Sacrifice
Cold, cold heart,
Hard done by you,
Some things look better, baby
Just passing through
------------------
I got in trouble for wearing a kilt to school.
Yep, you read that right. On Graduation Day, I promptly changed from my shirt and tie to a t-shirt and a kilt, as I was about to embark on a seven-hour journey to Boston to take two kids to their flights to Shanghai. Kilts are now regular garb for me; I find them comfortable, strikingly different, functional, and fun to wear. And since people know I wear them, I figured this would be no big deal. There was a great deal of interaction between the changing room and the school van, and every interaction with parents and students felt no different than it would have wearing a pair of jeans.
Almost without thinking, I dressed about the same way on Monday, running on three hours sleep and almost out of clean laundry (with the obvious desire not to dress to the nines on the last day of school).
When the person who cuts your paychecks comes looking for you when they never show their face in your wing of the building, something's wrong.
When you email them asking what's up, and they say they just have a "thought to share," something's DEFINITELY wrong.
I won't disclose what was discussed between me and my vague boss (even those of you who think you might know who don't really know which one), save for one phrase: "Even iconoclasts find a ceiling."
I think I've found mine. And yes, I am certainly an iconoclast. I apologized and left it at that. That is no hill to die on.
-------------------
Since schools are given so little (yes, before you get out your pens, schools get by with WAY less than is needed), the art of sacrifice is one that is frequently practiced. Take, for instance, the discussion I had with a colleague about possible new schedules for next year. This is not easy. These discussions often start with the empty shell of the school day (in our case, 8:00 to 1:50; this is not a lot of time). Then, the discussions will often posit differing start and end times for each class, transition times, lunch times, and everything in between, until the participants arrive with some configuration of time blocks that is, more or less, not really a whole lot different from what existed at the beginning.
This might feel like a simple act of puzzle building, but in reality it's much deeper. It becomes a question of values, and quickly. Even a minute more passing time (in order to give kids who might struggle with executive functioning or movement more time to get from class to class), or the leveling off of classes to make for transition times that are easier to remember, or trying to make for longer blocks of time (for deeper learning), start to press against the time demands of the other competing elements in the schedule. You start to make decisions and sacrifices, and they arise quickly and frequently.
So this colleague and I did, making four or five iterations of our current schedule with different meetings times and period configurations and places for lunch and passing times. We even engaged in the revolutionary idea of *gasp* lengthening the school day. (Don't say that too loudly at my school. It makes people upset.) The schedules all looked the same, and we threw up our hands in frustration. It wasn't going to be anything groundbreaking or new, and definitely, therefore, ineffective (our current schedule certainly doesn't work).
What's my point? Simple: with no guiding philosophy, no higher ideal to drive thinking or decision-making, schools make these sacrifices in an arbitrary, haphazard way, and so will often rush to any port in a storm in order to make a chance that seems to work. Ships need beacons, and schools need philosophies, not just mission statements thrown together for visiting accreditation committees. Of course, no changes work in these scenarios with no beacon for guidance, because every priority feels like just that: a priority. There is always some source of conflict that can't just be arbitrarily resolved, and when that happens, that conflict is exacerbated by a subjective call.
In Essential Schools, I feel like we (my colleagues and I) never had this problem quite this way. Even if we had hard decisions to make or a way in which sacrifices needed to be made, we had common principles (Ten of them, and that's what they're named, really) to fall back on in order to build our rationales for the choices we made. And at least my administrators always had the nerve to inform me when a decision was out of my control, and therefore, when a decision and its consequences were not on me.
Schools still sacrifice. Time. Money. Resources. Humanpower. Energy. Even students, in our case; by virtue of priorities, private schools and charter schools make active decisions that affect who ultimately chooses to come to those schools. Much like a ship already set to sail, the operation of the thing is smooth, but changing course is harder than simply turning the wheel. It is unwise to do this steering without a map, or a compass, or a lighthouse. But schools do it all the time.
And yet, schools like mine find themselves with this sudden incentive to innovate, to change things up in order to address shrinking enrollment and a desire to differentiate themselves from the pack. This is happening to me right now, at my current school, and I'm not so sure I like it.
--------------------
Sacrifice is definitely hardest when there are two (or more) lemmas to a decision, both (all) equally valid and worthy of consideration, but only one choice is acceptable or necessary. It feels even worse when these choices feel like non-negotiables, things that we can't live without in order to function more or less as we are.
Recently, I also got in trouble for offering alternative assessments for students in my physics classes. One student complained that they had to work far harder for an A with one teacher than with me, and since they don't get to choose who they take the courses with, this was seen as unfair. The root of this inequity (and yes, it is an inequity) is that my neighbor and colleague does not allow the flexibility of revision that I do, and gives exams on a way tougher basis (he is a sit-the-exam traditionalist, and I generally prefer bigger, tougher, more genuine forms of assessment (such as laboratory investigations or projects).
I have my own philosophies as a teacher, and while they've been heavily influenced by my time in Essential Schools. Some of them are:
1. The gathering of a class is a social act. Therefore, it is a teacher's primary duty to foster solid working relationships with students, and help students form these relationships with each other. These working relationships are what is leveraged in order to improve student achievement.
2. Every student learns at their own pace. The structures we set and the boundaries we place on work and demonstration of mastery must bend to a student's needs.
3. Work is not a punishment and grading is not a punishment. Any reporting done by a teacher must accurately reflect a student's current capabilities. (Where I see this coming into conflict frequently is with the "less credit for late work" rule, where teachers will give a student who turns in late work less of a grade than the demonstrated content mastery indicates simply because the work was late. I despise no practice more.)
4. Multiple modalities of assessment are required at any given time. No student can demonstrate the entire scope of their ability and understanding in one catch-all assessment.
I could go on, but these are but a few. I could probably fill a pamphlet (maybe not a book) with these principles.
Back to the story: my department chair suggested that "maybe I should talk to [the other physics teacher] and see if you can develop a common assessment." Yeah, right.
I heard the writing on the wall. Regardless of what I believe, I was being told to do something, so I made my own sacrifice. I went to my fellow physics teacher and simply told him that I would do his end-of-semester assessments for Honors Physics from now on, because it is very clear that my priorities for assessment are far different, and if given my druthers, I would never choose a test as a summative assessment. There is no compromise to be had, and I knew it.
When discussing the issue in question with my colleague, I made clear that I will not give up my practices of allowing students multiple attempts or revisions on tests, and I will not give up on my grading. It turned out that my colleague and I grade very similarly, and regard the completion of work in a similar way. So, phew. We see things the same on those fronts. I don't have to make more sacrifices, or fight tooth-and-nail on behalf of my core beliefs.
But, I did have to ditch a staple of what I do. It felt really hard, and I was livid about it. I still am, to a lesser extent. But, once again, is it the hill to die on? Where I am, there is too much to risk just to make my last stand on one principle. There is more work to do be done that I want to be a part of.
It still sucked.
------------------------
The absolute hardest part about sacrifice is knowing when you've been the recipient of such a sacrifice, when you know full right and well that someone has sacrificed something for you for your benefit, or to make you happy. How do we show our gratitude for these sorts of acts, particularly when the benefit is not immediately obvious, and the tax on the person making the sacrifice is much more immediate? It feels hollow to utter a simple "thank you", and it feels greedy and selfish to live with the fruits of that sacrifice, and even more hollow to share them. It feels like you should sacrifice right back.
Maybe it is simply enough to know that others do sacrifice for you, every day, and maybe you just don't know what those sacrifices entail. If that instills in people a sense of empathy, a sense of being acutely aware of just what it costs to live sometimes, maybe that will be enough.
Hard done by you,
Some things look better, baby
Just passing through
------------------
I got in trouble for wearing a kilt to school.
Yep, you read that right. On Graduation Day, I promptly changed from my shirt and tie to a t-shirt and a kilt, as I was about to embark on a seven-hour journey to Boston to take two kids to their flights to Shanghai. Kilts are now regular garb for me; I find them comfortable, strikingly different, functional, and fun to wear. And since people know I wear them, I figured this would be no big deal. There was a great deal of interaction between the changing room and the school van, and every interaction with parents and students felt no different than it would have wearing a pair of jeans.
Almost without thinking, I dressed about the same way on Monday, running on three hours sleep and almost out of clean laundry (with the obvious desire not to dress to the nines on the last day of school).
When the person who cuts your paychecks comes looking for you when they never show their face in your wing of the building, something's wrong.
When you email them asking what's up, and they say they just have a "thought to share," something's DEFINITELY wrong.
I won't disclose what was discussed between me and my vague boss (even those of you who think you might know who don't really know which one), save for one phrase: "Even iconoclasts find a ceiling."
I think I've found mine. And yes, I am certainly an iconoclast. I apologized and left it at that. That is no hill to die on.
-------------------
Since schools are given so little (yes, before you get out your pens, schools get by with WAY less than is needed), the art of sacrifice is one that is frequently practiced. Take, for instance, the discussion I had with a colleague about possible new schedules for next year. This is not easy. These discussions often start with the empty shell of the school day (in our case, 8:00 to 1:50; this is not a lot of time). Then, the discussions will often posit differing start and end times for each class, transition times, lunch times, and everything in between, until the participants arrive with some configuration of time blocks that is, more or less, not really a whole lot different from what existed at the beginning.
This might feel like a simple act of puzzle building, but in reality it's much deeper. It becomes a question of values, and quickly. Even a minute more passing time (in order to give kids who might struggle with executive functioning or movement more time to get from class to class), or the leveling off of classes to make for transition times that are easier to remember, or trying to make for longer blocks of time (for deeper learning), start to press against the time demands of the other competing elements in the schedule. You start to make decisions and sacrifices, and they arise quickly and frequently.
So this colleague and I did, making four or five iterations of our current schedule with different meetings times and period configurations and places for lunch and passing times. We even engaged in the revolutionary idea of *gasp* lengthening the school day. (Don't say that too loudly at my school. It makes people upset.) The schedules all looked the same, and we threw up our hands in frustration. It wasn't going to be anything groundbreaking or new, and definitely, therefore, ineffective (our current schedule certainly doesn't work).
What's my point? Simple: with no guiding philosophy, no higher ideal to drive thinking or decision-making, schools make these sacrifices in an arbitrary, haphazard way, and so will often rush to any port in a storm in order to make a chance that seems to work. Ships need beacons, and schools need philosophies, not just mission statements thrown together for visiting accreditation committees. Of course, no changes work in these scenarios with no beacon for guidance, because every priority feels like just that: a priority. There is always some source of conflict that can't just be arbitrarily resolved, and when that happens, that conflict is exacerbated by a subjective call.
In Essential Schools, I feel like we (my colleagues and I) never had this problem quite this way. Even if we had hard decisions to make or a way in which sacrifices needed to be made, we had common principles (Ten of them, and that's what they're named, really) to fall back on in order to build our rationales for the choices we made. And at least my administrators always had the nerve to inform me when a decision was out of my control, and therefore, when a decision and its consequences were not on me.
Schools still sacrifice. Time. Money. Resources. Humanpower. Energy. Even students, in our case; by virtue of priorities, private schools and charter schools make active decisions that affect who ultimately chooses to come to those schools. Much like a ship already set to sail, the operation of the thing is smooth, but changing course is harder than simply turning the wheel. It is unwise to do this steering without a map, or a compass, or a lighthouse. But schools do it all the time.
And yet, schools like mine find themselves with this sudden incentive to innovate, to change things up in order to address shrinking enrollment and a desire to differentiate themselves from the pack. This is happening to me right now, at my current school, and I'm not so sure I like it.
--------------------
Sacrifice is definitely hardest when there are two (or more) lemmas to a decision, both (all) equally valid and worthy of consideration, but only one choice is acceptable or necessary. It feels even worse when these choices feel like non-negotiables, things that we can't live without in order to function more or less as we are.
Recently, I also got in trouble for offering alternative assessments for students in my physics classes. One student complained that they had to work far harder for an A with one teacher than with me, and since they don't get to choose who they take the courses with, this was seen as unfair. The root of this inequity (and yes, it is an inequity) is that my neighbor and colleague does not allow the flexibility of revision that I do, and gives exams on a way tougher basis (he is a sit-the-exam traditionalist, and I generally prefer bigger, tougher, more genuine forms of assessment (such as laboratory investigations or projects).
I have my own philosophies as a teacher, and while they've been heavily influenced by my time in Essential Schools. Some of them are:
1. The gathering of a class is a social act. Therefore, it is a teacher's primary duty to foster solid working relationships with students, and help students form these relationships with each other. These working relationships are what is leveraged in order to improve student achievement.
2. Every student learns at their own pace. The structures we set and the boundaries we place on work and demonstration of mastery must bend to a student's needs.
3. Work is not a punishment and grading is not a punishment. Any reporting done by a teacher must accurately reflect a student's current capabilities. (Where I see this coming into conflict frequently is with the "less credit for late work" rule, where teachers will give a student who turns in late work less of a grade than the demonstrated content mastery indicates simply because the work was late. I despise no practice more.)
4. Multiple modalities of assessment are required at any given time. No student can demonstrate the entire scope of their ability and understanding in one catch-all assessment.
I could go on, but these are but a few. I could probably fill a pamphlet (maybe not a book) with these principles.
Back to the story: my department chair suggested that "maybe I should talk to [the other physics teacher] and see if you can develop a common assessment." Yeah, right.
I heard the writing on the wall. Regardless of what I believe, I was being told to do something, so I made my own sacrifice. I went to my fellow physics teacher and simply told him that I would do his end-of-semester assessments for Honors Physics from now on, because it is very clear that my priorities for assessment are far different, and if given my druthers, I would never choose a test as a summative assessment. There is no compromise to be had, and I knew it.
When discussing the issue in question with my colleague, I made clear that I will not give up my practices of allowing students multiple attempts or revisions on tests, and I will not give up on my grading. It turned out that my colleague and I grade very similarly, and regard the completion of work in a similar way. So, phew. We see things the same on those fronts. I don't have to make more sacrifices, or fight tooth-and-nail on behalf of my core beliefs.
But, I did have to ditch a staple of what I do. It felt really hard, and I was livid about it. I still am, to a lesser extent. But, once again, is it the hill to die on? Where I am, there is too much to risk just to make my last stand on one principle. There is more work to do be done that I want to be a part of.
It still sucked.
------------------------
The absolute hardest part about sacrifice is knowing when you've been the recipient of such a sacrifice, when you know full right and well that someone has sacrificed something for you for your benefit, or to make you happy. How do we show our gratitude for these sorts of acts, particularly when the benefit is not immediately obvious, and the tax on the person making the sacrifice is much more immediate? It feels hollow to utter a simple "thank you", and it feels greedy and selfish to live with the fruits of that sacrifice, and even more hollow to share them. It feels like you should sacrifice right back.
Maybe it is simply enough to know that others do sacrifice for you, every day, and maybe you just don't know what those sacrifices entail. If that instills in people a sense of empathy, a sense of being acutely aware of just what it costs to live sometimes, maybe that will be enough.
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