Don’t Reply All Rant

Don’t hit reply all. Don’t! Don’t! Don’t!

I’d like to tell you to never use reply all, but there may be legitimate reasons to reply all even if I can’t think of any of them. So consider my thesis to be: don’t use reply all ever!

While there may be a few times when replying to all is appropriate, I hereby give you permission to mess up by failing to reply all rather than replying to all inappropriately, which is far more likely.

It is like using effect as a verb. There are times when it is correct, but this occurs so rarely that using affect all the time is far less likely to get you in trouble. Reply all has that effect (which is not using effect as a verb).

Reply to the sender of the email only. S/he is the person who started the conversation in the first place. If the sender asks a question of ten people and they all hit reply all, you now have ten emails – and a possible reply from the sender to make number eleven. Just what you want - more emails!

What if each person sent a reply back to the sender and the sender sent a summary? Instead of ten emails, you have one. One. Only one. One that it is relevant to you. Do I really need to know that you can’t make the meeting because your daughter is getting her ears pierced or you are bringing gluten free doughnuts?

I know that some people can’t help themselves. Some are using phones with buttons so small that they hit the wrong choice. Some still get confused by the options. Some don’t understand the difference between reply and reply all. Some really want me to know that their spouse has strep.

There is an easy solution to this problem: When sending an email to a group of people, put the addresses in the BCC field. BCC stands for blind carbon copy. This means that those who receive the email cannot see the list of recipients, no matter how long. Putting the recipient list in the BCC field not only protects their privacy but also makes the email easier to read because it will not have the long list of addresses at the beginning, which is especially nice for those reading it on tiny screens. It also prevents anyone from using this list for other purposes. I love that people feel free to share my email address with large numbers of strangers.

If the long list is in the BCC field, the only person who will receive a reply is the sender, no matter how befuddled the recipient may be. No one’s email is shared at all! Problem solved.

Don’t use reply all. When sending emails to groups, put the list in the BCC field. Yes, you can leave the TO or CC fields blank, it will still send.

I will have to compose myself to write about group text messages, but we'll save that for another time. 

End of rant.

We Are Not Who We Were

Have you ever had a conversation with a distant family member who sees you occasionally and you realize that this person doesn’t really know you? They see you as who you were years ago. Their mental image of you has not kept up with the times.

This is a typical point of contention in families: as children grow and change, their parents and the other adults in their lives struggle to keep up, especially when the changes happen so quickly. However, children aren’t the only ones who change; we all keep growing.

I look back at my first years as a teacher, and I shake my head. I am amazed that I made it through! I am embarrassed by my mistakes, and I wonder what took me so long to figure things out. Sometimes, I look back at last week in the classroom and feel the same way.

One of the appeals of throwback Thursday is this embarrassment. We see the old photos and we are shocked! Yes, that is me, but it looks nothing like I am now  - on the outside.

I meet former students who have grown up, sometimes way up, and I struggle to see the person I knew years ago. Of course, they have changed physically, and as we talk, I am amazed and delighted by the wonderful people they have become. The person I knew has transformed into someone better.

Often, I beat myself up over stupid things I have done in the past. Sometimes, I am that distant relative who can’t see the older me. Maybe I am in denial, refusing to see the present me.  Maybe I get stuck.

It is easier to hang on to the past, clinging to the idea that our identities are static.  I don’t want to have to keep relearning and changing my views. I want people to be like the characters in books. My favorite characters are always in those pages. I know exactly what they will do. They are comfortingly predictable. Real people don’t work that way.

The reverse is true as well: I don’t want to let go of the negative feelings I had toward people in my past. I want to believe they are the same as when they hurt me long, long ago. Sometimes, those nasty people are still nasty. Sometimes, they have also changed and they, too, are embarrassed by their pasts. We don’t have to forget the past, but we shouldn’t imprint it on the present.   

When we see people daily or even just a few times a month, we don’t notice the changes. We adjust in such small increments that we are fooled into thinking nothing has changed. When we see people only occasionally or merely connect through Facebook, Instagram, or email, we are really conversing more with an old photograph than an old friend.

When my students visit, I need to get to know them again. We share a powerful past, but we haven’t shared much recently. Social media may provide the information, but those old anchors stay put. We have to take a new photo.

We are not who we were. I am not the person, teacher, husband, father, son, brother, friend, or relative I was years (or months) ago –and there big changes ahead.

Don’t Move Final Exams – Remove Them

When I asked my son how his first final exam went, he shook his head and told me, “I am done with it. I don’t remember anything.” While I hope this is not entirely true; he will have the second semester of that class to deal with, it is true that the trivia on final exams leaves kids’ brains as rapidly as they leave the room.

I just finished reading Most Likely To Succeed, which makes the argument that our content-based educational system is obsolete. The authors, Tony Wager and Ted Dintersmith, describe an experiment run by the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey, “When students returned after summer vacation, they were asked to retake the final exam they had completed three months earlier. Actually, it was a simplified version of the final, as the faculty eliminated any detailed questions that students shouldn’t be expected to remember a few months later. The results were stunning. When students took the final in June, the average grade was a B+ (87%); when the simplified test was taken in September, the average grade was an F (58%)” (Wagner and Dintersmith).

If the material in finals often doesn’t stick with students and is often irrelevant to anything they will do in the future, why do we make them memorize this minutia and regurgitate it back?

As I greeted students in the hall after my first final this year, and I asked them how they felt about their first test, many told me that their teacher had already graded it! The finals session had ended less than twenty minutes ago. It would take me a week to finish grading all the writing my students did! If a teacher doesn’t have to think to grade the test, how important can it be?  While there are ways to make multiple-choice tests meaningful, students are studying facts, words, and other bits of information that they could easily look up on the supercomputers in their pockets!

Many teachers finish the quarter with large unit or chapter tests the week before finals and then test on the same content on the final exam. Why test twice? Why beat up a kid with a ton of material on Thursday only to test again for even higher stakes the following Tuesday? How much learning happened in those four days? Did they go over the first test in the meantime? It is double jeopardy.

Many teachers are still using a percentage based grading system which makes the cost of making mistakes high. In our school, almost all finals count for twenty percent of the semester grade. In my experience as a parent and a teacher, finals don’t help students’ grades at all. Either the final simply strengthens what they were already earning, or it hurts their grades – and for kids on the grade bubble, finals frequently push their grades down. One test! One big long test (that will not stick with them) is what makes the difference!  

Should one seventy-five-minute test be equal to four weeks of class experience? Should it count as much? Can we put what is really important, relevant, and meaningful into it and then grade it in five minutes?

My finals are skill based. My freshmen read a story and then write about it. They demonstrate the skills we have been working on all year long. Although I call it a “final,” it doesn’t count for any more than any other assignment. I use a standard based evaluation system in which students’ grades are based on their ability to demonstrate specific skills. I look at their most recent work in each skill area to determine their proficiency and to guide what we need to study together.

Recently, my department chair asked what we thought about moving finals before winter break. Many schools are doing this so kids do not have homework over the vacation. My response was that moving finals solves nothing. It gives the appearance that we are addressing issues of student stress and meaningful assessment, but we are in fact shuffling shells.

We need to change what we teach and how we teach it. We need to make assessment (and school) meaningful and relevant. Finals are an archaic and problematic practice. Simply stating that colleges do them and we must prepare our students is inadequate justification. If colleges are doing something that is not pedagogically sound, that doesn’t mean we should follow. High schools and colleges need to get out of the nineteenth century. The well-being of our children depends on it!  

Star Wars: Into Darkness

As I sat in the movie theater waiting for Star Wars: The Force Awakens to begin, I noticed all the children arriving. I was distressed when a family with two children under the age of three sat not far from me. Another child had some kind of light up toy and was spinning it so it cast a green light throughout the theater.

One of the ads before the movie started was selling Star Wars pet toys. The pets were complaining that they didn’t get to go to the movie with their owners. I have seen Star Wars branded products from toys to oranges. It made me wonder if I had paid to see a movie-length commercial. SPOILER ALERT: I am now going to discuss the film assuming you have either seen it or don’t mind reading about details of the plot.

The movie was fun. I enjoyed it. I was surprised to see a storm trooper who is unwilling to kill people. I wanted to know more about how that happened. I loved that the primary protagonist was a woman who doesn't need others to rescue her. I was delighted that no one commented on her appearance. The variety and diversity in the casting are important and appropriate. This film even passes the Bechdel-Wallace test!

The Force Awakens reminded me of the three original Star Wars movies more than the three prequels, but it had shades of those, too. In fact, it reminded me of the prior movies too much. We started on a sand planet with scavengers. We had an orphaned character who adopts a droid. A short wise alien gave advice. The force was used to escape. A man battled with his father. Planets were destroyed by a horrible weapon and then the weapon was destroyed. It felt like returning to an old home that had been updated and redecorated by new owners, but was still essentially the same place. Although the film received initial praise, more recent reviews have been more critical of its derivative nature.

As has been well documented, the plot didn’t make sense. I kept asking questions that the film didn’t answer. It was a good versus evil parable, but it didn’t say much more than evil is like the Nazis and good must fight evil. The real title should have been Star Wars 3 7: The Search for Luke. However, how and where we found him was also baffling.

I imagined a script meeting for the 2013 Star Trek film, Into Darkness, where J.J. Abrams says to the Star Trek screenwriters, “Just take your favorite moments from earlier episodes and films and rework them. That’s what I am doing with Star Wars.” The prior Star Trek picture, also helmed by J.J. Abrams had some of the same issues as this one: too much rehash and a plot that didn’t make sense. Into Darkness lacked all of The Force Awakens’ positive traits, and is a far less faithful shadow of the original.

And unfortunately, that is what these two recent revivals of old beloved “Star” series have in common: they are nostalgic copies. They are action-adventure rollercoaster rides that dazzle our eyes, leave our hearts pounding, our heads spinning, but take us nowhere except back where we started. They are products designed to sell toys, merchandise, DVDs, and movie tickets. They exploit our fondness for Stars past by copying the shell but neglecting the substance. The recent Star Wars picture does much to modernize the franchise and bring it into the twenty-first century. It even feels more like the original trilogy. But it should have been so much more. 

Math's Need for Speed

Professor Jo Boaler, of Stanford’s Graduate School of Education, says, “Mathematics education in the United States is broken.” I can’t get her recent Atlantic Magazine article, “The Stereotypes That Distort How Americans Teach and Learn Math” off my mind. It has been sitting in an open tab on my browser since it was published in mid-November. 

In the article, Professor Boaler goes on to write that math classes have focused too much on “procedure execution” instead of embracing a far broader curriculum including making connections, working visually, and problem-solving. Boaler even challenges the idea that there is such a thing as a “math person.”

However, the part of the article that resonates the most for me is at the end of the article:

“Another problem addressed by the Common Core is the American idea that those who are good at math are those who are fast. Speed is revered in math classes across the U.S., and students as young as five years old are given timed tests—even though these have been shown to create math anxiety in young children. Parents use flash cards and other devices to promote speed, not knowing that they are probably damaging their children’s mathematical development. At the same time mathematicians point out that speed in math is irrelevant. One of the world’s top mathematicians, Laurent Schwartz, reflected in his memoir that he was made to feel unintelligent in school because he was the slowest math thinker in his class. But he points out that what is important in mathematics “is to deeply understand things and their relations to each other. This is where intelligence lies. The fact of being quick or slow isn't really relevant.” It is fortunate for Schwartz, and all of us, that he did not grow up in the speed- and test-driven classrooms of the last decade that have successfully dissuaded any child that thinks deeply or slowly from pursuing mathematics or even thinking of themselves as capable. " 

"The U.S. does not need fast procedure executors anymore. We need people who are confident with mathematics, who can develop mathematical models and predictions, and who can justify, reason, communicate, and problem solve. We need a broad and diverse range of people who are powerful mathematical thinkers and who have not been held back by stereotypical thinking and teaching. Common Core mathematics, imperfect though it may be, can help us reach those goals.”

Why must content-driven high school courses force students to demonstrate what they know quickly? Why do teachers insist on writing tests that challenge students’ ability to complete them? How does a child’s ability to move quickly demonstrate her academic skills?

In all fairness, math is not alone in subjecting students to speed testing. Many disciplines do it. However, it seems to accompany those subject areas that want kids to memorize facts, formulas, or procedures. From a Bloom perspective, it is always the lower level thinking skills of knowing, remembering, and applying that are the focus of these kinds of “objective” tests. What about evaluating, synthesizing, creating, or analyzing? Yeah, those don’t work as well on multiple choice Scantron tests. 

Do you work well when you are forced to move quickly? Do you do your best when the amount of work you have to do will not fit in the amount of time you have to do it? Want to be judged on the tasks you had to rush through? Why make kids do that?

When my children have struggled on tests, it is often not about the material or their preparation that has been the issue. It has been about finishing the test! Is that one of the targets of the course: be able to regurgitate at warp speed?

When a test is so long and difficult that kids must rush to finish, it a set up for failure.  Is it a realistic or reasonable assessment of their learning? What would we lose and what would we gain if students could take as much time as they needed to complete these tests and even had time to double check their responses?

We’d get a much more accurate measure of what they have learned!

A Bad Pick Up Line

I walk to school. When I arrive in the morning, a steady stream of cars drop off kids for early class, meetings with teachers, and other activities. When I leave in the afternoon, the line of cars is so long that it encircles the parking lot. Parents will sit in their car for a half hour or more waiting for their children to come out.

I am baffled. Why are they there? Why are they picking up their children as soon as school lets out?

The line is long at 3:15. The line disappears by 3:30 or 3:35. Why sit and wait that long? For that matter, why not let your child take the bus, walk, or ride a bike home?

Of course, sometimes there is a doctor appointment, skating lesson, or other obligation. But the number of cars waiting at the end of the day is far too many for those kind of periodic tasks.

Our school has over ninety clubs and sixty sports. Some of these require auditions or try outs, but a vast majority of them are open to all students. A handful meet in the morning before school starts, but a most activities and teams meet between 3:15 and 6pm after the class day has ended.

I want to knock on windows as I walk past the row of cars and ask, “Why are you here? Why are you picking up a child who should be able to find his or her own way home? Why isn’t your child involved after school?”

As a teacher of freshmen, I work hard to connect my students to our school’s co-curricular program of activities and athletics. Although there are no grades or transcripts for what happens in the afternoon, for many of my students, and many of us, sports, performing arts, clubs, and other activities were the real reason we went to school. They were also where we learned lessons that we carried into adulthood. The people with whom we spent time after school became our closest friends.

This is what the students who leave school at 3:15 are losing. Do they know how much they are missing? Are their parents who facilitate their departure aware of this price?

Yes, yes, yes: I play a spring sport, so in the fall I go home and several times a week, I work out or play with a club. I have a job. I go to youth group. That’s great. I don’t believe that the enormous line of cars is filled, even partially filled with these kids. The line is way too long.

High school is about more than classes. For many kids, classes are the gateway to the fun and wonderful things that happen after the final bell rings and the real love of learning begins. To deprive a student of this opportunity, even under the guise of helping them get home, sparing them bus embarrassment, or making their life easier, is to deny them a key component of their development.

Don’t pick your kids up after school! Don’t make it easy to get home. Do help them find their after school home. Do push them to join a club, be on or backstage, play a sport, or help with the countless events that occur all afternoon and into the evening at most high schools.

One my favorite aphorisms from Robert Heinlein’s Time Enough For Love is “Don’t handicap your children by making their lives easy”. Here is my corollary: Don’t pick them up after school!