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    I’m staring into the glass-smooth surface of my best friend’s swimming pool. It is June, the most wonderful month of the year, the month in which school stops and summer begins. June, pool, best friend, swimming pool. How could anyone possibly have a problem?

    And yet, I do. And the problem can be summed up in one other word: boyfriend.

    Let’s examine the word “boyfriend.”  What are its major components? “Boy”—an immature, underdeveloped youth of the male persuasion—and “friend”, a word used to describe a companion, somebody with whom you share mutual affection and trust. Can those two things truly blend together?

    Unfortunately, I am starting to find out. But let me start at the beginning: I am a self-described geek, I live with my dad (a Star Trek geek and scientist) and I was totally happy to keep to myself, play with my robot, and date any cute boy who thought he could talk me into sin. Most of them figured out that I was better at talking than they were, so the sin didn’t happen, which was very frustrating for them and led to some hot rumors about me being a lesbian. This was mostly because I started to hang out with Becca Gallagher, a new girl who spikes her hair and tweaks the nipples of any guy who gives her grief. But the lesbian thing is not true, as my current boyfriend, Fletcher, will tell you. And there’s that word again.

       In our freshman year, Becca came to Green Pines High school, home of the Puking Panthers football team.  I suspected that Becca was unique the minute I saw the huge dragon tattoo that covers the outside of her entire left calf, and I wasn’t wrong about that; we started the Queen Geek Social Club because she wanted to “find others of our kind.” Why? Because Becca has a thing for global domination, and she thought that if we started a club, we’d be able to amass enough girl bodies to storm the White House and effect great social change—okay, really, it was all about Twinkies. We collected Twinkies to send to super skinny super models, this got us on television, and from there we sort of took over the school dance, which went from being a lame event with papier mache palm trees to an unforgettable night of piracy, plunder, and one of those kisses that is simply etched in your memory. The kiss belonged to me, and to Fletcher, the aforementioned boyfriend.

     I should clarify that the boyfriend thing didn’t happen right away. Our relationship actually started with me beating him about the head and shoulders with a pillow. I know that sounds kind of mean, but actually, in context, it makes lots of sense. I had met a Norwegian guy at a bowling alley, dropped a ball on his foot, thought he liked me, but then, when we went on a date, he brought a girl. Fletcher happened to be in the car with all of us; he was just one of those casualties of war they’re always talking about. I don’t think the pillow thing inflicted any permanent damage, although he does twitch when we sit on the sofa.

     My trauma involving the word “boyfriend” begins June 12, the day after senior graduation, the official start of my official sophomore year. Becca and I  are at Becca’s mansion (and I’m not kidding about that), lounging around her pool as the late afternoon Southern California sun peeks out from behind a cloud. It’s really too cold to be swimming, but it’s the principle of the thing. It’s summer. We’ve gotta swim, even if we look like we’re wearing goose pimple bikinis.

     “If you want my opinion—” Becca starts.

     “I don’t.”

     She ignores me as if her heavy-duty sunglasses block sound as well as light. “If you want my opinion, I think you’re afraid.”

    I rub suntan lotion on my pasty legs even though I feel like I should be looking for a parka.   “Afraid of what?”

     She takes off the sunglasses, sits up in her lounge chair, and fixes me with an “oh, please” stare. Her short-cropped, bleached hair stands up in lots of individual spikes, and the tips are currently dyed royal blue, one of our school colors. “Afraid of actually being with someone who might be right for you.”

     “That doesn’t even make sense,” I mutter, trying to distract myself by vigorously rubbing lotion between my toes. Has anyone ever had sunburned toes?

    “No?” She stretches and squints sideways at me. “Here’s what I think. You like being a loner. You don’t want some perfect guy messing that up.”

     “Perfect!” I snort. “He’s about as far from perfect as—well—as anyone.” I don’t know how anyone can be expected to defend bad dating choices while wearing a bikini in sub-Arctic weather. Instead of listening, I decide to count the number of tiles on the bottom of her pool.

     Becca knocks on my head with a toy shark grabber stick. “Hello! Are you paying any attention?”

     “Sure I am.” That’s a lie. I’m desperately trying not to pay attention, actually. Why would I do this to my best friend? Because I don’t want to have this conversation.

October 2007
	Cover Story

A Counselor’s Tale

Even first-year educators have rights

Back to In Your Corner

Guidance counselor Jean Maynard knew she was in trouble when her principal told her she needed to reschedule her evaluation meeting so her union rep could be there. The only reason the principal would want a union rep present was to satisfy the contract requirement of union representation at a meeting involving discipline.

“I was a nervous wreck. I thought, ‘What have I done?’” she recalls. “I was expecting bad news going. But I didn’t expect her to end my career.”

That, however, is what the principal tried to do. Maynard was a first-year counselor with very few rights, and the principal announced she was being terminated.

There had been no warning, no feedback, no probation.

But Maynard did have some recourse. The contract did not require a principal to justify terminating a non-tenured educator, but it spells out rules for observations and feedback. Union leaders found nearly a dozen violations in the way the principal had behaved, and Maynard decided to fight.

Why had matters come to this pass? Maynard’s not sure, but they had clashed over student rights to privacy. “She wanted to watch me counseling students,” Maynard recalls. “One time, I was counseling a student who was in trouble with her, and she walked in and sat down to listen. Afterwards, I told her that might ruin my credibility with the student, and she got very defensive about it.”

But the superintendent backed his administrator, and the local school board backed their superintendent, so the union took the case to arbitration—and won. The arbitrator agreed that the principal violated the evaluation rules in the contract.

If the evaluation had been conducted properly, the principal would not have needed to defend her decision to fire Maynard—first-year educators don’t have that protection. But since she fired Maynard on the basis of a faulty evaluation, the arbitrator ordered the district to put Maynard back in her job.

The school board went to court, trying to overturn the ruling, and the case dragged on for two years.

Meanwhile, Maynard, a single mother with three children, was out of a job. “I applied for several openings, but every time I got to the question about why I left my old job, I couldn’t lie. I said I had a ‘difference of philosophy’ with my administrator. That’s not a real good answer when you’re trying to get hired at a school system.”

Fortunately, Maynard was a second career educator. She had spent years as a public assistance case worker, going to hospitals to help people who didn’t have health insurance figure out their options. Finally, interviewing for a job in a related field, she ran into someone she had worked with. Her former colleague knew firsthand how effective she was. Half a year after being fired as a counselor, Maynard was employed again.

Eighteen months later, the verdict came in.

By then, both the superintendent and the principal were gone. The principal, says Maynard,
had made life miserable for many other people. They were quitting left and right—victims every year. Finally, some teachers went to the school board and presented them with evidence that she had been lying. I heard she was told she could leave on her own with a favorable recommendation, or they would let her go without a recommendation. She chose to go. She got into the same kind of trouble in her next job and now she’s left the country.”
Maynard, though, is back at work in the same school, with a new principal. “It was his first job as a principal, and I was still new as a counselor—we hit it off and learned together.”

But it took a long time for Maynard to recover. “For the first two years, every time I got an email from him saying, ‘Stop in and see me,’ I’d get that fluttering in my stomach. That’s what it did to my confidence.”

But she got a string of glowing evaluations, and now she has tenure—“That was a relief!”—and she finally knows she did the right thing in deciding to work with children. “Sometimes it’s difficult,” she says. “The kids aren’t getting any easier and their families aren’t, either, but I love it.”

October 2007

Try This!

Educators Got Game

Using video games and simulations in the classroom.

by Cindy Long

The U.S. military uses video games to train forces. Doctors use them to practice surgery. And education technology experts are encouraging teachers to play simulation-themed games in the classroom to help students think more critically. By building cities, empires, cultures—or even zoos—students enter virtual worlds where they must rely on creative problem-solving and analytical skills.

Can students really learn from video games or simulations?

David McDivitt, who teaches world history and sociology at Oak Hill High School in Converse, Indiana, says games teach his students important lessons about cause and effect. In the game Making History, for example, students act as leaders of different countries during World War II. They have to make strategic decisions and anticipate the consequences, such as making a treaty with one country or violating a treaty with another. Their chosen strategies can also impact the outcome of the war, providing “excellent teachable moments,” McDivitt says.

I've had kids tell me they don’t think the war would have lasted as long if countries had been more aggressive with Hitler earlier on,” he says. “They can read that in a textbook, but they’re much more likely to remember it after seeing it played out.”

In McDivitt’s sociology class, students play The Sims, where they control the day-to-day lives of characters called Sims (short for simulations), choosing their careers, steering their social lives, and plotting their futures.

“The students then apply it to their own lives,” says McDivitt. “In high school, kids are in transition—they start to think about whether being a son, a daughter, a friend, a sibling, or college student is their most important role.”

What other games work in the classroom?

A pioneer of educational video games is Civilization, says Bill MacKenty, head of instructional design at Hunter College High School in New York City and a former Massachusetts elementary school teacher. In Civilization—called “Civ” by devotees—students literally build a civilization and learn how it survives through the ages with technology (like the invention of the wheel), agriculture, commerce, and the role of government.

SimCity is another favorite of MacKenty’s. While planning and creating a virtual city, the game shows students how to build revenue through taxes, provide water and power sources, build industrial and residential zones, and learn why distances between them are important.

Other titles he recommends are Age of Mythology, Age of Empires, and any title by the company Muzzy Lane.

Aren’t video games violent?

Games like Grand Theft Auto are popular with kids, but are “spectacularly inappropriate for the classroom,” MacKenty says. Look for games with age-rating labels and do your research to weed out the violent titles.

Doesn’t gaming isolate children from the real world?

We often think of gaming as a diversion from reality, says David Williamson Shaffer, an education science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of How Video Games Help Children Learn , but they’re actually more real than some of the experiences kids have in school. “Elections for student body can be a powerful way for kids to understand government and democracy, but not all students can run, and what you can really do as president is limited,” he says.

Shaffer, a former history and math teacher, was frustrated by his school’s emphasis on testing basic skills, which he believes does nothing to prepare students for the technological world. Games teach students to be innovators, he says. He now works in a research group that field tests games that “help students learn to think like engineers, urban planners, journalists, lawyers, and other innovative professionals, giving them the tools they need to survive in a changing world,” according to the group’s Web site, Epistemic Games.

OK, I’m convinced. How do I get started?

“Play games! Play lots of games. Find out what they’re like, and talk to other people about what games they’re using,” advises Brock Dubbels, who teaches language arts and literature at Richard Green Central School in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He says that after playing a few different titles, you’ll see how they can apply to your teaching goals.

Dubbels uses the literary elements of games—such as genre, tone, plot, setting, and characters—to increase student comprehension and critical evaluation skills. “All games have a story,” he says. “They’re built on traditional narrative elements and film theory, but have interactivity that students find engaging.”

He emphasizes, however, that games are merely tools that help teachers achieve pre-established curricular goals. A video game is “a killer app in the classroom,” but it’s a means, not an end, he says.

Bill MacKenty agrees that goal-setting is key. “You have to have a conversation before and after the game; you have to ask questions and get students writing about what they’ve experienced, or that critical thinking isn’t crystallized,” he says. “If you stick a kid in front of the computer and expect something magical to happen, you’re going to be disappointed. You need to ask, ‘what are my objectives?’ You need planning and assessment. It’s just good teaching.”

Plus, it’s just plain fun. “‘We’re going to play a game’ sounds a lot more appealing to a class than, ‘We’re going to summarize a story and analyze a plot diagram,’” says Dubbels.

October 2007

Cover Story

A Painful Mistake

How a transcription error nearly cost a teacher her home

Back to In Your Corner

For Julia Burns, the arbitration hearing was about whether she would lose her house. She had already lost her teaching career to an excruciating, inflammatory joint ailment that worsened over a period of three terrible years.

“I don’t teach from my desk or an overhead. I’m always running around,” she says, using a verb tense we might call the “hopeful present.” Burns hasn’t done any running around for years, but she still hopes to go back to the work she loves.

“It got to the point where I couldn’t count out papers with my fingers. I couldn’t carry books—I would pick them out in the library and a paraprofessional had to carry them to my room. My knees, my feet, my fingers, my shoulders—they were all in pain.”
Finally Burns (not her real name) realized she had to stop. Filling out the forms for long-term disability was tough, both because she wanted to keep working and because her fingers hurt so much.

But at least, she knew her contract guaranteed that the district would pay her medical insurance premiums—or did she?

Seven years after leaving on disability, Burns got a letter informing her that those payments would stop because they had been a mistake all along—the contract language called for no such thing.

By then, Burns, a single mother with a high-school age son, had sold her old house and had a new, handicapped-accessible house built for her. Otherwise, she would have been a prisoner in her own home. “My son did the laundry and cooked the meals. We ate a lot of scrambled eggs. He decided not to go to college so he could stay home and take care of Mom. You can imagine what a bad thing that is for a teacher-mother to hear!” She absolutely refused and he went off to college, but worked long hours at the same time to help pay the bills.

“I could hardly lift my pills up to my face. My son would leave them on a plate near my chair and when it was time to take them, I would lick them off the plate.”

Ironically, Habitat for Humanity would have built her house, but with the district paying her insurance premiums, she was just above their income limit. Now she found out she and her son would have to shoulder both the house payments and the insurance premiums.

What had happened was that a new person heading up the district’s benefits office had looked at the contract, and sure enough, although the wording was grammatically awkward, it did seem to say people on long-term disability had to pay their own premiums.

But Burns couldn’t believe it—she couldn’t afford to. The extra $450 per month was simply not there for her, and those premiums were bound to go even higher. So she started trying to track down the bargaining records.

Her union local had just moved so their records were all in boxes but the union president started digging though them, although she didn’t hold out much hope.

Meanwhile, Burns, with her painful fingers, sorted through box after box of old school materials and notices stashed in her garage, praying for some shred of evidence.
And found one piece of paper.

A notice from the union president explaining a relatively minor change in health insurance in the contract that left the crucial provision intact.

The union president dug harder through her own records and finally found the rough draft that had been agreed to. Burns filed a grievance—whatever the published contract seemed to say, that’s not what the parties had bargained. The awkwardness in the phrase as published was due to a mistake in transcribing the agreement. At least, that was the union’s position.
On the day of the hearing, says Burns, “I was a wreck, I was falling apart. I was going to keep my house or lose it depending on what happened that day.”

The retired district benefits administrator had not been willing to talk with Burns before the hearing and she had moved away. But at the hearing, she testified by phone—in support of the union side.

Still, the district argued that the published language was correct and should determine benefits.
Several weeks later, the union lawyer called Burns: the arbitrator had come down on her side. “I fell apart, I was crying,” says Burns, and she still cries every time she talks about it. Her life was changed again. The district reimbursed her for the premiums she had scraped together in the months before the decision.

Burns still has to pinch pennies—a long distance phone carrier is a luxury she can’t afford, because each year her pension, not adjusted for inflation, is worth a little less. But she makes her house payments.

With new drug treatments, Burns is a little better physically, too. “Some days, I can hold a newspaper and read it, but other days I can’t push my fingers together hard enough.” She still hopes some day to teach again, which is why she didn’t want to make any unnecessary waves and have her real name in this article.

Her son still helps her pay the bills, but he’s been able to finish school—he just became a registered nurse.

Read next story: A Counselor's Tale

Back to In Your Corner

October 2007

In Person

Laura Preble, 46

Santee, California
High school English teacher
Author of teen lit hit The Queen Geek Social Club

How did the book idea come to you?

I woke at 3 a.m. with the title in my head and started writing.

What’s scarier—writing the first page or the last page?

The middle is the tough part. I usually know the starting point and the destination of a story, but the characters often determine how we get there, and sometimes they get confused.

How long did it take you to land a publishing deal?

I met an editor at a writers conference whose imprint was looking for “chick lit.” I sent her 20 pages and an outline. Two weeks later she called and offered me a two-book deal—a writer’s dream!

What was it like reading your first batch of reviews?

Fun and kind of surreal. My favorites, though, are e-mails and comments from people who read the book. I answer everyone personally. (Because, so far, I’m not famous. When I get really big I'll have a pet monkey answer all my e-mails.)

How do you define “geek”?

A person who is intelligent, cutting edge, clever, and who doesn’t fit into the mainstream. 

Were you a geek in school?

Most definitely. I had a Han Solo poster in my room, memorized the names of all 79 original Star Trek episodes, and read The Lord of the Rings every summer.

What education issue is most important to you?

Failure to deal with students’ personal issues—the things that keep them from succeeding in school. Students drink, smoke, and participate in risky behaviors, but there are very few resources to deal with this. It’s not something that can be bubbled into a test booklet, so no one wants to put money into it.

What’s the best way to encourage a young writer?

Read their stuff, talk to them about it, and tell them not to give up. I’d been trying to get a book published since I was 16.

Why did you become an NEA member?

Teachers are on the front lines of social change. We are hit with the tidal wave of changing ideals, morals, values, and experiences every day. We need backup. NEA is like our posse.

The Queen Geek Social Club is now in its second printing. Her next book, Queen Geeks in Love , is out in November. Get a sneak peek.

Blair Todd, 29

New Carrollton, Maryland
Middle school reading and science teacher
World traveler, international tour leader for students

Are you adventurous by nature?

Yes. If I see a mountain, I want to climb it.

Most interesting place you’ve traveled?

Australia.

Worst travel experience?

Riding home on a plane for 11 hours with malaria.

What’s one travel tip you swear by?

Don’t overpack, or you won’t have room for gifts.

What makes for a good student travel leader?

Flexibility, patience, and openness.

Strict itinerary or wherever the road takes you?

Strict itinerary, because there is so much to see.

What benefits do kids get from travel?

They see that there is more to the world than just America.

Why did you become an NEA member?

Teachers must ensure that great public schools are the standard for our society.

October 2007

Pop Culture

Talk Back!

» Contact the Editor » Share a Story Idea » Free E-mail Newsletter » Advertise

Real-life School of Rock

Mark Campayno, a music teacher from Sterling, Virginia, is much calmer than frenetic actor Jack Black, but like Black's character in School of Rock, Campayno teachers his students everything from Ozzy Ozbourne and Jimi Hendrix to the Beatles and Oasis. The spitting image of a young Rod Stewart, the rock comparisons don't end there for Campayno. Every year, this real-life "School of Rock" teacher leads 200 7th- and 8th-grader guitarists through classic rock tunes such as "Crazy Train," by Ozzy Osbourne, "Purple Haze" from Jimi Hendrix, and that revered rock epic—"Stairway to Heaven" by Led Zeppelin.

Most of his students have never heard of these tunes when they start the class, but within a few weeks they're showing off iPods loaded with the classic rock hits. At first, Campayno wasn't really fazed by the movie "School of Rock." Then, he thought, 'yeah, I'm taking that approach to get the kids hooked on the instrument,'" he says. Now he even plays clips of the Jack Black comedy in class. "This kids just all talk about that movie a lot," he says. "I showed a clip and they knew every word." And some of his students have followed the movie's storyline and written their own tunes.

Please click here to view a larger version of "Leon's" artwork.

October 2007

ESP

Time Out

Louisiana ESPs challenge a new timekeeping system, raising questions about religious beliefs and privacy.

By John Rosales

When Louisiana’s St. John the Baptist Parish School Board installed a new biometric time clock for employees, the device clashed with the religious beliefs of bus driver Sandra McCray and electrician Rev. Herman Clayton Jr.

The $85,000 scanning system assigns points on thumbprints, which identify workers when they sign in. Clayton and McCray believe that the imprint or scan of any body part amounts to assigning numbers to the body, which they say is warned against in Revelation 13:16-17.

“My finger would be reduced to numbers,” says Clayton, a minister with Providence No. 2 Baptist Church in Montz, Louisiana, and a graduate of Christian Bible College. Clayton believes that using the biometric system would render him vulnerable to evil, in accordance with “end time” doctrine.

Biometric scanners have sparked similar debates in the private sector.

A former van driver for Hertz Corporation and two former nursing home employees filed similar lawsuits under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which requires employers to make reasonable accommodations for an employee’s religion unless doing so would create an “undue hardship.”    

But at a parish board meeting last April, what was expected to be a debate on religious rights and reasonable accommodation ended up as a dispute over whether the board violated its contract with the St. John Association of Educators (SJAE).

“The board violated terms of its bargaining contract by unilaterally changing the employees’ attendance policy,” says Julie Richard-Spencer, the attorney representing Clayton and McCray on behalf of SJAE.

According to the union agreement, any changes in the terms of employment must be negotiated between the board and union. “Implementation of the biometric system was not bargained with the union,” she says. “The superintendent admitted that he did not bargain the issue.” In news accounts, Superintendent Michael Coburn said he did not have to consult with the union about installing the system, which affects more than 700 district workers.

The district’s timekeeping system also presents “huge privacy issues,” according to Richard-Spencer. “A thumbprint is a uniquely distinct feature,” she says. “We have no idea how the system is maintained or where the information is stored.” 

The district’s previous sign-in system required plastic cards to be swiped. It was discarded to help ensure that employees were not being signed in or out by someone else.

Clayton and McCray were permitted to manually sign in on paper as the new scanning system was being installed in October 2006. However, last February, even before the system was fully installed, they were asked again to use the scanning device and were suspended when they refused.

“I showed up for work one day and my supervisor said if I did not finger scan, I could not work,” says Clayton, who is chair of SJAE’s grievance committee. Clayton has been doing part-time contract jobs to help pay bills. “No one will hire me on a permanent basis because of the pending action with the school board.”

At press time, the board and union had decided to let an arbitrator determine whether the employees must use the school system’s biometric time clock. For updates, visit www.nea.org/ref?scanner .

October 2007

Try This!

Video Game Resources for Educators

Video Games as Learning Tools

• A social networking resource for people interested in teaching and learning with video games:http://videogamesaslearningtools.wikispaces.com/
• Course and resources for teacher education course from the University of Minnesota that includes a syllabus, some readings, guiding questions, teacher blogs on the readings, as well as summaries and projects the teachers created. A great resource that includes materials for planning and creating a gaming unit. Specifically here: http://videogamesaslearningtools.wikispaces.com/games+studies+unit

Epistemic Games
Computer games that can help players learn to think like engineers, urban planners, journalists, architects, and other innovative professionals, giving them the tools they need to survive in a changing world. Based on more than a decade of research in technology, game science, and education, epistemic games revolutionize the ongoing debate about the pros and cons of digital learning to show the future of education in the digital age.

Education Arcade
The Education Arcade explores games that promote learning through authentic and engaging play. TEA’s research and development projects focus both on the learning that naturally occurs in popular commercial games, and on the design of games that more vigorously address the educational needs of players. Our mission is to demonstrate the social, cultural, and educational potentials of videogames by initiating new game development projects, coordinating interdisciplinary research efforts, and informing public conversations about the broader and sometimes unexpected uses of this emerging art form in education.

Persuasive Games
Games that influence players to take action through gameplay. Games communicate differently than other media; they not only deliver messages, but also simulate experiences. While often thought to be just a leisure activity, games can also become rhetorical tools.

SimTeach
Information and community for educators using "Multi-User Virtual Environments."

Sloodle
Sloodle is an Open Source project which aims to develop and share useful, usable, desireable tools for supporting education in virtual worlds, making teaching easier. Through engagement with an active community of developers and users, the Sloodle project hopes to develop sound pedagogies for teaching across web-based and 3D virtual learning environments. Sloodle integrates the Second Life multi-user virtual environment and the Moodle learning-management system.

Game demos, reports, walk-throughs, & fan fiction:

Game online journals associations:

DiGRA is the association for academics and professionals who research digital games and associated phenomena. It encourages high-quality research on games, and promotes collaboration and dissemination of work by its members

The Serious Games Initiative  is focused on uses for games in exploring management and leadership challenges facing the public sector. Part of its overall charter is to help forge productive links between the electronic game industry and projects involving the use of games in education, training, health, and public policy.

The International Journal of Computer Game Research explores the rich cultural genre of games; to give scholars a peer-reviewed forum for their ideas and theories; to provide an academic channel for the ongoing discussions on games and gaming.

Game Studies  is a crossdisciplinary journal dedicated to games research.

Video Gaming Blogs

• http://www.educationfutures.com/
• http://edtechlife.com/
• http://elianealhadeff.blogspot.com/
• http://www.gameology.org/
• http://brockdubbels.efoliomn2.com
• http://clarkaldrich.blogspot.com/
• http://davidmcdivitt.wordpress.com

October 2007

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