The joys of parenthood, courtesy of Bill Watterson.
I have a four-year-old and an 18-month-old at home. One of the unexpectedly nice things about that is the connection and empathy it creates between me and the parents of my students. Parents will understand, for instance, how it’s possible to walk into a closet door while trying to sneak silently out of the bedroom after your 18-month-old has finally, mercifully falling asleep, and how it’s possible to break a toe on that closet door, and even how it’s possible to ignore that broken toe for a day or two because of the voice in your head that says, “I ain’t got time to have a broken toe,” doing its best Jesse-Ventura-in-Predator impression.
That’s what happened to my wife this week, and it’s why I am missing Open House for the first time in nearly 15 years. Sure, it’s only 10 minutes together, but those ten minutes help us put faces to names and (share the end-of-a-work-day exhaustion etched into those faces), and I love the opportunity to share the makerspace with parents and to showcase some of the work students are doing. It’s a window for you into the process, and it’s pretty difficult to replicate that elsewhere.
We have some options, though. In fact, the initial reason I started building websites and archiving instructional materials online was to give parents greater transparency. First, here are the handouts that were made for Open House:
- Grade Abatement Profiles with Universal Skills/Traits | The key document and philosophy for the course.
- Quick Guide to Parental Involvement | How parents can be more involved in the course.
If you only have time to read a couple of things, make it those. The second one especially serves as an overview of the course for parents. It actually functions much like an instructional post does for students; it’s designed to be interactive, not just informational, and there are lots of links and embedded documents. You can read as much or as little as you want, and you’ll still come away with a greater understanding1.
That might be the best advice I can give you: This course always offers more for students to learn, and while it’s possible to skate across the surface of it and still learn a lot, it’s what lies beneath the ice that is transformative2. The work that goes into each post is deliberate, and the more you encourage students to go back, click on links, take notes, ask questions, and think about thinking, the more they’ll develop the skills and traits we all value.
That underscores a key focus for us this year, so I’ll highlight it: This course will force students to develop self-control and resilience, which are really just applications of those universal skills and traits listed above. There is a recent post talking about self-control, for instance, which teaches students interstitially and interactively. Learning about self-control teaches them self-control.
And that brings up the second best advice I might give you here. You are reading this on the screen, and he can see how much online and interstitial material I’ve given the students to read on similar screen. That’s not a bad thing, not exactly, and I’ve actually written a bit about my own conversion to this sort of technology. But we need to put the screens down and engage with the physical world more often.
Too often that advice is turned into a screed against technology or a romanticized plea to be more like Thoreau. I want us to be much more nuanced and empathetic than that. It’s about balance, but it’s actually much more about metacognition — our practice of thinking about thinking. You can help the work we do by inviting students to observe their screen habits, question the reasons for what they choose to do, write about their media consumption, etc. I really believe that this kind of self-awareness and regular metacognition will lead to more engagement with the physical world, because that’s part of what we need to be healthy. It’s like monitoring how long you sit each day and realizing that it’s the source of your back pain — that awareness and cataloging inexorably leads to the question of how to change habits and improve experience.
That’s why I call is kind of teaching interstitial, not flipped. I’m trying to accept that students will have access to smartphones and computers regularly. Instead of forcing them to sit down and stare at that screen for hours on end, these posts and connected materials can be accessed in bursts, in those interstitial moment, as part of a regular habit of learning. This can all be printed, too, or turned into an in-class discussion. It’s flexible and responsive and highly individualized, and it invites parents to be a part of the learning, too.
Anyway, that is probably enough soapboxing for tonight. Please get in touch if you have questions or comments, and thank you for all you do for your child’s education. It’s a cliché , but it’s still a powerful truth: Education starts at home.
If you have time to read a third thing, please make it the syllabus, which is linked for each course in that second document. It answers the question, “What is a Humanities makerspace?” and gives an overview of the year. ↩
That metaphor got away from me — I’m not sure we want much to do with whatever lurks beneath a frozen lake. ↩