This week found the entire teaching staff of USD 281 headed to Plainville to participate in a collective day of in-service. This was a first, or at least a first-in-a-long-while. With school budgets taking a continual pounding from state cuts, it just made sense for districts to consolidate their resources and work together on professional development.
The keynote speaker was Diane DeBacker, who at the time of her presentation was the Kansas Deputy Commissioner of Education (she is now the official “interim” commish, as later in the week Alexna Posney resigned to accept a post in Washington). Ms. DeBacker had a 100 slide PowerPoint presentation filled with everything you’d want to know about education in Kansas.
She talked to us about how Kansas Schools again had a higher percentage of their students reach proficient or better on the state assessments for the ninth straight year. She talked about how No Child Left Behind is probably on its way out, to be replaced by the new “Race to The Top” initiative. She talked a lot about teachers, from the those who quit after their first year, or leave the profession after five years or less, to those who will be eligible for retirement in the next five. She talked about mentor programs and performance pay and how Kansas is again slipping backward in the state rankings for teacher salaries.
She talked, and she talked. We listened, all 168 of us, from five school districts, representing every grade and every subject area.
When she finished, that was when the real in-service began. At that point, the teachers split into peer groups, joined with other teachers of their grade level and or area. They were given the task of completing an action plan for a collaborative project. Most important, though, they were given time to talk.
The next several hours featured not the talk of an expert, but the talk of teachers. Veteran and novice alike shared stories, swapped ideas, and talked about how to improve student performance and learning.
Afterwards, I heard nothing but glowing reviews. “It was so nice just to have time to talk with other teachers,” one person told me. “I heard many great ideas,” said another. “I can’t wait to work on our group project,” said a third.
Teaching is essentially a very lonely profession. Especially in a small school, where each teacher is not only the chairperson of their department, they may also BE their department. I remember from my teaching, being the only person teaching my classes. I was lucky in that I had other English teachers to talk to, but they never taught the same classes. I was the only speech teacher, the only Junior English teacher, etc.
During my first year, I remember asking the other English teacher what exactly I should teach. I asked where was the curriculum guide. “Curriculum guide?” she replied. “There’s no curriculum guide. Teach what you want.”
It was a liberating experience and a very heady time, to be sure. But also lonely. When you’re completely on your own, you question everything you do. There is no one else with whom to compare your teaching.
I have come to learn that my teaching experience is similar to most small town teachers. We wear many hats and we are able to meet the needs to our students one student at a time. But who meets the needs of the teachers?
I hope that this inservice will truly be of service to our teachers. I hope that by having time to collaborate with other area teachers, our educators will expand their base of teaching knowledge. Mostly though, I hope that this collective in-service has helped our teachers understand that they are not alone. When they need help, when they need some perspective on what is going on in their classrooms, they now have a list of peers they can turn to for advice and for support.
Teachers spend their careers “in service” of children. I hope they know that there are other teachers they can reach out to when they need someone to be “in service” of them.
Painted Pumpkins (10-12-09)
This weekend, I found myself in the Hay’s Walmart staring at something I found disturbing. No, it wasn’t a box of Twinkies, though there was a box in our cart, thank you Walmart! What had caught my attention was a bin full of…painted pumpkins.
I admit, that it wasn’t unusual. Considering all the outlandish Halloween decorations one can buy these days, a few painted pumpkins were hardly noteworthy. In fact, they weren’t even scary, at least not in the traditional sense. The faces were quite happy, like little clown faces done up in bright colors with exaggerated features. A little creepy maybe, the way each face was so happy, so cartoonish. And let’s not forget that these faces were painted on pumpkins…
My first thought was that someone artistic had obviously taken a lot of time to paint these pumpkins. I imagined a huddled figure, dripping paint-brush in hand, painting pumpkin after pumpkin, smiling face after smiling face.
Then I realized that the faces were too much alike, too exact to have been done by hand. And that made these things even more depressing. I imagined some horrible machine impersonally stamping or silk screening hundreds of pumpkins with forced holiday cheer.
To me, what is truly terrifying is that there is enough of a demand for pre-painted pumpkins to justify their production. I can understand plastic pumpkins and other decorations. They can be used year after year. An actual pumpkin, though, will only last the season. I suppose people buy them because they are too busy to decorate their own real pumpkins.
From my perspective as an elementary principal, buying a mass produced painted pumpkin misses a grand opportunity to interact with children. Most kids love pumpkins and will jump at a chance to paint them, carve them, and display them. I was reminded of this while evaluating our first grade student teacher, Vanessa Underhill. She put together a multi-lesson thematic unit on the big orange gourds, and on the day I observed, those kids couldn’t get enough of everything pumpkin.
She led them through the terms: stem, skin, ribs, meat, pulp, seeds. She opened pumpkins and had the kids feel the squishing pulp and scrape the seeds. She had them read poetry about pumpkins and draw pictures of pumpkins.
Every year, elementary kids the country over visit pumpkin patches and come home bearing their own handpicked pumpkin. There is even a Charlie Brown TV special dedicated to the “great pumpkin.”
My point is that there are few things in this world that inspire a sense of wonder in a child like a Halloween pumpkin. To take the child out of the equation by buying mass produced painted pumpkins just seems sad.
Growing up, my family never painted pumpkins, we carved them the night before Halloween. It is a tradition I carry on with my family. None of the pumpkins from my childhood would win any prizes. They were not works of art. In fact, I don’t remember a single design, and could not tell you about what any of them actually looked like.
But I can remember carving them. I can remember opening them up, scraping out the gunk, drawing the design and cutting out the face. Mostly, I remember how my mom would make such a big deal over my work. I remember feeling special and loved.
Now, every Halloween, I try to create the same good feeling with my own children.
So while our pumpkins may not be as perfect, perky, and well painted as those from the store, they come with cherished memories and feelings that no amount of money could buy. If painting pumpkins is your thing, I say give a kid an unpainted pumpkin and let him or her go nuts. What they create may not be Wal-mart worthy, but the joy of that creation will be much more rewarding.
I admit, that it wasn’t unusual. Considering all the outlandish Halloween decorations one can buy these days, a few painted pumpkins were hardly noteworthy. In fact, they weren’t even scary, at least not in the traditional sense. The faces were quite happy, like little clown faces done up in bright colors with exaggerated features. A little creepy maybe, the way each face was so happy, so cartoonish. And let’s not forget that these faces were painted on pumpkins…
My first thought was that someone artistic had obviously taken a lot of time to paint these pumpkins. I imagined a huddled figure, dripping paint-brush in hand, painting pumpkin after pumpkin, smiling face after smiling face.
Then I realized that the faces were too much alike, too exact to have been done by hand. And that made these things even more depressing. I imagined some horrible machine impersonally stamping or silk screening hundreds of pumpkins with forced holiday cheer.
To me, what is truly terrifying is that there is enough of a demand for pre-painted pumpkins to justify their production. I can understand plastic pumpkins and other decorations. They can be used year after year. An actual pumpkin, though, will only last the season. I suppose people buy them because they are too busy to decorate their own real pumpkins.
From my perspective as an elementary principal, buying a mass produced painted pumpkin misses a grand opportunity to interact with children. Most kids love pumpkins and will jump at a chance to paint them, carve them, and display them. I was reminded of this while evaluating our first grade student teacher, Vanessa Underhill. She put together a multi-lesson thematic unit on the big orange gourds, and on the day I observed, those kids couldn’t get enough of everything pumpkin.
She led them through the terms: stem, skin, ribs, meat, pulp, seeds. She opened pumpkins and had the kids feel the squishing pulp and scrape the seeds. She had them read poetry about pumpkins and draw pictures of pumpkins.
Every year, elementary kids the country over visit pumpkin patches and come home bearing their own handpicked pumpkin. There is even a Charlie Brown TV special dedicated to the “great pumpkin.”
My point is that there are few things in this world that inspire a sense of wonder in a child like a Halloween pumpkin. To take the child out of the equation by buying mass produced painted pumpkins just seems sad.
Growing up, my family never painted pumpkins, we carved them the night before Halloween. It is a tradition I carry on with my family. None of the pumpkins from my childhood would win any prizes. They were not works of art. In fact, I don’t remember a single design, and could not tell you about what any of them actually looked like.
But I can remember carving them. I can remember opening them up, scraping out the gunk, drawing the design and cutting out the face. Mostly, I remember how my mom would make such a big deal over my work. I remember feeling special and loved.
Now, every Halloween, I try to create the same good feeling with my own children.
So while our pumpkins may not be as perfect, perky, and well painted as those from the store, they come with cherished memories and feelings that no amount of money could buy. If painting pumpkins is your thing, I say give a kid an unpainted pumpkin and let him or her go nuts. What they create may not be Wal-mart worthy, but the joy of that creation will be much more rewarding.
Twinkie Quest (10-5-09)
On Friday night, my wife and I left the kids with a sitter and traveled to Hays. While there, we decided to catch a show, and chose Zombieland. Now you might wonder what a grade school principal is doing going to see such a movie, but please remember I wasn’t born a grade school principal. Sometimes I like to see movies without the kids, and as Saturday night held the promise of kid friendly Toy Story and Toy Story II, Friday night we chose the R-rated zombie movie.
To our delight, the movie was not only funny, but also incredibly warm-hearted. Afterwards, my wife and I agreed that it was “the feel good movie of the year!”
As with any great movie, the strength of Zombieland is found in the characters. The main character is an introverted college kid who survives by his wits and his general distrust of all people, zombie or not. He becomes obsessed with creating rules for survival and the longer he lives, the longer his list becomes.
Then this loner kid meets a man who not only survives, but actually enjoys the ride. Before the virus, he was an average guy, but now he is a zombie killer deluxe. While the loner lives by dozens of rules to carefully and meticulously survive, the man lives by only one: “Enjoy the little things.”
Still with me? I do have a point to all this. The man, while relieving the undead of the “un” part, is in search of one simple confectionary delight: Twinkies. He tells the loner kid, “Twinkies have an expiration date. One day soon, the Twinkie gauge will be riding on empty, forever.”
It makes for an enjoyable distraction, and by the end of the film, you are really pulling for this guy to get his Twinkie.
After the movie, I reminisced. When I was a kid, my mom made me a sack lunch everyday, and more often than not I either had a Twinkie or a Ho Ho waiting for me in my blue plastic lunch box. Talking about Twinkies, made me realize that it had been years since my last Twinkie or Ho Ho. My wife then commented that our children had probably NEVER had a Twinkie.
Now, while this might not be a global emergency (unlike a zombie virus), I was still a bit shocked. Our children needed to have a Twinkie. If just once in their lives, by God, they needed to experience the savory sweet creamy yellow cake preservative filled delight that is an American snack food tradition! Okay, sometimes I can get a little worked up.
So the next day, I set out on a Twinkie Quest. First, to Dollar General, finding Little Debbie snack cakes, but no Twinkies. Then to IGA. Again, Little Debbie, but no Twinkies. The quest continued to Casey’s General Store. You guessed it, a mostly empty rack reserved for Little Debbie, but nothing even slightly resembling a Hostess product.
At that point, I realized that Hostess must contract with different stores, and they probably have some kind of competition clause, like Pepsi and Coke. Maybe Little Debbie outlets can’t get Hostess products. Maybe Hostess doesn’t serve Northwest Kansas. Apparently, my family lives in a veritable Twinkie “dead zone.”
The quest ended at Cameron’s. Just as I was about to leave, I noticed, on an otherwise empty counter, a single package of two cream-filled oblong yellow cakes. They weren’t exactly Twinkies (they were an off brand and I don’t remember the name) but they looked exactly like Twinkies. I felt like I had found the last Twinkies (albeit imitation Twinkies) on the face of the Earth.
We served them to the kids sliced like bananas, carefully rationing each bite. The kids liked them. Not loved them. Not the kind of love that only a daily dose in your lunch box can inspire. But for me, the food wasn’t as important as the lessons learned.
First, the adventure reminded me not to take things for granted. You never know when something, or someone, will suddenly become rare or non-existent.
Second, it brought home the message of a ridiculous, but highly enjoyable movie: Enjoy the little things. In the end, everything an expiration date.
To our delight, the movie was not only funny, but also incredibly warm-hearted. Afterwards, my wife and I agreed that it was “the feel good movie of the year!”
As with any great movie, the strength of Zombieland is found in the characters. The main character is an introverted college kid who survives by his wits and his general distrust of all people, zombie or not. He becomes obsessed with creating rules for survival and the longer he lives, the longer his list becomes.
Then this loner kid meets a man who not only survives, but actually enjoys the ride. Before the virus, he was an average guy, but now he is a zombie killer deluxe. While the loner lives by dozens of rules to carefully and meticulously survive, the man lives by only one: “Enjoy the little things.”
Still with me? I do have a point to all this. The man, while relieving the undead of the “un” part, is in search of one simple confectionary delight: Twinkies. He tells the loner kid, “Twinkies have an expiration date. One day soon, the Twinkie gauge will be riding on empty, forever.”
It makes for an enjoyable distraction, and by the end of the film, you are really pulling for this guy to get his Twinkie.
After the movie, I reminisced. When I was a kid, my mom made me a sack lunch everyday, and more often than not I either had a Twinkie or a Ho Ho waiting for me in my blue plastic lunch box. Talking about Twinkies, made me realize that it had been years since my last Twinkie or Ho Ho. My wife then commented that our children had probably NEVER had a Twinkie.
Now, while this might not be a global emergency (unlike a zombie virus), I was still a bit shocked. Our children needed to have a Twinkie. If just once in their lives, by God, they needed to experience the savory sweet creamy yellow cake preservative filled delight that is an American snack food tradition! Okay, sometimes I can get a little worked up.
So the next day, I set out on a Twinkie Quest. First, to Dollar General, finding Little Debbie snack cakes, but no Twinkies. Then to IGA. Again, Little Debbie, but no Twinkies. The quest continued to Casey’s General Store. You guessed it, a mostly empty rack reserved for Little Debbie, but nothing even slightly resembling a Hostess product.
At that point, I realized that Hostess must contract with different stores, and they probably have some kind of competition clause, like Pepsi and Coke. Maybe Little Debbie outlets can’t get Hostess products. Maybe Hostess doesn’t serve Northwest Kansas. Apparently, my family lives in a veritable Twinkie “dead zone.”
The quest ended at Cameron’s. Just as I was about to leave, I noticed, on an otherwise empty counter, a single package of two cream-filled oblong yellow cakes. They weren’t exactly Twinkies (they were an off brand and I don’t remember the name) but they looked exactly like Twinkies. I felt like I had found the last Twinkies (albeit imitation Twinkies) on the face of the Earth.
We served them to the kids sliced like bananas, carefully rationing each bite. The kids liked them. Not loved them. Not the kind of love that only a daily dose in your lunch box can inspire. But for me, the food wasn’t as important as the lessons learned.
First, the adventure reminded me not to take things for granted. You never know when something, or someone, will suddenly become rare or non-existent.
Second, it brought home the message of a ridiculous, but highly enjoyable movie: Enjoy the little things. In the end, everything an expiration date.
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