Tags

how i work, to do list, time management, decontamination

iPod Edition

dy/av : 005 : how i work (640 x 480)

References

• my to-do list template.

Previous Episodes

dy/av : 004 : thank you, teaching
dy/av : 003 : on the office
dy/av : 002 : the next-gen lecturer
dy/av : 001 : earn the medium

I like to work and that’s fine. I appreciate that in Christian history, in Eden, before things went pearshaped, when everything was still perfect, people worked.

Lately I enjoy a workflow which lets me breeze through sixteen tasks in the same time it’d take my 20-yo self to check his e-mail. I like that. I like being the guy who gets done what he says he’ll get done and fast. I like that about you too.

Fittingly, one of the most fascinating articles I’ve read in the last five years is Fortune’s How I Work series, which prompts executives from Google to Starbucks to describe their work habits.

Tomorrow’s episode is my rejected submission. Not for nothing, it’s also the longest I’ve worked on any episode so far.

Motivating Questions

1. What is your work ethic?
2. What hardware and software are essential?

Recommended Reading

1. How I Work: Coffee Shops
2. Teacher of the Year: Lil Wayne
3. “How I Work.” Fortune

BTW: I’m on an island called Catalina right now, very nearly married, so I have invited Scott Elias, who shares my fixation on work habits and flow, along to handle the commentary.

I dig the collaboration, but calling in a sub for just one period throws off my game in a way that no one else in my department seems to mind.

Everyone else takes the loss in stride and adjusts pace to account for the lost period. Me, I tense up and pray for some freak snow flurry to close school and balance out my other periods. It’s awful. Plus I plan sub periods as strenuously as I do regular periods and wind up with with 50% more prep work the night before my department’s planning sessions.

But I think I got it right this time.

I exported the period’s Keynote slides to PNGs and recorded a voiceover track in GarageBand using my iBook’s built-in mic. Neither of those tasks required more than three clicks.

Then I pulled ’em both into Final Cut Pro …

… and lengthened each PNG to match my voice. (iMovie will do the same thing, as I recall, but I haven’t played with the newest version.) Then I burned a DVD.

Time cost: considerable. Somewhere around ninety minutes, though forty of those could be chalked under the Bumblin’ Around column, playing with formats, etc, time I’ll save next timeKeynote 4, which is to PowerPoint what an M16 is to a musket, has an “Export to iDVD” feature which is a few versions away from automating all the annoying parts of this process. At the moment the audio slips away from the video, but once Apple tightens the right belts, I won’t really have words to express my pity for PPT users. ¶ (I mean, seriously … once they get that working, I’ll strap on a wireless mic and record every lesson in real-time, exporting each day’s lesson to iPod-ready MP4 video. Why, you ask? Why not?!).

Moreover, I didn’t lose nearly as much ground as I would’ve with my usual lame sub-day regiment of handouts, book review, and a few Hail Mary’s for my sub.

Moreover, at a distance, I could …

1. … introduce the sub. (“Listen to Katie,” I said, just guessing at the name and gender of my sub.)
2. … set expectations. (“Hey, kids, it’s Mr. Meyer. You know I hate to miss fifth period but it couldn’t be helped. Assignments are worth triple today so don’t blow this.”)
3. … banter a bit. (“So who can tell me which conjecture cracks this thing wide open for us? [long pause] Nobody knows this one?!”)
4. … and freaking teach.

That last feat demanded I lighten up on my usual conviction that text rarely mixes well with PowerPoint. Ordinarily, I throw a diagram or a graph on the board and spin a conversation around it. The slides had to stand alone here, though, so I crowded ’em up more than I would’ve liked.

My sub’s only official capacity was that of Pause-Button Pusher. At various times I’d instruct “Katie” to pause the DVD so the class could work through a problem. I told the kids they could ask her to pause at any point also.

I caught the last five minutes. No one freaked out over the experiment, like, “yeah, Mr. Meyer, that was way more fun than a movie … thanks!” but the sub was keen, the kids were into the novelty of it, if nothing else, I didn’t have an educational mess to clean up the next day, and I didn’t embarrass myself by praying for snow in sunny Santa Cruz.

Things Got Out of Hand

My first Keynote lesson (August 2006) took four hours to layout and little has changed since then. For every hour I spend with my class, I put in at least two behind the scenes. On at least three occasions I’ve taught a full slate and then taken from the last bell until midnight to plan the next day’s full slate.

On Efficiency

But surely you understand that this is a one-time investment. These files, backed-up constantly, preserved forever in digital amber, aren’t just lecture notes or an outline. No, Keynote’s ordered builds, wipes, fades, and scale effects give me a precise record of instruction, one which I can tweak and tune forever, veritably altering history. These are lessons I’ll never build from scratch again but which I’ll forever improve.

Some suggest this careful control robs learning of its organic spontanaeity. They’re right.

But I’m happy to exchange hostages on this one — freewheeling, anything-is-possible education (no disrespect there) for the ability to carefully weigh instructional decisions against each other in advance of a lesson and then lock them down until class time. I teach every class in slow motion the night before and I can only recall two classes this year whose learning outcomes surprised me. This is a grind, yes, but one that is predictable, reproducible, formally assured, and occasionally astonishing.

On Time Management

Free time has been low this year, that much is regrettably true, but Keynote has helped me buy back full weeks of instructional time. This happens ten times a day:

A teacher has a monster conjecture to teach — let’s say, the Alternate Interior Angle Conjecture, which demands a picture and a paragraph at minimum.

The teacher draws the figure. She steps aside while her students sketch it down.

She states the conjecture once through, gesturing at the figure for effect. She then writes it out in full, her writing accompanied beat-for-beat by a familiar staggered monotone, “If … two … par … a … llel … lines ….”

After finishing, she steps aside and her students scribble it down for themselves. She waits.

This is a long transaction, extremely rote, and not particularly interesting. Regrettably it’s often a proxy for class management. (If the kids are writing, they aren’t causing trouble.) Don’t you get anxious reading it? I do just writing it down. Can we move on to the fun stuff yet? No? Still copying?

But with Keynote, I complete my half of the transaction the night before. I’ve nearly doubled my instructional value this year simply by halving the time I take to teach the same material. (Incidentally, this is how I meet standards while socking away class minutes for whatever else. I mean, we brought show and tell back to high school.)

On Aesthetics

I don’t know how to create these slides (all from the last few Geometry classes) using a traditional overhead projector given the same time constraints.

True, the work these required was off-off-contract but I’ve engaged my visual learners in ways that were functionally impossible a decade ago at no cost to class time. No drawing, no overhead shuffling; just the push of a button. Plus, next year, guess who won’t be trolling Google Images at 23h45 for just the right satellite image of the Pentagon? Go on, guess.

In addition to engaging math’s most neglected modality, Keynote makes my notes pretty. There are some studs out there who can keep the board accurate and tidy but, by their own whiney, relentless admission, my students prefer 20 point Tahoma to my barely-legible marker scrawl, vectorized lines and circles to my own wobbly impostors.

On Class Management

My tether to the whiteboard has grown from an arm’s length to fifty feet, so long as nothing lead-plated gets in the way. I can then question one student (snapping her side of the room to attention) while walking to the opposite side of the room (perking them up) all while advancing the slide deck up front.

I just got goosebumps a little right there.

The Pitch

I admit this reeks of a sales pitch but I don’t profit if you buy. It’s inescapably true that all this advance planning, building complete, reproducible learning experiences from the floorboards up, is making me a stronger, more reflective teacher. I click through slides and can’t avoid it.

I hope I’ve made this attractive. I can’t make the technology cheap but I’m about to make it easier. I’ll be posting my lesson content hereon. All of it. Notes, handouts, and especially my slidedecks. I’m a user and a pusher and the best thing I can do right now is make my product free.

Previously:

How I Work: The Hardware Package
How I Work: Coffee Shops

There’s the iBook (#1). It’s slow. Especially when running a Keynote presentation that spans a semester and comprises 500+ slides. I need to do something about that.

There’s the overhead projector (#2) which I haven’t used in a year. There’s probably someone on campus who could use it, probably someone who’s reading this post right now, right now carving murderous thoughts about me into a basement wall somewhere. But you just never know when you might need one, right? Makes a nice Ottoman for my laptop, in any case.

#3 is hot chocolate, delivered every first period by our SpEd-run café. It’s isn’t technology, but it is tasty, so it gets this brief nod. Moving on.

There is JBL’s On-Tour portable sound system (#4). It drains AAA batteries like they owe it money but it’s as portable as anything and packs a pretty decent dynamic range. Only used for the sporadic YouTube video. For religious reasons, I don’t include sound in my presentations.

#5 is my Sharp XR10L digital projector, the least portable and most expensive item in the class. I eagerly await the day of more portable, less expensive digital projectors. Incidentally, I had this in a closet for over a year after winning it in a grant. Shame has brought about the greatest innovations in my practice.

Aside: we find here one of the most obvious exceptions to Important Ratio #2. If a student decided to smash the projector lens — not a strenuous feat — I might disproportionately lose my cool.

I keep every lesson I’ve ever taught, every handout I’ve ever assigned, and every Keynote slide I’ve ever fussed over, all on a freaking Lego (#6). I’m no stranger to technology but that fact scares me.

Mark me: one day the Legos will rule the world.

In any case, I’ve invested hundreds of hours into my Keynote slides so I back them up more often than I brush my teeth.

Aside: whenever a teacher cracks open one of those enormous filing cabinets, two of which I have, neither of which I’ve ever used, I have to suppress a giggle.

Finally there’s the Kensington wireless remote (#7), good anywhere in my class. It has transformed me lesson-by-lesson into a showman, which, I know, is kind of a disreputable label for a teacher, conjuring up images of Robin Williams channeling John Wayne channeling an effete Eastern European all to teach quadratics. Wacky!

But I revel in the showmanship of teaching. I’m not some animated dervish. I don’t use accents or a lot of jokes or manic energy, but I know how to setup a lesson and then knock it down. Structurally speaking, good teaching is just one long, satisfying joke, not particularly funny but extremely well-told. Maybe some crack at The New Yorker is appropriate here.

I rehearse before class, I know what slide I’m on, where I’m going, what object will wipe-in or fade-out next. I can move about and stand near students who are having trouble focusing and then move on. It makes teaching three times more fun than it was before shame brought out the best in me.

So that’s it. One anecdote about portability and I’m out:

Early in the semester, a Geometry teacher had to handle a family emergency. It was my prep so I was called to sub. I quickly pulled #1, #5, and #7 over to his classroom. I popped #6 into #1, found out what sections the class was working on, and re-ordered some slides to match. It was a great day for scalability and portability, and if only they had delivered my #3 to the new classroom, it would’ve been a perfect day.

Any suggestions for improving portability and scalability in my practice, please have your way with the comments.

Okay, okay, so coffee shops are probably the least essential element of this series but the principle they represent rivals graphic design (HIW feature forthcoming) for importance.

I’m a huge fan of Michael Grinder’s class management system, specifically, his principle of “decontamination.” It’s mostly a riff on classical conditioning, but a cannily effective one.

In short, I don’t plan lessons, grade papers, or call parents anywhere near my bed. I spend a few dollars several days a week at Coffee Cat for a comfortable chair, free wireless, and a double white chocolate mocha extra hot light syrup in a to-go cup. (I know … I’m kind of a loser like that.)

The point: it’s far from anywhere I call home. That way, when I leave the coffee shop at nine-ish, lessons planned up, papers graded up, parents phone-called up, I can crash into bed and think happy bed-time thoughts. Like whether John Krasinski is as cool as Jim Halpert. Or which one of us is funnier, me or my girlfriend. Or if I had to go back and relive high school would it be emptier or more satisfying or zzzzzzzz ….

Thoughts like that. But nothing nothing nothing related to my job.

I wouldn’t be so hot on coffee shops and this decontamination idea if it weren’t for a nasty bout of contamination I endured my student-teaching year. Y’know, that year when you taught for three hours a day, studied for five, received more homework than you assigned, and went home to plan lessons for the next day? I’d finish planning at 23h00 and flop backwards from my computer desk to my bed.

Exhausted and all, I’d fall asleep quickly, but it was the worst sleep of my life. I’d have the most vivid waking dreams. I was awake. I was in my bedroom but my first period Algebra class was there also, ready for their lessons. I’d mumble and mumble and look for my whiteboard marker in my covers, sometimes for a half hour, before I thought to flick a light on and assure myself that my class wasn’t really there. I shudder to type all that. It was terrible.

So … coffee shops. Yeah. That’s how I work.