Third Eye Education
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Mapping our Distance Between 'Stress' and 'Overwhelm'

4/15/2022

 
by Heather M. F. Lyke and the Third Eye Education team 
As Third Eye Education, our main focus is to be a network of learners that shares their own learning as a way to propel learning in others. Additionally, we aim to keep our resources free of fiscal barriers—and we do this as a nonprofit run by volunteers with no budget.

One learning we've been leaning into lately is an individual's need to find balance. 

A commonality between those of us who make up the core team of Third Eye Education: we thrive on new challenges. While new challenges open doors to new learnings, create new conenctions, and allow for new collaborations—they can also lead imbalance. 

Brené Brown's newest book, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience​, states:
"When we don’t understand how our emotions shape our thoughts and decisions, we become disembodied from our own experiences and disconnected from each other."
Wishing to not become disconnected—we value our readers, our listeners, our collaborators in learning far too much—it's high time we share something with you: our team is stressed. Stressed, and wanting to ensure we don't dip into the world of overwhelm.
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To differentiate between stress and overwhelm, Brown shares stories from her time as a waitress, breaking down two common terms used in the service industry. At risk of oversimplifying, Brown explains:
  • In the Weeds is when a server is overloaded with tasks and demands, but can still articulate and understand each of the individual aspects leading to the inundation. 
  • Being Blown ​is when a server has become so overloaded with tasks and demands, that they can no longer articulate nor understand the nuances of the inundation.
Then noting:
"Stressed is being in the weeds. Overwhelmed is being blown."
Related read: My First Year of Teaching, Again and Again

Identifying Stressors

We are in the weeds. No doubt, without question, 100%: the weeds are surrounding us.
​
In Atlas of the Heart, readers learn that, 
"We feel stressed when we evaluate environmental demand as beyond our ability to cope successfully. This includes elements of unpredictablity, uncontollability, and feeling overloaded."
Here at Third Eye Education, we are no strangers to environmental demands, but lately they have been piling up more than ususal. ​For perspective, here is a glimpse:
  • ​Nick Truxal (Third Eye Education co-founder, podcast host, and writer) has returned to grad school: while taking an overload of courses he has also been doing an internship that has him traveling and working extra-long days. 
  • Anne Halliwell, (Third Eye Education ​podcast producer and audio engineer) recently started a new job with longer and less-predictable hours, while also juggling an increase in social obligations and household maintenance needs.
  • Heather Lyke (Third Eye Education co-founder, podcast host, writer, and editor), while navigating a new and more demanding role at work, has also been obtaining her superintendent's license and enduring recent personal trauma. 
All of this in addition to the stressors bought to all of us by 2022—the ongoing Covid pandemic, the war in Ukraine, the increase of mass shootings in the United States, and so on...

Of course, these are no different from what many have been juggling. Increasingly, many are tiptoping on the edge of overwhelm. Teacher strikes are on the rise,cost of living has been steadily climbing, and the ability to leave work at work has been deminishing. The great resignation—or what 
Ranjay Gulati is calling "The Great Rethink"—exists for a reason. 
Related read: Being Alive is Being Imperfect

Avoiding Overwhelm

"Overwhelmed," Brown explains, is "an extreme level of stress;" one where the "emotional and/or cognitive intensity [gets] to the point of feeling unable to function." We here at Third Eye Education don't want to reach this tipping point. While we may be in the weeds, we stand tall: we maintain sight of the horizon. 

For this reason, we are making some adjustments for the foreseeable future: 
  • ​Articles: Since our launch well over a year ago, we have posted a weekly article every Sunday. While we will still strive to post weekly, the consistancy of posting always on Sundays will falter from time to time. 
  • Podcasts: In Season 1, we released episodes every two weeks, always on a Tuesday. Even with our delayed launch of Season 2, we have found this difficult to maintain. So, while we have some amazing episodes to bring you, they will be released intermitently for at least the next few months. 
  • Collaborations: In 2021, we were gathering monthly with a small group of core collaborators, from whom many of our ideas bloomed. These meetings were structured and consistent. In 2022, structure and consistency have taken a backseat. We do still connect from time to time, but in spare pockets of time and not as a full group. 
These are temporary adjustments. Thank you for your compassion as we as we cut a new path  ​through our shifting realities.
Related read: We Are the Leaders We Seek
We always want to be honest with our community, even when it means admiting something hard, like stuggle. It brings us back to Atlas of the Heart, where Brown shares that:  
"Vulnerability is not weakness; it’s our greatest measure of courage."
We hope you agree.

From the Vantage Point of an Outsider: Navigating the 'Us' vs. 'Them' Mentality

3/13/2022

 
by Stefanie Whitney
This writing is an exploration of my own thoughts surrounding the world of education–where I have been, where I am currently, and where I aim to go. These are musings, questions, and curiosities I have had in a confusing, often contradictory, and sometimes frustrating profession fraught with nuance, complexities, and invisible norms. My writing aims to be curious, but it does not aim to be adversarial. My ultimate goal in education is to eliminate the timeworn battle lines of “us vs. them” and function as a “we”. If you are any kind of friend, you will allow me to cling to that hope. 

I am one of them.

  • I am a food sharer. Yes, I do want to try what you are having.
  • I prefer Cream of Wheat to oatmeal.
  • I constantly forget to bring my reusable grocery bags to the grocery store.
  • I am often late. One of those “fast and loose with my time and the time of others” type of folk.
 
And, the list goes on...
  • Over my 44 + 356 days on this earth (Pisces, Gen X/Xennial), I have shifted my political leanings from a Benjamin Moore “Rose Quartz” to one of their 2022 colors of the year “Mysterious” blue.
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  • I am a teacher who uses too many paper copies.
  • I am an English teacher who has personally left dozens of books unfinished (YOLO).
  • I am an educator who is currently not in the classroom.
  • My office is “downtown” and I’m positioned among “the district.”
  • I am working on acquiring my administrative license.
  • I believe in moving away from a grading system devised to label & divide folk and moving toward one that, to me, feels more human-centered.
  • I believe we have systems that have catastrophically divided humans and caused irreparable damage and our only way forward is to fix those systems.
  • I am an impatient advocate of change who also believes that change happens one conversation, one reflection, and one brave soul at a time.

I’m only getting started, but for the sake of time and my increasing anxiety, I will stop for now. 

If this list is all you know about me, then you have likely formed judgments, perhaps even drawn conclusions that all point to: I am or I am not “your kind of people”. Yet, I hope curiosity will encourage you to learn more. 
As one of “them”, I have also found myself hustling to find my “us.”
  • To find my fellow relative time folk and bolster ourselves up with bountiful reasons we are more right than the timelier “thems”.
  • To fly high my cream of wheat freak flag in hopes of attracting a few porridge wielding bears. I’ll even accept Goldilocks as long as she keeps her spoon out of my bowl. (I am a food sharer, but… Covid.)
  • Of course, I seek community with other folk currently not in the classroom, so we can form a human shield to fend off the “cut their positions” slings and “don’t work directly with kids” arrows coming our way.
 
In so many ways and to so many people, I am one of “them.”
 
And for the longest time, I have hustled to show the “us’s” that I’m one of the good “them’s.” 
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I am hustling to be one of the good ones. 

Focusing on the hustle.

Martha Beck believes that “Integrity is the cure for unhappiness.” I’m currently reading The Way of Integrity by Beck, and she explores the concept of hustling. Brene Brown deserves credit as the first to help me reflect on my own hustle, and Beck manages to take my self-reflection to another level. 
Related read: Meandering Through the Messy Middle, Searching for Solid Ground
Beck explains, 
“Humans create elaborate cultures because we are intensely social beings, dependent on the goodwill of others from the moment we’re born. We also have an enormous capacity to absorb and replicate the behavior of people around us. From childhood, often without even noticing it, we learn exactly how to win approval and belonging in our particular cultural context…. In this rush to conform, we often end up overruling our genuine feelings–even intense ones…to please our cultures. The extent to which people will defy nature to serve culture can be truly horrifying.” 
Literal and figurative battle lines are drawn because of people serving a culture–and, as Beck uncovers, often battle lines built not on our integrity but on our desire to fit in, to belong.
 
This quest to belong can be as catastrophic as a world war or as seemingly innocuous as cheering for your favorite hockey team. Seemingly is appropriate here because I cannot be the only one who has observed cheering turn into leering, then smearing, and finally–something much more sinister.
 
So–about our personal hustles. My personal understanding of both Brown’s and Beck’s explanations of the “hustle” is to do whatever it takes to be accepted into a culture of people, often at the expense of our own internal nature, or value systems. The definition is easy to accept. However, the extent to which we can get lost in the hustle is much harder to actualize, which is why Beck’s request of readers at the end of chapter two “admit–just to yourself–that some of your actions are designed to impress or fit in with other people” shriveled up my soul like a raisin. 
Related read: We Are the Leaders We Seek

"Us" vs. "Them": a living history

As a former member of the “not a math person” team, I feel a bit proud of my observation that division seems to be the most popular of the mathematical operations (I also feel flummoxed, sometimes defeated, and always overwhelmed by this reality).  I’m not sure if test scores or climate surveys quantify this, but observational data suggests we have been and continue to be really good at division in this profession, in this state, in this country, in this world. 
​[Scene setting: A Dances With Wolves journaling voiceover]
 
Today, I chose to venture into the camp of “thems”. Initially, I felt a bit disoriented, but I continued walking in the direction of their world mixed with both fear and hope. Their leader was willing to talk with me, and as we sought to understand one another through small talk about mutual friends, I realized the pit in my stomach was being replaced with a warm sense of familiarity. I noticed a physical change, as well. Settling in, my jaw relaxed enough to support a genuine smile; my shoulders relaxed as the tension of discord released. While walking away from camp that day, a thought crept into my mind: I think I like them. This was a puzzling reality, and I hope my new friend will invite me back again sometime soon. I cannot help but think there may be a much smaller gulf between us than originally thought.
 
[End scene. (I hope you, too, heard Kevin Costner’s voice while reading this)]
Continue ad nauseam. ​

Choosing to be an outsider

I know I am most motivated by curiosity and compassion for humans, animals, and the occasional inanimate object. Because of curiosity and compassion, I believe that crossing over to hang with “thems”, while initially unsettling, almost always ends in a feeling of warmth in my insides and a smile that is hard to wipe from my face. 
Related read: Why Does the Frame We Use Matter? Embracing Curiosity Over Judgment.
There are rare moments when this type of rendezvous doesn’t result in blossoming warmth and shared smiles. Upon reflection, I realize in many of these failed moments that I was/am hustling–trying to cajole, convince, fit in, or defend myself–often through evasive jokes, ducking and weaving, and the occasional speed talking. I leave these conversations frustrated, short of breath, and filled with the sinking dread that my position as a “them” has been solidified.
 
In the spirit of selective attention, I’m struck by just how often even those with the best of intentions manage to divide us. Take this recent quote by Adam Grant:
“In cultures of arrogance, people get rewarded for expressing certainty and conviction. The most confident speaker claims the most status. In cultures of humility, people are applauded for admitting ignorance and asking questions. The most complex thinker earns the most respect.” 
My initial reaction: “Yeah. See? It is them, not us.” 
Related read: Finding the Collaboration Balance
But I have been an active member of both cultures. I know where I feel most myself and how I show up among folk who inspire me rather than how I show up when inclined to bring my hustle. I prefer a culture of humility, but I need to frequently pause and consider how I am contributing and upholding this culture rather than perpetuating a culture where hustle and arrogance are the play calls. 
 
Grant brings up an example that does not have to be about division. If I accept my role in the situation and choose to avoid deflection and blame, then I understand he is talking about being human—choosing arrogance or humility. We have choices. Timshel.
An example: It is true that I do not work daily with students in a classroom setting. It is also true that I have an impact on the student experience. ​
And while both of these things can be simultaneously true, what is more important is that I stop trying to convince anyone else of this reality and simply know my own truth.
  • I chose this career path because I believe in helping lead change.
  • I choose to live by the values of compassion and curiosity; everything that sits right in my soul is grounded in these two beliefs.
  • Most everything I do that leaves me hustling is often untethered from these two values.
  • If untethered, I then need to figure out how to get grounded or I need to determine the purpose and value of this experience.
This isn’t to say that every time I am uncomfortable I’m untethered from my values; I may just need to more clearly identify the ties that bind. Discomfort is growth–an opportunity to reflect on what is causing me to feel this way. 
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Going forward, I am reminded that at the first sign of battle lines being drawn an opportunity exists to calmly step over the divide and ask questions. Listen and seek to understand. Fight the instinct to grab my ruler and Sharpie (it’s taking everything in me to not make a hurricane path reference here).
 
When we are in places where lines of division are being drawn, rather than choosing sides, I strive to be an outsider who starts asking more questions. (In this regard: I have been known, on rare occasions, to weaponize questions--sorry Socrates—so I find it helpful to check my tone of voice and know my authentic intent of asking before boldly striving for that outsider status.)
Related listen: Influencing Education with Terry O'Reilly
“Us vs. Them” only exists if we let it. We are the perpetrators of division and discord. We can either pick up the golden apple, pull out a sharp knife, and argue over who gets rewarded, or we can peel the superficial skin off to reveal the parts underneath where common ground exists. (Too much? Did that allusion get out of hand? Probably. Some will like it; some won’t. Oops, I did it again. Gah. Free Britney. Opportunities for division are everywhere.)

Stefanie Whitney, EdD, works with the Curriculum and Instruction team in Rochester Public Schools (RPS). She's also been an English teacher, an AVID instructor, and both a high school and a middle school instructional coach in RPS.

Doing the Deep Work of Education: 3 Reasons It's Needed, 3 Ways to Get Started

2/27/2022

 
by Heather M. F. Lyke
A simple Google Search or a scroll through a social media feed from an educator, and it’s easy to confirm that this is a hard year—a hard year that follows two previously hard years. This is a truth that has not alluded us here at Third Eye Education: simply explore some of our articles from this past year to confirm:
  • "Rethinking Education: Using the Pandemic as Inspiration for Innovation," May 2021
  • "My First Year of Teaching, Again and Again," August 2021
  • "Saving Students & Saving Ourselves," December 2021
  • "Meandering Through the Messy Middle, Searching for Solid Ground," January 2022​

In the past year—particularly, over the past few months—there is one phrase we hear over and over from educators: We just don’t have enough time.
 
Yep. That tracks. Over the course of a school day, teachers have classes to prep for, labs to set up, emails to answer, students to follow-up with, make-up assessments to give, test scores to analyze, poor student choices/behaviors to address, copies to make, coffee to drink, emails to answers, bathroom needs to attend to, parents to call, papers to grade, meetings to attend, assignments to create, messes to clean up, referrals to follow up on, chapters to preview, grades to update online, club meetings to facilitate… and those are only the basics. Not to mention what happens when the classroom phone rings: Can you cover __ class during your prep hour? Could you attend this IEP meeting in place of __ since he is out ill today? FYI, there will now be a mandatory after school meeting.

​
So the day finishes with work undone; which means that teachers take the work home with them, or they stay late to finish it, or they feel guilty that they did neither of the two. Little of this refuels the soul, little of this is why teachers went into the field, and none of this is sustainable for the long term.
Related podcast episode: Making Educational Constraints Beautiful with Mark Barden
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While too much to do in too little time may be a truth universally acknowledged in our field, it’s not one to embrace. In Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport, readers learn that you must “treat your time with respect” (227) and ensure there are many opportunities to do deep work, or “professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration” (3).

​Considering how little time educators have, the likelihood is low that most Third Eye Education readers will have time to complete Newport’s book in the near future (maybe once summer arrives), I bring you the following key reasons and applications for educators:


3 Reasons Why Deep Work is Needed


It increases job satisfaction.
Counterintuitive though it may be, “jobs are actually easier to enjoy than free time, because…they have built-in goals, feedback rules, and challenges, all of which encourage one to become involved in one’s work, to concentrate and lose oneself in it” according to the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Newport 84).

​Hungarian psychologist Csikszentmihalyi is perhaps most famous for his work on flow states, which is outlined here along with how educators can utilize this concept in classrooms:
Newport notes that a state of “flow generates happiness” and that “deep work is…well suited to generate a flow state” (85). Therefore, to increase satisfaction with work, educators may wish to find more opportunities for deep work, just as educational leaders may wish to remove/limit the many barriers that can get in the way. 
Related read: The Pedagogy of 'The Great British Bake Off'
It increases the ability to learn new things.
It is not uncommon to hear that “the educational system is broken” nor that someone would like to lead a new initiative but they “just don’t have the energy.” If we want to try new things, if we want to fix broken systems, then we have to have a capacity to learn new and hard things.
 
Newport notes that “to learn requires intense concentration” (34); yet, we often try to squish it into 10 minutes at the start of a staff meeting, 30 minutes of table conversation in a room where other groups are also talking, or 45 minutes of PLC session that is filled with interruptions by emails or visitors. But learning requires “deliberate practice”: attention “focused tightly on a specific skill you’re trying to improve or idea you’re trying to master” (35) for long periods of time.
 
The educational system we are working in right now needs change, but to learn and apply what is needed to make that change, we first must ensure there is time for deep work. 
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Related read: Finding Our Portals to Transcendence
It increases productivity.
Deep work pushes past that concept that being busy is being productive. “Doing lots of stuff in a viable manner” isn’t the aim (64). Instead, when deep work is embraced one identifies what tasks are most important and ensures they can be completed during periods of high concentration.
 
If one has “clarity about what matters” it then “provides clarity about what does not” (62), and knowing the difference allows one to focus on the work that will have the greatest impact. In turn, productivity—at least the productivity around what matters most—is enhanced.

3 Ways to Reclaim Time to Do Deep Work


Take control of your tasks.
Newport notes that the “key to developing a deep work habit is to move beyond good intentions and to add routines and rituals into your working life,” to “minimize the amount of your limited willpower necessary to transition into and maintain a state of unbroken concentration” (100).
 
Some routines to try:
  • Batching your work, or scheduling like tasks together, can help with concentration. Batching “hard but important intellectual work into long, uninterrupted stretches” (39) allows focus to be sustained when it’s needed most. Likewise, batching together smaller tasks, like replying to emails or phone messages, allows those smaller, distracting items to be checked off so they will not pull attention away from more important tasks.
  • Schedule your day. “Divide the hours of your workday into blocks and assign activities” to each block (223). By using Newport’s recommendations, but altering them to work for educators, such a schedule might look something like this:
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  • Shutdown work at the end of the day. Newport notes that “a strict shutdown ritual that you use at the end of the workday” is beneficial and that those interested in doing more deep work should craft “a series of steps you always conduct one after the other” (151). This might look like, at the end of every workday, (1) doing a final check of email, (2) straightening up your desktop, (3) grabbing your empty lunch bag, (4) verbally saying “done” and then (5) shutting off the classroom lights and locking the door. This creates an opportunity for your work-brain to turn off since incomplete tasks can dominate our attention, but “we don’t need to complete a task to get it off our minds;” rather, we simply need to “make a plan” for how it will be completed later (152-153).
Related read: Finding the Collaboration Balance
Limit distractions.
Some of what Newport suggests when it comes to limiting distractions doesn’t fit in education. For instance, as much as I would love to try his “Don’t Respond” method for dealing with email, I don’t think that would go over well with the staff, parents, students, and community members who email me frequently. Nonetheless, here are some ideas to do work in the education field:

  • Turn off email notifications during prep hours. For me, it’s the *da-ding* noise of each email hitting my inbox that distracts me, so I mute my computer when I’m doing deep work. I also turn my cellphone on to its “do not disturb” setting during the workday.
  • Come in early/stay late a few days a week. Since school days are filled with distractions, consider batching tasks that need focus into times when students and colleagues are less likely to interrupt. This could also look like a half-day that you work from home on the weekends. However, be careful not to do this too often: you need down time too (see “Build capacity for future focus” below).
  • Work outside of your classroom/office: make yourself harder to find. Personally, I love that “coffeehouse feel” I can get in the secondary Media Center, so if I need to really dig into a task, I simply leave my office and make it harder for interruptions to find me, while still knowing if it’s an emergency someone will track me down. 
  • Lock your door, maybe even add a note that says something like, “from 'X' time to 'Y' time I am unavailable because I am focusing intently on providing students with quality feedback, planning engaging lessons built on best practices, or doing a deep dive into what research says will make my students learning experiences more valuable. If this is an emergency, please    ; otherwise, please stop by later or send me an email.”
 
I know there are those who might scoff at some of these suggestions, usually with the argument that we need to be available for our students at all times. While that may be true in some cases, for most of us setting and sharing boundaries like these is a way to teach students time management as well as a way to model the importance of focused work. Setting boundaries lets us become even more available for students in those times when we are not engaged in deep work: these boundaries allow us to be more focused while working with students, as we know our other tasks have already been, or are scheduled to be, completed.
Related read: We Are the Leaders We Seek
Build capacity for future focus.
Perhaps this is the most counterintuitive of the ways to reclaim time and embrace deep work. To focus deeply, one must also have time allotted for boredom, reflection, meditation, and creativity: this is the yin that balances out the yang of deep work.
 
In Deep Work, Newport notes that he doesn’t “work at night and rarely on weekends;” yet, during the fall of 2011 to the fall of 2014 he published 20 peer-reviewed articles, won two highly competitive grants, published a book and wrote the bulk of another all while being a full-time professor at Georgetown. His ability to sequester work to Monday through Friday, and to finish each day by 5:30 PM, actually provided him with stronger focus; knowing he had limited time enhanced his productivity and allowed him, upon getting home, to be more present as a spouse and father.
Some ideas for reclaiming the downtown needed to do deep work while at work:
  • Say no to requests that don’t align with the deep work you are already doing or planning to do.
  • Do work at work by using some of the strategies outlined above. Leave your to-be-graded pile on your desk, keep your laptop at school, and end your day with a clear plan for tomorrow. This allows downtime to begin the moment you leave work until the moment you return.
  • Stay off Social Media, which can pull you back into thoughts of work. A simple post by a coworker, or a shared article about teaching, can have your brain back at work in no time. Instead, allow yourself a small window to engage on social media, if you must engage at all.
  • Schedule downtime by taking an art class, signing up for a yoga class, or meeting a friend for coffee.
Related read: Focusing on Our Students Requires Focusing First on Ourselves

By putting into practice some of what Cal Newport recommends, we might be able to make educational change happen faster and achieve more ideal outcomes. Whereas, as Henry Ford is attributed with saying: "if we keep doing what we have always done, we will always get what we have always gotten."
Now, with all of that said, I have just spent two hours doing deep work by focusing on this article (awesome!)—but I did it on a weekend (not so awesome​)… So, that is a change I will need to make going forward.

​In honor of my own suggestions above, I am now going to turn off this laptop and take a nice long soak in a warm bath so I can better focus on work when I arrive back at school on Monday.

Heather M. F. Lyke is the Director of Teaching & Learning for Dover-Eyota Schools and author of numerous articles focusing on quality education.

Meandering Through the Messy Middle, Searching for Solid Ground

1/16/2022

 
by Stefanie Whitney
I hear myself using the phrase “messy middle” quite frequently of late. This meander seeks to make sense of what the term “messy middle” even means.

In my mind’s eye, I imagine the messy middle as a place where one is suspended in an ocean between two shores–both shores well beyond reach. Solid ground no longer underfoot, it’s incumbent upon me to make decisions that will, once again, lead me to a steady, grounded place.  

Some moments I have experienced this uncomfortable feeling in the classroom and community have been when I have turned over the reins of control and held my breath in wonder about what my fellow humans will do with them. What will they do with the foundation I have built? What will my role look like now? Will they need me? What if a mess is made of the beautiful ground I crafted? What holds? What falls apart? And what was my role in both outcomes?

We cannot possibly know how all of this (envision widespread hands, palms up, gesturing at our world) is going to turn out, which is a bone chilling reality for anyone who appreciates a semblance of control. A reality that seems all the more staggering as each month passes in this extended twilight zone in which we all exist. (Though, I’d argue that messy middles occur whether we are in the middle of a global pandemic or not.)

From here, my mind wanders to William Butler Yeats’ “The Second Coming,” particularly this stanza: 
Turning and turning in the widening gyre   

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity.
I am always admittedly stalled by Yeats' use of the word “loosed” twice, placed so closely together. In a little search for an improvement that I’m certain Yeats would appreciate, I arrived at Merriam Webster’s definition of loosed:
Loosed:  (1) to cause a projectile to be driven forward with force (2) to find emotional release for (3) to set free as from slavery or confinement
Misters Merriam and Webster are speaking my language. For the purposes of this essay, please focus on the latter two definitions. Because of them, I will leave Yeats’ word choices alone. Also, if I may continue being so bold, it seems clear to me that Yeats was stuck in the messy middle of something, and he leaned on language to help make sense of it. The messy middle. Here we are. The middle of the school year, in the middle of a global pandemic, in the middle of hope for progress.
Related read: On the Joy of Discomfort
Observing myself and others during this sustained time of discomfort, I am starting to believe that the messy middle really indicates that moment when logic and structure disappear and emotions begin to creep into the fray. Of course, it makes sense to feel like things are starting to fall apart. That the center is not holding.
​
And yet….
I find myself considering: Who built the center?  And why is it their axis we seek to latch onto?

In fact, what if this discomfort isn't indicative of a  “falling apart” at all?

What if we are active participants in the collision of our outdated systems and our ever-evolving value systems? And what if the result of this “turning and turning” is the suggestion that logic and structure do not hold without an awareness and grounding in values and emotions? Maybe the feeling of a messy middle simply indicates we are now entering a phase that cannot hold upon the foundation and structures of the past, without an approach that requires us to tread water while we look around, feel things more deeply, and root ourselves in updated, albeit still developing, value systems.
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Safir and Dugan, in Street Data: A Next-Generation Model for Equity, Pedagogy, and School Transformation, address this type of uncertainty: ​
The idea of throwing yourself into a change process with no known outcome and just a line of inquiry may feel uncomfortable and revolutionary all at once--a blast of fresh air on the stale econometric framework, which assumes we can data-fy and plan our way into new results. By contrast, emergence calls on us to slow down, listen deeply to those at the margins, bring folks to the table to reimagine the landscape with us, and move in partnership to build a new reality. It is a liberatory change model, freeing us from the fantasy of control while pushing us to maximize our influence in service of equity and antiracism.”
Related read: Deeply Human (Dessa)

“...fantasy of control….” – “...the centre cannot hold….”

If we are finding that our old norms, our old systems are not working right now, then perhaps we need to investigate what those systems are built upon. If our souls are unsettled and we feel the bottom dropping out, then maybe our old systems are crashing head-on into our developing values; we are trying to hold our old systems up against an evolving human experience. It’s uncomfortable because that system felt safe and I knew my role, but I see more clearly all those not meant for that old system. They do not belong in it. So we don’t belong here, either. Change is crucial, and hard. 

A bit about belonging

Brene Brown’s latest work, Atlas of the Heart, aims to help us identify and name experiences and emotions in order to gain power of “understanding, meaning, and choice.” While delving into the experience of belonging, Brown interviewed 8th graders about what it feels like to belong in a place. In their words:
Belonging is being somewhere where you want to be, and they want you.
Brown juxtaposes the definition of “belonging” against the definition of “fitting in,” which they describe as:
Being somewhere where you want to be, but they don’t care one way or the other.
​Brown further explains,
Because we can feel belonging only if we have the courage to share our most authentic selves with people, our sense of belonging can never be greater than our self-acceptance.
Which begs the questions:
  • Shouldn’t we seek to build a community upon a center?
  • One where everyone can authentically root themselves?
  • One Where everyone feels like they are wanted and belong? 
Related read: Accessing Mirrors and Seeing Through Windows - Why Students Need Diverse Books

Heart is sea,
Language is shore.
Whatever sea includes, will hit the shore.

-Rumi
Brown’s explanation of belonging and Safir and Dugan’s description of a change process take us back to Yeats’ work; this time through the writing of Joan Didion, who borrows from Yeats’ poem for the titles of both a book of essays and a 1976 essay in the Saturday Evening Post. Didion acknowledges that, 
​It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.
Didion, in exploring the upheaval and disruption of the 1970s, writes about the critical nature of thinking for one’s self. Belonging to one’s self. In “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” Didion states: 
I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for one’s self depends upon one’s mastery of the language.
The words of both Didion and Rumi make me wonder:
  • Are we guiding students toward mastery of the language–so they are able to know themselves and think for themselves?
  • Are we giving them language that explains more than that which a system has determined is necessary to be successful?
  • Or are we also guiding them to master a language that helps them describe themselves? Language that helps them accurately describe how they feel and how they belong? Do we know this language? And are we willing to speak it? 
It seems fitting to acknowledge the great loss of  Joan Didion with her passing on December 23, 2021. ​
Again, Safir and Dugan address belonging when considering what a school district chooses to place value upon:
If we accept that success can be defined by a metric -- if we hold true that a child’s test scores or grade point average are determinants of her future -- we will find ourselves forever suspended in a hamster wheel, chasing external solutions, curricula, and validation. But if we believe that every student is more than a number (or a “trauma” story) -- is in fact a complex, layered human being with endless potential, brilliance, and access to community cultural wealth -- we can choose a pedagogy of voice that transforms everything from our classrooms to our adult cultures to our policies. Such a pedagogy says, “I see you. I believe in you. You are safe to grow and thrive here. I want to hear your voice.”
Related read: Why Does the Frame We Use Matter? Embracing Curiosity Over Judgment

Untethered Moments

During last week’s bone-chilling, sunlit days, while driving through slush and refreeze, a whisper encouraged me to keep driving. Drive past the chain restaurants, the organized meetings, the weight of expectations. Drive until nothing familiar surrounds me, expectations are impossible to meet, and there are no commitments on the horizon. Even now, I’m staring out the window–eyes focusing on everything beyond reach and nothing at all. Maybe my retina and optic nerve are having an argument? Silent treatment is the worst. In all of my efforts to live in the moment–the only moment we can actually count on–here I am, daydreaming about a four-wheeled mode of escape. And it’s funny, because I’m not actually trying to escape this very moment. I am good. I am warm. I have coffee. I’m mostly not hungry.

It’s likely I am trying to escape the foreboding feeling that unsavory moments from my past will repeat themselves -or- maybe I am trying to sidestep future moments that I cannot clearly control in the here and now. Futility at its finest, right?

​Nonetheless, I’m untethered right now, but I’m learning what tethers me. Perhaps these two things are the same for others: 
(1) Belonging to myself–getting square with my values (for me, compassion and curiosity).
For an exercise on isolating your core values, check out  Brene Brown’s Dare to Lead value activity. ​
​(2) A sense of belonging within my communities.      
When I’m feeling untethered, is it because the system and structures within which I’m trying to function no longer align with my values -or- because those systems and structures no longer feel like home to me? If I can answer this question, I tend to gather a bit more agency in my own experiences.
​
It’s not lost on me that I have the privilege to seek out agency in most of my experiences. Do our students have this same privilege? All of our students, I mean?  Social and emotional learning is an educational hot button right now, and rightfully so. The more language I have as an adult to work through my discomfort, my emotions, and get clear on my values, the more agency I have when working for equilibrium. As an educator, how can I build systems in my spaces that allow all of us to get grounded in our values, to belong in this community? 
Related read: Three Ways to Help Students Create Community

The Students’ Take

Recently, I seized an opportunity to talk with students about their experiences with feedback. The questions that guided my work were: What type of feedback feels most actionable to you? What types or approaches to feedback can hinder your growth?
Inevitably, the responses of all 43 students, grades 8-12, revealed themes surrounding  relationships, trust, and belonging. Feedback is an action, often a system at play. As an English teacher with limited time, logic centered my feedback, even if emotions (pride, frustration, excitement, passion) bolstered my feedback process. Students also acknowledged the existence of emotions at the heart of their feedback experience. All of the students spoke of how feedback, their teacher, or the classroom environment, made them feel.

Rarely did students talk about grades as the sole reason feedback is helpful, but all students discussed the need to have a relationship with the teacher or person giving feedback and a need to feel a sense of identity and belonging in the class. Some even spoke of the need for passion–from the teacher regarding their quest for students to learn and within the student for the subject area or topic. In short, students want to feel like they belong, like they are seen, and that their voices matter.
​
I’m struck by how students spoke of values and emotions, yet as adults we often find ourselves rumbling about external systems. 

Treading Water

The messy middle can also be explained as a feeling of great discomfort. We have been in this sustained discomfort for months, years even. When I’m uncomfortable, I seek to ease that discomfort as quickly and painlessly as possible. However, I’m learning that, for me, the answer is to slow down, take stock, feel the intensity of and seek to better understand my emotions. Get grounded in my values.

Of course, in this sustained discomfort, we are apt to fight harder to reach one shore or the other; some form of solid ground. But what are we hoping to accomplish with all the splashing, thrashing, and death grips on past systems that don’t serve everyone? What if we normalize the kind of discomfort that bends toward progress, inclusion, and shared humanity?

Maybe the next best step is to calmly look inside at what is causing the turbulence, ground ourselves in our values, and then confidently and slowly start moving in a direction that aligns our value systems with the external systems that demand our attention? In that slow motion, one shore starts to loom larger. We can belong to our messy selves, and we can move with those folk who want us among them exactly as we are.

Stefanie Whitney, EdD, works with the Curriculum and Instruction team in Rochester Public Schools (RPS). She's also been an English teacher, an AVID instructor, and both a high school and a middle school instructional coach in RPS. 

Learning from Our Students

12/19/2021

 
by Jean Prokott
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The sophomores have spent December writing creative nonfiction, short vignettes that allow them to rummage around for the metaphors hiding in their lives. I’ve been teaching personal essay for the last decade, so I often predict the topics students will choose (failing a test, church mission trip, sports injury) and the symbols they will find (butterflies, water, clouds) and preemptively direct them away from those clichés. The best part is to tell them what not to write. They have to keep rummaging.

Every once in a while, a kid finds a perfect peach of a topic and writes about it in a way that unties me. I want to share with you the story of “nonnie” so you see what I mean.* ​

​nonnie
​

When I found nonnie she was lying on her side, her stomach bloated, legs straight out, stiff, eyes wide open. The flies had already found her; they swarmed around her mouth, entered and exited as they pleased. She never let anyone as close as I was to her, she should have been running, putting a comfortable distance between us, keeping an eye on me as I fed the other cows. Yet there at my feet she lay motionless, off guard, vulnerable. Her fur coat fluffy, white and grey splotches with black running through like ink in water. Swirling, twisting, winding its way down her back and along her sides, creating an elegant contrast. This beautiful creature one foot away who should be running but is still as a rock. This beautiful creature with fluid creeping out of her mouth forming a puddle at my feet. The same fluid that built up in her lungs and drowned her, all because she faced an incline and couldn't get up. Such a simple action. There were visible imprints on the ground like a marred snow angel, made while she fought for life.
 
nonnie wasn't a tame cow, never one to crowd for food. She found out how to get under a fence in the far paddock and went for a couple joy runs. She ate grass in the pasture. She liked potatoes. I watched her birth, the first time I had ever seen a cow born. 3 days late, quick labor, the placenta covered her nose and I helped cut it away. Her mom tiredly cleaned her. She nursed the first milk, the most important for the calf, the colostrum containing antibodies necessary for immunity.  I remembered those things as I looked at her lifeless body. I saw this cow as a fresh little calf and I now see her as a bloated, lifeless, mound.
  
When Bill got there he told me what happened to nonnie. He got the skid loader and moved her to a grove of trees far from the house. I asked if he buried her, he said the coyotes would find her.​
That comma splice in the last line alone.

That structure with time, to start and end with death, to bring nonnie to life in the middle.

Her metaphor is one we all know. There's a defining moment in our lives when we learn about death. nonnie represents the literal of this coming-of-age, but also her struggle up the hill represents how my student felt when she lost nonnie.
Related read: On the Joy of Discomfort
It was a gift to read this piece. I wrote tomes of feedback in purple pen—mostly stars and wut and this is powerful over and over to the point where she probably thought I’d been living as a recluse for the last decade with only episodes of trash TV to keep me company. (Although to be fair, I think I just described last year and most of this one.)

One would have to be a callous car crash of a person if they didn’t feel their heart explode when they learned about nonnie’s fate and the effect she'd had on my student, and the day I read this, the time of year I read this, that this had been the 80th out of 95 essays I’d read—nonnie’s story was literally the saddest thing I’d ever heard in my whole sad life and I would spend the rest of my days mourning nonnie and my student’s loss.
​
After I read about nonnie, I had a flashback to an experience I’d had on my grandparents’ dairy farm and a cow named Flopsy, who’d been born with a messed-up leg. The end of that story is predictable: while eating hamburgers one evening, my father brought it up.

​​​That wasn’t the impetus of my response, however.
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I sent a few lines of the essay to a few teacher friends with the note:

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​And they wrote back: 

Because it is quite clear we are all nonnie. 
Related read: Our Stories are Data, Too
Her tragedy was that she’d wanted to climb a hill. There are so many hills this year. nonnie drowned “all because she faced an incline and couldn't get up. Such a simple action.” nonnie had spent her life free and sassy and getting under fences. She “liked potatoes.”  I like potatoes, too, I’d thought. I like potatoes, too.
​
Since the assignment was not one short scene, but three, when I conferenced with my student this week, I reviewed more rough drafts. One was about a horse named Iago (and I’m sorry, but find a more perfect name for a horse). An excerpt:
He broke through the fence the first day we had him […] Iago became my favorite horse. First I was brushing him, that soon turned into riding him, performing tricks like standing on him, spending hours in the barnyard making different ¨5 star meals¨ out of oats, potatoes, and grass (sushi was the favorite).
Is Iago still alive? I asked. Yes, Ms. Prokott, Iago is still alive.
​

The third scene was about a chicken.
the chicken I refuse to name

​Just two weeks after we got the chicks they had doubled in size. Besse chickens, white, fat, feathers missing, they were meat birds. As chicks they were cute but the chick phase quickly disappeared, lasting only two weeks. This type of chicken is bred to grow fast as most meat birds are. It's easier that way, the stressed heart, weak legs, achy joints, and poor quality of life are a small setback. So small in fact that it gets skipped over, we don't care about the living chicken, we care about the meat. The fact that it grows fast and is ready to butcher in about a month and a half outweighs the chicken's life experience.
 
The chicken I refuse to name was probably three weeks old, it was in a really ugly period where the feathers were patchy, bare pink skin showed through, like a red stain on white. The chicken's feathers were dusty, making her look cream. She was probably two pounds, not fully grown but not a chick. I found her laying down in the chick coop, her breath irregular, heavy, all the energy she had quickly depleted as she tried to prolong her life. Slow, sickly, inhale, shaky, lacking, exhale. Her eyes tired, head heavy, dropped like a weight to the hard ground. She was suffering. I brought over a bowl of water and a small handful of food, like that was going to help. She didn't even seem to notice me, eyes lazily fixed ahead of her, hanging on to all the energy she had left. When she didn't eat or drink I sat there for a while, I knew what was going to happen next. Though it was selfish I wasn't ready for her to die, maybe she would get better. As I sat there though, I knew I was kidding myself, she wasn't going to get any better. I looked at her one last time, in all her frailty and weakness. Then I told Bill.
 
As he walked toward the chickens I walked slowly the other way. I came back to the chickens, shovel in hand, gloves on. With a hole, about a foot deep, dug under the cover of a large maple, I picked up her small, delicate, body and buried her.
I read this, I looked up, I said: Why are you doing this? Why are you trying to kill me?
Related read: Creating Space for Student Empowerment
What also kills me is how humble she is. I think I might spend the rest of the year convincing her that, yes, it is that good. I know I will spend the next decade using her essay as a model for the assignment. And I just now realize this random IKEA print of a cow I have hanging in my classroom will never look the same.
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My reaction to this powerful piece was not only reader-response, of course—this student has mastered empathy and control of language and voice and happy accidents and every possible technique to make me react the way I did. But I don’t want to talk about how she got there, don’t care to list which activities we did in the classroom, don’t want to get my nails dirty in pedagogy. This was all her. I simply want to share this victory. Her victory to write such a heart wrenching piece, to have the maturity to revisit grief and make it beautiful.

While we’re all nonnies this year, struggling up the hill (and praying we don’t meet her fate) maybe we can also be my student. It’s been a year of loss, so let’s talk about it. Maybe find the metaphors. Learn from our students. 
​
And the next time you have a glass of milk, please pour one out for nonnie.

​* The student has given me permission to share. 

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​Jean Prokott is an English teacher in the Rochester Public Schools. She is also the author of the book The Second Longest Day of the Year which won the Howling Bird Press Book Prize, author of the chapbook The Birthday Effect, a recipient of the AWP Intro Journals Award, and has both poetry and nonfiction published in numerous journals.  Learn more about Prokott online or connect via ​email.


Finding Our Portals to Transcendence

11/21/2021

 
​by Phil Olson
There is an experiential continuum between being awestruck by the majesty and scale of the natural world and being utterly engrossed by a detailed, complex task.  Macro versus micro, breadth versus depth.
 
My students and I are suffering from a lack of both.
Related read: You Have Learned Something / You Have Lost Something
When my Advanced Placement Literature classes recently read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Or The Modern Prometheus, they encountered dense prose and the need for a good thesaurus.  At first, they didn't like it.  The plot is a slow burn, and all those words make it a slog, so we get through the early pages by looking for word combinations that might make excellent band names:
  • Bathed in Tears
  • Five Hungry Babes
  • Glut the Maw
  • Nocturnal Rambles
  • and the fave: More than Sister (Creepy, I know.)   
Some students take offense when I point out that young Victor Frankenstein is a STEM student who is obsessed with the potential power of numbers and formulas and is determined to make them answer humanity’s biggest questions: 
  • How can we make our lives meaningful?
  • What is our responsibility to others?
  • How can we bend the world to our own will? 
 
As he pursues science, Victor becomes a narcissistic jerk who makes an eight-foot-tall mistake, and students are eager to criticize him by arguing that no one could be so short sighted as to actually assemble and animate such a powerful creature without heeding its obvious dangers.  Then we talk about nuclear arsenals, the petroleum industry, Facebook and Twitter….
Shelley’s title character is not a good romantic, so he serves as the perfect foil for Shelley’s celebration of Romanticism, the early 19th Century artistic movement that championed a love and respect for nature, emphasized emotions over intelligence, and foregrounded the rights and potentials of all human beings, even those without rank or wealth.  Radical stuff.   Victor is a failed romantic because he violates nature, lacks empathy, and watches passively as lives are destroyed.
One concept of romanticism Victor does respond to is the idea of the sublime, a notion Shelley learned from the work of Edmund Burke.  (Warning:  what follows is an oversimplification, so apologies to Burke!) 
Basically, we experience the sublime when we contemplate features of nature that are vast, mysterious, enchanting, and even dangerous.  When we encounter a violent storm, a glacial mountain, or a roiling ocean, we feel small, vulnerable, and even afraid.  And this is good.  It’s humbling and allows us to take a load off:  we are not the center of the universe.  It also helps us put our daily experiences, especially nagging frustrations, into the proper context where they matter a heckuva lot less.  We need the sense of proportion afforded by the sublime.  ​
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Last summer I had a sublime experience while hiking, alone, in California’s Redwood National Forest.  It is morning, not yet full light.  Moisture hangs suspended between the mammoth trees and the carpet of ferns.  Silence.  I am tiny; somehow both exhilarated and at peace; and I can’t help but recall a conversation with a local who told about recent sightings of a mountain lion. 
Related read: Our Stories Are Data, Too
My spine tingles in the same way when I share this story with my students, and then I ask them about their recent, sublime experiences.  Some share stories, but many don’t, and some discover that the sublime erodes with time.  We all agree we want more sublime experiences, so we spend a few minutes planning class trips we’ll never take.
 
And back to the continuum.  When teaching Frankenstein, I place the sublime at one cosmic pole.  On the other, I situate another concept that emerges when reading the novel with my students:  the idea of “deep work,” a concept explored a few years ago by Cal Newport, a professor, author, and podcaster.  (Check out his book, Deep Work, and/or listen to this revealing podcast interview with Newport for a quick, thoughtful introduction to the topic.)
Related read: Focusing on Our Students Requires Focusing First on Ourselves
The starting point of Newport’s argument is that, in our distracted world, we have an increasingly difficult time engaging in meaningful, complex, absorbing work.  We have a hard time paying close attention.  If you want to test your ability to focus, see if you can read the first ten pages of Frankenstein and, as you do, immerse/lose yourself in the setting and the plight of the characters.  It’s not easy.  Reading complex literature is deep work, and so is writing essays (especially this one!). 
 
Everything educators do is deep work: reading and offering feedback on papers, planning lessons, creating projects, facilitating discussions, composing consequential emails, listening to students and colleagues, and on and on.  And, of course, studenting is deep work, too.  My students spend 35 hours per week in school, and each day is organized into eight periods, in which they take six classes, many of which assign homework.  Calculus, physics, economics, Spanish, orchestra, art, and English all require deep work.
 
The problem for students and for me, is that we all have to juggle competing demands while also attempting to fend off distractions.  The result is that I am always incredibly busy and seldom incredibly productive, and my students report the same.  It feels impossible, but we must all carve out more time for deep work. 
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Here, at the end, I had intended to list some actionable ways to approach the sublime. How to engage in deep work. But my draft list is rather obvious (i.e. When experiencing sublime experiences, do not take selfies, and Close Outlook if you want to accomplish anything, ever).  Instead, I return to Frankenstein and close with metaphors:
Sometimes, we are monsters who lash out at the world in frustration and rage, tearing down people around us and ourselves.  
​
At other times, we are Frankensteins—selfish obsessives with confused values and misspent talents.  

But we are also Shelleys:  deep-work creators of art, architects of profound and lasting human experiences. 
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There are portals to transcendence at both ends of the continuum.  When we channel our minds into the depths of experience, we flow with passion and power; and when we escape ourselves to tune in to the epic drama of existence, we’re left humbled, breathless.
 
We are readers.  Readers of novels, readers of people, and readers of ideas—all intricate and not-entirely insignificant elements of the sublime world.

Phil Olson is an English teacher at Century High School in Rochester, Minnesota. He prefers to keep things simple.

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