Life

Some very cool notes for a warm August night!

• The Science Leadership Academy was named one of the Ten Most Amazing Schools in the US by the Ladies Home Journal! We are honored and humbled to be listed alongside such incredibly innovative and interesting schools!
  
• I was on Radio Times with Marty Moss-Coane last week. Dr. Anne Gardiner of Bodine HS and I were talking about small schools in Philadelphia. It was a really fun hour, and it is archived as a podcast if you want to listen in.
  
• I have submitted a proposal for SXSW (South by Southwest) - one of the premier interactive / new media / social networking / new culture conferences in the world. Crowdsourcing makes up 30% of the approval process, so if you like the kind of ideas I write about here on the blog, please considering registering at SXSW and voting for my proposal - Building School 2.0 - Creating the Schools We Need. And while you're there, consider voting for the panel I'm on, too! Voting ends August 29th.
  

As always, thanks for reading!

My family is at the beach this week for our yearly vacation at the Jersey Shore. (No, Snookie isn't staying nearby.) Jakob is getting old enough that we need to bring every combination of soccer / baseball / basketball gear for beach play. Theo is old enough to love the sand and surf. He spent most of tonight talking about what a wonderful day he had. And I packed up a dozen books to clear off of the "must read" pile, and I am looking forward to getting through as many of them as I can carve the time for... in between game of miniature golf, bike rides and frequent naps.

Next week, I head off to Constructing Modern Knowledge with the amazing group of educators he has assembled, and I look forward to four days of just being a learner. It is rare these days when my own personal and professional learning gets to be my primary concern for several days.

Add to that a near zero professional email inbox and a goal of cleaning out my Practical Theory personal emails, and all of the sudden, there appears to be a realistic chance that I could put the previous twelve months away and start the coming school year (which for me means August 1st) rested, charged up, and in the proper mental space. Now that I've dared to put these words out there in the world, I fully expect something insane to happen to prevent it, but there it is.

My to-do list is as huge as ever, but most of what I have to do between now and August 1st is the kind of planning that never seems to be given enough time during the school year. We need to launch some new projects this September, and the time I am spending now on these things will reap huge benefits later. But it's also the time to examine what we have done and look for the spaces to innovate, to document, to reflect upon. And it is having the space and time to do that... and the mental distance and health to do that well, that is so important.

All of this is to say this... to all my friends and colleagues in education, I hope this summer allows you to find the time to recharge your batteries, to reflect deeply, wisely and well about the previous year, to learn about new ideas to bring back to the work we do, and find the time and space for restorative experiences this summer so that we can invest ourselves fully in the work we do for another year.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

This is just a test post from my new iPad using BlogPress. I didn't just buy this iPad as a "ooh shiny" flight of fancy. My goal is to stop bringing my laptop everywhere. So I bought a desktop for my desk at school, and I am setting up some combo of DropBox and MobileMe for my primary school files, and I am going to try to just work mobile with the iPad. Should be interesting.

So far, I don't mind working on this - although this is the longest thing I have written yet. Should be fun.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Anna Deveare Smith is one of my favorite American artists (and not just because she was on The West Wing.) She is a gifted actress, author and playwright, but even more importantly, her "documentary theater" style of writing and performing displays a respect for the diversity of voice and opinion that makes up the American mosaic. (See her TEDTalk which is a piece from her show "On the Road: A Search for American Character for an example.)

So it should come as no surprise that she has the ability to capture the range of the debate on health care in this country in an OpEd piece in today's New York Times. Here is her introduction:

Over the last few years, in preparation for a new play, I interviewed doctors, patients and healers about the human body, its resilience and its vulnerability. Although our conversations were not primarily about the health care debate, they do reveal many of the feelings and thoughts of the people in the audience President Obama will address tonight.

At a time when civility and rational discourse seem to be at an all-time low, her ability to listen so intently and bring across the myriad voices of the debate without irony and without judgment is so important. We all can learn from her ability to listen for the humanity in our voices.

Go read.

Tags: anna_deveare_smith, health_care

I've been neglecting the blog lately. I'm still here, and I'm still trying to write... but I'm finding myself with a good old-fashioned case of stuckness lately.

There are a ton of things I want to be writing about, but I'm finding that I'm not all that coherent lately. (Yeah, I know, that's the case when I am writing, too.)

What I am hoping is that I'm in a gestation period. I'm talking to a lot of people. I'm reading a lot. I'm listening a lot. And where I hope I'm going is to a place where I can articulate new questions, new answers and new thoughts. But right now, I feel like I've still in that place where I'm either writing posts I've already written or the posts that I want to write are so long and daunting that I'm not sure where to start.

But I'm at the beach this week, and -- going to Philly today for a summit at Penn notwithstanding -- I'm trying to use this time to get my head around some ideas I'm playing with. And I think I'm going to start writing a lot of the kinds of posts I've gotten away from lately -- asking a lot of questions and seeing what answers come out... but I miss blogging, which tells me it is time to start writing again.

And maybe this meta-writing post is just a way to force myself back into that habit of writing.

Anyway... that's the most coherent idea on my mind tonight.

[This was originally going to be a comment on a blog where folks were getting angry in the comments... I realized I just might have been projecting a bit.]

I think there's something else that we have to be aware of right now. I think there's a lot of collective exhaustion going on. It's that time of year where folks feel the grind. In Pennsylvania, it's PSSA time... the economy is lousy... people are fearful about their jobs and wondering how much their lives are going to change. And I think there's a lot of disconnect within our profession right now, and it didn't magically disappear with a new administration.

I'm not posting many blog entries right now because what I'm writing isn't public writing, certainly not in any helpful sense. I'm tired and cranky and my writing feels that way, and I know it isn't productive stuff. And worse, I know I'm not a whole hell of a lot of fun to be around right now. (My apologies to all those who have to deal with me in real life.) For me, it'll pass... and part of my process lately has been to try to figure out what I need to do to help that along. One thing I'm trying to do is remember what my sphere of influence is -- and to focus on the places I can have the greatest impact and to let go of the "reaches" for right now. That's not always an easy thing for me to recognize, and it's an even harder thing for me to come to terms with. But it's what I need to do right now.

Interestingly, though, one thing that is interesting is that I'm hearing much the same story from urban folks, suburban folks, east coast, west coast, etc... I'm hearing a very frustrated tone from a lot of educators right now, and I'm hearing more and more stories of kids coming stressed over the economic hardships or stories of the college process being an even more tortured process this year, and just stories of exhausted educators who aren't finding the renewal that they usually do with the coming of spring. In general, I think schools and teachers and kids are feeling the effects of living in very uncertain times, and that can't be a good thing.

It's one thing to hypothesize, but it's another thing to try to come up with ways out. In addition to trying to say the serenity prayer a whole lot more often right now, I'm trying to dial up my level of care with people -- and that has to include myself (even if I am dealing with some insomnia by blogging). I'm trying (and REALLY not succeeding all the time) to be more understanding -- both of others and of my own limitations. I think it's helpful if we all remember our shared humanity and our shared sense of purpose and give each other the benefit of the doubt right now. In the end, if we have built healthy communities -- healthy schools -- then now is the time to rely on that -- to rely on each other, and find our way through to some healthier times.

(And hey, Spring Break isn't too far away...)

This year, as we feel the pinch of difficult economic times, we should remember that there are those who still have much, much less. That's why you should join Karl Fisch's Team Shift Happens on Kiva.

Kiva is a micro-lending bank with a mission of helping to end global poverty. From the website:
And in Karl's words:
I contributed my $25 for myself, but then I also bought $25 gift certificates for everyone in my family, and I look forward to dinner table conversations about who we've lent our money to over the next few years.

This could be an amazing school project, a wonderful addition to any "Secret Santa" office holiday spirit, or just a wonderful way to remind ourselves that we are connected to everyone on the planet, no matter where we live.

Thanks, Karl, for inspiring me to do more this holiday season.

Tags: kiva, karl_fisch

Barbara Barreda, ed-tech blogger and principal, lost her house in the California wildfires today. I've been lucky enough to meet Barbara and spend some time with her. She's a wonderfully kind and smart educator, and I can't even imagine what she must be going through.

So Jen Wagner and Clarence Fisher have set up a way for people to help. Read Clarence's post first or just go right to Jen's page for the fund, but if you know Barbara or if you have read her blog and you can spare some money, please do.

If you've benefited from the edu-blogosphere, this is a wonderful way to say thanks by helping out one of the community's wonderful members.

I'm writing this post sitting on the steps in my backyard (yay wifi!) and watching my kids play with some of the neighborhood kids. In six hours, I get on a plane to San Jose where I'll be presenting at the Innovative Learning Conference and then it's back on a plane so that I can be back at SLA when it opens on Tuesday morning.

I don't encourage or endorse that kind of nuttiness, but the sad thing is that while the specifics of my travelling may be something that most teachers are strange, all over America today, teachers are grading papers over their morning coffee, principals are desperately trying to keep up on their emails, and educators are thankful for just one more day to try to catch up.

This is part of what I mean when I talk about putting good people into bad systems. In Philadelphia, a typical high school teacher would have over 165 students on their roster. This is why many teachers who would like to do authentic assessment regress to the simplest form of assessment or why teachers grade student writing by making grammar corrections on the first page only and then reading for content only on the rest of the essay. It's why some science teachers teach from textbooks, rather than asking kids to delve deeply, because with 165 kids, you can at least feel like you got "through" the material and had some rudimentary form of assessment because the idea of trying to help that many students through a true, deep level of inquiry seems daunting at best and impossible at worst.

And yet, there are teachers all over this country doing their best, and most of them aren't blogging. They are in the classrooms for 10-12 hours a day. They are bringing home papers to grade, and doing physics experiments with paper towel tubes, and as they hit their fifth, tenth, twentieth years in the classroom, they are forever making Faustian bargains about the balance between life and work.

And let me say this -- that's no way to run a public education system.

I want to celebrate every teacher who has made this job a calling. Thank you. But my concern is that this nation thinks that building an entire system around martyrdom is the way to go -- that if you aren't spending 80 hours a week and thousands of your own dollars, you can't be an effective Title I school teacher. (And yes, I know that it's not THAT much better in the wealthier districts.) We cannot build a national system on the idea that KIPP and TFA and the 60-70 hour work week is acceptable. It's not.

So as I watch Jakob and Theo play, stealing a moment where I can both be a dad (you have NO idea how many breaks I've taken in writing this entry) and a principal (I've answered about ten emails during the writing too,) I have a call to arms for us all.

Every time we see a teacher celebrated for their Herculean efforts, let's all be sure to ask the following questions:

• What can be done to support and sustain you?
• How can we change the system that more people can be as successful as you?
• How can we create schools where it does not require Herculean efforts to be a successful teacher?

Until we are willing to engage with those questions, we are going to continue down the path of the unrealistic and unattainable expectations for our urban teachers and our urban schools, and we're going to continue to wonder why so many of those schools aren't giving the kids the education they deserve.

And with that, I'm off to steal a few hours of playing with my kids. Have a wonderful Sunday.

Tags: school_reform, sustainability

(I love JibJab.)