I am not a Racist, am I? Part 1

My entire school just watched, Andre Lee's, I Am Not a Racist, Am I? which argues quite convincingly that racism is an institutional construct.   (movie website). I've taught for now a quarter of a century. That is staggering to me. For all of those years and thousands of kids I've taught, the students who almost always struggle the most are African-American males. Most black boys at my school don't struggle. But of the 4-6 kids who struggle the most, the majority of these kids are almost always black boys.

Why has this persisted at my school?

I'm on a task force to study this more deeply. There are a lot of uncomfortable places this can take us. Charles Murray speaks to this in ways that make me uncomfortable. He posits that IQ is different by race. While he claims to be agnostic on whether this is genetically based, he strongly suggests that there is such a component. I take comfort in the work of Steele and Aronson on stereotype threat which, I feel, negates/ explains away Murray's findings. The saddest finding of Steele and Aronson's work is  that African immigrants to the United States are not at risk of stereotype threat and perform just as well on IQ tests as their white and Asian counterparts. But their children ARE at risk. This seems to disprove any argument that suggests IQ differences are genetic.

The other explanation is that my school is structured in a way that makes it harder for black boys to succeed, in other words, we are structurally racist.  What does that look like? What about the way we teach history, English, math and science, make it more likely for some cohorts to succeed and others to struggle? Some argue that there is no "white" way to teach physics, chemistry, and math.  Indeed, the political right in the United States mocks any attempts to alleviate and address this discrepancy.

I have more thoughts on this.

Thanks, James Kennedy

Read James' blog post about his visit to my school.
We had a blast.

Starting Late and Starting New

    I'm late to the tech party. I was somewhat of a skeptic of the big promises of tech 2.0.  For instance,  I used to think podcasts were silly. Who's listening to them? "What's the big deal? To me, it was akin to the proverbial tree falling in a forest.
    Flipping the classroom was something about which I was also skeptical. I saw its merits. But for me, it really came (and still comes) down to what was being flipped? If content was still about recall and regurgitation, it matters little to me if students did this at home or in school. "So, what's the big deal?" I thought.
    To be fully candid, I was never a tech Luddite. I saw utility in some aspects of technology. Since I've never thought that "coverage" was particularly important, the fact that knowledge was a click away strengthened to my response to people who suggested that kids need to "know" certain facts. Still, I've been teaching a long time. This is my 25th year teaching and it wasn't until these last three years that I've become a tech enthusiast.
   The most obvious catalyst is that my school went 1 to 1. Yet, I do not think I would have adopted technology as fully if I also wasn't in the midst of a mid-career change. For at the same time my school went 1-1, I started to teach elementary school after two decades of teaching mostly 8th graders. Brand new kids, brand new school, brand new age group, brand new discipline. I was starting from scratch. I didn't have years of good stuff to get rid of. We all have those lessons, those greatest hits, that we roll out every year. They were all gone. Tabula rasa, baby. Since I had no legacy lessons, I was truly able to start from scratch and rethink my approach.
    I have now moved to teaching high schoolers. In my department, we have worked on revamping a 15-year-old curriculum that is near and dear to its creators' hearts. It is so much harder to change! People care deeply about courses they've honed over years. This course and courses were created before technology really was ubiquitous in the classroom. I am beginning to wonder if we need to start afresh if we ever want to truly leverage tech in our classrooms. I am beginning to feel that tinkering around the edges of classes that were envisioned, created and structured prior to tech will never get us there.

Chinese Nursing School Final Exam

App Smashing

App Smashing in Elementary School

I originally posted this last year on a now defunct blog, I still think I am prouder of this assignment than of most I've done:One of my favorite things to do in school using technology is "app-smash" What is it? Greg Koluwiec writes:

App Smashing is the process of using multiple apps to create projects or complete tasks. App Smashing can provide your students with creative and inspired ways to showcase their learning and allow you to assess their understanding and skills. 

Why app smash?

1. It requires creative and collaborative thinking.
2. It asks more from the technology. It maximizes the potential of digital tools by blending their features and functions.
3. It results in engaging learning.
4. Most critical to me, students have choices about demonstrating their learning, thus giving them ownership and intrinsic motivation.

  

How I did it? 

As a culminating project for our study of Maniac Magee, I asked students to capture the six most important moments in Maniac Magee and to make an interactive cube.  I was inspired by Greg Kulowiec's work and found the specific idea for the project form from +Wendy Goodwin's website.

I wrote to the students, “This project should include different photos or images either captured with a digital camera or located online. It should include narration of the pictures triggered by a qr code or by Aurasma.  Your “pictures” can be words in the form of a paragraph or a word cloud such as phoetic. You can write your reaction in a paragraph explaining an important scene.”

To find photos they didn’t take themselves, they used Creative Commons photos from:  Unsplash.com and commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Images.

To make the project interactive, students had to have at least two sides of the cube trigger an image via QR Code or Aurasma. Most students chose to make most sides of the cube interactive.

Apps Used: 

Students also used :

Phoetic, Aurasma, I-Nigma

Tech Training, What's Really the Point ?

At the starts and ends of school years, administrators call on ed tech specialists to train faculty.  And so ed-tech folks like myself dutifully prepare workshops and lessons for teachers. This model, at least where I work, is moderately effective at best.

Ed-Tech should support a school's vision and mission. Teaching tech tips and tricks separate from broader curricular discussions is not going to do much to inform or change teaching practices. We can put the best technology in the world into a classroom and it won't change much at all unless society/ schools/ teachers/ and students rethink what is important in the classroom. Witness the iPad fiasco. 

We have all the knowledge in the world at our fingertips. We have tech tools that can do amazing things. The tech support team with which I work is truly expert. (A new teacher who has worked at Columbia University and Haverford College told me our tech support team is the best she's ever seen. kudos to +FCIT Help ) It matters little as long as the "remember and regurgitate" (R and R model) of education still holds sway. Want proof that is true? AP tests. And yes, I can show people Kahoot and Socrative and other tools to support this R and R model. Kahoot?  Yeah, it's fun. But it changes very little in the end.

However..... if we really want our students to think critically and work creatively and in collaboration....  my goodness, then we could really help.

iMovie, Poetry, Lit Class Mash Up

A colleague of mine, +Terry Guerin  recently gave her 9th grade students this assignment for literature class.

POETRY FINAL ASSIGNMENT 

Using one of the poems in the packet, create an imovie visual/audio interpretation of it. Your film should be no more than 2 minutes long (preferably one minute). It may be a slideshow with music, it may have a voice speaking the poem while images float by, it may be an animation you create, it may include original music, paintings or drawings. You do not have to use the entire poem, you may use a portion of it. If you work better with a partner, you may work with someone but then you will create two presentations. Use the maker space to create a stop action animation? Ask anyone there for help with the imovie app OR consult the instructions on the app. On the day of the showing, please turn in an analysis of the poem (if you are working with someone, you will each write on one of the poems) and your inspiration for your film. Please include a description of the process, how you arrived at your work of art. 

I very much like the open ended nature of the assignment. I always like when students have real choice in how to attack a task. Here is one of my favorite videos and its accompanying explanation. Thanks to Jonah W. for allowing me to share his work here. 

He writes:

I chose to do “Do Not Go Gentle into The good Night” by Dylan Thomas. I chose this poem because it is full of imagery, poetic devices, and the words are very powerful. The poem is about how Dylan Thomas wants his father to fight death, and not allow it to take him. The poem speaks to me on a personal level because as my grandfather was sick, I watched him fight death, I watched him rage against the dying of the light, and I watched the night finally take him. In my imovie, I chose to include pictures of the sun setting, and night falling in. I chose these images because night is a common refrain throughout the poem. The concept of night is a powerful one, Thomas uses connotation to give night the greater meaning of death. When he says “Do not go gentle into that good night” Thomas is saying do not go gentle into death, but fight it. I also chose to put the image of soldiers throughout my imovie. I chose to put soldiers because Thomas talks about the different types of men that fight death. This concept made me think of how soldiers are fighting death when they are in battle. The poem also caused me to think of a candle. While it is burning, it is raging against the dying of the light, and when it goes out, it is going gently into that good night. Overall, “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” speaks to me in both a poetic and personal way, achieving powerful imagery and an even more powerful meaning, Do Not Go Gentle is truly an epic poem.

Built into this assignment is metaphor, imagery, and voice. I sat in on this class as they presented their films. A tech-skeptical teacher was blown away by both the quality and thoughtfulness of these videos. I've said all year that tech done well let's us build upon what we already do so well. So many teachers view tech as a sterile, Skinnerian learning box add on that will rob humanities classes of the essential way of being that makes a good humanities class. I've suggested that just the opposite is true, that it can enhance what we already do.  I love this assignment and I love the fact that my colleague took a big risk. I love it even more that the risk paid off.