I follow a few education gurus on the Twitter and the Facebook, and I understand the importance of finding materials, methods, and ideas from people who seem to be successful.  At the same time, I have noticed that when some teachers read that expert's books, posts, or blog, the teachers often buy in to everything that expert might say.  They reproduce everything the expert does and says, expecting the same results.

But that is not how it works.

You see, we often think that education is a science.  It may be, but I suppose we know less about this branch of science than we do about how to cure incurable diseases.  Put simply, what works for one person does not necessarily work for another.  I would encourage you to take what these people put out with a grain of salt.  That's not to say we can't learn from them, but to bite on everything, hook, line, and sinker, it to fail to discern what works for you.  We all - teachers and students - are different.  Rather than drive in someone else's ruts, how about picking and choosing the things that will work for you - a little from this guy, a little from that book, a little from this video, a little from that keynote - and include them along with your own strengths.  I don't ever want to teach without my personality and strengths, but that's exactly what happens when I try to become somebody else.  Take some from Ron Clark, some from Gerry Brooks, some from Dave Burgess, and some from your own teaching neighbors, and blend them all together to make them work.  For you and your students.

Why do we do it to them?

We throw our kids in a room with a stack of flash cards and expect them to learn.

We throw a box of paper cards at our kids, and we don't lift a finger to teach them how to properly use the cards.

We sit our children in front of 100 math problems, and we expect them to solve the problems with understanding and fluency.

Admittedly, I am guilty along with most American parents, but I have come to understand a number of things in the last few years.

We might even make some new flash cards to help us along:​

I am not quick to dig into the academics in our fourth grade classroom.  Instead, we have tried to figure out when to give attention to others or when to take attention from others.    Instead, we have made some progress with self-discipline.  Instead, we have gotten to know one another better.  We have learned to lead.  We have learned to trust.  We have learned to look forward, without quitting, to our potential.

In the slide show above, you can see some of our newest Hoggatteers, actively mirroring one another.  The idea of this Mirror, Mirror game is to lead the other person and not to stump them.  I've stressed to the class the concept that says a good leader is not just the person out front, outrunning the rest of the field, but that a good leader brings along followers.  The Mirror, Mirror activity is an excellent one to make this point.

When you see the beads in another of those photos, you're looking at them in their colored form.  In reality, I gave students white beads on strings for bracelets, telling them that the white beads represented a blank slate - like a blank sheet of paper, waiting for a story or a letter to be written on it.  The greatest things in life are more likely waiting for my fourth graders in the future.  I used the Latin phrase, Erudito Est Potentia, meaning "Imagine Your Potential," and I asked students to do just that.  Like a sports star, I wanted them to visualize their goals.  When the kids went to recess, they discovered on their own that the beads changed color in the ultra-violet light.  Those beads had great potential after all!

Just who fought in the French and Indian War?

​Look at these flags, and join in on the class discussion.

The teacher will introduce you to some Natives (in portrait form).
​Take time to get to know them as you sketch their likenesses.

In The First World War, the author does not spend very much time with the American experience in World War I. Finally, in the last chapter, he gives us this paragraph:

Almost 150 years after the American Revolution, the reputation of the U.S. forces remains one of being unprepared and going rogue.  The First World War openly admits that the United States played a relatively minor role in the actual events of World War I until the very end.  How relieved the European allies must have been when U.S. guns and troops arrived.  Germany wavered:

As I understand it, the United States wanted the occasion of Armistice to be engrained in the world memory.  The celebration of the Armistice agreement would be postponed until 11:11 on the 11th day of the 11th month of the year.  But while the occasion is memorable for that mnemonic, I recently heard (on the centennial of the Armistice) a PBS interview with a scholar connected to the WWI Memorial in Kansas City that more people died in WWI, because of the delay to that time and date, than died on D-Day during WWII.

Peace must be a tricky dance to choreograph.  There are many links that must be considered, and the whole thing must be chaotic.  A huge consideration at any time a soldier returns home, however, must be that of acclimating to "real" life.  I never served in the military, but I can certainly appreciate the mixed feelings.

I read this book to prepare for my week-long teacher institution at Fort Ticonderoga in upstate New York,
this summer.  Follow the link to my Fort Ticonderoga page for more.

For as long as I can remember, I have loved seeing "living history".  When I was a kid, my family spent some summers in Northeast Oklahoma, where we enjoyed camping at state parks.  I would play on the playgrounds, and I loved exploring lakeside, but one of the activities I remember was when we drove out of the campground for the day to visit a place called Tsa La Gi.  This was the destination for the Trail of Tears, when the Cherokee Indians were forced off of their traditional land and onto a reservation in Oklahoma.

At the site is a living history area, with traditional Cherokee housing, games, and daily life displayed and "reenacted" by members of the tribe in traditional clothing for the education of the paying public.  In the evening, there was a play, enacted in an outdoor amphitheater to tell the story of the Cherokee removal.  That experience has stayed with me for decades, and is probably one of the first times I saw living history.

Likewise I liked visiting Anadarko, Oklahoma, where other tribes were displayed in varying housing.  I enjoyed watching the dances performed.  The same is true of our visit to Seven Falls in Colorado, where I got to join in with dancers in a round dance.

Later, after college, when working at a place called The Wilds, in El Reno, Oklahoma, I encouraged living history as part of what we offered to the public.  We were able to have southwestern gunfights at the barn and corral area, but more importantly, we hosted a small rendezvous for Civil War reenactors.  The participants did not pretend to fight in a battle, but they did set up their tents and live for a couple of days like the soldiers they portrayed.  They even brought a cannon from the era, which they fired over the ten-acre lake in the center of the property, even doing so at night with a rain of sparks and thundering percussion.

With that said, I recently spent my week at Fort Ticonderoga in Upstate New York - a week of listening to fifes and drums parading in and out of the fort and watching French soldiers drilling and being inspected.  Every day it seemed there was something else to see.

Now that I am an adult (and have been one for quite some while, though I'm not quite sure when that happened), I can appreciate the efforts of the people at Fort Ticonderoga much more.  It is obvious to the conscious visitor that reenactors at the fort take their jobs seriously, taking the time to search for authentic costume pieces, sewing all of their clothing by hand on the property, using the correct thread, buttons, and lace.  Even the food they cook is real, understanding that as a French installation, they would have been Catholic and food restrictions on certain days and holidays would have been strictly adhered to.

Arriving in the morning, for a while I was the only person standing in 21st century garb - a time traveler, able to watch as the small contingent of soldiers drilled outside their barracks.  How this place must have bustled with thousands of men going about their daily business and preparing for battle or at the very least preparing to defend New France from any inkling of invasion by the British during the French and Indian War.

Living history is terrific, but living it in the real location of the history is even more meaningful.  With the right mindset, a person can transport himself into the period and experience the emotions and anxiety of being at war in an unfamiliar countryside, just waiting (and waiting) for something to break the monotony.  To me it was fascinating, but for the real soldiers who lived it, it must have been an inconvenient agony.

Whichever strand of history DNA a person wishes to follow, it will lead to all kinds of connections.  I often find myself stopping my reading, only sit and think for a minute before my eyes widen in understanding.  I literally say the word aha! to myself (sometimes out loud) and feel a sense of pride that I was able to make the connection. Then, of course, I look around to see if anyone is watching, because after all, I am the often the only one in the room who gets excited about such things.

May that sense of learning and that feeling of awe be contagious in my classroom, and may my students realize there is much to learn from history that will benefit humanity in the future.

I read this book to prepare for a week-long Teacher Institution at Fort Ticonderoga,
​on the east bank of Lake Champlain in upstate New York, this summer.
I continue to collect my thoughts on my Fort Ticonderoga page.

I passed out the individual testing results from last year's third grade state test.  The Missouri Assessment Program (MAP) test was administered in the spring for Mathematics and Communication.  ​In the interest of transparency, I want to share the results for students who are now in my class.

You know what that means, right?  It means we need to hunker down and work hard to improve ourselves.  The good news is that we really have no where to go but up.  We have an opportunity to make great strides toward raising our achievement levels by this spring.  I need to have everybody on board, supporting these kids.  They're going to need patience and instruction, but at the same time, some of them are going to require some stronger nudges and encouragement if we're going to see significant results.  I have no doubt that it's possible.

This was a tough comparison to make, but we had fun with it.  I gave each Hoggatteer a wind bag to inflate with air. 

While that probably sounds simple, it was not.

I have to admit, the classroom became quite colorful for a while as kids attempted to blow up the red, yellow, green, and blue bags.  Students were huffing and puffing all over the place.

But that didn't work.​

​Finally, I announced that I could blow up a wind bag with just one or two breaths.  To them this was highly unlikely:  they had just tried 30, 40, even 50 breaths to inflate each bag.

My approach was slightly different from what I had seen them attempt.  Instead of closing the end to blow through it, I opened it wide.  Instead of blowing directly into the tube, I stayed back about eight inches and aimed a stream of air straight through the middle of the opening, resulting in the bag being nearly completely full of air.

But how could this be?  Clearly my lungs could not have held the quantity of air that now filled the bag!

The answer, scientifically, comes from the Bernoulli Effect, which allows that the air being blown in such a manner actually attracts air from around it and pulls it into the bag behind it.

The lesson for us was that a good leader sometimes has to step back from the problem and look at it again (Sometimes we get too close to the problem, and we can't see the solution.).  Also, a good leader brings others with him/her.  Rather than trying to do everything myself, take control of every situation, and ignore input from my team, I should find ways to involve and engage my teammates.

And there is the lesson...and it was fun.

I felt like I could take my time and appreciate my surroundings.  I walked up the steps to the flag pole, sans flag at this time of the day, and peered over the wall at the La Chute River for the first time.  The La Chute is the waterway that descends from Lake George into Lake Champlain, so steeply that it is unnavigable by boat.  From the fort, it appears as a marshy part of the lake, with water plants all over - really something of a unique setting.

Then, of course, came the rows of 18th century cannon and mortars - large guns just standing before me waiting to be touched.  I spent time with many of them individually, laying my hands on them in an attempt to read their memories of battles 200-300 years ago.  I ran my fingers across their designs trying to imagine the soldiers whose jobs it was to move them or manipulate them, trying to figure out how they could be aimed accurately, and trying to hear those distant reports as they fired point-blank into an approaching collection of boats on the water or up onto Mount Defiance on the other side.

A few plaques decorated the walls of the fort, commemorating the rich history of the place.  Beginning with the French and Indian battles fought there, the courageous men who led or the brave soldiers who fought around the great fort.  I remembered that I was walking in the same place of famous Americans, Frenchmen, and British leaders - people like George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, but also Benedict Arnold, Phillip Schuyler, Henry Knox, and Ethan Allen.  Names like Montcalm, Amherst, Burgoyne, and Rogers stood out to me, and I had to stop to consider each of their contributions to the history of our nation.

Finally ready to enter the fort past the the big wooden doors and through the tunnel, I could hear French troops drilling, fifes and drums fifing and drumming, and chickens.  A few guests already shuffled along in the gravel, also waking up to a very warm morning that would become a dangerously hot day later.

As I read Fred Anderson's book, The War that Made America, I was reminded that it is a companion book to the PBS miniseries under the same title.  This series can be found below in YouTube videos.  If you have four hours to spare, check these out.

For more of my thoughts and experiences from the Fort Ticonderoga Teacher Institute,
​see the collection of posts on my Fort Ticonderoga page.