"That Pen" and Other Recent Inspirations

I was reflecting on a memory that came to mind from two years ago in my English class. It was of a student who brought in a book related to the content we were studying. The book was in English with some Chinese vocabulary definitions given throughout. This was a book in the student’s third language with her second language supporting. What was most electrifying about the whole scenario was how she used the book with her group for their project, applied and taught some words to her group members, and then was able to use higher-level thinking skills with those words as time went.

It’s amazing that this moment came to mind since I recently came across a tweet where an educator encouraged others to write about why they were still in education. What’s on my mind currently aren’t the only reasons why, but I’ve been quite encouraged lately in a few different ways.

One of those has been a student who has messaged me a few times outside of class regarding his group project, edtech ideas on the iPad, and how to better use the latter for the former. Another cause for this reflection has been the amount of talk my students have had outside of class about my class. In connection with that, some of those students who have held discussions after the bell have approached me, inquired deeper, or extended the dialogue with more genuine thoughts. (Side note: What’s heartwarming has been the amount of students known as “shy” who do this.)

What was tremendously cool within the last couple weeks was a particular student who edited a 30-second clip of hip-hop music on GarageBand and sent it to me. Upon finishing a class that week, I started to play the clip after the bell, and he walked quickly to the front to have me turn it up. We then proceeded to have a conversation regarding next steps he could take. That same student started to use a pen in his textbook, instead of a pencil, because he’s mentioned to me how he has this particular feeling when he has that pen in hand. By golly, he was right! Soon after that day, he came to me with a notepad where he had written a story in English. He said he had something on his mind, and he needed to get it out. What did he use? That pen.

Reflecting on events such as these provide inspiration, motivation, and hope. If I hadn’t taken the time to think back and consider the roles moments like these could have had for me, I’m not sure I would’ve discovered these possible purposes. I’m extremely thankful for my students, the enthusiasm they bring, and the joy their smiles and laughs possess. What/Who has inspired you lately?

photo credit: JFabra <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/7749900@N06/2150120698">It's not about demographics, it's about productivity growth!</a> via <a href="http://photopin.com">photopin</a> <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/">(license)</a>

An Unexpected Answer (Safety Series: Part 1)

This week in my 6^th grade Science and Critical Thinking class, we analyzed a story of two children who went swimming at a local pond. The problem arose when recent rain raised the bacterial levels too high. Upon this discovery, the lifeguard informed the children to get out of the water. She continued throughout to emphasize how they didn’t listen to her, how she’s responsible for them, and is their “boss” when swimming. The kick came when a scientist from a local water organization enters the pictures to describe some scientific details. Even with the lifeguard informing them of the rules and the scientist’s explanation, the children still want to swim because of their days, past and current, being ruined.

Thus came three choices the students and I evaluated, discussed, and voiced. 

Who should decide what is safe in this context? And why?

a) the scientist

b) children/people

c) the lifeguard whose first focus was on the rules

Most of the students selected the scientist because of experiences, experiments, and how he could know about what is unseen. I pushed those students to consider how he has this knowledge. Only one out of that group mentioned his education. (Side note: I wasn’t surprised about that, and there are layers to the reasons.) A decent amount of students said we should listen to the lifeguard who “knows what is safest for us”. What if the lifeguard didn’t see the bacteria? What if the scientist wasn’t around? In essence, students needed to defend the why behind their whys. It was engrossing to observe them.

Now one student shared a different perspective. He explained how the children should decide what’s safest here because, as one of the children in the story mentioned, they’ve gone swimming many times before and there weren’t any problems. They’re still alive, and they don’t feel like anything in them is different. He then brought up the possibility that the lifeguard and scientist are telling lies for something they want or just for fun.

Indeed I’m going to ask him regarding the connection between feelings and health, frequency of lies/bribery, and trust with people. But take a minute and consider what he said. What if the lifeguard and scientist are in on something together? I certainly didn’t explore that option.

Usually, more often than not, students will think of a view that hadn’t come to my mind yet. The question I now face is: how willing am I going to be when listening to them offer these suggestions instead of too quickly relying on the “one right answer” from the book or my own reasoning?

Elementary Integration of Educational Technology

Two years ago, I was solely dependent on Twitter, Facebook, and any other ed tech for connecting with educators who wanted to move forward. Last year, I was hardly on my VPN in order to connect with my students, coworkers, and community. Toward the end of this past spring semester, I found myself with a desire to log in because I needed (and still need) help.

Some of you may remember what happened before and Why Our BYOD Club Didn't Work And It's OK.

It all started during our initial workdays before students came last fall. I approached our elementary principal to inquire if our students could use electronic dictionaries since the school year before our leaders didn't want tech such as iPads or even Wi-Fi in the building. Her reply this time, "Why not let the students bring iPads?" Umm, hmm. Didn't expect that. Let me think about it. Yes.

From there, our principal, the three 6th grade homeroom teachers, and I collaborated on how to incorporate a BYOD program for our sixty-eight 6th grade students. The tricky part would be for our school to catch up with the students' resources. You see...61 out of the 68 students already had devices of their own (almost all were iPads) while some of the remaining students already planned to purchase a device of some kind. These devices would be used primarily in my Science and Critical Thinking classes along with my Foreign English classes. Why? I was the only teacher with any experience in this realm, the other teachers didn't know how to utilize tech within education (especially Chinese education), and well, to be honest, I think because I am American (or a foreigner in their eyes).

A little over a month later, the school allowed students to BYOD. Slight problem: we didn't have any Wi-Fi. Therefore, I had to create hotspots every class, and the speed was less than acceptable for my standards. In the spring semester, our school acquired building-wide Wi-Fi, and we were able to upgrade the bandwidth. Hardware was cooking though it took lots of patience on my part. I was relieved when the students came off more patient than I was internally.

The apps I used with the students included Evernote, Safari, ClassDojo, QQ, and (2nd semester) iMovie. I didn't want to introduce too much that was new since I knew we would have kinks to work through. This was, after all, the first year for numerous dreams of mine taking off. Slow and steady wins the race, right?

There are many areas that I need to grow, ask wisdom about, and apply to our school in this upcoming year. A big reason for that is also that the leaders have had me lead our elementary in integrating more technology into our daily methods since last spring, and they have asked me to continue that this upcoming year. Some steps are taking longer than I expected, but I am learning so much about what the bigger picture entails.

Time Flies When You're...Teaching!

Every time somebody asks me how I arrived at teaching English as a foreign language in China, I think back to the interview I was privileged to have at a teacher recruitment fair. It does not seem that long ago really. In reality, it was around five years ago. What that means is that I am approaching my sixth year of teaching. What that also means is that I have passed the peak times I could have left the teaching profession.

Am I proud of this? Sure! What I know now is that the minutes, days, and years go by quickly. It doesn't feel like it's been that long. Meanwhile, those of you who have been in the game ten years or more shake your head with a "You have no idea" look on your face. I know. This all connects to something Sir Ken Robinson says. If time seems to go by fast when you're doing something and you hardly check the time, you must enjoy it. If time drags and you find yourself looking at the clock every few minutes, there is probably a lack of passion or motivation. Now that was a paraphrase, but you get the idea. I rarely catch myself looking at my watch (or phone) during the day. So many times I wish I had more than forty minutes for a class, more than four times a week, with my students.

I want to spend quality time with the students.

Learning. Together. Pushing. Encouraging. Challenging. Growing. Molding. Loving.

One of the best ways to do this has been etched in my mind even deeper upon seeing a quote from Don Wettrick, author of Pure Genius. It was a quote from his dad that says...

https://twitter.com/DonWettrick/status/614189067312451585/photo/1

Think about that for a minute. It makes perfect sense. Teaching is fun because of the innovative ways we can guide students to go beyond the standards.

I leave in less than two weeks to return to China, and I am excited!! To be honest, I've actually been counting down the days until the first day of school for the upcoming year. My students have shared the same sentiment with me several times this summer.

Our Life at Baishan

Recently, I asked a student to write what life is like while attending our school. This idea came from Pernille Ripp who held a #studentlife challenge back on February 5th. At that time, our school was on break for Chinese New Year. Therefore it was only a matter of time after being back this semester before I could ask a student to describe life from his perspective, from which I would have to post it because most blog sites are blocked here in China. I have left the student anonymous in order to respect his privacy.

This is his story.

Baishan School is a private school in Shazikou, Laoshan District in Qingdao, China. The school shares it’s campus with another school - ISQ, which stands for International School of Qingdao.

Life at Baishan is hard work. My daily routine is to get up at 6:45, and after fussing about, I get down to catch the bus at 7:25.

Our homeroom teacher is one of the most strict teachers in the whole school, and is known to rip entire homework notebooks for lousy writing and make that student re-copy the whole thing again. Yes, the whole thing.

Each class usually takes 40 minutes, unless if the teacher decides that they don’t want to end the class. Usually, this doesn’t happen. But the student scores in Baishan are overall pretty high, and our English is some of the best for Chinese schools in Qingdao. I guess that’s the result of doing 4 ~ 5 hours of homework each day.

Our school also has an excellent Foreign teacher team, they are very professional and teach excellently.

At Baishan, lunch usually consists of homemade style Chinese food. (Which is pretty awful to me.) If you want to eat something else, you have to pay an extra 2000 RMB (Which I think is too much.) to have the option to have Korean food from food window #3.

Life at Baishan may be hard, but an old Chinese saying states “Good students come from strict teachers.”

Beyond History and Politics

Where I'm teaching, on the east coast in the city of Qingdao, China, most nationals hold grudges and hatred toward the Japanese because of events that took place in history. In 2012, there were riots in cities protesting anti-Japan messages related to disagreements over who owns the islands nearby. An English teacher at our school from Japan stayed in the teacher dorm for weeks during that time. Her heart was broken because she came to China for that exact reason: to show that Japanese can forgive and love Chinese.

Fast forward to now, neither country has taken ownership of what happened. Punches are continually thrown back and forth in media and politics. Truthfully, I still don't see much of a difference between the two (thank you, Neil Postman).

These past two weeks, my 5th graders have been learning about camping, itineraries, and how to plan trips. Upon completion of their understanding and analyzing of the content, the students had to group up, plan their own trips, and write a 3-day itinerary. They did phenomenal on working out the details together in the process and then creating brochures for their trips.

What made me stop in my tracks was what is pictured below.

https://instagram.com/p/2ms1unqvgk/?taken-by=dmscott05

Inside the classroom of a private Chinese school, there was a group of girls from (L to R) Korea, China, and Japan. 

Recent events have been cast aside. 

These girls laughed, joked, and planned a fun trip to Korea. Originally, their destination was to Japan! I wish the news would show stories like this. You know: the stories that make you freeze, stop thinking about everything in life, and run chills up your arms. The collaboration was just beautiful.

This is exactly what I hope every one of my students learns. No matter what culture or people say, we can still love, respect, and learn from those whom our country has had trouble with in the past. 

Forgiveness brings freedom. When we move beyond history and politics, who knows what is possible?

https://amritamaat.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/forgiveness.jpg

Why Our BYOD Club Didn't Work And It's OK

Earlier this school year, I was eager to be in the process of preparing a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) Club for our upper elementary. I was reading article after article and processing what to do during it. What I failed to consider were the steps to set it all up beforehand. I was extremely focused on the school acquiring Wifi, since it still doesn't have that, and simply moving on from there. (Sadly enough, our elementary office has more hot spots than the 3 buildings of our private K-12 school has routers combined.)

For some reason, in the meetings I held with administrators at the school, the solutions never came for how the school operates on ethernet providing kilobytes per second, the internet itself turned off in every classroom, and our school of 700+ students and 80+ teachers having one IT guy (who doesn't know Apple products while Google would be useless too since it's blocked by the Great Firewall.)

A couple of the previous issues were mentioned by the elementary principal to me, but we never took time to work out how these and other problems were going to be handled. This was all late last winter toward the end of the first semester. The break in between semesters, Chinese New Year, was when I took serious time to reflect on a culture where digital learning prospers by Eric Sheninger. It was at this time that there wasn't any communication from the admin to me about what was being worked out or what was going to happen when the next semester came. Therefore, I decided not to follow through with the idea before chaos or any constant, unconsidered situations would arise.

Upon our first workday of this spring semester back, I went to the elementary principal and informed her of my decision. She was surprised, and her surprise surprised me. To me, it was obvious how this club was not near the possibility of succeeding. How could it? It moved all too fast for it to do more good than harm. I rushed it.

http://www.iheartliteracy.com/2014/06/technology-in-classroom.html

One of the many lessons I have learned is this: Have a team of professionals dedicated to working out solutions (along with plans B & C) take the necessary time to prepare an action plan, follow it through, and reach a point where outcomes and positive collaboration can happen between students, teachers, administration, and the school's stakeholders.

Through it all, I felt the worst for the result I gave my students. They had been a part of this, so much so that they helped me make a video asking earnestly for wifi and resources other than books on their desks. I really wanted this to happen, obviously since I had rushed it. I went to each of the students I originally had planned to be part of the club, apologized, and reminded them how we can still work together via Minecraft and other media. Thankfully, every single one of them understood, while a couple asked questions about why. I explained the technicalities of it and how it couldn't work for now and not even for some time here. For the students and me though, moving forward isn't going to stop.

It's OK. I've been doing what I can this year with my 5th graders outside of the box. I now look forward to where I will move on to next, and I'm preparing for that adventure.