Today was our "interview day": from 9:00-11:00, all 150 members of the eleventh grade were interviewed by potential employers for the four-week internships they will undertake in May-June. As you can imagine, the school was buzzing. In my classroom and my teaching partner's classroom (which - by tremendous good fortune - were the only eleventh grade classrooms not being used for interviews) students were doing last-minute research into the companies that were interviewing them, perfecting and printing their résumés and cover letters, and asking each other interview questions.* In the halls, students (dressed to the nines, of course) were walking to their interviews, or sitting outside classrooms waiting to be called. 

Now, things did not run entirely smoothly: the schedule shifted dramatically overnight due to changes made by the organizations that were coming, so some students arrived at school to discover that they were being interviewed by different companies (sometimes in different fields) from the ones they had prepared for. Some interviewers were trying to leave early, and calling students in over a half hour ahead of schedule. Others did not show up until hours after they were scheduled (or at all). Here's the thing: the students took it all in stride. When they needed to, they rewrote cover letters to suit their new companies and reprinted them, the halls were calm all morning despite being criss-crossed by adrenaline-fueled kids clutching their résumés, and students kept it together after they were finished, even though they were buzzing so much that - to give one example - I conducted one informal debrief with a student while the person next to her literally spun in circles in order to shake off her extra energy. 

That was the morning, and it was amazing.

In the afternoon, we decided to do an hour of humanities and an hour of biology. We'd devoted all of Monday to preparing for interviews, half hour students will be gone tomorrow on a trip to San Francisco for College Day, on Thursday we'll all be gone for College Day, and it's a four-day weekend. And there are subject-specific things we need to do. For example, my students finished reading The Fault in Our Stars over the weekend. I hadn't realized how brief this week would be when I scheduled this, but today is the only chance we had to talk about the book until next Tuesday, a full seven days from now. 

During the afternoon, the students were not especially focused. Of course, there were lots of reasons for this: they were exhausted, half of them were departing for San Francisco either in the afternoon or at midnight, we hadn't discussed the book on Monday so it wasn't fresh in their minds, and my discussion plan was sub-awesome. I know all that. But no matter what, there's no way that lesson would have engaged students like they were engaged this morning, despite the fact that the sum total of guidance they received from me was a single Google slide with seven tasks on it. 

What made the morning magical was authentic purpose.

The students really, really cared about these interviews. Internship is a big deal, and they know it. Last Friday they did "speed dating" with 12th graders to find out about the internships they did last year. Everything they were doing had an authentic purpose. The afternoon had a purpose - I really wanted them to develop a richer understanding of The Fault in Our Stars and, via that (let's be honest about my hopes) their own lives, their place in the world, and what it means to live a good life) (you can see the blog here - I think their insights have been awesome). But even for students who had a lot to say about the book, there was no authentic purpose like walking on to an interview with a stranger who might offer them a job that could, potentially, show them the career they want to pursue. 

A constant struggle for me is how to combine the sense of authentic purpose that we had this morning (which invariably comes with a certain amount of tunnel-vision as students keep their eyes in the prize) with rich, and sometimes meandering engagement with big, often abstract questions of the sort that we tackle when we engage with literature. 

*to see how we prepared in detail, look my "what we did today" page for today and yesterday

This post is about reading, I promise. Just bear with me for a moment first.

I have two prosthetic heart valves. Or rather, I have a cluster of heart defects, of which the prosthetic heart valves are the most striking and easiest to explain. This rarely impinges on my life in any significant way, but it does affect my ability to run. I've been thinking about this recently, because I've started jogging. This is something I've done off-and-on ever since I was a teenager, and I've developed some hitherto-unspoken personal rules:

1. I never jog with a group.
I'm too hyper-aware of my limitations. I may have actually first become vividly aware of the disparity between my experience and most people's in 11th grade, when my AP English teacher wrote a sentence example in which she confessed "While some people can run 10 or 15 miles, I get out of breath after a measly two-mile jog." I remember thinking "Whoa, hang on. Two miles is measly?"

The summer after that, I went to a summer arts camp (OK, strictly speaking I was in the jazz band, so make all relevant jokes here). I ran a mile and a half every morning with my almost literally indefatigable friend Kyle (who was on the track team at his school) and several slower people. I was by far the slowest, but I could run most of it, and I felt great the rest of the day. That camp was a "safe space" in pretty much every sense, such as I haven't experienced since, and it was, not coincidentally, the only time in my life I've run in a group. Today, I don't have any desire to set off with a group of people who  and I know that other people will find it hard to understand that motivational exhortations will have no affect when I just can't draw the air I need to get up that next hill. 

The only person I run with is my wife, and even with her, the knowledge that she may accidentally set an unattainable standard just by running a normal distance at a normal pace stresses me out a bit. 

When it comes to pickup sports, it's a little different - I can normally hide my deficient running, and I am frequently (and contentedly) the least skilled person who's actually willing to join in. I'm all right with that - it's the stark, unforgiving linearity of running in a group and getting left behind that bothers me.  

2. I don't set myself any target beyond "to the streetlight at the end of this block"
My jogging mantra is "whatever I'm doing right now is better than doing nothing", so I always set myself an extremely modest goal, give myself permission not to meet it, and then incrementally ratchet it up if I feel OK having achieved it. I sometimes use a distance-tracking app on my phone, but I've made sure never to let it develop expectations based on my past performance. The idea of having a standard to hit and exceed alarms me. 

3. I don't really want to get better at running
What I mean by this is that being able to run for longer stretches at a time seems like a terrible prize for improving my fitness. Seriously, why would I want to spend more of my time doing this? This also applies to the running adage that "the first mile is the worst". I've noticed that I often feel more able to run at the end of a run than I did at the beginning, but the last thing I want to do, having just done my time, is to keep going! 

So here's why I'm writing about running: I'm certain that everything I've just written about running applies to reading for some of my students, and this is raising big questions for me about how I should be supporting them. 

Left to right: Amelia Earhart, Cesar Chavez, Susan B. Anthony

Students started arriving early into the classroom, some already in costume, most carrying bags and asking if they should get changed yet (the answer was an emphatic "yes"). The pair of Frederick Douglasses were tearing up a length of burgundy tulle into what they made into excellent-looking cravates. I was relieved that I'd taken the time to arrange the classes so thoroughly last night - the arrangement of the room established expectations and provided clear channels for the energy buzzing in the room. Here's what the classroom looked like before school, with a shot taken from behind the back tables (the tables set up for the note-takers) - all arranged, but empty:

 And heres's a close-up of two panellists' place-settings:

Our guests of honor were fifth graders from High Tech Elementary, who arrived with clipboards and a note-catcher. They were focused on studying our exhibition, because they are in the early stages of planning a US History exhibition of their own. You can see them watching the panel here:

I committed to 28 days of writing this morning. Tomorrow, the students of Team Run DMC (long story, which may be told here within the next 28 days) will be portraying figures from US history (in costume, naturally) including George Washington and Abigail Adams, Dolores Huerta, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Carl Sagan. These luminaries are gathering for what I named (not really thinking through the implications, beyond the idea that it consisted of "great" figures from history) the All-time Greatest Panel, to discuss their responses to Barack Obama's 2015 State of the Union. 

So, it was possibly not the best day to start my 28 days. I stayed at school to arrange tables and chairs for the panel, print out "reserved" signs for the rows where 5th graders will be sitting who are attending the (11th grade) panel discussion, set out the name cards for each character, flip a coin to decide which of the two students representing each character will read the opening statement (as the coin skittered around my silent and unobserved office, using up valuable milliseconds, I started to wonder whether I was taking my commitment to randomness a little too far). I created note-taking sheets with prompts for a few students to fill out who will sit at a row of tables in the back. I set a ruler with a right-angle next to the note-taking sheet that asked for a diagram connecting speakers in the order they spoke, because I realized the diagram shape I'd made was too small (I took this technique from a socratic seminar method I once heard about - the name has "tables" in it). Then I laid out a couple sheets of blank paper at each character's spot, just behind their name card, then drove to Costco to buy bottles of water and pens, because it occurred to me that if this were a conference, everyone would have paper for taking notes, a ball point pen, and a bottle of water. 

All of which means that at this point, it's a little late and I'm pretty tired. However, it just so happens that I wrote up the strange saga of how this project reached this pretty pass over the weekend, and this gives me an excuse to shape it up and post it - which was what I'd intended to do when I started drafting it on Saturday. Here it goes:

How it began: The "Rock the Document" Project
In November, I found an ad in the Atlantic magazine for the Atlantic Magazine and College Board’s essay competition, for which students were supposed to write essays about various historical documents, selected by AP US History teachers as the documents they were most excited about discussing with their students. I read that, and had a dangerous thought: "there's a really good project here. I'm not sure what it is yet, but that's bound to come eventually." 

The plan I developed (using the term "plan" extremely loosely) was for students to host discussions about various documents at tables in what we would set up as an 18th century coffee house. I never made a prototype of this (either of the essay, or of whatever I’d require to host a discussion), so the project never made sense to me, or seemed especially interesting. So the weekend before we returned from Winter break, I realized the project had never coalesced into an idea I was excited about - and I hadn't written a prototype essay so I had no idea what it would be like to actually write an essay for the Atlantic Magazine and College Board's essay competition. In addition, though I'd read the list of documents from which students could choose, I hadn't picked over them one-by-one and determined what I thought of them.

On Sunday (Monday was a staff day, so I figured I still had plenty of time), I called my friend Dan, formerly a High Tech High teacher, still an authority on all things educational. You can see my notes from our conversation below.

Last year we published an anthology of student writing that we called We Chose Our Own Adventures. You can read all about the project here.

Here's what one student, Gabby Tam, wrote about her piece:

Recently we had to do a creative writing essay. At first I decided to stick with the topic and write a piece that was supposed to convince the public of the importance of keeping habitats to their natural environments. I worked on this piece for a good week and a half, adding more and more info to keep the piece interesting. Draft after draft it was coming along into a final piece but the day before the final draft was due, I read over it and I was bored. I asked my teacher if I could restart my whole piece but with an entirely different topic. My teacher gave me a topic that would be interesting to write about and with that idea the thoughts began to flow right onto the page. Within two hours I had the ideas down and my essay written. There wasn’t much that needed to be fixed thankfully and it was finished in time to be put into the book. The story I had written was very personalized and I believe it gave the readers a deeper understanding of myself. During exhibition I was chosen to read part of my story out loud, which was an honor. It was also nerve racking because I have never been a great reader and always hated being called aloud to read in class. I think this situation was different because it was something that I had wrote and it was easier to portray my reading in a voice that fit the feeling of my story.

Tom told me about this technique before I taught my first class, and I have yet to use it, but I like the sound of it.

Here's how it works.

1. Take a set of lecture notes, and split them into a series of questions that are sequential and anticipatory

2. Present the class with the questions in sequence. Everyone in class responds to the question in their notebooks and pair-shares.

3. Call on people to tell the group what their partner's response was, saying  "X, what did Y say?" Then ask "Y, was that right?"

4. Write important points on the board, and add to them.

I guess you could call this "constructivist lecturing", since you help the students to construct knowledge about what's being discussed - though the teacher remains the ultimate arbiter of fact. 

Today I introduced Kelly Gallagher's Real World Writing Purposes by, as Gallagher suggests, having my students look for examples of these in magazines (actually, Gallagher recommends newspapers, but what I had access to was a motley collection of magazines and journals including San Diego magazine, the New Yorker, N+1, and Lucky Peach, among others). 

As is often the case, I'm fairly confident that I learned more than anybody else. Specifically, I learned how far I am from being conversant in the "Real World Writing Purposes." I started one class by grandly declaring "Whatever you write will fall within one of these purposes." It took about three minutes for a student to point to a humor piece in the New Yorker and say "I can't figure out where this one fits." 

"Hmm," I replied. "It doesn't, really. I take back what I just said."

When I was studying jazz saxophone, one of the things my teachers had me do was learn "licks" or "clichés" (not meant perjoratively), that is, little collections of notes that other sax players had used before me, that you could call upon spontaneously within a solo in order to connect your more original ideas together. 

When I began teaching, my own teachers offered a few "licks" or "clichés" to bring to the classroom - starting with techniques to quickly get a group quiet. Since then, I've been unofficially collecting these "licks", and it occurred to me today that I should put my collection online. So here's what I've got so far:

Getting students to be quiet quickly:

1. Clap "Shave and a Haircut" - students respond by clapping "two bits"
2. Shout "Mama Se Mama Sa Mama Ku Sa" - students respond in kind (from Bobby Shaddox).
3. Say "point at the screen if you can hear me" (from Carol Cabrera).
4. Count down from 5 - "quiet in 5… 4… 3… 2… 1" (get quieter as you count down).
5. Say "Clap once if you can hear me… Clap twice if you can hear me…"
6. Variation on 5: Just say "Clap one time… Clap two times…" (from Sonya Ramirez).

Regulating noise:

1. Establish three consistent volume levels: Restaurant (everyone talking), Library (mostly silent, talk if you need to ask a peer for something), Outer space (total silence). You can tell students "OK, outer space for 5 minutes, then we'll shift to Library" (Bobby Shaddox and Allie Wong).

Calling on students to respond to questions:

1. Have a box of popsicle students that students have written their names on, pull out a popsicle stick to call on a student.
1. I often use these for students to read out what I've got onscreen in a presentation. I try not to use this to call on students to do something that's more cognitively challenging, because I don't want to freak kids out and I know sometimes this just leads people to freeze up. However, it's really important that kids get cold-called to do cognitively challenging stuff, so it's not always the same kids who do it! My way of handling this is to have kids pair-share before I pull a popsicle stick - that way, students aren't just saying what they are thinking, they're saying what "they and their partner" are thinking. 
2. Call on students in threes - in other words, if five people are raising their hand, say "Mike, then Sarah, then James" (from Michelle Clark). 

Prompts for responding to reading

1. Choose a "golden line" - that is, a line that really grabbed you. Then say why you chose it, or ask a question about it.

Questions to ask during critique

1. "Does the writing sound like the person who wrote it? (from Carol Cabrera).

Last year I wrote a description of interdisciplinary teaching for my syllabus, and I really like it. 

This year, I'm taking it out of the syllabus, in an effort to make the syllabus as lean and mean as possible. But I still like it, so I wanted to post it here:

A note on interdisciplinary teaching

interdisciplinary (adjective): of or relating to more than one branch of knowledge (New Oxford American Dictionary)

At High Tech High, we do interdisciplinary teaching and learning. What that means for you is that you'll do projects that span across more than one subject – such as a project co-taught by Dr. Patton (humanities) and Mr. Leader (biology).

We still divide ourselves into separate subjects, because each subject has a unique set of skills and ways of working, and to some extent, these are easiest to master in isolation. But we work across these subjects whenever possible, because 'subjects' are, at best, a convenient filing system for human knowledge and once you leave school, nothing you ever do will ever divide neatly into subjects ever again.

"How would a professional present this learning, and to whom?"