from acceptable to ethical

Paul the Pre-Industrial Poet and his wife Gloria invite us over for dinner.  I take a copy of the Acceptable Use Agreement with me so that I can grill Paul on his approach.

"Paul, do your students sign a Acceptable Use Agreement?"

"They do.  I pass it out on the first day."

I hand him mine and ask him for his thoughts.  "I don't like it much, I admit.  It's not like we have a Acceptable Use agreement for math class.  Yet, we hand out protractors that can quickly turn into shanks."

My wife adds, "And we lie to kids about language arts.  We're not teaching them the art of language.  It's all science the way it's taught.  Why isn't there an Acceptable Use Agreement on the dangerous dark art of words?  Last time I checked, nations still go to war over words. Couples still fight over words.  Sticks and stones will break bones, but words can crush a soul."

Gloria points out, "Kids in your school mix chemicals in science.  Which is more dangerous: a pencil or chemicals that could potentially be fatal?"

I turn to Paul and ask him why he bothers.  "Look, I'm not against the Acceptable Use Agreement, per se.  I'd love to have a Acceptable Use Philosophy that covers all classes.  Let's be honest, don't we want kids to use the resources effectively?"

"Yeah, I guess.  But it should go without saying."

"You use that word 'should' but reality is reality. People 'should' avoid adding raisins to desserts and salads, but they do.  All the time. So, you have to work around it."

"What is your approach?"

"Oh, I just pull the raisins out of the cookie or the carrot cake."

"No, I mean, what's your approach to the Acceptable Use Agreement?"

"My students have their parents sign the Acceptable Use Agreement and then we develop our own agreement.  The first part is a guarantee of academic freedom.  It spells out their rights and it includes aspects that connect with pencils. The second is a Code of Ethics that they promise to adhere to as they approach learning.  We create a new document each year and we sign it collectively as a reminder of both the individual and social responsibility."

"Do kids understand that it applies to pencils?" my wife asks.

"They realize that it applies to all learning and to all learning tools.  So, they can't snap a pencil and they can't stab someone with a protractor and they can't use words to tear a student down."

"What do you do with the Acceptable Use Agreement?" I ask him.

"I turn them in to the district where they remain in a file folder. Students forget about it, but often we go back and visit our rights and Bill of Rights and Code of Ethics."

from pencil citizenship to citizenship

I meet with Paul the Pre-industrial Poet after my fourth day of our one-to-one unit.  I always feel conspicuously white when we hang out at this diner. I believe in Progress and so I imagine that, a century from now, we won't have a China Town or a Little Havana or an all-black Harlem.  I can't fathom that, over a hundred years after Reconstruction, we would still have segregated churches or neighborhoods or media.

"What do you think of the whole pencil citizenship idea?" he asks me.

"I guess it has its place in using pencils.  I mean, I suppose we need to educate kids on the dangers of pen pal predators and the problems with pencil sharpeners, but it seems a little overinflated right now."

"I'm not against the term," he adds, "but it just seems like the focus should be on citizenship first and pencils second."

"What do you mean?" I ask.

"I mean this.  If I thought about regular citizenship and all I taught students about was safety, we'd be living in an authoritarian regime.  I'd be scaring kids into following rules instead of developing a mentality of democracy, right?"

"I see what you mean.  So, pencil citizenship should include things like teaching kids to use a pencil to combat injustice and using paper to develop a social voice."

"Exactly.  I want students to know that pencil citizenship, if we're going to use that word, means analyzing how pencils are shaping humanity and how the written word shapes culture and community.  I want them to see how people like Frederick Douglass used pencils and paper to tell narratives that led to social change.  If all I do is teach kids how to avoid pen pal perverts, then I've failed."

"I wonder what it would look like to drop the word pencil from it.  I mean, what if we just said 'citizenship' and then focussed on what that means with pencils, images, photography, the printing press, music, poetry, whatever.  What if we added pencils as yet another tool that we analyze and use and apply to this concept of being a critical thinking, democratic citizen."

"I think it's a dangerous concept, because it goes beyond simply avoiding pedophiles and learning to write without using all capital letters.  Teaching citizenship from a critical perspective might mean they challenge the authority . . . "

"Which I don't seem to mind, unless they challenge me," I add.

I look out the foggy diner window and gaze at the gray pillar of smoke.

I point to it and say, "It seems eternal, unstoppable, unshakable.   The factory is a metaphor of our warehouse school system and slowly we are relegated to robotic machinery spouting out scripted curriculum. I keep thinking about when you mentioned an authoritarian regime. I'm thinking about the desks in a row and the difficulty of serving out of humility instead of being a dictator in the classroom.  I think about the hysteria over pencils and paper and the fear of low kill-and-drill test scores and our obsession with this Caravan to the Top."

"It's like we're all ruled by fear," he says.  "And those of us in the pencil world seem just as scared of not being innovative. For all the talk of a grand new pedagogy of paper and pencils, we have to define what it means to be well educated.  We need to explore a better metaphor than factories. Otherwise we end up simply creating a newer, shinier, Edison-projector-enhanced pencil factory that merely mimics what's already out there."

I wonder if one day we'll wake up in a daze, shake our heads and see with a little clarity that public education is meant to educate citizens on what it means to be free. I wonder if we'll walk out of the factory and ask ourselves, not just, "What new system do we need to create?" but "What did we lose?  What is buried under the industrial pavement?"

phonograph man and the geeky gurus

A man rides his carriage up to the playground and stops the horses.  He pulls out a hand-cranked, ultra-portable, larger-than-the-cosmos phonograph.  It's not a pretty piece by any means.  Far from Mozart, it is a repetitive drum beat and a song with some choice words that the average primary grade student doesn't use (Indeed, it was a bit of a shock to the kindergarten class whose idea of "dirty language" is poopy face and stupid head).

I suppose his main goal involved impressing five and six year olds, not by creating his own innovative music, but by blasting a record loud enough for everyone to hear. On some level, his plan worked.  The little tikes found the phonograph to be an almost mystical experience.  Then again, they are also intrigued by the notion of Santa Claus and four square and playing jacks.

A student points out to me, "Knowing how to use technology doesn't mean you know how to use it," and he says it just like that, italics and all.

I ask the students to set down their pencils and pose the question, "What does it mean to know how to use a medium?"  From here, we discuss the loss of silence in our world, the humming sounds of industry and the choking clouds of soot from the factories.

"So, I can do more, but I'm so rushed that I don't have time to do anything," a girl explains.

"Everything is compressed," a kid says.  "We pack more into it, but we lose the quality."

"Can you elaborate on that?"

"I can take a picture and it's portable, right?  But it's not as good as a painting.  I can listen to music on a phonograph, but it's all scratchy.  We have some motion pictures, but they're choppy.  People are now eating canned meat and it's processed and has the texture of jelly."

I want my students to be geeks and gurus. The geek is knowledgeable about technology.  This person loves it, embraces it and knows how to use it in creative ways.  One the best days, the geek thinks of the future and how technology can be used to solve social, economic and perhaps even personal problems. On the worst days, the geek becomes intoxicated by the novelty and applies futuristic solutions that lack foresight.  Or, the geek is simply a guy on a wagon with a really loud phonograph, imposing his narcissistic desires on the world.

On the other hand, the guru is wise about technology.  This person sees it as a force that is sometimes negative in its dehumanizing aspects.  On the best days, a guru will remind us that the physical is as important as the mechanical and that some things in life should not be chopped into pieces and processed, compressed and then industrialized. A guru knows that, even when we try and predict it, technology takes on a life of its own. However, on the worst days, a guru will grow cynical and angry and shake an elitist fist at every innovation while missing out on the ways technology improves society.

I want my students to be a bit of both. Call it a paradox or a mystery.  I don't want them to abandon technology in a doom-and-gloom fear.  However, I also don't want them to get into the mentality that a robotic world will fix everything.

should kids play games in class?

So, it's the second day of our one-to-one pencil to student unit.  I'm teaching a financial planning / economics unit and incorporating all of the subjects into it.  I expected the "honeymoon" period to last longer, but pencils have no become normal.  On some level, I suppose that's what it's all about.  It's about getting beyond the hype and simply using pencils and papers as tools for learning.

Don't get me wrong, I see a need to teach students to criticize all tools, whether they are designed for print culture or oral culture, agrarian or rural culture, local or global.  However, we also need to get to a place where we say, "Pencils are shiny and new, but the real excitement is what students are learning right now."

So, I spend some time developing a program for learning about economics.  It's a market simulation game, where students graph their own investments and interact with one another.  Throughout this process, they write reflections, send messages and join a discussion zone.

Gertrude steps into my room and asks, "Why are they playing a game instead of learning?"

"It's not a game. It's a research-based, student-centered, interactive learning activity constructed to integrate pencils into a core knowledge environment."  I can play the buzzword game, too.

A student walks up to us, "Mr. Johnson, I love this game.  Why can't we play games more often? This is fun!"

Gertrude gives me the death stare.

I explain to her that the students use math, reading and writing.  I hand her a short example of this and say, "They are actually spending more time using their core curriculum skills than they would be if I stood here and lectured them on economic theory."

"You can't be playing games," she reminds me. "School has always been about work, not play. The bottom line isn't fun."

"The purpose of this game is to learn.  If it's fun, so be it. Trust me, I'm not trying to turn this class into a game. It just happens to be what we are doing in the moment."

She settles down after walking around and asking economic questions to students.  "They seem to know what they are learning," she says with a slight smile.

***

For millennia, it was a cultural universal that games existed for learning.  True, children had fun, but the games were designed to teach both social and physical skills.  Children learned to be warriors, how to govern, how to access cultural narratives all through the act of play.  In fact, Plato theorized that one could learn more about a person through an hour of play than a lifetime of conversation.

Even in America, where we have shifted toward a sit-in-your-desk-and-shut-up-and-learn model, our games become methods of accessing these cultural skill sets.  Thus, Simon Says teaches social conformity and prepares small kids for the prison-like environment of factory schools.  Dodge Ball teaches Social Darwinism and Capitalism.  Hide and Go Seek teaches children that transparency is overrated.  Best run and hide from others.  After all, this is the building block of most grown-up relationships.

On the flip side, our games teach the best of American values.  Hide and Go Seek helps teach autonomy and creativity.  Simon Says teaches listening skills and proves to kids that language can be powerful.  Dodge Ball helps with team work and allows kids to see the value of throwing things at people.

People assume that we play games in the class as a review.  It's true that most classroom games tend to be trivial.  That's why we call them trivia.  For what it's worth, I don't want my students learning anything trivial. Having a contest to see who has memorized the most state capitals doesn't exactly inspire deep thinking.

People consider games to be superficial fluff designed as a cognitive escape.  However, a well-constructed interactive game can reveal the opposite.  Games can be authentic and powerful and vital to students developing a deeper understanding of concepts.

***

When the game ends, students debrief the information in their plogs.  After words, we set our pencils down and talk.  On some level, it feels like waking up for a daze.  Students debate the pros and cons of a market system, talk about the risks of speculation and relate this to the economic crash of last year.

The pencil smudge girl from yesterday raises her hand, "I think there is a danger in playing this game, but I'm glad we played it."

"Can you elaborate on that?" I ask.

"I think the people in Wall Street got suckered into the same vortex that we were just in.  They got selfish.  The market is supposed to curb selfishness, but we found out how quickly it was to form oligopolies and attack people.  It became a game to win.  I think that's how it is for some of the people who run Wall Street."

Seven Ways to Create A Super-Ultimate-Best-Ever Popular Plog

Okay, so I've been reading various 20th Century Plogs (short for pencil logs which sounds much more fun and futuristic than say, "journal") and I'm beginning to get the hang of it.

So, here is what I've figured out:

1. Use the colors associated with a pencil.  Notice my color scheme?  It's gray, like that crazy mechanical top and dual toned yellow (just to prove that I can use multiple brands).  The typography is readable and slick, very modern indeed.  Fit for a Gilded Age. (unlike this guy - what are we in first grade with that font?) 
2. Buy Stock Photography so that every picture can look like the journal pages of every other plog.  Let's be honest, cameras are smoky and expensive.  I don't want to char my lungs with carcinigans just to get a decent shot. The goal is to have as many pictures of pretty people doing what pretty people do - which evidentially is shaking hands, laying in the grass (if they're young) and subtly supporting obligatory diversity while wearing tailored business suits. I get my stock photography in the mail and simply cut it and paste it when I remember.  Some day there will be a free site I can walk to and get creative work from a public commons, but for now, I'm buying stock photos.  
3. Make every entry  a list.  I'm doing that today.  Seven is the best number. It's ambiguous and mysterious, with a sort-of religious connotation.  It's lucky on one hand and yet it's also a number we use to list the deadly sins (as opposed to those sort-of unhealthy sins) Indeed, few people know that the early church did not call them "deadly sins" but rather "the seven habits of highly ineffective church-goers."  Things began to change when seventh-century monks got sick of writing it all out on parchment and started abbreviating it and adding a more dramatic flair. 
4. Invest in a decent speller check program. I send my drafts to a speller check who underlines it all in red.  Even then, I have to be careful.  I once went with the first choice and had colleagues ask me what a "cumulative ass is mint" was.  I'm really pretty puritanical about cursed words, so this was extremely embarassing.
5. Use a picture of you where you have a real cool cowboy stare and you've printed it on yellow paper.  (I'm not sure why ploggers don't like regular pictures of themselves) Look at my picture.  Would you mess with a man like that?
6. Titles: Your first option is to promise the world to your readers.  Make sure that everything is "the ultimate" or "revolutionary." No one wants toy read a journal entry with the title, "something I tried that worked alright I suppose."  People want the magical formula.  If that doesn't work, try clever posts with rhymes and alliteration.  Let's be honest, "Leaves of Grass" was okay.  But it was the rhyme and meter that made Whitman so catchy! Thus I've used titles like "Nong Went Wrong." 
7. Connect it all to social media.  Not everyone owns a newspaper or a telegraph, so you have to be creative.  I've found a site I can go to where I hand passenger pigeons messages (within 140 characters) and they drop them at the homes of all my friends.  Could I have a pint and discuss things instead?  Perhaps, but I'd rather spare people my long-winded monologues and just send snarky musings via aviary media devices. Note that I also keep a public list of all the people who read my plog. It's a quantifiable data I can use to prove that I matter in this world.  

Note: This list was inspired by one of my favorite edubloggers Nashworld, whose blog is the opposite of this list.  It is visually appealing, insightful and far from cliche. I don't think he has ever tried to sell me educational snake oil. Also, much of this list is meant to be self-deprecating (aside from the absolute mockery of "seven steps" and other meaningless lists) 

should teachers take tools away?

We piloted our first day with one-to-one student to pencil learning.  I offered a quick explanation of the unit and reminded students that these were learning tools.  "I know many of you will want to play Hang Man." Parents hate that game.  They say that kids who are raised on violent pencil games will someday became mass murders. (Oddly enough, the same people who get upset about games are also the ones who have no qualms about Roosevelt leading a bloody crusade of American expansion)

"I also don't want to see you drawing pictures or sending one another short-hand messages.  Some of you might even be tempted to use the paper to create gliders. Personally, I think someday one of the kids of this generation will create an airplane, but this unit is not the time for it.  Remember, we need to think of these as tools and take care of them."

We begin the unit and students are doing a Venn Diagram.  A few students wrote comments on the margins of one another's notebooks, but they were generally on-task. However, I notice one of my top students using her finger to smudge pencil lines.  "Gladys, I need to see you." I warn her about the learning tool concept and moments later she sits alone smudging pencil again.  "Grab a slate.  You'll be using that today."

So, at lunch time, I process this with Mrs. Jackson.  "Was my lesson just not engaging enough?  Did I fail to motivate her?"

Mrs. Jackson surprised me with her response, "Dude, chill.  This stuff happens with slates, does it not? We like to believe in progress.  We like to believe that kids are naturally good.  But the reality is that they are just like us.  They want to play and they want to learn and sometimes they are addicted to fun and we  have to redirect them."

"So should I have created a lesson that was more fun?"

"I don't think so, but when this happens with slates, I don't take the slates away. You just don't take away tools.  It's our job to teach content not discipline," he added.

At this point our Vocational Learning teacher stepped in.  "Tom, tools require responsibility.  Sure, motivation is part of it.  But the goal is for students to learn.  If your lesson was meaningful and most students were engaged, that wasn't the problem.  Some kids are immature . . . Okay, all kids are immature, just at different times. "

"So, is it right to punish a kid for that?"

"It's not punishment, it's a preventative measure to keep things from escalating.  If a kid is messing around with a saw, I take it away from him.  It's a safety issue, but I also don't want tools to be wasted. The important thing is that the student has another chance tomorrow."  

Mrs. Jackson cuts in, "I still don't think we should teach students lessons by taking away supplies."

"What would you have done?"

"I would have given her the option of finishing the Venn Diagram at another time and found away to incorporate her picture into the lesson. But maybe that's a stretch."

So, the question I pose to people is whether I should have taken away a learning tool?

Note: I was influenced in my thinking on this one byRuss Goerend and his blog post about taking a learning tool away. One of the best lines was when he said, "You don't have to hide a learning tool."

Why Nong Went Wrong

The parent from the Temperance Society walks up to me and explains, "We're not keeping this under wraps.  I called a socially conservative newspaper and they're running a story on this.  It should hit the evening papers in a few hours."

"Okay, well I'm really sorry.  I knew there were ads, but I had no idea one would involve alcohol."

"I need school to be a safe place for my child.  I expect that."  On some level, I get it.  I would be angry about my daughter seeing ads for peep shows (which, fortunately Nong blocked) or even for burlesque dancers.  Yet, learning is dangerous and the world is not all velvet and lace.

The principal explains, "We understand your concern.  We'll re-examine our policy about allowing ad-generated content."

"I'm worried about this pencil stuff.  I got a set of colored pencils and some paper for my son.  I thought he'd use it to learn.  He joined this pen pal network and apparently he's writing letters to members of the Mafia."

"It's a game. Just like the farm and sorority game." I explain.

"So, he's not thinking of joining a sorority either?"

"No."

"Glad we got the gender confusion out of the way.  Still, I'm worried about exposing my son to the world so quickly and so young."

"Hey, you wouldn't happen to have a newspaper with you right now?" I ask her. She hands me one.

"Let's see, the lifestyle section. Look, an ad about meeting local singles.  I'll check the sports section.  Hey there's an ad for beer.  Oh, and one for gin.  And, if I'm not mistaken the Knickerbockers are playing in a stadium with beer advertisements. This is a real problem, considering your son idolizes athletes.  What do you do to keep your child away from the paper."

"Oh, I don't censor it.  I mean, I want him to read.  Sometimes we even read the paper as a family." The reality hits her and she moves from anger to embarrassment and she buries her face in her hands.

I've won, or so it seems. Until she cries.  Not simple tears, but huge sobs.  She tells the story of her father being abusive when he was drunk and her former husband who would throw bottles at the kids when he had a few too many.  Apparently, she left her entire life behind and moved to the city where she often sees drunk factory workers exposing her daughter to a grown-up world and she wonders if the biggest danger isn't alcohol, but the fact that one of her children has to work 50 hours a week for them to survive.

Sometimes I get so focussed on pencil integration that I miss the deeper social reality that exists on a daily basis.  Sure, they can block field trips and even try and keep us in a Pencil Island, but every child brings in a story and as a teacher, I have to make snap judgements based upon a sense of ethics that we may not all share.  We bring in our own stories and often those stories clash and we fight to retain our voice and our character and a common setting.

The story never hits the evening papers.  Either it had been a lie or something had changed.  The problem with stories is that they're incomplete.