I like technology, but I don’t like being hacked.

I mean, Who do these people think they are? And what’s the point, exactly, of hacking my professional blog and my class website?

Don’t they know I’m a teacher?

Yes, both this site and iseroma.com, my class website, were hacked multiple times over the past three weeks.

Not fun at all. The malware destroyed Iserotope’s RSS feed and linked the site to Canadian pharmacy advertisements. Then, over at iseroma.com, a different strain made it impossible to access the site at all.

All told, despite my above-average tech skills, I ended up having to hire a professional to clean up my websites.

Argh!

The good news is that it looks like everything is cleaned up now. Plus, I’ve added additional security so that (hopefully) this doesn’t happen again.

I know that some of you reported “weird” and “funky” things happening over the past few weeks, so I thank you for your patience as I figured it all out.

Update, February 27: It looks like the problem continues when accessing the site on phones and tablets. Please let me know at markisero AT lhssf DOT org. Let’s take care of these hackers!

Update, March 4: Thanks to Laura, I think I have nailed these suckers. I am hopeful that we won’t have any more problems. 

 I don’t believe in teacher movies. You know them: Dead Poets Society, Dangerous Minds, Mr. Holland’s Opus, Freedom Writers, and Stand and Deliver, to name a few.

Even when they’re accurate (which is almost never), these movies send the wrong message: that if you’re a (usually white) teacher who really cares, you can get your students to do extraordinary things (while being a martyr, too).

We all know things don’t quite work that way.

Progress is slow. Growth takes time. Breakthroughs are few and far between.

Most of the time, we see success only after the fact — at a graduation ceremony, or when students visit us many years after taking our class. Feel-good, movie-worthy moments rarely happen in real time.

That’s why the other day was special. A student texted me for help on her essay. She was stuck on understanding the passage’s syntax and didn’t know how to find solid evidence.

For the first hour, we texted back and forth. Texting, of course, is not the best medium for deep teaching and learning. But I was surprised how horribly we communicated with each other. I didn’t understand what she was trying to say. She thought I was being snarky. At one point, the exchange even got testy.

But I knew that I had to stay in, that I couldn’t let my student go. So I gave up on my frustration and tried a different tack. We agreed to cool off and try again later on Google Docs. (Believe me, at this point, talking on the phone likely would have made things worse.)

Once on Google Docs, we quickly got some momentum. The interface offers three discourse spaces at once: informal conversation in the chat window, academic dialogue in the comments, and student work in the essay window.

We had a good flow going for more than an hour. My student had persevered and gotten past the most challenging parts of her essay. The road looked clear. And then it happened.

She asked me what I thought about a specific piece of evidence she’d selected. Although it wasn’t horrible, it wasn’t too strong, so I told her so. I wasn’t even mean about it.

But my criticism set her off. In the chat window, she wrote that she was giving up, that there was no point to all this work, and that every time she worked hard, I shot her down.

I could have gotten defensive. I could have told her she was acting irrational.

Instead, I took a deep breath. And then I wrote, “I’m still here.”

There was a very long pause. Yes, I felt like I was in my own movie. I half expected Google Docs to tell me my student had signed off.

But instead — luckily, I think — my student responded, “OK, let’s go.”

And then we spent another finishing up her piece.

In her reflection afterward, my student wrote: “In the end, I finally pulled through. I think that I need to fix how I give up so easily when things don’t go my way. I just need to fight through.” 

 I’m not at a 1:1 school. Far from it.

Our school has no laptops, no tablets. There’s a computer lab downstairs, but that is shared with everyone, so you can use it every three weeks or so.

I used to collect old desktop computers. At one point, there were 12 computers in my classroom, thanks to donors. It was impressive. But they took up a lot of space.

In small classrooms, mobile devices rule. I’ve written grant proposals for laptops and netbooks. (I don’t believe in tablets.) So far, I’ve had no luck.

So I’m stuck with one computer in my classroom for student use. It’s a great machine. But when there are 23 students wanting to type and revise their essays, one computer just does not suffice.

The good news is that my students are getting better and better at using their phones as mini-computers. And technology is catching up, too, and bringing more functionality to smaller screens.

Google announced today some significant improvements to Google Docs on Android. Because my entire writing program is based on Google Docs, and because many of my students already use their phones for academic work, this update — which allows for full collaboration — is a big deal. Take a look.

Of course, writing on your phone is far from ideal. I find that students make many more errors when drafting on their phones. In addition, revision is more difficult because it’s harder to see the entire document and its organization. Nevertheless, I’m impressed with what my students can do.

Given the state’s budget cuts to education, it doesn’t look like my school will be getting huge numbers of computers anytime soon. But the good news is that more than 90 percent of my students have fairly sophisticated phones. So I’m pleased that phones can serve as a makeshift substitute.

I hope that phone technology will continue to improve. Maybe the next steps are pico projectors (to display a larger screen) and virtual laser keyboards (for easier typing).

And while the techies are doing that, maybe they could throw in a built-in printer, too? 

 Last Tuesday, the San Francisco Board of Education unanimously voted to renew Leadership High School’s charter for the next five years.

The 7-0 vote was unprecedented and demonstrated the Board’s confidence in the school’s track record. The renewal championed the democratic process. After all, charter schools are public schools and are accountable by law to their districts.

Don’t say this, though, to the California Charter Schools Association, which publicly called for the closure of Leadership High School in December.

Just in case the SFUSD Board did not receive its first memo, the CCSA made sure last Tuesday — on the day of the vote — to send Superintendent Carlos Garcia and the Board a seven-page letter advocating the school’s closure.

Here is the introduction to the last-minute letter:

We understand that the Board of Education of the San Francisco Unified School District will be considering the renewal of the Leadership High charter petition (Charter) today. We urge you to consider data related to the Charter’s poor academic performance, as explained more fully below, and deny the Charter renewal.

CCSA senior vice presidents Gary Borden and Myrna Castrejon go on to provide tables and charts explaining their rationale. At one point, they ask the Board to consider the organization’s own metrics of performance rather than relying on state law:

We recommend that the district take into account CCSA’s data analysis because current statutory renewal eligibility requirements do not provide an adequate evaluation of a charter school’s academic performance.

At the end of the letter, however, Borden and Castrejon reverse themselves and call on the superintendent and commissioners to act in order to preserve state law:

Ultimately, the intent of the Charter Schools Act cannot be fulfilled if charter schools do not improve pupil learning and increase learning opportunities for all pupils.

This extraordinary last-minute letter did nothing to sway the commissioners. In fact, the CCSA’s strategy backfired. President Norman Yee suggested that CCSA staff members should consider visiting the school themselves. Even more striking, Commissioner Jill Wynns, who does not support charter schools on principle, also voted yes to the renewal. In fact, Wynns said she would normally be inclined not to vote for renewal but did not appreciate CCSA’s political attack.

I am proud of the SFUSD Board of Education for doing its job — for visiting Leadership High School, considering the experiences of students and parents, and doing the necessary research to make an informed decision.

It is true that not all charter schools are performing well, and some deserve to close. Nevertheless, the CCSA’s approach is needlessly aggressive and reckless. Instead of issuing public calls for closure and sending last-minute letters to encourage district boards of education to close down schools, the CCSA should honor current law and the accountability process that currently exists. 

 One of my favorite ways to improve students’ reading skills, to expand their background knowledge, and to teach current events is through Kelly Gallagher’s Article of the Week.

In Mr. Gallagher’s assignment, students get one article each Monday to read, annotate, and respond to.

But what happens if your students ask for more articles to read (or you want them to read more)?

One idea is to provide your students with newspapers and magazines in the classroom. This is wonderful but expensive. Another option is to introduce your students to Google Reader. This takes a significant investment in technology.

But if you keep a class website or blog, an easy way to increase your students’ access to high-quality articles is by adding a Diigo Enhanced Linkroll on your sidebar as a widget.

If you haven’t used Diigo before, you should check it out. It’s a wonderful social bookmarking and research tool that lets you save articles, annotate them, and share them with groups.

To the left is a screenshot of part of my current Diigo linkroll on iseroma.com, my class blog. I call it “Read This Now!”

You’ll see that there’s a link to an article and a short description, which I’ve written to spark student interest.

This makes sharing interesting articles easy. All I need to do is read like normal. (I read a lot online.) When I find an article that I think students would like, I add a little blurb and make sure to tag it correctly so that it appears automatically in my class blog.

Now if you don’t use Diigo, or you think it’s too complicated, you can always do something similar by adding an RSS feed into your class blog’s sidebar. Some people use Evernote, while others prefer Google Reader (or a read-it-later service, or even ifttt.com). But the problem with RSS feeds, especially on WordPress blogs, is that you can’t (as far as I know) add text to items. That’s why I prefer Diigo.

This is a new feature on iseroma.com, so I don’t know if students will like it or how exactly how I’ll use it. But I believe deeply that students need tons of high-quality text around them to read, and “Read This Now!” is just another idea to get good reading material to them.

If you’d like more details about how to use Diigo, let me know, or check out this how-to video. 

 I’ve written before that the Kindle Touch is the best Kindle for students. But for me, I’m sticking with my trusty Kindle 3 (now known as the Kindle Keyboard).

Why? Here are three reasons I’m staying away from the Kindle Touch:

1. The touch capability decreases immersive reading. The whole point of the Kindle is to promote deep reading with no distractions. That’s why I don’t even try to read on my iPad. (That’s also why the Kindle Fire is not a true reading device.) Even though you can’t do too much with the Kindle Touch’s interactive display, there’s still the chance for distraction. By having to touch the screen to advance pages, the link between you and the author is interrupted.

2. There’s no shortcut for text-to-speech. One of my favorite things to do is to listen to current events on my Kindle during my morning commute. With the Kindle Keyboard, starting up the text-to-speech feature is a snap: Just press Shift-Sym. With the Kindle Touch, however, there are three steps, which makes things much harder when backing up on my driveway.

3. The speakers on the Kindle Touch aren’t as loud. Several people disagree with me on this point, particularly after the Kindle Touch’s 5.0.3 update. But I confirmed with an Amazon representative that the speakers on the Touch are not as loud as those on the Kindle Keyboard. Again, this limits my ability to listen to the Kindle in the car. When plugged into the auxiliary port, the Touch’s maximum volume does not get loud enough for me to hear when I’m driving on the freeway.

Yes, these are pretty small reasons to prefer the Kindle Keyboard over the Kindle Touch. (They make me seem more like a listener than a reader.) And, I must say, there are many things that the Kindle Touch does better — like looking up words and highlighting. That’s why it’s the best device for my students. But for me, who loves the text-to-speech feature, I’m sticking with the Kindle Keyboard…for now. 

 The San Francisco Board of Education voted last Tuesday to renew Leadership High School’s charter through 2017.

Here are three reasons why it was a big deal.

1. The vote was unanimous. All seven commissioners warmly praised the school. Even Commissioner Jill Wynns, who usually opposes charter schools, voted for the measure.

2. The vote was in support of students of color and students who will be the first in their families to graduate from college. The Board recognized the school’s track record in preparing students for higher education. More than 80 percent of LHS students are African American or Latino, and more than 80 percent will be the first in their families to graduate from college. More than 90 percent of students go to college.

3. The vote championed the local democratic process. Instead of paying attention to the California Charter School Association’s misguided public call for the school’s closure, the commissioners did their own research and listened carefully to their constituents. Five out of seven Board members visited the school. It was clear that all of them read parent and student letters. In other words, the Board did not succumb to nasty politics and instead weighed the school’s charter proposal on its merits.

I am proud to teach in San Francisco. The Board did the right thing on Tuesday. With its unanimous vote, it sent a strong message that educating youth is more than just producing high test scores. It’s also about building character and preparing students to transform themselves and their communities. 

 It’s pretty amazing what happens when students work with me one on one.

Their learning is accelerated. Their learning is deeper.

Yesterday, a student and I spent 10 minutes at Lunch on basic math skills. He’s trying to pass the California High School Exit Examination (CAHSEE). We added fractions and dealt with decimals. Years of math phobia, anguish, and avoidance disappeared. Together, we got past his shame. It was wonderful.

So was the 10 minutes I spent yesterday after school with a student on her grammar. Not only did she fix every single grammar error in her essay, but she also learned about run-on sentences and the serial comma. We even had time to study for today’s quiz — on which she earned a perfect score.

These little vignettes remind me of three things:

1. Teaching and learning are easy and fun given time, space, and relationship.

2. We need to invest much more money and many more resources into after-school tutoring.

3. I need to figure out a way to encourage more of my students to work with me one on one.

I really can’t figure out #3. My students know that it’s beneficial to come after school. But they, in general, don’t show up. This year, I don’t have the capacity to do a mandatory after-school program. Even if I did, I’m unsure about whether I’m philosophically in favor of such an approach, particularly with older students. It’s definitely something I need to think more about.

Please let me know your thoughts and ideas. 

Mike, Monae. Photo by Jessica Gammell.

 Leadership High School’s charter was renewed tonight for the next five years by the San Francisco Unified School District Board of Education.

The vote for renewal was a unanimous 7-0.

The school met with controversy in December when a state association called for the school’s closure.

School board commissioners praised the school for its commitment to providing a rigorous academic experience for all students, most of whom will be the first in their families to attend college.

Several students, parents, and teachers spoke out in favor of charter renewal and wrote letters of support. Special thanks go to Executive Director Elizabeth Rood, who spearheaded the campaign for charter renewal.

For more information, check out this press release and this article from The San Francisco Examiner. In addition, check out this blog post from The San Francisco Chronicle. 

 I think I’ve figured out the starkest difference between my students and those who perform better academically.

My students don’t always turn in their assignments.

I’m not talking about little assignments, like classwork. In fact, my students work harder in class than many suburban kids.

No, I’m talking about essays, projects — big assignments.

When I collect AP practice essays every other Thursday, I typically receive 21 or 22 out of 23. There are always one or two excuses, one or two emergencies, one or two instances of things coming up.

Some teachers would call this turn-in rate a success. I don’t. After all, students have several days (and many opportunities of support) to complete their essays. In addition, my students are just a few months away from enrolling in college, and as far as I know, if you don’t turn in assignments in college, you generally don’t pass classes.

I’m really worried that many of my students will receive Fs next year because they haven’t internalized how crucial it is to turn in all their assignments on time.

The problem is, They’ve missed assignments in high school and have gotten by. Their teachers have offered them deals. Some teachers, citing standard-based assessment, don’t give zeroes for missing work.

I understand that things happen and that students need extra chances, particularly in the earlier grades. That’s why our Humanities department last year agreed on a late work policy that becomes more strict from ninth to twelfth grade. (This year, the policy was suspended by the administration.)

Whatever the approach, we need to tell our students how important it is to follow through, to honor their commitments. Life moves forward, and in general, you can’t get on a time machine to correct your past mistakes.