Why Disagree?

When I disagree with grace

a piece of me falls off,

floats off into another person's life.

It lingers there

nudging the other

to think and rethink.

When I disagree poorly

what I have to say 

resides in me 

and stays there.

My dogma disables

any listener's ears

to hear nuance, empathy, love.

When I disagree well

I release my deep concern

and open my own ears

to hear fully 

the concern of the other.  

When we disagree with grace

we both depart in peace,

empowered and changed, 

because a part of us 

remains behind.

Writing to Think

So I'm committed to write daily because it helps me think. One day a week I'll be posting here and the other days I'll journal in a personal blog available to friends who request the link. I discovered Mind/Shift this week. In this issue you'll see ten educational tech trends to watch in 2012. Cell phones and IPads are pushing the boundaries of schooling through applications for adaptive, social and game-based learning. Ken Robinson has another video out. This time from TEDx in London. I'm in a school setting today so I'm blocked from finding the link on Twitter. At least I can still log.

Light

Where are God's people today?  Our hearts are turned to reason and not to God.  Our apologetic is unconvincing because we say that which we also do not do.  Men say, "Talk is cheap."  None-the-less none live differently.  "The fool says in his heart, 'There is no God.'" (Psalm 14)  So we live like God does not exist.  And we live foolishly as a result.  It is not a matter of the mind but of the heart.  We love ourselves instead of God.  We look to ourselves for what God alone can give us.  God is love.  When we rely on reason for guidance and not on love, we deceive ourselves.  The Truth is not in us.  We walk in darkness.  This is the reason God sent Jesus into the world.  In Jesus was life and the life was the light of man.  Our darkness cannot overcome this light.  But it is true that many did not recognize the light.  They were blind to that which could have given them life - blinded by their own self-centeredness.  

Leadership

I'm a key leader in a local church. I wrote this to our congregation this morning . . . I did not attach the article which can be found at The Alban Institute

To the congregation that gathers at Island Covenant, mercy, shalom, and love be yours in abundance.

If you read the February Lamplighter by now you may have noticed there was no elder buzz section. I apologize for not writing an article. Time slipped away from me as leaders in the church worked to understand the Pulse survey results. Yesterday one hundred eight people attended the Town Hall meeting where initial results were reported. The meeting ended with small group discussions and I've included the group reports in the attached document. The three questions to which people responded were:

1.Begin with gratitude . . . Think about why you are grateful to God, today. Then think about why you are grateful for MICC.
2.How does this report resonate with you? Where do you agree; where do you disagree?
3.What is your greatest hope going forward?

Please be assured that this is just the beginning for our church in looking into the roots of issues that have come up in this survey. You'll notice a couple of comments that yawn at yet another survey that no one will "apply". Our intent is to reflect and to act.

Those in attendance were introduced to an emphasis of prayer during this lenten season. Kathy R. explained several ways to be praying for MICC. You may signup to pray specifically for one of the forty church leaders including staff, deacons, Veritas team and elders. For Holy Week, the week just prior to Easter, we will have 168 consecutive hours of prayer. Kathy will let you know more about that later as well as provide opportunity to sign up. We intend to include a section on the prayer update in the bulletin specifically for issues within the church. A grass roots effort has already begun for 777 - 7 minutes of prayer at 7 am and 7 pm. Please join church leaders as we pray and listen to the Holy Spirit's guidance, as we seek to discern God's will for Mercer Island Covenant, and as we embrace the change that is upon us.

We plan two more Town Hall meetings in April and May in preparation for our annual meeting in June. As soon as they are scheduled, we'll publish the dates and times.

Finally, Lent is a time of discipline and self-sacrifice. I've included a second attachment, an article I just received from the Alban Institute on "Waiting and Yearning in Lent". It has helped me to reflect on Lent which begins this Ash Wednesday. I encourage you to join me and others in the church who plan to engage in some sort of self-sacrifice for the forty days leading up to Easter as a sign that we will wait for the Lord Jesus and listen to Him.

Mercy, shalom, and love be yours in abundance,
2 Chronicles 7:14

Weekends

For me writing on the weekends is more difficult. I just returned home after being out since 7:30 am. Weekend routines break the mold. We tend to eat out more, go to more concerts and movies and generally stay up later. Finding time to write only a few sentences takes even more discipline. So here's to the weekend.

Hitting my stride . . .

Not! There are days when I simply don't hit my stride. Today was one. I'm training for a half marathon on March 20. We had a day off of school so I used it to go for a ten mile run. I felt terrible the entire time. I never hit my stride the entire one and a half hours of running. I've noticed other days are similar. I wake up sluggishly. Coffee is no help whatsoever and I can't shake the sleep from the night before. I feel grouchy,unapproachable and irritable all day. I never hit my stride on a day like that. The only remedy is another night's sleep and a new day. Every day is a chance to hit my stride.

WooHoo - Field Trip

So I teach Marine Biology. Today we went on a field trip to the Seattle Aquarium. The exhibits were great, the students were great, lunch at the Aquarium Cafe was great and well, the entire day was great. Students ought to get out more - really! They are more engaged, better behaved, more interested and a joy to be around when they are not in the classroom. I wonder what this says about how their typical school day is structured?

tk

Penance

This is my bus. It is the penance I must partake for the folly of a botched oil change in my 1979 Mercedes in January of 2010. At dusk on a dreary January Sunday, I frantically changed the oil in my newly purchased "classic" Mercedes. The small rubber gasket that squeezes between the lid and metal canister holding the filter was not seated properly. Because I was in a hurry and did not bother with proper lighting, I did not realize my error until three weeks later when the engine simply stopped working. My sickening stomach could not overrule the law of friction. No amount of regret could fix frozen pistons or bent tie rod. So penance draws near to my carelessness. Now I am in debt to a friend who is rebuilding my engine, to an Orca card for bus fair, and to One-Bus-Away for keeping me on schedule. One thing for sure, I have slowed down. One does not hurry while riding a bus.

The Challenge

A good day begins with hot, black coffee and a whole grain scone. When there is time to reflect and write, that is a bonus. I've accepted a friend's challenge to write a "slice of life" story every day this month. I've tried this writing-every-day-thing before but failed after about a week. Maybe I'll last two this time. A couple half time jobs and church work have kept me from my morning routine of reading, reflecting and 'riting. As a result, my current journal is over a year old. So here we go . . . until tomorrow, grace and peace.

David Garibaldi is a performance artist with a calling.

Garibaldi dances on a drop cloth while two DJs and drummer play hip-hop music. Compact and energetic, he grabs paintbrushes as he moves. Holding one in each hand, he starts making brush strokes on a life-size canvas board. As he dances, a portrait slowly emerges before your eyes: Martin Luther King

Mendacity

The need to live in the truth is greater than ever. We tend to cling to facts as the basis of truth. Instead we must embrace relationship as the centering force for truth. We live by the truth in the context of the relationships we keep not in the facts we profess.

On the surface the fact that the pastor preached a sermon last Sunday seems like a truthful statement. But as a listener, do I live by the truth that was spoken or do I simply agree with the pastor. As we struggle to understand that which was spoken in a sermon or a conversation, we must enter into a relationship of listening and speaking. We must put ourselves and our ideas on the line, and we must be willing to be shaped by the words and ideas of the other.

When we attempt to live by facts it is easy to slip into a state of mendacity. We can bend the meaning of a fact to suit ourselves and to equivocate our reality. But if we have a relationship of truth with God or one of his image bearers, we cannot easily sweep away a fact as either true or false. We live and move and have our being in the midst of relationships, not in the midst of facts. Only when we embrace relationships do we embrace truth.

Kids Master Mathematics When They're Challenged But Supported | Edutopia

Kids Master Mathematics When They're Challenged But Supported | Edutopia

Slide Presentation BCS August 27, 2009

I had to upload the slide presentation to youtube in video format. If you want the slides, you'll need to email me at krell.tim@gmail.com.

Here's the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIZSeUJgfSs

Tim's UbD Lesson Plan for BCS Workshop on Facets of Understanding

UbD Plan – BCS, August 26, 2009

EUs – A student’s understanding is essential to fulfilling the BCS mission.

Students understand in a multifaceted manner.

EQ – How does UbD support the BCS mission?

BCS EQs – How is Jesus Christ at the center of my life and learning?

Whose perspective does this represent and how does a belief system influence point of view?

How do I learn, live and serve with others?

Assessment - How will I know if you “UNDERSTOOD” the Enduring Understandings?

Group discussion will bring out ideas of how perspective, empathy, and self-knowledge give evidence of student understanding. Ideas will be recorded on the group report form and each group will pick the most important ONE.

Exit card information about the relationship between the BCS mission and UbD.

Activities –

Powerpoint review: Vision trumps all.

Introduction Dialogue: How does UbD support the BCS mission?

Video/Discussion: The three facets – perspective, empathy, self-knowledge

Each group fills out one report form and selects ONE important idea.

Summary: Show the UbD lesson plan & watch the video summary

Exit Card Feedback

Six Facets & Understandings: Tim's Prewriting

A draft introduction to Bellevue Chrisitan teachers written in early August –

So why bother? I dare guess that some of the skeptics are still musing that the past few year’s focus on Understanding by Design has about run its course, and if I can hold on for just a bit longer, this too shall pass. To your consternation, I continue to argue it will stand, not simply because researchers verify that lesson design beginning with the end in mind produces better results, but more importantly because it treats students more like image bearers and less like commodities in a capitalistic market.

How so, you may ask?

Primarily UbD twists the focus of teaching and the outcome of learning one hundred eighty degrees about face. The focus is no longer on classroom teaching but on student learning and student learning is measured against common understandings instead of a comparison between students. Rather than norm-referenced rankings, a standards-based system measures each student against the concrete standard, instead of measuring how well the student performed compared to others. This is no longer a new idea as the outcome based education effort developed over twenty-five years ago after the Nation at Risk report of 1983, but controversy still hovers around like a news helicopter above a developing crisis. None-the-less, I hope to push you deeper still in your application of essential questions and enduring understandings so that student learning will be even more effective, robust and Christian.

In my thinking as a young teacher, standards based education was a foul idea because it originated in the secular school system and so I believed the standards would necessarily be secular in nature. My thinking has changed over time and one of the reasons is the progress made by Bellevue Christian. Bellevue Christian is applying the principles of Understanding by Design and the habits of heart and mind found in the Bellevue Christian Essential Questions to student learning. And, although this process has not guaranteed an essentially Christian education, it has provided the curriculum of educators for it to develop through an ongoing, facilitated conversation among teachers.

So as I have mentioned before, we are creators because “In the beginning God created” and we are made in His image. As Christian teachers our goal is to create a space in our classrooms where all learners flourish, where we help students understand the great diversity of gifts and abilities in His people, and where we challenge each one to discover and use his or her gifts to God’s glory. To do this in the current cultural is extremely hard work. Yet today you have again committed yourselves to that task. May God give you grace to do so as you begin this new school year.

Second attempt at an introduction (August 17):

Thank you for the opportunity to share with you a few ideas this morning. Our coming together is always a great joy for me as I am welcomed by so many smiles and kind greetings. However, I must tell you as honestly as I can that an anxious fear also creeps up on me as this day comes closer. As I prepare I know I will be judged not only on the content of this hour, which by the way is somewhat subscribed to me, but also by the balance in my delivery praxis where words or reflection move to action. It is only in your action that these words will become your words because we know, and rightly so, that we are not only hears but doers. And therein lies my most anxious moment: that by throwing out a small biblical phrase, even though it captures a great principle of Christian schooling, or of life for that matter, the principle that “knowing is doing”; that hearing by itself is only is a delusion; and in uttering these phrases I have somehow discharged my obligation to think and speak Christianly.

Today I would like to wonder openly, with you, if we would dare “be Christian” in the way we design lessons for our students. Or is designing a lesson a neutral activity like washing dishes? We may believe that backwardly designed lessons and curriculum mapping are busy work, something of no earthly good that the boss demands of us. UbD and assessment for learning are ideas we must endure; fads that ‘god willing’ will fade with time so I can get back to the real business of teaching.

Or is there a level of uncomfortable truth here that we would just as soon ignore? Do these contemporary ideas of the practice of teaching provide a more open framework for engaging the young image bearers you will face next week in your classrooms in their own quest to understand and evaluate and transform a broken, yet redeemed world. In assessment for learning, especially learning the big ideas inherent in every discipline, the scaffolding that shapes learning is made to be adjustable. So today as we think about the facets of our student’s understanding, our goal is not to somehow frost the secular cake of education with fluffy white Christian frosting. Our work should always be to understand and evaluate our own designing of lessons to see if they are in fact transforming the lives of our students. Are their minds finding renewal in your class? Because you see, a well designed and delivered lesson is no less “spiritual” than a well designed and delivered Sunday sermon.

Third Prewriting of an Intro, August 25, 2009

I find myself constrained as a teacher often is with 50 minutes. It is not uncommon in our current system of schooling to provide a teacher with 180 fifty-minute periods during which he or she imparts understanding to the wide-eyed class. I have fifty minutes to widen and deepen a teachers understanding about understandings, the big ideas we hope will catch fire in a student’s life.

This concept of enduring understandings, all that we want students to remember after they leave this place, is crucially important in a truly Christian school because, after the fear of the Lord, it is on principles like perspective, self-knowledge and empathy that wisdom is built. And when we apply these great truths to the task of learning, we help students develop habits of heart and mind that are aligned to our mission which is to understand, evaluate and transform God’s world into a place of reconciliation and shalom.

So in the next 48 minutes we will scratch the surface of understanding to catch a glimpse of what lies beneath. We will discover a gem with six faces. Of these facets, today we have time to look into only three: perspective, empathy and self-knowledge.

Questions for our dialogue:

What has BCS been doing with UbD over the past year? (sets context, we’re still working on this . . . beginning the 4th year of a 5+ year process)

I’m worried that UbD isn’t “philosophical” enough for some of the teachers at BCS, is my anxious feeling warranted, why or why not?

In what ways does UbD link lesson design to the BCS mission? Or does it?

How is lesson design a “spiritual” activity?

Day 33 - Summer is Slipping by Again

The Painter’s brush delicately strokes yellow, red and orange on the tips of maple trees. The morning air is cooler and sweeter. The sun’s rays work harder to push warmth into each new day. The rain falls sweeter still and washes away the haze that has gripped the distant landscape during the hot summer weeks.

The harvest will continue through the next few months as children return to school. Summer’s lessons of running on the beach, hiding in the forest and playing make believe give way to those in classrooms. Hopefully the imagination of teachers will find ways to conjoin the two. We tend to make learning more serious than it needs to be. Too often we make stern faces and talk with deeper voices because we have very important curriculum to teach. A teacher’s greatest challenge is to fan the coals of curiosity that precede serendipitous moments of learning and then gently and carefully lay the tinder of reading, writing and arithmetic on the embers so they too catch fire.

Day 32 – Capitalism is the rotting fruit of hope in ourselves

I wonder how often we dismiss the still small voice of God because we believe the message He brings and the resulting action required are financial unfeasible. We’re trapped in a culture propelled with the hope that contentment comes from financial stability. The peace we seek eludes us because slowly, like a great ship, our hearts are turned toward the love of money more than God.

The deceit in believing that money can bail us out of the mess we’re in is found in our self-talk. If I had a better job, if I just work harder or more hours, and if I only had a break become the mantra we live by. Our notion that “we can do it” leads to false hope in ourselves. A hope that is built on our own abilities and aspirations spoils over time and the fruit of our lives along with it. Hope that lasts is built on nothing less than Jesus blood and righteousness.

Day 31 – Focus

. . . Magellan demonstrated the fortitude of a life in focus . . . Jesus provides the priorities and perspectives that are essential for a focused life in an overloaded age. – Oz Guinness

Magellan was single-minded. His deep purpose, to find a channel from the Atlantic to the Pacific, permeated his thoughts, his emotions, and his desires. He gave his life to this task, and the sea took it but not until he discovered the straight through the tip of South America that bears his name.

Jesus was even more focused. Before he died, Jesus prayed, “I have glorified you [the father] on earth by completing the work you have given me to do.” His clear call to glorify the father and do his will flowed throughout his human nature. To do so, Christ had to renounce other possibilities, for instance an earthly kingship, and whole-heartedly focus on establishing God’s Kingdom on earth. He gave his life to this task and the religious establishment took it but only for a short time.

How then should we live but to “lay aside every encumbrance and run the race with perseverance?” A clear-minded focus in an age of abundance demands that we eliminate many distractions. The hard part is determining what not to do. The current culture drags our attention to a smorgasbord of possibilities, and due to the distractions, we might never decide to run but will gorge ourselves until we’re too fat to move.

Day 26 – July 4, 2009 - Still Fighting

Today is Independence Day. Two hundred thirty-three years ago the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia.

"When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

The secession from England would not be easy. It is estimated that 25,000 Americans lost their lives in the war and another number nearly equal to the first were wounded or disabled. That’s 2% of the estimated 2.5 million people who lived in the original thirteen colonies in 1776. In WWI 137,00 (.14%) US lives were lost and the number for WWII just shy of half a million (.37%). However, the total count for WWII was over 59 million. The Soviet Union alone lost 25.5 million people. Many believe this was the bloodiest war of all time.

The U.S. has been in eleven major “wars” since the Revolutionary war. That’s a war about every 20 years. I wonder if that much fighting was necessary. Since the Civil War ending in 1865, wars have been fought outside the continental U.S. although the Japanese did attack the U.S. on it’s own soil in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, 1941, and then there was 9/11/2001. I wonder why war is so much easier to wage than it is to make peace.

For the next week I will be out of WiFi range. I'll keep writing every day but will need to make one big post probably Friday night. Then the same thing happens next Saturday as I'll be riding STP so I'll plan to post Sunday night.

Day 25 – Strengths Based Schools

Keeping to one topic is sometimes very hard. I feel like I could ramble on about a number of things but that would thwart the purpose of the discipline of writing that I am intent to develop. Yesterday I started to read Strengths Based Leadership. The authors report that an awareness of our own strengths will increase our self-confidence. Higher confidence at a young age (14-22 years old) increases career satisfaction, produces a higher salary, and decreases the likelihood of health problems. People with high self-confidence have a “cumulative advantage” that grows over a lifetime. Conversely, if you focus on people’s weakness they lose confidence.

It seems to me that this has strong implications for schooling. Much in school does not boost student confidence. Teachers mark student’s mistakes on papers and grade accordingly. There is not a focus on what is done correctly but what is done poorly. If a student’s strength is not math, reading or writing then over seventy-five percent of his or her day is spent doing work that he or she is not good at doing. What if we re-focused schools and curriculum around student’s strengths? What if at least half of the school day students could work from those strengths and gain more confidence? Would that change the dropout rate? I think it might. I know more students would be engaged in learning if they could operate out of strengths.

Taking a cue from the research on leadership, if part of school was to help students find out what they were good at and then develop curriculum, goals, and learning targets from their strengths, the results might be more than we ever hoped. I think it’s worth a try.