Teaching: Make a Difference Lives

The Skills Lab was relatively quiet today a few days before the Labor Day weekend, so I had the chance to review student folders and my attendance book from the past year. As I looked at the names of students who signed up with me a year ago, when I first began work at the Shawano and Oconto Falls Regional Learning Centers, I was struck by the fact that many of the students I worked with have moved out of the lab. They have either received their GED certificate or achieved academic skills benchmarks that have led to a college program. Unlike other teachers, I am successful when I no longer see my students.

I have worked in a lot of careers and thought that I made a difference in each one.

When I worked for a weekly Catholic newspaper, my words and photos were seen by about 25,000 readers. I thought that was important. When I worked in a college marketing department, my promotions were placed in the hands of thousands of recruits, students, faculty and staff members. I thought that was important. When I worked in hospitality, I routinely hosted over 1500 guests each year. I thought that was important. When I worked in landscape design, I created and installed hundreds of creative functional landscapes. I thought these were all important.

But none of these were as important as teaching.

When you are a teacher, you not only work with students, but with their families, their friends, their coworkers and the community. The dreams that you see come to life, change lives in ways more honestly and more completely than any other career I have had the privilege to work in. I have a front row seat as students realize, often to their surprise, that they are able to succeed in a college classroom. Empowerment is a cliche, but describes the central impact of the Basic Skills Lab.

Community advocates promote Make a Difference Days. Teachers live Make a Difference Lives.

Welcome to College and Life

Today was one of a series of "Welcome Days" scheduled at the school. New students find a parking spot nearest the door, receive a printout of their schedule, get the latest information about financial aid and student services, and are given quick tour of the maze we call the college.

I volunteered to be one of two Welcomers in the General Studies section of the school. Students came up the hallway alone, in groups, with a tour guide dressed in a nifty blue NWTC shirt, or with their mom and rest of the family. My job was to welcome them (thus the name), locate the General Studies courses on their schedule, and show them the classrooms they will populate beginning next Thursday, Aug. 16, the first day of our fall term.

Most of our General Studies classrooms are straightforward: largely square in shape, functional beige, tables and chairs facing a SmartClassroom consul in the front of the room framed by whiteboards on either side. When the subject is writing, math, psychology, sociology, or ethics and diversity, we don't need a lot of extra equipment. Some of the classrooms are computer labs primed with software ready for the writing, math, and other courses. Our science classrooms are more impressive because they have more toys. Chemistry, physics, and microbiology labs look like a well-endowed high school science lab without the hand-painted homecoming posters hanging from poster tape.

The students say they are coming to see a classroom, but I doubt that is real reason. Most of them have seen plenty of classrooms and ours, while bright and shiny, are really no different than tens of others. The real reason they come is to quell their doubts about enrolling in a college in general and at NWTC in particular. One week before school starts, they are understandably nervous by this bold step. So my job today was not only to show them classrooms, but to assure them they made the right choice by in investing in their future. My job was to welcome them to the rest of their life.

Moving quickly from A to A

I didn't realize that my last blog was at the end of April of the last school year. What could I have been doing in May? Grading, prepping, correcting tests, crawling out from under my desk?

But now it's the other "A" month, August, and scheduled preparation for the 2012-13 school year begins. Actually unscheduled preparation has been ongoing since the 2011-2012 school year officially ended at the college on June 30. Summer is time for preparation, clearing and cleaning out files, writing new curriculum, and getting reacquainted with significant family members. I did work at the Shawano Regional Learning Center of the college during the summer and was introduced to WIDS (Worldwide Instructional Design System) when I wrote two Basic Education supplemental courses for our Organic Agriculture program. I also had a chance to schedule vacation time and home improvement projects.

But now it's back to work, doing what I love to do. Today has been the midday of a three-day IPA (Instructor Preparation Academy) course on Course Construction -- WIDS upon WIDS. My project has been converting a successful pilot program into competencies, objectives and assessments, so that it can be taught by other instructors. That's not as easy as it might sound. What content seems obvious to one teacher and teaching style, can be difficult to reconstruct for others. Teaching is as much a performing art as a quantifiably planned presentation.

After the IPA sessions, the school has scheduled Welcome Sessions for students at the end of this week. Monday I reconnect with the good people in Oconto Falls. The All-School In-Service is Tuesday, departmental in-services on Wednesday, and classes begin on Thursday, Aug. 16. Bang, we are back in business once again. Life moves quickly from April to August, but that is the way I like it.

How much do students learn?

"How much do students learn? How do you know?" are the final two sentences of today's NY Times column by David Brooks. Brooks gashes many academic sacred cows in this column: the idea that college makes you a better person and never mind the content, that college advances you from the hormonal confusion of high school to the ethereal thoughts of ivy towers, that students actually learn something in exchange for a decade of student loan payments.

The challenge, he writes, "is not getting educators to embrace the idea of assessment. It's mobilizing them to actually enact it in a way that's real and transparent to outsiders."

I suppose that as an instructor at a technical college I sit smug in my office knowing that in our case, students do learn because our learning product is easy to see and measure: you either learn how to run a CNC machine or you do not; you either learn how to find a vein and drawn blood or you do not; you either learn how to clean the back molars or you do not, you either learn how to produce a profit and loss statement or you do not. Our assessments are rather cut and dry. And, in my case as a basic ed instructor, my students either pass the GED tests or they do not. My instructional colleagues and I are able to point the projects, portfolios, and presentations of our students and say, "Yes, they have learned the material." Our job, we think, is much easier than, say, a French medieval scholar, a business leadership theorist, or even a tenured education professor.

Yet, Brooks challenges this complacency by asking if in addition to teaching students how to create and use widgets, do our students graduate into the workforce with the communicating and thinking skills necessary for employment as well as being contributing members of society. Gulp. He points out that studies show that nearly half the students (albeit he is talking four-year+ degrees here) "show no significant gain in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing skills during their first two years of college."

Assessment of things and activities are relatively easy. Assessment of critical thinking and communicating skills are much more difficult. The challenge, I think, is first to incorporate these critical skills in all curriculum (which we do on paper) and then work out ways to assess the learning of these skills. That is a continuing challenge for all educators. I don't consider the Brooks column as an indictment of education as much as a challenge, a challenge education needs to accept.

Losing language, losing a people

News item from Indian Country Media Network, "Alaska Native Language Loses Last Native Speaker." "The world and the Holikachuk Athabascan language suffered a great loss with the passing of Wilson "Tiny" Deacon on March 10, 2012. He was 86."

The loss of language coincides with the loss of the soul of a people, in my opinion. We are what we think and what we think is coded through our native (and sometimes acquired) languages. When the fluency of a language is lost, the language becomes a museum piece, a dusty exhibit visited only by equally dusty scholars but is, essentially, dead -- a shell of a way of life that can no longer be described. That loss is sad. Native people have long recognized the importance of native languages and have fought to retain their language as a mark of their identity. Here in Northeast Wisconsin, the Menominee and Oneida tribes work to carry on their language through the next seven generations, as they say, though that is hard to do in an overwhelming, encroaching white culture.

Julie Raymond-Yakoubian, of the University of Alaska-Fairbanks, described Mr. Deacon: "He strongly identified his life with the traditional, now-abandoned village of Holikachuk on the Innoko River in interior Alaska, where he was born. Tiny spent many years hunting and trapping in the forests of the Innoko River region and possessed an almost unimaginable wealth of traditional knowledge about the land the its inhabitants."

As a comparison of the importance of language, I think of the changes to the Catholic Church in the 1960s brought about not only by the Second Vatican Council, but also by the change from Latin to the vernacular at Sunday Mass. Once the mystery and music of the Latin prayer were replaced by the clanging sounds of English among other languages, the Church was bound to change, because the way we described and thought about the central weekly sacrament had changed. Change the language and you change the core of people. Lose the language, and the people and all they stand for fade away into history.

I mourn the loss of Wilson "Tiny" Deacon, but also of the Holikachuk way of life that has been lost.

Moving beyond the classroom

The two line summary beneath the blog title has bothered me since I started writing this in January. Do I limit myself to education and teaching, and if I do, will I be violating the privacy my students for the sake of a blog?

As you can tell, I have been a bit self-conscious about speaking on behalf of the school I work for. I think I have gotten over that. What I see in the classroom is important, and my opinion about the importance of continuing adult education stands fast and will likely continue to inspire reflections. That is, however, only part of who I am, and if this blog is to have a life beyond the rhythms of the college semester, my subject matter needs to expand into all areas that I am interested in.

I spent the last three years developing creative writing chops in a graduate program. It seems a shame to submerge them back under an undergraduate journalistic voice, the unbiased reporter of rhe mundane. So, rather than limit myself to teaching and education, I choose to expand into other subjects. A single line about exploring "the nature of things" will be more complete than what the blog had been titled. The writing may still be boring, but it will no longer be limited.

World don't want you to do that

Procrastination is a problem with workers, with students, and, yes, with instructors. We know what we need to do, we just don't get up and do it. I just read a memorial by Dinty W. Moore to memoirist Harry Crew (1935-2012) in the online blog for the online magazine, Brevity, that puts it much, much better. Crew wrote:

"You have to go to considerable trouble to live differently from the way the world wants you to live... The world doesn't want you to do a damn thing. If you wait until you got time to write a novel or time to write a story, or time to read the hundred thousands of books you should have already read -- if you wait for the time, you'll never do it. Cause there ain't no time; world don't want you to do that. World wants you to go to the zoo and eat cotton candy, preferably seven days a week."

Go out and live. Amen.