Failing Forward

Uncomfortable and unprepared. That's understandable. The typical new GED student would rather be almost anywhere except in a classroom. Most of them are forced by circumstances -- and the reality of needing the credential to find a job today -- to reenter a place (the classroom) with bad memories. In their eyes, classroom work is a slog through an incomprehensible mire, lectures drone on far too long, PowerPoint projects seem pointless, and the idea of actually passing test, much less a course, a semester or a program, seems a fantasy just left of the turn toward Neverland.

Yet here they sit. Askew in the seats, rarely facing you head on, their body language screams "Let me out of here!" Yet, something directed them here and keeps them in their seats. I give them a world of credit for that kind of courage. As they sit, a little more attentive if you can get their attention and trust, the GED orientation moves deliberately, mixing information about the test sequence with guides for student success. Most of them can attain the GED and move on to better job opportunities or college courses. They can succeed if they believe in that success and put in the time and the effort.

However, I know everything is not suddenly changed in their lives as if by a sprinkle of pixie dust. Disappointments and mistakes of the past need to be addressed. We owe the students that bit of reality. Everyone, absolutely everyone, makes mistakes and suffers the consequences. What's important is what happens next.

A few years ago, a colleague recommended I read John C. Maxwell, best-selling author and motivator, who says even positive, upbeat, successful people, the kind of people we admire for their resoluteness, have "a tough time learning how to see failure positively." Even the best of us, he says, fail at what we do. In his 2000 book, Failing Forward: Turning Mistakes into Stepping Stones for Success, Maxwell prescribes a Cinderella-like transformation of discouragement, mistakes, and failure into success. He calls that process "failing forward."

During the GED orientation, I list the many successful people who failed before they succeeded (Edison, Disney, J.K.Rowling -- the list goes on and on): persistence not brilliance is the key to success. Then, I pass out a list of the book's 15 stepping stones and ask students to chose which of those steps seem to make the most sense to them. Maxwell's steps include "Learn a new definition of failure," "Change yourself and your world changes," and "Manage the weakness that manages you." I write the steps students choose on the board and we talk about why the particular steps seemed relevant to them. It's a valuable discussion. These students know about failure and disappointment. They need to know what they need to do to right their academic ship.

Every time I present this exercise, I notice many students favor the last of Maxwell's 15 steps: "Get up, get over it, get going." To my students this means they can't rely on their past, on others, or on best wishes to succeed. I think they know that. That's why they are sitting in front of me starting work on their GED. I can help guide them, but they need to provide the motive power themselves.

Maxwell's book was probably written for self-help and business audiences, but I think his ideas also line up well for students. I tell my GED students there will be times when they feel discouraged, disheartened and want to give up. These feelings are natural for anyone who wants to push the boundaries of where they are into new unknown challenges. They will make mistakes. They will be discouraged. They will fail. There is nothing wrong with that.

The key point is what do they do after they pick themselves up and brush themselves off? How do they turn mistakes into success? How will they decide to "fail forward?"

Books Every Man Should Read

"These are the books the Internet says every man should read, and it's pretty disappointing," read the Huffington Post article title (Nov. 6, 2013). Aside from asking who exactly is Mr. Internet? (an unnamed conglomeration of digital sources), I wondered how many real guys voted for the list and if the vote was before or after their team's QB was injured: yes, that would make a difference. Huffington opined, "It's not that these are bad books individually... it's just that, taken together and put in these lists, they seem to showcase an infantile, reductive version of what our culture sees as 'masculinity.'"

Mr. Internet divided the thirty-some man books into five categories (war, brothers, politics, sex, and adventure). I didn't have a problem with the general divisions, though I would substitute science fiction/horror for sex because if a guy really wants to read about sex, he's not going to consult this list. I agreed with some of the books from Mr. Internet's list though not many. Others (such as Don Quixote by Cervantes) quietly should be allowed to quietly recede into English major optional reading lists. 

It's time to stand up, say I'm a man. I read, and I think I can do better. Here's my list.

1. Books about War. The Internet correctly chose two classic guy books to front this category: Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut and Catch 22 by Joseph Heller. Billy Pilgrim and Yossarian are atypical protagonists caught in the tragedy of their times as are most guys. Both novels are as chaotic as the conflict they describe, a perfect example of form following message. No problem there. I substituted the Internet's choice of War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (I really need to read that some day), with The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkein. LOTR combines a buddy trip along with a manly, magical struggle between light and dark, plus the character names are easier to remember even in Elvish. And then, to replace predictable Internet selections from Hemingway and Mailer that no one reads any more, I chose another book no one reads any more (but should), Instant Replay: The Green Bay Diary of Jerry Kramer by Jerry Kramer. If a guy wants to read about the modern equivalent of war, there is nothing better than a book about Lombardi and the NFL.

2. Books about Brothers. The Internet's category parameters are a little fuzzy here. Sure, Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyesky is an obvious choice, though I prefer Crime and Punishment. No to the collected stories of John Cheever and how did Corman McCarthy end here with The Road? Push that to another category. I'll agree to the Internet's choice of Hamlet by William Shakespeare, so long as I can add another play to modernize and fantacize the bard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard. And, I would include two-non fiction books of brothers bonding through creation: The Making of the Atomic Bomb, by Richard Rhodes, and Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder. Nothing binds guys together more than puttering with incomprehensilbe tools in a undisclosed workshop somewhere. Los Alamos and Data General are the ultimate man caves.

3. Books about Politics. Kudos to the Internet choices of The Autobiography of Malcom X by Malcom X, Lord of the Flies by William Golding (though why not George Orwell's Animal Farm -- guys like bacon), and All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren. I'll pass on Phillip Roth and George Saunders. My substitute choices for the theme, "Politics are a Man's Business," are The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam, the excellent, continuing Lyndon Johnson biography by Robert Caro, and Lincoln's masterful maneuvering chronicled in Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin. And, just for fun, I would add the politics of our souls in The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis.

4. Books about Horror and Science Fiction. I know that the genre has outstanding female authors such as Ursula LeGuin and James Tiptree, but go to a sci-fi con and 80-percent of the registrants are guys so I'll be guy-centric here. Start this list with the classics: The Tell Tale Heart by Edgar Allen Poe and Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (OK, yes, I did make an exception for this extraordinary fireside story). Horror doesn't get any better. Add Ray Bradbury's "I love to burn" Fahrenheit 451, Frank Herbert's Dune, and anything else by Harlan Ellison and Phillip K. Dick. The Road by Cormac McCarthy should have been here along with a dose of hard sci-fi; the three volume Mars series (Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars) by Kim Stanley Robinson would work well. And the category could not be complete without Stephen King. For my taste, I would add The Stand and Pet Sematary, but you really can't make a wrong man-choice with King.

5. Books about Adventure. I kept five Internet selections here, after all what guy could argue with Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, The Call of the Wild by Jack London, Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad and Moby Dick by Herman Melville. Most guys cut their reading teeth on these books in addition to stories about Arthur, Robin and the Arabian Nights. I did cull Internet picks from Cervantes, Hunter S. Thompson, Patrick O'Brien (though my wife disagreed with this one), Don Delillo, Jack Kerovac, Robert Pirsig, James Joyce (who would pick Ulysses as an adventure book -- no wonder the original list was criticized as a "reductive version" of masculinity), and another Cormac McCarthy (a Western would have been good, but, sorry, I don't read them and this is my list). If other books need to be added -- and I'm not sure they need to be -- I would add The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe, and something by Robert Ludlum and Tom Clancy.

Five categories and thirty-four books. Are there more? Indeed there are. Would others pick other books? Well, yeah, that's what guys do: we argue about inconsequential things (see category #3), but, I think, these selections up the macho level of Mr. Internet's list. From my man cave La-Z-Boy, these books provide more backbone to male literacy. Excuse my reach but pass the buffalo wings.

Ardor Erase Dry

I like whiteboards quite a bit.

Let me restate that in Yoda-speak for artificial emphasis: whiteboards like I a lot lot.

I like their open, friendly looks a lot lot on classroom walls, how they border and organize the room. Their size, their oddly pleasing elongated shape, the sheen as the morning sun angles off their pearlescent surface. I like the brown cork tack-strip on the top of the board for poster presentations and the metal marker tray below. Sure, the markers on those trays are usually uncapped and dry but the prepared instructor brings his or her own markers -- just buy the dry erase kind. Permanent markers are really hard to get off -- a lot lot.

Some traditionalists dream of grade school blackboards, or greenboards, or grey boards or another color-never-found-in-nature boards, but I never warmed up to them. Their cold dark surfaces create gaps on classroom walls: blackholes of classroom disappointment. Not only that, but blackboards are messy and hard to read. Erasing them leave a residue that lasts practically the entire semester. Unlike the smooth arc of a chisel-head dry-erase, chalk makes an uneven, irregular line that flakes off, usually on your pants. You don't want to lean against a blackboard. And, don't even think about letting your untrimmed fingernails strike chalk board surface. Ewww.

I have never really warmed up to the Smartboards either. Nice techy try, but they are way too expensive and too small to be useful. My neighbor's Big Screen TV is larger than most classroom Smartboards. Write a just couple of lines and you have to move to the next virtual page. In comparison, writing on a whiteboard can go on, and on, and on, circling the room in ideas. Inspiration until the class files out. In contrast, the image on the Smartboard ends when the room times out.

Another problem with Smartboard is the photo marker is often off center so the writing suffers from a geographic lag. The ceiling projector image looks nice on the Smartboard, but a 1920s pull-down projector screen works just as well, and is larger and cheaper. OK yes, the touch screen feature is magical, so long as the center mark is, again, aligned. And, Smartboard graphics are nice though primitive, no better than those in found Microsoft Word. Need to advance the PowerPoint slide? Don't tap Morse Code on the board, use the laser pointer. You should unplug yourself from the front and move around the classroom anyway.

So box up the blackboards, stash the Smartboards, and spend the material budget on circling the school (classrooms, meeting rooms, hallways, cubicles, and coffee shop walls) with whiteboards. Better yet, follow the lead of the ultra-tech note-taking app company, Evernote, which painted almost every surface of their California headquarters with ideaPaint that accepts and encourages dry-erase marker inspiration. I vote for that: floor to ceiling whiteboards. Throw in a couple of pull-down screens, invent a wireless, all-in-one mobile smart-station that doesn't lumber about like a 19th-century Victorian sideboard and one happy puppy am I a lot lot. 

Scholarship Good News and Bad News

"I have some good news, some bad news, and some good news."

Jeanne Stangel, interim Assistant Chancellor for University Advancement, spoke from a downstage lecturn at the Weidner Center on the UW-Green Bay campus. But instead of facing the three tiers of cloth-backed seats, she turned her back to the gorgeous auditorium and faced toward the stage, toward us.

The good news she teased us with was that the stage was filled elbow to elbow, seat back to seat back with UWGB scholarship donors and scholarship students. The bad news was there was no more room on the Broadway-sized Weidner stage. The cavernous stage had reached its capacity during this, the 17th-Annual Chancellor's Scholarship Reception. The good news was that was the kind of problem a university wants to have: more donors than space.

The annual fall reception brought together scholarship donors with the students who received those donations. It's a great idea to match up scholarships with real faces. My wife and I fund a small named scholarship and look forward to the chance to meet our student, who, to our delight this year, brought along his mother. Both of us were helped by scholarship money when we went to college, so our donation is just paying forward those donors who helped us in the past. Scholarship money, even our small grant, does make a difference. Stangel pointed out those who receive scholarships are more likely to continue than those students who do not.

The bad news is that the need for financial assistance continues to grow. The good news is that more and more college graduates are accepting the challenge to help current struggling college students. Students who receive scholarships know there are others out there who believe in them. At events like the Weidner reception, they meet and talk with us. And, once students turn that belief into an inner confidence, they take a big step toward their personal success.

The good news is in addition to alumni campaigns, staff and faculty are also helping as best they can. Individual faculty and department groups at UWGB funded a number of scholarships that were announced at the Weidner event. That seems to be a trend at other local colleges. At NWTC, my day job, colleagues achieved an amazing 93-percent donation rate during last fall's foundation campaign. That is money that goes directly to the students we see in the classroom each day.

So yes, bad news, there are growing needs among our students, but, good news, more and more community philanthropists, alumni, faculty and staff are stepping forward, answering the call to help students pursue their dreams of college success. Scholarship donors are not just investing in an individual student, but in the idea that supporting education is the keystone to university and community advancement. A motivated, dedicated, post-secondary graduate base from UWGB, from NWTC, and from other area colleges bodes well for the future of our area. That is the best good news of all.

Pole Climber Class Picture

On September 20, 2013, I blogged about the best class I ever had: students from the Electrical Power Distribution program. This week, another "Pole Climber" class had their class picture taken in a most appropriate location on campus. I am posting it here as a followup to the earlier blog. This is a different group from my students, but it seems, by the photo, another class carries on with energy and enthusiasm.

Novelist Frederick Buechner said, "Find that place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet." The Pole Climbers have found it, about 40-feet up.

The End is Near for GED 2002

The end is near. The end is near.

That has been the cry of 60-point text boxes over the past 18 months targeted to GED students who have just one, two or three GED tests left to take. There are just two months left in the current series. Those students who, for whatever reason, have not completed the 2002 test series will find that as of January 1, 2014, the old test series scores will expire and they will have to start their second chance all over again. The end of the GED 2002 test series is near. Very, very near.

Billboards, posters, handbills, stickers, buttons, and postcards about the GED 2002 Closeout have been printed, promoted, and promulgated since the summer of 2012. The message was always simple: those students who are close to finishing the 2002 series need to make this goal a priority and complete the work that they have started. College campuses and literacy councils across the state have sent letters to students foretelling the end of the 2002 series. Too many of those letters have been returned: Addressee Unknown. So to reach the unknown we have solicited news articles, broadcast reports and PSAs about the end of the series. Some campuses even recruited college staff and fellow students and offered bounties to find those who were close to finishing their tests.

Obviously, it would be best if those students who have started the 2002 test series immediately signed up at the various GED test centers across the state to complete the series. We have extra classes scheduled, focused instruction, and dedicated instructors who want to help as many students as possible finish the series. It doesn't help anyone, if these students don't complete the credential.

And, because of this national closeout campaign, many GED non-completers have returned and we celebrate that. But I have files of too many other students who remain unconcerned even though the GED is their best entree to future success. These students have been called, emailed and posted and have not responded. Yet, sometime after the first of the year, they will wander into the GED classroom and will discover that their previous work has been replaced with new curriculum and their test scores have expired. The end will not be near then; it will be there. That will be a sad, discouraging discovery.

The Pole Climber Cohort

A cohort is a group of students who have something in common and work together toward a common purpose. Education research shows, not surprisingly, that students in a close-knit cohort do better than students who are segregated, fearful, and uncertain. As I said, when you are taking Educational Psychology, this is not a surprise.

Seeing it transform a classroom is something else.

One spring semester I had a last-minute assignment for a group of Electrical Power Technicians, the workers who dig the trenches, climb the electric poles, string the cables, and restore our power during winter storms. The students needed to complete a one-credit interpersonal communications course called "Communicating Effectively" to finish off their degree. 

The course is usually a fun one to teach: lots of out-of-your-seat exercises, group work, games and puzzles all around the notion that we communicate verbally only a small part of the time and non-verbally the rest of the time. Most of the class lessons demonstrate to the students the non-verbal side of communications. I had successfully taught the course with a mixed program of students in earlier semesters and thought the class was a hoot. These students, however, had not, for whatever reason, completed this course. It was important, my Associate Dean explained, that this group complete this course this time so that they would graduate with the rest of their class.

The students dragged themselves to the first class still wearing the outdoor gear and boots splashed tan with clay from a muddy digging project from the morning. January in Wisconsin is not a good time to dig trenches. The class members were male, 20s to late 30s, dirty, tired, hungry (my class was scheduled tight against the outdoor lab, so most missed their midday meal), and had very little interest in this course. As they slumped into their seats, feet sprawled out beneath the table, the semester looked as bleak and long as a cold February night. Hoot indeed.

But then something interesting happened. Every class has a hierarchy among the students: some of the students are leaders, some are followers. If an instructor can catch the interest of the leaders, the rest often come along. An introductory exercise, nothing special really, caught the attention of a couple of the students and first session ended well. So did the second, third, fourth sessions and so on as each of the students found an area of interpersonal communications that seemed particularly interesting to them.

Six weeks in I noticed that the group had almost perfect attendance -- unusual in non-program Gen Ed courses -- and those who missed were harassed by classmates. "Where's Randy?" I asked. "He had a hard night and missed class today, but we'll get him his homework." And they did and he did. An instructor can tell if a student will be successful by his or her attendance: most of the cohort, I called them my Pole-Climbers (they liked the name), never missed a class. 

They almost always came at the first last moment -- my classroom was four buildings away from the trades building. One moment my class was empty but then it quickly filled with their active energy. I looked forward to the class, and feeding off their enthusiasm, heavily used group work and projects in each course, saving lecture for the reading in between classes and explanation of class experience.

The final assignment of the class was their choice: either an eight to ten page paper or a short project demonstrating one of the interpersonal skills discussed during the class. All of the students picked the project option. I should have videoed the final classes as one student after the other tried outdo classmates in creativity, application and energy. On the final day, though I had written a final exam, I put it to one side, talked with them about their future work, and wished them well.

Each semester I try to achieve the same kind of success and I've taught many other excellent classes, but none achieved the magic of my Pole Climbers.

It remains the only class in which I dismissed the final exam and aced the entire class. How much of their success was their own work and how much was the unifying power of the cohort? A little of both, I suspect. I certainly don't think it was instructional brilliance. Some class members would have been successful even if mixed with students in other programs and with other instructors, but others were pulled up by their classmates to achieve a level of student success that probably surprised all of them. A strong, vibrant cohort raises the student success bar beyond anyone's expectations.