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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.