Initiating Year 7

Because I first came to CAJ part-way through the '08-'09 school-year, measuring my time here has always been somewhat murky.  Do I round up or do I round down?  Part of me is motivated to round down, because I didn't start as a classroom teacher until the following August.  Recently, however, I've felt a stronger urge to round up.  I realized that this will be the 7th school-year I have been a part of at CAJ; the 7th High School Community Group I will advise; the 7th Senior Talent Show I'll watch; the 7th graduation I will attend.  For all intents and purposes, I'm calling this year 7, even though my six-year anniversary of arriving in Japan is not until January.

Today was orientation day, which entailed class mixer games, book check-outs, the annual fire-escape drill, and a brief assembly in the gym.  It was a day that somehow managed to be laid-back and brimming with excitement; perhaps a fitting transition from summer into the new school year.  This evening, I sent out an email to students who wish to join AP English, but made the decision just now and therefore missed out on the summer reading I had assigned back in May.  I explained that the summer reading/writings would be due at the end of September, and then offered to help the students plan out a schedule for finishing their work on time, if they wanted.

To my surprise, I had several responses within half an hour, asking if I would help them organize a work-schedule.  My first thought was "Wait, since when was I in a position to help anybody with organization?"  I am notoriously disorganized, myself, though I think the "method" shines through the madness just a bit more brightly with each passing year.  My second thought was, "I wonder how many of my non-AP students need help organizing their schedules?"  I may make this a standing offer going into the school-year.  I want my students to succeed, and perhaps the obstacle for some is not a lack of motivation or understanding, but rather a struggle to plan or organize their time... a struggle to which I can definitely relate!

I approach this task (and my 7th year of teaching as a whole) with awe and humility.  I am grateful that God sees fit to use even crooked sticks to clear a straight path!

Reflection on the value of teaching from a Biblical worldview

This is a reflection I wrote on the importance of worldview in education (and the impossibility of "neutral" teaching) for one of my Master's courses:

And the house on the sand went SPLAT! While my NIV words this a bit differently, Jesus’ point remains the same: foundation matters. The core beliefs that we choose to build our lives around? These matter. Moreover, it is clear that there is always a foundation. We cannot help but build on something. This is why a claim of neutral teaching is as ludicrous as a carpenter claiming that they can build a mansion atop a cloud. No indeed, every teacher is building on something--some set of core beliefs which filter, shape and inform every aspect of our classroom. The popular claim of neutrality in public school education is not only impossible, but in fact destructive, and it is crucial for Christian teachers to make sure that the Bible provides the basis for their teaching. 

It is both fascinating and disheartening that the myth of a neutral public education persists. There are few in education today who would not acknowledge the influence of Dewey on modern public education. Even elementary school children pick up something of Dewey as they learn to navigate their school libraries. And, none can deny that Dewey himself was anything but neutral on the subject of religion. Why, then, do contemporary proponents of public education so effortlessly ignore the influence that Dewey’s anti-religious views have had on public education? Why do people, whether principal, professor, pupil, politician or parent find it so easy to take a carving knife to Dewey’s beliefs and demarcate those which have endured in education and those which haven’t?  Dr. Robert Marzano tried to do exactly this in a 1992 speech by separating Dewey’s worldview from his views of education. In another, later context, Marzano acknowledged that worldview and teaching are inextricably bound. One can almost hear the masses try to justify the discrepancy: Oh, of course, this is a logical thing to suggest in general... but surely it cannot be true in Dewey’s case! For some reason, this seems to be the predominant perspective on public education. Unfortunately, under the compelling guise of neutrality, faith has been trivialized by insistent and inconsistent removal from the classroom. Insistent because anything that whiffs of Christianity is swiftly stifled, and inconsistent because so many other worldviews are given time and consideration not given to Christianity. The result is that a century’s worth of children have received an education that they are told is fair and unbiased in its perspective, but which actually paints the world with colors disdainful of faith. Worldview and education are inseparable--what we believe shapes what we teach, how we teach, even why we teach. So what, then, are we teaching, as Christian educators? 

We criticize the compartmentalization conducted by Dewey’s followers as they draw a line between his personal beliefs and his teaching, and yet many Christian educators fall into the same trap. We pray, we do devotions, but then our actual teaching may be indistinguishable in practice from teaching in the public school classroom. I have some personal experience with this: in my first few years, I never intentionally started planning with Biblical principles in mind and as a result, had to tag on a Christian perspective later. Aside from those tags, which felt about as relevant as hangnails, my teaching was secular. This was perhaps the most meaningful discovery I made during the process of creating my curriculum map for one of my Master’s courses last summer: as I properly engaged in backward design for the first time, I realized that I was not allowing my beliefs to enter into the equation until far too late. The project offered a wake-up call and an opportunity to do better: for each unit, as I crafted my essential questions and enduring understandings, I tried to determine the Biblical perspectives which lay at the foundation of my own beliefs about each topic. When I made these principles a core part of my curriculum, they came up organically in class, and wove through the curriculum in a way that they hadn’t before. The Bible simply has to be our foundation, our starting place, as we build our curriculum. Of course, we have standards and goals that are given to us that we need to build around, but these are not antithetical to a Biblical worldview. Rather, our task is to interpret these goals through the lens of our Biblical worldview and let that drive our planning, our assessment and our instruction. 

Going forward, I am committed to making sure that my teaching is distinctly Christian and that I am actually fostering Christian thinking and Christian action rather than just stapling on a perfunctory Christian Post-it. My students will not remember everything that I teach. In fact, it’s likely that 10 years from now, much of the content will have escaped them. What they won’t forget is how I taught them; what will stick with them even years later is the foundation that I impart to them. I better make it good.

Book Review: "S" by J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst

The glossy black book jacket has an ornate letter "S" across the front, but when you remove the book, you find a simple, gray, worn-looking library book from 1949: The Ships of Theseus by V.M. Straka.

Opening the book, you can't help but do a double-take, because the margins are filled with scribblings in black and blue ink: a written conversation between two strangers who have found the book and are trying to get to the bottom of the enigmatic circumstances surrounding Straka, about whom there are many theories.

Meet "S": the protagonist in The Ships of Theseus, an amnesiac man on a quest to discover his identity.

Meet Straka: the author and suspected anarchist whose identity is shrouded in mystery, the only apparent clues to which have been left behind in his writings.

Meet F.X. Caldiera: Straka's translator and editor who seems to be leaving coded messages in the footnotes.

Most importantly, meet Jen and Eric.  She's a college senior who found the book during her shift working in the library, and he's the Straka-obsessed ex-graduate student who left the book.  Read along with Jen and Eric as they puzzle through the novel, the footnotes and the dozen supplemental materials they've left in the book, including a clipping from the college newspaper, postcards from a faraway place, a napkin with a map sketched on it, and much more.  Watch as the duo realizes that the mysteries surrounding Straka are much more sinister than they ever imagined, even to their own endangerment.

Truly J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst have done something special here.  Abrams, of course, is best known as the TV producer and filmmaker responsible for creating "LOST", as well as directing the recent "Star Trek" films, not to mention the upcoming "Star Wars" sequel.  While Abrams' film credentials may be a turn-off for some avid readers, it is clear that he has a deep and abiding appreciation for the written word.  In an interview, Abrams revealed that the inspiration for S came from an airport layover years ago where he picked up a book that had been left on a seat at the boarding gate, and found a written message inside instructing whoever found the book to enjoy it and then leave it for someone else.  In Doug Dorst, novelist and professor of creative writing at Texas State University, Abrams found the right writer to realize his vision.

The reading experience is richly layered: one story unfolding in the text, another in the footnotes, another in the margins, and all three somehow connected.  The Ships of Theseus itself is a surreal and at-times creepy polemic against heartless corporations, rich with subtext that is not always immediately decipherable.  The footnotes are alternatively informative and fallacious, and serve to paint a back-story not only for Straka, but also for Caldiera, the editor.  Jen and Eric's conversation in the margins helps to illuminate both the novel and the footnotes as they immerse themselves in the collective body of Straka's works, researching what they can about the author and the editor and sharing their findings in several passes through the book.  The reader can even tell the chronology of the margin notes based on the color of ink used by Jen and Eric.  First, blue and black, next green and orange, etc.

I found it impossible to put the book down, but unlike Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, I was unable to finish this in one sitting.  In fact, it took me 10 days to finish S.  Though it is not a particularly long book (at roughly 450 pages), it is a long read.  Each page spread took between 5 and 10 minutes to read, depending whether or not there were footnotes, and on the amount of margin notes.  It does not take long for the reader to become immersed in the mysteries around Straka, just as Jen and Eric have, and that makes the time and effort seem worthwhile.

I rarely write book reviews, and I tend to only do so when I find a concept creative and worth commending.  The last review I wrote was for David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas several years ago.  Like Cloud Atlas, S presents the reader with an imaginative and brilliant premise which involves versatile writing on the author's part.  Each piece of the book is so distinct: Straka's personality comes through in his novel, Caldiera's personality comes through in the footnotes, and Jen's personality comes through in her loopy cursive script and Eric's personality comes through in his neat and orderly handwriting.  As someone who takes a deep joy in writing, I cannot help but admire a work such as this one, imaginative, thoughtfully planned and versatilely written as it is.

I would highly recommend S to anybody who loves reading for the sake of reading, or writing for the sake of writing.  It will not disappoint.

Tactile Unit Planning: A "Vlog"

I spent most of the morning and early afternoon working on my English 11 curriculum.  I was excited by the progress I made (one and a half units in four hours), so I decided to do a brief video blog showing and telling about what has worked for me.  If you're not a teacher, this might not interest you; if you are a teacher and you have other ideas about what has worked for you while planning, please feel free to sound off in the comments!  I hope this is helpful!

Part One: Introduction

Part Two: Tactile Planning in Action

EDUC 505: A Window's View

I have just started my online education courses for the summer.  For EDUC 505, which is about inclusion of students with special needs in the classroom, we were asked to introduce ourselves by talking about a view from a window that is special to us.  Using a word-picture, we were asked to share a bit about ourselves.  Here's what I wrote:

***

I've tried to count the buildings. Tried, I say, because I've never succeeded. Somewhere along the way, I always lose count: "Did I already count that short skyscraper?" "Is that just one building with two towers, or two separate buildings?" "I don't think I can even distinguish individual buildings on the horizon."

The city-scape stretches all around me in a dazzling panorama of office windows, pinprick taillights and headlights, radio towers and neon signs. This is what I see from the living room of the 22nd floor apartment where my wife, Tomomi, lived before we got married in December. After our wedding, she moved into my apartment in Higashi Kurume, the quiet Tokyo suburb, which is home to the Christian Academy in Japan, the international school where I've taught high school English and History for five years. Higashi Kurume is about an hour's train ride away from the Tokyo waterfront, where Tomomi had been house-sitting for some missionaries from our church, while they were on home-assignment in America. In Higashi Kurume, it's easy to forget that I am living in the biggest city in the world, but in Tsukishima, the evidence is always there, just outside the living room window.

The view is an odd mixture of tranquility and bustling activity. Tranquility, because 22 floors up, very little noise from the street level reaches the balcony. The twinkling city lights and their shimmery twins reflected in the bay may as well be stars in a vast night sky--endless, uncountable, and silent. Yet the view is also bustling, because the reality is that inside each of those illuminated windows are offices full of salary men and women working late. Behind those neon signs are clubs and bars where the night has only just begun. The pointillist painting of taillights and headlights indicate cars, taxis and buses filled with commuters. Within my range of vision, millions upon millions of people are living their lives.

I'm so far from the kitchen window of the home I grew up in just outside of Lynden, Washington, with our old red barn, the fields where my family's horses are grazing, and snow-capped Mount Baker watching vigilantly, a silent sentinel.

I miss the countryside sometimes. Yet as I look out over Tokyo, I know I am where I need to be. This is a nation in need. Less than 1% of the population identify as Christian, and of that number, only a small percentage regularly attend a church. The city lights remind me of the many people in Tokyo who are lonely, hopeless and lost. In 2012, over 27,000 Japanese people took their own lives. Somewhere between 500,000 and 1 million young people have withdrawn from society altogether, rarely leaving their parents' homes or even their bedroom. The city lights remind me of the tremendous devastation of the 2011 triple-disaster in which thousands died, and thousands more lost their homes and livelihood. I'm just a country boy. My time at Dordt, living in North Hall, Covenant Hall and finally Southview represented the most populous community I'd lived in up until that point. On paper, I do not seem a likely candidate to live and work in Tokyo. Yet, God uses us despite our weakness. He alone gives us strength, and that strength is always sufficient for the work He calls us to. I sigh as I look out over the vast city that has become my home. Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined that I would live here.

Teaching With Integrity

One quirk of a teacher's world is that December 31st is only the end of the year in an honorary sense.  We all know very well that the year really ends in June.

This means that our new year's eve is two months long, and like the evening of December 31, it is a time marked by celebration of the year that has ended, anticipation of the year to come, and also introspection.  I have now completed my 5th full year of teaching.  During the year, I made the transition from 'young, single teacher' to 'young, married teacher'.  I also spent this past year teaching in the light of Master's courses, which I started last summer.  With graduation past, grading mostly finished, and only one round of presentations left to hear, I cannot help but wonder what I, myself, have learned this year.  Indeed, I believe I learned more in this year of teaching than in any other since that dreaded first year.  This year, I was challenged to rediscover my identity in the classroom, a process which has been crucial to my integrity as a teacher.

Last summer, I read The Courage to Teach by Parker J. Palmer.  In this book, Palmer carries forward threads of thought started in To Know As We Are Known, perhaps his most famous work, and certainly a favorite of my headmaster and principal.  Palmer argues that before a teacher can know his students and engage them in the dance of truth in a "subject-centered classroom", a teacher must first know himself.  He must teach in line with his values and gifts.  This, by Palmer's definition is integrity.  Integrity is lost when a teacher tries to be something they are not.  It occurred to me during the course of this year that I have not been teaching with integrity to who I am.  In fact, I've worked very hard to suppress who I am.

Who am I?  I am a performer.  I love doing voices, I love giving speeches, I love making up songs, I love telling stories, I love playing characters, I love parody.  This is me.  And over the past two years in the classroom, I had actively been fighting back that side of myself.  I rationalized: "I'm too weird, my students won't get me"; "My students should be the ones 'on stage', I should be behind the scenes"; "A constructivist classroom is best practice, anyway."

Like any of the lies we tell ourselves, mine were injected with half-truths: Yes, I am weird.  No, not all of my students will "get" my weirdness.  Yes, my students do need to be "on stage", and no, I shouldn't make myself the star of the show.  Yes, constructivist learning is an important life skill and no, I shouldn't just tell my students what to think.

Unfortunately, I was marching into my constructivist classroom having left behind my weapons, my shield, my helmet, my armor, and ultimately, myself.  That was not always the case, though!  One story of many comes to mind: In my 2nd year of teaching, I staged a performance in the classroom where I interviewed myself (in a pre-recorded video clip, wearing a cowboy hat and speaking in a bad Texan accent) on the Mexican-American War.  I am pretty sure my students thought I was a little crazy, but to this day that class environment remains the best I've worked in.  Maybe because I was being authentic, the students felt at ease being authentic, themselves.  I'm not sure when, but somewhere along the road, self-consciousness sunk its talons into me and I lost my authenticity.  

While I'll grant that I shouldn't always be in the spotlight, that my classroom should not be "The Gibby Show", I absolutely do need to be on stage, performing.  If my job consists primarily of supervising my students at work or answering questions as they come up, I'll wither.  I know.  I have withered.  Worse still, my students won't invest their fullest.  Students have a radar for B.S.  They might not even completely realize that what they are seeing is a facade, but something--some intangible thing--will strike them as not-quite-right.  It's the same reason why I can't just waltz into the classroom and do a spot-on impression on some of my own excellent teachers from my school days (which, trust me, I am perfectly capable of doing) and expect to impact my students: it's just not me.

To use a metaphor close to my heart as a singer, I am the high tenor voice.  Everyone hears the high tenor part, everyone knows it is there, and if it is done well, the audience will "ooh" and "ah".  But the high tenor part mostly functions to make the lead singer sound better.  Without the lead, the high tenor is stranded, without a melody to attach to.  It's precisely why Art Garfunkel's solo career was unsuccessful, while Paul Simon made a name for himself on his own.  That's me as a teacher.  I need to be visible, need to perform, need to do my (quirky) thing.  At the end of the day, though, it's about bringing out the best in my students.  They are Paul Simon, I am Art Garfunkel.  I'm pitching in the high notes until they embark on a solo career or find a new band to be a part of.  

I need to embrace this about myself.  In March, I asked my Juniors to give me honest feedback on my teaching.  One boy said he wished I would lecture more often, and his classmates all made noises of agreement at this statement.  At the time, I mentally dismissed it with the excuse of "my students just want to be told what to think."  However, in giving it some thought, and weighing it back against what I'd so admired in Palmer, I realized my student was touching upon something more true than he perhaps knew.  

My resolution for the new year is not to lecture more.  Nor is it to do more independent learning activities.  My resolution for next year is simply to teach with integrity.  To teach not according to who I think I should be or who I think my students want me to be, but according to who I really am.  This means letting my creativity roam free, letting it take me where it takes me.  God gave me these unique gifts for a reason, and if I am not using them in my teaching, they become little more than decoration.  I look back not with regret, but with gratitude at what I've learned.  I look ahead not with trepidation, but with excitement at what the new year holds.  

I'm Not Dead!

I'm not.  I promise.  It's just been a while since I posted.  It turns out that married life pretty much doubles the speed at which time passes; not a complaint--the time Tomomi and I get to spend together in the course of a typical week is precious to me, and of course the moment we decide a certain time is precious, the faster it seems to pass by.  Factoring in work, and a newly discovered sense of duty toward household chores (particularly cooking), it has been very easy to let certain healthy habits like blogging and exercise go.  The effects of one of these lapses has been more noticeable than the other.

It happens that today, Tomomi is required to be at work.  Saturday is usually our date day; either we go for a walk, or we settle in a quiet cafe together, so needless to say, this was an unwelcome disruption.  Her company will have a 飲み会--drinking party--tonight and in addition to working at the office today, she is expected to make the arrangements and reservations ahead of time.  She is also required to actually BE at the drinking party, which will go until 9 or 10 pm.  And, she will not receive a compensatory day off for coming in today.  This is the point in the blog-post where I made several starts at a lengthy, raging rant against Japan's company culture.  Nothing I verbalized could adequately capture my frustration, though it's worth noting that the words 'counter-productive', 'misogynistic', and 'unjust' came up in every iteration.  **sigh** I love Japan dearly and so much is good here, but this is something that is just... backwards.  If you find it upon your heart to pray for Japan, please take some extra time to pray for the working culture, which I believe to be the catalyst for many other significant social issues in this country.

Anyway, Tomomi being away working leaves me with a choice: either I spend the day stewing in a pot of loneliness and bitterness at the work culture here, or I spend the day exercising muscles I haven't exercised in a while.  Since it's raining hard, I am opting for creative exercise over literal exercise.  I will get some grading done, and hopefully do a bit of writing, too.  Stay tuned!