I know that's not a common thing, but it is totally flipping true.  
​
    Today I spent almost every minute from 8:00 to 3:00 in a school conference room with my 8th grade team colleagues. (I know that's not a common thing, either.) Parents had signed up for 15-minute slots, and we basically had a revolving door of mothers & fathers coming to talk with us about their child.  We feel kind of punchy by the afternoon from the lack of oxygen, over-familiarity with each other's comments, and our unfamiliarity with sitting still for seven straight hours.
       Once again, no parent complaints about my flipped classroom method.  
       Once again, there were several comments like "I've seen you in some of your videos!"
      Once again, I had various things to say about children's performance with speaking, listening, working groups, recalling information, synthesizing ideas, creating products, solving problems, and applying organization skills.  We do it all in my class, so I observe them in diverse settings and situations.

       Meanwhile, students were in our classrooms following a regular schedule -- traveling from substitute to substitute teacher.  That is far from ideal, and I'm sure it was some kind of a circus upstairs although my classroom did not look too bad:

          Haha!  Just kidding. I don't have a comfy butterfly chair.

        Anyway, I needed a rock-solid sub plan for today.  This week's flipped lesson is the first time all year that students are watching a video that Mr. Swan did not produce (!).  One is a 5-minute Youtube clip from a History Channel documentary (fair use!) and the other is a segment from an Annenberg Classroom video series.  I don't believe that I could make something better, so we use these overlapping videos to teach about the post-war situation in 1780s America.  There are several categories of problems we want students to recognize:  many states were in conflict with each other,  the Articles of Confederation created a super-weak national legislature,  and endebted veterans & farmers were gearing up for violent resistance. Last year, many students had lots of problems with learning from these videos.  I don't think it's just the content; it was my presentation of the task.
       Today, they had to watch the clips once WITHOUT taking notes and WITHOUT knowing the specific topics they need to know.  I hope that allowed them to absorb the general situation (America is in trouble), rather than play-pause-write-play-pause-write in their usual choppy disjointed way.  After 10-12 minutes, in which they should have watched on laptops at their own pace*, students could signal to the substitute to ask for the notes sheet, which lists the 3 topics I gave in the previous paragraph.  Let's see how this turns out!

* I considered having students watch together on the projector screen, but that defeats a major purpose of flipping: individual pacing for learning.

      Thank you for lying and surrounding yourself with liars, Mr. Trump.  Thank you for making this easier on me.

       I have struggled for MONTHS with approaching politics in the classroom.  Mostly, I have decided to shove aside current events in favor of historical topics of the 1760s and '70s.  Maybe that was the wrong choice, but I'm not arguing about that now; I am looking ahead.  The area where I teach (the Boston metro region) is predominantly liberal/Democratic so "coming out" with some left-wing beliefs & preferences is not unique or controversial, but there are pockets of dissenters and I know that about 10 of my 85 students are Trump supporters. I believe it is never fair for a conscientious* minority to get disregarded / disrespected by the majority -- no matter what the issue.
       So I've tried to act neutral, I've avoided subjects like the 1st Amendment and contemporary protest, I've never shared my political decisions with students, I've rarely provided opportunities to discuss the news, I've required signing a contract (from Teaching Tolerance) to join those rare discussions ... and then only implemented it twice.  I've left my students to wonder "Is he hiding something scary from us?",  "Does he secretly hope that some families will get deported?",  "Does he care about any of the issues I care about?"
​
* With this adjective I discount immoral extremists like serial killers, slavery apologists, pedophiles, white supremacists, and other human beings who deserve to live but not to live comfortably because they choose to be this way.

     Let's ignore the partisan politics, the free-trade debates, the immigration opinions, the assault allegations, his real-estate history, the misogyny complaints, and all the rest.  Shove them aside. Please try. 

     Ready?

       Donald Trump lies and bends the truth. He hires and encourages staffers to do the same: Sean Spicer, Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway...

• The press secretary's first announcement was to berate most media outlets and to make 4 easy-to-disprove claims about Metro rider numbers and attendance figures.
• The former campaign manager defended her colleague for providing these "alternative facts", which became such a laughable assertion that Merriam-Webster trolled her on Twitter.
• Four days after his inauguration, Trump repeated the unsupportable claim that "three to five million votes" for Hillary Clinton came from illegal votes.  He defended and condoned Spicer's and Conway's statements the previous weekend.
• We have no reason to believe these were aberrations or rookie mistakes.

       Mister President, I must call you out in my classroom.  My 8th grade students don't get away with simply asserting that "many people say", or supporting claims with "alternative facts", or using "other studies" that don't actually say what they claim it does.  You can't get away with that, either.  Let's focus on one falsehood from today's news cycle, which Mr. Trump has repeated since November: There is no evidence that more than 0.1% of all votes in the 2016 election (or previous ones) were cast by people who entered the country illegally or otherwise should be barred from voting.
       When you repeatedly lie or bend the truth, and when you support friends when they mislead us, you lose our faith. You lose our trust.  Elementary schoolers know this; middle schoolers accept it too. Dishonesty costs friendships for teenagers. Cheating has consequences for children. We work so hard as school teachers to uphold these values and consequences. If I continue to treat the executive branch's statements at face value and/or to avoid their relevance in current events, then I am condoning and normalizing all forms of dishonesty. That makes me a bad role model, and a bad teacher.
       When you get caught lying, it makes all the rumors & stories about you much easier to believe.  All those things we shoved aside a few paragraphs ago return to the spotlight.  If we can't trust you ethically and morally, then your political, economic, social, and personal choices suffer a bigger burden of proof.  If that's not fair, then sorry. Stop lying for a while, and I will re-consider. (Just like I would eventually do for a misbehaving tween or teen.)

        So I am out. Out of my self-imposed closet.  I will not tell students to agree with me, and I will not tell them what to think. But I will tell my students about the lies, and I will tell them how I know* they are lies.  Yes, I will finally inform them sometime soon that I voted for Hillary Clinton last November, but I will focus on my beliefs about leadership qualities like honesty and trustworthiness (including the concerns I had about her as well).  My views on taxation, state sovereignty, and marriage rights are not particularly relevant to the classroom or my role as a school teacher, so I will continue avoid sharing those. That seems like an appropriate level of neutrality.
* That is different from believing they are lies.  Belief is subjective; knowing is objective and so are facts, or else you're living in The Matrix and nothing matters and we're all a program and I'm not even real so why are you even reading this, Mr. Anderson?

        Lying, misleading, exploiting, and cheating are wrong.  That is a non-partisan statement.  My students deserve to understand this lesson, and everybody in room 212 will await the end of this story -- to see the eventual consequences for Mr. Trump and his staff.  The children and I are watching.


P.S. Love this but don't know how to give credit to the original author:

P.P.S.  If my political views have angered you and now you hate me and my blog and flipping and public education and my dog and many other things, then that's OK.  Have a flipping awesome day, and welcome back whenever you feel ready.

      Behold! Finally my first post of 2016-17.  Where have I been?  Does anybody care?  Do people still read this thing?!

        Nobody has died (yet) or got seriously injured. My house didn't burn down, my own children seem fairly well-adjusted, my marriage appears to remain intact, and no students have threatened to hurt me. Looking at the big picture, my life is going okay, but I have not felt like a role model or reliable source for the flipped-classroom method so blogging felt useless. This is just a weird year, but today feels like a rare moment of keeping my head afloat -- not drowning in fear, regret, and emails.
      This will be my venting post, for posterity's sake at the very least. Something more thoughtful and coherent might follow on another day....

• The school year literally started with an accidental fire alarm at 8:10 on the first day, before kids knew their lockers or even their homeroom teacher's name and face. We actually began the year in chaos.
• My school is starting a new Advisory system two mornings a week, which changed most class times and for which I feel unprepared and unqualified. Almost every Monday and Wednesday begins awkwardly. It's one more bloody thing to do twice a week.
• The guidance counselor who looped with this grade of students retired last June, so the kids don't know their current counselor as well.  The old one let them get away with almost anything!  I love their new counselor because she actually writes passes, enforces appointments, and doesn't let kids skip class.  That's been a culture shock for the students, and we are all suffering their disgust.
• I had major problems working with a teaching assistant who spent more time playing Bejeweled Blitz on her phone than circulating the classroom.  And when she did talk to students, it wasn't helpful. Fine, go back to your game and zap that hypercube!
• The presidential election season was another unique once-in-a-lifetime twist. One of the biggest challenges in my career was trying to navigate the topic appropriately for 8th graders. (The Access Hollywood tape didn't help!)  I have struggled for months about how much to disclose of my own personal political attitudes, and that also drained some energy.
• Personal things included some pretty bad insomnia in October and November.  A few times I woke up after just 3 hours of sleep and my body was like "Okay, let's go!" My brain disagreed.  I have already been sick three times: a week-long cold in early October; a brief stomach thing in mid-November; and a nasty flu just before Christmas that made me leave parent conferences early, then miss 2 days of school, then morphed into a sinus infection for the whole vacation week, and my lungs still don't feel quite right.

        Despite all these issues, I think my students are making decent progress.  We're on almost the same schedule as last year: ending the Revolutionary War in late-January.  Overall I prefer our assessment system this year, which I will post more about soon. It has just been so exhausting, like I'm running through sand (sometimes it feels more like quicksand).  Anybody else feeling kinda like this??