Work Resolutions: Personal and Group
Our late circle today was to think about two sets of resolutions: two or three for yourself in terms of the work and two or three for the larger group with the caveat that it has to be something you think we can all agree to. Now they are humans so at least a third decided to write their own resolutions around personal stuff.
We didn’t share the personal ones but we did spend fifteen minutes as a group coming to consensus on what might work for the whole group: committing to one microphone. We’ll come back to this idea tomorrow and try and figure out what it means. One thing I did have to get involved with was when a student claimed that this was a problem all students have; I had to underscore that this is not an everyone problem, that almost all of them manage “one mic” very well.
It led to a human group problem: if everyone offers a side comment once every five minutes then you’ll have side conversations going pretty much continuously.
My two work resolutions:
1. Grade thirty minutes each night.
2. Meet with each student one-on-one once a week. I started this yesterday.
Seed Order, 12/31 Seed Savers Exhange
Balance and Letting Go
One of the things we’ve committed to this year is teachers presenting portfolios of their work over the course of the year. I’ll be honest, I didn’t look forward to this and thought that it would be one more task on an already too long list of things to do.
I was wrong. This presentations have been powerful and I’ve left each of them with new questions for myself.
Yesterday Captain America presented. His impressive and thoughtful presentation left me with the following thought: there’s a difference between learning to let go and achieving balance in your teaching practice.
Letting go is looking at the forty thousand things you might do as a teacher and knowing that you can’t do them all; what I’ve not quite learned is how to let go of these things. I still feel guilty, looking at various things that should have gotten done that simply have not gotten done and that given that there are only 168 hours in a week, will never get done.
Balance, then, is what happens when you figure out what you can do after you’ve let go of things. New teachers who haven’t figured out what to let go of, who are just trying not to drown.
I hope teachers realize that you can’t achieve balance until you know what you’re trying to balance. I also hope they realize that these are two separate skills for teachers to develop and maintain as they continue to teach.
Improvisation
Prompts
Improvisation
Create and make spontaneously; made do with what you have; going all MacGyver on it. (Note: none of them know who MacGyver is)
When is improvisation a good thing, a healthy thing, a worthwhile thing? Try and come up with at least three scenarios and explain why it helps? (Example: when there’s six seconds left on the shot clock, you don’t run a new play)
When is improvisation unproductive? When might it become a crutch or even an excuse?
MB: It can be not productive when you’re not getting anywhere or you’re not accomplishing anything. It might become an excuse because you think you’re doing something but you’re actually not.
EG: When you do it for no reason.
KM: When you are the president of the United States of America.
MH: When it’s the main or first way of going about things; it should come naturally out of fluid, good work.
HG: When you’re using it not to complete the work.
SH: One unproductive way is doing at the last minute and putting almost anything in it to get it done.
We ended the conversation by talking about why I would bring this up in terms of the CSpan video.
Example:
Why you read
I try and read something every night. Not always successful. Really liked this review but liked being able to give this paragraph to a student trying to make an argument about climate change:
More recent—and possibly more powerful—is the “ecosystems services model,” which is an attempt to cost out all the various services that nature provides, as if nature were a giant utility in charge of cleaning the water and freshening the air and sheltering coastlines from damaging storms but incapable of presenting us with a bill we can understand. The point of commodifying nature in this way is to give us a means of putting our actions—destroying mangroves, for instance—in perspective, showing us the hidden costs of what would otherwise look like rational economic behavior. The flaw here is that we can only value the ecosystems services that bear some resemblance to the things we’re used to assessing. Or as McCarthy puts it, “Worth is attributed only to services whose usefulness to us can be directly measured.” But what value, he asks, “do we give to butterflies which, when I was seven, captured my soul? What value do we give, for that matter, to birdsong?”
Curmudgeonly
We have definitely reached the point of the CSpan project where it’s just hard work. The kids are slowly synthesizing their research, they’re slowly composing a script, and they’re trying to begin thinking in concrete ways about what will be in on the screen of their videos. This is the not fun, grind of the project work.
One of my jobs, along with coaching and cheerleading, is to identify false leads, places where students are falling into unproductive traps. Tomorrow I’m going to talk about improvisation — many kids want to try and improvise their way through the film-making process — but today I want to start at the end and work backwards. And I wanted to build on my own feeling approaching the week before the holiday break: I’m feeling like a curmudgeon. I’m not the only one, either.
So the goal was to try and channel some of that bitterness to think about how a curmudgeon, a hater, an avowed critic, might respond to their film when it’s complete. In developing strategies to respond to a curmudgeon, I’m hoping they (unintentionally?) come up with ways of improving their film.
I asked student to write about both the content of their film and the technical aspects. Some of their strategies were genius and offered good starting points for others who were stuck. And, as with most things, a road map was provided even if they don’t choose to follow it.
Example
Limits
Listening to students present their possible projects for third quarter.
This is the question I keep asking myself:
How do I limit their projects without limiting their dreams?
Circle structure this AM
How do you create your own structure? Can you think of a time when you structured your own work/project with great success?
It is very important that teachers should realize the importance of habit, and psychology helps us greatly at this point. We speak, it is true, of good habits and of bad habits; but, when people use the word ‘habit,’ in the majority of instances it is a bad habit which they have in mind. They talk of the smoking-habit and the swearing-habit and the drinking-habit, but not of the abstention-habit or the moderation-habit or the courage-habit. But the fact is that our virtues are habits as much as our vices. All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits,—practical, emotional, and intellectual,—systematically organized for our weal or woe, and bearing us irresistibly toward our destiny, whatever the latter may be.
What is the relationship between habits and structure? How do they “make” each other?
Student quotes:
SH: If you mix good habits with structure, you get a good process.
VG: Habits make a system and a system is a structure. Structure forces you to develop habits .
HG: What you’re used to doing will shape the things you do and the way your work flows and the steps you take.
LM: What you do on a daily basis creates a relationship with you and habit.
AM: Habits can create structure; if you have a habit of doing the same thing every day then you have structured your day around that habit.
Yesterday’s circle:
This leads to a fourth maxim. Don’t preach too much to your pupils or abound in good talk in the abstract. Lie in wait rather for the practical opportunities, be prompt to seize those as they pass, and thus at one operation get your pupils both to think, to feel, and to do. The strokes of behavior are what give the new set to the character, and work the good habits into its organic tissue. Preaching and talking too soon become an ineffectual bore.
Highpoint of my year: Being called an ineffectual bore ten minutes after doing this activity.
Thank you Gerry Weiss. I hope you’re well.
William James on Habit
In re: my comments yesterday about how much teachers talk:
This leads to a fourth maxim. Don’t preach too much to your pupils or abound in good talk in the abstract. Lie in wait rather for the practical opportunities, be prompt to seize those as they pass, and thus at one operation get your pupils both to think, to feel, and to do. The strokes of behavior are what give the new set to the character, and work the good habits into its organic tissue. Preaching and talking too soon become an ineffectual bore.
The edition I had in college:
James, William. The Principles of Psychology. New York: Dover Publications, 1950.
