My rating: 5 of 5 stars

From time to time growing up, my dad has said something that’s been on my mind a lot recently: “Technology that is sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic.” This is a book about the dark side of technological magic, and how the greatest wizards are sometimes 17-year-old geeks.

Written in 2006, this young-adult techno adventure is Orwell updated for millennials living at the height of the “war on terror.” It’s a gripping adventure set in San Francisco, with gritty descriptions of young U.S. citizens being tortured at the hands of a maniacal Department of Homeland Security bent on surveilling the entire city after terrorists blow up the Bay Bridge.

This may sound preachy, but Doctorow underscores his earnestness about ensuring personal liberty in the face of state corruption by embedding the story with lucid, clear explanations of nerd culture and advanced technologies. In between discussions of Live-Action Role Playing and Scoville scales for measuring hot sauce heat, he explains Public Key encryption (which allows uncrackable electronic communication), arphid cloning (duplicating the digital signature of common devices like SpeedPasses), and hardware hacking (like installing Linux distributions on XBoxes).

I wasn’t much of a hacker when I was in high school, but I was keen on dismantling electronics, learning how to pick locks, and poking around local Bulletin Board Systems (the modem-days precursors to websites). This books took me right back and solidified my desire to learn Python, experiment with browser anonymizers (which will let me get on Facebook at school), and subscribe to MAKE magazine.

Put this in the hands of the nearest teenager and tell them to go find something to install Linux on.

And as for magic, I read this entire book (my first novel) on an iPad and an iPhone, using the booki.sh and bookworm cloud-based ereaders. You could hand that teenager a hardcopy, or you could just give them this link: http://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/

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The TFA DC Region is piloting a new cohort led by the Director of Transformational Teaching. The idea is to have an interdisciplinary group of corps members work with the Teacher Support and Development Team to design new models for sharing resources and improving effectiveness for 2nd-year teachers. I’ll be honest: four months ago, I would not have thought this was for me. But as I’ll explain in a future post, teaching is for me like engineering, and this, I think, is the next step on the road to supporting the common good through innovation.

So today’s creation is the Letter of Intent to apply to join the new cohort. Whether I get in or not, it’s been a good exercise in thinking about how I’ve grown as a teacher, so I’ve excerpted some of it here:

Late on a Friday evening in February, my principal sat down with me to discuss current issues in my 7th grade Reading/ELA classroom. She inquired, with full justification, about the rationale behind the lesson planning, the co-teaching structure, and the management. At last she said bluntly, “I don’t think your students are getting what they need.” And as hard as it was to admit it, they weren’t.

Jump ahead four months to late May. The same principal stopped in to check on my first period class one morning shortly after my scholars had taken their spring reading diagnostic, the Scholastic Reading Inventory. While I got a few students started on their work for the day, my co-teacher took a moment to show the principal some of the scores from the test. On average, these 7th graders began the year reading at a 4.5 grade level; more than a third of them have IEPs. Yet more than half the students had improved, for a net total of positive gains among four classes. Seventeen of 65 students made 0.8 years of growth or more. Nine of those students made between one and two years of growth. Two students made more than two years of growth. An astonished look broke out on my principal’s face. My students were now getting what they needed.

This sort of turnaround would not have happened if I hadn’t stopped, reflected on what was and was not working in my class, and put to use my experience at quickly learning and implementing new ideas. I decided that my instructional approaches had to become plastic rather than rigid. I had to experiment with different procedures and rhythms for independent reading (this also led to a radical reorganization of classroom seating). I had to bring more excitement and engagement to my lesson hooks (this eventually led to several days of teaching in a tinfoil hat). I had to design more flexible lessons that gave my students ample time to practice with new and challenging concepts (this led to more provocative, open-ended writing questions and less recall-based classwork). All this didn’t happen overnight, but I took deliberate steps and asked many people for help. I even transformed the way I communicated with students and parents, taking cues from my pervious experience as an editor and sometime-reporter for a web magazine about science policy. I sat down for lunch with some of my most disruptive students, interviewing them on what was important in their lives; I built a class website and online tool for students to record their daily reading logs.

Sign of a life-longer reader: still under the covers with a flashlight. flickr/purplemattfish

So much of the pre-institute reading and reflection has been about drawing connections between previous work and our new careers as educators. But stopping to think about what I hope the parents and families of my future students say at the end of my first year, I’ll have to defer to a couple of veteran teachers. After all, one of the most important lessons I hope I’ve internalized at this point is that I’m only going to get good at this if I ask for help from experts.

First, I hope that my students and their families say that I expected a lot from the kids in my classes, and that I worked hard for them in return. I want them to say that I pushed my students to their full potential and broadened their opportunities. Moreover, I want them to see that reciprocal hard work integrated with intellectual curiosity and a respect for the common good. But this morning, a DCPS middle school teacher put it much more eloquently than I can in an NPR commentary. Her students, she said, developed these simple class rules, which lived in bold lettering on the walls of her room: “We are kind. We are focused. We are honest. We are brave.”

I’ve really warmed up to some of the sloganeering that appears around highly effective schools. “Work hard. Be nice,” is the most distilled of the KIPP mottos, for instance. But I could imagine little better after a year in the classroom than a group of students declaring in unison that they are kind, focused, honest, and brave.

Kindness is crucial to building a safe and supportive environment where students help one another and share their knowledge. Focus will come only from investing everyone—students, families, parents, coaches—in the goals and hard work we’ll lay out. Honesty will be an important virtue governing student interactions, but students must also be honest about the amount of effort they must put into their work, and must be honest with themselves about recognizing when they need help. And reaching for academic achievements just beyond their current understanding will require bravery on top of focus.

If I can invest students in these habits and virtues, and if they were to write a note recognizing that, I think that would be a successful capstone to a first year.

But what might that look like for students, in terms of personal behaviors? For that, I’ll turn to the legendary Rafe Esquith and imagine that this note from my students and their families highlights the same habits of “life-long readers” recognized by his students.

“We started reading in other classes that were boring because we were dying to finished the books we had,” my students might write.

“We had to start scolding our sons and daughters for reading at the dinner table,” the parents might say. “Not only that, but we couldn’t get them to go to sleep at night. They were always hiding under the covers with flashlights reading their latest books.”

Because sloganeering aside, part of opening up new opportunities for students means cultivating a thirst for new knowledge, new stories, and new ideas to focus on. It will be hard; it will require focus; but it will be a brave thing for them to do.

1. Have you ever secretly read under you desk in school because the teacher was boring and you were dying to finish the book you were reading?
2. Have you ever been scolded for reading at the dinner table?
3. Have you ever read secretly under the covers after being told to go to bed?

The point being that you can do a bang-up job of teaching students the technical skills necessary to absorb and comprehend what they’re asked to read, but real success means helping students cultivate a life-long hunger for knowledge and stories.

I think the current version of this test for myself would go something like this:

1. Have you ever been reading something on the bus, then kept reading as you went up the elevator into the office, and then kept reading after you turned on your computer and were supposed to be working, and then kept going to refill your coffee mug and taken your book along to the kitchen?
2. Have you ever been too engrossed in what you were reading to bother fixing yourself dinner and instead eaten vegetarian hot dogs wrapped in tortillas for the second time in a week?
3. Have you ever wished that you had a reason to read under the covers in secrecy and done it anyway, perhaps using one of those silly travel book lights that someone gave you for Christmas years ago and for which there really isn’t a proper use besides this?