Snow Sleepover: 10 Emergency Supplies You Should Immediately Stash in Your Classroom Closet

The snowpocalypse happened, and we were all under-prepared. Here are some suggestions for supplies you should put in your classroom in case of emergency. I know I'm running out as soon as the roads clear to stock up!

The past thirty-six hours have been chaos in the south east. Birmingham and the surrounding suburbs were shut down yesterday late morning due to a seemingly minor snow storm. The storm, which began during the early hours of the work day, was forecasted as much less. James Spann, the most-trusted voice in local meteorology, said it wouldn't stick. Boy, was he wrong! At least 13 people are dead after a storm and resulting gridlock that paralyzed all roads for a period of time that would make Chris Christie say, "Pfft, see, what my staff did was nothing."

What was I doing? Spending my second week as a contract teacher in a school outside Birmingham camped on the floor of my new classroom with a group of teenage girls. All roads leading to and from the school were packed with abandoned cars and wrecks. Someone went into the Cahaba River. Nobody was getting home, and we made the best of it. (Why the South Fell Apart...)

From Facebook- https://www.facebook.com/spann

My principal did a great job organizing food and sleeping arrangements. When I finally left at 2p the next day, most of my charges had been picked-up by parents, but there were still at least 70 girls (and the boys were sequestered on the other side of the school with a locked fence between the genders to avoid shenanigans.) Our school even made NPR news this morning!

I was a girl scout, and I was always taught to be prepared. That's why there were two blankets in my car last night, which I used to roll myself up like a burrito so I could sleep in front of the door and worm my way out into the hall to supervise any late-night bathroom trips. Still, I was in a brand-new classroom, more worried about posters and paper trays than emergencies, and I could have had a few more things. Here is my list:

1. A Warm Blanket

Put a warm blanket in your closet so you have something to cover yourself with, should you have to camp overnight. Many schools put the heat on a timer, meaning an unexpected overnight stay on the floor can be very, very cold. Add a tiny pillow while you're at it!

2. Bottled Water

My school had a dedicated cafeteria staff and we didn't go hungry, but it's always good to have water in case stays are extended.

3. A First Aid Kit

Be safe and have basics in your classroom always. Bandages and gauze are the bare minimums.

4. A Toothbrush and Toothpaste

A night on your floor will leave a bad taste in your mouth.

5. Dry Shampoo

You may not be able to access a shower when trapped in your school, but a can of dry shampoo (a spray-in powder) will leave you feeling less greasy and a bit more human.

6. Deoderant

Once again, make yourself feel a bit more clean with some spare deodorant. If you think you might get trapped with a bunch of funky-smelling teenagers, you could go the extra step and make it spray deodorant (so you can share.)

7. Undergarments

You don't have to go the full-step of keeping an entire change of clothes in your closet, but perhaps keeping some clean undergarments in a gallon zip-lock bag tucked away somewhere is a good idea. Some students north of 459 here might be stuck more than one night, and I'm sure those teachers don't want to go on a third day with the same underwear.

8. Power Bars

If your cafeteria has meals, they probably won't be big, hearty ones. Have some high-protein snacks in your closet that will get you through the breaks between meals. As the adult in-charge, you don't need the distraction of hunger.

9. Board Games

We had power (and Netflix), but sometimes emergencies take out utilities, and you can only watch so much TV before you want to do something social. Have some bored games in your closet for emergencies, even if it's just Bananagrams.

10. Phone Chargers

Phones die pretty quickly when you're constantly texting and checking Twitter for updates on your emergency. Keep a spare wall-charger in your classroom so you're not cut off from important communications when the battery dies.

It may be a decade before north Alabama sees another emergency on this scale, but I know that when it happens, I will be ready. Be prepared and you won't regret it, just like I didn't regret being that weird northerner with the quilt in her car when it came time to sleep on a floor with no heat.

Exercise Caution: Your Reputation and Facebook Promoted Posts

Scenario: During the 2012 election, you found a page that was supporting a candidate you supported. You hit "Like" on their page to comment on posts and share their funny info-graphics. Then in February, this page decides to post pro-marijuana images. They promote a post and suddenly your friends are getting a pro-drug post in their feed that is attributed to you. Congratulations! You've taken a dent to your squeaky clean teacher reputation.

Shocked?

This is a reality thanks to Facebook promoted posts. It seems harmless enough when you like Oreo or The Hunger Games, but comedy pages, political pages, and other less predictable Facebook pages can put your reputation at risk. 

You can't predict the stances of pages you like down the road, but the choices of their admins could put your good name on the line.

My advice? Don't friends parents or untrusted coworkers, and every few months go through your "Likes" and clean them out!

Good luck!

The Most Exhausting/Rewarding Discussion I've Ever Lead

Art by Bernie Wrightson

Last week I introduced Frankenstein to five consecutive classes of 12th grade AP students. I used a list of provided anticipation guide questions that delved into sticky issues like parental responsibility, genetic modification, the nature of good and evil, and the treatment of disabilities in America. I've run discussions where three students talk and the rest stare you down until you squirm and someone else shouts out, and I knew that I did not want this to be a three person discussion for an audience.

What I did, which worked beautifully, was I made a line down the classroom. The trick with an anticipation guide is to make everything an agree or disagree statement and to NOT allow anyone to rest somewhere in the middle. You have to pick sides, there is no abstaining from the vote.

The result was awesome. Every student had to pick a side, so when I pointed and called on someone to explain, they had already stated a position with their physical location; all they had to do was give a reason. The debate got intense and I had to be on 100% of the time. Some classes were more congenial than others. I had to moderate every moment, negotiating whose turn it was to speak and making sure that nobody got hurt feelings. When the discussion got too one-sided I had to think on my feet to play the devil's advocate.

I went home and I poured myself into pajama pants before collapsing on the couch for a two hour nap, but the intense exhaustion was worth it. By being on my feet and taking an active role in moderating each discussion, I was rewarded with a fully-engaged class that connected to the themes of the material we were about to start.

I encourage you to think outside the box when you lead discussions. How can you make it physical? How can you pull the quiet students out of hiding? Draw the line and force your students to have opinions. You'll be tired, sure, but it's pays off.

Find Vocabulary With Search Inside the Book

It's hard for me to find vocabulary for a novel by merely re-reading the book. My vocabulary acquisition is so high above my students that challenging words don't stick out to me unless they are so unusual that you wouldn't consider them worth teaching to a bunch of sixteen year olds. I'm not saying that challenging words aren't important, I'm just saying that students in public school should learn the meaning of "condolence" and "tangible" before words like "perfidious" and "gulden."

I often google vocabulary lists that other teachers have compiled and shared for use in the classroom. I put them all together and then whittle down the list to find words that will be useful in the lives of my students. Of course, when teaching these words in the context of the book, it is nice to know where exactly the words are used and in what context.

Amazon's relatively new feature, Search Inside the Book, is perfect for this. When signed-in, you can search the text of any book enrolled (most classics) and find the passage you are looking for.

How do you use it? Once you have your word list (I don't recommend teaching any more than 10 words (and that's a lot) per week), go to the page for the edition of the book you own. Below the image for the cover will be a series of links, one of them labeled "Search Inside This Book." You can use the search bar on the left of the pop-up window to search for the word. If you are not satisfactorily logged-in, you will be prompted to log-in and then returned to the Search Inside The Book page.

I used this feature to find all of the 14 words on my The Things They Carried word list, then highlighted and flagged them in my physical book. Teaching vocabulary in the context of a written work is almost-always going to yield better results than picked an arbitrary list of words to know.

Happy searching!

More QR Codes (3 Ways to Use Them in the Classroom)

What the heck is a QR code? A barcode functions in two dimensions. A scanner reads blocks from left to right. A QR code is read in three dimensions and therefore can contain much more information. They can be read through a free application on a smart phone or tablet device. They look like this:

In a previous post I outlined one idea for using QR codes in the classroom. In this post I will outline 3 ideas to incorporate technology into the physical world of your classroom through the use of QR codes.

Why We Really Can't Afford to Teach to the Test

If you are at all involved in education, whether you're a teacher, a student teacher, a student, or a parent, you have probably heard the popular alliterated phrase "teaching to the test." Until World War II, standardized tests didn't even exist. The SAT was first created to filter the surge of college applicants resulting from the GI Bill. When my mother was a child, elementary school students did not have standardized tests. Until the 1970s, publishing test results in newspapers just wasn't a thing.

We went crazy over standardized testing when George W. Bush signed No Child Left Behind into law. Now, when you hear "teaching to the test," you know that it is supposed to be bad, even if you don't know why. Logically, if we test students on what they are supposed to learn, teaching to that test should not be a problem, right? And we want to measure how well teachers do because we don't want them to slack off, right? Unfortunately, it's not that simple. Let me break it down and explain why teaching to the test is bad for our education system and bad for the future of America's economy.

What do these test measure?

The first thing to understand is that tests don't have validity, inferences do. 

Validity is how well a test consistently measures what it is supposed to. An inference is a conclusion drawn based on information or data. A set of test results is just data. So the test, being pure data, cannot be valid. Instead, the inferences we make based on that data are what have validity. Example:

A multiple choice test on the characters of Harry Potter is not valid by itself. If the test covers a wide range of characters in a balanced way, the inference that students who score well on it have knowledge of Harry Potter characters is valid. The inference that those same students also have wide knowledge of the themes of Harry Potter is less valid. The inference that they are also good at biochemistry would be completely invalid.

Standardized tests-- like a Harry Potter test is not meant to measure knowledge of biochemistry-- are not designed to measure how well a teacher teaches. 

Bad teachers.

The idea that a pencil and paper test is the magic barrier keeping bad teachers from teaching is absurd. Giving a list of facts to teach will not magically improve a poorly trained teacher, and the assumption that bad teachers are bad because they don't want to teach kids is insulting. Teachers have one of the lowest paygrades for the level of education required and work long hours planning and grading. People are teachers because they want to be teachers. If they aren't, the natural cycle of teacher turnover and administrative observations will weed them out far better than a scantron test created by a corporation.

Apples and oranges.

Classroom exams are made to compare students to content. The goal is for everyone who knows the material to score 100% and students who don't know it to fail. Mastery of the content and exam is ideal.

Standardized exams compare students to students (not content).  These tests are not made to provide pass/fail results. The items that most students do well on are useless in differentiating between students, so they are omitted from the exam. These items are usually basics and foundations.

If we do not include foundations and basics on our test, then teaching to that test gives students superficial knowledge that lacks the roots of understanding and therefore will be shortly forgotten. We are already seeing this with the AP exam. In order to differentiate between a group of already over-achieving high school students, questions such as what is Calculus? are left off the test. Yet we can all agree, even if we are not math teachers, that students testing out of introductory level Calculus should understand what Calculus is. Because of reasons like these, college entrants trained to answer a bunch of questions without really tying the information together and building a foundation, many colleges are now deciding not to accept the AP exams.

Individualized inferences.

Standardized tests are fantastic for individual achievement inferences. They are not designed to test teachers. A combination of High School GPA and SAT scores are still incredibly good predictors of first-year college performance for individual students. Standardized tests have a point, but publishing scores in the newspaper to foster competition between schools is not the point.

Standardized tests with no consequences for students are unfair measurements of teaching because-- in many cases-- the students have no incentive not to blow off the test. In fact, it is much preferable to bubble random answers and take a nap. The types of questions we find on standardized tests often only test lower-level thinking. A student might correctly identify who wrote the Declaration of Independence, who signed it, and who made the famous ride to warn that "the British are coming!", but that does not guarantee that they will understand the underlying causes of the American Revolution. Which do you think is more important?

Then how do we test our education system?

So yes, these tests do have their purposes. A well-written reading comprehension test is valid for determining which students need remediation in reading. The point is, if we make the jobs of teachers hinge on their students bubbling correct answers on a scantron, the quality of our education system will suffer. Students will leave school with a memorized list of facts, but they will never really learn anything of importance. Memorizing the names of political figures won't help them decide who to vote for and knowing the meaning of "remediation" won't help them determine the meaning of the next unfamiliar word they come up against. 

Observations and continuing education are vital to strengthening our education system. All of our focus is placed on the quality of our teachers, yet teachers aren't deciding the curriculum taught. As long as we're cutting funding to struggling schools and letting politicians decide what to cut from textbooks, our children will suffer. There are ways to evaluate the effectiveness of a teacher, but I guarantee you it has little to do with making dots with number two pencil.

Pinterest Goes Private (And What that Means for Education)

Yesterday Pinterest announced a new program and launched it on a small, test scale. Pinterest users can find three private boards at the bottom of their profile, intended for planning Christmas presents, surprise parties, and any kind of event you might not be ready to share with the public. These boards can have multiple pinners (by invite only) and keep your content hidden from the feed.

Being a nerdy teacher, and currently being challenged to insert five unique types of technology integration into a unit plan, my immediate thoughts did not go to Christmas shopping or baby showers. I, of course, was plotting uses for education.

A few months ago I wrote a blog post about ways to use Pinterest for education. Most of those were ideas for teacher Pin Boards (though I am working on a follow-up post that includes more student-use ideas). However, for the few ideas that asked students to create their own board, and for the many ideas you undoubtedly have, this new feature is a blessing.

When students post work to the internet, we as teachers have the responsibility to make sure that it is their best, portfolio-level work. After all, what goes up there stays up there. Private boards give students a chance to post works-in progress and only invite teachers to look at them. A teacher can comment and help students work out their ideas without anyone else being able to look at the project. Privacy on Pinterest will help ease some students' anxiety and give teachers a new avenue for constructive feedback.

What are you Pinterest education ideas?