Final Presentation Speech

This is the original draft of the speech that I gave today as my final presentation. Before the text, here's the YouTube version:



Debate is changing.

Ten years ago, the activity of policy debate was about speaking 300 words a minute, about using tools of reason and communication to talk about big ideas and big government initiatives. For decades now, this formula has worked well to get kids from suburban schools, rural schools and fancy private schools to come to tournaments every weekend. But it’s been hard to get kids from urban schools to succeed at the top levels of debating in the traditional manner: talk faster, research more, know everything about the far-away lands of policy and politics. Recently though, several urban schools have started a new approach: make it personal. Suddenly kids are showing up at tournaments and winning by asking new questions: how does debating affect me? How does its elitism exclude us? How can we use its tools to break it down and put it back together again as something that connects to our experience? We’ll get back to these questions in a bit.

Education is changing.

In America, it’s always fashionable to talk about the latest change and how we can grab onto it, how the old way of doing things is obsolete and should be replaced. Education has always been changing; lately it’s been changing in a way that attempts to put the experiences of students front and center. Think about the questions Adie asked of us for this final project. “How can we bring students’ backgrounds into our teaching?” Not whether, not why, those questions are assumed to already be answered. This narrative that MSU wants us to learn isn’t about progress, it isn’t about saving American jobs; it’s sort of about saving the American soul, about healing the wounds of divisiveness and hierarchy. It’s about making education relevant to students; in short, making it personal. A few weeks ago I had a conversation with Avner Segall, the professor in charge of secondary social studies for all of us going that route. One of the things Professor Segall said to me was that TE250 is the real social studies curriculum, which I thought was a very revealing statement.

I am changing.

I got into teaching to be an agent of debate within schools, to gain the power of a teacher so I could spread my message like some kind of missionary for competitive speech. And don’t get me wrong, I still believe that. But I’ve been slowly waking up to something else recently, too. Teaching as a craft, as a science, as an art is not abstract. Great teaching is personal, and to be a great teacher I will need to know a lot more than just a body of theory or a handbook of guidelines, I will need to find out how those play out in every single one of my students. I am not a particularly good social studies teacher, in any area save perhaps government and civics. Here’s a factoid for you history folks: I have taken exactly zero history courses thus far at MSU. So I’m nervous about my lack of content knowledge, but after TE302 I’m way more nervous that I won’t be able to connect with some students in my classroom. All I can hope for is that my skills at learning and communicating along with my habit of trying to think my way through life will help me to figure that out. Because after this class, I’m convinced that making connections is critical.

 Here’s the other big picture idea I got from this class: teaching is bloody difficult! I think of teaching as a conversation between a teacher and a group of students, and man there are a lot of things to pay attention to in the midst of that conversation. I plan on keeping conversation moving to get the class into a team spirit of working for a common goal, which I have my coaching background to thank for. I want to let kids’ voices be heard, and that means more than just making sure everybody talks. It means stepping back sometimes and letting their interests come out, trying to find points of connection between what they know, what they like and what we’re thinking about that day. I want to test them in ways that allow them to have perspectives and beliefs. And this all sounds nice but at the same time it’s terribly subjective and I don’t really know yet how I’m going to be fair about it.

Debate is changing, education is changing, I am changing; seems like there’s change everywhere I look. And with change in mind, I hereby announce my endorsement of Barack Obama for … oh wait, wrong speech.

In the introduction to this course I posed a question for everyone, namely what is the purpose of education? Well at the end of the class, I want to ask a different question out loud, namely what is the purpose of my education? After taking this class and working more with kids and thinking a lot, I think the answer is simple: make it personal. I am creating myself as a teacher using the tools I have available. After almost 15 years debate is woven through me like threads in a tapestry. I think philosophy is important so I want to understand what’s going on in the field of education and why. And I have a new appreciation for the challenges and rewards of teaching that I didn’t have before.

To finish up, here’s a one-sentence summary of the history of human thought. Every time a group of people comes up with thinking tools in pursuit of some goal, a different group of people will use those same tools to ask “why that goal, why not another one?” and wander off. In debate, urban kids are asking big questions about what debate is and why it exists. In education we’re looking at kids in new ways, with the big idea that maybe what kids think really matters. And for myself? I’m still wandering off but now I call that learning. And helping other people to do the same? I call that teaching. Thanks for being my classmates.

Ugh

I promise to limit the number of posts like this that I make in this blog. The last week has been a blur of one task to complete after another, and it's not done yet by any stretch. I can't write very much today because I actually have to write a paper in the next hour or so, before getting some work done for my job and facilitating a debate meeting and preparing to lead a debate session and preparing to lead a discussion in my TE302 class and ...

The only reflective thing that I figure I can say about the busybusybusy I've been experiencing lately is, "sounds like a teacher's life." Especially a first year teacher. Well, I suppose if I survive this it's a good indicator of the future. When you see another post from me when I surface for air again, you'll know that I didn't actually have that nervous breakdown I was contemplating at 4:30 AM this morning while writing my syllabus assignment for TE302.

((end of whine))

Lessons Learned

This last Thursday I finished up my final segment of tutoring at a local middle school for TE302. Before we started tutoring, as mentioned in a previous post we did an exercise trying to understand and remember middle school. We were first asked to describe our own middle school experiences, then asked for a word to predict what the middle school kids would be like. For the second question my word was "unpredictable," mostly because I hadn't worked with middle school kids in a long time and didn't know what to expect. To be honest, I also used that word because I was playing it safe by choosing an ambiguous word. The word unpredictable can have many different meanings that are either positive or negative in bent; sometimes many meanings will be true at the same time. So, I'm writing today with some disambiguation of today's post title.

1. Getting students motivated can be hard, hard work. Maybe it's fair to say that I knew this already, but only in the abstract. Also bring everything that you know about to every student encounter, because you never know what part of your experience will interface with the experiences or interests of each student. Both of these are lessons about how to teach that I learned.
   
2. It's never too early to start thinking of ways to teach specific content. I was tutoring in math, and had a great but challenging time coming up with ways to make the most abstract of subjects engaging for kids. I remember a panel discussion by new teachers that I attended, where many of them talked about the amount of time they spent just trying to innovate in lesson planning because of the relentless pace of their classes. This, some would say, is the meat and potatoes of teaching, so I'm glad that I learned at least a couple of specific lesson outlines for getting kids to understand math.
3. The more interactive a learning community, the more interesting the result. We have had to post a tutoring log each day of tutoring that answers the questions "what, so what, now what" about something we did each day. On top of that, we had to respond to at least two of the logs of our classmates. This was a lot of writing. That's for sure why I haven't posted a blog entry since the first day of tutoring, and it was sometimes hard to find time to write the log entry for each day because I wanted to make an honest effort to think through an aspect of the day each time. The quick pace of the tutoring in the summer session (four days a week for three weeks) was intense in a good way, and I really value the opportunity to not just do my own reflecting but to peek inside the heads of my classmates as they worked through their tutoring time. Many of the comments that people would post on each others' work were words of encouragement and praise, and while I liked that I especially liked the opportunity for us to really start short dialogues with each other, to prod our thinking in new directions. I am frankly awed by the obvious facility with teaching and ease of engagement that some of my classmates demonstrated. I dare say that we all learned lessons about each other these last three weeks even without a single class period together and I'm looking forward to getting to see my classmates again.
4. Empathy in teaching is challenging and good. The tutoring plan that I'd created before the first day of tutoring was sort of like a philosophy of teaching statement, now that I think about it. I wrote about teaching as building bridges from what students know to what you want them to understand, in a shared conversational space built by both the student and the teacher. In an effort to reflect on my own analogy I said one of the flaws was that it left out my own intellectual location, presuming that I could work with students no matter where they were at. I'm glad I thought a little bit about that problem beforehand, because I wound up thinking about it quite a bit in the last three weeks. I think I had to build a lot of bridges of my own just to get from what I know (and how I know it) to what the students know and how they're thinking about things.
5. Writing about your own teaching can be educational even before anyone looks at it. In some ways, this statement is just about the benefit of reflecting on one's experience. I have been collecting information about my own teaching in the context of debate coaching for some months now, but I think that writing about teaching really forced me to organize my thoughts more productively than just remembering or even reviewing it. I've never been one for journaling in general (this blog is not a natural behavior for me if you are wondering), but in the last three weeks I've very much dug it. I hope that I can find time to keep a learning journal to continuously improve my future teaching practice.
   

I might go on I suppose, but I'll stick with those for now. Our class also read two books in the last two weeks, and I've been trying to think about what to write about those as well. Onward to classtime!