Broken cutters, broken saws
Broken buckles, broken laws
Broken bodies, broken bones
Broken voices on broken phones
Take a deep breath, feel like you’re chokin’
Everything is broken

Every time you leave and go off someplace
Things fall to pieces in my face

Broken hands on broken ploughs
Broken treaties, broken vows
Broken pipes, broken tools
People bending broken rules
Hound dog howling, bullfrog croaking
Everything is broken

I had arrived this morning with the intention of thinking about how our four words — inspirational, altruistic, influential, and consistent — might help us think about some of the daily issues we face.   I wanted to write about it; my genius student teacher suggested that we make a carousel of it.  So we gave each of them a magic marker and walked the classroom weighing in on how these words might help us with:

*constant, disruptive  cell phone use
*sleeping/withdrawing from the group
*regular side conversations
*mean-spirited commentary
*arriving late

(If were a good teacher, or one not so desperately pressed for time, I would have had them identify the issues that distract from our community.)

The results were exciting and part of the never ending quest to help students follow through.   I began the post-conversation by asking everyone to think about how these issues linked together and the answers were telling — these are all things that make it hard for us, they’re all things that we do, they’re all things that we can manage — but I was also impressed how aware the students were of they could be managed with moderation.

It’s part of our place, that we try and find a middle, respectful ground — no group of teachers I’ve been around manages side conversations particularly well — and I hope that we can continue to build on these ideas.

Most folks I know would profess to trying to create a student centered classroom.  I try to  do my  best to have the work emerge from the ideas, passions, and dreams of our students.   And I’ve tried to be a part of a team that allows a school to build on this idea.

The beginning of the year is the hardest time for this model.  Unlike the rest of the year, you do a lot of talking.  You’re trying to build a culture, a community, that will support students as their own ideas take shape.  The community has to be safe enough to take risks but not so comfortable that kids can’t challenge each other.   You’re trying to quickly pass ownership of the classroom and the work onto the students, to move yourself from facilitator to coach.   It’s real work.

But man, doing it after four-day weekends, three-day weekends, six-day weekends is hard, hard work.  I knew today would be difficult and urged any of my peers who came near me to forgive themselves as much of what would make today tough had nothing to do with them.  For students to take full ownership over the work, they have to know what they’re accepting and have an understanding of what the work is.  That’s next to impossible to do within a fragmented calendar.   We’ll get there but it’s going to take some time.

Don’t my gal look fine, when she’s coming after me…

Spent an hour this morning planting garlic.  I loosened the soil.  I cut in the last of the compost from the backyard (we’re eating our New York Times subscription after we read it).  I mixed in some perlite to keep the soil loose.   I put some straw on top (need more).

I’ll mulch it some more.  I’ll cut in some vermicompost on a regular basis.   I’ll chop out the scapes next spring.   Maybe two hours of work over the next nine-ten months.

But we’ll have garlic!  From Natural Gardening (Inchellium Red Sofneck on the left and Music Stiffneck on the right).

The news has come that we will have a six-day week.  I’ll assume that my city and school officials are doing their best and that this situation was unavoidable.

In a school where we’re doing our best to turn the work over to the students this is tough.  Whatever routines we build over a few days get erased.  Whatever momentum we have for the work dissipates.   Whatever culture is built needs to be rebuilt.  This is the nature of working with teenagers — long weekends make for difficult Mondays — but to not have a full week of school  until the sixth week is going to make it hard for students to take full ownership over their work.

It’s the difference between a college lecture when you arrive and settle into a row with your notebook knowing that whatever interactions you’ll have will be in your own head or in the notes you take versus the feeling you get when you walk into a small seminar and know that you’re going to have to do the reading and that you’ll not be able to stand by while class occurs.   We want our school to feel like the latter as much as possible.    The better analogy becomes the feeling when little kids continually start games over and declare “no, this time, this is real.”

It’s not insurmountable but it is frustrating.

One of the things that I like to do at the beginning of the year is to ask students to think about what makes good work.   I posed the question today of “what makes good daily work ?” but asked them to write about notions of good and daily in three areas:

thought: the way you think
speech: the things you say
actions: the things you do

These are the results, which we’ll turn into a daily rubric when we have time.  Student initials by the comments.

One of the best parts of this conversation was when HG pointed out that we can’t do all of these things every day.   We can only try.

No doubt.

In terms of follow-up, these posters have been placed on the wall and will be used as a way of judging the daily written work.  In a world where there is so little time, I hope that they can serve as gentle reminders of how we want to be known each day.

Read this review by Adam Gopnik too early this morning.   While Gopnik is assessing a recent history of the Holocaust, his final paragraph on Voltaire and the reality of building new things struck me as all too relevant to my teaching career:

The Enlightenment philosophers who insisted that the world could be improved were right. Voltaire was one of them. The mistake was to think that, once improved, it couldn’t get worse again. Voltaire’s point was not that optimism about mankind’s fate is false. It was that, in the face of a Heaven known to be decidedly unbenevolent, it takes unrelenting, thankless, and mostly ill-rewarded work to cultivate happiness here on earth, no matter what color the soil.

We met with representatives from a number of community groups today to discuss our “what’s out there ?”  project.   The kids worked in small groups, interviewing people about the impact of their community group.

Here are the final comments made by students and staff listing what they learned from the conversations:

1.  Network as much as you can!  Get up and do it.
2. Try to infuse your passion into the work you do.
3.  Many organizations partner up with other groups; you can have more success with partners.
4. At every stage, groups encounter challenges.   No matter what you think you know, you’ll encounter challenges.   Look at the ways other people have solved problems and use them.  Remember — you’re not the only one.
5. Invest your time.
6. Network: sometimes it’s great, sometimes it’s worthless!  Get up and Show up.
7. Manipulate legislators — find ways to change how people do things.

Thanks to our friends at Policy Lab and Mighty Writers!

MC