Game Dev Story puts you in charge of a game development company. You develop games and fulfill contracts in pursuit of industry awards, as well as the cash and research points necessary to recruit and develop workers and to license and develop more games and consoles. I enjoyed the game immensely, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t completely portray the complexities and operations of the game industry. Nevertheless, Game Dev Story does at least introduce its players to the kinds of decisions developers make regarding game mechanics, genres, and consoles. Plus, it’s full of puns and malapropisms, just like me.

How would Lesson Planning Story or School Management Story play by comparison? Would anyone even want to make either of those games for an audience in the United States of America? Would either game be released in the United States as anything but a satire?

Would you produce such a game knowing that you would have to trade off accurately portraying the complexities of public schooling in America in return for introducing players to broad tensions we face in running schools and designing learning opportunities in classrooms? How far could a little gamer education go for public education in our country?

What can a funny little app teach our casual gaming citizenry about education?

If you’d like to explore making a school or lesson development story – if that last question excites you – let me know. I’d contribute art and/or writing pro bono. We could at least launch a development blog for some vaporware.

it’s easy to visualize a classroom overlay atop Game Dev Story. It’s hard to imagine players in the United States of America caring, but perhaps that’s a shame a popular iPhone app could address.

Here’s a before painting that I especially like; it makes me question my wisdom – and rights – in asking students to paint over their work for the sake of a lesson on colonization.

A lake and some light painted by a middle-schooler

Regarding games: at the beginning of the colonization unit, only a few students began playing Civilization IV: Colonization. Moreover, since only one student who started the game geeked out enough to enjoy it, it’s been shelved in favor of Minecraft. (Next time we paint Minecraft landscapes! FTW!)

I heart Minecraft more than any other game I’ve taught. It’s easy to learn and difficult to master, even on peaceful mode (no zombies at night means no lost student work). It lets students craft their own narratives along with their homes and tunnels and train tracks. It is intensely personal and sculptural and communicates in a visual vocabulary of consumption, crafting, and reuse that gives kids genuine feelings of exploration, economy, and accomplishment.

You have to play it. If you love it, you can buy an account – accounts are transferrable and allow simultaneous use on multiple machines. Use the wiki for help. Check out a tutorial video. Imagine what kids can do with the game, as well what they can learn and show through it. With a little more coding to increase the number of variables under user control, Minecraft could be a more ludic hybrid of Scratch and Second Life that puts students into the flow of learning-by-making more quickly than either of those other platforms.

So what are we doing with it?

First, we’re exploring. Every instance of the game builds a different world for its player that runs as deep underground as its mountains reach into the sky . One student gasped when he found this “Natural Bridge.”

A student-discovered "Natural Bridge" in Minecraft

Here’s a view from the top:

Looking down from the top of a student-discovered "Natural Bridge" in Minecraft

Second, we’re settling. The student who found the bridge is going to build his colony here. Students generated a list of buildings that they thought early colonists needed, and I asked them to build any five near spots in their worlds that were well resourced for human life and industry. Students suggested that they build homes, fences for defense, farms, blacksmith shops, lumber mills, barracks, ports, and town halls. It’s been cool to see students figure out how to make furnaces for their blacksmiths’ shops and crafting tables for their lumber mills.

My brilliant TA is busy figuring out how to set up a server on which all of our students can play and settle together. We’d like to host a world in which our kids can launch and record virtual expeditions and create New England, Mid-Atlantic, and Southern colonies as part of our history classes; we’d also like to host a world of shared responsibility for a virtual economy in our civics class.

In language arts this week we’re working on topic, main idea, and supporting details – the sacrosanct trinity of standardized informational text reading comprehension questions. I’ve been attempting to differentiate for my boys by throwing in excerpts from passages about the new Tron movie and our invisible pal, dark Jupiter. Apparently I failed horribly because somehow today we wound up watching videos about volcanoes.

I figured, eh, what the hell? Reading, making, playing, and communicating matter more than my best guesses at engaging material.

We’ve decided to complete our own topic, main idea, and supporting details organizers on volcanoes and to use Minecraft to model what we learn. Each participating student is going to complete an organizer on one type of volcano – shield cone, cider cone, or stratovolcano. Then each boy is going to outfit his Minecraft avatar for an underground expedition with torches, ladders, blank signs, and brown floor tiles crafted by the students in-game. Each student will dig down to the magma layer, channel the magma to illustrate the inside of a volcano, lay down brown floor tile to model the outside of the volcano, and then post his topic, main idea, and supporting details on signs around the volcano. (If only they knew, “You shall not pass!”)

Descending to find magma in Minecraft

Outfitted for an underground inquiry adventure in Minecraft

We’re writing inquiry reports underground in a 3D engine and illustrating them with in-engine 2D volcano mosaics.

I love my job. I hope the vinegar and baking soda come next – and that the Skyping with volcanologists follows shortly thereafter.

We shouldn’t needlessly complicate instruction with technology, but we should definitely follow students’ learning underground when the stuff on the surface of schooling only amounts to so much dross.

Our own work in class to master Mario Kart as cooperative cycling teams has hit a kind of instructional equilibrium: everyone is happy to play, but the teams who have mastered the rotating 1-2-3-4 finish have mastered it, and the teams who have not mastered it have not. It’s clearly time to share before we play again. The meta-game might shift, though, from finishing 1-2-3-4 to coaching another team to do the same.

In other news, I’m adopting a US History I class this week filled with 6th and 7th graders. So far this year, I’ve only taught our 8th graders, so I’m thrilled with – and grateful for – the chance to work with all of our students.

I’ve decided to pick up with a re-framing of settlement, exploration, and colonization as a series of human decisions rather than a textual set of records.

To do so, I’m using two games – Civilization IV: Colonization and Minecraft – to present kids with the opportunities and conflicts inherent in trying to claim land from other people and nature.

The two games have a radically different amount of text. Civilization IV: Colonization is text- and infographic-heavy on the user-end. Minecraft is virtually without printed language, apart from its menu and code.

Together the games are like a picture-book/novel pairing from a language arts class, the former useful for scaffolding the themes in the latter. I didn’t think of teaching them this way until now, but maybe I’ll try that approach with another group later this year.

This week I’m going to invite students to pair up and pick the game each pair wants to play. The shared goal between games is to create a settlement that can sustain itself independently from the games’ variables in geography, resources, and competing AI. I’ve worked with my TA, an avid gamer, to develop before, during, and after questions about natural resources, conflict, justice, colonization, and the opportunity costs of students’ decisions.

Maybe I’ll even bust out Settlers of Catan for the table-top set.

I’ll post more later after students have a chance to learn from and reflect on the games.

I’m kind of sad that I downloaded the games. I want boxes or cases to put on our bookshelves next to our history books or atlases. I wonder how far we are from 1:1 consoles, game-design labs and spaces in media centers, and video games shelved with books. I could put our copies of Settlers of Catan on the shelves and see if any kids dare me to accept playing time as reading.

If you’re teaching history with other games, I’d love to hear from you, especially regarding games that independently problematize colonization and provide opportunities to play from indigenous points of view.

Moreover, if you have some suggestions for high quality, less complex colonial simulations, please pass them on to us. I worry about early rage-quits with the learning curves in these games; nevertheless, I expect us to have fun together learning how to play them.

What should we go and do in the real world in response to our learning about colonization?

To wit, here are the questions going through my mind this week.

1. Is it possible for reading and writing to get in the way of learning?
2. Do struggling readers and writers get rich, authentic instruction in parallel to intervention?
3. That is to say, are we certain that struggling readers and writers are also struggling learners, or are we setting up a debilitating environment by keeping rich, authentic instruction from capable learners who don’t behave in accordance with our expectations of their reading and writing? Another way to put it: given the combined life experiences of everyone in a classroom, is what we set out to achieve the best learning we can imagine?
4. Is school a monoculture of text? Or, rather, will students’ workplaces be monocultures of text?
5. Do texts in school in any way resemble the texts students might find in their workplaces?
6. In what ways does an over-dependence on text limit school, classrooms, students, and teachers?
7. Is school prone to a system crash because of its textual monoculture?
8. How can text be used in new-to-school ways to maximize learning time? For example, can a COPA-friendly version of Twitter (or whatever – let kids invent it) let kids collaborate with peers around the world to instantaneously retrieve information and subsequently collaborate on applications and the analysis, synthesis, and evaluation involved in peer-juried project-based work? Can teachers let kids use such social media and/or collaborate thusly face-to-face onsite? Can school become less about protecting the right answers for the right people and more about posing the right questions to bring us together in work that provides lasting value to us and our communities?
9. Is text the end of human communication or a mass-produced place-holder that has codified what we’ve learned while we’ve waited for technology to provide us with similarly produceable and preservable oral and graphic communications technologies?
10. How do I balance my duties to improve kids’ reading and writing with my responsibilities to prepare them for a world unlike school?

School is a legacy system. I wonder if text is, too. I love it, but it isn’t the end of teaching of learning; nor should reading and writing be the sole purpose of instructional technology in a class or building.

In civics class we learn that our duties are what we have to do; our responsibilities are what we should do. Is it the same for teaching?

Computing has survived all its platforms to become more mobile and customizable, which makes it more robust and democratic. How do we help our classrooms do the same given where we are? We don’t need to subvert universal public education to bring it down; we need to subvert it to help it survive.

Last year we used a lives-lost-per-level ratio to determine which teams of players were most efficient at preserving one another’s lives. Teams with more fluent players were sometimes at an advantage (when they could manage their own lives well) and sometime at a disadvantage (when they were impatient to “win” and didn’t shepherd less fluent players). The best evidence of teamwork came during strategy-planning sessions midway through our experiment as students discovered they could converse and work well with one another before certain levels taxed their patience with the game and one another. We did have the game beaten by the end of the year – a collaborative effort of 22 students (and a few adults).

This year we’re going to play local multi-player Mario Kart. We’ll play for 25-minutes each Friday in groups of four as part of our normal class rotation through stations. We’re going to play like a cycling team dedicated to helping rotating captains win each race. We’re going to graph group members’ placement distributions to find out which teams are best at spreading out first place finishes amongst all group members. Students are already thinking about how to block the bots so less skilled players can win. I’m also thinking about what kind of controller would be best for each student. I need to invest in more Wii Wheels.

My hope is that students will learn to put others’ interests before their own – or even to see how putting others’ before themselves is sometimes in their best interest. I’d like us to work through a similar progression of lessons as we did last year:

• Week 1: Introduce the content and let the kids play; graph the results.
• Week 2: Talk about how difficult it was to spread out the wins; ask what worked; let the kids play; graph the results.
• Week 3: Introduce a goal- and strategy-setting organizer; let the kids play; graph the results.
• Week 4 and onward: continue with goal- and strategy-setting, playing, and graphing; start analyzing graphs for trends, success stories, and strategies to share; maybe start an online strategy guide.

Last year, a small group of students hit a wall when they experienced how much work went into platformer level design and how much that work depended on collaboration between students who acted as researchers and artists. This year, however, we’re demonstrating on a daily basis remarkable pro-academic behaviors that we only inconsistently demonstrated last year. I wonder if we’re ready to stick with game design that integrates curriculum.

I have to figure out how to get kids like me – kids eager to spend hours in sandbox editors – to bridge school content into their worlds, or to draw “real-world” lessons from their design work. It’s a challenge. How do you help a kid move school into his or her quality world when you share a mistrust of what school has been, but don’t have a shared vision of what it could be? (And how can I get Little Big Planet 2 into the classroom?)

I started with this article: “National Security Inc.” On page 10, the article describes the work of Ken Pohill, an employee of General Dynamics, a defense contractor serving multiple roles in the United States intelligence community. Ken is watching a “white truck moving across his computer monitor” – and “the truck [is] in Afghanistan.”

To do this, he clicked his computer mouse. Up popped a picture of the truck driver’s house, with notes about visitors. Another click. Up popped infrared video of the vehicle. Click: Analysis of an object thrown from the driver’s side. Click: U-2 imagery. Click: A history of the truck’s movement. Click. A Google Earth map of friendly forces. Click: A chat box with everyone else following the truck, too.

I may be horribly naive, but I was astounded.

How do we teach this at school? How do we help students translate their affinity for technology and proficiency with certain tools into the skills needs to synthesize those tools – or to create new ones – for gathering, analyzing, and producing content? For self-expression? How do we provide rich problem sets for student work? How do we help them prepare for the development, implementation, and use of tool sets that provide for synchronous human and mechanized observation, collection, correlation, and evaluation?

And how do we do this in the humanities? In schools and classes as we know them? As we imagine them?

This project – this repository of journalistic and democratic investigation – has convinced me like never before that we need to provide digital equity.

Students deserve to know what’s possible for them; they also deserve to know what their government, its competitors, and private industry can do in terms of observing their habits and controlling the information that reaches them.

Part of preserving our checks and balances is knowing what needs to be checked and balanced.

I see this one kid working a computer with a USB keyboard tethered to it. He has a browser open to the information he has to learn. He has composing software open in another window. He has his notes with my feedback on them in front of him on a piece of paper. He’s using everything he sees to write some fairly chilling music about Kristallnacht.

I see another kid working on a game about smashing through the Berlin Wall. He has his programming and drawing windows open. He has image searches running on Berlin, East German soldiers, and 3D models of sledgehammers. He has another window open showing him feedback from his classmates on earlier drafts of the game, posted on a private network.

I see a third kid skipping between tabs to watch video, read news reports, look up players’ stats, and blog on the sport he loves.

I remember these kids and I think: Is it enough? What am I teaching them? Am I teaching them how to think? To produce? To consume? To create or to re-arrange? Am I teaching them for today’s world or their own?

I remember these kids and I ask myself: How can we help our peers get access to the technology we are so fortunate to have? How can we approximate a set-up like Ken’s for students and their learning? For their passions?

I know General Dynamics values Ken Pohill for his ability to analyze and synthesize what he sees, but what he sees, while orchestrated by humans, is entirely mediated by technology. I also know that Ken works with other people onsite, but I imagine that they talk a lot about what they see on their screens. Somewhere else other people are talking about how to orchestrate it even better with new technology.

How do we help kids see the world as it happens? How do we help them see the code behind our world? The people behind the code? How do we help kids see themselves using these tools for the kind of greater good that obviates defense?

How do we use authentic, germane, realtime data and commentary about learning to analyze our teaching?

Look at Ken. Now back at standardized tests. Now back at Ken.

Why are we teaching as if anything ends?

My map this year will look more course-specific than last year’s meta-map, which I think is still a useful model for project-based work. Here’s an early draft of this year’s map:

I’m mapping more granularly – at least in terms of structures and opportunities, if not content – in response to what worked this year in stations, pacing, and independent work. I’m also mapping to ensure that student learning moves flexibly and organically back and forth, inside and outside the classroom, physically and virtually, in service to students’ passions and in service to others.

Here are three constraints I’m using:

1. In terms of content, I plan to “cover” the state language arts and civics & economics curricula through direct instruction and blended learning modules that I create and then replace with subsequent student work. I will negotiate with students the particular standards each wants to master in a unit so long as she produces excellent work that demonstrates her learning. I would rather students leave the class as experts on what interests them about citizenship than as students with a superficial knowledge of sentence structure and/or our government’s org chart. Therefore, to help students master their chosen content more strategically, here’s the first useful constraint I want to use: “spaced learning.”

2. In terms of self-directed learning, I plan to protect at least 20% of class time for students’ self-directed learning. I love this line from the RSA animation of Dan Pink’s Drive talk: “you probably want to do something interesting…let me get out of your way!” Pink talks about the Australian software firm Atlassian and it’s quarterly employee autonomy days. Employees get to work on what they want for a day so long as they share out their work at the end in a celebration. The company benefits from its employees’ creativity in tackling nagging software bugs and proposing new products. I’ve seen this work in the classroom. I’ve seen a kid make a Scratch game about a jet-pack-wearing space panda that shoots palm trees from its butt to fight aliens turn the same skills he used in learning that game into a series of animations explaining the Cold War, ICBMs, and MAD. I never would have seen those content-specific short films without giving over class time to SPACE PANDA 2010. Other kids made similar transfers; this was not an isolated case. Kids will bring the skills they learn through self-directed learning to the content we are tasked to cover. Bet on it. Call it what you will: Google Time, Atlassian Days, self-directed learning. It’ my second useful constraint.

3. Because we know that timely feedback helps classroom relationships, increases student achievement, and helps curtail downtime, I will attempt to be in all places at all times via Edmodo. I’d like increase my capacity to give feedback during class time as I move between stations or groups. My kids have experience with Edmodo on their computers and iPods. If I’m working with a group and can’t make it across the room to answer a question that’s been shouted out, perhaps I can find the time to post a quick reply to a quick question or give an ETA and suggest a independent next step without engaging in disruptive cross-room conversation. Regardless, the big idea here is not to manage my classroom’s noise level, but to reward students’ investment in their work by improving the timeliness of my feedback and by providing students with a back-channel for helping one another and for giving feedback on the class. I also want to establish a daily community meeting time to make sure we work together on improving class for everyone based on our feedback about it. So my third useful constraint is better coaching and better communication make for better learning.

I will also remove arbitrary restraints on student democracy, community, and learning by abandoning traditional grading, trivial standards, and sending “problem” children out of my room to be “solved” by someone outside our own relationships.

What am I missing? What doesn’t best serve students and their learning? What boundaries on the map should I redraw?

An audience member said “curriculum needs to drive technology.” I asked what should drive curriculum. Dan Fink responded in good humor.

Dan’s response evoked some energy for me, so I want to paste my reply to him here; I think it’s a statement worth taking accountability for, and I don’t want to give the impression that I’m willing to let it sit on Mary Beth’s blog, but not my own.

I hear you, and I’m grinning, but I’m not convinced we can’t get away with greater flexibility and student choice. I think we self-limit here.

There are compromises we can make in how we choose to use class time. Google time is a possibility (say 20%). Negotiating state curriculum with students is a possibility (you give me three standards, and we’ll get you a blog and a trip/Skype call to the aquarium for or action research). Subverting the state curriculum is a possibility (A People’s Textbook of Algebra, anyone?). Ignoring the state curriculum is a possibility (gulp).

I feel keenly the conflict between my vocation as an educator to help others learn and my occupation as a public school teacher to cover state curriculum in such a manner that students recall it for an end of course test. I have positive evaluations, but my test scores have dropped since I stopped obsessively teaching to the state test. People walk through my classroom a few times a year and offer me a few complimentary generalities about what they see. Then, at the end of the year, people talk to me about all kinds of numbers in great specificity. I am confused in so many ways by this, but remain convinced that leaving public education to escape this confusion is self-serving. I recognize why I get talked to about numbers and I acknowledge the effective job people do in working with them – I value their efforts on our kids’ behalf and their work with me to push my teaching. I am lucky to be so supported in my work by my division.

My point: if we’re willing to dwell in ambiguity and take year-end commentary on our tests scores as feedback from adults with different priorities rather than as judgment from our betters – our approvers, our gatekeepers, even our mentors – then during the year we have a lot of wiggle room in covering “the” curriculum.

I worry that the easy answer is an easy target for our complaints and thus helps us be complacent in sitting in judgment without acting in accordance with what we know about learning, child development, and human motivation.

Yours,
C

I would add that there are fantastic administrators out there ready to partner with teachers and students in negotiating curriculum and establishing more targeted power standards embedded in powerful project- and service-based learning. I won’t name anyone in particular as I don’t want to suggest that this post speaks for him or her, but such administrators know who they are, and so do their teachers.

I do seem to remember a process where you people ask me questions and I give you answers, and then I ask you questions and you give me answers, and that’s the way we find out things. I think I read that in a manual somewhere.

-Dr. Heywood Floyd, 2010: The Year We Make Contact

The best thing I ever did for my teaching was to stop teaching.

Before I get into that, here’s a quick to-do list for next year.

1. Organize better for self-directed learning. I shifted my work with students into a more democratic, self-directed space midway through the year in an attempt to improve our relationships, to meet students’ learning needs, and to let students’ natural curiosity and creativity take over our time together. However, I wasn’t prepared to capture as much of the work as I should have. I’ll play around with a bunch of models and combinations this summer and be ready for students to pick ways to archive and reflect on their work this fall.

2. Learn more outside the school. We worked with several partners this year – with local instructional coaches (like @bethcosta6 and @tborash) and community partners, as well as with PLN tweeps like @crudbasher, @engltchrleo, and @kperry. However, we did so somewhat haphazardly thanks to snow-days and other hiccups in pacing. I’d like to work with my school to set aside specific time each week for each students to do, learn, and/or make something outside of school. I have in mind “electives” with a blacksmith, a master carpenter, a green roof nursery, a nursing home, and a musician. That covers maybe 3/5 of us according to numbers and interests. I need to do more legwork in soliciting ideas from students and lining up expert tutors this summer.

3. Bring in the parents. I know a few parents are happy that I’ve developed better relationships with their children. I know a few parents are happy that I’ve implemented self-directed learning. I know a few parents are always going to ask about grades. I know a few parents wonder what the hell I’m doing. I need to set up parent education nights – several of them, repeating and then spiraling – to try and share the big picture of teaching and learning to which I ascribe. I need to explain how a nascent democratic, self-directed classroom looks in a public school and how it promotes and tracks deep and authentic student learning. I need to explain how our class might be different from others, but also how every class here is alike in its determination to serve our students and rehabilitate their notions of learning and what school can be.

Back to teaching better by not teaching.

Here’s an embarrassing story. I’m so glad that this kid stuck with me. Note my sterling use of Choice Theory in August. Crikey.

August: Here’s your work. Hey, look, its on a computer. Let’s go. Hey. Come on. Do something. It’s right there. Wiggle the mouse. Come on. Click. CLICK! What? Come on. Get your foot down. Okay, okay. Now get your foot out of the drawer. Please. Out of the drawer. Let’s go. Come on. Can I help you? Can you tell me why you’re choosing not to work right now? You have to work to be here. Come on. You don’t have to go. You just have to choose to work. I’ll help. Hey – FOOT! DRAWER! If you won’t talk to me, go make a plan…

…December: Blah blah blah work blah blah choice blah help blah WHAT? I’m sorry, but you can’t say “this is [frakking bullpoop]” and stay in class. Go make a plan.

February: Okay. So we’re going to try something new. It’s called self-directed learning. You’re going to make a plan to learn about whatever you want. You’re going to make something to show me what you learned. You can make whatever you want. The idea is to read and write about something you love, and to make something with what you read and write. You tell me when to check in with you. I want you to do something you like at school. You do have to direct yourself to learn – it’s not do whatever you want time; it’s self-directed learning time. A blog? Sure. Basketball? Sure. What are you going to do? Write about the games? Okay. Can I leave you comments? Great. FOOT!

March: Can I see what you wrote? Okay. Let’s talk about organization. Like when you switch from one game to another, start a new paragraph so I can see I should think about a new game.

April: Great headline. Can we talk some more? Great. I wrote about elaboration in your comments last night. Elaboration just means details. Like when you predict who will win the playoffs, you give me your idea, but you don’t tell me why. If you tell me why – if you can give me some stats or reasons for your prediction – then you’re adding detail or elaboration. Okay? Okay. Try it.

May: A report? On what? Three-point shooters? Okay. Are you willing to research? Can you come up with questions? Sure I can help. How many questions do you think would give you enough detail to write a paragraph about each player? Three? Okay. Try it.

June: No, seriously. We have to do this before the end of the year. Please put your blog away. Yeah, I know, it’s [frakking bullpoop], but here we are. Save your draft. Let’s go. Thank you. I’ll get you back to it as soon as possible.

Here’s the student’s first post from March, after he got his blog set up:

Minnesota Timberwolves are on there 16 losing streak.

Here’s one of his inquiry posts from May:

Nate Robinson is one of the best dunkers in the NBA. He plays for the celtics now but near the begining of the year he played for the Knicks he is so awesome at dunking it is amazing. Once he dunked over yow ming he is really tall. He entered the dunk contest three times. He won the dunk contest three times. That is really good. He helped his team a lot when he was on the Knicks but when he was on the celtics he’s not that good now. He dose not play that much anymore but he is a good dunker.

Lebron James is one of the best dunkers in the NBA he can jump from really far and can do some awesome tricks in the air. Lebron James helps his team a lot he is like the best player on that team and he is like the best player in the league. Lebron James is a bad sport though and last year this guy named shannon Brown entered the dunk contest that is why he didn’t enter he was going to but then he punked out because he was scared. But he is good at basketball.

Andrey iguodala is a awesome basketball player and a dunker he should join the dunk contest then people will se his skills. He has got some real serious jumps he can dunk over just about anybody thats why i think he is such a good dunker. He helped his team a lot over the years. He plays for the 76ixer’s they are ok but not that good they did not make it to the play-off’s 

Dwight Howard plays for the magic that team is really good they are still in the playoffs. Dwight Howard has only entered the dunk contest once but he won he finished it with this dunk called the superman it was awesome he put on a cape and then got the basketball and started running and then he jumped in the air so high up in the air that he through the basketball strait down in to the hoop it was awesome i did not get to se it but i still herd about it on ESPN he won the whole entire thing with that. He is a big man. I told my brother about that and i said why did he win he did not even dunk it and my brother said the whole reason that he won is because the fact that he was high enough to throw the ball in to the hoop in the air. It was amazing for guy that tall and big to jump that high.

Jr Smith is one of the best dunkers in the NBA he so good at dunking and three point shots. He should enter a dunk contest thats how good he is at dunking he would might even win the whole thing if he try’s his very best in the dunk contest. He plays for the nuggets that team is okay but they are not the best team in the league. He helps his team a lot by how good his dunks are and by how good he is at three point shooting in the game. He will not let the nuggets down in the next playoffs i just know that he wont let them him down.

This is great progress, but, look, I know there’s work to be done. I know several students who accomplished more with me in a shorter amount of time in a traditional classroom. But I also know that there are kids out there like this basketball blogger who don’t have a shot at feeling safe, acknowledged, or valued in the traditional classroom. And I know it’s not the kid’s fault. It was mine. For all the other kids like this one in my first eight and half years of teaching, the fault was mine. I am sorry.

Sometimes you have to stop teaching because no amount of it will fix a broken relationship or make up for one where there isn’t one.

Sometimes you have to let go of yourself to hold a kid up.

Sometime you have to turn your back on what you were taught in order to learn what’s right. You have to turn your back on what you know to do what you believe. You have to turn your back on your past to change a kid’s future. You have to stop investing your salary in test scores and gamble it all away on finding ways to make learning matter. You have to stop measuring yourself by your best students’ scores and start measuring yourself by what you’re keeping all of them from for the love of a stratified society.

You can’t give up kids to the system and still be the one who won’t let them down.

When we wonder if kids are losing something vital to human relationships because of technology, I wonder if sometimes we don’t understand what the kids are doing, don’t want to value what the kids are doing, or haven’t modeled for them how to build human relationships with technology that is equal parts techno-enriched solipsism and socially-vibrant communications satellite. However, I’m not worried. Kid share their technology and media; their electronics don’t silo them.

I’m reading a lot about #artsed, as well, thinking about students’ opportunities for artistic expression and production in the upcoming year 3 of our arts-infused charter. There’s no doubt that the gifts students use and receive through the arts help them learn, know themselves, and navigate the world. I’ve become especially interested in music across the curriculum thanks to GarageBand, Korg Nano Key USB keyboards, and different iterations of the soundtrack project, thanks in large part to Marco Torres and the possibilities he and his students share with teachers around the world.

ReadWriteThink has a good description of what an autobiographical soundtrack project could be. In our classes, we use the project to study history, and we allow ourselves the option of composing our own music in GarageBand to match the tone and mood of the events we study. For example, this year one student put together a particularly haunting and driving song for Kristallnacht punctuated by percussion and sound effects arranged chaotically throughout the piece. It was scary. The student could also explain what each sound effect was supposed to be as he acoustically imagined the terror of the Nazis demolishing Jewish lives.

For any soundtrack project, I ask students to research the who, when, where, and so-what of any event they want to include. Typically, I teach a brief overview of a time period or major event and ask students to become experts on 3-10 parts of the event, depending on its weight in history, weight in the curriculum, and complexity.

Then I ask students to assemble a playlist of songs that fit the events and to write liner-notes explaining how the tone and/or lyrics of the songs connect to the events.

With those guidelines providing us with some constraint, students riff on the rest of the project.

Perhaps next steps include making our own music videos and burning DVDs and sharing those songs online. And sharing our glogs. Maybe even starting a class music blog, like largehearted boy, related to our content.

Certainly, in the past, it was also fun to make playlists and create album art for novels. It would be fun to do so again.

All of this brings me back to the idea I had walking out of the building today: kids’ theme music.

I think about the transformative power of music, especially in preparing us to take on challenges and celebrate successes.

I remember getting all twitchy with adrenaline as Thunderstruck played in the last minutes of ice-cleaning time before Whalers’ games (yeah, I know – the Whalers; deal). I remember Brass Bonanza playing after every Whalers’ goal. I remember listening to Survivor, Alice in Chains, and Kenny Rogers in the locker room before every high school football game. I sing in the car on the way to work (Glee soundtrack; deal). I play Aimee Mann and Bat for Lashes and Beastie Boys and Michael Franti and Gnarls Barkley and the Flobots and the Old 97’s and even the occasional Floyd (missed’em at Foxboro) or Rush (saw’em at Worcester) tune to get psyched when I feel a step behind. Who doesn’t feel the lift from singing the solo to “Deathly” or “Comfortably Numb?” Who doesn’t feel like a WWF superstar walking into the building with earbuds firmly in place?

Okay, probably several people. But they just need the right music.

And so do our kids.

Let’s ask them to write some kick-ass songs for themselves. Let’s ask them to compose something in GarageBand or I Am T-Pain or Audacity – something they can play or sing or hum like latter-day Trogdor-singing Strong Bads when they enter the room. Let’s help them put together a soundtrack of their learning lives so that entering the classroom is a celebration and affirmation. Let’s take all the time they want to write something that makes them feel good about walking around our shared schools, from class to class, from opportunity to opportunity to shine on like learning diamonds.

Let’s make sure students have access to their theme music whenever they want it.

And let’s have two rules for the music, two rules for school: it’s yours and it makes you happy.