More Coffee, Please

If we stop and think about what we need a citizen in a democracy to be able to do, it doesn’t take too much brainstorming before we get to the idea of “speak in public.” There’s far more to being a citizen than a secret ballot, and sometimes it’s not enough to question authority—sometimes it’s necessary to argue with it, too.

The funny part? Public speaking is probably the thing kids—and many adults—hate the most. So I was rather pleased to see that Saturday, the 28th, the Elm City Rotary club is sponsoring a speech contest. Taking place in the annex at MRHS, there are a large number of our best who will be competing for recognition—and a chance to go on to bigger and better contests.

Joanne Stroshine helped set it up—which is a very awesome thing. Now all we need to do is get more than just our best and brightest—instead, we need to get all our kids practicing the skills they need.

So I don’t think there’s any argument that every school in the MRSD—like every school in America—has an issue with drugs. The policy debates, the arguments over treatment vs criminalization—all of these things play out in our halls. Throw in cigarettes and alcohol, and there’s a number of students who need a serious wake up call about what it all means—not to mention the parents of every student.¹

So I was pleased to see time devoted to an assembly by a DEA special agent about drugs, and even more pleased to see the parent meeting that followed Wednesday night. Kate Margaitis, the health teacher in the middle school, was integral with setting it up, and the middle school principal as well. It’s a good age to get them—hopefully before they start.²

All in all, a couple of steps down the right road. Obviously, if the adults could get our message together, that would be a wonderful thing as well—but that’s probably asking a bit much from the nation right now.

Something rather different happened the other day. I had a student request to interview me for a research paper on photography.

This in itself is not new. I’ve been to “go-to” camera guy in the building for the last eight or so years, and mentored half a dozen students in photography. There’s far more to life than just the five core subjects–and sometimes the beat way to hve a student learn something is to show them what the adults around them are passionate about as well.

So the interview about photography was not new. Nor was it new to require students to interview someone for research. The senior project has been doing it for as long as I can remember.

But this wasn’t a senior. The student was a freshman—and for their 9th grade research paper, there was a very similar requirement to perform an interview as was present in the senior project.

This is awesome. The senior project is to be a capstone project—a demonstration of ALL the skills a student should have learned to that point… but the most frustrating part was that it so often wasn’t. Often the skills a student needed to have were new, something never required of them before. It takes skill to conduct a good interview, and it was never fair to just require it without some coaching of how to go about doing it. But that was often the case, and rather than a display of what they knew how to do, the senior project became a display of what they didn’tknow.

A good program ought to provide oppurtunities for students to practice skills at a higher and higher level. By requiring, say, a ten minute interview as a freshman, a longer and more detailed example later, (with higher and more strenuous requirements) we build in our students the skills they need to do capstone projects later.

It’s a great change in the senior project—even if no freshman at MRHS realizes it. If it’s an English department change, then kudos to Heather Gigliello and the rest of the department for being willing to discuss—and possibly slaughter—a few sacred cows.

Or, perhaps it’s just Gail Wrigley, who on her own is amazing. I can believe either—but I do hope for the former.

The Turkey Tussle—or the Turkeybowl, as it’s often called—won’t be happening next year. On one hand, it’s a bit sad to see something that brought so many people out leave—on the other, it’s a bit more right than getting trampled by a school more than twice your size every year.³

Hmm. Maybe that’s the metaphor to use about why America needs to think long and hard about India, China, and the other two billion or so people who want some piece of what we have…

This was a fun article.

I’ve often suspected this:

Image courtesy of XKCD.

Speaking of good communication… earlier this week, Deb Crowder sent around an email informing the school that the National Scholastic Art Awards have been announced. Big deal, right?

Except that Sylvianne Shurman, a student in the MRHS AP Studio Art, won the top award for the state of New Hampshire.

The national judges selected her drawing of MRHS’s boiler room⁴ as the best of over 200 Gold Keys judged from the NH Scholastic Art Awards.

An interesting little side-note? Miss Shurman is homeschooled—she’s been coming to the high school to work on her art for the past three years, and along the way she has consistently won award after award.

A strong program—of any kind—will draw talent into the school. We need to invest in solid, high quality programs that add value—and get more kids involved in them.

Did I just mention strong programs? Let’s talk about Mike Wright for a moment.

The moment that sticks out most in my mind about Mike—and I’ve known him for a good many years—was when he was in my classroom after school in 2005. I’d finally managed—though begging, pleading, extortion, and bribery—to get an LCD projector mounted in the ceiling of my classroom, and Mike was there to help wire it up. Like many teachers, Mike steps outside his duties quite often to help around the school.

In this particular case, I had a student after school for a detention. I had no idea who the student was—we’d met the previous afternoon when I had hall duty. He was in the halls, I asked for a pass, and the student ignored me—just kept walking. I asked again, he flipped me off, and things went downhill from there.

So now he was after-school, angry, and ready to blow up. He showed up at my door, and didn’t say a word—until Mike greeted him, at which point he got a cheery “Hey.”

But I was still the devil. So I asked him to sit down, and asked him to explain what happened the day before. He gave me his story, that he needed to get to his locker, that he was running late, and that he had to go right then because he had people waiting.

And I agreed with him. And I told him that I didn’t care about anything he had done until he walked away, until he raised his middle finger. I told him—as clearly as I could—that if he had communicated with me, then chances are, I would have said, “Sure—get a pass next time.”

I told him that this incident didn’t matter—what mattered was that he figure out what he did wrong, so he wouldn’t do it when it really counted. That I could care less about what he said to me—I can take it—but that I was worried about that same attitude out there when someone else would care. I told him that—and I let him why he was sitting in the room was because I was worried about ten years down the road, not because of what he did.

And by the time I was done talking, he got it. He wasn’t angry—he heard what I was trying to tell him. And then I let him go home.

Now the whole time I’m talking to this kid, I’m worried about Mike working there quietly behind me. There were a great many teachers who would think I was being too lenient—that the kid was wrong, I was the adult, end of story. I didn’t know where Mike stood about that kind of thing, so I was a bit nervous to see what he would say. I knew he was a solid teacher, with a good deal more experience than I—and I was a bit apprehensive.

Mr. Wright did say something, as I felt he would. It was pretty short. “Good job. That’s what he needed.”

Mike Wright is one of those people who get it. He has those kids who aren’t getting what they need in a math class, or a science class, or a social studies or English class—but he provides what they need. Given that we now have a state where dropping out is no longer an option—where we all need to start providing students with the skills they need—there’s going to be a great need for people who get it like he does—for classroom that allow students to engage by getting hands-on, through direct application of concepts and key ideas.

So anyway, what brought this all on? Why the long introduction?

This 26th and 27th, Mike is taking seven young men and women to a technologies competition in Lincoln New Hampshire. Seven individuals who are getting the chance to do something incredible—and who are going to walk out with memories and skills they’ll need for far longer than their high school career.

Seven more people who are going to “get it.”

The problem with the new computer animation abilities that have allowed such life-like renderings of fantastical elements is that Hollywood keeps making movies we have to see. It’s only my favorite children’s book of all time, after all…

So much for summer vacation. Maybe. I’d support it, though only if the district installs air conditioners, and we look at the way summer courses work. There’s no way we can have them sit in chairs for the whole summer like it’s still winter out there—summer courses would have to involve climbing Mt. Monadnock and writing poetry on Thoreau’s Throne for English, and blowing something up in science.

If you hadn’t noticed, Mr. Butterfield managed to take some awesome photos of Les Miserables. They’re incredible—and he’s offering them for sale. They’re well worth the very reasonable amount he’s asking.

I know I’d be charging more.

1 One of the things that was hardest and most difficult for me to deal with was the completely devastating assumption on the part of my students that every kid was engaged in illicit behavior. There was always that kid—usually, that group of kids—who simply made the assumption that if you weren’t doing drugs, then you were the freak, the outcast—the “everybody’s doing it” line. Anyone who said differently was a liar. The same was true of every nightmare a parent could have—the attitude among the students was always, “everybody must be doing it.” The truth was far different—the majority are not. Fighting the idea that doing the right thing is rare—that the kid trying to do what they should is alone—is one of the best things we can do.↺

2 Though the research says we need to be talking to them much younger as well… ↺

3 Though we did win in 2005… ↺

4 This would probably be the first time that the boiler room has been considered a work of art… but this is probably not the time to point that out. ↺

Gregarious

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