Teacher John V

So here is my question: Is eBay environmentally friendly? I am seriously looking for a dialogue on this topic. Can I ask for your personal opinion rather than Googling an answer/statistics? I will chime in with my own thoughts, but was hoping to get some of yours first. This is for a lecture @ FLCC that I will be giving and I would value some ideas. THANKS! JVN

Well, if you guessed English teacher, you are correct! But not an average English teacher. John believes that schooling is the antithesis of education. His classes in NYC are based on real world learning and students are given the opportunity to do internships or volunteer work on the Fridays of the school year (much like the Distillery internship some students are participating in tonight:).  He calls this “real responsibility as opposed to homework which he terms “fake” responsibility. Students should not be parasites for 18 years, they should learn to contribute to society. There is much in what John says that appeals to me. I was interested to hear him say that by the time a student is 13, he/she should have the mental capacity to participate in any aspect of society (I know I am paraphrasing here, but that is the gist of it I believe). His idea that learning should be useful and practical immediately is interesting as well.

And I know this was only a short version of what he does, but placing the burden on the student to be their own teacher needs guidance and has some inherent problems. Experts can help guide what things a student SHOULD know and are important to think about. I think of my own self-taught ornithology as an example…. I have huge gaps in my knowledge and it is due to a lack of formal instruction or at the very least, formal guidance.

 Is that enough to toss Gatto out in the ocean with cement shoes on? No. But his ideas are a bit radical and I think he is throwing away some baby with his bathwater. There are things about paper and pencil tests that are useful. There are good reasons to regurgitate facts. To just bury all of those ideas out in the end zone of Giants stadium is perhaps a bit rash.  

I love field trips. I think they are worth every bit of extra work and hassle and $$ that they cost. Students talk about trips years after they go on them. They are valuable for so many reasons beyond the curriculum.

My favorite field trip as a student was the trip to Lollipop Farms. Jimmy Schmidt fed one of the goats paper. I remember petting stuff and thinking “My mother would kill me if she knew I was touching a live animal.” I think I was in 3rd grade.

My first field trip as a teacher was to a nature center. Within five minutes of us being there, the educator told my students that beaver eat fish (they do not).

I chaperoned a social studies field trip to NYC that year as well. We were close enough to the city that it was a day trip. We went to the Statue of Liberty and climbed up the inner stairs to the top and looked out the windows in the crown. It was amazing. We could look out at the city and look down and see the tablet Lady Liberty was holding. Do you know what it says? It reads July 4th 1776 in Roman numerals. One of my students looked down and asked me “Who’s Julie Ivy?”.

I also took my students right out to the woodlot behind the school. I remember being so excited to find a nail in a tree and asked the students how far off the ground it would be in ten years. I remember that none of them knew that trees grow from their tips and therefore the nail would not travel any higher in ten years.

I spent two years teaching in the Catskills and then went to Utah State University for my Master’s Degree in Wildlife. How I got into that school is a pretty amazing story all in its own…… but they really didnt know what to do with me. Most of them did not value my BS in Education, nor were my two years of public school teaching seen as much of anything but a filler on my resume. But suddenly, they had someone who would actually volunteer to go to the public schools to give a guest lecture when the teachers called (I know that is not a field trip, but I am setting the mood here….). I was even more cocky then than I am now (I am hoping that now I am just self-confident). I felt I had lots to offer and was frustrated when my perceived skills were not being recognized, but that changed one day when the Assistant Dean came up to me and said they had arranged a field trip to the College with several local high schools and over 200 Juniors were going to be on campus and they needed my help! “You used to work with kids didn’t you?” “Yes sir.” I said. ”Can you help us out to host that field trip.” “Yes sir.” I said. I imagined that students would be rotating through some station I would staff….. “Great. We need someone to cook and serve hamburgers.”………… “Yes sir.” I said (He was on my committee).

As a student at USU, I remember few field experiences. One was a two day trip to Idaho to view different fish hatcheries (I hate fish). But I do remember the instructor telling a story as we drove down a dirt road to a remote stocking pond to look at some fish weir that was minutely different than the 400 we had already looked at that day. The story was that several years ago he arrived at the end of that dirt road only to find a postal truck parked there with a woman inside and a very surprised mailman engaging in a special delivery. We chuckled. The instructor continued…. “I tell that story every year. One year, one of the students didn’t laugh. Another student asked him why he didnt think that was funny. He answered: Because my Dad is the mailman.” I always thought that was an urban legend, but he told it as if it was real.

 From USU I went to Hawaii. I taught at the only high school in Hawaii located directly on the ocean. We visited the exposed reef at low tide often. I ran the hiking club and we took field trips on weekends with them and even went off Island. The best was the trip to the island that had been a Navy bombing target for decades. We literally had to be escorted by a munitions expert in case something was found. We stayed on the trails. We listened to directions. There was no fresh water, no dock. This was a sacred place for native Hawaiians and activists had sued the government for the right to visit. There were only a handful of visits per year allowed and only a small number of people allowed per visit. We were chosen due to the Hawaiian heritage of the students. It was a really special experience for them and for me. The remoteness of that spot hit home to all of us as one person with us (but not from the school) was stung by box jellyfish and had a severe allergic reaction. I watched as a (self-described) Hawaiian medicine woman chanted with him as he lay on a picnic table in a fever. We spoke by military phone to a doctor on another island (who happened to be Hawaiian and had ties to the U of R by the way…..) talked a trip leader through the process of giving the man an Epinephrine shot. He recovered within hours and the debate raged as to which form of treatment was to be credited.

When I returned from Hawaii, I worked at a middle school with 7th and 8th graders. I arranged a field trip to Montezuma National Wildlife Refuge. The district was 10 miles from this 8,000 acre complex and many of them had never been there.

And now…. well, now I have the dream job when it comes to field trips. Some of the classes I teach are entirely field based. I teach a camping class for the phys ed department for gods sake. I get to host public school kids when they are on field trips. I have taken some ultimate field trips…… twice to Yellowstone, twice to Newfoundland and four times to the Everglades and Florida Keys.

I have spent so much time reliving my history, I forgot my original point! haha! But it will come to me. In the meantime, let’s decide what field trip we want to go on this spring….

So here are my questions: When two cultures value different things, how do you come to an answer on how to proceed? And how do you sort out the differences between when something is cultural and when it is individual. In other words, when Johnny talks a lot in class, is that because of his culture or his personality? And what if a kid’s actions are in direct contrast to his/her culture?

We are just hitting on multicultural stuff now and I am most interested in that…. this idea that there are multiple cultures in each and every classroom, not just one or two. Perhaps I have too broad a definition of culture, but I think of he classes I teach that are almost exclusively white, but rich in diversity in other ways. So the “farm kids” have their own wealth of experiences and perspectives that I draw from and are totally different from the Suburbanites. Are those cultures?

I am embarrassed that I do not know the answer to this question and perhaps even more embarrassed that I continue to cling to the idea that it doesn’t really matter. I mean, people have been learning and teaching for centuries without having to develop any epistemological theories or worry about cognitive processes. Fire, the wheel, surgical practices, gunpowder, steamships, automobiles and even the airplane were invented before Vygotsky devised his ideas on how we learn. And who says Vygotsky is right? I have been exposed to about a half dozen theories on how people learn.

And to a much more modest degree, I hold as evidence that I have been teaching for 20 years myself and by many measures, those 20 years have been successful without me fully comprehending how students learn or even hearing the word “epistemology”. Of course, I recognize the defensiveness in my continued argument against this issue….. who wants to believe they have spent 20 years in a profession without grasping an essential basic premise of that endeavor?

I have always known some of the buzz words. “Hands-on”, “practical”, “meaningful”, “real-life” are all terms that I have used and embraced yet don’t really understand in a deep interconnected way. If I look back on what I have done, I can say I have just tried out different things and stuck with the ones that seem to work best. And to a certain degree, that is acceptable. In fact, that is a quick and dirty definition of action research.

I have learned a lot since starting at Warner this summer. Scaffolding is a new term to me and although I recognize it as being already present in my practice to a certain degree, I am more aware of its absence at times. Constructivism is new as well and I am only scratching the surface of that concept. But the idea that students construct knowledge is really fascinating. But to complete this assignment and tell you all HOW students learn is not going to happen. I can say though that my eyes are opening to all the things I don’t know, and that is the first step for me.

My task yesterday was to sit in on one of the STARS lessons and evaluate the lesson based on the RTOP. I have some experience formally evaluating teaching as I am required to do so in my current position, but I am still a novice and am not sure how good of a job I did. I can say for sure that I saw a great lesson that fully engaged the students.

I go on and on so often about how different it is teaching students outside rather than in a controlled setting like a classroom. Well, at STARS, that classroom was NOT a controlled setting. Besides myself, I counted 6 adults that entered the room during the lesson. One was taking pictures, one was hovering, one was louder than any of the kids. There were several interruptions from the PA system. And besides me taking nonstop notes,  there was a tape recorder running the entire time.

The room itself was spacious, but I found it strange. There was student work around and obviously places were more will be hung as the year progresses. But I was distracted by the rules. There were two different sets of rules posted (so you had two rule #1s, etc….) and there were additional rules posted such as “No eating and drinking” and “Stay in your seats!” (the later was posted TEN times). I am sure it is a constant challenge to maintain order in this school, but at some point the rules become wallpaper, blending into the background.

(Can I share my set of classroom rules when I taught in Hawaii? I was a bit nervous when I started teaching there. EVERYTHING was so different. I didn’t understand the culture, the language or most of the rules. We had some cultural training but it was not nearly enough. So I tried something different. I posted my rules but they were all phrased in ways that it made it appear I had to do the them rather than the students. Then I covered the rules and left the title “Van Niel’s Classroom Rules:” exposed. Well, day one arrives and the students come in and I go through the welcome stuff and introduce myself. I then get to the rules part and I say “These rules are very important. If you see these rules being broken I want you to let me know right away so the person breaking them can be disciplined.” Rule 1 was “I will not give you busy work.” I repeated my warning to the class that this rule must not be broken and if it was then I wanted to know about it! Rule 2 was “I will not talk when you are talking.” I explained how rude that would be and if anyone caught me talking when they were talking needed to tell me and I would stop. Rule 3 was “I will not let anyone interfere with your learning.”…. They loved it. Of course, it didn’t solve my problems that year, but it went a long way towards keeping peace. One kid said “Mister, they all about you those rules.” I said “Right. And If I break them, I will need to stay after school.” They thought I was crazy….. Less importantly, but more amusingly (is that a word?) THAT is how I became known as “Van Niels” instead of “Van Niel” for the next three years. The kids spoken Pidgin and did not use possessive. So the “s” in “Van Niel’s Classroom Rules” simply became a part of my name)

Genna and Alison both handled themselves very well and really attended to the student’s to keep them on task and interested. I think they blended the need to keep them working on the project well with the idea that this is after all an afterschool program that is supposed to be fun. There were times when the students were still whispering to each other when one of the teachers was talking, but I never detected a conversation that was off task. The girls helped each other with the microscopes and shared samples. They really were engaged the entire time and if one demanded absolute silence, I think it would have backfired.

And I was very impressed by how they handled the situation when an adult from the school showed up. “Heathcliff” (not his real name) was in the room for over 30 minutes total. You could tell he was interested in what was going on and he genuinely wanted to help. And he did actually help some of the time. He had a different way with the girls because of his familiarity with them. But he also proved a distraction. He was a bit loud even when Genna was talking. He moved around a lot, and with Alison and Genna already doing that, it made for a congested teacher traffic pattern. I found him distracting, but never ever was he meaning to be. I am sure I am just like that when I pop in on someone else’s class at school….. But kudos to the Warner duo for handling this so well.

In case you are wondering, I DID have a few constructive suggestions for the teachers (I had forgotten to call them arrows), but I will keep them off the blog. Not that anyone is still reading this post anyway  , but somethings are best left between a man and his RTOP.

The term “culture of power” is new to me since starting at Warner, but the concept itself is not. I have wrestled with issues of race, religion, gender and poverty since before I became a teacher.

I completed my second of three days with sixth graders this past Thursday (I wrote about day one last week). This time we had much colder weather and a much different group of students. At lunch, we spent some time talking amongst ourselves about wether the difference between the two weeks was due to the tone of these teachers, the poor weather, the kids themselves or a combination of them all. Funny, it never occurred to us to list ourselves as a possible difference

My money is on the weather. Many of the kids were in t-shirts and the temps had to be in the 50s. So I encouraged my people to crank it up a notch and keep them engaged. And I did so myself. Most notably, I had the kids act like chickens.

I had a nice mix of hands-on stuff including eggs and feathers and bones and a fully articulated chicken skeleton. As we all looked at the skeleton I asked them to think of a way that their skeleton is different than the chicken’s. Then we usually talk about their answers. But THIS time, I had each kid physically demonstrate the difference. So a human hand became a bird’s manus, lips were pursed into beaks, necks were curved, arms flapped like wings and of course, we all stood on our toes like birds.

In the afternoon class, I had one boy (”K”) that was particularly into this chicken charade. He bobbed his head farther than any of the other students, he stood higher on his toes, he flapped his wings with more vigor. He also happened to be the only African-American student I was to see the entire day. And as I stood there with 11 students all acting like chickens, “K” was stealing the show. I smiled and laughed and at that moment, from 20 yards away, came the shrill cutting voice of a teacher: “K! Knock it off!”. He immediately slumped and I verbally rushed to his defense, but it was too late. He hardly participated in the rest of the lesson.

I was angry (Confession: Some of my anger was due to my own ego: Did I LOOK like I needed rescuing??? please…). We were literally ALL acting like chickens, yet K was singled out (admittedly, he was more animated than the rest of us). Was it his skin color? Well, that is the easy answer. Was it K’s behavior earlier that day? One of my staff reported that he spent much of the time in at her station trying to balance his gum on his nose. So perhaps K earned his reputation honestly. Maybe being the only black kid had nothing to do with it, but I doubt it. I think K is in a vicious cycle with so many confounding effects that it takes so much effort to sort them all out that most will not even try. Those that want to see racism will (and be right) and those that see a kid that gets reprimanded because he misbehaves will see that (and will also be right).

I know this much though: I had K for 35 minutes and he never saw me stop smiling at him.

I just finished this reading and want to put a few thoughts to “paper” before I forget. This was a great assigned reading… written in a readable fashion and full of the kind of information that gets my brain going for hours.

The pendulum example was a fantastic choice for this paper. It was a discrete enough topic to be covered in the space available and the activity is explained well enough to allow readers to incorporate this exact activity in their own classes.

I would love to discuss with you all the idea of preconceived notions and whether they are a help or a hinderance. The paradox is that prior knowledge and familiarity are needed to build off of but they are hard to give up and therefore provide a stumbling block to education. I think the issue is not whether the preconceived notions are correct or not, but rather the key is HOW they were constructed. There are so many ways to learn “incorrectly”…. some students believe that their value is based on their being right, so they are unwilling to admit they are wrong because that decreases their value. Then there is what I call the “My Uncle” issue… So many of the wildlife and other nature-knowledge my students bring to class are NOT first-hand experiences, but rather stories they have heard at the dinner table, at the hunting camp or in an otherwise informal setting. Some respected friend or family member holds court and dishes up all of his (it is almost always a he) years of experience and facts about how nature works, what animals are really like and such. So I am faced with telling the students that coydogs are not common in NY, mountain lions don’t come in black and porcupines cannot shoot their quills and suddenly I am “calling out” a childhood hero who has told them the exact opposite. Now, often I can overcome that problem as the students get to know me in their time at the College and learn that I hunt, fish and camp and ain’t just one of them “perfessers” all full of book-learnin and no common sense.

The other topic of interest to me that came from this reading is the idea that the new idea will only be accepted if it is believable: “The scientific conception must be plausible.” p. 32

Well, isnt everything plausible these days? Nature shows on TV are dedicated toshowing the most extreme of examples of whatever the subject. Not that extremes are not extremely useful, but they are presented in almost a scandalous way. News accounts are even worse! A vagrant bird shows up from Asia and the reporter sent to cover it has no clue about birds, migration or what makes something rare. They fail to ask the right questions and even when I prod them with the information, they frame it in some ridiculous way in the paper or on the 6 o’clock news. And people fail to grasp the simple concept that all things are possible, but all things are not equally likely. So if a rare bird can show up in NY all the way from Japan, why can’t there be wolves in the Adirondacks from Canada (which I hear is way closer than Japan). And if male seahorses can have babies and female preying mantids eat their mates, why can’t people have 20 pounds of unpassed waste in their intestines?

 A few misconception passed along by my in-laws this weekend:

-”What kind of cranes are those we see in New Jersey? there must be a dozen of them by the lake.” Answer: “They are probably Great Blue Herons as there are only two species of crane in North America: one is endangered and the other is largely mid-western. People often confuse cranes and herons.” Response: “Yeah…. I wish I knew what kind of crane they were…..”

-”We saw 6 white-bellied hawks (authors note: there is no such animal) and it must have been mating season because the 5 were all going after the one female. She wasn’t interested but you could tell the males wanted her. The males are the big ones and boy, she didn’t want anything to do with them.”  Answer: “Those were probably Red-tailed Hawks. They are very common and have a white belly. And in hawks, the female is actually larger than the male. We call that reverse sexual dimorphism. Response: Silence.

-During a conversation about my brother-in-laws home that is for sale “Guess what kind of tree I have in my yard? A black walnut. Can you believe that? THAT is rare.” Response from me: Silence…. but I could not help but look up at the four black walnuts that surrounded us during this conversation as we sat in lawn chairs in my front yard………

 Perhaps that is why my in-laws do not visit very often…..

This week I was a presenter for a sixth grade environmental day. What a treat for me to be able to work with younger kids again. Especially when I can give them back at the end of the day They stay at the camp overnight, we are just visitors for the day to do the programming. We all arrive at the same time and while I was setting up my stuff, two of the boys came running up to me to tell me they saw a monster (a MONSTER) in their cabin. I was a little stunned. I waited for the punch line. There was none. I walked them tot he cabin and asked them to describe the monster. Apparently, it was 5 feet tall, black and moved fast. The one boy saw it as he opened the door. I told him it was probably the shadow from the door. He was not convinced. He thought MAYBE it was a black bear and not a monster. So I searched the cabin with a straight face and said there was nothing there and nothing to worry about. We opened the windows for fresh air and more light. This was at 9AM and all I kept thinking was God help the folks in charge when it gets dark out!

My daughter is in 6th grade and I am not gonna say her imagination doesn’t run wild at times, but a MONSTER? Never. A black bear inside a cabin? No……. But hten again, this is the same girl that made the entire Kindergarten bus cry by not just telling them there was no Santa Claus, but outlining her three best reasons why Santa could not exist. 

We have spent a lot of time focusing on teaching students content. It has been so long since I got my BS in Education that I do not remember if they actually teach you about all the other things you have to deal with teaching kids. Like the science teacher next to me having to explain to a girl that she was having her first period. Or the elementary kid that wanted to make sure her cat was in heaven waiting for her. I did half of my student teaching in the City (#39 school) and in my sixth grade class I had two girls that sat in the back of the room. One played with Barbies during recess and the other was pregnant. I was overwhelmed with the social issues, no less the course content….

Sometimes I think the best things I ever did for my students had nothing to do with science at all.

This weekend I taughta  Beginning Camping class. It is a physical science elective and I have been teaching this course for several years now. I REALLY enjoy it. I do like to camp and be outside, and the first reaction many people have is that it is a cushy assignment, so I will have to spend some time defending it. But I largely agree: with proper planning this class is pretty easy.

One of the things I like the most about the class is that I get to meet students from all throughout the college. All of my other assignments are largely Conservation majors. I get to interact with these students in a different way than I do in the other classes I teach.

This weekend, I had a dozen students that I didn’t know very well. One girl showed up ill and three had potentially serious medical conditions that I had to monitor for the weekend. We drove to the campsites in driving rain and hail. Our host regaled us with stories of recent black bear sightings. And I had to of the crew get lost on Saturday…

For the most part, the goals of the course revolve around teaching the students basic camping techniques, giving some natural history of the plants, animals and geologic features of the area, and provide a positive recreational experience in the hopes that the students will continue pursuing this activity for years to come.

So my “lesson plan” for the weekend includes attention to group dynamics, campfire games and providing some down time as well as vigorous hiking. I make sure I am the first one in the outhouses to clean out the spider webs, first one to pick up a maul to split fire wood and the first one to grab a pot that needs cleaning. That leading by example works well on these camping trips. That “we are all in this together” mentality sure goes a long way.

 In the classroom, the same technique can work as well. When I first starting teaching, I used to greet my students at the door when they filed in and greeted them and thanked them for coming. When the bell rang at the end, I would always say “Hey, thanks for coming today.” Most of them would laugh. Some would ask me “Where else did you think we were going to be today?” I never answered (didnt want to give them ideas). I have fallen out of that habit, but I remember shaking a lot of hands those first few years as students entered class.

So, did I enjoy myself this weekend? You bet. But I believe I earned my pay. This morning, as they sat at picnic tables taking our short quiz, I was amazed, as always, at what they got out of this short 48 hour experience.