I used twitcleaner.com last week.  Twitcleaner is a Twitter app intended ot help you manage the people you follow, so you can weed out inactive ones.  I found some interesting patterns–the ones in my list either had been inactive since may or last November.  The puzzle-solver in me wants to know why, so I dug a bit deeper to try to figure it out.  My hypothesis is that the November people were either:

*ones who had just joined and perhaps didn’t tweet past the class where they were encouraged to sign up–or

*they were hacked and they gave up after that happened.

The “May Twitter quitters” I figured just might have been taking a break near the end of school, or had taken off for the summer. I found one that was a surprise, though, even though I hadn’t noticed the Twitter absence because I haven’t had time to be on Twitter much the past few months. Knowing a co-worker, I wrote that person and asked if the Twitterer was okay.  Turns out s/he’s not and I found out something I wish I hadn’t. It’s made me very sad.

The week or so before, Scott McLeod had written a post called, Can you ever really know that edublogger beside you? Turns out Steven Anderson was also writing about the same topic: Social Media and Relationships The comments both places are interesting, and could easily be seen as depicting personalities. How people express themselves and what they say shows their personality, and lets us get to know them better, right? I know I certainly feel like I express myself honestly and put myself “out there” in many ways on my blog and in interactions on Twitter and other social networking sites. However, people can say anything on the web, and we can only know whether it is the truth through extended and repeated interactions with that person, right?

I don’t know that anymore. I know I have unfollowed people I’d like to learn from because of their language, because I DO read Twitter at school, and I don’t want curse words on my screen. I am sad this person was so obnoxious in their actions I had to not only unfollow, but block them. I had interacted regularly with this person.  I had met this person at NECC 09.  I had even had a drink with this person. But I didn’t really know this person, and that’s the point Scott makes in his blog.  That’s the point several commenters on his blog make as they ask if we ever really know anyone. How many times have husbands surprised wives (or vice versa) with some habit or behavior the other knew nothing about or we’ve found out something about a neighbor or friend that completely shocked us? I’m from a small town where everyone knows everyone else.  I’ve had very little personal experience with scandal or distrustful situations or incredibly obnoxious behavior–whether it involves drinking or not. I am incredibly naive…though less naive than last week.

I agree with many of the comments on Scott’s blog where people say they are choosing to be trusting. I am, and I will continue to do that with educators whom I meet online. I do think we should heed the warning here, on Wes Fryer’s Blog via Beth Still, though.

However, I have been really “out there” with my elementary kids. I haven’t hesitated to ask educators in my PLN to interact with my students on their wikis–and I have let educators join their wikis to interact with them. I am REALLY rethinking that practice… and how to set up situations to allow my teacher Twitter buddies to give my kids feedback–or respond to their polls–in ways that don’t quite open up my kids so widely to other possibilities like the potential for private interactions with adults, or older students. I’m thinking a Twitter account might serve that purpose. I’m thinking a conversation with Adam Frey (co-founder of wikispaces) is possibly in order to ask if moderated comments could somehow be allowed. I understand wikis are about collaboration, but when asking for responses or help from strangers, there has to be a way to do that safely for my students.

So, as I think about next year and setting up my kids for understanding global connections, share with me how you let them pursue their passions and create their own stuff on the web, AND interact with the world?  I’m not looking for structured projects between classes–I do that, and encourage the kid to kid  and teacher to teacher interaction.  I’m looking for ways to let my kids receive feedback from anyone on their personal creations, but not be able to then turn to a private space for interacting. Suggestions?

We’re placing kids in classrooms for next year right now. It’s a process gone through in multiple schools and classrooms in America in multiple ways. I hate this process, every June, for this reason: Gifted kids need to be placed carefully, based on researched needs, and most teachers not only don’t know this research, but they also don’t pay attention to those who do. EVERY year, I am asked by my principal to make recommendations about gifted kids’ placements.  EVERY year my principal tells the teachers in my buildings to listen to my recommendations or talk to me about why. EVERY year, I can count on several grades to ignore whatever I suggest–and then the next school year, I get to deal with parent and kid nervousness about having no friends in the classroom, or not being with an appropriate group of thinkers, or not being with the math group they were with the year before, or… you get the picture.

We deal with these social emotional needs in a variety of ways. . . sometimes we switch classes for the kids, sometimes it’s a matter of alerting the teacher and supporting her/him as s/he attempts to help the child make new friends and sometimes the child actually ends up going to a private school. My question is why not avoid this grief in the first place?

There are certain kids who simply need a different approach because they think differently. (I would argue there are many more than we acknowledge, but some are resilient enough to put up with the crap we call school.)

I recently got a thank you note from one of my kids. (I’ve cleaned up the misspellings.)

Dear Ms. White

Thank you for a great year. I appreciate every thing that you did for me and I hope that we can see each other next year. Thank you for helping me with my wiki and helping me with Spinc Industreys. You have really helped make my company known. Thank you for being a great teacher for me. You are the only teacher I have had that understands the message that I am trying to give. Thank you for letting me come over for lunch and recess with my friend Alex. Thank you for ideas for my website and other things like programs. You have helped me do lots of things by helping me along the way.

Thank you for answering the questions that I had and helping me think of new questions. Thank you for taking me to things like meetings. Thank you for telling me what’s going on so that I know what’s happening and not treating me like a normal student, instead you talk about things that a normal homeroom teacher wouldn’t.

I like that you talk about other things besides just one thing like most teachers do. You talk about the oil spill and you relate math with it and make things more fun than some teacher would have made them. Instead of giving us worksheets you let us do it on our iPods.  You also let us understand things about SOLs so that we know what’s going to happen instead of normal teachers that just give you the test and you do not know what is going to be in the test.

I like that you are not strict about websites and let us go to youtube and other things like that. You are a teacher that can trust me and other students. You are good at making a first impression also, when I first went into your class I thought all the work was going to be hard but when I walked in we were all setting up websites and telling us about what the year ahead of us is going to be like, I think that is a good way of making a first impression.

Thank you for making this year the best year of my life.

Three sentences stand out to me:

1. Thank you for being a great teacher for me.
2. You are the only teacher I have had that understands the message that I am trying to give.
3. Thank you for making this year the best year of my life.

I just pray that he gets a teacher next year in middle school that can let him soar as he did this year. I just pray he can make the connections he so desperately seeks and so desperately needs.

The fact is, some kids NEED a certain kind of teacher, and they need a peer group that will accept them. They think so differently they often have-shall I say–reduced social skills.  They don’t know HOW to make those connections for themselves. They don’t know how to NOT be brilliant in every conversation. They don’t know HOW to turn off that active brain. They don’t know HOW to inhibit the reactions (eye rolls, sighs, faces) they have when someone says something they KNOW to be wrong. Other kids see them as “weird” or “strange” or “not smart” because they don’t act like “normal” kids do–so they are often ostracized, which makes their need to be accepted even more crucial.

They need a teacher who can coach them in those skills AND accept them for who they are. They need a teacher who can help the other kids see their strengths and what they have to offer the community. The kid who wrote that letter was lucky this year–he had a classroom teacher who liked and honored him and he had me. Between the two of us, he went from being on the outskirts socially to being accepted as one of the smartest kids in the class who could teach other kids how to create web sites. He was the originator of the boy’s group who came to my room every day for recess and lunch to geek out–and the group grew throughout the year. He became a leader, partially because his classroom teacher empowered and honored him and partially because I did. It was a great fit and he made some good friends this year.

So why do teachers ignore my suggestions? Do they not recognize the need for these “odd ducks” to be able to blossom into beautiful swans? Do they not understand the social issues that surround being a really smart kid in schools and the need to have other smart kids you connect to with you?

I just wish teachers would ask the kids sometimes.  They can tell you how important it is to have at least one connection in a classroom. They can tell you how left out they feel sometimes.

So here’s another note I got:

I searched {for my wiki} in google, and found many of my pages not just on twitter, but on blogs, etc.. When I got my wiki, i never expected it to become this popular. I have to catch up on some reviews, but just wanted to say thanks for being a great teacher this year, and for making my wiki well known.

Then, I got this one a day or so later from the same kid:

subject: Apple releases

the iphone 4, and I think the next step for them is to put those features on the ipad (maybe not all of them). Check out this link for more:http://www.apple.com/iphone/?sr=hotnews.rss I just wanted you to know that, and that you are the best teacher I ever had. 🙂

So I wrote back:

I’m curious—best because I taught you, or best because I let you learn?   🙂

and he responded:

Best, because you let me learn what I want to learn. I really enjoyed that, and wish that schools would do that, too.

Dang, why don’t we let ALL kids connect deeply and learn things THEY are passionate about more often??  Why don’t we show that we understand it’s the HUMAN connections that are powerful. . .and that make kids remember things. They may not, as the saying goes, remember the content I taught, but they WILL remember how I made them feel.

When I taught kindergarten, I had a unit about dinosaurs. Young children are fascinated by dinosaurs.  I don’t know if it’s the “monster” connection, or the big words, or the idea of an animal being so huge, or living before men were on earth, or what, but the fact is that all children sit quietly for dinosaur books (well-written dinosaur books well read) and all kids LOVE exploring them–all facets, from their size to their names. Once I discovered this, and I tried teaching a unit on dinosaurs, it became one of my favorites–and one of my most powerful–units of study each year.  My units typically lasted anywhere from a week to three or four, depending on the complexity of my goals and the interest shown by my students.  This one usually lasted at LEAST four weeks.

First, while it was  a thematic unit, I did have big ideas I was trying to help young children understand–the idea of a LONG time ago, the idea of extinction, the idea of scientific hypotheses and the idea that science understanding is still evolving. The biggest idea I always  tried to convey, though, was that everything is connected. Whether it was a meteorite that hit the earth and caused a climatic disaster that killed the plants and thus the plant eaters so the meat eaters had no food, or “extensive release of volcanic gases, climatic cooling (with related changes in ocean currents and weather patterns), sea-level change, low reproduction rates, poison gases from a comet, or changes in the Earth’s orbit or magnetic field”, what happened in one place affected them ALL. (reference)

We studied word origins–herbivore, carnivore and omnivore as well as triceratops, tricycle, tripod and triangle.  We studied geography as we learned where dinosaurs typically lived and where dinosaur bones have been found.  We learned about reading as we began to recognize the names of common dinosaurs we read about–Tyrannosaurus Rex, Brontosaurus (which we learned was really Apatosaurus, since two different teams of scientists had discovered the same kind of dinosaur in two places, and the team who named it Apatosaurus found it first), Stegosaurus, Triceratops, Pterydactyl, and Pteranodon. We studied life processes as we learned dinosaurs laid eggs and that mothers nurtured their young. We practiced the scientific process and studied cartesian plotting as we dug-CAREFULLY-using toothbrushes and toothpicks, to uncover bones in our sandbox and plotted their findings on our grid. We learned about language and letters and words and writing as we wrote our own dinosaur stories and shared what we were learning in our journals and “words we find interesting”  lists. We learned about “silent letters” as we found the P silent in Pterydactyl and Pteranodon.  We constantly compared and contrasted and sorted as we discussed characteristics that were the same and different among various dinosaurs. We made lists of carnivores–of herbivores–and discovered most of us were omnivores. We learned about cold and warm-blooded animals as we studied their lifestyles and habitats–and that there is somewhat of a controversy as to whether these huge animals were truly lizard-like, (as the word part “saur” indicated) or whether they were more bird-like and descendants of the birds of today. We learned which dino was which through repeated exposure to them in books and movies, as well as the songs we loved from records like “Our Dinosaur Friends.”

(I have been 16 years away from my Kindergarten class–but I can still recite the words to these songs–how do you think I found this album online?)

Triceratops with three long horns, a beak like a parrot and a frill where his neck is. .. .or

My name is Stegosaurus, I’m a funny looking dinosaur.  For on my back are many boney plates, and on my tail there’s more…

and check out the comment on the link–the guy who put this online says he, too, still remembers these lyrics.

We ate, breathed and lived dinosaurs–reading about them, writing about them, playing with them in the block area and on the rug, comparing their sizes and drawing one on the blacktop to get a feel for just how huge these things really were, pretending to be paleontologists as we used hammers and nails (and our trusty toothbrush tools again) to dig bones out of plaster of paris we had made in milk cartons, pretending to be newspaper reporters as we reported on the “discoveries” made in the digging and in our block area. We counted dinosaur manipulatives in math–we measured and compared as we learned about the different sizes of their teeth.  We argued facts we learned in movies like “Land Before Time” against what we learned in our books.  We learned to defend our statements and justify our hypotheses, just as adult workers do.

My students were self-directed in what they chose to work with each day, but they were accountable to the bigger community of our classroom, expected to contribute in class conversations, to be able to state facts and make hypotheses, to defend their statements and justify their thinking. They worked in groups or alone at various times, mostly of their own choosing. They made books together (or sometimes alone) to share their learning or simply to celebrate their newfound knowledge. They brought books from home to add to our classroom collection of knowledge as we learned together. They suggested activities to do during our “work choice time” as they learned from their own studies both in and out of school. They looked for books about dinosaurs in the library and shared news they found (or learned from their parents) from the newspaper or TV news.

My job during this time (and always, I believe) was to support their learning, providing opportunities to expand their thinking (first we dug up bones in the sand table and plotted them, then we dug them out of plaster of paris to portray fossils in rocks), and scaffolding whatever they were working on–whether it be helping them with the letters they needed for the writing they were doing, or finding an appropriate book they might be able to “read” (from the pictures) or finding a source of information for the questions they had.

I did (and do) very little large group lecturing–I put information out there in a provocative way and watch them take off on it to see how to support them and how to guide them as they learn to read, write, and do math and science to make sense of their world. I subtly direct some activities so that they will need skills I know I have to teach them from the mandated curriculum. I marvel other times at how much they already know and strive to keep ahead of them a bit to provide new opportunities to learn. I have time, because they are mostly self-directed and internally driven, to work with individuals or small groups, DIRECTLY on the skills they need at that moment in time. I indeed spent most of my “time traveling from student to student to help individuals with individual problems” or challenging them to go beyond what they were already doing.

So, while I was doing this over 20 years ago (thus the title of the blog), isn’t this 21st century teaching, if there is such a thing?  Isn’t this just GOOD TEACHING? And, doesn’t it “support peace and democracy? Ecological integrity? Economic justice? Beauty?” (Okay, maybe NOT beauty or economic justice…)

The idea for this post came from the Cooperative Catalyst Blog Comments on a post I did there.