Let "Down Time" Work for You

And now a question from Chedra Philpott, an English teacher from Lake Chester, Nebraska: "I tried to gain some control over my rowdy class by giving assigned seating and moving some of the non-participants to the front. One social butterfly who loves to sit sideways in her desk chatting, and rolls her eyes at everything I say, was moved up front. Robbed of her audience, she glared at me coldly for all of first period. It was almost unsettling. I know this is the daily life of a teacher, but sometimes it simultaneously ticks me off and sucks the enthusiasm right out of me."

Thanks, Chedra. I have just four words for you: "Better you than me." But seriously.

I very recently had a similar situation, esp. re: the sideways-sitting-now-I-hate-you girl. Here's what I did: When they began to say how much they disliked this new seating arrangement, I fired back with "Now you know I've been feeling the whole dang semester!" Then, at the bottom of a quiz, I wrote a note to the sideways sitter encouraging her to find a way to seem more involved and enthusiastic before she began her studies at the next level.

Then she really hated me, but it didn't last, and she soon became a more frequent contributor to the class's general misunderstanding of what I was failing to teach them.

But here's something that works better. As an English teacher,you may find your class time is frequently devoured by the school's other little necessities: assemblies, yearbook photos, guidance-counselor visits, registration, schedule pickups, administering flu shots, things like that (I call these "Disrupt-O-Days," and I've come to accept them)

So occasionally, you find yourself with a pocket of time not quite long enough to start a discussion or to make a valid point or to give a test. One way to respond is by having the kids begin to prepare for whatever's going to happen next or to review whatever just happened, ensuring that not a precious second of learning time is wasted.

On days like this it's good to wear those reading half-glasses so you can peer threateningly over them should a student start checking for split ends or gazing wistfully out the window at a sunny day whose pleasure she's been deprived of. The half-glasses, when peered over correctly, really help create either the corporate-bully or evil stepmother look, whichever one you find most effective.

Or . . . you could allow your students to quietly do anything that's not illegal on the state or local level while you unobtrusively mingle with them, small talking and getting to know them a little better. You'll gain points just from this small gift. And they weren't going to learn anything in those few minutes anyway.

Ask some of the hard cases what they plan on doing with their lives and if they plan to go to college and if they're involved in any of the school's extracurricular activities (even though you should already know this from a first-day writing or something). You're just asking. You don't have to say, "Well, you're doing a real crappy job of preparing" or "Sure hope you don't need a letter of recommendation from me, Mr. Knucklehead." You are free, however, to offer genuine helpful advice.

By acting interested in them and genuinely listening to them, while they're held captive in your class, you may not need to say such things. Suddenly you're more human. If you find out one of your texting sideways-sitters plays volleyball, go watch her. Now you're even more human. Now you're almost likable. 

It's not fun, even for a teenager, to make a somewhat likable human miserable.

Hope you can try this, Chedra, and thanks again for your question. I'm having my staff try to round up that bag of multicolored paper clips you requested, and it should be in your mailbox by early October.

A Reader's Question

Lately, I've received a few questions from new teachers, and I'm very grateful for them because they keep me from saying things no one wants to hear.

Many of your questions will no doubt be beyond my field of expertise. If you're saddled, for example,with a class full of the criminally insane who may benefit most from a Hannibal lecture, about all I can suggest is body armor and a good stash of high-quality, but safe, antidepressants. But having taught since before your parents were born, there are many things I can tell you that will make your first months easier. So fire away!

Today's question comes to us from Sheila Burkson, a first-year teacher from Little Falls, Iowa, a sleepy bedroom community just a few miles east of Dubuque:

"I read your post about trying not to give busy work, but sometimes I mistime a lecture, or a discussion runs dry too soon, and I feel I have no choice but to give them busy work in the form of worksheets or reading or some such time eater. Then I'm swamped with grading. Trying to figure out how to fix this, because it stresses them out and gives me too much to grade!"

Thanks, Sheila. Try to convince the little rapscallions that in order for them to improve, they need to write more than you can grade. Take up this apparent busy work and if they ask if this one'll be graded, you say, "It sure as heck will be if you didn't do it." Keep these papers in a folder marked "later" or "just in case" or "mini-informal portfolio." And, of course, be sure to justify the assignment: "This will give you a better idea of what a(n) _______ is like and how to analyze a(n) _______ in order to ________."

Later, depending on the nature and quantity of future assignments, you may decide to grade these. That's not a problem because you notified the students of that possibility. Or a student may later have an extraordinary and legitimate excuse for missing an assignment that is next to impossible for her to make up, so you can plug in one from your folder.

Just be open about this. It's not trickery. You don't need to pretend you've lost a set of papers.

Give them the old piano-lesson analogy: At your weekly visit to your piano teacher, you play some pieces which she more or less grades; she then teaches you a new piece, then you go home and, if you're serious, play it 40 times, none of which is graded -- but those 40 ungraded efforts were necessary for you to improve.

And just keep repeating the mantra: "To improve as a writer (or substitute "reader," "thinker," etc.), you must write more than I can grade."

As for filling up leftover time with reading, there's nothing busy or wasteful about that. Reading helps on many levels, and your classroom may well be the only place some of these teens read (a) an actual book and (b) without the distractions of a room full of social-media temptations. Reading in class, on a practical level, can also eliminate homework, the bane of existence.

If reading-time makes you feel guilty, you can always have them sum up, free write, synthesize, comment on or ask questions about what they read, then take that up and do with it whatever helps. (But you don't have to do this; I seldom do.)

So thanks for your question, Sheila. And as a token of my appreciation, that free bag of Jolly Ranchers should be in the mail to you within the next day or so.

As for the rest of you, if you have a question you think I can help with, but you don't want the whole world to know you asked it, feel free to send it to me by way of Facebook message and, in my response, I will shroud your name in secrecy.

No Busy Work, Please!

Last year about this time, my school was forming a committee (on which I was lucky enough to serve, and by "lucky" I mean I couldn't think of a good excuse to get out of it) to review our grading policy and, in the process, to consider implementing a "no-zero" policy. We read some articles on the subject by a distinguished educator whose persuasive techniques were either weak or duplicitous and whose use of statistics was not much better.

As I pondered this nonsense, it dawned on me that a more essential issue was the quality and quantity of the tasks we assign and grade. In a post for this very blog, I encouraged teachers to think more carefully about the value of what they require of their students. I encouraged them to articulate clearly to the students the reason behind and the value of each assignment -- to never require them to do work "because I said so."

I argued that there is neither virtue nor pedagogical value in amassing a huge number of grades. In fact, I believed then and still believe now the concept of diminishing returns applies to graded work. I also believe that when students know there'll be 27 graded assignments in a quarter, they feel pretty okay about skipping one here and there.

As I was writing this snarky little masterpiece, I interrupted the narrative to admit that the writing was rushed "because I have a bunch of quizzes to get to."

That was last year. Now a new year is upon us and, man, have things changed!

Maybe not. A committee will once again address the grading-policy issue, and I will once again be a part of it. And as I sit at my computer, once again, to remind especially my new colleagues not to burden themselves or their students with superfluous work, I feel the need to quickly bring this thing to a close so that I may return to grading.

Click here for last year's essay in all its snarkiness.

If you have so much grading that you don't have time to read it, here's the Spark Notes version: Assign only work that will help students become more competent in your discipline; it's okay to assign more than you grade (more about this in a future post); always tell your students how an assignment will help them and where it fits in the big picture.

Giving your students lots and lots of work doesn't make you a better teacher. It makes you and your students tireder, less fit for teaching and learning. (One day we should talk about the teacher's role in cultivating workaholism, of encouraging  the culture of busyness.)

We become better teachers when we spend more time imagining learning activities and less time filling up the gradebook and in writing stuff in the margins that only a small percentage of students ever read. We also become better teachers when we leave time to convalesce, rehabilitate and rejuvenate during these precious but fleeting weekends.

Just Ignore It

So let's say you're teaching a topic close to your heart, something that means a lot to you, and has for a long time.

(Brief interruption: If you never have that feeling, getting up in the dark every morning to go stand in front of young people for very little money may not be the job for you.)

So, as I was saying, there you are expounding on, say, the beauty of the quadratic equation, and you notice either Jethro or Selmolina in the back of the room doing something that, while not harmful or dangerous, s/he knows full well s/he should not be doing. The offender may even be aware that this act of rebellion is within your line of vision.

Meanwhile, though, the rest of class is completely entranced by the quadratic equation, especially the ax² part. Students are taking notes. Their eyes have that priceless "this-is-why-we-go-to-school" look. But you're furious with that punk in the back row.

What to do?

Unless the student is disrupting the flow or continuity of the class, you just look the other way. The strategy could be the same even if it involves two kids, maybe even three.

Let them have their little world into itself. The consequences will come down on their little self-centered heads soon enough. If you single them out to call attention to the fact that they're doing something wrong when they already know that, you're the one disrupting your class, not them.

Now everyone is watching an exciting showdown between a frustrated adult and an attention-seeking adolescent. Who will win? Will Jethro or Selmolina get written up? Will the teacher become overwrought and let slip a profanity? Tension grows in the room, especially for students suffering from any degree of anxiety issues. All fascination for the quadratic equation -- despite the charms of ax² -- is long gone. What are the odds of your winning them back?

So do you then talk privately with the offender(s) after class, have a little heart-to-heart, remind the little knucklehead who's boss, threaten a call home to the parents, that sort of thing? I wouldn't even do that, not for a while, anyway. The student was seeking attention, but didn't get it. The other students continued to learn. Life went on. That wasn't any fun. Maybe tomorrow she'll try listening to you for a change. And if that happens, you can dish out some moderate praise for her decision to do what students are supposed to do.

In short, new teachers, it may take you a while to figure out which fights are worth engaging in. But whatever you do, don't jump into all of them. Adolescents hate to lose, especially in front of their kind. And when they do lose, their relationship with you is likely to be prickly for weeks to come.

Let's Try Again!

This blog has been dormant for a long time now, but is awakening as if from a deep but satisfying sleep. Where am I? What time is it, anyway?

In some districts, schools will open in a matter of days. The week called "pre-plan" (more on that in a future post) begins in a few hours, and early in the first day or so of that week, a principal will introduce us to new teachers, the ink still wet on their degrees and teaching certificates.

They do not know what awaits them during this week, and they certainly can't imagine what the following week -- the one where the "kids" show up in order to have their young minds molded -- will bring. In fact, the whole premise of this blog is that education departments don't prepare people to teach, nor does carefully observing one's own teachers over the years, though that certainly doesn't hurt.

Even people who are pretty sure they've heard the winds of pedagogy calling them to teach tend to make some pretty big, but mostly survivable, messes of their job the first few years. I personally have been making those messes for over 30 years, but if Old Me had been around to write this blog for Young Me (oh, how I miss that well-meaning goof!), I would've made fewer, would've become a pretty decent teacher much earlier in my career.

So I'm resurrecting this blog with a series of brief posts for committed but clueless young teachers. I'll try to help you avoid my mistakes and the mistakes I've seen other newbies make. I've covered some of this ground in posts dating back to the blog's inception in 2011, and when I believe those longer, more reflective pieces will be helpful, I'll refer to them by date.

Cooter, Duck and the Anti-Christ

I remember these two guys who sat in the back of my school bus. They were known as Cooter and Duck.

Cooter looked exactly the way northerners picture backwoods southerners: buzzed hair, small head on stooped shoulders, beady eyes, high cheekbones, buck teeth, no chin (and I mean no offense to anyone who looks exactly like that). Duck, on the other hand, tried to mimic the James Dean teen-rebel look, but carried things way too far: His well-oiled hair, for example, teetered absurdly and precariously high on his head, so if he laughed, coughed or sneezed, it all came cascading down over his face, at which point he would shove it back up, all the while glaring at us as if to say, "Don't think this is funny. Think this is cool. Or I will beat you up."

Cooter chattered and cackled nonstop like a zany jackal or hyena sidekick in a Disney film, while Duck said maybe 12 words the whole time I knew him. Having failed a grade here and there, they were a little older than the rest of us. Occasionally, they'd giggle over some raunchy reading material they'd found somewhere.

So we're on our way to school one morning shortly after Duck and Cooter's 11th-grade teacher had assigned Moby Dick. Just after he gets on the bus, Cooter gives Duck a little "looka-here" nudge in the ribs and pulls out of his zip-up notebook a yellow book with diagonal black stripes across the front.

What the rest of us assumed was just more titillating reading to fan the flames of male teenage lust was actually titled "Melville's Moby Dick," followed on the bottom of the cover with the words "Cliffs Notes."

This, then, was my introduction to study guides or cheat sheets or whatever generic title they go by. It was an object of shame shared by a couple of barely literate goobers in the back of a bus who possessed it because they were unable to do what was required of them. And, for the balance of my education, right up through grad school, no one I knew wanted to be seen in public with one of those things and they'd certainly never carry one into a classroom.

I later learned that there was a rather lofty-sounding "Note to the Reader" on the inside of the front cover, warning young scholars that these notes only supplement the work of literature and are not meant to be a substitute for the text itself. But I don't think Cooter and Duck read that disclaimer.

Well, the years have gone by, and Cliff Notes seem to have gone the way of hula hoops, AM radio and rotary-dial phones. They have been replaced by the snazzier colored SparkNotes (sky blue! firetruck red! sunlight yellow!), available at book stores or for more clandestine online reading. There are many other online options, including Pink Monkey, Jiffy Notes, Shmoop (seriously) and one with the blatantly honest moniker of GradeSaver.

My students over the years have heard me somewhat playfully refer to these shortcuts as the Anti-Christ, and, in an effort to help new teachers articulate an argument against them, I will explain -- in a matter of days or even hours -- what I mean by this. But first I'd like to acknowledge that some students, but very few, really do use these abominations to solve a text's knotty problems, to fill out characters' family trees or to get some idea of the value of a quid or the length of a league.

I'd also like to allow for the possibility that the nice people who publish these things really are interested in furthering the literary education of our nation's youth, helping them to live the examined life and to apply classical wisdom to modern-day issues. I do not claim that they're trying to take advantage of young people's fragmented lifestyle, short attention span, laziness, illiteracy and pressure to get high grades to make a truckload of money.

Anyway, here's why I call "study guides" the Anti-Christ . . .

Teach with Your Heart, But Don't Lose It

Reliable studies indicate that somewhere between 40 and 50 per cent of new teachers will leave the profession after only five years, and one of the reasons for this is the rather broad term burnout. I suppose that word covers the roughly 423 reasons I felt compelled to give up teaching forever (I thought) after 15 years as a professor at a liberal-arts college.

Roughly two years after that decision I found in Parker Palmer’s book The Courage to Teach a fairly accurate description – much better than “burnout” – of what happened to me there. Palmer believes most teachers choose the profession for reasons of the heart, but after a few years they begin to lose heart. That sounds right to me, and my next few posts will address some reasons for this process, especially the problem of taking our work too personally.

I hope what I say will help new teachers keep their hearts a little longer, and help experienced ones understand why their hearts may be beginning to feel heavy and hardened.

Sometimes it happens that a student who is clearly a good, decent, kind, lovable human being writes a paper with little support or focus and plenty of lousy sentences and a small sprinkling of major grammatical errors. I have to give the paper a low grade, but I want to tell the student not to take it personally, it’s not about her, it’s just, you know, we have these standards that have been around for a few centuries and you’re not quite meeting them right now, so here’s a D, even though you’re certainly not a D person.

The student is likely to respond with a weak smile and leave the classroom to melt into the bedlam of the hall. But how can she not be thinking, “I wrote that essay. I used my own personal brain and my personal imagination and used the words and syntactical structures that are accessible to a person such as I. How can I not take this D personally?”

Should the student have the nerve to ask me that question, I’d be tempted to respond, “Now you know how I feel all the time!” Teachers frequently take student responses personally, especially, I’d think, English teachers, especially when they’re teaching literature.

Take me, for example. Well before I grew up to be an English major, one of my personal hobbies was reading great books. Not that I knew they were great, or would have known why they were great if I did – I just knew they spoke to me, taught me stuff, made me feel as if my reading them was transforming me into a better human being. When I was very young, I became friends with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird, Great Expectations and William Faulkner’s Light in August.

I was a college dropout and a reluctant member of the United States Air Force when I read and fell in love with Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-5.

 I do not use “became friends” and “fell in love” loosely. Before I knew how to analyze or interpret literature (and by extension, I guess, appreciate it), I pal’d around with Huck on the Mississippi and laughed at his observations; I pulled for and was embarrassed by Pip and his awkward and misguided reaching for respectability; I feared Boo Radley, and was much relieved to find him not only harmless but courageous.

By the time I read Catch-22, I was amazed that Heller could write something so absurd, convoluted and outrageous while still mirroring exactly what I was experiencing in the Air Force; and by the time I got to Vonnegut, my cold and distant father had passed away, and Vonnegut became my mentor, my literary dad. He seemed to speak directly into my ear and in so doing helped turn me into the frustrated subversive I am today. Thanks, Kurt!

Obviously, all of these works, and many more after them, have been integrated into my being. Put another way, they are the materials from which I’ve constructed a soul.  They have shaped my values and my language and become the lens through which I observe and interpret my fellow human beings.

And now, as a teacher of AP Literature, I have the honor to introduce these beloved literary friends to my beloved students.

Have you ever had two close friends who were so different you were afraid to introduce one to the other, afraid even to see them try to coexist in the same room? Have you ever had one close friend express contempt for another close friend? If so, you know what it’s like for me all the time!

So when students don’t like the books I’ve chosen or refuse to read them or resort to the Anti-Christ (Spark Notes), how can I not take that personally and eventually tell one old friend (Don DeLillo’s White Noise, for example), “Sorry, Bud. I gotta shelve you for a while. These people don’t like you, and I can not handle the rejection!”

We’re sneaking up on the problem here. We’re good teachers when we care so much that we make ourselves vulnerable to painful rejections, causing us to back off and care less and thus become less effective teachers because we are less of who we genuinely are.