Another student take on Zander’s giving student’s an automatic “A”:

"May I axe you a question?" Astro's Got an Axe! by tohoscope

Bob is still looking for his A

Grades in middle school are controversial, especially now that students earn credits to be promoted to the next grade level. Ask a teacher at my school to “give an ‘A’” and their response is likely to be one of confusion, disbelief, laughter, or even anger. Administrators will tell you that grades should be used to measure student success and communicate progress. Unfortunately, many teachers use grades to communicate a very bad message and focus on “principle.” “Its the principle of the matter,” exclaims a colleague. “If you give an ‘A’ to a student who does nothing in your class, what kind of message are you sending the kid who works their butt off?”

So it goes back to measure and comparison (see chapter 2). Giving an A is not about allowing students a free ride and telling hard working students that it is all for nothing. Rather, it is eliminating the “anticipation of failure” and allowing the class to focus on what is more important; learning. It’s all about placing everyone on a level playing field (pardon the competitive sports analogy) and saying, “you already have the grade, what’s next?” It’s likely that the response will involve a feeling of relief and willingness to explore.

Ashley’s always reaching for an ‘A.’

However, I think the next step of giving an ‘A’ is just as important as giving the ‘A’ itself. Teachers who feel that giving an ‘A’ would eliminate student accountability will like this step the most. Requiring that students predict how they have earned the A before they have actually received it, helps them develop goals and builds intrinsic motivation. It also helps them see the possibility of being successful, something many have given up on.

Interested in seeing how I felt about this in October, click here. – Noel Nehrig

And my erudite response:

Grades are a bit like religion. There may have been a point at some time but it’s gotten lost in all of the noise and people are very scared to consider what to do if grades/religion had never existed. In the classroom, has the point of all the effort gotten lost to pursuing a grade? I mean, just like religion, isn’t all of this effort suppose to amount to something intrinsic, some good that goes beyond measure?

Grades are institution solution to communicating student progress and/or position in the A-to-F continuum within the classroom. There the measure, not the point. But i’ve seen instructors at all level quibble looking to seal up any possible loophole that a student might use to game the grading system. At best a grade is an approximation that may or may not be related to student progress fulfilling course requirements. In the end, it’s what we carry in our heads and hearts that matters more than this imperfect approximation. Funny how only those who excel and those who feel besmirched care so much about grades. What’s up with that?

Sources:
Wk 1 Reading- “A” is for Ax Murderer by Noel Nehrig. http://web.me.com/noelnehrig/The_Blog_Prince_for_EMDTMS_MAC/2010_MAC_OCD_Wk1/Entries/2010/2/6_Wk_1_Reading-_%E2%80%9CA%E2%80%9D_is_for_Ax_Murderer.html retrieved on 2/9/2010

Astro’s Got an Axe! by tohoscope. http://www.flickr.com/photos/tohoscope/182444838/ retrieved on 2/9/2010

Stone mason by sk8geek. http://www.flickr.com/photos/sk8geek/3917647300/ retrieved on 2/9/2010

Pretty Princess Picking Her Nose by Pink Sherbet Photography. http://www.flickr.com/photos/pinksherbet/3295969599/ retrieved on 2/9/2010

        

I’ve been watching Leo since the early ZD-TV days. It feels like it was early Internet, but it really wasn’t. Here was a guy and a show that was part of this tech world that I was a part of, that no one else understood. So for their last podcast for 2009, TWiT 228, they got a bit nostalgic (and funny). Good times. This was not the case several weeks ago when Leo and John C. Dvorak made fun of the NASA Tweet-up and totally forgot about what Twitter really means. Basically they took the low road and made jokes about what the hell are you going to say in 140 characters except, “I just peed in my diaper.” Twitter isn’t about the 140 characters or what one has for lunch. It’s about the community and connections that happen over time. So, sometime Leo gets it, and other times he goes for the cheap shot. Surprise, he’s human.

It is a bit strange to feel a connection with an Internet personality (who was a Cable-TV personality from a small network before that) and then discover that there’s a whole community of weirdos like me who work in tech. Following is a short documentary featuring Leo talking about the moment we’re at right now where it’s possible for a small media company can compete with giant corporations and get their message out without all the filters imposed in the past. It’s about the individual and the community and the message. It’s not about 140-characters.

Bonus video: Here’s a video circa 1996 during which Leo Laporte predicts the future. Given next week’s Apple announcement, Leo’s talk about the power of the Newton in 1996 might be all the more interesting:

Sources:
* YouTube video: TWiT 228: The TWiT Of The Decade posted by TWiT. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaq_FoA8jmo retrieved on 1/19/2010
* The Spark Series, Part 3: OPEN by Michael Sean Wright and Marc Ostrick. http://www.eguiders.com/exclusive/the-spark-series-part-3-open retrieved on 1/19/2010
* Of Mouse and Man. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzIV8BxlaQs retrieved on 1/19/2010

        

Last week I wrote this thought on my white board in my office:

What is it that you most love in life,
and how do you express it in your
day to day routine?

Thinking about the aunts and uncles who’ll be at this year’s Christmas gathering, and realizing that the list is getting shorter. My dear sister-in-law, Connie, passed last Spring. And a life-long friend whom I haven’t had the best communication with, has had incredible health difficulties since taking a fall a few months ago. For my part, I’ve been so busy, with an almost around-the-clock sense of urgency tending to my job. Because of the freedom I’ve been given I feel the need to work all the harder to deliver the best possible learning experience for my students. That’s a blessing, but I still need to pause a moment and consider bringing the bigger vision into the daily routine.

I shouldn’t let a day go by without picking up my guitar. I shouldn’t let a day go by when I don’t write in this blog. I should let a day go by when I don’t call up a friend just to say, “hi.” I’ve done these important things too infrequently this past year and that needs to change. After my uncle Joe passed, whenever I found myself relaxing for a moment, especially if the moment included a good IPA, I raised my glass in his honor. I didn’t do this because I thought that he might be haunting me or aware of my gesture, but because I wanted to honor the memory of his work ethic, what he contributed to in the life of his six daughters and dozen of grandchildren and just the man’s man who he was.

So, there needs to be more room for the meditation that I find in my guitar. Thus, last night when I should have been trying to get some sleep because I had an early morning video shoot (I was doing the behind the scene stills), I found myself listening to some Sarah McLachlan and then strumming along, then looking up the lyrics and chords for the song on the Internet, then learning the song and playing until my finger, that have long lost their callouses, forced me to quit. I’ve long felt a strong emotional connection to McLachlan, but when I listened to the lyric last night, something in the careful twist of words really connected it to the journey I’ve been on. I decided that this would be a good place to start getting back to the things/people I love in my life.

“Fallen“
Heaven bend to take my hand
And lead me through the fire
Be the long awaited answer
To a long and painful fight
Truth be told I tried my best
But somewhere long the way
I got caught up in all there was to offer
But the cost was so much more than I could bear

Though I’ve tried I’ve fallen
I have sunk so low
I messed up
Better I should know
So don’t come round here and
Tell me I told you so

We all begin with good intent
Love was raw and young
We believed that we could change ourselves
The past can be undone
But we carry on our back, the burden
Time always reveals
In the lonely light of morning
In the wound that would not heal
It’s the bitter taste of losing everything
that I’ve held so dear…

I’ve fallen
I have sunk so low
I messed up
Better I should know
So don’t come round here and
Tell me I told you so

Heaven bend to take my hand
I’ve nowhere left to turn
I’m lost to those I thought were friends
To everyone I know
Oh they turn their heads embarrassed
Pretend that they don’t see
But it’s one missed step you’ll slip before you know it
And there doesn’t seem a way to be redeemed

Though I’ve tried I’ve fallen
I have sunk so low
I messed up
Better I should know
So don’t come round here and
Tell me I told you so
I messed up
Better I should know
So don’t come round here and
Tell me I told you so

Sources:
* “Fallen” by Sarah McLachlan from her Afterglow CD

* youtube video: Sarah McLachlan Fallen Live – Macworld 2003 Keynote posted by cryotekk. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEKqFw9x_IM retrieved 12/11/2009

p.s., I used to catch hell for my affinity and attraction to artist’s like McLachlan. This person would tease me, saying that I needed to quit listening to the “lesbians” because the music was making me too moody. I’m glad that I didn’t stop listening. The music didn’t make me moody, it spoke to the shitty situation and my frustration with it. Making this song a part of my emotional vocabulary is a far better way to move past those trouble times than to pretend that they didn’t happen or wall off whole sections of ones life. There, I said it.

        

I just finished updating the reading part of my course and I somehow ended up telling my own story of Possibility. At this point in the course my students have read the first nine chapters of the Art of Possibility and are finishing up their final week in my course. They are just about to begin their last month in Full Sail’s emdtms program. Thus, the following is a glimpse of what my students suffer through. Don’t feel sorry for them. I’m the one who has to read (and grade) their blogs. Ack. Actually that is one of the best parts of this job, it’s reading the great things they share in their blogs… oh yeah, I usually share such things right here in this blog. Duh. Enjoy

:: Description
You will read the Art of Possibility chapters 10 -12 and post one entry (or more) into your blog.

:: Rationale

pacbell by joe bustillos

Ah, but the story continues from there. Truth be told, being a teacher was somewhat akin to being a phone company drone in that the highest form of praise tended to be that one always showed up for work on time and never did anything that made work for others. Yeah, I somehow ended up in another world of "lifers." Of course, I didn’t know any better so I kept doing things like teaching my students video journalism to help with their literacy and brought computers from home into my classroom. I guess I became a bit more entrepreneurial because I’d get involved in creating some new tech/ed/media program on campus, we’d have great success and then after a couple of years the funding would go away and I’d find myself working for another school/district, bringing tech/media to the natives. While getting a master’s degree and time spent working on a doctorate I continued the "create a tech program/find success/lose funding/change jobs" cycle three times. Alas, the doctorate program ran aground (twice), but I was lucky enough to work with Dr. Ludgate and somehow found a home on the opposite end of the country working for Full Sail. I am not the poster child for the Art of Possibility. But I am kind of stubborn as far as expecting a lot from myself because I’ve already been given so much. And if I can influence someone to not settle for the status quo, to push the technology, to enable their students, well then, that’s a damn good day.

The following video features someone who found amazing success, in many ways, through equally amazing failures. Having witnessed three of his incredible keynote speeches, this is not one of his better speeches. But the message is all the more real given the speech’s lack of polish. Enjoy.

:: Resources

The Practices
This books is less of a “study” book, where you try to analyze every sentence and paragraph and more a book that you want to move through and try to focus on the over-arching concepts presented. At the end of each chapter are some questions that form the “practices” part of the book. Use the questions to prompt your book notes that you will post in your blog. Feel free to answer the following study questions, or comment on the practices at the end of each chapter, or write about whatever moves you most (that’s directly related to the reading). Your choice.

Chapter 10. Being the Board: It’s not them. It’s not the circumstances. It’s me. It’s my choices. Now what do I do?

Chapter 11. Creating Frameworks for Possibility: How do I take this flash of insight and make it into daily thing? And how do I share this with others?

Chapter 12. Telling the WE Story: I told you it wasn’t about you. Have you been able to tap into the power of combining your expertise and passions with someone equally gifted? Have you had the pleasure of lifting a teammate, student, stranger up enabling them to realize their dreams and exceed anything that you could have imagined?

Coda: Now what do we do?

Sources:
Image: Pop!Tech 2008 – Benjamin Zander by Pop!Tech, http://www.flickr.com/photos/poptech2006/2968249798/ retrieved on 11/12/2009
image: pacbell01.jpg by Joe Bustillos, http://joebustillos.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/pacbell01.jpg retrieved on 11/12/2009
image: jbb & zander by Joe Bustillos, http://web.me.com/edm613/media/jbbnbzander.jpg retrieved on 11/12/2009
YouTube: Steve Jobs Stanford Commencement Speech 2005 posted by peestandingup, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1R-jKKp3NA, retrieved on 11/12/2009.

        

free child walking on white round spheres by D Sharon Pruitt

Then a couple of weeks ago I got a comment on my old blog, Jacob’s Ladder (which is why the writer makes the understandable mistake that my name is Jacob. oops):

Jacob, I’m not really skilled at computer codes, etc.,so I’ll try to get on the site using anonymous. I’m Don Kimrey My blog is Scripturestudent.wordpress.com. I came upon your site thru the “Ooze” posting and your comment there. Sounds like we have some things in common. I read right many of your posts and found them interesting and, more importantly perhaps, honest. Sounds like we traveled some of the same roads, and I discovered that a disappointed idealist makes the worst kind of cynic. But I also have come to believe God’s love is constant, even when ours falters and we’re not sure which way is up. Hang in there. You seem to be quite intelligent, and I sense that you’re on an honest quest. Let’s pray for each other. Don Kimrey

Thanks Don. The best I can promise is good thoughts about you and your journey. I’d forgotten all about the Ooze article. I wish I could find the article and my comment. Damn. Oh yeah, and today I got a letter from a local Baptist church inviting me to participate. Sounds interesting, but I think I’m better off finding misfits who appreciate Faith… just from a reasonable distance.

It’s a weird world we live in, it’s funny every day,
half the world prays like the preacher, other half don’t even pray.
So no one understands you if you pray in your own way.

Now I’m stuck here in the middle, everything is in a jam,
stuck right in the middle, doors on both sides seem to slam,
no one seem to want me, only God would take me like I am.

Well my brothers criticize me, say I’m just too strange to believe,
and the others just avoid me, say my faith is so naive,
I’m too sacred for the sinners and the saints wish I would leave – Mark Heard

Sources:
* Image: free child walking on white round spheres by D Sharon Pruitt, http://www.flickr.com/photos/pinksherbet/233228813/ retrieved on 11/04/2009.

* Stuck in the Middle by Mark Heard from the Stop The Dominoes CD

        

High Speed Aerodynamics by o b s k u r a

One of the books that I use for my course is the inspirational The Art of Possibility and in one of the opening chapters the authors, Ben & Roz Zander, propose getting rid of grades. This usually invokes strong pros and cons reactions from my students. For example…

“The author of the book, “The Art of Possibility” made a statement that “not just in this case, but in most cases, grades say little about the work done.” This statement could not be more true. The first thing I thought about when reading this chapter is the meetings that I have sat in with administrators that have implied students should earn nothing less than a 50% and that is if they even fail. Today, we are educators, which work in a data driven education system where the author’s statement of this book could not be more applicable. Grades today do not reflect the work or worth of a student for the simple fact that, like Southern California, there are so many other places that are driven by political, or administrative, holds to influence their “data” and/or “funding.” by Melissa C.

Two of Melissa’s classmates responded:

“I feel the exact same way!!! My school wanted us to also not give students anything less than a 50% a couple of years ago and last year the 50% was raised to 60%. When we were told this many of us were livid! I felt like what was the point of grading work if we were just going to GIVE grades. Where is the “Truth in Grading”? Our system depends on data for funding and political purposes. Since our high school graduation rate was so low I believe this was a strategies used to improve it. I don’t understand how passing the children when they clearly have not mastered the material. Giving students a passing grade is being done on all levels and it is so frustrating when students come into my classroom and you are thinking they are on level and find out they are very far behind.” by Nicole

The second classmate said…

“I recently shared this chapter with some of my colleagues at school and you should’ve heard the gasps of horror when I proposed that grades mean a lot less than we think. Of course, they all seem to agree that the way schools are “graded” according to NCLB is unfair. Talk about a double standard. In all actuality, grades can be a good way to provide feedback to students as long as what we are really assessing is mastery. Then again, there are a lot of better ways than grades to do that. I feel lucky that my administrator feels the same way I do (he has also read this book). Unfortunately, we have a steep hill to climb to get everyone on the same page.” by Noel

Being the class professor I had to add my two-cents:

So, part of the problem is that grades are meant to be a way to communicate progress, but rather than track the progress of the learner, they tend to be a crude measure kind of like the height requirement before a little kid could get on a rollercoaster, “rider must be this tall to ride this ride.” It doesn’t tell us anything except for that one data point. So in many ways it fails in it’s primary task. Worse than that is that this crude measure becomes the goal, when what the student is capable might be far beyond “the goal.”

Now your concern is a bit different because administrators are trying to keep students from digging themselves into a hole that they cannot get out of, because if they fail to turn in the first of three assignments, for example, they cannot make up the points needed to pass if they get a zero out of one-hundred the first time out. Now the grade is being used as an accounting tool that needs to be tweaked, which should be a sure sign that something’s amiss. There are some fundamental issues being lost in the need to show a number, forgetting that there might be dozens of reasons for the student not turning in an assignment, beginning with a basic cultural conflict between the needs of the school and the pressures at home and that the student probably can’t read. This is where data is the enemy because it provides excuses and allows decision-makers to hide from the truth that this section of the community/school wall is completely broken and needs more than meetings and studies to repair it.

Sources:
image: High Speed Aerodynamics by o b s k u r a, http://www.flickr.com/photos/mixedmedia/2650461196/ retrieved on 10/31/2009

Week 3 – Giving an A by Melissa Clark (with comments by Nicole and Noel), http://constantclarke.blogspot.com/2009/10/week-3-giving-a.html retrieved on 10/31/2009

image: Cover of “The Art of Possibility” from Google Books, http://books.google.com/books?id=qLz0SmPL-qgC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q=&f=false retrieved on 10/31/2009

        

Follow-up note on Thursday’s “Blog Action Day 09,” CNN.com reported, “The scale of involvement in the day has been impressive. So far, over 8,000 blogs have registered in 144 countries and organizers predict that there will be around 15 million readers.” BAD ’09 organizer, Robin Beck, stated in a follow-up email, “We hit 31,000 total trackable blog posts, and our current estimate is that together we reached at least 17.9 million people yesterday. We just exceeded 13,000 registered bloggers on the site and are working to get all of you who posted but haven’t yet registered into the final count.”

CNN.com

Beck continued, “We had at least three major world governments as active participants in this year’s event. United Kingdom Prime Minister Gordon Brown posted the first Blog Action Day entry in Britain at the stroke of midnight on the 15th, which was followed by Foreign Minister David Milliband and many others from the UK stationed around the world. The PSOE governing party of Spain hosted a bloggers event focused on climate change and transformed their website for the day to promote Blog Action Day. And late in the day, President Barack Obama’s White House blog joined in become part of the global movement of bloggers shaking the web.” So, in all Beck felt like it was a great success in that it sparked conversations about climate change.

Sources:

Image & article “Bloggers unite on climate change” By Matthew Knight/CNN, http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/europe/10/14/blog.action.day.climate/ retrieved on 10/16/2009

        

I recently heard that a government representative in DC wanted to call together the whole scientific community in order to determine once and for all whether human activity had any bearing on climate change. That the man feels the need to do this would indicate that he feels that there is some question as to whether what we are doing to the planet is having any lasting effect. I guess a shrinking polar ice cap and general glacial retreat can be attributed to the approach of 2012 or something like that.

So, let’s be entirely clear about what might contribute to this person’s state of doubt. We in the “Developed West” believe that the most important entity is the individual and we darn near worship the independent individual. Government, community, family, culture, they have some importance, but the most important thing in all of the universe is the individual. I before thee or we. Period. Somewhere in there is a twisted interpretation of the commission in the book of Genesis that man should go forth and conquer the world and do with it what he pleases. Man, individual, conquer, seems pretty clear.

Of course, up until this last century very very few individuals could even hope to survive a single year without the intervention or assistance of others. Forget that part. What we have here is the result of decades of individual-worship and the inability to recognize that we are, in fact, inter-connected and that everything we do has some ripple-effect across the world. The fact that we don’t “see” this, like watching dominoes knocking one another over on a table, only reveals the gross limitations to our powers of perception. Add to this that our lifespans are so pathetically short, too short for an individual to experience the changes wrought by ones actions. So, because we don’t see the changes very easily we assume that we can do whatever we please with no concern for the results of our behaviors. To me this shows how little we understand of this world we would presume to conquer. The scariest part is that those who have the need to lead and grasp at the reins of power may be most susceptible to the delusion that they as individual leaders are more important than those they represent or lead, and take no responsibility for their actions. So whether you are a five-year-old secretly coloring on the walls in your bedroom or a governor of a bankrupt state, or the former president of a religious denomination, every choice, no matter how small will effect us all on some level. We are all connected.

“Wherefore whatsoever ye have said in the darkness shall be heard in the light; and what ye have spoken in the ear in the inner chambers shall be proclaimed upon the housetops.” Luke 12: 3 (ASV)

How about we do something good with all of this power.

Sources:

image: “the heat is on” by jenny downing, http://www.flickr.com/photos/jenny-pics/3800586843/ retrieved on 10/14/2009.

        

An open letter to my emdt co-workers, co-conspirators & creativity enablers,

On one level or another I’ve been teaching communication and writing since I took my first teaching assignment 15-years ago. One thing that I learned right away was that it seemed to be a big function of the education system to take the eagerness of our little learners to share their every creation and over time crush it down to nothing, such that every fourth grader knows that no one wants hear what they have to say and even less what they think. The smart ones, in this system, are the ones who learn to speak and write in the language of their teachers, and that it’s critically important to not make any mistakes in spelling or grammar. It shouldn’t be much of a surprise that the ones who might suffer the most from this fear of writing are the ones who are part of the system that enforces this approach to writing, our masters students. But what they may not know, which I learned from my second-language 6th graders, is that they’ll never get any better at writing without working at it on an ongoing basis and that requires that I release them from the system that says that they can only write about things that the teacher cares about and only in the style set by the teacher. You have to work against a lifetime of “correction” and just get them to write before you can help them to write “better.”

As we begin to make blogging a bigger part of our process, please consider the learning process and that putting thoughts down in writing for others to read takes something more than can be expressed in a check-list (though a check-list can be very helpful in the beginning). What prompted this concern is the following exchange between two of my current students about having to do a blog in my course:

edm613 student blog entry:
“I must admit, I disliked blogging in the last class in which it was a requirement. I am really not sure why- I like to write- but it just never gelled for me. I did, however, revisit the idea of blogging after losing my job at the end of the last school year. I thought I would chronicle the ups and downs of my lack of job, talk about the new and exciting things I would encounter and boast about my new accomplishments. I would fill the pages with salsa lessons, daily musings and funny anecdotes. I think I actually managed to write a paragraph once or twice and it consisted of me complaining and moaning about emotional drudgery. I have a difficult enough time sounding interesting in one line on Twitter- I couldn’t possibly blog about my life- or lack there of.

“I decided not to re-purpose my last blog but start a new one. It will be chock full of fresh and new ideas, brilliant insight and astute observations. Words will flow from my mind, through my fingers and dance onto the page. I will be clever and captivating. What does this have to do with anything in class? Nothing, but every blog has to start somewhere. Welcome.”

Second students comment:
“I agree with you about blogging in our last class. The requirements were very limiting and seemed to hold me back. The blog became a chore and I dreaded each and every post for fear that I wouldn’t get a good grade or I would make some simple mistake and have to redo everything. I am very excited to get to share with everyone and express my thoughts more freely again. I like that you have brought a great sense of positivity into your new blog. I like your new point of view…you think you can assist me in bringing back my light?”

Standards of excellence and creativity will never be found where one doesn’t have the freedom to make a thousand mistakes first. I should know. jbb

Sources:
image: keyboard – clipart.com/jupiter graphics
thanks to jolene t. & joann s. for your thoughts and comments on blogging and giving it “one more try.”

        

Except for my Twitter feed, I haven’t been posting on my blog hardly at all over the past couple months because I’ve been moving and crazy busy at work. And I am way behind posting photos to my flickr account because I haven’t had the time to edit the shuttle launch clips. Ack. I was able to launch a demo version of a website/blog for my friend Neva. As I was updating her gig calendar I saw that she had a new YouTube video… I miss having the chance to stroll down the street and catch this girls shows. Damn. Enjoy.