Wait. People work during these two weeks?

I'm at work. The kids are at home on their holiday break. That just doesn't seem right. After 28 consecutive years of being on an academic calendar, this just doesn't seem right!

Nonetheless, I hope you are all rejuvenating and getting geared up for the seemingly endless stretch between now and Spring Break. Yikes.

As for me, I'll continue to work on my boy's Erector set. I'm four hours in, and here's all I have to show for my labors. Someday this will be a helicopter. Enjoy your break. You've earned it.

Entering through the side door into teaching

The Minneapolis StarTribune had an interesting article yesterday about a new program in the St. Paul public schools in which professionals from other sectors other than education will be brought on board, be given intensive teacher training, and enter the classrooms immediately in an effort to fill vacancies and also increase the diversity of the workforce.

The program is Run through the New Teacher Project, which claims the following:

In the fight to eliminate educational inequality, teachers matter most.
The New Teacher Project works with school districts and states nationwide to recruit, select, train and hire exceptional teachers.

There is a great deal of work being done to explore new ways of getting teachers into the classrooms. There is no question that this work is a result of good intentions and progressive innovations.

What I'm most curious about will be how the systems that bring these new teachers into schools will work to merge these new teachers with the "traditional" teachers already in place. Since St. Paul is in our backyard, this will be a fascinating process to observe. The jury will be out for sometime in regards to how these programs affect student achievement and the the teaching force writ large.

Do programs such as these rub any of you the wrong way or is this an innovation that you can embrace?

Ending the week with some good news!

I don't know if you're like me, but I spend a lot (too much?) time combing the internet for stories about education and educators. It's not too surprising that it's exceedingly easy to find negative, disparaging, or somewhat depressing news about schools. That's why whenever I find a positive story I'm always especially alert.

This recent story from the NY Times is one of those stories. It reports that the overall academic strength of the teacher pool has increased significantly. This is the type of story and the brand of trending that education needs more of, and it's always encouraging to see teaching cast in a positive light.

Happy reading and have a great weekend.

Nate

Video Greeting!

Well, I've completed a bit of a trifecta for the week. I've successfully posted a YouTube clip, a podcast, and today a home made video. Just click the title above and off you go!

Whereas I'm hopeful that the posts of this week were of some value, I'm afraid today's is almost entirely intended as a technological test run. Not a whole lot of content! That said, you get to "meet" my three-year-old son Peter. He's pretty darling, so that's enticement enough.

Again, thanks for viewing and stay connected.

Nate

An Introductory Podcast

I mentioned in a prior post that I was concerned I might not be able to have enough words rambling around my head to write a book and a blog simultaneously. To that end, I'm experimenting with multiple formats of communication just to spice things up.

Yesterday's YouTube vid is quite excellent, and I encourage you to give it a look.

Today I'm trying a quick podcast. We'll see how it goes. Let me know if it's working for you. Just click on the title above and you'll be taken to a site called zshare, a place that hosts audio files. Then sit back and enjoy my dulcet Midwestern twang.

Hope all is well with you. Enjoy your day.

Some serious fodder

Happy Monday!

If you've ever wanted a concise way to survey the challenges that we face heading into 21st century education, this video is pretty staggering. Give it a view and then let us all know what you think. I'll throw my 2 cents in later.

The Family of Teachers

Here's a bit of what I wrote yesterday:


The “Secret Life of Teachers” is really remarkable. Educators have a separate language, a distinct body of stories, and a niche of experience that only other teachers can understand. The taxation and joy of teaching is a connective sinew between educators that transcends place and time. Meet a retired teacher, and there is an instant connection. Meet a teacher from another country, and there is already a commonality. There is a global (if not universal) familial nature of educators.

I ruminated for a bit yesterday on this notion. Admittedly, my passions reside in the Humanities and Cultural Anthropology, so I might be a bit more apt to lean toward universal musings. Add to that my particular penchant for Whitman and the American Transcendentalists, and I suppose my thinking at times REALLY skews toward the nether-regions of big thoughts!

Nonetheless, I have always enjoyed the unspoken bonds that exist between teachers. When I meet someone who is a teacher or has been a teacher, there is a familiarity and bond that forms an undercurrent almost immediately. I've always enjoyed that.

I felt very much connected to this thinking as I imagined what it must be like to be a teacher in Omaha this week. I emailed Scott Butler, an assistant principal in Omaha and one of the nicest people I've met, to tell him that he and his teachers were in my mind this week as I thought about what it must be like to come together as a community of educators in service of a shaken community. Simply put, the macro community of educators is another family to which we belong and on which we can rely in moments of joy and trauma. It is a privilege not to be taken lightly!

Enjoy your weekends. Enjoy each other.

The Decision

At some point each teacher decided to become a teacher. The journey to that moment comes in myriad ways, on different time lines, with varying brands of a sense of calling to the profession. There are as many different stories behind the journey to the classroom as there are teachers in the classroom.

Those are the opening lines to a chapter of the book. The simple notion that we all chose to dedicate ourselves to serving young people in a variety of capacities is the centerpiece of exploring the adult asset of Commitment to Learning and Teaching.

My general contention is that our general health as educators can be measured by our relative connectedness to the values and principles we used individually in order to choose this profession. In simple terms, that means that the closer my teaching is to my core values, the happier I am. The further away my teaching feels from these core values, the more likely it is I'm losing (or have lost) my joy in teaching.

The challenge and promise of this thinking is that there are two levels an individual can engage to address this commitment level: internally what can the individual do to nurture and foster core values; externally, what can a group of adults do to create an environment that lessens the distance between practice and the collective values of a staff.

As a starting point, though, I encourage all to press rewind in our thinking and try to best recall the process we went through in deciding to enter into this work. What impacted your decision? How close are you today to following that decision? What distance is there today between your PRACTICE and your DECISION? What are you going to DO about the distance?

Enjoy yourselves! Have a joyful day.