We need to be on the same page, they say.

But why?  That doesn't sound like a celebration of diversity at all.

They say this because they believe something will magical will happen if we all teach the same thing at the same time in the same way.  But in doing so they ignore the obvious:
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• Kids are different, and combinations of kids are also different.  What works with the group dynamic in one location will elicit a totally different response with a different group.
• Teachers are different.  We have different skills and personalities, and students react to us in different manners.  No one teaches like I do, and I don't teach well with certain methods.
• Kids' needs are different.  A teacher may find that his/her students need more instruction in good manners before moving into academic topics.  One teacher may discover the students are fluent readers while another finds that more time needs to be invested to foster greater fluency.
• Schedules are different.  Some classes find two-hour blocks of time embedded into their schedule and others do not.  The duration of a solid block of time (in contrast to frequent shorter time blocks can greatly effect how things are taught.

Face facts:  I don't care to be on the same page as you are just for the sake of some kind of invisible club you believe exists.  We can teach the same standards in different ways at different times, and believe it or not, the universe will not fold in on itself.  In fact, I believe we are stronger when we encourage our differences.

At our school, we have four fourth grade teachers.  We are as different as the four points of the compass, and yet we get along quite cooperatively and affably.  We are stronger because we disagree.  We challenge each other. We recognize that we become stronger when we face resistance.  People see how different we are, and they can recognize our unique dynamic.

We are also able to handle student issues in different ways.  Where one of us might have a weakness, another can step in and help.  When one has run out of ideas, another steps up with suggestions.

And we don't even try to be copies of one another. Instead, we put our individual strengths together for the good of the group.  I'd much rather do this than be on the same page.  It allows me to retain my identity and belief system with less compromise.

I know who I am.  I know my weaknesses.  Certainly I can work to improve those weaknesses.  But at the same time, I can enhance my strengths.  Forcing my square peg into a round hole would only weigh me down with frustration.  I need to own what I'm doing in the classroom.  I need to make things my own.  I can't take things verbatim; instead I need to rewrite, rewire, and redevelop things in my own way.  Other teachers can re-, re-, re- in their own ways, as well.  And we'll all be stronger for it.

Because we're all different people, doing different things in different ways at different times.  And that's OK as long as we're working diligently, respectfully, and professionally toward all the right goals and standards.  Diversity in education is not only a good thing; it is essential for success.

You've got to stop...stopping, that is.

In a self-contained classroom, I have a great deal of say over when we learn what.  And I cannot allow a set schedule to get in the way.  Just because the hour has ended, and the schedule dictates a change in subject, does not mean you have to stop.  How many times have you dug into a lesson - really gotten your students engaged in something - and stopped because the clock screamed at you?

Stop it.

Take that "teachable moment" and run with it.

I've been known to stick with a lesson for hours, even for an entire day, because I'm smart enough to know what's working for my students.

Yes, I hear you.  An administrator can be so controlling and heavy-handed that s/he will not permit you the professional respect you need to make decisions for your class.  Some would have you teach the same thing at the same time as your grade level peers.  They want to see you on the same page and teaching in the same manner.

I don't wish to sound aggressive, but I will fight that concept.  Who knows my classroom, might students, and my style better than I do?  If it is a teacher's contractual duty to teach students, then any administrator worth his/her salt will respectfully allow the teachers in the building to teach.

That includes this preposterous idea that a teacher should understand best what to do in the classroom.  My friends, we are the tip of the spear.  We are the ones on the front lines in the war against ignorance.

Are any more military metaphors needed here, or are we getting the idea?

In contrast, I need the ability to shut down a lesson that isn't working.  We've all had lessons that have fallen flat. Did we keep marching forward in failure?  Or did we have the common sense to wave the white flag of surrender? We must know when to retreat from failure.  Oh, we can still learn from the failed lesson, change it on the fly, and keep trying, or we could change the lesson altogether and try again tomorrow - but we have to be able to make changes in our schedules as the days progress.

Don't tie yourself to the schedule.  Stop stopping when the bell tolls.  Exercise that famous flexibility we always hear about in our field.  Make this thing work for your students!

And you administrators, remember the greatest tool you have in your belt is to empower your teachers.  They should know better than you what they're students need.  Be their resource for support and advice, but grant them the professionalism they so desire.

I guess that's just my inclination:  I embody Dan Eldon's notion that "The journey is the destination."

I've found it's true in math, too.  No matter where the educational pendulum lands, this year, I know it is better for students to suffer than to sit.  It's better for pupils to struggle than receive handouts.  It's better for them to pull for themselves than for me to push them from behind.  I've written such notions into my educational philosophy for a long time.

And it still makes sense to me.

This year, I embarked upon a search for better math strategies.  In an attempt to understand the infamous Common Core, while at the same time doing what is best for my students.  The search for common sense, but not necessarily common core and definitely not in any overpriced and oversold textbook, led me from place to place to place, and the journey was so rich with scenery that I found myself stopping along the side of the road several times to take pictures.

Along the way, I found Andrew Stadel, Dan Meyer, Steve Wyborney, Fawn Nguyen, and Robert Kaplinsky.  I stopped to ask for directions, and they led me to others.

It was a virtual revolution in math presentation, and I was ready to enlist.

It seems these soldiers are making strides in math education, in a noble quest not to teach or present math, but to instill it in students, to embed it in the way they think.  These soldiers are leading the way in rebellion against tradition and textbooks.

My kind of people!

The only problem is that most of their materials are over our heads.  I'm charged with teaching fourth graders, and the material here is primarily for middle and high school classes.

Their materials may be over our heads, but their ideas certainly are not.

Perhaps you are a teacher who needs some inspiration.  Well, don't wait for the next sunrise to begin your own journey, and don't wait for someone to give you the script.  Check out the webpages that I'm following these days. The first are, for lack of a better description, blogs.

If all of that doesn't tickle your fancy, perhaps the next links might suit you better.  I selected the following websites because they are practical, understandable, useful, and unique.  They're also adaptable:  even if I do not use the sites directly with my students, they can influence my own instruction.  I can, and already have, adapt the concepts and the materials provided to make them more appropriate for the situation in our classroom.

I'm not going to describe these because, frankly, you need to pull off onto the shoulder for a while and consider the scenery for yourself.  Take your time:  there are attractions here that might surprise you.  Just remember:  we're charged with motivating our students to be curious and think for themselves.  It's not about memorization or formulas; it's about approaching the "problems", noticing the details, and discovering the math.

This is not a post about blackline masters (AKA worksheets) or tangible rewards (AKA bribes).

This is a commentary about giving your students too much.  Not only are you providing them with too many answers, but you're also guiding them too much.  You're practically doing the work for them.

I get it.  I really do.  I don't want my kids to fail either.

But if they can't do the work for themselves, I fail.

How about leaving things more open-ended.  There may be other ways to solve a problem or answer a question. Don't do the problem for them.  Make them talk it out.  Make them explain.  Allow them to get things wrong, then help them find their mistakes.  Stick with the kid who's struggling, and make him try, try again.

And then reward him when he finally makes it.

In some cases, we even teach too much up front.  Rather than give a situation and let the class discover their methods, we take their hands and walk them through it.  The fact is, there needs to be balance in how much we guide and how much we get out of the way.

That's how I learned to swim.  There's not enough instruction in the world that can teach a kid to swim without getting in the water.  When I was afraid of being in the deep end of the pool for any length of time, my parents finally took to tossing me.  I guess I wasn't smart enough to swim to the opposite side of the pool, and every time I'd make it to the side, my dad would pick me up and throw me back into the middle.

And it made me mad.

But I learned how to swim.

I know that I don't want my students or my own children to overly depend on me in the future, so I'm going to keep throwing them in without their floaties.  While I'm not going to let them drown, at some point, they still need to find their own solutions.

The struggle is what makes victory feel even better.  If achievement is easy, who cares?  If achievement is difficult, it's worth a lot more.  Kites only fly because of resistance.  The impeded stream is the one that sings. And the kid who works hard, succeeds.

So stop making it easy by handing them everything on a tray.  Get them in the dirt, make them wrestle with each other.  Get them engaged and interested enough to want to find the answers.  Give them a hand up and not a handout.

Recently, I took my children to the public library for some special events.  As we made our way to the entry, I noticed a short, older lady approaching as well. According to my upbringing, I held the door open and waited for the lady to enter before going in.  It was simple manners, and it is second nature for me.

Sometimes people don't even say thank you when you hold open the door, but usually they will.  According to her upbringing, this lady thanked me as she passed through.

Inside the building, I caught up with my children, while the elderly lady shuffled along. Before long I heard her behind us:  "Hey!"

"Hey!" she repeated again and again.  "Hey you!"

How many times have you heard it?

We don't need to reinvent the wheel.

What does that mean?  To me not reinventing something - anything - means we are satisfied with what we have. Or at the very least, we are satisfied with what someone else has given us.  Does anyone else see a problem here?

I'm not even going to try to count the number of times an administrator, teaching coach, or workshop presenter has told the participants that because someone has already created something, we don't need to put any thought into it.

I can't fathom a world where teachers are expected to just roll over and take everything so verbatim, but let's keep with the original metaphor that's overused in our field - We don't need to reinvent the wheel - to which I reply, "That's a bunch of bologna!"  That's exactly why the technology of Back to the Future's 2016 hasn't shown up by now. Not reinvent the wheel?How else will we ever get our cars off the ground?  Come on, people!

Is that the message we want to spread to our children?  If so, then we are perpetually stuck in the present with no hope of a better, brighter future.  Not reinventing the wheel means that I am satisfied with mediocre, that I have no desire for something better, that I have no need for improvement in my life.

As far as teaching goes, it means I can continue to recopy that ragged, old worksheet I've assigned to kids for over a decade.  Call it dedication to a worksheet, if you want, but it may be better labeled lazy (Now before you get you feelers hurt, you should understand that I'm preaching to myself as much as to you.  In fact, after we evaluate that worksheet each time it is distributed, we may deem it worthy of another yearly repeat.).  But we may also tweak that thing.  We might put glitter on it.  We could electrify it, turn it 3D, and fly it around the room a couple of times before we assign it again.

And don't just accept someone else's expert advice in the teachers edition either.  Textbook companies are well overpaid at the taxpayers' expense to make it look like they are complying with research and the newest standards (and now that you've got me started, I'll have to post a whole new Professional Pet Peeve about following the TE!). The point is this:  you are the professional.  So start acting like it.  Most of you know more than the textbook about what works for you and what works for your class.  Consider that when you open the book for the next lesson you tackle.  Admit it:  you could teach it better without that book, and your students might even find it easier to pay attention (Then again, that's for another post.  See what you did.).

Reinvent the stinkin' wheel, people!  How far do you think we can take this thing?

Beth Vrabel put together something really good in this one.  The first part of the book annoyed me with the talk of kissing some a jerky boy just for the sake of gaining some kind of popularity, but that may be just the kind of ridiculous ploy fourth graders would come up with.  Popularity, as it turns out, is not always all it's cracked up to be, which Lucy learns from the other side.

This book fits with the theme of how to deal with bullies - and these turn out to be some absurdly mean bullies.  As far as the books from this year's Mark Twain Award nominees, Pack of Dorks is clearly in the upper part of the list. I found myself wondering how Lucy and Sam would ever win their battle here, but the parallels with their report about wolves is quite interesting.

After reading Pack of Dorks, I found a sequel listed on Vrabel's website, and I was immediately saddened.  If you know me, you know how much I despise sequels to good books.  I try to give them the benefit of the doubt, but rarely are they as good as the original.  This one, in particular, looks like it fails to share the theme of the original story, but I could be wrong (They say there's a first time for everything.)

Here's a way to stay awake in those boring professional development sessions.  I'm not say they all put us to sleep, but let's just say I've used this on more than one occasion.  You see, it seems a toxic bacteria has taken hold among people who present these things in the 21st century.  It doesn't eat flesh, but it does appear to be contagious (apparently air-borne), and I expect it to take its place on the CDC website very soon as the leading cause of fatigue, nausea, and the sudden urge to go to the restroom (even when you don't really need to) among teachers in an endless meeting.

I'm talking about the propensity for presenters to want presentees to share out.  I'm not sure where they contracted this strange disease - perhaps in a national webcast that was only available for learning coaches and administrative assistants, officers, chiefs, or whatever they might be called in your district.  They brought the malady back to your building and succeeded in infecting your principal and perhaps even your counselor, and sadly some of the teachers contracted it at took it to their classrooms.

It is not life-threatening, but could easily slowly eat away at your nerves until you lose the ability to hear any substance of what is being presented.  Not only will you not grow as an educator, but their illness will cause you to second guess your own abilities to pay attention or the learn.  You'll notice a sharp memory loss.

It's not your disease, yet you have the symptoms.  Turn that around:  your symptoms are signs of their disease.

Sharing Out.

​They'll say it, but they don't know what it means.  They won't even realize they've said it.  They'll say they want you to discuss such-and-such topic at your table and be prepared to share out with the larger group.

What do they really want you to do?  They want you to share your findings or conclusions with the larger group...but they will not ask you to share; they will ask you to share out.  Whatever that means.  Were you preparing instead to share in?  Share up?  Down?  Sideways?  Would you prefer to share diagonally?  I'm sorry to report that your response will only be acceptable if you share out!

Pick up your laptop and head out the front door.  You've just been told to share out, and everybody knows you can't do something out when you are inside.  They'll chase you down and wonder where you are going, but you may simply claim to have misunderstood the extra syllable.  Return to the conference room, library, audicafenasium, or wherever your professional development is taking place, with the beaming satisfaction that you have just seen the sunlight and breathed fresh oxygen while your peers just sat there under the flickering fluorescents, trying to hear over the roar of the outdated HVAC unit.  You might have even missed your obligation to share out!

Mayhaps you would like to try the British definition of the phrase next.   Merriam-Webster says it means this:

Last night, we had our annual Food, Friends, and Fireworks event at church.  The burgers were terrific, and all the right side dishes were there, along with desserts and ice cream.

My daughter is away at my parents' house, so she missed the event here at home.  Though she loves spending a week with her grandparents, every summer, I think she was a bit forlorn about missing this Independence Day celebration.

That sets the scene for this post.

One of the girls, just slightly older than our daughter, brought her tablet computer with her.  As I understand it, her mother questioned her decision to bring it along, wishing instead for her to socialize (fellowship) with her peers and enjoy the fireworks.

But this girl had a plan.

Pointing the tablet at me, she told me to say hi to my daughter.  It seems, with four hours of highway between us, they were video chatting.  They might have had an interruption or two, but when the fireworks extended until 10:00, they were still connected, so that my daughter did not have to miss very much of the event at all.

In fact, my daughter should be honored that her friend thought enough of her to suggest the connection.  This kind of compassion is rare in our world, and it struck me as one of the nicest gestures I've seen from kid to kid in a long time.  We talk about getting kids to respect adults, but even harder than that is getting them to respect each other.  

Through all the noise of explosions in the sky above Joplin, the thoughtful consideration of one young lady screams loudly that kindness still exists.  I truly appreciate the time and effort she took to ensure my daughter felt included.

People I respect, people to whom I enjoy talking, people who really care about kids started using the non-acronym of SPED a few years ago, and it immediately stuck in my craw (whatever a craw is:  look it up).  SPED stands for Special Education, but it brings with it something else.  We talk a lot about how "labels" can stigmatize a child, but that's not what I'm talking about.

Or is it?  We use so many labels in our politically correct society that it's hard to tell any more.

Right up front, doesn't SPED sound more like an accelerated class than a special education class.  It sounds like it should mean something else.  The history of such classes is fraught with identity crisis.  The kids and the classes have been pinned with many labels through the years, some of which have become saturated with negativity, name-calling, and mean-spiritedness.  Sometimes that's what labels do.

We've all heard the terms.  When I was in school, back in the 18th century, kids were referred to clinically as retarded.  Yeah, I know, the word hurts; in fact, it hurts just seeing it on the computer screen, but it was a clinical term.  It was a literal term that meant "slowed".  The word referred to the child as being incapable of keeping up with "normal" kids.  In that sense, the children in that class were saddled with the idea that they couldn't catch up or that they couldn't learn much at all in a year's time.  I didn't know that when I was a single-digit-American.  In fact, I didn't know enough to pick on those kids, which is a good thing.  I suppose others did, but I don't remember.

As I understand things, terms like idiot were also clinical descriptions of kids who were believed to be without much hope of learning.  That was before my life began.  Since that time, other names also referred to the children: learning disabled, learning impaired, and other, more specific terms appeared in different places at varying times. Most seemed to be labels on the students and not on the programs in which they were participating.  People said those students were learning disabled or emotionally disturbed, naming the children by the accepted labels of the period.

I can't say that labels in themselves are bad things.  They are titles.  They are identifiers.  They are names.  But they should not define the student.  Our labels should define the behavior, the performance, the program, the classroom, the situation, or something else.  The labels are not who the students are, but what they are experiencing, how they are performing, the challenges they face.  Never should a student be called by there unfortunate circumstances, any more than we would call someone a cripple.

With that, I think some people believe that SPED is an acceptable term in 2016.  I think they believe the new abbreviation for Special Education comes with less sting.  But they ignore the fact that they are still labeling the students and not the program.  Now they are our SPED kids, when it should be sufficient to say that they are students in a SPED program.  See the difference?

But that's not the extent of this Professional Pet Peeve.  You see, it goes further than that.  Think with me for a moment about the implications to the rest of us.  First, there is still a temptation for some to call the rest of the class a normal class.  One may even hear, normal kids, in contrast to the special kids.  Are you implying that students who are not special are not special?  I know that's not true, but it sure sounds like it.

How about labeling the kids who are not SPED, as GenEd, or General Education.  That makes me a GenEd teacher, and I don't like that either.  General sounds average, and I like to think I push to be above average.  I don't ever want my students to be middle-of-the-road pencil pushers; I want them to be special.

Or there is always Regular Ed.  Regular?  Not small or large, but Regular.  Huh-uh.  I don't accept it.

By labeling some kids as SPED, we inadvertently have labeled other kids as mediocre.  It's a snowball!

I'm not out of joint because of the terms, but I like I say, words mean something.  With a little bit of effort, we might be able to see a simple solution.  If we really believe that all students can learn at high levels, we must stop "identifying students" and start identifying needs instead.  They are not Special Needs Students, but they are students who have needs.

In fact, all students (and teachers, parents, etc.) have needs.