Teaching – Meg Griswold

Browse Category by Teaching

Igniting a love of words and worlds.

And the next chapter of our adventure begins…

In late July, we updated our profiles on the international teaching search sites that we use to find jobs. September saw a few job posts trickle in and at the end of the month, we officially told Graded that this school year will be our last. In international teaching, you often have to give your current job up before you have your next job. It’s a leap of faith and an exercise in patience and anxiety management.

October 1 is the beginning of the search season for international teachers, but even that is really early and just the beginning. October 15 is another wave of postings. November 1 brings more, November 15 is another big listing day. Many European schools post in December or January, with a few not until March.

The job search is quite complex in our situation. First, we need to find a school with jobs that match both David’s and my teaching skills. Luckily we both have experience in middle and high school in at least 2 different content areas. Second, the jobs need to be in a school we are interested in working in, which means that it has a healthy sized international population. Many international schools are private schools for locals who want an English language education. That wouldn’t be a good fit for our little crew.

Another factor to consider is location. We had a few places on a list that was roughly titled, “Places we don’t want to live.” This is personal for each teacher and family. I’m not going to tell you to much about that list here, but it wasn’t very long and our reasoning makes sense to us.

Then comes the challenge of finding a school that will hire a family with 3 kids.

Like many teachers in our situation, we cast a wide net. We applied for almost everything that met our criteria. Sometimes we applied to a school that matched only one of us, with the hope that a job that matched the other one might be forthcoming.

You wait, then, for a response. The majority of “no” responses are silence. Some schools send a form letter rejection, some send a more personal rejection. Some explain why, and some do not. On a school’s end, it is also a puzzle. Matching up couples can be quite the challenge and requires different principals at different divisions to do some horse trading.

Some schools reply that they are interested in having a round 1 conversation. Most places schedule a 30-45 minute online call. This is often with the principal of the division we are applying to. Some of these were done with David and I together, but most were separate. Some have you do an online “self” interview, where you record yourself answering questions.

Round 1 could perhaps proceed to a round 2 interview. Round 2 could include other teachers or an assistant principal, sometimes a director of teaching and learning.

Usually round 3 is an offer call with a head of school, but an offer could be extended by email.

Here’s our stats:

We applied to 33 schools, but not all of them had jobs that matched both of us.

We had interviews (at least round 1) with 9 different schools across Africa, Asia, and Europe.

As often happens with this process, you start to feel like one of the schools that is interviewing you feels right. The particular classes we would teach there feel like a good fit. The school’s philosophy matches ours. The location is a place we are interested in. You don’t always know this before you start interviewing. You get a lot of info and impressions from the schools as you interview–even from the emails they send. I tried to take a lot of notes and pay attention to what I was asked and how they answered my questions.

One school started to stand out for us. I never know if David is going to feel the same way I do, so after we each had our interviews, we would meet and swap notes and impressions. David and I both agreed about this school: it felt right. We had a round two interview, and again, it felt like we were jiving with this school and community.

When we got the email from the superintendent asking to meet that day with both of us together, we started to get excited. Graded offered us the jobs by email, so this was my first time being offered the job on a video call. When the superintendent offered us the jobs officially in that call, I had to work real hard to keep my face calm. We took tons of notes in this conversation where we broke down all the details and nitty gritty of the contract. We were given the weekend to think about it.

David had a terrible sinus infection, so he took the next 24 hours to try to get better so he could think straight. We had both had agreed we were going to take it, but it’s always good to sleep on a big decision. By the next night, it was settled.

And so it is with great excitement that we announce that we are going to the American Community School of Amman, Jordan in July 2025!

From our first email interaction through every single conversation that followed, there was a good feeling of fit. Our excitement only grew through the process. It offers the diverse international community we were looking for, in a place rich in history, and it offers us a new culture to explore and learn from.

I will be teaching high school English, and David will be teaching 8-12 computer science. The school is smaller, so we will have more preps, but they are classes we both have experience teaching. ACS is an AP school, so I will be stepping back into AP territory after teaching IB courses here at Graded. I’m really excited for this! I have a blog post in my drafts about IB vs. AP. I don’t think I could say that one is better than the other in my opinion. That said, I have missed some of the elements of the AP curriculum, and I’m excited to dive back in to them.

To put it simply, I’m thrilled! I really wanted to stay in high school, but as a flexible person, I was willing to return to middle school for the right school. I just kept hoping that the right school would have a high school position.

There’s so much to say and so much to share. I’m sure if you’re reading this and you know us, you have a million other questions. Email me! Let’s talk!

For now, I feel a great sense of relief that the search process is over for us. It was very stressful to ride the international teaching job emotional roller coaster. Finding time to have a video call with schools in Asia, Africa, Europe and the Middle East is very tricky. We had many 6 am calls and 9 pm calls. I wrote so many versions of my cover letter. I obsessively refreshed the job posting sites. I was sad when a school that I thought was a good fit decided to move forward with other candidates. I was sad when immediate rejections came back from places I thought would want to talk to us.

We had a moment in November where we decided to set a date to decide we were just going to head back to the US. That isn’t our first choice, but it’s a viable choice. I didn’t want it to be Christmas, because that felt like a way to ruin the holiday, so we said January 1 was our shift focus to the US. We did some serious thinking about what that life would be like. We ran through a few scenarios. At first, this plan was scary. It’s honestly a whole new country for us. It may be hard to imagine if you live in the US, but it felt like moving to a foreign country. We’d have to transfer our licenses to a new state, find jobs in a market we didn’t know, change our day to day life to match the realities of that place.

Looking back, we were offered the jobs at ACS on November 14, so we were safely before our January 1 deadline. At the time, it didn’t feel like we had a lot of breathing room–it was stressful and emotional. I did all the things to manage the stress: good eating, good sleeping, running nearly every day, restorative yoga each night, deep breathing exercises. I won’t say I scored an A for managing the stress, but I didn’t fail.

Two things I really struggle with are not having certainty and not having any thing to do. I had to practice sitting with uncertainty and not doing anything more than I already had. I channeled those feelings into organizing and cleaning our apartment. I sold or gave away a lot of things we aren’t taking with us. I pruned the kids’ wardrobes of clothes that don’t fit any more. I cleaned out the refrigerator.

The weekend after we got our job offer I felt like I was thawing from a giant block of ice. Last week, I was able to focus on my classes and my family. What a relief! Remember my job? I love my job. Remember hanging out with my kids? That’s fun. Remember running because it’s fun and not as an alternative to crying?

What now? We look forward and we stay present. I am trying to enjoy and appreciate every moment we have in Brazil before we leave. I’m trying to leave it all on the dance floor. Beyond that, I’m thinking about what art we love and will ship, and what we can let go. I’m wearing my closet so I can decide what I don’t love anymore, so it too can get donated or swapped. I’m reading Our Last Best Chance by King Abdullah II of Jordan. I’m learning the depth of all I don’t know about Jordan, the region, and global history. I’m making lists and wishes.

Now we just keep living our vida boa here in Brazil, watching our next adventure approach on the horizon.

Teaching, Travel

It bears repeating: I love the IB

Note for my diverse audience of readers: The IB is the International Baccalaureate, whose diploma program “is an assessed programme for students aged 16 to 19. It is respected by leading universities across the globe.” It’s a total curricular program for 11th and 12th grades through which students can earn an IB diploma. This diploma can be used to apply to universities around the world, such as Europe or Korea. It was developed as a way for expat kids to get a standardized, externally assessed diploma and return to their home countries for college. (The US does not require an IB diploma for students to be admitted, an American diploma is sufficient, which our school offers. European Universities, on the other hand, require students to complete the IB diploma in lieu of the country’s own end-of-high school exams.)

My senior hoodie from last year says “I did the IB.” I’m not sure if when the seniors picked that there was a dig in there about how frequently I reminded them of this fact. I don’t care if there’s irony in their choice, I love my “I did the IB” hoodie unironically.

Yes, I do in fact have an IB diploma. I believe I’m currently the only adult on my campus with an IB diploma. I’m not going to claim it gives me magic perspective powers, but I do personal memories of what it was like take my oral exams, submit CAS hours, write a TOK essay, and sit the 3-5 hour exams for each class.

There’s a couple things that I can speak about meaningfully when it comes to the IB, that feel worthy of elaboration.

First, the IB diploma was really hard, but when I finished, I felt very ready for college. This was confirmed when I arrived at college, and it didn’t feel like a huge leap in challenge. I had learned how to work hard and manage my time.

One major factor in being able to handle the demands of college is the fact that I wrote an EE (extended essay). I wrote mine in Biology and it was 4,000 words about a pretty mediocre experiment I designed. Even though it scored a C (scores go from A to E), and it wasn’t really a success as an exercise in the scientific method, I learned a lot. I learned about process, resilience, and managing setbacks. Sure, I didn’t fail the EE, but don’t make me talk about the experiment I did on some really cranky hamsters.

Next, I completed 150 CAS hours (creativity, action, service). I had an abundance of hours in the creativity category because I was a theater kid who did 2-4 shows a year. But because I had to include hours in the service category, I joined a club that visited a nursing home in Caracas. We helped feed the residents, we talked, we played dominoes. I probably wouldn’t have pushed myself to do that had the IB not said, hey, you gotta do more than tap dance and sing.

Finally, I took the TOK (theory of knowledge) course. And I wish I could flex right now and claim I was a top student who saw the value in TOK from the first moment. I wish that I charmed my teachers and served as a role model for my classmates. No. Maybe you could argue I got there by the end, but that is not how I started.

Let me back up a step. In the IB, in addition to taking classes in the 6 core areas (roughly stated: primary language, secondary language, natural sciences, history/human sciences, math, arts) you take a seventh class called Theory of Knowledge. The purpose of this class is to examine and question all the knowledge that students are learning in the subject areas. TOK aims to show students how these areas are interrelated, and to push them question what and how we know what know. The ultimate goal is critical thinking and active participation in a community of knowledge.

If you are over 30, I wonder if, like me, this sounds awesome to you right now. How cool would that course be? Discuss the nature of knowledge, examine what you know, probe your own biases and perspectives. Okay, now imagine you’re 16. Maybe your one singular focus is college, and to get there you need the highest grades possible. And you happen to be in a place where classes are IB courses, and they are challenging. Now, I have to tell you that you don’t have 2 free periods, just 1, because in the other one you will be learning something called TOK. I can say whatever I want about how valuable it is, but students right away see TOK as an superfluous, less crucial thing that gets in the way of their primary goal.

That’s how I was. In year one, I bet I could have been categorized by teacher as annoying and less than enthusiastic. I think my arms were crossed; I was probably huffy.

And then we got to the natural sciences and we watched a Jane Goodall documentary. I’m not sure what clicked, but I was riveted. I could see how knowledge was developing, and the way that paradigms were shifting. I could see Jane’s struggle to be taken seriously in the scientific community despite her age and lack of science training. The discovery of knowledge was fascinating! In our study of the math area of knowledge, I got to write an essay about how much I love the puzzle of math. I talked about the satisfaction of the right answer, the feeling of falling into the rhythm all the way until the end. I didn’t really get to talk about that very much, and I got compliments on my writing. The metacognition of TOK finally made sense to me. In this class, I realized, we were thinking about thinking–about our own thinking, but also the history of the thinking of our subject areas.

I don’t totally remember the context, but at one point we had to study something on our own and then teach a lesson to our class. For reasons I don’t remember, I studied the human sense of smell. The things I learned then I have never forgotten. Did you know that the nerves in your nose are actually exposed neurons? They go straight to your brain. They are the only nerves like that in your body. Did you know smell is one of our most primitive senses? The parts of our brains that process smell are deep, related to the parts associated with emotion and memory. This is why smells make us have vivid flashbacks and emotional responses. I designed an experience for my classmates where I blindfolded them and had them smell certain classic things, like vanilla, and asked what memories came into their minds.

I’m not sure why all that stuff stuck so well for me. I guess it was because it felt like it explained a lot of the human experience to me. It was one of my early moments of interest in how the human mind learns and acquires knowledge. I felt a spark of interest that was unrelated to grades and college applications.

Now, here I am, teaching TOK. Perhaps my old teacher would call it fitting punishment for my initial attitude. But it’s also a chance to give to my students what he gave me: space and time and room to talk about what I knew and how I knew it. To question and dissect all the things I was learning in my academic classes.

Another reason I love TOK is that, in its essence, TOK is a writing course. The way that students process and share their thinking and answers to these deep questions is through writing. And I love this type of writing. It’s closer in style to the personal essay than the literary analysis or criticism paper. As the knower, they are by necessity present in all of their writing in some way. The best TOK work draws on a student’s own sense of wonder and curiosity.

Teaching TOK is both a challenge and a gift. I’m not taking it lightly, but I’m also can’t take it personally. I did, however, just show my students the 2017 documentary Jane (available on Disney+) and it was great to hear their oohs, as Jane sees, for the first time in scientific history, a chimp modify a twig to make a tool that pulls termites out of an ant hill. At one point in the documentary, I student turned to me and said, “How could they have not thought that chimps had personalities and emotions?!”

I’m working hard to engage students and inspire them. It’s not always a success and they’re still teenagers, but here’s hoping it does for them what it did for me.

To close, I’d like to share with you the letter of introduction that I wrote specifically for my two TOK classes.

August 11, 2024

São Paulo, Brazil

Dear TOK students,

Welcome to your first day of Theory of Knowledge! I feel like I’m welcoming you into a SpaceX ship that’s going to take you to Mars. It’s going to last almost 2 years and it will probably be like nothing you’ve ever experienced before.

Thank you for coming aboard, I am your captain, Mrs. Griswold! This is my 7th year at Graded, and before teaching high school English and TOK, I taught middle school humanities. Some of you were my students! I’m so excited to see how my old students have grown and changed, and also to get to know new students. I have 3 kids at Graded: a 2nd grader, a 5th grader, and a 7th grader. My husband teaches high school math and computer science.

I am originally from the US, but as a kid, I moved overseas for my dad’s job. I lived in Mexico City and then I moved to Caracas, Venezuela. In Caracas I went to a school like Graded and I got an IB diploma. That means that I, too, have taken TOK. The course looked a bit different then, but not by much. I still studied the different areas of knowledge and asked big questions. We wrote essays and discussed.

One of the core concepts of TOK is perspective, and I think perspective is key with how this year will go for us. You can approach TOK with the perspective that it is this extra class you have to do on top of all your other important work. One of those woo woo things that teachers make you do but don’t have any purpose or meaning. Something you suffer through just to get to where you need to go. It only gets a “Meeting” or “Not Meeting” grade, so clearly it doesn’t really matter. That could be your perspective. You will dread each class, groan inside your head a lot (or out loud), and you’ll generally feel a lot of discomfort.

To be honest with you, that’s how I felt about TOK myself at first.

But there’s another perspective. That perspective says, a class without regular 1-7 grades, so I can try new things without worrying about my transcript. A class where I don’t have to memorize things for quizzes or tests. A class where we get to talk about the things that really matter in life, not just high school. A time to hash out the questions that real people ask about their lives and their reality. A class where I will get to share who I am and how I think. It’s not about how the teacher thinks, or what experts of the past have said, but my unique perspective. A class where I get to share my hobbies, my passions, my interests—the kind that may not come up in other classes. Finally, a class where I can be myself and make my own choices.

In the first perspective, you suffer, you strain, you generally hate every minute. In the second perspective, you are energized, introspective, and you walk away feeling changed, smarter and more sophisticated. This class can be one you forget immediately or one you remember forever. So what makes the difference? What decides which experience you have?

You. You decide. And the truth is that it will take some faith and vulnerability from you. It’s easier to close yourself off, cross your arms, and call the whole thing stupid. It’s harder to open yourself up and bring your heart to this.

And by extension, if we all decide we are in this together, then we all have a better experience. Let me give you an example. When I’m in Brazil and live music starts playing, all these people get up and start singing and dancing. It’s infectious. I’m on the dance floor, everyone is smiling and the joy is palpable. Could you argue that it’s Brazilian music that made us all have such a good time? Yes. Brazilian music is awesome. But I’d argue that what makes a dance floor in Brazil so awesome is the people dancing on it. The love, the open hearts, the joy they bring.

So, trust me to bring cool things to read and watch and talk about. Trust me to design this class to blow your mind, to make you think, to make you question. And let me ask you to bring the joy, the curiosity, the openness, the willingness to dance.

And now comes the part I will hopefully not have to say too much, but it bears repeating. There are people who have to take TOK, because the place they want to go for college requires a full diploma. I got you. But if that’s not you, ask yourself why you are here. Because of a parent? Because of pressure from friends? Or do you actually want the challenge of the full diploma? Do you enjoy academic and intellectual challenges? I already have an IB diploma, so I’m not here because I need it. I’m here to help you achieve this. I shouldn’t have to fight you. If you don’t want to eat what I’m cookin’, you should get outta the kitchen. I will high five you and send you down to OCC to let them know that you don’t think the full diploma is for you. If you’re still here, then be here.

Now that I’ve written and introduced myself to you, can you write me a letter back and tell me about you? Who are you? Where do you come from? How are you feeling about TOK? Are you feeling ready to dance or fly to Mars, or some other mixed metaphor? What brings you here? What are your goals? What can you tell me that will help you be the best version of you this year?

From here to the stratosphere,

Mrs. Griswold

Teaching, Writing

Letter of Introduction: 18th Year of Teaching

Bymeggriswold | On September 01,24 | 0 Comment

As I do every year, I start by writing my students a letter of introduction and asking for one in return.

I’m not sure where the time has gone, but this is my 18th year of teaching, my 7th year at Graded. This year, I teach 9th grade English, 11th grade TOK and 12th grade IB Language and Literature SL. I’m including below my letter to the 9th graders. I have another post coming about TOK and I’ll include my letter to them there.

This year, I wrote the first two drafts of my letter on my Lettera 32 typewriter. My plan was to write the final draft on the typewriter and then make photocopies. Unfortunately, I had a problem crop up with the typewriter. (The platen kept getting stuck and not rolling, and the line spacing when I pushed the carriage lever was either not engaging at all or adding 3 line spaces.) I moved to my laptop for the final draft on Google Docs. Still, all in all it was a lovely composing experience.

See my set up below:

And without further ado…

August 10, 2024

São Paulo, Brazil

Dear students,

Welcome to the 2024-2025 school year! My name is Mrs. Griswold and we will spend this year together. This is my 7th year at Graded, where I’ve been a middle and high school teacher. Some of you have been in my class before. I’m excited to have you back! I can’t wait to see how you’ve grown and changed. I have 3 kids at Graded: a 2nd grader, a 5th grader, and a 7th grader. My husband is a math and computer science teacher here. I am originally from the US, but I grew up in Mexico and Venezuela. I am fluent in Spanish and Portuguese. I went to an international school like Graded and I have an IB diploma. After high school, I returned to the US for college, where I went to undergrad at Case Western Reserve University, and graduate school at NYU. When I am not teaching or responding to “Mommy,” I like to play the mandolin, run, and write.

One interesting way I have been writing recently is on a mechanical typewriter. At the end of last school year, I fell down an internet rabbit hole of antique typewriters and ended up with a 1965 Olivetti Lettera 32 typewriter. In fact, the first two drafts of this letter were written on that typewriter.

My mom’s reaction to me getting a typewriter was to wonder why I would want to deal with the hassle of changing the ink ribbon, losing the ability to edit, the loud clacking, and the bulky weight when I have a perfectly nice laptop and Google Docs.

It’s a fair question. First, I just think typewriters are cool. All the complex mechanical parts and no electricity makes it feel like magic. As for the noise, I like it. Typing on it is a bit like playing an instrument—noisy, but expressive. Like an instrument, it’s hard work on the fingers to type on a typewriter. But I feel a sense of power that I can make the words appear on paper as I type. We all know the pain of needing a printer and not having access to one. With a typewriter, my words have immediate mass and presence.

But my mistakes are also immediately visible. I’ll admit it can be frustrating to see a typo or error, but it has two positive side effects. To begin, I have to slow down and think about what I’m typing. I think this is a good thing. We move so fast all day, firing off messages. Maybe if we all had to type a little slower, and see our words on the page, we might be a little kinder, a little more thoughtful. And finally, I have to be okay with imperfection. On a typewriter, you have to accept the mistakes and keep writing.

One YouTuber referred to a typewriter as a portable printing press. I love that. There’s a line from Gutenberg’s invention of the movable type printing press in 1440 in Germany, to me typing at my desk in Brazil in 2024—that’s rad.

And who could resist that little bell that dings at the end of the line? When I first got this particular typewriter, the bell was broken; it didn’t make a sound. I had to watch a bunch of YouTube videos about how to fix it. I took the machine apart, located the bell, figured out the problem and fixed it! I felt like I’d won a gold medal. If my laptop broke, I would not be able to watch a few YouTube videos and fix it. Typewriters are a cool mechanical puzzle, and I love puzzles.

You know what my typewriter doesn’t have? Notifications. I can’t swipe to a different window or get distracted by scrolling. If I need to pause and think, I look up, and in my case as I wrote this letter, out the window. It’s a lovely silent moment. And then I’m back on it, clacking away.

Wow, Mrs. Griswold, you are going on and on about the typewriter, but isn’t this supposed to be a letter of introduction? Okay, okay, but I’m hoping that you are learning something about me through this story.

The typewriter is a symbol of where I am this year and where I want to go. I like puzzles. I like fixing things. I want to slow down and embrace imperfection. I want to disconnect from some things to connect more deeply to others. I’m excited by new experiences. I like taking on challenges.

One big goal is that I want to disconnect from technology and connect more with myself and others. I want to embrace messiness and mistakes. I want to try things that are hard, complicated and slow. I hope you might be willing to join me.

Hopefully you are starting to guess that I might be the kind of teacher who sees learning and students as a fun puzzle to solve. Hopefully you see that I’m not expecting you to be perfect. Maybe you can see that I value a love of challenge and curiosity in my students.

By now, you’ve probably guessed how I feel about the new cell phone policy. 😉

Now that you’ve gotten to know me, will you write me your own letter of introduction? Tell me who you are, what’s on your mind right now, where you want to go. Also, if there’s anything important for me to know about you, this would be a great chance for you to share that. It’s due next class. This is our first formal interaction as teacher and student, so bring your A game and turn it in on time next class.

Now, I know you probably don’t have a typewriter of your own, but in the spirit of slowing down and connecting with your own words, will you write me your letter by hand? Remember what I said about embracing imperfection. And please don’t worry about your handwriting. Anyone who has been in my class before can tell you how bad my handwriting is—who am I to judge? Try to keep it legible, but I’m good at reading handwriting.

Warmly,

Mrs. Griswold

Teaching, Writing

This week in the AI apocalypse…

This isn’t a super deep or long post. I just need to put this somewhere so the shouting will stop in my head.

First, my favorite new slang I learned recently is “slop.” It’s the AI garbage that is now all over search engines and social media. I do a weekly check in on social media to see all the travel, dogs, babies, weddings, meals, etc. Yes, social media is a wasteland. Yes, there’s not many of us left on Facebook, but there’s like 3 people and they post a lot and sometimes it’s nice. Leave me alone. I’m making this up, but it feels like 60% of my feed is bizarre AI slop. Like this:

Seriously, what the ****? The AI slop on Facebook started out a few months ago as like the face of Jesus in a farmstand of broccoli. Or a kid with a prosthetic leg with a sign about it being his birthday held by hands with more than 5 fingers. A week later that kid was holding hands with Jesus. Now comes this dada-esque atrocity of an ouroboros camel.

I really want to report this! (As if Facebook cares at all about what content is on its site.) But my sense of ethical do-gooderness was yelling at me to report this! I clicked the report button, hoping I could choose an option that says “This AI garbage is not just terrible, it’s disturbing.” This is not an option.

Clearly there is no human running these accounts. They’ve just been set to run and probably to learn from the clicks and comments.

I don’t comment on this slop either because whatever bot runs this account would be getting clicks, which is revenue, which they use to sell the profile later or to monetize the page. What am I even doing on Facebook? I know what I’m doing, I’m trying to find a local restaurant’s hours! It should be a federal law that all businesses get a free website that is just their hours, phone number, and address.

Okay, so that post and the ones like it are so bizarre they are laughable. Then yesterday, I’m watching the Olympics and just living for the commercials. Seriously, 80% of Olympics commercials make me cry. But not this one. It’s a commercial about a little girl who just loves running and her hero is a female Olympian runner. And her dad asks Google AI to write a fan letter to the athlete for the little girl. Google, are you drunk? Are you suggesting that little kids should send AI-written fan letters to their heroes? Are you hearing yourself?

I keep the letters that students have written to me over the years. One is on my bookshelf here in Minnesota, where we spend our summers. It was written to me when I was teaching at a drama camp after college and a kid wrote, in his own handwriting, that I helped him develop a love of performing “Shakesphere.” I treasure that letter. I know that a 13 year old wrote it.

Was no one in the room in the making of that ad who piped up to say that maybe this ad was saying the ugly part out loud? Was no one like, “Um, this seems like we’re not really keeping with the spirit of childhood, excellence, or personal connection? Tone deaf, anyone?”

So, let me tell you this now. It’s gross. Stop, Google. You are becoming the weird camel.

I bet if I asked AI to write a letter to an athlete it would sound something like this:

Dear [Name of Athlete],

I am a child in the 4th grade and I wanted to take this opportunity to express to you my deepest and most heartfelt respect of your athleticism and physical grace. Allow me a moment to delve into the myriad reasons I idolize your recent physical achievements, and hope to emulate your exploits myself.

When you were a high school athlete in New Jersey, you came in first place at an invitational meet, which was covered by your hometown newspaper, whose data I have recently scraped for information and training in my writing style. (Hat tip to journalist Maggie Stevenson for teaching me how to use semicolons and em dashes! Isn’t it great how much training data there is on the Internet? And it’s free!)
Your Wikipedia page says that you have three world records. There were footnotes and links to sources, but I haven’t been programmed to follow those to confirm the information. Also, I am not trained to question the veracity of Wikipedia.
I, a small human child, also want to be an award winning athlete. I want to consume high amounts of calories to fuel my wet meatsack of a body so that I can locomote very quickly on a oval shaped rubberized track over hurdles, which are defined as upright frames over which an athlete must jump. I’ve heard that running is hard and can cause physical pain. Humans generally do not like pain, but there seems to be some reason I, a 10 year old child, am interested in enduring the pain of running over hurdles. It might be for the gold medal–but that only contains 6 grams of gold, assuming I win the “gold” medal, and actually only copper, zinc and iron if I get bronze. But that’s if I even make it through the Olympic qualifiers with more than 1,800 competitors. Based on the probability, I should probably be encouraged to keep up with my studies an academics.

In closing, I hope to emulate your spectacular feats of strength and endurance when I mature into an adult woman. It is due entirely to your tenacity and indefatigability that I have set my sights on such a portentous achievement of physical prowess.

With heartfelt gratitude and sincerest adulation,

[Insert your name here]

Teaching

Why I Secretly Like Writing Report Card Comments, or, Why I Don’t Use AI to Write My Report Card Comments

I am wordy. There’s not denying it. I am rarely at a loss for words, words flow from me, words are my artistic medium. This is what I usually tell people when I admit to them that I like writing report card comments.

To be fair, writing 75-85 short paragraphs isn’t easy, and it can feel like Groundhog Day to keep churning out a repeated comment structure that has some repetitiveness to it. Despite all this, I do like writing them.

First, report card comments have a real audience. We talk all the time about giving students authentic audiences for their work, and any of us who have had our students share their writing with families, a writing competition, or the community, you can attest that the writing is better when real eyeballs other than yours are on it. I’d argue the writing is better because the students engage with it more. They care.

Thus it is for me. I care when I write these comments. I know that as a parent, I read my own kids’ comments very closely, often two or three times. I can assume that my students’ parents are also reading them like this.

Of course, some may be thinking that not every parent is reading the comments that closely, if at all. But the chance that even a handful of parents read them makes them meaningful. I also don’t have any reason not to believe that parents who don’t read the comments are the exception, not the rule. At the lunch table yesterday, more than one teacher told the story of a parent quoting their report card comment back to the teacher in a conference.

I also don’t often get the opportunity to talk about a kid like this, in a written form, without interruption. Most times when we talk about kids, it’s a conversation, or perhaps an email, with interruptions and back and forths. But report card comments are my chance to boil down my thoughts and impressions of a kid and their work into an uninterrupted little nugget of text. There’s room for me to think, write, re-read, and revise. I would liken report card comments to a thank you card or a note delivered to someone on a special occasion. Those are meaningful notes, and they usually contain the kinds of things that don’t get said on a daily basis.

My comment writing process is my own, and I know every teacher has one. My husband, David, writes the rough and the final draft all in one go. He doesn’t stand up from the computer until the kid’s comment is done, perfect and ready to be turned in. I, on the other hand, write a messy first draft in a tornado of key strokes. I sit down and compose wildly, without re-reading. Of course, I have a rough structure that I use for each comment, so it’s not a total chaotic mess. I also write with correct grammar, spelling and punctuation in the first draft. Typos will inevitably slip in, but it’s not an untamed mess.

Then, I let the comments go cold, which is writer speak for I don’t look at them for a day or two. Then, I re-read. I can usually spot any problems right away. If I can, I take another break from them and then return to paste them into our online gradebook system. That’s my last chance to read each one over and make sure the tone is right and no mistakes lingered.

I often take things away in the final re-read and paste. I usually have a line with a bit too much emotion that doesn’t belong. I let myself keep it in the early drafts as a little gift to myself. I can usually tell on that third re-read if the wording is off or I’m straying from the objective and constructive. To err is human.

Just yesterday I submitted final report card comments for 72 students, totally 7,943 words. And I wrote every single one of those words. I did not use predictive text, AI, chatbots, or Grammarly. I didn’t even use a comment bank. I wrote and revised each of those 7,943 words with no more than spellcheck.

This year, I had to refer 6 students to our administration for academic dishonesty, specifically for using AI to write part or all of an assignments for them. The consequences were wide-ranging based on how many times the student has plagiarized in the past, but some of the consequences were severe and had a real impact on their educational trajectory.

To me, my statement about my own comment writing and the students I have caught using AI are of a piece. It’s been a rough year for cheating and academic dishonesty. I’ve spent hours documenting and investigating what a student did, using Chrome attachments that can play a document history like a movie, AI checkers, TurnItIn reports, and good old fashioned “this doesn’t sound like a 17 year old wrote it.” I’ve sat down for conversations where I had to ask a student to explain very sophisticated vocabulary or a reference that I’ve never seen a high school student use.

It’s been demoralizing. It undermines not only the educational goals of the classes I teach, but it also touches on some core beliefs I have as a person about the power of writing, of voice, of expression.

So how could I ask a robot to write a comment about a kid I spent the last 10 months with? How could a Large Language Model understand the challenges a kid faced as a second language learner, or the anxiety a junior felt in an individual oral exam, or the way a freshmen dug deep into an academic journal article about Plato’s Symposium? What does a bot know of joy, triumph, frustration, or tears?

I can hear Taylor Mali telling me what teachers “make” in my head right now, “I can make a C+ feel like a congressional medal of honor and I can make an A- feel like a slap in the face.” Has Gemini or QuillBot ever spent an afternoon extra help session helping a kid identify personification, symbols, metaphors? Sure, it can scrape the internet for other writers’ ideas about poetic devices, but has it sat and read Juliet’s soliloquy before her suicide, in a room full of teenagers, and sifted through the iambic pentameter to find how odd and thrilling it is to contemplate her use of the word “rust” as she uses an apostrophe to speak to the dagger she will plunge into her chest: “there rust and let me die”? Has ChatGPT listened as your teacher tells you that until the 20th century there was a censoring of that word rust. The Victorians found it too graphic for a lady, so they changed it to “rest” and that revision of Shakespeare lasted until the 1960’s, when scholars decided to restore the original word, discomfort and grotesque imagery and all. And how when this teacher went home from college after the Shakespeare course she took, she found her mother’s old college copy of The Complete Works of Shakespeare on the shelf, fanned through the collected works to find Juliet in Act 5, and there, would you believe it, is Juliet telling the dagger to calmly “rest” in her chest. And isn’t that just a moment to pause and think about the power of the original words. The power of the choice that Shakespeare made, even if it’s odd or perplexing (does she imagine her hot blood will rust the dagger, or that the dagger will stay in her chest for eternity?), but that is what Shakespeare intended. And Shakespeare, like all of us, was just a human being–a talented human being, but a quirky, imperfect one even still.

I know that AI is alluring. Even just to plug in your first draft, as I had students do this year, into a bot that can correct your grammar, smooth out your word choice, and amp up your sentence construction. No more agonizing over where to put the period, or if (gasp!) perhaps a semi-colon is needed, if you can manage to remember the rules for using a semicolon. Writing is hard. And the world is judging your writing. You just want it to look and sound good. Short cuts can sound appealing when the work is hard and the pressure is on.

Let’s put it another way. Would I want my child’s teacher to use AI to write my child’s comments? Would I want to read that? The simple answer is no. Ezra Klein, the writer and host of the Ezra Klein Show podcast, has described it as a lack of friction. When he writes to a friend, a real human, there’s friction. He wants the person he is writing to to like him. To think he’s witty, or funny, or interesting. He is invested in what that person thinks of him. He’s tried to create bots that he can converse with and he said he usually ends up dropping the conversation because there’s no friction. There’s no person on the other end to be invested in. (Listen to a brilliant conversation about this here.) If my children’s comments were written by a bot, would I want to read them? What is real there? What is it actually telling me about my child? Something generic that could be said about any 4th or 6th grader? I know what the generic child of that age is like. I want to know what it’s been like to teach my child.

Or, perhaps, consider if your current employer wrote a letter of reference for you using AI. Would you want that letter? When this question has been posed to me and other teachers, the answer is a pretty quick no. I wonder what answer I would get if I asked a student who plagiarized using ChatGPT that same question. Would you be okay if I wrote your college recommendation letter using a bot? I’m not sure what their answer would be, and I’m afraid to ask. Perhaps all they care about is getting admitted, because they’ve been trained to place their entire sense of self worth in their college acceptances. Maybe the scenario I offer is a speech at their wedding in some imagined future. Would you be okay if your best friend got up to give a toast about you and they hadn’t written it themselves?

What am I doing here? If I used AI to do my writing, what is this job I’ve devoted my life to? If it isn’t about working with kids and teaching them to express themselves, what’s the point? I didn’t become a teacher to teach kids to sit in a room and prompt a Large Language Model to give them work that will be grammatically and technically perfect, but devoid of any real thought or experience.

But the time! The time! It saves so much time! You know what would also save me time writing comments? Not being a teacher. I would have 100% of my comment writing time back. I would have zero minutes of teaching another human to use a comma after starting a sentence with a subordinating conjunction. I would spend no time of my day explaining how sentence variety is like different parts of the song that keep your piece from feeling repetitive and mind-numbing. I could leave teaching! I have colleagues who are choosing to change careers.

There’s another angle that is maybe too far, but maybe just right. I don’t think I need to collaborate with the bots in my own obsolescence. By that, I mean that I don’t need to embrace technology that some are already arguing will eventually replace me. Remember when American jobs were getting “outsourced” and “off-shored” to low-paid workers in other countries, and they made the people getting fired train their replacements? That’s depressing. Do I have to go along with it, just because it’s here? Do I really need to “get with it” and “be cool” and embrace it? Kids are vaping a lot too, should we just give them a room where they can do it so they don’t hide in the bathrooms? Okay, maybe that’s a false equivalency.

Why am I here if kids are just going to have AI barf up some amalgamation of an Internet’s worth of words by real people, both paid and unpaid, who struggled through the writing process? Am I training highway robbers or thinkers? Am I training lip-syncers or composers? I have no interest in training copy-pasters. If there’s one thing that makes me seriously think about leaving the field, it’s AI. And I say that with a pang of absolute despair in my chest. Absolute despair. I love this job. I’ve worked so hard for the last 17 years of teaching and 2 years of graduate school before that to be good at this job.

I don’t know what the future will bring, but for now, I will be writing my own comments. What is more worthy of my time and effort, than to write a little note for parents about the child they love, that is aging and growing away from them with every passing day? What is more worthy of my time and effort, than leaving students with a final thought, a word of encouragement, a declaration of admiration and respect for the 180 days they have just spent with me?

Happy comment writing, y’all.

Teaching, Writing

When a student uses your favorite obscure rhetorical device

I really enjoyed teaching AP Language and Composition for many reasons–if nothing else, I still think everything is an argument. An advertisement is an argument, a speech is an argument, a letter is an argument, a poem is an argument, a novel is an argument, a painting is an argument…someone stop me. But one nice fringe benefit was learning a lengthy list of rhetorical devices. Some you may recognize: rhetorical question, pathos, oxymoron, but some are more obscure: chiasmus, synecdoche, and metonymy. But my absolute favorite is zeugma (pronounced zoog-mah).

Right off the bat, Zeugma draws the eye down there at the end of the list, and that vowel combo is uncommon. It comes from the Greek word “to yoke” or to link together, and it essentially is when you use one word and apply it in two different uses or senses. If you are a millennial, I can prove to you that you already know a zeugma and make you sing at the same time:

You are the bearer of unconditional things
You held your breath and the door for me
Thanks for your patience
Alanis Morissette

Our Lady of 90s Female Rage Alanis Morissette sang these lyrics in “Head Over Feet”. It’s a bit of a deep cut, but I just earwormed a few of you.

So there are two senses of the word “hold” at play here. Holding the door, which would be using your hand to keep a door open, and then holding your breath, which means to trap air in your lungs.

Another example of zeugma: he stole my heart and my camera. The two senses of stole are yoked together.

So imagine my delight when I open a short story that one of my 9th grade students wrote. It’s vivid, the setting is engaging, and then a character is introduced: “Among the mournful crowd of peasants and soldiers stood a man with a heavy armour and a heavier guilt.”

Y’all. I gasped! I don’t know if he knows that what he wrote is a zeugma, or if he did it intentionally. I definitely did not directly teach zeugma. But I love, love, love that he wrote a brilliant one. His sentence is a great demonstration of why I love zeugmas: they surprise and pivot. It’s a little switch that delights the mind. It’s also very tight, in that sense that in just one sentence we can visualize his armor, but we also establish that he’s done something bad. Zeugmas make for zippy plot and characterization. In an assignment that limited them to 1000 words, this was a good technique.

Okay, that’s all. Just wanted to say I am here for all zeugma-related content.

Teaching

All teachers should teach middle school at least once

A colleague said to me in passing last week, “I’d love to sit down sometime and hear your thoughts on middle school vs. high school.”

(For background, I’ve ping ponged in my career from MS to HS and back. I spent the first 4 years in MS, the next 7 hears in HS, the next 5 in MS and now I’m back in HS.)

I’ve spent a lot of the first quarter thinking about the differences. What I’ve arrived at is that I think all teachers should do a tour of duty in middle school–metaphor completely intentional. For some teachers this would be a joyful home to stay in forever, other teachers would find it challenging. But that is precisely my point: teaching middle school can make you a better teacher, if you don’t run screaming for the hills first.

First, teaching middle school reminds you of the fundamental skills in each discipline. Far from the anxiety and pressures of college and GPA, middle school is a little island of time where it’s a teachers duty to instill a love of their subject. Teaching middle school humanities, sometimes I felt like I was in a friendly competition to get students to like my subject the most. Science really gives us a run for our money.

Truly, though, teaching middle school English is about the wonders of reading and writing. We watch movies in our heads, we compose things that make other people feel something. What a gift! Teaching middle school you will be reminded about what really is at the heart of your subject, and probably what drew you to loving that subject in the first place.

Next, you can’t be sloppy or unprepared in middle school. They will eat you. Ha, I kid. But you will feel like you’ve been eaten. Middle school students are honest and they also don’t have a lot of self control to spare. So if something is confusing, illogical, rushed, incomplete–they will smell it and let you know. Sometimes they will raise their hand and tell you it doesn’t make sense, but more often then not, they will begin to roll across the floor, do a handstand, cut pencils in half, or make strange bird calls. This is your sign. You must right the ship immediately.

You better have all those photocopies made. You have to get the desks pre-arranged. Doing a group activity? Pre-sort and number the materials. If you lose time trying to sort things or arrange the room during the first 5 minutes, pandemonium will ensue. By contrast, in the high school I share rooms, and I often arrive to a desk arrangement that I need changed. I simply project the seating arrangement on the board, the 9th graders move the desks and then sit, ready to learn. If you’ve never taught middle school, asking them to rearrange the desks is disastrous. They will build them into a pyramid and then begin launching themselves at the ceiling. I kid, sort of.

When I began my last 5 year stint in middle school, in the first semester I went and talked to lower school teachers about transitions. I would transition from a minilesson at the front to independent work time at desks. Except it wasn’t a transition, more like it was a bunch of molecules firing off into infinite entropy. I was completely losing them in the transitions and I couldn’t reel them back in or get them to be productive after the transitions.

I learned that you keep those transitions tight, the instructions clear. If you can introduce a timer or a competition of some sort, even better. No dead air, no breaks, no loose ends. A well-choreographed dance.

If the instructions aren’t written in addition to being spoken, forget it. Make sure there are posters around the room with the concepts you’ve been teaching. Yes, you’ve told them the website for printing 16 times and asked them to bookmark it. They did not bookmark it. Put it on a poster and just point at the wall. Middle school students are easily distracted. They can miss instructions because a cool bird was outside, or their thumb nail is a weird shape. They are like smaller children in that way. While high school students may not need so many reminders, I’ve found they really appreciate the posters around the room that they can consult. High school students often have questions about the instructions, but they might be too shy or self conscious to ask, so putting them on the board is helpful.

In middle school, the attention clock is ticking down so fast. Give instructions efficiently and get them working as quick as you can. They cannot sit through 25 minutes of instructions and explanation. Spend 5 or 10, then get them working and address questions as they come. Middle school students often can’t envision an activity until they are doing it, so if you let them ask endless questions, they can can caught in the bog. Give instructions verbally, project the instructions on the board, and send them off, ideally with a timer or a ticking bomb or some kind of fun device to get them working.

Even though high schoolers have longer attention spans, they also don’t love endless instructions. They also appreciate getting to the work quickly.

In middle school, you need to save middle school students from themselves. I learned very quickly that if they are working on computers, they need to turn so that their screen is facing me. They don’t have the self control to resist games, YouTube, whatever is currently obsessing them. Are middle school students starting to sound like manic squirrels? Yeah, that’s not too far off. But as soon as they know you are watching, and you’ve told them three times to stop playing Fortnite, they get down to work.

Turns out that high school students might be more tech savvy, more mature, but they also need to be saved from themselves, technologically or otherwise.

Middle school students make you realize that if things don’t go super well, it’s probably your fault. Sorry to break this to you, but middle school students are basically doing the best they can, and if that lesson didn’t fly, you need to rethink the way you did it. In high school, it can sometimes be easy to shift the blame to the students. That sounds harsh and judgy, but I don’t mean it that way. Yes, high school students can be held to a higher standard, but it’s worth reflecting on how you as a teacher could have done things differently.

I shouldn’t let you walk away from this believing that middle school is just a post-apocalyptic wasteland with more hormones in the air than oxygen. When things go well, students will tell you both with their words and their engagement. They will hug you spontaneously, they will tell you that they really loved your class. The highs are high! And this will give you the feedback you need to find what works.

The growth is huge in middle school. The leaps can be impressive and the victory dances are joyful and unbridled. It’s a heady place to teach, middle school. And while I knew I needed a break, there are so many powerful teaching practices that I carry with me.

Teaching, Travel

Leaving the flowers in the dirt

When we were leaving Nashville and selling our house, I had a reaction to that massive change I didn’t expect. I got very worried about the landscaping in the backyard.

I had hired a local landscape architect to design a plan for our back yard. Then, David and I, with the help of many family member conscripted into the effort, dug up the beds ourselves. We drove an hour to a nursery that had great prices so that we could get all the plants ourselves. They were so tiny! To save money, I bought the smallest, youngest versions of each plant.

When we left, the backyard was thriving and lush. And I was struggling to imagine leaving it behind. What if the new owners didn’t prune the bushes at the right time? What if the crepe myrtle got leggy? Would they weed it and mulch it?

Moved this hydrangea from under the deck and nursed it back to health.

For a fleeting moment, I had this moment of insanity where I thought about digging up all the plants and selling them or giving them away to good homes. This is obviously nuts.

The only answer was that I just had to leave the flowers in the dirt.

This year, my fifth year of teaching 7th grade humanities and journalism at Graded, I started to think about something different. The world is scary right now, the pandemic is still reverberating, and in all the upheaval and uncertainty, we decided to consider our options. We started looking at job openings around the world.

Meanwhile, our kids are happy here. Matilda moved into the native-speaking Portuguese class. Everett is finally no longer saying he hates school. Calvin has friends and loves his teachers. This is the backdrop of our search. We watched schools post openings and each one led to the conversation: is this place good enough to leave Graded now? For most schools, the answer was no.

And then a high school English position opened up here. Before moving to Graded, I taught high school English for seven years at Harpeth Hall in Nashville. When we left Nashville, I was excited to return to middle school. Honestly, I didn’t want to hear the words “college” ever again. I wanted a break from high school problems. And for the past five years, I’ve loved working with middle school students again. Their joy! Their unbridled enthusiasm! Their silliness! A breath of fresh air.

Until the point comes when you are tired of silly noises, spacey students, forgotten materials. I started to feel myself needing a break from teaching students to use the TAB button and not the space bar five times. Reminding them to get their notebooks and folders for the 85th time. Telling them to stop very obviously mouthing words across the room to their best friend in the middle of my lesson. Threatening life and limb to the next person who blasts that annoying song from their laptop in the middle of silent work time. Sometimes students said or implied that they felt like the work didn’t matter, it’s just middle school anyway. Dare I admit that I wished someone might mention college and have it lend gravitas to the work?

I applied for the high school English job. I felt that panic again. What would happen to the 7th grade curriculum, or the journalism class? I needed to be there to guard these things I’d helped build. I couldn’t just let them go.

But I could. This is life, especially for teachers. The curriculum you wrote will be rewritten or thrown out. The new teachers will bring their own ideas and expertise. And? That’s beautiful. That’s life. That’s this ever-evolving field. It’s not meant to stay the same forever.

I went back and forth; I slept on it. I talked to some new teachers and some old ones. And I took the job.

I wasn’t sure if I’d done the right thing at first. That feeling changed when I started to feel some joy and appreciation again. This was, after all, the last time I’d be teaching The Giver for quite some time, maybe ever. It stopped feeling like, Ugh, fifth time with The Giver, here we go, and started to feel like, Oh, The Giver, you’re great. Let’s do this and move on.

Of course, this isn’t a grass is greener. The grass is just different, and I’d like a change of turf for a while. Yes, high school students have their own problems. But they’re different problems. Problems I’m not tired of troubleshooting.

We signed a two-year extension and the kids are elated. We are all happy that our time in Brazil and at Graded is not coming to an end yet. We have time for more Portuguese, more travel, more time working with and learning from these amazing educators.

I’m working on leaving the plants in the dirt and trusting that the next generation will do with them what needs to be done–including replacing them or letting them die. It’s alright; I’ve got a new garden to tend.

Teaching

Agency: Observations From the First Day of Middle School

Playing zipper tag with 100 7th graders on the first day of school.

In our pre-service deeper learning work this year we delved into a few areas in our new statement of deeper learning at Graded. One of the items on the list is agency.

To kick off our discussions, we read this text, “Making sense of student agency in the early grades” by Margaret Vaughn from Kappan. Despite the title, it’s very applicable to all ages and grade levels. And I love an article that begins with a teaching anecdote. According to Vaughn, agency is “a student’s desire, ability, and power to determine their own course of action.”

Reading that text, I immediately thought about students in my middle school journalism elective. The way I operate it, it is much like a workshop where students are writing on their own topics at their own speeds. After our first assigned topics, there are no required or common topics, and I don’t set deadlines for students. Everyone writes at their own speed, ideally matching the writing and revision speed to the type of article and level and complexity they have chosen.

This freedom of choice and pace is amazing for some students and paralyzing for others. I started to think that the difference between the two reactions comes down to agency.

I’ll come back to the journalism course as a study in agency later, but today was our first day with students and there were so many moments that made me think about student agency. A first day of school is hard for anyone, but for new students, it demands a high level of agency. They have to listen closely to instructions, decide which peers to follow or reach out to, ask for help of adults they maybe have never met.

After a morning of advisory, grade level, and middle school assemblies, after lunch, students got to go to their first four, each for a short 30 minutes. Every student had 3 copies of their schedule given to them in the morning. The schedule lists the block (1-8), the course (humanities 7), the teacher (Mrs. Griswold), and the room number (D27). But it’s a schedule of a normal school day rotation.

Students had to use the printed schedule to find blocks 1, 2, 3, and 4 for our short afternoon classes today. They had to notice the teacher and the classroom printed there. Then they had to use our classroom numbering system or ask a peer or adult for help. This all requires a lot of agency.

Standing outside my room, the most common question I got was “Where is Mr. Lockhart’s room?” or a variation on that. My follow up was always, “What’s the room number?”

Very few students had noticed the room number or remembered it. Many claimed that room numbers were not listed on their schedule. I loved waiting patiently for them to show me that they were no room nu–oh, it’s right here. E07.

Sometimes a student came up knowing the room number. I was standing outside room D27. “Where’s D28?” I would point out that I was in D27 and D26 was to their left. Any guesses for D28? Being middle schoolers, they often forgot to say goodbye or thank you after the lightbulb went off and they scampered to class.

There was one student who stood out today. He came to my room during the start of block 2, when I had already started the class. I could tell he wasn’t a 7th grader. I asked if he had my class right now. He said yes. I asked to see his schedule. Block 2 said PE in the main field.

“Do you know where the main field is?”

“No.”

“We just had recess. Did you go to the field for recess?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, head back there.”

That seemed to click for him and he turned and left. Turns out he only made it to 2 of his 4 classes successfully. I think he switched block 4 and block 1.

Listen, he’s a new student on a big campus. I totally get it. But there wasn’t a lot of giddyup in his step as he left my room. He seemed a bit passive, unfluffed, adrift. I know his cognitive load was probably at the max, but I theorized that I was seeing a student who generally lacked agency. I’m curious to see if this pattern holds. He was one of almost 30 new students in the middle school, and the only one I saw or heard about having those difficulties. It wasn’t a common pattern for new students.

I think there’s something here in this first day experience about agency. Agency means using the tools in your hands, knowing when and how to seek help, planning ahead and setting your speed to compensate for lost time. These are important parts of driving your own ship. I know that the definition I gave of agency was about determining a course of action, but part of agency is weathering storms. Steering through rough weather.

If the first day of middle school isn’t the purest form of steering through rough weather, I don’t know what is.

(I started at a new school in a new country in 7th grade myself. Sheesh, I could tell some stories. More on that to come.)

My challenge for myself is to think about ways to teach students to be agents. How can we help them reflect and then try to exercise more agency? How can we be explicit when teaching them how to be agents? I bet some kids today thought I was being mysterious when I prodded them to find the room number on their printed schedule, or when I explained how the buildings were numbered–this is D, the next building is E; 1 digit number is 1st floor, 2 digit number is second floor–rather than just pointing and telling them.

I’m not being difficult. I’m showing you that you, like Dorothy, had the answers all along. The power was always yours.

Group in journalism class tries to remember all the news they heard or read this summer.

Teaching

Better, Not Awesome

Things are better, but not awesome. I don’t think awesome has really been on the table for the last 55 weeks, but it’s worth adding that caveat. Sometimes when you are struggling, people who wish you well want you to be great again so that they can not worry about you anymore. And sometimes those struggling get tired of carrying their own load plus someone’s else anxiety and worry, so we smile and say we’re fine! All cleared up!

It’s not “all cleared up,” but it is better. This Monday, Everett’s day care reopened. As a day care, they are classified as essential, even in the emergency phase we find ourselves in as a city with regular schools closed. On Monday morning, I sent this gif to my coworkers in our group chat with the message “Me walking away from dropping Everett off at day care this morning.”

For a moment I felt a bit bad. I don’t have tons of mom guilt, but sometimes I worry non-parents are going to be shocked.

So I followed that up with this gif and the caption, “To be fair, this was Everett running in the door without looking back.”

Monday was so much better. The two older kids did their work and due to leading less attention, I was able to focus on what I needed to do with less interruption.

Everett was sad before he went to school and said he’d miss us. I reassured him that we’d pick him up at the end of the day. He still repeats that feeling some mornings, but he comes home dirty from the sandbox and talking about what he did that day.

The other change I made that has improved my mental state was planning in more offline time in each of my 80 minute blocks. When we started the school year, I planned in 30-50 minutes of off-screen (asynchronous) work time for students. But as we went back to campus, I started running 80 minute live Zoom classes. It’s just exhausting for everyone involved, and I need to be free to help my children with their lessons and activities. Just being able to send my students off to work while I go get lunch started or help a kid with their writing assignment has done so much for me.

In case you needed reminding, I’m working two jobs and parenting at the same time. Matilda can’t read her math word problems or log herself into her computer. She needs help with instructions. She needs pencils sharpened and clean sheets of paper. She needs help finding her Portuguese book. They all need a time keeper to get them logged into their 4 Zoom classes a day. David and I have all these alarms set and we have to stop our teaching to tell the kids to join their Zoom classes when our phones start playing funny songs. And many times, we have to strong arm them into logging on because they resist.

They resist? I must admit that until March of this year, my kids have done 0 specials classes in distance learning. No PE, art, music, or counseling classes. And until this semester, they weren’t always consistent about going to their Portuguese classes every day. So, about half the time I tell them they have Portuguese or special, a cloud rolls over their eyebrows and they start negotiating skipping it. We’ve held the line and they always have a good time in those classes.

So I’m not in the low-bottom any more, in the words of Marc Maron. And that’s huge. I’m more focused, I’m less stressed, I’m less depressed.

We’re still waiting to find out if the state and city government will allow schools to reopen next week. Because we have parent/teacher conferences next week and only have classes on Monday and Friday, we bumped our tentative reopening to April 19, the following Monday.

The situation in Brazil and Sao Paulo is still really bad. You have to be really avoiding the news to not know that. There are a few signs of improvement in our state and city. Hospitalizations are down and we have some days of lower cases. It’s going to take some time for that to have an effect on the death rate and the ICU occupancy.

Teachers 47+ can get vaccinated starting on Monday. They haven’t announced when teachers under 47 will get vaccinated, but I’ve pre-registered and our school is hosting a vaccination site, so we may be able to get ours on home turf.

So, everything is “a little better, but…” That’s about as good as it gets in this pandemic, I guess.

But, hey, both my kids went outside to play with friends during our lunch break today and I’m writing this in a quiet, nearly empty apartment. I’ll take it where I can get it.