Perfectly Circular Holes, Differentials and Wooden Cougar Skulls.

Finding Usefulness in the Useless.

Recently  I received my first hate mail for a blog  post I wrote about not wanting to be told I had to become a better teacher. You can find it here.  The hate mail wasn’t really hateful, more just rude, unkind and not based on the facts, which I suppose hate is, too, but it did make me think. The writer, a fellow who I'll call Richard, said he was an assistant principal and that I was the poster child for why teacher unions and teacher tenure should be abolished. If not for high-priced lawyers he would “fire my ass.” I shouldn’t be allowed around children, I was pretty much useless and so on. Well, being the introspective fellow that I am, I have reflected a bit on this and the writer may have a point.

I teach in a small rural high school and as a result I wear many hats. Besides teaching three different science classes, I have two woodworking classes with kids ranging from those who have never cut anything more challenging than butter to students who have worked with me for four years, often more than once a day. 

And here I wonder if Richard isn’t right. The kids have four required projects that sequentially teach them skills and safety around machines that can turn their fingers into hamburger. After that, they can pretty much build whatever  they want. And this continues as long as they are in woodshop. So I have students building everything from chairs they may never sit in to bookcases for books they don't have.

Now I am sure there are state standards for what I should be doing in shop. But luckily my administrators don’t have time to get worked up over them, either because there are no high stakes standardized tests in woodworking, or, according to Richard, since my job is as secure as the Queen Mother’s they can’t do anything about me in any case, so why bother.

But I do have a few standards of my own that I follow. These weren’t developed by consultants or committees, so I am sure they are lacking in all sorts of important ways. 

My first standard is that students show up on time and get to work. As any teacher or business person knows, this isn’t an easy one to meet. 

My second is that students work to the best of their ability. They don’t get to move on until their project meets a very subjective standard of mine, which is, if they take the project home, are their parents going to be impressed that their child built this, or are they going to say, "Mr. Miller lets you get away with building this POS..." and he shouldn’t be allowed to work around children, yada, yada, yada.

My third standard is that students have to have something “useful” to work on and then they need to put in time on that project. This isn’t an easy one, either. Often high school kids don’t always have projects they want to build, period, and who gets to decide what’s useful anyway?

Industry certainly has an idea of what is useful. In a feeble effort to improve myself, last summer I sat in on a seminar sponsored by Boeing and other local industries to find ways to encourage kids to go into manufacturing and the STEM fields. 

There was a presentation by a Boeing representative about how Boeing uses the local high school skills center to teach kids how to become airframe specialists. He showed off a section of an airframe: imagine someone had taken a Skilsaw and cut a random square out of a 737 about the size of a pizza box. It was shiny and smooth and lined with hundreds of perfectly spaced rivets in perfect rows. Just like you would want to see the next time you board a jetliner.

 He explained that this was the culminating project of an eight week course on how to drill perfect circular holes in perfectly spaced patterns and perfectly rivet them together so that your next ride in a 737 doesn’t end up like this. 

Now that is useful. Trust me, I want my rivets in rows as much as the next fellow and here these folks have high school students learning this important and useful skill.  

And what do I have my kids doing? Pretty much any damn thing they want. 

You see, in my class, the kids get first right of refusal on what is useful. I have one boy building a custom gaming chair complete with drink holder so a moment won't be lost while he is zapping aliens.  I have a kid building an amazingly elegant, but possibly uncomfortable lounge chair, who will learn first hand where form and function collide. 

 I  have a couple of less directed boys who were always at a loss for useful projects so I put them to work doing shop improvements. After a few days of this they came to me and told me they had a plan. They wanted to build a game table out of the blown out rear end of one of their pickup trucks, the differential.  I was so happy they had a project that I said sure. And build it, they have. It stands about four feet tall and weighs over a hundred pounds. When I asked how were they going to sit at it, they replied that they would build tall stools. They learned how to weld and forge steel, and that an idea and its execution are two different things. And we all do like to say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, right?

 I also have a very creative and talented young woman carving an accurate and realistic life-sized cougar skull out of basswood. The real cougar skull is a family heirloom that resides in a velvet lined box. She reminds me of Hamlet as she studies the skull from all angles and sketches and carves it. She has become intimate with her project, she totally owns her learning, and in the end it has absolutely no practical use. There is no wooden skull reproduction industry threatening to ship its jobs over seas if our schools can't provide skilled skull carvers. But she is happy and so am I. 

So, in the end, who is right? Do we need skilled workers who can build airplanes in American factories for decent wages? Absolutely. Do we need people who are willing to do repetitive, precise, detailed work? Absolutely. Do we want the workers who rivet our airplanes to be free spirits who drill their holes any old place they want to? I would hope not. 

But we also need the type who see a cougar skull as more than a dead piece of bone and create something unexpectedly beautiful out of nothing. Or maybe an entrepreneur who looks at a junked airplane and sees furniture. Or the kid who decides that drilling hole after perfect hole isn't what they want to do for life and maybe they want to try something more interesting. Even if they can't meet the standards of fellows like Richard, maybe they would consider teaching. You never know where a little uselessness might lead. 

Please Don't Try and Make Me Into a Better Teacher.

The more I teach the less I want to think about teaching. At a recent district wide science and math meeting I announced, “I have no interest in improving my teaching.” This shocked pretty much everyone within earshot, and like a politician trying to take back an unfortunate soundbite, I backtracked on my words and tried to explain them. But fundamentally they were true. I have taught for fifteen years and that is long enough for someone who makes it past the first few trying and desperate years to learn the craft. And a lot of it is a craft. Preparing lessons, time management, grading papers, learning to manage a classroom are skills that one learns over time and skills that become easier with time. 

And just because I want to think less about teaching doesn’t mean that I do.  In the shower in the morning I tweak my lesson plans  for the day. I wake up in the middle of far too many nights with school on my mind and on my drive home I still wonder and reflect about what went well and what didn’t. But what I don’t want to do is to told I have to read books about teaching techniques, be forced to “reflect” on my teaching for my evaluation or generally keep being told that I need to improve my teaching. Frankly I am good enough. 

I once heard an interview with Bob Dylan who was asked whose music did he listened to and who influenced him now. He laughed and said he didn’t really listen to anyone anymore. Why would he, he is Bob Dylan for Christ's sake? I am no Bob Dylan. And I’m not even proportionate in the teaching world to the Bob Dylan’s of our profession. 

But I am the teaching equivalent to a journeyman studio musician or a journeyman carpenter for that matter. I know what I am doing, I put in a full days work and I can be counted on to adapt to new situations, new curriculum and a changing student population. I try new things. I spend a lot of time finding new activities and techniques to connect better with my kids. I work to adapt my teaching to my audience just like any proficient professional will. But being a teacher is what I do, it is not my life. 

And I am think this is a good thing. In fact I think this balance in my life makes me a better teacher than I would be without it. It also means I haven’t burned myself out trying to be the Bob Dylan or Jesus Christ of teaching world. 

No one expects their accountant, their doctor, their lawyer, their favorite athlete or even their carpenter to routinely reform their profession, but for teachers reform is the norm. It is the norm to the point that veteran teachers roll their eyes with a “What goes around, comes around,” look at the introduction of the latest techniques  or technologies that we are expected to adopt to make every child succeed. 

But nobody talks about reforming our society so that kids aren’t left alone while their parent(s) work two jobs. Nobody talks about reforming our society so that our students most stable and caring place isn’t just in their classrooms.  Instead we reform education. We send teachers to relearn their craft on the fool’s errand that with enough  blame, with enough cajoling, with enough threats we can get teachers to solve the problems that our larger society refuses to face.  

But more training won’t teach me to me more empathetic. More accountability won’t tell me which kid’s parents are getting divorced. More inservices won’t help me notice that a kid is looking depressed. These are the intangibles that make me a better teacher. And I don’t want training in how to learn them. I think as caring aware humans we learn these lessons all on our own though experience and perseverance. And while we embrace the idealism and enthusiasm of new teachers, unfortunately idealism and enthusiasm are the first casualties of working in a system where your profession isn’t respected and you are blamed for the failures of that system. 

Most teachers are foot soldiers in the war on ignorance, a few make it to platoon leaders and an even fewer few might make the rank of of a non-commissioned officer and with that rank have some input into developing the strategy of this war. But unfortunately most of the educational strategists aren’t teachers, they don’t spend time in classrooms, instead they radio in their orders from afar. 

I am an optimist, I don’t think you can make teaching a career if you aren’t. But I am also a realist and I am not ashamed to say that that realism tells me to not to accept even more irrational responsibility for things that are out of my control as a teacher. So the next time some policy maker, politician or administrator tells me I need to improve my teaching I apologize in advance if the request is met with a roll of my eyes. 

The Allure of Fire.

Even using conservative archeological evidence, humans have been staring into fires at least 10,000 times as long as humans have been staring into computer screens. So what happened recently in the Materials Science class that I teach shouldn’t really have been a surprise 

I am trying to interest my students in metals. Where do metals come from, how do we get them, why should we care? I started the lesson with where do metals come from. The digital generation that is my students were only moderately engaged; in fact a couple were surreptitiously trying to use their cell phones. One student correctly answered, “From stardust.” Everyone laughed and I had to work to get their attention back. The lesson wasn’t going well; frankly, they didn’t seem very interested. After leading them to the understanding that almost all metals start as ores, I told them the story of how I personally got interested in this question. 

I was home sick one day, hypnotized by my laptop, when I found a video clip on You Tube simply titled “Making Steel from Dirt.” Watching it led me to an epiphany. A fellow who looked like a cast member from Deliverance was explaining the process of smelting iron from iron ore, or dirt. He was doing it essentially the same way it has been done since the beginning of the iron age. You really need just four things: iron ore (the right kind of dirt), charcoal, a furnace, and a source of air.

I then told my students that I had tried to do it myself. In fact I had tried it on three separate occasions. With the absolute certainty that only teenagers possess, several of them were happy to tell me that I had obviously wasted my time. 

By any rational accounting of time and money, I suppose I had. I spent many weekends collecting scrap wood and turning it into charcoal in a filthy process that could have been out of Dickens. Because I didn’t know where to dig for iron ore, I used my credit card and bought 150 pounds of commercial ore that is used for pottery glaze. I scrounged, bought and collected the parts to build three separate furnaces and spent days assembling them. Then, each actual smelting attempt took a complete day from morning to night to fire the furnace. 

I passed around the few bits of iron that was what I had to show from all this work. It wasn’t much, it could easily fit in one hand. My students enjoyed my joke that even if I had only paid myself minimum wage, in an ounce to ounce cost comparison my iron probably approached that of gold, if not platinum. With this revelation several more students joined the chorus that I really had wasted my time. 

After they all had a good laugh, I showed a short video of my own iron smelting adventures. The video is laced with clips of white hot fires, sparks lofting into the dark night, glowing coals and red hot slag pouring out of the furnace like blood. It isn’t a great video. I had pieced it together from clips people at the smelting party had taken, and the fact that people had come to watch this further amused my students. In the end there is a clip of me hammering a bit of white hot iron right out of the furnace and flattening it on the anvil. There were cheers from the people present. It wasn’t a lot, but I had wrestled iron from dirt. 

By the end of the video my room was quiet and I heard one student say, “Could we do that?” Then a couple more joined in. “Could we really do it?” I was surprised and taken aback. I sort of mumbled that we could, but it would have to be outside of the school day. It wasn’t something we could do during a regular class period. And the actual smelting would have to take place on a weekend. After explaining the time commitment, I asked again if they were still interested; they were. Then I asked for a show of hands from the rest of the class and to my surprise two thirds of the class wanted in. 

Two boys immediately offered to bring wood for charcoal. One of the only three girls in the class took it upon herself to schedule a time to start. I suggested she ask me next week as class was nearly over, and with determination she simply asked, “Is there any reason we couldn’t we pick a date now?” So we did. Next week we will start with making charcoal in this long process to recreate a discovery. 

For the ancients it took three of the four elements, earth, air and fire, to wring a new element, iron, out of the earth. For my students I think it was the fire that got them. Humans would not be human without controlling fire. This control changed the world in ways that make modern marvels like airplanes, cell phones and computers pale in comparison. And there is nothing more profoundly simple than staring into the depths of the coals and thinking about nothing and thinking about everything.

I am sure teenagers since the beginning of the human race really aren’t any different than my students, with their fascination with the new and interesting, their tendency to jump to next best thing. By next week, my student’s interest may have moved on so we will see if they show up. I hope they do.

The Recommendation Letter: a Fine Balance Between Non-Fiction and Creative Writing.

Receiving a good letter of recommendation is as close as one can come to attending their own funeral. The letters are full of fine praise and adulation, at times unfounded, that make the subject of the letter feel like they can walk on water. As my daughter's physics professor summed it up, he said he would tell the truth about her as much as he could, then he would, "Lie like a rug."

I write a fair number of these letters for seniors as they apply to college. Some are easy to write. When you really know the student and especially if you really like the student, the words flow off the page and it is hard to limit yourself to a length an overworked college admissions officer might care to read.

Other times they are hard to write, especially when you don’t really know the person, perhaps they are new, or have only taken one class with you their freshman year. And like the minister at the funeral of a lapsed parishioner or worse someone whom they have never met, you are left struggling to fill a page with nice things about someone you can barely remember. 

The best letter of recommendation I ever wrote was also the most fun, and the easiest. A friend of mine Tweeted this blog about writing letters of recommendation for students and the blogger encouraged trying to insert a little levity into the process. It reminded me of a student I will call Marty, one of my favorite students who I knew well and his letter.

Anytime a student asks for a letter they need to provide a transcript and fill out a short bio sheet that lets me know things I might not otherwise know. Things like what clubs they belong to, the sports they played, how they help little old ladies across  the street or maybe they rescued orphans from a burning building. 

Perhaps because we did know each other well, when Marty returned his bio sheet, the content was minimal. The last question on the sheet asks the student to tell the reader something unusual or interesting about themselves. Marty simply wrote that he had a dog named Ollie. The letter I wrote for him follows:

To whom it may concern,

I am pleased to write this letter of recommendation for Marty _________. It has been gratifying to have had Marty as a student for much of his high school career. Marty is a fine young man and he is someone who others, not so fine as himself, can aspire to. Marty has a well earned reputation as being kind to young children, the elderly and dogs. 

Marty especially likes dogs. And dogs like Marty. Often Marty will come to school and tell us elaborate stories about his dog Ollie. He will hold us spellbound while he regales us with tales of heroism and derring-do that he and his dog Ollie engage in when they are not at school. Often these stories involve dangerous dealings with terrorists, anarchists, socialists and communists, just the type of people Marty is not. The type of people who do not like dogs. According to Marty, he and his dog Ollie have foiled many a plot by these type of people who would turn America into a godless, if not dogless country. 

It is in his dealings with dogs that Marty displays his considerable leadership qualities. There is no question, in anyone’s mind, including Ollie’s, about just who is in charge. Through his kind yet firm direction Marty has taught Ollie to roll over, sit up, shake hands and bark when told to. These skills will serve Marty well when he leaves the protected enclaves of public school and enters the real world. 

Because of the respect that Marty accords dogs they return the feelings in kind. Dogs will come and congregate around Marty from miles around. Often we will see Marty crossing the high school campus with a long retinue of dogs following him. This canine entourage ranges from the haughty purebred to the lowliest mutt. But they all display their love and affection for Marty with their enthusiastic and joyful tail wagging and yelping.

It is hard not to overdo my praise for Marty. I am confident that when Marty graduates from high school he will easily find his place in this world and I am equally certain that the dogs of this earth will be better for it. If I have any small criticism about Marty it involves cats. He hates cats.

Sincerely yours,

Todd Miller

Apparently Marty’s mother was shocked at this letter. I did provide him with a more conventional follow up letter extolling his accomplishments, intelligence and character. He was accepted into a four year university, though I never learned  which letter he submitted. I hope that who ever read what he did send had the good sense to be a little skeptical though, because both letters had the marks of fiction in them.

If you haven’t got something nice to say, then say it in the faculty room.

I have more interest in Andrew Carnegie the steel industry baron turned philanthropist than Dale Carnegie, the self help author of “How to Win Friends and Influence People.” But even though making steel interests me more than winning friends, it’s Dale  who I have been thinking about lately. The basic tenet of his philosophy was that it is possible to change other people’s behavior by changing your own and how you interact with them counts toward accomplishing that. Now when you think of this, it isn’t exactly rocket science but as teachers I wonder if we think about it enough. 

When my first principal gave me a tour of  the building before school started we walked past the long and narrow burrow that was then the faculty room and he advised me to stay out of it. I should eat my lunch elsewhere he suggested. I wasn’t  sure why, but he hinted that being in there wasn’t helpful for a beginning teacher. I immediately found that for lunch I wanted to be away from the kids and in the company of adults, so I ignored his advice. But I came to understand his sentiment. 

I have worked a wide variety of jobs before becoming a teacher and I have my eaten my lunch in all manner of places, in a shack behind a saw mill, perched on a workbench in a boatyard, standing on the slime covered deck of a fishing boat, and sitting at linen covered tables in a restaurant after the customers left. And while the language in many of those places would make the average school teacher blanch, I remember lunch time as being a generally positive moment to relax and take a break. Of course there would be complaints about the weather, the boss, the lack of fish...  but overall there was a sense of common purpose and camaraderie.

On the other hand, the  lunch room my first principal advised me to avoid, and our fancier lunchroom now is never profane, maybe it would have helped if it were, but it is generally filled with a more soul destroying  sort of conversation. It is filled with the language of frustration, negativity, complaining, and criticizing, language my father called “bellyaching” This language is aimed at the administration, advisory, the block schedule, the heat, the list is long, but most insidiously a majority of the language is aimed at our students. And it goes on day after day. I am as guilty of it as anyone, teaching is a stressful job and everyone needs to vent, but too much of this kills the very attitude that is required to be able to handle this stressful job. 

Once I heard the late Andy Mackie answer a question about what life is all about, he quickly replied “Life is 99% attitude,” then he paused and thought for a moment and finished “and I forget what the other part is.” If we want our students to have positive attitudes we need to model positive attitudes. And that is hard to do after hearing for most of our duty free lunch  how bad certain students are and then having to face the same students five minutes later.

My father disliked Dale Carnegie, and being a voracious and open minded reader, I am sure he read Carnegie’s famous book. He was a small business man himself and thought the glad handing of the salespeople Carnegie trained artificial, manipulative and obsequious. He wasn’t a very positive person himself, but on the other hand he also didn’t cotton to whining and in his honor I want to stop.

So I am going to start small, I am inviting anyone who wants to have a bellyaching free lunch to join me in the wood shop on Wednesdays. Just like Math Monday and Physics Friday (in my class anyway) how about whineless Wednesday?


Why the wood shop? Well, first of all, it is away from the kids, just because I am sick of complaining about them, doesn’t mean I want to hang out with them either. 

Second, it has a thermostat and a clock and they both work. I can also set up a table if you don’t want to sit on a workbench. 

And third, why not ? In the six or seven years I have taught woodworking there are teachers who, as far as I know, have never set foot in there, and it’s a pleasant space that smells nicely of wood and honest work.

Everyone is welcome, teachers, administrators, EAs, secretaries, just leave your troubles at the door. I may end up eating alone, and that is fine, I don’t mind my own company. We won’t have a secret  handshake to get in, How about you just knock three times in the hallway, not the ceiling, like in that sappy song from the seventies?


In case you have forgotten the words you can find them here.

Occupy this.

My daughter went on a trip back to Boston recently. We called to check on her and were a bit surprised to learn that she wasn't in Boston, but in fact she was in New York at the Occupy Wall Street protest. She spent two nights sharing a tent with someone she met there. 


Last week after she was back home the police raided Zuccotti park and evicted the Occupy Wall Street protesters. She sent this letter to Mayor Bloomberg and I think she makes some 
good points and it is not just that she is my daughter. 

Dear Mr. Bloomberg,
I am 26 years old, I have a bachelor's degree in biology, and I have a secure job with pay appropriate to my experience and locale. I am not a street kid, a bleeding heart hippie, or a lazy unemployed college dropout.

I am outraged at your eviction of protesters from Zuccotti park. Last weekend I participated in the occupation while on a vacation to visit friends. I stayed for two nights and have never done something like that before. Thanks in part to your negative, narrow-minded actions, and to the amazing, well organized and thoughtful group of people that "lead" the occupation, I intend to do more of that.

Your claim that the park was unsanitary and unsafe is absolutely wrong--I felt completely comfortable there, volunteers cleaned it continually, kitchen staff operated according to standard food handler practices.

I understand that some neighbors to the park have complained about the protesters. I find it appalling that you have invested thousands and thousands of dollars in huge police forces to surround, intimidate, and evict a peaceful protest in one park, when a few short miles away the Bronx is riddled with crime and NONE of the parks are safe.

I look forward to seeing news that you are respecting the rights of citizens to peaceably assemble, and turn your attentions instead to reform and fighting the gross inequality enmeshed in your city. The country is watching you.

Sincerely,
Lillian Kuehl

What Should Kids Learn in High School? Some thoughts.

Note: I actually wrote this last spring shortly after the event I described happened, I just kept putting off posting it.

I don’t remember much about my education program in college. There was the occasional professor whose knowledge and teaching was valuable but at the time Howard was not one of them. In fact I don’t even remember Howard’s last name. He did give us one assignment that stuck with me. We were told to write an essay that simply answered the question, “What will I teach?”

Well duh, I would teach them science. I waxed lyrical about how I would teach my students to become lifelong learners, I would stimulate their interest in science and they would come to love, if not live for science. I even suggested that through my teachings some of them might  become scientists. 

After a couple thousand words of this I turned my paper in, confident that I had Howard in the palm of my hand. I didn’t. I got back the paper and he basically said, “Yes that was all very nice but what are you going to teach?”

Now that is a question. It is a question I have given serious thought to for the last fourteen years. Just what is important for students to learn? And I still don’t know. 

Of course I know what I am going teach day to day, even year to year but I am constantly questioning just what is really important. So during a faculty meeting when my principal asked essentially the same question it took me back to Howard. What exactly do I want my students to take away from their time with me. The same type of qualities I mouthed a decade and a half ago, tempered by time and realism, sprung to mind. 

But then a terrible and profound thing happened in the time between her question and today. One of my freshmen science students shot himself. He was a student that seemed to love science. He was the ideal science student. He answered questions with a depth of understanding and curiosity that belied his age. I didn’t teach him all his science by any means but he had, what I wished all my students had, that burning interest in a subject I find fascinating. And he killed himself. 

In light of this tragedy the wonders of quantum physics or DNA replication lose their importance. Instead the verities of life: love, family, understanding, , compassion and hope rise to the top. So given the opportunity to impart one thing to students it wouldn’t be about what I wish they would learn about science but it would be for them to understand that life gets better than it is in high school.

I would say this: high school is a moment in your life that few students entirely enjoy but life does get better. You are going through changes physical, mental, sexual, emotional and intellectual and many of them are not pleasant. But this will pass. Your skin will clear up, your shyness decrease, your search for someone who loves you and understands you will more than likely be fulfilled. The demands about what you are going to do with your life will become less strident and your confusion about what to do with your life will decrease. You might be pleasantly surprised with what you end up doing, and it may be far from whatever you had imagined in high school. 

The false sense of urgency that we foster in high school will fade and you will appreciate that the trajectory of your life is not inflexible. Life will offer you a multitude of choices and you will have many chances to choose from that menu. Even if you find yourself in trouble or facing enormous obstacles, ours is a country of second and third and fourth chances. And over time you can adjust your life’s path and make it better or at least more interesting. 

In all ways this young man’s death is a tragedy. It is an unimaginable loss to his family and friends. It is a loss to the school and a loss to the greater community. And it is an especially tragic loss because for whatever reason he must have simply found himself in a place he couldn’t see a way out of. And if someone could have reached him with the message that his life would get better, it is just possible that his death might have been prevented. 

So finally, to answer Howard’s question just what would I like my students to learn, I think that is it.