Letters from Lisa

Child: “How close are we to being there?”
Me: “Closer than we were.” 

Sitting in the colonial schoolhouse: “This is so much better than our REAL school. No offense, Lisa.”

Upon hearing that a child’s father would take him “out to the woodshed” when he misbehaved: “Why, what happens in the woodshed?”

One boy, on seeing me in my bathingsuit: “I’m glad you’re wearing that and not a bikini. That would make you look… inappropriate.”

Overheard at dinner: “I need to have another cup of soda. I deserve it!” 

Birthday boy, upon noticing the balloons and singing waitstaff and not realizing they were approaching HIS table: “I feel sorry for the poor sucker who’s going to get that!”

Back in the hotel room negotiating over what to watch on TV: “Can we watch the Simpsons?”
Me: “Is it rated G?”
Kids: (collective mutter)
Me: “There must be something appropriate that you’d all want to watch.”
Child: “What about Bad Girls?”
(after the group has stopped hysterical-laughing)
Me: “_______, do you really watch Bad Girls?”
______: “All the time!”
Different child: “Do your parents know that?”
________: (gazing imploringly at me) “You won’t blow my cover, will you?” 

Walking down the hotel hallway with the group of boys staying in my room plus the adjoining room: “We must look so weird all walking together with just all of us and Lisa. Look at you, Lisa. You’re like the Octomom!”

It may be spring in some parts of the Northern Hemisphere, but in the last three days staying at Mount Hood, I’ve seen almost a foot of snow fall. It’s continuing to float down as I sit here by the window, pondering another morning of struggling through downhill runs (and even more so, sitting exposed to the elements on the lift afterwards) with the wind whipping snow and hail in my face.

The most difficult part of the day, though, was not the inclement weather - it was the several inches of freshly fallen snow - powder - on the trail. Though I can take almost any intermediate trail under typical conditions, I only ski a few times a year and I only started skiing a few years ago. This was my first time skiing on powder, so in some ways I felt like a complete beginner all over again. Almost as soon as I got started, my ski got stuck under the inches of snow and I tumbled to the ground. I then spent the next few minutes pushing myself painstakingly back up and then sliding around in frustration as I attempted to get my skis back on.

Once I was up and ready to go, I stood looking down the expanse of the trail and wondered whether I could make it down. I didn’t want to fall again. Of course, this made it even more likely that I would fall again, because with the anxiety taking the forefront, I couldn’t ski naturally using the techniques that I knew. I was extremely cautious, nervous, jerky in my movements. I got down to the bottom, finally, and wanted to head straight in for the hot chocolate and forget about the whole rest of the day. Why push it? Why risk injury, frustration, and embarrassment?

This was how I felt, too, when I first learned to ski. I could barely get the skis on without slipping, and I was terrified of crashing into a tree or tumbling down somewhere and being unable to get up. My sense of direction not being the greatest, I also worried about wandering onto a trail that was too difficult - and of course, as a beginner, most trails ARE too difficult. (I still struggle with finding my way when I’m at a new mountain, but now that I can take a wider variety of trails, this anxiety has lessened at least.)

The first few times I went skiing, I approached the activity with a sense of dread and left afterwards feeling relieved and proud for getting through it. I’d go on the green trails and feel satisfied with that, unwilling to press my luck on anything that required greater technique. Then we visited Snowbird for a ski vacation as a family, and the instructor informed me that I was on the “hardest green trail in the United States”. Once I got through that, I realized that I could take a wider variety of trails and not worry so much about getting lost. That was nice.

Each time we went, I would think to myself, “I’m glad I got through this… now I never have to do it again.” It took quite a while, and many successful runs, before I ever thought that I might want to ski for fun. Even now, I’ll choose to go when the opportunity presents itself - it’s not something I seek out on my own. I’m happy enough when I’m doing it, and happier when I’ve gotten through another successful day. Maybe someday I’ll book a ski vacation purposefully and look out the window and think, “Today looks like a great day to ski… I can’t wait to get out there.” But I doubt it.

A lot of things come naturally to me, but it’s a very useful experience to deal with learning something that doesn’t. It really helps to understand when trying to work with someone who’s struggling, to know how it feels to be stuck in the struggle. You don’t want to try because of what might happen. Maybe it isn’t exactly like skiing, where you can actually physically hurt yourself, but there are other ways to get hurt. You know you’re not a natural, and you know there are people around watching and judging you even as they’re standing by to help you when (not if) you need it. Even worse, the anxiety itself is clouding your brain and making you forget what you already know. If you happen to have a successful run, it can feel like luck - like you’ve tempted fate and you’ll get the worst of it next time. That reinforces the relief you feel about being finished, and the desire to never ever go near it again.

The only way to get through it is to stack up a pile of successes. There isn’t a substitute. You won’t feel better about your ability until you’ve experienced it again and again.

So I’m going back out on the powder today. I’ll probably fall. I’ll probably get frustrated, and I’ll definitely feel relieved when it’s over. But it’s the only way to learn how.

Today in science class, I was showing my 3rd graders footage of astronauts on an Apollo mission driving the lunar module. A student said, “You know what I would do if that was me? I’d crank my iPod all the way up and rock out!”

I had to break it to her that iPods were not invented yet.

She recoiled in horror. “You mean… they didn’t even have music???”

One of my boys came in to the science room this morning to drop off some materials for me. While we were chatting, he suddenly got a twinkle in his eye and said, “Oh, and I have a dare for you.”

“Yeah? What’s that?”

“Which would you rather do - eat a spider, or lick the science room floor?” Satisfied smug, thinking - I’ve got her now.

I quickly glanced down at the floor, still smeared yellow and pink from Friday’s prop painting session. Then I smiled back up at him, and with a matching twinkle in my eye, said,

“Well, I’ve eaten ants before. So a spider wouldn’t be so bad.”

He grimaced and started to back away. “I was just joking…”

Lesson learned: Do not try to out-gross the science teacher. Especially if she’s been to Australia. It’s like Fear Factor out on those tours. (The ants tasted like Sprite and are said to be very high in Vitamin C.)

Today I was supervising recess, watching the kids engage in a time honored playground tradition - picking teams. There’s no way around it - someone has to be picked last. Even if your group consists entirely of professional athletes and superstars, and you start picking one by one, you still end up with someone getting left until the end. And this being an elementary school group with a typical range of sports ability - some play competitively on the weekends and some can barely make contact with the ball, and everything in between - it’s almost inevitable that certain kids are going to get snapped up first and others left hanging until the end. We’ve all been there and remember how it feels.

I have to say, this particular group plays very fair. When I was a kid and boys and girls were expected to play on mixed teams, every boy were always picked first, unless there was a super-ultra-tomboy in the group, who would generally get picked in the middle even if she was a superior athlete. This group is more enlightened (and their teachers make sure of it). The active girls are picked right alongside the boys. There is some angling to make sure that friends end up on the same team, but with such a small group, that often can’t happen and the kids don’t make much fuss about it. The last kids to be picked are generally the ones who don’t really know the game rules, and/or don’t make much contact with the ball.

Of course, the experience of being picked last never does anything to change that, either.

There’s one boy who always gets picked last for teams - I can’t remember watching a game where he wasn’t picked last. He’s a kid I’ve gotten to know quite well over the past few years and yet the fact that this keeps happening surprises me. What surprises me is that he hangs in there. He’s eminently clumsy, chronically knocking things over and bumping into people, and often can’t make contact with the ball or defers to more confident, aggressive players because he really wants his team to win. He’s competitive (read: anxious about losing) and he does bristle sometimes when he’s picked last, like today when he burst out, “This is a stupid team!” after watching the most non-athletic, disconnected girl get welcomed onto a team before he was. (She later wandered away from the game, without anyone noticing she was gone.) It’s the closest I’ve ever heard him get to complaining that he is always, always picked last.

What’s amazing to me is that this kid goes out there, every day, and stands there in public, and watches everyone else get picked before he does, and takes it. He wants to be in there, with those kids, so badly that he’s willing to take it. Not always with the best grace, but guaranteed if it isn’t raining tomorrow and the group goes out there, he’ll be right there waiting to get picked, hoping maybe this time - this one time - the team captain will turn to him and pick him out of the crowd. Maybe not first. Maybe not even second. And if he’s last again, he’ll take it, because he isn’t giving up.

I didn’t do that, as a kid. I gave up. I couldn’t control the embarrassment or anger I felt about being picked last, and I was convinced that the other kids hated me and were picking me last to send me a message that I wasn’t wanted. It was a tangle of mistaken perceptions and emotional overreaction, and a compounding of teasing and rejection and insults until I finally just walked away. I actually stopped trying. I played alone at recess - for years and years. I was almost too old for recess by the time I started interacting with other kids on the playground. There had to be kids at my elementary school who stood there and endured the selection process day after day, but I didn’t notice because I couldn’t even bring myself to be a part of it at all. I didn’t participate, or even watch.

This kid stands there and opens himself up to the possibility of being picked last every single day, and because he does, he ends up on a team. And he gets to play. It makes me really proud to watch.

Last fall we began a display outside the science room called the Great Wall of Questions. The original inspiration occurred when I noticed that some of my students were really laboring to articulate deep, thoughtful questions about science topics, only to have other kids in the class shoot them down, with pithy one liners like, “Duh! It’s GRAVITY of course!” Never mind that even Isaac Newton himself couldn’t give you a straight definition of what gravity actually IS. Since learning is basically asking questions, which lead to answers, which lead to more questions, I wanted to encourage questioning.

So we started tacking questions up on the wall. Pretty soon we were off the bulletin board and spread out on the walls. Kids love to ask questions! Sure, some of them are silly questions like, “How many Beanie Babies are in the world?” but others are quite serious. Some recent examples: Are all people related? What is static electricity made of? How are eggs made inside the body of an animal? I’ve been compiling all the questions (I’m kinda behind in posting at the moment, but I am going to catch up!) at http://churchillscience.edublogs.org.

Today at dismissal a former student of mine came up to me and said, “Lisa, I have a question for the wall that I really want to know, but it’s inappropriate.”

“Well, if you already know it’s inappropriate…” I began.

“Well, it’s not bad or anything, it’s just a bathroom question.” 

“Hmmm…. Well. Why don’t you tell me the question and maybe we can phrase it a different way so that we can post it.”

The question was, “Why is poop brown?”

Now I can think of different ways to phrase this one so that the word “poop” is not used. However, generally I post the question along with a relevant image, and… yeah, maybe we won’t be posting this one.

I feel like a stranger here, even though this site’s got my name right in the URL.

Basically, I’ve been working. Pretty much non-stop. It’s work in the best, most fulfilling sense - on any given day I have a different opinion about which of my job descriptions is my favorite. The reason is probably that I am the type of person who MUST be doing many different things in order to feel challenged and entertained. Parent conference day was Thursday, and after sitting the entire day in front of my computer - even though we had a steady stream of visitors and various interruptions - I understood why I will never, and could never, hold an office job. I just couldn’t look at the computer anymore. I wanted to get up and go do something.

What’s been taking up large chunks of my time is this year’s musical theater production. I probably should have predicted this, given how many kids told me at the end of last year that they were going to join, but we had an absolutely massive sign-up for the play, the largest enrollment that I’ve ever had (or, to be honest, that I could handle!) Combining onstage and backstage, we have literally half the student body participating. Why so much interest? My (admittedly biased) guess is that, aside from my most committed actors who join year after year regardless of what the show is, it was the perfect storm of storywriting, swordfighting, and social networking.

Storywriting - because we’re constructing the story and the script, and the premise caught the imagination of many kids who aren’t interested in traditional musicals. I gave kids some options as far as characters, but ended up going based on who chose Good, Evil, or Traitor. (Many of the boys who signed up wanted to be traitors! They were totally enthusiastic about betrayal. Should we all be worried?) We’ve had to flesh out the plot a LOT due to the number of actors onstage, which means that it’s gotten more and more complex as time has gone on. I’m struggling to keep our run-time below an hour, which I think is the maximum that most audiences can tolerate a live show without an intermission (and despite repeated lobbying from certain Monty Python and the Holy Grail fans who want to insert an intermission, we are NOT doing that). I’ve had to promise kids that if we can’t use their story ideas in the live version, we can always film “deleted scenes” for the eventual DVD recording. We may even have to do an alternate ending in which the bad guys win, since I’ve been subjected to repeated, heated pleas and threats about the fact that in all of my plays, I throw the victory over to the ‘boring good guys’ in the end. I’ve also been chastised about the need to include a lot of comedy and sarcasm. I don’t think any editor would be this demanding…

Of course, from the perspective of someone who spent all last summer working on developing our writing program, I’m delighted with this state of affairs. I can’t think of a better way to teach about dialogue, character development, setting, plot, and general story development than actually working on all of the above with the kids.

Swordfighting is pretty straightforward - I know my group, and they love a good fight, so I am going to give them several, albeit sanitized-for-their-protection. (Actual exchange between myself and one of my lead actors: “Do I fight the King?” “Yes.” “Can I cut his head off?” “No.”)

Social Networking - There’s always a core group of students who join theater because they love acting and singing. Some years, when I’ve had groups of 20-25 students onstage, this is the constituency I got. But other years, like this one, I’ve gotten additional members who are primarily joining because they want to spend the time with their friends and think that this will be something fun to try together. I don’t discourage this, so long as it doesn’t lead to kids joining who really don’t want to act or sing at all (which occasionally happens - but when it does it’s usually because their parents, not their friends, have talked them into it). It’s nice to have a mix of motives, actually, because the ones joining for social reasons usually don’t mind when the spotlight doesn’t fall on them much. If I had 60 actors all clambering to be the leads, I’d have to disappoint a lot of them!

In any case, this particular year, kids did an amazing job of recruiting their friends. It doesn’t hurt that many of them saw their buddies in the show last year (which also featured the first two ingredients, storywriting and swordfighting) and that they’ve spent a lot of time with me in class and on field trips, so there’s a comfort level that lowers the barrier for more participation.

I don’t think I could ever turn anyone away, no matter how crazy the level of enrollment got. When I was in high school, both the marching band and the chorus accepted absolutely everyone who wanted to join, no matter their level of experience or “talent”. The result was always impressive - there is a huge advantage in numbers, even if it creates inconveniences at times. Plus, there is no truly fair way to select among applicants without feelings being hurt or potentially talented folks being eliminated because they are too young or inexperienced. Besides, this is SCHOOL, not Broadway. It’s supposed to be a teaching and learning experience! Everyone has to start somewhere, and absolute beginners often have the greatest level of drive and enthusiasm and are the most likely to be good sports about doing whatever’s asked of them.

So I’m thrilled, and a little scared, about this production. Thrilled because it’s a great opportunity. Scared because we need a bigger stage!

To Whom It May Concern:

I am writing to express my outrage at the recent comments made by Michael “Savage”, a radio host on Talk Radio Networks, targeting young children with autism and their families. We live in a society and age in which there are plenty of legitimate grievances and issues about which to express one’s anger; there is no need to blast the innocent and defenseless and to spread misinformation about medical and educational issues.

I am a teacher, learning specialist, and adjunct professor. I have worked with autistic children and their families; I have never once encountered a child whose problems could be fixed by verbal abuse such as Savage advocates. Telling a nonverbal three year old, who barely responds to his own name, that he is a “brat” and to “cut the act out” accomplishes nothing. There is no act involved. These children are not brats. Their parents are not lax. In many cases they have spent thousands of dollars (in some cases, hundreds of thousands) of their own money on lawyers, medical treatments, and private schools in a desperate effort to get their children help. Furthermore, I have never met any parent eager to convince me that a child is more disabled than s/he actually is.

While I advocate free speech (I am an educator, after all) I don’t see any reason why companies such as yours would choose willingly to financially support an individual whose hatred for innocent children and families and prejudice towards people in general is so evident. Is this the sort of message that your company endorses?

Finally, I would not underestimate the power and determination of the autistic community. These people have fought long and hard for their children and, in the case of autistic adults, for themselves. They are not about to stand by while they are slandered and verbally abused on national radio, or in the mainstream media as a result of these comments.

I urge you to take immediate action and pull your financial support from Talk Radio Networks and The Savage Nation Radio Show in response to these hateful comments.

Sincerely,
Lisa Fischler

For a list of Savage’s sponsors, visit this page on the Autism Self Advocacy Network.

One of the coolest websites I’ve seen in a long time is dipity.com. You can create an interactive timeline by inputing your own events and (the genuis part) adding feeds from blogs or websites. You can include google maps, images, and video links to go along with what you’ve added.

Just to play around, I created one for myself:
http://www.dipity.com/user/lfischler/timeline/Lisa_F/list

Why have I been so quiet on this site? Maybe because I’ve been developing a new blog - with my kids! It’s called Crazy Mad Science (.org) and can be found here. They’re VERY proud of it. Twice so far we’ve devoted a class period to teaching them to use the site, so many of the comments posted there are from those sessions, but you’ll also see a significant number of comments posted from home, including over our recent spring break. One child went home from school, posted three comments that night, and then another two before getting on the school bus the next morning.

Since it’s a site for and by kids, you have to be a registered user at Edublogs to comment. This has been a great opportunity, besides working on science content and writing skills, to talk about internet safety with my students. I’ve made it clear from the beginning that our audience is primarily people who know and love us, but that what you post online is potentially viewable to anyone, and that it represents us to the world. The other day, as they were posting comments from their laptops, I turned on the smartboard screen in class so that they could watch me moderate the comments - I only had to delete two for being utterly off-topic. They giggled, but understood: we apply the “Kristy test”, which is “Would you want Kristy [the school’s director] to read this?” (If only the kids at Horace Mann had had me as a teacher when they were younger - all of the hoopla in the news could have been avoided.)

I also told my kiddos that I offer “free editing”, so if they try to post a comment that is hard to read because of spelling or punctuation, I will fix it. Some of them actually have better writing skills online than most stuff you see posted around the Internet, but of course, given their issues with reading and writing, some of it’s going to be a bit rough around the edges. I’ve done a bit of patching up here and there. Mostly, though, I leave well enough alone. I don’t consider their comments to be finished products worthy of editing and revision.

Posts directly to the blog or one of its pages, though, are a different story. Those get much more in-depth treatment. This group loves to come up with catchy titles and doesn’t mind mulling over revisions, like re-ordering sentences or substituting clearer vocabulary.

My other two classes in the same grade level are just starting out with their sites. It’s going to be a bit hairy trying to administer three separate sites all at once - next year we’ll bundle all three classes into one blog instead of giving each class its own. Live and learn!

1. Science teachers aren’t supposed to know how to play the piano.

2. If a kid says, “…Or else!” and you ask, “Or else WHAT?”, you deserve the answer that you get! (For the record, it was, “I’ll lock you up and throw away the key!” But he was joking. I think.)

3. When public officials are caught misbehaving, hope and pray it’s for something easier to explain to young kids than prostitution. Thanks, Governor.

4. Never put the camera away. Never, ever, ever put the camera away.

5. If you consistently use the same verbal expressions, be prepared to be mimicked. Now every time I click on the wrong weblink or drop something, my entire class gleefully shouts, “Just kidding!”

6. Don’t go off on a five-minute tangent with your class unless you’re prepared for it to take 45 minutes.

7. The quickest way to spread news around school is to whisper it in one kid’s ear where other kids can see you. The slowest way is to announce it to everyone in the group at once.

1. Fix up and print out the course syllabus for the next section of my class, plus gather any printed materials the students will need to have over the next several weeks so I can distribute it all tomorrow night
2. Draft a letter to my theater kids’ families about bringing in their costumes
3. Order curriculum books
4. Upload all of our skiing/vacation pictures so I can post them!
5. Type up more entries from my Antarctica travelogue (you’ve seen the video, now read about it in slow motion!)

There’s a lunar eclipse happening outside the window, but dense fog has rolled in and so we’ve got no chance of seeing it. I’m sure it’ll be tomorrow’s Astronomy Picture of the Day - which much better resolution than the naked eye anyhow. With a telescope you’re supposed to be able to see Saturn’s rings, but living just outside New York City, there’s no reason to own a telescope. You can’t see anything but the city lights. I think if Mike Bloomberg is really serious about going green, he might convince NYC businesses to turn off their flashy lights for an evening every now and again when the weather’s going to be clear, and then they can throw a massive stargazing event AND save energy at the same time. I’d participate.

Space has become my favorite science unit to teach. I almost wish I taught older kids, sometimes, so that we could get into all of the complex stuff that just isn’t appropriate to delve into with third graders. As it is, I think third grade is almost too young to begin with, but it’s the oldest group I’ve got, and we’ve managed nicely with the resources that we have. Still, this time around, we barely left our own solar system. That’s barely the beginning. I’ve tried to make it very clear to the kids that there’s so much happening with space right now, that we have tools to explore space like never before, and that there’s just so much we don’t know - so they shouldn’t consider themselves “done” with space. I never tire of reading about it (or in the case of my astronomy podcasts, listening about it). If I had my college career to do over again, one of the rare changes I would make would be actually taking that astronomy class, rather than just looking at it in the course handbook and then turning the page.

Space isn’t my only topic that I’ve only become interested in as an adult. I accumulate interests like some people accumulate gadgets or shoes. I have a chronic bookshelf shortage problem, since I keep buying new books faster than I can clear out old ones (and I hate giving away books anyway - I keep telling myself that someday I’ll want to read them again, and I’m often right). If I had to articulate a vision of what kind of learners I’d want kids to develop into as adults, that would probably be it. If you can identify something that excites your curiosity, find information about it, and feel enriched as a person from interacting with that information, that is my definition of successful learning. And, ideally, it should lead to wanting to learn more. I hate the idea of studying something but only learning as much as you absolutely have to, and then forgetting it as soon as possible. I don’t ever want to teach someone who does that. Luckily, since I teach young kids, I don’t think I ever will. That’s a cynical attitude that only develops later, and with good educational experiences, should never happen at all.

Learning is risk taking. First, you have to admit that there’s stuff out there that you don’t know, but that you should know or would like to know. Some people get hung up right there. I’m thinking about this one kid that I know, whom I like and respect very much and think is very smart, but man I wish he would deign to ask a question every now and then. His first reaction is always to sneer when someone else asks a question, as if they just stated, “I’m the most stupid person on Earth for not already knowing this, but…” It’s really too much for him to accept the idea that you can not know something and admit it, and still be respected as a smart person. I recognize this fear-based reaction - it’s the same one I used to have at the thought of people finding out that I got a B on a test. It’s guarding your position from a place of insecurity. But you’re not going to learn anything that way. Things have been hectic over the past few weeks and we’re on vacation now, but I am going to make sure to find time and pull him aside and say, “Why don’t you have more questions on my wall outside the classroom? Think of some. I bet you can’t stump me!” And I’m sure he will, since I asked. One day I hope he will because he realizes how smart he is, and decides he wants to learn. Really learn, for its own sake.

I can’t believe it’s December. That changes everything.

Time has passed at an alarming pace this fall. Maybe it’s because I was at school most of the summer working on curriculum and that seemed to pass slowly, while it always seems to fly by when the kids are around. Maybe it’s because I’ve dipped my hand into so many different projects and areas, and every time I go somewhere, my agenda gets interrupted by three other things. For example, yesterday I went down to the cafeteria to show some printouts to a teacher, and was suddenly surrounded by 3rd graders demanding more lines in the play.

Maybe it’s me. Although I’m going on six and a half years with the school, this is only my 2nd year in my current incarnation as specialist/administrator, so there’s been a fairly steep learning curve for me as far as how to manage my time, how to teach classes of kids that I only see for 90 minutes a week, and how to coordinate with the rest of the staff and be useful to them. Part of my job has been to build up our lower elementary science program, and as I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I’ve been closing in on some favorite topics and methods.

I’m a fairly structured teacher, and I have a definite set of goals for every class that walks in the door, but I also try to seize on a good idea when it pops up unexpectedly and alters all the carefully laid plans. For example, I originally wanted all of my 3rd grade classes to create posters for the planets in the solar system with me on the computer, listing important facts as we learned them and then evaluating whether there could be life on that planet. We started it with the first group and found that it worked great - they looked at every picture and piece of information with a critical eye and therefore processed the information a lot more thoroughly. But then, literally 45 seconds before the next group of kids walked in the door, I thought, “Why are they going to want to create posters when they can see the first class’s posters already hanging up? Maybe I should have them do another kind of project instead. They’re fairly advanced in their thinking - maybe we could do a slideshow.”

You can’t do anything with these kids unless you are willing to stretch it as far as it can go. They don’t care that the unit is supposed to finish at the end of December and therefore there “isn’t time” to debate for 20 minutes about whether to call the slideshow “Mystery of the Galaxy” or “A Journey Through the Solar System”. (We eventually decided on “Mystery of the Galaxy” because galaxies are bigger than solar systems - and I hadn’t been planning to cover galaxies with them!) They had fantastic ideas - starting the slideshow with a countdown and blastoff, for example - and I intend to shove as many in the finished product as I can. And now it’s December, and I’m thinking, “Man, we should have started this a month ago.” Next year…

Maybe I’m also feeling the time crunch because I’m traveling this winter. I don’t usually take my big trips during the school year, for obvious reasons, but Antarctica is the exception. You can’t go in July and August, so here I am, taking almost the biggest trip of my life in the middle of a busy school year, and with a lot less foreplanning than I usually do for my trips. (I planned both Australia and South America about 6 months in advance - this one, I booked 2 months in advance. Crazy!) I’m planning to do all of my teaching about Antarctica after winter break, so I’m not too worried yet about gathering stuff to show the kids, but on the other hand it DOES mean that I have to be finished with everything else because once I show up at school with penguin pictures, whatever other subject we’ve been discussing is going to fly out the window.

I thrive on this kind of pace and I love to be busy - I just keep reminding myself to slow down enough to enjoy it.

I have a lot of different job descriptions - learning specialist, curriculum coordinator, musical theater director, adjunct professor - but the one that I really prize is science teacher. I don’t think there’s ever been a better time on Earth to be a science teacher than right now. You don’t have to have a fancy lab or a class full of Einsteins and Hawkings to do some really exciting things. All you need is an Internet hookup and a blank wall.

We have been studying the solar system with the 3rd graders, and now that we’ve talked about the Earth and Moon and stars, it’s become time for the return of my very favorite teaching website, Planet 10. This site allows you, individually or as a class, to design your own planet and launch it into the existing solar system. Aside from the option to put “aliens” on the planet, which results in silly Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy references during the game, it’s fairly scientific. You have to pay attention to your planet’s tilt, gravitational pull, atmospheric composition, position in reference to the Sun, and orbital path. Yet the interface is so visual and simple that with some minor guidance from an adult, 3rd graders can do it.

Kids sure are funny creatures. You give them the choice to create an entire world, and they decide to call it Planet Bob. Despite its unromantic name, Planet Bob was a winner. It approximated the conditions of Earth so closely that it remained habitable throughout the simulation. It’s the first time that I’ve done this with a group of kids and we’ve won the game. It did take many tries to get there, and one of the early obstacles was the kids’ love of the dramatic. One of our earlier attempts was called Planet Nailclipper. Unfortunately, we put Nailclipper all the way in the back of the solar system, near Pluto, so it froze over in short order. The kids were also piqued by the thought of creating a planet with a highly explosive atmosphere and placing it close to the Sun. That one was christened Fireball. Needless to say, Fireball’s existence was nasty, brutish and short.

We’ve used many great websites and free software downloads during our study of space, but this one takes first prize because kids not only enjoy it during class, but demand the URL so that they can go home and try it themselves. Even kids who aren’t studying space want to try it. During one of my classes, an older kid stuck his head in the door to see what we were doing and then said, “Why can’t WE do that? I want to try that!” Later, the 4th graders came down for class and saw it running on my computer. “Oh yeah, I remember doing that last year! What was that website again? Can you write it down for me? I want to make more planets.”

Of course, I put in a lot of effort to get us to the point where we’re casually discussing tilts, orbits, rotations, gravitational pull and atmosphere. When kids are prepared for an experience, they can go much deeper. I wouldn’t use Planet 10 to TEACH kids what an atmosphere is. We did a series of activities about air, looked at diagrams, watched a video of a space shuttle blasting through the layers of the atmosphere and eventually leaving Earth, and did a simulation with M&Ms representing air molecules and a small plastic bag representing the Earth. (Naturally, one group neglected to close their bag, and so some of their air molecules escaped into space…) But now I’m satisfied that we have enough background knowledge to really enjoy the challenge of creating habitable - or unhabitable - planets. It’s an exciting, manageable challenge. I know I played Planet 10 incessantly until I got my first win!

So that’s the internet hookup - now for the blank wall.

The other thing I’ve been working on is a new bulletin board. As a classroom teacher, I never liked bulletin boards. For one thing, there was a lot of anxiety on the part of the adults about showing kids’ work. Do we correct spellings? Are we setting up competition between kids or classrooms? Do we put up work that is excellent, but not particularly visual? Do the kids even care? Science bulletin boards are a lot easier for me to conceptualize because we are usually investigating a focused topic. Last year my boards were a mix of kids’ drawings, photographs of experiments in progress, and charts or diagrams having to do with concepts. When the kids created planets on Planet 10, those went up on the boards for a while.

I think I’ve figured out a different way to do things - one that is less of “let’s show off our finished work” and more of “let’s work on some things together”. Just the other day, a girl came in with a question about gravity that easily could have taken the whole period. She wanted to know why you can hang from a roller coaster upside down and not have gravity pull you down, and also if it would be different if you lived at the “bottom” of the world. She was having trouble articulating her question, and the other kids were getting impatient, and so we eventually shelved it for the time being. I wasn’t happy with that, for several reasons. First, she was clearly committed to getting her question answered, and I didn’t want to discourage her. Second, the other kids were spouting off answers that were basically correct, but I wasn’t confident that they understood her question or really could explain the answers well. You can say “It’s because of gravity” without really even knowing what gravity is.

And even more importantly, there are some kids in that class that I’ve known for a long time, and I can’t remember them EVER asking a single question. They constantly want to prove how smart they are and how much they know. For them, asking a question would be like admitting that they don’t know anything. I want them to see asking questions as an intellectual pursuit, not an admission of ignorance. If you’re not asking questions, you’re not doing science. You’re doing religion.

So I ripped down our old bulletin board (which was a game in which you had to look at microscopic and satellite photos and guess what the items were) and put up a sign that said The Great Wall of Questions. Then I spent 45 minutes with the girl who had the gravity questions, and we finally hammered out what she wanted to ask and how she wanted to phrase things. She drew two diagrams to go with her questions, and we posted them up on the board. One of the final questions was, “If you fall off a roller coaster in Antarctica, would you fall off the Earth?”

This, to me, is an awesome question. I wouldn’t have ever thought to ask it myself. But it really tests your knowledge of gravity when you think about it. And if you’re a teacher like me, it’s like peering through a window into a child’s brain to see how kids think.

First of all, a lot of kids think of the Earth as being like a container, with a top and a bottom. The air you breathe is at the top, you are in the middle, and the ground is on the bottom. If you start out in the air, you fall to the ground. Air is up (North) and ground is down (South). Now if you look at a map or a globe, at least one produced here in North America, it looks like Antarctica and Australia are on the bottom. Now maps are flat, so you show kids a globe, and they all notice that the Southern Hemisphere sticks out the bottom. Therefore, it looks like air and ground would be the reverse. Ground is up and air is down. When kids picture it, they picture something like people in Australia walking on the ceiling. This is great, except that the mental model gets over-applied. If you try to walk on your ceiling, you fall down. So it seems entirely possible to kids that people in Australia or elsewhere in the Southern Hemisphere might fall off the ground and into the air.

This is where gravity comes in. The kids I work with all understand that gravity pulls you toward the ground, so they intellectually know that people in Australia can’t fall OFF the ground and into the air. But the roller coaster hints at something interesting - a belief that maybe if you are kind of in the air to begin with, and maybe if you’re going fast enough, you’ll end up falling down. Where is down? Is it the ground? Or is it the concrete perception of down, which in the roller coaster example would be - off the Earth?

So even if a kid can spout off about gravity keeping us from floating away off the Earth, that kid can still be picturing people in Australia walking on the ceiling, or people in Antarctica flying off a roller coaster straight “down” into space. And indeed, the next morning, two middle school kids stopped me on the stairwell to ask me if you would fall off the roller coaster in Antarctica into space. I asked, “What do you think?” and they hesitated before replying that “maybe” you could fly off into space. Middle school kids!

We’re going to try to fill up that Great Wall of Questions. I’d be thrilled if I got stopped on the stairwell more often. And I want kids to ask the questions that tell me what and how they’re thinking.

No, I didn’t get into a fight with someone - it’s the title of one of the songs for the musical this year.

This year’s musical is shaping up in an interesting way. I put out an open call for show ideas and got suggestions in dribs and drabs. Immediately nixed any hope of “Grease”, “High School Musical” (shudder) or a musical rendition of Pokemon (double shudder). One kid suggested a sequel to the Hank Zipzer adaptation we did two years ago. Another suggested the Chronicles of Narnia. My personal feeling on that one was - if you are going to have a talking lion in a musical, you’re pretty much doing the Wizard of Oz. Which is on my blacklist, along with The Sound of Music, so no go.

Eventually, ideas trickled down from various age groups all centering around the theme of adapting fairy tales. (Yes, these kids have all seen Shrek and its sequel spawn - why do you ask?) That, with no more details to be had, was the show that I pitched to the elementary school crowd on club choosing day, and based on that alone I got 25 takers, plus another 5 in set design. It didn’t quite approach last year’s numbers (38 onstage) but then again, last year’s show was about a computer game. I fully intended to enjoy my smaller numbers and we moved right along into choosing the fairy tales to adapt, brainstorming what nasty horrible things to do to the stories once we got a hold of them, and then casting.

I decided to use the long bus ride to the pumpkin farm to pick kids’ brains about the script. I rode with the 3rd graders and there were a number of them signed up for the show, so I figured I would ask them. I obviously forgot Rule #17 about communicating with children - as soon as you need to talk to a select few about something private, ten others are hanging on your every word and will have perfect memory for everything that was said. I’m half-convinced that teachers who want to pass along information to students should try whispering it to a single kid in the back row. Pretty soon I was being pelted with questions. “Are you going to do the show for everyone? Even us?” “So-and-So says he’s the main character, is that true?” “Is So-and-So really the Prince? Is he going to have to kiss anyone?” Eventually the conversation started to die down, but one persistent little girl wanted to know if I needed any ideas for the show. I asked if she could come up with anything about our Snow White section, which I was struggling with. She launched into a lilting melody about how Snow White and the dwarves went walking through forest, and how one by one the dwarves are picked off by different dangers - a deep hole, a large snake, several snakes, five hundred snakes - well, you get the picture.

I told her I was going to use her idea, but I don’t think she believed me. And then I went ahead and did it. I changed it a bit, obviously - first off, only ONE dwarf gets eaten by a snake. I mean, let’s not go overboard. Anyway, I made sure that everyone whom I spoke with about the show knew that the Snow White song was this girl’s idea and that I was going to give her a writing credit in the playbill. But this wasn’t enough for her. She had now decided that she wanted to BE one of the dwarves, though - shocker! - not the one that gets eaten by the snake. We went on another field trip on Wednesday, and most of the bus ride going there was taken up with “Can I be in the show, Lisa?”

And then, of course - still adhering to Rule #17 - other kids overheard, and suddenly I had a whole group of them asking to join the play.

Normally I would have said no. One of the cardinal rules of musical theater is that it has to be your first choice from the beginning. Once it gets started, you can’t leave early - or join late. But this was an unusual situation in that I had basically one of the co-authors of the show asking for an onstage role, and I was inclined to give it to her. And then, since I was letting one person join late, it wouldn’t really be fair if I didn’t let the other kids join late too. I tried to warn them that the script was basically finished and we’d have to add them in, and that all the good roles were already taken. I told them that they had to go back to school after the trip and think about it, and make sure that was what they really wanted, and only then would we make it official. One reconsidered, but the other five were firm. (The one who reconsidered later re-reconsidered. She’s now a dwarf. Still not the one who gets it from the snake, though!)

THEN, to add the final straw, the same little troublemaker talked the show up on the school bus next morning and convinced yet another child to join - one of the 4th grade boys whom I NEVER would have guessed would EVER willingly participate in the show. Maybe she should just do my club commercial next year?

So now I’m up to 32 onstage and 6 backstage. We’re about back up to last year’s numbers. It’s going to take a miracle to keep the show down to 45 minutes once we’re done granting everyone’s requests for more lines and more to do. That was a major problem last year, giving everyone enough lines to make them happy. I even resorted to “Guys, this is NOT Lord of the Rings, we can’t have a 3 hour show!” Which - I’d better be careful or someone’s going to angle for LOTR for NEXT year’s production.

In case you’re wondering, “Take That!” is the first song in the show. It’s… about a food fight.

Yeah, this one’s going to be interesting.

I posted a countdown to my Antarctica trip on the side of my computer monitor - just a screenshot from Google Earth of the Antarctic continent and the sentence, “Lisa is going to Antarctica in ____ days.” (39 as of today, by the way.) I am not above a little shameless self-trip-promotion. It’s part of the fun. I’m not talking the trip up or devoting instructional time to it - I’m just floating it out there so that it can start to generate interest and questions among the kids.

One of my strong beliefs about education is that teachers have to be well rounded people. Kids automatically assume that we sleep at school and spend our free time reciting the times tables to each other while diagramming sentences and concocting new and ever more diabolical homework assignments to torture kids. (To be fair, most children’s books and media do nothing to discourage this perception.) Now I’ve certainly given my share of diabolical homework and I do spend a lot of time planning and thinking about education, but there’s a lot more to my life than school life. And I think it’s important for kids to see that.

“How do you know so much about this stuff?” I’m asked this question by kids all the time. My response: “I read books about it.” My bookshelf has its fair share of “How To Teach Reading To Struggling Learners” and that sort of text, but those books share space with “Guns, Germs and Steel” and ”Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy”. I also seek out information firsthand, by traveling whenever I can. The kids know that when they are at camp or their country house, I am off somewhere too. Antarctica is different in that I am taking the trip during the school year. It’s one of the few destinations in the world that don’t lend themselves to a teacher’s summer vacation.

“Why are you going?” kids are asking me. “Because I want to see it,” I answer. They nod, but seem skeptical. You mean you’re going all the way down to another continent, on three airplanes and a ship, just to see it? Exactly the point. There’s value in seeing things with your own eyes, not just listening to what someone else tells you. On the other hand, you won’t understand what you’re seeing unless you have the context of what others have seen and thought about it. The days of explorers are over, but to me this is still exploration. Just because others have gone before doesn’t eliminate the possibilities for you. Kids need to know this too. Sometimes, in our attempt to help them understand, we present information to them like it is an absolute certainty, all figured out, as though there aren’t still questions to be answered and avenues to explore. It’s why I love to teach about space. Kids ask me questions all the time that there are no answers for. I love to say, “Maybe one of you will figure that out.”

One final, amusing note is that kids wanted to make sure that I wasn’t being “sent” to Antarctica because I had done something wrong. I had to reassure a few that I was going because I wanted to.

Where have I been? Come walk with me –

-through the vibrant markets of old Morocco, where women in pom-pom Berber hats still offer baskets of green and purple figs on the side of the street, interspersed with hanging bags of Pampers and bestsellers reprinted in French and Arabic. Our tour guide rushes ahead to the next shop where we can buy “the best” rugs and cheap jewelry probably made in China, his partner at the end of our blatant tourist conga line shooing us away from interacting too much with anyone or wandering off down the labyrinth of sidestreets. Later, we pack ourselves back onto the tour bus - large, sparkling, out of place among the dusty cars that spend their whole lives out in the Moroccan countryside, instead of just one hectic day.

-through the gloomy medieval palaces of southern Spain, snapping endless photos of intricate columns and tiles whispering Arabic prayers, doll-faced Marys with rhinestone skirts holding red cheeked babies, and then back out to the street into the bright blue light for an afternoon coffee and tapas.

-through the newly carpeted hallways of my school, shrouded in plastic and littered with half empty cardboard boxes. Cabinets are flung open to reveal spelling workbooks and rolled up maps and brand new composition notebooks. It’s quiet now, and we are waiting. 

-as the new 6th graders burst into the science room in the mornings, greeting us dramatically, showing off new iPods and groaning about new rites of passage like history tests and gym uniforms. The younger ones pop in too, bewildered to see the “older kids” in an elementary classroom, and sneak over behind my desk to coo at my tortoise and examine the figurines and pictures scattered around my work area. I put my headphones on in an attempt to get some work done, and shoo them all upstairs.

-through the pumpkin patch, surrounded by kids in their jackets against the new fall cold, exuberantly shouting. “Look, I’ve found one!” “This one’s bumpy!” “Can you take it off the vine, Lisa?” We get to a patch of vines on the ground with pumpkin-shaped berries, and the kids exclaim their surprise when I admit that I don’t know exactly what it is. “But you know how to find out, and that’s the important thing!” They laugh and run off to fill their blue plastic bags with gourds, and I pull out my camera again…

-and later, back on the bumpy bus ride back to school, I ride in the back perched on a giant pumpkin wedged into the aisle, periodically scolding the two boys next to me to stop play fighting before someone gets hurt and finally resorting to squeezing in between them so that they can’t reach each other. I expect grumbling about how unfair it all is and how the bus ride is far too long, as well as the usual abrasive comments that show that we are above all this babyish school stuff and far too cool for teachers. Instead we chat and we giggle and before long one is calmly gazing out the window lost in daydreams, and the other is leaning on me contentedly.

Up next: How to plan a trip to Antarctica at the very last minute.

It’s been a busy summer. A very busy summer.

We ended school for the kids, attended the high school graduation, and then spent two days cleaning up. I wish I had photos of the grand landfill that formed outside the principal’s office - mountains of half-used notebooks, markers with and without caps, folders and more folders, magazine bins with labels taped to them, games with two pieces missing - some of which was outright thrown away, much of which was donated to camps and school summer programs. I joked that I was going “dumpster diving” in the pile as I carted away old 1 inch binders and permanent markers and plastic containers for the science lab.

They’re painting the hallways on the elementary floor this summer, redoing the carpets, installing cabinets above the lockers, reformatting the computers, replacing the hanging maps in some rooms, and replacing the desks in others - so people spent hours packing materials into boxes and labeling all the furniture with names and room numbers. We looked at the still-forming reading and math groups for next year and what books would have to be ordered for them.

Then it was Tuesday afternoon, and everybody started to leave. And I stayed.

Aside from July 4th, which was a national holiday, I’ve been at school every day since. I’ve been meeting with teachers about their curriculum for next year, putting together a guide that lays out what is to be covered at each level. When do kids first learn about the continents? When are they expected to write a paragraph? Who is going to be doing the clay landforms, the homeroom teacher or art teacher? Communication and coordination is hard work. It’s just as with any complex system - effort needs to be put in to maintain all of the moving parts and keep them coordinated, or the natural tendency is for different pieces to start slipping.

These are all questions that we’ve thought about before - actually, I gave out a scope and sequence for geography last year, but in talking to people now, I can see that it wasn’t always followed. These sorts of decisions can never be made by one person alone - especially when it’s not the person who’s going to be doing the actual work. One big push this year is going to be keeping everyone attuned to what everyone else is doing, both within the same level and between levels. And we’re going to be particularly working on writing, which is by far the toughest subject to coordinate.

I wasn’t originally going to be at school, doing this every day. I was originally going to come in a few times during the summer to work on the social studies curriculum with teachers, in keeping with my job as curriculum coordinator. I also asked if I could come in a day or two and work on the lower elementary science curriculum. Then, a few days into the post-school-year-session, I was offered the position of learning specialist. That converted me from a 10-month person with some extra days working over the summer to a 12-month person who gets three weeks of vacation over the summer. (So yes, I am still going to Spain.)

It’s been exciting and very, very busy. (I am also continuing to teach graduate school at night - in three more sessions we’re going to wrap up the July semester.) But in the midst of everything, I’ve had some time to read. More about my new books of choice in the next post.

It’s 12:03 am and I can’t sleep. This is a relatively common occurrence, but generally my tossing and turning can be traced back to an identifiable cause. For once it isn’t residual over-caffeination or jitters about a big event coming up. I’m not quite sure why I’m up, other than the fact that I went into bed at 8:00 last night and apparently I do not need that much sleep. It could be as basic as that. Or, it could have something to do with the fact that I am getting old.

It’s not that I feel old. I don’t. I feel energized and upbeat and ready to take on big things. But I keep getting subtle and not-so-subtle reminders in my daily life that time is passing. Whenever I try to have a conversation with kids about technology, for example, and I end up sounding like my grandparents. “Why, when I was your age, cell phones hadn’t even been invented yet!” (Of course, the speed of advancement in technology has bypassed us all. I’m sure the children of today will sound like old codgers when they attempt to explain to THEIR kids how they recorded music into those quaint little colored boxes with the little white headphones. Headphones! The next generation will be plugging themselves directly into iTunes and downloading music straight into the brain. Or something.)

Today what brought it home was watching the 8th graders graduate. I was in the audience as the graduation proceeded, and the little pipsqueaks I knew as 4th and 5th graders strode confidently across the stage as brand new high schoolers, complete with corsages and diplomas. Each of them gave a short speech about their middle school years, thanking their family and friends and teachers for supporting them and enabling them to succeed. A few even made passing references to how hard school was for them as elementary students, even to the point of saying, “When I first got to this school, I didn’t like it very much.” Thankfully, none of them had been in MY classes… that would have been awkward. Though the fact is, I am one of the few remaining staff people in my division who even worked at the school when these kids were elementary students.

Sometimes I feel like the school historian, when I find myself saying things like, “You should have seen him when he was in elementary school… he’s come a long way.” People nod, but it’s like we’re talking CD players and iPods again. It’s hard to imagine what it was like “back then”. And this is the group that feels “back then” for me, because this is the group that welcomed me to the school when I started out as a student teacher.

They were my first students in every academic subject except science.

They were the founding castmembers of my very first musical theater production.

They slept overnight on the floor with me at the Central Park Zoo.

They beat me mercilessly at checkers, Connect 4, Battleship and UNO, and only stopped reminding me about it when we passed in the hallway fairly recently.

These were kids who challenged me with Star Wars and Lord of the Rings trivia until they finally realized that I had so many more years of viewings under my belt that my trivia supremacy was assured.

These were kids whose voices still ring out in my language samples and case studies from graduate school. Though they were reduced to pseudonyms and made-up circumstances, they were always perfectly real to me. Sometimes, even now, I find myself telling stories about them to my graduate classes as though I worked with them just last week, when in fact what I am describing happened 5 years ago. 

These were kids who found out what it was like to face me in an all out, no-holding-back, supercharged powerhouse dizziness-inducing Tag smackdown. (And for the record, I caught every single one of them. So what if I was out of breath for the next 20 minutes?)

These were kids who, on my last day as a student teacher, clung to me and threatened to lock me in the closet so that I couldn’t leave. Realizing that was probably unworkable, they then sat together at dismissal plotting how to shuttle me in between their various houses, as if the reason I was leaving was that I didn’t live nearby. They just didn’t believe that I would leave them because I actually wanted to. And they were right. I never did leave. I told myself that I was going to see each of them graduate from high school, and in just a few more years, I will. Some of them eventually moved away or left to go to other schools - and I wonder about them all the time - but I feel a loyalty to this group that I don’t think I’ll ever lose, and that I might not ever quite feel again.

As a teacher, I know I’m going to be faced with this year after year. It’s partly why I do this job. Sometimes, in the moment, one can start to despair. It seems that if a child doesn’t “get” something within your 45 minute period, all hope is lost and they’ll “always” be stuck where they are. Well, on that stage today were kids who, when I knew them, seemed very stuck. And somewhere along the line, they got unstuck and started to move forward. Maybe I had a little part in that, I don’t know. They taught me a lot more than I taught them. And one thing that they have taught me, just today, is that sometimes you don’t get to see exactly how your work with kids gets them toward the end result - but it does.

I walked into the reception after the ceremony today and immediately felt overwhelmed by the huge crowd, and was about to head out the door when one of the kids spotted me and yelled out my name. I slipped through the crowd to congratulate him and his family. “Remember the Star Wars trivia game from 4th grade?” he asked. “It seems like only yesterday.”

“It was yesterday,” I said.

And now it’s tomorrow. But maybe I can put it off for a few hours while I get some sleep.