Tone and Meaning

All last year, the challenge of conveying an effective balance of Warmth/Demand was a high hurdle.

I think I got better, at least.

I learned my lesson when I met my cousin from California this spring during a family visit to NYC from California with his parents, my uncle and aunt-in-law.  I saw my brother swoop down and lift him up in a playful manner, "fun uncle" style.  I was fighting every breathe of my teacher's mentality coming out of me, but I let a little wisp come through.

I didn't lecture or anything, I simply taught him about things that were helpful for him, and spent time with him that would stimulate his thinking and understanding- playing a math game while waiting for dinner, looking at paintings upstairs before dessert came.

At the end of the night, I thought I had been the more-mechanical-serious-teacher-cousin, until my cousin came over to me unprovoked, and gave me a great big hug.  As I looked over him, my uncle gave me a thumbs up and a look that showed that this was not a common occurrence.

Wow, that happened.

As I met my students in the last two days (some for the second time), I saw myself realizing my lesson in my practice: Treat these students like you would your own family.  They are children seeking guidance, support, and connection, at the same time as expectations and structure.

When respect was not maintained, I did not chastise, but rather told them why it was disrespectful, and maintained their dignity.  After issues happened in class, I saw them in the hallways and had calm, supportive, and clarifying conversations.

I don't know how this will continue into the future, as these were just the first two days, but I feel much more at home with myself than I did last year.

Here's to the family.

Round 2

Round two has begun.  

(This post is a bit incoherent, a part of my warming up to get my writing chops back).

Amidst a summer of 9-5 grad school classes four days a week (thank you to the professor who planned her behind off making a summer class engaging. Not so many thanks to the professor who decided that reading off from a textbook printout every day, talking for 2 and a half hours at us, would help us stay awake and learn something), not a single day went by when I wasn't thinking about something I could do differently this year.

How will the expectations be strong and clear from day 1.
How will I convey myself as intensely caring and no-nonsense, while calm and able to connect in a genuine way.
How to manage my meticulous, systematic nature to give order in the classroom without betraying my past of serious bouts of OCD.
How to work with many of the same students I had last year, and be able to up the tone and expectations.
How to be a presence in the classroom and school that I want to be.

To say they were on my mind a lot is a gross understatement.  I had over a dozen "first-day dreams" in July, some great, some not so great.

For those teachers who will be wondering during their first year about whether it can be better- the second year is different:

In a high attrition school, kids seeing a common face gives them some certainty and constancy in their life.  It was amazing how many kids (particularly the gentlemen), wanted to shake hands in the first week.  I felt like I was on Cheers.

Experience makes a difference-Mistakes will be made in the first year, I made many.  I learned.  I grew.
 
In a plug for Teach Like a Champion, Cold Call, Emotional Constancy, Strong Voice, and the J Factor (stories in particular) make a big difference.

Consistency and planning are the keys to teaching.  If you want it, expect it always.  If you don't, address it.  Always.

Personally, I was concerned that looping with my class for year two into 7th grade would make changing the teaching persona much more of a challenge.  Kids have an interesting way of changing as easily, and it was surprising to see the difference.

The question now is, for me and for them, what else can be improved upon?

Failure.

Check mark, X, X, check mark, X, X, X.  Enter.

X, X, X, X, X, check mark, X, X, X...

The grades are on the screen in an excel spreadsheet.  

A sea of red with lonely islands of green in the mastery tracker screams failure in my face.

You are not good enough.  They did not learn what they needed to.  How do you feel about your effort now?  Are you happy?  Are you glad you took that night for yourself, or went out to that event just to talk to people?  Was your lesson plan really worthy of your name?

A shiver moves down my shoulders into the pit in my stomach, like the Grim Reaper just gave me a tap to tell me it was time.  Is it my time to rethink things?

Will the kids give up?  They were so happy some days learning (I thought it was learning) the material, and now it is like their memory and skills blew away with the wind.  I can't blame them, I was the one giving them the knowledge.  I was the one responsible for them wanting and achieving success.

Will the students revolt?  Will I be the teacher they say messed up?  The teacher they tell others to avoid?  It's ok to be tough when it helps them, am I just now the person who is strict to make up for his own weakness as a teacher?  I have no leverage of effectiveness to get engagement.

Will I beat myself up?  I have sometimes had a flagellant tendency when it comes to regrets.

Two things pop into my mind:

The famous quotation, as recited in Coach Carter:

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people don't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine as children do. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own lights shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others."

On iTunes is Lupe Fiasco's Beautiful Lasers (2 ways), rapping how there are two ways out of every situation.

This is not an unworthy activity or a sidetracked project that can be put to the wayside.  These are 30 kids who need the power to take on the world that will be theirs in less than a decade.  

I've said a challenge is either a lesson learned or an obstacle overcome.  Screw it, this will not be my year at the end.  #1 down, #2 to go.

My sea of red is going to be a color copy posted on my wall from now on.  No, you cannot go to bed just because you feel a little bit sleepy.  No, this cannot be a "we'll see" day.

Any Given Sunday comes to mind right now: 

Heal as a team, or crumble as individuals.  There are inches everywhere to be had, who's going to fight for that extra inch?

What do I want to feel as I look back upon this moment, pride for a turning point, or shame for the beginning of stagnancy.

Hard work = good memories.

I remember the one time I broke down during the summer.  A kid felt unknown in class. Unhelped.  Unserved for what he needed.

I felt in need once.  People responded and I always felt like I had a net.

No kid can fall because of this.  They will rise.

The thoughts begin to transform from a storm to a calmness.  Is this the eye or the edge of it?

Tonight- go home, grade, plan for a better day tomorrow.   Every day is a new day, right?

Setting the tone.

Last week, I did a personal experiment on how teaching personality affects tone of my classroom.  

Up until this point, I had been a very high energy, managerial, positive-pushy-pseudo dictatorial teacher in my classroom.  Many students were compliant and on task, and a few of my students were reacting adversely.  (Slight non-compliance, strong reaction to negative consequences.)

Last weekend, in grad school class, I heard a fellow teacher talk about how she tried to imitate the unfathomably calm tone of a colleague, and saw surprisingly successful results.  Why not? I figured.

I decided that I would be the calmest teacher my students had seen.  Nothing would phase me.  Bad behavior would still not be acceptable, but I would calmly ask the loud child to take his voice down a few notches, rather than make him stay with me during lunch.

It was like someone had slipped a sedative into the drinking water.  My students began to calm themselves, with more smiling and less fear of consequences.  Some students were asking me why I was so happy, yet they unconsciously found themselves in a better mood in my class as well.

I learned two lessons from this:

1) It is better to be the sun than the wind.  My students might do what I need them to do if I were managerial, but I do not naturally have the managerial personality.  I like to be positive, and I think that my students will want to work harder in a positive (and high expectations) environment, especially in the long term.  Which kind of class would you want to be in?

2) Students will feed off of your energy.  If you respond to behavior by getting annoyed, raising your voice, and confronting the behavior with contest, they will too.  If you emphasize calmness in your words, and soft voices when reasoning out troubles, what you do think they will do?

In the ocean.

The Fish

Is there just one person for each person?  That singular person, who is everything that you want, you everything they need?

I would not say there are singular soul mates.  Part of me wants to know how many people exist in the world that have all or nearly all of the qualities I look for.  (A curiosity for life and desire for growth, a quick mind, a deep thoughtfulness, and a positive energy are important for me, to name a few.)  In the game of odds, how many women live like that?

Swim, don't fish.

I often wonder, how married couples felt about their partner when they met and over the course of them falling in love.  Were they seeking each other?  Was it a random meeting?

For the years since I first became interested in the attraction of others (a relatively recent experience, college was the first time I spent much time during the day in the presence of girls.), I was searching.  Waiting for a connection.  When I felt a spark, I went in with a net, aggressively pursuing.  Fish swim away fast when you chase them.

When I decided to simply swim in the water, I found that the other fish were more open to swimming nearby.  The closest I've come to something, came from a simple conversation, without a pursuit or goal in mind.  Just the presence of another.

In any ocean.

I've learned over the past year that when you are fishing for anything, the fish rarely bite.  When you want to spend time with someone, don't act like you are fishing.  You are swimming, and they are welcome to join.  When you want the respect of your kids, don't fish for it.  Swim along, do what you need to do, and they will come along.  If you need them, they will know it.

Even in networking.  I remember a time when a U.S. ambassador came to our college, and attended a dinner afterwards.  Someone came up to him, and after about three minutes of conversation, handed him her business card for a media group.

Too much fishing.  I hated the idea of networking after that.

Then I saw others who understood.  They sought to support others, never fishing for their support.  They sought the interesting ideas and stories others wanted to share.  They did not fish for connections.

When you seek anything, keep in mind what you might be doing that comes off as fishing.  Don't chase them all away.

Do Tiggers create Eeyors?

2 characters from the children's classic, Winnie the Pooh.  Eeyor is the ever-sullen donkey, Tigger the always energetic and peppy Tiger with a curled tail he bounced on like a spring.

When I was younger, my Dad used to describe me as a Tigger.  I loved singing in the hallways, and had a little extra energy for life on a normal day.  It seemed accurate to me.  I'm a singer to this day, and try to keep smiling whenever I can.

The question of the day: What do Tiggers do to people who are not at the Tigger level?  If one is either in between the two, or in an Eeyor mood, what is the affect of seeing a Tigger?

I always thought that positive energy breeds more positive energy.  That seeing someone smile brought that out in you.

But someone recently suggested that similarity might be what is needed for positivity to radiate.  It might be that what makes us feel good is to see that someone is like us, that they are going through the same thing, that they understand us and our experience.  Simply, that they are a human like us.

Through significantly challenging experiences, I have tried to keep my spirits high by holding things lightly, allowing myself to psychologically flow with what happened.  On a bad day, "It's never boring," with a light, floating smile.  As a first year teacher, I've been told this is not the norm.  Am I not being real?  Perhaps not expressing everything I could.  But I am expressing what I need to so I can push towards the next day with joy.

I don't think these two are necessarily mutually exclusive, though.  Tiggers don't have to create Eeyors.  What is key is whether they understand each other.

If we see someone smiling in a tough situation, we feel separated from them, like they are understanding only their own world that moves with them from place to place like a personal quarantine inflated bubble.

But if the smile can reach out and connect, an understanding, an I get it smile, maybe that bubble can be broken and we can all breath the same air together.  Smiles can be good, if they connect.  Now the next step is to keep smiling while developing the I get itness.

I'll always be a Tigger.  Will I get you to start bouncing on your tails?  We'll see.

Sponges and the self in the pursuit of excellence.

Sponges

I walk through the streets every day, watching people going about their lives.  They have their own style to doing things in and outside of work.  Routines, relaxation, personal organization permeate what they do and how well they do it.

How do we learn to do something in our lives, ever?  We see, watch, or hear how it is done by someone else.  How to talk, say please and thank you, shake hands like a pro.

How do we learn to something better?  We see it done better.  We learn to speak like a President, give praise like a, well, teacher, and shake hands like a salesman, because we see them done in our lives.

Let's say that every person is working at 90% of their potential, in terms of how awesomely they can do the things in their lives that matter.  We all have weaknesses that we can improve.  (If there is a perfect person out there, please do let me know.)

Maybe for half of what they do well, it is 100%, and for the other half, they are doing things at 80% of what it could be.  These are not going to be the same things for everyone.  So what if we took the something done at 100% from each person we see?

If we do it until we have a way of doing nearly each thing at 100%.  Suddenly, moving from 90% (if you are great from the start), or 80% (if you are average at the start of something) to body temperature (98.6%) or even higher does not seem so hard.

I am a sponge.  When I see someone doing something better than me, I like to remember it and make it my own.  How to speak, how to organize my free time.  At school, I ask if I can take photos of every teacher's classroom- they have years of experience on me and do things a lot better.  Whether it is celebratory student exhibitions or progress tracking charts, why wait until I get more experience to do them too?

Move down the learning curve fast, and you get closer to excellence.  Learn to do better when you are younger.

The Self


"But you're just copying everyone else.  Where's the originality?"

What is truly you? As I've discussed before, there is rarely something that organically grows from within ourself, independent of outside influence.  It is simply a continuum on which the degree of explicit outside influence shows in what we do.

Where is the me in it?

Nietzche described the self not as a pearl of something original in ourselves, but rather the molding of all the things that we are and have been into a continuously coherent self.  Not a pearl, but rather a balloon that encapsulates everything that can float around on its own.

Our balloons of life fill with a bit more air of experience every day, allowing us to reach even greater heights.  Yes, my balloon has patches of others'.  I'm making a big balloon.