Remember being in elementary school and on that last day of school before winter break bringing your teacher a Christmas, or whatever you celebrate, gift? Remember no matter how many snowman mugs of hot chocolate she had already received, she acted like yours was the best.

Now think about this, what if the teacher gave it back to you and said “it is worth something so I cannot keep it” or even worse, “since your gift is considered worthless I get to keep it.” Yeah seriously. Imagine if that teacher gave it back! That would hurt.

This year in the state of Alabama parents and students cannot send gifts, holidays or not, to teachers unless they can be deemed worthless. My child wants to give her teacher something because she loves her, and I have to go through a list to determine if I can give it to her or not. Sad, my child does not understand this.

There are two things that really make me upset about this law (here is an article that does a great job explaining it). The first is that the legislators in the state of Alabama think teachers are so corrupt that we should not receive the typical $5 Starbucks card from a child.  We may turn around and sell it. Really? Probably not, teachers usually aren’t on the black market selling mugs with apples on them.

The part that makes me really sad is that we can keep gifts that are determined “de minimis” which according to dictionary.com means “so small or minimal in difference that it does not matter.” I can honestly say that at the end of the year, Christmas, my birthday, etc, when a student gives me something it always matter. Please do not use a term which says that. Even the little bags of candy on Halloween or that scary cookie matters.

This entire law makes me sad. I am so sad teachers are looked at as unethical heathens that cannot be trusted. I do not understand the constant “anti-teacher” society. It is heartbreaking.

(By the way, if you are in Alabama and are looking for teacher gifts, you can give lotion and homemade food, not turkeys and hams. )

My daughter is an amazing dancer and gymnast. Watching her grace will stop you in your tracks. But she will fall down and get hurt just walking through the living room. She did that last weekend and I asked my mom “how can someone be so graceful and clumsy at the same time?” Her response was “you may need to ask yourself that question.” So OK my daughter is pretty close to a clone of me, especially when it comes to physical grace and clumsiness.

Also last weekend I went on a reading binge. I read 5 books from Thursday afternoon to Sunday night (it was a 3 day weekend and I was at the beach). In the car on the way home I read “Graceful” from Seth Godin. I thought as I read it “how can I be so clumsy but expect to be graceful?” I also was surprised to find myself graceful in some areas but other areas I’m just plain clumsy.

I am having a hard time finding difference between being graceful and being brave. Bring graceful is allowing failure, but I wonder how many times you can fail before you completely crumble. I wonder how to be graceful when your failures pointed out to you. All I know is that I do not always fail gracefully and I definitely do not take enough chances to fail for fear of it.

Godin does talk about sharing with others. I did love that, I love sharing my passion. He talks about having an “abudance mindset” and says:

engaging with the mesh, building communities that benefit from sharing resources instead of destroying them is a strategy that scales…It encourages you to focus on your work and the generosity that comes from interacting with (and helping) your community.

I love this so much. I get asked often why I “tweet” or why I put so much time into blogging or going to conferences on my own dime (registration for edcampBham is now open by the way). The answer is simple. Learning with and helping other educators is my passion. I do not get the luxury of doing this as my “job” but it is what I love to do and it is what I will keep doing (probably to fulfill the extreme aggravation that it is still not the job I have). Last night #edchat was focused on how to get other educators to develop a PLN, I do not know the answer to that but what I do know is that if you are reading this and not sharing with others, it is time to be graceful it is time to have an abundance mindset. No you do not have to use the internet, twitter, blogs to share but the internet is a:

connection machine, connecting people and ideas and organizations.

We need to take advantage of this wonderful “machine” and connect. Internet is cheap and what we get from it is huge wealth of knowledge and learning. This is huge during our recession, don’t you think?

So the purpose of this is not to push this book, but it is to reflect on what being “Graceful” is, which will eventually help me grow personally and mostly professionally. Not always easy but through sharing fear and failures as well as sharing what I am learning is a step closer to becoming Graceful.

So often we get on the soap box about “no desk in rows” or “no sage on stage” when talking about classrooms. Yet our classrooms are mostly supplied with 2 things: desks and boards in the front of the room. Maybe we get a table or chair or two but that is it. Then we are left to move these around as we see fit, but usually the best fit of all the furniture is rows of desks. Designers of schools are not educators and furniture salespeople aren’t either. Collaboration is not anywhere in the minds of there people. Their school experience was probably desk and chalkboard so why would they think differently? Last week I was able to visit an Education Environment Symposium at Dekalb Office. Dekalb sells school furniture and I really went in there expecting to see “desks.” But I was wrong!

Ed Roy who works for a company called Steelcase that makes furniture was the first to present. He immediately began to discuss pedagogy, learning, and teaching styles. I was actually shocked to hear this. His world revolved around furniture and his presentation kept going back to importance of collaboration in a classroom. He spoke about flipped classrooms, backchanneling, and learning from each other. He kept saying that classes that are completely based on just lectures were not meeting needs of all students. This presentation focused mostly on things we as educators focus on often. Sometimes on twitter it seems we almost beat these ideas into the ground. But it did not take me long to realize I was the only one from the K-12 area in the presentation. The others were from area Higher-Ed institutions (non edu depts), designers, or architects, people who probably don’t hear this everyday. Not only do they not here it, they never really even thought about it.

He had some great ideas about how the learning environments will change the dynamics of the classroom as well as the school. Some spaces he shared were:

• lecturer is set up in center of the room with all walls having screens, the view of projectors can be seen at any angle.
• classrooms have hubs set up through the room where students can project from one laptop but also have numerous white boards (the marker kind!) for brainstorming and collaboration.
• lecture halls that were surrounded by spaces for breakout rooms
• lecture halls where the tables can immediately be turned into areas for collaboration
• spaces for outside a classroom where students can sit on couches, can plug in computers/iPads and project them onto TVs (see picture)
• school buildings where the entrance is full of collaboration spaces and professors have to walk through the spaces to offices and lecture halls



I left there with a great understanding of how these collaboration spaces can change learning and which spaces are more effective. Also I loved how most of these spaces still allowed for whole group learning with projection around the classroom and desks or tables that quickly moved. I sat there mostly daydreaming of how wonderful these spaces would be in my classroom or if I ever was in charge of a school. (you are more than welcome to buy and donate any of these products to my classroom!)

Yesterday I opened my Gmail and a box popped up, I didn’t read what it said, as usual, and pushed ok and next thing I know, the internets changed me Gmail. Immediately, OMG just fell out of my lips and for the rest of the day (and still this morning) I feel like that feeling when you cut like 6 inches off your hair and you keep wanting to put it in a ponytail.

Yesterday I was sitting in a PD on IWBs and the conversation came up about preparing our kids for college and lectures. (I have a post sitting in drafts right now on what I learned last week about colleges changing learning spaces, good stuff, stay tuned.)  The convo turned into the fact that even though technology today will be totally different by the time our students get into college or “the real world” (not that they don’t already live there) they will need to know how to adapt to this changing technology. Something as simple as the Gmail change can really through you for a loop, but I decided not to change it back to the old Gmail, it is time to move forward and stop looking back. Every time something changes, we usually look back later and realize it is for the better, we just need that adjustment period (think the new Facebook!). Our goal as educators, whether you believe in the term “digital native” or not, is to produce learners that have smaller adjustment periods when it comes to technology or even solving problems.

On the signature of my email I have this quote:

“The illiterate of the twenty-first century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”—-Alvin Toffler

We need “unlearners” and “relearners” and saturating their lives with different types of technology and pushing problem solving (not the math kind) will move this forward.