This is a linchpin. Not only does she go out of her way to help out a customer by giving him the very shoes off of her feet, but note what he boss has to say about her when he realizes what she did. Wow.

And I thought the Ultra-Marathon Man, Dean Karnazes was nuts. But this guy tops him! He ran a marathon EVERY DAY for a year to raise money for cancer research! That's it, I'm done with the elliptical every morning. I'm moving on to the treadmill now.

Nature is truly amazing. Here I am complaining about all the snow we have gotten over this winter - even though I invested in a new snowblower finally - and have to talk myself into getting motivated enough to go out and use it just when we get an inch of snow.

I mean if a freaking alligator can do this to survive, how dare I complain about having to dress up and go outside to blow snow for 20 minutes?!

I'm going to be honest, I have completely fallen off in terms of reading over the past year. I used to devour books. I don't know if it's the toll of coaching or just plain laziness or what, but it saddens me.

Luckily, I received a couple of books from Mr. Zutz. He said, "These will challenge your thinking."

I couldn't have asked for a better jump start.

The subtitle of the book "How Great Leaders Create Organizations Their People Never Want to Leave" had me from the second I read it.

Isn't that what we all want? Whether we are leaders or not? Yet, how many people are fleeing the company, school, classroom, or organization you are a part of?

What does that say about leadership today?

Try these four things next semester (or on Tuesday when we get back from break)

1. Meet your students at the door.

2. Smile.

3. Greet them by name.

4. Talk to them about something unique to their interests or passions.

Now, you might not be able to do that every single class period. For example, I have one class with 28 students. It would take me 15 minutes to do that every day.

Instead, do 1-3 every day - unless they sneak by you - and then make sure that you do number four with a couple different students every day.

The newest podcast I was listening to "Remarkable People" by Guy Kawasaki, featured a guest who was talking about how to transform organizations and achieve greater success. One of the first things he talked about was humanizing our work.

He mentioned how if doctors look into their patient's eyes and talk to them directly for just 39 seconds, patient care and satisfaction skyrockets. He mentioned how data centers that pour over medical data will improve their results by 80% if they get a picture of each patient attached to their medical data. Finally, he mentioned how study after study proves that teachers who greet their students by name at the classroom door every day have far more engaged, and thus more successful students.

If nothing else, what can doing this hurt?

Getting a chance to share moments with my students. We certainly get many chances to share important moments - such as students doing well on a big test or them nailing it on a major research paper - but some of the most powerful moments are often from the mistakes we make together.

Several years ago, I had students who wanted to read The Scarlet Letter. Now I cautioned this student that the book would be a challenge for them. But the student said she was up for the challenge. I said okay, and I reminded her - along with the entire class - to bring their books to class because we would have a week for free reading time.

Well, the following week in walked the student . . . without her copy of The Scarlett Letter. I asked her where it was, for she had assured me she was going to order her own copy.

She sheepishly shook her head and admitted that she had ordered the wrong copy.

I couldn't believe it. I asked her to bring it in. That was when she left to grab it out of her locker.

I was shocked when she came in with the largest copy of The Scarlett Letter that I had ever seen! You see, she thought it would be easier to read if she bought the large print edition! I don't know what she was thinking, but we all had a great laugh over it. She still said she would use it even if it was the size of the tablets Moses brought down from the hill! Worse yet, for whatever reason, this large print edition didn't have page numbers! So it was not easy to cite in her paper, but ultimately we made it work.

Well, just this week I happened to run into this student, who now works out at the Sanford Fitness Center. As I came out of the workout area and saw her behind the desk, we smiled and began to visit as it had been several years since we last spoke.

As I was leaving, I smirked and told her I still caution my College Comp students to refrain from order the large print editions of any books they buy off Amazon.

In turn, she smirked and said, "I will never forge that!" And we had another great laugh.

"I will never forget that." I'll take that as a compliment.

I've been a huge Guy Kawasaki fan since I saw one of his presentations on Youtube years ago. Then I bought his iconic book, Enchantment, and I was hooked. Kawasaki was one of Apple's first employees where he worked as a "software evangelist."

One of his recent endeavors has been to start the "Remarkable People Podcast," where - you guessed it - he interview remarkable people. In this episode he interviews someone I had never heard of before, Tom Peters, who is a business expert and the author of the iconic book, In Search of Excellence.

This episode was so much fun, not just for the takeaways about creating excellence in your businesses, organization, or classroom but also for the sheer charisma and energy between Peters and Kawasaki.

Some of my favorite takeaways from this episode were -

1. The power of personalization - simply greeting people at the door or talking to them on the floor pays massive dividends.

2. You have to humanize the content - This is where I learned that teachers who stand at their doors and greet their students individually as they enter have far greater student engagement than those who don't. And that extends into the worlds of business and health care too.

3. And ultimately - and this one reminds me of our former principal, Mr. Zutz - that culture eats strategy for lunch. The more you make your people feel valued, the greater the results will be. So simple but so, so difficult and so rarely happens.

I know this happened back in 2017, but thanks to Twitter, I just saw it now. This is amazing. I wrote about how this is leadership. This principal heard that this young man had shaved his head because his relative was battling cancer. Yet, the principal also heard that some people were picking on him for his shaved head.

The principal could have shrugged it off with the "kids-will-be-kids" attitude. Or he could have called them in and thrown the book at them. Or he could have called their parents.

Instead, what he did shows just how amazing his leadership is. He called the students together and told them what happened. Then he had this young man shave his head in front of them all as a reminder and tribute. Wow.

Twitter is the best PD I've ever had. I learn more in half an hour on Twitter than I did in my first decade of school sponsored PD.

If you ask me, this is what teaching really is. I will always be indebted to my teachers and coaches who saw things in me I never saw and who pushed me to work hard to bring them out.

I think #5 and #7 are so important.

A very interesting way to think about what takes our energy vs. what fuels it.

This one is going to be the focus of my first day of College Comp II as a segue into reading Malcom Gladwell's Outliers.

I think we could add "humility" and "curiosity" to that list of "super powers" I posed earlier in this newsletter.

Genius. I love those last two lines - "Intensity makes a good story. Consistency makes progress." I also like what Dave Ramsey has to say about combining these two things - "Find a way to put a year's worth of work into the first three months on the job. That will get you noticed and promoted. That's exactly who a diesel engine works. Force and pressure creates combustion."

Outside of the missing Oxford comma, I love everything about this.

Self-reflection as a learner assignment.

This is something I have done with my LINC classes and something we did with our football team last fall.

I push out a Google Survey simply asking for students to tell me how they learn best and what they enjoy most about their classes (and what they enjoy least). Not that this will drastically change how I teach, BUT it does give me some inside information that allows me to tweak some of my teaching. For instance, if a student says that they dislike having so much homework due to the fact that they work a part time job and then also have to look after their siblings until their mom gets home from work on the weekends, that gives me some useful information. I then can explain to them - and the class - that they better make great use of their in-class work time so that they don't have to have 'home work' just because they were lazy. OR if I do have to assign homework, then I better make sure it is truly valuable homework and not just busywork or homework for the sake of homework (guilty on all charges there).

When it came to football, I tweaked this just a bit to have the players reflect on how they are coached the best. That is, how can we coach them so that we can get them to give their best efforts.

Of course, not every player was honest and after repeated attempts to coach them how they wanted to be coached, we didn't see any results. Then it was time for a frank conversation. Those frank conversations almost always resulted in the players realizing that they were wrong about how they thought they were coached best, and we took a different approach, and it almost always revealed better results.

Plus, this gives students a chance to think critically about how they learn, but it also lets them have a stake in how the class - and my teaching of it - will be shaped.

ChatGPT is something that a former student of mine, Josh Koop, texted me about a few months ago. I had no idea what it was, so I asked him to describe it. Here is his response: "Imagine taking google, but then putting it on the same steroids The Rock probably uses." Ha ha. Then he texted the dreaded phrase, "It's A.I."

Basically, ChatGPT is a software program that will write anything for you. So imagine that you're a high school junior who has procrastinated his essay on The Picture of Dorian Gray until the morning that it's due. He sits in the commons and pulls up ChatGPT and types in the following - "compose a 6-8 page research paper analyzing the themes of corruption, temptation, and appearance vs. reality in The Picture of Dorian Gray. Be sure to use at least three outside sources."

And boom. In a matter of seconds, the students has his paper.

Scary? Maybe. Maybe not.

I think that there are more subtle aspects to writing such a paper that will reveal that it was not written by this student. Checking his revision history on Google Docs will be one. The fact that all eight pages suddenly popped into the document at 9:15 am the day of is a great tell-tale sign. The fact that he didn't actually show me any of his progress during our in-class conferences would be another. The failure to have the paper meet the proper format might be another. The point is, we can still tell what is the student and what is a bot.

Maybe. Maybe not.

So why would the author of this article, Ben Berman, suggest that dooming current high school English classes is a good thing?

Well, it comes down to this: Too often we have focused - mainly in the composition classes - on what students produce instead of why and how they produce it. We are talking craft here - and that happens to be one of my favorite aspects of writing.

Berman hits the nail on the head with this passage -

And yet, as a writer, I know that this is what drives me to wake up well before dawn every morning with half-formed ideas and tangled feelings and a cup or three of coffee. It’s not the hope for rewards or fear of punishment. In fact, those things get in the way of my creativity. I write because it offers me the freedom of the imagination and the pleasures of deep contemplation. And I realized that if I wanted my students to tolerate the uncertainties and ambiguities of the creative process, I needed to start encouraging them to think not just about what they were writing, but about why they were writing.

By getting out students to focus more on the importance of expressing themselves and grappling with ideas and finding their voices and saying things in original ways, that is how we can reinvent the English classroom and render bots like ChatGPT irrelevant or at least put in on par with Grammarly.

Here is last month's Teaching Thoughts newsletter.

I am married to the most amazing person in the world, Kristie. It was love at first sight. At least for me. And it still is.

We have four wonderful children, Casey, Koko, Kenzie, and Cash. And now we have been blessed with six grandchildren!

I also happen to have the greatest job in the world: teaching English to high school students.

I am in my 25th year of teaching at Lincoln High School. I graduated from Lafayette High School in Red Lake Falls in 1992. I decided to enter the field of education because of two amazing teachers, Mr. Mueller, my fourth and sixth grade elementary school teacher and assistant baseball coach, and Mrs. Christianson, my 9th grade English teacher.

I attended Northland Community College, and had my life changed by the amazing Dr. Diane Drake. Then I transferred to Bemidji State University in 1995. There I had amazing professors who further inspired me to teach English (Dr. Helen Bonner, Dr. Mark Christensen, Susan Hauser, and Gerry Schnabel). I graduated with my BS in English Education in 1997.

I student taught with the wonderful Lisa Semanko and then began teaching full-time at LHS in 1998.

I took a year's leave of absence in 2001-02 to return to BSU for my MA in English. There I had the privilege to teach and work closely with my greatest mentor, Dr. Mark Christensen. I earned my MA in English in 2006 and was honored with "Thesis of the Year" for my creative non-fiction, braided, multi-genre memoir, "Meeting Myrtle: A Biography."

In 2013, thanks to my dear friend and mentor, Dr. Jodi Holen, I was offered an adjunct teaching position fall semester at the University of North Dakota. Tuesday nights I teach Intro to Education: Teaching and Learning 250 from 5-8. Those three hours fly by in about ten minutes.

Then in 2016 I was blessed to win a WEM award (thanks to a nomination from a former student (and now an elementary school teacher), Ciera Mooney).

In 2017 I became part of the #pineconepd podcast club along with Brian Loe, Jeff Mumm, Kelsey Johnson, Kelly Weets, Josh Watne, Tevia Strand, Megan Vigen, Mariah Hruby, Laura Brickson, Loren Leake, Katie Hahn, Melora Burgee, and new members all the time. This has been one of the best forms of PD I've ever been a part of. They make me a better teacher every time we meet. Please think about joining us in the summer at the Pine Cone Pub from 6:30 - until we've solved all the world's problems. For that evening anyway.

In 2021, I became head coach of the Powler football team. It is a dream come true. I have an amazing staff and had an excellent mentor in two amazing former head coaches, Jeff Mumm and Bryce Lingen. I couldn't have asked for greater men to learn from.

Finally, thanks to the inspiration of Shane Zutz (our former principal) I devised this as a way to distribute my Teaching Thoughts and add more content to, hopefully, help out and inspire others.

Email: kurt.reynolds@myprowler.org
Website: http://teacherscribe.blogspot.com
Location: 101 South Knight Aver Thief River Falls MN 56701
Phone: 218-686-7395
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Twitter: @teacherscribe