Let's Keep It Real In Education

September 25, 2017 / Oskar Cymerman

“I was taught that the way of progress was neither swift nor easy.”

— Marie Curie

Translation: If you want things to change, get your ass off the couch and do the work.

That's what Marie did. In a world full of men unwilling to accept a woman, an atheist, and a person who followed her heart, she had to work her ass off to overcome the sexism and xenophobia of her times.

In 1911, just before receiving her Nobel Prize, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences asked Marie not to come to Stockholm, so King Gustav V would not be subjected to shaking hands with an adulteress.

Of course, she went to accept the award in person. That was her second Nobel. She was the first ever woman to receive one, and the first ever person to receive two. She discovered radium and polonium and coined the term radioactivity. She earned many prestigious awards, honors, and posts for her work.

Ultimately, her work killed her. But before she died of cancer at 66, she changed the world. For women, for men, for all of us. And the way she did it inspires.

You see, Marie didn't just write a bunch of papers. She worked to apply what she learned to help humanity. She did not seek patents and recognition. Rather, she used her discoveries and knowledge to invent the first ever portable X-Ray machines. The Little Curies were used to diagnose over a million soldiers during World War I. Later, she raised money to build hospitals to use her discoveries to provide advanced treatments to patients. Today, we cure cancer and other illnesses thanks to Marie's work.

So What Does Marie Curie Have To Do With Keeping It Real In Education?

To me, everything. Marie understood that her work was greater than herself and she always saw it as more important than any personal achievement. She faced criticism and prejudice. She persevered. The work was too important not to and it did not matter what anyone else said.

I think the work educators do is just as important. We can't keep shying away from the difficult conversations, hard feelings, and tough decisions. I really believe it is the only real way toward meaningful and sustainable progress.

Beautiful words and flipping the script every time negative feelings surface is inspiring, but not always helpful. It is the kind of an approach that invalidates tough feelings our kids and we ourselves experience because we're human. Our humanness requires we process them, not simply shove them aside and immediately replace with growth-mindset. That's not real. Not always.

And while Marie Curie is my hero and compatriot, I would never presume to fill her shoes. I am not the champion for humanity she was, just a teacher pushing aside anxiety and introversion to muster courage to speak up and fight for what I believe.

That involves doing things I'm not always comfortable doing. Public speaking? Check. So, I started a podcast. Writing is one thing. This... the podcast... I feel naked. Here it is:

All teachers and administrators want their students to succeed in school and beyond. Many of us are noticing that our schools are becoming less effective at providing the right education to help our kids accomplish that. We see the need for change; a paradigm shift.

The few authentic voices and change agents we encounter get drowned out by the constant barrage of Band Aid approaches and empty words on social media. Hundreds if not thousands of educational technology blogs, which provide great tools, but nevertheless approaches that can easily be replaced with the next new thing. Would be leaders quoting themselves on slides encouraging, but not showing how. Noise.

“Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement, and success have no meaning. ”

— Benjamin Franklin

At this point, I wish I had the answer to help cut through the noise and make education better, but all I have is ideas. And, I have passion and beliefs. And, I have you. And, you have passion, beliefs, and ideas too.

Let's take this passion and spread it. Let's use our beliefs to help make education better for our students. Let's combine our ideas and create new ways and tools to help teach and guide our students. Let's learn, but let's apply too. Let's talk, but let's show as well.

I want to use my new podcast as a platform for meaningful change in education. I want to take a closer look at the things we often don't talk about, shy away from, or passively aggressively ignore. I want to explore solutions we fear to help make education better. I want to always find the courage to seek the right, not straight, often rough full-of-jagged-rocks road.

I promise you not to shy away from the ugly and the happy conversations.

I hope you feel a little uncomfortable when you listen because I believe the greatest progress happens outside of the confines of our safe places.

I hope you are inspired to seek your own answers, ones that benefit those you serve.

I hope the conversations will help you think and reflect and act.

And while I don't hope for it, I know and accept that I will piss some people off in the process.

Because on Keeping Ed Real, taboos don't exist. From now on nothing is off the table. In fact, let's just kick the table down and make our own rules. We must.

Because, while there will never be another Marie Curie, maybe there's a Manya Sklodowska out there; a girl full of curiosity, passion, and drive. Maybe Manya is a student who needs to be given direction by her teacher, or the teacher who needs to be shown the way by her administrator. We owe her that. She's tired of empty words and promises. She's ready for real talk.

So, let's keep it real for her, others, and ourselves. Let's Keep Ed Real.

Oskar

P.S. Click here for the first episode of Keeping Ed Real. I promise you it's as boring as unicorns flying over rainbows as fireworks are going off everywhere :)

Hi! I'm Oskar.

I teach, write, speak, rant to make the world better.

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categories / Life Reflections
tags / teaching, podcast, education, education reform, be the change

How To Learn Faster Infographic

September 22, 2017 / Oskar Cymerman

I started teaching my students Accelerated Learning. I still teach them chemistry, engineering, and learning to study, but this is more important.

A few of my students might become chemists. Some are future engineers. Many will be other things.

All of them will have to know how to learn effectively and the faster they can encode, store, and recall information they learn the more successful they will be.

I want them to be wildly successful. I know you do too.

Here's a good way to start.

How To Learn Faster Infographic

I wrote a more detailed article connected to the infographic above here.

For more becoming a better learner resources, check out the archive to the right.

But whatever you do, please focus on helping your students how to learn more than you focus on what to learn. They need it more and are often not guided properly. Be that exception.

You have the power to change lives. Use it often.

Oskar

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I teach, write, speak, rant to make the world better.

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categories / Learning
tags / focus, deep work, productivity, teaching teens, parenting teens

Too Much What, Not Enough How

September 19, 2017 / Oskar Cymerman

A student in my 4th-hour Learning to Study Effectively class asked me today how to best memorize information for his upcoming biology test. The 10-page study guide packet all filled out, he had trouble remembering all that stuff. They say better late than never, but the test was scheduled for next hour... He wanted to learn but didn't know how... Royally screwed is what he was.

it's hard to argue with the statement that the purpose of school is for students to learn. We do that, but I think teachers focus on the what of learning much too much. The how of learning, which is transferable and transcends any subject, is often amiss from our instruction. At best, it's vague and incomplete.

Study Strategies

Most teachers (I hope) talk about spaced repetition. Problem is we're not specific enough. It seems simple enough to do, right? Students too might think it's simple, but many never do spaced repetition, because they don't know how to begin. They're not given a plan. They have to come up with their own. They don't know how to do that. We rarely teach them how. They procrastinate.

Study Habits

Students don't know how to develop good habits. Teachers differentiate between good and bad study habits, but we don't teach how good habits are developed. We don't explain that ingrained bad habits need to be replaced gradually by new habits. We don't take the time to help our students come up with a plan to change. We say Don't do that but do this instead. It's a bad joke.

Learning Strategies

We might mention learning effectively and move on to the topic of the day. In high school, we assume a mention is enough and we rush to the important stuff; the curriculum. We reiterate main concepts, but we don't reiterate learning how to learn techniques. We might reteach main subject ideas students struggled with, but we don't reteach, remind, and reinforce learning how to learn strategies.

Ironically, subject struggles often result from the underlying lack of understanding of how the human brain learns; how it encodes, stores, and recalls information. If students don't know which strategies speed up learning and which waste time, how are they to learn effectively?

Students often give up because the strategies they use are ineffective. Too hard, too passive, too slow, too boring.

So... Let's Start Teaching Students How To Learn Better

Let's teach them how to learn FASTer.

I recently started listening to Jim Kwik's podcast Kwik Brain. Besides knowing what he's talking about, Jim uses a lot of mnemonics to teach learning strategies. A lot of the information he shares is common sense, but not common practice as he puts it. Kind of like what we rarely do, but should be doing more of in schools to help our students learn...

Anyways... Let's break down the acronym FAST Jim uses to explain how anyone can learn faster and remember more.

FAST stands for Forget, Active, State, and Teach.

Forget your limitations, what you know, and what you need to do.

When I said F is for Forget to my 1st-hour chemistry class, one student exclaimed: I do! All the time! But actually, the idea is to stop the negative self-talk that students often partake in.

I suck at math. I'm bad at reading and writing. Science is not my thing. Those are limitations that students reinforce all the time. Problem is that if they keep thinking that way about a subject or task, they will indeed suck, be bad, and it won't be their thing. You see, our hippocampi, the parts of the brain that decide what's important, receive the message that it's not important when we think we suck at something. And, we don't learn it as a result.

Forget what you know. This is something I am guilty of often. When I assume I know a lot about something, I am not 100% receptive to learning. I don't know everything and I'm not a know-it-all. If I can remember that, I'll keep an open mind and learn more.

Forget what you need to do later today, tomorrow, next week and next month. Be present and focus on the task at hand. Immerse yourself in the experience that is now. If you do, you will learn faster.

Active Learning

Probably a no-brainer, but we often miss the point in the classroom. Too often, the learning is passive. Students consume the information all the while they should be creating with it. Creating meaning. Creating understanding. All we have to do is limit direct instruction to 10 minutes and allow students to discuss key ideas, draw visuals, record videos, make models etc. that show their learning.

State of Mind and Being Matters

Stressed, tired, and disengaged brains don't learn. It's true that teachers have limited influence when it comes to how a student is feeling when she's in our class. But we can do these three things:

Minimize stress in our class. Be flexible and don't force it. Is homework necessary? Are deadlines more important than the learning itself?
Discuss with students how rest, sleep, and exercise affects learning. Make movement and brain breaks part of the classroom culture.
Be enthusiastic, passionate, caring, active, and novel yourself.

If Your Students Can Teach a Concept, They Get to Learn It Twice

Every teacher gets this. All we need to do is reflect on the countless hours we spend strategizing how to teach concepts so they're understandable and memorable to our students. The more we do it the deeper our understanding of the concept becomes as new realizations keep coming.

We can increase the number of such light bulb moments for our students.

The key to getting our students to employ the teaching strategy for themselves is to design lessons that ask students to teach their peers. One way to do this is to have students create instructional videos in which they explain how something works or how to do something.

Just today, I had my chemistry students use Flipgrid to explain how to calculate the average atomic mass of an element. The goal was to help them learn and remember it better. Take a peek at their videos here.

F.A.S.T. Forget. Active. State. Teach.

Encourage your students to Forget the limitations they place on themselves and they will learn faster.
Design lessons for Active learning and your students will learn faster and understand better.
Model a State of curiosity, enthusiasm, and caring and many students will follow in your footsteps and they will learn faster and remember more.
Create a classroom culture in which students Teach each other and they will learn faster and deeper.

By the way... Did you think I left the student who asked me for help hanging? Not a chance! Yes, the test was the next hour, but I had to give him something. I taught him a visualization strategy I'll talk about in a near-future post. I will ask him if it helped tomorrow. In the meantime, I will make you a promise: You'll like this technique :)

Until then, remember you have the power to change lives. Use it often.

Oskar

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Hi! I'm Oskar.

I teach, write, speak, rant to make the world better.

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categories / Teaching
tags / focus, deep work, productivity, teaching teens, parenting teens