Why I Teach

My colleague has been commemorating “Teacher Appreciation Month” by recalling some memories of his teaching career. He’s much, much older than I am, so he has many more stories than I do. Still, it made me think of a question my students ask often: How’d you know you wanted to be a teacher?

When I started high school, I met teachers entirely different from those I’d had in grade school. They were just so intelligent, and would actually ask questions for which I didn’t immediately have an answer. Nearly every one of my teachers was not only an expert in their subject, but also clearly cared about us students and enjoyed their job. But for all the great teachers I had, the one who is most responsible for me being a teacher was without a doubt my least favorite.

My favorite class as a freshman was World History. I’d always enjoyed reading about history, especially ancient civilizations, and so this course was right up my academic alley. Unfortunately, I did not like the teacher. He was sarcastic (but not charming, like I am), frequently rude to the students, and one day he stole my milk money (true story). I’d always been a teacher’s pet, but for the first time I was in a position where I loved the subject matter but not the teacher. I found myself going home often and thinking to myself, “If I were teaching about ancient Rome, I would’ve done it this way...” I was formulating in my head my own little lesson plans and projects.

I actually have a specific memory of lying in bed one night, thinking about that class and what I would do differently, and realizing, “Huh, I guess that means I want to be a teacher.” From that point on, I never really wavered, no matter how much my mom tried to convince me to be a doctor. I flirted with Corporate America briefly, but fortunately Corporate America dumped me before it was too late. I imagined going to law school, but then I realized I didn’t actually want to practice law, just wanted to tell people I went to law school—not a good reason to do anything.

That teacher that “inspired” me to do better? He’s still teaching, and I even had the... pleasure of working with him briefly. I never told him his role in making me who I am. I wonder if he’d be flattered?

Comics Gene

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I’m a nerd, always have been, and presumably always will be.

As a kid, my nerd interests of the moment almost always involved collecting things. First, it was Transformers—the original Transformers, not Michael Bay’s bastardized explosion-fests. Then, I became a voracious reader, with shelves and shelves lined with Star Trek and Star Wars books, neatly arranged chronologically or alphabetically, depending on my mood.

In fact, it turns out that all this collecting may be in my genes. I recently spit into a test tube and mailed it off to 23andMe. While I wait for them to analyze my DNA, the 23andMe website has a series of surveys to entertain me, and to be used for various research projects.

Some of the surveys ask obvious questions about my health–those are boring. The much more interesting ones are the personality surveys. So far, I’ve learned that I am introverted (no kidding) and neurotic (yep). Relevant to my nerdom, I scored highly above average on the “Systemizing Quotient”, which means that I am quite driven to arrange or reduce things into a system. This isn’t surprising, and probably explains a lot about my various geek tendencies over the years. I am genetically predisposed to collect and organize things.

With all of this being said, it’s a bit surprising that I never really got into comics as a kid, seeing as that seems like a hobby tailor-made for a kid like me. I had a phase, but it was not particularly long-lived. I picked up the Death of Superman TPB at K-Mart (not exactly a local comic shop), and I followed the various Supermen stories that came out of that for a while before I got bored. I was also a big fan of the X-Men, but I just couldn’t keep up with all the titles. I would watch the cartoon, and then be massively confused by all the different characters in the comics. I still remember one issue that I bought primarily because it had a shiny cover. I was thoroughly confused, and went back to following comic book movies, but not comic books.

I received a copy of Marvel: The Untold Story for my birthday, and it actually explained why, despite all signs pointing to me being a childhood reader of comics, it never came to pass: comic books weren’t very good in the 90’s. There seems to be a consensus that the quality of comics has improved lately, and indeed, my semi-dormant nerd genes have awoken in a way not seen since I amassed a triple-digit DVD collection in college. I’m reading comics.

​A sample of my collection.

I’ll put the quality of Saga, All-New X-Men, or Hawkeye up against anything on the bestseller lists. Even my skeptical wife plowed through the entire run of Y: The Last Man and eagerly awaits new issues of Saga. And for somebody like me with so little time to read for pleasure, 22-page issues are the perfect mental health break.

If I’d read this post before I started this hobby, it would’ve been very helpful. Fortunately for me, I had my own Comics Godfather to help me get back into comics, telling me what was essential reading (House of M and A v X) and what to skip (most of The New 52, except Scott Snyder’s Batman). Fake-Internet-Celebrity Merlin Mann was also influential by turning most episodes of Back to Work into a comics podcast—and more specifically, by talking incessantly about Saga until I started reading it. (Seriously, read it. But only if you’re a Mature Audience.)

At first, I was reluctant to admit that I Read Comics, but now I’ve embraced it. I’m a Collector, and right now that means collecting (digital) comics. It’s in my genes.

Battery Life: The iPad's Killer Feature

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One thing that didn't happen during my iPad trial? Tripping over charging cables. The battery life of the iPad, including the iPad mini that's become my primary device, is taken for granted a bit. But in a school, knowing that your device will last all day, no matter how you are using it, is transformative. I'm currently at 10 hours of use, and still have 32% battery remaining. All hardware requires trade-offs (like the non-Retina display I'm using right now), but I for one am glad Apple has prioritized battery life. Less than 10 hours would be a huge disappointment now.

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iTunes U and Edmodo

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The Info tab for my AP Latin course. Lofty goals.

For this school year, I have been using Edmodo as the LMS for all of my classes. It’s worked better than I had anticipated, and certainly better than our school’s current system. For the period my AP students were a part of the iPad trial, I wanted to test out using iTunes U, so I created a course just to use during those five weeks.

There are enough great walkthroughs of iTunes U out there that I won’t go into much detail, but there are a lot of things that I, and my students, liked about it.

Positive:

  • The teacher interface for managing the course was easy to learn and pleasant to use.
  • The ability to easily add content was very helpful, particularly when adding content from the iTunes Store. I added (free) apps, iBooks, and podcasts to the course, and the students had no problems finding them. In general, the students seemed to have less trouble accessing any of the posted resources than with Edmodo.
  • Most students took notes in their preferred note-taking app, but the ability to take notes on books, podcasts, and lectures and have them all in one place was very slick.
  • So long as the students had Notifications enabled, I could be reasonably certain that if I posted something, they would see it.
  • Several students commented that they simply liked using iTunes U better, because it was so well-designed. That "delight" factor is tough to quantify, but not unimportant.

Less-Positives:

  • As a teacher, I could only update the course from my computer. Not a huge problem, but as I am using my iPad more and more, this was annoying.
  • Communicating with the students was easy, but that communication was only one-way. There was no way for students to turn in materials or communicate with me or the class (other than email, of course).

So, when all of my students have iPads, would I prefer iTunes U or Edmodo? I’m still not sure. I have a lot of issues with Edmodo. For one, I’m wary of any free service whose business model is unclear to me. What happens if/when Edmodo is purchased by some textbook company? I’m also not a fan of their iOS apps, which are buggy at best and non-functional at worst. Still, Edmodo does a lot of things well. Namely, it is easy for students to interact with me and their classmates. That has been even more useful this year than I would have anticipated. In addition, Edmodo’s ability to do some basic polls, quizzes, and to collect assignments can really make it a one-stop shop for most teachers. With iTunes U, I would continue to use other sites (like Quia) for online quizzes and Dropbox or Evernote for assignments. That being said, for an iPad-centric environment iTunes U is a powerful, well-designed app whose design alone makes it a great option. Fortunately I don’t have to decide today.

Using iTunes U for five weeks did really highlight one of its strengths: the ability to create a self-paced course. While my course was created as “In-Session” so that I could attach due dates to assignments, it was obvious that iTunes U would really shine in creating a self-paced learning environment. While at first that doesn’t seem to apply to a high school classroom, I began to think about how it really could help create a more student-focused environment. What if my Latin 4 class had different units, that they completed at their own pace? There could be a “War Unit” with excerpts from Caesar, Nepos, and Vergil. There could be a “Love” unit with Catullus, Ovid, and Vergil. Students would work in class, but at their own pace, on whichever unit seemed most interesting at that time. I would love to create a course like this (cf), and iTunes U would make it very doable for the teacher. Summer enrichment courses or AP review would also be great candidates for a self-directed iTunes U course.

For now though, both Edmodo and iTunes U are pretty good options for teachers. Now if our grade book and SMS software would finally enter the 21st century, I’d be in good shape.

AP delenda est?

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A recent NY Times article reported that Dartmouth is no longer accepting credit for high scores on AP tests. According to Dartmouth, 90% of students who scored a 5 on the AP Psychology test couldn't pass the exam for Dartmouth's intro psych class. Now this is only my first year teaching an AP course, so I don't speak with a lot of experience here, but this only serves to feed this question that's been gnawing at me: Can a content-based AP course truly coexist with an innovative 1:1 iPad deployment?

During the five weeks that all of my students had iPads, we were reading the tail-end of the Julius Caesar portion of the AP Latin syllabus. After a semester of traipsing through Gaul with C. Iulius, my students, while good soldiers, grew noticeably weary of the material. The brief foray into the cultures of the Druids and their "wicker man" helped, but there's only so much one can do to make Caesar's genocide palatable for teenage girls. Since they all had the iPads, I tried to think of ways they could save us.

Unfortunately, I kept running into two problems. I will be the first to admit that these are probably just illustrations of my own limitations, as somebody still new to both AP Latin and teaching with iPads. Still, no easy solution presented itself.

The first problem I had was with time. Some of the ideas I had for ways to engage with the material would have necessarily meant slowing down the pace at which we moved through the curriculum. The AP syllabus is not a small chunk of reading, and while I am happy to slow down and look at a few sections in-depth, there's a limit to how much of that can be done while still getting through at least most of the syllabus–which is the expectation.

The larger issue I found myself running up against was the curriculum itself. My students had in their hands devices containing virtually every word ever written in Latin that has survived. Yet, they are stuck reading only the lines that the College Board has declared to be worthwhile. You love Ovid? Sorry, no time. You want to be a lawyer, so Cicero sounds interesting? No can do. The rigidity of an AP curriculum is not new, but it is highlighted when the students have these Internet-connected devices.

I realize I am teaching a dead language, but I like to convince myself that I can still teach important skills like problem-solving, critical thinking, etc. Based on what I've read and my limited experience, teaching those skills is vastly more palatable when the subject matter is something the students are passionate about. How great would it be to let the students choose which Latin authors they want to read and then teach some text to their classmates? The new technologies make that very possible, but what happens when curriculum stands in the way?

To paraphrase Fraser Speirs again, technology, pedagogy, and curriculum all have to adapt to really get lasting change. At my school, the technology is coming, I can learn the pedagogy, but what do I do when I don't control the curriculum? AP courses aren't going away any time soon, so is it possible to really change anything in that context?

iPad Trial: Day 4

iPad Trial: Day 4

My school is currently running a trial 1:1 iPad program by rotating a set of iPads among different groups of students every six weeks. It is now my turn, with my AP Latin class. The students are allowed to use their iPad 24/7 for the duration of the trial.

The students have had the iPads since last Wednesday, but because of various timing snafus and absences for various retreats, today was really the first day trying to learn Latin with the iPads. Some thoughts from the first few days:

  • To project my iPad onto the board, I plug my computer into the projector and use AirPlay via Reflection. It works fine for both me and the students (once I made sure my computer was on the same wireless network as the students access), but I am still hoping to find a way to use an Apple TV instead. Unfortunately, I think our network’s HTML login page might make that impossible, which is a shame.
  • Unsurprisingly, the wireless network has been flaky. Several students were connected to the network but unable to access the Internet. A restart of the iPad solved the problem, but was a bit frustrating. I’ve experienced this quite often with my own devices, but still haven’t figured out the problem.
  • The first thing the students wanted to do last week was get their email working. This actually surprised me, since that does not seems like their primary mode of communication. Still, just going through that process helped those who had never used an iPad before get more comfortable with the basics of operation.
  • Next, I had them go into the App Store and download the iTunes U. app. Again, most of them were pretty familiar with using the App Store, but a few were hesitant. Fortunately everybody remembered their Apple ID, and there were no issues downloading the app. One student is particularly wary of using the iPad (she has a strong preference for Windows, and named her iPad “Lamey McLamesauce”), but perked up a bit when she saw the free My Little Pony game in the App Store. Whatever, at least she knows how to use the store.
  • I told them the enrollment code and got them all signed up for the course in iTunes U. Even young Ms. Lamesauce said, “This is pretty cool, but I’m sure Windows has something similar.”
  • I walked them through the set-up of the iTunes U. course. For their next assignment, I had attached a PDF that I want them to mark up in Notability. I showed them how to download the PDF, send it to Notability, and add notes. They seemed pretty pleased with the workflow (if not the assignment itself).
  • Then we discovered the first hiccup that I’ll need to investigate. We have been using a Google Doc to keep track of in-class translations. While you can edit Google Docs in Safari on iPad, it seems to require that you be signed in, even if the file is set to be editable by anybody with a link. I’ll have to research if there’s a work-around, or if they will all need Google accounts. For now, some of them have Google Accounts, and the others can simply type a note to themselves and paste it in later.
  • One student who is accustomed to bringing a laptop into class has already decided that she prefers it to the iPad. I tried to gently insist that she try using the iPad, just to give it a fair chance, but she refused vehemently enough that I decided not pick that battle. She is pretty tied to her laptop, so it’s not surprising that she is reluctant to give it up. Teenagers do not like change.
  • We tried out using Nearpod, simply going through the sample presentation to see how it worked. The students know they will get the chance to do some presentations, and they seem genuinely excited to use this tool. Today they asked if I had created another Nearpod presentation for them, and were disappointed when I hadn’t. We also tried using Socrative, and while it was interesting we had some issues with it not working properly.
  • Thanks to a lot of absences and retreats last week, today was our first real day of trying to simply read Latin like we have done all year, but using the iPads as a new tool. We didn’t attempt anything too innovative today, and really substituted iPads for notebooks. Still, I think things went well. I was marking up the Latin text in Notability as we went along, and I noticed that several students were doing the same. I pointed out that I could simply email them the PDF, but they preferred to follow along and do it themselves. I have done essentially the same thing simply using the projector and whiteboard, but this was the first time that they really wanted to follow along this closely. It could certainly just be the novelty of the new tool, so I am eager to see if this lasts or not.

So, just a few days in, have my goals or preconceived notions changed? One thing that has surprised me is the extent to which the students are both quick-learners and also very tentative with new technology. Even in my small class, there is a wide range between students who are eager (and unafraid) to explore and those who are pretty tentative with the new tools. High school students are not that different from the public at large: some are quicker to adapt to new technology than others. The other item that has surpsised me is just how differently they interact with their iPad as opposed to a laptop. Virtually every student in the class had brought a laptop at various points in the semester, some more regularly than others, but they are actively looking for ways to use the iPad in ways that I never saw with their laptops. Again, some of that could simply be the novelty of the device, but I really think that the personal aspect of an iPad makes a difference. My primary concern is the same as before I started. The students’ access to an iPad enables entirely different modes of learning, and my pedagogy and curriculum needs to change along with it. But since this is an AP course, I have virtually no control over the curriculum. How do I move from simple “Substitution” to “Redefinition” and “Augmentation” activities?

State of Perpetual Sunday

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You know that feeling that sets in every Sunday evening? That anxiety/sadness that settles like a lump of poorly-digested Chipotle in your stomach at the knowledge that your weekend is over?

Well as a teacher, I get nine weeks of vacation. So now that my final week of “freedom” has arrived, I have that same Sunday Night feeling, except it will last all week and is magnified by a factor of nine. Happens every year around this time.

It’s not that I dread going back, exactly. I like my job–most of the time. It’s more an anxiety borne from not having completed the myriad things I had hoped to achieve this summer, both for business and pleasure. Books unread, planning unfinished, video games unbeaten.

Once August hits and the meetings resume and the students return, the feeling fades away. I will resolve that next summer will be more productive and more relaxing at the same time. So it goes.

Backward Design

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On episode 76 of Back to Work, Merlin talked a bit about the idea of backward design. Of course, he wasn’t talking about education, but it was the same principles that all teachers learn in their first education class. I was thinking about this today when I saw The Dark Knight Rises. I haven’t read all of the reviews I’ve saved in my Instapaper queue, but the consensus seems to be that it’s a good film, though not as strong as the first two in the trilogy, and a fitting end to the series.

I’m not sure precisely how this film stacks up against the others, but viewed as a trilogy it’s hard not to be awed by Christopher Nolan’s achievement. Watching them all, it seems clear that Nolan had a clear idea of where he wanted the story to go from the very beginning, his own version of “backward design.” It is of course entirely possible that I’m wrong, but I think it’s difficult to fake this level of completeness in a story. Breaking Bad is another prime example of this. While the details of the story have evolved over the seasons, the basic premise of Walter White turning from Mr. Chips to Scarface has driven the show successfully. I haven’t read enough interviews with Christopher Nolan to know the arc he had in mind for his Dark Knight triogy, but I can give it no higher praise than to say it compares favorably with Breaking Bad.

It’s that time of summer where I am beginning to think about my classes for the upcoming year. I’m no Vince Gilligan or Christopher Nolan, but I’d really like to be able to have just as strong a vision for what I want to happen from August to May. What is my ultimate goal for this course? In the AP course in particular, which I am teaching for the first time, that’s not an easy question to answer. Possibilities include:

  • High participation rate on the AP Latin test in May
  • High average scores on the AP Latin test in May
  • For the students to have an appreciation of the literature of Classical Rome
  • For the students to be experts on Latin grammar and syntax
  • For the students to be able to translate Classical Latin fluently

Of course, I do not have to choose just one of those goals, but the order in which I prioritize them will have an impact on the day-to-day planning of the class. Since this is my first time with this particular course, I’m not really hoping for Gilligan or Nolan level of execution (sorry, students), but at least the first season of Heroes would be nice.