What is beautiful?

Today I asked a class of seniors to list what they think is beautiful. Here it is in no particular order (the extra info in parentheses is directly from them)...

Mom (doesn't matter what she's wearing), the last hug, the naked body (in it's purest form; how you were born), music, snow, love & marriage, spring, flowers, silhouettes, sky, skiing, sunrise, city, meeting someone, Honduras, laughter, family time, Little Compton, 40 Beaver Pond Rd., Grace Kelly, green grass, happiness, the sun, painted toenails, eyes, clouds, lights, foliage, dessert, friendship, smell of wood burning in the fireplace, chic clothing store, classical music, old European cities, modern buildings, my room, Caribbean, Augusta National, good story, shell fish, trees, new baby's smile, sunset, funfetti cake, mountains, autumn, insects, beach, forest, night, my grandmother's hands, the top of a mountain, sunny morning after snowfall, candle light service on Christmas Eve, Vermont, waves, camp fire, rings, feeling loved, watching your parents joke around.

I was a little surprised and very encouraged by the depth of some of their responses. Music and love were listed the most often (what else is there after all?) and, in spite of the toughest, longest winter in their short lives, quite a few students listed snow. I remain hopeful about the future of the human race.

Thinking about time.

I have recently fallen back in love with the old-fashioned paper calendar for my students. It all started last term when I realized not enough teachers seemed to be talking to the 9th graders about how there were only three weeks left until their first final exams as high schoolers. We do so many things online here at my school, including calendaring, and I think that is a great way to stay organized and on top of things...for me. For some teenagers, though...I think they need to see it in front of them and be reminded of it everyday. I'm not big on deadlines. I rarely give deadlines for the projects we do. I let them work at their own pace, but that does not mean not being aware of time at all. There is an end at some point. The end of the term arrives. So I made some paper calendars (last term on the left, this term on the right) and I pointed to the date at the beginning of class and then made a big deal of crossing the day off at the end of class. It seems to be helping already this term, especially for my seniors who are preparing for their show at the end of the year. The end of the year sounds like a long way away, but if you check the paper calendar, it's, like, tomorrow.

The Sartorialist as a model for looking at the world.

I'm constantly posting videos on my class site that I think will inspire my students. They love the youtube and I think video is a good way to get to them, to show them stuff on the side that I think will effect how they see the world. I love this one, in particular, because many of the girls I teach read The Sartorialist blog often (so do I), so he has some pull with them already. I also love anything that allows my students to see people talking about how they came to be creative beings and especially videos that show creative people in the act of seeing the world and creating their work. How DID we teach art before Art 21?

14 year old heartbreak.

made by a 14 year old boy three days before valentine's day. no assignment.

what is it about drawings by teenage boys? they are always my favorites in the classroom. of course i try not to let it show...but the details, the imagination, i just love it. i'm always trying to figure out where they come from and why they are so consistently different from drawings by teenage girls which are fussy and self-conscious. i made those fussy drawings when i was a teenage girl and can still feel them haunting me. 3rd from the right on the top row, shaggy, might be my favorite...ever. click on it.

worrying...

s.a.t. scores came online at 8am today. does the college board hate teachers? i mean how do they expect the kids not to check on their phones and laptops and then how do they expect us to keep teaching after the freak outs about how they're not going to be able to get into any colleges start.

it is only 9am and i've already had kids in tears, running to the bathroom, and worries that have run from academics into appearances and back. i wouldn't want to be a teenager today for all the money in the world.

by the way, it's only been the girls who are freaking out this way. they asked me what i worried about when i was in high school. other than looks and body image...i can't remember.

i only turned my back for a second...

in trying to mix the right color to paint her hair on her self-portrait, this student decided to cut a piece of her hair off to lay next to the paint for comparison. anything for art.

dancing in the studio.

this is what happens after you force 15 year old boys to draw for 2 hours.

me...on stage.

yesterday i gave a speech...to the entire upper school.

it was terrifying and wonderful. my legs shook visibly through the whole thing. luckily the podium covered them up.

the head of the school asked me to do it...give a speech at the cum laude assembly. i went against my number one rule which is to sleep on big requests like this and get back to people. i said yes right away. maybe i was blinded by the beautiful light in his office or thrown off by the idea of being asked. either way i ended up doing it and it felt great...but maybe not for the reasons you might think it would. sure, it was nice to be recognized and get some compliments after...but here's what was really great about it.

i've had a tough fall. this is year 8 in my teaching life and i've been afraid that i might be experiencing true burn-out. i haven't looked forward to coming to school much and the kids have been driving me crazy. and everyone knows that when you start to get down on the kids you know it's bad.  

but thinking about what i wanted to say to the kids-at-large yesterday made me fall in love with them all over again. it made me feel the hopefullness that working with kids can give you. and when i stood up on stage and looked at them all at once smiling back at me it was hard not to cry...honestly.  

these kids were so generous. 

they laughed at my jokes. they smiled at me and waved. they cheered my name. and they came to find me later in the day to tell me how much they liked what i said. teenagers did this. privileged teenagers did this. lots of them...not just a few. they didn't have to but they did. and i love them for being so open and loving. i think i remember just how hard that is to do that when you're a teenager and your body and emotions are all out of whack.

you can watch the speech in these two youtube clips...

clever teens.

cereal in a cup...and with chocolate milk.

clever teens.

today i discovered that many of the young women i teach carry their cell phones in their ugg boots for sneakier text messaging during class. it only took me two and a half years. 

and for the record i've been waiting for the ugg boot trend to end for much more than two and a half years. 

student quotes

important note: all of the students who participated in this conversation or were sitting near it were 10th grade boys.

one student describes to another his science experiment which will test the effect of noise on foul shooting in basketball.

second student says: "i love basketball. i'll be one of you testees."

long pause.

giggles.

if you don't get it. read the quote aloud.

yes, this is my job.

birthdays at school?

when i was first handed an advisory group with no curriculum to work with one of the things i did was to hand some of the time back over to the kids. they each drew a tuesday of the month from a hat and that was their day to plan however they wanted. we called it first tuesdays and it was very successful. now i have more students than there are months in the school year so i just picked a bunch of random dates and they're running advisory on those dates.

one of them planned a birthday party for two of the others last week. and yes, i did allow them to swat at a pinata in the middle of my classroom as you can see in the slideshow and no, i have never see them so happy.

i've never been a big fan of the in-school birthday party (maybe pent up frustration at always having had a summer birthday) but i saw something happen this week when one student helped a group of students make two students feel special for one day. and when one of the birthday girls thanked the hostess with the mostess on our advisory blog...it was one of those moments that makes me think maybe everything will be ok. 

oh, and i was also reminded...they're still kids. so maybe we're doing birthdays now...or at the very least monthly pinata swatting.

patience is a virtue?

i think patience is something you have to practice very very hard. 

when the kids start to get to me...and they do... i pull this book out even though i've read it several times. i would not be the teacher i am had i never read this book. if your life in any way involves people between the ages of 13 and 20 please read this book. 

it even mentions the high school i went to...in the chapter on sleep deprivation. hmm.

child of the day

yesterday afternoon i had to go to two meetings. 

at the first meeting there were 20 people in attendance. lots of good ideas. very little listening. i told the story of me getting my advisees to reflect on the hike and no one...said...a thing...in response. total silence. i was very frustrated. 

the second meeting i went to had about 6 people in attendance. we talked a lot. we generated wonderful ideas for how to support our new teachers including something we're going to call brags'n'snags (my term) where teachers can share what's going well and what's troubling them. it might take the form of a blog or a cool looking worksheet (which i'll generate) they can keep in the back of a notebook for future brags'n'snags chat sessions.

but the best part of the meeting was when one of my colleagues (a middle school teacher) shared with us the story of the child of the day. once a week he selects a student to be the child of the day. each student in the class says something nice about the student and then they get to talk about whatever the student of the day wants to talk about for a certain amount of time. so nice...

keep meetings small. listen to each other. be nice.

reflecting on the hike

a few weeks ago i wrote about how i used the junior hike as a lesson for my advisory group which was met with mixed reviews. unfortunately we didn't have time to reflect on the experience until two weeks later. i didn't want to belabor my point of trying to get them to work together but i knew we needed to get some thoughts out in the open.

so i asked them to write down their thoughts on the hike in terms of 4 categories...positive things they experienced, positive things they saw others experiencing, frustrations they experienced, and frustrations they saw other people experiencing. i asked them to go write these things down in a private place and not to put their name on it. when they returned to the group we put our notes in the bowls you see in the photo below.

then we passed the bowls around, reading one slip at a time aloud to the group. my hope was that we were able to hear everyone's voices while at the same time experiencing everyone's happiness and frustrations by reading other people's thoughts.  here are some of the responses (if you click on the pictures you should be able to enlarge them to see the writing better):



i can't be sure how long the effect of this activity lasted on the girls but in the moment it felt powerful to hear them reading one another's thoughts, especially when it came to the frustrations. i didn't do a lot of talking after we read the slips of paper. i wanted to let the voices continue to be heard rather than my omnipotent summary.

hiking as a metaphor.

at my school we have a fairly strong and effective advisory program. usually teachers start by advising 9th graders and then move through their four years with them. but my first year i didn't have a group. so last year i asked for a 10th grade group because i felt a real connection to that class and 10 girls requested me as their advisor. i love having an all-girls group because we can really get into stuff in a way they can't in a mixed group. i have always had the romantic idea that my group was different, more bonded, more thoughtful because of the good work we do together.

at the beginning of the school year each grade goes on an overnight trip. we teachers go with the grade we're advising. so i went on the 11th grade trip this year. i was sent on this trip my first year when i didn't have an advisory and i remember returning upset. the trip involves a hike up mt. monadnock in new hampshire. the hike is very tough and i saw kids struggling physically in ways i hadn't ever before. i also kids literally running up the mountain. i felt like it divided the class ...into the athletic and non-athletic and into groups of kids who've had access to trips involviong hike and those that hadn't.

so i made a decision that my little group was going to do the hike together no matter what. we would reach the top as one which meant some students had to hike at about a quarter of the pace they would have normally while other students had to push out of their comfort zones to keep up. i envisioned everyone helping each other and all of us chatting sweetly as we worked our way up the mountain. i prepped them with my ideas for the trip way back in the spring. a few of the girls helped me make t-shirts for our group last week and i went and bought some silly bouncy headbands for us to wear.

here's the thing...there are 80 kids in the 11th grade and my 10 were the only ones being "forced" to climb the mountain this way. some of them loved all my hoopla and others were not pleased...and they let me know in that lovely way only teenagers can. eye rolling. hands on hips. sighing. i felt for the first time the way parents of teenagers must feel.

we began the hike at 11am. despite my clear instructions several of the girls took off at breakneck speed. i ran up to the front and asked them to slow down. they wanted to debate about it. i felt annoyed. the more we hiked the more the girls at the back struggled. at times i wondered if i was pushing them too hard. the girls at the back told me how bad they felt for making the others wait. i explained that it was the girls at the front who were in the wrong. the girls at the front said they thought stopping and waiting for the girls at the back would make them feel worse. were they pretending to be emphathetic and then using it as a way to get what they wanted? i was so frustrated. i explained to them i didn't want them to stop and wait. i wanted them to help their classmates, encourage them...walk with them. i begged them to put themselves in their classmates's shoes.

eventually i started to pick places we could see up ahead and we would all agree to hike to that point and then sit and rest. this allowed some of the faster girls to push on and seemed to make the whole concept of the hike more manageable to the girls who were struggling.

eventually...after several lectures and me digging down deep into my bucket of patience...they started to get it. they started to stop without me telling them. i saw hands reach back to help.

and by god, somehow, we did it. we reached the top as one group...smiling.


we were the last people to arrive at the top which was humilitating for some of the girls. i was exhausted. i had given away all my water and was carrying stuff from the bags of girls who had packed way too heavily. those cell phones and ipods really add up.

now that i'm back home and too sore to do anything much but update this blog i'm thinking about what we did....

i really don't think some of the girls at the back would have made themselves go to the top without the encouragement (however half-hearted at times) of the rest of the group. there were other students who didn't make it to the top. would they have been able to do it if they'd had a built in support group?

i got angry about halfway up and i let them know it. was my being up front and "real" what helped us get it togther or do i need to allow kids more time and space to figure things out? could i have held my tongue? would they have figured out on their own?

sometimes i worry about students who are at a disadvantage for whatever reason (lower income, less athletic, less artistic, they represent an ethnic or racial minority) having to suffer to educate the students who are naturally getting ahead. is this what i was doing? did the athletic girls learn to help out at the expense of the slower girls? or did we all learn from each other?

WE have so much work to do. teaching empathy might just be the hardest and most important work out there. maybe there's a way to do it that doesn't involve a rocky mountain.

overheard in the halls.

egdar allen poe is the...worst...author...ever.