Friday, January 29, 2016

The Truth

Ask a teacher to list the needs of a successful learner – the essentials that must be in place for learning to take place – in a prioritized list.  No doubt the order of needs would vary depending on the grade level taught, and perhaps be influenced by subject matter.  It is safe to assume, though, that most lists would include engaging lessons, safe environment, high expectations, regular attendance, classroom control, highly qualified teacher, and parental involvement.  Tough to argue the inclusion of any one of those needs; picking the most important would be tough as well.

Ask this teacher for the same list and you would find one additional need near the top of the list that too few educators provide to students:  the truth.  Students need to hear the truth and they need to hear it every day.  Be it for strengths or weaknesses, work performance, social skills, hygiene – my students get the truth from me clearly, concisely, and consistently.

Today was the first meeting of our second semester Tier 3 reading class.  These gatherings, called WIN (What I Need) time, occur every day for the first and second graders of our K-2 school and will be the topic of a future post.  The students who come to my classroom (this year known as Mudville….another post) for Tier 3 reading support know exactly why they come; they are the worst readers in each grade level.  Most of the kids in each WIN group are the same students we worked with in first semester, when they were honestly told they might end up being in the class all year.  I do not belittle, condescend, or mock their struggles...I don’t spin or sugarcoat them either.  Neither approach is more or less dangerous than the other.

To improve self, one must first know self.  Students need to know who they are, what they are, what they can do, and what they stink at.  Introspection and self-analysis cannot be lit like a match, especially with the youngest students in our schools.  Studying self is no different than studying math or science; to study a subject one must be taught the subject.  We cannot expect reading instruction to have meaning if “self” instruction has not been provided first.  So provide it, I do.  Blunt, it is.  Hurtful, it is not.

Back to our WIN class.  In September our WIN students found out they were chosen for a daily trip to Mudville because they were “bad readers”, “the worst readers in first or second grade”.  I can hear you wincing.  Please comment below if you have a better description for the kids who had the lowest word per minute scores in each grade level…using language a September first grader can understand.  Guess what? Nobody cried.  Nobody complained.  Everyone understood.  Today when those same kids told me they were still in the class because they were still bad readers they got more truth – they are not bad readers anymore (they can all read!) but they still are the worst readers in the grade, so they still have a lot of work to do.  We talked about their improvements, we compared their scores to the winter targets and the spring targets, and I emphasized the enormous job we have ahead of us to meet those spring targets.  Nobody cried.  Nobody complained.  Kids are tough – in many ways tougher than most teachers when it comes to accepting the truth.


Too many teachers, and parents, avoid telling kids the truth about poor performances or traits.   We do an extreme disservice to our kids if we tell them only the good stuff or only what they want to hear.  Helping a child understand his weaknesses and his strengths will lead to greater knowledge than he who knows only his strengths.  When we understand our limits we create the power to overcome them.  The truth doesn’t just set you free, it sets you up – for success.

Monday, January 18, 2016

Scarlett Fever

I wanted to post a new entry much sooner than this – really, I did.  When we rolled into the New Year I was revolved….or was I resolved?...........I was determined to make this a “year of writing”.  Alas, these first two weeks of the year have been brimming with an unexplained phenomena:  I have stunningly discovered that someone somewhere plays basketball against someone somewhere every single night, and my television shows these incredible happenstances every single night.  Amazing.  Oh sure, I could write a bit at halftime or find a spare half-hour before tip-off to construct a sentence or two, but a separate phenomena has made me wary of even thinking about journeying into the Interweb.  Folks, I have had myself a close encounter of the technological kind.

It was a dark and stormy night…..actually it was too darn dark to tell if it was stormy, so we’ll just go with a dark night (you have no idea how much I want to make a Batman reference here).  Time: very late.  Location:  parents’ living room.  Not having Internet access at my own home makes me doubly addicted to roaming the web when I stay at my folks’.  This being the final night of my Christmas vacation stay I was cramming in some final visits to my favorite sights.  As the clock rolled past midnight into the second day of 2016 I settled into ESPN’s website to get a final recap of this day’s sports action and a preview of what was on tap for the next.

After checking scores ranging from college football to international ping pong I clicked on a link to read about the 25 most rewatchable movies of all time because, you know, that’s obviously a topic that belongs on an all-sports website.  (Interesting side note:  I’ve watched all 25 of those movies at least four times each; none of them should have qualified for a rewatchable list.)  As I finished reading about movie #25 I noticed a link to “hilarious unplanned photos”, so I clicked another step deeper into the webyrinth.  These photos certainly seemed unplanned but the term “hilarious” was stretching the truth a bit.  My waning attention was quickly aroused by Scarlett Johansson looking at me from the sidebar of the screen.  Without reading the accompanying text I clicked on her picture because, you know, it was Scarlett Johansson.  Read the text, people…..read the text!!!

This link turned out to be “75 of the hottest screen moments from 75 hot actresses”.  I immediately clicked out of this site….after giving careful consideration to the accuracy of all 75 moments on the list (well done!)….and was greeted with a pop-up window telling me I was under attack from an enemy force known as Malware.  My only option for survival was to dial a phone number and beg for mercy, but it was friggin’ 2 a.m.; there was no way I was gonna start making phone calls at 2 a.m.  Then a voice from beyond…a female voice…NOT Scarlett’s voice…urged me to call the number.  She meant business, telling me that if I didn’t call the number I would be hacked to death the next time I tried shopping online.  With cold sweat on my forehead and tears rolling down my cheeks I did a combination forcequit/logout/shutdown, went to bed, and hid under the covers.

After confessing my sins to my tech goddess at school I was relieved to find out nothing evil had happened, or would happen, to my computer or myself.  Apparently I had fallen victim to a phishing scam, which was terribly ironic after all of the hours I had spent that week sitting in a fish house on various lakes.

I return to the world of the web with some lessons learned from that frightening chain of decisions:

**There is nowhere safe on the Internet after midnight.

**When visiting a sports site, stick to the sports articles.

**Scarlett is not my color.