That Clicking Sound

My oldest son has recently rekindled the Lego fire that began burning in his life last year. We have spent a lot of time over the past week building stuff together and we are both having a blast. One of the things we started to do was to make our own creations rather than building off of directions from a kit. I would add a piece, then Eli would add a piece, and back and forth it goes. We had very little idea of what the end product would be, but we just concentrated on picking out that next piece.

I watched as his small hands shuffled through the bin of blocks and carefully selected his next piece. I listened as he exclaimed, "this would be a good piece!" and then watched him add it to our slowly developing creation. Aside from his little voice talking to me, one of the most satisfying sounds was the squeak-and-click sound of two Lego blocks fitting perfectly into place. Eli's four year old hands still struggle with getting the pieces to make that sound and I leaned over several times to help him as we both pressed the pieces together. It is a very distinct sound that I remember well from when my small hands would press the pieces together until there were tiny, round indentations in my thumbs. It is the sound of things working. Of things coming together. Of being one step closer to the finished product.

I love that sound.

I heard the squeak-and-click sound in class this week. Instead of the sound of plastic blocks clicking together, it was fingers tapping on iPads as my students completed graphic organizers for their essays. It was the sound of low talking as students read each other's latest blog posts and gave feedback. It was the sound of my students telling me their goals for the day as I conferenced with them individually. It was the sound of the radiator blowing warm air into a nearly silent room as my students worked.

There were many other sounds over the past few weeks. Harsh sounds coming from mouths that once spoke softly. Defeated sounds made by voices once filled with joy. Some from my own mouth, some from my students.

It's been tough.

But the past few days have been worth plowing through the rough patches. We have made it to yet another clearing where there is peace and productivity. Safety and shelter.

Where the sounds of things clicking into place help give a much clearer picture of what this creation is and is turning into.

I love this sound.

Who We Are and What We Do

A roller coaster couple of weeks.

We have experienced great highs as a class, as well as great lows. It has taken awhile for me to both process the events as well as muster the courage to publish these two posts about a particular experience. They are from Wednesday and Thursday:


Yesterday:

The past week has been an emotionally draining one. 

Last week saw us sharing intensely raw and emotional blog posts together. There was an incredible sense of us coming together as a group and sharing our experiences. I heard student after student beg for more time to write so they could express what was on their hearts.  

What they shared was messy, raw, and emotionally charged. It showed their brokenness, their struggles, their burdens.

It was beautiful. 

There was an incredible sense of trust and honesty in the room. I felt like we made it to a new level of connectedness. 

And then today all the connectedness fell apart. 

The details are immaterial, but the impact was intense. A deep division occurred and emotions were at their peak. It was truly one of the most painful things I have ever experienced. The outrage and frustration was aimed at me and I would not be honest if I said I wasn’t deeply hurt. There were multiple students who came to my defense, but I still felt the blows.

But this isn't about pain or hurt or who said what. 

This is about grace and moving on.

I am thankful for an opportunity for us to spill our guts to each other, even if it was not done in the most respectful of ways. I am thankful to have an opportunity to demonstrate grace and what a fresh start looks like rather than just tell them about it.

We need to pull ourselves back together. We need to heal. We need to move on.

Fresh starts and clean slates are for us all, whenever they are needed.

Today saw us burned down to ashes.

Tomorrow will see us rise as something better.

Today:

I wrote yesterday's post in the car as I sat by the beach processing the day. I committed to putting my thoughts down and then focussing on being the husband and dad that my family deserves and needs me to be once I got home.

Being a very analytical person, it is often quite difficult for me to not examine previous conversations or events from every conceivable angle, thinking of things I should have done or said. While I did have images of the day flash in my mind, I found myself thinking more about the end of the year when I could high five, fist bump, or shake hands with my eighth grade students as they conclude their time at our school. I kept imagining how significant it will be to shake or slap hands with a deep knowledge of all that we have been through together. The triumphs. The challenges. The wounds. The healing.

Today, that restoration and healing began.

We begin every class with students reading the mastery objectives for the day. I always write them in "I can" language, and the first one on the board was "I can rise from the ashes." I saw so many smiling and eager faces as a student read that. She happened to be the one who articulated the meaning behind OOTA at the beginning of the year and she knocked it out of the park again today: "That's just who we are and what we do."

That is who we are and what we do.

For the majority of class, we moved forward by going outside to examine trees for Winter Moths and will be reporting our findings through Vitalsigns.org.

For a few students, restoration looked like individual conversations where we talked about how to move forward and be the best that we can be. It was incredibly touching to see students ask for forgiveness and a fresh start.

It was wonderful to give a fresh start and see smiles on faces that have recently held frowns.

Today, we rose from the ashes and became something better.

It's who we are and what we do.

The Dream

This past week was draining in so many ways. I am formulating multiple things to write about, and this post is not about any of them. This is a quickie. My dream for what education could/should be. It hit me tonight as I thought about several of my students who are struggling with particular content areas.

This is not the whole of the dream, but merely one small aspect of what I could do to teach my students to learn and to help change lives. Both theirs, and mine.

I believe in marketing as a key strategy in my classroom. How something is pitched to the students often plays a significant role in how engaged the students are in the content. I would love to capitalize on my students' natural inquisitiveness and pitch to them that we are focussing on how stuff works: Here's how understanding other people's writing works. Here's how expressing our own opinions, ideas, frustrations, thoughts, feelings, points of view works. Here's how governments work. Here's how civilizations work. Here's how money works. Here's how numbers and data works. Here's how life systems work. Here's how our body works. Here's how the creative process works (well, that's a stretch since the creative process often takes what works and pile drives it into something new). Here's how language works, both ours and others'. Here's how communities work. 

Instead of segmenting everything up into different blocks both within a schedule and within our minds, we would show that, while they are all separate cogs, here's how it all works together and here's why you are essential to keeping it all going. Here's when you're going to learn how to change things to make them work better.

If I do not impress upon my students that they do indeed have an essential role to play in the beautiful and messy synergy of it all, I will continue to see students staring out of windows or into screens looking for where they belong and why they should care.