My Classroom Rules

Hammurabi’s Code of Conduct

Observe the Golden Rule. In other words…

Food and drink

Leave the room as neat and tidy as you found it. I allow you to eat and drink in class (within reason: no waffles please). If your class leaves food or drinks in the room this privilege will be suspended.

Cell phones

Cells phones and any personal communication devices should be turned off during takeoff (class) and stowed in a bag, backpack, or under your desk. Please do not answer phones, text, or allow your phones to ring or vibrate during class. Feel free to bring a laptop to class (desktops are not a great idea),  but it must be shut unless I say otherwise. The first time your cell phone goes off in class, I will answer it; there won’t be a second time. I've had some hilarious conversations with friends of students! Don't let it be yours.

Sleeping in class

You may not sleep in class without my permission. I haven't given anyone permission yet. Sleeping in class will affect your grade, open you to surprise attack, and leave silly red marks on your face.

Discussion

There is a great deal of opportunity for discussion in this class.

Discussion (and life in general) works best if you observe the following rules.

Listen.

Speak your mind (not just your heart).

Restate what the other person has just said before you respond to it.

Attack ideas, not people. Don’t kill the messenger.

Ask as many questions as you make statements.

It’s ok to disagree. You can still be friends.

Work towards understanding.

Do us all a favor and think about what you are going to say before you say it.

Follow this guide: Is what you are saying true? Is it important? Is it worth saying? Is it hurtful?

Don’t repeat things that have already been said. Don’t begin with, “Somebody already said this…”

Respond to the thread of the discussion, not what was said five minutes ago (let it go).

If you start a sentence with, “I’m not racist, but…” you probably are and you definitely shouldn’t say it.

I’m glad you are a part of our our class. It’s going to be a great year. Now sit back and enjoy your flight.
 

Asking All Kinds of Questions

I was rummaging through an old file cabinet last week when I came upon a stack of yellowing papers from before the Obama era. I started to flip through the papers trying to figure out what they were. As I shuffled through the pages, I remembered that a couple of years ago while my class was studying the media, a group of my students decided to do some original research on the impact of media on teenagers’ self-perception. They put together a questionnaire, anonymously surveying students on the amount of time they spent with the media, followed by some questions about their self-perception. I held these decade old answers in my hands.

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One of the questions the researchers asked seemed especially poignant:

If there were one thing about your appearance that you could change, what would it be?

Here are some of my students’ responses…

·      I like the way I look; it makes me who I am. If I had to change something I guess I would give myself less fragile nails so I wouldn’t have to keep them super short.

·      Legs and face

·      Flexibility

·      I would probably like to be 10 pounds lighter and have lighter eye color.

·      I wish I were thinner

·      Less hair. I hate shaving

*I would change my chest proportion

*I would change my feet size

*I would change my veiny eyes

·      This is an interesting/hard question. Coming from someone who has a low self-esteem, there are several things I’d like to change about me but I’ve come to accept most of my flaws and appreciate them. One thing I’d like to change the most would be my upper legs, haha. Ah well. We can’t be perfect right?

·      I would have a different nose

·      Probably height…would want to have long legs

·      Hmm wouldn’t want to age

·      I don’t know. I wish that I could change my face. Not too Attractive.

·      Hmm…prob. The bone structure on my face because I don’t really have defined cheekbones.

·      Smaller lower body

·      18 inch waist FOR SURE

·      um, how about my entire bone structure!?!? I’m SO bulky; I wish I was more like Alessandra Ferri or someone. But if it had to be something humanely possible (as opposed to complete bone structure implants), my weight.

·      Nose

·      I would lose the butt

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I sat in my office and scrolled through my memories of all those student faces from the past ten years of teaching and I felt pretty bad for them. After all, for young people, there’s an appearance-war being waged. Then I started to wonder about those students now - a decade later – and how their answers might have changed. Sitting alone in my office, I answered the question for myself; first as a young man in high school, then later, as 46 year-old wrinkly me. After all, as any physics teacher over 30 will tell you, as we get older gravity begins to exert a stronger force, and things tend to go downhill in the looks department. By the time I got finished answer the question my pity for my young students had evaporated.

Now it’s your turn.

If there were one thing about your appearance that you could change, what would it be?

And, how has this answer changed for you over the years.

I’m going to give my students more research assignments where they take the pulse of their own generation on all sorts of matters, and I’ll report back on our findings. In years past we’ve asked questions about ideology, civil liberties, race, views on gun control, abortion, immigration, foreign policy, and all sorts of political and social questions. Students love to be asked questions (who – besides a Trappist monk - doesn’t), especially when you listen and share their answers. What questions are you asking your students about themselves?

Gratitude

I hated school. The hours passed like weeks.

In math class, a friend whispered across my desk, “if I only had one day left to live, I’d want to spend it in here”

"Why the hell?" I asked.

"Because," my friend snarled, "in here, every moment seems like an eternity."

And that's precisely how I felt about school. Getting so little never took so long.

I must have been a pain-in-the-ass student. I was always asking my teachers why we had to learn whatever they were teaching. "You'll need it next year," they always said. Then the next year, my new teachers would answer with the same, "You'll need it next year," I was always a year away from my answer and it just absolutely made me hate school. I hated that nothing mattered. I hated watching the hands crawl around the clock face. Already, at age 15, life seemed much too short to waste. And I knew if I ever graduate, if I had a job anything like school I would hate it too. The last thing I ever thought would happen to me was that I would end up in the very place I was so happy to escape - school. Here I am.

I do have to thank all those teachers for motivating me. Sitting bored out of my skull in their glacial classes, I imagined all the various ways their classes could be taught and vowed I’d never be like them.

I couldn’t have made it without those rare and wondrous teachers who helped pull me through all those wasted hours of school. Mrs. Brown's class was magic. She asked us big important questions about human nature, good and evil, aesthetics, ourselves, and we all grappled with the answers together. "Why are the bad characters more interesting than the good ones?” she would ask. “Do you know anybody that actually talks like that?" Or, “Imagine a life where everything was perfect. Would you even want to read a book if it didn’t have any conflict or evil? Wouldn’t that be just a little bit boring?” And we were supposed to ask our own questions too - the harder the better. And if she didn't know the answer, she damn well found it: she wasn’t too proud to learn. And of all the questions we wrestled with, the best ones didn’t even have answers. I looked forward to that class everyday.  We read aloud together, we laughed, we taught each other, we learned, and it mattered. Thank you, Mrs. Brown!

As today's class starts, Ms. Brown is guiding my way.

Powerful Questions Can Kill Zombies

Everybody is creative. It’s an impulse all humans have. It separates us from the beasts. Creativity is all around us: in houses, road systems, a song, your family, your city, the store where you shop, these words you sit reading happily. All creations. Each one a question answered! If we humans didn’t follow our impulse to change things, to make life better, to create we’d still be running around naked, living in caves. Caves are drafty.

One year my class was getting close to our year-end exams. I was behind. I’m always behind. We were running out of time. I found myself hustling my students towards answers, filling them up with data, as if we were in a hotdog-eating contest trying to stuff the most food down our throats. As I stood there spitting information at my students, my classroom was very well behaved, orderly, I was in charge, the room was quiet, and we were making good time. But the air was being squeezed out of my room, creativity was dying, eyelids were drooping, and we were quickly getting nowhere. In one high-speed class, I remember stopping and actually telling a student that I didn’t have time for any questions. Sorry.

What happens when a student asks a question?

1) First, it shows that they’re listening. They’re awake. That’s a good start.

2) It means they give a damn. They actually care about the answer.

3) Something they have been reading, seeing, hearing, or thinking about has caused them to ponder, to put things together, to care, to take a risk, to ask, to wonder, to create a question. And in the act of questioning they have move from being passive to being active.

4) The questioner becomes an empowered, independent, learning-generator.

5) Student questions are always more valuable than teacher questions. Student questions are multipliers. Their authenticity makes other students want to answer them, which usually leads to another student question, to another, and another, into a virtuous cycle of questions.

6) Questions often lead to answers, but even when they don’t, the search for knowledge, the learning, the journey is even more important than the destination.

7) There should always be a # 7.

8) Asking a question is a bold act of originality and creativity. It should be practiced.

So we were speeding through all the answers, detouring past questions like they were potholes. That evening I got a phone call. A friend who worked for the UN was home from his work in war torn Bosnia. Could he come and speak to my class? The test was only a week away so we didn’t have any time for a guest presentation. Bosnian history wasn’t going to be on the test, for goodness sake! Then again, my friend Ray was a big deal (how often does someone from the UN speak to a high school class?) he was leaving the next day, and I had told him last year, when the test was still months off, that if he was ever in town I’d love for him to stop in and share his work with my class. But the test!!!! It’s a hard test! Okay, I told Ray, just talk for half an hour to one class. That’s all I can give you.

 When Ray walked to the front of my sleepy classroom, the students looked surprised. They sat up in their desks. Listened. Ray began to tell the story of a family, half Muslim, half Orthodox Christian that was torn apart by the war. In the inky morning light, at exactly the appointed time, this divided family’s father stole away from his sleeping wife and children without a kiss, without saying goodbye. As soon as he had driven safely across town, his former neighborhood came under assault by his religious brethren. My students shook their heads. As my friend shared his story with my students a fog began to lift. A few eyes welled with tears. Ray looked over at me, raised his eyebrows, and tapped his watch. Was it time to stop? A student lifted their hands in the air to ask a question. I shook my head. Keep going. As Ray answered the first question three other hands shot up. Ray looked back over at me. I smiled and waved for him to keep talking. He didn’t have time to answer all of their questions, but it hardly mattered, their questions would lead my students forward, curious, engaged, searching. When the class ended everyone was wide-awake. Scores of students crowded around my friend to ask more questions about the history of Bosnia, how they could get involved with his work, how one goes about doing international relief work, what language they speak in Bosnia, what America was doing to help, what Bosnian schools were like, what life was like for Bosnian teens.

I wrote lots of notes so my students could be late to their next classes. Then the next day in class some students had done some research on their own, and my class had even more questions for me. I wondered how I could connect their curiosity and Ray’s story to the test. How I could try to weave this eruption of curiosity into my planned lessons. The more I thought about it the more I realized that I didn’t really need to. After all, we aren’t really teaching information any more – anybody can get that with a cell phone, we’re teaching skills, and one of the most important skills we can teach is asking and pursuing questions. I answered their questions as well as I could. I farmed out the questions I couldn’t answer to teams for homework. Then I asked questions of my own. I challenged them to do some reading that Ray had recommended. I assigned the beginning of a project. Students took different topics on Bosnia to help us all make sense of what had happened there.

At the end of the year my students took their test. The test had seemed pretty important to me a week before. Looking back now, I don’t have any clue how they did and I’m sure they don’t remember a thing that was on that test. But I do know that I was in Bosnia later that summer. That we brought seven Bosnian kids to our classroom on an exchange program over the following years. That my students produced exhilarating, creative, and informative projects and reports on Bosnia in the week following the test. One of my students even majored in Balkan studies in college where she learned the Bosnian language and then interned in Sarajevo the next summer. Another student was in Bosnia a few years later. The Bosnian soccer team, created out of the ashes of the Balkan war, played proudly at the World Cup this year. And I know that all those students who journeyed with us through those questions cheered!

After elementary school, the markers and scissors are put away, questions are discouraged, and cooperation is renamed cheating (if it wasn’t for collaboration we’d have no buildings, art, science, children!). For most students, schools are caves, incubators of stasis, where they have been steered away from any original thoughts or hard questions, and had their natural creative impulses buried.

On the first day of kindergarten, classrooms across the land fill with excited, energetic, creative children. By the time they graduate, students slouch away from their high schools like zombies with their creative instincts nearly drowned. That sparkling kindergartener still resides within our seniors. And when we reignite that spark, allowing their creative, original questions to flow, our students become powerful, their learning, limitless.