#stadingstrong

Entr’acte

/ @tchlrn_ak / Leave a comment

I am at #ecet2scak this weekend.  It is a teacher-led conference, and the acronym stands for Elevating and Celebrating Effective Teaching and Teachers.  In other words, rock star teachers come together to share what they do and build networks of awesomeness.  It’s a nationwide thing created out of the desire to raise teachers up through the sharing of stories.

Stories. I feel I’m at an (the?) entr’acte of my teaching.  This convening, as they call it, is the last thing my husband knew would happen in my career, and the last thing that gave his encouragement and enthusiasm about me attending, since he was my #1 cheerleader.

How does one do amazingly awesome teaching and learning when one’s #1 cheerleader isn’t around to soothe the doubts and provide counsel from a non-education perspective?  How does the next part of the story unfold when written through the hole of grief?  If I decide to figure it out, this blog might have another section dedicated just to holes of grief.  But the reality is that grief is now part of my teaching whether I want it or not because it is part of me.

To bring it back to teaching, how does a student get through the struggles of becoming a grown human without a cheerleader?  What holes do students cleverly carry throughout the day, wanting to or not?  What does the next act look hold for the students who drag trauma with them from class to class?

How does one make it without one’s #1 Cheerleader?

Trauma-Informed Everything

/ @tchlrn_ak / Leave a comment

trauma (noun): a deeply distressing or disturbing experience.

Trauma-informed teaching is a new term that represents what good teachers instinctively know:  a child isn’t going to learn to the best of his or her ability if they are dealing or have dealt with trauma in their life.  If a child lives in a home where there is violence and fear, her brain isn’t going to function at full capacity.  A teen who stays awake all night to keep her abuser from coming into her bedroom yet again probably isn’t going to stay awake too well in class.  Children who only eat food at school because there is nothing else are not going to have stellar Mondays.  Good teachers know that learning will not be the most important thing in these students lives when survival is on the line.  Great teachers will take the time to do something about it.

What about the children whose father’s terminal prognosis from Stage IV Kidney Cancer came to pass a lot sooner than anyone expected?  Living with a parent who has a chronic illness is stressful enough, and many families who have this prognosis do approach it as a chronic disease:  something to manage.  Priorities change, foci change, benchmarks for success change.  Great teachers work with these students to individualize for their educational needs while also helping meet social and emotional needs.

Summer 2017 in Seward, Alaska

When the passing comes, though, children react differently depending on developmental stages.  The seven-year-old takes everything seemingly in stride while feeling “a little bit sad” that her dad has died.  The nine-year-old is angry, going through all of dad’s things, pushing the boundary of established rules yet trying to step up and be helpful around the house.  The 14-year-old retreats into Netflix and laughs some of mom’s weak jokes about being a single homeowner and tries not to let the sadness overwhelm her by hanging out with a trusted friend or two.

It isn’t just trauma-informed teaching we are doing.  It is trauma-informed everything.  Because their mom is also in the midst of a great trauma and things aren’t going to run as well with a sub in her classroom as it might otherwise.  Her students are concerned and her colleagues are compassionate.

We knew my husband’s kidney cancer would shorten his life but we most certainly did not expect it to be over on Labor Day 2018.  Not when three weeks prior he had been healthy enough to travel back home from Seattle where he’d been doing treatment for six months, reconnect with his friends through visits, and transition to being a stay-at-home dad.  We expected a few more years at least of this and us being a family of five with a dog.  In twelve years of teaching at my school, we’ve only lost two parents and those were a while ago.  Three students lost a parent over that weekend, nevermind their teacher mom.

Trauma-informed everything.

Great teachers do something about it.

We love you, husband and dad.  Thank you for taking care of us so well.

Ed Stading
1966-2018

An Honor

/ @tchlrn_ak / Leave a comment

20180510_2304401474445334.jpg

See this beautiful guy?  He’s an Inupiaq hunter, retelling his success on the ice.  He drums and sings in a sing-song voice, calling, chanting.  Perhaps it is a seal he’s followed or maybe a walrus.  Regardless, he’s already been successful.  If he hadn’t, he wouldn’t be masked up and drumming;  he’d be out hunting.

Thursday night I joined four other amazing teachers from my district to be honored by British Petroleum as Teachers of Excellence.  The energy company (since of course, it isn’t just oil now) honors teachers each year and has for over 20 years.  The honorees receive $500 for their school, $500 for themselves, and a free college class about natural resources in Alaska.  One teacher is chosen as Teacher of the Year and is given $1000 for continuing education.

It was an interesting process.  First, a teacher is nominated by folk (I suspect the more, the merrier) and then invited to complete an interview form.  I’ve heard of teachers balking at that step and I suspect there are plenty that decide not to continue.  You know why?  It’s HARD for teachers to talk about all the great things they do!  For real, we are just doing our job.  The memes, “I don’t mean to brag but I totally _____” and the blank is something pretty easy and normal come to mind with I think about this.  It’s just what good teachers do!

My daughter told me later that the district should make a school of only BP Teachers because everyone’s classroom sounded so amazing.  Rightly so!  I want to be in their classrooms, too!  Congratulations Carlyn Nichols, Will Chevernek, Jen Booz, and Staci Wells!  Please brag about what goes on in your classrooms and come alongside other teachers so that every teacher in our schools knows how to be a teacher of excellence.

We had a day’s notice to have some words prepared if we were named the Teacher of the Year.  I ended up writing mine on the back of a parking receipt in addition to the words a student gave me to say:  Nitwit! Blubber! Oddment! Tweak!  It’s what I do, involve students.  (The Potterheads in the crowd chuckled when I did actually say them last night.)

Being a teacher of excellence doesn’t come without a support network of excellence.  Thank you to my students and parents, community and colleagues, district and PLN.

I joked with my husband later about now being beholden to BP but that isn’t correct.  If anything, I’m bound to teachers and helping them all establish excellence in their classrooms. Like my soapstone hunter, it’s time to dance it out because I have a story to share.

 

 

Red Zone or Bottom of the 9th?

/ @tchlrn_ak / Leave a comment

I’ll admit, I don’t often use sports metaphors.  I do love baseball and football, but they don’t encompass my being.  Our school is a basketball school and I don’t know as much about the sport as I should after a decade plus.  Certainly not enough to use basketball-based imagery.

But here I am:  one (big) assignment away from submitting all work required for my M.Ed in Education Leadership.  And clearly procrastinating it while I decide which phrase to use the rest of the night.

Red Zone:  this is the last 20 yards before a touchdown.  It makes me think of offensive plays, though the defense also has red zone stats.  (Actually, is it really a thing other than the TV graphics and commentators?  Like I said, fan, not fanatic.)  The team wants to convert the red zone field position into a score, preferably a touchdown.

Bottom of the 9th:  this is clearly an offensive term since there is no bottom of the 9th if the home team is winning.  The visiting team is on the offensive (as the defense) to keep the ball off the field, out of the stands, off the scoreboard.  The home team is actually playing offense, looking to advance runners and win the game.

Friends, I think I’m in the bottom of the 9th here.  Perhaps down by three with one out left but the bases are loaded and the clean-up hitter is at bat.  Full-count then the sweetest, juiciest pitch ever slips from the pitcher and there it goes.  Root for the home team grand slamming away.

What a dramatic metaphor…if you’re into baseball.

The good news is that the situation isn’t quite two-out, full-count drama.  More like a single runner on base and all the outs left to use in a one-run game.   And possibly extra innings because of the extension I received because my husband’s cancer decided to throw down, charge the mound, and delay the game for a bit.

So…

Stading to the plate.
Game’s on the line.
A crook of the elbow.
A shuffle of the feet.
Settle into the crouch.

And here’s the pitch.

pexels-photo-139762.jpeg

Necessity and Invention

/ @tchlrn_ak / Leave a comment

My goal was to blog once a week about Genius Hour as we did it in class. I got one week. And I think there is a draft in here somewhere for week two. But then this poor blog falls fallow, like so many other years. Well, my new co-teacher is planning on blogging once a week and I am going to use her to keep me accountable.

Necessity: I am starting my third week out of the classroom, unplanned. A month ago, we rather suddenly discovered my husband has cancer. Stage IV Renal Cell Carcinoma (Clear Cell), if you care for the specifics. We have a big, big monster to slay so we’ve left Alaska and got him set up in Seattle for care there. Family first. I’m very thankful to my co-workers, school, and district for their agreement in that belief.

Invention: Now, I know many teachers do this all the time: deliver content online to students. And I am generally moving my few electives to blended-style courses that can be (mostly) accessed asynchronously. This week, though, I’m designing a series of lessons that my co-teacher will help deliver in person to our MS ELA class so that when I’m back in person, we keep carrying on. It’s a read-aloud. I love reading aloud to students. So why let a few thousand miles interfere with that?

Here’s a video I recorded for my class where one-take dorkiness abounds.

If you’re looking for a fun elementary/middle grade read aloud to do this Spring, look up The Wild Robot and The Wild Robot Escapes, by Peter Brown.

PS.  Some friends set up a social media campaign of encouragement for us in this cancer journey; check out #stadingstrong on Facebook, IG, and some on Twitter.