"You know what they say about big feet right?".... Long story short, I Think Highly of Myself

For a long time now, I have had no problem looking in the mirror and finding something I like. I don't know how this came about, I come from quite a humble household. I guess at some point I got it in my head that girls liked confidence(said the single 21 year old with ego made in Texas) so I changed my wallflower ways and opened up. Honestly it's served me quite well. I'm still relatively reserved around strangers, yet I'm more than capable of articulating my points and getting people to like me. It has not been until recently that I realized I may need to tone it down.

Let me explain. You see I have this goal of establishing a classroom community which I think is vital for all classrooms. How that community looks and functions is solely up to the teacher and should be natural for that teacher. For instance, the two teachers I learned the most from in high school were Mr. Axe and Mr. Carter. Mr. Axe wouldn't dream of lecturing or really telling us anything. He simply gave us books paired with articles and gave us incredible discussion topics or essay prompts or let us teach the class anything about the book we chose. It was self-directed learning that drew upon personal experience; it was authentic and it was community. The second was Mr. Carter. Mr. Carter taught social studies and economics, and most of his class was lecture. Now don't misunderstand me. Lecture often has a negative connotation when associated with pedagogy, but lecturing is not bad. Again, it is all about the person. I learned an incredible amount about their content area, teaching and how to be a man from both of these individuals: both were very different, but both were successful based on their passion and community.

The trouble I am having with community is that it's a process. Because of my personality, I gravitate much more towards the Mr. Axe way of doing things. I'm laid back. I like students to do their own work at their own pace. I also love listening to them through conferences and class discussions. The problem is I have a lot of ideas about the books we read. So when I pose a question and I hear crickets, I rephrase it ( aka I dumb it down or ask it in a way that leads them toward what I want to hear). This is wrong. i am conditioning my students to avoid answering because they know that I will come in for the rescue. In the process their learning is stifled and the community ceases to grow.

Like I have said before, the root of most harmful teaching practices is fear. My ego makes me fear how I look in the eyes of others. What perceptions will they have of me? What will the silence that follows my question say about me? Parker Palmer talks about this when he speaks of the paradox's of good teaching, specifically good teaching values discussion as much as silence. According to Palmer, when I choose to end the silence, I am interfering with my students thinking and thus learning. Rather than allowing them to eventually be led to their own conclusions, my fears cause me to spoon feed them my own regurgitated ideas.

In Arthur Miller's play All My Sons, the character Chris says "I don't know why it is, but every time I reach out for something I want, I have to pull back because other people will suffer." Chris is speaking to a very fundamental principle of teaching/service in general: I come second. Building a community is a process. I had the pleasure of having Mr. Carter his first year, and every year i was in high school, and I can tell you he got better every year. I am not discouraged, It's just scary when you find yourself talking AT your students, ask them to quiet down so they can hear YOU, and all the sudden I realize I'm like the Dad who vowls he'll never parent like HIS father I just know i can do better!

"If I Should Have Daughter.."

The one thing I can not help but notice is the need for role models. Not just people who lead a good example, but people that have screwed up so often and so bad, that they want to share it, just to prevent other people from making those same mistakes. I try to do this in my class, with reservations. There are a lot of mistakes I can't really tell them, but I am always looking for ways to share parts of me with them. One way I do this is with free writes. Free Writes are times where we pour our brains and our souls onto paper, forget about commas and subject-verb agreement and just get out what we need to get out. That piece of us that is on the tip of our tongue but not ready to leave our mouths. I ask my students to share these secrets with a few people: their paper, their classmates and me. This takes a certain amount of trust, so I try t always write along side them and share my stories, poems and memories in the same circle, with the same mixed emotions of fear and vulnerability that they do. For me, this is one way that I can build community and lead by example all the while creating a culture of writing.

However the more I watch and listen the more I am convinced that what this society needs is role models. I try to be that man that boys can look up to, have fun with and learn from but I'm facing the disheartening realization that I can't necessarily fill that role with my girls. Not that I can't teach them and learn from them, it's just more and more I'm realizing that I'm a bit clueless in this department. And the more I listen to them share and talk to them, the more I wonder if i want a daughter, you see the world is tough for these girls.

Now I don't know if I want a daughter, but I probably do ( obviously one boy/one girl makes the perfect family) but I know for a fact that I want to ease the transition from adolescence for all my students, boys and girls. So I've been trying to brush up a bit on gender issues and that sort of thing. I have been listening carefully to conversations among my female students and watching their reactions to certain situations and I'm learning, but I'm still clueless. All of this reminded me of a poem I really like by an amazing female poet named Sarah Kay. Here's two poems I really like by her, hope you enjoy.

What Were Working Towards

This semester I am teaching my eighth graders The Hunger Games. Many have of you have probably read this book, and if you have you may be wondering why it's being taught in school. On the surface the books appears to be one of those trendy teen books that blows up and becomes the biggest thing around for about ten minute. On some level that may be true, but do not get it twisted. The Hunger Games is no Harry Potter or Twilight, it is actually a bit of a literary gold mine that dives into serious issues like love, freedom, survival and identity. The latter is the basis of the unit I'm teaching. Identity is huge for me, because I believe the best knowledge is self-knowledge. If you do not know yourself than you cannot accomplish very much. So try not to focus my teaching on Shakespeare, poetry or writing essays, but rather in questions like how can I find myself through Shakespeare? What does this poem say about me? How do I write an essay that authentically represents who I am? If these connections are not made, than I have no business telling my kids to read something.

So I am focusing this Hunger Games unit on Identity to start, I gave the kids a Core-Value Survey. They had 40 cards in front of them, each displaying a core-value and definition. Things like "faith," "religion," "trustworthiness," "pleasure," "social," "wealth," "knowledge," "freedom" and many others. The goal was, through process of elimination, to get this down to the 5 values that are at your core. In other words, at your center, what do you value the most? What will you never give up? It was awesome to see hear the kids talk about what these values mean to them and where they came from. Each student will present these values to the class throughout the unit by bringing in objects that reflect or represent them.

Through these values, we will base all of our endeavors into the book. We will talk about characters' identities and why they are that way. We will talk about setting and how that effects our characters and us. Things like reality TV and government. Students will know what it means to hold onto these values even in a hostile environment. This is all leading up to the final project which will have them identify a social injustice that violates their core values and write a paper relating that injustice to the book, themselves and propose a change. Like the young man in the video, students will be required to take action as a component of the assignment. We will talk about what it means to inspire change, how revolutions begin at the bottom and work their way up and how to use the system to your advantage.

I do not expect all of my students to be on TED speaking to the world about change, but than again I believe everyone of them is capable. So often we look at a task as being too big and ourselves as too small. Through companion texts such as the tipping point and civil disobedience, I plan on showing my kids the power of the individual in or against the system. Maybe they won't make it to TED or the UN, but they can post facebook statuses. They can educate those around them. And little by little, if enough people stay true to those 5 values, a change will come. If I didn't believe that, than I wouldn't be working in a system that is so screwed up.

I Respect Wile E. Coyote for Doubling His Efforts Even After He's Over the Edge

It's inevitable. We all know it's coming, yet it's still funny every time we see that dam coyote chase the road runner off the ledge, look at camera, sigh and drop to what we can only assume is his death. I for one would like to refrain from laughing at our poor coyote friend, and do what few people do enough: salute him. You see there are two things about Wile that I think are worth pointing out : his ability to keep running even after he's over the ledge and the fact he never accepts defeat. Think about it, he's out in mid air and he just keeps running, In fact he doubles his efforts. He runs faster and faster. Eventually he falls, but he does not dies; he gets up and starts chasing that dam bird again.

Teaching is tough. I'm three days in and I'm beat. Granted in those three days I have had to proctor and grade a test and deal with a substitute. Now don't get me wrong, it's not the substitute thats the problem. Its the fact that in 8th grade math, substitute + student teacher< a real teacher. But overall there wasn't a whole lot problems. Its just a lot of work. Waking up at 5, teaching all day, staying there till four doing lesson plans and then coming home to do more work. Overall I'm just tired. But here's the thing. Passion is better than red bull. It's definitely harder to create a classroom community than I thought. You come out of a college class that tells you all kinds methods and you think you're invincible. But these are real kids, and change doesn't happen over night. Were moving in the right direction though. We did an activity concerning core values today and it was really awesome to hear kids share what it most important to them and where those values came from.

It's scary when you don't know how things are going to come together. But I have faith that they will. And until they do, I'm going to take a page out of Mr. Coyotes book and keep my feet moving. Also I'm going to sleep like all day Saturday.

How Can We Build to Last?

Since my days as a Journalism major, when I realized just how toxic our media can be, I have made it a point to not watch television journalists when I can help it. So I switched my major to education, and in the last couple of years I have realized just how nauseating politics is. How deep the corruption runs and how strong the bureaucracy stands. So I have made it a point not to listen to politicians either. In Teaching as a Subversive Activity, Neil Postman talks about the problems facing our education system. He says schools are in the business of "creating eager consumers, "of transmitting dead ideas, values, metaphors and [irrelevant] information," and that they produce "smoothly functioning bureaucrats" that "undermine our chances of surviving as a viable democratic society." I think that sums up our current system pretty well, and that's sad. What's even sadder is that this book was written in 1968.

Most recently I have decided I can't afford to "sit the bench" of the political spectrum. I need to know what's being said and done and vice versa. So I listened to the State of the Union for the first time in years. I would first like to commend our commander in chief for being so eloquent and for what I think overall was an accurate picture of America and a bold plan for what lies ahead. A lot of what he said was idealistic and romantic and probably a lot of it will not happen, but we are in a time that demands idealism. As an education major I can tell you that we need to be idealistic, because the alternative is what your looking at today, and it's seemingly hopeless.

Mostly, I want to applaud President Obama for what he said regarding education. Of the hour and ten minute speech the portion of education was about 2 min, and that is heartbreaking on a lot of levels. But it's also about 2 minutes more than the average GOP candidate is willing to devote to education. Obama praised good teachers (and I thank him for that) saying "a good teacher can raise the lifetime income of a classroom by $250,000." He talked about the excruciating hours, the "modest" pay, spending their own money for resources and the regular "bashing" that goes on in todays media. He came out and said "Teachers Matter!" That's awesome. However he also said some misleading things as well. Such as "we have problems in our education system and we know how to fix them," and "Let's offer schools a deal: give them the resources to keep good teachers on the job and reward the best ones." First, I do no believe that the minds in charge of this country know how to fix the education system. If they do, they simply do not care. Because if NCLB and Race to the Top are their best efforts and their "solutions," than we are in trouble. Second, I am all in favor of a reward system that benefits great teachers and gets rid of the bad ones. The question is, how do we measure success? He does not say it in his speech, but Obama's plan for "rewarding great teachers" is rooted solely in standardized tests. The very thing that says we need to stop teaching towards.

The title of Obama's SOTU was Build to Last America. That's a great title. America is often so concerned with the short term fix. What's the fastest way to see results? What that leads to is disasters like the demise of the housing market and bills like No Child Left Behind. High risk loans and test scores are a really FAST way to see results, but they don't benefit anyone long term. I'm not a political analyst, but I liked a lot of what Obama had to say, because he admitted that our nation is somewhat broken, and there is a divide that needs to be fixed. I have a friend who I value a lot. She's teaching in the same building as me this semester and she's amazing at it. But she's also discouraged. Because she looks around at the system and the leaders and the professionals already in the field of education and she feels hopeless. She told me she's thinking about ditching teaching and becoming a missionary because that's a field where she actually feels like she can make a difference. Thats the cost of a broken system.

We cannot afford to lose passionate, honest people of any profession to hopelessness. Because without passion, we can't build anything. So I really urge you to vote this election. Look at each candidate, listen to their views and research every issue that matters to you and vote for a person, not a party.

If Success is Measured by Facebook Friend Requests, Then I Think I Did Good!

So that's a recording of my first day of student teaching that I took on my ipad today. As you can see, it went extremely well! In all seriousness though, today was awesome. It was your basic first day kind of stuff. I gave the kids a letter that outlined my goals and expectations for the time that I am with them and began to outline the upcoming units (you can view that handout here:

https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B003QpF8WxQAN2MxNzFmYjQtN2FhZC00YTg1LWI0N2YtMzJlYWM0NmRjNzVm

I realized however that while my new years resolution of crunches and push-ups before bed may be well intended, I should have been working out my voice as well, because by 5th period my voice was cracking like one my pubescent students. I had a lot to do this morning so I went in at 6 am, which is the time my co-op gets there every day (crazy). As I began making my handouts, I realized Millersville has prepared me well in the area of pedagogy and content, but not so well in the "copier use" department (I apologize to the rain forest for the damage I did today).

One thing you learn quickly when you're in front of kids is the difference between quiet and listening. In the time I spent in the class last semester I often experienced crickets, and not the good kind. However today, I can say honestly that 80% of the time I was in front of the class today kids were engaged. They really latched on to a lot of the new ideas I presented to them. As I guided them through what was for many of them their first free write, I saw the same fear in their faces at the idea of sharing their writing that I had in mine over a year ago when the idea was first introduced to me.

Like I shared yesterday, fear is a part of life. That fact is just as true for my students as it is for me. However, often this fear is ignored. Teachers don't want to deal with it because often it leads to silence, and silence is scary. But eventually, if you embrace that silence, and you affirm that silence kids will share. It is through this destruction of walls and comfort zones that real learning can begin. I'm not there yet. I have a lot to do before I can establish the classroom community that I feel is most conducive, but today I planted a seed.

When I came home I had three friend requests waiting for me from students. This is terrifying for me. Todays culture is not so supportive of teachers being friends with students on social networks. I have my own views of this idea, but as a student teacher I definitely cannot take any risks, and my profile is in no way ready to be combed over by my students, so I denied those requests immediately. But as I sat at my desk checking emails I realized that I had three friend requests from STUDENTS. My students are interested in getting to know me, and that's a hell of a start.

"I'm that guy on the boat pissing his pants"

You do not have to know much about me to know that I am a huge movie buff. In fact, the first thing anyone notices when they walk into my college house the 6 ft. book shelf full of dvd's. Now I like all kinds of movies. I can bro-down with Wedding Crashers seven nights a week or melt as Richard Gere wins back Julia Roberts and they embrace and all is right with the world. But one of my favorite genre of movies is war films. Just the other day I was scanning through Saving Private Ryan trying to find a particular seen that I knew related well to a lesson I was planning for my student teaching. Eventually I couldn't take it anymore so I just started from the beginning and watched the whole thing (I mean come on, its SO good). I realized something in that opening scene, there is always a guy in war movies who gets so scared before a battle that he pees his himself. A lot of times you see this character before or after and he always is confident and talking a big game but for that one moment, he's deathly afraid.

Well, I'll just say it. Tomorrow I start student teaching, and I am that guy with the wet pants. Just like in little league, I talk a big game in the dugout and in the field when a kid from the other team is on base, but when I step in the batters box, my knees wobble like a weeble. But here's the thing. I'm nervous about all kinds of stuff that honestly I don't really care about. My co-ops approval of my teaching style, my lesson plan format, rubric structure and how I am going to read 2 plays for my one on campus class and submit an allocation plan for my club and get my graduation form completed all by this weekend. Just like the wet GI standing next to Tom Hanks, I'm focused so much on the beach and all the explosions that I forget my training, and what's worse, I forget my cause.

Parker Palmer, in The Courage to Teach, describes teaching as being rooted in integrity and identity as well as being an act of the heart. In this way teaching is an act of love. Therefor the opposite of love, at least as I define love, is selfishness. When I examine my fears, I find that I am leaving out the most important part of the equation: my students. I care about my students. Regardless of the fact that I am only a student-teacher, I care about my students, because they are my students. Palmer, in another of his books Let Your Life Speak (FYI this is an awesome book about finding your calling and IS NOT specific to teaching),“We ourselves, driven by fear, too often betray true self to gain the approval of others." This is the reason for my wet pants. I allow fear to forget that at my core I am driven by a desire to serve and a heart of compassion.

The thing about that soldier who loses control of his bladder is that he only does so for a moment. Eventually he is brought back to reality and realizes what he has to do to preserve himself and save his comrades. Now obviously the explosions and bullets, or in my case rubrics and lesson plans, don't go away. It's important that I am conscious of these things because if I'm not they'll end up being my demise.

So I'm going to go in there tomorrow and I'm going to rock student teaching, just like I always said I would in the dugout (are you keeping all these metaphors straight?), and frankly I don't care if my pants are wet, because I know who I am and where I want to be, plus I usually spill coffee on myself by third period anyway....

"A Tree Grows in Denver" or What I learned over Winter Break

If there is one thing I truly miss about going to school in Ohio, it is the drive. A man finds out quite a bit about himself on a six hour drive with his thoughts and an Ipod. What I always really liked was the feeling I would get right as I got off the Turnpike in Denver. I can't really describe it, but it was as if something inside of me, something I had not felt in a long time, was renewed. I think quite simply I can call this feeling: Home. Since I have been at Millersville, this doesn't happen as much. Home's never too far away. But for some reason, maybe it was the intense semester or my lack of visiting friends throughout the semester, this break I felt that feeling again.

So as I stayed at home over break laying around with Libby, reading, lesson planning, having my mom cook breakfast for the boys, all of it felt good, it felt right. Yet things were different. My same old friends hung out at the same old places, but something about us had changed. We had left Denver four years ago and soon a lot of us are going to leave for good. We sat around one night at the Hill Top buying rounds and we heard a lot of the same stories: the baseball championship we won in middle school, the senior talent show that we rocked and we listened to Brennen and Gwinny argue about who was better at lacrosse (in the end the consensus of the table was they both blow). But in the midst of all of this, we threw out words like "graduation," "PRAXIS," "MCAT," "Grad School," "moving down south" and "falling in love."

As I sat last night in my basement, my sanctuary since middle school, I thought about how much things had changed and how much more they are going to after this spring. And for the first time in awhile I was scared about my future. Nervous to student teach. In the midst of this nervous breakdown I spotted the photo montage on the wall of senior year. Senior dress up day (Best Group Costume Award: Toy Story, just saying), Sir Valentine, Prom, Graduation. You can't tell by looking at those pictures, but I was scared back then too. scared that I'd go to Ohio and lose the friends I had always had. I was reminded of the book "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn". Betty Smith describes Francie the man character in terms of her home life. She says "Part of her life was made from the tree growing rankly in the yard. She was the bitter quarrels she had with her brother whom she loved dearly. She was Katie's secret, despairing weeping. She was the shame of her father staggering home drunk." Later Smith says that it's true that Francie was all of those things, but she was also something more.

One of the units I'm teaching this semester is rooted in Identity. I chose this because I believe it's paramount for students to have an understanding of who they are, why they are that way and where they want to be. For me, that basement, the photo collage, my friends, my family, the books I read, all of that has led me to where I am. I love the feeling I get when I pull into my driveway and hang out with my friends, but I also love sitting around talking and finding out that in the last four years we've each become more.

"You want to make God Laugh?" Not really, I'd rather everything just work out like I planned....

Ladies and Gentleman, Common Spence is back. And as per my New Years Resolution, I will be posting on her every day of this semester, and hopefully of the year. At least that is the plan. Are you familiar with that saying "if you want to make God laugh tell him your plans?" I hate it. Mostly it bothers me because most of my plans do not work out and I hate thinking that some big guys sitting up a chair up there laughing at me, because I think most of my plans are pretty good.

Now I'm not that paranoid or egotistical as to think that God really sits up there foiling all of my plans on purpose just to assert some sort of power and prove a point. But why is it that these things seem to happen? Why do I spend most of my time planning valentines dates with a girl I don't know will even be interested in me in a month? Why do I stress to plan an entire calender for my student teaching experience when I know you can't adhere to a strict plan of action while keeping the students interests and needs in mind? In Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner's book Teaching as a Subversive Activity, a book which is quickly becoming my educational Bible, they state in the introduction that they are "serious professional educators." They go on to explain that this means that they are "simple, romantic men who risk contributing to the mental health problem by maintaining a belief in the improvability of the human condition through education."

I like this definition of a "professional educator" because it resonates with me; both my tendency to plan and romanticize every aspect of my life and my belief that my actions won't be in vain. That being said, I also am going to take this year to stop planning just a bit. I was recently reminded of a quote from one of my favorite books/movies Into the WIld. The author, Jon Krakauer writes "The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun." Planning is great, and I'm always going to romanticize my future, but it's also important to maintain a sense of adventure. To never adhere to a plan simply because it's written out, and miss an opportunity right in front of your face. Maybe that's why God laughs at our plans, not because he enjoys wrecking them, but he can't wait for us to stumble upon something even better. Something that no calender or planner could ever anticipate.