Monthly Archives: April 2020

SQUIDD: an origin story in 10 facts

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FACT 1: When I was a kid and I needed help with my homework, I’d often ask my father who would sit next to me at the table and begin fumbling for paper and a pencil. I need a pencil, he’d say. I can’t think without a pencil.

It rubbed off. I like taking notes. I love taking notes. And doodling. My father can’t think without a pencil, but whenever I’m sitting down listening to someone talk at me, I can’t focus without doodling. I mix thinking and playing, notes and doodles. Sometimes the two coincide. Sometimes not.

Definitely more doodles than notes here. An artifact from my previous career.

FACT 2: At the beginning of the year I warn my English students with an adage I heard from Marilyn Elkins during the AP training course I took before teaching the class: AP English Language is just good readin’, writin’, and thinkin’.  I don’t transmit a lot of data, facts, and information to my students. It’s a skills-based writing class and what we do is write and read. And write about what we read and read as examples of how to write. We practice those skills all year long. 

FACT 3: About five years ago one of my former students stopped by to say hello and she was eager to tell me about her first college English paper she had to write. Her class had just finished a poetry unit and she had read about 100 poems. Her assignment? Write a 15-page paper on poetry. What was the prompt? I asked. Write a 15-page paper on poetry. There was no prompt. I had spent so much time giving students writing prompts, prepping them for a prompt-based test, but I hadn’t prepared them for this: no prompt.

FACT 4: Up to a couple years ago I’d get frustrated seeing my students simply sit and watch the front of the room during lectures or discussions. I’d see very few of them write anything down, and after reminding myself that they can’t all be doodlers like me, and that there’s not ONE vocab or factual question on the AP test I’m preparing them for, I knew I had to do something. Worksheets were not an option. 

FACT 5: Thoughts and ideas are elusive creatures.

FACT 6: The Aquatic Life of Steve Zissou. Bill Murray’s character, oceanographer Steve Zissou, travels everywhere with a rag-tag film crew documenting just about every move he makes as he searches for a creature he calls a jaguar shark that ate (“swallowed whole? Klaus asks. “No, chewed,” Zissou says) his partner.

“Klaus, why aren’t you rolling? Why aren’t you getting this?”

FACT 7: Probably over tacos, my friend David Theriault and I were picking each other’s brains, looking for ideas to improve our classes. He had his struggles. I had mine—I needed some way for students to keep track of their thinking, something beyond taking notes. Something simple. Something that would provide fodder for their writing now, and something that would serve their learning well into the future.

FACT 8: David Theriault LOVES acronyms (more precisely, he hates crappy acronyms. KWHLAQ gives him hives while something like SCUBA warms his soul), and so we cobbled together S.Q.U.I.D.D., a low-fi, extremely malleable, life-long learning tool. In a nutshell, after we read, listen to, or watch something in class I ask my students to put down some S.Q.U.I.D.D. ink, a quickwrite where they focus on one S.Q.U.I.D.D. element, either in composition notebooks, or on a 3×5 card. In just a few minutes all students have thought about and responded to the work in question and they’re ready for a discussion. Then on a regular basis I’ll have them do a deep dive where they expand on one or more of their S.Q.U.I.D.D. inks.

FACT 9: David and I do A LOT more with S.Q.U.I.D.D. (did I mention S.Q.U.I.D.D. is extremely malleable and easy to use in lots of ways?), but that will have to wait for another post or twelve.

FACT 10: The bare bones of S.Q.U.I.D.D.—

squidd-pdfDownload

COVIDucation

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Photo by Calvin Tran

We all fled to our homes, with little warning, and certainly without a clue that we’d never be gathered as a class, this class, ever again.

We spent the first few days with our families, figuring out what this new normal looks like and scouring stores for toilet paper.

Then I reached out to my students, by email, by video conference, and planned out enrichment activities while my school district figured out what schooling while sheltering at home looks like.

No one knows.

But I knew where to start trying to figure it all out—A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change by Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown. I’d read the book years ago and it’s been infecting my craft in all the time since. Infecting, because it burrowed itself deep into how I teach, how I motivate my students to learn.

I worked backwards in my re-reading, starting with the last two paragraphs:

“That moment of fusion between unlimited resources (referring to the internet) and a bounded environment creates a space that does not simply allow for imagination, it requires it. Only when we care about experimentation, play, and questions more than efficiency, outcomes, and answers do we have a space that is truly open to the imagination.

And where imaginations play, learning happens.”

Right now, world, state, and local political leaders, public health officials, and the medical community should be concerned with “efficiency, outcomes, and answers,” but teachers, thrust into remote education without a bit of training, have a responsibility to the students we serve to lead them to learning by creating a flexible space where “experimentation, play, and questions” reign. 

A space where students can continue learning while living in a world upside down, radically different than any of us have ever experienced.

What might this look like?

Different for every teacher, every subject, as they respond to the needs of their students. For me, a writing and journalism teacher, I stripped down my syllabus to four lines from Mary Oliver’s poem “Sometimes”:

Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.

I would hope all teachers, no matter the subject, would be able to make that subject applicable to students’ lives as they’re lived, right now.

So what might be the results of my four-lined syllabus, one that prioritizes questions? Well, I just revised it, so it will take some time to see what students come up with, but I do have a few early examples.

Camelia let herself be astonished by the sound of falling rain.

Sandra tweeted how she has “really found some courage in myself,” hoping she “can confidently express [herself] without any worthy.”

Anna wants to break out her old analog, film-based, SLR Minolta camera to “document how the world has changed during COVID-19.” You see, she’s astonished by how people have changed, how their relationship to each other and their environments have changed, and she’s going to use that camera to pay attention. I can’t wait for her to tell about her findings.

Then there’s Justin, who, upon listening to an episode of John Green’s The Anthropocene Reviewed podcast, was left “grappl[ing] with the nature of luck, merit, and fairness.” And so the 10 minutes of writing I asked students to do after listening to the podcast turned into 14 pages and 10 graphs, “pseudosystematic visuals that helped give shape to [his] ideas.”

Had I been concerned with trying to re-create an exact (and efficient) virtual replica of my brick and mortar classroom, expecting exact outcomes and answers from students, dangling a reward (points, a grade) over their head, they would’ve checked the box and moved on to what was more pressing in their life.

infinite expansion

But because I gave them, hopefully, a purpose to their learning, to live a life, their life, they experimented, they played, they learned. Learning “not as some verifiable end-form, but [learning] as growing, changing, maybe even culturally transforming” (Geoffrey Sirc).

There’s no way every student will be moved to write for hours like Justin did, and I don’t expect them to. But I hope to lead them to discover for themselves “kernels of infinite expansion” that will “flourish later in interesting ways” (Sirc) and motivate their learning for years.