Funeral for a Friend
We went to a funeral for a friend in my classroom today.
Actually, we didn’t go to a funeral; we actually held a funeral.
And, to be fair, it wasn’t so much for a friend as it was for a phrase that has been overused in my classroom this year.
I got the idea from a colleague within my district. Whenever she notices a word or phrase that students overuse, she has a funeral for it and then challenges students to stop using it in the classroom. I’ve loved this idea since she first told me about it three years ago, but this is the first time I’ve had the opportunity to use it.
The phrase that we put to rest today was “I am going to tell you…” Nearly all of my students have been using this phrase in their persuasive, explanatory, and opinion writing. I have repeatedly explained that they do not need to tell me that they are going to tell me because they are obviously telling me when they tell me something! Of course, that is a bit confusing, so I tried something new to get the point across: during my minilesson for writers’ workshop, I started every single sentence with “I am going to tell you…” I nearly two dozen pairs of eyes looking at me with bewilderment as I explained what I wanted them to do by saying, “I am going to tell you that you should have an introduction that tells your audience about your subject. Then I am going to tell you that you should have at least three supporting reasons for why you want your audience to know about your topic. The next thing I am going to tell you is that you should have a paragraph that describes the materials you will need to do the thing you are explaining…”
After establishing the reality of the overuse of this entirely unnecessary phrase, we brainstormed some reasons why the students loved using it: the phrase constantly focuses on us as the writers, it has a sense of humour, it is always there for us, and we love it.
But I shared the sad news that the phrase “I am going to tell you…” died in a horrible accident and it was no longer with us. We had a funeral (I played a recording of Taps as we had a moment of silence) and then the students read through their writing to remove the offending phrase from their writing, along with its cousins, “that is why I think you should…” and “I hope you liked my essay about…”
What are words or phrases that you find are overused that you wish you could have a funeral for?
Special Days
Today was a special day, and yet it was a very typical Tuesday in my classroom: My students started the day by writing about our classroom jobs and trying to decide which one was most important (one girl, always finding a way to answer prompts by not-answering them, insisted that every job is important; she was correct), then we spent 75 minutes in our guided math block (we are working on division of whole numbers) before having an indoor recess (the wind chill had dropped from 18° to 14°) and then going to Dance. Our morning wrapped up with social studies (getting background knowledge on the Southern Colonies in America) and Writers’ Workshop (writing demonstrative essays). After lunch the students worked on their Digital Passports with Common Sense Media and then we finished our day with our Daily CAFE literacy block and a read aloud (another chapter of The Walls of Cartagena by Julia Durango).
Some might be wondering what could make such a typical day so special?
The answer is simple: I have now completed 33 trips around the Sun!
Yep, today was my birthday. I told my students yesterday that the one gift I really wanted was for everyone to promise that they would try their best every day. I didn’t get any formal promises like that this year (unlike my first year teaching, when one student made a very lovely card for me that expressed that promise), but I did get a bunch of wonderful notes and hand-made cards, including a set of cards from my students’ kindergarten learning buddies. Each card and note I received will be treasured, but I wanted to share three of them. First, two from kindergarteners who apparently notice much more about me than I would have thought since I am only in their room for about 30 minutes once a week:
I love how she captured my thick curly locks of dark hair!
I don’t know if you can read what it says in the top left corner, but I’ll leave it to you to decode what IlfYo! means.
And finally, one from a current student who has had several different challenges this year:
Getting all of these notes, as well as the wishes from students and coworkers in the halls, truly made today a special day. (The best hallway greeting had to have been a kindergartener who ran up from behind me and shouted, “Happy Thursday!”)
And finally, because I share a birthday with my favourite country/continent in the Southern Hemisphere, here’s a classic video of Slim Dusty singing a classic Australian folk song, Waltzing Matilda:
Inquiry-Based Learning with Front Row
I have been using Front Row in my classroom for the past two years to provide my students with differentiated math instruction. This year I also started using it with my guided math groups to help me plan for targeted instruction and make sure that I am giving my students the level and variety of work that they need to improve their math skills and strategic thinking. I have really enjoyed using Front Row because my students enjoy it and because it is free. (And let’s be honest: what teacher doesn’t love a high-quality resource that doesn’t cost anything?!)
This year the team at Front Row rolled out a new feature: inquiry-based lessons. These are usually three or four lessons taught over as many days that cover a specific concept and are connected through a narrative that is tied to grade-level science or social studies concepts. (I wrote about them back in September for savvy readers with great memories, but I wanted to expand on them today.) There are a few free units available for each grade level, but the entire collection is only accessible with the paid School Edition. During the month of December, though, Front Row did an inquiry-based learning focus and ran several short contests. I participated in them and one of the prizes I received was full access to the entire library for the month of January.
We didn’t do anything with Front Row our first week back after break, but we dove in last week with a unit on rounding multidigit numbers based on a fictional cross-country road trip. Working with my guided math groups, I had students use these numbers to perform multidigit arithmetic with addition and subtraction, too. This week we did a multiplication unit connected to relief efforts after Hurricane Katrina. For both units, I would start the students on the lesson and then have them work in their math teams while I worked with small groups at my back table. We would come together at the end of the unit to share answers and strategies for solving.
I loved listening to my students’ conversations as they worked! They would compliment each other, encourage one another, and use phrases like, “Oh, I didn’t think about it that way!” or “This is challenging; will you help me?” or “Oh, now I get it! Thanks!” I was also able to identify specific needs of students as I worked with their groups, such as the students who are not quite grasping the concept of multiplying by multiples of ten or the students who are not lining up digits by the place values. I also discovered that some of my students are much better at interpreting word problems than others and they are able to explain the problems in such a way that their peers were able to understand the task.
Next week will be our last Front Row unit that I do while I have access to the entire library, so I am going to use a unit on division of whole numbers. It will be interesting to see how the class responds because many of the students have not actually done division in a formal sense, but the lesson is designed in a way that they will naturally thinking about dividing objects into equal groups and then later learn to decide what to do with remainders.
I wish that Front Row had some kind of intermediary offering between the free teacher edition and the paid school edition because I would love to be able to continue to access all of these features. In the meantime, though, I will be grateful for the resources I have available!
What kind of success have you had with online learning tools?
Indoor Recess
One of the realities of living in East Central Illinois is that it gets cold in the winter. Not Antarctica-in-the-winter cold. Not Alaska-in-the-winter cold, and not Siberia-in-the-winter cold, but still cold. Our district policy of staying indoors when the temperature is under 20° F means that we spend a lot of days indoors during January and February. (December, surprisingly, is usually fairly mild.)
Besides the onslaught of cabin fever that comes with the cold weather, students don’t get nearly as much physical activity when we have indoor recess as they do when they are outside. I admit that I don’t blame them. I am frequently expressing a desire to stay inside, wrapped in a blanket, sipping herbal tea, and reading a good book. (Come to think of it, I expressed this very sentiment yesterday when we had our first major snow of the season.) However, as much as I understand the desire to curl up and not move when it is cold out, the reality is that my students need the physical activity. Their bodies are designed to be on the move.
Which is why I am really glad that I finally got around to checking out the Indoor Recess Mega Mixes today from GoNoodle! Instead of spending 10-15 minutes sitting around with their eyes glued to a screen, my students were standing, dancing, high-fiving, and just plain moving. We used one of them today and I was so surprised that all of my students were participating! And then when it was time for Fine Arts, nobody complained about “missing” recess!
Of course, they still like to have time to just chat and play, but we will definitely be using the Indoor Recess Mega Mixes in the future to make sure we are getting in our much-needed physical activity when we can’t go outside because it is too cold!
How do you encourage physical activity when the weather doesn’t cooperate?
First Snow of the Season
We got snow last night. And it actually lasted through the day. In fact, there is still snow on the ground right now, which is the longest the snow has lasted this winter except for maybe one time. And even that time it was just a thin dusting and it was gone within a couple of days. So I am considering this the first snow of the season.
Unfortunately for my students, the temperature was stubbornly hanging around at just below 20° F all day long, and that is the official district-mandated cut-off for staying indoors. (Yes, there are teachers who will take their students out when it is below the cut-off; I am not one of those teachers.) All of that combined to mean that I had several students who wanted to spend more time today staring out the window looking longingly at the snow than actually doing their work.
I tried to inoculate against this first thing in the morning. After the students came to the carpet for our morning meeting, I had everyone stand up and look outside for 30 seconds. Then I had them sit back down and announced that now we all knew that everyone knew that there was snow and we would be able to get to work.
Most of my students accepted my statement and stayed focused and on task all day long. A few fought valiantly against my charge to actually work instead of daydreaming of snowball fights, forts, and hot chocolate. But I always try to focus on the positive, and so I am finding myself grateful today that the majority of my class was able to ignore the snow for the day, knowing that there would be plenty of sunshine left after 3:00 pm for them to play in the snow after they got home.
Me, I prefer to admire the snow from indoors, preferably wrapped in a warm blanket, sipping herbal tea, and reading a good book.
What do you do when the snow finally comes to stay?
Writing Stamina
We do a lot of writing in my classroom. Sometimes it is paper-and-pencil writing, sometimes it is typing-on-a-device writing, but we write. A lot. With all of the writing we do in our room, one would expect that my students all have excellent writing stamina. After all, conventional wisdom says that anything we do often we begin to do well.
But that isn’t always the case.
Instead of writing for extended periods of time, many of my students write for incredibly short periods of time, interspersed with excessively long breaks. They don’t, of course, call them breaks. In fact, if you were to ask them, they would probably claim to be writing the entire time. But what actually happens is that my students are very good at appearing busy while accomplishing next to nothing. A student will walk over to the pencil sharpener, pick out the perfect pencil, sharpen it to needlepoint accuracy, and then walk back to her seat. Then she will walk over to the paper tray, pick out several sheets of paper (none of them touching each other), and walk back to her desk. She will start writing for a few minutes until the tip of the pencil breaks and then she needs to sharpen a pencil again. While on the way, she grabs a tissue to blow her nose, picks out a clipboard, throws away the tissue, finally sharpens the pencil, gets a new tissue to blow her nose again, throws that tissue away, and then finally sits back down. This process goes on throughout our entire writing block. At the end of the 30-45 minutes, she has one or two sentences written and says she is done.
I may or may not feel like hitting my head on my desk when this happens.
So this week I have decided that we need to go back to a component of the first twenty days of writers’ workshop and focus on building our writing stamina:
First I made sure that every student had a sharpened pencil, a working eraser, and a piece of paper. (The few students who had permission to work on the carpet also had clipboards.)
Then I gave them a prompt: How do you feel about cold weather? Do you love it? Hate it? Why? What do you do when it is cold outside? Why?
Finally, I gave them a set amount of time to write: one minute.
Yes, that is all. Just one minute to write on this topic. The expectations were that they would have pencils on the paper and voices silent for the duration of the writing time. Remember, though, that this was just one minute. Sixty seconds. That’s all.
Nearly everyone in the class was successful. A few needed some extra support. After making sure they were all ready, I told the students to continue writing for jut one minute. This time I had all of my students writing silently. Once we had established that everyone in the room could write independently for just one minute, I extended the time to three minutes. We repeated this twice. At this point the students had written independently for eleven minutes. So then I gave them five minutes to write. Once again, everyone was able to do it and they had increased their stamina more. Another five minutes brought them to a total of twenty-one minutes of independent writing. We had nine minutes remaining until lunch, so I challenged the students to write for the entire nine minutes, still on this same topic. Some said that they were done, but I told them that they were expected to actually write the entire time, not just write until they felt they were done. I told them that they could write poems, lists, essays, narratives, or even just write “I hate the cold” over and over again.
Nobody took me up on the last suggestion. What they did take me up on was the challenge to actually write for the entire time. When we finished, my students had successfully written independently for thirty minutes. Yes, we broke it into smaller chunks. Yes, some of them needed some extra help. Yes, there were a few who did not get much writing done because they were thinking about the prompt. But many students had an entire page or two of writing completed.
I informed the class that we would continue to work on building our writing stamina this week so that they can start working on their explanatory/demonstrative essays again next week. The goal is for every student to be able to write for thirty minutes without interruptions while I work with small groups on key skills.
How do you build stamina, whether it is for reading, writing, or other tasks?
Presenting to Colleagues
Today was my school district’s annual Winter Institute, a one-day event in which staff from all levels come together to participate in professional development workshops. Sometimes we have a presenter who has been brought in to speak to everyone in the district or all of the EC-5 teachers, sometimes we have a bunch of different workshop sessions, and sometimes we have a mix. This year was a workshop sessions year and, as one of the grade-level leaders in the district and also a member of the technology cadre, the technology-enhanced learning environments task force, the the model content framework for English/language arts task force, I was invited to propose a session. Looking at the suggestions, I offered to lead a workshop on guided math groups, something I began experimenting with a couple of years ago and have fully implemented this year.
The proposal was accepted and so I found myself presenting to colleagues from across the district this morning. I didn’t have a large group of teachers come to my session, and two of them were colleagues from my own building, but I enjoyed the opportunity to share some of what I have been doing with others and inviting them to try it out in their own rooms. I focused my presentation on the time management and organisation side of guided math instruction because the instructional content varies widely from grade to grade. (For myself, I rely heaving on many on the online learning tools that we use and refer to my grade level math standards to monitor progress. I don’t use a specific formal curriculum because I am not satisfied with the print resources I currently have, although I am definitely moving toward using the EngageNY materials that are available online.)
I honestly have no idea what the teachers in my session really thought about using a guided math approach, although I hope that they will at least be willing to try it out. I have found that guided math lets me work with small groups of students in a setting that lets them grow as they learn and I feel that our math time is much more effective than if I were to just present one lesson to the whole class. We still have bumps along the way, such as students not working independently the entire time or students who are needing extra support from a teacher who is also trying to work with a small group, but I think it is definitely a structure or framework that I will continue to use with my class.
I think I am also finally getting used to presenting to my colleagues. I am super comfortable teaching a large group of students and I am usually comfortable talking to a large diverse group of adults, but I get really nervous talking to groups of teachers because they are my colleagues and many of them probably know more than me anyway. But I didn’t feel that way this time. I felt like I was sharing what I have done because I am proud of the outcome and I wanted them to know more about it.
How has it gone when you’ve presented to your colleagues at work?
Guest Artist Visit
In large part due to the wonderful grant-writing skills of two teachers in my building, my students were able to spend part of the morning on Tuesday with a guest artist from our community who also works at the Krannert Art Museum on the University of Illinois campus. Ms. Glowacki was a one-time student art teacher in our building, so many of the students already knew her, but this time they got to know her as an artist instead of as a teacher.
My class was invited to join her in art room for about 45 minutes of Tuesday where she showcased several examples of her work, included screen-printed t-shirts, record album covers, and artwork for the Ninth Letter literary journal. She also showed pieces that were part of a solo art exhibit and demonstrated the techniques she uses to create her art.
I was really pleased by how responsive my students were to her presentation. They were respectful, listened politely, asked wonderful questions, and expressed sincere interest in her work and how she creates art. Many were amazed by the variety of coloured pencils, paint markers, and even ink pen styles (one pen had a writing tip of just 0.5 mm!
I often wonder which of my students will be inspired to pursue a career by a guest visitor in our classroom. Will one of them this year decide to learn more about visual arts and graphic design because they saw what Ms. Glowacki does? Will one of them dream of having his or her own solo art exhibit? Will one of them choose to take an elective art class in high school? I don’t know, but I do know that many students will not even consider such things if they don’t know they exist, which is why I will continue to invite and welcome guests into my classroom.
Were you inspired by a special guest when you were in school? What happened?
Practice Without Punishment
When I was kindergarten, my wonderful teacher, Mrs. Essington, noticed that I had a severe speech impediment and referred me for services with Mrs. White, who worked with me diligently several times a week every single week for the next nine years to help me learn how to properly pronounce several sounds such as L, R, S, and Z. (There may have been others but those are the ones that I know I worked on the most.) Even now I feel very self-conscious when I think about pronouncing those sounds, but I remember the last time I worked with Mrs. White at the end of eighth grade and she told me that I had finally graduated from needing services. How did I learn to overcome my speech impediment? Practice. Lots and lots of practice.
This is Mr. L. He loves lemon lollipops. Hearing me try to say this is how my kindergarten teacher recognised I needed speech therapy services.
In fourth grade I learned how to play the recorder in my music class. Twenty-two years later, I can play Mary Had a Little Lamb and Hot Cross Buns. But in fourth grade I was able to play the instrument with a fair degree of competency for a ten-year-old child. How did I learn to play this instrument? Practice. Lots and lots and lots of practice.
In fifth grade I joined the beginning band and started playing the trumpet. I have continued to play it in a number of settings, including concert band marching band in middle school, marching band, concert band, symphonic winds, and two jazz ensembles in high school, a concert band at the University of Illinois, a community wind ensemble through Parkland College in Champaign, a community band through a community arts grant in St. Joseph, and a church orchestra. I readily admit that I am not the greatest trumpet player in the world, but I love performing and I love being able to play the harmonic parts for my instrument. How did I learn to play the trumpet well enough to be admitted to these different bands and ensembles? Practice. Lots and lots of practice.
I was in an advanced math class in seventh and eighth grade that helped prepare me to be able to take calculus my senior year of high school. I vividly recall struggling to learn how to factor polynomials in my eighth grade algebra class. Our teacher had taught us the FOIL method to multiply two binomials and we were learning how to rewrite polynomials as two binomials. Everyone in my class had learned how to do it but I struggled for weeks. Then one day it was as if a light turned on and I understood the process! How did I learn to master this mathematical process? Practice. Lots and lots of practice.
Recognising how important it is to practice the things that you want to do well, I am surprised how often my students view some forms of practice as a form of punishment. I don’t think any of them think I am punishing them when I have them do daily math fluency practice each morning. I don’t think any of them think I am punishing them when I have them do a six-minute timed multiplication facts test each week. I don’t think they view it as punishment when I expect them to read independently and write independently each day as part of our Daily CAFE. I don’t think any of them think I am punishing them when I instruct them to read independently at home each evening for at least 25 minutes. They know that it is by doing these things often and doing them as well as they can that they get better.
But there is one form of practice that is almost always viewed as punishment: hallway expectations.
There was a time in my school’s history that we had thick carpeting throughout the building and students were permitted to speak in the hallways because the carpet dampened the noise. The summer before I got hired, however, all of the carpet was ripped out and brand new tile was put in its place. And thus began the quest to convince students (and teachers!) at Wiley to be silent in our halls. It is five years later and, while we are much better, there is still a lot of talking that goes on.
And so I have my students practice it. A lot. They are reminded of hallways expectations every time we leave the room and every time we return. We discuss why we want silent halls and we reflect on how disruptive it is when others are noisy in the halls. And yet when I have my students line up so we can practice walking in the halls the right way, eyes forward, voices silent, hands by our sides, giving each other space, I am met with groans, dramatic eye rolls, and complaints that it isn’t fair. (Oddly enough, these behaviours only come from the students who are still struggling to carry out the expected hallway behaviours. The students who are always safe, responsible, and respectful in the halls never complain when I tell them that we are going to practice.)
So I have been wondering why this is. And I think today I stumbled upon at least one reason: far too often, teachers only have students practice correct behaviours when the students are not modeling them correctly. We don’t make our students practice silent halls when they are already being silent in the halls. We don’t make them practice lining up the right way if they did it the right way the first time. We only practice them when they are wrong. My students are smart; they know when they are not doing what they are supposed to do. So it makes sense that, in their minds, they are being punished for doing something wrong.
What I need to do is find a way to make sure that they know it isn’t punishment. Just as I wasn’t being punished by Mrs. White when she helped me with my speech, just as my music teacher, Mrs. Howell, wasn’t punishing us by teaching us to play the recorder, just as my band directors, Mrs. Donnell, Mr. Tallman, Mr. Richardson, Mrs. Miller, and others, weren’t punishing us by having us practice our songs so we could play them better, teachers are not punishing their students by having them practice expected behaviours. Indeed, we want them to show us that they can do them and do them well. And if they are doing them well, we want them to do them even better. Practice isn’t punishment; it is an opportunity to improve.
How do you practice without punishment?
Meaningful Assessments
Teachers do a lot of assessing. Some will argue that we do too much assessing, while others still argue that we don’t do enough. I find myself, as usual, somewhere in the middle. I think that we do too much assessing on criteria that aren’t particularly useful and not enough that will meaningfully impact our instructional decisions. I have been trying to change this in my own classroom and work my schedule in such a way that I can quickly grab snapshots of what my students can do (assessing them) without it taking away from instructional time. This kind of formative assessment is useful when done well and just a waste of time when done poorly.
I’d like to think that I conduct formative assessments well more times than not.
One of the types of formative assessment I have been trying to use more consistently is the oral reading record, also known as the running record or the reading record. The process is fairly straightforward: students are given a reading passage that is at their current instructional level and they are directed to read it aloud. As they read, the teacher makes notes of errors, self-corrections, and repetitions while also timing how long it takes to read. The goal in fourth grade is for students to read 120 or more words per minute with 98% or better accuracy. After the student is done reading, the teacher may ask a few comprehension questions to determine how well the student understood the text. This information is then recorded and tracked over time. The goal is to see students increasing their oral reading fluency, accuracy, and comprehension while also reading more complex texts.
The challenge is that all of this takes time. Teachers can’t assess multiple students at once, so that they have to be able to set aside the time to let each student read individually. Students who are not reading with the teacher need to be engaged in tasks that are meaningful (positively impact their learning) and worthwhile (valuable to them as learners).
I tried something new today that I felt worked pretty well. All week, students have been reading a short text in their guided reading groups. After discussing plot elements such as characters, setting, genre, and the key events of the story. Today I had each student read a brief passage from the text to me. I meet with each of my five reading groups for 15 minutes a day. Each group has between four and seven students. Because the passages were only about 100 words in length, I was able to have all of my students read aloud to me when they came to me during their group’s assigned times. When not reading aloud, the students worked on a vocabulary sheet that connected to the text. After everyone in the group had read, we were able to go over the worksheet together. The students then took the worksheets with them and added the vocabulary words to their working document they are making with Google Slides that helps them keep track of new vocabulary words.
The key to these assessments, however, and what will make them formative, or, as my superintendent and my district director of curriculum, instruction, and assessment like to call them, informative, is that I will be sharing the results with my students on Monday when I meet with their groups again and introduce new texts. Students need to know how they did, what the goals are, and what they need to do better. Otherwise, we are just assessing to assess, and that is neither worthwhile nor meaningful.
How have you made the assessment process, whether formal or informal, more meaningful for you and those you assess, whether they are students, employees, employers, or other?
Letting Students Use Technology
As an elementary teacher who has technology deeply infused in my classroom, it is not at all uncommon for someone to walk into my room and see me sitting at my horseshoe table at the back of the room with four or six students while the other twenty or so are scattered about the room working on their Chromebooks. I have spent a great deal of time and effort learning how to best integrate technology in my classroom in a way that makes it so the devices are not simply a substitution for traditional learning tools. (However, like even the best of technology-minded teachers, it still happens.)
This week, however, I came to a realisation: far too much of my students’ technology use has been student-centered but teacher-directed. By this I mean that while I use technological resources to differentiate my instruction and allow my students to work within their zones of proximal development (as many of the tools we use provide help within their interfaces), they are almost always doing things that I have specifically directed them to do.
This week, however, my students have begun using their Chromebooks in a way that I quite honestly did not expect. We are starting a new science unit on how Earth’s processes impact landforms and I have had them working out of our Harcourt Science textbooks to build up background knowledge. To hold my class accountable for their learning, I have had the students answer the review questions at the end of the text lessons. Instead of just writing them answers on a piece of paper and turning them in, many students, without asking or even thinking that they should ask, opened their Chromebooks, created a new Google Doc or Goole Slides presentation, and combined information from the textbook with information they found online and then sharing the final product with me.
It has been really cool looking through the responses. One student had a separate slide for each of the review questions and then linked to a video about Mt. Etna in Sicily. If I had told the students that they had to use paper and pencil for their responses, the likelihood of my students finding this video and learning more about how volcanic eruption impact Earth and its plant and animal (including human) populations!
The result of this realisation has been a recommitment on my part to let my students use technology. I will still direct, guide, and prompt, but if I want them to become savvy users of these advanced tools, I need to be willing to let them explore and find ways to use them that I wouldn’t consider.
How has learning to let others act on their own impacted what you do?
Overheard in Guided Reading Groups
I love meeting with my students in guided reading groups. It is an opportunity for them to share thoughts and ideas and questions in a small setting (four to seven students instead of twenty-six). Sometimes, though, they say things that make everyone else just look at them with a bewildered expression on their faces, me included. Then we laugh together and I clarify any misunderstandings if I can. Here are a couple of quick examples from yesterday:
Teacher: What is the difference between fiction and nonfiction?
Student: Fiction is real. Nonfiction is fict… wait. No. The other way around.
T: Which character would you like to be in this story and why?
S1: I would want to be the bird in this story because he got stolen.
S2: Why would you want to get stolen?
S1: I don’t know.
T: Did this story take place in the past, present, or future? And when I say pas, I mean a long time ago, like over a hundred years ago.
S: Oh, so when dinosaurs were around?!
T: …
What are some things you have overheard recently?
Seeking Expert Assistance, Part II
Several weeks ago, I wrote about my students discovering that the maps of the world are not as accurate and consistent as they had expected. While there are certainly issues with countries changing borders, changing names, or even changing existence, they were shocked when the maps couldn’t even agree on the names or even number of oceans. So, doing what I do best, I quickly sought out an expert and told my students to ask him.
And they did. I sent a packet of letters to Dr. John M. Toole, Senior Scientist in the Department of Physical Oceanography at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts to ask him to settle the question once and for all.
I was so thrilled to check my mailbox after Winter Break and find a letter from Dr. Toole waiting for my class!
After explaining what he does as a physical oceanographer, Dr. Toole explained to my students that there is actually no consensus on the number or names of the oceans! While he prefers to name the oceans as North Pacific, South Pacific, North Atlantic, South Atlantic, North Indian, South Indian, Arctic, and Southern (naming eight oceans!) he has colleagues who insist that there is just one large ocean and others who argue for just three oceans and several seas.
Even though we did not get a definitive answer, my students were so excited to learn that they could write to someone who is an expert in a field and actually get a response back! I am now hoping that we can get a collection of letters to put on my bulletin board in my classroom. (And come to think of it, if we get enough, we can even migrate them to a bulletin board in the hallway!)
I don’t think Dr. Toole is present on social media, but I will be emailing him to let him know that we received his letter and were very grateful for his response!
