Alert: you are a sandwich

I’m learning the basics of javascript and how it works with html5 so I can be useful to students interested in making their own web pages and programs. I’m using Run, Sandwich, Run! as an excuse to make a random sandwich, sandwich death, and sandwich distance-traveled generator as a toy. It’s not much of a program, but over time I hope it becomes amusing. It’s taken me close to 50 Codecademy projects and a few chapters of Wayne Graham’s Beginning Facebook Game Apps Development to get to the point where I could conceptualize and storyboard the project in my mind. It took about a day to code, half of that spent in switch cases when I should have been using arrays. [Disclosure: Wayne works with my wife, Bethany Nowviskie, at the Scholars' Lab.]

While I try to figure out how to get the script working inside of a web page (check back soon for “Run, Sandwich Run!: the button”), please enjoy these screen captures of the program running in Codecademy’s scratch pad.

Corned beef & pepper-jack

Tuna & Leicester

Chicken curry & chevre

Shawarma & American

I am totally down with help, critique, and suggested ingredients.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Detail from a stencil art display

This week we held our second Expo Night of the year. I am always caught by surprise by how much fun we have preparing for the event. Everyone spends the day hard at work on something – kids who finish their projects, reflections, and displays early often wind up helping others or setting up our largest room for Expo. I look around and think that this is how school should be every day, but translating the feeling of an event into the (frequently interrupted Springtime in middle school) flow of day-to-day learning proves difficult. Maybe the best we can do is stay true to the principles behind Expo: choice, community, making and sharing work we value.

Writing about blacksmithing

At the beginning of our school’s life, writing was not a very valued part of our culture. Students resisted it as they resisted reflecting on their own choices, academic and otherwise. We could all react to things, but examining our reactions, and communicating our thoughts and feelings about them, seemed incredibly difficult.

Comparing public and school Minecraft servers

In preparing for this week’s Expo and in helping students write their reflections, it seemed clear that writing has become increasingly valued and decreasingly resisted. Not every student embraces either writing or reflecting – and I don’t think that’s necessarily a laudable goal in and of itself. However, most of our anxiety – which was mostly of the useful kind – focused on how to get our reflections drafted and revised so they could be included on our displays. Our collective, cultural position seems to have shifted somewhat from, “No,” to, “How?” – from, “You can’t make me,” to, “Can you help me?”

Detail from an essay on the role of knowledge in Minecraft

As I’ve said before, I think part of our success in fostering students as writers comes from the choices we offer them in how to learn and work – and I think part of our success comes from offering students the chance to write or otherwise reflect about stuff they make or plan to make. Some students value writing, but all of them have come to value at least one piece of work they’ve tackled inside or outside school. Asking kids to write about the things they value – the things they make – is different than insisting on the value of writing.

A stencil art display with reflection

And the value of writing – of expression itself – is something to be discovered, rather than delivered.

The difficulty of the game rises and falls in direct proportion to your deliciousness. You design yourself at the beginning of each game so that your avatar is a custom-made sandwich. The more delicious you make yourself, the more difficult the game becomes. As your deliciousness increases you must flee more enemies with better AI and special abilities than those faced by disgusting sandwiches that nobody wants. Your scores and achievements are awarded by how difficult you make the game for yourself and how far you get while running.

As you run, your bread becomes more stale and your wet ingredients make the interior of your sandwich more soggy. As your staleness and sogginess rise, your deliciousness falls. When your deliciousness reaches zero, or when you are caught and eaten, the level ends and your score is tallied factoring in your initial deliciousness and distance run.

Different breads, meats, vegetables, and condiments bring with them their own bonuses and drawbacks. A fatty sandwich runs slowly, but may become soggy more quickly, thereby lowering its deliciousness more readily than a well-balanced sandwich. Some sandwiches, like meatball subs, that would run very slowly could have bonus powers like meatball ejection to slow up pursuing predators. However, losing too many meatballs too quickly in this case would drastically lower your sandwich’s deliciousness and thereby shorten the duration of the level as sogginess, staleness, and meatball attrition do you in for good.

Character design would incorporate a nutrition-label-like UI so that players could see the calorie count and other nutritional impacts of the foods they choose to include in their sandwiches. Making it through even a minute of a level using a 1,000-calorie sandwich of unbridled yummitude could earn some kind of special award.

Multiplayer would be an awesome deathmatch between hungry sandwich shop patrons and user-designed sandwiches with powers (maybe shoe-dependent for people and ingredient-dependent for sandwiches) unlocked by experience earned in multi-player matches. Maps could be sandwich-themed spoofs on the best PVP arenas in gaming history. Maybe you could unlock side dish packs and drop chips behind you to stuff your predators so that they lose interest in you.

And let’s throw in some zany challenges – can you get a predator to eat you at zero deliciousness? At negative deliciousness? Can you, as a disgusting sandwich, prey on a customer and be eaten? Can a fried stinky-tofu sandwich camouflage itself as grilled cheese?

If this game was funded through a Kickstarter-like campaign, major donors could have pre-set sandwiches or secret ingredients or power-ups named in their honor. Minor donors could receive DRM-free copies of the game with coupons to local sandwich shops (No chains unless they underwrite the game, right?). I’m sure other rewards for other levels will come to mind – please feel free to post your ideas and wants in the comments. Gaming companies could pitch in some money and time in exchange for sandwiches named after franchises or beloved characters.  Run, Sandwich, Run! could bring the gaming world together.

There could be a sandwich-maker app for mobile devices that talks with your console or PC so you can design a sandwich on the train to work and then play it when you get home and also find local shops that could make the sandwich and deliver it to you at lunch time to test out in the real world. You could maybe take a picture of the real sandwich with your smartphone to import into your console or PC as a sprite for that sandwich.

Here’s what I wish for in the 11th Spring of my teaching career:

I want this sucker funded, developed, published, and loved with the profits going to the establishment of a school run on Valve’s Handbook for New Employees.

For that I would re-negotiate the CC permissions of this post and make sandwiches for a lot of people. For now, let’s just say the following license supersedes the site’s license for this post in particular:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

If anybody wants to play – or if any body wants to develop, program, or otherwise contribute – please let me know.

I was somewhere in the 8th grade – or at least in middle school. I don’t remember the which season it was or what I was doing or whether or not this part happened before or after the start of the Gulf War.

My poor dad. Sitting there, completely caught in a Catch-22.

I grew up a “husky” kid. I always played rec league soccer and made my way as a defender who could play the angles and kick the ball far. However, I really wanted to play football. Mom would have none of that because of the specter of injuries.

That night, though, after I asked for tenth, hundredth, or thousandth time, my mom turned to my dad and said, “Charles, you played football and soccer. Tell him which one you liked better.”

Poor mom. Poor dad. He said it quickly; he kind of smiled; I kind of won: “Football.”

So, freshman year I joined the team and got my ass handed to me. “Huksy,” despite the breed’s image, does not translate into “able to run while carrying a lot of weight” when applied to overweight boys. However, I kept at it. I lost some weight and then put it back on more purposefully. I memorized plays and gained confidence running them. I made some friends. I survived some mild hazing. I hung out with some of the coaches the same way I hung out with many adults – being an adult-pleaser and only child and all.

I became a middle-of-the-road high school athlete filling out the roster and the line.

During my time in high school – and before I got injured and began the recurring dreams about returning to the field – my coaches were an idiosyncratic bunch. The head coach road a Harley in spandex shorts, had a mullet, and kept alligators. We ran a Wing-T offense with pulling guards and tackles, so he talked a lot about turning and shaking hands with the midget. The freshman coaches seemed like erstwhile members of the A-Team – mostly in the Hannibal and Murdoch veins. At some point a reservist kid not much older than us joined the staff and taught us “violence of action across the territory objective” and other young soldier speak. There was also this former Mr. Connecticut-turned-sports-psychologist who was a kind of hero to us, but also made things awkward for us with the upperclassmen by saying things like, “You’ve got legs like tree trunks!”, and by holding us up as examples of industriousness for lazy – and otherwise incapacitated – juniors and seniors.

And then there was Coach McCabe, the family man, who worked mostly with upperclassmen, mostly with skilled positions, and mostly with defense. I worked with him some, but not always. Coach McCabe had the easy authority of a teacher who cared supremely for kids and of a coach who was excellent at his job. He also taught gym.

And he played a hell of a badminton game. Like, Olympic.

When you partnered up and played badminton with Coach McCabe or against him, you knew you were in for it. It was like playing tennis at ten paces. Top spin. Back spin. Slices. Drops. I think Coach McCabe played badminton like that to model excellence and to show how much fun a person could have while trying to be excellent.

Coach didn’t give up on kids. He didn’t let them off, either. He kept at them and convinced them they could be the people and athletes he could see them being. He played pick-up badminton in gym class in the same way he coached football. He wasn’t out to win; he was out to be surpassed by kids trying to be excellent and to have fun. He was out to help us see what we could do alone, together, and with fulfillment.

Coach McCabe passed away this week.

It’s not like I can say I was any part of his life these past 16 years, but I can say this:

He stayed a part of mine.

And I think that’s the essence of teaching and coaching. We get paid for our time, but that’s neither the real price of our work nor our real reward.

We try to give away the best pieces of ourselves – and when we find excellence, we try to make sure our kids know that it comes from and belongs to them.

That’s what Coach McCabe did. May he rest in peace, and may we remember to be excellent like he taught us.

Clearly, I’ve been hitting the science fiction again. Also, the gaming.

Last night I finished a pretty stellar game – one advertised as the last in a series, if not the last in a setting.

It ended much as I thought it would, but it also bugged me in ways I hoped it would not.

First, let’s talk narrative. Each of us lives a narrative. It takes a significant amount of self-knowledge and work to shift narratives in our lives. Sometimes events jar our narratives and cause us to reconsider how and why we’re living. Sometimes events jar our narratives and just piss us off; enter the unduly unfair boss battle.

Scant moments away from the culmination of this series I played, I got caught in a boss battle I could not win without adjusting the difficulty of the game downward. I’m not really a casual gamer so much as a gamer who is aware of his tastes and limitations. In some genres, I am the equivalent of a grognard; in others, I am a tourist looking for adventure. Regardless of genre, I hate situations in games that are made impossible to “win” by a sudden ramping up of difficulty matched with my own mediocre mechanical skill. I played my character really well; my difficulty in passing this portion of the game did not come from my portrayal of the character or from the decisions I made during the course of the series – which are, ostensibly, the engine of the narrative – narrative being the engine of the franchise. I think it’s a bad design decision to make a gamer feel mechanically inept minutes before the end of a series in which that player has survived dozens of appropriately leveled challenges. The narrative pay off – the big picture, connection-making a-ha moment of the endgame – was, in my mind, needlessly delayed for me by a slog of a battle I reloaded half a dozen times before ratcheting down the difficulty of the game.

So, how many big picture, connection-making a-ha moments do we deny kids because they cannot defeat the inappropriately leveled boss battles we set in front of them? What could our non-readers learn from and do with all that time we confront them with impossible situations? How do we acknowledge that some kids – even our most “successful” readers and writers – could be creating amazing narratives for themselves without the undue influence of “rigor” (code for developmentally inappropriate), which, in our school system, is a kind of insensate systems intelligence unable to adapt itself away from the belief that some things are best left for the kids who read and write and sit still on time, dammit.

First, we acknowledge that critical thinking, imagination, playfulness, composition, design, and iteration are interdisciplinary skills that students can evidence in a variety of ways – even in ways we can’t imagine. Then we acknowledge that reading and writing carry some unique flavors of these skills, but that every other mode of expression does, also. You talk about word choice in creating imagery and symbolism in a novel; you talk about color and line in doing the same in a graphic novel; you talk about graphics, writing, voice-acting, and player choice in doing the same in a video game. Finally, we start building learning spaces rich with all sorts of texts and authoring tools in which it is easy and joyful to create a community and share connections, insights, and strengths between people, projects, and genres.

What else bothered me about the game?

Although many people have complained about the lack of choice at the very end of the game, I thought the options I had were fitting. They were choices that involved sacrifice. They were in line with the mood of the game and what had to happen; I’m not sure what others were expecting. I do, however, dislike games in which there are no consequences for players’ choices. This reminds me too much of school wherein differentiation becomes a matter of picking a teacher’s idea out of many of that teacher’s ideas. Not a lot of room for democracy, emergent behavior, or self-directed learning there.

What really bothered me is the presence of narrative elements held hostage in the code as unlockable downloadable content (buy a license) and bonus content that is released for playing other products from the company that published the game. The message here is that no matter how well you play the game – no matter which decisions you make or how much feeling you invest in the characters and story – you just can’t have some things until you behave the way we, the gatekeepers, want you to behave (as a consumer).

That is school. We will withhold access to the learning you want to pursue, dear student, until you pay us what we say we deserve.

Do game companies have a right to make a profit? Sure. Can gamers be critical about their purchases. Sure. Does school have to be a capitalist, transactional marketplace? No.

What we expect from our kids is unconditional compliance – which we blithely confuse with unconditional learning.

What we should be offering our children is unconditional teaching.

Except to maintain a culture of privilege, there is no advantage to learning in using reading and writing to limit students’ access to authentic and engaging learning. In fact, it’s inequitable to do so. Some kids arrive ready and able to pay their dues because when they enter school they enter an affirming, tautological feedback loop. Because they fit into the stories we at school tell ourselves about successful students, these kids get the teaching and learning all kids deserve – the independent work; the inquiry-based work; the collaborative work; the arts. For them, is “reading and writing” part of the place, or is it the place? The answer is different for kids who arrive at school with different skill sets. It shouldn’t be.

It makes no sense to me to use reading and writing to further disadvantage students who come to school without the cultural, mechanical, and neurological affordances that belong to the kids for whom we really run our schools. Reading and writing – where these kids are – should be part of the awesome learning available to them, not a teacher-imposed prerequisite to it. Call it the instruction or pedagogy gap. It’s endemic. I wonder if it can be excised from the system without killing the system.

At school, we hold the most motivating, student-negotiated learning hostage behind a firewall of reading and writing codes that require students to pay up with unreciprocated “respect,” hollow scores, and blind compliance.

Why are we here? That’s the question. The game question. The science fiction question. The school question. The teacher question. The life question.

Is it to make sure that all students can read and write in isolation?

Is it to make sure all students find ways to learn and express themselves in community?

Is it to accommodate a willful systemic blindness to those of our needs that school did not meet and that school cannot meet for our students and their children?

At the end of the world, I want everyone together fighting to turn the tide – not just the people who can read and write – because there will be problems we cannot solve, solutions we cannot see, and stories we cannot tell.

It is the principal failing and limitation of my teaching that I am so fundamentally invested in the story of myself as a reader and writer (and one easily susceptible to Western archetypes, at that).

I want to hear all of my students’ stories. I need to listen to kids who tell their stories differently the most. These kids aren’t invited to speak up or act out in traditional spaces, both literal and metaphorical. That’s why it’s so important to meet them where they are, no matter the odds, no matter how far out or alien the planet seems to us.

We think we are the heroes; in reality, for students fighting the hardest to hold on to their worlds, we are the impossible boss battle; we are the firewall to learning.

So let me first say, “Brava,” to the foundations, labs, organizations, and educators of all sorts who shared their walk on/walk out work at #DML2012. I think it’s unabashedly good to model real learning and create community-based authentic learning spaces outside of school. It’s clear that groups like the Hive are working to take networks of out-of-school organizations and to make those networks into communities of co-practitioners who frequently co-locate for what I heard best described as “learning parties.” These parties serve kids; they serve learning; and, if schools pay close enough attention, these parties serve schools by modeling personally meaningful work, by suggesting how schools might reconfigure themselves to be relevant, and by intimating that it might not be too long until class sizes drop as students leave public schools for other public learning spaces – at least in cities that build sustainable learning networks outside of school houses.

Let me also say that I have now officially heard enough (which is different, of course, from having done enough). All of this is very clear to me. I see the flywheel gather momentum. However, I’m not sure that it will ever collide with the grinding flywheel of school (think kids as Conans drudging through the sands) – as Mitch Kapor said on Friday’s plenary panel, “we have trouble changing our institutions.” So should we try? (By “we,” from here on out, I mean, “we, the DML tribe.)”

In Walk Out, Walk On, by Margaret Wheatley & Deborah Frieze, suggest that our institutions are living systems because we humans create and populate them. This, however, makes our institutions impossible to change, according to Wheatley and Frieze, because once a living system adopts a set of behaviors, it will not change them – and only at the height of its power will viable competitors emerge to any such system and begin their new cycles of scaling up immutably. Systems scale and die; they don’t evolve. Perhaps they iron patches over tears. See also: paging @usedgov.

Kind of makes you wonder if we should’t just start new public learning institutions – including higher education institutions – to get a handle on the problems of race, gender, sexuality, and other forms of identity we greatly admire as a system and rightly rail against as individuals.

Do the foundations and organizations and individuals we love have an obligation to position themselves more directly opposed to public schooling?

Moreover, as Wheatley & Frieze might ask, do the foundations and organizations and individuals we love have an obligation to help with the hospice care of schools and their inhabitants as schools fizzle, pop like a lightbulb, die?

I ask all of this from my position as a classroom teacher in a public school – a small one, albeit one that goes out of its way to reconnect struggling learners with the joys of learning about things that matter to them.

But why do I ask any of it?

Here goes:

• DML, compelling vision; meh delivery. As much fun as I had giving an Ignite talk, lecturing is only so much fun. It seems to me like the conference (and organization) could take a page from nearly any group of stakeholders and close the gap between lecturing panels and participatory sessions. Let’s bring and/or look at data that provides us with motivating discontent; let’s have game sprints and hack jams and DMLCamps pushing us all into the social-justice/maker work to which we pay homage. Empanel folks in re-combinatory ways so our shared work becomes enmeshed in the local practices we bring to share. Lecture is the lowest common denominator of learning, despite its ubiquity in the institution of schooling. The idea that we know better, but that sometimes we just need to lecture is an absolute corollary to the argument of school apologists. (Maybe we should have a cos-play day?)
• DML and foundational friends, resist systemization. I know its difficult. I know you want to offer some helpful protocols and criteria for contests and grants, but standardized protocols, criteria, contests, and grants are not new or disruptive because, as one of our own pointed out during the second-day plenary panel, it’s not easy to help the failing failing schools when school divisions and their leaders are sending foundations and their moneys to successful failing schools. It would be more disruptive to experiment with new ways of identifying local instances of the learning environments we want (even those in “rogue” public school classrooms!) and granting money to them based less on a budget based on a plan and more on a rolling basis to support evolving work. I think of scouts here, who travel to identify individuals, but the idea deserves more thinking than that. Maybe prototype a system that allows pseudo-day-trader grantor agents freedom to fail forward in creating learning portfolios absent stringent ROI requirements that stifle rapid prototyping, iteration, and the abandonment of what doesn’t work. As a relatively unfunded lad, I, of course, have little idea of how much of this is already being done, but certainly I see invitations to apply for stuff all the time. This is a tremendously dispiriting thing for a teacher like me who feels the need to look over her should as much as she looks ahead. As transparent as I try to be, it’s difficult to find the time to multi-thread justifications both for what I do (in case someone up there gets to questioning it) and for what I do (in case someone out there wants to fund some of it). There has to be a way to support teachers doing the work of the DML tribe in schools. There has to be a way to make relationships a part of an abundant gift economy between grantors and public school practitioners who are already tending to students’ school wounds as best they know how without the cache of this company or that charity or program.
• DML tribe, let’s escape the false dichotomy that is plainly part of our creation myth – the one that says we must support this work outside schools because either it’s not happening in schools or it can’t happen in schools. I was surprised to hear the school apologist argument at DMl that goes like this: it’s unethical to create engaging learning environments in schools with high stakes testing because it harms the kids. I call bullshit. The high stakes testing harms the kids. Getting rid of it only harms adults who have invested their egos and funds in an LCD-screen-dusted mountain of SIS, testing, intervention, accountability, and portal products that have digitized the paper-shuffling adults want to believe is important because we do not trust the quality of student work or the clarity of student joy as indicators of our success. We need to report stuff for the approval of our parent figures further up the admin ladder. We look up for approval, rather than laterally – to our kids as co-learners and co-teachers – for the satisfaction of learning. DML, find the courage to call out those scant urban districts that hold back over a third of our children from the kinds of learning their affluent peers pick up hither and yon. Do some hospice. We hospice workers don’t need relief – or your funds or approval for that matter – but we wouldn’t say no to solidarity and we wouldn’t keep you from opting in to our work and out of the “it’s unethical to interrupt the testing cycle” mantra, which – in the starkly insane school-to-prison pipeline world of United States education – unambiguously couples work that does not fulfill human needs with punishment for those who do not fulfill adults’ wants at school.

And here are some additional solutions I would propose from where I live – let’s keep in touch and keep dialoguing in public if any of them speak to you.

• DML, check out EduCon and some hack jams (which Meenoo Rami and I gladly offer to adults skeptical of hacking). Send some reps. Worry less about thematic strands and more about practical, practice-based ones. I want to leave with some handmade Minecraft/social justice e-textiles next year, dammit.
• Foundations, create an opt-in, secure database of teachers who think they have something to offer you. The folks applying for your grants are self-selecting. The teachers who can’t see a way to getting local approval for their work probably aren’t contacting you; their students are needlessly cut off from your support, given the communications technologies we have, literally, at-hand.
• Universities, I’ve said it before: hack thyself. I will trade you badges if you trade me admissions standards that make “college-ready” synonymous with “learning-loving.” For the love of thorny, unambiguous good, demand that kids submit portfolios of interdisciplinary, arts-infused work that oozes passion. Make your primary community of affinity that of students who want to change the world through their learning rather than that of a community of adults pitched at one another across the jousting rail trying to lift up these lances skewer-full of metric brain-tons of work that doesn’t help kids learn – right? I mean, libraries have to subscribe to those rapacious journal conglomerates for Research I professors, not for undergraduates. Serve kids better by refusing them entry from schools that stake-them to intellectual, imaginative, and generative deaths. Stars of the higher education, DML-and-pals tracks and fields, move your labs to affordable schools with deeply compelling admissions policies for kids and learning unless your home institutions change shit up. You want to change the culture of woefully underprepared undergraduates? Change your departmental cultures, band together with other departments, and storm the faculty senate. Stop being compliant with NCLB, or stop calling foul on K12 education. You shouldn’t be looking down when you look at public schools. Problem solve.
• Foundations, organizations, higher education, school divisions, and gaming companies: create some shift in the educator workforce. Create either hybrid jobs or part-time jobs to get the best teachers in public education out of the schools and into the public. Imagine a fantastic teacher leaving after lunch time – and taking a class or two with her by proxy – to a community-based learning environment. If we pulled this off, we would connect the best teachers and best out-of-school educators in rolling learning parties. We would give teachers #alt-ac-esque career paths without squelching or asking them to disavow their mission-driven service to children in public schools. We would pressure schools to offer such programs or, at the very least, bleed off some students per day without totally removing their per-pupil funds from their neighborhood schools. The schools keep the money – if you set up the partnership correctly so that they stay enrolled full-time (but go to a part-time “internship” or recurring “field trip”) – and get half-a-day of smaller class sizes.
• Foundations, fund some of the amazing out-of-school-like work going on in schools in such a way that it’s financially attractive for school systems to support that work. If you fund part of a salary (let’s skip over the argument we all know and need to ditch and work around about funding salaries) or sponsor a public school division’s accreditation from a private-school accreditation consortium, why couldn’t a brave school board and local executive lose state money for those kids or that teacher or small program or school?

We are set up really well to continue our own works. So is school.

I’m impatient, sometimes caddy, and a terrible audience member unless I’m live-tweeting, so I really hate it when I get caught up in losing or tautological arguments because I feel like I’m being wasteful of my time and others’ time because I’m impatient, caddy, and distractable.

Know what I hate more? Assuming that I – and the work I love – is lost.

But I hope. I came into DML hoping. I leave DML hoping. And I know I will act.

Just how differently, we’ll see. Sometimes we have to kill our darlings to change ourselves. Sometimes in changing ourselves we kill our darlings. Sometimes – especially in the white West – we white Westerners (males, especially) forget that our darlings and our problems are one in the same.

I am the teacher underground. I sound my barbaric yawp from SFO. The institution I love is the institution I hate. This is the way it is inside school, even when I’m out and about.

Who’s up for GDC?

The Others

At the same time, I really enjoyed delivering an Ignite Talk. Time went so quickly I didn’t have to remember half of what I wanted to say (thank goodness for pictures). Nevertheless, I felt heard; I felt focused; the 5-minute format with auto-progressing slides worked for me.

I’m sure I’m not the first one to suggest such a thing, but it would be great to make something like Ignite part of school culture and school-community partnerships.

I think a lot of the tension between educators and parents comes not from competing interests, but rather from wishing really, really hard that the “others” knew what “we” wanted them to know about our work, our children, and our hopes for public education. When teachers and parents – and students, for that matter – meet to discuss a concern, it’s natural – instinctual, really, and buttressed by school conditioning (how many of us really get to speak his or her mind in the office or classroom?) – that folks feel on the defensive and want to exit the situation with as little emotional expenditure possible. The difference between taking a short cut – “the next time it happens please…” – and actually putting one’s beliefs on display through explanation and dialogue is huge.

I’d like to see faculty members deliver Ignite talks to one another; then I’d like to see faculty members host Ignite nights throughout the year for teachers, students, and parents to share their passions around education or their notions of the purpose of education, to borrow a prompt from Doug Belshaw’s Purpos/ed (see also @dajbelshaw).

I think I would make some 5-minute blocks open during such nights just for impromptu questions or testimonies from audience members. We need to understand one another, not just the some-another who self-select for Ignite Talks, though the Ignite talks would provide needed energy and humor to traditionally pallid “parent information” nights. Five minutes seems like a manageable share for me, especially if discussion is informal and after the talks without a direct Q&A after each speaker.

I want to know more about what my kids and parents know about learning, school, and our class. I want to know all that the way they know it. I think the next thing to do must be to act on that want, which, frankly, we in public education need to treat as a need.

I’ve been a gamer ever since Dad got the Nintendo Entertainment System for his 40th birthday. I can’t seem to shake the controller out of my hand.

I’ve been trying to be the teacher I think I should be ever since I moved to Virginia – for just over a decade. I can’t seem to shake the idea that there’s something I should be doing to make things better for kids.

Lately, I’ve become convinced that English and language arts classes need to democratize composition. Reading and writing need to be embedded in a student-directed curriculum of communication and design. That curriculum needs to offer students experience with critical media consumption and production through actives like gaming, programming, community service, and the arts.

I’d like to help schools stay relevant by modeling how classroom teachers can acknowledge, celebrate, and scaffold learning around students’ compassion, curiosity, and diverse new media literacies. I’d like to help teachers accomplish all this by creating communities of practice and permission to speak organized around core values of community, democracy, and dignity in public education.

This explains so much.

Here’s a quick scan of the digital work going on in our classroom on #DLDay:

Over there a student is…

• Using ScriptBuddy to plan a commercial for his collectable card game. The commercial is part of his business plan. The game uses a card template programmed in Python (with the help of a parent).
• Editing a casting call for his next film in which an unnaturalized Canadian student tries to fit in with – and hide inside – an anti-immigration secret society. This film will be the last he edits in iMovie before his mentor begins teaching him Final Cut Express.
• Building a Rubik’s Cube factory in Minecraft before starting on the construction of a working Rubik’s Cube in Minecraft.
• Explaining how Twinkies (cake – and, no, I won’t tell you his secret) get made in his Minecraft Hostess factory, which is wired with a dizzying array of red stone circuits, decorated with signs explaining Hostess’s bankruptcy, and somehow full of creepers.
• Airbrushing a skateboard using a stencil cut from a design drawn on a Bamboo tablet in SketchBookPro.
• Taking screenshots of iCivics.org’s Lawcraft game to create a comic that shows how a bill becomes a law.
• Adding content to the student-run Chevro Skates company website so it can be launched sometime soon.
• Drafting the next chapter of an epic StoryBird tale about a fantasy land’s economy.
• Discussing voir dire and jury selection as they apply to the fictional prosecution of an Argonian Skyrim character trying to avoid an all-Nord jury.
• Eating a chicken nugget in a biscuit dipped in mashed potatoes.

Here’s all I’ve got: Minecraft is Scratch using blocks instead of text. Talk amongst yourselves.

Finally, I apologize for the glaring lack of links, but the post is too product-focused as it is. The point isn’t the products, but the variety of expression that they allow the students who chose to use them.

Sansing out.

The second one, it was like we was both back in older times and I was on horseback goin through the mountains of a night, goin through this pass in the mountains. It was cold and snowin, hard ridin. Hard country. He rode past me and kept on goin. Never said nothin goin by. He just rode on past and he had his blanket wrapped around him and his head down, and when he rode past I seen he was carryin fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold, and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. Out there up ahead.

And then I woke up.

There is a map of the future we carry inside us; for many of us, our schools’ walls mark its end, as if it’s the buildings we’re working to network and their machines, but not ourselves. As if the world is flat and there is still time to turn away from the edge.

There is a sense of place we invest in our schools and a sense of motion we see in them as if they are arks determining their own course or being buffeted by a sea, and as if our worth comes from how well we play our roles within them stoking them on or plugging their leaks.

But the cold, hard feeling of truth is that the arks have landed, and that their only courage and shortcomings are ours. They have carried us as far as they can. They were not built to last, even though their mechanics refuse to lay down their tools and their captains refuse to give the order to abandon ship.

If these arks could ever actually feel anything, it would be a jealousy directed at us and our escape. It would be a solipsism – an insistence on their importance in our lives – an unwillingness to acknowledge all the possibilities we might find outside them if only we stopped caring for them in their malaise. If our schools had feelings, the kindest would be a sad and covetous creature.

But our schools don’t have feelings. We do. And what we feel is what we teach; what we perceive is what we learn. The stories we tell are the lives we live.

I’m not sure anyone knows what new worlds exist outside the arks. No those of us in them; not those of us plotting our own courses away from them, in relation and retaliation to them; not those of us guarding the doors or calling from within: come back to us; come back; these things matter; don’t leave us alone in our past.

I would like EduCon to become an ark full of people ready to open its doors. I would like those people to reach back, but march ahead. I would like that march to be a joyful parade.

I don’t know how to make that happen or what to tell anyone to do or plan or escape. Good schools make good neighbors; are we willing to become anything more?

I feel like EduCon is maturing, but of course it can do nothing of the sort. There’s just us, and that is sublime.

I can imagine panelists ready to discomfort us about school; I can imagine a conference-wide chat, conducted in still silence by a maestro of kind inquietude like Bud Hunt; I can imagine a tear-bright catharsis at the moment we realize we never needed schools to be teachers.

If learned anything at EduCon (and I learned plenty), it came from the way a later session answered one of the first.

How do you support change? You let yourself play and you play with others.

I have this idea for a story in my head – the story of a boy kidnapped by his father and taken to the stars. He spend all his life aboard a salvage ship, wondering at the variety of human ingenuity, wastefulness, and difference. Near a debris field, something goes wrong, and this wave starts to pulse through universe, cutting every intention in half and keeping everything apart by halves. His dad turns the ship and races against the wave to bring the boy back home to his mother before he can’t. They get closer and closer, never knowing if the wave has overtaken them, if they have become stuck in a kind of galactic amber, and, still hurtling forward towards a planet’s edge, the story stops, the boy and his father silhouetted against the forward windows, standing together, beginning to hold hands as the ship begins to descend.

And although the story ends there, I very much want them to get out.

Where will our intentions go this year, and will they carry us out of our schools or ever closer to their walls?

Will the children we never meet still study inside schools, or will they approach them like canny archaeologists uncovering temples buried in the jungle?

In their future, will they dream of us carrying the fire on ahead, or will they see us only in cold ashes left at campfires far behind?

I like to stand at my classroom window, raising my hand to wave, imagining them all at play, out past the arks, at play.