Let's Start Celebrating Mondays

Monday is my favorite day of the week.

Monday is a clean slate.

Monday is the day to try something new.

To blaze a new trail.

To kick the tires and light the fires.

My best ideas come on Sunday night and Monday is the first time I get to test them.

I stumbled across this image a while back and I love it.

The weekend is only 2 days out of 7. If all we do all week is count down the seconds until the weekend comes we are wasting over 70% of our life. And, if you ask most people how their weekend was, they tell you it was nothing special.

Don't get me wrong. I love my family and my favorite thing in the world is spending time with them. But my family knows that I love my job, too, because family is not my only passion.

You need to find what excites you and pursue it with unrelenting energy and steadfast determination. 

Take today to pursue your passion. Your weekend will thank you for it.

America versus the World

The Media likes to pull out the random fact that the US is falling farther behind other countries in terms of Math and Science testing. Clearly our public schools are failing our students because we are not the best in the world on this standardized test. But, maybe that's ok.

This weekend I was at the NJ GAFE Summit and a student from Ramapo College spoke about a project he completed for one of his classes. His teacher used Google's Moonshot Thinking idea to ignite his passion to complete a project centered about building a strong community on campus around the World Cup Soccer matches. The student was from Nepal and mentioned that if he was in his home country the focus of class would have been to memorize the facts in the books and recite them back to the teacher for a grade. He came to America expecting school to be the same and was amazed that he was able to use his creativity to complete a project based on his passion: soccer. And that comment made me stop and think.

What if the reason we are falling behind on these Math and Science tests is because the US has been focusing more on creativity and less on knowledge?

Even though we are standardized test crazy right now, nothing is going well for schools when it comes to state tests. More and more schools are approaching failing. If I gave a test in my class and half of the students failed, would I blame the students or my test? Yet, when school after school fails the state test, it is the school's fault.

When today's students live in a world where anything they want to know is at their fingertips, maybe a focus on creativity and passion is the better topic to be teaching.

MHSS TED Ed Club's #BookItForward

I haven't seen a Kid President episode in a while so the one below caught my attention when I saw it mentioned on Twitter.

Our TED Ed Club has changed focus this year and I feel we have lost a little of the magic that we had last year. In an attempt to regain some of it, I decided we are going to participate in #BookItForward with Kid President.

My idea is for every member of the club to find a book that has meaning for them. It might be something they love to read over and over; it might be something from their childhood; it might be something that someone important gave to them and they want others to hear the story behind it. Each person is going to write down on an index card why this book is meaningful to them and stick it somewhere inside the book. We are also going to add a letter inside explaining our project with a Book Crossing sticker to help us track how far the books go. Then the hard part comes: finding 30 people to send the books to.

I was debating whether this would be a good project when I happened to see this post from Nick Provenzano which confirmed for me that this needs to happen.

So, here is what I need from you, dear readers. I am looking for volunteers to receive books from my TED Ed Club members.  Send me an email (marcseigel@gmail.com) with the subject #BookItForward Volunteers and your address. I will pick a book from those my club contributes and send it to you. I will also post here thanking you for participating and the story behind the book.

Thank you, in advance, to all of you who volunteer!

It's Official!!!

I am sorry to be slow in updating this blog, but I wanted to formally write that we are an Official TED Ed Club!!!  It has been an amazing journey so far and it is only going to get better from here.

So now that I talk about what we are doing without putting the word "PILOT" in front, what does that really mean for the club?  Actually, not much is going to change.  We are still going to be a Community Impact Club (I think I need to copyright that phrase), but rather than having meetings centered around discussions, the students need to start putting their ideas into action.  The discussion format is being dropped by TED Ed so we are shifting to a presentation format--basically the students are required for creating their own TED Ed Talks.  My club is composed, primarily, of students who don't really talk much in class--great workers, just not stand-up/take control types--so I am particularly interested to see how this all develops.

We are also taking on a more formal training method to our meetings to get the students ready to give 10 minutes talks about what they are passionate about.  I have made modifications to the Idea Book that was given to all advisors so that it would work better to our club and my methods as an advisor.

Because we have grown so much over the past few months (7 students at our first meeting, 40 today) I decided to mix things up.  Each student was assigned a seat and given an index card with their name on it.  On the back they were to "Draw a picture of something they are passionate about."  We then discussed within our small groups what we drew and then a few members shared with the group as a whole.  Here are some of my groups' passions:

Some members have approached me in the last couple of weeks about projects they wanted to start so we shared their ideas and the videos that inspired them.  In the planning stages, we have:

1.  Gangster Garden--We are going to build a community garden for the purposes of not only feeding the community, but also improve the quality of the food provided by the school.  We also talked about using the food as a fundraiser for some of the other projects and reinvesting in the garden (possible greenhouse).  I think our biggest step was that everyone agreed to plant seeds and take them home to germinate as a way to get the garden going before spring arrives.

2.  Dumpster Diving for the Homeless--one student saw a talk on YouTube about a man who was collecting non-expired food from dumpsters behind supermarkets and was living completely off of this food.  After doing some research he found that supermarkets actually have a policy of throwing out the food rather than donating it to shelters simply for the ease of disposal.  He also found that clothing stores will shred clothing rather than donating them because they can't thrown them away if they aren't damaged.  We are not dumpster diving, but it will include trying to convince a lot of stores (supermarkets, bakeries, bagel shops) to change their policies to help those less fortunate.

3.  Look Up More--The first video we saw as a club was by Charlie Todd.  One of his projects was called "Look Up More" which basically focused on getting people out of their own head and to take a look around.  So, inspired by this photo

we are going to hang a variety of objects that catch the sunlight (cocktail drink umbrellas, small prisms, tissue paper flowers, etc) from the ceiling in the atrium outside of our media center.  The ceiling in that area is about 30 feet above the students and has large windows with a fantastic amount of sunlight streaming through.  On the floor we are going to put LOOK UP MORE in the hopes that student stop walking through the halls in a trance.

I will update again after our next meeting.

Small Update:  I forgot to post the pictures of our tentative plans for the projects.  We identified what we needed, who needed to be contacted, and where we wanted to do the project.  These pictures were taken with Google Glass.

Jump

Twice in the last year, administrators have told me I am "too passionate."  Out of curiosity, when did passion become a bad thing?  I have been pondering this question for the last few days and I think I have an answer.

Passion is a negative when the status quo is the objective.

Now when I say status quo I am not talking about being stagnate.  You can still be moving forward, but you are following the same 5 year goals that you had 5 years ago.  That isn't necessarily a bad thing, and a lot of good schools are doing this and having great results.  But I want need something more.

I thought of this analogy this morning:  You are standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon.  Far below you is the canyon floor with the Colorado River running through it.  You have 3 choices: sit there with a pair of binoculars and watch the river from the top of the canyon wall, ride a donkey or walk down a twisting path to the bottom, or base jump off the top of the canyon and parachute down.

All three choices get you a view of the river.  None of them is necessarily a bad choice depending on what your intended outcome is.

http://goo.gl/gXwuy

But I am a base jumper.  I love the thrill of doing something that few others are and I love the rush of not knowing exactly how everything will turn out.  I never jump without a parachute (ok, almost never).  I want to help others to learn how to take that first leap and I want an administrator who is going to be standing there handing out parachutes.

So, who's with me?

EduCon Philly Day 1

I just finished up my first day at EduCon and I needed to share some of the amazing things that I saw.  I could go on for a very long post, but I want to group everything into three categories.

Leadership
If you have ever heard Chris Lehmann speak, you know immediately that he is an amazing educator.  But I want to talk about how he runs leads the school.

• Food
• There was food and drink everywhere.  I went into one classroom and I would say at least 2/3 of the class had some sort of drink bottle on their desk.  And yet, for some reason, this didn't seem to disrupt the learning that was happening and there wasn't a bug to be seen. (sorry, couldn't help the sarcasm) But what really struck me was lunch.  As we are on our tour, we noticed 6 students sitting and eating in a Spanish classroom and there was no teacher in there supervising them.  The students eat EVERYWHERE--hallways, lunchroom, classrooms, window ledges--you name it, there were students eating there.  The best part about it was the kids had the utmost respect for their environment.  When the lunch was over there wasn't a single piece of trash to be found and I didn't see a custodian anywhere.  Whether they were in the classroom or the hallways, these kids loved their school and it showed.
• Computers
• Every student is issued a Mac laptop when entering the school and they must pay an insurance fee ($85) every year to keep it.  Most of the computers were decorated with stickers, drawings, quotes written in Sharpie.  Most schools would freak out if the kids were "damaging" school property, but not this school.  They trust that the students will respect the computers and the students respond.
• His Office
• It is not often that I am caught like a deer in the headlights, but this one really threw me.  I was walking passed an office and a student I met called out to me from a conference room in the back.  I noticed a number of students in both the front office and the back conference room (probably 15 or so).  As I walk into the office, Chris Lehmann is sitting at his desk laughing with the kids around him.  That's right, I walked right into the principal's office without realizing it.  I was stunned by the fact that he welcomed me right in as if it was no big deal.  Now, let me mention something else about the office.  Chris' desk is where the secretary should have been and the larger space was used as a place for the students to congregate and eat or get work completed.  Anyone else have a principal like that?

Teaching

• Teaching Philosophy
• Everything is done for the kids.  There was no talk of working within the contractual time.  Everyone put all of themselves into building dynamic classrooms that were student-focused and learning by doing was at the heart.  Students talked just as much as the teachers did and the lessons were engaging.
• Attitude
• Everyone smiles.  Everyone wanted to be there, staff and students alike.  Students were helpful because they wanted to be not because they had to be.  Teachers gave up lunch time to sit and converse with visitors because they are passionate about what they do and want to share it with everyone.

Students

• Passion
• I need to tell you about Maggie.  I was wearing my infamous neon green tie, and after watching Diana Laufenberg's class, Maggie comes up to me saying how much she loves my tie.  She is going on and on about it and how I have to wear it for the entire weekend.  Later in the day, I am walking through the halls with a friend.  Maggie is about halfway down the hall and starts waving at me the second she saw me.  Then, at the end of the day, Maggie is the student who called out to me from Lehmann's conference room.  She comes running through his office and gives me a big hug right in front of him saying that we are friends now so it is OK to give me a hug.  That's passion.
• Dedication
• Every kid we asked questions of stopped whatever they were doing and gave us their full attention.  Most of the kids used their lunch time to collaborate with peers on a variety of projects.  None of the kids seemed stressed about anything they were working on and were eager to share their ideas regardless of what the topic was.  Even in the history class I saw, the teacher encouraged the students to make comments on a New York Times education page about the State of the Union, and she showed that one student in the class had already done it before being asked.  

What makes this school so successful is the fact that the entire school takes on the same mindset.  There is a culture of learning in everything the students do and it permeates into everything and buy in from staff, students and parents.  Every school could be like this if they wanted to and change the culture to make it happen.