I don’t know how many Christmas’ ago she got the house, but she picked it up out of the attic in her parent’s house and has all the pieces strewn across the bed and the floor.

Piece by piece, she snaps the house together.

“Maybe this is why I like England so much,” she said. “The house is Victorian after all.”

I accidentally stumbled upon Khan Academy while preparing for an algebra lesson on youtube. While many other online video lessons use quite dry narrator, Sal’s deep voice carries the listener through the video; he seems more like a fried telling someone how to do something. Also unlike many other youtube videoizers, no long annoying intros bore the listener and the audio streams through crystal clear to anyone with decent speakers. After watching his TED Video last year, I knew I would have to try this in my classroom.

So I am trying it out and I just wanted to let anyone thinking about using the program how it has been working for my classroom. There are some really great things about the program and there are some things about the program that I would absolutely change if I could.

Let’s start with the good things.

Arguably, probably because of Sal’s data driven background,, the site literally goldmines data for it’s users. Not only can you see how many problems your student got right or wrong, but also how long the student takes to complete the problem, whether or not they used a hint, and what answers they put in each time they got the problem wrong. If you had your students scanning in their scratch paper, you might be able to analyze student data all paperlessly.

But with the good, there is the bad and the ugly. Setting up student accounts was akin to trying to jump through fire. I honestly couldn’t even set up the accounts at school because, for some weird reason, you can only sign on to the site through google or Facebook.

Right off the bat, this sends up red flags. I haven’t done a lot of research on how Khan Academy gets its funding, but we certainly know that Facebook and google make their money through advertising. Thus, signing in through Khan Academy from these portals inevitably sends more of our data away to corporate giants who will sell that information to the highest bidder. Considerations of student privacy could be in order here and just general good practice would call on the creators of Khan Academy to create a more “in-house” approach for creating student accounts.

Teachers also really need to have up to date computers that are not finicky with sites like Khan Academy. In our classroom, we constantly fight with the school internet to allow us to get to the site because the security certificates and whatnot to not match up well with LAUSD. I am using mac iBook G4s from 2004 to run Khan Academy and it took quite a few workarounds before I found the right version of firefox to work with the practice programs.

Finally, the data simply cannot be downloaded or taken off-site. To put the data into a grade book requires a lot staring back and forth from one screen to another. I don’t have the option of dual screens at school at the moment, so this requires a lot of mission control back and forth on my macbook. The designers of the site really need to come up with a simple way to download the data into a CSV file so that teachers can edit and disaggregate the data in a way that is helpful to them.

All in all, I would highly recommend the actual practice and videos available on site, but I would think twice if you are thinking about using it as a tool for student assessment because of the many hurdles you might run into with it as a system.

Lately I’ve delved deep into the reverberating caverns of productivity by intently listening to a sleuth of productivity podcasts and reading a whole host of blogs about how to do “things” quickly so that I can get to the “stuff” I really want to do. There is a lot of so-called “echo” going on in the world productivity, so I often try not to get too sucked in. But…

Just like I am not into quicksilver for the sake of quicksilver, I am not into productivity for the sake of productivity. Applications that improve my productivity should be thought of more as lights in the dark cavern that help streamline the “things” that I have to do so that I can get back to searching the caverns for the “stuff.”

However, I find the “things” I have to do–taking attendance, giving out grades, giving out classwork, etc.–all take up a significant amount of time.

When I think of “things,” I imagine the metaphorical yellow forms I always have to fill out so that students can go the library or the endless pile of nurse passes students inevitably need throughout the day. I have to fill out the date, the time, the student, etc., and make sure all the i’s are dotted and the t’s crossed.

Stuff, on the other hand, is the massive amount of time I put into crafting quality keynote presentations, community math exercises where students work together to figure out the mystery box, and quality benchmark assessments that truly assess student growth over time.

I know that I don’t have it all figured out, but I think that we seriously need to consider how much time we spend on the “things” and how much time we spend on the “stuff.”

Recently, I realized that I was spending a load of time everyday doing attendance. So I created this to simply take role from a seating chart as students were walking in using a dot if they are present, a dash if they are absent, and making the dash into a T for the students that show up after the bell rings. In the present iteration, there are five boxes, one for each day of the week (this way I don’t have to worry about the actual date; I only need to know the day of the week). At the end of the week, I write the dates of the week on the bottom of the paper and put the paper in a sheet protector with all the other weeks. Behind the weeks, I put every slip that has to do with attendance in case I ever need them for later reference (this NEVER happens, but it only takes one car to kill a careless cat).

I keep all the sheet protectors and the current week attendance rosters on a clipboard so that I don’t have to be chained to a desk when I take roll. This also eliminates the bulkiness of the usual attendance roll books. Also, I just hate the inconvenience and inflexibility of traditional role books for new students and for the sheer sake of having to concentrate real hard to make sure you are bubbling in the right day of the year. I am not smart enough to concentrate on taking attendance and concentrate on helping my students at the same time (just ask my wife when I am using quicksilver and trying to listen to her talk about Art History at the same time; inevitably, I have to close the computer to listen to what she is saying). In my classes, there is no time for me to dedicate that kind of concentration to a menial task like attendance.

I don’t ever touch a computer attendance system until after fourth period rings. I have created an alarm in iCloud that goes off one minute after the bell rings so that I know to enter grades into the LAUSD system, into Easy Grade Pro and I already have the students marked in a paper grade book as mentioned above. I take the roll from a clipboard so that I can walk around and check in with students as they are walking in. I only allow myself five minutes after school to do attendance and the maybe 30 seconds it takes to do the manual by hand role at the beginning of each class. The only days where I don’t meet that goal is when LAUSD ISIS attendance system is down (which happens more often that I would like to admit).

This is one way that I move away from the “things” that toward the “stuff.” There are so many other things that I am trying to learn so that I can really work with and impact the lives of students. I am trying to find ways to make grading as transparent as possible so it does not get in the way of the “stuff” either, but students have been so well trained to see the grade as an end in and of itself. I am trying to make “stuff” the center of classroom learning because it is the “stuff” that students really need to be learning anyway…

The discourse response is left out.  We do not hear how the pharisees responded to such a claim, but from the reactions of the disciples, it is clear that the people observing Jesus’ words had difficulty understanding the meaning behind his words.  Thus, the disciples ask him further clarifying questions later on in the passage.  And although the book of Mark is relatively old for pulling out educational or didactic theories, I think we have a found a gem that we might use in our own teaching:

Don’t lay out all your chickens for the world to see.

In other words, don’t answer all of your audiences’ questions before they ask them.  Pastors often attempt to give entire sermons without leaving anything open for interpretation, but I think that the small openings they leave for people to question themselves are the vital starting point for the church.  Moreover, we ought to allow time during service or after service as a time for questions to answer some of the tough questions that get raised as a result of biblical interpretation.

Furthermore, what I have said reminds us of the importance of discussion in the midst of our didactic endeavors.  While we may think we need to get from point one to point three for people to get a “clear” picture of whatever it is we are teaching, we may find that there is a point between one and two that people have serious quandaries with.  Skipping over the quandaries may seem more efficient, but, in the long run, people fixate on the quandaries and need quality time to explore these issues within the discourse community.

Building up and constructing comprehension of a text should be a community endeavor.  There are a number of programs nowadays that allow for communities of faith to build these models together based on their comprehension and subsequent discussion of a text.  One that I would suggest is google documents.  Here we have a place for people to come together and write corporate documents with infinite time to add or delete content as needed.  Exploring such technologies could provide innovative and novel was for church to construct meaning from text in the future.

Sola Scriptura vs. Prima Scriptura
Scot McKnight reviews a book by N. Clayton Croy that argues that we primarily use scripture rather than only use scripture. Scripture, according to Croy, can only be interpreted within the context of other contextual factors. What think you?

To Hell or Not to Hell?
That is the question that John Frye asks on Scot McKnight’s blog. The comments after the post are the most interesting part to me.

Teaching about Homosexuality in Schools
Teaching about homosexuality will become required and more prominent if Gov. Brown of California signs this CA legislation.

Do College Scholarships “Pay off?”
According to Wisconsin, yes they do.

First to the teacher (although a pastor is just as much so a teacher), I rediscuss the importance of helping students develop discipline-specific knowledge when they are interacting in your field.  Too often we think of students as either comprehending something or not comprehending something, but most of the time, as Langer notes, student comprehension is “a mixture of understandings, questions, hypotheses, and connections to previous knowledge and experience.”

Students come to a specific subject with very little knowledge of how experts in that field interact with one another and why those experts interact in the way they do.  In fact, those experts only learned how to interact because of complex sociocultural cues they picked up as they worked for days, months, and years in a particular discipline.  A scientist, for instance, learns about the scientific method, but probably understood little about the actual process until actually performing his first experiment and seeing how his theoretical knowledge of the field played out in a specific context.  Preparing students, no matter what their specific field, for this so-called “lab time” is the ultimate goal of any discourse we have in the classroom.

In other words, when a student hears a math word problem for the first time, he is not simply going to read the question and understand what he is supposed to do.  The students will first need to be taught that when mathematicians write word problems, they mean for us to read them, analyze and isolate variables, solve the problem, and then check our answer to see if it is reasonable.  All of these steps require explicit instructions for the student to know how to interact with mathematicians who have already been welcomed into the “club.”

While I see some teachers talking about discipline-specific knowledge, including why the field uses their procedures and terminological jargon the way they do, many simply skip over this step as theoretical mumbo-jumbo (thinking some of these ideas too “complex” for students).  I compare this to trying to talk about a sailboat without talking about the tides.  The currents and the winds are an integral part of the sailboating experiment and make up part of the theoretical framework even though they are not “part of the boat,” per se.  Students need to understand the environment in which the dialogue and discourse is taking place.

We cannot simply “get to the content.”

While I have less experience in a pastoral role, I have seen enough sermons to know that pastors often do a good job of sharing their conclusions during a sermon, but do little for their congregations to model their process of getting towards a conclusion.  While, for instance, it might be important to talk about helping the poor, the first step in talking would be to share fundamental framework ideas and how church, as a whole, might fit sociologically in helping people groups and why the church, in general, interacts in the world proactively.

And this is important: Talking about the poor (or any other issues/subjects in which a sermon might deal) cannot be something imposed on the outside by a pastor from some reality “out there.”  The talk about poor needs to start with student definitions and work from there.  We cannot simply “get to the content.”  The way we approach the content will be different for almost any group we interact with based on their notions of poor.  I have more to say on this pedagogical struggle for pastors, but that may have to wait for another post.

The main point I wish to get across here is that we must bring students into our discipline.  Our job is to give them the framework for the discipline and to help them interact themselves in it.  Too often, we simply leave students on the outside and share our conclusions from our work within the discipline, but students end up being unable to do any sort of the discipline-specific work because we never taught them about the parameters of the discipline).

Let us say, for instance, that you and I both view a car accident.  We will not wait until the car accident is finished and we have gone home to “make meaning” from the event.  The conversation might start like:

“Did you see what that black car just did to that white car?”

While such a phrase might seem like just a restatement asking if you saw the accident, asking such a question already shows a representation of the event and I have begun a discourse on the subject.  Most probably, I have seen an accident in the past and am comparing the event to past experiences in real life, from movies, and from accounts they I heard from friends of family.  Similarly, the other person might respond by saying:

“Yeah. The white car hit their brakes so suddenly.”

Again, this may seem like the person has just restated what they saw, but the person is already taking a perspective and, perhaps, supplying blame to the white car.  The events that we talk about almost always emphasize certain facts and leave out others in an attempt for us to create a clear picture of what we have seen.

The police might come and ask the two witnesses what they saw, but the police are bringing in their relatively vast experience with car accidents to bear on the situation.  They are, right from the start, using some sort of preconceived reliability test that they have created for situations just like this.  They look at the types of clothes people at the scene are wearing, the type of language they use, and so many other sociocultural factors.  They also hold in their pocket the signs of authority in our culture, so the way we tell a story to a policewoman might be different than the way we would tell it to a friend (just as your conception of the story changed when I called her a ‘policewoman’).

Why does all of this matter?  All of these conversations are part of a discourse.  If an historian was interested in the situation, he could record all the witnesses as they spoke, read the accounts from the drivers and policeman, read about the history of the city in which it took place, look at the different people involved in the crash and their backstory, but what would the historian come out saying?  The historian may not have been there at the time of the accident, but just like the eye witness, the historian will have inevitably seen car crashes in life or on TV and has many of the same biases.

The historian or discourse analyst might add their two cents to what happened based on the evidence they read.  He may even be close to what actually “happened” somewhere “out there” in “actuality,” but his explanations will be couched in American English and be inevitably limited in his diction, syntax, and grammar by standard English rules.  His cultural construct, if he is western, will be inevitably constructed on western philosophy, linguistics, and sociology.  Even if he has studied a different “type” of philosophy like Eastern philosophy, he will inevitably understand that philosophy through western eyes.  He or she can never fully distance themselves from it.

What has this to do with education?  Pretty much everything.  When teaching students in any content area, we should remind them that they are part of this discourse.  They should read who has come before them, understand the limitations of the field, and try their best to join in the conversation.  It is freeing, in my view, that students are not so constricted by the rules of right and wrong, but of recognition that many have come before them and that they are one of many who have tried to make sense of this world.

I am not arguing for an educational field free from “facts,” but am arguing for a study of history, math, science, art, or social studies from the perspective that those who came before us were each products of their society.  Seeing ourselves as cultural products of those who came before us give us a sense of place in a culture of western individuality.  I am arguing for a classroom that looks at a textbook and says, “Now these authors probably wrote this text for a reason?  What do you think that reason might be? Let’s spend this year trying to figure it out by analyzing the facts they put in and the facts they leave out.”

One might think that this could only work in the “softer” sciences, but there are ways to incorporate such a way of thinking in any classroom if teachers will take the time to think about how influenced they are by people who came before them and how those people influenced the way they think in their discipline.  We must consider the cultural constructs within which scientific and mathematical discoveries are made and for what political reasons they are made.  All of these things could take place in a discourse driven classroom.

This would require, however, teachers to give up their infallibility (including those in the church) and try to have a discussion about the biases and limitations of their discipline and why their field has formed to be the way it is.  It will require teachers to scaffold discipline-specific knowledge so that students can access it.  Teachers would have to listen and guide students towards valuable resources and steer students away from others, all the while giving them their best reason as to what constitutes “value.”  It would be, in my opinion, a central shift in education for the better.

As much as you can, aim to know your neighbours, and consult with the wise.  Let your conversation be with intelligent people, and let all your discussions be about the law most high. Let the righteous be your dinner companions, and let your glory be the fear of the Lord. -Ecclesiasticus 9: 14-16

While the quote above is true, I often find myself needing to explain to people the idea of “confounding variables.”  In other words, you could take similar studies from those same demographics as above comparing the socioeconomic status of those parents and find largely the same results.  Why?  Because affluent parents have money to buy books and the time to read the books because their advanced degree status affords them time to read stories to their children (largely because they are paid more per hour usually for less strenuous work).

Although the importance of reading to children cannot be emphasized enough, the real question is, “When will we, as a people, decide that reading to children is worth enough to start paying people rightly for all jobs – no matter how small – and to give them enough time off to properly read to their children?”  Such a question poses a deeper and more pressing question to the public.  Namely, how much are we willing to really decry such statistics without doing something about the statistics?

The famous educational philosopher and practitioner, Paulo Fiere, once said, not unlike the author of the book of James in the New Testament, “To affirm that men and women are persons and as persons should be free, and yet do nothing tangible to make this affirmation a reality, is a farce.”