Beyond School

Oof. It’s Sunday afternoon. Since returning Friday night from a skipping-rock of a flight home from Koh Samui, Thailand – departed 6 a.m., layover and transfer in Bangkok, another layover in Hong Kong, a refueling layover in Taiwan, an arrival at Incheon (Korea) at 9 p.m., and an airport bus and taxi to enter the door at 10.30p – we gasped at the two-week-old dust bunnies bounding across our apartment, unpacked, and then I slept a few hours before driving through the brutal cold (oh Thai sun, please shine up here) to my radio job at 6.30 the following morning. Home again, write a post for Education.Change.org, sleep, more radio this morning, and finally, though sleepy, here to write a bit – *inhale* – about….

The Wonderful World of International School Hiring Fairs

It was wonderful, in a weird way. Talking for hours for four straight days to school leaders around the world about our views on teaching and learning (and most interestingly, though probably most damning for many of my job prospects, about technology in education) is an interesting way to spend the time.

Without naming names of schools or interviewers, here’s a random and sleepy-eyed report of lessons learned from the experience.

1. Bad interviews are good things

No matter the reputation of the school, the people sitting across from you in the hotel room asking you questions in that school’s name are a stronger indicator of how it would feel to work at that school. I talked to English department heads whose questions – and my answers – made it clear to both of us that we would, or would not, make a happy marriage. There was an unsurprising correlation between this marital element and the offering or non-offering of a position at each school. Schools touting themselves as “21st century schools” and banging their laptop program drums – and during interviews with which I expected flower petals to descend from on high – on an occasion or two turned out to instead voice sentiments belonging to, um, people who’d obviously never experienced the literacy magic that happens after a few months writing and conversing behind the wheel of a blog. No rose-petals there – instead, many mental leaves of wet cabbage fell, probably, in both our imaginations. Marriage for the next two years? We think not. Thank goodness for the bad interview, and for the “We’re sorry we cannot offer you a job at this time.” No apology necessary, really – good luck.

2. “Energy is eternal delight” – so its opposite is….?

(h/t to William Blake who, though dead, deserves eternal credit for the eternally delightful maxim.) If, like mine, your own heart seems to pump more espresso than blood, then it may be important to consider the energy coming from those interviewing you. I’m not saying interviewers need to be manic or anything; I’m just saying a lack of excitement, of a sort of buoyancy – of even a decorously restrained intensity – when discussing educational vision while courting for a temporary professional marriage may be, well, a screaming red flag. Granted, the interviewers are stuck in their hotel rooms interviewing candidate after candidate for many more straight hours than the candidates themselves, but still – we’re all teachers, current or past, so we should be pretty good at keeping our energy level up whenever a professional client enters the room, be it classroom or hotel room. The short version? Beware the droopy interviewer, and put a gold star by the inspired/inspiring one. You are, after all, bound to be sitting in many more meetings with them if you sign the contract to work with them. If they’re sleepy, chances are you’ll be a sleepy worker with them. But if they’re exciting – in a way that rings true (and we all have what Hemingway calls a “shock-proof sh!t-detector,” don’t we, to distinguish real from fake excitement, yes?) – then consider fishing your pocket for that ring, and dropping to your knees on the spot.

3. Interview questions make the interviewer.

By the end of the first of my four days of interviewing, it struck me how different interviews are based on the questions asked (and not asked) by the interviewer. Some of them seemed as stilted and scripted as the worst end-of-chapter questions from the worst textbooks (redundant?). They felt less like interviews than exercises in checking off the questions boxes. It wasn’t quite “schooliness,” so can we call it “interviewiness”?

The best interviews, on the other hand, were more free-flowing and responsive, characterized by give-and-take expansiveness as one party or the other heard something no script could predict.

4. Being yourself is better, come what may, than trying to be someone else.

Think about it. Not only does pretending to be what you’re not cheat your interviewer – it also cheats you. Show your true colors now, so you’ll know whether it’ll be okay to show them over the length of your contract. I love the fact that, at my second interview with the two interviewers for the school I chose, Singapore American School, I replied to a question by saying something to the effect of, “There’s no denying that people’s first impression of me is often, ‘Damn, Burell, you’re too intense!’ But after a while they see the rest of me, and realize I’m also mellow in my own way.” “Damn” is a soft enough word these days – and I certainly don’t toss out higher-level potty words like rhymes-with-fit or ends-many-limericks-about-Nantucket or leads-to-supposedly-eternal-damnation in professional company – and I wondered about the wisdom of the utterance after it escaped my mouth (and this was in like the middle of the second hour of the interview), but somehow the fact that the offer was still made left me feeling even happier than otherwise about accepting it when it came in hour three.

5. Check your ego at the door.

I got about an even mix of offers and rejections from the schools I talked to. One school in particular seemed so right after two interviews that getting the rejection note broadsided me with the force of a turbo-powered school bus. I bumped into one of the interviewers later, and he told me that choosing my competitor over me was the hardest decision they made the night before, and that it took them over an hour of group deliberation to make it. A rejection can happen for all sorts of reasons – maybe they needed yearbook experience you didn’t offer, or needed that administrator whose spouse happened to be a less-qualified candidate for the position you want. So don’t take it personally.

6. Remember to research.

I’m sure I blew one interview by expressing my desire to get experience in a program they didn’t offer, and expressing my distaste for the one they did. Oops. I’d mistakenly thought they did offer that program.

7. Benefits, preps, class sizes, and student mix.

You don’t offer a flight home after the first year? You don’t cover dependents? 70% of your student population is Korean? You laugh off the notion that four preps is too much for new (or old) teachers?

8. Courtesy is cool, good will is good stuff.

When it came down to thinking I’d be choosing between two very attractive schools, I told one of them how I hoped that saying “no” this time, if the decision went that way, wouldn’t close the door to a “yes” next time in years to come. The gentlemanly answer of the man I said this to was so winsome, I don’t know what to say, other than that it made me want to work in this man’s school even more. The answer was no less impressive for its simplicity, which was, simply, “Your saying no to us will offend us no more than we’d want to offend you if we said no to you. It’s the nature of the beast, and we understand that, so no doors will close at all.”

9. Remember to check yourself in the mirror before you leave your hotel room for the day’s interviews.

I can’t believe I forgot my belt. At least my fly wasn’t down.

That’s about it. Hope it helped, and fyi, Mr. Utecht, consider the assignment done

Ben Grey’s “21st Century Confusion” post asks a simple question that I’ve often toyed with too:

The Partnership for 21st Century Skills believes demonstrating originality, communicating, being open and responsive, acting on creative ideas, utilizing time efficiently, accessing information, etc. are all 21st Century Skills.  I’d retort that in reality, these skills have always been in existence and of the utmost importance.  They don’t need to have the 21st Century moniker on them to make them significant.

I’ve often wondered the same thing: “What’s all this talk of ’21st century literacy’? (Ben somewhat conflates “literacy” and “skills” in his post.)  Is there anything really new here?  My comment:

The only uniquely “21st century literacies” I can think of involve the web.

Students need to be able to evaluate information on screens upon which any sage, charlatan, or idiot can publish. That’s new (sort of. Books really are open to the same range of authors).

They need to learn “online identity management,” and I would argue that’s a new literacy. New because they’re publishing themselves, and that means reading/writing/speaking/filming/photo-ing (literacy), and 21st century because privacy has never been so porous as now. They need to know how to keep Big Brother, Big Employer, and Big Google from knowing too much.

They need to learn “social reading” online. By that attempt at a cute label I mean the ability to evaluate communication acts by strangers in social networks, emails, comment threads wherever, and the whole range of places people can attempt to connect to us individually now. They need to be able to “read” a phish, for example, and a fraudster, and yes, a p&rv.

Hm. What else. Co-writing might be new. “How to participate in collaborative writing communities.” Wikipedia, for example. I know I don’t know how to do that.

Could we even go so far as to say that social networking online is itself a “new literacy”? That networking is (or may be) an essential skill for adulthood in the 21st century?

Hm. Searching. That’s new, yes? How to effectively search for good, timely information online, and do so efficiently. I know I’m still not great at that.

I’ll stop there. Thanks for the prompt. I agree the “21st c.” buzz can be as tiresome as the “2.0.” But I think the Berners-Lee Revolution has created some unique changes, just as Gutenberg’s did. Can you see any I missed?

Who is Arne Duncan and how will his choice as Secretary of Education affect education in the US (and, for better or worse in this hegemonic age, much of the rest of the world)? I’ve spent so many hours since the announcement reading reactions online that both my eyes and my brain cells are fried. (Enjoy the Diigo bookmarks if you’re masochistic.) All that reading will have to steep for a while before I can serve it as tea.

Until that happens, I’m going to focus on one controversy surrounding Duncan, and toss out some thoughts on it. That controversy is performance pay for teachers.

Bill Ferriter’s excellent recent post on this issue at the Tempered Radical got me thinking. I replied there,

Thinking about it a little more, this is what I can come up with so far:

We’d have to define “merit” to include the higher-order thinking skills – analysis, synthesis, evalutation/critical thinking, creativity – that the best learning projects require. This is not the opposite of the “fact-based, right/wrong, multiple choice” testing that NCLB and the College Board/AP/SAT pushes, but what you might call the upward extension of it. Mastery of facts is the beginning, not the end, of the assessment for meritorious teaching and learning.

If we start there, that means teacher merit is measured by the types of projects that are assigned in the classroom – not by the standardized testing industry – and by the performance of students who complete these projects. This further means that said teacher measurement is performed not centrally, but locally – or perhaps by boards consisting of local and central judges. (I know that “central” is vague.)

My thinking is that if teachers were rewarded for designing learning activities that measured positively against a checklist of such higher-order thinking traits – and crucially, that the measurement was based not on a single unit, but on a portfolio of all units assigned throughout the semester or year (this eliminates the dog-and-pony show liability of single principal evaluations) – then the best teachers would be rewarded with higher pay, while the worst ones would have an incentive to change their practice for the better. Teaching to the test wouldn’t be the goal any more; teaching to higher instructional standards would be.

As for what those higher instructional standards would look like, we need look no further than Linda Darling-Hammond for answers. Her presentation linked in an earlier post lays the groundwork for such guidelines.

As I commented on Will’s post about the Duncan pick,

Since Darling-Hammond led BO’s ed transition team, she may have had his ear long enough to fill it with good sense on how to reform NCLB’s assessments for the better – so that they align with better teaching-and-learning.

And I just discovered Bill Ferriter posted a follow-up to my comment, so off I go to fry a few more cells. Bill’s worth it.

[Update: Oh my goodness. Seems the student writing below is, shall we say, not entirely original. I'm still thankful for the gesture, oddly.]

Call me slow. I’m spring cleaning in December. Old papers may as well follow old leaves.

And I come across this, which a 15-year-old student,  who never said much of anything (in a “still waters running deep” way) during his year in my Asian history class in Shanghai, gave me at mid-year.

Why he decided to re-write me as a character who’d been a poor villager in Nazi-occupied WW II, I’ll never know.

Before tossing the paper, I had to scan it. Call this post part of an “open file cabinet.”

My question: Why can’t I show this to prospective employers as a recommendation letter?  And my caveat: I can only hope he was serious. It’s hard to tell.  And my mis-giving: how much “light-reflecting into dark places” can you do in school – especially if you shine that light in places too close to home?

"This is the meaning of my life."

Life is interesting.

Before I turn this post over to a new 21-year-old voice I find worth listening to, a bit of background:

He followed me on Twitter. I went to his Twitter page to check him out, followed its link to his blog, skimmed it to get a sense of this guy. Mostly short posts, random-seeming. The Captain Beefheart music video was what stopped me from leaving. That spoke to an original sensibility and taste, and prompted me to snoop a little more.

I started reading another seemingly short post, “Me, My Blog, and I,” and discovered he’d folded the quite long post behind a cut-line. So I went to the permalink page, and read the whole thing.

I learned a lot about him there. He’s 21. From a working-class background, but a scholarship-to-private-school education (interesting from a socio-economic angle to this also-working-class, but without scholarship guy). I went back to his Twitter page and followed him back. I also subscribed to his blog.

Because he’s wrestling more honestly with the dark side of learning and crafting via blogging and web-reading than most of the converts in our evangelosphere (and his writing skills and voice don’t hurt either).

I first heard about Slow Blogging (a la Barbara Ganley) when Alan Levine at CogDogBlog wrote a post identifying my “Portrait of the Teacher as a Good Young Racist” post as an example. (What’s the old joke about the person who learns the definition of “prose” and is thrilled to discover he’s been a “prose writer” all his life?) And it raises its seductive voice in this “Post-Punk Nerd’s” post yet again, in a way that challenges much of my thinking about classroom blogging, blogging in general, and books versus websites.

The irony? I wouldn’t have discovered this young writer had it not been for the very Tweeting and blogging he so powerfully questions. Have a nice dose of ambiguity on me.

Here’s the money quote, but again, the entire thing is worth a read:

When I was in third grade I read the complete works of Shakespeare. I found an old single volume hardcover copy in my parents’ basement with a faded brown dust jacket decorated with a watercolor of the Bard’s England, and I set my mind to read it. I knew that Shakespeare was supposed to be good, the best even, and I knew that I loved good writing, so it seemed the moral thing to do. I lugged the massive book to school each day, where it would sit on my desk when not in use, taking up a quarter of the surface area. My teacher would threaten all the usual grade school punishments if I didn’t start bringing a less obtrusive book from home, but I persevered. At the age of eight, I read the complete works of William Shakespeare.

I am not telling you this to brag or to show you how smart I was. To be completely honest, I didn’t understand ninety-five percent of what the poet was trying to say. I didn’t even understand what the characters were saying in the dialogue. I am telling you this because what is important is that I took the effort to read every single word that we’ve inherited from Shakespeare and when I didn’t understand something, I thought about it until I either understood it or I had a headache. I did not go to sparknotes.com and I did not skim. I did not turn to Wikipedia for a summary of the plot. I didn’t do any of those things because I couldn’t. I had no access to the internet whatsoever and even if I had, those resources probably weren’t available back in 1995.

And now, at age twenty one, when searching for the online article that accompanied that NPR broadcast, I find that I cannot even finish it before getting distracted and opening up a text editor to start writing this.

I am actually less skilled at reading and thinking now then I was at the age of eight. I may read more words per minute, but I am reading less carefully. I am learning less. I am retaining less. Worst of all, I am reflecting less.

Did you ever read somebody who reminded you of yourself when younger? This is about as close as I’ve come to that….