This afternoon I returned from a five-day trip around northern Florida. My wife and I drove from Atlanta to the Gulf Coast (Apalachicola) to the Atlantic Coast (New Smyrna Beach) and back to Atlanta. Needless to say, this required a lot of driving. A lot of driving down the most long, straight roads I have ever seen in one trip. And these roads were not that scenic; lots of two-lane roads through pine trees and swamps and by prisons. As a result, we had to create a lot of conversations. We decided to take the route of philosophical questions. Some were plans about the first things we would do if we won the lottery. Some were personal, some were psychological, and some were professional. I thought I would make a list of the more interesting ideas about education.

• We discussed the chronic complaining of people in the areas of education and medicine. In education, teachers often complain about conditions and pay. The public perception of these complaints are bogus because the fact that teachers are 10-month employees. My opinion is that this time is not used wisely. In my experience, I usually use this 9-week period like this; 3 weeks of decompression and relaxation, 3 weeks of reflection on my practices of educating and the final three weeks are used to get an early jump on planning and changes in philosophy. However, I rarely have an opportunity to know what exactly I am teaching the upcoming year, not to mention the resources to teach it. In many cases, the curriculum has often been completely rearranged, with no real warning to the teachers who teach it.
• I revisited this previous discussion and concluded that teachers should get a 17% raise and be required to spend the summer planning for the next year. This would require schools to be much more clear about the teachers’ schedules and counselors would have the entire summer to work out any kinks in the schedule. I have heard of research that says that quality teaching has a direct correlation to the number of hours of planning. Its a win-win, if school districts would pony up the pay.
• On Saturday night, there was a discussion with my sister-in-law about education. She works as a GED instructor in Florida’s prison system. She teaches guy who have murdered and done other serious crimes. I have never taught students with such pasts. However, I have been a teacher in a similar situation; I have been a teacher in a poorer population where there was a very strong gang influence. I argued that her guys were physically imprisoned and mine were psychologically imprisoned by their situations. They had not been locked up…yet. (Many of them were, as I taught them.) In retrospect, I am not sure if I was right or not.However, I argued that relationship and kinship made all the difference in the world. She felt that these prisoners were not reachable because of their pasts.I still believe that it a risk worth taking.

In any case, I hope to learn something to use from these conversations and reflections. I guess time will give me the lessons, if I only pay attention.

When I decided to rededicate myself to blogging, I discovered that it was important to publish something everyday. But sometimes The Universe doesn’t see it that way. Yesterday was one of those days.

The plans for this day had been laid out for me in my recent past. My wife made plans to drive from Atlanta to Apalachicola, Florida. Once there, we would check into the hotel, she would relax and I would meditate and write my daily blog.

For unforeseen reasons, it didn’t happen that way. After 6 hours or so in the car, I was “saddle sore.” I was a little hungry and a little tired. We also soon learned that internet service in our room was very unreliable. I decided that I would figure that out later. I was even more hungry now.

With our geographic location, I had gotten in my head that I wanted to go to a raw bar and have some raw oysters and a glass of bourbon. On my GPS, I saw a place called Boss’ Raw Bar. Something in my head attracted me to it. (Even though several people gave it two out five stars.) We passed several raw bars to get to this one.

When we got there, it seemed really ragged. We went straight to the bar and sat down. There were two middle aged men there, not together. They said nothing. After a pretty long wait, a waitress appeared behind the bar. My wife ordered one of their specialty cocktails. I ordered a half dozen raw oysters and a glass of Scotch. She grabbed a highball glass and filled it 3 quarters full of Scotch. (I asked for no ice.) with about half an ounce left in the bottle, she shrugged her shoulders gave me the rest. I happy but astounded. I knew I would be no shape for any decent blogging. Since the next day was my birthday, I looked at it as the Universe saying to me, “Enjoy your birthday and take the night off.” I decided to listen to this Divine guidance.

As you already know, I have decided to go under the name of the Jungian Educator. You may also realize that I am also on Spring Break. I thought that this might be a good time to show my reader the non-educational side of me. It is noneducational but not necessarily uneducational.

When I am not educating teenagers, I really try to pay attention to all things symbolic. It can be very interesting and can really reveal stuff about yourself.

First symbolic scenario; My teaching schedule gives me planning periods in the middle of the day. So I hit ground running with a first period class and it gives me back-to-back-to-back classes. (I kinda hate first period classes because teenagers tend to oversleep. Well, at least the boys. I was one of those boys.) I then get a break from 11 AM to 1:30 PM. Yeah, I am supposed to be grading or planning or something. But I love that I am in a trailer and there is a practice field between me and the main building. I love standing on my trailer deck and watch Nature intersect with Man. As I watch, I see several quite large crowd flying around and some land on top of the high building. They are cawing quite loudly. It makes me think of how they symbolize the foretelling of Death. I then think, “Whose death?” My death of a teaching career? The death of certain programs in the school? The death of our principal’s tenure at our school? I am a little ashamed that that may be my favorite. But wait! If I noticed the birds, it is death inside of me. I decide to just wait and see what dies in me. Hopefully it is a death of a distraction/distractions.

Scenario 2; I am in my car, running some errands. I pull out of the Pep Boys parking and onto, what I like to call, “The Mayan Highway.” (I call it this because of its strong Central American influence. I love the experience.) As I accelerate, a lizard lands on the upper part of my windshield. (I am not a reptilian expert so it could be a gecko, salamander or some other lizard.) I find this very weird; I did not pass under trees or wires and no trucks have driven by. But there he is, looking at me through the windshield. I want to stop but I just drive.

I wonder about the significance of these guys. I know about their ability to regenerate severed limbs, like tails. I know biologists test their skin for signs of environmental toxins. I know they are kinda of harmless, unless you are a small bug. And their ability to stick to a windshield.

Sorry, Peter, but I looked up their symbolism. They are good luck. The represent abundance. They are used to warm people about the presence of poisonous snakes. They are thought to be guides to the underworld. They represent a need to pay attention to dreams. You can’t really unlearn that.

I then thought about author Carlos Casteneda. I thought about the lizards with the sewn eyes and lips. I became intrigued and fascinated. I guess I found my beach reading.

Later in the day, I had lunch with my best friend in teaching. We had some barbecue together and it was kinda weird. My friend is always full of energy and laughs. But, today, he was mellow. We talked but it was very quiet and calm. He said he had been fixing stuff and reading. That lead into a short conversation how being around teenagers fosters growth in us teachers. We are teachers AND learners.

I guess just wait and see what the symbols really mean. Maybe the beach will tell me.

I don’t really know where to start on this one. I have been thinking and feeling about this ever since I heard about it. Almost everything I hear about this, as far as solutions, makes me think to myself, “No, that ain’t it.” I guess more accurately I see that their perspective is not my perspective. The question I now ask myself this question; “What is my perspective?”

First, I should tell you about my current situation. I am mathematics teachers at a charter high school under the umbrella of a public school system. The school system is part of the suburbs of a major American city. I teach in a 12 foot by 24 foot trailer in the shadows of four story building. There is no fence between my trailer and the school’s neighborhood. The location of the school and study body is definitely middle class.

Is it safe? Mostly. I have yet to see violence at this school in my three years here, although it occasionally happens. On the other hand, I once read a news report that said a 16-year-old student who was trying to sell some handguns was caught across the street from the school and arrested a few years ago. I am in a place where street guns exist and I teach in a vulnerable physical position. Yet I am not scared. Why? I do not really know. I guess I trust the students and families of the neighborhood.

I have been in worst places. I taught for four years at school in a rough neighborhood that had an armed robbery performed directly across the street from the school and used the school parking lot for the location of the getaway car….during school hours. I taught at a school where a student expressed a desire to copy the Columbine shooting on the anniversary of the Colorado shooting. (Administration got intel on this and put the student on home schooling for a while.) Another kid at this school was gone for three months because he got shot in the butt cheek. (This is the school I graduated from as a youth.) I taught in California, where my bandana in my pocket elicited questions from students of Crips or Bloods, even though one band was yellow and another was purple.

Despite all of this, I feel perfectly fine showing up to school everyday. In fact, I look forward to it. I love my students and I love, or at least like, most of the people I work with. When I try to answer the question for myself about my lack of fear, I come across two things that influence me. First, I have this twisted thing in my psyche that goes something like this; I am scared of the things that I should not be scared of and not scared of things I should be scared of. The other thing that explains part of this comfort I feel is that I feel strongly that I do everything I can do understand what is going on with the people around me. I keeps me feeling safe.

I guess it is part of my survival mode. I grew up as the littlest guy in class. (I am now about 6 feet tall and weigh about 220 pounds.) I had few friends and we lived on the edge of some pretty rough neighborhoods. I heard of guys getting beat up and jumped but I escaped those kind of confrontations. I guess it was my humor. Maybe charm. Maybe being scrawny and shy. Maybe I was just lucky. It certainly wasn’t my toughness.

Anyway, I do feel like we need to hash out a solution to this problem. We  need to do something that makes us feel a little safer. But what? All the solutions I have heard (arming teachers, arming veterans, etc.) are obviously from people that don’t know schools or teachers very well. In the gun debate, I have a tendency to believe that less is better. Don’t worry, Mr. Cat Scratch Fever, I am not advocating taking all your guns. I’m just saying to remove the guns of those meant for a battle field. Or just turn them into harmless toys. You don’t need those just like you don’t need hand grenades and tanks and bazookas.

On a similar note, I love what some high school kids are doing. We have heard for years how we want teenagers to think for themselves. Now, when they do, many people are telling them to be quiet because they are “just kids.” I, on the other hand, I am so proud of them that it almost makes me cry like a proud parent. Kudos to the teachers and parents who taught them so well.

And the solution? In my eyes, we, as adults, need to start paying attention. We need to stop “mailing it in.” Students are pissed and tired of our lame leadership. Why don’t we just sit back and listen to what they have to say. You might be amazed. And not just these brilliant kids on TV. Let’s listen to the disgruntled 9th grader who is failing all his classes. And everyone in between. If we don’t listen and watch them all, who knows where our next shooter may come from. Just watch, listen and act if we have to….Because, at some point, we will be required to take the right action.

Let me take a second run at this. I recently posted my need for participants in my study for my dissertation. Thanks to some comments from some great mentors, I decided to make some adjustments. The process is now simpler and more streamlined, so as to put as little stress on the participant yet still achieve my objective.

Since my last post, I have received great advice, about 75 likes from many geographic places and one verbal commitment from a volunteer, unrelated to this post. So here goes the official recruitment flyer;

Are you a secondary math teacher in the United States?

Are you looking for ways to improve the ways secondary math is taught?

My name is Claudius “Bo” Guynn and I am a PhD student at Saybrook University in Oakland, California. I am doing a dissertation study titled, “Person Centered Teaching in the Classroom.” As part of this study, I need 8 volunteers. They would be trained in psychological methods for classroom methods leading to a greater appreciation of the meaningfulness, usefulness, and joy of mathematics.

If you are interested, please contact me at cguynn@Saybrook.edu and

will share the details of this proposed study.

 

Sincerely,

Claudius L. Guynn IV

 

In addition to this flyer, here is my “flyer from my heart”;

I know you heard it before but America sucks in math education when compared to the rest of the world. In the latest figures (2015), the U.S. is 42^nd out of 72 countries. It is the twelfth country below the word average and their average score is 20 points below the world average. Since the last test, the U. S.’s average dropped 11points.

Have I got your attention? Do you feel the need to improve as a country in math education? I don’t care if it is USA pride or a knowledge that math knowledge leads to better employment prospects. I care that you want to help make a change.

If you want a change, I would think that you would try anything that hasn’t been tried before, as long as it doesn’t take too much of your time and focus. Here is your opportunity; I am a PhD candidate at a prestigious psychology graduate school and I am doing a dissertation study that takes about 5 minutes a workday for about 4 weeks. It is my hope that this takes mathematics to a deeper intellectual level and thereby increases mathematical knowledge retention.

If you a secondary (middle school and high school) mathematics educator, you can help by volunteering. If you are not, you can help by spreading the word to passionate mathematics educators who are looking for a positive change. I need 3 to 8 volunteers to move this forward.

If you think I sound desperate, you are right. If you think I sound passionate about improving the lives of adolescents, you are right. If you think I teach way outside of the box, you are right. I believe in this study and I will do anything I can to complete this study (and finish my PhD.)

If you are interested, just send your email to claudiusguynn@hotmail.com or cguynn@Saybrook.edu.

I know you heard it before but America sucks in math education when compared to the rest of the world. In the latest figures (2015), the U.S. is 42^nd out of 72 countries. It is the twelfth country below the world average and their average score is 20 points below the world average. Since the last test, the U. S.’s average dropped 11 points.

Have I got your attention? Do you feel the need to improve as a country in math education? I don’t care if it is USA pride or a knowledge that math knowledge leads to better employment prospects. I care that you want to help make a change.

If you want a change, I would think that you would try anything that hasn’t been tried before, as long as it doesn’t take too much of your time and focus. Here is your opportunity; I am a PhD candidate at a prestigious psychology graduate school and I am doing a dissertation study that takes about 15-20 minutes a workday for about 4 weeks. It is my hope that this takes mathematics to a deeper intellectual level and thereby increases mathematical knowledge retention.

If you a secondary (middle school and high school) mathematics educator, you can help by volunteering. If you are not, you can help by spreading the word to passionate mathematics educators who are looking for a positive change. I need 3 to 8 volunteers to move this forward.

If you think I sound desperate, you are right. If you think I sound passionate about improving the lives of adolescents, you are right. If you think I teach way outside of the box, you are right. I believe in this study and I will do anything I can to complete this study (and finish my PhD.)

Here are the words of the flyer is used to attract participants;

“Are you a secondary mathematics instructor in the United States?

Are you looking for ways to improve the ways secondary mathematics is taught?

My name is Claudius “Bo” Guynn and I am a PhD student at Saybrook University in Oakland, California. I am doing a dissertation study titled, “Person Centered Teaching in the Classroom.” As part of this study, I need 8 volunteers who would be taught the steps used in dream work. These steps would then be used to provide a foundation for class closings that is intended to lead to deeper immersion into the daily subject matter.

If you are interested, please contact me at cguynn@Saybrook.edu and I will share the details of this proposed study.

Sincerely,

Claudius L. Guynn IV

Saybrook University”

This has been published on a couple of social media pages. What do you think the response was? It was liked by a few dozen people (and I thank you!) and attracted zero participants. Why do you think this happened? Did I only reach people who can do little to help me, like parents and teachers of other disciplines? (It made me think how parents and students may be embracing change far more than educators. Who are really working for here?)  Was I not convincing enough? Possibly.

I can’t help but wonder one thing; Are my readers ready to embrace change, as long as somebody else does it? Is it like the recent school shootings; many people with simple answers to complex questions and others blaming various others?

It is my belief that it does little good to blame people other than myself. Also, I also believe that only complex answers solve complex issues. I know some this seems hypocritical on my part. I am blaming others for not responding. The difference, from my view, is that I am asking the questions so I can solve the problems. I am asking, you, my reader, where I have gone wrong. When I get that feedback, I will work to change it, whatever way I can. All I need is a few people who believe in this.

Christmas morning. Over the years, it has meant many different things to me. Nowadays, it is all about reflection. Where am I and where am I going? Where is my head? More importantly, where is my heart?

On this holiday morning, everything is in my 6-year-old grandson. For the moment, I am inside him and watching him, at the same time. He is me and I am him. I want to be the someone I needed when I was young.

What does he need from me? He needs me to be the best man I can be. He needs a guide. But, more than anything, he needs me to clear a path so he can be the man the Universe intended him to be.

How can I, with my given talents, clear the path for him? The best way I know is to do all I can make our public school system the best it can be. And we have a long way to go. It is, as many of Southern colleagues say, “A hot mess.”

Where do we start? I don’t believe anybody is going to let me change things from the top. Administrators seem scared of my ideas. Mainstream teachers seem to be scared to step aside to see what they are really doing. Many are more concerned with “surviving” until retirement. Some others just see it as a job and don’t want to make any waves. For whatever reasons, there doesn’t seem to be many educators who willing to make a change for the better.

That’s why I want to take my little corner of education and transform it as a model of the right way to education. Maybe someone will notice my ways and want to duplicate it. Maybe someone powerful will pay attention to my research and essays. Maybe I will get the opportunity to teach teachers my unusual but effective ways. I don’t care how it happens, as long as positive change happens. Admittedly, I am always looking for my own educational and teaching freedom.

I see kids on the verge of dropping out. I see kids getting pushed out the door. I see kids transferring to home schooling. I write letters to help kids get into private schools. I understand their motives. But I can’t understand why we can’t fix public schools so they don’t want to leave. It seems we are too busy acting like a government agency instead of a service for the general population, paid by the general population, to improve the general population.

Of course, I am off to a rough start; I teach in a 12 foot by 24 foot trailer called a few “portable classroom.” I rather refer to it as a “Learning Chateau.” And I feel a little scared to do anything different because I was recently suspended for protecting some students. Despite these factors, I want public schools safe and productive by the time my dear grandson, and kids his age, get to public high schools. I want to do that for all kids of his age. (Ones like little Hudson, Travis?!)

I do this because I love and care for my grandson and I love and care about all the students I have taught over the years. For many of them, I felt like I was the only one that cared deeply about their success. A few even referred to me as “Dad.” I guess I am just doing what is expected by my “family.”

The following blog was written a couple of years ago. I published it and removed it. I removed it because I felt unsafe publishing it. I feared that it was too close to my suspension and it would lead to another suspension. I feel better about that now. The student has not had contact with me since then and, honestly, not much has changed. Hopefully, we are paying better attention to incidents like this. maybe we are not. Anyway, it is a story that needs to be shared.

I have been working on my dissertation for several years now. I am pursuing a PhD in psychology and my dissertation focuses on using psychology to teach high school mathematics. Through my research, I constantly see arguments for a connection between education and psychology. It has been mostly theoretical…until recently.

Brittney (a pseudonym) has been a student in my class for most of this academic year. She is a very intense and smart girl. She often announces how immature some of her classmates are. She calls out classmates when they play their iPods too loud in class.

Many times in class, Brittney would get worked up about something and I would try to calm her down. I was usually successful. Some other days I would notice her agitation when she arrived in class. I would pull her aside and ask her what was going on. She would start to tell me that she was having trouble with another teacher. After a few of these conversations, she asked if she could talk to me during her next class. After finding out that it was gym class, I agreed that she could come talk to me. (Of course, I checked with her gym teacher and he assured me that it was okay.)

It started as a tutorial of the mathematics she had missed from being absent in a class or two. It soon morphed into a venting session for her. It was all about a disagreeable teacher of hers. She then reported the details of her negative interaction of her and this unnamed teacher. My sense of the situation was that this teacher was a “my way or the highway” type of teacher. I recognize this type of teacher because I have sometimes been that type of teacher. It was obvious to me that this didn’t ride well with little Britt. Her response was to shut up and do it the teacher’s way. The result was having her teacher calling her parents. According to Britt, she did some things that were not within class rules. However, when the teacher called home, the small violations were fabricated (Brittney’s thoughts) into bigger violations than they were. According to Brittney, they were lies. So now she had to explain herself to her mother. I got the sense that her mother was just as intense as she was. Brittney felt trapped between two angry adults. As a result, she often would vent in my classroom, with no one else around except me, her and occasionally her sister. I would just let her say everything on her mind until she ran out of steam. I would occasionally give her advice or encouragement. At the end, I would ask, “Is it all out?” She would smile and say, “Yeah. I feel better now. Thank you, Mr. Guynn.” I would then walk her to class in the gym.

Things seemed to be getting better. Then one day it didn’t. I saw her one day as I passed through the gym. She was quite agitated. I tapped her on the shoulder and motioned her to try to calm down. She never indicated she felt my presence. She was deeply involved in some drama. I haven’t seen her since. She contacted me, via email, about some make up work but nothing else. She was soon dropped from my class.

Are you thinking what I am thinking? My conclusion was, and is, that Brittney was pushed to the edge of her anger. Whether her stories were true, doesn’t matter. Her anger was real and I am convinced of that. She could not lash out towards them so released all that anger on a student who, in Brittney’s mind, was antagonizing her.

That I was not able to talk to her about this, kinda breaks my heart. I have felt this heartbreak before as a high school teacher. It doesn’t make it easier. I hope for the best and worry about the worst for her.

Yesterday, I had the following conversation with a trusted colleague;

Colleague: …I just lost two kids to the nastiness of small town drama. Ugh.

Me: So sorry! I recently lost one because she took out her rage for a teacher by beating the crap out of another student. (The other student was hospitalized.)

C: Wow. What the hell are we doing?

M: The bad part is that I may be the only one that made that connection. Not a counselor, not the offending teacher, not the parent. I don’t think it’s what we are doing but what we’re not doing; paying attention and communicating!

C: Amen my friend.

 

Amen, indeed!

For a few years now, I have been trying to combine the two worlds of dreaming and teaching. Each are great teachers of who I am and how the world works. These topics are what my psychology degree is about. However, I never really imagined them coming together there way they did while I slept the other night.

About fifteen years ago, my wife was really concerned about my explosive and destructive anger. Through a series of events, I taught myself meditation and it was a game-changer; my anger and its episodes were greatly reduced and my wife could tell immediately on days that I did not meditate. But there was another bonus to meditation; when I meditated, I made the greatest discoveries and had the greatest ideas when I was meditating. Over the years since then, I turned to many other versions that gave me more awareness about what goes inside my psyche. In 2009, Jungian dream work found me. It has been the most powerful thing that has ever happened to me. It has led down roads I would have never gone down. It has made me learn things about me that I would have never otherwise learned. And, guess what? It has given me the greatest ideas about how to lead my life as a human and to become the best teacher I can be. I had one of those ideas on Saturday morning.

Allow me to back up a bit. I am a high school mathematics teacher with about a dozen years of experience. I am always looking for ways to become a better teacher. When I first became a teacher in 2000, I was instructed by an administrator that my classes should be designed with a four-part plan in mind. During my teaching career, I have been resistant to many educational ideas. This is not one of those times; the part lesson plan is a great template for designing a daily class. What are the four parts? The first 15% is a warm up exercise, the next 35% is teaching, the following 35% is practice and the last 15% of the time is closing exercise that gives everyone feedback about how much they learned. I have used this template for 12 years of teaching. However, I use this varies from other teachers. In my research and teaching, I have changed the opening, tested its effectiveness in a research project. I am convinced it is an improvement. I am now writing a proposal to correct the flaws with a closing exercise. my experience with this idea tells me that my idea is an improvement but it is also a work in progress. I believe it has great potential.

But what about the middle parts? Are they fine they way they are? Well, yes and no. The teaching portion of classes has plenty of research and support. In my experience, education journals and classrooms are full of great ideas on how to present any mathematical concepts. Therefore, it is my belief that these ideas can work for people that want to learn these concepts. What I am saying is that these do not need to change this portion of teaching.

However, the practice part, and its transition from the teaching, is ineffective. In my opinion, that is the reason that many schools educate the upper echelon of students are well-educated in mathematics and the rest are not. Not only that but bright students believe that they are poor students and “cannot do math.” In this part of a math lesson, the is when teachers give classwork/homework. It makes me think of Finland education. They eliminated homework and they went from having mediocre achievement to having the highest achievement in the world. There are studies that say homework is ineffective in high school. Teachers see it as practice at refining skills and students see it as busy work. Who is right in this debate?

Back to my dream. Maybe it presented me with a possible answer. Here is description of what I reported in my dream journal; “As I wake up, I have thoughts about the pattern of Sunday School and Church; Sunday School is about gaining knowledge and Church is about gaining inspiration. Why can’t this be a pattern for teaching and learning? Deliver the information and then feel the knowledge!” As I thought about this idea, I thought about where teaching was effective and why was it such a surprise. For example, the idea of the “dumb jock.” These are guys who are absolutely the worst example of a student. A bad example because they are uncomfortable in the classroom but geniuses in their playing venue. Math is logic and they suck in class. However, they play basketball or football or soccer and they can read a complex defense in a flash. How can this be? In my view, because they feel every success and every failure. When they succeed, they are Superman. When they are wrong, these athletes are embarrassed and beaten.

So how can we translate this to the classroom? Or the board room? Or the workplace? We can translate this by discovering that we need to find the student a way to FEEL what we are teaching them. We need to find ways to replace classwork and homework with something we can feel. What does this look like? I don’t know yet. I need to investigate ways that inspire and helps the student to feel what I am teaching. I need to know that we all have different feelings. I need to know that it is hard for some people to feel anything at all. The learning has to become emotional, for me and them. Can we sing the concept? Can we dance the concept? Can we rhyme the concept? Can we emotionally express the concept? Can we see they concept as someone who will not talk to us? How do we get them to speak or communicate? When we can answer these questions, we then know a way to feel the concepts we are teaching. That is now my goal. It won’t be easy but at least I have an idea of where I need to go.