"Jimmy Chan"

I first met Jimmy in a colleague's tenth grade Health class. One of the key tricks in her toolbox is using fictional situations to help students get over the embarrassing parts of her course to move right to thinking through what to do in some tough situations. Jimmy and George and Gloria and Eugene (and a few others) regularly turned up in her class as students who were encountering a typical teenage difficulty. Class discussions focused on giving advice to these "extra" members of class.

Jimmy first showed up in one of my classes when I was stuck for a way to explain the word "taboo" to a class of ninth-graders. "...So there's this kid named Jimmy, and he comes to class naked. That would be 'taboo'. Not to mention instant suspension." Somehow Jimmy often returned our class, albeit still invisible, and still nude. Mostly he came up in those moments when students toss out anything they can think of to avoid the day's lesson. "Mr P, when did you first meet Jimmy? Doesn't he EVER wear clothes? Why are you friends with a naked kid? Isn't that breaking some law?"

Then, at my new school, working with middle schoolers, something changed. Jimmy took on a new life, one that did not focus on a lack of clothing: he became a fully fledged imaginary friend. He grew a last name - Chan - AND a full Chinese name. He's written sample essays for my English classes, but he's still most prominent in lessons on health and relationships in Moral Education. I found out from my students that he has a girlfriend, Gloria Ng. They met outside of a school bathroom. She smokes, but he's a star athlete and doesn't touch cigarettes. He stands up against bullies, but once got a beating for his efforts.

Some of the students here still believe my initial introduction, that he's actually a student at my old school. Jimmy has even been seen a few times, and one day when the students were socializing in my room during a recess they drew his image. Apparently, he looks a lot like the demon from "Death Note".

What's the educational insight from Jimmy Chan? Damned if I can connect him to anything I ever learned in teacher training, or read about on somebody's blog. And I don't think that any of the teacher appraisal systems I've seen have a category on "Makes Up Good Stories" or "Has Extensive Set of Imaginary Colleagues". But despite all that, I think that my ability to bring a class of students with me on an imaginary tale is one tiny part of what makes me effective in the classroom.

Telling stories is all about manipulating the mental space of the classroom. If you can take the kids with you on an imaginary journey to meet this guy named Jimmy, if kids ask you about him in the halls, if they become invested enough in this imaginary friend to draw him on the board during their free time, then something has happened. The collective group becomes willing to try new things in lessons. You gain more power when you ask a class "close your eyes and imagine you're in Feudal Europe." (Post on my four-hour simulation of feudalism coming next...)

So next time you finish a lesson five minutes too soon, introduce your class to a Jimmy Chan. Give them a few broad brushstrokes, let them flesh your friend out. Don't worry - while he is an extra student, he won't add to your marking load...and you just might find that he helps your class learn a few unexpected lessons along the way.

Annual Report, 2007

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Here's my entry to Dan's design contest: 2007 as viewed through the lens of television.

And here are some thoughts about making these images...

The idea came together when I was miles above the earth somewhere over Siberia. Even though I was seriously sleep-deprived, it instantly made me smile. My graphics don't really pack a whole lot of information into them, but they do tell two different stories - my physical journeys, and my television consumption from the year - and I'm pleased with that.

It was pretty clear to me as I conceived of the theme that I don't have the design skills necessary to make this set of images as sharp as I would wish. I think if I had more data / time / skillz I could have pulled more information into the arc of my story. Knowing that wouldn't happen, I focused on communicating the core storyline. I kept my fingers crossed that my design wouldn't look like something a middle schooler would make, and I think I did manage to do that..barely.

But man, I would love to know how to do something like the first graphic by Mr K; it took me forever on Excel to get the color bands inside the television the appropriate respective size. And what a crappy looking TV...mebbe I should've taken a photo and edited it? What's salving my ego is that I know I've got a clever storyline, something completely different to the other entries.

Well, thanks for another thought-provoking competition, Dan!

Caution: Post May Contain Resolution-Type Substances

Well, I'm back in HK. And guess it's appropriate to post some type of New Year's Resolution-ish thoughts...it wouldn't have been right to have any resolution-type thoughts while I was still in the US of A, on holiday.

Had a fun return trip...fun if you enjoy not sleeping for about 48 hours and after all that getting home to find that the door to your flat is stuck and won't open. It took an hour for me to find someone to help. The locksmith showed up, busted out some WD-40, and presto! I was home, how anticlimactic.

Slept about 10 hours, through the night, a good sign that my TradeMarked FailSafe Jet-Lag Solution will work. (It's simple - just switch your sleep cycle to the new time zone starting 24 hours before you fly). Woke up and went for a run - how's that for a good start to the new year? During said run, at 8am on a Sunday morning, I had to dodge bazillions of pedestrians, people walking in droves to the HK Stadium. How's that for a welcome back to HK?

I came back and drafted out a nice long to-do list. Four different categories: Pleasure, Pain, Work, and Shopping. I think it'd be a good thing to do, to keep up with those different lists and try to monitor how much I do on each one.

Priority Items for the week:
Work: Mark Papers; Prepare students for Semester Exam
Pleasure: Complete an entry to Dan Meyer's latest design contest.
Pain: Run/Swim twice more this week, Stay Away From Cigarettes
Shopping: Get some double-A batteries. I'm all out!

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I'll be back up in the next week or so to share that entry to the design contest. It's grabbed my brain by the horns and won't let go!

Would you hire this explorer?

Last month I started a file with International Schools Services (ISS), one of two leading recruiting agencies for (would you believe it) international schools. It's the sort of thing that you have to do if you're thinking about moving across the world, from HK to, say, Luxembourg. Or wherever.

So, here's one of the essays I wrote for that application.

What do you think - would you hire me? What do I sound like?

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Narrative I: Please write a statement describing the personal and professional qualifications and experience you have that will enable you to be successful in an international school overseas. (200-400 words - not to exceed one page)

Name: Jeff Pierce

I often wonder what is different about me, what is special. I grew up in a two-story yellow-brick house on the north side of Columbus, Ohio, spent my summers playing baseball, my autumns rooting for the hometown football team, and winters indoors shooting hoops. But then at 20 years old I crossed the Atlantic to volunteer at an orphanage in Morocco, and two years later I went the other direction, across the Pacific, to begin my teaching career at an international school in Hong Kong. And I’ve done very well overseas, adapting quickly to two very different settings and to lifestyles completely foreign to anything I experienced growing up. What personal qualities have helped me to not only survive but thrive in an international setting? Wow, what a question…

The short answer is that I’ve always been an explorer. I’ve always wanted to find out more. The same impulse that caused six year-old Jeff to pick up rocks to see what new creature would scurry away also made it hard to say no to an offer to move across an ocean. That spirit of exploration sustains me, making every day in a foreign country an adventure, a chance to taste a new food, learn a new word or make a new friend.

And that same spirit of exploration drives me forward in my professional pursuits. No lesson is ever the same the next time you teach it. Every class has its own special character, every student responds to the class dynamic and to the texts in a unique way. How could an explorer not love this job?

In addition to the ever-changing classroom dynamic, teachers must be life-long learners. In four years on the job, I have participated in the following diverse workshops / trainings: a creative writing course for teachers, the Klingenstein Summer Institute for promising young educators, an Understanding by Design workshop led by Jay McTighe, MYP Level 1 Training in both Humanities and Language A, and the Learning 2.0 Conference, exploring the future of technology in education.

While I love all the new adventures both overseas and in the classroom, I do all this without forgetting that I am paid to teach my students, that they have skills they need to acquire. My job is quite simple: help my students become better learners than they were when they entered my class in August.

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PS I'm a bit antsy about posting this - don't want a potential employer / ISS / a dishonest teaching rogue to find this page and get into any sorts of complications. I suppose that probably somewhere in the fine print of my application to ISS I might have easily signed off on being allowed to republish this essay in any format.

But...what is the point of the interwebs if I can't share this online?!

Middle School / Sex Ed

All I'll say regarding an apology for being quiet so long is that, like so many other teachers, I've just not been making the time to sit down and reflect on what's going on.

But then on Friday I wanted my 7th graders to spend some time reflecting on what I'd taught them in Moral Education about Sex and Relationships. And, the best way to get 18 twelve year-olds to do something quiet like write or read for an extended period of time is for the teacher to do it, too. So, I sat down with them to write out my own reflection on the unit. Here it is.

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I learned...
"Normal is different for everyone." That's the main point of a sex-ed video we watched together, and it really is true. Some of these 7th graders are already acting out on their crushes and dating and kissing, but they won't hold hands in school. The 8th graders, well, are some of them experimenting with anything further than that? Probably. 6th graders...wow, they're really still in primary, still for the most part oblivious to it all.

Another eye opener is how much talking about sex embarrasses them. Can't get through a single lesson without at some point the class dissolving into laughter. I will never forget about the stories they came up with when I introduced our two imaginary classmates, Jimmy Chan and Gloria Ng, so that we could talk about specific situations without putting anyone on the spot. The students decided that they met outside of the restroom. Huh? Then, there was the time I asked them if they thought that Jimmy & Gloria should think about having sex. K__ shouted out at the top of his lungs "YES!", then fell out of his chair because he was laughing so hard.

But they aren't just embarrassed in front of the opposite sex. For about 20 minutes one lesson we split into boys and girls, and the boys went nuts. One of them brought up masturbation - in Canto slang, "shooting the airplane". The whole 20 minutes was spent with them laughing and making "firing" motions from their crotch.

I have to come to the conclusion that with this age group, there's really no possibility of a serious conversation about sex, at least not in a group setting. The point of the unit needs to be to give them answers to the questions they aren't willing to ask in front of their peers, or, as Doc J, my 12th grade religion & moral ed teacher always said, "Give answers to the questions they aren't asking yet".

In their journals, and one on one, they're willing to ask more of the questions that they won't share in front of their peers. We're moving on from sex ed to other topics - right now it's something brief on families - but I'll always let them ask questions about the topics we've already discussed. So I'll wait and see if any of our previous topics, like smoking or drugs or sex ed, come up throughout the rest of the year.

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To any readers - what do you think? Does my approach sound right? Do you have any recollections from middle school, that twisted and confusing time, that jibe with what I'm saying here?

Cheers!