Learning new things as an adult

As I may have mentioned before, I’ve worked as a musician for some of my life.  When I was at university I was the drummer in one band, and then played bass in another.  In my mid-30s I left teaching to play bass full-time in a punk rock band.  I love making music, though at around 40 I realized I’d rather spend time with my family than out on tour.

When my son turned 10, he decided that he’d like to learn how to play the bass guitar, just like dad.  With lessons, he’s doing pretty well, though I think it may be a while before he forms his own band.  I’m just glad he didn’t choose trumpet, because I don’t think I could have survived that.

When he started playing bass, I got an urge that I’ve never felt before:  I wanted to learn how to play the guitar.  Whereas many bass players are guitar players who have switched, I started as a bass player and had never picked up a guitar in all of my years of playing in bands.  Now that my son was trying something new, I was inspired to try something new of my own.

My family has been remarkably nice to the discordant noise this has brought to their lives.  I’ve been playing for two months now and have gotten better at playing chords and at sight reading music.  Not great, mind you, but not terrible, either.  It’s fun to see myself getting better, and it’s undoubtedly the case that my past bass experience has been helping.

For me, one of the best features of learning guitar is that my son gets to see me suck at it.  We adults all know that learning something takes time and are OK with it.  However, kids don’t always realize this, and believe that they should master something within weeks of starting it.  I’m glad that my son can see that his dad, who he still believes is capable of anything at all, struggles with learning new things.

A lot of adults, both in teaching and outside of teaching, are afraid to show kids that they’re not good at something.  Just as we expect our kids to learn from their mistakes in the classroom, it’s important that we also model this behavior on our own.  This doesn’t have to be music, of course.  Maybe we’d like to do a project for the first time with our students and don’t know if it will work.  In this case, it would be good for the students to know that we’re trying something new and to see us work out the kinks on the fly.  At the end, we can ask our kids what went right, what went wrong, and how we can change things in the future.  Not only will this make the activity better, but it will show kids that learning new things isn’t always a smooth process, and that this is absolutely OK.

I hope my guitar playing improves soon.  Until then, I’m happy to keep showing my flaws in front of my son and his friends.  After all, nobody’s perfect.

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Why I left teaching

A few years back I had a student who cheated.  This wasn’t one of those “my word against yours” sorts of things.  What happened was that I photocopied the graded tests before passing them back, and when one of the kids turned it back in for a regrade claiming that I’d graded something wrong, I found that he’d changed his answer so that it would look like I’d made a mistake.  This was an open-and-shut case of cheating, complete with irrefutable documentation on my part.

Of course, he claimed that he hadn’t cheated.  When I showed him the evidence of his cheating, he got very quiet.  He asked what he could do and I told him that he’d head up to the honor council and they’d decide what the punishment was.  All by the book.

About a week later, my principal came into my room.  He explained that the kid’s mom was very active in the PTA and that she had the tendency to overreact when it came to her kids.  I pointed out to him that there was no room for misunderstanding, showing him the evidence, and he again explained the situation with the kid’s mom.  Finally, I just asked him if he was telling me to drop the cheating case against the kid and he told me that he did.  And that the case would be dropped irregardless of what I said.

I dropped the case.  And at the end of the school year tendered my resignation.

Before this all happened, I had only very occasionally caught kids cheating in my class.  It was something that was usually handled quietly and was meant to teach the kids a lesson more than it was to punish them.  The typical punishment was a reprimand and a zero on the assignment.  Not that big a deal.

However, once I was pressured into dropping the case, I realized that I couldn’t, in good conscience, hold other kids to the standards that had been ignored when this kid had his case dropped.  I dropped out of the honor council, and when students would be caught cheating I’d tell them to retake the test and not to do it again.

It also wasn’t long before my enthusiasm for teaching waned.  I was still a good teacher and the kids were doing well, but it became harder for me to be the cheerful and happy teacher that I had been before.  Even though the cheating charge would have been dropped regardless of what I did, the shame of my having caved was like a weight around my neck.  I wasn’t happy with the administrator for having pushed me into this position, but was even less happy with myself for having caved in to his demands.

And that’s why I stopped teaching.  It wasn’t the first time that administrators had tried to manipulate me into doing what they wanted, but it was the first time that I’d agreed.  Teaching was no longer good for me because I knew I’d done the wrong thing.  And if I couldn’t be a good example to the kids, I didn’t belong in the classroom.

I miss teaching.

Political stupidity made useful

At the time I write this, the American Federal government has been partially shut down for nearly a month.  Some people are working without pay, while others aren’t working at all.  I live in the Washington, D.C. area and can attest that the effects of this are real and are damaging to many everyday folks.

Why is this happening?  It’s happening because politicians are acting like idiots.  I have my own opinions about who’s responsible and I think you probably do, too, but whether we agree or disagree, I think that the complete lack of discussion between the two sides is appalling.  As we all know, to solve a problem both sides have to want to reach out to the other, and I haven’t noticed that this is true with either side.

Fortunately, as teachers we can use this mess to better inform our teaching.

  • Nothing happens if lines of communication are closed:  This is true in our personal lives as well as in politics.  If you’ve got an issue with somebody (as might happen in a lab group!), it’s always best to rationally discuss the issue and work it out.  It may be uncomfortable and you may thing it won’t work, but it’s always worth a shot.  If you’ve got kids in a lab group who can’t play nicely with each other, consider telling them this.
  • If people feel unwanted or unrewarded, they will respond by disengaging.  Right now there are employees considered not critical to the government who aren’t getting paid, and there are employees considered critical who aren’t getting paid and have to go to work anyway.  As a result, there’s a lot of absenteeism and work is not going smoothly at all.  We teachers need to keep this in mind when working with our kids, because if they don’t feel like they’re being rewarded enough for what they do, they’ll also disengage.  Fortunately for us, rewarding the kids doesn’t have to be anything major – simply telling somebody that they’re doing a good job and that you’ve noticed their effort goes a long way.  By the way:  Don’t use grades as your reward system – grades are something that the kids earn, not something they’re given.
  • Having somebody to blame doesn’t help anything:  In our budget issue, each side has spent a lot of time blaming the other as being completely wrong.  Let’s go out on a limb and assume that one of the sides is completely to blame for the shutdown.  Even if this is true (and it most certainly is not), assigning blame doesn’t make anything better for anybody.  Pointing fingers doesn’t solve problems, communication does.  This is something to remember when our kids have trouble working with each other, and when we have problems with parents or colleagues.
  • Relationships can’t be fixed in a moment.  I’m sure most of us already know from hard experience that a relationship with a student can be very damaged by a single thoughtless comment.  Though the misunderstanding can usually be worked out, there will always be a longer time in which the relationship itself has to mend.  This is something everybody (particularly our politicians!) can appreciate.

Though outrageous, we can use our government dysfunction as a teachable moment, both for ourselves and for our students.  If you know somebody who’s dealing with the shutdown, or if your family is dealing with it, know that this will eventually be OK.  Our politicians may be ridiculous, but ultimately they all want to do what’s best for the people.

A letter to my son’s teacher

My son’s fourth grade teacher sends out a weekly email to the parents of her students.  It contains news about what’s being studied, a breakdown of upcoming events, and some questions that parents can ask at home to reinforce the topics being learned.  This week the question was “Why do you think so many settlers died in the Jamestown colony in the first four years?”  I’m not sure why, but I had to email a response:

Hi Ms. Lawson,

When we asked Steve the question about why so many settlers died in the first year, as you’d suggested, he answered, “Because they were dumb as hell.”  Though I was surprised by this answer, I was pleased to find after some research that this is, in fact, the correct answer.
Best,
Ian
At this point, I’ve received no response.  However, given that I do science activities with her class on a weekly basis, it’s likely that she realizes I’m just being silly.

Common sense is so passé

Today’s fun educational story comes from Ohio, where a student wrote a message on the blackboard in his classroom threatening to murder everybody at his school.  For two days in a row. (Story)

Or so some of his classmates thought.  Upon investigation by the school, it turned out that the message “December 7, Time to [some symbol]” actually referred to the fact that the Super Smash Bros Ultimate video game was coming out on December 7.  When the concerns were brought to the principal of the school, who investigated, found that the symbol was emblematic of the game and harmless, and let the whole thing go.

Of course, this wasn’t the end of it.  Rumors started in the school that this kid really and truly was going to shoot up the school, which led to an investigation by the school resource officer which found that the kid was excited about the upcoming release of Super Smash Bros Ultimate on December 7.  A letter was sent home, etc.

I’m not writing to say that the school did anything wrong in this case.  It’s clear that, when it was brought to their attention, the principal and resource officer did exactly the right things in investigating a possible threat.  When the matter was explained to them, they did exactly the right thing in concluding that the threat was false.  In this case, the system worked.

What’s appalling about this situation is that both the students and parents of this school were so quick to judge that this kid, whom everybody thinks is “weird” (according to his own account), was going to shoot the place up even though the matter had already been investigated and concluded.

Let’s use this story as a cautionary example regarding the rush to judgement.  If a weird kid in the school puts something weird on the board, it’s entirely appropriate to ask if it means something odd.  However, when it has been investigated by the school, it’s time to let it go.  Problems with school shooters have either happened when 1) Everybody ignored warning signs; or 2) The shooter surprised everybody with their apparent harmlessness.  When the school does everything right in investigating a suspected threat, it’s time to let it go.

The boy who was twice investigated in this case was essentially bullied by those of his classmates and their parents who believed that somebody with seemingly odd interests is naturally harmful.  Perhaps instead of treating others like the enemy, we can try treating them with respect.

Safety hypocrisy

I was drinking my morning coffee and watching YouTube this morning when I came across this video by The Backyard Scientist.  For those of you who haven’t seen him, he’s a guy who does “scientific” things in his backyard, usually involving something destructive.  Highly entertaining, to say the least.

The video I mentioned above is titled “This Is Why You Need To Wear Safety Goggles” and shows a number of dangerous things involving power tools.  As with most of his videos, it’s fun to watch things get destroyed.  Unfortunately, during many of the demonstrations he doesn’t actually wear safety goggles at all.  Specifically, when he works with the impaling device/table saw and when he plays with the chainsaw/angle grinder.  Yep, you read that right:  A video that’s supposed to promote safety goggle use neglects to use safety goggles.

I’d like to say that this content creator is the only person who does this sort of thing, but I can’t.  In most of the chemistry classrooms I’ve visited, there are serious violations in eye-protection safety precautions.  It’s not uncommon for teachers to tell students to wear goggles and then do one or more of the following:

  • Fail to wear safety goggles, or wear them only when immediately in the presence of the lab equipment.
  • Fail to ensure that each of the students is wearing their safety goggles.
  • Fail to ensure that visitors to the classroom wear safety goggles.

One might argue that goggles aren’t always needed because eye-related injuries are extremely rare.  After all, we’ve all seen that safety goggles are typically damaged by being dropped rather than through accidents.  However, consider this:  It only takes one accident like this in your career to blind a child.  One instant of having a student fail to wear their goggles can lead to blindness.  Put like this, it’s clear how important it is to have everybody in the room wear their goggles.

The reason I focus so much on this, rather than on other topics, is that eye safety in a high school chemistry lab is the biggest concern we have.  Though it’s not uncommon for students to burn themselves or cut themselves on broken glass, these injuries are rarely serious enough to warrant even minor medical help.  Even in the very rare cases where medical help is necessary, a burn or cut won’t lead to the same life-altering injury that is caused by blindness.

The good news is that it’s very easy to practice good eye safety in the lab.  Just follow these steps:

  • Make sure everybody in the classroom wears goggles during lab experiments, whether or not they’re in proximity to the equipment.
  • Make sure everybody wears goggles until the last lab group has completed their lab.
  • Make sure all visitors to the classroom (this includes your administrator!) wear goggles during the lab.
  • You need to wear goggles during the lab to set an example.

To show the seriousness of this rule, the punishment for not wearing goggles should be a zero on the lab and removal from the classroom.  I know it sounds harsh, but there is nothing more important in a chemistry class than safety.  Though no credit on a lab can hurt a kid’s grade, an accident involving one’s eyes can cause permanent blindness.  As long as you make it abundantly clear that this rule is to be followed, it will quickly become a habit that your kids just automatically follow.

Enjoy the link to the video and The Backyard Scientist’s other videos – they’re interesting and fun to watch.  However, don’t be as casual when it comes to lab safety.