The History Teacher 2.0

Listening and Bears

I've got a small goal that I've been pursuing for about a year now. That is to listen to my students more. As I've been more intentional about listening, I've noticed that it happens in places and times that I've found unexpected. A few observations:

I noticed that in the mornings, I had a bunch of students in my class, but I didn't really have meaningful interactions with them. I had the same 3 to 5 kids who would check in, I'd make my traditional morning joke, they'd laugh out of pity, then I'd get back to working on grading, or planning, or reading an article, or whatever. I had thought that I was particularly good at interactions with students. But this realization made me think I had a lot more work to do.
I noticed that I had stopped greeting students as they came into my classroom. I've started to make more of an effort at this. There was an awesome video that went around social media of a teacher who had handshakes with all of his kids. The guy is a freaking legend. I've got like 9 handshakes. I'm getting there.

I noticed that I had a lot of great surface-level relationships with kids. But I didn't have as many deep, personal, meaningful relationships as I thought I should have. I am, deep down, a people's person. It's a huge reason why I teach. So to realize that I didn't have kids coming to me and talking about real issues meant I wasn't interacting in a way that fostered those conversations.
Lastly, I realized I was having too many days where I was trying to be more serious than I felt natural. I wasn't being me. I was acting. And while 'fake it 'till you make it' works in some scenarios, if you do that in the classroom, you won't make it very long.

So what to do? Those realizations were a bit of a gut-check, a reminder to be humble and realistic about the impact I have with students. The kids are why we all teach, and that had been lost on me a little bit. It's easy with all of the grading, the phone calls, the committee meeting and the extra curriculars - but if we step back and think about why we spend so much time in these damn buildings*, it's because of the students.

*On a side note, this is how I know we'll be OK despite Betsy DeVos being in charge of public education in America. She has without any shadow of a doubt underestimated the fight she will receive from teachers if she tries to screw over public education.

Like I said, this has been a journey a year or so in the making. A few changes I've tried to make:

I don't work in the mornings. GAAAAAHHH! I so struggle with this! I have so much to do and so little time. But it works. From 7:45 AM to 8:05 AM, I'm a coffee-sipping, conversation-having, handshake-creating beast.
I walk with students. I'm a high school teacher, so this doesn't apply to all grade levels. After a class is over, if I'm in the middle of a good conversation, I'll walk the student towards their next class. It skirts hall-duty a bit, but it has led to a bunch of great conversations, some having to do with class, some having to do with life.
I'm goofy in class. Why? Because that's exactly who I am the rest of my life. So in class, we laugh a lot. We watch goofy videos to break up the lesson. We play music and dance (and sing...sort of). I speak loudly and in a Greek accent, probably more than my neighbors appreciate. And IT IS A BLAST!

It's always a work in progress. So many mentor teachers along the way have given the same advice - that if you feel you are good enough, then you've stopped learning. That's why this blog is so good for me, and why I think so many leaders in education advocate for blogging. As I write, and as I think about what I'm going to write, I examine myself and my classroom. Often times I like what I analyze, but there are times that I don't! Rather than those things I don't like continuing on for years, I'm better prepared to catch them and adjust.

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Have a great week!

Thanks for reading this blog! I hope you'll consider taking a moment to comment below and turn this into a conversation. Whether you are an educator or not, we have all had common experiences with education both good and bad. I want to hear what you think!

About Me:

My name is Alec Chambers. I am a high school history and government teacher at a small, urban public school in Kansas City called Center High School. We regularly kick tail. Among many awards, we were named a National Blue Ribbon School in 2014. I don't just teach at Center- I also graduated from Center in 2006 after attending Center Schools K-12. I have a degree in Political Science, a second degree in International Relations, a third degree in Education and a Master's of Arts in Teaching. I have an unofficial degree is soccer. All of those degrees have led me to the high-paying teaching profession! I have two beautiful daughters, Katena and Emily and am married to the most awesome woman on the planet and fellow educator, Angela. All struggles aside, my life is flippin' awesome.

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Ruts and Other Stuff

It's funny what will get you on a roll again. I think it's pretty natural for any of us to get into ruts. It happens in relationships. It happens to athletes. It happens emotionally. So it is only reasonable to expect it to happen professionally.

Todd Whitaker came to our district today to speak to us about being great educators. One of the lines that hit me was about what exactly makes teaching so difficult. A lot of non-teachers think it's the hours, the idea of working with (fill-in-blank-age-student-you-are-deathly-afraid-of) or the low pay. Todd said, and I think he's right, that none of that really is true. The really difficult part about teaching is the intensity of every moment; the knowledge that almost every single second you are at work is vitally important to the growth and development of a real human being. It's why the term burn-out is such a fitting term for why so many teachers quit the careers they so desperately love.

Pressure makes diamonds. Well, yeah. But pressure applied indiscriminately tends to just break things.

The funny thing about ruts that I'm discovering as I grow older is that you often don't realize that you're in one until you finally get out of one. I used to picture a rut being like a ditch. Your view of the world changed. When you're in a ditch, you know without a doubt you're in a ditch. You know you need to get out, but you just keep slipping on the sides as you try.

A better analogy than a ditch, I think, is a road where years and years of use have created indentations in the road that are small and easy to not notice. Without much attention, these indentations can start to guide where you travel and limit your ability to move around. But they're small. They're easy to not notice. And if you're in one for a while, they can start to feel normal, maybe even kind of comfortable. They don't totally restrict you like being in a ditch would. They just kind of keep you doing the same thing you did yesterday, and the day before, and the day before.

The other thing I really like about this analogy is that it is easy for everyone around you to see these marks in the road and think that if so many other people drive their tires there, then surely that's the best place to drive. That, I think, is how ruts start to feel normal and comfortable, especially in a career like teaching. Until one day you get some damn fed up with those indentations in the road that you decide to just get off the highway, because one more day in those indentations doing the same thing would just make you snap. And that, my friends, is burn-out.

I haven't been in a ditch. I may have been in some very worn and used tire tracks, though. Listening to Todd Whitaker talk about being great has given me a little wake up call, not necessarily that I've been stuck in a rut, but that I need to be wary of falling into a rut every day. This is especially true now that I have two beautiful kids to keep me really busy and generally really tired. Again, ruts can get comfortable when you're tired. And the longer you're in a rut, the more effort it takes to get out of it.

More to come. I haven't been posting much, largely because my youngest daughter still wakes up twice a night! But this needs to be a priority for me. I need to carve out an hour a week to write here, to reflect and to think. As much as I hope you, dear reader, enjoy and learn something by reading my thoughts, it is selfishly also really important to me.

Have you ever found yourself in a rut? How did you get out of it? How did you fight against becoming comfortable being average?

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Thanks for reading this blog! I hope you'll consider taking a moment to comment below and turn this into a conversation. Whether you are an educator or not, we have all had common experiences with education both good and bad. I want to hear what you think!

About Me:

Fighting Inertia

Oh hey there, dear reader. Good to see 'ya.

My last post was in February of 2016, which by my mathematical calculations is about a lot of months ago. The wife and I have added our second beautiful daughter and have moved to a newer,
larger house (I HAVE A GARAGE!!!) since that last post. So now I'm a teacher and a dad of two daughters under two, which was a really good idea when it comes to keeping up with writing a weekly blog.

I've thought about writing here many times. I'd love to give you some poetic reason about, philosophically speaking, why I've stayed away from publicly writing for 22 months. But the truth is, when my kids are both asleep and I'm caught up on grading and planning and there isn't a soccer game on, I sleep like a slumbering bear.

Except tonight. I'm wide awake. My youngest is starting to only wake up once throughout the night, which is really awesome. You parents out there may have shed a happy tear for me. Thanks for that. So tonight, while my daughters and wife sleep, I've read 30 pages of a good book, I've planned out the first three weeks of my government class, I've deleted A LOT of emails and I'm all caught up on rumor season with soccer around the globe.

I'm still wide awake.

So if I'm going to be awake, and you're going to read this, let's have a talk about inertia. It's a cruel way to be unhappy. I think I am starting to realize that more than staff meetings, more than monotonous grading, more than frustrating students and frustrated peers, more than budget cuts and every single article written about public education in the state of Kansas, it is inertia that is the single biggest cause of educators becoming jaded. It is the slow but steady realization that I complain way more today than I did five years ago. And without some extreme and focused effort, I will complain way more in five years than I do today. So on and so forth until I'm a crabby 53 year old teacher counting the days to retirement, bemoaning the rotten, hopeless generation I'm tasked with teaching.

Meme courtesy of Pintrest

I don't want that future. I think if you're taking the time to read this, you probably don't either, whether you are a teacher or something, anything else. Without fighting the urge to be complacent in one's job and get bitter about the fact that one's job is still the same frustrating job, we are liable to let years pass without ever shaking things up dramatically. No announcement about some big career shift is coming in the next paragraph, but I've started thinking more sincerely about what kind of educator I want to be in 5 years...10 years...at my retirement dinner. This year is my seventh year teaching, four as a history and government teacher preceded by three as a physical science teacher.

I see teachers around the internet who have lost their spark either because it burned out, or because they got so lost in the day-to-day struggle of public education that they forgot that fires need fuel to continue to burn, and fuel doesn't get added without some personal attention. If nothing else, writing these words tonight is me publicly crying out that I will more intentionally kindle my own flame. I will more courageously try to kindle the flame of my friends at Center and friends I have around the world.

How?

Who the hell knows. It's 2:27 AM and the white noise machine in the room next door is screwing up my thoughts right now. Or it's when this is being written. Whatever...

My wife has commented before that she often would use the blog as a gauge for how stressed I was with life, how in control things were. If I was posting every Wednesday, she figured, then surely all of the other things in life were in a pretty good place. As is often the case, she is right.

Looking at the last 22 months, I don't love the teacher that I currently am. I don't hate it either, but something is missing. The inertia of the public education system has pushed me to a more cynical, pessimistic place. I am realizing that if I don't start fighting that inertia, I will end up like so many others before me, beaten by the system, frustrated and ready to quit, be it in 5 years or 25.

I don't want that. I'm going to push back against the inertia. I'm going to be more optimistic and hopeful, if for no other reason then godammit, Carrie Fisher fought against her personal demons so I can fight against my professional ones. I hope to finish my career and life with the same confidence and gusto that she seemed to have at the end of her life.

Someone on the interwebs pointed out that Fisher's last line in a Star Wars movie (not counting CGI recreations of her) was the simple word, hope.

So holding aside the fact that personally, 2016 was pretty awesome, from a societal standpoint, screw off 2016!

2017 may not end up much better, but if we don't all have hope that it will be, then we'll never muster the strength to fight the fights that will make it a better year.

Fight the inertia. Fight with hope. I've heard in a galaxy far, far away that hope is what revolutions are built on.

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