Certifiable?

Davy Crockett in buckskins could have been striding through the halls at TJ last Wednesday, and not far behind him, Paul Bunyan with a double-bladed axe over his shoulder. But no, it was only Michael Sottosanti, primitive technology expert, and Mike Wilson, horse logger, two of the speakers at our “Canoe Kickoff,” an in-school field trip that introduced our tenth grade Humanities students to the year-long project to build a Native American dugout upon which we have now officially embarked.

The one hundred kids split into three groups and rotated around to three stations: Wilson and Joe Youcha, director of the Alexandria Seaport Foundation, along with master boat builder Howell Crim, showed tools and techniques for turning the one-ton Tulip poplar log that waits for us at historic Mount Vernon estate into a seaworthy craft.

The students have to make a choice, Youcha said, about which style of dugout we want to make: a pre-Columbian “hog trough”; an African-influenced Pamunkey version with a raised prow for crashing through waves; or, a Western-flavored model with more familiar “knife-point” ends that evolved after contact between the colonial settlers and the woodland Indians.

Station number two featured three interpreters from the Museum of the American Indian, who toted along replicas of indigenous boats as well as materials the kids could touch and smell, like sinew and cedar chips. Sharyl Pahe, a Navaho-Apache, explained the distinctions between three boats: the Bolivian “aymada” (this and other terms in quotes here show my best guess at the spelling), made from bundled reeds tied with prairie grass; the Hawaiin outrigger canoe, constructed with rare Koa wood along with the lighter “willy willy” for flotation; and, last, the Y’Upik Eskimo seal-skin cayak, which can be turned into a dog sled and is individually sized to each hunter (the span from one outstretched arm to the opposite elbow gives the width).

Adrienne Smith, of Cherokee extraction, told how picking a tree for a log is as special as selecting just the right Christmas tree, and described a ceremony where the builder asks permission of a tree to kill it so that he may give life to his own family with the boat it will become.

Renee Gokey, from the eastern Shawnee, taught students an Ojibway greeting, “Boo-joe,” and explained not only how birch bark was harvested for the signature canoe of that region, but the legend that led the tribes to travel to a place where food grows on top of the water (then she told us how the wild rice was actually harvested).

At the third station, primitive tech guru Sottasanti held forth in the appropriate setting of an outdoor classroom recently constructed in the school’s courtyard as a kid’s Eagle Scout project. With experiential educator Austin Birch, Mike amazed us by creating fire four different ways in five minutes, none of which involved a match. “I love to explode the myth that primitive man had a hard time doing this,” Sottasanti explained, as he twirled a stick fast enough to make a coal with a bow drill and by hand. “This one’s even easier,” he said, performing the same feat with a piston-like popper from southeast Asia that was first used thousands of years ago. Minutes later, with a dried milk thistle blossom, some sinew, and a sharp stick, Sottasanti made a blow dart that went through a card board box on Birch’s head, William Tell-style, thirty feet away.

After the event, though we had never left the school, it took a while for students and teachers alike to come back to shore. The boats-eye view of history, technology and culture that we had envisioned came into sharp focus on this special day. We plan to begin roughing out the canoe itself on Columbus Day.

Posted by Emmet Rosenfeld at 7:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I suck at golf. When I hit the ball at the driving range, it might fly straight up and land ten feet away, or hook meanly to the left. Sometimes it’s a grass cutter, burning along just off the ground. Every now and then I whack the thing just right and it feels like the heavens have parted. The little orb describes a beautiful arc lit by a shaft of heavenly light.

I haven’t been at the sport long-- just took it up this summer. Nor am I “avid.” Having two young boys pretty much prevents me from being avid at anything, except falling asleep by nine every night. “Piqued” might be a better word for the way I feel about golf right now.

The high school jock in me relishes the challenge of a new sport, while at the same time, the dad I’ve become is okay with my utter lack of skill. It takes the pressure off when par is a goal rather than an expectation. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the reason why I like golf is because I suck at it.

For one thing, there’s nothing but upside. Every time I go out, infrequently as that may be, I get better. A neighbor I ran into at the block party told me to stand with my feet in a “v” instead of parallel like a batter up to plate. One little tip, and the ball started to go straighter. Second, I’m a beginner again. Which makes me a better teacher.

This week, I had tenth graders start writing groups. Some had done it before, but most don’t get it. They’re programmed to correct grammar mistakes and say, “Good job,” even if they don’t mean it. They need to learn how to help each other’s writing without hurting each other’s feelings, but right now they’re scared to do one or the other. Much less both.

I want my writing groups to soar, like they did for me and my colleagues in the summer institute. But I have to remind myself that they might not, at first. A bunch of teachers who love their job enough to devote a summer to reading and writing about it are going to generate a different dynamic than kids wondering when this touchy-feely stuff is going to stop and the red pen will come out. Even though some of these kids are brilliant and all are smart, they’re beginners at this.

Like I am at golf, but not much else. Because, let’s face it, there comes a point in life when we know what we’re good at. And that tends to be what we stick with. We get rewarded, become accomplished. A lot of TJ kids are at this point already in life, maybe prematurely. They’re good at school, of course, and also playing the piano, programming a computer, or whatever. Whatever it is... is safe.

Conversely, we learn what not to do. “I can’t draw,” a lot of people decide, or, “Snowboarding isn’t for me.” While I can see the wisdom in not taking up a sport in which you fall on you hip over and over, where’s the danger in art? Getting a paper cut? A paintbrush in the eye?

No, the danger isn’t physical. It’s failure, or the fear of it. That’s what keeps us from trying new things. Rediscovering risk-- even if it’s only on the golf course-- puts me in touch with what some of my students, many of whom are not accomplished writers, might feel in the writing circle.

There’s a nine-hole golf course near TJ that I’m going to try to get to after school one day. I’ll leave a stack of ungraded papers in my briefcase in the car. Maybe I’ll make par on one hole. And maybe one of those essays, when I do get around to reading it, will surprise me with language that’s fresh and not scared of the red pen. Or maybe not, this time out. Let’s take a swing and see.

Posted by Emmet Rosenfeld at 9:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

We’ve survived the opening of school. Met our kids, issued lockers, given out homework. There was a lot of nervous energy, but things ran smoothly, and I had done enough planning over the past couple of weeks to actually feel a semblance of control. At this time of transition and fresh starts, I couldn’t help but notice some other memorable beginnings this week.

First day of first grade for my almost 6-year old. A mental snapshot of him I’ll always cherish: tousled hair, kakhi shorts, a dark green polo shirt (in kindergarten they didn’t have to wear the school uniform), and cool socks covered with soccer balls. When did he shed his toddler’s body and become the willowy milk-guzzler standing in front of me?

First time I couldn’t shield him from death. Lying next to Jack in bed the other night after stories, he announced in a matter of fact tone, “The Croc Hunter’s dead, you know. A stingray barb went into his heart.” I did know, since the popular conservationist’s freakish demise had been plastered all over the media for two days. But I had desperately been trying to prevent my son from finding out, assuming the news would crush him. Turns out, he saw it while watching TV with the babysitter. It also turns out that I was wrong: I couldn’t prevent him from hearing, and he could handle it. “He did a lot of risky stuff, Dad,” he consoled me.

First week for my new-to-TJ colleagues. My rookie IBET team did great. On the very first day, we managed to “flex” our schedules to get all the biology, English and tech kids together in the cafeteria for getting-to-know-you skits. During one, a boy pulled off a decent imitation of the tech teacher after only having had his class for half an hour. On other fronts, we shot around emails to keep the ball rolling on our Occoquan Bay water quality project. A bit shell-shocked by Friday, the biology teacher observed, “These kids are something. I just taught in two days what it took me a semester to do last year.” Welcome to TJ, Jennie.

First steps on the canoe project. The grant-funded plan to build a Native American dugout with traditional stone tools has been a highly abstract proposal up to this point. Two things happened that made it seem real: we got an email from our partner at the Alexandria Seaport Foundation saying he’d obtained a log and was having it delivered to Mount Vernon; and I brought in my well-worn canoe backpack, jammed with tarps, ropes and stove, to do a hands-on lesson with kids. The first bit of news surprised us. We had planned a trip with kids to see the standing tree, maybe learn about how it would be taken down and transported. Expedience trumped verisimilitude. But we do have a log.

The “magic backpack” lesson, however, was a hit. Kids acted like cultural anthropologists of the future as they sketched items from a recently discovered cache. “Describe, analyze, and infer” were our watchwords in pondering the materials, design and function of familiar and unfamiliar artifacts.

First time with my TA (this year). A sort of home room that lasts all four years, “teacher advisory” is a place for sharing news of the school and the world, playing games of touch football against other TAs, and other more or less organized forms of hanging out. All the kids in my group were in my IBET last year; together, we’re sophomores now. While we were talking about what sort of service project we want to do this year, I realized how well I knew these kids already, and imagined how these relationships might deepen over the next three years. It was a good reminder, amidst the dizzying flow of the first week, that some things are constant. Like the reason I go to work everyday.

Posted by Emmet Rosenfeld at 10:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I’ve reached that manic stage of pre-school preparation where I’m slapping together documents with the reckless abandon of a... well, of a teacher before the first week of school. Syllabi, letters home, program reports, field trip requests. If only I were paid by the word for this sort of week. Certain paragraphs, at a time like this, tend to get used more than once. For example, here’s a pithy one about the canoe which is more or less the abstract from the original grant proposal penned last spring:

Our tenth grade Humanities class will get a boats-eye view of history, culture, and technology as we build an authentic Native American canoe using traditional stone tools at Mount Vernon Estate in conjunction with the Alexandria Seaport Foundation. Students will discover the rich nexus of cultural and environmental influences that reside in the unlikely form of an age-old wooden canoe as they select and harvest a tree, use indigenous stone tools to burn and scrape the rough-hewn log, and finish it with pine tar. Beyond the classroom, we will join the regional celebration of Jamestown’s 400th Anniversary by connecting with organizations like the National Museum of the American Indian and the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, where we will display our finished product in the summer of 2007. We will create a website to document this year-long project.

Here’s a second paragraph in heavy rotation this week, about a project that my freshmen will do in what we call “IBET”:

Ninth grade students in an integrated biology, English and technology program from Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology will embark on an exciting partnership with public and private groups to monitor the water quality of an important local wetland. The Occoquan Bay National Wildlife Refuge, established in 1998, is a square mile of water and woods at the confluence of the Potomac and Occoquan Rivers in nearby Woodbridge, Virginia. Working with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service and a nonprofit conservation group, Friends of the Potomac River Refuge, students will design and execute original research experiments and gather water quality data from Catamount and Marumsco Creeks as part of what will be an ongoing effort to determine the impact of nearby development on the local watershed.

I share these paragraphs because I’m pretty sure I’ll use both of them again, in some form or another, as part of my portfolio for board certification. And, while it’s difficult to look too far over my shoulder amidst the flurry of planning for the upcoming year, in order to complete the still looming Entry Four, in addition to reusing this year’s most popular paragraphs I will need to spend time reflecting on past classroom adventures.

(Entry Four, as faithful readers of this blog or other NBPTS-savvy types will recall, tasks a candidate to describe, analyze and document “accomplishments that contribute to student learning.” In this blog, I’ve spent quite a bit of time hemming and hawing over how to do this, with the best intentions of having actually completed the entry itself by this point. I haven’t. If you too are trying to do Entry Four, see: How To Eat an Elephant, April 9; Describe, Analyze and Reflect on This, April 23; Tastes Like Chicken, April 30; Artists of Our Profession, May 7; Eat, Sleep and Breathe, May 21; The Crowded Classroom, June 4; BS Artist, June 18; During Apple-Picking, June 25.)

With one eye to the future, then, your now-cross-eyed guide glances back in time several years to retrieve another blurb, polished by frequent use then, that describes a program I developed at my last school:

How can children hold learning in their hands? At ACDS, we seek to answer that question with an exciting new program called Learning Alive! This experiential education program takes students beyond page or screen, and even beyond our walls themselves, to create opportunities that our students will cherish for a lifetime.
In the middle school, students learn and apply outdoor skills on overnight trips in the fall and spring. Outings are springboards to understanding rich local and natural history, and provide the chance to master basic outdoor skills that foster a lifelong sense of independence and confidence. Throughout the year, students at all grade levels participate in curriculum-specific field trips conceived by classroom teachers, or age-appropriate outdoor activities including local canoeing, biking, and rock climbing. Guided writing and discussion nurture observation and reflection, and ultimately, a sense of connection to community and the environment.

And so, another document (this week’s post) is cobbled together in record time with a few odd paragraphs found lying around the desk. And, as I continue to inch toward actually assembling my NBPTS portfolio, the process already begins to illuminate patterns in my teaching and philosophy that I had only vaguely recognized before.

Posted by Emmet Rosenfeld at 1:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (17)