Graduation Speech, 2016

Nearly four years ago, I taught the class of 2016 for the first time as Freshmen.  I taught them again as Juniors last year.  Tonight, I had the incredible honor to speak to them at their graduation.  Here is the text of my speech:

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Ladies and gentlemen of justice, good evening.

We find ourselves this evening in a setting so familiar to us, the scene of basketball games and beep tests, of Christmas concerts and commencement ceremonies. These events have been constants in your lives at CAJ, reliable mileposts that stay the same from year to year.

What has changed, with each passing year, is you: this year, you are sitting front and center. This year, you are the ones graduating.

Let’s back up four years to an earlier graduation night at CAJ. Whether you were in the audience that night, or somewhere else, you were likely feeling some common emotions: You had just finished 8th grade. You had climbed the middle school social ladder, and survived. Perhaps you were feeling on top of the world, like you had finally figured out this whole school thing--Look out CAJ high school, here comes the class of 2016!

I have a confession for you--I was feeling the same way that evening. I was the graduation speaker that night, too. I had just finished my 3rd full year of teaching, and like you, I felt like I was on top of the world. I felt like I had finally figured out this whole teaching thing--Look out CAJ high school, here comes Mr. Gibson!

God has a funny way of dismantling our pride, though it might not feel so funny in the moment that it happens.

For me, that moment was when God introduced me to the class of 2016.

I remember sitting in my classroom on the first day of school, waiting for my 4th period World History class to arrive, and out in the hall, I heard <DAWWWRP!!> <GRAAAWWP> <BLAAARP!>

...and I wondered what living thing could be making those sounds. My question was answered when a huge group of freshman boys piled through the door and filled the entire back half of the classroom.

To say the least, I was not at all prepared for the school-year that lay ahead of us. I think that if someone had told us then, that I would be speaking to you on your graduation night, we all would have laughed.

But here we are tonight, all the same. I’m standing up here speaking to you by your class’s choice, and by my choice. But more importantly, I think it is by God’s choice, and that our journey from your freshman year to this moment, here and now, holds for us two profound lessons. It is these lessons that I would like to share with you tonight. The first is this:

I. We are all living teacher’s drafts.
For the sake of those in the audience: most of the major essays that CAJ students write go through several drafts before the students submit a final product. The teacher’s draft receives feedback and comments from--you guessed it--the teacher. Now, as you know, the purpose of a teacher’s draft is not to get everything perfect the first time around--the purpose is to receive feedback, and then go back to revise, renew, and rework your writing. This process is incredibly important.

In Paul’s letter to the church in Rome, he gave this advice:

“Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is--his good, pleasing and perfect will.”

Paul was a man who knew a thing or two about renewal. In fact, he had been a bitter enemy to the church until he encountered Jesus for himself.

For Paul, God’s renewing work was not merely a hope, but a firm reality. We can take comfort in this. You see, like us, Paul, was a living teacher’s draft; an essay in need of revision… and God’s renewing work in Paul becomes that much more obvious when we look back at who he was, compared to who he became. Perhaps that’s where we need to start for ourselves, if we want to fully understand what it means to be living teacher’s drafts--perhaps we need to look back at who we were.

Have you ever gone back and re-read essays that you’d written in past years of school?

What did it feel like to re-read these old writings?

I know that for me, personally, the first thing I notice when I re-read things I’d written before is just how many mistakes I made and failed to catch. If you’ve re-read your old writings, you probably know what I’m talking about. But even if you haven’t, just think back to what kind of person you were at different points in your life:

What were you like in...

9th grade?

8th grade?

Even earlier?

You may have fond memories from each of those years, but more likely than not, you did or said things you wish you could take back, made fashion decisions you wish you could erase from your memory, or spent countless hours on hobbies you now find a waste of time.

Maybe this is why our gut reaction to old photos of ourselves tends to be embarrassment. When we come face to face with images from our past, there’s absolutely nothing we can do to change who we were.

Here is a snapshot from a class discussion you had in your freshman year. You were discussing what you felt to be the weaknesses of the class of 2016. These are direct quotes from the transcript of that discussion:

“We have boys and girls divided.”

“Segregation.”

“Everyone’s immature.”

“We lack respect toward teachers and other students.”

Perhaps you remember specific occasions where you saw these struggles in your class first-hand. Perhaps you remember frustrated teachers and principals. Perhaps you remember feeling like you couldn’t trust your classmates, or like your classmates couldn’t trust you.

You weren’t the only ones struggling with fear & doubt, though.

I started that school-year so full of myself. I’d had a couple good years of teaching, and I thought I could just coast on my successes. For reasons I cannot comprehend now, I was expecting teaching to suddenly be easy and effortless. When the personalities in your class started to clash with mine, when I ran into actual challenges in the classroom, my response was to retreat. I invested less and less into my teaching, and invested more in other parts of my life. I met my wife in the fall of that year, and after that for the rest of the school-year, my heart was miles away from my classroom, and from CAJ. Falling in love is wonderful, but so totally disruptive.

When my wife and I got engaged in the Spring of that year, I finally took a serious look at whether or not I was really called to teach. It was a defining moment in my life. Did you know that some studies suggest as many as 40% of teachers will leave the profession within their first five years? That’s the point that I was at. I had two options in front of me: The first was to quit--to say “teaching isn’t the job for me, after all” and then to find something else that would fit better. The second option--and frankly, the more terrifying one--was to admit that teaching was my calling and that I just hadn’t been doing a very good job of it. It was essentially a choice between victimhood and agency. The first option would have been to shift the responsibility from myself onto my circumstances. The second option meant taking responsibility for my struggles and then doing something about it.

So, in the week after I got engaged, I took the GRE--that’s the graduate school entrance exam--I gathered my references, and I applied for an online Master’s program. It was a busy week. But I was certain that God had called me to teach. What’s more, I knew I would have you all in class again when you got to your Junior year, and I desperately wanted to be ready to teach you then. I knew what I had to do.

Tonight, we look back on where we were four years ago, and it is crystal clear just how far we’ve all come between then and now. I shared a snapshot from your freshman year earlier, but I’d like to share a few more snapshots that I had the privilege to witness over the past few years:

I watched as you shared heartfelt stories of struggle with one another at the start of your Junior year. In that moment, there was trust.

I watched as you formed committees to plan an international festival to fight Ebola. In that moment, there was no division between the genders.

I watched as you rallied together to support classmates on a number of occasions, from Dig Teal, to Thrift Shop, to Senior Comps projects. In those moments, there was respect.

I watched as you grew from a class grappling to find its place at CAJ to a class well-loved by the teachers and admired by the underclassmen. Do you know what your kohai say about you? “The class of 2016 always sets the bar so high.”

God has been at work in your class these past four years, making constant revisions, and it shows.

I turned 30 a few months ago, and it occurred to me that God has been revising me, too, from where I was four years ago.

I am a married man now--it’ll be three years in December.

I finished my Master’s thesis this Spring, so I guess I get to say that I graduated in 2016, too!

I was able to teach you again last year, your Junior year. It was a privilege to spend the year together engaging the important question of how we can live as people of justice. It was a good year, and one I’ll remember distinctly decades from now.

But we’re not done growing, and that is vital to understand. You and I both know that none of us has attained perfection. In fact, do you want to know my biggest takeaway from three years of graduate work? We’re never done learning. This leads me to the second lesson I’d like to share with you, and that is,

II. God continues to revise us, so that we can bless the world. 

Tonight is not the destination. This is not the final draft submission space on turnitin.com, or Moodle, or Google Classroom. You are still living teacher’s drafts, and God is not done revising you yet.

Now, some of you might be wondering to yourselves, “ugh--why do we have to go through this process, anyway?”

After all, revision can be painful. You probably know how difficult it is to cut content from an essay that was over the word limit--it’s almost like being asked to perform an amputation on yourself. Yes, revision is often painful.

And if a process is going to be difficult, even painful, there had better be a purpose behind it, right? Maybe you’ve sometimes questioned that purpose as you have revised your own essays: “What’s the point of this, anyway? Can’t I just re-submit the essay as it is and take the grade I got for the teacher’s draft?”

The answer to this question lies in our very mission as a school--the mission of your teachers, your principals, your coaches, your librarians, everyone who has worked with you over the past 12 years--to equip you to serve Japan and the world for Christ.

THIS is why we undergo a process of constant revision. Service is an important task, and one which demands our absolute commitment. To look for life-hacks or shortcuts in the way that we serve misses the point of service entirely; instead, we must constantly seek out opportunities to improve in our ability to serve and bless those around us. It’s a timeless calling, and one which is so tightly interwoven with being men and women of justice in the world today. The prophet Isaiah called the Israelite people to “Learn to do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the fatherless; plead the case of the widow.” Service to those who are hurting, to those who are in need, to those on the fringes of society--this is a critical component of what it means for us to pursue justice in this broken world.

I’ve seen glimmers and glimpses of this over the past couple of years in your class, but it cannot stop with a class charity event, a Senior Comps project, or even laying the foundations for a special education facility in Thailand. These are accomplishments to be proud of, to be sure, but they are ultimately raw pieces in an unfinished draft, in what will hopefully be a lifetime of service.

Unlike four years ago, I have no illusions about what tonight means for me, either. I know now that I’m still being revised, myself. I know now that complacency is the enemy of good teaching and that I must constantly, and earnestly confront my weaknesses as a teacher, and seek to learn and grow. I know now that my curriculum will never be perfect--there will always be something to change, something to add, or something to get rid of for the next school-year. 

I’m learning to embrace the journey of learning, this process of constant revision, and I hope you will too. Commencement, after all, is not an ending but a beginning! Think of it this way: if we are living teacher’s drafts and God is revising us, He’s maybe just now finished revising your introduction and thesis; He hasn’t even gotten into the body paragraphs yet! Where will you be four years from now? Eight years? Twelve years? What revisions will have taken place between now, and then?

Now--over the past few weeks, I’ve heard from some of your parents, some other teachers, and even some of you directly, that apparently, you expect me to sing one last song to you. And maybe you were starting to worry that I wouldn’t sing anything. I thought about singing “Let it Go” tonight, but it didn’t really have anything to do with what I talked about… so I re-wrote the words to make it more applicable. Consider this is my final message for you as your English teacher.

Wherever you go and whatever you do, I hope that you’ll continue to write, and continue to revise your writing to make it better with each draft. As you revise, I hope you’ll be led to think about how God is revising you. Thanks for being such wonderful students. It’s been a privilege to teach you, to learn alongside you, and to go through the same journey of revision as you. Never stop learning, and never stop serving--I’m looking forward to reading the next draft.



Closing Song: Just Revise (Frozen Parody)

The lanterns shine bright in the plaza tonight,

And the end is within reach.

It’s CAJ graduation,

And I need to close this speech.

The wind is howling through the cabbage patch outside,

Hope I’ve made my point, heaven knows I’ve tried.



Don’t set it down, don’t let it be,

Right now your thesis is just a ‘3’,

Reword, renew, don’t compromise,

Aim for the skies!



Just revise, just revise,

Don’t settle for just all right.

Just revise, just revise,

Until your words take flight.



I don’t care

If it takes all day,

Bring the feedback on:

The next draft will be better anyway!



It’s funny how some distance

Makes our past drafts look sub-par,

And the marks upon each rubric

Seem like steps to who we are!



It’s time to see what we can do,

To get a ‘4’ and then break through

Use active voice, keep verbs alive, reach for the ‘5’!



Just revise, just revise

You are one with the Pages doc

Just revise, just revise,

Then submit by ten o’clock!



Here you’ll sit,

And here you’ll stay

Bring the feedback on...



Your power flurries through the keyboard to the page,

Your soul is verbalized in letters that will soon engage,

And one thought hits you like an exclamation mark!

You’re never going back,

On a new draft, you’ll embark!



Just revise, just revise,

Let your words give voice to the voiceless!

Just revise, just revise,

It’s anything but pointless.



Here we are,

On graduation day,

Bring the feedback on,

The next draft will be better anyway!

A Celebration of Learning

The past month has been filled with busyness of all kinds, and while I am usually diligent about setting aside time to write a blog-post each week, my spare time and attention during the month of May has been redirected to writing of a different kind.  In early May, I was honored to discover that the Seniors had voted as a class to ask me to speak at their graduation ceremony on June 3.  I accepted, and immediately set to work on writing my speech.  I put the final touches on the speech earlier this week and sent it off to be translated.  A sizable number of parents do not speak English and so having a printed copy in Japanese is vital.

I will post my speech next week after delivering it, but what I can tell you up front is that I am speaking on the theme of renewal, and using the analogy that we are all living "teacher's drafts" (the work-in-progress draft of an essay submitted to the teacher for feedback).  I feel like this is a relevant theme not only for the students, but for myself as well: I taught this class twice, first as Freshmen and then again as Juniors, and... suffice it to say we both did our share of growing up over the course of those three short years.

Speech-writing has accompanied all sorts of end-of-year grading, and over the past week, I have been providing feedback on the teacher's drafts of my 11th graders' Justice essays.  As of this evening, I have finished reading 37 essays, and have 14 to go.  Each one has taken me between 30 minutes and one hour.  Likely if you're not an English teacher, your reaction to those numbers is to feel particularly grateful that you're not an English teacher.

I'm weird.  I am thoroughly enjoying this time-consuming and largely sedentary task.  Granted, some drafts are much better than others, but what I enjoy so much is that each reveals what my students learned throughout the course of the past school-year.  I told my students on the first day of class back in August that our course-theme was "Becoming People of Justice", and that their final writing assignment of the year would be an essay engaging with what it means to be people of justice, and every unit I taught contained some piece of the puzzle.  Now I get to watch the students put it all together.  What is so exciting is that everyone has learned something.  Yes, I am grading these drafts strictly, and no I don't think I've given a higher score than a 'B' to anybody's draft so far.  Most have been in the 'C' range (I figure, this is my last opportunity to give feedback on these students' writing, so I had better make it count).  But everyone has learned something.  Everyone has grown.  Everyone is genuinely thinking through what justice means.

I think we as teachers need to be intentional about treating the final assignments in our class as a celebration of the learning that has taken place just as much as a summative assessment.  Along with these essays, my students are also preparing final projects which they will present to their classmates next week.  The instructions were simple: to choose a topic from class this year that resonated with them and to create a project of some kind that articulates what they now understand about that topic.  Projects can be paintings, sculptures, videos, skits, debates, songs; whatever format each student (or group, if they choose to collaborate) feels represents the best they have to offer.

Simply watching the students get to work planning and making their projects has taught me a lot about what my students took away this year.  For some students, it was our early discussion of labelling, stereotypes and biases.  For some students, it was our study of rhetorical fallacies.  For some students, it was our unit on agency and victimhood (actually, for quite a few students; I learned that this unit had a tremendous impact on a number of students).  For some students, it was our comparison of different worldviews.  I am looking forward to seeing the projects that the students come up with.  I won't grade these as strictly as I am grading the essay drafts, and in fact, my main criteria is whether or not the students clearly and successfully articulate an understanding of the topic they chose.  This, too, is a celebration of learning.

I know, I know... my seeing these end-of-year tasks as a celebration does not mean that the students won't grumble about the work-load, nor does it mean that the students will be filled with profound joy when they sit down to revise their essays or finalize their projects.  But perhaps they will recognize in my joy an invitation to look back at where they were in August and take pride in how far they have come.  Perhaps they will feel encouraged to reflect on moments, lessons or assignments that affected them significantly this year, whether they were difficult at the time, or not.  Perhaps when all is said and done, when my students have cleaned out their lockers, and walked out the door into the humid summer sun, they will be able to smile and celebrate, just a little bit.

Perceptions of International High School Students Regarding Flipped Classroom Strategies in the Humanities Classroom

That was the title of my Master's thesis, a 41-page undertaking which I put the final touches on, and sent off earlier today.

This project represents the culmination of almost three years of studies, and I really cannot think of a better way to have ended my Master's program.

I had been interested in learning more about flipped classroom strategies for a couple years, and this project gave me a reason to commit, and invest both time and energy into using them in my own classroom.

I should explain up front that flipped classroom strategies refer to the shifting of content and information from inside the classroom to outside the classroom, instead favoring higher-level thinking activities (discussions, debates, simulations, workshops, etc) during class-time.  Thus, the sort of application and discovery tasks traditionally assigned as homework become the "meat" of time in class, while the lecture and information acquisition that previously dominated class-time instead become homework.  I chose to do this primarily through the use of short lecture videos, in order to shift historical content outside of my classroom as much as possible.

My Humanities class served as the testing ground for this study, and the students were very helpful in providing their feedback.  I spoke to each student in the class briefly about the use of flipped strategies, and conducted in-depth interviews with six students.

Students were almost universally positive about the use of lecture videos.
Here are some of the reasons why:
1) The videos allowed for a greater degree of flexibility than classroom lecture.  Students appreciated the ability to choose when to take in content rather than having that dictated by the teacher in class.
2) Having access to lectures in video form meant that students could re-watch if they needed to.  For instance, most students re-watched the lecture videos I had posted about the time leading up to the Civil War while working on their Document Based Question (DBQ) essay on the causes of the Civil War.
3) 90% of the class cited the transcripts that I posted along with the videos as being very helpful.  Students in need of English language support said that it helped them to understand the videos more clearly than they would have understood a classroom lecture.  Other students said that the transcript helped when they needed to re-visit the video, to find a particular section to re-watch.
4) Most of the students felt that the videos were the right length, each clocking in at somewhere between 2 minutes and 5 and a half minutes.
5) Several students expressed appreciation for the fact that the videos helped them to better understand discussions and activities we did in class.
6) Students never felt that lecture or details were the point of my class--there was always a bigger picture we were aiming for.

All this being said, there are still bugs to be worked out: I would like to find more resources to offer students, so that lecture videos are not their only option, and I would like to help students feel comfortable accessing further background information on their own (and even, have a desire to access further background information on their own).  I would also like to make my videos less dry and more creative and engaging than a talking head.

Still, the feedback I collected was affirming that this tool has tremendous potential in my classroom, and I hope that my positive experience with flipped strategies will encourage colleagues and other readers to consider how they might use flipped strategies in their own classrooms as well.

To Any and All Teacher Education Students

Imagine this:

You are a college senior just about to finish the teaching program at your university.  You have spent the last four years studying educational psychology, curriculum & instruction, assessment practices, pedagogy in your subject area, and much, much more.  No doubt, you have also completed a couple short-term practica in which you may have been a fly-on-the-wall or even a temporary T.A. in another teacher's classroom.

Perhaps you were even able to teach a lesson or two of your own before you started your official student teaching placement in your Senior year.

What lies before you now is a choice, and--it turns out--an important choice, at that:

Will you try to find a teaching job right after you graduate?

Or, will you go straight into a Master's program?

I can certainly understand the appeal of pursuing a Master's right away--after all, you have been a student for the past 16 years of your life and momentum is on your side!  All of the theory you've accumulated over the past several years of education courses is still fresh in your mind, and wouldn't it be better to have as much preparation as possible before that dreaded first year of teaching?  And anyway, you'll have to get a Master's sooner or later, so you might as well just get it over with, right?

But what if your choice made a big difference to your long-term growth as both a teacher and learner?  What if "sooner" was not the proactive, forward-thinking choice we often believe it to be? What if "getting it over with" was the wrong mentality entirely?

The truth is, the first year of teaching will be painful no matter how much you prepare.  You will forget what you learned in your education classes, and sometimes you'll forget a lot.  You will do things that you know are not best practice in the name of making it through the day.  You will not be able to keep a smile on your face and a spring in your step every minute of every day.  You might not ever snap and lose your temper (Confession: I did), but a time will come when your students will observe that "you're not as nice [or fun, or energetic, or <positive quality>] as you were at the start of the year." You'll have moments where you will feel overwhelmed, exhausted and quite possibly, even questioning your decision to be a teacher....

...and you'll learn more in that one year of struggle than you learned in all of your education courses combined.  Through trial and error, a constant cycle of forgetting and recovering, theories will turn into realities before your eyes.  You will develop your "voice" as a teacher.  Your daily and hourly failures to be the best you can be will drive you ceaselessly back to the drawing board, and each time you will come up with something better, something stronger.

Your second year will feel like a new pair of running shoes and the breeze at your back: you'll be able to run further and jump higher than you could the year before, and things that were challenging to you in your first year will seem like second-nature in year two.

On and on it will go, each year bringing you closer to becoming the teacher you want to be, and then...

...you'll reach a point where you can't improve on your own.  It'll feel like hitting a wall, and it might be painful, or frustrating, or simply perplexing.  You'll encounter an issue in your teaching that you cannot find an obvious solution to, and you will want to learn more about teaching.

No, "want" is too weak a word--you will crave a deeper understanding of teaching.  You will be hungry for growth, eager to dig deep into the theory and philosophy that had so easily escaped you in your first year of teaching, to soak up best practice and make it your practice. 

It will be a desire based not on convenience or momentum, not on "getting it over with", but rather on need.  

That is the right time to pursue your Master's--not sooner, and certainly not later (if you hit a wall and have no desire to find a way over it, teaching is not for you).  

Pursuing your Master's under these conditions will be a richly rewarding experience: you'll have spent enough hours in the classroom to know your own strengths and weaknesses as an educator; you'll be in a better position to ask questions and research what is most important to your situation; you'll have an abundant supply of concrete examples to give real grounding to the philosophies and theories you will study.  If you happen to find a program that allows you to teach and study simultaneously, you'll also have a built-in lab in which you are able to try new things that you are studying, and consequently, you will have real-time experiences to discuss and reflect on in your coursework.  Perhaps of chief importance, you will learn what it means to be a lifelong learner at the time that you need that mindset and skill-set the most.

Poet Wendell Berry wrote, 

It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,

and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.

The impeded stream is the one that sings.

Being baffled is an uncomfortable feeling, as is the helpless feeling of not knowing where to go or what to do.  Yet it is these feelings that ensure that we will be learners for life and not simply learners until our 20s.  

So if you're facing the choice between teaching or marching straight into your Master's, the decision should be simple: teach first.  

Teach long enough to forge an identity as a teacher, and then long enough beyond that to find yourself truly "baffled".  

Then, famished, come and enjoy the feast that further education offers.

As educators who desire for our students to become lifelong learners themselves, what could be better?

Learning Flexibility

For years, I was spoiled: I taught the same students for English 11 and U.S. History in back-to-back class periods.

This enabled me to teach those subjects as a single, blended Humanities block.  The bell would ring at the end of 3rd period, but the students would stay, and we would continue whatever activity we happened to be doing.

Among other things, this arrangement allowed me to design and fine-tune several classroom simulations intended to take up the full 90+ minutes of class-time.

Unfortunately, this arrangement also had significant ramifications for when other subjects could or couldn't be scheduled, and as CAJ has expanded its science and language offerings in recent years, it became necessary this year to break up the Humanities block in order to allow for more scheduling flexibility.

My 2015-16 Humanities class meets 3rd period and 5th period.  The bell rings at the end of 3rd period and the students go away to their 4th period classes.  They return 50 minutes later for 5th period, and we resume our Humanities lesson.

In some ways, this has helped me think through how I use my two periods of class-time more consciously.  Being able to march straight through the bell was nice, but I'd be the first to admit I'm not great at holding to an organized schedule, and sometimes often-times, time would get away from me, the result being that I would have to scrap or push back some other activity I'd planned for the day.

I've actually found a fairly nice equilibrium this year in which 3rd period tends to be more structured and guided, often involving the whole class together examining or discussing some topic, and 5th period tends to be independent work-time for a bigger class assignment.

The greatest challenge has been making my simulations work with this new schedule.

I watched two simulations that I had spent hours designing start strong during 3rd period, but then fizzle when students came back for 5th period.  I'd designed these simulations with an uninterrupted 90 minutes in mind and all of the momentum the students had built up 3rd period would have completely evaporated when they came back 5th period.

It was frustrating and disappointing to see activities that I'd spent so much time and care creating falling flat due to circumstances beyond my control....

...until I realized that circumstances were not beyond my control.

For our final simulation of the school-year, on the decision to drop the atomic bomb, I decided to tweak the format to fit a split-period model.

The original simulation had called for 55 minutes of research and about 40 minutes of discussion, with the actual vote happening on the next day of class.

This year, I shortened the research time to one class period--roughly 45 minutes, factoring in my short introduction to the simulation.  The discussion would start after students came back for 5th period, and would last only 30 minutes.  10 minutes would be set aside for closing arguments and the vote would happen in the last 5 minutes of class.

While this meant shortening each component of the simulation more than I would have liked, I decided that it would be best to leave the students wanting more, rather than less.

The adjustments worked.  Students researched and collaborated diligently in their teams during 3rd period.  It was not a lot of time, but they used it well to put together the arguments and evidence they would need during the 5th period discussions.  The teams met in separate locations outside of the classroom so that they would not be tempted to start the debate too early or talk to any of their indeterminate classmates before they were supposed to.

Then, when the students came back 5th period, they were able to build fresh momentum in the discussion portion of the simulation.  It wasn't as though they needed to try and get back into character, or find their place, as they had in the previous two simulations that had not gone so well--it was a new phase of the simulation entirely, so the students merely needed to apply their research.  Plus, with only 30 minutes, the students could not afford to waste a moment: they launched right in, and the entire half-hour was filled with heated conversations, the indeterminates asking probing, thoughtful questions and the teams trying to provide the best possible answers.  The closing statements felt poignant, and voting on the same day actually gave the whole simulation a better sense of urgency.

The lesson I've learned in all of this is the importance of flexibility.  It is tempting to blame external factors such as scheduling when an activity does not work the way I had hoped it would, but the most constructive response is to ask what I can change to make the activity work.

This is a lesson I will not soon forget!

Representatives from the "Drop" and "Don't Drop" teams try
to convince indeterminate classmates to vote their way.

Mid-semester conferences

This week, something happened that has not happened since my first years of teaching: I wound up with extra class-time.

Our mega-unit on worldview is drawing to an end, and when I'd sat down to set the calendar back in January, I had anticipated needing every spare minute all the way up to Spring Break.  However, due to my usage of lecture videos instead of in-class lecture, and a mid-unit decision to not dive as deeply into the progressive movement (which was somewhat tangential to our unit goals), I wound up with two weeks of open time; no small amount in Humanities class, which meets two periods a day.

Having this amount of extra time would've freaked me out in my earliest years of teaching, and very likely I would have responded by putting together busy-work--empty calories to chew up the class-time.

Now, however, I see it as a rare privilege and have treated it as such.  The kids have had the whole week to work in class on a poetry assignment and on the teacher draft of their unit essays, free to come to me for guidance or assistance at any time.

The flexible timing allowed me to do something I have never tried before: substantive one-on-one conferences with the students.  I put together a schedule with ten-minute long blocks and asked each of the students to sign up for a time to come and talk to me.

My Humanities class tend to be a quiet bunch.  They never complain, nor do they get overly worked up about things, for better or for worse.  They are dutiful, conscientious students, but it can be difficult to read how they are doing, and how they are responding to the lessons I'm teaching, strategies I'm using, and assessments I'm giving.

The conferences have been enormously helpful to me as a teacher.

For starters, it's been largely an affirmation that things are going well.  Every student has been able to identify particular lessons or assignments that they really enjoyed and articulate specific reasons for why they enjoyed it.  I learned that many students enjoyed reading The Great Gatsby and putting together a scrapbook of the major symbols (my big assessment on Gatsby--that's a topic for a future post).  I learned that many students are really relishing the chance to think about and wrestle with the topic of worldview in this unit.  I learned that many students appreciate the flexibility of my prompt for this unit essay.

I also asked students what they had found frustrating or uninteresting.  While it may be that a number of students were too polite to offer me feedback, I did appreciate the few suggestions I received.  I learned that students wished I would sing more, and wished that I would play characters more (I did more of this in the first two units of the year).  I learned that a number of students were not happy with the last in-class simulation (it had been kind of flat, with a majority of the class not really getting into it).

Several students blamed themselves for struggles in Humanities class, and I was able to have constructive conversations with a few students about time-management and work-habits.

I also learned that many students have found my use of lecture videos helpful.  I did receive some useful suggestions, such as doing more to follow-up on specific videos in class, or possibly offering more of a platform for students to discuss or ask questions about the videos, but overall the reactions were much better than I expected, given how quiet the students have been.  In particular, students thanked me for including transcripts of all my videos in the description boxes on YouTube, saying that this had been helpful as they went back and re-watched or re-read.

This feedback fit nicely, timing-wise, as I have been separately interviewing a sample of students in my Humanities class in greater depth about the use of flipped classroom strategies for my Master's project throughout the week.  It gave me a clearer sense of what my findings and my research will mean for my classroom moving forward.

Perhaps more than anything else, it was good to have a conversation with each of my students.  I felt like I was able to come away with a deeper understanding of how each student is doing, and what I can do to serve them more effectively.  Because so many of the students tend to be shy, and I tend to be shy, conversations such as these do not always happen naturally and it was a valuable opportunity.

The question is, how can I make sure that I'm intentionally carving out time for conversations like these on a more regular basis in the future?

Leaving the 20s Behind

It was the best birthday present I could have asked for at the time--in the middle of a 10-day choir tour from Iowa to California and back, my parents, brother and sister flew down from Washington to catch the Dordt Choir's Mar. 15 concert in San Jose.

As luck would have it, the better part of the day leading up to the concert was a free-day.

So, I spent a brief but wonderful couple of hours with my family in and around San Francisco--it was tough to say goodbye after the concert.

That was how I started my 20s--on a journey, far from home.  I had no idea at the time just how much further my 20s would carry me from the town I grew up in and from the family I grew up with.

Two years later, I celebrated my 22nd birthday on another Spring choir tour, somewhere between Iowa and New York City.

My 23rd birthday, I celebrated in Tokyo, having arrived only a couple months earlier.

I celebrated my 24th birthday in Thailand, accompanying the CAJ Senior class of 2010 on their service trip as a chaperon.

The rest, I've celebrated at home in Japan.

Yes--at home in Japan.  No matter where my 30s may take me, Japan has been the home of my 20s.
I sometimes tell friends that I have no idea what it means to be an adult in the U.S.--I'm not kidding!  I would have to learn so much that I'm sure my stateside friends and family take for granted.

On the flip side, I cannot think of a better place to have spent my 20s, growing from a just-out-of-college kid to an adult.
There were moments of doubt, to be sure, but there were even more moments that affirmed I was in the right place, following the right calling.
There were lonely evenings, to be sure, but there were also plenty of adventures with friends.
There was heartbreak, to be sure, but there was also the moment I exchanged vows with my wife and started a new Gibson family.

My 20s were wonderful and I am grateful for God's faithfulness.  As I leave behind my 20s and enter my 30s (the decade from which I will emerge "at the top of the hill"), I cannot wait to see what God has in store for me!