens correlate closely with the unprecedented prosperity, material abundance, and physical comfort of the last century. For another, I can't find very many positive examples of large groups of humans going from a time of abundance to a time of scarcity, without a lot of violence. 

Here's where this is going: when educators talk about "21st century skills", we usually assume that these involve the internet. But the internet is the ultimate product of cheap energy and global stability - it works because lots and lots of servers never get switched off, and because an exceptionally complex international network of cables, satellites, and dishes is being maintained. So I just don't feel confident that the internet as we know it is here to stay. That isn't to say that I don't think it's possible that the kind of innovation we've become used to will continue on indefinitely into the future, I just think it's very possible that it won't.  

I think "21st century skills" are at least as likely to be the skills that make it possible to maintain a resilient, civil community that respects the strongest and the weakest equally, at a time when there is less of everything to go around. 

I know this is an exceptionally depressing blog post, and one that is bound to upset people. I really, really, really am not writing it looking for a fight. Rather, I'm writing it because I feel like I spend most of my time suppressing these anxieties and avoiding thinking about them, and I want to acknowledge them in the hope that I can find a way forward. Right now I feel like I'm assuming a future that I don't, based on the data I have, actually  think is very likely, and that seems like a problem.