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Sunday, December 4, 2011

More on Observation Day

Let’s say you’re going to be observed tomorrow morning.

If you go back and look quickly at my early posts on first-day activities and on establishing rapport with your students, and you realize that you weren’t able to do any of that with this year’s bunch and, actually, you never got to know each other and they don’t like you very much, well, you’re probably screwed.

If you overstepped your bounds earlier this semester or played a power card when you really didn’t need to, well, you’re probably screwed again. When you “win” against a teenager, especially in a battle you should’ve let slide in the first place, said teenager immediately begins to plan a re-match, a retaliatory strike. Nothing like seeing you in the vulnerable position of being observed by someone who can play a power card on you to bring out his or her Adolescent Avenger.

Okay, I’m overstating a bit. Most of your kids are probably as forgiving as your pets. Only a few will hold on to a grudge like sweet death. But, hey, don’t tempt them.

Here’s the upside: If your students know you care about them, are pulling for them, are doing your best to be a good, helpful, fair teacher, they’ll team up to make your observation day a success.
If you have advanced notice – and I think you will as that’s part of the new MPMP (Marzano Plan for Merit Pay) – tell them about it and tell them what you need to happen. Tell them to pay no attention to the new grownup in the room. Tell them to keep their focus on you and to follow your cues.

Maybe they should know about the relevant Marzano indicators, and you could even do a little rehearsal: “When I allude to Lady GaGa’s 14-minute video, I’m demonstrating ‘Withitness,’ so act interested.” That way it will be sort of like teaching to the test, something all of us should be pretty much accustomed to by now. And it’ll seem kind of fake and staged. But didn’t you really want to be an actor in the first place?

I admit that back when I was a very young freshman-comp teacher at FloridaState, I’d tell my students what my observer wanted. I knew, for example, that one of these guys thought it was critical to have students from different areas in the room to participate, i.e., he didn’t want only people in the first two rows to talk.

Incidentally, just so you know, it makes absolutely no difference what part of the room student contributions emit from. But back to my story.

So on observation day, introspective students would trade desks with some extroverts so we’d have good, spread-out coverage. It always pleased me to see this shortly after I had thrown up in the men’s room just down the hall.

Be sure to put your goals for the day on the board, and that should put you over the top. More on all of this later. If you have questions, please find a way to get them to me.

Sunday, November 27, 2011

"Come watch my pretend class!"

There’s no denying that being observed is stressful, no matter how long you’ve been teaching.

The Boston Celtics’ legendary Hall-of-Fame center Bill Russell claims, during his first few years in the NBA, he got so worked up that he threw up before every game. Later, he said, he got his nerves in check and only threw up before playoff games.

Likewise, in my first year or so as a teacher, I’d get so pumped up for a class I’d become almost ill. But by my third year, I only tossed my grits on the days I was observed.

Even now, after a handful of decades, I don’t look forward to it. Why is that? I’m not ashamed of or embarrassed by my teaching. I’m not a bad teacher. I shouldn’t be intimidated if Marzano himself trotted in for a peek. But there’s something unnatural about the whole thing.

People who understand teaching know that what is only a collection of teenagers on the first day evolves into some sort of community after a few weeks, and usually into another kind of community a few weeks after that.

The same sort of thing happens, in microcosm, during each class. There is, in the first minutes, the Great Entrance, a sort of unruly procession of kids shaking off the transitory freedom sandwiched between classes, the conversation bytes as they settle into desks, trading a few last-second greetings or jibes or insults with their friends across the room, the rehashing and reducing – if it’s a quiz day – of a literary masterpiece into hurried simplistic fragments (“Macbeth has Banquo wacked but, but like, his kid gets away and Macbeth totally freaks … ”).

After some order is established, they move into a probationary, wait-and-see period, no one wanting to be the first one to show too much interest. Slowly, a conversation begins and the community, which was alive and well yesterday, rises like a Phoenix from its ashes and class begins in earnest.
What does it take to derail this process? Very little. Once, a first-period student wanted to see how things went in second period, so she dropped by, found a seat and quietly observed. The mood of the class changed. The temperature dropped a degree or two.

An observer, then, is assured of not observing your actual class, especially if she enters once the conversation has begun. This community, this rapport that you’ve spent so many hours building devolves into, to quote Fitzgerald, a “feigned counterfeit ease,” an icy, self-conscious desire (you hope) to please, a collective impulse of (you hope) good intent.

So maybe this is a reason not to be nervous: Your actual class will not be observed. The stuff that has gone badly for you on other days probably won’t today; those spontaneous zingers you’ve fired off with great effect into a sometimes appreciative teenaged audience will be silenced today; if there is laughter, it will be forced or muted or self-conscious, with a look back over the shoulder to see how the observer’s taking this.

Unless you can loosen things up a little, your observer will watch you teach a room full of pod people from Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

And speaking of invasion, this whole process feels something like a weird sort of invasion of privacy.

There are a few things you can do to prepare for this bit of artifice, this teaching theatre, and it doesn’t have to include memorizing the Marzano indicators. After a brief commercial break, I’ll be back with some suggestions.

Thursday, November 24, 2011

"Indicators" Aren't the Whole Story

Now that the holidays are upon us, it is time for us all to pause and reflect on what is most important to us. And by “most important,” I can only mean attending day-long workshops designed to prepare us for the rigorous new Marzano-based evaluation system which will be used to determine if we can keep our jobs or, if we’re really good, qualify for Merit Pay – the funding of which, by the way, seems awfully doubtful at this point.

Marzano (let’s just say his first name is “Hank”), meanwhile, is probably resting comfortably at home with his family, roasting his chestnuts over an open fire and serenely surveying the material luxuries he has earned by reinventing the ancient Wheel of Pedagogy.

Hank Marzano, of LearningSciencesInternational (all one word with the “i” in “Learning” dotted with a rising sun), has generated, isolated or discovered 60 indicators of, I guess, effective teaching. Many school systems, however, have trimmed those down to, say, 15 or 18 because 60 is – what’s the academic term? – freakin’ insane!

You can imagine my chagrin when I was first introduced to this list at the beginning of my 31st year of teaching, 36th if you include my graduate teaching-assistant years. I was overwhelmed with regret. “If only I had known about these 60 indicators in 1981,” I cried out above the din of my colleagues chatting among themselves during the in-service, “I might’ve amounted to something. I could’ve been a contender! I could’ve been doing this thing right all these years!”

To my beloved new colleagues whose generous spirits have softly beckoned them into these unfriendly waters – infested not so much with sharks as with ill-tempered ducks – I cannot blame you if you stay up late at night studying and memorizing the Marzano Indicators and practicing as many as possible in front of body-length mirrors.

But as you proceed through Marzano’s “Domains” and “Lesson Segments” and “Design Questions,” doesn’t it feel as if your gold has been turned into straw?

My gold appeared decades ago – possibly before Hank was even born – when a teacher’s deep love for the words imprinted on the wispy, onionskin-thin pages of the Norton Anthology of British Literature inspired me to follow his gaze to those pages and follow my heart to a life of teaching and learning. Then, as I’ve recorded in an earlier post, my journey almost immediately took me into the presence of another mentor who gave me, not 60 indicators, but 1 simple maxim that “You can’t teach’em if you don’t love’m.”

You most likely have a similar story. Don’t abandon it. Repeat it to yourself like a mantra throughout the endless holiday workshops ahead. Don’t let the soullessness of this enforced quantification of a most human gift sour your resolve to do what you love. Stay with what brought you here and you’ll be nurturing and encouraging students long after Marzano’s obnoxious little checklist has been deposited into the dust bin of pedagogical history.

Sunday, October 16, 2011

How Grading Is Like Horseshoes and Hand Grenades

Here’s the short version of how to keep grading from being a disproportionate pain for you, your students and their parents: Have clearly articulated standards, help your students meet those standards, provide enough feedback to explain or justify your grade, be flexible enough to admit when you’ve made a mistake and do all you can to relieve anxiety about grades.

It is unfair, dishonest and misleading to give C- work a B or vice versa. The grade is a flimsy shorthand effort to tell the student where she stands, how near or far she is from mastering the course content. Your comments, written or otherwise, about the grade tell her what she needs to do to achieve that mastery, and they tell you what you need to do to help.

A higher grade than she deserves will boost her self-esteem, make her mom happy and make both of them leave you alone so you can grade the rest of your essays, but now the whole process has become a waste of time, as big a lie as our cynical students already believe it to be. A lower grade than she deserves, on the other hand, can be pretty devastating, especially if she is actually working hard in your class.

So if you are going to be your department’s new Ms. or Mr. Hardass, you must provide the stepladder to help students reach your lofty standards. Just telling them to work harder is no more effective than a basketball coach telling his players to play harder while they’re receiving a 78-21 shellacking. You must tell them specifically the areas in which they need to improve. If you’re teaching an honors or AP class, you’ll almost certainly need to tell mom, too, because she or her beloved spouse will be in touch. How much time, during that hectic first year, do you want to spend in parent conferences?

If you are planning on being Ms. or Mr. Easy-A, well, don’t. Some of your students will be driven, highly motivated workaholics in training, and they will have dang well earned that A. They won’t appreciate the goofball sitting next to them getting the same grade for that junk he scrawled on the way to class. To make matters even worse, on rare occasions the goofball will put his heart into an assignment, for once just completely investing himself in it – maybe because you’ve finally assigned something that interests him – and then be so excited to learn that at long last he has earned an A … only to find that pretty much everyone else did, too.

Clearly, you have to get this grading thing somewhat right, but you can’t try to fine tune it too much. As a new teacher, I spent far too much time agonizing over the most accurate grade for an essay. I would actually be grinding my teeth over the distinction between, say, a C and C+. I’d refer back to the rubric, if I had one, compare the essay to others I’d given Cs or C+s to, maybe even ask some of my fellow equally clueless colleagues.

This turns out to be a huge waste of time. You have to acknowledge that evaluating writing is an inexact science; that their other grades in your class will correct the inconsistency in this one; that their future happiness turns out not to be directly related to the grade they received on a particular essay; that if they’re unhappy with the grade, they may be moved to come talk to you about it and therefore learn much more than they would’ve from your comments alone.

Sunday, October 2, 2011

Memories Are Made of This

Dear New Teacher,

It must’ve occurred to you by now that you are locked into a curriculum designed by lawmakers elected by the wise citizens of the state, lawmakers who know far more about pedagogy than the human beings who have devoted their entire adult lives to its study and practice.

Consequently, it is your job simply to prepare your students for exams. If they pass these exams, it will show that you are a successful teacher. This means you can keep your job. It doesn’t mean much more than that.

Yawn. And just think: You gave up being a systems analyst for this.

On the other hand, these students will only take this class from you once. The arc of a kid’s life has placed her in your hands, in no one’s classroom but yours. You have one shot at offering this young person something valuable that in some way emanates from the combination of you, the kid, and the course.

Many other teachers could’ve helped little Bobby pass those standardized tests. What is it that you alone can do?

Love and best wishes,

Doc

Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Grading Papers When There Are Too Many

In the ideal world with a realistic number of students, you’d assign something to write practically every day, you’d have conferences with all of your students, then they’d turn in first drafts and you’d make insightful comments and return them, and they’d consider your comments and hold workshop sessions with their peers, then crank out another draft and on and on until their essays were publishable.

You, unfortunately, are or soon will be teaching in a system funded by pocket change, so you’ll need to think more about surviving responsibly than actually teaching young people to write. It hurts me to acknowledge that you’ll basically wind up teaching “at” writing as opposed to teaching the thing itself.

Briefly, this is what you’ll need to do: Assign more essays than you can grade, and on those you do grade, find only one, certainly no more than two, areas to improve. More than that, and the student despairs. If there’s copious writing in the margins, the student either will not read it or, if she does, will either be pissed off or discouraged. She’ll go back to saying, “I’m just not a very good writer” or “I’m gonna get a bad grade in this class.” Neither response improves her writing. Be brief and direct and legible in your comments. When possible, let students revise essays based on your comments so that you know they read them, then speed grade the revisions, perhaps just tacking a few points on to the grades of the original.

As I grade a set of essays, instead of writing on several of them “You need to introduce quotes from the text, then briefly show the reader how it supports your thesis,” I jot down a brief note to myself about this issue. When I see other recurring errors or, yes, examples of effective writing, I note those too, and when the pile is complete, I put my notes on Blackboard, go over them in class and, when I feel the need, give quizzes on them. I have also asked them to revise their essays based on my Blackboard comments. I also refer back to this particular Blackboard document when it’s time for them to write another similar essay. This process saves much time and aggravation. (Obviously, it isn’t necessary to use Blackboard for this. It just makes it easy for all students to access this information at any time.)

You can assign a cluster of, say, three essays over a brief period of time, then have them run all three through the rubrics grinder, engage in peer editing if you’re into that scene, then pick the one they want you to grade. This way, they still get the practice, they aren’t penalized for their less successful efforts, and you only have to grade what is, according to them, their best work.

Sunday, September 25, 2011

Two Don'ts

Here are a couple of Thou Shalt Nots, the first probably more for old-timers like me than for you. Still, you should cut it out and tape it to your desk or bulletin board or some other place at work so you can see it as the years go rolling by:

Don’t become so cynical and jaded that you forget about the students in your class who can’t wait for the learning to start. They’re excited about what they read last night and about what you’ll say today. They’re excited about what they or other students might say. Once you’ve been at it for a few years, some students will have heard about you from siblings and older friends, and they’ll have anticipated your class since junior high. Seriously. So imagine their response when they hear you talking as if it’s all a joke and none of them care and why are you even wasting your time doing this for a living. Try, try to teach to the ones who care, even if you think you have to imagine them, to pretend they’re out there. Trust me: They’re out there.

Don’t bring your problems into the classroom. If you’re having a bad day, the most you should say about it is, “I’m having a bad day.” So what? One of them is always having a bad day. You’re probably really angry with your significant other, your pets, a new district-wide initiative, the traffic, or Rick Scott. Do NOT make students pay for the sins of others! Fall into your lesson, and soon you’ll all feel better.

Monday, September 12, 2011

You Don't Have Time to Read This

My dear new high-school teachers, especially English teachers, please know that I’m aware of the irony of my writing something to make your professional life easier or more fulfilling or both at a time when you are too busy even to check your e-mail. But if I wait until you do have time – next summer – my advice won’t be helpful.

Well, that’s the way it always goes: Your leaky roof needs repairing most when it’s raining too hard to get up there. With that in mind, I return to the task at hand – offering tips for improving discussion classes — even if my words float harmlessly into an empty universe:

Because you are a human being, it can be very difficult not to load up your responses to student comments with warmth, affection, disdain, contempt, disbelief, etc. But try your best not to do this, not to make your responses personal. For one thing, a student’s comment shouldn’t be weighted with his family history (both his brother and sister were royal pains in the ass when they were your students), the history of his earlier comments (“That’s the fifth time you’ve connected this poem to Harry Potter. Could you perhaps climb up the ol’ literary ladder a bit?”), his lack of earlier comments (“Whoa! Look who decided to join us!”) or your ongoing tense relationship with him (you respond grudgingly through gritted teeth, avoiding eye contact).

Every student’s input is potentially another brush stroke in the evolving portrait of an idea. It’s all about how that particular comment contributes to the process that’s happening this moment. Your job is to measure the fit, to appreciate the effort, to make clear its connection to what has gone on before or to tactfully show how it is perhaps a brush stroke for another portrait, not the one that’s being painted today.

Do your best to respond thoughtfully, gratefully, and evenly to each comment. Do not respond to the first three with “Okay, good, fine,” and to the fourth one with “THAT’S IT! NOW WE’RE GETTING SOMEWHERE! GREAT POINT, BOBBY!” This shines altogether too much light on the lameness of the first three efforts. You can’t entirely choke back your enthusiasm for the Blue Ribbon insight and still be authentic, but you can be careful with your wording. Some teachers successfully address this issue by simply saying “Thanks” after each comment, unless further elaboration or clarification is needed.

Try to spread the wealth. Don’t keep calling on Irwina, especially if other hands are up, even if Irwina’s comments tend to be especially insightful. If no other hands are up, pause for a second, then solicit other responses: “Okay, let’s hear from somebody else. Irwina can’t be the only one in here with ideas.” If Irwina becomes the sole spokesperson early in the semester, her classmates may happily allow her to carry the ball for the entire game.

Don’t, however, try to force everyone into the discussion. Students can be involved, participating, and actively learning without saying anything. Clearly, it is good to get as many ideas and pieces of ideas in the air as possible, but calling on someone who is pathologically shy may result in a continuity-breaking momentary freeze. The rest of the class will take a timeout from thinking about the topic at hand to share the anxiety of the stammering, quaking, dry-mouthed, coerced responder, while the responder will try to find ways to become invisible for the rest of the semester starting now.
Furthermore, introspective, contemplative, introverted students may sit in silence not due to lack of interest, but because they are busy internally processing and synthesizing their classmates’ observations. In college, I was one of these students, and I would get intensely caught up in a lively discussion only to find that by the time I was ready to step my toe in the river, the relevant water was downstream a ways. I did not want to begin my comment with something like, “Getting back to what Sheila said about Nick Carraway a few minutes ago …”

My best responses weren’t formulated until a few minutes after class, at which point, striding across campus to my next class, I would see the fallacies in comments A and B, the wisdom in C and D, and was now prepared to articulate a coherent contribution of my own.

Not to hold on to a grudge or anything, but I still sting at the memory of a high-school English teacher asking me a question about Emerson’s transcendentalism. I thought hard about her question and I could almost see the answer in the deep recesses of my adolescent mind. “I don’t exactly know,” I said. “You don’t exactly know?” she said. “I’d say you don’t know at all.” Without that snarky rejoinder, and given a bit more time, I believe an answer would’ve eventually made its way to the surface and I could’ve added to that class’s great store of Emersonian wisdom.

While I don’t like the idea of forced participation (or grading participation based on quantity), I also don’t like the idea of some publishable insight, some aphorism of the ages, trapped forever in the mind of a mute inglorious Milton in the third row, two desks from the back.

So I battle my distaste for calling on reluctant or seemingly reluctant students by trying to read their facial expressions. Most teenagers have not yet developed great poker faces, so if they have something to share, even if they’re shy, they’ll look like they’re about ready to jump out of their desk. If not, their face will say “If you call on me, I will either faint or race for the door.”

Sometimes I just ask students after class, “Hey, if I call on you, will you talk?” Or, “Are you one of those students who don’t mind reading aloud in class?” If I can’t catch them after class, I ask them in writing.

(If you’re asking questions to see if they read, of course, it’s tough luck if they’re shy or introspective: be ready or be embarrassed.)

Be sure, of course, to make it clear that students must be recognized before they speak. Otherwise, Irwina will begin sharing her opinion before you’ve finished asking the question, and all the other little ideas in the room will die a silent death.

Wednesday, September 7, 2011

Discussion Strategies That Might Work: Part Two

* Have a goal or an objective or a critical rationale – a spine, if you will – for the session, and try to link all comments to it. There’s no need to be overly fussy about this, but you must show students this is NOT a random bull session. Many students have been conditioned to believe that when the teacher steps from behind the lectern and asks for their input, they (the students) can all relax and share their feelings, opinions, politics and family history.

You do NOT want to be in the room when this happens.

This fuzzy, sprawling, pseudo-academic, late-night coffee-house, teenage-angst talk therapy session needs to be nipped in the bud immediately: “Today, we’ll explore the nature of _____ in Ch. ____ of ______.” “Let’s talk for a while about the role of older women in the first third of Huckleberry Finn.” This will help keep the discussion focused, will help keep it moving, progressing toward an attainable goal. All the comments become barnacles attaching themselves to the same sunken ship.
* Having a goal or an objective isn’t the same as having an agenda. If you have an agenda, i.e., your own favorite interpretation of a story or poem or historical incident, you’ll tend to ask questions that nudge your students in the direction of your interpretation. “So can you see where Twain was probably ridiculing the Grangerfords’ lack of taste?” “Yes.” “Anyone else?” Silence.

When students catch on to your manipulative line of questioning, their responses may degenerate into the “I-think-what-you-want-us-to-say” variety. That’s just embarrassing.

The agenda-ridden discussion doesn’t really go anywhere, and there doesn’t tend to be any original insights, though it certainly keeps you from having to think on your feet. Your particular reading of a text or event is free to live another day and you still will not have experienced the net-less terror of having to reconsider, revise or defend it in front of a live audience.

If you have become quite attached to your interpretation, you can still share it, but why not give your students a crack at articulating one of their own first? It will give them a great deal of confidence and make them look forward to playing this game again some day. They’ll remember this class and this topic longer because of the role you let them play. One day they’ll e-mail or text or Facebook you and thank you for letting them think for themselves and arrive at their own conclusions.

That is not to say that this is all about making them feel good about themselves. Maybe they will, but the important achievement is you’ve allowed them to join in legitimate academic discourse and they can see that it’s not just people shouting each other down, but a quite exhilarating, if taxing, activity that serves as a training ground for critical reading, thinking on their feet, analysis, arguing with evidence, careful listening, patience, tolerance and the expression of feelings.

So let’s recap this balancing act quickly: You can’t let an academic discussion go wherever it wants, but at the same time you, the teacher, cannot know exactly where it’s headed. Leave room for the students to surprise themselves and you, so that you, too, are forced to think on your feet and work on synthesizing fresh ideas into, well, something.

Stephen Brookfield , author of The Skillful Teacher, likens this to white-water rafting: Your discussion now has a destination (down river), but there are many ways to get there. Students may go from shore to shore as long as they’re still in the river. They may not reach the destination the way you had in mind or the most efficient way, but they’ll still get there. They may bring up questions and issues you aren’t prepared for, but, hey, you’re a teacher: Deal with it! Just avoid the rocks!

The Skillful Teacher

I found this a helpful book when I first read it years ago. http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0787980668.html

Monday, September 5, 2011

Discussion Strategies that Might Work: Part One

I have these priceless little moments of Eternity while I’m teaching when I seem to be given a God’s-eye view of myself and of my class filled with students and I will feel like the overly excitable Othello greeting Desdemona at Cyprus – it’s too much joy, a bliss that becomes a burden with my awareness that it may never be duplicated. Where else, I wonder, will I have this kind of fun again?
Almost every time I’m granted this gift, it comes during a class discussion, and given the exuberance of the moment, “discussion” is about the most withered, bland, hollow word possible. “Communion” would be more accurate, because the “I-ness” of the 20-something students and their teacher has morphed into a charged “We.”

When I reflect back on these moments, I remember intimate, almost mesmerizing eye contact; smiles of recognition; scattered laughter, often of the ah-hah variety; brows furrowed in concentration and anticipation; hands raised, queued up as other voices await their turn; I hear my voice, if at all, answering a question with another question or saying, “Okay, let’s go to Fred, then Stacy, then Hank, then Lily. Go!”

My work, in these moments, has become the game I was sent here to play. I am become a (male) midwife – a midhusband? – of ideas, a tour guide for insights, a trainer for mental aerobics, an aging Yoda trying to turn the Farce of public education into the Force.

So for purely selfish reasons, I prefer discussion to lecture – not that I can’t get quite a kick out of the latter as well. But it’s not just fun: We have known for many decades that students retain very little from lectures, that they learn more when they learn actively, i.e., when they have a larger role in the learning process, and that students remember most the classes in which they spoke (as opposed to chatted) the most.

Learning is more meaningful and lasting when the learners are involved in the arduous search for the concepts to be learned. I suppose we could save time by telling them up front the “meaning” of Macbeth’s “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” soliloquy, but think of how much more a part of them that speech will become if they work through it and arrive at a meaning of their own.
Perhaps we’ve all heard this too many times by now, but it doesn’t hurt to repeat this saying, most often attributed to Lakota lore: “Tell me and I will listen, show me and I will understand, involve me and I will learn.” Discussion classes, done well, involve everyone with even a trace of a desire to be involved.

Here are some suggestions to help you start and maintain an engaging conversation with a room full of young people:

* Unless your discussion is purely exploratory (“Let’s see what we all know about nuclear fission! Joey? Anyone?”), be sure to provide adequate information or background – through lectures, handouts, assigned readings or such – before the session. In most cases it’s not a good idea to erect a discussion on the foundation of a fairy’s wing, or to try to forge wisdom out of fumes.

Early in my high-school teaching career, as I was leading into Huckleberry Finn, I tried to evoke some feedback on the Reconstruction Era. A more serious student, prepared to take notes on whatever motes of knowledge our discussion produced, asked, with pen poised above his paper, “Was Reconstruction before the Vietnam War or after the Vietnam War?” Even I knew then I should probably put things in a little context before we talked further.

* Hospitality is vital. Figuratively speaking, you need to send students invitations to contribute, greet them warmly when they do, thank them for their help and protect their vulnerability. Remember that they’re taking a risk when they publish an idea, insight or opinion in the presence of other teenagers, i.e., some of the most judgmental humans on the planet.

Their comment may sound stupid to their classmates. It may sound stupid to you. It may even be stupid. Let’s say for the moment that it is.

Unlike the brains of the responder’s classmates, yours has developed a capacity for empathy. Your immediate task is to channel your inner Meryl Streep and act as if the comment is perfectly valid, that it does not make you want to laugh out loud, now, then share the hilarity with your spouse when you get home, then remember to enter it into your log of Student Howlers.

You need not, on the other hand, act as if the comment is right on target. Rather, try nodding pensively and saying something like, “Hmm. You may be on to something. I’ll have to think about that a little more. You keep thinking, too. And thanks for you comment. Someone else?”

The task of discouraging classmates from ridiculing the comment needs to have been accomplished back on the first days of school when you were building rapport and establishing a community of mutual trust and respect. If you’ve done that, anyone who mocks another student during a discussion will feel like an idiot.

“You’re among friends,” I remind them early and often. I start saying this on the first day and keep saying it, implicitly at least, from then on, especially before a discussion.

It’s tempting to say here, “Don’t be intimidating to your students or they’ll be afraid to say anything, and if they do say something, it’ll just be what they think you want to hear.” But I’m not sure we always have much say in such matters. If you’re very tall and have a deep voice, for example, that’s not likely to change. Some humans are just flat out more intimidating than others.

You can, however, carry your education, your knowledge, your wisdom as a gift to be shared, a living, breathing search engine at the disposal of the class rather than as a shield to protect your dominance. Most students are already pretty sure you know more than they do, so have some modesty about your advantage. The truly well-educated person has good reason to be humble about all s/he has yet to learn, as well as the protean and contingent nature of what s/he already “knows.”
If students feel intimidated by you or they think you’re dismissive or will make light of their responses, they won’t talk; if they do, it’ll just be what they think you want to hear. This means discussion classes are usually better later in the academic year. This also means you have to work on building a kind of rapport that encourages conversation.

Before we go any further — you know, we could have our own discussion if you’d submit some questions or observations.

Saturday, August 27, 2011

Tell Them What You Want . . . Unless You Want More

O Anxiety! Thou taker of life, both literally and figuratively! O provoker of the perpetually furrowed brow and knotted stomach! O great distracter from life’s still, deep, full moments, thou cause for skimming and racing and cursoriness, thou robber of focus and concentration!

How canst we elude thy powerful grip and gain peace with our vocation and gain sweet but appropriate harmony with those we seek to teach, knowing as we do how little they learneth when they be scared bleepless.

Well, my dear friends new to the world of pedagogy, you could try some of the following:

Be predictable – not a slave to routine, but don’t be throwing them curves and changing your mind about assignments and due dates. Don’t assign a paper and have them get all worked up over it, then tell them later you decided not to grade it because they did a lousy job with it or for some other lame reason. Try to remember how it feels to have as little control as students have. They can’t make you delay an assignment, for example, when the due date just happens to coincide with that of a 20-page paper in another class.

What may seem like a great, spur-of-the-moment idea for you may create an anxiety attack for them: “We weren’t counting on this! We have band practice all week! Why didn’t you tell us earlier?” So you shouldn’t take it personally when they don’t share your enthusiasm for that startling pedagogical inspiration the muses dropped in your lap on the way to work this morning. For them, now (they may see the wisdom in it later), it’s just more clutter in an already cluttered daily planner, for those who keep them, and just another thing to forget, for those who don’t.

Don’t change exam dates unless absolutely necessary, and when you do, give them as much advance warning as possible.

You can lessen your students’ anxiety about an assignment by providing a rubric, preferably on the day you assign it. That way you won’t hear this: “Well, hey, I didn’t know you were counting off for grammar!” Remind them, also, of all the little things that aren’t that little to you: “Put your name, date, and class period in the upper right-hand corner.” Some anxiety-ridden students will spend more time worrying about where to put that information than in formulating a thesis – you know, the same ones who have their parents buy an obnoxiously over-sized, monogrammed wooden folder to bury their hastily written research paper in.

If, on the other hand, the “little things” aren’t important to you, tell them. Also, would it kill you to tell them why those little things are important, if they are?

If you say an essay will count 40% of their grade, don’t change it to 50% or 30%. Be very clear about expectations for every assignment. It’s okay to say, “This is just for practice, more for you than for me, so don’t get all freaked out over it. It’s just a small quiz grade.” It’s not cool when Delbert turns in three pages typed, plus a cover page, and Sylvia scrawls a few scarcely legible lines on previously wadded up paper, then you accept them both and have to tell Delbert after the fact that this was just for practice. He could’ve used that time for calculus or Facebook!

Speaking of expectations, here was one of my major pet peeves when I was a student: The teacher makes an assignment, then refuses to respond to questions about it, firing back, “Don’t ask me what I want. Just do this the way you think it should be done. Do your best and you’ll be fine.” Not true. Hardly ever true. Sure, you want them to take initiative, to be original, to stamp their own personality or way of learning on their assignments. But you do want something. You have standards and you’re giving the grades.

So what do you want? Evidence of learning, of studying, of research, of creativity, of collaboration, of memorization? All of these? Tell them: “As long as you ________, you’ll be fine. Now get after it!”

One of my most frustrating and unsettling moments as a student came when I was a college freshman during the last gasps of the anything-goes, let’s-reinvent-the-curriculum ‘60s. My art history class was team taught by a far-out hippie couple who were just a bit too old to be actual hippies – mid-30s, I’d guess. During their opening-day “joint” presentation, they appeared to be in dire need of a nap, drug rehab, and perhaps a blood transfusion, just to be safe.

Their good news was the class had only one requirement. The bad news was that the requirement was “A Happening.” Some of us wanted to be told exactly what “A Happening” was. Their response cleared the matter right up: “Anything, man. Just make it beautiful. Make it real.”

I tried for about a week to think of something that would count as A Happening, then bravely dropped the class, retaking it later with a terminally giddy septuagenarian who always wore a bowtie and who gave actual 1950s-style exams.

Finally, the rule of full, honest disclosure requires me to admit that after all these decades, I remain an anxiety-ridden teacher, too much aware of the real potential in every class meeting for a complete catastrophe. Furthermore, I know I have caused my students more anxiety than I should have, often because of late-arriving “terrific” ideas and a reluctance to delineate too clearly my expectations for some assignments.

In my defense, I have received much beautiful, creative, original, bountiful work from my beloved students because they were free to take assignments where their particular gifts and inclinations wanted to without having to fulfill the nagging, prosaic, ponderous demands of a checklist produced by a smaller vision than theirs.

To my former students, then, I offer a limited apology and an admonition to do as I say, not as I do (or did).

Monday, August 22, 2011

Miles to Go Before I Sleep

On the day I walked into my department chair’s room to resign from my first high-school teaching job, she wasn’t there and she wasn’t in the work room or down at the front office. I don’t know where she was, and no one else seemed to know, either. So I continued with my day, going to fourth period, which was really perhaps my worst class of the day with the possible exception of fifth and sixth. That day, they were all just as bad as ever, really stinking up the place, and afterwards I limped out to my Nissan a tired, dejected, miserable human being.

When I got home I told my wife the big news that I still had a job. We went down the street a ways to one of our favorite restaurants and sulked over our sandwiches. When we first began to discuss it, I said “I can’t do this.” By the time we were ready to leave a tip to the server whose job I envied, I said “But I’ll do it one more day.” As I was falling asleep that night, I repeated that mantra. “I’ll do it one more day. That’s all I have to do. One more day.”

This next part is all irrational and preternatural and extrasensory and I wouldn’t believe a word of it if I were you. I’m not sure I believe it, but it happened.

I had one of my usual teaching nightmares, this one starring my current crop of imps. They weren’t being mean, just going about their business, being too loud and completely ignoring me. As I watched them, I heard myself say, “God, I love these kids,” and the sentiment of that statement was so blatantly false it woke me immediately.

“No, I do not love them,” I said in my waking state.

Okay, so maybe it was actually a truck roaring by my house that woke me, and maybe it was the jalapenos on my sandwich that caused the dream. But it sure made me think. Maybe, I thought, I was so accustomed to loving my students that that condition had become a default setting for my dreams of them. And I also thought maybe I could love them. And I thought maybe I already do. And none of it made sense.

Just one more day.

I didn’t resign Thursday or Friday. On Saturday, accustomed as I was to getting up before 5, I had a very early breakfast at one of those greasy diners with good coffee and colorful, gum-popping waitresses. On the way in, I grabbed a newspaper. On the top, above the banner, were little pictures calling attention to the stories inside.

One picture was a mug shot of a cheerleader, her hair drenched with rain and her face reflecting her extreme discomfort with the soggy conditions. That cheerleader was my student. She was in my anarchic fourth-period class.

That woke something in me. I couldn’t wait to point her out to Maudie the waitress. “That’s my student. That’s one of my kids,” I told her.

I cut out the little picture and put it on my bulletin board. The student saw it, liked it, and we became buds, and I started putting more pictures and articles up, all that I could find. All my students’ documented accomplishments went straight to my bulletin board. One day I took all their pictures – still halfway thinking I was documenting my very brief stint as a high-school teacher – and put them up on the bulletin board. I’ve continued that practice every year since.

I don’t know how communities form, or how a sense of belonging evolves or how one goes from being an alien to a citizen or a member of the family.

It’s almost like you begin to become part of the Body.

I know my stuffy little overcrowded classroom started to become my home. The kids became family. And while the first year continued to be almost unbearably challenging, I wasn’t going anywhere.
So if you’ve already had enough, don’t quit yet. Come back one more day. Don’t give up before the miracle, as they say, before you hear voices you’d rather not hear, whose message you can’t put into language, but that are telling you the truth any dang way.

Speaking of voices from beyond, one of them is telling me to shut up and get my classes ready for tomorrow.

Saturday, August 20, 2011

The End of the Game Is Before the Game

If you just finished your first week of teaching, you’re probably pretty tired right now. Monday morning – very early Monday morning – will be here very soon, and you can start getting even more tired. While you quickly rest up for the next week, maybe you have grading to do. Maybe you’re not quite ready for the students who will file into your first period class by the dawn’s early light. You should probably read those chapters you assigned in case they do.

It doesn’t look like you’ll be spending the weekend resting and relaxing with your loved ones, lounging around by your pool, reading a great novel while sipping a cool, possibly adult, beverage. You probably won’t take in that My Chemical Romance concert at the Citrus Bowl or see the latest artsy offering at the Enzian.

Maybe the high point of the weekend was that you don’t have to get up at 5 and you can go to the restroom on your own schedule.

The kid(s) who gave you a load of crap on Friday will probably have another load for you on Monday. It’s possible you’ll be both tired and upset when you get home, then more tired and upset on Tuesday, and then you’ll have an after-school meeting on Wednesday that alerts you to some all-new “initiatives” (i.e., flavor-of-the-month institutional missions that add to the stuff you’re already behind in).

You’ll try to stay awake for your daily commute back home, then you’ll try to explain that unique end-of-the-school-day fatigue to that special someone who shares your living quarters. Then it’ll all start over again in a matter of hours. Don’t even try to stay up for the 11 o’clock news to find out the latest atrocity the myopic Legislature has committed against your life’s calling.

Maybe you feel like quitting.

In my first year as a high-school teacher, I certainly did.

My first-period class was mellow and respectful, or maybe they were still half asleep. Second period was bright, but rowdy. The cadre of guys on the right side of the room decided to ignore this new teacher, and when I tried to redirect their attention to things educational, they grew sullen and began to dislike me. I know this, because they told me so later.

Some girls in the middle made me furious with their giggling and constant conversations. I remember saying something really whiny and stupid to them, a great example, by the way of an appeal to pity: “I would never do this to you.” At the end of the year, they apologized in my yearbook and explained that they were just breaking me in.

A guy on the left side of the room couldn’t control his contributions to class, and that’s all I’ll say about that.

When second period was over, I’d walk into the hall and look through a glass wall at my little Nissan pickup, purchased to mark me as resident of the little Colorado rural town to which I had retreated from my former teaching gig, sitting enticingly beneath the oak trees of a sandy parking lot and calling out to me like the Sirens of yore. On some days I almost answered that call.

When colleagues talked to me about what it was like to make the transition from college professor to high-school teacher, I tactfully told them that not only did I not like teaching high school, I hated it. I couldn’t stand it.

At about that time, a guidance counselor told me “Your students really like you” as I walked by her office one day. Without slowing down, I barked over my shoulder, “They sure have a funny way of showing it.”

I had not forgotten Dr. Crook’s wisdom: “You can’t teach’em if you don’t love’m.” But how the heck was I supposed to love students who treated me as an afterthought, as someone who did little more than get in the way of their conversations? Sure, I had grown weary of life as a college professor, but the vast majority of my students there seemed to enjoy my company, maybe even benefit from it. They also laughed at my jokes. My high-school students were too freaking loud to even hear my jokes.

So I missed teaching and being funny.

One day on my commute to work (I lived about half an hour away), I remember arriving at this grim realization: “I have to do this, and die?! That’s not fair!”

My wife and I talked it over and agreed this was no way to go through life. It was probably better, we decided, for me not to spend the rest of my days angry, disappointed, frustrated and tired, especially as a teacher, since teaching was the one thing I didn’t stink at. If I were going to have all those lousy feelings, perhaps it should be as a bartender or an undertaker – something that compensated a fellow for all his misery.

So we set a date: On Wednesday the whatever (it was in September), I’d walk down to my department chair’s room and tell her I would stay long enough for her to find a replacement. The night before, I slept like a baby on Ambien Junior.

On the big morning, I got through my compliant, kind, heavy-lidded first-period class and my playfully brash and antagonistic second period. It was planning period now and it was show time and I was only moments away from answering the call of my little Nissan pickup.

Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Final First Impressions

So you wrap up those first days of class by going over your contract, so to speak, with your students. Much of this will be by way of your syllabus, and much of the contract may be dictated by your school or district.

Your syllabus should contain all the necessary information without being overwhelming. If it turns into a 10-page detailed rendering of an entire course that hasn’t happened yet, your students will find it offputting and intimidating. A sparse, half-page document, on the other hand, makes them think you’re not very serious about the course and haven’t given it a great deal of thought.

It never hurts to begin a syllabus with a rationale for the class, as well as your goals and objectives for it. It’ll be good for you to think about these things long enough to write them down.

Be clear about policies, requirements, consequences, grades and, when possible, due dates. “If you do such and such, you can expect this or that.” “The exam in October will cover X; the one in December will cover Y.” Don’t set down rules that will be difficult to enforce unless those rules are dictated by the school. Unfortunately, it may take you a few semesters to identify these.

When you’re laying out the ground rules, use flexible language such as “you should expect” as opposed to more binding language (“All late papers will be penalized,” etc.). Only the students who are going to grow up to be lawyers will notice it isn’t binding anyway, so it will sound like you’ve laid down the law when in reality you’ve allowed room for exceptions.

The truth is, sometimes students’ excuses are valid. Sometimes these kids are overwhelmed, either from school work or social issues or family problems or all of the above. While you’re busy putting Martin Luther’s 95 theses on the board, they may be learning via text that their boyfriend or girlfriend is cheating on them or their mom’s leaving their dad and consequently they’ll be moving to Buffalo tomorrow.

We are not privy to all these things. Granted, students can lie to us, but come on. Most of them don’t. Could you write a thorough analysis of the great prose-poem that ends Great Gatsby if you’d just lost your favorite pet of 12 years? Teachers have to allow room for occasional acts of grace. We can be fair without always following the letter of the law.

When kindness (read “humanness”) dictates that you let a student take a test tomorrow instead of today, you can always give that individual a slightly different version so student chatter about it won’t give them much of an advantage. (You’ll save yourself a great deal of time if you compose the make-up version the same day you finish the original.)

And about students lying to you in order to turn in work late: If you work hard to develop a relationship of trust with them, they are less likely to do this. Make it hard for them to lie to you. If you must always be the King or Queen, always have the last word, always be right about everything, then they’ll love to pull one over on you periodically.

The syllabus should also convey the tone of the course (as should your entire first day of class). If you tend towards irony and humor, allow those qualities to shine through on the syllabus. If you’re strictly business, keep the jokes and humorous asides to yourself. As a new teacher, you probably don’t know the system – the whole big picture – well enough to justify a draconian or school-marmish or dictatorial approach. My own preferred tone is something I like to call “don’t worry, it’s gonna be okay, there’ll be a good bit of work, and if you goof off you won’t do well, but there can be joy in learning, and anyway you’re among friends.” There must be a word for that.

At the end of the first class, you should have conveyed the following: In this class, we’ll be learning this kind of stuff. The nature of the subject matter combined with my teaching style means we’ll learn it in this way. It can be done and it can be enjoyable for both of us. Success is likely. I often say, “Trust me. You’re going to like this class. It’ll be fun. Really.”

You also want to convey this message: We will be a learning community. We’ll know each others’ names. We may not always like each other, but we’ll learn tolerance. We’ll be civil. We’ll respect other opinions even if we don’t share them. We won’t ridicule or belittle.

I want students to leave my classroom on the first day excited to come back (I’m not sure that’s likely to happen in the Drill-Instructor paradigm). And, not to be mean, I want their next class of the day to be an unendurable drag by comparison.

Having said all of this, I have to admit that I can only remember one first day of class from high school: I was a junior and I had enrolled in a Spanish class because someone told me I’d need a foreign language if I wanted to get into college and therefore avoid going directly to Vietnam after high school. We were greeted by Miss Whitman, a lovely young woman in her first year of teaching. By “lovely,” I mean the guys were constantly staring at her or very consciously not staring at her. She stood in front of her desk and, when we had all taken our seats, she greeted us in Spanish.

I didn’t know any Spanish and it never occurred to me that I would learn some of it while I was in there. She assigned us all Spanish names and had us introduce ourselves to each other. My name became Ramon, and that made no sense to me at all. In fact, it troubled me. Anyway, I flubbed my introduction pretty badly and I found it unbearable to fail in front of a tall beautiful woman, so 10 minutes into class I’d already decided to drop the course and never ever be Ramon again.

I think Miss Whitman pretty much did all that a teacher should do on the first day, and as a result I sprinted to the guidance counselor’s office for a change-of-course form. So perhaps there’s another goal for the first day: Make it enough of a microcosm of the course that the students can see if it’s for them. Some of the “don’t smile until Christmas” gang try to keep their enrollment down by scaring students off with unrealistic demands on the first day. The stunning Miss Whitman scared me off just by showing me how things were going to be in her class.

Sunday, August 14, 2011

First-Day Must-Do's

Okay, quickly, here are a few must-do’s for the first days of class:

Introduce your classroom: You could always pretend you’re a realtor showing off a hot new property or just a considerate host helping your new guests find their way around your spacious mountain cabin. “Here’s where you recycle plastic and aluminum, here’s the trash, here are the books you can sign out, that’s the bulletin board honoring all my students who grew up to be teachers, there’s where you turn in late papers,” and all of that.

Introduce yourself. Tell them who you actually are (as far as you know), why you got into this business, where and how you were educated, and how you happened to wind up at this particular school. If you find yourself saying things such as, “Then when things started getting a little dicey in my third marriage … ,” or “At this point, of course, I chose to increase my medication,” you know you’ve gone too far. Also, if you take 15 minutes, that’ll encourage them to do the same and you won’t get to the syllabus until mid-quarter.

If you’re a young new teacher, I strongly advise against making statements such as “I don’t know any more than you guys, so we’ll all learn together” or “This is my first year, so I’m sure I’ll learn just as much from you as you’ll learn from me” or “I thought it might be fun if we all made the syllabus together.” Why not just go ahead and say, “There is no authority in this room. Let the anarchy begin!”

You are not just one of them. You are the authority figure. You know (sort of) where the class is going and they don’t. You know more about learning than they do.

I would even let them call me “ma’am” or “sir” (whichever is more accurate) if I were you and if your students were so inclined. Too many young teachers resist that, complaining that it makes them feel old. Tough luck! You’re the teacher! You are older, and “ma’am” (or “sir”) is not a curse.

Introduce themselves. You can’t get to know 25-35 people in one class period, but you can get everyone well underway into learning each other’s names. There are numerous ways to do this, but you can always have them write a little blurb about themselves in which they respond to such prompts as “I’m the one who _____” or “What you need to know about me,” along with questions they have about the course. One of the ancillary benefits of such activities is that they model ice-breaking, small-talk chat sessions. Kids their age are often horrible at this, especially the introverts, who, let’s face it, are never going to be much good at it without pharmaceutical aid.

One way – and there are many – to melt the social ice cubes is to play a little something I’ve heard called the “Name Game.” Pick a student at random and ask her to give her name and something short and pithy about herself. At a teaching workshop once, the facilitator asked us to “share something no one knows about you.” Really? I’m going to tell a room full of strangers about my recurring dream of driving a wheelless car with a broken GPS through a house cluttered with pine-tree limbs? Such prompts just beg for smart-ass responses, no responses or mumbled fake intimacies.

If the student can’t think of anything to go with her name, ask if she has a Golden Retriever. She may have one, and even if she doesn’t, several other kids will, and they’ll suddenly become interested in this game. Once the first student has told you her name is Secky Nipfast from Donforth,Pa., and no, she doesn’t have a Golden Retriever, but does have a calico cat named Oswald, you ask another student to give the previous kid’s name (it’s Secky, in case you’ve forgotten already), her own name, and if she has anything resembling a Golden Retriever. The last person to be called on, of course, has to try to give everyone else’s name.

Several good things come out of this activity, if you don’t let it go on too long, perhaps the best being that you can go around the room and give all their names and, in so doing, earn your first round of applause of the semester.

However you choose to do it, you really must learn their names as soon as possible. Before age stole my short-term memory, I knew all of my students’ names at the end of the first day. Even now I have them down by the end of the first week. Some teachers brag that they don’t know all their kids’ names till Thanksgiving. This is inexcusable unless the teacher is suffering from dementia. For discussion classes in particular, names are essential: You need to know their names, they need to know each other’s. No one likes it when a student says, “I agree with the girl over there.”

* Introduce the course’s content and methods. Pretend you’ve been given 12 minutes, including student input, to teach your entire course – a micro teach, if you will. As a literature teacher, the best way to do this is to discuss a very brief poem. If it happens to be by Emily Dickinson, for example, you can go over it almost word by word, so that here, on the first day, they learn or review how to perform a close reading. They learn what kind of thinking is expected in this class. They start seeing the difference between opinion and analysis. They see the importance of tying their comments back to the poem or how the basic rules of grammar can dictate interpretation. They see how much this subject interests you and how interested you are in their responses.

If you can find for this exercise something even mildly interesting to teenagers, you may find yourself in the rarefied air of an ideal learning environment. Given the current atmosphere in public schools, this will be one of the few times you can witness and be a part of learning for learning’s sake. You can hear young people asking, analyzing, arguing and pondering with the specter of exams and grades deleted from the process. You get to tell them names of things because they matter right now, not so they can memorize for a test next Thursday. Unless the class is a real dud (and I’m afraid these really do exist in nature), this mini-lesson evolves into a lively, informal, thought-provoking conversation. Actually, it’s one of my favorite times of the year.

I cannot remember who encouraged me to do the micro-teach on the first day, but whoever and wherever you are, Sensei, thank you!

I recommend doing both the “Name Game” and the micro-teaching before going over the syllabus. It’s easier to introduce the Herculean labors ahead to people you’ve just made laugh than to a roomful of potentially hostile strangers. In most high schools, unfortunately, schedules aren’t set for a couple of weeks, so there will be plenty of time to get through the course requirements.

The fact is, if students like what they see during the name game and the representative slice of your course’s subject matter, they’ll want to come back for more and will resign themselves to doing whatever it takes to succeed in a class that is this lively and this friendly.

Stay tuned for more on the first day and a great not-quitting story. But for now, in the words of Oprah Winfrey, “We’ll be right back. We’ll be right back.”

Wednesday, August 10, 2011

It Must Be Love

So here’s how I got a piece of teaching advice, which turns out to be the most valuable I ever received. It happened during my senior year at Florida State.

I was in the office of my Chaucer professor Dr. Eugene Crook, and I mentioned to him my desire to become a teacher. After we talked a while about the challenges of the profession, he ended our conversation with a shrug, almost ushering me out the door with this statement: “Roy, you can’t teach’em if you don’t love’m.”

From my first day of teaching, I recognized the truth in Crook’s assertion. The young people in my inaugural class at FSU came to mean more to me than almost anyone else in my life up to that time. What I did in that classroom, and everything I did to prepare for it, evoked a feeling that I can only describe as love – maybe because it was an all-new feeling for me and I didn’t know what else to call it. So that year, I fell in love with my students and with my profession – which I prefer to call a vocation – and now some 35 (gulp) years later, I love them both more than ever.

As far as I know, my motives for entering teaching had the purity of love. I didn’t want it for career advancement (I never aspired to be a department chair or dean or principal or president or any other position that required meetings and neckties) or for wealth (I rarely noticed the number that showed up on my check, at least not until the Florida legislature began to pound my beloved profession into a bloody pulp) or fame (no matter how hard teachers work, they don’t show up in the media unless they’re wearing an orange jumpsuit, usually from misunderstanding the whole “you can’t teach’em if you don’t love’m” thing). I wanted nothing from it but itself.

I’ll say more later about how this philosophy looks in practice. For now, as the students start filing into your classroom in the next week or so, consider how you would treat them and how you would help them learn and grow if you did love them. If you do this, you won’t need to fret over the 60 freaking categories on the all-new Marzano Teaching Evaluation Form.

No more stalling: Next time I’ll say something that I hope helps you with the first days in the classroom.